. Pleiades
On Wandering in Poland
MY first sight of anything Polish, except the fields through which we had passed in the early morning on our way from Vienna, was the ancient city of Cracow, the old capital of the Kingdom of Poland before Warsaw took its place. My first and my deepest impression of Poland came to me as I wandered over the Wawel—a knoll rising above the swift waters of the Vistula, and looking over the city—on which there stand the palace and the cathedral. In the cathedral I saw the great coffers of the crypt, where the kings of Poland lie in solemn state ; and I marvelled at the beauties of Renaissance chapels, and the sumptuous lavishing of ancient art to the greater glory of God. But it was in the palace which imme- diately adjoins the cathedral that I had my first feeling of the newly risen life of Poland. The first glimpse of its court-yard was a sudden and happy surprise. Italy, I said to myself, an Italian palace ; and yet not Italy, and not an Italian palace ; for that great colonnade on the topmost floor, and its curious and arresting pillars, and the mural paintings I can dimly see at the back—this is unlike anything I have ever seen before. So I was tuned to new wonders when I went inside the palace, and I was not disappointed. It was old and yet it was new ; it was an ancient building which had just been renovated, and was still being renovated, with a loving care ; it had new marbles on its staircases, and new woodwork in its doors and panelling ; but the framework and essence of the building came straight and untouched from the past, and the tapestry and pictures and furniture were old treasures of Polish history. This is Polonia Rediviva, I thought, and altering my Milton I quoted to myself :—
" She tricks her beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
It is a good thing, I went on, when a nation recollects its past ; and it is a very good thing when a nation can not only recollect but also repair its past—when it is free to purge its national monuments, and to make them shine with the reflection of its own renewed spirit. Praelerita reparare—this is a motto which Poland is following ; and perhaps I shall find, as I wander through Poland, that futura praeparare is also another motto. * * « * * * *
The Zamek at Warsaw, the later palace of the Polish kings, repeats the lesson of the Wawel at Cracow. It, too, rises on a hill above the Vistula, and there, too, the Vistula is a river of swift waters, as if it were in a hurry to link Poland to the sea but it is now a broad and majestic river, spanned by majestic bridges. It is a fine thing to cross one of those bridges in the evening, to the Eastern bank, and then to look back and see the Zamek silhouetted black against the red sunset. Polish kings have seen it so ; and Napoleon himself; and heavy-eyed Russian Czars ; and Polish patriots who waged what seemed a desperate battle to set it free again. It is free again to-day; and to-day its old splendours are being renewed. YOu can stand in the little eduncil:chamber of the last Polish king— intact, renovated, once more Polish ; - you can see on -its walls his portrait, and the portraits of our George III, of Frederick of Prussia, of Joseph of Austria, of Louis of France ; and you can reflect that Poland stands erect again, by the side of England and Germany, of Austria and France. And if your mind has been heavy in the past when you have thought of the partition of Poland, and when you have wondered about historic justice and the fate of nations, you cannot hut be happy to look from the window of Stanislaus Poniatowski's council-chamber over a free Poland.
Stanislaus, one feels, pervades the city of Warsaw. Perhaps he was not a great king : perhaps he should not have let his kingdom die under him, in the three partitions, without some challenge to the three powers by which it was constricted and absorbed. But if he did not save Warsaw, at any rate he adorned it ; if he might have loved, his kingdom better, at least he loved beauty with a happy love. The relics of the pottery which he encouraged show a fine taste ; and his buildings and his pictures are a monument to his love of the arts. But a sort of haul go& and an artistic sense—sometimes, perhaps, a little flamboyant, but always free and fluent and easy—seem to characterize most of the old Polish buildings. There is a palace built for John Sobieski, a few miles away from Warsaw, which is a treasure house of decoration. And it is an education in architecture—sometimes in its freaks, but sometimes also in its beauties and its nobilities—to wander through the churches of Cracow.
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A nation is not judged by its art, or even by its past. The question which it has to answer goes deeper than those things. What is it doing in the present, and what is it doing for the future, to make the lives of its members better and worthier lives ? Praelerita reparare is a good tiling; but futura praeparare, in a good and broad sense of those words, is a still better thing. In things material, you can readily see that Poland is marching forward. She has leeway enough to make up, now that she has got her own fortunes in her own hands ; and she is making it up with a good heart. You see new buildings everywhere : you see better roads (and there is plenty of room for them) : you see, at the new Polish port of Gdynia, which in the last four years or so has grown from zero to a population of 40,000, a new and vigorous commerce : you see the evidences of a large coal industry, new manufacturing plants, busy streets, and all the general activity of a nation of thirty million souls. But it is when you are taken to institutes of public health and to schools, and when you see for Yourself what is being done for the bodies and minds of the next generation, that you begin to have the best hope for the future. There is an institute of public health in Warsaw which is one of its finest buildings and is hill of all sorts of activities. Re- search is being conducted : sera are being prepared : OffiCCTS of public health are being trained by a full course of instruc- tion, and shorter courses are being given to all who can in any way aid—by nursing, in the course of public administra- tion, or otherwise—the improvement of the health of the nation. There is perhaps nothing parallel in England ; but a new State will naturally devise new things. Still more exciting than our visit to this institute was a visit we paid to a boys' technical school. It was new and beauti- fully built, in the form of a quadrangle : it was admirably equipped with swimming bath and gymnasium, with a long refectory, with chemical and physical laboratories, and with rooms for woodwork and metalwork : we were told that it provided instruction, in one way or another, for over a thousand pupils ; and the three boys who took us round, with their bright fine-cut faces and their eager pride, pre- possessed us in favour of everything we saw. It was a school on which we had come at random, by our own choice : it was not, so far as we knew, in any way a " show " school ; and we were told that the ordinary primary Schools, in their own degree, were of Similar style and comparable equipment.
This is as hopeful a thing as Poland has to show. One notices, from tables in year-books, that Poland has a very large army, and that it spends a large percentage of its revenue (over 30 per cent., to France's 20 and our 15) upon armaments. The Polish army .did not seem aggressively present : where it was to be seen it looked like a civic army, without clank' Or swagger : there was no obvious sense of militarism in the air. With uncertain frontiers, fixed by no obvious natural divisions (that has always been the problem of Poland), a large army is perhaps necessary, or at any rate excusable ; and a large army involves a large expenditure. And there are two other things to be said. Though there is a sort of military dictatorship in Poland, there is also a representative parliament, a play of parties, and a regular system of elections ; nor is there any feeling, as you go about, of police regimentation. The Pole seems naturally an individualist ; and individual freedom, or what we call "the liberty of the subject," has not been sacrificed. That is one thing. The other is that, whatever may be spent on armaments, there is a good deal being spent, and spent sensibly as well as liberally, on public health and public education. Poland is .insuring its own civic welfare
as well as its frontiers and its political stability. Onloa.
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