Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/95

Rh road. It loses sight of life. You paint allegories or knightly spectacles. Every other picture at your exhibitions is the closing tableau of a five-act play just before the curtain falls. Your great deceased idealist, Grottger, was a poet, not a painter. Your great living master, Matejko, is a near-sighted psychologist, not a painter. The picture which took the prize at the exhibition this year, a Catholic allegory with angels at the bedside of a sick person, is a horror." Some one asked, "Is there then in your opinion absolutely nothing which is good for anything?" The foreigner answered, "Horowitz's portraits and Witkiewicz's paintings; but the best thing I have seen is certainly an album with drawings by the brothers Gierymski. The best of these well over with talent; one sees a study of Nature in them and the perception of an artist. They have been seen and felt, a praise one can rarely give to modern Polish art." A tall man behind him clapped his hands; it was the man who had published the album and written the text for it, Sygietinski.

So little has the art of the brothers Gierymski been understood in their native land that the publisher, an enthusiast in modern art, lost 8000 rubles on this album. At last he publicly offered to give it for nothing to the subscribers to the weekly paper Wedrowiec, but the majority of them did not even care to fetch it.

The circle which has formed about the journal just named, unfortunately a publication hardly destined to long life, has, as its leading power, the energetic artist Witkiewicz, who comprehends characterisation as few do. It consists further of young doctors, engineers, literary historians, novelists like Prus, gifted mechanics (a smith, perhaps the most subtle student of literature in Poland), a number of painters, musicians, amateurs—representatives of refined radicalism.

Swientochowski's group is antiquated in its views of art, in spite of its lofty culture. The men who belong to it have admirable collections of books, but pictures on their walls which a Parisian concierge would despise. Swientochowski even writes old-fashioned didactic dramas like Elvia or Antea. The younger men who write for Wedrowiec or design for it, live in rooms without furniture, but with magnificent