The Polish
miners who work the coalfields in Silesia were,
till 1913, paid one-half of the wages received by
other miners in Germany, besides being the
objects of gross tyranny on the part of the German
mineowners.
miners who work the coalfields in Silesia were,
till 1913, paid one-half of the wages received by
other miners in Germany, besides being the
objects of gross tyranny on the part of the German
mineowners.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
org/access_use#pd-google
? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 15
settling Germans on Polish soil. The Napoleonic
wars diverted the attention of Prussian policy for
a time into other directions, and it appeared as
though Prussia were prepared to respect the rights
of the Poles she governed. But at the time of the
Polish insurrection of 1830 a change set in. Polish
soldiers who had crossed the Russian frontier into
Prussia were handed over by the latter to Russia
and to their death, or shot in cold blood by the
Prussian authorities; and the Prussian Govern-
ment began to treat its Polish subjects more
severely than it had hitherto done. When the
Polish rising broke out in iS? 3, Prussia entered
into agreement with Alexander II. Not only were
those Polish insurgents who had taken refuge in
Prussia imprisoned and sent back into Russia,
but, at the instigation of Bismarck, Prussia under-
took to support Russia in her reprisals against
Poland. Hence the similarity between the measures
of repression adopted by the Russian and Prussian
governments against the Poles in their respective
dominions. During the Franco-Prussian war,
Germany made a bid for Polish support by per-
mitting the military bands to play the Polish airs
as the Poles went to battle, which concession is
now withdrawn. But when she found herself
victorious, she had no further object in conciliat-
ing the Poles. She then, led by Bismarck, pro-
ceeded to the persecution which, in flagrant
violation of the Treaty of Vienna and of Frederick
William IV's solemn promise to protect the
liberties of his Polish subjects, has continued to
gather volume till it has reached its present
lengths.
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? i6
POLAND
The Kulturkampf that, in the seventies of the
nineteenth century, Bismarck directed against
the Catholic Church in Germany fell upon Prus-
sian Poland with the double violence of an attack
upon religion and nationality. The Archbishop
of Gnesen and Posen, Ledochowski, was thrown
into prison for refusing to allow the Polish children
to be taught their faith in German. He remained
two years there, and was then banished. Priests
were expelled from their parishes, penalized for
administering the sacraments. Over two hundred
thousand Polish Catholics were left without a
priest to minister to them the consolations of
their religion. Convents were closed and re-
ligious orders banished, several of which have
never been permitted to return. The Kulturkampf
died out. Then Bismarck opened his direct war
upon the Polish nation.
In 1885 forty thousand Poles, men, women,
and children, were ruthlessly deported from
Prussian Poland at forty-eight hours notice, be-
cause they were Poles who were not Prussian
subjects. They were turned out into the world,
homeless and friendless, to find a living as best
they could. Soon the Government was faced with
a serious shortage of labour in consequence of
the thousands of Polish labourers it had lost: and
it proposed to import Chinese coolies into the
heart of Europe to supply the place of the hard-
working, frugal Pole who might work no longer
in his country.
In the following year--1886--the Colonization
Bill was passed. Enormous grants of money
went to the foundation of the Commission of
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 17
Colonization, by which Polish land is bought up
and parcelled out at small rates to German settlers.
The Poles parried this attack by founding their
own land-bank, by which they in their turn bought
up land and let it out to Polish peasants. Again
and again immense sums have been voted by the
Prussian Government for German colonization
of Polish lands; and yet it was proved that the
Poles bought more rapidly than the Germans, and
that this attempt at Prussianization was a failure.
In 1896, therefore, the Government established
its own first right of purchase. From thenceforth
no Pole can ever re-acquire land that has passed
into the possession of the Commission. The
struggle for the soil, between those to whom it has
belonged for centuries and the Germans who are
determined to drive them out, continuously pro-
ceeds. In the centre of the Polish population Ger-
man colonists are planted, with German schools,
Lutheran churches and parsonages, for which the
Pole pays by heavy taxation--thus forced to
contribute to his own ruin. And yet, as the Pole
still continued to gain ground instead of losing it,
the German Government went further. A bill of
1907 prohibited Poles from building dwellings"
even on their own land. The poor Polish peasant,
whose dearest dream is to possess some portion
of his mother earth as his own, who will toil for
that cherished desire during a life-time, thus found
himself brought up against the bitter fact that the
simple joys for which he had striven so long, the
home on his own plot, were snatched away from
him just as he had won them. The cases con-
sequent on this law, that occurred shortly before
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? i8
POLAND
the outbreak of the present war, illustrate at once
the tragedy and the absurdity of Prussian methods.
A peasant was compelled to sleep in a caravan on
his own field, as he might not build a house. A
miller was driven to dig a cave to shelter himself
and his fourteen children on the river banks. He
might not have any other resting place, nor even
sleep in his mill.
Then came the Expropriation law, passed in
1908, by virtue of which the Polish landowner is,
at the bidding of the government, evicted from
his estate. The year before this measure became
law the great Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz,
himself a Russian subject, addressed an appeal to
the whole civilized world against the oppression
of which his fellow Poles under the Prussian
Government are the victims. It runs as follows:
"Sir,--The twentieth century has seen an
unheard of act carried out, an insult against
civilization, against right, against justice, and
against all those humanitarian conceptions which
are the foundation of life and of the intellectual
culture of modern society.
"For a long time, a Commission of Colonization
has existed in Prussian Poland, with the object of
buying Poles' estates in order to settle Germans
on them, and which pays for these properties
with funds to which the Poles themselves, Prussian
subjects, have been forced to contribute by taxes.
If to that we add the martyrdom of Polish children
in the German schools and the recently projected
law forbidding the use of the Polish language in
public assemblies, it seems impossible that iniquity
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 19
and the contempt of equality before the law could
be pushed further. And yet the Government,
whose principle is that ' might is right,' has not
been content with this.
"In fact, a bill for compulsory expropriation has
been presented to the Prussian Diet. The Poles,
who are subjects of the Prussian sceptre, will be
at last driven forth from that soil which is their
native land, that beloved earth where, for cen-
turies, long generations have been born, have
lived, and are buried.
"The part of Poland which the monarchy of
the Hohenzollerns has seized has never lit the
flames of revolution. She bears herself pacifically,
she strictly fulfils the painful duties that events
have imposed upon her. She pays the taxes, and
furnishes a military contingent whose valour
Bismarck himself more than once admired. Thus,
when the first news of this enforced expropriation
appeared in the European press, the project was
universally looked upon as a savage and mad
lucubration of some fanatics bereft not only of
moral sense but of all reason. Men felt sure that
a civilized state, which recognizes the right of
property as the corner stone of the social edifice,
would never go so far as to trample underfoot with
such brutality both that principle itself and the
most elementary conceptions of justice. Nobody
believed such a crime possible in a society that
calls itself Christian and considers itself as
such.
"And yet the Chancellor Biilow has presented
to the Prussian Diet a bill for the compulsory ex-
propriation of the Poles, and the Diet, instead of
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? 20
POLAND
sending the Chancellor to the study of law and
morality, sent on the bill to the Commission.
"The official news of this act has now been
spread abroad through all the world; and, to
the honour of humanity, it must be stated that
everywhere it has called forth a unanimous cry
of protestation and indignation. The European
press without distinction of side and party--and
with it all the independent German press--has
condemned the action of the Prussian Govern-
ment as a shameful attack on the natural rights of
humanity and against the Constitution that is in
force in the kingdom of Prussia.
"Every government, even the one in question,
is obliged to reckon with that universal indig-
nation and that universal contempt.
"But we Poles would wish this protest against
barbarism to endure as long as possible, and to
take on the vastest proportions. This is why we
do not consider the voice of the press sufficient,
obliged as it is to be occupied each day with new
events. This protest will not obtain durability,
and at the same time an immense authority, unles?
the most eminent representatives of science, litera-
ture, and art throughout the whole world consent
to express their opinion individually. That would
be the final judgment of the universal conscience
in the face of a crime that is without precedent;
and it would also be the most powerful plea for
the defence of an important portion of a civilized
nation which has deserved well of humanity.
"There is no question here of interfering with
the internal affairs of the Hohenzollern monarchy.
The question is a matter on which every civilized
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 21
man has the right to speak, and, above all, those
who are among the nations the pillars of civiliza-
tion and intellectual culture.
"It is for this reason that, Sir, we address
ourselves to you, earnestly begging you to pro-
nounce your opinion upon the bill presented by
the Prussian Government, the object of which
is to tear their land from the Poles by means of
compulsory expropriation. Naturally we do not
suppose for a single moment that your opinion
can be anything else than a word of indignation
and reprobation; but a public reproach, coming
from a man like you, will be the condemnation
of the greatest infamy in the history of the twen-
tieth century. Your answer will fill the Polish
nation with ardour and with hope, and will also
be a powerful support to all upright men in
Germany who, unwilling to see their country
dishonoured in the eyes of the whole universe,
fight steadily against the odious design of the
Prussian Government. "
The Expropriation Bill was first put into ex-
ecution in October, 1912, when. four Polish land-
owners were given orders to quit their homes.
The so-called compensation that they received
was so inadequate that they found their fortunes
reduced by one quarter or one third. On the eve
of the war a bill was under consideration which,
if passed, will disqualify every Pole from holding
property in that part of his country that at
present belongs to Prussia.
The battle for the Polish language proceeds on
equal lines with the struggle for the land.
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? 22
POLAND
In 1887 the Polish language was forbidden in
the elementary schools, with the exception of the
prayers and religious instruction, which remained
Polish. In 1905 that exception was withdrawn;
and from that time the Polish child has been
compelled to learn its religion and to recite its
prayers in German. The children refuse to pray .
or to be taught their faith in the language which
they do not understand, which is forced upon
them instead of their own mother tongue. They
are punished by detention or flogged; and the
instances of Polish children beaten to death by a
brutal Prussian master are unhappily not uncom-
mon. A parent whose boy is in a high fever after
such a flogging is fined if he does not send the
sick child to the house of detention, to which he is
condemned because he would not say his prayers
in German. The affair at Wreschen is still fresh
in the mind of every Pole. The children refused
to recite the prayers in German instead of Polish.
They were mercilessly flogged. The parents,
hearing their children's screams, ran to the school-
house and protested. Several of them--bread-
winners of the family--were sent to prison. Their
number included a poor woman, the mother of
young children, who was expecting her confine-
ment. She was condemned to prison for two years,
because, maddened at the sight of her children's
sufferings, she had abused the schoolmaster.
Fines, loss of employment, are the answers that
the parents' protests receive.
Polish ladies, determined that the children of
their nation shall not be deprived of their birth-
right, secretly gather them together and teach
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 23
them gratuitously the truths of their religion in
their own language. When discovered, these
ladies are thrown into prison, and treated there
as common malefactors.
No word of Polish may be uttered in class, or
between the children, in the elementary school.
The German master refuses to explain his meaning
in the only language that the children know,
because it is Polish. He illustrates the German
word he is teaching by pictures, by signs, in any
way rather than allow the pupils to hear their
own tongue spoken.
In the secondary schools Polish is proscribed;
Polish history, Polish subjects are dismissed from
the curriculum. But here the language may still be
taught as an extra lesson, once or twice a week
for three-quarters of an hour, and for two years
only. Even this concession, meagre enough when
we consider tjis peculiar difficulty and intricacy
of the Polish grammar, is hedged round with
vexatious hindrances^ TKe Polish boy in the
grammar-schools, however marked his abilities,
is debarred from scholarships and the government
stipends granted to successful scholars, and for
which, of course, his parents are taxed. Bullied
and persecuted by his German masters and school-
fellows, he leads the life of a dog. He is compelled
to sit and listen in indignant silence while, before
the whole class, the teacher calumniates his nation,
and expends his coarse ridicule on the beautiful
Polish language and on all that is Polish. For the
crime of having founded a private society among
themselves for the study of their literature and
history, a band of high-class Polish schoolboys
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? POLAND
were some years ago expelled from school, con-
demned to exclusion from every other school in
Germany, which involved the ruin of any such
career as is open to the Pole, with the added
penalty of three years service as privates in the
Prussian army. Likewise, schoolboys found with
Polish histories and works on Polish literature in
their possession run the same danger of ex-
pulsion.
The war upon the Polish language is not con-
fined to the limits of the school. Polish parents
I are not permitted to have Polish tutors and
governesses for their children. German officials
are authorized to enter a private house at any
moment to ascertain if the children are being
taught in Polish. The patriotic Polish mother will
not desist from teaching her children in their
native tongue their country's history and tra-
ditions; but she is driven to do so in the shelter
of her bedroom, as the one place in her house
which the German inspector is not allowed
to investigate.
The Polish language is forbidden in public
Polish assemblies. At the ticket office the Pole must
ask for his ticket in German; and, if he does not
know German, he must bring an interpreter with
him. A Polish waiter speaking Polish in a restaurant
is liable to instant dismissal. The peasant who
requires some remedy in the chemist's shop is not
allowed to ask for it in his own language. The
label Poison must not be written in Polish over the
medicine purchased by a Pole. The evidence of
the Pole in the law-courts must go through the
medium of a German interpreter. A poor Polish
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 25
man or woman who cannot take his or her oath in
a language not their own is sent to prison. The
Polish soldier, forced to serve in the German
army, may not speak Polish with a brother Pole
in uniform. The names of the Polish towns and
villages, the Polish streets, are rechristened by
some German title, as unrecognizable as senseless
to the Polish ear. The Polish infant, after being
baptized by the name its parents choose, is entered
on the register by the German officials under a
German name. Letters addressed in Polish are
detained at the post-office until the recipient
pays a fine. Telegrams may be sent in any and
every language--but not in Polish.
What has been well described as " Pole worry-
ing " extends to every branch of existence, small
or great. The diplomatic career, rank in the army
above a major's, municipal office, the jury, respon-
sible posts on the railway, are all closed to the
Pole, unless he will forswear his nationality. The
Polish national tunes may not be played. The
Polish colours--red and white--may not be worn
or used in public decorations. If a Pole happens
to wear a red and white tie, he is fined. Boys
laying wreaths on the statue of Adam Mickiewicz
in Posen--which statue is only permitted to
stand in a sequestered spot behind railings--are
fined. Priests who allow grown-up persons to
join a school excursion are fined.
The Polish
miners who work the coalfields in Silesia were,
till 1913, paid one-half of the wages received by
other miners in Germany, besides being the
objects of gross tyranny on the part of the German
mineowners. Only a determined strike compelled
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? 26
POLAND
the German Government to redress their griev-
ances.
The Pole is, in fact, treated as the despised and
/ detested alien in the country that has belonged
[ to him centuries before Prussia rose into exist-
* ence. When Chancellor of the German Empire,
Bulow launched a studied insult against the
Polish subjects of William II, comparing their
high birth-rate to the propagation of a rabbit
warren, rabbits in Germany b'eing regarded as
vermin. Prussian officers, hearing fellow-travellers
talking to each other in Polish, bid them cease
speaking "that dogs' language. " The teacher in
the elementary school brands the language of the
pupils in terms that, in this country, children are
neither permitted to employ or hear. It may be
said with truth that every day of these latter
years has increased the weight of Prussia's iron
hand on the Poles within her rule. And yet the
Poles have not lost ground. They have gained it.
They have stood shoulder to shoulder, presenting
a front of mingled strength and spirit, with the
result that four million people have proved them-
selves stronger than a great military autocracy.
Every attack of the Prussian Government they
have parried with a counter thrust. The German
buys out the Poles from their land. The Poles
buy out the Germans and divide their estates
among Polish tenants. The Government boycotts
Polish goods. The Poles retaliate by boycotting
German goods. The upper class Poles are debarred
from ordinary professions. They overcome their
old prejudices, and take to trade with admirable
results to their nation. Poles are forbidden to
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 27
speak Polish in their meetings: so they hold
meetings over the frontier in Holland--before
the war, of course. So invariably is it the case that
in a mixed marriage between a Pole and a German
the German becomes Polish, and all the children
grow up Poles, that the German Government
has forbidden its functionaries to marry Polish
wives.
It might have been supposed that while Germany
is fighting for her existence she would have re-
laxed her oppression of the Poles. She has scattered
broadcast proclamations and promises that the
Poles take at their worth as "scraps of paper. "
And, in the meantime, her treatment of her Poles
at home continues on its old lines: so that the
Polish deputies have boldly refused to vote the
war subsidies. One instance may be recorded here.
The Poles in Prussian Poland organized a relief
fund for the assistance of their starving and
destitute brother Poles in those parts of Poland
over which the war has swept. That fund has been
confiscated and its originators punished by the
Prussian Government.
Abroad, the Polish cities that have fallen into
the hands of the German soldiers have all alike
suffered from the brutality of Prussian warfare.
Czenstochowa has been the scene of unnamable
outrages. Kalisz has been destroyed, its women
and children deliberately butchered. Warsaw
groans beneath the tyranny of the conqueror,
who has introduced there the same methods that
the citizens of Posen know too well.
Between the Pole and Prussian there is no single
bond of sympathy, similarity, or union. Polish
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? 28 POLAND
\ idealism, the Polish soul, the Polish tradition, are
\ all at absolute antagonism with the principles of
the Bernhardis and Bismarcks and their disciples.
! And yet--greatest of all the tragedies of this
I war ! --Polish youths, placed by their German
rulers in the post of danger, the vanguard, are
forced to fight in defence of a cause that is abhorrent
to them, and whose triumph would ensure the
ruin of their beloved nation. Commanded, in the
beginning of the war, to fire upon the Belgians,
who were struggling to defend their homes and
country, the Polish soldiers, rather than obey the
order, shot wide. That Polish boy may be taken
as typical who, as the Germans advanced upon
Louvain, ran to the hall of the University, tore
down the Polish flag and carried it under his
clothes on his flight to France, delivered from
Prussian capture.
/ Such is the rough outline of the last hundred
/ygars of Poland's history.
Through unparalleled misfortune, against odds
under which a less vivid and less heroic people
must have gone down, the Polish nation, battling
for dear life, has preserved an intense national
existence, has kept her ideals unimpaired. Her
soul remains, not merely alive, but passionate
and invincible. She represents a great principle.
She has proved, against fact, that the idea can
prevail over brute force; that the hope, the
spiritual conscience of a race, shall save her. Her
language, the noblest of Slavonic tongues, lives
on the lips of twenty-two million men and
women. Her literature, one of the most powerful
means by which patriotism and confidence were
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 29
kept alive in the hearts of an oppressed nation,
stands among the magnificent expressions of art
and idealism in European history. ^ Beset within
and without, exposed to all the deadly moral
perils of the conquered and persecuted, she has
emerged triumphant from her long ordeal. We
may confine ourselves here to one testimony alone,
that of a political study published in 1913 by a
Polish writer who, far from pronouncing a pane-
gyric upon his nation, does not hesitate to point
out her faults with unsparing frankness; faults,
which, as he says:
"Have been redeemed and compensated by
. . . nobility of sentiment, chivalrous spirit,
uprightness, love of liberty, patriotism, respect
for traditions, tolerance, faith in the future, all
virtues, which, after our disasters, have preserved
us from destruction, and which were like a cuirass
against which the arms of our enemies lost the
edge. They have not prevented our blood from
flowing, but they have saved us from hatred.
"Sweetness and nobility of character, while
rendering the work of enfranchisement more
difficult, have permitted the Poles to resist the
evil influences of servitude, and have guaranteed
them against demoralization and degradation.
That degradation, that servility, that hypocrisy,
that contempt of right, that hatred, those vices
of all sorts that are the fruit of oppression, Poland,
sweet and noble Poland, has not known them. "*
The same writer has stated that the political
* E. Starczewski, VEurope et la Pologne. Paris, 1913.
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? 30
POLAND
decadence of Poland which, in part, contributed
towards her fall may be traced back to the ex-
cessive ease with which the nation expanded. Her
conquest of Lithuania and Ruthenia was blood-
less. It was without effort that she became the
leading power of Eastern Europe. The exact
reverse has been her record since her partition.
It is by unending sacrifice and struggle that she
will have purchased her resurrection. Every great
national stake, every detail of homely life with its
perpetual background of large issues behind it,
from the general principle that Poland must and
shall rise again to the incident of a child in Prussian
Poland refusing to lisp her prayers in German
instead of in the tongue learnt at her mother's
knee, has been wrestled for with the heart's blood
of a nation. An immense spiritual and mental
strength must lie behind such a combat. This
strong and set purpose gives the clue to the whole
of Polish history, Polish thought, Polish art, since
the dismemberment of Poland. Kosciuszko, that
noblest of national heroes, fought for it. The
Polish legions, to their war-cry " Poland hath not
perished," fought for it. The youth of Poland, in
their two hopeless risings, died for it. It is this that
has enabled the Poles in Prussian Poland to stand
out, undismayed and unyielding, against the
forces of a great military empire. It has inspired
the literature of Poland that is its mouthpiece
and its messenger. It glows from Matejko's great
canvases of Polish history. It speaks through
Grottger's pictures of a nation's suffering, through
. the symbolism of Polish contemporary painters.
The mingled fire and sadness of Chopin is but the
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 31
voicing of the sorrows, the hopes, the heroic
memories of his mother country.
While these words are written, Poland is the
battlefield of Eastern Europe. Her fields are laid
waste, her towns, her villages, her dwellings, are
in flames and ruin. Her sons, compelled to serve
under one or another of the three powers that
partitioned their nation, are forced to fight,
brother against brother, friend against friend, to
lay down their lives by thousands without the
consolation of dying for their country. Devastated
by a war in which her all is at stake and in which
she has no voice, the condition of Poland is the
most tragic in all Europe.
"Three days later," wrote in 1846 the poet
Zygmunt Krasinski to a fellow Pole, " the resur-
rection shall come; but during those days how
many hearts shall break. " *
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I, Lw6w, 1882. To Con-
it an tine Gaszynski, March 30, 1846 (Polish).
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? CHAPTER II
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE OF
POLAND
AFTER the Rising of 1830, the story of
Poland becomes that of the long agony
of an idealistic and profoundly patriotic
race, and of its protracted battle for existence.
On one side, in the country itself, the prisons and
the mines were the price the Pole paid for remain-
ing a Pole. On the other, beyond the frontiers,
there were the throngs of Polish exiles, dragging
out lives of poverty, homesickness, and grief. The
nation lived on; but her life was mutilated,
abnormal, unlivable.
And yet those years when Poland had no
history except a monotony of suffering, no life
except that life jealously preserved against pro-
scription and penalty in the heart of every Pole,
coincided with the splendid outburst of Polish
literature. Unlike the three great empires of the
world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose pros-
perity inspired their golden age of letters, it was
the sorrows of Poland that gave birth to her great
romantic song which, for its tragic power, its
idealism, no less than its haunting beauty, ranks
among the noblest productions of European art.
Great as is the literature of Poland from an
artistic point of view, it stands on another plane
than that of literary value alone. In the first half
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 33
of the nineteenth century, the Polish poets rose
as the national teachers and moral leaders. They
spoke to the people held in bondage by the bitterest
facts of life, of the hope that would save them.
The youths of Poland were prohibited from learn-
ing their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in
the ordinary channels. They learnt them, there-
fore, of the poets who taught them the lessons of
devotion and self-immolation for a native country;
whose writings kept alive the fires of patriotism,
the Polish ideality and moral health, in young
souls beset by peril. The national literature was
no mere art, an element disconnected with the
deep things of life, written for recreation or re-
laxation. It $poke straight to a stern purpose. It
was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any
that she could have chosen, in the cause of Poland.
In this light the Polish poets regarded the poetry
they gave their people. The literature they brought
forth is, said Mickiewicz, speaking in the College
de France, "above all things true. Each work is
at the same time an action. " * Poland's poets
were more than her poets. They were her
patriots.
The Pole in Poland might not read the master-
pieces of his native literature in normal ways.
were published abroad, often at no little risk to
the author. Colporteurs smuggled them into the
country. Boys read them behind barred doors,
with one of their number posted in the street to
give the alarm should the police be near. After
one hurried but intense perusal they were thrown
banned by the censor. They
* Adam ftjickiewici! , Its Slayes,
p
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? 34
POLAND
into the fire. Prison and Siberia were the lot of
those readers who were discovered. The possession
of Mickiewicz's Ancestors sent a boy of seventeen
to the dungeon, where, maddened with terror
lest under the knout he should betray the names
of his companions, he burnt himself to death.
Hundreds of young men went to Siberia for
having read Krasinski's Temptation. Often the
only means by which the Polish poet could speak
to his nation, with any degree of safety to himself
or to the reader, was under the protection of an
allegory or some sort of veiled meaning, where
the Pole could read between the lines. Mickiewicz,
in the heart of Russia, wrote an epic of the revenge
of the Lithuanian, Konrad Wallenrod, on the
Teutonic knights, the oppressors of his country.
Every Pole knew for whom the Teutonic knights
stood. Krasinski bade his compatriots abjure the
weapons of vengeance, and work by love alone;
but he did so under the figure of a Greek
in the Rome of Heliogabalus. He warned
the Polish women against marriage with the
enemies of their nation; and the language of his
Summer's Night is so obscure as almost to fail in
its aim. He sought to arm the Polish youth
against those seductions of the Imperial Court
that had laid their siege to his own soul in vain;
yet the elaboration with which he designedly
disguised his point could not avert the conse-
quences to his readers. Even in a poem as objective
as Slowacki's Father of the Plague-stricken, the
lamentation of the father over his children dying
in the desert is said to represent the desolation of
a bereaved country.
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? THE 'NATIONAL LITERATURE 35
Poland, then, was assailed from every side. In
anguish of mind her poets and her thinkers sought
for some explanation of her tragedy to justify
the working of Providence, to save their country
from the atrophy and despair that would destroy
her as certainly as all exterior persecution. So
arose the dreams of a Polish national mysticism,
known by the name of Messianism. Its strange
and mournful glory casts over Poland's poetry, in
the days of Mickiewicz and Krasinski, a faint
spiritual kinship with the prophecies of those who
saw Sion irradiated with a mystical splendour as
the adored of the nations. Poland, says Messianism,
was rent asunder that her destruction might bring
salvation to the human race.
? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 15
settling Germans on Polish soil. The Napoleonic
wars diverted the attention of Prussian policy for
a time into other directions, and it appeared as
though Prussia were prepared to respect the rights
of the Poles she governed. But at the time of the
Polish insurrection of 1830 a change set in. Polish
soldiers who had crossed the Russian frontier into
Prussia were handed over by the latter to Russia
and to their death, or shot in cold blood by the
Prussian authorities; and the Prussian Govern-
ment began to treat its Polish subjects more
severely than it had hitherto done. When the
Polish rising broke out in iS? 3, Prussia entered
into agreement with Alexander II. Not only were
those Polish insurgents who had taken refuge in
Prussia imprisoned and sent back into Russia,
but, at the instigation of Bismarck, Prussia under-
took to support Russia in her reprisals against
Poland. Hence the similarity between the measures
of repression adopted by the Russian and Prussian
governments against the Poles in their respective
dominions. During the Franco-Prussian war,
Germany made a bid for Polish support by per-
mitting the military bands to play the Polish airs
as the Poles went to battle, which concession is
now withdrawn. But when she found herself
victorious, she had no further object in conciliat-
ing the Poles. She then, led by Bismarck, pro-
ceeded to the persecution which, in flagrant
violation of the Treaty of Vienna and of Frederick
William IV's solemn promise to protect the
liberties of his Polish subjects, has continued to
gather volume till it has reached its present
lengths.
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? i6
POLAND
The Kulturkampf that, in the seventies of the
nineteenth century, Bismarck directed against
the Catholic Church in Germany fell upon Prus-
sian Poland with the double violence of an attack
upon religion and nationality. The Archbishop
of Gnesen and Posen, Ledochowski, was thrown
into prison for refusing to allow the Polish children
to be taught their faith in German. He remained
two years there, and was then banished. Priests
were expelled from their parishes, penalized for
administering the sacraments. Over two hundred
thousand Polish Catholics were left without a
priest to minister to them the consolations of
their religion. Convents were closed and re-
ligious orders banished, several of which have
never been permitted to return. The Kulturkampf
died out. Then Bismarck opened his direct war
upon the Polish nation.
In 1885 forty thousand Poles, men, women,
and children, were ruthlessly deported from
Prussian Poland at forty-eight hours notice, be-
cause they were Poles who were not Prussian
subjects. They were turned out into the world,
homeless and friendless, to find a living as best
they could. Soon the Government was faced with
a serious shortage of labour in consequence of
the thousands of Polish labourers it had lost: and
it proposed to import Chinese coolies into the
heart of Europe to supply the place of the hard-
working, frugal Pole who might work no longer
in his country.
In the following year--1886--the Colonization
Bill was passed. Enormous grants of money
went to the foundation of the Commission of
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 17
Colonization, by which Polish land is bought up
and parcelled out at small rates to German settlers.
The Poles parried this attack by founding their
own land-bank, by which they in their turn bought
up land and let it out to Polish peasants. Again
and again immense sums have been voted by the
Prussian Government for German colonization
of Polish lands; and yet it was proved that the
Poles bought more rapidly than the Germans, and
that this attempt at Prussianization was a failure.
In 1896, therefore, the Government established
its own first right of purchase. From thenceforth
no Pole can ever re-acquire land that has passed
into the possession of the Commission. The
struggle for the soil, between those to whom it has
belonged for centuries and the Germans who are
determined to drive them out, continuously pro-
ceeds. In the centre of the Polish population Ger-
man colonists are planted, with German schools,
Lutheran churches and parsonages, for which the
Pole pays by heavy taxation--thus forced to
contribute to his own ruin. And yet, as the Pole
still continued to gain ground instead of losing it,
the German Government went further. A bill of
1907 prohibited Poles from building dwellings"
even on their own land. The poor Polish peasant,
whose dearest dream is to possess some portion
of his mother earth as his own, who will toil for
that cherished desire during a life-time, thus found
himself brought up against the bitter fact that the
simple joys for which he had striven so long, the
home on his own plot, were snatched away from
him just as he had won them. The cases con-
sequent on this law, that occurred shortly before
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? i8
POLAND
the outbreak of the present war, illustrate at once
the tragedy and the absurdity of Prussian methods.
A peasant was compelled to sleep in a caravan on
his own field, as he might not build a house. A
miller was driven to dig a cave to shelter himself
and his fourteen children on the river banks. He
might not have any other resting place, nor even
sleep in his mill.
Then came the Expropriation law, passed in
1908, by virtue of which the Polish landowner is,
at the bidding of the government, evicted from
his estate. The year before this measure became
law the great Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz,
himself a Russian subject, addressed an appeal to
the whole civilized world against the oppression
of which his fellow Poles under the Prussian
Government are the victims. It runs as follows:
"Sir,--The twentieth century has seen an
unheard of act carried out, an insult against
civilization, against right, against justice, and
against all those humanitarian conceptions which
are the foundation of life and of the intellectual
culture of modern society.
"For a long time, a Commission of Colonization
has existed in Prussian Poland, with the object of
buying Poles' estates in order to settle Germans
on them, and which pays for these properties
with funds to which the Poles themselves, Prussian
subjects, have been forced to contribute by taxes.
If to that we add the martyrdom of Polish children
in the German schools and the recently projected
law forbidding the use of the Polish language in
public assemblies, it seems impossible that iniquity
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 19
and the contempt of equality before the law could
be pushed further. And yet the Government,
whose principle is that ' might is right,' has not
been content with this.
"In fact, a bill for compulsory expropriation has
been presented to the Prussian Diet. The Poles,
who are subjects of the Prussian sceptre, will be
at last driven forth from that soil which is their
native land, that beloved earth where, for cen-
turies, long generations have been born, have
lived, and are buried.
"The part of Poland which the monarchy of
the Hohenzollerns has seized has never lit the
flames of revolution. She bears herself pacifically,
she strictly fulfils the painful duties that events
have imposed upon her. She pays the taxes, and
furnishes a military contingent whose valour
Bismarck himself more than once admired. Thus,
when the first news of this enforced expropriation
appeared in the European press, the project was
universally looked upon as a savage and mad
lucubration of some fanatics bereft not only of
moral sense but of all reason. Men felt sure that
a civilized state, which recognizes the right of
property as the corner stone of the social edifice,
would never go so far as to trample underfoot with
such brutality both that principle itself and the
most elementary conceptions of justice. Nobody
believed such a crime possible in a society that
calls itself Christian and considers itself as
such.
"And yet the Chancellor Biilow has presented
to the Prussian Diet a bill for the compulsory ex-
propriation of the Poles, and the Diet, instead of
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? 20
POLAND
sending the Chancellor to the study of law and
morality, sent on the bill to the Commission.
"The official news of this act has now been
spread abroad through all the world; and, to
the honour of humanity, it must be stated that
everywhere it has called forth a unanimous cry
of protestation and indignation. The European
press without distinction of side and party--and
with it all the independent German press--has
condemned the action of the Prussian Govern-
ment as a shameful attack on the natural rights of
humanity and against the Constitution that is in
force in the kingdom of Prussia.
"Every government, even the one in question,
is obliged to reckon with that universal indig-
nation and that universal contempt.
"But we Poles would wish this protest against
barbarism to endure as long as possible, and to
take on the vastest proportions. This is why we
do not consider the voice of the press sufficient,
obliged as it is to be occupied each day with new
events. This protest will not obtain durability,
and at the same time an immense authority, unles?
the most eminent representatives of science, litera-
ture, and art throughout the whole world consent
to express their opinion individually. That would
be the final judgment of the universal conscience
in the face of a crime that is without precedent;
and it would also be the most powerful plea for
the defence of an important portion of a civilized
nation which has deserved well of humanity.
"There is no question here of interfering with
the internal affairs of the Hohenzollern monarchy.
The question is a matter on which every civilized
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 21
man has the right to speak, and, above all, those
who are among the nations the pillars of civiliza-
tion and intellectual culture.
"It is for this reason that, Sir, we address
ourselves to you, earnestly begging you to pro-
nounce your opinion upon the bill presented by
the Prussian Government, the object of which
is to tear their land from the Poles by means of
compulsory expropriation. Naturally we do not
suppose for a single moment that your opinion
can be anything else than a word of indignation
and reprobation; but a public reproach, coming
from a man like you, will be the condemnation
of the greatest infamy in the history of the twen-
tieth century. Your answer will fill the Polish
nation with ardour and with hope, and will also
be a powerful support to all upright men in
Germany who, unwilling to see their country
dishonoured in the eyes of the whole universe,
fight steadily against the odious design of the
Prussian Government. "
The Expropriation Bill was first put into ex-
ecution in October, 1912, when. four Polish land-
owners were given orders to quit their homes.
The so-called compensation that they received
was so inadequate that they found their fortunes
reduced by one quarter or one third. On the eve
of the war a bill was under consideration which,
if passed, will disqualify every Pole from holding
property in that part of his country that at
present belongs to Prussia.
The battle for the Polish language proceeds on
equal lines with the struggle for the land.
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? 22
POLAND
In 1887 the Polish language was forbidden in
the elementary schools, with the exception of the
prayers and religious instruction, which remained
Polish. In 1905 that exception was withdrawn;
and from that time the Polish child has been
compelled to learn its religion and to recite its
prayers in German. The children refuse to pray .
or to be taught their faith in the language which
they do not understand, which is forced upon
them instead of their own mother tongue. They
are punished by detention or flogged; and the
instances of Polish children beaten to death by a
brutal Prussian master are unhappily not uncom-
mon. A parent whose boy is in a high fever after
such a flogging is fined if he does not send the
sick child to the house of detention, to which he is
condemned because he would not say his prayers
in German. The affair at Wreschen is still fresh
in the mind of every Pole. The children refused
to recite the prayers in German instead of Polish.
They were mercilessly flogged. The parents,
hearing their children's screams, ran to the school-
house and protested. Several of them--bread-
winners of the family--were sent to prison. Their
number included a poor woman, the mother of
young children, who was expecting her confine-
ment. She was condemned to prison for two years,
because, maddened at the sight of her children's
sufferings, she had abused the schoolmaster.
Fines, loss of employment, are the answers that
the parents' protests receive.
Polish ladies, determined that the children of
their nation shall not be deprived of their birth-
right, secretly gather them together and teach
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 23
them gratuitously the truths of their religion in
their own language. When discovered, these
ladies are thrown into prison, and treated there
as common malefactors.
No word of Polish may be uttered in class, or
between the children, in the elementary school.
The German master refuses to explain his meaning
in the only language that the children know,
because it is Polish. He illustrates the German
word he is teaching by pictures, by signs, in any
way rather than allow the pupils to hear their
own tongue spoken.
In the secondary schools Polish is proscribed;
Polish history, Polish subjects are dismissed from
the curriculum. But here the language may still be
taught as an extra lesson, once or twice a week
for three-quarters of an hour, and for two years
only. Even this concession, meagre enough when
we consider tjis peculiar difficulty and intricacy
of the Polish grammar, is hedged round with
vexatious hindrances^ TKe Polish boy in the
grammar-schools, however marked his abilities,
is debarred from scholarships and the government
stipends granted to successful scholars, and for
which, of course, his parents are taxed. Bullied
and persecuted by his German masters and school-
fellows, he leads the life of a dog. He is compelled
to sit and listen in indignant silence while, before
the whole class, the teacher calumniates his nation,
and expends his coarse ridicule on the beautiful
Polish language and on all that is Polish. For the
crime of having founded a private society among
themselves for the study of their literature and
history, a band of high-class Polish schoolboys
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? POLAND
were some years ago expelled from school, con-
demned to exclusion from every other school in
Germany, which involved the ruin of any such
career as is open to the Pole, with the added
penalty of three years service as privates in the
Prussian army. Likewise, schoolboys found with
Polish histories and works on Polish literature in
their possession run the same danger of ex-
pulsion.
The war upon the Polish language is not con-
fined to the limits of the school. Polish parents
I are not permitted to have Polish tutors and
governesses for their children. German officials
are authorized to enter a private house at any
moment to ascertain if the children are being
taught in Polish. The patriotic Polish mother will
not desist from teaching her children in their
native tongue their country's history and tra-
ditions; but she is driven to do so in the shelter
of her bedroom, as the one place in her house
which the German inspector is not allowed
to investigate.
The Polish language is forbidden in public
Polish assemblies. At the ticket office the Pole must
ask for his ticket in German; and, if he does not
know German, he must bring an interpreter with
him. A Polish waiter speaking Polish in a restaurant
is liable to instant dismissal. The peasant who
requires some remedy in the chemist's shop is not
allowed to ask for it in his own language. The
label Poison must not be written in Polish over the
medicine purchased by a Pole. The evidence of
the Pole in the law-courts must go through the
medium of a German interpreter. A poor Polish
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 25
man or woman who cannot take his or her oath in
a language not their own is sent to prison. The
Polish soldier, forced to serve in the German
army, may not speak Polish with a brother Pole
in uniform. The names of the Polish towns and
villages, the Polish streets, are rechristened by
some German title, as unrecognizable as senseless
to the Polish ear. The Polish infant, after being
baptized by the name its parents choose, is entered
on the register by the German officials under a
German name. Letters addressed in Polish are
detained at the post-office until the recipient
pays a fine. Telegrams may be sent in any and
every language--but not in Polish.
What has been well described as " Pole worry-
ing " extends to every branch of existence, small
or great. The diplomatic career, rank in the army
above a major's, municipal office, the jury, respon-
sible posts on the railway, are all closed to the
Pole, unless he will forswear his nationality. The
Polish national tunes may not be played. The
Polish colours--red and white--may not be worn
or used in public decorations. If a Pole happens
to wear a red and white tie, he is fined. Boys
laying wreaths on the statue of Adam Mickiewicz
in Posen--which statue is only permitted to
stand in a sequestered spot behind railings--are
fined. Priests who allow grown-up persons to
join a school excursion are fined.
The Polish
miners who work the coalfields in Silesia were,
till 1913, paid one-half of the wages received by
other miners in Germany, besides being the
objects of gross tyranny on the part of the German
mineowners. Only a determined strike compelled
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? 26
POLAND
the German Government to redress their griev-
ances.
The Pole is, in fact, treated as the despised and
/ detested alien in the country that has belonged
[ to him centuries before Prussia rose into exist-
* ence. When Chancellor of the German Empire,
Bulow launched a studied insult against the
Polish subjects of William II, comparing their
high birth-rate to the propagation of a rabbit
warren, rabbits in Germany b'eing regarded as
vermin. Prussian officers, hearing fellow-travellers
talking to each other in Polish, bid them cease
speaking "that dogs' language. " The teacher in
the elementary school brands the language of the
pupils in terms that, in this country, children are
neither permitted to employ or hear. It may be
said with truth that every day of these latter
years has increased the weight of Prussia's iron
hand on the Poles within her rule. And yet the
Poles have not lost ground. They have gained it.
They have stood shoulder to shoulder, presenting
a front of mingled strength and spirit, with the
result that four million people have proved them-
selves stronger than a great military autocracy.
Every attack of the Prussian Government they
have parried with a counter thrust. The German
buys out the Poles from their land. The Poles
buy out the Germans and divide their estates
among Polish tenants. The Government boycotts
Polish goods. The Poles retaliate by boycotting
German goods. The upper class Poles are debarred
from ordinary professions. They overcome their
old prejudices, and take to trade with admirable
results to their nation. Poles are forbidden to
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 27
speak Polish in their meetings: so they hold
meetings over the frontier in Holland--before
the war, of course. So invariably is it the case that
in a mixed marriage between a Pole and a German
the German becomes Polish, and all the children
grow up Poles, that the German Government
has forbidden its functionaries to marry Polish
wives.
It might have been supposed that while Germany
is fighting for her existence she would have re-
laxed her oppression of the Poles. She has scattered
broadcast proclamations and promises that the
Poles take at their worth as "scraps of paper. "
And, in the meantime, her treatment of her Poles
at home continues on its old lines: so that the
Polish deputies have boldly refused to vote the
war subsidies. One instance may be recorded here.
The Poles in Prussian Poland organized a relief
fund for the assistance of their starving and
destitute brother Poles in those parts of Poland
over which the war has swept. That fund has been
confiscated and its originators punished by the
Prussian Government.
Abroad, the Polish cities that have fallen into
the hands of the German soldiers have all alike
suffered from the brutality of Prussian warfare.
Czenstochowa has been the scene of unnamable
outrages. Kalisz has been destroyed, its women
and children deliberately butchered. Warsaw
groans beneath the tyranny of the conqueror,
who has introduced there the same methods that
the citizens of Posen know too well.
Between the Pole and Prussian there is no single
bond of sympathy, similarity, or union. Polish
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? 28 POLAND
\ idealism, the Polish soul, the Polish tradition, are
\ all at absolute antagonism with the principles of
the Bernhardis and Bismarcks and their disciples.
! And yet--greatest of all the tragedies of this
I war ! --Polish youths, placed by their German
rulers in the post of danger, the vanguard, are
forced to fight in defence of a cause that is abhorrent
to them, and whose triumph would ensure the
ruin of their beloved nation. Commanded, in the
beginning of the war, to fire upon the Belgians,
who were struggling to defend their homes and
country, the Polish soldiers, rather than obey the
order, shot wide. That Polish boy may be taken
as typical who, as the Germans advanced upon
Louvain, ran to the hall of the University, tore
down the Polish flag and carried it under his
clothes on his flight to France, delivered from
Prussian capture.
/ Such is the rough outline of the last hundred
/ygars of Poland's history.
Through unparalleled misfortune, against odds
under which a less vivid and less heroic people
must have gone down, the Polish nation, battling
for dear life, has preserved an intense national
existence, has kept her ideals unimpaired. Her
soul remains, not merely alive, but passionate
and invincible. She represents a great principle.
She has proved, against fact, that the idea can
prevail over brute force; that the hope, the
spiritual conscience of a race, shall save her. Her
language, the noblest of Slavonic tongues, lives
on the lips of twenty-two million men and
women. Her literature, one of the most powerful
means by which patriotism and confidence were
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 29
kept alive in the hearts of an oppressed nation,
stands among the magnificent expressions of art
and idealism in European history. ^ Beset within
and without, exposed to all the deadly moral
perils of the conquered and persecuted, she has
emerged triumphant from her long ordeal. We
may confine ourselves here to one testimony alone,
that of a political study published in 1913 by a
Polish writer who, far from pronouncing a pane-
gyric upon his nation, does not hesitate to point
out her faults with unsparing frankness; faults,
which, as he says:
"Have been redeemed and compensated by
. . . nobility of sentiment, chivalrous spirit,
uprightness, love of liberty, patriotism, respect
for traditions, tolerance, faith in the future, all
virtues, which, after our disasters, have preserved
us from destruction, and which were like a cuirass
against which the arms of our enemies lost the
edge. They have not prevented our blood from
flowing, but they have saved us from hatred.
"Sweetness and nobility of character, while
rendering the work of enfranchisement more
difficult, have permitted the Poles to resist the
evil influences of servitude, and have guaranteed
them against demoralization and degradation.
That degradation, that servility, that hypocrisy,
that contempt of right, that hatred, those vices
of all sorts that are the fruit of oppression, Poland,
sweet and noble Poland, has not known them. "*
The same writer has stated that the political
* E. Starczewski, VEurope et la Pologne. Paris, 1913.
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? 30
POLAND
decadence of Poland which, in part, contributed
towards her fall may be traced back to the ex-
cessive ease with which the nation expanded. Her
conquest of Lithuania and Ruthenia was blood-
less. It was without effort that she became the
leading power of Eastern Europe. The exact
reverse has been her record since her partition.
It is by unending sacrifice and struggle that she
will have purchased her resurrection. Every great
national stake, every detail of homely life with its
perpetual background of large issues behind it,
from the general principle that Poland must and
shall rise again to the incident of a child in Prussian
Poland refusing to lisp her prayers in German
instead of in the tongue learnt at her mother's
knee, has been wrestled for with the heart's blood
of a nation. An immense spiritual and mental
strength must lie behind such a combat. This
strong and set purpose gives the clue to the whole
of Polish history, Polish thought, Polish art, since
the dismemberment of Poland. Kosciuszko, that
noblest of national heroes, fought for it. The
Polish legions, to their war-cry " Poland hath not
perished," fought for it. The youth of Poland, in
their two hopeless risings, died for it. It is this that
has enabled the Poles in Prussian Poland to stand
out, undismayed and unyielding, against the
forces of a great military empire. It has inspired
the literature of Poland that is its mouthpiece
and its messenger. It glows from Matejko's great
canvases of Polish history. It speaks through
Grottger's pictures of a nation's suffering, through
. the symbolism of Polish contemporary painters.
The mingled fire and sadness of Chopin is but the
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 31
voicing of the sorrows, the hopes, the heroic
memories of his mother country.
While these words are written, Poland is the
battlefield of Eastern Europe. Her fields are laid
waste, her towns, her villages, her dwellings, are
in flames and ruin. Her sons, compelled to serve
under one or another of the three powers that
partitioned their nation, are forced to fight,
brother against brother, friend against friend, to
lay down their lives by thousands without the
consolation of dying for their country. Devastated
by a war in which her all is at stake and in which
she has no voice, the condition of Poland is the
most tragic in all Europe.
"Three days later," wrote in 1846 the poet
Zygmunt Krasinski to a fellow Pole, " the resur-
rection shall come; but during those days how
many hearts shall break. " *
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I, Lw6w, 1882. To Con-
it an tine Gaszynski, March 30, 1846 (Polish).
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? CHAPTER II
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE OF
POLAND
AFTER the Rising of 1830, the story of
Poland becomes that of the long agony
of an idealistic and profoundly patriotic
race, and of its protracted battle for existence.
On one side, in the country itself, the prisons and
the mines were the price the Pole paid for remain-
ing a Pole. On the other, beyond the frontiers,
there were the throngs of Polish exiles, dragging
out lives of poverty, homesickness, and grief. The
nation lived on; but her life was mutilated,
abnormal, unlivable.
And yet those years when Poland had no
history except a monotony of suffering, no life
except that life jealously preserved against pro-
scription and penalty in the heart of every Pole,
coincided with the splendid outburst of Polish
literature. Unlike the three great empires of the
world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose pros-
perity inspired their golden age of letters, it was
the sorrows of Poland that gave birth to her great
romantic song which, for its tragic power, its
idealism, no less than its haunting beauty, ranks
among the noblest productions of European art.
Great as is the literature of Poland from an
artistic point of view, it stands on another plane
than that of literary value alone. In the first half
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 33
of the nineteenth century, the Polish poets rose
as the national teachers and moral leaders. They
spoke to the people held in bondage by the bitterest
facts of life, of the hope that would save them.
The youths of Poland were prohibited from learn-
ing their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in
the ordinary channels. They learnt them, there-
fore, of the poets who taught them the lessons of
devotion and self-immolation for a native country;
whose writings kept alive the fires of patriotism,
the Polish ideality and moral health, in young
souls beset by peril. The national literature was
no mere art, an element disconnected with the
deep things of life, written for recreation or re-
laxation. It $poke straight to a stern purpose. It
was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any
that she could have chosen, in the cause of Poland.
In this light the Polish poets regarded the poetry
they gave their people. The literature they brought
forth is, said Mickiewicz, speaking in the College
de France, "above all things true. Each work is
at the same time an action. " * Poland's poets
were more than her poets. They were her
patriots.
The Pole in Poland might not read the master-
pieces of his native literature in normal ways.
were published abroad, often at no little risk to
the author. Colporteurs smuggled them into the
country. Boys read them behind barred doors,
with one of their number posted in the street to
give the alarm should the police be near. After
one hurried but intense perusal they were thrown
banned by the censor. They
* Adam ftjickiewici! , Its Slayes,
p
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? 34
POLAND
into the fire. Prison and Siberia were the lot of
those readers who were discovered. The possession
of Mickiewicz's Ancestors sent a boy of seventeen
to the dungeon, where, maddened with terror
lest under the knout he should betray the names
of his companions, he burnt himself to death.
Hundreds of young men went to Siberia for
having read Krasinski's Temptation. Often the
only means by which the Polish poet could speak
to his nation, with any degree of safety to himself
or to the reader, was under the protection of an
allegory or some sort of veiled meaning, where
the Pole could read between the lines. Mickiewicz,
in the heart of Russia, wrote an epic of the revenge
of the Lithuanian, Konrad Wallenrod, on the
Teutonic knights, the oppressors of his country.
Every Pole knew for whom the Teutonic knights
stood. Krasinski bade his compatriots abjure the
weapons of vengeance, and work by love alone;
but he did so under the figure of a Greek
in the Rome of Heliogabalus. He warned
the Polish women against marriage with the
enemies of their nation; and the language of his
Summer's Night is so obscure as almost to fail in
its aim. He sought to arm the Polish youth
against those seductions of the Imperial Court
that had laid their siege to his own soul in vain;
yet the elaboration with which he designedly
disguised his point could not avert the conse-
quences to his readers. Even in a poem as objective
as Slowacki's Father of the Plague-stricken, the
lamentation of the father over his children dying
in the desert is said to represent the desolation of
a bereaved country.
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? THE 'NATIONAL LITERATURE 35
Poland, then, was assailed from every side. In
anguish of mind her poets and her thinkers sought
for some explanation of her tragedy to justify
the working of Providence, to save their country
from the atrophy and despair that would destroy
her as certainly as all exterior persecution. So
arose the dreams of a Polish national mysticism,
known by the name of Messianism. Its strange
and mournful glory casts over Poland's poetry, in
the days of Mickiewicz and Krasinski, a faint
spiritual kinship with the prophecies of those who
saw Sion irradiated with a mystical splendour as
the adored of the nations. Poland, says Messianism,
was rent asunder that her destruction might bring
salvation to the human race.
