Chapter V: V. Rozanof, Wall-Painting (3)

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.

Footnote 11:

The Frontispiece of this book.

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 the 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 garment. 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 special 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 life,” 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 sad 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.

Each 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 lady 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 heard 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 needs 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.

Footnote 12:

The frontispiece of this book.

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 ...

The 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.

The 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.

We look on our fellow-creatures with dull eyes, and our personal character and spiritual beauty is not sufficient to lighten up the landscape and the faces of the people around us. There is no light about our heads, and people touching the hem of our garments feel no contact with mystery. So we do not reveal Christ to men. Though all is within our power. Martha’s ordeal is as great a one as Mary’s, her consecration as vital. We cannot go out carelessly and minister to the poor, for if we do, we perform no miracles. And without miracles the poor are not satisfied.

The true Martha has the wishing heart, and her fingers are full of virtue. She is an argument in herself, and her presence without words works true miracles, revealing the mystic meaning of Christ in herself, and causing every one who _meets_ or _sees_ her to be miraculously affected in some way or other.

* * * * *

Obviously the service of Martha is always personal. Therefore nothing anonymous is Christian, and philanthropical societies, parliaments, reform movements, and the like are doomed to failure unless they are served by men and women with Christ-faces.

X
MAKING WEST EAST

... who made West East
And gave to Man
A new heaven and a new earth,
As Holy John hath prophesied of Me.

The West seems to have the tradition of the way of Martha, England especially. Our Victorian era, of which the popular teachers were Kingsley, Carlyle, Ruskin, was essentially an era of work and deeds rather than of faith. As children, we in our prime to-day were brought up on the gospel of work. Thoughts about one’s soul were considered rather ignoble: they were smoke that we had to consume ourselves. We were urged to forget the question of our souls and _work_. The whole world was working, all the factories of England sang together. Every man in England, from the highest to the lowest, knew when he wakened each morning that he had that day some real and indispensable work to do. The child must learn his lesson in that light. “If I hear of an artist of promise,” says Ruskin, “the first question I ask is, ‘Does he work?’” Ruskin dismissed Whistler, who painted rather in the way of Mary, because he obviously did not work. All great men whatsoever worked.

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

If you want to be a Knox or a Luther or a Cromwell or a Frederick or a Bismarck you must work.

The spirit of industry seemed to be Christianity itself. In reading Froude’s history one seemed to gain the idea that the Reformation meant getting rid of idleness and monks and abbeys, and substituting noble labour, honest craftsmen, and factories. It is a modern misapprehension. There was a time when we used to sing a hymn extravagantly opposed to the gospel of work—

Doing is a deadly thing,
Doing ends in death.

We have a reputation for work. Most Russians would be incredulous if told that Englishmen had ever sung such words. Yet they have, and we know that we are not like the ants who have always been working and always will work. We have been out of love with work before and will be again.

During the Victorian era every Englishman had his coat off and was working for all he was worth, perspiration on his brow, grime on his body, the clangour of machinery in his ear. Carlyle found his generation working, and gave it his blessing in effective phrase, and was so obsessed by his own message that he gave up his own quest, his own seeking, and lived in the British Museum, pondering, grubbing, scratching, and turning forth volume after volume of dull Frederick, and he forgot his own soul and the man who wrote _Sartor Resartus_ and _The Heroes_.

And although this work, work for work’s sake, is not a Christian thing, it is associated in the mind with what I call the “way of Martha.” It is an exaggeration of her sweet serviceableness, a supposition that she had gone crazy and had not only become cumbered about with many things, but was so cumbered that she could never in all her life spare a moment to come to the Master. Be that as it may, England had a fairly clear and simple notion of her creed. Work pleased her. Popular opinion was on the side, not of the parson who did nought, but of the old farmer “who stubbed Thornaby Waaste.” Tennyson sang work and the goal of work—“All diseases cured by science,” “the Parliament of the World,” “the rule of the meek upon earth.” We gave our shoulders and our hearts and our lips to the work, though indeed not much of the last, for in those days silence was golden.

Now silence is golden only for those who do not know what to say. A change has come about, is coming about. Work has ceased to be holy.

“To labour is to pray.” “Do the duty which lies nearest to you, that which is doablest.” “Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ...” such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the first of the moderns, and he wrote:

Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work,” must sentence pass.

And again:

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

And again:

He fixed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

The way of Martha had given place to the way of Mary. My elders read _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ to comfort one another:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made;

and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those I loved; I carried it with me wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down, it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms, roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It was good b’ye to the old. It was a sight of one’s own immortality and Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.

But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning. Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.

It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real _Imitatio Christi_ when he made something with his hands and saw that it was good. Then we read _Andrea del Sarto_, despising

This low-pulsed craftsman’s hand of mine,

knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.

From Browning’s day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming to Mary. The note-books of those young ones who loved thoughts began to be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many of the elder ones to whom we read what we had found were blind and deaf to the new ideas. I remember one old literary man and artist who used always to say, “I take my stand with Jim”—meaning that he held with St. James that faith without works is barren. He belonged to the old.

I admit we were not sober in our judgments. We went to see Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, and it was easy to agree that Nora was right when she fled from her home and her husband to save her soul, and we thought that the immoral and unprincipled Dubedat was sooner to be saved than the hard-working slum doctor. We saw in Solveig, who stayed in the background and prayed, the true type of womanhood, and understood how Peer Gynt through her could be saved. We read Nietzsche, that mad Christian, a sort of Mary who hated her sister Martha, calling out in anger that man had ceased to be man and had become merely _neighbour_. We entered the domain of Russian literature, and read Dostoieffsky and Chekhof and Gorky, and so fell under the spell of Eastern Christianity, where we remain to-day.

The taste of England has been steadily changing this last ten years, and the current becoming deeper and broader. Russia and the East have been coming steadily nearer, and more and more of us have turned our backs on work and service and that Divine materialism—the raising of the poor. Not that we are on the way to becoming a philosophic and reflective or ascetic nation, or even in the way of singing again “Doing is a deadly thing”; but more and more of our nation is attempting to take to itself and re-express the other aspect of Christianity—the way of Mary.

Even in the North of England, where the land is devoted to work and the towns are little more than barracks of workmen, there is a noticeable and, even from a capitalist’s point of view, an alarming change of spirit. The “workers” are rebellious. It is not that they want more money or lighter hours or better conditions. They simply don’t want to work. The rising generation is disinclined to settle down, and the time is coming when there will be difficulty in getting labouring hands, when it will be difficult to buy them. The gloom of our industrialism is destined to be broken.

As yet, however, those who represent us in politics, literature, and art belong to the old. Mr. Lloyd George with his care for the poor is a Martha. Mr. Bonar Law is a Martha also. H. G. Wells, with his World set Free, and his rooms with rounded instead of squared corners to help the women to sweep, is a Martha. Our poets are not Marys, and it is necessary to go to Francis Thompson or Rossetti to find a mystic poet. Our painters, Peter Graham, Farquharson, Leader, and others whose works deck Academy walls, are occupied with the outward appearances of things rather than the transcendental. And since Watts is dead we have not even a mystical portrait painter, but all admire the gift to show in the face money, importance, style, meat. Our people are worth painting, but there is no one to paint them. We need an English Serof to show the true kindred and spiritual relationship of faces.

On the stage we admire Russian opera and Russian ways. We show _The Dynasts_ in the same way as it would have been shown in Moscow, or nearly so. There first of all the new tendency is showing. Unfortunately we have a long battle against American humour and vulgarity, American materialism and the capital that would exploit our stage. Otherwise our stage would change at a greater speed. Still the difference in the way Shakespeare is produced in England is an index of the change. When we produce _Hamlet_ as it is produced at the Theatre of Art, Moscow, we shall have traversed the whole distance between the way of Martha and the way of Mary as far as the stage is concerned.

XI
THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH

Strange that there should be a feud between the Church and the Theatre! They were originally one and the same, and as it is the Church remains a holy theatre where day after day is enacted the same holy mystery. In passing: how much nearer the Theatre is brought to the Church by the constant repetition of the great classical and mystical dramas such as _Hamlet_. The reason for the religious distrust of the Theatre which exists in all countries,—in England in the Free Churches; in Russia in the Orthodox Church,—lies in the degradation of the Theatre, the making it a show of wild beasts, a stage for indecent dances and comic songs, an arena for combats of athletes. The common townspeople are not and never can be the pupils of Hypatia. They will have their indecencies and vulgarities, wild beasts, acrobats, invitation to sin. The showman has usurped the place of the mystagogue, and money-making has replaced religious service or service to art and culture as a motive of theatrical production. The Theatre to-day, even if it aspire to be serious, has unclean hands, and the Church not unfairly regards it as part of the stock-in-trade of the evil one.

An interesting exemplification of the relation of Church and Stage is furnished by Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_. To the Christian, to look at the dance of Salome is to glance into the charnel-house where all is decay and worms and death, and to see there the head of one of the saints with celestial aureole. But the dramatist has turned the interest to the dance itself and made you say that it is interesting: he has dwelt on the jewels, the crimsons, the thick lips, the luscious movements. Every effort is made to make you agree with Herod, and the best way to do that is to suggest to your body and soul the same feelings towards the dancer on the stage as Herod felt towards the daughter of his brother’s wife—so that you would give her anything, even the pure body of the saint that is in your keeping. He would give you a place with the worms and the spirit of decay, and let you end as Herod ended, eaten by the worms at the last. No aureole for you!

But the Church suggests the aureole for you, and if _Salome_ were presented as a mystery-play the whole interest of the populace would be directed towards the sainthood of John the Baptist. When Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_ was produced at Petrograd, Russia made short work of it. On the first night, at the first public performance, some one stood up in the middle of a scene and shouted in a bass voice:

“_Spustee zanavess!_” “Lower the curtain!” and the curtain was lowered; and _Salome_ has not been repeated there from that day to this.

Who it was said this is rather a mystery, but it was doubtless some one who had the voice or the ear of Orthodoxy. Russia probably gained by this prohibition. A pity, however, that many other plays quite as injurious are allowed their way to the perversion of private morals and the corruption of public taste. Indeed it would be a gain to Russia if the Church would cease looking at the Stage from a merely ecclesiastical point of view. The fault of the clergy is their pride in their own order and their institutions. The clergy, ministers of the living Church of Christ, should in nature be the humblest of people, so humble in fact, so meek and unresentful, that it would be necessary occasionally to protect them from the enmity of the secular world. As it is, in their pomp, they are proud. They despise the Stage and often prohibit plays on quite wrong grounds, incidentally depriving not only the theatre and the public, but the Church also, of something helpful to the cause of Eastern Christianity and of all real Russian values. The prohibition of Andreef’s _Anathema_, performed at the Theatre of Art in Moscow, is an example. Though this prohibition was at the instance of the Archbishop of Moscow the play was in essential teaching profoundly helpful to Eastern Christianity. It was written by a man who belonged to the revolutionary movement, but it was only the more remarkable and the more powerful thereby. It was in substance a refutation of Westernism and the ideals after which secularist Russia was striving. A pious and philanthropic Jew inheriting immense wealth, millions of American dollars, resolved in his simplicity to save the world, feeding the hungry, clothing the ragged, giving money to the needy, medical aid to the suffering. The drama shows the futility of this dream, and at the end the mob of enraged and suffering humanity stone the philanthropist to death. Not by material but by spiritual things could their sufferings be assuaged.

The archbishop who stopped it was probably never in a theatre in his life, and no doubt condemned it on hearsay, and from a complete misapprehension of the significance of the drama.

The Church of the future in England, and probably in Russia, will have to come into alliance with what may be called the right side of the theatre. For occasionally in the theatre people worship as much as others do in the Church. Many young people whose families have lapsed from the Church find their religious life functionised in the book, the drama, the opera, the symphony. They are not _communicants_ in the literal sense, they are outside the church walls and the shut church doors, but they are inside the living Church. They have a common word with people inside church walls. Their chorus of praise swells from the other side of the walls, and in some countries the secular chorus of praise to God has considerably more volume than the official ecclesiastical chorus. Somehow in church one rather resents the choir, especially in the _Te Deum_, when they are singing it to some “God-forsaken” curious tune that a pedant musician has chosen. It is good when the whole church can lift one great voice. And outside the church the greater congregation rather resents the church-goers. They would sing _Te Deum_ also.

The relation of Church and Stage exhibits the confusion of religious values at present existing. The same confusion exists with regard to the Church and Literature—many of the great classics of Russian literature, like Gogol’s _Dead Souls_, the monks would regard it a sin to read. The ecclesiastical Church takes no useful stand with regard to what is helpful, what harmful, in past and present literature; it is left for the living Church to find out for itself and do what it can without organisation. Even in the domain of Holy Writ there is a confusion of what the living Church believes, and what mere ecclesiasticism lays down. At least one fundamental idea in Christianity has been overlaid, and, as it were, frustrated by the Church itself—the idea of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost has been conventionalised and made terrible. It has become the most inscrutable and awe-inspiring aspect of the Trinity, whereas it should be the most familiar and consoling, Christ saying good-bye to his disciples in that last long sweet talk where He calls them friends, tells them that after He is gone away from them there will come a new consolation, the vision of Truth.

“I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, ... the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.... If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.... When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me: And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.”

And in the cross-examination before Pilate, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews.... To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.”

Therein lies the true idea of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit—it is the vision of Heavenly Truth that gives the lie to worldly values, worldly truth. By virtue of this Holy Spirit the blind see, though they have no eyes, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the dead live, mortality itself is disproved. The mysteries of the Pentecostal mitres, of the gift of tongues, and the conventionalised notion of what is called the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” have stood in the way of the simple and beautiful conception of the comforting vision of Truth. The Church, with its keys of heaven and hell, and its arrogation of the power of anathema and excommunication, has preferred to lay its emphasis on those texts which may seem to imply the dreadfulness of offence against a certain more inscrutable aspect of the Trinity. There is nothing in the Gospels but love of man, forgiveness of man, and nothing is more pitiful than the man who, having a glimpse of the Truth, yet denies it or wilfully confuses it with magic or unclean power.

But the _Filioque_ clause of the Creed is alone sufficient to exemplify the confusion of ecclesiasticism and the living Church. There are many who think that the two Churches of England and Russia are kept apart by this clause alone. England holds that the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father and from the Son, Russia that it proceeds from the Father alone. Russia’s basis is St. John, XV. 26, “... the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” “What does it matter how it is put?” cries the living Church. But ecclesiastical pedantry is strongly entrenched, and whenever the question of the intercommunion of the two Churches is mentioned there arises that fatal phrase—“_Filioque_—and from the Son.”

“Does not one of your Thirty-nine Articles lay down that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father _and from the Son_? And is not assent to the Thirty-nine Articles obligatory upon your clergy? Why, then....” To which one can only answer in one’s heart:

Thirty-nine Articles,
Ye precious little particles,
And did God really make the world by you?

The same confusion exists with regard to the Church and Life. That which the living Church of Christ possesses is a spiritual communion, not a set of dogmas or a set of points of ecclesiastical law. If a man is really touched to go to church, if he has the impulse from the heart, it is not in order that he may hear dogma. He goes to blend his voice and his thoughts with the voice and the thoughts of humanity in hymn and prayer. But to-day many misconceptions arise. Carlyle could not go to church because the sermon bored him. Many stay away from churches because they can’t stand so-and-so’s sermon. As if the sermon were part of the service! In old days the sermons were often delivered outside the churches after the service was done. The priest came through the worshippers, went out into the church square, and rising to a platform or “outside pulpit” harangued the everyday crowd. The function of the Church service is not to be a frame to a sermon, even a clever or profound or inspiring sermon. Its function is praise.

A Jew writing for an important Russian newspaper about the state of the Church of England remarks that “dogmas make many leave the Church, and those who stay remain to preach ethics,” and he goes on to praise ethics as the function of the Church, leaving out of account, and evidently having no notion of, the Church as a temple of religion, a place of communion and aspiration. Surely the preaching ethics is a work begun by parents and confirmed by the schoolmaster. Christ did not die on the cross or forgive the thief who recognised Him in order to preach “Thou shalt not steal!” Yet such a confusion of ideas remains in the mind even of the cultured.

Still, the whole world and the universe is an orchestra praising God, and, remembering that, it is impossible to say there is real confusion or final confusion. It is as impossible to classify and show series of like things, for the imagination tells you that every instrument in the orchestra is diverse. Hence I am open to misconception when I write of confusion or when I classify, as for instance when I talk of Marthas and Marys. There is confusion and there is order. Nothing is fixed, all is in motion, the kaleidoscope is ever moving. So it would be wrong to say that all who were in the way of Martha were in towns working for the poor, or that all in the way of Mary were away in the desert saving their souls at the feet of the Master, or that the priests in their orders and vestments with their processions and grandeur were all in the way of Martha, or that the hermits of the desert did not upon occasion come like Paphnutius to Alexandria to save Thaïs, the dancing-girl. The sisters love one another; and though it is not written in the Gospels, there were certainly occasions when Mary might have been seen cumbered about with many things whilst Martha sat with her Lord.

XII
WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH

The purely Eastern aspect of the Church is the way of Mary, the spiritual, meditative, introspective, mystical way, and this is ever the strength of the whole Church. It is even the strength of the Protestant churches, though there the spiritual life is more private. In Orthodoxy the voice speaks from the desert right into the ears of the everyday mundane crowd. The people are enjoined against sloth in the name of the fathers of the desert. They sing their hymns in praise of those who have overcome. They are encompassed round about with “the crowd of witnesses,” the ikon faces and frescoed saints of the church walls, the thousands of those who have died in the Lord looking on whilst we run with patience the race that is set before us.

Our work is in the world, our passion is for the realisation of good worldly hopes. We pray for the King, the Emperor; we own a true allegiance to a God-guided Cæsar, and are ready to render to such a Cæsar the things that are his. We pray for the administrative bodies and for Parliament, may they go forward to the raising of the poor, the healing of the sick, the raising to a life of knowledge those who are dead in ignorance. We pray for our fellow-man and for ourselves. We band ourselves in a Christian order, and confirm in ourselves the resolve to fight against sin, ugliness, unhappiness. We promise to give time, to give money, to work for the Cause. This is all in the way of Martha. But these thoughts and prayers are made in a temple where the light is the light of candles placed before shrines of the Unseen. A vision accompanies the Christian man. Though his passion is towards the things of this world he is encompassed and enveloped by the atmosphere of another world. The remembrance remains his that Cæsar is not God, nor Cæsar’s officers the angels of God, nor this world the real world, that the poor we have always with us, that our true citizenship is of another realm.

The work of Martha fails, fails again; the poor multiply, sickness becomes a plague and scourge from God, the ignorant increase, peace becomes war, the progressive work of centuries topples down like Babel, kings or emperors become killed, allegiances of millions are changed, famous Christian workers and organisers who have given their whole life to the Cause go out to death with grey hairs, all their life-work made as nought before their eyes. The passionate soldier-saint goes out in failure. The lukewarm mediocre man and the cheerful happy-go-lucky mortals, the ordinary folk, the witty ones, the dull ones, the run of mankind as we call them, also go out, looking at the failure of ideas to which they have vaguely or earnestly given assent. But Christianity does not fail. Thousands of years hence this young religion of Christianity will be more triumphant, splendid, vital, than it is to-day. And this by virtue of the mystical and transcendental aspect of the word.

The service of the Church is more than a consecration of duty. It is a bearing witness to the Truth, a watching till He come, an expectancy, a getting into position for a great procession, a carrying of banners and emblems, a joining in a universal hymn sung not only by ourselves but by all the dead. The light of the Church is the light of transfiguration, not the light of common day, it is the light of the halo round the saint’s head.

You enter a church, such a temple, for instance, as the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow. At a step you are in the precincts of a different world. You have overstepped a frontier line, and the language has changed, just as when in Europe you cross a boundary and the language changes, say from German to Russian. The people are looking a different way, not Westward as to the Emperor but Eastward as to God. You are in a new kingdom; but as your thoughts go back to the street you left you realise that the kingdom is not from thence.

The faces in the ikons are not the faces of men. The figures are twisted and strange. One asks: “Why did not the Byzantine painters paint the truth? There never were men looking as these men. Why these copper-coloured and flame-coloured faces? Why the unearthly expression in eyebrows and eyes? Men never looked like that.” The answer is: the early Christian painters did not wish to paint earthly truth. Their object was to indicate the unearthly nature of man, his citizenship of another world. They wrote into the features of every saint, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” This was one of the earliest traditions in the Christian Church, and has been handed down from generation to generation in the books of _ikonopis_ or ikon-painting. There is a way to paint a Christian saint, and that way has to be followed in the Eastern churches. He must be represented as a witness unto the Truth, a face that at least at last owns no allegiance to the monarch in the West, but only to the God in the East, the face of an archangel or of one who sings continuously, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.” One may belong to a mighty empire, but the citizenship of those within the Church is of a mightier and grander and vaster empire. The thrill of the new national hymn is the greater, the characteristic uniforms and robes have the more reverence in their associations.

The vestments of the priests astonish one. They are gorgeous past belief. Whence comes that gold brocade? It was cut in another world. At least, that is its intention, that is what it would signify. Who are they in white robes? Why do the priests at the altar walk so stately? What is that new _tempo_ to which they have learned to move and to swing the censer?

And the voice of the clergy, that unearthly bass, that profound groaning and seeking of notes that man does not utter, that voice as of Jesus commanding the soul of the dead Lazarus to return to the awful and dreadful corpse? The service in the Slavonic tongue, not in the everyday tongue....

All these things bear witness unto the Truth and are the emblems of our allegiance to the kingdom of Christ, marks of our other citizenship, the visible emblems and symbols of our hope, our love and passion. Hence it is possible to sing with angels and archangels. Failure in the work of Martha loses significance as failure. Failure is even good, it is one more sign, an involuntary ritual, telling of our truer destiny.

So though the way of Mary is consummated in the desert, in the cell, in giving up the world, in pilgrimaging, praying, fasting, and only a few can necessarily take to that way, yet it is that way which speaks triumphantly in the Church. The great majority of human beings must always remain behind “cumbered about with many things,” though loved by the Master they will not be able to sell everything, take up the Cross and follow to the place of the Skull. They will keep the commandments of Christ and enter on set occasions the temples we have set up. They will receive confirmation in their life and in the love of the Lord, they will pray for what they will, and confess themselves. They will praise and be in communion. They will recognise that they belong to another kingdom, and their hearts will swell with the triumphant and passionate affirmation of the Godhead which each finds in his poor conditional existence as man. The way of Martha and the way of Mary.

XIII
THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD