THIS collection of stories and sketches, which presumably represents the
last gleanings from the work of an author who -died a couple of years ago, has been made without much regard for the fame of the writer, and with no indication whatever as to whether the contents are genuinely posthumous or have already appeared in print. The nature of the book might have seemed to call for a memoir, or at least a preface, but neither is forthcoming.—It seems to be the fashion nowadays only to prefix memoirs to the works of living authors.—But making all reservations for these deficiencies in selection and editing, Last Words contains enough that is characteristic and representative of Stephen Crane to interest that section of the reading public to which his peculiar genius appeals. We cannot believe it to be a large section, either here or in America. He was perhaps too crudely American to be fully appreciated in America, while his angularity, his choice of subject, and above all, his unconventional methods of expres- sion, repelled and affronted the average English reader. For example, the average man will only be disconcerted by en- countering in the middle of a story of essentially comic com- plexion such a sentence as the following :—" The sea became uneasy and heaved painfully, like a lost bosom, when little forgotten heart-bells try to chime with a pure sound. The voyagers cringed at magnified foam on distant wave crests. A moon came and looked at them." This is from an account, mainly ludicrous, of the drifting out to sea of two bathers on a raft. One cannot imagine the author of Three Men in a Boat indulging in the "pathetic fallacy." And that prompts us to note a remarkable fact about Mr. Crane; though practically a semi-literate author, singularly unencumbered with culture, guilty of constant inaccuracies of grammar. construction, and even spelling, his works are a regular mine of all the figures and tricks of speech which grammarians delight to classify and illustrate. In a word, the happy daring of ignorance prompted him to express himself in an original and highly picturesque manner. He was not crushed with reminiscence or reading, or depressed by the fear of plagiarising those qui nostra ante nos dizerunt, and so it came about that when he had anything to say he said it in his own way. With the necessary alterations his appreciation of Irish wit may be applied to his own style : " For amid his wrongs and his rights and his failures—his colossal failures—the Irishman retains this delicate blade for his enemies, for his friends, for himself, the ancestral dagger of fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing—an inheritance which could move the world." " Fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing," that seems to us to express admirably the peculiar equipment of Stephen Crane. He had the power of vision to the extent of clairvoy- ance,—for his earlier war pictures were based on no personal experience in the fighting line, and to this gift of vision he added the further gift of a terse and vivid style. He never wrote a long sentence in his life, but he could compress a flood of colour into two lines,—e.g., when speaking of the saturnine dignity of fishermen he says : " Those who go with nets upon the reeling sea grow still with the mystery and solemnity of the trade." Then Mr. Crane also had a thorough apprecia- tion of the sovereign fact that style often depends quite as much on the ability to dispense with adjectives as on that of their appropriate employment. He can at times adopt a truly eloquent baldness. When the belated bathers are con- versing by night in the cabin of their rescuer's schooner, he describes how they were interrupted "by a pair of legs that appeared among the stars. The captain came down the ladder. He brought a coffee pot from the sky." Again, he was never at a loss for illuminative images. His impecunious New York artists smoke tobacco of which he says that it "smelled like burning mummies." The captain of the schooner had a " bronze face and solitary whiskers," and Mr. Crane's windows in a London hotel " overlooked simply a great sea of night in which were swimming little gas fishes." The pages of this volume which will probably appeal most to English readers are those which record Mr. Crane's London impressions. It has been said by a great modern painter of Goya that he painted human beings as though he saw them for • Last Words. By Stephen Crane, London; Digby, Long, and Co, [6a.]
the first time, and one is sometimes reminded of this suggestive estimate of the Spanish painter's method by the originality and freshness of Mn Crane's point of view. Like the Oriental Prince who visited us some years back, he was chiefly struck by the drilling of the vehicles by the policemen. For the rest he was impressed by horses who could skate, and by the " unbridled strategy " of the British advertiser, As he puts it--
" I went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent mucilage, some hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ran through soap."
These impressions—which we commend to the attention of Mr. Richardson Evans and his excellent Society for com-
bating the excesses of advertisement—hardly come within the province of a critic of fiction, and the same remark applies to the rather disappointing Irish Notes and sundry specimens of descriptive journalism, in which Mr.
Crane is not seen at his best. The episodes in the life of sundry struggling artists in New York are vividly done, and the fancifully named "Spitzbergen Tales "—pre- sumably based on the author's experience as a war correspon- dent in Cuba—have something of the poignancy of Mr.
Crane's earlier studies in the psychology of the fighting line. That Mr. Crane had it in him to write a historical romance is, we think, sufficiently shown by the fragment of imaginary autobiography dealing with the War of Independence. Lastly, we may note a highly humorous narrative of the efforts of a little American counter-jumper, amid the frequent interruptions of his customers, to read a highly sensational French novel, and his indignation at the disappointing dgnouement. Tested by the standard of achievement attained in The Red Badge of Courage and The Open Boat, this mis- cellaneous collection is decidedly disappointing. But there are at least hall-a-dozen things in it which emphasise the regret inspired by the premature removal of this richly endowed, if undisciplined, genius.
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