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Vilmos Voigt
1666), Court Marshal of the Crown (since 1650) published a pamphlet (Polonia
Defensa contra Ioan. Barclaivm, Vbi, occasione ista, de Regno Genteque Polona multa
narrantur, hactenus litteris non tradita—Dantisci/Danzig/Gdañsk, 1648, 138 pp.—
the authors name is not mentioned on the title page) in which the author corrects
the errors of Barclay, as regards Polish matters. Opaliñski was educated first in
Poznan, then also at the University of Leuven, the University of Orleans, the Uni¬
versity of Strasbourg, and the University of Padua, and accumulated thus a practi¬
cal comparative view on several European countries. He not only refuses the biased
remarks (calumniam & opprobrium gentis nostrae) concerning the “non-European”
characteristics, but corrects all “mistakes.” (E.g. Poland is not a “flat” country, there
are mountains; in the country there lives not one kind of bee, but two kinds of bees,
etc.). Opalinski refutes Barclay’s view that Polish people are “savage and licentious,
speaking of liberty”—saying that Scots are equally “savage.” “Ferociam ad Scotos
jam ablegavi, agnitam ab ipso Barclaio. De libertatis apud nos modo & statu, dicam
infra. Nunc vero legem, qua nos barbaros facit, a calumnia vindicabo” (Ibidem p. 79).
‘This is a typical word-fencing! And of course similar opinions might arise in ev¬
ery nation in Europe, dissatisfied with the critical remarks by Barclay. But I do not
know of other cases in published form. Barclay did not reply to Opaliñski either.
As for the later generations’ influence of the /con Animorum, we should say
that from the eighteenth century onward, the comparative description of European
peoples became very popular, particularly in the area of ethnic stereotypes.* Bar¬
clay’s book is not a direct source for those works. A new German edition (Johann
Barklai’s Gemälde der menschlichen Charaktere nach Verschiedenheit der Alter, Zei¬
ten, Länder, Individuen und Städte. Mit geschichtlichen Nachweisungen von Anton
Weddige Pastor zu Lippborg, Münster, 1821) was serving the new, post-Napoleonic
interest in European character. A later French book? follows the same way. The
nineteenth-twentieth century modern books on “Europeans,” as e.g. by Hermann
Graf Keyserling (Europas Zukunft 1918, Das Spektrum Europas 1928, in English
translation: Europe 1928) or by Salvador de Madariaga (Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Spaniards 1928), in which the Englishman is classified as /’homme de l'action, the
Frenchman as /’homme de pensée, and the Spaniard as /’homme de passion, may be
closer to Barclay’s views. (See also de Madariaga’s later summary: Europe. The Unit
of Human Culture 1952) But they do not refer to Barclay. From the number of cop¬
ies kept today in Hungarian libraries (see ill. 1,2) we admit that Barclay’s book was
directly known in Hungary (at least) until the nineteenth century.
Because of the limits of my paper I am not going here into details about the
Volkerpsychologie by Wilhelm Wundt (second, enlarged edition in ten volumes,
Leipzig, 1912-1921), or the problems of psychological characterology, which may
8 See e.g. Brand 1700 (It isa desk painting from Steiermark).
? Colignon 1906.