THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
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Frontispiece
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
[2. Modern Russia and Holy Russia] [12]
[3. Pereplotchikof again] [29]
[5. The Movements of the Peoples] [48]
[6. Let us go into the Tavern] [58]
[2. The Hermitage of Father Seraphim] [121]
[3. Tolstoy’s Flight from Home] [130]
[5. The Religion of Suffering] [143]
[7. At the Convent of Martha and Mary] [161]
[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]
[6. From Egypt To Russia] [263]
[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.
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.
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.
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.