With two classes I have no sympathy: writers who pander to morbid, dirty tastes, and readers who support gruesome, nasty writers for pure love of noisome pestilence. No more do we have need for the not-impure and not-revolting yet depressing and pessimistic fiction which serves no good purpose beyond that of producing revenue. The place for such unpleasant, unhappy-beginning, tearful-middle, and sorrowful-ending stories is precisely nowhere. But in Gorki we have a queer contradiction of conditions: some of his most revolting fiction is as important to the Muscovite land which bred it as light is vital to a dark place. Yet when some one of these poignant, dreadful diagnoses of Russian sicknesses is translated and spread abroad, say in English, it should be read only by those who are students of the writer and his country, and not by the young or the morbid. It is needful to expose ulcers in a clinic, it is indecent and disgusting to parade them on the street. In a word: the horrible in fiction needs be justified by a high purpose. In “The Exorcism,” a thousand-word sketch, Gorki has produced a terrible illustration of how worse than useless such material may be for purposes of general reading in translation, while originally serving a tremendous moral purpose by showing his own people what beasts some of their fellows are. Along a village street a strange procession is moving slowly with wild howls. The dense, wave-like crowd surrounds a cart. Tied by her wrists to a rope attached to the cart is a slight, almost girlish woman--entirely nude. Dazed, halting, gazing into nothing with wide, lacklustre look, she staggers bleeding on. Now and again a tall peasant standing in the cart, his white canine teeth showing, his eyes bloodshot from fury, lays a lash upon the woman’s body, already covered with unspeakable slashes and bruises. And every fiendish brutality--detailed and repeated until the soul sickens--the men, women, and children of the mob acclaim! “This,” he concludes, “which I have written above, is not an allegorical description of the persecution and torture of a prophet, who has no honor in his own country--no, unfortunately, it is not that! It is called an ‘exorcism.’ Thus do husbands punish their wives for infidelity; this is a picture from life, a custom--and I beheld it in the year 1891, on the 15th of July, in the village of Kandybovko, Government of Kherson.” Need I say that I have toned down the horror of this presentment, and that I relate it, horrible still, to show the very futility of such pictures _as_ pictures, and their very great worth, _to those concerned_, as pleas for reform?