The son of Alphonse Daudet in his memoirs of his father relates that the
gifted French writer half jokingly called himself a "seller of
happiness." People of all sorts would constantly apply to him for advice
and assistance. They came with their sorrows and worries, and he,
already bedridden with a painful and incurable disease, found sufficient
courage, patience, and love of mankind in himself to penetrate into
other people's grief, to console and encourage them.
Chekhov, certainly, with his extraordinary modesty and his dislike of
phrase-making, would never have said anything like that. But how often
he had to listen to people's confessions, to help by word and deed, to
hold out a tender and strong hand to the falling.... In his wonderful
objectivity, standing above personal sorrows and joys, he knew and saw
everything. But personal feeling stood in the way of his understanding.
He could be kind and generous without loving; tender and sympathetic
without attachment; a benefactor, without counting on gratitude. And
these traits which were never understood by those round him, contained
the chief key to his personality.
Availing myself of the permission of a friend of mine, I will quote a
short extract from a Chekhov letter. The man was greatly alarmed and
troubled during the first pregnancy of a much beloved wife, and, to tell
the truth, he distressed Anton Pavlovitch greatly with his own trouble.
Chekhov once wrote to him:
"Tell your wife she should not be anxious, everything will be all right.
The travail will last twenty hours, and then will ensue a most blissful
state, when she will smile, and you will long to cry from love and
gratitude. Twenty hours is the usual maximum for the first childbirth."
What a subtle cure for another's anxiety is heard in these few simple
lines! But it is still more characteristic that later, when my friend
had become a happy father, and, recollecting that letter, asked Chekhov
how he understood these feelings so well, Anton Pavlovitch answered
quietly, even indifferently:
"When I lived in the country, I always had to attend peasant women. It
was just the same--there too is the same joy."
If Chekhov had not been such a remarkable writer, he would have been a
great doctor. Physicians who sometimes invited him to a consultation
spoke of him as an unusually thoughtful observer and penetrating in
diagnosis. It would not be surprising if his diagnosis were more perfect
and profound than a diagnosis given by a fashionable celebrity. He saw
and heard in man--in his face, voice, and bearing--what was hidden and
would escape the notice of an average observer.
He himself preferred to recommend, in the rare cases when his advice was
sought, medicines that were tried, simple, and mostly domestic. By the
way he treated children with great success.
He believed in medicine firmly and soundly, and nothing could shake that
belief. I remember how cross he was once when some one began to talk
slightingly of medicine, basing his remarks on Zola's novel "Doctor
Pascal."
--"Zola understands nothing and invents it all in his study,"--he said
in agitation, coughing. "Let him come and see how our Zemstvo doctors
work and what they do for the people."
Every one knows how often--with what sympathy and love beneath an
external hardness, he describes those superb workers, those obscure and
inconspicuous heroes who deliberately doomed their names to oblivion. He
described them, even without sparing them.