Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/211



period 1820—1850 was the richest and most important as regards poetry. And in this period the three fundamental factors which determined the literature were evidently these: the national character, European romanticism, and the exceptional political situation.

The national character, as it had been developed down to this period, was specially adapted for the influences of romanticism. It was intelligent and magnanimous, splendour-loving and visionary, with a propensity to chivalrous virtues and religious aspirations. Then as now it lacked the ballast which the Germanic nations have in their native phlegm, and the Latin races in their native logic. It was akin to the French in its fickleness, different from it in the nature of its capriciousness; for the Frenchman is capricious when his native rationalism leads him to shatter his historic heritage, the Pole when temperament or enthusiasm carries him away. It was akin to the Italian in its idolatry and its vivacity, but differed from it in its want of shrewd political sense, and of that plastic tendency which has made the inhabitants of Italy pagans under all forms of religion.

When European Romanticism reached this nation, it did not fare as in Germany, where it was engendered in the non-political societies of provincial towns, and allied itself to the indefinite idealism, the want of social feeling, and the aversion to reality, which had laid hold of the minds of thinking men nor as in England, where Romanticism found