His
strength
is in his will and
brain, in the compelling and ruthless mind that no
softer influence can bend aside.
brain, in the compelling and ruthless mind that no
softer influence can bend aside.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
This is the lure of all
others most calculated to ensnare him.
"Be thou what thou mayest," cries he, his vanity on fire:
"false or true, victory or destruction, I will believe in thee,
emissary of glory. "
He flings away a viper that crosses his path.
"Go, mean reptile," says he contemptuously, re-
garding it as the emblem of the lower orders that are to
rise against those who have held them in thrall. They
shall be crushed, and perish unmourned and ingloriously
even as this adder.
But before Henryk takes up his part as a soldier
and leader of men, his domestic drama, together with
the curse that has fallen upon the child, must be worked
out. The short remaining scenes of this division of the
play could not have been what they are were it not
that Krasinski put into the figure of the blind, dis-
traught child two facts of his own life. Almost blind
himself while he was writing The Undivine Comedy,
and under the terror of the lifelong and total darkness
that then threatened him, Krasinski describes George's
blindness from the internal evidence of personal ex-
perience. The other point, the son's inheritance from his
mother of a sick brain, touched him closely also, al-
though in the play he presented it under dimensions that
were never approached in his own case. He, too, in-
herited from his mother an overstrained nervous fancy,
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? ii2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that was the cause of intense suffering to him, and
against which he was strongly warned by his father as
against a hereditary disease. The Undivine Comedy may
be looked upon, apart from its many other aspects, as a
painful study of heredity.
The father has summoned the doctor to examine
George's eyes. This doctor, with his formalism and his
dry want of sympathy with what he considers merely
an interesting case, is of a piece with the other per-
sonages in the grey world of Krasinski's drama.
Husband. Nothing has done him any good. My last hope
is in you.
Doctor. I am greatly honoured. -
Husband. Tell the gentleman what you feel.
George. I can't see you, father, or this gentleman any
more. Sparks and black threads are running before my eyes1.
Sometimes a thing like a little, thin snake comes out from
them--and then it becomes a yellow cloud. The cloud flies
up, then falls down, a rainbow breaks out of it. And that
doesn't hurt me at all.
Doctor. Stand in the shade. He looks at his eyes. Now
turn to the window. (To George) You can laugh at this.
You will be as sound as I am. (To the Husband) There is
no hope. There is an entire failure of the optic nerve.
George. A mist has come over everything--everything.
Doctor. His brain has ruined his body. Catalepsy is to be
apprehended.
Husband {leading the doctor aside). All you ask--half my
fortune.
Doctor. Disorganization cannot be reorganized.
Husband. Have pity on me, do not leave us yet.
Doctor. Perhaps you would be interested to know the
name of this disease?
Husband. And is there no, no hope?
Doctor. It is called in Greek: amaurosis. (Hegoes out. )
Husband (clasping his son to his breast). But you do still
see something?
George. I hear your voice, father.
1 In letters to his friends Krasinski described his own blindness in
exactly similar terms.
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? The Undivine Comedy 113
Husband. Look at the window. There is the sun, the
beautiful weather.
George. A crowd of figures swarm between my eyes and
eyelids. I see faces I have seen, places I know, pages of books
I have read.
Husband. Then you do still see?
George. Yes, with the eyes of my soul, but the others have
gone out.
The Husband falls on his knees. A moments silence.
Husband. Before whom have I knelt? Where can I de-
mand the redressal of my child's wrong? {Rising. ) Rather let
us keep silence. God laughs at prayers, Satan at curses.
Then again is heard the unknown, inexorable voice:
"Thy son is a poet. What more dost thou desire? "
Now reappears the godfather, pompous and banal
as ever. The years since we last saw him have left him
unchanged. His type does not change.
"Certainly it is a great misfortune to be blind," is his brilliant
remark to the doctor who has been called in to investigate
the strange mental condition of the boy. "He had always a
delicate constitution, and his mother died rather--rather--a bit
cracked. "
Husband {entering). I must apologize for calling you at
such a late hour, but for some days my unfortunate son has
waked about midnight, got up and talked in his sleep.
Doctor. I am very curious to see this phenomenon.
They go to the bedroom. The relations gather
round to look on at another curious family spectacle
and to comment on it in almost the same terms that
they had used when watching the child's mother.
A Relation. Hush.
A Second. He has awakened, and doesn't hear us.
Doctor. Pray do not speak, gentlemen.
Godfather. This is a most extraordinary affair.
First Relation. How slowly he walks!
Another. His eyelids do not flicker. He scarcely opens his
lips, and yet a shrill, long-drawn out voice comes from them.
Servants. Jesus of Nazareth!
George. Off from me, darkness! I was born the son of
light and song. I will not yield myself to you, though my
G.
8
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? 114 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
sight has fled with the winds and wanders somewhere in space:
but it will one day return, rich in the rays of the stars, and
will set my eyes aflame with its fires.
Godfather. He babbles, not knowing what he says, just
like his dead mother. This is a very remarkable sight.
Doctor. I agree with you.
Nurse. Our most holy Lady of Czenstochowa, take my
eyes and give them to him!
George. Oh, my mother, I beseech you, send me thoughts
and pictures so that I can live within my soul, so that I can
create a second world within myself, equal to the world that
I have lost.
A Relation. Do you think, brother, this requires a family
council?
George. You do not answer me. Oh, mother, do not leave me!
Doctor (to the Husband). It is my duty to tell you the
truth.
Godfather. So it is. It is a duty--and the virtue of doctors.
Doctor. Your son's senses are disordered. He has con-
jointly an abnormal excitement of the nerves which often
causes, so to say, a condition of being asleep and awake at the
same time, a state similar to that which we see here.
Husband {aside). Oh, God, he seeks to explain Thy
judgment.
The room is cleared. George wakes, hearing the
confused goodnights of the departing guests. His
father soothes him, tells him that the doctor has pro-
mised the return of his sight, and leads him back to bed
with a tenderness he never showed his mother. The
boy sleeps: and Henryk pours out over him the lamen-
tation, partly sincere but partly turned with an artist's
eye for effect, that brings the history of his private life
to an end.
Let my blessing rest on thee. I can give thee nothing more,
neither happiness, nor light, nor fame: and the hour has struck
when I must go to war, when I must act with a few men
against many. Where wilt thou take refuge, thou, alone, blind,
powerless, child and poet in one, sad singer with none to
listen to thee, thy soul living beyond the confines of the earth,
and thy body chained to earth--oh, thou unhappy, unhappiest
of angels, oh, thou my son?
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? CHAPTER VI
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY:
THE SOCIAL DRAMA
The second division of The Undivine Comedy, con-
sisting of Parts III and IV, is devoted to the great
upheaval of which we have at intervals caught the
ground-swell in the foregoing scenes. The storm has
burst, with no transition from the normal to the
deluge: a transformation, the truth of which none of us
who have witnessed the greatest cataclysm in history
can deny.
In the third and fourth parts of the drama the world
is nothing but a battlefield between the opposing classes
of humanity. The representatives of the old order of
things, or the aristocrats, with such dependents as care
to remain with them, have been driven into their last
stronghold, the fortress of the Trinity. The leader of
a dying and rotten society is Henryk. We have called
one division of The Undivine Comedy the domestic, and
the other the social, drama: but in reality there is no
cleavage between them. Henryk still figures under one
name only, that of the "Husband. " The curse of his
marriage is always with him. The man who failed in
every branch of his intimate life will fail in the mastery
over other men. The poet who, to quote Klaczko's
expression, "sought impressions, not truth1," will break
down when confronted with the crisis. He plays the
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne.
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? 116 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part he has longed to play, that of the commander of an
army. Well-sounding phrases fall as usual from his
lips; but he has none of the conviction of the justice of
his cause that either sweeps all before it, or that takes
the sting from defeat. He fights, knowing that his side
is doomed, without the grandeur of a forlorn hope. At
least he will be the chief actor on the world's stage till
the curtain goes down for ever. More--he is a poet:
and the picturesque trappings of tradition are with the
past. There is no artistic beauty in a future represented
by a mob of infuriated men and women, haggard with
toil and want.
The opponent to Henryk is the man of action,
Pankracy. Where H enryk is the impersonation of imagi-
nation without heart, Pankracy is that of cold reason,
equally without heart. With no family ties to sweeten
life, he has dragged himself up from childhood in
poverty and misery.
His strength is in his will and
brain, in the compelling and ruthless mind that no
softer influence can bend aside. That such a man
will gain the day over Henryk is self-evident. His
triumph is doubly assured from the character of their
respective followers. Henryk's party consists of mere
inert decadents, whereas the revolutionaries have be-
hind them the strength of rage and ferocity. But in
Krasinski's system the heart is the creative and life-
giving power of humanity. Without it, the mind can
only bring forth inefficiency and destruction. There-
fore like Henryk, Pankracy has neither faith nor fire.
The grandeur of a noble ideal and its wholehearted
service is looked for in vain from The Undivine Comedy.
Were it there the play would be false to its name and
intention. This is in part the explanation of Pankracy's
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? The Undivine Comedy
secret moments of vacillation: but also, as Mickiewicz
remarks, how many great leaders have not known
doubt of their own cause at given instants1!
The prologue to the third part, the least happy of
the four prologues, gives a sketch of the revolutionary
camp and a short description of the person of Pankracy,
of his icy face and his strange magnetism over his
followers. Here we see too one of his Jewish ad-
herents. These, in reality, are only biding their time
to turn with fury against their new masters. When the
third part begins, the bloody work of Pankracy's camp
is in full swing. Certain of these scenes are based on
those of the French Revolution. This part of the drama
has also for a foundation Krasinski's ideas on the logical
conclusions of Saint-Simonism. Knives are being
sharpened for the massacre of the nobles, cords prepared
by which they shall swing on the gallows. Pankracy
has despatched a Jew to treat with Henryk for a secret
interview. Leonard, the youth who alone of all the
personages in The Undivine Comedy is possessed of
true ardour, brutal as it is in its manifestations, enters
Pankracy's tent and reproaches him with his inaction.
What is the use of these half measures, these negotiations?
When I swore to admire you and to listen to you it was because
I held you for the hero of latter times, for the eagle flying
straight at his aim, for the man staking himself and all his on
one card.
Pankracy. Silence, boy.
Leonard. All are ready. The Jews have forged weapons
and woven cords. The crowds are shouting and calling for the
command. Give the command, and it will run like a spark, like
lightning, and change into flame and pass into a thunderbolt.
Pankracy. The blood is mounting to your head. It is the
consequence of your age, and you do not know how to cope
with it, and you call it enthusiasm.
1 A. Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? 118 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Leonard. The feeble aristocracy have shut themselves up in
the Trinity, and are awaiting our arrival like the knife of the
guillotine. Forward without delay, and have done with them!
Pankracy. It is all the same. They have lost their physical
strength in pleasures, their mental strength in sloth. To-
morrow, or the day after to-morrow, they must perish.
Leonard. Of whom are you afraid? Who is keeping you back?
Pankracy. No one. Only my will.
Leonard. You are betraying us.
Pankracy. Like a refrain in a song, so treason comes in at
the end of every speech of yours. Don't shout, because if any-
one overheard us--
Leonard. No spies are here, and what if they were?
Pankracy. Nothing--only five balls in your breast, because
you dared to raise your voice one note higher in my presence.
Believe me. Be at peace.
Leonard. I confess I was carried away: but I am not afraid
of the penalty. If my death can serve as an example, and
add strength and weight to our cause, command it.
Pankracy. You are full of life, full of hope, and you believe
sincerely. Happiest of men, I will not deprive you of life.
Pankracy has set his mind upon meeting Henryk in a
private conference, ostensibly to win him over to his
side, in reality because if he can convince the one man
who stands in opposition to him he can convince himself.
"Why," so he soliloquizes in solitude, "does that one man stand
in the way of me, the leader of thousands? His strength is little
in comparison with mine--a few hundred peasants, blindly be-
lieving his word, attached to him with the love of their domestic
beasts. He is a wretched being, he is a cypher. Why do I long
to see him, to lure him over? Is it that my spirit has met its
equal and has halted for a moment? He is the last obstacle
against me in these plains. He must be overthrown, and then
--My mind, why canst thou not deceive thyself as thou de-
ceivest others? Shame on thee, for thou knowest thine aim;
thou art mind--the ruler of the people. In thee is gathered
the will and power of all, and what is a crime for others is thy
glory. Thou hast given names to mean, unknown men. Thou
hast given a faith to men without feeling. Thou hast created
a new world around thee; and thou thyself wanderest and
knowest not what thou art. No, no! Thou art great. "
Meanwhile, Henryk is in his element. He is in a
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? The Undivine Comedy 119
position to attract all eyes. He goes to the war not from
any sense of honour or obligation, but as to a wild and
romantic poem1. He re-enters the scene, disguised in
a heavy cloak, with the red cap of liberty on his head,
compelling a Jew to guide him through the hostile camp
and show him all there is to be seen. This journey where
the poet is led by a double-faced traitor through what
Dr Kallenbach calls the Walpurgis-night of a brutal,
revolting humanity is, says the same writer, an ironical
travesty of Dante's pilgrimage with Virgil in The
Divine Comedy, and the motive of Krasinski's change
of title from the original one, The Husband, to that of
the comedy that was not divine2.
Henryk and the Jew are concealed in a wood, near
a meadow where a gibbet has been erected. Tents are
pitched. Camp fires are blazing. The bottle passes
from hand to hand. One by one, bands of the different
classes of men and women who have been victims for
centuries of tyranny and greed, come out and dance
around the gibbet, singing and clamouring for blood.
Bread, money, wood to burn in winter, rest in summer!
Hurrah! Hurrah! God did not have pity on us. Kings did
not have pity on us. The lords did not have pity on us. To-
day we will return thanks to God, kings and lords for our
service.
Husband (to a girl). I am glad you are so rosy and merry.
Girl. Well, and it's because we've waited long for such a
day. I was always washing plates, scouring forks with a dish-
cloth. I never heard a kind word. And now it is time, time,
that I myself should eat, I myself should dance.
Husband. Dance, citizeness.
Jew (softly). For pity's sake, your illustrious lordship. Some-
body might recognize you.
Husband. If anybody recognizes me, then you will die.
Let us go on further.
1 J. Klaczko, Le Poite Anonyme de la Pologne.
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.
others most calculated to ensnare him.
"Be thou what thou mayest," cries he, his vanity on fire:
"false or true, victory or destruction, I will believe in thee,
emissary of glory. "
He flings away a viper that crosses his path.
"Go, mean reptile," says he contemptuously, re-
garding it as the emblem of the lower orders that are to
rise against those who have held them in thrall. They
shall be crushed, and perish unmourned and ingloriously
even as this adder.
But before Henryk takes up his part as a soldier
and leader of men, his domestic drama, together with
the curse that has fallen upon the child, must be worked
out. The short remaining scenes of this division of the
play could not have been what they are were it not
that Krasinski put into the figure of the blind, dis-
traught child two facts of his own life. Almost blind
himself while he was writing The Undivine Comedy,
and under the terror of the lifelong and total darkness
that then threatened him, Krasinski describes George's
blindness from the internal evidence of personal ex-
perience. The other point, the son's inheritance from his
mother of a sick brain, touched him closely also, al-
though in the play he presented it under dimensions that
were never approached in his own case. He, too, in-
herited from his mother an overstrained nervous fancy,
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? ii2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that was the cause of intense suffering to him, and
against which he was strongly warned by his father as
against a hereditary disease. The Undivine Comedy may
be looked upon, apart from its many other aspects, as a
painful study of heredity.
The father has summoned the doctor to examine
George's eyes. This doctor, with his formalism and his
dry want of sympathy with what he considers merely
an interesting case, is of a piece with the other per-
sonages in the grey world of Krasinski's drama.
Husband. Nothing has done him any good. My last hope
is in you.
Doctor. I am greatly honoured. -
Husband. Tell the gentleman what you feel.
George. I can't see you, father, or this gentleman any
more. Sparks and black threads are running before my eyes1.
Sometimes a thing like a little, thin snake comes out from
them--and then it becomes a yellow cloud. The cloud flies
up, then falls down, a rainbow breaks out of it. And that
doesn't hurt me at all.
Doctor. Stand in the shade. He looks at his eyes. Now
turn to the window. (To George) You can laugh at this.
You will be as sound as I am. (To the Husband) There is
no hope. There is an entire failure of the optic nerve.
George. A mist has come over everything--everything.
Doctor. His brain has ruined his body. Catalepsy is to be
apprehended.
Husband {leading the doctor aside). All you ask--half my
fortune.
Doctor. Disorganization cannot be reorganized.
Husband. Have pity on me, do not leave us yet.
Doctor. Perhaps you would be interested to know the
name of this disease?
Husband. And is there no, no hope?
Doctor. It is called in Greek: amaurosis. (Hegoes out. )
Husband (clasping his son to his breast). But you do still
see something?
George. I hear your voice, father.
1 In letters to his friends Krasinski described his own blindness in
exactly similar terms.
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? The Undivine Comedy 113
Husband. Look at the window. There is the sun, the
beautiful weather.
George. A crowd of figures swarm between my eyes and
eyelids. I see faces I have seen, places I know, pages of books
I have read.
Husband. Then you do still see?
George. Yes, with the eyes of my soul, but the others have
gone out.
The Husband falls on his knees. A moments silence.
Husband. Before whom have I knelt? Where can I de-
mand the redressal of my child's wrong? {Rising. ) Rather let
us keep silence. God laughs at prayers, Satan at curses.
Then again is heard the unknown, inexorable voice:
"Thy son is a poet. What more dost thou desire? "
Now reappears the godfather, pompous and banal
as ever. The years since we last saw him have left him
unchanged. His type does not change.
"Certainly it is a great misfortune to be blind," is his brilliant
remark to the doctor who has been called in to investigate
the strange mental condition of the boy. "He had always a
delicate constitution, and his mother died rather--rather--a bit
cracked. "
Husband {entering). I must apologize for calling you at
such a late hour, but for some days my unfortunate son has
waked about midnight, got up and talked in his sleep.
Doctor. I am very curious to see this phenomenon.
They go to the bedroom. The relations gather
round to look on at another curious family spectacle
and to comment on it in almost the same terms that
they had used when watching the child's mother.
A Relation. Hush.
A Second. He has awakened, and doesn't hear us.
Doctor. Pray do not speak, gentlemen.
Godfather. This is a most extraordinary affair.
First Relation. How slowly he walks!
Another. His eyelids do not flicker. He scarcely opens his
lips, and yet a shrill, long-drawn out voice comes from them.
Servants. Jesus of Nazareth!
George. Off from me, darkness! I was born the son of
light and song. I will not yield myself to you, though my
G.
8
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? 114 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
sight has fled with the winds and wanders somewhere in space:
but it will one day return, rich in the rays of the stars, and
will set my eyes aflame with its fires.
Godfather. He babbles, not knowing what he says, just
like his dead mother. This is a very remarkable sight.
Doctor. I agree with you.
Nurse. Our most holy Lady of Czenstochowa, take my
eyes and give them to him!
George. Oh, my mother, I beseech you, send me thoughts
and pictures so that I can live within my soul, so that I can
create a second world within myself, equal to the world that
I have lost.
A Relation. Do you think, brother, this requires a family
council?
George. You do not answer me. Oh, mother, do not leave me!
Doctor (to the Husband). It is my duty to tell you the
truth.
Godfather. So it is. It is a duty--and the virtue of doctors.
Doctor. Your son's senses are disordered. He has con-
jointly an abnormal excitement of the nerves which often
causes, so to say, a condition of being asleep and awake at the
same time, a state similar to that which we see here.
Husband {aside). Oh, God, he seeks to explain Thy
judgment.
The room is cleared. George wakes, hearing the
confused goodnights of the departing guests. His
father soothes him, tells him that the doctor has pro-
mised the return of his sight, and leads him back to bed
with a tenderness he never showed his mother. The
boy sleeps: and Henryk pours out over him the lamen-
tation, partly sincere but partly turned with an artist's
eye for effect, that brings the history of his private life
to an end.
Let my blessing rest on thee. I can give thee nothing more,
neither happiness, nor light, nor fame: and the hour has struck
when I must go to war, when I must act with a few men
against many. Where wilt thou take refuge, thou, alone, blind,
powerless, child and poet in one, sad singer with none to
listen to thee, thy soul living beyond the confines of the earth,
and thy body chained to earth--oh, thou unhappy, unhappiest
of angels, oh, thou my son?
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? CHAPTER VI
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY:
THE SOCIAL DRAMA
The second division of The Undivine Comedy, con-
sisting of Parts III and IV, is devoted to the great
upheaval of which we have at intervals caught the
ground-swell in the foregoing scenes. The storm has
burst, with no transition from the normal to the
deluge: a transformation, the truth of which none of us
who have witnessed the greatest cataclysm in history
can deny.
In the third and fourth parts of the drama the world
is nothing but a battlefield between the opposing classes
of humanity. The representatives of the old order of
things, or the aristocrats, with such dependents as care
to remain with them, have been driven into their last
stronghold, the fortress of the Trinity. The leader of
a dying and rotten society is Henryk. We have called
one division of The Undivine Comedy the domestic, and
the other the social, drama: but in reality there is no
cleavage between them. Henryk still figures under one
name only, that of the "Husband. " The curse of his
marriage is always with him. The man who failed in
every branch of his intimate life will fail in the mastery
over other men. The poet who, to quote Klaczko's
expression, "sought impressions, not truth1," will break
down when confronted with the crisis. He plays the
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne.
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? 116 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part he has longed to play, that of the commander of an
army. Well-sounding phrases fall as usual from his
lips; but he has none of the conviction of the justice of
his cause that either sweeps all before it, or that takes
the sting from defeat. He fights, knowing that his side
is doomed, without the grandeur of a forlorn hope. At
least he will be the chief actor on the world's stage till
the curtain goes down for ever. More--he is a poet:
and the picturesque trappings of tradition are with the
past. There is no artistic beauty in a future represented
by a mob of infuriated men and women, haggard with
toil and want.
The opponent to Henryk is the man of action,
Pankracy. Where H enryk is the impersonation of imagi-
nation without heart, Pankracy is that of cold reason,
equally without heart. With no family ties to sweeten
life, he has dragged himself up from childhood in
poverty and misery.
His strength is in his will and
brain, in the compelling and ruthless mind that no
softer influence can bend aside. That such a man
will gain the day over Henryk is self-evident. His
triumph is doubly assured from the character of their
respective followers. Henryk's party consists of mere
inert decadents, whereas the revolutionaries have be-
hind them the strength of rage and ferocity. But in
Krasinski's system the heart is the creative and life-
giving power of humanity. Without it, the mind can
only bring forth inefficiency and destruction. There-
fore like Henryk, Pankracy has neither faith nor fire.
The grandeur of a noble ideal and its wholehearted
service is looked for in vain from The Undivine Comedy.
Were it there the play would be false to its name and
intention. This is in part the explanation of Pankracy's
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? The Undivine Comedy
secret moments of vacillation: but also, as Mickiewicz
remarks, how many great leaders have not known
doubt of their own cause at given instants1!
The prologue to the third part, the least happy of
the four prologues, gives a sketch of the revolutionary
camp and a short description of the person of Pankracy,
of his icy face and his strange magnetism over his
followers. Here we see too one of his Jewish ad-
herents. These, in reality, are only biding their time
to turn with fury against their new masters. When the
third part begins, the bloody work of Pankracy's camp
is in full swing. Certain of these scenes are based on
those of the French Revolution. This part of the drama
has also for a foundation Krasinski's ideas on the logical
conclusions of Saint-Simonism. Knives are being
sharpened for the massacre of the nobles, cords prepared
by which they shall swing on the gallows. Pankracy
has despatched a Jew to treat with Henryk for a secret
interview. Leonard, the youth who alone of all the
personages in The Undivine Comedy is possessed of
true ardour, brutal as it is in its manifestations, enters
Pankracy's tent and reproaches him with his inaction.
What is the use of these half measures, these negotiations?
When I swore to admire you and to listen to you it was because
I held you for the hero of latter times, for the eagle flying
straight at his aim, for the man staking himself and all his on
one card.
Pankracy. Silence, boy.
Leonard. All are ready. The Jews have forged weapons
and woven cords. The crowds are shouting and calling for the
command. Give the command, and it will run like a spark, like
lightning, and change into flame and pass into a thunderbolt.
Pankracy. The blood is mounting to your head. It is the
consequence of your age, and you do not know how to cope
with it, and you call it enthusiasm.
1 A. Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? 118 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Leonard. The feeble aristocracy have shut themselves up in
the Trinity, and are awaiting our arrival like the knife of the
guillotine. Forward without delay, and have done with them!
Pankracy. It is all the same. They have lost their physical
strength in pleasures, their mental strength in sloth. To-
morrow, or the day after to-morrow, they must perish.
Leonard. Of whom are you afraid? Who is keeping you back?
Pankracy. No one. Only my will.
Leonard. You are betraying us.
Pankracy. Like a refrain in a song, so treason comes in at
the end of every speech of yours. Don't shout, because if any-
one overheard us--
Leonard. No spies are here, and what if they were?
Pankracy. Nothing--only five balls in your breast, because
you dared to raise your voice one note higher in my presence.
Believe me. Be at peace.
Leonard. I confess I was carried away: but I am not afraid
of the penalty. If my death can serve as an example, and
add strength and weight to our cause, command it.
Pankracy. You are full of life, full of hope, and you believe
sincerely. Happiest of men, I will not deprive you of life.
Pankracy has set his mind upon meeting Henryk in a
private conference, ostensibly to win him over to his
side, in reality because if he can convince the one man
who stands in opposition to him he can convince himself.
"Why," so he soliloquizes in solitude, "does that one man stand
in the way of me, the leader of thousands? His strength is little
in comparison with mine--a few hundred peasants, blindly be-
lieving his word, attached to him with the love of their domestic
beasts. He is a wretched being, he is a cypher. Why do I long
to see him, to lure him over? Is it that my spirit has met its
equal and has halted for a moment? He is the last obstacle
against me in these plains. He must be overthrown, and then
--My mind, why canst thou not deceive thyself as thou de-
ceivest others? Shame on thee, for thou knowest thine aim;
thou art mind--the ruler of the people. In thee is gathered
the will and power of all, and what is a crime for others is thy
glory. Thou hast given names to mean, unknown men. Thou
hast given a faith to men without feeling. Thou hast created
a new world around thee; and thou thyself wanderest and
knowest not what thou art. No, no! Thou art great. "
Meanwhile, Henryk is in his element. He is in a
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? The Undivine Comedy 119
position to attract all eyes. He goes to the war not from
any sense of honour or obligation, but as to a wild and
romantic poem1. He re-enters the scene, disguised in
a heavy cloak, with the red cap of liberty on his head,
compelling a Jew to guide him through the hostile camp
and show him all there is to be seen. This journey where
the poet is led by a double-faced traitor through what
Dr Kallenbach calls the Walpurgis-night of a brutal,
revolting humanity is, says the same writer, an ironical
travesty of Dante's pilgrimage with Virgil in The
Divine Comedy, and the motive of Krasinski's change
of title from the original one, The Husband, to that of
the comedy that was not divine2.
Henryk and the Jew are concealed in a wood, near
a meadow where a gibbet has been erected. Tents are
pitched. Camp fires are blazing. The bottle passes
from hand to hand. One by one, bands of the different
classes of men and women who have been victims for
centuries of tyranny and greed, come out and dance
around the gibbet, singing and clamouring for blood.
Bread, money, wood to burn in winter, rest in summer!
Hurrah! Hurrah! God did not have pity on us. Kings did
not have pity on us. The lords did not have pity on us. To-
day we will return thanks to God, kings and lords for our
service.
Husband (to a girl). I am glad you are so rosy and merry.
Girl. Well, and it's because we've waited long for such a
day. I was always washing plates, scouring forks with a dish-
cloth. I never heard a kind word. And now it is time, time,
that I myself should eat, I myself should dance.
Husband. Dance, citizeness.
Jew (softly). For pity's sake, your illustrious lordship. Some-
body might recognize you.
Husband. If anybody recognizes me, then you will die.
Let us go on further.
1 J. Klaczko, Le Poite Anonyme de la Pologne.
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.
