not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit
of slum fiction, ending with the tragic finality of a Greek drama. It
is a skeleton of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful
outline, written about a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper
reporter in New York. It is a singularly fine piece of analysis, or a
bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a
few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes
what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is
"George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a
cumulative effect quite overwhelming.

Crane published two volumes of poetry--"The Black Riders" and "War is
Kind." Their appearance in print was jeeringly hailed; yet Crane was
only pioneering in the free verse that is today, if not definitely
accepted, at least more than tolerated. I like the following love poem
as well as any rhymed and conventionally metrical ballad that I know:--

"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."

"If war be kind," wrote a clever reviewer, when the second volume
appeared, "then Crane's verse may be poetry, Beardsley's black and white
creations may be art, and this may be called a book";--a smart summing
up that is cherished by cataloguers to this day, in describing the
volume for collectors. Beardsley needs no defenders, and it is fairly