Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/26

14 buying and selling take place in the open air. But it strikes the stranger that in those places where the people are to be seen in large numbers, as on their Sunday promenades in the principal streets, they never have the contented and well-to-do Sunday look common in other large cities, but a melancholy or brooding expression. A merry scene is never witnessed in the street, and a joke is never overheard.

The physiognomy of the city does not, however, lack character. The Circassian regiments (that is to say, in reality Cossacks and Armenians in Circassian costume) with their fur caps, their sabres at their sides, their yataghans in their belts, have a picturesque oriental appearance. Every moment also you meet among the less characteristic Polish carriages a Russian equipage, in which a Russian officer is driven by a coachman in the long black national costume with the blue scarf round the waist.

One of the most noticeable things, so far as externals are concerned, in the streets of Warsaw is, that without exception all the names (even of the streets), all the signs, all the notices are in two languages or two kinds of characters; on the left side the inscriptions are in Polish, on the right in Russian, or above in Russian and below in Polish. It is a little element in the contest which the government keeps up to force the foreign language on the Polish nationality.

Recently the government has even begun to try to introduce the Russian language into the Roman Catholic Church. On account of a refusal to carry out an order of this kind, the Bishop of Wilna, Hryniewiecki, was exiled to Yaraslaw, and some weeks later his substitute, Harasimowicz, to Wologda.

The only place where it is allowed to speak the Polish language publicly is on the stage. As yet it is not forbidden to give Polish theatrical representations, and this circumstance has given to the theatre a preponderance in Polish intellectual life, which is intelligible, but unfortunate, and so much the more harmful and unnatural as the dramatic literature of the country is rather poor. There is something depressing in seeing this seriously constituted and highly endowed people attributing an importance to the theatre