To attempt the more difficult problem.  What is most peculiar to Tchehov’s unity is that it is far more nakedly aesthetic than that of most of the great writers before him.  Other writers of a rank equal to his—­and there are not so very many—­have felt the need to shift their angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but they were not satisfied with this.  They felt, and obeyed, the further need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or disapproved, accepted or rejected it.  It would be perhaps more accurate to say that they gave or refused their endorsement.  They appealed to some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.

The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the unity he discovers.  Its uniqueness is sufficient for him.  It does not occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better.  The act of comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance.  He is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural, and beautiful than the flowering of a plant.  Not that Tchehov is a greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more wholly an artist, which is a very different thing.  There is in him less admixture of preoccupations that are not purely aesthetic, and probably for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of equal rank.  It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees, need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order to be very vigorous and very fruitful.  Tchehov has the virtues and the shortcomings of the pure case.

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation of l’art pour l’art, because in any commonly accepted sense of that phrase, he is not.  Still, he might be considered as an exemplification of what the phrase might be made to mean.  But instead of being diverted into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate interest—­his modernity.  Again, the word is awkward.  It suggests that he is fashionable, or up to date.  Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of literature.  The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern writer—­to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the greatest possible unity of aesthetic impression.  Diversity of content we are beginning to find in profusion—­Miss May Sinclair’s latest experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a settled