Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/204



Polish literature of this century presents the same picture of changing elemental tendencies as the other European literatures with which I am familiar. The setting is everywhere the same. At the beginning of the century an antiquated classicism and soon cast aside, a romanticism absorbing the largest part of the century, and in the seventies and eighties a dawning realism.

This is common to Europe. But in every nation these tendencies assume a different character, according to its historic theories and historic relations. The Polish literature of this century bears a peculiar stamp, apart from the peculiarities issuing from the national character, in this respect, that it developed in a country which had recently ceased to exist as an independent state. The literature, and especially the poetry, came on this account to supply, as it were, the place of all the organs of a national life which were lost at the partition of the State. It gains thereby in spiritual exaltation, but necessarily loses in variety.

A brief retrospect of the history of development in the last few centuries is necessary to the understanding of the poetry of the present century.

The upheavals which the Reformation caused in the principal countries of Europe left Poland comparatively undisturbed. While kindred Bohemia, under the desire for a great social and ecclesiastical reform, wore itself out in the Hussite War through the whole of two centuries, from the death of Huss to the battle at the White