Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician | Page 7

the clergy
were, however, somewhat better off; and the burghers, too, enjoyed
some shreds of their old privileges with more or less security. If we
look for a true and striking description of the comparative position of
the principal classes of the population of Poland, we find it in these
words of a writer of the eighteenth century: "Polonia coelum nobilium,
paradisus clericorum, infernus rusticorum."
The vast plain of Poland, although in many places boggy and sandy, is
on the whole fertile, especially in the flat river valleys, and in the east
at the sources of the Dnieper; indeed, it is so much so that it has been
called the granary of Europe. But as the pleasure-loving gentlemen had
nobler pursuits to attend to, and the miserable peasants, with whom it
was a saying that only what they spent in drink was their own, were not
very anxious to work more and better than they could help, agriculture
was in a very neglected condition. With manufacture and commerce it
stood not a whit better. What little there was, was in the hands of the
Jews and foreigners, the nobles not being allowed to meddle with such
base matters, and the degraded descendants of the industrious and
enterprising ancient burghers having neither the means nor the spirit to
undertake anything of the sort. Hence the strong contrast of wealth and
poverty, luxury and distress, that in every part of Poland, in town and
country, struck so forcibly and painfully all foreign travellers. Of the
Polish provinces that in 1773 came under Prussian rule we read that--
the country people hardly knew such a thing as bread, many had never
in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages had an oven. A
weaving-loom was rare; the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article
of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of
holy-water under it....It was a desolate land without discipline, without
law, without a master. On 9,000 English square miles lived 500,000
souls: not 55 to the square mile. [Footnote: Carlyle. Frederick the Great,
vol. x., p. 40.]
And this poverty and squalor were not to be found only in one part of

Poland, they seem to have been general. Abbe de Mably when seeing,
in 1771, the misery of the country (campagne) and the bad condition of
the roads, imagined himself in Tartary. William Coxe, the English
historian and writer of travels, who visited Poland after the first
partition, relates, in speaking of the district called Podlachia, that he
visited between Bjelsk and Woyszki villages in which there was
nothing but the bare walls, and he was told at the table of the ------ that
knives, forks, and spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants.
He says he never saw--
a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to
Warsaw--for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly
overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon
was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with
beech, birch, and small oaks). The occasional breaks presented some
pasture- ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The
natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we
had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped
they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the
most abject gestures....The Polish peasants are cringing and servile in
their expressions of respect; they bowed down to the ground; took off
their hats or caps and held them in their hands till we were out of sight;
stopped their carts on the first glimpse of our carriage; in short, their
whole behaviour gave evident symptoms of the abject servitude under
which they groaned. [FOOTNOTE: William Coxe, Travels in Poland,
Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784--90).]
The Jews, to whom I have already more than once alluded, are too
important an element in the population of Poland not to be particularly
noticed. They are a people within a people, differing in dress as well as
in language, which is a jargon of German-Hebrew. Their number
before the first partition has been variously estimated at from less than
two millions to fully two millions and a half in a population of from
fifteen to twenty millions, and in 1860 there were in Russian Poland
612,098 Jews in a population of 4,867,124.
[FOOTNOTE: According to Charles Forster (in Pologne, a volume of
the historical series entitled L'univers pittoresque, published by Firmin
Didot freres of Paris), who follows Stanislas Plater, the population of
Poland within the boundaries of 1772 amounted to 20,220,000

inhabitants, and was composed of 6,770,000 Poles, 7,520,000 Russians
(i.e., White and Red Russians), 2,110,000 Jews, 1,900,000 Lithuanians,
1,640,000 Germans, 180,000 Muscovites (i.e., Great Russians), and
100,000