The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Soul of Poland
THE SOUL OF POLAND
It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to
murder, the soul of a nation. The call that comes
to a people's heart from the soil that gave them
birth is a spiritual force which no conquering
empire should dare to kill. How powerful it is,
how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how
infinitely pathetic! The land of one's country
may be so bleak, so bare, so barren, that the
stranger may think God can never have intended
that it should be trodden by the foot of man,
yet it seems to us, who were born to it, to be
the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs
of one's country may be the simplest staves that
ever shaped themselves into music, yet they
search our hearts as the loftiest compositions
never can. The language of one's country (even
the dialect of one's district) may be the crudest
corruption that ever lived on human lips, yet it
lights up dark regions of our consciousness which
the purest of the classic tongues can never reach.
Do we not all feel this, whatever the qualities or
defects of our native speech—every Scotsman,
every Irishman, every Welshman, nay, every
Yorkshireman, every Lancashireman, every
Devonshireman, when he hears the word and
the tone which belong to his own people only?
There are phrases in the Manx and the Anglo-
Manx of my own little race which I can never
hear spoken without the sense of something
tingling and throbbing between my flesh and my
skin. Why? Because it is the home-speech
of my own island, and whatever she is, whatever
fate may befall her, however she may treat me,
she is my mother and I am her son.
Such is the mighty and mysterious thing which we call a nation's soul. Nobody can explain it, nobody can account for it, but woe to the presumptuous empire which tries to wipe it out. It can never be wiped out. Crushed and trodden on it may be, as Austria has crushed and trodden on the soul of Austrian Poland, and as Germany has crushed and trodden on the soul of Prussian Poland, when they have fallen so low in the scale of civilized peoples as to flog Polish school- children for refusing to learn their catechism and say their prayers in a language which they cannot understand. But to kill the soul of a nation is impossible. The German Chancellor could not do that when he violated the body of Belgium. And though Warsaw has fallen the fatuous Prince Leopold of Bavaria, with his preposterous proclamations, cannot kill the soul of Poland.
At Cracow in 1892 I tried to buy for one of my children the little Polish national cap, but after a vain search for it through many shops (where I was generally suspected of being a spy for the Austrian police), the cap was brought to me at night, in my private room, by shopkeepers who had been afraid to sell it openly in the day. At Wieliezhe, I, with some forty persons of various nationalities (including the usual contingent of detectives), descended the immense and marvellous salt-mine which is now used as a show place for visitors. After passing, by the flare of torches, down long galleries of underground workings, we were plunged into darkness by a rush of wind over a subterranean river through which we had to shoulder our way on a raft. Then suddenly, no face being visible in that black tunnel under the earth, the Polish part of our company broke into a wild, fierce, frenzied singing of their national anthem which, in those days, they dare not sing on the surface and in the light: "Poland is not lost for ever; she will live once more." No, Poland is not lost for ever! She will live once more!