hen she looked upon Foma with the
look of the Mother-Woman. She might have been a power for good in his
life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety and
honour and understanding. Yet she went away next day, and he never saw
her again. No story is told, nothing is finished.

Ah, but surely the story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished,
as lives are being finished each day around us. Besides, it is the way
of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism. But it is a less
tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev. It lives and breathes
from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain.
Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear
it royally.

Even so, but so helpless, hopeless, terrible is this life of Foma
Gordyeeff that we would be filled with profound sorrow for Gorky did we
not know that he has come up out of the Valley of Shadow. That he hopes,
we know, else would he not now be festering in a Russian prison because
he is brave enough to live the hope he feels. He knows life, why and how
it should be lived. And in conclusion, this one thing is manifest: Foma
Gordyeeff is no mere statement of an intellectual problem. For as he
lived and interrogated living, so in sweat and blood and travail has
Gorky lived.

PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
_November_ 1901.

THESE BONES SHALL RISE AGAIN

Rudyard Kipling, "prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals
and idol of the unelect"--as a Chicago critic chortles--is dead. It is
true. He is dead, dead and buried. And a fluttering, chirping host of
men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut
leaves of _Kim_, wrapped him in _Stalky & Co._, for winding sheet, and
for headstone reared his unconventional lines, _The Lesson_. It was very
easy. The simplest thing in the world. And the fluttering, chirping
gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not
do it long ago, it was so very, very simple.

But the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen
are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter. And
when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century to
find what manner of century it was--to find, not what the people of the
nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought,
not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did