articulate in literature, are
always sentimentalists and nearly always optimists.

It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky writes in
such a story as this of "Creatures that once were Men" are to the
Western mind children. They have, indeed, been tortured and broken by
experience and sin. But this has only sufficed to make them sad
children or naughty children or bewildered children. They have
absolutely no trace of that quality upon which secure government rests
so largely in Western Europe, the quality of being soothed by long
words as if by an incantation. They do not call hunger "economic
pressure"; they call it hunger. They do not call rich men "examples of
capitalistic concentration," they call them rich men. And this note of
plainness and of something nobly prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky,
the most recent and in some ways the most modern and sophisticated of
Russian authors, as it is of Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of
mind. The very title of this story strikes the note of this sudden and
simple vision. The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily
Telegraph says, of men living in a slum, that "their degeneration is of
such a kind as almost to pass the limits of the semblance of humanity,"
and we read the whole thing with a tepid assent as we should read
phrases about the virtues of Queen Victoria or the dignity of the House
of Commons. The Russian novelist, when he describes a dosshouse, says,
"Creatures that once were Men." And we are arrested, and regard the
facts as a kind of terrible fairy tale. This story is a test case of
the Russian manner, for it is in itself a study of decay, a study of
failure, and a study of old age. And yet the author is forced to write
even of staleness freshly; and though he is treating of the world as
seen by eyes darkened or blood-shot with evil experience, his own eyes
look out upon the scene with a clarity that is almost babyish. Through
all runs that curious Russian sense that every man is only a man,
which, if the Russians ever are a democracy, will make them the most
democratic democracy that the world has ever seen. Take this passage,
for instance, from the austere conclusion of "Creatures that once were
Men."

Petunikoff smiled the smile of the conqueror and went back into the
dosshouse, but suddenly he stopped and trembled. At the door facing
him stood an old man with a stick in his hand and a large bag on his
back, a ho