Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/51

 Rh Nowhere else can be found such a religion of remembrance, such a clinging to national recollections. They cling to everything that can recall the Poland of the past. It is true that all the works of art of the city and all the treasures of the nation have been carried away to St. Petersburg; the city has even been robbed of the great Zaluski library of 300,000 volumes, but the more stubbornly do the people hold on to national recollections. They have been assisted in this endeavour in the most forcible manner by the fact that all the Polish poetry and historical writings of this century, as well as Polish painting, have been pressed into the service of the national idea. Artists like Mateiko and Brandt—both admirable colourists who fall short in simplicity and perspicuity of composition—almost constantly treat national historical subjects; their poets have treated Poland and Poland's fate, even when, like Krasinski in Irydion, they place the action in old Rome, or like Slowacki in Anheli, transfer the scene to a fantastic Siberia. Poetry in the Polish home has the same importance as religion. The best works are, or have been, strictly forbidden reading. Their acquisition as well as their possession was perilous. Generally the books, when they had been carefully read till the thoughts were remembered, even if the words were forgotten, were burned—with the same pain with which a woman who is not free burns a letter from the man she loves. But they have not forgotten in Poland, how, when the young Lévitoux was put into the citadel in Warsaw because a copy of Mickiewicz's Dziady had been found in his house, in his despair after the torture he had suffered, and in his anxiety lest in his ravings he should name his comrades, he with his manacled hands pulled his night-lamp under his bed of rushes, and burned himself to death; nor have they forgotten that several hundred Lithuanian students were seat to Siberia for having published the Temptation of Krasinski in book form after the poem, which the censor had not understood, had seen the light in the feuilleton of a little paper.

The national authors are found to-day in every house, and even if the Poles have been obliged to establish their