The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and pretenses of civilization. But he has nothing to put in the place of these things. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he shows us a hero blind with fear; and the theme of all his short stories and later novels is that life is a matter of accident, and the universe a thing without moral sense or meaning. This belief Crane put also into his conduct; he knew nothing to do with his life, except that he had a childish wish to see a real war with his own eyes. First he tried to get to Cuba, and was shipwrecked; and while he got a good story out of that, “The Open Boat,” he paid with a part of his very small store of vitality. Then he went to Greece, but the cooking made him ill. Finally he saw our war in Cuba, and displayed such indifference to his own fate that the tongues of the gossips wagged faster than ever. He must be seeking death, because of some dark scandal hanging over his head! He was altogether out of step with the 1890’s; but now a new generation has come, and all our young intellectuals are cold and objective and cynical, agreeing that pity is a mistake and life nothing in particular. They leave to me the unpleasant task of holding uninvited post-mortems over the ardent unhappy dead. Let me put it briefly: that some day there will be yet another generation, which will realize that no man can get along without a religion, least of all the creative artist. It will not be the Methodist religion, but it will be something that gives young geniuses a reason for taking care of themselves and their gifts. There was one religion which Stephen Crane adopted for a period of two weeks. He was a Socialist for that long--so he explains in a letter; but he met two other Socialists, who told him his doctrines were wrong, and then fell to quarreling as to which of the two was right. I say: Oh, young Stephen Cranes of the future, judge truth by the tests of truth, and not by our personal frailties and follies! CHAPTER CV THE CALIFORNIA OCTOPUS