"
Towards the end of his life we can picture Krasinski
in a happy domestic circle.
Towards the end of his life we can picture Krasinski
in a happy domestic circle.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 280 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
heart they are redeemed, because while they were sun-
dered they were as hell, and when they become brothers
they are saved. In the third part Krasinski points once
more to the ideals that alone can bring salvation to
man, a nation, the human race: purity, the love that
accepts toil, the courage that does not shrink from
suffering.
Be unpolluted in the midst of vileness. In the midst of
outrage hold fast thy love. Let thy heart be strong as steel,
and thine eyes weep over every alien grief--and so reach God
by the one chain of deed, by a pure and sincere soul.
And I gaze 'midst the whirlwind at the death shroud of the
skies, and I hear amidst the clouds the choir of those risen
from the dead. Ah! a voice I know! But the blood shed by
vengeance shall not touch the cause of Poland.
She shall shun all evil if she would both live and
banish eternal death from the nations. "Thus shall be
the resurrection": and so the Psalm of Grief closes on
the note of hope.
We now reach the poem that brings the epoch of
the national mysticism which rose out of the sorrows of
the Polish Rising to its magnificent close--the Psalm
of Good Will. Here, with the full powers not only of
his poetical genius but of a great heart and soul,
Krasinski spoke the last and grandest word of his
nation's prophetic and mystic nationalism. Under every
aspect this Psalm is the supreme masterpiece of the
Anonymous Poet of Poland. The exultation of Dawn
is absent. Nor is there any abandonment of grief.
With the dignity of one who, after long battling with
the tempest had gained the goal, Krasinski turns to his
people with his farewell message. The deep and sorrow-
ful accents of the Psalm roll on like the tones of a
great organ till they die away in the Anonymous Poet's
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? The Psalms of the Future 281
last prayer for Poland that hers may be not earthly
glory, as the world knows it, but good will.
The peculiar correspondence of Krasinski's national
mysticism with that of the unit is perhaps more ap-
parent in the Psalm of Good Will than in any other of
Krasinski's directly patriotic work. The conditions of
moral resurrection, the struggle against temptation, the
all conquering power of the will, as Krasinski sings of
them in relation to a country, not only read as a page
of a soul's experience; but in at least one line Krasinski
distinctly argues that, as of the man, so of a nation.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord. " Each stanza of the Psalm begins with these
words until the scene of the final temptation, and each
closes with the petition: "Now that Thy judgment has
thundered in heaven on the two thousand years that
have passed, grant us, oh, Lord, in the midst of this
judgment to raise ourselves to life by holy deeds. " In
both of these refrains is contained the epitome of the
whole moral idea of the Psalm of Good Will. Every
gift has been bestowed upon the nation; her salvation,
as with the individual soul, depends upon her response
to the vocation with which she has been endowed and
called to carry out. Now let her answer the Divine
summons by deed.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord": rule for a thousand years, a history of love
unstained by the lust of conquest1. "When we de-
scended from the life of the Capitol [i. e. the heights of
power2] into the pit of our dismemberment, Thou
didst keep us who were dead living upon the field of
1 See Chapter X, pp. 237, 238.
2 Note to Jubilee edition. Vol. V, p. 73.
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? 282 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
war. We were not, and behold, we were": as soldiers
in the Polish legions on the battle-fields of Europe.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the purest life and therefore worthy of the cross, and the cross
itself, but such a cross as brings us to Thy stars. Earth Thou
didst take from us and heaven send down, and on all sides
Thy heart doth shelter us. But our free will Thou hadst to
leave to us. Without ourselves Thyself canst not redeem us;
for so hast Thou ennobled man and every nation that Thy
design, on high suspended, awaits till by their choice men
and a nation go upon their destined roads. Forever is Thy
Spirit the spouse of freedom only.
An eternal idealist, Krasinski has, his own country-
men are the first to acknowledge, transfigured the history
of Poland. If however his language may be called that
of a lover, not of sober fact, is, pertinently asks Count
Tarnowski, the conclusion of Krasinski's whole teaching
and of the life which was one long labour to attain it,
erroneous because his premisses were at fault1? Does
not this glorification in itself lead directly to the rigorous
truth of his summons to the battle that can, and it alone,
make a nation worthy of her heroic destiny2? This is
not the place to enter into an argument as to whether
the reminder of past failings or the appeal to live up
to a sublime ideal, whether it had in reality ever been
reached or no, were the more profitable spiritual spur.
Krasinski chose the latter.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the example of Thy unhappy Jerusalem in whom Thy love
dwelt so long.
The conception of a certain analogy between the
lot of Poland and of Sion is not uncommon in Polish
mysticism: but Krasinski viewed it on a curiously
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Op. tit. See also J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt
Krasinski.
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? The Psalms of the Future
different line to that of Mickiewicz or Goszczynski.
The resemblance was to him a sinister one1. Jerusalem
had fallen for ever. Krasinski's idea is that Poland
must take warning for should her sins be like to those
of the Hebrew race--the disdain of the cross and of
the law of love--by which Jerusalem "lost her queen-
ship and is now a widow," the fate of his nation shall
be like S ion's.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
in the example of the foul deeds of wrong of our oppressors,
for which the weeping of our children curses them, for which
they stand by the shame of their own hearts ashamed before
Thee. Not by the death of others, but by their own, all crimes
finish without fruit upon this earth.
Then for the first time in the Psalm of Good Will
the note of a mortal anguish sounds. The moment is
here of the conflict for life or death that beats around
the poet's country, defeat in which means not only her
ruin but the retrogression of all humanity. Krasinski
represents it with the strange imagery peculiar to him
in which perhaps it were not wholly fanciful for the
English reader to discern some resemblance to the
painted clouds and mists and waves of Watts, illuminated
by the celestial vision of a devout son of the most
Catholic of lands.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord.
We are above the abyss upon the narrow pass. Our wings are
growing to the resurrection, our lips are parted for the cry of
joy. Towards us from the blue, as from Thy bosom, golden
shafts of dawn as though Thine arms are hastening from the
heavens to the earth, to take from our foreheads the load of
agelong sorrows. All is ready. The east is all aflame. The
angels gaze. And there on yonder side is the dark beneath
the unbottomed sinking of the shore. And the abyss is rising
surging, growing, sweeping on us--eternal death where Thou
art not, which from all time engulfs the proud and evil, and
1 J. Kleiner, op. cit.
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? 284 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
is itself pride, strife, and passion, and is that murder old as
is the world, the seething sea of blasphemies and lies. And it
has risen foaming where half above the grave, yet half within
the grave, we stand in this first span of our rebirth. If we cast
one backward glance upon it, if we move one only step towards
it, then the light of dawn shall grow pale upon our temples, the
Son shall shed no tear for us, and never shall the Spirit
comfort us.
Have mercy, Lord, defend us, be with us! In vain! Here
must we stand alone1. In this transfiguration of our final fate
none of Thy angels to our aid shall hasten. Thou hast given
us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord!
But remember, remember that we are Thy servants of old,
[and that] since the nation first showed herself from the mists
of time millions of Polish souls have gone forth from Polish
bodies with her [Mary's] name upon their lips in death. Let
her to-day remember them with given back remembrance.
Girt with the mighty cloud of all those dead, let her upon Thy
skies pray Thee that nor devils from hell shall bind our feet,
bent to the heights--no, nor yet abject men.
Look on her, Lord, as, with that host of souls that round
about her throng in heavenly wreath, slowly she rises on un-
measured space to Thee. Towards her all the stars have
turned in prayer: and all the powers eddying in space are
stilled. Higher and still more high she rises, borne by those
pale shades. She floats into the azure beyond the clouds of
Milky Ways, beyond the sun, higher and still more high.
Look on her, Lord! Amidst the throngs of seraphs lo! she
kneeleth at Thy throne. And on her brow flashes the Polish
crown, her mantle strews forth rays of which the skies around
her there are made, and all the spaces wait while she prays
very softly. Beyond her, stand the phantoms of our fathers,
weeping; and in her hands of snow two chalices she holds.
She gives to Thee Thine own blood in the right, and in the
left, held lower, the blood of these her subjects on a thousand
crosses crucified, shed by the sword of their three executioners.
And with the first, divine and upraised chalice, for mercy on the
second she imploreth Thee, oh, Lord. With its loud laughter
roareth the abyss. We hear the thunder of its subterranean
waves. It rolls in ever eddying rings of snaky deeps. With
tempest, mists and foam it blinds our eyes to slay our life into
the murderers', liars' death. Oh, vain one, it seeth not what is
1 Because Heaven had done its part in giving all that was requisite,
and it now remained to the tempted to correspond with Divine grace.
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? The Psalms of the Future 285
being wrought on high. Oh, vain one, it seeth not that its
storms are nought when such a heart for us is wrung.
Then--and we are tempted to believe that Krasinski
could have written this passage only on his knees--the
poet, who had taught his nation the secret of death and
suffering, pours out the heart that had carried the sorrows
of his people since his ruined boyhood into the prayer
which sweeps in unbroken majesty to the end of the last
J-'sa/m of the Future.
Oh, Lord, Lord, then not for hope--as a flower is it strewn:
then not for the destruction of our foes--their destruction
dawns on to-morrow's clouds: not for the weapon of rule--
from the tempests it shall fall to us: not for any help--Thou
hast already opened the field of events before us: but amidst
the terrible convulsion of these events we beseech Thee only
for a pure will within us, oh, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Oh, Thou most dear, hidden but visible beyond the veils
of the transparent worlds; Thou present everywhere, immortal,
holy, Who dwelling in each motion alike of hearts and stars
shatterest to nought rebellion of the stars even as Thou
shatterest the wanderings of the heart--Father, Son and Holy
Ghost; Thou Who commandedst the being of man that, poor
in strength and puny in his birth, he should to an angel grow
by might of sacrifice, and to our Polish nation didst ordain
that she should lead the nations into love and peace; Thou
Who in the tumult of the world's confusion piercest to the sod
children of wrath and savest the upright--because that they are
upright--from their torment; we beseech Thee,Father,Son and
Holy Ghost, we, suspended between Thy kingdom and the pit,
we beseech Thee with our foreheads sunk to earth, with our
temples bathed in the breathing of Thy spring, surrounded
with the wheels of shattered times and perishing rules, Father,
Son and Holy Ghost! we beseech Thee create within us a
pure heart, make new our thoughts within us, root out from our
souls the tares of sacrilegious falsehood, and give us the gift,
eternal among Thy gifts--give us good will.
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? CHAPTER XIII
THE UNFINISHED POEM
^From 1847 to 1852 Krasinski's life was passed mainly
\ in Rome, Germany and Warsaw. When in the late
forties Europe was threatened on all sides by the
\ revolutionary movement, Krasinski was divided between
apprehension of such scenes as he had foretold long ago
\ in The Undivine Comedy and the hope that Pius IX
'would inaugurate a new political and spiritual era.
Through all this storm of unrest in which he dreaded
to behold his country either a prey to communism, or
to the engulfing power of a Panslavism in which the
Polish nation must perish, Krasinski remained firm to
the principles he had already laid down. Poland should
be saved if she continued faithful to her soul. He ad-
dressed memorials in French to Montalembert, Lamar-
tine, Pius IX, all expressing his unwearying love of his
country and the political ideals that we have already
examined in his writings. In his letter to the Pope he
appealed to the Holy See to champion the cause of
Poland before all Christendom. Late one night in
the April of 1848 while the revolutionary forces were
gathering about Rome, he walked with Pius IX in the
Quirinal garden, then defended by soldiers and guards,
and begged him to declare for United Italy.
On the occasion of the outbreak of the revolution in
Vienna in 1848, Krasinski sent Trentowski one of the
best of his purely episodical lyrics, called in the early
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? The Unfinished Poem
287
editions Windobona, written on an October night: "in
ignorance of what had become of Vienna," so the author
adds to the poem. No Pole can forget the fact that /
Vienna, which owed its deliverance from the Turks to /
Sobieski and a Polish army, repaid Poland by dismem- S
bering her. Describing the tumult in the streets of
Vienna as the writer of The Undivine Comedy could
well do--the whistle of bombs, the crashing of alarm
bells, houses laid in ruins, the shrieks among the flames
of women and children--Krasinski ends each verse
with the cry of avenging irony: "Vienna, to-day there
is no Sobieski here. "
To take one stanza:
And the night is denser, and morning is not near. Vienna
has grown pale, has cried aloud and fallen on her knees: gazeth
from old habit with eyes of terror to the quarter whence came
Polish mercy, to the Kahlenberg1. But in the whirlwinds only
hears repeated: "Vienna, to-day there is no Sobieski here. "
Since the spring of 1846 Krasinski's affections had
gradually turned to his wife. He never ceased to be
Delphina Potocka's friend, assisting a lonely and un-
protected woman through harassing cares: but, as time
goes on, Elisa Krasinska plays an ever larger and more
intimate part in her husband's correspondence with his
friends till at last she is the "Incomparabile Donna,"
as Krasinski styles her; theobject of those poems of love
and passionate regret in which he seeks the pardon of
her whose youth he in an agony of repentance confessed
that he had ruined, and who now had gained his whole
heart2. He became, too, a devoted father to his children.
To them, in absence, he wrote letters of fond affection
1 The heights whence Sobieski led the Poles to the relief of Vienna.
2 "I spoilt, I consumed, I poisoned Elisa's youth. " Letters to Cieszkow-
ski. Baden, June 1, 1855.
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? 288 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after the early Victorian pattern, filled with moral pre-
cepts somewhat above childish comprehension, carefully
calling the attention of his little correspondents to any
mistake in spelling or grammar on their part. One
daughter died in infancy two years before Krasinski's
own death. The three others survived him, but none
of them lived to old age, and with the premature death
of Count Adam Krasinski the male line of the poet died
out in 1912. As both a father and a Pole the thought
of the future of his children in those troubled times often
filled Krasinski's heart with foreboding. Telling his
friends how he and his wife when their eldest son was
at the point of death watched by what seemed the child's
dying bed:
When these terrible days came upon us, when we saw that
beloved and strangely lovely little head sinking into the depths
of eternal sleep, when all hope failed in our hearts, we looked
upon each other in the silence of despair and with one and the
same thought in our hearts, and at last that thought burst from
our lips: "Perhaps if he had lived it would have befallen him
to rot in the prisons or to wander exiled in Siberia--perhaps
the knout would have torn that fair little body. To-day he will
breathe forth his soul--and he will never perish like Sieroczyn-
ski1 under 7000 strokes because he loved Poland. " With this
consolation, with this, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, do Polish parents save themselves from despair when
their loveliest, purest child dies. And I shed still more bitter
tears, and said to myself: "Oh, unhappy race, to whom the
death of their children must seem their salvation3.
"
Towards the end of his life we can picture Krasinski
in a happy domestic circle. Besides the company of a
wife linked to him by the strongest mutual affection and
of cherished children, he was surrounded by those who
1 Who was flogged to death in Siberia under circumstances of indescrib-
able brutality.
2 Letters to St. Kozmian. Heidelberg, April 22, 1851. Letters to
Cieszkowski. Heidelberg, April 21, 1851.
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? The Unfinished Poem
289
loved and admired him. Gaszynski was often a per-
manent member of the family, acting as amanuensis in
the poet's recurrent attacks of blindness. The relations
of Krasinski's wife and his own devoted friends were
constantly coming and going. To all of these Krasinski
was as a beloved brother, taking upon himself all their
troubles and their affairs as his personal concern. Of
further intimate details of his private life we have none,
beyond those few that Kozmian relates in his introduc-
tion to his share of Krasinski's letters. Strangely few
personal anecdotes remain of the Anonymous Poet of
Poland.
After Krasinski had published his Undivine Comedy
he formed the plan of writing a trilogy, that play being
its second part. The subject should be the progress
of humanity and--in the first part--his poetical auto-
biography. In the first part Henryk as a youth must
know the "eternal Divine truth and the contemporary
truth of the earth. " He must pass, led by another
Virgil, through the hell of our own days. "The
journey to hell," said Krasinski with bitter irony, "is
not so far as in the time of the ancient Ghibelline. You
can find hell now by remaining on the surface of the
earth1. " This second Virgil, Aligier, is Krasinski's
tribute to his friendship with Danielewicz; but when he
first started upon the work his intention was the im-
mortalization of Delphina Potocka. "If I die early,"
lie wrote to her, "remember that desire of mine that
thou shouldest never die on earth, that thou should-
est be remembered for ever. Thou hast given me
happiness: oh, would that I could give thee immortality2. "
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, Jan. 10, 1839.
2 Sketch of the Undivine Comedy, written for Delphina Potocka, March
20, 1840. Jubilee ed. , Vol. V, p. 351 et seq.
G. 19
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? 290 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
As a matter of fact Krasinski's scheme underwent
many modifications with the passage of time, and not
Delphina, but Danielewicz, is the leading influence of
the work as we know it. The third part of the trilogy
was to treat of the transformation of humanity after the
cataclysm in the second part, The Undivine Comedy.
Here Henryk reappears. Saved by angels as he had
leapt to his doom, he has learned in the solitudes of the
deserts from his own heart and from his guardian spirit,
Delphina. He who had fought for the past returns to
unite past and future, to transform "the poetry of his
youth into reality. He will raise and ennoble all men.
All become equal, but on the heights, not below1. "
From 1838 to 1848 the poet worked intermittently
at this drama. The failing health of his last ten years
on earth put an end to its accomplishment. With the
exception of a single episode, the Dream, that was
published separately in 1852 with the initials J. S.
(Slowacki's), and which had been begun in 1838 and
completed, it is believed, in 1843, though some time
later additions were made, all the rest stayed in
manuscript during Krasinski's lifetime. The year after
his death what was found of it among his papers was
made public, under the title of the Unfinished Poem,
albeit it is written in prose. In the Jubilee edition it is
called The Undivine Comedy, Part I, which name Kra-
sinski himself gave to it. I follow Dr Kleiner, and to
avoid confusion retain the earlier name.
The third part of the trilogy was never begun, and
how far the remaining Unfinished Poem stands as
Krasinski intended it to stand is utterly uncertain.
In this Unfinished Poem Krasinski is profound, he is
1 Op. cit.
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? The Unfinished Poem 291
idealistic, as always; but, save for passages of the Dream,
he is not poetical. The Unfinished is not only dis-
appointing as a work of art. It is dull. Its value lies
in the fact that it is the completion of Krasinski's national,
religious and sociological theories, in which he shows us
sidelights of his personal life. The autobiographical
element, inasmuch as the youth is guided by a beloved
friend, and becomes deeply enamoured of an unhappy
woman, though the latter episode is not worked out, is
stronger in this play than anywhere else in Krasinski's
works.
The introduction shows us Henryk hunting chamois
in the mountains above Venice: a youthful Henryk
full of the clean and fresh joy of life. The difference
between him and the man he has become in The Un-
divine Comedy, for Krasinski gives us none of the
intervening process, is startling and infinitely tragic.
The younger Henryk is not depicted with the extra-
ordinary genius of the Henryk of The Undivine Comedy.
There seems to us a hint of overdoing in the exuberant
youth; a too insistent note on his ardour and vitality.
His almost childish eagerness is both irritating and
unconvincing. But no doubt Krasinski wished to
emphasize the gulf between the boy and his later self.
In the mountains with him is the friend and mentor,
Aligier (Danielewicz). When Henryk runs off in chase
of a chamois Aligier, looking after him, trembles at his
ignorance of life.
He may become all or nothing: the chosen of heaven, or
the victim of hell. Ceaselessly, itself not knowing it, his soul
struggles to Thy heaven. The seed of all beauty, Thy spark,
burns in its depths. . . and he has not yet seen that Thou art not
only high above him, not only deep below him, but alike dwellest
within himself. And I am sorrowful to death, for the time of
19--2
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? 292 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
his innocence is passing away, for soon his heart shall be torn
by the war of good and evil, the only, dread mother of virtue.
The prayer of the Pole for the Polish boy goes on:
I do not pray that Thou shouldest take him from the toils
of life. Thy Will be done. Scourge him with the hail of
griefs, humiliate him among men. Let them lay fetters on his
hands, let his body endure the extremity of martyrdom. Only
spare him the shame of abasement, only deliver him from the
eternal night of the spirit.
As the two leave the mountains the youth asks
Aligier if he remembers their first meeting: and then
Krasinski gives in a poetized form the scene that had
burnt itself like fire into his memory, when he had been
insulted in the University at Warsaw.
Oh, I see that ancient building in whose halls a thousand
of my comrades sit. I see that stone stairway on which thou
didst appear to me. I passed among them all with pride upon
my brow. They pressed around me, ever closer. Oh, God ! for
the first time hell was born at that moment in the heart, of
a child. I caught at the iron railings. Perchance I would have
fallen underneath their feet, but thou didst show thyself. I still
feel the pressure of thy hand, I still hear thy voice: "They are
unjust. Be thou more than just. Forgive them in thy soul and
love them in thy deeds. "
Aligier. And from that day we were inseparable.
Henryk. And will be until death.
Krasinski finishes this apotheosis of his friend, dead
when the words were written, by Aligier's presentiment
that death is soon to divide the two. "But my spirit
shall not die in thee, though my form shall depart.
Thought passeth on wings from heart to heart. " And
he bids Henryk as the lover of beauty to be careful that
his soul shall be, above all, beautiful. "Give thy brothers
that happiness. Be a masterpiece among them. "
Aligier then leads Henryk through mysterious mists
suddenly rolling about them to a cemetery where he
tells him he must sleep. The face of the guide has
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? The Unfinished Poem
293
become Dante's: the youth sleeps, and we reach the
Dream, told in the poetical prose that Krasinski in his
earlier days affected.
It seemed to the youth that the figure of Dante turned to
him and said: "Where are eternal Love and Reason and Will,
thence have I been sent to show thee the hell of the days that
are now: so cast off all fear, and whither I go come thou. "
They pass through the inferno of all the miseries
and crimes of the world. They meet first on the descent
into hell armies of men driven like cattle to take the
lives of their fellow-men, for no love of country, but for
the greed of tyrants. Then comes the terrible picture,
only too real to the Pole, of the man dealing out gold
giving his instructions, to the spies and delators. They
shall worm themselves into the home, flattering the
magnate, pitying the poor, sympathizing with the sad.
Where the weak are oppressed they shall defend the
weak:
"and all their complaints and hopes, like hidden treasure, shall
be opened to you. If any one be silent and filled with gloom,
begin ye to express despair, and your cry shall awake his
voice. If you meet youths, trembling with impatience for
action, bind them by fearful oaths. Give them hidden weapons
to carry beneath their garments. Love children and play with
them. Often on the lips of infants are heard the family's
secrets. " [The final triumph of the spy is when a poor wretch
dying of starvation is haled to a table of food and, before he
may touch it, is told to swear before the crucifix that he will
reveal everything he sees and hears, whether it be his own
brother and sister he betrays. He struggles to resist. Then
hunger is too strong for him, and he swears. The cry of an
angel is heard. ] That cry pierced the heart of the youth
through and through, and it seemed to him that he must bow
down his head for his unendurable grief.
The vision proceeds on these lines. The youth is
guided through the varying scenes of what is pitiable
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? 294 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
and ignoble. He sees the world as a great money
market, whose god is mammon and where there is no
other God. He sees the oppression of labourers, the
horrors of unbridled revolution, the degradation of
women, and the like. In the light of what the young
Henryk has gazed on at the moment when his nature
was most liable to take fire at such a sight, we under-
stand the strength of Pankracy's appeal, in the duel
between him and Henryk, to what had once been near
to the latter's heart. The same moral of The Undiuzne
Comedy is here too. Dante reproaches the godless
hordes with the words: "Look in my dead eyes. Shall
not your hearts burst for shame? Know you not what
is the liberty of the spirit? You only know what is the
comfort of the body. "
Where the women tell of their wrongs the Beatrice
of Dante appears, faint and shadowy, merged into
another woman, a sad woman, unhappily married,
who reproaches the onlooker with the words: "I loved
him, and he left me. " This is Delphina Potocka's
entrance into the drama, and these words must have
been penned in the light of the poet's marriage.
When that episode is over, a great multitude passes
before the eyes of the youth, all hastening in one
direction, mothers abandoning their infants, all hurrying
not to be left behind. To Henryk's wondering question:
"Master, is this the hour of the last judgment? " comes
the answer that it is only the hour of the money market
and of the bargains. It is a pandemonium of the lust
for wealth, in which Krasinski read a true picture of
the world in which he lived, where the weak go down
before the strong, where there is no mercy, but one
insensate cry for gold, purchased by crime. This is
/
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? The Unfinished Poem
295
the modern hell, and, cries Dante, "the hell of the men
of old pained me not as this. "
After hell follows purgatory.
"There is no death," [says the guide to the youth]. "God
never, nowhere, conceived it, for Himself everywhere and ever
liveth. Only by our degradation of self can we inflict upon
ourselves eternal death. But who shall live again must trans-
figure himself. Each transfiguration bears the aspect of death.
This is the test of the grave. "
Here, then, is Krasinski's purgatory, the "test of
the grave," the epoch of transition, the hour of a nation's
seeming death in which she but awaits, in penal fires,
the summons to her resurrection. The forest of gibbet
trees, upon each of which hangs on his mother-soil a
martyr for Poland in the moonlight, till all space seems
dying with them, while a weeping woman stands by
each, is a fine descriptive scene. Tears blot out the boy's
vision, but his guide exhorts him: "Turn not away.
To conquer pain we must steep ourselves in the know-
ledge of pain. " The martyrs are summoned by their
tyrants to renounce their country and their God, and
they shall be given every earthly good. None answer,
the women are silent, their children all cry No. Then,
told in Krasinski's favourite imagery, two Milky Ways
run together in the sky and form one mighty cross.
? 280 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
heart they are redeemed, because while they were sun-
dered they were as hell, and when they become brothers
they are saved. In the third part Krasinski points once
more to the ideals that alone can bring salvation to
man, a nation, the human race: purity, the love that
accepts toil, the courage that does not shrink from
suffering.
Be unpolluted in the midst of vileness. In the midst of
outrage hold fast thy love. Let thy heart be strong as steel,
and thine eyes weep over every alien grief--and so reach God
by the one chain of deed, by a pure and sincere soul.
And I gaze 'midst the whirlwind at the death shroud of the
skies, and I hear amidst the clouds the choir of those risen
from the dead. Ah! a voice I know! But the blood shed by
vengeance shall not touch the cause of Poland.
She shall shun all evil if she would both live and
banish eternal death from the nations. "Thus shall be
the resurrection": and so the Psalm of Grief closes on
the note of hope.
We now reach the poem that brings the epoch of
the national mysticism which rose out of the sorrows of
the Polish Rising to its magnificent close--the Psalm
of Good Will. Here, with the full powers not only of
his poetical genius but of a great heart and soul,
Krasinski spoke the last and grandest word of his
nation's prophetic and mystic nationalism. Under every
aspect this Psalm is the supreme masterpiece of the
Anonymous Poet of Poland. The exultation of Dawn
is absent. Nor is there any abandonment of grief.
With the dignity of one who, after long battling with
the tempest had gained the goal, Krasinski turns to his
people with his farewell message. The deep and sorrow-
ful accents of the Psalm roll on like the tones of a
great organ till they die away in the Anonymous Poet's
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? The Psalms of the Future 281
last prayer for Poland that hers may be not earthly
glory, as the world knows it, but good will.
The peculiar correspondence of Krasinski's national
mysticism with that of the unit is perhaps more ap-
parent in the Psalm of Good Will than in any other of
Krasinski's directly patriotic work. The conditions of
moral resurrection, the struggle against temptation, the
all conquering power of the will, as Krasinski sings of
them in relation to a country, not only read as a page
of a soul's experience; but in at least one line Krasinski
distinctly argues that, as of the man, so of a nation.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord. " Each stanza of the Psalm begins with these
words until the scene of the final temptation, and each
closes with the petition: "Now that Thy judgment has
thundered in heaven on the two thousand years that
have passed, grant us, oh, Lord, in the midst of this
judgment to raise ourselves to life by holy deeds. " In
both of these refrains is contained the epitome of the
whole moral idea of the Psalm of Good Will. Every
gift has been bestowed upon the nation; her salvation,
as with the individual soul, depends upon her response
to the vocation with which she has been endowed and
called to carry out. Now let her answer the Divine
summons by deed.
"Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh,
Lord": rule for a thousand years, a history of love
unstained by the lust of conquest1. "When we de-
scended from the life of the Capitol [i. e. the heights of
power2] into the pit of our dismemberment, Thou
didst keep us who were dead living upon the field of
1 See Chapter X, pp. 237, 238.
2 Note to Jubilee edition. Vol. V, p. 73.
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? 282 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
war. We were not, and behold, we were": as soldiers
in the Polish legions on the battle-fields of Europe.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the purest life and therefore worthy of the cross, and the cross
itself, but such a cross as brings us to Thy stars. Earth Thou
didst take from us and heaven send down, and on all sides
Thy heart doth shelter us. But our free will Thou hadst to
leave to us. Without ourselves Thyself canst not redeem us;
for so hast Thou ennobled man and every nation that Thy
design, on high suspended, awaits till by their choice men
and a nation go upon their destined roads. Forever is Thy
Spirit the spouse of freedom only.
An eternal idealist, Krasinski has, his own country-
men are the first to acknowledge, transfigured the history
of Poland. If however his language may be called that
of a lover, not of sober fact, is, pertinently asks Count
Tarnowski, the conclusion of Krasinski's whole teaching
and of the life which was one long labour to attain it,
erroneous because his premisses were at fault1? Does
not this glorification in itself lead directly to the rigorous
truth of his summons to the battle that can, and it alone,
make a nation worthy of her heroic destiny2? This is
not the place to enter into an argument as to whether
the reminder of past failings or the appeal to live up
to a sublime ideal, whether it had in reality ever been
reached or no, were the more profitable spiritual spur.
Krasinski chose the latter.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
the example of Thy unhappy Jerusalem in whom Thy love
dwelt so long.
The conception of a certain analogy between the
lot of Poland and of Sion is not uncommon in Polish
mysticism: but Krasinski viewed it on a curiously
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Op. tit. See also J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt
Krasinski.
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? The Psalms of the Future
different line to that of Mickiewicz or Goszczynski.
The resemblance was to him a sinister one1. Jerusalem
had fallen for ever. Krasinski's idea is that Poland
must take warning for should her sins be like to those
of the Hebrew race--the disdain of the cross and of
the law of love--by which Jerusalem "lost her queen-
ship and is now a widow," the fate of his nation shall
be like S ion's.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord:
in the example of the foul deeds of wrong of our oppressors,
for which the weeping of our children curses them, for which
they stand by the shame of their own hearts ashamed before
Thee. Not by the death of others, but by their own, all crimes
finish without fruit upon this earth.
Then for the first time in the Psalm of Good Will
the note of a mortal anguish sounds. The moment is
here of the conflict for life or death that beats around
the poet's country, defeat in which means not only her
ruin but the retrogression of all humanity. Krasinski
represents it with the strange imagery peculiar to him
in which perhaps it were not wholly fanciful for the
English reader to discern some resemblance to the
painted clouds and mists and waves of Watts, illuminated
by the celestial vision of a devout son of the most
Catholic of lands.
Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord.
We are above the abyss upon the narrow pass. Our wings are
growing to the resurrection, our lips are parted for the cry of
joy. Towards us from the blue, as from Thy bosom, golden
shafts of dawn as though Thine arms are hastening from the
heavens to the earth, to take from our foreheads the load of
agelong sorrows. All is ready. The east is all aflame. The
angels gaze. And there on yonder side is the dark beneath
the unbottomed sinking of the shore. And the abyss is rising
surging, growing, sweeping on us--eternal death where Thou
art not, which from all time engulfs the proud and evil, and
1 J. Kleiner, op. cit.
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? 284 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
is itself pride, strife, and passion, and is that murder old as
is the world, the seething sea of blasphemies and lies. And it
has risen foaming where half above the grave, yet half within
the grave, we stand in this first span of our rebirth. If we cast
one backward glance upon it, if we move one only step towards
it, then the light of dawn shall grow pale upon our temples, the
Son shall shed no tear for us, and never shall the Spirit
comfort us.
Have mercy, Lord, defend us, be with us! In vain! Here
must we stand alone1. In this transfiguration of our final fate
none of Thy angels to our aid shall hasten. Thou hast given
us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord!
But remember, remember that we are Thy servants of old,
[and that] since the nation first showed herself from the mists
of time millions of Polish souls have gone forth from Polish
bodies with her [Mary's] name upon their lips in death. Let
her to-day remember them with given back remembrance.
Girt with the mighty cloud of all those dead, let her upon Thy
skies pray Thee that nor devils from hell shall bind our feet,
bent to the heights--no, nor yet abject men.
Look on her, Lord, as, with that host of souls that round
about her throng in heavenly wreath, slowly she rises on un-
measured space to Thee. Towards her all the stars have
turned in prayer: and all the powers eddying in space are
stilled. Higher and still more high she rises, borne by those
pale shades. She floats into the azure beyond the clouds of
Milky Ways, beyond the sun, higher and still more high.
Look on her, Lord! Amidst the throngs of seraphs lo! she
kneeleth at Thy throne. And on her brow flashes the Polish
crown, her mantle strews forth rays of which the skies around
her there are made, and all the spaces wait while she prays
very softly. Beyond her, stand the phantoms of our fathers,
weeping; and in her hands of snow two chalices she holds.
She gives to Thee Thine own blood in the right, and in the
left, held lower, the blood of these her subjects on a thousand
crosses crucified, shed by the sword of their three executioners.
And with the first, divine and upraised chalice, for mercy on the
second she imploreth Thee, oh, Lord. With its loud laughter
roareth the abyss. We hear the thunder of its subterranean
waves. It rolls in ever eddying rings of snaky deeps. With
tempest, mists and foam it blinds our eyes to slay our life into
the murderers', liars' death. Oh, vain one, it seeth not what is
1 Because Heaven had done its part in giving all that was requisite,
and it now remained to the tempted to correspond with Divine grace.
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? The Psalms of the Future 285
being wrought on high. Oh, vain one, it seeth not that its
storms are nought when such a heart for us is wrung.
Then--and we are tempted to believe that Krasinski
could have written this passage only on his knees--the
poet, who had taught his nation the secret of death and
suffering, pours out the heart that had carried the sorrows
of his people since his ruined boyhood into the prayer
which sweeps in unbroken majesty to the end of the last
J-'sa/m of the Future.
Oh, Lord, Lord, then not for hope--as a flower is it strewn:
then not for the destruction of our foes--their destruction
dawns on to-morrow's clouds: not for the weapon of rule--
from the tempests it shall fall to us: not for any help--Thou
hast already opened the field of events before us: but amidst
the terrible convulsion of these events we beseech Thee only
for a pure will within us, oh, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Oh, Thou most dear, hidden but visible beyond the veils
of the transparent worlds; Thou present everywhere, immortal,
holy, Who dwelling in each motion alike of hearts and stars
shatterest to nought rebellion of the stars even as Thou
shatterest the wanderings of the heart--Father, Son and Holy
Ghost; Thou Who commandedst the being of man that, poor
in strength and puny in his birth, he should to an angel grow
by might of sacrifice, and to our Polish nation didst ordain
that she should lead the nations into love and peace; Thou
Who in the tumult of the world's confusion piercest to the sod
children of wrath and savest the upright--because that they are
upright--from their torment; we beseech Thee,Father,Son and
Holy Ghost, we, suspended between Thy kingdom and the pit,
we beseech Thee with our foreheads sunk to earth, with our
temples bathed in the breathing of Thy spring, surrounded
with the wheels of shattered times and perishing rules, Father,
Son and Holy Ghost! we beseech Thee create within us a
pure heart, make new our thoughts within us, root out from our
souls the tares of sacrilegious falsehood, and give us the gift,
eternal among Thy gifts--give us good will.
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? CHAPTER XIII
THE UNFINISHED POEM
^From 1847 to 1852 Krasinski's life was passed mainly
\ in Rome, Germany and Warsaw. When in the late
forties Europe was threatened on all sides by the
\ revolutionary movement, Krasinski was divided between
apprehension of such scenes as he had foretold long ago
\ in The Undivine Comedy and the hope that Pius IX
'would inaugurate a new political and spiritual era.
Through all this storm of unrest in which he dreaded
to behold his country either a prey to communism, or
to the engulfing power of a Panslavism in which the
Polish nation must perish, Krasinski remained firm to
the principles he had already laid down. Poland should
be saved if she continued faithful to her soul. He ad-
dressed memorials in French to Montalembert, Lamar-
tine, Pius IX, all expressing his unwearying love of his
country and the political ideals that we have already
examined in his writings. In his letter to the Pope he
appealed to the Holy See to champion the cause of
Poland before all Christendom. Late one night in
the April of 1848 while the revolutionary forces were
gathering about Rome, he walked with Pius IX in the
Quirinal garden, then defended by soldiers and guards,
and begged him to declare for United Italy.
On the occasion of the outbreak of the revolution in
Vienna in 1848, Krasinski sent Trentowski one of the
best of his purely episodical lyrics, called in the early
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? The Unfinished Poem
287
editions Windobona, written on an October night: "in
ignorance of what had become of Vienna," so the author
adds to the poem. No Pole can forget the fact that /
Vienna, which owed its deliverance from the Turks to /
Sobieski and a Polish army, repaid Poland by dismem- S
bering her. Describing the tumult in the streets of
Vienna as the writer of The Undivine Comedy could
well do--the whistle of bombs, the crashing of alarm
bells, houses laid in ruins, the shrieks among the flames
of women and children--Krasinski ends each verse
with the cry of avenging irony: "Vienna, to-day there
is no Sobieski here. "
To take one stanza:
And the night is denser, and morning is not near. Vienna
has grown pale, has cried aloud and fallen on her knees: gazeth
from old habit with eyes of terror to the quarter whence came
Polish mercy, to the Kahlenberg1. But in the whirlwinds only
hears repeated: "Vienna, to-day there is no Sobieski here. "
Since the spring of 1846 Krasinski's affections had
gradually turned to his wife. He never ceased to be
Delphina Potocka's friend, assisting a lonely and un-
protected woman through harassing cares: but, as time
goes on, Elisa Krasinska plays an ever larger and more
intimate part in her husband's correspondence with his
friends till at last she is the "Incomparabile Donna,"
as Krasinski styles her; theobject of those poems of love
and passionate regret in which he seeks the pardon of
her whose youth he in an agony of repentance confessed
that he had ruined, and who now had gained his whole
heart2. He became, too, a devoted father to his children.
To them, in absence, he wrote letters of fond affection
1 The heights whence Sobieski led the Poles to the relief of Vienna.
2 "I spoilt, I consumed, I poisoned Elisa's youth. " Letters to Cieszkow-
ski. Baden, June 1, 1855.
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? 288 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after the early Victorian pattern, filled with moral pre-
cepts somewhat above childish comprehension, carefully
calling the attention of his little correspondents to any
mistake in spelling or grammar on their part. One
daughter died in infancy two years before Krasinski's
own death. The three others survived him, but none
of them lived to old age, and with the premature death
of Count Adam Krasinski the male line of the poet died
out in 1912. As both a father and a Pole the thought
of the future of his children in those troubled times often
filled Krasinski's heart with foreboding. Telling his
friends how he and his wife when their eldest son was
at the point of death watched by what seemed the child's
dying bed:
When these terrible days came upon us, when we saw that
beloved and strangely lovely little head sinking into the depths
of eternal sleep, when all hope failed in our hearts, we looked
upon each other in the silence of despair and with one and the
same thought in our hearts, and at last that thought burst from
our lips: "Perhaps if he had lived it would have befallen him
to rot in the prisons or to wander exiled in Siberia--perhaps
the knout would have torn that fair little body. To-day he will
breathe forth his soul--and he will never perish like Sieroczyn-
ski1 under 7000 strokes because he loved Poland. " With this
consolation, with this, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, do Polish parents save themselves from despair when
their loveliest, purest child dies. And I shed still more bitter
tears, and said to myself: "Oh, unhappy race, to whom the
death of their children must seem their salvation3.
"
Towards the end of his life we can picture Krasinski
in a happy domestic circle. Besides the company of a
wife linked to him by the strongest mutual affection and
of cherished children, he was surrounded by those who
1 Who was flogged to death in Siberia under circumstances of indescrib-
able brutality.
2 Letters to St. Kozmian. Heidelberg, April 22, 1851. Letters to
Cieszkowski. Heidelberg, April 21, 1851.
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? The Unfinished Poem
289
loved and admired him. Gaszynski was often a per-
manent member of the family, acting as amanuensis in
the poet's recurrent attacks of blindness. The relations
of Krasinski's wife and his own devoted friends were
constantly coming and going. To all of these Krasinski
was as a beloved brother, taking upon himself all their
troubles and their affairs as his personal concern. Of
further intimate details of his private life we have none,
beyond those few that Kozmian relates in his introduc-
tion to his share of Krasinski's letters. Strangely few
personal anecdotes remain of the Anonymous Poet of
Poland.
After Krasinski had published his Undivine Comedy
he formed the plan of writing a trilogy, that play being
its second part. The subject should be the progress
of humanity and--in the first part--his poetical auto-
biography. In the first part Henryk as a youth must
know the "eternal Divine truth and the contemporary
truth of the earth. " He must pass, led by another
Virgil, through the hell of our own days. "The
journey to hell," said Krasinski with bitter irony, "is
not so far as in the time of the ancient Ghibelline. You
can find hell now by remaining on the surface of the
earth1. " This second Virgil, Aligier, is Krasinski's
tribute to his friendship with Danielewicz; but when he
first started upon the work his intention was the im-
mortalization of Delphina Potocka. "If I die early,"
lie wrote to her, "remember that desire of mine that
thou shouldest never die on earth, that thou should-
est be remembered for ever. Thou hast given me
happiness: oh, would that I could give thee immortality2. "
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, Jan. 10, 1839.
2 Sketch of the Undivine Comedy, written for Delphina Potocka, March
20, 1840. Jubilee ed. , Vol. V, p. 351 et seq.
G. 19
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? 290 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
As a matter of fact Krasinski's scheme underwent
many modifications with the passage of time, and not
Delphina, but Danielewicz, is the leading influence of
the work as we know it. The third part of the trilogy
was to treat of the transformation of humanity after the
cataclysm in the second part, The Undivine Comedy.
Here Henryk reappears. Saved by angels as he had
leapt to his doom, he has learned in the solitudes of the
deserts from his own heart and from his guardian spirit,
Delphina. He who had fought for the past returns to
unite past and future, to transform "the poetry of his
youth into reality. He will raise and ennoble all men.
All become equal, but on the heights, not below1. "
From 1838 to 1848 the poet worked intermittently
at this drama. The failing health of his last ten years
on earth put an end to its accomplishment. With the
exception of a single episode, the Dream, that was
published separately in 1852 with the initials J. S.
(Slowacki's), and which had been begun in 1838 and
completed, it is believed, in 1843, though some time
later additions were made, all the rest stayed in
manuscript during Krasinski's lifetime. The year after
his death what was found of it among his papers was
made public, under the title of the Unfinished Poem,
albeit it is written in prose. In the Jubilee edition it is
called The Undivine Comedy, Part I, which name Kra-
sinski himself gave to it. I follow Dr Kleiner, and to
avoid confusion retain the earlier name.
The third part of the trilogy was never begun, and
how far the remaining Unfinished Poem stands as
Krasinski intended it to stand is utterly uncertain.
In this Unfinished Poem Krasinski is profound, he is
1 Op. cit.
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? The Unfinished Poem 291
idealistic, as always; but, save for passages of the Dream,
he is not poetical. The Unfinished is not only dis-
appointing as a work of art. It is dull. Its value lies
in the fact that it is the completion of Krasinski's national,
religious and sociological theories, in which he shows us
sidelights of his personal life. The autobiographical
element, inasmuch as the youth is guided by a beloved
friend, and becomes deeply enamoured of an unhappy
woman, though the latter episode is not worked out, is
stronger in this play than anywhere else in Krasinski's
works.
The introduction shows us Henryk hunting chamois
in the mountains above Venice: a youthful Henryk
full of the clean and fresh joy of life. The difference
between him and the man he has become in The Un-
divine Comedy, for Krasinski gives us none of the
intervening process, is startling and infinitely tragic.
The younger Henryk is not depicted with the extra-
ordinary genius of the Henryk of The Undivine Comedy.
There seems to us a hint of overdoing in the exuberant
youth; a too insistent note on his ardour and vitality.
His almost childish eagerness is both irritating and
unconvincing. But no doubt Krasinski wished to
emphasize the gulf between the boy and his later self.
In the mountains with him is the friend and mentor,
Aligier (Danielewicz). When Henryk runs off in chase
of a chamois Aligier, looking after him, trembles at his
ignorance of life.
He may become all or nothing: the chosen of heaven, or
the victim of hell. Ceaselessly, itself not knowing it, his soul
struggles to Thy heaven. The seed of all beauty, Thy spark,
burns in its depths. . . and he has not yet seen that Thou art not
only high above him, not only deep below him, but alike dwellest
within himself. And I am sorrowful to death, for the time of
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? 292 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
his innocence is passing away, for soon his heart shall be torn
by the war of good and evil, the only, dread mother of virtue.
The prayer of the Pole for the Polish boy goes on:
I do not pray that Thou shouldest take him from the toils
of life. Thy Will be done. Scourge him with the hail of
griefs, humiliate him among men. Let them lay fetters on his
hands, let his body endure the extremity of martyrdom. Only
spare him the shame of abasement, only deliver him from the
eternal night of the spirit.
As the two leave the mountains the youth asks
Aligier if he remembers their first meeting: and then
Krasinski gives in a poetized form the scene that had
burnt itself like fire into his memory, when he had been
insulted in the University at Warsaw.
Oh, I see that ancient building in whose halls a thousand
of my comrades sit. I see that stone stairway on which thou
didst appear to me. I passed among them all with pride upon
my brow. They pressed around me, ever closer. Oh, God ! for
the first time hell was born at that moment in the heart, of
a child. I caught at the iron railings. Perchance I would have
fallen underneath their feet, but thou didst show thyself. I still
feel the pressure of thy hand, I still hear thy voice: "They are
unjust. Be thou more than just. Forgive them in thy soul and
love them in thy deeds. "
Aligier. And from that day we were inseparable.
Henryk. And will be until death.
Krasinski finishes this apotheosis of his friend, dead
when the words were written, by Aligier's presentiment
that death is soon to divide the two. "But my spirit
shall not die in thee, though my form shall depart.
Thought passeth on wings from heart to heart. " And
he bids Henryk as the lover of beauty to be careful that
his soul shall be, above all, beautiful. "Give thy brothers
that happiness. Be a masterpiece among them. "
Aligier then leads Henryk through mysterious mists
suddenly rolling about them to a cemetery where he
tells him he must sleep. The face of the guide has
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? The Unfinished Poem
293
become Dante's: the youth sleeps, and we reach the
Dream, told in the poetical prose that Krasinski in his
earlier days affected.
It seemed to the youth that the figure of Dante turned to
him and said: "Where are eternal Love and Reason and Will,
thence have I been sent to show thee the hell of the days that
are now: so cast off all fear, and whither I go come thou. "
They pass through the inferno of all the miseries
and crimes of the world. They meet first on the descent
into hell armies of men driven like cattle to take the
lives of their fellow-men, for no love of country, but for
the greed of tyrants. Then comes the terrible picture,
only too real to the Pole, of the man dealing out gold
giving his instructions, to the spies and delators. They
shall worm themselves into the home, flattering the
magnate, pitying the poor, sympathizing with the sad.
Where the weak are oppressed they shall defend the
weak:
"and all their complaints and hopes, like hidden treasure, shall
be opened to you. If any one be silent and filled with gloom,
begin ye to express despair, and your cry shall awake his
voice. If you meet youths, trembling with impatience for
action, bind them by fearful oaths. Give them hidden weapons
to carry beneath their garments. Love children and play with
them. Often on the lips of infants are heard the family's
secrets. " [The final triumph of the spy is when a poor wretch
dying of starvation is haled to a table of food and, before he
may touch it, is told to swear before the crucifix that he will
reveal everything he sees and hears, whether it be his own
brother and sister he betrays. He struggles to resist. Then
hunger is too strong for him, and he swears. The cry of an
angel is heard. ] That cry pierced the heart of the youth
through and through, and it seemed to him that he must bow
down his head for his unendurable grief.
The vision proceeds on these lines. The youth is
guided through the varying scenes of what is pitiable
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? 294 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
and ignoble. He sees the world as a great money
market, whose god is mammon and where there is no
other God. He sees the oppression of labourers, the
horrors of unbridled revolution, the degradation of
women, and the like. In the light of what the young
Henryk has gazed on at the moment when his nature
was most liable to take fire at such a sight, we under-
stand the strength of Pankracy's appeal, in the duel
between him and Henryk, to what had once been near
to the latter's heart. The same moral of The Undiuzne
Comedy is here too. Dante reproaches the godless
hordes with the words: "Look in my dead eyes. Shall
not your hearts burst for shame? Know you not what
is the liberty of the spirit? You only know what is the
comfort of the body. "
Where the women tell of their wrongs the Beatrice
of Dante appears, faint and shadowy, merged into
another woman, a sad woman, unhappily married,
who reproaches the onlooker with the words: "I loved
him, and he left me. " This is Delphina Potocka's
entrance into the drama, and these words must have
been penned in the light of the poet's marriage.
When that episode is over, a great multitude passes
before the eyes of the youth, all hastening in one
direction, mothers abandoning their infants, all hurrying
not to be left behind. To Henryk's wondering question:
"Master, is this the hour of the last judgment? " comes
the answer that it is only the hour of the money market
and of the bargains. It is a pandemonium of the lust
for wealth, in which Krasinski read a true picture of
the world in which he lived, where the weak go down
before the strong, where there is no mercy, but one
insensate cry for gold, purchased by crime. This is
/
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? The Unfinished Poem
295
the modern hell, and, cries Dante, "the hell of the men
of old pained me not as this. "
After hell follows purgatory.
"There is no death," [says the guide to the youth]. "God
never, nowhere, conceived it, for Himself everywhere and ever
liveth. Only by our degradation of self can we inflict upon
ourselves eternal death. But who shall live again must trans-
figure himself. Each transfiguration bears the aspect of death.
This is the test of the grave. "
Here, then, is Krasinski's purgatory, the "test of
the grave," the epoch of transition, the hour of a nation's
seeming death in which she but awaits, in penal fires,
the summons to her resurrection. The forest of gibbet
trees, upon each of which hangs on his mother-soil a
martyr for Poland in the moonlight, till all space seems
dying with them, while a weeping woman stands by
each, is a fine descriptive scene. Tears blot out the boy's
vision, but his guide exhorts him: "Turn not away.
To conquer pain we must steep ourselves in the know-
ledge of pain. " The martyrs are summoned by their
tyrants to renounce their country and their God, and
they shall be given every earthly good. None answer,
the women are silent, their children all cry No. Then,
told in Krasinski's favourite imagery, two Milky Ways
run together in the sky and form one mighty cross.
