# Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 1/Chapter 4

IV
In many ways Warsaw affects the foreigner almost as if it were a French city. French is the auxiliary language of the Poles, the language which among the higher classes all know perfectly—although I met several who had half forgotten it during a twenty years' exile in Siberia the—language which is spoken as fluently as the mother-tongue and even better than the Russians speak it. In aristocratic circles Poles frequently converse with one another in French, a state of things which from the beginning of the century was promoted not only by the continual intellectual intercourse with France, and the emigration thereto, but by the need of being able to meet the Russians on neutral territory so far as language is concerned. As the Poles in addition are now frequently called the Frenchmen of the North or East, and as they themselves believe that they are closely related to the French through their defects, which they themselves characterise as inconstancy and instability, the foreigner is constantly asked if he does not see a great and lamentable similarity between the Poles and the French.
This great similarity is purely imaginary.
The trifling similarity which does exist consists in a cognate capacity for swift enthusiasms and violent revulsions of feeling, a craving for adventures and emotions, and a love of fame and show.
But these points of similarity do not exclude a fundamental difference. The rationalistic, argumentative basis of ​the French character is entirely absent in the Pole. The algebraic, arithmetical basis of the French manner of thought is wholly wanting in the Pole. The Frenchman is a great writer of prose, the Pole is a poet. On this account the stronghold of the French world of letters is prose, that of the Polish, poetry–verse. In addition nothing can well be less French than the continual and perfect use of a foreign language, the remarkable knowledge of foreign authors, which meet one everywhere in Poland. Young girls of twenty who speak six languages perfectly and without accent are met in Poland, certainly not in France. Almost every young man or woman of the higher classes knows the most important capitals of Europe, and knows the most important literatures to a great extent. The passionate fondness for travel and the versatility of culture resulting therefrom are in the highest degree un-French. The Pole widens his purview and diminishes his brain power by learning four or five foreign languages; the Frenchman as a rule is either ignorant or a specialist.
But the most striking difference assuredly lies in the relations between the sexes. The fundamental trait of the Polish national character is a certain combination of mildness and energy. But what gives Polish character, and especially Polish patriotism in this century, its special stamp, is the preponderance of the feminine elements over the masculine.
That the relations between man and woman are very different in Poland and in France is quickly perceived in daily conversation. While the tone among Frenchmen, whenever conversation turns on women, is always extremely free, sometimes to a foreigner repulsive, and generally lascivious, the Poles as a rule in discussing women manifest warmth, often tenderness or indulgence, but, so far as I could judge, seldom frivolity.
I have found a remark in an Italian author which possibly goes to the root of this. He thinks that while as a rule among the Germanic races the man is more gifted than the woman, and while among the Latin races man and woman on an average stand on the same level as to ​intellectual qualities, among the Poles, the most characteristic Slav race, woman is decidedly superior to man. If we set aside the power of invention or production, we must be struck with the truth of these words. The men in Poland are certainly not wanting in passion, in courage and in energy, in wit, in love of freedom, but it seems as if the women have more of these qualities. In Poland's great uprisings they have been known to enter into conspiracies, to do military duty, and frequently enough of their own free will to accompany their loved ones to Siberia. Mickiewicz's Gracyna, who led an army on horseback, has had successors in this century. Celebrated above all others is Emilia Plater, a young lady of one of the first families of Poland, who in 1830 induced a whole district to rise in rebellion, took part in several battles, and at last, having joined the detachments under Dembinski which refused to take refuge on Prussian soil, attempted to cut her way with her corps through the hostile army, but in December, 1831, died of want and over-exertion at the age of 26, in the hut of a forester. Mickiewicz's, beautiful poem, The Colonel's Death, celebrated her memory. During the rebellion of 1830-31 there was not a battalion nor a squadron of the Polish army in which there were not female combatants; after a battle or a march the soldiers always arranged a bivouac for the women, just as they took care that no word was spoken which could offend their ears.
The time for such achievements is now past, but still the women are ever the most earnest patriots, because they feel the most warmly and criticise the least keenly. Nevertheless, the influence of woman has somewhat fallen off in the last twenty years. Once the women laboured as the chief supporters of the Catholic faith; but faith is vanishing where it has not vanished. Once the woman laboured in the same way as the priest, but the union between the women and ​the clergy is dissolving, just as culture and the Church are drifting apart. And in addition to this, as all public life is forbidden, and there are neither assemblies nor unions of any kind, the men seek each other almost exclusively in social life. Since the reception-room does duty as a place of political and literary assemblies, the men think less of winning women to their interests there. The latter feel themselves set aside, overlooked and abandoned, as in South Germany, where the man passes all his evenings in the ale-house, only the desertion has other causes. The pressure from above has evidently greatly aided in separating the sexes and diminishing the social influence of woman. It may at the present time be weaker in Poland than in France. The education of the young girls, moreover, is conducted in much the same way as there—they are never left a moment unprotected—and marriages are made in the same manner as in France; the contracting parties seldom know much of each other before the wedding, and generally see each other for the first time a few weeks before.
So far as the Polish instability is concerned, it also has no similarity to the French. The instability of the French shows itself more particularly in public life, especially where they are collected in masses, as in public meetings or mobs. It depends on the sudden change of mood, for which no single person feels himself responsible. The instability of the Poles is personal, depends partly on the propensity to change, and partly on an instinctive inclination to universality.
In France the ruling principle is a prudent and sometimes subtle egoism which runs in the family and is inherited by the children, which is impressed upon them from the beginning, and which as a rule directs their lives. Parents do not, as in England and America, first strive to develop the youth into a capable man, able to help himself, but they try to smoothe his path in life, procure for him favours, connections, patronage, assure his future or his advancement. And if the path is smoothed, the young man will not willingly abandon his career before the highest rung of the ladder of honour is reached.
​The situation is entirely different in Poland, where the young man in private life far oftener allows himself to be led by fleeting instinct than by prudent egoism, and where a single public interest (the lost fatherland, the lost independence, the mother-tongue, the national literature and art), stands immutable and imperishable.
Undoubtedly the foreign rule has tended to obliterate Polish inconstancy in this highest domain; on the other hand, it has necessarily increased the national instability within the circle of private life.
For what can an educated young man do in Russian Poland? For instance, he studies law; he can never become a judge, generally not even an official, without separating himself from all intercourse with his countrymen. He studies medicine; he can never obtain a post at a university, never be at the head of a hospital, never conduct a public clinic, therefore can never attain the first rank in his science. The result is that if he has means—and there is still great wealth in Poland, since to be rich is almost the only thing which is permitted to every one—he goes from one study to another, obtains a smattering of different branches of science, surprises the foreigner by the versatility of his knowledge and information, but has no real mastery of anything.
The following instances were given me in my own circle: A very able young man began as a jurist, passed on to medicine and became a physician, then gave that up and bought an estate, studied agriculture, mechanics, &c., for four years, introduced many improvements on his estate, shortly after sold it, and at the present time is the best theatrical critic in Warsaw. Another young man began life as a farmer, had given up agriculture for music, qualified as a virtuoso, abandoned the career, established a manufactory of instruments, made violoncellos for several years, lost interest in that, and is now working at the Academy of Art in Munich as a genre-painter.
They have too many talents and too little inducement to persevere.
The women complain bitterly of this. Like good wives they endeavour to share their husbands' interests, to identify ​themselves with their occupations, and are in despair that every second or third year they have to interest themselves in something quite different. They meditate with anxiety on what the next year may bring.
One evening, when Feuillet's Dalila was acted at the theatre, and when the actor who took the part of Carnioli was not especially happy, I could not suppress an outburst of wonder that the actor could be in want of a type of the genial dilettante who educates the young composer, in a city like Warsaw, where there are so many men of Carnioli's stamp. The most admirable type stood by my side behind the scenes. And the same evening, when in a large circle I was asked how as a critic I would characterise Polish society, I answered: "You are a society of dilettanti."
I believe that the definition is correct, taking the word in its broad sense, and bearing in mind how the Poles have come to be what they are.
We must picture to ourselves a naturally very energetic people, against whose energy a barrier not to be broken down has been erected, a warlike people, who only reluctantly enter the army, in which practically no young man voluntarily chooses the post of officer; an extremely ambitious people, to whom all high positions and offices are closed, and to whom all distinctions and demonstrations of honour are forbidden, in so far as they are not bought with sacrifice of conviction or denial of solidarity with their countrymen; a people naturally hostile to Philistine ideals, but who needed to acquire the civic virtues, and whose circumstances now give them constant encouragement to unsteadiness; a pleasure-loving people, in whose capital not a single public place of entertainment is found; a people with a lively irresistible inclination to politics, for whom all political education has been made impossible, because they are allowed neither to elect representatives nor to discuss affairs of state, and whose political press is silenced in all political matters; to speak of political newspapers in Poland is like speaking of nautical journals in Switzerland. Let us imagine to ourselves this people, constituted for a large free life in the broad daylight of publicity, imprisoned in the ​chiaroscuro of private life; let us conceive a people who, from the time of Arild, had the most extravagant conceptions of the rights of the individual in regard to the power of the state, living their life without any sort of public security against encroachments on the part of an accidental superior official, thinking of Siberia, as we think of a disease, which may come when least expected.
Conceiving all this, we shall understand that under the pressure, which has been exerted simultaneously from so many sides, there necessarily sprang up an extraordinary concentrated activity, a boiling intensity of life, in the narrow circle which remained to them.
As the actual people were shut out, as all education of them, all approach to knowledge was made impossible, the higher classes, which could not adequately recruit themselves, came to lead a kind of island life of the highest and most refined culture, a life, which is indeed national in every heartbeat, but cosmopolitan in every form of expression, a hot-house life, where flowers of all the civilisations of Europe have come to development and exhale fragrance, an eddying, seething maelstrom life of ideas, endeavours, amusements and fetes. The best society scarcely ever goes to bed before four o'clock in the morning in the month of February. In carnival time the day in Warsaw has twenty hours, and so long as the season lasts they are prodigal of time and strength.
"Life in Warsaw is a neurosis," said one of the most intelligent men of the city to me; "no one can keep it up long."
This people, who discovered the dance of the planets around the sun, also, as is well known, invented the polonaise with its proud solemnity, and the mazurka, with its contrast of masculine force and feminine gentleness, and the people are perhaps almost as proud of the mazurka as of Copernicus. In Poland the mazurka is not the dance we call by that name, but a long, difficult, and impassioned national dance, in which the gentlemen and ladies, though they dance hand in hand, constantly make different steps in the same time. It is a genuine sorrow to the Poles that the ​consistent Russian government has forbidden the dancing of this dance in the national costume; and the fourth or fifth question the foreigner is asked in Warsaw is this: “Have you seen our national dance?” In every other country it would at least be the thirtieth or fortieth.
They dance all through the carnival time as people dance in no other place. Probably nowhere else are so many charity balls given. They dance for everything–for “the poor sewing girls,” for “the poor students,” &c. I do not deny that many times, when I stood watching the dances–sometimes I was invited to two balls on the same night–I could not help remembering the old hard adage: slavus saltans! But as a young girl said in allusion to a moralising article in Prawda: “What would be the advantage if we left off dancing in Warsaw?”
Yet the gaiety with which they whirl is not the common joy of life; it reminds us rather of that which the prisoners of the Revolution displayed in their ignorance as to what the next day would bring forth. This levity is not common levity, but a lightness often found in those who daily defy suffering and death.
For like reasons at times they are more serious than people on similar occasions in other countries. At a very sedate entertainment which the representatives of literature and art gave me, when there were a series of speeches in French and Latin, the ancient festival tongue of the Poles, it happened, when one of the speakers said some words which especially excited those assembled, that tears at once stood in their eyes, and that old men, who had passed a whole period of their lives in Siberia, and hundreds of times had seen death staring them in the face, sprang up, and while the tears rolled down their cheeks, embraced the speaker. It seems, then, as if the foreign rule had equally increased the susceptibility to social enjoyment and the susceptibility to serious emotion. The power of feeling pleasure and pain, the disposition to tears and laughter, seem to be as strong as in the sick.
Besides, passionately as the Poles are a people of the moment, just as thoroughly are they a people of memories. ​Nowhere else can be found such a religion of remembrance, such a clinging to national recollections. They cling to everything that can recall the Poland of the past. It is true that all the works of art of the city and all the treasures of the nation have been carried away to St. Petersburg; the city has even been robbed of the great Zaluski library of 300,000 volumes, but the more stubbornly do the people hold on to national recollections. They have been assisted in this endeavour in the most forcible manner by the fact that all the Polish poetry and historical writings of this century, as well as Polish painting, have been pressed into the service of the national idea. Artists like Mateiko and Brandt—both admirable colourists who fall short in simplicity and perspicuity of composition—almost constantly treat national historical subjects; their poets have treated Poland and Poland's fate, even when, like Krasinski in Irydion, they place the action in old Rome, or like Slowacki in Anheli, transfer the scene to a fantastic Siberia. Poetry in the Polish home has the same importance as religion. The best works are, or have been, strictly forbidden reading. Their acquisition as well as their possession was perilous. Generally the books, when they had been carefully read till the thoughts were remembered, even if the words were forgotten, were burned—with the same pain with which a woman who is not free burns a letter from the man she loves. But they have not forgotten in Poland, how, when the young Lévitoux was put into the citadel in Warsaw because a copy of Mickiewicz's Dziady had been found in his house, in his despair after the torture he had suffered, and in his anxiety lest in his ravings he should name his comrades, he with his manacled hands pulled his night-lamp under his bed of rushes, and burned himself to death; nor have they forgotten that several hundred Lithuanian students were seat to Siberia for having published the Temptation of Krasinski in book form after the poem, which the censor had not understood, had seen the light in the feuilleton of a little paper.
The national authors are found to-day in every house, and even if the Poles have been obliged to establish their ​national museum at Rapperswyl, Switzerland, for safety, still there is to be found in almost every home in Warsaw an album with reproductions of Arthur Grottger's remarkable paintings at Cracow, representing the history of the sufferings of Poland, a (prohibited) lithograph of the same artist's March of the Exiles to Siberia, and some pictures of the defence of Warsaw in 1831, representing the last Polish regiment, which blew itself up with Ordon's redoubt. The Poles regard with tenderness and emotion not only the faces, but the antique, semi-comical chasseur uniform of the soldiers, with the swallow-tail coats. This was, it is true, the last Polish military uniform.
It is in accordance with this national feeling, made vigilant by oppression, that they cherish a hatred for all foreign authors who occasionally or systematically depreciate the Poles. Not that they took Heine's celebrated lampoon (Zwei Ritter) about the two valiant noblemen, Krapülinski and Waschlapski much to heart. They have laughed at its wit and know it by heart, and they know very well how warmly he expressed himself in many places about Poland. But they are familiar with Freytag's Soll und Haben; they attach great importance to a casual remark of the younger Dumas about the Poles from everywhere, who took part in the insurrection of the Commune, and in February they were in an uproar over the word ausrotten (exterminate), in reference to the Poles in Prussia, used by Eduard von Hartmann in an article in a review, an expression which they took too much au sérieux. The Poles pay altogether too much attention to what is written about them in Europe. Anxiety as to what is said about one is a general accompaniment of weakness.