PROLOGUE
From Russia to America; from the most backward to the most forward country in the world; from the place where machinery is merely imported or applied, to the place where it is invented; from the land of Tolstoy to the land of Edison; from the most mystical to the most material; from the religion of suffering to the religion of philanthropy.
Russia and America are the Eastern and Western poles of thought. Russia is evolving as the greatest artistic philosophical and mystical nation of the world, and Moscow may be said already to be the literary capital of Europe. America is showing itself as the site of the New Jerusalem, the place where a nation is really in earnest in its attempt to realise the great dream of human progress. Russia is the living East; America is the living West—as India is the dead East and Britain is the dying West. Siberia will no doubt be the West of the future.
For one who knows Russia well America is full of a great revelation. The contrast in national spirit is so sharp that each helps you to see the other more clearly. The American people are now on the
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threshold of a great progressive era; they feel themselves within sight of the realisation of many of their ideals. They have been hampered badly by the trusts and the "bosses" and the corrupt police, but they are now proving that these obstacles are merely temporary anomalies, caused by the overwhelmingly sudden growth of population and prosperity. A few years ago it could with truth be said that material conditions were worse in the United States than in the Old World. But it has been clear all the time that the corruption existent in the country was truly foreign to the country's temper.
The common citizen is becoming the watchdog of the police-service. Tammany has fallen. Women are getting the suffrage, state by state. The nation is unanimous in its cry for a pure state, a clean country, and an uncorrupted people. All diseases are to be healed. Couples who wish to be married must produce health-certificates. The mentally deficient and hereditary criminals are to be segregated. Blue-books, or rather what the Americans call White-books, are going to form the Bible of a new nation. The day is going to be rationally divided into eight hours' work, eight hours' pleasure, eight hours' sleep—or rather, eight hours' looking at machinery, eight hours' pleasure, eight hours' sleep, for machinery is going to accomplish all the ugly toil. Everybody is to be well dressed, well housed, comfortable. America is raging
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against drink, against the exploitation of immigrants, against the fate of the white slave, against any one who has done anything immoral. It will nationally expel a Russian genius like Gorky. It makes great difficulty of admitting to its shores any one who has ever been in prison. It is so in earnest about the future of America that it has set up what is almost an insult to Europe—the examination of Ellis Island. Any one who has gone through the ordeal of the poor emigrant, as I did, going into America with a party of poor Russians in the steerage, and has been medically examined and clerically cross-questioned about his life and ethics, knows that America is a materialist and progressive country, and that she is no longer a harbour of refuge for the weak, but a place where a nation is determined to have health and strength and prosperity.
Now in Russia, when you arrive there, you find no such tyranny as that of Ellis Island awaiting you. You have come to the land of charity. If there is any question it is of whether you are a Russian Jew wanting to be recognised as an American citizen. Their charity does not extend to the Jews. But disease does not stand in your way, neither does crime; ethics are not inquired into; Mylius or Mrs. Pankhurst or Miss Marie Lloyd receive their passports without a frown. You have come to the nation to whom are precious the sick, the mentally deficient,
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the criminal, the waste-ends of humanity, the poor woman on the streets, the drunkard. Her greatest novelist, Dostoievsky, was an epileptic; her national poet, Nekrasof, was a drunkard; Vrubel, one of her greatest painters, was an imbecile; Chekhof, her great tale-writer, was a hopeless consumptive. She is not opposed to the good and the sound, but the suffering are dearer to her, more comprehensible. She loves the drunkard, and says "Yes, you are right to be drunk; you are probably a good man. It is what you are likely to be in this world of enigmas." She loves the white slave, but does not wish to shut her in a home for such. The Russians, so far from segregating the diseased and the fallen, frequently fall in love with them and marry them. They are sorry for the crippled children, but do not wish they had never been born. They see in them a reminder of the true lot of man upon the world. They make such children holy, and set them at the church doors. Russia does not execute the murderer except under martial law, but she sends him to Siberia to understand life and be resurrected. Thus, in The Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikof the murderer, goes to Siberia with little Sonia, the white slave, who whispers to him all the way the promises of St. John's Gospel.
In America the man who is tramping the road and will not work is an object of enmity. He is almost a criminal. He is not wanted. He will receive little
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hospitality, must chop wood for his breakfast or steal. His life is a blasphemy breathed against the American ideal. But in Russia none is looked upon more kindly than the man on the road, the tramp or the pilgrim. There are a million or so of them on the road in the summer. They are characteristic of Russia. In them the Russian confesses that he is a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth.
The Christianity of Russia is the Christianity of death, of renunciation, of what is called the podvig, the turning away from the empire of "the world" as proposed by Satan on the mountain, the wasting of the ointment rather than the raising of the poor, the giving the lie to Satan, the part of Mary rather than the part of Martha.
But the Christianity of America is the Christianity of Life, of affirmation, of "making good," of accepting "the world" and preparing for Christ's second coming, of obedience to the law, of almsgiving. America is the great almsgiver, appealed to for money from the ends of the earth, and for every object. If Russia can give faith, America can give the rest. It is impossible for America to say with St. Peter, "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee." The Americans believe in money, and the pastor of a fashionable church is able to say, "I preach to fifty million dollars every Sunday morning." But as Mme. Novikof, in one of her brilliant conversations,
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once said, "What is greater than the power of money? Why, contempt of money." There are no people in the world who keep fewer account-books than the Russians. They fling about their wealth or the pennies of their poverty with the generous assurance that the bond of brotherhood is greater than their fear of personal deprivation.
The Americans are great collectors. It may be said collecting is the genius of the West; empty-handedness is the glory of the East.
The Russians are a sad and melancholy people. But they do not want to lose their melancholy or to exchange it for Western self-satisfaction. It is a divine melancholy. As their great contemporary poet Balmont writes:
I know what it is to moan endlessly—
In the long cold Winter to wait in vain for Spring,
But I know also that the nightingale's song is beautiful to us just because of its sadness,
And that the silence of the snowy mountain peaks is more beautiful than the lisping of streams—
which is somewhat of a contrast to a conversation reported in one of Professor Jacks' books:
Passenger, looking out of the train window at the snowy ranges of the Rockies: "What mountains!"
American, puzzled for a moment: "I guess I h'ant got any use for those, but ef you're thinking of buying real estate...."
The phrase, real estate!
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Britain is seated in the mean. Compared with America she is semi-Eastern. Despite the blood-relationship of the American and British peoples they are more than an ocean apart. We receive without much thanks American songs and dances, boxers, Carnegie libraries, and plenty of money for all sorts of purposes. But our backs are to America; we look towards Russia and are all agog about the next Russian book or ballet or music. We are an old nation; as far as the little island is concerned hope has died down. We have explored the island. America will take a long time to explore her territory. No vast tracts and inexhaustible resources and terrific upheavals of Nature reflect themselves in our national mood. The American working man has a true passion for work, for his country, for everything; the British working man does his duty. We have not the belief in life that the American has—we have not yet the Russian's belief in death.
The American breathes full into his lungs the air of life. The American is glad at the sight of the strong, the victorious, the healthful. How often, in novels and in life, does the American woman, returning from a sojourn in the far West, confess to her admiration of the cowboy! She is thrilled by the sight of such strong wild "husky" fellows, each of them equal to four New Yorkers. In England, however, the town girl has no smiles for the strong peasant; he is a country bumpkin,
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no more. She wants the ideal, the unearthly. In Russia weakness attracts far more than strength; love is towards consumptives, cripples, the half-deranged, the impossibles. The Americans do not want the weak one; England backs the "little un" to win; Russia loves the weak one, feeling he will be eternally beaten, and loves him because he will be beaten. But America loves the strong, the healthy, the pure, because she is tired of Europe and the weakness and disease and sorrow of Europeans.
