No More Learning

1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
G. 7
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? 98 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
The wedding feast takes place with high rejoicing.
The bride, half fainting with fatigue in the dance, but
lovely in her pallor, is gazed upon with rapture by her
poet husband.
"Oh, eternally, eternally thou shalt be my song," he tells
her; to which she:
"I will be thy faithful wife, as my mother told me, as my
heart tells me. "
She implores him to let her leave the dance, for she
is weary to death. No, he entreats her to remain, and
to go on dancing, so that he can stand and feast his
eyes on her beauty.
For a short time the husband lives more or less
contentedly. Then comes the inevitable reaction. His
old poetical longings seize upon him. Krasinski sym-
bolizes them by the figure of the evil spirit that, clothing
itself in the form of the ideal woman of Henryk's
dreams, appears to him at night while he is asleep.
Husband (waking up). Where am I? Ha! by my wife.
This is my wife. He gazes at his wife. I thought you were
my dream, and behold! after a long interval it has returned
and is different from you. You are good and agreeable, but
the other Oh, God, what do I see?
The Maiden. Thou hast betrayed me. She disappears.
Husband. Cursed be the moment when I married a woman,
when I forsook the beloved of my young years1.
The wife wakes, sees something amiss, and, sup-
posing her husband to be ill, entreats that he will take
this or that remedy.
Husband {starting up). I must have fresh air. Remain here.
For God's sake don't come with me.
He escapes to the moonlit garden. Loathing for
1 All through The Undivine Comedy, long after the wife has disappeared
from the scenes, it is always as the "Husband" that Henryk is introduced.
In like manner, Marya is always the " Wife. "
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? The Undivine Comedy
99
the domestic fetters that have taken the place of poetry
in his life fills his being. He abhors the thought of the
clinging, loving wife, in whom he can find no fault ex-
cept that the soul of a poet is wanting in her.
Since the day of my marriage I have slept the sleep of the
torpid, the sleep of a German shopkeeper by the side of a
German wife. I have gone about after relations, after doctors,
in shops; and because a child is going to be born to me I have
had to think about a nurse. Two o'clock strikes from the church
tower. Come to me, my old kingdom, subject to my thought.
Once the sound of the night bell was your signal. He walks
about and wrings his hands. God, is it Thou Who hast sanc-
tified the union of two bodies? Thou Who hast decreed that
nothing can part them, though their souls discard one another
and leave their bodies like two corpses beside each other?
Again thou art near me. Oh, my own, my own, take me
with thee.
Maiden. Wilt thou follow me in whatsoever day I come
for thee?
Husband. At each instant I am thine.
The colloquy is cut short by the sound of the window
being thrown up in Henryk's house, and the wife's
voice begging him to beware of the night <jold and to
come back.
By the next scene the child has been born. It lies
asleep in its cradle. Henryk reclines on a chair, his
head buried in his hands. Dry " Thank you's " fall from
his lips as his wife deluges him with the tiresome details
of her preparations for the christening feast. Krasin-
ski's whole depictment of this injured woman, sweet,
lovable, and weak of soul, has a truth and tender-
ness of touch that is remarkable in a youth of his age.
She is, indeed, the only sympathetic figure in the
drama: yet hers too is that same want of staying power
that is hurrying her class to their doom. She can make
no stand against the misery of her marriage save by
7--2
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? ioo The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the disordered imagination that destroys herself and
her child.
Caressing her baby, soothing her "little one, her
pretty one," to sleep, her husband's morose gloom as
he sits apart attracts her attention. She seats herself
at the piano. Her hands run vaguely over the keys.
She can bear her fears in silence no longer.
Wife. To-day, yesterday, ah! my God! and all the week
and now for three weeks, for a month, you have not spoken a
word to me--and everyone I see tells me I look ill.
Husband. On the contrary I think you look well.
Wife. It is all the same to you, for you don't look at me
any more, you turn away when I come in. Yesterday I went
to confession, and called to mind all my sins--and I could
find nothing that could have offended you.
Husband. You have not offended me.
Wife. My God! My God!
Husband. I feel I ought to love you.
Wife. You have given me the finishing stroke with that
one: "I ought. " Ah, it would be better to stand up and say:
"I do not love yt>u. " At least I would then know all--all.
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle. Do not
forsake him, and I will sacrifice myself to your anger. Love
my child--my child, Henryk. She kneels down.
Husband. Don't pay any attention to what I said. I often
suffer from bad moments--ennui.
Wife. I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him.
Husband. You and him too.
He kisses her; and as she throws her arms about
him a peal of thunder rolls through the room. Then
wild and strange music is heard; the demon maiden
appears, luring Henryk to follow her. Calling on the
name of Mary, the frenzied wife, clasping her child to
her breast, clings to her husband. Where she sees
a horrible ghost and smells the foul air of the grave,
he sees the beautiful incorporation of his poems. In
vain is her cry of anguish and terror. Her husband
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? The Undivine Comedy
IOI
turns savagely upon her. She is nothing more to him
than the "woman of clay and mire," while the appari-
tion is the heavenly ideal for whose sake he will cast
off his home. He disappears with the demon. His
wife, shrieking out his name, falls senseless.
The guests assemble for the christening. They
whisper and wonder. Where is the father? Why is
the mother so pale and wild? Krasinski's Polish critics
rank this scene as one of the most powerful of the drama
for its concentrated bitterness, for the irony with which,
in a few words, the author exposes the characters of
each of the spectators who are to be the defenders of
the world against the coming deluge. An idle curiosity
is the only sensation of the men and women who watch
the unhappy mother. The priest, as Mickiewicz notices,
confronted with grief where surely a minister of God
might have offered some word of spiritual comfort,
contents himself with performing the function for which
he was summoned, and there his part ends1.
First Guest {under his breath). It's a queer thing where
the Count has got to.
Second Guest. He is gaping about somewhere or is writing
poetry.
First Guest. And Madam is pale and looks as if she has
not slept. She hasn't said a word to anybody.
Fourth Guest. I have left a charming princess. I thought
there would be a good lunch, and instead there is, as the
Scriptures say, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Priest. George Stanislas, dost thou accept the holy oil?
Godparents. We do accept it.
One of the Guests. Look. She has got up, and walks as if
in her sleep.
Second Guest. She has stretched out her hands in front of
her, and, tottering, is going up to her son.
The Priest. George Stanislas, dost thou renounce Satan
and all his pomps?
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? io2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Godparents. We do renounce them.
The Wife {laying her hands on the child? s head). Where is
your father, George?
Priest. Please do not interrupt.
Wife. I bless you, George, I bless you, my child. Be a
poet so that your father may love you and never cast you off.
He will be pleased with you, and then he will forgive your
mother.
Priest. Have respect for the things of God, Madam.
Wife. I curse you if you are not a poet. She faints and
the servants carry Iter out.
The Guests {all together). Something unusual has happened
in this house. Let us go away.
They retire with haste. The christening proceeds.
When it is concluded the godfather makes over the
cradle a speech that has obviously been made very
often before, and as obviously will be made very often
again1.
George Stanislas, you have just been made a Christian
and entered human society, and later you will become a citizen,
and by the efforts of your parents and the grace of God an
eminent holder of office. Remember that you must love your
country, and that it is fine even to die for your country.
So he speaks who in the end of the play is the first
to leave the sinking ship.
In the meanwhile, Henryk has been pursuing his
will-o'-the-wisp in the mountains. She decoys him to
a precipice she bids him leap, and there shows herself
in her true form, a hideous fiend. The devils are
thrusting him down over the brink: and even in that
dread moment Henryk's cry is rather that of the actor's
monologue than of a human soul about to face its
eternal fate. He is falling without a struggle, for his
is never a moral conflict.
Invariably he yields without
a stand. Then the angel guardian rises over the sea.
Henryk has thrown away the chance of salvation the
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 103
same angel had offered him on his marriage eve. He
is now given another: "to return to his house and sin
no more; to love his son. "
He goes home. His wife is there no longer. The
servant falters out that she has been taken to the mad
asylum. And now the husband realizes what he has
done.
"All that I have touched I have destroyed," he cries, "and
I shall destroy myself in the end. On what pillow will she lay
her head to-day? What sounds shall surround her in the night?
The howls and songs of the insane. "
So he raves on.
A voice from somewhere. Thou composest a drama.
That voice, says Count Tarnowski, is not an ex-
ternal voice: it is the voice of Henryk's conscience1.
For even now Henryk must poetize. He--and his
son--are the only two who ever talk poetically in a play
where stern simplicity is the rule. The son's poetry
is spontaneous, as the song of a bird: but it is patent
that Henryk has always his eye on an imaginary audi-
ence. He reproaches himself for his wife's madness:
but his language does not convey that sense of agony
and measureless remorse which would have been evoked
from another man in the like circumstances. How
much of it is real sorrow, how much of it the pose that
is now an integral part of the nature of a man who has
for years used emotion as the tool of poetry, who has
lived as an actor greedy for dramatic settings, the
speaker himself is incapable of telling2. It is part of
the genius of Krasinski's creation that, except in one
later episode, the reader with no explanation of the fact
1 St Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 Op. cit.
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? 104 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
remains perfectly cold when Henryk holds forth, how-
ever passionate to outward semblance his utterances
may be: while on the other hand Marya's words,
simple, unstudied, dictated by love and grief, speak
straight to the heart.
Henryk rushes to the asylum. Klaczko and Dr
Kallenbach dwell upon the mastery with which Kra-
sinski treats the scene in the madhouse. One shade
less restraint would have overstepped the bounds of
tragedy and turned it into the grotesque: but all is
grave and moving1. Krasinski unites his personal im-
pressions of a madhouse, where he had visited a friend,
with the great world convulsion for which the first part
of The Undivine Comedy is preparing us. We are con-
scious of uneasiness and dark forebodings as within
these lugubrious walls Henryk, sitting by his wife's
couch, hears resound from the rooms above, the rooms
below, the rooms on either side, mad cries: one blas-
pheming, another clamouring for the heads of kings
and the liberties of the people, a third shrieking that
the comet is already flashing in the skies which is to
bring "the day of terrible judgment. "
Here Henryk's eloquence leaves him. We feel
that he is more or less genuine, constrained and in-
efficient as he is in an ugly situation that can appeal
to no poetic sense, but only to the strength of soul that
is not in him.
Husband. Do you know me, Marya?
Wife. I have sworn to be faithful to you to the grave.
Husband. Come, give me your hand. We will go away.
Wife. Let me have a few minutes more, and then I will
be worthy of you. I have prayed three nights, and God has
heard me.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Undivine Comedy 105
Husband. I don't understand you.
Wife. From the time I lost you a change came over me.
"Lord God," I prayed, and beat my breast. "Send down upon
me the spirit of poetry": and the third day in the morning
I became a poet.
Husband. Marya! /
Wife. Henryk, you will not despise me now. I am full of
inspiration. You will not forsake me now in the evenings.
Husband. Never, never.
Wife. Look at me. Have I not made myself your equal?
I understand everything, I will give it out, I will play it, I will
sing it. Sea, stars, storm, battle. Yes, stars, storm, sea--ah!
something still escapes me--battle.
She breaks into doggerel lines.
Husband. The curse! the curse!
Wife (throwing her arms round him and kissing him). My
Henryk, Henryk, how happy I am!
Seeing his gloom, she tells him what will surely
drive the cloud from his brow, namely, that his son
will be a poet.
At the christening the priest gave him for his first name--
Poet, and you know the others, George Stanislas. I did this.
I blessed him, I added a curse--he will be a poet. Ah! how
I love you, Henryk!
Then the wildness of the prophecies that are ringing
from every side of the asylum while she and her husband
talk together falls upon her also. She babbles incoher-
ently, but ever gently, of what would befall the world
if God went mad; soon returning to her favourite
thought of the poet child who will bring joy to his
father. Her brain gives way: and she dies, happy,
says she, because it is in Henryk's arms that she dies.
Here ends the first part of the domestic drama.
How much of its peculiar dreariness may be ascribed
to the shadows of Krasinski's own childhood we can
but conjecture; but possibly the picture was, if only
subconsciously, coloured by a sensitive and observant
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? 106 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
child's impressions of a home where there had been
little sympathy between husband and wife. Certain it
is that George, the son of Henryk and Marya, is to
a great extent Krasinski himself.
There is a further point to observe in this unsparing
portrayal of a poet's marriage, or, in other words, of
the dreamer mated with reality. Krasinski spoke here
not merely out of his knowledge of human nature in
general, but out of his knowledge of his own self. The
marriage of Henryk is the curious foreshadowing of
Krasinski's marriage. Krasinski was to be the indiffer-
ent husband whose heart when he married was turned
with passion in another direction. The resemblance
does not end there. Morbid introspection, love of a
situation, a tendency to self-dramatization, were the
chief faults of Krasinski's character. Henryk is, in fact,
Krasinski at the latter's potential worst--but a worst
that he never reached: for Henryk erred through want
of heart, Krasinski through too much. Yet in Henryk
we have the clear vision of what the Anonymous Poet
might have been, and what his innate nobility of soul
withheld him from becoming.
Henryk's marriage, then, thus wretchedly ends. He
has failed as a husband; but he is still a father.
With the son something of the ruthlessness of Greek
tragedy enters the play. The poetical prologue to the
second part is entirely devoted to this strange child.
He gazes to the skies and sees something, hears some-
thing, that no one but himself knows. His father looks
at him in silence, with eyes that fill with tears. A gypsy
refuses to reveal what she reads in his hand, and goes
away, wailing. Beautiful, pure, mysterious, he is like
some flower in Eden before the fall of man.
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? The Undivine Comedy 107
Thus the introduction. The figure of the sad child
who never plays like other children, whom his father's
friends visit and to whom they promise some great
future, whose nerves destroy his fragile body, is Krasin-
ski's recollection of his boyhood in his father's house,
told poetically as he tells all such scraps of his autobio-
graphy. And, passing beyond Krasinski's childhood,
not only is the blindness of George the blindness in
which Krasinski wrote the play, but, says Dr Kallen-
bach, "all this second part is full of personal memories
and personal sorrows. " So openly does the Anonymous
Poet expose in these few pages the wounds of his heart,
his sacred domestic tragedies, that this were alone
sufficient to account for the elaborate precautions which
he took so that the authorship of The Undivine Comedy
should never be discovered1.
The action opens with Henryk and George praying
at the mother's tomb. This beautiful and artistic scene
is the reminiscence of Krasinski's visits in his childhood
with his father to his mother's grave2.
Husband. Take off your hat and pray for your mother's
soul.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, Queen of heaven, Lady
of all that flowers on the earth, in the fields, on the banks of
streams.
Husband. Why do you change the words of the prayer?
Pray, as you have been taught, for your mother who died ten
years ago at this very hour.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among angels, and each of them, when thou
passest by, plucks a rainbow from his wings and casts it at
thy feet.
Husband. George!
George. But those words rush on me and pain my head so
much that, please, I must say them.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmmit Krasinski.
1 Op. cit.
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? io8 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Husband. Get up. A prayer like that does not reach God.
You do not remember your mother. You cannot love her.
George. I see Mother very often:
and he tells his father that she appears when he is be-
tween sleeping and waking, and that the last time she
was white and wasted, and sang to him this song:
I wander everywhere,
I enter everywhere,
In the confines of the worlds,
Where there are angels' songs:
I gather up for thee
The throngs of countless forms,
Thoughts and inspired words,
Oh, little child of mine!
And from the highest souls,
And from the lowest souls,
Colours and shadowings,
Sweet sounds and rays of light,
I gather up for thee,
That thou, my little son,
Shalt be like those in heaven,
And by thy father loved.
Husband {leaning on a pillar of the tomb). Marya, would you
destroy your own child, burden me with two deaths? What
am I saying? She is in heaven, tranquil and peaceful as she was
during her life on earth. The poor child is only dreaming.
George. And now I hear her voice, but I see nothing. . .
from those two larches on which the light of the setting sun
is falling.
I'll give thy lips to drink
Of sound and power,
I will adorn thy brow
With ribands of bright light,
And with a mother's love
I'll wake in thee
All that is beauty called
By angels in heaven and man on earth,
So that thy father may
Love thee, my little son.
Husband. Do the last thoughts at death accompany the
soul even when it reaches heaven? Can a spirit be happy, holy
and mad at the same time?
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