No More Learning

2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 120 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
It is the turn of the lackeys. One boasts he has
killed his old master, another is looking for his to inflict
the same punishment upon him. "Citizens,"cries a valet,
"we, bent over a boot-tree in sweat and humiliation,
polishing boots, trimming hair, we have felt our rights. "
With wild, hoarse cries a troop of butchers comes
next, clamouring for blood, no matter whose it is,
whether that of cattle slaughtered for the lords, or that
of the lords slaughtered for the people. And in the
world revolution that Krasinski foresaw it is not merely
the savage instincts of the human race that are let
loose: moral shackles must also go. A woman boasts
to Henryk that she is free at last, and that she owes
society a debt of gratitude for having released her from
her husband, who was "my enemy, the enemy of
freedom, who kept me in bonds. "
She is left behind: and there is the brief episode of
the condottiere of the people, Bianchetti, absorbed in
his plans for taking the fortress of the Trinity. He
refuses to confide them to Henryk, his apparent comrade
in arms. "Though you are my brothers in liberty," he
says haughtily, "you are not my brothers in genius. "
"I advise you to kill him," Henryk says to the Jew,
"because every aristocracy begins like that. " These
few lines show how barren of its end the revolution
will be. One aristocracy will perish; another, if even of
a different order, will rise in its place.
Into Henryk's words breaks a piteous cry from a
poor, broken old man, a silk weaver.
Cursed be the merchants, the directors of factories. My
best years, when other men love women, fight on the open
field, sail on the open seas, I spent in a narrow room, bent over
a silk-loom.
Husband. Empty the bottle you hold in your hand.
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? The Undivine Comedy
121
Artisan. I have not got the strength to do it. I cannot
raise it to my lips. I have scarcely been able to crawl here,
but the day of freedom will not dawn now for me. Cursed be
the merchants who sell the silk and the lords who wear the
silk. He dies.
"Where are your fine words now," says Henryk
with contempt to his despised companion, "your pro-
mises--equality, the perfection and happiness of the
human race? "
It is for the satisfaction of his curiosity and by way
of doing a daring thing that Henryk is in his enemies'
camp, not for any military purpose. An unmoved
spectator, he stands and looks on at his brother nobles
being dragged off to the gallows by the crowds of pea-
sants who have suffered wrong at their hands: unmoved,
because, by his own showing, he despises his own class
and hates the one below him. No thought of sympathy
crosses him for the oppressed whose sufferings once
meant something to him. After The Undivine Comedy
was published, Krasinski wrote a species of prose drama
which he was never able to complete, in which we are
given the history of Henryk's youth. There he is an
enthusiastic dreamer, who is led on a pilgrimage through
the sorrows of the world which it is his hope one day
to relieve. The intermediate stages are missing: till in
The Undivine Comedy we have the mournful indication
of the gulf between the idealist's beginning and his end.
From the power and the pathos with which Kra-
sinski represents the unhappy toilers of the earth who
have had nothing out of life save grinding and uncheered
labour, hour in, hour out, we see clearly enough that it
was neither from aristocratic prejudice, nor from any
lack of the deepest compassion for the misery of
the poor, that Krasinski could find only matter for
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? 122 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
dread in the coming revolution. In that revolution
he foresaw, not the amelioration of suffering, but the
annihilation of moral law. He foresaw it as a necessity
before the dawn that at this time he only dimly, in com-
parison with his later vision, perceived would rise be-
hind it. The laws of religion and morality must first
run riot: and hence the scenes watched by Henryk and
his guide of the orgies ushering in new and degraded
rites on the overthrowal of Christ's altars, which
Krasinski based on what he considered the logical
consequences of the teaching of Saint-Simonism.
"Eagle, keep thy promise," murmurs Henryk, as
he hears the blasphemies around him, and gazes on the
horrible profanations which, led by Leonard as the
high-priest of the new religion, are being perpetrated
in the ruins of the last cathedral to fall beneath the axes
of the rebels, that have swept away every church from
the face of the earth. "On their shoulders I will raise
a new church to Christ. " In the spectacle of unspeak-
able outrage on which he has been gazing Henryk
has found another stepping-stone to his ambition. He
will restore God's Church, not as her son but as her
patron.
I will express this new, mighty world in one word. That
word of mine shall be the poetry of all the future.
And again the voice he has heard before rings
above his head: "Thou composest a drama. "
The day is dawning. Henryk turns to leave the
enemy's camp. Unearthly lamentations of the spirits
who have "kept guard over the altars and monuments
of the saints, who have carried the echo of the bells on
their wings to the faithful, whose voices were in the
music of the organs," follow him.
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? The Undivine Comedy
123
We weep for Christ. . . Where is our God? Where is His
Church?
Husband. Faster, faster to the sword, to battle! I will give
Him back to you. I will crucify His enemies on a thousand
crosses. Jesus and my sword!
Voices in the bushes. Mary and our swords! Long life to
our lord!
Husband. Follow me! Follow me! Jesus and Mary!
And henceforth Henryk becomes the champion of
Christianity. Often before this scene the language of
some sort of piety has been surprised on Henryk's lips;
and yet it might have seemed as though a man of his
stamp would have rather chosen a species of refined
agnosticism as his appropriate setting. Had Krasinski
adopted this perfectly obvious treatment part at least
of the terrible truth with which he presents Henryk
would have been sacrificed. Henryk's is the type of a
lip religion. He talks in exquisite phraseology of the
sacred things which have no bearing on the conduct of
his daily life. He will freely utter the old Polish battle
cry of Jesus and Mary or the name of God when the
poetry of the situation demands it: as his defence
against moral fall, never. Religion in his conception
adds beauty to the world. It is picturesque. It is, be-
sides, his aristocratic inheritance that descends to him
with his great name and estates. His pose is to be
something in the nature of a crusader. Atheism he
leaves to Pankracy, to the vulgar. For one moment
we saw him take a poetical excursion into the regions
of scepticism when rebelling against his son's fate: but
this was obviously one of his situations, and holds no
particle of the agony . that broke the heart of Mickiewicz's
Konrad when grief for his nation drove him into
blasphemy.
The hour has struck for the secret midnight interview
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? 124 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
between Henryk and Pankracy. Henryk awaits his
opponent in a palatial hall of the castle, drawn from
Krasinski's memories of his own home. The portraits
of Henryk's ancestors hang around the walls; his
armorial bearings shine on a pillar; silver goblets and
tankards glitter on the tables.
"In a moment will stand before me," soliloquizes Henryk
to imaginary spectators, " the man without a name, without
ancestors, who rose from nothingness, and perchance will
begin a new epoch if I do not thrust him down into nothingness.
My ancestors, inspire me with what made you the rulers of
the world ! . . . Let descend upon me a blind, inexorable, burn-
ing faith in Christ and His Church, the inspiration of your
deeds on earth, the hope of immortal glory in heaven: and I
will slay the enemies, I, the son of a hundred generations, the
last inheritor of your thoughts and deeds, your virtues and
your errors. (Midnight strikes. ) Now am I ready. "
Pankracy is led in, and he and Henryk are left
alone together.
Pankracy. I greet Count Henryk. That word "Count"
sounds strangely in my throat. (He fixes his eyes on the pillar
where the coat of arms hangs. ) If I am not mistaken, those red
and blue badges are called coats of arms in the language of
the dead. There are ever fewer such little dots on the surface
of the earth.
Husband. With the help of God you will shortly see thou-
sands of them.
Pankracy. There is my old nobility--always sure of them-
selves, proud, obstinate, flourishing with hope, and without a
farthing, without a weapon, without soldiers, believing, or
pretending that they believe, in God, because it would be
difficult to believe in themselves. But show me the thunderbolts
sent down in your defence, and the regiments of angels from
heaven.
Husband. Laugh at your own words. Atheism is an old
formula, and I expected something new from you.
Pankracy. Laugh at your own words. I have a stronger,
mightier faith than yours. The groan torn by despair and
pain from thousands of thousands, the hunger of artisans, the
misery of peasants, the shame of their wives and daughters,
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? The Undivine Comedy 125
the degradation of humanity: that is my faith and my God for
to-day.
Husband. I have placed my strength in the God Who
gave the rule to my ancestors.
Pankracy. And all your life you have been the plaything
of the devil. But I leave the rest of this discourse to theo-
logians if some pedant of that trade still exists in the country.
To business! I came here, because I wanted to know you, and,
secondly, to save you.
Husband. I am obliged to you for the first. The second,
leave to my sword.
Pankracy. Your sword is glass, your God is a dream. You
are condemned by the voice of thousands, you are hemmed
round with the arms of thousands. A few spans of earth
remain yours that will scarcely suffice for your graves. You
cannot defend yourselves twenty days. Where are your cannon,
your stores, your provisions--and, finally, where is your
courage?
His insults, says Henryk, escape with impunity only
because the aristocrat has given his word that the
leader of the people shall leave his roof unscathed.
"Knightly honour has come upon the scene," sneers
Pankracy. "It is a worn-out rag on the banner of humanity.
Oh! I know you. You are full of life, and you ally yourself
with the dying, because you want to deceive yourself, because
you still want to believe in caste, in the bones of your great-
grandmothers, in the word 'my country': but in the depths
of your heart you know yourself that the penalty is owing to
your brethren, and after the penalty, oblivion. "
Husband. And what else is there for you and yours?
Pankracy. Victory and life. I recognize only one law. It
is your destruction. It cries by my lips; "Decrepit worms,
full of food and drink, yield to the young, the hungry and
the strong. "
Pankracy then speaks of the new epoch that is to
be born from his word, when the earth shall be rich
and flourishing from pole to pole, man free, great and
happy. But that the true fire is not in him we gather
from Henryk's rejoinder: "Your words lie, but your
unmoved, pale countenance cannot counterfeit inspira-
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? 126 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
tion. " Still Pankracy knows how to appeal not only to
the ambition of the poet, but to that in him which was
once, long ago, noble.
"If you would attain immortality," he says, "if you love
truth and have sought it sincerely, if you are a man in the
pattern of humanity, not in the fashion of nursery fables, do
not throw away this moment of salvation. Not a trace will
remain to-morrow of the blood which we will both shed to-
day. If you are what you once seemed, forsake your house
and come with me. "
For the first time Henryk wavers. His wish to see
the man of those dreams that had once been his was
not mere curiosity: it was a desire to gaze, as it were,
upon his own marred face1. Pankracy's words recall
to his memory the visions of a long past day.
The
higher voices to which he had listened in his now
doubly dead youth call faintly to him once more. He
rises. He paces the room, murmuring to himself in
broken whispers: "Vain dreams! Who shall fulfil them?
Progress, the happiness of the human race--and I once
believed in them. " Is there here an undertone of real,
if fruitless, regret for his ruined self? Pankracy, watch-
ing the transitory struggle as the caustic spectator,
congratulates himself that he has "touched the nerve
of poetry"; proof that for his part his language had not
been actuated by sincere and passionate faith.
Both Pankracy and Henryk, as is apparent from their
respective taunts, know that his adversary is doubting
within himself. No spark of truth, says Klaczko, comes
out in either2. In the midst of what appears an out-
burst of real emotion Pankracy betrays himself by the
admission that he has succeeded in playing upon Hen-
ryk's poetical fancy. The duologue must end where it
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne. 2 Op. cit.
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? The Undivine Comedy 127
began. The Undivine Comedy is not to tell of success,
but of failure, of negation*. With contempt Henryk
rejects Pankracy's proposal, and makes mockery of his
base birth. With equal contempt, Pankracy points to
the portraits of Henryk's ancestors, and rakes up the
scandals of each. The interview concludes merely with
a mutual bandying of words. The final issue will be
played out on the ramparts of the Trinity.
Part IV opens with a short prose poem descriptive
of the morning breaking over the doomed castle. Mic-
kiewicz, himself a master of word painting, likens its
effects of light, mist and cloud to a canvas of Salvator
Rosa1. In preparation for the last struggle Henryk
is solemnly blessed as the leader by the Archbishop,
while choirs of priests sing, and Henryk's brother nobles
watch coldly and grudgingly.
First Count. See with what pride he looks on us all!
Second. He thinks he has subjugated the world.
Third. And he only got through a camp of peasants in the
night.
All swear in reply to his harangue--the usual one
on such occasions--that they will be faithful to him till
death. Yet where will such resolution be found in this
effete band? Krasinski's loss of faith in the society of
his generation and his sense of its demoralization are
openly expressed in these closing scenes of The Undivine
Comedy. Yet Krasinski himself was a son of one of the
most courageous races in Europe, and when he wrote
The Undivine Comedy the spectacle was still recent
of Polish men and women shedding their life-blood,
parting with every joy in life, for their country's sake.
The craven, time-serving aristocrats of The Undivine
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? 128 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Comedy are not Polish types. As we have said before
there is nothing national in the play. Indeed the absence
of Polish colouring in the depictment of character is
the one reproach that Mickiewicz makes against The
Undivine Comedy.
All hope of victory is gone. The nobles gather round
Henryk. One whispers to him:
What, is all lost then?
Husband. Not all--unless your hearts fail you before the
time.
Count. What time?
Husband. Death.
Baron (leading him to the other side). Count, you have
probably seen that dreadful man. Will he have if only a little
mercy on us when we fall into his hands?
Husband. I tell you truthfully that none of your ancestors
ever heard of a mercy like that. It is called the gallows.
Baron. We must defend ourselves as best we can.
Prince. Two words with you in private. All that is good
for the common people, but between ourselves it is obvious
that we cannot resist. You have been chosen leader, and there-
fore it is your business to open negotiations.
Husband {turning to the crowd). Who mentions surrender
will be punished by death.
Baron, Count, Prince (all together). Who mentions surrender
will be punished by death.
Although Henryk knows that his doom is close upon
him, he still delights in his lordship. The sinking sun,
as he watches it from the towers of the fort, seems to
him the fiery and fit ending to his life in the wild glory
of which he had always dreamt.
I stand here on the boundaries of the eternal sleep, the
leader of all those who yesterday were my equals.
And on these words breaks once more the avenger
of that past from which the husband and father cannot
escape, the witness to his eternal failure--the blind boy.
He has heard without fear or interest the sounds of the
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? The Undivine Comedy 129
battle raging round the walls of the fortress. His heart
is not with outer things, it is in his visions: and it is
there that the delicately strung soul, incapable of coping
with the tempests of the world, will take refuge1.
Everything about this unhappy child is weak. Even
his religion, notes Klaczko, is not his mother's deep
piety. It partakes more of the nature of his father's
poetizing, a thin, sentimental stream from which he can
draw no strength either for himself or a battling world3.
His very end is pointless. He falls a useless sacrifice
to a random shot'.
He leads Henryk into the subterranean caverns of
the fortress.
Do you not hear their voices, do you not see their forms?
Husband. There is the silence of the grave, and the torch
lights but a few steps before us.
George. Ever nearer, ever clearer, they come from under
the narrow vaults.
Husband. In your madness is my curse. You are mad,
child: and you are destroying my strength at the moment I
most need it.
George. I see their pale forms assembling for the dreadful
judgment. The prisoner advances. He has wrung his hands.
Husband. Who is he?
George. Oh, father, father!
Choir. Because thou hast loved nought, because thou hast
worshipped nought but thyself, thou art damned--damned for
all eternity.
The eyes of the child then see the vision of Henryk
being tortured.
"I hear your groans," cries he, falling on his knees at his
father's feet. "Father, forgive me. In the middle of the night
my mother came to me and bade me "--He faints.
Husband. Only this was wanting. My own child has led
me to the threshold of hell. Marya! Inexorable spirit! There
begins the eternity of torments and of darkness. I must still
fight with men. Afterwards the eternal war.
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.
G.
9
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? 130 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
He leaves the vaults, while the spirit voices wail
after him:
Because thou hast loved nought, worshipped nought save
thyself, thou art damned--damned for all eternity.
The starving inhabitants of the besieged fortress
throng round the leader, clamouring to him to make
terms. The godfather, who has no mind to face ex-
tremities, has taken upon himself to treat with the
revolutionaries.
All my life has been a true citizen's, and I do not heed your
reproaches, Henryk. If I have undertaken the office of envoy,
it is because I understand my century and know how to appre-
ciate its worth.
Turning to the crowd, the baron, the prince and the
rest of them who are all prepared to save their skins by
going over to Pankracy, he tells them: "The great man
who has sent me promises your lives on the condition
that you join him and acknowledge the tendency of the
age. "
"We do acknowledge it," they cry. Yet it wants
only a few words from Henryk, whose role is that of
the glorious champion who will die but not yield, and
the appearance of an armed band of his soldiers, and
once more the waverers are more or less with him again.
For the moment the enemy is driven off: but it is with
the last shots of the defenders. Henryk's servant comes
to tell him that there is no more powder, no more bullets.
"Then bring me my son," says Henryk, "that I may em-
brace him once again. "
The servant leads in the blind boy.
Come, son. Put your hand in mine. Touch my lips with
your forehead. Your mother's forehead was once as white and
soft.
George. I heard her voice to-day, and she said: "This
evening thou shalt be sitting with me. "
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? The Undivine Comedy 131
/
Husband. Did she so much as mention my name?
George. She said: "This evening I expect my son. "
Husband (aside). Will my strength fail me at the end of
the road? Oh, God, permit it not! For one moment of courage
Thou shalt have me as Thy prisoner for all eternity. (Aloud)
Oh, son, forgive me that I gave you life. You will forget me
among the angelic choirs. Oh, George, George, oh, my son!
A shot resounds, and George lies dead at his father's
feet. The father seizes his sword and, shouting to his
men, rushes into the hopeless combat. The enemy are
in the castle. Henryk's followers are slain: the remain-
ing defenders of the fortress fall on their knees before
the victor, whining for mercy. Pankracy's soldiers run
through the castle, looking for Henryk. Covered with
blood, he stands on the angle of the bastion that over-
hangs the precipice.
I see it all black, floating towards me in spaceless tracts
of darkness, my eternity without shores, without end, and in
its midst God as a sun that shines eternally--and lights nothing.
(He takes a step forward? ) They are running. They have seen
me.
And with the words: "Jesus, Mary ! "--on his lips
the romantic call to battle of his ancestors rather than
the last prayer of the departing soul--crying, " Poetry,
be thou cursed by me as I shall be cursed for all eter-
nity," with his arms flung out as the swimmer about to
take his plunge, he leaps into the abyss.
Pankracy is left apparently the conqueror of the field.
He sits in judgment in the castle court, condemning
to death each wretched survivor of the aristocrats as
they appear before him in chains, in a scene that is the
reflection of the revolutionary tribunals of the French
Revolution. He then leads Leonard to the bastions and,
standing on the spot where Henryk perished, points to
the world he has won.
9--2
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?