AUTUMNAL GORKY
Tales of Two Countries, by Maxim Gorky. [B. W. Huebsch, New York.]
Gorky’s genius was meteoric. It flashed in the nineties for a brief period with an extraordinary brilliance, illuminating a theretofore unknown world of “has beens,” of Nietzschean Bosyaki. Gorky’s genius, we may say, was elemental and local; it revealed a great spontaneous force on the part of the writer in a peculiar atmosphere, on “the bottom” of life, in the realm of care-free vagabonds. As soon as Gorky trespassed his circle he fell into the pit of mediocrity and began to produce second rate plays, sermon-novels, political sketches, and similar writings that may serve as excellent material for the propaganda-lecturer. The present volume may be looked upon as Gorky’s swan-song, if we consider his ill health; in fact he outlived himself long ago as an artist, and in these Tales we witness the hectic flush of the autumn of his career. The exotic beauty of Italy appears under the pen of the Capri invalid in a morbid, consumptive aspect; the author is too self-conscious, too much aware of the fact of his moribund existence to see the intrinsic in life. The tendency to preach socialism further augments his artistic daltonism, which is particularly evident in the Russian Tales. The doomed man casts a weary glance over his distant native land, and he sees there nothing but dismal black, hopeless pettiness and retrogression. The satire is blunt and fails the mark; the allegories are of the vulgar, wood-cut variety. Gorky has been dead for many years.