Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/300

254 ing he can't do, so that all the Govorovsky girls are crazy about him. Our military chief will soon get the sack too, they say. High time he did!"

The poor old Deacon is fairly embalmed in irony.

Yet Chekhov, notwithstanding dry exactnesses like the foregoing, has a fresh and fascinated cordiality of picturing that few realists can muster. He does not furnish, it is true, the filled-full sense of acquaintance that a three-ply Saxon realistic epic lavishes on us; he is not the realist of the itemized account. And he is as little disposed to the accurate, morose baldness, the mere tractarian tipping of decent illusions that Artzibashev practises. His realism is not his theory, really; it is his character, his unflagging native interest. Conditioned always, it is true, by a very article-of-faith reserve, he has, more than most realists, a robust inheritance in the foundation instinct of the natural dramatist: the frank appetite for personality, even abject personality, the gusto for Sturm und Drang, even if they are petty, the power of stomach, the zest in acquaintance, the expert interest in everything human. His eyes have seen all with the most absorbed interest, his ears have heard all with the freshest wonder. His perceptions have never gone stale; impressions have formed upon his sensibility inexhaustibly, always full coloured, varied, insistent, real. He may work in the spirit of irony and be as laden with disillusion as Artzibashev, but he writes with a resiliency that Artzibashev, for all his simooms of power and passion, does not know. Few realists have known so well as Chekhov how to be spellbound. The capital instinct is in him; he is as intent as a fancier when the matter is the items of character and appearance, or the terms of personality, or the set of situation and scene. Through his detachment and against his irony shows something of the robust Pepysian, the thoughtful but eager folk-lorist, the chimney-cornerer with the gift of vividness. His vision of humanity and its purposes is not intricate, but the consideration of life has never failed to fill his mind and absorb his heart.