But at all events I will not express opinions aimed at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for epigram. In the first place, then, what is, and what is _not_, a short story? Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale, like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at a forgotten quarter. A short story--I mean a short imaginative work in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part--a short story may be any one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides; but one thing it can never be--it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’ That is a favourite definition, but not a definition that holds. It is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot possibly be a _précis_, a synopsis, a _scenario_, as it were, of a novel. It is a separate thing--as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is from the Epic--it involves the exercise almost of a different art.