Part 1

THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY

BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

AUTHOR OF ‘WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM,’ ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1915

PREFACE

The quotation “Martha, Martha, thou art cumbered about with many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her” is as common in Russia as “faith without works is dead” is common here. Speaking roughly, Eastern Christianity is associated with Mary’s good part and Western Christianity with the way of Martha and service. The two aspects seem to be irreconcilable, but they are not; and I have called my book _The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary_ because the ways of the sisters are as touchstones for Christianity, and in their reconciliation is a great beauty.

If you would know what a nation is, you must ask what is the religion of the people. Without a national religion a nation is not a nation but a collection of people. It is a truism to say that what is best in a nation springs from its religion, from some central idealism to which every one in the nation has access—the idea of the nation. There is a “British idea,” an “American idea,” a “German idea,” a “Russian idea.” This is profoundly true of Russia; for all that is beautiful in her life, art, and culture springs from the particular and characteristic Christian idea in the depths of her. She is essentially a great and wonderful unity. It is of that essential unity that I write, and in writing hope to show on the one plane Russia, and on another the splendour of the true Christian idea.

This book was written in Russia and in Egypt during 1914 and 1915. In 1913 I was in America and wrote my study of American ideals in contrast to Russian ideals. I returned to Russia in January 1914 eager to look at the East afresh and compare it with the West. In setting out for Russia the fundamental idea in my mind was that of Russia as a religious country where one found refuge from materialism and worldly cares, and I hoped to find stories and pictures of life with which to clothe the beautiful idea of the sanctuary. The book I was going to write I always called in my mind “the sanctuary book,” and my notion was to make a book that should also be a sanctuary itself—a book in which the reader could find sacred refuge.

Much has intervened. My quest resolved itself first of all into a seeking for what I call the Russian idea, then into a study of Russian Christianity. My new volume is necessarily one of seeking and finding, a making of discoveries. One chapter led me on to another, and the scope of my study increased till it took in the whole question of what Eastern Christianity is and how it is in contrast to Western Christianity.

Athwart this peaceful work came the typhoon of the Great War, and my hand was claimed by the new friendship between England and Russia, the friendship of brothers in arms. It was fitting to seize the opportunity to make that friendship wider and deeper by describing and interpreting the Russian people to larger audiences. But I carried the purpose of this book with me, and much of what is written here was first put into words on public platforms in the winter of 1914-15. Finally, as a culmination to this personal work, on the 16th April 1915 I gave a lecture at the Royal Institution on “The Russian Idea,” and therein collected together and summarised all that I had said during the winter. That evening I read almost all that is vital in Part I. of this book.

In May, in order to carry on this study I went to Egypt to visit the shrines and monasteries of the Desert, some of the sources of inspiration of Eastern Christianity, and to make a journey to Russia the way Christianity came to her. In these journeyings and doings lie the chronological and geographical scheme of this new volume.

I feel that this book, the hardest of all my books to write, is not in any sense a collection or a medley of impressions and stories, but has one and the same object and quest running through the whole of it; and that in order to understand it even in a small way it is necessary to read the whole of it, and perhaps re-read it. It is an organic unity, and reflects in its form something of the Russian idea and of Sancta Sophia itself.

_The Way of Martha and The Way of Mary_ is an interpretation and a survey of Eastern Christianity, and a consideration of the ideas at present to the fore in Christianity generally.

Christianity is not yet a system: it is chaotic in its tenets and the manner of its profession. This _young_ religion of Christianity! Perhaps 6000 years hence it will have crystallised out, but as yet it is in the confused grandeur of youth. It has all possibilities. A young man or young woman of to-day can live by Christianity because it is young with them. Probably any true book on Christianity must reflect this fact. As yet Christianity is running germs: it is in being’s flood, in action’s storm. It is not all logical, symmetrical, like a thesis demonstrated and proved to a class in moral philosophy.

Christianity is a great live religion still absorbing all that is true in other religions. It is _the word_. It is part of our language, and by means of it we express what is deepest in ourselves. There has not been in history such a powerful medium of self-expression. Words are our means of inter-communication, of understanding one another and telling one another what is in the heart, that is—of communion with one another. That communion is deep and tender, and the knowledge of it, like the knowledge of God, passeth understanding; all that we know is that love kindles from it. I make this affirmation as one whose special medium is the written and the spoken word.

STEPHEN GRAHAM.

MOSCOW, _September 1915_.

CONTENTS

I. THE RUSSIAN IDEA—

1. TO RUSSIA 1

2. MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA 12

3. PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN 29

4. AT THE THEATRE 37

5. THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES 48

6. LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN 58

7. IN THE CHURCH 73

8. IN THE MARKET-PLACE 86

9. THE RUSSIAN IDEA 90

10. THE LABYRINTH 105

II. MARTHA AND MARY—

1. THE _PODVIG_ 111

2. THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM 121

3. TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME 130

4. BACK TO MOSCOW 136

5. THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING 143

6. THE TWO HERMITS 155

7. AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY 161

8. THE WAY OF MARTHA 168

9. MARTHA’S TRUE WAY 178

10. MAKING WEST EAST 182

11. THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH 190

12. WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH 200

13. THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD 206

III. THE DESERT AND THE WORLD—

1. A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS 217

2. THE HERMITS 221

3. IN THE DESERT 235

4. THE WORLD 246

5. ST. SOPHIA 256

6. FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA 263

APPENDICES—

1. WAR AND CHRISTIANITY 273

2. THE CHOICE OF EAST AND WEST 280

_Frontispiece_—MARTHA AND MARY.

I THE RUSSIAN IDEA

I TO RUSSIA

KIEF, _January 1914_.

All night long from Paris to Cologne the train speeds like a bird, joyously screaming. I am in the carriage next the engine, and as I lie full length in the darkened empty carriage I look out on snow-patched fields and hills, now partly obscured by wild volumes of vapour, now fierily illumined by the glow of the furnace, the black sky raining showers of red sparks on to the vague night landscape, the engine racing forward past signal-boxes and stations, clattering along the changing points of the rails of junctions, knowing apparently that all signals are _for_, never anticipating any hindrance, skirling and leaping in the exuberance of accomplishment.

We pass the Belgian frontier at three in the morning near Namur, and the German at Herbesthal in the dim glimmering before dawn. The world that becomes visible as the sun rises is the ordered world of the Germans. Everything is prim, everything is as it should be; the fields are symmetrical, the palings are vertical and in good repair, the manure heaps are compact; where houses are being pulled down or set up there is no disorder whatever; nothing is scattered about, everything is collected and numbered. At the little stations we pass through, the station-master in brilliant red and blue is standing erect at that point on the platform that it is his duty to occupy. On the train a woman in uniform has appeared. She has put thirty or forty little tablets of soap and two dozen hand-towels into the lavatory; she has picked up the bits of paper that lay scattered in the corridor all night; she has washed everything in the lavatory; put water in the cistern and boiled water in the carafe. The conductor, a well-groomed military man, has come and allotted us definitely numbered seats in the carriages and has seen that our respective hand-luggage occupies just that space in the rack which is above our numbered seats.

At Cologne there are just four minutes to cross the subway and get into the Berlin express. My porter—luggage-dragger, as the precise Germans call him—takes me across at a run and puts me in the train, and my registered box of books and papers and what-not is not allowed to miss the connexion. I hardly sit down in the speckless third-class carriage of the real German train before the whistle goes and we slip past the great black piles of Cologne Cathedral in the background. All day long we tear over Germany at sixty miles an hour to Berlin.

At Paris I had registered my box to the Charlottenburg Station of Berlin, but to my dismay the train did not stop there. I had only ten minutes in which to change francs to marks, get my ticket to the Russian frontier, have my luggage weighed and registered, and get into the train. And I do not speak German, but the Germans understood. I was put down at Zoological Gardens Station. My porter understood the situation at once, ran me along to some stairs, and pointed down them. I went down; he went “to expedite my baggage,” so I understood. I took my ticket, and in doing so offered the girl in the booking-office about six more marks than was necessary. She pushed back the superfluous silver without a smile. Turning round, I saw my trunk reposing on the weighing machine. My porter pointed to the registration window. I paid two marks and obtained my receipt and went up the stairs to the platform for the Russian train, and had two minutes to spare.

How efficient the Germans are! They have a great excellence in their way. They permit no one to lose himself, they permit no disorder, everything is done by the chronometer rather than by the watch. They have a genius for orderliness, neatness, and precision. They have our English ideal of thoroughness and smartness, but they seem to have consummated it whilst we have paused in the ways of Destiny and changed our mind in favour of something different. If we could see Germans in a friendly spirit there are many English who would bow down in admiration to their civilisation. For the Saxon part of English nature has a similar instinct for order, for living one’s life like a neatly-worked mathematics paper. It is the aboriginal Celtic base in us which with much that came over with the Normans has frustrated the Saxon element in our race. The British earth itself has formed us, inspired us: hence our kindliness, verve, and imaginativeness, human tenderness. Thanks to the ancient Briton in us, we are more like the Russians than the Germans. _There_ is a people who are the antipodes of the Germans—wild in their emotions, anarchic in their spirits, amused by laws and regulations, lacking in the instincts that make “progress” possible. Naturally the Russians can’t stand the Germans. As a Russian said to me when I recounted how once I left a Kodak behind in the waiting-room at Cologne station, wired from Dusseldorf my Russian address, and eventually received the apparatus in good condition at Rostof-on-the-Don, “The Germans are an accurate people. O Lord, how accurate they are!”

We reached the Russian frontier at one in the morning, and, passing in single file, gave up our passports to the sentry. At the Custom-house the baggage was submitted to a vigorous examination. An armed Customs officer in a heavy overcoat with black astrakhan collar directed the operations; three or four porters and inspectors fumbled in the trunks, turning things almost upside down, and a slim girl of twenty-five, a female expert, scrutinised all the clothes for the things that men were not likely to see of themselves—embroidery, lace, silk underwear, neatly packed away Paris blouses, feathers, new costumes with artificial creases and tacked-in dirty linings. But I am not smuggling anything through, and no one takes the trouble even to look at the contents of my books.

I take my ticket to Kief and a supplement to Warsaw. At half-past three we are allowed to board the Russian train and spread out our bedding and make ourselves comfortable. The station is dark and gloomy, the dreariest station in western Russia. As we stand at the windows of the train and look out a strange procession comes up out of the darkness—threescore of men in irons, following a soldier who carries on a pole high above his head a flaming naphtha torch. The faces of the men are pale, furtive, hairy, their shoulders awkward; some are in old blouses, some in collars, some in sheepskins; they are Jews, Poles, Russians, chained together in fours, marching along the railway track to a barred convict-train waiting at a siding. Foot soldiers accompany them with drawn swords in their uplifted hands. They come out of the darkness like living shadows and disappear into the darkness again.

“_Soloveiki_,” says the conductor disparagingly.

“Well,” says a Russian, “I don’t suppose they’re heroes. Poland swarms with thieves and smugglers, and people smuggling themselves across the frontier in order to get to America.”

“They are human beings,” says another. “They are in chains and we free. It is a heavy sight.”

But the second bell and the third bell sound, and the train moves gradually out of the station and nearly every one lies down to sleep. Even when we arrive at Warsaw many of the passengers are snoring and have to be awakened up by acquaintances or porters.

Across the two miles of the slush-covered cobbles of Warsaw, through driving rain and sleet, in an open _droshky_ at dawn, from the Vienna to the Brest station.

“_A vam ne skoro!_” says the Russian porter who greets me. “Your train is not soon. The next for Kief is at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

I have breakfast. I stroll into the rainy city and back, have a plate of hot soup, read the papers, write letters.

Opposite me in the Kief train was a little girl in simple but antique national attire, in soiled clothes, but having a fresh and delicate classical face and black hair in two plaits, one about each little ear—a rare beauty: it was a piquant pleasure just to look at her.

“When do we get to Kharkof?” she asked.

“Seven, to-morrow night.”

“Oh, what a long time! It’s a long way: it’s the first time I’ve been away from home.”

As the guard blew his whistle she stood up, looked towards the city, and crossed herself.

“Are you a little Russian?” I asked.

“No; a Pole. I was once a Jewess, but have just been baptized. See....”

She showed me a little crucifix, and the figure of the Virgin on a little medallion hanging from her neck.

“You’re a Catholic now?”

“Yes; and I don’t like the Jews.”

I wondered whether in view of the ill odour in which the Jews were at that time, she had been told by her mother to announce her conversion very distinctly.

“Such a mama I have!” said she, turning out a basket of provisions—two bags of nuts, several pots of jam, biscuits, a Polish Christmas pudding.

There were in the carriage besides myself and the girl opposite me a Russian student, a young Polish _flaneur_, and a middle-aged, grizzly, smelly, Polish peasant. The young convert offered us all nuts. She was very engaging. She took out a long bottle, put it to her lips and drank from it. She told me it was cold tea with sugar at the bottom of the bottle, but to the Pole announced that it was vodka.

He was fool enough to believe her, and at once cast about in his mind some means of doing her an ill turn. He came over and made love to her in excited whispers, and was so rude and urgent that at last the girl refused to have anything more to do with him, and turned sullen and angry. He for his part sneaked off to another compartment, and we saw no more of him. After a while the girl relaxed and smiled, took out a large but cracked hand-mirror, looked at her pretty face, and patted the curls to her temples. I got a kettleful of boiling water and made tea for the grizzly peasant and her and myself. Then the peasant climbed on to the shelf above and spread out his big overcoat and slept on it, and the little girl, after explaining that she was going to live with Poles in Kharkof, and that her father played the violin and she the mandoline, and that she was going to take a part in a “troop” and earn her living, undid her black locks, put down a quilt and a pillow, and curled herself up and slept. The conductor came round and searched under the seats for “hares,” the flickering candle burned low, and I was about to turn in and sleep when the Russian student, who had been trying to read a newspaper by the aid of a dip of his own, finally gave up the task and set himself to talk to me.

“How far are you going? Where from? What for? How long have you been away from Russia? What interest can Russia have for you? I should have thought the West more interesting....” and so on, the usual flood of questions.

Then my questions. “Has much happened in Russia during the year? What are people talking about? What are they doing? What is in the air?”

“Oh,” said he, “the Futurists are walking about with gilded noses and dyed faces. The Jew-haters of the Black Hundred want to raise a temple in memory of the Christian boy Yushinsky. Everyone has been discussing a play of Artsibashef called _Jealousy_. Literary Russia has been giving a welcome to the Belgian poet Verhaeren, such as you in England have been giving Anatole France. Every one is either hearing or giving lectures about Verhaeren. But I suppose most clamour of all has been raised about Gorky and Dostoieffsky and the Theatre of Art at Moscow. They propose to perform Dostoieffsky’s _Demons_ at the Theatre of Art, and Gorky has raised a great protest. He holds that Dostoieffsky is so reactionary in tendency that he ought not to be played at the great democratic theatre. Not only that, but he holds that Tolstoy, and indeed all Russian literature, is on the wrong side in the struggle for the liberation of the people. He is almost ready to say, ‘Burn the works of Tolstoy and Dostoieffsky; burn them, and let us be free!’”

“How does Russia take it?” I asked. “It is indeed true that Dostoieffsky’s work is not on the side of progress and freedom. He believed in suffering; he believed in the Russian Church, and was a Christian.”

“Russia is mostly against Gorky,” said the student. “Merezhkovsky, for instance, has written a brilliant article against him in the _Russian Word_, and he says, ‘Yes, Gorky is keenly sensitive, but in Italy or Greece, where he lives,[1] he is too far away to feel what Russia is now. Russia has changed much in the last eight years. Her wounds have healed up, many of them; she has the great hope of the convalescent. If Gorky breathed Russian air he would understand that there was now in Russia a strong religious movement.’”

“And what do you think?” I asked. “Do you possibly agree with Gorky?”

“No. I don’t think it is right to steal an instrument from the other side’s box of tricks. The Censorship is one of their weapons, not one of ours. The people have loved Dostoieffsky more than they have loved any other Russian author; he is still beloved. We Russians are a religious and loving people. We will never sacrifice humanity for ideas....”

We talked a long time. When I lay down on my shelf to sleep I felt only gladness that I was coming back to Russia, coming to live with her and for her once more, after a year in England and America. It seemed to me a pity that Gorky had not come back the year before when so many exiles took advantage of the Tsar’s manifesto, and returned to the open arms of a loving, astonishingly patriotic people!

Next morning at dawn I arrived at Kief, said “Good-bye” to the little girl who was sleepily stretching herself, and to the student who was chatting with a new acquaintance in the gangway and smoking a cigarette. The grizzly peasant I let snore on....

A fine crowd this of the Kief streets: stalwart, diverse, interested in one another, attractive-faced, they are a refreshment, such a refreshment, after Paris and New York.

But I do not reckon that I have achieved the first stage of my journey back till I enter the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and light candles before Queen Olga, King Vladimir, and the Mother and Child, baring my head in the presence of Russia and accepting her sanctuary from the West.

Footnote 1:

He had not then returned to Russia.

II MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA

KIEF, _January 1914_.

One of the first friends I visited in Kief was Little-Russian Katia, a typical Russian of to-day, with the problems and prospects of the new-formed middle class.

At the time of the Boer War Katia ran away from school and set off on foot for South Africa as a Russian pilgrim would set out for Jerusalem, with a bundle on her back and a stick in her hand. She would beg her way to the Transvaal and collect money to help the Boers! At the same school, in the time of the riots in Kief, the first class presented an ultimatum to the masters and directors, demanding among other things the right to hold meetings, the right to get books from the public libraries, and equal justice for all pupils irrespective of race, be they Russians, Poles, or Jews! A go-ahead school as far as the scholars were concerned. If a mistress in a fit of anger strikes one of her class, straight away a boycott of her lessons is arranged, and no one answers her questions, no one does any homework for her.

Katia learnt at school to adore above all things the works of Oscar Wilde. She professes to know his works almost by heart; she sleeps with _The Happy Prince_ under her pillow. On a wall in her bedroom hangs a large portrait of Oscar Wilde; in a corner is the sacred ikon, before which on festival nights and for holy days she lights a little lamp. She was the last Russian I had seen when I left Kief some fifteen months before. She was then engaged to Sasha, a thinly-clad, stern, poverty-stricken student, who in order to travel thirty versts on the railway free would take a conductor’s job and examine the tickets in the second class. If she married Sasha he would get drunk and beat her; they would live dogs’ lives—so every one said. The father, a rich manufacturer, was opposed to Sasha, but then the father was a tyrant; the mother, not on speaking terms with the father, gave countenance to the engagement. Sasha was able to come to all meals and stay as long as he liked with Katia. When Katia was indisposed and thought fit to lie in bed, he might spend whole evenings sitting by her. That was all _comme il faut_, for in Russia a betrothed couple are already called bride and bridegroom and have such freedom.