Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (864 page)

It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a great part in Europe.  To such statesmen as she had then that act of brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom.  The King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that time Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian illusions.  Morally, the Republic was in a state of ferment and consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social reform.  The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I mean the comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces.  But, probably from innate inclination towards treachery, Frederick of Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception.  Appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the Republic, and then, before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes.

As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction.  They cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a measure sincere.  They arose from a vivid perception that Austria’s allotted share of the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of strength and territory to the other two Powers.  Austria did not really want an extension of territory at the cost of Poland.  She could not hope to improve her frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of Galicia, a province whose natural resources were undeveloped and whose salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her own.  No doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very distasteful to the conservative monarchy; Austrian statesmen did see at the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the West, in France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would be needed for its suppression.  But the movement towards a
partage
on the part of Russia and Prussia was too definite to be resisted, and Austria had to follow their lead in the destruction of a State which she would have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against Prussian and Russian ambitions.  It may be truly said that the destruction of Poland secured the safety of the French Revolution.  For when in 1795 the crime was consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner and was in a state to defend itself against the forces of reaction.

In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland.  On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so.  But France’s geographical position made her much less vulnerable.  She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy lot.  The only States which dreaded the contamination of the new principles and had enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an immediate satisfaction to their cupidity.  They made their choice, and the untold sufferings of a nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.

Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history.  Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their hearts.  It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count.  As an emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body into three pieces.  There was really nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave.  But the spirit of the nation refused to rest therein.  It haunted the territories of the Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh-pooh’d ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors.  Poland deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere geographical expression.  And even that, itself, seemed strangely vague, had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime.  What was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold.  That persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to the rest of Europe also.  It would intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of European politics, into the theory of European equilibrium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the doctrine of nationalities.  That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows.  It would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine railleries of Gorchakov.

As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: “Till the year ‘48 the Polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient rallying-point for all manifestations of liberalism.  Since that time we have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance.  It’s very disagreeable.”

I agreed that it was, and he continued: “What are we to do?  We did not create the situation by any outside action of ours.  Through all the centuries of its existence Poland has never been a menace to anybody, not even to the Turks, to whom it has been merely an obstacle.”

Nothing could be more true.  The spirit of aggressiveness was absolutely foreign to the Polish temperament, to which the preservation of its institutions and its liberties was much more precious than any ideas of conquest.  Polish wars were defensive, and they were mostly fought within Poland’s own borders.  And that those territories were often invaded was but a misfortune arising from its geographical position.  Territorial expansion was never the master-thought of Polish statesmen.  The consolidation of the territories of the
sérénissime
Republic, which made of it a Power of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by force.  It was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a long and successful defence against the raiding neighbours from the East.  The lands of Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never conquered by Poland.  These peoples were not compelled by a series of exhausting wars to seek safety in annexation.  It was not the will of a prince or a political intrigue that brought about the union.  Neither was it fear.  The slowly-matured view of the economical and social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral sense of the masses were the motives that induced the forty three representatives of Lithuanian and Ruthenian provinces, led by their paramount prince, to enter into a political combination unique in the history of the world, a spontaneous and complete union of sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of peace.  Never was strict truth better expressed in a political instrument than in the preamble of the first Union Treaty (1413).  It begins with the words: “This Union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of love” — words that Poles have not heard addressed to them politically by any nation for the last hundred and fifty years.

This union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights, liberties, and respective institutions.  The Polish State offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal administrative federalism which, in its Parliamentary life as well as its international politics, presented a complete unity of feeling and purpose.  As an eminent French diplomatist remarked many years ago: “It is a very remarkable fact in the history of the Polish State, this invariable and unanimous consent of the populations; the more so that, the King being looked upon simply as the chief of the Republic, there was no monarchical bond, no dynastic fidelity to control and guide the sentiment of the nations, and their union remained as a pure affirmation of the national will.”  The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Ruthenian Provinces retained their statutes, their own administration, and their own political institutions.  That those institutions in the course of time tended to assimilation with the Polish form was not the result of any pressure, but simply of the superior character of Polish civilisation.

Even after Poland lost its independence this alliance and this union remained firm in spirit and fidelity.  All the national movements towards liberation were initiated in the name of the whole mass of people inhabiting the limits of the old Republic, and all the Provinces took part in them with complete devotion.  It is only in the last generation that efforts have been made to create a tendency towards separation, which would indeed serve no one but Poland’s common enemies.  And, strangely enough, it is the internationalists, men who professedly care nothing for race or country, who have set themselves this task of disruption, one can easily see for what sinister purpose.  The ways of the internationalists may be dark, but they are not inscrutable.

From the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a poisoned stream of hints of a reconstituted Poland being a danger to the races once so closely associated within the territories of the Old Republic.  The old partners in “the Crime” are not likely to forgive their victim its inconvenient and almost shocking obstinacy in keeping alive.  They had tried moral assassination before and with some small measure of success, for, indeed, the Polish question, like all living reproaches, had become a nuisance.  Given the wrong, and the apparent impossibility of righting it without running risks of a serious nature, some moral alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its misfortunes on its own head by its own sins.  That theory, too, had been advanced about Poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin and folly), and it made some way in the world at different times, simply because good care was taken by the interested parties to stop the mouth of the accused.  But it has never carried much conviction to honest minds.  Somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of view as to the Force of Lies and against all the power of falsified evidence, truth often turns out to be stronger than calumny.  With the course of years, however, another danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally from the new political alliances dividing Europe into two armed camps.  It was the danger of silence.  Almost without exception the Press of Western Europe in the twentieth century refused to touch the Polish question in any shape or form whatever.  Never was the fact of Polish vitality more embarrassing to European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland’s resurrection.

When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that invincible soul of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so arrogantly denying for more than a century.  Perhaps in the whole record of human transactions there have never been performances so brazen and so vile as the manifestoes of the German Emperor and the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human heart and intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were flung into the face of historical truth.  It was like a scene in a cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort unfathomable by the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment.  At that time, and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in Poland, and I remember perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out, the confidence in the moral turpitude of mankind they implied did not even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men whose most sacred feelings and dignity they outraged.  They did not deign to waste their contempt on them.  In fact, the situation was too poignant and too involved for either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion.  For the Poles it was like being in a burning house of which all the issues were locked.  There was nothing but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calmness which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not constitutionally prone to despair.  Yet in this time of dismay the irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral attitude.  I was told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely necessary for the Poles to affirm their national existence.  Passivity, which could be regarded as a craven acceptance of all the material and moral horrors ready to fall upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment.  Therefore, it was explained to me, the Poles
must
act.  Whether this was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom.  When there is apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason, sentiment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation or to utter perdition, no one can tell — and the sentiment does not even ask the question.  Being there as a stranger in that tense atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, I was not very anxious to parade my wisdom, especially after it had been pointed out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its values worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it which can make it worthy or unworthy.