the
symbolism
of Polish contemporary painters.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
org/access_use#pd-google
? 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.
? ? 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
? 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 In 1905 that exception was withdrawn;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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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.
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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).
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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.
? ? 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 '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. Out of the mysteries
of pain and death are born new life and resur-
rection. Death is the condition of resurrection.
The Saviour of mankind redeemed us by embracing
death, and after three days in the grave rose again.
So, in the political world, one nation has been
signalled out to lay down her life. Her sufferings
are the price by which the new and better epoch
of humanity shall come about. She will rise
gloriously to be the spiritual leader of that world,
where all nations and governments will be united
in Christ and rule in the spirit of Christ. Violence
against that spirit of Christ was committed
when so hideous a crime against man's rights as
the blotting out of a free nation from the land
of the living was perpetrated. The restoration of
that nation will therefore logically be a return to
the ideals of Christ, the first step to their realisa-
tion. Various of the Messianists looked to that
future period as the third epoch, the reign of
? ? 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
? 36
POLAND
the Holy Ghost, thus presenting a curious link
with the tenets of Joachim of Flora.
Pushed to its extreme limits, the doctrines of
Polish Messianism tended to an exaggeration and
a falsity of outlook that were likely to prove in-
jurious to those for whose welfare they were
intended. But in its best form, propagated by
such a teacher as Krasinski, who made its promises
conditional on each individual's purity of soul,
it may be taken as a sublime spiritualization of
national suffering. The workings of Providence
were made clear. The dignity of a great calling
was conferred upon a downtrodden people. The
Poles were given an end for which to strive. The
light of hope was shed over the dark places of
grief.
"You all know, my brothers, that we were
born in the womb of death," says Krasinski in
his prose preface to Dawn. "Hence the eternal
pain that gnaws your hearts; hence the incerti-
tude that has become your life. But every end
contains already in itself the successive beginning;
the day of death but precedes the hour of waken-
ing. Look closely, and the signs of death will
suddenly change for you into the signs of resur-
rection. Our death was necessary; necessary will
be our resurrection; and the Word of the Son
of Man, the eternal word of life, shall be shed
through the social circumference of the world.
By our very nationality crucified on the cross of
history will be manifested to the conscience of
the human spirit that the political sphere must
be changed into a religious sphere. The Lord in
the whole political sphere, where hitherto He
? ? 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 NATIONAL LITERATURE 37
was absent, will be present; and the vessel of
His providence to this end will be no other than
the Polish nation. "
"One of the two--either the blessed future of
humanity is forfeited, or the condition of its
fulfilment is the life of Poland. "
A This idea of the chosen race is the keynote of
'f:he great Messianistic poetry of Poland. As in
the Hebrew prophets, Jerusalem is the mystic
city, the object alike of patriotic and spiritual
passion: so the prophet poets of Poland looked
towards their country, not solely as the earthly
home for which they pined with the human long-
ing of the exile, but as the transfigured heavenly
mistress of the soul. Poland is the instrument of
God's future favours. She is set apart, therefore,
and consecrated. Thus we have Mickiewicz draw-
ing up a manual of religious guidance for those
whom he regarded as the apostles of the new
civilization. His Books of the Polish Pilgrimage,
with their curious blending of Biblical flavour,
almost homely detail, and the yearning of a man
whose face was set to a Jerusalem on a far-off
horizon, were addressed to exiles to whom he
would not suffer the name of exile to be given.
For he would have men know by their demeanour
that they were pilgrims in whose hands lay the
future of a hallowed country and a new race.
Thus we have Krasinski apostrophizing Poland
las "The holy one," "Holy Poland. " She is no
longer to him merely a native land. She is his
jfaith, his idea (Dawn). He will liken, to mark the
great capital difference, his nation to but one
other: Jerusalem, who fell because she spurned
? ? 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
? 38
POLAND
the love that would have saved her {Psalm of
Good Will). "The Jerusalem of our return for
which we sigh," is the language in which Mick-
iewicz expresses to a friend the weariness of his
banishment. "O God of Israel," prays Severyn
Goszczynski; "Thou Who for forty years led
him by the way of victories and pain, through
pathless deserts to the promised land, behold
to-day Israel of the new covenant, the Polish
nation, travels to her promised land. Forsake her
not, O Lord, strengthen her with Thy grace.
Still lead her, as till now Thou ledst her by Thy
girdle till, fed by the blessed word of life Thou
gavest her, she, in the strength of youth, fulfils
her road. And lo! this year may be the year of
her espousals. And I, who lift these prayers to
Thee to-day, pray if only for one moment I may
be at my people's bridal feast" {The Prayer of a
Poet). And the poet who watched the fires of the
incendiary blacken his native Galicia placed the
expression of his grief on the lips of a Jeremias,
lamenting over the desolation of the chosen city
(Kornel Ujejski, The Complaints of Jeremias).
The poetic symbolization of Poland takes
differing guises. She is the mother, weeping for
her sons. She is the great heavenly archangel of
Krasinski's vision, crowned with the purple of
her sorrows, whose eyes are of the eternal blue,
whose brow flashes with the lightning of God,
before whom the future new-born ages to whom
her suffering has given their being cast down their
wreaths in homage. She is--again and again--
the beloved dead, sleeping in a grave from which
she will rise again. The last word of Messianism
? ? 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 NATIONAL LITERATURE 39
confers on her the lineaments of a Christ of
the nations, dying on the cross of expiation for
the sins of humanity (Mickiewicz, The Ancestors,
Part III. ) A less usual conception is Bohdan
Zaleski's repentant Magdalen {The Spirit of the
Steppe). But behind all these types there is always
the same figure of one beautiful and haloed by
grief; inexpressibly dear to the heart of him who
wrote; the one who, in Krasinski's dreams, calls
him, "and I went forth and I go, I know not
where, but that voice I will follow if needs be
even to the end of the world" (The Dream of
Cezard). If on one hand Poland is the ethereal,
star-encircled image of a mystic's desire, yet she
is at the same time the living love, spoken of in
the passionate and endearing tones of human
affection.
It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the
patriotic character of the nineteenth century
Polish literature. Devotion to a native country
is one of the most strongly marked features of the
Polish nature. Moreover, the lives of Poland's
poets were, at the time of which we are speaking,
linked with the national cause in an exceptional
manner, difficult of realization by those whose lot
is cast in a land where tradition is the patriotism
of freedom. There was not one of the poets in
the great period of Polish literature whose daily
existence was not ravaged with the personal
afflictions that the public tragedy had brought
upon them. They were nearly without exception
living in exile, penury, loneliness, suspense.
Grinding poverty, domestic trouble, grief at his
absence from his Lithuanian forests, whitened
? ? 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
? 40
POLAND
J Mickiewicz's hair before his time. Slowacki,
parted for ever from an adored mother, wandered
from country to country, beholding in the ruins
of Greece the likeness of another land, his heart
wrung as he watched the sun set over the Mediter-
ranean by the sadness and the homesickness of
the Pole {'The Grave of Agamemnon. Hymn). The
one craving of Bohdan Zaleski, the poet of the
Ukraine, was that he might see again the steppes
that had nursed his childhood, if but to breathe
his last there; and he died far away from them
after half a century of exile. Gaszynski's prayers
met his mother's in their mutual loneliness on
the Christmas Eve which they could spend to-
gether no more (Constantine Gaszynski, To my
Mother on Christmas Eve). He lived to hear of her
murder by Russian soldiers at her door. From his
nineteenth year till his death at the age of forty-
seven, Krasinski bore a tragedy bitterer than exile,
on which his lips were sealed. The heart-sickness
of the wanderer, pining to return, runs in mourn-
ful undertones through the poetry of Poland,
especially in that of Mickiewicz and Bohdan
Zaleski; but it is a larger grief than individual
deprivation that gives its tragic accents to Polish
literature. Poland's national poetry must of
necessity be profoundly sad. " I and my country
are one," says Mickiewicz in the Ancestors. " My
name is Million, because I love millions and for
millions suffer torment. I look on my unhappy
land as a son upon his father broken on the wheel.
I feel the sufferings of the whole nation, as the
mother feels within her bosom the sufferings of
her child. " Or again, the charge laid upon Irydion,
?
? 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.
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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.
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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).
? ? 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
? 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
? ? 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 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
? ? 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
? 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.
? ? 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 '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. Out of the mysteries
of pain and death are born new life and resur-
rection. Death is the condition of resurrection.
The Saviour of mankind redeemed us by embracing
death, and after three days in the grave rose again.
So, in the political world, one nation has been
signalled out to lay down her life. Her sufferings
are the price by which the new and better epoch
of humanity shall come about. She will rise
gloriously to be the spiritual leader of that world,
where all nations and governments will be united
in Christ and rule in the spirit of Christ. Violence
against that spirit of Christ was committed
when so hideous a crime against man's rights as
the blotting out of a free nation from the land
of the living was perpetrated. The restoration of
that nation will therefore logically be a return to
the ideals of Christ, the first step to their realisa-
tion. Various of the Messianists looked to that
future period as the third epoch, the reign of
? ? 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
? 36
POLAND
the Holy Ghost, thus presenting a curious link
with the tenets of Joachim of Flora.
Pushed to its extreme limits, the doctrines of
Polish Messianism tended to an exaggeration and
a falsity of outlook that were likely to prove in-
jurious to those for whose welfare they were
intended. But in its best form, propagated by
such a teacher as Krasinski, who made its promises
conditional on each individual's purity of soul,
it may be taken as a sublime spiritualization of
national suffering. The workings of Providence
were made clear. The dignity of a great calling
was conferred upon a downtrodden people. The
Poles were given an end for which to strive. The
light of hope was shed over the dark places of
grief.
"You all know, my brothers, that we were
born in the womb of death," says Krasinski in
his prose preface to Dawn. "Hence the eternal
pain that gnaws your hearts; hence the incerti-
tude that has become your life. But every end
contains already in itself the successive beginning;
the day of death but precedes the hour of waken-
ing. Look closely, and the signs of death will
suddenly change for you into the signs of resur-
rection. Our death was necessary; necessary will
be our resurrection; and the Word of the Son
of Man, the eternal word of life, shall be shed
through the social circumference of the world.
By our very nationality crucified on the cross of
history will be manifested to the conscience of
the human spirit that the political sphere must
be changed into a religious sphere. The Lord in
the whole political sphere, where hitherto He
? ? 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 NATIONAL LITERATURE 37
was absent, will be present; and the vessel of
His providence to this end will be no other than
the Polish nation. "
"One of the two--either the blessed future of
humanity is forfeited, or the condition of its
fulfilment is the life of Poland. "
A This idea of the chosen race is the keynote of
'f:he great Messianistic poetry of Poland. As in
the Hebrew prophets, Jerusalem is the mystic
city, the object alike of patriotic and spiritual
passion: so the prophet poets of Poland looked
towards their country, not solely as the earthly
home for which they pined with the human long-
ing of the exile, but as the transfigured heavenly
mistress of the soul. Poland is the instrument of
God's future favours. She is set apart, therefore,
and consecrated. Thus we have Mickiewicz draw-
ing up a manual of religious guidance for those
whom he regarded as the apostles of the new
civilization. His Books of the Polish Pilgrimage,
with their curious blending of Biblical flavour,
almost homely detail, and the yearning of a man
whose face was set to a Jerusalem on a far-off
horizon, were addressed to exiles to whom he
would not suffer the name of exile to be given.
For he would have men know by their demeanour
that they were pilgrims in whose hands lay the
future of a hallowed country and a new race.
Thus we have Krasinski apostrophizing Poland
las "The holy one," "Holy Poland. " She is no
longer to him merely a native land. She is his
jfaith, his idea (Dawn). He will liken, to mark the
great capital difference, his nation to but one
other: Jerusalem, who fell because she spurned
? ? 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
? 38
POLAND
the love that would have saved her {Psalm of
Good Will). "The Jerusalem of our return for
which we sigh," is the language in which Mick-
iewicz expresses to a friend the weariness of his
banishment. "O God of Israel," prays Severyn
Goszczynski; "Thou Who for forty years led
him by the way of victories and pain, through
pathless deserts to the promised land, behold
to-day Israel of the new covenant, the Polish
nation, travels to her promised land. Forsake her
not, O Lord, strengthen her with Thy grace.
Still lead her, as till now Thou ledst her by Thy
girdle till, fed by the blessed word of life Thou
gavest her, she, in the strength of youth, fulfils
her road. And lo! this year may be the year of
her espousals. And I, who lift these prayers to
Thee to-day, pray if only for one moment I may
be at my people's bridal feast" {The Prayer of a
Poet). And the poet who watched the fires of the
incendiary blacken his native Galicia placed the
expression of his grief on the lips of a Jeremias,
lamenting over the desolation of the chosen city
(Kornel Ujejski, The Complaints of Jeremias).
The poetic symbolization of Poland takes
differing guises. She is the mother, weeping for
her sons. She is the great heavenly archangel of
Krasinski's vision, crowned with the purple of
her sorrows, whose eyes are of the eternal blue,
whose brow flashes with the lightning of God,
before whom the future new-born ages to whom
her suffering has given their being cast down their
wreaths in homage. She is--again and again--
the beloved dead, sleeping in a grave from which
she will rise again. The last word of Messianism
? ? 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 NATIONAL LITERATURE 39
confers on her the lineaments of a Christ of
the nations, dying on the cross of expiation for
the sins of humanity (Mickiewicz, The Ancestors,
Part III. ) A less usual conception is Bohdan
Zaleski's repentant Magdalen {The Spirit of the
Steppe). But behind all these types there is always
the same figure of one beautiful and haloed by
grief; inexpressibly dear to the heart of him who
wrote; the one who, in Krasinski's dreams, calls
him, "and I went forth and I go, I know not
where, but that voice I will follow if needs be
even to the end of the world" (The Dream of
Cezard). If on one hand Poland is the ethereal,
star-encircled image of a mystic's desire, yet she
is at the same time the living love, spoken of in
the passionate and endearing tones of human
affection.
It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the
patriotic character of the nineteenth century
Polish literature. Devotion to a native country
is one of the most strongly marked features of the
Polish nature. Moreover, the lives of Poland's
poets were, at the time of which we are speaking,
linked with the national cause in an exceptional
manner, difficult of realization by those whose lot
is cast in a land where tradition is the patriotism
of freedom. There was not one of the poets in
the great period of Polish literature whose daily
existence was not ravaged with the personal
afflictions that the public tragedy had brought
upon them. They were nearly without exception
living in exile, penury, loneliness, suspense.
Grinding poverty, domestic trouble, grief at his
absence from his Lithuanian forests, whitened
? ? 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
? 40
POLAND
J Mickiewicz's hair before his time. Slowacki,
parted for ever from an adored mother, wandered
from country to country, beholding in the ruins
of Greece the likeness of another land, his heart
wrung as he watched the sun set over the Mediter-
ranean by the sadness and the homesickness of
the Pole {'The Grave of Agamemnon. Hymn). The
one craving of Bohdan Zaleski, the poet of the
Ukraine, was that he might see again the steppes
that had nursed his childhood, if but to breathe
his last there; and he died far away from them
after half a century of exile. Gaszynski's prayers
met his mother's in their mutual loneliness on
the Christmas Eve which they could spend to-
gether no more (Constantine Gaszynski, To my
Mother on Christmas Eve). He lived to hear of her
murder by Russian soldiers at her door. From his
nineteenth year till his death at the age of forty-
seven, Krasinski bore a tragedy bitterer than exile,
on which his lips were sealed. The heart-sickness
of the wanderer, pining to return, runs in mourn-
ful undertones through the poetry of Poland,
especially in that of Mickiewicz and Bohdan
Zaleski; but it is a larger grief than individual
deprivation that gives its tragic accents to Polish
literature. Poland's national poetry must of
necessity be profoundly sad. " I and my country
are one," says Mickiewicz in the Ancestors. " My
name is Million, because I love millions and for
millions suffer torment. I look on my unhappy
land as a son upon his father broken on the wheel.
I feel the sufferings of the whole nation, as the
mother feels within her bosom the sufferings of
her child. " Or again, the charge laid upon Irydion,
?
