Some of Górkiy’s tramps are, of course, philosophers. They think about human life, and have had opportunities to know what it is. “Everyone,” he remarks somewhere, “who has had a struggle to sustain in his life, and has been defeated by life, and now feels cruelly imprisoned amidst its squalor, is more of a philosopher than Schopenhauer himself; for abstract thought can never be cast into such a correct and vivid plastic form as that in which is expressed the thought born directly out of suffering.” (I, p. 31.) “The knowledge of life among such men is striking,” he says again. Love of nature is, of course, another characteristic feature of the tramp--“Konováloff loved nature with a deep, inarticulate love, which was betrayed only by a glitter in his eyes. Every time he was in the fields, or on the river bank, he became permeated with a sort of peace and love which made him still more like a child. Sometimes he would exclaim looking at the sky: ‘Good!’ and in this exclamation there was more sense and feeling than in the rhetoric of many poets.... Like all the rest, poetry loses its holy simplicity and spontaneity when it becomes a profession.” (I, 33-4.) However, Górkiy’s rebel-tramp is not a Nitzscheite who ignores everything beyond his narrow egotism, or imagines himself a “man”; the “diseased ambition” of “an intellectual” is required to create the true Nitzscheite type. In Górkiy’s tramps, as in his women of the lowest class, there are flashes of greatness of character and a simplicity which is incompatible with the super-man’s self-conceit. He does not idealise them so as to make of them real heroes; that would be too untrue to life: the tramp is still a defeated being. But he shows how among these men, owing to an inner consciousness of strength, there are moments of greatness, even though that inner force be not strong enough to make out of Orlóff (in _The Orlóffs_) or Iliyá (in _The Three_) a real power, a real hero--the man who fights against those much stronger than himself. He seems to say: Why are not you, intellectuals, as truly “individual,” as frankly rebellious against the Society you criticise, and as strong as some of these submerged ones are?