No More Learning

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? 82 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
General had received a mandate from the Tsar, to dis-
obey which meant Siberia1, is a matter of conjecture.
It was one step further in the road that the Anonymous
Poet trod for his father's sake.
All Krasinski's letters to Reeve from the moment
that he crossed the frontiers are worded with great cau-
tion. With his correspondence opened by the Russian
police, he could say no word of any Polish matters, of
the things that most went to his heart. In a letter to
Reeve, sent after he had started for Petersburg, he
writes, with irony pointed to deceive those through
whose hands the words might pass, both a covert warn-
ing to the Englishman to be careful what he wrote to
him2 and his own vow to be ever faithful to Poland.
If you ask me "What shall you do there? " I will answer:
/ don't know [in English]. However, you know me, and you
know that I love eating, drinking, etc. , and that nothing in this
world can make me change my opinion on that point, nothing,
nothing3.
Krasinski spent five months in Petersburg, too ill
to leave his room. He passed his time between his bed
and walking restlessly about his luxurious apartment,
hung with green and silver tapestry, which looked out
on a courtyard and a sky heavy with snowclouds. His
solitude was only broken by the visits of his father who,
says he to Reeve, was "an angel" to him, and by the
occasional calls of the few uncongenial acquaintances he
had in the city. His eyes were on fire, and the doctors
doubted whether they could save them. He was obliged
to see the original, and in this instance quote Dr Kallenbach's reference.
J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Correspondence. Dr Kallenbach's note, Vol. II, p. io.
3 Ibid. Krasinski to Reeve. Knyszyn, Sept 22, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 83
to live with closed eyes, to dictate his letters, to employ
a secretary to read aloud. In later years he confided to
a Polish friend that these months in Petersburg were
the saddest of his life; practically blind as he was, in
acute fear of totally losing his eyesight, alone in his
singularly painful position, cut off from all to whom he
could unburden his mind1. But that dreary winter of
moral loneliness was filled for Krasinski with one ab-
sorbing occupation: thought.
"I have learned to think," he wrote to Reeve2. Ut-
terly cast upon the resources of his own soul, he not
only collected clearly his thoughts on the strife between
past and present that were to become The Undivine
Comedy, but it was during this winter that Iridion took
being. Dr Kallenbach points out the analogy between
the two great Polish poets, Adam Mickiewicz and the
Anonymous Poet, whose genius rose above the same
conditions of slavery, and who were, by those very con-
ditions, inspired to speak under a veil the words for
their nation that could not be said openly3.
"A few days ago," Krasinski told Reeve, " during the night
the idea of a poem came to me, a great idea. I leapt from
my bed, and cried: AncK io sonopittore*"
This idea was his Iridion. Three months later he
tells Reeve in a dictated letter that his Iridion Amphilo-
chides is " a Greek in Rome : et dulces moriens reminis-
citur Argos6. " More he dared not say.
That the motive of Iridion was already sufficiently
1 St. Maiachowski, op. cit. Quoted by Count Tarnowski and Dr
Kallenbach in their monographs on Krasinski.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. I, 1832.
3 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
4 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Oct. 22, 1832.
6 Ibid. Jan. 20, 1833.
6--2
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? 84 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
developed for the play to be begun proves what point
Krasinski had reached in the conflict between his
craving for revenge and what was to the young Pole,
watching his country's agony, the hardest word of Christ-
ianity. Three years more passed before Iridion was
finished: its creator wavered before he could attain to
his sublime conclusion at the foot of the cross in the
Coliseum. But the fact remains that it was in the heart
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction. As a son of the conquered race in the enemy's
city, Krasinski was in moral kinship with the Greek
Iridion, gazing on the triumph of Rome. He fought
his battle out in the silence and solitude of his room,
while, as a relief from the monotonous snows of the
northern capital, his memory returned to translucent
blue Italian skies, to the roses of the Palatine, the glowing
colours of classical Rome among which walks Iridion1.
While he was thus developing in Petersburg the
problem of Iridion he also reflected on those that, touch-
ing the innermost emotions of his heart less intimately,
were, as we see from his letters to Reeve, fast ripening
for expression in The Undivine Comedy.
Reeve had made a new friend in an Englishman,
who, as the man of the future, evolved into the Pan-
kracy of The Undivine Comedy. Krasinski mistrusted
him.
Henry! every man, if he be weak, finds his Mephistopheles
like Faust. [These words show how Krasinski's conception both
of the Mephistopheles in Iridion and of Pankracy was seething
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
85
in his brain. ] It begins with enthusiasm, it finishes with disgust
or despair. There is nothing to fear from a heart we love; but
the ascendancy of a strong head is a very different thing. For
some time we struggle, then we become a slave1.
There are two parts in man: thought and action [writes
the creator of Henryk] : one as noble as the other, and dividing
life turn and turn about between them. Those who never act
are called fakirs; those who never think and always act are
called machines; those who think and work are called men.
It is obvious that in this last class there are individuals in whom
the element of thought predominates, in others that of action.
But if there is to be greatness or beauty there must always be
a proper quantity of both one and the other2.
I know better than anyone there must be a future. I un-
derstand the triumphal procession of that future. . . I know that
we will all pass to dust, having admired nothing, loved nothing
real, hated much. And, if we do love something, it is only a
world of dreams, of emptiness: the past.
When I consider the matter as a philosopher, I see only
an admirable and eternal order; but when I consider the
matter as a man who has the heart of a man, the feelings of a
man, ties on this earth, I see only disorder. . . Then, when we
have perished, let them arrange the earth in their own way, as
they like; and here I think that a day will come when love
will again prevail. For God is justice and beauty, the universe
is harmonious, and I am immortal*.
Before Krasinski left Petersburg he told Reeve that
since he had last seen him he had thought so deeply
that the work of several years seemed to have taken
place within him.
God forgive me for having reached a conclusion degrading
to humanity. It is that the masses have nothing but appetite,
and never make use of reason; that man is everything, and
that by him all things are done, and that men are nothing.
Still the man is always obliged to sacrifice himself for men,
and never to sacrifice them for him. Even though he himself
be convinced that happiness is impossible on this earth, he
ought to believe in it for others and walk with all his strength
to that chimerical end4.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. 17, 1832.
2 Ibid. Nov. 21, 1832. 3 Ibid. Jan. 6, 1833.
* Ibid. Feb. 5, 1833.
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? 86 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Though Krasinski was barely twenty-one, by now
his youth seems far behind him. He reminds Reeve of
the "fabulous time of life" when they both dreamed
and hoped, and had faith in men.
Formerly we wanted to become poetical beings; to-day we
must become moral beings, live in the bosom of reality, that is
to say, sustain each moment a struggle that burns by slow fire,
a struggle which is waged between our ideas and facts, which
produces the modification of our ideas, the concessions that
our soul, formerly absolute and superb, is forced to make to
the world of matter, action, interest, etc. etc.
He sees in that very conflict poetry ; but the poetry of
duty done in darkness, of work unrewarded save by the
sentiment of personal dignity1. This is the language of
one who is no more young. There is in these letters of
Krasinski a growing pessimism. At this time he began
the study of German philosophy that for years contri-
buted to darken his spiritual outlook. In the first letter
he was free to write to Gaszynski after he had left Russia
he told him that he still wrote: "but not with a like
faith as of old. Where are all my faiths gone2? "
One significant incident cut across the manner of
Krasinski's life in Petersburg. He was presented by
his father to Nicholas I. He stood face to face with
the man at whose hand the Polish nation suffered a fate
that has made the history of Poland the tragedy of
modern Europe; whose treatment of the vanquished
was one of such pitiless cruelty that Mickiewicz could
find no greater blasphemy to place on the lips of his
Konrad, driven mad by the tears of his people, than
the taunt that God was no father to His creatures, but
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Jan. 25, 1833.
2 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Vienna, July 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 87
their Tsar1. Krasinski, being the son of a Pole who
had thrown in his lot with Russia, was received by the
Tsar with a graciousness that was in itself the bitterest
affront to a Polish heart, and offered a post at court or
in the diplomatic service. The danger of the moment,
when a refusal might have involved the gravest con-
sequences, was only averted by the condition of Zyg-
munt's health that won him the imperial permission to
leave Russia for a better climate.
These details of his interview with Nicholas I
Krasinski probably confided long afterwards to the friend
who has related them3. In his as yet published corre-
spondence we have no word upon the subject. But an
echo of what it had meant to him may be found, in
veiled figures, in another place--in a prose poem, called
The Temptation, that he wrote four years later for a
young compatriot who was about to be confronted with
the moral ordeal of a Pole's life in Petersburg.
He left Petersburg in March, 1833. He stopped for
a short time in Warsaw on his way to Vienna. Dictating
from there a letter to Reeve, he apologizes for a long
silence. He had had no one to write his letters for him,
and could only during his journey trust to the kindness
of any chance person who would take down his dictation.
There are ineffable delights for the artist [he proceeds with
reflections that are the key to Henryk's character in The Un-
divine Comedy] : but also he is fated to suffer more than anyone
else in this world. In truth his egoism is sublime; but it is
always egoism. And what will he do when he finds himself in
positions where, to be happy, he must forget himself? He will
1 Adam Mickiewicz, The Ancestors, Part III. See my Adam Mickie-
wicz, where I have given a translation of the scene in question.
2 Stanistaw Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski, quoted by Count Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski,
and by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 88 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
never know what the love of a woman really is; because, for
him, everything is himself. He loves his masterpieces ; but he
loves nothing else. That is why reality is poison to him. That
is why he can find nowhere any fulfilment of his desires, any
end to his dreams. Everything that is not himself disgusts him
and drives him to despair. . . So long as he is alone he is happy
. . . That is why a great artist is never either a good husband or
a good father. . . One pays dearly for having been admitted to
the secrets of the gods. One only drop fallen from on high on
your brow renders you incapable of living here below1.
In our dreams [writes the idealist, tormented by the eternal
quest], in those sublime conceptions which yet must often
seem ridiculous to the masses, we never feel the most simple
difficulties, our courage is ready to brave the thunderbolt of
heaven; but if we have to take but two steps, say a few words,
approach, in fact, earthly life in its daily occurrences, we sink
with fatigue. . . To dream is to be of another world, but it is not
to be ignorant or mad. There is only madness if we think we
can apply the laws of our dreams or of our synthesis to the
analysis of life down here; but everyone is obliged to fall into
that mistake in the beginning. Some stay in it, and those are
feeble, incomplete beings, but full of gentle poetry and misfor-
tunes. Others, having recognized their youth, and not under-
standing this sublime warning of Heaven, imagine that all is
finished; that the true world is wretchedness and analysis.
These are also feeble and incomplete beings, who end by the
corruption of materialism. There are few men who have
strength enough to bear difficulties and obstacles, to decide to
enter practical life by facing it--the only one that leads to
some results--and to keep at the same time an unshakable
faith in the promises that were made to them in the day of
their delirium, when they caught a glimpse of luminous
spheres that they have never since been able to attain. They
only will do something3.
Konstanty Danielewicz, the friend who had stood
by Krasinski wTTeli~n~e~was~mobbed at the University,
joined Zygmunt in Warsaw, and went on with him to
Vienna. From this time Danielewicz, until his death,
was the devoted companion of Krasinski in his wan-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw, April 4, 1833.
2 Ibid. April 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
89
derings, and the one that the poet seems to have loved
best of all his friends. The misfortunes of his life were
a bond that knit Krasinski, with whom to pity was to
love, very closely to him. His philosophical intellect
strongly influenced, not altogether for the good, the
trend of Krasinski's mind during the years that they
lived together. He was a finished musician, though no
poet; and in his playing, Krasinski, who was passion-
ately fond of music, found inspiration for the struggle
of the spirits in The Undivine Comedy over Henryk's
soul1. His somewhat severe candour, and a certain want
of sympathy with Zygmunt's nervous and highly strung
temperament, never chilled their friendship, or dimin-
ished the enthusiastic admiration that Krasinski, an
idealist in his affections as elsewhere, lavished upon him.
Krasinski spent the summer in Vienna with Daniele-
wicz, undergoing medical treatment. He was in wretched
health, and the days went by for both youths in exter-
nal monotony, but, for Krasinski, in creation. He and
Danielewicz sat talking for hours of the social problems
which were at the time convulsing Europe: and it was
then that Krasinski, only able to write a few words at
a stretch in his blind condition, committed to paper The
Undivine Comedy. To antedate the words he wrote to
Gaszynski, with their foreshadowing of the promises of
Dawn, soon after The Undivine Comedy was completed:
I know that our civilization is nigh to death: I know that
the times are near when new crimes will come to punish the
old, and themselves be condemned in the sight of God--but
I know that they will create nothing, will build nothing. They
will pass like the horse of Attila, and, after them, silence. Then
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish). See also Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw,
April 9, 1833.
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? 90
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
only, that which neither you nor anyone knows or understands
will come upon us, rise from the chaos, and build the new
world from the Divine Will, from the predestiny of the human
race; but then both your and my bones shall be somewhere
dust1.
In the October of 1833 Krasinski published under
false initials his Agay Han.
He had begun this story in Geneva. The Tartar
page, Agay Han, is in love with Maryna, the widow
of the false Demetrius. After her husband's death,
Maryna has taken refuge in a castle, where the Mus-
covite boyars capture her, and cast her into prison.
She is rescued by the page; but she gives her hand to
Zarucki, who had defended the castle before it fell.
Panting for revenge, Agay Han follows them with
Russian troops, slays the husband, and drowns both
Maryna and himself.
This, the last work of Krasinski's immaturity, lacks
interest. Begun when the author's nerves had gone to
pieces during his sufferings in Geneva2, the style of the
first part is weak and over coloured. Before the story
ends the errors of manner are pruned away, and after
the earlier chapters the rest of the work, says Dr Kal-
lenbach, shows a decided step forward in the poet's
powers3. There is, however, so great a gulf between
Agay Han and its successor--the masterpiece of
matured genius which as The Undivine Comedy will live
with the Polish language--that it is hard to realize
they were written, and with no intermediate degrees,
by the same hand.
In the autumn Krasinski wandered, still with
1 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Rome, Jan. 17, 1834.
s J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 91
Danielewicz, by slow stages from Vienna through Italy,
till he reached Rome. We find this journey with its
memories of Krasinski's dead companion in the Un-
finished Poem. The Undivine Comedy was finished
during the halt at Venice. In a letter written from
Rome to Reeve, between whom and Krasinski some
cause of coolness had arisen which had put an end to
their correspondence for several months, Zygmunt
details the plot of the play. To Gaszynski he wrote
telling him that he was sending him the manuscript, to
which he first gave the name The Husband, charging
him by everything that was holy to guard the secret
of the authorship, to get it published in Paris if possible, 1
and to accept as a friend's gift whatever financial gains
came of it. But for some reason Krasinski changed
his mind, and left the manuscript alone. More than a
year after he had told Gaszynski that the work was
ready, he wrote, speaking darkly for fear of unwar-
ranted eyes discovering his identity:
If you should find in Paris a recently published work, The
Undivine Comedy, tell me your opinion of it. . . Then I also will
give you my remarks and observations1.
But psychologically The Undivine Comedy belongs
to the year in which Krasinski wrote it. Therefore we
have now reached that chapter of the poet's life.
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, March 29, 1835.
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? CHAPTER V
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY: THE
DOMESTIC DRAMA
The Undivine Comedy is the drama of a perishing world.
It was written little more than forty years after the
French Revolution, at a time of widespread social up-
heaval and universal unrest. A Polish boy of twenty-
one voiced the problems and apprehensions which are
still ours with the penetration of genius that places The
Undivine Comedy amongst the masterpieces of the
world's literature.
The Undivine Comedy is written in prose, the finest
that ever came from Krasinski's pen. It stands alone
among his creations. The gravity and restraint of the
style, its strange terseness, unique in the work of one
whose tendency is to over elaboration, have been in
part ascribed to the conditions under which Krasinski
wrote the play, forced as he was by practical blindness
to concentrate much into brief phrases1. We never,
says Mickiewicz, see the dramatis personae full figure.
The situations and characters are not developed: they
are only indicated2. Yet such is the strength of the
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmuni Krasinski.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. Paris, 1849. Vols. IV and V, the
former of which contains the fine analysis of The Undivine Comedy, have
been republished in one volume by the Musee Adam Mickiewicz, Paris,
1914.
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? The Undivine Comedy
93
few strokes with which Krasinski draws them that they
stand out sharp, living. The nurse speaks once: and in
her one cry over the blind child the Polish peasant, with
her simplicity, her piety, her devotion to her nursling, is
in the flesh before us1. To the godfather falls a part that
does not fill a page; but how well we know him and
his stupid, pompous complacency! The whole story of
the wife, who has nothing except the limitations of a
woman's heart to pit against the restless egoism of
a poetic genius, is played out in scarcely half a dozen
short scenes, as remarkable for their power and un-
swerving truth to human nature as for their reserve.
The atmosphere of the play is profoundly pessi-
mistic. Its gloom is unrelieved. The domestic tragedy,
the ruin of a wife and son, is the theme of the first part:
the universal tragedy, where the war of class against
class, past against future, ends also in ruin, but the
ruin of all the world, is the theme of the second.
Although by birth and tradition, and, to a certain extent,
conviction, which was however not nearly so pronounced
in his youth as later, Krasinski belonged to the aristo-
cratic party; yet in The Undivine Comedy he gauges
each class alike with icy impartiality, or, to speak more
correctly, with a severity that effectually withholds the
reader's sympathy from either. His aristocrats are
wholly without moral fibre: decadent, flabby inheritors
of a doomed cause. Their opponents, revenging them-
selves for years of oppression, . are not demons--the
colour of the drama is not lurid or stained with crim-
son, but grey: they are merely brutalized human beings
taking the heads of their tyrants in cold blood. The
champion of the past, or of the aristocracy, plays his
1 J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? 94 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part without conviction out of a heart no longer capable
of nursing any spark of the living fire. Faith and en-
thusiasm are wanting likewise to his antagonist, the
leader of the revolution. In Iridion we have the mar-
tyrs of the catacombs, the lovely lineaments of Cor-
nelia, grandeur in the figure of Iridion himself, who,
although he sinned, sinned because he had "loved
Greece. " But in The Undivine Comedy there is no one
even approaching heroic proportions: no one for whom
we can feel a spark of whole-hearted admiration. The
fact that these morally negative men and women are
not abnormal, but human characters whom we have
met in our daily lives, is among the most painfully
true aspects of The Undivine Comedy.
For the sadness of The Undivine Comedy is not that
of a young pessimism. There is no touch of youth about
the drama. It is the work of one who had passed
through a rude shock, a bitter awakening. The tragedy
of Poland was too recent, his own wounds were too
fresh, for the Anonymous Poet to be able as yet to
speak the language of Dawn and Resurrecturis. As
Dr Kallenbach observes, The Undivine Comedy, with
its brooding melancholy, its presages of woe, was one
of the first fruits of the disastrous Polish Rising1.
"I know nothing more painful than all this drama," said
Mickiewicz, speaking in Paris to his audience of Poles and
Frenchmen, who were all ignorant as to who the author of The
Undivine Comedy might be. "The poet who composed it could
only have been born in the bosom of a nation that has suffered
for centuries. Grief is not exhaled here in pompous phrases.
I have no tirades to quote. But each word is a drop drawn
from one great mass of suffering and painV
Beyond the fact that it is written in the Polish
1 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 95
language The Undivine Comedy is not national. There
is no mention, even indirectly, of Poland. There is no
indication of place except that to the last rampart of
the besieged nobles is given the name of an old fortress
of the heroic days of the Polish Republic. Were it not
for the nurse's invocation to " Our Lady of Czenstoc-
howa," and the typical characteristics of the servants
who are at once recognizable as Poles, whereas all the
other personages in the play are cosmopolitan, not Polish,
types, we should not know that the scene of The Un-
divine Comedy is laid in Poland. All Krasinski's later
work was spoken directly to his people, and through
them to the world. His earliest, the first that gave him
his rank among the great poets of his race, is spoken
to the world, and then to his nation.
In front of each of the four parts into which Kra-
sinski divides the play he places a short preliminary
prose poem, by way of introduction. The first is the
surest indication of the unyouthful despair which filled
Krasinski's heart at this time. He writes, says one of
his biographers, in the flower of his age a work of
genius unique of its kind in Europe; and his opening
is the antithesis to the rapture and sublime faith in
self of a young poet. It is the bitterest curse on
poetry1.
There are stars around thy head [he addresses poetry]; the
waves of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rainbow
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.
Thou playest to strange ears of unconceived delights. . .
Thou drawest forth tears. But thou thyself, what feelest thou?
What dost thou create? Through thee floweth a stream of
beauty, but thou art not beauty. Woe unto thee! The child
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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