Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/107

Rh compromise the speaker. They vigorously applaud some innocent comparison or other a few minutes later, or they reserve the most hearty applause to the close, when no one can determine what it is which has specially called forth the storm of approval. The passage belongs to those which were struck out in the censorship subsequent to the lectures and the first printing in the feuilleton. This examination lasted seven months, and left the little work extremely mutilated.

Here is a last example of what the censor, who probably was not very familiar with Shakespeare, or who had no sense for the symbolic, allowed to be said. The passage was about the poets among Polish emigrants. I compared them to Hamlet, and said among other things:—

"We find traits of Hamlet's character in all these spirits; they are in his position from their youth. The world is out of joint, and it must be set right by their weak arms. They feel, like Hamlet, all the inner fire and outward weakness of their youth; high-born as they are, and noble-minded as they are, regarding the conditions which surround them as a single great horror, they incline at once to day-dreams and to action, to musing and to recklessness.

"Hamlet saw his mother, his dear mother, whom he loved more than other sons love theirs, degraded under the hand of the crowned robber and murderer. The court, which is open to him, frightens him, just as the court in Krasinski's Temptation (a symbolical representation of the St. Petersburg court) frightens the young man. These descendants of Hamlet, like him, allow themselves to be sent away to a foreign land. When they speak, they dissemble as he does, clothe their meaning in comparisons and allegories, and it is true of them, as Hamlet says of himself to Laertes:—

"Yet have I something in me dangerous Which let thy wisdom fear; hold off thy hand."

Strangely enough, not one of the many censorships to which these lectures were submitted, not one of the many which preceded their delivery, and neither of the two new ones which examined the edition in newspaper and book form, found anything to object to in this passage.