



Produced by Judith Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.










CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN


By

MAXIM GORKY




INTRODUCTORY.

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
they 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 civilisation, 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
devilworship.  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 civilisation 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 dehumanising 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 civilised 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