Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or vegetable? Is the expression, “Thou art the beard on another man’s face,” intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber? Certainly, after reading this, “Simple Simon” is a ballade of perfect form, and “Jack and Jill” or “Hickity, Pickity, My Black Hen,” are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said:
Now let me crunch you
With full weight of affrighted love.
—I doubted you—
And in this short doubting
My love grew like a genie
For my further undoing.
Beware of my friends,
Be not in speech too civil,
For in all courtesy
My weak heart sees specters,
Mists of desire
Arising from the lips of my chosen;
Be not civil.
This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard’s exquisite sensitiveness:
Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
As you thrust a bare arm backward.
And made play with your hair
And a comb, a silly gilt comb
—Ah, God, that I should suffer
Because of the way a little finger moved.
Mr. Crane’s verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures, which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:
“My good friend,” said a learned bystander,
“Your operations are mad.”
Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to some of Maupassant’s.
Pittsburg Leader, June 3, 1899
After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris’ “Blix,” it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, “Active Service,” by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he edits the Sunday edition of the New York “Eclipse,” and delights in publishing “stories” about deformed and sightless infants. “The office of the ‘Eclipse’ was at the top of an immense building on Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson was a broad path of silver in the distance.” This leaves little doubt as to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus Coleman as its Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman’s days were spent in collecting yellow sensations for his paper, and we are told that he “planned for each edition as for a campaign.” The following elevating passage is one of the realistic paragraphs by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of Coleman’s life known to us:
Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze, gilt and steel dropped magically from above. Coleman yelled “Down!” * * * A door flew open. Coleman stepped upon the elevator. “Well, Johnnie,” he said cheerfully to the lad who operated the machine, “is business good?” “Yes, sir, pretty good,” answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank swiftly. Floor after floor seemed to be rising with marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight into the sky. There was soaring lights, figures and the opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black inscriptions. Other lights were springing heavenward. All the lofty corridors rang with cries. “Up!” “Down!” “Down!” “Up!!” The boy’s hand grasped a lever and his machine obeyed his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing swiftness.