Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/49

 Rh chiaroscuro of private life; let us conceive a people who, from the time of Arild, had the most extravagant conceptions of the rights of the individual in regard to the power of the state, living their life without any sort of public security against encroachments on the part of an accidental superior official, thinking of Siberia, as we think of a disease, which may come when least expected.

Conceiving all this, we shall understand that under the pressure, which has been exerted simultaneously from so many sides, there necessarily sprang up an extraordinary concentrated activity, a boiling intensity of life, in the narrow circle which remained to them.

As the actual people were shut out, as all education of them, all approach to knowledge was made impossible, the higher classes, which could not adequately recruit themselves, came to lead a kind of island life of the highest and most refined culture, a life, which is indeed national in every heartbeat, but cosmopolitan in every form of expression, a hot-house life, where flowers of all the civilisations of Europe have come to development and exhale fragrance, an eddying, seething maelstrom life of ideas, endeavours, amusements and fetes. The best society scarcely ever goes to bed before four o'clock in the morning in the month of February. In carnival time the day in Warsaw has twenty hours, and so long as the season lasts they are prodigal of time and strength.

"Life in Warsaw is a neurosis," said one of the most intelligent men of the city to me; "no one can keep it up long."

This people, who discovered the dance of the planets around the sun, also, as is well known, invented the polonaise with its proud solemnity, and the mazurka, with its contrast of masculine force and feminine gentleness, and the people are perhaps almost as proud of the mazurka as of Copernicus. In Poland the mazurka is not the dance we call by that name, but a long, difficult, and impassioned national dance, in which the gentlemen and ladies, though they dance hand in hand, constantly make different steps in the same time. It is a genuine sorrow to the Poles that the