1

is evident in many of his late letters, according to Van Wyck Brooks.1 As it was, he wrote with vivid immediacy of the surfaces which he knew, and the stormy physical conflicts of his books are but eidola of the great conflict which was raging within his own breast, and in which he was defeated.

A similar story is told in the lives of Morgan Robertson (1861-1915) and Harris Merton Lyon (1883-1916). The sea-stories of Robertson have all the sound and scent of the sea, and there is the same worship of action in them which we find in the tales of Jack London. And yet life conquers him, and if his surrender is much less complete, we feel that his talent is finally atrophied by circumstances. Lyon wrote in obscurity, and published two volumes which I have read long ago, but which I have been unable to procure for the purpose of this history. As I recall them, it seems to me that he did not compromise in these little pictures of life which were graphic enough, but that he never quite succeeded in breaking through the bars of his cage until the end when, poor and dying, he wrote that masterly poetic parable of his 1 Civilization in the United States, 1922, p. 183.

own life, The Weaver Who Clad the Summer, which would have been a jewel in Hawthorne's crown had he written it. I like to think that I was permitted to bring a little happiness to Lyon's last days by rescuing this masterpiece from a Sunday newspaper supplement, after every American magazine editor had refused it, and by reprinting it in The Best Short Stories of 1915.

Of Viola Roseboro's two contributions to the American short story, her editorial championship of many an unrecognized talent is perhaps the greater, but I think that her book Players and Vagabonds (1904) should not pass unnoticed. Its quiet excellence has been overshadowed by the work of many a writer whom she was the first to introduce to the public. Nor should the deft workmanship of Madelene Yale Wynne (18471913) be overlooked. Howells, with critical acumen, first perceived the subtle art of The Little Room and Other Stories (1895), whose fragrance still lingers for the quiet reader, as well as its ghostly charm.

The name of Norman Duncan (1871-1916) may fittingly close this chapter. His first book, The Soul of the Street (1900), (and certain critics

may be defended who have thought it his best), portrayed with much human reality the life of the Syrian quarter in New York. A trip up the Labrador, however, and among the outports of Newfoundland, led to the long series of short stories and episodic novels by which he is best known. Preoccupied as he was with local color and romantic sentiment, he seems nevertheless to have penetrated into the mind of a primitive folk with as much intuitive sympathy, though with less art, than his contemporary in Ireland, John Synge. He really succeeds in telling natural folk-stories, and if his brush is coarse and deals with primary colors only, it is not unsuited, as I can testify from personal knowledge, to the rugged life which he portrays. His virtues are those of Dickens, and so are his faults for the most part, though Dickens was not a Shorter Catechist. While the Biblical diction of his stories lacks the economy of Caradoc Evans, it has more color and human warmth. His psychological range, though limited, is usually genuine, and his simplicity does not strike us as false. Certainly he is never subtle, but his good colloquial prose has grain, and his use of dialect, though somewhat formalized and ornamented, is unusually persuasive. If we set his

best folk-stories of struggle with the elements against the pseudo-epic narratives of Jack London, their superiority is evident. Duncan sought freedom by romantic escape, and it cannot be denied that in the end he found it.

CHAPTER XI

O. HENRY

O. HENRY, as William Sydney Porter preferred to sign himself, is the most representative short story writer of the period which immediately preceded our own, and therefore calls for somewhat more extended critical treatment than we have devoted to subtler artists. Hitherto, it has seemed impossible to hold the critical scales evenly balanced whenever his stories have been a matter of concern. He has been either exhalted to a supreme position at the expense not only of his contemporaries, but of all his predecessors, or he has been dismissed with a patronizing smile as a clever but ephemeral journalist. His true place seems to be a trifle below that of the real Mark Twain who created Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and the first forty chapters of Life on the Mississippi. Let us see if we can disentangle his significant achievement from the mass of irrelevant commentary and adulation which has obscured it.