Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/116

104 distant future it will be an ice-cold sphere, on which no life can flourish. They have always known that every individual of the human race must die, but they would prefer that the race itself should not. This conception of the frozen globe destroys all their cherished illusions about the constant advance of culture, the religion which most of those who have given up revealed religions live upon; for there are even now only a few who have grasped the ideal that the goal of humanity cannot be at its end or death, if death be in store for it, but must lie in its highest individualities. Even if the human race is to die out, true culture is not on this account less valuable, not less worth striving for. Its worth does not depend on its continuance through all eternity. We do not ask whether a symphony is long or short, but whether it is beautiful. Its value is independent of the time it occupies.

The Poles know historically, as we do, that many kingdoms and nations have blossomed and disappeared, but they will not believe that this lot is now that of their nation and language, however sorely they are pressed from all sides. They will fight for their life, and this is to their honour, whatever the result may be.

Many of them must necessarily doubt whether they will ever succeed in tearing themselves free from a supremacy which is supported by an enormous army, in establishing a Polish political hierarchy, and in founding a kingdom out of a nation unaccustomed to all self-government as the Poles have now been for almost a century. Inevitably the question presents itself which I once formulated thus (in the preface to Cherbuliez's Ladislaus Bolski): "Is Poland an ideal or a reality? It could not continue when it existed, can it be re-established, now it has fallen? Is this Poland for which the Poles live and go to death more than an abstraction and a chimera? Is the object worth the sacrifices? Or is it the sacrifices which give the object its worth?"

The object, like all earthly objects, only more plainly, more palpably, is an ideal, that is, an unreality, the conception of something good. It shows its power over the mind by the strength with which it compels generation after