Complete Works

to find £60 that day, before the sun set, before dinner, before the “six-forty” train to Oxted, at once, that instant — lest peace should be declared and the opportunity or seeing a war be missed. I had not £60 to lend him. Sixty shillings was nearer my mark. We tried various offices but had no luck, or rather we had the usual luck of money-hunting enterprises. The man was either gone out to see about a dog, or would take no interest in the Spanish-American War. In one place the man wanted to know what was the hurry? He would have like to have forty-eight hours to think the matter over. As we came downstairs, Crane’s white-faced excitement frightened me. Finally it occurred to me take him to Messrs. William Blackwoods & Sons’ London office. There he was received in a most friendly way. Presently I escorted him to Charing Cross, where he took the train for home with the assurance that he would have the means to start “for the war” next day. That is the reason I cannot to this day read his tale, ‘The Price of the Harness,” without a pang. It has done nothing more deadly than pay his debt to Messrs. Blackwood; yet now and then I feel as though that afternoon I had led him by the
    hand to his doom. But, indeed, I was only the blind agent of the fate that had him in her grip! Nothing could have held him back. He was ready to swim the ocean.
    Thirteen years afterwards I made use, half consciously of the shadow of the primary idea of ‘The Predecessor” in one of my short tales which were serialized in the Metropolitan Magazine. But in that tale the dead man in background is not a Predecessor but merely an assistant on a lonely plantation; and instead of the ranch, the mountains, and the plains, there is a cloud-capped island, a bird-haunted reef, and the sea. All this the mere distorted shadow of what we two used to talk about in a fantastic mood; but now and then, as I wrote, I had the feeling that he had the right to come and look over my shoulder. But he never came. I received no suggestions from him, subtly conveyed without words. There will never by any collaboration for us now. But I wonder, were he alive, whether he would be pleased with the tale. I don’t know. Perhaps not. Or, perhaps, after picking up the volume with that detached air I remember so well and turning over page after page in silence, he would suddenly read aloud a line or two and then, looking straight into my eyes as was his wont on such occasions, say with all the intense earnestness of affection that was in him: “I — like — that, Joseph.”
     

HIS WAR BOOK
     
    A Preface to Stephen Crane’s “The Reo Badge of Courage”
    One of the most enduring memories of my literary life is the sensation produced by the appearance in 1895 of Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” in a small volume belonging to Mr. Heinemann’s Pioneer Series of Modern Fiction — very modern fiction of that time, and upon the whole not devoid of merit.! have an idea the series was meant to give us shocks, and as far as my recollection goes there were, to use a term made familiar to all by another war, no “duds” in that small and lively bombardment. But Crane’s work detonated on the mild din of that attack on our literary sensibilities with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive. Unexpected it fell amongst us; and its fall was followed by a great outcry.
    Not of consternation. The energy of that projectile hurt nothing and no one (such was its good fortune), and delighted a good many. It delighted soldiers, men of letters, men in the street; it was welcomed by all lovers of personal expression as a genuine revelation, satisfying the curiosity of a word in which war and love have been subjects of song and story ever since the beginning of articulate speech.
    Here we had an artist, a man not of experience but a man inspired, a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things and with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions, who, in order to give us the image of war, had looked profound into his own breast. We welcomed him. As if the whole vocabulary of praise had been blown up sky-high by this missile from across the Atlantic, a rain of words descended on our heads, words well or ill chosen, chunks of pedantic praise and warm appreciation, clever words, and words of real understanding, platitudes, and felicities of criticism, but all as sincere in their response as the