erved
for him to write the poem of vagrancy.

His preference is for the short story. In seven years, he has written
thirty, contained in three volumes, which in their expressive brevity
sometimes recall Maupassant.

The plot is of the simplest. Sometimes, there are only two personages:
an old beggar and his grandson, two workmen, a tramp and a Jew, a
baker's boy and his assistant, two companions in misery.

The interest of these stories does not lie in the unraveling of an
intricate plot. They are rather fragments of life, bits of biography
covering some particular period, without reaching the limits of a real
drama. And these are no more artificially combined than are the events
of real life.

Everything that he relates, Gorky has seen. Every landscape that he
describes has been seen by him in the course of his adventurous
existence. Each detail of this scenery is fraught for him with some
remembrance of distress or suffering. This vagrant life has been his
own. These tramps have been his companions, he has loved or hated
them. Therefore his work is alive with what he has almost
unconsciously put in of himself. At the same time, he knows how to
separate himself from his work; the characters introduced live their
own lives, independent of his, having their own characters and their
own individual way of reacting against the common misery. No writer
has to a greater degree the gift of objectivity, while at the same time
freely introducing himself into his work.

Therefore, his tramps are strikingly truthful. He does not idealise
them; the sympathy that their strength, courage, and independence
inspire in him does not blind him. He conceals neither their faults,
vices, drunkenness nor boastfulness. He is without indulgence for
them, and judges them discriminatingly. He paints reality, but
without, for all that, exaggerating ugliness. He does not avoid
painful or coarse scenes; but in the most cynical passages he does not
revolt because it is felt that he only desires to be truthful, and not
to excite the emotions by cheap means. He simply points out that
things are as they are, that there is nothing to be done about it, that
they depend upon immutable laws. Accordingly all those sad, even
horrible spectacles are accepted as life itself. To Gorky, the
spectacle presented by these characters is only natural: he has seen
them shaken by passion as the waves by the wind, and a smile pass over
their sou