In his time young people read
and worshipped Walter Scott.
and worshipped Walter Scott.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
From the hour that I began
my Polish studies under his direction, twenty years ago,
until the outbreak of the war cut off all possibility of
communication between us, his help, his advice, his
unfailing sympathy, were ceaseless. He died in Poland
while the war was ravaging his country. It is to him
that as a small tribute of affection and gratitude for a
long and most precious friendship I dedicate this book.
May, 1919.
M. M. G.
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? CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
Note on the Pronunciation of Polish names . viii
CHAP.
I. The Initiation (1812-1829) . . . . I
II. The First Exile (1829-1830) . . . . 19
III. The Sacrifice (1830-1831) . . . . 38
IV. The Sowing of the Seed (1831-1834) . . 67
V. The Undivine Comedy: the domestic drama . 92
VI. The Undivine Comedy: the social drama . . 115
VII. Iridion 135
VIII. The Deviation: A Summer Night and The
Temptation (1836-1838) 169
IX. Before the Dawn: The Three Thoughts and The
Treatise of the Trinity (1839-1842) . . . 192
X. Dawn (1843) 219
XI. The Psalms of the Future: the Psalms of Faith,
of Hope, and of Love (1843-1847) ? ? ? 247
XII. To-Day, The Last, and the last Psalms of the
Future (1847-1848) 270
XIII. The Unfinished Poem 286
XIV. Resurrecturis: the Last Words of the Anony-
mous Poet (1851-1859) 304
Bibliographical Note 315
Index 317
Zygmunt Krasinski (after Ary Scheffer) Frontispiece
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? NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF
POLISH NAMES
C= English is.
Ch = the Scotch strongly aspirated ch.
Ci, 6= a very softly hissed sound between is
and the ordinary English ch in charm.
Cz = ch in charm.
Dz = j in jam.
J=y.
h, a letter peculiar to the Polish alphabet,
with a sound between an English u and w.
0 = oo as in mood.
Rz = French j as in je.
5, si = a very soft hissing j^.
5^ = j&
W=ff.
Z, zi = French j.
The stress in Polish is almost invariably on
the penultimate.
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? CHAPTER I
THE INITIATION
(1812-1829)
A biography of the great Polish poet, Zygmunt Kra-
sinski, is one that offers to its,writer no easy task. It
can concern itself but little with outward events; for of
such there are very few in Krasinski's life. The son of
a soldier, with the blood in his veins of men who had
helped to make the history of Poland, he was compelled
by the tragedy of circumstance to stand aside from what
is commonly, and perhaps erroneously, termed action.
Nor can a study on Krasinski be merely a piece of
literary criticism. With scarcely an exception Kra-
sinski's work, for all its high literary beauty, is the
organ of a great idea to which he regarded art as sub-
servient. The history of the poet, who during his life-
time was known only as the Anonymous Poet, and after
death had revealed his secret was, and is still, honoured
under the same title, is that of an overmastering thought
and of its development through a soul's travail. The
poet who began his career by being unable to write
verse ended it, by force of devotion to a cause, as one
of the three supreme singers in the magnificent literature
of Poland. The Pole who was driven to the brink of
despair by grief for his country, who spoke in his early
youth the language of pessimism, became the most
sublime teacher of his nation, the herald of hope, the
prophet of resurrection. The life of Krasinski, there-
G.
1
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? 2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
fore, resolves itself into the record of a moral conflict
and of the message that it wrung forth, which, primarily-
intended for the poet's own nation, yet appeals most
powerfully to all humanity and to the spiritual necessity
of every human soul.
It was in Paris on the nineteenth of February, 1812,
that Zygmunt Krasinski was born to a noble and wealthy
house; the greatly desired son of a marriage that, save
for an infant daughter who did not survive her birth,
had been childless for nine years. His family was re-
lated to the Royal House of Savoy. His mother was
a Radziwift, one of the oldest names in Lithuania,
written on nearly every page of Polish history. Behind
him stretched a distinguished line of ancestors; soldiers
who in the splendid, brilliantly coloured annals of Poland
had led their armies of retainers into the battle-fields
against Tartars, Turks, Russians; statesmen who had
rendered conspicuous service to their country.
The father of the poet, Wincenty Krasijjsjd^ like
so many Poles of his epoch, fought under Napoleon's
flag. Among the Polish legions, devoted by a chivalrous
and passionate attachment to Napoleon upon whom
they looked as the future saviour of their nation, Win-
centy Krasinski gained considerable distinction. He
was above all things a soldier, with a soldier's physical
courage and lightheartedness; vain, ambitious, and fond
of show. With his character and temperament those of
his only son were at life-long odds: and yet the con-
fidence and affection, proof against the bitterest of tests,
that united a wholly dissimilar father and son went so
deep as to be exceptional. Zygmunt's mother gave
him her plain face, her keen intelligence, her profound
religious sense, and the fatal inheritance of melan-
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? The Initiation
3
choly and disordered nerves that tormented him all his
life.
The conditions of Krasinski's infancy were strangely
inconsistent with those of the shadowed life that fol-
lowed. He entered the world amidst the clash of arms:
he was the little son of a regiment, the plaything of the
soldiers under Wincenty Krasinski's command. More-
over, he was born into that spring of high hope for the
Polish nation, of which Adam Mickiewicz sang as the
one year of gladness that he as a Pole had ever known.
Those were the days of Napoleon's march upon Russia
when all Poland enthusiastically hailed him as her de-
liverer. Wincenty Krasinski shared to its utmost the
devotion to Napoleon that even the betrayal of their
cause could never shake in the hearts of the Poles.
Zygmunt was brought up in the Napoleonic tradition.
Napoleon was the first of the five names which his
parents gave him, among which the Zygmunt that re-
mained by him came last; and in his childhood he was
called by a pet Polish diminutive, equivalent to "Little
Napoleon. " The Napoleon cult played a very large part
in the influences that shaped his views: and his final
solution of his national and spiritual enigmas was in
part based upon his theories of the Napoleonic con-
quests.
The downfall of Napoleon ended Wincenty Kra-
sinski's career in the Polish legions. In 1814 he re-
turned with his wife and child to the family palace in"
Warsaw; and, after the establishment of the autonomous
Kingdom of Poland by the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
he received a high command in the Polish army. The
childhood of Zygmunt Krasinski synchronized there-
fore with the last days in which his nation possessed
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? 4 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
any vestiges of freedom. The Kingdom had been
granted her own administration, her national army and
constitution under the Russian Tsar, crowned king of
Poland; but Krasinski was not out of his boyhood be-
fore the portents of tempest were fast gathering about
his country. Her rights were attacked by Russia on
every side, her liberties outraged. There could be but
one end:--the Rising of 1830.
Although Krasinski was the idol of both his parents
his childhood, even before his mother's death, was no
happy one. He was brought up with as little relaxation
and as few amusements suited to his age as any prince
in a rigidly ceremonious court. The precocious brain
of the frail and highly-strung child was forced at a pace
that to our modern ideas seems frankly appalling. Be-
tween the father's ambition for his son and the peda-
gogic severity of the tutors, the delicate boy, despite
his mother's entreaties, was kept at his lessons for the
greater part of the day. Both head and heart were too
soon developed. At four years old, the pretty, little
ringleted boy, in the low-necked frock and high sash
of the pre-Victorian era, such as we see him in a
charming early portrait, recited to Alexander I at the
latter's request verses of his own choosing: and with
eyes fastened on the Tsar of all the Russias he spouted
Brutus's defence of democracy from Voltaire. A child
of seven, he made courtly repartees to the Dowager
Empress. Clear signs of the acute sensitiveness and
strong affections that were his characteristics through
life already foretold the future. In his childish sick-
nesses his entreaty was that his invalid mother must
not know what he was suffering.
Nor could Zygmunt Krasinski carry away from his
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? The Initiation 5
home the remembrance of a domestic hearth united by
deep family attachment such as we find in the free,
happy, boyish days of Adam Mickiewicz. He was the
chief bond between his parents. Their marriage had not
been a love-match. Although the high moral character
of his mother was unimpeachable, her melancholy, her
forebodings, her nervous petulance, her jealousies--for
which her husband, gay, handsome, younger than her-
self, gave her good reason--made her no easy inmate
of a household. Long before her death she retired from
society, a mental and physical invalid, and occupied
herself with the religious and moral training of her boy.
She died in 1822, when Zygmunt was ten years old, of
the lung disease that he inherited: her parting wish
for her son, recorded in her will, being that he might
grow up a good Christian and a good Pole.
It is said that the grief of the orphaned child was
far more profound than that of his father for his dead
wife. But what between the detestation with which
Wincenty Krasinski has been regarded by many of his
fellow-Poles and the white-washing process by which
others have defended his memory, it is difficult to arrive
at a correct judgment upon a character that was, more-
over, in itself one of contradictions. All agree that to
supply the loss of a mother's love he redoubled his
fondness to the child. Father and son spent hours
together in the General's private room. There Win-
centy taught his son the national history. He spoke
to him at length of the glorious deeds of his ancestors
whose portraits, hanging round the walls of the palace
such as the poet later described in a famous scene of
his Undivine Comedy, impressed upon the boyish mind
the realization of the patriotic inheritance and obliga-
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? 6 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
tions of his house. Krasinski was, in fact, brought up
in the spirit of devoted attachment to his country. This
close intimacy between the soldier and his son deepened
the latter's enthusiastic hero-worship for a father who
had fought so gallantly himself for Poland1. It stands
out with the most tragic significance when the trial of
Zygmunt Krasinski's life swept down upon him. Be-
yond his father's love all the tenderness that Krasinski
knew as a motherless boy was supplied by a French
governess, to whom in his letters after he had reached
manhood he always alludes with strong affection. His
father's mother, it is true, lived in the palace; but her
presence introduced no motherly or womanly influence
into her young grandson's lonely life. H er rigid severity
was the terror of her servants and all who approached
her, and had early driven her son when a youth from
home.
Such was the environment of Krasinski's childhood.
His attainments were so far beyond his years that when
he had reached the age of twelve his father invited the
most learned men and best teachers in the country to put
his son through an elaborate examination in his palace.
It is consoling to learn that as a reward for his brilliant
performance in an ordeal of which, badgered and over-
worked as he was, he entertained no agreeable re-
membrance, his father gave him a gun; and the one
pleasingly childish picture that stands out from an un-
natural childhood is that of a little boy going out with
wild joy, in the short holiday that was allowed him, to
shoot partridges and ducks in his country estate.
In the chapel of that country home--Opinog6ra--
Krasinski's mortal remains now lie. The happiest
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski Lw6w, 1904 (Polish).
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? The Initiation
7
moments of his boyhood were passed there. The long,
plain house, built on one story, stood on a low hill, and
was encircled by a flat, marshy landscape. Although the
scenery was dreary and monotonous, it inspired Zygmunt
with romantic fancies.
In his time young people read
and worshipped Walter Scott. Inevitably, therefore, the
ruins of a castle near the mansion filled Krasinski's head
with the dreams of bygone history, common to all poetic
boys. But in his case they took a strong national colour-1
ing, tinged by the melancholy of the Pole looking back
to the great past of his dismembered country, and seeing
around him the life and death struggle of his nation to
preserve even that shred of liberty that was still hers.
He describes these surroundings of Opinogora in a
sketch that he wrote when he was sixteen. His manner
of expression is the conventional one of a boy of his age;
but the deep patriotic feeling behind it is significant.
I mused in this castle. I laid my gun upon the ground,
and recalled the history of my country. The wind at times
broke the silence. At times the raven with its ill-omened
voice recalled the unhappiness of the present. The moon,
rising behind the clouds, often found me leaning on an insen-
sate stone, deep in old times. The rays of heaven's torch
flowed on me and, suffusing with a mournful light the
remnants of ancient glory, struck upon fallen stones, on
wreathing plants, and when they chanced on fragments of a
sword or armour, flowing in fiery streams, they seemed to
rejoice that in a land of slavery they had met with the traces
of our freedom of yore.
Oh, thou, freedom, exiled from this land, inspire my strains,
and, if thou mayest not be in our native country, take refuge
in our hearts, and beautify these feeble songs with thy divine
accords. (The Lord of the Three Hillocks. 1828. )
When Krasinski had turned fourteen, he was sent
to the Warsaw Lyceum to prepare for the University.
Everything in his unwholesome training had been cal-
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? 8
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
culated to encourage in an impressionable childish mind
an overweening self-estimation. Yet all his life Kra-
sinski was singularly free from the slightest tendency
to vanity. Morbid and introspective as he undoubtedly
was, egotism was unknown to him. He idealized others,
himself never. His human sympathies that made him
the most generous, the tenderest of friends were far
from being stifled in the mental forcing-house of a
necessarily self-absorbed childhood. He gave his whole
heart to those he loved with an unreserved devotion.
He made friendships that endured for life with the boys
who were his school companions: notably, with Kon-
stanty. Gaszynski. The latter is known in Polish lite-
rature as a graceful and patriotic poet, albeit of no very
marked order. An exile after the Rising of 1830 in
which he fought, the victim like the majority of his
Polish contemporaries of bitter afflictions1, he became
one of Krasinski's closest intimates and constant com-
panion, at times the amanuensis during his blindness.
To Gaszynski, in the long series of letters that began
in early youth and ended only when the pen fell from
his dying hand, Krasinski poured out his sorrows,
his confidences, his passion for his country with a self-
abandonment expressive of the entire sympathy that
reigned between them.
There is little of note in Krasinski's year at school.
He worked well, and entered the University of War-
saw in the autumn of 1827.
The plunge of the fifteen-year-old boy into Univer-
sity life was not in reality so great a change from the
1 The mother to whom he wrote a touching sonnet in their separation
was shot by Russian soldiers on the doorstep of her house. His last years--
after the death of Krasinski--were darkened by the national tragedies fol-
lowing the Rising of 1863.
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? The Initiation
9
school benches as it appears. At that time the students
at the University were hedged in by such strict regu-
lations that they were more like schoolboys than what
we should call undergraduates. Young Krasinski was a
lively, witty, turbulent boy, troublesome to his professors,
touchy and quarrelsome with his colleagues. . In class
hours he was under strict discipline; but at home,
during the frequent absence of his father, he was com-
pletely left to his own devices. The atmosphere of the
palace when Wincenty Krasinski was there was one of
social brilliance and a festive coming and going. Loving
display and popularity, Wincenty Krasinski kept open
house, and gave weekly dinners at which the guests
were men of distinction in the world of politics and
letters. Zygmunt was too young to take part in these
reunions; but the accounts of the literary discussions
that went on there, reported to him by Gaszynski who,
several years his elder, was present at them, added
fresh fire to his burning ambition to write1. When the
master of the house was absent, the palace sank into
a petrified stillness and tedium. According to Krasin-
ski's letters to his father, the only sounds that broke
the dragging silence of the long winter days and nights
Were the howling of the wind and the storm shaking
the silver on the table2. He sat for hours in his grand-
mother's room, dull and bored, irritated by her ill humour,
trying, as he says, to please her by reading aloud to
her. His leisure time he spent in writing crude stories
after Walter Scott and falling in love.
It was no doubt inevitable that a poetically minded
and precocious boy, left so much alone, should have
worshipped at the shrine of a handsome young woman,
1 J. Kallenbach, op. cit. 2 Ibid. .
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? io The Anonymous Poet of Poland
a good many years older than himself, with whom he
was thrown into close contact. His cousin, Amelia
Zatuska, a ward of Wincenty Krasinski, was staying
under the protection of his roof while her husband was
in prison with other Polish nationalists in the famous
affair, to which we shall return. She looked upon Zyg-
munt as a young brother: but he, believing himself to
be in love with her, lived in constant and feverish agi-
tation. Watching her every mood, he worked himself
up, mentally and physically, into a condition of un-
natural excitement and exaltation, for which he after-
wards, in letters to Henry Reeve, bitterly blamed
himself. He ruined his already overstrung nerves by
inordinate tea drinking, diluted with rum. He read to
excess poetry and romance. With no one to control his
proceedings, he sat up late into the night, writing
stories. One of these, The Grave of the Reichstals, he
saw when he was only sixteen printed in a Polish paper,
probably through the complaisance of the editor who
was a friend of his father. His father was not only the
confidant of his first literary attempts ; he was also their
somewhat unsparing critic. It speaks much for the
unusually intimate relations between father and son
that we find Zygmunt solemnly offering his Lord of
the Three Hillocks to the General, sending him his
manuscripts, and describing to him minutely his pro-
jected characters and plots. The father frankly thought
the story presented to him poor stuff, and his son's
absorption in his pen waste of time.
The great romantic revival in Polish literature was
just then setting in, with Adam Mickiewicz as its chief
and magnificent spokesman. While Krasinski was still
a boy in his father's house, Mickiewicz, fourteen years
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? The Initiation
11
his senior, had already entered into his exile in Russia.
His words and movements were under the supervision
of the Russian police ; his genius was held in shackles;
and yet he wrote his Konrad Wallenrod. Using the
figure of the struggle of Lithuania against the Teutonic
Knights he told a tale, understood by every Pole who
read it, of the vengeance to which an oppressed nation
may be forcedl. The poem was given to young Kra-
sinski by a cousin. He too was in his turn to write, on
widely different lines, of the son of a conquered race
preparing the destruction of the victor. But neither he
nor those around him could have guessed that the boy
of brilliant intellect, indeed, but with no capacity for
writing poetry, who read with ecstasy Mickiewicz's
splendid verse set against a great patriotic theme, was
to stand with the author of Konrad Wallenrod as one
of the trinity of Poland's most inspired poets. Knowing
as we do that the basis of Krasinski's future teaching
was the abjuration of revenge and hatred it is instruc-
tive to note how, when a youth, lurid Byronic avengers,
albeit not Byron but Walter Scott was Krasinski's
first love, always took his fancy. He chose them for
the heroes of his own novels : and, speaking of Konrad
Wallenrod to his father, he records the fascination
exercised upon him by the patriot whose weapons are
those of treachery and undying hatred. With the sadly
ripe experience of the Polish boy living under a foreign
yoke, he adds: "All the poem breathes grief and sad-
ness, the grief that is so appropriate to us2. "
In after years, when circumstances had not only
driven him from his home, but robbed it of all joy for
1 See my Adam Mickiewicz, Dent, 1911.
2 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
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? 12 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
such short periods as he ever unwillingly returned to it,
Krasinski looked back yearningly to those hours of his
youth, the last before the catastrophe struck his life.
Gaszynski was his frequent visitor. The two talked
endlessly in Krasinski's room, or hunted, or roamed the
countryside round Opinogora. The "pipe era": so
Krasinski in his later letters to Gaszynski fondly calls
this part of his life from a joke they shared together.
Forbidden by his father to smoke, Zygmunt enjoyed a
pipe on the sly with Gaszynski till the General gave in;
when Gaszynski, finding Krasinski celebrating the
victory by smoking like a chimney, scrawled on the
mantelpiece in high glee : " Hail, era of the pipe! "
The end of 1828 saw Krasinski in a University
scrape, of a rather mild description, though it was taken
very seriously by the authorities. H eaded by K rasinski's
friend, Leo iaabienskL a band of youths stamped down
one of the professors to mark their disapproval of the
public reprimand of a student. Krasinski was foremost
among the ringleaders, and was sent to prison for two
days. Thence he scrawled on his blotting-paper re-
pentant letters to his father, promising that he would
never do such a thing again. "Please forgive me," he
writes in a very chastened frame of mind: "I solemnly
swear that I will keep my given word1. "
With this, our last, glimpse of a boyhood free from
tragedy, we may close the account of Krasinski's early
years. If we have dwelt somewhat at length upon their
influences and circumstances, it is because these were
of extraordinary significance to his subsequent history,
and because, at the same time, the character that his
life shows us is in strange--in noble--contradiction to
1 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
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? The Initiation
13
many of them. The paradox is part of the complex
personality of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Those national events were now going forward
which changed the whole tenor of Krasinski's life, and
precipitated his country into the Rising and its long
and mournful sequel. The promises given by Alexan-
der I had fallen to the ground. The history of the
Kingdom of Poland had resolved itself into one
desperate struggle on the part of the Poles to preserve
their guaranteed rights. In 1825 Alexander died. He
had begun his career as a liberal ruler and the friend of
Poland. He ended it as a weak reactionary who had
violated the liberties that he had solemnly pledged
himself to respect. On his death the famous Decem-
brist rising broke out in Petersburg. The Russian
Liberals--those friends of Mickiewicz whose fate he
has mourned in one of the most tragic of his poems--
died on the gallows or were sent to the mines.
The Russian government then discovered that in
touch with the Russian Liberals there existed a
patriotic society in Poland, whose object was the
restoration of Polish independence. The leaders were
sent to join the numbers of their fellow-Poles who were
already languishing in the prisons: and Nicholas I
demanded their trial by the Senate of the Polish Diet.
They were brought before this tribunal. Bielinski
presided over it, and among its members sat Wincenty
Krasinski.
The Polish court was between two most difficult
alternatives. It must either obey the will of the Tsar
and condemn to death men who had been guilty of no
crime except the desire of their national restoration;
or it must declare the innocence of the accused, and
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? 14 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
thereby, by placing the nation in direct opposition to
the Tsar, jeopardize the very existence of the Kingdom,
where conditions were by now unworkable and strained
to the last point. It was manifestly impossible for a
Polish tribunal to brand as criminals Poles whose only
aim had been that of Polish independence. After a long
and intricate process, those who were convicted of
actual knowledge of the Russian Decembrist plot were
condemned to varying terms of imprisonment. The
remaining members of the patriotic association, amidst
the acclamations of the whole nation, were liberated.
One, and only one, member of the court voted for
the death sentence. That man was the father of
Zygmunt Krasinski. Opinions differ as to his motives.
Some say that he yielded to the dictates of his ambitious
and time-serving nature, and was determined to stand
well with the Tsar. Again, his friends maintain that he
saw the danger of Poland irrevocably losing that which
was still hers to lose if she and the Tsar came to
conflict on this matter. But, whichever of these judg-
ments be correct, the immediate result of his conduct
was a storm of execration that gathered against him.
Many of those who had been his best friends and the
most habitual intimates of his house would never set
foot again in the Krasinski palace.
The decision of the tribunal was given in the end
of 1828. In March, 1829, gielinski, who had been its
president, died. All Warsaw determined to honour him
by following his coffin to the grave. The funeral in
fact was to be a great national demonstration. The
University authorities, fearing a scene at this highly
delicate and critical moment, gave orders that the
students should not attend the obsequies, but should be
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? The Initiation
15
present at the lectures as usual. When the day came,
every student--with one exception--followed the bier
of the dead patriot, and, with wild enthusiasm, rushed
upon the coffin and tore pieces from the pall as relics.
The lecture halls were empty--still with the exception
of one student. That student was Zygmunt Krasinski.
I n obedience to his father's command, the unhappy boy,
in dumb despair and rage, sat alone in the class-room,
while all his compatriots mourned at the grave of the
man who had defended Poland. It seems difficult to
conceive how a father, who was most fondly attached
to his son, could have had the cruelty to expose an
abnormally sensitive and intensely patriotic boy to such
a position. It is said that his vanity, always his master-
passion, was pricked by the knowledge of the unpopu-
larity that he had brought upon himself, and that he
was in consequence resolved to brave the opinions of
his countrymen1.
On the following day Zygmunt went to the lectures
as usual. There was never any lack of physical courage
in his character, and he showed no outward sign of the
mortal dread that must have filled his soul. As he
entered the class-room, crowded not only by students
but also by a public audience, a murmur of disapproba-
tion greeted him, only silenced by the entrance of
the professor. It must be remembered that it was a
time of great national tension when patriotic ardour,
especially among the young men, ran at fever heat. In
the eyes of these boy companions of Krasinski, many
of whom in less than two years were to fall fighting for
Poland, who, moreover, naturally could not enter into
1 Count Stanistaw Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski, Cracow, 1892
(Polish).
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? 16 The A nonymous Poet of Poland
the extraordinarily difficult situation in which Krasin-
ski was placed, both father and son were equally some-
thing like renegades to the Polish cause.
my Polish studies under his direction, twenty years ago,
until the outbreak of the war cut off all possibility of
communication between us, his help, his advice, his
unfailing sympathy, were ceaseless. He died in Poland
while the war was ravaging his country. It is to him
that as a small tribute of affection and gratitude for a
long and most precious friendship I dedicate this book.
May, 1919.
M. M. G.
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? CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
Note on the Pronunciation of Polish names . viii
CHAP.
I. The Initiation (1812-1829) . . . . I
II. The First Exile (1829-1830) . . . . 19
III. The Sacrifice (1830-1831) . . . . 38
IV. The Sowing of the Seed (1831-1834) . . 67
V. The Undivine Comedy: the domestic drama . 92
VI. The Undivine Comedy: the social drama . . 115
VII. Iridion 135
VIII. The Deviation: A Summer Night and The
Temptation (1836-1838) 169
IX. Before the Dawn: The Three Thoughts and The
Treatise of the Trinity (1839-1842) . . . 192
X. Dawn (1843) 219
XI. The Psalms of the Future: the Psalms of Faith,
of Hope, and of Love (1843-1847) ? ? ? 247
XII. To-Day, The Last, and the last Psalms of the
Future (1847-1848) 270
XIII. The Unfinished Poem 286
XIV. Resurrecturis: the Last Words of the Anony-
mous Poet (1851-1859) 304
Bibliographical Note 315
Index 317
Zygmunt Krasinski (after Ary Scheffer) Frontispiece
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? NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF
POLISH NAMES
C= English is.
Ch = the Scotch strongly aspirated ch.
Ci, 6= a very softly hissed sound between is
and the ordinary English ch in charm.
Cz = ch in charm.
Dz = j in jam.
J=y.
h, a letter peculiar to the Polish alphabet,
with a sound between an English u and w.
0 = oo as in mood.
Rz = French j as in je.
5, si = a very soft hissing j^.
5^ = j&
W=ff.
Z, zi = French j.
The stress in Polish is almost invariably on
the penultimate.
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? CHAPTER I
THE INITIATION
(1812-1829)
A biography of the great Polish poet, Zygmunt Kra-
sinski, is one that offers to its,writer no easy task. It
can concern itself but little with outward events; for of
such there are very few in Krasinski's life. The son of
a soldier, with the blood in his veins of men who had
helped to make the history of Poland, he was compelled
by the tragedy of circumstance to stand aside from what
is commonly, and perhaps erroneously, termed action.
Nor can a study on Krasinski be merely a piece of
literary criticism. With scarcely an exception Kra-
sinski's work, for all its high literary beauty, is the
organ of a great idea to which he regarded art as sub-
servient. The history of the poet, who during his life-
time was known only as the Anonymous Poet, and after
death had revealed his secret was, and is still, honoured
under the same title, is that of an overmastering thought
and of its development through a soul's travail. The
poet who began his career by being unable to write
verse ended it, by force of devotion to a cause, as one
of the three supreme singers in the magnificent literature
of Poland. The Pole who was driven to the brink of
despair by grief for his country, who spoke in his early
youth the language of pessimism, became the most
sublime teacher of his nation, the herald of hope, the
prophet of resurrection. The life of Krasinski, there-
G.
1
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? 2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
fore, resolves itself into the record of a moral conflict
and of the message that it wrung forth, which, primarily-
intended for the poet's own nation, yet appeals most
powerfully to all humanity and to the spiritual necessity
of every human soul.
It was in Paris on the nineteenth of February, 1812,
that Zygmunt Krasinski was born to a noble and wealthy
house; the greatly desired son of a marriage that, save
for an infant daughter who did not survive her birth,
had been childless for nine years. His family was re-
lated to the Royal House of Savoy. His mother was
a Radziwift, one of the oldest names in Lithuania,
written on nearly every page of Polish history. Behind
him stretched a distinguished line of ancestors; soldiers
who in the splendid, brilliantly coloured annals of Poland
had led their armies of retainers into the battle-fields
against Tartars, Turks, Russians; statesmen who had
rendered conspicuous service to their country.
The father of the poet, Wincenty Krasijjsjd^ like
so many Poles of his epoch, fought under Napoleon's
flag. Among the Polish legions, devoted by a chivalrous
and passionate attachment to Napoleon upon whom
they looked as the future saviour of their nation, Win-
centy Krasinski gained considerable distinction. He
was above all things a soldier, with a soldier's physical
courage and lightheartedness; vain, ambitious, and fond
of show. With his character and temperament those of
his only son were at life-long odds: and yet the con-
fidence and affection, proof against the bitterest of tests,
that united a wholly dissimilar father and son went so
deep as to be exceptional. Zygmunt's mother gave
him her plain face, her keen intelligence, her profound
religious sense, and the fatal inheritance of melan-
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? The Initiation
3
choly and disordered nerves that tormented him all his
life.
The conditions of Krasinski's infancy were strangely
inconsistent with those of the shadowed life that fol-
lowed. He entered the world amidst the clash of arms:
he was the little son of a regiment, the plaything of the
soldiers under Wincenty Krasinski's command. More-
over, he was born into that spring of high hope for the
Polish nation, of which Adam Mickiewicz sang as the
one year of gladness that he as a Pole had ever known.
Those were the days of Napoleon's march upon Russia
when all Poland enthusiastically hailed him as her de-
liverer. Wincenty Krasinski shared to its utmost the
devotion to Napoleon that even the betrayal of their
cause could never shake in the hearts of the Poles.
Zygmunt was brought up in the Napoleonic tradition.
Napoleon was the first of the five names which his
parents gave him, among which the Zygmunt that re-
mained by him came last; and in his childhood he was
called by a pet Polish diminutive, equivalent to "Little
Napoleon. " The Napoleon cult played a very large part
in the influences that shaped his views: and his final
solution of his national and spiritual enigmas was in
part based upon his theories of the Napoleonic con-
quests.
The downfall of Napoleon ended Wincenty Kra-
sinski's career in the Polish legions. In 1814 he re-
turned with his wife and child to the family palace in"
Warsaw; and, after the establishment of the autonomous
Kingdom of Poland by the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
he received a high command in the Polish army. The
childhood of Zygmunt Krasinski synchronized there-
fore with the last days in which his nation possessed
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? 4 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
any vestiges of freedom. The Kingdom had been
granted her own administration, her national army and
constitution under the Russian Tsar, crowned king of
Poland; but Krasinski was not out of his boyhood be-
fore the portents of tempest were fast gathering about
his country. Her rights were attacked by Russia on
every side, her liberties outraged. There could be but
one end:--the Rising of 1830.
Although Krasinski was the idol of both his parents
his childhood, even before his mother's death, was no
happy one. He was brought up with as little relaxation
and as few amusements suited to his age as any prince
in a rigidly ceremonious court. The precocious brain
of the frail and highly-strung child was forced at a pace
that to our modern ideas seems frankly appalling. Be-
tween the father's ambition for his son and the peda-
gogic severity of the tutors, the delicate boy, despite
his mother's entreaties, was kept at his lessons for the
greater part of the day. Both head and heart were too
soon developed. At four years old, the pretty, little
ringleted boy, in the low-necked frock and high sash
of the pre-Victorian era, such as we see him in a
charming early portrait, recited to Alexander I at the
latter's request verses of his own choosing: and with
eyes fastened on the Tsar of all the Russias he spouted
Brutus's defence of democracy from Voltaire. A child
of seven, he made courtly repartees to the Dowager
Empress. Clear signs of the acute sensitiveness and
strong affections that were his characteristics through
life already foretold the future. In his childish sick-
nesses his entreaty was that his invalid mother must
not know what he was suffering.
Nor could Zygmunt Krasinski carry away from his
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? The Initiation 5
home the remembrance of a domestic hearth united by
deep family attachment such as we find in the free,
happy, boyish days of Adam Mickiewicz. He was the
chief bond between his parents. Their marriage had not
been a love-match. Although the high moral character
of his mother was unimpeachable, her melancholy, her
forebodings, her nervous petulance, her jealousies--for
which her husband, gay, handsome, younger than her-
self, gave her good reason--made her no easy inmate
of a household. Long before her death she retired from
society, a mental and physical invalid, and occupied
herself with the religious and moral training of her boy.
She died in 1822, when Zygmunt was ten years old, of
the lung disease that he inherited: her parting wish
for her son, recorded in her will, being that he might
grow up a good Christian and a good Pole.
It is said that the grief of the orphaned child was
far more profound than that of his father for his dead
wife. But what between the detestation with which
Wincenty Krasinski has been regarded by many of his
fellow-Poles and the white-washing process by which
others have defended his memory, it is difficult to arrive
at a correct judgment upon a character that was, more-
over, in itself one of contradictions. All agree that to
supply the loss of a mother's love he redoubled his
fondness to the child. Father and son spent hours
together in the General's private room. There Win-
centy taught his son the national history. He spoke
to him at length of the glorious deeds of his ancestors
whose portraits, hanging round the walls of the palace
such as the poet later described in a famous scene of
his Undivine Comedy, impressed upon the boyish mind
the realization of the patriotic inheritance and obliga-
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? 6 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
tions of his house. Krasinski was, in fact, brought up
in the spirit of devoted attachment to his country. This
close intimacy between the soldier and his son deepened
the latter's enthusiastic hero-worship for a father who
had fought so gallantly himself for Poland1. It stands
out with the most tragic significance when the trial of
Zygmunt Krasinski's life swept down upon him. Be-
yond his father's love all the tenderness that Krasinski
knew as a motherless boy was supplied by a French
governess, to whom in his letters after he had reached
manhood he always alludes with strong affection. His
father's mother, it is true, lived in the palace; but her
presence introduced no motherly or womanly influence
into her young grandson's lonely life. H er rigid severity
was the terror of her servants and all who approached
her, and had early driven her son when a youth from
home.
Such was the environment of Krasinski's childhood.
His attainments were so far beyond his years that when
he had reached the age of twelve his father invited the
most learned men and best teachers in the country to put
his son through an elaborate examination in his palace.
It is consoling to learn that as a reward for his brilliant
performance in an ordeal of which, badgered and over-
worked as he was, he entertained no agreeable re-
membrance, his father gave him a gun; and the one
pleasingly childish picture that stands out from an un-
natural childhood is that of a little boy going out with
wild joy, in the short holiday that was allowed him, to
shoot partridges and ducks in his country estate.
In the chapel of that country home--Opinog6ra--
Krasinski's mortal remains now lie. The happiest
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski Lw6w, 1904 (Polish).
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? The Initiation
7
moments of his boyhood were passed there. The long,
plain house, built on one story, stood on a low hill, and
was encircled by a flat, marshy landscape. Although the
scenery was dreary and monotonous, it inspired Zygmunt
with romantic fancies.
In his time young people read
and worshipped Walter Scott. Inevitably, therefore, the
ruins of a castle near the mansion filled Krasinski's head
with the dreams of bygone history, common to all poetic
boys. But in his case they took a strong national colour-1
ing, tinged by the melancholy of the Pole looking back
to the great past of his dismembered country, and seeing
around him the life and death struggle of his nation to
preserve even that shred of liberty that was still hers.
He describes these surroundings of Opinogora in a
sketch that he wrote when he was sixteen. His manner
of expression is the conventional one of a boy of his age;
but the deep patriotic feeling behind it is significant.
I mused in this castle. I laid my gun upon the ground,
and recalled the history of my country. The wind at times
broke the silence. At times the raven with its ill-omened
voice recalled the unhappiness of the present. The moon,
rising behind the clouds, often found me leaning on an insen-
sate stone, deep in old times. The rays of heaven's torch
flowed on me and, suffusing with a mournful light the
remnants of ancient glory, struck upon fallen stones, on
wreathing plants, and when they chanced on fragments of a
sword or armour, flowing in fiery streams, they seemed to
rejoice that in a land of slavery they had met with the traces
of our freedom of yore.
Oh, thou, freedom, exiled from this land, inspire my strains,
and, if thou mayest not be in our native country, take refuge
in our hearts, and beautify these feeble songs with thy divine
accords. (The Lord of the Three Hillocks. 1828. )
When Krasinski had turned fourteen, he was sent
to the Warsaw Lyceum to prepare for the University.
Everything in his unwholesome training had been cal-
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? 8
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
culated to encourage in an impressionable childish mind
an overweening self-estimation. Yet all his life Kra-
sinski was singularly free from the slightest tendency
to vanity. Morbid and introspective as he undoubtedly
was, egotism was unknown to him. He idealized others,
himself never. His human sympathies that made him
the most generous, the tenderest of friends were far
from being stifled in the mental forcing-house of a
necessarily self-absorbed childhood. He gave his whole
heart to those he loved with an unreserved devotion.
He made friendships that endured for life with the boys
who were his school companions: notably, with Kon-
stanty. Gaszynski. The latter is known in Polish lite-
rature as a graceful and patriotic poet, albeit of no very
marked order. An exile after the Rising of 1830 in
which he fought, the victim like the majority of his
Polish contemporaries of bitter afflictions1, he became
one of Krasinski's closest intimates and constant com-
panion, at times the amanuensis during his blindness.
To Gaszynski, in the long series of letters that began
in early youth and ended only when the pen fell from
his dying hand, Krasinski poured out his sorrows,
his confidences, his passion for his country with a self-
abandonment expressive of the entire sympathy that
reigned between them.
There is little of note in Krasinski's year at school.
He worked well, and entered the University of War-
saw in the autumn of 1827.
The plunge of the fifteen-year-old boy into Univer-
sity life was not in reality so great a change from the
1 The mother to whom he wrote a touching sonnet in their separation
was shot by Russian soldiers on the doorstep of her house. His last years--
after the death of Krasinski--were darkened by the national tragedies fol-
lowing the Rising of 1863.
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? The Initiation
9
school benches as it appears. At that time the students
at the University were hedged in by such strict regu-
lations that they were more like schoolboys than what
we should call undergraduates. Young Krasinski was a
lively, witty, turbulent boy, troublesome to his professors,
touchy and quarrelsome with his colleagues. . In class
hours he was under strict discipline; but at home,
during the frequent absence of his father, he was com-
pletely left to his own devices. The atmosphere of the
palace when Wincenty Krasinski was there was one of
social brilliance and a festive coming and going. Loving
display and popularity, Wincenty Krasinski kept open
house, and gave weekly dinners at which the guests
were men of distinction in the world of politics and
letters. Zygmunt was too young to take part in these
reunions; but the accounts of the literary discussions
that went on there, reported to him by Gaszynski who,
several years his elder, was present at them, added
fresh fire to his burning ambition to write1. When the
master of the house was absent, the palace sank into
a petrified stillness and tedium. According to Krasin-
ski's letters to his father, the only sounds that broke
the dragging silence of the long winter days and nights
Were the howling of the wind and the storm shaking
the silver on the table2. He sat for hours in his grand-
mother's room, dull and bored, irritated by her ill humour,
trying, as he says, to please her by reading aloud to
her. His leisure time he spent in writing crude stories
after Walter Scott and falling in love.
It was no doubt inevitable that a poetically minded
and precocious boy, left so much alone, should have
worshipped at the shrine of a handsome young woman,
1 J. Kallenbach, op. cit. 2 Ibid. .
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? io The Anonymous Poet of Poland
a good many years older than himself, with whom he
was thrown into close contact. His cousin, Amelia
Zatuska, a ward of Wincenty Krasinski, was staying
under the protection of his roof while her husband was
in prison with other Polish nationalists in the famous
affair, to which we shall return. She looked upon Zyg-
munt as a young brother: but he, believing himself to
be in love with her, lived in constant and feverish agi-
tation. Watching her every mood, he worked himself
up, mentally and physically, into a condition of un-
natural excitement and exaltation, for which he after-
wards, in letters to Henry Reeve, bitterly blamed
himself. He ruined his already overstrung nerves by
inordinate tea drinking, diluted with rum. He read to
excess poetry and romance. With no one to control his
proceedings, he sat up late into the night, writing
stories. One of these, The Grave of the Reichstals, he
saw when he was only sixteen printed in a Polish paper,
probably through the complaisance of the editor who
was a friend of his father. His father was not only the
confidant of his first literary attempts ; he was also their
somewhat unsparing critic. It speaks much for the
unusually intimate relations between father and son
that we find Zygmunt solemnly offering his Lord of
the Three Hillocks to the General, sending him his
manuscripts, and describing to him minutely his pro-
jected characters and plots. The father frankly thought
the story presented to him poor stuff, and his son's
absorption in his pen waste of time.
The great romantic revival in Polish literature was
just then setting in, with Adam Mickiewicz as its chief
and magnificent spokesman. While Krasinski was still
a boy in his father's house, Mickiewicz, fourteen years
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? The Initiation
11
his senior, had already entered into his exile in Russia.
His words and movements were under the supervision
of the Russian police ; his genius was held in shackles;
and yet he wrote his Konrad Wallenrod. Using the
figure of the struggle of Lithuania against the Teutonic
Knights he told a tale, understood by every Pole who
read it, of the vengeance to which an oppressed nation
may be forcedl. The poem was given to young Kra-
sinski by a cousin. He too was in his turn to write, on
widely different lines, of the son of a conquered race
preparing the destruction of the victor. But neither he
nor those around him could have guessed that the boy
of brilliant intellect, indeed, but with no capacity for
writing poetry, who read with ecstasy Mickiewicz's
splendid verse set against a great patriotic theme, was
to stand with the author of Konrad Wallenrod as one
of the trinity of Poland's most inspired poets. Knowing
as we do that the basis of Krasinski's future teaching
was the abjuration of revenge and hatred it is instruc-
tive to note how, when a youth, lurid Byronic avengers,
albeit not Byron but Walter Scott was Krasinski's
first love, always took his fancy. He chose them for
the heroes of his own novels : and, speaking of Konrad
Wallenrod to his father, he records the fascination
exercised upon him by the patriot whose weapons are
those of treachery and undying hatred. With the sadly
ripe experience of the Polish boy living under a foreign
yoke, he adds: "All the poem breathes grief and sad-
ness, the grief that is so appropriate to us2. "
In after years, when circumstances had not only
driven him from his home, but robbed it of all joy for
1 See my Adam Mickiewicz, Dent, 1911.
2 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
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? 12 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
such short periods as he ever unwillingly returned to it,
Krasinski looked back yearningly to those hours of his
youth, the last before the catastrophe struck his life.
Gaszynski was his frequent visitor. The two talked
endlessly in Krasinski's room, or hunted, or roamed the
countryside round Opinogora. The "pipe era": so
Krasinski in his later letters to Gaszynski fondly calls
this part of his life from a joke they shared together.
Forbidden by his father to smoke, Zygmunt enjoyed a
pipe on the sly with Gaszynski till the General gave in;
when Gaszynski, finding Krasinski celebrating the
victory by smoking like a chimney, scrawled on the
mantelpiece in high glee : " Hail, era of the pipe! "
The end of 1828 saw Krasinski in a University
scrape, of a rather mild description, though it was taken
very seriously by the authorities. H eaded by K rasinski's
friend, Leo iaabienskL a band of youths stamped down
one of the professors to mark their disapproval of the
public reprimand of a student. Krasinski was foremost
among the ringleaders, and was sent to prison for two
days. Thence he scrawled on his blotting-paper re-
pentant letters to his father, promising that he would
never do such a thing again. "Please forgive me," he
writes in a very chastened frame of mind: "I solemnly
swear that I will keep my given word1. "
With this, our last, glimpse of a boyhood free from
tragedy, we may close the account of Krasinski's early
years. If we have dwelt somewhat at length upon their
influences and circumstances, it is because these were
of extraordinary significance to his subsequent history,
and because, at the same time, the character that his
life shows us is in strange--in noble--contradiction to
1 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
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? The Initiation
13
many of them. The paradox is part of the complex
personality of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Those national events were now going forward
which changed the whole tenor of Krasinski's life, and
precipitated his country into the Rising and its long
and mournful sequel. The promises given by Alexan-
der I had fallen to the ground. The history of the
Kingdom of Poland had resolved itself into one
desperate struggle on the part of the Poles to preserve
their guaranteed rights. In 1825 Alexander died. He
had begun his career as a liberal ruler and the friend of
Poland. He ended it as a weak reactionary who had
violated the liberties that he had solemnly pledged
himself to respect. On his death the famous Decem-
brist rising broke out in Petersburg. The Russian
Liberals--those friends of Mickiewicz whose fate he
has mourned in one of the most tragic of his poems--
died on the gallows or were sent to the mines.
The Russian government then discovered that in
touch with the Russian Liberals there existed a
patriotic society in Poland, whose object was the
restoration of Polish independence. The leaders were
sent to join the numbers of their fellow-Poles who were
already languishing in the prisons: and Nicholas I
demanded their trial by the Senate of the Polish Diet.
They were brought before this tribunal. Bielinski
presided over it, and among its members sat Wincenty
Krasinski.
The Polish court was between two most difficult
alternatives. It must either obey the will of the Tsar
and condemn to death men who had been guilty of no
crime except the desire of their national restoration;
or it must declare the innocence of the accused, and
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 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
? 14 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
thereby, by placing the nation in direct opposition to
the Tsar, jeopardize the very existence of the Kingdom,
where conditions were by now unworkable and strained
to the last point. It was manifestly impossible for a
Polish tribunal to brand as criminals Poles whose only
aim had been that of Polish independence. After a long
and intricate process, those who were convicted of
actual knowledge of the Russian Decembrist plot were
condemned to varying terms of imprisonment. The
remaining members of the patriotic association, amidst
the acclamations of the whole nation, were liberated.
One, and only one, member of the court voted for
the death sentence. That man was the father of
Zygmunt Krasinski. Opinions differ as to his motives.
Some say that he yielded to the dictates of his ambitious
and time-serving nature, and was determined to stand
well with the Tsar. Again, his friends maintain that he
saw the danger of Poland irrevocably losing that which
was still hers to lose if she and the Tsar came to
conflict on this matter. But, whichever of these judg-
ments be correct, the immediate result of his conduct
was a storm of execration that gathered against him.
Many of those who had been his best friends and the
most habitual intimates of his house would never set
foot again in the Krasinski palace.
The decision of the tribunal was given in the end
of 1828. In March, 1829, gielinski, who had been its
president, died. All Warsaw determined to honour him
by following his coffin to the grave. The funeral in
fact was to be a great national demonstration. The
University authorities, fearing a scene at this highly
delicate and critical moment, gave orders that the
students should not attend the obsequies, but should be
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 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 Initiation
15
present at the lectures as usual. When the day came,
every student--with one exception--followed the bier
of the dead patriot, and, with wild enthusiasm, rushed
upon the coffin and tore pieces from the pall as relics.
The lecture halls were empty--still with the exception
of one student. That student was Zygmunt Krasinski.
I n obedience to his father's command, the unhappy boy,
in dumb despair and rage, sat alone in the class-room,
while all his compatriots mourned at the grave of the
man who had defended Poland. It seems difficult to
conceive how a father, who was most fondly attached
to his son, could have had the cruelty to expose an
abnormally sensitive and intensely patriotic boy to such
a position. It is said that his vanity, always his master-
passion, was pricked by the knowledge of the unpopu-
larity that he had brought upon himself, and that he
was in consequence resolved to brave the opinions of
his countrymen1.
On the following day Zygmunt went to the lectures
as usual. There was never any lack of physical courage
in his character, and he showed no outward sign of the
mortal dread that must have filled his soul. As he
entered the class-room, crowded not only by students
but also by a public audience, a murmur of disapproba-
tion greeted him, only silenced by the entrance of
the professor. It must be remembered that it was a
time of great national tension when patriotic ardour,
especially among the young men, ran at fever heat. In
the eyes of these boy companions of Krasinski, many
of whom in less than two years were to fall fighting for
Poland, who, moreover, naturally could not enter into
1 Count Stanistaw Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski, Cracow, 1892
(Polish).
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 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
? 16 The A nonymous Poet of Poland
the extraordinarily difficult situation in which Krasin-
ski was placed, both father and son were equally some-
thing like renegades to the Polish cause.
