Page:Chekhov - The Darling and other Stories (Macmillan, 1917).djvu/12

 flower is not a solid pigment, but is the result of the play of light on the broken surface of its innumerable cells, so Chekhov's art, however tragic or melancholy may be the life of his characters, produces the effect of living colour by the shifting play of human feelings. Note, for example, how the "depressing," squalid atmosphere of "Anyuta" is broken up by the artist's rapid inflections of feeling. Again, "A Trousseau" and "Talent" offer us fine examples of Chekhov's skill in conveying the essence of a situation, and of people's outlooks, by striking a few notes in the scale of their varying moods. Further, remark how from the disharmony between people's moods and circumstances springs the peculiar, subtle sense Chekhov conveys of life's ironic pattern of time and chance playing cat and mouse with people's happiness. Compare the opening pages, in "Three Years," of Laptev's passion for Yulia with the closing scene where she is waiting to tell him how dear he is to her, while he himself finds no response in his heart, and "cautiously removes her hand from his neck." But Chekhov is too subtle, too delicate an artist to emphasise this note in his impressionistic picture of life's teeming freshness and fulness; so he then touches in life's elusiveness and promise in the description of how "Yartsev kept smiling at Yulia and her beautiful neck with a sort of joyous shyness." Here is love's new birth indicated with exquisite delicacy. And here, as in the little scene preceding, where Laptev stands in