_The Russian Soul and the American Spirit_
New York is geographically misplaced for such a purpose as mine. It
ought to lie somewhere west of Niagara Falls, so that one might be able
to take strangers to that wonderful cataract without their having
previously exhausted all the emotions which they are capable of
expressing.
The day journey between New York and Buffalo is never commonplace,
especially when it furnishes such euphonious names as Susquehanna,
Wilkes Barre, Mauch Chunk, etc. From the hilltops we had glimpses of
great valleys below, valleys which are mined and furrowed and channelled
by a great industrial host whose crowded dwellings resemble the hives of
bees and are as monotonously alike.
I could make these glimpses interesting enough, for I could tell by the
shape of the church steeples and by the style of cross which crowned
them, what faiths were there contending with each other. With equal
certainty, and by the same signs, I knew the nationality of the people
who worked there, and had faith enough to build steeples in the shadow
of mine shafts and coal breakers. It was an atmosphere tense from the
labor of seven unbroken days, and heavy from noxious gases in which
trees languish and die, fish perish in the murky rivers, birds fear to
nest, and man alone, immigrant man, lives and works and worships.
The Herr Director, like all Germans, has a natural contempt for the
Slavs, and when I proposed that before we visited Niagara Falls we
should see some of the Slavic settlements, he demurred; but when the
Frau Directorin added her plea to mine, he reluctantly yielded. I was
able to promise them an interesting meeting with an idealistic, young
Russian priest, who had voluntarily taken a mission among these miners.
He was earnestly striving to guard their souls, and also that which
seems quite as precious to their church, their Russian nationality.
The Greek Orthodox Church is the most nationalistic church in existence,
and where-ever those bulbous towers with their slanting crosspieces
dominate the sky, it is equivalent to the raising of the national flag.
The Slavic soul is thoroughly Christian in its quality of patient
endurance, in which it has had long and hard tutelage. At the same time
it is tenacious and unyielding of its particular dogma, having been
taught from its earliest consciousness that its salvation lies in strict
adherence to the national faith.
The city where we tarried is one of the best in which to study the
Slavic Soul, and its relation to the American Spirit, being large enough
to express that Spirit in its varied manifestations; yet not so large
that the articles it manufactures hide or crush the articles of its
faith.
I knew my guests would like the place, for while it is a busy town in
the very heart of Pennsylvania's industrial region, it has retained a
sort of homelike atmosphere. Situated midway between the large cities
and the small towns which we had thus far visited, it has all the usual
bustle, and is full of vigorous rivalry with other like cities in the
same valley. Whatever one city does, whether building ambitious
sky-scrapers or a commodious Y. M. C. A., promoting a revival, or
bringing in new industries, this little city endeavors to duplicate upon
a still larger scale.
My guide for the day was the town's chief "hustler," the secretary of
the Y. M. C. A., who is an embodiment of the American Spirit, being both
body and spirit. He made a splendid foil to the Russian priest who is
all soul, Russian soul and as little at home in the United States as the
Czar's double eagle would be, floating from the city's court-house which
stood in typical court-house fashion in the center of the town square.
The Y. M. C. A. secretary met us at the station, needless to say, in an
automobile, as there is nothing the average American would rather do
than "show off" his town. He gave his time unstintingly for that
purpose, beginning the process by taking us through his institution
which is American enough to have challenged the Herr Director's
attention. In great good humor he, with the rest of us, followed the
secretary from the bowling alley to the roof garden, looked into the
dormitories and class rooms, and protested only when our zealous guide
gave us long statistics as to how many people took baths, how many men
were converted, and how much of the mortgage had been paid off during
his incumbency.
I had to explain to the Herr Director the meaning of mortgage and its
relation to our religious institutions; for the two seemed related in
some mysterious way.
He was duly impressed; for this practical side of religion, this
combination of saving souls and giving baths was new to him. Newer and
more interesting still was the clerical machinery with its card indices,
its numerous secretaries, stenographers, and its clock-like regularity
and efficiency.
The secretary is undoubtedly a religious man; but he is a business man
first, and his soul has had no small struggle in an atmosphere which
demands that he attract new members, raise a generous budget, pay off a
mortgage and at odd moments look after his own business; for besides
being secretary of this great institution, he dabbles in Western lands,
has an interest in a canning factory, and helps "boom" the town.
I could assure the Herr Director that, nevertheless, his soul survives;
for the average American is remarkably adaptable, and while this
secretary may permit his religion to suffer before his business, I know
he does not "lose his own soul"; although in that respect as in
everything else he does run frightful risks.
When we left the palatial lobby of the Y. M. C. A., having had bestowed
upon us its annual report, souvenir postal cards, and incidentally a
prospectus of the Western Land Co., the secretary insisted upon
accompanying us. As he put his automobile at our disposal, and the
Slavic settlements were out of reach by the ordinary means of
locomotion, we reluctantly accepted his kind offer, the Herr Director
having previously confided to me that he did not like the secretary's
"hustle," and that his "efficiency" made him nervous.
There were two things which the Frau Directorin found everywhere and in
which her soul delighted: marked and courteous attention to the
ladies--and automobiles. We took just one street car ride in New York
City, having been fairly showered by offers of automobile rides, one
form of hospitality of which we have grown quite prodigal.
It was well that we had both the secretary and the automobile; for
although I thought I knew where the Russian parish was located I did not
reckon with the fact that it was three years since I had last visited
it. During that interval the town had so altered that the landscape was
quite unrecognizable.
It is the peculiarity of this and neighboring towns that they change
their topography over night. What was a hill becomes a hollow, and the
reverse process also takes place though more slowly, because of the
huge culm piles which accumulate.
The mining of coal being carried on under the town has been so thorough
in later years that intervening coal props have been removed, and houses
and churches which formerly were above the level are now below it.
We finally found the Russian church and its adjoining parsonage in as
uninviting an environment as I have ever seen. The three years since I
visited them had not only let them down from their eminence, but had
developed a stagnant pool on one side, while refuse from the mines had
encroached upon the other. All the glory of red and yellow paint had
departed, leaving only a drab dinginess, the prevailing tone of the
landscape.
The priest received us in his study, which, besides the _Icons_ and a
_Samovar_ had no ornaments. The musty air was full of cigarette smoke,
and most diminutive stumps of these "_Papirosy_" were lying about,
adding to the general untidiness. A parish register lay upon the desk.
It contained the names of more than a thousand souls with the chronicle
of their coming into this world and their going out of it, and also that
most important item, when they had attended Holy Communion, the one
visible sign of their allegiance to the true faith.
The Holy Father had a strange history. The son of a priest, he naturally
was destined for the same calling. Caught by the ever moving tide of
revolt he had "sown his wild oats," which consisted of disseminating
revolutionary literature. He was imprisoned, then like many good
Russians repented, and, as a penance, came to Pennsylvania.
In desolation and distance from home his parish was not unlike Siberia.
It was even worse, for it was an exile from like-minded men, and his
suffering on that score was acute. I have watched the manifestation of
national or racial characteristics in individuals, and I feel certain
that the Russian reflects those characteristics most intensely, whether
he be peasant, priest or noble.
Not without reason does he call his country "Mother Russia." He has for
her just that kind of affection, and it is as different from the violent
love of the Herr Director for his Fatherland as is the matter-of-fact
sentiment of the American for his.
The Russian completely reflects his country, and as both her virtues and
her faults are feminine, there is in him something gentle and yielding
towards external authority, and yet something unconquerable and defiant.
There is a capacity for suffering and sacrifice of which no other people
seem to be capable. There is also a confidence in the goodness of
humanity, no matter how bad it may seem, which reminds me of the
confidence of the woman who is beaten by her drunken husband, yet knows
that in his sober moments he is not a bad man.
The predominance of the spiritual quality may or may not be feminine,
but it certainly is Russian, and one may indeed speak of the soul of a
people in relation to the Slavs in general, and the Russians in
particular.
The priest possessed all these characteristics; he was the Russian Soul,
and this soul quality became even more apparent in contrast with the
complex spirit of the American secretary, in whom Teuton and Celt were
blended, and with the Herr Director, whose soul had hardened under the
discipline which Germany had given him.
He lost no time in beginning an argument with the priest as to the
relations of their respective countries, and when it threatened to
become acrimonious, the secretary, hoping to create a diversion, asked
the priest why he did not encourage his parishioners to come to the Y.
M. C. A. At that point I threw myself into the breach, and with
considerable difficulty directed the conversation into safer channels.
I asked the priest to show us his mission, and he took us into the
church, much poorer than any I have ever seen in Russia, and then into
the schoolroom, where the children of the miners received their
religious instruction and as much of secular education as they craved.
The teacher was a lean youth who looked as if he had suffered moral,
spiritual and physical bankruptcy before coming to America. He and the
whole equipment seemed hopelessly inadequate and out of place.
The secretary did not know that hundreds of children were growing up in
an American community, yet completely isolated from it, and the Herr
Director remarked that in Germany this would be regarded as treason to
the state. The priest declared that it was his mission in America not
only to keep his people and their children loyal to the national church,
but to inject into our Westernized materialism this true Slavic faith
and its leaven.
He believed that in America we lack soul. We worship science and money
and business. The Russian alone lives in intimacy with God and regards
that relation of the supremest importance. "The American," he continued,
"believes in developing natural resources, the German develops the mind,
the Russian alone develops the soul."
I have always had the greatest reverence for the Russian Soul. I have
learned something the Herr Director could not see, on account of the
natural, political antagonism between his own country and Russia;
something the secretary could not comprehend on account of his
provincialism, and the priest would not admit because of his official
position, namely: that neither the Russian State nor the Russian Church
represents the Russian Soul. Its common people, although nearly crushed
by the one and confused by the other, are still Christian souls and as
such have a mission to America; but I could not see how that mission
would be fulfilled by locking up a few hundred children in a filthy
schoolroom and teaching them their national catechism.
The Spiritual Russia, as it is incorporated in its common people and as
it is interpreted by Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky, has reached us and taught
us the greatest lesson which we self-righteous Americans needed to
learn: the impossibility to judge our peers or to be judged by them.
It was Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky who compelled some of us to see our own
guilt, and they, not the Russian Church, united our voices with those of
the Russian people in the chief note of their Mass, "Lord have mercy! O
Lord have mercy!" The Russian peasant always knew that men are stricken
by crime as by a disease; and when he passed those consigned to prison,
he cried out incessantly: "Lord have mercy! O Lord have mercy!" And for
the man who escaped, he never hunted with the bloodhound's passion, as
we do; he put a crust of bread upon the window, to help him on his way.
It was news to the secretary that Judge Lindsay, the "Kid's Judge," as
he is affectionately called, received his inspiration from Tolstoy, and
that the tendency to change our prisons into Social Clinics was
originally suggested by Dostoyewsky, a name quite unfamiliar to him.
The Herr Director spoke of the inadequacy of these same Russians when
they try to put their theories into practice, and what prosaic,
impossible preachers they make. To which I replied that their failures
are due to their preponderance of soul and their lack of the practical
spirit with which we are so super-abundantly endowed.
The secretary could scarcely believe that his practical, matter-of-fact,
card-indexed, efficient-from-top-to-bottom, result-bringing, tabulated,
report-making, American Y. M. C. A. might be benefited by an infusion of
Russian Soul. He almost doubted that the delving miners whom we saw
coming home from the mines, sooty and begrimed, possessed that soul. Nor
did the Herr Director realize that all his Germanic searching and
classifying, all his minute, painstaking investigation into the
innermost of everything, left him where the Russian had long ago
preceded him: in the holy presence of the unknowable, unsearchable
wisdom of God.
The American has great reverence for results, and it is hard for him to
be patient with failure. The German respects authority, and has scant
respect for the individual. The Russian respects man and knows what it
means to love him in his weakness, and to be humble in the presence of
another's failure.
I had a long, intimate talk with my friend the priest, who has never
spent a happy day since he has been in America which he hates, or
rather, despises, and so hurts me more than he knows.
Throwing open the well-thumbed, poorly kept register, in such striking
contrast to the Y. M. C. A. secretary's card index, he said: "Look how
many I have buried this month," and he counted them, and there were
eighteen, "all of them slain in that dreadful mine, and no one in the
Company or in the town cares how they were buried. These Americans have
no souls. They send an undertaker who wants to bury them like dogs, and
the quicker the thing is done the better. They sent me notice shortly
after I came here that the funerals lasted too long and kept the men
from work. Look how those men walk! My _mujiks_, who walked like
princes, now bend their backs before your dirty coal, and walk like
slaves."
His complaint was not altogether unreasonable. In some things he was
right, in many things he was wrong; but to argue with a Russian is as
hopeless as to try to argue with Niagara Falls. I did tell him that
while the Russian here must bend his back over his work, he does not
have to bend it at every corner before the _icon_ or before every
policeman he meets; that here, by virtue of the American Spirit, his
soul may be freed from superstition and his mind from darkness.
When in parting the priest embraced and kissed me, he said: "No, even
you don't understand the Russian Soul."
The Herr Director suffered his embrace with good grace, but when the
secretary's turn came he fled. To be kissed by a man is a sentimentality
which the American cannot endure.
"We don't understand the Russian Soul," I said to him, "neither you nor
I, but one thing I do know. When the coal has been dug out of these
hills and these cities shall have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and your churches and Y. M. C. A. may have vanished because it did not
pay to keep them going, this Russian Soul will endure; and the sooner we
learn to understand it the better for us and for them and for our
country."
When we left the Russian church and its faithful priest, the Frau
Directorin told us that the children were incredibly filthy, and that
she had spent the time we wasted in argument cleaning them up, good
_hausfrau_ that she is. The secretary was thinking deeply, and when he
deposited us at the hotel, he thanked me for revealing something which,
although so near, he would never have discovered. The Herr Director kept
me up until midnight talking about the Slavic menace to Germany, and the
intellectual poison of its modern literature.
We reached Niagara Falls the next afternoon, and, as I had feared,
neither of my guests showed any surprise nor felt any thrill. I could
understand the Herr Director's coolness towards our natural wonder, for
he had seen it thirty years before; but his wife's attitude was
inexplicable, until she told me what I had all along anticipated. Her
capacity for receiving impressions had been exhausted by the city of New
York, and after seeing the "high-scraps" nothing astonished her.
As we stood at the bottom of the American Falls, watching the Maid of
the Mist making her journeys into their very spray and returning, only
to begin her journey again, I suggested that it was like the American
Spirit in its daring; but the Herr Director, with truer insight, said
that it was "like the Russian Soul, mystical, elusive, on the verge of
destruction always, but of little practical service."
That same day we were in a power-house, which looked more like a temple
than the utilitarian thing it is, and peered into the depths of a shaft
which creates power enough to move the street railways of half a dozen
cities, and change the night of a million people into day. As we
listened to the engineer's account of almost miraculous achievement, I
said triumphantly, "_This is the American Spirit!_" and the Herr
Director replied deliberately, and without sarcasm, "This is the one
time when you are right."