That eternal complaint about poverty and bad luck, that helplessness and hopelessness which were the dominant notes with the early folk-novelists, are totally absent from Górkiy’s stories. His tramps do not complain. “Everything is all right,” one of them says; “no use to whine and complain--that would do no good. Live and endure till you are broken down, or if you are so already--wait for death. This is all the wisdom in the world--do you understand?” Far from his whining and complaining about the hard lot of his tramps, a refreshing note of energy and courage, which is quite unique in Russian literature, sounds through the stories of Górkiy. His tramps are miserably poor, but they “don’t care.” They drink, but there is nothing among them nearly approaching the dark drunkenness of despair which we saw in Levítoff. Even the most “down-trodden” one of them--far from making a virtue of his helplessness, as Dostoyévskiy’s heroes always did--dreams of reforming the world and making it rich. He dreams of the moment when “we, once ‘the poor,’ shall vanish, after having enriched the Crœsuses with the richness of the spirit and the power of life.” (_A Mistake_, I, 170.) Górkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear that self-castigation in which other Russian writers so much delight: which Turguéneff’s sub-Hamlets used to express so poetically, of which Dostoyévskiy has made a virtue, and of which Russia offers such an infinite variety of examples. Górkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men. Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who gnaw all the time at their own hearts, compel others to drink with them in order to perorate before them about their “burning souls”; those beings, “full of compassion” which, however, never goes beyond self-commiseration, and “full of love” which is never anything but self-love. Górkiy knows only too well these men who never fail to wantonly ruin the lives of those women who trust them; who do not even stop at murder, like Raskólnikoff, or the brothers Karamázoff, and yet whine about the circumstances which have brought them to it. “What’s all this talk about circumstances!” he makes Old Izerghil say. “Everyone makes his own circumstances! I see all sorts of men--but the strong ones--where are they? There are fewer and fewer noble men!” Knowing how much the Russian “intellectuals” suffer from this disease of whining, knowing how rare among them are the aggressive idealists, the real _rebels_, and how numerous on the other hand are the Nezhdánoffs (Turguéneff’s _Virgin Soil_), even among those “politicals” who march with resignation to Siberia, Górkiy does not take his types from among “the intellectuals,” for he thinks that they too easily become “the prisoners of life.”