Though Tchehov’s genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a much exacter study than it has yet received.  The publication of this volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief constituents of his perfect art.  These touch us nearly because—­we insist again—­the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only great modern artist in prose.  He belongs, as we have said, to us.  If he is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in him—­and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist.  He did not rub his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a millennium which he alone had the ability to control.  He was and wanted to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a hero—­more than that, the hero of our time.

   [Footnote 8:  Letters of Anton Tchehov.  Translated by Constance
   Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]

It is significant that, in reading Tchehov’s letters, we do not consider him under the aspect of an artist.  We are inevitably fascinated by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing.  He did not throw in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and saying so.  In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great exemplar, by us.  He refused to march under any political banner—­a thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism and social reform.  He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod.  From his childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.  Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a saint.  His self-devotion was boundless.