The most revealing point is that Henry is thinking in terms of a victory, not over the confederate enemy or his fear of them, but of a victory over Nature, as if he sees his new condition as a vengeful triumph over the hostile forest which refused him solace in the cathedral-like bower. Henry’s real enemy is Nature or, by extension, the whole universe. Mountains, fields, streams, the night, the sun itself, appear in his distorted point of view as living presences, monstrous and terrible. He sees the “red eyelike gleam of hostile campfires set in the low brow of distant hills,” the “black columns of enemy troops disappearing on the brow of a hill like two serpents crawling from the cavern of night.” Crossing a stream Henry imagines that the black water stares back at him with “white bubble eyes,” and he sees lurking in the shadows of the woods terrible “fierce-eyed hosts.” Thus his cowardly flight in his first battle is not from enemy soldiers, but from the redoubtable dragons of his egotistical imagination, from the approach of horrifying “red and green monsters.”

These images of a sinister Nature take a variety of metaphorical forms—monsters, dragons, ogres, serpents—but the most characteristic is the hostile mountain. It occurs regularly in The Red Badge: “a dark and mysterious range of hills…curved against the sky,” “the low brows of distant hills,” careening boulders, “a cliff over which one tumbles at midnight.” The image occurs in variation in many of Crane’s stories, always in the guise of an adversary. In “The Open Boat” it is the threatening horizon which is “jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.” In his imagination the hero of George’s Mother sees his problems in the image of “granite giants,” as “peaks” that lean threateningly toward him, or as “chasms with inclined approaches.” Crane ends “An Experiment in Misery” with a description of big-city buildings in another variant of the image: they are buildings of “pitiless hues…sternly high, forcing regal heads into the clouds, throwing no downward glances.” But this is an extension of the mountain which Crane usually associates with the natural, not the man-made, world. It is not mere coincidence that both the heroes of George’s Mother and The Red Badge of Courage see themselves in moments of supposed triumph as victors over a hostile Nature. Henry Fleming thinks that he has found the vanquished mountains to be merely “paper peaks,” and George Kelcey once sees himself in a daydream as “a stern general pointing a sword at the nervous and abashed horizon.” In Crane the figure symbolizes the conflict between man and the universe and underscores the futile morality of sentimental self-aggrandizement.

Like most writers whose fiction touches upon a profound personal problem, Crane tells the same story again and again. The deluded, vainglorious hero, forever misinterpreting, making outrageous assumptions about his place in the universe, appears in “The Blue Hotel” as the crazy Swede who, because he has overpowered a human adversary in a fist fight, assumes that he has also asserted himself successfully against the world in general. In a brilliant passage describing the Swede in a snow storm after his fight Crane writes:

We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here with the bugles of the tempest pealing it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life.

Here we find once again the major elements of Crane’s art: the egotism of the hero, the indifference of nature, the irony of the narrator.

The same basic pattern underlies “The Open Boat.” The correspondent is astonished to find the meaning of the sea and his relation to it so difficult to grasp. It seems furiously hostile (the waves, the sinister gulls, the shark); but it seems also somehow sympathetic (the gentle calm of the sea, its picturesque beauty, the lovely pattern of gulls in flight); but then again it seems flatly indifferent (the high cold star, the distant tower). Which mood, the correspondent asks, is the true one? He is the only hero in Crane’s fiction who is permitted to see through the tricks his egotism plays on him to find an answer. Nature is neither hostile or sympathetic; it is simply indifferent:

The tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.

The tough-mindedness of this conclusion—which is the author’s as well as the correspondent’s—is indeed in the spirit of realism, but it is a point of view hard come by and, moreover, no doubt fleeting and uncertain, if we judge by the usual case in Crane’s fiction. For illusion in Crane is more permanent than “reality,” even when they can be distinguished.

At first glance Crane’s studies of big-city slum life seem closer to the ideal of realism than The Red Badge or “The Open Boat,” but neither Maggie nor “An Experiment in Misery,” is in the reportorial, analytical style which is the hallmark of realistic fiction. From Crane’s own statement that his intention in Maggie was “to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless,” one might argue that the novel is in the tradition of the tough-minded naturalistic analysis of a social condition—which in a sense it is. But this is not the only point, perhaps not even the most important point, to be made about Maggie. Crane was perhaps nearer the mark in a letter to a young woman who had complained that Maggie was morbid and offensive:

I do not think much can be done with the Bowery as long as [the people there] are in their present state of conceit. A person who thinks himself superior to the rest of us because he has no pride and no clean clothes is as badly conceited as Lillian Russell. In a story of mine called “An Experiment in Misery” I tried to make plain that the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking.

Crane is concerned here with the moral responsibility of the individual, not with the deterministic power of a social condition. And as the statement suggests, moral capability depends upon the ability to see through the illusions wrought by pride and conceit—the ability to see ourselves clearly and truly. In this sense, Maggie and “An Experiment in Misery” play variations upon the themes developed in The Red Badge, “The Open Boat,” and “The Blue Hotel”—the moral consequences of human delusion.

The language of Maggie plays constantly on two opposing and contradictory aspects of life in the slums. It evokes on the one hand the violent and sordid, and on the other false interpretation and evaluations. The description of the fight between the slum gangs in the opening pages is representative: “howls” and “roars” of “wrath,” “barbaric” cursing, the “fury” of “convulsed faces” play off ironically against the pitifully unreal interpretation of the event by the combatants, whose false feelings are reflected in such epithets as “champions,” “victors,” “honour,” and “ideal manhood.” Jimmy Johnson is “a tiny insane demon” whose “infantile countenance” is “livid with fury.” All the boys wear “the grins of true assassins.” But as they withdraw from the battle, the boys begin to see the event in terms of heroic self-aggrandizement:

They began to give, each to each, distorted versions of the fight. Causes of retreat in particular cases were magnified.