*His play "Die Letzten" was put on at the "Deutsches Theater," Berlin, 6 September 1910. The press despatch says, "The father is a police inspector, drunkard, gambler, briber, bribe-taker, adulterer, and robber." Is it possible that success robbed him of something? He became a popular author in conventional environment, surrounded by books and modern luxuries, living in the pleasant climate of Italy, with no anxiety about his meals and bed. Is it possible that wealth, comfort, independence, and leisure have extinguished his original force? Has he lost something of the picturesque attitude of Gorki the penniless tramp? He is happily still a young man, and perhaps he may yet achieve the masterpiece that ten years ago we so confidently expected from his hands. He is certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of the shoulders or a sceptical smile. He shakes the foundations of our fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as axioms. As the late M. de Vogue remarked, when little children sit on our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our philosophy, we get rid of the bother of it by telling the children to go away and play; but when a Tolstoi puts such questions, we cannot get rid of him so easily. Russian novelists are a thorn in the side of complacent optimism. And yet surely, if life is not so good, as it conceivably might be, it is not so darkly bitter as the Bitter One would have us believe. In a short article that he wrote about one of the playgrounds of America, he betrayed his own incurable jaundice. In the New York "Independent" for 8 August 1907, Gorki published a brilliant impressionistic sketch of Coney Island, and called it "Boredom." Gorki at Coney Island is like Dante at a country fair. Thomas Carlyle was invited out to a social dinner-party once upon a time, and when he came home he wrote savagely in his diary of the flippant, light-hearted conversation among the men and women about the festive board, saying, "to me through those thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat glaring." What a charming guest he must have been on that particular occasion! Gorki speaks poetically in his article of the "fantastic city all of fire" that one sees at night. But as he mingles with the throng, disgust fills his lonely heart. "The public looks at them silently. It breathes in the moist air, and feeds its soul with dismal ennui, which extinguishes thought as a wet, dirty cloth extinguishes the fire of a smouldering coal." Describing the sensations of the crowd before the tiger's cage, he says:--