No More Learning

"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played. Oaks repeated the sound
to the oaks, and the beech to the beech.
"Again he blew; and it seemed as though in
the horn a hundred other horns played. You
heard the confused, mingled noise of the chase, of
anger, of fear, of the hunters, the dogs, and the
quarry, till the Wojski lifted the horn on high,
and the hymn of triumph smote on the skies.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played. All the trees in the forest
were so many horns that carried the song to each
other, as from choirs unto choirs. And the music
travelled ever wider, ever farther, ever softer,
ever purer, ever perfect, till it died far, far, some-
where far off on the threshold of heaven. "
(Thaddeus, Book IV. )
Mickiewicz is a master of the Polish language.
The natural richness of the Polish tongue, its
peculiar delicacies of word shading, its onomato-
poeia that is one of its chief characteristics, are
handled by Mickiewicz with the skill of a musician
whose instrument obeys his every call. The sounds
of the woodland life of Lithuania, the roaring of
the tempest through the forests, the whisper of
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the wind over meadows and marshes, the cries of
bird and beast, fill the pages of Thaddeus with
the harmonies of a wild and romantic land.
/ "My native trees! " he says in one place,
hailing the giants of the forest whose age was as
long as time. " If Heaven grant I shall return to
gaze on you, my friends of old, shall I still find you?
Are you still living? Ye, around whom I wandered
once, a child.
"How much I owe you, oh, my native trees!
I, a poor shot, escaping from the mockery of my
friends for my missed quarry, how often, in your
stillness, I hunted dreams when, in the wild hunt-
ing grounds, I forgot the chase and sat me on a log.
And around me the earth was silver with the hoary-
bearded moss mingled with the deep blue of black
and rotten berries. And, further, flamed heathery
knolls decked with red berries, like a rosary's coral
beads. All darkness round me. Branches swung
on high like green, thick, drooping clouds. Some-
where above their tranquil arch the gale raved,
wailing, roaring, howling, crashing, thundering.
Strange deafening uproar! It seemed that over-
head was rocking a roaring sea. " (Thaddeus,
Book IV. )
While the ear is satisfied in Thaddeus, the eye
dwells on the pageantry of sunset and sunrise on
the marshes, on the storm sweeping over the wide
Lithuanian skies. As a painter of nature, exquisite
and true to detail, Mickiewicz stands unrivalled
in his native literature. There are few, says Dr.
Kallenbach, his equal in any literature. * Such is
the veracity of his descriptions that a Pole whom
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickieaicz,
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ v 101
years of exile had separated from his country-
could say: "I read Thaddeus aloud, and often
had to break off the readings, so moved was I
by that absolute transportation of body and
soul into our native Polish plains. "*
The background of these tranquil and lovely*^
Lithuanian scenes is the war that was changing
the face of Europe, for:
"The rest of the world was drowned in tears
and blood; when that man, that god of war, girt
with a cloud of regiments, armed with a thousand
cannons, having yoked to his car of triumph the
gold with the silver eagles, flew from the Libyan
plains to the sky-reaching Alps, hurling thunderbolt
after thunderbolt, in the Pyramids, in Thabor,
Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz. Before him and after
him ran victory and conquest. The glory of those
deeds, pregnant with warriors' names, went
roaring to the north, till, on the Niemen's banks,
it was flung back as from a rock, by the ranks of
Muscovy defending Lithuania with their walls
of iron from news, terrible for Russia as the
plague. " (Tbaddeus, Book I. )
Even the remote hamlets in Lithuania beat to ^
the pulse of the events that shook the world.
Thaddeus tells us--and amidst such scenes Mickie-
wicz's boyhood had been passed--how a beggar
who had lost a leg or an arm would arrive at the
manor, and whisper, looking round to see that
no Russian soldier was near, that he was a legion-
ary, come to die in his own land. Then the whole
household, masters and servants alike, would
* Correspondence of Adam MickiewicM, Paris, 1872. Letter of
Stanislas Worcell, Nov. 7th, 1838 (Polish).
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? io2 w POLAND
press about him, overcome by weeping, while he
told them the tales they were forbidden to hear
of the valour of the Polish legions, and of the
victories of Napoleon. His stories were secretly
repeated over the countryside. Then many a boy
vanished from his home, and, escaping through
the forests, swam the Niemen to the other bank
where, in the Duchy of Warsaw, he might enrol
himself under the Polish flags. Or a wandering
fri4r from a foreign convent would appear at
the country house, unrip his scapular, and show
the war gazette that he had smuggled through.
Parents then learnt for the first time after years
of absence the death or glory of the son who had
left them. The family went into mourning; it
was guessed, but could not be told, for whom; and
their obvious grief or equally obvious joy was as
the war news for the district. (Tkaddeus, Book I. )
I This undercurrent of national hopes, the echo
of Napoleon's trumpets, vibrate through Thaddeus
till the end. The year 1812 is now here. The
campaign, when Napoleon's armies were about
to march on Russia, was greeted by the Polish
nation with boundless joy, for the hour of resur-
rection seemed close at hand. That spring when
the fields were green with unwonted promise,
when the birds of passage returned early with
strange clamour to their haunts in Lithuania,
and the voice of war was heard in the land, was
Mickiewicz's greatest memory.
"Oh, year! " he sings in the eleventh canto
of Thaddeus. "To this day the people call thee
the year of harvest, and the soldier the year of
war. To this day, the aged love to tell tales of
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? ^ ADAM MICKIEWICZ 103
thee, to this day song dreams of thee. Long wast
thou heralded by heavenly marvel,* and preceded
by low rumours among the people. With the sun
of spring some strange presentiment' filled Lithu-
anian hearts as of the end of the world; some
yearning expectation full of joy.
"Oh, spring, who saw thee in our land, memor-
able spring of war, and spring of harvest! Oh,
spring! who saw thee flowering with corn and
grass, brilliant in men, fertile in deed, pregnant
with hope! Still do I see thee, fair dream of a
night! Born in captivity, fettered in my swad-
ling-bands, only one such spring have I known in
my life. " . .
Amidst this exultation and martial ardour,
Thaddeus' wedding takes place. He has returned
with the Polish legions for his marriage, on the ad-
vance to the Russian campaign. Side by side with
the gorgeous national costume flash the accoutre-
ments of the soldiers of the legions. Dombrowski,
the hero of many a battlefield, and his fellow-
generals are here. The Count, from being a
weaver of fantastic fancies, has become a soldier,
and sits in his Lancer uniform a guest under the
roof against which he had fought. Every heart is
throbbing with that patriotic rapture that, to-
gether with the glowing local colour, make the last
scenes of Thaddeus one brilliant song of rejoicing.
The banquet is carried out with all the old
national traditions. The officers compete in sword-
play. The patriotic Jew plays, as none other can,
the zimbala.
"He dropped the sticks on the strings. First
* A comet that appeared in 1811.
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? POLAND
he beat out a tune of triumph. Then, louder, he
swept on the strings like a tempest of rain. It was
only to test them, for soon he broke off, and he
lifted the sticks on high.
"He played. Now trembled the sticks as though
a fly's wing quivered over a string, giving forth a
humming scarce heard. He lifted his hands;
together they fell, and he smote with both sticks.
"All at once the tune burst forth from all
strings as though a Janissaries' band played on
the bells, on triangles, on drums; the Polonaise
of the Third of May rings out ! * The gay notes
breathe joy, make the ear drunk with joy. The
girls would fain dance, the young men spring
from their seats. . . .
"The master ever hurries the time, and strains
at the strings. Then he struck a false chord like
the hiss of a snake, like a knife grinding on glass.
He plucks at the traitorous note, he confuses the
tune; tearing loud and more loud on the sullen
conspirator chord that destroys the sweet sound
of the strings. Then it burst with a crash, that
string of ill omen. "
^ That was how the player told in music of the
conspiracy of Targowica, formed by a handful of
Polish traitors, which played into the hands of
Catherine II. before the second partition of Poland.
He passes to the storming of Warsaw by Suvorov.
"The musician runs to the treble. He draws
out a tune. The tune is confused. He casts off the
treble, and runs with his sticks to the bass. Hear
* The day on which the liberal constitution of the Republic of
Poland was passed, in 1791. This, the last great act of what
remained of independent Poland, would have saved her, had her
exterior enemies not been too powerful for her.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 105
thousands of clamours ever louder, the sound of
a march, and of battle, of attack, of the storming
and shots, the wailing of children, and weeping of
mothers. The peasant women trembled, recalling,
with tears of grief, the slaughter of Praga which
they knew from song and from story. They re-
joiced when at last the master thundered on all
the strings, then silenced their sounds as though
they sank to the earth.
"Then other music. At first, light and low
humming. A few slender strings sigh :"
And, after playing the songs of the legions:
"He sounded another strain, he measured the
strings with his eye, and, joining his hands, he
smote with both hands and both sticks. That
blow was so full of art, that blow was so full of
power, that the strings rang out like trumpets of
brass, and like trumpets blew to the skies the
famous song, the triumphal march: Poland hath
not perished. Dombrozaski, march to Poland / And
all applauded and all cried out in chorus, ' March,
oh, Dombrowski! ' The player let the sticks fall
from his fingers, and lifted his hands on high. . .
'General,' said he, 'long hath our Lithuania
awaited thee, long as we Jews await our Messiah.
Live thou and combat, oh, thou who art ours. '"
(Thaddeus, Book XII. )
This whole passage, with its wonderful imita-
tions of the sound of a musical instrument to
which the Polish language is so peculiarly adapted,
is one of the masterpieces of Thaddeus. My rough
prose rendering can do no sort of justice to the
original.
Then the company dances the Polish national
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POLAND
dance, the Polonaise with its intricate character
figures.
"Couples followed couples, noisy and gay.
They unwind; then they turn again in a wheel,
like a great snake twirling in a thousandfold scroll.
The many-hued colours of the costumes of the
ladies and soldiers and lords change like the flash-
ing scales of a fish, gilt with the setting sun's rays.
Whirls on fast and furious the dance, the music
rings out, ring out the plaudits and toasts. "
The festivity is carried on far into the night,
with Vivats to the bridegroom and bride, to
Napoleon and the leaders of the legiohs.
"And I " : these are the last words Mickiewicz
adds to the poem : " was with the guests. I drank
the wine and mead, and what I saw and heard I
have gathered in this book. "
^ The dream of the poet, who had no literary
ambition, and whose thought was always with
his country, was that this song of manners and
tradition should penetrate to the cottage hearths
of his nation, and be sung by the lips of the peas-
ants. He had his desire. To this day Thaddeus
remains the most beloved of poems to the Polish
heart.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE ANONYMOUS POET OF POLAND:
ZYGMUNT KRASINSKI
IN 1812, during the tempest of the Napoleonic
wars, Zygmunt Krasinski was bom- into the
world; he who, as the Anonymous Poet of
Poland, was to stand second only to Mickiewicz
in the history of his nation's literature. He was
the only child of a noble house, allied by mar-
riage to the royal family of Savoy. His father,
Vincent Krasinski, played a distinguished part
among the officers of the Polish legions, and
Zygmunt was brought up in strong patriotic
traditions. Despite the utter dissimilitude of their
characters, the father and son were all their lives
united by the strongest mutual affection, undes-
troyed even by the tragic circumstance that rose
between them.
After the death of his mother, from whom he
inherited his melancholy temperament and his
highly strung nerves, Zygmunt led a lonely and
precocious childhood in the family palace in
Warsaw. The tension between the Poles" and the
Russian Government was then near the breaking
point.
The Russian Decembrist revolution took
place in 1825. It was discovered that the Russian
I
communication with patriotic
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POLAND
Polish societies. The members of the latter were,
at the demand of Nicholas I. , tried by the Polish
Senate. The opinion of the Polish nation and of
the judges was universally in favour of the accused,
who Vere acquitted. Vincent Krasinski alone
'voted for their death. In 1829 the senator who
had presided over the trial died. The whole of
Warsaw attended the funeral as a great patriotic
. demonstration. All the students from the Univer-
sity followed the bier--with one exception, and
that exception was young Krasinski. Compelled
by Vincent Krasinski he, and he alone, presented
himself in the lecture-hall that day', maddened
with pain and rage against his father. From that
rtioment dates the struggle, between his love for'
his father and his passionate devotion to his
country, that was the tragedy of his life. The next
d*ay, when the class met as usual, he was moirr5ed
as- a renegade by his fellow students; and the first
to lay hands on him was one of his personal
. friends. - -
That scene branded itself for life into the soul
of the proud and sensitive boy. His position in
\Varsaw then became impossible, and his father
sent him to study at Geneva. Sad and lonely as
he was, he found a warm friend in young Henry
Reeve, who was completing his education in the
same town. Devoured with literary ambition,
Krasinski spent his time in writing essays and
sketches in French and Polish prose, studying with
the zest of a highly gifted youth, riding and sail-
ing with Reeve. So passed nearly a year. He then
wer^t to Rome, and there he heard the news of
the Polish Rising.
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? ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 109
In an agony of suspense Krasinski awaited his
father's summons to fight by his side. His fears
were realized. The summons did not come.
Already suspected by his compatriots, v Vincent
Krasinski now incurred their odium by taking no
part in the national movement. He ended by
yielding to the dictates of ambition and wounded
vanity; he went to Petersburg, in his heart still
clinging to his country, and accepted favours at
the hand of Nicholas I. His son's impassioned ^
appeals were made in vain. Zygmunt now saw
himself compelled, either to be at open" war with
his father in the sight of all the nation should he
join the Rising, whither his whole heart and the
traditions of his patriotic and famous house'
called him; or to remain seemingly faithless to
his country in the hour of her need, branded andN
dishonoured.
We cannot enter here into the details of the
long and painful duel between father and son. At
last, the latter, ^recoiling from the rupture that
would have put Vincent Krasinski even more
hopelessly in the wrong with his nation than he
was already, yielded to his father's command. The
anguish of mind that the boy of nineteen under-
went through all this episode shattered his weak /
bodily frame, and laid the roots of the disease that
brought him in his prime to the grave. * His tears
caused the semi-blindness and threatened total'
loss of eyesight that from that time repeatedly
recurred, cutting him off from book and pen.
He never again returned of his own will to Poland,
where his situation under his father's roof was
* J. Kallpnb^ch, Zygmunt Krasinski- Lw6w, 1904 (Polish).
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? no POLAND
unendurable. For the rest of his life, racked by
mental and physical sufferings, haunted by the
terror of . Siberia, he wandered abroad under the
supervision of the Russian Government, only
going back to his native land at rarejnlervals for
a few months, when compelled by Vincent Kras-
inski or by the Russian authorities. Cioyalty to
his father imposed upon him the concealment
of his love and grief for his nation; the accept-
ance of something akin to disgrace in the eyes of
many of his fellow Poles. The poet who, when a
brilliant boy, had longed for literary fame, now
surrendered even his name. The poems and plays
that he wrote, with the one intention of his
country's welfare, appeared anonymously under
pseudonyms, or under the names of his friends.
Only his most intimate confidants knew that the
Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski. Of
the many acts of self-devotion that the sons of
Poland have been called upon to offer in her
service, that of Zygmunt Krasinski has been one
of the most bitter. He bore in silence the ruin of
his life and the burden of allegiance to his father
that he only laid down on his deathbed at the age
of forty-seven. Unable to speak, unable to act, as
he would, he was forced to hide his friendships,
his opinions, his fondest predilections. He remained
faithful to the two antagonistic claims that tore
his heart between them; and yet he sacrificed
neither. In the part that he was driven to play,
he sacrificed no principle, no person, except one
--and that one was himself. *
There is nothing more in a short sketch like
* S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. Cracow, 1892 (Polish).
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI in
, this to tell of his outward life. The history o*
Zygmunt Krasinski does not lie in exterior things?
but in the battlefield of a tortured soul, and in the
evolution of his mystic thought which became
the highest moral teaching ever given to the
Polish nation. As a poet, Krasinski is not equal to
Mickiewicz. For pure artistic beauty he ranks
below Slowacki. (But for the nobility of the phil-
osophy, which he spoke out of a suffering soul to
a suffering country, he stands alone, i
He dedicated his sad and frustrated life to
Polandi He could do nothing for her except in
one way, the way he chose. In his poetry and his
dramas he taught her what he considered was her
only means of salvation. Love, purity that spurns
all evil weapons, pain borne for the redemption
of humanity, is the language he incessantly speaks.
Krasinski's idea was to adapt the principles of
individual morality to that of a nation and of
mankind. * His words were said ostensibly and
mainly to a pain-stricken country; but they
speak with the strongest actuality and with pierc-
ing spiritual directness to every human soul. It is
this that gives Krasinski his great power, and that
places him among the poets whose inspiration is
a beacon light to suffering and struggling man.
Krasinski sought for the answer to the enigma
of his nation's suffering until he found it. He ex-
acted of his countrymen nothing that he himself
had not given first. He did not merely watch the
battle from a distance. His was the heat and
burden of the field. Those who have studied
* J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Lw6w, 1912 (Polish).
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Krasinski's letters, which are scarcely less fine an
exposition of his thought than his poetical work,
are often tempted to halt astounded at the insight
with which, even as a young man, he goes straight
to the heart of the problems of pain and struggle.
Only personal grief could have given him a like
knowledge. In his youth, between the writing of
Irydion and Dawn--that is, from 1836 to 1842--
the sight of the fate that had befallen Poland
drove him into a gulf of despair and religious
doubt. He wandered for seven years in spiritual
darkness, seeking always for that explanation of
the wrong before his eyes which would at once
save his nation and his own soul. He won to his
triumph only after having, as he tells us in Dawn,
passed through the sorrows of hell.
The masterpieces of Krasinski in which we
may follow the course of his leading ideas are The
Undivine Comedy, Irydion, Dawn, The Psalms of
the Future, and Resurrecturis. As a boy of twenty-
one, Krasinski wrote the sociological prose drama
to which, in ironical antithesis to Dante's Divina
Commedia, he gave the title of the Undivine Comedy.
It is an interesting fact in Krasinski's psychology
that this--the first work by which he proved his -
genius--is not directly national. The subject is
the future class revolution to which in the poet's
youth Europe appeared to be hastening. That the
scene is laid in Poland we only gather from chance
allusions. The characters, with the exception of
the servants, are cosmopolitan rather than Polish.
And yet, said Mickiewicz, who devoted several
lectures in the College de France to its analysis,
this play, with its heavy sadness, its atmosphere
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 113
of ruin and approaching cataclysm, could have
been written by none other than a Pole. "Its
grief is not exhaled in pompous phrases; but
each word is drawn from one great mass of suffer-
ing and pain. "*
The play reads as the expression of one who had
gone through a great shock. Krasinski wrote it
shortly after the failure of the Polish Rising, and
fresh from the agony of what the Rising had
brought on his personal life. There is nothing
youthful in its pessimism, nothing even Byronic
in its want of confidence in men. Its laconism,
strangely different from the rest of Krasinski's
work, is in part explained by the fact that the
author was half blind when he wrote it, and had
to set down his ideas on paper as briefly as he
could. t The situations and characters, says Mickie-
wicz, live by indication rather than by develop-
ment. A hint here: a half uttered phrase there;
short passages that bite into the memory like acid
for their cruel curtness, their concentrated irony,
their pitiless truth to one side of human nature.
These things were taught by pain to the boy of
twenty-one.
The Undivine Comedy has seemingly little con-
nection with Krasinski's national philosophy.
Indeed, at this period of his youth the poet had
not discovered his spiritual bearings. Yet it fore-
shadows, as we shall see, some highly important
elements in Krasinski's life-work. The piece of
poetical prose that introduces the first part throws
light on Krasinski's whole attitude to the poet's
* Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
t J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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POLAND
calling, an attitude which, according to Mickie-
wicz, is Slavonic. He curses the poetry that
expresses itself only in words, and that is dead to
the deed that alone could ennoble it.
"There* are stars around thy head, the waves
of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rain-
bow runs on the waves of the sea, and cleaves
asunder the darkness. What thou beholdest is.
thine. The heavens are thine. There is nought
equal to thy glory. But thou thyself, what feelest
thou? What dost thou of thyself create? Woe
unto thee! Who gave thee thy base life, so false
that thou canst feign an angelic moment ere thou
wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent thou
descendest to crawl and stifle in the slime? Thou
sufferest, albeit thy pain shall create nought, shall
avail nought. Thou destroyest only those who
have consecrated themselves to thee, who have
become the living voices of thy glory. Blessed is
he in whom thou hast dwelt, invisible, unheard.
He will love man, and stand out as a man amidst
his brothers. "
For the author of the play, said Mickiewicz,
while commenting on this description of poetry,
"poetry is not an art, not an amusement. He
has painted here the picture of the power of a soul
which flings itself entirely into its imagination,
and which believes it possesses all things, but
which is lost because it uses this gift of heaven
for its own pleasure. . . . True poetry, among the
Greeks themselves, signified nothing else except
action. What does the Polish author ask? That
the most initiated souls, the highest, the strongest,
those that communicate with the Divinity,
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 115
should reserve all their strength to act instead of
speaking. "*
This preface, then, not only explains the ideals
which actuated Krasinski, but it gives the clue to
his conception of Henryk, the poet, the egotist,
the dreamer, who is the chief character in the
Undivine Comedy. The first part of the drama,
with its subdued threatenings of the tempest that
is to engulf the world, is the domestic tragedy
of Henryk. The second part is the war of the
classes, where Henryk is the champion of an effete
and doomed aristocracy, and that culminates in
a universal ruin.
Henryk has lived upon his impressions and
cultivated his imagination at the expense of his
heart, till he has become nothing more than a
moral decadent, a poseur incapable of discerning
between true and false emotion. He marries, or,
as he expresses it, " descends to earthly marriage"
from his dreams. "Peace to men of good will,"
an angel proclaims over his roof on the eve of his
marriage; and Klaczko has pointed out that
Krasinski's first word to his people was this
message of good will, as, in his fifth Psalm of the
Future, it was to be well-nigh his last. f Salvation
is promised to Henryk on the condition that he
loves his wife: but the end of the marriage may
be easily foretold. Henryk soon wearies of the
loving, domestic woman, in whose soul no spark
of poetry resides--except, as Klaczko observes, the
poetry of a woman's devotion, a poetry truer than
* Adam Mickiewicz, op. cit.
+ Julian Klaczko, Le Pohte Anonyme de la Pologne. Revue des
Deux Mondes, Jan. ist, 1862.
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