Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/76

 64 latter offers him a cup of chocolate, the young actor makes an excuse for his negligence with regard to the rent, laments his want of money, and there is no more said about the matter."—"And his tailor, his shoemaker, does he not pay them either?"—"No; they hope that he will some day make a rich match. On the other hand, he does not receive an invitation to dinner without reciprocating, and when he gives a dinner at the Hôtel d'Europe to Kronenberg (the richest banker in Poland), it is not less magnificent than Kronenberg's own dinners—and then he pays."

According to this way of looking at it, it is only necessary to pay for the unnecessary, the superfluous. Nowhere else indeed does the superfluous stand in so great honour. The young men of the highest class in Poland are products of luxury, extremely engaging, gently affectionate like women, delicate as late off-shoots of old noble stocks. As a rule they do not work; and when by exception they do, without necessity, devote themselves to a study, prepare themselves for a professorship, or something of that sort, they awake general amazement and wonder. They applaud a young man not for working, but because he does the superfluous.

Thus to do the superfluous has always been the characteristic of Polish heroism. The men of the great days of Poland have taken part in the most varied European wars whenever the contest was about an object which had their sympathy. They fought in 1848, and later in the Crimea, in Italy, in Turkey. Thus it was with the old Ordon, sung by Mickiewicz, the hero of 1831, who blew up his redoubt before Warsaw when the Russians entered it, and who was himself saved by a miracle. He had been everywhere where a blow was struck for freedom or against Russia. Until last year this true hero, in whom all that is lofty and rare in the Polish character was combined, lived a quiet life in Florence. Proud and poor as he was and advanced in age, unable to work, in his fear of becoming a burden to others, he put an end to his life by a pistol shot. His courage was that of a knight-errant. And this kind of martial courage is found in spirits of the second rank, as, for instance, the lately deceased Tripplin, who in his accounts