Creatures That Once Were Men | Page 4

women except in a country which had once been full of slavery and
the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are tricking us
altogether, and are hiding in their current scientific jargon things that
they knew before science or civilization were.
They say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably, that they
are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they describe scenes
which are sickening and dehumanizing in the name of art or in the
name of truth; but it may be that they do it in the name of some deity
indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror before the
beginning of history.
This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly
disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one broad truth in
the matter which may in any case be considered as established. A
country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing
revolution in revolutionists than any country of the type of England or
America. Communities highly civilized and largely urban tend to a
thing which is now called evolution, the most cautious and the most
conservative of all social influences. The loyal Russian obeys the Czar
because he remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance. The disloyal
Russian frets against the Czar because he also remembers the Czar, and
makes a note of the necessity of knifing him. But the loyal Englishman
obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they are there.
Their operation has become to him like daylight, or gravitation, or any
of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are
no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of
England is so complete as to be invisible. The thing which can once get
itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.
Gorky is preeminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not because
most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are not), but
because most Russians--indeed, nearly all Russian-- are in that attitude

of mind which makes revolution possible, and which makes religion
possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a
revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to
believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State.
But in countries that have come under the influence of what is called
the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic righting of wrongs,
and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold) there never will be.
These countries have no revolution, they have to put up with an inferior
and largely fictitious thing which they call progress.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other
Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a
simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a
rebelliousness which we in the West feel to he very new. We cannot in
our graduated and polite civilization quite make head or tail of the
Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the tale
of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the superman. We
hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite certain whether his
protest is the protest of the first anarchist against government, or
whether it is the protest of the last savage against civilization. The
cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has done much to
burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time has left them one thing
which it has not left to the people in Poplar or West Ham.
It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power of seeing the
cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a tramp, a man of the
people, and also a critic, and a bitter one. In the West poor men, when
they become articulate in literature, are always sentimentalists and
nearly always optimists.
It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky writes in
such a story as "Creatures that once were Men" are to the Western mind
children. They have, indeed, been tortured and broken by experience
and sin. But this has only sufficed to make them sad children or
naughty children or bewildered children. They have absolutely no trace
of that quality upon which secure government rests so largely in
Western Europe, the quality of being soothed by long words as if by an
incantation. They do not call hunger "economic pressure"; they call it
hunger. They do not call rich men "examples of capitalistic
concentration," they call them rich men. And this note of plainness and

of something nobly prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky, in some ways
the most modern, and sophisticated of Russian authors, as