summer in the letter of an American to an English publisher something of this kind:—
Mr. So-and-So's novel may be a success with you,
but we shan't be able to do much with it over here
as it ends on a note of failure; the reader must be
quite sure that the hero and heroine, whatever troubles
they may have at the beginning, are going to win
through in the end. Anything that ends on a curse
or a suicide or hysteria is almost sure to fall commercially
dead over here.
Now the Russian considers failure and despair and
cursing and suicide as a glory, and success to be
a reproach—the likely destiny of Jews or earth-swallowers.
America and the West prize the whole,
the sound, the substantial banking account, the ideal
marriage, domestic bliss, correct collars and ties,
creases where they should be on the right sort
of attire, that glamour of materialism which Mr.
Bennett so satisfactorily renders in his descriptions
of hotel apartments and the clothes of the soulless.
But Russia, even Gorky in his best days, prizes
the barefooted tramp, the consumptive and disease-stricken,
the imbecile, the improvident, the man
who has no sense of the value of money, the
poverty-stricken student of Chekhof's Cherry
Garden who can refuse money, saying, "Offer
me two hundred thousand, I wouldn't take it. I am
a free man. And none of all that you value so
highly is any use to me. I can do without it on
the way to higher truth."
The grandeur of the West, Gorky's "magnificent