and increased by the public response to these writers, produced a vast outpouring of regionalist fiction. The tide of local color is to-day on the ebb perhaps, but it is still forceful, and presently we shall study our younger contemporary regionalists and see what conclusions as to the future it is possible to draw from their work.

CHAPTER X

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

So far practically all the writers whom we have considered had produced their most characteristic work before the Spanish-American War. The time was ripe for a change, but the harbingers of that change were condemned to frustration, and it is significant enough that Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce still suffer from popular neglect in America, although their art has been long recognized in England.

Had Stephen Crane (1870-1900) lived and been sheltered, it is not only conceivable, but probable, that he would have been a very great artist. As it is, he probably ranks a little below Maupassant and considerably above Kipling. Edward Garnett has related how he picked up recently a first edition of The Red Badge of Courage for sixpence shortly before a first edition of Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad was sold for twelve pounds. "Conrad was also amused when I told him, and we suggested a title for an

allegorical picture yet to be painted—the Apotheosis of an Author crowned by Fashion, Merit, and Midas. For we both had in mind the years when the critics hailed The Nigger of the Narcissus as a worthy pendent to the battle-pictures presented in The Red Badge of Courage, and when Sir, then Mr. Arthur Quiller-Couch spoke of The Nigger as 'having something of Crane's insist

It has been remarked more than once that when Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1896) he had no personal experience of war. And yet no man realized the essential aspects of war more profoundly, nor the psychological effects of war upon the soldier. The hurtling passions of the struggle, pride and fear, exulting triumph and strangled rage, conscious of glory and futility alike, are incomparably realized with youthful intuition and fused into objective unity by an art as inevitable as that of Hardy. When Crane came to England from the Balkans, he said to Joseph Conrad, according to Garnett's report: "My picture of war was all right! I have found it as I imagined it." 2

1 Friday Nights, 1922, pp. 201-2. 2 Friday Nights, 1922, p. 213.

His poignant realism in Maggie (1896) makes that of the Goncourts and Huysmans seem feeble and ineffective. With the steady and remorseless inevitability of blind incurious fate, life crushes the New York street girl, and the story purges our minds with pity and terror as surely and directly as Edipus Tyrannus or Hecuba. If these two great little books are not short stories according to the laws of the Medes and Persians, the laws must be changed.

In The Little Regiment (1896), The Open Boat (1898) and Wounds in the Rain (1900), we find Stephen Crane's most mature achievement. He has found an utterly personal style of great distinction, flexible, resilient, grave, mocking, ironic, tragic, shifting its pattern with every turn of life's wheel, and yet uniquely his own in its individual charm. Crane is America's only great honest ironist, and his irony is pitiful and kind. But we are afraid of ironists in America, and equally afraid of passionate life that expresses itself naked and unashamed.

The Third Violet (1897) and Active Service (1899) are novels which the reader can afford to neglect, but George's Mother (1896) whose realism is but little inferior to that of Maggie, and

The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), in which all the passionate irony of The Red Badge of Courage and The Open Boat are expressed in distinguished free verse poems which our imagists have not surpassed, although they are much indebted to them, are among the very few vital books of the period.

The Monster (1899), while a collection of short stories with much subtle psychology, is on the whole inferior to Crane's earlier books, and Whilomville Stories (1900) mark a more measurable decline. Last Words (1902) may be left to obscurity for the most part, and so may the few new pieces posthumously collected in Men, Women, and Boats (1921), although they would have made the reputation of another man. It is scandalous that we have no collected edition of his better work and no biography. Even the editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature seem scarcely conscious of his existence, and mention him only to damn Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage with faint praise. Yet it would seem that a public which responds almost unanimously to Kipling might find something to admire in Crane, who is his superior in very similar qualities. Certainly the man who has