gs hated shall not
ever prevail, nor that for which the heart yearns turn to ashes at our
touch.

* * * * *

"I 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 viseed 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 Fa