To save one nation, how much more are
necessary
human
deaths and afflictions1!
deaths and afflictions1!
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
He gave
Reeve a little lecture that proved to be strangely ap-
propriate, not to Reeve, but to Krasinski himself.
1 "Perhaps one day it will be the only proof that will witness in my
favour. " Corresfondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, July 25, 1831.
a J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 56 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
You ought not to hurry to finish your poem. Wait from
day to day now; life will become harder for you and, in pro-
portion to the load, your powers will grow. . . Laocoon, you
will wrestle; and from the struggle and the fight stars will
burst forth, I mean thoughts, unknown flights, stronger, more
gigantic, to the beautiful and sublime, because you will be
surrounded by baseness and ugliness. . . Till now, Henry, you
have only been a man in your moments of poetry, while you
walked in the circle of a child. But now, when your circle is
enlarged, when you are a man among men, struggling every
minute, you will be above man in your poetry, for to be a poet
is to carry his present reality to the past or future. . . to heaven
or hell1.
Then the Anonymous Poet, whose inspiration was
now clamouring for release, tells the friend, whom he
still believed possessed of gifts far greater than his own,
that at last he is convinced that he too has:
a spark of poetry in my bosom, very imperfect, it is true, as
rhythm is wanting in me. The proof is that, without any hope
of men ever reading me, I write and write. . . What is it to
be a poet if not to have a superabundance of thoughts which
rush in torrents over the surface of the soul, and which boil
there until they find an outlet? It matters little to him if this
outlet reaches the ears of men or the void, so long as he rids
himself of that fire which burns him, and gives him not one
moment's breathing space2.
On a July afternoon there is a glimpse of Krasinski
for once, in the thick of his troubles, at play. He went
to the garden of Reeve's adored Constance to steal a
rose for his friend.
In the road which passes the garden hedge I met the
Sautter father talking to a neighbour, while a string of oxen
plied before him. Between my teeth I murmured a Damn and
tied my horse to a little gate behind. Then I paced up and
down the road in the attitude of a man who awaits his adver-
sary to fight a duel. At last he [Sautter] came towards me,
and appeared to be considering me. I gave him back look for
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, June 23, 1831.
2 Ibid. July 13, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
57
look and, seeing that he wouldn't learn any more about me, he
went off in the direction of the cornfields. I thought the
opportunity favourable, and I leaped the hedge. But at the
same instant two enormous dogs rushed out of a thicket, and
attacked me. I drew out my dagger and, thanks to the blade
that I presented at their heads, I made an honourable retreat
as far as the gate where I jumped on my horse. But there
behold! there was father Sautter, who reappeared among the
ears of corn on the other side. Caught between two fires, I
behaved with an astonishing presence of mind: for I pacified
the dogs by whistling and making friendly signs to them. As
for father Sautter, when I saw him passing out on my right
ten steps away from me, I stretched myself out on my saddle,
I laid my head on the neck, my feet on the back of my horse,
and I made as if I were going to sleep. The lawful proprietor
of Bourdigny passed by, looking at me with a smile, as if I
had given him the impression of being an oddity, then he
retreated to his house, leaving me for company his two amiable
Cerberuses. . . Like a falcon dying of hunger I swooped upon a
rose and another flower which I arranged in my pocket-book,
and that I shall send you as soon as they are dried.
This letter was still open when the courier came
in from Petersburg.
"What can I say to you, my dear Henry? My distress only
grows worse. My father writes to me with a heart-rending
tenderness. He tells me he is ready to make a sacrifice of
himself and his child to his country; but he implores me to
wait, and declares that he will shortly join me. Henry, what
would you do if you were in my place? Ah ! what need have
I to ask another what he would do? I see that I am ruined.
I am a fool, I am a coward, I am a wretched being, I have the
heart of a girl, I do not dare to brave a father's curse. I ex-
pected an imperious, violent, forcible letter, and I was prepared
for a decisive, terrible, forcible struggle too. . . But when
yesterday's letter arrived; when instead of threats, I found
prayers; instead of fury, I saw blessings; instead of commands,
supplications; instead of sentiments at the thought of which
I shuddered, a love of Poland piercing through each word, all my
strength melted into tears "--these three words are in English.
"I had prepared my arm to strike a blow; and, when it fell,
I found no resistance. . . I am touched to tenderness, full of
affection for my father, for his bitter misfortunes, and I have
no longer sufficient strength to decide. That is my condition.
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? 58
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
You can cast on my head the curse of a friend ; but I tell you
I am no longer myself. I have, however, answered, promising
nothing, still saying that if the opportunity presents itself I
shall go to Poland. But where is that opportunity? . . . I have
just seen in the last few days a Pole. . . who informed me that
prince Gagarin told him in Rome that all the Russian em-
bassies have my description, and the order to arrest me and
send me straight to Saint Petersburg if I try and escape from
Geneva. That's nothing. When it is the case of duty one
faces everything. But my father, my father, he who once
powerful, rich, loaded with flatteries and glory, saw himself
the first man in Poland1,. . . to-day he is beaten down, he has
lost everything, and has only me in this vast universe. If this
'last support fails him, what will become of him? It is not
death I fear for him. It would be a benefit to us both, but it
is those long years of old age, full of heart-breaking recol-
lections, disgust and bitterness; it is his heart broken above
my tomb; it is the look that he will cast around him without
finding one who will stretch out a hand to him. . . Yet I have a
ray of hope remaining that he will fight for Poland, and I at
his side. . .
"However, I am in the most complete incertitude. The
advice of men can do nothing for me. I hope for inspiration
only from the Mother of God ; and when that inspiration comes
I will follow it. . .
"And that thought of suicide that still hovers in my brain,
it is odd it no longer has the effect on me of a crime. On the
contrary, it seems to me that it is a thing which is permitted. . .
But when I reason I see truly it is a crime. Oh! if to die were
to sleep for ever! Eternity? Oh, well, you will see, we shall
have new toils, new troubles, in that eternity. We shall curse
it one day as we curse the earth. . . Rest! Rest! Sleep ! but no
dream ! or rather dreams, sometimes, but those of a child. . .
"What a madman am I! What a fool! Judge by this where
I have got to. I, I am setting up for a materialist! I, I already
desire annihilation ! Ah! how suffering beats down the wings
of the soul'! "
Krasinski's every mood and emotion, and his con-
1 Here Krasinski's filial feelings led him to a considerable exaggera-
tion of his father's former position.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, July 8, 12, 1831. The
letter quoted before this is obviously wrongly dated, having been written
before Krasinski heard from his father.
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? The Sacrifice
59
tradictory impulses, flowed out in unchecked streams
to the ear of the only person to whom he could then
speak freely: so the weakening of religious faith of
which he speaks in this last letter may be taken as only
the wild words of a boy of nineteen, half beside himself.
Yet possibly they were the first steps towards the agony
of doubt which came upon him later.
Side by side with his confessions to Reeve, who, still
busy over mad plans on his friend's behalf, answered
in genuine, if somewhat sentimentally worded, sym-
pathy, Zygmunt continued to wrestle vainly with his
father.
"I would give my life if I could see you somewhere else," he
wrote to the General, "and to embrace you once more before
I die. . . . I love, oh, I love my father, and with folded hands I
stay far from Poland. Have pity on me! "
He reminds his father of the forty wounds the latter
bore on his body for Poland, and implores him to con-
sider what comfort can the son ever have in the re-
maining years of his life, the son who remained behind
when his country summoned him? He has in his heart
that which no argument can pacify or destroy:
I allude to that desire to fight for Poland, that deep con-
viction that it is my duty, to that terrible fear that I shall be
cursed by men and God for sitting quietly here.
Carrying that fiery coal in my bosom, I have not one, not
one moment of peace. Lethargy and fever--those are the two
states which master me by turns. Two days of fever, two days
of lethargy--that is my life! Take pity on me, dear father! . . .
I repeat again, that feeling of duty and the fear of disgrace
torment me so much that sometimes I go out of my senses
when I think about it. I am unhappy! In the past I used
to say that from Romanticism; to-day, alas! it has become
reality1.
The father's move was to appeal once more to the
1 Given by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 6o
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
son's affections and to assure him that the Rising was
no national movement, but the work of a few revolu-
tionaries. His eyes opened to the fact, bitterer to him
than death, that his father in Petersburg was listening
to the enemies of his country, belittling a conflict that
all Europe regarded as a national war, Krasinski re-
torted by a noble defence of a great cause, prophetical
of the Anonymous Poet's future philosophy.
It is the war of the weak against the mighty, of those con-
secrated to death against their old aggressors, of men mindful
that they have had great ancestors. . . And the more Poland is
covered with blood, flames, corpses, the more holy does her
cause become to my heart, the more do I see in this cause the
finger and the Providence of God, for to those whom He pro-
tects He is not wont to give victory without toil and sorrow.
Those, on the contrary, whom He sends for the punishment
of the human race, those, I say, He surrounds with ease and
benefits without labour; but, for those whom He has charged
with any great work of redemption, He places obstacles in
the way, He bids them suffer and die, for, by the fault of men
themselves, it is one of the laws of this unhappy world that
there can be nothing beautiful or salutary without suffering
and pain. . . To save the world the death of God was necessary.
To save one nation, how much more are necessary human
deaths and afflictions1!
So the duel dragged on between father and son
during the summer months of 1831 : the son writing
to his father, with tears in his eyes and rage in his
heart'', the letters that were a torment to write, pass-
ing through crises that, so he tells Reeve, took years
from his life. The while, defeat after defeat in Poland
were telling plainly of the end. To Reeve, who com-
1 Given by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 "Though I am in a very bad moment for criticizing, though I have
just finished a letter for my father and I have tears in my eyes and rage
in my heart, let us speak of Maria]' a poem by Reeve. Correspondance.
Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 18, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
61
plained that he could not love his own country, the
Pole replied:
Henry, do not imitate Byron. If you hate the men, adore
the land. . . Wait till your country is unhappy. Wait for the
day when the tears of your sisters will be mingled with the
ocean, when the groans of your brothers will prevent you from
closing your eyes, when you see your country ravaged. . . en-
tangled in chains, shamed by her degradation; and then you
will love your country more than you love the inspiration of
poetry, more than your mother, more than everything that
could awaken in you a feeling of affection, friendship, love.
"Better to perish in the first battle than to live far
from one's country," the writer mournfully said, as he
gazed out on the lake and mountains of Geneva, and
thought of the Polish plains, where war was raging1.
Out of that acute shame in his own position, which
is scarcely ever absent from his correspondence during
the Rising, sudden insight flashed upon the poet who
chose to remain anonymous and unknown.
I now know that at the bottom of the heart every noble
soul possesses something more holy than glory: it is the idea
of sacrifice ignored [he underlined the words], dumb, silent, of
the duty to be accomplished for one's own interior glory, and
not for the fame that goes forth from the same mouth as
calumny2.
As he watched his country's doom closing on her,
he added:
If Poland is going once more to perish, I feel no longer
the strength to remain upon this earth. The day that War-
saw surrenders will be the signal to a Polish soul to leave the
body3.
It was in these September days that Poland's last
desperate stand was made. After a heroic defence,
Warsaw fell on September 7, 1831. The Rising was
over.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, August 24, 1831.
Ibid, Sept. 2, 1831. 3 Ibid.
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? 62 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"Warsaw has surrendered": so, under the first
shock of the blow, Krasinski wrote to Reeve, who was
awaiting almost with terror its effect upon his friend.
How I now adore that land, bleeding, sacred with so many
sorrows and disasters, bathed in the blood of martyrs. . . All
for her, my life, my endeavours, my days, my nights, my
sadness, my joys! All for her, my sword, my lyre, all, to my
last sigh1!
Again he wrote in an outburst of passionate grief:
Henry!
Have you heard it, the last cry of my great nation? Has
the iron of the victorious horses resounding on the pavement
of Warsaw reached your ears? Have you contemplated in a
dream of despair the Satan of pride and crime rushing through
the ranks of an appalled crowd, making his entry into the
streets of an expiring city? For death is there where liberty
is no more. Such then had to be the end of that noble
Poland. . . I speak no more of the future, of hope. . . We have
become again what we were before, men with no attribute
of humanity, beings destined. . . to see, in their ripe age, the
oppressor gather the harvests on the fields they watered with
their blood in the days of their youth; to speak low and bow
their heads. . . to break the strings of our lyre, the blades of
our swords, and to sit beside them in silence. . .
This nightmare of delirium, this nightmare of a year, is
broken to shivers; so many sorrows and so many hopes, so
many strong emotions and such great enthusiasm, have come
to their end. I have no longer to struggle against obstacles;
for the road that I should have followed has crumbled into
the abyss. Where is she? Where is she, that Poland of a
moment, that meteor of a country? Do you hear the pass-
word of the Russians on the walls of Warsaw?
Nothing, nothing attaches me to this world any longer,
neither H. , nor you, Henry, nor the tranquil happiness that
certain men promise themselves when a revolution is ended,
nor the hope of seeing my father again--nothing, nothing!
And, I tell you, in days when crime triumphs many souls
doubt God.
He himself was for the sake of his country's sorrows
to know that doubt.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 25, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
63
Of course those are not the elect, but weaker men--and
yet men with high souls, men who many times adored God
and invoked Him in the hour of danger. . . I shall never doubt;
for each drop of blood shed only reminds me of that of Gol-
gotha; but I shall say aloud, "The human race is cursed for
its iniquities, and the penalty involves the innocent and the
guilty. Death and agony must be to counterbalance impiety
and bad faith. The Poles have perished. ". . .
"Now my role begins," goes on the Anonymous Poet; "and
if it is to be more obscure, perhaps it will not be less unhappy.
Remember these words; and if, one day, you hear that I have
been dragged off to Siberia, raise your eyes on high, and thank
your God for having permitted your friend for once at least to
show that he was a good Pole. "
Telling Reeve he can write no more because his
heart is too heavy, he transcribes an article by Lamen-
nais on Poland1, of which the last words:
made me start. Again it seems to me that all is not lost, that
from these ashes and these bones will soon spring forth a dawn
more lasting than that which has just been quenched. . . It is
not said in God's thought that a people must perish, until the
moment when that people itself accepts death. And we will
never accept it; because from the death of so many victims
has sprung forth a new moral life that for long will animate my
country. Let us walk from sacrifice to sacrifice, from sorrow
to sorrow, and always in silence. At last, we will reach the
term of expiation. At last, we shall hail a horizon unveiled
before us. And if not, if the generation to which I belong
must again perish full of glory and young in years, or must
slowly wither away and go out unknown, so be it! as long as
our last thought is a thought consecrated to Poland.
This is all very fine; but, in one word, they are in Warsaw,
Poland has fallen, I am in Geneva2.
The downfall of the Polish Rising of 1830 ends the
most painful chapter in Krasinski's history, and the
most decisive.
With the full knowledge of all that it entailed he
1 Mickiewicz said of Lamennais that his tears for Poland were the
only sincere ones he saw in Paris. v
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 21, 1831.
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? 64 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
chose the sacrifice which ruined his life. For his
father's sake, he lost friends and well-wishers. For
his father's sake, he bore the disgrace of his name, the
fiery trial, intolerable to a proud and patriotic youth,
of the imputation of indifference to his country. For
his father's sake, says, after Zygmunt's death, one who
had greatly loved him, "he denied himself the liberty
of saying what he thought, acknowledging what he
wrote, or showing to whom he was attached1. " All
the dreams of literary fame that had been his as a
brilliantly gifted boy he now renounced. Were it only
for his father's relations with the Russian authorities,
it was impossible for him ever to disclose his authorship
of the most impassioned utterances of nationalism that
exist in the Polish language. From the time that he
was a boy of nineteen to his death nearly thirty years
later, the life of Zygmunt Krasinski was maimed and
stunted. He could never again live in his own country.
Each hour that he stayed there was to him a martyr-
dom, an insult to his patriotism, dwelling as he must
under the roof of a father, throwing in his lot to all
outward seeming with that father, who was the recipient
of honours from the hand that was inflicting the most
unrelenting of persecutions upon his nation2. Only
1 See the letter of Count Ladislas Zamojski to Henry Reeve. J. K.
Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve.
2 What a mortal pang the favours conferred on his father by Nicholas I
carried to Krasinski's heart is illustrated by a letter to Reeve, in reply to
the information volunteered by that tactless youth shortly after the fall of
Warsaw, that Wincenty Krasinski had been decorated by the Tsar. "I
know it, I know it, Henry. Why speak to me of the Tsar and his gifts?
Hamlet said as he went into his mother [quoted in English]: 'I will speak
daggers to her, but use none. ' And I permit anyone to plunge a dagger
of steel in my heart, provided that he spares me what you have not spared
me. . . You have the right to tell me everything; it is not you that I blame,
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? The Sacrifice
65
under compulsion when the Russian government with-
drew his passports, and threatened confiscation of the
family estates unless he showed himself in the Kingdom
on the appointed day, even if he were on a sick-bed at
the moment, did he from time to time go back to
Poland. Watched closely by the Russian authorities,
who marked against him the names of those with whom
he consorted, and whose spies opened his private corre-
spondence, he wandered, homeless, abroad, seeking in
vain for the health that the events of 1831 had shattered,
rent by grief for his country, battling against despair1.
But during those years of Poland's history between
1831 and the eve of the sixties, when the Russian
but my destiny. But let us say no more on the subject, for there are words
that a woman never utters, and also things of which a man never speaks. "
Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Dec. 26, 1831.
1 See Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Ko&mian, Lw6w,
1912 (Polish), p. 131. Krasinski encloses an official letter from the con-
queror of Warsaw, Paskievich, to his father, in which Paskievich states
that the suspicions of the Russian government have fallen on Zygmunt by
reason of his relations with a body of Polish priests, the Resurrectionist
Fathers, in Rome, whose crime in the eyes of the Russian rulers of Poland
was the spiritual work that they carried on for their country. The whole
letter is an open threat, informing Wincenty Krasinski that his son is
regarded with disfavour by the government, and that not even the elder
Krasinski's "many merits" can save the son if the latter compromises
himself further. This missive throws light on the extreme circumspection
with which Krasinski was obliged to walk. The fact of spies reporting
upon him and overlooking his letters accounts for the precautions that he
takes when writing to his friends. To each of them he signs himself by
a different name, in allusion to some common joke, to his address at the
moment, his passing mood. With Gaszynski he is "Era Piper," in memory
of their boyhood in the Krasinski palace. His mystifications when re-
ferring to his work, knowing that unbidden readers could discover and
report his authorship to Petersburg, thus most seriously involving his
father and bringing Siberia upon his own head, are even more elaborate.
He speaks of his writings under feigned titles: Iridion is "the Greek,"
the Psalms of the Future, "embroidery," and so on ; or else he mentions
them dispassionately as the compositions of other men.
G.
5
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? 66 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
government was avenging the earlier Rising and driving
a maddened nation into another; when the youth of
Poland, debarred from every national heritage, could
only learn the teaching of their country in a literature
as magnificent in its art as uplifting in its ideals, in a
poetry, persecuted and proscribed, that was read in hiding
at the peril of life and liberty throughout all Poland,
there arose a nameless poet1. He spoke out of the
silence tragically imposed upon him what his own grief
taught him, a message so noble and so inspiring that it
remains to our own day among the greatest of Poland's
and indeed of the world's spiritual possessions. No one
except a handful of intimate friends, sworn to secrecy,
knew that the Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski,
thus consecrating his life and genius to the country he
was forbidden openly to serve.
1 For details of this period of Polish literature see my Adam Mickiewicz,
and my Poland: a Study in National Idealism.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE SOWING OF THE SEED
(1831-1834)
Krasinski was now at grips with the problem that to
him and his nation meant life or death. There now
began for him the years of his long search after the
word that would clear the enigma of Poland's fate, and,
by so doing and thus justifying an inexplicable Divine
ordering, save his people and himself from moral de-
struction.
Reeve a little lecture that proved to be strangely ap-
propriate, not to Reeve, but to Krasinski himself.
1 "Perhaps one day it will be the only proof that will witness in my
favour. " Corresfondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, July 25, 1831.
a J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 56 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
You ought not to hurry to finish your poem. Wait from
day to day now; life will become harder for you and, in pro-
portion to the load, your powers will grow. . . Laocoon, you
will wrestle; and from the struggle and the fight stars will
burst forth, I mean thoughts, unknown flights, stronger, more
gigantic, to the beautiful and sublime, because you will be
surrounded by baseness and ugliness. . . Till now, Henry, you
have only been a man in your moments of poetry, while you
walked in the circle of a child. But now, when your circle is
enlarged, when you are a man among men, struggling every
minute, you will be above man in your poetry, for to be a poet
is to carry his present reality to the past or future. . . to heaven
or hell1.
Then the Anonymous Poet, whose inspiration was
now clamouring for release, tells the friend, whom he
still believed possessed of gifts far greater than his own,
that at last he is convinced that he too has:
a spark of poetry in my bosom, very imperfect, it is true, as
rhythm is wanting in me. The proof is that, without any hope
of men ever reading me, I write and write. . . What is it to
be a poet if not to have a superabundance of thoughts which
rush in torrents over the surface of the soul, and which boil
there until they find an outlet? It matters little to him if this
outlet reaches the ears of men or the void, so long as he rids
himself of that fire which burns him, and gives him not one
moment's breathing space2.
On a July afternoon there is a glimpse of Krasinski
for once, in the thick of his troubles, at play. He went
to the garden of Reeve's adored Constance to steal a
rose for his friend.
In the road which passes the garden hedge I met the
Sautter father talking to a neighbour, while a string of oxen
plied before him. Between my teeth I murmured a Damn and
tied my horse to a little gate behind. Then I paced up and
down the road in the attitude of a man who awaits his adver-
sary to fight a duel. At last he [Sautter] came towards me,
and appeared to be considering me. I gave him back look for
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, June 23, 1831.
2 Ibid. July 13, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
57
look and, seeing that he wouldn't learn any more about me, he
went off in the direction of the cornfields. I thought the
opportunity favourable, and I leaped the hedge. But at the
same instant two enormous dogs rushed out of a thicket, and
attacked me. I drew out my dagger and, thanks to the blade
that I presented at their heads, I made an honourable retreat
as far as the gate where I jumped on my horse. But there
behold! there was father Sautter, who reappeared among the
ears of corn on the other side. Caught between two fires, I
behaved with an astonishing presence of mind: for I pacified
the dogs by whistling and making friendly signs to them. As
for father Sautter, when I saw him passing out on my right
ten steps away from me, I stretched myself out on my saddle,
I laid my head on the neck, my feet on the back of my horse,
and I made as if I were going to sleep. The lawful proprietor
of Bourdigny passed by, looking at me with a smile, as if I
had given him the impression of being an oddity, then he
retreated to his house, leaving me for company his two amiable
Cerberuses. . . Like a falcon dying of hunger I swooped upon a
rose and another flower which I arranged in my pocket-book,
and that I shall send you as soon as they are dried.
This letter was still open when the courier came
in from Petersburg.
"What can I say to you, my dear Henry? My distress only
grows worse. My father writes to me with a heart-rending
tenderness. He tells me he is ready to make a sacrifice of
himself and his child to his country; but he implores me to
wait, and declares that he will shortly join me. Henry, what
would you do if you were in my place? Ah ! what need have
I to ask another what he would do? I see that I am ruined.
I am a fool, I am a coward, I am a wretched being, I have the
heart of a girl, I do not dare to brave a father's curse. I ex-
pected an imperious, violent, forcible letter, and I was prepared
for a decisive, terrible, forcible struggle too. . . But when
yesterday's letter arrived; when instead of threats, I found
prayers; instead of fury, I saw blessings; instead of commands,
supplications; instead of sentiments at the thought of which
I shuddered, a love of Poland piercing through each word, all my
strength melted into tears "--these three words are in English.
"I had prepared my arm to strike a blow; and, when it fell,
I found no resistance. . . I am touched to tenderness, full of
affection for my father, for his bitter misfortunes, and I have
no longer sufficient strength to decide. That is my condition.
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? 58
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
You can cast on my head the curse of a friend ; but I tell you
I am no longer myself. I have, however, answered, promising
nothing, still saying that if the opportunity presents itself I
shall go to Poland. But where is that opportunity? . . . I have
just seen in the last few days a Pole. . . who informed me that
prince Gagarin told him in Rome that all the Russian em-
bassies have my description, and the order to arrest me and
send me straight to Saint Petersburg if I try and escape from
Geneva. That's nothing. When it is the case of duty one
faces everything. But my father, my father, he who once
powerful, rich, loaded with flatteries and glory, saw himself
the first man in Poland1,. . . to-day he is beaten down, he has
lost everything, and has only me in this vast universe. If this
'last support fails him, what will become of him? It is not
death I fear for him. It would be a benefit to us both, but it
is those long years of old age, full of heart-breaking recol-
lections, disgust and bitterness; it is his heart broken above
my tomb; it is the look that he will cast around him without
finding one who will stretch out a hand to him. . . Yet I have a
ray of hope remaining that he will fight for Poland, and I at
his side. . .
"However, I am in the most complete incertitude. The
advice of men can do nothing for me. I hope for inspiration
only from the Mother of God ; and when that inspiration comes
I will follow it. . .
"And that thought of suicide that still hovers in my brain,
it is odd it no longer has the effect on me of a crime. On the
contrary, it seems to me that it is a thing which is permitted. . .
But when I reason I see truly it is a crime. Oh! if to die were
to sleep for ever! Eternity? Oh, well, you will see, we shall
have new toils, new troubles, in that eternity. We shall curse
it one day as we curse the earth. . . Rest! Rest! Sleep ! but no
dream ! or rather dreams, sometimes, but those of a child. . .
"What a madman am I! What a fool! Judge by this where
I have got to. I, I am setting up for a materialist! I, I already
desire annihilation ! Ah! how suffering beats down the wings
of the soul'! "
Krasinski's every mood and emotion, and his con-
1 Here Krasinski's filial feelings led him to a considerable exaggera-
tion of his father's former position.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, July 8, 12, 1831. The
letter quoted before this is obviously wrongly dated, having been written
before Krasinski heard from his father.
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59
tradictory impulses, flowed out in unchecked streams
to the ear of the only person to whom he could then
speak freely: so the weakening of religious faith of
which he speaks in this last letter may be taken as only
the wild words of a boy of nineteen, half beside himself.
Yet possibly they were the first steps towards the agony
of doubt which came upon him later.
Side by side with his confessions to Reeve, who, still
busy over mad plans on his friend's behalf, answered
in genuine, if somewhat sentimentally worded, sym-
pathy, Zygmunt continued to wrestle vainly with his
father.
"I would give my life if I could see you somewhere else," he
wrote to the General, "and to embrace you once more before
I die. . . . I love, oh, I love my father, and with folded hands I
stay far from Poland. Have pity on me! "
He reminds his father of the forty wounds the latter
bore on his body for Poland, and implores him to con-
sider what comfort can the son ever have in the re-
maining years of his life, the son who remained behind
when his country summoned him? He has in his heart
that which no argument can pacify or destroy:
I allude to that desire to fight for Poland, that deep con-
viction that it is my duty, to that terrible fear that I shall be
cursed by men and God for sitting quietly here.
Carrying that fiery coal in my bosom, I have not one, not
one moment of peace. Lethargy and fever--those are the two
states which master me by turns. Two days of fever, two days
of lethargy--that is my life! Take pity on me, dear father! . . .
I repeat again, that feeling of duty and the fear of disgrace
torment me so much that sometimes I go out of my senses
when I think about it. I am unhappy! In the past I used
to say that from Romanticism; to-day, alas! it has become
reality1.
The father's move was to appeal once more to the
1 Given by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 6o
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
son's affections and to assure him that the Rising was
no national movement, but the work of a few revolu-
tionaries. His eyes opened to the fact, bitterer to him
than death, that his father in Petersburg was listening
to the enemies of his country, belittling a conflict that
all Europe regarded as a national war, Krasinski re-
torted by a noble defence of a great cause, prophetical
of the Anonymous Poet's future philosophy.
It is the war of the weak against the mighty, of those con-
secrated to death against their old aggressors, of men mindful
that they have had great ancestors. . . And the more Poland is
covered with blood, flames, corpses, the more holy does her
cause become to my heart, the more do I see in this cause the
finger and the Providence of God, for to those whom He pro-
tects He is not wont to give victory without toil and sorrow.
Those, on the contrary, whom He sends for the punishment
of the human race, those, I say, He surrounds with ease and
benefits without labour; but, for those whom He has charged
with any great work of redemption, He places obstacles in
the way, He bids them suffer and die, for, by the fault of men
themselves, it is one of the laws of this unhappy world that
there can be nothing beautiful or salutary without suffering
and pain. . . To save the world the death of God was necessary.
To save one nation, how much more are necessary human
deaths and afflictions1!
So the duel dragged on between father and son
during the summer months of 1831 : the son writing
to his father, with tears in his eyes and rage in his
heart'', the letters that were a torment to write, pass-
ing through crises that, so he tells Reeve, took years
from his life. The while, defeat after defeat in Poland
were telling plainly of the end. To Reeve, who com-
1 Given by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 "Though I am in a very bad moment for criticizing, though I have
just finished a letter for my father and I have tears in my eyes and rage
in my heart, let us speak of Maria]' a poem by Reeve. Correspondance.
Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 18, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
61
plained that he could not love his own country, the
Pole replied:
Henry, do not imitate Byron. If you hate the men, adore
the land. . . Wait till your country is unhappy. Wait for the
day when the tears of your sisters will be mingled with the
ocean, when the groans of your brothers will prevent you from
closing your eyes, when you see your country ravaged. . . en-
tangled in chains, shamed by her degradation; and then you
will love your country more than you love the inspiration of
poetry, more than your mother, more than everything that
could awaken in you a feeling of affection, friendship, love.
"Better to perish in the first battle than to live far
from one's country," the writer mournfully said, as he
gazed out on the lake and mountains of Geneva, and
thought of the Polish plains, where war was raging1.
Out of that acute shame in his own position, which
is scarcely ever absent from his correspondence during
the Rising, sudden insight flashed upon the poet who
chose to remain anonymous and unknown.
I now know that at the bottom of the heart every noble
soul possesses something more holy than glory: it is the idea
of sacrifice ignored [he underlined the words], dumb, silent, of
the duty to be accomplished for one's own interior glory, and
not for the fame that goes forth from the same mouth as
calumny2.
As he watched his country's doom closing on her,
he added:
If Poland is going once more to perish, I feel no longer
the strength to remain upon this earth. The day that War-
saw surrenders will be the signal to a Polish soul to leave the
body3.
It was in these September days that Poland's last
desperate stand was made. After a heroic defence,
Warsaw fell on September 7, 1831. The Rising was
over.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, August 24, 1831.
Ibid, Sept. 2, 1831. 3 Ibid.
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? 62 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"Warsaw has surrendered": so, under the first
shock of the blow, Krasinski wrote to Reeve, who was
awaiting almost with terror its effect upon his friend.
How I now adore that land, bleeding, sacred with so many
sorrows and disasters, bathed in the blood of martyrs. . . All
for her, my life, my endeavours, my days, my nights, my
sadness, my joys! All for her, my sword, my lyre, all, to my
last sigh1!
Again he wrote in an outburst of passionate grief:
Henry!
Have you heard it, the last cry of my great nation? Has
the iron of the victorious horses resounding on the pavement
of Warsaw reached your ears? Have you contemplated in a
dream of despair the Satan of pride and crime rushing through
the ranks of an appalled crowd, making his entry into the
streets of an expiring city? For death is there where liberty
is no more. Such then had to be the end of that noble
Poland. . . I speak no more of the future, of hope. . . We have
become again what we were before, men with no attribute
of humanity, beings destined. . . to see, in their ripe age, the
oppressor gather the harvests on the fields they watered with
their blood in the days of their youth; to speak low and bow
their heads. . . to break the strings of our lyre, the blades of
our swords, and to sit beside them in silence. . .
This nightmare of delirium, this nightmare of a year, is
broken to shivers; so many sorrows and so many hopes, so
many strong emotions and such great enthusiasm, have come
to their end. I have no longer to struggle against obstacles;
for the road that I should have followed has crumbled into
the abyss. Where is she? Where is she, that Poland of a
moment, that meteor of a country? Do you hear the pass-
word of the Russians on the walls of Warsaw?
Nothing, nothing attaches me to this world any longer,
neither H. , nor you, Henry, nor the tranquil happiness that
certain men promise themselves when a revolution is ended,
nor the hope of seeing my father again--nothing, nothing!
And, I tell you, in days when crime triumphs many souls
doubt God.
He himself was for the sake of his country's sorrows
to know that doubt.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 25, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
63
Of course those are not the elect, but weaker men--and
yet men with high souls, men who many times adored God
and invoked Him in the hour of danger. . . I shall never doubt;
for each drop of blood shed only reminds me of that of Gol-
gotha; but I shall say aloud, "The human race is cursed for
its iniquities, and the penalty involves the innocent and the
guilty. Death and agony must be to counterbalance impiety
and bad faith. The Poles have perished. ". . .
"Now my role begins," goes on the Anonymous Poet; "and
if it is to be more obscure, perhaps it will not be less unhappy.
Remember these words; and if, one day, you hear that I have
been dragged off to Siberia, raise your eyes on high, and thank
your God for having permitted your friend for once at least to
show that he was a good Pole. "
Telling Reeve he can write no more because his
heart is too heavy, he transcribes an article by Lamen-
nais on Poland1, of which the last words:
made me start. Again it seems to me that all is not lost, that
from these ashes and these bones will soon spring forth a dawn
more lasting than that which has just been quenched. . . It is
not said in God's thought that a people must perish, until the
moment when that people itself accepts death. And we will
never accept it; because from the death of so many victims
has sprung forth a new moral life that for long will animate my
country. Let us walk from sacrifice to sacrifice, from sorrow
to sorrow, and always in silence. At last, we will reach the
term of expiation. At last, we shall hail a horizon unveiled
before us. And if not, if the generation to which I belong
must again perish full of glory and young in years, or must
slowly wither away and go out unknown, so be it! as long as
our last thought is a thought consecrated to Poland.
This is all very fine; but, in one word, they are in Warsaw,
Poland has fallen, I am in Geneva2.
The downfall of the Polish Rising of 1830 ends the
most painful chapter in Krasinski's history, and the
most decisive.
With the full knowledge of all that it entailed he
1 Mickiewicz said of Lamennais that his tears for Poland were the
only sincere ones he saw in Paris. v
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 21, 1831.
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? 64 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
chose the sacrifice which ruined his life. For his
father's sake, he lost friends and well-wishers. For
his father's sake, he bore the disgrace of his name, the
fiery trial, intolerable to a proud and patriotic youth,
of the imputation of indifference to his country. For
his father's sake, says, after Zygmunt's death, one who
had greatly loved him, "he denied himself the liberty
of saying what he thought, acknowledging what he
wrote, or showing to whom he was attached1. " All
the dreams of literary fame that had been his as a
brilliantly gifted boy he now renounced. Were it only
for his father's relations with the Russian authorities,
it was impossible for him ever to disclose his authorship
of the most impassioned utterances of nationalism that
exist in the Polish language. From the time that he
was a boy of nineteen to his death nearly thirty years
later, the life of Zygmunt Krasinski was maimed and
stunted. He could never again live in his own country.
Each hour that he stayed there was to him a martyr-
dom, an insult to his patriotism, dwelling as he must
under the roof of a father, throwing in his lot to all
outward seeming with that father, who was the recipient
of honours from the hand that was inflicting the most
unrelenting of persecutions upon his nation2. Only
1 See the letter of Count Ladislas Zamojski to Henry Reeve. J. K.
Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve.
2 What a mortal pang the favours conferred on his father by Nicholas I
carried to Krasinski's heart is illustrated by a letter to Reeve, in reply to
the information volunteered by that tactless youth shortly after the fall of
Warsaw, that Wincenty Krasinski had been decorated by the Tsar. "I
know it, I know it, Henry. Why speak to me of the Tsar and his gifts?
Hamlet said as he went into his mother [quoted in English]: 'I will speak
daggers to her, but use none. ' And I permit anyone to plunge a dagger
of steel in my heart, provided that he spares me what you have not spared
me. . . You have the right to tell me everything; it is not you that I blame,
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? The Sacrifice
65
under compulsion when the Russian government with-
drew his passports, and threatened confiscation of the
family estates unless he showed himself in the Kingdom
on the appointed day, even if he were on a sick-bed at
the moment, did he from time to time go back to
Poland. Watched closely by the Russian authorities,
who marked against him the names of those with whom
he consorted, and whose spies opened his private corre-
spondence, he wandered, homeless, abroad, seeking in
vain for the health that the events of 1831 had shattered,
rent by grief for his country, battling against despair1.
But during those years of Poland's history between
1831 and the eve of the sixties, when the Russian
but my destiny. But let us say no more on the subject, for there are words
that a woman never utters, and also things of which a man never speaks. "
Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Dec. 26, 1831.
1 See Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Ko&mian, Lw6w,
1912 (Polish), p. 131. Krasinski encloses an official letter from the con-
queror of Warsaw, Paskievich, to his father, in which Paskievich states
that the suspicions of the Russian government have fallen on Zygmunt by
reason of his relations with a body of Polish priests, the Resurrectionist
Fathers, in Rome, whose crime in the eyes of the Russian rulers of Poland
was the spiritual work that they carried on for their country. The whole
letter is an open threat, informing Wincenty Krasinski that his son is
regarded with disfavour by the government, and that not even the elder
Krasinski's "many merits" can save the son if the latter compromises
himself further. This missive throws light on the extreme circumspection
with which Krasinski was obliged to walk. The fact of spies reporting
upon him and overlooking his letters accounts for the precautions that he
takes when writing to his friends. To each of them he signs himself by
a different name, in allusion to some common joke, to his address at the
moment, his passing mood. With Gaszynski he is "Era Piper," in memory
of their boyhood in the Krasinski palace. His mystifications when re-
ferring to his work, knowing that unbidden readers could discover and
report his authorship to Petersburg, thus most seriously involving his
father and bringing Siberia upon his own head, are even more elaborate.
He speaks of his writings under feigned titles: Iridion is "the Greek,"
the Psalms of the Future, "embroidery," and so on ; or else he mentions
them dispassionately as the compositions of other men.
G.
5
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? 66 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
government was avenging the earlier Rising and driving
a maddened nation into another; when the youth of
Poland, debarred from every national heritage, could
only learn the teaching of their country in a literature
as magnificent in its art as uplifting in its ideals, in a
poetry, persecuted and proscribed, that was read in hiding
at the peril of life and liberty throughout all Poland,
there arose a nameless poet1. He spoke out of the
silence tragically imposed upon him what his own grief
taught him, a message so noble and so inspiring that it
remains to our own day among the greatest of Poland's
and indeed of the world's spiritual possessions. No one
except a handful of intimate friends, sworn to secrecy,
knew that the Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski,
thus consecrating his life and genius to the country he
was forbidden openly to serve.
1 For details of this period of Polish literature see my Adam Mickiewicz,
and my Poland: a Study in National Idealism.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE SOWING OF THE SEED
(1831-1834)
Krasinski was now at grips with the problem that to
him and his nation meant life or death. There now
began for him the years of his long search after the
word that would clear the enigma of Poland's fate, and,
by so doing and thus justifying an inexplicable Divine
ordering, save his people and himself from moral de-
struction.
