Maxim Gorki | Page 7

regulate his life, and is the leader and boon companion of a strange band. His best friend is a derelict schoolmaster, who earns a very fair income as a newspaper reporter. But what is money to a man of this type? He sallies forth, buys fruit and sweetmeats and good food with half his earnings, collects all the children of the alley in which Kuvalda's refuge is situated, and treats them down by the river with these delicacies. He lends the best part of his remaining funds to his friends, and the rest goes in vodka and his keep at the doss-house.
Other wastrels of the same type lodge with Kuvalda. They are all men who have been something. And so Gorki calls them Bivshiye lyudi, which may be literally translated "the Men Who Have Been" ("Creatures that once were Men ").
To our taste the story is too discursive and long-winded. The prolonged introductory descriptions, the too exact and minute particularities of external detail, especially in regard to persons, destroy the sharp edge of the impression, and obliterate its characteristics. It would have been clearer with fewer words. Honesty bids us recognise a certain incapacity for self-restraint in Gorki.
This, however, is a trifle compared with the vivid, impersonal descriptions of the conduct of the derelicts--illuminated by the heroic deed of Kuvalda, as by an unquenchable star. Kuvalda loses his mainstay when his comrade, the schoolmaster, dies. He is enraged at the brutal treatment meted out to him and to the other inhabitants of the slum by the Officials of the City and the Government. He embroils himself with ill-concealed purpose with his deadly enemy the merchant Petunikov and insults the police. His object is gained. He is beaten, and led away to prison.
Unfortunately Gorki endows his characters with too elevated a philosophy. He pours his own wine into their bottles. Vagabonds and tramps do often indeed possess a profound knowledge of life peculiar to themselves, and a store of worldly wisdom. But they express it more unconsciously, more instinctively, less sentimentally, than Gorki.
From the artistic point of view this ground-note of pathos is an abiding defect in Gorki. He is lacking in the limpid clarity of sheer light-heartedness. Humour he has indeed. But his humour is bitter as gall, and corrosive as sulphuric acid. "Kain and Artem" may be cited as an instance.
Kain is a poor little Jewish pedlar. Artem, the handsome, strong, but corrupt lover of the huckstress, is tended by him when he has been half-killed by envious and revengeful rivals. In return for this nursing, and for his rescue from need and misery, Artem protects the despised and persecuted Kain. But he has grown weary of gratitude--gratitude to the weak being ever a burden to strong men. And the lion drives away the imploring mouse, that saved him once from the nets that held him captive--and falls asleep smiling.
[Illustration: The bare-footed brigade on the Volga-quay, and Nijni Novgorod (After a sketch by Gorki)]
This sombre temperament determines the catastrophe of the other stories. They almost invariably close in the sullen gloom of a wet March evening, when we wonder afresh if the Spring is really coming.
In "Creatures that once were Men," Gorki's sinister experience and pathos are essential factors in the accusing symbolism. He relates in the unpretending style of a chronicler how the corpulent citizens reside on the hill-tops, amid well-tended gardens. When it rains the whole refuse of the upper town streams into the slums.

The new romance; Sentiment and humour; Russian middle class; The man of the future; Descriptions of nature; Superfluity of detail; The Russian proletaire; Psychology of murder; Artistic inaccuracy; Moujik and outcast; A poet's idealism.
And yet it is just this sombre pathos and experience that compel us so often to recognise in Gorki's types a new category of hero. They are characterised by their sense of boundless freedom. They have both inclination and capacity to abandon and fling aside all familiar customs, duties, and relations.
It is a world of heroes, of most romantic heroes, that Gorki delineates for us. But the romance is not after the recipes of the old novelists: ancient, mystic, seeking its ideals in the remote past. This is living, actual romance. Even though some of Gorki's heroes founder like the heroes of bygone epochs of literature upon their weakness, more of the "Bitter One's" characters are shipwrecked on a deed.
And it is this reckless parade and apotheosis of such men of action that accounts for Gorki's huge success in comparison with many another, and with the writers of the preceding generation. It is for this that the young minds of his native country rally round him--the country that is loaded with clanking fetters.
Gorki is dominated by a characteristic passion for strong, abnormal men. This type reappears in almost all his