A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a genius for consolation--a genius for stretching out a hand to his floundering fellow-mortals--it was Tchehov. He was as active in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude to Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of the _Novoe Vremya_, he wrote: The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic--they are going towards something and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects--the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects--God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you. If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.