The Third Violet (1897)

Summary

“Book Notices.” Bachelor of Arts 4 (May 1897), p. 511

The author of The Red Badge, The Little Regiment, and Maggie, in this summer story applies his heavy, realistic system to a light, silly love tale. His intense style, extraordinary use of English, and thundering adjectives are here out of place. The book is dull, and the flirtation a piece of idle vacuousness. The girl throws three violets, and is won at last in a hopeless sort of confusion—for the reader. “Oh, do go—go! Please! I want you to go!” This in Cranese is the girl's method of gently saying, “I love you.” Hawker, the crack-brained lover, says, “What?” to this, springs to his feet, and explodes with delight. Crane is out of his element; his conceits of style do not sound so well in light, trifling comedy.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 16, 1897, p. 16

Stephen Crane's most recent story, “The Third Violet” (D. Appleton & Co.), should convince its author that a love story cannot be told in the matter of fact manner in which he would describe the episodes of a battlefield or the life of the streets and the tenements on the east side. Yet, this is just what Mr. Crane has attempted in this new novel. Apparently his idea was that a report of the conversations between a pair of lovers, an account of their actions, the inconsequent talk that flowed from the people about them, the things they did and what they said to other people or which other people said about them—all told just as it actually happened, would form an interesting compilation.