We are forced to treat superficially so great a theme, for the women of Poland crowd the history of their country, especially since its fall. We cannot give the gallery of eminent Polish women, for this task belongs to the painter and to the historian of Polish literature and culture. But whenever a great man came under a Polish woman's spell, he succumbed to it: Napoleon the Great for once became a romantic lover under the influence of the beautiful Countess Walewska; the first German emperor felt his heart bleed when dynastic reasons forced him to give up a union with Countess Radziwil; Goethe grows enthusiastic, at the age of eighty, when in August, 1829, the great Adam Mickiewicz and his friend Odyniec presented themselves at Weimar, introduced by Madam Szymanowska, a great court pianist at Saint Petersburg; he exclaims spontaneously: "How charming she is, how beautiful and graceful!" The Polish poet's loves, adduced by Brandes, are different from all the others: they are ardent and wild, but never sensual; they are repressed or chastened by the constant emotions of sorrow for their country, their own condition, the desperate future. So are also their poetic creations: Polish women are either heroic amazons struggling for the holy cause of the fatherland (ojczyzna), or they are angelic beings belonging to another world. Nor is the motherhood of a Polish woman sweet or idyllic; the same pain prevails in bearing a Polish son whose future fate is the sorrow of "the man who lost his fatherland." Mickiewicz strikes the real chord of this sentiment in the celebrated ode To the Polish Mother: "Take thy son in time into a solitary cave, teach him to sleep on rushes, to breathe the damp and vitiated air, and to share his couch with poisonous vermin. There he will learn to make his wrath subterranean, his thought unfathomable, and quietly to poison his words, and give his being the humble aspect of the serpent. Our Redeemer, as a child, played in Nazareth with the cross on which He saved the world. O Polish mother! In thy place, I would give to thy son the toys of his future to play with. Give him early chains on his hands, accustom him to push the convict's dirty wheelbarrow, so that he shall not grow pale before the executioner's axe, nor blush at the sight of the halter. For he will not go on a crusade to Jerusalem, like the olden knights, and plant his banner in the conquered city, nor will he, like the soldier of the tricolor, be able to plough the field of freedom and water it with his blood! No! an unknown spy will accuse him; he must defend himself before a perjured court; his battlefield will be a dungeon underground, and an all-powerful enemy his judge. The blasted wood of the gallows will be the monument of his grave; a few woman's tears, soon dried, and the long talks of his countrymen in the night-time will be his sole honor and memorial after death." (Transl. Brandes, Poland.)
Such is the character of Polish womanhood, in reality and in poetic fiction. Inexhaustible riches dwell in its type. The sins of past centuries have been avenged bitterly upon them and their children; but they live on, true to their Polish nature. The variety of the human races, created by Divine Providence, with all their manifold peculiarities, their virtues and faults, would suffer greatly, and the human family would be seriously impoverished, should the species "Polish Woman" ever be merged in the conquering nations and vanish with them, however great and nobly endowed the latter may be. If the realization of this wish be the hope of statesmen, the historian of culture can only desire that the race remain according to a Tacitean word regarding the Teuton "similar only to itself."
CONTENTS
[I.] [II.] [III.] [IV.] [V.] [VI.] [VII.] [VIII.] [IX.] [X.] [XI.] [XII.] [XIII.] |
[DEDICATION] [PREFACE] THE WOMEN OF THE PAGAN TEUTONS THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS (CONTINUED) THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION THE DAYS OF THE MINNESINGERS THE COMING OF THE MASTERSINGERS WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION AN ERA OF INTELLECTUAL DESOLATION WOMAN HELD IN TIGHTENING BONDS THROUGH STORM AND STRESS TO CLASSICISM AND HUMANISM EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN WOMEN OF RUSSIA WOMEN OF POLAND |
List of Illustrations
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[Emma carrying her lover] [Capture of Thusnelda] [A Teutonic alliance] [Fredegond watching the marriage of Chilperic and Galswintha] [Princess Sophia and the old and new school religionists] [Kalmuck interior] |
G. L. P. Saint-Ange H. Konig Ferdinand Leeke L. Alma-Tadema V. G. Peroff Racinet |