Creatures That Once Were Men: Introduction by G. K. Chesterton

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 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
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 pre-eminently 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
Russians--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 be very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilisation 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 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. 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, the most recent and 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 strikes 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 odd 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 tranquillised 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 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. 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 learnt 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.

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