Only in
suffering
are we truly great.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
There shall be sledges that will depart for Siberia, spies
denouncing, prisons gorged, young men made privates in the
army for life, geniuses exiled or crushed, hearts which will be
frozen, which will be broken by dint of persecutions, not violent,
not obvious, but clandestine, secret, persecutions every day,
every morning, every evening, insults of every nature, vexa-
tions each moment. . . Laws will be mutilated, institutions over-
thrown, schools forbidden. . . They will protect the corruption
of morals, they will make a scarecrow of holy religion to
disgust noble hearts with it, vileness will be rewarded with
crosses and honours. . . They will brutalize the people by dint
of brandy. . . Remember this prophecy when they speak to you
of the magnanimity of the Emperor of Russia3.
But it was far from Krasinski's scheme of things to
sit passive either in lamentation or the smugness of
content. He continually urged upon Reeve to bestir
himself and act. "There is weakness where there is no
struggle," he told him. "Where there is struggle there
is strength and nobility3. "
To think of happiness as an aim is pure childishness. You
will never gain anything by that; you will always lose. I too
cradled myself in those mad ideas, and I thank my God for
having got out of them both pretty quickly and pretty early.
The only thing that man can hope for. . . to which he can steer
his soul and the emotions of his soul, is greatness, that is to
say, superiority in any direction. And I maintain that. . . this
continual struggle between obstacles and men can bring about
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Oct. 2, 1831.
2 Ibid. Oct. 16, 1831. >> Ibid. Sept. 29, 1831.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 69
noble and radiant moments, instants of joy. But to ask for
calm is to ask dew of the deserts of Sahara. . . Why do I write
all this? . . . Because I want to pursue your ideal of calm into the
furthest recesses of your soul, because I want to drive it for
ever from your soul. For, if you keep it. . . you will descend
instead of mounting, you will sleep when everything around
you will be awake, you will go on shooting partridges, but
never will you be either a man or a poet. . . To-day, when for
me all is finished, when my name is destined not to rise above
the waves of the abyss, I want you to be celebrated. If you
give yourself up to calm, you will go down both in my eyes
and in my love*.
But, although Krasinski had parted with his hopes
of fame, he continued writing. Soon after the news had
reached him of the loss of Warsaw, he sent to La
, Bibliotheque Universelle what he told Reeve was his
"funeral hymn for Poland," Une Iitoile: a pathetic
little prose poem, in which Poland is the falling star
that will again rise. In October he wrote, also in
French, one of his fanciful stories on the cholera and
a demoniacal youth who disseminates it. He drew here
on his own excessive impressionability, recalling the
moments when, in the midst of his struggle with his
father, Asiatic cholera appeared in Europe, and he, with
his nervous system wrecked by his troubles2, had made
sure that it would carry him off3. He wrote the story
"from ten in the morning to eight in the evening,
without leaving the table except to light a cigar. When
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Oct. 20, 1831.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Krasinski arranged the whole programme of his dying, so to speak,
on this occasion; settled to write in his last hours to Reeve and Henrietta
Willan, and drew up a will in which he left all his French and English
manuscripts to Reeve, and which he concluded with the words: "The
only regret that I have in leaving this earth, in the century of bankers and
oppressors, is not to have fallen on a Polish battle-field, and to have none
of my English friends at my death-bed. " Correspondance. Krasinski to
Reeve. Geneva, July 13, 1831.
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? 70 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
I got up I was half mad1. " Traces of Le Choldra
appear in the Unfinished Poem"1. In this same autumn,
too, was begun Agay Han, the first of Krasinski's
published work that is of any importance. The young
Pole found solace for his patriotic grief in picturing to
himself the reverse of the shield, the hour in Poland's
history when she placed a Tsar on the throne of
Muscovy.
It is with admiration and wonder that the reader
dwells upon Krasinski's Iridion as a noble summons to
the heights of pardon, written by a Pole under the
most cruel national circumstances. What was the fiery
struggle through which Krasinski, beset by storms of
not only patriotic, but personal, hatred, passed before
he gained the victory we know in part from letters that
he wrote to Reeve at the end of 1831, five years before
Iridion was given to the Polish nation. In October,
1831, Krasinski received a visit from Lubienski, the
youth who had mortally outraged him in the University.
-Lubienski came with the intention of effecting a re-
conciliation and readmission to Krasinski's friendship.
Krasinski, taught by suffering, as he tells Reeve, to be
hard and reserved for the first time in his life, would
not forgive one whose overtures he distrusted, and
whose character--certainly no heroic one, for Lubienski,
free to fight for his country, had not done so--he
despised. As they parted, Krasinski heard the other's
voice, broken by tears, calling after him a last good-bye.
A moment of what he describes as "terrible hesitation"
rent Zygmunt's soul. Then he remembered that it was
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Oct. 30, 1831.
a J. Kallenbach. Preface to Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski
et de Henry Reeve.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
7*
by the doing of this sometime friend that, as he says, his
father had been often calumniated, he himself driven
from Poland, hated, so he believed, by his compatriots,
regarded by them as an unpatriotic Pole. He bade
Lubienski a dry farewell, and turned his back upon
him1.
Reeve had already sent Krasinski a candid rebuke
for the spirit of hatred that breathed through his every
mention of tubienski, saying plainly that Krasinski's
lust for vengeance, which Reeve had always deplored,
was the dark side of his moral character, and could not
be justified by the sophisms with which Krasinski
attempted to defend it.
To this Krasinski replied in the above quoted letter,
adroitly turning the point of the young Englishman's
easy reproach by his appeal to what he, the Pole, had
seen and known.
Your letter is beautiful; it is sublime, Henry. In other
moments I would have bowed my head before it. To-day I
admire it as a work of art, but it does not reach my heart. . . You,
a free man, a man born free, you cannot understand the feelings
of a man whose ancestors were as free as you, but who, him-
self, is an oppressed slave. You have never seen a young and
beautiful woman weeping hot tears for the loss of her honour,
torn from her by the brutality of a conqueror. You have never
heard the chains quivering around the arms of your com-
patriots. In the night, the sounds of lamentations have not
made you start from your sleep, you have not risen on your
pillow, you have not listened, half asleep, to the wheels jolting
on the pavement, the wheels of the cart that carried your
relation, your friend, one of your acquaintances to the snows
of Siberia. In the day you have not seen bloody executions,
nor a tyrant in uniform scouring public places like lightning,
hurling his four Tartar horses at full gallop against the passers-
by: the passers-by were my compatriots, he was a Russian.
You have not been forced to hear a hard and harsh language
imposed on a people who did not understand a word of it.
1 Correspondence. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Nov. 18, 1831.
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? 72
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
You have not felt the degradation that slavery brings in its
train. You have not caught a glimpse of the haggard faces o/
your brothers through the grating of a prison. Round the
winter hearth, they have never told you how such a one dis-
appeared, how the other was condemned, how this village was
burnt, that town sacked, and all Praga drowned in the blood
of its inhabitants, children flung palpitating on the frozen,
stiff breasts of their mothers. . . You have not followed on the
map the desolation of your country, how it has grown shrunken,
impoverished, how at last it has been overwhelmed under the
weight of the oppressors. . . In tranquility you were born; in
tranquility your childhood passed; everything. . . has spoken of,
and inspired you with, peace, happiness, forgetfulness, dreams.
That is why hatred appears so hideous to you. I speak no
longer of iubienski. He has gone. He and his father are
unhappy. That is enough to make me forget even the word
vengeance. But I only want to explain to you, to justify, the
feeling, the passion rather, of that hatred that is in me. I hated
with all the strength of my little heart before I loved either
woman or friend. It is an element that has mingled with my
nature, which has become a part of all that I am. For a man
who hates a whole nation as unrestrainedly as I do, it is a
small thing to hate an individual1.
Along with this moral battle, the precursor oilridion,
Krasinski's deep intellect was wrestling with the social
problems of the future, poring over history and philo-
sophy, mainly as they affected the fate of his country.
To his thinking everything pointed to that cataclysm
that he was to paint with such mastery in his Undivine
Comedy; even such an episode as the gift of tongues
claimed by Edward Irving, because, as he wrote to
Reeve, "souls are strained to the last degree" in "the
instinct of the great catastrophe2. " To his father he
addressed similar language.
It is obvious that the fall of the present society of Europe
is rapidly approaching. . . that something new, unknown, of
which we do not even dream, is struggling to emerge and en-
compass this world.
1 Correspondence. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Nov. 18, 1831.
2 Ibid. Nov. 25, 1831.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
73
We are in a condition like that of Rome, perishing under
the invasions of the Barbarians. And then civilization had
reached a high level, and then men were satiated with every-
thing to the utmost of their desire and satisfaction. . . Therefore
they sank into weariness and weakness. We of to-day proceed
differently as to form, but the same as to spirit. . .
To us men of the present generation life has become
difficult indeed. We are suspended between the past and the
future. We love the past because we are its children, and
everything is tearing us from it and driving us to the future
which we shall never see, for, before its confirmation, certainly
several generations must suffer and struggle and fall in the
midst of the battle. The only shield here is faith in Christ,
and courage, for all our life will be a tempest. . . We are not
born for happiness, but for the sweat of blood, for the continual
war. not onlyexternal. with circumstances--that matters little--
but internal, with our contradictory feelings, memories and
hopes which will never cease to clash, to oust each other from
our souls1.
But in the immense convulsion that he foretold,
Krasinski, even at this early stage of his philosophy,
saw hope in the acceptance of pain, regeneration in the
abjuration of materialism.
"Note well," says he to Reeve, "this eternal truth
that the happier a man becomes the more he degener-
ates.
Only in suffering are we truly great. . . But all
these noble sentiments have perished in Europe to-
day": he alludes to the desire for moral glory and
for national independence triumphing over material
pleasure and mental comfort.
A native country no longer plays any part. Material
happiness is everything. Those who possess it desire peace;
those who have it not desire war to acquire it. . . So I believe
in a vast desolation. Everything must crumble into ruins. . .
and then only I hope for regeneration, but not before.
He adds he is not far from the conviction, which
became his national faith, that his nation shall bring
1 Given by J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 74 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
new life when there "is nothing left in Europe except
silence and ruins1. "
During his solitary rambles, Krasinski continually-
pondered over these matters. One day, entering a
wretched inn near Geneva to clean his pipe, he talked
there to two peasant girls of the workmen's riots then
going on in Lyons. He told Reeve the profound im-
pression made upon him by the class hatred of one
girl, driven to rage by hunger, and by the terror of the
other, a gentle and timid soul, at the prospect of the
bloodshed that must come. This occurrence strongly
influenced certain scenes of The Undivine Comedy.
Now begins with sad reiteration Krasinski's apolo-
gies for breaking off abruptly in his letters: these he
will repeat all his life. The pain in his eyes will not
let him write, he says; or he is nearly blind. Reeve
joined him in the February of 1832; but the joy of their
meeting was soon shattered by Wincenty Krasinski's
summons to his son to join him in Poland. "God only
knows what may happen"," wrote Reeve to his mother
in well founded apprehension: for the position was
fraught with peril to a youth like Krasinski, devoured
with patriotism, incapable, as he had written months
ago to Reeve, of bearing in silence the spectacle that
awaited him of his nation ground down under the fate
of the conquered. "I cannot dissimulate," he had said,
"and from Warsaw the road is all ready, all mac-
adamized to Siberia3. " Although he wrote to his father
what a son was obliged to write, that he longed to see
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Dec. 1, 1831.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Oct. 7 (wrongly
dated for November, Dr Kallenbach points out), 1831.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 75
him and the home of his childhood, he told him frankly
that when outside the doors of his country house only
pain awaited him, and that he shuddered at the pros-
pect of beholding the misery which had overwhelmed
Poland. The real confidants of his heart, Reeve and
Gaszynski, knew that the thought of his return to his
country was agony which, were it not for his father's
command, he would have refused to face1. Gaszynski
especially must have understood, without the words that
Zygmunt could not bring himself to utter, what life in
Poland would henceforth mean to the son of Wincenty
Krasinski.
Gaszynski now re-enters Zygmunt's life, never
again to leave it. The two had been completely cut off
from each other by the Rising: Krasinski had in vain
endeavoured to find out through his father what had
become of his old schoolfellow. Exiled from Poland,
Gaszynski joined the Polish emigration in Paris; and
in the spring of 1832 was at last able to communicate
with Krasinski. When Zygmunt saw once more his
friend's familiar handwriting, he wrote back:
It is long since I have shed one tear. I believed that their
source had dried within me, for my brain is long since parched;
but to-day I wept when I received your letter, when I read the
writing of a friend.
That friend, as Krasinski reminds him, had been
his defender in the University scene. He had shared
with him the sports and studies of their boyhood, gone,
Zygmunt mournfully asks, whither?
Then, sadly and tersely, so tersely that Dr Kallen-
bach ascribes this unusual restraint to the state of the
1 See the letter to Reeve above quoted, where Krasinski states plainly
that he will not go back to Warsaw, even if his father returns there.
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? 76 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
writer's eyesight, Zygmunt gives his friend the account
of his year and a half of silence.
If you hear them calumniate me, do not defend me, but
think: "It is a lie. " You know me. Know me still. I have lived
out bitter moments. As I unhappily began life, so it continues
still in that same fashion. . . All this time I have been driven
mad, I suffered to extremity, I sickened again and again. I
used every means to reach you [to fight with Gaszynski in the
war], but obstacles stronger than my strength closed the way
to me. . . In the beginning I spent the days and nights in fever,
later in madness. . . In two months I must return where fetters
clank, "to the land of graves and crosses. " Siberia awaits me.
I shall find compatriots there.
Now tell me, Konstanty, what do you think of doing?
Do you need anything? Money? I have not got much, but
what I have is at your disposal1.
The generosity with which Krasinski gave financial
assistance to his brother-Poles, whether friends of his
or no, was always a marked feature in his character.
Later in his manhood, when in command of great wealth,
he had but to suspect that a Polish poet or some other
Polish exile was in need, and, even if the relations be-
tween himself and the man in question were not cordial,
he at once sent help. He always handed over these
sums of money anonymously, generally through the
intermedium of one of his friends. Not only his own
delicacy of feeling, but the peculiar difficulty of his
position among his fellow-countrymen, impelled him to
the same unbroken secrecy in his contributions to either
private or national causes that ruled over every other
department of his life2.
The conviction of which he speaks in the above
letter, and of which he had often written to Reeve, that
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 9, 1832.
2 Preface to Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Matachowski,
Cracow, 1885 (Polish).
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? The Sowing of the Seed 77
every journey of his to Poland meant one longer still,
and for ever, to the mines, now haunted Krasinski's
mind. The fear of Siberia, where, should his authorship
have been discovered, he would in all probability have
been sent, became one of the nightmares of his life.
Every time he set out for his country, he bade farewell
to his friends as one on the eve of an eternal parting.
"I have changed much, Konstanty," wrote Krasin-
ski again to the friend who had last known him as an
ambitious, wayward boy. "I have despaired of happi-
ness. " Summarizing in a few words the ideals of
greatness he had learnt in suffering and his loss of love
and glory, he tells Gaszynski who, in the past, had
been his literary sponsor:
I have written a great many things this year, all stamped
with fever and despair ; but now the time is coming to betake
myself to the poetry of deeds. . . I have not sufficient strength
of soul to become a Cooper spy; but I will be what God created
me, a good Pole, always and everywhere.
"I am half blind, I scarcely see my letters " : but he
scrawls a few more words of deep thankfulness that
Gaszynski still loved him and had not misjudged him1.
A few days later he wrote with the same difficulty,
repeating to Gaszynski what was now his faxed idea.
Do not be so carried away by hope in happiness and faith
in success. A great work is never accomplished in a short time.
Thousands of sufferings are needed to save a nation. . . There is
nothing good, nothing noble in this world without long pain,
without long toils.
"Konstanty, write often to me," he adds in a transport of pain,
hinting at what he would not say openly of the meeting be-
tween him and his father, and his future position in his country.
"Oh! if you knew what I have suffered, what I suffer, what is
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 17, 1832.
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? 78 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the fate that is awaiting me, what weariness, what difficulties;
but I trust in God that the day will come when you will know
that my love for Poland did not end in words1. "
His mournful anticipations preyed upon his mind
and body with such injury to his eyesight that the doc-
tors cut him off from his two chief solaces, reading and
writing.
"You are happy," he tells Gaszynski in his letter of April 2nd,
"to have escaped the sight to which I must hasten back ;. . . you
will not gaze on the tears and execrations of the vanquished.
To one used to live a European life it will be terrible to return
again. . . to dissimulation, to the concealment of one's thoughts.
"If it is possible to write anything in Poland, I will write.
I feel the source throbbing in me, and I could inundate the
hearts of my countrymen by many a wave of poetry, but
under the censure, but amidst constraints, I cannot write. The
poet must have freedom2. "
Yet the Anonymous Poet was inspired with Iridion
in Petersburg and with his first Psalms in the Warsaw
palace.
"God saved all the world by His own sufferings,"
he says a few days afterwards, returning again and
again with the reiteration of one sick at heart to the
only thought in which he could find comfort in his grief
for Poland.
We will save our country by our sufferings. It seems that
this is the eternal law, and that salvation cannot be without
suffering, without pain, without blood. And when yearning
falls on you, when sadness burdens you, when on a foreign soil
it befalls you to curse your fate and to sigh for Poland, think:
God also suffered for us! And that thought will reconcile you
with the world, not with that transient, little world which
passes away before our eyes, and each moment can sink from
beneath our feet, but that great, only world, embracing all the
order of creation, spirits, man and the Creator Himself. And
then you will feel that you are walking towards immortality,
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 22, 1832. 2 Ibid. April 2, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 79
that your aim is suffering and greatness on this earth, but on
the other side of the grave greatness and happiness.
But because I am preaching you a sermon, do not think
that I have reached that rest of which you speak. On the con-
trary, each day I sink deeper into rage and despair. . . I have
sought and I have not found, I have dreamed and have gained
nothing by my dreams1.
In May, with Reeve as his companion for part of
the way, Krasinski started for Poland. His father had
ordered him to present himself at Turin to Carlo Al-
berto, his cousin, at which, writes Reeve, "he is much
annoyed and I much amused. . . I shall grin on seeing
him return from an interview with the man who be-
trayed Santa Rosa and sought to hang Prandi and Co. 2"
Reeve, however, did not enjoy this spectacle, for the
interview failed to come off. In a condition near blind-
ness, Krasinski made the journey by slow stages, halting
at Venice for an unsuccessful treatment on his eyes.
He . parted with Reeve at Innsbruck. It was the
farewell of their youthful friendship3. They still corre-
sponded for a few years longer, with as great affection
as before--on Krasinski's side at all events : all Reeve's
letters from this time are missing, probably destroyed
by Krasinski for caution's sake--but with ever increas-
ing lapses into silence. They met each other again ; but
they were never more to each other what they had once
been. Propinquity had been the chief motive of their
intimacy in Krasinski's young loneliness; but the life
of Henry Reeve, the successful politician, the prosperous
man of affairs, and that of the Polish poet, working for
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
April 6, 1832.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 "I never lived in his intimacy again" : thus Reeve, op. cit.
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