zealous German offered to take the precious Ghent pictures to Holland for safety. At this critical hour the Canon wavered; should the precious Van Eyck be slipped in among the others? but happily his friends were dead against it. Was not even a bombarded Ghent safer than German protection? Would the Crypt of St Bavon be safer than the present hiding place? But again consultation resulted in a negative; and M. Franz Coppejans declared that, in case Ghent was bombarded, he would go himself to protect the treasure from the danger of catching fire.

These were indeed days of mental anguish; but we can imagine the intense joy of the inhabitants when on Monday, Nov. 10, a cry was heard at midnight, becoming louder and louder: The Germans are gone! The Germans are gone!' The tramp, tramp of soldiers was heard on every side; no one slept; and soon the shouting in the streets turned into delirious singing of the Brabançonne and the Marseillaise, as the relieving army approached Ghent from the suburbs. All the long years of oppression were in a moment forgotten. Every one rushed into the streets; every one congratulated every one else. Yet even now the truth could hardly be believed; Ghent was free and the Van Eyck was saved. With great joy the unconquered Canon gave thanks to God, the Deliverer. Once more he could breathe freely! On Nov. 29 again the friends met together. Without any advertising of the fact, the panels were liberated from their hiding-place and replaced in the chapel for which they had originally been painted; and on Nov. 30, 1918, they were opened to the public. The little kingdom of Belgium had played a great part in the great war. It had not loved nor fought in vain for Liberty; and the Germans had not found their picture!

ESMÉ STUART.

Art. 3.-TCHEHOV AND HIS ART.

1. Letters of Anton Tchehov to his Family and Friends. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. Chatto & Windus, 1920.

2. The Tales of Tchehov.

Vols. I-X (In Progress). Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. Chatto & Windus, 1916-21.

3. (a) The Black Monk and Other Stories. (b) The Kiss and Other Stories. By Anton Tchekhoff. Translated from the Russian by R. E. C. Long. Duckworth, 1903. 4. (a) Russian Silhouettes. (b) Plays. By Anton Tchekoff. Translated from the Russian by Marian Fell. Duckworth, 1912, 1915.

5. The Note-Books of Anton Tchekhov. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. Hogarth Press, 1921.

OF English appreciations of Tchehov Mr Middleton Murry's is alike the most serious and the most illuminating. His eloquent pages in 'Aspects of Literature ' * testify that he among the younger school of critics has understood best the quality of Tchehov's genius and the beauty of his character. Moreover, he it is who has directed attention to the modernity of Tchehov's attitude, rightly declaring that he is a good many phases in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in literature.' It is therefore in no sense of fault-finding if we try here to enlarge our vistas of the subject and supplement some of Mr Murry's critical remarks by other comments. Mr Murry in his articles has discussed Tchehov's life and Tchehov's art. Let us quote some of his remarks on Tchehov the man:

'He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in him—and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for universal wisdom, or indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He

'Aspects of Literature.' By J. Middleton Murry. Collins, 1920.

was and wanted to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel gradually from within ourselves the conviction that he was a hero-more than that, the hero of our time.

'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 neighbours than all the high-souled professors of liberalism and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin in 1890 to investigate the conditions 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 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.

'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.'

This is an admirable tribute to Tchehov, for which all his admirers must be grateful, but it presents Tchehov too much as an isolated phenomenon. Tchehov must be seen in relation to Russian culture, if his English readers are not to see him out of focus. Candour of soul is common in Russian literature. It was the spiritual tradition of Tchehov's great predecessors, no less than intellectual sincerity. Of course in Russia, as elsewhere, vanity and stupidity, conceit and pretentiousness are qualities ever springing up in literature like tares in the corn; but for the two generations before

Tchehov, Russian genius had evolved and responded to the twin ideals of remorseless sincerity and large warmhearted humanity. From Pushkin (1799-1837) to Tchehov (1860-1904) we find these twin ideals animating Pushkin, Gogol, Byelinsky, Aksakov, Grigorevitch, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shtchedrin, Ertel, Korolenko, Garschin, and Gorky. These ideals are to be found underlying the conversations and analyses of character in the works of the leading writers. In Turgenev's novels especially the reader will find 'candour of soul' and 'pureness of heart' in constant evidence; no less were 'respect for human personality,' 'dread of lying and of vanity,' 'development of aesthetic feeling,' the ' ennoblement of the sexual instinct' insisted upon as the chief constituents of the 'true culture' which Tchehov emphasises in his letter to his brother Nikolay. And 'the new humanity' which Mr Murry says Tchehov 'set himself to achieve was nothing new to Russian contemporary thought, though Mr Murry is perfectly right in stressing the 'modernity' of his attitude. In restating and emphasising this creed of humanism Tchehov proved himself a true spiritual descendant of his great literary fore-runners, and their representative successor in the nineties of the last century.

Secondly, Mr Murry has not perhaps quite grasped that among the salt of Tchehov's own generation there were thousands of workers in science, art, and the liberal professions-school-teachers, professors, doctors, students, and land-owners-who also had been saturated in all the disillusions,' and who, like him, 'did not march under any political banner' but did their work with 'pureness of heart,' with complete 'moral and intellectual honesty.' It was to them that Tchehov appealed; it was they whom Tchehov represented both in their aspirations and their disillusionment with politics. The eighties and early nineties which left their imprint on Tchehov's youth and early manhood were a time of discouragement and general disbelief in revolutionary activity. The Nihilist movement of the previous years had collapsed; political reaction under Alexander II was in full swing. Kropotkin, indeed,†

See Tolstoy's 'Letter to the Liberals.'

Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature,' pp. 313, 311.

singles out Tchehov as pre-eminently the painter of 'the disillusioned intellectuals' of the eighties and early nineties, and of the 'breakdown of the Intelligentsia.' 'In the fifties,' he says, 'the intellectuals had at least full hope in their forces; now they had lost even these hopes.' Kropotkin, a revolutionary propagandist himself, criticises Tchehov in a partisan spirit; but it is true that in Tchehov's four plays, 'Ivanov,' 'Uncle Vanya," 'The Three Sisters,' 'The Cherry Orchard,' the moral collapse of the Intelligentsia is threatening, and that this was one of the portents heralding the crash of the régime a generation later. It is true, also, as Mr Murry states, that 'Tchehov submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political indifference'; but it is an exaggeration to style his action 'an act of almost inconceivable courage' in the Russia of the nineties, where the periodical press had long been saturated with polemical attacks on this writer and on that for his 'reactionary' or 'revolutionary' or 'indifferent' attitude. Tchehov's contemporaries, Ertel and Garschin, were equally indifferent to politics. Turgenev himself, for the last twenty years of his life, had lived in a storm of such attacks. Yet as Mr Murry says, Tchehov was a 'saint' and a 'hero' and an example to his contemporaries, though this does not make him a phenomenon in Russian eyes. His unselfishness and purity of spirit, his radiant character, his devotion to his work, his struggle against human stupidity and contemporary lies, unite with his genius and his modesty to make him the most delightful figure of his 'disillusioned' generation.

His

Anton Tchehov, born in 1860 at Taganrog, was the son of an emancipated serf. His father was a very talented man, 'active in all the affairs of the town,' devoted to church singing and violin playing. mother was the daughter of a cloth-merchant of fairly good education, a highly spiritual woman, who instilled into her children a hatred of brutality, and a feeling of regard for all who were in an inferior position, and for birds and animals. As a boy Anton was always writing stories.' By the age of twenty he had seen many kinds of life, earning his living from the age of sixteen, at Taganrog, and paying for his education at the high