"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 civilisations as our own. To
no Western, 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.
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