(1) They respect a man's personality, and therefore they are always tolerant, gentle, polite, yielding. . . . (2) They are compassionate, and not only with beggars and cats, for they grieve in their soul for what the naked eye does not see. (3) They respect other people's property, and therefore they pay their debts. (4) . . . They do not show off, they behave in public as they behave at home, they do not throw dust in the eyes of humbler people, they do not chatter, and do not make up soul-to-soul conversations when they are not asked. . . . (5) They do not belittle themselves to arouse the compassion of others. They do not play on the strings of other people's souls so that they shall sigh over and fondle them. . . . (6) . . . They do not care about such false diamonds as acquaintance with celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P . . . Doing a farthing's worth, they do not walk about with attaché cases as if they had done a hundred rubles' worth. . . . (7) If they possess talent, they respect it. For it they sacrifice rest, women, wine, vanity . . . They are proud of their talent. . . . And also they are fastidious. (8) They foster the æsthetic feeling in themselves. . . . From woman they require, not a bed. . . . They, especially if they are artists, need freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for being not a . . . but a mother.
A notable program that, coming extempore from a young fellow of twenty-six, desperately busy, up to his neck in medicine, up to his neck in short-story writing for the newspapers, and already attacked by the disease which eventually carried him off. I call attention to it because it contains a good part of the ethical code of Chekhov. It is perfectly genuine. There is no windy inflation in the man—nothing to
