Gorki was read before the lecture.

About fifteen years ago, in Paris, Charles Peguy, myself, and a few
others, used to meet in a little ground-floor shop in the rue de la
Sorbonne. We had just founded the "Cahiers de la Quinzaine." Our
editorial office was poorly furnished, neat and clean; the walls were
lined with books. A photograph was the only ornament. It showed Tolstoy
and Gorki standing side by side in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. How
had Peguy got hold of it? I do not know, but he had had several
reproductions made, and each of us had on his desk the picture of these
two distant comrades. Under their eyes part of _Jean Christophe_ was
written.

One of the two men, the veteran apostle, has gone, on the eve of the
European catastrophe whose coming he foretold and in which his voice has
been so greatly needed. The other, Maxim Gorki, is at his post, and his
free-spirited utterances help to console us for Tolstoy's silence.

Gorki has not proved one of those who succumbed to the vertigo of
events. Amid the distressing spectacle of the thousands of writers,
artists, and thinkers who, within a few days, laid down their role as
guides and defenders of the masses, to follow the maddened herds, to
drive these herds yet more crazy by their own cries, to hasten the rush
into the abyss, Maxim Gorki was one of the rare exceptions, one of those
whose reason and whose love of humanity remained unshaken. He dared to
speak on behalf of the persecuted, on behalf of the gagged and enslaved
masses. This great artist, who shared for so long the life of the
unfortunate, of the humble, of the victims, of the outcasts of society,
has never denied his sometime companions. Having become famous, he turns
back to them, throwing the powerful light of his art into the dark
places where wretchedness and social injustice are hidden away. His
generous soul has known suffering; he does not close his eyes to the
sufferings of others.

Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco....

Consequently, in these days of trial (trial which we greet, because it
has taught us to take stock of ourselves, to estimate the true value of
hearts and of thoughts), in these days when freedom of the spirit is
everywhere oppressed, we must cry aloud our homage to Maxim Gorki.
Across the battlefields, across the trenches, across a bleeding Europe,
we stretch forth our hands to him. Henceforward, in face of the hatred
which rages among the nations, we mu