IC-NRLF P G 7012 F67 1911 MAIN O >- LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class OLISH LITERATURE A LECTURE BY NEVILL FORBES, M.A., PH.D. READER IN RUSSIAN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Price One Shilling net HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS ,ONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE POLISH LITERATURE A LECTURE BY NEVILL L FORBES, M.A., PH.D. READER IN RUSSIAN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE COrV AODr'D 3JNALTQBE RETAINED NOTE AIDS TO THE PRONUNCIATION OF POLISH WORDS : c = ts in English its cz = ch church sz = sh shall w = v love o = oo n boot ie = ye yet dzi) _ di \-~- dy d>u ^ } = tty " " Lutt y ens ch = ch loch j =r y i, you 'I = j French jour All Polish names are acc'eri'texf on the penultimate syllable *". J !/6.gJ M4Gtipwjcz\= Mitskyevich ' Potocki" ''^"Potdtski 111 I POLISH LITERATURE THAT so little attention has been given in England to Polish literature is unjust, but intelligible. The language itself has always been a barrier ; difficult to acquire and pronounce, essential neither in commerce nor in travel, there are few foreigners who master it sufficiently to appreciate the literature, still fewer who are capable of translating from it adequately into English. And yet the treasures of this literature are so ample, its attractions so manifold, that any one who has surmounted the initial difficulties of language need never spend another dull moment ; for a knowledge of Polish opens the doors to a civilization whose history and characteristics offer as great a contrast to the plodding consistency that has made Germany the type of perfect organization, as to the impulsive expression of primitive forces to which Russia owes her flashes of triumph, her intermittent paralysis. Unlike Germany, where centuries of incubation were needed before the federated State was born, Poland early acquired political unity, which, however elastic and loosely knit, enabled the country for many years to present a solid front to its enemies abroad, and actuated a continuous, cohesive and prolific intellectual develop- ment at home. Unlike Russia, where, after centuries of fruitless tumult, power gradually became centralized in an auto- cracy, which reduced the colossal realm to unquestion- ing submission, Poland, from being in its early years a despotism, became, partly by accident, partly by arrangement, a non plus ultra of decentralization, a sort 229808 * C: (V:< ; f POLISH LITERATURE c*. ^ ^ ." ,, t t * fc, t C * O * of wild-garden of individualism, where the personal caprice of nobles and squires ran riot like brambles, choking the seeds of progress ; political evolution was frustrated, but artistic talent could branch forth unques- tioned and undisturbed. The most vital moment, or rather succession of moments, in the early history of Poland was the intro- duction of Christianity in the tenth century. Though the influence of the missionary brothers Cyril and Me- thodius of Salonica, disseminating far from their home the tenets of Eastern orthodoxy, is credited with having reached the Vistula, the glory of gathering Poland into the true fold and holding her there, to this day a patient and profitable convert, belongs to Rome. Now a few years later the Princes of Kiev accepted for themselves and their people the Eastern faith, so when, in 1054, the Church of Rome was divorced from that of Byzantium a definition of confessional spheres of influence was in- volved ; into this business the prudent directors of the two faiths entered with a zeal that betrayed anxiety for temporal as well as for spiritual aggrandizement, and in its course that rift was made which immediately rent the Slavonic world into two halves and prevents their recon- ciliation to-day. It is the difference of confession, more than anything else, that is at the bottom of all the cankerous trouble between Russians and Poles, trouble that, exploited by others, has weakened both. The influences of Byzantium and Rome on their respective Slavonic flocks have been various. The Eastern empire, in the eleventh century already fast de- clining, was not equal to the conquest or assimilation of its new converts, though its civilization exerted on them, till its fall, a considerable if ungenial influence. The budding autocrats of Servia, Bulgaria, and Russia con- solidated their despotisms on Byzantine lines, fledgling eaglets were soon to appear in unfriendly rivalry on their standards, the Church became in their countries an appendage of the State, a political institution, as it was POLISH LITERATURE 5 in Constantinople, and Byzantine culture, temporarily superior to that of Rome, began to spread amongst them its ossifying roots. Monasteries and seminaries sprang into being with mushroom rapidity, dispensaries of the jejune educational ideals of the metropolis. The position of those Western Slavs who were fasci- nated by the Roman orbit was different ; the Latin hier- archy, independent of the State, undermined monarchical power, and Roman culture, inferior for the moment to that of Byzantium, too remote to stir the intellects of the Czechs and Poles, was made more inaccessible to them by the fact that the Latin monks were ignorant of Sla- vonic dialects, the use of which amongst their neophytes for religious purposes those of the East had the fore- sight not only to sanction but to encourage. Thus the advantages, it is clear, -were to begin with on the side of the Southern and Eastern Slavs, but the tables were soon turned ; between the Turks and the Tatars there was before long not much left of their political indepen- dence; while the overthrow of their Byzantine light- house, whose rays, bright in the Balkans, pale by the time they reached Russia, had for long past been dark- ened by the approach of Islam, left them in complete intellectual obscurity. Byzantine culture found an asylum in Italy, where the literary treasures of the classical world, for centuries warehoused by the tight-laced and inappreciative theo- logians of the Bosphorus, were enthusiastically wel- comed, shook off their dust, and emerged in all their pristine splendour. The anti-monarchical policy of Rome, again, had surprising benefits in store for the Western Slavs, since it weakened the temporal power of the German emperors and simultaneously allowed the Poles and the Czechs to reassert their political independence, which, however, never assumed proportions formidable enough to excite the jealousy of the Holy See. Harm- less while faithful to Rome, the Teutons, as soon as their vitality had been regenerated by the Reformation, 6 POLISH LITERATURE became dangerous to Poland, and from that time onward the Poles were menaced on both sides by peoples whose hostility, originating in variety of race, was accentuated by difference of confession, by the Germans in the West and the Russians in the East. To the North their neighbours were the Lithuanians, a gentle and bucolic people, who, united to the Poles by a political accident, were destined from amongst the ranks of their polonized aristocracy to lend to the roll of Polish letters some of its brightest names. Their southern neighbours were the Slovaks, early over- shadowed by the Magyars, fresh from Asia, but with these the Poles had comparatively little intercourse, divided from them as they were by the Carpathians, their one natural boundary. For us in England, with our one panacea, the North Sea and English Channel, it is difficult to appreciate the horror of having frontiers on all sides open to attack, for the Poles early lost con- trol of what little coast they originally had, retaining hold only on Danzig, allowing the Teutonic Knights to take firm root in East Prussia, where their power, often quelled, but never extinguished, smouldered on, a con- stant menace to its neighbours, destined to bring about their final ruin. The Poles found no difficulty in admin- istering, from time to time, severe blows at these adven- titious neighbours, but always happy-go-lucky and debonair, they could never bring themselves to crush or oust them. In those days the immense importance of having untrammelled access to the ocean was not fully understood, and given one port on the coast, Danzig, and free communication down the Vistula to it, the Poles, thus enabled to export their surplus cereals and in so doing amass facile and unexpected fortunes, asked no more. They seem not to have realized that with Prussians to the east of it and Prussians to the west of it, the control of their unique harbour was qualified and incomplete. Besides leaving the Teutons on their borders un- POLISH LITERATURE 7 disturbed, the Poles encouraged them to overrun the country, and the Germanization of the Polish towns, which began in the thirteenth century, acquired pro- portions such that Polish was not to be heard spoken in the streets of Cracow. The reason of this peaceful invasion was the fact that the Poles, people of pre- eminently rural pursuits, frequenting the towns only for political or social gatherings, were unable of them- selves to cope with the demands for material improve- ment and to take part in the increasing industrial activity which even in so agricultural a country as Poland were in course of time inevitable; to fulfil these necessary functions there were none more proper than the thrifty and tidy Germans. Although there was at that time no racial animosity on the part either of the new-comers or on that of their hosts, the growing danger of a permanently established exotic bourgeoisie became apparent even to the non- chalant Poles, who, after the severe defeat inflicted by them on the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in East Prussia in 1410, and the temporary eclipse of Prussian power thereby entailed, realized that steps to deal with these anomalous urban conditions must be initiated without further delay. When it came to the point, the Poles found they had been making mountains out of mole-hills, and the assimilation of the Germans, whose nationality has never been wider than their own frontiers, was accomplished with rapidity and ease. But the strength of the German element in Poland during the two centuries of its unrestricted development can be gauged by the influence of the language of these alien citizens on that of their foster-country; Polish, namely, has borrowed from German the words for numberless articles of commerce, the appellations of municipal offices, besides the expressions for a whole series of abstract conceptions, such as: condition, direction, relation, computation, salvation, representation, which might, it would have seemed, in view of the 8 POLISH LITERATURE immense influence in the country of Latin, the language of Church and State, have been, as they were in England, introduced from that source. The fact, however, that the Poles so early appropriated a number of abstract expressions from their German neighbours, neither from Latin, which held the monopoly of culture, nor as other of the Slavonic nations have since done, coining words in etymological imitation of Latin, often in the process violating their own language, under the misapprehension they were ennobling it, this fact is an interesting illustration of Polish receptivity and broad-mindedness, of the capability of the language to digest and assimilate foreign mouthfuls ; these old German words too lend an archaic and not unpleasant colour to the language, besides affording the opportunity of creating doublets at will from Latin, for the sake of humour or style, as occasion may demand. The Jews, too, from early times formed a large part of the urban population in Poland, but, unlike the Ger- mans, they have never been assimilated to any extent. Encouraged to come to the country by its rulers for the promotion of trade, they were granted facilities denied them at that time in all other European lands, but it must be admitted that in Poland's hour of need they have not stood by her. Important to the social and economic history of the country, they play no role in its literature, nor has their speech affected Polish. As for Lithuania and Russia, with both of which countries Poland was always in uninterrupted contact, the languages of neither of them have influenced Polish, which, on the contrary, wherever it was politically supreme, and that was for many centuries over the whole of Western Russia, for all purposes of social and official intercourse ousted the vernacular, in proportion as the aristocracy in those lands became polonized or yielded before the immigrant nobility of the suzerain power. Czech, too, though there was, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a certain exchange of intellectual POLISH LITERATURE 9 ware between Poland and Bohemia, has left little mark on the Polish language. Poland, territorially shapeless and ungainly, with boundaries perpetually fluid, open to both peaceful and armed invasion on a dozen fronts, harbouring immense quantities of resident foreigners, and weakened by the chronic if stifled discontent of the peasants against the peers, yet possessed extraordinary national vitality, which was symbolized then, as it is to-day, in the language. Still it was many years before this admirable medium of expression was appreciated and turned to account ; for all literary purposes it was long obscured by Latin, which was considered the only decent language for the conveyance of serious information. This error, prevalent all over Roman Catholic Europe in the early middle ages, assumed exaggerated proportions in Poland and Hungary. The Poles cannot be blamed for falling into this mistake; it was only natural they should try to emulate their co-religionists in other more advanced countries, but it is no less astonishing than it is un- fortunate that such an illusion should have mesmerized them for so long. With one or two notable exceptions, all Polish authors, if they wished to write anything impressive, if they wished to create anything which they hoped would have permanent value, anything, in fact, except that which they considered ephemeral and trivial personal satires, facetious tales, epigrams, and novelettes wrote in Latin, while works of grave import such as histories, political and philosophical disquisitions, even memoirs, they continued to compose in that language till the middle of the eighteenth century. For long inaccessible to and insurmountable by them, owing to its remoteness and strangeness, Latin, once established, fascinated the Poles, and for centuries held them in its inflexible grip ; their early distaste for it and arduous apprenticeship in it they redeemed later by assiduous and intensive cultivation of its standard works, B io POLISH LITERATURE and, though inexpert in prosody (the Poles used to quote in self-mockery the doggerel line: 'nos Poloni non curamus quantitatem syllabarum' [sic]), they prided themselves in imitating the methods and continuing the traditions of the best authors, making up for want of individuality by elaboration of style. Yet the Church, through whose agency Latin had been introduced, the hierarchy, to whose ranks almost ex- clusively what men of letters there then were belonged, found this language was too cold and severe to appeal to the masses, especially to the women-folk of all classes, on whom the success of the new religion so much depended. Therefore in the thirteenth century, when the country was distracted by dynastic quarrels within and terrorized by Tatar incursions without, and the demand for spiritual reinforcement rose to its height, the Church perceived and seized its opportunity ; steps were taken in high ecclesiastical quarters to interpolate more popular episodes in the order of the liturgy, and, to the delight of the people, the arid latinity of the Mass became interspersed with refreshing hymns, psalms, prayers, and sermons in the vernacular. It is to this accident that is due the existence of those few specimens of Polish as it was spoken in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that have survived. In this respect Polish literature is immeasurably poorer than Russian, which possesses vast quantities of traditional folk-epics, folk-tales, ceremonial songs, forming an inexhaustible mine of material for ethnographers and philologists. No doubt there must also have been in Poland similar productions of the popular imagination, anonymous creations handed on from generation to generation, elaborated and embellished by each in turn ; but whether because they were less fostered and cherished by the people themselves than in Russia, or, which is more likely, because they fell an easier prey to the jealous and prudish censoriousness of the hierarchy, able to keep their flocks in stricter control POLISH LITERATURE n than were their colleagues in the limitless expanses of Muscovy, be the reason what it may, they have not come down to us; those examples of early Polish that are extant are not the spontaneous expression of immemorial beliefs and fancies, but artificial works whose composition was dictated by the interests of the Church. The fourteenth century began with the accession to the Polish throne of the Czech, Prince Wenceslas, and for a short time the influence of Bohemia, more civilized than Poland, in close touch with Western Europe and already possessing a university in Prague, became predominant. It ended with the marriage of the daughter and heiress of King Louis of Hungary and Poland to Ladislas Jagiello, Prince of Lithuania; as a result of this desirable and convenient match, Poland peacefully and economically acquired not only a new dynasty, but also a vast accession of territory, wealth, and power, and became a determining factor in European calculations. It was during the fifteenth century that the political power of Poland reached its height. The territorial union of Lithuania with Poland, symbolized in the matrimonial junction of their reigning families, crowned with the successful repulse of the nation's enemies, had trebled the size of the country, lent greater and more dignified proportions to the whole organization of the State, and facilitated a more rapid and consistent development of material and intellectual resources. But simultaneously began that increase in the power of the nobles and squires, that multiplication of privi- leges, that premature development of parliamentary institutions to the detriment of the central authority, which eventually proved the ruin of the country. For the moment, however, its position was one of unprecedented and unequalled prosperity; in the intellectual life of the people this was symbolized by the establishment and efflorescence of the University 12 POLISH LITERATURE of Cracow. Tentatively mooted by Casimir the Great in 1364, it was founded and confirmed in 1400 owing to the initiative and energy of Queen Jadwiga, who did not live to see the realization of her project. This seat of learning rendered invaluable service to the cause of civilization and enlightenment in Poland ; it provided a most important contribution to Polish literature in the person of its alumnus Jan (John) Dlugosz, the first Polish historian and most conspicuous author in the fifteenth century. A dignitary of the Church, and tutor of the royal children, he was always true to the ultra-conservative maxims of those circles in which he moved; deeply religious and an uncom- promising patriot, his chronicle was a work of immense and conscientious labour, an idealization of the time in which he lived and of the institutions that had made his country what it was. Refreshingly subjective, he would omit facts which discorded with his theories, yet was averse from distortion of the truth. An easy-going critic, he lacked the sense of historical perspective, a faculty of later date, and it is by his patriotism and devotion, by his assiduity, by the proportions of his labour, the in- credible variety of sources from which he commanded his information, that he impresses us now. Unfortu- nately, obedient to the order of the day, he wrote exclusively in Latin ; so did another prominent writer of the fifteenth century, John Ostrorog, the first author from the ranks of the lay aristocracy. A pupil of Western Europe, he composed, on return- ing to his country, a pamphlet full of the bitterest criticisms of the domestic abuses and ecclesiastical pretensions, to which his eyes were wide open, those of Dlugosz half-closed. This pamphlet was the first breath of the fresh air of humanism, about to dispel the chilling mists of asceticism and scholasticism in which the Polish literary world was becoming more and more impenetrably POLISH LITERATURE 13 enveloped; it was at the same time the first political brochure, a form of literature which acquired immense vogue in subsequent centuries, in which Poles always delighted to vent their aptitude for satire, give play to their ready wit, and indulge in the favourite pastime of polemics. This first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the continued ascendancy of Latin as the literary language and the growing discredit and degradation of the vernacular ; this in spite of the fact that Polish was making headway amongst the upper classes in the newly-acquired territories to the East, whither families migrated in numbers from Poland proper and where by their urbanity and sociability they converted to their language, if not to their faith, those Lithuanian and Russian nobles who had till then been faithful to the social traditions of Muscovy. Yet while in the fifteenth century the use of Latin for all purposes of literature, and indeed for any kind of writing, was confined almost exclusively to eccle- siastical circles, because authorship amongst the laity was still uncommon, in the first half of the sixteenth century, with the growth of education and of the desire to communicate with each other amongst the landed aristocracy, Latin became the language of society. To write any one a letter in Polish implied that the recipient was deficient in elementary education, and could not be done without preliminary justification. Records even exist, of the year 1534, of formal prohibitions to print in Polish having been issued by the hierarchy, prohibitions that called forth praiseworthy remon- strance. What little was written in Polish during this time was to satisfy the just demands of the ladies, weary of homilies and liturgies, and inexpert in Latin ; they were accordingly supplied with translations of edifying tales and fables, the most talented purveyor of which was a doctor and citizen of Lublin, by name Biernat, 14 POLISH LITERATURE who rendered his literature an additional service by seasoning his adaptations with a sprinkling of homely Polish proverbs. That these translations were destined chiefly for the use of women is evident from the prefaces, which e.g. chaff their readers with innate curiosity inherited from Eve. One translator hazarded the admission that it was owing to their fear of the sharper wits of women-folk that men by the use of Latin excluded them from the fields of science. The general awakening to the importance of their own language came when, in the interests of propagating the Reformation amongst the people, it was found that any language but the vernacular was useless. The second half of the sixteenth century, the age of the Reformation, a little belated in Poland, is known as the golden age of Polish literature, and was brilliantly inaugurated by the poet Nicholas Rey, who published his first work in 1543, and, ignorant of Latin, was able with fruit of his fertile wit, by his invention and originality to lay firm the foundations of the national literature. Up to his time what had been written in Polish was mostly translated from other languages for the benefit of lady-readers; Rey's pithy joviality, his searching satire were directed against the public at large, and won him wide popularity, especially amongst the supporters of the reformed religion, of which he was a stanch adherent. The progress of the Reformation into Poland from Prussia was at first slow, the conservatism of the people and the indifference of the nobility were against it ; but the new religion made considerable strides amongst the citizens, and when the nobles understood that con- version to it would free them from what little control over them the Church and State still claimed, many of them embraced it. The University of Cracow, no longer at the apex of its fame, once more meandering in the maze of scholasticism, which it tried to exploit in the services of counter-propaganda, offered passive and POLISH LITERATURE 15 short-sighted resistance to the new faith by shutting its doors to all heretics. But Poland, as a whole always honourably dis- tinguished for perhaps excessive tolerance, could not be roused, in spite of papal fulminations, to take active steps against the progress of the new religion, which it may almost be said to have killed with kindness. The confessional history of Poland is complacent and edify- ing compared with that of its Eastern and Western neighbours. The Inquisition never developed more than academic activity in Poland, where mutual toler- ance was a watchword at a time when the policy of the Church in other countries was the reverse of Christian. The Reformation certainly seemed at one moment to be carrying all before it, but several causes contributed to a decay of the new faith which was as unexpected as had been its success. Lutheranism failed to appeal to the peasants, who resented the abolition of hagiolatry and preferred having to conciliate numberless interven- ing saints to what struck them as the almost shocking directness of the new religion ; besides they were acute enough to perceive that the landlords, once rid of all ecclesiastical control, would become more relentless taskmasters than ever. Again, the want of unanimity amongst the reformed, the fissiparous multiplication of their sects, their mutual jealousies, bewildered and dis- couraged those whom they might otherwise have attracted. Finally, the appearance at this juncture of the Jesuits, who tactfully adapted their formulae to the needs of the situation and the character of their public, turned the scales, and Poland speedily re- lapsed into her pristine devotion to Rome, tranquil and profound. Thanks to his heresy, the poet Rey suffered almost total eclipse for many years ; Poland, counter-reformed by the Jesuits, was no longer as tolerant as before, and his complete rehabilitation is largely due to the efforts of his countryman Professor Bruckner, the talented and 16 POLISH LITERATURE distinguished exponent of Slavonic philology in the University of Berlin. The Reformation, however volatile its confessional influence, was the direct cause of the permanent recog- nition of Polish as a literary language, and by thus dis- crediting Latin, which was preparing for a series of fresh triumphs, fruit of the humanistic movement, rather took the wind out of the sails of the Renaissance. But the influences of humanism had already been at work in Poland, and were betrayed by the elegance of form and diction, as well as by the nobility of thought, which the authors of the golden age of Polish literature displayed when they came to write in the vernacular. Rey wrote a number of didactic and satiric poems, in the form of conversations between members of different classes of society, or under such titles as ' mirror ' and ' true representation ' of contemporary morals, of which they give a vivid and invaluable picture. These poems are full of the practical philosophy of the time, which they sugared with an exquisite coating of language, rhyme, and rhythm, and seasoned with generous doles of the racy national humour. A gifted musician and singer, an inveterate huntsman, an indefatigable bon- viveur, he was able to enjoy to the full that personal popularity which these bents assured him amongst his countrymen, devotees of sociability and sport. An adept in mundane accomplishments, Rey had also a more serious side to his nature ; his homilies and adaptations of the New Testament, written to further the propaganda of the Reformation, were very widely read, while their style was so admirable that Rey could claim to be the founder of Polish prose, no less than the first writer of original Polish verse. The greatest poetical talent of the golden age was that of Kochanowski, the first Polish lyrist, and the most gifted poet of independent Poland. A traveller in Italy and France, he had come under the influence of Ariosto and Ronsard, and was stimulated by their POLISH LITERATURE 17 example to create real poetry in his native language. He was the first of his countrymen to devote himself whole-heartedly to his art, to look upon the profession of a man of letters as an honourable calling, and not merely as a stepping-stone to preferment. Not a genius, he had heart and imagination, and infallible taste; his mind was broad, though not profound, and his artistic sense was highly developed. He was a humorist and a classic, able to invest his own compositions with the grace and proportion of those of Rome and of the Renaissance. A fervent Christian and faithful Catholic, he was alive to the faults of the hierarchy and preferred the calm of country life to participation in the con- fessional battles of the day. Besides writing pastoral poems, idylls of village life, at a time when nature still repelled more than it attracted, he wrote a drama, which, with a classical subject, was a transparent allegory of the ominous political infirmity of his country. His best works were a verse adaptation of the Psalter, and a series of threnodies, written on the death of his little girl, full of pathetic and poignant beauty, ranging from expressions of utter despair to glimpses of reconciliation with the inevitable. His aesthetic equilibrium, his perfection of form, his command of metaphor, and his freedom from the classical swathing-bands that trammelled the school of Ronsard, won Kochanowski a shoal of imitators, while main- taining him high above the level any of them ever reached. But this age counted a number of other writers who struck out lines of their own, and each in his way acquired distinction and fame : such were Bielski the historian, who performed, in writing his Universal History in Polish, a feat without precedent, and one not paralleled till the nineteenth century; Skarga, the genius of the pulpit and incomparable leader of the Jesuits in Poland ; Klonowicz, the citizen poet and moralist ; Orzechowski, the cultured and gifted polemist, c i8 POLISH LITERATURE who became a priest, but conscious that the Church needed reform waged stubborn war on, amongst other things, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, his supreme disregard for which he aptly illustrated by courageously marrying a wife ; another character of the time was Count Zamojski, who founded a university on his own property in the country, surrounded himself there with a brilliant coterie of authors and thinkers, and for long eclipsed the seat of learning in the capital. Quantities of this sixteenth-century literature have been lost; printing was expensive, fires were common, but from what remains it is possible to argue the extra- ordinary spontaneousness of the intellectual develop- ment, the prevalence and high level of culture in Poland at that time; this was due in part, no doubt, to the humanistic currents which penetrated Poland from Italy, spread on their return to their country by the innumerable Poles who visited and studied at Padua and at other Italian universities, due in part too to the Reformation which reached Poland from Germany and taught the Poles the value of prose, just as humanism opened their eyes to the beauty of poetry in their own language. Yet credit must be given to the ground on which these seeds fell, to whose growth Poland lent a character eminently original. No one could maintain that the literature of Poland's so-called golden age was a purely national product; it had produced no real genius, it was always overshadowed and influenced by the literary tendencies of other countries. Yet it contained much that was eminently characteristic of Poland, much that could not have been produced except under the peculiar conditions of Polish life, facts that militate against its successful translation into any foreign language. One of its healthiest and most gratifying characteristics was the extraordinary sense of corporate civic responsibility displayed by almost all its representatives; ardent patriots, anxious to inculcate into their readers their own sense of duty, they were never weary of exposing the abuses and POLISH LITERATURE 19 conjuring the defects from which their country suffered. From Kochanowski in his poems to Skarga in his sermons, one and all were conscious that Poland was on the wrong tack, that the ship was already entangled in the Sargasso sea of anarchy from which it was never to emerge entire; poets and preachers, historians and pamphleteers echoed the one cry: we are perishing. This general sense amongst the intellectual classes of impending calamity to the State, of Poland's inevitable doom, at a time when jeremiads were really premature, when Poland was still compact within and formidable without, are in all the more creditable contrast to the blind complacency and criminal optimism characteristic of Polish society throughout the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, when the country was actually tottering to disruption. By the end of the sixteenth century, it is true, the extinction of the hereditary dynasty of the Jagiellos had enabled the team of aristocrats and squires to break through the last traces of royal control which still held them in nominal check: the nobles had, by making kingship elective, robbed it of power ; they had hand- cuffed the peasants to the soil, confined the citizens to the cities, and made the tenure of any and every office conditional on ownership of land; they had, with a delicious sense of paradox, made unanimity a sine qua non of all fresh legislation, and so rendered nugatory every attempt at reform, for unanimity was the one condition which the Poles, the most urbane, gregarious, and sociable of people, but always coming to fisticuffs whenever two or three of them were gathered together in their country's interest, could never attain. Yet, in spite of this premiation of individuality, this organized anarchy or rather panarchy, this distorted conception of democracy, in spite of the enormous in- crease of wealth and luxury, the backbone of the nation had not yet been sapped, victories were reported abroad, intellectual triumphs celebrated at home, while the exist- 20 .POLISH LITERATURE ence of self-criticism, though exaggerated, showed that the national mind was healthy, present and alert. The history of Polish literature in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries is, in spite of the appearance of occasional and meteoric talents, character- ized by stagnation and decay. In contrast to the sixteenth century, of which the chief features were variety and originality of talent, perfection of language and indepen- dence of style, the seventeenth century, the age in Poland of exaggerated individuality in politics, was one of grey uniformity of intellectual development. The religious waywardness of the sixteenth was followed by whole- sale reversion and unbroken fidelity to the mother-Church in the seventeenth century. The number of people who took part in literature reached amazing proportions, but few acquired positions of distinction or command. Always gifted orators, the Poles now spent their time in justifying and preserving the disorder by which their country was distracted, and in defending the miscon- ceived liberty in which the minority throve, the political assemblies were flooded with eloquence, society with endless streams of poetry religious and political, lyric and historical, epic, didactic, romantic, erotic and pas- toral, while the air of the cities was filled with quips and squibs, lampoons and pasquinades. The growing mania for crests and connections, for heraldry and genealogy, which grew in importance as great charac- ters became more rare, for baroque panegyrics, which became more voluminous in proportion as there was less to extol, all pointed to intellectual deterioration. Latin regained ground it had lost, while the habit of latinizing Polish prose became incurable a style later dubbed maccaroniism ; linguistic purity was only pre- served in poetry and in the pulpit. The people, bemused with easy living, benumbed with verse and oratory, were yet startled by occasional and unexpected triumphs in the field, but the endless wars with Sweden and Turkey, who should have been POLISH LITERATURE 21 Poland's best friends, exhausted the scattered forces of the country, and prepared the way for the really danger- ous enemies, Russia and Prussia, unappreciated because so near at hand, already sharpening their claws in anti- cipation of the feast. During the reigns of the Saxon kings in the first half of the eighteenth century the culture of Polish society reached its lowest level. Poland, which had always been behind but had in the beginning of the seven- teenth century begun to catch up the rest of Europe, drifted further and further out of the stream of civiliza- tion. Poland had proclaimed religious tolerance in the sixteenth century, when the Christians of the rest of Europe were torturing one another for their beliefs, but as time went on, became more and more intolerant. The eighteenth century was in Poland characterized by religious unity and intellectual monotony. Fighting and husbandry occupied the people more than art and literature, while conviviality and the chase filled their leisure hours. What literature there was, continued on the same lines ; the vogue of poetry increased when in the rest of Europe its place was being taken by prose. Letters became a pastime instead of a profession, little was published, so carelessness of style resulted, corre- spondence was carried on in verse, while circumstantial poems appeared by the hundred and would be occa- sioned by the most trivial events, a divorce or an execution. Innumerable panegyrics continued to gratify the morbid love of heraldry and genealogy ; books of devotional poetry and of ascetic character multiplied incessantly, while the more prominent position occupied by women in society manifested itself in the debut of numerous authoresses. Meantime the organized political anarchy, symbolized in the phrase 'A Pole in his castle's as strong as a king', and cunningly guaranteed by the neighbouring powers, resulted in the luxuriant omnipotence of the great nobles, too selfish and jealous of each other to 22 POLISH LITERATURE promote or even to permit any reform, in the impoveriza- tion of the towns and the oppression of the peasants. Poland was like a garden where none of the fruit- trees had ever been pruned, whose hundred branches, unable to submit to the curtailment of a single privilege, had passed beyond all control ; their exuberant growth would ever and again produce splendid attitudes and lines, effects of colour or of shape the more startlingly picturesque because unorthodox and unprecedented, which, however, not only overshadowed and devitalized the rest of the flora, and reduced the gardener to ridicule and despair, but excited the prejudice and brought about the officious interference of the neighbours. These perceived that the continued existence in their midst of this seminary of liberty, this democratic wilder- ness, this happy hunting-ground of individual caprice would mar the tidiness of their own spick-and-span properties and prevent the consolidation of their harden- ing autocracies, that on the other hand its distribution amongst themselves would be a smart piece of business. So they set to work, their appetite increased as they ate, till by the end of the century the three empires had met, and the Polish Commonwealth was no more. To these facts the society of this chevaleresque republic awoke when it was too late. With the acces- sion of the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, a man as cultured and sprightly as the Saxon kings had been ponderous and dull, a great revival of intellectual activity, inspired by the conscious- ness of imminent ruin, had begun ; but the centre of political gravity was no longer in Warsaw, it was in Berlin, the realization of the national danger was post- humous, and reform of the State no longer possible at home, because dismemberment had been decided on abroad. Filled with the sense of this tragedy, the loss of political independence, all the more bitter because long prepared, Polish society had recourse to education and POLISH LITERATURE 23 literature to save what it still could. Under the in- fluence of French culture, then predominant in Europe, the complete rehabilitation of the Polish language, in prose as well as in verse, was finally effected. In the field of history much lost time had to be made good, and the King, genuinely interested in the promotion of literature, was especially energetic in his support of the historian Naruszewicz. The stage, which had never been a favourite diversion of the Poles, at length be- came relatively popular under the direction of the play- wright Niemcewicz, who took contemporary politics and morals as the theme of his comedies. The greatest poet of the age was Krasicki, Bishop of Warmia, the first since Rey and Kochanowski, excepting Potocki in the seventeenth century, to make letters his profession out of love for them and for his country, not from mo- tives of personal interest. The bitterness of his satires he mellowed with modera- tion and indulgence, they were distinguished by objec- tive sense of humour rather than by subjective irony, and in an age of shameless corruption he never became cynical. His stores of invention and observation were copious, his wit was recognized by his monarch, whom in his turn he delighted to compliment. Like King Stanislas, he was unconscious of the political necessi- ties of the time, and missed the political moment, but like him he did his best to enlighten his countrymen, lest political be followed by intellectual captivity. His lucid thoughts were expressed, except for occasional relapses into eighteenth-century rococo, concisely and with admirable precision of diction, while he was master both of style and of form. After the declaration of the freedom of the press in 1789 the country, which in spite of its ostensible liberty had never had any newspapers, was inundated with political literature. Economic and political rights were won for the towns by the eminent publicist Kollontaj. The Education Commission and Society of the Friends 24 POLISH LITERATURE of Science in Warsaw both developed hectic but invalu- able activity, to which the valorous maintenance of intellectual independence in the nineteenth century, in spite of calamity on calamity in the field of politics, can be directly traced. Men of fortune, for the first time alive to the wealth of their own literature, were seized with bibliomania, and none too soon ; for much was already lost, and little space remained to save what was left. To appreciate the meaning of the partition of Poland it is necessary to imagine America in possession of Ireland, and Great Britain divided between France and Germany, to imagine books and newspapers pub- lished in the South of England prohibited in the rest of the kingdom, and all English schools and universities North of the Trent abolished, in Ireland none but Americans qualified to buy land, and in Scotland, the North and Midlands only Germans allowed to build houses. Under these circumstances it would be com- prehensible that all who cared for their country should turn their attention to education and literature, the only means of maintaining intellectual independence, and of keeping the flame of nationality alive. It is this dire need that inspired the great Polish poets of the nine- teenth century, this consciousness that their literature occupies a unique place amongst those of Europe, for while in other countries literature is but one of the factors of the national life, in Poland it and the language in which it is expressed are the bond that still keeps the disjected fragments of the people morally united, are the one sanctuary where expressions of national feeling may still take refuge and that not always. The extraordinarily spontaneous and prolific revival which took place in the second half of the eighteenth century came to a sudden end in 1795 ; what with the completion of the partition, the establishment of censor- ships, the French Revolution, the defeat of Austria and Germany by Napoleon, his campaign against Russia, and all the hopes and fears which these kaleidoscopic POLISH LITERATURE 25 changes generated amongst the Poles, the times were too harassing and troublous to permit people reading anything but despatches and gazettes. After Moscow and Waterloo, when the hopes of the resuscitation of Poland had been disappointed, Warsaw, in the centre of the largest and most prosperous of the three divisions into which the country had been cut up, again became the national focus, the literary cynosure. Posen was too detached and commercial ; Galicia, before Magenta and Solferino, Sadowa and Koeniggraetz had taught Austria of what she was made, still abandoned to the caprice of Vienna, was then, in contrast to the present day, a sort of Polish backwoods. But the revival that took place in Warsaw was, for the moment, only an aftermath of what had gone before ; the eighteenth century and its criteria had vanished from Western Europe, but continued in Poland to lead a peaceful backwater existence, with its paraphernalia of powdered shepherdesses, periwigs and minuets. Only one remarkable talent stands out from this rather monotonous background, that of the comedian Count Fredro. He began his career in Lemberg, but soon moved to and settled in the more responsive atmosphere of Warsaw. Careless of his themes and their development, he was unsurpassed in his handling of witty dialogue, and his aphorisms are household words to-day wherever Polish is spoken. Besides highly amusing farces, a historical comedy and melo- dramas, he achieved great success with his character^ comedies, in which the Lovelaces and shrews, prigs and xenomaniacs, misers and grumblers, though inspired by foreign models, are all impregnated with downright Polish spirit, which appears not only in their speech, but in their thoughts and actions, reckless and incon- sequent, good-humoured and urbane, witty and to the point, receptive and alert. This period is also characterized by a general seculari- zation and democratization of literature, panegyrics 26 POLISH LITERATURE became obsolete, there was no court, and therefore no court poets, the vogue of moralizing and didactic poems had gone, and literature became a profession instead of a pastime, from being a distraction became a necessity. And now even the most inveterate classics could no longer anaesthetize their senses to the vibrations of romanticism which Scott and Byron, Goethe and Schiller were transmitting over Europe. The stereo- typed repetitions of classical models could no longer satisfy the craving for the novel, the individual, the national, the supernatural, the romantic. In supplying this demand Lithuania was to play to Poland the part of Scotland to England ; Lithuania, like Scotland, had furnished the neighbouring country with its dynasty and its territory, a fact which was never allowed to be forgotten, and was now, remoter and wilder than Poland, with a polonized upper but untouched lower class, to supply not only material for romance, but Poland's greatest writer himself, Mickiewicz. A native of Black Russia, on the borders of Lithuania, he spent a normal childhood at home and passed through Vilna University. His first poems, a book of ballads and romances published in 1822, erotic in character, were partly occasioned by a disappointment of the affections, and by their marked vein of personality and introspection, a novelty in Polish letters, at once aroused comment. This was followed by a more ambitious work, ' Dziady ' (' The grandfathers '), a fantastic drama in a popular framework, with a background of Lithuanian and White Russian folk-lore, and all the essential adjuncts of Romanticism, a work which, full of splendid episodes, lacks unity. One of his finest lyrical outbursts is the ' Ode to Youth ', a challenge of triumphant youth, all- pervading and all-conquering, to ossifying routine and humdrum worldliness. His inspiration was sincere and profound, his instinct and taste infallible, his per- sonality passionate and convincing, while his language was novel, daring, and polychrome; his facility and POLISH LITERATURE 27 versatility baffled a thousand imitators, and bewildered the criticasters of Warsaw. He visited Petersburg and Moscow, where he imbibed experience and was made much of in society; from Odessa, where he was sent to teach, he brought back a series of oriental cameo- sonnets descriptive of land- and sea-scape, wreck and storm, sunshine and colour, joy and sorrow in the Crimea, that called forth general amazement and ad- miration. Another dramatic poem, ' Konrad Wallen- rod/ celebrated the cunning triumph in the middle ages of Lithuanian patriotism over the aggressive Teutonic Knights, and though of unequal propor- tions, contains numberless details of perfect workman- ship. He went abroad in 1829 and never returned to his country, which in two years from then was over- taken by the consequences of the ill-judged and fatal revolution of 1831. What had been left of Polish liberty was swept away, and ten thousand of the flower of the nation went into voluntary exile in France, without lay- ing down their arms, never to return, though none be- lieved but in an imminent restoration of their country's fortunes. The effect of this wholesale emigration on Poland was disastrous, and it was not till a new genera- tion arose that the country regained full command of all its moral and mental powers. Yet it was under these restless and unsettled conditions, exiled from their homes, in the soul-destroying atmosphere of recrimination and regret, that the three greatest Polish poets, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, carried out their greatest work. Mickiewicz, conscious not only that he had lost his country for ever, but that the life and society of his country as he had known them were a thing of the past, determined to immortalize them while he could. He wrote his great national epic, ' Pan Tadeusz ' (' Mr. Thad- deus '), in which he telephotographed his mother-country Lithuania, its forests and the beasts that roamed in them, the life the people led there in the early nineteenth century, had led there for centuries past, their petty 28 POLISH LITERATURE quarrels about boundaries, resulting in hand-to-hand en- counters, their bouts of hunting and drinking, dancing and talking, love-making and mushroom-gathering, their patriarchal etiquette, their splendid hospitality, their manners homely yet courteous, their conversation down- right but full of wit, their dress, their cuisine, their houses and their habits, their rising and their going to bed. Without idealization and without sentimentality, without hero and without heroine, with a sense of humour remarkable for the age, this epic is unique and great amongst those of all literatures ; it is of local, national, not of universal Homeric dimensions, but it is historical, vivid, and spontaneous, inspired by profound and sincere patriotism, by the wish to crystallize for his compatriots the life in their patria which he and they had known, which was no more. It is the bitter lament of one who has lost his country, whose air and water, forests and fields, soil and people he had touched and loved, could still see and smell from afar, but never more regain. Combining the fervent earnestness, the stubborn affection of the sober Lithuanian, with the imagination and feeling, the verve and mobility, the patriotism and devotion of the Pole, Mickiewicz is in contrast to the two purely Polish poets, Slowacki and Krasinski. Slo- wacki, who spent his whole life in the cause of his art, a much greater master of language than Mickiewicz, and of much loftier aspirations, was eclipsed during his lifetime by the more obvious attractiveness, the more tangible charm of his rival, but his themes of universal, Shakespearian dimensions, his mastery of form and refinement of language, his wealth of ideas and imagination, have entitled him to a posthumous glory greater than that of Mickiewicz. His romantic love of the morbid, of accumulating horrors on horror's head, his want of dramatic feeling and total lack of humour, are redeemed by his sincerity and nobility, by his enthusiasm for, and his perfection in his art. Krasinski again had nothing in common with art for POLISH LITERATURE art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist, rather than as an artist. Reflective and thoughtful, he was an optimist and idealist, who believed in the regene- ration of mankind and the salvation of the world. A devout Catholic and stanch conservative, he resisted the wave of mysticism and spiritualism which had engulfed Mickiewicz and Slowacki, in which, with all its impedimenta of necromancy, pow-wows and bogey- worship, Polish society in exile sought to drown its despair, as society in Russia does to-day. Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, the three giants of Polish Literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, two of whom did all their writing, while the third, Mickiewicz, composed his greatest work, abroad, overshadowed not only all other writers of the emigra- tion, but also for a long time those who claimed attention in the home-country. With the unparalleled development and inexhaustible variety of Polish literature in Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century, it. is impossible to deal here, for time does not permit. Resigned, though far from reconciled to fate, the Poles have indemnified themselves for their political atrophy by the cultivation of art. The life of the people past and present is mirrored, the torch of nationality is kept alive in the historical novels of Kraszewski and Sienkiewicz, the peasant-epics of Konop- nicka and Reymont, while poets, novelists, and dramatists of the first quality, including Prus,Zeromski, Weysenhoff, Asnyk,' Tetmajer, Kasprowicz, Wyspianski, Przyby- szewski, Szymanski, and Sieroszewski, are almost too numerous to mention. The sources of inspiration seem never to run dry, the tree of Polish literature ever sends forth new shoots, to make those of .other lands appear leaderless and unshapely; the Holy Alliance buried Poland, but trees that bear fruit have sprung from the grave, that flourish like the talipot-palms of the king of Dahomey, each 30 POLISH LITERATURE planted on the body of a victim, that astonish those who fancied Poland dead, while the language, supple and abundant, receptive and retentive, more dignified if less go-ahead than Czech, more malleable than Russian if less melodious, impressive with its solemn rhythm weighing down the penultimate syllable of every word, offers to any who can command it unfailing pleasure, infinite reward. OXFORD : HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY YC 76296 U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES