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"I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!" The people who cannot wound others those are the people whose sharp pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov.

After Henry's return from France he continued his lessons, and by the spring of 1916 he could read easily, write fairly, and speak atrociously. He then adopted Russia, an easy thing to do, because his supposed mastery of the language gave him a tremendous advantage over his friends. "I assure you that's not so," he would say. "You can't judge Tchehov till you've read him in the original.

Also of this: it takes a more intense effort of the creative imagination to leave out what Tchehov leaves out of his short stories than to say what Meredith put into his long ones. In the Plutarchian method there was ever a snare, and I have come near treading in it. The difference between Matisse and Picasso is not to be stated in those sharp antitheses that every journalist loves.

As one reads Ariadne, one feels that those who say the artist is not a judge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is a prosecuting perhaps even a defending counsel. Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no more in love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades as vice.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment, however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring and vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is.

Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances and feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appears supererogatory." Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough as clear as if it followed a summing-up from the bench.

And, no doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence. Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is Tchehov. He is so obviously not a god.

I know no writer who leaves one with the same vision of men and women as lost sheep. We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky. In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches a high level.

There has, I think, never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as in the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the average man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people into books. They have written plays longer than Hamlet, and novels longer than Don Quixote, about ordinary people.

The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinary people are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities is how to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will become better company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves the problem better than any of the other novelists.