Tchekov has written in all eleven plays, out of which six are farces in one act, and five are serious dramas. The farces, though sometimes very funny, are not important; it is in his serious dramatic work that Tchekov really found himself, and gave to the world something new and entirely original. The originality of Tchekov’s plays is not that they are realistic. Other dramatists--many Frenchmen, for instance--have written interesting and dramatic plays dealing with poignant situations, happening to real people in real life. Tchekov’s discovery is this, that real life, as we see it every day, can be made just as interesting on the stage as the catastrophes or the difficulties which are more or less exceptional, but which are chosen by dramatists as their material because they are dramatic. Tchekov discovered that it is not necessary for real life to be dramatic in order to be interesting. Or rather that ordinary everyday life is as dramatic on the stage, if by dramatic one means interesting, as extraordinary life. He perceived that things which happen to us every day, which interest us, and affect us keenly, but which we would never dream of thinking or of calling dramatic when they occur, may be made as interesting on the stage as the most far-fetched situations, or the most terrific crises. For instance, it may affect us keenly to leave for ever a house where we have lived for many years. It may touch us to the quick to see certain friends off at a railway station. But we do not call these things dramatic. They are not dramatic, but they are human. Tchekov has realised this, and has put them on the stage. He has managed to send over the footlights certain feelings, moods, and sensations, which we experience constantly, and out of which our life is built. He has managed to make the departure of certain people from a certain place, and the staying on of certain others in the same place, as interesting behind the footlights as the tragic histories of Œdipus or Othello, and a great deal more interesting than the complicated struggles and problems in which the characters of a certain school of modern dramatists are enmeshed. Life as a whole never presents itself to us as a definite mathematical problem, which needs immediate solution, but is rather composed of a thousand nothings, which together make something vitally important. Tchekov has understood this, and given us glimpses of these nothings, and made whole plays out of these nothings.