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 civilisation. 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 this of "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.
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