Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/58

 46 the attitude of the conservative party especially surprised me. More than one Catholic priest received me heartily, and the greatest festivity to which I was invited during my visit in Warsaw was given by the leader of the conservative party, the owner of the newspaper Slovo (The Word), Count Przezdziecki. (He is the son of who published the complete works of the Polish historian,, in fourteen large quarto volumes, at great personal expense, and a near relative of the Countess Przezdziecka, who is "Second Unknown" (Autre Inconnue).)

Although, according to my idea, Polish culture at present must thus be limited to an extremely prudent and wary evolution, it is evident that the year 1863 marks an epoch in the intellectual life of Poland. The follies and horrors of this year, the frantic chaotic rebellion, with its tragic result, has made the nation sober. Too sober, it may seem to some, for while before 1863 it was the wont of the Poles to see all merits united in their own people, since that time it has become the fashion to speak sorrowfully and depreciatingly of Poland. But it is a great gain in any event to have cast off the sickly self-worship which prevailed in the thirties, at the time when the two great opponents, Mickiewicz and Slowacki, simultaneously adopted the visionary dreams of the mystic, who regarded the Poles as the Messianic race, suffering for the sins of mankind, and by suffering, working out the salvation of humanity. They have learned to look the stern reality in the face, and the hopes they cherish—and though certainly not sanguine, they are by no means without hope for the future—are not founded on dreams and fantasies.

Finally, the drastic foreign rule since 1863 has produced an intellectual condition which, however unhappy it may be, may in certain ways be called the finest and best possible to a nation, a condition which calls to mind that of primitive Christendom under the oppression of Rome, a conception of the world, pessimistic in many points, but not on that account less true.

Perhaps after all there is no condition more elevating for a race than one in which no distinguished man ever has any