I shall never forget the performance of "The Night Asylum, Nachtasyl," which I saw acted in Munich by one of the best stock companies in the world, a combination of players from the "Neues" and "Kleines" theaters in Berlin. In reading this utterly formless and incoherent drama, I had been only slightly affected; but when it was presented on the stage by actors who intelligently incarnated every single character, the thing took on a terrible intensity. The persons are all, except old Luka, who talks like a man in one of Tolstoi's recent parables, dehumanised. The woman dying of consumption before our eyes, the Baron in an advanced stage of paresis who continually rolls imaginary cigarettes between his weak fingers, and the alcoholic actor who has lost his memory are impossible to forget. I can hear that actor now, as with stupid fascination he continually repeats the diagnosis a physician once made of his case: "Mein Organismus ist durch und durch mit Alcool vergiftet!" Gorki, in spite of his zeal for the revolutionary cause, has no remedy for the disease he calls Life. He is eaten up with rage at the world in general, and tries to make us all share his disgust with it. But he teaches us nothing; he has little to say that we can transmute into anything valuable. This is perhaps the reason why the world has temporarily, at any rate, lost interest in him. He was a new sensation, he shocked us, and gave us strange thrills, after the manner of new and unexpected sensations. Gorki came up on the literary horizon like an evil storm, darkening the sky, casting an awful shadow across the world's mirth and laughter, and making us shudder in the cold and gloom.. Gorki completely satisfied that strange but almost universal desire of well-fed and comfortable people to go slumming. In his books men and women in fortunate circumstances had their curiosity satisfied--all the world went slumming, with no discomfort, no expense, and no fear of contagion. With no trouble at all, no personal inconvenience, we learned the worst of all possible worsts on this puzzling and interesting planet. But we soon had enough of it, and our experienced and professional guide failed to perceive the fact. He showed us more of the same thing, and then some more. Such sights and sounds--authentic visions and echoes of hell--merely repeated, began to lose their uncanny fascination. The man who excited us became a bore. For the worst thing about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety and complexity. His passion for mere effect has reacted unfavourably on himself.*