No More Learning

Husband. Marya! /
Wife. Henryk, you will not despise me now. I am full of
inspiration. You will not forsake me now in the evenings.
Husband. Never, never.
Wife. Look at me. Have I not made myself your equal?
I understand everything, I will give it out, I will play it, I will
sing it. Sea, stars, storm, battle. Yes, stars, storm, sea--ah!
something still escapes me--battle.
She breaks into doggerel lines.
Husband. The curse! the curse!
Wife (throwing her arms round him and kissing him). My
Henryk, Henryk, how happy I am!
Seeing his gloom, she tells him what will surely
drive the cloud from his brow, namely, that his son
will be a poet.
At the christening the priest gave him for his first name--
Poet, and you know the others, George Stanislas. I did this.
I blessed him, I added a curse--he will be a poet. Ah! how
I love you, Henryk!
Then the wildness of the prophecies that are ringing
from every side of the asylum while she and her husband
talk together falls upon her also. She babbles incoher-
ently, but ever gently, of what would befall the world
if God went mad; soon returning to her favourite
thought of the poet child who will bring joy to his
father. Her brain gives way: and she dies, happy,
says she, because it is in Henryk's arms that she dies.
Here ends the first part of the domestic drama.
How much of its peculiar dreariness may be ascribed
to the shadows of Krasinski's own childhood we can
but conjecture; but possibly the picture was, if only
subconsciously, coloured by a sensitive and observant
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? 106 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
child's impressions of a home where there had been
little sympathy between husband and wife. Certain it
is that George, the son of Henryk and Marya, is to
a great extent Krasinski himself.
There is a further point to observe in this unsparing
portrayal of a poet's marriage, or, in other words, of
the dreamer mated with reality. Krasinski spoke here
not merely out of his knowledge of human nature in
general, but out of his knowledge of his own self. The
marriage of Henryk is the curious foreshadowing of
Krasinski's marriage. Krasinski was to be the indiffer-
ent husband whose heart when he married was turned
with passion in another direction. The resemblance
does not end there. Morbid introspection, love of a
situation, a tendency to self-dramatization, were the
chief faults of Krasinski's character. Henryk is, in fact,
Krasinski at the latter's potential worst--but a worst
that he never reached: for Henryk erred through want
of heart, Krasinski through too much. Yet in Henryk
we have the clear vision of what the Anonymous Poet
might have been, and what his innate nobility of soul
withheld him from becoming.
Henryk's marriage, then, thus wretchedly ends. He
has failed as a husband; but he is still a father.
With the son something of the ruthlessness of Greek
tragedy enters the play. The poetical prologue to the
second part is entirely devoted to this strange child.
He gazes to the skies and sees something, hears some-
thing, that no one but himself knows. His father looks
at him in silence, with eyes that fill with tears. A gypsy
refuses to reveal what she reads in his hand, and goes
away, wailing. Beautiful, pure, mysterious, he is like
some flower in Eden before the fall of man.
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? The Undivine Comedy 107
Thus the introduction. The figure of the sad child
who never plays like other children, whom his father's
friends visit and to whom they promise some great
future, whose nerves destroy his fragile body, is Krasin-
ski's recollection of his boyhood in his father's house,
told poetically as he tells all such scraps of his autobio-
graphy. And, passing beyond Krasinski's childhood,
not only is the blindness of George the blindness in
which Krasinski wrote the play, but, says Dr Kallen-
bach, "all this second part is full of personal memories
and personal sorrows. " So openly does the Anonymous
Poet expose in these few pages the wounds of his heart,
his sacred domestic tragedies, that this were alone
sufficient to account for the elaborate precautions which
he took so that the authorship of The Undivine Comedy
should never be discovered1.
The action opens with Henryk and George praying
at the mother's tomb. This beautiful and artistic scene
is the reminiscence of Krasinski's visits in his childhood
with his father to his mother's grave2.
Husband. Take off your hat and pray for your mother's
soul.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, Queen of heaven, Lady
of all that flowers on the earth, in the fields, on the banks of
streams.
Husband. Why do you change the words of the prayer?
Pray, as you have been taught, for your mother who died ten
years ago at this very hour.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among angels, and each of them, when thou
passest by, plucks a rainbow from his wings and casts it at
thy feet.
Husband. George!
George. But those words rush on me and pain my head so
much that, please, I must say them.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmmit Krasinski.
1 Op. cit.
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? io8 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Husband. Get up. A prayer like that does not reach God.
You do not remember your mother. You cannot love her.
George. I see Mother very often:
and he tells his father that she appears when he is be-
tween sleeping and waking, and that the last time she
was white and wasted, and sang to him this song:
I wander everywhere,
I enter everywhere,
In the confines of the worlds,
Where there are angels' songs:
I gather up for thee
The throngs of countless forms,
Thoughts and inspired words,
Oh, little child of mine!
And from the highest souls,
And from the lowest souls,
Colours and shadowings,
Sweet sounds and rays of light,
I gather up for thee,
That thou, my little son,
Shalt be like those in heaven,
And by thy father loved.
Husband {leaning on a pillar of the tomb). Marya, would you
destroy your own child, burden me with two deaths? What
am I saying? She is in heaven, tranquil and peaceful as she was
during her life on earth. The poor child is only dreaming.
George. And now I hear her voice, but I see nothing. . .
from those two larches on which the light of the setting sun
is falling.
I'll give thy lips to drink
Of sound and power,
I will adorn thy brow
With ribands of bright light,
And with a mother's love
I'll wake in thee
All that is beauty called
By angels in heaven and man on earth,
So that thy father may
Love thee, my little son.
Husband. Do the last thoughts at death accompany the
soul even when it reaches heaven? Can a spirit be happy, holy
and mad at the same time?
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? The Undivine Comedy
109
George. Mother's voice is growing faint. It is nearly dying
away behind the wall of the charnel house. Oh, there--there
--she is still repeating:
So that thy father may
Love thee, my little son!
Husband. God, have pity on our child to whom it seems
Thou in Thy wrath hast destined madness and an early death.
Lord, tear not reason away from Thine own creation. Look
on my torments, and do not give this little angel up to hell.
Me at least Thou hast endowed with strength to bear up
against a throng of thoughts, passions, and feelings, but Thou
hast given him a body like a spider's web which each great
thought shall tear asunder--oh, Lord God! oh, God! For ten
years I have not had one day of peace. Thou hast sent down
upon me a hail of sorrows and evanescent images, feelings and
dreams. Thy grace has descended on my brain, not on my
heart. Grant me to love my child in peace, and let there be
harmony henceforth between the Creator and creature. Son,
cross yourself and come with me. "Eternal rest. "
This is the one moment, says Dr Kleiner, when
it seems as though Henryk's heart were for once to
guide him1. Henryk is no monster. He is not ab-
normal. His character throughout is drawn with the
truth and consistency that give The Undivine Comedy
its terrible power. Henryk is the idealist whose ideals
remain on his lips, and who is ignorant of the struggle
that, as Krasinski said in another place, of itself ennobles.
Krasinski was too great an artist to drive Henryk into
the unnatural extremity of a man without love for his
one son2. He was also too close an observer of human
nature to lend himself to such a situation. The in-
difference of a man of Henryk's stamp to his wife was
a foregone conclusion: but the son was flesh of his
flesh, the inheritor of his name. There is egoism, there
is pose, in Henryk's intercourse with his son: but there
is unfeigned love. His cry of anguish, when he calls
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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? no The Anonymous Poet of Poland
upon the doctor to tell him if all hope is gone, rings
true enough. And in this presentment of a father's love
for the son whose life he yet ruined, Krasinski draws
very tenderly upon his own father's relations with
himself: the only intimacy of family affection that he
who, as he once told Reeve, scarcely remembered what
it was to have a mother, had ever known. Yet such
paternal sentiment as is Henryk's cannot save him.
In it he seeks himself, not his son. Self-dedication to
a child suffering for the father's sin is no part of Henryk's
programme.
We gather that in the years which are supposed to
succeed the scene in the cemetery Henryk seeks for
mental rest in the study of philosophy, and fruitlessly.
Then we see him once more wandering in the moun-
tains. The desires of his heart are returned in bitter-
ness to his lips. H is wife's prayer for her son is granted:
the child is a poet, in whose madness the father must
ever gaze upon the curse of poetry, the disordered
adjustment of mental perception, that have ruined the
lives of husband, wife and son.
"For many years," thus complains Henryk as he walks
among the hills, " I have worked at the discovery of the last
end of knowledge, thought and pleasure, and I have found--
the emptiness of the grave in my heart. I know every feeling
by name, and there is no desire, no faith, no love left in me.
Only a few presentiments cross the waste--that my son will
be blind, that the society in which I have grown up will be
dissolved. And I suffer in the same way as God is happy,
alone in myself, alone for myself. "
Voice of the Angel Guardian. Love the sick, the starving,
the despairing, and thou shalt be saved.
He does not listen. He still wanders, lamenting,
in carefully picked words, that his child "for the sins
of the father, the madness of the mother, is destined to
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? The Undivine Comedy
in
eternal blindness. " The demon, in the form of a black
eagle, sweeps upon him, bidding him gird on the sword
of his fathers and fight for their honour and power:
promising him that his enemies, his "mean enemies,"
will crumble to dust before him. Here is the anticipa-
tion of the war of the universe, in which Henryk is to
be the champion of his class. This is the lure of all
others most calculated to ensnare him.
"Be thou what thou mayest," cries he, his vanity on fire:
"false or true, victory or destruction, I will believe in thee,
emissary of glory. "
He flings away a viper that crosses his path.
"Go, mean reptile," says he contemptuously, re-
garding it as the emblem of the lower orders that are to
rise against those who have held them in thrall. They
shall be crushed, and perish unmourned and ingloriously
even as this adder.
But before Henryk takes up his part as a soldier
and leader of men, his domestic drama, together with
the curse that has fallen upon the child, must be worked
out. The short remaining scenes of this division of the
play could not have been what they are were it not
that Krasinski put into the figure of the blind, dis-
traught child two facts of his own life. Almost blind
himself while he was writing The Undivine Comedy,
and under the terror of the lifelong and total darkness
that then threatened him, Krasinski describes George's
blindness from the internal evidence of personal ex-
perience. The other point, the son's inheritance from his
mother of a sick brain, touched him closely also, al-
though in the play he presented it under dimensions that
were never approached in his own case.
He, too, in-
herited from his mother an overstrained nervous fancy,
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? ii2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that was the cause of intense suffering to him, and
against which he was strongly warned by his father as
against a hereditary disease. The Undivine Comedy may
be looked upon, apart from its many other aspects, as a
painful study of heredity.
The father has summoned the doctor to examine
George's eyes. This doctor, with his formalism and his
dry want of sympathy with what he considers merely
an interesting case, is of a piece with the other per-
sonages in the grey world of Krasinski's drama.
Husband. Nothing has done him any good. My last hope
is in you.
Doctor. I am greatly honoured. -
Husband. Tell the gentleman what you feel.
George. I can't see you, father, or this gentleman any
more. Sparks and black threads are running before my eyes1.
Sometimes a thing like a little, thin snake comes out from
them--and then it becomes a yellow cloud. The cloud flies
up, then falls down, a rainbow breaks out of it. And that
doesn't hurt me at all.
Doctor. Stand in the shade. He looks at his eyes. Now
turn to the window. (To George) You can laugh at this.
You will be as sound as I am. (To the Husband) There is
no hope. There is an entire failure of the optic nerve.
George. A mist has come over everything--everything.
Doctor. His brain has ruined his body. Catalepsy is to be
apprehended.
Husband {leading the doctor aside). All you ask--half my
fortune.
Doctor. Disorganization cannot be reorganized.
Husband. Have pity on me, do not leave us yet.
Doctor. Perhaps you would be interested to know the
name of this disease?
Husband. And is there no, no hope?
Doctor. It is called in Greek: amaurosis. (Hegoes out. )
Husband (clasping his son to his breast). But you do still
see something?
George. I hear your voice, father.
1 In letters to his friends Krasinski described his own blindness in
exactly similar terms.
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? The Undivine Comedy 113
Husband. Look at the window. There is the sun, the
beautiful weather.
George. A crowd of figures swarm between my eyes and
eyelids. I see faces I have seen, places I know, pages of books
I have read.
Husband. Then you do still see?
George. Yes, with the eyes of my soul, but the others have
gone out.
The Husband falls on his knees. A moments silence.
Husband. Before whom have I knelt? Where can I de-
mand the redressal of my child's wrong? {Rising. ) Rather let
us keep silence. God laughs at prayers, Satan at curses.
Then again is heard the unknown, inexorable voice:
"Thy son is a poet. What more dost thou desire? "
Now reappears the godfather, pompous and banal
as ever. The years since we last saw him have left him
unchanged. His type does not change.
"Certainly it is a great misfortune to be blind," is his brilliant
remark to the doctor who has been called in to investigate
the strange mental condition of the boy. "He had always a
delicate constitution, and his mother died rather--rather--a bit
cracked. "
Husband {entering). I must apologize for calling you at
such a late hour, but for some days my unfortunate son has
waked about midnight, got up and talked in his sleep.
Doctor. I am very curious to see this phenomenon.
They go to the bedroom. The relations gather
round to look on at another curious family spectacle
and to comment on it in almost the same terms that
they had used when watching the child's mother.
A Relation. Hush.
A Second. He has awakened, and doesn't hear us.
Doctor. Pray do not speak, gentlemen.
Godfather. This is a most extraordinary affair.
First Relation. How slowly he walks!
Another. His eyelids do not flicker. He scarcely opens his
lips, and yet a shrill, long-drawn out voice comes from them.
Servants. Jesus of Nazareth!
George. Off from me, darkness! I was born the son of
light and song. I will not yield myself to you, though my
G.
8
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? 114 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
sight has fled with the winds and wanders somewhere in space:
but it will one day return, rich in the rays of the stars, and
will set my eyes aflame with its fires.
Godfather. He babbles, not knowing what he says, just
like his dead mother. This is a very remarkable sight.
Doctor. I agree with you.
Nurse. Our most holy Lady of Czenstochowa, take my
eyes and give them to him!
George. Oh, my mother, I beseech you, send me thoughts
and pictures so that I can live within my soul, so that I can
create a second world within myself, equal to the world that
I have lost.
A Relation. Do you think, brother, this requires a family
council?
George. You do not answer me. Oh, mother, do not leave me!
Doctor (to the Husband). It is my duty to tell you the
truth.
Godfather. So it is. It is a duty--and the virtue of doctors.
Doctor. Your son's senses are disordered. He has con-
jointly an abnormal excitement of the nerves which often
causes, so to say, a condition of being asleep and awake at the
same time, a state similar to that which we see here.
Husband {aside). Oh, God, he seeks to explain Thy
judgment.
The room is cleared. George wakes, hearing the
confused goodnights of the departing guests. His
father soothes him, tells him that the doctor has pro-
mised the return of his sight, and leads him back to bed
with a tenderness he never showed his mother. The
boy sleeps: and Henryk pours out over him the lamen-
tation, partly sincere but partly turned with an artist's
eye for effect, that brings the history of his private life
to an end.
Let my blessing rest on thee. I can give thee nothing more,
neither happiness, nor light, nor fame: and the hour has struck
when I must go to war, when I must act with a few men
against many. Where wilt thou take refuge, thou, alone, blind,
powerless, child and poet in one, sad singer with none to
listen to thee, thy soul living beyond the confines of the earth,
and thy body chained to earth--oh, thou unhappy, unhappiest
of angels, oh, thou my son?
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? CHAPTER VI
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY:
THE SOCIAL DRAMA
The second division of The Undivine Comedy, con-
sisting of Parts III and IV, is devoted to the great
upheaval of which we have at intervals caught the
ground-swell in the foregoing scenes. The storm has
burst, with no transition from the normal to the
deluge: a transformation, the truth of which none of us
who have witnessed the greatest cataclysm in history
can deny.
In the third and fourth parts of the drama the world
is nothing but a battlefield between the opposing classes
of humanity. The representatives of the old order of
things, or the aristocrats, with such dependents as care
to remain with them, have been driven into their last
stronghold, the fortress of the Trinity. The leader of
a dying and rotten society is Henryk. We have called
one division of The Undivine Comedy the domestic, and
the other the social, drama: but in reality there is no
cleavage between them. Henryk still figures under one
name only, that of the "Husband. " The curse of his
marriage is always with him. The man who failed in
every branch of his intimate life will fail in the mastery
over other men. The poet who, to quote Klaczko's
expression, "sought impressions, not truth1," will break
down when confronted with the crisis. He plays the
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne.
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? 116 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part he has longed to play, that of the commander of an
army. Well-sounding phrases fall as usual from his
lips; but he has none of the conviction of the justice of
his cause that either sweeps all before it, or that takes
the sting from defeat. He fights, knowing that his side
is doomed, without the grandeur of a forlorn hope. At
least he will be the chief actor on the world's stage till
the curtain goes down for ever. More--he is a poet:
and the picturesque trappings of tradition are with the
past. There is no artistic beauty in a future represented
by a mob of infuriated men and women, haggard with
toil and want.
The opponent to Henryk is the man of action,
Pankracy. Where H enryk is the impersonation of imagi-
nation without heart, Pankracy is that of cold reason,
equally without heart. With no family ties to sweeten
life, he has dragged himself up from childhood in
poverty and misery. His strength is in his will and
brain, in the compelling and ruthless mind that no
softer influence can bend aside. That such a man
will gain the day over Henryk is self-evident. His
triumph is doubly assured from the character of their
respective followers. Henryk's party consists of mere
inert decadents, whereas the revolutionaries have be-
hind them the strength of rage and ferocity. But in
Krasinski's system the heart is the creative and life-
giving power of humanity. Without it, the mind can
only bring forth inefficiency and destruction. There-
fore like Henryk, Pankracy has neither faith nor fire.
The grandeur of a noble ideal and its wholehearted
service is looked for in vain from The Undivine Comedy.
Were it there the play would be false to its name and
intention. This is in part the explanation of Pankracy's
?