Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/299



N method Chekhov would appear to be a detached realist of the Impersonal Succession; in character one suspects him of being a realist by sheer fascination with his perceptions. There is a matter-of-factness about his ironical folk and middle-class tales that would reduces their content to so much ineloquent information were it not for his seeming-ingenuous absorption in his narrative, and his reliable and perennial sense of effect, which is so fine that the edged picturing survives even the process of translation. He has that bias for a diminished range of spirit which Henry James thought deplorable in Flaubert: no splendid persons, no fine cases, no heightened characters.

One feels Chekhov, in these stories, to be a confirmed dealer in the lore of human petty actuality, the endless small defeats that men accomplish for one another. Underneath and carefully never overflowing his impersonality, his perfect assiduity to fact, is as abiding an irony as Thomas Hardy's, without Hardy's admiration for men and women, with a touch, perhaps, of something cousin-german to contempt. We hear from Chekhov truly little of the stature and dignity of man; his typical characters cut uninspiring figures enough. The third tale in the present volume, The Letter, is, for instance, a thoroughly Chekhovian piece. Deacon Liubimov, in this story, is so much disturbed by the wild career of an absent raffish son that he implores Father Fyodor to help him compose a letter which will head the young rake-hell back to the strait gate. Father Fyodor dictates, Deacon Liubimov writes. In the Deacon's eyes the result is a masterpiece of reproach. To know that his old father could be capable of such dignity and eloquence must infallibly shame the scapegrace into righteousness. But before the Deacon could send off this imposing exhortation he must needs sit down and add on his own account at the bottom of the letter:

"They have sent us a new inspector. He's much friskier than the old one. He's a great one for dancing and talking, and there's noth-