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Mr. Crane’s verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures, which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:

“My good friend,” said a learned bystander,
“Your operations are mad.”

Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to some of Maupassant’s.

Pittsburg Leader, June 3, 1899

After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris’ “Blix,” it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, “Active Service,” by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he edits the Sunday edition of the New York “Eclipse,” and delights in publishing “stories” about deformed and sightless infants. “The office of the ‘Eclipse’ was at the top of an immense building on Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson was a broad path of silver in the distance.” This leaves little doubt as to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus Coleman as its Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman’s days were spent in collecting yellow sensations for his paper, and we are told that he “planned for each edition as for a campaign.” The following elevating passage is one of the realistic paragraphs by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of Coleman’s life known to us:

Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze,
gilt and steel dropped magically from above. Coleman yelled
“Down!” * * * A door flew open. Coleman stepped upon the
elevator. “Well, Johnnie,” he said cheerfully to the lad who
operated the machine, “is business good?” “Yes, sir, pretty
good,” answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank
swiftly. Floor after floor seemed to be rising with
marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight
into the sky. There was soaring lights, figures and the
opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black
inscriptions. Other lights were springing heavenward. All
the lofty corridors rang with cries. “Up!” “Down!” “Down!”
“Up!!” The boy’s hand grasped a lever and his machine obeyed
his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing
swiftness.

Later, when Coleman reached the street, Mr. Crane describes the cable cars as marching like panoplied elephants, which is rather far, to say the least. The gentleman’s nights were spent something as follows:

“In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of
champagne. The last of the wine he finished in somber mood
like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the straw that
litters his prison house. During his dinner he was
continually sending out messenger boys. He was arranging a
poker party. Through a window he watched the beautiful
moving life of upper Broadway at night, with its crowds and
clanging cable cars and its electric signs, mammoth and
glittering like the jewels of a giantess.

“Word was brought to him that poker players were arriving.
He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the broad hall,
occupied mainly by miscellaneous people and actors, all deep
in leather chairs, he found some of his friends waiting.
They trooped upstairs to Coleman’s rooms, where, as a
preliminary, Coleman began to hurl books and papers from the
table to the floor. A boy came with drinks. Most of the men,
in order to prepare for the game, removed their coats and
cuffs and drew up the sleeves of their shirts. The electric
globes shed a blinding light upon the table. The sound of
clinking chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards,
careless and dextrous.”