SHOBT STORY 408 SHOSHONE FALLS Johnson, developed a briefer, more highly moral form of short story, which was appended usually to their essays. The modern short story, as we have it in English today, is a product of the Romantic movement at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th cen- turies. In French, concision and unity have always been characteristic of the short story, and the change in form has been less great. Books and magazines in the early nine- teenth century are full of short narratives which deal with the horrible, the mys- terious, the pitiful. Many of these were written by, or imitated from, the stories of the so-called German romantic school, J. L. Tieck, de la Motte Fouque, A. Hoff- man, etc. Occasionally these stories, as with Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), or Sir Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale" (1824), are clear and beautiful in form, but usually they are rambling, turgid, and often pointless. The taste for didactic stories had disappeared. The growth of the magazine had created a real need for short stories that were effective. The problem was first worked out in America. Edgar Allan Poe, already a poet of ability in the romantic manner, applied, in the attempt to write stories of horror and mystery that would grip the imagina- tion, the principle of narrative suspense. In "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Mosque of the Red Death" (1842), he made a single vivid impression the result of the reading of his story; accomplishing this in part by a carefully toned style, but more particularly by consciously directing the interest of the reader from the very first sentence toward the climax of his story. The result was a kind of short story that in spite of its brevity did make an effect on the imagination. In other words, Poe achieved a higher unity for the short story. The story of weird romanticism has gone out of fashion, but the method Poe used has remained a prime factor in writing short stories. In America Haw- thorne, with his "Twice-Told Tales" (1837, 1842) was little influenced by it, because his moral tales were based upon situations which themselves gave unity to the story. But Bret Harte (see "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," 1869), T. B. Aldrich (see "Marjorie Daw," 1873), F. R. Stockton (see "The Lady or the Tiger," 1882) ; the writers of local color short stories, such as Sarah Orne Jewett (see "A Native of Winby," 1893), and Hamlin Garland (see "Main Traveled Roads," 1891) ; O. Henry (see "The Four Million," 1906), Edith Wharton (see "Crucial In- stances," 1901, and "Ethan Frome," 1911), and the magazine writers of today, are all deeply indebted to Poe for this artificial but very effective method of giving high specific gravity to a short story. Henry James, however (see, for example, "The Madonna of the Future," 1873, or "The Real Thing," 1893), trusted to a single subtle situation as the factor of unity in his stories. In England, the really important short- story writers have been less numerous. Rudyard Kipling (see for example, "Sol- diers Three," 1888, and "They," 1904), learned his art from Bret Harte and Henry James, but chose his material from fresh fields. R. L. Stevenson (see "Mark- heim," 1885) is, in short narrative, Haw- thorne's most evident disciple. In France, the tradition of the simple conte has been carried on by Prosper Merimee (see "Mateo Falcone," 1829), Alphonse Dau- det (see "Contes du Lundi," 1873), Guy de Maupassant (see "Contes du Jour et de la Nuit," 1885), Anatole France (see "Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue," 1909), and many others. In Russia with Ivan Turgenev (see "A Lear of the Steppes," 1870), Maxime Gorky (see "Chelkosh," 1895) and Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov (see "The Kiss and Other Stories," in English, 1908), a freer, less artificial form of short narrative, casual and impressionistic in effect, but highly unified in theme, has become fa- miliar to western readers. Good in itself, it is valuable as a protest against the increasing artificiality of the American form. In a sense, the vivid verse narra- tives of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, and other realist American poets may also be regarded as American short stories written in a new and fresher fashion. For a selective list of representative short stories from the earliest times to 1903, see Jessup & Canby, "The Book of the Short Story." A good bibliography is included in the "Cambridge History of American Literature." See also Brander Matthews' "The Philosophy of the Short Story," H. S. Canby, "The Short Story in English"; Walter B. Pitken, "The Art and Business of the Short Story." SHORTT, EDWARD, a British public official. He was educated at Durham School and University and became a bar- rister. He was Recorder of Sunderland during 1907-18, and in 1910 became Lib- eral member of parliament for Newcastle. In 1918-1919 he was Chief Secretary for Ireland and became Home Secretary since 1919. SHOSHONE FALLS, an attractive fall in the Lewis or Snake river, Idaho. They rank among the waterfalls of North America, next to those of Niagara in
