tavern, and yet in it you see the same wonderful national idea (as
Chesterton wrote of a similar idea, “It is as if we gazed long at a
design full of disconnected objects, and suddenly they came together in
a huge and staring face”)—divine disorder, the disorder of the starry
sky, instead of man’s order, instinctive mingling instead of ranks and
pews, the live crowd instead of the dead crowd; or to translate the idea
into political phraseology, true democracy instead of collectivism, the
ballet of imagination rather than the regimental march of progress,
human destiny as a mystery play rather than a problem play, enacted in a
mysterious labyrinth rather than in a corridor of time or up and down an
everlasting staircase of evolution.
IX
THE RUSSIAN IDEA
Those familiar with ideas can tell at sight a German idea, an American
idea, a Russian idea, a Roman Catholic idea, and so on. Each nation has
its fundamental idea, its mother idea, the idea of which all other
characteristic ideas are children. As Dostoieffsky says: “No nation has
ever been founded on science and reason; it has always grown about some
central idea.”
It is a remarkable fact that, although Russia is a great composite
empire with an enormous number of small nations and tribes under
her rule, she is not a country of mixed ideas. Her literature,
art, music, philosophy, religion, her theatre, her dancing, is
something intrinsically Russian. No Poles, Finns, Jews, Armenians,
Kirghiz, contribute to it. No German-Russians contribute to it. Of
all the names by which Russia is known as a nation mighty in art
and in thought, not one belongs to the subject nations. In
literature—Dostoieffsky, Turgenief, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin,
Chekhof, Gorky, Balmont; in painting—Vasnetsof, Nesterof,
Verestchagin, Sierof; in music—Tchaikovsky, Korsakof, Mossugorsky;
in philosophy—Solovyof; in history—Kluchevsky, Karamsim; in
contemporary journalism—Rozanof, Menshikof, Doroshevitch,
Merezhkovsky; even in Russian science, which is something apart
from European science, Mendeleef, Metchnikof, all without
exception are Russian names, the names of Russian people at once
Christian and Slavonic. Nothing is contributed by Jews; nothing is
contributed by Poles; nothing by Finns. These people each have
their own characteristic separate literature and religion and art.
They think in their own tongues, pray in their own churches, have
their own characteristic ideas. There is not the blending we have
in England, where we include in our national literature the works
of, for instance, Disraeli, Zangwill, Conrad, Hueffer, and so
forth, proud to be Jewish, proud to be Polish, proud to be German
in extraction and yet speaking for England. The Russian idea is
something purely Russian.
This is important not merely as a curious circumstance. It indicates the
fact that the fundamental Russian idea should be something more easy to
unravel, more evident, more mighty than other contemporary ideas. How
much more easy, for instance, to determine just what is the national
Russian conception of life than to determine ours, obscured and
complicated by so many foreign elements.
There is a spirit abroad to-day which calls for the thing called
cosmopolitanisation, in other words, for that process of the
mongrelising of nations and ideas that is manifest to-day in America. It
wishes the breaking down of national barriers—intermarriage. The
doctrine seems to be promulgated chiefly by those Jews who have sold
their priceless birthright, who have given up the Zionist ideal, and
settled down to think that they are no longer Jews but Englishmen,
Americans, Germans, what not. They talk of the United States of Europe,
as if the United States of America were not sufficient of a problem and
a muddle.
Russia is the strongest bond of nationality, being the purest and
clearest of the nations. Germany, France, and England also tend to shake
themselves free, and seek to find and to be themselves.
My quest at present is to unravel the Russian idea, and present Russia
as she is in her spirit and her passion. By seeing Russia in this way we
have a revelation of the majesty of a national idea. We obtain a notion
how we should look if we could see ourselves as we really are.
Russia and England are akin, if it were only in the bond of
Christianity. We have certain spiritual affinities. We could know
ourselves much nearer to one another, though that depends on us rather
than on Russia. She has much more to teach us than we have to teach her.
It is only kindness to our politicians and progressive workers that
could ever suggest that Russia was a blank sheet on which they might
write what they chose. Russia, alas! may learn wrong things of us and go
wrong—Dostoieffsky’s nightmare. The noisy middle-class Russia of to-day
does indeed tend to follow after other gods. But for the moment I cannot
pause to give actual pictures of Russia going wrong. I am in quest of
the vital and fundamental idea of Russia, that which is the mother of
her art, literature, music, of her religion and her traditional national
life.
I am tempted to say that the Russian idea is an aspect of Christianity.
Hence the title of this book, _The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary_.
Russia is the fairest child of the Early Church. Her national idea is
identified with one of the Byzantine aspects of Christianity. But it
would be impossible to deny that Russia draws her marvellous spirit from
something earlier than Christianity. There is Nature-worship in the
Russians; there is Scandinavian mythology; there is Oriental mysticism.
The remote past still lends impulses of passions, dreams, fears, hopes,
to the rustling and blossoming present. Yet all its past has been
absorbed into Russian Christianity, though Russians have not yet
explored and reproduced in art all the significances of that mysterious
time in Russian history. We may say that the Russian idea is a Christian
idea. Christianity has been great enough to include and say _yes_ to all
that was wonderful in the old.
What then of Russian ideas? Of the Russian idea?
When you first step into a Russian novel you come across symptomatic
ideas, and when you go into Russia you find them again in the life of
the people. Probably the most obviously characteristic thing is the love
towards the suffering, pity. Russia is a remarkably tender and
comforting nation. She is greatly concerned with her neighbour, and her
heart is touched by his destiny. As Rozanof writes:
Is there one page in the whole of Russian literature where a mock is
made of a girl who has been betrayed, of a child, of a mother, of
poverty? Even the thief is an honest thief. (Dostoieffsky’s _Honest
Thief_.) Russian literature is one continuous hymn to the injured
and insulted. And as of such people there must always be a multitude
in vain and gigantically-working Europe, it is possible to imagine
the shout of joy which breaks forth when they are shown a country, a
whole nation, where no one ever dare offend the orphan, the
destitute, in the moral sense never dares to look insultingly upon
the person left forlorn by circumstance, by destiny, by the break up
of life. Of such people there are only too many. And what can the
“kings” of Victor Hugo say to them, or in general, the manifestly
artificial subjects of Western writers? Russian stories can give
consolation. For besides being taken from the habitual common
everyday life they have a tenderness. The Western man can say:
“There is a country where I should not have been despised; there is
a country where I should not have been so coarsely insulted, where
every man would have taken my part and interceded for me, where they
would have taken me by the hand and raised me upon my feet again. I
am cursed, but only in my own country, not on the whole planet.”
That is the effect of Russian literature. Its significance is not a
matter of the reviews of Western critics, not a matter of the noisy
fame which has overtaken it; it lies not in its material triumph,
but in a direct and absolutely unhampered affinity to the soul of
the simple and universal reader. To some the Russian song is always
pleasing.... No,—bigger, better. There are souls to whom the Russian
song is the one thing necessary in life, to whom it is dearer than
anything else in life—as to the hurt one, his mother; as to the sick
child, again his mother, perhaps neither a beautiful nor a virtuous
one. Virtue—it is of course somewhat strange to ask virtue from
Russians.... “The Troika.”... But one thing there always is in
Russia—sympathy, responsiveness. Perhaps it sprang up in Russia, and
became exaggerated there just because so many people were crushed by
various “troikas.” However that may be, to be sung to sleep with
Russia’s cradle song many wish....
There is love towards the suffering one. It is part of a love towards
the destiny of the individual. There is a remarkable absence of
conventional standards. You are not looked at askance because you seem
poor. The tramps and pilgrims on the road are never made ashamed of
themselves. A contrast to America, where the tramp is an object of
mirth, where he is regarded almost as an enemy of society. The Russian
takes the tramp in. He has real hospitality, and not only hospitality of
hearth and home, the giving of food and a night’s shelter, but also a
more vital hospitality, that of mind and heart. He wants to know all
about you. He asks you the human questions. He asks about father and
mother and brothers and sisters, about your home and your calling and
your goal. In return he tells you the intimate things of his life.
This is not only a matter of the road. How often the most utter
stranger, met in a railway carriage or a post-station or at an inn, will
after a remark about the weather or the crops begin to tell you the
whole story of his life. He assumes the hospitality of your heart; a
sure sign that in general people’s hearts are hospitable, that in
general there is a love towards destiny.
As a wanderer and a seeker I have myself experienced the ordinary
material hospitality of hearth and home, and also this of the heart,
having often been poor, strange-looking, and enigmatical enough.
Russians have not looked askance; they have been brotherly. They have
accepted a stranger naturally and simply as they would one near to
themselves. More than that, knowing that I had a special quest, there
have always been those who came forward and helped me in the spiritual
things. Mysterious beings have, as it were, anticipated my coming, and
have stepped out and recognised and said: “Read this; go to that one and
talk to him; see this Russian picture.” They love to preserve the
mystery too. I have known people who had the aspect of having dreamed of
my coming.
The first day I was in Vladikavkaz, an old tatterdemalion standing by
the bridge over the Terek came forward to embrace me and welcome me in
the name of God. I had never met him before; I knew no one in the town.
When I left Vladikavkaz last, to make my long and possibly dangerous
Central Asian tramp, the most mysterious of my friends brought me a
beautiful little copy of Nesterof’s “Martha and Mary” to keep me from
harm. And one night, months later, in a remote Moslem town on the fringe
of the desert, I had a strange experience of adventure and terror when,
as it seems to me, I was literally saved by looking at the picture. The
giving of it was love towards destiny, hospitality of the heart.
It might be thought, however, that the Russian love stopped short with
the honest, the religious, the seeking—that as long as a man could give
a decent explanation of himself and his mode of life the Russian was on
his side. But that would be to miss the real saliency of this love. The
Russian loves the dishonest, the criminal, the despicable, the
unpleasantly strange, the man who can give no explanation of himself, as
much as she loves the other, even a little more than she loves the
other; she has a “weakness” for the prodigal. Half her novels are
expressive of love towards “criminals.”
In English novels the plot is so adjusted that the author has scope to
make a thorough out-and-out condemnation of the villain. He has a few
pages where he lays himself out to show how inexcusable the villain’s
conduct was, what an abject scoundrel, what a disgraceful creature he
is. The condition on which you may describe sin is that you condemn the
sinner. In life also, as well as in literature, we are condemnatory; we
love to pass judgment on others. How different in Russian literature!
You find no condemnatory spirit there. The author’s whole passion is to
defend and explain the criminal, to evoke the tender sympathy of the
reader. He makes you feel how strange, how pathetic, is man’s destiny,
how sordid his life compared with his spirit. Over the portal of Russian
life and literature you might find the motto, “Neither do I condemn
thee.” Russia feels that however mean, however ugly and strange a man’s
life may seem, it is nevertheless a part of his great pilgrimage. He has
got to go through it, he is learning something thereby, fulfilling
something sacred thereby. This is exemplified very remarkably in
Russia’s legal system where, for instance, there is no capital
punishment except under martial law. A man commits a murder, but he is
not therefore condemned and hanged and turned over to God; he gets
merely a dozen years in Siberia, and he goes on with his life.
Dostoieffsky, when he was in Siberia with forgers and murderers and
highwaymen, was much concerned to seek out the gold in their character;
and he remarks how a violent and dangerous man will even shed tears at
the sight of a child suffering. “Murderers are much more simple than we
take them to be,” says he in another place, “so are we all.”
The Russians are unashamed. Men and women confess voluntarily to having
committed crimes or behaved abominably upon occasion. The man who lives
an immoral life does not do so secretly to his wife. The black sheep of
the family is not hidden in the background, “never mentioned,” or
subscribed for and sent to a distant colony; he is sitting at the table
and is quite cheerful, and every one takes him for granted. No one is
ashamed to borrow or to be tremendously in debt; no one horror-struck at
the idea of visiting the pawn-shop. All which exemplifies the love
towards individuals and individual destiny.
This is why Russia is so free. It is almost a platitude to say that
conventions determine the extent of personal freedom much more than the
laws of the realm or the behaviour of the police. Yet it is a fact lost
sight of when people talk of tyrannous government. In Russia love is
towards the individual much more than towards the State. There is indeed
no particular love towards the State. We British uphold the State; to us
the police and the police-system are almost sacred. We often condemn
individual behaviour in the name of the State. We abhor “shirkers,”
“rebels,” “breakers of the peace.” Hence our comparatively limited
British freedom. We believe in order. Our freedom is freedom within
bounds. We allow ourselves to be disciplined along definite lines. In
Russia it is different. There freedom often amounts to chaos. Even
Russian order, _poryadok_, that which comes from Petrograd, is something
borrowed from Germany to keep the nation together. Russians have no
instinct for order. Watch our best British troops marching—they give you
the idea that each soldier has been turned out from a factory, and is of
one and the same type and size. They march like moving patterns. But the
Russians march any-way; their order is of the lowest kind. It is even
tolerated to have wives and mothers marching in the ranks with their
husbands and sons, carrying their bundles. Some men are marching; others
are running. Each man has his own individual expression in his
countenance; he has not merely a regimental expression. Russia does not
care for ranks, for blocks of houses, for formal gardens, for churches
with pews. She likes the individual to do as he pleases. Hence a divine
disorder, a glorious promiscuity. The church perhaps shows the quickest
picture of national life—the kaleidoscopic mingling of people and
colours, the wonderful crowd encompassed by the frescoed walls, the
faces of the saints, the great cloud of witnesses.
The same picture, though modified by Western influence, is shown in the
theatre. Russia wishes the disenchanting of the footlights, the
participation of the public in the action of the drama, the removing of
stalls and chairs—a divine disorder in the theatre. She believes in the
emotional communion of the theatre—the actors inspired by the people,
the people inspired again by the actors, the dance and interplay of
human thoughts and emotions. Shut your eyes to the material world and
you realise there are no footlights, no separating river of light
between the two worlds of stage and auditorium. There is a great and
wondrous ballet of thoughts and impulses, hopes and fears, going forward
and across and backward and across again between the priests of the
drama and the conspirators, the worshippers.
The church service and the drama, the church and the theatre have much
in common. The Mass has much in common with the mystery play. And the
mystery play was originally the Mystery—at which you did not look, but
_into_ which you were initiated. You participated in the action. You
were the victim sacrificed, or the priest, or one of the conspirators in
the orgy. You were made one in the sacrifice, as in the Mass you are
made one in the sacraments of bread and wine, symbols of the victim.
Share is taken in the sacrifice, we consent unto the death. We are made
one. We get free from the idea of separation, from space and time,
realising the everywhere-here, the eternal present.
In such a form is the Russian notion of the world and his conception of
life. It is such a church, such a theatre, such a mystery play. It has
its liturgies of beauty, its many processions, its sacrifices, its
ecstasies; it is a great phantasmagoria of emblems. Nothing is without
significance; every man has his part; by his life he divines it and
fulfils it. Every common sight and sound is charged with mystery.
Everything is praising, everything is choric, everything triumphant.
To recapitulate and restate this in aphorism: Russian life is remarkable
by virtue of its love towards the suffering, towards the individual
destiny; by the absence of condemnation; by faith in life even if life
should express itself in meanness, sordidness, crime; a feeling for the
pathos and wonder of life as exemplified in the individual; no love
towards “the State” or man’s order, but great love towards the
individual and individual instinct; a consequent freedom, amounting at
times to seeming chaos, a divine disorder such as the disorder of the
starry sky, as opposed to man’s order, say the order in which stars
might be classified in a book; a disorder such as that of the flowers
and shrubs of the forest, rather than order as in a formal garden; a
belief, then, in instinctive genius and divination by impulse of one’s
place in the kaleidoscope of existence.
With such natural disorder comes an incapacity for “discipline,”
“efficiency,” “progress.” Life is a mystery play.
Whence may be inferred the following differentiation of ideas:
Instead of the God of the Ten Commandments, and the consequent ten
condemnations, the Russian acknowledges the God whose service is perfect
freedom.
Instead of the simplification of life, a love of its complexity. The
Russian says “yes” to the multiplicity of doctrines; he does not wish
personal destinies to be unravelled and straightened out by the State,
standardised and guaranteed by the State. He will not reduce the chess
of life to the draughts of life. A religious belief in pure democracy;
no belief in Socialism.
Instead of belief in the Future, belief in an eternal Present.
Instead of life understood as a march, life understood as a ballet.
Instead of life understood as Evolution, life understood as a marvellous
phantasmagoria.
Instead of Time understood as a passage or corridor, Time as a
labyrinth.
Instead of the world-ideal of garden cities and carefully planned parks
and squares, a belief in the maze of the world.
Instead of a belief in the coming of universal peace, a belief in the
recurrence of wars. No belief in the “making virtuous of the world and
all people.”
No belief in any explanation as sufficient.
No prejudice against impossibilities; a cheerful acceptance of miracles,
infractions of the “laws of Nature,” of the significance of dreams and
visions, of the design of destiny hidden in apparent accident; a
predisposition towards superstition.
A belief that in apparent failure lies a truer destiny than in apparent
success.
A saying “yes” to the mysteries of the Birth, Crucifixion, and
Resurrection of Christ. The West would take Christ down from the cross,
heal His wounds, and save Him. The East would not do that; she knows
that she must crucify Him.
X
THE LABYRINTH
Man is a labyrinth. He is masked, and there are masks over masks. When
you have gone past his first surface you come to a second. He is like
thousands of overpainted frescoes. His soul is a mystic temple with a
hundred and a thousand standing-places further forward or further back.
His soul circulates in passages, hides in caves or recesses, is missed
among intricacies or complexities. It has the power of metamorphosis and
can lurk in the by-ways of his being in strange guise. It manifestly
takes possession of his body, or it dwells in dim caves and recesses, or
marches soundingly along corridors; it creeps insidiously through secret
mazes; it dwells lingeringly in empty chambers, makes its exit
stealthily by little doors leading as it were to vast reservoirs; or
hurriedly it traverses many apartments to look from the outmost gate
like a newly risen moon. It is sometimes enthroned like a king or a
queen, or descending from the throne trails long robes over marble. Or
it is abased to a slave or a prisoner and is confined in towers and
dungeons serving tyrants for unknown ends; or it lies stretched on
couches, in trances, overcome in chambers of voluptuousness, escaping
again and again from the spell of enchantment and the stress of tyranny,
from would-be masters too weak finally to enthral. There are issues of
joy from many passages of pain. There are processions in the temple of
the soul; and sometimes the soul is a victim bound to be sacrificed in
honour of some conqueror, or it is the priest at the altar, or the
conqueror-god to whom sacrifice is made. The sense of destiny in the
soul may rise to a majestic height of godhead, or may be extinguished to
the dull inanition of the worm or perverted to the fury of a devil. But
even lying at great depths and in great darkness it sees the eternal
stars, as the stars are seen even in the glare of the Egyptian noonday
from the innermost chambers of the pyramids. It becomes upon occasion an
enchanter, an Ariel who can summon fairies and sprites with pageants and
choruses, and make heavenly music in every passage and turn and cranny
in the great labyrinth of man’s being.
There are many labyrinths. Squares and circles and straight lines are in
themselves lies—they are disjointed fragments of labyrinths. There is no
truth in them until they are pieced together. A labyrinth is something
which cannot be drawn by mathematical instruments, which cannot be
photographed. It can be sensed, it can be conveyed to the mind by music,
by a certain sort of impressionism in writing and painting. We have
knowledge of the labyrinth of the world because our body and soul and
being is a labyrinth, and part answers to part. We understand such music
with our whole bodies, not only with our ears; we see such pictures with
the soul itself, which is all eye, rather than with the mere physical
eye. It is truth—heavenly harmony.
A paragraph of good writing is a labyrinth: it is comprised in one
breath, and mirrors in its construction the natural stops and alleys of
the body. Every fruit is a labyrinth.
All disorder is a diviner order not understood: the order of the
labyrinth, the disorder of the starry sky, the disorder of the forest,
the disorder of the world, of a nation, of the web of intricacies on the
palm of a hand.
All astronomy, astrology, geography, cosmography, botany, natural
history, palmistry are more or less the tracing of the lines of the
labyrinth, our playful attempts to follow out the mystical maze of
natural phenomena.