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Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 31
voicing of the sorrows, the hopes, the heroic
memories of his mother country.
While these words are written, Poland is the
battlefield of Eastern Europe. Her fields are laid
waste, her towns, her villages, her dwellings, are
in flames and ruin. Her sons, compelled to serve
under one or another of the three powers that
partitioned their nation, are forced to fight,
brother against brother, friend against friend, to
lay down their lives by thousands without the
consolation of dying for their country. Devastated
by a war in which her all is at stake and in which
she has no voice, the condition of Poland is the
most tragic in all Europe.
"Three days later," wrote in 1846 the poet
Zygmunt Krasinski to a fellow Pole, " the resur-
rection shall come; but during those days how
many hearts shall break. " *
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I, Lw6w, 1882. To Con-
it an tine Gaszynski, March 30, 1846 (Polish).
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? CHAPTER II
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE OF
POLAND
AFTER the Rising of 1830, the story of
Poland becomes that of the long agony
of an idealistic and profoundly patriotic
race, and of its protracted battle for existence.
On one side, in the country itself, the prisons and
the mines were the price the Pole paid for remain-
ing a Pole. On the other, beyond the frontiers,
there were the throngs of Polish exiles, dragging
out lives of poverty, homesickness, and grief. The
nation lived on; but her life was mutilated,
abnormal, unlivable.
And yet those years when Poland had no
history except a monotony of suffering, no life
except that life jealously preserved against pro-
scription and penalty in the heart of every Pole,
coincided with the splendid outburst of Polish
literature. Unlike the three great empires of the
world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose pros-
perity inspired their golden age of letters, it was
the sorrows of Poland that gave birth to her great
romantic song which, for its tragic power, its
idealism, no less than its haunting beauty, ranks
among the noblest productions of European art.
Great as is the literature of Poland from an
artistic point of view, it stands on another plane
than that of literary value alone. In the first half
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 33
of the nineteenth century, the Polish poets rose
as the national teachers and moral leaders. They
spoke to the people held in bondage by the bitterest
facts of life, of the hope that would save them.
The youths of Poland were prohibited from learn-
ing their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in
the ordinary channels. They learnt them, there-
fore, of the poets who taught them the lessons of
devotion and self-immolation for a native country;
whose writings kept alive the fires of patriotism,
the Polish ideality and moral health, in young
souls beset by peril. The national literature was
no mere art, an element disconnected with the
deep things of life, written for recreation or re-
laxation. It $poke straight to a stern purpose. It
was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any
that she could have chosen, in the cause of Poland.
In this light the Polish poets regarded the poetry
they gave their people. The literature they brought
forth is, said Mickiewicz, speaking in the College
de France, "above all things true. Each work is
at the same time an action. " * Poland's poets
were more than her poets. They were her
patriots.
The Pole in Poland might not read the master-
pieces of his native literature in normal ways.
were published abroad, often at no little risk to
the author. Colporteurs smuggled them into the
country. Boys read them behind barred doors,
with one of their number posted in the street to
give the alarm should the police be near. After
one hurried but intense perusal they were thrown
banned by the censor. They
* Adam ftjickiewici! , Its Slayes,
p
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? 34
POLAND
into the fire. Prison and Siberia were the lot of
those readers who were discovered. The possession
of Mickiewicz's Ancestors sent a boy of seventeen
to the dungeon, where, maddened with terror
lest under the knout he should betray the names
of his companions, he burnt himself to death.
Hundreds of young men went to Siberia for
having read Krasinski's Temptation. Often the
only means by which the Polish poet could speak
to his nation, with any degree of safety to himself
or to the reader, was under the protection of an
allegory or some sort of veiled meaning, where
the Pole could read between the lines. Mickiewicz,
in the heart of Russia, wrote an epic of the revenge
of the Lithuanian, Konrad Wallenrod, on the
Teutonic knights, the oppressors of his country.
Every Pole knew for whom the Teutonic knights
stood. Krasinski bade his compatriots abjure the
weapons of vengeance, and work by love alone;
but he did so under the figure of a Greek
in the Rome of Heliogabalus. He warned
the Polish women against marriage with the
enemies of their nation; and the language of his
Summer's Night is so obscure as almost to fail in
its aim. He sought to arm the Polish youth
against those seductions of the Imperial Court
that had laid their siege to his own soul in vain;
yet the elaboration with which he designedly
disguised his point could not avert the conse-
quences to his readers. Even in a poem as objective
as Slowacki's Father of the Plague-stricken, the
lamentation of the father over his children dying
in the desert is said to represent the desolation of
a bereaved country.
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? THE 'NATIONAL LITERATURE 35
Poland, then, was assailed from every side. In
anguish of mind her poets and her thinkers sought
for some explanation of her tragedy to justify
the working of Providence, to save their country
from the atrophy and despair that would destroy
her as certainly as all exterior persecution. So
arose the dreams of a Polish national mysticism,
known by the name of Messianism. Its strange
and mournful glory casts over Poland's poetry, in
the days of Mickiewicz and Krasinski, a faint
spiritual kinship with the prophecies of those who
saw Sion irradiated with a mystical splendour as
the adored of the nations. Poland, says Messianism,
was rent asunder that her destruction might bring
salvation to the human race. Out of the mysteries
of pain and death are born new life and resur-
rection. Death is the condition of resurrection.
The Saviour of mankind redeemed us by embracing
death, and after three days in the grave rose again.
So, in the political world, one nation has been
signalled out to lay down her life. Her sufferings
are the price by which the new and better epoch
of humanity shall come about. She will rise
gloriously to be the spiritual leader of that world,
where all nations and governments will be united
in Christ and rule in the spirit of Christ. Violence
against that spirit of Christ was committed
when so hideous a crime against man's rights as
the blotting out of a free nation from the land
of the living was perpetrated. The restoration of
that nation will therefore logically be a return to
the ideals of Christ, the first step to their realisa-
tion. Various of the Messianists looked to that
future period as the third epoch, the reign of
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? 36
POLAND
the Holy Ghost, thus presenting a curious link
with the tenets of Joachim of Flora.
Pushed to its extreme limits, the doctrines of
Polish Messianism tended to an exaggeration and
a falsity of outlook that were likely to prove in-
jurious to those for whose welfare they were
intended. But in its best form, propagated by
such a teacher as Krasinski, who made its promises
conditional on each individual's purity of soul,
it may be taken as a sublime spiritualization of
national suffering. The workings of Providence
were made clear. The dignity of a great calling
was conferred upon a downtrodden people. The
Poles were given an end for which to strive. The
light of hope was shed over the dark places of
grief.
"You all know, my brothers, that we were
born in the womb of death," says Krasinski in
his prose preface to Dawn. "Hence the eternal
pain that gnaws your hearts; hence the incerti-
tude that has become your life. But every end
contains already in itself the successive beginning;
the day of death but precedes the hour of waken-
ing. Look closely, and the signs of death will
suddenly change for you into the signs of resur-
rection. Our death was necessary; necessary will
be our resurrection; and the Word of the Son
of Man, the eternal word of life, shall be shed
through the social circumference of the world.
By our very nationality crucified on the cross of
history will be manifested to the conscience of
the human spirit that the political sphere must
be changed into a religious sphere. The Lord in
the whole political sphere, where hitherto He
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 37
was absent, will be present; and the vessel of
His providence to this end will be no other than
the Polish nation. "
"One of the two--either the blessed future of
humanity is forfeited, or the condition of its
fulfilment is the life of Poland. "
A This idea of the chosen race is the keynote of
'f:he great Messianistic poetry of Poland. As in
the Hebrew prophets, Jerusalem is the mystic
city, the object alike of patriotic and spiritual
passion: so the prophet poets of Poland looked
towards their country, not solely as the earthly
home for which they pined with the human long-
ing of the exile, but as the transfigured heavenly
mistress of the soul. Poland is the instrument of
God's future favours. She is set apart, therefore,
and consecrated. Thus we have Mickiewicz draw-
ing up a manual of religious guidance for those
whom he regarded as the apostles of the new
civilization. His Books of the Polish Pilgrimage,
with their curious blending of Biblical flavour,
almost homely detail, and the yearning of a man
whose face was set to a Jerusalem on a far-off
horizon, were addressed to exiles to whom he
would not suffer the name of exile to be given.
For he would have men know by their demeanour
that they were pilgrims in whose hands lay the
future of a hallowed country and a new race.
Thus we have Krasinski apostrophizing Poland
las "The holy one," "Holy Poland. " She is no
longer to him merely a native land. She is his
jfaith, his idea (Dawn). He will liken, to mark the
great capital difference, his nation to but one
other: Jerusalem, who fell because she spurned
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? 38
POLAND
the love that would have saved her {Psalm of
Good Will). "The Jerusalem of our return for
which we sigh," is the language in which Mick-
iewicz expresses to a friend the weariness of his
banishment. "O God of Israel," prays Severyn
Goszczynski; "Thou Who for forty years led
him by the way of victories and pain, through
pathless deserts to the promised land, behold
to-day Israel of the new covenant, the Polish
nation, travels to her promised land. Forsake her
not, O Lord, strengthen her with Thy grace.
Still lead her, as till now Thou ledst her by Thy
girdle till, fed by the blessed word of life Thou
gavest her, she, in the strength of youth, fulfils
her road. And lo! this year may be the year of
her espousals. And I, who lift these prayers to
Thee to-day, pray if only for one moment I may
be at my people's bridal feast" {The Prayer of a
Poet). And the poet who watched the fires of the
incendiary blacken his native Galicia placed the
expression of his grief on the lips of a Jeremias,
lamenting over the desolation of the chosen city
(Kornel Ujejski, The Complaints of Jeremias).
The poetic symbolization of Poland takes
differing guises. She is the mother, weeping for
her sons. She is the great heavenly archangel of
Krasinski's vision, crowned with the purple of
her sorrows, whose eyes are of the eternal blue,
whose brow flashes with the lightning of God,
before whom the future new-born ages to whom
her suffering has given their being cast down their
wreaths in homage. She is--again and again--
the beloved dead, sleeping in a grave from which
she will rise again. The last word of Messianism
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 39
confers on her the lineaments of a Christ of
the nations, dying on the cross of expiation for
the sins of humanity (Mickiewicz, The Ancestors,
Part III. ) A less usual conception is Bohdan
Zaleski's repentant Magdalen {The Spirit of the
Steppe). But behind all these types there is always
the same figure of one beautiful and haloed by
grief; inexpressibly dear to the heart of him who
wrote; the one who, in Krasinski's dreams, calls
him, "and I went forth and I go, I know not
where, but that voice I will follow if needs be
even to the end of the world" (The Dream of
Cezard). If on one hand Poland is the ethereal,
star-encircled image of a mystic's desire, yet she
is at the same time the living love, spoken of in
the passionate and endearing tones of human
affection.
It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the
patriotic character of the nineteenth century
Polish literature. Devotion to a native country
is one of the most strongly marked features of the
Polish nature. Moreover, the lives of Poland's
poets were, at the time of which we are speaking,
linked with the national cause in an exceptional
manner, difficult of realization by those whose lot
is cast in a land where tradition is the patriotism
of freedom. There was not one of the poets in
the great period of Polish literature whose daily
existence was not ravaged with the personal
afflictions that the public tragedy had brought
upon them. They were nearly without exception
living in exile, penury, loneliness, suspense.
Grinding poverty, domestic trouble, grief at his
absence from his Lithuanian forests, whitened
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POLAND
J Mickiewicz's hair before his time. Slowacki,
parted for ever from an adored mother, wandered
from country to country, beholding in the ruins
of Greece the likeness of another land, his heart
wrung as he watched the sun set over the Mediter-
ranean by the sadness and the homesickness of
the Pole {'The Grave of Agamemnon. Hymn). The
one craving of Bohdan Zaleski, the poet of the
Ukraine, was that he might see again the steppes
that had nursed his childhood, if but to breathe
his last there; and he died far away from them
after half a century of exile. Gaszynski's prayers
met his mother's in their mutual loneliness on
the Christmas Eve which they could spend to-
gether no more (Constantine Gaszynski, To my
Mother on Christmas Eve). He lived to hear of her
murder by Russian soldiers at her door. From his
nineteenth year till his death at the age of forty-
seven, Krasinski bore a tragedy bitterer than exile,
on which his lips were sealed. The heart-sickness
of the wanderer, pining to return, runs in mourn-
ful undertones through the poetry of Poland,
especially in that of Mickiewicz and Bohdan
Zaleski; but it is a larger grief than individual
deprivation that gives its tragic accents to Polish
literature. Poland's national poetry must of
necessity be profoundly sad. " I and my country
are one," says Mickiewicz in the Ancestors. " My
name is Million, because I love millions and for
millions suffer torment. I look on my unhappy
land as a son upon his father broken on the wheel.
I feel the sufferings of the whole nation, as the
mother feels within her bosom the sufferings of
her child. " Or again, the charge laid upon Irydion,
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 41
the symbolization of Krasinski's national thought,
is: "Thou shalt see thy love transpierced,
dying; and the sorrows of thousands shall be
born in thy one heart. " ) These words of Poland's
two greatest poets may be taken as typical of the
vocation and the attitude of the leaders of her
literature. There is here no room for egoism. The
affliction of their country was to her poets as
their own, more than their own. Their poetry is
written in the tears of their nation. It is the cry
of an inconsolable distress, of a pain personal and
intimate as that of a son mourning for the dearest
of mothers, a lover for the beloved of his heart.
And yet, whatever its deep melancholy, there
is in Poland's patriotic and prophetic song neither
pessimism nor despair. Its hope is as eternal as
its grief; victorious over circumstance, however
adverse. The idealism, the immense vitality of the
Polish race by which it has preserved its life,
speak through the literature that is the direct
outcome of national calamity, whose themes are
built upon a nation's tragedy. Nor is this hope like
that figure familiar in English art of one clinging
to the last string of a broken lyre. It is rather a
radiant certainty, unjustified by a single outward
token, rising unshaken in the midst of disaster and
defeat, glowing with the mysticism which is the
inheritance of the Pole.
"On the third day," writes Mickiewicz when
the downfall of the Rising was scarcely a year old,
"the soul will return to the body, and the nation
will rise from the dead and will free all the nations
of Europe from slavery. And two days have already
passed: one day passed with the first taking of
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? 4*
POLAND
Warsaw,* and the second day passed with the
second taking of Warsaw,! and the third day will
arrive, but will not pass away. And as with the
resurrection of Christ sacrifices of blood ceased
on the whole earth, so with the resurrection of
the Polish nation wars will cease in Christen-
dom" {Book of the Polish Nation). ' i
"But the day will rise--the day of victory
rises," sang Bohdan Zaleski, as he wandered over
the Roman Campagna, with his heart in the
steppes of the Ukraine. "Oh, to our grand-
children our sorrows shall be told as fables. Christ
is already in our homes. Our youths, living and
strong, new reapers for the harvest, gather
strength by prayer. Blessed are they who believe.
The Lord God, a father in His bounty, visits
more mercifully those whom He orphans. For
them He will fulfil the promise of the Lamb. He
will shake free the earth from its pale, shadowed
husk till it grows green for them, it flowers, it is
the spring. The emissaries from over seas, the
birds of joy, shall make our fields rejoice with
their compelling song. And the heroic, mighty
nation's heart shall inspire the new poet of a
generation new. The burden of his song shall be:
Faith, Hope, and Love. And holy as the sowing
time, so shall the harvest be fruitful, for Poland
reigning queen o'er the Slavonic lands. " {Walk
beyond Rome).
And this resurrection, so dear to the hearts of
the national poets, did not depend merely or
even mainly on outward events. Naturally they,
as every son of Poland has always done, watched
* By Suvorov after the second partition. t In 1831.
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 43
each political event in Europe, either with hope
or in the anguish of disillusion, for what it would
bring upon their nation. But to the great Polish
idealists of the nineteenth century the salvation
of their country lay behind what is visible to the
eye. Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrimage is
a rule of life given to his fellow Polish exiles;
and in that work there is no hint that Poland shall
be restored by the prepotency of earthly powers.
Rather her mission and her resurrection depend
on the fidelity of the Poles themselves to saving
principles. The peculiar spirituality of Krasinski's
teaching we shall consider in a later chapter.
Three generations have passed since the great
prophetical poetry of Poland closed with Kras-
inski's Resurrecturis. Yet Mickiewicz's Book of
the Pilgrimage was, as recently as the late Russo-
Japanese war, found on the bodies of the Polish
soldiers, as they lay dead on the battlefields in a
cause that was not theirs. There are not wanting
countrymen of Krasinski's living now who speak
of the day when they first read his work as the moral
crisis of their lives, who confess that it was upon
his tenets that they henceforth built the edifice
of their souls, and that in them they found their
defence against the temptations of surrounding
evil influences. * A modern political writer appeals
to the conclusion of Krasinski's Irydion as the
basis for an oppressed nation's conduct. f
''' To this day, the poetry of Mickiewicz, Kras-
inski, and the band of poets at whose head they
stand, is the ethical armoury of Poland, the
* M. Zdziechowski, Vision ofKrasinski. Cracow (Polish),
t E. Starczewski, LEurope et la Polognt. Paris, 1913.
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? 44
POLAND
influence that is of paramount consideration in
any study of the mental attitude, whether past
or present, of the Polish nation. The Poles have
seen their country spoliated and desolate, them-
selves the. victims of overwhelming armies and
crushing laws. But their poets point steadily to
the truth that the idea will prevail against the
machinery of war or of autocracy. Resurrection
by spiritual strength, response to a high mission,
the ultimate triumph of moral over material
preponderance, is the inheritance that the poet-
patriots left to their people. Or rather, we will
not give the name of inheritance to what speaks
so directly to the innermost temper and conscious-
ness of the nation that it is indeed part and parcel
of the Polish soul. We might more correctly say
that the voice of the poets fortified what was
already there, raising it to a magnificent expression
which remains the truest index to the Polish
spirit and mind.
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? CHAPTER III
THE POET OF A NATION'S SUFFERING:
ADAM MICK1EWICZ
HE genius of Adam Mickiewicz has
raised him above all other Polish poets.
M. His fame has travelled the furthest
beyond his native land. But it is not merely as
the chief glory of their literature that his com-
patriots honour him with an affection and vener-
ation undimmed by time. He lives in the national
history as the man who devoted all his life--a life
sad as the annals of his country--to the cause of
Poland. The beauty of his moral character and
the charm of his personality have endeared him
almost as one alive and beloved to the generations
which have come after him. '
Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania in
1798. He lived the simple life of a wild and remote
countryside, where patriarchal customs and
ancient traditions still prevailed. As a boy he
wandered in forests, as old as time, whose remoter
recesses have never to this day been trodden by
human foot; about the marshes listening to the
cries of the geese and wild birds, gathering the
folk-lore of the peasants and the fishermen. When
a lad of fourteen, he witnessed the transports of
patriotic hope with which all Poland hailed in
1812 the march of Napoleon to Russia. He saw
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? 46 POLAND
the return of the Grand Army, shattered, fugitive,
starving. All these things gave his future poetry
their strong distinctive colour.
From a home whose atmosphere was that of
simple and homely virtue, domestic affection and
ardent patriotism, Mickiewicz passed on to the
University of Wilna. Here it was that he began
the work for the young men of his country that
led him to imprisonment and exile, and from
which he may be said never to have desisted.
Together with his friend, Thomas Zan, he
founded the famous student societies of the
Philomathians for the moral improvement of the
Lithuanian young men. For them, after he had
left the university and become a schoolmaster at
Kowno, he wrote his first great poem, the Ode to
Youth. With a young and generous scorn of
egotism--he was but twenty-two when he wrote
it--he cries to his comrades:
"Without heart, without soul, those are the
nations of skeletons. Oh, youth, give me wings!
Let me soar above a dead world to the heavenly
home of enchantment, where enthusiasm works
miracles, strews flowers fresh and new, and clothes
hope in golden pictures.
"Oh, youth! Soar thou beyond the horizon's
bounds. Gaze down ! There, where eternal night
darkens the mighty plain submerged in the chaos
of sloth, there is the earth. See how on its stagnant
waters rises a reptile in its shell; rudder and ship
and pilot to itself, feeding upon the smaller reptiles'
lives. It rises, then it sinks into the deep. To it the
wave clings not, it clings not to the wave. And
then it bursts against the fragment of a rock.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 47
None knew it when alive, or knows its death. It
is the egotist. 1/
"Oh, youth! The nectar of life is only sweet
when it is shared with others. Heaven's joys
inebriate our hearts when they are bound
together by one golden thread.
"Together, youthful friends! The happiness
of each one is the aim of all, mighty in union, in
enthusiasm standing steady. Together, youthful
friends! And happy is he who, fallen in the midst
of his career, makes of his dead body a rung of the
ladder for others to attain the garden of glory.
Together, youthful friends! Although the road
be slippery and steep, and violence and weakness
defend the entrance, let violence hurl violence
back, and let us learn to conquer weakness in our
youth.
"He who a child in the cradle smote off the
Hydra's head, in youth shall slay the Centaurs,
shall tear its victim out of hell and ascend t<a^
heaven on laurels. Reach where the eye does not
reach. Break what the reason will not break. Oh,
youth! thy flight shall be as the strength of
eagles, as a thunder-bolt thine arm.
"Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle
the little circle of the earth with the chains that
bind us to each other. To one end let aim our
thoughts, and to one end let aim our souls. Leave
thy foundations far, thou earthy world! We will
force on thee new paths till, shaking off thy rotten
skin, thou shalt remember thy past verdant years.
"And as in the lands of chaos and of night, of
elements at war, at one ' Let it be,' spoken from
the power of God, the living world stood forth,
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? 48
POLAND
the winds roared, the deep seas flowed, and stars
lit up the blue of heaven.
"So in the country of humanity there is still
deep night. The elements, men's passions, are
still at war. Lo, love shall breathe forth fire. From
chaos shall the spiritual world come forth. Youth
shall conceive it in its womb, and friendship bind
it in eternal bonds.
"The insensate ices and the dark prejudice
that hid the light are burst. Hail, dawn of liberty,
behind thee is the redeeming sun. "
The appeal to unity that may be found in these
lines is the poet's protest against the want of
harmony that had been politically fatal to his
country. * It is said that the Ode to Youth acted
as a call of the trumpet to the youth of Poland
when they rose in 1830.
From the time he wrote the Ode to Youth,
Mickiewicz continued in the then new road of
romantic poetry. He wrote ballads, the earlier
part of the Ancestors, and the epic Grazyna. All
these were founded on national themes7 The
ballads took life from Lithuanian legend. The
Ancestors has as its setting the half pagan and very
ancient Lithuanian feast of the dead, against
which Mickiewicz places his hopeless love for
Maryla Wereszczak. I shall return to this play.
In Grazyna, Mickiewicz tells the tale of the
princess who, rather than submit to a disgraceful
peace with the national enemy, dons her husband's
armour and leads the Lithuanians to battle. This
again played its part in the Rising of 1830, for
under its inspiration the girl heroine of the war,
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewtcx. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 49
Emilia Plater, fought and died as a soldier in its
ranks.
These were the productions of Mickiewicz's
early youth. What he next wrote came after he
had passed through the ordeal first of imprison-
ment, then of parting for life from his friends and
country. Novosiltzov's persecution of the student
societies swept Zan and Mickiewicz, with their
associates, into prison. The two former were
arrested on October 23rd, 1823. For six months
Mickiewicz and his comrades were incarcerated
in Wilna. Years afterwards, the poet described
the scenes of his prison, with the power alike of
genius and of fidelity to the actual events, in the
third part of the Ancestors: scenes which had
branded themselves indelibly on his mind. The
brotherhood stood firm, through floggings that to
some of their number resulted in death, through
solitary confinement in rank dungeons, through
the infliction of foul air and putrid food, through
the mental torture of harassing judicial inquisitions
where any word might send the speaker or his
friends to their end. Boys, many of them mere
children, were transported in chains to the mines:
others condemned to serve in the ranks of the
Russian army; exiled, like Zan, to Siberia or to
Russia. Mickiewicz himself, after waiting six
months in Wilna when released from prison, was
banished in the first instance to Petersburg.
In 1824 he left the country which he never
saw again, for which he pined with a homesick-
ness that thirty years of poverty and sorrow could
not quench. For the following five years he lived
in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa.
? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 31
voicing of the sorrows, the hopes, the heroic
memories of his mother country.
While these words are written, Poland is the
battlefield of Eastern Europe. Her fields are laid
waste, her towns, her villages, her dwellings, are
in flames and ruin. Her sons, compelled to serve
under one or another of the three powers that
partitioned their nation, are forced to fight,
brother against brother, friend against friend, to
lay down their lives by thousands without the
consolation of dying for their country. Devastated
by a war in which her all is at stake and in which
she has no voice, the condition of Poland is the
most tragic in all Europe.
"Three days later," wrote in 1846 the poet
Zygmunt Krasinski to a fellow Pole, " the resur-
rection shall come; but during those days how
many hearts shall break. " *
* Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I, Lw6w, 1882. To Con-
it an tine Gaszynski, March 30, 1846 (Polish).
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? CHAPTER II
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE OF
POLAND
AFTER the Rising of 1830, the story of
Poland becomes that of the long agony
of an idealistic and profoundly patriotic
race, and of its protracted battle for existence.
On one side, in the country itself, the prisons and
the mines were the price the Pole paid for remain-
ing a Pole. On the other, beyond the frontiers,
there were the throngs of Polish exiles, dragging
out lives of poverty, homesickness, and grief. The
nation lived on; but her life was mutilated,
abnormal, unlivable.
And yet those years when Poland had no
history except a monotony of suffering, no life
except that life jealously preserved against pro-
scription and penalty in the heart of every Pole,
coincided with the splendid outburst of Polish
literature. Unlike the three great empires of the
world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose pros-
perity inspired their golden age of letters, it was
the sorrows of Poland that gave birth to her great
romantic song which, for its tragic power, its
idealism, no less than its haunting beauty, ranks
among the noblest productions of European art.
Great as is the literature of Poland from an
artistic point of view, it stands on another plane
than that of literary value alone. In the first half
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 33
of the nineteenth century, the Polish poets rose
as the national teachers and moral leaders. They
spoke to the people held in bondage by the bitterest
facts of life, of the hope that would save them.
The youths of Poland were prohibited from learn-
ing their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in
the ordinary channels. They learnt them, there-
fore, of the poets who taught them the lessons of
devotion and self-immolation for a native country;
whose writings kept alive the fires of patriotism,
the Polish ideality and moral health, in young
souls beset by peril. The national literature was
no mere art, an element disconnected with the
deep things of life, written for recreation or re-
laxation. It $poke straight to a stern purpose. It
was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any
that she could have chosen, in the cause of Poland.
In this light the Polish poets regarded the poetry
they gave their people. The literature they brought
forth is, said Mickiewicz, speaking in the College
de France, "above all things true. Each work is
at the same time an action. " * Poland's poets
were more than her poets. They were her
patriots.
The Pole in Poland might not read the master-
pieces of his native literature in normal ways.
were published abroad, often at no little risk to
the author. Colporteurs smuggled them into the
country. Boys read them behind barred doors,
with one of their number posted in the street to
give the alarm should the police be near. After
one hurried but intense perusal they were thrown
banned by the censor. They
* Adam ftjickiewici! , Its Slayes,
p
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POLAND
into the fire. Prison and Siberia were the lot of
those readers who were discovered. The possession
of Mickiewicz's Ancestors sent a boy of seventeen
to the dungeon, where, maddened with terror
lest under the knout he should betray the names
of his companions, he burnt himself to death.
Hundreds of young men went to Siberia for
having read Krasinski's Temptation. Often the
only means by which the Polish poet could speak
to his nation, with any degree of safety to himself
or to the reader, was under the protection of an
allegory or some sort of veiled meaning, where
the Pole could read between the lines. Mickiewicz,
in the heart of Russia, wrote an epic of the revenge
of the Lithuanian, Konrad Wallenrod, on the
Teutonic knights, the oppressors of his country.
Every Pole knew for whom the Teutonic knights
stood. Krasinski bade his compatriots abjure the
weapons of vengeance, and work by love alone;
but he did so under the figure of a Greek
in the Rome of Heliogabalus. He warned
the Polish women against marriage with the
enemies of their nation; and the language of his
Summer's Night is so obscure as almost to fail in
its aim. He sought to arm the Polish youth
against those seductions of the Imperial Court
that had laid their siege to his own soul in vain;
yet the elaboration with which he designedly
disguised his point could not avert the conse-
quences to his readers. Even in a poem as objective
as Slowacki's Father of the Plague-stricken, the
lamentation of the father over his children dying
in the desert is said to represent the desolation of
a bereaved country.
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? THE 'NATIONAL LITERATURE 35
Poland, then, was assailed from every side. In
anguish of mind her poets and her thinkers sought
for some explanation of her tragedy to justify
the working of Providence, to save their country
from the atrophy and despair that would destroy
her as certainly as all exterior persecution. So
arose the dreams of a Polish national mysticism,
known by the name of Messianism. Its strange
and mournful glory casts over Poland's poetry, in
the days of Mickiewicz and Krasinski, a faint
spiritual kinship with the prophecies of those who
saw Sion irradiated with a mystical splendour as
the adored of the nations. Poland, says Messianism,
was rent asunder that her destruction might bring
salvation to the human race. Out of the mysteries
of pain and death are born new life and resur-
rection. Death is the condition of resurrection.
The Saviour of mankind redeemed us by embracing
death, and after three days in the grave rose again.
So, in the political world, one nation has been
signalled out to lay down her life. Her sufferings
are the price by which the new and better epoch
of humanity shall come about. She will rise
gloriously to be the spiritual leader of that world,
where all nations and governments will be united
in Christ and rule in the spirit of Christ. Violence
against that spirit of Christ was committed
when so hideous a crime against man's rights as
the blotting out of a free nation from the land
of the living was perpetrated. The restoration of
that nation will therefore logically be a return to
the ideals of Christ, the first step to their realisa-
tion. Various of the Messianists looked to that
future period as the third epoch, the reign of
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POLAND
the Holy Ghost, thus presenting a curious link
with the tenets of Joachim of Flora.
Pushed to its extreme limits, the doctrines of
Polish Messianism tended to an exaggeration and
a falsity of outlook that were likely to prove in-
jurious to those for whose welfare they were
intended. But in its best form, propagated by
such a teacher as Krasinski, who made its promises
conditional on each individual's purity of soul,
it may be taken as a sublime spiritualization of
national suffering. The workings of Providence
were made clear. The dignity of a great calling
was conferred upon a downtrodden people. The
Poles were given an end for which to strive. The
light of hope was shed over the dark places of
grief.
"You all know, my brothers, that we were
born in the womb of death," says Krasinski in
his prose preface to Dawn. "Hence the eternal
pain that gnaws your hearts; hence the incerti-
tude that has become your life. But every end
contains already in itself the successive beginning;
the day of death but precedes the hour of waken-
ing. Look closely, and the signs of death will
suddenly change for you into the signs of resur-
rection. Our death was necessary; necessary will
be our resurrection; and the Word of the Son
of Man, the eternal word of life, shall be shed
through the social circumference of the world.
By our very nationality crucified on the cross of
history will be manifested to the conscience of
the human spirit that the political sphere must
be changed into a religious sphere. The Lord in
the whole political sphere, where hitherto He
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 37
was absent, will be present; and the vessel of
His providence to this end will be no other than
the Polish nation. "
"One of the two--either the blessed future of
humanity is forfeited, or the condition of its
fulfilment is the life of Poland. "
A This idea of the chosen race is the keynote of
'f:he great Messianistic poetry of Poland. As in
the Hebrew prophets, Jerusalem is the mystic
city, the object alike of patriotic and spiritual
passion: so the prophet poets of Poland looked
towards their country, not solely as the earthly
home for which they pined with the human long-
ing of the exile, but as the transfigured heavenly
mistress of the soul. Poland is the instrument of
God's future favours. She is set apart, therefore,
and consecrated. Thus we have Mickiewicz draw-
ing up a manual of religious guidance for those
whom he regarded as the apostles of the new
civilization. His Books of the Polish Pilgrimage,
with their curious blending of Biblical flavour,
almost homely detail, and the yearning of a man
whose face was set to a Jerusalem on a far-off
horizon, were addressed to exiles to whom he
would not suffer the name of exile to be given.
For he would have men know by their demeanour
that they were pilgrims in whose hands lay the
future of a hallowed country and a new race.
Thus we have Krasinski apostrophizing Poland
las "The holy one," "Holy Poland. " She is no
longer to him merely a native land. She is his
jfaith, his idea (Dawn). He will liken, to mark the
great capital difference, his nation to but one
other: Jerusalem, who fell because she spurned
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POLAND
the love that would have saved her {Psalm of
Good Will). "The Jerusalem of our return for
which we sigh," is the language in which Mick-
iewicz expresses to a friend the weariness of his
banishment. "O God of Israel," prays Severyn
Goszczynski; "Thou Who for forty years led
him by the way of victories and pain, through
pathless deserts to the promised land, behold
to-day Israel of the new covenant, the Polish
nation, travels to her promised land. Forsake her
not, O Lord, strengthen her with Thy grace.
Still lead her, as till now Thou ledst her by Thy
girdle till, fed by the blessed word of life Thou
gavest her, she, in the strength of youth, fulfils
her road. And lo! this year may be the year of
her espousals. And I, who lift these prayers to
Thee to-day, pray if only for one moment I may
be at my people's bridal feast" {The Prayer of a
Poet). And the poet who watched the fires of the
incendiary blacken his native Galicia placed the
expression of his grief on the lips of a Jeremias,
lamenting over the desolation of the chosen city
(Kornel Ujejski, The Complaints of Jeremias).
The poetic symbolization of Poland takes
differing guises. She is the mother, weeping for
her sons. She is the great heavenly archangel of
Krasinski's vision, crowned with the purple of
her sorrows, whose eyes are of the eternal blue,
whose brow flashes with the lightning of God,
before whom the future new-born ages to whom
her suffering has given their being cast down their
wreaths in homage. She is--again and again--
the beloved dead, sleeping in a grave from which
she will rise again. The last word of Messianism
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 39
confers on her the lineaments of a Christ of
the nations, dying on the cross of expiation for
the sins of humanity (Mickiewicz, The Ancestors,
Part III. ) A less usual conception is Bohdan
Zaleski's repentant Magdalen {The Spirit of the
Steppe). But behind all these types there is always
the same figure of one beautiful and haloed by
grief; inexpressibly dear to the heart of him who
wrote; the one who, in Krasinski's dreams, calls
him, "and I went forth and I go, I know not
where, but that voice I will follow if needs be
even to the end of the world" (The Dream of
Cezard). If on one hand Poland is the ethereal,
star-encircled image of a mystic's desire, yet she
is at the same time the living love, spoken of in
the passionate and endearing tones of human
affection.
It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the
patriotic character of the nineteenth century
Polish literature. Devotion to a native country
is one of the most strongly marked features of the
Polish nature. Moreover, the lives of Poland's
poets were, at the time of which we are speaking,
linked with the national cause in an exceptional
manner, difficult of realization by those whose lot
is cast in a land where tradition is the patriotism
of freedom. There was not one of the poets in
the great period of Polish literature whose daily
existence was not ravaged with the personal
afflictions that the public tragedy had brought
upon them. They were nearly without exception
living in exile, penury, loneliness, suspense.
Grinding poverty, domestic trouble, grief at his
absence from his Lithuanian forests, whitened
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POLAND
J Mickiewicz's hair before his time. Slowacki,
parted for ever from an adored mother, wandered
from country to country, beholding in the ruins
of Greece the likeness of another land, his heart
wrung as he watched the sun set over the Mediter-
ranean by the sadness and the homesickness of
the Pole {'The Grave of Agamemnon. Hymn). The
one craving of Bohdan Zaleski, the poet of the
Ukraine, was that he might see again the steppes
that had nursed his childhood, if but to breathe
his last there; and he died far away from them
after half a century of exile. Gaszynski's prayers
met his mother's in their mutual loneliness on
the Christmas Eve which they could spend to-
gether no more (Constantine Gaszynski, To my
Mother on Christmas Eve). He lived to hear of her
murder by Russian soldiers at her door. From his
nineteenth year till his death at the age of forty-
seven, Krasinski bore a tragedy bitterer than exile,
on which his lips were sealed. The heart-sickness
of the wanderer, pining to return, runs in mourn-
ful undertones through the poetry of Poland,
especially in that of Mickiewicz and Bohdan
Zaleski; but it is a larger grief than individual
deprivation that gives its tragic accents to Polish
literature. Poland's national poetry must of
necessity be profoundly sad. " I and my country
are one," says Mickiewicz in the Ancestors. " My
name is Million, because I love millions and for
millions suffer torment. I look on my unhappy
land as a son upon his father broken on the wheel.
I feel the sufferings of the whole nation, as the
mother feels within her bosom the sufferings of
her child. " Or again, the charge laid upon Irydion,
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 41
the symbolization of Krasinski's national thought,
is: "Thou shalt see thy love transpierced,
dying; and the sorrows of thousands shall be
born in thy one heart. " ) These words of Poland's
two greatest poets may be taken as typical of the
vocation and the attitude of the leaders of her
literature. There is here no room for egoism. The
affliction of their country was to her poets as
their own, more than their own. Their poetry is
written in the tears of their nation. It is the cry
of an inconsolable distress, of a pain personal and
intimate as that of a son mourning for the dearest
of mothers, a lover for the beloved of his heart.
And yet, whatever its deep melancholy, there
is in Poland's patriotic and prophetic song neither
pessimism nor despair. Its hope is as eternal as
its grief; victorious over circumstance, however
adverse. The idealism, the immense vitality of the
Polish race by which it has preserved its life,
speak through the literature that is the direct
outcome of national calamity, whose themes are
built upon a nation's tragedy. Nor is this hope like
that figure familiar in English art of one clinging
to the last string of a broken lyre. It is rather a
radiant certainty, unjustified by a single outward
token, rising unshaken in the midst of disaster and
defeat, glowing with the mysticism which is the
inheritance of the Pole.
"On the third day," writes Mickiewicz when
the downfall of the Rising was scarcely a year old,
"the soul will return to the body, and the nation
will rise from the dead and will free all the nations
of Europe from slavery. And two days have already
passed: one day passed with the first taking of
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POLAND
Warsaw,* and the second day passed with the
second taking of Warsaw,! and the third day will
arrive, but will not pass away. And as with the
resurrection of Christ sacrifices of blood ceased
on the whole earth, so with the resurrection of
the Polish nation wars will cease in Christen-
dom" {Book of the Polish Nation). ' i
"But the day will rise--the day of victory
rises," sang Bohdan Zaleski, as he wandered over
the Roman Campagna, with his heart in the
steppes of the Ukraine. "Oh, to our grand-
children our sorrows shall be told as fables. Christ
is already in our homes. Our youths, living and
strong, new reapers for the harvest, gather
strength by prayer. Blessed are they who believe.
The Lord God, a father in His bounty, visits
more mercifully those whom He orphans. For
them He will fulfil the promise of the Lamb. He
will shake free the earth from its pale, shadowed
husk till it grows green for them, it flowers, it is
the spring. The emissaries from over seas, the
birds of joy, shall make our fields rejoice with
their compelling song. And the heroic, mighty
nation's heart shall inspire the new poet of a
generation new. The burden of his song shall be:
Faith, Hope, and Love. And holy as the sowing
time, so shall the harvest be fruitful, for Poland
reigning queen o'er the Slavonic lands. " {Walk
beyond Rome).
And this resurrection, so dear to the hearts of
the national poets, did not depend merely or
even mainly on outward events. Naturally they,
as every son of Poland has always done, watched
* By Suvorov after the second partition. t In 1831.
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 43
each political event in Europe, either with hope
or in the anguish of disillusion, for what it would
bring upon their nation. But to the great Polish
idealists of the nineteenth century the salvation
of their country lay behind what is visible to the
eye. Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrimage is
a rule of life given to his fellow Polish exiles;
and in that work there is no hint that Poland shall
be restored by the prepotency of earthly powers.
Rather her mission and her resurrection depend
on the fidelity of the Poles themselves to saving
principles. The peculiar spirituality of Krasinski's
teaching we shall consider in a later chapter.
Three generations have passed since the great
prophetical poetry of Poland closed with Kras-
inski's Resurrecturis. Yet Mickiewicz's Book of
the Pilgrimage was, as recently as the late Russo-
Japanese war, found on the bodies of the Polish
soldiers, as they lay dead on the battlefields in a
cause that was not theirs. There are not wanting
countrymen of Krasinski's living now who speak
of the day when they first read his work as the moral
crisis of their lives, who confess that it was upon
his tenets that they henceforth built the edifice
of their souls, and that in them they found their
defence against the temptations of surrounding
evil influences. * A modern political writer appeals
to the conclusion of Krasinski's Irydion as the
basis for an oppressed nation's conduct. f
''' To this day, the poetry of Mickiewicz, Kras-
inski, and the band of poets at whose head they
stand, is the ethical armoury of Poland, the
* M. Zdziechowski, Vision ofKrasinski. Cracow (Polish),
t E. Starczewski, LEurope et la Polognt. Paris, 1913.
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? 44
POLAND
influence that is of paramount consideration in
any study of the mental attitude, whether past
or present, of the Polish nation. The Poles have
seen their country spoliated and desolate, them-
selves the. victims of overwhelming armies and
crushing laws. But their poets point steadily to
the truth that the idea will prevail against the
machinery of war or of autocracy. Resurrection
by spiritual strength, response to a high mission,
the ultimate triumph of moral over material
preponderance, is the inheritance that the poet-
patriots left to their people. Or rather, we will
not give the name of inheritance to what speaks
so directly to the innermost temper and conscious-
ness of the nation that it is indeed part and parcel
of the Polish soul. We might more correctly say
that the voice of the poets fortified what was
already there, raising it to a magnificent expression
which remains the truest index to the Polish
spirit and mind.
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? CHAPTER III
THE POET OF A NATION'S SUFFERING:
ADAM MICK1EWICZ
HE genius of Adam Mickiewicz has
raised him above all other Polish poets.
M. His fame has travelled the furthest
beyond his native land. But it is not merely as
the chief glory of their literature that his com-
patriots honour him with an affection and vener-
ation undimmed by time. He lives in the national
history as the man who devoted all his life--a life
sad as the annals of his country--to the cause of
Poland. The beauty of his moral character and
the charm of his personality have endeared him
almost as one alive and beloved to the generations
which have come after him. '
Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania in
1798. He lived the simple life of a wild and remote
countryside, where patriarchal customs and
ancient traditions still prevailed. As a boy he
wandered in forests, as old as time, whose remoter
recesses have never to this day been trodden by
human foot; about the marshes listening to the
cries of the geese and wild birds, gathering the
folk-lore of the peasants and the fishermen. When
a lad of fourteen, he witnessed the transports of
patriotic hope with which all Poland hailed in
1812 the march of Napoleon to Russia. He saw
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? 46 POLAND
the return of the Grand Army, shattered, fugitive,
starving. All these things gave his future poetry
their strong distinctive colour.
From a home whose atmosphere was that of
simple and homely virtue, domestic affection and
ardent patriotism, Mickiewicz passed on to the
University of Wilna. Here it was that he began
the work for the young men of his country that
led him to imprisonment and exile, and from
which he may be said never to have desisted.
Together with his friend, Thomas Zan, he
founded the famous student societies of the
Philomathians for the moral improvement of the
Lithuanian young men. For them, after he had
left the university and become a schoolmaster at
Kowno, he wrote his first great poem, the Ode to
Youth. With a young and generous scorn of
egotism--he was but twenty-two when he wrote
it--he cries to his comrades:
"Without heart, without soul, those are the
nations of skeletons. Oh, youth, give me wings!
Let me soar above a dead world to the heavenly
home of enchantment, where enthusiasm works
miracles, strews flowers fresh and new, and clothes
hope in golden pictures.
"Oh, youth! Soar thou beyond the horizon's
bounds. Gaze down ! There, where eternal night
darkens the mighty plain submerged in the chaos
of sloth, there is the earth. See how on its stagnant
waters rises a reptile in its shell; rudder and ship
and pilot to itself, feeding upon the smaller reptiles'
lives. It rises, then it sinks into the deep. To it the
wave clings not, it clings not to the wave. And
then it bursts against the fragment of a rock.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 47
None knew it when alive, or knows its death. It
is the egotist. 1/
"Oh, youth! The nectar of life is only sweet
when it is shared with others. Heaven's joys
inebriate our hearts when they are bound
together by one golden thread.
"Together, youthful friends! The happiness
of each one is the aim of all, mighty in union, in
enthusiasm standing steady. Together, youthful
friends! And happy is he who, fallen in the midst
of his career, makes of his dead body a rung of the
ladder for others to attain the garden of glory.
Together, youthful friends! Although the road
be slippery and steep, and violence and weakness
defend the entrance, let violence hurl violence
back, and let us learn to conquer weakness in our
youth.
"He who a child in the cradle smote off the
Hydra's head, in youth shall slay the Centaurs,
shall tear its victim out of hell and ascend t<a^
heaven on laurels. Reach where the eye does not
reach. Break what the reason will not break. Oh,
youth! thy flight shall be as the strength of
eagles, as a thunder-bolt thine arm.
"Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle
the little circle of the earth with the chains that
bind us to each other. To one end let aim our
thoughts, and to one end let aim our souls. Leave
thy foundations far, thou earthy world! We will
force on thee new paths till, shaking off thy rotten
skin, thou shalt remember thy past verdant years.
"And as in the lands of chaos and of night, of
elements at war, at one ' Let it be,' spoken from
the power of God, the living world stood forth,
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? 48
POLAND
the winds roared, the deep seas flowed, and stars
lit up the blue of heaven.
"So in the country of humanity there is still
deep night. The elements, men's passions, are
still at war. Lo, love shall breathe forth fire. From
chaos shall the spiritual world come forth. Youth
shall conceive it in its womb, and friendship bind
it in eternal bonds.
"The insensate ices and the dark prejudice
that hid the light are burst. Hail, dawn of liberty,
behind thee is the redeeming sun. "
The appeal to unity that may be found in these
lines is the poet's protest against the want of
harmony that had been politically fatal to his
country. * It is said that the Ode to Youth acted
as a call of the trumpet to the youth of Poland
when they rose in 1830.
From the time he wrote the Ode to Youth,
Mickiewicz continued in the then new road of
romantic poetry. He wrote ballads, the earlier
part of the Ancestors, and the epic Grazyna. All
these were founded on national themes7 The
ballads took life from Lithuanian legend. The
Ancestors has as its setting the half pagan and very
ancient Lithuanian feast of the dead, against
which Mickiewicz places his hopeless love for
Maryla Wereszczak. I shall return to this play.
In Grazyna, Mickiewicz tells the tale of the
princess who, rather than submit to a disgraceful
peace with the national enemy, dons her husband's
armour and leads the Lithuanians to battle. This
again played its part in the Rising of 1830, for
under its inspiration the girl heroine of the war,
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewtcx. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 49
Emilia Plater, fought and died as a soldier in its
ranks.
These were the productions of Mickiewicz's
early youth. What he next wrote came after he
had passed through the ordeal first of imprison-
ment, then of parting for life from his friends and
country. Novosiltzov's persecution of the student
societies swept Zan and Mickiewicz, with their
associates, into prison. The two former were
arrested on October 23rd, 1823. For six months
Mickiewicz and his comrades were incarcerated
in Wilna. Years afterwards, the poet described
the scenes of his prison, with the power alike of
genius and of fidelity to the actual events, in the
third part of the Ancestors: scenes which had
branded themselves indelibly on his mind. The
brotherhood stood firm, through floggings that to
some of their number resulted in death, through
solitary confinement in rank dungeons, through
the infliction of foul air and putrid food, through
the mental torture of harassing judicial inquisitions
where any word might send the speaker or his
friends to their end. Boys, many of them mere
children, were transported in chains to the mines:
others condemned to serve in the ranks of the
Russian army; exiled, like Zan, to Siberia or to
Russia. Mickiewicz himself, after waiting six
months in Wilna when released from prison, was
banished in the first instance to Petersburg.
In 1824 he left the country which he never
saw again, for which he pined with a homesick-
ness that thirty years of poverty and sorrow could
not quench. For the following five years he lived
in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa.
