The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 8
Moscow, March 1914.
What a divine disorder! The peasants seem to have an instinctive sense for grouping. No matter how much the crowd moves or how many changes are evolved in it, it is always a beautiful whole, a fair scene, with balance of colour and form and sound. You see not a crowd but a nation. No wonder the Russian produces a ballet which is bewilderingly beautiful when the peasants in their gait are true to themselves and to their nation. What troubles the eye in a Western crowd is the fact that every one is afraid to be himself, to be true to personal impulses, and to walk and dress and act as he likes. Stupid censure and the criterion of convention robs our crowds of life, of diversity of colour and form. We in the West abhor a crowd as something disorderly in itself; we prize the drilled squad, where each and every soldier looks as if turned out from one and the same factory.
One of the most wonderful pieces of stage production in Moscow this year was Gogol's Fair of Sorotchinsky, resented at the New Dramatic Theatre, a picture of a Russian crowd and a market on a hill. The first scene shows a highway and an ox-cart laden with village girls and young peasants coming laboriously along it. They are on the way to the fair. The second scene, the fair itself, takes one's breath away. The sun is blazing with a ten o'clock in the morning full-armed effulgence, so that the bright cottons of the peasant women, the chestnut-coloured sheepskins of the men, the ribbons hanging from the stalls, the black tangles of astrakhan hats, the trodden mud and puddles of the track, all glitter like bunting on a May morning; and the tilts of the shop-tents and stalls ascend the hill one beyond another to the sky-horizon, so that behind the foreground, where the action takes place, there rises a mountain of irregularly ribbed canvas. All manner of people float in and out of the colour design: flirting village girls wearing bright beads; stalwart yokels standing about in the mud with hay-rakes in their hands; antediluvian monks with greasy, tangled hair, with wrinkled and wise countenances, black and dirt-stained cloaks; tired pilgrims with huge bundles on their backs, wiping their sunburned brows with the backs of their grimy hands; beggars, drunkards. All the talking and bargaining and singing is allowed to mingle, and the customers stump about amongst the stalls and the piles of golden melons and brown pottery, and ask prices and haggle. And the little story of the play shows itself when the ox-cart of the first scene comes in with its burden of laughing girls and swains. Mardzhanof, the producer, does not allow the life of the fair in the background to slacken for a moment in order to emphasise the main story. He lets the fair be the world, which always goes on no matter what story is enacted upon it. Morning wears to noon, noon to afternoon and evening, and the ox-cart sets out again home.
Necessarily there is design in the kaleidoscope of the market as shown on the stage; but then the design is to show what a Russian fair is like, and this of Sorotchinsky is a wonderful representation of the Russian crowd. Every one who went to the performance was struck with the crowd, the way each small part was played by the actor and actress who had it. There was not one of the great troupe who simply walked on and filled a space; every one was realising a separate part. Such individual work was necessary if the psychology of the Russian crowd was in any way to be represented.
The market-place is more secular than the theatre, the church, or the tavern, and yet in it you see the same wonderful national idea (as Chesterton wrote of a similar idea, "It is as if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and suddenly they came together in a huge and staring face")—divine disorder, the disorder of the starry sky, instead of man's order, instinctive mingling instead of ranks and pews, the live crowd instead of the dead crowd; or to translate the idea into political phraseology, true democracy instead of collectivism, the ballet of imagination rather than the regimental march of progress, human destiny as a mystery play rather than a problem play, enacted in a mysterious labyrinth rather than in a corridor of time or up and down an everlasting staircase of evolution.