eat 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 plo