Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/50

 38 consistent Russian government has forbidden the dancing of this dance in the national costume; and the fourth or fifth question the foreigner is asked in Warsaw is this: “Have you seen our national dance?” In every other country it would at least be the thirtieth or fortieth.

They dance all through the carnival time as people dance in no other place. Probably nowhere else are so many charity balls given. They dance for everything–for “the poor sewing girls,” for “the poor students,” &c. I do not deny that many times, when I stood watching the dances–sometimes I was invited to two balls on the same night–I could not help remembering the old hard adage: slavus saltans! But as a young girl said in allusion to a moralising article in Prawda: “What would be the advantage if we left off dancing in Warsaw?”

Yet the gaiety with which they whirl is not the common joy of life; it reminds us rather of that which the prisoners of the Revolution displayed in their ignorance as to what the next day would bring forth. This levity is not common levity, but a lightness often found in those who daily defy suffering and death.

For like reasons at times they are more serious than people on similar occasions in other countries. At a very sedate entertainment which the representatives of literature and art gave me, when there were a series of speeches in French and Latin, the ancient festival tongue of the Poles, it happened, when one of the speakers said some words which especially excited those assembled, that tears at once stood in their eyes, and that old men, who had passed a whole period of their lives in Siberia, and hundreds of times had seen death staring them in the face, sprang up, and while the tears rolled down their cheeks, embraced the speaker. It seems, then, as if the foreign rule had equally increased the susceptibility to social enjoyment and the susceptibility to serious emotion. The power of feeling pleasure and pain, the disposition to tears and laughter, seem to be as strong as in the sick.

Besides, passionately as the Poles are a people of the moment, just as thoroughly are they a people of memories.