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Title: The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary

Author: Stephen Graham

Release date: April 25, 2021 [eBook #65157]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY ***

                 THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY




    MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
    LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
    MELBOURNE

    THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
    NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
    DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

    THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
    TORONTO




                 THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY

                                   BY

                             STEPHEN GRAHAM

                               AUTHOR OF
             ‘WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM,’ ETC.


                       MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                      ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
                                  1915




                                PREFACE


The quotation “Martha, Martha, thou art cumbered about with many things:
but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part which
shall not be taken away from her” is as common in Russia as “faith
without works is dead” is common here. Speaking roughly, Eastern
Christianity is associated with Mary’s good part and Western
Christianity with the way of Martha and service. The two aspects seem to
be irreconcilable, but they are not; and I have called my book _The Way
of Martha and the Way of Mary_ because the ways of the sisters are as
touchstones for Christianity, and in their reconciliation is a great
beauty.

If you would know what a nation is, you must ask what is the religion of
the people. Without a national religion a nation is not a nation but a
collection of people. It is a truism to say that what is best in a
nation springs from its religion, from some central idealism to which
every one in the nation has access—the idea of the nation. There is a
“British idea,” an “American idea,” a “German idea,” a “Russian idea.”
This is profoundly true of Russia; for all that is beautiful in her
life, art, and culture springs from the particular and characteristic
Christian idea in the depths of her. She is essentially a great and
wonderful unity. It is of that essential unity that I write, and in
writing hope to show on the one plane Russia, and on another the
splendour of the true Christian idea.

This book was written in Russia and in Egypt during 1914 and 1915. In
1913 I was in America and wrote my study of American ideals in contrast
to Russian ideals. I returned to Russia in January 1914 eager to look at
the East afresh and compare it with the West. In setting out for Russia
the fundamental idea in my mind was that of Russia as a religious
country where one found refuge from materialism and worldly cares, and I
hoped to find stories and pictures of life with which to clothe the
beautiful idea of the sanctuary. The book I was going to write I always
called in my mind “the sanctuary book,” and my notion was to make a book
that should also be a sanctuary itself—a book in which the reader could
find sacred refuge.

Much has intervened. My quest resolved itself first of all into a
seeking for what I call the Russian idea, then into a study of Russian
Christianity. My new volume is necessarily one of seeking and finding, a
making of discoveries. One chapter led me on to another, and the scope
of my study increased till it took in the whole question of what Eastern
Christianity is and how it is in contrast to Western Christianity.

Athwart this peaceful work came the typhoon of the Great War, and my
hand was claimed by the new friendship between England and Russia, the
friendship of brothers in arms. It was fitting to seize the opportunity
to make that friendship wider and deeper by describing and interpreting
the Russian people to larger audiences. But I carried the purpose of
this book with me, and much of what is written here was first put into
words on public platforms in the winter of 1914-15. Finally, as a
culmination to this personal work, on the 16th April 1915 I gave a
lecture at the Royal Institution on “The Russian Idea,” and therein
collected together and summarised all that I had said during the winter.
That evening I read almost all that is vital in Part I. of this book.

In May, in order to carry on this study I went to Egypt to visit the
shrines and monasteries of the Desert, some of the sources of
inspiration of Eastern Christianity, and to make a journey to Russia the
way Christianity came to her. In these journeyings and doings lie the
chronological and geographical scheme of this new volume.

I feel that this book, the hardest of all my books to write, is not in
any sense a collection or a medley of impressions and stories, but has
one and the same object and quest running through the whole of it; and
that in order to understand it even in a small way it is necessary to
read the whole of it, and perhaps re-read it. It is an organic unity,
and reflects in its form something of the Russian idea and of Sancta
Sophia itself.

_The Way of Martha and The Way of Mary_ is an interpretation and a
survey of Eastern Christianity, and a consideration of the ideas at
present to the fore in Christianity generally.

Christianity is not yet a system: it is chaotic in its tenets and the
manner of its profession. This _young_ religion of Christianity! Perhaps
6000 years hence it will have crystallised out, but as yet it is in the
confused grandeur of youth. It has all possibilities. A young man or
young woman of to-day can live by Christianity because it is young with
them. Probably any true book on Christianity must reflect this fact. As
yet Christianity is running germs: it is in being’s flood, in action’s
storm. It is not all logical, symmetrical, like a thesis demonstrated
and proved to a class in moral philosophy.

Christianity is a great live religion still absorbing all that is true
in other religions. It is _the word_. It is part of our language, and by
means of it we express what is deepest in ourselves. There has not been
in history such a powerful medium of self-expression. Words are our
means of inter-communication, of understanding one another and telling
one another what is in the heart, that is—of communion with one another.
That communion is deep and tender, and the knowledge of it, like the
knowledge of God, passeth understanding; all that we know is that love
kindles from it. I make this affirmation as one whose special medium is
the written and the spoken word.

STEPHEN GRAHAM.

MOSCOW, _September 1915_.




                                CONTENTS


    I. THE RUSSIAN IDEA—

    1. TO RUSSIA 1

    2. MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA 12

    3. PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN 29

    4. AT THE THEATRE 37

    5. THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES 48

    6. LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN 58

    7. IN THE CHURCH 73

    8. IN THE MARKET-PLACE 86

    9. THE RUSSIAN IDEA 90

    10. THE LABYRINTH 105


    II. MARTHA AND MARY—

    1. THE _PODVIG_ 111

    2. THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM 121

    3. TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME 130

    4. BACK TO MOSCOW 136

    5. THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING 143

    6. THE TWO HERMITS 155

    7. AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY 161

    8. THE WAY OF MARTHA 168

    9. MARTHA’S TRUE WAY 178

    10. MAKING WEST EAST 182

    11. THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH 190

    12. WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH 200

    13. THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD 206


    III. THE DESERT AND THE WORLD—

    1. A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS 217

    2. THE HERMITS 221

    3. IN THE DESERT 235

    4. THE WORLD 246

    5. ST. SOPHIA 256

    6. FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA 263


    APPENDICES—

    1. WAR AND CHRISTIANITY 273

    2. THE CHOICE OF EAST AND WEST 280

    _Frontispiece_—MARTHA AND MARY.




                                   I
                            THE RUSSIAN IDEA




                                   I
                               TO RUSSIA


    KIEF, _January 1914_.


All night long from Paris to Cologne the train speeds like a bird,
joyously screaming. I am in the carriage next the engine, and as I lie
full length in the darkened empty carriage I look out on snow-patched
fields and hills, now partly obscured by wild volumes of vapour, now
fierily illumined by the glow of the furnace, the black sky raining
showers of red sparks on to the vague night landscape, the engine racing
forward past signal-boxes and stations, clattering along the changing
points of the rails of junctions, knowing apparently that all signals
are _for_, never anticipating any hindrance, skirling and leaping in the
exuberance of accomplishment.

We pass the Belgian frontier at three in the morning near Namur, and the
German at Herbesthal in the dim glimmering before dawn. The world that
becomes visible as the sun rises is the ordered world of the Germans.
Everything is prim, everything is as it should be; the fields are
symmetrical, the palings are vertical and in good repair, the manure
heaps are compact; where houses are being pulled down or set up there is
no disorder whatever; nothing is scattered about, everything is
collected and numbered. At the little stations we pass through, the
station-master in brilliant red and blue is standing erect at that point
on the platform that it is his duty to occupy. On the train a woman in
uniform has appeared. She has put thirty or forty little tablets of soap
and two dozen hand-towels into the lavatory; she has picked up the bits
of paper that lay scattered in the corridor all night; she has washed
everything in the lavatory; put water in the cistern and boiled water in
the carafe. The conductor, a well-groomed military man, has come and
allotted us definitely numbered seats in the carriages and has seen that
our respective hand-luggage occupies just that space in the rack which
is above our numbered seats.

At Cologne there are just four minutes to cross the subway and get into
the Berlin express. My porter—luggage-dragger, as the precise Germans
call him—takes me across at a run and puts me in the train, and my
registered box of books and papers and what-not is not allowed to miss
the connexion. I hardly sit down in the speckless third-class carriage
of the real German train before the whistle goes and we slip past the
great black piles of Cologne Cathedral in the background. All day long
we tear over Germany at sixty miles an hour to Berlin.

At Paris I had registered my box to the Charlottenburg Station of
Berlin, but to my dismay the train did not stop there. I had only ten
minutes in which to change francs to marks, get my ticket to the Russian
frontier, have my luggage weighed and registered, and get into the
train. And I do not speak German, but the Germans understood. I was put
down at Zoological Gardens Station. My porter understood the situation
at once, ran me along to some stairs, and pointed down them. I went
down; he went “to expedite my baggage,” so I understood. I took my
ticket, and in doing so offered the girl in the booking-office about six
more marks than was necessary. She pushed back the superfluous silver
without a smile. Turning round, I saw my trunk reposing on the weighing
machine. My porter pointed to the registration window. I paid two marks
and obtained my receipt and went up the stairs to the platform for the
Russian train, and had two minutes to spare.

How efficient the Germans are! They have a great excellence in their
way. They permit no one to lose himself, they permit no disorder,
everything is done by the chronometer rather than by the watch. They
have a genius for orderliness, neatness, and precision. They have our
English ideal of thoroughness and smartness, but they seem to have
consummated it whilst we have paused in the ways of Destiny and changed
our mind in favour of something different. If we could see Germans in a
friendly spirit there are many English who would bow down in admiration
to their civilisation. For the Saxon part of English nature has a
similar instinct for order, for living one’s life like a neatly-worked
mathematics paper. It is the aboriginal Celtic base in us which with
much that came over with the Normans has frustrated the Saxon element in
our race. The British earth itself has formed us, inspired us: hence our
kindliness, verve, and imaginativeness, human tenderness. Thanks to the
ancient Briton in us, we are more like the Russians than the Germans.
_There_ is a people who are the antipodes of the Germans—wild in their
emotions, anarchic in their spirits, amused by laws and regulations,
lacking in the instincts that make “progress” possible. Naturally the
Russians can’t stand the Germans. As a Russian said to me when I
recounted how once I left a Kodak behind in the waiting-room at Cologne
station, wired from Dusseldorf my Russian address, and eventually
received the apparatus in good condition at Rostof-on-the-Don, “The
Germans are an accurate people. O Lord, how accurate they are!”

We reached the Russian frontier at one in the morning, and, passing in
single file, gave up our passports to the sentry. At the Custom-house
the baggage was submitted to a vigorous examination. An armed Customs
officer in a heavy overcoat with black astrakhan collar directed the
operations; three or four porters and inspectors fumbled in the trunks,
turning things almost upside down, and a slim girl of twenty-five, a
female expert, scrutinised all the clothes for the things that men were
not likely to see of themselves—embroidery, lace, silk underwear, neatly
packed away Paris blouses, feathers, new costumes with artificial
creases and tacked-in dirty linings. But I am not smuggling anything
through, and no one takes the trouble even to look at the contents of my
books.

I take my ticket to Kief and a supplement to Warsaw. At half-past three
we are allowed to board the Russian train and spread out our bedding and
make ourselves comfortable. The station is dark and gloomy, the
dreariest station in western Russia. As we stand at the windows of the
train and look out a strange procession comes up out of the
darkness—threescore of men in irons, following a soldier who carries on
a pole high above his head a flaming naphtha torch. The faces of the men
are pale, furtive, hairy, their shoulders awkward; some are in old
blouses, some in collars, some in sheepskins; they are Jews, Poles,
Russians, chained together in fours, marching along the railway track to
a barred convict-train waiting at a siding. Foot soldiers accompany them
with drawn swords in their uplifted hands. They come out of the darkness
like living shadows and disappear into the darkness again.

“_Soloveiki_,” says the conductor disparagingly.

“Well,” says a Russian, “I don’t suppose they’re heroes. Poland swarms
with thieves and smugglers, and people smuggling themselves across the
frontier in order to get to America.”

“They are human beings,” says another. “They are in chains and we free.
It is a heavy sight.”

But the second bell and the third bell sound, and the train moves
gradually out of the station and nearly every one lies down to sleep.
Even when we arrive at Warsaw many of the passengers are snoring and
have to be awakened up by acquaintances or porters.

Across the two miles of the slush-covered cobbles of Warsaw, through
driving rain and sleet, in an open _droshky_ at dawn, from the Vienna to
the Brest station.

“_A vam ne skoro!_” says the Russian porter who greets me. “Your train
is not soon. The next for Kief is at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

I have breakfast. I stroll into the rainy city and back, have a plate of
hot soup, read the papers, write letters.

Opposite me in the Kief train was a little girl in simple but antique
national attire, in soiled clothes, but having a fresh and delicate
classical face and black hair in two plaits, one about each little ear—a
rare beauty: it was a piquant pleasure just to look at her.

“When do we get to Kharkof?” she asked.

“Seven, to-morrow night.”

“Oh, what a long time! It’s a long way: it’s the first time I’ve been
away from home.”

As the guard blew his whistle she stood up, looked towards the city, and
crossed herself.

“Are you a little Russian?” I asked.

“No; a Pole. I was once a Jewess, but have just been baptized. See....”

She showed me a little crucifix, and the figure of the Virgin on a
little medallion hanging from her neck.

“You’re a Catholic now?”

“Yes; and I don’t like the Jews.”

I wondered whether in view of the ill odour in which the Jews were at
that time, she had been told by her mother to announce her conversion
very distinctly.

“Such a mama I have!” said she, turning out a basket of provisions—two
bags of nuts, several pots of jam, biscuits, a Polish Christmas pudding.

There were in the carriage besides myself and the girl opposite me a
Russian student, a young Polish _flaneur_, and a middle-aged, grizzly,
smelly, Polish peasant. The young convert offered us all nuts. She was
very engaging. She took out a long bottle, put it to her lips and drank
from it. She told me it was cold tea with sugar at the bottom of the
bottle, but to the Pole announced that it was vodka.

He was fool enough to believe her, and at once cast about in his mind
some means of doing her an ill turn. He came over and made love to her
in excited whispers, and was so rude and urgent that at last the girl
refused to have anything more to do with him, and turned sullen and
angry. He for his part sneaked off to another compartment, and we saw no
more of him. After a while the girl relaxed and smiled, took out a large
but cracked hand-mirror, looked at her pretty face, and patted the curls
to her temples. I got a kettleful of boiling water and made tea for the
grizzly peasant and her and myself. Then the peasant climbed on to the
shelf above and spread out his big overcoat and slept on it, and the
little girl, after explaining that she was going to live with Poles in
Kharkof, and that her father played the violin and she the mandoline,
and that she was going to take a part in a “troop” and earn her living,
undid her black locks, put down a quilt and a pillow, and curled herself
up and slept. The conductor came round and searched under the seats for
“hares,” the flickering candle burned low, and I was about to turn in
and sleep when the Russian student, who had been trying to read a
newspaper by the aid of a dip of his own, finally gave up the task and
set himself to talk to me.

“How far are you going? Where from? What for? How long have you been
away from Russia? What interest can Russia have for you? I should have
thought the West more interesting....” and so on, the usual flood of
questions.

Then my questions. “Has much happened in Russia during the year? What
are people talking about? What are they doing? What is in the air?”

“Oh,” said he, “the Futurists are walking about with gilded noses and
dyed faces. The Jew-haters of the Black Hundred want to raise a temple
in memory of the Christian boy Yushinsky. Everyone has been discussing a
play of Artsibashef called _Jealousy_. Literary Russia has been giving a
welcome to the Belgian poet Verhaeren, such as you in England have been
giving Anatole France. Every one is either hearing or giving lectures
about Verhaeren. But I suppose most clamour of all has been raised about
Gorky and Dostoieffsky and the Theatre of Art at Moscow. They propose to
perform Dostoieffsky’s _Demons_ at the Theatre of Art, and Gorky has
raised a great protest. He holds that Dostoieffsky is so reactionary in
tendency that he ought not to be played at the great democratic theatre.
Not only that, but he holds that Tolstoy, and indeed all Russian
literature, is on the wrong side in the struggle for the liberation of
the people. He is almost ready to say, ‘Burn the works of Tolstoy and
Dostoieffsky; burn them, and let us be free!’”

“How does Russia take it?” I asked. “It is indeed true that
Dostoieffsky’s work is not on the side of progress and freedom. He
believed in suffering; he believed in the Russian Church, and was a
Christian.”

“Russia is mostly against Gorky,” said the student. “Merezhkovsky, for
instance, has written a brilliant article against him in the _Russian
Word_, and he says, ‘Yes, Gorky is keenly sensitive, but in Italy or
Greece, where he lives,[1] he is too far away to feel what Russia is
now. Russia has changed much in the last eight years. Her wounds have
healed up, many of them; she has the great hope of the convalescent. If
Gorky breathed Russian air he would understand that there was now in
Russia a strong religious movement.’”

“And what do you think?” I asked. “Do you possibly agree with Gorky?”

“No. I don’t think it is right to steal an instrument from the other
side’s box of tricks. The Censorship is one of their weapons, not one of
ours. The people have loved Dostoieffsky more than they have loved any
other Russian author; he is still beloved. We Russians are a religious
and loving people. We will never sacrifice humanity for ideas....”

We talked a long time. When I lay down on my shelf to sleep I felt only
gladness that I was coming back to Russia, coming to live with her and
for her once more, after a year in England and America. It seemed to me
a pity that Gorky had not come back the year before when so many exiles
took advantage of the Tsar’s manifesto, and returned to the open arms of
a loving, astonishingly patriotic people!

Next morning at dawn I arrived at Kief, said “Good-bye” to the little
girl who was sleepily stretching herself, and to the student who was
chatting with a new acquaintance in the gangway and smoking a cigarette.
The grizzly peasant I let snore on....

A fine crowd this of the Kief streets: stalwart, diverse, interested in
one another, attractive-faced, they are a refreshment, such a
refreshment, after Paris and New York.

But I do not reckon that I have achieved the first stage of my journey
back till I enter the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and light candles before
Queen Olga, King Vladimir, and the Mother and Child, baring my head in
the presence of Russia and accepting her sanctuary from the West.

Footnote 1:

  He had not then returned to Russia.




                                   II
                     MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA


    KIEF, _January 1914_.


One of the first friends I visited in Kief was Little-Russian Katia, a
typical Russian of to-day, with the problems and prospects of the
new-formed middle class.

At the time of the Boer War Katia ran away from school and set off on
foot for South Africa as a Russian pilgrim would set out for Jerusalem,
with a bundle on her back and a stick in her hand. She would beg her way
to the Transvaal and collect money to help the Boers! At the same
school, in the time of the riots in Kief, the first class presented an
ultimatum to the masters and directors, demanding among other things the
right to hold meetings, the right to get books from the public
libraries, and equal justice for all pupils irrespective of race, be
they Russians, Poles, or Jews! A go-ahead school as far as the scholars
were concerned. If a mistress in a fit of anger strikes one of her
class, straight away a boycott of her lessons is arranged, and no one
answers her questions, no one does any homework for her.

Katia learnt at school to adore above all things the works of Oscar
Wilde. She professes to know his works almost by heart; she sleeps with
_The Happy Prince_ under her pillow. On a wall in her bedroom hangs a
large portrait of Oscar Wilde; in a corner is the sacred ikon, before
which on festival nights and for holy days she lights a little lamp. She
was the last Russian I had seen when I left Kief some fifteen months
before. She was then engaged to Sasha, a thinly-clad, stern,
poverty-stricken student, who in order to travel thirty versts on the
railway free would take a conductor’s job and examine the tickets in the
second class. If she married Sasha he would get drunk and beat her; they
would live dogs’ lives—so every one said. The father, a rich
manufacturer, was opposed to Sasha, but then the father was a tyrant;
the mother, not on speaking terms with the father, gave countenance to
the engagement. Sasha was able to come to all meals and stay as long as
he liked with Katia. When Katia was indisposed and thought fit to lie in
bed, he might spend whole evenings sitting by her. That was all _comme
il faut_, for in Russia a betrothed couple are already called bride and
bridegroom and have such freedom.

The father, however, cut short Katia’s pocket-money and cut short his
wife’s housekeeping money, and made coarse jokes at the expense of the
house-hold. Though Katia was twenty-two years of age she had no passport
of her own. Her father simply kept her name written on his own passport,
and in that way cut off the chance of his daughter’s running away from
home. You cannot get far in Russia without a passport of your own. You
certainly cannot get married without a passport and without many
documents.

Katia’s sweetheart was not at all abashed by his own poverty or by the
rudeness of the father. He came to all parties and functions in his
shabby clothes. He lectured the father and mother on their behaviour. He
was even hard and brusque to Katia herself upon occasion. But he stood
up for her dignity, and would have fought any one who insulted her.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Returning to Kief this month I rather wondered how far Katia’s romance
had got. Perhaps she and Sasha were now man and wife. But I could not
imagine it. One of the felicities of travelling is to pay surprise
visits. I had heard nothing from Katia in the interim. So I rang at the
door and gave my name to a strange servant and went in and....

Exclamations! “Oh, how fine! on the twenty-fifth of January is my
wedding,” says the same beautiful Katia.

“I congratulate you. I did not know whom to visit first,” said I, “you
or Sasha.”

“Sasha is in Moscow,” says Katia with a troubled expression.

“Will you live in Kief?” I ask.

“_I_ in Kief,” says she with meaning emphasis.

So it is not Sasha that she is marrying.

Presently in comes a bright-looking soldier of rather charming manners,
and he is introduced as the bridegroom. He is a guest in the house and
has been living there some weeks—Fedor Leonidovitch Smirnoff—who has
completed his university course in law, and is now serving his term in
the army.

“The date is absolutely settled?” I suppose.

“If papa will take out the papers in time,” says Katia.

But the new young man is on good terms with the father. He has evidently
plenty of money of his own, and he is a _persona grata_.

“What of Sasha?” I ask Katia aside.

“We quarrelled,” says she. “God, how we quarrelled! We were rowing in a
boat on the Dnieper, and when I told him it was no good, we could never
be married, he shot at me with a revolver. I had to save myself by
jumping into the water.”

“You’ve chosen a nice young man this time. Perhaps you are more likely
to be happy with him.”

“Yes. Everybody likes him.”

Fedor is certainly a relief after the sternness of Sasha. He is affable,
he is interested in the prices of all things, and is bourgeois, but he
says that success and money and luxury do not tempt him. He would like
to give up everything and try and find out what life means. He would
like to be a wanderer as I am, or to go into a monastery.

All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer,
and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He
will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a
Russian.

This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and
Europeans come out.

“Once a European, always a European,” says some one.

“A European may become an American,” I hazard.

“But he can never become a Russian again.”

“What am I?” asks Katia of me, “a Russian or a European?”

“I don’t know. You are changing perhaps. But keep a Russian!”

One evening, on Katia’s advice, I took a sledge across the snow-covered
city to Solovtsof’s theatre and saw _Jealousy_ performed, a story that
has had a vast vulgar success in Russia. It is by Artsibashef, the
author of the most notorious books of the last ten years. He is the
voice of the bourgeois, of the new commercial middle-class Europeans
being turned out at such an astonishing rate by the modern industrialism
of Russia. He concerns himself almost entirely with sexual problems, and
the relation of woman to man. His outlook in life is something like that
of Bernard Shaw, but his criterion in life is not racial progress so
much as physical happiness. He mirrors the life of those whose aim is
money, whose relaxation is feasting and flirtation. He reflects the
growing non-Christian Russia, the increasing mass of Parisian types of
men and women obscuring the real Russia.

A crowded theatre, nobody in evening dress, many women pretentiously
dressed, many rich town-folk in the stalls, clerks and their sweethearts
or their wives in other parts of the house. The play is very well
staged, well upholstered, and is vociferously received. What they are
cheering is nothing more or less than a series of opinions about women,
a disparagement and uglification of the symbol “woman,” of what is
holiest.

But to quote the opinions gives the play.

    In woman first of all it is necessary to awaken curiosity.

    Women do not value those who pray to them.

    Woman, of course, likes admiration, but only gives herself to the
    man who despises her a little.

    Men are most interesting when they are angry.

    Woman is only interesting, vivacious, clever, when she is bathed in
    the atmosphere of love.

    Man is interested in his business, in sport, in thought, but woman
    is only interested in herself, and if she seems to have interest in
    other things it is only feigned. Her sole object is to make herself
    more alluring, more interesting.

    We seek Lauras and Beatrices, not knowing that such creatures are
    only the incarnation of male fancy, and do not and cannot exist.

    Girls are charming, but when you marry one you find her to be a
    tedious _baba_ like the rest. At the piano they tinkle, “I am a
    princess, I am a princess.” All young girls are princesses, but you
    never come across a queen.

    A woman lies in a way that a man would not wish to lie, and indeed
    cannot lie. She lies with her whole being. When a man deceives he
    grows cool, and in that betrays himself. But a woman returns from
    another man’s love specially languorous, caressing, and tender....
    Sin must surely set her soul ablaze. Even the most sinful man is
    ashamed of deceit, and that prevents him from lying effectively. A
    woman quite sincerely reckons she has a right to deceive. She thinks
    that to deceive not only does not humiliate her, but, on the
    contrary, makes her more interesting.

The action of the drama shows two women, one who may be dismissed as a
wanton, the other is a flirt who loves her husband best of all. The
latter coquettes in various ways with an officer, a student, and a
savage Caucasian prince. She leads them on to the last limit of
propriety, and evidently finds her sole zest of life in the vanity of
having lovers always expecting rendezvous and secret kisses.

The only words spoken on behalf of woman come from an old fellow who has
been three times married—and deceived and made foolish by three women in
turn. He says:—

Woman is a magnificent, delicate instrument on which each can play all
that he can and will. Of course, put some Beethoven at the piano, and he
will find you a wonderful sonata; but put some giftless strummer there,
and he rattles out a vulgar polka. We are just such giftless fools, and
swear at the instrument because it produces no music. No, friends, you
are wrong; woman is sensitive, hospitable, tender, poetic. God gave us
woman as an adornment of our lives; we ourselves have spoiled her and
complain.

The play _Jealousy_ is a sort of public trial of woman, and when at the
end the crazy husband of the woman who flirted but loved him best
strangles her, it is a sort of verdict, sentence, and execution in one.

How serious the trial is may be judged from the fact that each of the
audience is given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to record his
opinion as to whether the man was justified in committing the murder.

How repulsive the whole thing! A play that should put “Woman” adequately
on the stage needs many women and the various kinds of men who need from
women the things that women can give—faith, love, children. For setting
or for evidence it needs the world. The powers of life and death must
stalk across the stage. The stakes for which men bid must be there, and
also the

                          Stars silent over us,
                          Graves under us silent.

_Jealousy_ is the reflection of a shameful way of life. It is trivial,
mean, parochial, the rage of talk for a day among the bourgeois of
Russia, interesting now, as opposed to the story of Antony and
Cleopatra, interesting for ever.

“And what do _you_ think of woman?” asked a Kief friend.

“Why,” said I, “the beast was a beast until a woman loved him. Then he
became a man, even a prince. So it is with all of us. When a woman
kisses a man, even an ugly, wretched, despised creature, he knows that
he has found grace and is precious in the sight of God. When a woman
smiles on a man she bids him live.

“The world is kept fresh by women and children, by their faith and their
influence and their prayers. It would have rotted away but for them.

“The love and the faith of women empower men to do things. No man who is
out on the adventurous tracks of life but has women behind him, and
their love even far away keeps him alive. A woman has cords from her
soul to the far-off hands of man, and at her will can empower men to
lift their hands and do things. She has spiritual nervous force.”

“But if these cords get broken?” said my friend.

“Ah, then indeed she is in a different position. She finds herself
stranded in destiny. She may become a man’s plaything or worse. Or she
may become a militant suffragist or a believer in secular education or a
propagandist of eugenism and hygienics.”

“In England,” says my friend. “But in Russia we have no woman’s
movement. She becomes one of Artsibashef’s women, no more; a man’s
plaything and fetish.”

Even so.

                  *       *       *       *       *

What has Artsibashef’s play got to do with Russia? It has a good deal to
do with her because of thousands such as Katia who are at the
cross-roads. With her cross, hard, but loving student Sasha she might
have been poor and unhappy, but, on the other hand, she would save her
soul’s health. Whereas with her new-found bourgeois Fedor she may easily
enter the world and the atmosphere of _Jealousy_.

Among those I visited at Kief was a certain Vassia, a poverty-stricken
doctor who worked from morning to night healing men and women, a
specialist in internal diseases but practising in a poor district. He
did not receive a fifth of his fees; he healed on trust.

“They come to me suffering: how can I refuse to help?” he would urge
when people tried to harden his heart against those who couldn’t pay.

An extraordinarily kind, impracticable fellow, with a flat in complete
disorder, with an adopted child but no wife; lazy and thieving servants.
Neighbours have stolen much of his furniture, even the ikons from some
of the rooms; and the candles burn in the empty corners from which the
ikons have been stolen! That is Russian.

Vassia and I were invited to an astonishing all-night feast given in
honour of Katia on the occasion of her last name-day before marriage.

We sat down to dinner at six, we got up from dinner at half-past eleven;
we went to the drawing-room and talked and sang till a quarter past
twelve, then we returned to the dining-room for tea and coffee and
dessert.

The funniest moments were when the bride’s father sat on the floor
pretending he was drunk, and when the bridegroom, to prove he was not
tipsy, crawled under the table on all fours among the guests’ feet and
went from one end to the other, and then jumped up and gave a military
salute.

They drank too much. They were near quarrelling at the end. One of the
guests shouted in a loud voice that Katia’s brother had played the piano
like a bootmaker.

Then the toasts! They drank twice to everybody in the room, and the men
kissed the hands of the women as well as clinking glasses with them. All
the bridegroom said at dinner was, “So-and-so, for what reason do you
not drink?” though So-and-so was often half-seas over. They drank to
absent friends, to Freedom, to Truth, to English Literature—“Let us
drink to English Literature, ‘urrah!”—to Russian dancing, to Katia, to
Katia’s figure (“thank God she isn’t like a telegraph pole”), to Katia’s
future happiness.

She changed her dress between dinner and dessert.

Some of the women present had a private view of the bride’s linen—eight
dozen chemises at a hundred and forty roubles the dozen, and all the
rest on a similar scale.

“Fine batiste and lace,” said an old lady present, rubbing her fingers
together as if feeling the linen; “fine batiste that at the first wash
goes into shreds from the chemicals the laundresses use. I wouldn’t
accept such garments as a gift. It is a sin to wear them. Nowadays, when
you live in a city and the washerwoman won’t wash naturally, the only
thing to do is to wear cheap things and replace them continually.”

What was interesting to me was the complete absence of attention on the
part of the bridegroom. He could not have treated an enemy more
negligently.

It even prompted the German governess, who had unfortunately got a
little drunk with champagne, to cry out—

“The bridegroom has not kissed the bride once; why is it?”

Poor Katia! she did not seem to have one true friend amongst all these
people, and was possibly marrying to escape from father and home....

But away from these problems! Thousands of sleigh-horses flog the
grey-white snow of the Kief streets, flocked with Christmas traffic. The
sleighs are loaded with baskets of cakes and sweets. Men are driving,
carrying in their arms huge Christmas trees. There are men struggling
with little pigs and live geese and turkeys designed for the market or
the Christmas dinner. On the slippery sidewalks urchins are crying with
cheerful irrelevance:—

“Five copecks, aluminium wonder lights, cold fire without smoke, without
smell.”

“Five copecks, warm socks to put inside boots or goloshes.”

In the Jewish old-clothes market of the Podol there are tremendous
crowds, and much business is being done. The mood of Jewry is happy in
the Christmas orgy of trade. All is calm after the ritual trial, and the
fear of persecution is all gone in the reality of good business. All
Kief seems to be in the streets buying; and the tram-cars tinkling their
alarm bells are crowded to the last inch of the step-boards.

But somewhere there is another Kief, a quiet radiant city, silent but
for the footfalls of monks or pilgrims on the snow—the sanctuaries,
monasteries, ruins, shops, hostelries of the Petcherskaya Lavra. This
Kief stands high on those cliffs of the Dnieper whence the Russians sent
tumbling down their old god Peroun; it looks upon the river to which
King Vladimir at the dawning of Russian faith stepped down with his
whole army to be baptized. Yellow walls, half a mile long, twenty feet
high, go down, alongside steep, snowy, rutty, over-drifted roads, from
church to church. Peasant men and women in chestnut-coloured sheepskins,
fur-edged and embroidered, are plodding up and down with bundles on
their shoulders. Bright gilded domes of churches glitter above white
walls, and from many kolokolnyas come antique-sounding chimes. As you
look down from a tower you see beyond the thirty-five churches of the
beautiful Lavra the blue and white Dnieper, half frozen and snowed over,
half free as yet from winter’s grip—you see beyond all the far snowy
steppes and forests of Little Russia.

Here, in a historical sense, is Holy Russia, for the whole cliff on
which the monasteries are built is holy ground. The foundations are
honeycombed with cells of the primeval hermits and saints of Russia. You
enter dark and narrow passages in the rock, places in which you cannot
stand erect, and you wander candle in hand from shrine to shrine in the
depths of the earth. An old monk with black cloak, grey hair, and yellow
five-times broken twisted candle, leads you from skeleton to skeleton
wrapped in purple pall; shows you now and then a skull, a dried-up hand;
points out the picture of the likeness of the saint whose remains you
salute, indicating the nickname the hermit bore in the days when he was
upon the world, thus: the industrious, the silent, the bookless, the
faster, the healer, the herbalist, and so on; thrusting the glimmer of
his torch into the intense darkness of the cell which the father had
occupied when alive. All day long the peasants wander from sepulchre to
sepulchre in this unlocked cemetery or dungeon of the dead, kissing the
coffins, laying personal ikons upon the relics in order that they may
receive special sanctification, dropping their farthings on the palls,
listening to services in remote underground churches, gathering unusual
impressions of death, tasting the sweet emotions of religion.

In the hostelries, where are accommodated upon occasion as many as
20,000 pilgrims, you may wander at will and see peasant Russia sprawling
on sheepskins and reading holy books, or making tea. You may go into the
refectories and see 500 pilgrims sit down together to a free monastery
dinner of cabbage soup and porridge and kvass, or you may sit with them
yourself and eat. On this Christmas Eve just past I sat with such a
party in the twilight waiting for the first star to come out, the signal
to make the holy meal of _Sotchelnik_. It was a different Russia from
Katia’s, this of the 500 uncouth, shaggy-headed men and women at long
dark tables, waiting in front of huge Russian basins full of soup, as
the shades of night came down, and the lamp before the Virgin and Child
grew brighter and brighter.

You tread with gentle steps across the giving snow and enter one of the
churches, and find yourself in an irregularly grouped crowd of antique,
hairy, patriarchal-looking men in sheepskins and birch-bark boots. There
are no pews or seats, there is no electric light, but there is the gloom
and effulgence of much gold and of many half-illuminated paintings and
frescoes. You stand with peasant Russia on a stone floor in the glimmer
and shadow of an immense candle-lit temple. You pass through with a
candle to the front, to the altar-rail lit by scores of steady silver
flames, the votive tapers of the pilgrims; you find yourself in the
presence of a radiant line of calm, attentive, singing faces. This is
Holy Russia independent of historical association. The music you hear in
Russian churches robs you of the sense of time. On Christmas Eve in
Russia you hear the music of the herald-angels, and see at the same
time, in the likeness of the listening Russian peasants, the shepherds
who heard the angels sing. You veritably escape from “the world” and
from “to-day,” and are so potently reminded of the beauty and mystery of
man’s life that you shake off all dull cares and the reproach of failure
or success, the soil and stain of circumstance, and know that what is
_you_ is something utterly beautiful before God.

Kief has been called many names—the Canterbury of Russia, the Russian
Jerusalem, the Font of Russia—but it may most truly be called the
Russian Bethlehem, the place where Christ was born in Russia, adored by
rude shepherds, sought by the noble and the wise.




                                  III
                          PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN


    MOSCOW, _February 1914_.


I went to Moscow to see my old friend Vassily Vassilievitch
Pereplotchikof, the painter. He received me in his house in the Sadovia,
in that mysterious sitting-room of his where scores of his paintings are
always standing with their faces to the wall, like very shy young
maidens who wait till it is their turn to be shown to society and to
their prospective suitors.

During the summer in America which I had tramped, he had been seeking
impressions on the barren Arctic island of Nova Zemlia. What a contrast
in our fields of action! He in the silent snow-swept island; I on the
luxurious mainland of the New World. Vassily Vassilitch prefers places
like Nova Zemlia, where, as it were, candles are burning in corners from
which ikons have been taken away. We exchanged our impressions.

Nova Zemlia has only a hundred inhabitants, one steamer calls there in
the year. There is only one post. In winter there is three months
darkness without light; in summer two months light without darkness. The
ice and snow do not melt away even in July, and the colonists—trappers
and hunters—live a stark life in opposition to the storm and stress of
nature. They are dead to the world—the world all dead to them until the
prow of their one annual steamer comes into view on the ocean in July.
The day of its arrival they call their Easter, and they do not hold
Easter according to the calendar in the dark and terrible spring, but
postpone their holiday till life is born again with the coming of the
ship. Their resurrection day is when their brother-man comes again to
them. In the arriving of the ship they see Jesus walking towards them on
the sea.

Vassily Vassilitch told me this with a subtle emphasis. I felt rich in
having Vassily Vassilitch as a friend, for I realised he was able to
tell me sacred things. This evening of our seeing one another again he
read me many poems which he had written “not to print, but for his own
pleasure.” All that he says has a deep human interest, a significant
emphasis and luminous suggestiveness that may be recognised in his
paintings also.

Vassily Vassilitch left Archangel for Nova Zemlia one morning in July.
The boat steamed placidly and peacefully out of the vast and enlarged
Dwina into the White Sea, and then out of the White Sea into the cold
and buffeting Arctic. On board were two Government officials going to
consider “Colonisation,” an English artillery officer, an astronomer, a
journalist from Archangel, a monk going to relieve another monk and
spend the winter on the island, peasant fur-buyers, carpenters, and
workmen.

The monk was one of the most interesting characters, and told how a
Samoyede once in a storm dug a hole in the snow and lay there three or
four days, and slept till it was over. When the blizzard ceased he broke
out of his white grave and went home. He told how there was once such a
storm on Easter Eve that he and the villagers had to crawl to church on
hands and knees. Coming home they were all blown about half a mile out
of their course.

From the hunting expeditions the islanders nearly always brought home
young bears taken alive, and they fed them and reared them and
eventually sold them into menageries and circuses. The monk had two
young bears one season and they were very much attached to him. They
followed him everywhere and would take food from his hands alone. If by
any chance he escaped them and got away by himself to do something they
raised a _scandal_. However, on the return journey to Archangel the monk
lost one of them. When they were some 250 miles out at sea one of the
bears broke her fastenings, jumped into the ocean and swam away. And she
swam all the way back to the harbour and was recaptured by the Samoyedes
there. The other bear gave a lot of trouble at Archangel by absolutely
refusing to be tended by any one else but the monk who had brought him.
But at last the monk exchanged his cassock with some one else, and it
was found that the bear at once transferred his obedience, and that he
could be managed by any one who wore the monk’s garments. The monk
therefore sold the cassock with the bear, and both are now part of the
stock-in-trade of a circus. In this case the habit did make the monk.

The boat had an open hatchway, and the captain was for ever crying out:—

“More careful, people! Don’t fall down the hole. Once the Governor of
Archangel fell down there; he didn’t get hurt because he fell on a
chambermaid who was passing. Once an official fell through and broke
twelve bottles of various drinks; he didn’t get hurt either, but was
much upset when we gave him the bill for the drinks. Another official
was reading a bit of paper and stepped over and fell on some baskets—he
also didn’t get hurt; but be careful all the same. And various ordinary
passengers fell....”

But, as it happened, some tremendous weather overtook the ship, and not
many dare move from their places in the cabins. So the hatchway remained
open without misadventure.

It was touching—Vassily Vassilitch’s account of their coming into view
of the shore, and the whole population of the little colony standing
staring at the ship with greedy eyes, the first visitors to them from
the great family of mankind on the rest of the world, their Easter. Poor
lonely ones! With what thirst they exchanged the first greetings and
questions!

“How have you got on?”

“Any sick?”

“Any dead?”

“Have you shot many bears?”

“How’s trade?”

The islanders had suffered very much from scurvy during the year. The
day before the vessel arrived a man had died of it and Vassily
Vassilitch saw the funeral. It took place about midnight. From one of
the huts came the _klak_, _klak_, _klak_, of the nailing up of the
coffin. The coffin issued from the little village borne on a dog-drawn
hearse, then followed the priest in his gilded raiment, the frantic
widow, the mourners. “Holy God,” they sang, “Holy Strong One, Holy
Immortal,” and the dogs all whined and howled. In the bitter shadowy
night they bore the corpse away, over grey earth and rags of snow, far
away to the side of a black tumbling river, and the midnight sunshine
gleamed on all the snowy mountain peaks, catching the light from the
horizon where the sun seemed poised.

Vassily Vassilitch showed me a copy he had made of a diary kept by a
Russian peasant who had died of scurvy. Two Russian peasants settled on
a desolate part of the island to spend the winter and hunt. It was
somewhat pathetic that the man doomed to die should have had the idea of
keeping a log-book. The story tells much of Russian patience,
simplicity, tenderness, pluck. I only quote a few entries from the
diary:—

    _November 30._—Bear came to door of hut and began to gnaw the
    carcase that was there. Snatched my gun, but he saw me and was off
    and I dare not follow in the dark.

    _December 5._—Daylight was short. Hardly got a shot before it was
    dark. Eve of the day of my angel. In the evening drank tea. Washed
    my body at a basin for want of a bath. Changed my linen. Lighted
    lamp before the ikon.

    _February 1._—Cloudy and windy. Shot some seals. Had great
    difficulty in bringing them home. We have colds. Northern lights.

    _February 28._—Heavy weather. Both seriously ill. Extraordinary
    pain. First the toes ache as if frozen, then it goes into the legs,
    into the knees and muscles. Man must lie down. Over his whole body
    and arms a rash breaks out.

In March the scurvy was too much for him; the diary is continued by the
hand of his mate, who writes on April 16:—

    To-day Kulebakin (the former writer of the diary) was in pain and
    delirium, but afterwards calmly and peacefully gave back his soul to
    God. Weather cloudy to clear. No water. Dug the grave. All by myself
    now. No one to talk to now. It is sad.

    _April 21._—Lighted a candle and burnt incense over Kulebakin, and
    then carried him to the grave. Bright and sunny day. No water.

    _April 23._—The ice has cleared. Hung a torn shirt on the mountain
    instead of a flag. I still wait on the chance of some one coming
    from the settlement. It is very dreary. Pain in the legs. Walk with
    difficulty. Need to gather strength against illness. Nothing to eat
    but bread.

At this point the diary comes entirely to an end, and it might have
seemed the writer was dead, but a peasant came from the settlement,
rescued him, and carried him back, and he returned to Russia and
recovered. The astonishing thing is he came back again to Nova Zemlia,
and wintered and hunted, repeating the experiment. A tough fellow!

One of the sights of Nova Zemlia is the cemetery, with its tumbled and
broken crosses. The dead sleep there in the Russian faith even as they
sleep far away in tropical Turkestan and the pleasant borders of Persia.
Not only a nation stretching from West to East, these Russians, but
diving four or five thousand miles from North to South. How do they
support life in the Far North? They have to have their vodka there.[2]
There is a big supply of it on the ship for them. It will not, however,
be sold to them till all the business of fur-selling is accomplished and
the cargo brought on board, and the ship is ready to steam away. The
sale of vodka begins only after the second blast of the hooter. The day
after the boat leaves the island there is an orgy of drinking, and in a
short while all the vodka disappears and there ensue months of enforced
sobriety.

The island has a loving and striving priest who wrestles with the people
for their souls.

Vassily Vassilitch came upon him sobbing. There had been a case of
cheating on the island.

“I try to make them good men and women,” said the priest; “I pray for
them. I pray with them, and yet see how they cheat and drink and forget
all that they learn!”

Vassily Vassilitch went right round the island calling at the various
points where there were inhabitants, painting a little, talking to the
people. It is a wonderful island, a continuation of the Urals, very rich
in metals, very mountainous. There were no trees, however, and though
there were bright and beautiful flowers and birds and butterflies it was
ever bleak and wind-swept. There was not a mosquito or hornfly in the
island even in July.

Coming home the ship passed through a field of icebergs. Vassily
Vassilitch for the first time in his life saw a mirage. It gave him the
idea that all that he had seen on the island was really a mirage, a
dream, an insubstantial pageant; that life itself was such.

When he heard the last of the growling and snapping of the twelve or
fifteen bears tied up on deck and stepped off on to the pier and sat
once more in an Archangel _droshky_, clattering over the cobbles of the
muddy town, he felt indeed that all that he had seen and heard was
something folded and hidden away in the everyday, a wonderful,
fantastic, even absurd and improbable dream.

“Some time, perhaps, after we die and awake elsewhere, we shall look
back on life and say the same of it,” said he.

Footnote 2:

  Before the vodka prohibition. How they get on now it would be
  difficult to say.




                                   IV
                             AT THE THEATRE


    MOSCOW, _March 1914_.


At Moscow, at one of the meetings of the Religious and Philosophical
Society, I met Namirovitch Danchenko, the manager of the Theatre of Art,
and he invited me to see five or six pieces of the repertory. This gave
me great pleasure and interest.

An interesting figure in the stalls of the theatre on the first night I
was there was Maxim Gorky, who had unexpectedly returned after eight
years’ involuntary exile, and now was looking at the theatrical
presentation of Dostoieffsky’s novel, _The Possessed_, against which he
had been writing from abroad in such a way as to provoke all literate
Russia to discussion. His hair cut short, his black blouse put aside for
European jacket and waistcoat and collar, the tramp-author looked
somewhat shorn of the mystery of his personality. As he tripped quickly
past me, in one of the _entr’actes_, in his light evening boots it was
easy to think he used to be a more real character in _sapogi_. For the
rest, he did not look in bad health, was even a little flushed with
colour. But his face was nervous, self-conscious. I should say it is not
by any means the old Gorky that has returned.

There was considerable excitement in the theatre amongst those who knew
of the novelist’s presence, Moscow being crazy to welcome Gorky with
banquets and speeches and newspaper headlines, but being unable to do
so, because Gorky’s health will not stand excitement, and because he can
remain happily in Russia only on condition that he keeps quiet.

I was sitting next to M. Lakiardopulo, the secretary of the theatre.
“You know how he has been slating us,” whispered he to me. “There was a
time when on such an occasion Gorky would have stood up in his seat and
addressed the house, saying, ‘Why do you come to see such a thing? It is
no good; it is reactionary, and only helps to put back the progress of
Russia.’ But he is afraid to do it now. He is not sure of the Russia to
which he has returned.”

Around Gorky and the spirit of Dostoieffsky rage for the time being all
the questions of the hour in Russia—Apollo _versus_ Dionysus, Progress
and Westernism _versus_ Life understood as a religious orgy; Materialism
_versus_ Mysticism. How weak is the power of the West may be seen in the
guise of its champion—Gorky with his foot in his grave, Gorky, whose
wonderful literary gift Italy and Greece have withered.

But Gorky, frustrate as he seems, has effectually raised the question
and set Russia thinking and differentiating.

    I have a strange, strange feeling about Moscow (says he), a mournful
    feeling.... Were the Moscow streets and the Moscow people like this
    before, or do I only remark it now because I have seen what it is
    like in the West? There, in Italy, amidst the brilliance and
    magnificence of Nature, in the magnificent chaos of cities buzzing
    with automobiles, humming with factories, you feel at least that Man
    is not losing himself; you feel he is the master, the centre. His
    voice is full-sounding, it is ever in one’s ears, the voice of one
    who is master of earth and master of his life. But in Moscow! On the
    streets I feel the people are all voiceless. The pavements are
    populous, lively, noisy; there are people of all kinds going to and
    fro, but the actual human voice of mankind seems to be utterly
    silent. The people are all gloomy, melancholy, above all, angry. The
    women have widows’ faces.... Is it possible it was like this when I
    was here before?

Gorky, despite his experience in what may be called the absolute
West—America[3]—has come back enchanted with the West. The idea accepted
in the revolutionary days that the West was good, the West was Russia’s
bright destiny providentially lighted before her for her to follow, has
died out almost unremarked. Gorky alone, all these eight years, has
nursed it, and he has been writing stories and dramas which fall flatter
and flatter on the ears of Russia. The Theatre of Art alone has refused
in turn each of his last eight plays! No wonder the faces seem to him
preoccupied.

He cannot understand why the Theatre of Art, in its working out of a new
life for the theatre in general, should take _The Brothers Karamazof_
and _Besi_ (_The Possessed_). Were there not new writers who would
breathe the new ideals and new hopes of Russia into the work of the
stage? Dostoieffsky was a genius, but in Gorky’s opinion an evil
genius—the evil genius—the evil genius of Russia which Russia must
overcome, an abscess on the Russian body. Dostoieffsky was profoundly
national, yes, but he expressed the Asiatic side of the Russian. “If
Russians give themselves up to Dostoieffsky they will become like
China,” said he. “In each of us sits a Dostoieffsky—we have to overcome
him.”

Well, the great fact of this month is that Gorky’s protest has had the
fullest publicity, and has been discussed at many hundred public
meetings and in numberless newspaper articles, and yet the great mass of
the people have supported the Theatre of Art and Dostoieffsky—even
although the performance of _The Possessed_ is but a poor experiment.

The difference between Eastern and Western literature may be aptly
contrasted. I read last 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 chaos of cities buzzing
with automobiles and humming with factories” only prevent, _tolko
meshait_, as Russians say so constantly. Man’s voice is loud because he
has to overcry noisy machines; it is loud also because, like a child, he
is wildly excited over his toys. It is unjustifiably loud.

But Gorky, like a fond savage, would give up broad lands and a fair
birthright for coloured beads and toys.

Round about _Besi_ rages also the question of the future of the theatre.
Moscow is likely to become the literary capital of Europe; it is already
the theatrical capital. Whatever it is working out is likely in time to
affect the whole stage of Europe.

Almost every one in Russian literature has contributed something towards
the question of the new development of the theatre. Strange to say, it
is a question of the theatre and the producer, not a question of the
dramatist. That is a starting-point.

The two fundamental ideas which are in contrast are again that of East
_versus_ West, Materialism _versus_ Mysticism. One party derives the
theatre from the puppet-show and the elaborated Punch and Judy show,
suggests a theatre of dolls or types, and above all things heralds “the
glorious cinema” as the womb of the theatre-to-be—that is the Western
notion of the theatre, a show to arrest passers-by, divert them and coax
coppers from them. The other party derives the theatre from the ancient
mystery, and requires that in the theatre of the future the audience
shall collaborate with those on the stage, the foot-lights shall be
disenchanted, there shall be mystical dancing and singing and horror and
exaltation—this is the Eastern notion.

The latter seems at first glance far removed from possible realisation
in the present, a dream of the impractical even romantic and absurd. But
when we remember that church and theatre were once one and the same, all
plays being holy, and that our Mass or Communion Service was in a sense
a survival of the Holy Mystery wherein not only the actors, _i.e._ the
priests and those who serve at the altar, took part but also the people
themselves, then it is seen to be not quite so remote.

The Shaw plays are remarkable examples of the developed Punch and Judy
show, where various bizarre dolls with funny faces reel off amusing
speeches, all of which are just audibly prompted by the man who holds
the strings. He tries to create the illusion that the dolls are flesh
and blood—for that reason he sometimes will have even a
doll-representation of himself on the stage, as in the case of Mr.
Tanner in _Man and Superman_. And if we are deceived for a moment or an
hour and the illusion succeeds and we discuss the acts of Punch and
Judy, and Judy’s mother, and the Counsel for the Prosecution, and Toby,
and the Judge, as if they were real people, yet when we get home we
reflect after all it was all Shaw—“awfully clever, very funny, but it
was the man behind the red curtain talking all the while; we must tell
so-and-so they ought to go.”

The Ibsen play is more or less a game of chess; again observe the
skilful moving of puppets on a board. His drama is specialised
intellectually. It is interesting to keen minds, but not diverting, not
so elementary as Shaw. _Peer Gynt_, however, is a mystery play, or could
be taken as such; there are parts in it not only for the prime actors
but for everybody in the theatre. The sad fact is that the theatre
audiences are heavy. They are not quite so heavy in Russia as in
England, for no one here considers his dinner as of any importance
beside being at the theatre; and indeed if you are not punctual at the
Theatre of Art you find the doors are closed and you cannot get in. But
all the same the people are heavy, clinging to their seats as if in them
they had found refuge. The moderns are not the Greeks. The minds and
souls of the modern Russians are at the disposal of the Hierophant of
the Mystery, but the bodies are more enslaved by gravity than lead. So,
in the near future at least, there can be no active collaboration
between audience and actors, no real disenchantment of that line of
lamps separating the stage from the world. Perhaps in time choruses will
be devised for audiences—even now in English music-halls where the
people sing the choruses of the popular songs there is a witness of the
possibility of the realisation of such an idea. Perhaps in time a part
of the public may take part in dances or may march with banners and
emblems, or opportunity may be given to public characters of the day to
make their exits and their entrances, and make speeches not to be found
in the books of words. But all this belongs to the thrice-interesting
future, not to the tantalising present moment.

All that the theatre is doing now is to put the dramatist in his place
and give scope to the producer and the Master of Ceremonies. The Theatre
of Art, the Moscow Free Theatre, and in London, as a beginning,
Granville Barker’s theatre, are all working for a new, large, vital
stage. In a sense it is futuristic work, for it takes no inspiration
from the past, unless from ancient Greece. It regards all the work of
the last few thousand years as makeshift. It will work out something
worthy of Man, something noble and enduring. Then again Man will have a
voice, and not that gay, confident, business cry to which Gorky has
fondly given his ear. And that brings me back to _Besi_ (_The
Possessed_), at which I was sitting with Gorky in front of me and the
genial secretary at my side.

_Besi_, or, as it is entitled in the programme, _Nikolai Stavrogin_, is
an example of the present work of the Theatre of Art. The theatre that
will produce _Pickwick Papers_ as a play and can set one of its own
staff to work out the libretto is not in need of dramatists at present.
_Nikolai Stavrogin_ was arranged by Namirovitch Danchenko, and it is a
presentment in some fifteen or twenty scenes of the vital portions of
Dostoieffsky’s novel. It assumes that the public has read the book and
knows it well, and so, subtly, makes the person sitting in his seat
collaborate, by supplying in his mind the missing links. The performance
commences at 8 P.M. and finishes about 12.30. All the while you are
considering failure—death to all Americans.

In the first scene, a very beautiful one, with little village church and
worshippers and beggars and lackeys, the bells are set a-ringing and you
open the doors of the temple of your soul and admit the whole Russian
world of the suffering. The stage becomes the forecourt of your heart,
and the many people in the mystery commune with your sympathies. It must
be said that from an English, even from a Celtic point of view, the
story is rather desperate, somewhat unredeemed; the dream-picture that
you see is rather the nightmare of some one who is too conscious of
being ill himself—the epileptic Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s physical
ills and personal down-heartedness are interesting in his biography, but
blemishes in his artistic work. All those long novels were written as
almost everlasting _feuilletons_, scribbled often while the printer’s
devil was waiting, or writhed into black and white in the still hours of
lonely poverty and feebleness, in dreary midnight hours in Petrograd. In
order to understand them truly you need Dostoieffsky himself somewhere
on the stage, or in the heart.

Footnote 3:

  Gorky went to America to raise money to help the Revolutionary Party
  in Russia, but was hounded out of the country as an immoral man. The
  newspapers started a campaign against his private life, and despite
  American sympathy for the cause of “liberty” he was forced to leave
  the country. No hotel would take him in.




                                   V
                      THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES


    MOSCOW, _March 1914_.


During the summer, in which I lived in a cottage in the Urals, there
passed my window an endless procession of weary tramps, not in flocks or
crowds, in hundreds or in fifties, but in twos and threes day by day. I
saw them on the highway stamping their weak boots and bruised feet in
the deep August dust, trudging forward patiently, patiently. They would
come to the door, untie the black kettle that dangled from the pack on
their shoulders, beg water to make tea, sit down to munch our
peasant-wife’s pastry, resting their ragged elbows on the unvarnished
table, holding a saucerful of hot tea in both hands, and sucking at it
and breathing over it in manifest appreciation and satisfaction.

I would ask one of them, “What are you, brother, a pilgrim?”

“No, brother, we seek land,” he would answer. “Where we live it is too
close—we live too near together; we are going to Siberia to get land.”

“And where do you come from?”

“From Tambovsky Government, from Penzensky, from Nizhegorodsky,” they
would answer. From all the more crowded parts of Central Russia. They
were _perecelentsi_, migratory Russians, children of the womb of
nations, the race ever pushing out from the centre, extending Russia to
the East and the South and the North.

Wherever you go to-day you find on the confines of the Empire, and
indeed beyond the confines, the wandering poverty-stricken
emigrant-tramp; in Siberia, in Russian Turkestan, in Mongolia, Persia,
Turkey. Anon he grows tired, or he finds his happy valley and settles
down, forming the nucleus of a new Russian colony, or adding to the
strength of one already existent. After him comes the Russian army,
claiming interests, and the Russian flag, claiming sovereignty or giving
protection; but it must always be remembered that the movement is first
of all natural, it is not merely aggressively imperial. It is not even
encouraged by the Government; thousands of the tramps die of privation
every year; thousands get thrown into prison for being, as is often the
case, _bez-passportny_ (without passports); the people they meet on the
way call them fools going from bad conditions to perhaps worse—but the
tramps go on. They say they seek a better land, but God alone knows what
they really seek, what they imagine they may see at the next turning of
the long long road.

If you stay at Chelyabinsk, the eastern gate of Russia, you may see
thousands of these wanderers. And it is interesting to compare their
type with those whom you see at Libava, the western gate of Russia.

Through Libava pass the greater number of those who are going to
America. Every ten days the Russo-Asiatsky Lloyd embarks a thousand or
two thousand emigrants, every week vessels sail for London and Hull
carrying Russians who have booked by the Cunard and the White Star and
other lines. From Russia there pass over to America more colonists than
from any other country in the world—upwards of 275,000 people every
year. A great number of these are Jews and Poles and Lithuanians. For
many years the number of actual Russians had been few; but in 1913 there
were of Russians alone more than of any other nationality in the world.
They are richer Russians these. They have money to show to the
inspectors at Ellis Island; they have trunks full of clothes. They could
not carry their burdens on their shoulders; they have come to the port
in trains. They are not melancholy and dusty and bearded like the
tramps, but bright-eyed, well dressed, so as to pass muster at the
inspection. They are making a bold bid for new life; they have had the
courage to pay for the new life with all the old; to take a jump in the
dark, and trust God. They do not belong eternally to the road; and they
are not carrying the cross on their backs, as are those melancholy
tramps of Siberia.

The Siberian emigrants stop at many factories and mines and do a few
days’ work, and are perchance shot down like dogs, at a place like the
Lena gold-washings, or they settle in a fever-stricken swamp and are
swept away by pestilence. But for the most part they come to no harm,
dying eventually of old age, full of memories, poverty-stricken all
their lives, and yet in a spiritual sense rich, confessing always that
they were strangers, seeking something better than that they were
leaving behind.

But they who go out at the western gate take their chance of strange
destiny. They are cast off from Russia and from that understanding of
life that Russia breathes. They go to be the most unfortunate class in
America, the simplest and therefore the most exploited; they go to do
work fitted better to black slaves; their young women, though they do
not know it, are often already sold into infamy whilst they breathe the
“air of freedom” on the steamer; and often the men, contracted in gangs
to the Argentine and Brazil to work on railways and plantations, are
simply living merchandise for which the labour agent who engages them
receives a substantial premium. They go to work as Russians never worked
before, and to receive double the wages they would get in Russia, and
then to realise that money buys little or no extra happiness. Or they go
to settle on the land and form a Russian community, as the Dukhobors
have done in Canada, the Molokans in California, the Adventists in the
Dakotas and in the backwoods of America, to forget that they are not in
Russia, to be as much in debt to the agricultural machine manufacturers
as they were in arrears in the payment of rent and taxes in the old
country, to perish of starvation in lean years, to be persecuted by
educational and sanitary officials, and to be spurred on once more to
seek a happier country. Others are destined to enter the choir-dance of
the races with Jew and German and English and Irish, marrying the
foreigner and merging the European in the new type—the coming American.

At Odessa, the southern gate of Russia, the pilgrims are embarking for
Mount Athos and Palestine a thousand at a time, an unexpected delivery
of bowed and aged men and women out of the depths of Russia. There you
may see another of the continual movements of the people of Russia, an
astonishing procession this to those who are absorbed in the commercial
life of Russia, to those Jews and exiled Russians who write to the
English papers that the outward signs of Russian religion are “the
mummery of the Holy Synod.” At Odessa, and indeed on all the roads of
Russia, there are many thousands of pious Russians, pack on back, staff
in hand, on their way to the monasteries and holy places, to the
sepulchre, to Kief, to the Hermitage of Father Seraphim, to New Athos,
to many a little wayside shrine and monastery that only has its ten
pilgrims where the great ones have their hundreds and their housefuls.

It has been said that with an Englishman the conversation always, sooner
or later, turns to sport, with a Frenchman to woman, and with a Russian
to the subject of Russia.

This is true of the educated classes of society; but the peasants do not
talk of these things so much—the peasants’ talk nearly always turns to
God and religion. The Russians are always _en route_ for some place
where they may find out something about God, and if there is a
particularly animated conversation in the hostelry of a monastery, a
third-class carriage, or a tea-shop or Russian public-house (_traktir_),
it is almost always sure to be about religion.

The modern evangelical movement may almost be said to have had its birth
in the famous but filthy public house, “Yama,” where originally over
vodka and beer, and later more commonly over tea, the question of
salvation was continually mooted. In the third-class carriage you will
occasionally come across an old man who reads an antique Bible through
iron-rimmed spectacles. He has heard that a new sect has been formed by
some peasants in some remote village, and is off to discover “whether
they have found anything.”

Then what of those who march in chains from prison to prison on the
road? Often I have stopped my writing on a bright summer morning to
listen to an appalling sound—the clank, clank, clank of fifty or sixty
men in fetters—and I have looked out at a procession of unfortunate
Russians, dust from head to foot, the sun flashing on the bright steel
links on their legs and their bodies. They also belonged to the road.
They move us to the depths of sorrow or to hoarse anarchy; but they are
of the road. Their vague shuffled footmarks are the writing of the
finger in the dust. They are symbolical. We also walk as they. Listen
with “the third ear,” and you will hear the clangour of our chains as we
tramp—

                               having unearthly souls,
                   Yet fettered and forged to the earth!

The world is like a theatre, is it not? The theatre should reflect the
world and touch man to a remembrance of his mystery. He comes into it to
be stirred by pity and fear, not simply to be amused between dinner and
sleep. He comes into it as to a Communion Service, not merely to
receive, but to partake. Such a theatre is the world, with its marches
and processions, its lively and its heavy measures, its sacrifices, its
words of ancient wisdom from the lips of priests, words of prophecy from
oracles, the joyful choruses and jubilations, its sympathies and
choruses of sadness, its ramified manifold movements and
counter-movements. Most moving of all is the procession to the altar and
the songs we sing carrying our emblems.

“Having been at home in many realms of the spirit,” it is good to
realise this theatre in the heart. Having a personal knowledge of the
road to Jerusalem and to America, and of the pilgrims and tramps on the
various roads of Russia, having even been marched six days along the
road under arrest on one occasion, it is good to realise all that is
happening at one and the same time in Russia—the flocking to Jerusalem
and to America, the trickling into Siberia and Mongolia and Turkestan
and Persia, the tramping to the monasteries to find God, the tramping to
cities and factories to get work, the third-class carriages of the
trains crammed with people, the uproarious taverns where is all manner
of exchange of rude ideas, the beautiful churches alight with candles
and paintings, the little theatres and cinema shows as crammed as the
churches, the bazaars and fairs, the prisons, the poor prisoners on the
road clanking their chains.

Every common sight is charged with significance. This is the source of
the Russian spirit and the genius of Russian literature and fine art.
Thus, for instance, when you mention “smoke” to a Westerner he at once
thinks of factory smoke and that which pains the eyes or darkens heaven.
But to the Russian smoke is always

                 That which comes forth out of the censer,

the smoke of the sacrifice, the smoke of our lives—the sighs and regrets
and fears and aspirations of men and women, our crooked smokes, which,
in the language of Shakespeare, mount upwards to the gods.

In such an atmosphere Russians can forget personal anger when looking at
the chains on their convicts, and they can see in those chains emblems
of human destiny. There is in Russia a whole beautiful sad literature
about chains and fetters. Hermits and holy men have even taken to
wearing chains voluntarily as one of their rites of world-negation.
Dostoieffsky could find Siberia, after personal experience, to be the
supreme place for the understanding of the world.

We are encompassed about by mystery. Every common sight is a rune, a
letter of the Divine alphabet written upon all earthly things. Man’s
heart is a temple with many altars, and it is dark to start with, and
strange. But it is possible with every ordinary impression of life to
light a candle in that church till it is ablaze with lights like the
sky. That is the functions of ordinary sights—to be candles.

So the night of ignorance is lit up with countless stars. It is not less
night but more, more beautiful—

             There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
             But in his motion like an angel sings.

At those places on the road where springs gush from the rocks the
peasants have chalked the face of Jesus, so that the water seems to pour
from His mouth. At these springs stop the pilgrims, the emigrants, the
wayfarers, even the poor prisoners and their guards. That is one of the
visions of Holy Russia.




                                   VI
                       LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN


    MOSCOW, _March 1914_.


In a sense the tavern is also a theatre or a church. It is a place of
life.

“I am glad you’ve come,” said a friend to me. “Keep your ears open; this
is the very bottom; everything springs from here. This is the
changing-house of the ideas of the common people.”

There is no “bar,” in the English sense. On the long wooden counter are
bottles and glasses, and plates of sausage and ham. But you do not
lounge there and gossip over your glass. The Russian public-house is all
tables and chairs, like the accommodation for a smoking concert. But
such dirty chairs and tables!

You sit down; you are attended by a waiter. There is an army of waiters
serving for 30s. a month and no tips. They are in white blouses, white
trousers, and white aprons, and they look as if they had strayed into
the filthy hall in their night attire. On one wall is a square
candle-lantern with the word TRAKTIR printed on it in decayed brown; on
another wall is an immense gilt ikon. The doors creak heavily to and
fro, admitting customers unreadily—how unlike the little swing doors of
the American saloons, so easy to open that you may slip in as it were by
accident. At almost all the tables are working-men and women drinking
tea, vodka, or beer, talking loudly.[4] There are many cabmen in their
round fur hats and voluminous blue cloaks; many market-women in their
cottons, with soiled coloured kerchiefs on their heads. You see twenty
people drinking tea to one drinking vodka—they pour the tea into the
saucers, hold the saucers to their hairy mouths, and guzzle at the
gratifying golden drink. But if you look about you will notice
vodka-drinkers, some asleep, with their unkempt heads on the table
(looking like tramps asleep in a free library); you see also men with
red cheeks and fiery eyes not yet overcome by liquor, but ready to bawl
and make a scandal at the least provocation. The atmosphere is heavy
with the smoke of the vilest tobacco in the world (_makhorka_). A blind
musician is playing the concertina, several people are singing, hawkers
with pies, with Bibles, with shirts, with pencils, with old clothes, are
going from table to table offering their wares. There is tremendous
bargaining and long-drawn-out haggling on the part of people who, it
would seem, do not really intend to buy, even at the last. There are
beggars, cripples, blind men, dwarfs, asking for alms in the name of
Christ. There are drunken hooligans trying to get drinks for nothing.
There are antediluvian pilgrims hundreds of miles from home, not going
to a shrine, but collecting coppers throughout all Russia for the
building of a new church in their far-away native villages. You may even
see upon occasion a peasant carrying a great church bell. You ask him
why. He tells you the church of his village was by the will of God
destroyed by a fire, and that only the bell remains, and he is
collecting alms to build a new church and hang up the bell again.

Throughout the whole tavern all day and almost all night is a clamour of
talking and an animated scene of gesticulating, unwashed, ragged men and
women. Almost all the small business of hawkers, stall-keepers, and
little traders is accomplished over vodka or tea in the _traktir_, but
indeed the successful, even the millionaire, peasant merchant will step
without a ruffle of dignity into the most miserable tavern of the city,
and not be too proud to answer the taunts or questions of ragamuffins.
That is part of Russia’s strength.

Then, the home is not all-absorbing in Russia, and even the poorest
people like to spend the whole evening in the tavern drinking tea,
talking, talking, talking. No one would reproach a Russian for lingering
thus away from his wife and little ones. Not much money is spent, man
for man. In three or four hours it often happens that a man spends no
more than five copecks (a penny farthing), and has only purchased a
little teapot of tea and a big teapot of hot water, the tavern’s
substitute for the samovar.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Kuprin tells the tale of a tavern in Odessa famous for one of its ragged
musicians, Sasha. He filled the public-house with the strains of the
violin, and every night the place was packed with men and women. Every
table was occupied, there was tea or beer or vodka everywhere, all the
men were smoking _makhorka_, the windows were all shut, and the air was
of that warm, dense, suffocating character that the Russian people like.
A din as of Babel pervaded the hall, and no one except those near the
music could hear Sasha’s tunes, yet every one felt that they were
hearing.

Sasha would come in in the early hours of the evening, when people were
few, would take his first mug of beer and then begin to play,
mournfully, melancholily. His were sad, heart-aching tunes, full, as it
were, of a world’s sorrow. He sat in his accustomed place and brooded
over his violin, seemingly uninterested in everything but the soul of
music.

The windows of the tavern were crusted with ice or clouded with steam,
and the shadows of men and women passed incessantly, some lingering,
some hurrying. But Sasha did not heed them, nor notice how many came in
at the dark and dirty doorway from the street. Only when there got to be
a crowd he began to put aside his own repertory of songs, and take up
those that were suggested by the customers, that were shouted in his
ear—

“Sasha, play _Maroosia_.”

“Sasha, play _The Nightingale_, play _Spring has passed by_.”

Then, till the small hours of the morning, he would play what people
wanted him to—sad songs, gay songs, marches, dances, country
measures—dances, dances, dances, every dance in Russia he played, and
the tables were crushed back and a space made and the people danced.

Every night, every week, every month Sasha was there, and the crowd and
the music and the air thick with _makhorka_ smoke. Not that the nights
were always the same. Events in the town, in Russia, had their echoes
there. In the time of the South African War Sasha played twenty times a
night the _March of the Boers_. During the festivities of the
Franco-Russian Alliance he played the _Marseillaise_, which was
fearfully popular with the dock-labourers. When the Japanese War broke
out he played all those sad tunes about far Manchuria and fighting in a
strange land.

Alas, the Japanese War made a great change in the tavern. Sasha was
taken for a soldier and disappeared from ken. For a year and a half no
word was heard from him or of him. He was given up for dead, and the
tavern lost its old attraction. At last, however, one night in came
Sasha, the same as ever, unhurt, untouched. He had been captured by the
Japanese and held a year as a prisoner at Nagasaki. He had learned
Japanese music. Not that anybody wanted it.

“Play us the old tunes, Sasha; play _Maroosia_, play _To Odessa we
sailed on the sea_.” Sasha played that night all the old tunes.

The tavern became as of old.

But there was storm in the air. Every one was talking of revolution.
Sasha began to play the _Marseillaise_ again, and now with a different
note from that in which he had played when friendship with France was
being honoured. In came the police and stopped him. They forbade the
playing of any Anthems whatsoever.

There was a _pogrom_ in the town; hired ruffians appeared in the streets
inciting the population to the murder of the Jews. Not once or twice
Sasha himself was taken for a Jew and attacked.

Into the tavern came the same ruffians, and tried to stir up the
drunkards to pillage and violence. Sasha was playing a tune of his own
fancy when suddenly one of them, a converted Jew, jumped up and cried:

“The National Anthem! Brothers, the National Anthem in honour of our
adored monarch. The National Anthem!”

“Anthem, Anthem,” cried his mates.

“No Anthems whatsoever,” said Sasha, repeating the words of the
police-officer.

“What do you mean, you don’t obey, you filthy Jew?” answered the man.

“And you?” said Sasha.

“I? What do you mean?”

“I’m a filthy Jew. All right, what are you?”

“I’m Orthodox.”

“Orthodox! And for how much?”

The whole tavern laughed.

“Brothers,” said the ruffian, “shall we stand the blasphemy of this Jew
against Throne and Church any longer?...”

There was a rush at Sasha. But he jumped up, and lifting his fiddle in a
rage, smashed it on the head of the first who came up to him.

So Sasha was arrested as a revolutionary, and once more he disappeared.
This time every one thought he had gone for ever. It would have seemed
proper to wear mourning for him. The tavern changed in atmosphere. In
Sasha’s place came another musician, one of those who had sat and
listened to him in the old days and learned of him. One night, however,
when they were playing the old tunes and the violin was gently crooning
the song _Expectancy_, a voice from somewhere cried out nervously:

“Brothers, Sasha!”

All turned, and there stood the twice-raised Sasha, bearded, gaunt, and
pallid. The people flocked around him and cried to him and called on him
to play. But the same nervous, frightened voice cried out again:—

“His arm!”

All grew silent. Sasha’s left arm hung broken and twisted and nerveless
from his shoulder.

“What is it, brother?” asked one.

“Muscle dried up, that’s all,” he answered.

“So—o.”

“Then that’s an end to _Chaban_,” said one of the crowd, referring to
one of the most popular dances that Sasha played.

But Sasha took out of his pocket with his right hand a queer black
wooden instrument which he had either made in prison or had had given to
him, and he put it to his lips and began to play.

Then every one began to dance, and Sasha sat in his place, and all was
as before. As Kuprin says at the conclusion of his tale, “Man is for
Life, but Art is For Ever.”[5]

                  *       *       *       *       *

Such is the orgy unrehearsed. So a tavern can be a popular theatre. It
can also be a church, a place of searching after God. In England you sit
down in church but stand in the public-house; in Russia you stand in the
church but sit in the tavern; it humanises it, makes it more like a
home, makes it possible for the tavern to be upon occasion a kind of
church.

It is a great national assembly-place.

In Russia you are not allowed to hold a public meeting without the
special authorisation of the police and the presence of a
police-officer. But in the tavern is a great informal accidental
meeting; and a great deal is enacted there that the police have no power
to stop. Thus, for instance, in recent years several sects have used the
tavern as the place for their prayer meetings, and have had something
equivalent to a Salvation Army gathering, not “round the corner,” but
actually inside the public-house itself. The religious conspirators have
come as it were accidentally, one by one, have ordered their tea, and
have started an animated conversation into which, sooner or later, the
whole houseful was drawn.

The most famous public-house in Moscow is the “_Yama_” (The Pit), in the
street called Rozhdestvensky, a public-house which Tolstoy much wanted
to visit, a tavern frequented not only by the common people but by
scholars and seekers, especially by those who style themselves
_Bogoiskateli_, seekers after God. Here appeared at times such
well-known Russians as Solovyov, Bulgakof, Chertkof, Velikanof—it was
the last who asked me to the “_Yama_,” and through whom I was able to
hear a multifarious collection of the common people discuss religion and
Russia and ghosts and the eternal questions.

From the “_Yama_” have sprung several interesting sects, for example,
the _Bezsmertniki_, or deathless ones. Their doctrines, promulgated by a
wretched consumptive who had both feet in the grave, was that it was
possible to escape death. He held that health was faith in life, and
that disease was faith in death. Death came simply from lack of faith.
There were people living eternally but we did not know where to find
them. The _Bezsmertniki_ make pilgrimages to the East to seek those who
have been living for ages. Alas! the founder died before the eyes of his
followers. “He lacked faith,” said they, and the new religion continued.
One of the most ardent of them is a frequent visitor of the “_Yama_,”
Alexey Yegorovitch, a stocking-hawker.

So much trouble came from the discussions in the “_Yama_” that the
public-house was closed by the Government. But as in the case of Sasha,
so in the case of the “_Yama_” and the God-seekers. You can kill or
mutilate the body, but you cannot kill the soul, the thing in itself.
The “_Yama_,” crushed in one tavern, broke out in another.

I visited the “_Yama_” one Sunday. It was resuscitated in the “Bay”
public-house in Malo-Golovinskaya by the Candlemas Gate. We sat down in
the tavern at 12 o’clock, and over two glasses of tea talked for six
hours and a half—our only other sustenance being occasional hot cabbage
pies brought to us in trayfuls by a little serving-boy from the kitchen.
The tavern swarmed with religious characters, home missionaries,
propagandists, Bible-hawkers. There was a strong detachment of Old
Believers; an old Baptist hawker of women’s hose; many stall-keepers
from Sukareva Market; Velikanof, a friend of Pereplotchikof; Victor
Karlovitch, greasy and fat, who believes in evil spirits and feels
attracted to Theosophy.

The talk went on evil spirits and was enlivened by many stories. A mad
woman had been taken to the New Jerusalem monastery near Moscow, and had
had a fit in church. After the fit she was found to be in her right
mind, and it was said that the unclean spirit had been caught as it came
out of her, and was now preserved in a jar of spirit and exhibited to
pilgrims as one of the sights of the monastery. Were there evil spirits
or were there not? Was it not said that they passed out of Legion into
the swine? Did not the devils cry from the bodies of the insane, giving
witness to Christ as He passed them by?

Velikanof told an amusing story of two peasants and a steam-engine. One
of them held that it was an unclean spirit that made the engine go
foward; the other said it was just steam, no more, he knew.

“It is an unclean spirit,” the former repeated; “I’ll bet it is an
unclean spirit.”

“How will you prove that it is?”

“I’ll bet you a quarter the engine won’t be able to pass the ikon of
Mikhail the _Ugodnik_.”

“Very well; done!”

The ikon was brought to the railway lines. Presently thrum, thrum,
thrum, the post-train left the village railway station. The first
peasant stood himself on the lines and held the ikon in front of him
with both hands. The other stood by and watched. The train came on, but
when the engine-driver saw the peasant barring the way and apparently
flagging the train, he brought his machine to a standstill and cried out
to know what was the matter.

“You see,” said the peasant, “the engine dare not pass the ikon. The
quarter is mine; let’s go and have a drink.”

Another visitor to the tavern told a sort of Ingoldsby legend of a
ten-pound black cat whose favourite way of entering a house was by
coming down the chimney. Another, a peasant workman, made the
astonishing statement that if you make a candle from human fat and light
it you can see _all_.

A long discussion was started on the difference between a man and an
animal. The sole criterion set by Christ was, “By your fruits are ye
known.” A man is he who can sacrifice his life to an ideal. An animal
hungers and at once looks about to satisfy his hunger. But upon occasion
a man says to his hunger, “No, I shall fast.” A man feels blessed when
he suffers for conscience sake, but no animal feels blessed through
suffering.

A contrast was drawn between Napoleon and Christ. Christ was offered the
empire and crown of the world and knew that in Himself He had the power
to take it, but He preferred to deny the world. In that He showed
Himself the highest type of man. They of the world nailed Him upon the
Cross and cried up to Him, “Save yourself.” He could have saved Himself,
but He did not. He preferred to deny life. But Napoleon on the mountain
fell down and worshipped Satan, and took for his portion the empire of
the world. Napoleon was an animal taking what his stomach whispered to
him.

The conversation went on—Russia’s great destiny was to carry the banner
of the ideal, to sacrifice the material ends of life for the mystical.
“Directly you make a step nearer to God you become aware of
contradictions in terms in the life you see about you; when you get
really near to God you enter into such a maze of contradictions and
paradoxes that it is almost too much for the human brain,” said
Velikanof, quoting from a book that was being widely discussed in
Russia, _The Pillar and the Foundation of Truth_, by the priest
Florensky. “It is for Russia to explore these contradictions and
paradoxes.”

“Russia has long dwelt in these paradoxes,” said another. Russia offers
to the world glorious paradoxes:—

“As a substitute for success it offers failure.

“As a substitute for fine clothes it offers rags; and for fine mansions
it offers taverns and log-cabins.

“As a substitute for rich men it offers beggars.

“Instead of the march music of Progress it offers the choir dance of the
Mystery.

“Instead of Progress itself it offers Communion.”

I told them my belief that Russia is the hope of Europe, that we are all
looking to her, that she is the living East, the pole of mysticism, in
opposition to America, the living West, the pole of materialism. This
pleased the _Bogoiskateli_ very much. They made quite sure it was not
simply a compliment, and then one of them added:—

“Yes, Russia is the hope of Europe, and Moscow is the hope of Russia.”
And another, an Old Believer, added to that:—

“And beyond the Preobrazhenskaya Zastava is the hope of Moscow”—it is
there that the Old Believers have a vast and important settlement.

At half-past six the discussion broke up in the central part of the
tavern and was left to be prolonged in separate groups. Perhaps later it
again became general. I went out, and eight who accompanied me suggested
that we go to another tavern two streets off and drink another glass of
tea. This we did, and the talk went on and on as it goes on every day
and hour in Russia, in every town or village—talk about God and the idea
of Christ and suffering, of what is necessary and what not.

Russia is considered a country where speech is not free, and, indeed,
listening to such meetings as ours there are often plain-clothes
detectives. But the police could no more stop the mouths of the Russian
people or the current of popular opinion than they could drain or hide
the water of the ocean. In the monastery hostelry, in the third-class
waiting-rooms, in third-class carriages, in the muddy and crowded
market-square, in the tavern, the Russian is always to be found eagerly
asking, seeking, informing, emphasising, making points of exclamation.
All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires,
commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness
to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an
explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So
Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much
drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free
churches or open debating societies.

Footnote 4:

  Since the War vodka has of course disappeared.

Footnote 5:

  From _Gambrinus_, Kuprin’s Works, vol. iv.




                                  VII
                             IN THE CHURCH


I have been much struck with the many ruins of abbeys in England. There
are many ruined abbeys that seem to need comparatively little
restoration to make them great places of worship. Kirkstall Abbey
outside Leeds, for instance, is a grand pile of stone, and has room for
1200 worshippers—but it remains little more than a curiosity and a
questionable adornment of industrial Leeds. In Russia there are no such
ruins. Throughout the wide stretch of Russia there is not a single
Christian ruin. Christianity does not tolerate ruins. Kirkstall would
never have been allowed to fall out of Christian service unless a
heathen power like Turkey had gained possession of it. Russia, for
instance, in 1875, coming into possession of the ruins of early
Christian churches on the newly-acquired Caucasian shore of the Black
Sea, at once set to work to restore them and to build new churches on
the old holy sites. Kirkstall was built in 1152; it struck me, looking
at it, that at their best the Russians of to-day are not unlike the
English Christians of that date. They have the characteristics of early
Christian fervour.

The most representative cathedral of Russia is quite a modern one—that
of St. Vladimir at Kief. It is much worth entering. A wonderful interior
painted by the marvellous Russian painters, Vasnetsof and
Nesterof—mediæval artists alive in the present, the eyes of the dead
Middle Ages opening again after a thousand years’ sleep. All the walls
and the pillars of St. Vladimir are painted by these wonderful artists.
At the north by the font is a vast representation of the birth of
Russian Christianity, the stepping of the army of King Vladimir down
into the waters of the Dnieper to their first baptism. And away high
over the altar in a background of dark blue is painted Vasnetsof’s
majestical Mother and Child, whence naturally the congregation raises
its eyes in adoration and aspiration. In the choir at the west is
painted the story of Adam and Eve and their sin, and at the east is the
wonderful Crucifixion and Resurrection, human birth balanced by
spiritual birth, Paradise lost by Paradise regained. On the columns of
the church are immense figures of the warrior-saints of Russia, the
champions of Russian Christendom. When on Easter Eve this wonderful
modern cathedral is full of all manner of Russians, you have a complete
and national picture—another vision of Holy Russia. It is not necessary
to pray or to fall upon one’s knees. It is only necessary to exist in
the great choric throng and to look over a thousand heads to the awful
and yet altogether lovely vision of the Virgin to feel one’s heart
almost stand still and one’s soul become rapt in wonder, awestruck,
thrilled. You wish to stretch arms above the head and give yourself
completely to the spirit of beauty, the Godhead. You lose the sense of
the Ego, the separated individual, you are aware of being part of a
great unity praising God. You cease to be _man_ and become the _church_,
the bride of Christ.

The walls of all churches in Russia are painted all over with immense
pictures. This is dimly thought by Western people to be in bad taste.
But that is because the distance between the Western and Eastern
churches of Christ is as yet unbridged. The Russian has the child-soul,
the peasants get to heaven where we fail, because they are “as little
children.” And the children like the pictures. Older and more staid folk
would not perhaps have thought of them. But they only need to go through
the spiritual experience of praying in a Russian church surrounded by
the painted cloud of witnesses to wish to be such children, and to feel
that the child-idea of painting the walls with the pictures of the
heavenly host is a perfect felicity.

The Eastern Church abhors dumb walls and the restriction of movement and
attitude implied by pews. Every wall and every pillar is painted with
pictures of the saints, and of incidents recorded in Holy Writ. Walls,
blank walls, are always in the nature of prison walls. They separate us
from other people. But the Russian, by painting the walls blue and
crowding them with the saints, imparts to them a character of infinity.
He gives to the worship a background of eternity. He paints in the
spiritual landscape of the church.

A great interpretive Russian writer[6] thus writes of the fresco and
wall-painting:—

    In the West, where the Gothic arose, wall-painting naturally
    disappeared. There was no place for it on the arrowy columns and in
    the spaces between the windows. But in orthodoxy a continuous blank
    wall begged to be covered with painting. An ikon, a little picture
    in a square frame, was hung here and there, but still did not cover
    or give voice to the senseless walls at which the eyes of the
    worshippers gazed. In orthodoxy the wall must not be dumb, it must
    speak. But the wall cannot speak by texts—for which there are books.
    The people in the church ought to see themselves surrounded by holy
    scenes, pictures—of immense content and of immense dimensions. Such
    are frescoes. Only in orthodoxy are they possible, and indeed
    without them orthodoxy is dumb, powerless, not expressed. Thirst for
    such pictures among the Russian orthodox is great.

    Frescoes make the walls live. The soul poured forth on the walls
    calls to prayer, and says as much to the worshippers as does the
    reading and the singing in church, not less.... The worshippers feel
    around them the great background of historical Christianity. They
    not only hear but see—Christian history, they not only hear but
    see—the story of salvation, they not only hear but see—the exploits
    of the martyrs, the suffering.... They see the pageant of orthodoxy,
    its splendid victories.

    The great difference between our immense wall-paintings and mere
    painting on canvas, the things that are exhibited in galleries and
    academies, is that the one is national whereas the other is only
    _personal_. Instead of nervous shrieking pictures, these minute
    creations which hang on academy walls, we have something eternal,
    everlasting, to which may bow their heads generation after
    generation, to which will pray one human family, another human
    family, another....

This is an orthodox Russian’s view of one of the characteristic features
of his own church. To the Russian it means so much. But to one who has
worshipped in both churches, and is speaking for those who for the most
part pray in churches that have dumb walls, there is a great deal more
to note and to follow up in the consideration of this most interesting
new emblem in religion. Rozanof sets us on the highroad for a
fundamental understanding of Russian orthodoxy, and what I call the
Eastern point of view in Christianity.

This praying in a church whose walls are “the great cloud of witnesses”
is a portentous matter.

First of all, a word as to the _service_ in a Russian church—the holy
scene that shows itself if you go into vespers or matins, to a funeral
or a wedding or a baptism, or a service for the remembrance of the dead,
or any of the numerous occasions of religious gathering. There are no
pews, no chairs. There is always a crowd, a promiscuity of rich and
poor, of well-dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscopic mingling of people
and colours, people standing and praying, people kneeling, people
prostrated, people pushing their way to the altar, people handing
candles over one another’s heads, people pushing their way out,
churchwardens wandering about collecting alms, no irritation at the
pushing, no anger through discomfort. The lights are dim, being mostly
those of the worshippers themselves, of the candles they have lit before
votive shrines. There is no organ music, but an unearthly and
spontaneous outburst of praise from the souls of the choir and the
clergy and the laity worshipping together. It is a strange and wonderful
crowd where noble human faces, broad shoulders, and beautiful forms
predominate rather than clothes or uniforms. No ranks of pews and
people, no “man’s order,” only God’s order, the varying and wonderful
multitude. And from the back and the sides, and from the pillars and
columns look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are
alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died, all
praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the
church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and
splendour of the mystery of God.

All the walls and the people and the priests are praising God. Whom do
they praise?

Whom are we all praising? It is Some One or Something that has been
praised for all time, and that will be praised for ever. Any narrow
conception is necessarily wrong. It does not matter that many a
worshipper has a low or superstitious idea of the God he worships. We
are all comparatively narrow—even the widest-eyed of us. It does not
matter that many deny intellectually that they are praising at all. We
at least know by what we have heard, by bursts of universal praising
borne in upon our ears, that all there is, is praising. That is one of
the reasons why frescoes touch the soul, they remind us of a truth we
know in ourselves that the face of every human being, good or evil, is
turned towards God, as the flowers turn their blossoms to the sun.

Russia has her modern frescoes, for she has rediscovered the art of
painting on wet plaster. She has also her ancient Byzantine frescoes—the
expression of the early Church. There is something in them all that
expresses the idea of choric praise, “the same yesterday, to-day and for
ever.”

Rozanof very suggestively remarks that archaeologists are poets, in that
they turn their backs on present-day reality and go to live with a time
a thousand or two thousand years ago, holding that time to be as great a
reality as the present day. They realise that the Past lives. We make a
mistake when we talk of the dead past. It is a great religious truth
that all that has ever lived lives for ever.

We are provincial dwellers in Time; we are, few of us, explorers, and
many who do explore Time, explore it as moles do a field. We do not scan
the vast stretch of Time from aloft. We are patient plodders, crawling
on hands and knees and peering and poring over little plots of eternity.
Few, very few of us, have the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But
if we had the poet’s eye and the poet’s point of view we could see the
_time-that-was_ existent now, we could see it glowing and breathing and
singing. We could see every event and circumstance in history—in living
action, discharging itself and yet not getting discharged, rampant.

Keats, looking at the bas-relief on a Grecian urn, had the true poetic
vision. He realised the ever-living quality of a moment of life poised
in a picture. So he looked at the living groups on the ancient urn and
sang:—

               What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
               What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

He looked at the Greek shepherds with their pipes and heard the liquid
melody float away, and he cried:—

              Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
              Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.

What enchanted the poet was that though the sculpture was all action, it
was only a single moment. He felt that all was living, all moving, all
processional; but that all was fixed. He saw the eternity in the moment.

                  Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
                  ... yet do not grieve;
                  She cannot fade ...
                  For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!

He sees the trees whose leaves will never fall, and the spring which is
an eternal spring.

A joy of art and of the eyes is the poising of a moment thus, and the
showing in a sculptured relief or a picture or a poem all that was
happening in the moment—the eternal life that the moment holds, the
moment which we think passes, but which in truth never passes but ever
is. We move past the landscape of Time and deceive ourselves that it is
Time which passes us. It is we who pass by Time. The Time we have passed
through remains. We can keep it in our view. We must go high into the
heaven to see All-Time—nearer to God, nearer to the central sun of
glory.

It is to take cognisance of the infinite breadth of Time, a richer
knowledge than that on which we pride ourselves, knowledge of the length
of Time. There is nothing more touching that one man can say to another
than the recounting of all that is happening at one and the same time in
the Universe. But speech and writing have one great lack. It is that we
must spend time to write and we must spend time to read. We must write
one word after another, must read one word after another. But, joy of
the artist! in a picture he can give an immediate impression of many
things happening at the same time. The gazer at beauty has not to follow
laboriously word by word and line by line and page by page to find out
what all was happening at one and the same time; he sees it at once and
takes it to himself at once in the painting. Especially in the fresco.
He sees the breadth of Time shown in the breadth of the picture, and the
multiplicity and variety in it.

So the sculptures and frescoes of the church touch the human soul. They
are fragments of the breadth of Time, fragments of the pictures which
Man writes on the breadth and surface of Time, fragments of the mystical
“Garment” of which Goethe speaks. They are fragments of universal
pictures, fragments of the picture of the Universe grouped about the
feet of God. They have a choric and processional aspect. No matter what
the figures in the fresco seem to be doing, they have the aspect of
praising God, of being part of a choric universe.

Have we not noticed this in Nature, of which Art is the mirror? A dead
man lying in an open coffin is like a piece of a fresco framed. The face
of a dead man is a picture of a man going through a great gate. It has a
grand processional look.

The roll of history itself is a long strip of fresco. It is only too
narrow a strip. It is in the breadth of history that the beauty lies. If
we could only see in poised moments all people and all nature praising
God in all their various ways at one and the same time! That is the full
roll of history—to see the broad eternity in each moment. To see that is
to see the great phantasmagoria, the infinite blending of all shapes and
colours, of all the runic and mystic manifestations which, seen in
small, thrill us and puzzle us and perplex us in our mortal lives. It is
also a vision of the Last Judgment. I often think in these days of
accusing God and quarrelling with Providence it will not be God that
judges us, but we who give our judgment about Him. When the true and
full vision bursts upon us, we shall all cry Hosanna unto the Highest.
The whole universe, seeing itself and understanding itself, will burst
into one great cry of glory.

How that could come about, or what such a cry would mean, is beyond
thoughts and words. We cannot be literal about it, and yet we have sense
of it, and are able to strike chords of the great harmony or catch
glimpses of the symphonies of colour and form. The strange picture is
miraged for us backward through Eternity and we catch glimpses of it. So
it is in the Orthodox Church, in a crowd of pilgrims in a dim temple lit
by the lights which the pilgrims themselves have lighted at the altars,
enfolded in the great cloud of witnesses we sing praises to the One, the
Central One, the God of All.

There is nothing more wonderful than a real crowd, a crowd attracted by
a personality or an idea. At interludes throughout history we catch
glimpses of gazing crowds, the

          Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
          Man, brute, reptile, fly—alien of end and of aim—

that rush into sight at once as you name the ineffable Name.

The New Testament pictures of Jesus standing in the midst of the crowd
is the symbol for all time of the Church, “Jesus teaching among the
people, living in His heart the life of every one He saw, living from
His heart in living veins over the whole earth, the thousand people
about Him listening, calling, reviling, praying, the angelic spirits
gazing at Him rapt, even the devils acknowledging Him from the bodies of
the possessed, the disciples bringing sick people to and fro at the
Master’s feet.”[7] This is just the same picture as the Russian Church
presents to-day. It is the idea of that wonderful modern Russian
painting, “Holy Russia,” where Jesus walks out of the ikon frame and
stands enhaloed above the crowd of all sorts and conditions of Russian
men and women. It is the picture presented in the work of the great
novelist Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s novels are pictures of great
crowds of Russian men and women in the presence of the mystery of Love.
Dostoieffsky’s novel is a church, and in the church there is room for
Raskolnikof, the murderer, and the little white-slave Sonia, room for
the sick and the suffering and the lustful and the pure. And even the
devils cry out from the bodies of _The Possessed_ acknowledging the
Christ. Jerusalem of to-day, with its thousands of poor Russian pilgrims
and its crowds, is such a church. Thither come not only the good and the
respectable, but the outcast, the criminal, and the drunkard; there is
room for them in the presence of the Sacred Face.

The little village church of any forest-side of Russia is also such a
church. All Russia is such a church, and the world itself also, for
every face is turned to one idea of God as the flowers are turned to the
sun. Hence we sing most felicitously the Hymn of the Three Children, so
popular in the early church, the _Benedicite Omnia Opera_:

    O all ye Works of the Lord ...

    O ye Angels, O ye Heavens, ye Waters ...

    O all ye Powers of the Lord ...

    O ye winter and summer ...

    O ye mountains and little hills ...

    O ye children of men ... ye priests of the Lord, ye servants of the
    Lord, ye spirits and souls of the righteous, ye holy and humble men
    of heart, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.

Footnote 6:

  V. V. Rozanof, _Wall-Painting_.

Footnote 7:

  “The Ikon not made by Hands,” a Russian mystical story in _A Vagabond
  in the Caucasus_.




                                  VIII
                          IN THE MARKET-PLACE


    MOSCOW, _March 1914_.


What a divine disorder! The peasants seem to have an instinctive sense
for grouping. No matter how much the crowd moves or how many changes are
evolved in it, it is always a beautiful whole, a fair scene, with
balance of colour and form and sound. You see not a crowd but a nation.
No wonder the Russian produces a ballet which is bewilderingly beautiful
when the peasants in their gait are true to themselves and to their
nation. What troubles the eye in a Western crowd is the fact that every
one is afraid to be himself, to be true to personal impulses, and to
walk and dress and act as he likes. Stupid censure and the criterion of
convention robs our crowds of life, of diversity of colour and form. We
in the West abhor a crowd as something disorderly in itself; we prize
the drilled squad, where each and every soldier looks as if turned out
from one and the same factory.

One of the most wonderful pieces of stage production in Moscow this year
was Gogol’s _Fair of Sorotchinsky_, presented at the New Dramatic
Theatre, a picture of a Russian crowd and a market on a hill. The first
scene shows a highway and an ox-cart laden with village girls and young
peasants coming laboriously along it. They are on the way to the fair.
The second scene, the fair itself, takes one’s breath away. The sun is
blazing with a ten o’clock in the morning full-armed effulgence, so that
the bright cottons of the peasant women, the chestnut-coloured
sheepskins of the men, the ribbons hanging from the stalls, the black
tangles of astrakhan hats, the trodden mud and puddles of the track, all
glitter like bunting on a May morning; and the tilts of the shop-tents
and stalls ascend the hill one beyond another to the sky-horizon, so
that behind the foreground, where the action takes place, there rises a
mountain of irregularly ribbed canvas. All manner of people float in and
out of the colour design: flirting village girls wearing bright beads;
stalwart yokels standing about in the mud with hay-rakes in their hands;
antediluvian monks with greasy, tangled hair, with wrinkled and wise
countenances, black and dirt-stained cloaks; tired pilgrims with huge
bundles on their backs, wiping their sunburned brows with the backs of
their grimy hands; beggars, drunkards. All the talking and bargaining
and singing is allowed to mingle, and the customers stump about amongst
the stalls and the piles of golden melons and brown pottery, and ask
prices and haggle. And the little story of the play shows itself when
the ox-cart of the first scene comes in with its burden of laughing
girls and swains. Mardzhanof, the producer, does not allow the life of
the fair in the background to slacken for a moment in order to emphasise
the main story. He lets the fair be the world, which always goes on no
matter what story is enacted upon it. Morning wears to noon, noon to
afternoon and evening, and the ox-cart sets out again home.

Necessarily there is design in the kaleidoscope of the market as shown
on the stage; but then the design is to show what a Russian fair is
like, and this of Sorotchinsky is a wonderful representation of the
Russian crowd. Every one who went to the performance was struck with the
crowd, the way each small part was played by the actor and actress who
had it. There was not one of the great troupe who simply walked on and
filled a space; every one was realising a separate part. Such individual
work was necessary if the psychology of the Russian crowd was in any way
to be represented.

The market-place is more secular than the theatre, the church, or the
tavern, and yet in it you see the same wonderful national idea (as
Chesterton wrote of a similar idea, “It is as if we gazed long at a
design full of disconnected objects, and suddenly they came together in
a huge and staring face”)—divine disorder, the disorder of the starry
sky, instead of man’s order, instinctive mingling instead of ranks and
pews, the live crowd instead of the dead crowd; or to translate the idea
into political phraseology, true democracy instead of collectivism, the
ballet of imagination rather than the regimental march of progress,
human destiny as a mystery play rather than a problem play, enacted in a
mysterious labyrinth rather than in a corridor of time or up and down an
everlasting staircase of evolution.




                                   IX
                            THE RUSSIAN IDEA


Those familiar with ideas can tell at sight a German idea, an American
idea, a Russian idea, a Roman Catholic idea, and so on. Each nation has
its fundamental idea, its mother idea, the idea of which all other
characteristic ideas are children. As Dostoieffsky says: “No nation has
ever been founded on science and reason; it has always grown about some
central idea.”

It is a remarkable fact that, although Russia is a great composite
empire with an enormous number of small nations and tribes under
her rule, she is not a country of mixed ideas. Her literature,
art, music, philosophy, religion, her theatre, her dancing, is
something intrinsically Russian. No Poles, Finns, Jews, Armenians,
Kirghiz, contribute to it. No German-Russians contribute to it. Of
all the names by which Russia is known as a nation mighty in art
and in thought, not one belongs to the subject nations. In
literature—Dostoieffsky, Turgenief, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin,
Chekhof, Gorky, Balmont; in painting—Vasnetsof, Nesterof,
Verestchagin, Sierof; in music—Tchaikovsky, Korsakof, Mossugorsky;
in philosophy—Solovyof; in history—Kluchevsky, Karamsim; in
contemporary journalism—Rozanof, Menshikof, Doroshevitch,
Merezhkovsky; even in Russian science, which is something apart
from European science, Mendeleef, Metchnikof, all without
exception are Russian names, the names of Russian people at once
Christian and Slavonic. Nothing is contributed by Jews; nothing is
contributed by Poles; nothing by Finns. These people each have
their own characteristic separate literature and religion and art.
They think in their own tongues, pray in their own churches, have
their own characteristic ideas. There is not the blending we have
in England, where we include in our national literature the works
of, for instance, Disraeli, Zangwill, Conrad, Hueffer, and so
forth, proud to be Jewish, proud to be Polish, proud to be German
in extraction and yet speaking for England. The Russian idea is
something purely Russian.

This is important not merely as a curious circumstance. It indicates the
fact that the fundamental Russian idea should be something more easy to
unravel, more evident, more mighty than other contemporary ideas. How
much more easy, for instance, to determine just what is the national
Russian conception of life than to determine ours, obscured and
complicated by so many foreign elements.

There is a spirit abroad to-day which calls for the thing called
cosmopolitanisation, in other words, for that process of the
mongrelising of nations and ideas that is manifest to-day in America. It
wishes the breaking down of national barriers—intermarriage. The
doctrine seems to be promulgated chiefly by those Jews who have sold
their priceless birthright, who have given up the Zionist ideal, and
settled down to think that they are no longer Jews but Englishmen,
Americans, Germans, what not. They talk of the United States of Europe,
as if the United States of America were not sufficient of a problem and
a muddle.

Russia is the strongest bond of nationality, being the purest and
clearest of the nations. Germany, France, and England also tend to shake
themselves free, and seek to find and to be themselves.

My quest at present is to unravel the Russian idea, and present Russia
as she is in her spirit and her passion. By seeing Russia in this way we
have a revelation of the majesty of a national idea. We obtain a notion
how we should look if we could see ourselves as we really are.

Russia and England are akin, if it were only in the bond of
Christianity. We have certain spiritual affinities. We could know
ourselves much nearer to one another, though that depends on us rather
than on Russia. She has much more to teach us than we have to teach her.
It is only kindness to our politicians and progressive workers that
could ever suggest that Russia was a blank sheet on which they might
write what they chose. Russia, alas! may learn wrong things of us and go
wrong—Dostoieffsky’s nightmare. The noisy middle-class Russia of to-day
does indeed tend to follow after other gods. But for the moment I cannot
pause to give actual pictures of Russia going wrong. I am in quest of
the vital and fundamental idea of Russia, that which is the mother of
her art, literature, music, of her religion and her traditional national
life.

I am tempted to say that the Russian idea is an aspect of Christianity.
Hence the title of this book, _The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary_.
Russia is the fairest child of the Early Church. Her national idea is
identified with one of the Byzantine aspects of Christianity. But it
would be impossible to deny that Russia draws her marvellous spirit from
something earlier than Christianity. There is Nature-worship in the
Russians; there is Scandinavian mythology; there is Oriental mysticism.
The remote past still lends impulses of passions, dreams, fears, hopes,
to the rustling and blossoming present. Yet all its past has been
absorbed into Russian Christianity, though Russians have not yet
explored and reproduced in art all the significances of that mysterious
time in Russian history. We may say that the Russian idea is a Christian
idea. Christianity has been great enough to include and say _yes_ to all
that was wonderful in the old.

What then of Russian ideas? Of the Russian idea?

When you first step into a Russian novel you come across symptomatic
ideas, and when you go into Russia you find them again in the life of
the people. Probably the most obviously characteristic thing is the love
towards the suffering, pity. Russia is a remarkably tender and
comforting nation. She is greatly concerned with her neighbour, and her
heart is touched by his destiny. As Rozanof writes:

    Is there one page in the whole of Russian literature where a mock is
    made of a girl who has been betrayed, of a child, of a mother, of
    poverty? Even the thief is an honest thief. (Dostoieffsky’s _Honest
    Thief_.) Russian literature is one continuous hymn to the injured
    and insulted. And as of such people there must always be a multitude
    in vain and gigantically-working Europe, it is possible to imagine
    the shout of joy which breaks forth when they are shown a country, a
    whole nation, where no one ever dare offend the orphan, the
    destitute, in the moral sense never dares to look insultingly upon
    the person left forlorn by circumstance, by destiny, by the break up
    of life. Of such people there are only too many. And what can the
    “kings” of Victor Hugo say to them, or in general, the manifestly
    artificial subjects of Western writers? Russian stories can give
    consolation. For besides being taken from the habitual common
    everyday life they have a tenderness. The Western man can say:
    “There is a country where I should not have been despised; there is
    a country where I should not have been so coarsely insulted, where
    every man would have taken my part and interceded for me, where they
    would have taken me by the hand and raised me upon my feet again. I
    am cursed, but only in my own country, not on the whole planet.”

    That is the effect of Russian literature. Its significance is not a
    matter of the reviews of Western critics, not a matter of the noisy
    fame which has overtaken it; it lies not in its material triumph,
    but in a direct and absolutely unhampered affinity to the soul of
    the simple and universal reader. To some the Russian song is always
    pleasing.... No,—bigger, better. There are souls to whom the Russian
    song is the one thing necessary in life, to whom it is dearer than
    anything else in life—as to the hurt one, his mother; as to the sick
    child, again his mother, perhaps neither a beautiful nor a virtuous
    one. Virtue—it is of course somewhat strange to ask virtue from
    Russians.... “The Troika.”... But one thing there always is in
    Russia—sympathy, responsiveness. Perhaps it sprang up in Russia, and
    became exaggerated there just because so many people were crushed by
    various “troikas.” However that may be, to be sung to sleep with
    Russia’s cradle song many wish....

There is love towards the suffering one. It is part of a love towards
the destiny of the individual. There is a remarkable absence of
conventional standards. You are not looked at askance because you seem
poor. The tramps and pilgrims on the road are never made ashamed of
themselves. A contrast to America, where the tramp is an object of
mirth, where he is regarded almost as an enemy of society. The Russian
takes the tramp in. He has real hospitality, and not only hospitality of
hearth and home, the giving of food and a night’s shelter, but also a
more vital hospitality, that of mind and heart. He wants to know all
about you. He asks you the human questions. He asks about father and
mother and brothers and sisters, about your home and your calling and
your goal. In return he tells you the intimate things of his life.

This is not only a matter of the road. How often the most utter
stranger, met in a railway carriage or a post-station or at an inn, will
after a remark about the weather or the crops begin to tell you the
whole story of his life. He assumes the hospitality of your heart; a
sure sign that in general people’s hearts are hospitable, that in
general there is a love towards destiny.

As a wanderer and a seeker I have myself experienced the ordinary
material hospitality of hearth and home, and also this of the heart,
having often been poor, strange-looking, and enigmatical enough.
Russians have not looked askance; they have been brotherly. They have
accepted a stranger naturally and simply as they would one near to
themselves. More than that, knowing that I had a special quest, there
have always been those who came forward and helped me in the spiritual
things. Mysterious beings have, as it were, anticipated my coming, and
have stepped out and recognised and said: “Read this; go to that one and
talk to him; see this Russian picture.” They love to preserve the
mystery too. I have known people who had the aspect of having dreamed of
my coming.

The first day I was in Vladikavkaz, an old tatterdemalion standing by
the bridge over the Terek came forward to embrace me and welcome me in
the name of God. I had never met him before; I knew no one in the town.
When I left Vladikavkaz last, to make my long and possibly dangerous
Central Asian tramp, the most mysterious of my friends brought me a
beautiful little copy of Nesterof’s “Martha and Mary” to keep me from
harm. And one night, months later, in a remote Moslem town on the fringe
of the desert, I had a strange experience of adventure and terror when,
as it seems to me, I was literally saved by looking at the picture. The
giving of it was love towards destiny, hospitality of the heart.

It might be thought, however, that the Russian love stopped short with
the honest, the religious, the seeking—that as long as a man could give
a decent explanation of himself and his mode of life the Russian was on
his side. But that would be to miss the real saliency of this love. The
Russian loves the dishonest, the criminal, the despicable, the
unpleasantly strange, the man who can give no explanation of himself, as
much as she loves the other, even a little more than she loves the
other; she has a “weakness” for the prodigal. Half her novels are
expressive of love towards “criminals.”

In English novels the plot is so adjusted that the author has scope to
make a thorough out-and-out condemnation of the villain. He has a few
pages where he lays himself out to show how inexcusable the villain’s
conduct was, what an abject scoundrel, what a disgraceful creature he
is. The condition on which you may describe sin is that you condemn the
sinner. In life also, as well as in literature, we are condemnatory; we
love to pass judgment on others. How different in Russian literature!
You find no condemnatory spirit there. The author’s whole passion is to
defend and explain the criminal, to evoke the tender sympathy of the
reader. He makes you feel how strange, how pathetic, is man’s destiny,
how sordid his life compared with his spirit. Over the portal of Russian
life and literature you might find the motto, “Neither do I condemn
thee.” Russia feels that however mean, however ugly and strange a man’s
life may seem, it is nevertheless a part of his great pilgrimage. He has
got to go through it, he is learning something thereby, fulfilling
something sacred thereby. This is exemplified very remarkably in
Russia’s legal system where, for instance, there is no capital
punishment except under martial law. A man commits a murder, but he is
not therefore condemned and hanged and turned over to God; he gets
merely a dozen years in Siberia, and he goes on with his life.

Dostoieffsky, when he was in Siberia with forgers and murderers and
highwaymen, was much concerned to seek out the gold in their character;
and he remarks how a violent and dangerous man will even shed tears at
the sight of a child suffering. “Murderers are much more simple than we
take them to be,” says he in another place, “so are we all.”

The Russians are unashamed. Men and women confess voluntarily to having
committed crimes or behaved abominably upon occasion. The man who lives
an immoral life does not do so secretly to his wife. The black sheep of
the family is not hidden in the background, “never mentioned,” or
subscribed for and sent to a distant colony; he is sitting at the table
and is quite cheerful, and every one takes him for granted. No one is
ashamed to borrow or to be tremendously in debt; no one horror-struck at
the idea of visiting the pawn-shop. All which exemplifies the love
towards individuals and individual destiny.

This is why Russia is so free. It is almost a platitude to say that
conventions determine the extent of personal freedom much more than the
laws of the realm or the behaviour of the police. Yet it is a fact lost
sight of when people talk of tyrannous government. In Russia love is
towards the individual much more than towards the State. There is indeed
no particular love towards the State. We British uphold the State; to us
the police and the police-system are almost sacred. We often condemn
individual behaviour in the name of the State. We abhor “shirkers,”
“rebels,” “breakers of the peace.” Hence our comparatively limited
British freedom. We believe in order. Our freedom is freedom within
bounds. We allow ourselves to be disciplined along definite lines. In
Russia it is different. There freedom often amounts to chaos. Even
Russian order, _poryadok_, that which comes from Petrograd, is something
borrowed from Germany to keep the nation together. Russians have no
instinct for order. Watch our best British troops marching—they give you
the idea that each soldier has been turned out from a factory, and is of
one and the same type and size. They march like moving patterns. But the
Russians march any-way; their order is of the lowest kind. It is even
tolerated to have wives and mothers marching in the ranks with their
husbands and sons, carrying their bundles. Some men are marching; others
are running. Each man has his own individual expression in his
countenance; he has not merely a regimental expression. Russia does not
care for ranks, for blocks of houses, for formal gardens, for churches
with pews. She likes the individual to do as he pleases. Hence a divine
disorder, a glorious promiscuity. The church perhaps shows the quickest
picture of national life—the kaleidoscopic mingling of people and
colours, the wonderful crowd encompassed by the frescoed walls, the
faces of the saints, the great cloud of witnesses.

The same picture, though modified by Western influence, is shown in the
theatre. Russia wishes the disenchanting of the footlights, the
participation of the public in the action of the drama, the removing of
stalls and chairs—a divine disorder in the theatre. She believes in the
emotional communion of the theatre—the actors inspired by the people,
the people inspired again by the actors, the dance and interplay of
human thoughts and emotions. Shut your eyes to the material world and
you realise there are no footlights, no separating river of light
between the two worlds of stage and auditorium. There is a great and
wondrous ballet of thoughts and impulses, hopes and fears, going forward
and across and backward and across again between the priests of the
drama and the conspirators, the worshippers.

The church service and the drama, the church and the theatre have much
in common. The Mass has much in common with the mystery play. And the
mystery play was originally the Mystery—at which you did not look, but
_into_ which you were initiated. You participated in the action. You
were the victim sacrificed, or the priest, or one of the conspirators in
the orgy. You were made one in the sacrifice, as in the Mass you are
made one in the sacraments of bread and wine, symbols of the victim.
Share is taken in the sacrifice, we consent unto the death. We are made
one. We get free from the idea of separation, from space and time,
realising the everywhere-here, the eternal present.

In such a form is the Russian notion of the world and his conception of
life. It is such a church, such a theatre, such a mystery play. It has
its liturgies of beauty, its many processions, its sacrifices, its
ecstasies; it is a great phantasmagoria of emblems. Nothing is without
significance; every man has his part; by his life he divines it and
fulfils it. Every common sight and sound is charged with mystery.
Everything is praising, everything is choric, everything triumphant.

To recapitulate and restate this in aphorism: Russian life is remarkable
by virtue of its love towards the suffering, towards the individual
destiny; by the absence of condemnation; by faith in life even if life
should express itself in meanness, sordidness, crime; a feeling for the
pathos and wonder of life as exemplified in the individual; no love
towards “the State” or man’s order, but great love towards the
individual and individual instinct; a consequent freedom, amounting at
times to seeming chaos, a divine disorder such as the disorder of the
starry sky, as opposed to man’s order, say the order in which stars
might be classified in a book; a disorder such as that of the flowers
and shrubs of the forest, rather than order as in a formal garden; a
belief, then, in instinctive genius and divination by impulse of one’s
place in the kaleidoscope of existence.

With such natural disorder comes an incapacity for “discipline,”
“efficiency,” “progress.” Life is a mystery play.

Whence may be inferred the following differentiation of ideas:

Instead of the God of the Ten Commandments, and the consequent ten
condemnations, the Russian acknowledges the God whose service is perfect
freedom.

Instead of the simplification of life, a love of its complexity. The
Russian says “yes” to the multiplicity of doctrines; he does not wish
personal destinies to be unravelled and straightened out by the State,
standardised and guaranteed by the State. He will not reduce the chess
of life to the draughts of life. A religious belief in pure democracy;
no belief in Socialism.

Instead of belief in the Future, belief in an eternal Present.

Instead of life understood as a march, life understood as a ballet.

Instead of life understood as Evolution, life understood as a marvellous
phantasmagoria.

Instead of Time understood as a passage or corridor, Time as a
labyrinth.

Instead of the world-ideal of garden cities and carefully planned parks
and squares, a belief in the maze of the world.

Instead of a belief in the coming of universal peace, a belief in the
recurrence of wars. No belief in the “making virtuous of the world and
all people.”

No belief in any explanation as sufficient.

No prejudice against impossibilities; a cheerful acceptance of miracles,
infractions of the “laws of Nature,” of the significance of dreams and
visions, of the design of destiny hidden in apparent accident; a
predisposition towards superstition.

A belief that in apparent failure lies a truer destiny than in apparent
success.

A saying “yes” to the mysteries of the Birth, Crucifixion, and
Resurrection of Christ. The West would take Christ down from the cross,
heal His wounds, and save Him. The East would not do that; she knows
that she must crucify Him.




                                   X
                             THE LABYRINTH


Man is a labyrinth. He is masked, and there are masks over masks. When
you have gone past his first surface you come to a second. He is like
thousands of overpainted frescoes. His soul is a mystic temple with a
hundred and a thousand standing-places further forward or further back.
His soul circulates in passages, hides in caves or recesses, is missed
among intricacies or complexities. It has the power of metamorphosis and
can lurk in the by-ways of his being in strange guise. It manifestly
takes possession of his body, or it dwells in dim caves and recesses, or
marches soundingly along corridors; it creeps insidiously through secret
mazes; it dwells lingeringly in empty chambers, makes its exit
stealthily by little doors leading as it were to vast reservoirs; or
hurriedly it traverses many apartments to look from the outmost gate
like a newly risen moon. It is sometimes enthroned like a king or a
queen, or descending from the throne trails long robes over marble. Or
it is abased to a slave or a prisoner and is confined in towers and
dungeons serving tyrants for unknown ends; or it lies stretched on
couches, in trances, overcome in chambers of voluptuousness, escaping
again and again from the spell of enchantment and the stress of tyranny,
from would-be masters too weak finally to enthral. There are issues of
joy from many passages of pain. There are processions in the temple of
the soul; and sometimes the soul is a victim bound to be sacrificed in
honour of some conqueror, or it is the priest at the altar, or the
conqueror-god to whom sacrifice is made. The sense of destiny in the
soul may rise to a majestic height of godhead, or may be extinguished to
the dull inanition of the worm or perverted to the fury of a devil. But
even lying at great depths and in great darkness it sees the eternal
stars, as the stars are seen even in the glare of the Egyptian noonday
from the innermost chambers of the pyramids. It becomes upon occasion an
enchanter, an Ariel who can summon fairies and sprites with pageants and
choruses, and make heavenly music in every passage and turn and cranny
in the great labyrinth of man’s being.

There are many labyrinths. Squares and circles and straight lines are in
themselves lies—they are disjointed fragments of labyrinths. There is no
truth in them until they are pieced together. A labyrinth is something
which cannot be drawn by mathematical instruments, which cannot be
photographed. It can be sensed, it can be conveyed to the mind by music,
by a certain sort of impressionism in writing and painting. We have
knowledge of the labyrinth of the world because our body and soul and
being is a labyrinth, and part answers to part. We understand such music
with our whole bodies, not only with our ears; we see such pictures with
the soul itself, which is all eye, rather than with the mere physical
eye. It is truth—heavenly harmony.

A paragraph of good writing is a labyrinth: it is comprised in one
breath, and mirrors in its construction the natural stops and alleys of
the body. Every fruit is a labyrinth.

All disorder is a diviner order not understood: the order of the
labyrinth, the disorder of the starry sky, the disorder of the forest,
the disorder of the world, of a nation, of the web of intricacies on the
palm of a hand.

All astronomy, astrology, geography, cosmography, botany, natural
history, palmistry are more or less the tracing of the lines of the
labyrinth, our playful attempts to follow out the mystical maze of
natural phenomena.

The lines which men trace in their goings to and fro upon the world are
part of the mystical tracery, so also are the tracks of the clouds, the
outlines of coasts, the ramifications of the lines of rocks.

Reflections of the labyrinth are caught in many curious pictures and
patterns: in the design on butterfly’s wings, the markings on plumage,
the lines and mottling on birds’ eggs, the frosting on the window-pane.

All the rest of nature seems unconscious of it; but we men are half
conscious, and pause and stare continually at what we call astonishing
or curious or wonderful things. Our life is a life of lisping and
marvelling. Every thrill is the accompaniment of a perception of part of
the labyrinth; death itself is our greatest thrill, and is perhaps the
necessary phenomenon of fuller initiation.




                                   II
                            MARTHA AND MARY




                                   I
                              THE _PODVIG_


Russian Christianity is sharply in contrast with Western Christianity in
the characteristic idea of denial of “the world,” as opposed to our
Western idea of accepting the world and “making the best of it.” An
essential idea in Russian Christianity is denial of “the world,” denial
of this mortal life as real life, denial of material force as real
force, denial of speech as real speech. An act of denial is called a
_podvig_, and a man who does some great act of denial is called a
_podvizhnik_.

The act of Jesus on the mountain denying the road that led to the empire
of the world in favour of the road that led to an ignoble death is a
_podvig_—denial of the world.

“Turning the other cheek” is a _podvig_—denial of material power.

Going two miles with the man who forces you to go one is a _podvig_.

Mary, breaking the precious box of alabaster which might have been sold
in aid of the poor, accomplished a _podvig_.

Simon Stylites, standing on the pillar when he might have been doing
“useful work in the world,” was a _podvizhnik_.

The hermits of the Thebaid were all doing _podvigs_—renouncing the
world.

Father Seraphim, who took an oath of silence and was silent thirty-five
years—proving in himself that silence was golden—accomplished a great
_podvig_.

It is difficult in Russia to carry on a discussion of any point of
religion without coming to a consideration of this idea of the _podvig_.
For instance there is a saying in Russia, “Blessed is he who can escape
and yet chooses to take the punishment the world would give him.” A
story is told in Russia that when Jesus was stretched on the cross many
of those who had accepted his doctrines were in great distress not
knowing that this had got to be; but they said among themselves, “You
will see: there will be a miracle. I wouldn’t be in the place of these
stupid and brutal Roman soldiers for worlds. You will see He will step
off the cross, and amaze and conquer the world.” And in their anxiety
and excitement they cried out: “Save thyself.” Pessimists whispered to
one another sad thoughts, “Alas, alas! has it not always been so in the
world’s history; mankind has stoned the prophets of God. Now He is going
to die, to perish miserably, and the whole new movement will be ruined.
People who never saw Him work miracles will say He was a charlatan, and
that He never had any mission or any power. But we who saw Him raise the
dead know He has the power to save Himself.” But both the optimists and
the pessimists were wrong. They did not realise that the Man on the
cross was giving the lie to the reality of death and to the material
power of the Romans and the Jews. The giving the lie is the _podvig_.

That strange German fairy tale of the three sluggards is probably taken
from conquered Slavs. There lies in it something of the Russian point of
view. The old king gave his kingdom to the son who would not save
himself from the gallows-tree, even though a knife were put into his
hand to cut himself down. The German version is that the king gave the
throne to the laziest of the three, but in reality he gave it to the one
who was most capable of denying the world.

Dostoieffsky had a habit of saying that he was glad to have gone through
penal exile in Siberia, and he felt that those revolutionaries who fled
abroad and did not accept the worldly judgment and punishment meted out
by the Russian court were not true to Russian ideas and not in reality
helping Russia. He would have preferred that they accepted the cross
which Russia put upon them. Dostoieffsky constantly refers to himself as
a slice from the loaf of Russia, a slice from the communion loaf—a share
in the sacrifice. Those who flee from punishment are outside the
communion, they have no real portion in Russia. “The religion of
suffering” does not mean “suffering for its own sake,” but rather the
religion of not avoiding suffering, not avoiding or trying to avoid
destiny. The religion of the _podvig_.

A tempter once came to a hermit living in a cave, and told him about the
pain and misery and poverty of his fellow-men living in the world, and
asked him what he would do if a million of money were brought to his
cave and put at his disposal. The hermit crossed himself and muttered,
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” The tempter was annoyed and urged his
point. “But what would you do?” he asked.

“I should not alter my way of life,” said the hermit.

That was a _podvig_, a denial of the reality of misery on earth, a
denial of the power of money to gain real happiness for man.

One of the most interesting of Russian mystery plays, Andreief’s
_Anathema_, is concerned almost wholly with this idea. A man after God’s
own heart succumbs to the temptation of thinking he can put the world
right with money. He inherits a million from a relative who has died in
America, and he sets to work to alleviate human suffering. But the more
suffering he tries to remedy the more appears before him, till finally
he is drowned in suffering, and God says to Human Reason, “Not by these
measures shall it be measured, nor by these numbers shall it be counted,
nor by these weights shall it be weighed, O Anathema, dwelling among
numbers and measures, and not yet born into light!”

This idea is so pervasive, so characteristic, that I would call it an
extra letter in the alphabet of Russian philosophy.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The history of literature is the history of ideas.

Man first made sounds to represent elementary ideas such as hunger,
cold, warmth, danger, death. Then he made signs to represent sounds, and
invented reading and writing. The signs were systematised; they were
split up into letters and then remade as words. Alphabets and
dictionaries were made. Languages grew.

At first people spoke only of hunger, cold, pain, pleasure, fighting,
death, and such simple things. They had perhaps only five hundred or so
words. But year by year they added to words as they discovered new
things in the world and in themselves.

At first clever men, brave warriors, intrepid hunters gave us words;
then philosophers and astrologers and historians; then priests and
minstrels and poets. They named all the things on the world and their
feelings about the things; they named the ideas for which men fought,
for which tribes and nations fought. They named the things of which they
were afraid, the evil spirits in the darkness, in the forests, in the
earthquakes and tempests. Last of all, when they found and considered
the great spirit of man, the spirit in themselves, they named the gods,
and they named the transcendental glories and sorrows of man.

The minstrels struck their harps and sang of the great deeds of famous
men, and then poets without harps wrote of the same deeds, changing into
words the music of the harp as well. Priests burned sacrifices on
altars, and the poets wrote of it and changed the smoke of the incense
into words. Great warriors fought before Troy, and the poets changed
their passion into words. They sailed the terrible seas ten years to get
home, and the poets changed the storms into words. The poets found out
the assonances of mankind, what every one admired, and they gave to
whole generations watch-words, words that were battle-flags. The poets
described the gods.

Poems were so much read that whole lines and verses were as familiar as
ordinary words, and people could quote a line of poetry and everybody
would know the idea that was meant. And when the name of a god or a hero
was mentioned there rose at once to people’s minds stories about him,
poems about him.

Stories became like extra words in the language. That is what the
wonderful Greek stories such as those of Narcissus, Demeter, and
Persephone, and the labours of Hercules became—extra words in the
dictionary or, better still, extra letters. For simple people took them
into their lives, and combined them with their own thoughts, and made
new words of their own. People learnt to use these stories in their
prayers and in all their thoughts of mankind.

Some nations like the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, grew to great
culture, and the peoples in their beautiful capitals struck thousands of
harps and sang thousands of songs, whilst away in the backwoods and lost
places of the world the rest of mankind lived almost inarticulate,
almost like beasts,—in Germany, in Gaul, in what is now Russia, in
Britain. But their upward movement was at hand. A new idea came into the
world and all the old order changed, giving place to new. The last of
the stories which became a word was the story of Christ on the cross.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” An extraordinary new letter
was given to the world, and people fitted it into their thoughts and
made new words, new languages, new cultures.

The savage races of Western Europe came turbulently to the knowledge of
the God-like in themselves, and threw the world into confusion,
observing the old words and stories and culture of the ancient world.
They followed the word-flags of Christianity, the watchwords. Once more
the making of language was first in the hands of clever artificers,
brave warriors, intrepid hunters, adventurous sailors. It passed into
the hands of mediæval philosophers, alchemists, and scholars, to
minstrels, priests, and poets. At last they realised a wide and wondrous
culture, and they took from the ancient world all the stories and extra
words and letters now called myths, and they added them to their own
stories and words, as one might add strings to a stringed instrument.
They learned to praise God on many strings.

To-day we express ourselves with great orchestras as formerly, long long
ago, man, emerging from the animal, the rude Pan learned to express
himself on a simple reed.

The discovery of words has been the history of self-expression. Words
have no value in themselves. They are symbols or tokens of ideas in us.
And when we find words continually adding themselves to our vocabulary
and our culture, we know ourselves increasing in the knowledge of
ourselves and of the beauty and passion which lie latent in our souls.
Education in its highest sense is the learning of words and the learning
how to use them, learning the notes of the great instrument, learning
how to play the music of the ages, and to express with that music and
with that playing the passion and the mystery of our own souls.

The highest of literature, like the noblest of music, is that wherein
the great stories are used as extra letters and words. Rich writing is
that which is full of allusions which we all understand. Poor literature
is often that in which the author is frequently making allusions to
events and stories which are known only to a few and have no strong
significance. To use stories as words when the majority of people do not
know the stories is to write in a language that is not understood, it is
to write in words that are not in use. The reality of a book that draws
its allusions from the Bible and from the Greek myths and general
European history is immeasurably greater than one that is constantly
referring to the Koran or the stories of the Buddha or Zoroaster or
Khrishna or Confucius. That is in itself an adequate defence of
Christianity as a religion for us. Its stories are our stories. Its Word
is the living Word. The other stories are not our stories. Christianity
is our language. If ever asked to defend Christianity, the defence lies
not in the historical accuracy of Christian documents or the verity of
records. Christianity is the _Word_. All words are at our disposal for
the expression of our passion and the sense of our mystery. The
Christian story is the word that fits.

Our golden deeds, the deeds we consider as golden, are our extra
letters. Let the poets and musicians blend them into their music. Every
time a golden deed is made to sound beautifully in allusion a common
chord is struck in the souls of men.

                  *       *       *       *       *

And the _podvig_ is an extra letter. There are many who claim that it is
the word itself; that denial of “the world” is actually the _logos_ of
Christianity. Even in Russia, where there is also the richer and grander
conception of the Church, there are those who stand for the _podvig_
only, for denial of the world and material force only. Witness Tolstoy
and many of his followers. It is even held by some that the whole of
true and vital and historical Christianity is founded on—“If thine eye
offend thee, pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”
The important sect of _Skoptsi_ go so far as to say that the begetting
of children is sin, and they mutilate themselves, and in that way deny
life in the name of the spiritual life.




                                   II
                    THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM


Thinking of the _podvig_, I made a pilgrimage to the hermitage of Father
Seraphim, a few hundred miles from Moscow.

Over treeless wastes and desolate commons, where far-away churches on
the sea of snow look like ships sailing under full canvas; through
snow-blown forests of pines, through woods of tall birch trees; very
seldom past villages or human beings—to the holy city of Arzamas in the
Government of Nizhni-Novgorod. A night in an inn among the many churches
of Arzamas, and then on the road across fifty miles of desolate
snow-covered moor that lie between the city and the great monastery. I
hear of the terrible hurricane that has swept southern Russia, and the
flood that has drowned hundreds of poor fisher-folk and workmen on the
shores of the Azof. To-day there is bad weather all over Russia. It is
ten degrees colder, it still snows, and a high easterly gale is blowing
up the fallen snow and the drift-tops and drift slopes in blinding
clouds that look like engine smokes and volumes of vapour. A bitter day.

There are no pilgrims on the way, the weather is too heavy for them.
Often as you stand and try to go forward over the uneven road, the wind
sets you sliding backward on the clumps of ice, and you suddenly blunder
into two feet of soft snow. You come to little cottages on the Sarof
side of which stand drifts higher than the cottages themselves; they
look like cliffs, and the snow blowing off unceasingly and tempestuously
above the cottage roofs looks like long white grass going in all
directions at the sport of the gale. In the afternoon the snow ceases to
fall from the sky, but it still rises in smokes and sprays over the
rolling plains. Far away on the horizon to which I am journeying the
black line of the wolf-haunted forest is visible. At night I sleep in a
peasant’s hut, on felt spread on the floor. A whole family goes to sleep
in the same room, and as I lie stretched flat on this primitive couch,
resting my weather-beaten limbs, each of the others says his prayers
before the many ikons. There are many ikons in the room, and besides
them, holy oleographs enough to give the idea that the bare wooden walls
have been papered on some religious design. Chief among the pictures is
a representation of the Tsar and the Grand Dukes giving their shoulders
to the triumphal carrying of the relics of the Father Seraphim, on the
occasion of the canonisation of the Russian hermit and _starets_.

Father Seraphim was a saintly monk and ghostly counsellor of the type of
Father Zosima, familiar to English readers of _The Brothers Karamazof_.
He accomplished extraordinary holy exploits during his youth and middle
age, conquering the flesh and denying the world, and in his old age
became famous for his godly sagacity and humility. When he died his body
was reputed to have in it holy charm, and thousands of peasants brought
their sick and their blind, and their sins and their sorrows to the
miracle-working relics. Finally the Empress, wishing to have a male
child, abode at the monastery and prayed, and Father Seraphim gave
Russia a Tsarevitch. The Tsar named Seraphim as a saint, and the shrine
of Sarof, already astonishingly sought of pilgrims, gained a great
ecclesiastical distinction. Hence this grand oleograph on the wall.

I slept as one sleeps who, after weeks in town, is one day surcharged
with open air. Next morning the whole family was up before dawn, and the
samovar was on the table in the grey light of sunrise. A man from the
village decided to accompany me to Sarof.

“Haven’t been there for four years,” said he, “and now I’m homesick to
see it again. I think I’ll go and pray a little.”

We talked of Father Seraphim on the way.

“Is the cell still there where he fed the bear with bread?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s there; about five versts from the monastery away in the
woods. There is a shrine there now. You’ll see the stone, too, on which
he prayed a thousand days and a thousand nights without moving away. And
the spring that he found. Many people have been cured there. It’s quite
unusual water. Will you bathe?”

“Perhaps,” said I. “But the weather’s cold.”

“No one ever takes cold there,” said the peasant. “It’s quite safe. The
water is very very cold. But there’s something about it. You take it
home, it doesn’t go bad like ordinary water.”

“He was a great saint, this Father Seraphim!”

“Of course; he was a God-serviceable man, he did many _podvigs_.”

When we arrived at the monastery in the holy wood we were accommodated
in a cell, and a novice brought in the samovar at once. No passports
were required, no charge was made. We found at the monastery some two or
three hundred other pilgrims, most of whom had been there several days.
A pleasant collection of churches, hostelries, little shops, and
work-sheds set on a fair hill among ancient pines, a peaceful shelter
and sanctuary after the wild weather and desolation of the moors. We
wandered about the buildings in the dusk, listened to the antique
chimes, and then returned to sleep a few hours before the midnight bell
to the first service of the morrow. About one in the morning we left our
cells and all muffled up and mysterious followed other pilgrims across
the soft new snow to the door of the Cathedral of the Assumption. Then
in the witching hour of night we entered the church—such an immense
church it seemed, barely lit by the few struggling tapers, and we such a
few people in it. The peasants, however, paid no attention to numbers,
and they stood and prayed and crossed themselves and gave the responses
for hours and hours, at last receiving the blessing of the priest,
kissing the cross in his hand, being marked on the brow with holy water,
stepping up to the altar and kissing through a hole in some canvas a
part of the remains of the saint. There was nothing touching in the
service except the demeanour of the pilgrims, no music worth mentioning.
Our leaving our beds to come and stand for hours on the cathedral floor
without an inclination to shirk or go out was a _podvig_—an inbred part
of the Russian character now.

I went to a fuller service later in the day, in a church much more
alight with candles, taken by a deacon with a deep spirit-summoning
voice, and mellowed by wonderful choral accompaniments, a long service
requiring patience from the aged folk who came to take part in it.

A seventy-five-year-old dame explained in one of the monastery
dining-rooms, as some twenty of us with wooden spoons sat round four
huge Russian basins of soup and helped ourselves together—“I felt I
might die before it ended, but I prayed to the holy _Ugodnik_, Father
Seraphim, to ask God to give me strength to stay till the end of the
service.”

“Why not to God direct?” I asked.

“It’s not for a poor creature like me to trouble God to attend to me,”
said she. “No, I ask the _Ugodniki_, if they have time, to go to Him and
ask Him at a convenient moment....”

“As to the Tsar,” said some one.

“But God has time for every one,” said another, “and can attend to
everything at once....”

“_Pozhalui_, I suppose so ...” said the old woman meekly in a cracked
voice, and went on with her soup.

I talked with one of the monks about Father Seraphim. What a character
the Russian hermit was; there is material in his life for the pen of
another Carlyle writing a new Past and Present. He was silent all those
thirty-five years, and then opened his mouth. Alas! no one could tell me
the first words that he spoke. He was actually silent all the time that
Napoleon was ravaging Russia, during the time when he was in occupation
of the holy mother of Russian cities, Moscow. Napoleon was popularly
understood in Russia as Antichrist, and when the news of the terrible
French sacrilege spread over Russia there were all manner of extravagant
rumours about the end of the world.

By this time Seraphim had obtained a name of great sanctity. Sick men
had been restored to health by drinking from the hermitage well, the
leprous had discharged their disease by touching the garments of the
holy but silent man. So when Napoleon came to Moscow, the crowd appealed
to Seraphim to work a miracle.

“They are burning our sacred shrines,” they cried, “they are using our
cathedrals as places of execution, they are murdering our priests and
our pilgrims. Is it naught to thee, Father?”

But Seraphim was silent.

And others said, “He is called Napoleon, but he is in reality
Antichrist. Lead us, O Seraphim, against him in the name of the Lord.”

But Seraphim was silent. His face retained unchanged its look of
exaltation; his uplifted eyes still seemed bent on some unearthly
vision; his attentive ears seemed to be listening to some other voices.
The old monk never spoke a word. Napoleon and the world had no power to
shatter his vision. Napoleons might come and go, but the truth to which
he was a witness remained unchanging, unchanged. And if Napoleon had
come to Sarof and pulled the hermitage down about Seraphim’s ears, the
old monk would still have prayed on in silence.

Almost every characteristic of the Father and every circumstance of his
life had something in it that is emblematic and suggestive. In his old
age, when he became so famous, he received thousands of letters, most of
which, however, he answered without opening! It is told how in his old
age the light of sainthood shone from his brow, and on one occasion a
holy man coming to visit him in his cell found the light too strong for
his eyes and shielded them with his hands.

“What is the matter?” said Father Seraphim.

“The light shines from your head, O holy one.”

“Do not be afraid,” said the Father. “You also are bright as I am or you
could not have seen me thus. I see you also a shining one. Thank God
that it has been given to miserable Seraphim to see a manifestation of
the Holy Spirit.”

The Father during his hermitage scooped out of the trunk of a
lightning-stricken oak the coffin that should hold his remains when he
died, and he pulled it in at the door of his hut, slept in it at night,
and prayed beside it by day.

He was an extraordinary ascetic, and yet in the picture that you get of
him in his old age, when he relaxed his asceticism, he is distinguished
by the warmth of his love and the sweetness of his counsel. The pilgrims
who come to him he calls his “joys”; before even the wicked he falls
down and he kisses their feet. When he gives his benediction he also
gives a handful of that dried black bread, _sukaree_, with which he fed
Mishenka, the bear which he tamed in the woods—Father Seraphim’s bread
which came down from heaven, the bread of the _podvig_.

My pilgrim acquaintance took me to the various shrines, and we knelt and
kissed the thousand-day stone still standing before the great rough-hewn
cross that the saint made, kissed the ikons, crossed ourselves before
many forest shrines, and eventually came to the far shrine where
Seraphim spent so many years in the wilderness. Here an aged monk,
taking the place of the _starets_, asked us our Christian names and
where we came from. He had a great sack of _sukaree_ similar to that
which Seraphim had dispensed, and he gave us each a handful with his
parting benediction. At the well, now made into an elaborate bath-house,
men one side and women the other, my pilgrim had a bath. It struck me as
rather interesting that the monks of Sarof had fitted a dozen or so taps
to Seraphim’s natural spring and conducted it through pipes—that is the
true ecclesiastical function, to put taps to living water.

I went into the bath-house and watched some peasants stand under the
frigid douche, and when my friend had put his clothes on again—without
drying himself—we took each a bottle of the water and put it in our
pockets.

Then away again from Sarof and home over the snow. I carried the
_sukaree_ and the water from the well that I might give them to the old
grandmother at Vladikavkaz when I went south—the actual _sukaree_ with
which Father Seraphim fed the bear! Some weeks later when I went to the
Caucasian city I call my Russian home I took the old lady my gift from
the Father. Next day behold her doling out half-thimblefuls of the water
to her visitors and giving them each a crumb of the comfort of St.
Seraphim to eat.




                                  III
                       TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME


    ASTAPOVO RAILWAY STATION.


From a historical figure to a contemporary figure. From the simplicity
of a mediæval choice such as Seraphim’s to the difficulty of the choice
that confronts a modern.

Nothing in Tolstoy’s life is so interesting to me as the circumstances
of his death, his flight from home to the monastery, his perishing on a
wayside station like some aged pilgrim broken down on the way to
Jerusalem. The story is such a beautiful, pathetic, touching one that
the station of Astapovo may well be an object of pilgrimage for people
who can feel in themselves the poignancies of life, and who are
interested in the destinies of mankind.

Not a place for sightseers, however! A dreary journey at the rate of
eighteen miles an hour and at the end of it all this little station on a
by-line. In the waiting-room are peasants in rags, in sheepskins, in old
blouses, peasants sleeping on forms; bundles on the floor, heaps of
bundles, tied-up sacks, ancient green trunks. On one side of the room is
a grandfather’s clock, on the other is a little wooden chapel with ikons
and votive candles. From the clock to the chapel runs a long
linoleum-covered bar, and on the ikon side of it are scores of fresh
loaves, while on the clock side are vodka and wine. On the top of the
clock burns a paraffin lamp. There is praying and disputing and
tea-drinking, children crying, bundles, boxes, pointsmen with dim
lanterns, a mouldy-looking gendarme, and it is five o’clock in the
morning.

Out of the lingering train they brought Tolstoy into just such a room
and to such a scene. “They brought him through here,” says the heavy
bearded man behind the bar, “and they put him first in the woman’s room
and then took him to a room in the stationmaster’s house.”

The man behind the bar has trained his whiskers to look like those of
Tolstoy, and is vain enough to ask me: “Did you not take me for
Tolstoy’s double? Some are frightened when they see me and think I am
Tolstoy’s ghost. Am I not like him?”

“Did you look as like him _then_? What did Tolstoy’s friends think of
your appearance?”

“They laughed.”

“Did you have many people here?”

“Not many strangers, fifteen of the family, twenty correspondents, a
general from Petrograd, two doctors.... I put them all up and fed them.”

A gruff, astonishing old fellow, this double of Tolstoy. A strange
coincidence that Tolstoy should die at his station. He is heavy,
awkward, unpleasant-looking, like a Guy Fawkes effigy of Tolstoy; and as
you watch him cross the waiting-room it seems as if his hair might fall
off and prove to be a wig, and as if one might pull his beard and
whiskers away.

But he is quite obliging to me, and shows me the marble tablet in the
stationmaster’s wooden wall, and directs me to the room in which
everything stands just as it did then, which is being preserved so _for
all time_—if Time spares Tolstoy’s memory.

The first I ever heard of Tolstoy was the discrediting whisper, “His
wife banks his money; everything is in his wife’s name.” And later on,
when I came to Russia, coupled with national pride in Leo Nikolaevitch
was always the rumour: “When he wants to go to Moscow he travels
first-class; he does not go on foot as he advises others to do. He
counsels us to live simply while he himself lives in style at Yasnaya
Polyana. He disbelieves in doctors, but when the least thing is the
matter with him doctors are in attendance.” I suppose no one really put
these things in the balance against Tolstoy’s sincerity—unless, perhaps,
it was Tolstoy himself.

Tolstoy was evidently heavily oppressed by the worldly life in which he
seemed to share and which he seemed to countenance. It was mirrored in
his soul as the everyday reflection of life, the luxury, feasting,
drinking, trivial conversation, and vulgar pride of his home.

Some time in his life, perhaps several times, Tolstoy must have been on
the point of running away. In order to make his personal life correspond
to his teaching, it would have been necessary to give up his wife and
family and the life they insisted on living. He ought to have gone out
into the wilderness and become a hermit or a pilgrim. So he would have
made his personality and doctrine into one great snow-crowned mountain
and holy landmark in the national life of Russia.

Tolstoy failed to do this, not through weakness, but because he felt he
would lift a heavier cross and would be truer to his own ideal if he
continued to lead his life in “the world,” in the midst of the
frivolities and luxuries which did not pertain to him. He would live his
personal life against the background of this stupidity, his flesh nailed
to that cross.

His life will not stand out in relief till some one writes the evangel
of his life. As yet Tolstoy is merely a great man, the author of _Anna
Karenina_ and _War and Peace_. Few know the real significance of his
life. But certainly it may be said of him, despite calumnies and
appearances, “He had no possessions on earth; he always confessed to
being a stranger and a pilgrim here. He did not believe that machinery
or medicine or law were of any value to the soul of man. And though he
lived in the midst of wealth he lived very simply.”

A very brilliant old man at Yasnaya Polyana. You went away impressed
with his brilliance, and even if you were inclined to scoff you still
acknowledged he was great. But greatness was not much to Tolstoy; it was
surely nothing to him that he remained _great_ to the end. The chief
fact about him was that for many years he was really _old_ and confused
in spirit, troubled. In his heart of hearts he was not sure that he was
living the true life. He felt a doubt that the emptiness and vanity
around him were his own emptiness and vanity. The world was too much
with him; the vision forsook him.

In the blaze up of the candle before death he saw his way and sought
sanctuary from the world, fled....

And he perished on the road, with his back to Yasnaya Polyana and the
“world.” In the room where he died are the poor two-foot-six by
five-foot-six iron bedstead, the table with medicine bottles, a chair,
the enamel basin they washed him in. It is all to remain as it was on
the day that he died. Pleasant symbolism! The world will also remain the
same: it will remove his body to Yasnaya Polyana, and quarrel over the
prayer to be said over the grave; it will quarrel over the rights in his
autograph manuscripts; it will publish the old man’s love-letters; it
will rig up in Moscow a facsimile of Astapovo Station and the room where
he died; it will arrange ten-year jubilees, fifty-year jubilees,
centenaries; build statues ...; but those who seek to know the true
Tolstoy, the real man who had this strange life-journey, will hear the
whisper, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”




                                   IV
                             BACK TO MOSCOW


The Russians are considerably more interested in religion and religious
ideas than other nations. Perhaps that is due to the greater national
growth and greater national changes: questions about destiny rise to the
surface of each man’s mind. The appetite for religious discussion is
robust and eager. You go to a debate which begins at eight in the
evening. Some one reads a lecture which lasts three hours and then there
is a three hours’ general discussion. The room is packed, no windows are
open, but every one is keen. A roar of general conversation ensues at
the ten-minutes interval every hour and a half.

A curious story enacted itself whilst I was in Moscow this spring. A
journalist discovered a group of Hindu philosophers doing a turn at a
smart cabaret restaurant. In the midst of a vulgar music-hall programme
they were performing rather beautifully on their native instruments.
They seemed somewhat out of place; and the journalist, knowing English,
sought them out and entered into conversation with them—as you can at
the cabaret, where performers mix pretty freely with those who have come
to eat and be amused. Two days later the story of the Hindus appeared in
one of the Moscow newspapers. Their leader was the chosen missionary of
Sufism, and was going through all the world preaching a new gospel. He
had had a considerable fashionable success in London and Paris, and at
the latter city a Russian hearing his music—which was in itself an
illustration of Sufism—had said, “Come to Russia; I’ll arrange
everything for you.”

“I’d like to,” said the Hindu; “I have long wished to go there.”

The Russian brought a form of contract and engaged the missionary and
his fellows to play every night for six months in cabaret restaurants
and music-halls in Russia. But the Hindu averred that he thought he was
signing an agreement for a lecturing tour.

Readers of this story in the morning newspapers were much touched, and a
lady whom I know sought out X—— at his hotel, questioned him, and found
that he was indeed a serious religious man, desirous of spreading the
gospel of Sufism in Russia. And she promised to rescue his mission.

In a week or so she had arranged a meeting for him, and X—— came with
his fellow-Hindus and their instruments and gave a lecture and rendered
some music. Several of the most cultured people in Moscow were present.
Mme. Ivanova, the wife of Viacheslaf Ivanof, interpreted for him
sentence by sentence, and afterwards question by question, and answer by
answer. The lecture amounted briefly to this: “First there was the One
and then all was peace, happiness, bliss. Then the One became the many,
and there will never be peace, happiness, bliss again until the many
becomes the One. Therefore we should strive towards the One and get rid
of the sense of the many.”

The lecture lasted about an hour, and the Russians were pleased,
curious, earnest. They took the Hindu seriously, and questioned and
cross-questioned without mercy. The gentle prophet gave the sweetest
replies, delicately evading, politely agreeing, playfully turning
simplicities into paradoxes and back again, and all his terms of speech
were definite and simple. He never took refuge in anything vague or
emotional, treated the infinities and the immensities like little toys
or bits of toys. Everything was clear to him, everything simple; he was
above all things playful. But the Russians sent question after question
and would not take evasion or smile at playfulness, till at last at
half-past eleven the gentle Eastern begged to be excused if he did not
answer any more questions as he was tired. Indeed he seemed worn out.
But the Russians had a feeling of disappointment. For them the evening
was only beginning.

The question of the many and the One, the world or the cell, the many
cares of Martha or the one devotion of Mary, would keep any Russian
audience speculating for an indefinite length of time.

In Moscow in March I met again Mme. Odintseva. A great change had come
over her life. Her husband had been killed, her fortune lost, and she
had changed her religion. When I met her first she was a Theosophist, a
modern Hypatia whose home was a temple, an elegant woman surrounded by
pictures and volumes of poetry, her own especial rooms all scented with
rose de Shiraz. Now all was changed in her life; no pictures, no poets,
no perfume, no elegance, and she had exchanged Theosophy for evangelical
Christianity. The particulars of her husband’s death had evidently been
a terrible shock to her. He had been in the habit of paying blackmail to
a band of revolutionaries or depraved police, and one night he either
failed to bring the money demanded of him, or he quarrelled with his
persecutors, or he got tired of life and committed suicide. He was found
shot dead, in a lonely spot a mile from his home. A note appointing the
rendezvous was found, but the writer was never traced. His wife
necessarily does not tell what she went through in mind and soul, but
the astonishing result was visible in her new life and home in Moscow.
All was in disorder, everything had become coarser, harder. She herself
was much stouter, had given up vegetarianism, dressed very simply, read
only volumes of sermons and the New Testament, referred all questions to
texts in the Gospels, and went to prayer-meetings every other night.

I accompanied her on one occasion. We went to what may be styled the
lowest sort of Evangelical meeting in Moscow. There is no Salvation Army
there. This was something in the nature of a slum shelter meeting. The
preacher was an enthusiastic barber. There were five or six hundred men
and women present at the meeting, and a gendarme stood at the back to
see that nothing objectionable was said.

“We have converted three gendarmes,” said Mme. Odintseva in my ear. We
sat on forms at one side of the room, and could survey the whole meeting
without turning our heads. The men present were straight from toil,
grimy, unkempt, wild-looking. A few years ago the same type of workman
grasped a revolver in his pocket and thought of barricades and
revolutions. Now he has a New Testament and sings hymns in dark rooms,
the tears stealing down his face the while.

As they sat waiting the opening of the service they looked a stolid,
heavy, unemotional crowd, the pale broad-browed women with shawls on
their heads, the heavy, unshaven, clumsy men in ill-fitting clothes
heavy with dirt. But they all changed under the influence of religious
feeling. There was a consciousness of unanimity in this low, vast,
irregular room. Something not to be put down in words communicated
itself from man to man. No one had come there to sleep through the
sermon or, like Yourgis at Chicago, to get out of the cold. There was
attention to the reading of the Scriptures, a communion of melancholy
love and passion in the singing of the simple hymns, testifying and
confessing with sobs and gesticulations in the midst of the prayers,
happy cries of pain and anguish from people whose sole confession was,
“I am unworthy, Lord, an unworthy one; O Lord, have mercy!”

The barber’s sermon was simple and sweet. “Read the Gospel, brothers;
the whole sense of your lives is in the Gospel. If you are in doubt
which way to act turn to the Gospel; do not ask other people, do not try
to remember what other people have done, but be guided directly by the
words of God. And if you have sinned, and if your past life has become
unbearable to you, do not despair, turn to the Testament; it is just one
big forgiveness from beginning to end.”

Mme. Odintseva was anxious that I should like the barber; he was a
favourite of hers. Frequently during his sermon she whispered in my ear,
and called my attention to points she considered good. Yes, the barber
was interesting; he was giving a new criterion to the people, a new
touchstone for good and evil.

After his sermon we concluded with ten minutes’ private prayer and a
last hymn. In England the private prayer would have been silent, and
there would have been that strange surcharged silence which suggests to
the mind that there might be an explosion if one were to light a match.
But in Russia though they had borrowed the idea they had understood its
practice differently. The prayer was not silent.

We all stood up to pray, and as we stood there began a murmuring and a
mumbling and a calling, a general muttering and a crying, a sonorous
clamour, hands waving, faces thrown upward toward heaven, faces drooping
and sobbing, every one saying his own prayer, and every one saying
different. It was a music, a symphony of pain and anguish from an
orchestra of human hearts. I did not pray, but looked about me and saw
the people swaying as if a wind were blowing among them. There seemed to
be no silent lips, and the barber-pastor prayed with the rest,
indistinctly and personally and yet vocally. Far away, beyond the low
roof of the meeting-room, a mysterious and understanding God heard each.




                                   V
                       THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING


Nietzsche wrote of religion disparagingly as an intoxicant, and yet by
his own religion he was intoxicated. No one ever acted more strangely or
became more excited under the influence of personal religion than
Nietzsche. It is no reproach to religion that it changes reasonable
beings to emotional beings. And yet there is associated with religion a
false emotionalism and sentimentalism that we call morbidity, a desire
to be miserable and to make other people miserable, a wearing of weeds
on festival days, pessimism and “God grant we may all be as well two
months hence,” a living with death and a loving of the gruesome.

Gloominess is a danger for the Slav soul as with us it is for the
Celtic. The bright energy of the Teuton is lacking. It is not worth
while _making_ things or working for _position_. The mind is free and
questioning. There is no sense of—

                     Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
                       Makes that and the action fine,

or of

                    The trivial round, the common task,
                    Will furnish all we ought to ask.

Nature is “vainly sweet,” and the eye looks out on the recurring pageant
of the seasons with unutterable ennui and sadness. And in life the petty
circumstances, if congenial, are but playfully pleasant, but if
uncongenial, seem surcharged with malice.

The river that runs through life is easily dammed, floods the whole
being of a man, and becomes stagnant, whilst poisonous mists lower over
him. The joyful current ceases.

It is a common disaster in Russia, the falling into a morbid state. A
Russian poet writes:

       All earthly perishes, thy mother and thy boyhood.
         Thy wife betrays thee, yea, and friends forsake;
       But learn, my friend, to taste a different sweetness
         Looking to the cold and Arctic seas.
       Get in thy ship, set sail for the far Pole,
         And live midst walls of ice. Gently forget
         How there you loved and struggled;
         Forget the passions of the land behind thee;
       And to the shudderings of gradual cold
         Accustom thy tired soul,
         So that of all she left behind her here
         She craveth nought whatever,
       When thence to thee floods forth the beams of light celestial,

which is a beautiful poem written for those who have become morbid. It
is a beloved poem, and you may come across it written laboriously and
exquisitely on tinted paper. But those who read it and love it will
never “step into the ship, set sail for the far Pole”; it is not an
invitation to join Shackleton, not even figuratively. It is for those
who love and nurse their sorrows. They have not the power nor the wish
to move. They are transfixed by mournful ideas, ideas that sing through
the air as they come, like arrows, and yet console as with music. As
another poet (Brussof) writes:

           On a lingering fire you burn and burn away,
             O my soul,
           On a lingering fire you burn and burn away
             With sweet moan.

           You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
             Without strength to breathe,
           You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
             In shoulder and breast.

           Your enemies around you look on with mirth
             Bending the bow,
           Your enemies around you look on with mirth
             Increasing the woe.

           So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
             In the eventide,
           So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
             For the last time,

which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such
poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in
provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local
journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book
from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet’s
pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching
melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is
literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower
down in society, where there is less reading, life itself gives the
terms of this outlook. So the coffin-maker in Tchekhof’s
story—“Rothschild’s Fiddle”—has a ledger in which he notes down at the
end of each day the _losses_ of the day. All life expresses itself to
him in losses, terrible, terrible losses. Smerdyakof, Dostoieffsky’s
most morbid conception, catches cats and hangs them at midnight with a
ceremony and ritual of his own invention.

The old beggar pilgrim sings with cracked voice as he trudges through
wind and rain:

                  I will go up on the hi-igh mounta-ain
                  And look into the mi-ighty de-ep,
                  A-and see about me a-all the earth
                  Where I fre-et and ve-ex my soul.
                  Ah, Eternity, it is but The-e I se-ek,
                  Little gra-ave, my little gra-a-a-a-ve,
                  You are my e-everla-asting ho-ome.
                  Yellow sand my be-ed,
                  Stones my ne-eigh-bours,
                  Wo-orms my fri-ends,
                  The da-amp earth my mo-other,
                  Mo-other, my mo-other.
                  Take me to e-e-ternal re-est.
                  O Lord have me-e-e-e-ercy![8]

Indeed, many such examples might be adduced to show the pre-occupation
of the Russian with the idea of death. The funeral service music is
favourite popular music. In the procession of moods in the soul of the
young man he comes comparatively rapidly to “worms my neighbours.” The
excessive number of suicides in Russia may be explained by the
extraordinary liability of the Russian soul to falling into a morbid
state.

But we are all of us, even the merriest hearts that “go all the way,”
subject to morbid moods, to fits of depression, black hours when we are
ready to deny the world, our ambition in it, our own life, our greatest
happiness, and live wilfully in an atmosphere of grief and pessimism,
loving sorrow for its own sake, lamenting for the sake of lamentation.
We love what Dostoieffsky calls self-laceration. We must every month or
so deliver ourselves up to Giant Despair and be cudgelled.

                The darker the night the clearer the stars,
                The deeper the sorrow the nearer to God,

says a Russian proverb, but these recurrent moods are not really sorrow,
they are a being morbid. They have nothing in common with the suffering
that comes from destiny itself, nothing of the circumstances of going
into the wilderness, or taking the road with the burden on one’s back,
nothing of the pangs of new birth, of the _podvig_.

                  Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
                    Who never spent the midnight hours
                  Toiling and waiting for the morrow,
                    He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.

—Who never ate his bread in real sorrow. Life is of this sort, that if
you will stake all of it for a new life you will get the new life. But
when you really do give up all the old and dear, that is a dark and
terrible hour, the hour of renunciation, of the _podvig_.

And on the road of life itself there is a great gulf between the
vigorous and Teutonic “Welcome each rebuff that turns earth smoothness
rough” and the morbid and Oscar Wildean “living with sorrow,” a great
gulf between Father Seraphim kneeling a thousand days on a rock, and the
sad “intelligent” who reads to himself in the evening hour:

             To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
               Without strength to breathe,
             To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
               In shoulder and breast.

Tolstoy in his later years was morbid. I suppose if the psychology of
Tolstoy’s life were to be followed out we should be surprised at the
frequent recurrence of morbid and despondent moods. Nothing seems more
characteristic of his later years than fruitless quarreling with the
life of Yasnaya Polyana, threatening to run away, lamentations,
self-lacerations. But now and again in relief Tolstoy did actually flee.
He took the road to Moscow to live like a simple artisan and earn his
living by carpentering, or he set off for a monastery where some famous
monk lived in his cell, and sought relief by confession and Christian
intercourse.

That going forth on the road, a-seeking new life, is characteristic. At
times one would think half Russia is on the road. Utility has been flung
aside, the chances of gain have been passed over, the so-called duty to
work and fulfil your place in the state has been flung to the winds, and
the Russian is out on the dusty road, wearing out his boots, thinking,
trudging, praying, recognising—finding what his soul desires. That is
not morbidity, but a noble form of life.

And many promise themselves wholly to God and enter monasteries or
convents, and there find happiness, the bright ray of destiny they
sought with their eyes in a dark world.

                       Every morning, noon, and night
                       Praise God! says Theocrite

—that is not a morbid life, though a life of denial. It does not mean
that every one who would live well should enter a monastery or a
convent, it only means that some one whose soul craved such a life has
found his way. How we have suffered in England from the difficulty of
giving one’s soul to God in that way. Those who would have been monks
and sisters have had to give themselves in other ways. There are
thousands of other ways. Every one who is living well has found a way.
The way meant renunciation, hardship, sorrow—but not morbid sorrow, the
sorrow which leaves you as you were, as the cloud of gnats wailing by
the tree and the stream leave the tree, leave the stream, just as they
were, just what they were.

The differentiation between morbid sorrow and real sorrow, between
self-laceration and the tribulation that comes of destiny, is important
if we would understand aright what the Russian means by the “Religion of
Suffering.”

The religion of suffering, of which so much is said, is a term easily
misunderstood, meaning differently in the mouths of different people.
The political propagandist holds that the Russian people are melancholy
because their institutions are so bad, and that the religion of
suffering is the religion of revolution, a growing resentment against
the government.

The morbid Russian will say that the religion of suffering is the
knowledge of the truth that _only_ in suffering and near to death can
you understand anything about life. He will deny that anything else can
teach you.

The peasant pilgrim will interpret it as the religion of taking to the
road and bearing the cross; being a beggar for Christ’s sake; refusing a
lift on the road to the Sepulchre, holding that where Christ walked it
is not for them to ride.

Another will say it is the religion that helps you to face suffering,
and point to Tolstoy’s story of the death of Ivan Ilyitch. Ivan Ilyitch
was a man who had no religion, and had never faced suffering in his
life, an ordinary bourgeois of the type of lower intelligentsia, jovial,
selfish, cynical, fond of cards and of his dinner, and having no other
particular interest in life except an ambition to make more money.
Suddenly he is stricken with cancer, and lives for years in increasing
pain till at last he dies in agony. He has no spiritual comfort; pain
quite o’ercrows his spirit. The truth is, no pain really conquers the
spirit, the spirit always triumphs at the last, even if the body is
rendered useless by the struggle. But this truth is lost in the
irreligion of Ivan Ilyitch. It would seem it would have been better if
he had lived a more regular and healthy life in his youth, but that is a
false moral. The fact is he had never faced the solemn mystery of life,
never taken his ordinary human share in suffering, and so was lost in
the hour of pain. But perhaps there were more spiritual gleams in the
end of Ivan Ilyitch than Tolstoy tells us of. Tolstoy was a moralist.
But in any case Ivan Ilyitch presents a contrast to a religious Russian
on his death-bed, in his last agony, gripping tight in his hand a little
wooden cross, his eyes upon the ikon of his patron saint before which
the candle is burning.

Another will say, the religion of suffering is that which helps you to
face life, which is perhaps another way of saying that it is the
religion which helps you to face death ... the religion which prompts
you to take risks and will face no dangers. He is losing his soul. In a
great war he wakens up and offers himself—and saves his soul. Or in the
ordinary course of things, in the “weak piping times of peace,” he
resolves to make a leap in the dark and get life, he gives up the old
for the new—he saves his soul, and out of his sufferings springs a
glory.

Still it is not for every one to make this leap in the dark. Villagers,
the peasants of a countryside, have obviously no call that way, or
seldom a call that way. They have not the need that the townsman has,
they have satisfying visions of truth, from nature, in their way of
life, in their traditional customs. _Brand_ was probably wrong trying to
lead his village flock up among the glaciers and avalanches to make a
church of ice. He should have preached such sermons and made such
appeals in towns. He would have led people from the towns. Nevertheless
there has been a cult of _Brand_ in Russia, especially since Ibsen’s
long drama was produced at the Theatre of Art, and many divinity
students and young priests have been touched by his vigorous onslaught
on the quiet lives of simple folk.

On the other hand, there have not been wanting vigorous opponents to
_Brand_ and the “God of the Heights,” and I have even seen the scientist
working to relieve pain put in opposition to _Brand_ working to increase
the pain and sorrow in the world. But in that opposition lies a
misconception. Crucifixion under chloroform does not conquer death and
sin, and there is no sleeping-draught for the young man on the threshold
of life who has got to dare and suffer and die many times before he
emerges at his noblest and richest.

Dostoieffsky voiced the religion of suffering for Russia, he suffered
himself, and in his personal suffering discovered the national passion.
He sanctified Siberia, redeeming the notion of it from that of a foul
prison and place of punishment to a place of redemption, and finding
one’s own soul. He did not find Siberia an evil place, but on the
contrary, found it holy ground. These men came face to face with reality
who had lived till then in an atmosphere of unreality. The roads of
Siberia were roads of pilgrimage. Dostoieffsky sent successively his two
most interesting heroes to tread those roads—Raskolnikof and Dmitri
Karamazof. Tolstoy develops and materialises the idea in the story of
Katya and Neludof.

Then in his novels Dostoieffsky generally shows the suffering ones,
never suggesting the idea that the suffering should be removed. He has
no interest in the non-suffering normal person. He prefers a man who is
torn, whose soul is disclosed and bare. He feels that such a man knows
more, and that his life can show more of the true pathos of man’s
destiny. Such people think, dream, pray, hope, they are infinitely
lovable, they are clearly mortal. Hence a pre-occupation with suffering,
a saying _yes_ to suffering when the obvious answer seems to be _no_,
and _Let this cup pass from me_. It is perhaps because the West has
taken it for granted that suffering is an evil thing, and has set itself
consciously the task of eliminating suffering from the world that the
East has emphasised its acceptance of suffering. Nietzsche noted what he
called the watchword of Western Europe—“We wish that there may be
nothing more to fear.” He despised that wish. The East does not despise
the wish, but finds it necessary to affirm its own belief more
vigorously. It accepts many things which the West considers wrong in
themselves—War, Disease, Pain, Death.

Footnote 8:

  Cited by the priest Florensky, who copied down the song as he heard it
  (_The Pillar and Foundation of Truth_).




                                   VI
                            THE TWO HERMITS


Although self-laceration and being wilfully gloomy are frequent in
Russian life the idea of repentance is not popular, there being no
particular passion for righteousness and consequently no insistence on
sin as something deadly in itself. In Russia you never hear that the
wages of sin is death. The man who sins is even thought to be nearer to
grace than he who never sins, the prodigal nearer than his elder
brother. “Sin committed is nothing to grieve over. What is done can’t be
helped. Hurry on and do something else, don’t waste time in penance or
repentance.” There is no idea of penance in connection with the Russian
Church, and consequently no “indulgences.” Russia has escaped the evil
of thinking that it is possible to pay for past actions and neutralise
their effect. Even in asceticism the Russian has no idea of paying for
sins by fasting and praying and mortifying the flesh. And he who sets
out on pilgrimage does not do so as a penance for sin, he is not trying
in any way to make up to God for sin. His act is an act of praise, a
promise, his asceticism is a denial of this world in honour of the world
to come, a denial of the world’s peace in praise of the peace which
passeth understanding, a denial of the world’s truth in allegiance to
the Holy Ghost, a showing forth in symbolic act of the glory of man’s
heavenly destiny.

The story of two hermits given by the Russian philosopher Solovyof gives
a Russian point of view.

In the desert in Egypt two hermits were saving their souls. Their caves
were quite near one another but they never entered into conversation
unless it were to sing psalms at one another or call one another by name
now and then. In this way of life they passed many years, and the fame
of their sanctity spread beyond Egypt and into many lands. But in course
of time the devil, mortified by their holiness, succeeded in tempting
them. He snared them both at the same time, and, not saying a word to
one another, they gathered the baskets and pallets which in their long
spare time they had plaited from grasses and palm leaves, and they set
off together for Alexandria. There they sold their work, and on the
money they got for it they spent three gay days and nights with
drunkards and sinners, and on the fourth morning, having spent
everything, they returned to their cells in the desert.

One of them wept bitterly and howled aloud. The other walked at his side
with bright morning face and sang psalms joyfully to himself. The first
cried:

“Accursed that I am, now am I lost for ever. I shall never out-pray my
hideous sin, never, never. All my fasts and hymns and prayers have been
in vain. I might as well have sinned all the time; all lost in one foul
moment! Alas! alas!”

But the other hermit went on singing, quietly, joyfully.

“What!” cried the first hermit. “Have you gone out of your mind?”

“Why?” asked the joyful one.

“Why don’t you repent?”

“What is there for me to repent of?” asked the joyful one.

“And Alexandria, have you forgotten it?” asked his companion.

“What of Alexandria? Glory be to the Almighty who preserves that famous
and honourable town!”

“But what did we do in Alexandria?”

“What did we do? Why we sold our baskets of course, prayed upon the ikon
of holy St. Mark, visited several churches, walked a little in the town
hall, conversed with the virtuous and Christly Leonila....”

The repentant hermit stared at the other in pale stupefaction.

“And the house of ill-fame in which we spent the night ...” said he.

“God preserve us!” said the other. “The evening and night we spent in
the guest-house of the patriarch.”

“Holy martyrs! God has already blasted his reason,” cried the repentant
hermit. “And with whom did we get drunk on Tuesday night? Tell me that.”

“We partook of wine and viands in the refectory of the patriarchate,
Tuesday being the festival of the Presentation of the most Blessed
Mother of God.”

“Poor fellow! And whom did we kiss, eh?”

“We were honoured at parting with a holy kiss from that father of
fathers, the most blessed Archbishop of the great city of Alexandria and
of all Egypt, yes and of Libya, and of Pentapolis, and of Kur-Timothee
with its spiritual court, and with all the fathers and brothers of his
divinely appointed clergy.”

“Ah, why do you make a mock of me? Does it mean that after yesterday’s
abominations the devil has entered into possession of you. You embraced
sinners, you accursed one.”

“I can’t say in whom the devil has found a home, in me or in you,” said
the other, “in me when I rejoice in the God’s gifts and His holy will,
when I praise the Creator and all His works, or in you who rave and call
the house of our most blessed father and pastor a house of ill-fame, and
defame the God-loving clergy, calling them sinners as it were.”

“Ah, you heretic!” screamed the repentant hermit. “Arian monster! Thrice
accursed lips of the abominable Appollonion!”

And the repentant hermit threw himself upon his companion and tried to
kill him. But failing to do that he grew tired of his efforts, and the
two resumed their journey to their caves. The repentant one beat his
head on the rock all night and tore his hair and made the desert echo
with his howls and shrieks. The other calmly and joyfully went on
singing psalms.

In the morning the repentant hermit made the following reflections:

“Just think of it. I had earned from Heaven especial blessings and holy
power by my fasts and my _podvigs_.[9] This has already become evident
by the miracles and wonders I have lately been enabled to perform, but
after this that has happened, all is lost. By giving myself up to
fleshly abomination I have sinned against the Holy Ghost, and that sin,
according to the word of God, will be forgiven me neither in this life
nor in the life to come. I have thrown the pearl of heavenly purity to
be trampled under feet by swine, by devils. The devils have taken my
pearl, and, no doubt, having stamped it into the mire, they will come
after me and tear me. Well, well, if I am irrecoverably lost whatever is
there for me to do out here in the desert?” And he returned to
Alexandria and gave himself up to a life of debauch. Eventually, on one
occasion when he was hard up he conspired with other vagabonds, fell
upon a rich merchant, killed him, and robbed him. He was tracked down,
caught and tried in the courts. The judge condemned him to death and he
died without repentance.

But his old companion continued his holy life, his
_podvizhnitchestvo_[10] attained a high degree of sanctity and became
famous through the many miracles wrought at his cave-mouth. At a word
from his holy lips a woman past the age of child-bearing yet conceived
and brought forth a male child. When at last the good man died, his
shrivelled and worn-out body, suddenly as it were, blossomed in beauty
and youth, becoming translucent and filling the air with a heavenly
perfume. Over his holy relics a monastery was built, and his name went
forth from the church of Alexandria to Byzantium and thence to the
shrines of Kief and Moscow.

The lesson of this story is, according to Varsonophy, who told it, that
there are no sins of any importance except despondency. Did not both
these hermits sin alike and yet but one of them was lost, namely, he who
desponded?

Varsonophy was a pilgrim from Mount Athos, who used to say, “Eh, eh,
don’t grieve about your sins, be done with them, they don’t count. Sin
539 times in a day but don’t grieve about it, that’s the chief thing. If
to sin is evil, then to remember sin is evil. There is nothing worse
than to call to mind one’s own sins.... There is only one deadly sin and
that is despondency, from despondency comes despair, that is more than
sin, it is spiritual death.”

Footnote 9:

  _Podvig_ is a Russian word for holy exploits and victories, especially
  for those consisting in a denial of the world. See Chapter on
  _podvigs_, page 111.

Footnote 10:

  _Podvizhnitchestvo_ = the life of going on doing _podvigs_, the
  continuance of denial of the world.




                                  VII
                   AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY


One Sunday I went to the convent of St. Martha and St. Mary in the
Bolshaya Ordinka on the other side of the Moscow river. It is a
wonderful institution, belonging to the new Russia and yet being part of
the old, a young dainty stem with leaves sprung from the rugged
many-wintered tree of the Russian Church. Like St. Vladimir’s Cathedral
at Kief, its beauty lies not in any antiquity or ruin. It is a new
institution; it is served by young people; and has new life, new
interest, and ideals. It is the convent of which the Grand Duchess
Elizaveta Federovna, the widow of the Grand Duke Sergius, whose murder
was contrived by Azef the Jewish agent-provocateur during the
revolutionary period, is the abbess.

The remains of the Grand Duke were deposited at the shrine of St.
Alexey, and praying there, the grief-stricken widow promised herself,
her life, and her estate to God. The beautiful sister of the Empress
found her way from desolation and the tomb to a bright and spacious and
yet devoted life, and she was consecrated and took the veil.

One of the first deeds of her new life was to purchase a building site
in one of the poorer parts of the city, and to have it consecrated for
the building of a convent and churches. A temporary church was put up
and services took place from the first. The first plans were realised in
1907; the sisterhood was already formed and had begun work by February
1909. The Grand Duchess is the abbess and there are about a hundred
sisters. Every one is young, every one is active. No woman over forty
can enter the sisterhood, no one also who is weak physically or likely
to be unable to perform the arduous labours for and among the poor which
the sisters impose upon themselves.

The convent combines in its ideal the imitation of both Martha and Mary.
Each sister dedicates herself to “God and her neighbour.” She would sit
at Jesus’ feet like Mary, and be occupied with many things like Martha.
But certainly the idea of Martha and service stands first in their
minds. Their religion is the religion of good deeds. They visit, clothe,
comfort, heal the poor, and all but work miracles, flowers springing in
their footsteps where they go. They receive and consider thousands of
letters and beggars. They perform work which is often left to the
municipalities and Care committees in the West, but the work is much
more fruitful since it is done in the Name of Christ rather than in the
name of reason. In some convents the sisters are divided into Marthas
and Marys, and there is a question when a new one takes her place—a
Martha or a Mary? But in the Martha Marinskaya all have to be Marthas.
Each sister has a specific calling and name, _e.g._ the letter-writer,
the purchaser, the guest-receiver: there are medical sisters, church
sisters, kitchen sisters, and so on.

The service in the convent church is open and free. All and sundry may
go in. And yet necessarily one is in a way a guest, a visitor. It is a
very gentle and delicate experience to stand on the stone flags of the
wide church beside fifty or sixty maidens in white and avow allegiance
to the same emblems, praise the same splendid Creator and God.

I came to the service, but I also wished to satisfy a desire to see the
frescoes and wall-paintings by Nesterof. The rood-screen, the apse, and
the sides have been painted by that great artist, and two or three of
his most beautiful pictures are the surface of the walls.

There is a large picture, the whole width of the church, a presentment
of Holy Russia at the margin of a birch forest; plains and folding
valleys and uplands and broad acres in the distance. In the foreground
bright green grass thick with purple labiate and yellow rattray, an
opening in the forest, delicate silver birches on each side and tiny
pine trees, seedlings of pine-trees. In the opening all manner of
characteristic Russian “poor folk” gazing, praying, kneeling, crying.
For a haloed Christ stands among the birch trees and receives all who
will come to Him.

The Russian peasant believes that Christ wanders on his roads—

                                      the heavenly King
                    Our mother Russia came to bless
                    And through our land went wandering;

and he is quite right, believing that. The thought, almost by itself,
constitutes the idea of “Holy Russia.”

The most beautiful picture in the church is the dedicatory Martha and
Mary—“The Master is here and calleth thee”[11]—a panel in front of which
stood a sister all in white like a statue, little candles in front of
her, a stout six-feet wax candle beside her.

A tall and portly priest with long hair, whimsical and gentle, took the
service—Father Mitrophan; and he walked to and fro, now with the people,
now behind the sacred gates. A score of sisters in black veils and with
black crowns on their heads sang in the choir. A sister stood at a
counter by the door and sold candles. A congregation of sisters,
fashionable visitors, peasants, working-people, and beggars grouped
themselves miscellaneously in the wide, open, light-filled body of the
church. Of course there were no seats. It was pleasant to be there;
there was good air, a fragrance occasionally of flowers, and a sense of
young women in a certain mood towards God. We sang, assented, crossed
ourselves, bowed. The sixty sisters all in white prostrated themselves,
and there was a billowy flood of white linen on the floor. And the black
choir sang, gently, pitifully, sweetly, exaltedly, with _pale_ voices.
It was their church, their temple. They expressed themselves there as a
maid expresses herself in her private room at home. The gentle Nesterof
paintings pertained to them specially. They were chosen by them.

In the midst of the service in come the convent waifs, children of the
childless, two dozen little boys in green blouses, two dozen little
girls in blue frocks and drab pinafores. And they stand in the midst of
the church. They are so small, they might be the children of dwarfs.

Father Mitrophan comes out to deliver his sermon, and we all move up
closer towards the altar rails so as to hear him. He is higher than we,
and looks a shepherd with a flock about him. A gentle sermon: “You have
parents in the flesh, you have also parents in the Spirit. There are
earthly families, there are also spiritual families; worldly intercourse
and heavenly intercourse. Our parents bore us and then as soon as
convenient brought us to the font to give us back to God. The parents
were not present at the baptism because they were only parents of the
flesh, but the guardian angels were present because they were parents of
the Spirit. To-day is the day of St. Afanasief and of St. Sergey,
spiritual fathers, to whom we must look for guidance and love. What do
they teach us? Why, first of all, to do things, to work. What a worker
was St. Paul, for instance, writing fourteen epistles. We mustn’t be
lazy! We shan’t get anything without making effort. Fast day comes; we
say it doesn’t matter much, we’ll eat ordinary fare. It’s time to go to
church; you say to yourself, ‘No, no, don’t need to,’ and you take a
stool and a book of church verses and sing to yourself pleasantly and
comfortably. No, no, it won’t do. The Fathers of the Church didn’t go
lazy like that, or where should we be....” And so on, in a sententious
manner and sing-song tone, nodding his head and pronouncing many of his
dicta in a colloquial tone of voice like an old woman saying proverbs.
He had an Orthodox voice. There is such a thing in Russia, a voice and
manner in which the Church and the Church service are reflected. It
communicates itself to the worshipper and is often a superadded grace of
personality in a man or woman, a certain Byzantinism in expression, a
holding oneself like a figure in a fresco.

Amen! A crossing of ourselves; the sermon is ended. The crowd about the
altar breaks up, and we spread ourselves out in the fresher spaces of
the church once more, and the _pale_ singing of the black-robed choir
recommences as the conclusion of the liturgy is sung. The sixty sisters
prostrate themselves together in a billowy mass once more. Worshippers
cross themselves before the altar and go out. The Communion bread is
taken and the service is over. The waifs march out; we all come out.

It is good to have been at prayers with the sisters, just as if one had
spent a few hours in perfect mood in a garden. It took my mind back to a
morning in an immense London church when I came in late and was taken up
and put in a seat just underneath a picture of the Virgin. At the
Virgin’s feet were armfuls of lilies. I had a sense, I have it now—all
flowers are flowers at the feet of the Virgin.

Footnote 11:

  The Frontispiece of this book.




                                  VIII
                           THE WAY OF MARTHA


The way of Russia is more the way of Mary, and yet no people are more
given to working for their neighbours and being actively kind than the
Russians. There are many Marthas among them. They visit the poor, bring
food to the hungry, clothe the wretched. They work for the suffering
people around them. Almost every cultured Russian of grace or character
has some social or personal responsibility or care, the passion to put
right the affairs of some unhappy family, the will to raise drunkards
and law-breakers from spiritual death. It is national and natural, and
it is strange that this should be the characteristic of a people who
also have a passion for going into the desert and saving their souls.

But it is impossible for every one to go into the desert or take to a
cell, and indeed the impulse to go away does not come to every one, and
when it does come it is seldom sufficiently strong to break down the
ties of everyday life and make a road of the affections—the narrow road
that leads away from the world. Even among a mystical people the great
majority remain behind in “the world” and have the normal life, serve
man as well as God, marry, have children, work as well as pray, and live
through six everydays to one of incense and song. The Church has its two
aspects, that of Martha and of Mary, and it is with the way of Martha
that we are generally more familiar, though many may look lingeringly
towards the wilderness, feeling that perhaps after all the better part
is to be found out there.

The way of Martha has come into some discredit in the West owing to the
organisation of charity, the reliance on parliaments and philanthropical
societies and committees rather than on individual volition. As a
substitute for love towards one’s fellow-man have appeared many
things—voting for a candidate, appeals to policemen and to magistrates,
prison, sending a young man to the Colonies, trusting to the
court-missionary ... that is the way of “the world” and not the way of
the individual. However much “organisation” there may be, there will
always remain as a fundamental idea of the Church personal love towards
one’s neighbour and care for him. Such love when seen is something that
convinces in itself, like the action of the good Samaritan.

There is a family I know in Russia, the V’s. To come into touch with
them is to touch something that works miracles like the hem of the
sacred garment. Yet all in the family are Marthas, they are all of the
spirit of good deeds: there is nothing particularly contemplative about
any of them. Most interesting of all is the youngest of the children,
Lena. She is being brought up in an atmosphere of altruism. She is only
twelve years old, and is like a plant springing up in a flower-garden;
one can watch her growing more beautiful from day to day. She is gentle,
quick, and tender. She has many desires and is eager, but when Julia her
eldest sister tells her to do one thing or another, perfectly obedient
and submissive. She is slender and wistful like a girl in one of
Nesterof’s pictures. She has the intense pleasure of a child, and when
we read _Alice in Wonderland_ together I wondered at the gladness of the
little girl. Grown-up humans are often so constrained and polite when
you read a paragraph to them. You can never be quite sure that they are
not secretly bored. On her birthday Lena _gives_ presents to her sisters
instead of receiving them, and has been brought up to feel that it is a
joy and privilege to give. When distant relatives or friends from far
away come to visit the family, Lena gives them presents. One day she was
debating what was the very biggest present she could make to a lady who
was staying at the house, and she decided to give away one of her little
pet tortoises. Once Vassily Vassilitch brought her a present, a big book
with pictures. How vexed Julia seemed! “You spoil the child bringing her
presents without any special reason!” said she. She was sorry that he
should be giving, and not Lena or she herself.

Julia is so self-denying that some years she goes without a greatcoat
even for the coldest winter weather. All her money goes to other people.
But she is not at all proud of her good works. She is just simple and
cheerful, a quiet though impulsive woman. You never hear her laugh
loudly, but there is always a sort of kind warmth and cheerfulness in
her face. She will give up a book, her time, her means of making a
living, her pleasure, to whatever appeals to her; and the whole house in
which she lives is founded on altruism. Occasionally there comes to
visit them a friend who is also extremely unselfish and altruistic. Then
sometimes there are some amusing, even absurd scenes—contests in
altruism.

The family is vegetarian, for no one in it would cause any animal pain.
They have even scruples about killing flies and troublesome insects, and
rather catch them and put them out of the window than destroy them. One
day Julia showed me with horror an article from the _Russian Word_ on
the fate of lost dogs. The State voted a certain amount of money for
poison to destroy ownerless dogs, but the police, instead of killing
them with poison in a humane way as intended, hired the worst type of
criminals in the town gaols to beat them to death for a few copecks in
order that they might peculate the greater part of the money voted.
“Such ugly things are part of the background of our everyday life,” said
I. “They are hidden from us, but they are always there, none the less.”
Julia could not believe it.

One summer I spent some days with the family in a big country-house in
the province of Kaluga. The estate was an island in a loop of a little
river. I spent one morning watching the fish which swarmed in the water
of the river, and I longed for a rod and a line. Not that I ever caught
many fish in that way. But when I was seven years old some one gave me
Izaak Walton and a fishing-rod, and I slept with _The Compleat Angler_
under my pillow. I had visions of great captures of fish. The one thing
wanting was a grasshopper. Izaak was always talking of grasshoppers, and
I had lost faith in worms and paste. But though I heard grasshoppers in
many country banks I could never find one. Here at Dietchino were both
grasshoppers and fish in manifest abundance.

In the little river were perch and gudgeon and chub, minnows, pike. I
watched the sinister shadows of the pike. They moved about like sharks,
and every now and then there would be a splash as if a branch had
dropped into the water, and I would see six or seven little fish jumping
bodily out of the water as a murderous pike rushed at them, and they
fled in terror. The fish seemed pretty hungry. I caught several
grasshoppers and rather cruelly threw them on to the surface of the lake
and watched the perch snatch them away. A sad end for the grasshoppers,
but a better luncheon for the fish. Lena and her next sister, Olya, were
much horrified at my action, though they were too kind and well-trained
to say more than “Oh!” when I mentioned it. Later Olya told me how one
evening she had seen that on one of the lines left by the village boys a
fish was caught and struggling, and how she came next morning and the
fish was still on the hook and not taken in, and she thought it so
cruel, and wrote a letter to the boy and pinned it on a tree near by.

Some time after that we went out one day and watched the fish. Little
Lena had three biscuits in her coat pocket in case she should be hungry.
But she broke up two of them and threw the bits to the fish, and we saw
them come and eat the fragments with as much avidity as they had taken
the grasshoppers I provided. We were out for a walk; Lena and I went on,
and she kept one remaining biscuit in case she should be hungry.
Presently along the road came a familiar dog and fawned around us
ingratiatingly. “Poor dog!” said Lena, “it’s just had puppies, it is
very hungry,” and she took out her last biscuit and gave it to the dog.

The little girl has an almost perfect character, and the fact that she
will never do or think anything unkind has a constraining effect on
elders in her presence; and yet she is an open-air little girl, and rows
and bathes and plays games and goes long walks, as any boy might wish
his sister to do.

Each of the four sisters has inherited consumption, and though not
actually in consumption they have all a certain fragility and
slenderness. Their only brother died of consumption, a clever boy, who
never for a moment permitted grief to enter the hearts of those who were
tending him. All was mirth and laughter at his death-bed. Joke after
joke, idea after idea put forward. All agreed that it would be absurd to
wear black for such a one. And the sisters and near friends went to the
funeral in bright summer dresses. They were of those who hope all
things, believe all things.

This winter Julia was chiefly engaged arranging popular lectures on the
Oriental religions—“in order to give an interest in religion to those
who had fallen away from Orthodoxy and had now no religion at all.” She
had set a room apart for meetings and given it the atmosphere of a
church, and there was a library of several hundred volumes to which
visitors referred frequently. She kept open house, and I have often been
there in the evening when there were more than a dozen visitors sitting
at the long table of the dining-room having tea. There would be all
sorts of people, some real seekers, others of a friendly gossipy type.
Many of them were really foreign to Julia’s nature and temperament,
wrapped up in themselves and consequently not able to realise what a
sweet and wise and wonderful woman their hostess was. But all were
welcome.

Julia’s grandmother, a very gentle and simple old lady of eighty, always
presided on these occasions, and if she were not drinking tea, a space
would be cleared on the tablecloth and _patience_ would be laid out. She
is always in black, has large eyes and fine brow and a magnificent Roman
nose, regards the cards intently, and puts them one upon another
deliberately and solemnly as if she knew all their secrets and were the
Queen of Spades herself. But she listens to all that is said, and can
repeat almost the whole of the conversation after the people are gone.
She is of the old Orthodox Russian type and dwells under the ikons. No
meal is ever begun without her grace being said. And she also has the
gentle spirit of altruism. Every other Sunday night a rather obstinate
old lady who belongs to the Evangelical Christians comes and sits beside
her and reads in a loud distinct voice a volume of Spurgeon’s sermons in
translation. And the old lady asks no questions, always seems to be
pleased, and goes on putting out her cards and making up her patience
pack in sympathetic silence.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Julia has lived in France and England, and she especially likes the
English. “They have learned to be so kind,” she would say. “They take
care not to injure people’s feelings when they talk. They are gentle,
and they are not unjust, they are fair. They are centuries in front of
us Russians in that way.”

That observation struck me very forcibly when I heard it; for Julia has
herself an English manner. She is like an English lady of quality of the
best type. She has that something which she admires in us expressed in
herself.

It is good that the standard notion of an Englishman which one finds in
Russia is something which corresponds to this praise which Julia gave
us. The Russians see us at our best, that is, as we really are, and they
admire us. They like our quiet kindness and fairness. They admire our
passion for social reform and “putting the world right.”

Julia also is “helping to build the kingdom of heaven upon earth,”
helping to make the world really ready for the Master when He comes
again. She is an _Eager-Heart_, who would even give up her chance of
sheltering the heavenly Babe and wondrous Mother in order to take in a
human babe and earthly mother homeless in the snow.

That is the way of Martha, the finding of Christ in the suffering human
being in the world, the realisation of “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the
least of these ye did it unto Me” as contrasted with the way of Mary—the
denial of the world and of the reality of the suffering in it, the
pouring of the ointment on the feet of Christ instead of selling it and
giving the proceeds to the poor.

The way of Martha implies a great number of workers and the consequent
necessary organisation—a church. It has its priests, its temples and
buildings, its ceremonies and sermons. The hermit needs no church, no
temple or priest, but the worker in the world needs everything.

Hence the pomp and splendour of the Church is associated with the way of
Martha. Its faith is carried like a great banner wherein is depicted a
world set free, a kingdom of heaven upon earth. The ranks of the world
are understood as grades of authority in the great business of
well-doing, and kings and men are consecrated with solemn rites to the
service of God. We are enrolled as soldiers of the heavenly King and
need a religious music which is military, and appeals of sound and
colour which stir the heart.

So in Nesterof’s picture of Martha and Mary,[12] Martha is painted in
resplendent rose and is in the forefront, whilst the mystical-faced Mary
is darkly robed and stands behind her sister. So in Christianity all
that is visibly and obviously splendid is associated with the way of
Martha—the wonderful cathedrals, the soul-stirring processions, holy
wars, solemn rites and pageants. Martha is always to the fore and
splendid, and goes to meet Christ, whilst her sister Mary remains in the
background at home in faith.

Footnote 12:

  The frontispiece of this book.




                                   IX
                           MARTHA’S TRUE WAY


The view I take of the miracles is this, that no one _met_ Jesus or
_saw_ Him who was not miraculously affected in some way or other. The
deaf began to hear, those who had never spoken in their lives had their
lips unsealed, the cripples found out that they had the souls of men,
the sick were as if they were well, scales fell from the eyes of the
blind, and he who never saw anything in his life was suddenly awake to
beauty. The outcast and the vile learned to believe in themselves; even
the dead became alive. When John asked, “Art thou He who should come, or
do we look for another?” it was sufficient to answer, “The blind see,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are
raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.”

And the miracles never cease. As they happened two thousand years ago,
so they happen to-day. We have the vision, and our infirmities fall
away: we see, we hear, we praise. Christ is ...

                 The subtle alchemist who in a trice
                 Life’s barren metal into gold transmutes.

There is much of the Gospel written by men who had not the vision, or by
politic priests. Many ecclesiastics of the early Church could not
understand the mystic story, and misunderstanding it they yet strove to
defend by every means in their power the authenticity of their
misreadings. Explanations, local colour, even absolute inventions were
interpolated in the sacred writings in order to prove that certain
dogmas were right, in order to prove that other dogmas were wrong. They
actually raised Lazarus materially from death, instead of leaving what
was probably the original story, the fact that Jesus convinced Martha
and Mary that Lazarus was still alive in the presence of God. Not that
the Gospels are the worse, or that we would have them otherwise. There
is an added poetry in the marks which time and life make on any living
thing. And the Gospels have been crucified as He of whom the Gospels
were written was crucified before them.

Most explanations of the miracles are true, but inadequate. They often
lead to confusion of thought and the emphasis on the material facts and
outward manifestation rather than on the spiritual facts and inner
reality. It is true that Christ “went about the world doing good,” and
that He is to us “an ensample of godly life,” but the good that He did
was spiritual good.

The works of our Marthas get a great deal of their inspiration from the
healing of the sick and the ministry to the suffering. Progress itself,
the whole modern reform movement as far as it associates itself
consciously and verbally with Christianity, identifies its inspiration
with that touching of Christ’s soul which did not permit Him to pass one
suffering man without healing him.

But it is often forgotten that the good which He did was spiritual good.
The true way of Martha is not so much giving money to the penniless,
clothes to the ragged, medicine to the sick, homes to the houseless,
decent dwellings to those who live in slums, as it is to make the poor
know that all these things are nothing and of no account; as it is to
touch their hearts and give them a new outlook upon life. Martha has
also to make the blind see, make the deaf hear, the mute speak, and to
raise the dead. As it is, it frequently happens that the poor, receiving
“charity,” are left angry, and so become poorer thereby, and the blind
find themselves in a greater darkness, and the deaf in a more deathly
silence.

We look on our fellow-creatures with dull eyes, and our personal
character and spiritual beauty is not sufficient to lighten up the
landscape and the faces of the people around us. There is no light about
our heads, and people touching the hem of our garments feel no contact
with mystery. So we do not reveal Christ to men. Though all is within
our power. Martha’s ordeal is as great a one as Mary’s, her consecration
as vital. We cannot go out carelessly and minister to the poor, for if
we do, we perform no miracles. And without miracles the poor are not
satisfied.

The true Martha has the wishing heart, and her fingers are full of
virtue. She is an argument in herself, and her presence without words
works true miracles, revealing the mystic meaning of Christ in herself,
and causing every one who _meets_ or _sees_ her to be miraculously
affected in some way or other.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Obviously the service of Martha is always personal. Therefore nothing
anonymous is Christian, and philanthropical societies, parliaments,
reform movements, and the like are doomed to failure unless they are
served by men and women with Christ-faces.




                                   X
                            MAKING WEST EAST


                    ... who made West East
                    And gave to Man
                    A new heaven and a new earth,
                    As Holy John hath prophesied of Me.


The West seems to have the tradition of the way of Martha, England
especially. Our Victorian era, of which the popular teachers were
Kingsley, Carlyle, Ruskin, was essentially an era of work and deeds
rather than of faith. As children, we in our prime to-day were brought
up on the gospel of work. Thoughts about one’s soul were considered
rather ignoble: they were smoke that we had to consume ourselves. We
were urged to forget the question of our souls and _work_. The whole
world was working, all the factories of England sang together. Every man
in England, from the highest to the lowest, knew when he wakened each
morning that he had that day some real and indispensable work to do. The
child must learn his lesson in that light. “If I hear of an artist of
promise,” says Ruskin, “the first question I ask is, ‘Does he work?’”
Ruskin dismissed Whistler, who painted rather in the way of Mary,
because he obviously did not work. All great men whatsoever worked.

                 The heights by great men reached and kept
                 Were not attained by sudden flight,
                 But they, while their companions slept,
                 Were toiling upward in the night.

If you want to be a Knox or a Luther or a Cromwell or a Frederick or a
Bismarck you must work.

The spirit of industry seemed to be Christianity itself. In reading
Froude’s history one seemed to gain the idea that the Reformation meant
getting rid of idleness and monks and abbeys, and substituting noble
labour, honest craftsmen, and factories. It is a modern misapprehension.
There was a time when we used to sing a hymn extravagantly opposed to
the gospel of work—

                          Doing is a deadly thing,
                          Doing ends in death.

We have a reputation for work. Most Russians would be incredulous if
told that Englishmen had ever sung such words. Yet they have, and we
know that we are not like the ants who have always been working and
always will work. We have been out of love with work before and will be
again.

During the Victorian era every Englishman had his coat off and was
working for all he was worth, perspiration on his brow, grime on his
body, the clangour of machinery in his ear. Carlyle found his generation
working, and gave it his blessing in effective phrase, and was so
obsessed by his own message that he gave up his own quest, his own
seeking, and lived in the British Museum, pondering, grubbing,
scratching, and turning forth volume after volume of dull Frederick, and
he forgot his own soul and the man who wrote _Sartor Resartus_ and _The
Heroes_.

And although this work, work for work’s sake, is not a Christian thing,
it is associated in the mind with what I call the “way of Martha.” It is
an exaggeration of her sweet serviceableness, a supposition that she had
gone crazy and had not only become cumbered about with many things, but
was so cumbered that she could never in all her life spare a moment to
come to the Master. Be that as it may, England had a fairly clear and
simple notion of her creed. Work pleased her. Popular opinion was on the
side, not of the parson who did nought, but of the old farmer “who
stubbed Thornaby Waaste.” Tennyson sang work and the goal of work—“All
diseases cured by science,” “the Parliament of the World,” “the rule of
the meek upon earth.” We gave our shoulders and our hearts and our lips
to the work, though indeed not much of the last, for in those days
silence was golden.

Now silence is golden only for those who do not know what to say. A
change has come about, is coming about. Work has ceased to be holy.

“To labour is to pray.” “Do the duty which lies nearest to you, that
which is doablest.” “Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ...”
such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature
there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the
first of the moderns, and he wrote:

                     Not on the vulgar mass
                     Called “work,” must sentence pass.

And again:

             Thoughts hardly to be packed
             Into a narrow act,
         Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
             All I could never be,
             All, men ignored in me,
         This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

And again:

               He fixed thee midst this dance
               Of plastic circumstance,
           This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
               Machinery just meant
               To give thy soul its bent,
           Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

The way of Martha had given place to the way of Mary. My elders read
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_ to comfort one another:

                  Grow old along with me!
                  The best is yet to be,
              The last of life, for which the first was made;

and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and
the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with
a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those
I loved; I carried it with me wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in
my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to
radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down,
it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms,
roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and
clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It
was good b’ye to the old. It was a sight of one’s own immortality and
Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.

But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can
remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning.
Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.

It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from
Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than
that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real
_Imitatio Christi_ when he made something with his hands and saw that it
was good. Then we read _Andrea del Sarto_, despising

                 This low-pulsed craftsman’s hand of mine,

knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.

From Browning’s day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming
to Mary. The note-books of those young ones who loved thoughts began to
be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many
of the elder ones to whom we read what we had found were blind and deaf
to the new ideas. I remember one old literary man and artist who used
always to say, “I take my stand with Jim”—meaning that he held with St.
James that faith without works is barren. He belonged to the old.

I admit we were not sober in our judgments. We went to see Ibsen and
Bernard Shaw, and it was easy to agree that Nora was right when she fled
from her home and her husband to save her soul, and we thought that the
immoral and unprincipled Dubedat was sooner to be saved than the
hard-working slum doctor. We saw in Solveig, who stayed in the
background and prayed, the true type of womanhood, and understood how
Peer Gynt through her could be saved. We read Nietzsche, that mad
Christian, a sort of Mary who hated her sister Martha, calling out in
anger that man had ceased to be man and had become merely _neighbour_.
We entered the domain of Russian literature, and read Dostoieffsky and
Chekhof and Gorky, and so fell under the spell of Eastern Christianity,
where we remain to-day.

The taste of England has been steadily changing this last ten years, and
the current becoming deeper and broader. Russia and the East have been
coming steadily nearer, and more and more of us have turned our backs on
work and service and that Divine materialism—the raising of the poor.
Not that we are on the way to becoming a philosophic and reflective or
ascetic nation, or even in the way of singing again “Doing is a deadly
thing”; but more and more of our nation is attempting to take to itself
and re-express the other aspect of Christianity—the way of Mary.

Even in the North of England, where the land is devoted to work and the
towns are little more than barracks of workmen, there is a noticeable
and, even from a capitalist’s point of view, an alarming change of
spirit. The “workers” are rebellious. It is not that they want more
money or lighter hours or better conditions. They simply don’t want to
work. The rising generation is disinclined to settle down, and the time
is coming when there will be difficulty in getting labouring hands, when
it will be difficult to buy them. The gloom of our industrialism is
destined to be broken.

As yet, however, those who represent us in politics, literature, and art
belong to the old. Mr. Lloyd George with his care for the poor is a
Martha. Mr. Bonar Law is a Martha also. H. G. Wells, with his World set
Free, and his rooms with rounded instead of squared corners to help the
women to sweep, is a Martha. Our poets are not Marys, and it is
necessary to go to Francis Thompson or Rossetti to find a mystic poet.
Our painters, Peter Graham, Farquharson, Leader, and others whose works
deck Academy walls, are occupied with the outward appearances of things
rather than the transcendental. And since Watts is dead we have not even
a mystical portrait painter, but all admire the gift to show in the face
money, importance, style, meat. Our people are worth painting, but there
is no one to paint them. We need an English Serof to show the true
kindred and spiritual relationship of faces.

On the stage we admire Russian opera and Russian ways. We show _The
Dynasts_ in the same way as it would have been shown in Moscow, or
nearly so. There first of all the new tendency is showing. Unfortunately
we have a long battle against American humour and vulgarity, American
materialism and the capital that would exploit our stage. Otherwise our
stage would change at a greater speed. Still the difference in the way
Shakespeare is produced in England is an index of the change. When we
produce _Hamlet_ as it is produced at the Theatre of Art, Moscow, we
shall have traversed the whole distance between the way of Martha and
the way of Mary as far as the stage is concerned.




                                   XI
            THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH


Strange that there should be a feud between the Church and the Theatre!
They were originally one and the same, and as it is the Church remains a
holy theatre where day after day is enacted the same holy mystery. In
passing: how much nearer the Theatre is brought to the Church by the
constant repetition of the great classical and mystical dramas such as
_Hamlet_. The reason for the religious distrust of the Theatre which
exists in all countries,—in England in the Free Churches; in Russia in
the Orthodox Church,—lies in the degradation of the Theatre, the making
it a show of wild beasts, a stage for indecent dances and comic songs,
an arena for combats of athletes. The common townspeople are not and
never can be the pupils of Hypatia. They will have their indecencies and
vulgarities, wild beasts, acrobats, invitation to sin. The showman has
usurped the place of the mystagogue, and money-making has replaced
religious service or service to art and culture as a motive of
theatrical production. The Theatre to-day, even if it aspire to be
serious, has unclean hands, and the Church not unfairly regards it as
part of the stock-in-trade of the evil one.

An interesting exemplification of the relation of Church and Stage is
furnished by Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_. To the Christian, to look at the
dance of Salome is to glance into the charnel-house where all is decay
and worms and death, and to see there the head of one of the saints with
celestial aureole. But the dramatist has turned the interest to the
dance itself and made you say that it is interesting: he has dwelt on
the jewels, the crimsons, the thick lips, the luscious movements. Every
effort is made to make you agree with Herod, and the best way to do that
is to suggest to your body and soul the same feelings towards the dancer
on the stage as Herod felt towards the daughter of his brother’s wife—so
that you would give her anything, even the pure body of the saint that
is in your keeping. He would give you a place with the worms and the
spirit of decay, and let you end as Herod ended, eaten by the worms at
the last. No aureole for you!

But the Church suggests the aureole for you, and if _Salome_ were
presented as a mystery-play the whole interest of the populace would be
directed towards the sainthood of John the Baptist. When Oscar Wilde’s
_Salome_ was produced at Petrograd, Russia made short work of it. On the
first night, at the first public performance, some one stood up in the
middle of a scene and shouted in a bass voice:

“_Spustee zanavess!_” “Lower the curtain!” and the curtain was lowered;
and _Salome_ has not been repeated there from that day to this.

Who it was said this is rather a mystery, but it was doubtless some one
who had the voice or the ear of Orthodoxy. Russia probably gained by
this prohibition. A pity, however, that many other plays quite as
injurious are allowed their way to the perversion of private morals and
the corruption of public taste. Indeed it would be a gain to Russia if
the Church would cease looking at the Stage from a merely ecclesiastical
point of view. The fault of the clergy is their pride in their own order
and their institutions. The clergy, ministers of the living Church of
Christ, should in nature be the humblest of people, so humble in fact,
so meek and unresentful, that it would be necessary occasionally to
protect them from the enmity of the secular world. As it is, in their
pomp, they are proud. They despise the Stage and often prohibit plays on
quite wrong grounds, incidentally depriving not only the theatre and the
public, but the Church also, of something helpful to the cause of
Eastern Christianity and of all real Russian values. The prohibition of
Andreef’s _Anathema_, performed at the Theatre of Art in Moscow, is an
example. Though this prohibition was at the instance of the Archbishop
of Moscow the play was in essential teaching profoundly helpful to
Eastern Christianity. It was written by a man who belonged to the
revolutionary movement, but it was only the more remarkable and the more
powerful thereby. It was in substance a refutation of Westernism and the
ideals after which secularist Russia was striving. A pious and
philanthropic Jew inheriting immense wealth, millions of American
dollars, resolved in his simplicity to save the world, feeding the
hungry, clothing the ragged, giving money to the needy, medical aid to
the suffering. The drama shows the futility of this dream, and at the
end the mob of enraged and suffering humanity stone the philanthropist
to death. Not by material but by spiritual things could their sufferings
be assuaged.

The archbishop who stopped it was probably never in a theatre in his
life, and no doubt condemned it on hearsay, and from a complete
misapprehension of the significance of the drama.

The Church of the future in England, and probably in Russia, will have
to come into alliance with what may be called the right side of the
theatre. For occasionally in the theatre people worship as much as
others do in the Church. Many young people whose families have lapsed
from the Church find their religious life functionised in the book, the
drama, the opera, the symphony. They are not _communicants_ in the
literal sense, they are outside the church walls and the shut church
doors, but they are inside the living Church. They have a common word
with people inside church walls. Their chorus of praise swells from the
other side of the walls, and in some countries the secular chorus of
praise to God has considerably more volume than the official
ecclesiastical chorus. Somehow in church one rather resents the choir,
especially in the _Te Deum_, when they are singing it to some
“God-forsaken” curious tune that a pedant musician has chosen. It is
good when the whole church can lift one great voice. And outside the
church the greater congregation rather resents the church-goers. They
would sing _Te Deum_ also.

The relation of Church and Stage exhibits the confusion of religious
values at present existing. The same confusion exists with regard to the
Church and Literature—many of the great classics of Russian literature,
like Gogol’s _Dead Souls_, the monks would regard it a sin to read. The
ecclesiastical Church takes no useful stand with regard to what is
helpful, what harmful, in past and present literature; it is left for
the living Church to find out for itself and do what it can without
organisation. Even in the domain of Holy Writ there is a confusion of
what the living Church believes, and what mere ecclesiasticism lays
down. At least one fundamental idea in Christianity has been overlaid,
and, as it were, frustrated by the Church itself—the idea of the Holy
Ghost. The Holy Ghost has been conventionalised and made terrible. It
has become the most inscrutable and awe-inspiring aspect of the Trinity,
whereas it should be the most familiar and consoling, Christ saying
good-bye to his disciples in that last long sweet talk where He calls
them friends, tells them that after He is gone away from them there will
come a new consolation, the vision of Truth.

“I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter that he
may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth whom the world
cannot receive, ... the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, whom the
Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring
all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I
leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give
I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid....
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If
ye were of the world the world would love his own: but because ye are
not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the
world hateth you.... When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto
you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the
Father, He shall testify of me: And ye also shall bear witness, because
ye have been with me from the beginning.”

And in the cross-examination before Pilate, Jesus said, “My kingdom is
not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my
servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews.... To this
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should
bear witness unto the truth.”

Therein lies the true idea of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit—it is the
vision of Heavenly Truth that gives the lie to worldly values, worldly
truth. By virtue of this Holy Spirit the blind see, though they have no
eyes, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the dead live, mortality itself is
disproved. The mysteries of the Pentecostal mitres, of the gift of
tongues, and the conventionalised notion of what is called the “sin
against the Holy Ghost,” have stood in the way of the simple and
beautiful conception of the comforting vision of Truth. The Church, with
its keys of heaven and hell, and its arrogation of the power of anathema
and excommunication, has preferred to lay its emphasis on those texts
which may seem to imply the dreadfulness of offence against a certain
more inscrutable aspect of the Trinity. There is nothing in the Gospels
but love of man, forgiveness of man, and nothing is more pitiful than
the man who, having a glimpse of the Truth, yet denies it or wilfully
confuses it with magic or unclean power.

But the _Filioque_ clause of the Creed is alone sufficient to exemplify
the confusion of ecclesiasticism and the living Church. There are many
who think that the two Churches of England and Russia are kept apart by
this clause alone. England holds that the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit,
proceeds from the Father and from the Son, Russia that it proceeds from
the Father alone. Russia’s basis is St. John, XV. 26, “... the Spirit of
truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” “What
does it matter how it is put?” cries the living Church. But
ecclesiastical pedantry is strongly entrenched, and whenever the
question of the intercommunion of the two Churches is mentioned there
arises that fatal phrase—“_Filioque_—and from the Son.”

“Does not one of your Thirty-nine Articles lay down that the Holy Ghost
proceeds from the Father _and from the Son_? And is not assent to the
Thirty-nine Articles obligatory upon your clergy? Why, then....” To
which one can only answer in one’s heart:

                 Thirty-nine Articles,
                 Ye precious little particles,
                 And did God really make the world by you?

The same confusion exists with regard to the Church and Life. That which
the living Church of Christ possesses is a spiritual communion, not a
set of dogmas or a set of points of ecclesiastical law. If a man is
really touched to go to church, if he has the impulse from the heart, it
is not in order that he may hear dogma. He goes to blend his voice and
his thoughts with the voice and the thoughts of humanity in hymn and
prayer. But to-day many misconceptions arise. Carlyle could not go to
church because the sermon bored him. Many stay away from churches
because they can’t stand so-and-so’s sermon. As if the sermon were part
of the service! In old days the sermons were often delivered outside the
churches after the service was done. The priest came through the
worshippers, went out into the church square, and rising to a platform
or “outside pulpit” harangued the everyday crowd. The function of the
Church service is not to be a frame to a sermon, even a clever or
profound or inspiring sermon. Its function is praise.

A Jew writing for an important Russian newspaper about the state of the
Church of England remarks that “dogmas make many leave the Church, and
those who stay remain to preach ethics,” and he goes on to praise ethics
as the function of the Church, leaving out of account, and evidently
having no notion of, the Church as a temple of religion, a place of
communion and aspiration. Surely the preaching ethics is a work begun by
parents and confirmed by the schoolmaster. Christ did not die on the
cross or forgive the thief who recognised Him in order to preach “Thou
shalt not steal!” Yet such a confusion of ideas remains in the mind even
of the cultured.

Still, the whole world and the universe is an orchestra praising God,
and, remembering that, it is impossible to say there is real confusion
or final confusion. It is as impossible to classify and show series of
like things, for the imagination tells you that every instrument in the
orchestra is diverse. Hence I am open to misconception when I write of
confusion or when I classify, as for instance when I talk of Marthas and
Marys. There is confusion and there is order. Nothing is fixed, all is
in motion, the kaleidoscope is ever moving. So it would be wrong to say
that all who were in the way of Martha were in towns working for the
poor, or that all in the way of Mary were away in the desert saving
their souls at the feet of the Master, or that the priests in their
orders and vestments with their processions and grandeur were all in the
way of Martha, or that the hermits of the desert did not upon occasion
come like Paphnutius to Alexandria to save Thaïs, the dancing-girl. The
sisters love one another; and though it is not written in the Gospels,
there were certainly occasions when Mary might have been seen cumbered
about with many things whilst Martha sat with her Lord.




                                  XII
                         WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH


The purely Eastern aspect of the Church is the way of Mary, the
spiritual, meditative, introspective, mystical way, and this is ever the
strength of the whole Church. It is even the strength of the Protestant
churches, though there the spiritual life is more private. In Orthodoxy
the voice speaks from the desert right into the ears of the everyday
mundane crowd. The people are enjoined against sloth in the name of the
fathers of the desert. They sing their hymns in praise of those who have
overcome. They are encompassed round about with “the crowd of
witnesses,” the ikon faces and frescoed saints of the church walls, the
thousands of those who have died in the Lord looking on whilst we run
with patience the race that is set before us.

Our work is in the world, our passion is for the realisation of good
worldly hopes. We pray for the King, the Emperor; we own a true
allegiance to a God-guided Cæsar, and are ready to render to such a
Cæsar the things that are his. We pray for the administrative bodies and
for Parliament, may they go forward to the raising of the poor, the
healing of the sick, the raising to a life of knowledge those who are
dead in ignorance. We pray for our fellow-man and for ourselves. We band
ourselves in a Christian order, and confirm in ourselves the resolve to
fight against sin, ugliness, unhappiness. We promise to give time, to
give money, to work for the Cause. This is all in the way of Martha. But
these thoughts and prayers are made in a temple where the light is the
light of candles placed before shrines of the Unseen. A vision
accompanies the Christian man. Though his passion is towards the things
of this world he is encompassed and enveloped by the atmosphere of
another world. The remembrance remains his that Cæsar is not God, nor
Cæsar’s officers the angels of God, nor this world the real world, that
the poor we have always with us, that our true citizenship is of another
realm.

The work of Martha fails, fails again; the poor multiply, sickness
becomes a plague and scourge from God, the ignorant increase, peace
becomes war, the progressive work of centuries topples down like Babel,
kings or emperors become killed, allegiances of millions are changed,
famous Christian workers and organisers who have given their whole life
to the Cause go out to death with grey hairs, all their life-work made
as nought before their eyes. The passionate soldier-saint goes out in
failure. The lukewarm mediocre man and the cheerful happy-go-lucky
mortals, the ordinary folk, the witty ones, the dull ones, the run of
mankind as we call them, also go out, looking at the failure of ideas to
which they have vaguely or earnestly given assent. But Christianity does
not fail. Thousands of years hence this young religion of Christianity
will be more triumphant, splendid, vital, than it is to-day. And this by
virtue of the mystical and transcendental aspect of the word.

The service of the Church is more than a consecration of duty. It is a
bearing witness to the Truth, a watching till He come, an expectancy, a
getting into position for a great procession, a carrying of banners and
emblems, a joining in a universal hymn sung not only by ourselves but by
all the dead. The light of the Church is the light of transfiguration,
not the light of common day, it is the light of the halo round the
saint’s head.

You enter a church, such a temple, for instance, as the Cathedral of the
Assumption in Moscow. At a step you are in the precincts of a different
world. You have overstepped a frontier line, and the language has
changed, just as when in Europe you cross a boundary and the language
changes, say from German to Russian. The people are looking a different
way, not Westward as to the Emperor but Eastward as to God. You are in a
new kingdom; but as your thoughts go back to the street you left you
realise that the kingdom is not from thence.

The faces in the ikons are not the faces of men. The figures are twisted
and strange. One asks: “Why did not the Byzantine painters paint the
truth? There never were men looking as these men. Why these
copper-coloured and flame-coloured faces? Why the unearthly expression
in eyebrows and eyes? Men never looked like that.” The answer is: the
early Christian painters did not wish to paint earthly truth. Their
object was to indicate the unearthly nature of man, his citizenship of
another world. They wrote into the features of every saint, “Be of good
cheer, I have overcome the world.” This was one of the earliest
traditions in the Christian Church, and has been handed down from
generation to generation in the books of _ikonopis_ or ikon-painting.
There is a way to paint a Christian saint, and that way has to be
followed in the Eastern churches. He must be represented as a witness
unto the Truth, a face that at least at last owns no allegiance to the
monarch in the West, but only to the God in the East, the face of an
archangel or of one who sings continuously, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God
Almighty, which was and is and is to come.” One may belong to a mighty
empire, but the citizenship of those within the Church is of a mightier
and grander and vaster empire. The thrill of the new national hymn is
the greater, the characteristic uniforms and robes have the more
reverence in their associations.

The vestments of the priests astonish one. They are gorgeous past
belief. Whence comes that gold brocade? It was cut in another world. At
least, that is its intention, that is what it would signify. Who are
they in white robes? Why do the priests at the altar walk so stately?
What is that new _tempo_ to which they have learned to move and to swing
the censer?

And the voice of the clergy, that unearthly bass, that profound groaning
and seeking of notes that man does not utter, that voice as of Jesus
commanding the soul of the dead Lazarus to return to the awful and
dreadful corpse? The service in the Slavonic tongue, not in the everyday
tongue....

All these things bear witness unto the Truth and are the emblems of our
allegiance to the kingdom of Christ, marks of our other citizenship, the
visible emblems and symbols of our hope, our love and passion. Hence it
is possible to sing with angels and archangels. Failure in the work of
Martha loses significance as failure. Failure is even good, it is one
more sign, an involuntary ritual, telling of our truer destiny.

So though the way of Mary is consummated in the desert, in the cell, in
giving up the world, in pilgrimaging, praying, fasting, and only a few
can necessarily take to that way, yet it is that way which speaks
triumphantly in the Church. The great majority of human beings must
always remain behind “cumbered about with many things,” though loved by
the Master they will not be able to sell everything, take up the Cross
and follow to the place of the Skull. They will keep the commandments of
Christ and enter on set occasions the temples we have set up. They will
receive confirmation in their life and in the love of the Lord, they
will pray for what they will, and confess themselves. They will praise
and be in communion. They will recognise that they belong to another
kingdom, and their hearts will swell with the triumphant and passionate
affirmation of the Godhead which each finds in his poor conditional
existence as man. The way of Martha and the way of Mary.




                                  XIII
                        THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD


At Easter I was at my old home, Vladikavkaz, and on the second Tuesday
after Easter Sunday went through one of the most characteristic of
Russian holidays—Krasnagorka. It is half-Christian, half-pagan—a
festival of spring and of new life, but celebrated almost entirely in
graveyards and cemeteries. At Krasnagorka almost the whole population of
the town goes on an outing or a picnic—to the cemetery.

Early in the morning I received a message from a Russian friend, “Come
to our church; you’ll see an interesting sight.” The church was crowded,
but I got in, for nobody objects to your pushing. It was an unusual
service. The whole centre of the floor of the church, a space of some
twenty feet by seven, was covered with napkins in which lay lumps of
cake, brightly coloured eggs, basins of rice and strawberry jam, basins
of rice and raisins. In each basin, and there were some hundreds of
them, a lighted wax candle was stuck in the rice and gave a little
flame, and beside each lay the little red book in which the peasant
records the names of his relatives as they die.

“What is it all for?” I asked. “It is the food for the dead,” my friend
answered.

A priest and a deacon were standing at the near end of the spread of
illuminated food, and they read aloud from sheaves of papers the names
of dead persons whom members of the church had wished to have
remembered. Each person who had brought in food for sanctification
brought also a slip of paper with the names of his dead. It took hours
to read them all out, and when at last the task was finished, the deacon
took a smoking censer, and walking round the feast flung incense over
it, the chains of the censer rattling as he made the Sign of the Cross.
We sang once more the festal hymn of Easter, _Christos voskrese iz
mertvikh_—“Christ is risen from the dead,”—sung at every service until
Ascension, and then, after kissing the cross in the priest’s hand, each
person sought out his special basin of rice and pieces of cake and bowl
of coloured eggs and moved out of the church.

At the door of the church stood many beggars, six or seven bearded,
tattered, and dirty old men, and a score or so of women and children.
All the old men had their mouths open, and each worshipper, as he made
his exit, helped a beggar liberally to rice and jam, scooping out great
spoonfuls with wooden spoons and poking them into the open, waiting
mouths. Many beggars had cotton bags hanging from their necks, and into
these were promiscuously flung spoonfuls of rice and raisins, eggs,
biscuit, cake. The beggars were told to eat what was given them in the
name of the dead. My friend fed at least ten beggars before she left the
church, and gave eggs and bits of cake, but she did not give all that
she had. A great quantity was reserved for a spread in the graveyard.

Many cabs were waiting at the church door, and the worshippers stepped
into them with their napkins of sanctified food, and drove to the
cemeteries of the town. From ten o’clock in the morning until sunset,
the cemeteries were as thronged with people as Hampstead Heath on
Whit-Monday.

Nearly every grave in a Russian churchyard has seats round it, and it is
possible to go to the family grave and sit down and think a little, or
pray a little when you wish. I went to the graveyard where my friend’s
sister lies buried, an acre of cypress and pine and gentle mounds, where
the dank earth seems like bed-clothes laid over the dead. To-day this
wide melancholy collection of green mounds and wooden crosses was alive
with the laughter and songs of children. On the heaps of mouldering
earth samovars were humming, and little candles gleamed against a
background of lilac blossoms and spring flowers.

My friend and I sat down. The mother of the dead one came, deep in crape
and laden with gifts. We planted our candles, and on this grave as on
all the others round about the wan flames flickered. We took
bright-coloured eggs—our Easter eggs dyed purple and crimson and
brown,—dug holes in the mould with our fingers, buried the eggs, covered
their brightness over with mould again. Then we put down slices of
Easter cake on the grave, and emptied there saucers of rice—that the
dead one might share in. We sat on the crazy wooden seats around, and
looked at the earth and were silent.

The mother went away to find a priest, and presently brought a
purple-cloaked greybeard to sing over the grave and burn incense. His
red and wrinkled face was all red and fresh from the open air, for he
had been in the graveyard all day singing over the graves. He was tired,
but he raised his head and his voice and called forth his little
memorial prayer in an antique musical bass: “Grant to her who has passed
away, O Christ, to obtain Thy unspeakable glory.... Give rest, O Christ,
to the soul of Thy servant....” We all stood around, silent and
awe-stricken, and listened and crossed ourselves, and kissed the cross
in the priest’s hand.

He received a rouble, then went away to another grave; beggars besought
us; and as if they had not been satisfied at the church door, but were
taking enough to last them a whole year, they received helping after
helping of rice and cake and eggs. This, I felt, was the great beggars’
day in the year. They were important people. They were necessary to the
feast. Strange that they should appear as proxies for the dead and eat
for them. A beautiful reminder that in the living we find all our dead
again.

We had stood to meet the priest and to give the beggars the food we had
brought, so now that the beggars had eaten all the rice and raisins and
rice and jam and had gone farther to eat at other graves, we sat down
again in the still presence of the green mound and we talked of the
virtues of the dead one, of how old she would have been and how beloved
she was, and of how often she had been remembered, and how soon we
should join her. Evidently the mother assumed that what she said was
heard by her whose body lay in the earth. We were all quietly joyful—not
sad. We had the spirit of children making believe; we had also the calm
faith and knowledge of elders—that there is no death, that those who
have passed out of sight have not ceased but are alive for evermore. I
felt the Russians, and indeed mankind altogether, to be very dear at
this festival; they were doing things that must touch those invisible
ones who know more than we do and look on, bring tears to the eyes of
angels, and not as often in man’s history and the spectacle of his
civilisation and abomination call down the wrath of higher powers.

We talked ... and then as we became silent again we heard the music of
man’s life, and listened with our souls.

At some graves there was boisterous jollity, at others terrible anguish
and grief. Near where we sat a woman lay moaning on the grave of her
husband, her red tear-washed cheeks and her lips on the earth; and she
called to him with sobs, telling him all that had happened during the
year, how the children were, how often they had thought of him. It was
heart-rending to listen to her. And yet, mingled with her terrible
lament, came the sound of mumbling priests, the buzz of conversation,
the laughter of children wrestling among the graves and gambling in the
eggs that had been given them, the tinkle of the guitar and of light
songs, the strains of the concertina.

We walked by winding ways across the graveyard and saw many an old man
and woman knocking at the door of the earth they would soon enter,
dropping placid tears and thinking what it would be like some years
hence when they would be under the earth and this festive crowd of live
beings above, candle-lighting, feasting, singing, thinking, praying. And
there were young men and women walking arm-in-arm, looking brightly into
one another’s eyes, strengthening their bonds of love and of life. There
were also little children, boys and girls, thoughtless, indifferent to
death and to the dead, waiting for the older people to go away, so that
they might forage among the graves and dig up again the red and blue
eggs that had been buried there.

“Are they allowed to do that?” I asked in horror.

“Yes,” said the sister. “Every one knows that directly evening comes and
we elders go home the poor children will come and dig up the eggs and
take them away, and take also the wild flowers we have brought. Let
them! It is quite good that they should. You know it is the festival of
spring and of life.” I realised that she was right. It is the way to
give to the dead—give to the beggars and to the children. The dead get
what we send them, surely.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Strange to notice in this acre of God some graves that had not been
visited this day—old graves. I reflected on many a country walk in
England, culminating in a visit to an old church and graveyard, and the
tracing of the names and dates of people long since passed away. It is
somewhat strange. When we are in an old graveyard and looking at the
graves of people who have died centuries ago we feel, instead of grief,
a sort of quiet satisfaction, and that even when those whose burial is
recorded are of our own name and family. We dare not even contrast our
feeling with the poignancy that is attached to a new grave—with its
garish stone, fresh clods, and wilted flowers.

I often wonder where the dead are. Neither in heaven nor hell, I
suppose, nor waiting for a last day and dreadful judgment, nor going
through the circles of purgatory, nor just simply under the earth....

We know that they exist and are alive, and the knowledge is of that more
certain kind that does not spring from our mentality but is felt in our
bodies. The grief we have when sons or daughters or fathers or mothers
die is a _physical_ anguish, and is akin to the pains of birth. Some one
has been cut off, deceased—cut off from us. Even in a dream to lose one
of those _nearest_ to us is to suffer a sort of physical mortification,
to weep senselessly, lose control of nerves, and be prostrated.

The fact is we are all one. Even the death of some one who is quite
remote jars upon the soul.

We were talking one evening of death and some one said to me:

                    “... to die and go we know not where,
                  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,

—that is what I fear in death. They tell me I am a pagan, but I feel the
dead are under the earth. I hate to think of lying in a damp churchyard
and decaying all alone, through days and nights and spring rains, summer
storms, autumn winds, winter snows. The rain must be terrible for the
dead—to be all wet and old like a fallen leaf.”

Another said he did not mind the idea of lying under the earth in the
rain and changing into mould. It was gentle and restful. And it was
beautiful too, for flowers would rise from where the body slept. One
recalled the lines:

                     Oh, never blows the rose so red
                     As where some buried Caesar lies;

and another, the beautiful lines of Nash:

                       Worms feed on Hector brave,
                       Dust hath closed Helen’s eyes.

But to my mind came some words said to me by Algernon Blackwood the
first day we met:

“You know we all came out of the earth; somehow or other we have got to
get back to her. The Earth is not dead, she is living.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

He was right. And the dead under the earth are in living care. All that
is is One and is beautiful. Life and death make a unity. Everything in
the world and without it, in the past and in the future, is to me a
unity, and I am calm and happy in it. In me, in you, are all the
dead—they crowd behind my eyes and look out, one above another’s
shoulders like the people at a great spectacle. There are myriads of
them—I hold them. In this sense they are under the earth, in that you
and I are earth, and they are in us, and look out of us. We are all
windows through which there glance at times faces of each of all there
ever have been.




                                  III
                        THE DESERT AND THE WORLD




                                   I
                         A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS


Winter changing to summer I gave up life in towns and set off upon a new
adventure. In May I was looking at Bokhara and the gay-coloured
meditative Mohammedan world. In June I was tramping across Russian
Central Asia the way the pioneers go to find new land and new life. My
road companions were people who had given up the old and were seeking
the new—not farther West but farther East. By July I had crossed to
southern Siberia, and was away on the Altai Mountains when the War with
Germany broke out. In the autumn I returned in the wake of the mobilised
Russian army, and was in Moscow during the first month of its
enthusiasm, then at Libau and Vilna and Warsaw, at Petrograd, and home
to England. I wrote my book on the War. All the winter I wrote and spoke
for Russia. Life resolved itself into lectures, speeches, addresses,
meetings, and all with the view of making Russia and especially Russian
Christianity better known in England. Time flies in such a way, and very
quickly it was May again and time to set out upon a new adventure. So I
took up my quest of Martha and Mary once more and set out for Egypt,
hoping to be able to go from Egypt to Russia the way Christianity came
to her. For a great deal of Russian Christianity came from the Egyptian
deserts and had its source in the life led there by the hermits during
the first five centuries after Christ.

Doubtless the quiet life of the hermit saints had more power to change
the world than all the clangorous wars of their time, than the talk and
the gossip and the cheering and the hooting, than the foes laid low or
tyrants raised to power. There is a beautiful passage of Nietzsche—“The
thoughts that change the world come on doves’ feet. The world revolves
round the inventors of new values; noiselessly it revolves.” So if we
would know what sort of a Europe is going to be, or of Russia what sort
of an East she will be—

               Oh! Russia, what sort of an East will you be,
               The East of Xerxes or of Christ?

it is necessary to seek the ideas of to-morrow in the quiet places where
they lurk unseen, not in the clash of the Great War. The trenches are
pungent with fumes, the earth itself deaf from the sound of artillery,
both Nature and Man’s work lie blasted and ruined along a long but
narrow stretch of land—that is the front, the War, the biggest and only
thing in the world. But I must leave it and go southward and eastward to
the places where ideas are born.

In May when I left England the streets of London were flocking with
merry crowds; there was a vigorous popular optimism in the air. At night
the Soho restaurants were packed, the theatres ablaze with the glamour
of success. Paris was different. One European capital was bright;
another silent, vigilant, and clad in serious garb. The enemy was
encamped and militant and near. South to Marseilles, to the vivacious,
light-hearted, southern port! The ship by which I sailed for Egypt was
painted an austere leaden colour to resemble a man-of-war or armed
merchantman, and so deceive the enemy lurking under the waves—a masked
ship. We were delayed a week in the port through lack of labouring
hands; for every one had gone to the War. We watched liner after liner
go out of the harbour laden with young soldiers going to fight the Turk
and win Constantinople.

My slow ship left the land and slipped away through the night as it
should, towards Egypt, unhasting, unresting, over the calm shadowy
Mediterranean ... an almost fourth-dimensional progress, a mysterious
magical journey. The stars looked through soft vigils and possessed a
mystery; they dreamed over us as we went. We disturbed nothing; we went
on. I sat up in the prow of the vessel and looked forward—the eye of the
boat.

                        ... Everything is akin to me
                    That dwells in the land of mystery.

The ship is masked; its colour is the colour of the waves at night. The
ship is pleased. A shadowy blue-grey ship going forward calmly, equably,
yet triumphantly, ever gently forward, towards the unknown, the
mysterious....




                                   II
                              THE HERMITS


The first effort of the Apostles towards the establishment of
Christianity was along the way of Martha—the sharing out of the money
and the starting of a sort of Christian-socialist state. But life taught
them that this was impracticable, and they and all the early Christians
soon found themselves working and living and praying in an altogether
different way—driven into the wilderness, stoned out of cities, hounded
into gaol, faced with the horrors of torture or barbarous execution.
There were soon more Christians in the desert places of the earth,
living in caves and in forests, than there were in the towns and
villages. Some fled from persecution, others were driven by the Spirit;
and no doubt all, when they found themselves cut off from the world,
began to share in the meditative idea of Christianity. They obtained the
consolation of wanderers, and found a new significance in the promise of
the Comforter. They had visions; they met the resurrected spirits of
those who had died in the Lord. The strange life they had to live
brought a romantic mystery into the possibilities of the road and the
outside world, so that when one met a stranger there was the doubt that
he might be an angel, that he might even be the risen Lord Himself. The
heavens opened, and sweet music accompanied the vision of the Grail. The
stigmata appeared on the hands and bodies of those who had attained to
unity with Christ.

Yet those who went out into the wilderness, alike those who fled
persecution and those who went out voluntarily to seek and be alone with
God, were tempted “of the devil” as they phrased it. The town and the
world which they wished to overcome tempted them back. They had left
behind in “the world” fathers, mothers, brides, children, friends,
money, position, pleasure. They lived on locusts and wild honey and
grains and roots—and they longed for the good meat of the city. They
were ragged, unwashed, bruised, unkempt—they longed for the freshness of
the bath, white linen, and clean clothes. Their bones ached and they
were tired—they longed for soft beds. They were solitary and longed for
company, longed especially for the company of women. And the devil who
tempted them was a dragon that could never be killed, which, slain, but
changed to a different shape. The temptation was put forward in new
guise, and the lure of sin more subtly baited. They entered into the
temptation of Jesus as they entered also into his sufferings.

They drew men unto them. All those whose minds were troubled by the
monstrous woman—Babylon—thought of the Christian solitude in the desert.
It became a not infrequent phenomenon—the going into the desert “to save
one’s soul.” The wild places of the earth began to have names and fame.
Hermits lived in places where no one had ever lived before, and the
curious came out to see them. By their spiritual virtues they made the
desert, which was barren in the material sense, blossom as the rose.

The caves in the mountains by the Dead Sea filled with anchorites, and
the holy men looked upon the dead salt lake that had once been the gay
world of Sodom and Gomorrah. The mountain supposed to be the mountain of
Christ’s temptations became honeycombed with the abodes of
world-forsakers. “If a man does not say to himself in his innermost
heart, God and I, we are alone in the world; he will never find rest,”
said one, and betook himself to Mount Sinai. The Virgin Mary sailing in
a boat with St. Thomas and St. John was wrecked off the coast of
Macedonia and miraculously washed ashore on the mountain of Athos; and
in due course there appeared on the strange uninhabited mountain an
antique Greek, lean, long-haired, unutterably devout, and he lived in a
cave and meditated on the Mother of God. Another followed and another,
till a laura was founded.

The hermits gave Christianity a new bias. One has only to compare an
ascetic’s dream, the majesty and the mystery of the Revelation of St.
John, with the sweet reasonableness of the Gospels ... “A sower went
forth to sow,” and the like ... to see how great is the change in the
spirit of the Church under the influence of the anchorites. Such a
sentence as—“To him that overcometh I will give of the hidden manna, and
will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it,” comes straight from the
desert and is part and parcel of the spiritual fervour of the early
Church.

The hermit based his life on Christ’s wanderings in the wilderness and
His denial of the world, on the idea of bearing the Cross, and on the
promised second coming of Christ. As Christ renounced the power of
changing stones into bread, so they renounced the power of bread, the
feeding of the hungry, _i.e._ service in the world, the way of Martha.
As Christ refused the throne of Caesar when the devil was ready to show
him the way to obtain it, so they refused to try to establish Christ’s
kingdom in a material form. They denied all material power—denied that
the power of Caesar was real power, that physical force had power, that
money had power. St. Arsenius, the anchorite, was offered all the
revenues of Egypt by the Emperor Arcadius and asked to use them for the
help of the poor, the hermits, and the monks; but Arsenius refused,
saying that such work would be worldly and was not for him. The same
Arsenius inherited a great fortune, his cousin’s estate, but refused it.

“When did my cousin die?”

“Two months ago,” he was told.

“Oh, then the estate is not mine, for I died long before that,” said
Arsenius.

He had died to the world, and to money among other worldly things.

The hermits also denied the physical senses—our ordinary sight, hearing,
touching.... “Grieve not that thou art without what even flies and gnats
possess,” said Antony, the father of Egyptian hermits, to blind Didymus;
“rejoice that through thy physical blindness thy spiritual sight has
become more clear.” The hermits took upon themselves oaths of silence,
went into remote places where was the most abject barrenness of earth,
the utter negation of all physical life and material power. Not content
with the privations of the Sahara they went into abominable marshes like
the soda swamps of Nitria, where they mortified even the most innocent
of the senses, the sense of smell. They strove to be as it were dead in
all the physical body and limbs, and in the physical senses. “Unless a
man imagines to himself that he has been lying for three years in the
grave and under the earth, he will never die to himself,” said Moses the
Ethiopian, a simple negro anchorite, who though he seemed black in the
body was all white in the soul.

In this denial they did things which seem fantastic to the modern world.
They dug their graves in advance and lived in them till they died. They
stood on one leg, the foot of the other leg on their knee, their arms
outstretched as if crucified to the air; they climbed to the height of
ancient pillars and remained there praying for years. Pachomius is said
to have prayed for days together, standing with outstretched arms as
immovably as if his body had been fastened to a cross. His eyes were
lifted upward at a strange angle and were full of light, he gazed in
fixed rapture as if his eyes were resting on a celestial vision. In this
Pachomius praying thus an artist might show a picture of what the hermit
stood for. These hermits were not foolish; they were mighty and
wonderful like the living word of God itself. They were living
hieroglyphics.

It must be remembered that Christianity had to overcome a world of
philosophy, had to absorb all that lay in the philosophy of the East, in
the religions of Egypt and Greece, and of the Jews. Thanks to the
hermits, Christianity took to itself all that was vital in all extant
ideas. By the life and death of Jesus the seed of Christianity was sown,
thrown into the spiritual life of the world, and instead of springing up
immediately and bearing fruit, it sent its strength downward like the
seed of a mighty tree; it grew deeper into the spiritual world rather
than higher, became more mysterious and secret rather than manifest and
clear.

To-day Christianity is of different portent. But in those days the
enthusiasts, visionaries, and saints did not clearly know what
Christianity was: Christianity was not clear to them; they sensed it, it
had possession of them, they were in a state of exaltation because of
it. Christianity was growing through them, growing deeper. Their
intellectual conceptions of what Christianity was and was not were often
quite mistaken—but the vision they could not express was authentic. The
new idea was in the air. Hence, for instance, the gift of tongues.
People listening to the apostles were caught by the idea, even though
the language spoken was foreign to them. Christianity was imparted by
enthusiasm alone, by the gait, the gesture, the expression of
countenance of the believer, the living hieroglyphic; and it did not
matter that the apostles spoke one language and the listener another.
The spirit of truth sat in the faces of the apostles like tongues of
fire and spoke for them. In those days many who had never seen an
apostle dreamed and became Christians, heard a voice from heaven, were
struck blind by the heavenly vision like Saul, whose mind on the way to
Damascus was far from Christianity, but whose soul was so near that even
at the stoning of Stephen there could have been but the thinnest
partition between him and the great splendour. Many people in those days
went about in strange apprehension—as if the world were coming to an
end, and quite truly a world, that of the Romans, was coming to an
end—and suddenly they were aware of the mystery, and without a word of
proselytism gave up everything and went to the desert.

Needless to say, the number of Christians grew, and the reputation of
the Christians grew. Persecution soon ceased, and presently it became
such a mark of distinction to be a Christian that all the mundane crowd
came in and called itself Christian. Some of them were Christian in name
only, and their children in superstitious obedience. Even till to-day
Christianity is cumbered about with the descendants of this mass of
people, the great crowd who vaguely assent to the term Christian but
have only a remote conception of what Christianity really is. The
riotous and lascivious population of Alexandria supporting worldly
Cyril, though Christian in name, was nothing less than an obstacle to
Christianity, an opaque mass between the light shining in the desert and
the north whither the light should shine. Still, when “the world” came
in and called itself Christian there were a great many who took their
conversion seriously, and of these, many went to the desert and schooled
themselves to become hermits, tried the life to see what it was like.
Ammon and his bride were dressed, ready for their nuptial festivities,
when the revelation came to them, and on their wedding-day they resolved
to forego the worldly tie of marriage and live in the desert as holy
bachelor and virgin. They dwelt in Nitria and entertained thousands of
young men and women of the rich and cultured world and meditated on the
hermit’s life, Ammon receiving the men at his cell, his bride the women
at hers. After some time Ammon, who was rich, founded a monastery, and
he and his bride agreed to part, she going to a distant place to
continue her work, he remaining to establish his. Ammon became abbot of
the monastery, and under him were four thousand monks; this was in the
evil-smelling swamp of Nitria, on the fringe of the Sahara, some forty
miles west of what is now the Alexandria-Soudan railway. People began to
flock to the desert. There were tens of thousands of hermits and monks
and consecrated virgins waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom of the
Church. These Christian converts gave to the desert the largest human
population it has ever had. There were four hundred monasteries in the
desert of Nitria alone. It was possible to invent such an anecdote about
the younger Macarius the anchorite as that some one gave him a bunch of
grapes and he, being so altruistic, took it to a neighbouring anchorite,
that anchorite to another, and so on, till the grapes had made the whole
circuit of the Sahara and came back to Macarius again, preserved all the
way by the virtue of the self-denying hermits.

The desert had an atmosphere of Christianity. Many aged solitaries like
Arsenius and Paphnutius took to the road with sacred missions. The
hermit’s life was not always continuous cave-dwelling. St. Arsenius, a
gracious genius, went to the councils of Emperors; we read of men like
Paphnutius returning to “the world” at the obedience of the heavenly
vision and saving people whom the Lord needed. Thaïs, the courtesan of
Alexandria, was taken from the midst of her gay life and brought to a
cell in the desert. The anchorites found for her this beautiful prayer,
“Thou who formed’st me have mercy,” and Thaïs was saved, though she
died. And she was numbered among the Marys. No hermit setting out upon
the road took away money with him or had thought for the morrow. That
was a golden rule in their ways; money counted for nothing. Serapion the
Sindonite sold himself as a slave in order that he might save those who
were slaves of the world; and he put the money he received as the price
of himself in a pit and covered it with earth. He was a perfect servant,
and by his humility and sweetness touched the heart of his master and
mistress, who soon learned to say the Lord’s Prayer with him and were
converted to Christianity. One day they said to Serapion: “We are
unworthy that you should be our servant and slave, take back, we pray
you, your freedom!”

Serapion replied that he thanked God for the day when his mission was
accomplished, and thanked his master and mistress for his freedom. Then
he went to the pit where the purchase money was buried and brought it to
his two converted friends. They were much astonished, and implored
Serapion to keep the money. But he refused though they wept, and he set
off for the desert once more, cared for by the Lord.

Nothing counted in Egypt except Christianity. Monasteries and churches
sprang up all over the land. The rich women who gave up all for Christ’s
sake gave their jewels to the adornment of the screens and altars in the
desert churches, and it was thought to be the best place for jewels,
_fruitlessly sacrificed_ to the spiritual. The wealthy bequeathed their
estates to the Church, hoping thereby to find grace in heaven; and the
Church employed the wealth so gained for the building of new monasteries
and the employment of Byzantine painters and metal workers, for the
upkeep of their institutions, and for alms. It seems the new wealth did
not altogether spoil the life in the desert. Egypt was particularly
suited to be the mysterious source of contemplative Christianity and its
spiritual power—the greatest deserts in the world, the emptiest
landscape, the incomprehensible Nile coming out of the depths of
mysterious and untrodden Africa, the ancient monuments of religion, the
Sphinx, the pyramids, the obelisks ... the oldest domain of man, a land
of tombs. But for the Mohammedan hordes Egypt must have remained the
true holy land of Christianity. As it is, the life lived in Egypt at
that time is certainly the spiritual inspiration of the Eastern Church
till this day.

It is somewhat astonishing to reflect that in the early centuries of our
era Christianity in Egypt was alone with the ancient monuments of Egypt,
and that those monuments were in a considerably greater state of
grandeur that they are to-day. There was very little robbing of the
tombs and destruction of old buildings before the coming of
Saracens—those terrible robbers and destroyers. Egypt has now become
associated with Mohammedanism in a secondary way. But in the days of the
hermits there were none of those mosques which guides delight to show
one now as part of the interest of Egypt—the alabaster mosque, the
mosque of Sultan Hassan, all built with stolen stones. But Christianity
and the worship of Isis were side by side, the Egyptian religion of
death side by side with the Christian religion of death to the world. No
wonder that the early Christians embalmed their dead, and that they
painted the faces on wood as the Egyptians had painted the faces of the
dead on the cases of the mummies, or that regarding hieroglyphics they
began to paint Christian hieroglyphics—the frescoes peculiar to the
Eastern Church. Paphnutius flinging a stone at the Sphinx learned his
mistake when he saw a look of sadness come over the face, and the lips
seemed to murmur to him the name of Christ.

The influence of Egypt went northward. As the gospel is read facing the
north, and the belfries of Eastern Churches calling the people to
worship are put northward of the holy building, so the whole Church
looked northward. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern World.
The embalmed bodies of the saints who had died in the desert were taken
thither, the faces of the dead were painted into the fresco and the
ikon. Hermits appeared in all the desolate mountains and rocks of Greece
and Bulgaria and Asia Minor. Christianity crossed the Black Sea, and
hermits appeared in the Caucasus, and stately cathedrals were built on
the shores of the sea. Christianity sailed up the Russian rivers and hid
in the Russian forests. Only in the year 988 was Russia officially
converted to Christianity, but long before that the Christian hermits
and missionaries had appeared. St. Andrew himself is said to have been
the first to come to Russia. The religion that came in was the religion
of the hermit, and the faces on the ikons were the faces of anchorites
who had died in Egypt or Asia Minor. Christianity took various aspects,
but its vital source was the spiritual life of the hermit in the
wilderness.

Anon, Egypt was overrun by the Turks. The jewels were plucked from the
screens and ikon-frames, the monasteries and churches were pulled down,
the monks and hermits put to the sword, and practically the whole
material evidence of the existence of Christianity was swept away as if
a storm of the dead sand itself had come over it. One year the desert
was a-tinkle with Christian bells, choric with Christian psalms; the
next year all was desolation, and when an ancient hermit missed by the
Arabs came to Nitria he found not one human being there, and he lived
amongst the ruins of monasteries and chapels as if the place were the
remotest and most solitary in which a world-forsaker could dwell. In its
turn, also, Constantinople fell, and the Hellespont and Bosphorus, the
issue to Russia, became Mohammedan. Eastern Christianity receded to
Greece, was shut away in Russia. And Greece and Russia, and especially
Russia, have preserved the direct traditions of the early Church and
what Christianity originally meant. With them has remained the spiritual
fervour of the hermits.




                                  III
                             IN THE DESERT


Between the Nile and the Red Sea lay the desert of the Thebaid, and the
remote monastery of St. Anthony is now reached after two days’ camel
ride from the station Beni Suef. The desert of Scete where Arsenius
lived—the desert where Philammon the hero of “Hypatia” learned to be a
monk—is on the Upper Nile. What was Nitria is now Wadi el Natrun, and is
reached by three days’ camel ride from the Pyramids, or _via_ Khatadba,
one of the stations on a loop of the Cairo-Alexandria railway. The
shrines of the hermits are in the hands of the Copts, a simple Christian
people, said to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The
Coptic Church is an Eastern one, and it is the lineal descendant of the
Church of Egypt that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity.
Only whereas the Church of Egypt was a brightly living church, the
Coptic Church is going on in a tradition. What is valuable in the Coptic
Church to-day is that it has slept through many centuries unchanging,
that it has never been rich and pompous, never erudite, never
pleasure-loving. It has withstood the Arabs through dwelling in the
wilderness and fortifying its churches and monastery walls and being
hard. It has never had the opportunity to thrive. So it has preserved
the traditions and something of the spirit of early Christianity, and in
the half-ruined temples of the desert you may see the stigmata of
Christ.

                  *       *       *       *       *

I had some difficulty finding out about the monasteries: no one goes to
Egypt to visit Christian shrines, so my desire to know where the ancient
hermits had lived sounded strange and unwonted in the ears of most
people. But at length, through the Bishop of Jerusalem and Marcus Bey
Simaika, the leader of the Coptic community in Cairo, I got a letter
from the Patriarch and full directions as to how to reach the desert
shrines. I chose to go to Nitria.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Out of sight of the grey triangles of the Pyramids, out of sight of
everything, and over the even, empty desert, white, yellow, burning,
rose-lined on the horizon, glaring ... heat and light beat upward from
the sand on which and into which the terrible and splendid sun drives
its armies all day. The air is so dry and light that one seems to have
lost weight. There is a feeling of unusual exhilaration.

I came on horseback to an oasis, not a bountiful and delectable oasis
with shade of palm trees, fruit to pluck above the head, and cold water
bubbling from a spring below, but a poisonous marsh overgrown with reeds
full of reptiles and blood-sucking flies. There are good and evil oases.
This was the marsh that gave its name to Nitria—the soda marsh. The
hermits chose it because it was even worse than the desert. My black
horse prances along on somewhat doubtful turf, and then once more to the
loose and heavy sand blown into waves and undulating like the sea. On
the horizon lies the strange blunt silhouette of the first of the
monasteries, and without a trace to follow, we plunge through the sand
towards it. We come up to it at last, an enigmatical-looking building
which has the shapelessness and silence of a ruin. How silent it is!
What a deathly and unearthly silence! It seems hardly possible that
human beings are living there. The cream-coloured walls are lined,
patched, broken, gigantic. It is a rectangular fortress. There is but
one entrance, and that is a small one and heavily barred. There are no
steps in the sand; if yesterday had any footfalls the wind has smoothed
them away, and the breathless silence is one which it seems almost
possible to hold in one’s hand.

From the high yellow battlement an old loose rope hangs down, and is
evidently connected with a bell.

Jingle-jangle-jangle! I ring the bell and wait expectantly. There is a
long silence and I ring again, jingle-jangle, jangle-jangle-jangle! Then
some one comes and laboriously undoes the little door, and a
dishevelled, bare-footed monk appears. I present the letter which I bear
from the Patriarch, and am admitted. The monks are pleased; all shake
hands. I sit on one divan, and five of them on another. One novice
washes my hands, another brings me a glass of a brown-coloured drink—it
is medlar juice and water, and is full of the fibre of the fruit. This
finished, he brings me a glass of pink sugar water, then coffee all
round, thimble-fulls of sweet coffee. The abbot, a fine-looking fellow
with regular features, broad face, black moustache and beard, and with
an open space showing the freshness of the lower lip, is talkative. He
has a towel wrapped round his brows for turban, and fingers black beads
as he talks. Next to him is a comfortable-looking monk in a blue smock
and white knitted skull-cap on his head. Next to him, an old fellow with
wizened bare legs and feet, old yellow rags on his grizzled head, ragged
black cassock over his grey underclothes.

“What do you do all day?” I asked.

“Pray, read, sing,” they answered.

“What do you think of the war?”

“The war does not touch us. If they come and kill us, we don’t mind, but
we pray each day that God will bring it soon to a close.”

“If the Arabs come, what will you do?”

“If they shoot at us we will throw bread to them, that will be our
reply.”

“Do you have many visitors?”

“Not many.”

“Do the Russian pilgrims come here to pray?”

“Yes, some.”

“Are you content to live out here in the Sahara whilst all sorts of
great events are happening in the world, and content to have no news and
never mix with the people of the city? In England we’re too busy, one
couldn’t escape to a place like this even if one wanted to.”

The abbot gave me a remarkable reply:

“I think there is room for everybody: one seeks money, that is his way;
another prays, that is his way; another does his duty and ploughs, that
is his way. There are many ways. You know of Martha and Mary. Martha was
right, but Mary’s good part was right also.”

How touching it was for me to get this true reply in this remote
monastery, and to hear of Martha and Mary in the first half-hour of
conversation with the monks. My mind was preoccupied with the ideas of
Martha and Mary, and here was this simple Coptic abbot using almost the
same terms to express himself as I might use myself.

There were in this monastery about sixteen monks, and in the desert
altogether there may be about one hundred and fifty. Once there were
thousands of holy men and hundreds of monasteries. There was gold in the
monasteries, there were jewels and pictures. Not an inch of the little
desert temples but was covered with Byzantine fresco.

But the Saracen came and murdered the cultured clergy, and tore away the
jewels, as was fit, and rolled down many a wall, wrecked many an altar.
There was a sixty years’ gap in the Christian history of the desert.
Then a wilder type of Christian took possession, Arabs who had been
converted, or enslaved Copts who had forgotten their own language and
learned that of their masters. They brought Arabic gospels and
liturgies. They repaired some of the ruins of the old monasteries and
churches, and they put up Arabic inscriptions and painted out the old
Coptic frescoes and hieroglyphics with frescoes of their own conception.
They built round their temples impregnable fortress walls with
draw-bridges at a height of forty feet above the level of the desert.
They withstood sieges and persisted ... to this day.

The abbot showed me round the monastery. The buildings were all a
patchwork of ruins and repairs and changes. The frescoes had been
white-washed out in nearly every part. The old stained glass, broken and
shapeless, was mortared in with new glass. And yet there was a real
odour of antiquity in the place. The patterns in the ikons were but dust
patterns, and the face of the Virgin crumbled away as the abbot took the
picture down to show me. In a niche here and there left by accident were
the original frescoes in wonderful purple and crimson, pictures of the
choric saints, their faces and bodies all of that unearthly and mystical
shape and colour by which the early Christians loved to represent
citizenship of heaven and denial of the world.

The lectern had a nail on which to fix the candle. The communion cup was
swathed in the oldest vestments of the monastery. In an ordinary
cupboard with easy-swinging wooden door I was shown the mummies of the
sixteen Patriarchs of the Coptic Church. Sixteen Patriarchs in a
cupboard, each wrapped in his robes and tied up compactly! The Abbot
unwrapped one a little and showed me the dried brown flesh. The
seventeenth Patriarch, he from whom I had my letter, will find a place
in this cupboard in his turn.

In one of the churches I was shown the box with the sacred remains of
Macarius, the primitive hermit in whose name the monastery had been
founded.

They showed me the books from which the service is read, all hand-copied
volumes. I wondered especially at a copy of the New Testament, written
ages ago in Coptic and now spattered on every page and every paragraph
with new and ancient spots of candle grease.

From the vault of one of the churches hang seven old dusty ostrich eggs
by long strings. A monk explained to me that as the ostrich looks to its
egg as the most precious thing in life, so they look to God in their
prayers—at least, the egg is to remind them.

We went into the fortress church, the only entrance to which is at a
height of forty feet by a bridge from the outer rampart. They showed me
how the bridge could be drawn in and the monks be secure from assault of
arms. Up on the ramparts a novice had his duty beside a pile of bread
and a stoup of water. When Bedouin beggars ring the monastery bell, he
lowers them bread and water in a basket. “We give away twice as much as
we eat ourselves,” said the Abbot, showing me the bakery. Here were
hundreds of wheaten loaves in long stone receptacles, good bread, but
made dirty so that the monks should not get to prize it. They showed me
illuminated books a thousand years old, showed me the scrivener’s cell
where among many quills a monk still copies the Scriptures day by day.
They showed me one chapel the whole floor of which was covered with
chillies drying, showed me the long room where every evening all the
monks gather about the Abbot to read the gospel and discuss its
meanings, showed me the massive doors, two feet thick, of wood and iron,
meant to resist the Arab. In one room was a small cask, and the Abbot
took a tin mug and drew me a little wine—communion wine. I drank half;
he finished.

The monks were most kind, simple and loving. It was an amusing spectacle
at lunch. I lunched; every one else waited on me. A beautiful Abyssinian
boy washed my hands, two monks shelled eggs all the time and filled my
plate, two others stripped cucumbers for me, another kept helping me to
hot milk soup in which slabs of sugar were dissolving. The Abbot stood
above me with a feather-brush waving the flies off me. Every one was
talking. There was especial interest in the questions which the
Abyssinian boy who had washed my hands was continually trying to put. He
was a beautiful stripling who could have been posed for Christ Himself,
but for the fact that he was black. He was tall and gentle, with large
liquid eyes. He was not a monk, but a pilgrim stranded in the desert. He
had been on his way to Jerusalem, and had been turned back from Port
Said because of the War. He was anxious to hear from me whether I knew
of any way of getting to Jerusalem now. The Abbot was the only one who
knew Abyssinian, and he interpreted. Alas! I could give him no hope of
getting through to the Holy Sepulchre.

I lunched, and slept a little, and the brethren of the monastery slept.
Then my horse was brought out to me and I rode away across the sand.
Before going, I went to the western side of the monastery and looked out
over the Desert. Thousands of miles it went on, level, empty, burning,
and yet mysterious. Some Coptic hermits have wandered forth into its
mystery and are living the antique life of the anchorite out there. At
least, so the Abbot told me, though he couldn’t say where they are or
how they live. Only now and again, at rare intervals, some one of them
comes back to the monastery to communion and then disappears once more.

                  *       *       *       *       *

I rode away to Bir Hooker, where I stayed the night. That is on the
other side of the salt marshes. There an enterprising British company is
producing thousands of tons of caustic soda annually. The antique
hermits chose this spot in the Desert because of the death-dealing
odours which intensified their denial of the world, but in another era,
behold British business men doing in the way of trade and worldly gain
or duty what these others do in the name of denial of the world. As the
Abbot said: There are various ways of serving God, the way of Martha and
the way of Mary.

Still, the manager of the caustic soda works, a shrewd and circumspect
Scotsman of Protestant temperament, would like to have the sixteen
Patriarchs buried decently and, if he could, spend three days in each of
the monasteries tidying up. “It’s not showing due respect to the dead,”
said he, “nor is it sanitary, nor decent. I’ve nothing to say against
the monks; they are simple and kind and hospitable. But they’re just
_wasting_ their lives. They’re doing nothing, making nothing.”

The manager would show the monks how they ought to keep house. But
better still, he would clear them all out. They are very good, very
kind, there is nothing against them, but what are they _doing_, he asks.
Their lives are pure waste. They don’t produce caustic soda.

                  *       *       *       *       *

I go to my room to sleep, and then at midnight come out again to see the
full moon flooding the vast plain of sand with light, and to realise
once more the breathless and perfect stillness of the desert.




                                   IV
                               THE WORLD


From the Desert back to the town, to “the world,” to the hurly-burly of
Cairo and the flesh-pots of Egypt! It is war-time, the summer of 1915,
the Turks are being fought on the Peninsula of Gallipoli. The city is
full of soldiers, sunburned Australians and New Zealanders who have not
yet been in action but are being kept lest the Arabs should come out of
the Desert and strive to efface the English and French civilisation of
the banks of the lower Nile and so add more ruins to the ruins of Egypt.
The city is majestical with its broad streets, white stone palaces and
stately mansions, its wondrous river and its mighty bridges. The
dryness, cleanness, and whiteness of a city that knows no rain; the city
gleams in a vast supply of sunshine. The wind blows all the time from
the Desert, and wafts heat in the face as from a furnace. A city of life
and gay energy. The fountain of life plays rapidly and brilliantly all
the time, throwing up all colours, forms, faces. There is a sense of
resplendent and tremendous gaiety. No one comes to Cairo to be an
ascetic and mortify the flesh. But every building, every sight and
sound, says, “Life, life, life.” All around is death—the Desert which is
death itself, the Pyramids which are tombs, the old cities and ruins
which are the bodies of ancient civilisations passed away. But every
sight and sound in the oasis of the great city says—Live, be gay, let
the pulse beat fast, let the heart go and be glad, let the eyes sparkle
and burn, let the lips form words of passion and pleasure.

There is a sense of an immense antiquity which in contrast with the
little second of the present moment makes the latter less important,
less holy. There is a subtle smell in the air, an odour that makes the
head a little dizzy and the hands a little feverish as you walk; it is
the actual odour of antiquity, a finest dust in suspension in the wind,
the dust of decay from past ages. All that dies in Egypt becomes dry,
and only after centuries turns to dust and loses form. That which rots
away in a year in our northern clime keeps its semblance for a thousand
years in Egypt. The stones of the houses of native Cairo were many of
them quarried by the ancients; the wooden beams and joists have lasted
from the days of the Pharaohs, and only now are gently crumbling. Here
the very stones can be used to manure the fields. Subtly, secretly, the
seventh foundation is always crumbling away and passing in dust into the
Desert air. The smell in the air is partly the fine dust of mummies, of
the bodies that were once erect and nervous and vivid, gay and
felicitous and moving, the mysterious flocking humans of thousands of
years ago.

The streets roll forward with flocking crowds—dark faces, brown faces,
sallow faces; red caps and straw hats and little turbans and smocks and
burnous; negroes, Copts, Arabs, women in white veils, women with dark
veils; Europeans, soldiers, hawkers, mendicants, post-card sellers,
newspaper vendors. Along the centre of the broad sun-swept roadways
crash the electric trams; the rubber-tyred cabs and wide-hooded
victorias follow pleasantly; the motor-cars proceed; the military
auto-cycles pant; and the heavy ox and buffalo carts of the natives
blunder along at the sides. There is doing everywhere, happening, being.
Voluminous and promiscuous action floods and surges through the city
with the traffic. It is life everywhere. And yet mingled with life there
is death. There is plague in Cairo, and every now and then the eyes rest
on a native funeral procession, one procession, two processions, five
processions, ten processions all following one another. They are in
every street, and they go past with their strange pomp of death, with
the body and the mourners and the keeners and professional howlers. The
brightly living crowd on the footways each side of the road pause a
moment and think, “Some one has died,” and pass on, oblivious, intent on
life.

In luxurious hotels gentle and beautiful Nubians are handing out
delicate fare, rich dishes cooked and served in that sought-out and
magnificent style that Egypt has inherited from ages of epicurism. And a
wonderful assembly of officers and ladies, rich pleasure-seekers and
tourists from the Mediterranean shores, invalids, receives—sitting at
flower-decked tables in great halls. Many restless souls fall into the
rhythm of Egypt and feel themselves part of a great and satisfying
grandeur. It is borne in upon the mind that the rich have always lived
in a certain way in Egypt, and that the grandeur of Pharaoh and of
Antony and Cleopatra are one and the same with the grandeur of to-day. A
living thread of crimson and gold runs through the centuries of Egypt
and is caught to-day, unbroken. Cairo is the capital of the Desert, and
yet I do not know. It seems to me even at midday, when the sun glares
over the stones, that somehow the Desert does not exist, or that it is
in profound darkness, and that Cairo is a city all lamps, an island of
effulgent light encompassed on all sides with darkness. It is barely
credible that the sun of Cairo is the terrible sun of the Sahara, the
sun whose monstrous arms clasp thousands of miles of scorched sand and
wasted world, that the sun may not even notice Cairo as it looks on the
Desert. But those who live in the cities of Egypt are enough unto
themselves.

A strange impression, in the afternoon, to go down side streets and
observe the throngs of young men, unsteady on their feet but bright-eyed
and thirsty-lipped, greedy, eager; the strong-limbed sun-burnt Colonial
soldiers dancing with Arab girls, the café-chantants, shooting-saloons,
bars, bad houses, the barrel-organs, the smell of the air.

One can spare a questioning thought as to the homes of the soldiers.
They come to Egypt from a fresh Colonial country, from good homes, pure
women who are their mothers, gentle and innocent girls who are their
brides. They nobly offer themselves to fight for their race against a
false idea and a predatory nation. Tears fall at their departure.
Prayers accompany them. But though bound for France and England they
suddenly find their destination changed to Turkey, and they are put
down, for convenience, in Egypt. They are dumped upon this mysterious
and astonishing country as if one bit of dry land were just the same as
any other, and without any notion of the spiritual significance of being
stranded here. No blame to any one. Providence directs the destinies of
men and women.

The first army that came were the wildest, boldest, and they plunged
right away into the sin and gaiety and dangerous pleasures of the city,
conducted by the money-grubbing but ingenious and smiling Arabs to the
gambling dens, dancing-houses, and strange parlours of the back streets.
They were cheated, swindled, robbed whilst drunk, robbed whilst asleep,
but they saw strange sights and tasted unusual pleasures, sating the new
eyes and lips which Egypt had given them. At last, the time drawing nigh
for their departure for the Dardanelles, they resolved to get back part
of what they had lost in the back streets of the city—certain things
they could never get back—and they went down in force and sacked the
houses and rushed the Arabs and Arab women to the streets and took back
what they could find. There was a great riot. The native police were
called out, and they fired at the screaming mob. Such scenes were
enacted in the city that brought to mind the continuous street-rioting
in Alexandria in the old early-Christian days. But what is most
significant in the sight of these fine young men in the city is the
realisation of the impure strain they take back with them from Egypt to
the women and the children of Australia and New Zealand.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Night comes over the stately city, and the Europeans in their white
clothes come in greater numbers into the streets. The great remote
staring moon stands over the broad highway and arched bridges. Heat
seems to be generated through the haze in the sky, but a light dry
breeze is ever blowing, and the pungent sweetish odour of the city is in
the nostrils. In the contrast of darkness and night silence the clangour
of Eastern music is more stirring. It stirs the body, not the soul, and
is like the sensuous music of Nebuchadnezzar, the music of cornet,
flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer. Dark women with gold
ornaments hang out from curtainless windows or lurk just inside doorways
and dark passages, ready to coil snake-like upon a prey. In the roadways
a shouting, calling crowd. In the taverns they are singing “Tipperary”
and “We won’t go home till morning”; some men are standing on the
tables, others are trying to put gawky Arab girls through the steps of a
tango. The music jangles. The whole street has a collective voice, a
strange tinkling and murmuring uproar.

A tall, lank, loose-jawed, genial Copt would show you the haunts of
evil, and offers his services to procure you pleasure. You have said
“No” to him; he stands there where you left him on the pavement in his
long cotton rags, smiling gently and cogitatively—the same type as stood
in the city of the Pharaohs in the old days of the Israelitish bondage.
It is strange to reflect that they find in the mummies of those who
lived so many thousands of years ago the marks of “the city’s disease,”
and the sign of the impure strain. There is a community of sin. What was
in ancient Egypt is in the world to-day and was not invented in any
recent time but has been carried on from one human being to another, to
many others, and from them to others still.

I look at the mummies of Egypt, at the bright pictures of the people,
fresh as if painted yesterday. These paintings on the coffin-lids live,
they are the real people. You know that the brown, dry bodies wrapped in
thick folds of linen did once walk, and were the beautiful society of
some era five or six thousand years ago. There is in Cairo the unwrapped
mummy of the majestical Pharaoh who would not let the children of Israel
go. As you look at his face time is bridged over, and you see how brief
a space is our vaunted history of man and what parochial dwellers in
time we are, rolling our eyes and hushing our accents when we speak of a
hundred or a thousand years, as if those seconds of being were of vast
extent, tiring the angels to get over them. There lies old Pharaoh,
brown, but still in the flesh. He has a Roman nose, distinguished
features, the face of a man of learning; there is a look of Dante about
him. His neck has shrunk to the size of a bird’s neck and his head
rather dangles on it, but it is an actual head and an actual face.

Pharaoh is unwrapped, but beside him stands an unopened pupa case; the
linen is fresh as when new, and daintily folded and tied as on the day
of burial five thousand years ago. A lotus flower lies in the coffin; it
looks as if it had been picked last month and had wilted a little, and
yet it may have been picked by the princess herself, and she was a
daughter of one of the Pharaohs—perchance even of her who found and
cherished the baby Moses.

When you read of Jacob in the Old Testament, that—

    ... the physicians embalmed him. And forty days were fulfilled for
    him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and
    the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days. And when the
    days of his mourning were past ... Joseph went up to bury his
    father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders
    of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt ...

you realise that there is perhaps somewhere a mummy of Jacob, and a
modern might see him face to face.

Time flies. But the distance is near. I would like to imagine one night
in ancient Egypt. The faces on the coffins, as I look at them, lid after
lid, are quite realisable, those broad cheeks and bright eyes.... I
suppose one could find five thousand mummies who in their lifetime were
contemporaries, and one night they are all thinking about much the same
thing. Something is toward at the Court; their chairs or carriages or
chariots come for them; they are decked out, they have their jewels in
their hair, their fine garb, their vanities, spites, triumphs,
vexations, loves, ambitions. They dwell in their present moment, eyes
burn, hearts beat faster, lips frame vain words. The same moon is on
high, the same odour in the air. They bend their gaze towards the
throne, they flock towards the throne as if the touch of it were
miraculous. Vanity of vanities! The Israelites had to go out to the
Desert to find the ten commandments and the Mosaic laws. Vanity of
vanities—and is it not _all_ vanity? Is not the life of the ascetics in
the Desert vanity also? No, for they have denied the world. They have
said _No_ to Egypt and gone into the wilderness to seek a promised land.
In their shrunken pearly faces is written a different allegiance from
that of Pharaoh. They deny that this world is our world, that our life
is our true life, that death is really death.

But we do not condemn the gay crowd that imagination has summoned from
the linen wrappings of the tombs, nor the glimmering of khaki and
burnous in the purlieus of Cairo in that moment we call 1915. Mankind is
one and indivisible.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Outside the city stand the three triangles and the woman’s head, signs
written in the sand which might cause all people to know that there was
some mystery about Cairo.

The dead are sleeping and you cannot wake them. There are crowns on
their heads, and they sleep that fixed, unearthly, steady sleep,
undisturbed, untouched, uncorrupted. Egypt that was is dreaming Egypt
that is. Out in the Desert sits the Sphinx with an I-am-that-I-am
expression on its face.




                                   V
                               ST. SOPHIA


    ... new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride
    adorned for her husband.


Kingsley remarks that though Cyril thought he was establishing the
kingdom of God upon earth, he was in reality establishing a sort of
devil’s kingdom. The kingdom of God was independent of Cyril. And yet,
of course, a great deal of the material success of Christianity was due
to Cyril—if Christianity can really have such a thing as material
success. Cyril was a sort of Cæsar to whom must be rendered the things
that are Cæsar’s. And in his day imperial Cæsar himself had become
Christian, and kings were to arise who would claim as a divine right,
not only the things that are Cæsar’s but also the things that are God’s.

They were in their day accounted great, and there was noise about them
and lights, and throngs of those who flock to noise and light. But
though some were mighty instruments of the Divine Will, the spiritual
power did not proceed from them but from the silences and the
obscurities and privacies of life. But for the holy men in the desert
Cyril could no more have gloried and lasted than could a blossom without
root. And on the other hand, Cyril and his like, and what they stood
for, were in one sense the blossom and fruit of the seed sown by the
hermits. It was the hermits who gave the spiritual impulse to
Alexandria. Alexandria in turn gave new hermits to the desert—as new
seeds fall from flowers in autumn. Such is the unity of the Church.

It seems at first as if the rude cave or cell of the hermit cannot be
reconciled with the splendour of the churches of their time, with, for
instance, the wondrous cathedral of St. Sophia, as if the wretched cave
or hole in the earth were a contradiction of the great marble temple,
painted and gilded and set with all manner of gold ornament and precious
stone—and yet there is this obvious reconciliation, that the one is the
seed, the other the blossom; the one the prayer in secret, the other the
reward made openly; one the white light, the other the rainbow of
Creation.

The first centuries of Christianity were a wild time. Many religions and
philosophies were in the throes of glorious death, exchanging their
mortality for Christian immortality. The music of change streams upward
in wild, rapturous, sensuous, and agonising melody. Ten thousand
passions and tragedies of conflicting import ravish the senses, and the
heart leaps and the blood dances in the veins at the spectacle of death
becoming life, or the heart sinks and the face pales at the dread of
life turning to death. Only the calm soul sees the myriad colours blend
at last and become reconciled in the whiteness of Christ.

And that whiteness into which the other creeds must merge is the Holy
Wisdom, the Sancta Sophia, with the name of which the early Eastern
Church identified itself, representing the Bride of Christ as a new
Athene, Sophia, the Christian Wisdom.

The Holy Wisdom distilled from Isis and Athene and thousands of other
goddesses and conceptions that died to become Christian, the water of
life distilled from all the magical fluids of antiquity. The wild waste
of passion and colour, the almost barbarous pageantry of the early
Church, is the pageantry of autumn; the reds and browns and yellows, the
flame-colours and death-colours, that go before the whiteness of
Christmas.

The cathedral of St. Sophia itself, the beautiful symbol of the Bride of
Christ, is the representation of the death of thousands of creeds to
become immortal in the new Christian conception. There is not an idea
that is being transmuted that does not find its counterpart in the
sacred edifice.

A mystic wrote: “St. Sophia was not born or created, but was built.” A
relic, the dust or bones of those who had died for the faith, was built
between every tenth stone in the walls of the cathedral. The walls were
of granite and marble; the pillars of porphyry, malachite, and
glimmering alabaster; the floor of polished marble; the doors of cedar
inlaid with ivory and amber. Its height was as the height of heaven, its
breadth as that of the earth. They brought the glory and honour of the
nations into it. Trees of silver with lights for fruit sprang from the
floor, like the tree of life in the midst of the City. Silver boats with
oil and floating wicks hung from the domes. The stone canopy above the
ambo bore a great cross inlaid with diamonds and pearls. Above the
screen which shut off the choir were twelve columns overlaid with
silver, and between them representations of the Jewish prophets, the
Holy Family, and the four Evangelists—the past, the present, and the
future of Christianity. The altar was raised upon a throne of gold, and
was formed of thousands of precious stones and gems and pearls that had
been crushed to dust and diffused in molten gold—as if of the pure lives
and passions of all men a wine had been pressed into a precious chalice.
On all the walls and on many of the pillars were painted the pageant of
the Church, the prophets walking with God, the Saviour revealing God,
the saints and martyrs and champions living and dying for the truth.
There was not a religious history nor a Christian life that did not find
its counterpart or emblem in the frescoes of St. Sophia. The cathedral
and the idea of Sophia functionised every true conception and beautiful
life lived in its day. It was “The Word” written in stone, and standing
instead of the ruined and almost illegible tablets of Moses. It was the
white stone in which the new name was written.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The idea of St. Sophia is reduplicated throughout the Eastern Church. It
is a-gleam in millions of ikons, endeavours to paint the _all_ of
Christianity and the living breathing Church itself, the Bride. It is
the inspiration of such a cathedral as that of St. Basil, that
marvellous mediæval passion in stone built by Ivan the Terrible in the
Red Square of Moscow—hence its many colours, its extraordinary diversity
of shapes, its harmonisation of incongruous angles and solecisms of
form, its many chapels and standing places by which the Byzantine
architect endeavoured to suggest that each and every one who entered the
cathedral might find a particular place where it was most fitting he
should stand and praise, a particular chapel where he might kneel in
secret. Astonishing to find the architectural idea coming up again in
such an unlikely place as New York, in the cathedral of St. John, which
will be the largest church in the world, and pre-eminently the cathedral
of the West. Into the walls and body of this new cathedral bits of every
kind of stone existent in America are being built. St. John, built from
the substance of the world, will be the counterpart of St. Sophia, built
of the substance of the other world, and having the dust of martyrs
between each tenth stone—the cathedral of the way of Martha and the West
balancing the cathedral of the way of Mary and the East.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Roman Catholicism was founded on the rock of apostolic succession. St.
Peter’s represents the House built upon a rock, the House that shall
survive all storms and tempests. Eastern Christianity or Orthodoxy was
founded on St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom; and whereas Catholicism is a
House built on the earth, Orthodoxy is a House vouchsafed from heaven,
the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride
adorned for her husband.

The word is one and the same. But the Roman Catholic is the least free
of individuals, religiously. The rock of apostolic succession is the
rock of infallibility. And whereas a foundation of wisdom implies
freedom of individual thought, a foundation of infallibility implies
intellectual and religious servitude. A Roman Catholic who thinks for
himself in religious matters has already begun to be a heretic and has a
sin to confess to his father confessor.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The service in one of our London churches frequently ends on the
antiphone:

                    I am the Living Bread,
                    Which came down from heaven.
                    Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.

Even among the least religious people the sitting down together to a
meal makes a certain intimacy. The loaf which is broken for you and me
and another goes to make flesh and blood in each of us. Without any
reflection or thought we know that we are nearer because we have broken
bread together. At the symbolical meal, Communion, we are consciously
nearer. By virtue of the bread that was broken for us we know ourselves
nearer to one another.

Unity is the deepest knowledge. There are moments when one feels one
would with deep emotion offer one’s ego and individuality upon the altar
of unity, when one would cease to be John Brown or Ivan Ivanovitch, and
become one with the human race, giving up one’s rich treasure of
memories and experiences, character, developed intelligence, dear
idiosyncrasies. In the depths of that humility is discovered a new
graciousness and love, a new faith.

Only at death do we pass completely to the unity, though in life at rare
moments we can apprehend it. That unity is not necessarily the unity of
the family, of the human race as a family; it may be the human race is
after all only one human being—Sophia, the Bride of Christ.




                                   VI
                          FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA


On the quay at Alexandria flocks of Russian peasant pilgrims with great
bundles on their backs, men and women who had been in Jerusalem when the
Great War broke out, or at Mount Sinai in the desert seeking remote
shrines and holy men. As Smerdyakof said, “No one in these days can move
mountains into the sea by faith, unless perhaps one man in the world, or
at most two, and they most likely saving their souls in secret somewhere
in the Egyptian desert”; and the peasant pilgrim, through the traditions
of his Church, always looks to these deserts for spiritual power.

Besides the Christian pilgrims are hundreds of refugee Jews driven out
of Zion by the belligerent Turk, many of them patriarchal types of great
piety, long-bearded men with multiplex wrinkles on their brows.

My ship goes riding over the sea to Greece, passing the seven churches,
those candles lit in the dim dawn of Christianity, passing Cyprus and
Patmos and a thousand nameless islands where lived mystics, hermits, and
writers of the early Church. We carried ikons brought from Jerusalem to
be carried back to Russia. The pilgrims sang Christian hymns; the Jewish
patriarchs, with phylacteries on their brows, read the Mosaic books and
the prophets. Nearly every one on the boat was bound for Russia. We went
thither the way these things have ever gone, from the desert northward
over the sea. Not in vain does the reader of the Gospel stand facing the
north; not in vain is the belfry of the cathedral built on the northern
side. The direct message of Christianity has been the message that has
gone northward.

The cathedral of Christianity, our St. Sophia in large, may perhaps be
imagined in this guise.

                         North
                       —-||—-
                      (        )
                      | S    S |
                      | U    I |
                      | R    A |
     +————————+        +———————-+
     |  England                         Greece |
     |                                         |
    == WEST    Stalls of the choir where stand  ) JERUSALEM
     |         the martyrs and the saints      |
     |    Rome        | | | | | |              |
     +————————————————————-+
                         EGYPT

Egypt is the choir of the cathedral where stand the martyrs and the
saints singing in white robes. Through the gates at the north and the
west come those who hear the sweet tidings and the heavenly music.

The journey from Egypt to Russia is like going across our great Sophia
from the splendid choir to the multitudes who have come out of the
forests to listen.

Christianity went over the waves to Athos and Tsargrad, to the Greek and
Roman cities of the Black Sea shores, and up the mighty rivers to Kief
and Novgorod and Yaroslaf, down the great Volga, driving the Tartar
before it, across the forests and along the rivers where lived the
primeval nature-worshippers of Russia, brought by knights in armour, by
priests and bishops, engendered by hermits and martyrs, enforced
eventually by princes and monarchs, interwoven with the splendour of
mediæval chivalry. Russia became officially Christian in 988, when King
Vladimir and his hosts were baptized in the Dnieper at Kief. A cathedral
of St. Sophia, “mother of Russian churches,” springs up at Kief, St.
Sophia appears at Novgorod, St. Sophia at Yaroslaf. At the time of our
Edward the Confessor Russia was as fervently Christian as England. And
the seed, no doubt, had sunk deeper or had been wafted into remoter
solitudes. There was room in Russia for Christianity to mature in the
popular mind.

At last the Turks streamed across the Levant, and severed the Christian
world in two. Foolish and naïve Mahomet came stamping into the great
cathedral of Sophia on horseback, shouting out at the foot of the
sublime altar, “There is no god but God, and Mahomet is His prophet.”
Legend says that on that day a priest was celebrating Mass at the altar,
and he prayed that the body of Christ might be saved from profanation.
As an answer to his prayer the stones gaped, and priest and Host were
enclosed, as the relics had been that in earlier days were placed
between the tenth stones. The priest was probably murdered as he broke
the bread, and, it is true, he has been taken into the wall and has
become part of the Bride.

Leopards have their dens where Christian hermits once prayed to God, and
they do not know that the ground is holy ground. And the ferocious yet
simple Turk has it not in his power to profane Sancta Sophia. When the
time comes he can be driven back to the wilds whence he came.

Constantinople falls. But Christianity does not fall, rather it grows.
Russian Christianity is saved from much ecclesiastical exploitation,
Levantine corruption, and materialism by the severance of the earthly
tie, the break-up of the patriarchate of Tsargrad. After the Turks took
Constantinople Russian Christianity was fed by the angels. Hence its
fair face to-day.

Over the sea to Russia, to the Kremlins round the many-domed churches,
to the gleaming ikons, to the great choruses, resplendent and triumphant
Orthodoxy; to the land where ever day and night there is witness, where
the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams; to Kief, to
Novgorod, to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to the great pink-walled hill that
stands above the mother-city crowned with churches. Bowing at the
Ilinskaya, baring the head to enter at the Spassky Gate ... my eyes rest
on the wan wall of St. John the Great. I climb to the belfry and let my
fingers pass lovingly over the bulging bells. I light a candle in the
cathedral of the Assumption. I walk across the broad open spaces where
Napoleon’s cannon are ranged and listen to the sad slow chime of the
Kremlin clock giving the hours and the quarters. Here again is a holy
city standing above a merely worldly city, this walled hill over
commercial Moscow, this Sophia exalted above Prudentia.

In the first autumn of the War, when I was at Moscow, I used to go to
the Kremlin last thing each night. They were beautifully starry and
peaceful nights. The churches and the low pavements that wander among
the cobbles were flooded with silver, the toothed battlements and
antediluvian old towers of the Kremlin walls seemed gigantically
exaggerated in silhouette, and yet, though exaggerated, in a way truer,
as if the ordinary vision of them we had by day was not correct, as if
they were really in themselves of enormous importance and
correspondingly enormous proportions. The moat of the Moscow river lay
murky below, and afar among the vast congregation of the houses of the
city a lamp burned here and there as if before votive shrines.
Motionless sentries stood in front of the cathedrals. One’s own steps
echoed startlingly. The single liquid melody of the Kremlin chime broke
out and poured away—_ding_, _ding_, _ding_, _ding_, _dong_, _dell_,
_dell_. Holy Russia was watching.

I went into a cathedral: still many candles were burning. I walked along
the walls: lamps were alight before holy pictures set in the old bricks.
There was a perfect stillness and serenity. I paused, and the mind went
across Moscow and beyond it fifteen hundred miles to Poland and Germany
and Austria where was another scene, a more exterior scene and
manifestation of the life of Russia,—Russia in arms against a false
ideal. Russia was serene though Russia was in deadly struggle. The heart
was beating faithfully, strong hands were smiting the foe.

In the night the hundreds of Napoleon’s black cannon had a sinister
aspect, each one seemed pointed at me. The mind went back to their real
hour of history when from them death blazed forth; when instead of this
stillness and serenity the thunder and tumult of battle was around them.
They are death’s heads of what once were live guns; they are greedy as
death, menacing as death—harmless also as death. Away above them among
the glittering stars stand the gold crosses of the churches, the
splendour of God. The mind’s eye takes in hundreds and thousands of gold
crosses, waving, dipping, lifting, triumphant, the grand processional
aspect of the Church. Even at this moment how many are dying, how many
souls are passing. In the Kremlin in the still night Holy Russia is
watching. Away on the battlefields the brave are dying. Look, in the
Kremlin you see their crosses among the stars; listen, you hear the
heavenly chorus swelling as they join the great procession of the
Church.

                  *       *       *       *       *

From Egypt to Russia, and then from Russia West once more to England.
The tempestuous War still rages, and in the seasons of history it is
deep winter. Ravenous winds lash the bare trees, howl through the
churchyards. Or the wind dies down awhile and bitter frost sets in, and
the merciless hungry stars stare at the dead earth. Or heavy clouds come
over and the snow sifts down, becomes deeper, communes with the breeze,
wreathes itself in fantastic drifts. On the still branches of the forest
the snow is balanced, or only disturbed by ravens flitting awkwardly
from one tree to another. It is the winter of history, but the season
will change. Under the crusted streams the water is flowing, flowers are
rising under the snow, flowers from the living seed. The seed lives
through the four seasons, and the seed is the Word of God.




                               APPENDICES




                               APPENDIX I
                          WAR AND CHRISTIANITY


Among the Russians, as among other nations, there are many whose
conscience does not permit them to bear arms and fight, many who believe
that war is evil in itself, and that it is unchristian to oppose force
with force. Russia has its non-resisters, Dukhobors, Molokans, Quakers,
who either obtain official exemption from military service, or who
suffer punishment for refusing to obey the call. And among the mass of
the Russian people who as yet do obey the summons and shoulder the gun
for the Fatherland, the question is frequently raised, “Can we reconcile
Christianity and war? Can we reconcile the spirit of Russian religion
with the using of brute force to overcome a wrong or to defeat an
enemy?”

Not that any great number of the Russian peasant soldiers ask themselves
questions about the ethics of war. They go forward gladly to fight for
the Tsar, and to defend their country. With them fighting is a
tradition—Christianity is Christian warfare, not warfare with sin and
disease and crime, but war against the heathen. Since the pagan god
Peroun was rolled down the cliffs, and the army of Vladimir stepped into
the Dnieper and was baptized as one man, Russian Christianity has been a
Christianity in arms, in arms against Tartar and Mongol and Turk. The
spirit that prompted the Crusades perseveres. That is why a war against
the Turk is a great national war; it is still something in the nature of
a great religious pageant. More than half the man saints on the Russian
Calendar are warriors, and the rest are simply monks and hermits.

Still as wars go on they change in type. Fighting has ceased to be a
praising of God. There is no raining of splendid blows on the Saracen’s
head. War for the common soldier has ceased to be fighting, and has
become “obeying orders.” The soldier does not even know whither his shot
has sped. He seldom or never shoots at a man; he shoots at a vague
general man called the enemy. He also knows that no one is trying to
kill him personally, and that he in his turn is also part of a vague
impersonal man—the enemy of the man on the other side.

War becomes a standing to be killed for one’s country, and an obeying of
orders.

It is a noble and a Christian thing to die for one’s native land. It is
also one’s duty to obey the orders of those put in authority over us.
The question is, Are those who direct the war acting in a Christian
spirit? They in their turn obey orders of those in authority over
them—the Generals, the Commander-in-Chief, the Government, the Tsar.
They must render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.

Is it then Christianity in the Tsar to make war, or to answer force by
force? Some Russians say, “It depends on the cause. A war to protect
little Servia is a good and Christian war.” Others say, “It does not
depend on the cause. No cause, not even the best in the world, can
justify the carrying on of war; of that wholesale and organised murder
which goes by the name of war.” So we come to the Russian pacifists, and
those who believe that any peace is better than the justest war. They
declare that war is evil in itself. They offer no compromise on the
subject. In time of peace the Pacifists have a great following, and they
seem to be in a majority; but when war breaks out a great number who
merely sympathise, but do not absolutely believe, fall away and leave
the true Pacifists standing, as they have stood in each war up till now,
in a hopeless minority.

They hold that war is a survival of barbarism, or, to put it in the
words of Solovyof, “Something like cannibalism, a barbarous custom that
must in time be isolated and localised among the more savage regions of
the world, and then slowly but steadily disappear till it becomes merely
a historical curiosity.”

The simplest way to test this notion of war would have been to survey
the modern history of the civilised world and see if war between
civilised community tended on the whole to be less. But here and now as
I write is the vast conflagration of the German war. If this war had not
come about it might have been possible to say, “Man is on the whole
tending towards universal peace.” The Spanish-American War was scarcely
a war at all. The South African War was an example of the power which
could be brought to bear on an uncultured and wild people to make them
behave themselves and be peaceful. The Russo-Japanese War was begun in
the misconception that the Japanese were yellow devils, and if the
Russians had known with whom they had to deal they could have arranged
matters. The Italian-Turkish War was simply a cultured nation taking
over territory of the wild and warlike Turks, and so precluding war for
the future. The wars in the Balkan States were the natural conflicts of
wild tribes not yet properly civilised. Up to that point war could be
explained away, but then we come to July 1914 with its European
conflagration, and the Pacifist inference cannot be made.

For the time being war is redeemed from the imputation of savagery by
the great German conflict. It can no longer be classified as a
disgusting practice such as cannibalism or sutteeism.

But the minority, those who still take peace as a golden rule, are even
now unconvinced. At the best they hold that this war is a war to prevent
war in the future, a war for the establishment of the Federation of
Europe, a war that will make possible universal peace.

Still they hold that notion as a makeshift opinion. They would never in
the palmy days of peace have thought it possible that mankind would go
to war in order to get a better peace afterwards. They held that war was
always avoidable, and that you could not by Satan cast out Satan.

They hold that nationally as individually we should give back good for
evil. Amongst the educated Russians there are many pacifists, many
non-resisters, a number also of quaker-like people who refer all war
arguments to the one simple commandment—“Thou shalt not kill!”

Many Russians hold that Christ substituted for the Jewish law “Thou
shalt not kill!” the moral principle “Thou shalt not hate!” And they
understand the chastisement of war as performed more in sorrow than in
anger.

Those who try to follow out literally the patterns of behaviour set out
in the Gospel ask what would the Good Samaritan have done if he had come
earlier than he did and had met the man who fell among thieves just at
the moment when the thieves were attacking him with apparently murderous
intent. Would he then have had to pass by on the other side like the
Levite, or should he have fallen on his knees and prayed, or should he
have rushed to the physical assistance of the man who was being
attacked. Many held that it would have been the Samaritan’s duty to
defend his neighbour with all the means in his power. As the General
says in Solovyof’s conversation, “I prayed best when giving commands to
the horse-artillery.” So in August 1914, when Austria fell upon Servia
and Germany fell upon Belgium, Russia in the East and Britain in the
West rushed generously to give their physical assistance to the nations
in distress. America, like the Levite, averted his eyes and said, “It is
no concern of mine.”

The action of Britain and Russia is no doubt popular Christianity. It is
the way of the world. Christianity was not preached to nations but to
individuals.

The true Christian attitude of the man who falls among thieves is to
give up his money and strip off his clothes and hand them to the thieves
saying, “Would to God there were more for thee!” He would offer no show
of defence, but, on the contrary, would rejoice. For in taking away
money and clothes they took away earthly material things, things that
should be lightly prized. To have given them freely and affectionately
to those who wanted them was to blossom spiritually or, to use another
figure, it was to quicken the circulation of love. And directly he gives
up these things the Good Samaritan comes along and he, out of pure
affection, gives from his superfluity the means to the naked one to be
clothed and restored.

If the Good Samaritan had come up in time he would as a Christian have
been ready to give his things also to the thieves. Or if the thieves had
been actuated by the impulse of murder, he would have fallen on his
knees and prayed. Such is the way of those who deny “the world,” and
with it deny also the power of physical force.

Somewhat of this interpretation of Christian impulse is given in the
following Russian conversation taken from the book on War and
Christianity written by the great Russian philosopher, Vladimir
Solovyof:[13]

    _Prince._ He who is filled with the true spirit of the Gospel will
    find in himself when necessary the ability by words and gestures,
    and by his whole spiritual demeanour so to act upon the soul of his
    unhappy brother who would commit a murder, that the latter will be
    suddenly overwhelmed and converted, and will see the error of his
    ways and turn away from the wrong road.

    _General._ Holy Martyrs! Is that the way you’d have me behave
    towards, for instance, the Bashi-Oozooks, who in Asiatic Turkey
    massacre the women and children of the Armenian villages. You think
    I ought to stand before them making touching gestures, saying
    touching words and making a tender religious appeal to them.

    _Mr. Z._ Your words would not be heard owing to the instance of the
    murderers, and if heard would not be understood since you know not
    one another’s languages. Then as regards gestures, as you will of
    course, but I should have thought that under the circumstances the
    best gesture one could think out for the occasion would be the
    firing of a few volleys.

    _Lady._ But, seriously, could the General have explained his
    Christian sentiments to the Bashi-Oozooks?

    _Prince._ I did not at all assume that the Russian army should have
    acted according to the spirit of the Gospel when dealing with the
    Bashi-Oozooks. But I do say that a man filled with the true spirit
    of the Gospel would have found even the possibility then of
    awakening in dark souls that good which lies hidden in every human
    being.

    _Mr. Z._ You really think that!

    _Prince._ Not a whit do I doubt.

    _Mr. Z._ Well, do you think that Christ Himself was sufficiently
    filled with the true spirit of the Gospel?

    _Prince._ Is that a question or a joke?

    _Mr. Z._ I put the question because I’d like to know why Christ did
    not so apply the true spirit of the Gospel as to awaken the good
    hidden in the souls of Judas and Herod and of the Jewish chief
    priests and of the wicked thief of whom we commonly forget when
    speaking of his repentant brother....

Which confuses the issue because Christianity is not a converting of
non-Christians to itself, it is a way of bearing oneself with regard to
the world and God, a witnessing of the truth. This life is not truth.
For that reason among others, Christ does not save Himself from death;
material gains on earth are not real gains, so to the man who would take
the coat the cloak is given also; the kingdom of this world is not a
real kingdom, so Christ turns His back on the Devil when the presidency
of the world is offered to Him on the mountain. When St. Peter smote off
the ear of the High Priest’s servant, Christ restored the ear as a sign
that His kingdom could not be won by the sword. When war is brought to
the test of Christian idealism, especially as interpreted by the
Russians, it is found to be of the world—a rendering to Caesar of the
things which are Caesar’s.

Nevertheless, if we say that war is unchristian, or if we hold that
those waging war are by their very behaviour unchristian, we are wrong.
We are mistaking the true spirit of Christianity. For Christianity is no
rule which people must obey; it is no set of rules for people. The
deepest thing in Christianity is personal choice. Those who are saved
are those who personally choose. If a man goes to bear arms for love of
his country, if he offers his life as a sacrifice on the altar of his
Fatherland, he is still a true Christian though engaged in violence. Or
if a man stands out to refuse to go like the peasant in _Peer Gynt_, who
cut off one of his fingers so as to be rejected by the army doctor, we
still have Christianity exemplified in personal choice and in the
readiness to sacrifice material things for spiritual gain.

What, then, of the peasant soldiers who presumably make little choice?
Of them it must be said, they are Christians on the emotional plane, not
on the intellectual. By their splendid enthusiasm it is evident that the
peasants do make an emotional choice. Perhaps in that choice lies their
Christianity with regard to war.

They are Christians also in that they do not regard death as something
terrible. Death for them is a sacrament, a new baptism, a second time
going down of the warriors of King Vladimir to the River Dneiper.

Footnote 13:

  _War and Christianity_, by Vladimir Solovyof, now translated into
  English—Constable’s Russian Library.




                              APPENDIX II
                      THE CHOICE OF EAST AND WEST


An interesting new domain of study is opening for the Bible student in
the comparison of what the various nations have taken to themselves in
their understanding of the Gospels. Translation itself inevitably
changes the emphasis, the _accent_ of various passages. And Slavonic
perception, British perception, German perception, American perception
necessarily differ. It is a truism to say that we each take from a book
only what we wish to take from it. To one who knows Russia and has the
feeling for Eastern Christianity, there is no more enthralling
occupation than to read the Gospels with an eye to discovering which
parts Eastern Christianity has emphasised, which parts Western
Christianity has taken; which parts, for instance, Russia has
emphasised, which parts America has emphasised.

One evening in Vladikavkaz I had a long talk with Russian friends about
this difference in emphasis, and we went through the whole of St.
Matthew and discussed many texts of the New Testament.

We started with the Beatitudes, as they are the beginning of the
Christian teaching. We agreed that “Blessed are the poor in spirit” was
a stumbling-block to the West, a phrase that preachers had to interpret
very carefully as having a meaning other than “Blessed are the
poor-spirited.” In Russia, however, it is perhaps the most important
beatitude—at least, two of my Russians held it to be so. In the Russian
translation it runs, “Blessed are those who are beggars in spirit.”
Russia sees blessedness in the state of beggars, in the state of those
who have nothing; a beggar in Russian is one who has no earthly
possessions. The beggar is a national institution. No one purely Russian
in temperament wants to get rid of the beggar—the man who has nothing.
Even Gorky calls the beggar the bell of the Lord, the reminder to man
that he can have no true possessions here in the world.

The second beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn,” we also took to
mean more to the East than to the West. The East feels the blessing of
mourning, the West the blessing of being comforted.

The third beatitude, “Blessed are the meek,” meant more to the West we
concluded. We in England and America look forward to what Tennyson calls
“the reign of the meek upon earth.” We remember the promise that the
lion shall lie down with the lamb. One of the most popular of Western
pictures is that of the child carrying a palm-branch, “A little child
shall lead them.” The East, however, feels that the lions will always be
lions, that “the world” will remain “the world” without much change,
full of the faithless, the cruel, the predatory, mingled with the
faithful, the gentle, the self-abnegatory.

The fourth beatitude, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after
_righteousness_, for they shall be filled,” seemed to me to be also a
purely Western one. America and the West have taken it specially to
themselves. It has been the watchword of the Puritans. But my friend
Vera astonished me by reading it, “Blessed are they who hunger and
thirst after _truth_, for they shall be filled,” and on looking at the
Russian translation I found indeed that the word was _pravda_ and the
popular sense was nearer “truth” than “righteousness.” That difference
means a great deal to a national outlook.

“Blessed are the merciful” we took to be a Western beatitude, “Blessed
are the pure in heart” to be Eastern. “Blessed are the peace-makers” has
become a very Western idea, and King Edward the Seventh was sung to the
grave as a saint as King Edward the Peace-maker. “Blessed are they who
are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” is in Russian “Blessed are they
who are persecuted for the sake of truth”—for theirs is the kingdom of
Heaven. “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake, for great is
your reward in heaven” is taken equally by West and East, though the
East feels more that the reward is within you, whereas the West thinks
of a reward after death.

We considered the Temptations in the Wilderness. First, it was Eastern
to go into the wilderness at all. It would have been more Western to go
into the town and find salvation in work, in “doing the duty that lay
nearest.”

The teaching of the temptation to turn stones into bread has an Eastern
emphasis. The Russian, says, “I would not if I could.” The Western is
ever coming to the Russian and saying, “Lo, your people are starving;
but see how undeveloped your country is, you have gold, you have oil,
you have coal, you have all manner of precious things in your soils and
your rocks; say but the word and they can be changed into bread, and
your starving may be fed.” But the Russian says, “Bread is not so very
important; what is important is the word that proceedeth from the mouth
of God.”

The second temptation, that of suicide or of nihilism, of casting
oneself down from the Temple, is something the West has understood more
clearly. The East continually succumbs to this temptation, and the
Russian is ever “tempting God.”

The third temptation has a great Eastern emphasis; Jesus, in lofty
contemplation of the world and of His own genius, understands that He
could be a new Alexander and be king of the whole world. He could reign
in wonderful glory, and could enact perfect laws for mankind and issue
them with the authority of a king. But He denies the world and its glory
in the name of the life of the Spirit. The typical earnest American of
to-day, if he saw a chance of ruling all the worlds and felt that he had
in him the Divine message, would almost certainly take the opportunity;
but the typically serious Russian, or at least the Russian monk, would
prostrate himself on the ground, saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for
it is written, ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt
thou serve’”—“Him only,” that is, not mankind.

On the strength of this introduction I have gone through the main
teaching of the Gospel, and have made the following differentiation of
how East and West have taken or emphasised or avoided the thoughts and
words of the New Testament. We are somewhat tired of the comparison of
the Authorised and Revised Versions, or of the English translation with
the original Greek texts. Here, I fancy, is something more vital; a
comparison of the way the teaching has been generally understood by the
masses of the people in the Western and Eastern Churches. I am not
comparing the opinions of the authorities in both Churches, but the
opinions which hold sway, which make ethics. By this means it may be
possible to make what would be a valuable historical record of the
position of the progress of Christianity to-day.

The way of the West—what may be called the way of Martha—is easier, more
human than the way of the East—the way of Mary. Thus at the
Transfiguration the disciple cried out, “Master, it is good for us to be
here: let us build three tabernacles.” It was not at all necessary to
build three tabernacles. The good part was like that of Mary—to sit at
Jesus’ feet.

But to take the teaching in the order it is given in St. Matthew’s
Gospel: “Ye are the salt of the earth” has been printed in red ink in
the Bibles of the West, and it is generally thought to refer to the just
and upright, the elder brothers, the stand-by’s of the community as
opposed to the prodigals.

“Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works
and glorify your Father which is in Heaven,” has in the West become a
weekly exhortation to give a good alms at collection-time. This is an
instance of materialism. The spendthrift East takes its stand more with
St. Peter, who was able to say, “Silver and gold have I none; but such
as I have give I to thee.” The giving of money is the least of the good
works in the power of the East; “Am I so bankrupt of grace that my
function is to give money?” the Eastern may exclaim.

“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out” means more to the East, where
in the monastic life of the Orthodox Church the lusts of the flesh are
mortified—that is, made dead; where hermits wear heavy chains and take
oaths of silence, or hide themselves from mankind. It is witnessed in
many sects, such as the Skoptsi, who deny the world by defunctionising
the body!

“Swear not at all” is a simple admonition, appealing directly to the
Western mind. In Russia the swearing in ordinary conversation is thick
as the weeds on a waste. A curiosity in Russian swearing is the common
expression _Yay Bogu_, which means really, “Yes: I say it to God,” but
which through carelessness and iteration has become equivalent to
something like our “’s’truth.” In America, however, the adjective
God-damn is commoner than any other unpleasant expression in any
country.

“Resist not evil. Who will take away thy coat, give him thy cloke also;
and who forces thee to go a mile, go with him twain; and whosoever shall
smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” This has
been taken more seriously by the Eastern Church. In the West it is more
“a counsel of perfection,” or the words and the sentiment are taken as
an ornament of Christianity. Agnostics and non-Christians make a mock of
Christians because they do not turn the other cheek. The teaching is
considered of so little importance that it is a Christian act to give a
cad a thrashing, and the clergyman well versed in the noble art of
self-defence is by no means a rarity. In Russia, non-resistance is a way
of overcoming the world and putting Satan behind you. Going two miles
with the man who forces you to go one, giving the cloak to the man who
takes the coat, turning the other cheek, are _podvigs_, holy exploits,
taking the uniform of Christ’s not saving Himself from the Cross.

“Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away.” This has authority in Russia. In England we do not
give for the asking, and to borrow is disgraceful. In Russia giving and
lending are scarcely virtues; they are a condition of life. America is
also ready to give and lend, but not so much to persons as to societies,
funds, hospitals, new priesthoods.

“Love your enemies” is the _podvig_, the holy exploit once more, by
which the world is overcome, and is very real in Russia.

“Pray for them which despitefully use you”: this is essentially a
teaching that has Western acceptance. The Russian does not pray much for
his enemies.

“Be ye perfect!” This is a Western ideal, to be perfect. The East does
not strive to be better than it is now.

“Do not your alms before men” is generally disregarded by West and East.

“When ye pray, use not vain repetitions”: the West has obeyed this
monition. The prayers of the East are indeed not unlike the prayers of
the heathen. The Lord’s Prayer has meant much more to the West than to
the East.

“When ye fast, be not of a sad countenance”: the West, except in the
case of the Roman Catholic Church, does not fast. The Roman Catholic
Church, though Western in its locality and constitution, is in many of
its customs Eastern—for example, in the celibacy of its clergy, in the
monastic life it affords, in its fasting, in its repetition of prayers.
A wide gap, however, divides it from Eastern Orthodoxy, and as wide a
gap separates it from the leading spirit of the West, the latter being
decidedly Protestant. Dostoievsky, in the story of the Grand Inquisitor
in _The Brothers Karamazov_, treats Roman Catholicism as a great
conspiracy to defeat Christianity, and that point of view is taken very
seriously by Russians to-day. Roman Catholicism indeed provides a holy
way of life, and puts its members in a true position with regard to life
and the world, but it does so by authority. Little is allowed to spring
from personal initiative, and truths are not so much personal
experiences as priestly guarantees. Roman Catholicism stands to one
side, and this comparison of the spirit of East and West does not
greatly involve her.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.” To this the East has
paid heed. Russia is the greatest spending nation in the world. No money
is saved. Every rouble is spent as it is obtained. In England and
America children are actually given money-boxes and taught to save their
pennies!

“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall
drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on”: this is obviously a
teaching which conditions the ragged and disorderly and unconventional
East. In England and America one might almost think the opposite ideas
had been recommended, seeing how we cherish the right crease in the
right sort of attire, how we strive to be in fashion.

But “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you” is something which obtains the
hearty belief of the West.

“Take no thought for the morrow” has an Eastern accentuation.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” is taken by the West as a
cynical utterance. The West believes that Christianity means,
“Sufficient unto the day is the good thereof.” The West says each day is
full of blessing; the East says each day is full of suffering.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged”: no one pays much attention to this.

“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye”—a reproof to
the West, not needed in the East. America is terribly censorious and
critical of the neighbour. Russia has no censure.

“Ask, and it shall be given you” the West has believed. It has, however,
asked for material things. The East has taken rather, “Seek, and ye
shall find.”

“Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”
is in great favour in the West.

“Enter ye in at the strait gate”: this is quite Western in adhesion.

“Beware of false prophets.” Both churches have gladly taken this phrase
to use against schismatics and dissenters.

“By their fruits ye shall know them.” This criterion the West has
adopted. Easternism may be said to regard the barren tree as holy. At
least, it never curses the barren.

The story of the wise man who built his house upon a rock has edified
the West.

To the story of the scribe who wished to follow Jesus, but who
apparently wished to do so and remain comfortable and well-off at the
same time, and to the story of the disciple who wished to bury his
father first, but to whom was said, “Let the dead bury their dead,” the
West has paid little or no attention, whilst the East has taken it to
himself.

The fact that Jesus sat down and ate with publicans and sinners is in
the spirit of the East; the West prefers ever the company of the just.
The West is glad to have the action of Jesus explained in the following
verse: “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
sick.”

“Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses.” Alas, all
Western weal believes that it is founded on gold. If any good work is to
hand, the first thing is to raise a fund.

“When they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak
...”: this has always been most helpful to persecuted nonconformists and
heretics.

“I came not to send peace, but a sword” is overlooked in the West. The
West thinks that Christ proclaimed peace. And the peace that was before
the Great War was thought to be a wonderful fruit of Christianity—the
peace of mutual jealousy and fear, the great commercial peace of the
twentieth century, that Kipling calls the “Peace of Dives”:

                 The whole wide earth is laid
                 In the peace that I have made;
                 And behold, I wait on thee to trouble it.

“He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for
My sake shall find it”: the West emphasises this thought. Carlyle gave
it great force in his gospel of work. “Forget your troubles,” says the
West; “throw yourself into work and lose yourself—then you’ll soon find
yourself.” The East will not work in that way.

“Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden” has been comfort
to the West.

In the matter of healing on the Sabbath the Western is rather on the
side of the Jews.

The question, “Who is my mother and who are my brethren?” has not been
acceptable to the West. The West would have preferred Jesus to be a
model family man, not only loving mother and brothers and sisters, but
having a wife and children about him. The Eastern Church takes its stand
with the early Christians and the denial of earthly ties. Sometimes news
is brought of father or mother or brethren to the wonderful Russian
hermits such as Father Seraphim, but they coldly repel the tidings with
Christ’s words, “Whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is my brother
and sister and mother.”

Casting the wicked into the fire—this idea lingers in America, but it is
dead in Russia and in England.

The confession of Peter, and the prophecy, “Thou art Peter, and on this
rock I will build my Church,” the Roman Church has necessarily taken to
itself.

The Transfiguration on the mountain—the possessed about the foot of the
mountain—is taken as an Eastern understanding of life. The light of
transfiguration is the halo about the head of the hermit; the possessed
below make the hurly-burly of the world whence the hermit made his
escape. “The light of transfiguration,” I heard Prince Trubetskoi say in
a lecture at Moscow, “is the light of haloes, the light of Holy Russia,
the light of friendship.”

“Let us build three tabernacles” is, as I said, Western.

The West has believed Jesus in that He answered the question, “Who is
the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” by taking a little child and
setting him in the midst of them.

The West has allowed its eyes to rest on the parable of the Talents, but
the East has had more appreciation of “The first shall be last, and the
last first.”

The West has insisted on “Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s,” but it has avoided the condemnation of the Pharisees; the
Gospel of St. Matthew reveals itself as the gospel of the kingdom of
heaven as opposed to “the world.” But the West has sought to find “the
world” holy. Western Christianity was started by the conquest of worldly
armies, but Eastern Christianity was founded on the example of hermits,
eunuchs, stoics, philosophers, fanatics. It had all the advantage of
proximity to the place where Christianity started, all the advantage of
the traditions of Greek and Roman philosophy. Despite all our study of
Greek and of history and of philosophy at the schools, and despite the
Russian’s lack of study, yet the latter is nearer to the ancient spirit;
but he has lived historically in direct relation to Byzantium, and has
ever had before his eyes living examples of the way to live a Christian
life.

“Many are called, but few are chosen” has had great influence in the
West, but the power of the text is waning. Protestantism is becoming
more philanthropical, easy-going, and generous than it was in the days
of persecution.

The idea of the Second Coming of Christ is a strange will-o’-the-wisp of
light that cannot be tracked and is difficult to account for, breaking
out ever and anon unexpectedly where you would think it had for ever
disappeared. At present it is seen in many places, East and West.
Originally it was a very powerful sentiment, but after two thousand
years of waiting hope has died down, and it is seldom that whole
societies sell up all their worldly goods and repair to the valley of
Jehoshaphat to wait the great day.

The story of Mary pouring the precious ointment on Jesus’ head rather
than selling the ointment and giving the proceeds to the poor, is the
way of Mary rather than the way of Martha.

Here perhaps ends the Gospel of St. Matthew as far as definite sentences
of teaching are concerned, and probably sufficient ideas have been taken
out and compared for the purpose of this differentiation.

As regards the acts of the Gospel, there remains the consideration of
the miracles. The healing of the sick, the lame, the blind, has become
the example of the West, and what Christ did by miracle they do by
science. The East, however, insists on the miraculous, and to-day in
Russia thousands of miracles are performed annually at the sacred
shrines. Whether these miracles are genuine or no is a moot point. Many
certainly are no more than ecclesiastical contrivances for gaining
popular support for ikons and shrines. Many are said to be the result of
the faith of those who ask the miracle. At Kief and Sarof and New
Jerusalem many a blind man receives sight, many a crippled woman
straightens herself out, many a sick man is restored to health. The
Eastern Church lays stress on the miraculous; the miracle, however, is
esoterically understood as mystery. The Russian has an extraordinary
capacity for belief.

There remains the Crucifixion, of which I will say no more than that it
is the greatest _podvig_, the crown of the life of Jesus. For the West
it is the Resurrection that is emphasised. As I wrote in _With the
Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem_: “For the Orthodox, He was dead; for the
Protestant, He is alive for evermore.” So two churches combine to make
one truth, and the hand-maidens of the Lord, Martha and Mary, are shown
to be indeed two sisters, not only in kindred but in spirit.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.




BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM


    =A TRAMP’S SKETCHES.=

    =WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM.=

    =WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA.=

    =THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY.=

These four books, published by Macmillan & Co., form a sequence of which
the _Tramp’s Sketches_ is like a prologue or a promise. The Pilgrim book
is of the Way of Mary; the America book is of the Way of Martha; and the
fourth book, _The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary_, knits the other
three in one.


_Other Volumes._

    =RUSSIA AND THE WORLD=: An Account of how Russia is affected by the
    War. Fifth Edition.

    =VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS=: Mr. Graham’s first book.

    =UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA=: A Presentment of Holy Russia.

    =CHANGING RUSSIA=: Written in 1912.




By STEPHEN GRAHAM

WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM

Illustrated. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

    _THE ATHENÆUM._—“M. Jusserand’s _Pilgrim Life in the Middle Ages_ or
    Burton’s or Doughty’s accounts of their pilgrimages to Mecca are
    books of secure repute. Mr. Graham in _With the Russian Pilgrims to
    Jerusalem_ gives us a companion volume.”

    _THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN._—“‘Many think in the head,’ wrote Francis
    Thompson, ‘but it is thinking in the heart that is most wanted.’ It
    is because this book has been pondered, and the events it describes
    lived ‘in the heart,’ that it possesses such grace and distinction.
    Those who have followed Mr. Graham and have watched his style
    becoming with every volume he has written a more and more
    close-fitting and appropriate garment for his thought, will not be
    disappointed. It is his best work—gay, beautiful, and tender; gay
    with the spirit of youth, beautiful with the spirit of poetry, and
    tender with the spirit of worship.... Compare these reverent and
    radiant pages with the bright semi-cynicism of _Eothen_, and you get
    a measure of the distance the English spirit has travelled since
    1844.”

    _THE NATION._—“The Russians have not been broken by Russia. Mr.
    Stephen Graham, in his beautiful and remarkable book, throws this
    great truth into vivid perspective. Not for him the ‘grey days’ of
    Tchekhof or the hoarse challenge of Gorky’s exultant mood, not for
    him the symbol of Andreyev’s Red Laughter.... This Englishman does
    not dwell upon the Russians’ suffering, but upon their immense hope;
    he is preoccupied not by their material poverty but by their
    spiritual wealth.”

    _THE DAILY MAIL._—“Mr. Stephen Graham is favourably known as the
    interpreter of modern Russia and more particularly of the peasant.
    To that task he brings every accomplishment. He has sympathy; he has
    the insight of genius and the heart of the poet. He has a rare and
    precious gift of style.... He seems to have divined by some flash of
    intuition the psychology of the Russian. This book will add greatly
    to his already great reputation. It is a pleasure to praise such
    work. Here he has given us an extraordinarily beautiful and
    interesting account of an extraordinarily interesting
    achievement.... It breaks entirely fresh ground. It makes a deep and
    universal appeal.”

    _THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE._—“The best book on Russia written by an
    Englishman.”

    _THE OUTLOOK._—“Something more than a book of travel, a spiritual
    Murray—a very remarkable piece of work ... at once simple and
    extraordinary.”

    _CHURCH TIMES._—“We are sure that the student of human nature and
    the student of religion alike will find a deep interest in this
    book. Its merit is the complete sympathy and the true insight with
    which it describes the child-like faith of the Russian peasant and
    his passionate love of the Saviour who died for him.”

    _MERCURE DE FRANCE._—“C’est une longue aventure où l’on se croirait
    reporté au temps des croisades, et l’auteur dessine en quelques
    traits nets et durs des types étonnants. Voilà un livre à lire pour
    quiconque veut être intéressé et obligé de réfléchir.”

    _THE TIMES_ (in a leading article Feb. 5, 1914).—“No living English
    writer has made investigations so patient and so wide into the
    habits and manners of the great dumb masses who are the body of the
    largest and the least-known nation in Europe.”

LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.




By STEPHEN GRAHAM

WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA

Illustrated. 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

    _THE NATION._—“Mr. Stephen Graham is a real super-tramp, and in his
    aspect of the world and his fellows there is always a touch of the
    pilgrim’s sanctity. He feels an attraction, partly æsthetic, often
    sentimental, to people of simple and religious life, and especially
    to the Russian peasants, whom he depicts as the simplest and most
    religious of all mankind. He loves the beauty of untouched nature,
    and of man pursuing the primitive and traditional methods of
    pasture, plough, or loom. He is always conscious of a spiritual
    presence behind phenomena, and is strongly drawn by emotions of
    pity, sympathy, and fellow-feeling, as by the qualities of humility
    and indifference to material things.... Of all English writers on
    America Mr. Graham is almost the only one who tells us certain
    things that we really wanted to know.”

    _SPHERE._—“Not one of the well-known writers who from the days of
    Dickens and Thackeray to our own has written his experiences of the
    United States has proved so attractive.”

    _TIMES._—“Of these three travellers (Henry James, H. G. Wells, and
    Stephen Graham) Mr. Graham has at least the advantage of extreme
    contrast.... His book is full of humanity, sensitive with the love
    of peace and beauty.”

    _GLASGOW NEWS._—“With a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the books
    on travel in America published in the past twenty-five years by
    English authors, the present writer has not a moment’s hesitation in
    declaring that _With Poor Emigrants to America_ is immeasurably the
    best among them all. It is not only an unusually informative book;
    it is a work of spiritual genius, precious by reason of its
    revelation of as unique and beautiful a character as surely has
    dignified the trade of letters since the period of Lamb or
    Goldsmith. Stephen Graham is something far more rare than an
    ‘interpreter of Russia’ or a philosophical ‘tramp’; his quiet voice,
    if he be spared, is likely to sound even more distinctively and more
    impressively above the noisy chatter of his contemporaries. It is
    perhaps a little unfortunate that his interest should be so much
    engaged with Russia, for we grudge to Russia an expositor who, we
    think, might be better employed in writing about his own race, but
    then we must admit that but for the influence of Russia we might
    perhaps have had no Stephen Graham.”

    _SPECTATOR._—“An extremely interesting record, with many penetrating
    illustrations of the contrast between Russian and American ideals.”

    _FIELD._—“The book is full of Mr. Graham’s philosophy, but that
    philosophy largely reveals itself in the narration of his
    experiences both on board ship and on land. They are narrated with
    an abundance of anecdotes and with a charming simplicity of style
    which make the book delightful reading.”

    _LIVERPOOL POST._—“This is a book of sheer delight which will compel
    most readers to finish it at a single sitting. It tells his story in
    the free and effortless style which Mr. Graham uses so magically.”

    LINDSAY BASHFORD in the _DAILY MAIL_.—“The best of his books. Mr.
    Graham is the modern poet-pilgrim; his is the vision of wide roads
    and long deliberate journeys; his the gift to understand the heart
    of the poor and the wanderers. Each day’s little events, each casual
    encounter, each wayside talk or tiny adventure has its deeper
    significance, and resolves into the deeper human movements he seeks
    for as he goes, and which he interprets for us. I do not know of any
    books of contemporaries which have a more intimate appeal, which
    speak with more friendly confidence of the actual life of human
    beings in our world to-day than do these wonder-books of Mr. Stephen
    Graham.”


LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.




By STEPHEN GRAHAM

A TRAMP’S SKETCHES

Extra Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

    _ACADEMY._—“To have read _A Tramp’s Sketches_ is to have been lifted
    into a higher and rarer atmosphere. It is to have been made free,
    for a few hours at least, of the company of saints and heroes. This
    much we owe to Mr. Graham, who has added to English Literature a
    book that, if we mistake not, is destined to endure.”

    _SPECTATOR._—“Like Jefferies’ _Story of my Heart_, but the author is
    much more occupied with men than Jefferies was. Unlike most books of
    its kind _A Tramp’s Sketches_ has indisputably a genuine passion
    running through it.”

    _ENGLISH REVIEW._—“It is a delightful book, redolent of the open
    air, of the night, of the great silences of expanse, and yet full of
    incident, of real spiritual and material sympathy, both with the
    ‘black earth’ and the monks of the monasteries, whose hospitality he
    enjoyed, and with his fellow-comrades on the road. It is life that
    interests the author.”

    _PALL MALL GAZETTE._—“Descriptions of Nature are apt to become
    tiresome, but we have not been wearied once in reading these pages;
    and this is not, we believe, altogether due to Mr. Graham’s fine
    style, his ever-adequate perception of the right word, but because
    of his sincere and absolute love of Nature in all her moods. Here is
    no pretence, no make-believe. He writes of the mystery and beauty of
    the sea, the night, the sunset, the moon, and the stars in words
    that seem at times to take colour from that which they describe.”

    Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD in _COUNTRY LIFE_.—“They are the notes of a
    spiritual pilgrim going towards the new Jerusalem. The writer’s
    passionate worship of Beauty, his love of simplicity, his charity,
    his courage, all these make a strong appeal. He has in him poetry
    and vision.”

    Mr. WM. PURVIS in the _SUNDAY CHRONICLE_.—“Stephen Graham walks the
    earth in the garb of beggary, and sees unusual types and meets
    incredible men and women and analyses his emotions, and worships the
    Great Spirit in vague fashions; and writes excellently about it all.
    He wishes there were more like him; and so do I.”

    _DAILY NEWS._—“This robust book, a classic of educated yet wild
    vagabondage.”

    _LIVERPOOL COURIER._—“Mr. Graham found pleasure, even joy
    everywhere, and he has an almost inspired faculty for making the
    reader see things as he sees them.”

    _THE QUEEN._—“The whole book is full of beautiful things.”

    _IRISH TIMES._—“Not a chapter, scarcely a page, which cannot be
    re-read with profit and delight.”

    _GLASGOW HERALD._—“Told in language that is always adequate and
    luminous.”

LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.




 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
      Text that was in bold face is enclosed by equals signs (=bold=).
    ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
      referenced.



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