But that power, that force does not last. Orlóff says somewhere that “he is torn in all directions at once,” and that his fate is to be--not a fighter of giants, but merely a tramp. And so he ends. Górkiy is too great an artist to make of him a giant-killer. It is the same with Iliyá in _The Three_. This is a powerful type, and one feels inclined to ask, Why did not Górkiy make him begin a new life under the influence of those young propagandists of socialism whom he meets? Why should he not die, let us say, in one of those encounters between workingmen on strike and soldiers which took place in Russia precisely at the time Górkiy was finishing this novel? But here, too, Górkiy’s reply probably would be that such things do not happen in real life. Men, like Iliyá, who dream only of the “clean life of a merchant,” do not join in labour movements. And he preferred to give a very disappointing end to his hero--to make him appear miserable and small in his attack upon the wife of the police-officer, so as to turn the reader’s sympathies towards even this woman--rather than to make of Iliyá a prominent figure in a strike-conflict. If it had been possible to idealise Iliyá so much, without over-straining the permissible limits of idealisation, Górkiy probably would have done it, because he is entirely in favour of idealisation in realistic art; but this would have been pure romanticism. Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity of an ideal in the work of the novel-writer. “The cause of the present opinion (in Russian Society) is,” he says, “the neglect of idealism. Those who have exiled from life all romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us quite naked: this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so disgusted with one another.” (_A Mistake_, I. 151.) And in _The Reader_ (1898), he develops his æsthetic canons in full. He tells how one of his earliest productions, on its appearance in print, is read one night before a circle of friends. He receives many compliments for it, and after leaving the house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling for the first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a person unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those present at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk about the duties of the author.