No More Learning

And, I tell you, in days when crime triumphs many souls
doubt God.
He himself was for the sake of his country's sorrows
to know that doubt.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 25, 1831.
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? The Sacrifice
63
Of course those are not the elect, but weaker men--and
yet men with high souls, men who many times adored God
and invoked Him in the hour of danger. . . I shall never doubt;
for each drop of blood shed only reminds me of that of Gol-
gotha; but I shall say aloud, "The human race is cursed for
its iniquities, and the penalty involves the innocent and the
guilty. Death and agony must be to counterbalance impiety
and bad faith. The Poles have perished. ". . .
"Now my role begins," goes on the Anonymous Poet; "and
if it is to be more obscure, perhaps it will not be less unhappy.
Remember these words; and if, one day, you hear that I have
been dragged off to Siberia, raise your eyes on high, and thank
your God for having permitted your friend for once at least to
show that he was a good Pole. "
Telling Reeve he can write no more because his
heart is too heavy, he transcribes an article by Lamen-
nais on Poland1, of which the last words:
made me start. Again it seems to me that all is not lost, that
from these ashes and these bones will soon spring forth a dawn
more lasting than that which has just been quenched. . . It is
not said in God's thought that a people must perish, until the
moment when that people itself accepts death. And we will
never accept it; because from the death of so many victims
has sprung forth a new moral life that for long will animate my
country. Let us walk from sacrifice to sacrifice, from sorrow
to sorrow, and always in silence. At last, we will reach the
term of expiation. At last, we shall hail a horizon unveiled
before us. And if not, if the generation to which I belong
must again perish full of glory and young in years, or must
slowly wither away and go out unknown, so be it! as long as
our last thought is a thought consecrated to Poland.
This is all very fine; but, in one word, they are in Warsaw,
Poland has fallen, I am in Geneva2.
The downfall of the Polish Rising of 1830 ends the
most painful chapter in Krasinski's history, and the
most decisive.
With the full knowledge of all that it entailed he
1 Mickiewicz said of Lamennais that his tears for Poland were the
only sincere ones he saw in Paris. v
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Sept. 21, 1831.
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? 64 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
chose the sacrifice which ruined his life. For his
father's sake, he lost friends and well-wishers. For
his father's sake, he bore the disgrace of his name, the
fiery trial, intolerable to a proud and patriotic youth,
of the imputation of indifference to his country. For
his father's sake, says, after Zygmunt's death, one who
had greatly loved him, "he denied himself the liberty
of saying what he thought, acknowledging what he
wrote, or showing to whom he was attached1. " All
the dreams of literary fame that had been his as a
brilliantly gifted boy he now renounced. Were it only
for his father's relations with the Russian authorities,
it was impossible for him ever to disclose his authorship
of the most impassioned utterances of nationalism that
exist in the Polish language. From the time that he
was a boy of nineteen to his death nearly thirty years
later, the life of Zygmunt Krasinski was maimed and
stunted. He could never again live in his own country.
Each hour that he stayed there was to him a martyr-
dom, an insult to his patriotism, dwelling as he must
under the roof of a father, throwing in his lot to all
outward seeming with that father, who was the recipient
of honours from the hand that was inflicting the most
unrelenting of persecutions upon his nation2. Only
1 See the letter of Count Ladislas Zamojski to Henry Reeve. J. K.
Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve.
2 What a mortal pang the favours conferred on his father by Nicholas I
carried to Krasinski's heart is illustrated by a letter to Reeve, in reply to
the information volunteered by that tactless youth shortly after the fall of
Warsaw, that Wincenty Krasinski had been decorated by the Tsar. "I
know it, I know it, Henry. Why speak to me of the Tsar and his gifts?
Hamlet said as he went into his mother [quoted in English]: 'I will speak
daggers to her, but use none. ' And I permit anyone to plunge a dagger
of steel in my heart, provided that he spares me what you have not spared
me. . . You have the right to tell me everything; it is not you that I blame,
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? The Sacrifice
65
under compulsion when the Russian government with-
drew his passports, and threatened confiscation of the
family estates unless he showed himself in the Kingdom
on the appointed day, even if he were on a sick-bed at
the moment, did he from time to time go back to
Poland. Watched closely by the Russian authorities,
who marked against him the names of those with whom
he consorted, and whose spies opened his private corre-
spondence, he wandered, homeless, abroad, seeking in
vain for the health that the events of 1831 had shattered,
rent by grief for his country, battling against despair1.
But during those years of Poland's history between
1831 and the eve of the sixties, when the Russian
but my destiny. But let us say no more on the subject, for there are words
that a woman never utters, and also things of which a man never speaks. "
Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Dec. 26, 1831.
1 See Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Ko&mian, Lw6w,
1912 (Polish), p. 131. Krasinski encloses an official letter from the con-
queror of Warsaw, Paskievich, to his father, in which Paskievich states
that the suspicions of the Russian government have fallen on Zygmunt by
reason of his relations with a body of Polish priests, the Resurrectionist
Fathers, in Rome, whose crime in the eyes of the Russian rulers of Poland
was the spiritual work that they carried on for their country. The whole
letter is an open threat, informing Wincenty Krasinski that his son is
regarded with disfavour by the government, and that not even the elder
Krasinski's "many merits" can save the son if the latter compromises
himself further. This missive throws light on the extreme circumspection
with which Krasinski was obliged to walk. The fact of spies reporting
upon him and overlooking his letters accounts for the precautions that he
takes when writing to his friends. To each of them he signs himself by
a different name, in allusion to some common joke, to his address at the
moment, his passing mood. With Gaszynski he is "Era Piper," in memory
of their boyhood in the Krasinski palace. His mystifications when re-
ferring to his work, knowing that unbidden readers could discover and
report his authorship to Petersburg, thus most seriously involving his
father and bringing Siberia upon his own head, are even more elaborate.
He speaks of his writings under feigned titles: Iridion is "the Greek,"
the Psalms of the Future, "embroidery," and so on ; or else he mentions
them dispassionately as the compositions of other men.
G.
5
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? 66 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
government was avenging the earlier Rising and driving
a maddened nation into another; when the youth of
Poland, debarred from every national heritage, could
only learn the teaching of their country in a literature
as magnificent in its art as uplifting in its ideals, in a
poetry, persecuted and proscribed, that was read in hiding
at the peril of life and liberty throughout all Poland,
there arose a nameless poet1. He spoke out of the
silence tragically imposed upon him what his own grief
taught him, a message so noble and so inspiring that it
remains to our own day among the greatest of Poland's
and indeed of the world's spiritual possessions. No one
except a handful of intimate friends, sworn to secrecy,
knew that the Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski,
thus consecrating his life and genius to the country he
was forbidden openly to serve.
1 For details of this period of Polish literature see my Adam Mickiewicz,
and my Poland: a Study in National Idealism.
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? CHAPTER IV
THE SOWING OF THE SEED
(1831-1834)
Krasinski was now at grips with the problem that to
him and his nation meant life or death. There now
began for him the years of his long search after the
word that would clear the enigma of Poland's fate, and,
by so doing and thus justifying an inexplicable Divine
ordering, save his people and himself from moral de-
struction.
"He emerged from the year 1831," writes Dr Kallenbach,
"as from a severe illness, with his health ruined, his imagina-
tion strained to its last limits, tortured and restless, his heart
seared, and the more painfully, because it was wounded by
a father's hand1. "
He spent the end of 1831 and the beginning of
1832 quietly in Geneva. For himself he had no hope
of happiness; but faith in the future of his nation woke
again after the first shock of her defeat.
"For us," writes this boy whom suffering had unnaturally
matured, " for us, contemporaries panting in anguish, delirious
with fear and hope, a partial defeat seems a lost cause; for,
when an event is delayed beyond our grave, for us it is already
an affair of eternity and no longer an affair of time. But, by
the order of things, this is not so; because as great things,
noble and holy things, call for an enormous amount of pain in
order to be effected, in order to reach their ends, only one
generation, and sometimes even several, cannot be enough.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
5--2
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? 68 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
To resign oneself, then, is a law; it is another one to make
every effort to add our drop of sacrifice, of bitterness, to the
ocean of pain whose waves shall one day demolish the throne
of the unjust and the oppressor1. "
Then he, when the Rising had but just sunk to its
close, foretold the fate of Poland under the vengeance
of the Tsar; words that were fulfilled to the letter, both
during Krasinski's lifetime, and until the day when we
saw the fall of the Russian empire.
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.