"It threatens to attain," said the New York Sun five years after his death, "the proportions of the Stevenson myth, which was so ill-naturedly punctured by Henley. It appears to be inevitably the fate of 'the writers' writer'-and O. Henry comes under this heading notwithstanding his work's universal appeal -to disintegrate into a sort of grotesque myth after his death. As a matter of fact Sydney Porter was, in a sort of a way, a good deal of a myth before he died. He was so inaccessible that a good many otherwise reasonable people who unsuccessfully sought to penetrate his cordon and to force their way into his cloister drew bountifully upon their imaginations to save their faces and to mask their failure."

But however mythical his personality, O. Henry's work remains the most solid fact to be reckoned with in the history of twentieth-century American literature. "More than any author who ever wrote in the United States," says Mr. Stephen Leacock,* "O. Henry is an American writer. And 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.” If variety and range of appeal be an indication, O. Henry would seem to be approaching the time thus prophesied. He has won the three classes of readers,

*See the chapter on "The Amazing Genius of O.; Henry" (in Essays and Literary Studies.) A London reviewer of Mr. Leacock's book singles out for special praise the chapter on O. Henry, placing him "on a level with the great masters, Poe or Maupassant or Cable."

those who work with their brains, those who work with their hands, and those who mingle the two in varying but incalculable proportions. The ultra-conservatives and the ultra-radicals, the critical and the uncritical, the bookmen and the business men, the women who serve and those who only stand and wait, all have enlisted under his banner. "The men and women whom I have in mind," writes Mr. W. J. Ghent, author of "Socialism and Success," "are social reformers, socialists, radicals, and progressives of various schools, practical and theoretical workers in the fields of social and political science. Some of these persons read Marx; most of them read H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy; but all of them are much more likely to read bluebooks and the Survey than the current fiction which contains no 'message.' Yet it was just among these persons, so far as my individual acquaintance goes, that O. Henry established himself as a writer almost at the beginning of his career."

"When I was a freshman in Harvard College," writes Mr. John S. Reed in the American Magazine, "I stood one day looking into the window of a bookstore on Harvard Square at a new volume of O. Henry. A quietly dressed, unimpressive man with a sparse, dark beard came up and stood beside me. Said he, suddenly: 'Have you read the new one?' 'No,' I said. 'Neither have I. I've read all the others, though.'

'He's great, don't you think?' 'Bully," replied the quietly dressed man; 'let's go in and buy this one."" The quietly dressed man was William James.

A writer is not often called a classic until at least a half century has set its seal upon his best work. But Mr. Edward Garnett,* the English author, reviewer, and critic, admits to "the shelf of my prized American classics" seven authors. They are Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Stephen Crane, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Mr. W. D. Howells, and O. Henry, though O. Henry published his first book in 1904. Professor Henry Seidel Canby, author of "The Short Story in English," thinks that the technique of the short story has undergone marked changes in recent years, "especially since O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary master." Mr. James Lane Allen believes that the golden age of the American short story closed about 1895. "The best of the American short stories," he says, "written during that period [1870-1895], outweigh in value those that have been written later— with the exception of those of one man the one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period as a world within himself, as much apart from any one else as are Hawthorne and Poe."

Mr. Henry James Forman, author of "In the Foot

*See "Some Remarks on American and English Fiction" (Atlantic Monthly, December, 1914).

tinct genre.

prints of Heine," finds also that, with one exception, there has been a decline in the short story as a dis"Publishers still look upon it somewhat askance," he writes,* "as on one under a cloud, and authors, worldly-wise, still cling to the novel as the unquestioned leader. But here and there a writer now boldly brings forth a book of short tales, and the publisher does his part. The stigma of the genre is wearing off, and for the rehabilitation one man is chiefly responsible. Mr. Sydney Porter, the gentleman who, in the language of some of his characters, is 'denounced' by the euphonious pen-name of O. Henry, has breathed new life into the short story." After a tentative comparison with François Villon, Dickens, and Maupassant, Mr. Forman concludes: "It is idle to compare O. Henry with anybody. No talent could be more original or more delightful. The combination of technical excellence with whimsical sparkling wit, abundant humour, and a fertile invention is so rare that the reader is content without comparisons." The Nation,† after indicating the qualities that seem to differentiate him from Kipling and Mark Twain, summarizes in a single sentence: "O. Henry is actually that rare bird of which we so often hear false reports—a born story teller."

Professor William Lyon Phelps in "The Advance of the English Novel" puts O. Henry among the five

*The North American Review, May, 1908.

† July 4, 1907.

greatest American short story writers. "No writer of distinction," he continues, "has, I think, been more closely identified with the short story in English than O. Henry. Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Stevenson, Kipling attained fame in other fields; but although Porter had his mind fully made up to launch what he hoped would be the great American novel, the veto of death intervened, and the many volumes of his 'complete works' are made up of brevities. The essential truthfulness of his art is what gave his work immediate recognition, and accounts for his rise from journalism to literature. There is poignancy in his pathos; desolation in his tragedy; and his extraordinary humour is full of those sudden surprises that give us delight. Uncritical readers have never been so deeply impressed with O. Henry as have the professional, jaded critics, weary of the old trick a thousand times repeated, who found in his writings a freshness and originality amounting to genius."

There is no doubt that the jaded critics extended a warm welcome to O. Henry, but that they were more hospitable than the uncritical admits of question. For several years I have made it a practice in all sorts of unacademic places, where talk was abundant, to lead the conversation if possible to O. Henry. The result has been a conviction that O. Henry is to-day not less "the writers' writer" but still more the people's writer.