Mr. Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage (London: Heinemann) , is a great artist, with something new to say, and consequently, with a new way of saying it. His theme, indeed, is an old one, but old themes re-handled anew in the light of novel experience are the stuff out of which masterpieces are made, and in The Red Badge of Courage Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece. He writes of war—the ominous and alluring possibility for every man, since the heir of all the ages has won and must keep his inheritance by secular combat. The conditions of the age-long contention have changed and will change, but its certainty is coeval with progress: so long as there are things worth fighting for fighting will last, and the fashion of fighting will change under the reciprocal stresses of rival inventions. Hence its double interest of abiding necessity and ceaseless variation. Of all these variations the most marked has followed, within the memory of most of us, upon the adoption of long-range weapons of precision, and continues to develop, under our eyes, with the development of rapidity in firing. And yet, with the exception of Zola’s la Débâcle, no considerable attempt has been made to portray war under its new conditions.

—from New Review (January 1896)

If there were in existence any books of a similar character, one could start confidently by saying that [The Red Badge of Courage] was the best of its kind. But it has no fellows. It is a book outside of all classification. So unlike anything else is it, that the temptation rises to deny that it is a book at all. When one searches for comparisons, they can only be found by culling out selected portions from the trunks of masterpieces, and considering these detached fragments one by one, with reference to the “Red Badge of Courage,” which is itself a fragment, and yet is complete. Thus one lifts the best battle pictures from Tolstoi’s great “War and Peace,” from Balzac’s “Chouans,” from Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” and the forest flight in “ ‘93,” from Prosper Merimée’s assault of the redoubt, from Zola’s “La Débâcle” and “Attack of the Mill,” (it is strange enough that equivalents in the literature of our own language do not suggest themselves,) and studies them side by side with this tremendously effective battle painting by the unknown youngster. Positively they are cold and ineffectual beside it. The praise may sound exaggerated, but really it is inadequate. These renowned battle descriptions of the big men are made to seem all wrong. The “Red Badge of Courage” impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before.

—January 26, 1896

Mr. Stephen Crane is said never to have seen a battle; but his first book, “The Red Badge of Courage,” is made up of the account of one. The success of the story, however, is due, not merely to what Mr. Crane knows of battle-fields, but to what he knows of the human heart. He describes the adventures of a private—a raw recruit—in one of those long engagements, so common in our civil war, and indeed in all modern wars, in which the field of battle is too extensive for those in one part of it to know what is going on elsewhere, and where often a regiment remains in ignorance for some time whether it is victorious or defeated, where the nature of the country prevents hand-to-hand fighting, and a coup d‘oeil of the whole scene is out of the question. In such an action Mr. Crane’s hero plays an active part. It is what goes on in his mind that we hear of, and his experience is in part so exactly what old soldiers tell young soldiers that Mr. Crane might easily have got it at second-hand. The hero is at first mortally afraid that he is going to be afraid, he then does his duty well enough, but later is seized with a panic and runs away, only to come out a hero again in the end. His panic and flight are managed well; the accidental wound which he luckily gets in running, helps him to a reputation for bravery before he has earned it. When he fights in the end, he fights like a devil, he saves the regimental flag, he is insane with the passion of the battle; he is baptized into the brotherhood of those who have been to hell and returned alive. The book is undeniably clever; its vice is over-emphasis. Mr. Crane has not learnt the secret that carnage itself is eloquent, and does not need epithets to make it so. What is a “crimson roar”? Do soldiers hear crimson roars, or do they hear simply roars? If this way of getting expression out of language is allowable, why not extend it to the other senses, and have not only crimson sounds, but purple smells, prehensile views, adhesive music? Color in language is just now a fashionable affectation; Mr. Crane’s originality does not lie in falling into it.

July 2, 1896

It was a new thing, in a new school. When one looked for sources, one thought at once of Tolstoy; but, though it was clear that Tolstoy had exerted a powerful influence upon the conception, if not the actual writing, of [The Red Badge of Courage], there still remained something entirely original and novel. To a certain extent, of course, that was the new man as an individual; but, to at least an equal extent, it was the new man as a typical young American, free at last, as no generation of Americans have been free before, of any regard for English criticism, comment, or tradition, and applying to literary work the conception and theories of the cosmopolitan studio with a quite American directness and vigor.

—from The North American Review (August 1900)

Tolstoy ranks as the supreme living writer of our time to me. But I confess that the conclusions of some of his novels, and the lectures he sticks in, leave me feeling that he regards his genius as the means to an end. I happen to be a preacher’s son, but that heredity does not preclude—in me—a liking for sermons unmixed with other material. No, that sentence doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean that I like my art straight.

—from Thomas Beer’s “Introduction” to Volume 7 of
The Work of Stephen Crane, edited by Wilson Follett (1925-1926)

He came to believe that The Red Badge of Courage was too long, and as this distaste for length—mblematically—included his own life he is to remain a halved portrait, an artist of amazing talent and of developing scope who died too soon for our curiosity.... A man so brilliantly impatient of shams had surely something amusing to say, and the legitimate pity of the case is that he did not live to say more.

-from his “Introduction” to Volume 7 of
The Work of Stephen Crane,
edited byWilson Follett (1925-1926)

Perhaps it was because Stephen Crane had read so little, was so slightly acquainted with the masterpieces of fiction, that he felt no responsibility to be accurate or painstaking in accounting for things and people. He is rather the best of our writers in what is called “description” because he is the least describing.

—from her “Introduction” to Volume 9 of
The Work of Stephen Crane

Recalling now those earnestly fantastic discussions it occurs to me that Crane and I must have been unconsciously penetrated by a prophetic sense of the technique and of the very spirit of film-plays of which even the name was unknown then to the world.

—from Conrad’s “Introduction” to
Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (192 7), by Thomas Beer