The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1906-09-24
TRIBUTE TO eoRKY.
A Plea for a Genius Who Is Not I'm
derstood.

From Harper's Weekly.
Gorxy has run the whole gamut of
agonles. The descendant of men famed
for cruelty and for miserliness, one grand
father was degraded from the ranks Of
the army of Nicholas I. for wanton bru-
tally to his soldiers, a quality which he
afterwards exercised without restraint
upon his family and his servants, while
the maternal grandfather who brought
him up was known in his neighborhood
as a bigot, a skinhint and a hypocrite.
Gorkys father died when he was four
years old, and his mother handed him
over to his grandfather, and never again
troubled herself about him. At the age
of four he fell victim to cholera, dis
ease of which his father. catching it
from him, died; at seven he had small
pox; and at nine, still ignorant and il
literate, he was put out to earn his own
living behind the counter of a book store.
Despite his further pitiful pushing from
pillar to post working in the shop of an
icon-painter, as scullery boy for a cook
on board a river syeamer working in an
underground cracknel bakery, where the
light of day never pierced the Cimmerian
gloom of the sitting hole in which he
labored from early morning till ten at
night, his strange. unquenchable genius
yet Powered. The cook on the steamer
taught him to read and with this adj
vantage he raised himself to the level
where he is easily recognized as one of
the most poetic and forceful writer's of
Russia.
Naturally enough the virtues he glorifes
are not of the kind to be understood in
the pleasantest and most conventional
country of civilization. 1t would be diff
fieult for any one in our led of free
public education organized charities, So
cieties for the prevention of cruelties to
children ara to animals. to fathom the
sufferings of man who with the awful
capacity of genius to feel in himself and
for others, had been. even as a little
child, so initiated into the miseries and
the vices and the degrade lions of life
Doubtless If his books were well known
here they would win him little popularity.
The Intensity the vehemence, the insis-
tence upon reality candor, the unabashed
holding up of the mirror to life as he has
seen 1t, the heart-rending pictures he
paints of the breaking of the individual
on the social wheel, the quenching of
the great, primal personal virtues in
the smelling fire of a social system, are
too rude, too rough, too alien, to be I'M
derstood.
Few men can utter the whole truth. And
the primal virtues of courage, force, can
dor. love, must be reborn, Invested of
egoism before they appear sublime-not
suicide in despair, but the glad abnega-
ton of life for others; not alternate
spasms of hatred and raptures of love.
but the still waters of brotherly affec-
tion-are the conquering and universal
forms Those who offer us the highest
Ideals are the greatest prophets. but
those who unmask hypocrisy and petit
ness and selfishness serve life, too. And
this great genius, misunderstood one dav
received with acclaim and the next rele-
gated to obscurity and oblivion, must at
least have the consolation of knowing that
when his little detractors lie In that utter
oblivion which best crowns the avera ora
man, his name viii be honored for ali
that he has suffered, all he has attempted
all he has overcome.