As another verse of what sounded like a primeval harvest hymn began, the brief glimpse of the reapers, erect and majestic in the dress of toil, and laden with the instruments of the harvest, the high quality of the singing:
“The undisturbed song of pure concent,”
made the place into a temple of august and sacred calm in the quiet light of the evening. The sacerdotal figures that passed by, diminutive in the distance, belonged to an archaic vase or frieze. The music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the initiation into an immemorial secret, into some remote mystery—who knows?—perhaps the mystery of Eleusis, or into still older secrecies of which Eleusis was the far-distant offspring. A window had been opened on to another phase of time, on to another and a brighter world; older than Virgil, older than Romulus, older than Demeter—a world where the spring, the summer, and the autumn, harvest-time, and sowing, the gathering of fruits and the vintage, were the gods; and through this window came a gleam from the golden age, a breath from the morning and the springtide of mankind.
When I say that the singing called up thoughts of Greece, the thing is less fantastic than it seems. In the first place, in the songs of the Russian peasants, the Greek modes are still in use: the Dorian, the hypo-Dorian, the Lydian, the hypo-Phrygian. “La musique, telle qu’elle était pratiquée en Russie au moyen age” (writes M. Soubier in his History of Russian Music), “tenait à la tradition des religions et des mœurs païennes.” And in the secular as well as in the ecclesiastical music of Russia there is an element of influence which is purely Hellenic. It turned out that the particular singers I heard on that evening were not local, but a guild of women reapers who had come from the government of Tula to work during the harvest. Their singing, although the form and kind of song were familiar to me, was different in quality from any that I had heard before; and the impression made by it unforgettable.
Nature in Russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and uniform, but this does not mean that beauty is rare. Not only magic moments occur in the most unpromising surroundings, but beauty is to be found in Russian nature and Russian landscape at all times and all seasons in many shapes.
For instance: a long drive in the evening twilight at harvest-time, over the immense hedgeless rolling plains, through stretches of golden wheat and rye, variegated with millet, still green and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes later; when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying fields, and when you see, in the distance, the cranes, settling for a moment, and then flying off into space.
Later in the twilight, continents of dove-coloured clouds float in the east, the west is tinged with the dusty afterglow of the sunset; and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of stubble are burnished and glow in the heat; and smouldering fires of weeds burn here and there; and as you reach a homestead, you will perhaps see by the threshing-machine, a crowd of dark men and women still at their work; and in the glow from the flame of a wooden fire, in the shadow of the dusk, the smoke of the engine and the dust of the chaff, they have a Rembrandt-like power; the feeling of space, breadth, and air and immensity grows upon one; the earth seems to grow larger, the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted, stretched, and magnified.
Russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring and winter—the brief spring which arrives so suddenly after the melting of the snows, with the intense green of the birch-trees, the uncrumpling fern; woods carpeted with lilies of the valley; the lilac bushes, the nightingale, and later the briar, which flowers in profusion; and the winter: the long drives in a sledge under a leaden sky to the tinkle of monotonous bells; a whistling blizzard with its demons, that lead the horses astray in the night; transparent woods black against an immense whiteness; or covered with snow and frozen, an enchanted fabric against the stainless blue; or, when after a night of thaw, the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy threads and sparkling drops of dew.
The sunset and twilight of the winter evening after the first snow had fallen in December used to be most beautiful. The new moon, like a little sail on a cold sea, tinged with a blush as it reached the earth, flooded the snow with light, and added to its purity; the snow had a blue glint in it and showed up the wooden houses, the red roofs, the farm implements in a bold relief; so that all these prosaic objects of everyday life assumed a strange largeness and darkness as they loomed between the earth and the sky.