e also remembers the
Czar, and makes a note of the necessity of knifing him. But the loyal
Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they
are there. Their operation has become to him like daylight, or
gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal
Englishmen; there are no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic
management of England is so complete as to be invisible. The thing
which can once get itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.

Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not
because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are
not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all Russians--are in
that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible and which makes
religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To
be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is
necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe
or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of
what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic
righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold)
there never will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to
put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which they call
progress.

The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other
Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a
simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a
rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new. We cannot in
our graduated and polite civilisation quite make head or tail of the
Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the
tale of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the
superman. We hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite
certain whether his protest is the protest of the first anarchist
against government, or whether it is the protest of the last savage
against civilisation. The cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or
necessity has done much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but
time has left them one thing which it has not left to the people in
Poplar or West Ham. It has left them, apparently, the clear and
childlike power of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is
a tramp, a man of the people, and also a critic and a bitter one. In
the West poor men, when they become