effect of them is large. Chekhov is a Russian classic, yet doubtless, as Prince Mirsky says, a classic of the Silver Age.
He is not to be described as an imposing elemental force. He is not a huge, originating, crushing and dominating mind. He hardly cared to be that. Between 1885 and 1904—a relatively languid generation, spiritually, between the liberalism of the '60s and the incipient Bolshevism that followed the Japanese War—Chekhov made for himself a personal ideal of sensible, sensitive civility. As an artist he sought to reflect Russian life from the point of view of a sensible, sensitive intellectual. His purpose, one may say, was to make readers see and feel the contemporary spectacle as such a man sees and feels it. He stands, then, for culture as contrasted with passion, ethical urgency, and yeasty fermentation. In respect to mood and temper, he stands in relation to Tolstoy as Matthew Arnold stands in relation to Carlyle, or Renan in relation to Victor Hugo, or, say, Mr. Santayana in relation to Royce and James.
Now the fact that Chekhov is coming into English-speaking lands twenty years after his death and is finding sympathetic and intelligent friends among the disenchanted writers of the post-war period, may greatly help us not only to see where his force lies, but also to enter more sympathetically into the minds of contemporary writers of our own time whom ruddy purposeful persons are prone to dismiss as unprofitable pessimists, dilettantes, futilitarians, belittlers of all that is venerable and august. I am thinking now of the vogue enjoyed by the Stracheyan biography, the Beerbohmian caricature, the fiction of Rose Macaulay, the Aldous Huxleyan "novel" and tale, and our in
