No More Learning

Byzantine culture found an asylum in Italy, where the
literary treasures of the classical world, for centuries
warehoused by the tight-laced and inappreciative theo-
logians of the Bosphorus, were enthusiastically wel-
comed, shook off their dust, and emerged in all their
pristine splendour. The anti-monarchical policy of Rome,
again, had surprising benefits in store for the Western
Slavs, since it weakened the temporal power of the
German emperors and simultaneously allowed the Poles
and the Czechs to reassert their political independence,
which, however, never assumed proportions formidable
enough to excite the jealousy of the Holy See. Harm-
less while faithful to Rome, the Teutons, as soon as
their vitality had been regenerated by the Reformation,
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? 6 POLISH LITERATURE
became dangerous to Poland, and from that time onward
the Poles were menaced on both sides by peoples whose
hostility, originating in variety of race, was accentuated
by difference of confession, by the Germans in the West
and the Russians in the East.
To the North their neighbours were the Lithuanians,
a gentle and bucolic people, who, united to the Poles by
a political accident, were destined from amongst the
ranks of their polonized aristocracy to lend to the roll
of Polish letters some of its brightest names. Their
southern neighbours were the Slovaks, early over-
shadowed by the Magyars, fresh from Asia, but with
these the Poles had comparatively little intercourse,
divided from them as they were by the Carpathians,
their one natural boundary. For us in England, with
our one panacea, the North Sea and English Channel,
it is difficult to appreciate the horror of having frontiers
on all sides open to attack, for the Poles early lost con-
trol of what little coast they originally had, retaining
hold only on Danzig, allowing the Teutonic Knights to
take firm root in East Prussia, where their power, often
quelled, but never extinguished, smouldered on, a con-
stant menace to its neighbours, destined to bring about
their final ruin. The Poles found no difficulty in admin-
istering, from time to time, severe blows at these adven-
titious neighbours, but always happy-go-lucky and
debonair, they could never bring themselves to crush or
oust them. In those days the immense importance of
having untrammelled access to the ocean was not fully
understood, and given one port on the coast, Danzig,
and free communication down the Vistula to it, the
Poles, thus enabled to export their surplus cereals and
in so doing amass facile and unexpected fortunes, asked
no more. They seem not to have realized that with
Prussians to the east of it and Prussians to the west of
it, the control of their unique harbour was qualified
and incomplete.
Besides leaving the Teutons on their borders un-
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? POLISH LITERATURE 7
disturbed, the Poles encouraged them to overrun the
country, and the Germanization of the Polish towns,
which began in the thirteenth century, acquired pro-
portions such that Polish was not to be heard spoken
in the streets of Cracow. The reason of this peaceful
invasion was the fact that the Poles, people of pre-
eminently rural pursuits, frequenting the towns only
for political or social gatherings, were unable of them-
selves to cope with the demands for material improve-
ment and to take part in the increasing industrial activity
which even in so agricultural a country as Poland were
in course of time inevitable; to fulfil these necessary
functions there were none more proper than the thrifty
and tidy Germans.
Although there was at that time no racial animosity
on the part either of the new-comers or on that of their
hosts, the growing danger of a permanently established
exotic bourgeoisie became apparent even to the non-
chalant Poles, who, after the severe defeat inflicted by
them on the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in East
Prussia in 1410, and the temporary eclipse of Prussian
power thereby entailed, realized that steps to deal with
these anomalous urban conditions must be initiated
without further delay. When it came to the point, the
Poles found they had been making mountains out of
mole-hills, and the assimilation of the Germans, whose
nationality has never been wider than their own frontiers,
was accomplished with rapidity and ease.
But the strength of the German element in Poland
during the two centuries of its unrestricted development
can be gauged by the influence of the language of these
alien citizens on that of their foster-country; Polish,
namely, has borrowed from German the words for
numberless articles of commerce, the appellations of
municipal offices, besides the expressions for a whole
series of abstract conceptions, such as: condition,
direction, relation, computation, salvation, representation,
which might, it would have seemed, in view of the
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? 8 POLISH LITERATURE
immense influence in the country of Latin, the language
of Church and State, have been, as they were in England,
introduced from that source.
The fact, however, that the Poles so early appropriated
a number of abstract expressions from their German
neighbours, neither from Latin, which held the monopoly
of culture, nor as other of the Slavonic nations have
since done, coining words in etymological imitation of
Latin, often in the process violating their own language,
under the misapprehension they were ennobling it, this
fact is an interesting illustration of Polish receptivity
and broad-mindedness, of the capability of the language
to digest and assimilate foreign mouthfuls ; these old
German words too lend an archaic and not unpleasant
colour to the language, besides affording the opportunity
of creating doublets at will from Latin, for the sake of
humour or style, as occasion may demand.
The Jews, too, from early times formed a large part
of the urban population in Poland, but, unlike the Ger-
mans, they have never been assimilated to any extent.
Encouraged to come to the country by its rulers for
the promotion of trade, they were granted facilities
denied them at that time in all other European lands,
but it must be admitted that in Poland's hour of need
they have not stood by her. Important to the social
and economic history of the country, they play no role
in its literature, nor has their speech affected Polish.
As for Lithuania and Russia, with both of which
countries Poland was always in uninterrupted contact,
the languages of neither of them have influenced Polish,
which, on the contrary, wherever it was politically
supreme, and that was for many centuries over the whole
of Western Russia, for all purposes of social and official
intercourse ousted the vernacular, in proportion as the
aristocracy in those lands became polonized or yielded
before the immigrant nobility of the suzerain power.
Czech, too, though there was, in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, a certain exchange of intellectual
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? POLISH LITERATURE 9
ware between Poland and Bohemia, has left little mark
on the Polish language.
Poland, territorially shapeless and ungainly, with
boundaries perpetually fluid, open to both peaceful and
armed invasion on a dozen fronts, harbouring immense
quantities of resident foreigners, and weakened by the
chronic if stifled discontent of the peasants against the
peers, yet possessed extraordinary national vitality,
which was symbolized then, as it is to-day, in the
language.
Still it was many years before this admirable medium
of expression was appreciated and turned to account ;
for all literary purposes it was long obscured by Latin,
which was considered the only decent language for the
conveyance of serious information. This error, prevalent
all over Roman Catholic Europe in the early middle
ages, assumed exaggerated proportions in Poland and
Hungary. The Poles cannot be blamed for falling into
this mistake; it was only natural they should try to
emulate their co-religionists in other more advanced
countries, but it is no less astonishing than it is un-
fortunate that such an illusion should have mesmerized
them for so long. With one or two notable exceptions,
all Polish authors, if they wished to write anything
impressive, if they wished to create anything which
they hoped would have permanent value, anything, in
fact, except that which they considered ephemeral and
trivial personal satires, facetious tales, epigrams, and
novelettes wrote in Latin, while works of grave import
such as histories, political and philosophical disquisitions,
even memoirs, they continued to compose in that language
till the middle of the eighteenth century.
For long inaccessible to and insurmountable by them,
owing to its remoteness and strangeness, Latin, once
established, fascinated the Poles, and for centuries held
them in its inflexible grip ; their early distaste for it and
arduous apprenticeship in it they redeemed later by
assiduous and intensive cultivation of its standard works,
B
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? io POLISH LITERATURE
and, though inexpert in prosody (the Poles used to quote
in self-mockery the doggerel line: 'nos Poloni non
curamus quantitatem syllabarum' [sic]), they prided
themselves in imitating the methods and continuing the
traditions of the best authors, making up for want of
individuality by elaboration of style.
Yet the Church, through whose agency Latin had been
introduced, the hierarchy, to whose ranks almost ex-
clusively what men of letters there then were belonged,
found this language was too cold and severe to appeal
to the masses, especially to the women-folk of all classes,
on whom the success of the new religion so much
depended. Therefore in the thirteenth century, when
the country was distracted by dynastic quarrels within
and terrorized by Tatar incursions without, and the
demand for spiritual reinforcement rose to its height,
the Church perceived and seized its opportunity ; steps
were taken in high ecclesiastical quarters to interpolate
more popular episodes in the order of the liturgy, and,
to the delight of the people, the arid latinity of the Mass
became interspersed with refreshing hymns, psalms,
prayers, and sermons in the vernacular. It is to this
accident that is due the existence of those few specimens
of Polish as it was spoken in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries that have survived.
In this respect Polish literature is immeasurably
poorer than Russian, which possesses vast quantities of
traditional folk-epics, folk-tales, ceremonial songs, forming
an inexhaustible mine of material for ethnographers and
philologists. No doubt there must also have been in
Poland similar productions of the popular imagination,
anonymous creations handed on from generation to
generation, elaborated and embellished by each in
turn ; but whether because they were less fostered and
cherished by the people themselves than in Russia,
or, which is more likely, because they fell an easier
prey to the jealous and prudish censoriousness of the
hierarchy, able to keep their flocks in stricter control
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? POLISH LITERATURE n
than were their colleagues in the limitless expanses of
Muscovy, be the reason what it may, they have not
come down to us; those examples of early Polish
that are extant are not the spontaneous expression of
immemorial beliefs and fancies, but artificial works
whose composition was dictated by the interests of the
Church.
The fourteenth century began with the accession to
the Polish throne of the Czech, Prince Wenceslas, and
for a short time the influence of Bohemia, more civilized
than Poland, in close touch with Western Europe and
already possessing a university in Prague, became
predominant. It ended with the marriage of the
daughter and heiress of King Louis of Hungary and
Poland to Ladislas Jagiello, Prince of Lithuania; as
a result of this desirable and convenient match, Poland
peacefully and economically acquired not only a new
dynasty, but also a vast accession of territory, wealth,
and power, and became a determining factor in European
calculations.
It was during the fifteenth century that the political
power of Poland reached its height. The territorial
union of Lithuania with Poland, symbolized in the
matrimonial junction of their reigning families, crowned
with the successful repulse of the nation's enemies,
had trebled the size of the country, lent greater and
more dignified proportions to the whole organization
of the State, and facilitated a more rapid and consistent
development of material and intellectual resources.
But simultaneously began that increase in the power
of the nobles and squires, that multiplication of privi-
leges, that premature development of parliamentary
institutions to the detriment of the central authority,
which eventually proved the ruin of the country.
For the moment, however, its position was one of
unprecedented and unequalled prosperity; in the
intellectual life of the people this was symbolized by
the establishment and efflorescence of the University
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? 12 POLISH LITERATURE
of Cracow. Tentatively mooted by Casimir the Great
in 1364, it was founded and confirmed in 1400 owing to
the initiative and energy of Queen Jadwiga, who did
not live to see the realization of her project.
This seat of learning rendered invaluable service to
the cause of civilization and enlightenment in Poland ;
it provided a most important contribution to Polish
literature in the person of its alumnus Jan (John)
Dlugosz, the first Polish historian and most conspicuous
author in the fifteenth century. A dignitary of the
Church, and tutor of the royal children, he was always
true to the ultra-conservative maxims of those circles
in which he moved; deeply religious and an uncom-
promising patriot, his chronicle was a work of immense
and conscientious labour, an idealization of the time in
which he lived and of the institutions that had made his
country what it was.
Refreshingly subjective, he would omit facts which
discorded with his theories, yet was averse from
distortion of the truth. An easy-going critic, he lacked
the sense of historical perspective, a faculty of later
date, and it is by his patriotism and devotion, by his
assiduity, by the proportions of his labour, the in-
credible variety of sources from which he commanded
his information, that he impresses us now. Unfortu-
nately, obedient to the order of the day, he wrote
exclusively in Latin ; so did another prominent writer
of the fifteenth century, John Ostrorog, the first author
from the ranks of the lay aristocracy.
A pupil of Western Europe, he composed, on return-
ing to his country, a pamphlet full of the bitterest
criticisms of the domestic abuses and ecclesiastical
pretensions, to which his eyes were wide open, those
of Dlugosz half-closed.
This pamphlet was the first breath of the fresh air
of humanism, about to dispel the chilling mists of
asceticism and scholasticism in which the Polish literary
world was becoming more and more impenetrably
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? POLISH LITERATURE 13
enveloped; it was at the same time the first political
brochure, a form of literature which acquired immense
vogue in subsequent centuries, in which Poles always
delighted to vent their aptitude for satire, give play to
their ready wit, and indulge in the favourite pastime of
polemics.
This first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the
continued ascendancy of Latin as the literary language
and the growing discredit and degradation of the
vernacular ; this in spite of the fact that Polish was
making headway amongst the upper classes in the
newly-acquired territories to the East, whither families
migrated in numbers from Poland proper and where
by their urbanity and sociability they converted to their
language, if not to their faith, those Lithuanian and
Russian nobles who had till then been faithful to the
social traditions of Muscovy.
Yet while in the fifteenth century the use of Latin
for all purposes of literature, and indeed for any kind
of writing, was confined almost exclusively to eccle-
siastical circles, because authorship amongst the laity
was still uncommon, in the first half of the sixteenth
century, with the growth of education and of the desire
to communicate with each other amongst the landed
aristocracy, Latin became the language of society. To
write any one a letter in Polish implied that the recipient
was deficient in elementary education, and could not
be done without preliminary justification. Records
even exist, of the year 1534, of formal prohibitions to
print in Polish having been issued by the hierarchy,
prohibitions that called forth praiseworthy remon-
strance.
What little was written in Polish during this time
was to satisfy the just demands of the ladies, weary of
homilies and liturgies, and inexpert in Latin ; they
were accordingly supplied with translations of edifying
tales and fables, the most talented purveyor of which
was a doctor and citizen of Lublin, by name Biernat,
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? 14 POLISH LITERATURE
who rendered his literature an additional service by
seasoning his adaptations with a sprinkling of homely
Polish proverbs. That these translations were destined
chiefly for the use of women is evident from the
prefaces, which e. g. chaff their readers with innate
curiosity inherited from Eve. One translator hazarded
the admission that it was owing to their fear of the
sharper wits of women-folk that men by the use of
Latin excluded them from the fields of science. The
general awakening to the importance of their own
language came when, in the interests of propagating the
Reformation amongst the people, it was found that any
language but the vernacular was useless.
The second half of the sixteenth century, the age of
the Reformation, a little belated in Poland, is known as
the golden age of Polish literature, and was brilliantly
inaugurated by the poet Nicholas Rey, who published
his first work in 1543, and, ignorant of Latin, was able
with fruit of his fertile wit, by his invention and
originality to lay firm the foundations of the national
literature. Up to his time what had been written in
Polish was mostly translated from other languages for
the benefit of lady-readers; Rey's pithy joviality, his
searching satire were directed against the public at
large, and won him wide popularity, especially amongst
the supporters of the reformed religion, of which he was
a stanch adherent.
The progress of the Reformation into Poland from
Prussia was at first slow, the conservatism of the people
and the indifference of the nobility were against it ; but
the new religion made considerable strides amongst the
citizens, and when the nobles understood that con-
version to it would free them from what little control
over them the Church and State still claimed, many of
them embraced it. The University of Cracow, no longer
at the apex of its fame, once more meandering in the
maze of scholasticism, which it tried to exploit in the
services of counter-propaganda, offered passive and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 15
short-sighted resistance to the new faith by shutting its
doors to all heretics.
But Poland, as a whole always honourably dis-
tinguished for perhaps excessive tolerance, could not
be roused, in spite of papal fulminations, to take active
steps against the progress of the new religion, which it
may almost be said to have killed with kindness. The
confessional history of Poland is complacent and edify-
ing compared with that of its Eastern and Western
neighbours. The Inquisition never developed more
than academic activity in Poland, where mutual toler-
ance was a watchword at a time when the policy of the
Church in other countries was the reverse of Christian.
The Reformation certainly seemed at one moment to be
carrying all before it, but several causes contributed to
a decay of the new faith which was as unexpected as
had been its success. Lutheranism failed to appeal to
the peasants, who resented the abolition of hagiolatry
and preferred having to conciliate numberless interven-
ing saints to what struck them as the almost shocking
directness of the new religion ; besides they were acute
enough to perceive that the landlords, once rid of all
ecclesiastical control, would become more relentless
taskmasters than ever. Again, the want of unanimity
amongst the reformed, the fissiparous multiplication of
their sects, their mutual jealousies, bewildered and dis-
couraged those whom they might otherwise have
attracted. Finally, the appearance at this juncture of
the Jesuits, who tactfully adapted their formulae to
the needs of the situation and the character of their
public, turned the scales, and Poland speedily re-
lapsed into her pristine devotion to Rome, tranquil and
profound.
Thanks to his heresy, the poet Rey suffered almost
total eclipse for many years ; Poland, counter-reformed
by the Jesuits, was no longer as tolerant as before, and
his complete rehabilitation is largely due to the efforts
of his countryman Professor Bruckner, the talented and
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? 16 POLISH LITERATURE
distinguished exponent of Slavonic philology in the
University of Berlin.
The Reformation, however volatile its confessional
influence, was the direct cause of the permanent recog-
nition of Polish as a literary language, and by thus dis-
crediting Latin, which was preparing for a series of
fresh triumphs, fruit of the humanistic movement, rather
took the wind out of the sails of the Renaissance.
But the influences of humanism had already been at
work in Poland, and were betrayed by the elegance of
form and diction, as well as by the nobility of thought,
which the authors of the golden age of Polish literature
displayed when they came to write in the vernacular.
Rey wrote a number of didactic and satiric poems, in
the form of conversations between members of different
classes of society, or under such titles as ' mirror ' and
' true representation ' of contemporary morals, of which
they give a vivid and invaluable picture. These poems
are full of the practical philosophy of the time, which
they sugared with an exquisite coating of language,
rhyme, and rhythm, and seasoned with generous doles
of the racy national humour. A gifted musician and
singer, an inveterate huntsman, an indefatigable bon-
viveur, he was able to enjoy to the full that personal
popularity which these bents assured him amongst his
countrymen, devotees of sociability and sport.
An adept in mundane accomplishments, Rey had also
a more serious side to his nature ; his homilies and
adaptations of the New Testament, written to further
the propaganda of the Reformation, were very widely
read, while their style was so admirable that Rey could
claim to be the founder of Polish prose, no less than the
first writer of original Polish verse.
The greatest poetical talent of the golden age was
that of Kochanowski, the first Polish lyrist, and the
most gifted poet of independent Poland. A traveller in
Italy and France, he had come under the influence of
Ariosto and Ronsard, and was stimulated by their
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? POLISH LITERATURE 17
example to create real poetry in his native language.
He was the first of his countrymen to devote himself
whole-heartedly to his art, to look upon the profession
of a man of letters as an honourable calling, and not
merely as a stepping-stone to preferment. Not a genius,
he had heart and imagination, and infallible taste; his
mind was broad, though not profound, and his artistic
sense was highly developed. He was a humorist and
a classic, able to invest his own compositions with the
grace and proportion of those of Rome and of the
Renaissance. A fervent Christian and faithful Catholic,
he was alive to the faults of the hierarchy and preferred
the calm of country life to participation in the con-
fessional battles of the day.
Besides writing pastoral poems, idylls of village life,
at a time when nature still repelled more than it attracted,
he wrote a drama, which, with a classical subject, was
a transparent allegory of the ominous political infirmity
of his country. His best works were a verse adaptation
of the Psalter, and a series of threnodies, written on the
death of his little girl, full of pathetic and poignant
beauty, ranging from expressions of utter despair to
glimpses of reconciliation with the inevitable.
His aesthetic equilibrium, his perfection of form, his
command of metaphor, and his freedom from the classical
swathing-bands that trammelled the school of Ronsard,
won Kochanowski a shoal of imitators, while main-
taining him high above the level any of them ever
reached.
But this age counted a number of other writers who
struck out lines of their own, and each in his way
acquired distinction and fame : such were Bielski the
historian, who performed, in writing his Universal
History in Polish, a feat without precedent, and one
not paralleled till the nineteenth century; Skarga, the
genius of the pulpit and incomparable leader of the
Jesuits in Poland ; Klonowicz, the citizen poet and
moralist ; Orzechowski, the cultured and gifted polemist,
c
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? i8 POLISH LITERATURE
who became a priest, but conscious that the Church
needed reform waged stubborn war on, amongst other
things, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, his
supreme disregard for which he aptly illustrated by
courageously marrying a wife ; another character of the
time was Count Zamojski, who founded a university on
his own property in the country, surrounded himself
there with a brilliant coterie of authors and thinkers,
and for long eclipsed the seat of learning in the capital.
Quantities of this sixteenth-century literature have been
lost; printing was expensive, fires were common, but
from what remains it is possible to argue the extra-
ordinary spontaneousness of the intellectual develop-
ment, the prevalence and high level of culture in Poland
at that time; this was due in part, no doubt, to the
humanistic currents which penetrated Poland from Italy,
spread on their return to their country by the innumerable
Poles who visited and studied at Padua and at other
Italian universities, due in part too to the Reformation
which reached Poland from Germany and taught the
Poles the value of prose, just as humanism opened their
eyes to the beauty of poetry in their own language.
Yet credit must be given to the ground on which these
seeds fell, to whose growth Poland lent a character
eminently original. No one could maintain that the
literature of Poland's so-called golden age was a purely
national product; it had produced no real genius, it was
always overshadowed and influenced by the literary
tendencies of other countries. Yet it contained much
that was eminently characteristic of Poland, much that
could not have been produced except under the peculiar
conditions of Polish life, facts that militate against its
successful translation into any foreign language. One
of its healthiest and most gratifying characteristics was
the extraordinary sense of corporate civic responsibility
displayed by almost all its representatives; ardent patriots,
anxious to inculcate into their readers their own sense of
duty, they were never weary of exposing the abuses and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 19
conjuring the defects from which their country suffered.
From Kochanowski in his poems to Skarga in his
sermons, one and all were conscious that Poland was
on the wrong tack, that the ship was already entangled
in the Sargasso sea of anarchy from which it was never
to emerge entire; poets and preachers, historians and
pamphleteers echoed the one cry: we are perishing.
This general sense amongst the intellectual classes of
impending calamity to the State, of Poland's inevitable
doom, at a time when jeremiads were really premature,
when Poland was still compact within and formidable
without, are in all the more creditable contrast to the
blind complacency and criminal optimism characteristic
of Polish society throughout the seventeenth and the
first half of the eighteenth centuries, when the country
was actually tottering to disruption.
By the end of the sixteenth century, it is true, the
extinction of the hereditary dynasty of the Jagiellos had
enabled the team of aristocrats and squires to break
through the last traces of royal control which still held
them in nominal check: the nobles had, by making
kingship elective, robbed it of power ; they had hand-
cuffed the peasants to the soil, confined the citizens to
the cities, and made the tenure of any and every office
conditional on ownership of land; they had, with a
delicious sense of paradox, made unanimity a sine qua
non of all fresh legislation, and so rendered nugatory
every attempt at reform, for unanimity was the one
condition which the Poles, the most urbane, gregarious,
and sociable of people, but always coming to fisticuffs
whenever two or three of them were gathered together
in their country's interest, could never attain.
Yet, in spite of this premiation of individuality, this
organized anarchy or rather panarchy, this distorted
conception of democracy, in spite of the enormous in-
crease of wealth and luxury, the backbone of the nation
had not yet been sapped, victories were reported abroad,
intellectual triumphs celebrated at home, while the exist-
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? 20 . POLISH LITERATURE
ence of self-criticism, though exaggerated, showed that
the national mind was healthy, present and alert.
The history of Polish literature in the seventeenth and
first half of the eighteenth centuries is, in spite of the
appearance of occasional and meteoric talents, character-
ized by stagnation and decay. In contrast to the sixteenth
century, of which the chief features were variety and
originality of talent, perfection of language and indepen-
dence of style, the seventeenth century, the age in Poland
of exaggerated individuality in politics, was one of grey
uniformity of intellectual development. The religious
waywardness of the sixteenth was followed by whole-
sale reversion and unbroken fidelity to the mother-Church
in the seventeenth century. The number of people who
took part in literature reached amazing proportions,
but few acquired positions of distinction or command.
Always gifted orators, the Poles now spent their time
in justifying and preserving the disorder by which their
country was distracted, and in defending the miscon-
ceived liberty in which the minority throve, the political
assemblies were flooded with eloquence, society with
endless streams of poetry religious and political, lyric
and historical, epic, didactic, romantic, erotic and pas-
toral, while the air of the cities was filled with quips
and squibs, lampoons and pasquinades. The growing
mania for crests and connections, for heraldry and
genealogy, which grew in importance as great charac-
ters became more rare, for baroque panegyrics, which
became more voluminous in proportion as there was
less to extol, all pointed to intellectual deterioration.
Latin regained ground it had lost, while the habit of
latinizing Polish prose became incurable a style later
dubbed maccaroniism ; linguistic purity was only pre-
served in poetry and in the pulpit.
The people, bemused with easy living, benumbed
with verse and oratory, were yet startled by occasional
and unexpected triumphs in the field, but the endless
wars with Sweden and Turkey, who should have been
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? POLISH LITERATURE 21
Poland's best friends, exhausted the scattered forces of
the country, and prepared the way for the really danger-
ous enemies, Russia and Prussia, unappreciated because
so near at hand, already sharpening their claws in anti-
cipation of the feast.
During the reigns of the Saxon kings in the first half
of the eighteenth century the culture of Polish society
reached its lowest level. Poland, which had always
been behind but had in the beginning of the seven-
teenth century begun to catch up the rest of Europe,
drifted further and further out of the stream of civiliza-
tion. Poland had proclaimed religious tolerance in the
sixteenth century, when the Christians of the rest of
Europe were torturing one another for their beliefs, but
as time went on, became more and more intolerant.
The eighteenth century was in Poland characterized by
religious unity and intellectual monotony. Fighting
and husbandry occupied the people more than art and
literature, while conviviality and the chase filled their
leisure hours. What literature there was, continued on
the same lines ; the vogue of poetry increased when in
the rest of Europe its place was being taken by prose.
Letters became a pastime instead of a profession, little
was published, so carelessness of style resulted, corre-
spondence was carried on in verse, while circumstantial
poems appeared by the hundred and would be occa-
sioned by the most trivial events, a divorce or an
execution. Innumerable panegyrics continued to gratify
the morbid love of heraldry and genealogy ; books of
devotional poetry and of ascetic character multiplied
incessantly, while the more prominent position occupied
by women in society manifested itself in the debut of
numerous authoresses.
Meantime the organized political anarchy, symbolized
in the phrase 'A Pole in his castle's as strong as a
king', and cunningly guaranteed by the neighbouring
powers, resulted in the luxuriant omnipotence of the
great nobles, too selfish and jealous of each other to
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? 22 POLISH LITERATURE
promote or even to permit any reform, in the impoveriza-
tion of the towns and the oppression of the peasants.
Poland was like a garden where none of the fruit-
trees had ever been pruned, whose hundred branches,
unable to submit to the curtailment of a single privilege,
had passed beyond all control ; their exuberant growth
would ever and again produce splendid attitudes and
lines, effects of colour or of shape the more startlingly
picturesque because unorthodox and unprecedented,
which, however, not only overshadowed and devitalized
the rest of the flora, and reduced the gardener to ridicule
and despair, but excited the prejudice and brought
about the officious interference of the neighbours.
These perceived that the continued existence in their
midst of this seminary of liberty, this democratic wilder-
ness, this happy hunting-ground of individual caprice
would mar the tidiness of their own spick-and-span
properties and prevent the consolidation of their harden-
ing autocracies, that on the other hand its distribution
amongst themselves would be a smart piece of business.
So they set to work, their appetite increased as they
ate, till by the end of the century the three empires had
met, and the Polish Commonwealth was no more.
To these facts the society of this chevaleresque
republic awoke when it was too late. With the acces-
sion of the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus
Poniatowski, a man as cultured and sprightly as the
Saxon kings had been ponderous and dull, a great
revival of intellectual activity, inspired by the conscious-
ness of imminent ruin, had begun ; but the centre of
political gravity was no longer in Warsaw, it was in
Berlin, the realization of the national danger was post-
humous, and reform of the State no longer possible at
home, because dismemberment had been decided on
abroad.
Filled with the sense of this tragedy, the loss of
political independence, all the more bitter because long
prepared, Polish society had recourse to education and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 23
literature to save what it still could. Under the in-
fluence of French culture, then predominant in Europe,
the complete rehabilitation of the Polish language, in
prose as well as in verse, was finally effected. In the
field of history much lost time had to be made good,
and the King, genuinely interested in the promotion of
literature, was especially energetic in his support of the
historian Naruszewicz. The stage, which had never
been a favourite diversion of the Poles, at length be-
came relatively popular under the direction of the play-
wright Niemcewicz, who took contemporary politics
and morals as the theme of his comedies. The greatest
poet of the age was Krasicki, Bishop of Warmia, the
first since Rey and Kochanowski, excepting Potocki in
the seventeenth century, to make letters his profession
out of love for them and for his country, not from mo-
tives of personal interest.
The bitterness of his satires he mellowed with modera-
tion and indulgence, they were distinguished by objec-
tive sense of humour rather than by subjective irony,
and in an age of shameless corruption he never became
cynical. His stores of invention and observation were
copious, his wit was recognized by his monarch, whom
in his turn he delighted to compliment. Like King
Stanislas, he was unconscious of the political necessi-
ties of the time, and missed the political moment, but
like him he did his best to enlighten his countrymen,
lest political be followed by intellectual captivity. His
lucid thoughts were expressed, except for occasional
relapses into eighteenth-century rococo, concisely and
with admirable precision of diction, while he was master
both of style and of form.
After the declaration of the freedom of the press in
1789 the country, which in spite of its ostensible liberty
had never had any newspapers, was inundated with
political literature. Economic and political rights were
won for the towns by the eminent publicist Kollontaj.
The Education Commission and Society of the Friends
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? 24 POLISH LITERATURE
of Science in Warsaw both developed hectic but invalu-
able activity, to which the valorous maintenance of
intellectual independence in the nineteenth century, in
spite of calamity on calamity in the field of politics, can
be directly traced. Men of fortune, for the first time
alive to the wealth of their own literature, were seized
with bibliomania, and none too soon ; for much was
already lost, and little space remained to save what was
left. To appreciate the meaning of the partition of
Poland it is necessary to imagine America in possession
of Ireland, and Great Britain divided between France
and Germany, to imagine books and newspapers pub-
lished in the South of England prohibited in the rest of
the kingdom, and all English schools and universities
North of the Trent abolished, in Ireland none but
Americans qualified to buy land, and in Scotland, the
North and Midlands only Germans allowed to build
houses. Under these circumstances it would be com-
prehensible that all who cared for their country should
turn their attention to education and literature, the only
means of maintaining intellectual independence, and of
keeping the flame of nationality alive. It is this dire
need that inspired the great Polish poets of the nine-
teenth century, this consciousness that their literature
occupies a unique place amongst those of Europe, for
while in other countries literature is but one of the
factors of the national life, in Poland it and the language
in which it is expressed are the bond that still keeps the
disjected fragments of the people morally united, are
the one sanctuary where expressions of national feeling
may still take refuge and that not always.
The extraordinarily spontaneous and prolific revival
which took place in the second half of the eighteenth
century came to a sudden end in 1795 ; what with the
completion of the partition, the establishment of censor-
ships, the French Revolution, the defeat of Austria and
Germany by Napoleon, his campaign against Russia,
and all the hopes and fears which these kaleidoscopic
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? POLISH LITERATURE 25
changes generated amongst the Poles, the times were
too harassing and troublous to permit people reading
anything but despatches and gazettes. After Moscow
and Waterloo, when the hopes of the resuscitation of
Poland had been disappointed, Warsaw, in the centre
of the largest and most prosperous of the three divisions
into which the country had been cut up, again became
the national focus, the literary cynosure. Posen was
too detached and commercial ; Galicia, before Magenta
and Solferino, Sadowa and Koeniggraetz had taught
Austria of what she was made, still abandoned to the
caprice of Vienna, was then, in contrast to the present
day, a sort of Polish backwoods. But the revival that
took place in Warsaw was, for the moment, only an
aftermath of what had gone before ; the eighteenth
century and its criteria had vanished from Western
Europe, but continued in Poland to lead a peaceful
backwater existence, with its paraphernalia of powdered
shepherdesses, periwigs and minuets.
Only one remarkable talent stands out from this
rather monotonous background, that of the comedian
Count Fredro. He began his career in Lemberg, but
soon moved to and settled in the more responsive
atmosphere of Warsaw. Careless of his themes and
their development, he was unsurpassed in his handling
of witty dialogue, and his aphorisms are household
words to-day wherever Polish is spoken. Besides
highly amusing farces, a historical comedy and melo-
dramas, he achieved great success with his character^
comedies, in which the Lovelaces and shrews, prigs and
xenomaniacs, misers and grumblers, though inspired by
foreign models, are all impregnated with downright
Polish spirit, which appears not only in their speech,
but in their thoughts and actions, reckless and incon-
sequent, good-humoured and urbane, witty and to the
point, receptive and alert.
This period is also characterized by a general seculari-
zation and democratization of literature, panegyrics
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? 26 POLISH LITERATURE
became obsolete, there was no court, and therefore no
court poets, the vogue of moralizing and didactic poems
had gone, and literature became a profession instead of
a pastime, from being a distraction became a necessity.
And now even the most inveterate classics could no
longer anaesthetize their senses to the vibrations of
romanticism which Scott and Byron, Goethe and
Schiller were transmitting over Europe. The stereo-
typed repetitions of classical models could no longer
satisfy the craving for the novel, the individual, the
national, the supernatural, the romantic. In supplying
this demand Lithuania was to play to Poland the part
of Scotland to England ; Lithuania, like Scotland, had
furnished the neighbouring country with its dynasty
and its territory, a fact which was never allowed to be
forgotten, and was now, remoter and wilder than Poland,
with a polonized upper but untouched lower class, to
supply not only material for romance, but Poland's
greatest writer himself, Mickiewicz. A native of Black
Russia, on the borders of Lithuania, he spent a normal
childhood at home and passed through Vilna University.
His first poems, a book of ballads and romances
published in 1822, erotic in character, were partly
occasioned by a disappointment of the affections, and
by their marked vein of personality and introspection,
a novelty in Polish letters, at once aroused comment.
This was followed by a more ambitious work, ' Dziady '
(' The grandfathers '), a fantastic drama in a popular
framework, with a background of Lithuanian and White
Russian folk-lore, and all the essential adjuncts of
Romanticism, a work which, full of splendid episodes,
lacks unity. One of his finest lyrical outbursts is the
' Ode to Youth ', a challenge of triumphant youth, all-
pervading and all-conquering, to ossifying routine and
humdrum worldliness. His inspiration was sincere
and profound, his instinct and taste infallible, his per-
sonality passionate and convincing, while his language
was novel, daring, and polychrome; his facility and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 27
versatility baffled a thousand imitators, and bewildered
the criticasters of Warsaw. He visited Petersburg and
Moscow, where he imbibed experience and was made
much of in society; from Odessa, where he was sent
to teach, he brought back a series of oriental cameo-
sonnets descriptive of land- and sea-scape, wreck and
storm, sunshine and colour, joy and sorrow in the
Crimea, that called forth general amazement and ad-
miration. Another dramatic poem, ' Konrad Wallen-
rod/ celebrated the cunning triumph in the middle
ages of Lithuanian patriotism over the aggressive
Teutonic Knights, and though of unequal propor-
tions, contains numberless details of perfect workman-
ship. He went abroad in 1829 and never returned to
his country, which in two years from then was over-
taken by the consequences of the ill-judged and fatal
revolution of 1831. What had been left of Polish liberty
was swept away, and ten thousand of the flower of the
nation went into voluntary exile in France, without lay-
ing down their arms, never to return, though none be-
lieved but in an imminent restoration of their country's
fortunes. The effect of this wholesale emigration on
Poland was disastrous, and it was not till a new genera-
tion arose that the country regained full command of all
its moral and mental powers. Yet it was under these
restless and unsettled conditions, exiled from their homes,
in the soul-destroying atmosphere of recrimination and
regret, that the three greatest Polish poets, Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, and Krasinski, carried out their greatest work.
Mickiewicz, conscious not only that he had lost his
country for ever, but that the life and society of his
country as he had known them were a thing of the past,
determined to immortalize them while he could. He
wrote his great national epic, ' Pan Tadeusz ' (' Mr. Thad-
deus '), in which he telephotographed his mother-country
Lithuania, its forests and the beasts that roamed in
them, the life the people led there in the early nineteenth
century, had led there for centuries past, their petty
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? 28 POLISH LITERATURE
quarrels about boundaries, resulting in hand-to-hand en-
counters, their bouts of hunting and drinking, dancing
and talking, love-making and mushroom-gathering, their
patriarchal etiquette, their splendid hospitality, their
manners homely yet courteous, their conversation down-
right but full of wit, their dress, their cuisine, their
houses and their habits, their rising and their going to
bed. Without idealization and without sentimentality,
without hero and without heroine, with a sense of humour
remarkable for the age, this epic is unique and great
amongst those of all literatures ; it is of local, national,
not of universal Homeric dimensions, but it is historical,
vivid, and spontaneous, inspired by profound and sincere
patriotism, by the wish to crystallize for his compatriots
the life in their patria which he and they had known,
which was no more. It is the bitter lament of one who
has lost his country, whose air and water, forests and
fields, soil and people he had touched and loved, could
still see and smell from afar, but never more regain.
Combining the fervent earnestness, the stubborn
affection of the sober Lithuanian, with the imagination
and feeling, the verve and mobility, the patriotism and
devotion of the Pole, Mickiewicz is in contrast to the
two purely Polish poets, Slowacki and Krasinski. Slo-
wacki, who spent his whole life in the cause of his
art, a much greater master of language than Mickiewicz,
and of much loftier aspirations, was eclipsed during
his lifetime by the more obvious attractiveness, the
more tangible charm of his rival, but his themes of
universal, Shakespearian dimensions, his mastery of
form and refinement of language, his wealth of ideas
and imagination, have entitled him to a posthumous
glory greater than that of Mickiewicz. His romantic
love of the morbid, of accumulating horrors on horror's
head, his want of dramatic feeling and total lack of
humour, are redeemed by his sincerity and nobility,
by his enthusiasm for, and his perfection in his art.
Krasinski again had nothing in common with art for
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? POLISH LITERATURE
art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured
with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist,
rather than as an artist. Reflective and thoughtful, he
was an optimist and idealist, who believed in the regene-
ration of mankind and the salvation of the world. A
devout Catholic and stanch conservative, he resisted
the wave of mysticism and spiritualism which had
engulfed Mickiewicz and Slowacki, in which, with all
its impedimenta of necromancy, pow-wows and bogey-
worship, Polish society in exile sought to drown its
despair, as society in Russia does to-day.
Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, the three giants
of Polish Literature of the first half of the nineteenth
century, two of whom did all their writing, while the
third, Mickiewicz, composed his greatest work, abroad,
overshadowed not only all other writers of the emigra-
tion, but also for a long time those who claimed attention
in the home-country.
With the unparalleled development and inexhaustible
variety of Polish literature in Poland in the second half
of the nineteenth century, it. is impossible to deal here,
for time does not permit. Resigned, though far from
reconciled to fate, the Poles have indemnified themselves
for their political atrophy by the cultivation of art. The
life of the people past and present is mirrored, the torch
of nationality is kept alive in the historical novels of
Kraszewski and Sienkiewicz, the peasant-epics of Konop-
nicka and Reymont, while poets, novelists, and dramatists
of the first quality, including Prus,Zeromski, Weysenhoff,
Asnyk,' Tetmajer, Kasprowicz, Wyspianski, Przyby-
szewski, Szymanski, and Sieroszewski, are almost too
numerous to mention.
The sources of inspiration seem never to run dry,
the tree of Polish literature ever sends forth new shoots,
to make those of . other lands appear leaderless and
unshapely; the Holy Alliance buried Poland, but trees
that bear fruit have sprung from the grave, that flourish
like the talipot-palms of the king of Dahomey, each
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? 30 POLISH LITERATURE
planted on the body of a victim, that astonish those who
fancied Poland dead, while the language, supple and
abundant, receptive and retentive, more dignified if less
go-ahead than Czech, more malleable than Russian if
less melodious, impressive with its solemn rhythm
weighing down the penultimate syllable of every word,
offers to any who can command it unfailing pleasure,
infinite reward.
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? OXFORD : HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
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? ? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:10 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc2.