ABSTRACT
What an evening of strange sensations! ‘The Sea-Gull’ with its macédoine of empty or wasted or ruined lives, its futile failures and still more futile successes, its jangled nerves, its forlorn lovers, its innocent but cruel egoists, ought to send one away depressed and disheartened. And yet the outcome is just the contrary. One finds oneself in a mood of exaltation, if not of exhilaration. Why? Because one feels the gratification of having gained not a new but a deeper vision of life, and entry into the more recondite secrets of the human heart. And there is a peculiar thrill in the play for any man who has ever practised the metier of writing. Chekhov exhibits in it two distinct literary types. First, the born author, not the master, but the slave of the literary ‘urge’ (if that uncouth Americanism may be pardoned), who is obsessed by the need for expressing his experiences to such a pitch that he lives them in order to express them, and takes out his note-book almost in the act of kissing the woman that takes his wandering fancy. Trigori, if for a moment you consider him as a responsible human being, ruining, as he does, a young life just to make another ‘short story,’ is horrible. But he is horribly true, an exactly analysed ‘case’ of morbid psychology. The actor (Mr. Randolph McLeod) did his best, one is sure, to realize this type, but, somehow, you instinctively felt rather than got yourself logically convinced that the thing wasn't quite right. The author seemed a little conscious of his authorship, and a little awkward in it. You felt that he would have been really more in his element fishing in the lake. Nevertheless, between the dramatist and the actor, you did get nearer to a live author on the stage than you had ever got before, and that is much.
