Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/68

56 faith in freedom; her minor novels have a keener stamp of realism, and more decided artistic form, but the same patriotic, didactic tendency. A younger poetess, who has attained a very high rank in lyric poetry—Marja Konopnicka—while contending with the most difficult and oppressive conditions of life, has developed into the poetic representative of a life of freedom of thought and emotion which is still exceptional in Poland. The chord of the love of country also vibrates strongly in her poetry, as, for instance, in her ode to Matejko on the painting, The Battle at Grünwald.

The opposition between Poland and Russia is never out of the mind of the women. This is constantly noticeable in daily life. A young girl was deserted by her lover. It was always cited as a detail which made the perfidy and cruelty more bitter, that it was for the sake of a Russian dancer he left her. A young girl, not twenty years old, rebuked a group of half-grown Polish schoolboys in the Saxon Park because they were speaking Russian to each other. Such little traits teach every one who resides for any time in Russian Poland that it is the women who keep the national passion at white heat.

In other respects, like the women of other countries, of course they are of all sorts; gentle and quiet, or suspiciously sharp-sighted, virginal and combative, or with erotic tendencies, or vain, theatrical dispositions. There are some who, genuine Slavs, are wholly absorbed in intellectual enthusiasms, and there are individual commanding natures, typically Polish, with the determination and firmness of an exceptional man. There was one, whom her father, a general of artillery, who wished to cure his child of fear, had compelled from the time she was ten years old to stand at the side of the cannon when they were fired, and who now, at the age of twenty, was characterised as a woman who could stand fire.

Often common patriotic interests unite them to the men; sometimes they choose a man instinctively for the reason that he falls less short than others of their patriotic ideal. On the whole it may be said that they think rather lightly