There is nothing
youthful in its pessimism, nothing even Byronic
in its want of confidence in men.
youthful in its pessimism, nothing even Byronic
in its want of confidence in men.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
.
"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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? ii4
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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POLAND
any to which Henryk can lay claim. A demon
maiden who stands for Henryk's old poetic ideals
appears to him, tempting him from the side of
his wife.
"From the day of my marriage I have slept
the sleep of the torpid," says Henryk, turning
with loathing from the earthly woman; "the
sleep of a German manufacturer with a German
wife. I have gone round after relations, doctors,
shops ; and because a child is going to be born to
me, I have had to think about a nurse. "'
When the child is born it is the same story.
Henryk sits, morose and brooding, uttering short
thanks as his wife unwittingly plagues him with
the domesticities of the christening feast that is
to be celebrated. It is with a mingling of tender-
ness and fidelity to fact, strange in a boy of Kras-
inski's years, that he paints the wronged wife;
the one sympathetic figure, for all her want of
balance that ruins herself and her child, in a play
which exposes on one side a rotten aristocracy, on the
other savage and lawless revolutionaries. She is
pierced to the heart by her husband's indifference.
"To-day, yesterday," says she, " ah, my God,
and all the week, and now for three weeks, for a
month, you have net said a word to me, and
everybody I see tells me I look ill. "
"On the contrary, I think you look well. "
"It is all the same to you, because you don't
look at me now. You turn away when I come in,
and cover your eyes when I sit near you. Yester-
day I went to confession, and remembered all my
sins, and I could find nothing that could have
offended you. "
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 117
"You have not offended me. "
"~l feeFTought to love you. "
"You have given me the last blow with that
one ' I ought. ' Ah, better stand up and say, 'I
do not love you. ' At least I would then know all. "
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle.
"Do not forsake him. Love my child, my child. "
"Don't pay any attention to what I said. I
often have bad moments. "
"I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him. "
"You and him too. "
He kisses her, and she clings to him. The demon
maiden again enters, still the symbolization of
Henryk's poetical fancies. The wife shrieks in
terror. Henryk thrusts her aside, and disappears
after the ghost.
The christening feast is held: a lugubrious
festivity, for the father is absent, no one knows
where, and the guests look curiously at the wild
and pallid aspect of the mother. No softer or
pitying thought can be discerned in these vapid,
selfish spectators--the men who will be called to
defend their order in a perishing world. The
distraught mother invokes upon the infant's head,
as he is baptized, her curse if he does not become
a poet, so that he may gain the father's love which
has been refused to her. The guests see that some-
thing unpleasant has occurred, and promptly
leave the disagreeable scene. The pompous,
stupid godfather--one of the most admirably
drawn types in the play--utters a conventional
speech over the baby's cradle, exhorting him to
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? ii8 POLAND
civic virtues, and to the love of his country. The
orator himself does his best to save his own life
in the end by abandoning a sinking cause.
In the course of time Henryk returns. He has
been lured by the demons to the brink of a preci-
pice, and there abandoned amidst their laughter.
He comes back to find his house desolate, his wife
in a lunatic asylum. The scene in the madhouse
between him and the wife is handled with an
extraordinary power. On all sides, above and
below, ring the cries of the insane; wild and blas-
phemous ravings, prophetical of the convulsion
of the world which will be the second part of the
Undivine Comedy. Into these break the gentle,
incoherent babblings of the wife. She tells Henryk
that she has won the gift of poetry by her prayers.
She falters out limping verses of her composition.
She promises him that his son will be a poet.
Finally, she dies in her husband's arms, happy
because she breathed her last with him by her
side. The characterization of Henryk is throughout
true and consistent. He is shocked at the result
of his conduct to his wife. He does what he can
as he sits beside her in the asylum; and the genius
of Krasinski in the portrayal of a character is
perhaps never more manifest than when he shows
what that passionless and inefficient best of
Henryk's amounts to. Outbursts of remorse or
of enthusiasm can be heard from Henryk's
lips at the appropriate moments; and across
them cuts a hidden voice from somewhere with
the taunt or the admonition, whichever it may
be: "Thou composest a drama. " The fact is
that Henryk has so long toyed with emotion that
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI
119
he himself cannot by now distinguish between
genuine and false feeling. The reader instinctively *
suspects and remains unmoved, even in Henryk's
apparently impassioned speech; whereas every
word of the wife's is spoken out of the depths of
a woman's heart, carrying its sure appeal. In this
lies part, at least, of the strange and subtle force
of the Undivine Comedy.
There is one more test left in Henryk's domestic
life. The angel, on the eve of his wedding, had
promised him salvation if he loved his wife. The
same angel, when he stood on the brink of the
abyss whither the demon had led him, promised
him salvation if he returned and loved his son.
There remains, then, the child, the strange, mourn-
ful child who sees visions and talks to his dead
mother. ! He is said to be the reminiscence of
Krasinski's own shadowed childhood. His blind-
ness is described with the psychology of intimacy,
for while Krasinski wrote the play he was nearly
blind himself. The son's hallucinations are the
embodiment before his father's eyes of the lattef's
punishment, of the spirit of poetry in its destruc-
tive form. The child is the type of a soul that is
too weak to cope with a difficult world, whose only
refuge is in dreams, and whose death is as unneces-
. Whatever Henryk's egoism, Krasinski was too'
great an artist to paint him without affection for
an only son. f His knowledge of human nature
rather chose to represent the decadent husband,
. who wearied of an uninteresting and domestic
wife, as a selfish but not indifferent father of a son
* J. Klaczko, op. cit, + J. Kleiner, op, cit.
sary as his life had been futile. *
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POLAND
who was, after all, part of himself. The child is
doomed by the physician to incurable blindness.
"Thy son is a poet," calls the unknown voice.
"What more couldst thou desire? " But for
once Henryk's grief rings true. There is no pose
in his cry: "Is there no, no hope? "
He wanders in the mountains. What is left to
him? His family happiness, through his doing, is
shattered. His only child, the inheritor of his
house, is blind, and more or less mad. He has
tried philosophy, and all in vain. The society in
which he has been brought up is dissolving. He
has known every feeling " by name, and there is
no faith, hope or love left in me. " He has, indeed,
loved his son, but with the love of self that could'
not save him. Then the demon again appears to
him, this time under the form of an eagle repre-
senting ambition; and henceforth Henryk is
dominated by the lust of power.
Now begins the second part of the Undivine
Comedy. The revolution is let loose upon the
world. The remnants of the aristocracy, wretched,
boneless specimens, are making their last stand in
the fortress of the Trinity. Once, in the long past,
as we know from a poem of Krasinski's which,1
written after the Undivine Comedy, was intended
to be its introduction, and which remains un-
finished, Henryk had had his dreams of a people's
liberties. Now, not from conviction, for he is not
convinced, not from enthusiasm to a cause, for
his heart is too worn out to harbour enthusiasm,
but from the desire to play the part of a leader of
men and to go out with all eyes upon him, he is
the champion and the commander of the nobles.
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?
"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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POLAND
any to which Henryk can lay claim. A demon
maiden who stands for Henryk's old poetic ideals
appears to him, tempting him from the side of
his wife.
"From the day of my marriage I have slept
the sleep of the torpid," says Henryk, turning
with loathing from the earthly woman; "the
sleep of a German manufacturer with a German
wife. I have gone round after relations, doctors,
shops ; and because a child is going to be born to
me, I have had to think about a nurse. "'
When the child is born it is the same story.
Henryk sits, morose and brooding, uttering short
thanks as his wife unwittingly plagues him with
the domesticities of the christening feast that is
to be celebrated. It is with a mingling of tender-
ness and fidelity to fact, strange in a boy of Kras-
inski's years, that he paints the wronged wife;
the one sympathetic figure, for all her want of
balance that ruins herself and her child, in a play
which exposes on one side a rotten aristocracy, on the
other savage and lawless revolutionaries. She is
pierced to the heart by her husband's indifference.
"To-day, yesterday," says she, " ah, my God,
and all the week, and now for three weeks, for a
month, you have net said a word to me, and
everybody I see tells me I look ill. "
"On the contrary, I think you look well. "
"It is all the same to you, because you don't
look at me now. You turn away when I come in,
and cover your eyes when I sit near you. Yester-
day I went to confession, and remembered all my
sins, and I could find nothing that could have
offended you. "
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? ZTGMUNT KR4SINSKI 117
"You have not offended me. "
"~l feeFTought to love you. "
"You have given me the last blow with that
one ' I ought. ' Ah, better stand up and say, 'I
do not love you. ' At least I would then know all. "
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle.
"Do not forsake him. Love my child, my child. "
"Don't pay any attention to what I said. I
often have bad moments. "
"I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him. "
"You and him too. "
He kisses her, and she clings to him. The demon
maiden again enters, still the symbolization of
Henryk's poetical fancies. The wife shrieks in
terror. Henryk thrusts her aside, and disappears
after the ghost.
The christening feast is held: a lugubrious
festivity, for the father is absent, no one knows
where, and the guests look curiously at the wild
and pallid aspect of the mother. No softer or
pitying thought can be discerned in these vapid,
selfish spectators--the men who will be called to
defend their order in a perishing world. The
distraught mother invokes upon the infant's head,
as he is baptized, her curse if he does not become
a poet, so that he may gain the father's love which
has been refused to her. The guests see that some-
thing unpleasant has occurred, and promptly
leave the disagreeable scene. The pompous,
stupid godfather--one of the most admirably
drawn types in the play--utters a conventional
speech over the baby's cradle, exhorting him to
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? ii8 POLAND
civic virtues, and to the love of his country. The
orator himself does his best to save his own life
in the end by abandoning a sinking cause.
In the course of time Henryk returns. He has
been lured by the demons to the brink of a preci-
pice, and there abandoned amidst their laughter.
He comes back to find his house desolate, his wife
in a lunatic asylum. The scene in the madhouse
between him and the wife is handled with an
extraordinary power. On all sides, above and
below, ring the cries of the insane; wild and blas-
phemous ravings, prophetical of the convulsion
of the world which will be the second part of the
Undivine Comedy. Into these break the gentle,
incoherent babblings of the wife. She tells Henryk
that she has won the gift of poetry by her prayers.
She falters out limping verses of her composition.
She promises him that his son will be a poet.
Finally, she dies in her husband's arms, happy
because she breathed her last with him by her
side. The characterization of Henryk is throughout
true and consistent. He is shocked at the result
of his conduct to his wife. He does what he can
as he sits beside her in the asylum; and the genius
of Krasinski in the portrayal of a character is
perhaps never more manifest than when he shows
what that passionless and inefficient best of
Henryk's amounts to. Outbursts of remorse or
of enthusiasm can be heard from Henryk's
lips at the appropriate moments; and across
them cuts a hidden voice from somewhere with
the taunt or the admonition, whichever it may
be: "Thou composest a drama. " The fact is
that Henryk has so long toyed with emotion that
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? ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI
119
he himself cannot by now distinguish between
genuine and false feeling. The reader instinctively *
suspects and remains unmoved, even in Henryk's
apparently impassioned speech; whereas every
word of the wife's is spoken out of the depths of
a woman's heart, carrying its sure appeal. In this
lies part, at least, of the strange and subtle force
of the Undivine Comedy.
There is one more test left in Henryk's domestic
life. The angel, on the eve of his wedding, had
promised him salvation if he loved his wife. The
same angel, when he stood on the brink of the
abyss whither the demon had led him, promised
him salvation if he returned and loved his son.
There remains, then, the child, the strange, mourn-
ful child who sees visions and talks to his dead
mother. ! He is said to be the reminiscence of
Krasinski's own shadowed childhood. His blind-
ness is described with the psychology of intimacy,
for while Krasinski wrote the play he was nearly
blind himself. The son's hallucinations are the
embodiment before his father's eyes of the lattef's
punishment, of the spirit of poetry in its destruc-
tive form. The child is the type of a soul that is
too weak to cope with a difficult world, whose only
refuge is in dreams, and whose death is as unneces-
. Whatever Henryk's egoism, Krasinski was too'
great an artist to paint him without affection for
an only son. f His knowledge of human nature
rather chose to represent the decadent husband,
. who wearied of an uninteresting and domestic
wife, as a selfish but not indifferent father of a son
* J. Klaczko, op. cit, + J. Kleiner, op, cit.
sary as his life had been futile. *
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
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POLAND
who was, after all, part of himself. The child is
doomed by the physician to incurable blindness.
"Thy son is a poet," calls the unknown voice.
"What more couldst thou desire? " But for
once Henryk's grief rings true. There is no pose
in his cry: "Is there no, no hope? "
He wanders in the mountains. What is left to
him? His family happiness, through his doing, is
shattered. His only child, the inheritor of his
house, is blind, and more or less mad. He has
tried philosophy, and all in vain. The society in
which he has been brought up is dissolving. He
has known every feeling " by name, and there is
no faith, hope or love left in me. " He has, indeed,
loved his son, but with the love of self that could'
not save him. Then the demon again appears to
him, this time under the form of an eagle repre-
senting ambition; and henceforth Henryk is
dominated by the lust of power.
Now begins the second part of the Undivine
Comedy. The revolution is let loose upon the
world. The remnants of the aristocracy, wretched,
boneless specimens, are making their last stand in
the fortress of the Trinity. Once, in the long past,
as we know from a poem of Krasinski's which,1
written after the Undivine Comedy, was intended
to be its introduction, and which remains un-
finished, Henryk had had his dreams of a people's
liberties. Now, not from conviction, for he is not
convinced, not from enthusiasm to a cause, for
his heart is too worn out to harbour enthusiasm,
but from the desire to play the part of a leader of
men and to go out with all eyes upon him, he is
the champion and the commander of the nobles.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
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