Love of nature is, of course, another characteristic feature of the tramp—“Konováloff loved nature with a deep, inarticulate love, which was betrayed only by a glitter in his eyes. Every time he was in the fields, or on the river bank, he became permeated with a sort of peace and love which made him still more like a child. Sometimes he would exclaim looking at the sky: ‘Good!’ and in this exclamation there was more sense and feeling than in the rhetoric of many poets.... Like all the rest, poetry loses its holy simplicity and spontaneity when it becomes a profession.” (I, 33-4.)
However, Górkiy’s rebel-tramp is not a Nitzscheite who ignores everything beyond his narrow egotism, or imagines himself a “man”; the “diseased ambition” of “an intellectual” is required to create the true Nitzscheite type. In Górkiy’s tramps, as in his women of the lowest class, there are flashes of greatness of character and a simplicity which is incompatible with the super-man’s self-conceit. He does not idealise them so as to make of them real heroes; that would be too untrue to life: the tramp is still a defeated being. But he shows how among these men, owing to an inner consciousness of strength, there are moments of greatness, even though that inner force be not strong enough to make out of Orlóff (in The Orlóffs) or Iliyá (in The Three) a real power, a real hero—the man who fights against those much stronger than himself. He seems to say: Why are not you, intellectuals, as truly “individual,” as frankly rebellious against the Society you criticise, and as strong as some of these submerged ones are?
In his short stories Górkiy is great; but like his two contemporaries, Korolénko and Tchéhoff, whenever he has tried to write a longer novel, with a full development of characters, he has not succeeded. Taken as a whole, Fomá Gordéeff, notwithstanding several beautiful and deeply impressive scenes, is weaker than most of Górkiy’s short stories; and while the first portion of The Three—the idyllic life of the three young people, and the tragical issues foreshadowed in it—makes us expect to find in this novel one of the finest productions in Russian literature—its end is disappointing. The French translator of The Three has even preferred to terminate it abruptly, at the point where Iliyá stands on the grave of the man whom he has killed, rather than to give Górkiy’s end of the novel.
Why Górkiy should fail in this direction is, of course, too delicate and too difficult a question to answer. One cause, however, may be suggested. Górkiy, like Tolstóy, is too honest an artist to “invent” an end which the real lives of his heroes do not suggest to him, although that end might have been very picturesque; and the class of men whom he so admirably depicts is not possessed of that consistency and that “oneness” which are necessary to render a work of art perfect and to give it that final accord without which it is never complete.
Take, for instance, Orlóff in The Orlóffs. “My soul burns within me,” he says. “I want space, to give full swing to my strength. I feel within me an indomitable force! If the cholera, let us say, could become a man, a giant—were it Iliyá Múromets himself—I would meet it! ‘Let it be a struggle to the death,’ I would say; ‘you are a force, and I, Gríshka Orlóff, am a force, too: let us see which is the better!’”
But that power, that force does not last. Orlóff says somewhere that “he is torn in all directions at once,” and that his fate is to be—not a fighter of giants, but merely a tramp. And so he ends. Górkiy is too great an artist to make of him a giant-killer. It is the same with Iliyá in The Three. This is a powerful type, and one feels inclined to ask, Why did not Górkiy make him begin a new life under the influence of those young propagandists of socialism whom he meets? Why should he not die, let us say, in one of those encounters between workingmen on strike and soldiers which took place in Russia precisely at the time Górkiy was finishing this novel? But here, too, Górkiy’s reply probably would be that such things do not happen in real life. Men, like Iliyá, who dream only of the “clean life of a merchant,” do not join in labour movements. And he preferred to give a very disappointing end to his hero—to make him appear miserable and small in his attack upon the wife of the police-officer, so as to turn the reader’s sympathies towards even this woman—rather than to make of Iliyá a prominent figure in a strike-conflict. If it had been possible to idealise Iliyá so much, without over-straining the permissible limits of idealisation, Górkiy probably would have done it, because he is entirely in favour of idealisation in realistic art; but this would have been pure romanticism.
Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity of an ideal in the work of the novel-writer. “The cause of the present opinion (in Russian Society) is,” he says, “the neglect of idealism. Those who have exiled from life all romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us quite naked: this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so disgusted with one another.” (A Mistake, I. 151.) And in The Reader (1898), he develops his æsthetic canons in full. He tells how one of his earliest productions, on its appearance in print, is read one night before a circle of friends. He receives many compliments for it, and after leaving the house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling for the first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a person unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those present at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk about the duties of the author.
“You will agree with me,” the stranger says, “that the duty of literature is to aid man in understanding himself, to raise his faith in himself, to develop his longing for truth; to combat what is bad in men; to find what is good in them, and to wake up in their souls shame, anger, courage, to do everything, in short, to render men strong in a noble sense of the word, and capable of inspiring their lives with the holy spirit of beauty.” (III, 271.) “It seems to me, we need once more to have dreams, pretty creations of our fancy and visions, because the life we have built up is poor in colour, is dim and dull.... Well, let us try, perhaps imagination will help man to rise for a moment above the earth and find his true place on it, which he has lost.” (245.)
But further on Górkiy makes a confession which explains perhaps why he has not yet succeeded in creating a longer character-novel: “I discovered in myself,” he says, “many good feelings and desires—a fair proportion of what is usually called good; but a feeling which could unify all this—a well-founded, clear thought, embracing all the phenomena of life—I did not find in myself.” And on reading this, one at once thinks of Turguéneff, who saw in such a “freedom,” in such a unified comprehension of the universe and its life, the first condition for being a great artist.
“Can you,” the Reader goes on to ask, “create for men ever so small an illusion that has the power to raise them? No!” “All of you teachers of the day take more than you give, because you speak only about faults—you see only those. But there must also be good qualities in men: you possess some, don’t you?... Don’t you notice that owing to your continual efforts to define and to classify them, the virtues and the vices have been entangled like two balls of black and white thread which have become grey by taking colour from each other?”... “I doubt whether God has sent you on earth. If he had sent messengers, he would have chosen stronger men than you are. He would have lighted in them the fire of a passionate love of life, of truth, of men.”