Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives and antitheses in which his own faculty delighted. In mechanical invention he is almost the leader of his race. In a related quality--a defect--his leadership is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the probable, or, more precisely, of the available in the improbable, ever became equally weakened or deadened in a man who made his living by its exercise. The improbable, even the impossible, has its place in art, though that place is relatively low; and it is curious that works such as the "Arabian Nights" and Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the incredible, are the works which give almost no trouble on the score of verisimilitude. The truth is that we reject not what it is impossible to prove, or even what it is possible to disprove, but what it is impossible to imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimaginable--that is his crime. The right and wrong improbabilities may be illustrated from two burglar stories. "Sixes and Sevens" contains an excellent tale of a burglar and a citizen who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the score of their common sufferings from rheumatism. This feeling in practice would not triumph over fear and greed; but the feeling is natural, and everybody with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. Nature _tends_ towards that impossibility, and art, lifting, so to speak, the lid which fact drops upon nature, reveals nature in belying fact. In another story, in "Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette of their mutual relation by formulas derived from short stories with which both are amazingly conversant. This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the maturity of small boys will have naught to do with this insanity. But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inventions in his tales the very utterance of which--not the mere substance but the utterance--on the part of a man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses the reader as incredible. In a "Comedy in Rubber," two persons become so used to spectatorship at transactions in the street that they drift into the part of spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. Can human daring or human folly go further? O. Henry is on the spot to prove that they can. In the "Romance of a Busy Broker," a busy and forgetful man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his hand to the stenographer _whom he had married the night before_. The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I came upon the following sentence: "Never will the imagination approach the improbabilities and the antitheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated February 21, 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was not born till September of the same year.