Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/39

 Rh Probably there was a great deal of justice and truth in this older view. It is therefore interesting to inquire which of these characteristics the foreign rule has developed and which it has obliterated.

Love of external splendour is necessarily repressed. It is evidently not killed. Love for all that is symbolised so profoundly by the father's plume in Cherbuliez's Ladislaus Bolski, lies deep in the Polish nature. The father's red and white plume, which Ladislaus always carries with him in a case, is the glittering principle of grandeur. And it is extremely significant that in one of the leading poets of Poland this definition of God is found:—

"I see that he is not the God of the worms or of creeping things. He loves the flight of gigantic birds and gives the rein to the rushing horse. He is the fiery plume on the proud helmet."—(Beniowski, 5th Canto.)

Compare the prophet Habakkuk's grand description of God. But the whole spirit of Poland is in these lines. No other race could see divinity in the waving plume.

Nevertheless the love of the tinsel and spangles of glory is necessarily repressed now by a deeper feeling of honour.

When I went to a ball in the town hall on my first evening in Warsaw, where a thousand people, the flower of good society in Warsaw, were assembled in the large saloon, the fact struck me that, with the exception of three Russian officers, there was not a man in the hall who wore a decoration. From his birth almost every Pole renounces decorations as well as uniforms. There is a tale told in Warsaw of a poor school-teacher who had distinguished himself, and received the order of Stanislaus. He kept it hidden in a case, and only used it to punish his children with. When the youngest was naughty, he said, "If you cry again, you shall wear the order of Stanislaus about your neck at dinner." That was enough.

The essentially aristocratic character of the nation still exists, though greatly modified. The Pole has no inborn inclination to the civic virtues; his ideal is, and