Górkiy is a great artist; he is a poet; but he is also a child of all that long series of folk-novelists whom Russia has had for the last half century, and he has utilised their experience: he has found at last that happy combination of realism with idealism for which the Russian folk-novelists have been striving for so many years. Ryeshétnikoff and his school had tried to write novels of an ultra-realistic character without any trace of idealisation. They restrained themselves whenever they felt inclined to generalise, to create, to idealise. They tried to write mere diaries, in which events, great and small, important and insignificant, were related with an equal exactitude, without even changing the tone of the narrative. We have seen that in this way, by dint of their talent, they were able to obtain the most poignant effects; but like the historian who vainly tries to be “impartial,” yet always remains a party man, they had not avoided the idealisation which they so much dreaded. They could not avoid it. A work of art is always personal; do what he may, the author’s sympathies will necessarily appear in his creation, and he will always idealise those who answer to them. Grigórovitch and Márko Vovtchók had idealised the all-pardoning patience and the all-enduring submissiveness of the Russian peasant; and Ryeshétnikoff had quite unconsciously, and maybe against his will, idealised the almost supernatural powers of endurance which he had seen in the Uráls and in the slums of St. Petersburg. Both had idealised something: the ultra-realist as well as the romantic. Górkiy must have understood the significance of this; at all events he does not object in the least to a certain idealisation. In his adherence to truth he is as much of a realist as Ryeshétnikoff; but he idealises in the same sense as Turguéneff did when he pictured Rúdin, Helen, or Bazároff. He even says that we _must_ idealise, and he chooses for idealisation the type he admired most among those tramps whom he knew--the rebel. This made his success; it appeared to be exactly what the readers of all nations were unconsciously calling for as a relief from the dull mediocrity and absence of strong individuality all about them. * * * * * The stratum of society from which Górkiy took the heroes of his first short stories--and in short stories he appears at his best--is that of the tramps of Southern Russia: men who have broken with regular society, who never accept the yoke of permanent work, labouring only as long as they want to, as “casuals” in the sea-ports on the Black Sea; who sleep in doss-houses or in ravines on the outskirts of the cities, and tramp in the summer from Odessa to the Crimea, and from the Crimea to the prairies of Northern Caucasia, where they are always welcome at harvest time.