CHAPTER IV.
POLAND AND BOHEMIA.
I. The Contrast—National Character of the Poles—Our Lady of Csenstochova—Dancing Peasants—Galician Poles—Selfish Policy—Austria a Slav State.
II. The Poles in Russia—Russia’s Repressive Measures—The Slav Ideal—A Better Understanding—The Poles in Prussia—The Iron Heel—Law of Expropriation.
III. Csech Characteristics—Professor Masaryk—Jan Huss—Slav Puritans—The Hradćin—Modern Politics.
I.
Roughly speaking the Group of the Northern Slavs includes twenty million Poles and eight million Csechs. Numerically, therefore, they are the greatest of the unliberated Slav peoples. Bohemia and her sister-country Moravia are under Austrian rule, while Poland has been dismembered and partitioned between Russia, Germany and Austria. At one time both countries were great and flourishing, and played a prominent part in history. In 1526 the Csechs[51] acknowledged the Hapsburgs as their ruler,[6] and Bohemia’s political decay and gradual loss of independence date both from this point. The first partition of Poland in 1772 deprived the Republic of liberty. Her dismemberment was finally completed and sealed by the third partition in 1795, and henceforth the Poles were even deprived of the possibility of co-operating as a nation.
The Csechs and Poles have both passed through a national tragedy, but of the two the Polish tragedy makes a stronger appeal to the imagination, because of the contrast between their former greatness and their present position, the high level of their culture, and the lofty principles at stake in the Great Polish Revolution. The Poles fell victims to the foreign yoke just as their civilization, their culture, and their esprit were on the fairway to rival the intellectual splendours of France under Louis XIV. They were a brilliant people—mentally and intellectually refined, but physically decadent, and quite incapable of surviving their political freedom. They yielded to listless sentimentality and bewailed their lost greatness instead of fighting to retrieve it. You may love the Poles with your heart but never with your reason! In this they are the very antithesis to the Csechs whom you cannot love except with your reason. You may admire them for the culture they have so laboriously won, but you cannot love them for it.
To the German and Austrian the Csech presents a comic type. But no one looks upon the Pole as comic; you hate him or you love him, but you cannot ridicule him—there is something great and tragic about him. The Russians who hate him for political reasons are fired by religious fanaticism. They hate the Jesuitical principles of the Pole. The Germans hate the Polish want of management, and “Polnische Wirtschaft” (“Polish management”) is a German idiom. But no one would insult Polish idealism and the innate nobility of the Pole. He compares with the Csech as Don Quixote with Sancho Panza. He is a dreamer and visionary who prostrates himself before an invisible shrine and awaits the miracle of salvation and liberation. This life of dreams has endowed the modern Pole with hyper-sensitive nerves, dogmatic onesidedness, and extreme passivity. Lost in the contemplation of their royal past, the Polish people wait in breathless silence for the first bird-note to herald the dawn of freedom that shall dispel the night of tribulation.
But, while the conscience of the nation languishes, crucified in the bitter suffering of a Messianic ideal, the Masses—the common people—are sane and sturdy; they live and multiply far removed from the griefs of the Classes. Their hard life has made them dull and unfeeling; caught in a world of factories, mines, and social democracy, they are only interested in their own immediate concerns and personal pleasures. Anything beyond that they expect from the mediation of “Bogarodjitza” (Mother of God).