Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/101

 Rh censor, and since I also saw that three lectures would not be enough for the subject, even if I spoke for two hours each time, I sought to obtain from the chief of the police permission to deliver four lectures instead of three, and asked to have my time extended beyond February.

The number four did not meet with approval.—"Why not?" was then asked.—The answer was: "Because three lectures are an entertainment; four are a course of instruction." They were afraid, it seemed, that under the form of lectures for charity, a sort of Polish university should be established in the town hall, in which one cycle of lectures should in some way or other be continued in the next.

The matter of the prolongation of the time was then debated. Why do you not lecture in February? It is your fault if you do not do it.—I complained of the difficulties with the censor.—Well, well, then there was this to be done; give a written petition to the chief of police; he would send it to Apuchtin, he would forward it to General Gurko; the latter would possibly inquire at St. Petersburg if the request could be granted, and the reply would come back through the same channels in reversed order.—When could the answer be expected?—Oh, in five weeks.—But then March will be over, and by the 1st of April (Russian style) I must be in Copenhagen.—Well, that was my affair, and did not concern the authorities.

Plainly enough they were not very anxious to have lectures on Polish national literature delivered in Warsaw.

At this time I received my first lecture back from the censor. They had been very thorough. The conclusion, several pages, was struck out, and in various places the erasures were numerous. Even a well-known quotation from Schiller, "the living is right," was struck out. Words like résignation or tristesse, used as characteristic of Polish literature, were blotted out. In one place where I had spoken of the Catholic piety of the poets these words were erased. In another place where I had spoken of the life which is described in the most celebrated work of Mickiewicz, the red pencil had gone over these words: "The Lithuanian forest, the natural setting of this life;" and in, "For the