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Creatures That Once Were Men

by Maxim Gorky


Translated from the Russian by J. M. SHIRAZI and Others

Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON


September, 1998  [Etext #1466]


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CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

By MAXIM GORKY



Translated from the Russian by J. M. SHIRAZI and Others
Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON

THE MODERN LIBRARY
PUBLISHERSNEW YORK
Copyright, 1918, by
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
Manufactured in the United States of America
for The Modern Library, Inc., by H. Wolff

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION............  V
Creatures That Once were Men.... 13
Twenty-Six Men and a Girl .....104
Chelkash..............125
My Fellow-Traveller ........178
On a Raft .............229






INTRODUCTION

By G. K. CHESTERTON


It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices
of what is called our modern religion have come from countries
which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric.
A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without
having ever had either a great classical drama or a great
romantic drama.  A nation like Russia makes us feel its
modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction.
It has produced its Gissing without producing its Scott.
Everything that is most sad and scientific, everything that is most
grim and analytical, everything that can truly be called most modern,
everything that can without unreasonableness be called most morbid,
comes from these fresh and untried and unexhausted nationalities.
Out of these infant peoples come the oldest voices of the earth.

This contradiction, like many other contradictions, is one which
ought first of all to be registered as a mere fact; long before we
attempt to explain why things contradict themselves, we ought,
if we are honest men and good critics, to register the preliminary
truth that things do contradict themselves.  In this case,
as I say, there are many possible and suggestive explanations.
It may be, to take an example, that our modern Europe is so exhausted
that even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is difficult
for every one except the most robust.

It may be that all the nations are tired; and it may be that only
the boldest and breeziest are not too tired to say that they are tired.
It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky
in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they
can really believe in scepticism.  It may be that they are the only
people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really
feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism.
This is one of the possible hypotheses or explanations in the matter:
that all Europe feels these things and that only have strength to believe
them also.  Many other explanations might, however, also be offered.
It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries, like Russia or Norway,
which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the extreme edge
of the circle of our European civilization, have a certain primal
melancholy which belongs to them through all the ages.  It is highly
probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal.
It is highly probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly discovered
in scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they absorbed
and experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human sacrifice
in black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in the dark.
Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their paganism,
as in old times, is merely devil-worship. Certainly, Schopenhauer could
hardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a country
which had once been full of slavery and the service of fiends.
It may be that these moderns are tricking us altogether, and are hiding
in their current scientific jargon things that they knew before science
or civilization were.

They say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably,
that they are still worshipping the Norns.  They say that they
describe scenes which are sickening and dehumanizing in the name
of art or in the name of truth; but it may be that they do it
in the name of some deity indescribable, whom they propitiated
with blood and terror before the beginning of history.

This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it,
is highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion.
But there is one broad truth in the matter which may in any case
be considered as established.  A country like Russia has far
more inherent capacity for producing revolution in revolutionists
than any country of the type of England or America.
Communities highly civilized and largely urban tend to a thing
which is now called evolution, the most cautious and the most
conservative of all social influences.  The loyal Russian obeys
the Czar because he remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance.
The disloyal Russian frets against the Czar because he also remembers
the Czar, and makes a note of the necessity of knifing him.
But the loyal Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has
forgotten that they are there.  Their operation has become to him
like daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature.
And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English
revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England
is so complete as to be invisible.  The thing which can once
get itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.

Gorky is preeminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist;
not because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they
are not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all Russian--
are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible,
and which makes religion possible, an attitude of primary
and dogmatic assertion.  To be a revolutionist it is first
necessary to be a revelationist.  It is necessary to believe
in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State.
But in countries that have come under the influence of what is
called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic righting
of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold)
there never will be.  These countries have no revolution,
they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious
thing which they call progress.

The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many
other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact
between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old,
and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to he very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilization quite make head
or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way
that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his head
is the head of the superman.  We hear his lonely cry of anger.
But we cannot be quite certain whether his protest is the protest
of the first anarchist against government, or whether it
is the protest of the last savage against civilization.
The cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has
done much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time
has left them one thing which it has not left to the people
in Poplar or West Ham.

It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power
of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them.  Gorky is a tramp,
a man of the people, and also a critic, and a bitter one.
In the West poor men, when they become 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 "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, 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 strike 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 horrible old
man in rags and tatters, which covered his bony figure.
He bent under the weight of his burden, and lowered his head
on his breast, as if he wished to attack the merchant.

"What are you?  Who are you?" shouted Petunikoff.

"A man..." he answered, In a hoarse voice.  This hoarseness
pleased and tranquillized Petunikoff, he even smiled.


"A man!  And are there really men like you?"  Stepping aside,
he let the old man pass.  He went, saying slowly:

"Men are of various kinds... as God wills... There are worse
than me... still worse... Yes...."

Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from humanity,
Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and essential value
of the human being which is far too commonly absent altogether from
such complex civilizations as our own.  To no Westerner, I am afraid,
would it occur, when asked what he was, to say, "A man."
He would be a plasterer who had walked from Reading, or an iron-puddler
who had been thrown out of work in Lancashire, or a University man
who would be really most grateful for the loan of five shillings,
or the son of a lieutenant-general living in Brighton, who would not
have made such an application if he had not known that he was talking
to another gentleman.  With us it is not a question of men being
of various kinds; with us the kinds are almost different animals.
But in spite of all Gorky's superficial scepticism and brutality,
it is to him the fall from humanity, or the apparent fall
from humanity, which is not merely great and lamentable,
but essential and even mystical.  The line between man and the beasts
is one of the transcendental essentials of every religion;
and it is, like most of the transcendental things of religion,
identical with the main sentiments of the man of common sense.
We feel this gulf when theologies say that it cannot be crossed.
But we feel it quite as much (and that with a primal shudder)
when philosophers or fanciful writers suggest that it might be crossed.
And if any man wishes to discover whether or no he has really
learned to regard the line between man and brute as merely relative
and evolutionary, let him say again to himself those frightful words,
"Creatures that once were Men."


G. K. CHESTERTON.





CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN





PART I


In front of you is the main street, with two rows of miserable-looking
huts with shuttered windows and old walls pressing on each other
and leaning forward.  The roofs of these time-worn habitations
are full of holes, and have been patched here and there with laths;
from underneath them project mildewed beams, which are shaded
by the dusty-leaved elder-trees and crooked white willow--
pitiable flora of those suburbs inhabited by the poor.

The dull green time-stained panes of the windows look upon each
other with the cowardly glances of cheats.  Through the street
and toward the adjacent mountain runs the sinuous path,
winding through the deep ditches filled with rain-water.
Here and there are piled heaps of dust and other rubbish--
either refuse or else put there purposely to keep the rain-water
from flooding the houses.  On the top of the mountain, among green
gardens with dense foliage, beautiful stone houses lie hidden;
the belfries of the churches rise proudly toward the sky,
and their gilded crosses shine beneath the rays of the sun.
During the rainy weather the neighboring town pours its water
into this main road, which, at other times, is full of its dust,
and all these miserable houses seem, as it were, thrown by some
powerful hand into that heap of dust, rubbish, and rainwater.

They cling to the ground beneath the high mountain, exposed to the sun,
surrounded by decaying refuse, and their sodden appearance impresses
one with the same feeling as would the half-rotten trunk of an old tree.

At the end of the main street, as if thrown out of