It is not a pretty book, but it is a masterful interrogation of life--not of life universal, but of life particular, the social life of to-day.  It is not nice; neither is the social life of to-day nice.  One lays the book down sick at heart—­sick for life with all its “lyings and its lusts.”  But it is a healthy book.  So fearful is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for good.  It is a goad, to prick sleeping human consciences awake and drive them into the battle for humanity.

But no story is told, nothing is finished, some one will object.  Surely, when Sasha leaped overboard and swam to Foma, something happened.  It was pregnant with possibilities.  Yet it was not finished, was not decisive.  She left him to go with the son of a rich vodka-maker.  And all that was best in Sofya Medynsky was quickened when she looked upon Foma with the look of the Mother-Woman.  She might have been a power for good in his life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety and honour and understanding.  Yet she went away next day, and he never saw her again.  No story is told, nothing is finished.

Ah, but surely the story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us.  Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism.  But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev.  It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain.  Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear it royally.

Even so, but so helpless, hopeless, terrible is this life of Foma Gordyeeff that we would be filled with profound sorrow for Gorky did we not know that he has come up out of the Valley of Shadow.  That he hopes, we know, else would he not now be festering in a Russian prison because he is brave enough to live the hope he feels.  He knows life, why and how it should be lived.  And in conclusion, this one thing is manifest:  Foma Gordyeeff is no mere statement of an intellectual problem.  For as he lived and interrogated living, so in sweat and blood and travail has Gorky lived.

Piedmont, California. 
November 1901.

THESE BONES SHALL RISE AGAIN

Rudyard Kipling, “prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals and idol of the unelect”—­as a Chicago critic chortles—­is dead.  It is true.  He is dead, dead and buried.  And a fluttering, chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut leaves of Kim, wrapped him in Stalky & Co., for winding sheet, and for headstone reared his unconventional lines, The Lesson.  It was very easy.  The simplest thing in the world.  And the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not do it long ago, it was so very, very simple.