No More Learning

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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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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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.
From the wounds of the Figure thereon crimson moons
flash out and rainbows that break into myriad stars till
the martyrs on their crosses pass into its radiance.
"Too late, too late," groans the youth. His nation is
slain. But the guide answers:
"This is the purgatory of our present days, for all flesh on
these plains is tortured, but over the soul of this nation the
Most Dear and Hidden One Himself watcheth. Weep not for
them, but for those in the grey world, for there is hell, and
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? 296 The A nonymous Poet of Poland
here is pain only. I have told thee that from pain the soul
riseth from the dead. Only from self-degradation shall there
be no resurrection. "
"Oh, Master, Master," [cries Henryk with outstretched
hands]. "Show me heaven--that third estate--on earth. "
"Hitherto on your earth," [is the reply]," there have been only
hell and purgatory, but the spirit of the Lord hath dwelt in
your hearts. Awake it by faith to life. Lift it by the wing of
a holy will on high, bring it forth externally. Cast it wide
from horizon to horizon, above you, before you, around you by
the deed of love. "
These last passages of the Dream were added by
Krasinski, as might indeed be gathered from their moral
resemblance to the Psalms of the Future, after the rest
had been written.
The Unfinished then returns to its dramatic form.
Having learnt the sorrows of humanity and of his
nation and beheld their remedy, Henryk is plunged
into the Venetian carnival. His cicerone is a prince-
banker, the type of the man of money, whose incapacity
to understand any dream or aspiration is in glaring
contrast to the character of the young man beside him.
"I felt like that when I was eighteen," is his would-be
sympathetic answer to the youth whom he means to
please. Henryk is too true a lover of beauty for the
Italian sky not to claim his gaze rather than the
masqueraders; too much of a patriot not to wonder
how men can play the harlequin in their streets that are
trodden by the soldiers of foreign rulers. He and the
banker pass by an unmasked woman, the Princess
Rahoga, leaning on her husband's arm. She is a Pole,
married to a man unworthy of her. Captivated by her
misfortunes and her beauty, dimly conscious that he
has seen her before--in his dream--Henryk falls
desperately in love. This is a chapter of Krasinski's
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? The Unfinished Poem , 297
autobiography. The woman is Delphina Potocka, the
victim of a miserable marriage, and Venice was the scene
of Krasinski's first love where as a youth he spent
hours with Mme Bobrowa. Aligier warns Henryk
against this infatuation. His soul, says the mentor, will
grow old before its time under its influence. He will
squander life, when the treasure of the Pole is "in pain,
sacrifice, service, memories, hopes, immortal desires,"
and his place in the "great and dark forest. " The youth
answers that the woman's pain draws him to her: "Pain,
whether here or whether there, whether in a brother,
or in one of these my sisters, always sadness and pain
call me, lure me. " Here we know from similar ex-
pressions in Krasinski's letters that he is speaking of
himself. Aligier reproaches Henryk for having already
forgotten that the guide has promised to lead him "to
the gathering of secret yearners where the spirit of the
future is labouring to come forth. " There Henryk,
beholding all earthly history, will no longer find it
worthy to dream of one fellow-countrywoman. How far
Krasinski meant to work out Henryk's love-story and
to link it to that of the indifferent husband in The
Undivine Comedy we shall, as Count Tarnowski
observes1, never know. It ends here: and now he is
conducted, still by Aligier, into the vaults of a Venetian
palace where scene after scene is displayed to him
representing the development of the Divine Thought
through all the ages of history.
They are greeted by a choir:
Ye who would create the present and discover the future
take first into the depths of your souls all the dead days of the
past. For albeit history changeth there is one eternal thought
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 298 The A nonymous Poet of Poland
and one only truth. Each thought, conceived in God, sent
from eternity into space and time, as part of the truth, must
suffer as the Son of God suffered in His flesh. It shall be
manifested among men, and suffer and bear its cross, and have
its grave. But each one has risen again in the one which
followed it. Each has risen from the grave in another higher
body.
The first to give their witness from the past are the
Chaldeans. "Ormuzd and Ahriman war eternally. We
craved to be delivered, to be purified, to flow on
flame to thee, oh, unmoved light. "
Their power died to give place to others. The
Egyptian priests next rise before Henryk.
The mystery of mysteries was preserved among us. We
first knew Thee Whose name is: "He was and is and ever shall
be. " Wherefore, oh, Thou Infinite, dost Thou elude us? We
were fain to teach a corrupted race the eternal truth. From
the mighty pyramids, from the labyrinths, Thou didst depart
from us to the setting of the sun.
Strains of aerial voices singing of roses and myrtles
and the sea foam whence rose Aphrodite fall upon
Henryk's ears, and the priests of Eleusis appear to-
gether with Plato. The Hellenic part in the world's
advance is typified by the summons of this choir to
love "the ideal beyond measure. "
"Love," adds Plato, "with unequalled love, and flame in
that love. Know thyself, and, knowing, raise thy butterfly-like
wings. They shall carry thee to thy home, and thy home, thy
native home, is the bosom of God. "
They pass away with their eternal yearning for the
"Desired of ages": and hence it is an easy transition first
to the solitaries of Mount Carmel, expecting the advent
of Christ, then to the Jewish sect of the Essenes
living lives of austerity that preached the victory of the
soul over the body, as they too awaited the Messiah.
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They kneel, and the youth sinks on his knees also with
Aligier: for they see the form of Christ in the skies,
risen from the dead. An invisible choir sings that Sion,
Greece, and Rome shall no more hold back the human
race. The Son of God has died and risen. "Hence-
forth no people that has become a nation dieth on the
earth. Henceforth no man who has become a" spirit
shall die in the grave. "
The panorama of the "second part of history," with
its "other trials of humanity," now unrolls itself. The
various trends of human thought with their evil and
their strain of good are depicted: the Albigenses,
prophesying the arrival of a Paraclete; the Templars, in
the dying words of their Grand Master, looking for the
world to become one fold; the wanderings of magic
and alchemy always seeking a perpetual elixir they
cannot find; Freemasons in whom Krasinski saw the
inheritors of the Templars, overthrowing kings and
governments. In all these deviations of the human
mind Krasinski beholds a spark of the Divine idea,
which results in nothing because they did not embrace
the entire truth, but only dimly saw one portion of it1.
Revolution and war and bloodshed are everywhere,
and: "as God was slain in man so is humanity slain in
a nation. " The youth now gazes on funeral obsequies,
where three stand by a catafalque, holding sceptres
surmounted not by a cross but a bayonet, and in whose
crowns are shining the jewels of human blood and
tears. In the coffin she sleeps, at the very thought of
whose name the youth cries that he must kiss if but
the earth. "She is my father and my mother, she is my
all. " She breathes still; but her executioners proclaim
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 300 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that there will be no peace till she is dead for ever.
While young Henryk is rapt into patriotic passion, the
choir chants: "From the day of the death of the just
the European world shall not rest till itself becomes
just. The nations live, and yet live not, because they
cannot live according to the Thought of God1. "
Since that sin against humanity the world is ruled
by hatred. Choirs swear around Henryk to spread
universal ruin. The guillotine is erected. The French
Revolution shakes the world. Then there rises over
its tempests the figure of Napoleon, beloved by the
Polish mystics.
And now the Lord will say to his soul: "Go forward! " and
nothing and no one shall stay it, and it shall pass on and find
the further way in the darkness.
The choir takes up the panegyric:
Who is equal to him of those who have gone by till now?
All human fates shall flow into that one man--all toils and
triumphs, powers and defeats, joys and woes. As the world
was created straight from God's hand out of nought, so he shall
appear from nought among men and be raised from nought
He shall be heroic like unto the Greek Alexander, an emperor
like the Caesar of Rome, a martyr as the saint of the first
spring of Christ. And he shall die like unto Moses, alone in
the sight of God, foretelling the will of God for the future days
of the race of man.
But the light of him from whose uprising it at first
seemed that "neither kings nor people were to wield
power, but nations and the human race, and in the
name of God," goes out. The three executioners of
1 Here we may point out the striking analogy between what Krasinski
said more than sixty years ago and the language of leading politicians
and thinkers of our day, who have ascribed the great European war to
the original crime of the partition of Poland, at the same time basing
their hopes for the future of Europe on the restoration of Poland.
? ? 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
? The Unfinished Poem 301
Poland, defeated by Napoleon, return after his fall. The
so-called Holy Alliance is formed. "Diplomacy, police,
gendarmerie," mutter subterranean voices, in answer
to voices crying against them on high.
"Oh, Aligier, is this the solution of so many ages? "
cries Henryk in despair. Have their visions only ended
in this? Aligier would have him wait and hope.
"This is only the ending of the past. Beyond this
threshold begins the present. " Voices hail them in
ecstatic accents, calling them to come and gaze upon
the promised hour. "All that is past and that pained,
passing away shall return, shall live again, be higher
raised, but shall pain no more. " The doors are flung
wide, and the last stage in the pilgrimage is reached.
The action is still in the vaults, and takes the shape
of the initiation of a neophyte into secret rites. The
president in a white toga is on the throne, and against
the walls are ranged choirs of the different nations,
each garbed in national colours, Italian, Irish, German,
French, Slavonic, and Polish. At the head of the
latter stands Pankracy. Henryk is to be received into
1 this brotherhood whose purpose is to work for the
hastening of Christ's kingdom on earth. Kneeling at
the feet of the president he is commanded by the latter
to give an account of what he has seen, and to utter a
protestation of faith in the Trinity of which the history
of man, says the president, is the reflection. Let the
neophyte declare which of the past eighteen centuries
since Christ has honoured Christ. He answers, None.
"That one," takes up the president, "will only honour
Him who will make visible and tangible in all actuality His
precept. Its accomplishment shall be the descent of the spirit,
the deed the very Paraclete. Where is that deed? Dost thou
behold it? Look in thyself. It is there. In thine as in every
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl.