No More Learning

Again, from the reciprocal overflowing between the
Persons of the Blessed Trinity, Krasinski deduces that
of each soul, fashioned in the image of the Blessed
Trinity, upon one another. This, too, plays a consider-
able part in his mystic theories of Poland's apostolate.
14--2
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 212 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
In humanity the social state, the sanctification and raising
of which is the aim of humanity, is precisely that reciprocal
imparting to each other of human spirits. Everywhere and
always who gives receives, who loves is multiplied, who pours
out of himself or creates something external, is in that very
moment created higher himself. . . To impart self on earth to
others is in outward seeming to lose something of self, even to
be utterly destroyed--but that is only a delusion. That destruc-
tion is itself destroyed, for in truth only by that means does
the living spirit grow and immortalize itself. . . By what it gives
out from itself it becomes more powerful.
Showing how Christ wrought out this rule "most
sublimely and most perfectly" by His life and death,
Krasinski argues that as the plant to become a flower
must pass through light, so each man and collective
humanity must pass by the law of Christ, "and work it
out in themselves to gain salvation. For the individual
man salvation is eternal life. . . For humanity it is the
Kingdom of God on earth, that is, the condition of
social Christ-likeness. "
But as humanity is the collective state of all in-
dividual men, each unit composing the aggregate must
make himself ripe for this high spiritual calling. "He
must fulfil that condition somewhere and somehow. "
Perhaps by transmigrations, suggests Krasinski (who at
that time was inclined to believe in metempsychosis), or
perhaps by some state of trial and purgation after human
life is over, which state the poet calls purgatory, but
which he develops somewhat further than the Catholic
doctrines on the subject in which he had been brought
up. The state of purgation he looks upon as that
of the transition of which he often speaks. Man,
deprived of his first condition, that of earthly being or
existence, enters the second phase of his trinity, that
of thought or mind, impossible to manifest itself by
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Before the Dawn
213
action. This phase of transition, deprived of corporeal
existence but where mind and soul remain, leading to
the third state or epoch of union by love between being
and thought, was to Krasinski the exact counterpart of
the then condition of his nation, and this conception
cleared his views on her present and future. In that
purgatory, writes the poet with his thoughts turned to
his country, there is "indescribable yearning, infinite
mournfulness," endless searching for what is not yet
realized.
But the moment will arrive when the perfect
harmony between thought and being will be effected,
and that will be the day of the Holy Ghost, Who shall
unite them by love. It will be the completion of the
trinity both in man's soul and in humanity. Christ left
it to "human toil to prove in the whole of nature, in all
the departments of life and death, in all the spheres of
thought and in every civilization the necessity of Christ's
law. "
Suffering and struggle are always Krasinski's in-
exorable conditions. The same law of the torments of
transition applies equally to the individual and to
the human race. Man is composed in the image of
the Trinity: of body; soul, the latter, according to
Krasinski, the thought and consciousness of man about
himself; and spirit, that is the individuality that binds
these two and which is man's personality1. These
correspond, as we see, to each member of the Divine
Trinity. "To reach the spirit it is necessary for the
human race to pass through thousandfold and terrible
cycles, and equally is it necessary for each individual
1 See Count Tarnowski's clear summarization of Krasinski's doctrines
in his Zygmunt Krasinski.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 214 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that composes it. Being, or the body, wars in our
bosoms with thought or the soul. " By this war shall
the spirit be born in man. "The All Spirit or the Holy
Ghost will manifest Himself to creatures as soon as
they themselves reach the reconciliation within them-
selves of their being with their thought, of the body
with the soul. " "Action is the sign, the consequence
of life. Life manifests itself by deeds. " The creation
of the world was the highest of deeds. We from afar
unite ourselves to God's great deed inasmuch as we act
or create perpetually: and when these acts
reach a certain degree of perfection, when there shall be in
them harmony of being and thought, then will we attain union
with the Holy Spirit. . . The better and more profoundly we
know Him by that deed. . . of ours the more He will show Him-
self to us, beautiful, wise, infinite. . . ever more unattainable,
though each moment attained: ever abiding in His relation
to us as the ideal, albeit as the reality unfolded about us: as
our unceasing desire, as our life that is never ceasing nor
possible to end. And this in very truth is eternal love. . . But
it is difficult to write clearly on all that touches the all spirit
and the all life, for we, spirits torn asunder and divided into
twain, unhappy, suffering, have not reached the ages of life.
One torn asunder can only faintly anticipate what are peace,
harmony, love, and the creative deed that flows from them.
Yes, but it is well to have this anticipation. It is the glimmer-
ing spark in us of the all life.
Humanity then toils and progresses to its aim,
which aim is the Kingdom of God, or in other words
the new Christ-disposition of the universe,
passing into deed and reality; now not only affecting indi-
vidual souls, but the whole of humanity, all its laws, statutes,
and governments, and thus changing earth into one great
living temple of the Holy Ghost.
What then is humanity? It is the common labour of all
human individual spirits, advancing through the ages of the
history of this world, so that by their mutual training of self
they may reach that rung of time whence they will soar to
their eternal life,
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Before the Dawn 215
which is that new epoch when all the universe shall be
united in eternal harmony.
If, then, humanity is the common labour of individual
spirits travelling to the eternal life, there must be intermediary
circles in which is wrought the common labour of individual
spirits training humanity in its highest signification, that is,
God's kingdom on earth. . . and from whose organization and
harmony is to arise the living and perfect organism which we
call God's kingdom and the rule of the Holy Ghost on this
earth.
These circles are the individual nations each called
to its own working out of one of God's ideas, endowed
like man with free will as to whether it will correspond
to the Divine grace of its calling. If unfaithful to this
vocation, it shall lose its entity for ever, and be swallowed
up by other nations.
We only call a nation that collection of living spirits which
has comprehended the aim to which it tends, that is, humanity
in its highest signification, and has consecrated itself to this
by historical deeds, or has so acted as to hasten its apparition
and fulfilment.
From this follows the duty of the individual to
sacrifice himself for the nation and therefore for
humanity, because "the Christ-likeness of the collective
spirit is not attained otherwise than by the Christ-like-
ness of individual spirits. " With Krasinski the in-
dispensable condition of the resurrection of Poland will
always be the moral worth of the individual Pole.
When the individual spirits give up their body and life for
the nation, for humanity, by that very act they gain them
back, for the nation is exalted and the day of God's kingdom
approaches, consequently the solution of the history of the
human race.
"Hence results the sanctity and the inviolability of
nationality. " A nation's first beginning, her rise from
her myths into the light of history, "in which God's
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 216 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
special grace worked under the form of the national
instinct and inspiration," constitutes the first stage of
the trinity in a nation's life, that of being. When after
centuries of labour she gains a clear knowledge of her
vocation and beholds "the secret of her own being,"
she has reached the second stage of her trinity, that of
thought. Then succeeds her long battle between "the
two elements, the body and soul of the nation," that is
to lead her to the third stage, when she shall be a
medium of God's kingdom on earth. "Then only in
that third epoch the immortal spirit of the nation shall
shine in its fulness. . . having fused body and soul"--
Krasinski's definition of the soul will be remembered--
"in one love and one life. "
Krasinski then works out his idea of the trinity in
history: the ancient world, the classical age, corre-
sponding to the first stage of the body or being: the
Christian era to the second of thought and of the soul.
"But before these two worlds finish out the struggle with
each other," writes the Pole, wearied by the evil days in which
his lot had been cast, " unite and flow together into the one
world of the spirit, how many ages must pass? How many
transformations, tribulations, tempests, must befall? How
much blood shall be shed by the body, how much despair by
the soul? . . . [Our age] being a transition, bears all its signs,
all the marks of disunion, disruption, of the war between being
and thought, between the body and soul of the world. "
The idea of nationality, slowly growing through
history, is opposed to the rule of the ancient world
which was of government only, the rule of the body
preceding the rule of the soul.
But we are reaching the ages when such a division of soul .
from body shall be no more possible, and the first principle of
public law shall be the dissolution of all governments that are
not founded on nationality.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Before the Dawn
217
This is the age of nationalities. The nations "are
reaching the consciousness of the inviolability and in-
dependence of their life. " But as only after Christ's
life and death did the individual spirit reach the full
knowledge of its life and immortality and of its road to
heaven, so now the collective spirit of humanity neces-
sitates its pattern to point it out its road and to prove
to it that destruction is impossible.
But such a truth, descending for the first time into the
world, can only be proved by death and rebirth. Before we
can begin to live lastingly without death, first we must rise
from death, to show all who are mortal and our brothers that
they are in very truth immortal.
"The necessity of the like examples is the eternal
law of history," where:
nothing is brought about flimsily or easily. All is done little by
little, with difficulty, laboriously, and beyond measure gravely
and sternly. No abstract thought, no idea unjustified by
execution, no theory taken by itself can direct the fate of the
world. It must first take flesh, become a living example, a
doctrine with a beating heart.
There must be in our days some one member of the
human commonwealth to be the living proof of the
sanctity of nationality and the disseminator of the truths
upon which history is built. It can only speak through
the power of martyrdom and death by which alone
immortality and resurrection can be proved, which have
been preceded by a past of glorious deed.
So here we have the poet's own country, now, he
says, in the second stage of her trinity.
That will be in some wise the state of Purgatory for the
soul of a great nation. Ground down on all sides by a fear-
ful slavery, wounded by daily injustice, suffering and wandering,
she, by indescribable pain and an equally infinite ideal strength
of faith and hope, prepares for herself a new body for the day
of resurrection. . . No one without deliberation and strong reso-
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 218 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
lution, without a thousand hesitations, researches, painful de-
ceptions, collapses of the powers of thought and transforming
uprisings will reach the self-inebriation of its own Christ-like-
ness, awakened in us by the manifestation of the Son of God.
The collective spirit of a nation must pass through precisely
the same cycle as individuals if she is to rise from the dead
and stand in the band of living creative nations.
The conviction of the identity of the morality of the
individual with that of the universal law is always one
of Krasinski's fundamental tenets, of which we shall
have more to say in another place.
Then with a touch of ecstasy Krasinski sets forth
the mission of his nation to lead us by her death to the
realization of God's kingdom on earth. But we will
not linger upon these fine passages for we shall meet
them as sublime poetry in Dawn, whither Krasinski
had now nearly won his way.
In the third part of the Treatise the poet points to
the Slavonic race in contradistinction to the Roman
and Germanic families as that which will introduce the
future element of life into the world. Poland, says he,
will be the leader of that race. For in Russia an
Asiatic conception of government stamped out liberty,
and thus the element of love and life and progress
perished. It is curious to note that one of the argu-
ments Krasinski uses in his case against Russia is the
denial by the Russian state religion of the equal pro-
cession of the Holy Ghost from the two first Persons
of the Blessed Trinity. This, as is obvious from the
whole tenor of The Treatise of the Trinity, proves to
Krasinski the rule of all-power in the Russian nation,
the deification of power, and hence the loss of the spirit
and of progress. But at the moment that he turns
fondly to the contrasting image of his own nation, the
manuscript breaks off abruptly, never to be resumed.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? CHAPTER X
DAWN
(1843)
On the 9th of April, 1842, Krasinski wrote from Basle
to Gaszynski:
"Where shall I begin and where must I end, oh,
my Konstanty? At that very name "--it had also been
Danielewicz's--"my heart is broken. Only two weeks
ago there were three of us, united of old together from
our childhood. Now there are only two, you and I\"
In February under the shock of a terrible family
tragedy, to which indeed one who knew him well ascribes
his death2, Danielewicz had fallen sick of typhus. For
weeks Krasinski watched by his bedside in an agony
where there was small room for hope: and on Easter
Sunday Danielewicz died in the poet's arms, the only
one of his friends who did not outlive him.
"He was," writes Krasinski to their mutual school-
fellow, "my guardian angel, my strength, the intellect
of my intellect: and he loved me so, he loved me so that
if all had forsaken me I would not have complained if
only he had remained8. "
Krasinski only tarried in the city that had become
hateful to him long enough to lay his friend's remains
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Basle, April 9, 1842.
2 See Stanislaw Koimian's Introduction to Letters of Zygmunt
Krasinski to Stanistaw Ko&mian.
3 Letters to Gaszynski, ibid.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 220 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
in the grave and to write the epitaph that he placed
above them: "To him who was pierced with a bullet
at Ostrotenka," who: "eleven years later died on foreign
soil. . . to the companion of all his youth, to his friend
who was more than a brother, this stone is placed in
his despair by Zygmunt Krasinski" : and he ends it by
Job's cry of grief: " My days have been swifter than a
post, they have fled away and have not seen good.
"
Then sick in mind and body he wandered slowly and
sadly into Switzerland, detained on his journey by a
physical break-down. "I seek for forgetfulness in the
mountains," he told Cieszkowski, "but on all sides of
me and behind me and before me goes his beloved
form1. " In June he was at Freiburg, where was also
Delphina Potocka. Three years before he had been
there with her and Danielewicz; and here he now
wrote those beautiful lines, commemorating a dead
friend and a living love, that remain to us as the poem:
Fryburg.
Three were we once. We did not know beneath the
shadows of these towers, crowned by the rainbows of these
coloured windows, that three years were to pass and we should
be alone, and he a memory only to our hearts.
After recalling the days the three had spent to-
gether, when Delphina had sung to Danielewicz's piano,
Krasinski recounts in language almost identical with
that which he had written at the time to his friends
the scenes of Danielewicz's deathbed. He kneels be-
fore the corpse whose face, he says in the poem as he
said in his letters, "was beautiful so that it seemed to
me like Christ's own face: and I cried out in certitude,
'He is Thine, Lord God. '"
1 Letters to Cieszkowski. Lucerne, April 30, 1842.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Dawn
221
Then did I weep--not for him, but myself; for overwhelmed
by egotistic grief I saw around me the desert of my life.
Only thy image [Delphina's] rose from far, the figure of the
second angel of my fate. No other voice now calls to me, nor
other tenderness can move my soul. Whether the flowers
bloom or the world fall to dust to me it is the same--the same
for evermore, because the spirit of my soul is far from me,
he who should uphold me 'midst the billows and with me
raise from the grave's darkness the shade of our dead Mother.
Now are there ever fewer spirits to defend our Mother. All
thither go--by that same road: beyond the world, beyond
Poland, to the unseeing grave; and we who here remain can
fight no more. High hearts have broken. Every mind, be it
but free, strong or great, bids us farewell. All that is godlike
doth forsake us here.
With his characteristic exaltation of his friends
over himself the poet next confesses that without
Danielewicz he is nought: that it was the dead man
who was his strength and who gave him comprehension
of life and courage for action1.
And now he in one grave, my country in another: and on
those graves 1, driven by madness, with thee alone, oh, sister,
have remained, only with thee!
Oh, angel woman, thou art still with me. Thou hast not
yet departed.
She cannot be by his side in the hour when he will
fight and die for Poland, but till its advent:
Thou art my salvation, the only rainbow in the darkened
skies, the last song of my love art thou! Oh, let me hear thy
voice and touch thy hand! 2 That hand perchance shall me
1 Despite Krasinski's eulogy of the friend who had been his protector
when his other young fellow-Poles had turned against him, Danielewicz's
influence over Krasinski had not, according to Kozmian, been salutary.
Danielewicz was strongly affected by pantheism and German philosophy,
and had been driven by his troubles into a profound pessimism and loss
of faith. At the instance, however, of a Pole, Cezary Plater, then in Munich,
Zygmunt summoned a priest to the deathbed of his friend: and it was after
having seen the latter die with the last sacraments of his Church that
Krasinski returned to the practice of his religion. Kozmian, op. cit.
2 Krasinski found spiritual and national inspiration in Delphina's
beautiful voice. He once wrote to her that from the moment he heard
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 222
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
from ruin defend. Thy voice perchance can, with a poet's
breath, people and ring within this lonely heart. Come, weep
with me above the stones of graves, and from our tears shall
grow sad and great roses, dark, like blood congealed from sad-
ness. One of their garlands shall we cast on Poland's grave,
the second shall our offering be to him. From heaven he
then will send us strength that we shall live and die in faith,
oh, sister mine, in faith that she, that Holy One who sleeps in
bonds, shall in the end cast off her chains.
That faith Krasinski had by now gained. This
year--1842--was to him one of bitter bereavement and
of dreary forebodings at the prospect of his marriage.
But private sorrow affected not at all his hope for Poland
and for the human race in the light of which he was
now walking always more surely. The two strands of
personal pessimism and national optimism run side by
1 side in Krasinski's life. In this July of 1842 when he
was with his father at Kissingen, yearning for his lost
friend and too ill to be able to write more than a few
words:
In spite of continual physical sufferings, a succession of
new and unaccustomed thoughts continually stands before the
eyes of my soul. . . Everything is unfolding itself before me
always more broadly and more clearly, at the same time
logically and beautiful and holy. . . When I look into the future
I feel faith, love and hope, not as I did of old, because of old
grief for the past hid and darkened everything to me. To-day
the sun has now risen in my spirit, but many days will still
pass before that same sun is shed on the world. As an indi-
vidual I suffer and shall suffer, but as a link of the great chain
I see a splendour of light in the further course of succeeding
links, and I bless the Lord1.
And in October when to the same friend he confides
her sing a certain song there was scarcely a minute in which he did not
hear within his soul her high, pure notes ringing to heaven. And again
he tells her, when in Rome, that his craving to hear her sing again was
almost madness. Unknown Letters from Zygmunt Krasinski to Delphitia
Potocka. Tygodnik Illustrowany, 1899.
1 Letters to Sottan. Kissingen, July 14, 1842.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Dawn
223
1
that since the death of Danielewicz "a thousand troubles
and anxieties have come upon me, and the future is
also amaritudinis plena"--an allusion to his approach-
ing marriage--he adds in the same breath:
"The resurrection is near, at least by the spirit and
in the spirit1. " Writing to Cieszkowski--in November,
1842--that he was tempted to suicide between "grief
for the past and detestation of the future," he makes
haste to add that he is speaking of the individual past
and future, not of the universal2.
Out of all these new-born hopes Krasinski was now
writing Dawn. After he left his father he stayed a
couple of weeks at Nice in the company of Delphina
Potocka, Gaszynski and Matachowski. Krasinski had
been drawn to this latter faithful friend, not by any
intellectual gifts on the other's side, but by the sterling
qualities of soul that attracted the esteem and trust of
all his fellow-Poles, and by their mutual love of their
country3. When Krasinski went to Nice Dawn was
in great part written. Other stanzas were composed
there as, always intensely sensitive to music, Krasinski
listened to the exquisite voice of the woman who had
inspired the poem; and others again came to him as he
rode along the shores of the Mediterranean. From
Nice, accompanied by the devoted Matachowski who
chose to give him the support of his presence in those
difficult moments of his life, Krasinski went on to Rome
for the winter that preceded his marriage. Gaszynski
consented to put his name to Dawn in order to avert
all suspicion of the authorship, for being in exile he
1 Letters to Sottan. Genoa, Oct. 3, 1842.
2 Letters to Cieszkowski. Nov. 25, 1842.
3 See Preface, Letters 0/ Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Mata-
chowski.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 224
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
was beyond reach of the Russian penalties: and in
1843 the poem was published that marks the term of
the Anonymous Poet's seven years' spiritual wandering.
To that most noble paean of victory over suffering
and evil which lives as Dawn Krasinski places as
mottoes two prophecies of Christ's reign on earth
before which darkness was to flee--the lines "from
the fourth eclogue of Virgil referring to the prophecy
of the Cumaean Sibyl: Ultima Cumaei venit jam
carminis aetas: magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur
ordo; and the adaptation of a verse from Exodus that
the Catholic Church sings in her office for Christmas
Eve: Hodie scietis quia veniet Dominus et salvabit nos
et mane videbitis gloriam ejus.
The poem is preceded by a prose introduction
justifying Krasinski's convictions by the logic of his-
torical fact. Krasinski was a poet, a mystic, and he
may even be called a dreamer: but every theory of his,
every vision, must be confirmed by logical consequence
before he would accept it or hand it on to others. His
heart refused to take to itself the conclusions for which
it yearned unless his mind were first satisfied by proof.
So now the obscurity of his former works is to be found
no more. Dawn is mystical: but even in its highest
1 flights it is clear as crystal.
In marked contrast even to the pages of its immediate
predecessor The Treatise of the Trinity is the tone of
tranquil certainty that runs through the preface of the
poem.
In the days of Caesar, preceding the great day of Christ,
the ancient world had reached the final consequences of its
history. . . Wherever you might look there was in the world of
the spirit ruin, licence, disruption--and from those signs it
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Dawn
225
was easy to recognize that this world was nigh to the day of
judgment and to its metamorphosis.
And not only does that mental condition without faith and
of vain longings and grief bear witness to this. Another sign
steps forth. In the material field all grows and centralizes.
Rome ever conquers. Then arose Julius Caesar.
And the Jews thought of him that he was their Messias,
and for a moment the world thought he was its God. But you
know that he was only the precursor of its God. In the field
of historical deed he was as the angel to whom it was ordained
to move the impediments from before the feet of the ap-
proaching God. He led the world to material unity without
which no word of life could be dispersed abroad. He changed
the known world of that time into one great, broad highway.
And a few years later who began to tread that highroad,
to announce that the new life was already sent down from on
high, and that the dead shall not die, and that the God, un-
known in Athens, had shown Himself in Jerusalem? Was it not
Peter? Was it not St John? . . . The material unity of government
. . . was the condition, the necessary medium, of progress for
Christianity. . .
Discite historiam exemplo moniti! Two thousand years have
passed, and those same signs are spread abroad upon the
waves of time. The last throes of the Roman Republic were
reflected in the terrible, epileptic convulsions of the French
Revolution. Finally, the days of Caesar were remoulded into
the days of Napoleon.
Krasinski, fondled as an infant by the soldiers
fighting for Bonaparte, had been brought up by his
father in a passionate admiration for Napoleon which,
not uncommon even in this country in a generation
nearer his age than ours, with the Poles reached
something like a religious veneration. To Mickiewicz
Napoleon stood for a superhuman figure, imbued with
the spirit of Christ, called to the task of redeeming the
political world till he forfeited it by personal failing.
In Krasinski's case Napoleonism dispelled the shadows
that lay before his vision, and led him to the rising of
his orient.
G.
15
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 226
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
And the Christian Caesar, higher by a whole past epoch
than his predecessor, filled with the knowledge of himself, and
with the aim for the sake of which the Spirit of God that
directs history had sent him here below, said, as he died on the
rock of exile, "The beginning of the new era will be reckoned
from me. " In that word is contained the truth both of his and
of the whole past. But before that truth is developed and
fulfilled, before the world shall pass from the Napoleonic
standpoint to another, to a more entire and more sanctified
transformation, it must first be worn out as the ancient world
was worn out. . . From the time of the Gracchi the pagan world
did not rest till it heard the promise of Christ: from the time
of Luther the new world has had no rest. . . and shall not rest
till it reaches, not now the hearing, but the understanding and
the fulfilment of the promise of Christ.
There is decadence of religion everywhere, goes on
Krasinski; an anarchy of thought. All forms of belief
have passed over the human race, all crying for the
spark of life that shall renew their youth.
That anarchy is so fearful that it necessarily tends to
crisis--that desire so great, and up to now vain, that it neces-
sarily calls for the help of the Father Who is in heaven.
When was that help ever refused? When did God ever forsake
history when history raised its hands to Him, and in the
language of all the peoples of the earth cried out: " Lord, show
Thyself to us"?
Endless desire brings with it eternal yearning and endless
grief. As the individual, so the human race sinks into melan-
choly. From collective man shall also often flow the bloody
sweat of agony on the Mount of Olives of history. Were it
otherwise there would be no spirit of humanity training itself
by its own will. Where would the merit be with which it
merits in this time? What is that merit if not its life in history,
if not that course of labour divided into the moments of death
and of the resurrection of the dead from death? And how
can it die if it does not doubt? And how can it rise again
if it does not believe? Not to die you must be God. To
die you must be man. When the spirit of God unites itself
with the nature of man, the divine life breaks asunder the
human grave--Christ died and rose again from the dead.
And to the epoch, begun in His word, the same must be-
fall before it can by deed be adequate to the whole purport
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Dawn
227
of that word. Our fathers stood on that declivity which leads
to the grave. Fate carried us further, and laid us deeper--
we are in the grave. I err, we are already beyond the grave.
You all know, my brothers, that we were born in the womb
of death: and from the cradle your eyes have been used to
look on the livid stains of death, widespread on the body of
the European world. Hence the eternal grief that gnaws your
hearts: hence the incertitude that has become your life. . .