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very beautifully important when the right temperament is there - but Chekhov does not mind because his temperament is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness.

p 252-253

Chekhov managed to convey and impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail, the fade-out of human life - all the peculiar Chekhovian features - are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly

83

iridescent verbal haziness.

p 253

Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous ability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything - a good man who cannot make good.

p 253

What mattered was that this typical