Men, Women, and Boats | Page 3

men going into action, wave on wave, or in scattering charges;
we hear the clink of their accoutrements and their breath whistling
through their teeth. They are not men going into action at all, but men
going about their business, which at the moment happens to be the
capture of a trench. They are neither heroes nor cowards. Their faces
reflect no particular emotion save, perhaps, a desire to get somewhere.
They are a line of men running for a train, or following a fire engine, or
charging a trench. It is a relentless picture, ever changing, ever the
same. But it contains poetry, too, in rich, memorable passages.
In "The Monster and Other Stories," there is a tale called "The Blue
Hotel". A Swede, its central figure, toward the end manages to get
himself murdered. Crane's description of it is just as casual as that. The
story fills a dozen pages of the book; but the social injustice of the
whole world is hinted in that space; the upside-downness of creation,
right prostrate, wrong triumphant,--a mad, crazy world. The incident of
the murdered Swede is just part of the backwash of it all, but it is an
illuminating fragment. The Swede was slain, not by the gambler whose
knife pierced his thick hide: he was the victim of a condition for which
he was no more to blame than the man who stabbed him. Stephen
Crane thus speaks through the lips of one of the characters:--
"We are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is a kind of
an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us,
have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually there are from a
dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case
it seems to be only five men--you, I, Johnnie, Old Scully, and that fool

of an unfortunate gambler came merely as a culmination, the apex of a
human movement, and gets all the punishment."
And then this typical and arresting piece of irony:--
"The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a
dreadful legend that dwelt atop of the cash-machine: 'This registers the
amount of your purchase.'"
In "The Monster," the ignorance, prejudice and cruelty of an entire
community are sharply focussed. The realism is painful; one blushes
for mankind. But while this story really belongs in the volume called
"Whilomville Stories," it is properly left out of that series. The
Whilomville stories are pure comedy, and "The Monster" is a hideous
tragedy.
Whilomville is any obscure little village one may happen to think of.
To write of it with such sympathy and understanding, Crane must have
done some remarkable listening in Boyville. The truth is, of course, he
was a boy himself--"a wonderful boy," somebody called him--and was
possessed of the boy mind. These tales are chiefly funny because they
are so true --boy stories written for adults; a child, I suppose, would
find them dull. In none of his tales is his curious understanding of
human moods and emotions better shown.
A stupid critic once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking
effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights
of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls occasionally
into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is
sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the
critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks
"scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to "terror-stricken"
wagons. The very touches of poetic impressionism that largely make
for Crane's greatness, are cited to prove him an ignoramus. There is the
finest of poetic imagery in the suggestions subtly conveyed by Crane's
tricky adjectives, the use of which was as deliberate with him as his
choice of a subject. But Crane was an imagist before our modern
imagists were known.

This unconventional use of adjectives is marked in the Whilomville
tales. In one of them Crane refers to the "solemn odor of burning
turnips." It is the most nearly perfect characterization of burning turnips
conceivable: can anyone improve upon that "solemn odor"?
Stephen Crane's first venture was "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." It
was, I believe, the first hint of naturalism in American letters. It was
not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit of slum
fiction, ending with the tragic finality of a Greek drama. It is a skeleton
of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful outline, written about
a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper reporter in New York.
It is a singularly fine piece of analysis, or a bit