Chapter 14
We passed in through the gate of the Russian settlement, and in a moment were at the monastery doors. How gladly we threw off our packs on the green grass sward and hurried into church to the Thanksgiving Service, buying sheaves of little candles at the door and pressing in to light them before the sacred ikons. When the priest was given the great Bible to read, it lay on the bare heads of pilgrims; so close did the eager ones press together to share in the bearing that the Holy Book needed no other support. We sang the _Mnogia Lieta_ with a deep harmonious chorus; we prostrated ourselves and prayed and crossed. I stood in the midst and sang or knelt with the rest, timid as a novice, made gentle by the time, and I learned to cross myself in a new way. One by one the peasants advanced and kissed the gold cross in the hands of the priest, and among them I went up and was blessed as they were. And we were all in rapture. Standing at the threshold afterwards, smiling peasants with wet shining eyes confessed to one another their unworthiness and their happiness; and a girl all in laughing tears fell down at our feet, kissing our dusty boots, and asking our forgiveness that she had been permitted to see Jerusalem.
We were taken to the refectory and seated at many tables to a peasant dinner: cabbage soup and porridge, bread and _kvass_, just as they are served in Russia itself. We passed to the hostelry and were given, at the rate of three farthings a day, beds and benches that we might occupy as long as we wished to stay in Jerusalem. The first night we were all to get as rested as possible, the next we were to spend in the Sepulchre itself. I slept in a room with four hundred peasants, on a wooden shelf covered with old pallets of straw. The shelves were hard and dirty; there was no relaxation of our involuntary asceticism, but we slept well. There was music in our ears. We had attained to Jerusalem, and our dreams were with the angels. Jerusalem the earthly had not forced itself upon our minds; we held the symbolism of the journey lightly, and the mind read a mystery in delicate emotions. The time was to come when some of us would be discontented with Jerusalem, as some of the disciples who fell away were discontented with the poor and humble Jesus; but as yet even to these all the material outward appearance of Jerusalem was a rumour. We knew not what we should see when we stepped out on the morrow; perhaps pearly gates, streets of gold, angels with harps. Jerusalem the earthly was unproved. We had as yet only toiled up the steep Jaffa way, and the road to heaven itself might be not unlike that road. To-morrow ... who could say what to-morrow would unfold? For those of us who could see with the eyes of the heart there could be no disappointment. But for all, this night of golden dreams was a respite, and Jerusalem the symbol and Jerusalem the symbolised were one. Happy, happy pilgrims!
Next day we went to the strange and ugly church erected over the Sepulchre of Jesus, the "Church of the Life-giving Grave"; and we kissed the stone of anointing--the stone on which the body of Jesus lay whilst it was being wrapped in fair linen and anointed with oil. We knelt before the ark-like inner temple which is built over _the hollow in the rock_. We were received into that temple, and one by one crept along the passage-way to the Holy of Holies, the inmost shrine of Christendom. Only music could tell what the peasant realised in that chamber as he knelt where the sacred Body lay, and kissed the hollow in the stone.
Then we spent a whole night in the Sepulchre and entered into the mystery of death--saw our own death as in a picture before us, our abiding in the grave until the resurrection. In the great dark church the solemn service went forward. On the throne of the altar at Golgotha near by, the candles gleamed. Night grew quiet all around, and the Syrian stars looked over us, so that centuries and ages passed away.
III
We went through the life of Jesus in symbolical procession, journeyed to Bethlehem and kissed the manger where the baby Jesus was laid, that first cradle as opposed to the second, the hollow in the rock. We came as the Kings, saw the shepherds and their flocks, saw the star stop over the house of Mary, and went in to do homage, bringing thither the gifts of our hearts--gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
We tramped to the river Jordan, and all in our death shrouds at Bethabara, waded into the stream and were baptized. In symbolic act the priest baptizing us was veritably John, but in second symbolism it was Jesus. As we stepped down into the water it was John, but when we stepped up again it was Jesus receiving us into light. We made a picture of the past, but we had also in our hearts a presentment of the far future. As we stood there on the banks all in our white robes it seemed like a rehearsal of the final resurrection morning. These shrouds in which the pilgrims are baptized they preserve to their death day, in order that they may be buried in them. They believe that on the Last Day not only will their bodies of this day be raised up, but the Jordan-washed garments will be restored as well.
We followed the course of the river down to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, and thence walked across the wilderness to the Mountain of Temptation, where in innumerable caves had lived thousands of hermits and saints. In a great caravan we journeyed to the Lake of Galilee, where the Twelve were called. We camped upon the mountain where the five thousand had been fed, and scattered bread there. We dwelt in the little town of Nazareth and saw the well where Mary had drawn water. We heard of all the dearnesses which the priests and monks had imagined as likely in the boyhood of Jesus. We stood and wondered at the place where Mary and Joseph are supposed to have stopped and missed their twelve-year-old son who had gone to the Temple to teach. We stood where Jesus had conversed with the woman of Samaria. We visited the cottage where the water was changed into wine. At Bethany we prayed at Lazarus' grave.
We lived with the life of Jesus as the story has been told. It was a second pilgrimage, an underlining of the essentials of the first. We finished the first pilgrimage at the Church of the Tomb on the day after our arrival in Jerusalem; we should finish the second on the last day of Holy Week, at the triumphant Easter morning.
On the Friday before Palm Sunday we went out to Bethany and slept in the monastery which is built "where Martha served." Next day we returned to Jerusalem with olive branches, palms and wild flowers, scattering blossoms as we walked. On Saturday evening and in the morning of Palm Sunday we filled the churches with our branches. Two aged pilgrims who had died were buried on Palm Sunday. They lay in open coffins in church dressed in the shrouds they had worn at Jordan, covered with olive branches and little blue wild flowers (Jacob's ladder), which the pilgrims had picked for them at Bethany. On their faces was perfect peace. The pilgrims thought them happy to die in the Holy Land and be buried there.
The crown of the pilgrimage was Holy Week. By Palm Sunday all the pilgrims were back in Jerusalem from their little pilgrimages to Nazareth, Jericho, and Jordan. The hostelries were crowded. Fully five hundred men and women slept in the hall in which I was accommodated. All night long the sound of prayer and hymn never died away. At dawn each day a beggar pilgrim sanctified our benches with incense which he burned in an old tin can. By day we visited the shrines of Jerusalem, the Virgin's tomb, the Mount of Olives, the Praetorium, Pilate's house, the dungeon where Jesus was put in the stocks. We saw the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday; we walked down the steep and narrow way where Christ carried the cross and stumbled, kissed the place where Saint Veronica held out the cloth which took the miraculous likeness. We examined our souls before Good Friday; we went to the special yearly Holy Communion now invested with a strange and awful solemnity. There was the prostration before the Cross at Golgotha on Good Friday, the receiving of the Sacred Fire, symbol of the Resurrection, on Holy Saturday, and then the night of the year and the Great Morning. It seemed when we all kissed one another on Easter Morning that we had outlived everything--our own life, our own death; we were in heaven. In symbolic act we had attained unto bliss. The procession had marched round the church to the supreme emotional moment. We had all stood on the highest holy place on earth and looked out for a moment upon Paradise. We had caught the gleam of the Sun of another universe.
What happens in the pilgrim's soul on Easter Night is something which you and I and all of us know; if not in our own minds and in the domain of letters and words, at least in the heart where music speaks. To those who have not themselves attained unto Jerusalem and the "highest of all earthly" it is a promise, and to those who have been it is a memory and a possession. The Greek monks say that at the sepulchre a fire bursts out of its own account each Easter Eve, and there is at least a truth of symbolism in their miracle. An old bishop and saint was once asked to give sight to a blind woman. He had performed no miracles in his life, yet he promised to pray for her. And whilst he knelt in church praying, the candles which were unlit burst of themselves into flame. The woman at that moment also received her sight and went home praising God. It is something like that which happens when the pilgrim kneels on Easter Night. Candles unlit in the temple of his soul burst into flame, and by their light new pictures are seen. The part of him that was blind and craved sight gains open eyes at that moment, and that which seemed impossible is accomplished.
IV
And I, to use the metaphor of the unvisited island, had in a dream crossed the ocean, had become, through the fulfilling of a rite, more bound to the life which is beyond. Henceforth I have a more credible promise and a more substantial hope.
But what then? The journey is ended, the gleam of the vision fades, and we all return to the life we came from. We descend from what the pilgrims call the highest holy place on earth and get back to the ordinary level of life. How can we go back and live the dull round again? Shall we not be as Lazarus is depicted in Browning's story of him, spoiled for earth, having seen heaven? The Russian at home calls the returned pilgrim _polu-svatoe_, a half-saint: does that perhaps mean that life is spoilt for him?
Some hundreds of aged pilgrims die every year in Lent; they fall dead on the long tramps in Galilee on the way to Nazareth. Many pass peacefully away in Jerusalem itself without even seeing Easter there. They are accounted happy. To be buried at Jerusalem is considered an especially sweet thing, and it is indeed very good for these aged ones that the symbol and that which it symbolised should coincide, and that for them the journey to Jerusalem the earthly should be so obviously and materially a big step towards Jerusalem the golden. It would have been sad in a way for such old folk to return once more across the ocean to the old, somewhat irrelevant life of Mother Russia. But what of the young who must of necessity go back?
Once Easter was over it was marvellous how eager we were to get on the first boat and go home again. What were we going to do when we got there, seeing that we had been to Jerusalem?
We carry our vision back into daily life, or rather, we carry the memory of it in our hearts until a day of fulfilment. All true visions are promises, and that which we had was but a glimpse of a Jerusalem we shall one day live in altogether.
The peasants took many pictures of the sacred places of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem ikons, back with them to their little houses in Russia, there to put them in the East corners of their rooms. They will henceforth light lamps and candles before these pictures. The candle before the picture is, as we know, man's life being lived in front of the vision of Jerusalem; man's ordinary daily life in the presence of the heavenly city.
We realise life itself as the pilgrimage of pilgrimages. Life contains many pilgrimages to Jerusalem, just as it contains many flowerings of spring to summer, just as it contains many feasts of Communion and not merely one. Some of the pilgrims actually go as many as ten times to that Jerusalem in Palestine. But there are Jerusalems in other places if they only knew, and pilgrimages in other modes. It is possible to go back and live the pilgrimage in another way, and to find another Jerusalem. Life has its depths: we will go down into them. We may forget the vision there, but as a true pilgrim once said, "We shall always live again to see our golden hour of victory." That is the true pilgrim's faith. He will reach Jerusalem again and again. He may forget, but he will always remember again; he will always rise again to the light of memory. Deep in the depths of this dark universe our little daily sun is shining, but up above there is another Sun. At times throughout our life we rise to the surface, and for a minute catch a glimpse of that Sun's light: at each of these times we shall have attained unto Jerusalem and have completed a pilgrimage within the pilgrimage. There is light on the faces of those living heroically: it is the light of the vision of Jerusalem.
VII
THE MESSAGE FROM THE HERMIT
The question remains, "Who is the tramp?" Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these rôles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real and true, the product of his time, at once a phenomenon and a portent.
He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation to the life of his time.
The great fact of the human world to-day is the tremendous commercial machine which is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration the smaller and meaner sort of man, the middle class, the average man, "the damned, compact, liberal majority," to use the words of Ibsen, and the world daily becomes "more _Chinese_". The rocks are fraying one another down to desert sand, and mankind becomes a new Sahara.
But over and against the commercial machine stand the rebels, the defiers of it, those who wish to limit its power, to redeem some of the slaves, and to rebuild the temples which it has broken down.
Commercialism is at present the great enemy of the individual man. One already reads in leading articles such phrases as "our commercial, national, and imperial welfare"--commercial first, national second, imperial third, and spiritual nowhere.
Commercialism has already subdued the Church of Christ in Western Europe, it has disorganised the forces of art, and it tends to deny the living sources of religion, art, and life.
It remains for the rebel to assert that even though the name and idea of Christianity be sold--as was its Founder--for silver, though it be rendered an impotent and useless word, yet there is in mankind a religion which is independent of all names and all words, a spring of living water that may be subterraneanised for a while, but can never be altogether dammed and stopped; that there is an art which shall blossom through all ages, either in the secret places of the world or in the open, in the place of honour, as long as man lives upon the world.
And he does more than assert, than merely wind upon his horn outside the gates of the enchanted city, he is a builder, collector, saver. He wishes to find the few who, in this fearful commercial submersion, ought to be living the spiritual life, and showing forth in blossom the highest significance of the Adam tree. He himself lives the life which more must of necessity live, if only as a matter of salt to save the body politic.
It has been urged, "You are unpracticable; you want a world of tramps--how are you going to live?" But we no more want a world of tramps than the promiser of new life wants a world of promisers: we want a world that will take the life promised.
As I have said, we want first of all the few, the hermits, saints, the altogether lovely men and women, the blossoming of the race. It is necessary that these be found or that they find themselves, and that they take their true orbits and live their true lives; for all the rest of ordinary humanity is waiting to live its life in relation to these. The few must live their lives out to the full in order that all others may live their lives completely; for the temple of humanity has not only the broad floor, but the Cross glittering above the pinnacle.
The night is dark, but there is plenty of hope for the future; the very extremity of our calamity is something that bids us hope. Fifty years ago nobody would listen to a gospel of rebellion, and such a great man as Carlyle was actually preaching that to labour is to pray. To-day men are ready to lay down their working tools and listen to any insurrectionist, so aware has mankind become of an impending spiritual bankruptcy. Never in any preceding generation has the young man standing on the threshold of life felt more unsettled. His unsettlement has frequently turned to frenzy and anarchy in individual cases. Never has he cast his eyes about more desperately for a way of redemption or a spiritual leader. For him, as for all of us, the one requirement is to find out what is the _first_ thing to do; not the nearest, but the _first_, the most essential; the one after which all other things naturally take their places.
It is not to wreck the great machine, for that would be to rush to the other extreme of ruin and disorder. It is not even, as I think, to build a new machine, for that would be to enter into a wasteful competition wherein we should spend without profit and with much loss of brotherly love, all our patience and our new desires.
The one way and the first way is to use and subordinate the present machine, to limit it to its true domain, and let it be our true and vital servant.
But how?
By finding the few who can live the life of communion, the few who can show forth the true significance of the race. By saving our most precious thoughts and ideals, and adding them to the similar thoughts and ideals of others, by putting the instruments of education in their proper places, by separating and saving in the world of literature and art the expressions of beauty which are valuable to the coming race, as distinguished from those that are merely sold for a price. By the making solitary, which is making sacred.
For instance, I would have the famous and wonderful pictures now foiling and dwarfing one another in our vulgar galleries, distributed over the Western world. I wish their enfranchisement. Each great picture should be given a room to itself, like the Sistine Madonna, not only a room but a temple like that of the Iverskaya at Moscow, not only a temple but a fair populous province. The great pictures should be objects of pilgrimages, and their temples places of prayer. In the galleries, as is obvious, the pictures are at their smallest, their glory pressed back into themselves or overlapped or smudged by the confusing glory of others. Out in the wide world, enshrined in temples, these pictures would become living hearts, they would have arms dealing out blessings, they would outgrow again till their influence was as wide as the little kingdoms in which they were enshrined. Pictures would again work miracles. What is more, great pictures would again be painted.
This illustration is valuable allegorically. Great pictures are very like great souls, very like great and beautiful ideas. What is true for pictures is true for men.
The men who feel in themselves the instinct for the new life must take steps to make space for themselves and to make temples. Where they find the beautiful, the real, they must take it to themselves and protect it from enemies, they must at once begin to build walls of defence. So great is their responsibility and so delicate their charge that they must challenge no one, and invite no discussion and no hostility. They must have and hold their own beautiful life as they would a fair young bride.
Where they have visions they must build temples, as the Russian mouzhiks build churches and put up crosses. Of course I do not mean material temples, but temples not made by hands, temples of spirit, temples of remembrance. Where they read in books sacred pages they must make these pages sacred, sacred for them. Where they find men noble they must have reference to the noble part of them and deny the other. They have to win back the beautiful churches and cathedrals. Often it is said nowadays, "Such and such a church is wonderful and its service lifts one to heaven, but the clergyman and his sermon are impossible." But though a clergyman can condition his congregation it is much more true that the congregation can condition the clergyman. It is written, "Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them." When they in the pews are those in white robes, then He in the pulpit is the Christ Himself.
In literature we have to differentiate what is purely a commercial product like the yellowback novel, what is educational like the classic, and what is of the new. With the commercial we have of course no traffic; the classic is a place for those still learning what has already been said, a place for orientisation, for finding out where one stands. In this category are the Shakespearean performances at the theatre. In any case the classic is necessarily subordinate to the new literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature of ourselves. It is the school which prepares for the stepping forth on the untrodden ways.
This fencing off, differentiation and allocation, these defences of the beautiful and new, and of the temples enshrining them, shall be like the walls round a new sanctuary. We shall thereby protect ourselves from the encroaching commercial machine, its dwarfing ethics, mean postulates, and accurst conventions, and we shall rear within the walls all the beautiful that the outside world says does not exist. We shall find a whole new world of those who despise the honours and prizes of the commercial machine, and who care not for the shows, diversions, pleasures, and gambles provided for commercial slaves. But it will not cause those of that world to falter if the great multitude of their fellow-men scoff at them or think that they miss life.
Our work is then to separate off and consecrate the beautiful, to bring the beautiful together and organise it, not renouncing the machine, but only taking from it the service necessary for our physical needs, in no case being ruled or guided by it or its exigencies. When we have accomplished that, a miracle is promised. The outside world will take shape against our walls and receive its life through our gates--it will come into relation to us even to the ends of the earth. The new heart means the salvation of all.
With that we necessarily return to ourselves, the out-flung units of modern life, tramps so called, rebels, hermits, the portents of the new era, the first signs of spring after dark winter; some of us, the purely lyrical, spring flowers; others the prophetic and dynamic, spring winds--who blowing, shall blow upon winter, as Nietzsche says, "with a thawing wind."