The published letters are full of literary criticism; it is always consistent--and in every case exactly the opposite of what you find in this book. Ibsen and Shaw are “very small men--pets of the drawing-room and gods of the hour.” Tolstoi is “not an artist,” and Burns is “gibberish”; Gorki is “not only a peasant, but an anarchist and an advocate of assassination.” Bierce was living in Washington, serving the Hearst newspapers, when Gorki came to America. Bierce had never met him, and really knew nothing about him, but he swallowed with greedy eagerness the propaganda emanating from the Russian embassy in Washington; he writes to Sterling mysterious hints from inside information: “It isn’t merely the woman matter. You’d understand if you were on this side of the country.” All this has become familiar to us with the passage of the years; it is the thing known as hundred percent American boobery. The capitalist system sets up its colossal slander-mills, with a staff of secret agents, forgers and safe-crackers and confidence men, a devil’s crew. The people of course have no conception of this machinery for the manipulating of their minds; and how pitiful to find a haughty intellectual as credulous as the poorest clodhopper! It is one more demonstration of the fact that a modern man who does not understand revolutionary economics is a child wandering in a forest at midnight. There were other factors in the making of Bierce’s irascibility. He describes himself as “an eminent tankard-man,” and he found in San Francisco plenty of people willing to practice art for art’s sake, not troubling themselves or him with hopes for the human race. There is a tale of a riotous crew, resolving to put an end to Christianity by pulling down a cross which stood upon the highway. They tied themselves to the cross with ropes and pulled their hardest, only to sink down exhausted in drunken slumber. I wonder that some Catholic poet does not take this for a piece of symbolism. Maybe it has been done--I admit there are gaps in my knowledge of Catholic poetry! What had this man to give the world, if anything? The answer is: love of truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And therein lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate mass-murder. The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces into the mud. When we see in the chances of battle a son shoot his own father, we may draw the conclusion that all human life is futile, as Bierce wishes us to; or we may elect to draw a different conclusion, and join the League to Outlaw War.