Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/318

306 it. There would have been a fine scope for comic effects in The Godless Comedy. Pancratius and his associates would have gained thereby.

Generally speaking, it may be said that a more widely diffused and more delicate sense of the comic among the leading persons of the nation would have prevented several of the excesses of the romantic heroes, driven the romantic ghosts and witches more into the background, and sharpened the delineation of a crowd of secondary characters.

The lack of the comic element in this literature has a triple reason; first, the serious, nay, melancholy temper of the public for whom the poets wrote, secondly, their strenuous conception of their calling, for they regarded themselves as the teachers and leaders of the people, never as their maitres de plaisir; finally, the exaggerated idealism of the Polish intellectual life of this century.

This idealism, which naturally has engendered no little boldness in expressing an unwelcome conviction or a burning protest, excluded the bold and many-sided conception and description of human nature. Polish Romanticism lacks the strong contrasts which produce the impression of the comic, because it has represented man too exclusively from the intellectual side. That man is first and foremost a being with necessities, not a being with ideas, is here suppressed or glossed over. That strong erotic or political passion is an exception in human life we note as little in this romantic literature as in others. But there is perhaps no literature in which the life of the senses and instincts, which is the foundation of all passions, is so set aside, or—where it could not be wholly passed over—is so foreshortened and placed in the background. Therefore we shall seek in vain for more sexless love-making than that which is described in the romantic literature of Poland, in Slowacki's In Switzerland, in Krasinski's Aurora, &c. We are actually astonished at the note and the key which Telimene puts into the hand of the hero in Pan Tadeusz, and yet this is all that we learn of the relation between the two. But where the whole sensual entity of man, and therewith one of the strongest elements of contrast between spiritual struggles and earthly instincts is omitted