Texas, or as reporter, government clerk, or banker, in one or another of the cities of Texas, he lived the last eight years of his life in New York City, where he made himself so thoroughly at home that one hesitates to name anyone-save perhaps Walt Whitman-as his equal, so far as intimate first-hand knowledge of that city is concerned. When he died, he left behind him a dozen volumes of short stories dealing with life in the southwest, in Central America, and in New York-and the best are those of the last group. In such collections as The Four Million (1906) and The Voice of the City (1908), for example, one sees him at the height of his power. Here are the New Yorkers whom other people never wrote about-the people who wash dishes in restaurants and measure ribbons behind the counters of stores. Here, skillfully blended, are the comedy and pathos and selfishness and heroism which somehow or other make life in New York what it is, and that make life over all the world, so far as the fundamental issues are concerned, precisely what it is on Manhattan Island. And the man who thus pictured not only New York but human nature, was born in a far-away southern state, brought up to be a clerk in a country drug store, and spent three years and three months in the Ohio State penitentiary, convicted of embezzlement while serving as cashier in a national bank. Withal he was a simple, friendly, human being, modest, unselfish, untainted by the bitterness of his dark years, unspoiled by the success of his last decade; a man whose only boast was that he "had never written a filthy line." Take him all in all, he seems to have been one of the most lovable persons with whom the student of American letters can come in contact.

The story of his life has been told by C. Alphonso Smith in his sympathetic study, O. Henry Biography (New York, 1916). Reading this chronicle one realizes again that the child was father to the man. The young pharmacist, occupying his leisure by drawing pictures of the people who came into the store, had already begun his life-long study of human nature. The amateur cow-boy on Red Hall's ranch, carrying Webster's dictionary and Tennyson's poems with him in the saddle, had already fallen victim to the fascination of words. The newspaper reporter, writing for a living, and trying his hand at any sort of journalistic work that would pay, had begun the years of apprenticeship that were necessary before the mature O. Henry could produce the stories in which all the United States was to delight.

teller of the later years. It was in the penitentiary that O. Henry really grew up. Convicted on inconclusive evidence, and largely the victim of a go-as-you-please banking system against which he had vainly protested to his directors, he was fortunate enough to be assigned to duty as night-clerk in the prison drug store and hospital. Here, in comparative leisure, he served his time, studying the luckless men around him, and writing a score of stories which first introduced his newly adopted pen-name to the public.

When he was released, he soon found his way to New York, where he lived the rest of his life. Before long he was under contract with The World to write a story a week, at the modest rate of one hundred dollars for each story. During the rest of his life he was ceaselessly busy, sometimes drawing for material on his early experiences in the west, sometimes looking about him at the fascinating drama of life, and recording what he saw. When he died, in 1910, no other short story writer in America had such a following.

It is easy to borrow Alphonso Smith's phrase, and say that O. Henry "humanized the short story." It is almost as easy to point out one or two things concerning his technique, especially his use of the "surprise ending," which, on analysis, often proves to be more logical than the conclusion the reader had anticipated. It is easy to praise him for his persistent optimism, his manliness, his cleanness. Only one thing should be noted by way of adverse criticism. O. Henry wrote so fast, under such constant, such almost unbelievable pressure, that he never allowed himself the privilege of writing a story as well as he might have written it. A personal friend once told the editors of this book how he had sat for an hour in O. Henry's study while Porter, using the longdistance telephone, dictated the conclusion of a story for which an importunate publisher was clamoring. The writer who does his work under such disadvantages hardly expect even the best of his output to measure up to, say, The Brushwood Boy or The End of the Tether. In finish, in the fine points of technique, as in breadth of vision, O. Henry is simply outclassed by such writers as Conrad or Kipling. But even to compare him with these masters is to honor him, and in his own particular métier as chronicler of the "four million," he is unique and supreme.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

can

O. Henry's collected works are available in a uniform edition published by Doubleday Page, N. Y., 1911, 12 vols. The only extensive study is C. Alphonso Smith's O. Henry Biog

JACK LONDON (1876-1916)

Jack London was born in California, of humble stock, in 1876, and after a few years of elementary schooling became an unskilled laborer in and about San Francisco. Like Carl Sandburg he learned at first hand the life of the proletariat, working as ranchman, coal-shoveler, longshoreman, and factoryhand, and hunting seals on the Pacific, where he went as far as Japan and the Bering Sea. After tramping ten thousand miles over the United States and Canada, joining the mad rush for gold in the Klondike, and studying for a year at the University of California, he became a leader among socialists of the less conservative type and developed a talent for prose fiction which gained him an enormous popularity. Continuing to travel, he explored the slums of London, cruised the South Seas in his own vessel, and finally bought a ranch in California where he could enjoy the prosperity which came to him through his writings. Of the ups and downs of his sensational and picturesque, though not altogether romantic, career, many volumes could be written and indeed have been written. most strongly autobiographical volumes are: The People of the Abyss (1903), The Road (1907), Martin Eden (1909), The Cruise of the Snark (1911), and John Barleycorn (1913); and the study of his personality may be carried further by reference to the recent Book of Jack London by his widow, Charmian London. Between 1900 and 1916 London accomplished the stupendous task of producing over fifty volumes, chiefly of popular fiction. His public experienced the thrill of travelling the world from England to Japan, from Alaska to the South Seas, with a man who, within those large geographical limits, seemed to have gone everywhere and seen everything. Despite his large income and the social opportunities which came to him as a popular author, London definitely cast his lot with the masses, and died in 1916 a man of the common people.

His

London probably did more than any of his contemporaries to vitalize, and at the some time to brutalize, the short story. His work in this field was so vivid and so appealing to certain elemental instincts that it became immediately popular, and was widely imitated. But the stories, like the author, were lacking in the patrician touch that makes for finish of style, and his vogue with the more cultivated class of readers has been very moderate. He came into prominence when even the mushroom growth of short story magazines seemed unable to satisfy the demand for a certain type of fiction, when the public wanted "action stories" and "stories with punch" and stories of "red-blooded he-men" regardless of literary merit, and when editors frankly advertised their need of such wares in those very terms. Yet amid the host of already forgotten catch-penny authors who

con

aimed at quantity production of what the public wanted, London stood out as an almost unique writer; if he was a lumber jack rather than a cabinet-maker among American authors, he did his work more scientiously and more skillfully than the would-be lumber jacks. His local color is accurate as well as vivid, for he knew whereof he wrote and many of his stories have a flavor of autobiographical truth. In his novels, except those treating the themes of socialism, the same faults are obvious: they deal with men who act like animals, or with animals who act like men; physical struggle is omnipresent; the descriptions, especially in the earlier work, show a considerable artistry, but the subtle shadings of character by which great fiction is commonly recognized are sought in vain. For this reason, perhaps, his books dealing principally with animalsThe Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905), for instance-seem likely to leave a more lasting impression on our literature than the more conventional novels in which he attempted a form a little too fine to be shaped by his heavy axe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

No collected edition of London's work has been published. The titles listed in the preceding note will be adequate for the purposes of the student.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919)

Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States, was born in 1858 and graduated from Harvard in 1880. His rise to positions of increasing importance was rapid; and though the bitterness of party strife still clings to his memory too strongly to permit a fair estimate of his position as a statesman, a few of the brilliant points in his career may be reviewed. As civil service commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Lieutenant-Colonel of the "Rough Riders," and Governor of New York, he climbed to the height of popularity which made him Vice-President in 1900; and on the death of President McKinley he carried on the duties of the chief executive in such a fashion that in 1904 he was elected President by the largest popular majority ever accorded a candidate up to that time. His leadership in cutting short the Russo-Japanese War (for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), in defending the Monroe Doctrine against infringement by Germany, and in "taking" the Panama Canal, was characteristic of the manner in which he conducted affairs of state for many years. At the expiration of his term in 1909, he travelled extensively, made a spectacular but unsuccessful attempt to lead the Progressive Party to victory in 1912, and died in 1919, loved, honored, feared, and disliked

as only a few other distinguished leaders of his country have been, and admired throughout Europe as our most representative American.

No President except Lincoln is more certain of a permanent place among our men of letters than is Roosevelt, and in variety of literary achievement the advantage rests entirely with the latter; there is, indeed, some chance that his posthumous reputation may rest almost as much on his writings as on his active life in the world of affairs. The honors which he won in the Spanish-American War and the notable part he played in the government of New York are now but chapters-or pages-in the history of his country; even his career of national and international leadership as President has, in the opinion of some people, been a little shadowed by his treatment of ex-President Taft in the campaign of 1912, and by the débacle of the Progressive Party through his overwhelming defeat in the election of the same year. But throughout the mature years of his "strenuous life”—one inevitably falls into his own phrase-he produced a number of books on history, biography, nature, and standards of conduct (both personal and national) which are still of interest. Just as his characteristic words, nature-faker, muck-raking, mollycoddle, have come into general use throughout the country, so his philosophy of strenuous living and of fearing God and taking your own part has been an important element in the thought of an entire generation. And his accounts of the joys of outdoor existence, his accurate and intimate pictures of the life of nature in western America, show him in his most delightful vein, and apparently will be read as long, and with as much pleasure, as the similar pages of Burroughs or John Muir.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roosevelt's collected works are available in several editions, best of which is the Memorial, edited by Herman Hagedorn, N. Y., 1923-25, 24 vols. Biographical treatments of Roosevelt are numerous. The following are useful as points of departure for a study that may be as extensive as the reader's time will allow: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, N. Y., 1920; Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, by Joseph B. Bishop, N. Y., 1920, 2 vols.; My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt, by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, N. Y., 1921; Theodore Roosevelt, by Lord Charnwood, Boston, 1923. Further information is available in The Bibliography of Theodore Roosevelt, by John Hall Wheelock, N. Y., 1920.

NOTES

THE STRENUOUS LIFE

905. The address was delivered in Chicago, on April 10, 1899, when the events of the Spanish War were still fresh in men's minds.

HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

His

If George Meredith had been able to follow Adams's career to its close, he would have taken a keen relish in noting the "comedy" of it all. Here was a New Englander, with the blood of the Puritans in his veins, a member of a family whose very name had for a century and a half been synonymous with success and distinction, grandson of President John Quincy Adams and greatgrandson of President John Adams, a man who began life by turning to the appropriate career of historian and teacher of history in Harvard, and yet who ultimately came to the conclusion that all his labors had been essentially futile, and wrote an extensive autobiography to prove how pointless his own career had been, and how out of sorts was the entire order of things that his family had done so much to establish. With the publication of this work, The Education of Henry Adams, immediately following the author's death, there came to Adams's memory the honor which he had never coveted. autobiography attained the distinction of a "best-seller," and he himself was generally recognized as a man of genius who had given virtually final expression to one phase of American life. All that Barrett Wendell, writing in 1904, could say of Adams was that his History of the United States "combines accuracy of detail with grasp of subject and scale of composition in a manner which fairly achieves, in dealing with a limited epoch, what Macaulay did not live to achieve when he tried to deal with two English centuries." In 1921 Professor John Spencer Bassett, a historian not given to superlatives, put the case in quite a different way: "Two of [Adams's] books, the Mont Saint Michel and the Education, deserve to rank among the best American books that have yet been written." (C. H. A. L. III, 199.) The difference between the two statements fairly represents the difference between what Adams felt that he had accomplished, and what the world insists on crediting him with. In this discrepancy Meredith would have found something essentially comic. There is a further touch of Meredithian comedy, a comedy that shades perilously close to tragedy, in the fact that -as Paul Elmer Moore puts it "the latest spokesman of the Adamses and of New England ended his career in sentimental nihilism.'

This career can be easily sketched, though no one who finds himself interested in Adams will be content with the narrative in any form except that which he gave it himself in the Education. Born in 1838, the son of Charles Francis Adams, he graduated from Harvard College, and during the Civil War was private secretary to his father, whom Lincoln had appointed Minister to the Court of St. James's. When he returned to the United States in 1868, he spent eight years as editor of the North American Review and

assistant professor of history in Harvard, and then for a decade gave himself to writing various books dealing with American history.

By 1892, however, he had become so impressed with the futility of his efforts that he gave over the type of work in which he was engaged, and found relief in study of the Middle Ages, especially the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1904 he printed, privately, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, in which his historical and artistic enthusiasms were given full expression, and which is so well written that when it was finally published in 1913 it was recognized, over-night, as one of the masterpieces of American literature. In 1906 he allowed The Education of Henry Adams to be printed, but again, with characteristic reticence, circulated it only among his most intimate friends. In 1918, after Adams's death, the Education was published, and greatly exceeded the earlier work in popular favor. So far as American literature is concerned, Adams might well have limited himself to these two volumes.

Different as they may be from each other, the Mont Saint Michel and Education have certain traits in common. In both, one sees Adams as a keen observer, a conscientious scholar, an assured master of words. If the almost mystical enthusiasms of Mont Saint Michel seem difficult to reconcile with the cynicism and asperity of the Education, the fact only goes to show the many-sidedness of Adams's own personality, and to make more interesting the study of a man who felt himself to be of little significance to anyone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Boston, 1913, and The Education of Henry Adams, Boston, 1918, are the two books which every student of Adams will read. His historical writings are listed in the C. H. A. L. Stuart P. Sherman's Evolution in the Adams Family, in The Nation, April 10, 1920, and Paul Elmer More's Henry Adams, in his Shelburne Essays, Eleventh Series, N. Y., 1921, are two admirable interpretations of Adams and his work.

NOTES

MONT SAINT MICHEL AND CHARTRES

913. The relatively few technical architectural terms which appear in this selection may be interpreted by referring to any good dictionary.

914. a. 27. Truie qui file, etc. The spinning sow and fiddling ass. Probably an allusion to two gargoyles on the cathedral which were known by these names.

WOODROW WILSON (1856-1924) Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth President of the United States, and the sixth to

find representation in this volume, was born in Staunton, Virginia, on December 28, 1856. He attended Davidson College, North Carolina, for one year, and then transferred to Princeton, where he received his A. B. degree in 1879. Two years later he completed the course in law at the University of Virginia, and began what was to prove a brief practice as an attorney. He then entered the Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student of history and economics, and received his Ph.D. in 1886. From 1885 to 1888 he taught at Bryn Mawr, and from 1888 to 1890 at Wesleyan University. In 1890 he returned to Princeton as Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy, and twelve years later was elected President of the University.

Until 1910 Wilson's connections with politics had largely been those of the scholar and historian. But in the autumn of that year, when he resigned the Presidency of Princeton, he was elected Governor of New Jersey, and began a term of service so distinguished that in 1912 he was nominated for the Presidency by the Democratic party, and was elected by an overwhelming majority of the Electoral College, defeating both Roosevelt, the Progressive candidate, and Taft, the Republican. On November 7, 1916, he was again elected, defeating Charles E. Hughes by a narrow margin.

Wilson's second term began on March 4, 1917, when the United States was on the verge of entering the Great War. The events of the four turbulent years that followed his second inauguration are still too recent to admit of impartial interpretation. But one thing at least is certain: from the time of Wilson's War-Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, until his appearance at the first session of the Versailles Peace Conference, January 18, 1919, as head of the American Commission, he exercised the almost dictatorial war-time powers of the President in masterly fashion, and came to occupy a position of unique and unbelievable prominence in world affairs. To Europeans, especially the rank and file of the people, he seemed the one man who had brought the United States to the aid of the Allied nations at a time when only that aid could have saved them. Furthermore, because of his many distinguished addresses and letters on the problems of international polity which the closing year of the war threw into the foreground, he appeared as the triumphant prophet of a new and better civilization, a civilization in which the common people, the "democracy" of the world, should have a larger opportunity for liberty and happiness.

It is a commonplace that Wilson's advocacy of the League of Nations, which he considered the best means of bringing about the new order, caused many Americans to lose faith in him, and gave his political enemies a weapon which they used vigorously and relentlessly. It is as clear that his acquies

cence in the Treaty of Versailles, with its harsh measures of reprisal, lost him the admiration of many subjects of the Central Empires who had hoped that Wilson would be able to hold in check the old-school politicians most influential in framing the treaty. Once the document had been signed, however, Wilson returned to the United States to begin a nation-wide campaign looking to the ratification of the treaty by the Senate. In the midst of his first speaking tour his health gave way, and he returned to the White House incapacitated for further active participation in the gigantic struggle. He spent the rest of his second term as an invalid, and died on February 3, 1924, in Washington.

On Wilson's significance as a statesman it would be futile to comment either here or now. But something of his literary power is suggested by the two addresses printed on pages 917 ff., and it seems only fitting to indicate that he occupies a high and even unique position among the political writers of his country. In this connection it is essential to have in mind the changes in the style of the political address brought about by the development of the newspapers, especially as they grew in circulation at the time of the Great War. In the days of Webster and Calhoun the political address had been delivered chiefly for its immediate effect on a relatively small group of auditors. More recently, however, and especially during the last two decades, the political address has had to meet two demands: to compel the attention of the hundreds or thousands who actually heard it delivered; and, what is much more important, to satisfy the analytical study of the millions who would read it a few hours later in the daily papers-a reading which would have none of the speaker's voice or personality to make the address "carry."

Of this modern type of political address Wilson was a master. He had every advantage of academic training; he was practised in the arts of class-room exposition and political campaigning, as well as in the more exacting requirements of biographical and historical writing. Avoiding alike the ornate periods which may be lifeless and even tiresome to the ordinary reader, and the intricate argumentation which is sure to be over the head of the average listener, he combined a restrained but moving eloquence with a simple and convincing logic in proportions which made his speeches effective wherever newspapers circulated--that is, over the whole civilized world.

He came into power at a time when his own country, and the entire democratic world, needed a spokesman. His passionate enthusiasm for the cause of democracy was as sincere as that of Mrs. Stowe or of Lincoln. And for a time his speeches in advocacy of this cause made him the most influential figure in either Europe or America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDITIONS. There is as yet no collected edition of Wilson's writings. The most important of them are Congressional Government, Boston, 1885; Division and Reunion, N. Y., 1893; Mere Literature, N. Y., 1893; A History of the American People, N. Y., 1902, 5 vols.; Constitutional Government in the United States, N. Y., 1908; The New Freedom, N. Y., 1913; On Being Human, N. Y., 1916. The speeches and letters that marked Wilson's eight years as President are available in the files of the daily papers, in the Congressional Record, and in various war-time booklets. His last published essay, The Road Away from Revolution, appeared in the Atlantic for August, 1923.

BIOGRAPHIES. William E. Dodd's Woodrow Wilson and His Work, N. Y., 1920, and William Allen White's Woodrow Wilson, Boston, 1924, are two admirable biographical studies.

CRITICAL ARTICLES. Two articles which the student will find different from the many controversial publications concerning Wilson are Bliss Perry's Woodrow Wilson as a Man of Letters, in The Praise of Folly, Boston, 1923, and Charles William Eliot's Woodrow Wilson, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1924.

NOTES

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

917. Delivered at Hodgenville, Kentucky, September 4, 1916. Wilson had gone to Hodgenville to accept, on behalf of the nation, the gift of the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

FLAG DAY ADDRESS

919. The most significant feature of this address is the care with which Wilson distinguishes between the German people and the "military masters" of Germany. The collapse of German power ulti mately came about much as Wilson here prophesied.

WALTER HINES PAGE (1855-1918)

Walter Hines Page was born in 1855 in Cary, North Carolina, and studied at Randolph-Macon College and The Johns Hopkins University from 1872 to 1878. At the age of twenty-five he became editor of the St. Joseph, Missouri, Daily Gazette; by rapid strides he made his way to positions of increasing importance until he attained the distinction of editing The Forum (1890-95), The Atlantic Monthly (1896-99), and The World's Work (1900-1913). His Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths (1902) and his many delightful essays were well received; but it was his