Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/83

Rh the safety of the inmates, invariably serves also as an instrument of the police.

Thus the students are driven to study alone, but this is also made difficult. A great many of the most celebrated foreign works, as well as the most important of the literature of their own land, are forbidden, and must be got over the frontier as smuggled goods, which on the one hand increases the cost and on the other is dangerous. Therefore it cannot be wondered at that among the more intelligent of these young men there are found many with far-reaching anti-governmental views.

There are no Nihilists among them: neither the name nor the thing is known in Poland. The most advanced among them fall into two groups. Some call themselves democrats and some socialists. The democrats hold the views which are supported in Prawda. Still, their chief interest is not social or political, but purely intellectual. They constitute the first free-thinking group of this century in Poland. But as Catholicism and the power of the clergy from remote times have had their support in the Polish aristocracy, which represents the national tradition, and as the press of the aristocracy, especially the newspaper Slowo, is the organ of Catholicism, free-thinking allies itself with democratic inclinations and aims.

The young men who hold democratic views would like to introduce into Poland modern thoughts, views, theories and books. They would like to translate even the trivial protests of Max Nordau, if they were not afraid of the censor. Their strongest speaker, Swientochowski, is about forty years old, handsome, clear-eyed, stubborn, with a head like that of a provincial Christ, a poet and a fine writer, and, above all, a character. He has great qualities as a controversialist and as a didactic author, but his dogmatism causes him to be easily involved in squabbles, and he lacks grace and tact. His chief task is a war against the Catholic clergy. But an attack upon the clergy in Poland, even more than elsewhere, is an unpopular thing, because the nationality of the country has been for so long a time bound up with the Romish religion, and because the religious difference even now—