VI

On the mechanical side of short story construction O. Henry was skilful indeed. He had the unusual power of gripping his reader's attention and compelling him to go on and on to the end. Moreover, he was possessed of an extraordinary originality, finesse, brilliancy of style and diction, and that sense of form which can turn every element of the seemingly careless narrative to a single startling focus. It is this architectonic quality of the work of O. Henry that has endeared him to the makers of handbooks and correspondence courses. It was this in addition to the freshness and originality of his humor and his diction that has given him as his most enthusiastic admirers that most difficult of all groups to please, the manuscript readers for publishing houses and the professional reviewers of books. Amid the dead mass of material that constituted their day's work O. Henry shone like a star. His technique is peculiar. He began at the end of his story always and worked backward. With him it was primarily an intellectual problem: the reader and his psychological processes were constantly before him. A typical O. Henry tale begins with seemingly random remarks of a facetiously philosophical nature illustrated at length with an ex

ample seemingly taken on the impulse of the moment. The example widens into a rather unusual situation. The reader becomes interested as to the solution of the increasingly complex problem, finds that materials have been given in abundance, sees clearly at length how it is going to end, is about to throw the tale aside as not worth pursuing further-then suddenly is given an absolutely other solution that comes like a jet of water in the face. Study the mechanism of such tales as "Girl," "The Pendulum," "The Marry Month of May," and the like. One may detect instantly the germ of the story, the sole cause why it was written. A whole narrative is built up carefully to bring this sentence into startling focus at the end: "At last I have found something that will not bag at the knees," or this "Oh, Andy,' she sighed, 'this is great! Sure I'll marry wid ye. But why did n't ye tell me ye was the cook? I was near turnin' ye down for bein' one of thim foreign counts.'

Intellectually brilliant as all this may be, however, one must not forget that it concerns only the externals of short story art. The failures were at vital points. A short story must have characterization, and O. Henry's pen turned automatically to caricature. We seldom see his characters: we see only the externals of costumes, masks and make-ups, and exaggerated physical peculiarity. He gives us

types, not individuals, and often he describes them in terms of types. Here is the wife of one of his heroes:

Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sunday afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft-all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers.

One never sees in his stories a shop-girl; it is always the shop-girl, described in generalities like this:

She was a wonder. Small and half-way pretty, and as much at her ease in that cheap café as though she were only in the Palmer House, Chicago, with a souvenir spoon already hidden in her shirt waist. She was natural. Two things I noticed about her especially. Her belt buckle was exactly in the middle of her back, and she didn't tell us that a large man with a ruby stick-pin had followed her up all the way from Fourteenth Street.

Or this:

Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde,

with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you looked again you wondered how she had come by Minerva's eyes.

But generally he is not so specific even as this. How shall one visualize a character described in these terms:

She was looking like a bulbul, a gazelle, and a tea rose, and her eyes were as soft and bright as two quarts of cream skimmed off the Milky Way.

Or a hero like this:

He had a face like a picture of a knight-like one of that Round Table bunch-and a voice like a 'cello solo. And his manners! Lynn, if you'd take John Drew in his best drawing-room scene and compare the two, you'd have John arrested for disturbing the peace.

Again, to speak only of fundamentals, a short story should have dialogue that is natural and inevitable. The characters should talk as such people in life would actually talk. In his sketch “The World and the Door," O. Henry makes this pertinent remark: "I read in a purely fictional story the other day the line: 'Be it so, said the policeman.' Nothing so strange has yet cropped out in Truth,”

and yet in the same volume he makes a college professor talk like this: "You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag."

And I wonder if there ever was a man in the world who, chosen at random at night from the bread-line in New York and given a dinner by a whimsical millionaire who has sent a servant out to secure some one to dine with him, would greet his host whom he has never seen with these preliminary words:

Good! Going to be in courses, is it? All right, my jovial ruler of Bagdad. I'm your Scheherazade all the way to the toothpicks. You're the first Caliph with a general Oriental flavor I've struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line.

Again, a short story should be true, and exaggeration is not truth. A short story should leave sharp and indelible the impress of a vital moment in the history of a human soul. It should, as O. Henry himself has expressed it, "take you by the throat like a quinsy," and not because of a situation and not because of a skilfully prepared moment of surprise, but because of a glimpse into the depths of a human heart. To deal with types-the shop-girl, the grafter, the border desperado or with the stock