Women of the Teutonic Nations Part 22

Nevertheless, there were not wanting intellectual women who contributed to the brilliancy of the Polish genius during the golden era of their nation's literature. It touches us strangely when the great Polish poet Kochanowski sings in the elegies upon the death of his little daughter Ursula, in 1580:

"Thou, Slavie Sappho, singer young and sweet, The heiress of my poetry shouldst thou be; This was my hope in cheerful mood, When lovely songs welled from thy angel lips, Unconscious to thyself, yet sweet to me....

Alas! too early silent, didst thou part, s.n.a.t.c.hed forth by death, beloved poetess!...

Not even death sealed thy poetic lips, That, full of woe, spoke with heart-breaking kiss: 'No longer can I, mother, serve thee now; My place near by thy side will be no more; The honor of the keyboard will not fall to me; O Loved ones, far from you must I depart.

Thus didst thou speak, and more, angel of death, Which I forgot in bitter parting's woe."

The first great Polish poetess who created her t.i.tle of n.o.bility by her own talent in the dreariest time of Polish literature was Elizabeth Druzbacka, nee Kowalska. Born in 1687, in Great Poland, she pa.s.sed her youth under the care of the cultured Panna Sieniawska, Chatelaine of Cracow, married the treasurer Druzbacki, and, as a widow, retired to the cloister of Tarnow, where she died in 1760. Though unacquainted with foreign languages, and therefore with foreign literatures, she drew her inspiration from her own poetic soul and rose high above the level of her poetic contemporaries prophesying a renascence of Polish literature.

Her poetic works, published by Joseph Zaluski, the famous historian and bibliographer, and later Bishop of Kief, and republished several times since, show much poetic beauty and graceful originality of composition, though the material itself betrays sometimes the undeveloped taste of the time: she apostrophizes the elemental forces in her poem _Water, Fire, and Air_; she describes in inspired words the life of King David; the four seasons; she writes allegorically of the fortress built by G.o.d, locked with five gates (the soul of man, with its five senses); she sings praises of the forests, so dear to the Pole and to the Germans:

"The dense and shady forests glow in richest colors: White is the birch tree, tender green its branches: The beech tree proud s.h.i.+nes in its youthful fulness; The n.o.ble fir spreads green its lofty branches; Centuries' strength sleeps in the iron oak tree."

(H. S.)

Toward the end of the eighteenth century occurred the great and terrible events which, culminating in the tripart.i.tionment of Poland, accomplished its political destruction as an independent commonwealth.

This important event revolutionized the life, thought and aspirations of Polish women, suddenly expanded the horizon of their political ideas, and stirred them up to an understanding of the earnestness of national existence or national annihilation. These influences are constant, and ceaselessly interfere with the life of Polish womanhood, either encouraging them to great efforts or driving them to despair or denationalization. That great calamity, according to J. Moszczenska in Helene Lange's Handbook of the Woman's Movement, forced the Polish woman to take a deeper interest in the condition of her country and her own position, and impelled her to stand by the Polish man as companion of his misfortune, his exile, his solitude in foreign lands.

When speaking of the unfortunate political situation of Polish women, we must, however, in justice exclude their sisters in Austrian Poland, to whom perfect freedom and national self-development are permitted; for a free and untrammelled national existence is in every respect vouchsafed to that part of Poland which fell to Austria, namely, Galicia and Lodomeria, with the capitals of Cracow and Lemberg.

When Poland had actually fallen, the leading patriots began to realize the sins and follies which had eaten so much of the marrow of the great nation with the glorious past, and which had allowed their country to fall an easy prey to the disciplined and superior power of three mighty neighbors. Superior Polish women began to aid strongly the patriots in revivifying the slumbering forces of the ma.s.ses of the lowly people who had so long been kept in servitude, prevented from partic.i.p.ating in the national progress, and deprived of education and incentives to patriotism, the lack of which latter in the common people had been so bitterly avenged on the entire nation. Princess Czartoryska, of the ill.u.s.trious house of Polish magnates, undertook to diffuse a universal culture and national consciousness among the people. By far superior to her, however, was Klementyna Tariska, born in 1798 in Warsaw, who, in her Gallicized country, did not at first even learn her national language, but had to make herself familiar with it through study. In 1824 she began her literary activity, and strongly influenced ethically and nationally the society of her time, especially the women and the newly rising generation. This activity was intensified when, in 1827, she became superintendent of all the girls' schools in Warsaw. Married at the age of thirty to the historian Hoffmann, she left Poland and died in France in 1845. Her writings are of cla.s.sical purity; and her services to the Polish language, which in its present literary worth and linguistic form is equal to any in existence, cannot be overestimated.

Her historical portraits of the glorious past of her nation and of its great literary luminaries exercised a powerful influence upon the education of the young Poles, inasmuch as she vivified old Polish tradition and history. Her Jan Kochanowski at Czarnolas reveals the golden era of Polish literature: its environment, its great personalities of both s.e.xes, the old Polish virtues and qualities which made the nation powerful, the commonwealth strong and prosperous. In short, this great Polish woman strove to raise her sisters to a higher plane of responsibility, of wifehood and of motherhood, in order to produce a new and better generation of men of Polish men withal. She was an opponent to the virago type of advocates of the emanc.i.p.ation of women who desired to arrogate to themselves what is by natural laws the domain of man. But realizing that the political conditions might make fearful gaps in the ranks of Polish men, and that there might be hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans, she desired to open to women all possible avenues of independent life and work, and to set before them the ideal of toil toil with the hands and toil with the head as the one worthy purpose of life. The works of this remarkable Polish author were edited in 1877, in twelve volumes, with an introduction, by another important Polish writer and extraordinary woman, Gabriele Narzyssa Zmichowska, who herself wrote admirable tales and a collection of charming lyric poems which reveal a lofty soul and a melancholy disposition.

Klementyna Tanska's fears of a depopulation of her beloved country became a reality by the revolution of 1831. Deaths on the battlefield, wholesale exiles to Siberia, political flight and emigration en ma.s.se, deprived Poland of numbers of her n.o.blest sons. Those who remained behind were cowed, and reduced to servile obedience: no wonder that Poland's women lost much of their former admiration for, and dependence upon, the strong s.e.x. They began to realize that they must become independent, and wage the campaign of nationalism for themselves, if the Polish language, literature, and genius were to be saved, or a regeneration of the aftergrowth was to be possible. The right of a higher, or rather of the highest education for woman was demanded, to enable her to partic.i.p.ate effectively in the political problems of the nation, in the social questions and the welfare of the race, to free her from the shackles of conventionalism which had reduced woman well-nigh to the standard of a social toy or an adornment of the "salon."

Women were trained to work, to live up to the higher ideals of life and nationality, to subordinate the common petty interests to a higher, more universally human existence. A circle of superior women, the so-called enthusiasts, gathered around Gabriele Zmichowska, who worked for the rights of man, for the abolition of servitude, for the free development of the natural forces of their great race. The result was that Gabriele languished for two years in the fortress of Lublin and the other prominent members of her circle were scattered by persecution. But Polish women thus attained their revolutionary citizens.h.i.+p, and, confessedly or not, they belong to the irreconcilables in the political systems of Prussia and Russia, biding their time, knowing well that an open resistance, instead of the policy of pa.s.sive and latent opposition, would be both unwise and untimely.

Sociological questions have become prominent in denationalized Poland, and Polish women have been drawn into their discussion. The tariff barrier between Poland and Russia having been abolished, commerce and industry were turned into wider channels. The revolution of 1863, ill prepared and ill executed, failed utterly, and the only hope left for the nation was progress along economic lines. The great work of the czar-liberator, Alexander II., who released the Russian peasantry from servitude, also revolutionized the problems of economic sustenance in Poland: the struggle for existence under the changed conditions. Poland, placed as she is between Russia and her powerful western neighbors, quickly became an industrial centre. Polish women came forward with their legitimate claims to partic.i.p.ate in this material movement. They had no easy victory. The Russian government, as such, excluded Polish women _ipso facto_, even more rigidly than Polish men. But the breadless women forced their way into the factories, the offices, and the workshops, _i. e._, into commerce and industry. Finally, even the state recognized their punctuality, conscientiousness, and frugality, and all this with consequent cheaper wages, and received them in the postal, the telegraph, and even in the railway service, and as clerks in the courts.

The teaching profession is still most sought by women, though instruction, in all the schools, is almost entirely in Russian, or other modern languages, Polish being excluded. The demand for university education, though granted to women in theory, is not so in practice. It is very much restricted, as the University of Warsaw does not admit women, though the stirring events after the j.a.panese war, the const.i.tutional conflict throughout Russia, and the struggle for autonomy in Poland may change all this in the near future. The Austro-Polish universities of Cracow and Lemberg have recently opened their doors to them, a fact which drew the many earnest and studious Russian-Polish women to those centres of learning, as they had previously been attracted by the liberality of the Swiss universities and the University of Paris. As Cracow and Lemberg admit only women who have obtained the certificate testifying to proficiency for university studies, thus placing them on a level with the male students, gymnasia for women have been established in Cracow, Lemberg, and Przemysl. This academic movement is powerfully seconded by the literary, social, and political clubs of Polish women. These contribute much to the intellectual activity of the nation, if such the Polish people can to-day be called, and they produce able and earnest women teachers, correspondents, editors of reviews, and authors.

Bismarck, the greatest German statesman that ever lived, and as such, naturally, the most unmitigated political enemy of the Polish race, which, in his mind, const.i.tuted a constant danger to the empire, expelled from Germany, in 1886, fifty thousand Poles of both s.e.xes, not only foreign Poles, but even Germans who had married unnaturalized Polish women; for experience taught, he said, that such wives invariably make their husbands, and especially their children, Polish patriots. A higher testimony to their pride and worth, though unconsciously given, could hardly be cited, for if any man ever understood what was needful to Germany, it was Bismarck, the gigantic German statesman, who subordinated everything to German interests.

Polish women of the aristocracy are born to rule; their pride and self-esteem never forsake them, even in misery; and the women of the lower cla.s.ses are ever faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, which with the downfall of Poland has lost one of its most precious domains. Polish women, then, carry the spark of a dangerous patriotism and the torch of a Church foreign to Prussia and Russia from generation to generation.

_Virgo Maria, Regina Polonice_, is still protectress of the land. And the woman wors.h.i.+p of the "_Sarmats_ ruled by women," as Pliny has it, still remains; gallantry to their women is a trait ingrained in Polish men; the word "for a lady" has still a magic charm. Their beauty, the proverbial perfection of their hands, and the smallness of their feet, do the rest in the subjection of men.

Georg Brandes, the aforementioned sharp observer, rightly calls Polish women of rank patriarchal and active only on their country estates, while at Warsaw they appear immersed in social duties; but this is only a guise under which they promote the cause of their country in every enterprise, be it the founding of a library, a hospital, or a sewing school. Every member of a social, charitable, or economic inst.i.tute is also a member of the great army for the future redemption of their beloved country. The Polish language being forbidden in the schools, every n.o.ble Polish woman becomes a schoolmistress of her language at home, not only for her children, but also for her servants and those who are drawn under her sway. Polish women of the higher cla.s.s once had the reputation of being frivolous; if so, they have become chastened by the one absorbing idea of patriotism and the restoration of Poland. They are elegant _grandes dames_ in a higher degree than German ladies of their cla.s.s with their substantial virtues, and more self-controlled and faithful than their French sisters, though their hearts and heads are surely not colder. Of course, woman's nature is as complex and as uncla.s.sifiable in Poland as elsewhere, and generalization will therefore always remain onesided; but the Polish type of womanhood is unmistakable; so is the preponderance of the feminine element over the masculine. Brandes is quite right when he quotes the opinion of an Italian author: "Among Germanic races the men are more gifted than the women; among the Latin races they stand on the same level; among the Poles, the most characteristic Slavic race, woman is decidedly superior to man as to intellectual qualities, pa.s.sion, courage, wit, patriotism.

Polish history is pervaded as with a red thread with heroic deeds of women. They have aroused whole districts to rebellion against foreign oppressors, fought in battles, endured the hards.h.i.+ps of camp and march, and died on the battlefield." We need only read Henryk Sienkiewicz's novels to find such real types of Polish women-heroes in all the domains of warlike and political activity. The rebellions of 1830-1831 and 1863 found female warriors, as real combatants, in every Polish detachment.

The Polish n.o.blewoman Emilia Plater, sung in Mickiewicz's brilliant pasan, _The Colonel's Death_, raised a detachment of patriots, fought in many battles, tried to break with the sword the iron girdle of the enemies surrounding her corps, and finally died in a forest cabin, in December, 1831, of her wounds and from fatigue and hunger. The female martyrs who have followed voluntarily their exiled husbands or fathers to Siberia may be counted by thousands. No wonder that the Poles love their women with extraordinary tenderness and gladly concede to them the palm of superiority!

It must be confessed, however, that conditions are quite the reverse in many places among the lower and lowest cla.s.ses. The police system, and the exceedingly faulty and incomplete system of education, which seems consciously to be bent upon stupefying the lower strata of Polish society, has destroyed the force of Polish religion, language, and national characteristics, and has reduced thousands of Poles to the lowest social level. Much drunkenness prevails among the men, and consequently much brutal treatment of the women. Coa.r.s.e vulgarity is heard in the karczmas (taverns) at dances and carousals. It is an ancient experience in history that an attempt at a violent denationalization of a race always produces a deterioration of the ma.s.ses, while, on the other hand, the highest elements are steeled and tested as by fire.

Several eminent women s.h.i.+ne as luminaries on the Polish Parna.s.sus. Maria Ilnicka, born in 1830, excels as an admirable translator of the songs of Ossian and of Walter Scott, and as a creator of profoundly thoughtful poems. Deotyma-Jadwiga Luszczewska, the talented Polish improviser and poetess, published in 1854 and 1858 two volumes of exquisite poetry, and later an epic, _Tomyra, the rhapsody Stanislaw Lubomirski_, and a brilliant _Symphony of Life_ for the Beethoven festival in the great theatre at Warsaw in 1870. Her fine creation, _Poland in Song_, published in 1887, treats of the Wanda legend in dramatic form.

Omitting a large galaxy of lesser lights two women authors reign supreme in Poland: Elise Orzeszko and Marja Konopnicka. The former, born in 1842, though too pa.s.sionate in her plea for her ideals, especially for the absolute emanc.i.p.ation of woman, whom she believes is superior to the deceiver and cynic man, is a deeply poetic nature. Her novels and social-philosophical works have been, in later years, realistic and true to nature, and are permeated with a humanitarian sympathy for the oppressed, be they Poles or Jews or women. Her novels _Eli Makower_ (1874) and _Meir Esofowicz_ (1878) treat of the relation of the Jews to the Polish n.o.bility, and again of the contrast and warfare between the Talmudic fanatics and the tolerant, cosmopolitan, cultured Jews of the world. She prophesies to the homeless race a better future. Her brilliant literary works and her endeavors to inculcate on her people Polish ideals did not always find friendly appreciation on the part of the Russian government, which confined her for several years to Grodno.

Her plea for the emanc.i.p.ation of woman found a strong antagonist in Eleonore Ziemiecka (1869), who declared that the unlimited emanc.i.p.ation of women is but a dream of unhappy and oppressed women, which, if realized, would lead society to destruction. Ziemiecka insists that in any sound society the natural mission of woman is that of a wife and mother, and as the counsellor of man.

Marja Konopnicka is a lyric or rather elegiac poet of great power and genius. Her poetry is not soothing and comforting, but painful, pessimistic, and despairing. Freedom of thought, sometimes verging on atheism, is the inspiration which she drew from the condition of her country and of her people. She is the singer of despair; according to her conception of the world, G.o.d has lost his fatherly feeling for the world, or perhaps for Poland only:

"The thundercloud is thy crown, lightning thy garment, The sun the stool of thy mighty feet.

What are human tears to thee? Dewdrops!

And yet omniscient, none is shed without thy will!

Indeed I And yet thou hast never dried them?" (H. S.)

Not to end with a misconception of this poet's nature, let it be mentioned that love is not strange to her; but it is the love for her native land, and for all those who in some way glorify her native land.

Such love she breathes in her ode to the great Polish painter Matejko, when she writes of his great pictorial apostrophe to the glory of Poland, _The Battle of Grunwald_, as _Zaleski_, also, eulogizes Matejko, "who with the magic staff of the brush resuscitates Poland."

Though dramatic art is not the forte of the Polish race, the theatre has produced some great actresses, chief among whom are Helen Marcello and Wisnoska, who found such a tragic death at the hands of a jealous Russian officer; Madame Popiel Svienska; and, greatest of all, Madame Modrzejewska (Modjeska), whom Brandes calls a wonder of the nation.

Unfortunately, the range of Polish dramatic poetry and the despotically ruled theatre at Warsaw could not satisfy Modjeska's genius. Her repertoire is drawn mostly from the creations of Shakespeare and Schiller; and with her art she has fascinated until her old age--she is now about sixty-three--vast audiences in the capitals of almost all the European states and in the United States, and vivified the n.o.blest creations of the greatest thinkers and poets.

We are forced to treat superficially so great a theme, for the women of Poland crowd the history of their country, especially since its fall. We cannot give the gallery of eminent Polish women, for this task belongs to the painter and to the historian of Polish literature and culture.

But whenever a great man came under a Polish woman's spell, he succ.u.mbed to it: Napoleon the Great for once became a romantic lover under the influence of the beautiful Countess Walewska; the first German emperor felt his heart bleed when dynastic reasons forced him to give up a union with Countess Radziwil; Goethe grows enthusiastic, at the age of eighty, when in August, 1829, the great Adam Mickiewicz and his friend Odyniec presented themselves at Weimar, introduced by Madam Szymanowska, a great court pianist at Saint Petersburg; he exclaims spontaneously: "How charming she is, how beautiful and graceful!" The Polish poet's loves, adduced by Brandes, are different from all the others: they are ardent and wild, but never sensual; they are repressed or chastened by the constant emotions of sorrow for their country, their own condition, the desperate future. So are also their poetic creations: Polish women are either heroic amazons struggling for the holy cause of the fatherland (ojczyzna), or they are angelic beings belonging to another world. Nor is the motherhood of a Polish woman sweet or idyllic; the same pain prevails in bearing a Polish son whose future fate is the sorrow of "the man who lost his fatherland." Mickiewicz strikes the real chord of this sentiment in the celebrated ode To the Polish Mother: "Take thy son in time into a solitary cave, teach him to sleep on rushes, to breathe the damp and vitiated air, and to share his couch with poisonous vermin.

There he will learn to make his wrath subterranean, his thought unfathomable, and quietly to poison his words, and give his being the humble aspect of the serpent. Our Redeemer, as a child, played in Nazareth with the cross on which He saved the world. O Polish mother! In thy place, I would give to thy son the toys of his future to play with.

Give him early chains on his hands, accustom him to push the convict's dirty wheelbarrow, so that he shall not grow pale before the executioner's axe, nor blush at the sight of the halter. For he will not go on a crusade to Jerusalem, like the olden knights, and plant his banner in the conquered city, nor will he, like the soldier of the tricolor, be able to plough the field of freedom and water it with his blood! No! an unknown spy will accuse him; he must defend himself before a perjured court; his battlefield will be a dungeon underground, and an all-powerful enemy his judge. The blasted wood of the gallows will be the monument of his grave; a few woman's tears, soon dried, and the long talks of his countrymen in the night-time will be his sole honor and memorial after death." (Transl. Brandes, Poland.)

Such is the character of Polish womanhood, in reality and in poetic fiction. Inexhaustible riches dwell in its type. The sins of past centuries have been avenged bitterly upon them and their children; but they live on, true to their Polish nature. The variety of the human races, created by Divine Providence, with all their manifold peculiarities, their virtues and faults, would suffer greatly, and the human family would be seriously impoverished, should the species "Polish Woman" ever be merged in the conquering nations and vanish with them, however great and n.o.bly endowed the latter may be. If the realization of this wish be the hope of statesmen, the historian of culture can only desire that the race remain according to a Tacitean word regarding the Teuton "similar only to itself."