No More Learning

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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? 96 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that weeps on its nurse's bosom, the flower of the fields that
is unconscious of its own fragrance, have more merit before the
Lord than thou.
Whence hast thou arisen, empty shadow, that givest to man
to know the light, and knowest not the light thyself, hast not
seen it, shalt not see it? Who created thee in irony or wrath?
Who gave thee thy futile life, so false that thou canst feign an
angel's moment, ere thou wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent
thou goest to crawl and stifle in the slime? Thine and the
woman's is the same beginning1.
Yea, but thou dost suffer, albeit thy pain shall create
nought, shall avail nought. . . Thy despair and thy sighs sink to
the earth, and Satan gathers them and, rejoicing, adds them
to his lies and deceptions--and the Lord will one day deny
them, as they denied the Lord.
Not that I complain of thee, poetry, mother of beauty and
salvation. Only he is unhappy who, in worlds in womb, in
worlds that are to die, must remember or foresee thee: for
thou only destroyest those who have consecrated themselves
to thee, who have become the living voices of thy glory.
Blessed is he in whom thou hast dwelt, as God dwelt in
the world, unseen, unheard, mighty in each member, great, the
Lord, before whom creation humbles itself, and saith: "He is
here. " Such a one shall carry thee as a star on his brow, and
will not depart from thy love with a chaos of words. He will
love mankind, and come forth as a man among his brethren.
But he who keepeth thee not secretly in his heart, who be-
trayeth thee before the time and giveth thee forth as an empty
delight to men, upon his head thou shalt scatter a few flowers
and turn away, and he amuseth himself with withered flowers
? and weaveth a funeral wreath for himself through all his life.
His and the woman's is the same beginning.
If poetry, for art's sake, had once tempted Krasinski,
as, from his boyish letters to Reeve, we know that it
had done, it did so no more. He was himself a poet:
and he saw the danger, the false outlook on life and its
1 The meaning is that woman, a being of the earth, rises high only
to sink low. J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Lw<5w, 1912 (Polish). The aspersion Krasinski here casts upon women is
very unlike him, for his ideal of woman was a singularly high and spiritual
one. It illustrates again the pessimistic condition in which The Undivine
Comedy was written.
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? The Undivine Comedy 97
ruinous consequences, engendered by poetry taken as
the worship of form and the dramatization of emotion
and passion, without the soul's stern realities behind
them. "For him," to quote Mickiewicz, "poetry is not
an art, not an amusement. " It is:
a serious inspiration. . . True poetry, among the Greeks them-
selves, 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, should
reserve all their strength to act instead of speaking. . . He has
painted here the picture of poetical power, the power of a soul
which flings itself entirely into its imagination. . . and which
believes it possesses all things, but is lost because it uses this
gift of heaven for its own pleasure1.
This brings us straight to the conception of Henryk
and the first part of The Undivine Comedy.
Henryk is a poet who, setting out with some noble
aspirations, has consumed his life in poetic dreams and
worship of the imagination. He has toyed with his
emotions so long as a thing of art that, by the time the
drama opens, his heart is little more than a worn-out
husk. Genuine passion is dead: he poses, unaware that
he is posing. Believing he has at last found the woman
of his fancies, he decides to "descend to earthly mar-
riage. " On the eve of his wedding, an angel flying over
his house with the message, "Peace to men of good
will," utters the warning: "Blessed be he among crea-
tures who has a heart. He may still be saved," and pro-
mises Henryk salvation in his fulfilment of a husband's
and father's duties. At the same moment a chorus of evil
spirits make ready to capture the soul that will be an
easy prey, under the guises of poetic love, ambition,
and nature. The third of these Krasinski never worked
out.
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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