comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He
is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of
creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of
his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the
arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural,
and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a
greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more
wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less
admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably
for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of
equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees,
need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order
to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the
shortcomings of the pure case.

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that
phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification
of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted
into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring
into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate
interest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he
is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases
in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of
literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that
is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern
writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the
greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content we
are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a