Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title of _Chelkash_ is Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, his _Twenty-Six of Us and One Other_. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a “gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that a “god” has died, they go back to work. _Chelkash_, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a careful brush and a sureness of his subject. In _The Steppe_ he does the same. _A Rolling Stone_, and _Chums_, the last the best story in the volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it is in stories like _One Autumn Night_, _Comrades_, _The Green Kitten_, and _Her Lover_ that Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason he cannot write them. _One Autumn Night_ might have been one of the world’s strongest classics.