surface of the earth. The people here are the most ignorant, ill-bred, contemptible, boorish, degraded, insulting, sordid, vile, foul-mouthed, indecent, profane, drunken, dirty, mean, depraved curs that I ever imagined could exist. Columbus people are models of chivalry compared with them. I shall linger here no longer than necessary. . . . If I could get 30 days in the O. P. I believe I'd crack one of the statues that much to get a change of society from the hounds here. I'd rather sit in the dumphouse there and listen to the bucket lids rattle than to hear these varmints talk, as far as entertainment is concerned." 1

This cynic with faith, this agnostic with all the theological virtues, fought with himself and laughed at himself as he did so. And always he wore a mask of indifference and rattle-brained triviality. Was the mask too successful? Has it concealed the message as well as the man? I am afraid that it has.

(He could never take his art seriously enough,

because he could not believe that an art was a complete life in itself, and so this incomparable improvisatore told his expanded anecdotes as if they were matters of a moment only, and con1 Ibid. pp. 257-259.

cealed his wisdom by dressing it in ready-made clothing. His work is smothered with learned commentaries upon his technique, but he had no technique except this: "Be concise and familiar, and punch when your adversary is off guard. This stuns him, and you may then disappear." The formula has its merits if there is a spirit behind it, but it is a ghastly practical joke in the form it has assumed among his mechanical disciples whose numbers are legion. Bagdad has forgotten the subway underneath.

Will O. Henry take a place beside the greater American writers? The answer is: Yes, and no. Like Mark Twain, the vast body of his ephemeral productions will be forgotten, referred to occasionally by social historians perhaps, but wellnigh unintelligible to a future age with a different idiom. But the best of his stories, twenty-five or thirty in number, seem assured of permanence for their vitality and human understanding, their droll and yet sad romance, and their reticent truth half-masked by exaggeration.)

CHAPTER XII

THE SCHOOL OF HENRY JAMES

THE title of this chapter is intended to suggest a tendency rather than to define a rigid classification. While the influence of Henry James is direct enough upon Edith Wharton and Katharine Fullerton Gerould and Anne Douglas Sedgwick, in most cases it has been indirect and half unconscious, and has shown itself in different forms. Henry James's contribution to the present group is in some cases evident in a subtler psychological curiosity, in others in a preoccupation with special and limited social relations, elsewhere again in an echoing to tenuity of his technique. In every case, I think, it has resulted in an altogether unusual care for form, though not always unfortunately for precision.

Edith Wharton (1862) is not only the pioneer, but so far the most representative disciple. The distinction of her stories is as evident as their Arctic frigidity. She has assimilated every lesson that her master can teach except

tenderness and ease, and in sheer craftsmanship it may even be held that she has occasionally surpassed him. But how often do we surprise the breath of life in her characters? How often does their frosty brilliance tingle with human exuberance? They move among the shades with reticence and decorum, and they have their moments of vicissitude sharply pointed and implicit with compact meaning, but Mrs. Wharton's scalpel slays them while it reveals them, and these puppets who live tremendous days seldom communicate their experience or set it against the sky.

Speaking of Mrs. Wharton among other American writers, Van Wyck Brooks has remarked: "That little seed of the spirit a wayward and unlucky wind has planted in them, why has it never been able to take on flesh and blood, why has it so dried up the springs of animal impulse? It is as if, driven in upon themselves, their lives were a constant strain, as if their emotional natures had run dry and they had come to exist solely in their intellects and their nerves, as if in fact they had gone gray and bloodless precisely in the measure that an inflexible conscience had enabled them in spite of all to trim the little lamp that flickered in them.

"Grow they certainly do not. With immense difficulty our intellectual types forge for themselves a point of view with which they confront the world, but like a suit of armor it permits no further expansion. They do not move easily within it; they are chafed and irritated by it; in order to breathe freely they are obliged to hold themselves rigidly to the posture they have at first adopted; and far from being able to develop spontaneously beyond this original posture they have to submit to its cramping limitations until the inevitable shrinkage of their mental tissues brings them release and relief." 1

The point, I think you will admit, is overproven, but there is a great deal of truth in it. Mrs. Wharton's pictures are painted to be hung on the line, and her studies in manners frequently harden into studies in manner. We may recall that the Pelican in her story had the art "of transporting second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions," 2 a sufficiently common accomplishment which confronts us everywhere. Is it not a pardonable reaction to transpose first-hand emotions occasionally back again into second-hand

1 Letters and Leadership, 1918, pp. 11-12.

2 The Greater Inclination, 1899, p. 56.