Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/94

82 hundred years. Otherwise they are heterogeneous enough, controversialists, dissatisfied, independent thinkers, or mere admirers and echoes, yet almost all of good courage in so far as they are persuaded that the world can be reformed, that it is only necessary to set about it the right way. Among them we may note some aristocrat, erstwhile in debt, then richly married, who in his quiet way is as radical as any of them, some gaunt figure with disorderly beard and hair hanging down over the eyes, just returned for the fifth time from a Russian fortress in the Urál mountains, where he usually does penance for his socialist sympathies for several months at a time. Here, as everywhere in this quiet land, a general conversation is an unknown thing; conversation is carried on with subdued voices in small groups. And in whatever direction the conversation drifts, you always stumble as if against a wall upon innumerable obstacles and hindrances, which every kind of attempt to achieve some human object invariably encounters in this land. "Naturally you are right," says the host to the foreigner. "We really have neither democratic nor any other politics whatsoever in this country, but we have reflections of what are so called in Europe"—a remark as exact as it was hopeless.

The same thing strikes one under a slightly different aspect in the peculiarly intelligent Bohemia, which does not trouble itself about politics, but lives wholly in studies and art. Here we are (intellectually speaking) in the land of the extreme left. I hardly met a more interesting circle in Poland than that which I found collected in the house of the art critic, Antoni Sygietinski, who, with the highly gifted artist Witkiewicz, unfortunately a great invalid, represents artistic socialism in Poland.

Sygietinski is a slender, handsome young man, with a long red beard and bright, enthusiastic eyes. Common art sympathies have brought him and his Polish and foreign colleagues together. In Swientochowski's circle one day a foreigner stood alone in his unfavourable judgment on the Polish art of painting of the present day. The conversation was somewhat as follows: "Your art is wholly on the wrong