manner and a fixed reputation—­but how rarely do we see even a glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified aesthetic impression!  The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has been, present to consciousness is ipso facto unified aesthetically.  The result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical method.

The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving aesthetic unity by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an arbitrary (because non-aesthetic) argument.  This argument was let down like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a unified crystalline structure congregated about it.  Of all great artists of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this method.  How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big for a parenthesis.  But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist.  The modern problem—­it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak of a modern method—­arises from a sense that the classical method produces over-simplification.  It does not permit of a sufficient sense of multiplicity.  One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines.  They might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.

Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new.  To make use again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness.  In a sense he began at the other end.  He had decided on the quality of aesthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision, but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life which he had achieved.  The essential quality he discerned and desired to represent was his argument, his string.  Everything that heightened and completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and argument.  There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest story in this volume, ‘The Steppe.’  The quality is dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is reinforced by the incident.  Tiny events—­the peasant who eats minnows alive, the Jewish inn-keeper’s brother who burned his six thousand roubles—­take on a character of portent, except that the word is too harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a sense of incalculability that haunts us.  The emphases have all been slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme.  It is not while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much significance could attach to a little boy’s questions in a remote village shop:—­