Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/109

Rh sober spirit of investigation predominates. Polish writers on such subjects approach the German method and German style. Poland's leading and distinguished literary historian, Spasowicz, who is also the most renowned advocate of the Russian empire, living and writing in Russia, has been obliged to exercise a prudence in everything touching upon politics, which has made his chief work, The History of Polish Literature, less interesting than it otherwise would have been. The most esteemed critic, Professor Tarnowski of Cracow, is an academician of the old school, of a romantic turn of mind, whose tendency becomes more and more ultra-Catholic with advancing age. Ultramontanism in Cracow has almost as depressing an influence as the government tyranny in Warsaw. And when Tarnowski appears as a lecturer in Warsaw he can only secure his effects by a purely external and formal eloquence.

It is a general superstition, which must be given up, that raw external means of power are powerless to crush and break down national spirit.

The censorship is indeed the most intellectual of the brutal means the authorities use for that purpose.

A less intellectual and even more effective means is confiscation. After the rebellion of 1863 all the real estate of the landed proprietors who participated in it, or who were suspected of having given it sympathy or support, was confiscated. I know a man of a princely old Lithuanian family, who possessed a princely fortune, and who now, after twenty years in Siberia, is reduced to a little situation in a bank. I know a lady who was the heiress to a property of a million rubles, but who had been robbed of her inheritance because the peasants on her uncle's estate had given provisions to bands of rebels.

Even the confiscation of the soil is naturally not of final importance, so long as the peasant remains on it and continues Polish in his ideas. But Russia seeks to win the peasant in every way. She abolished serfdom, the abolition of which, proclaimed by the Poles themselves (in the constitution of May 3, 1791), she had set aside, and the old hatred of the peasants towards their masters has been richly

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