II MARTHA AND MARY
Reading edition
111
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.
112Simon 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 113never 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 114mean “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 115numbers 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 116the 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 117of 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 118culture, 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 119significance. 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, 120there 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.
121
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 122slopes 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.
123Father 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 124monastery 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 125to 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 126to 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 127leprous 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 128one 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.
“What is the matter?” said Father Seraphim.
“The light shines from your head, O holy one.”
“Do not be afraid,” said the Father. “You also are bright as I am or you could not have seen me thus. I see you also a shining one. Thank God that it has been given to miserable Seraphim to see a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.”
The Father during his hermitage scooped out of the trunk of a lightning-stricken oak the coffin that should hold his remains when he died, and he pulled it in at the door of his hut, slept in it at night, and prayed beside it by day.
He was an extraordinary ascetic, and yet in the picture that you get of him in his old age, when he relaxed his asceticism, he is distinguished by the warmth of his love and the sweetness of his counsel. The pilgrims who come to him he calls his “joys”; before even the wicked he falls down and he kisses their feet. When he gives his benediction he also gives a handful of that dried black bread, sukaree, with which he fed Mishenka, the bear which he tamed in the woods—Father Seraphim’s bread which came down from heaven, the bread of the podvig.
My pilgrim acquaintance took me to the various shrines, and we knelt and kissed the thousand-day stone still standing before the great rough-hewn cross that the saint made, kissed the ikons, crossed 129ourselves before many forest shrines, and eventually came to the far shrine where Seraphim spent so many years in the wilderness. Here an aged monk, taking the place of the starets, asked us our Christian names and where we came from. He had a great sack of sukaree similar to that which Seraphim had dispensed, and he gave us each a handful with his parting benediction. At the well, now made into an elaborate bath-house, men one side and women the other, my pilgrim had a bath. It struck me as rather interesting that the monks of Sarof had fitted a dozen or so taps to Seraphim’s natural spring and conducted it through pipes—that is the true ecclesiastical function, to put taps to living water.
I went into the bath-house and watched some peasants stand under the frigid douche, and when my friend had put his clothes on again—without drying himself—we took each a bottle of the water and put it in our pockets.
Then away again from Sarof and home over the snow. I carried the sukaree and the water from the well that I might give them to the old grandmother at Vladikavkaz when I went south—the actual sukaree with which Father Seraphim fed the bear! Some weeks later when I went to the Caucasian city I call my Russian home I took the old lady my gift from the Father. Next day behold her doling out half-thimblefuls of the water to her visitors and giving them each a crumb of the comfort of St. Seraphim to eat.
130
III TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME
Astapovo Railway Station.
From a historical figure to a contemporary figure. From the simplicity of a mediæval choice such as Seraphim’s to the difficulty of the choice that confronts a modern.
Nothing in Tolstoy’s life is so interesting to me as the circumstances of his death, his flight from home to the monastery, his perishing on a wayside station like some aged pilgrim broken down on the way to Jerusalem. The story is such a beautiful, pathetic, touching one that the station of Astapovo may well be an object of pilgrimage for people who can feel in themselves the poignancies of life, and who are interested in the destinies of mankind.
Not a place for sightseers, however! A dreary journey at the rate of eighteen miles an hour and at the end of it all this little station on a by-line. In the waiting-room are peasants in rags, in sheepskins, in old blouses, peasants sleeping on forms; bundles on the floor, heaps of bundles, tied-up sacks, ancient 131green trunks. On one side of the room is a grandfather’s clock, on the other is a little wooden chapel with ikons and votive candles. From the clock to the chapel runs a long linoleum-covered bar, and on the ikon side of it are scores of fresh loaves, while on the clock side are vodka and wine. On the top of the clock burns a paraffin lamp. There is praying and disputing and tea-drinking, children crying, bundles, boxes, pointsmen with dim lanterns, a mouldy-looking gendarme, and it is five o’clock in the morning.
Out of the lingering train they brought Tolstoy into just such a room and to such a scene. “They brought him through here,” says the heavy bearded man behind the bar, “and they put him first in the woman’s room and then took him to a room in the stationmaster’s house.”
The man behind the bar has trained his whiskers to look like those of Tolstoy, and is vain enough to ask me: “Did you not take me for Tolstoy’s double? Some are frightened when they see me and think I am Tolstoy’s ghost. Am I not like him?”
“Did you look as like him then? What did Tolstoy’s friends think of your appearance?”
“They laughed.”
“Did you have many people here?”
“Not many strangers, fifteen of the family, twenty correspondents, a general from Petrograd, two doctors.... I put them all up and fed them.”
132A gruff, astonishing old fellow, this double of Tolstoy. A strange coincidence that Tolstoy should die at his station. He is heavy, awkward, unpleasant-looking, like a Guy Fawkes effigy of Tolstoy; and as you watch him cross the waiting-room it seems as if his hair might fall off and prove to be a wig, and as if one might pull his beard and whiskers away.
But he is quite obliging to me, and shows me the marble tablet in the stationmaster’s wooden wall, and directs me to the room in which everything stands just as it did then, which is being preserved so for all time—if Time spares Tolstoy’s memory.
The first I ever heard of Tolstoy was the discrediting whisper, “His wife banks his money; everything is in his wife’s name.” And later on, when I came to Russia, coupled with national pride in Leo Nikolaevitch was always the rumour: “When he wants to go to Moscow he travels first-class; he does not go on foot as he advises others to do. He counsels us to live simply while he himself lives in style at Yasnaya Polyana. He disbelieves in doctors, but when the least thing is the matter with him doctors are in attendance.” I suppose no one really put these things in the balance against Tolstoy’s sincerity—unless, perhaps, it was Tolstoy himself.
Tolstoy was evidently heavily oppressed by the worldly life in which he seemed to share and which he seemed to countenance. It was mirrored in his soul 133as the everyday reflection of life, the luxury, feasting, drinking, trivial conversation, and vulgar pride of his home.
Some time in his life, perhaps several times, Tolstoy must have been on the point of running away. In order to make his personal life correspond to his teaching, it would have been necessary to give up his wife and family and the life they insisted on living. He ought to have gone out into the wilderness and become a hermit or a pilgrim. So he would have made his personality and doctrine into one great snow-crowned mountain and holy landmark in the national life of Russia.
Tolstoy failed to do this, not through weakness, but because he felt he would lift a heavier cross and would be truer to his own ideal if he continued to lead his life in “the world,” in the midst of the frivolities and luxuries which did not pertain to him. He would live his personal life against the background of this stupidity, his flesh nailed to that cross.
His life will not stand out in relief till some one writes the evangel of his life. As yet Tolstoy is merely a great man, the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Few know the real significance of his life. But certainly it may be said of him, despite calumnies and appearances, “He had no possessions on earth; he always confessed to being a stranger and a pilgrim here. He did not believe that machinery or medicine or law were 134of any value to the soul of man. And though he lived in the midst of wealth he lived very simply.”
A very brilliant old man at Yasnaya Polyana. You went away impressed with his brilliance, and even if you were inclined to scoff you still acknowledged he was great. But greatness was not much to Tolstoy; it was surely nothing to him that he remained great to the end. The chief fact about him was that for many years he was really old and confused in spirit, troubled. In his heart of hearts he was not sure that he was living the true life. He felt a doubt that the emptiness and vanity around him were his own emptiness and vanity. The world was too much with him; the vision forsook him.
In the blaze up of the candle before death he saw his way and sought sanctuary from the world, fled....
And he perished on the road, with his back to Yasnaya Polyana and the “world.” In the room where he died are the poor two-foot-six by five-foot-six iron bedstead, the table with medicine bottles, a chair, the enamel basin they washed him in. It is all to remain as it was on the day that he died. Pleasant symbolism! The world will also remain the same: it will remove his body to Yasnaya Polyana, and quarrel over the prayer to be said over the grave; it will quarrel over the rights in his autograph manuscripts; it will publish the old man’s love-letters; it will rig up in Moscow 135a facsimile of Astapovo Station and the room where he died; it will arrange ten-year jubilees, fifty-year jubilees, centenaries; build statues ...; but those who seek to know the true Tolstoy, the real man who had this strange life-journey, will hear the whisper, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
136
IV BACK TO MOSCOW
The Russians are considerably more interested in religion and religious ideas than other nations. Perhaps that is due to the greater national growth and greater national changes: questions about destiny rise to the surface of each man’s mind. The appetite for religious discussion is robust and eager. You go to a debate which begins at eight in the evening. Some one reads a lecture which lasts three hours and then there is a three hours’ general discussion. The room is packed, no windows are open, but every one is keen. A roar of general conversation ensues at the ten-minutes interval every hour and a half.
A curious story enacted itself whilst I was in Moscow this spring. A journalist discovered a group of Hindu philosophers doing a turn at a smart cabaret restaurant. In the midst of a vulgar music-hall programme they were performing rather beautifully on their native instruments. They seemed somewhat out of place; and the journalist, knowing English, sought them out and entered into conversation 137with them—as you can at the cabaret, where performers mix pretty freely with those who have come to eat and be amused. Two days later the story of the Hindus appeared in one of the Moscow newspapers. Their leader was the chosen missionary of Sufism, and was going through all the world preaching a new gospel. He had had a considerable fashionable success in London and Paris, and at the latter city a Russian hearing his music—which was in itself an illustration of Sufism—had said, “Come to Russia; I’ll arrange everything for you.”
“I’d like to,” said the Hindu; “I have long wished to go there.”
The Russian brought a form of contract and engaged the missionary and his fellows to play every night for six months in cabaret restaurants and music-halls in Russia. But the Hindu averred that he thought he was signing an agreement for a lecturing tour.
Readers of this story in the morning newspapers were much touched, and a lady whom I know sought out X—— at his hotel, questioned him, and found that he was indeed a serious religious man, desirous of spreading the gospel of Sufism in Russia. And she promised to rescue his mission.
In a week or so she had arranged a meeting for him, and X—— came with his fellow-Hindus and their instruments and gave a lecture and rendered some music. Several of the most cultured people in Moscow were present. Mme. Ivanova, the wife 138of Viacheslaf Ivanof, interpreted for him sentence by sentence, and afterwards question by question, and answer by answer. The lecture amounted briefly to this: “First there was the One and then all was peace, happiness, bliss. Then the One became the many, and there will never be peace, happiness, bliss again until the many becomes the One. Therefore we should strive towards the One and get rid of the sense of the many.”
The lecture lasted about an hour, and the Russians were pleased, curious, earnest. They took the Hindu seriously, and questioned and cross-questioned without mercy. The gentle prophet gave the sweetest replies, delicately evading, politely agreeing, playfully turning simplicities into paradoxes and back again, and all his terms of speech were definite and simple. He never took refuge in anything vague or emotional, treated the infinities and the immensities like little toys or bits of toys. Everything was clear to him, everything simple; he was above all things playful. But the Russians sent question after question and would not take evasion or smile at playfulness, till at last at half-past eleven the gentle Eastern begged to be excused if he did not answer any more questions as he was tired. Indeed he seemed worn out. But the Russians had a feeling of disappointment. For them the evening was only beginning.
The question of the many and the One, the world or the cell, the many cares of Martha or the 139one devotion of Mary, would keep any Russian audience speculating for an indefinite length of time.
In Moscow in March I met again Mme. Odintseva. A great change had come over her life. Her husband had been killed, her fortune lost, and she had changed her religion. When I met her first she was a Theosophist, a modern Hypatia whose home was a temple, an elegant woman surrounded by pictures and volumes of poetry, her own especial rooms all scented with rose de Shiraz. Now all was changed in her life; no pictures, no poets, no perfume, no elegance, and she had exchanged Theosophy for evangelical Christianity. The particulars of her husband’s death had evidently been a terrible shock to her. He had been in the habit of paying blackmail to a band of revolutionaries or depraved police, and one night he either failed to bring the money demanded of him, or he quarrelled with his persecutors, or he got tired of life and committed suicide. He was found shot dead, in a lonely spot a mile from his home. A note appointing the rendezvous was found, but the writer was never traced. His wife necessarily does not tell what she went through in mind and soul, but the astonishing result was visible in her new life and home in Moscow. All was in disorder, everything had become coarser, harder. She herself was much stouter, had given up vegetarianism, dressed very simply, read only volumes of sermons and the New Testament, referred all questions to texts in the 140Gospels, and went to prayer-meetings every other night.
I accompanied her on one occasion. We went to what may be styled the lowest sort of Evangelical meeting in Moscow. There is no Salvation Army there. This was something in the nature of a slum shelter meeting. The preacher was an enthusiastic barber. There were five or six hundred men and women present at the meeting, and a gendarme stood at the back to see that nothing objectionable was said.
“We have converted three gendarmes,” said Mme. Odintseva in my ear. We sat on forms at one side of the room, and could survey the whole meeting without turning our heads. The men present were straight from toil, grimy, unkempt, wild-looking. A few years ago the same type of workman grasped a revolver in his pocket and thought of barricades and revolutions. Now he has a New Testament and sings hymns in dark rooms, the tears stealing down his face the while.
As they sat waiting the opening of the service they looked a stolid, heavy, unemotional crowd, the pale broad-browed women with shawls on their heads, the heavy, unshaven, clumsy men in ill-fitting clothes heavy with dirt. But they all changed under the influence of religious feeling. There was a consciousness of unanimity in this low, vast, irregular room. Something not to be put down in words communicated itself from man to man. 141No one had come there to sleep through the sermon or, like Yourgis at Chicago, to get out of the cold. There was attention to the reading of the Scriptures, a communion of melancholy love and passion in the singing of the simple hymns, testifying and confessing with sobs and gesticulations in the midst of the prayers, happy cries of pain and anguish from people whose sole confession was, “I am unworthy, Lord, an unworthy one; O Lord, have mercy!”
The barber’s sermon was simple and sweet. “Read the Gospel, brothers; the whole sense of your lives is in the Gospel. If you are in doubt which way to act turn to the Gospel; do not ask other people, do not try to remember what other people have done, but be guided directly by the words of God. And if you have sinned, and if your past life has become unbearable to you, do not despair, turn to the Testament; it is just one big forgiveness from beginning to end.”
Mme. Odintseva was anxious that I should like the barber; he was a favourite of hers. Frequently during his sermon she whispered in my ear, and called my attention to points she considered good. Yes, the barber was interesting; he was giving a new criterion to the people, a new touchstone for good and evil.
After his sermon we concluded with ten minutes’ private prayer and a last hymn. In England the private prayer would have been silent, and there 142would have been that strange surcharged silence which suggests to the mind that there might be an explosion if one were to light a match. But in Russia though they had borrowed the idea they had understood its practice differently. The prayer was not silent.
We all stood up to pray, and as we stood there began a murmuring and a mumbling and a calling, a general muttering and a crying, a sonorous clamour, hands waving, faces thrown upward toward heaven, faces drooping and sobbing, every one saying his own prayer, and every one saying different. It was a music, a symphony of pain and anguish from an orchestra of human hearts. I did not pray, but looked about me and saw the people swaying as if a wind were blowing among them. There seemed to be no silent lips, and the barber-pastor prayed with the rest, indistinctly and personally and yet vocally. Far away, beyond the low roof of the meeting-room, a mysterious and understanding God heard each.
143
V THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING
Nietzsche wrote of religion disparagingly as an intoxicant, and yet by his own religion he was intoxicated. No one ever acted more strangely or became more excited under the influence of personal religion than Nietzsche. It is no reproach to religion that it changes reasonable beings to emotional beings. And yet there is associated with religion a false emotionalism and sentimentalism that we call morbidity, a desire to be miserable and to make other people miserable, a wearing of weeds on festival days, pessimism and “God grant we may all be as well two months hence,” a living with death and a loving of the gruesome.
Gloominess is a danger for the Slav soul as with us it is for the Celtic. The bright energy of the Teuton is lacking. It is not worth while making things or working for position. The mind is free and questioning. There is no sense of—
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine,
144or of
The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask.
Nature is “vainly sweet,” and the eye looks out on the recurring pageant of the seasons with unutterable ennui and sadness. And in life the petty circumstances, if congenial, are but playfully pleasant, but if uncongenial, seem surcharged with malice.
The river that runs through life is easily dammed, floods the whole being of a man, and becomes stagnant, whilst poisonous mists lower over him. The joyful current ceases.
It is a common disaster in Russia, the falling into a morbid state. A Russian poet writes:
All earthly perishes, thy mother and thy boyhood.
Thy wife betrays thee, yea, and friends forsake;
But learn, my friend, to taste a different sweetness
Looking to the cold and Arctic seas.
Get in thy ship, set sail for the far Pole,
And live midst walls of ice. Gently forget
How there you loved and struggled;
Forget the passions of the land behind thee;
And to the shudderings of gradual cold
Accustom thy tired soul,
So that of all she left behind her here
She craveth nought whatever,
When thence to thee floods forth the beams of light celestial,
which is a beautiful poem written for those who have become morbid. It is a beloved poem, and you may come across it written laboriously and exquisitely on tinted paper. But those who read it and love it will never “step into the ship, set sail for the far Pole”; it is not an invitation to join 145Shackleton, not even figuratively. It is for those who love and nurse their sorrows. They have not the power nor the wish to move. They are transfixed by mournful ideas, ideas that sing through the air as they come, like arrows, and yet console as with music. As another poet (Brussof) writes:
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away,
O my soul,
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away
With sweet moan.
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Bending the bow,
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Increasing the woe.
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
In the eventide,
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
For the last time,
which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet’s pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower down in 146society, where there is less reading, life itself gives the terms of this outlook. So the coffin-maker in Tchekhof’s story—“Rothschild’s Fiddle”—has a ledger in which he notes down at the end of each day the losses of the day. All life expresses itself to him in losses, terrible, terrible losses. Smerdyakof, Dostoieffsky’s most morbid conception, catches cats and hangs them at midnight with a ceremony and ritual of his own invention.
The old beggar pilgrim sings with cracked voice as he trudges through wind and rain:
I will go up on the hi-igh mounta-ain
And look into the mi-ighty de-ep,
A-and see about me a-all the earth
Where I fre-et and ve-ex my soul.
Ah, Eternity, it is but The-e I se-ek,
Little gra-ave, my little gra-a-a-a-ve,
You are my e-everla-asting ho-ome.
Yellow sand my be-ed,
Stones my ne-eigh-bours,
Wo-orms my fri-ends,
The da-amp earth my mo-other,
Mo-other, my mo-other.
Take me to e-e-ternal re-est.
O Lord have me-e-e-e-ercy![8]
Indeed, many such examples might be adduced to show the pre-occupation of the Russian with the idea of death. The funeral service music is favourite popular music. In the procession of moods in the soul of the young man he comes comparatively rapidly to “worms my neighbours.” The excessive number of suicides in Russia may be explained by 147the extraordinary liability of the Russian soul to falling into a morbid state.
But we are all of us, even the merriest hearts that “go all the way,” subject to morbid moods, to fits of depression, black hours when we are ready to deny the world, our ambition in it, our own life, our greatest happiness, and live wilfully in an atmosphere of grief and pessimism, loving sorrow for its own sake, lamenting for the sake of lamentation. We love what Dostoieffsky calls self-laceration. We must every month or so deliver ourselves up to Giant Despair and be cudgelled.
The darker the night the clearer the stars,
The deeper the sorrow the nearer to God,
says a Russian proverb, but these recurrent moods are not really sorrow, they are a being morbid. They have nothing in common with the suffering that comes from destiny itself, nothing of the circumstances of going into the wilderness, or taking the road with the burden on one’s back, nothing of the pangs of new birth, of the podvig.
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Toiling and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
—Who never ate his bread in real sorrow. Life is of this sort, that if you will stake all of it for a new life you will get the new life. But when you really do give up all the old and dear, that is a dark and terrible hour, the hour of renunciation, of the podvig.
148And on the road of life itself there is a great gulf between the vigorous and Teutonic “Welcome each rebuff that turns earth smoothness rough” and the morbid and Oscar Wildean “living with sorrow,” a great gulf between Father Seraphim kneeling a thousand days on a rock, and the sad “intelligent” who reads to himself in the evening hour:
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.
Tolstoy in his later years was morbid. I suppose if the psychology of Tolstoy’s life were to be followed out we should be surprised at the frequent recurrence of morbid and despondent moods. Nothing seems more characteristic of his later years than fruitless quarreling with the life of Yasnaya Polyana, threatening to run away, lamentations, self-lacerations. But now and again in relief Tolstoy did actually flee. He took the road to Moscow to live like a simple artisan and earn his living by carpentering, or he set off for a monastery where some famous monk lived in his cell, and sought relief by confession and Christian intercourse.
That going forth on the road, a-seeking new life, is characteristic. At times one would think half Russia is on the road. Utility has been flung aside, the chances of gain have been passed over, the so-called duty to work and fulfil your place in the state has been flung to the winds, and the Russian is out 149on the dusty road, wearing out his boots, thinking, trudging, praying, recognising—finding what his soul desires. That is not morbidity, but a noble form of life.
And many promise themselves wholly to God and enter monasteries or convents, and there find happiness, the bright ray of destiny they sought with their eyes in a dark world.
Every morning, noon, and night
Praise God! says Theocrite
—that is not a morbid life, though a life of denial. It does not mean that every one who would live well should enter a monastery or a convent, it only means that some one whose soul craved such a life has found his way. How we have suffered in England from the difficulty of giving one’s soul to God in that way. Those who would have been monks and sisters have had to give themselves in other ways. There are thousands of other ways. Every one who is living well has found a way. The way meant renunciation, hardship, sorrow—but not morbid sorrow, the sorrow which leaves you as you were, as the cloud of gnats wailing by the tree and the stream leave the tree, leave the stream, just as they were, just what they were.
The differentiation between morbid sorrow and real sorrow, between self-laceration and the tribulation that comes of destiny, is important if we would understand aright what the Russian means by the “Religion of Suffering.”
150The religion of suffering, of which so much is said, is a term easily misunderstood, meaning differently in the mouths of different people. The political propagandist holds that the Russian people are melancholy because their institutions are so bad, and that the religion of suffering is the religion of revolution, a growing resentment against the government.
The morbid Russian will say that the religion of suffering is the knowledge of the truth that only in suffering and near to death can you understand anything about life. He will deny that anything else can teach you.
The peasant pilgrim will interpret it as the religion of taking to the road and bearing the cross; being a beggar for Christ’s sake; refusing a lift on the road to the Sepulchre, holding that where Christ walked it is not for them to ride.
Another will say it is the religion that helps you to face suffering, and point to Tolstoy’s story of the death of Ivan Ilyitch. Ivan Ilyitch was a man who had no religion, and had never faced suffering in his life, an ordinary bourgeois of the type of lower intelligentsia, jovial, selfish, cynical, fond of cards and of his dinner, and having no other particular interest in life except an ambition to make more money. Suddenly he is stricken with cancer, and lives for years in increasing pain till at last he dies in agony. He has no spiritual comfort; pain quite o’ercrows his spirit. The truth is, no pain really conquers the 151spirit, the spirit always triumphs at the last, even if the body is rendered useless by the struggle. But this truth is lost in the irreligion of Ivan Ilyitch. It would seem it would have been better if he had lived a more regular and healthy life in his youth, but that is a false moral. The fact is he had never faced the solemn mystery of life, never taken his ordinary human share in suffering, and so was lost in the hour of pain. But perhaps there were more spiritual gleams in the end of Ivan Ilyitch than Tolstoy tells us of. Tolstoy was a moralist. But in any case Ivan Ilyitch presents a contrast to a religious Russian on his death-bed, in his last agony, gripping tight in his hand a little wooden cross, his eyes upon the ikon of his patron saint before which the candle is burning.
Another will say, the religion of suffering is that which helps you to face life, which is perhaps another way of saying that it is the religion which helps you to face death ... the religion which prompts you to take risks and will face no dangers. He is losing his soul. In a great war he wakens up and offers himself—and saves his soul. Or in the ordinary course of things, in the “weak piping times of peace,” he resolves to make a leap in the dark and get life, he gives up the old for the new—he saves his soul, and out of his sufferings springs a glory.
Still it is not for every one to make this leap in the dark. Villagers, the peasants of a countryside, 152have obviously no call that way, or seldom a call that way. They have not the need that the townsman has, they have satisfying visions of truth, from nature, in their way of life, in their traditional customs. Brand was probably wrong trying to lead his village flock up among the glaciers and avalanches to make a church of ice. He should have preached such sermons and made such appeals in towns. He would have led people from the towns. Nevertheless there has been a cult of Brand in Russia, especially since Ibsen’s long drama was produced at the Theatre of Art, and many divinity students and young priests have been touched by his vigorous onslaught on the quiet lives of simple folk.
On the other hand, there have not been wanting vigorous opponents to Brand and the “God of the Heights,” and I have even seen the scientist working to relieve pain put in opposition to Brand working to increase the pain and sorrow in the world. But in that opposition lies a misconception. Crucifixion under chloroform does not conquer death and sin, and there is no sleeping-draught for the young man on the threshold of life who has got to dare and suffer and die many times before he emerges at his noblest and richest.
Dostoieffsky voiced the religion of suffering for Russia, he suffered himself, and in his personal suffering discovered the national passion. He sanctified Siberia, redeeming the notion of it from 153that of a foul prison and place of punishment to a place of redemption, and finding one’s own soul. He did not find Siberia an evil place, but on the contrary, found it holy ground. These men came face to face with reality who had lived till then in an atmosphere of unreality. The roads of Siberia were roads of pilgrimage. Dostoieffsky sent successively his two most interesting heroes to tread those roads—Raskolnikof and Dmitri Karamazof. Tolstoy develops and materialises the idea in the story of Katya and Neludof.
Then in his novels Dostoieffsky generally shows the suffering ones, never suggesting the idea that the suffering should be removed. He has no interest in the non-suffering normal person. He prefers a man who is torn, whose soul is disclosed and bare. He feels that such a man knows more, and that his life can show more of the true pathos of man’s destiny. Such people think, dream, pray, hope, they are infinitely lovable, they are clearly mortal. Hence a pre-occupation with suffering, a saying yes to suffering when the obvious answer seems to be no, and Let this cup pass from me. It is perhaps because the West has taken it for granted that suffering is an evil thing, and has set itself consciously the task of eliminating suffering from the world that the East has emphasised its acceptance of suffering. Nietzsche noted what he called the watchword of Western Europe—“We wish that there may be nothing more to fear.” He 154despised that wish. The East does not despise the wish, but finds it necessary to affirm its own belief more vigorously. It accepts many things which the West considers wrong in themselves—War, Disease, Pain, Death.
155
VI THE TWO HERMITS
Although self-laceration and being wilfully gloomy are frequent in Russian life the idea of repentance is not popular, there being no particular passion for righteousness and consequently no insistence on sin as something deadly in itself. In Russia you never hear that the wages of sin is death. The man who sins is even thought to be nearer to grace than he who never sins, the prodigal nearer than his elder brother. “Sin committed is nothing to grieve over. What is done can’t be helped. Hurry on and do something else, don’t waste time in penance or repentance.” There is no idea of penance in connection with the Russian Church, and consequently no “indulgences.” Russia has escaped the evil of thinking that it is possible to pay for past actions and neutralise their effect. Even in asceticism the Russian has no idea of paying for sins by fasting and praying and mortifying the flesh. And he who sets out on pilgrimage does not do so as a penance for sin, he is not trying in any way to make up to God for sin. His act is an act 156of praise, a promise, his asceticism is a denial of this world in honour of the world to come, a denial of the world’s peace in praise of the peace which passeth understanding, a denial of the world’s truth in allegiance to the Holy Ghost, a showing forth in symbolic act of the glory of man’s heavenly destiny.
The story of two hermits given by the Russian philosopher Solovyof gives a Russian point of view.
In the desert in Egypt two hermits were saving their souls. Their caves were quite near one another but they never entered into conversation unless it were to sing psalms at one another or call one another by name now and then. In this way of life they passed many years, and the fame of their sanctity spread beyond Egypt and into many lands. But in course of time the devil, mortified by their holiness, succeeded in tempting them. He snared them both at the same time, and, not saying a word to one another, they gathered the baskets and pallets which in their long spare time they had plaited from grasses and palm leaves, and they set off together for Alexandria. There they sold their work, and on the money they got for it they spent three gay days and nights with drunkards and sinners, and on the fourth morning, having spent everything, they returned to their cells in the desert.
One of them wept bitterly and howled aloud. The other walked at his side with bright morning face and sang psalms joyfully to himself. The first cried:
“Accursed that I am, now am I lost for ever. I 157shall never out-pray my hideous sin, never, never. All my fasts and hymns and prayers have been in vain. I might as well have sinned all the time; all lost in one foul moment! Alas! alas!”
But the other hermit went on singing, quietly, joyfully.
“What!” cried the first hermit. “Have you gone out of your mind?”
“Why?” asked the joyful one.
“Why don’t you repent?”
“What is there for me to repent of?” asked the joyful one.
“And Alexandria, have you forgotten it?” asked his companion.
“What of Alexandria? Glory be to the Almighty who preserves that famous and honourable town!”
“But what did we do in Alexandria?”
“What did we do? Why we sold our baskets of course, prayed upon the ikon of holy St. Mark, visited several churches, walked a little in the town hall, conversed with the virtuous and Christly Leonila....”
The repentant hermit stared at the other in pale stupefaction.
“And the house of ill-fame in which we spent the night ...” said he.
“God preserve us!” said the other. “The evening and night we spent in the guest-house of the patriarch.”
“Holy martyrs! God has already blasted his 158reason,” cried the repentant hermit. “And with whom did we get drunk on Tuesday night? Tell me that.”
“We partook of wine and viands in the refectory of the patriarchate, Tuesday being the festival of the Presentation of the most Blessed Mother of God.”
“Poor fellow! And whom did we kiss, eh?”
“We were honoured at parting with a holy kiss from that father of fathers, the most blessed Archbishop of the great city of Alexandria and of all Egypt, yes and of Libya, and of Pentapolis, and of Kur-Timothee with its spiritual court, and with all the fathers and brothers of his divinely appointed clergy.”
“Ah, why do you make a mock of me? Does it mean that after yesterday’s abominations the devil has entered into possession of you. You embraced sinners, you accursed one.”
“I can’t say in whom the devil has found a home, in me or in you,” said the other, “in me when I rejoice in the God’s gifts and His holy will, when I praise the Creator and all His works, or in you who rave and call the house of our most blessed father and pastor a house of ill-fame, and defame the God-loving clergy, calling them sinners as it were.”
“Ah, you heretic!” screamed the repentant hermit. “Arian monster! Thrice accursed lips of the abominable Appollonion!”
And the repentant hermit threw himself upon his companion and tried to kill him. But failing to do that he grew tired of his efforts, and the two resumed 159their journey to their caves. The repentant one beat his head on the rock all night and tore his hair and made the desert echo with his howls and shrieks. The other calmly and joyfully went on singing psalms.
In the morning the repentant hermit made the following reflections:
“Just think of it. I had earned from Heaven especial blessings and holy power by my fasts and my podvigs.[9] This has already become evident by the miracles and wonders I have lately been enabled to perform, but after this that has happened, all is lost. By giving myself up to fleshly abomination I have sinned against the Holy Ghost, and that sin, according to the word of God, will be forgiven me neither in this life nor in the life to come. I have thrown the pearl of heavenly purity to be trampled under feet by swine, by devils. The devils have taken my pearl, and, no doubt, having stamped it into the mire, they will come after me and tear me. Well, well, if I am irrecoverably lost whatever is there for me to do out here in the desert?” And he returned to Alexandria and gave himself up to a life of debauch. Eventually, on one occasion when he was hard up he conspired with other vagabonds, fell upon a rich merchant, killed him, and robbed him. He was tracked down, caught and tried in the courts. The judge condemned him to death and he died without repentance.
160But his old companion continued his holy life, his podvizhnitchestvo[10] attained a high degree of sanctity and became famous through the many miracles wrought at his cave-mouth. At a word from his holy lips a woman past the age of child-bearing yet conceived and brought forth a male child. When at last the good man died, his shrivelled and worn-out body, suddenly as it were, blossomed in beauty and youth, becoming translucent and filling the air with a heavenly perfume. Over his holy relics a monastery was built, and his name went forth from the church of Alexandria to Byzantium and thence to the shrines of Kief and Moscow.
The lesson of this story is, according to Varsonophy, who told it, that there are no sins of any importance except despondency. Did not both these hermits sin alike and yet but one of them was lost, namely, he who desponded?
Varsonophy was a pilgrim from Mount Athos, who used to say, “Eh, eh, don’t grieve about your sins, be done with them, they don’t count. Sin 539 times in a day but don’t grieve about it, that’s the chief thing. If to sin is evil, then to remember sin is evil. There is nothing worse than to call to mind one’s own sins.... There is only one deadly sin and that is despondency, from despondency comes despair, that is more than sin, it is spiritual death.”
161
VII AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY
One Sunday I went to the convent of St. Martha and St. Mary in the Bolshaya Ordinka on the other side of the Moscow river. It is a wonderful institution, belonging to the new Russia and yet being part of the old, a young dainty stem with leaves sprung from the rugged many-wintered tree of the Russian Church. Like St. Vladimir’s Cathedral at Kief, its beauty lies not in any antiquity or ruin. It is a new institution; it is served by young people; and has new life, new interest, and ideals. It is the convent of which the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Federovna, the widow of the Grand Duke Sergius, whose murder was contrived by Azef the Jewish agent-provocateur during the revolutionary period, is the abbess.
The remains of the Grand Duke were deposited at the shrine of St. Alexey, and praying there, the grief-stricken widow promised herself, her life, and her estate to God. The beautiful sister of the Empress found her way from desolation 162and the tomb to a bright and spacious and yet devoted life, and she was consecrated and took the veil.
One of the first deeds of her new life was to purchase a building site in one of the poorer parts of the city, and to have it consecrated for the building of a convent and churches. A temporary church was put up and services took place from the first. The first plans were realised in 1907; the sisterhood was already formed and had begun work by February 1909. The Grand Duchess is the abbess and there are about a hundred sisters. Every one is young, every one is active. No woman over forty can enter the sisterhood, no one also who is weak physically or likely to be unable to perform the arduous labours for and among the poor which the sisters impose upon themselves.
The convent combines in its ideal the imitation of both Martha and Mary. Each sister dedicates herself to “God and her neighbour.” She would sit at Jesus’ feet like Mary, and be occupied with many things like Martha. But certainly the idea of Martha and service stands first in their minds. Their religion is the religion of good deeds. They visit, clothe, comfort, heal the poor, and all but work miracles, flowers springing in their footsteps where they go. They receive and consider thousands of letters and beggars. They perform work which is often left to the municipalities and Care committees in the West, but the work is much more fruitful since 163it is done in the Name of Christ rather than in the name of reason. In some convents the sisters are divided into Marthas and Marys, and there is a question when a new one takes her place—a Martha or a Mary? But in the Martha Marinskaya all have to be Marthas. Each sister has a specific calling and name, e.g. the letter-writer, the purchaser, the guest-receiver: there are medical sisters, church sisters, kitchen sisters, and so on.
The service in the convent church is open and free. All and sundry may go in. And yet necessarily one is in a way a guest, a visitor. It is a very gentle and delicate experience to stand on the stone flags of the wide church beside fifty or sixty maidens in white and avow allegiance to the same emblems, praise the same splendid Creator and God.
I came to the service, but I also wished to satisfy a desire to see the frescoes and wall-paintings by Nesterof. The rood-screen, the apse, and the sides have been painted by that great artist, and two or three of his most beautiful pictures are the surface of the walls.
There is a large picture, the whole width of the church, a presentment of Holy Russia at the margin of a birch forest; plains and folding valleys and uplands and broad acres in the distance. In the foreground bright green grass thick with purple labiate and yellow rattray, an opening in the forest, delicate silver birches on each side and tiny pine trees, seedlings of pine-trees. In the opening all manner of 164characteristic Russian “poor folk” gazing, praying, kneeling, crying. For a haloed Christ stands among the birch trees and receives all who will come to Him.
The Russian peasant believes that Christ wanders on his roads—
the heavenly King
Our mother Russia came to bless
And through our land went wandering;
and he is quite right, believing that. The thought, almost by itself, constitutes the idea of “Holy Russia.”
The most beautiful picture in the church is the dedicatory Martha and Mary—“The Master is here and calleth thee”[11]—a panel in front of which stood a sister all in white like a statue, little candles in front of her, a stout six-feet wax candle beside her.
A tall and portly priest with long hair, whimsical and gentle, took the service—Father Mitrophan; and he walked to and fro, now with the people, now behind the sacred gates. A score of sisters in black veils and with black crowns on their heads sang in the choir. A sister stood at a counter by the door and sold candles. A congregation of sisters, fashionable visitors, peasants, working-people, and beggars grouped themselves miscellaneously in the wide, open, light-filled body of the church. Of course there were no seats. It was pleasant to be there; 165there was good air, a fragrance occasionally of flowers, and a sense of young women in a certain mood towards God. We sang, assented, crossed ourselves, bowed. The sixty sisters all in white prostrated themselves, and there was a billowy flood of white linen on the floor. And the black choir sang, gently, pitifully, sweetly, exaltedly, with pale voices. It was their church, their temple. They expressed themselves there as a maid expresses herself in her private room at home. The gentle Nesterof paintings pertained to them specially. They were chosen by them.
In the midst of the service in come the convent waifs, children of the childless, two dozen little boys in green blouses, two dozen little girls in blue frocks and drab pinafores. And they stand in the midst of the church. They are so small, they might be the children of dwarfs.
Father Mitrophan comes out to deliver his sermon, and we all move up closer towards the altar rails so as to hear him. He is higher than we, and looks a shepherd with a flock about him. A gentle sermon: “You have parents in the flesh, you have also parents in the Spirit. There are earthly families, there are also spiritual families; worldly intercourse and heavenly intercourse. Our parents bore us and then as soon as convenient brought us to the font to give us back to God. The parents were not present at the baptism because they were only parents of the flesh, but the guardian angels were present because 166they were parents of the Spirit. To-day is the day of St. Afanasief and of St. Sergey, spiritual fathers, to whom we must look for guidance and love. What do they teach us? Why, first of all, to do things, to work. What a worker was St. Paul, for instance, writing fourteen epistles. We mustn’t be lazy! We shan’t get anything without making effort. Fast day comes; we say it doesn’t matter much, we’ll eat ordinary fare. It’s time to go to church; you say to yourself, ‘No, no, don’t need to,’ and you take a stool and a book of church verses and sing to yourself pleasantly and comfortably. No, no, it won’t do. The Fathers of the Church didn’t go lazy like that, or where should we be....” And so on, in a sententious manner and sing-song tone, nodding his head and pronouncing many of his dicta in a colloquial tone of voice like an old woman saying proverbs. He had an Orthodox voice. There is such a thing in Russia, a voice and manner in which the Church and the Church service are reflected. It communicates itself to the worshipper and is often a superadded grace of personality in a man or woman, a certain Byzantinism in expression, a holding oneself like a figure in a fresco.
Amen! A crossing of ourselves; the sermon is ended. The crowd about the altar breaks up, and we spread ourselves out in the fresher spaces of the church once more, and the pale singing of the black-robed choir recommences as the conclusion of the liturgy is sung. The sixty sisters prostrate themselves 167together in a billowy mass once more. Worshippers cross themselves before the altar and go out. The Communion bread is taken and the service is over. The waifs march out; we all come out.
It is good to have been at prayers with the sisters, just as if one had spent a few hours in perfect mood in a garden. It took my mind back to a morning in an immense London church when I came in late and was taken up and put in a seat just underneath a picture of the Virgin. At the Virgin’s feet were armfuls of lilies. I had a sense, I have it now—all flowers are flowers at the feet of the Virgin.
168
VIII THE WAY OF MARTHA
The way of Russia is more the way of Mary, and yet no people are more given to working for their neighbours and being actively kind than the Russians. There are many Marthas among them. They visit the poor, bring food to the hungry, clothe the wretched. They work for the suffering people around them. Almost every cultured Russian of grace or character has some social or personal responsibility or care, the passion to put right the affairs of some unhappy family, the will to raise drunkards and law-breakers from spiritual death. It is national and natural, and it is strange that this should be the characteristic of a people who also have a passion for going into the desert and saving their souls.
But it is impossible for every one to go into the desert or take to a cell, and indeed the impulse to go away does not come to every one, and when it does come it is seldom sufficiently strong to break down the ties of everyday life and make a road of the affections—the narrow road that leads away from 169the world. Even among a mystical people the great majority remain behind in “the world” and have the normal life, serve man as well as God, marry, have children, work as well as pray, and live through six everydays to one of incense and song. The Church has its two aspects, that of Martha and of Mary, and it is with the way of Martha that we are generally more familiar, though many may look lingeringly towards the wilderness, feeling that perhaps after all the better part is to be found out there.
The way of Martha has come into some discredit in the West owing to the organisation of charity, the reliance on parliaments and philanthropical societies and committees rather than on individual volition. As a substitute for love towards one’s fellow-man have appeared many things—voting for a candidate, appeals to policemen and to magistrates, prison, sending a young man to the Colonies, trusting to the court-missionary ... that is the way of “the world” and not the way of the individual. However much “organisation” there may be, there will always remain as a fundamental idea of the Church personal love towards one’s neighbour and care for him. Such love when seen is something that convinces in itself, like the action of the good Samaritan.
There is a family I know in Russia, the V’s. To come into touch with them is to touch something that works miracles like the hem of the sacred 170garment. Yet all in the family are Marthas, they are all of the spirit of good deeds: there is nothing particularly contemplative about any of them. Most interesting of all is the youngest of the children, Lena. She is being brought up in an atmosphere of altruism. She is only twelve years old, and is like a plant springing up in a flower-garden; one can watch her growing more beautiful from day to day. She is gentle, quick, and tender. She has many desires and is eager, but when Julia her eldest sister tells her to do one thing or another, perfectly obedient and submissive. She is slender and wistful like a girl in one of Nesterof’s pictures. She has the intense pleasure of a child, and when we read Alice in Wonderland together I wondered at the gladness of the little girl. Grown-up humans are often so constrained and polite when you read a paragraph to them. You can never be quite sure that they are not secretly bored. On her birthday Lena gives presents to her sisters instead of receiving them, and has been brought up to feel that it is a joy and privilege to give. When distant relatives or friends from far away come to visit the family, Lena gives them presents. One day she was debating what was the very biggest present she could make to a lady who was staying at the house, and she decided to give away one of her little pet tortoises. Once Vassily Vassilitch brought her a present, a big book with pictures. How vexed Julia seemed! “You spoil the child bringing her presents without any 171special reason!” said she. She was sorry that he should be giving, and not Lena or she herself.
Julia is so self-denying that some years she goes without a greatcoat even for the coldest winter weather. All her money goes to other people. But she is not at all proud of her good works. She is just simple and cheerful, a quiet though impulsive woman. You never hear her laugh loudly, but there is always a sort of kind warmth and cheerfulness in her face. She will give up a book, her time, her means of making a living, her pleasure, to whatever appeals to her; and the whole house in which she lives is founded on altruism. Occasionally there comes to visit them a friend who is also extremely unselfish and altruistic. Then sometimes there are some amusing, even absurd scenes—contests in altruism.
The family is vegetarian, for no one in it would cause any animal pain. They have even scruples about killing flies and troublesome insects, and rather catch them and put them out of the window than destroy them. One day Julia showed me with horror an article from the Russian Word on the fate of lost dogs. The State voted a certain amount of money for poison to destroy ownerless dogs, but the police, instead of killing them with poison in a humane way as intended, hired the worst type of criminals in the town gaols to beat them to death for a few copecks in order that they might peculate the greater part of the money voted. “Such ugly things are part of the background of our everyday 172life,” said I. “They are hidden from us, but they are always there, none the less.” Julia could not believe it.
One summer I spent some days with the family in a big country-house in the province of Kaluga. The estate was an island in a loop of a little river. I spent one morning watching the fish which swarmed in the water of the river, and I longed for a rod and a line. Not that I ever caught many fish in that way. But when I was seven years old some one gave me Izaak Walton and a fishing-rod, and I slept with The Compleat Angler under my pillow. I had visions of great captures of fish. The one thing wanting was a grasshopper. Izaak was always talking of grasshoppers, and I had lost faith in worms and paste. But though I heard grasshoppers in many country banks I could never find one. Here at Dietchino were both grasshoppers and fish in manifest abundance.
In the little river were perch and gudgeon and chub, minnows, pike. I watched the sinister shadows of the pike. They moved about like sharks, and every now and then there would be a splash as if a branch had dropped into the water, and I would see six or seven little fish jumping bodily out of the water as a murderous pike rushed at them, and they fled in terror. The fish seemed pretty hungry. I caught several grasshoppers and rather cruelly threw them on to the surface of the lake and watched the perch snatch them away. A 173sad end for the grasshoppers, but a better luncheon for the fish. Lena and her next sister, Olya, were much horrified at my action, though they were too kind and well-trained to say more than “Oh!” when I mentioned it. Later Olya told me how one evening she had seen that on one of the lines left by the village boys a fish was caught and struggling, and how she came next morning and the fish was still on the hook and not taken in, and she thought it so cruel, and wrote a letter to the boy and pinned it on a tree near by.
Some time after that we went out one day and watched the fish. Little Lena had three biscuits in her coat pocket in case she should be hungry. But she broke up two of them and threw the bits to the fish, and we saw them come and eat the fragments with as much avidity as they had taken the grasshoppers I provided. We were out for a walk; Lena and I went on, and she kept one remaining biscuit in case she should be hungry. Presently along the road came a familiar dog and fawned around us ingratiatingly. “Poor dog!” said Lena, “it’s just had puppies, it is very hungry,” and she took out her last biscuit and gave it to the dog.
The little girl has an almost perfect character, and the fact that she will never do or think anything unkind has a constraining effect on elders in her presence; and yet she is an open-air little girl, and rows and bathes and plays games and goes long walks, as any boy might wish his sister to do.
174Each of the four sisters has inherited consumption, and though not actually in consumption they have all a certain fragility and slenderness. Their only brother died of consumption, a clever boy, who never for a moment permitted grief to enter the hearts of those who were tending him. All was mirth and laughter at his death-bed. Joke after joke, idea after idea put forward. All agreed that it would be absurd to wear black for such a one. And the sisters and near friends went to the funeral in bright summer dresses. They were of those who hope all things, believe all things.
This winter Julia was chiefly engaged arranging popular lectures on the Oriental religions—“in order to give an interest in religion to those who had fallen away from Orthodoxy and had now no religion at all.” She had set a room apart for meetings and given it the atmosphere of a church, and there was a library of several hundred volumes to which visitors referred frequently. She kept open house, and I have often been there in the evening when there were more than a dozen visitors sitting at the long table of the dining-room having tea. There would be all sorts of people, some real seekers, others of a friendly gossipy type. Many of them were really foreign to Julia’s nature and temperament, wrapped up in themselves and consequently not able to realise what a sweet and wise and wonderful woman their hostess was. But all were welcome.
Julia’s grandmother, a very gentle and simple old 175lady of eighty, always presided on these occasions, and if she were not drinking tea, a space would be cleared on the tablecloth and patience would be laid out. She is always in black, has large eyes and fine brow and a magnificent Roman nose, regards the cards intently, and puts them one upon another deliberately and solemnly as if she knew all their secrets and were the Queen of Spades herself. But she listens to all that is said, and can repeat almost the whole of the conversation after the people are gone. She is of the old Orthodox Russian type and dwells under the ikons. No meal is ever begun without her grace being said. And she also has the gentle spirit of altruism. Every other Sunday night a rather obstinate old lady who belongs to the Evangelical Christians comes and sits beside her and reads in a loud distinct voice a volume of Spurgeon’s sermons in translation. And the old lady asks no questions, always seems to be pleased, and goes on putting out her cards and making up her patience pack in sympathetic silence.
Julia has lived in France and England, and she especially likes the English. “They have learned to be so kind,” she would say. “They take care not to injure people’s feelings when they talk. They are gentle, and they are not unjust, they are fair. They are centuries in front of us Russians in that way.”
That observation struck me very forcibly when I 176heard it; for Julia has herself an English manner. She is like an English lady of quality of the best type. She has that something which she admires in us expressed in herself.
It is good that the standard notion of an Englishman which one finds in Russia is something which corresponds to this praise which Julia gave us. The Russians see us at our best, that is, as we really are, and they admire us. They like our quiet kindness and fairness. They admire our passion for social reform and “putting the world right.”
Julia also is “helping to build the kingdom of heaven upon earth,” helping to make the world really ready for the Master when He comes again. She is an Eager-Heart, who would even give up her chance of sheltering the heavenly Babe and wondrous Mother in order to take in a human babe and earthly mother homeless in the snow.
That is the way of Martha, the finding of Christ in the suffering human being in the world, the realisation of “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these ye did it unto Me” as contrasted with the way of Mary—the denial of the world and of the reality of the suffering in it, the pouring of the ointment on the feet of Christ instead of selling it and giving the proceeds to the poor.
The way of Martha implies a great number of workers and the consequent necessary organisation—a church. It has its priests, its temples and buildings, its ceremonies and sermons. The hermit 177needs no church, no temple or priest, but the worker in the world needs everything.
Hence the pomp and splendour of the Church is associated with the way of Martha. Its faith is carried like a great banner wherein is depicted a world set free, a kingdom of heaven upon earth. The ranks of the world are understood as grades of authority in the great business of well-doing, and kings and men are consecrated with solemn rites to the service of God. We are enrolled as soldiers of the heavenly King and need a religious music which is military, and appeals of sound and colour which stir the heart.
So in Nesterof’s picture of Martha and Mary,[12] Martha is painted in resplendent rose and is in the forefront, whilst the mystical-faced Mary is darkly robed and stands behind her sister. So in Christianity all that is visibly and obviously splendid is associated with the way of Martha—the wonderful cathedrals, the soul-stirring processions, holy wars, solemn rites and pageants. Martha is always to the fore and splendid, and goes to meet Christ, whilst her sister Mary remains in the background at home in faith.
178
IX MARTHA’S TRUE WAY
The view I take of the miracles is this, that no one met Jesus or saw Him who was not miraculously affected in some way or other. The deaf began to hear, those who had never spoken in their lives had their lips unsealed, the cripples found out that they had the souls of men, the sick were as if they were well, scales fell from the eyes of the blind, and he who never saw anything in his life was suddenly awake to beauty. The outcast and the vile learned to believe in themselves; even the dead became alive. When John asked, “Art thou He who should come, or do we look for another?” it was sufficient to answer, “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.”
And the miracles never cease. As they happened two thousand years ago, so they happen to-day. We have the vision, and our infirmities fall away: we see, we hear, we praise. Christ is ...
179The subtle alchemist who in a trice
Life’s barren metal into gold transmutes.
There is much of the Gospel written by men who had not the vision, or by politic priests. Many ecclesiastics of the early Church could not understand the mystic story, and misunderstanding it they yet strove to defend by every means in their power the authenticity of their misreadings. Explanations, local colour, even absolute inventions were interpolated in the sacred writings in order to prove that certain dogmas were right, in order to prove that other dogmas were wrong. They actually raised Lazarus materially from death, instead of leaving what was probably the original story, the fact that Jesus convinced Martha and Mary that Lazarus was still alive in the presence of God. Not that the Gospels are the worse, or that we would have them otherwise. There is an added poetry in the marks which time and life make on any living thing. And the Gospels have been crucified as He of whom the Gospels were written was crucified before them.
Most explanations of the miracles are true, but inadequate. They often lead to confusion of thought and the emphasis on the material facts and outward manifestation rather than on the spiritual facts and inner reality. It is true that Christ “went about the world doing good,” and that He is to us “an ensample of godly life,” but the good that He did was spiritual good.
180The works of our Marthas get a great deal of their inspiration from the healing of the sick and the ministry to the suffering. Progress itself, the whole modern reform movement as far as it associates itself consciously and verbally with Christianity, identifies its inspiration with that touching of Christ’s soul which did not permit Him to pass one suffering man without healing him.
But it is often forgotten that the good which He did was spiritual good. The true way of Martha is not so much giving money to the penniless, clothes to the ragged, medicine to the sick, homes to the houseless, decent dwellings to those who live in slums, as it is to make the poor know that all these things are nothing and of no account; as it is to touch their hearts and give them a new outlook upon life. Martha has also to make the blind see, make the deaf hear, the mute speak, and to raise the dead. As it is, it frequently happens that the poor, receiving “charity,” are left angry, and so become poorer thereby, and the blind find themselves in a greater darkness, and the deaf in a more deathly silence.