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. IX THE RUSSIAN IDEA Those familiar with ideas can tell at sight a German idea, an American idea, a Russian idea, a Roman Catholic idea, and so on. Each nation has its fundamental idea, its mother idea, the idea of which all other characteristic ideas are children. As Dostoieffsky says: “No nation has ever been founded on science and reason; it has always grown about some central idea.”