I WOULDN'T MIND HAVING the body I had at 28, the age that poor Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis but not if it meant I didn't have the life experience and reflection that the later decades gave me. True, by that age I hadn't lived as much as he had, though I'd seen a considerable part of an even more depraved demimonde than furnished him with a large part of his education and grew up in a far less innocent age than he had. I was still a young jack ass in many ways as most people are until they're older, I hadn't yet developed a deep skepticism for the intellectual milieu in which I grew up and was educated into - not in the classroom, in the media and entertainment and general trends. Seeing through that was one of the great things I got out of living longer though it could have gone bad very easily. If I had not made my way from the youthful conceit of agnosticism back to Christianity I might have lapsed into cynical materialism like so many of those who went from the left to the right. It was the morality that I got from Christianity that kept me from doing that. If Crane would have developed the same way out of the ultimately sterile and futile late 19th century notions of naturalism to what would now be called the left instead of vulgar materialism, no one can know. Mark Twain just sort of soured into an intense cynicism though he still had some notions of morality to it. His attempts at capitalism were not successful.
I am taunted with a link to a "Humanist" website that goes into the young man's, Crane's alleged irreligion, which I have to say I was vaguely aware of when I listed him yesterday but which I didn't take seriously. I haven't looked into it in regard to him but generally when I have looked at such claims by atheists (which "Humanist" means after the word was usurped by ideological atheists) about such historical figures they lay claim to, I've found those are anything from exaggerated to outright lies. One such earlier figure about whom such claims were made to me was Mozart whose letters, known associations (his Masonry, for example), and his music disprove those claims. Others in the repeated claims of such atheist polemicists, especially such crap coming from the "Humanists" and such outfits as "Freedom From Religion" should not be taken without fact checking but which never are, at least not by any atheists citing them who I've run across. And some of them are academics who should certainly know better but clearly don't have that level of integrity.
I mentioned Stephen Crane because his work of imagination, The Red Badge of Courage, has been sometimes compared to Huckleberry Finn. It reproduces the feelings of a young man, not much more but significantly more mature than Huck. It's not novel about a fully mature adult with an adult's level of experience and knowledge, Both books contain extremely important lessons for readers, certainly Twain's using Huck Finn to show readers what Uncle Tom's Cabin already had, that Black People are People, that enslaving them is wrong, something that John Woolman's Journal had done even earlier, though as it wasn't a story book, to less wide readership. Those parts of Huckleberry Finn are the parts when he and Jim are on the river, the parts in which the idiotic Tom Sawyer doesn't appear. The parts I said I might be able to re-read with pleasure.
One of the things I recall reading was that Stephen Crane said what I did, that of Twain's books, he liked Life on the Mississippi best, though that's my recollection of reading something about that. If I hadn't been struck at Crane having the same opinion as me, I probably wouldn't remember it.
You tend to focus on that which agrees with you and you develop that in your imagination instead of having a wider view of the entire picture. Which is one of the problems with taking the thinking of a young man as being what he would think if he had had the chance to become an old man with all of the life experience. But he imagined being an old man in one of his later stories, "The Veteran" which some think was him imagining his novel's hero surviving the war and achieving a heroic death far later. It starts with the old Veteran admitting to having been scared in battle, where his novel started out. No doubt he got that from him talking with Civil War veterans, and the young Crane doesn't appear to have shut off the possibility that he'd have gone in a different direction if he'd lived, too.
Old Fleming staggered. It was true; they had forgotten the two colts in the box stalls at the back of the barn. “Boys,” he said, “I must try to get ’em out.” They clamored about him then, afraid for him, afraid of what they should see. Then they talked wildly each to each. “Why, it’s sure death!” “He would never get out!” “Why, it’s suicide for a man to go in there!” Old Fleming stared absent-mindedly at the open doors. “The poor little things!” he said. He rushed into the barn.
When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released from its body—a little bottle—had swelled like the genie of fable. The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul.
I could speculate on what he meant by that, whether it was a sop to conventional piety in his readers or whether it showed he really believed in something like that but the young man didn't live long enough to tell us if there was anything to it.
Without that, something we can never have, there is no way to know.
He had a fine imagination for experiences he had never had directly and a talent for making his thoughts about that convincing. It's an extreme irony that so much of what is called "naturalism" and the like is a product of such imagination though it is never admitted that's what it is. Same with science, same with everything. The basic conceit of modernism, naturalism, etc. that we can have an unmitigated knowledge of things is plainly wrong.
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