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but later is seized with a panic and runs away, only to come out a hero again in the end. His panic and flight are managed well; the accidental wound which he luckily gets in running, helps him to a reputation for bravery before he has earned it. When he fights in the end, he fights like a devil, he saves the regimental flag, he is insane with the passion of the battle; he is baptized into the brotherhood of those who have been to hell and returned alive. The book is undeniably clever; its vice is over-emphasis. Mr. Crane has not learnt the secret that carnage itself is eloquent, and does not need epithets to make it so. What is a “crimson roar”? Do soldiers hear crimson roars, or do they hear simply roars? If this way of getting expression out of language is allowable, why not extend it to the other senses, and have not only crimson sounds, but purple smells, prehensile views, adhesive music? Color in language is just now a fashionable affectation; Mr. Crane’s originality does not lie in falling into it.

July 2, 1896

H. G. WELLS

It was a new thing, in a new school. When one looked for sources, one thought at once of Tolstoy; but, though it was clear that Tolstoy had exerted a powerful influence upon the conception, if not the actual writing, of [The Red Badge of Courage], there still remained something entirely original and novel. To a certain extent, of course, that was the new man as an individual; but, to at least an equal extent, it was the new man as a typical young American, free at last, as no generation of Americans have been free before, of any regard for English criticism, comment, or tradition, and applying to literary work the conception and theories of the cosmopolitan studio with a quite American directness and vigor.

—from The North American Review (August 1900)

STEPHEN CRANE

Tolstoy ranks as the supreme living writer of our time to me. But I confess that the conclusions of some of his novels, and the lectures he sticks in, leave me feeling that he regards his genius as the means to an end. I happen to be a preacher’s son, but that heredity does not preclude—in me—a liking for sermons unmixed with other material. No, that sentence doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean that I like my art straight.

—from Thomas Beer’s “Introduction” to Volume 7 of

The Work of Stephen Crane, edited by Wilson Follett (1925-1926)

THOMAS BEER

He came to believe that The Red Badge of Courage was too long, and as this distaste for length—mblematically—included his own life he is to remain a halved portrait, an artist of amazing talent and of developing scope who died too soon for our curiosity.... A man so brilliantly impatient of shams had surely something amusing to say, and the legitimate pity of the case is that he did not live to say more.

-from his “Introduction” to Volume 7 of

The Work of Stephen Crane,

edited byWilson Follett (1925-1926)

WILLA CATHER

Perhaps it was because Stephen Crane had read so little, was so slightly acquainted with the masterpieces of fiction, that he felt no responsibility to be accurate or painstaking in accounting for things and people. He is rather the best of our writers in what is called “description” because he is the least describing.

—from her “Introduction” to Volume 9 of

The Work of Stephen Crane

JOSEPH CONRAD

Recalling now those earnestly fantastic discussions it occurs to me that Crane and I must have been unconsciously penetrated by a prophetic sense of the technique and of the very spirit of film-plays of which even the name was unknown then to the world.

—from Conrad’s “Introduction” to

Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (192 7), by Thomas Beer

Questions

1. What is it about Crane’s style that distressed the critic who wrote in The Nation? Are there elements of literature today that are “allowable” and others that are not?

2. Wyndham and Wells, both reading from the British perspective, found in Crane a new literature. What about Crane’s style is original? What are we to make of Wells’s comments about the “American,” and how does The Red Badge of Courage