Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupassant is to French, but he has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with the middle classes, minor officials and the professional classes. Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like "ennui," "greyness," and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed playing vint.

Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had sunk back into torpor: the disease of OblÒmovism had a firm grip of them.

He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a good education, finishing at the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing, which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year in artistry.

His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life, especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the all-pervading meanness of everyday life.

I will treat first of his dramas.

The Russians, it must be premised, go to the theatre to see what they would see off the stage: they are incurably realistic. They do not take a delight, as we do, in huge catastrophes: they like to see the trivial incidents of ordinary life reproduced with life-like accuracy on the stage.

He wrote in all eleven plays, five of which are serious: the remaining farces need not detain us. He discovered that life can be made interesting and dramatic with indulging in heroics. He is always human, and makes us feel moods and sensations over again which we have often felt before. He seems, in other words, to make his plays out of nothing, without having recourse to action or any extraordinary phenomena.

We are not introduced to men and women stripped of the masks which they wear in ordinary life: his characters behave exactly as they would off the stage, and betray themselves as people do by a phrase, a gesture, the humming of a tune and the smell of a flower.

In The Seagull we are introduced to the family of Sorin, whose sister is a famous actress called Arkadina. Preparations have been made for some private theatricals written by Arkadina's son, Constantin. The chief part is to be played by Ina, the young daughter of a neighbour who is in love with Constantin, who is full of ideals about reforming the stage. A well-known writer, Trigorin, a man of about forty, is staying with Sorin at the time.

The play is acted: Arkadina labels it decadent; Constantin gets annoyed. Ina after the performance is introduced to Trigorin. The daughter of an agent who has witnessed the performance (her name is Masha) confesses to a doctor visitor that she is in love with Constantin, and the curtain falls on Act I.

The second Act takes place in the same house. Constantin brings in a dead seagull, and lays it at Ina's feet as a symbol which she fails to understand.

Trigorin in the course of a conversation with her tells her what it feels like to be a famous author.

"'What is there so wonderful about it? Like a monomaniac, who is always thinking day and night of the moon, I am pursued by the one thought which I cannot get rid of, I must write, I must write, I must. I have scarcely finished a story when I must write a second, then a third, then a fourth. I write uninterruptedly, I cannot do otherwise. What is there so wonderful and splendid in this, I ask you? It is a cruel life. I get excited with you and all the time I am remembering that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud which is like a piano, and I at once think that I must remember to say somewhere in the story that there is a cloud like a piano.

"'When I write it is pleasant, and it is nice to correct proofs: but as soon as the thing is published I cannot bear it, and I already see that it is not at all what I meant, that it is a mistake, that I should not have written it at all, and I am vexed and horribly depressed. The public reads it, and says: "Yes, pretty, full of talent, very nice, but how different from Tolstoy!" or "Yes, a fine thing, but how far behind Fathers and Sons: Turgenev is better." And so, until I die, it will always be "pretty and full of talent," never anything more: and when I die my friends as they pass my grave will say: "Here lies Trigorin; he was a good writer, but he did not write so well as Turgenev."'"

This reads like that very rare thing in Tchehov, a confession of the author himself.

However that may be, Ina replies that to her it is none the less a most wonderful gift that he possesses. For her part, for the joy of being an artist she would bear the hate of friends, want and disappointment. Trigorin then notices the seagull and is driven to turn it into copy at once.

"'An idea has occurred to me,'" he says, "'for a short story. On the banks of a lake a young girl lives from her infancy. She loves the lake like a seagull, she is happy and free: unexpectedly a man comes and sees her and out of mere idleness kills her, just like this sea-gull.'"

That is the end of the second Act.

In the third Act Ina has fallen in love with Trigorin. Constantin out of jealousy has tried unsuccessfully to kill himself and challenged Trigorin to a duel, of which he takes no notice. After a quarrel with his mother, which is made up, Constantin is inspired to take up the threads of life again. We now discover that Trigorin has been and is Arkadina's lover. Ina tells the famous author that she is going to follow him to Moscow and they part on a note of passion. Two years elapse.

In the fourth Act we find that Constantin has become famous: Ina has gone on the stage and failed. She has had a child (which died) by Trigorin: he has returned to Arkadina and deserted Ina, who has been thrown over by her parents too. She enters and tells her story, and Constantin declares that he still loves her in spite of all, but she is still in love with Trigorin. Constantin, hearing this, can bear up no longer, but shoots himself.

Such is the rather grim plot: the characterisation is well-nigh faultless, especially of Arkadina, the loving mother, who is quite unable to appreciate her son's talents, and of Trigorin, the weak, vain egoist, who is without a vestige of ill-nature or malice.

The Cherry Garden was his last play and sounds a note of hopefulness which re-echoes through all his stories. Though the present may be black and bitter, Tchehov always looks to a future where ideals shall once more reign.

In the first Act we see the return of a lady who is heavily burdened with debts to her estate in South Russia. It is the month of May and the cherry orchard is in full blossom. We get the exact atmosphere of the arrival of people from a journey and the return of a family to a home from which it has long been absent.

The lady, Ranievskaia, is a child in financial matters and, Micawber-like, imagines that someone or something will turn up to extricate her out of her difficulties. A merchant neighbour of singular astuteness propounds a solution. If they cut down the cherry-trees and let the land for villa holdings they will ensure an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year at least. They regard this idea as quite out of the question. They refuse to listen to such a ridiculous suggestion. They revert to their Micawber-like attitude and wait for an aunt to die and leave them a legacy and something of a like nature.

In the third Act we arrive at the day of the auction when their house and property are to be sold over their heads. Nevertheless they are holding a dance in spite of it. The merchant enters and announces that he has bought the cherry orchard.

In the last Act we see them leaving their house for ever; the trees are already being cut down and the house is going to make room for neat suburban villas. The pathos and naturalness of this Act are extraordinary. Every character in the play lives. It is historical and at the same time symbolical, because it shows us why the landed gentry in Russia has ceased to have any importance and how these unpractical, amiable people must go under when faced by energetic, rich, self-made men. The play seems to be about nothing and yet every casual remark has always a definite purpose.

Three Sisters represents the intense monotony of provincial life, relieved momentarily by a passing flash, and then rendered doubly grey by the disappearance of the flash. A regiment of artillery comes to the garrison of a small town. One of the three sisters, Masha, has married a schoolmaster: the two others, Irina and Olga, are living with their brother, who is a professor. Irina is in the telegraph office, Olga teaches. They live for one thing only, to get away and settle in Moscow. They only remain on Masha's account. Masha's husband is an exceedingly tedious schoolmaster, who is always reciting tags of Latin. Once his wife thought him the cleverest man in the world, now she thinks of him as the kindest but most tedious.

When the play begins we hear of a new commander appointed to the battery. His name is Vershinin and he is married to a half-mad woman. Other officers are Baron Tuzenbach and Major Soleny. The former is in love with Irina, who is willing to marry him but does not love him. Masha falls passionately in love with Vershinin. The Major is jealous of Tuzenbach. Suddenly the battery is transferred to some remote corner of the country. Soleny challenges the Baron and kills him. The three sisters are left alone, Vershinin bidding a passionate farewell to Masha, who does not even trouble to hide her grief from her husband. He in a most pathetic way tries to console her: Ina does not care even when she is told of the death of the Baron ... and so the sisters are left to go on working in their misery, deprived even of the flash which promised to lend some colour to their existence. It is, of course, impossible to deny that these plays are laden with gloom, but it is the darkness of the last hour before the dawn. Tchehov never despairs: he has an invincible trust in the coming day. He shows us how difficult life is, that there is nothing to be done but to continue working as cheerfully as we may, but in doing so he fulfilled the first condition of all great writing: he never failed to interest, and consequently his plays are, in spite of their sombreness, a never-failing fount of inspiration and Æsthetic delight.

As a short story-writer he has certainly no equal in Russia and few in any other country.

Owing to the indefatigability of Mrs Constance Garnett we now possess eight volumes, all containing priceless cameos of Russian life, ranging through the humorous, the bizarre, the mystic, the unconventional and lawless to the pathetic, poignant and dramatic.

He is unflinching in his realism, but passionately devoted to his search for truth and full of a poet's sensitiveness to beauty. He is softer, warmer, altogether kindlier than Maupassant. Even the odious characters are seen through the eyes of a kindly creator who never descends to hardness or bitterness. Indeed this faculty of refraining from judging others is almost the most peculiar feature of Russian writers taken as a whole. They are many degrees nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than any other Christian country, if this virtue is really so valuable as the New Testament insists. There is nothing cynical in Tchehov's melancholy. He accepts the world with all its glaring, tangled skein of inconsequences and wickedness and foolishness and humorously transcribes what he sees in a mood of cool, scientific passivity blending with the sensibility of a sweet, wholesome, responsive nature. Unlike Dostoievsky, he seldom identifies himself with his unfortunate characters.

The first story in the series edited by Mrs Garnett is The Darling, which treats of a woman who shares her first husband's anxiety about his theatre; throws herself into the interests of the timber trade in which her second husband works; under the influence of her third begins to regard the campaign against the foot and mouth disease as the most important matter in the world and is finally left engrossed in grammatical questions and the interests of the little schoolboy in the big cap.

She devotes herself with her whole being in each case to the man and the cause he represents. And Tolstoy in his criticism thinks that Tchehov set out to scoff at her inconstancy. Yet do we laugh at Dryden's frequent change of front? Is it not a sign of life and growth to throw oneself heart and soul into whatever pursuit may be immediately to one's hand? Certainly she loves absurd people, but love is sacred whatever the object of the affection. "He, like Balaam," says Tolstoy, "intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless. And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her."

But I do not feel convinced in my mind that Tchehov meant Olenka to excite our disgust or careless laughter. Where she loves there she loves whole-heartedly: her life is a blank, ready to take any impress, nor does she seek to erase any one of them until it is irrevocably removed from her. There are innumerable little touches deftly sketched in which make us feel not the ridiculousness or emptiness of the Darling, but rather love her for her sensibility and power of loving.

The main attraction of Tchehov for normal English readers is the shrewd psychology and the quick lightning flashes of nimble wit with which the text is strewn. As with his plays, so in his tales there is practically no plot. Passions spin the plot and mere catastrophic incident is not required.

In Ariadne, for instance, we are more intrigued by the conversations about women in general (a favourite topic of conversation among the Russians) than by the events that take place. Listen, for instance, to this point of view:

"We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. But the trouble is that when we have been married for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again—disappointment, again—reputation, and in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel—in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men."

There are moments, too, when we could find it in our hearts to wish that Tchehov had given rein to his obvious gifts for scenic description: so many writers indulge in an orgy of nature panegyrics that we rarely want more from any man, and Tchehov very wisely subordinates everything to his main theme, but all the same we could well do with more of this sort of thing:

"Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water chatters noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flower-beds, bee-hives, a kitchen garden, and below it a river with leafy willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless look as though they had turned grey: and on the other side a meadow, and beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine forest. In that forest delicious reddish agaries grow in endless profusion, and elks still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know, when the sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and beyond the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, while they play the piano indoors and the stream babbles ... when there is such music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to sing aloud."

But it is for little character sketches like this of Lubkov, who "would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: 'It would be nice to have tea here,'" that endears Tchehov to us so conclusively.

It is certainly sound psychology and good for a young lover to learn by heart (it would save endless heartaches and a thousand other natural shocks the flesh is heir to if they did) this aphorism: "A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness."

It is with more than a thrill of delight that we read of so exquisitely apt a simile as that for the girl who had refused a wealthy but utterly insignificant prince and then immediately fretted at her decision. "Just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of krass with cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of the prince."

The story from which these extracts are taken is an amazingly true psychological study of a girl whose coldness only made her more sensual: she lived solely for the purpose of attracting men, was deceitful when deceit was unnecessary, able to appear cultured in society and yet be in reality superstitious, bigoted, illiterate and devoid of all taste.

"'She is half a human beast already,'" says the misogynist, who had given up everything to please Ariadne, speaking of educated women generally. "'Thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human genius has been lost again: the woman gradually disappears and in her place is the primitive female ... of course a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine? To get on terms with a woman is easy enough,'" he concludes. "'You have only to undress her: but afterwards what a bore it is, what a silly business.'"

And now by way of a change let me just lightly give the plots of the following few stories. In Polinka we are simply invited to listen to the conversation over the counter of a little milliner and a draper's assistant who loves her and objects to her being led astray by a young medical student. The poignancy of the tale lies in the fact that the conversation, which is quite tragic, has to take place in public and therefore covered by discussions about buttons and corsets.

Anynta describes the misery of a kept mistress of a medical student who is tired of her.

The Two Volodyas shows us a girl who has married one elderly Volodya pining for the affection of another Volodya, who treats her as a child who has to be humoured. He told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed: "Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay ... tara-ra-boom-dee-ay."

The Trousseau gives us a pathetic picture of a wife and daughter in some dull, out-the-way place preparing year in, year out, material for her "bottom drawer," the girl after all dying before she met anyone who wanted to marry her.

The Help-Mate describes the doings of a suspicious husband who finds that his wife is corresponding secretly: he offers to set his wife free in order that she may marry her lover. We hear of a mother-in-law who aids her daughter in her immorality delightfully touched in in a phrase that cuts like a lash: "A stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything: if her daughter were strangling someone the mother would not have protested but would only have screened her with her skirts."

The wife refuses to accept a divorce because it will lower her status and perhaps her lover will throw her over. He is younger than she is.

In An Artist's Story we get some invaluable hints on the problem of the education of the masses.

"'The whole horror of their position,'" says the artist, "'lies in their never having time to think of their souls, of their image and resemblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block for them every way to spiritual activity—that is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth living—the people must be freed from hard physical labour: we must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields, but may also have time to think of God—may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity, the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day. What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. If one must cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause—physical labour—and then there will be no disease. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.'"

The story itself, however, concerns the love of an artist for a girl who disobeys the dictates of her heart and gives up her happiness at her sister's behest without question. The passage where the artist hears that his chance of real abiding love has been snatched from him is peculiarly Tchehov-like at his most poignant. He goes, full of hope and ecstasy, to meet his beloved and hears her sister, who dislikes him, giving a dictation lesson.

"'God ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating.... "'God sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow ... a piece of cheese ... Who's there?' she called suddenly, hearing my steps.

"'It's I.'

"'Ah! Excuse me. I cannot come out to you this minute: I'm giving Dasha her lesson.'

"'Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?'

"'No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,' she added after a pause. 'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese.... Have you written it?'

"I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of 'A piece of cheese ... God sent the crow a piece of cheese.'"

In Three Years, a somewhat longer tale, we read of the gradually waning affection between husband and wife and their reconciliation.

Very deftly does the author show us the difference between the passion which Laptev felt for Yulia at the beginning and his feeling at the end when she tells him how dear he is to her: though he kept smiling at her and her beautiful neck with a sort of joyous shyness as a sign of the new birth of his love, yet we read that when she put her arm round his neck he cautiously removed her hand. The mingled emotions are exquisitely rendered.

His longest story is The Duel and in it we hear of a neurasthenic, Laevsky, who finds that "'living with a woman who has read Spencer and followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Kulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception.'" He tries every means in his power to raise money by loan to leave the Caucasus and his mistress: there is a clear-headed, cold-blooded zoologist called Von Koren who despises Laevsky for his degeneracy. He thus analyses Laevsky's character:

"'His existence is confined like an egg within its shell. Whether he walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards, slippers and women. He has had great success with women and therein lies his noxiousness. He is a failure, a superfluous man, a victim of the age.'" Meanwhile Laevsky's mistress had been philandering with other men. He discovers her infidelity just when he is on the point of fighting a duel with Von Koren. He was wounded but slightly and became reconciled to his wife, while Von Koren was the one to go away, leaving lover and mistress almost happy in each other's society.

Mire is a horrible story about two men neither of whom was able to resist the fascinations of a Jewess prostitute.

Neighbours is an account of a visit paid by a brother to his sister who had run away with a married man: his first intention is to wreak his vengeance on her lover for the dishonour he had brought upon his house, but he remains as their friend.

At Home gives us a picture of the dull monotony of life in the country: a girl returns to her aunt's house and out of sheer boredom is induced to marry the local doctor.

Expensive Lessons shows the unrequited passion of a research student for a poor French governess whom he had hired to teach him French.

The Princess tells of a rich girl who likes to see others happy and revels in the thought that she is the means of making many content who otherwise would not be. She is taken severely to task by a doctor who tries to show her her true character as seen by her inferiors. '"You look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea: you have nothing except aversion: your philanthropic work has been a farce from the beginning. There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets.'" He says too much, is frightened and apologises, and the Princess goes from him once more reinstated to her former position of Lady Bountiful in her own mind. "'How happy I am!'" she murmured, shutting her eyes. "'How happy I am!'"

The Chemist's Wife is a charming trifle dealing with a country town in which an officer and a doctor knock up a chemist late at night on the pretext of wanting some peppermints, in reality to talk to the pretty young wife of the chemist. She is flattered: adventure has at last come her way: she stays some time downstairs talking to them while her husband sleeps. Reluctantly her visitors leave her, and when she is once more in bed return, this time waking her husband, who attends to them himself.

"Two minutes later the chemist's wife saw Obvyosov go out of the shop, and after he had gone some steps she saw him throw the packet of peppermints on the dusty road. The doctor came from behind a corner to meet him ... they met, and gesticulating, vanished in the morning mist."

"'How unhappy I am!'" said the chemist's wife, looking angrily at her husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. "'Oh, how unhappy I am!'" she repeated. "'And nobody knows, nobody knows.'

"'I forgot fourpence on the counter,'" muttered the chemist, pulling the quilt over him. "Put it away in the till, please....'" And at once he fell asleep again.

In The Lady with the Dog we get one of those notes of optimism which are so characteristic of Tchehov just where the normal writer would be pessimistic.

"The monotonous hollow sound of the sea, rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us: in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection."

The story is about a married man who conceives a violent passion for a married woman whom he meets while on holiday.

"Anna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends: it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband: and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both."

By far the greater number of Tchehov's tales deal with the illicit loves of married women: young girls are compelled to marry husbands who are distasteful to them, and in after years they revenge themselves by giving themselves to sprucer, cleaner, stronger men who flit into and out of their lives only too quickly.

In A Doctor's Visit Tchehov harks back again to a subject which is always dear to him, the uselessness of modern labour. In this case two thousand workpeople work without rest in unhealthy surroundings making bad cotton goods ... for what purpose? The factory owner's family are unhappy: "the only one who enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, the governess, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez. All these five blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink Madeira."

The doctor who is called in to attend the daughter of the house ventures on a criticism of present-day life.

"'Our generation sleep badly, are restless, talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are right or not. For our children or grandchildren that question will have been settled. Things will be clearer for them than for us. Life will be good in fifty years' time.'"

Ionitch shows us Tchehov in another characteristic vein. Here he indulges in one of his favourite tricks, that of divulging the foolishness of his dramatis personÆ through their idiotic conversation. Ivan Petrovitch is an irritating buffoon whose idea of wit is to repeat ad nauseam phrases like "How do you do, if you please?" and "Not badsome."

Tchehov's sense of irony is well shown in the following passage which occurs in this story:—

"Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces and Vera Iosiforna read her novel. It began like this: 'The frost was intense ...' The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions.... It was comfortable in the soft deep arm-chair: the lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and laughter floated in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was difficult to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain. Vera read how a beautiful young countess founded a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and fell in love with a wandering artist: she read of what never happens in real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen ... it was comfortable, and such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind one had no desire to get up.

"'Not badsome' ... Ivan said softly."

"Hugeous," "Thank you most dumbly," were among the sallies of wit which Ivan hurled at his audience from time to time.

The object of the story is as usual to emphasise the uselessness of the narrow lives of the inhabitants of a provincial town where men and women did absolutely nothing, took no interest in anything and looked askance at anyone who tried to speak intelligently on any topic of importance. There was nothing to do except eat and play vint. Tchehov shows us these people growing older but otherwise changing not at all, dragging down to their level even those who in their youth endeavoured to break loose from the bondage of aimlessness and inertia.

There is, however, a side of Tchehov which one would not expect in so relentless a realist. In The Black Monk we cross the border of the unseen and are in the society of mystics. No writer has so severely handled those who rely on old wives' fables and ignorant superstitions, but in this story he probes far down into the spiritual world and comes into line with Dostoievsky in a field which we are astonished to see him approach.

The phantom that appears periodically to Kovrin and so enhances his happiness may be an hallucination: it is completely in the vein of Smerdyakov and Ivan The Brothers Karamazov, though the conclusions are very different.

"'And what is the object of eternal life?'" asks Kovrin of the black monk, and the spirit answers: "'As of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said: "In my Father's house there are many mansions."'"

One of Tchehov's most remarkable traits is his capacity for getting right inside the very body of his characters. In An Anonymous Story, with a sureness of touch that we can only wonder at, he paints for us the hardships of a flunkey's life. Just as Turgenev seems to have been able to see into the most secret recesses of a young girl's heart, so Tchehov can put on the guise of an old man or a young boy lover, a jealous wife or an unfaithful husband, a garrulous father or a feckless waster at will, and actually become them for ten, twenty, fifty pages at a time without once giving us a chance to doubt the truth of his creation.

There are moments when we imagine that he leans rather to that side of life which we associate with authorship, hatred of domesticity. So many of his characters fall foul of conjugal relationships, but it is one of his worst characters who says that love is only a simple physical need, like the need for food or clothes, and instances the French workman who spends ten sous on dinner, five sous on wine, five or ten sous on women, and devotes his brain and nerves entirely to his work, and it is surely the voice of Tchehov himself who replies: "'Your everlasting attacks on female logic, lying, weakness and so on—doesn't it look like a desire at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may be on the same level as your attitude to her?'"

There are many places in this long "anonymous story" where Tchehov himself seems to be speaking to us across the footlights. It is his voice again that I hear in Zinaida's "'The meaning of life is to be found only in one thing—fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it. That's the meaning of life. In that alone or in nothing.'"

In the pseudo-valet's "'One can serve an idea in more than one calling. If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one, one may find another.'" And once more in "'Man finds his true destiny in nothing if not in self-sacrificing love for his neighbour.'" And lastly in the same man's "'All I ask for is an objective attitude to life: the more objective, the less danger of falling into error. One must look into the root of things and try to see in every phenomenon a cause of all the other causes. We have grown feeble, slack—degraded, in fact. Our generation is entirely composed of neurasthenics and whimperers: we do nothing but talk of fatigue and exhaustion. Life is only given us once and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play a striking, independent, noble part: one wants to make history so that those generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse.... Why should my ego be lost?'"

But if I had to select one characteristic story of Tchehov's to illustrate his method more perfectly than any other I should choose The Husband. It is simply on account of a tax-collector and his wife going to a dance held in honour of the coming of a regiment to the town. The wife under the influence of the music, the drink and the unaccustomed society begins to revel in the function: her husband immediately orders her to return home, merely to satisfy a whim.

The final paragraphs of the story, in which we see the wretched couple walking home in the dark, the mud slushing under their feet, choking with hatred of each other, are inimitable.

The fourth volume of tales is called The Party, and contains a wonderful story called Terror, in which we again get Tchehov's favourite plot of a man making love to his friend's wife.

The terror lies in the fact that the man loves his wife while she is indifferent to him and gives herself to her husband's friend, who leaves her as soon as he has won her.

In A Woman's Kingdom he reverts to machinery and capital, and in passing introduces a very sound criticism of Maupassant's work.

The Kiss, which is just the story of an officer being kissed in the dark in mistake for somebody else, is a supreme example of Tchehov's genius in making a completely successful story out of the merest trifle.

The Teacher of Literature is a man who chafes, as so many of Tchehov's heroes do, at the littleness of life. "I am surrounded," he writes in his diary, "by vulgarity, and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women.... There is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and distressing than vulgarity. I must escape—I must escape."

In volume five The Wife is a poignantly pathetic story of a man who loves his wife desperately but meets with no response to his affection; it differs from other tales of the same sort in that the wife in this case states most plainly and forcibly exactly why they fail to get on.

"'You bring suffocation, oppression,'" she says, "'something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree. Law and morality are such that a self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend her life in idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and to receive board and lodging from a man she does not love.'"

Difficult People shows us, as Tchehov is fond of doing, a family in the process of bickering and squabbling from day to day.

The Grasshopper is the picture of a married girl who jumps from one lover to another, only realising the purity and greatness of her husband when he dies heroically.

A Dreary Story is the notebook of an old man who is about to die, having achieved fame but not found happiness. In this story there is a magnificent description of the fascination of lecturing.

"'No kind of sport,'" he concludes, "'no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.'"

We feel again that some autobiographical thread of the author's is creeping in when he makes his old man say: '"I am interested in nothing but science. I still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man: that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature.'"

The remaining stories in the volume, which are peculiar in that they are linked by having characters in common, dwell on the evils of Tchehov's days, the listlessness of the educated public, the refusal to break out of the case or the groove, the general hypnotism and blindness to suffering of the so-called happy.

"'There ought to be,'" says the hero in Gooseberries, "'behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people.'"

We learn in About Love that Tchehov's apprenticeship to medicine "taught me one invaluable lesson as an artist, to individualise each case."

In the sixth and last volume we have The Witch, which gives its name to the volume, which is parallel with The Chemist's Wife in that it again shows a wife dissatisfied with her husband endeavouring to secure a moment's romance with a postman who has lost his way.

Peasant Wives dwells on the unfaithfulness of women, and in Agafya he reverts to the style and plot of The Witch.

Gusev is a horrible story of a man dying at sea: when dead his body is sewn up and thrown into the water, where he is eaten by a shark.

In the Ravine is a picture of a girl not very different in her calculated brutality and heartlessness from Regan and Goneril: it is one of the most powerful stories that Tchehov ever wrote.

As a short story-writer Tchehov stands in a unique position. He relies very little on plot, he is interested only in characters: every one of his creations stands out definitely and clearly, and though he points no moral it is easy to come to quite certain conclusions with regard to his own view on life.

He obviously regards women as frail, easily dissatisfied, just as he looks upon the men of his age as invertebrate, lacking in energy, ideals, or any sense of the nobility of work.

His scenic descriptions are clear-cut and beautiful, not less effective because they are so sparingly used.

He is obviously puzzled by the why and wherefore of existence, and refuses to shut his eyes when he finds himself confronted by uncomfortable truths.

But his main feature is his incurable optimism. He has no very great opinion of the men of his own day, but it is easy to see that he has unbounded faith in the future, and to stigmatise such a writer as "gloomy" only betrays the impotence and wrong-headedness of the critic.

Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation has been left as written.
Dialect has been left as written, e.g. tÄake. However obvious typos (outside of speech) have been corrected.