ThE TRAGEDY OF POLAND.*

Ix the unhappy rivalry of martyrdom between various countries, Belgium, Serbia, Armenia, and Poland, brought about by the present war, Poland in many ways may claim a sad pre-eminence, for none has had so many enemies in the past or has been more continuously oppressed. But Miss Monica Gardner in her eloquent and touching book is not concerned with any com- parisons, nor does she dwell, except incidentally, on the sufferings of Poland in the last year and a half. Her aim is rather to bring home to her readers the expression of the soul of a people by its poets, and in particular by Mickiewicz, Krasinski, Slowacki, Zaleski, and trjejski, and to emphasize the peculiar qualities which distinguish them from the poets of other lands.

Poland was called "a nation in mourning" by Montalembert some eighty years ago, and Miss Gardner's brief historical retrospect, though it carries us back to the partitions towards the close of the eighteenth century, shows how the later history of Poland has only added a deeper significance to the title. it is impossible to overlook the share of Russia in these recurrent tragedies, or to minimize her misdoings in the past. But, as Miss Gardner observes, the Russian nation, now that she has shaken herself free from Prussian influence "—the evil genius of Russia—" has promised to redress the wrongs that Poland has suffered at her hands. The greater these wrongs have been, the more profound will be the admiration of Europe when she beholds their reparation." Furthermore, as she points out, "the Polish subjects of Prussia have suffered from a rule which for its drastic brutality, no less than for its galling pettiness, is, say the Poles, more intolerable than any other." Whatever may be said of the policy of Austria, the third of Poland's great oppressors, up to the year 1861, the grant of modified autonomy then made to her Polish subjects was a substantial concession, and resulted in making Galicia until this day the centre of Polish national life.

The modern national literature of Poland had its origin in the abortive rising of 1830. "Unlike the three great empires of the world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose prosperity inspired their golden age of letters, it was the sorrows that gave birth to her great romantic song." But this is not its only differentia. "The youths of Poland were prohibited from learning their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in the ordinary channels. They learnt them, therefore, 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 . . . written for recreation or relaxation. It was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any that could have been chosen in the cause of Poland." Pub- lished abroad and banned by the Censor, these poems were read in secret and behind barred doors. The poets themselves were driven by force of circumstances to the employment of allegory and symbolism in place of a direct appeal. Two other remark- able features of the Polish national literature emerge in this survey. One is the absence of egotism and self-assertion. Even where, as in the case of Mickiewicz, there was a tendency at the outset to dwell on his personal grief and disappointment, this soon disappeared. The hero of his famous allegorical drama Ancestors undergoes a transformation. The disappointed lover of a woman becomes the whole-hearted lover of his country. And the other and more remarkable feature of this literature is its mystical Messianism. The great poets of Poland found the only explanation of the prolonged and unmerited sufferings

of their country in the belief that it was reserved for her to redeem the world by her sacrifice, and their belief in a national resurrection was never shattered, though the prospect of a national restoration was indefinitely postponed. Mickiewicz, who was born in Lithuania in 1798, though he suffered imprison. meat as a young man, and never revisited Poland after 1824, escaped deportation to Siberia. But this respite was only gained at the cost of years of banishment in Russia, of wandering in Germany and Italy, and a long exile in Paris. He held the post of Professor of Slavonic Literature at the College de France, but lost it owing to his devotion to Napoleonism. His domestic • Poland: a Study in National Idealism, By Monica Gardner, Loader.: Burro and Oates. t3s. 6d. neta

life was clouded by the insanity of his wife and by a constant struggle for the bare needs of a livelihood. Towards the close of his life he abandoned literature to become the disciple of a fantastic mystic named Towianski, and ended his days at the time of the Crimean War in a vain effort to organize a Polish legion to fight for Turkey. The story of Krasinski, torn in two between a passionate love for his country and filial devotion to a reactionary father, is equally tragic. Sent to study in Geneva in 1829, he heard of the news of the Polish rising of 1830 at Rome :—

" In an agony of suspense Krasinski awaited his father's summons to fight by his side. His fears were realized. The summons did not come. Already suspected by his compatriots, Vincent Krasinski now incurred their odium by taking no part in the national move- ment. Be ended by yielding to the dictates of ambition and wounded vanity ; he went to Petersburg, in his heart still clinging to his country, and accepted favours at the hand of Nicholas I. His son's impassioned appeals were made in vain. Zygmunt now saw himself compelled, either to be at open war with his father in the sight of all the nation should he join the Rising, whither his whole heart and the traditions of his patriotic and famous house called him ; or to remain seemingly faithless to his country in the hour of her need, branded and dishonoured. We cannot enter here into the details of the long and painful duel between father and son. At last, the latter, recoiling from the rupture that would have put Vincent Krasinski even more hopelessly in the wrong with his nation than he was already, yielded to his father's command. The anguish of mind that the boy of nineteen underwent through all this episode shattered his weak bodily frame, and laid the roots of the disease that brought him in his prime to the grave. His tears caused the semi-blindness and threatened total loss of eyesight that from that time repeatedly recurred, cutting him off from book and pen. Ho never again returned of his own will to Poland, where his situation under his father's roof was unendurable. For the rest of his life, racked by mental and physical sufferings, haunted by the terror of Siberia, he wandered abroad under the supervision of the Russian Government. only going back to his native land at rare intervals for a few months, when compelled by Vincent Krasinski or by the Russian authorities. Loyalty to his father imposed upon him the concealment of his love and grief for his nation; - the acceptance

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of something akin to disgrace n the eyes of many of his fellow Poles. The poet who, when a brilliant boy, had longed for literary fame, now surrendered even his name. The poems and plays that he wrote, with the one intention of his country's welfare, appeared anonymously under pseudonyms, or under the names of his friends. Ouly his most intimate confidants knew that the Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski. Of the many acts of self-devotion that the sons of Poland have been called upon to offer in her service, that of Zygmunt Krasinski has been one of the most bitter. He bore in silence the ruin of his life and the burden of allegiance to his father that he only laid down on his deathbed at the age of forty-seven. Unable to speak, unable to act, as he would, he was forced to hide his friendships, his opinions, his fondest predilections. He remained faithful to the two antagonistic claims that tore his heart between them ; and yet he sacrificed neither. In the part that he was driven to play he sacrificed no principle, no person, except one—and that one was himself."

Slowacki, another short-lived genius, made his way from pessi- mism to mystic exaltation. Indeed, all the poetry of modern Poland, though it sprang medio de fonte dolorum, has preserved an indomitable spirit of belief in the ultimate resurrection of the nation. In varying forms the Messianistic doctrine manifests itself throughout. The doctrine of Wallenrodism —so called from Mickiewicz's drama, Konrad Wallenrod, in which a patriotic Lithuanian enters the service of his enemies in order to betray them—is rather the artistic presentation of the painful dilemma by which so many Poles were confronted than the deliberate advocacy of a set policy. Mickiewicz's teaching culminates in his Book of the Polish Pilgrimage, where he bids the unarmed pilgrim, face to face with the Governments of Europe, take heart, for a few poor fishermen were victorious over Rome. "The nations shall he redeemed by the merits of a martyred nation, and shall be rechristened in the name of God and liberty. And who is thus christened shall be your brother." So, too, Krasinski's final message to his countrymen is to be found, not in the obscure allegory of his fantastic drama of lrydion or the almost unrelieved pessimism of the Undivine Comedy, but in the series of mystical lyrics entitled Dawn, and in his Psalms of the Future. In the former, love, self-sacrifice, and suffering are the road of glory that leads to the triumph of Poland, who died a victim for the world's sin, yet " hath not perished," because she has risen above the storms of this world to the land of the idea. In the Psalms he bids his people rise above moral stain, employ the weapons not of the assassin but of Christ, and conquer in His power.

Miss Gardner gives us an excellent account, enriched by many spirited translations, of the principal works of these remarkable poets; and in none is she more suc:essful than in what is the most romantic of them.all, Krasinskra Anhelli—a strange story

of a mystic pilgrimage in Siberia. Well may we say of Poland as Wordsworth said of Toussaint l'Ouverture

:-

"Thy friends are exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

For the soul of Poland, as Miss Gardner says, 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, tho

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 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 perse- cuted, 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 [Starczewski] who, far from pronouncing a panegyric 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 oppres- sion, Poland, sweet and noble Poland, has not known them. The same writer has stated that the political decadence of Poland which, in part, contributed towards her fall may be traced back to the excessive ease with which the nation expanded. Her conquest of Lithuania and Ruthenia was bloodless. 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 per- petual 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. Koieduszko, 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."