Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/201

Rh of losing his eternal salvation, in case he allowed himself to be made a Lutheran, moved him to march home with the rest of the Polish troops. He became the favourite of two kings in his native land and at last died in old age in 1700. It was not till 1836 that his admirable memoirs were found and published.

When to this description of the Denmark of that period we add that Lelewel wrote a book on Edda Skandinawska, and that in several of the romantic poems of Poland, as for instance in Krasinski's Irydion, there are here and there fantastic descriptions of Denmark in heathen days, in "King" Odin's time, we shall have summed up the impressions of Denmark to be found in the culture and intellectual life of Poland.

But the existence of Poland has made a deeper impression upon Danish literature. This is more especially true of the critical periods in the history of Poland in this century, the revolutions of 1830 and 1831 and of 1863, which attracted attention to the country and aroused sympathy, a fleeting sympathy certainly, but genuine.

Between the years 1830 and 1840 there appeared in Denmark, as elsewhere, beautiful and emotional lyric poems on Polish subjects (such as Paludan-Miiller's Call to Poland, Aarestrup's A Polish Mother), and in the fifties appeared Hauch's great and famous novel, A Polish Family, with its beautiful songs, one of which, Hvorfor svulmer Weichselfloden, is one of the best lyrics of our literature.

This novel is interesting as the one great attempt of a Dane to identify himself with the spiritual and social life of the Poles. Nevertheless, as a novel it is a work of the second rank, the description of character being weak and abstract. It was quite in accordance with the spirit of his time, that Hauch made no attempt to write from his own knowledge. He never travelled in Poland, never even made any efforts to study one or two Polish families before he so elaborately presented one; but he had studied the Polish ballads, which had been translated with great diligence, reproducing or paraphrasing many of them in Danish, and thus in the tones of sadness, despair, love of country and Catholic piety,