Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/71

Rh had granted them freedom from military service and had given them the soil for partition, but that the nobility prevented the carrying out of this imperial regulation. When the young nobles then sought to win over the peasants to a national revolt, the fury of the latter turned against the Polish nobility; in three days two thousand men, women, and children of noble rank were exterminated, some being burned alive, others flogged to death, and others cut to pieces.

Ujejski's song is the expression of the despair of the younger race at seeing the hopes of Poland thus brought to naught by the Poles themselves, as Wibicki's song is the expression of the bright hopes of the old race, even after the blow of the third partition had fallen. The first is a hymn which resembles a psalm, the second a march which approaches a mazurka.

The two sides of the character of the people, the whole Polish spirit, are reflected herein. In Ujejski's hymn there is the lofty, burning earnestness, the love of country as a religion: " Our lamentation mounts up to Thee, O Lord, with the smoke of fire and the steam of our brother's blood!"

Jeszcze Polska, which is generally believed to be pathetic, because it has played the same part in the national life of Poland as the Marseillaise in that of France, is an extremely careless, merry song, the ballad of heroic thoughtlessness. Its argument is: No fear. Poland endures still. March, march, Dombrowski! It is joy to live, to sing, to fight.

The virtue which has gradually made its way in Europe in modern times as the chief civic virtue is that of working, and loving work for its own sake. The conception on which it is based is very rare in Poland. Its children have cultivated the earth and cultivated their minds for centuries, but they have at the same time obstinately regarded work merely for money as a low, degrading thing. They have nourished the inherited aristocratic contempt for the merchant and the manufacturer, to say nothing of the shopkeeper and the mechanic. They have collected great fortunes, but they have spent them. Money was a means; very seldom an end: work a semi-disgraceful resource; never its own reward.