"You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction is bad?"
"I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness, "with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an analysis of almost any of his plots.
"But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure. Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and with no obvious pillars of support.
"Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry's facetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the morbid formality we find in Poe.
"The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen underwear pernicious!
"The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a Greek urn. But, after all, chastity is not the first and last requisite. O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a Mona Lisa smile."
Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English literature. In reply to my question she said:
"I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example of cousinship. American literature probably will continue to be an effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling.
"David Copperfield and Vanity Fair come from a people whose lineage goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must come."