tion. In 1919 his publishers announced that "Up to the present time about four millions, one hundred thousand of O. Henry's books have gone to the public," or about one to every twenty-five of our population. Since then the market has been more difficult to follow and the publishers will venture no figures, but the sale, they declare, has gone steadily on as from the first. The conclusion is inevitable: the people would not have bought these volumes had they not wanted them, had they not craved just those things the advertising sheets so vividly promised; the reading public of America undeniably wants O. Henry. With such figures and facts before us, is it too much to say that the last two decades in America have been the age of O. Henry, and that we are still befogged within it and with little promise of emergence?

O. Henry is paradox; at every point you touch him, paradox. Four years after his death the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, erected a memorial to him to this columnist of a Sunday supplement —and the orator of the day was the Poe professor of English at the University of Virginia, a scholar of distinction. Then with an acclaim that was national and international came the O. Henry Hotel dedication in a Southern city and another burst of superlatives. Then just as calm was settling again and it seemed to the conservative that Time was

preparing her inevitable verdict, there came the Smith biography. Amazing paradox! The man never had been a cow-boy at all, at least not a rider of horses. During his eleven years in Texas he had been for the most of the time a newspaper reporter and a clerk, his last clerkship in a bank. Accused of too great freedom with the bank funds, he had made a plunge into South America by way of New Orleans. For months he had vagabonded "with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere," but returning at last to Texas he had been arrested, convicted of embezzlement, and condemned to prison, where he had spent four years. It was in prison that he had taken to writing, and from his cell, with an assumed name necessarily (for was he not a convict?), had actually marketed those stories which first had brought him into notice. When "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" appeared in "McClure's," its author had two and a half more years to serve on his prison sentence. Sensational, surely! The author of the biography was stormed with abuse because he had refused to conceal the truth. Delicious irony! The public should not know too much about its idols. The South is chivalrous: de mortuis nil nisi bonum; the good fellows who had helped shorten his days were chivalrous; he was a good fellow; he was dead, therefore he should be

canonized. Concerning the quality of his work, all this made no difference either way, but it is interesting.

That was in 1916. Could these fastidious critics North and South, have seen 1921 and its "Through the Shadows with O. Henry" with its prison coverdesign, its jacket puff of "an amazing revelation, with a thrill in every chapter," and its author, Al Jennings, reformed desperado and convict described by O. Henry himself as "pickpocket, supper man, second-story man, yeggman, box man, all-round burglar, card-sharp and slickest con man west of the Twenty-third Street ferry landing," and, he might have added, murderer and gun-man and thug and boon companion during the South American experience, and general model for the desperadoes and bad men of most of his picaresque stories of the Southwest and of South America-had this revelation appeared in 1916 what would have been the sensation? American literature of late is becoming picturesque in its personalities.

So much for the paradox of O. Henry himself: what of the 250 tales in the twelve volumes of his literary remains?

Conservative criticism has been inclined to withhold its verdict and wait. A comet, be it ever so brilliant, fades if you give it time, but in the case of O. Henry the critic has not been allowed to

wait. He has been forced to render judgment. It has become impossible to ignore the voices that have poured upon him from barber-shop and university, from home and public library, from club and pulpit, from reviews in popular journals and critiques in quarterlies and solemn volumes. And the volume of praise seems to be increasing. Editors of college texts have admitted him among the time-tried classics. A recent book of selections from "the world's greatest short story writers," made by a sober critic, includes five Americans: Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Bunner, O. Henry. Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, the breadth of whose scholarship no one questions, sent forth his biography with the dictum: "O. Henry's work remains the most solid fact to be reckoned with in the history of twentieth century literature." This same critic at the dedication of the Raleigh memorial had added the man to the great American four: Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, and Harte. "O. Henry," he declared, "has given the American short story a new reach and a widened social content . . . he has socialized the short story." The Canadian humorist and critic, Stephen Leacock, has published an essay entitled "The Amazing Genius of O. Henry," and in it he has dared to use words like these: "The time is coming, let us hope, when the whole English-speaking world will recognize in him one of the great masters of modern

literature." Some of the most discriminating of scholars both in America and abroad have found joy in him: the late William James, we are told, had read his every story. University men everywhere, and conservative critics even, have turned to him for relaxation and have praised him in superlatives. Few authors, indeed, have ever so completely captured the high and the low of their generation.

In view, then, of this no uncertain verdict of his era, his work becomes important. To study it is to study an epoch, for a people and a generation are to be judged by what they read and enjoy, by what they teach in their schools and crown in their academies. A success like O. Henry's means imitators, a literary school, a standard of values. And what are these values to be? What of the age of O. Henry?

II

Before one may crown O. Henry or dismiss O. Henry one must read him, all of him, thirteen volumes: it goes without saying. But let the reader keep his balance: the mixture is intoxicating; it blunts after a time all the critical faculties. One emerges from the thirteenth volume of this strange harlequin epic completely upset, unable for a time rightly to evaluate anything, condemning, yet at