agely 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 aesthetic 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 indifferen