No More Learning

"There* are stars around thy head, the waves
of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rain-
bow runs on the waves of the sea, and cleaves
asunder the darkness. What thou beholdest is.
thine. The heavens are thine. There is nought
equal to thy glory. But thou thyself, what feelest
thou? What dost thou of thyself create? Woe
unto thee! Who gave thee thy base life, so false
that thou canst feign an angelic moment ere thou
wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent thou
descendest to crawl and stifle in the slime? Thou
sufferest, albeit thy pain shall create nought, shall
avail nought. Thou destroyest only those who
have consecrated themselves to thee, who have
become the living voices of thy glory. Blessed is
he in whom thou hast dwelt, invisible, unheard.
He will love man, and stand out as a man amidst
his brothers. "
For the author of the play, said Mickiewicz,
while commenting on this description of poetry,
"poetry is not an art, not an amusement. He
has painted here the picture of the power of a soul
which flings itself entirely into its imagination,
and which believes it possesses all things, but
which is lost because it uses this gift of heaven
for its own pleasure. . . . True poetry, among the
Greeks themselves, signified nothing else except
action. What does the Polish author ask? That
the most initiated souls, the highest, the strongest,
those that communicate with the Divinity,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 115
should reserve all their strength to act instead of
speaking. "*
This preface, then, not only explains the ideals
which actuated Krasinski, but it gives the clue to
his conception of Henryk, the poet, the egotist,
the dreamer, who is the chief character in the
Undivine Comedy. The first part of the drama,
with its subdued threatenings of the tempest that
is to engulf the world, is the domestic tragedy
of Henryk. The second part is the war of the
classes, where Henryk is the champion of an effete
and doomed aristocracy, and that culminates in
a universal ruin.
Henryk has lived upon his impressions and
cultivated his imagination at the expense of his
heart, till he has become nothing more than a
moral decadent, a poseur incapable of discerning
between true and false emotion. He marries, or,
as he expresses it, " descends to earthly marriage"
from his dreams. "Peace to men of good will,"
an angel proclaims over his roof on the eve of his
marriage; and Klaczko has pointed out that
Krasinski's first word to his people was this
message of good will, as, in his fifth Psalm of the
Future, it was to be well-nigh his last. f Salvation
is promised to Henryk on the condition that he
loves his wife: but the end of the marriage may
be easily foretold. Henryk soon wearies of the
loving, domestic woman, in whose soul no spark
of poetry resides--except, as Klaczko observes, the
poetry of a woman's devotion, a poetry truer than
* Adam Mickiewicz, op. cit.
+ Julian Klaczko, Le Pohte Anonyme de la Pologne. Revue des
Deux Mondes, Jan. ist, 1862.
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POLAND
any to which Henryk can lay claim. A demon
maiden who stands for Henryk's old poetic ideals
appears to him, tempting him from the side of
his wife.
"From the day of my marriage I have slept
the sleep of the torpid," says Henryk, turning
with loathing from the earthly woman; "the
sleep of a German manufacturer with a German
wife. I have gone round after relations, doctors,
shops ; and because a child is going to be born to
me, I have had to think about a nurse. "'
When the child is born it is the same story.
Henryk sits, morose and brooding, uttering short
thanks as his wife unwittingly plagues him with
the domesticities of the christening feast that is
to be celebrated. It is with a mingling of tender-
ness and fidelity to fact, strange in a boy of Kras-
inski's years, that he paints the wronged wife;
the one sympathetic figure, for all her want of
balance that ruins herself and her child, in a play
which exposes on one side a rotten aristocracy, on the
other savage and lawless revolutionaries. She is
pierced to the heart by her husband's indifference.
"To-day, yesterday," says she, " ah, my God,
and all the week, and now for three weeks, for a
month, you have net said a word to me, and
everybody I see tells me I look ill. "
"On the contrary, I think you look well. "
"It is all the same to you, because you don't
look at me now. You turn away when I come in,
and cover your eyes when I sit near you. Yester-
day I went to confession, and remembered all my
sins, and I could find nothing that could have
offended you. "
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 117
"You have not offended me. "
"~l feeFTought to love you. "
"You have given me the last blow with that
one ' I ought. ' Ah, better stand up and say, 'I
do not love you. ' At least I would then know all. "
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle.
"Do not forsake him. Love my child, my child. "
"Don't pay any attention to what I said. I
often have bad moments. "
"I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him. "
"You and him too. "
He kisses her, and she clings to him. The demon
maiden again enters, still the symbolization of
Henryk's poetical fancies. The wife shrieks in
terror. Henryk thrusts her aside, and disappears
after the ghost.
The christening feast is held: a lugubrious
festivity, for the father is absent, no one knows
where, and the guests look curiously at the wild
and pallid aspect of the mother. No softer or
pitying thought can be discerned in these vapid,
selfish spectators--the men who will be called to
defend their order in a perishing world. The
distraught mother invokes upon the infant's head,
as he is baptized, her curse if he does not become
a poet, so that he may gain the father's love which
has been refused to her. The guests see that some-
thing unpleasant has occurred, and promptly
leave the disagreeable scene. The pompous,
stupid godfather--one of the most admirably
drawn types in the play--utters a conventional
speech over the baby's cradle, exhorting him to
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? ii8 POLAND
civic virtues, and to the love of his country. The
orator himself does his best to save his own life
in the end by abandoning a sinking cause.
In the course of time Henryk returns. He has
been lured by the demons to the brink of a preci-
pice, and there abandoned amidst their laughter.
He comes back to find his house desolate, his wife
in a lunatic asylum. The scene in the madhouse
between him and the wife is handled with an
extraordinary power. On all sides, above and
below, ring the cries of the insane; wild and blas-
phemous ravings, prophetical of the convulsion
of the world which will be the second part of the
Undivine Comedy. Into these break the gentle,
incoherent babblings of the wife. She tells Henryk
that she has won the gift of poetry by her prayers.
She falters out limping verses of her composition.
She promises him that his son will be a poet.
Finally, she dies in her husband's arms, happy
because she breathed her last with him by her
side. The characterization of Henryk is throughout
true and consistent. He is shocked at the result
of his conduct to his wife. He does what he can
as he sits beside her in the asylum; and the genius
of Krasinski in the portrayal of a character is
perhaps never more manifest than when he shows
what that passionless and inefficient best of
Henryk's amounts to. Outbursts of remorse or
of enthusiasm can be heard from Henryk's
lips at the appropriate moments; and across
them cuts a hidden voice from somewhere with
the taunt or the admonition, whichever it may
be: "Thou composest a drama. " The fact is
that Henryk has so long toyed with emotion that
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI
119
he himself cannot by now distinguish between
genuine and false feeling. The reader instinctively *
suspects and remains unmoved, even in Henryk's
apparently impassioned speech; whereas every
word of the wife's is spoken out of the depths of
a woman's heart, carrying its sure appeal. In this
lies part, at least, of the strange and subtle force
of the Undivine Comedy.
There is one more test left in Henryk's domestic
life. The angel, on the eve of his wedding, had
promised him salvation if he loved his wife. The
same angel, when he stood on the brink of the
abyss whither the demon had led him, promised
him salvation if he returned and loved his son.
There remains, then, the child, the strange, mourn-
ful child who sees visions and talks to his dead
mother. ! He is said to be the reminiscence of
Krasinski's own shadowed childhood. His blind-
ness is described with the psychology of intimacy,
for while Krasinski wrote the play he was nearly
blind himself. The son's hallucinations are the
embodiment before his father's eyes of the lattef's
punishment, of the spirit of poetry in its destruc-
tive form. The child is the type of a soul that is
too weak to cope with a difficult world, whose only
refuge is in dreams, and whose death is as unneces-
. Whatever Henryk's egoism, Krasinski was too'
great an artist to paint him without affection for
an only son. f His knowledge of human nature
rather chose to represent the decadent husband,
. who wearied of an uninteresting and domestic
wife, as a selfish but not indifferent father of a son
* J. Klaczko, op. cit, + J. Kleiner, op, cit.
sary as his life had been futile. *
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POLAND
who was, after all, part of himself. The child is
doomed by the physician to incurable blindness.
"Thy son is a poet," calls the unknown voice.
"What more couldst thou desire? " But for
once Henryk's grief rings true. There is no pose
in his cry: "Is there no, no hope? "
He wanders in the mountains. What is left to
him? His family happiness, through his doing, is
shattered. His only child, the inheritor of his
house, is blind, and more or less mad. He has
tried philosophy, and all in vain. The society in
which he has been brought up is dissolving. He
has known every feeling " by name, and there is
no faith, hope or love left in me. " He has, indeed,
loved his son, but with the love of self that could'
not save him. Then the demon again appears to
him, this time under the form of an eagle repre-
senting ambition; and henceforth Henryk is
dominated by the lust of power.
Now begins the second part of the Undivine
Comedy. The revolution is let loose upon the
world. The remnants of the aristocracy, wretched,
boneless specimens, are making their last stand in
the fortress of the Trinity. Once, in the long past,
as we know from a poem of Krasinski's which,1
written after the Undivine Comedy, was intended
to be its introduction, and which remains un-
finished, Henryk had had his dreams of a people's
liberties. Now, not from conviction, for he is not
convinced, not from enthusiasm to a cause, for
his heart is too worn out to harbour enthusiasm,
but from the desire to play the part of a leader of
men and to go out with all eyes upon him, he is
the champion and the commander of the nobles.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI ". ; 121
Opposed to him is Pancracy, the head of the
revolutionaries. No softening element has ever
entered Pancracy's life. ,Nj|meless, he has grown
'up in jnisery, Jiunger, _toil. He will stop short of
nothing. His camp is a shambles, given up to
orgies of bloodshed and _licence, described in
scenes that_ are in p^rt-ikmnded,jwi-th? _e^esses
. of the French revolution, and in part on certain
[of the tenets of Saint-Simonism. That Krasinski
I had no want of sympathy with the oppressed
classes is obvious, from the pathos which he put
into the complaints of the men and women whose
whole existence had been a XQ-und 01 treadmill'
labour, unsweetened by any joy. But he saw no
hope for the future either in the effete ruling
class, or in a revolution where violence was" the
mistress. /Where love 1? not and where the heart'
is absent there can be no victory, according to
Krasinski. So he presents both aristocrat and
democrat with a like cold severity. So he figures
Pancracy as having his moments of wavering,
even as Henryk has. He caiyconvince others, but
not himself. Should he be able to win~Henryk
over TuiTconfidence will be assured, and the one
impediment to his triumph will be removed.
And so the two meet secretly in Henryk's
castle.
In this scene, Henryk's self-dramatization comes
out with startling clearness. His family escutcheons
hang on the walls about him. He summons now
the shades of his ancestors, now the God of his
fathers, to assist him in the interview. Pious
sentiments flow, from his lips.
He has assumed
the attitude of the defender of Christianity.
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POLAND
Religion is his aristocratic heritage--and it counts
for nothing else_in his life^^
Pancracy enters.
"I greet Count Henryk. That word 'Count'
sticks in my throat. If I am not mistaken, these
red and blue badges are called coats of arms in
the language of the dead. There are ever fewer
of such little dots on the face of the earth. "
Henryk: "With the help of God you will soon
see thousands of them. "
Pancracy: "There is my old nobility. Always
sure of themselves. Haughty, obstinate, flourish-
ing with hope, and without a farthing, without a
weapon, without soldiers, believing, or pretending
they believe, in God ; for it would be difficult to
believe in themselves! "
Henryk: "Atheism is an ancient formula, and
I expected something new from you. "
Pancracy: "I have a stronger, a mightier faith
than yours. The groans torn by despair and pain
from thousands of thousands, the hunger of
workmen, the misery of peasants, the shame of
their wives and daughters. That is my faith and
my God for to-day. "
Henryk: "I have placed my strength in the
God Who gave the government to my fathers. "
Pancracy: "And all your life you have been
the plaything of the devil. As for the rest, I
leave this discussion to theologians, if some pedant
of the trade still exists in the country. To business!
I came here because I wanted to know you, and,
in the second place, to save you. "
He attempts to move Henryk. The latter en-
trenches himself behind his sworn oath.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 123
"Knightly honour has come upon the scene,"
sneers Pancracy. "That is a faded rag on the
banner of humanity. Oh, I know you. You ally
yourself with the dying because you want to
deceive yourself, because you want to believe still
in caste, in the bones of your great-grandmothers,
in the word my country; but in the bottom of
your heart you know that the punishment is
owing to your brethren, and, after the punish-
ment, oblivion. "
Henryk: "And what else is there for you and
yours? "
Pancracy: "Victory and life. I only recognize
one law. That law is your destruction, and through
my lips it cries: 'Decrepit worms, full of food
and drink, yield to the young, the hungry and the
strong. '"
Then Pancracy paints the golden age which the
revolution will bring about. He speaks alike to the
nobler dreams that had been Henryk's in his
youth and to the poseur's weakest side:
"If you know how to reach immortality, if you
love truth and have sought it sincerely, if you are
a man in the pattern of humanity and not of
nursery rhymes, do not throw away this moment
of salvation. If you are what you once seemed to
be, rise up and follow me. "
For the moment, Henryk wavers. Pancracy's
words sound to his ear as the murmuring of the
"dead sea-shell " of his lost days. Even his spent
heart experiences a stab at the recollection of the
ideals that had gone from him. Meanwhile Pancracy
looks'on with the sarcastic comment--a sufficient
index that his appeal to Henryk was not that of a
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POLAND
deeply felt truth: "I have touched the nerve of
poetry. "
But neither can win over the other. The Un-
(divine Comedy is the drama of negation. No con-
version to an opposing side can enter within its
scope. *
Driven by hunger and panic, Henryk's adher-
ents, feeble to the end, drop away from his side.
The avenging, innocent witness, against whom the
husband and father can have no redress, leads
Henrylc mto the vaults of the castle, and recounts
to him the vision he sees of his father's damnation.
Voices of invisible spirits wail; "Because thou
hast loved n&ight save thyself, because thou hast
worshippeoVnought save thyself, thou art damned
. --damned for all eternity. " All hope is gone. The
enemies are at the gate. The son is slain by a
chance shot at his father's feet; but Henryk can
still exult that his own life will go down in a blaze
of glory. The fortress is captured. Henryk stands
poised for a moment in the sight of his foes on
the ramparts above the precipice. "Poetry, be
. thou cursed by me, as I shall be cursed for all
eternity," is his last cry; and, with hands out-
stretched as a swimmer about to plunge, he leaps
down into the darkness. .
The victory, then, is with Pancracy. One by
one, he sweeps off the miserable survivors of the-
t>ld order to the death, which they face with the
same want of fortitude that characterized their
lives. He stands, as Henryk stood, on the ramparts.
Wherever his gaze rests he beholds the new world
he has created. Then, on a sudden, he cries aloud
* St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI
to his companion. For, above the cloud on fire
with the light of the setting sun, appears to him,
and him alone, a sign of terror. He sees One Who
rises:
"As a pillar of snow-white brilliance above
the precipices. Both hands lean on the cross as the
avenger's on his sword. Of wreathed thunderbolts
is the crown of thorns. From the lightning of
that glance he must die who lives. Put thy hands
on my eyes. Smother my eyeballs with your fists'
Part me from that look that shatters me to dust.
Thy hands are transparent as water, transparent
as glass, transparent as air. I see still! Give me if
only a crumb of darkness! Darkness--darkness!
Galihee, vicisti! "
He falls dead, and the Undivine Comedy ends.
? What remains? Nothing except a ruined world,
where every living thing has gone down in^lhe
pwaters of destruction and desolation. Klaczko has
said that the Undivine Comedy is "a^fareweH'
|rather than a greeting addressed by the poetTto
I humanitarian inspirations, a strong protest against
the ^ataT Illusion of the age which believes it can
regenerate humanity without having first regen-
erated the man, and establish universal right
without having first strengthened the individual
Tin his duties. "* It is this moral, deep down, be-
'neath the surface, and the dramatic conclusion,
told in a few scathing sentences, that redeem the
Undivine Comedy from being an expression' of
unrelieved pessimism, and that give the link without
~ which Krasinski's subsequent work might seem
a far cry from the play of his ,yduth. He saw
* J. Klaczko, op. cit. s'
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POLAND
a world where two opposing forces disputed for
its mastery. He saw, albeit he does not speak in
the Undivine Comedy with that certainty of his
maturer years which suffering taught him, still
he saw that final triumph lay with neither, but
beyond. *
The Undivine Comedy resembles nothing that
Krasinski ever wrote again. Not only does its
curious terseness give it a place apart in the pro-
duction of a poet, whose literary sin is a tendency
to over ornamentation and elaboration; but its''
unbroken dreariness, its pessimism, are not charac-
teristic of Krasinski as a writer. Devoured by
sadness all his life, never expecting and never
finding personal happiness, he yet looked with
confidence to the resurrection of his nation; and,
deep as are the accents of sorrow that breathe
through his poetry, the keynote of that poetry is
hope. f
II
The idea of Irydion came to Krasinski before
that of the Undivine Comedy; but the latter was
finished first. During the years that the poet was
writing Irydion his life was racked with passion,
and he could not complete it till 1836.
In 1830, in the days preceding the Rising, he
wandered about the Coliseum, then the most
* Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
t Lord Lytton's Orval is a sort of paraphrase of Krasinski's
Undivine Comedy. Taken from a French rendering1, it is in no
sense a translation, but rather a version of Krasinski's story with
scarcely any resemblance to the. Polish original.
I may add that I am preparing a translation of the Undivint
Comedy direct from the Polish.
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 127
poetical of ruins, dreaming by moonlight. His
dreams slowly took shape in the form of the Greek
who plotted in Rome for the overthrow of the
empire that had enslaved his country, and who
was given his sentence at the foot of the cross in
the Flavian amphitheatre. The first time that
Krasinski returned to Poland, after he had left it
as a boy, was in 1832. He stayed a few weeks in
his home; and was then obliged by his father to
spend the winter with him in Petersburg. That
winter was one of Krasinski's dreariest remem-
brances. He was overcome with grief at the fate
of Poland, lonely and desolate of soul in the
capital of Russia, parted from all his friends with
whom--Polish exiles as they were--he might not
correspond. To Reeve alone could he write, albeit
with strict reserve, because the letters were read
by the censor, and also because the condition of
his eyes frequently compelled him to dictate his
correspondence. More or less blind, he could do
nothing but remain all the winter shut up in one
room, with no occupation or distraction except
his father's visits and his own meditations, and
that one painful and perilous audience with
Nicholas I. , which he has told under an allegorical
form in his Temptation. Under these circumstances,
he evolved the conception of Irydion, his Thought,
as he always called it. The Pole in Petersburg put
his feelings into the son of Hellas who trod the
streets of Rome with rage in his heart. Yet the
teaching of Irydion is that hatred for the oppressor
will compass the destruction of the nation that
employs it, and that iove, and only love, is the
constructive force of a downtrodden people.
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? 128
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POLAND
Unable for his father's sake to speak openly,'
unable for his own sake to do so in days when
frank language was liable to send writer, as well
as reader, to Siberia, Krasinski couched his mean-
1 ing under a symbolism where he who ran might
read.
The morals that Krasinski urges upon his
countrymen are invariably forgiveness ajjd love;
but his confidences to his intimate friends lay
bare the nature of the battle that he fought against
himself. His heart, as a young man, was swept by
a storm of hatred for those who had brought
misery upon his nation. He wrote--in 1831--to
Henry Reeve:
"You, a free man, a man born free, you cannot
understand the feelings of a man whose ancestors
were as free as you, but who is himself an oppressed
slave. You have never seen a young and beautiful
woman weeping hot tears for the loss of her
honour, torn from her by the brutality of a con-
queror. You have never heard the chains quiver-
ing around the arms of your compatriots. In the
night, the sounds of lamentations have not made
you start from your sleep, you have not risen on
your pillow, you have not listened half asleep to
the wheels jolting on the pavement, the wheels
of the cart that carried your relation, your friend,
to the snows of Siberia. You have not been forced
to hear a hard, rough language thrust on a people
who did not understand it. You have not caught
a glimpse of the haggard faces of your brothers
through the grating of a prison. Round the winter
hearth, you have never been told how such a one
disappeared, how another was condemned, how
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 129
this village was burnt, that town sacked, and all
Praga drowned in the blood of its inhabitants,
children flung palpitating on the frozen, stiff
breasts of their mothers. . . You have not followed
on the map the desolation of your country, till
it was at last overwhelmed under the weight of
the oppressors. To you everything has spoken of
peace, happiness, forgetfulness. That is why
hatred appears so hideous to you. -Hatred was the
companion of my childhood. I hateawith all the
strength of my little heart before I loved either'
a woman or friend. It is an element which has
mingled with my nature and which has become
a part of my being. "'*V I
To a Polish friend, better able than the pros-
perous young Englishman to understand the
strength of the temptation, Krasinski confided
that his sympathies were with Irydion, the hater
and the avenger, and that only logic and necessity
led him to the conclusion of love triumphant
that makes the moral grandeur of the play.
"What is, is," he added. " It is not our caprices
'that rule the world, but the mind of God. "t
Irydion represents the victory of Krasinski's
higher self, a life-giving truth spoken from the
anguish of one Pole to the anguish of thousands
. of Poles.
The length of the drama, the elaboration of.
the style, the wealth of detail that, indeed, at times
somewhat overlays the main purpose, are in
? Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski et de Henry Steve,
Paris, 1902. Letter of Krasinski to Reeve, Nov. 18, 1831.
t Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol, I. fo Constantine Ga>>z-
ynski, June 6, 1837,
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle.