“You will agree with me,” the stranger says, “that the duty of literature is to aid man in understanding himself, to raise his faith in himself, to develop his longing for truth; to combat what is bad in men; to find what is good in them, and to wake up in their souls shame, anger, courage, to do everything, in short, to render men strong in a noble sense of the word, and capable of inspiring their lives with the holy spirit of beauty.” (III, 271.) “It seems to me, we need once more to have dreams, pretty creations of our fancy and visions, because the life we have built up is poor in colour, is dim and dull.... Well, let us try, perhaps imagination will help man to rise for a moment above the earth and find his true place on it, which he has lost.” (245.) But further on Górkiy makes a confession which explains perhaps why he has not yet succeeded in creating a longer character-novel: “I discovered in myself,” he says, “many good feelings and desires--a fair proportion of what is usually called good; but _a feeling which could unify all this_--a well-founded, clear thought, embracing all the phenomena of life--I did not find in myself.” And on reading this, one at once thinks of Turguéneff, who saw in such a “freedom,” in such a unified comprehension of the universe and its life, the first condition for being a great artist. “Can you,” the _Reader_ goes on to ask, “create for men ever so small an illusion that has the power to raise them? No!” “All of you teachers of the day take more than you give, because you speak only about faults--you see only those. But there must also be good qualities in men: you possess some, don’t you?... Don’t you notice that owing to your continual efforts to define and to classify them, the virtues and the vices have been entangled like two balls of black and white thread which have become grey by taking colour from each other?”... “I doubt whether God has sent you on earth. If he had sent messengers, he would have chosen stronger men than you are. He would have lighted in them the fire of a passionate love of life, of truth, of men.” “Nothing but everyday life, everyday life, only everyday people, everyday thoughts and events!” the same pitiless _Reader_ continues. “When will you, then, speak of ‘the rebel spirit,’ of the necessity of a new birth of the spirit? Where is, then, the calling to the creation of a new life? where the lessons of courage? where the words which would give wings to the soul?” “Confess you don’t know how to represent life, so that your pictures of it shall provoke in a man a redemptive spirit of shame and a burning desire of creating new forms of life.... Can you accelerate the pulsation of life? Can you inspire it with energy, as others have done?”