looking to her, that she is the living East, the pole of mysticism, in
opposition to America, the living West, the pole of materialism. This
pleased the _Bogoiskateli_ very much. They made quite sure it was not
simply a compliment, and then one of them added:—
“Yes, Russia is the hope of Europe, and Moscow is the hope of Russia.”
And another, an Old Believer, added to that:—
“And beyond the Preobrazhenskaya Zastava is the hope of Moscow”—it is
there that the Old Believers have a vast and important settlement.
At half-past six the discussion broke up in the central part of the
tavern and was left to be prolonged in separate groups. Perhaps later it
again became general. I went out, and eight who accompanied me suggested
that we go to another tavern two streets off and drink another glass of
tea. This we did, and the talk went on and on as it goes on every day
and hour in Russia, in every town or village—talk about God and the idea
of Christ and suffering, of what is necessary and what not.
Russia is considered a country where speech is not free, and, indeed,
listening to such meetings as ours there are often plain-clothes
detectives. But the police could no more stop the mouths of the Russian
people or the current of popular opinion than they could drain or hide
the water of the ocean. In the monastery hostelry, in the third-class
waiting-rooms, in third-class carriages, in the muddy and crowded
market-square, in the tavern, the Russian is always to be found eagerly
asking, seeking, informing, emphasising, making points of exclamation.
All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires,
commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness
to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an
explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So
Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much
drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free
churches or open debating societies.
Footnote 4:
Since the War vodka has of course disappeared.
Footnote 5:
From _Gambrinus_, Kuprin’s Works, vol. iv.
VII
IN THE CHURCH
I have been much struck with the many ruins of abbeys in England. There
are many ruined abbeys that seem to need comparatively little
restoration to make them great places of worship. Kirkstall Abbey
outside Leeds, for instance, is a grand pile of stone, and has room for
1200 worshippers—but it remains little more than a curiosity and a
questionable adornment of industrial Leeds. In Russia there are no such
ruins. Throughout the wide stretch of Russia there is not a single
Christian ruin. Christianity does not tolerate ruins. Kirkstall would
never have been allowed to fall out of Christian service unless a
heathen power like Turkey had gained possession of it. Russia, for
instance, in 1875, coming into possession of the ruins of early
Christian churches on the newly-acquired Caucasian shore of the Black
Sea, at once set to work to restore them and to build new churches on
the old holy sites. Kirkstall was built in 1152; it struck me, looking
at it, that at their best the Russians of to-day are not unlike the
English Christians of that date. They have the characteristics of early
Christian fervour.
The most representative cathedral of Russia is quite a modern one—that
of St. Vladimir at Kief. It is much worth entering. A wonderful interior
painted by the marvellous Russian painters, Vasnetsof and
Nesterof—mediæval artists alive in the present, the eyes of the dead
Middle Ages opening again after a thousand years’ sleep. All the walls
and the pillars of St. Vladimir are painted by these wonderful artists.
At the north by the font is a vast representation of the birth of
Russian Christianity, the stepping of the army of King Vladimir down
into the waters of the Dnieper to their first baptism. And away high
over the altar in a background of dark blue is painted Vasnetsof’s
majestical Mother and Child, whence naturally the congregation raises
its eyes in adoration and aspiration. In the choir at the west is
painted the story of Adam and Eve and their sin, and at the east is the
wonderful Crucifixion and Resurrection, human birth balanced by
spiritual birth, Paradise lost by Paradise regained. On the columns of
the church are immense figures of the warrior-saints of Russia, the
champions of Russian Christendom. When on Easter Eve this wonderful
modern cathedral is full of all manner of Russians, you have a complete
and national picture—another vision of Holy Russia. It is not necessary
to pray or to fall upon one’s knees. It is only necessary to exist in
the great choric throng and to look over a thousand heads to the awful
and yet altogether lovely vision of the Virgin to feel one’s heart
almost stand still and one’s soul become rapt in wonder, awestruck,
thrilled. You wish to stretch arms above the head and give yourself
completely to the spirit of beauty, the Godhead. You lose the sense of
the Ego, the separated individual, you are aware of being part of a
great unity praising God. You cease to be _man_ and become the _church_,
the bride of Christ.
The walls of all churches in Russia are painted all over with immense
pictures. This is dimly thought by Western people to be in bad taste.
But that is because the distance between the Western and Eastern
churches of Christ is as yet unbridged. The Russian has the child-soul,
the peasants get to heaven where we fail, because they are “as little
children.” And the children like the pictures. Older and more staid folk
would not perhaps have thought of them. But they only need to go through
the spiritual experience of praying in a Russian church surrounded by
the painted cloud of witnesses to wish to be such children, and to feel
that the child-idea of painting the walls with the pictures of the
heavenly host is a perfect felicity.
The Eastern Church abhors dumb walls and the restriction of movement and
attitude implied by pews. Every wall and every pillar is painted with
pictures of the saints, and of incidents recorded in Holy Writ. Walls,
blank walls, are always in the nature of prison walls. They separate us
from other people. But the Russian, by painting the walls blue and
crowding them with the saints, imparts to them a character of infinity.
He gives to the worship a background of eternity. He paints in the
spiritual landscape of the church.
A great interpretive Russian writer[6] thus writes of the fresco and
wall-painting:—
In the West, where the Gothic arose, wall-painting naturally
disappeared. There was no place for it on the arrowy columns and in
the spaces between the windows. But in orthodoxy a continuous blank
wall begged to be covered with painting. An ikon, a little picture
in a square frame, was hung here and there, but still did not cover
or give voice to the senseless walls at which the eyes of the
worshippers gazed. In orthodoxy the wall must not be dumb, it must
speak. But the wall cannot speak by texts—for which there are books.
The people in the church ought to see themselves surrounded by holy
scenes, pictures—of immense content and of immense dimensions. Such
are frescoes. Only in orthodoxy are they possible, and indeed
without them orthodoxy is dumb, powerless, not expressed. Thirst for
such pictures among the Russian orthodox is great.
Frescoes make the walls live. The soul poured forth on the walls
calls to prayer, and says as much to the worshippers as does the
reading and the singing in church, not less.... The worshippers feel
around them the great background of historical Christianity. They
not only hear but see—Christian history, they not only hear but
see—the story of salvation, they not only hear but see—the exploits
of the martyrs, the suffering.... They see the pageant of orthodoxy,
its splendid victories.
The great difference between our immense wall-paintings and mere
painting on canvas, the things that are exhibited in galleries and
academies, is that the one is national whereas the other is only
_personal_. Instead of nervous shrieking pictures, these minute
creations which hang on academy walls, we have something eternal,
everlasting, to which may bow their heads generation after
generation, to which will pray one human family, another human
family, another....
This is an orthodox Russian’s view of one of the characteristic features
of his own church. To the Russian it means so much. But to one who has
worshipped in both churches, and is speaking for those who for the most
part pray in churches that have dumb walls, there is a great deal more
to note and to follow up in the consideration of this most interesting
new emblem in religion. Rozanof sets us on the highroad for a
fundamental understanding of Russian orthodoxy, and what I call the
Eastern point of view in Christianity.
This praying in a church whose walls are “the great cloud of witnesses”
is a portentous matter.
First of all, a word as to the _service_ in a Russian church—the holy
scene that shows itself if you go into vespers or matins, to a funeral
or a wedding or a baptism, or a service for the remembrance of the dead,
or any of the numerous occasions of religious gathering. There are no
pews, no chairs. There is always a crowd, a promiscuity of rich and
poor, of well-dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscopic mingling of people
and colours, people standing and praying, people kneeling, people
prostrated, people pushing their way to the altar, people handing
candles over one another’s heads, people pushing their way out,
churchwardens wandering about collecting alms, no irritation at the
pushing, no anger through discomfort. The lights are dim, being mostly
those of the worshippers themselves, of the candles they have lit before
votive shrines. There is no organ music, but an unearthly and
spontaneous outburst of praise from the souls of the choir and the
clergy and the laity worshipping together. It is a strange and wonderful
crowd where noble human faces, broad shoulders, and beautiful forms
predominate rather than clothes or uniforms. No ranks of pews and
people, no “man’s order,” only God’s order, the varying and wonderful
multitude. And from the back and the sides, and from the pillars and
columns look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are
alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died, all
praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the
church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and
splendour of the mystery of God.
All the walls and the people and the priests are praising God. Whom do
they praise?
Whom are we all praising? It is Some One or Something that has been
praised for all time, and that will be praised for ever. Any narrow
conception is necessarily wrong. It does not matter that many a
worshipper has a low or superstitious idea of the God he worships. We
are all comparatively narrow—even the widest-eyed of us. It does not
matter that many deny intellectually that they are praising at all. We
at least know by what we have heard, by bursts of universal praising
borne in upon our ears, that all there is, is praising. That is one of
the reasons why frescoes touch the soul, they remind us of a truth we
know in ourselves that the face of every human being, good or evil, is
turned towards God, as the flowers turn their blossoms to the sun.
Russia has her modern frescoes, for she has rediscovered the art of
painting on wet plaster. She has also her ancient Byzantine frescoes—the
expression of the early Church. There is something in them all that
expresses the idea of choric praise, “the same yesterday, to-day and for
ever.”
Rozanof very suggestively remarks that archaeologists are poets, in that
they turn their backs on present-day reality and go to live with a time
a thousand or two thousand years ago, holding that time to be as great a
reality as the present day. They realise that the Past lives. We make a
mistake when we talk of the dead past. It is a great religious truth
that all that has ever lived lives for ever.
We are provincial dwellers in Time; we are, few of us, explorers, and
many who do explore Time, explore it as moles do a field. We do not scan
the vast stretch of Time from aloft. We are patient plodders, crawling
on hands and knees and peering and poring over little plots of eternity.
Few, very few of us, have the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But
if we had the poet’s eye and the poet’s point of view we could see the
_time-that-was_ existent now, we could see it glowing and breathing and
singing. We could see every event and circumstance in history—in living
action, discharging itself and yet not getting discharged, rampant.
Keats, looking at the bas-relief on a Grecian urn, had the true poetic
vision. He realised the ever-living quality of a moment of life poised
in a picture. So he looked at the living groups on the ancient urn and
sang:—
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
He looked at the Greek shepherds with their pipes and heard the liquid
melody float away, and he cried:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
What enchanted the poet was that though the sculpture was all action, it
was only a single moment. He felt that all was living, all moving, all
processional; but that all was fixed. He saw the eternity in the moment.
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
... yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade ...
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
He sees the trees whose leaves will never fall, and the spring which is
an eternal spring.
A joy of art and of the eyes is the poising of a moment thus, and the
showing in a sculptured relief or a picture or a poem all that was
happening in the moment—the eternal life that the moment holds, the
moment which we think passes, but which in truth never passes but ever
is. We move past the landscape of Time and deceive ourselves that it is
Time which passes us. It is we who pass by Time. The Time we have passed
through remains. We can keep it in our view. We must go high into the
heaven to see All-Time—nearer to God, nearer to the central sun of
glory.
It is to take cognisance of the infinite breadth of Time, a richer
knowledge than that on which we pride ourselves, knowledge of the length
of Time. There is nothing more touching that one man can say to another
than the recounting of all that is happening at one and the same time in
the Universe. But speech and writing have one great lack. It is that we
must spend time to write and we must spend time to read. We must write
one word after another, must read one word after another. But, joy of
the artist! in a picture he can give an immediate impression of many
things happening at the same time. The gazer at beauty has not to follow
laboriously word by word and line by line and page by page to find out
what all was happening at one and the same time; he sees it at once and
takes it to himself at once in the painting. Especially in the fresco.
He sees the breadth of Time shown in the breadth of the picture, and the
multiplicity and variety in it.
So the sculptures and frescoes of the church touch the human soul. They
are fragments of the breadth of Time, fragments of the pictures which
Man writes on the breadth and surface of Time, fragments of the mystical
“Garment” of which Goethe speaks. They are fragments of universal
pictures, fragments of the picture of the Universe grouped about the
feet of God. They have a choric and processional aspect. No matter what
the figures in the fresco seem to be doing, they have the aspect of
praising God, of being part of a choric universe.
Have we not noticed this in Nature, of which Art is the mirror? A dead
man lying in an open coffin is like a piece of a fresco framed. The face
of a dead man is a picture of a man going through a great gate. It has a
grand processional look.
The roll of history itself is a long strip of fresco. It is only too
narrow a strip. It is in the breadth of history that the beauty lies. If
we could only see in poised moments all people and all nature praising
God in all their various ways at one and the same time! That is the full
roll of history—to see the broad eternity in each moment. To see that is
to see the great phantasmagoria, the infinite blending of all shapes and
colours, of all the runic and mystic manifestations which, seen in
small, thrill us and puzzle us and perplex us in our mortal lives. It is
also a vision of the Last Judgment. I often think in these days of
accusing God and quarrelling with Providence it will not be God that
judges us, but we who give our judgment about Him. When the true and
full vision bursts upon us, we shall all cry Hosanna unto the Highest.
The whole universe, seeing itself and understanding itself, will burst
into one great cry of glory.
How that could come about, or what such a cry would mean, is beyond
thoughts and words. We cannot be literal about it, and yet we have sense
of it, and are able to strike chords of the great harmony or catch
glimpses of the symphonies of colour and form. The strange picture is
miraged for us backward through Eternity and we catch glimpses of it. So
it is in the Orthodox Church, in a crowd of pilgrims in a dim temple lit
by the lights which the pilgrims themselves have lighted at the altars,
enfolded in the great cloud of witnesses we sing praises to the One, the
Central One, the God of All.
There is nothing more wonderful than a real crowd, a crowd attracted by
a personality or an idea. At interludes throughout history we catch
glimpses of gazing crowds, the
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly—alien of end and of aim—
that rush into sight at once as you name the ineffable Name.
The New Testament pictures of Jesus standing in the midst of the crowd
is the symbol for all time of the Church, “Jesus teaching among the
people, living in His heart the life of every one He saw, living from
His heart in living veins over the whole earth, the thousand people
about Him listening, calling, reviling, praying, the angelic spirits
gazing at Him rapt, even the devils acknowledging Him from the bodies of
the possessed, the disciples bringing sick people to and fro at the
Master’s feet.”[7] This is just the same picture as the Russian Church
presents to-day. It is the idea of that wonderful modern Russian
painting, “Holy Russia,” where Jesus walks out of the ikon frame and
stands enhaloed above the crowd of all sorts and conditions of Russian
men and women. It is the picture presented in the work of the great
novelist Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s novels are pictures of great
crowds of Russian men and women in the presence of the mystery of Love.
Dostoieffsky’s novel is a church, and in the church there is room for
Raskolnikof, the murderer, and the little white-slave Sonia, room for
the sick and the suffering and the lustful and the pure. And even the
devils cry out from the bodies of _The Possessed_ acknowledging the
Christ. Jerusalem of to-day, with its thousands of poor Russian pilgrims
and its crowds, is such a church. Thither come not only the good and the
respectable, but the outcast, the criminal, and the drunkard; there is
room for them in the presence of the Sacred Face.
The little village church of any forest-side of Russia is also such a
church. All Russia is such a church, and the world itself also, for
every face is turned to one idea of God as the flowers are turned to the
sun. Hence we sing most felicitously the Hymn of the Three Children, so
popular in the early church, the _Benedicite Omnia Opera_:
O all ye Works of the Lord ...
O ye Angels, O ye Heavens, ye Waters ...
O all ye Powers of the Lord ...
O ye winter and summer ...
O ye mountains and little hills ...
O ye children of men ... ye priests of the Lord, ye servants of the
Lord, ye spirits and souls of the righteous, ye holy and humble men
of heart, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.
Footnote 6:
V. V. Rozanof, _Wall-Painting_.
Footnote 7:
“The Ikon not made by Hands,” a Russian mystical story in _A Vagabond
in the Caucasus_.
VIII
IN THE MARKET-PLACE
MOSCOW, _March 1914_.
What a divine disorder! The peasants seem to have an instinctive sense
for grouping. No matter how much the crowd moves or how many changes are
evolved in it, it is always a beautiful whole, a fair scene, with
balance of colour and form and sound. You see not a crowd but a nation.
No wonder the Russian produces a ballet which is bewilderingly beautiful
when the peasants in their gait are true to themselves and to their
nation. What troubles the eye in a Western crowd is the fact that every
one is afraid to be himself, to be true to personal impulses, and to
walk and dress and act as he likes. Stupid censure and the criterion of
convention robs our crowds of life, of diversity of colour and form. We
in the West abhor a crowd as something disorderly in itself; we prize
the drilled squad, where each and every soldier looks as if turned out
from one and the same factory.
One of the most wonderful pieces of stage production in Moscow this year
was Gogol’s _Fair of Sorotchinsky_, presented at the New Dramatic
Theatre, a picture of a Russian crowd and a market on a hill. The first
scene shows a highway and an ox-cart laden with village girls and young
peasants coming laboriously along it. They are on the way to the fair.
The second scene, the fair itself, takes one’s breath away. The sun is
blazing with a ten o’clock in the morning full-armed effulgence, so that
the bright cottons of the peasant women, the chestnut-coloured
sheepskins of the men, the ribbons hanging from the stalls, the black
tangles of astrakhan hats, the trodden mud and puddles of the track, all
glitter like bunting on a May morning; and the tilts of the shop-tents
and stalls ascend the hill one beyond another to the sky-horizon, so
that behind the foreground, where the action takes place, there rises a
mountain of irregularly ribbed canvas. All manner of people float in and
out of the colour design: flirting village girls wearing bright beads;
stalwart yokels standing about in the mud with hay-rakes in their hands;
antediluvian monks with greasy, tangled hair, with wrinkled and wise
countenances, black and dirt-stained cloaks; tired pilgrims with huge
bundles on their backs, wiping their sunburned brows with the backs of
their grimy hands; beggars, drunkards. All the talking and bargaining
and singing is allowed to mingle, and the customers stump about amongst
the stalls and the piles of golden melons and brown pottery, and ask
prices and haggle. And the little story of the play shows itself when
the ox-cart of the first scene comes in with its burden of laughing
girls and swains. Mardzhanof, the producer, does not allow the life of
the fair in the background to slacken for a moment in order to emphasise
the main story. He lets the fair be the world, which always goes on no
matter what story is enacted upon it. Morning wears to noon, noon to
afternoon and evening, and the ox-cart sets out again home.
Necessarily there is design in the kaleidoscope of the market as shown
on the stage; but then the design is to show what a Russian fair is
like, and this of Sorotchinsky is a wonderful representation of the
Russian crowd. Every one who went to the performance was struck with the
crowd, the way each small part was played by the actor and actress who
had it. There was not one of the great troupe who simply walked on and
filled a space; every one was realising a separate part. Such individual
work was necessary if the psychology of the Russian crowd was in any way
to be represented.