The “Seagull” is a play full of delicate subtleties and dreamy glimpses of shy humane wisdom.  The manner in which outward things—­the mere background and scenery of the play—­are used to deepen and enhance the dramatic interest is a thing peculiarly characteristic of this author.  Tchekoff has that kind of imaginative sensibility which makes every material object one encounters significant with spiritual intimations.

The mere business of plot—­whether in his plays or stories—­is not the important matter.  The important matter is a certain sudden and pathetic illumination thrown upon the essential truth by some casual grouping of persons or of things—­some emphatic or symbolic gesture—­some significant movement among the silent “listeners.”

52.  ARTZIBASHEFF.  SANINE, translation published by Huebsch.

Artzibasheff is an extremist.  The suicidal “motif” in the “Breaking-point” is worked out with an appalling and devastating thoroughness.

Pessimism, in a superficial sense, could hardly go further; though compared with Dostoievsky’s insight into the “infinite” in character, one is conscious of a certain closing of doors and narrowing of issues.  “Sanine” himself is a sort of idealization of the sublimated common sense which seems to be this writer’s selected virtue.  Artzibasheff appears to advocate, as the wisest and sanest way of dealing with life, a certain robust and contemptuous self-assertion, kindly, genial, without baseness or malice; but free from any scruple and quite untroubled by remorse.

If regarded seriously—­as he appears to be intended to be—­as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome.  He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him.  On the other hand there is something direct, downright and “honest” about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration.  Artzibasheff is indeed one of the few writers who dare excite our sympathy not only for the seduced in this world but for the seducer.

53.  STERNE—­TRISTRAM SHANDY.

Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list reveals the secrets of his manner and mind to the casual and hasty reader.  “Tristram Shandy” and “The Sentimental Journey” are books to be enjoyed slowly and lingeringly, with many humorous after-thoughts and a certain Rabelaisian unction.  A shrewd and ironical wisdom, gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked from these digressive and wanton pages.

At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative interpretation of character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed.  For the Epicurean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in his style—­a style so baffling in the furtive beauty of its disarming simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable to analyze its peculiar flavour.  There is a winnowed purity about it, and a kind of elfish grace; and with both these things there mixes, strangely enough, a certain homely, almost Dutch domesticity, quaint and mellow and a little wanton—­like a picture by Jan Steen.