When I was first told, as a boy, how to keep my petty cash accounts, my instructor, in a rash moment, once let me see her own. The largest single item on the debit side stood opposite the initials “G.O.K.” Intrigued, I asked who the mysterious “Mr. K. was”. “No-one”, was the reply, “it stands for “God only knows”. The money is gone – on what I could not tell you. G.O.K. balances the accounts and takes care of my ignorance”.

The first history of American literature by a British author, John Nichol's American Literature, An Historical Sketch, 1620–1880, was published in Edinburgh in 1882. In several ways the publication was an unlikely event. By 1882 few American scholars had devoted themselves to the study of American literary history. For a British one to do so at that date must have struck most of his contemporaries as scarcely comprehensible. In 1866 Henry Yates Thompson of Liverpool had offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge in the ‘History, Literature, and Institutions of the United States’—the lecturer to be appointed by the President and Fellows of Harvard. But for a combination of ecclesiastical, political, and academic reasons the offer was rejected as a dangerous novelty. Nothing had happened to make the ‘dangerous novelty’ of 1866 a respectable subject of academic concern in 1882.

It is rather a pity that modem criticism is couched so exclusively in terms of black and white. If a writer these days is not a great creative artist, he is liable to be wiped off the slate altogether. Therefore, those who would preserve a reputation seek to establish it in the strongest possible terms. Terms, perhaps, which it cannot possibly support. This often draws a rebuttal from critics who are impressed less favourably. And, indeed, they may be quite within the bounds of reason if what is in question is the inflating of a minor talent. Yet, to confute an over-estimation is not to condemn a talent which may be genuine. Good writing is rare enough in any period, and we must take it as we find it.

Vain, pushing, pretentious and unquestionably naive, Stephen Crane emerges from the collected letters as something less than one's idea of a literary genius. As Professor Stallman says in his introduction, the letters do give us “a new perspective” on Crane. Artists are notoriously self-contradictory, Professor Stallman tells us; but there is something disturbing about the contradictoriness of these letters, where Crane says one thing to one friend and something very different to another, makes high claims for himself in one letter and low ones in the next. The letters, indeed, tempt the reader to make an overall hypothesis about them; they may have the variousness of the complicated mind that makes an interesting personality (Stallman's reading of the case) or they may be the letters of a man whose largest aim in life was to dramatize himself and to impress others. He says in one letter (to John Northern Hilliard):