Complete Works

had listened to the tales of veterans, “tales of gray bewhiskered hordes chewing tobacco with unspeakable valour and sweeping along like the Huns.” Still, he cannot put his faith in veterans’ tales. Recruits were their prey. They talked of blood, fire, and sudden death, but much of it might have been lies. They were in no wise
    to be trusted. And the question arises in no wise to be trusted. And the question arises before him whether he will or will not” run from a battle”? He does not know. He cannot know. A little panic fear enters his mind. He jumps up and asks himself aloud.” Good Lord, what’s the matter with me?” This is the first time his words are quoted, on this day before the battle. He dreads not danger, but fear itself. He stands before the unknown. He would like to prove to himself by some reasoning process that he will not “run from the battle.” And in his unblooded regiment he can find no help. He is alone with the problem of courage.
    In this he stands for the symbol of all untried men.
    Some critics have estimated him a morbid case. I cannot agree to that. The abnormal cases are of the extremes; of those who crumple up at the first sight of danger, and of those of whom their fellows say “He doesn’t know what fear is.” Neither will I forget the rare favourites of the gods whose fiery spirit is only soothed by the fury and clamour of a battle. Of such was General Picton of Peninsular fame. But the lot of the mass of mankind is to know fear, the decent fear of disgrace. Of such is the Young Soldier of ‘The Red Badge of Courage.” He only seems exceptional because he has got inside of him Stephen Crane’s imagination, and is presented to us with the insight and the power of expression of an artist whom a just and severe critic, on a review of all his work, has called the foremost impressionist of his time; as Sterne was the greatest impressionist, but in a different way, of his age.
    This is a generalized, fundamental judgment. More superficially both Zola’s “La Debacle and Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” were mentioned by critics in connection with Crane’s war book. But Zola’s main concern was with the downfall of the imperial regime he fancied he was portraying; and in Tolstoi’s book the subtle presentation of Rostov’s squadorn under fire for the first time is a mere episode lost in a mass of other matter, like a handful of pebbles in a heap of sand. I could not see the relevancy. Crane was concerned with elemental truth only; and in any case I think that as an artist he is non-comparable. He dealt with what is enduring, and was the most detached of men.
    That is why his book is short. Not quite two hundred pages. Gems are small. This monodrama, which happy inspiration or unerring instinct has led him to put before us in narrative form, is contained between the opening words I have already quoted and a phrase on page 194 of the English edition, which runs: “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”
    On these words the action ends. We are only given one glimpse of the victories army at dusk, under the falling rain, “a procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low wretched sky ...”, while the last ray of the sun falls on the river through a break in the leaden clouds.
    This war book, so virile and so full of gentle sympathy, in which not single declamatory sentiment defaces the genuine verbal felicity, welding analysis and description in a continuous fascination of individual style, had been hailed by the critics as the herald of a brilliant career. Crane himself very seldom alluded to it, and always with a wistful smile. Perhaps he was conscious that, like the mortally wounded Tall Soldier of his book, who, snatching at the air, staggers out into a field to meet his appointed death on the first day of battle
    —   while the terrified Youth and the kind Tattered Soldier stand by silent, watching with awe “these ceremonies a the place of meeting”
    —   it was his fate, too, to fall early in the fray.
     

JOHN GALSWORTHY
     
    When in the family’s assembly at Timothy Forsyte’s house there arose a discussion of Francie Forsyte’s verses, Aunt Hester expressed her preference for the poetry of Shelly, Byron and Wordsworth, on the ground that, after reading works of these