William Gerhardi, who has lately fluttered our dovecotes with "Futility" and "Polyglots," novels touched with Chekhovian humor in the presence of big wigs and embroidered uniforms. As a critic Mr. Gerhardi has linked himself with the group by declaring his discipleship to Middleton Murry. And in 1923 he published an extensive and intelligent study of Chekhov's art and his character, inspired, I suppose, by the letters and enriched certainly by many pertinent extracts from them. By no means incidentally he shoves Chekhov into the critical arena and eagerly backs him for genuine-artistic modernity against Henry James and his militant champion, Mr. Ford Maddox Ford, on the one hand, and, on the other, against Dostoievsky and his alleged successor in psychological profundity, Mr. James Joyce.
I have no intention of thrusting myself among these glittering blades. In general I think Chekhov's English friends have taken hold of him and presented him wisely as a fine, conscientious artist whose realism is far more subtle, suggestive and truly profound than that of more flamboyant novelists who have invaded us since the Japanese War. Andreyev and Gorky, for example. Perhaps in the excess of appreciation they push his claims a little harder than he himself would have approved against the looming figures of Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoievsky.
Chekhov did a marvelous thing: he carried fine art into the newspaper and kept it there as long as he was alive. He picked up the newspaper reporter's "human interest story" and treated it with the fine scrupulosity of a great artist working on the perfection of a sonnet. He wrote innumerable little stories with a touch which made them classical, and the cumulative
