Chapter V: V. Rozanof, Wall-Painting (1)

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.

The market-place is more secular than the theatre, the church, or the 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.

The lines which men trace in their goings to and fro upon the world are part of the mystical tracery, so also are the tracks of the clouds, the outlines of coasts, the ramifications of the lines of rocks.

Reflections of the labyrinth are caught in many curious pictures and patterns: in the design on butterfly’s wings, the markings on plumage, the lines and mottling on birds’ eggs, the frosting on the window-pane.

All the rest of nature seems unconscious of it; but we men are half conscious, and pause and stare continually at what we call astonishing or curious or wonderful things. Our life is a life of lisping and marvelling. Every thrill is the accompaniment of a perception of part of the labyrinth; death itself is our greatest thrill, and is perhaps the necessary phenomenon of fuller initiation.

II
MARTHA AND MARY

I
THE _PODVIG_

Russian Christianity is sharply in contrast with Western Christianity in the characteristic idea of denial of “the world,” as opposed to our Western idea of accepting the world and “making the best of it.” An essential idea in Russian Christianity is denial of “the world,” denial of this mortal life as real life, denial of material force as real force, denial of speech as real speech. An act of denial is called a _podvig_, and a man who does some great act of denial is called a _podvizhnik_.

The act of Jesus on the mountain denying the road that led to the empire of the world in favour of the road that led to an ignoble death is a _podvig_—denial of the world.

“Turning the other cheek” is a _podvig_—denial of material power.

Going two miles with the man who forces you to go one is a _podvig_.

Mary, breaking the precious box of alabaster which might have been sold in aid of the poor, accomplished a _podvig_.

Simon Stylites, standing on the pillar when he might have been doing “useful work in the world,” was a _podvizhnik_.

The hermits of the Thebaid were all doing _podvigs_—renouncing the world.

Father Seraphim, who took an oath of silence and was silent thirty-five years—proving in himself that silence was golden—accomplished a great _podvig_.

It is difficult in Russia to carry on a discussion of any point of religion without coming to a consideration of this idea of the _podvig_. For instance there is a saying in Russia, “Blessed is he who can escape and yet chooses to take the punishment the world would give him.” A story is told in Russia that when Jesus was stretched on the cross many of those who had accepted his doctrines were in great distress not knowing that this had got to be; but they said among themselves, “You will see: there will be a miracle. I wouldn’t be in the place of these stupid and brutal Roman soldiers for worlds. You will see He will step off the cross, and amaze and conquer the world.” And in their anxiety and excitement they cried out: “Save thyself.” Pessimists whispered to one another sad thoughts, “Alas, alas! has it not always been so in the world’s history; mankind has stoned the prophets of God. Now He is going to die, to perish miserably, and the whole new movement will be ruined. People who never saw Him work miracles will say He was a charlatan, and that He never had any mission or any power. But we who saw Him raise the dead know He has the power to save Himself.” But both the optimists and the pessimists were wrong. They did not realise that the Man on the cross was giving the lie to the reality of death and to the material power of the Romans and the Jews. The giving the lie is the _podvig_.

That strange German fairy tale of the three sluggards is probably taken from conquered Slavs. There lies in it something of the Russian point of view. The old king gave his kingdom to the son who would not save himself from the gallows-tree, even though a knife were put into his hand to cut himself down. The German version is that the king gave the throne to the laziest of the three, but in reality he gave it to the one who was most capable of denying the world.

Dostoieffsky had a habit of saying that he was glad to have gone through penal exile in Siberia, and he felt that those revolutionaries who fled abroad and did not accept the worldly judgment and punishment meted out by the Russian court were not true to Russian ideas and not in reality helping Russia. He would have preferred that they accepted the cross which Russia put upon them. Dostoieffsky constantly refers to himself as a slice from the loaf of Russia, a slice from the communion loaf—a share in the sacrifice. Those who flee from punishment are outside the communion, they have no real portion in Russia. “The religion of suffering” does not mean “suffering for its own sake,” but rather the religion of not avoiding suffering, not avoiding or trying to avoid destiny. The religion of the _podvig_.

A tempter once came to a hermit living in a cave, and told him about the pain and misery and poverty of his fellow-men living in the world, and asked him what he would do if a million of money were brought to his cave and put at his disposal. The hermit crossed himself and muttered, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” The tempter was annoyed and urged his point. “But what would you do?” he asked.

“I should not alter my way of life,” said the hermit.

That was a _podvig_, a denial of the reality of misery on earth, a denial of the power of money to gain real happiness for man.

One of the most interesting of Russian mystery plays, Andreief’s _Anathema_, is concerned almost wholly with this idea. A man after God’s own heart succumbs to the temptation of thinking he can put the world right with money. He inherits a million from a relative who has died in America, and he sets to work to alleviate human suffering. But the more suffering he tries to remedy the more appears before him, till finally he is drowned in suffering, and God says to Human Reason, “Not by these measures shall it be measured, nor by these numbers shall it be counted, nor by these weights shall it be weighed, O Anathema, dwelling among numbers and measures, and not yet born into light!”

This idea is so pervasive, so characteristic, that I would call it an extra letter in the alphabet of Russian philosophy.

* * * * *

The history of literature is the history of ideas.

Man first made sounds to represent elementary ideas such as hunger, cold, warmth, danger, death. Then he made signs to represent sounds, and invented reading and writing. The signs were systematised; they were split up into letters and then remade as words. Alphabets and dictionaries were made. Languages grew.

At first people spoke only of hunger, cold, pain, pleasure, fighting, death, and such simple things. They had perhaps only five hundred or so words. But year by year they added to words as they discovered new things in the world and in themselves.

At first clever men, brave warriors, intrepid hunters gave us words; then philosophers and astrologers and historians; then priests and minstrels and poets. They named all the things on the world and their feelings about the things; they named the ideas for which men fought, for which tribes and nations fought. They named the things of which they were afraid, the evil spirits in the darkness, in the forests, in the earthquakes and tempests. Last of all, when they found and considered the great spirit of man, the spirit in themselves, they named the gods, and they named the transcendental glories and sorrows of man.

The minstrels struck their harps and sang of the great deeds of famous men, and then poets without harps wrote of the same deeds, changing into words the music of the harp as well. Priests burned sacrifices on altars, and the poets wrote of it and changed the smoke of the incense into words. Great warriors fought before Troy, and the poets changed their passion into words. They sailed the terrible seas ten years to get home, and the poets changed the storms into words. The poets found out the assonances of mankind, what every one admired, and they gave to whole generations watch-words, words that were battle-flags. The poets described the gods.

Poems were so much read that whole lines and verses were as familiar as ordinary words, and people could quote a line of poetry and everybody would know the idea that was meant. And when the name of a god or a hero was mentioned there rose at once to people’s minds stories about him, poems about him.

Stories became like extra words in the language. That is what the wonderful Greek stories such as those of Narcissus, Demeter, and Persephone, and the labours of Hercules became—extra words in the dictionary or, better still, extra letters. For simple people took them into their lives, and combined them with their own thoughts, and made new words of their own. People learnt to use these stories in their prayers and in all their thoughts of mankind.

Some nations like the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, grew to great culture, and the peoples in their beautiful capitals struck thousands of harps and sang thousands of songs, whilst away in the backwoods and lost places of the world the rest of mankind lived almost inarticulate, almost like beasts,—in Germany, in Gaul, in what is now Russia, in Britain. But their upward movement was at hand. A new idea came into the world and all the old order changed, giving place to new. The last of the stories which became a word was the story of Christ on the cross. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” An extraordinary new letter was given to the world, and people fitted it into their thoughts and made new words, new languages, new cultures.

The savage races of Western Europe came turbulently to the knowledge of the God-like in themselves, and threw the world into confusion, observing the old words and stories and culture of the ancient world. They followed the word-flags of Christianity, the watchwords. Once more the making of language was first in the hands of clever artificers, brave warriors, intrepid hunters, adventurous sailors. It passed into the hands of mediæval philosophers, alchemists, and scholars, to minstrels, priests, and poets. At last they realised a wide and wondrous culture, and they took from the ancient world all the stories and extra words and letters now called myths, and they added them to their own stories and words, as one might add strings to a stringed instrument. They learned to praise God on many strings.

To-day we express ourselves with great orchestras as formerly, long long ago, man, emerging from the animal, the rude Pan learned to express himself on a simple reed.

The discovery of words has been the history of self-expression. Words have no value in themselves. They are symbols or tokens of ideas in us. And when we find words continually adding themselves to our vocabulary and our culture, we know ourselves increasing in the knowledge of ourselves and of the beauty and passion which lie latent in our souls. Education in its highest sense is the learning of words and the learning how to use them, learning the notes of the great instrument, learning how to play the music of the ages, and to express with that music and with that playing the passion and the mystery of our own souls.

The highest of literature, like the noblest of music, is that wherein the great stories are used as extra letters and words. Rich writing is that which is full of allusions which we all understand. Poor literature is often that in which the author is frequently making allusions to events and stories which are known only to a few and have no strong significance. To use stories as words when the majority of people do not know the stories is to write in a language that is not understood, it is to write in words that are not in use. The reality of a book that draws its allusions from the Bible and from the Greek myths and general European history is immeasurably greater than one that is constantly referring to the Koran or the stories of the Buddha or Zoroaster or Khrishna or Confucius. That is in itself an adequate defence of Christianity as a religion for us. Its stories are our stories. Its Word is the living Word. The other stories are not our stories. Christianity is our language. If ever asked to defend Christianity, the defence lies not in the historical accuracy of Christian documents or the verity of records. Christianity is the _Word_. All words are at our disposal for the expression of our passion and the sense of our mystery. The Christian story is the word that fits.

Our golden deeds, the deeds we consider as golden, are our extra letters. Let the poets and musicians blend them into their music. Every time a golden deed is made to sound beautifully in allusion a common chord is struck in the souls of men.

* * * * *

And the _podvig_ is an extra letter. There are many who claim that it is the word itself; that denial of “the world” is actually the _logos_ of Christianity. Even in Russia, where there is also the richer and grander conception of the Church, there are those who stand for the _podvig_ only, for denial of the world and material force only. Witness Tolstoy and many of his followers. It is even held by some that the whole of true and vital and historical Christianity is founded on—“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” The important sect of _Skoptsi_ go so far as to say that the begetting of children is sin, and they mutilate themselves, and in that way deny life in the name of the spiritual life.

II
THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM

Thinking of the _podvig_, I made a pilgrimage to the hermitage of Father Seraphim, a few hundred miles from Moscow.

Over treeless wastes and desolate commons, where far-away churches on the sea of snow look like ships sailing under full canvas; through snow-blown forests of pines, through woods of tall birch trees; very seldom past villages or human beings—to the holy city of Arzamas in the Government of Nizhni-Novgorod. A night in an inn among the many churches of Arzamas, and then on the road across fifty miles of desolate snow-covered moor that lie between the city and the great monastery. I hear of the terrible hurricane that has swept southern Russia, and the flood that has drowned hundreds of poor fisher-folk and workmen on the shores of the Azof. To-day there is bad weather all over Russia. It is ten degrees colder, it still snows, and a high easterly gale is blowing up the fallen snow and the drift-tops and drift slopes in blinding clouds that look like engine smokes and volumes of vapour. A bitter day.

There are no pilgrims on the way, the weather is too heavy for them. Often as you stand and try to go forward over the uneven road, the wind sets you sliding backward on the clumps of ice, and you suddenly blunder into two feet of soft snow. You come to little cottages on the Sarof side of which stand drifts higher than the cottages themselves; they look like cliffs, and the snow blowing off unceasingly and tempestuously above the cottage roofs looks like long white grass going in all directions at the sport of the gale. In the afternoon the snow ceases to fall from the sky, but it still rises in smokes and sprays over the rolling plains. Far away on the horizon to which I am journeying the black line of the wolf-haunted forest is visible. At night I sleep in a peasant’s hut, on felt spread on the floor. A whole family goes to sleep in the same room, and as I lie stretched flat on this primitive couch, resting my weather-beaten limbs, each of the others says his prayers before the many ikons. There are many ikons in the room, and besides them, holy oleographs enough to give the idea that the bare wooden walls have been papered on some religious design. Chief among the pictures is a representation of the Tsar and the Grand Dukes giving their shoulders to the triumphal carrying of the relics of the Father Seraphim, on the occasion of the canonisation of the Russian hermit and _starets_.

Father Seraphim was a saintly monk and ghostly counsellor of the type of Father Zosima, familiar to English readers of _The Brothers Karamazof_. He accomplished extraordinary holy exploits during his youth and middle age, conquering the flesh and denying the world, and in his old age became famous for his godly sagacity and humility. When he died his body was reputed to have in it holy charm, and thousands of peasants brought their sick and their blind, and their sins and their sorrows to the miracle-working relics. Finally the Empress, wishing to have a male child, abode at the monastery and prayed, and Father Seraphim gave Russia a Tsarevitch. The Tsar named Seraphim as a saint, and the shrine of Sarof, already astonishingly sought of pilgrims, gained a great ecclesiastical distinction. Hence this grand oleograph on the wall.

I slept as one sleeps who, after weeks in town, is one day surcharged with open air. Next morning the whole family was up before dawn, and the samovar was on the table in the grey light of sunrise. A man from the village decided to accompany me to Sarof.

“Haven’t been there for four years,” said he, “and now I’m homesick to see it again. I think I’ll go and pray a little.”

We talked of Father Seraphim on the way.

“Is the cell still there where he fed the bear with bread?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s there; about five versts from the monastery away in the woods. There is a shrine there now. You’ll see the stone, too, on which he prayed a thousand days and a thousand nights without moving away. And the spring that he found. Many people have been cured there. It’s quite unusual water. Will you bathe?”

“Perhaps,” said I. “But the weather’s cold.”

“No one ever takes cold there,” said the peasant. “It’s quite safe. The water is very very cold. But there’s something about it. You take it home, it doesn’t go bad like ordinary water.”

“He was a great saint, this Father Seraphim!”

“Of course; he was a God-serviceable man, he did many _podvigs_.”

When we arrived at the monastery in the holy wood we were accommodated in a cell, and a novice brought in the samovar at once. No passports were required, no charge was made. We found at the monastery some two or three hundred other pilgrims, most of whom had been there several days. A pleasant collection of churches, hostelries, little shops, and work-sheds set on a fair hill among ancient pines, a peaceful shelter and sanctuary after the wild weather and desolation of the moors. We wandered about the buildings in the dusk, listened to the antique chimes, and then returned to sleep a few hours before the midnight bell to the first service of the morrow. About one in the morning we left our cells and all muffled up and mysterious followed other pilgrims across the soft new snow to the door of the Cathedral of the Assumption. Then in the witching hour of night we entered the church—such an immense church it seemed, barely lit by the few struggling tapers, and we such a few people in it. The peasants, however, paid no attention to numbers, and they stood and prayed and crossed themselves and gave the responses for hours and hours, at last receiving the blessing of the priest, kissing the cross in his hand, being marked on the brow with holy water, stepping up to the altar and kissing through a hole in some canvas a part of the remains of the saint. There was nothing touching in the service except the demeanour of the pilgrims, no music worth mentioning. Our leaving our beds to come and stand for hours on the cathedral floor without an inclination to shirk or go out was a _podvig_—an inbred part of the Russian character now.

I went to a fuller service later in the day, in a church much more alight with candles, taken by a deacon with a deep spirit-summoning voice, and mellowed by wonderful choral accompaniments, a long service requiring patience from the aged folk who came to take part in it.

A seventy-five-year-old dame explained in one of the monastery dining-rooms, as some twenty of us with wooden spoons sat round four huge Russian basins of soup and helped ourselves together—“I felt I might die before it ended, but I prayed to the holy _Ugodnik_, Father Seraphim, to ask God to give me strength to stay till the end of the service.”

“Why not to God direct?” I asked.

“It’s not for a poor creature like me to trouble God to attend to me,” said she. “No, I ask the _Ugodniki_, if they have time, to go to Him and ask Him at a convenient moment....”

“As to the Tsar,” said some one.

“But God has time for every one,” said another, “and can attend to everything at once....”

“_Pozhalui_, I suppose so ...” said the old woman meekly in a cracked voice, and went on with her soup.

I talked with one of the monks about Father Seraphim. What a character the Russian hermit was; there is material in his life for the pen of another Carlyle writing a new Past and Present. He was silent all those thirty-five years, and then opened his mouth. Alas! no one could tell me the first words that he spoke. He was actually silent all the time that Napoleon was ravaging Russia, during the time when he was in occupation of the holy mother of Russian cities, Moscow. Napoleon was popularly understood in Russia as Antichrist, and when the news of the terrible French sacrilege spread over Russia there were all manner of extravagant rumours about the end of the world.

By this time Seraphim had obtained a name of great sanctity. Sick men had been restored to health by drinking from the hermitage well, the leprous had discharged their disease by touching the garments of the holy but silent man. So when Napoleon came to Moscow, the crowd appealed to Seraphim to work a miracle.

“They are burning our sacred shrines,” they cried, “they are using our cathedrals as places of execution, they are murdering our priests and our pilgrims. Is it naught to thee, Father?”

But Seraphim was silent.

And others said, “He is called Napoleon, but he is in reality Antichrist. Lead us, O Seraphim, against him in the name of the Lord.”

But Seraphim was silent. His face retained unchanged its look of exaltation; his uplifted eyes still seemed bent on some unearthly vision; his attentive ears seemed to be listening to some other voices. The old monk never spoke a word. Napoleon and the world had no power to shatter his vision. Napoleons might come and go, but the truth to which he was a witness remained unchanging, unchanged. And if Napoleon had come to Sarof and pulled the hermitage down about Seraphim’s ears, the old monk would still have prayed on in silence.

Almost every characteristic of the Father and every circumstance of his life had something in it that is emblematic and suggestive. In his old age, when he became so famous, he received thousands of letters, most of which, however, he answered without opening! It is told how in his old age the light of sainthood shone from his brow, and on one occasion a holy man coming to visit him in his cell found the light too strong for his eyes and shielded them with his hands.