CHAPTER XIII

WOMEN OF POLAND

In the great family of the Slavic races the Poles are preeminent by their ancient civilization, their genius, and their literary and artistic activity. Their ancient history, like that of most other nations, is lost in a confused mass of legends, but the rich treasures of their ancient popular songs reveal to us, largely, their old cultural status. Especially do many love and marriage songs of ancient origin and others preserved in Latin versions in old chronicles prove the conservatism of the mind of the Polish people and their conceptions of life. The maiden, now as in the olden days, sings before the all-important act of marriage: "Wreath, delicately bound of roses and white lilies intertwined, thou shalt for the last time adorn my anxious brow. Thou art the last of all garlands that I wound in the spring of maidenhood! By the side of the husband do I wander far away. Farewell to the mother's heart that bore me through bliss and pain. Might I repay all her toils with rich treasures...." Adorned with the gaily colored bridal treasures or tinsel, she kneels to-day as of yore before her parents to receive their blessing. All the symbolic ceremonies betray an ancient origin.

Though legendary and mythical, Princess Wanda, daughter of Cracus (founder of the ancient capital Cracow), symbolizes the virtues of Polish patriotism, chastity, and grace. She is the noblest type of Polish womanhood, and her memory lives on and on, in the soul of her race, as it were the personification of her sex Polonized. She had vowed eternal chastity, but a German war lord, Ritiger, inflamed by her beauty, waged war against her people to win her by force. Though the Poles were victorious, Wanda threw herself from the bridge of the castle on the Wawel mountain into the Vistula to save her country and her people from similar wars. Lyric and dramatic poetry, as well as the fine arts, music, painting, and sculpture, have glorified the self-sacrifice of the noble Polish princess at the legendary entrance of her race into history. Only the other great race of the western Slavic family, the Czechs, begins its history in like fashion with the beautiful and semi-divine form of Libussa.

With the reign of Mieczyslaw I. (962) Polish history begins. In 965, this prince adopted Christianity in order to win the hand of Dombrowka, daughter of king Boleslaw of Bohemia, and thus to consolidate the two great western Slavic races against the ever-increasing encroachments of the Germans. Roman Catholicism stands at the cradle of the Poles, thus placing them from the start in opposition to the eastern Slavs, foremost among whom are the Russians. After Dombrowka's death in 977, a German markgravine, Oda, shared the Polish throne.

Polish literature begins with a hymn to the Holy Virgin (_Bogarodzica_, Mother of God), the national protectress of the Poles, whose worship pervades their entire life, and whose sacred picture is the essential part of their national coat of arms of the white eagle and their national banner. This hymn is the Polish catechism; it accompanies the schoolboy and the warrior and, in fact, all classes and ages throughout life. This feminine romantic song and the _Psalter of Queen Margaret_ are the oldest monuments of Polish literature.

The later princes and kings of Poland, a dignity bestowed upon them by Otto II., Emperor of Germany, married, for dynastic reasons, Czech, Kief, and German princesses, who, it is true, did not further Polish national life, but broadened Polish culture by contact with other nations. Wladislaw Lokietek (the Short), who about 1312 made Cracow the centre of Poland, being the first monarch crowned there, married Jadwiga, daughter of Boleslaw, Prince of Kalisz. She was an eminent woman, and was buried in the magnificent cathedral at Cracow, where her granite monument still stands.

The early kings favored the common people, who, unfortunately, in later centuries were reduced to servitude, against the _szlachta_ (_Geschlechi_, nobility), so that in early days the women of the people (_naród_) attained a high social standard. Especially Casimir the Great, "the king of the peasants," and of the oppressed generally, greatly increased the happiness and prosperity of the nation. He even admitted to his realm the persecuted Jews by virtue of the statute of 1357 (privilegia judaeorum), a favor which, according to an unauthenticated tradition, was due to his love for a beautiful Jewess _Esterka_ (Esther). This great king was legally married three times. He was unhappy in his marriage with Anna Aldona, a Lithuanian princess, a union which remained, however, without political consequences. Anna never felt at home in Poland; she clung to Lithuanian customs, music, and dance. She loved the manly sports of horseback riding and hunting, and during her indulgence in them she was accompanied by Lithuanian flute players. Her Christianity appeared at all times rather doubtful in the eyes of the Polish clergy, and the Church pomp and ceremony were to her very distasteful.

Her husband, to whom she was married almost in his boyhood, led a very licentious life. Theodor Schiemann, the historian of the Slavs, relates how Casimir at the court of Budapest fell in love with Clara von Zach, daughter of a court official. Casimir's sister, Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, aided him in seducing the innocent maiden. The father of the latter, maddened by the disgrace, broke into the royal hall to avenge himself upon the betrayers of his child, and wounded the royal couple, but he was finally slain. A terrible judgment was passed upon all the members of the family of Zach: Clara herself was mutilated and chased, as a beast might be, to death, but her royal seducer did not interpose a barrier to her punishment. This event throws a lurid light on the mediæval court life in Hungary and Poland.

After the death of Lithuanian Anna, Casimir betrothed himself to Margareth of Bavaria, who is said to have died of grief at the approaching marriage to the hated Polish king. His next wife, Adelheid of Hesse, was neglected and ill treated, and when the king married another woman, Christina Rokiczan, she left Poland forever. Christina shared the fate of her predecessor, and the king married in 1365 Hedwig, Duchess of Sagan, during the lifetime of his undivorced wife Adelheid. The Pope, however, who had at first called that marriage "a public disgrace," granted him a divorce from his former wife to legitimatize the new union. We may draw interesting comparisons between that otherwise great and tolerant but morally depraved Polish king and Henry VIII. of England.

The first great Polish woman in the glowing light of history is Jadwiga, daughter of King Louis of Hungary and Poland, the legitimate queen of Poland in default of a male heir, crowned on October 15, 1384, in the Cathedral of Cracow. Betrothed in her childhood to an Austrian prince, who now came to Cracow and quickly won her heart and actually consummated the marriage, she was nevertheless compelled by the Polish nobles, who hated the German and forced him to flee for his life, to accept Jagiello, the supreme duke of the Lithuanians, a still barbarous, pagan people, but whose power extended down to Kief. This union was a political stroke of the first magnitude. Jagiello and the Lithuanians became Christianized in the Latin form, the united countries became the greatest power in eastern Europe, and therewith the overwhelming might of the Teutonic Order was broken forever. The dynasty of the Jagiellos was founded and reigned supreme in Poland for two hundred years (1386-1572). When Jadwiga, a great queen and woman, died in 1399, the Poles, otherwise unruly, retained as their ruler King Wladislaw Jagiello, who from a great but savage pagan had become a good Christian and a strong statesman. The destruction of the Teutonic Order in the battle of Tannenberg, 1410, one of the greatest and most decisive battles in history, insured for centuries the hegemony of Poland in eastern Europe. Of this battle we have an interesting letter from Jagiello to Anna, his second wife, whom he addressed from the camp on the battlefield as "noble princess, illustrious and dear consort": "We slew numberless enemies, not through the strength of Our arm, or the multitude of Our warriors, but solely with the aid of Our Lord, who may further us in power and virtue!" This document not only shows Jagiello's adherence to Christianity, but also proves the respect paid to a Polish queen, even though she was inferior to Jadwiga, who was the reorganizer and refounder not only of a mighty realm, but also of the famous old University of Cracow, which before her time had sunk into complete insignificance. She had obtained in 1397 a papal bull for the foundation of a theological faculty, and insured the existence of the university for the future by rich legacies bequeathed on her deathbed.

One century and a half later a royal romance with a tragic ending was enacted in Poland. King Sigismund (Augustus) II. (1547-1572), on the death of his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I., married secretly Barbara Radziwil, of the most illustrious Lithuanian family. On his accession to the throne he avowed his marriage, and the princess accompanied him to Cracow to attend the funeral of his father. The diet of Piotrkow believing a union with a foreign princess more profitable to Poland, demanded the annulment of his marriage with Barbara, but the king resisted, and saw her crowned as his queen in 1550. Six months after her coronation, however, she died suddenly, probably poisoned by her mother-in-law, the hated Italian, Bona Sforza, who as queen had exercised a baneful influence upon Polish life. The unfortunate Queen Barbara is idealized in Polish lays, and the portraits preserved of her show beauty of form and features.

It may be interesting to note the relation of the great Polish king Jan Sobieski (1674-1696), the liberator of Vienna, and in truth of Europe, from the Turkish conquerors, to his wife, who exercised an almost complete dominion over him. We have an admirable description of the Polish court at the time of Sobieski; of his extraordinary wife and daughter, and of social affairs there, in a report by a contemporary, an anonymous French abbé, whose manuscript was found in the Bibliothèque Mazarin, in Paris, and was published for the first time in 1858. He describes the Polish nobility as turbulent in the Diet and at home, tells of their luxury and their habits, the high esteem in which ladies of high birth were held, and the scandalous treatment of peasant women, as well as the absolute power of the _szlachta_ over the life and honor of the serfs and their women.

Sobieski's wife was a French woman, but she became completely Polonized: Marie Casimire d'Arquien, originally maid of honor of Marie Louise, wife of Wladislaw and of his brother Casimir successively, had been married first to the Polish magnate Zamoiski, and after his death to Sobieski. She is said to have induced her royal consort to assist Austria against the Turks, very much against the wishes of Louis XIV. of France, who desired the power of Austria to be broken forever. The King of France had incurred her ill will by refusing to elevate her father to the rank of a duke. The queen had the strongest Polish interests and sympathies; the letters of Sobieski to her are all in Polish; they are of the greatest historical value, as the king informs her constantly of his progress; also the personal element in them is highly interesting; they abound in words of endearment: "My charming and incomparable Mariette." "Only joy of my soul." The queen, though beautiful and passionately loved by Sobieski, was an avaricious, despotic, jealous, revengeful woman. After the death of the great king she lived in Italy and France, and died in 1716 in the castle of Blois which Louis XIV. had given to her. Her remains rest with those of Sobieski in the Cathedral of Cracow.

The description of the decline of Poland under the Saxon kings, of the political and moral decay of the country under foreign rulers, does not belong to our theme, since the national element in the social life of the unfortunate country is wanting.

If so much attention has heretofore been given to royal women, it was done in the conviction that, since, after all, the history of culture is a comparatively modern branch of scholarship, national life in periods not too clearly defined in history is best depicted in the highest circles, which, for good or for evil, will ever serve as a model or a type to be imitated by the classes below. We need only to glance at the life of fashion, so essential to women in all stages of society, to realize the truth of this conclusion.

In spite of all class distinctions, which were stronger in Poland than in any other country of western civilization, the Polish type of womanhood was nevertheless more recognizable throughout all the classes than anywhere else. In spite of all their modesty and womanly beauty, Polish women were at all times political enthusiasts; at all epochs we find among them commanding natures, resolute and manly patriots. Patriotic motives governed their loves, their marriages, their motherhood, and at no time more than since the partition of their beloved country. They excel in hospitality, which is their particular métier, and upon which they lavish, almost frivolously, their earthly goods. Courage, bravery, even heroism, are common traits, and are presupposed in their men as prerequisites to winning female affections. Ideals prevailed at all times; and for ideals, often very empty and unstatesmanlike, they sacrificed themselves, and also the life blood of their men, nay, their commonwealth, in fatal contrast to the self-interested, cool-headed, and cold-hearted statesmanship of their well-disciplined German neighbors. Upon this noble, but unpractical, national characteristic is to be based also their lack of an economic sense; work as such for material reward was always, it may be said, despised by Polish women; money was, and is, considered a sordid means for a purpose; and the same training, inculcated into the souls of the sons of Polish women, was one of the chief reasons for the political downfall of the nation. A too highly developed sense of individual liberty, the pursuit of ideals, impracticable even for their own people, and a contempt for everyday work and commonplace activity, have destroyed Poland. The eminent Danish literary historian Georg Brandes, in his Poland, reports characteristically this significant remark by a distinguished Polish lady: "What company they invited me to meet! It was made up of workmen, advocates whom we pay, manufacturers who sell goods, doctors into whose hands three rubles are slipped for a visit."

It is true that it was not always thus with Polish women, and certainly not with those of the poorer classes. In early times the education of woman consisted in prayer and work. Learning was not a womanly requisite; the domestic and agricultural work in the fields belonged to women, while the tavern was too frequently the abode of the man (_chlop_). Piety is a most genuine reality with Polish women; they were at all times a rock of the Catholic Church. Chastity was the most common virtue, and was strictly enforced. Nitschmann, the German historian of Polish literature, mentions the fact that as late as A. D. 1645, a young gentlewoman at the Polish court, who had entertained improper relations with several courtiers, was condemned to death, together with her lovers. Strict discipline went so far that, according to old Polish custom, maidens were chastised with rods every Friday to remind them of Christ's sufferings and to bring them nearer to God. The prayer of innocent children was reputed more effective, which was a strong incentive for young women to keep themselves pure as long as possible. No wonder that such women attained, in the course of time, a moral supremacy over their men, and that nowhere in Europe such a genuine deference was offered to women as in Poland. The almost supreme rule of the Polish mother over her sons is proverbial. With all her tenderness for her children, it is the Polish mother who drove the youth of the land to an almost hopeless struggle against the foreign conqueror, and to death on the altar of the fatherland. Nowhere has the Spartan mother's "Either with the shield or upon the shield" become such an often repeated reality as in the Polish insurrections against Russia.

Until the entrance of French fashions, which, however, especially influenced the higher classes, the costume of Polish women of all classes was national, beautiful, and many-colored. A cap of fine linen and a diadem were worn; the neck was left uncovered, as with the Polish men, and was adorned with strings of beads or jewels; rich furs ornamented the edges of their garments. The unmarried women wore fine silken or linen aprons, which are even to-day an indispensable part of the costume of Polish peasant girls at their social functions, for example, dances and spinning parties. A gaily colored cloth, artistically wound around the head, was always worn by the Polish girl of the lower classes; a white veil, which, however, must not cover the face, as with Mohammedan women, covered the heads of the maidens of the higher classes. Since the partition of Poland the gay national costume of the Poles is prohibited in Russia, but it is still worn, especially on festal occasions in Austria and Prussia.

The charm and beauty of Polish women is the constant theme of the national poets. A lyric poet of the seventeenth century, Morsztyn, sings of the Polish virgin:

"Thou model mine, divine in all thy beauty, Compared with whom spring's roses even languish, O brightest star, produced on earthly meadows, Yet unsurpassed by heaven's luminaries!

"Pure spirit, encompassed in crystal, From which thou shinest in lofty light of virtue; Perfected creature by the hand of God, My spirit's comfort and my heart's delight!" (H. S.)

If during the more ancient epochs there are recorded no Polish women who have made a mark in literary pursuits, this is not due to any intellectual deficit in those otherwise brilliant and gifted representatives of the fair sex, but to prevailing conditions, which did not permit them to turn from the maidenly or housewifely occupations, for

"Woman's virtue never gets along With novel-reading, sport, and song."

According to the Polish idea, man belongs on the horse, woman to the hearth; in which respect the otherwise antagonistic Germans and Poles do not differ essentially, if we may accept Emperor William's formulated four K's: _Kirche_ (church), _Kuche_ (kitchen), _Kinder_ (children), _Kleider_ (clothing), as typical of German ideals.

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, Snatched 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 title of nobility by her own talent in the dreariest time of Polish literature was Elizabeth Druzbacka, née Kowalska. Born in 1687, in Great Poland, she passed 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 God, 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 shines in its youthful fulness; The noble 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 tripartitionment 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 masses of the lowly people who had so long been kept in servitude, prevented from participating 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 illustrious 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 classical 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 sexes, 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 emancipation 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 masse, deprived Poland of numbers of her noblest 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 sex. 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 participate 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 citizenship, 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 passive 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 participate 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 Japanese war, the constitutional 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, constituted a constant danger to the empire, expelled from Germany, in 1886, fifty thousand Poles of both sexes, 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 classes 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 worship 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 institute 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 noble 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 class 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 class 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 unclassifiable 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, passion, 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 hardships 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 noblewoman 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 classes. 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. Coarse 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 masses, while, on the other hand, the highest elements are steeled and tested as by fire.

Several eminent women shine as luminaries on the Polish Parnassus. 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 passionate in her plea for her ideals, especially for the absolute emancipation 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 nobility, 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 emancipation of woman found a strong antagonist in Eleonore Ziemiecka (1869), who declared that the unlimited emancipation 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, God 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 noblest 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 succumbed 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 nobly 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."

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

PREFACE

I. THE WOMEN OF THE PAGAN TEUTONS. II. THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS. III. THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS (CONTINUED). IV. THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION. V. THE DAYS OF THE MINNESINGERS. VI. THE COMING OF THE MASTERSINGERS. VII. WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION. VIII. AN ERA OF INTELLECTUAL DESOLATION. IX. WOMAN HELD IN TIGHTENING BONDS. X. THROUGH STORM AND STRESS TO CLASSICISM AND HUMANISM. XI. EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN. XII. WOMEN OF RUSSIA. XIII. WOMEN OF POLAND

List of Illustrations

Emma carrying her lover, G. L. P. Saint-Ange. Capture of Thusnelda, H. Konig. A Teutonic alliance, Ferdinand Leeke. Fredegond watching the marriage of Chilperic and Galswintha, L. Alma-Tadema. Princess Sophia and the old and new school religionists, V. G. Peroff. Kalmuck interior, Racinet.