believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use
again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different
string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a
sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of
aesthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision,
but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life
which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to
represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and
completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of
whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and
argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest
story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout,
and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is
reinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows
alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand
roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too
harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a
sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not
while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much
significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote
village shop:--

'"How much are these cakes?'

'"Two for a farthing.'

'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before
by the Jewess and asked him:--

'"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'

'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all
sides, and raised one eyebrow.

'"Like that?' he asked.

'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--

'"Two for three farthings...."'

It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a
stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles,
infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately
sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every
pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the
real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a
secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have
explored and mastered it Tcheh