Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/65



thus appears that Bismarck regards the Polish women as even more dangerous to the unity and safety of the German empire than the men. He has unintentionally borne testimony to their pride and worth. And they deserve it, for in all that relates to the contest for the preservation of the national spirit, they are the marrow of the land.

The women here referred to belong to the aristocracy. Among the common people there is only a religious national consciousness, and there is no middle class as in the Germanic and Latin countries.

Broadly speaking, we may say of these women of the higher and lower aristocracy that their qualities, virtues, and vices have nothing bourgeois about them. They are not domesticated, they are not small-minded. The best of them have a pride, which exalted and exceptional as it is, springs from their feeling of the strength and purity of the spiritual life. They are women who are born to rule, and who even in narrow and straitened circumstances preserve the grand self-esteem which runs in their blood. In women of this type the emotional life is wholly absorbed in the national cause. Several among them, indeed, are zealous children of the Catholic Church, but for the larger number and the more intelligent, Catholicism is precious only as the palladium of the nationality. Cherbuliez's characterisation of the Polish women as "Punch mixed with holy water" is now a trifle antiquated.

The Polish women are renowned for beauty, and deserve their reputation. It is a kind of dogma in Poland that the real Polish woman is blonde; it is considered most elegant to be so; still, although some women are to be found