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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.
Yet she went away next day, and he never saw her again. No story is told, nothing is finished. Ah, but surely the story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us. Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism. But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev.
"Write this," he says to his biographer, "write this without changing a single word: It is Korolenko who taught Gorky to write, and if Gorky has profited but little by the teaching of Korolenko, it is the fault of Gorky alone. Write: Gorky's first teacher was the soldier-cook Smoury; his second teacher was the lawyer Lanine; the third, Alexander Kalouzhny, an 'ex-man; the fourth, Korolenko...."
In such living Russian writers as I have read, in Kuprin, Gorky, and others, I still see and welcome this peculiar quality of rendering life through but not veiled by the author's temperament; so that the effect is almost as if no ink were used.
I already hate the names of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Symons, Maeterlinck, and Gorky. I am only waiting for them to discover Max Klinger and Manet " "Klinger?" asked Stone. "Where have I heard that name?" "He is the great unconscious humorist of modern art, also a great etcher," said Isabel, dryly. "Have you ever heard of the Secessionists?" "Of course," replied Stone, huffily.
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.
But Alexander Kuprin does not depict adepts of the "religion of pity," nor the psychology of the abnormal, the "pathological case," so curious and rare, and so dear to the author of "Crime and Punishment." He does not reincarnate the sad genius of Korolenko. He is equally separated from Tolstoy and Gorky. He is himself.
It's very hard to write in Yalta, by the way: I am interrupted, and I feel as though I had no object in writing; what I wrote yesterday I don't like to-day.... Well, take care of yourself. My humblest greetings to Olga Leonardovna, to Vishnevsky, and all the rest of them too. If Gorky is in Moscow, tell him that I have sent a letter to him in Nizhni-Novgorod. YALTA, October 16, 1900.
The student had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose. The Russian people could never have changed could they ever be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or take new form?
It was a conversation of the peasants about religion and government. But there is no need to send that chapter to Paris, as indeed there was no need to translate "Peasants" into French at all. I thank you most sincerely for the photograph; Ryepin's illustration is an honour I had not expected or dreamed of. In your letter you speak of Gorky: how do you like Gorky?
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