Georg Morris Cohen Brandes

“ But it is a great gain in any event to have cast off the sickly self-worship which prevailed in the thirties, at the time when the two great opponents, Mickiewicz and Slowacki, simultaneously adopted the visionary dreams of the mystic Towianski, who regarded the Poles as the Messianic race, suffering for the sins of mankind, and by suffering, working out the salvation of humanity. They have learned to look the stern reality in the face, and the hopes they cherish—and though certainly not sanguine, they are by no means without hope for the future—are not founded on dreams and fantasies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 young men of the highest class in Poland are products of luxury, extremely engaging, gently affectionate like women, delicate as late off-shoots of old noble stocks. As a rule they do not work; and when by exception they do, without necessity, devote themselves to a study, prepare themselves for a professorship, or something of that sort, they awake general amazement and wonder. They applaud a young man not for working, but because he does the superfluous.
Thus to do the superfluous has always been the characteristic of Polish heroism. ”

“ But the whole spirit of Poland is in these lines. No other race could see divinity in the waving plume.
Nevertheless the love of the tinsel and spangles of glory is necessarily repressed now by a deeper feeling of honour.
When I went to a ball in the town hall on my first evening in Warsaw, where a thousand people, the flower of good society in Warsaw, were assembled in the large saloon, the fact struck me that, with the exception of three Russian officers, there was not a man in the hall who wore a decoration. From his birth almost every Pole renounces decorations as well as uniforms. ”

“ Although, according to my idea, Polish culture at present must thus be limited to an extremely prudent and wary evolution, it is evident that the year 1863 marks an epoch in the intellectual life of Poland. The follies and horrors of this year, the frantic chaotic rebellion, with its tragic result, has made the nation sober. Too sober, it may seem to some, for while before 1863 it was the wont of the Poles to see all merits united in their own people, since that time it has become the fashion to speak sorrowfully and depreciatingly of Poland. ”

“ It was an enthusiastic and unpractical people, noble-minded and untrustworthy, pomp-loving and volatile, vivacious and thoughtless, a people who despised severe and fatiguing labour, and loved all intense and delicate, sensuous and intellectual enjoyments, but, above all, who worshipped independence to the point of insanity, freedom to the extent of the liberum veto, and who even now, when they had lost independence and freedom, had remained faithful to their old love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For whereas the capitals of countries elsewhere are generally the object of the rulers' care, almost of their tenderness, and cities elsewhere from mere self-love take heed of beauty and convenience, and strive to provide as great attractions for country folks and for foreigners as possible, Warsaw is the capital of a country whose existence the government does not recognise, and is a city whose pride the government wishes to humble in every way. ”

“ A dreadful dilemma presents itself to the Polish intelligence: it seems condemned either to choose progress, with the danger of playing into the hands of its own worst enemy, and the worst enemy of all progress, or to choose stagnation, with the danger that the nationality which is thereby preserved, and of which its sons were and are so proud, should drop behind in the culture of Europe, becoming antiquated and outstripped. ”

“ Broadly speaking, we may say of these women of the higher and lower aristocracy that their qualities, virtues, and vices have nothing bourgeois about them. They are not domesticated, they are not small-minded. The best of them have a pride, which exalted and exceptional as it is, springs from their feeling of the strength and purity of the spiritual life. They are women who are born to rule, and who even in narrow and straitened circumstances preserve the grand self-esteem which runs in their blood. ”

“ POLAND A SYMBOL A weighty, and for Poland a decidedly happy, result of the foreign rule has been the welding and uniting of everything Polish. All provincial differences have vanished in this unity; the different parts of Poland, Austrian, Russian, and Prussian Poles feel that they are without exception one people. ”

“ Poland was a great republic, with an elective king, or more exactly, a great democracy of nobles; for the nobility was so numerous, so accessible, so zealous to maintain the political equality of every single noble with greater peers, that the constitution, though it conferred rights only on the nobility, had a democratic stamp. The organisation of the diet carried out the idea of almost unlimited freedom for the individual. ”

“ The future fate of Poland is wholly dependent on that of Europe; for if the idea of the right of the people to independence, and the right of every nation to full political freedom continually gains ground in the world, then the hour is drawing near when the resurrection of Poland shall be something more than a hope. ”

“ As may be seen, according to my opinion, the point of view for the appraisement of the different parties and intellectual powers, which the foreigner feels himself compelled to adopt, is this: how far do they offer a greater or lesser power of resistance to the principle which aims by all means at breaking down the individuality of the people, the new and fearful principle of Asiatic absolute monarchy? It will be only when the danger which is threatened herefrom is removed that Poland can afford the luxury of measuring the different aims of the times by a new and sounder standard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poland is a symbol—a symbol of all which the best of the human race have loved, and for which they have fought. In Poland everything is concentrated, all that is most hateful and despicable, all that is most lovable and most brilliant; here the contrasts of human life are found in bold relief ”

“ Until the middle of the eighteenth century society was immovable, because the nobility regarded every reform as an attack upon their freedom, and enthusiastically upheld not only the free choice of a king, which had degenerated into an actual auction of the crown to the highest bidder, but also the liberum veto—that is, the right of every single member of the diet to prevent any enactment by his protest. ”

“ In such a trifling matter as the custom-house examination the two distinguishing marks of the bulk of Russian prudential regulations can be traced: the oppressive and the inconsequent. If I had known of the prohibition against having a pistol in my travelling bag, all I needed to do was to put it into my pocket; for the pockets are not searched. If I had known that it was forbidden to carry foreign books, I might have sent them from Vienna to a bookseller in Warsaw, and I should have received them without any delay. ”

“ Hospitality is a more essential feature in Polish life than in that of any other country. Elsewhere people are hospitable only when they are bored: here they are hospitable without being bored; to shrink from showing hospitality here is accounted snobbery; to shrink from accepting hospitality, even on a grand scale, is also snobbery, for it shows that you value it in money.
In ancient Poland even war was festive. In war the Polish knights wore large wings on their cuirasses, real ostrich wings on their saddles, and, as a matter of course, plumes in rich variety. ”

“ A similar consideration to that which ought to prevent a thoughtful and prudent Pole from placing himself on the side of the Polish Socialists, even if he is otherwise inclined to socialistic theories, should prevent him from giving his full support to the free-thinking group in Poland.
One can be as good an European as any one, one may despise all the chauvinism, which as national conceit merely stupefies a people, and still regard the forcible annihilation of a rich and valuable national individuality as a misfortune for the whole of Europe. ”

“ More than one man, who represents the Polish intelligence in its highest development, sees himself—like the proud Count Henrik in Krasinski's tragedy—condemned to defend the citadel of the Holy Trinity. These men are modern men, and they are silent on the subject. They are free-thinkers, and if as landed proprietors in Posen they have seats in the German Parliament and the Prussian Herrenhaus, they vote invariably with the centre. ”

“ But ideals, disinterested ideals, are a luxury, which bring their own punishment on a people almost as national vices do. The nations which attain to new religious ideals in the emotional life, or in their contemplative life raise themselves to new heights, or which follow aristocratic ideals in their conduct, are always weak as makers of states; frequently they have been compelled to pay for more exalted qualities by the loss of their political existence, but a race like the Poles is placed in a more difficult position than ever in a period so uniformly civic and martial as our own. ”

“ The opposition between Poland and Russia is never out of the mind of the women. This is constantly noticeable in daily life. A young girl was deserted by her lover. It was always cited as a detail which made the perfidy and cruelty more bitter, that it was for the sake of a Russian dancer he left her. A young girl, not twenty years old, rebuked a group of half-grown Polish schoolboys in the Saxon Park because they were speaking Russian to each other. Such little traits teach every one who resides for any time in Russian Poland that it is the women who keep the national passion at white heat. ”

“ Poland presents the spectacle of a nation which is not only condemned to death, but which, as Cherbuliez has said, has been buried alive, and yet which continually raises the lid of its coffin, and shows that its vital power is still far from exhausted. ”

“ There is a dilemma here, which troubles the Polish intelligence more than anything else. Many of the best people dare not say what they think, lest they should injure the cause, which is to them the holiest, or rather the only holy cause: the cause of Poland. Other eminent men are led to the reflection, which under common conditions would be unquestionable, but which in this case does not suffice, that there are ideas which have greater weight and importance than the idea of nationality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Polish servant does not kiss his master's hand but his sleeve, and so deeply rooted is this custom of expressing gratitude or affection that I have repeatedly seen young Polish students carry to their lips the arm of a man to whom they wished to show respect.
The Poles have not become much more economical under foreign rule than before. ”