A revolutionary, inasmuch as he deliberately disowns, in his most characteristic work, all the devices of literature, of rhetoric, of literary architecture, he is at his worst in prolonged narrative, such as Foma Gordyeeff. And when he philosophizes he is long-winded. It is in the short tale with a simple setting that Gorky knows how to stir us. A strip of sea beach, the sky a hot azure, the water green as grass, two or three men and women, and we are given a tragedy in miniature. Or the steppes, sullen and brown, stretch before us to the setting sun; a few tramps talk at random, night falls. Misery huddles close. We have felt the very pulse-beat of life--and such lives! A wretched outcast, starved, wet as a dog in the rain--for he is but a dog in the rain--meets a woman as miserable and as degraded as himself. They manage to steal some mouldy bread, and sleep one night in a cask. It is but the recital of one night. They drift apart in the morning, never to meet again. Why should they care? Drab and monotonous, their soiled lives need be viewed but for a moment to surmise their future. Yet Gorky--for he is his own hero--contrives to sound undertones in this dark music that appeal. Instinctively he lays bare the souls of the men and women he dissects--souls as of muddy flame. A dreary sigh escapes their lips as they drag their poor carcases from place to place. Life has drugged them with sorrow. Why move at all? Why live at all? Why were they born? Why do they die? Existence is reduced to a few primary movements; eat, sleep; if vodka can be secured, then drink it to oblivion, for the sole blessing in this vale of tears is oblivion. It may be seen that, compared to Gorky's rank, unsavoury, but sincere notation of facts, Thomas de Quincey's charming narrative of his youthful woes in Oxford Street--that "stony-hearted mother"--and his walks and talks with Anne, the noctambulist, is an idyll. Gorky transfers to his pages the odours of a starving, sweating humanity, its drunkenness, its explosions of rage, guttural cries of joy, and its all too terrible animalism. We turn our heads the other way when his women curse and rave. Walt Whitman, said Moncure Conway, brought the slop pail into the drawing-room; but for Gorky there is no drawing-room. Life is only a dung heap. For years I have searched for the last word in dramatic naturalism, and in Gorky's Nachtasyl I found it. I heard it first in Berlin at the Kleines Theatre, and later in Vienna at the Deutsches Volkstheatre. Gorky, himself a lycanthrope, pessimist, despiser of his fellow-men, has assembled in this almost indescribable and unspeakable mélange--for it is not a play--a set of men and women whose very lives smell to heaven; the setting recalls one of his stories, Men with Pasts. (It is in Orloff and his Wife.)