Welsh Journals

THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY* THIS is a very beautiful book: that is the first 1 thing to say about it. It is beautifully written, in simple warm sentences, with the occasional strange- ness of a word glowing like a lamp, for the habitual chastity and starkness of the whole. It might almost have been written for children. And secondly, it is the account of a singularly simple and beautiful personality amongst beautiful and simple adventures. Russia for a long time now has been for many Western readers a sort of fairy-tale come true. The time has gone by since her Western sympathisers' first emotion was one of pity. But it is not so long ago since Liberals and others held firmly to the idea of Russia as a poor, backward, down-trodden nation waiting for her hour of prosperity and happiness under the beneficent reign of Western ideals. We looked upon her poverty and contrasted it with her enormous natural wealth that lay either unworked at all or badly mismanaged. We understood her revolutionaries, imagining that they, too, as some undoubtedly, through long exile, did, longed for a Western constitution, with Western ideals of tidiness and good management all ready to hand. Then we read Dostoievsky. It was Dostoievsky who first broke through our slightly contemptuous good wishes for his country's material welfare. It was through him that the suspicion first dawned upon our minds that perhaps the apparent Russian failure was not the failure that we thought it, that it might be accounted for by a difference of aim. It was perhaps, the thought struck us, not so much that Russia was far behind us on the road, as on a different road altogether. 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." As is usual with us of the West, we had rather forgotten that there was such a person as Mary in the Bible. Now, this is, for many at all events, completely changed. We are ready to go to Russia to learn and not to teach. We know that in that strange and utterly unknown country a spiritual life is being daily lived that is of more value than anything we can give her. Mr. Graham has already done much to open British eyes to this fact: he has tramped to Jerusalem, he has wandered all over the face of the new fairy-land, and has told us much that we wished to know, not merely of the Russian Intellectuals who have been often half-Westernized, but of the .8, Stephen Graham. Mscmillao Ie Co. Pp. 291. 7/6 net Russians themselves, the peasants, the priests, the small merchants, the pilgrims, the tramps, the monks. We have begun to see the Eastern Church not as an erastian implement in the hands of the Czar, but as a spiritual community with an extraordinary piety and tenderness and self-denial of its own, with a life of its own, whose aim was neither akin to the Roman Catholic or the Protestant that we knew. We saw the peasant not merely as a starving, credu- lous, bullied slave, in the power of cruel masters, but with a freedom at least as great as that of our own poor, and a gentleness and beauty that ours do not attain. When you first step into a Russian novel," says Mr. Graham, you come across symptomatic ideas, and when you go into Russia you find them again in the life of the people. Probably the most obvious characteristic thing is the love towards the suffering, pity As Rozanof writes: Is there one page in the whole of Russian literature where a mock is made of a girl who has been betrayed, of a child, of a mother, of poverty ? Russian literature is one continuous hymn to the injured and insulted. And as of such people there must always be a multitude in vain and gigantically-working Europe, it is possible to imagine the shout of joy which breaks forth when they are shown a country, a whole nation, where no one ever dares offend the orphan, the destitute, in the moral sense never dares to look insultingly upon the person left forlorn by circumstance, by destiny, by the break up of life. The Western man can say: There is a country where I should not have been despised there is a country where I should not have been so coarsely insulted, where every man would have taken my part and interceded for me, where they would have taken me by the hand and raised me upon my feet again." Over and over again in Russian literature do you come across this fondness for the prodigal. The Russian seems often to believe that the sinner is nearer to God than the righteous man, because of his suffering. The Russian would never try to rid his country of beggars and tramps, for to him they are almost a noble example of that absolute poverty in which he believes. He does not wish for a simplifica- tion of life by rules, but loves diversity. Actually he is the freest of all men, for in Russia there is no censure, and social censure as everyone who thinks for a moment knows, is a far greater curtailer of freedom than law.