[Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance
Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]

It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not
consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated
by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most
frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the
infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in
himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw
in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for
refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked
everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and
saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his
letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--a
thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his
country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political
indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active
good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism
and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin
in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he
spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures
against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and,
although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he
refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of
action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising
practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his
childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.
Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a
saint. His self-devotion was boundless.