The realists had been ruling the literary roost, insisting that you must portray life by describing its external details. But this boy had a new idea; the interesting thing to him was the way people felt, and details merely served to reveal the human spirit. He was not afraid to describe emotions as having colors. So here was a new kind of fiction, called “impressionism”; and the realists were laid on the shelf for a while. “Stevie” made a small fortune, and no longer drank his drinks in the saloons of the Bowery, but in the high-priced cafés on Broadway. He wrote short stories and sketches, and verses without rhyme or rhythm, which puzzled the critics--I remember that in my student days they were the joke of the newspaper paragraphers. The gossips got busy with him, of course, and a legend was built up concerning the extent of his revolt against social conventions. His biographer, Thomas Beer, defends him vigorously against these tales. It seems clear that he did not take drugs; while, as to his drinking, we can only repeat what we said about the pipes--any drinking at all was too much for a man who was to die of tuberculosis in a few years. As to the women stories, they seem to have been partly blackmail, and partly the young writer’s imprudent notions of chivalry. He was talking with a girl of the streets in a saloon, and a policeman arrested the girl, and Crane came into court to testify in her behalf, and so of course got himself in for a lot of disagreeable publicity. It would have been so easy for him to avoid that, by having the ordinary caution of a man of the world. If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal!