Aspects of Literature

by John Middleton Murry

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.

Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent; but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only; they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves … they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for it.'

In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end. But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because civilisation is largely a sham.

'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'

Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.

'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation…. That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.'

What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story about the son of a serf—Tchehov was the son of a serf—who 'squeezed the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.

He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses; it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of the artist was to be a decent man.

'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary…. We cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely hooked…. And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as simply a man…. Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up solidarity.'

It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present importance to ourselves.