’Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses and prisons alone.  I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation....  That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation.  I regard trade marks and labels as a superstition.  My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—­freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take.  This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.’

What ‘the most absolute freedom’ meant to Tchehov his whole life is witness.  It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and self-refinement.  In one letter he says he is going to write a story about the son of a serf—­Tchehov was the son of a serf—­who ’squeezed the slave out of himself.’  Whether the story was ever written we do not know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his life long.  He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.

He was, thus, in all things a humanist.  He faced the universe, but he did not deny his own soul.  There could be for him no antagonism between science and literature, or science and humanity.  They were all pluses; it was men who quarrelled among themselves.  If men would only develop a little more loving-kindness, things would be better.  The first duty of the artist was to be a decent man.

’Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary....  We cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely hooked....  And is there any need for it?  No, in order to help a colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as simply a man....  Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up solidarity.’

It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of Tchehov’s, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike us as more than strange.  One predominant impression remains:  it is that of Tchehov’s candour of soul.  Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present importance to ourselves.

[MARCH, 1920.

American Poetry