Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/46

 34 the clergy is dissolving, just as culture and the Church are drifting apart. And in addition to this, as all public life is forbidden, and there are neither assemblies nor unions of any kind, the men seek each other almost exclusively in social life. Since the reception-room does duty as a place of political and literary assemblies, the men think less of winning women to their interests there. The latter feel themselves set aside, overlooked and abandoned, as in South Germany, where the man passes all his evenings in the ale-house, only the desertion has other causes. The pressure from above has evidently greatly aided in separating the sexes and diminishing the social influence of woman. It may at the present time be weaker in Poland than in France. The education of the young girls, moreover, is conducted in much the same way as there—they are never left a moment unprotected—and marriages are made in the same manner as in France; the contracting parties seldom know much of each other before the wedding, and generally see each other for the first time a few weeks before.

So far as the Polish instability is concerned, it also has no similarity to the French. The instability of the French shows itself more particularly in public life, especially where they are collected in masses, as in public meetings or mobs. It depends on the sudden change of mood, for which no single person feels himself responsible. The instability of the Poles is personal, depends partly on the propensity to change, and partly on an instinctive inclination to universality.

In France the ruling principle is a prudent and sometimes subtle egoism which runs in the family and is inherited by the children, which is impressed upon them from the beginning, and which as a rule directs their lives. Parents do not, as in England and America, first strive to develop the youth into a capable man, able to help himself, but they try to smoothe his path in life, procure for him favours, connections, patronage, assure his future or his advancement. And if the path is smoothed, the young man will not willingly abandon his career before the highest rung of the ladder of honour is reached.