Complete Works

travel; whether purchase it was more than the mastery of first impression; showed in the sanity of our outlook on the world modern traveller revolt against its facts but in the fiered himself to his whole, or in the conformity ... he is fashioned by the and the mental reiplored earth in which the latitudes. It is this mood which men recorded once for all have inner promptings suggested by travel, which informs the felicitous rendering of his visual impressions. This it is that forces him, while looking out into the night from the deck of an Irrawaddy flotilla steamer, to admit to himself man’s secret antagonism to the wilderness; or during his few hours’ stay in Bhamo, a town on the very frontier of the Chinese enigma, where caravans incessantly come and go through mysterious valleys and where people live on rumours from day to day, to absorb its spirit of secrecy and waiting and hear suddenly around him “the whisper of innumerable hills passing on one to another the restless murmur of men’s hearts.” Very modern in impressions, in appreciations, in curiosities, and in his very love of the mother earth, of whose children he has written subtly and tenderly in some three volumes of characteristic tales; a traveller of our day, condemned to make his discoveries on beaten tracks, he looks on, sensitive, meditative, with delicate perceptions and a gift for expression, alive to the saving grace of human and historical associations; and while pursuing amongst the men busy with ascertained facts the riddles presented by a world in transition, he seems to have captured for us the spirit of modern travel itself.
     

STEPHEN CRANE
     
    In truth I had never expected the biography of Stephen Crane to appear in my lifetime. My immense pleasure was affected by the devastating touch of time which like a muddy flood covers under a mass of daily trivialities things of value: moments of affectionate communion with kindred spirits, words spoken with the careless freedom of perfect confidence, the deepest emotions of joy an sorrow
    —   together with such things of merely historical importance as the recollection of dates, for instance. After hearing from Mr. Beer of his difficulties in fixing certain dates in the history of Stephen Crane’s life. I discovered that I was unable to remember with any kind of precision the initial date of our friendship. Indeed, life is but a dream
    —   especially for those of us who have never kept a diary or possessed a notebook in our lives.
    In this extremity. I had recourse to another friend of Stephen Crane, who had appreciated him intuitively almost as soon as I did myself and who is woman of excellent memory. My wife’s recollection is that Crane and I met in London in October, 1897, and that he came to see us for the first time in our Essex home in the following November.
    I have mentioned in a short paper written two years ago that it was Mr. S.S. Pawling, partner in the publishing firm of Mr. Heinemann, who brought us together. It was done at Stephen Crane’s. At that time the facts we knew about each other were that we both had the same publisher in England. The only other fact I knew about Stephen Crane was that he was quite a young man. I had, of course, read his “Red Badge of Courage,” of which people were writing and talking at that time. I certainly did not know that he had the slightest notion of my existence, or that he had seen a single line (there were not many of them then) of my writing. I can safely say that I earned this precious friendship by something like ten months of strenuous work with my pen. It took me just that time to write “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” working at what I always considered a very high pressure. It was on the ground of the authorship of that book that Crane wanted to meet me. Nothing could have been more flattering
    than to discover that the author of ‘The Red Badge of Courage” appreciated my effort to present a group of men held together by a common loyalty and a common perplexity in a struggle not with human enemies, but with the hostile conditions testing their faithfulness to the conditions of their own calling.
    Apart from the imaginative analysis of his own temperament tried by the emotions of a battlefield, Stephen Crane dealt in his book with the psychology of the mass — the army; while I — in mine — had been dealing with the same subject on a much smaller scale and in more specialized conditions — the crew of a