is
no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive
things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see
what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down
naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is
black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the
same vision of men and women as lost sheep.

We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov
in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the
author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky.
In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches
a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov
is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of
the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story
writer who has yet appeared on the planet.

XX

LADY GREGORY

It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the
Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the
greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer
to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in
comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore,
imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of
Moliere, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and
beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her
contemporaries.

She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr.
G.A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._,
she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which
Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses the
others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more
comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham
has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss
Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class
patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave
of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like
Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea
of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It
is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the l