# The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 2/Chapter 10

. . . who made West East And gave to Man A new heaven and a new earth, As Holy John hath prophesied of Me.
The West seems to have the tradition of the way of Martha, England especially. Our Victorian era, of which the popular teachers were Kingsley, Carlyle, Ruskin, was essentially an era of work and deeds rather than of faith. As children, we in our prime to-day were brought up on the gospel of work. Thoughts about one's soul were considered rather ignoble: they were smoke that we had to consume ourselves. We were urged to forget the question of our souls and work. The whole world was working, all the factories of England sang together. Every man in England, from the highest to the lowest, knew when he wakened each morning that he had that day some real and indispensable work to do. The child must learn his lesson in that light. "If I hear of an artist of promise," says Ruskin, "the first question I ask is, 'Does he work?'" Ruskin ​dismissed Whistler, who painted rather in the way of Mary, because he obviously did not work. All great men whatsoever worked.
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
If you want to be a Knox or a Luther or a Cromwell or a Frederick or a Bismarck you must work.
The spirit of industry seemed to be Christianity itself. In reading Froude's history one seemed to gain the idea that the Reformation meant getting rid of idleness and monks and abbeys, and substituting noble labour, honest craftsmen, and factories. It is a modern misapprehension. There was a time when we used to sing a hymn extravagantly opposed to the gospel of work—
Doing is a deadly thing, Doing ends in death.
We have a reputation for work. Most Russians would be incredulous if told that Englishmen had ever sung such words. Yet they have, and we know that we are not like the ants who have always been working and always will work. We have been out of love with work before and will be again.
During the Victorian era every Englishman had his coat off and was working for all he was worth, perspiration on his brow, grime on his body, the clangour of machinery in his ear. Carlyle found his generation working, and gave it his blessing in ​effective phrase, and was so obsessed by his own message that he gave up his own quest, his own seeking, and lived in the British Museum, pondering, grubbing, scratching, and turning forth volume after volume of dull Frederick, and he forgot his own soul and the man who wrote Sartor Resartus and The Heroes.
And although this work, work for work's sake, is not a Christian thing, it is associated in the mind with what I call the "way of Martha." It is an exaggeration of her sweet serviceableness, a supposition that she had gone crazy and had not only become cumbered about with many things, but was so cumbered that she could never in all her life spare a moment to come to the Master. Be that as it may, England had a fairly clear and simple notion of her creed. Work pleased her. Popular opinion was on the side, not of the parson who did nought, but of the old farmer "who stubbed Thornaby Waaste." Tennyson sang work and the goal of work—"All diseases cured by science," "the Parliament of the World," "the rule of the meek upon earth." We gave our shoulders and our hearts and our lips to the work, though indeed not much of the last, for in those days silence was golden.
Now silence is golden only for those who do not know what to say. A change has come about, is coming about. Work has ceased to be holy.
"To labour is to pray." "Do the duty which lies nearest to you, that which is doablest." "Do ​noble things, not dream them, all day long . . ." such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the first of the moderns, and he wrote:
Not on the vulgar mass Called "work," must sentence pass.
And again:
Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
And again:
He fixed thee midst this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
The way of Martha had given place to the way of Mary. My elders read Rabbi Ben Ezra to comfort one another:
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made;
and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those I loved; I carried it with me ​wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down, it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms, roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It was good b'ye to the old. It was a sight of one's own immortality and Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.
But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning. Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.
It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real Imitatio Christi when he made something with his hands and saw that it was good. Then we read Andrea del Sarto, despising
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knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.
From Browning's day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming to Mary. The notebooks of those young ones who loved thoughts began to be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many of the elder ones to ​whom we read what we had found were blind and deaf to the new ideas. I remember one old literary man and artist who used always to say, "I take my stand with Jim"—meaning that he held with St. James that faith without works is barren. He belonged to the old.
I admit we were not sober in our judgments. We went to see Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, and it was easy to agree that Nora was right when she fled from her home and her husband to save her soul, and we thought that the immoral and unprincipled Dubedat was sooner to be saved than the hard-working slum doctor. We saw in Solveig, who stayed in the background and prayed, the true type of womanhood, and understood how Peer Gynt through her could be saved. We read Nietzsche, that mad Christian, a sort of Mary who hated her sister Martha, calling out in anger that man had ceased to be man and had become merely neighbour. We entered the domain of Russian literature, and read Dostoieffsky and Chekhof and Gorky, and so fell under the spell of Eastern Christianity, where we remain to-day.
The taste of England has been steadily changing this last ten years, and the current becoming deeper and broader. Russia and the East have been coming steadily nearer, and more and more of us have turned our backs on work and service and that Divine materialism—the raising of the poor. Not that we are on the way to becoming a ​philosophic and reflective or ascetic nation, or even in the way of singing again "Doing is a deadly thing"; but more and more of our nation is attempting to take to itself and re-express the other aspect of Christianity—the way of Mary.
Even in the North of England, where the land is devoted to work and the towns are little more than barracks of workmen, there is a noticeable and, even from a capitalist's point of view, an alarming change of spirit. The "workers" are rebellious. It is not that they want more money or lighter hours or better conditions. They simply don't want to work. The rising generation is disinclined to settle down, and the time is coming when there will be difficulty in getting labouring hands, when it will be difficult to buy them. The gloom of our industrialism is destined to be broken.
As yet, however, those who represent us in politics, literature, and art belong to the old. Mr. Lloyd George with his care for the poor is a Martha. Mr. Bonar Law is a Martha also. H. G. Wells, with his World set Free, and his rooms with rounded instead of squared corners to help the women to sweep, is a Martha. Our poets are not Marys, and it is necessary to go to Francis Thompson or Rossetti to find a mystic poet. Our painters, Peter Graham, Farquharson, Leader, and others whose works deck Academy walls, are occupied with the outward appearances of things rather than the transcendental. And since Watts is dead we have not even a ​mystical portrait painter, but all admire the gift to show in the face money, importance, style, meat. Our people are worth painting, but there is no one to paint them. We need an English Serof to show the true kindred and spiritual relationship of faces.
On the stage we admire Russian opera and Russian ways. We show The Dynasts in the same way as it would have been shown in Moscow, or nearly so. There first of all the new tendency is showing. Unfortunately we have a long battle against American humour and vulgarity, American materialism and the capital that would exploit our stage. Otherwise our stage would change at a greater speed. Still the difference in the way Shakespeare is produced in England is an index of the change. When we produce Hamlet as it is produced at the Theatre of Art, Moscow, we shall have traversed the whole distance between the way of Martha and the way of Mary as far as the stage is concerned.