Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician | Page 7

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 Wallachians.]
They monopolise [says Mr. Coxe] the commerce and trade of the country, keep inns and taverns, are stewards to the nobility, and seem to have so much influence that nothing can be bought or sold without the intervention of a Jew.
Our never-failing informant was particularly struck with the number and usefulness of the Jews in Lithuania when