Blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite accuracy. Valor grew strong again, and the little boys began to brag with great spirit.
Though Crane is characterizing children here, it is essentially the same with the adults in his fiction; like Henry Fleming, the correspondent, and the Swede, they are in varying degrees the victims of grotesque self-estimates.
The beer hall and theater scenes in Maggie make the same point with the heroine, who finds in the mummery, illusion, cheap splendor, and vulgar sentiments of the melodrama a false ideal of values. She is transported by “plays in which the dazzling heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her treacherous guardian by the hero with beautiful sentiments.” These melodramas, with their “pale-green snow storms,” “nickel-plated revolvers,” and self-sacrificing rescues were “transcendental realism.” No wonder she mistakes the swaggering Pete for a knight.
“An Experiment in Misery,” a justly famous sketch of Bowery life, has been much praised by literary critics. Edward Garrett saw in its “nervous audacity of phrasing…the quality of chiaroscuro of a master’s etching,” an observation exactly to the point. It depicts the Bowery, not in realistic terms, but in the brilliant imagery of a kind of prose poem. To the human derelicts “strewn in front of saloons” around Chatham Square even ordinary things seem sinister and threatening. Footprints on the muddy sidewalks are “scar-like impressions.” The elevated train stations squat over the streets like “some monstrous kind of crab.” And behind the “somber curtains of purple and black,” street lamps glitter “like embroidered flowers.” Crane’s poetry transforms the fetid and murky flop house into a house of dead souls, a morgue of the human spirit. A locker at the head of a cot stands “with the ominous air of a tombstone,” and across the floor men are lying “in death-like silence, or heaving and snoring with tremendous effort, like stabbed fish.” One “corpse-like being,” beneath whose “inky brows could be seen…eyes exposed by partly opened lids,” lay in “this stillness of death like a body stretched out expectant of the surgeon’s knife.” It goes without saying that this is hardly the circumstantial language of realism.
The Monster is more “normally” realistic, less consciously artful in its imagery and metaphors, despite occasional exceptions like the brilliantly chromatic description of the catastrophic fire which disfigures Henry Johnson. The book generally, though, is a rather straightforward dramatization of another of Crane’s themes—the malice of self-righteous respectability, a prominent motif in Maggie and its companion piece, George’s Mother. Like Mark Twain, Crane detested herd thinking and feeling and the viciousness of mob morality, and in The Monster he probed beneath the surface of small-town life, which he portrayed with genial humor in other Whilomville stories, to point up the moral destructiveness of social snobbery. In this sense, the realism of The Monster anticipates Sinclair Lewis’ unflattering exposés of village life in the nineteen-twenties.
Unlike “An Experiment in Misery” the brief story “The Pace of Youth” is known hardly at all. Yet it is nearly as good as any of Crane’s short stories, skillfully sustained in tone and sense of movement. At the end it develops an unexpected depth, for it becomes a story about the father as well as about the lovers. The happy bobbing of the couple’s flying carriage with “that little pane, like an eye, that was a derision to him” is to the father a symbol of the power of youth “to fly strongly into the future and feel and hope again, even at a time when his bones must be laid in the earth.” The outraged father is pathetic, an impotent old man whose failure to reduce the infinite promise of life leaves him with “the astonishment and grief of a man who has been defied by the universe.”
These stories and novels are representative of Crane’s art at its best. It is not the art of the realist but of an impressionist, and one is not surprised that Crane, living in a time when literary realism was drawing its practitioners from the ranks of journalists, was never successful as a newspaper reporter. He could not, as Howells was advocating, represent the world as it “actually is”; in his best work he transformed the mere appearance of things into the poetry of impressionism, and when he was good, as he often was, revealed the inner reality of the world he observed.
An Episode of the American Civil War
I
THE cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold.
“We’re goin’ t’ move t’ morrah—sure,” he said pompously to a group in the company street. “We’re goin’ ’way up the river, cut across, an’ come around in behint ’em.”
To his attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of two-score soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from a multitude of quaint chimneys.
“It’s a lie! that’s all it is—a thunderin’ lie!” said another private loudly. His smooth face was flushed, and his hands were thrust sulkily into his trousers’ pockets. He took the matter as an affront to him. “I don’t believe the derned old army’s ever going to move.
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