elegant and somewhat brutalized American version of the same Zeitgeist, which we may perhaps summarily designate as Menckenism.
Prince Mirsky, to whom I must refer once more, underscores Chekhov's "pessimism," his "realistic gloom," his gentle melancholy, his pity and sympathy, his consummate artistry. He links him with Turgenev in the "cult of inefficiency," and there is his dominant emphasis. Chekhov, he declares, with more than a touch of paradox,
hated the man who deserves success quite as much as the man who commands it undeservingly. Inefficiency is for him the cardinal virtue, and defeat the only halo. This attitude has been believed by some to be essentially Russian, but in its extreme expression it is certainly quite personal to Chekhov. The tendency of English literature has been the other way, but latterly, and parallel with the great vogue of Chekhov, the cult of inefficiency and the hate of Vulgar Success has spread in this country. There is nothing more Chekhovian, outside Chekhov, than Mr. Lytton Strachey's life of Cardinal Manning, with the pointed contrast between the active and obviously detestable Archbishop of Westminster and the gentle dreamer, Newman. [Newman, by the way, was less "gentle" than he is made out.]
Of Chekhov as an artist, Prince Mirsky speaks, to be sure, in the highest terms. But "Chekhovism" as an historical mood of Russia—a mood for which he appears to hold Chekhov in some measure responsible—he condemns unsparingly as "a stage of the past we have no grounds to be proud of, of a past which is largely responsible for the greatest shame of Russian
