Men, Women, and Boats | Page 2

Badge of Courage," is
essentially a psychological study, a delicate clinical dissection of the
soul of a recruit, but it is also a tour de force of the imagination. When
he wrote the book he had never seen a battle: he had to place himself in
the situation of another. Years later, when he came out of the
Greco-Turkish fracas, he remarked to a friend: "'The Red Badge' is all
right."
Written by a youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has
been compared with Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Débâcle,"
and with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison
with Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so.
Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they apply
themselves to a devoted--almost obscene--study of corpses and carnage
generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy
commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his
realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept
down where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are
accomplished with studied awkwardness.
Crane was an obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort,
he says, somewhere, "was born of pain--despair, almost." It was a
better piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is
far from flawless. It has been remarked that it bristles with as many
grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am
certain that many of Crane's deviations from the rules of polite rhetoric
were deliberate experiments, looking to effect--effect which, frequently,
he gained.
Stephen Crane "arrived" with this book. There are, of course, many
who never have heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he

was very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following
publication of "The Red Badge of Courage," although even before that
he had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems
called "The Black Riders and Other Lines." He was highly praised, and
highly abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be "made." We have
largely forgotten since. It is a way we have.
Personally, I prefer his short stories to his novels and his poems; those,
for instance, contained in "The Open Boat," in "Wounds in the Rain,"
and in "The Monster." The title-story in that first collection is perhaps
his finest piece of work. Yet what is it? A truthful record of an
adventure of his own in the filibustering days that preceded our war
with Spain; the faithful narrative of the voyage of an open boat,
manned by a handful of shipwrecked men. But Captain Bligh's account
of his small boat journey, after he had been sent adrift by the mutineers
of the Bounty, seems tame in comparison, although of the two the
English sailor's voyage was the more perilous.
In "The Open Boat" Crane again gains his effects by keeping down the
tone where another writer might have attempted "fine writing" and
have been lost. In it perhaps is most strikingly evident the poetic
cadences of his prose: its rhythmic, monotonous flow is the flow of the
gray water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in
cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and the
tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that go to
make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I
doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better
rendered than in Stephen Crane's curious, distorted, staccato sentences.
"War Stories" is the laconic sub-title of "Wounds in the Rain." It was
not war on a grand scale that Crane saw in the Spanish-American
complication, in which he participated as a war correspondent; no such
war as the recent horror. But the occasions for personal heroism were
no fewer than always, and the opportunities for the exercise of such
powers of trained and appreciative understanding and sympathy as
Crane possessed, were abundant. For the most part, these tales are
episodic, reports of isolated instances--the profanely humorous

experiences of correspondents, the magnificent courage of signalmen
under fire, the forgotten adventure of a converted yacht--but all are
instinct with the red fever of war, and are backgrounded with the
choking smoke of battle. Never again did Crane attempt the large
canvas of "The Red Badge of Courage." Before he had seen war, he
imagined its immensity and painted it with the fury and fidelity of a
Verestchagin; when he was its familiar, he singled out its minor,
crimson passages for briefer but no less careful delineation.
In this book, again, his sense of the poetry of motion is vividly evident.
We see