Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when he wrote:  ‘It is essential to be indifferent.’  Tchehov was indifferent; but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies will show, was of a curious kind.  He made of it, as it were, an axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline.  Since life is what it is and men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon the individual.  The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it.  In one of his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his brother Nikolay, who lacked it.  Cultivated persons, he said, respect human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only; they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent they respect it; they develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves ... they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct.  The letter from which these chief points are taken is tremulous with sympathy and wit.  Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote it.  He concludes with the words:  ’What is needed is constant work day and night, constant reading, study, will.  Every hour is precious for it.’

In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man.  He set himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it.  The indifference upon which Tchehov’s humanity was built was not therefore a moral indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the fact that life itself is indifferent.  To that he held fast to the end.  But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and character of the individual were all-important.  There was, indeed, no panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there could be a mitigation in men’s souls.  But the new asceticism must not be negative.  It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because civilisation is largely a sham.

’Alas!  I shall never be a Tolstoyan.  In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit.  Ach!  To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!’

Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, ’we are concerned with pluses alone.’  Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly precious.  Only they must be amenities without humbug.