I have never seen anything on the stage so poignantly melancholy as this last scene. In this play, as well as in others, Tchekov, by the way he presents you certain fragments of people’s lives, manages to open a window on the whole of their life. In this play of _Three Sisters_ we get four glimpses. A birthday party in the first act; an ordinary evening in the second act; in the third act a night of excitement owing to a fire in the town, and it is on this night that the love affair of Vershinin and Masha culminates in a crisis; and in the fourth act the departure of the regiment. Yet these four fragments give us an insight, and open a window on to the whole life of these people, and, in fact, on to the lives of many thousand people who have led this life in Russia. Tchekov’s plays are as interesting to read as the work of any first-rate novelist. But in reading them, it is impossible to guess how effective they are on the stage, the delicate succession of subtle shades and half-tones, of hints, of which they are composed, the evocation of certain moods and feelings which it is impossible to define,--all this one would think would disappear in the glare of the footlights, but the result is exactly the reverse. Tchekov’s plays are a thousand times more interesting to see on the stage than they are to read. A thousand effects which the reader does not suspect make themselves felt on the boards. The reason of this is that Tchekov’s plays realise Goethe’s definition of what plays should be. “Everything in a play,” Goethe said, “should be symbolical, and should lead to something else.” By symbolical, of course, he meant morally symbolical,--he did not mean that the play should be full of enigmatic puzzles, but that every event in it should have a meaning and cast a shadow larger than itself.