At first sight one is tempted to say that there is no action in the plays of Tchekov. But on closer study one realises that the action is there, but it is not the kind usually sought after and employed by men who write for the stage. Tchekov is, of course, not the first dramatic writer who has realised that the action which consisted in violent things happening to violent people is not a whit more interesting, perhaps a great deal less interesting, than the changes and the vicissitudes which happen spiritually in the soul of man. Molière knew this, for _Le Misanthrope_ is a play in which nothing in the ordinary sense happens. Rostand’s _L’Aiglon_ is a play where nothing in the ordinary sense happens.[28] But in these plays in the extraordinary sense everything happens. A violent drama occurs in the soul of the Misanthrope, and likewise in that of the Duke of Reichstadt. So it is in Tchekov’s plays. He shows us the changes, the revolutions, the vicissitudes, the tragedies, the comedies, the struggles, the conflicts, the catastrophes, that happen in the souls of men, but he goes a step further than other dramatists in the way in which he shows us these things. He shows us these things as we ourselves perceive or guess them in real life, without the help of poetic soliloquies or monologues, without the help of a Greek chorus or a worldly _raisonneur_, and without the aid of startling events which strip people of their masks. He shows us bits of the everyday life of human beings as we see it, and his pictures of ordinary human beings, rooted in certain circumstances, and engaged in certain avocations, reveal to us further glimpses of the life that is going on inside these people. The older dramatists, even when they deal exclusively with the inner life of man, without the aid of any outside action, allow their creations to take off their masks and lay bare their very inmost souls to us. Tchekov’s characters never, of their own accord, take off their masks for the benefit of the audience, but they retain them in exactly the same degree as people retain them in real life; that is to say, we sometimes guess by a word, a phrase, a gesture, the humming of a tune, or the smelling of a flower, what is going on behind the mask; at other times we see the mask momentarily torn off by an outbreak of inward passion, but never by any pressure of an outside and artificial machinery, never owing to the necessity of a situation, the demands of a plot, or the exigencies of a problem; in fact, never by any forces which are not those of life itself. In Tchekov’s plays, as in real life, to use Meredith’s phrase, “Passions spin the plot”; he shows us the delicate webs that reach from soul to soul across the trivial incidents of every day.