No More Learning

Eternally the usurper stands before all eyes, the tempter
already in that he standeth there to say that God is not. He
dissolves conscience by the load of pain. He teaches little
children to believe in murder as in glory. Maidens shall take
daggers in their hands like roses. The sister shall say:
"Brother, take them, for butchery is our salvation. " Our country
shall be not heaven, but hell.
"Oh, my holy one," cries the devout lover of Poland in an
anguish of foreboding, "abjure these delusions! They are the
nightmares of an evil moment. Thou shalt not rid thee of thy
ancient faith that he only shall cut through his bonds who is
anointed with the sign of virtue, that to be a Pole upon this
earth is to live nobly and to God. "
But the powers of evil are thronging close on every
side.
Oh, my Poland! Holy Poland! Thou standest on the
threshold of thy victory. This is the last term of thy pain. Let
it be only manifest that thou art the eternal foe of evil. Then
shall the bonds of death be shattered, and thou shalt be caught
up to heaven, because even until death thou wert with God.
When the last moment brings death's crisis into life,
then is the terrible battle. Sobs of despair, wailings of lament,
are moaned by dying lips--oh, my God! In the strength of
thy suffering overcome that moment, conquer that pain. And
thou shalt rise again, and thou shalt rise the queen of the
Slavonian plains.
Let men gaze into thy face with love as though upon the
spring. Be thou the mistress who straightens the crooked ways
of the world, the herald of all love. Efface all sin. Dry all
tears. Rule the world of souls, disdain the rule of flesh. From
sheep-like men nations do thou create.
But again all this is conditional; and the refrain of
the closing stanzas of the poem must needs be the cry
of warning: "Cast away your murderous weapons! "
When the harvest is ripe and the word thunders forth,
then and only then: "forward in the name of God.
Take your swords, your flails, your scythes," cries the
poet with the vision of Kosciuszko's peasant bands
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? 264 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
before his eyes. The holy rising of class, fighting side
by side' for the liberation of their country, shall break
down prison and fortress, and then of a surety: "God
will not turn away His face. "
Thus ends the Psalm of Love, which lives in Polish
history as a noble piece of pleading, justified too late
by the catastrophe that it had striven to avert.
Krasinski spent the winter and spring of 1846 with
his wife and infant son in a villa at Nice. Delphina
Potocka was also at Nice in her own villa. Krasinski,
as we learn from his correspondence with his friends,
was already suffering acutely from the goad of his
conscience in this false position, when the blow of 1846
fell upon him. The February of that year saw the
/ terrible uprising of the Galician peasantry. A general
insurrection had been projected through all Poland.
We have seen that one party of young Poles intended
to work it on social lines, and in particular to arm the
peasants. The Austrian government, having discovered
what was going forward, seized the opportunity to carry
into effect what its policy in Galicia had been stealthily
aiming at: the enfeebling of Poland by deliberately
setting one class against another. It sent its agents
among the ignorant Polish peasants, and succeeded in
persuading a certain number of them that the Polish
landowners were their deadly enemies who must be
exterminated. Deluded by these secret propagandists,
bribed by the Austrian government that paid so much
on the head of every Polish noble, maddened by the
drink with which the same government incited them to
the deed, the peasants, in two provinces, for the
Austrian machinations were not wholly successful,
attacked the manor houses. Scenes of appalling
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? The Psalms of the Future 265
horror followed, in which thousands of Polish nobles
were butchered.
This triumph of the Metternichian policy is one of
the most painful pages in modern Polish history.
"Are there words,"wrote Krasinski to Matachowski,
*' in any human tongue with which to express the suffering
of this moment? . . . This world and its each day bears
for us the name of hell1. " Krasinski had interpreted
the fate of the nation by the promise of a great spiritual
leadership only to be gained by purity and sacrifice;
hence the Galician massacres were the visible triumph of
the powers of darkness thrusting an adored country into
the pit of infamy from the only road that could save her.
It seemed as though the catastrophe that had befallen
his nation was to cost Krasinski his life. For the next
two years he lived in a condition of such physical
collapse that those who watched over him were in
constant expectation of his death. He never recovered
the effect of this national disaster. At the age of thirty-
four he became prematurely aged. From 1846 to the
year of his death, 1859, his was uninterrupted bodily
suffering.
But to him who before the massacres had written:
We shall sink into chaos, our bodies may die in tortures as
our souls have died even before them: but our Idea is all
powerful like God, for like God it is truth and love, and shall
be victorious over our corpses2:
to him it was impossible to fall into despair more than
momentary. However great the anguish that had in-
vaded his soul the hope which he had won at the cost of
pangs of travail did not die. His Idea was to be proved
by the test of fire.
1 Letters to Matachowski. Nice, March 16, 18, 1846.
2 Ibid. Nice, Jan. 9, 1846.
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? 266 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I go as a madman since I read in all the papers
what has happened": were his first words to Gaszynski
after the news had reached Nice.
About myself I know that I shall die, but I know also that
the idea shall conquer. It conquers by defeats. That which
has to conquer for all ages must suffer before the day of
triumph, must be formed by pain, be trained by martyrdom1.
And later to Matachowski:
See if the lot of Christ is not repeated to the last letter
under the figure of the history of the nation. Fearful that
moment, that "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? " We to-
day are in that like position. . . He only felt Himself forsaken
in the last moment of death. And those who are to rise again
from the dead must pass through this. But before the Resur-
rection morning how many hearts shall break. Mine first of
all8.
"I am sinking under the burden of life"--to Gas-
zynski--"where all is like to death with this one
difference that there is not the rest of death3. " "I am
exiled from my hopes," he says in one dark moment,
when the very faith by which he had lived seemed rent
from him. "I am wandering and fugitive. Where
should I go? " he adds, in reference to his plans for the
immediate future. "Nothing lures me anywhere. The
world is to me a desert where here and there lie
scattered the dead bodies of the Galician nobles4. " So
run the letters of one borne down under the extremity
of mental agony; but even" now he can still tell
Gaszynski that: "all is lost except faith, but with faith
all can be regained. "
What cast any stain upon the moral integrity of
his nation was far more hideous in Krasinski's eyes
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Nice, March I, 1846.
2 Letters to Matachowski. Nice, March 30, 1846.
3 Letters to Gaszynski. Nice, May 5, 1846.
4 Ibid. Nice, May 7, 1846.
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? The Psalms of the Future 267
than all exterior persecution. When in the autumn of
the year Austria, in flagrant violation of the Treaty of
Vienna, annexed Cracow, the last remaining vestige
of Poland's independence, great as was Krasinski's
patriotic indignation, he wrote the following words on
the subject to his friends, the philosopher, Bronistaw
Trentowski, and Stanislaw Kozmian:
When we last embraced each other there was still a span
of Polish earth as though independent on the map of Europe.
To-day you will find none. This is the beginning of the end,
this is the crisis. The last evil must indeed be the last. I am
profoundly convinced that if we do not with our own hands
give the finishing stroke to ourselves to the glorification of our
enemies, our political resurrection from the dead shall begin
from the day of Cracow's death. There was never a nation in
such sublime circumstances, in such favourable conditions,
who was so near, from the cross on which she hangs, to the
heaven whither she must ascend. No human history has till
now presented, at any period of the development of history,
such a concurrence of events facilitating the transition from
death to life and triumph1.
That last span of earth torn from us, that fourth partition,
has more than anything else advanced our cause. Every
wound inflicted on something holy and good becomes a far
deeper wound, by the reflection of the Divine Justice that
rules history, on him who inflicted it. Earlier or later--the
question is only what hour--from this crime that has been
effected absolutely shall come forth our resurrection, or rather
the external circumstance which will permit us to emerge from
the grave, for our true resurrection is not outside us but
within us2.
The recipient of the second passage, Stanislaw
Kozmian, had been Krasinski's friend in boyhood.
The Rising of 1830 parted them till the year 1843 when,
to the joy of both, they met in Rome, and renewed a
1 Letters, Vol. III. To Bronislaw Trentowski. Aix-en-Provence,
Dec. 16, 1846.
2 Letters from Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Kozmian. Nice, Dec.
18, 1846.
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? 268 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
friendship only closed by Krasinski's death. After Kra-
sinski had left this world Kozmian published Zygmunt's
letters that he bequeathed to his descendants as the
most precious of legacies: and in the touching notes
which he added to them he tells us how he ranked the
Anonymous Poet "highest among men," and that the
memory of him "will strengthen and support me to the
last of my days1. "
Borne down as Krasinski was by his heavy sadness
in the fresh national tragedy, his spirit struggled, against
mental distress and physical incapacity, to give his
nation help. In October, 1846, he wrote to Delphina
Potocka:
"I tried if that penalty of speechlessness would not leave
me. I sat for four hours, but all was astray, till at times despair
seized me that such a state of sterility could befall a man's
soul. Oh, my Dialy, pray for me to God. I feel nothing
egotistic in that desire, but I feel that such a sketch"--the
poem he was attempting to write--" is needed: for Poland"
--he calls her by a veiled name--" is driven by all the winds.
She implores, she implores for counsel V
Early in the following year he tells Trentowski:
I have lost all certitude and mental balance. I am not
certain even for one moment of my thoughts or expressions or
of rhythm or any sound. . . That state is a cursed one. I have
been struggling with it for this year past, and if you could only
know how madly, how bitterly, at times how passionately, and
more often with what despair. The voice of a luring, com-
pelling destiny rings constantly by day and night in my ears.
I would fain follow it, and some infernal power keeps me back.
Now only God knows if I can find again my lost powers and
if I shall ever again be able to clothe in shape the thought and
feeling, to put into words the longing and love, vainly seething
in my heart, into external sound--to create something. I
would wish only once more, and this when there is such urgent
1 Op. tit. Introduction.
a Jubilee edition. Vol. VI, p. 369.
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? The Psalms of the Future 269
need, to tear from my heart the Idea of all my life, and then
let my heart break1.
The result of this labour of soul and body was
Resurrecturis, spiritually speaking perhaps Krasinski's
most sublime poem. Although written at this time, it
was not published, probably because it did not satisfy
the poet, and he intended to rewrite it. Only in 1851
did it appear, as it first stood, with a few trifling altera-
tions. It therefore belongs to the closing chapter of
Krasinski's work for his people, and will find its place
there. But two other poems that Krasinski had begun
in former years were now finished and published in
Paris in 1847: To-Day and The Last.
1 Letters, Vol. III. To Trentowski. Nice, Jan. 2, 1847.
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?
CHAPTER XII
TO-DAY, THE LAST, AND THE LAST
PSALMS OF THE FUTURE
(1847-1848)
As a whole To-Day falls below the level of Krasinski's
great national work. The first speech of the dying man
and the demon's monologue are ranked very high by
Count Tarnowski, and it is said that Mickiewicz, pene-
trating Krasinski's disguise, gave enthusiastic praise to
one of its passages1. But after the opening the poem
drags. All that is noblest in its sentiments Krasinski
had said before and with greater force: he was at the
moment too spent to speak with the accents of a Psalm
of Love or a Psalm of Good Will.
A Pole--Krasinski himself--lies dying. Around
his bed stand his friends, each holding national opinions
which are at variance with his, and from whom, in the
sadness and weariness of the life that is ebbing away,
he turns, praying to be left in peace. Two stanzas where
the dying man's wandering fancy returns to his Polish
plains contain a poetic and exquisite touch of nature,
foreign to Krasinski's usual style, and more akin to the
work of other poets of his nation.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? To-Day and The Last 271
Oh, come ye, then, come through the hamlets of home,
through the green of the meads and the billows of corn. There
in each ear of corn murmurs the nation's grief. There does the
lily of the field for vengeance cry. In that wide space save for
the whispers of the forests nothing shall you hear; and in the
forests there are graves of green and stones, and in each grave
a martyr sleeping lies, and o'er him pine trees sing the hymn
of death.
Then he prays that he may not die with his despair
for his nation unrelieved. Where is the angel who had
promised him succour in his last hour? This refers to
Delphina Potocka, Krasinski having written this part
of the poem in the years of his love for her before his
marriage. He sees instead his "Satan," come to tell
him that his country is destined to purchase the life of
the world by her everlasting death, which is of course
in direct opposition to the Krasinskian ideal of death
leading to new life. Let the dying man bow to reason
and necessity. But still he refuses to be overcome by
the specious temptation. He answers--and here Kra-
sinski is influenced by the theory on which much of
his hope for Poland depended--that the tempter is:
only the half of universal life. From thy lips flows the word
of eternal death because thou knowest blind force, not what
is will. The desire of many hearts can descend as angels to
the grave, and an angelic strength pour into bones and dust.
God cast the seed of miracle into the will of man. Eternal
humility in tears and blood--before God. Undying strife in
tears and blood--before the foe. This is our fate, our faith,
our conscience.
And, still calling upon her whom he loved to fulfil
her promise, he sinks into what the bystanders believe
is death.
It is now the turn of his friends to speak. They do
so, some ten of them, one after the other. For the most
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? 272 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part each of them urges a special line of policy,
which Krasinski held to be injurious to his country:
an exclusive aristocracy, democracy, communism, Pan-
slavism, and so on, which they reproach their dead
friend for not having supported. In the speech of one
there are words so descriptive of Krasinski himself that
they sufficiently prove whom the dying man represents.
"See," says he, pointing to the face upon the bed; "on those
features grief for his nation has blotted out all else: that grief
which for a hundred years tears every heart in Poland. Blessed
that grief which is the proof of immortality: that purgatorial,
provident and shielding grief which, as religion, unites us who
are torn apart. "
The fame of the dead man must be not that he was
an aristocrat, democrat or any of the rest, but: "if you
would mark him out by any sign, call him a Pole, for he
loved Poland. In this love he lived and in it died. "
Such might well be Krasinski's epitaph.
At this moment the dying Pole regains conscious-
ness. He hears the "voice of my angel, the voice of
my spring, eternally remembered, eternally beloved. "
"O, let them also see thee," he prays, for then they
will understand their errors and how they must conquer
in the war for Poland. Though he should spend an
eternity of joy with his angel it would not be joy if she,
refusing to appear to them, leaves them in their mental
wandering and "my Poland sad. " She hears his prayer.
The watchers fall upon their knees, and as her voice
repeats the phrase: "Poland shall be in the name of
the Lord," they one by one confess that they have
sinned and erred.
One tells in all Krasinski's fervid imagery--this was
the passage by which Mickiewicz recognized the identity
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? To-Day and The Last 273
of the author of the poem--of the horror of the Galician
massacres, and at the voice from above: "his heart
breaks, his thought is shattered. " Another, as he said, had
urged upon his nation to fling away her diadem of thorns
and yield herself to the embraces of the false lover who
will be her destroyer. H is long speech is the refutation of
Wielopolski's famous Lettre dun Gentilhomme Polonais
au Prince de Metternich, in which the Pole, whose name
twenty years later was to be the object of violent national
passions, advocated a Polish reconciliation with Russia
on lines which no Polish independent would accept.
"Forgive me, forgive," the speaker concludes, weeping.
"See how I sob, and how I love my Poland. Through
pain I lost my reason. " A fourth says he lost not reason,
but heart, through the same suffering. So each tells his
sin against his nation. The heavenly voice promises
forgiveness on the condition of their individual virtue.
"The Almighty Himself cannot lay the dawn of ages
in an impure heart. "
"Alas! " reply the dying man's friends in chorus. "Our errors
rose from our despair. By law we were bidden to live by
crimes, by law bidden to be spies, by law bidden to betray son,
father, brother. Even in God's temples the name of Poland
was as a foul word. Only was it free to utter that name aloud
--from the scaffold. "
"Repay her," the voice answers, "for her cross by
your good deeds," and to that the chorus: "There is
one road by which we must go to Poland as to God, by
that which never was defiled. "
All that is now left for the dying Pole is to urge his
brothers to be of good heart, for the day so often pro-
phesied by the Anonymous Poet shall be theirs.
I shall not be with you when on that day your hearts re-
sound with hymns, when, as the Jewish prophets sang, the
g. 18
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? 274 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
rainbow-hued clouds descend on you from high. Oh, be pure,
be holy, and what I have foretold shall be fulfilled for you by
a just God.
So he dies: and the last words of the poem are
spirit voices, his and the angel's, repeating from unseen
worlds: "Poland shall be in the name of the Lord. "
The second poem \vhich Krasinski brought out now
-- The Last--is of all his poetic work the most in line
with other European verse. It was begun years before,
perhaps even as early as the time when the poet, almost
a boy, visited with Mickiewicz the dungeon of Chillon
which gave him the idea of the poem. Told in narrative
form, in style equal to the best in that particular type1,
The Last is the story of a Polish poet who has languished
for twenty years in a Siberian dungeon. If here and
there in the beginning faintly reminiscent of Byron's
Prisoner of Chillon, as indeed it was almost bound to
be, Krasinski soon carries his poem up to those higher
planes where at the period of life when he com-
pleted it he dwelt familiarly. Moreover, The Last is
impregnated with that terrible tragedy of real fact which
must of necessity be found in the work of any Pole of
Krasinski's day, when telling the all too well-known tale
of exile and of prison. The captive of The Last has in
fact been identified with two different Poles whose long
martyrdom is conspicuous even in the via dolorosa of
Poland's national records: Roman Sanguszko, deported
to Siberia and personally condemned by Nicholas I to
make the journey on foot, and tukasinsJiL-whose prison
was his living tomb. But Count Tarnowski adduces
the internal evidence of the poem as proof that its
spokesman is intended for no other than Krasinski him-
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? To-Day and The Last 275
self. The poet's foreboding that he would end his days
in Siberia amounted almost to obsession.
The prisoner tells his story. He has rotted for years
in his underground cell, chained by a hook to the wall.
Days, months, years dragged on, and all his hopes died.
He struggled against the death of his soul, against de-
spair, against the dying out of reason. In the cells above
his where light and air penetrated were confined those
whose crimes in the eyes of the Tsar were less than his.
They had murdered a mother, a father, a brother. He
was a Pole who had loved his country and sung of her
to his countrymen.
To no one I confided my last thought. To my beloved
ones I did not bid farewell. At night--without a trace, in
silence and in secret, the prison cart hurled me away; and only
the stars of Poland may remember those first and hidden, those
my journeys after death.
The Tsar condemned him to his fate:
And I went on foot to beyond the world, into this ice, I, son
of the Republic of Poland and of freedom, among the fettered
droves of criminals.
He was driven into the far north at the end of the
knout.
Would to God I had died in the beginning of my martyr-
dom. But we die not when death is our salvation. Thou shalt
die in the day of joy, thou shalt perish in the day of victory.
But when thou livest in pain thou art immune.
And in a transport of suffering he crjes:
Ah, where are my native flowering plains? Where are my
fields of corn, the marshes of my meadows? Where are the
woods of pines, murmuring o'erhead like a strange, secret
prayer? Where is the people that calls Mary Queen?
At this sudden awakening of memory that he be-
lieved had been crushed out by captivity he, for the
first time for many a year, weeps. Thought is not dead
18--2
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? 276 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after all. He remembers his past visions of the advent
of the Paraclete to renovate humanity and of the great
mission of his country; Who knows but that transfi-
guration may have already taken place in the world to
which he has perished? He feels his chains no longer
The prison walls fade. The spring green of the Polish
meads stretches before his eyes, and he sees a multitude
of Poles with the national banners of crimson and white.
Horsemen in his hallucination detach themselves from
the others, and gallop to the north across the Russian
steppes towards the prisons of Siberia. One moment
more, and he will be delivered: "and Poland shall
enter in my prison to give me back what I have lost
for her--my life1. "
Krasinski's poem was to have ended here with the
release of the prisoner whose history he in the first
instance entitled, not The Last, but The Delivered.
All this part was written prior to the year 1846 while
Krasinski was under the dominion of such hopes as in-
spired Dawn. Then occurred the catastrophe of the
Galician massacres. In his grief of mind Krasinski
changed the end of the poem into tragedy, while at the
same time the fear of Siberia under which he had
written The Delivered left him, and yielded to a longing
for death as his only deliverance. The existence of the
Polish prisoner is unknown to the rescuers. They are
told that there are no Poles in the fortress. Within sight
of the walls they turn back, and he, "the last," is left
behind, the only Pole to whom the prison doors are not
opened. Transports of rage shake his soul. Blasphemies
stream from his lips. Then he chances to pronounce
the name of Poland.
1 See the identical expression in the letter to Gaszynski of June 1,1843.
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? To-Day and The Last 277
Poland! Poland! It is true she has arisen. Lord! is it true?
To-day all Poland no more awaiteth death in chains as I?
Forgive me, Lord, for Poland did I love. She liveth on the
earth and Thou in heaven. And therefore do I die, blessing
Thy name for ever, everywhere, before and in the grave. With
Thine and Poland's name upon these lips which in a few
moments shall be stone, I die. Holy Thy will! Holy my long
bondage, holy the terrors of my lonely death, since now no
longer torn asunder is the sweet soil of my sires.
And, hearing heavenly Hosannas, death delivers
him.
In both To-Day and The Last there runs the strain
of a conspicuous weariness. But this is apparent no
longer in the poems that followed them in 1848, the
concluding Psalms of the Future. The fact that in all
these poems, and in marked measure in the Psalms,
the Anonymous Poet could rise above the horror of
what 1846 had brought upon his nation, and still speak
to her in words of hope, was the greatest victory that
even he had ever won. He won it through and for the
love of Poland. The Galician massacres however left
their deep traces on his national idea. Dr Kleiner notes
that the theory of the dependence of Poland's resur-
rection on each Pole's personal purity of heart and deed,
which Krasinski had already indicated in various of his
works, now became paramount.
While the motive of the Psalm of Grief was Kra-
sinski's wish to console and fortify his nation in the
affliction in which she was then plunged, its immediate
cause was the attack made by Stowacki against the
tenets of the Psalm of Love. Stowacki circulated in
manuscript a fine poem of which the form was partly
modelled on that of Krasinski's Psalm of Love, in
which he mercilessly derided, with more than one per-
sonal thrust at the Anonymous Poet, the latter's fore-
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 278 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
bodings. Against the knowledge or desire of its author
who, after strained relations with Krasinski on account
of a personal matter, had renewed his friendship with
him, this poem was published in 18481. In a few words
of introduction to his fourth Psalm Krasinski stated his
intention of answering his brother-poet's poem, the style
of which he praises unreservedly; and he then opens
his Psalm of Grief.
Stowacki had thrust in Krasinski's teeth the taunt:
"Thou wert afraid, son of a noble. " "Did terror speak
from me," replies Krasinski, without passion, "when I
foresaw that we were going forward into darkness, not
to dawn?