believe Stevie is not quite at home here—he'll not remain so very long," said a woman to me in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Five years have gone by, and recently the cable flashed the news that Stephen Crane was dead.
Dead at twenty-nine, with ten books to his credit, two of them good, which is two good books more than most of us scribblers will ever write. Yes, Stephen Crane wrote two things that are immortal. "The Red Badge of Courage" is the strongest, most vivid work of imagination ever fished from an ink-pot by an American.
"Men who write from the imagination are helpless when in presence of the fact," said James Russell Lowell. In answer to which I'll point you "The Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and Stevie was in the boat.
American critics honored Stephen Crane with more ridicule, abuse and unkind comment than was bestowed on any other writer of his time. Possibly the vagueness, and the loose, unsleeked quality of his work invited the gibes, jeers, and the loud laughter that tokens the vacant mind; yet as half-apology for the critics we might say that scathing criticism never killed good work; and this is true, but it sometimes has killed the man.
Stephen Crane never answered back, nor made explanation, but that he was stung by the continued efforts of the press to laugh him down, I am very sure.
The lack of appreciation at home caused him to shake the dust of America from his feet and take up his abode across the sea, where his genius was being recognized, and where strong men stretched out sinewy hands of welcome, and words of appreciation were heard, instead of silly, insulting parody. In passing, it is well to note that the five strongest writers of America had their passports to greatness viséed in England before they were granted recognition at home. I refer to Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Stephen Crane.
Stevie did not know he cared for approbation, but his constant refusal to read what the newspapers said about him was proof that he did. He boycotted the tribe of Romeike, because he knew that nine clippings out of every ten would be unkind, and his sensitive soul shrank from the pin-pricks.
Contemporary estimates are usually wrong, and Crane is only another of the long list of men of genius to whom Fame brings a wreath and finds her poet dead.