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. XI THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH