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Don't read Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" and "Pippa Passes" when you know in your heart that you would rather saw wood. Let Pippa pass. She is not for you. If you find that you like Laura Jean Libbey's books better than Ibsen's, read Laura Jean Libbey. Never mind Ibsen's feelings. It is no reflection on him. Anjrway, I doubt Dante myself. Hand me that last book by O. Henry. Thjuik you. The Amazing Genius of O. Henry* y W^iS real name was William Sydney Porter. His nom de § m plume, O. Henry, — hopelessly tame and colourless from a -*• -*■ literary point of view, — seems to have been adopted in a whimsical moment, with no great thought as to its aptness. It is amazing that he should have selected so poor a pen name. Those who can remember their first shock of pleased surprise on hearing that Rudyard Kiplint.'s name was really Rudyard Kipling, will feel something like pain m learning that any writer could deliberately christen himself " '." The circumst. »he more peculiar inasmuch as O. Henry's works abound in i nomenclature. The names that he claps on his Central Ameiicau idvent iers are things of joy to the artistic eye, — General Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon! Ramon Angel de las Cruzes Miraflores, president of the republic of Anchuria! Don Sefior el Coronel Encarnacion Rios! The very spirit of romance and revolution breathes through them! Or what more beautiful for a Nevada town than Topaz City ? What name more appropriate for a commuter's suburb than Floralhurst? And these are only examples among thousands. !n all the two hundred stories that O. Henry wrote, there is hardly «'*-'Yi;S "He that U without tin, let him fint coat a •tone—" A woman croucfitd dovm agaiutt the iron fence of the park, soibing turbulently. Her rich fur coat dragged on the ground. Her dia- mond ringed hands clung to the slender plainly dressed working girl who leaned close, trying to console, Dan "was the cause of it aB. Dan and that chap with the auKh mobile and the diamonds. O.Henry sarw, and seeing, understood. He tells about it all in one of his won- derful stories. * This stiiry of O. Henrv's life is taken from Stephen Leacocli's book "Essays and Literary Studies," published by John Lane Co., New York. a single name that is inappropriate or without a proper literary sug- gestiveness, except the name that he signed to them. O. Henry, — as he signed himself, — was born in 1867, '"t>st proba- bly at Greensboij, North Carolina. For the first thirty or thirty- five years of his life, few knew or cared where he was born, or whither he was going. Now that he has been dead five years he shares already with Homer the honour of a disputed birthplace. While still a boy, O. Henry (there is no use in calling him any- thing else) went to Texas, where he worked for three years on a ranch. He drifted into the city of Houston and got employment on a news- paper. A year later he bought a newspaper of his own in Austin, Texas, for the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars. He rechristened it The Rolling Stone, wrote it, and even illustrated it, himself. But the paper was too well named. Its editor himself rolled away from it, and from the shores of Texas the wandering restlessness that was characteristic of him wafted him down the great gulf to the en- chanted land of Central America. Here he "knocked around," as he himself has put it, "mostly among refugees and consuls." Here too was laid the foundation of much of his most characteristic work, — his Cabbages and Kings, and such stories as Phcebe and The Fourth in Salvador. Latin America fascinated O. Henry The languor of the tropics; the sunlit seas with their open bays and broad sanded beaches, with green palms nodding on the slopes above, — white-painted steamers lazily at anchor, — quaint Spanish towns, with adobe houses and wide squares, sunk in their noon- day sleep, — beautiful Seiioritas drowsing away the afternoon in hammocks; the tinkling of the mule bells on the mountain track above the town, — the cries of unknown birds issuing from the dense green of the unbroken jungle — and at night in the soft darkness, the low murmur of the guitar, soft thrumming with the voice of love — these are the sights and sounds of O. Henry's Central America. Here live and move his tattered revolutionists, his gaudy generals of the mimic army of the existing republic; hither ply his white-painted steamers of the fruit trade; here the American consul, with a shadowed past and $600 a year, drinks away the remembrance of his northern energy and his college education in the land of forgetfulness. Hither the absconding banker from the States is dropped from the passing steamer, clutching tight "ExtradiUd from Bohtmia" Poor little letter! IVhtn Hoskins eot it, he set right out for New York City as fast as he could go and— "when he got there— ^ut it's all told better by O. Henry iff one more of his wonderful stories. in his shaking hand his valise of stolen dollars; him the disguised detective, lounging beside the littlt. drinking shop, watches with a furtive eye. And here in this land of enchantment th broken lives, the wasted hopes, the ambition that was never reached, the frailty that was never conquered, ure somehow pieced together and illuminated into what they might have been, — and even the reckless crime and the open sin, viewed in the softened haze of such an atmosphere, are half forgiven. Whether this is the "real Central America" or not, is of no con- sequence. It probably is not. The"realCentral America" may best be left to the up-to-date specialist, the energetic newspaper expert, or the travelling lady correspondent, — to all such persons, in fact, as are capable of writing Six Weeks in Nicaragua, or Costa Rica As I Saw It. Most likely the Central America of O. Henry is as glor- iously Tinreal as the London of Charles Dickens, or the Salem of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or any other beautiful picture of the higher truth of life that can be shattered into splinters in the didtorting prism of cold fact. From Central America O. Henry rolled, drifted or floated, — there was no method in his life, — back to Texas again. Here he worked WhoWm-'Thm GuOty Party?" When this younv, prl — slipped far from the tuoHd's idea of "virtue — her heart trtaking -with outraxd love — tent a kmje into the heart of the man, ivomen ailed her guilty — men called him guilty —but O. Henry, -who kncrws the hearts of weak huma^t, rvho understands women, "who sets ot. . faint line between the angfl and the si nn er -O. Henry found the guilt far baik in another place — in the heart of a red-headed, unshared, untidy party, -who sat by his "Uiindotv and read, "while his children played in the streets. for two weeks in a drug store. This brief experience supplied him all the rest of his life with local colour and technical ma- terial for his stories. So well has he used it that the obstinate legend still runs that O. Henry was a druggist. A strict examination of his work would show that he knew the names of about seven- teen drugs and was able to describe the rolling of pills with the life-like accuracy of one who has rolled them. But it was characteristic of his instinct for literary values that even on this slender basis O. Henry was able to make his characters "take down from shelves" such mys- terious things as Sod. et. Pot. Tart., or discuss whether magnesia carbonate or pulverised glycerine is the best excipient, and in moments of high traced" poison themselves with "tincture of aconite." Whether these terms are correctly used or not I do not know. Nor can I conceive that it matters. O. Henry was a literary artist first, last and always. It was the effect and the feeling that he wanted. For technical accuracy he cared not one whit. There is a certain kind of author who thinks to make literature by introducing, "■ let us say, a plumber using seven differ- ent kinds of tap-washers with seven different names; and there is a certain type of reader who is thereby conscious of seven different kinds of ignorance, and is fascinated forthwith. From pedantry of this sort O. Henry is entirely free. Even literal accuracy is nothing to him ao long as he gets his effect. Thus he .imences one of his stories with the brazen statement: "In Texas you may joMiney for a thousand miles in a straight line." You can't, of course; and O. Henry knew it. It is only his way of saying that Texas is a very big place. So with his tincture of aconite. It may be poisonous or it may be not. But it sounds poisonous and that is enough for O. Henry. This is true art. • • • • • After his brief drug-store experience O. Henry moved toNewOrleans. Even in his Texan and Central American days he seems to have scrib- bled stories. InNewOrleans he set to work deliberately as writer. Much of his best work was poured forth with the prodigality of genius into the columns of the daily pi ess without thought of fame. The money that he received, so it is said, was but a pittance. Stories that would sell to-day, — were O. Henry alive and writing them now, — for a thousand dollars, went for next to nothing. Throughout his life money meant little or "— — ^— — — — — — ^^-^— — nothing to him. If he had it, he spent it, loaned it or gave it away. When he had it not he bargained with an editor for the payment in advance of a story which he meant to write, and of which he exhibited the title or a few sentences as a sample, and which he wrote, faithfully enough, "when he got round to it." The story runs of how one night a beggar on the street asked O. Henry for money. He drew forth a coin from his pocket in the darkness and handed it to the man. A few moments later the beggar looked at the coin under a street lamp, and being even such a beggar as O. Henry loved to write about, he came running back with the words, "Say, you made a mistake, this is a twenty-dollar gold piece." *'I know it is," said O. Henry, "but it's all I have." The story may not be true. But at least it ought to be. "I Am Jmt a Poor Boy From tho Country" "Oh, pshaw! Leant me alone! I am put a poor boy from the country. " Sensitive, avoiding the lime /ijAr, this is the "whimsical answer that O. Henry — America's greatest short story writer — made when the world tried to lioniv him. He pre f erred the shadows of the street comers, where he could gaze upon the hurrying stream oflifr, deep into the hearts of men and picture for you the generosity, fero- city, kindliness, -want, devotion, 'the laughter and the mockny, the frverish tcti-vity and the stark despair— all the ■:ompUX interplay of human emotions which go to make /• "r. From New Orleans O. Henry moved to New York and became a unit among the "four million "dwellers in flats and apartment houses and sand-stone palaces who live within the roar of the elevated railway, and from whom the pale light of the moon and the small effects of the planetary system are overwhelmed in the glare of the Great White Way. Here O.Henry's finest work was done, — inimitable, unsurpassable stories that make up the volumes entitled The Four Million^ The Trimmed Lamp and The Voice of the City. Marvellous indeed they are. Written ofF-hand with the bold carelessness of the pen that only genius dare use, but revealing behind them such a glowing of the imagination and such a depth of understanding of the human heart as only genius can make manifest. Bagdad on the Subway What O. Henry did for Central America he does again for New York. He waves a wand over it and it becomes a city of mystery and romance. It is no longer the roaring, surging metropolis that we thought we knew, with its clattering elevated, its unending crowds, and on every side the repellent selfishness of the rich, the grim strug- gle of the poor, and the listless despair of the outcast. It has become, as O. Henry loves to call it, Bagdad upon the Subway. The glare has gone. There is a soft light suffusing the city. Its corner drug-stores turn to enchanted bazaars. From the open doors of its restaurants and palm rooms, tliere issues such a melody of softened music that we feel we have but to cross the threshold and there is Bagdad waiting for us beyond. A transformed waiter hands us to a chair at a little table, — Arabian, I will swear it, — beside an enchanted rubber tree. There is red wine such as Omar Khayyam drank, here on Sixth Avenue. At the tables about us are a strange and interesting crew, — dervishes in the disguise of American business men, caliphs mas- querading as tourists, bedouins from S3'ria and fierce fantassins from the desert turned into western visitors from Texas, and among them — can we believe our eyes,— houris from the inner harems of Ispahan and Candahar, whom we mistook but yesterday for the ladies of a Shubert chorus! As we pass out we pay our money to an enchanted cashier with golden hair, — sitting behind glass, — under the spell of some magician without a doubt, — and then taking O. Henry's hand we wander forth among the ever changing scenes of night adventure, the mingled tragedy and humour of The Four Million, that his pen alone can depict. Now did ever Haroun al Raschid and his viziers, wandering at will in the narrow streets of their Arabian city, meet such varied adven- ture as lies before us, strolling hand in hand with O. Henry in the new Bagdad that he reveals. But let us turn to the stories themselves. O. Henry wrote in all two hundred short stories of an average of about fifteen pages each. This was the form in which his literary activity shaped itself by instinct. A novel he never wrote. A play he often meditated but never achieved. One of his books, — Cabbages and Kings, — can make a certain claim to be continuous. But even this is rather a collection of little stories than a single piece of fiction. But it is an error of the grossest kind to say that O. Henry's work is not sus- tained. In reality his canvas is vast. His New York stories, like those of Central America or of the west, form one great picture as gloriously comprehensive in its scope as the lengthiest novels of a Dickens or the canvas of a Da Vinci. It is only the method that is different, not the result. It is hard indeed to illustrate O. Henry's genius by the quif.-ition of single phrases and sentences. The humour that is in his work lies too deep for that. His is not the comic wit that explodes the reader into a huge guffaw of laughter and vanishes. His humour is of that deep quality that smiles at life itself and mingles our amusement with our tears. Still harder is it to try to shew the amazing genius of 0. Henry as a "plot maker," as a designer of incident. No one better than he can hold the reader in suspense. Nay, more than that, the reader scarcely knows that he is "suspended," until at the very close of the story O. Henry, so to speak, turns on the lights and the whole tale is revealed as an entirety. But to do justice to a plot in a few para- graphs is almost impossible. Let the reader consider to what a few poor shreds even the best of our novels or plays is reduced, when we try to set forth the basis of it in the condensed phrase of a text-book of literature, or diminish it to the language of the "scenario" of a moving picture. Let us take an example. We will transcribe our immortal Hamlet as faithfully as we can into a few words with an eye to explain the plot and nothing else. It will run about as follows: "Hamlet's uncle kills his father and marries his mother, and Hamlet is so disturbed about this that he either is mad or pretends to be mad. In this condition he drives his sweetheart insane and she drowns, or practically drowns, herself. Hamlet then kills his uncle's chief adviser behind an arras either in mistake for ^, rat, or not. Hamlet then gives poison to his uncle and his mother, stabs Laertes and kills himse'f. There is much discussion among the critics as to whether his actions justify us in calling him insane." There! The example is, per- haps, not altogether convincing. It does not seem somehow, faith- ful though it is, to do Shakespeare Th* Enchtmttd Kia* fVith violets and champapie and eUctricity to help, he dared to kiss her — there in that Spanish built tvwu on the border, inhere the color of the Mexican has fired the cold courage of the Anglo-Saxon to a spirit of lore and adventure — where men kill and women kiss on the jump. There this sly young man kissed the beautifiU girl — and later, carefully le justice. But let it at least illustrate the point under discussion. The mere bones of a plot are nothing. We could scarcely form a judgment on fenvale beauty by studying the skeletons of a museum of anatomy. But with this distinct understanding, let me try to present the outline of a typical O. Henry story. I select it from the volume entitled The Gentle Grafter, a book that is mainly concerned with the wiles of JefF Peters and his partners and associates. Mr. Peters, who acts as the narrator of most of the stories, typifies the peren- nial fakir and itinerant grafter of the Western States, — ready to turn his hand to anything from selling patent medicines under a naphtha lamp on the street corner of a western town to peddling bargain Bibles from farm to farm, — anything in short that does not involve work and carries with it the peculiar excitement of trying to keep out of the State penitentiary. All the world loves a grafter, — at least a genial and ingenious grafter, — a Robin Hood who plunders an abbot to feed a beggar, an Alfred Jingle, a Scapin, a Raffles, — or any of the multifarious characters of the world's Hterature who reveal the fact that much that is best in humanity may flourish even on the shadowy side of technical iniquity. Of this glwious company is Mr. Jefferson Peters. But let us take him as he is revealed in Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet and let us allow him to introduce himself and his business. "I struck Fisher Hill," Mr. Peters relates, "in a buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an actor in Texarkana. I don't know what he ever did with the pocket-knife I swapped him for it. "I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life- dnssed in an eUAortOt -wrapper with her little bare feet in white fwansdvtun dippers, she waited for him to come. And when he did, just by accident she turned the light the wrong Win. A Umgh, a •whiff of heliotrope, a groping Mtle hand on his arm. What he did was the last ihmg you'd expect. Read this story and you ■will know why they caU O. Hauy master of the unexpected ending Lovm on 7%« Mtxiean Bordmr Sntetlv the smiled into the eyes of both, kisses she took from both— the nddy American and the dark-skinned Mexican. And in the strong arms of the man from the North, was it any wonder that for the moment At forgot that Pedro would soon be there? Her punish- ment? Men of the North laugh coldly and pass on, but the Southern brother below the Rio Grande loves, as he hates, with a singleness that knows no mercy. On this erring woman, going so gayly to her fate, O. Henry could look with excuse and pity, as he did on the -weaknesses of women, always, everywhere, for he knew their small shoulders bear burdens hat would break the backs of men. giving plants and herbs acci- dentally discovered byTa-qua- Ia,the beautiful wifeofthechief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for an annual corn dance. . . ." In the capacity of Dr. Waugh-hoo, Mr. Peters "struck Fis'ier Hill." He went to a druggist and got credit for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks, and with the help of the running water from the tap in the hotel room, he spent a long evening manufacturing Resur- rection Bitters. The next evening the sales began. The bitters at fifty cents a bottle "started off like sweetbreads on toast at a vegetarian dinner." Then there intervenes a constable with a German silver badge. "Have you got a city license.?" he asks, and Mr. Peters* medicinal activity comes to a full stop. The threat of prosecution under the law for practising medicine without a license puts Mr. Peters for the moment out of business. He returns sadly to his hotel, pondering on his next move. Here by good furtune he meets a former acquaintance, a certain Andy Tucker, who has just finished a tour in the Southern States, work- ing the Great Cupid Combination Package on the chivalrous an \ unsuspecting South. "Andy," says JeflF, in speaking of his friend's credentials, "was a good street man: and he was more than that— he respected his profession and was satisfied with 300 per cent, profit. He had 12 I In one short ugly sentence Ae stripped him of his manhood. In « moment of jest, she had cut deep into his heart. As he lay gazing at me blinking stars and the shells that shrieked ati J burst, there again rang in his ear tha^ mocking laugh which fid sent him flying to the front. She h