Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/88

76 citadel of the Holy Trinity. These men are modern men, and they are silent on the subject. They are free-thinkers, and if as landed proprietors in Posen they have seats in the German Parliament and the Prussian Herrenhaus, they vote invariably with the centre. There are those among them who would very gladly dine with a socialist leader like Viereck, and yet officially follow Windhorst's flag. They know Heinrich Heine by heart and belong to the Catholic party. They are free-thinkers, and as Poles feel themselves compelled to support Rome—an intellectual torment which is not known anywhere else.

And in all domains it is manifest how patriotic or supposed patriotic struggles repress modern intellectual life: in the plastic arts, where patriotic allegories and symbols have too long usurped the place of pictures of real life, and in literature, where the historical romance still blossoms, a late aftermath of Walter Scott. The writer of greatest narrative talent among the living authors of Poland, Henryk Sienkiewickz, made his début with excellent modern novels; gradually associating himself with the Catholic party, he has taken up the line of great patriotic historical romances in the style of The Three Musketeers, with endless sequels. He regards it as his task in view of the depressing present to show the people the image of a past, when it still existed as a nation, and he prefers to describe the most unhappy period of the old history of Poland, in order to strengthen the people's faith in the surmountableness of the existing wretched condition by pictures of the terrible crises of bygone days. Nevertheless, in spite of all his talent, the result is that when from times which he knows he goes back to times which he does not know, and works with an aim entirely different from that of art before his eyes, he generally falls so far short as an author that he loses his best readers, and his novels are only successful as a means of amusement, or as stimulants to patriotic feeling.

Just as socialist and democratic or free-thinking tendencies do not mean the same in Poland as elsewhere, so also Catholic and conservative leanings have a special character here.