rious fronts. Here, in the centre, the revolution
was an established fact. People had ceased to
wonder when it would end, were settling into
their places in the new social order, and took their
pleasures not as if they were plucking flowers on
their way to execution, but in the ordinary routine
of life.

The play is well known, a drama of bourgeois
society in a small country place. A poor land-
owner scraping money for an elder brother in the
town, realizing at last that the brother was not the
genius for whom such sacrifice was worth while;
a doctor with a love for forestry and dreams of
the future; the old mock-genius's young wife; his
sister; his adoring mother; the old nurse and the
ancient dependent adopted, as it were, with the
estate; all these people in their own way make
each other suffer. Chekhov's irony places before
us wasted lives, hopelessness, exaggerated interest
in personalities, vain strugglings after some better
outlet for the expression of selves not worth ex-
pressing.

That play, acted to-day, seemed as remote as a
play of the old régime in France would have

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