rrible 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.

Creatures that once were Men.

PART I.

In front of you is the main street, with two rows of miserable looking
huts with shuttered windows and old walls pressing on each other and
leaning