STEPHEN CRANE: _AN ESTIMATE_


It hardly profits us to conjecture what Stephen Crane might have written
about the World War had he lived. Certainly, he would have been in it,
in one capacity or another. No man had a greater talent for war and
personal adventure, nor a finer art in describing it. Few writers of
recent times could so well describe the poetry of motion as manifested
in the surge and flow of battle, or so well depict the isolated deed of
heroism in its stark simplicity and terror.

To such an undertaking as Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire," that powerful,
brutal book, Crane would have brought an analytical genius almost
clairvoyant. He possessed an uncanny vision; a descriptive ability
photographic in its clarity and its care for minutiae--yet
unphotographic in that the big central thing often is omitted, to be
felt rather than seen in the occult suggestion of detail. Crane would
have seen and depicted the grisly horror of it all, as did Barbusse, but
also he would have seen the glory and the ecstasy and the wonder of it,
and over that his poetry would have been spread.

While Stephen Crane was an excellent psychologist, he was also a true
poet. Frequently his prose was finer poetry than his deliberate essays
in poesy. His most famous book, "The Red Badge of Courage," is
essentially a psychological study, a delicate clinical dissection of the
soul of a recruit, but it is also a _tour de force_ of the
imagination. When he wrote the book he had never seen a battle: he had
to place himself in the situation of another. Years later, when he came
out of the Greco-Turkish _fracas_, he remarked to a friend: "'The
Red Badge' is all right."