XITHE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV

A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a genius for consolation—a genius for stretching out a hand to his floundering fellow-mortals—it was Tchehov. He was as active in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude toTolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of theNovoe Vremya, he wrote:

The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic—they are going towards something and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through every life’s being soaked in theconsciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.

Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his trial—that is unworthy of literature.”

We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a lecture-room, a museum, and atheatre. At another time, he is off to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English translation of his letters:

He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings.

This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly very unlike the practiceof despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In one letter he writes:

I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there all over Russia—educated people or peasants—they have strength though they are few.

In another letter he says:

Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come to know the truth of the real God—that is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four.

If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is an enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-marks and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:

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 may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.

In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort of realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent parable:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world. Writers must not imitate Ham....

On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the practice of honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is the object of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:

A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough, he mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent, out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers, would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?

In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,” he declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the greatartist will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and withheld it from others.

On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual men, not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend from his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest often comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a widower, and has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a priest who is a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an unthinkable paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in nature: he accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was indifferent to the vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one occasion to a great journalist: “Why do they write nothing about prostitution in your paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our Sobelev street is a regular slave-market.”

Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He had the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also the doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in opposite directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war, instead ofweakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great artist is a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to have lived aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that repeated summons to reconciliation in his plays is thecredoof a man who has plumbed the great secret of the liberalism of his time and, equally, of ours. Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. He tells us the truth even when it is most cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes like a doctor going his rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the sick world. That is why his stories delight us as the synthetic golden syrup of more optimistic authors never does.

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