Several eminent women shine as luminaries on the Polish Parnassus. Maria Ilnicka, born in 1830, excels as an admirable translator of the songs of Ossian and of Walter Scott, and as a creator of profoundly thoughtful poems. Deotyma-Jadwiga Luszczewska, the talented Polish improviser and poetess, published in 1854 and 1858 two volumes of exquisite poetry, and later an epic, Tomyra, the rhapsody Stanislaw Lubomirski, and a brilliant Symphony of Life for the Beethoven festival in the great theatre at Warsaw in 1870. Her fine creation, Poland in Song, published in 1887, treats of the Wanda legend in dramatic form.
Omitting a large galaxy of lesser lights two women authors reign supreme in Poland: Elise Orzeszko and Marja Konopnicka. The former, born in 1842, though too passionate in her plea for her ideals, especially for the absolute emancipation of woman, whom she believes is superior to the deceiver and cynic man, is a deeply poetic nature. Her novels and social-philosophical works have been, in later years, realistic and true to nature, and are permeated with a humanitarian sympathy for the oppressed, be they Poles or Jews or women. Her novels Eli Makower (1874) and Meir Esofowicz (1878) treat of the relation of the Jews to the Polish nobility, and again of the contrast and warfare between the Talmudic fanatics and the tolerant, cosmopolitan, cultured Jews of the world. She prophesies to the homeless race a better future. Her brilliant literary works and her endeavors to inculcate on her people Polish ideals did not always find friendly appreciation on the part of the Russian government, which confined her for several years to Grodno. Her plea for the emancipation of woman found a strong antagonist in Eleonore Ziemiecka (1869), who declared that the unlimited emancipation of women is but a dream of unhappy and oppressed women, which, if realized, would lead society to destruction. Ziemiecka insists that in any sound society the natural mission of woman is that of a wife and mother, and as the counsellor of man.
Marja Konopnicka is a lyric or rather elegiac poet of great power and genius. Her poetry is not soothing and comforting, but painful, pessimistic, and despairing. Freedom of thought, sometimes verging on atheism, is the inspiration which she drew from the condition of her country and of her people. She is the singer of despair; according to her conception of the world, God has lost his fatherly feeling for the world, or perhaps for Poland only:
"The thundercloud is thy crown, lightning thy garment,
The sun the stool of thy mighty feet.
What are human tears to thee? Dewdrops!
And yet omniscient, none is shed without thy will!
Indeed I And yet thou hast never dried them?" (H. S.)
Not to end with a misconception of this poet's nature, let it be mentioned that love is not strange to her; but it is the love for her native land, and for all those who in some way glorify her native land. Such love she breathes in her ode to the great Polish painter Matejko, when she writes of his great pictorial apostrophe to the glory of Poland, The Battle of Grunwald, as Zaleski, also, eulogizes Matejko, "who with the magic staff of the brush resuscitates Poland."
Though dramatic art is not the forte of the Polish race, the theatre has produced some great actresses, chief among whom are Helen Marcello and Wisnoska, who found such a tragic death at the hands of a jealous Russian officer; Madame Popiel Svienska; and, greatest of all, Madame Modrzejewska (Modjeska), whom Brandes calls a wonder of the nation. Unfortunately, the range of Polish dramatic poetry and the despotically ruled theatre at Warsaw could not satisfy Modjeska's genius. Her repertoire is drawn mostly from the creations of Shakespeare and Schiller; and with her art she has fascinated until her old age--she is now about sixty-three--vast audiences in the capitals of almost all the European states and in the United States, and vivified the noblest creations of the greatest thinkers and poets.