Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 1/Chapter 3
III
At the commencement of the century what was the condition of this people on which this pressure of foreign rule rests, which, sundered into three parts, with an imperial eagle over each part of its divided body, still lives and seeks to convince indifferent Europe of its power and vitality?
It was a people which at the brightest time of its regeneration fell a victim to the breach of faith and covetousness of a foreign power.
From the close of the fourteenth to the close of the sixteenth century Poland had been the important power of Eastern Europe, and had extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Elbe and the Oder to the Dnieper, over a territory of more than 20,000 square miles. 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 weak point in the state organisation was that the nobility (Szlachta) was only a class of from 800,000 to 1,000,000 men in a population of from 8,000,000 to 13,000,000, and that the ruling class, after having realised its ideal of freedom and vitality, stood still in a dead conservatism. 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.
Ideas of reform—mostly from France—made way slowly in the last half of the eighteenth century, when it was too late. They did not become predominant till after the first partition of Poland in 1772. From that time forth Polish politicians subjected the existing arrangements to a persistent criticism, the political results of which were shown in the celebrated four years' diet, which met a year before the breaking out of the French Revolution. In this diet the strong national party, in constant conflict with the obdurate aristocrats, who were not very numerous, and the venal traitors who were partisans of the Tzarina Catherine, worked incessantly, secretly, and harmoniously at the reform of the constitution. Finally, May 3, 1791, an epoch-making date in Polish intellectual life, the constitution which had been prepared (an excellent work for those days, which, among other things, made the royal power hereditary, established a responsible ministry and abolished the liberum veto) was discussed, adopted, and sworn to by the king and the members of the diet in common in a nine hours' session. A fact like the adoption of this constitution is strong evidence against the alleged unfitness of Poland for self-government.
If the people themselves had dared to decide their fate, they would easily have got the better of that little group of reactionary nobles who, as early as 1792, met in Targowice, at the instance of Russia, to invoke Russia for the protection of their old liberties; but the weak Stanislaus Augustus, as is well known, submitted to the pressure from St. Petersburg, broke his oath, and joined the confederation at Targowice. Thus when the Prussian army, under the pretence of fighting against Jacobinism, but in reality to divide the booty with the Tzarina, invaded the land in 1793, the second partition of Poland was carried out.
Then followed the first great Polish rebellion, under Kosciusko as Dictator. After a three days' fight the Russians were driven out of Warsaw and in a short time Wilna, the capital of Lithuania, was also liberated. With varying success the contest was continued amidst victory, defeat, and treachery, until Kosciusko—on the sudden arrival of Suvorow on the battlefield—lost the battle almost won at Maciejowice, and, severely wounded, fell into the hands of the Russians.[1] Suvorow carried Praga by assault, and after causing 20,000 men to be cut down on the 8th of November, entered Warsaw. In 1795 came the third and last partition. There was no longer any kingdom of Poland. But there was still a Polish people—a people who had heroic, chivalrous, brilliant, useless qualities enough, but very few of the useful, civic virtues. 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.
It was a credulous and confiding martial people, always ready to risk their lives upon a promise, which no one thought of keeping.
Consider the relation of this people to Napoleon, on whom, after the last partition of the country, they naturally fixed their hopes. Only two years after the partition, General Dombrowski agreed with Bonaparte that the Polish legions (in national uniform, but under French leaders) should fight in Italy with the soldiers of the republic. The Poles received many a blow for the French in Lombardy in 1797 and in the Italian campaign of 1798-99. The first legion was almost annihilated under Dombrowski in the battles of Trebbia and Novi; the second under Wielhorski entered Mantua, which the Austrians were besieging; when the French were compelled to capitulate they bound themselves to surrender these deserters—that is, the Poles—to their masters. Nevertheless the Poles raised new legions, and took part during the Consulate in the battles on the Danube and in Italy. But neither the treaty of peace at Luneville in 1801 nor that of Campo Formio in 1797, contained any article in which the name of Poland was mentioned.
Nevertheless the Poles, deceived by lying promises, hoped at every new campaign that by alliance with the French troops they should succeed in restoring Poland. The celebrated song which the soldiers of the legion had composed far from their native land, "The Dombrowski March"—"It is not yet all over with Poland, not so long as we live"—contains this thought.
But after the peace of Luneville, Bonaparte, who aspired to imperial dignity, merely wished to keep the Poles as a bodyguard for himself, and when General Kniaziewicz answered him by demanding his dismissal, he determined to get rid of them. They were first sent to Italy, and there it was announced to them that they were to go to St. Domingo to put down an insurrection of negroes who were fighting for freedom. Their protests availed nothing. Threatened on all sides with artillery, they were embarked at Genoa and Leghorn, and in the unhealthy climate and in the terrible war nearly all perished.
And yet the Polish legions again fought by the side of the French at Jena. At the peace of Tilsit Russia was treated leniently, while out of what was then Prussian Poland the little Grand-Duchy of Warsaw was created. But this was enough to arouse anew the confidence of the Poles and win their whole trust. When preparations were made for the campaign against Russia, it was in vain that Kosciusko resisted Napoleon's hypocritical advances and flatteries, and demanded positive and publicly given promises. When Fouché was unable to induce Poland's dictator to give his name by threats, they imitated his signature, and by a shameless forgery issued a proclamation signed by Kosciusko to the Polish people, which earnestly entreated the Poles to unite their forces with those of the French. It might have been supposed that they were cured of the worship of Napoleon. But in spite of everything which had happened, when, in 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen, by simply calling his Russian campaign the second Polish war, he induced 80,000 Poles under Josef Poniatomski to accompany him. The following year only 8000 of them came back.
The Poles are as vivacious as Southerners, but they are not a politically prudent people, educated in the school of Machiavelli, like the Italians, who understood how to make the French pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them. They are a people whose legions Napoleon induced to shed their blood on a hundred battlefields merely by holding the white eagle before them, and a people whose battalions Steinmetz, in 1870, induced to storm the terrible heights at Spicheren, by allowing the Prussian bands to play the melody of the national song, Jeszcze Polska nie zginela, which is prohibited in Posen in time of peace.
Such a youthful or childish enthusiasm is certainly not a sustaining element in the great struggle for life of the nations in industrial and militarian ages. It does not flourish in conjunction with thrift, industry, discipline, moderation, and civil prudence, qualities which ensure the continuance of the individual and of the state.
In old descriptions of the Poles it is commonly said that their chivalry and personal bravery can be counted on under all circumstances, but that there is something of vanity in their magnanimity, something volatile in their generosity, that they are obstinate, combative and quarrelsome, recognising no higher law than their own will, and incapable of keeping this will long on the same point. They are commonly represented as poor economists, very easily involved in pecuniary embarrassments, however large their incomes, as turning over thousands of books, but not studying any, as being exceedingly erratic, and wasting their time and talents. It has been charged against them that at the very time they were raving over ideas of freedom, they were playing the autocrat towards their peasants, and that though they are the most tender husbands, they have two or three mistresses as well as the adored wife. In brief, a combination of eastern and western peculiarities is ascribed to them.
Probably there was a great deal of justice and truth in this older view. It is therefore interesting to inquire which of these characteristics the foreign rule has developed and which it has obliterated.
Love of external splendour is necessarily repressed. It is evidently not killed. Love for all that is symbolised so profoundly by the father's plume in Cherbuliez's Ladislaus Bolski, lies deep in the Polish nature. The father's red and white plume, which Ladislaus always carries with him in a case, is the glittering principle of grandeur. And it is extremely significant that in one of the leading poets of Poland this definition of God is found:—
"I see that he is not the God of the worms or of creeping things. He loves the flight of gigantic birds and gives the rein to the rushing horse. He is the fiery plume on the proud helmet."—(Beniowski, 5th Canto.)
Compare the prophet Habakkuk's grand description of God. 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. There is a tale told in Warsaw of a poor school-teacher who had distinguished himself, and received the order of Stanislaus. He kept it hidden in a case, and only used it to punish his children with. When the youngest was naughty, he said, "If you cry again, you shall wear the order of Stanislaus about your neck at dinner." That was enough.
The essentially aristocratic character of the nation still exists, though greatly modified. The Pole has no inborn inclination to the civic virtues; his ideal is, and continues to be, that of a grand seigneur. The aversion to counting and saving, to reckoning and computing and keeping accounts, is universal. In all places where Germans and Poles compete in the domain of trade and industry, the Poles get the worst of it. The great manufacturers in Russian Poland, who, thanks to the enormous protective duty, enrich themselves at the expense of the purchasers, are almost without exception immigrant Austrians or Prussians. Nay, in this century, a whole manufacturing town (Lodz) has sprung up and grown with American speed; a town, which, lying in the middle of Poland, was founded and is inhabited by Germans only. The Poles are, and continue to be, an aristocratic race; the middle class, which has been gradually wedged in between the nobles and the peasants, is yet comparatively small, and, for a long time to come, for the educated Pole of distinction, the life of the burgess will mean a life passed in eating and drinking, or, as the Count says in Krasinsky's Godless Comedy, in "sleeping the sleep of the German Philistine with his German wife."
But we must not forget that the Szlachta in its constitution was something very different from the nobility in most of the countries of Europe. It was never a separate caste. After the victorious defence of Vienna John Sobieski ennobled all his cavalry. Even in our century whole regiments of infantry have been ennobled. There are thus at this moment in the different parts of Poland not less than 120,000 noble families. The nobility thus corresponds here most nearly to what elsewhere in Europe is the upper middle class. It must also be noted that the titles, prince, marquis, &c., are not originally Polish, but were first conferred upon the most important families by the foreign conquerors, for which reason they are not much used in the country. In Warsaw in speaking French they address a countess as madame and not as comtesse. Even on making introductions I never heard any titles given among the aristocracy—an agreeable thing when one comes from Germany.
At the same time the relations between people of rank and their inferiors have certainly something Asiatic. No small degree of extravagance is usual in the employment of servants. In every house owned by a person of ample means, for instance, there is a doorkeeper who sits the whole day on a chair at the entrance to open the open hall door. A Dane could never be induced to sit so long on a chair. I was also much struck by the inclination or custom of the servants to wait up for the master at night, even when they were allowed to go to bed. Finally, according to northern ideas, their humility was amazing. 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. If any change had taken place in this respect it would have been in Posen, where the German example has made itself felt. They are prodigal of their time.
As there is no freedom of meeting, as no kind of association is allowed—the only club in Warsaw was closed, when a few years since it tried to prevent riots against the Jews in a suburb in which the police did not interfere—as, generally speaking, all public life is forbidden, so that fifty men cannot assemble in a hall without the permission and surveillance of the police, private society, which has to supply everything that is lacking in this direction, consumes an enormous amount of time.
The hospitality is very great and very tasteful. An exceptional quality which is inborn in the race, is tact. In this connection I must be allowed to note with gratitude the delicacy with which hospitality was shown to me on my arrival at Warsaw. I was taken to large, luxuriously furnished apartments, adorned with fine pictures, and supplied with books; my name was on the door; on the writing-table were visiting cards with my Warsaw address; and two servants who could speak foreign languages were told off to wait upon me.
Hospitality is a deep-seated instinct among the Poles. It is certainly exercised towards foreigners more lavishly now that foreigners seldom visit Poland, but the chief reason of its culmination among the native born of to-day is evidently that social intercourse has so completely to supply the place of public life.
- ↑ His famous exclamation, "Finis Poloniæ!" is a legend of later invention.