STEPHEN CRANEANDTHEDARWIMAN Women“ g '-

Dissertaté’on for the Degree of Ph. D. m
MICHEGAN STATE ummsm
ALLEN mom SMITH
1974 _ '

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ABSTRACT

STEPHEN CRANE AND THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION

By
Allen North Smith

Stephen Crane wrote fiction for only a decade before his death
in l900 at the age of 28, yet his work passes through remarkable
changes in style and philOSOphy. His early allegiance to the realism
of Garland and Howells helped produce instead one of America's first
naturalistic novels in Maggie. While still revising that novel for
private publication, Crane already had embarked on the psychological
study of war which made him famous. Ihe_figg_§gggg_gf Courage is itself
a clearly divided book. Within its pages, the naturalistic situation
and imagery wrestle with the unquenchable power of self reflection
with which the author endows its hero. Unless he chooses to kill
Henry Fleming, Crane cannot resolve the story without giving Henry at
least an illusion of knowledge, something which few other naturalistic
heroes in American literature ever receive. In the much debated final
passages of the war novel, Crane applies his natural irony to the illu-
sions of the universe in place of the hypocrisies of human nature and
from this moment on Crane becomes the prophet of nihilism in American
letters. The best of his laterstoriesexplore the realm of pure

chance in the universe, fuse space and time and mind and matter into a

Allen North Smith

single concept of pure experience and make use of a flood of images
drawn from the latest developments in science and technology to
dramatize the contrast between the visible world of the senses and
the barren underlying structure of the universe. Crane was the first
major American writer to abandon the materialistic determinism which
constituted the first wave of the Darwinian revolution and to ad0pt
the realtivistic and nihilistic outlook which constituted the second

wave of this intellectual revolt near the turn of the century.

STEPHEN CRANE AND THE DARNINIAN REVOLUTION

By

Allen North Smith

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English, Program in American Studies

1974

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6/ TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter
I. A WORLD BOILING WITH CHANGE . . . . . . . . . . . 6
II. WONDERS AND TERRORS OF SCIENCE . . . . . . . . . . 39
III. THE IRON LAWS OF SOCIETY . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
IV. THE QUEST FOR SELF KNOWLEDGE . . . . . . . . . . . 102
V. THE INDIFFERENT UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l64
FOOTNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l7l
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l96

ii

INTRODUCTION

No writer can escape the influence of the events and ideas
which dominate his own culture. Together with his own personal
experiences, they comprise the entire material content of any story
which he chooses to tell. The works of Stephen Crane have been
exhaustively analyzed by critics and scholars in recent years, and
most of whatever will be known about his life has been gathered in
Robert W. Stallman's authoritative biography published in l968. Yet,
biography at best is only a skeleton framework of a few incidents and
thoughts which chance happens to record in the living stream of a
human life, and even the closest reading of Crane‘s works leaves
nagging questions unanswered because he often takes pains to disguise
his meanings. Where did Crane get the idea for a naturalistic novel
almost a decade before any other major American writer embraced this
philsophy? After presenting his first heroine as a victim of natural
and social forces of which she is entirely ignorant, why did he then
turn almost immediately to his famous portrait of inner fear and
courage in war? Was he sincere or ironic in suggesting that the young
Civil War recruit had learned something from his experiences in
battle? Was Crane basically a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist
or a symbolic writer? Most importantly for a study of Crane and his
culture, why do the best of his stories employ so many of the literary

themes and techniques of 20th century American literature? This study

offers a partial explanation of these questions by reviewing Crane's
principal works in light of some of the most compelling intellectual
and cultural ideas which prevailed during the brief period in which he
lived and wrote at the end of the l9th century.

During this period, the shocking theories of Charles Darwin
made the western world an intellectual battleground. At first, the
success of Darwinism in bringing all forms of life under one great
principle of development seemed to promise the final triumph of sci-
entific materialism. The empirical methods by which increasingly
general laws of the physical universe had been discovered now might
be applied to man himself and the societies which he had evolved.

Many of the best thinkers of the day believed that ”the complete
determination of mental laws" was almost at hand.1 In the wake of
Darwin's success, a great wave of popularity arose for the determinis-
tic theories of the British social philosopher Herbert Spencer,
particularly in America which accorded him a hero's welcome during

his tour here in l882.2 Spencer's sweeping synthesis of natural and
cultural evolution became something of a bible for social Darwinists
near the turn of the century and profoundly influenced the development
of American literary naturalism.3

But Darwin's own theory of natural selection carried within
it the hidden bomb of blind chance which eventually overthrew the
simple faith in scientific materialism and social determinism. The
idea of chance variation in heredity which was at the root of Darwin's
theory was at first largely ignored in the furious theological debate

generated by Darwinism, but one of the earliest American reviewers of

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The Origin gj_Species saw the issue clearly. "Our author denies that

 

the same physical antecedents are always followed by the same conse-
quences,“ said Francis Bowen. "He affirms that irregular or
unsuspected variations are perpetually interrupting the chain of
orderly causation."4 The success of such a doctrine threatened the
very logic of knowledge itself and culminated in the final decade of
the century in a rebellion against immutable principles in virtually
every field of human activity. Classical standards of truth and
beauty were undermined. Mathematical axioms were denied the status of
a priori knowledge and subjected to the tests of empirical and histori-
cal analysis. A widespread revolt was mounted against the absolute
principles of space and time handed down from Newton and Kant. The
conflict between materialism and idealism which raged throughout the
second half of the century was reconciled by a new pragmatic theory of
knowledge which argued that neither mind nor matter was uppermost,
but that both were mere abstractions from the only concrete reality
of "pure experience."5
In the following analysis of Crane's principal works, I hope
to show that he was one of the first major American fiction writers
to sense and dramatize the ideas which constituted the second wave of
the Darwinian revolution. While other writers like Norris, London
and Dreiser continued to base their stories on a deterministic
philosophycyfman and nature long after Crane's death, Crane himself
quickly perceived the hidden bomb of blind chance in the Darwinian
formula. His early ”realism" or deterministic social criticism soon

gives way to a more subtle and vivid impressionism designed to mirror

the inner psychological states of his heroes through their subjective
perceptions of surrounding nature. Through the power of his own
imagery, Crane gradually welds together man and nature into his own
imaginative version of "pure experience." In the best of his later
stories, he consciously fuses mind and matter and space and time,
explores the realm of subconscious precognition and symbolically
portrays the universe as an endless, relativistic void filled with
invisible forces which destroy man not by ironclad natural laws but
rather through the uncaring malicegof blind chance. In the face of
this vision of utter chaos, Crane in some of his last stories offers
a pragmatic formula of human-endurance and grace hauntingly like the
themes of Hemingway and Faulkner. The mainstream of American litera-
ture does not approach Crane's imaginative output until his own
prophecy of man's inevitable lust for war has been fulfilled a genera-
tion later.

It is my contention, then, that Crane's strikingly modern
themes and literary techniques arise from his acute perception of the
most far reaching intellectual currents of his time. No effort is
made here to prove that Crane read any particular work or that he
gained certain facts or ideas from any particular acquaintance although
his friendship with such men as William Dean Howells, Henry James and
H. G. Wells undoubtedly contributed to his intellectual education.

The first two chapters of this study are devoted to a general outline
of the events and ideas of the period which appear relevant to Crane's
work. The interpretation of his principal work which follows in the

last three chapters is based on a reading of these stories in light

of these general ideas. It stands or falls, of course, on the evidence

found in Crane's own words.

I would like to acknowledge here the aid of members of my
doctoral committee: Dr. Victor Howard, chairman of the American
Studies Program; Dr. William Callaghan, chairman of the Department of
Philosophy; Dr. Paul Varg, professor of history, and Dr. Russel Nye,
professor of English, who has generously given up valuable time from
his own distinguished work in American cultural history to direct this

dissertation.

CHAPTER I

A WORLD BOILING WITH CHANGE

When Stephen Crane arrived in New York City in the early l890$
to make his way as a professional writer, he became a witness to the
20th century in the making. He saw streets strangled with traffic and
buildings soaring eight and ten stories in the air. He heard the
rumble of steam driven elevated trains and the brittle rattle of
cable cars. During the day, garish advertisements and brilliantly
decorated shop windows offered a thousand products of the new indus-
trial age, and at night the flickering gaslights of saloons and
theaters already were beginning to be eclipsed by the blinding glare
of Broadway's great white way.1 The slums in which Crane went to live
were teeming with the poor of the nation and the world speaking in a
hundred different dialects, and the massive tenements which he shared
with them were filled with the dark hallways and mysterious little
doorways which imprinted themselves on his excited imagination. The
New York newspapers which Crane read gathered the latest news from
around the world in a matter of hours and printed shocking accounts of
labor strife, crime and political corruption at home. The progressive
magazines for which he soon was writing offered a strange mixture of
social and political reforms, racial theories, prophecies of world
wars, new scientific discoveries, reports of psychic phenomena and
repeated calls for new roads to insure future progress.2 When Crane

6

arrived in New York, the-bicycle craze was in full sway, and shortly
before he left to spend his final years in England, the horseless
carriages made their triumphant appearance in a Decoration Day parade
witnessed by thousands of awed spectators.3 Crane became a man and
a writer in a world boiling with change.
The most striking symbol of the modern age which he saw in

New York was the disorderly web of telegraph and telephone wires which
filled the sky above its streets.4 Scores of articles in the leading
magazines of the day cited the benefits of electricity as the most
illustrious triumph of modern science. "Within one generation, this
subtle force has conquered the world,” proclaimed one writer in the
Arena in 189l. He continued:

By means of electricity, the news of the world is brought to

us at a moment's notice; by means of electricity, the voices

of friends, with all their characteristic inflections, are

carried to us over the space of thousands of miles; elec—

tricity floods the largest cities with a sea of light at any

given moment; electricity, transformed into force, rives

and propels cars loaded with freight or passengers.
Yet, to many New Yorkers, "the poles and wires were hideous symbols of

6 Some writers discussed the physical

change they did not like.“
dangers of electric power while others warned that the new energy
source would only increase the economic concentration of power which
marked the era. "Shall the miraculous lamp of Aladdin raise one or a
few men to princely station, or shall it become the benefactor of all
mankind?" asked the Arggg_in calling for nationalization of electric
power.7 More than l25 cities heeded the call between l887 and 1893 by

converting from privately owned to municipal electric power systems.8

.1 :1 I' \Il‘ll" 4’.|\[(l‘{illll|ll Illllll'l:llllll III.

Electricity was both the wonder and the terror of the age, and Crane
reflects this obsession in many of his stories.

Whenever Crane walked through the streets and parks of New
York City on sunny days, he was likely to encounter members of the
growing army of photographers who were seen everywhere capturing the
life of the city.9 The introduction in the late l880$ of dry plate
photography and hand held cameras capable of taking pictures instan-
taneously had transformed the medium from the studio art of a few
well equipped professionals to an outdoor recreation enjoyed by

thousands of amateurs.10

Camera clubs were springing up in major
cities throughout the country. ”It is evident that the practice of
photography soon will become universal," said F. C. Beach in an
article on "Modern Amateur Photography“ in 1888. "[It] will be as
useful in a family as music, an excellent recorder for the tourist,
artist, lecturer, historian and engineer. . . . It will elevate the
public taste to a higher appreciation of the merits of artistic pic-

"11 Actually, the new amateurs, who came from all walks of life,

tures.
were less likely to be aware of the rules of composition than their
well educated and carefully trained predecessors, but "they were
fascinated that a click of a shutter could capture a slice of life
bustling with activity."]2
While the amateurs were enjoying their sport, a new band of
professional photographers also was combing the city for the kinds of
pictures which would help sell newspapers and magazines. Editors of

Joseph Pulitzer's N§w_Ygrk_World discovered in the mid '805 that

generous use of illustrations "made the circulation go up like a

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13 Rival publications quickly embraced the

thermometer on a hot day."
principle. The new photo journalists, both free lancers and staff,
were looking for colorful and dramatic pictures which would arouse
strong human emotions, and they soon learned that one of the strongest

stimulants of all was misery. Jacob Riis's series, "How the Other

Half Lives," first published in the New York Sun in l888, explored

 

the subject in the tenements, sweatshops, almshouses and stale beer
dives of the city, and initiated a long series of slum exposes in the
newspapers and progressive magazines. Paradoxically, the powerful
photos of Riis and other pioneer photo journalists could not be repro-
duced directly in the newspapers, which offered illustrations based

14 But the value of the camera lay in providing

on the photos instead.
graphic proof of the worst charges made by the social reformers.

In many different ways, photography reinforced the demands for
realism in journalism, art and literature. Pictorial exposés like
those of Riis compelled attention to the most pressing social problems
of the time. The rising number of newspaper and magazine illustrations
also produced the kind of readership excitement which reporters and
fiction writers were forced to emulate in increasingly colorful and
detailed descriptions of real life scenes. Painters and sculptors on
both sides of the Atlantic were irresistibly influenced by the new
science which revealed details of visual reality undetected by the
naked eye. Making use of the new instantaneous cameras and his own

invention of one of the first camera shutters, Eadweard Muybridge

produced his celebrated Animal Locomotion in l887 which he offered as

 

"an atlas for the artist, a visual dictionary of human and animal

l0

l5

forms in action." In Philadelphia, portrait artist Thomas Eakins

borrowed and improved upon Muybridge's work16

while in Paris, Aime
Morot, disclaiming the use of photographs, devised his own camera
shutter in order to produce his vivid pictures of cavalry charges.

According to an account of Morot's work offered in Harper's Magazine

 

in l890:

He avoids in the principal figures all intermediary elements

of movement; he selects rather the beginning or the end. In

the confused mass of a cavalry charge sweeping past, he will

paint one horse completely, and the rest of the troop will

be bits of horses, elements of movements, all the phases

which scientific analysis gives; and this agglomeration of

detail creates the illusion of a vision of rushing horsemen.l7
Peter Henry Emerson, the principal Spokesman for naturalistic photog-
raphy, commented that "The influence of photography on painting . .
has been nothing short of marvelous as can be seen in the general
improvement in the drawing of movement."18

Photography also made an important contribution to the impres-

sionistic movement. Early experiments in color photography paralleled
the experiments in color made by Monet and Seurat. Both were inspired
by the theories of light and vision propounded by Helmholtz and

‘9 The old studio

Tyndall and other well known scientific figures.
photographers, like the classical painters, had carefully controlled
their light and their subjects in striving for clear and sharp repro-
ductions, but with the advent of the new equipment, photographers were
able to join the movement outdoors into natural light and photograph
subjects in their natural settings. After viewing a pioneer exhibit

of impressionist paintings in England in l889, George Davison shocked

the traditional photographers by exhibiting a photograph of "The Onion

ltttll[[[.[[([[{[[zll ||||| I

ll

Field," deliberately blurred by a soft focus and rough surfaced

paper.20 Emerson took up the cause the same year with the publication

of his widely acclaimed Naturalistic Photography, which burst on the

 

worlds of art and photography "like a bombshell dropped in a tea

2] Emerson acknowledged the mutual debt of science and photog-

party."
raphy, but he insisted that the highest goal of photography should be
to produce fine art and the goal of all visual arts "should be a trans-

22 Emerson justified

lation of a scene as seen by the normal eye."
impressionist photography by arguing that the new physical and psycho-
logical experiments in vision proved that human perception always
focused on a center of interest with less distinct impressions of
outlying materials. Nothing in nature has sharp edges, he asserted.
Although Emerson recanted his views in a pamphlet called "The Death

23 his original ideas

of Naturalistic Photography" only a year later,
exerted a permanent influence on photographers and artists and became
an important expression of the strange love-hate relationship with
science which was a hallmark of the impressionistic movement. In a
curiously circular argument, he and his fellow impressionists held
that artists should make use of the latest scientific principles to
produce a faithful picture of nature which would be art rather than
science. Emerson, in 1890, was one of the first to specifically
express what the other impressionists merely sensed: that a true
picture of nature involved the interaction of man and his environment
rather than a set of iron laws which held man in its grip.

The improved photographic equipment quickly led to the first

crude experiments in motion pictures. As early as 1878, readers of

 

[{[Illlf‘r‘f‘ll‘lllktlr‘

12

the Scientific American were invited to cut out 18 drawings of a man

 

walking and a horse running based on Muybridge's photos and paste
them in a circular dum called a "zoetrope." When the drum was
twirled rapidly, the pictures viewed through slits seemed to be
moving. Two years later, Muybridge converted the zoetrope into a
"zoogyroscope" and projected the moving images on a screen at the

California Institute of Fine Arts.24

There matters rested, except
for the increasing popularity of lantern slides, until Thomas Edison
produced a roll of transparent film which made it possible to actually
take a continuous series of pictures of objects in motion. Being a
practical man, he also invented a kinetosc0pe viewer to show the
films and aggressively marketed the new entertainment. The first
kinetosc0pe parlor opened in New York City in April, 1894, and by the
end of the year the machines had been sent to Chicago, San Francisco,
Paris and London. The moving pictures in a box were amusing, but
other promoters quickly saw that projecting the pictures on a screen
would offer more satisfactory entertainment to a far larger audience.
Louis and Auguste Lumiere's Cinematographe created a sensation in
Paris at the end of 1895 and by the end of 1896 a host of rival
projectors were being used to screen films regularly in the principal
cities of Europe and America.25
The revolutions from print to visual communications and from
still to moving pictures profoundly influenced Crane's work. His
early preoccupation with exploring the seamy side of New York undoubt-

edly was stimulated by the newspaper and magazine exposes which

preceded his arrival in the city. His vivid impressionistic style and

l3

obsession with color imagery probably owed more to the New York
newspapers which he read than to the French impressionist novelists
which he claimed he didn't. In several of his best stories written
after 1895, Crane experiments with time flashback and stillness in
motion, literary techniques which generally are associated with the
development of motion pictures.

As an aspiring writer of short stories and color sketches,
Crane presumably was a fairly close reader of the American magazines
of his day, particularly of those which printed his early works.
During his early years of struggle, W. D. Howells, long time editor of

the Atlantic Monthly, and B. 0. Flower, editor and publisher of the

 

new Arena, were his closest allies. In Arpil, 1893, Crane wrote to
Lily Brandon Monroe:

The book [Maggie] has made me a powerful friend in W. D.
Howells. B. 0. Flower of the "Arena" has practically
offered me the benefits of his publishing company for all
that I may in the future write. Albert Shaw of the "Review
of Reviews" wrote me congratulations this morning and
tomorrow I dine with the editor of the ”Forum.”2

Howell printed Crane's first magazine story in Cosmopolitan while

 

serving there as editor briefly in 1892. John 0. Barry, editor of
the fgrgm, subsequently became a good enough friend of Crane's to
read his poetry before the Uncut Leaves Society in April, 1893.
Corwin Linson reports seeing Crane reading the Century frequently
during his visits to Linson's studio in 1893. Crane also submitted

his work to the new McClure's Magazine during this period and a number

 

of his poems and sketches went into Elbert Hubbard's Philistine.

 

Other magazines mentioned repeatedly in Crane's letters include Ihg_

l4

Bookman, Harper's Magazine and Harper's Weekly. Some, though not

 

 

all, of these magazines offered important sources of issues and ideas
for Crane's fiction. No attempt will be made here to prove that
Crane read any particular issue or article, but the topics which are
found with the greatest frequency within the publications with which
Crane was most closely associated will be employed in sketching the
cultural influences which are seen throughout his fiction.

The end of the century also saw the birth of a new form of
journalism which irretrievably altered cultural values and helped to
produce a mass society. Fueled by rapidly growing city populations and
a massive increase in commercial advertising, daily newspapers in the
United States grew in number from 387 to 2.326 between 1870 and 1900.27
In the largest cities, the newspapers employed new high speed printing
equipment, improved pictorial reproduction and a rich diet of sex,
crime, scandal, comics and sports to build massive circulations.28
With the aid of a growing world wide telegraph and cable network,
the major papers combed the world for the most sensational stories of
the day and presented them in a personal, but highly condensed. style
under screaming streamer headlines. When an ample supply of such

news could not be found, the most enterprising newspapers produced

their own, beginning with the New York Herald's search for Dr. Living-

 

stone in Africa in 1871 and culminating in William Randolph Hearst's
personal promotion of the Spanish-American War.29 A writer in the

November, 1891, issue of the Atlantic Monthly responded to this

 

assault on his emotions and senses by complaining:

l5

The telegraph has put out of the field the chief fruit of cul-
ture in journalism which remained to our fathers, the
cultivated correspondent's letter; the interviewer has vulgar-
ized and turned into offense what once was the charm of
personality. The morning paper read at breakfast or finished
on the train to the city, has given the skimmings of the
world's affairs, and letters and the arts, served to order by
the most convenient member of the staff, are crowded in the
space that can be spared for them.3

Crane was one of the first major American fiction writers whose
life and works were profoundly influenced by the new journalism. From
the very beginning of his career as a substitute summer correspondent
at Asbury Park,lVdJ.,to his final sojourns in Greece and Cuba, he
sought both profit and fame as a writer primarily through journalistic

3l

media. His earliest Sullivan County Sketches printed in the Phila-

delphia Press were typical "slice of life“ features published for

 

reader entertainment. His first novel, Mgggje, was one of many
exposés of New York slum life and prostitution which the newspapers and
progressive magazines were publishing at the time even if the estab-
lished book publishers weren't. Ih§_Reg_ngge_gf_Courage helped
satisfy widespread public curiosity about romantic Civil War exploits,
and its episodic structure was designed, whether intentionally or not,
for the newspaper serial publication which made Crane famous at the
age of 24. Throughout his career, Crane was most prolific and most
successful in writing short stories for the newspapers and magazines
of his day. He wrote and traveled constantly for the new newspaper
syndicates which offered the best market for a writer not respectable
enough for the conservative literary magazines and book publishers,

and when his fame finally compelled the attention of the latter, he

l6

failed utterly in trying to create the full length romantic novels
which they required.

Although Crane never mastered the art of straight news
reporting, his style, nevertheless, bears the indelible marks of
training in the news rooms of his day. Because newspaper space was
now at a premium, every word had to say as much as possible. Because
newspapers now were read by the masses, everything had to be told in
the simplest and clearest language, and emphasis was placed on words
and phrases which created the most vivid pictures in the mind. A
striking lead was required to arrest the busy reader's attention and
to sum up the significance of the whole story. The new art of
headline writing taught writers the impact which could be gained from
a few well chosen words and tempted them to seek sensational effects.
Crane had no particular aptitude for gathering facts, but he had a
natural talent for the vivid impressionistic writing spawned at least
in part by the new journalism. All of his writing is marked by
economy of phrasing, perfect clarity and strikingly vivid images.
Time after time in his fiction, he labored to create brilliant opening

32

sentences and passages. On occasion, he skirted the paper thin

boundary between brilliance and sensationalism, as in his famous
phrase, "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a fierce wafer."33
The line between fiction and fact is particularly difficult to
distinguish in Crane's work. His Sullivan County Sketches are thinly
veiled, though highly embellished, personal experiences. "An Experi-

ment in Misery” is nothing more in substance than a reporter's

personal investigation of a flop house in New York, yet it contains

17

the same vivid imagery employed in his best fiction, including a
description of the sleeping men which closely resembles that of the

exhausted soldiers sleeping in the grove in The Red Badge gf_Courage.

 

"In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” written in the same period, was the
product of a specific journalistic assignment, but it contains no
names or places. Rather, it offers metaphorical description of the
human condition equal in power to some of his great short stories.
"An Ominous Baby" nominally is fiction, but it actually is a crude
parable about the violent class conflict of the times in which Crane
freely violates his own credo about "not preaching.” "Death and the
Child" is only slightly more structured than many of Crane's dispatches
about the war in Greece. All fiction writers employ real experiences
within the fabric of their imaginative creations, but it is signifi-
cant that several of Crane's finest short stories are based on

single events which he witnessed or participated in, and this may
help explain why he was a master of the short story and a relative
failure in constructing longer works of fiction. He was at all

times more of an artist than a reporter, but, with the notable excep-
tion of Ih§_Beg_ngg§_gj_Courage, he apparently required a close
proximity to physical experience to stimulate his greatest creative
efforts.

All of Crane's most successful and enduring fiction is based
on the violent and provocative issues of his day. Unlike the delicate
descriptions of American social life of Howells and the subtle psycho-
logical portraits of Henry James, Crane chose to write about war,

poverty, prostitution, racial fear, shipwrecks and wild west duels.

[t{l[l{[f \[ll' ‘II i‘ll‘llllllllllll I i I.

l8

His characters are beaten, maimed, drowned, knifed and shot to death
and driven to suicide. All of these subjects undoubtedly were stimu-
lated by the sensational new journalism and chosen by the author with
a sharp eye for their news value. Some critics and biographers have
held that Crane was destroyed either by his economic dependence on
the new journalism or by his own personal need to prove his courage in
physical combat. But it also may be argued that he was the first of
the new realists who realized that he had to give up the study and
the drawing room in order to experience the true suffering and bru-
tality which the new journalism was reporting daily. In this he
precedes many other American writers whose style and themes are the
product of their apprenticeships in the news room.

If Crane wanted to experience suffering and brutality at
close hand, he had no trouble in finding it in the American society
of his age. The last two decades of the century were marked by social
strife unparalleled in American history. The magnificent development
of the railroads, mines and industrial corporations following the
Civil War coupled with a tidal wave of immigration and the gradual
loss of open farmland created extremes in wealth and poverty previously
unknown in America. These extremes were glaringly spotlighted by the
newspapers which ran exposes of homeless children sleeping in the
streets of New York hand in hand with accounts of the magnificent
homes and sumptuous parties of the new society leaders. The new
captains of industry justified their wealth and position by embracing
the deterministic social and economic theories of Herbert Spencer and

his followers, feting Spencer royally at New York's famous Delmonico

19

restaurant during his triumphant visit here in 1882.34 Andrew
Carnegie, one of Spencer's most ardent disciples, wrote in the North

American Review in 1899 that "the contrast between the palace of the

 

millionaire and the cottage of the laborer measures the change which

"35 and William Graham Sumner became

has come with civilization,
famous at Yale by insisting that every advance in civilization was
the result of unfettered competition and that “the law of the sur-
vival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by
man."36

But the American business leaders relied only on economic and
political power rather than on inherited class distinctions, and
their power and their theories, therefore, were quickly challenged by
workers, farmers and intellectuals who denied the Darwinian analogy
and demanded a new c00perative society which would Spread the benefits
of modern science and industry to all mankind. Lester Ward effec-
tively countered the deterministic sociological theories of Spencer
and Sumner by arguing that human evolution arose from, and depended
upon, the abandonment of the struggle for existence.37 Henry George

electrified the nation by calling for the abandonment of all private

land ownership through a confiscatory tax. His Progress and Poverty

 

ran through more than 100 editions duringiflma'BOs and '905 and George

6. 38 Edward

narrowly missed election as mayor of New York in 188
Bellamy captured the public imagination with his vision of a future

communistic society in Looking Backward. His utopian theories,

 

however, probably were less powerful than his bitter description of

his own society which he compared to:

{“lll { [\l \' ll I ‘.l ‘lll'l‘ll‘l'ulII I ..

20

. . a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were
harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and
sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging,
though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the dif-
ficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road,

the top was covered with Bassengers who never got down, even
at the steepest ascents.3

While progressive and radical thinkers were debating the social
Darwinists in print, millions of farmers and workingmen were taking
their discontents into the streets. Recurrent financial panics and a ,
constantly rising spiral of strikes and lockouts kept millions out of

40

work during most of the 18805 and '905. The bloody warfare between

workers, strikebreakers and police reached a peak with the killing of
seven Chicago policemen in the Haymarket bombing in 1886, and the
execution of four of the alleged terrorists in the following year

gave the militant labor movement a rallying cry for the remainder of

4l

the century. Farmers, laborers and small town businessmen joined

forces to cast more than a million votes for third party candidates in
the 1892 presidential election. The People's Party platform drafted
in a sweaty convention hall in Omaha and telegraphed to the nation
eloquently expressed the class struggle which held America in its

grip during the hot summer of 1892. "The conditions which surround us
best justify our cooperation," the preamble began:

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of
moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates
the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches
even the ermine of the Bench. The people are demoralized;
most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters
at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation or
bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled,
public opinion silenced, business prostrated, our homes cov-
ered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land
concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban

21

workmen are denied the right of organization for self-
protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages;
a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is estab-
listed to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating
into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions
are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few,
unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the possessors
of these in turn despise the Republic and endanger liberty.
From the same prolific womb of government injustice we breed
the two great c1asses--tramps and millionaires.

Where does Crane stand in this violent social spectrum? While
the fires of class conflict were burning in Omaha, he was enjoying
the seashore at Asbury Park, reportedly rewriting Maggig_and working
for brother Townley's news agency. Late that summer he ran afoul of
his newspaper employers for mocking the dignified parade of the Junior
Order of the United American Mechanics in behalf of the protective
tariff advocated by Republican presidential candidate Benjamin

Harrison. Crane's sketch printed August 21 in the New York Tribune

 

strongly implies that the patriotic display of the mechanics was an
ignorant betrayal of their own true class interests. He contrasted
the stolid, ill-dressed, sun-beaten marchers with the throng of
onlookers in summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis trousers, straw hats
and "indifferent smiles," and commented, ”The bonafide Asbury Parker
is a man to whom a dollar, when held close to his eye, often shuts
out any impression he may have had that other people possess rights."
Crane and Townley apparently were discharged by the Tribune, although
Willis Fletcher Johnson, their editor at the Tribune, claimed they
were not. Crane later told Hamlin Garland, ”I was so hot at the sight
of those poor misshapen fools shouting for monopoly that I gave no

thought to its effect upon my master [Whitelaw Reid]. I don't know

22

that it would have made much difference if I had. I wanted to say
those things anyway."43
Throughout his career Crane displayed contempt for the greed
and hypocrisy of respectable society and fascination with the plight
of the poor. His apparent rebellion against his own respectable
family and all traditional authority, his self—imposed privation
while struggling to establish himself as a writer and his early
allegiance to the realists against the conservative literary estab-
lishment all suggest that Crane was at home on the far left side of
the political scene of his day. His first novel, Mgggjg, not only
exposes New York slum conditions but clearly indicts the respectable
society for creating the tenements and saloons in which the poor
are forced to live and prostitute themselves. "An Ominous Baby,"
his first story published in B. 0. Flower's progressive minded Arggg,
portrays the class struggle between haves and have-nots as an
inherent part of the human condition by the simple expedient of
having a tough slum baby steal a toy fire engine from a tender
minded child born in better circumstances. The note of warning is
clear here. The upper class baby's childish faith in property rights
is no defense at all against the overpowering "trembling desire" of
the slum child. Crane openly attacks the coal mine operators for
their vicious use of child labor in his vivid report,"In the Depths

of a Coal Mine," published in McClure's Magazine in August, 1894.

 

His final passage, expunged from the published version by McClure's
editors in deference to the business interests, clearly expresses

Crane's outrage:

.III {IIIIIIII(.[{r-i [I‘ll {II‘IIi‘f .

23

If all men who stand uselessly and for their own extraor-
dinary profit between the miner and the consumer were
annually doomed to a certain period of danger and darkness
in the mines, they might at least comprehend the misery and
bitterness of men who toil for existence at these hope-
lessly grim tasks.44

Crane's contempt for the dominant commercial interests of his
society never abated. In "The Monster," written in 1897, he savagely
parodies Whilomville's dominant white society by mirroring its petty
greed and pompous customs in the imitative actions of the underlying
black society. And a year later in his last great short story, "The
Blue Hotel," Crane indicts the commercial avarice of the hotel keeper
as being responsible for the Swede's death as the saloons are in
driving Maggie to suicide.

Yet, if Crane was permanently alienated from the dominant
classes in his society, it does not follow that he was a champion of
the poor. In an 1896 letter to Catherine Harris often cited by
critics and biographers, he wrote:

I do not think that much can be done with the Bowery as long
as the [blurred] are in their present state of conceit. A
person who thinks himself superior to the rest of us because
he has no job and 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 a
licking.45
It should be noted, however, that the purpose of the letter to Miss
Harris was to reiterate Crane's doubt that Christian missions in the
Bowery would do the poor any good, and in conclusion, he suggested
sardonically that "The missions for children are another thing and if
you will have Mr. Rockefeller give me a hundred streetcars and some

money, I will load all the babes off to some pink world where cows can

24

lick their noses and they will never see their families any more."
In "An Experiment in Misery," published in 1894, Crane portrays the
investigator's companion as a rudderless fellow with no thought for the
future. And in "The Men in the Storm," published later the same year,
he carefully distinguishes between the habitual Bowery dwellers and
the "strong, healthy, clear skinned fellows, with the stamp of
countenance which is not frequently seen upon seekers after charity."
For this latter group, presumably forced to charity by particularly
hard times, Crane seems to hold the greatest contempt:

They were men of undoubted patience, industry and temperance,

who, at these times of ill-fortune are apt to wear a sudden

and singular meekness, as if they saw the world's progress

marching from them, and were trying to perceive where they

had failed what they had lacked, to be thus vanquished in

the race. 6
It may be that Crane simply was reporting what he saw, as he told
Miss Harris with regard to his novel, E9913, but it is difficult to
escape the feeling that he also was unconsciously inciting the poor
workingmen to riot. It is not the inherently weak or imcompetent
members of society here that he is accusing of cowardice, but rather
the average workingman who meekly accepts his fate at the hands of
the system.

Throughout his work, Crane wavers between heredity and environ-
ment as the root cause of poverty and social ills. In his often
repeated inscription in copies of Mgggie_given to friends, he said
that he was trying to show that "environment was a tremendous thing in

this world and shapes things regardless."47 And in this early work

it is the forces of society as well as Maggie's inherent weakness

25

which causes her doom. Yet, as his work progresses, it is the basic
instincts of greed and pride, shared by all men and controlling

their institutions, which seem to Crane to be the root cause of human
tragedies.

Crane never fully identified emotionally with any class.
Nothing in his work suggests any definite political philosophy. He
was the supreme individualist who sought knowledge for its own sake
and never enlisted in any cause other than artistic truth. This may
help explain his success as a writer as well as the bitter nihilism
which was the product of his unsuccessful search for the true meaning
of the universe.

Crane's attack on Bowery saloons and concert halls in Mgggj§_
and several of his short stories was part of the nationwide battle
against the "rum power." The Prohibition Party, formed in 1872,
grew steadily in power through the early 18905 and mounted its most
vigorous campaign in the 1892 presidential election. The Arggg_was
in the forefront of the battle. 8. 0. Flower editorialized that the
saloon and the "disreputable concert hall" were the two greatest

48

curses of metropolitan life and he eagerly opened the pages of his

magazine to a series of writers who attacked the distilleries and
the saloon owners for exploiting the poor workingman to enrich their
own pockets. "This county has just emerged from a terrible conflict
with slavery, when now it is confronted in its political arena with

another great moral evil in the form of drunkenness,‘ exclaimed

Henry Hartt, M.D., in 1890. “Drunkenness pervades all classes. The

land is filled with its orgies, its pauperism, and its crimes."49

26

Like the old southern "slave power," the rum power was accused of being
a principal cause of the political corruption of the era. Flower
said “it is essentially a law-defying, crime-breeding and disorder-

producing element."50

Howard Crosby, one of the most prolific prohi-
bitionist writers of the time, asked sarcastically, "Why not government
by rum-sellers? Is not rum-selling a legitimate business? Are not

businessmen well fitted to govern a city?"51

Henry George tried to
enlist the aid of the prohibitionists in his general campaign against
political corruption. "Intemperance is a grave evil," he told the
Arggg_readers. "But it is not the only evil. Political corruption is
also a grave evil."52 George said the elimination of political cor-
ruption would solve the problem of intemperance without direct
prohibition, but Crosby demurred in a succeeding article. "There are
two fallacies in this position. One is that any political tyranny is
worse than moral death, and the other is the failure to see that the
destruction of intemperance would necessarily destroy the Rum Power."53
In "A Plea for the Prohibition Party," published a month before the
1892 presidential election, the Rev. E. E. Bartlett bid for broader
support by linking drunkenness and unrestricted immigration as twin
causes of urban poverty. "The majority of the nine hundred miles of
saloons in the United States are kept by emigrants from the old world,
most of whom cannot speak a word of English," he charged. "Yet so
great is the desire for party supremacy that almost as soon as a male

emigrant from any part of the old world reaches the place of his

destination, he is made a voter by some zealous party worker, with

27

all his old-world habits and attachments still clinging to him." In
his general indictment of the rum power, Bartlett concluded:

The luxuries enjoyed by the brewer, the distiller, and saloon-

keeper, mean the joy-deserted homes, debased manhood,

wan-faced childhood, heart-broken womanhood, pauperism, and

all the crimes known to the decalogue. . . .

The Prohibition Party proposes to open a home market for the

farmer and the manufacturer, by turning the enormous waste

of brain and muscle through the liquor traffic into channels

of productive labor.5

In spite of such broad appeals, the Prohibition Party received

only 264,000 votes for its presidential candidate at the height of

its power in 1892.55

But in the small world which Crane recently had
entered, the evil rum power was a burning issue to which he gave seri-
ous attention in his early fiction.

Gambling was another widely condemned form of intemperance.
Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice, reported that the Methodist Ecumenical Council considered
betting and gambling "as two great vices of the age" and he urged
vigorous legislation to suppress them. Comstock linked gambling,
intemperance and unclean publications together as corrupting public
morals and insisted that "our courts of justice are, or ought to be,

56

schools of public morals." Another writer in the North American

 

Bgyingdrew a thinly veiled analogy between I'Gambling and Cheating in
Ancient Rome" and his own society. He said that the ancient empire
was threatened by the abolition of laws against gambling until
Justinian restored these laws. He concluded, however, ”that the sub-
siding of the passion for gambling, after Justinian's age, must be
attributed less to his code of government than to the spreading of

57

Christian principles.“ A retired sea captain told the readers of

28

the same magazine that his job had been threatened when he inadvertently
gave information about his ship's probable daily run to a professional
gambler on board. He concluded that this gambling is permitted
because the steamship owners wished to sell as much wine and liquor as
possible. "Men who gamble drink, and largely too," he commented.58
The A5333, as usual, took a slightly different view. While
agreeing that gambling was another reprehensible form of public
immorality, Flower and his contributors concentrated their attack on
a society which piously condemned small betting in card games and
lotteries while openly encouraging the greatest betting parlor of all
on Wall Street. In “A Paradise of Gamblers,” Edgar Fawcett ridiculed ‘
the postmaster general for raiding the mail of the Louisiana Lottery
and scathingly attacked the stupidity, vulgarity and cupidity of the
typical Wall Street financier. His famous article is surely one of
the great group character assassinations in American history. He
said that he had painted it "faithfully in the oil of their own
slippery speculations.”59 Citing Fawcett's article, Flower commented
editorially that thousands of persons who had applauded the postmaster
general's action against the lottery were amazed at press reports that
the postmaster general had speculated heavily on Reading stock and
was losing vast sums. ”The lottery is a small evil indeed compared
with the speculation shark, who gambles on the price of the very bread
our wives and children eat and puts our daily bread in pawn to squeeze
an added cent out of the palm of poverty.“ The viciousness of Wall

Street speculations above all other forms of gambling is that they play

29

with "loaded dice," Flower charged. "There is no chance as far as
they are concerned."60
Crane's views about drinking and gambling are confusing. The

evils of drink are dramatized in both Maggie and George's Mother and

 

alcohol is the catalyst in the Swede's violent death in the saloon

in "The Blue Hotel." Crane's apparently sincere attack against the
"rum power" didn't prevent him from seeking social life as well as
story ideas in saloons throughout his career, although there is no
record that he drank excessively. His attitude about gambling is
equally blurry. Games of chance are a focus of action in many of

his stories, starting with "Four Men in a Cave" and ending with the
card game in "The Blue Hotel." Crane apparently shared with Fawcett
and Flower the idea that the game of life was rigged, and the card
games which his characters play often dramatize this idea. Yet, the
higher symbolism of such games frequently is to dramatize the element
of pure chance in the universe. In several short stories, the

heroes either die or escape death through blind chance. Although
Crane pays increasing attention to the element of pure chance in the.
universe as his stories progress, he consistently holds to the view
that nature itself ultimately is rigged against man and that sooner
or later in some unpredictable way man will lose the game of life.
'This is hardly an original view, but the power of many of Crane's
later short stories derives from his curious dramatic mixing of fate
land chance in the universe. The social issue about gambling with all

its hypocrisy providedlrhnwith the material symbols of his vision and

30

his exploration of the nature of the universe produced the hidden ideas
which lay behind the symbols.

The 18905 also marked the real beginning of the American
sexual revolution. The roots of the revolution were economic. A
growing army of women, and their children, was needed in factories
and sweatshops. The new big city department stores employed hundreds
of young women at scanty wages to sell their wares. Business offices
once reserved almost exclusively for men now called upon women to
operate their new typewriters and to perform other clerical tasks
required by a more complex and ostentatious way of doing business.
The same forces which created employment for women prevented a
growing part of the male population from providing for them adequately
in the home. Poverty was widespread among farmers and immigrants
throughout the era, and periodic strikes and depressions added
hundreds of thousands of American laborers to the pool of unemployed
husbands and fathers. Reluctantly or eagerly, their wives and
daughters went to work where they could and for wages which were
often scandalous, but once they were there, the right to a political
voice and to a little pleasure in life suddenly became paramount.

The resulting furor became a central theme in the art and
Social commentary of the decade. In Europe, Ibsen and Hardy leveled
dramatic siege guns at the subjugation of women while Shaw was content
‘to employ the sharply pointed arrows of his wit. In America the
‘talent employed in the cause was thinner, but emotions ran just as
high. "The woman movement is a world-wide fact," declared Lucinda 8.

Chandler in the Areng in 1891. Miss Chandler argued that the evolution

31

of brains, which is nature's method of human development, had perma-
nently altered the relation of the sexes. "The woman who thinks has
come, and the struggle no longer is one of muscle, nor can it ever
again become so," she said:
The woman of the future no more can be remanded to the merely
patient plodder hithe kitchen and nursery, with no horizon
but the cook—stove and the cradle illuminated by the weekly
church service, than the lightning printing-press of to-day
can be remade to the cflumsy instrument of a century ago, or
the electric light to the tallow dip.5l
The Arena editorialized that "The era of woman has dawned, bearing the
unmistakable prophecy of a far higher civilization, . . ." and
called for women to fight for the right of suffrage "for those who

wish to exercise it."62

But the fg:gm_took the position that women
didn't need the vote because “women are not a class but a sex. What
special interest of women can be named which is in danger of suffering
at the hands of a legislature composed of their husbands, sons and

?"63 In another Forum article called "The Ethics of Marriage,"

brothers
the author held that the moral tone of society depends on the chastity
of women and their chastity in turn depended upon the absolute character
of marriage. He quoted Balzac to the effect that "Nothing more con-
clusively proves the necessity of marriage than the instability of

"64 Still another Forum contributor called upon no less an

passion.
Iauthority than Herbert Spencer to prove that woman had developed

Inefore the advent of civilization a natural guile to protect herself
‘From stronger males: "In order to please her brutal lord she had to
(disguise her natural sentiment and to return caresses for blows and

ssmiles for discourtesy. . . . The craftier, the more guileful she was,

‘the better were her chances for survival." The writer concluded that

32

"there is inherent in all women what may be called without any invidious
inference, a yearning for the commonplace, the normal lot."65
An uglier element of the sexual revolution was the increasing
visiblity of an old social problem: prostitution. In 1894, B. 0.
Flower and the New York superintendent of police compared notes and

66 It

estimated there were 40,000 prostitutes in that city alone.
was widely believed that the employment of women in factories and
sweatshops at starvation wages was responsible although one writer in
a four part series on prostitution in the Aregg_concluded that only
seven per cent of the prostitutes she interviewed had been working

67 Edgar Fawcett ignored the survey in his 1891 article on

girls.
"The Woes of the New York Working-Girl“ in the same magazine. He
charged that ”The prices paid her are often a disgrace to her employers
. who literally mount from mercantile obscurity to prominence on
the bodies of herself and her dead or dying fellow-slaves.” In a
passage which closely anticipates the central theme of Crane's and
Dreiser's early novels, Fawcett comments:
The more one observes the joyless lives of working-girls the
more he wonders that so many of them should be jealous of
their good names. In losing these they not only relinquish
a possession about which no one, for the most part, cares
much whether it be lost or kept, but they obtain material
comforts which must fall on their jaded spiritg like some
magic mantle woven of starlight and sea-winds. 8
Ir) his closing passage, Fawcett addressed the New York clergy much as
CTane was to have Maggie accost one of their number near the end of
hGar life. ”Ah, gentlemen of the clergy--and of the New York clergy in

I36irticular--two hundred thousand wretched New York working-women need

your help far more than those noble scientific regenerators of the age

33

need your anathemas!”69

Similarly outraged at the moral hypocrisy of
society, Flower swung wildly in a long series of articles called
"Wellsprings and Feeders of Immorality." ”The lust for gold and the
lust for flesh are the two wellsprings of present day misery,
degradation and crime," he charged. In another, he demanded stricter
age of consent laws to protect young girls from the "lust of moral
lepers" who traffic in the innocence of childhood.70
Crane's response to the sexual revolution was as ambivalent
as his reaction to the social struggle. In his personal life, he
rebelled against both the religious teachings and social respectability
of his family71 and more or less Openly engaged in illicit sexual
activities with prostitutes. Yet, there is no hint that he ever made
love with any respectable woman. He courted several girls of his own
age as a youth, but his longest alliances were with older women, both
respectable and not. Lily Brandon, one of the older women who was
respectable, but married, said Crane was so prudish about the daring
new bathing suits that she was never able to go swimming with him.72
The treatment of women in his works raises even more questions about
his sexual attitudes than the admittedly sketchy record of his own
romances. Other than Maggie and the heroines of his ill-fated romantic
novels, there are no major female characters in any of his fiction
except mothers. Maggie herself is hardly a romantic figure. She is
presented as a daughter and as a sister who is victimized by the
loutish advances of a young street hoodlum. Her own desires are paper

thin dreams for a little amusement and beauty rather than a serious

romantic yearning for her love. The mothers are dominant figures in

34

both Maggie and George's Mother. The latter is presented sympathet-

 

ically as an ignorant old woman unable to understand the frustrations
of her son and ignorantly offering a religion he cannot use. Maggie's
mother, on the other hand, isaiwild beast who savagely drives her
daughter to suicide by aping the conventions of respectable society.
In several other works Crane repeats the same characterization of the
savage earth mother. Often the mother's instinctive adherence to
social customs threatens the lives of her children. When the mothers
and women in general are not actively threatening their men folk, they
are seen in the background carelessly pursuing their domestic duties
while great tragedies are befalling their men folk. Crane in his
fiction adopts the naturalistic creed that sex is one of the tools
which nature creates to entrap the human animal while giving him
another illusion of his humanity. Only in his poetry does Crane

ever express a romantic vision and then only as a fleeting image within
a world of utter despair.

Crane wrote Mgggig and The_Reg_ngg§_gf_ngrgge_during a time
when progressive thinkers clearly foresaw the possibility of world war.
"Europe is again in a state, not of wars, but of rumors of war,"
proclaimed the fgrgm_in the opening passage of its lead article in

November, 1891.73

Another article in the same issue reported that ”In
Europe today three million men, the physical flower of the Continent,
have been drilling, marching and counter-marching, practicing at tar-
gets, learning the use of bayonet . . . ready at a sign to spring to

74

arms and slay each other.“ Another writer warned that "The existing

antagonism between Germany and France constitutes to-day the chief

35

75

threat of a bloody war in Europe.“ In the more radical and mystical

Arena, an article by a physician called "The Coming Cataclysm of
Europe and America,“ predicted in 1890 that the world wide class
struggle soon would engulf both continents in a world war. According
to the author's timetable, the war was to begin in Europe near the
beginning of the 20th century, spread to this country 19 years later
and end about 1916. In addition to his timetable, he offered this
remarkable sketch of the war to come and its influence on 20th century
life:

It will be a labor and capital war intermingled with a reli-

gious element of discord and with a mixture of the race

question from the presence of a powerful negro element con—

fronting the Caucasian negro-phobia. It will be a dreary

triumph of the destructive elements, compelling a new depar-

ture for the future and a more thorough democracy. The

Church as a power will be thoroughly shattered, for the

power in this revolution has outgrown the old Bible. The

fetters of the past will be shaken off--the marriage relation

approximated to freedom, for the drift of the future is that
way and beyond.76

The threat of war in Europe on an unprecedented scale stimulated

a spirited debate in the same journals about America's own military
preparations. The Forum asked, "Is our Military Training Adequate?”
warning that the traditional principles of warfare may have become
obsolete in the modern scientific age:

Slowly at first and latterly with a rush the principles of

science have invaded every detail of the art of war and con-

trolled the operation of its entire mechanism. . . . Woe to

the people who invoke the power of the sword and fail to

sharpen it, and trusting war fail to master it. If peace

and its fruits are at the price of battle, then the law of

battle must be learned.
But Flower, the socialistic and pacifistic publisher of the Arena, was

horrified at the rise of militarism in the United States. In an

36

article called "Fostering the Savage in the Young," he bitterly
decried the military training of youth in the churches and schools of
America. He lamented the elaborate and laudatory accounts of church
fostered military companies in the daily newspapers of New York and
other cities and attacked the religious leaders for departing from the
fundamental teaching of their own accredited Leader. "The work of
fostering the savage spirit in the minds of the young has not been
confined to the churches," he continued. "The introduction of mili-
tary training into the common schools of America marked the triumph

of the military spirit of despotic Europe over the long cherished

78 In this and other articles,

traditions of the [American] republic."
Flower clearly linked the rise of American militarism to the develop-
ment of American industrial capitalism and the corresponding corruption
of its political system.

Much of Crane's fiction reflects this rising mood of militarism
in American life. The savage struggle of the street urchins ”for
the honor of Rum Alley" in the opening passage of Maggig_is the first
expression of a constant theme in his works: that man inherently is
dommed by his own conceit to a fatal struggle with his own kind. The
same theme of man's fatal conceit is presented in its most successful

form in the last of his great short stories, ”The Blue Hotel." But of

all his work, surely The Red Badge gf_Courage is the one devoted most

 

directly to the cause of war, and the answer lies within the mind of
the single soldier Crane employs to describe the universal human
folly. Henry Fleming is driven to war through his own ignorant craving

for glory. At first the author seems to indict society for duping his

37

young hero, but in the course of the novel it becomes increasingly clear
that Henry is free to fool himself, and his final triumph in battle in
his own mind is a prelude tonknwebattles to be fought and more wars to
come. Ihg_3gg_nggg_gf_Courage is not a fictional history of a past
war. It is a remarkable prophecy of the great wars which lie ahead

for a young and overly proud nation reaching out to dominate the

world.

The bitter class struggle at home, threats of new wars abroad
and the seeming decline of all religious and moral values bred a deep
pessimism at the end of the century. Henry George's theory that
progress itself creates poverty captured the imagination of millions
of Americans while his solution of a single tax on land enlisted the
aid of only a few thousands. Bellamy's vision of the carriage being
dragged slowly uphill by the masses of humanity while a few rode
free was more powerful than any promise he made for the future in his
utopian novel. Jacob Riis's picture of children starving in the
alleys of New York was presented without any solution at all as was
the daily chronicle of violence and corruption offered by the new
mass circulation journalism. Constant reports of widespread prosti-
tution dramatized the guilt which respectable society felt about the
larger sexual revolution which was forcing its attention on the public
conscience. The established church faced a double attack from
science and from social reformers who attacked its general apathy in
the face of human suffering. After nearly a century of relative iso-
lation from EurOpean conflicts, Americans sensed their growing

involvement in world affairs at a time when new machines and weapons

38

promised wars on an unprecedented scale. They moved toward world
leadership hithe '905 with a mixture of fear, greed and pride.
Margaret Steward Sibley's "Fin-De-Siecle Vision," published in the
Arggg_at the height of the depression in 1894, asked what the Man
from Nazareth would see if he were to return to the world:

Should he see the toil-worn, old faces of children,
Where the tireless spindle noiselessly hums,

The baby-fingers gravely plucking the bastings,

Or the nameless horrors of city slums?

Strange vision! The land is filled full with the harvest,
Hungry men look for the morrow with dread;

Our hearts swell with pride of our civilizgtion -

God! Hear that piteous crying for bread!

Another poem called "Progress and Pain” concluded:

0 God, have pity on thy world;

For man through all these thousand years,
Battling against grim want and fears
Holding his banner still unfurled,

Has won the victory in vain,

Since progress means increase of pain.80

CHAPTER II

WONDERS AND TERRORS OF SCIENCE

The late 19th century was the golden age of science in western
culture. Never before and never since has the power of science held
such a grip on the public imagination. It was a period when the most
extraordinary secrets of the universe were being revealed to a society
already surrounded by the material fruits of the scientific method.
"It seems almost incredible that a single century can have witnessed

1

so much achievement," said John Fiske. "It is as if we had sailed

to the end of the ocean and landed on a new world of science," agreed

2 .
News about sc1ence was everywhere. The newspapers

Clarence King.
and magazines were filled with articles about evolution, electromag-
netism, astronomy and the new psychology. The works of the greatest
scientific figures of the day--Maxwell, Darwin, Helmholtz, Tyndall

and Kirchhoff-~were heavily advertised. The scientific lectures of

Fiske and Thomas Huxley were widely attended and regularly covered by

the press. The New York Times established a weekly column called

 

"The Progress of Science."

A “new education" based on modern psychological principles
and offering training in the experimental methods of science was
challenging classical education in both Europe and America. Huxley

said in Science and Culture that "the diffusion of thorough scientific

 

education is an absolutely essential condition of industrial progress,"3

39

40

and that "neither the discipline nor the subject matter of classical

education is of such direct value to the student of physical science

4

as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either.“ In

"The Education of the Future,” Clarence King warned:
To choose between the old classical and the new technical
training is simply to decide which side of a man's mind
shall be develOped and which carefully destroyed. Utility
casts the preponderating vote, and in consequence scientific
and technical education is expanding out of all proportion
to the spread of the classics. 5
Science was viewed by many observers as the key to social as
well as material progress. However different their goals, Herbert
Spencer, Huxley, Lester Ward, William Graham Sumner and the young
thahn Dewey all called for the application of scientific methods to
(que social ills. Many writers noted the parallel development of
scieence and democracy. Some simply saw the advance of material
Progress through science as a way of ending poverty6 while others
bel'ieyved that technological breakthroughs like the telegraph and
teleepnione would break the tyranny of monopolistic corporations.7

In ii] 1 of these ways, science seemed to be “the auspicious pledge of

a yet higher, purer and happier civilization in ages yet to come."

 

Th9? f”ledgling MgClure's Magazine celebrated the new year in 1894 by
gathering glowing forecasts of future progress from leading experts
1" ‘tlie fields of science, education, religion and social reform.
TI“3$€3 luminaries predicted the advent of airships, television, elec—
tTCHTIC medical diagnosis, the complete determination of mental laws
anti the cessation of war and hunger.9 A contributor to the Nggth

EHEEEISQD Review promised that ”No one can imagine the reach and

41
limit . . . of the application of the intellect to the problems of

life today. The border-land of science still stretches on into the

unknown."10

The spirit of scientific naturalism which pervaded the age
rested on two theories and a method. The first theory stated that

“the total quantity of all forces capable of work in the whole uni-
..ll

verse remains eternal and unchanged throughout all their changes.
This principle of the conservation of force formulated by Helmholtz,

Joule, Kelvin and other physicists shortly before midcentury almost

finmediately was fused with the rapidly developing theory of biological
12

evolution by the most famous synthesizer of the age, Herbert Spencer.
He lield that the "persistence of force" predetermined all development

frmnn the origin of the universe to the evolution of life and the

13

prCKJFESS of increasingly complex forms of society. Clarence King

Citend the theories of conservathyiofforce and biological evolution

as ‘ttie two greatest intellectual achievements of the age on which

all fflJture progress would be based.14 Then, he added: "Not even the

wor“lci—wide scientific activity of the present is more remarkable than
the} sstrictly inductive cast of all research--law and principle, safely

aruj ‘Faithfully reasoned and drawn from observation and experiment,

Patiieantly multiplied and repeated to the point of proof."15 The

e'SSence of the naturalistic method was the abandonment of metaphysical
Spe3Culation in all fields in favor of careful observation, measure—
‘neths and experiments based on direct experiences in nature. This

"FWEVolt against formalism,‘I stimulated by the success of scientific

enlDIricism and dramatized by Darwin's own patient research became the

42

common denominator of every major progressive movement in the late
19th century.16
Within the century long development of scientific naturalism,
there was a briefer period, like the eye of a storm, in which many
scientists and phi1050phers came to believe that all natural and
human activity could be explained solely in terms of matter in motion.
This creed of scientific materialism developed rapidly after 1850 and
reached a crest during Crane's lifetime. One of the most popular

exponents of the doctrine was Ludwig BUchner, a German professor of

medicine whose principal work, Force and Matter, ran through 15 edi-

 

tions in German and English. Taking his cue from the latest develop-
ments in molecular physics, BUchner began his thesis by insisting that

force and matter were merely abstract names for two different aspects

of the same natural phenomena. ”No force without matter--no matter
without force," he said. "One is no more possible and no more
I117

imaginable by itself than the other. Applying the conservation of

force principle to both force and matter, BUchner paints a picture of
the universe as a closed system filled with atoms of matter moving in
a constant flux relative to one another in accordance with immutable

laws:

Never and nowhere has there been matter without motion, nor
can there exist any. Motion in the universal space, mechani-
cal motion of smaller masses in the individual spheres,
molecular vibration as heat or as electrical or magnetic
action, chemical decomposition and composition, organic life
--each single atom of matter in the world is in one or other
of these modes of action, or in many of them at the same
time, at any given moment. All rest, all equilibrium, is

but comparative. ‘8

43

According to BUchner all of these natural phenomena, including human
nervous energy and thought, were different manifestations of the
"inconceivably swift vibrating or wave-like motion of matter . . . in
the infinitely rare light ether" which filled all space and penetrated

‘9 For BUchner and many other scientific materialists,

all matter.
the invisible light rays of the sun were the cause of all action in
the universe and the key to all its mysteries.

The success of Darwinism did not create the naturalistic or
materialistic beliefs but, like a thunderbolt, it placed man under
their dominion. Descarte, Kepler, Galileo and Newton had laid the
groundwork for a universal system of deterministic natural laws but
until Darwin offered a plausible explanation for the natural evolution
of life, man generally had been declared exempt from these laws, a

20 The

privileged observer who owed his obedience directly to God.
widespread acceptance of the theory of natural selection in the 18705
changed this conception of man abruptly. As Helmholtz noted, l'Darwin's
theory contains an essentially new creative thought. It shows how
adaptability of structure in organisms can result from the blind rule
of a law of nature without any intervention of intelligence.21 From
this he concluded that his own principle of the conservation of force
must hold good for living organisms as well:

If then the law of conservation of force holds good also for

the living body it follows that the chemical forces of the

material employed in building up the body are in continuous

action without intermission and without choice and their

exact conformity to law never suffers a moment's interrup-

tion.

BUchner's picture was even blacker. “Man does not stand outside or

even above Nature, but wholly and thoroughly in her midst, and the great

44

and mischievous error that all Nature was created for his sake must

23

be looked upon as exploded.“ He and other materialists ruled out

all possibility of innate ideas, mind or consciousness existing apart
from the material body. "Nervous energy and electricity may be

looked upon as the same thing," BUchner said, ”and thinking itself

24

has been experimentally proven to be a form of motion.” He insisted

that intelligence is proportional to the physical density and firmness
of the brain and pointed out that the brains of young children and

the senile as well as those of inferior races all were softer than

25

those of members of superior races in their prime. Such a picture

of mechanistic man obviously precluded any hope of immortality. "A
soul without a body, or a spirit without physique, and a thought
without substance, can no more be realized or exist than electricity,
magnetism, undulations of heat, gravity, etc. can exist without those

bodies . . . by which the phenomena designated by those names are pro-

26

duced." In place of the hope for personal immortality or the

continuation of the human race on earth, BUchner offered only the
possibility of eternal cosmic evolution, in a passage which may not
have bred as much optimism as intended:

Though our little earth with its inhabitants may perish, it
by no means follows that the fate of the immeasurable and
everlasting universe should likewise be sealed. Nay, at the
very time when our own race dies away in cold and desolation,
we have a right to assume that upon thousands of other spots
in the universe the condition of things will have reached a
culminating point from which a new race can take its depar-
ture, similar to ourselves in the fundamental principles of
physical and intellectual development, and doomed, like our-
selves, to eventual individual and collective extinction.
Therefore, the destruction of our earth with everything on
it does not seem to signify any more in the universe, than
the death of one individual does on our own earth; and the

45

wave of life which passes over our earth is, as Proctor says

so forcibly and so beautifully, but a gentle ripple on the

sea of life within the solar systems, and the sea of life,

again, is itself nothing more than an insigifigant wave, in

the ocean of the eternal life of the universe.

The growing geological record confirmed the development of the

earth and Hueevolution of life over an almost incomprehensible period
of time. Beginning in 1831, twelve editions of Charles Lyell's

Principles gf_Geology meticulously documented the tremendous age of

 

the earth and argued that every effect in nature was the product of
slow working material laws. Lyell's reluctant acceptance of the Dar-
winian hypothesis which flowed directly from his own work led him to
publish the Antiguity gj_Mgg_in 1863, a popular account of the
development of mankind over millions of years. A series of dramatic
discoveries of the early remains of man was climaxed in 1893 by the
unearthing of the bones of so—called Java man, a species said to be

28 All of these widely

midway between the anthropoid apes and man.
publicized events exerted a strong influence on the mental horizons
of 19th century men. As Fiske commented, ”When once the truth of
Lyell's conclusions began to be distinctly realized, their influence
upon men's habits of thought and upon the drift of phi1050phic specu-
lation was profound.”29
During the same period, striking advances in astronomy
extended the reign of materialism throughout the universe and literally
unseated God from the heavens in the public mind. Throughout the
century, increasingly powerful Fraunhofer telescope lenses had pushed

back the boundaries of space until they seemed to disappear altogether.

BUchner said at the beginning of his chapter on ”The Heavens":

46

Every schoolboy knows to-day that the heaven is no blue vault
su5pended over the earth, with holes in itthrough which the
fiery sphere of the universe gleams in the shape of stars and
sun, but that, in looking at it we are gazing into an incom-
mensurable and almost empty space without beginning and without
end, the vast desert of which is interrupted only by single
stars or groups of stars, few in number and infinitely far
between, and in which e.g. our own solar system, despite its
gigantic extent, appears as a mere dot in the infinitude of
space.

The application of photography to astronomy made possible by
the develOpment of silver bromide plates around 1870 vastly improved
the precision of astronomical measurements and also provided a sensa—
tional feature topic for the new photo journalism. Pictures made by
the new state supported observatories began appearing in newspapers
and magazines in the 18805 and '905. Close-up photos of the moon made
by the famous Lick Observatory and published hithe Century in July,
1891, offered a vivid example of the infinitely gradual evolution of
the universe. In the accompanying article, Edward Holden described
the moon as a planet encased in ice and frozen in time, its presumed
sub—freezing surface temperatures preventing even the normal slow
rate of evolution caused by melting and freezing. “It is almost
impossible to conceive the immense step between the paroxysmal activity
of the volcanos which originally shaped its topography and the icy
calm which now preserves its surface completely unchanged from century
to century,“ he wrote.31

The most spectacular success of astronomy in the late 19th
century was its reunion with physics and chemistry through the wonder
of spectrum analysis. The discovery by Heidelberg physicist Gustav

Kirchhoff in 1859 that the flames of different burning materials

yielded different patterns of colored lines in a spectroscope made it

47

possible to explore the inner chemistry of the sun and the stars, a
feat which Auguste Comte had declared forever beyond the province of
science only 25 years earlier.32 Ingenious applications of spectrum
analysis by Kirchhoff and his followers also made it possible to
measure the distances of the stars and their smallest movements and
revealed that the inner chemistry of matter was the same throughout

the universe.33

At first, the rays of the sun yielded only black

lines corresponding in pattern to the colored lines of different
chemical elements, but the American physicist Charles Young viewing

the solar eclipse of 1868 through a spectroscope reported that at the
moment when the moon entirely covered the sun with only the surrounding
gaseous vapors emitting light, a full range of colored lines

34 This confirmation of the identity of the sun's chemical

appeared.
structure with that of the earth set in motion a whole generation of
research into the inner constitution of the sun and led eventually

to the birth of the modern atomic age. According to Rudolph Thiel:

"Atomic physics developed by leaps and bounds out of this sport. It
is perhaps fair to say that atomic physics is entirely based on spec-
tral lines."35

Reports of this new wonder filled the newspapers and magazines.

Loren Eiseley, author of Darwin's Century, said that ”For a time the

 

new cosmology rivaled the Darwinian controversy in interest, and there

can be no doubt that it promoted and stimulated willingness to accept

n36

Darwin. In his review of the century's progress in science, John

Fiske said that Kirchhoff's discovery made it possible to extend

37

Newtonian laws throughout the universe. Some of the popular accounts

48

were accurate, others were highly imaginative. An article called “The
Wonderful New Star of 1892" in the Egggm offered a detailed descrip-
tion of the identification of the new star by its color spectrum,

but it also speculated ominously about the disappearance of the star
and its reappearance as a full blown nebula some months later. "In
other words," the author warned, "it had developed changes of light
and heat, which if repeated in the case of our own sun, would mean a
quick end of the human race and the utter annihilation of every

vestige of animal and other life on earth."38

A writer for the Arena
in 1890 excitedly reported that the latest discoveries in astronomy
and physics revealed two primary creative principles in nature, "Actien"
and "Ether." According to his highly dramatic account, the sun and
other stars throw off the force of Actien which travels invisibly
through the dark and cold Ether of space:

A conflict ensues between Actien, the positive, and Ether,

the negative principle, resulting in the birth and construc-

tion of atomic and molecular substances. . . . Electricity,

magnetism and the gases are thus produced, followed by the

more ponderable substance of cinderous, nebulous matter,

which under restrictive influence, is sent floating into

spacgg like the misty globules that form a cloud in our

sky.

The most far sighted thinkers of the late 19th century

accepted the naturalistic view of man and nature formulated by science,
but a growing number of them questioned the rigid determinism which
seemed to flow from it. In one of the first American reviews of Igg
Origin gf_Specie , Francis Bowen clearly perceived the hidden bomb of
blind chance which was an integral part of the theory of natural

selection. "Our author denies that the same physical antecedents are

49

always followed by the same consequences,” Bowen wrote. "He affirms
that irregular or unsuspected variations are perpetually interrupting

the chain of orderly causation."40

In the fierce religious debate
which followed the introduction of Drawinism, few others raised the
issue of chance causation, but Charles Peirce began his now famous

exposition of pragmatism in Popula: Science Monthly in 1877 by point-

 

ing out that both Darwinism and the new kinetic theory of gases were
based on the laws of statistical probability. "Darwin, while unable
to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in every
individual case will be, demonstrated in the long run they will adapt

. . . 41
animals to their Circumstances."

Probability became the basis of
Peirce's pioneer work in the logic of scientific inquiry and chance
became the building block of his later transcendental metaphysics of

42 Peirce's work was largely unknown during

universal evolution.
Crane's lifetime, but it was increasingly reflected in the popular
lectures and articles of his good friend, William James. James, who
freely acknowledged Peirce as the primary source of his own prag-
matism, borrowed Peirce's logical arguments against determinism to
support his own faith in human choice freely working within a universe
filled with novel possibilities. In an address at the Harvard

Divinity School in 1884, James passionately exclaimed that "Determinism,
with its necessary carrion, and with no possible maggots to eat the

43 In

latter up, violated my sense of morality through and through.”
the same talk, he offered a preview of his pragmatic philosophy. "I
myself believe," he told his eager audience, ”that all the magnificent

achievements of mathematical and physical science--our doctrines of

50

evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed from our
indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in
our minds than the shape into which it is thrown by the crude order

"44 In France, Emile Boutroux already had come to

of our experience.
a similar conclusion. "The laws of nature have no absolute exis-
tence. . . . They are the image, artifically obtained and determined,

45 Boutroux's

of a model, that, in essence, is living and moveable.“
son-in-law, Auguste Poincare, asserted that all mathematical and
scientific principles were based on evolving human experience rather
than absolute laws of nature or the mind, and Henri Bergson, in his
first work published in 1889, argued that man's inner consciousness
of duration in time was a higher reality that superseded the abstract
laws of deterministic science.46 The philos0phic defense of human
free will coupled with increasing difficulties in reconciling
classical mechanical principles with new develOpments within science
itself challenged determinism and destroyed materialism as the century
drew to a close. In his survey of modern French philosophy,
J. Alexander Gunn commented, "Beginning with an overweening confidence
in science and a belief in determinism and in a destined progress,
the century closes with a complete reversal of these conceptions."47
The success of Darwinism in linking man to the great chain of
natural evolution gave strong impetus to the development of the new
experhnental psychology in America. Shortly after publishing IE2
935%}. 2: Mall in 1871, Darwin himself asked one of his most astute
American reviewers, Chauncey Wright, to analyze how human reason might

48

tmve evolved from animal instincts. lhjght responded a year later

51

with an article in the North American Review called ”The Evolution of

 

Self-Consciousness." He suggested that accidental growth in the

power of "revived impressions" and the association of such impressions
with outward signs might have aided the survival of certain species
and have eventually planted "the germ of the distinctly human form of

49

self-consciousness." Wright, a strict empiricist, concluded that

human reflection then is "not what most metaphysicians appear to

50 Wright's

regard it as-—a fundamentally new faculty in man."
friend, William James, professor of physiology at Harvard and an early
American visitor to Wilhelm Wundt's pioneer experimental psychology
laboratory in Leipzig, enthusiastically told President Charles Eliot
in 1875 that ”a real science of man is being built up out of the
theory of evolution and the facts of archaeology” and proposed a
course in the new psychology.5] During the next 15 years, James
taught the subject to a small body of students, making use of his

own homemade laboratory to conduct psychological experiments, and

laboriously drew together all of the known facts about the new science

for his massive Pringiples g: Psychglggy_finally published in 1890.

 

American interest in the new science of the mind reached a
crest in the late '805 and early '905. As late as 1885, James and
6. Stanley Hall, one of his first students, were the only trained
experimental psychologists in America, according to Frank M. Albrecht's
excellent dissertation on I'The New Psychology in America.”52 While
James was becoming the best known American psychologist abroad, Hall
was assuming leadership of the new movement at home. He established

the first formal experimental psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins

52

University in the mid '805, founded the Journal gj_American Psychology

in 1887 and was the principal organizer and first president of the

53

American Psychological Association in 1892. Stimulated by James

and Hall, experimental psychology laboratories were formed at the
University of Wisconsin, the University of Pennsylvania, the new Clark
University, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Princeton and the Uni-
versity of Chicago between 1888 and 1893. The laboratories were
equipped with apparatus to measure hearing, vision, muscular sensa-
tions and reaction times and with tests to measure human emotion, will
and reasoning processes.54 Through such means, it was widely believed,
as the contributor to McClure's Magazine had pointed out, that the
"complete determination of mental laws" would come in a short time.55
The development of the new psychology in America during the
18905 paralleled the general movement from determinism to inde-
terminism in the natural sciences. The pre-Darwinian pioneers in
experimental psychology were wedded to the mechanical principles of
the parent sciences of physics and physiology, and the German and
British schools generally retained this approach until the end of
the century.56 But in America the particular interpretation which
.James and some of his colleagues placed on the theory of evolution led
‘thenlgradually from a mechanical to a functional and organic view of
nmn1tal development. When James began to write his Principles, he held
firwnly to the mechanistic view as in his famous description of habit:
"An acquired habit from a physiological point of view is nothing but

a 118%! pathway of discharge formed in the brain by which certain incom-

ing; CtJrrents ever after tend to escape.”57 But as the work slowly

53

emerged in the 18805 and James began wrestling with the problems of
perception and cognition and Space and time, it became obvious to him
that man was not just another chapter in physics.58 By 1884, he

had largely given up the old associationist psychology and was
writing instead about "The Stream of Thought,“ in which he said, "No
one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our
natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and
what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative atten-

tion.”59 When James had begun his Principles in the late '705, he was

 

a physiologist interested in the new science of psychology; when he
finished it in 1890, he was a psychologist caught in the grip of
philosophical problems that science alone could not solve. Another
philosophically minded psychologist, James Mark Baldwin, decried

"That most vicious and Philistine attempt. in some quarters, to PUt

60

science in the straight-jacket of barren observations," and the

young John Dewey, who had written a decidedly metaphysical treatise
on psychology in 1886, a decade later was criticizing the concept of
discrete stimuli and responses as a ”survivor of the old metaphysical
dualism of subject and object” and proposing to study in its place
purposive and coordinated human functions and goals.61

The closing years of the century also saw the dawn of modern
‘theories of the subconscious. Several of the early scientific psycholo-
ggists who believed in the continuity of all natural phenomena offered
thenaries of the subconscious to fill in the gaps between conscious

62

nunatal activities. But a stronger impetus came from the need to

CHM/ise practical treatments for mentally ill persons for whom none of

54

the physiological investigations seemed to promise much hope. The
French "morbid school of psychology," initiated by Charcot and Ribot
and culminating in the work of Pierre Janet, made extensive use of
hypnotism to treat patients suffering from hysteria and "double per-

63 Janet's early theories of

sonality" during the '805 and '905.
subconscious behavior were made known to the American public in the
early 18905 by James and Morton Prince, the first American psychologist
to make an extensive study of abnormal behavior. In an article called
"What Psychical Research Has Accomplished" in the fprgm_in 1892, James
cited Janet as "the most brilliant French inquirer into the extra-
consciousness." He described Janet's treatment of a young girl
named Marcella who initially was suffering from ”invincible apathy
and inertia” and spells of violence. According to James's account,
Janet's hypnotic suggestions caused the girl to experience a series of
hallucinations which were, in fact, memories of forgotten experiences.
"Each later hallucination that was peeled off, so to speak, by M. Janet
gave an older one a chance to become more acute, until the whole
regressive series was run through,” James reported. "Her mind was
thus gradually freed of a deposit of obsessions that had accumulated
during five years."64
During this same period, the work of Sigmund Freud gradually
was becoming known beyond his home city of Vienna. Freud's observa-
tion of Dr. Joseph Breuer's hypnotic treatments of the now famous
Anna 0. between 1880 and 1882 led him first to eagerly promote the

use of hypnotism in psychotherapy, but his own treatment of a woman

patient in 1892 led him at first to compel her to consciously recall

55

forgotten memories and then to recall them voluntarily through free

association.65

F. W. H. Myers, the first psychologist to analogize
the conscious mind to the tip of an iceberg, reported Freud's new
methods in London in April, 1893, at a meeting of the Society for
Psychical Research66 and James reviewed Freud and Breuer's report of

their treatment of hysteria in the ngchological Review in 1894.67

 

Freud's own account of psychoanalysis first appeared as a chapter in
Studies gf_Hysteri , published in 1895, and the doctrine was intro-
duced in France the following year.68 Freud's first major work, Ihg_

Interpretation gf_Dreams, was not published until 1900 and generally

 

was ignored for several years after that, but the theories of the
unconscious and the basic technique of psychoanalysis developed by
Janet and Freud were products of the 18905 and began to exert an
influence on the culture of that era, notably in the French symbolist
movement, the phi1050phy of Henri Bergson and the "interior journeys"
of Proust. The years between 1895 and 1900 also marked a period of
spiritual illness for Henry James. His biographer, Leon Edel, notes
that James attempted to exorcise his own spiritual demons by exploring
the inner experiences of children in the stories such as "The Turn of
the Screw" written during this period. During this period, according
to Edel, ”James was probing the same human experience—-and in an
analogously systematic if unconscious way--as Sigmund Freud, who was

69 Given

making his discoveries at this very moment in Vienna."
Myers's report to the Psychical Society in 1893 and William James's
close ties with that body, it is probable that Henry James actually

knew of Freud's work and certain that he was acquainted with the

I‘ll!"
ll V‘illl‘lll

 

 

IIII ll. I'll"

 

56

psychology of the unconscious being formulated by Janet and his
colleagues in France.

On all sides, the traditional common sense dualism of subject
and object was being eroded by rival theories of philosophy which
strove to emulate Darwin's fusion of man and nature. As already
described, materialists like BUchner held that the boundary line
between man and nature was nothing more than the interconnection of
various systems of molecular action and that all ideas were merely
the products of matter in motion. A strong wave of idealistic
philosophies arose in the 18905 to combat this stark view. George
Ladd, professor of philosophy at Yale, resolved what he called the
"burning question" of mind and body by concluding that the dualistic

structure of psychology and science as a whole ”must undoubtedly be

dissolved in some monistic solution."7O He reasoned that since the

human mind cannot be responsible for creating the individual body or
nature at large the only possible explanation was “an Other and
Absolute Mind." William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College

and a well known theologian, attacked materialism at its own front
cknar by arguing that science proved everywhere a rational order in
natureeand that this order could only come from the mind. "Science
bears vfisdom to the twofold truth that the real is rational and the
rurtional is real." Yet, science is only the skeleton of reality. "We
inust ruat confound these laws of science with the ultimate reality," he
warvuai.7] Even Charles Peirce, who early in his career had attacked

metaphysical speculations, succumbed to the pressures of evolutionary

sciencmz in the early 18905 and proposed a sweeping metaphysics in

57

which a purely spontaneous absolute mind gradually had hardened into
regular patterns of habit and matter. “The one intelligible theory
of the universe is that of an objective idealism, that matter is
effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws," he said.72
The respectable phi1050phic and religious theories of
iciealism were only a stone's throw away from the innundation of
SFJiritualistic thought which marked the last decades of the century.
In "The Higher Evolution of Man,“ Henry Wood promised:
.A new light is breaking in upon mankind. Its dazzling rays
are penetrating into the cold, dark caverns of gloom and
pessimism, and transforming it into the abodes of warmth and
torightness. The clear-cut outlines of divinity as engraven
in humanity, long obscured by the deep shadows of material-
‘ism, now stand out with unmistakable sharpness.
He ssriarply distinguished between his own creed and traditional religion
by I1c>tzing that ”A domestic and materialistic Christianity is giving

73 J. M. Peebles

Place to one that is both spiritual and scientific."
saici ‘that the wonders of the telegraph, the telephone, the phono-
grapr: £35 well as mesmerism, clairvoyance and psychometry were
resDoriszible for the present rediscovery and propagation of spiritualism.
"PrenKDriition, hypnotism, telepathy, trance, vision, clairvoyance,
PSYChCDnietry and other varied spirit phenomena are all about us," he
exclaimed. "Personally, I know that the dead are alive--I know that
friencis. departed live and manifest themselves to us still," he said.74
Even wi‘l'liam James, the least fanatic of men, was perfectly willing to
embrace} ‘the possibility of a universal mind. In a lecture delivered

at Harvard in 1897 on "Human Immortality," he argued seriously that

the bYYiiri may be the transmissive function for the soul which is part

58

of a universal mind or soul which occasionally shows glimpses of
consciousness through extrasensory perception and other psychic phe-
nomena.75 F. C. S. Schiller, the English pragmatist who taught at
(Cornell, also defended this sort of transmission theory and argued in

111% Riddles g the Sphinx in 1891, "the unity of philosophy and the

 

universe is vindicated by the discovery of fundamental Identity of

Matter and Spirit, and by an ultimate reduction of the former to the

latter."76

James's willingness to consider the possibility of an over-
soul , so reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson's principle of spiritual
unity, and his active participation in the investigations pursued by
the Society for Psychical Research, dramatizes the inherent connection
between spiritualism and psychic research, a connection which many

77

writers of the period noted. Margaret Peeke said in the Arena that

"we find the words psychic, spiritual, spirituality, spiritist stand-

ing for one and the same thing; and not one in a hundred can

78 B. 0.

discriminate or define wherein one differs from another."
Flower, the editor of the magazine, used the terms spiritualism and
PSyChical research interchangeably in his account of the general move-
ment. He pointed out the phenomenal rise of spiritualism in the mid
19th century to combat the forces of scientific materialism and its
gradual evolution into the systematic investigations of such bodies
as the English Society for Psychical Research, the American Society
and Simi lar societies. "During the last decade of the 19th century,"

he said, "psychical phenomena were challenging the attention of many

psyche] Ogists, physicists and other leading thinkers trained in

59

modern critical methods of research."79 Flower's adulatory review of
the rise of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science doctrine in the same
history and his connection of all these movements with the drive for
class justice casts doubt on his own allegiance to scientific princi-
ples of investigation, but there is no doubt that the distinguished
scientists who joined in the movement for psychic research were
determined to root out the metaphysics and the sham and make use of
rigid empirical methods of research. Richard Hodgson, in his investi-
gation of apparitions and haunted houses, commented, "In a field where
so much is new and so much is continually being discovered, we must
refrain from dogmatic generalizations. The theory of telepathy itself
is eminently serviceable, Simply because it asserts so little." Citing
Darwin's laborious 22 years of research before publication of Ihg
ijgjp_gf_5pecies, Hodgson said "what we especially need at the present
time is not speculation so much as a larger accumulation of well

authenticated experiences. In no branch of our research is this

80

truer than for our investigations of haunted houses.” Alfred Russel

Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, spent much of his
latter years studying the same field. In his article called "Are
There Objective Apparitions?” he said, “We do not know whether the
luminiferous ether is material, or whether electricity is material,
but both are certainly objective." In like manner, he concluded, vari-
ous classes of "phantasmal appearances from the 'doubles' of living
persons to those apparitions which bring us news of our departed
friends.or are in some cases able to warn us of future events," are

subject to objective scientific investigations regardless of their

6O

8‘ 0. B. Frothingham said that the work of the Society

materiality.
for Psychical Research "gets continually farther from any spiritualistic
conclusions, . . . it leaves aside questions of immortality and disem—

82 Objective or not, an amazing array of prominent men joined

bodiment."
in the hunt to verify psychic phenomena during the '905. James and
Hodgson were joined in their founding of the American Society by

G. Stanley Hall, C. S. Minot, Asa Gray, Simon Newcomb, Josiah Royce
and William Dean Howells and in England F. W. H. Myers, Sir William
Crookes and J. J. Thomson were active in the English Society during

83 This brief, but serious, excursion into the "sci-

the same period.
entific underworld" and the related spiritualistic phenomena which
surrounded it were spurred by the revolt against scientific materialism,
the growing evidence that there was something, after all, going on
beneath the realm of conscious thought and motivation.

What materialism, idealism and pragmatism all had in common
was the denial of the traditional common sense dualism of subject and
object. Although these movements overlapped in time, each may be
seen as a successive response to the problems raised by the progress
of biological and physical science. Scientific materialism expressed
the simplest philosophic conclusion to be drawn from Darwinism and
molecular physics; i.e.: that all sense impressions and ideas were
products of the interaction of material forces. The idealists,
spurred by this attack on reason and morality, simply turned the
tables on the materialists by asserting that the increasing rational

order'which science had discovered in nature proved that matter must

be a fbnction of some absolute mind which ruled over all of nature.

61

Pragmatism in turn attacked both the deterministic materialism and the
rational idealism by asserting that neither matter nor mind was upper-
most, but rather that both were abstractions from the living stream
of human experience which was the only concrete reality. In his
presidential address to the American Psychological Association at
Princeton in 1894, James dramatically asserted that "The thought-stuff
and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature.”84
He argued as both Schiller and Bergson had in their earlier works
that the dualism of subject and object is produced by the abstraction
of concepts after the living experience has occurred in a unified way.
The revolt against absolute space and time was well advanced
long before Einstein's theory of relativity was offered to resolve
the impasse between mechanical principles and Maxwell's theories. In
Paris beginning in the 18805, Poincaré insisted that all mathematical
principles, including the axioms of geometry, were conventions based
on experience rather than a priori truths. He championed the new
non-Euclidean geometries as equally acceptable to experience and pro-

posed as his own theory of relativity that ”the state of bodies and

their mutual distances must be relative to a given intant of time

85

rather than to an absolutely fixed spatial system.” In Vienna,

the supremely skeptical Ernst Mach ridiculed Newton's attempt to
prove the existence of absolute Space by whirling a bucket filled
lvith water around in the air. Because the water in the bucket at
first remained still and only gradually assumed a concave appearance,
Newton had concluded that it initially must have been at rest in

sonua absolute medium of which space was composed. Mach retorted that

62

the experiment proved the existence of absolute space only if one
assumed that the stars were fixed in the heavens. "Try to fix Newton's
bucket and rotate the heaven of fixed stars and then prove the absence

86

of centrifugal force," Mach said scathingly. In America, James

concluded from his own psychological investigations that space is "a

87

special form of sensibility" and that "Date in time corresponds to

position in space. . . . The original experience of both space and

88

time is always of something already given as a unit." Another of

the early pragmatists, F. C. S. Schiller, said in Riddles gf_§gg
Spgjgx, that “time depends on motion and motion on time." He

pointed out that "if the motions on which our measurements of time
depend were uniformly accelerated, the flow of time also would be
accelerated in like proportion, and the events of a lifetime might be
crowded into what would previously have been regarded as a few min-
utes." Schiller said that the ideas of infinite time and space were
"convenient functions of science . . . for nothing infinite can be
perceived." Schiller held that the inner sensibility of time or dura-
tion was a higher form of reality. "For the reality of time is
involved in the reality of the world-process.”89 Schiller, who
taught at Cornell from 1893 to 1897 before returning to Oxford, labored
in relative obscurity during the early 18905, but Henri Bergson's
more eloquent expression of a similar philosophy of time attracted
increasing attention in France throughout the decade. His first work,
11913 apgfjggyfll, began from the same premise that time is a
directly felt sense impression and that divisions into past, present

and future are mere intellectual abstractions. He said that every

63

concrete perception in space is in reality a directly intuited
experience in time and that all deterministic laws of science were

based on a confusion of spatial extension with the intuition of time

which is the only authentic human experience. The new non-Euclidean

geometries, the substitution of psychological experiments in percep-
tion for metaphysical speculations about the mind and the soul and,
above all, the extension of universal space and time to an infinity
whicfli could only be understood abstractly, all combined to break down

the iiistoric conceptions of space and time as absolute and distinct

fron1 one another. Both scientists and philosophers moved in the late

l9trl (:entury to replace this rigid dualism with relative conceptions
0f sgaéuse and time as a means of solving problems within science itself
651M621 l as problems caused by science in the realm of the human spirit.

The unity of light and electromagnetic phenomena discovered
by Maxwell and confirmed by Hertz suggested that the basic structure
0f tile! universe was a sea of waves. In the early 19th century,

Fesnl aand Young had resurrected the wave theory of light, overcoming

NEWtCJrI's objections with improved experimental methods. During the

same period, Faraday had demonstrated the existence of an electromag-

"9t1<2 ‘force between two charged poles and suggested that they acted
”p071 Cnne another at a distance through "tubes of force."92 Unhappy
Witjl ‘ttlis crude explanation, Maxwell, the dominant figure in 19th

Century physics, offered a mathematical field theory in which both
Iigrlt iand electromagnetic waves traveled at approximately the same

Speed-93 Hertz in 1887 began publishing his experimental proofs that

such Waves actually existed.94 "This discovery was of transcendental

64

importance both for pure science and for its application to the service

of man," J. J. Thomson recalled in his memoirs. "It aroused great

95

interest throughout the world.” In America, one of the first accounts

of Hertz's work appeared in the 1889 annual report of the Smithsonian

96 Pppular Science Monthly published a full account of

97

Institution.
his life and work shortly after his death in 1894. Scientists on
both sides of the Atlantic vied with one another in the early '90s to
construct devices to detect and produce the new ”Hertzian waves."98
The potential use of the new medium for communications was quickly
perceived. Sir William Crookes said in the London Fortnightlnyeview
in 1892, "Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world.

Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy with-
out wires.”99 In 1896, Marconi startled British post office officials

and all of London by transmitting a message through the air between

100

the central post office and a nearby savings bank. The popular

accounts of invisible solar rays, the preoccupation with all things
electrical and, finally, the prospect of music and voices traveling
through the air on mysterious waves led pe0ple to believe, as Sir
James Jeans later said, "we are beginning to suspect that we live in
a universe of waves and nothing but waves.“10]

Roentgen's discovery in late 1895 of a mysterious ray which
pemmrtrated solid bodies and photographed skeletons beneath living
'flestl aroused even more intense public speculation and fear about the
grtnving powers of modern science. News of the then obscure German
PhySicrist's eerie discovery appeared in newspapers and magazines
102

thrwnJghout the world in January, 1896. The Lpgdon_paily Chrppicle

65

reported that Roentgen had "discovered a light which for the purpose
of photography will penetrate wood, flesh, cloth and most other

organic substances.“ The Frankfurter Zeitung said in a story illus-

 

trated with striking photographs of X-rays that ”The light rays from
a Crookes tube penetrated dense objects as easily as sunlight pene-
trates a piece of glass." The first American report of X-rays

appeared January 16 in the New York Times, and later that month the

 

Matjgp_told its readers that "the photograph of a man, whether clothed
or naked, is merely a human skeleton with a watch or ring, if he
happens to wear them." The news was accompanied by growing speculation
that the advent of X-rays would banish personal privacy forever and
advertisements of "X—ray proof underwear" appeared in competition with
advertisements flmc"X-Ray opera glasses. American magazine writers
debated whether X-rays would prove or disprove the existence of "a
spiritual body within man” and a number of contributors were inspired

to poetry as the one in Life Magazine which began:

 

She is so tall, so slender; and her bones -
Those frail phosphates, those carbonates of lime -
Are well produced by cathode rays sublime, .

Photography_Magazine chimed in with:

The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays,
What is this craze?

The town's ablaze

With the new phase

of X-rays' ways.

(One of the most authoritative accounts of Roentgen's discovery appeared
as the lead article in McClure's Magazine in April, 1896, by H. J. W.
Dam, a journalist and a member of the Royal Institution of Great

103

Britain. Based on a personal interview with Roentgen in his

66

laboratories and accompanied by X—ray pictures of a cigar case showing
the dark shadows of cigars inside, the bones of a foot inside a shoe,
etc., the article described the process of making an X-ray photograph
in colorful detail:

The moment the current passed, the paper began to glow. A

yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds,

waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the

stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered,

and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of

the discharge. Through the metal plate the paper, myself,

and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with the

effect strange, interesting and uncanny.10

Roentgen's success in producing a new ray from the phosphores-

cent gases in a Crookes' tube led almost immediately to the discovery
of radioactivity and the birth of modern subatomic physics. In 1896,
Antoine Becquerel reported from Paris that uranium salts placed
either in light or total darkness emitted radiations upon a photographic
plate whith were stronger and more continuous than the phosphorescence

105 At the famous Cavendish Laboratories

given off by Roentgen's rays.
in England, J. J. Thomson studied the effects of the cathode rays and
X-rays passing through various gases and decided that ”atoms are not
invisible, for negatively electrified particles can be torn from them
by the action of electrical forces, impact of rapidly moving atoms,
ultra violet light or heat." His conclusions that these "negative
particles" were part of every atom of every element and that they were

always of the same mass or charge was reported to the Royal Institution

on April 29, 1897, and published in the Electrician the following month.

 

A full account of his discovery of the electron was carried in the

Philosophical Magazine in October of the same year.106 At the end of

 

1898, Pierre and Marie Curie published their initial account of the

67

radiation emitted from pitchblende and began their arduous task of
isolating the hidden element within the pitchblende which was its
cause“)7 The years between 1896 and 1900 were extraordinarily
fertile in the development of modern physics, particularly for the
scientists at Cavendish Laboratories who published no less than 104

papers during this period.108

Together with Roentgen, Becquerel and
the Curies, Thomson and his colleagues were preparing the way for what
Henry Adams called the ”metaphysical bomb of radium” announced to the
world by the Curies in 1902. The known structure of the universe was
being revolutionized in the final years of the 19th century and a
perceptive young writer living in London during this period and
talking with such friends as Henry James and H. G. Wells could hardly
have failed to know about it.

The advance of science bred a pervading climate of intellectual
and moral relativism at the end of the century. Materialists like
BUchner claimed that ideas were nothing more than matter in motion and
that morality, therefore, “is not innate or implanted by a higher

109 He concluded that “the fountainhead of all

power in the mind."

good actions is not to be sought in the belief in God or in mortality
. but in the conviction that it is the duty of the individual to

act in the manner which is recognized and defined as good or useful

”110 The question of who would decide what was good for

in society.
society was left unanswered. Huxley, the chief apostle of evolution
and agnosticism, never tired of pointing out that no moral end can be
discerned in the natural struggle for existence. “Viewed under the

dryllght of science, deer and wolf are alike admirable," he said.]]]

68

Noting that any cessation in the struggle for existence among men would
lead to overpopulation, Huxley concluded:

And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competi-

tion of man against man and of nation against nation may be;

however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the

negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous

wealth at the positive pole; this state of things must abideé

and grow worse. . . . It is the true riddle of the Sphinx.1

As the greatest century of scientific progress neared an end,

many thoughtful observers pondered the meaning of its lessons. God had
been displaced from nature. Man was revealed as a creature of blind
instincts and dark desires, and the universe itself was described as
a sea of vibrating waves in constant flux. Huxley was one of the
first to foresee the impact which his materialistic philosophy would
have on many of those who followed the progress of science. "The
consciousness of this great truth weighs 'like a nightmare, I believe,
on many of the best minds of these days,” he said. ”They watch what
they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and
powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great

shadow creeps over the sun."113

Huxley tried to rescue his listeners
from this "materialistic slough" by promising further progress and
enlightenment through future scientific advances, but the irony was
that science in its quest for the ultimate truth had begun to move so
far away from sensible reality and human values that it no longer
could command the popular faith which it had stolen from religion.
The artists and philosophers who had accepted the closely reasoned

arguments of Darwinism and embraced the principle of scientific

amfiricism could no longer follow the scientists into the skeleton

69

world of symbols which had been erected by the end of the century.

The most perceptive scientific observer of the age said he had tried
to fathom Lyell's principle of uniformity, Darwin's theory of

natural selection, the laws of statistical probability and, finally,
"the metaphysical bomb of radium," and had finally concluded at the
turn of the century that ”Chaos was the law of nature; order the dream

I.114

of man. With these words, Henry Adams determined to "leave in

silence," promising only that ”Of all the travels made by man since
the voyages of Dante, this new exploration along the shores of multi-

pIICltY and complexity promised to be the longest."“5

CHAPTER III

THE IRON LAWS OF SOCIETY

The hidden meaning of much of Crane's fiction is based on the
pervading cultural ideas discussed in the preceding chapters. Certain
of these ideas remained constant throughout his work. Crane never
wavers in his naturalistic belief that man is an animal struggling with
others of his own kind for a place in an essentially hostile environ-
ment. Nearly all of his characters act according to the blind instincts
of fear, greed and pride which Crane sees as dominant throughout the
animal kingdom. He also holds to the idea that the universe is composed
of invisible particles of force moving in a constant flux relative to
one another and determining every visible action of both natural and
human objects. The source of this universal energy is the invisible
rays of the sun and the stars which, though colorless themselves, have
the power of interacting with human sense perceptions and emotions to
create various illusions of color and sound. In Crane's work, these
illusions of the visible world occasionally are pierced by the higher
reality of physical experience and, at moments of revelation, the
uncaring malice of the universe is momentarily illuminated by the pure
white light of the sun and the stars. The highest irony of all Crane's
work is man's inborn incapacity to directly perceive until the moment

of death the true nature of the universe revealed by modern science.

70

71

Within this general framework of scientific naturalism and
materialism, Crane's work evolves dramatically in the single decade
in which he wrote. His early Spencerian belief that man and society
are rigidly controlled by ironclad deterministic laws quickly gives
way to a preoccupation with the role of pure chance in the universe.
With the exception of Maggie and George all his major heroes meet
individual fates which turn on chance events working within the bounda-
ries of necessity. This change in philosophy is accompanied by a
change in literary perspective and style. In Maggie, Crane assumes
the omniscient position of the typical naturalistic writer who educates
his readers at the expense of an ignorant hero, but in his later stories,
Crane as author increasingly identifies himself with his own heroes'
search for knowledge. The "psychological exploration" of the human

mind for which The Red Badge gf_Courage is often cited is in reality

 

a metaphysical quest about the nature of the universe in which Crane
himself fully participates. The growth of Crane's impressionistic
style parallels this change of perspective. His early "creed of
realism" in fact produced what we would now call a naturalistic novel
filled with vivid, but literal, images of the forces of nature and
society. But in the war novel and in the Bowery Sketches which he
wrote immediately thereafter, Crane employs his imagery to mirror the
inner mind of his heroes through their subjective impressions of the
natural world. This fusion of mind and matter becomes increasingly
sophisticated in the best of his later short stories. In the world
of "The Open Boat,” despair and hope rise and fall as naturally as

the motion of the world itself, and all the normal rules of space and

72

time are suspended by fear. At the climactic moment when the boat
overturns in the surf, the paper thin horizon between the inner and
outer worlds is breached by the physical image of the cold water which
symbolizes death, the only absolute in a world of relativity. Within
this world of utter relativity in which man is helpless in the grip
of both natural forces and pure chance, Crane for the first time
introduces human faith as a factor in the total equation. Unlike
characters in any other Crane story, the men in the boat face the
void together and act decisively to improve their chances for life.
Crane explores the mysterious world of subconscious motivation and
precognition in "The Blue Hotel." Unlike the men in the open boat,
the Swede knows from the moment he is introduced what his fate will
be. All of his actions, stimulated by fear, are designed to bring
about his own death in a negative application of James's pragmatic
maxim that man can help determine his fate through his own beliefs.
James offered his philosophy as an optimistic rebuttal to the growing
pessimism of his age, but for Crane the same reasoning about the role
of pure chance only deepens his natural pessimism. The interpretation
of Crane's principal works which follows traces his bitter odyssey
from naturalistic determinism to utter relativity and nihilism.
Although marked by Crane's unique style and imagination, Maggig
clearly belongs to the naturalistic school of fiction which appears in
America in the 18805 and continues in force for the next half century.
Crane's announced intention in Maggi_, which he began to write while
attending Syracuse University in 1891, is "to show that the environment

is a tremendous thing in this world and frequently shapes things

73

regardless."1 The description of the tenements, taverns and street

life of the slums in Maggig is extensive and realistic and the symbolism
is literal. Jimmie's defense of the gravel hill in the opening scene
represents the struggle for space and pride which Crane saw as inherent
in human nature. The dialogue is intended to reproduce the actual dia-
logue of the Slums as Crane conceived it. The plot is a mere device to
show Maggie's fatal entrapment. Crane's irony here is directed at the
human indifference to Maggie's fate, as in the case of the benevolent
gentleman who "saves his respectability by a vigorous sidestep"2 rather
than brush his coattails on Maggie's sin or in the final reflections of

3 Most

Maggie's mother who forgives her after learning of her death.
importantly to the definition of a naturalistic novel, Maggie herself
remains entirely ignorant of the forces which surround and destroy her.
She is not a heroine at all, but a target for the crushing forces of

the environment which it is the business of the novel to Show.

As one of the first major naturalistic novels in America, Maggig
clearly shows the roots of American naturalism in the popular conception
of Darwinism at the time. In the opening scene, the howling urchins are
competing for space just as all animal species must compete for space in
order to survive, according to the Darwinian theory. The rocks which
the children employ as weapons are the weapons of cave men, showing the
link between animals and early man which Darwin's theory suggested.

The passive observers of the battle represent the apparent calm of
nature which masks the constant warfare beneath its surface and, more

importantly, the total indifference of nature to the struggle for

existence which is a hallmark of Darwin's theory and most of Crane's

74

later work. The gravel heap for which the children contend symbolizes
the materialistic goals of an age reeling under the impact of both
Darwinism and advancing technology.

According to Darwinian theory, the forces of the environment
act to select certain individuals among each species for survival and
propagation while sentencing others to death. The story of Maggie is
nothing more than the literary application of this proposition to
certain members of the human species. That environment is the focus
of the novel is everywhere apparent. The first three chapters are
devoted to showing the savagery of Maggie's early childhood environment.
Maggie purposely is introduced immediately after the description of her
tenement at the beginning of Chapter 2. She is described there simply
as "a small, ragged girl" and no other physical description of her is
ever offered except for the assertion that she is a ”pretty girl" and
Pete's admission that "I'm stuck on yer shape."4 She is a blank page
on which Crane intends to paint his savage picture of New York slum
life. The most vivid picture which the reader gains of Maggie is
produced by the heartbreaking contrast between her vague inner dream
(If beauty and the harsh slum dialect in which she is compelled to
express it. Maggie is surrounded and eventually destroyed by the wild
disorder of her own home, the teeming life of the slums and the iron
lenvs of economics imposed on her class by the forces of higher society.
Crarua's famous line, "The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle,"
illustrates his gift for uniting complex ideas in a single phrase.5 It
descn~ibes her present environment while also clearly alluding to the

materialistic origins of all mankind and at the same time presents her

75

as a rare flower growing in the alien soil of the tenement district.
The balance of the story is devoted to showing that this chance
variation in her inheritance makes her unfit to survive in the environ-
ment of Rum Alley.

The structure of the novel is built around the relationships
in Maggie's own family. Her mother, Mary, serves as a symbol of the
source of life itself, a great earth mother who throws off heat and
energy like the seething stove in their tiny apartment. Mary also is
the engine of rage which personifies the slums and pounds her family
into submission. In her personality, Crane has fused the forces of
heredity and environment. Her natural vitality is corrupted by drink
into frenzy and into an hypocritical sentimentality which for Crane is
the worst sin of a society which refuses to acknowledge its true
animalistic nature. In the first family fight, Mary defeats her hus-
band's wish for household peace and drives him to the saloon. Jimmie,
whose natural capacity for rage in defending the honor of Rum Alley
matches that of his mother, makes a belated plea for justice when his
now drunken father steals the old woman's beer, but he soon learns to
clad himself in the armor required by his environment and eventually
joins his mother in condemning Maggie. Maggie's love of flowers and
her wistful desire for household order link her to her father's natural
instincts symbolized by his pastoral symbol of peace, the applewood
pipe. His defeat and subsequent early death and the death of the baby
whicfll Maggie had cared for place Maggie squarely in the hands of the
warufilike instincts of her mother and brother and foretell her own doom.

Thus, (Jane's application of the Darwinian theory of natural selection

76

to human psychology leads him to suggest a pre-Freudian analysis of
oedipal relationships as well.

Commerce and religion are the principal means by which society
creates and controls the slum environment which entraps Maggie. Through-
out the story, members of the higher classes pass by the inhibitants of
Rum Alley without making direct contact, but Crane makes their responsi-
bility clear. The yellow bottles which fuel the rages of Maggie's
mother and provide escape for her father lead directly to "the open
mouth of the saloon [which] called seductively to passengers to enter

6 In the midst of the altar of

and annihilate sorrow or create rage.”
liquor decanters and glasses behind the bar, Crane notes that a
"nickelplated cash register occupied a position in the exact center

of the general effect."7

When Jimmie and his friend try to avenge
Maggie at Pete's bar they discover the natural alliance which exists
between the bartender and the policeman who represents society.

The iron laws of economics hold Maggie firmly in their grip.
She finds employment in a factory which, ironically, makes collars
and cuffs, symbols of the respectable classes. Like other members of
her class, Maggie is entranced by the tawdry glitter of the beer hall
entertainments and rejoices in the sentimental morality of the plays
which teach that the poor and virtuous eventually triumph over the
wealthy and wicked. But when she is driven from the wild disorder of
her own home into Pete's arms, she is crucified by her own class for
betraying the same Christian morality ordained by the respectable

classes. Her mother in a truly disgusting display of drunken hypocrisy

turns her out of her home amid a chorus of approval from the neighbors.

77

Just before embarking on her own career as a prostitute, Maggie desper-
ately approaches the clergyman who saves his respectability with a
vigorous sidestep just as Maggie had when she previously encountered
the prostitutes in the tavern. Maggie's blind acceptance of the
morality of her class prevents her from adapting to her new trade as
successfully as Nell who easily displaces Pete's loyalty to Maggie by
her superior decoration and commercial instincts. In a single swift
scene, Crane sketches Maggie's rapidly declining value as a prostitute
as she moves down the street from respectable businessmen, to farmers,
to laborers, to creatures as ragged as herself and, finally, to her
meeting with the fat man at the river.8

The mating of Maggie and Pete is as mindless as that of any
other pair of animals. When Maggie first begins to attract notice

from the young men in the neighborhood, her brother warns her, "Yeh've

9

edder got teh go teh hel or go to work." She tries work first but

after meeting Pete and sensing his taste in women, she "began to see

"10 Maggie sees in Pete's apparent

the bloom in her cheeks as valuable.
finery and in his apparent scorn for the "brass clothed power” of the
upper classes the trappings and manner of a successful warrior in the
constant conflict of life. At the end of Chapter 6, Pete rescues her
'from the wreckage of her cave-like apartment in which the fire has
gone out leaving "remnants of a meal, ghastly, like dead flesh, in

the: corner." In the courtship which follows, Pete, "racking his brains
for amusement," takes Maggie to a menagerie where they view "the
spectacle of a very small monkey threatening to thrash a cageful"n

arm! to a museum of ancient history where Pete moralizes over mummies

 

4

 

 

 

 

(111'

10

as
br
av
ap
de
Ma
‘10
it

Oil

0!
59

0i

78

and questions the use of collecting ancient artifacts in neatly ordered
rows. Here, and in his mocking description of Pete as an ancient
warrior, Crane joins other reform minded thinkers of his time in re-
examining history in light of the Darwinian revolution for the purpose
of showing the continued force of ancient customs and taboos in modern
life. Pete, of course, proves to be a rather timid warrior whose
pugnacious outlook quickly gives way to a concern for his position

as bartender when threatened by Maggie's embarrassing demands and her
brother's abortive effort to defend her honor. Despite Pete's initial
avowal, "Say Maggie, I'm stuck on yer shape," neither he nor Maggie
appear to be motivated by sexual desire itself as much as by sexual
decoration, an important feature of Darwin's theory of sexual selection.
Maggie initially is desired by Pete as an additional status symbol to
go with his fine dress and position, but he quickly abandons her when
attracted by the superior decorative arts of Nell.

Maggie ultimately loses her brief race for existence to her
own brother. She and Jimmie and the baby, Tommie, all are victims of
their mother's drunken wrath, but only Jimmie's natural rage enables
him to adapt to the constant pounding of his environment. Throughout
the novel the chapters are evenly divided to Show the contrast in
Jimmie's and Maggie's reactions to the same environmental influences.
When Maggie complains that his fighting will cause them all to be
beaten, he strikes her himself. While Maggie dreams of beauty and
order, Jimmie is in the streets learning to "clad himself in armor"
against the hypocrisy of religion and at the same time to steer clear

of the overwhelming power of society represented by the fire engine

79

12

which "had been known to overturn streetcars." Even his protest as

a small child against his father's theft of the old woman's beer is
carefully qualified by his interest in seeking refuge in her apartment
from his mother's wrath. Jimmie begins as Pete's protégé, adopting
his attitudes about life and society and pursuing the same interests.
Later, he is confronted by the dilemma of defending one's own sister
while ruining those of others. He resolves it by accepting the
conventional double standards of society and joining his mother in
disowning Maggie. "Radiant virtue sat upon his brow and his repelling
hands expressed horror of contamination.“13 Jimmie's condemnation
serves dramatically to seal Maggie's doom, but there is no more real
choice in the matter than in her mother's instinctive condemnation
because he has been trained from childhood to embrace hypocrisy as
a defense against the environment. The old woman, "who could don at
will an expression of great virtue" and who makes her living by begging
and stealing under the guise of religion, is his guide.14
In accordance with the implications of the Darwinian revolution,
Crane replaces the church's threat of everlasting damnation with his
own conclusion that life is a hell on earth. Throughout the novel,
he repeatedly applies supernatural labels to the human denizens of the
:slums and constantly employs "hell" as a swear word. Jimmie fights

like "an insane demon” on the gravel heap and his attackers from

H15

Devil '5 Row are called "the true assassins. In the first family

figrn:, his father states the theme directly: ”My home reg'lar livin'
hell,fl' and the theme is restated again and again.16 At the end of

his (filildhood, Jimmie concludes reverently, "Deh moon looks like hell,

80

17 Later, he mocks his own conclusion when he reports telling

18

don't it?"
the passerby, "Go teh hel and get off deh eart'." When Maggie is told
by her mother, "Go teh hel and good riddance,“ the author tells the
reader simply, "She went," signifying her submission to Pete's demands.19
In the final scene, when the ladies agree that Maggie has gone "where
her sins will be judged," Crane clearly implies that Maggie has in fact
finally achieved her escape from the judgments which made her life a
hell on earth.

In the same scene, Crane interlaces his bitter mockery of
Christian morality with the mother's unwitting allusion to the true
environmental causes of Maggie's death. Jimmie, now a full grown man,
enters the apartment and announces his sister's death. The neighbors
join the old woman, "whose vocabulary is derived from the mission
churches" in a chorus begging the mother to forgive Maggie. Mary,

"her good motherly face . . . wet with tears," over and over again
repeats variations of the phrase, ”I can remember when her feet were
no bigger than a thumb and she wore worsted boots.” She demands that
Jimmie go get the corpse. "Go get yer sister and we'll put deh boots
on her feets," she cries, and he replies, ”Dey won't fit her now, yeh

20 Mary, of course, long ago has put the boots to Maggie's

damn fool."
feet, and nothing can be done about it now.

In Maggip, Crane appears to embrace the social Darwinist credo
tfiurt wealth and poverty in society are a natural extension of the
struggle for existence in nature. But, unlike some of the social

Darwinist spokesmen of his age, he more logically implies that those

vnn) benefit most from the organized institutions of commerce and

81

religion are just as animalistic as those who survive on the edges of
society. In fact, Maggie fails to survive in part because she is a
throwback to human dreams. Her brother succeeds relatively speaking
because he pursues his animal nature more consistently, and Pete,
though a fool, obtains a position on the lower rungs of society by
virtue of a certain native shrewdness also shared by his old girl
friend, Nell. By implication, the owners of the saloons and beer
halls and factories and the religious leaders who ignore Maggie while
alive but plead for her forgiveness after death are still more shrewd.
Instinct replaces reason in Crane's lexicon of survival skills. Blind
will replaces purpose as a motive force. Materialism replaces beauty
as a goal.

Although Crane portrays Maggie as the victim of mechanistic
laws which govern society as well as nature, he also recognizes the
principle of disorder implicit in the Darwinian formula. Maggie's
mother is introduced as the life force reeling between the seething

stove and the pan-covered table who anoints Jimmie's lacerated cheek

21

with water from ”an unholy sink.“ Then, "She shrouded herself,

puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at the stove,“ and produces
a frying pan full of potatoes which she feeds to her animalistic
children.22 Mary is a natural force which makes their home a constant
Inaelstrom of broken furniture, brutal beatings and wasted food. At
(”we point, "She returned and stirred up the room until her children

23

watt: bobbing about like bubbles.” When Maggie first notices Pete,

she (nontemplates the dark, dust-stained walls of the apartment and

the scant and crude furniture. "A clock, in a splintered and battered

{(1 it!“ {ii} li.IIIl|l‘l." {III il‘il’l l'll‘(!l|.'ll. III-Ill i

 

82

oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an abomination.
She noted that it ticked raspingly. The almost vanished flowers in
the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous.” Maggie spends
some of her week's pay for flowered cretonne and makes a lambrequin
with infinite care and hangs it on the "slightly careening mantle over
the stove" in a pathetic effort to beautify her home. Her mother
smashes it along with the rest of the furniture, leaving Maggie to
wait for Pete in the wreckage of her cave.24 Crane here portrays the
mother as both a naturalistic force which destroys Maggie's dream of
natural order while also making her the principal spokesman later for
the hypocritical conventional morality which he sees taking place in
his own age.

Crane's first major work is dominated by the influence of
Darwinism in his time. His portrait of slum life in Rum Alley is a
faithful replica of the struggle for existence found throughout nature.
Its inhibitants act through the same instincts of fear, greed and rage
which govern all members of the animal kingdom. The forces of environ-
ment act to select certain members of society for survival while
condemning others, like Maggie, to death. The iron laws of human
nature and society which determine individual fates are as rigid as
the natural laws which govern motion and reproduction.

Yet, in spite of the overwhelming determinism of his first
novel, Crane clearly recognizes the principle of indeterminacy in the
Darwinian formula. He pictures Maggie as a chance variation in the
hereditary scene of things which blossoms briefly in Rum Alley before

being destroyed by members of her own species. The principle of

83

disorder is uppermost in the character of Maggie's mother, who represents
the forces of life itself. The timid clergyman who steps aside to save
his respectability rather than to save a soul faces the same dilemma

as the church itself in confronting the implications of the Darwinian
revolution. "For how was he to know that there was a soul before him

25 The naturalistic artists who

that needed saving?" the author asks.
followed Crane's early path Shared the same dilemma as the churchmen
they attacked. How can one dispassionately explore the soulless
society which modern science seems to prove when the artist's own

soul passionately cries out against the injustice and suffering which
such explorations everywhere reveal? While other naturalists struggled
with this conflict of heart and mind, Crane in his later work took an
even darker road which led him beyond the rigid laws of naturalism into
the total chaos of nihilism.

Crane continues his attack on society in a number of his Bowery
Sketches, but his zeal for reform gradually diminishes as his artistic
powers grow. In the so-called "Tommie sketches,” Crane “resurrects”
Maggie's dead baby brother to act as the hero of three distinct lessons
about the effects of poverty on the very young.26 The style of these
sketches, presumably written shortly after the completion of Maggjg,
is essentially the same as that of the novel, and the themes definitely
are in the realm of social commentary. As previously indicated, Tommie
reappears in "An Ominous Baby" as the militant champion of the poor who
steals from a well to do baby what society has denied him as a birth-

right. Attracted by a crimson and gold toy fire engine in the hands of

84

the pretty child in fine clothes, Tommie first asks courteously, "Say,
le' me play with it?” The other child replies with the simple logic

of his class, "No . . . it's mine.“ Tommie retorts with equal logic,
"I want it," and with superior force wrests it from the other child's

hands.27

Here, Crane simply reverses the social Darwinist ethic to
show that the ultimate power may lie in the hands of the poor, but
rough, Slum child and by implication with the growing population of
his class. Neither reason nor ethics is displayed on either side of
the encounter. Both children act instinctively in defense of their
own class interests. The slum child's use of force is given precisely
the same moral value as the middle class baby's appeal to property
rights, and pure force triumphs. The social warning here is clear.
The second sketch in the series, cryptically called "A Great
Mistake," has a different outcome.28 Tommie covets ”the mass joys of
the world: represented by the red and orange fruit on a Italian street
vendor's stand. "He was fascinated by the tranquillity of the vendor,
the majesty of power and possession." The vendor is lulled to sleep
by reading his daily newspaper, a sardonic comment on the role of
journalism in the period, and the baby attempts to snatch his prize
with "fingers bent, claw-like in the manner of a heart-shaking greed."
But fate ordains that the vendor should awaken at that moment and
catch Tommie barehanded. "He glared at the babe a fierce question.”
Crane employs here for the first time a phrase repeated again and
again in his later stories. The mistake here ostensibly is Tommie's.
He has challenged superior power and lost for the moment. But Crane

probably also meant that the unappeased greed and stealth of the baby

85

were mistakes for which society ultimately would have to pay. By
denying the slum child the simple fruits and joys of the world, society
was laying up a store of misery and violence in the future.

"The Dark Brown Dog" is by far the best of the Tommie sketches,
and the one least directly concerned with the social struggle. The
child and the dog meet on the street and, despite the child's fierce
blows, the dog's loyalty and good humor compel the child to take him
home. The fierce father decides that the dog should remain in order
to spite the rest of the family. The child continues to beat the dog,
but the dog gives back only love and sympathy for the child's troubles.
"He was too much of a dog to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge."29
When the dog finally has won a place in the child's heart, the father
one day becomes exceptionally drunk and with cheerful good humor pitches
the dog "with great accuracy" out of the window of their fifth story
tenement apartment. The child "burst into a long dirge-like cry, and
toddled hastily out of the room. It took him a long time to reach the
alley, because his size compelled him to go downstairs backward, one

30 The

step at a time, and holding with both hands to the step above."
reader is left to speculate about the thoughts which may have run
through the baby's head on this long journey. By the time the child
has reached the ground and seated himself by the body of his dark
brown friend, he certainly has learned that loving and caring have no
place in society. For Crane, the dog's natural behavior mirrored

the child's natural capacity for human warmth, crushed by his human

environment.

86

Crane continued to write his sketches and stories about New

York street life after completing The Red Badge gf_Courage early in

 

1894, but his style, even in his journalistic accounts, becomes in-
creasingly impressionistic and his themes no longer are concerned
solely with the plight of the poor. "An Experiment in Misery" and

"An Experiment in Luxury," published in the New York Press in April,

 

1894, were based on personal experiences which Crane sought for the
purpose of writing journalistic exposes. Yet, the product in both
cases was indecisive even from a reporter's point of view because Crane
became caught up in his own imaginative visions without having any
preconceived form for them. In both Sketches, Crane describes his
own role as observer by creating a fictional third-person, nameless
youth who is performing the experiments in wealth and poverty, the
same device he used in writing short stories based on his own true
life experiences.

Like many of Crane's short stories, "An Experiment in Misery"
begins with a lengthy description of a street scene in which nature
and artificial light combine to create an impressionistic spectrum
of ominous colors. "It was late at night, and a fine rain was swirling
softly down, causing the pavements to glisten with hues of steel and

3] In Ma ie,

blue and yellow in the rays of the innumerable lights."
the color impressions are literal and directed at the reader's emotions,
but in this sketch, Crane uses the same imagery to mirror the inner
psychological mood of his characters. For example, he writes in the

opening passage that "The sifting rain saturated the old velvet collar

of his overcoat, and as the wet cloth pressed against his neck, he

87

32 Much of the

felt that there no longer could be pleasure in life."
imagery here is far fetched and the tension between the author's point
of view and that of his make believe third-person hero frequently
results in tortured constructions:
Through the mists of the cold and storming night, the cable cars
went in silent procession, great affairs shining with red and brass,
moving with formidable power, calm and irresistible, dangerful
and gloomy, breaking silence only by the loud fierce cry of the
gong. Two rivers of people swarmed along the sidewalks, spattered
with black mud, which made each shoe leave a scar-like impression.
Overhead, elevated trains with a shrill grinding of the wheels
stopped at the station, which upon its leglike pillars seemed to
resemble some monstrous kind of crab squatting over the street.
The quick fat puffings of the engines could be heard. Down an
alley there were somber curtains of purple and black, on which
street lamps dully glittered like embroidered flowers.3
Despite the awkwardness and excessiveness of this and other passages,
the germ of Crane's powerful impressionistic style is plainly evident
in this sketch: the rivers of people swarming along the sidewalks,
the scar-like impressions left by their footsteps, the combination of
visual and sound imagery in the quick fat puffings of the engines and
the eerie union of the pastoral imagery of the embroidered flowers
with the flickering lights of the city street lamps.
Crane's experimental observer in poverty eventually meets a
native of the slums whom the author introduces as ”an assassin steeped

34 This description, a favorite Crane

in crimes performed awkwardly."
phrase for the poor, is both ironic and ambivalent. It suggests that
the man is guilty of the crime of being poor and that respectable

readers fear such persons as the potential assassins of their polite

society. Crane pointedly contrasts this fearful image of the poor

with his description of the character as a bumbling and good natured

88

beggar who for a small price offers to guide his new friend into the
bowels of poverty. The subsequent experience which the observer under-
goes in his overnight sojourn in the flop house is anything but funny.
A man with "benevolent spectacles" collects their money and leads them

35 The

into a dark and secret place filled with "unspeakable odors."
youth enters an intensely gloomy room furnished with tall lockers
which tower over him like tombstones or mummy cases and sees "on cots
that thickly littered the floor the forms of men sprawled out, lying
in death-like silence, or heaving and snoring with tremendous effort,
like stabbed fish." He is forced to lie down on one of the slab—like
leather covered cots, "as cold as melting snow.‘I

And all through the room could be seen the tawny hues of naked

flesh, limbs thrust into the darkness, projecting beyond the

cots; upreared knees, arms hanging long and thin over the cot

edges. For the most part they were statuesque, carven dead.

With the curious lockers standing all about like tombstones,

there was a strange effect of a graveyard where bodies were

merely flung.36
This passage is almost the same as Crane's description of the dead men

seemingly "dumped from the sky” onto the battlefield in The Red Badge

 

gf_Courage. And the subsequent description of pale white light which
finally announces dawn in the flop house and reveals the poor in their
naked, natural splendor "standing massively as chiefs” is reminiscent
of the dawn which reveals the grove in which the battle-weary men are

37 It is hardly

sleeping "as a charnel house" in the war novel.
surprising that Crane should borrow some of his best images from the
war novel to describe his own fearful experience in the flop house,
but it clearly illustrates that in both works he is moving rapidly

away from "his little creed of realism" and is becoming increasingly

89

concerned with the experiences which promise to reveal the condition
of man in the universe. Both the Civil War novel and the later and
better Bowery Sketches are metaphysical explorations disguised as
realistic descriptions of war and poverty.

"The Men in the Storm," considered by many critics the best
of Crane's Bowery Sketches, clearly illustrates his gradual transition
from a social reformer to an artist concerned with universal values.
According to Stallman, this sketch was based on a street scene which
Crane witnessed in February, 1894, although it was not published in
the A:ega_until the following October. In contrast to the militancy
of "An Ominous Baby,” the poor here are portrayed as deeply passive
creatures who wait in the snowstorm, "like statues of patience" for
a charity kitchen to open.38 Crane here makes no direct attack on
the forces of society which he had indicated for participating in
Maggie's death, and he comments only briefly on the "moral cowardice”
of the poor. This sketch offers no clear message and little plot and
yet its careful structure and well controlled impressionistic language
mark it as a forerunner of the best short stories which Crane was to
write several years later.

The snowstorm which Crane graphically describes is both a
naturalistic and a psychic force. During the long winter's afternoon
the blizzard drives the waiting men with whips, forcing them to huddle

together "like sheep in a winter's gale.‘ The snow falls on this

huddled mass of humanity as if ”they were unresisting grass of the

fields," and from above it makes them appear like a “heap of snow

39

covered merchandise.” When the charity kitchen finally opens, the

90

crowd strains and pushes “like a turbulent water forcing itself through

one tiny outlet."40

But these naturalistic images of brute force and
passive determinism are accompanied in this sketch by a more subtle use
of Crane's gift for impressionism. Almost all of his images of the
storm are designed to explore the moods and sensibilities of the
creatures caught within it. As so often in Crane's work, the opening
line of the sketch signals this dominant interest. ”The blizzard
began to swirl great clouds of snow along the streets, sweeping it
down from the roofs, and up from the pavements, until the faces of
pedestrains tingled and burned as from a thousand needle-prickings."4]
The remainder of the Opening passage describes the effect of this force
on the crowd of humanity largely in mental terms. The pedestrains are
made to stoop "like a race of aged people.” The wagon drivers are
"more cruel" because they are exposed to the elements while the
streetcar drivers who are duty bound to face the storm are "models
of a grim philosophy."42
In the second paragraph, the mood and perspective change
abruptly. It begins, “All the clatter of the street was softened by
the masses that lay upon the cobbles, until, even to one who looked
from a window, it became important music, a melody of life made
necessary to the ear by the dreariness of the pitiless beat and sweep
of the storm." In contrast to the harsh physical images of the opening
passage, the reader here sees and hears the music of the storm from
behind the window which throws out "great beams of orange and yellow

light upon the pavement." These beams are ”infinitely cheerful," the

author tells us, "yet in a way they accentuated the force and discomfort

91

of the storm, and gave a meaning to the pace of the people and the
vehicles." He continues:

There was an absolute expression of hot dinners in the pace of

the people. If one dared to speculate upon the destination of

those who came tr00ping, he lost himself in a maze of social

calculations; he might fling a handful of sand and attempt to

follow the flight of each particular grain. But as to the

suggestions of hot dinners, he was in firm lines of thought,

for it was upon every hurrying face. It is a matter of

tradition; it is from the tales of childhood. It comes forth

with every storm.43

For Crane, the ultimate power of the snowstorm, and of all
adverse elements in nature, is to make men blind to their common
humanity. The entire sketch is built on a series of contrasting
psychological viewpoints which are heightened by the crisis of the
storm. The division of the general crowd of pedestrians fleeing to
their homes and hot dinners in contrast to the poverty stricken men
who must wait in the storm for food and shelter is, of course, an
obvious dramatic device as is the contrast between the cheerful shop
windows and the storm outside. But the pattern of contrasts runs
much deeper and serves a philosophic as well as a dramatic purpose.
In the opening passage, Crane carefully distinguishes between the
middle class pedestrians who shelter their faces from the bite of the
storm in the collars of their coats as they race for home and the
wagon and streetcar drivers who must stand erect in the storm. Of
the drivers, he distinguishes the former who is made cruel by his
exposure from the latter who faces his trial stoically.
Among the poor and homeless, there also are at least two sorts,

the "professional poor" who come to the charity kitchen in hard times

because they no longer can afford the 10 cent price of their regular

92

slum lodgings and the ”men of undoubted patience, industry and temperance"
who are not often seekers after charity but presumably are brought to

this level by the great depression of 1893-94.44

"But they were all
mixed in one mass so thoroughly that one could not have discerned the
different elements but for the fact that the laboring men, for the most
part, remained silent and impassive in the blizzard, their eyes fixed
on the windows of the house, statues of patience." This crowd "swayed
gently with a unanimous, rhythmical motion," marching in place to keep
their feet from freezing, but they do not more forward together.
Instead, "One could hear little combats of opinion." The men wrangle
and debate among themselves whether the charity kitchen is about to

45 Just

open and repeatedly demand of one another, “Keep off me feet."
before the rumors begin, Crane notes pointedly, the windows from the
building shine forth clearly, while "A street lamp on the curb struggled
to illuminate, but it was reduced to impotent blindness by the swift

gusts of sleet crusting its panes.”46

When the rumor is passed back
that the doors can't be opened because the men in front are crushed
against it, the men in the rear who are responsible irrationally blame
those at the front: ”Ah, git away f'm th' door!" "Git outa that!"
"Throw 'em out!" "Kill 'em!”47
The crowd unites briefly at the appearance in his window of the
fashionable dry goods merchant with the Prince of Wales beard. "He
slowly stroked his moustache, . . . and looked down at the snow-
encrusted mob. From below, there was denoted a supreme complacence

in him. It seemed that the sight operated inversely, and enabled him

to more clearly regard his own environment, delightful relatively."

93

The men in the storm drive him from the window with a torrent of genial
abuse, "and the mob chuckled ferociously, like ogres who had just
devoured something."48
When the doors finally open, the crowd of men, fearful that
all will not get in, threaten to trample one another in the desperation,
and a genial policeman is hard pressed to restore order. Those who
arrive at the doorway are bathed in Crane's familiar red light at the
entrance, but the effect here is to rob them of rage:
As they thus stood upon the threshold of their hopes, they looked
suddenly content and complacent. The fire had passed from their
eyes and the snarl had vanished from their lips. The very force
of the crowd in the rear, which had previously vexed them, was
regarded from another point of view, for it now made it inevitable
that they should go through the little doors into the place that
was cheery and warm with light.49
The sketch is complex and not altogether clear from a phi1050phical
point of view, but it reflects several important advances in Crane's
art. First, Crane's overt criticism of society has been subdued and
hidden behind a veil of images and scenes which only indirectly reflect
his meaning. At the same time, he has turned from a direct interest
in the class struggle to an exploration of the basic elements of human
nature which are responsible for it. Finally, and most importantly,
he has begun to weld together the power of his impressionistic vision
with a growing phi1050phy of nature. What differentiates "The Men in
the Storm" from his earlier Bowery Sketches is that each image of the
storm and of the flood of humanity in its grip is designed to reveal
the hidden bond which links the human mind to the surrounding universe.

There is nothing particularly profound about Crane's social or natural

philosophy, even in the best of his works, although it goes deeper than

94

that of the other American naturalists, but the important thing for
an artist is that his reasoning about life should gradually become
fused with his craft and his vision.

When Crane and Corwin Linson visited a Pennsylvania coal mine
in the summer of 1894 on assignment for McClure's magazine, the young
author who only recently had completed the manuscript for Ige_Red
Bagge_gf_Courage must have felt that the images of his own fevered
imagination suddenly had come to life. He saw ominous coal "breakers"
squatting on the hillsides and in the valleys belching smoke like the
cannon in his war novel. A company guide led his party along paths of
black coal dust to another secret doorway, the slimy, moss grown,
dripping granite walls of the old mine shaft. Within the mine, the
headlamps of the miners cast flickering shades of colored light against
the surrounding black walls, and at the bottom of the shaft, Crane
discovered a perfect naturalistic symbol of human blindness in the
slave like mules who lived out their lives in the ”limitless night
of the mine."50

On the surface, Crane's account of his visit, ”In the Depths
of a Coal Mine," published in McClure's in October, 1894, is simply
an exposé of the inhuman working conditions of the miners. He describes
the blighting of the landscape by the mining operations, the notorious
practice of employing "spanking age” children as slate pickers, the
pitifully low wages of the miners and the constant dangers which they
face from cave-ins, gas and "miner's asthma." In the final passage
of the article, deleted before publication, Crane bitterly indicts the

coal operators for callously exploiting the miners. But beneath this

95

journalistic account, Crane has carefully constructed one of his most
subtle and imaginative works of art in which social injustice is no
more than a corollary of the endless war between man and nature.
Crane begins by painting a vivid naturalistic picture of men
caught in the grip of insatiable industrial machines. The breakers
are "eating of the sunshine, the grass, the green leaves. The smoke
from their nostrils has ravaged the air of coolness and fragrance."51
As Crane's party approaches one of the mines:
A ”breaker" loomed above us, a huge and towering frame of blackened
wood. It ended in a little curious peck, and upon its sides there
was a profusion of windows appearing at strange and unexpected
points. Through occasional doors one could see the flash of
whirring machinery. Men with wondrously blackened faces and
garments came forth from it. The sole glitter upon their persons
was at their hats, where the little tin lamps were carried.52
Mules and cars appear like toys on the giant waste heaps that rise in
the center of each of the mining sites and a web of railroad tracks
connects the mines to a distant town on the horizon. At the very top
of the breaker the men dump the coal into chutes and great teeth on
revolving cylinders chew and sort the coal into ”classified fragments."
"The dust lay inches deep on every motionless thing, and clouds of it
made the air dark as from a violent tempest. A mighty gnashing sound
filled the ears. With terrible appetite this huge and hideous monster
sat impeturbably munching coal, brinding its mammoth jaws with un-
earthly and monotonous uproar."53
In the center of this maelstrom, in a room whose floor is
tilted at a 45 degree angle, the little slate pickers sit sorting coal.

Crane describes these children as "a terrifically dirty band” of black

imps filled with ignorant pride and vain glory. “They resembled the

96

New York gamins in some ways," he writes, "but they laughed more, and

when they laughed their faces were a wonder and a terror. They had an

air of supreme independence, and seemed proud of their kind of villainy."

Crane mocks their ambitions to become door-boys and later mule-boys and

then laborers and helpers. "Finally, when they have grown to be great

big men, they may become miners, real miners, and go down and get

'squeezed,' or perhaps escape to a Shattered old man's estate with a

mere 'miner's asthma.”54
The first dialogue between the workers in the mine dramatizes

the cheapness of life there and offers a subtle comment on the "struggle

for existence" theory of the social Darwinists. Accompanied by the

company guide, Crane and Linson suddenly come upon two miners crouching

at their work, their eyeballs and teeth shining phosphorescently in

the glare of the lamps ”like two grinning Skulls in the blackness."

One of the workers asks the company guide when he is going to "measure

up" the mine and says half jokingly, "Yeh wanta hurry up, . . . I

don't wanta git killed.“ The guide replies that he has forgotten his

measuring tape and says easily, "Oh, I'll be down on Monday." The

brief scene ends with the author's comment that ”one had to look

closely to understand that they were not about to spring at each other's

throats. The vague illumination created all the effect of the snarling

55 Crane here appears to be gently ridiculing the

of two wolves."
struggle for existence theory often cited to justify business practices
of the day. Rather than a savage struggle, this “clash" between labor
and management is marked by indifference to the miners' fate on the

part of the management representative and passive, even good humored,

acquiescence by the workers.

97

The mules which toil year after year in the mines closely
resemble the workers themselves. Crane finds them in dungeon like
stables at the bottom of the mine shaft "placidly arranged in solid
rows." Like the eyes of the miners previously encountered, their
eyes shine like huge lenses in the glow of the miner's lamps. "They
resembled enormous rats." The mules who have been to the surface fear
the darkness, but they are tricked into working by a boy who walks
ahead of them with a light. "Afraid of the darkness, they would
follow." One of the mules is named "Molly Maguire" in honor of the
secret labor rebellion which swept the Pennsylvania mine fields in
the 18705. The mule, "indifferent to the demands of art," constantly
moves when Linson tried to sketch her, but the miners good humoredly
grab her tail, head and legs and squash her rebellion. However, one
of the other mules who had ”spent some delirious months on the surface
after years of labor in the mine” simply refuses to return in spite of
the plans and conventions held by the men to budge him. ”No cudgellings
could induce him," Crane comments, and adds, "The celebrated quality of
obstinacy in him won him liberty to gambol clumsily about on the sur-

"56 Once again Crane seems to be mounting a thinly veiled attack

face.
on the timidity and cowardice of the workers for suffering their fate
without rebellion.

However, the social struggle is no more than a secondary theme
in this complex sketch. The main purpose of Crane's account of his
journey "to the center of the earth” is to strip away the illusions

of the visible world and to reveal the universe as an endless, rela-

tivistic void. This is signaled in the initial plunge of the elevator

98

down the mine shaft. The men march aboard the plain wooden platform
of the mine elevator armed with little lights "feeble and gasping in
the daylight." Instantaneously the landscape which had been framed
by the doorposts of the shed disappears and the men are dropping with
"extraordinary swiftness" straight into the earth. "It was a plunge,
a fall." In the total blackness the men lose all sense of fixed
relationships:

The dead black walls slid swiftly by. They were a swirling dark

chaos on which the mind tried vainly to locate some coherent

thing, some intelligible Spot. One could only hold fast to the

iron bars and listen to the roar of this implacable descent.

When the faculty of balance is lost, the mind becomes a confusion.

The will fought a great battle to comprehend something during

this fall, but one might as well has [sic] been tumbling among
the stars. The only thing was to wait revelation.

It was a journey that held a threat of endlessness.57
At the bottom of the shaft the miners' lamps cast red and orange shades
on the walls and illuminate little points of coal which shine like
diamonds, an obvious reference to exploration of the stars through
spectrum analysis.58 The infernal din of machinery in the mine creates
a constant vibration which makes the very walls of this universe
tremble until they seem about to break apart. All sense of time,
direction and distance is lost and the visitors are amazed at the
vast distances between different points in the blackness of the mine.
"We were impelled to admire the guide because he knew all the tangled
passages."59
The ultimate law in Crane's vision of this relativistic universe
is nature's indifference to man's fate. Crane concludes from all that

he has seen in the mine that the miners are "grimly in the van" of the

endless war between man and nature. "They have carried the war into

99

places where nature has the strength of a million giants. Sometimes
their enemy becomes exasperated and snuffs out ten, twenty, thirty
lives. Usually she remains calm, and takes one at a time with method

60 The

and precision. She need not hurry. She possesses eternity."
dangers in the mine are for Crane analogous to the dangers which all
men face on the surface of the earth at the bottom of the universe.
"There is an insidious, silent enemy in the gas. If the huge fanwheel
on the top of the earth should st0p for a brief period, there is
certain death."61
All of the appearances on the surface of the earth are illusions
of men's souls. The mules held captive at the bottom of the mine see
nature more truly than man himself. "Upon the surface there had been
the march of the seasons; the white splendor of snows had changed again
and again to the glories of green springs. Four times had the earth
been ablaze with the decorations of brilliant autumns." But to the
mules who had remained in these dungeons, "daylight, if one could get
a view up the shaft, would appear a tiny circle, a silver star aglow

62 At the beginning of the sketch the coal black

in a sable sky.”
breakers reach up toward "a sky of imperial blue, incredibly far away
from the sombre land." And when Crane's party is returning to the
surface he notes that "Far above us in the engine-room, the engineer
sat with his hand on a lever and his eyes on the little model of the
shaft wherein a miniature elevator was making the ascent even as our
elevator was making it. Down one of those tremendous holes,” he says,

63

"one thinks naturally of the engineer." Crane ends the sketch with

a vision of the landscape similar to that of the final passages of

100

The Red Badge gf_Courage: "The high sun was afloat in a splendor of

 

spotless blue. The distant hills were arrayed in purple and stood
like monarchs. A glory of gold was upon the near-by earth. The cool
fresh air was wine." But this illusion of the visible world cannot
negate the “sinister struggle far below," which Crane reveals:64
"Great and mystically dreadful is the earth from a mine's depth. Man
is in the implacable grasp of nature. It has only to tighten slightly,
and he is crushed like a bug. His loudest shriek of agony would be
as impotent as his final moan to bring help from that fair land that
lies, like Heaven, over his head."65
In those works written between 1891 and 1894 which are specifi-
cally concerned with the poor and with the social struggle in the
American society at that time, Crane holds fast to the classic natu-
ralistic conception of man as a blind victim of the overwhelming forces
of society and nature. The men in the storm and the coal mine are as
ignorant and helpless as his first heroine, Maggie. They talk but they
do not actually think. They act in accordance with the presence or
absence of pain. They constantly misjudge the causes of their own
plight. In contrast to the public view of the poor as fearsome and
dangerous radicals, Crane soon perceives that they generally are tooth-
less. He expresses thinly veiled impatience with the good natured
passivity of the gentle poor and scorn for the false bluster of the
hoodlums. His social irony is allotted equally among the poor and the
rich.

But his own powers of expression are in direct conflict with

his early social phi1050phy. His vision of a street scene in a blizzard

101

or of the dark passageways of a tenement flophouse or coal mine is
incurably surrealistic. He cannot describe such a scene as realisti-
cally as other naturalistic writers could, nor, on the other hand, is
he ever content with employing the heavy handed artificial symbols of
many naturalistic writers to dramatize a preconceived philosophy.

The tension between Crane's artistic vision and the materialistic
philosophy which he embraced as a youth helps define the development
of his later works. He never abandons this phi1050phy, but his own
acutely self-conscious relationship with the world compels him to
join his later heroes in a constant search for knowledge. The result
is an extraordinary, though vain, attempt to discover the meaning of
the universe through the power of his own imagery. In order to trace
this development, it is necessary to move back in time and consider

the earliest works in which Crane pits man directly against nature.

CHAPTER IV

THE QUEST FOR SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Nothing better reveals the ambivalence of Crane's early liter-
ary development than his almost simultaneous composition of the early
drafts of Maggje_and a series of strange sketches based on his summer
experiences in the woods of Sullivan County, New York. According to
Stallman, Crane's fraternity brothers at Syracuse said that he wrote
the first draft of Maggie there in the spring of 1891 after reading

Madame Bovary,1 and Crane himself boasts in a letter to a boyhood

 

friend that he wrote or rewrote the novel in two days before Christmas

of that year.2

He rewrote it again in the spring of 1892 after showing
it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century. During the same
period, Crane was spending part of his summers in Port Jervis, N. Y.,
and he and his friends went hunting in the 3,500 acre tract which his

brother, Judge William Howe Crane, had acquired for legal services to

the Hartwood Club.3 New York Tribune editor Willis Fletcher Johnson

 

recalled that Crane showed him the first two Sullivan County Sketches
in July, 1891,4 but none apparently appeared in the Tribune until the
following fehruary.5 The sketches have all the earmarks of talltale
hunting sketches, but their themes and imagery are so closely cor-
related with Crane's later work that they repay close study.

All of these sketches match the natural world represented by
the ponds and woods of Sullivan County against the inner world of

102

103

fear and courage which lives in the hearts and minds of the four
anonymous heroes who represent humanity. Each of the stories involves
a literal exploration or hunt and a metaphorical search for truth and
meaning. In the sketches, Crane for the first time begins to divide
his irony between human nature and the universe itself. As in many
of his later short stories, Crane offers a striking symbolic statement
in the opening lines of his Sketches which sets forth the nature of
the quest or conflict to come. Crane later said he wrote the Sketches
when he was "clever,” but he was willing to have them published as a

collection after the successful publication of The Red Badge gf_Courage.16

 

They obviously represent the early development of a personal philosophy
which he sets forth more fully in his poetry.

One of the earliest Sullivan County Sketches, "Four Men in a
Cave," begins with the line, ”The moon rested for a moment on the top
of a tall pine on a hill,” and with the premise that "The little man
was determined to explore a cave, because its black mouth gaped at

him."7

He and his three companions explore the dark labyrinth of
passages within the cave and ultimately come upon ”an infinitely
sallow man" standing in front of a "great, gray stone, cut squarely

like an altar." He commands, ”It's your ante, and requires them to
play a ghostly hand of cards.8 Although Crane offers a tongue in
cheek natural explanation for the recluse, he has introduced here the
themes of dark passageways of knowledge and chance which govern much
of his later work.

Crane casts the same four men into a swamp of Darwinian natu-

ralism in “The Octopush,” but they eventually turn on their nocturnal

104

guide when he becomes the victim of his own illusions. The sketch,
which Crane also called "The Fishermen," begins, "Four men once upon

a time went into the wilderness seeking for pickerel," an ancient

fish, and ”proceeded to a pond which is different from all other sheets
of water in the world, excepting the remaining ponds in Sullivan
County."9 There they encounter "a creature with a voice from the
tomb," who insists on becoming their guide. Later as the sun goes
down, this ”individual" separates the four men from the ”common stump"
on which they all are resting and "redistributes them, each to his
personal stump." Later, as the shadows of dusk "mingle in combat"

with the red flare of the campfire and nocturnal creatures scramble

and flop in the weeds and sticks, the four men realize that they are
”separated from humanity by impassable gulfs.” Suddenly, the little
man shrieks that I'All creeping things were inside his stump," but their
escape is blocked by the surrounding black waters in which there were
things which wriggled. Just as suddenly, the drunken guide who has

led them to this naturalistic morass himself leaps up and exclaims,
"Stump turned into Octopush. I was settin' on his mouth.” At this
point, the little man regains his courage, kicks the guide, and they
all row ashore together.

In "A Ghoul's Accountant," Crane immortalizes the power of
commercialism. He begins with the cryptic observation that ”In a
wilderness sunlight is noise. Darkness is a great, tremendous silence."10
Again, he pits the red flames of the dying campfire, ”which glowered and
hated the world" against the surrounding darkness of the unknown world.

A ghoul appears, "His skin was fiercely red, his whiskers infinitely

105

black.’I He threatens the man with a three-pronged pickerel spear and
forces the little man to accompany him to a little house where he is
required to calculate the price of 35 bushels of "pertaters" at 64%
cents a bushel while a wild, gray man looks on. The latter, evidently
the loser in the deal, then kicks the little man out of the door. In
this sketch the overriding commercialism of the age coupled with
Darwinian naturalism replaces religious belief in immortality.
Crane dramatizes the fear of the unknown in "The Black Dog."H
The four men are again wandering in the woods, ”everlastingly lost,"
when they meet a slate-colored man who tells them that his friend is
sick ”ter death.” He superstitiously predicts that his friend won't
die until the black dog comes. When the song of the spectral dog
finally is heard, "a strange, unnatural wail burdened with the weight
of death," the men rush outside and find a perfectly natural dog eating
beef-tea. When they return to the cottage, they find the old man dead..
"Without," Crane concludes, "the specter was wagging his tail."
Despite the natural explanation of this and other nocturnal adventures
in the Sketches, the irony is not aimed at human frailties. The death
of the old man clearly expresses that fear reigns supreme in the human
heart and the final image of the dog wagging his tail is an early symbol
of the "uncaring malice" of the universe which fully justifies man's
fears.

In "Killing His Bear,” Crane for one of the first times weds
his recurring themes of fear and love.12 Despite overwhelming fear,

the little man stalks and kills the bear. "When the rifle cracked,

it shook his soul to a profound depth. Creation rocked and the bear

106

stumbled.“ In exultation, the little man walks up to the bear through
the blood soaked snow and kicks its ribs. "Upon his face was the smile
of a lover."

The little man tests himself against the bear again in "A Tent

in Agony."13

Crane returns to the theme of the quest for self-knowledge
in the opening line: "Four men once came to a west place in the roadless
forest to fish.” The little man is left alone in the roadless forest
while his three companions go for supplies. ”There's only one of you--
the devil make a twin," they say in parting malediction. The bear
appears and chases the little man into the tent where they confront
each other nose to nose. The little man crawls out of the tent, and
the bear brings "a chaos of canvas about his head." "Now the little
man became the witness of a mighty scene. The tent began to flounder.
It took flopping strides in the direction of the lake. Marvelous
sounds came from within-~rips and tears, and great groans and pants."
The three men return just in time to see the ”canvas avalanche" sweep
past them. When they interrogate the little man sitting calmly by
the campfire he remarks, "There's only one of me--and the devil made
a twin."

Once again, the little man is "sweating and swearing his way
through an intricate forest” in "An Explosion of Seven Babies” when
he encounters a brown giantess who attacks him without apparent
reason.14 Her seven babies watch "like a Roman populace ready to
signify the little man's death by rubbing their stomachs.” The pudgy
man sits upon a wall and views the fray in amazement, and finally

"performs the feat of his life" by falling off the wall and accidentally

107

saving the little man by diverting the savage mother's attention.
Later, they encounter the cause of their near fatal encounter: a
salesman selling "Smither's Eternal Fly Annihilating Paper," which
has made the mother's dear babies sick.

The image of the tent of agony returns in a new form in "The

Mesmeric Mountain."15

This time the little man cannot resist exploring
"an irregular black opening in the green wall of forest." "I wonder
where the devil it goes to,” he thinks and steps through the green
portals, "shutting out live things." He battles the ”ignorant bushes."
As he walks on, the sun Sinks in red silence and ”a leaping pickerel

off on the water created a silver circle that was lost in black

shadows." Suddenly he cries, “There's eyes in this mountain! I feel

em.

Eyes. The mountain was approaching. As he feels the heel of

the mountain about to crush his head, he fights back with pebbles. In

a moment, he has defeated the mountain and reached the top. ”The
mountain was motionless.”

"The Holler Tree," offers a new set of symbols for the Darwinian

theme introduced in "The Octopush."16

In the later story, the little
man accidentally stumbles against the pudgy man and almost breaks the
basket of eggs he is carrying. They run upon a ”tall, gaunt relic of
a pine that stood like a yellow warrior still opposing an aged form

to blows in storm-battles.” The little man says, ”I bet it's got lots
of nests in it. . . . Yes, I bet it's a cornerstone with an almanac in
it and a census report and a certified list of the pew-holders." The

little man climbs up the tree to prove his point. He sits atop the

tree and reports that there is nothing to climb down with. He slides

108

down the inside of the tree and becomes trapped. The little man
eventually topples the tree down upon his companion and wriggles out.
"There's your eggs--under the tree," he remarks and strides away like
”a proud grenadier."

Crane's most overt fictional account of the Darwinian struggle
for existence is found in "The Snake," a story similar in style and
setting to the Sullivan County Sketches, but not published until August,

17

1896, in Pocket Magazine. It begins with the same description of a

 

path wending its way through tangled bushes and ends with the hero
pompously proclaiming his victory over nature, but there is no meta-
phorical quest here. It is a simple and brutal tale of the life and
death struggle of two ancient enemies. The man is strolling along
the path in a decidedly pastoral setting with his dog walking ”tran-
quilly meditative" at his master's heels when they hear the snake's
rattle. Both react with precisely the same instinctive fear and hatred:
Like the fingers of a sudden death, this sound seemed to touch
the man at the nape of the neck, at the top of the spine, and
change him, as swift as thought, to a statue of listening
horror, surprise, rage. The dog, too-~the same icy hand was
laid upon him, and he stood crouched and quivering, his jaw
dropping, the froth of terror upon his lips, the light of
hatred in his eyes.
Without thought, the man's "unguided” fingers reach for a stick of
adequate weight and length, and he and the snake confront one another:
"In the man's eyes were hatred and fear. In the snake's eyes were
hatred and fear. These enemies maneuvered, each preparing to kill.
It was to be a battle without mercy. Neither knew of mercy for such

a situation. In the man was all the wild strength of his ancestors,

of his race, of his kind." In the battle that follows, the snake's

109

agility is no match for the superior strength and reach of the man
with his weapon:

The stick swung unerringly again, and the snake, mutilated,
torn, whirled himself into the last coil.

And now the man went sheer raving mad from the emotions of

his forefathers and from his own. He came to close quarters.

He gripped the stick with his two hands and made it speed

like a flail. The snake, tumbling in the anguish of final

despair, fought, bit, flung itself upon this stick which was

taking its life.
With hands still trembling from the encounter, the man hoists the dead
snake on his stick, and turning to his dog with a grin of victory,
says, "Well, Rover, . . . we'll carry Mr. Snake home to show the
girls."

Crane's vivid description of man's bestial reversion to nature
is accompanied by scathing comments about his pretensions to knowledge
and morality. He attacks the church by noting that in "the formation
of devices, hideous and horrible, Nature reached her supreme point in
the making of the snake, so that priests who really paint hell well
will fill it with snakes instead of fire." The snake's natural gal-
lantry in battle compares favorably with the man's boastful pride in
a victory won solely through superior strength and reach. "The snake's
attack was despairing," Crane writes near the climax of the struggle,
"but it was nevertheless impetuous, gallant, ferocious, of the same
quality as the charge of the lone chief when the walls of white faces
close upon him in the mountains." Crane here couples sincere praise

for the natural courage of the snake with a sarcastic reference to

the lone Indian chief which ridicules man's romantic notions about

110

the nobility of courage while also recalling the racial genocide

practiced by the white man on the Indians during the 19th century.*
Whether Crane wrote "The Snake" as an early Sullivan County

Sketch or, as Stallman suggests, after himself killing a snake in the

summer of 1894,18

this story shows the young author's preoccupation
with the lessons of the Darwinian revolution. It also shows the link,
and the difference, between the two different strands of his early
writing. The story clearly is intended to show that man is an animal
subject to all of the predetermined instincts of every other species
in nature, including fear and loathing and rage. At the same time,
it offers an answer to the essential question raised in the other
Sullivan County Sketches: How can man acquire knowledge? The meta-
phorical sketches all show man setting off to hunt down the meaning
of life and his own nature, and many of them end with the illusory
triumph of their heroes. But here in presenting man as identical with
the snake in his blind rage and fear, he notes that ”the snake had no
knowledge of paths; he had no wit to slink noiselessly into the bushes."
Obviously, the man Shares the snake's ignorance because he senselessly
does battle with the snake for the sake of pride, and false pride is
highest in Crane's catalogue of human sins.

Except for "The Snake” and the powerful ending of "The Black
Dog,’I the Sullivan County Sketches generally are considered ineffective,

but they are a rich source for those seeking the origins of Crane's

 

*

The reference to Indians here suggests that Crane may have
had the same issue in mind in his repeated references to the poor as
"poor Indians" in the Bowery Sketches.

111

later style and philosophy. In these Sketches he begins to weld
together the images and the ideas which mark the best works of his
final years. Here too is the beginning of a preoccupation with
epistemological questions which leads to his ultimate judgment of a
nihilistic universe.

Crane returns to a naturalistic theme in writing The Red Badge

 

gj_Courage in 1893, but his artistic vision no longer is purely

naturalistic. His hero, Henry Fleming, is trapped within "the moving

box of his regiment, enclosed by "iron laws of tradition and law on

"19

four sides. The ensuing battle ”is like the grinding of an immense

and terrible machine, and Henry in battle is ”not a man but a member.

he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a

20 Yet, unlike the typically ignorant natu-

revolution from a hand.”
ralistic hero, Henry himself is aware of these and other vivid impres-
sions he receives in the course of his experiences. From the moment
he crawls into his tent "to be alone with some new thoughts that
lately had come to him," all of the battle scenes and interludes in

camp are viewed through his eyes.21

The brilliant imagery of The Red
Bagge_gf_Courage is not designed simply to show the hero's entrapment
in his environment, but rather to mirror his intense inner reflections.
Although Henry's ultimate conclusions about the nature of the universe
are painfully at variance with those of the author, he is permitted to
think and puzzle out his experiences in a manner permitted no other

naturalistic hero, including Crane's own Maggie. Thus, most critics

see Crane's most famous novel as a psychological drama although many

critics fail to note the inherent conflict between this literary mode

112

and the naturalistic mode which educates the reader at the hero's
expense. There is still another dimension in the war novel. Its
power is based neither on the drama of human entrapment nor on pene-
trating psychological insights. Rather, it symbolically offers a new
metaphysics of human existence which the author appears to have worked
out in the course of writing the story.

Crane suddenly achieves great power in writing The Red Badge

 

g: Courage by applying the surrealistic imagery which he began to develop
in the Sullivan County Sketches to the realistic theme of warfare. The
brilliant opening passage of the war novel employs the same fogs, muddy
roads and shadowy rivers which abound in the Sketches to describe the
opposing army camps, and “the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires
set in the low brows of distant hills" which climaxes the passage is

a realistic application of the central image which terrorizes the
little man in ”The Mesmeric Mountain."22 The rutted and muddy roads
which stand for passageways to knowledge and lead to unknown fates in
the lexicon of imagery created in the Sketches become the scenes of
epic marches and wild retreats in Ige_fled Badge gf_Courage. Thickets
and tangled forests stand for the epistemological maze in both works.
The spectral dog which symbolizes the fear of the unknown in one of

the Sketches becomes the infinitely more powerful spectral soldier
whose eyes stare fixedly into the unknown in the war novel.

The initial introduction of the characters in The Red Badge pf

 

Courage also is drawn directly from the Sketches. Crane's eventual
decision to identify the main characters in the war novel primarily by

physical characteristics such as "the tall man,” ”the loud man" and

113

"the youth" or "young recruit" enlarges their representation of humanity
in the same manner as the use of the "little man" and the "pudgy man"

in the Sketches. The initial argument among the soldiers in the Civil
War camp is carried on with the same ignorance, pomposity and eagerness
to dispute which marks the opening dialogues in the Sketches and
introduces the same theme of truth seeking.

Like the Sullivan County Sketches, The Red Badge gf_Courage

 

is both a psychological test and an epistemological quest. After
receiving a fill of discussions concerning marches and attacks, Henry
goes to his hut and "crawls through an intricate hole that served it
as a door. He wished to be alone with some new thoughts that had

lately come to him."23

The dark forest openings and tortuous passage-
ways through which the Sullivan County heroes pass to seek knowledge
become the "intricate little hole" through which Henry crawls to seek

knowledge about himself in The Red Badge gf_Courage. The shadowy

 

enclosed caves and cabins and tents in which the Sullivan heroes test
their courage become first the glowing tent in which Henry seeks
truth and later the eerie ”chapel of the boughs" and "hall of the
forest" in which he momentarily discovers it.

The central conflict in The Red Badge gj_Courage is not man

 

against man, but man against the universe, and the central question is
not the nature of man's fear and courage, but the nature of the universe
itself. The metaphysical nature of Henry's quest is signaled by his

24 After the

initial impression that "They were in an eternal camp."
last casual human contact between the sentries of the opposing armies,

the enemy never again appears in the novel except on the horizon or

114

hidden among the trees or as "skirmishers continually melting into the

25

scene." Henry feels that the landscape itself continually threatens

him. "A house standing placidly in distant fields had to him an ominous

look," and ”The shadows of the woods were formidable. He was certain

that in this vista there lurked fierce eyed hosts."26 What Henry does

see and feel at close quarters is the product of an unknown but

apparently supernatural agency: ghastly forms of the dead men who

27

seemed to have been "dumped out upon the ground from the sky" and

the invulnerable dead man which forced its way among the moving

troops whose tawny beard the wind moves ”as if a hand were stroking

it."28 All this creates in Henry's mind ”the impulse of the living

to try to read in the dead eyes the answer to the Question."29

Henry's
vision of the threatening, but incomprehensible universe culminates in
the famous image, "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a [fierce]
wafer" at the end of Jim Conklin's race with death.30
The color dichotomy of red and black introduced in several of

the Sullivan County Sketches is expanded in The Red Badge gf_Courage.

 

The essential conflict between the red fire of man's violent will and
the blackness of the unknown universe remains in the center of the
scheme, but Crane adds a whole spectrum of related hues in the war
novel. The green earth is turned brown by man's violent warfare. The
Vvhite sunlight filters through the tent which shelters Henry's thoughts
aand becomes "the yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions."3]
'The uniforms of Henry's massed regiment become ”the blue demonstration”

32

which encases him in man's organized customs and traditions. In

certain moments of revelation, such as Henry's visit to the chapel of

115

the boughs, all of the colors of Crane's universe are brought together
in a single vision:
At length he reached a place where the high, arching boughs made
a chapel. He softly pushed the green doors aside and entered.
Pine needles were a gentle brown carpet. There was a religious
half light.

Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of
a thing.

He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his

back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a

uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melan-

choly shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had

changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish.

The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow.

Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trun-

dling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.33
Here, mankind is the victim and mother nature is revealed as the ultimate
aggressor. The blue of man's organized society has returned after death
to a melancholy shade of green, the color of natural decay. The red
mouth of man's fiery self-expression has changed to an appalling
yellow, the color produced by the universal white light of the sun
in combination with man's futile ambitions. The entire spectrum of
colors in the passage is the stained glass of nature's chapel which
mocks the universal lessons of religion. The gray of the corpse's
face is the color of the void, the median point between the black and
white which bound Crane's nihilistic universe and surround the futile
red life force at its center.

To this universe of color, Crane adds the vivid imagery for

which The Red Badge gf_Courage is justly famous. Throughout the

 

novel, the descriptions of battle are mingled with descriptions of

nature until nature itself seems at war. Before Henry enters the

116

chapel of the boughs, the sounds of musketry and cannon grow faint,
giving way to the rhythmical noise of insects which "seemed to be

"34

gnashing their teeth in unison. In the next battle, the wind and

the smoke of gunfire combine to become "the swirling battle phantoms

35

stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat." In the first

wild retreat of Henry's regiment, "the sight of this stampede seemed

36 an

to be able to drag sticks and stones and men from the ground" d

when the enemy opens fire from the woods, Crane says, "the forest made
a tremendous objection."37

Crane constantly combines the impressions of different senses
in the same description. He writes of the "crimson roar of battle,"
of the trees beginning "to sing a hymn of twilight" and of the ”new
silence” of Henry's wound. The sights and sounds and smells of battle
become so fused in Henry's mind that his whole odyssey seems to become
a single universal sensory experience.

But the ultimate experience in Crane's image-filled universe
is physical: choking smoke, dripping blood, bullets “buffing into
men," the soldier whose knee joint is shattered by a ball and who
clings to a tree pleading for aid all develop in Henry “the acute

38 The final image of war is an

exasperation of a pestered animal.”
orderly sergeant who is shot through the cheeks, ”his jaw hanging
down, disclosing in the wide cavern of his mouth a pulsing mass of

blood and teeth.”39

The moments of truth in the novel always are
symbolized by physical images: the invulnerable dead man forcing his
way through the line of marchers, the ants crawling across the face

of the corpse in the chapel of the boughs, the convulsive death

117

struggles of Jim Conklin, and Henry's own wound, "his little red badge
of courage."40
The physical revelation of the universal void is symbolized
in Crane's work by the removal or tearing away of the thin coverings
which shelter mankind. The soles of the shoes of the invulnerable
dead man who forces a way for himself through the ranks of marchers
are "worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in
one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had
betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty

which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends."41

Later,

when Jim Conklin finally has fallen, the "flap of his blue jacket

fell away from the body" and Henry sees that ”the side looked as if

it had been chewed by wolves.“42
Neither Henry Fleming's fate nor his final interpretation of

the universe is predetermined, but rather depends on chance. After

the grim and truthful visions he sees in the chapel of the boughs and

in the field with his dying friend, Jim Conklin, Henry believes that

his cowardice inevitably will be found out. The tattered man tells

him, "Ye'd better take care of yer hurt. . . . It might be inside

mostly, and them plays thunder.” ‘The tattered man's chance persistency

made him feel that he could not keep his crime concealed in his bosom.43

In a long passage omitted from the published version of what was to

have been Chapter VIII and later became the crucial Chapter XII, Crane

has Henry deliver a long soliloquy in which he senses that he is part

of a universal materialistic order and rationalizes that the material-

istic laws of nature justify his flight to save himself:

118

Nature has provided her creations with various defenses and ways
to escape that they might fight or flee, and she had limited
dangers in powers of attack and pursuit, that the things might
resist or hide with a security proportionate to their strength
and wisdom. It was all the same old philosophy. He could not
omit a small grunt of satisfaction as he saw with what brilliance
he had reasoned it all out.44

Crane may have chosen to omit this passage either because it offered a
too literal account of the war between materialism and chaos which

permeates The Red Badge pf_Courage or because it no longer fit Henry's

 

state of mind after the visions cited above. In any event, it clearly
indicts the phi1050phy of materialism as one of Henry Fleming's series
of illusions.

In the published version of Chapter XII, a new battle commences
immediately and Henry "forgets that he was engaged in combatting the
universe. He threw aside his mental pamphlets on the philosophy of

45 He lost

the retreated and rules for the guidance of the damned."
concern for himself, in the midst of a swirling mass of humanity fleeing
down the road of life, Henry tries to ask one of his own soldiers a
question and the man turns on him and strikes him on the head with a
rifle. In Chapter XIII, Henry is found and nursed by his friends who
mistake the rifle blow for an honorable wound in battle and Henry

falls asleep in the glow of peace and glory.

"When the youth awoke, it seemed to him that he had been asleep
for a thousand years, and he felt sure that he opened his eyes upon an
unexpected world." He looks around and sees rows and groups of wounded
and battle weary men sprawled under the trees:

His disordered mind interpreted the hall of the forest as a

charnel place. He believed for an instant that he was in the
house of the dead, and he did not dare to move lest these

119

corpses start up, squalling and squawking. In a second, however,
he achieved his proper mind. He swore a complicated oath at
himself. He saw that this somber picture was not a fact of the
present, but a mere prophecy.46
This is Henry's final vision of the author's truth. From this moment
on in the novel, Henry follows one illusion after another and his
illusions are matched by his growing success. His own sense of well
being causes him to interpret his formerly boastful friend's compassion
as wisdom. "Apparently the other had now climbed a peak of wisdom from

47 In the next

which he could perceive himself as a very wee thing.”
battle, Henry in renewed terror grabs the regimental flag as a symbol
of invulnerability and in a blind panic leads the charge. In the final
battle, Henry, still carrying his own emblem, finally comes to grip
with a mirror image of himself, the enemy flag bearer, and captures
the enemy's flag in a superbly ironic climax to the young recruit's
test in battle.

Irony, always one of Crane's most potent literary weapons,
is aimed at two different targets in Ige_3eg_8agge_gf_Courage. On
the one hand, it is directed at the human customs and human nature
which drive man to war as exemplified in Henry's own quest for glory
and the final injunction of his mother that “If so be a time comes
when yeh have to be kilt or do a mean thing—-why, Henry, don't think

48 This savage moralism delivered

of anything 'cept what's right.“
while peeling potatoes echoes the ruthless maternalism of the brown
giantess in the potato patch in "An Explosion of Seven Babies.‘I

The second, and deeper, irony of The Red Badge gf_Courage is

 

Henry Fleming's constant quest to understand the universe and his

ultimate misconception of it in the final passages of the novel.

120

Henry has moved in the course of the story from a simple desire to

prove his courage in mankind's ultimate testing ground of war to a

clear vision of the materialistic natural forces which predetermine

man's fate. Having observed these laws of nature in operation and
justifying his own actions in their terms and succeeding thereby,

Henry in his final reflections "was thus fraternizing again with nature."
Like other materialistic philosophers with a theological bent, Henry

puts the sin he has observed at a distance and "even saw in it quaint

uses."49

With the same false humility he displays immediately after
awakening from his blow on the head, Henry at the end of the story
"found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his
earlier gospels and see them truly":50

He was emerged from his struggles, with a large sympathy for

the machinery of the universe. With his new eyes, he could

see that the secret and open blows which were being dealt

about the ggrld with such heavenly lavishness were in truth

bleSSlngs.
Here, in the final passage of his war novel, is a clear indictment of
the social Darwinist rationale. Crane attached three different endings
to this passage, each one raising the irony to a higher pitch. The
first ending simply reiterates Henry's feeling that the "world was
made for him though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking
sticks." The second ending offers a vivid contrast between Henry's
previous image of himself as a pestered animal, "blistered and sweating
in the heat and pain of war," and his present pastoral vision of
tranquil skies, fresh meadows and cool brooks. According to Crane's

new found philosophy, neither of these visions is correct. Henry is

not merely an animal proceeding toward a predetermined fate, nor is

121

nature an existence of soft and eternal peace. The third and final
ending of the war novel offers a veiled but powerful image of the
truth as Crane had come to see it in writing his most famous novel:
”Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden

rain clouds."52

The leaden rain clouds, of course, are the color of
the void coupled with an image of the iron weight of battle which
climaxes this physical imagery of the novel. And the word "hosts"
suggests a reincarnation of the phantoms which swirl around Henry

in battle.

But the ultimate irony of the final passage is the reappearance
of the sun as a vision of hope. The sun appears again and again in
the course of Henry's experiences, and he interprets it in accordance
with his understanding at those moments. At the outset, the white
sunlight beats down on his thin shelter and throws yellow light on
the color of his ambitions. After the first battle, Henry sees the
pure blue sky and the sun-gleamings on the trees and fields and
wonders that "Nature had gone on so tranquilly in the midst of so

53

much devilment.“ After the revelation of Jim Conklin's wound,

Henry sees more truly that "The red sun was pasted in the sky like

54 When Henry himself is wounded and awakens from

a [fierce] wafer.”
a long sleep, the first rays of sunlight at dawn paint the skins of
the other exhausted soldiers in corpse-like hues, and Henry propheti-

55 At

cally interprets the hall of the forest as "a charnel place.”
this moment in the novel, when Henry for the last time sees clearly
the meaning of life and death, Crane offers the same vision of the

sunlight as Melville had when he wrote that ”Nature absolutely paints

122

like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house

within."56

At this moment, Crane, like Melville, employs the white
sunlight as the supreme symbol of universal evil. The sunlight turns
yellow when mixed with the color of Henry's ambitions and red when
mixed with his wild desire for revenge, but in itself it is white,
the color which truly reveals the uncaring malice of the universe.57

In the course of writing Ipe_3eg_8agge_gf_Courage, Crane has
treated and discarded the philosophy of materialism. He has tested
the idea of human courage and found it of only transitory importance.
He has attacked religion and society and found they are not the real
enemies of man. Perhaps led by the force of his own imagery, he has
made nature itself the indifferently vindictive force which dooms man
to a meaningless existence and thus discovered the nihilistic philoso-
phy which marks the best of his later works.

The development of Crane's nihilism is revealed most directly

in the remarkable poetry he wrote intermittently throughout his career.

The Black Riders and Other Lines, written during the same period as the

 

war novel, was his own favorite work. It ”is the more ambitious effort,"
he said. ”In it I aim to give my ideas of life as a whole, . . . and
the latter [Ige_Red_Badge gf_Courage] is a mere episode, . .“58

Both the style and the phi1050phy of The Black Riders baffled

 

most readers at the time. Parodist Carolyn Wells wrote, "His language

amazes/ He writes in blue blazes/ And his verses are really insane."59

The rhythm of the verses is irregular and the rhymes are non-existent.
Even more puzzling from the modern reader's viewpoint, the poetry is

largely barren of the vivid imagery which is intrinsic in most of

123

Crane's prose. Perhaps Crane used poetry as a means of directly
expressing the ideas which he purposely concealed behind the rich
tapestry of his prose.

At first glance, Crane's poems seem to resemble those of Emily
Dickinson. Howells introduced her relatively unknown work to Crane in

the early 18905.60

Both Dickinson and Crane deal almost exclusively
with metaphysical questions in their poems. Both employ short, tightly
compressed verses. But the resemblance is superficial. Dickinson
mastered the values of irregular rhythms and rhymes long before Crane
was born, and Crane, though he may have imitated her techniques, never
mastered them at all. Dickinson's poems are infinitely subtle, but
always simple and always clear. Crane's frequently are complex and
abstruse, and when their meaning is known, it is anything but subtle.
Dickinson is always at home in the natural world, while Crane's revolt
against nature reaches its climax in his poems. Yet, in the best of
his verses, Crane's artistic vision transcends his limitations as a
poet and rivals that of Emily Dickinson herself.

The central theme of all of Crane's poetry is the identification
of evil with the nihilistic universe. Paradoxically, the idea that
evil is simply the nothingness of the universe is presented through

both passive and actively malignant images. The opening line of Ipe_

Black Riders, "Black riders came from the sea,"61 employs Crane's

 

favorite color for the universe to present a blank image charging out

of the void. In a later collection of poems, K9£.L§ Kind and Other

 

Lines, Crane writes that "The sea was dead gray walls/ Superlative in

vacancy/ Upon which nevertheless at fateful time/ Was written the

124

hatefulness of nature."62 The desert is another favorite symbol of

universal emptiness. In the third verse of The Black Riders, a

 

creature, naked and bestial in the desert, feeds upon his own bitter

heart.63

The image of the jagged peaks of a moving mountain on the
horizon which Crane introduced in "The Mesmeric Mountain," appears

again in one of the earliest verses written for The Black Riders:

 

On the horizon the peaks assembled;
And as I looked,

The march of the mountains began,
As they marched, they sang4

"Ay! we come! we come.
One of three Crane poems discovered in Jacksonville, Fla., long after
his death powerfully draws together the image of jagged peaks moving
against the horizon with the image of vacant space:

A man adrift on a slim spar

A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle

Tented waves rearing lashy dark points.
As the man's pale hand slides from the polished spar the poem ends with
a favorite Crane image of vacant, enclosed space:

The puff of a coat imprisoning air

A face kissing the water-death

A weary Slow sway of a lost hand

And the sea, the moving sea, the sea

God is cold.65

In the nihilistic universe of Crane's poetry, nothing can be

truly known. In The Black Riders he writes:

 

Yes, I have a thousand tongues
And nine and ninety-nine lie
Though I strive to use the one

It will make no melody at my will
But is dead in my mouth.66

In another verse:

There was one who sought a new road
He went into direful thickets

125

And ultimately he died thus, alone
But they said he had courage.67

A learned man who claims to know the way in another verse at last cries,

68

"I am lost." When a seer holds open the book of wisdom, the poet

looks and exclaims, "Strange that I should have grown so suddenly

blind."69

In keeping with this nihilistic theory of knowledge, Crane
vigorously attacks the faith in natural design and portrays a world
of utter disorder:

Once there came a man

Who said:

”Range me all men of the world in rows."
And instantly

There was terrific clamor among the people
Against being ranged in rows.

There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.

It endured for ages;

And blood was shed

By those who would not stand in rows,

And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.7O

In the following verse, the "ship of the lwnflcf' which God has fashioned
with meticulous care slips ”rudderless down the ways" when God looks
the other way to correct a wrong:

So that, forever rudderless, it went upon the seas

Going ridiculous voyages.

Making quaint progress,

Turning as with serious purpose

Before stupid winds.

And there were many in the sky

Who laughed at this thing.71
In another verse, a poet returns from the land of farther suns and sees
"a reptile swarming place . . . shrouded above in black inpenetrable-

ness." God tells the poet, "Spirit, this is a world, this was your

126

72

home." In one of the most famous verses of The Black Riders, Crane

 

sardonically parodies the death of tradition. A youth in glittering
apparel is offered a meaningful death at the hands of an assassin
attired in the grab of old days. "Sir," the youth replies, "I am
enchanted believe me, To die, thus, in this medieval fashion, According
to the best legends; . . ."73
If evil is the true nothingness of the universe in Crane's

philosophy, then sin results from man's pretense of knowledge. In the

opening verse of The Black Riders, the ”ride of sin" in the final line

 

follows man's futile conflict with the uncaring malice of the universe.
Two verses later, the naked, bestial man eats his own bitter heart. In

Verse 9, the poet looks down from a high place at a group of devils

74

and is saluted as a ”comrade, brother." Crane attacks both moral

and intellectual hypocrisy throughout his poetry. The newspaper is

75 76

derided as "the wisdom of the age." In ”Charity, thou are a lie,"

77

and "Best little blade of grass,“ Crane contemptously exposes man's

moral pretensions. In another verse, Crane poses the power of human
love against the abstract idea of justice. A stern spirit ordains that
no flowers can be placed on the grave of a wicked man despite a maiden's

entreaties. "If the spirit was just," the poet concludes, "why did the

78

maid weep?” Finally, in Verse 33, the poet shows his human wares to

a stranger on the road, and each one is judged a sin. "But I have none

other,” the poet exclaims. ”Poor soul," the stranger replies.79

Isolated within the endless void of human experience, Crane

finds the fleeing hope of beauty in the human heart. ”She is none so

80

fair as she is in my heart,” he writes. ”Since she is here, in a

127

81

place of blackness, here I stay." Crane describes the loveliness of

a woman as an oasis of infinite beauty surrounded on both sides by

82

"mile upon mile of snow, ice and burning sand." In Verse 10, he

offers a vision of love in the midst of chaos hauntingly like that of
Hemingway in A_Farewell §p_Arms three decades later:

Should the wide world roll away,
Leaving black terror,

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential,

If thou and thy white arms were there,
And the fall to doom a long way.83

And in one of the last verses of The Black Riders, “A woman's arms

 

tried to shield the head of a sleeping man from the jaws of the final
beast."84
Crane announces that "God is dead" in one of the last verses

of The Black Riders, but his renunciation of all religious and philoso-

 

phic faith is seen more clearly in another of the last verses in which
the striking power of his artistic vision shows through his obvious
limitations as a poet:

If I should cast off this tattered coat,

And go free into the mighty sky;

If I should find nothing there

But a vast blue,

Echoless, ignorant,--

What then?8
Here Crane awesomely captures the loss of faith which was the heritage
of the Darwinian revolution in the late 19th century. The first two
lines of the verse superbly recreate mankind's exultant dream of
discovering a higher order and purpose beyond the futility of mortal

existence and the final lines awkwardly but powerfully express the

robbery from mankind of all hope in a transcendent being or idea.

CHAPTER V

THE INDIFFERENT UNIVERSE

The publication of The Black Riders in 1895 is a convenient

 

place to mark a turning point in Crane's career. All of his prior
work seems to involve a search on the part of the author for a philoso-
phy of existence. Maggie and the Sullivan County Sketches are experi-

ments in different directions. The Red Badge gf_Courage is a brilliant

 

but indecisive novel. None of Crane's early work shows the mastery of
theme and form which he achieves in the best of his Short stories
written between 1897 and 1900.

The element of pure chance which helps determine Henry Fleming's

fate in The Red Badge_gf_Courage becomes an increasingly important

 

theme in Crane's later stories. He draws on his own love of poker to
satirize the wild business speculations of his era in ”A Poker Game."1
This brief story, written about 1896, pits young Bobbie Cinch of
Chicago, heir to a 22 million dollar fortune gained principally by

his father's famous corner on bay rum, against old Henry Spuytendyvil,
"who owns all the real estate in New York." Both men fill straight
flushes in the same hand, an event rarer than "berries on a juniper
tree." The real estate tycoon's flush is one card higher. With “a
contempuous smile” and "a sinister and relentless light in his eyes,"

he bets modestly Uahook his young opponent, but Bobbie, "as generous

128

129

as sunshine,‘ merely calls him, saying in gentlemanly fashion, "I

can't play a sure thing against you." The actor who has watched this
drama unfold draws the moral, "Bob, my boy . . . you're as no gambler,
but you're a mighty good fellow, and if you hadn't been, you would be

losing a good many dollars this minute."

"A Tale of Mere Chance," published in the English Illustrated

 

Magazine in March, 1896, is one of Crane's few essays into pure
fantasy.2 Its silliness suggests one of Crane's very early pieces,
but none of his other early stories deals with the elements of chance
and time and psychic guilt as this story does. Stallman says it is
"an outright imitation of Edgar Allen Poe."3 The first person narrator
of the story enters a drawing room and kills a man he believes has
stolen his girl friend. The shot apparently stops ”an old tall clock"
which had "placidly ticked its speech of time” and the blood from the
victim splatters the white tiles on the floor. This chance suspension
of time in the drawing room ultimately leads to the apprehension of
the murderer who in his own imagination has been pursued to the ends
of the earth by the bloody tiles.

A game of chance determines life and death in "The Five White
Mice," one of the stories based on Crane's visit to Mexico in 1895.
The "New York Kid," a likely counterpart to Crane himself, loses a
barroom dice game after calling on the "five white mice of chance"
to "let me come in--into the house of chance."4 As a penalty he must
take the winners to the Mexican circus. He refuses to welsh on his
bet despite his friends' entreaties to come with them for the evening

and thereby avoids becoming drunk with them. Later, he meets his now

130

drunken friends, the Frisco Kid and Benson, on the street and they
encounter three Mexican desperadoes in a dark alley. Unmindful of
the danger, Benson responds affirmatively to the Mexicans' invitation
to fight, and the six men face each other, five of them with their
hands on their pistols, just like the dice on the barroom table. The
New York Kid suddenly realizes he can probably win the gun duel
singlehandedly against all three Mexicans if he acts without hesi-
tation. "It was a new game." And here the verse about the five white
mice of chance runs through his mind again. "At the supreme moment,
the revolver came forth as if it were greased, and it arose like a
feather." At this decisive action, the "beautiful array of Mexicans
was suddenly disorganized," revealing the same fears which had beset
the Kid only a moment before, and peace is restored by mutual consent.5
Crane also reveals in this story his familiarity with a number
of cultural ideas which were being p0pularized at the time. The heart
of the story consists of a full two-page description of the New York
Kid's stream of consciousness as he faces the imminent threat of death.
Images from his past life are interwoven with thoughts about the future
mourning of his family as he tries to calculate the present probabilities
of life and death. "These views were perfectly stereopticon," Crane
says, "flashing in and away from this thought with inconceivable
rapidity, until, after all, they were simply one quick, dismal impres-

6

sion." The Kid also experiences definite powers of telepathy and

precognition in this crisis. Staring at one of the Mexicans, "He

actually watched the progress of the man's thought toward the point

7

where a knife would be wrenched from its sheath." At the moment of

131

truth, "he suddenly knew that it was possible to draw his own revolver,
and, by a swift maneuver face down all three Mexicans. If he was quick
enough he would probably be victor. If any hitch occurred in the draw
he would undoubtedly be dead with his friends."8 Here then is a
pragmatic test of faith in which the hero is forced to make a_"living
decision" and by making it decisively can and does influence the out-
come. Crane, in this story apparently written after his arrival in
England in 1897, highlights the role of pure chance in determining
individual fates and offers his own pragmatic formula for meeting the
test.

A clear line of thought and imagery runs from Crane's early
work to "The Open Boat," which he wrote in 1897 following his real life
shipwreck off the coast of Florida. Once again, Crane applies images
and ideas from his own mind to a realistic theme with startling impact.
He chooses four men to represent humanity and places them at sea in a
lO-foot dinghy. Their initial argument about the difference between a
life-saving station and a house of refuge introduces the inquiry which
is to be made about man's place in the universe. Only when the men
learn that the lighthouse is not, in fact, a life-saving station do
they realize that the indifference of nature rather than that of man
is their implacable enemy.

Many of the images with which Crane symbolizes the indifferent
void also are borrowed from previous works. The ”jagged waves which
seemed to thrust up in points like jagged rocks” above the horizon of
the little boat echo the imagery of “The Mesmeric Mountain" and "The

9

March of the Mountains." “The thin little oar" by which the men

132

attempt to maintain direction in the grip of great natural forces and
the overcoat which they employ as a sail are both drawn from Crane's

10 The slate-colored waves with their ominous white crests

poetry.
are a symbol of the colorless void, and both the sea itself and the
desert in Algiers which takes its place in the correspondent's dream
are images of the wasteland in Crane's poetry. The little boat buried
within the mountainous seas is another little hole in which Crane's
heroes seek answers to the great question. The giant white wind tower
on the shoreline, standing with its back to the plight of ants, is
another version of the fanwheel in the towering coal breaker which
controls life and death in the mines.H
Having arrived at a firm conception of the human predicament
in his previous works, Crane in "The Open Boat” constructs his symbolic
universe with a sure hand. It is a barren place, filled with ungovern-
able and unfathomable forces of nature. He places the four men who
represent humanity on the sea of life in a precariously balanced
dinghy and offers them the hope of safety in a mirage-like coast line
while blinding them to the vast sky from which these forces emanate.
The little craft is driven to and fro by the vector forces of wind and
tide until at one point, ”A changed tide tried to force them southward,
but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea
and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed

“12 Mankind here is revealed as a

to indicate a city on the shore.
mere dot on the face of a geometrical plane.
Crane sets his universe in motion with the precision of a

master clock maker. In The Red Badge g: Courage, Crane developed the

 

133

technique of alternating intense periods of motion and rest with
corresponding periods of human fear and courage, but the effect is
episodic, a means of sustaining suspense and extending the experience
of the young recruit. In "The Open Boat," the same patterns are fused
with the natural motion of the universe itself. The rise and fall of
the dinghy on the great sea corresponds with the pattern of hope and
fear of its occupants. In moments of exultation, they ride the little
boat up and down the sea of the waves, like a bucking broncho. In
moments of despair, they feel buried within a cave formed by the same
waves. The great wind which creates the terrifying waves also is, by
chance, driving them toward shore, but to make the paradox of human
existence complete, it at the same time creates the wild surf which
blocks their safety.

In the more subtle world which Crane has created in his own
mind since writing Maggie, man no longer is imprisoned only by the
forces of nature. He is held in even closer bondage by the fears and
necessities which these forces erect in his own mind. As the story
of the open boat begins, these inner forces require that the men glance
level at the sea which surrounds them. The horizon of their perspective
is the gunwale of the boat itself. Even when the dinghy reaches the
crest of a wave, they are unable to appreciate the panorama of the
"shining and wind-riven” open sea. The narrow two-dimensional quality
of this human perspective is hauntingly underscored by the author's
sudden interjection: ”Viewed from a balcony, the whole world doubtless

n13

would have been weirdly picturesque. Psychologically, then, the

134

men are not merely lost on the open sea, but buried within the moun—
tainous sea of their own fear.

The course of the open boat is determined by necessity, but
necessity itself is governed by pure chance. Chance has placed the
four men in communion with one another in the open boat. The fierce
wind which holds them in its grip is, by chance, driving their boat
to shore, and their first optimistic approach to land is celebrated
ominously by the chance discovery of four dry cigars and three dry
matches.M Also by chance, as the author informs the readers, the
men approach shore at least 20 miles from the nearest life saving
station. Their ignorance of this fact causes them to bitterly assail
human indifference to their plight. The same wind which drives them
to shore also creates the wild surf in which the men must gamble their
lives. Maddened by this play of chance forces, the correspondent
begins to ask, “If I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the
seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and

n15 The four men finally are forced to

contemplate sand and trees.
play their hands in the race for life through the surf, and the gods

of chance choose the strongest and most skillful of them all for death.
Within the framework of necessity, chance operates decisively to deter-
mine individual fates.

In contrast to the almost uncontrollable profusion of colors

in The Red Badge gf_Courag , the universe of "The Open Boat" is deeply

 

muted. The opening line, ”None of them knew the color of the sky,"
superbly combines Crane's image of the colorless void with his idea

of man's narrow perspective and begins to unite his physical and

135

psychological themes. The world of the men in the open boat is mostly
gray. The waves which surround them are "slate-colored save for the

"‘5 out of this gray world, the lighthouse

t0ps which were foamy white.
emerges as "an upright shadow against the sky" which "had almost
assumed color," and the land appears. ”From a black line it became

17 After their

a line of black and a line of white--trees and sand."
hopes of any early rescue are dashed, the men watch the eerie scene
in which the dusk swallows up the parade of humanity on the shore.
"The man waving a coat blended gradually into the gloom and it swallowed
in the same manner the omnibus and the group of people.“18
In the world of "The Open Boat," all color is an illusion of
men's souls. The true universe is a colorless void. On the first
morning, as the sun swings up into the sky, the men observe the water
around their boat change “from slate to emerald green streaked with
amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow." Crane notes that
the process of breaking day was unknown to them. "They were aware only

."19 0n the following

of this effect upon the color of the waves.
morning when they prepare for the final plunge into the surf, the
morning dawns with "a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on

20 In both cases, the men are blind to the

the tips of the waves."
clear white light of the sun and see only its reflection on the color
of their ambitions. But the clear vision which is denied to the men
during daylight is revealed to the correspondent during the long night
at sea. The tall gray waves become black and the only remaining

features of the universe are the receding golden light of the light-

house in the south and a new pure bluish light in the north on which

136

they set their course. During the night, the correspondent thinking
himself the one man afloat on all the oceans witnesses "a gleaming
trail of phosphorescence, like a blue flame . . . furrowed on the
black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife.”2] In
his vigil with the circling shark, he experiences the utter loneliness
of human existence which man discovers when he realizes the indifference
of nature to his needs. "A high, cold star on a winter's night is the
word she says to him,”22 Crane later remarks as his thoughts come to-
gether with those of the correspondent. Man senses the passive in-
difference of the universe in the gray world of his ordinary senses,
but the true malignancy of this indifference to the human spirit is
seen in moments of revelation as a colorless void, so pure and cold
that it strikes the senses as a bluish gleam.

The thin boundary between the inner world of the mind and the
outer world of matter is breached by the great seas which engulf the
open boat. The little craft is an extension of the human spirit of
the occupants. All of the human fears and virtues which the correspond-
ent shares with his companions are confined within the tiny space he
shares with them. The gunwale six inches above the water line is the
horizon of their consciousness, the sole barrier between their human
purpose and its threatened extinction in the meaningless natural world
which surrounds them. Every time the little boat loses direction or
goes off course in the great waves, the sea water drenches the men.

It soaks and numbs them. They lie in the water at the bottom of the
boat. They sleep and dream in it. It begins to permeate their

conscious and unconscious thoughts. Finally, the water seems to

137

warm them, but they rouse themselves to one more effort. At the end

of the voyage, the foamy white water of the surf turns the horizontal
boundary line of the gunwale perpendicular and water pours in over

the fingers of the correspondent on the gunwale. "And when the water
entered at that place he swiftly withdrew his fingers as if he objected
to wetting them." In the water a moment later, he is appalled by its
coldness. "The coldness of the water was sad, it was tragic. This
fact was somehow mixed and confused with his opinion of his own
situation, so that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The

23 The true coldness of the water which enters the

water was cold.”
correspondent's mind at the moment that the sea swallows the open
boat is almost the only physical imagery in "The Open Boat." As
always in Crane's work it marks the beginning of a truthful experience.
Immersed in the water, unrelieved by the warmth of his companions, the
correspondent enters the stream of life where only a miracle can save
him.

Space and time are subjective in the universe of ”The Open
Boat.” Distances expand or contract according to the needs and
desires of human observers. When the story begins, the men in the
boat can see no farther than the tops of the mountainous waves which
surround them, but later they see the lighthouse on the horizon as
small as the point of a pin. "It took an anxious eye to find a

24 On the open sea, time and

lighthouse so tiny,” Crane comments.
distance are measured by one another. The approach of the boat to
the coast line is measured by the apparent rise of the land from the

sea. The oncoming night at sea is measured by the fading shadows of

138

the human figures on the beach. During this long night, the course
of the boat is determined by the two points of light which comprise
”the furniture of the world." At the same time, Crane notes with
gentle irony that “the distances were so magnificent in the dinghy
that the rower was enabled to keep his feet warm by thrusting them
under his companions."25 When at last the men are tumbled into the
wild surf, the correspondent loses all sense of space and time. In
a dreamlike state, he paddles leisurely toward the apparently
immoveable shore. He is frozen in time and space.

Matter and motion are relative in "The Open Boat.” Throughout
the story the men in the boat are constantly in motion in a universe
of endless waves. The coast line which they yearn to reach appears
as the only still point in this world of flux. The illusory quality
of this perception is signaled in the opening chapter by the brown
mats of seaweed which appear on the surface of the open sea, like
islands or like bits of earth. ”They were traveling, apparently,
neither one way nor the other. They were, to all intents, stationary.
They informed the men that it was making progress slowly toward the

land.”26

A moment later, the lighthouse appears as a ”small still
thing on the horizon.‘' As the men approach, the land appears slowly
to rise from the sea, but after their h0pes of reaching shore before

27 The

nightfall fade, the ”remote beach seemed lower than the sea."
aDparent solidity of the land is an illusion which rises and falls
With the hopes of the human observers. In the final race for life
through the surf, the four men are all in motion relative to one

anOther as they move toward the apparently immoveable shore. When

139

the correspondent is caught in the hidden current and in fear of
drowning, he sees the shore before him like "a bit of scenery on a

stage."28

The safety of solid land is a mirage which men yearn for
in a world of constant motion. By 1897, Crane has discovered that
all rigidity is an illusion and all reality is flux.

In such a world, infinite delicacy is required to maintain
one's balance. The central theme of ”The Open Boat" is the precarious
position of humanity on the sea of life. This requires the captain
to withhold his anger and revulsion when the sinister gull attempts
to light on his head. He brushes it away gently because "anything
resembling an emphatic gesture would have capsized this freighted
boat."29 Throughout the ordeal, the brotherhood of the oiler and the
correspondent in willingly spelling one another at the oars is inter-
woven with the delicacy with which they exchange places in the frail
craft.

The four men in the open boat maintain their direction in a
disordered world through human skill and endurance. The "frail little
oars" of their craft are powerless to overcome the forces of nature.
Every once of skill and energy which the men possess is required just
to avoid swamping the boat and to maintain the best course which the
winds and tides permit. The task of rowing at first prevents the
oarSmen from viewing the goal toward which they labor, but the oiler
magically turns the boat around when it threatens to swamp during
their first attempt to land. Later, this wizard of the oars squarely
faces his fate and backs his friends to safety while giving up his

own life.

14O

Everywhere in "The Open Boat" there is a quality of gentle
grace. Gone is the savage irony with which Crane exposed the indiffer-
ence of the universe in previous works. ”There was a terrible grace

30 The tall wind

in the move of the waves, as they came in silence.”
tower symbolizes "the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the
individual."31 The gentle rhythm of the story, the absence of harsh
color contrasts and the limited use of physical imagery all contribute

to the pastoral quality of the sea story in contrast to the violent

conflicts of The Red Badge pf Courage. Unconsciously, the men in the

 

open boat respond to the deadly grace of nature with as much human
grace as they can muster. As silently as the waves themselves, the

32

men establish ”the subtle brotherhood of man." The correspondent

pictures the crew huddled together in the boat as ”the babes of the
sea."33 By the time they enter the surf, the men no longer are afraid.
They are protected by the bonds of human endurance and brotherhood
which they have forged in response to the elements.

This faith produces a miracle of grace in the surf. When the
correspondent responds to the captain's call to ”come to the boat,"
he is saved. “A large wave caught him and flung him with ease over
the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in
9Ymnastics and a true miracle of the sea."34 Through this miracle,
the correspondent at last touches land. At the same moment, the
1Image of the life saver appears, "naked as a tree in winter; but a

35 This image

halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint.”
13 a miraculous embodiment of human grace coupled with the utter

frailty and barrenness of ”a tree naked in winter." A moment later

141

the men are on the beach surrounded by a wealth of human implements--
blankets, clothes and flasks and women with coffee pots--but the warm
and generous welcome of the land is belied by the still and dripping
shape for whom the land's welcome could only be the "different and

36 The final image of the white waves

sinister quality of the grave."
"pacing to and fro in the moonlight" instantly recreates the terror
experienced by the correspondent in his vigil with the shark. The
lesson of which the men will be interpreters is that the shore with
all its human warmth is no more than a house of refuge in a terrifying
state of nature.

The full force of Crane's nihilism probably was not felt by
most of his readers until he applied it directly to the American way
of life in the first of his stories about Whilomville society. "The
Monster" was completed in September, 1897, but because of its outrageous
material remained unpublished for almost a year despite ready acceptance
of Crane's other stories during this period. In I'The Open Boat,"
Crane expresses his nihilistic philosophy by stripping the universe
down to its bare skeleton, but in "The Monster" he dramatizes the
same philosophy more violently by painting the symbol of a faceless
black man across a richly detailed portrait of American town life at
the turn of the century. Crane's choice of this particular symbol

probably was influenced by his admiration for Joseph Conrad's novelette,

The Nigger gf_the Narcissus, which was being serialized in England

 

while Crane was writing "The Monster" there. Like Conrad's tale,
Crane's story is far more than a plea for brotherhood between blacks
and whites. It is, in fact, a complex treatment of the revolution in

science and morals taking place at the end of the century.

142

The central theme of "The Monster" is the loss of moral
innocence in the machine age. As always, Crane announces his purpose
obliquely in the opening passage. Dr. Trescott is innocently executing
the sweet new blades of grass which make up the smooth face of his lawn
when his small son, Jim, playing train and running late, rounds a corner
and destroys a flower in the garden. Jim's innocent shame is matched
by the perfect certainty of his father's kindly moral judgment that
he shouldn't play train anymore that day. Afterwards, Jim retreats
to the stable where his pal, Henry Johnson, is washing the family
horse and buggy. I'In regard to almost everything in life they seemed
to have minds almost precisely alike," Crane tells us, and adds, "on
all points of conduct as related to the doctor, who was the moon,

37 Both Jim and

they were in complete but unexpressed understanding."
Henry, then, are children who worship Dr. Trescott as blindly as
savages worship the moon. Henry also serves as a priest to this

moon god, personally conducting him on splendid pastoral journeys
through the countryside. Sometimes, Henry chooses to suffer for Jim's
sins. At other times, he preaches the doctor's creed, pointing out
all of Jimmie's abominations, but "Jimmie did not discover that this

38

was odious in his comrade." Rather, Jim is visibly moved by the

sprinkling water which flies from the wheel revolving on the tree and

overcome with reverence when Henry explains “with unction" each detail

39

of the business of the stable. Later, Henry dons his finery for the

evening "like a priest arraying himself for some parade of the church.”40
Outside Dr. Trescott's garden, Whilomville is caught in the

grip of modern science and technology. The ever present shimmering

143

blue of the electric street lamps make their first appearance in the
evening when Henry Johnson dons the garb of a civilized gentleman and
goes to pay a call on his girl friend. As he journeys downtown on
the main street, the crowd waiting for the evening mail is bathed in
the orange glare of the shop windows. The electric streetcars pass
by, "the motor singing like a cageful of grasshoppers, and its gong
clanging forth great warnings." Social gradations have been lost in
the mobs of young men gathered at the street corner, and when Henry
Johnson passes by, a member of one of the profane groups "telegraphed
news" of his extraordinary arrival.4] Later, "the great hoarse roar
of a factory whistle,” which announces the fire, explodes the crowd
of indolent and cynical young men "like a snowball disrupted by dynamite”
and sends the black crowd of humanity "pouring after the machine" with
which they intend to fight the blaze.42

Crane links the human instincts of greed and pride to the
rigidly ordered numerical systems which govern society. The outbreak
of the fire is signaled by the factory whistle which blows twice to
indicate its location in the second district of the town. The men
and boys militantly rally behind the different numbered fire companies
which compete in fighting the blaze. "They were divided into parties
over the worth of different companies, and supported their creeds with

”43 The regular peal of the church bells accompanies

no small violence.
them into battle. The pride in numbers applies to commercial as well
as military exploits. Alek Williams' fear of the monster is overcome
by a raise in his weekly room and board from $5 to $6. Later, it is

John Twelve, the grocer who is worth $400,000, who leads the delegation

144

which urges Dr. Trescott to send the monster away. The final image of
the 15 empty tea cups on Mrs. Trescott's table sums up the emptiness
of a society which lives by numbers.

Crane employs the relativity of time and space as an increasingly
50phisticated literary technique in "The Monster." The story proceeds
sequentially in both time and space from Jim's accident in the garden
through Henry's first visit to Bella Farragut's, although the point of
view briefly changes to the townspeOple's when Henry passes the barber
shop. Crane then returns without any of his principal characters to a
second description of the townspeople at the band concert in order to
describe their militant reaction to the fire alarm. The rush of
humanity to the fire is climaxed by the mother's judgment to her son
that it may be too late to go to the fire. "It's half past nine now,"
She says repeatedly.44 At this point, the story moves backward in
time to describe the outbreak of the fire unwitnessed by any human
observer. By this means, Crane suggests that its cause is rooted in
the past and in forces beyond human control. Henry's rescue attempt
takes place in a timeless, still moment within the dark house. At
the moment he is disfigured in the laboratory, the flow of time and
humanity begins again outside the house with the phrase, "Suddenly

45 The story moves back in time

all roads led to Dr. Trescott's.“
again briefly to underscore the irony of Dr. TreScott's last tranquil
moments of scientific pride before he hears the fire siren, then leaps
forward an indefinite period to render Judge Hagenthorpe's judgment

of his actions. The remainder of the tale features a series of

vignettes chronicling the sudden appearance of the monster at different

145

locations in the town. Together, they create the impression of a
pervasive force moving beyond the limits of time and space within the
imagination of the townspeople. The disjunctive organization of "The

Monster,’ unified around the fire rather than in the normal sequence
of time and space, is strikingly like that of William Faulkner's LIED:
ig_Aggg§§, written more than three decades later. Like Faulkner,
Crane employs the technique here to show the effects of group con-
sciousness and to bring out the historical metaphor of the work.

The fire at Dr. Trescott's house first is portrayed as a
radical revolution against sacred American principles. The traditional
Queen Anne shape of the home has faded against the black evening sky
when the first wisp of smoke comes out of a window and drifts quietly
into the branches of a cherry tree. Soon its companions are pouring
into the fruit-laden branches. ”It was no more to be noted than if a
troop of dim and silent gray monkeys had been climbing a grapevine
into the clouds.” Within the still quiet house, the fire imps are
imagined to be ”calling and calling, clan joining clan, gathering to
the colors." Suddenly, the window brightens as if stained with blood
and a moment later, the red window tinkles and crashes to the ground.
"This outbreak had been well planned, as if by professional revolu-
tionists." In the hall a lick of flame cuts the cord that supports
the "Signing of the Declaration" and it falls to the floor "with the

46 The news of the fire is telegraphed by the fire

sound of a bomb.”
box and the subsequent fire bell in the night calls the crowd into
action, interrupting the leader of the band who was about to order

the "first triumphant clang of a military march.” But the man who

146

already has responded with "fabulous speed” to the call of the colors
is the man in the lavender trousers with the crumpled straw hat in
his hands, a mocking black image of the patriotic white American
culture.47
The true cause of this revolution soon is revealed as the
demonic power of modern science. Henry attempts to find his way through
the smoky upper hallways of the house, another version of Crane's
epistemological maze, but the walls of these corridors of knowledge
threaten to burst into flames under his hands. He finds Jim in a
smokeless room, only faintly illuminated by a beautiful rosy light.
In this sanctuary of innocence, the boy sits on his bed "his lips
apart, his eyes wide, while upon the little white robed figure played

caressingly the light from the fire."48

Henry has given up hope and
is prepared to submit to the fire with slave-like submission when he
suddenly remembers a little private staircase leading to the laboratory
which the doctor has fitted up to perform ”experiments which came in

49 AS his knowledge of the labo-

the way of his study and interest.“
ratory returns, Henry's confusion and apathy are replaced by growing
certainty and fear. Odors of envy, hatred and malice assail Henry

as he approaches the laboratory, and as he enters the burning chemicals
appear as a garden of burning flowers. "Flames of violet, crimson,
green, blue, orange and purple were blooming everywhere." One blaze

is precisely the hue of a delicate coral. Another mass "lay merely

in phosphorescent inaction.“ An orange colored flame leaps like a

panther at his lavender trousers, and a sapphire shaped fairy lady,

swifter than eagles, catches him with her talons and drives him to the

147

floor. Suddenly, a glass breaks and a ”ruby-red, snake-like thing
poured its thick length out upon the t0p of the old desk . . . and

flowed directly down into Johnson's upturned face."50

No more perfect
synthesis of the terrors of Darwinian naturalism and experimental
science can be found anywhere in American literature.

After the fire, Dr. Trescott and Judge Hagenthorpe meet like
two gods to discuss who is responsible for this horrible mutation and
what should be done. The old judge with the cane argues that according
to the laws of nature the creature should be dead and charges that the
doctor's ”questionable charity" will be responsible for creating a
monster. "He will be your creation, you understand. He is purely
your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead.”
To this, the doctor replies in sudden fury, ”He will be what you like,
Judge," and the judge acknowledges his role as the eyes of society by

5] The debate between the

saying, “Trescott, Trescott! Don't I know.“
doctor's old fashioned morality and the judge's advocacy of the "sur-
vival of the fittest” creed ends in mutual confusion, but Crane already
has indicted the judge's materialistic viewpoint by noting at the
outset of the scene that ”the judge had successfully dissembled for
more than a quarter of a century, only risking the truth at the times

52 This god-like debate later is carried on

when his cane was lost."
at the human level in the barber shop. The practical minded engineer
says that the doctor should have let the creature die, but the barber,
who like the doctor shaves the smooth face of Whilomville society,

calls the engineer a "flint-hearted fish." The engineer charges the

barber with hypocrisy. "You're kicking because if losing faces became

148

popular, you'd have to go out of business," to which the barber
ironically replies, ”I don't think it will become so popular."53
The chemicals which destroy Henry Johnson's human identity
strip away the human mask of Whilomville society, and the burning eye
which remains reflects the Darwinian heritage which its black and
white communities share in common. The patrons of Reifsnyder's barber
shop first question Henry's identity as they look out from the "yellow
glamor" of the shop through a window made watery in appearance by the
shimmering glare of the electric street lamps. The author notes that
"the people without resembled the inhabitants of a great aquarium
that here had a square pane in it. Presently, into this frame swam

54 Reifsnyder says that the

the graceful form of Henry Johnson.“
sartorially perfect black man could not be Henry Johnson, but the
customer in the first chair convinces the barber by telling him that

he gave Henry the lavender trousers he now is wearing. A moment later,
as Henry approaches Bella Farragut's house, this young lady "dashed

55 and Henry

around the corner of the house, galloping like a horse,"
and the Farragut family, ignoring their humble surroundings, "bowed

and smiled and ignored and imitated until a late hour, and if they

had been the occupants of the most gorgeous salon in the world they
could not have been more like three monkeys.’I While they ape white
society, Henry's face "showed like a reflector as he bowed and bowed."S6

After the fire, the newspaper officially announces the death

of Henry Johnson, but the town boys who temporarily link his name

with sainthood ominously chant, "Nigger, nigger never die, black face

and shiny eye."57 Henry himself indicates the animal nature which

149

has survived the destruction of his human identity when he babbles,
"Alek Williams don' know a hoss! 'Deed he don't. He don' know a

hoss from a pig."58 Later, when the monster is on his gentle rampage,
the white boys goaded by the girls at the children's tea party pile
out of the house in a manner similar to Alek Williams' four dogs.
Bella Farragut is reduced to a blubbering and crawling beast by the
renewed attentions of her suitor, and the enormous respectability of
her mother is encouraged to scale a high fence. Alek's own fear of
the monster and concern for his family are overcome by commercial
greed, but Dr. Trescott's failure to heed the warning of John Twelve,
the grocer, later places Mrs. Trescott in precisely the same social
position as Mrs. Williams. By stripping away the human appearance of
Henry Johnson, Crane not only makes the inhabitants of Whilomville
behave like the animals they are, but, even more monstrously, he shows
that Darwinian naturalism makes the black and white communities mirror
images of one another. No wonder the friendly police chief finally
suggests on behalf of society that Dr. Trescott cover his creation
with a veil.

Dr. Trescott turns away from his orderly world when he takes
reSponsibility for the monster and plunges into a world of moral chaos.
Determined to care for his son's benefactor in spite of the judge's
warning, the doctor wraps the creature in an old fashioned ulster and
departs for Alek Williams' house. Along the way, the monster seems
to have lost all sense of time and babbles, "These buggy wheels sure
don' look like I wash them yesterday, Docteh." As the horse and buggy

approaches Alek's house, the buggy wheels which revolved so smoothly

150

during the religious rites conducted by Henry in the doctor's stable
begin to bump often on out-cropping boulders. When they arrive at

the house, the doctor is confronted by "a dark sea of grass" in contrast
to the smooth lawn of his own yard. A man appears “on a beach of yellow
light” shining from a window of the house and "plunges into the surf"
when the doctor says, ”Come down here and show me where to drive."

Alek grabs the horse and asks prophetically, "Will she stand, Docteh?"
and the doctor replies optimistically, ”She'll stand all right."59
But when the hostler escapes, Alek gallops across the field toward
town calling widly for Dr. Trescott, whom the author imagines to be

60 Dr.

”poised in the contemplative sky over the running Negro."
Trescott's well intentioned effort to do the right thing is reminiscent
of the god who looks the other way to correct a wrong and lets the

ship of the world "slip rudderless down the ways.”

The overthrow of Dr. Trescott's world of moral certainity is
paralleled by his son's loss of innocence. Throughout the story, the
children of Whilomville are active exponents of the pride and hypocrisy
of their elders in contrast to Jim's gentle innocence in his father's
garden. But when the doctor is forced to care for the monster in his
own house, Jim ”seemed to reap all the joys of the owner and exhibitor
of one of the world's marvels.”6] He accepts the dares of his baby
class companions and leads the way in teasing the now veiled monster
sitting peacefully in front of the stable. Dr. Trescott discovers the
enormity of his loss when he realizes that Jim is responding to a dare.
Crane leaves the doctor's attempted explanation to the boy hanging in

mid-air in mute recognition of the futility of rationalizing natural

instincts.

151

In "The Monster," Crane succeeds better in posing the problem
of moral chaos in the modern world than he does in describing its
effects. The opening chapters through Johnson's defacement in the
laboratory are subtle and compelling. As other critics have noted,
the account of the monster's terrorizing the community is by comparison
bland and fragmented. The comic irony with which Crane treats the
encounters between the monster and the townspeople is out of place
after the terrifying mutilation scene. His attempts to personify the
blind "pig-like" force of public opinion in the lengthy description
of Martha Goodwin is a wonderful character sketch which has no inherent
relationship to the other action of the story. It is merely a philo-
sophical summing up, a sin of which Crane often is guilty. In his
last two great western stories, Crane masters comic irony and finally
achieves the synthesis between the forces of nature and human nature
which has been the goal of his art throughout his career.

Crane employs the relativity of time and space and matter
and motion more distinctly to set forth a historical theme in ”The
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." The town of Yellow Sky lies at the apex
of the angle formed by the Rio Grand River and the railroad track
which transports all of the appurtences of civilization from the east.62
As the story opens, the town marshal and his bride are engaged in a
race against time with Scratchy Wilson, the "last of the old gang

that used to hang out along the river."63

For the first time, Crane
employs the technique of a divided story line, first introducing the
already married couple, then going back 21 minutes in time to Scratchy

Wilson's anticipated attack at the saloon. The irony, of course, is

152

that the marshal already has arrived in Yellow Sky with his new bride
before Scratchy begins his last shooting spree. Scratchy's dream is
foredoomed.

Rather than simply describing the advance of eastern civili-
zation to the west, Crane pictures the overwhelming attraction of
this civilization as a great vacuum cleaner sucking up the last vestiges
of primitivism in the west. In the Opening passage of the story, "The
great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity Of motion that a
glance from the window seemed to prove that the plains of Texas were
pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of
mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light
and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the

horizon, a precipice.”64

And when we arrive in Yellow Sky, it is
apparent that it already has been firmly civilized with its artificial
grass plots and the bar securely armored against Scratchy's attacks.
The delicacy which Crane began to develop in "The Open Boat"
emerges as the marvelously comic treatment of humanity in "The Bride

Comes to Yellow Sky.‘ Jack Potter is a natural man encased in the

vestments of civilization. "From time to time he looked down
respectfully at his attire, like a man waiting in a barber's shop."65
His unpretty wife from the “east" (San Antonio) continually twists her
head to regard her puff sleeves, very stiff, straight and high. Both
are the embarrassed but happy victims of civilized customs and frills.
Their flight from civilization ironically places them on a collision

course with Scratchy Wilson. Scratchy is inhuman, a ghost, a myth, a

figment of his own and other imaginations, but Crane treats him with

153

love. All that remains of the wild west in this story is that part

of Scratchy's mind which surfaces from his memories of the "old gang
from the river" during his bi-monthly drunken sprees. Scratchy is
dressed in a maroon shirt made by some New York East Side garment maker
and he wears boots with red tops and gilded imprints "of the kind
beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New

England."66

Yet, Crane considers Scratchy's childlike dream of epic
importance. Scratchy stalks the silent streets of Yellow Sky enraged
and befuddled that there is no offer to fight. All of the doors of
civilization are shut against him, and his ferocious challenges ring
against the walls of silence. "It was as if the surrounding stillness

formed the arch of a tomb over him."67

At the end of the story, the

simple child of the earlier plains picks up his starboard revolver

and goes away, his feet making ”funnel shaped tracks in the heavy

sand." The final image of Scratchy's comic sorrow reveals his true

identity as a mere ghost of the Old west.68
The western myth comically embodied in Scratchy Wilson becomes

an object of terror in the mind of the Swede in ”The Blue Hotel."

The shaky, quick-eyed Swede who arrives with other guests at the

garish hotel on the Nebrasks plains soon reveals that he is terrified

by his new companions. The hotel keeper tries to convince him of the

advanced civilization of Fort Romper first by announcing the forth-

coming plan for "illictric [sic] streetcars," then by showing the eminent

respectability of his own family and finally by plying him with drink.

Meanwhile, the silent Easterner whose background is similar to that of

the Swede correctly interprets Swede's fears to Johnnie and the cowboy:

154

"It seems to me this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks
he's right in the middle of it--the shootin' and stabbin' and all."69
Unfortunately, the quiet man doesn't look like an Easterner and doesn't
announce it so the Swede takes him for one of the desperadoes. In
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," tragedy is averted by Wilson's sudden
acknowledgement of the passing myth of the Old west. In "The Blue
Hotel," the failure to acknowledge the same myth in the mind of the
Swede leads to sudden tragedy as Crane returns to the nihilism of all
his major works.

Once again in ”The Blue Hotel," Crane immortalizes the power
of commercialism. Scully, the hotel keeper, has chosen the strategic
location and garish display of his business in order to command
humanity to his presence. On the day the story begins, he performs
the marvel of catching the three men whose coming together results
indirectly in the Swede's death. At first, Scully appears as a
greedy Santa Claus whose boisterous hospitality is merely a tool of
his trade. But the room to which Scully leads his guests "seemed to
be merely a proper temple for an enormous stove, which, in the centre,

was humming with a God-like violence."7O

Scully then anoints the cowboy
and the Easterner with the coldest water in the world. They "burnished
themselves fiery red with this water, until it seemed to be some kind

7] When the Swede attempts to leave the hotel, Scully

of metal polish."
follows him upstairs carrying a small yellow lamp and momentarily
appears as the ”infinitely sallow man“ of ”The Ghoul's accountant."
“The yellow effulgence, streaming upward, colored only his prominent

features, and left his eyes, for instance, in a mysterious shadow. He

155

resembled a murderer."72

Scully first appeals to the Swede's reason,
then demonstrates his own impeccable respectability and, finally,
unrolls a yellow-brown bottle of whisky from the ominous coat which
he has taken from beneath the bed. The Swede hysterically puts the
rim of the bottle to his mouth and drinks. Scully later breaks into
a strange language Of tongues in justifying his act to his son. "I
keep a hotel. . . . A guest under my roof has sacred privileges. . . .
Not one word shall he hear that would prejudice him in favor of going

away."73

Scully, then, is the high priest of his commercial temple
who prepares his guest for sacrifice as Crane renews his attack on
the deadly interwoven hypocrisy of business and religion.

To the greed and hypocrisy which govern society, Crane adds
the deadly sin of individual pride as the catalyst to the tragedy.
The cowboy is a “board whacker" who "took tricks with a glowing air
Of prowess and pride that sent thrills of indignation into the hearts

of his opponents."74

Stimulated by the intense contest, Johnnie takes
the lead in baiting the miserable Swede, refusing to understand his
fears despite the Easterner's explanation and setting his own pug-
naciousness against his father's interest in keeping his guest. After
taking courage from Scully's bottle, the Swede dominates the feast.

He adopts the cowboy's practice of board whacking and in a drunken
rage accuses Johnnie of cheating. Scully's greed finally gives way

to his more ancient Celtic lust for battle, and he ordains that the
Swede and Johnnie should fight. The hulking Swede eventually over-

powers the youth and leaves the hotel without paying, exclaiming to

the proprietor, "I guess if it was anyway at all, you'd owe me

156

75

something." When he reaches the saloon, he demands that the customers

there drink with him, saying, "By gawd, I've whipped a man tonight and

I want to celebrate."76

Their indifference to his triumph drives him
to frenzy and he lays hands on his second small Opponent of the evening
with different results.

Human instincts are the determining forces in "The Blue Hotel,"
but pure chance works within the limits of these forces to determine
individual fates. Fear, greed and pride replace the winds and tides
of "The Open Boat" in determining the course of action. The Swede's
preconceived fear of the old west sets the plot in motion. Scully's
benevolent avarice holds the Swede in the grip of his fate, and the
vicious pride of the board-whacking cowboy which infects them all and
causes Johnnie to pointlessly cheat in a friendly game of cards causes
the battle which sends Swede tacking across the face of the storm to
meet his fate. Each of the characters is compelled to act in accordance
with his nature. Yet, Crane takes pains to show that the Swede's fate
is finally determined by blind chance working within the limits of
blind will. Chance, of course, brings the three strangers together
and confines them within the tiny space of the blue hotel. The game
of chance which the Swede joins after learning it "wore many names"
is a favorite Crane image for the game of life dating back to the
"ghostly hand of cards" played in "Four Men in a Cave." The intensity
of the game in the blue hotel stimulates the Swede's growing fears
until he suddenly exclaims, "I suppose there have been a good many

77

men killed in this room," and sets in motion the chain of events

which eventually drives him to the saloon in town. There, chance

157

takes over again. He encounters the four townspeople playing cards
and in his drunken triumph, "he stalked over to the table and by chance

78 This chance

laid his hand upon the shoulder of the square gambler."
meeting determines both the Swede's fate and that of the gambler him-
self.

The universe Of ”The Blue Hotel" is as starkly barren and
relativistic as that of ”The Open Boat." In the western story, the
three human passengers emerge from the railroad line to confront a
single fixed point on the snowy plain, the gaudily painted blue hotel.
The plot action takes place entirely within this fixed point, princi-
pally around a minute four-sided card table, until the moment when
Johnnie and the Swede emerge from their shelter to do battle in the
storm. Clouds of snowflakes swept up from the ground by the frantic
winds are "streaming southward with the speed of bullets“ into the
black abyss.79 The snow covered land was ”blue with the sheen of an
unearthly satin, and the only other light in the universe is one
jewel-like light which shone from the black shadow Of the incredibly

80 The fight takes place in a tiny V-shaped

distant railway station.”
patch of snow encrusted grass on the lee side of the hotel which
shelters them from the universal snowdrifts piled on its windward
side. To the Observers, the encounter in the darkness was "such a
perplexing motion of flying arms that it presented no more detail than
would a swiftly revolving wheel. Occasionally, a face, as if
illumined by a flash of light, would shine out, ghastly and marked

81

with pink spots.“ After his victory, the Swede leaves the hotel

and “tacks across the face of the storm” towards the indomitable red

158

light of the saloon." In the best thematic statement of his career,
Crane notes that the Swede “might have been in a deserted village"
and describes the universe as a "whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked,
disease-stricken, space-lost globe.”82

The blizzard which swirls around the blue hotel is a psychic
storm. The hotel itself is a symbol of the idea in the Swede's mind.
In the Opening passage of the story, the pale blue color of the hotel
is compared with that on the legs of a kind of heron which fixes the
bird's position against any background. From the moment the action
begins with Scully's imprisonment of the three guests, the reader
gradually becomes aware that the Swede is the silent observer of all
that takes place. He furtively makes estimates of each man in the
room. At the dinner table, he first remarks that the western communi-
ties can be very dangerous and, like the heron, “straightened his legs
out under the table, tilted his head, and laughed again, loudly."83
When the blizzard begins in Chapter 2, ”two little windows presented
views of a turmoiling sea of snow,“84 and the Swede, standing near the
window, shows signs of an inexplicable excitement. Later, as his fears
climb toward hysteria, he backs into a corner of the room. "In his
eyes was the dying swan look. Through the windows could be seen the
snow turning blue in the shadow of the dusk.” The wind tears at the
house and "some loose thing beat regularly against the clapboards

85 At this moment, a door opens and Scully

like a spirit tapping.“
enters to take the Swede on the fatal trip upstairs. To the Swede,
the windows of the hotel are the windows Of his mind. and the storm

which swirls around the hotel is the madness which swirls around the

159

fixed idea in his mind. Soon, he is screaming and howling like the
blue hotel itself.

The Swede in the growing madness of his fear instinctively
perceives the true madness of the universe and foretells his own fate.
In the beginning, he announces prophetically, ”Yes, I'm crazy, but I

86

know one thing, . . . I won't get out of here alive." A moment

later he announces his intention to leave the hotel in a manner which
corrects his earlier prediction. "Yes, of course, I am crazy,” he
says again, ”but I know one thing, I will go away. I will leave this

87 The traveled Easterner perceives the Swede's fear, "he thinks

88

house."
he's right in the middle of hell.“ Ironically, the Swede's fixed
idea about the western myth enables him to reach a correct judgment
about the universe itself. When the Swede is about to drink from
Scully's bottle, he sees into the future and casts "a look of horror
upon Scully.“ ”Drink," the old man commands affectionately, and "The
Swede laughed wildly. He grabbed the bottle, put it to his mouth, and
as his lips curled absurdly around the Opening and his throat worked,
he kept his glance burning with hatred upon the Old man's face."89
The Swede's fear not only enables him to perceive the future, but
actually helps cause it to happen.

A madman can be the epic hero of a mad universe. In the
beginning, the Swede appears as a pathetic greenhorn tormented by the
western myths of dime novels. Throughout the story he gains stature
in spite of the human flaw of pride which leads to his death. After
accepting his fate at the hands of the high priest Scully, the Swede

reappears downstairs and dominates the bacchanal feast which follows.

160

"He seemed to have grown suddenly taller. He gazed, brutally disdain-

ful, at every face.”90

This time he himself insists on playing the
game of life and adOpts the cowboy's practice of board whacking. In
utter moral outrage, he utters the fatal words, "You are cheating,"
and gazing with the hot, steely eyes of a warrior, he vows to fight,

91

"to show you what kind of man I am.“ In the midst of the elements

preparing to fight, the Swede is portrayed as ”pale, motionless,

"92 When Johnnie has

terrible” and Johnnie as ”brutish, yet heroic.
fallen, the Easterner sees the Swede leaning against a "wind-waved
tree,” his savage and flame-lit eyes roaming from man to man. "There
was a splendor of isolation in his situation at this time which the
Easterner felt once when, lifting his eyes from the man on the ground,

93 When the Swede

he beheld that mysterious lonely figure waiting."
leaves the hotel and enters the storm again, ”his face, fresh from

the pounding of Johnnie's fists, felt more pleasure than pain from

the wind and the driving snow,” and when he reaches the saloon, he

tells the bartender, “This isn't too bad weather. It's good enough

for me.” The Swede in his growing maddness has acclimated himself to
the madness Of the universe. Consciously, he remains a fearful and
ignorant man, disgustingly transformed into a blustering bully by his
chance success in battle, but unconsciously he achieves the triumph
which all literary heroes seek in behalf of their readers: knowledge
and kinship with the true nature of the universe. Without such success,
the Swede could not serve as the hero of Crane's greatest tragedy.

The occupants of the blue hotel and the saloon betray the

Swede's humanity by refusing to acknowledge his terrified state of

161

mind. Both Johnnie and the cowboy profess utter bewilderment when the
Swede first expresses his fear. He then appeals to the silent Easterner
whose unacknowledged background enables him to understand the Swede's
viewpoint, but the little man after ”prolonged and cautious reflection"
replies impassively, "I don't understand you."94 Later, Scully, who
sympathizes with his hysterical guest for reasons of his own, addresses
the Easterner for the first time by name, "Mr. Blanc, what has these
boys been doin'?," and the man with the ominous title reflects again.

95 While

"I didn't see anything wrong at all,” he said at last slowly.
the Swede is upstairs with the hotel keeper, Johnnie and the cowboy
argue over the Swede's identity and the cowboy decides that he's some
kind of Dutchman. The Easterner then correctly interprets the Swede's
fear of the western myth. Scully confirms this view and the cowboy
acknowledges that the Easterner was right, but is angered by the
drunken bravado with which the Swede now has covered his fear. When
the Swede charges Johnnie with cheating, the Easterner vainly tries

to prevent the fight without taking sides. The Easterner assumes the
role of Observer during the battle. ”This confused mingling was
eternal to his sense, which was concentrated in a longing for the

end, the priceless end."96

When the Swede staggers into the saloon,
the bartender and the four men playing cards shield their curiosity
at the appearance of the stranger, and when they learn of his victory
over their fellow townsman, ”they encased themselves in reserve."97
Enraged by their indifference to his glory, the Swede by chance lays
his hand on the shoulder of the square gambler and wrathfully demands
that he drink with him, and the gambler replies in behalf of humanity,

"My friend, I don't know you."98

162

The forces of human nature and universal chance which together
determine the Swede's fate are superbly synthesized in the character
of his assassin, the square gambler. The gambler is in appearance
indistinguishable from the respectable business and professional men
of the town who admire his skill in preying on reckless and senile
farmers. His family life is impeccable. Unlike Scully, he is quiet
and deferential in pursuing his trade. Unlike Johnnie, who cheats
pointlessly at cards, the gambler is square, a man who plays by the
rules of life in earning his way. Unlike the Swede, he is fearless.
The fundamental thing to remember about the square gambler, Crane
takes pains to point out, is that ”in all matters that occur eternally
and commonly between man and man, this thieving card player was so
generous, so just, so moral, that, in a contest, he would have put to
flight the consciences of nine-tenths of the citizens of Romper."99
The Swede, who has survived the gross avarice and brutality of the
occupants of the blue hotel is felled by his chance meeting with the
gambler who represents an infinitely more refined adaptation to human
society. When the Swede in his frenzy grabs the gambler by the throat,
the gambler's code instantly strips away the veneer of civilization
and reveals the deadly forces inherent in human nature. Unlike the
interminable fight in the snow, which now seems childish, the Swede's
encounter with the gambler is swift and final.

In "The Blue Hotel," Crane weds the psychological and metaphysical
themes which have run as separate threads through all his previous work.
For the first time, the human instincts of fear, greed and pride are

thoroughly interwoven with the forces of blind chance in a perfect

163

symbolic expression of Darwinian naturalism. The barren, relativistic
universe no longer is distinguishable from the tormented world of the
hero's own fear-stricken mind. His madness is synonymous with universal
madness. Human indifference and universal indifference, two perennial
and distinct targets in Crane's works are, as directed toward the Swede,
one and the same phenomenon in "The Blue Hotel.” The Swede's rage

within the raging storm explains that the conceit of man is the very
engine Of life, and the gambler's swift action pierces this "citadel

of virtue, wisdom and power . . . as easily as if it had been a melon."100
The cash register which shows the amount of the Swede's purchase in
life before his lifeless eyes brilliantly dramatizes that the power of
commercialism is an outgrowth of nature itself and that all human
beliefs and institutions are inevitably destroyed as part of the
negative entropy Of nature itself. That the square gambler is a

victim of his own act of assassination is the final irony of the

uncaring malice of a universe which knows no heroes and no villains.

CONCLUSION

Certain themes, images and literary techniques form a consistent
pattern in Crane's work. From the beginning he was bent on discovering
the forces which govern society and determine individual fate. Human
fear, greed and pride are motivating forces in nearly all his stories,
and religion, commercialism and motherhood are constantly indicted as
the interwoven hypocrisies formed by these human instincts. With the
exception of Maggie, Crane's heroes perpetually are engaged in a search
for knowledge of themselves and the universe. They usually pass through
little holes or passageways into small enclosed spaces which provide a
thin shelter from the elements. Time after time they undergo physical
experiences or suffer little wounds prior to moments of revelation.
Throughout his works, Crane employs a generally consistent color scheme
in which colors represent various psychological values and colorless
shades symbolize the universal void. He repeatedly uses horizons of
different dimensions as symbols Of limited human perspective and the
blind rush of crowds down streets and roads to dramatize human ignorance.
Both vast barren places and intimate hollow spaces become images of the
empty universe. Most of Crane's stories begin with a metaphorical
description of a physical scene followed by a dialogue which introduces
the principal characters and the nature of their inquiry. The plots
proceed in a series of episodes featuring both ironic contrasts in

human emotions and ironic parallels in behavior of dissimilar characters

164

165

or groups. All of Crane's work is clearly identified by the wonderful
imagery which was his natural gift and the irony which was both a
talent and a curse.

The evolution of Crane's thought and art is even more remarkable
than its continuity. His initial attack against society quickly gives
way to a psychological study of human nature and later to a metaphysical
quest about the nature of the universe. His creed of realism soon is
transformed by his own natural talents into a brilliant impressionism.
His preconceived determinism in Maggje_is replaced by a growing
preoccupation with the role of pure chance. Within the pages of IMe_
Meg_§agge_gf_Courage Henry Fleming first is the victim and later the
champion of materialism as the author appears to move in the course
of the novel from a naturalistic to a nihilistic phi1050phy. At the
end, Crane ridicules his hero's new found materialistic creed and
portrays the universe as "a charnel place." He explicitly confirms
his nihilism and continues his attack on materialism in Ipe_§lagM
nge§§_and other poems. In his sea story, Crane takes full command
of his artistic gifts and at the same moment dramatizes his own
perception of the fundamental intellectual revolution of his time.

He constructs a relativistic universe in constant flux, welds together
the forces of determinism and pure chance and crosses over the ancient
boundary between mind and matter. His perception of the psychological
subjectivity of space and time leads to bold experiments in the
structure of his later short stories. Both "The Monster” and "The
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" move backward in time to underscore their

historical themes and both make abrupt transitions in space to

166

dramatize underlying relationships among different characters and
groups.

Crane introduces many of the themes and techniques which
dominate American literature after World War 1. His imaginative
recapitulation of the young Civil War recruit's fear and pride in
battle is a harsh indictment of the psychological causes of war and
an early experiment in the stream of consciousness technique. The
physical imagery which Crane employs as a touchstone of reality in a
world of illusion becomes an integral part of Hemingway's craft more
than two decades later. In the story of the faceless black man who
has lost all human identity, Crane seems to reach forward in time to
trace modern anxiety back to its roots in the overthrow of natural
design in the Darwinian revolution. The flow of the west back into
the east in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is hauntingly like the

east-west theme summed up in the famous final line of The Great Gatsby:

 

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaslessly into
the past.” Both the fire which mutilates Henry Johnson and Scratchy
Wilson's futile race against time introduce the idea that the present
already is in the past, a dominant theme in Faulkner's fiction. The
Swede's unconscious omniscience Mlcontrast with his overt fear and
arrogance is a pre-Freudian exploration of subconscious motivation.
The grace and endurance with which the men in the open boat respond
to the overwhelming universe is an early formulation of Hemingway’s
code of conduct in a nihilistic universe.

The question remains: Why was Crane so like the writers of

the 19205 and so unlike his own contemporaries? The answer lies in

167

part in his response to two great questions raised by the Darwinian
revolution. First, how could human reason have evolved from animal
instincts? Crane like other naturalistic writers answered this
negatively by showing in his fiction that man ultimately was governed
by animal instincts rather than reason. The second question was how
could man hope to Obtain knowledge in a universe governed by chance
rather than laws. This was the question which led a few scientists
and philosophers to demand an end to all absolute concepts, to challenge
Kantian Space and time and to propose a new theory of knowledge in
which truth at best was only a probability and at least an article of
faith. Crane joined the revolution long before any other major writer
of his day. He too was intrigued by the role of pure chance in the
universe. Very early he broke with the mechanistic determinism advocated
by most serious thinkers and artists of his time. As early as 1879,
the psychological studies of William James led him to conclude that
space is nothing more than a "special form of sensibility" and by 1886
he was asserting that "Date in time corresponds to position in space."
During the same period, experiments in color and sound led the German
philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach to conclude that no precise boundary
line can be found between physical phenomena and the sensations which
they produce in an observer. Mach arrived at the same conclusion as

a physicist as James had as a psychologist: that the distinction
between the external and internal worlds is an illusion based on
outmoded concepts. For example, if a pencil is placed in water it
appears crooked to an observer. It is, according to Mach, really

impossible to say that the pencil is straight or crooked. We can only

168

say that it is straight in air and crooked in water. Similarly, it

is impossible to define absolute motion because all motion is relative
to some other body also in motion. Probably without ever hearing of
Mach, Crane captured the same kind of thought in the world of flux
which surrounds the Open boat. His surrealistic imagery which unites
the natural world with the state of mind of his characters is the
dramatic counterpart of Mach's straight and crooked pencil. By 1890,
James was asserting, ”My thesis is that if we start with the supposition
that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff
of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure
experience,‘ then knowing can easily be explained.” The artistic
synthesis Of psychological and natural forces toward which Crane was
groping a few years later culminates in the “pure experiences" of the
correspondent in the mad surf of "The Open Boat” and the Swede in the
psychic snowstorm of "The Blue Hotel." This doesn't mean necessarily
that Crane knew of James's work, nor is it likely that he understood
the logical problems posed by the Darwinian hypothesis of chance
variations. But he sensed the problem and participated in the second
wave of the Darwinian revolution just as surely as did the few thinkers
who laid the groundwork for the age of relativity a few years later.
Crane's revolt against determinism at a time when other writers were
just beginning to embrace this philosophy testifies to the far reach
of his imagination. He paid a heavy price for his precociousness.

His acceptance of the first tenet of naturalism that man is governed
by blind instinct and his rejection of the rigid system of natural

laws which supposedly governed these instincts led him inevitably to

169

a disbelief in all knowledge. Together with his perception of the
materialism and hypocrisy Of his own age, this intellectual conflict
drove him to the bitter nihilism which haunted the final years of
his life. The best of Crane's work is not only great art, but also
brilliantly conceived intellectual history rendered by a man instinc-
tively sensitive to the fundamental revolution in thought of his time.
Crane's movement from naturalism to nihilism foretells the
rebirth of the human spirit in American literature. The literary
naturalism which flourished immediately after his death sought to
reduce man's desires and actions to blind animal instincts governed
by mechanistic natural laws. The strength of naturalism was a new form
of truth. Its weakness was the paradox of borrowing a scientific theory
to prove that man ultimately did not reason at all. Crane accepted
the first tenet of naturalism that man was motivated by animal instincts,
but the attention he payed to the role Of pure chance led him ultimately
to reject the concept of rigid mechanistic laws. In place of the iron
laws of the universe, he came to believe in a universe without laws
at all. Out of this bitter disbelief, Crane forged the subtle brother-
hood of the men in the open boat, the rich loving portraits of the
gentle monster and the comic cowboy and the unconscious heroism of the
tragic Swede. The best known writers of the 19205 followed him in
this direction. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner all acknowledged
mankind's entrapment in the materialistic world, but each of them
through his own art found a means of affirming the human spirit.
Fitzgerald portrayed Gatsby's world as ”material without being real,”

and celebrated his dream of beauty even while guaranteeing its doom.

170

Hemingway Offers man no hOpe in a meaningless universe, but, like

Crane, he writes about the fleeting hope of beauty within the human
heart and counsels human courage and grace in place of an outworn faith.
Faulkner most of all acknowledges man's kinship with the animal kingdom,
but he also promises that the human spirit will endure just because it
is born of the land and partakes of the same natural virtues which all
living creatures possess. Naturalism is a passing phase in the intel-
lectual history of mankind, but nihilism is a recurring state of mind
which man arrives at periodically in the course of changing intellectual
direction. The temporary disbelief in all laws permits man to resurrect
human creativity. This is what was happening in both art and science

in the first years of the new century. Crane and his followers in the
mainstream of American literature employ their art to renew the human

spirit.

FOOTNOTES

INTRODUCTION

1”The Edge of the Future,” McClure's Magazine, II (January,
1894), 202.

2Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism jg_American Thought
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 48.

3" . . [Spencer] nearly killed me," Dreiser said, "took every
shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in
a whirl Of unknown forces. " W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), p. 60. London's autobiographical hero,
Martin Eden, says, "I still think that Herbert Spencer is a great and
noble man.” Jack London, Martin Eden (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1956), p. 362.

4North American Review, xc (April, 1860), 506. Herbert H.
Schneider identifies Francis Bowen, professor of moral philosophy at
Harvard, as the author of this unsigned review.

 

 

 

 

 

5The specific name of' 'pure experience" was coined by William
James in "A World of Pure Experience," Journal of Philosophy, Eeychology

 

and Scientific Methods, I (1904), 533- 43, 561- 70. But the general
revolt against dualism was well under way during the 18905 and James
himself expressed earlier versions of both his pragmatism and radical
empiricism during this decade.

 

CHAPTER I:
A WORLD BOILING WITH CHANGE

1The general description Of New York City street life in this
chapter is drawn primarily from John A. Kouwenhoven, ed., The Columbia
Historical Portrait gf_MaM_York (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & CO.,

1953), and Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (New York: Random House,
Inc., 1951).

 

 

 

 

2See particularly Arena and Forum.

 

171

172

3Morris, Incredible New York, p. 213.

 

4Kouwenhoven, Portrait gf_MeM York, p. 357.

5Solomon Schindler, "The Nationalization of Electricity,"
Arena, X (June, 1894), 85.
6Kouwenhoven, Portrait gf_MeM_York, p. 359.

7Schindler, "Electricity," p. 85.

8Robert J. Finley, "Electric Street Lighting in American Cities,"
Review gfi Reviews, VII (February, 1893), 68.

9Kouwenhoven, Portrait gf_MeM_York, p. 375.

10Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, M_Concise History 9:
Photography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), p. 167.

HF. C. Beach, "Modern Amateur Photography," Harper's New
Monthly Magazine, LXXVIII (January, 1889), 288.

12

 

 

 

 

Gernsheim, M_Concise History 9f Photography, p. 168.

 

 

13Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1938), p. 428. Pulitzer told his editors to discontinue
using so many woodcuts when he left for Europe because he felt they
lowered the dignity of his newspaper, but when they did the circulation
went down immediately, and when they restored the illustrations, it
shot up again.

14

 

Kouwenhoven, Portrait gf_MeM_York, pp. 382-84.

15Beaumont Newhall, ed., The Historygf_Photography(New York
Museum Of Modern Art, undated), p. 86. Muybridge, born Edward James
Muggeridge in England, began his studies of animal motion in the 18705
using a series of cameras lined up in a row to take pictures of former
California Governor Leland Stanford's race horses.

16

 

 

Ibid., p. 85.

17Theodore Child, "Some Modern French Painters," Harper's New
Monthly Magazine, LXXX (May, 1890), 832.

18Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (New York:
E. & F. Spon, 1890, first published in 1889), p. 6.

19Emerson strongly recommends that photographers study the
theories of vision of Helmholtz and Tyndall. The reliance of Monet
and Seurat on scientific theories of light is described in Francesco
Abbate, ed., Impressionism: Its Forerunners and Influences (London:
Octopus Books, 1972), p. 101.

 

 

 

 

 

173

ZOSometimes the painters sent the photographers outdoors instead.
Degas, who disliked outdoor painting, Often employed photographs as
models which accounts for the "snapshot“ quality of some of his paint-
ings. Gernsheim, A_Concise History_gf_Photography, p. 167. ‘

21

 

 

Newhall, The History af_Photography, p. 8.

 

 

22Emerson, Naturalistic Photography, p. 97.

 

23The black bordered pamphlet which Emerson issued in January,
1891, explained that "a great painter" had convinced him that "the
limitations of photography are so great that, though the results may
and sometimes do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must

 

 

always rank the lowest of all the arts. . . .” Newhall, The History
gf_Photography, p. 10.
24

Ibid.. pp. 84-85.

251bid., p. 9].

26Stephen Crane, Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. by Robert W.
Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press,
T960). p. 21.

27Sidney Kobre, The Yellow Press and Gilded Aga Journalism
(Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1964).

28For example, the pioneer in this "yellow journalism," Joseph
Pulitzer's New York World, increased its circulation from 95,000 in
1884 to 600,000 13 years later only to see its lead cut away by William
Randolph Hearst's even more sensational New York Examiner.

29In whipping up public interest for the war, Hearst printed

highly imaginative atrocity reports and at one point had his reporters
rescue a Cuban "heroine” from the hands of the Spanish, but he reserved
his most audacious command for the outbreak of the war when he ordered
his reporter in London to rent a British steamship and sink it in the
straits of Gibralter to block the Spanish fleet. However, the Spanish
fleet sailed before the harassed reporter could complete the negotiations.
W. A3 Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1961 .

 

 

 

 

 

 

30W. J. Stillman, ”Journalism and Literature," Atlantic Monthly,
LXVIII (November, 1891), pp. 687-95, see p. 694.

311 am indebted to Robert W. Stallman's Stephen Crane: .5
Biography (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1968) for these and
most of the other facts about Crane's life, but not, of course, for
the interpretation which I am placing on them here with regard to the
influence of journalism in his life. Whenever biographical information
about Crane is drawn from a source other than Stallman's authoritative
work, it will be indicated.

 

 

174

32Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. His most
famous lead, of course, is "None of them knew the color of the sky,"
from ''The Open Boat." The opening passages of The Red Badge gf_Courage
and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" are equally powerful. Even his
minor works, particularly the Sullivan County Sketches, clearly show
Crane's conscious effort to suggest the entire significance of his
story in a Single striking sentence or two at the beginning of the
story.

33Many reviewers in Crane's own time and some later critics
have accused Crane of seeking to create a sensational effect in his
first published book of poetry, Black Riders and Other Lines.

34An excellent account of Spencer's impact on American intel-
lectual and business thought is given in Richard Hofstadter, Social
Darwinism jg_American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). See
Chapter 2, "The Vogue of Spencer.” The dinner at Delmonico's is
described on p. 48.

35"Wealth," reprinted in Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An American
Primer, Mentor Books (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 520.
Originally printed under the title "The Gospel of Wealth" in England's
Pall Mall Gazette in June, 1890, and reprinted as "Wealth" in the North
American Review. According to Boorstin the article was widely printed
in pamphlet form and made Carnegie more famous than all of his activi-
ties as an industrialist.

36William Graham Sumner, "Sociology," from Collected Essays 1g
Political and Social Sciences, 1885, reprinted in Perry Miller, ed.,
American Thought: Civil War aa_World Mar I_(Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
19681. p. 80.

37Lester Ward, "Sociocracy," from The Psychic Factors a:
Civilization (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893), reprinted in Miller, American

Thought. pp. 106-20.
38

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miller, American Thought, p. xxv.

 

39Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Lancer Books,
1968, originally published in 1888).

40More than 23,000 strikes and lockouts occurred between 1881
and 1900 according to Irving S. Kull and Nell M. Kull, A_Chronological
Encyclopedia gf_American History_(New York: Popular Library, 1952),
p. 245. The number of workers on strike rose to 600,000 in 1886 and
750,000 in 1894 in the wake of the financial crash the previous year.

4‘Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charter Books (Indianapols: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.,—1938).

42Boorstin, Mg American Primer, p. 535.

 

175

43Stallman, Stephen Crane: M_Biography, p. 55.

 

44Stephen Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine," McClure's
Magazine, August, 1894, reprinted in Stephen Crane, The New York City
Sketches gf_Stephen Crane, ed. by Robert W. Stallman (New York: New
York University Press, 1966), pp. 289-97.

45

 

 

Crane, Letters, p. 133.

46Stephen Crane, "The Men in the Storm," The New York City
Sketches, p. 93.

47Inscriptions by Crane on copies of Maggie sent to Hamlin
Garland and Dr. Lucius L. Button in March (?), 1893. Crane, Letters,
p. 14.

 

48"The Saloon Curse,‘
1891), 763.

49Henry A. Hartt, MD, "Another View of the Rum Problem," Arena,
I (May, 1890), 742-43.

50

editorial note in the Arena, IV (November,

"The Saloon Curse," p. 763.

5‘IHoward Crosby, "Government by Rum-Sellers," Forum, IX (May,
1890), 341.

52Henry George, "To Destroy the Rum Power," Arena, I (January,
1890), 196.

53Howard Crosby, "Rum and the Rum Power," Arena, I (March,
1890), 396.

54The Rev. E. E. Bartlett, "A Plea for the Prohibition Party,"
Arena, VI (October, 1892), 600-01.

55Kull, Encyclopedia, p. 263.

 

56Anthony Comstock, ”Lotteries and Gambling," North American
Review, CLIV (January, 1892), 217.

57R0d01f0 Lanciani, "Gambling and Cheating in Ancient Rome,"
North American Review, CLV (July, 1892), 105.

58Charles William Kennedy, "Gambling on Ocean Steamers," North
American Review, CL (June, 1890), 782.

59Edgar Fawcett, "A Paradise of Gamblers," Arena, IV (November,
1891), 648-49.

60

 

 

 

Editorial note, Arena, IV (November, 1891), 758-59.

176

61Lucinda B. Chandler, "The Woman Movement," Arena, IV (November,
1891), 704.

628. 0. Flower, "The Era of Women," Arena, IV (August, 1891),

382.

63Goldwin Smith, "Woman's Place in the State," Forum, VIII
(January, 1890), 523.

64W. S. Lilly, "The Ethics of Marriage," Forum, VIII (January,
1890), 514.

65Jhalmar Jhorth Boyesch, "Types of American Women," Forum,
VIII (November, 1889), 337 and 345.

66B. 0. Flower, "Wellsprings and Feeders of Immorality.“ Arena,
XI (December, 1894), 59.

67Ibid., p. 60.

68Edgar Fawcett, “The Woes of the New York Working-Girl," Arena,
V (December, 1891), 30.

69Ibid., p. 35.

70Flower, ”Wellsprings," Arena, XI (December, 1894), 56, and
(January, 1895), 167-68.

71Introductory note by Stallman, Crane, Letters, p. 5.
721bid., p. 19.
73

Edward A. Freeman, "Dangers to the Peace of Europe," Forum,
XII (November, 1891), 297.

74William R. Thayer, "The Armed Truce of the Powers," Forum,
XII (November, 1891), 312.

75Camille Pallatan, ”French Feeling Towards Germany," Forum,
XII (December, 1891), 453.

76Joseph Rodes Buchanan, MD, "The Coming Cataclysm of American
and Europe,“ Arena, II (August, 1890), 294.

77Charles W. Larned, "Is Our Military Training Adequate?"
Forum, XII (February, 1892), 783.

78B. 0. Flower, "Fostering the Savage in the Young," Arena,
X (August, 1894), 422.

177

79Margaret Steward Sibley, “A Fin-De-Siecle Vision," Arena,
XI (December, 1894), 98.

80"Progress and Pain," Arena, 11 (July, 1890): 131-

CHAPTER II:
WONDERS AND TERRORS OF SCIENCE

1John Fiske, "A Century's Progress in Science," Atlantic
Monthly, LXXVIII (July, 1896), 14.

2Clarence King, "The Education Of the Future," Forum, XIII
(March, 1892), 24.

3Thomas H. Huxley, Science and Culture and Other Essayg
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1881), p. 5.

4Ibid.. p. 7.

 

5King, "The Education Of the Future," p. 30.

6George H. Knight, "The Relation of Invention to Conditions
of Life," Cosmopolitan, XII (February, 1892), p. 452.

 

7nThe Edge of the Future," McClure's Magazine. 11 (January,
1894), 202.

8Knight, ”Invention," p. 452.

9"The Edge of the Future.”

10R. H. Thurston, "The Border-land of Science," North American
Review, CL (January, 1890), p. 79.

HHerman von Helmholtz, Popular Lectures gg_Scientific Subjects
(New York: 0. Appleton and Co., 1873), p. 360.

 

lzRichard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism jg_American Thought
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 36.

 

13Fiske, who called Spencer, "Master,” said that ”The theory
of evolution had already received in Spencer's hands a far more complete
rand philosophical treatment than ever before, when the theory of natural
selection came to supply the one feature which it lacked." "A Century's
Progress in Science," p. 21.

178

14King, "The Education of the future." P. 24.
15Ibid., p. 25.
16

Morton White, in Social Thought in America (New York: Viking
Press, 1949), coined the phrase, ”The Revolt Against Formalism," to
summarize the intellectual revolution against all forms Of abstract
knowledge and formal principles which emanated from the Darwinian
revolution near the end of the 19th century.

17Ludwig BOchner, MD, Force and Matter or Principles Lf the
Natural Order a: the Universe witha System of Morality Based Thereon
(4th English ed.; London: Asher and Co. , 1884),

 

 

 

 

 

 

'81bid. , p. 75.
19Ibid., p. 7.
20

L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists (London:
Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1937), p. 144.

 

 

 

 

2IHelmholtz, Popular Lectures, p. 385.
22Ibid.. p. 384.

23Bllchner, £9££§.QDQ_M2££§£; p. 251.
241919;, p. 304.

zsapig , p. 270.

26Ibid., p. 401.

27l§i§ , p. 244.

28

Sir William Dampier, A Hi lstory of Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 285—

29Fiske, “A Century's Progress in Science." P- 17-

3OBiichner, Force and Matter, p. 131.

 

3iEdward S. Holden, "Contributions from the Lick Observatory:
.A Lunar Landscape," Ceptury, XLII (July, 1891), 439.

32Fiske, "A Century'5 Progress In Science," p. 15'

33Rudolph Thiel, And There Was Light: The Discovernyf the
Lhiiverse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , 1957), pp. 313-14.

 

 

179

 

36Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century, Anchor Books (Garden City,
N Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961), pp. 333-34.

37

 

Fiske, ”A Century's Progress in Sicnece," p. 15.

38Edward s. Holden, "The Wonderful New Star of 1892," Forum,
XVI (October, 1893), 211.

39Stephen M. Allen, ”A Newly Discovered Law in Physics," Arena,
I (April, 1890), 530-31.

40North American Review, XC (April, 1860), p. 506. Herbert W.
Schneider identifies Francis Bowen, professor of moral philosophy at
Harvard, as the author of this unsigned review.

41Charles S. Peirce, ”The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science
Monthly, November, 1877, reprinted in Perry Miller, American Thought:
Civil War to World War I (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968),

u—---—-———-———.———-—

 

 

 

 

 

43William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism, an address at
the Harvard Divinity School March 13, 1884, printed in the Unitarian
Review, XXII (1884), 193-224, reprinted in The Writings af_WilliaM_James,
ed. by John J. McDermott, Modern Library (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1968), p. 606.

44

 

 

 

Ibid., p. 688.

45Emile Boutroux, Qg_the Contingencies gf_aha_Laws gf_Nature,
trans. by Fred Rothwell (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1916),
p. 195.

 

46Selections from Bergson, ed. by Harold A. Larrabee (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), pp. 38-42. For a fuller account of
Bergson's life, see Jacques Chevalier, Henri Bergson (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1928) and J. Alexander Gunn, Bepgson and His Philosophy
(London: Methuen and Co., 1920).

47J. Alexander Gunn, Modern French Philosophy (London: T.
Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1922), p. 317.

48Edward Madden, Chauncey_wright and the Foundations 9:
Pragmatism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), pp. 21-22.

 

 

 

 

 

 

180

49Chauncey Wright, "Evolution of Self-Consciousness," North
American Review, CXVI (April, 1873), reprinted in Miller, American

Though , p. 35.

50Ibid., p. 36.

 

S‘lRalph Barton Perry, ed., Thought and Character gf_William
James (2 vols.; Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1935), II, 11.

52Frank M. Albrecht, Jr., "The New Psychology in America:
1880-1895" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University,
l960). P. 136.

53

 

Ibid., Pp. 129-30 and pp. 186-88.

 

54Ibid., pp. 132-134.
55Fiske, "A Century's Progress in Science."
56

For the best history of experimental psychology. see Edwin G.
Boring, M_History gf_§yperimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1950). Among the founders of scientific psychology
were Gustav Fechner, whose work in "psychophysics" in 1860 attempted
to establish a unit of measurement for mental phenomena; Herman von
Helmholtz, a trained physiologist who made historic contributions in
both physics and psychology. and Wilhelm Wundt, who established the
first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 and helped
train many of the first generation of American psychologists. Boring
discusses the departure of American psychology from the German and
English traditions on pp. 505-08.

57William James, Principles gf_Psychology, excerpts reprinted
in Writings gf_William James, p. 109.

58

 

 

 

Perry, Thought and Character gj_William James.

 

 

59James, Writings pf_William James, p. 21.

 

6oBoring, Experimental Psychology, p. 529.

 

6lQuoted in Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey_(New York:
Washington Square Press, 1967), p. 15.

62Bernard Hart, "The Conception of the Subconscious," The_
Journal gf_Abnormal Psychology, IV (1909-10), 352-54.

63A. A. Roback and Thomas Kiernan, Pictorial History_g£
Psychology_and Psychiatry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1969).

64William James, "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,"
Forum, XIII (July, 1892), 741-42.

 

 

 

181

65Ernest Jones, The Life and Work af Sigmund Freud (New York:
Basic Books, 1957), p. 250.

66

 

 

Ibid., p. 159.

67William James, Notice of J. Breuer's and S. Freud's "Ueber
den Psychischen Mechanismus Hysterischer Phanomene," Psychological
Review, 1894, I, 199, reprinted in Writings gf_William James, p. 832.

68

 

 

Jones, Freud, p. 164 and p. 170.

69Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969), p. 15.

70George Trumbull Ladd, Philosophygf_Mind: Mg_Essay ig_the
Metaphysics gf_Psychology_(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895),
p. 411.

 

 

 

 

 

7iWilliam DeWitt Hyde, Practical Idealism (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1897), pp. 110-11.

72Charles S. Peirce, "The Architecture of Theories," Monist,
January, 1891, reprinted in Charles S, Peirce: The Essential Writings,
ed. by Edward C. Moore (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 168.

73Henry Wood, "The Higher Evolution Of Man,” Arena, X (July,
1894), 214.

74J. M. Peebles, "Primitive Christianity and Modern Spiritualism,
Arena, X (November, 1894), 826-27.

75William James, "Human Immortality, the Ingersoll Lecture
delivered at Harvard University in 1897, printed in Human Immortality:
Two Supposed Objections §p_the Doctrine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1898).

 

 

 

 

 

 

76F. c. s. Schiller, Riddles gf_the sphinx: g_Study j__ghe_
Philosophy_gf.Humanism_(New York: Macmillan Co., 1910), p. 270.

77

 

 

Perry, Thought and Character 9: William James, II, 155-61.

 

 

78Margaret 8. Peeke, "The Psychic and the Spiritual,” Arena,
XIII (June, 1895), 43.

798. 0. Flower, Progressive Men, Women and Movements jg_§he_
Last 2§_Years (Boston: The New Arena, 1914), p. 183. Flower devotes
two consecutive chapters to "Psychical Research” and ”The Rise and
Rapid Growth of Christian Science” and clearly associates the two
movements within the larger framework of spiritualism.

 

182

80Richard Hodgson, ”Psychical Research: Apparitions and
Haunted Houses," Arena, 111 (September, 1890), 416.

8lAlfred Russel Wallace, "Are There Objective Apparitions?"
Arena, III (January, 1891), 146.

82O. B. Frothingham, "Some Aspects of Psychical Research,"
Atlantic Monthly, LXVI (August, 1891), 204.

83The original Society for Psychical Research was founded in
England in 1882 and included many prominent scientific figures there.
James helped found the American Society for Psychical Research two
years later after becoming interested in the subject during his visit
to England in 1882. See Perry, Thought and Character gf_William James,
II, 160, for a list of the American members and J. J. Thomson's
Recollections and Reflections (New York: Macmillan Co., 1937), pp. 147-
49, for his description of a seance which he and a number of other
members Of the British society attended.

84William James, "The Knowing of Things Together," president's
address at the American Psychological Association meeting, December,
1894, reprinted in Writings gf_William James, p. 156.

85Auguste Poincaré, Science and Mypothesis: The Foundations
gf_$cience (New York: The Science Press, 1913), p. 83.

86J. Bradley, Mach's Philosophy g:_Science (London: The
Athlone Press of the University of London, 1913), pp. 150-53.

 

87William James, "The Spatial Quale,” Journal gf_Speculative
Philosophy, x111 (1879). p. 65.

88William James, "The Perception of Time,” Journal a:
Speculative Philosophy, XX (1886), p. 379.

 

89Schiller, Riddles gf_the sphinx, p. 58.

90A1901 Rule and Nancy Margot Paul, Henri Bergson (London:
Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1914), pp. 126-27.

91Henry A. Boorst and Lloyd Motz, eds., Ihe_World gf_aha_Atom
(New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 330.

92Ibid., p. 332.

93James Clerk Maxwell, "A Dynamical Theory of the Electro-
lnatnetic Field,” Philosophical Transactions, 1865, reprinted in Iha_
World 9f.£fl§ Atom, p. 343.

94Helene Bonfort, "Sketch of Heinrich Hertz," Popular Science
Monthly, XLV (July, 1894), reprinted in the Annual Report pj_aha_Board

183

.9: Regents g: the Smithsonian Institution, July, 1894 (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1896), p. 722.

95Thomson, Recollections and Reflections, p. 391.

 

96G. W. deTunzelmann, “Hertz's Researchesclelectrical Oscil-
lations," Annual Report of ahe_Board pj_Regents pf the Smithsonian
Institution, July, 1889 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891).

97

 

 

 

Bonfort, ”Sketch of Heinrich Hertz."

98Ernest Greenwood, Amper_ap_Amperes: The Story_gf_Electricity
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931), p. 209.

99

 

 

Ibid.

 

'OOIbid., p. 2l2.

1OiSir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1948), p. 39.

102W. Robert Nitske, The_Life gf_Wilheim Conrad ROntgen [Roentgen]
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971), pp,112-25. All of the
quotations from newspaper coverage of ROentgen's discovery are included
in Nitske's chapter on ”The News Media,” pp. 112-25.

 

 

 

Ibid., pp. 126-37. The entire article is reprinted here.
Ibid., p. l32.

 

105Boorst and Motz, ID§_W0F1d 9£_Ebs.8£emi PP~ 402'07'

 

 

 

106Thomson, Recollections and Reflections, pp. 338-39.
1071219 , p. 332.

108Boorst and Motz, IDS H9El§.9f.333.5$999 p. 430'
109Bijchner, Force and Matter, p. 480-

HOIbid., p. 484.

111

Thomas Huxley, “Introductory Essay: The Struggle for
Existence in Human Society,” Letter to the Lgndpg_limes, 1891,
reprinted in Selected Works Of Thomas HuxLey (Westminster ed.; New

-_._.—— ”a...

York: D. Appleton and Co., 1903):.1X, 197.
112

 

 

Ibid., p. 212.

113Quoted in Stebbing, Philospphy and the Physicists, p- 146-

 

184

114Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Sentry Edition;

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p? 451.
115

 

 

Ibid., p. 449.

CHAPTER III:
THE IRON LAWS OF SOCIETY

1Inscriptions by Crane on copies of Maggie sent to Hamlin
Garland and Dr. Lucius L. Button in March (?), 1893. Stephen Crane:
Letters, ed. by Robert W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New
York University Press, 1960), p. 14.

 

 

2Stephen Crane, Ma ie: A_Girl gf_the Streets (1893 ed.;
Boston: D.C. Heath and Company), reprinted in Maurice Bassan, ed.,
Stephen Crane's Maggie: Text and Criticism (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth
Publishing C01, 1966), p. 54. Unless otherwise noted, all of the
quotations from Maggie are from this edition.

3Donald Pizer argues in ”Stephen Crane's Maggie and American
Naturalism” that Crane's irony is foreign to the naturalistic vision,
but the contrast between the naturalistic hero's ignorance and the
knowledge given by the author to the reader is the essential dramatic
irony of nearly all naturalistic fiction. In Maggie, Crane directs
his irony at the hypocrisy and indifference of society which is entirely
in keeping with the naturalistic outlook. Pizer's article is reprinted
in Maurice Bassan, ed., Stephen Crane: A_Collection gf_Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), His comment about
irony is on page 116.

 

 

 

 

4Crane, Maggie, p. 4 and p. 19.

Ibid., p. l7.
6Ibid., p .35
7Ibid

 

8The early version of Maggie in which the heroine clearly is
murdered or driven to suicide by a sex maniac is more in keeping with
Crane's sketch of the declining commercial value of his heroine. He
deleted the reference to the fat man in the version published in 1896
to avoid censorship problems.

9Crane, Maggie, p. 17.

185

 

 

Ibid., p. 13.

 

 

 

Ibid., PP. 3-4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ibid.. pp. 20-22.

 

251bid., p. 54.

26The babies in the ”Tommie" series are not named, but,
according to Stallman, Crane wrote "An Ominous Baby--Tommie's home-
coming" in his notes. Robert W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A_Biography
(New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1968), p. 101.

27Stephen Crane, "An Ominous Baby," Arena, IX (May, 1894),
reprinted in The Complete Short Stories and Sketches gf_Stephen Crane,
ed. by Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1963),
pp. 154-56. Unless otherwise noted, all of the quotations from Crane's
Bowery Sketches in this chapter are from Gullason's collection.

 

 

 

 

 

28Stephen Crane, ”A Great Mistake," Ibid., pp. 157, 58.
29$tephen Crane, “A Dark Brown 009," Ibid., p. 161.
30Ibid., p. 163.

31

Stephen Crane, “An Experiment in Misery," Ibid., p. 139.

 

 

186

H
CT
A.
Q

I

p. 140.

 

H
0'
—J.
Q

U

p. 141.

 

H

U”

do

Q
U

p. 142.

 

b—c
U'
—I
Q

pp. 142-43.
Ibid., p. 144.

 

38Stephen Crane, "The Men in the Storm,“ Ibid., p. 178.

 

Ibid., p. 180.

 

Ibid., p. 176.

 

 

Ibid., p. 177.

 

Ibid., p. 178.

 

Ibid., p. 177.

 

Ibid., p. 178.

 

Ibid., p. l79.

 

Ibid., pp. 180-81.

 

50Stephen Crane, “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,“ reprinted in
The New York City §E§I£D§§.9I.St99h€fl grape, ed. by Robert W. Stallman

(New York: New York University Press, 1966), p. 295. All of the
quotations from this article are from this collection.

 

Ibid., pp. 289-90.

 

Ibid., p. 290.

 

 

Ibid., pp. 290-91.

 

Ibid., p. 293.

187

I id., PP. 294-96.
Ibid., p. 292.

 

 

Ibid., p. 295.

 

Ibid., pp. 294-95.

 

Ibid., p. 296.

 

Ibid., pp. 295-96.

 

 

 

63Ibid., p. 297.
64Ibid.
65Ibid., p. 296.
CHAPTER IV:
THE QUEST FOR SELF KNOWLEDGE
l

Stallman emphasizes the importance of his discovery of the
simultaneous composition of Maggie and the Sullivan County Sketches
and bases his dating of the first draft of the Bowery novel on the
accounts of several fraternity brothers of Crane's at Syracuse and

the report by Willis Fletcher Johnson that he saw a manuscript of
Maggie in summer, 1891. See Robert W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: ‘5
Biography (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1968), p. 32 and p. 567,
and Chapter V, ”Maggie,“ pp. 66-86.

 

2Ibid., p. 66.
3Ibid., p. 37.‘
4

Willis Fletcher Johnson, "The Launching of Stephen Crane,"
Literary_Digest International Book Review, IV (April, 1926), p. 289.

5The six unsigned hunting sketches which Stallman has dis-
covered in the Tribune between February and July, 1892, presumably
are by Crane, but they bear little relationship except setting to the
sketches which Crane published in the Tribune beginning with ”Four Men
in a Cave“ in July, 1892. The earlier sketches are simply tongue in
cheek hunting tales while the latter ones discussed in this paper have
clear metaphorical allusions. Stephen Crane, Sullivan Counpy Tales and

 

 

Sketches, ed., with an intro., by Robert W. Stallman (Ames: Iowa State
University Press, 1968).

 

 

111:1

188

6Letter to Copeland and Day, New York City book publishers,
June 1895 (?), reprinted in Stephen Crane, Stephen Crane: Letters,
ed. by Robert W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York
University Press, 1960), p. 59.

7Stephen Crane, The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of
Stephen Crane, ed. by Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City, N. Y. Doubleday
& Co., l963), pp. 66-69. All of the quotations from the Sullivan
County Sketches are from Gullason's collection.

 

 

 

Ibid., pp. 67-68.

 

Ibid.. pp. 74—77.

 

Ibid.. PP. 77-79.

 

Ibid., pp. 80-84.

 

Ibid., pp. 84-86.

 

Ibid., Pp. 90-92.

 

Ibid., pp. 96-99.

 

Ibid., pp. 99-l02.

 

Ibid., Pp. 102-107.

 

Ibid.. pp. 295-97.

 

18Stallman, Stephen Crane: A_Biographx, pp. ll6-ll7.

 

19All of the quotations from The Red Badge of Courage are taken
from the text published by D. Appleton and Co. in l895, reprinted in
Stephen Crane, Stephen Crane' s The Red Badge of Courage. Text and
Criticism, ed. by Richard Lettis, Robert F. McDonnell and William E.
Morris (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, l960), p. l6.

20

 

 

Ibid., p. 24.-

 

211bid., p. 4.

 

22Compare the Opening passage of The Red Badge of Courage, Ibid.

 

p. 3., with the final passage of ”The Mesmeric Mountain," in Crane,
The Complete Short Stories, p. l02.

 

23Crane, C:gpei§_3ed_8adge gj_§gprag , p. 4.
24Ide , p 3
25

I89

26

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ibid.
27Ibid., p. 26.
281bid., p. T7.
291bid.
3OIbid., p. 40.
“Ibid., p. 5
321bid., p. T6.
33Ibid., pp. 32-33.
34Ibid., p. 32.
35mg” p. 24.
36Ibid., p. 22.
37Ibid., p. 69.
381bid., p. 24.
391616., p. 32.
401616.
“Ibid., p. l7.
42M}! , p. 40.
431616.

44

This passage is from a written manuscript of Ihe_fied Badge
gj_Courage collected by Crane's friend, Willis Brooks Hawkins, and
reprinted in Robert W. Stallman‘s collection of Crane's works, The_
Red_Badge gf_§gyrage and Selected Stories, Signet Classic (New York:
New American Library, l960), p. 2l2 (notes).

 

 

45Crane, Crane's Red Badge 9: Courag , p. 46.
46Ibid., p. 54.

47Ibid., p. 55.

48

Ibid., p. 6.

 

190

49These quotations are not included in the version of The_3eg_
Badge gf_Courage published by Appleton, but are from Crane's original
manuscripts. See Stallman's The Red Badge gj_Courage, pp. l32-33.

50

 

Crane, Crgne‘s Red Badge gj_Courage, p. 87.

 

51This passage also has been added by Stallman from the original
manuscripts, The Red Badge gf_Courage, p. l34.

52

 

For an analysis of the textual endings, see, Ibid., p. 220
(notes).

S3Crane, Crane's Red Badge gf_Courag , p. 27.

 

54Ibid., p. 40. The bracketed word ”fierce” is from Stallman's
edition based on the original manuscript.

551bid., p. 54.

 

56Herman Melville, final passage of Chapter 4l on "The White-
ness of the Whale,” Mgby_Dick (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.),
p. 2l8.

57It is tempting to think that Crane may have read Moby Dick
which was re-issued in America in l893 with notices in several literary
periodicals of the time. Moreover, Melville lived until his death in
l89l only a few blocks from Crane's first lodgings in New York City and
was an occasional guest at meetings of the Author's League held at the
home of Richard Watson Gilder which attracted many of the leading
literary figures of the period, including William Dean Howells. During
the lBBOs and ‘90s Melville's work was being championed by a small
group of English literary men, led by James Bilson, a close friend
of George Bernard Shaw. Although there is no direct evidence that
Crane read any of Melville's works, there is a strong probability
that he knew about them. Both Melville and Crane acknowledged reading
Goethe, and Crane said that Goethe's Theory of Colors was a principal
source of his own color symbolism. Whether or not Crane read Melville,
there is no doubt that their color symbolism derives from a common
perception of l9th century physical principles of colorauwisolar energy.

58

 

Crane, Letters, p. l59.

59Robert W. Stallman, ed., The Stephen Crane Reader (Glenview,
111.: Scott, Foresman and Company, l9603, p. 520.

6OStallman, Stephen Crane: A_Biography, p. 72.

6]Stephen Crane, The Poems of Stephen Crane, ed. by Joseph

M _—-——.—

Katz (New York: Cooper Square PubliEhers, l9667, p. 3. All quotations
crf Crane's poetry are from this volume.

621bid., p. 84.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

p. 5.

Verse 37, p. 39.

p. 125.

Verse 4, p. 6.

Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse
Verse

Verse

Verse

17, p.

19.

20, p. 22.

36, p.

5, p.

38.

6, p. 8.

29, p.
27, p.
9, p.

ll, p.
l6, p.
l8, p.
25, p.
33, p.
8, p.

23, p.
2l, p.

10, p.

66, p.

3].
29.

ll.

l3.
18.

IO.

25.
23.
12.

70.

192

CHAPTER V:
THE INDIFFERENT UNIVERSE

1Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations from Crane stories
in this chapter are from Stephen Crane, The Complete Short Stories and
§ke§ghe§_gf_5tephen Crane, ed. by Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday & Co., I963), "A Poker Game," pp. 325-28.

2

 

 

Ibid., pp. 249-52.

3Robert W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A_Biegraphy (New York:
George Braziller, Inc., l968), p. 584 (note).

 

4Stephen Crane, ”The Five White Mice," The Complete Short
Stories, p. 4ll.

5

 

H

bid., p. 4l8.

 

61

C1.

.i

0'

p. 4l7.

 

7T

Q.
U

i

0'

p. 4T6.

 

81bid., p. 4T7.

 

9Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” Ibid., p. 334.

101616., p. 340.

 

Ibid., p. 355.

 

Ibid., p. 347.

 

Ibid., p. 34).

 

Ibid., p. 345.

 

Ibid., p. 346.

 

Ibid., p. 339.

 

Ibid., p. 345.

 

Ibid., p. 350.
Ibid., p. 352.

 

Ibid., p. 355.

 

Ibid., p. 352.

 

193

Ibid., p. 363.

 

Ibid., p. 367.

 

Ibid., p. 343.

 

Ibid., p. 35].

 

Ibid., p. 346.

 

Ibid., p. 348.

 

Ibid., p. 257.

 

Ibid., p. 342.

 

Ibid., p. 341.

 

Ibid., p. 355.

 

Ibid , p. 343.

 

Ibid., p. 341.

 

Ibid., p. 358.

 

 

361bid., p. 359.

37Stephen Crane, “The Monster," Ibid., p. 43l.

Ibid., p. 432.

 

Ibid., p. 433.

 

 

Ibid., DD. 433-34.

 

Ibid., p. 437.

 

Ibid., p. 444.

 

Ibid., p. 438.

 

Ibid., p. 442.

 

Ibid., PP. 438-39.

 

47Ibid., p. 439.

I94

Ibid., p. 440.

 

Ibid., p. 44].

 

Ibid., p. 442.

 

Ibid., p. 448.

 

Ibid., p. 447.

 

Ibid., pp. 454-55.

 

Ibid., p. 434.

 

Ibid., p. 435.

 

 

Ibid., p. 446.

 

Ibid., p. 449.

 

Ibid., pp. 449-50.

 

0—4
0"
c—l

Q.

' .. pp. 458-59.

 

Ibid., p. 465.

 

62Stephen Crane, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,“ Ibid., p. 384.

63Ibid., p. 388.

 

 

69Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel,“ Ibid., p. 492.

7OIbid., p. 485.

71Ibid.

 

721bid., pp. 489-90.

73Thid., p. 493.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

195

pp. 486-87.
p. SDI.
p. 504.
p. 487.
p. 505.
p. 497.

p. 498.
p. 502.
p. 486.

p. 488.

p. 492.
p. 49l.
p. 494.
p. 495.
p. 498.
p. 499.
p. 487.
p. 489.
p. 498.
p. 503.
p. 505.

' . p. 504.

p. 505.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

l96

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The first section of this bibliography lists sources used to
outline the culture and science of Crane's time. The second section
is devoted to primary and secondary sources employed in preparing an
interpretation of Crane's works.

General

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Barzun, Jacques. Darwin, Marx, Wagner. 2nd rev. ed. Garden City,
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Boorstin, Daniel J., ed. Ag_American Primer. Mentor Books. New York:
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Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale Uni-
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Dewey, John. The Influence gj_Darwin gg_Philosophy, New York: Henry
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Eiseley, Loren. Darwin's Century. Anchor Books. Garden City, N.Y.:
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Flower, B. O. Prggressive Men, Women and Movements i_.£h_ Last_J§
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Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. New York:
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Hofstadter, Richard. Ihe_Age.gf_Reform. New York: Random House,
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. Social Darwinism jg_American Thought. Boston: Beacon
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Kull, Irving 5., and Kull, Nell M. A_Chronological Encyclopedia gf_

American History, New York: Popular LTbrary, T952.

 

 

I97

I98

Miller, Perry, ed. American Thought: Civil War §e_WorId We:_l, New
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Schneider, Herbert W. A_History ef_American Philosophy. New York:
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White, Morton. Social Thought ifl_flmerica. New York: Viking Press,
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Wilson, R. J., ed. Darwinism and the American Intellectual. Homewood,
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Cultural Life and Social Issues

 

Abbate, Francesco, ed. Impressionism: Its Forerunners and Influences.
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Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
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l99

Articles

Bartlett, The Rev. E. E. “A Plea for the Prohibition Party." Arena,
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Beach, F. C. "Modern Amateur Photography.” Haeper's New Montth
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Boyesch, Hjalmar Hjorth. "Types of American Women." Forum, VII
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Child, Theodore. "Some Modern French Painters.” Harper's New Monthly
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Crosby, Howard. ”Government by Rum-Sellers.” Forum, IX (May, l890),
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“Rum and the Rum Power.” Arena, 1 (March, I890), 396-402.

 

Fawcett, Edgar. ”A Paradise of Gamblers.” Arena, IV (November, l89l),
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. ”The Woes of the New York Working-Girl.“ Arena, V
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Finley, Robert J. ”Electric Street Lighting in American Cities."
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Flower, B. O. ”Era of Women.” Arene, IV (August, I89I), 382-84.

. “Fostering the Savage in the Young.” Arena, X (August,
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. "Wellsprings and Feeders of Immorality.” Arena, XI
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Freeman, Edward A. ”Dangers to the Peace of Europe.” Forum, XII
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200

Kennedy, Charles William. "Gambling on Ocean Steamers." North American

 

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Schindler, Salomon. "The Nationalization of Electricity." Arena,
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Sibley, Margaret Stewart. "A Fin-De-Siecle Vision.” Arena, XI
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Stillman, W. J. "Journalism and Literature.“ Atlantic Monthly,
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Sumner, William Graham. "Sociology," from Collected Essays ig_Political
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Thayer, William R. "The Armed Truce of the Powers.” Forum, XII
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Science and Philosophy

 

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20l

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Annual Report pf_£he_Board gf_Regents pf_the Smithsonian

 

203

Institution, July, I889. Washington: Government Printing
Office, I89l.

 

"The Edge of the Future." McClure's Magazine, 11 (January, I894),
l99-2I6.

 

Fiske, John. "A Century's Progress in Science.” Atlantic Monthly,
LXXVII (July, 1896), I3-25.

 

Frothingham, O. B. "Some Aspects of Psychical Research." Atlantic
Monthly, LXVI (August, I890), 203-O7.

Hart, Bernard. "The Conception of the Subconscious." Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, IV (I909-IO), 35I-7I.

 

Hodgson, Richard. "Psychical Research: Apparitions and Haunted
Houses." Arena, III (September, I890), 409-2I.

Holden, Edward S. "Contributions from the Lick Observatory: A Lunar
Landscape." Century, XLII (July, l89l), 436-37.

. "The Wonderful New Star of I892.” Forum, XVI (October,
l893), 2ll-220.

 

Huxley, Thomas, H. “Introductory Essay: The Struggle for Existence
in Human Society." Letter to the London Times, I89I. Reprinted
in Selected Works gf_Thomas Huxley, IX, I97.

 

 

 

James, William. "The Dilemma of Determinism.” Unitarian Review, XXII
(I884), I93-224. Reprinted in The Writings gf_WiIliam James.
Edited by John J. McDermott. Modern Library. New York:
Random House, Inc., I968.

 

"Human Immortality." Lecture delivered at Harvard Uni-
versity in I897. Printed in Human Immortality: Two Supposed
Objections ;g_the Doctrine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., I898.

 

 

 

 

. "The Knowing of Things Together.” President's Address at
the American Psychological Association Meeting, December,
I894. Writings gf_William_James, pp. l52-68.

 

 

. "The Perception of Time." Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
XX (October, I886), 374-407.

 

. "The Spatial Quale." Journal gf_SpecuIative Philosophy,
XIII (January, I879), 64-87.

 

. "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished." Forum, XIII
(July, l892), 727-42.

 

King, Clarence. "The Education of the Future.” Forum, XIII (March,
I892). 20-33.

204

Knight, George H. "The Relation of Invention to Conditions of Life."
Cosmopolitan, XII (February, I892), 442-52.

 

Maxwell, James Clerk. "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic
Field." Philosophical Transactions, I865. Reprinted in Boorst
and Motz. The World of the Atom.

 

Peeke, Margaret. “The Psychic and the Spiritual.” Arena, XIII (June,
l895), 43-49.

Peirce, Charles S. ”The Architecture of Theories.” Monist, January,
I89I. Reprinted in Charles S, Peirce: The Essential Writings,
pp. I59-74.

 

 

. "The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly,
November, I877. Reprinted in Miller. American Thought, pp. l2I-
39.

 

 

 

Thurston, R. H. ”The Border-land of Science.” North American Review,
CL (January, I890), 67-79.

 

Wallace, Alfred Russel. "Are There Objective Apparitions?” Arena,
III (January, I89I), l29-46.

Wood, Henry. "The Higher Evolution of Man.” Arena, X (July, l894),
2l4-24.

Wright, Chauncey. ”Evolution of Self Consciousness." North American
Review, CXVI (April, I873), 245-3IO. Reprinted in Miller.
American Thought, 27-45.

 

 

Primary_SourceS of Crane's Work

 

Crane, Stephen. The Complete Novels of Stephen Crane. Edited by

Thomas S. Gullason. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., I967.

 

 

The Complete Short Stories and Sketches Lf Stephen Crane.
Edited by Thomas A. Gullason. Garden City, N. Y. Doubleday &
Co. , I963.

 

 

 

. Ma aggie: A Girl Lf the Streets. I883 ed. Reprinted in
Stephen Crane' s Ma aggie: Text and Criticism. Edited by Maurice
Bassan. Belmont, Calif. Wadsworth Publishing Co., I966.

 

 

 

 

. The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane. Edited by
Robert W. Stallman. New York. New York University Press, I966.

 

 

 

. The Poems pf Stephen Crane: A_Critical Edition. Edited
by Joseph Katz. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, I966.

 

 

 

 

205

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badgeny Courage. I895 ed. Reprinted in
Stephen Crane' s The Red Badge Lf Courage: Text and Criticism.
Edited by Richard Lettis, Robert F. McDonnell and William E.
Morris. New York. Harcourt, Brace & World, I960.

 

 

 

 

Stephen Crane: Letters. Edited by Robert W. Stallman

 

 

and Lillian Gilkes. New York: New York University Press, I960.

Stephen Crane: UncoIIected Writings. Edited by OIov W.

 

 

 

Fryskstedt. Uppsala, Sweden: University of Uppsala, I963.

The Sullivan Coungy Tales and Sketches. Edited by Robert

 

 

W. Stallman. Ames: Iowa State University Press, I966.

The War Dispatches Lf Stephen Crane. Edited by Robert W.
Stallman. New York. New York University Press, I966.

 

 

 

. The Work Lf Stephen Crane. Edited by Wilson FoIIett.
I2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., I925-26.

 

 

Bibliographical Studies

 

Beebe, Maurice, and Gullason, Thomas A. "Criticism of Stephen Crane:
A Selected Checklist with an Index to Studies of Separate
Works." Modern Fiction Studies (Stephen Crane Number) V (Autumn,
I959), 282-29I.

 

Hudspetch, Robert N. "A Bibliography of Stephen Crane Scholarship:
l893-I962." Thoth (Syracuse University Graduate Group) IV

(Winter, I963), 30-58.

Stallman, Robert W. Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography, Ames:
Iowa State University Press, I972.

 

 

Biographical Sources

 

Beer, Thomas. Stephen Crane: A_Study ip_American Letters. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , I923.

 

 

Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: William Sloane Associates,
Inc., I950.

 

 

Gilkes, Lillian. Cora Crane: A Biography_Lf Mrs. Stephen Crane.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I960.

 

Linson, Corwin Knapp. My_Stephen Crane. Edited by Edwin H. Cady.
Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, I958.

 

Solomon, Eric. Stephepw Crane Ln England: A Portrait Lf the Artist.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, I964.

 

206

Stallman, Robert W. Stephen Crane: A_Biography. New York: George
Braziller, Inc., l968.

 

Articles and Commentaries of Special Value

 

Cady, Edwin. "Stephen Crane and the Strenuous Life." ELH, XXVIII
(December, I96l), 376-82.

Cather, Willa. "When I Knew Stephen Crane." The Library, I (June 23,
1900), l7-18.

 

Conrad, Joseph. Introduction to Beer, Stephen Crane.

 

Crane, Helen R. "My Uncle, Stephen Crane." American Mercury, XXXI
(January, I934), 24-29. '

 

Garland, Hamlin. Roadside Meetings. New York: Macmillan Co., I930,
pp. l89-206.

 

. "Stephen Crane as I Knew Him." Yale Review, III (April,
I914). 494-503.

 

 

Gullason, Thomas A., ed. "The Letters of Stephen Crane: Additions
and Corrections.” American Literature, XLI (March, I969),
l04-06.

 

Johnson, Willis Fletcher. "The Launching of Stephen Crane." Literary
Digest International Yearbook, IV (April, I926), 288-90.

 

Liebling, A. J. ”The Dollars Damned Him.“ The New Yorker, XXXVII
(August 5, l96l), 48-72.

 

O'Donnell, Thomas F. "DeForest, Van Petten, and Stephen Crane."
American Literature, XXVII (January, l956), 578-80.

 

. "John B. Van Petten: Stephen Crane's History Teacher."
American Literature, XXVII (May, I955), l96-202.

 

 

Pizer, Donald. "The Garland--Crane Relationship.” Huntington Libregy
Quarterly, XXIV (November, l960), 75-82.

 

Pratt, Lyndon Upsett. "The Formal Education of Stephen Crane."
American Literature, X (January, I939), 460-7I.

 

 

 

Wells, H. G. ggperiment 1g_Autobiography, Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Company, I967 (originally published in I934),
pp. 522-25.

207

Selected Criticism

 

Aahnebrink, Lars. The Beginning§_of Naturalism in American Fiction.

Uppsala, Sweden: Almquist & Wiksell, I950:

 

 

 

Bassan, Maurice, ed. Stephen Crane: A_Collection gf_Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., l967.

 

 

 

Cady, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
I962.

 

Gibson, Donald B. The Fiction gf_Stephen Crane. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, I968.

 

 

Gullason, Thomas A., ed. Stephen Crane's Career: Perepectives and
Evaluations. New York: New York University Press, I972.

 

 

Hoffman, Daniel G. The Poetry_gf_Stephen Crane. New York: Columbia
University Press, I957.

 

 

Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper, I89I.

 

Katz, Joseph. Stephen Crane jp_Transition: Centenary Essaye. DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, I972.

 

 

LaFrance, Marston. A_Reading gj_Stephen Crane. New York and London:
Oxford University Press, l97l.

 

Stallman, Robert W. Stephen Crane: Ap_0mnibus. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., I952.

 

Walcutt, Charles C. American Literarnyaturalism: A_Divided Stream.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I956.

 

 

Articles of Special Interest

 

Brennan, Joseph X. "Ironic and Symbolic Structure in Crane's Maggie.
Nineteenth Century_Fiction, XVI (March, I962), 303-I5.

 

Buitenhuis, Peter. ”The Essentials of Life: 'The Open Boat' as
Existentialist Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies (Stephen
Crane Number) V (Autumn, I959), 243-50.

 

 

Colvert, James B. "Structure and Theme in Stephen Crane's Fiction."
Modern Fiction Studies (Stephen Crane Number) V (Autumn, I959),
l99—208.

Cox, James Trammel. ”The Imagery of The_Reg_Bed e gj_Courage." Modern
Fiction Studies (Stephen Crane Number) V Autumn, I959),
209-I9.

 

 

208
Fitelson, David. ”Stephen Crane's Ma ie and Darwinism." American
Quarterly, XVI (Summer, I964 , I82-94.

Gleckner, Robert F. “Stephen Crane and the Wonder of Conceit." Modern
Fiction Studies (Stephen Crane Number) V (Autumn, I959), 27l-8l.

 

 

Maclean, Hugh N. "The Two Worlds of the Blue Hotel." Modern Fiction
Studies (Stephen Crane Number) V (Autumn, I959), 260-70.

 

Nye, Russel B. ”Stephen Crane as Social Critic." Modern QuarterLy,
XI (Summer, I940), 48-49.

 

Rosenfeld, Isaac. "Stephen Crane as Symbolist.“ Kenyon Review, XV
(Spring, I953), 3Il-I4.

 

Stone, Edward. "The Many Suns of The Red Badge gf_Courage." American
Literature, XXIX (November, I957), 322-26.

 

 

Wells, H. G. "Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint.” North
American Review, CLXXI (August, I900), 233-42.

 

West, Roy B., Jr. ”Stephen Crane: Author in Transition.l American

Literature, XXXIV (May, I962), 2l5-28.

 

Westbrook, Max. ”Stephen Crane's Social Ethic." American Quarterly,
XIV (Winter, I962), 587-96.

 

. ”Stephen Crane and the Personal Universe." Modern Fiction
Studies, VIII (Winter, l962-63), 35l-360.

 

 

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