Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/70



men are well-grown, often thin; most frequently with clear-cut faces and long, thick, pendant moustaches. This type may be traced from peasant to aristocrat. A frequent variation is the heavy, childishly frank country noble, who greets his friends at meeting and parting with a kiss, and has his heart on his lips, but who, nevertheless, has a manly bearing and much natural dignity; this is the type which Mickiewicz has immortalised in several instances in Pan Tadeusz.

Political qualities are universally wanting. While the German generally feels as if he had found his destiny when he is harnessed to the chariot of state, even if he thereby loses some of the best of his nature, the Pole is without any talent as a politician. The economic as well as the political sense is but slightly developed in Russian Poland.

Therefore there was in the old kingdom of Poland (just as in Greece) a high civilisation without the material foundation which could secure its continuance, and on that account a development of personal freedom took place here (as in Judaea) at the expense of the power of the kingdom in its relation to foreign countries.

There are two Polish national songs, which together give a complete picture of the national character of the Poles: one is Wibicki's Jeszcze Polska of 1797, a poem famous throughout the world as "Poland is not yet lost;" the other is Ujejski's Zdymen Pozarow of 1846, written after the Galician massacres. The Metternich Government, which got the idea of using the peasants against their masters from Archduke Ferdinand, persuaded the peasantry in Galicia that the