It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense
of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were
monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any
respect paid to the rivals of the god of the moment. And so one year
Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, no
doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge
eminence.
Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is
Tchehov. He is so obviously not a god. He does not deliver messages to
us from the mountain-top like Tolstoy, or reveal himself beautifully in
sunset and star like Turgenev, or announce himself now in the hurricane
and now in the thunderstorm like Dostoevsky. He is a man and a medical
doctor. He pays professional visits. We may define his genius more
exactly by saying that his is a general practice. There has, I think,
never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as
in the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the average
man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people
into books. They have written plays longer than _Hamlet_, and novels
longer than _Don Quixote_, about ordinary people. They have piled such a
heap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him out
of existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has a
sense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the big
subject to literature.
Henry James complained of the littleness of the subject in _Madame
Bovary._ He regarded it as one of the miracles of art that so great a
book should have been written about so small a woman. _Tom Jones_, on
the other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which few
people complain. But then _Tom Jones_ is a comedy, and we enjoy the
continual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom the
common man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At the
same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself,
indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature.
Were it not for the oppression of his futile and philoprogenitive
presence, imaginative writers would be poets and romancers.
The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinary
people are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities is
how to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will become
better company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves the
problem better than any of the other novelists. He sees, for one thing,
that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumbling
towards some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blown
off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to be
a break in the meanest life.
Tchehov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a
charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of
his sympathy. He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular
novelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his
heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I
think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his
introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks
admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is
less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr.
Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his
characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances
and feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appears
supererogatory." Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough--as clear
as if it followed a summing-up from the bench. He portrays his
characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the
judgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moral
and material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt as
to their being ugly. His attitude to a large part of life might be
described as one of good-natured disgust.
In one of the newly-translated stories, _Ariadne_, he shows us a woman
from the point of view of a disgusted lover. It is a sensitive man's
picture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful. "This thirst
for personal success ... makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to me,
to nature, and to music." Tchehov extends towards her so little charity
that he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a neck
like goose-skin and a big Adam's apple," and who, as he talked,
"breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled
beef." As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks
back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her
charm:
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her
coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster,
fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used
to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat
it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the
night she would eat apples or oranges.
The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover
dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as
the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment,
however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring
and vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never
permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will to
fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's critical
mind:
She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It
was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a
house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by
her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day
to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was
in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms
gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in
tournaments.... She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms;
she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could
have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin,
she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of
her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she
would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting
me.
A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:
Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant
or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to
read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.
As one reads _Ariadne_, one feels that those who say the artist is not a
judge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is a
prosecuting--perhaps even a defending--counsel.
Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no more
in love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades as
vice. _An Artist's Story_--a beautiful sad story, which might almost
have been written by Turgenev--contains a fine critical portrait of a
woman absorbed in the egoism of good works. She is always looking after
the poor, serving on committees, full of enthusiasm for nursing and
education. She lacks only that charity of the heart which loves human
beings, not because they are poor, but because they are human beings.
She is by nature a "boss." She "bosses" her mother and her younger
sister, and when the artist falls in love with the latter, the stronger
will of the woman of high principles immediately separates lovers so
frivolous that they had never sat on a committee in their lives. When,
the evening after the artist confesses his love, he waits for the girl
to come to him in the garden of her house, he waits in vain. He goes
into the house to look for her, but does not find her. Then through one
of the doors he overhears the voice of the lady of the good works:
"'God ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice,
probably dictating--"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow
... A piece of cheese ... Who's there?" she called suddenly,
hearing my steps.
"It's I."
"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving
Dasha her lesson."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the
province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,"
she added after a pause. "'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of
cheese....' Have you written it?"
I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the
village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese ... God
sent the crow a piece of cheese."
And I went back by the way I had come here for the first
time--first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into
the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was overtaken by a
small boy who gave me a note.
"I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from
you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give
you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother
and I are crying!"
The people who cannot wound others--those are the people whose sharp
pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. The
people who wound--it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett
suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though
he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than
not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In
_Anyuta_, the medical student and his mistress live in a room
disgusting in its squalor:
Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big
filthy slop--pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends
were swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though
purposely jumbled together in one confusion....
And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which a
great part of the human race lives, neither are the people more
beautiful than ordinary people. In _The Trousseau_, the poor thin girl
who spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will never
take place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of a
stranger into her mother's house:
Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red
first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of it
is distressing.
The woman in _The Darling_, who marries more than once and simply cannot
live without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" to
look at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish and
adoring--especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin,
yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on his
forehead," and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment of
endearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfect
sincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"
Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov's
stories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathy
in himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. His
world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the
presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and
laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is
no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive
things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see
what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down
naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is
black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the
same vision of men and women as lost sheep.
We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov
in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the
author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky.
In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches
a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov
is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of
the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story
writer who has yet appeared on the planet.