Each succeeding year until 1911 was to be marked by the publication of two collections of his stories: “The Trimmed Lamp" and "Heart of the West" in 1907, "The Voice of the City" and "The Gentle Grafter" in 1908, "Roads of Destiny" and "Options" in 1909, "Strictly Business" and "Whirligigs" in 1910. A year after his death "Sixes and Sevens" appeared, and in 1913 "Rolling Stones," the latter being chiefly a collection of early material with an Introduction by the lamented Harry Peyton Steger.

"The Trimmed Lamp," "The Voice of the City," and "Strictly Business" are "more stories of the four million" and were written for the most part in 19041905. "Heart of the West" is the fruit of the years spent in Texas, most of the stories having appeared before 1905. "The Gentle Grafter" found its inspiration in the stories told to O. Henry from 1898 to 1901. The first eleven stories in this book had not before been published. They probably belong, as do some of the stories in "Cabbages and Kings," to the accumulation of manuscript mentioned by O. Henry in his letter to Mrs. Roach (see page 160), though they could hardly have been made ready for publication before 1908.

"The Gentle Grafter" is not a novel. It is a kind of "mulct'em in parvo," a string of "Autolycan adventures" told by one whose vocabulary consisted chiefly of "contraband sophistries" and whose life conformed to

"the gilded rule." "I never skin a sucker," says Jeff, in an autobiographic confession, "without admiring the prismatic beauty of his scales. I never sell a little auriferous trifle to the man with the hoe without noticing the beautiful harmony there is between gold and green." The stories take place in the South, in the West, and in New York. In each of the succeeding collections, "Roads of Destiny," "Options," "Strictly Business," "Whirligigs," and "Sixes and Sevens," O. Henry mingles Latin America, the South, the West, and New York. The titles, however, are arbitrary and are not intended as keynotes to the contents.

But the real life of O. Henry in New York is to be sought in the ideas out of which the stories grew rather than in the succession of incidents that happened to him or in the names of the books that he published. A re-reading of the stories in the order in which they were written seems to show that from first to last he moved from theme to theme. Character, plot, and setting were ancillary to the central conceptionwere but the concrete expressions of the changing ideas that he had in mind. Only a few of these will be traced, enough to indicate, however, that his real biography, the biography of his mind, is to be found in his work.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

FAVOURITE THEMES

EVERY one who has heard O. Henry's stories talked about or has talked about them himself will recall or admit the frequent recurrence of some such expression as, “I can't remember the name of the story but the point is this." Then will follow the special bit of philosophy, the striking trait of human nature, the new aspect of an old truth, the novel revelation of character, the wider meaning given to a current saying, or whatever else it may be that constitutes the point or underlying theme of the story. Of no other stories is it said or could it be said so frequently, "The point is this," because no other writer of stories has, I think, touched upon such an array of interesting themes.

Most of those who have commented upon O. Henry's work have singled out his technique, especially his unexpected endings, as his distinctive contribution to the American short story. "I cannot drop this topic," says Professor Walter B. Pitkin, author of "The Art and the Business of Story Writing," "without urging the student to study carefully the maturer stories of O. Henry,

who surpasses all writers, past and present, in his mastery of the direct dénouement."

The unexpected ending, however, is not, even technically, the main point in the structural excellence of a short story. Skill here marks only the convergence and culmination of structural excellencies that have stamped the story from the beginning. The crack of the whip at the end is a mechanical feat as compared with the skilful manipulation that made it possible. Walter Pater speaks somewhere-and O. Henry's best stories are perfect illustrations of "that architectural conception of the work which perceives the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first." In fact, it is not the surprise at the end that reveals the technical mastery of O. Henry or of Poe or of De Maupassant. It is rather the instantly succeeding second surprise that there should have been a first surprise: it is the clash of the unexpected but inevitable.

It is not technique, however, that has given O. Henry his wide and widening vogue. Technique starts no after-tones. It flashes and is gone. It makes no pathways for reflection. If a story leaves a residuum, it is a residuum of theme, bared and vivified by technique but not created by it. It is O. Henry's distinction that he has enlarged the area of the American short