The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 9
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 anyway; 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.