“Nothing but everyday life, everyday life, only everyday people, everyday thoughts and events!” the same pitiless Reader continues. “When will you, then, speak of ‘the rebel spirit,’ of the necessity of a new birth of the spirit? Where is, then, the calling to the creation of a new life? where the lessons of courage? where the words which would give wings to the soul?”
“Confess you don’t know how to represent life, so that your pictures of it shall provoke in a man a redemptive spirit of shame and a burning desire of creating new forms of life.... Can you accelerate the pulsation of life? Can you inspire it with energy, as others have done?”
“I see many intelligent men round about me, but few noble ones among them, and these few are broken and suffering souls. I don’t know why it should be so, but so it is: the better the man, the cleaner and the more honest his soul, the less energy he has; the more he suffers and the harder is his life.... But although they suffer so much from feeling the want of something better, they have not the force to create it.”
“One thing more”—said after an interval my strange interlocutor. “Can you awake in man a laughter full of the joy of life and at the same time elevating to the soul? Look, men have quite forgotten good wholesome laughter!”
“The sense of life is not in self-satisfaction; after all, man is better than that. The sense of life is in the beauty and the force of striving towards some aim; every moment of being ought to have its higher aim.” “Wrath, hatred, shame, loathing, and finally a grim despair—these are the levers by means of which you may destroy everything on earth.” “What can you do to awake a thirst for life when you only whine, sigh, moan, or coolly point out to man that he is nothing but dust?”
“Oh, for a man, firm and loving, with a burning heart and a powerful all-embracing mind. In the stuffy atmosphere of shameful silence, his prophetic words would resound like an alarm-bell, and perhaps the mean souls of the living dead would shiver!” (253.)
These ideas of Górkiy about the necessity of something better than everyday life—something that shall elevate the soul, fully explain also his last drama, At the Bottom, which has had such a success at Moscow, but played by the very same artists at St. Petersburg met with but little enthusiasm. The idea is the same as that of Ibsen’s Wild Duck. The inhabitants of a doss-house, all of them, maintain their life-power only as long as they cherish some illusion: the drunkard actor dreams of recovery in some special retreat; a fallen girl takes refuge in her illusion of real love, and so on. And the dramatic situation of these beings with already so little to retain them in life, is only the more poignant when the illusions are destroyed. The drama is powerful. It must lose, though, on the stage on account of some technical mistakes (a useless fourth act, the unnecessary person of a woman introduced in the first scene and then disappearing); but apart from these mistakes it is eminently dramatic. The positions are really tragical, the action is rapid, and as to the conversations of the inhabitants of the doss-house and their philosophy of life, both are above all praise. Altogether one feels that Górkiy is very far yet from having said his last word. The question is only whether in the classes of society he now frequents he will be able to discover the further developments—undoubtedly existing—of the types which he understands best. Will he find among them further materials responding to the æsthetic canons whose following has hitherto been the source of his power?
PART VIII
Political Literature, Satire, Art Criticism, Contemporary Novelists, Bibliography