Oaks
repeated
the sound
to the oaks, and the beech to the beech.
to the oaks, and the beech to the beech.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
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? 90
POLAND
Lord. For the independence, integrity and free-
dom of our country, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. "
Mickiewicz's last and greatest poem followed
the Book of the Pilgrimage by two years; but, in
order not to interrupt the narrative that yet
remains of the rest of the poet's life, I will return
to Thaddeus later. \Poverty, domestic griefs,
sorrow for his nation, an endless yearning to behold
his native land again; such is the private history
of Adam Mickiewicz. Moments came when he
and his wife were almost starving. Yet through
all he maintained an unshaken composure of soul,
jhe confidence in Providence of one to whom the
unseen matters more than the vicissitudes of
earth. j
Before Mickiewicz moved to Lausanne, and
again after he returned to Paris to take up the
professorship of Slavonic literature at the College
de France, madness fell upon his wife.
. ^Dusjng his first year at the College, Mickie-
wicz compared each of his lectures to a hard-
fought battle. In the intervals of tending his wife
in her paroxysms of insanity he prepared the
lectures, on which his family of young children
depended for their maintenance, as best he might
out of a mind racked with suffering. Weighed
down by the tribulation of his home and the
national sorrows that had by now driven all joy
from his heart, he stood before his audience in
which sat the most brilliant men and women in
Paris, his sad face worn and wearied, but with the
fire behind it leaping forth whenever he spoke of
the nation he loved. In the summer of 1841, his
domestic troubles reached their climax, and it
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 91
x was found necessary to remove his wife to a mad-
house.
On his return from accompanying his wife to
the asylum, Mickiewicz sat alone in his desolate
home, broken with grief. A stranger from Lith-
uania entered his room. He told Adam that he""'
had words of great import, that he was endowed
with a message from God that should save both
the human race and their country, and that as a
proof of what he said he was able to cure the poet's
wife. In grievous doubt, Mickiewicz spent *he
night wrestling with his conscience as to whether.
he should accept the leading of this man, Andrew
Towianski, or no. He decided finally to go with
Towianski to the asylum. The result was that his
wife was restored to health, probably by a species
of magnetism, and that Mickiewicz became the
chief apostle of the mystic system inaugurated
by the new prophet.
The scope of this book does not permit me to
dwell upon this episode of Mickiewicz's life, or
upon the personality and teaching of the mystic
Towianski, which latter have been a fruitful sub-^
ject for controversy. I have t^ild the story more
fully in a different place. * Suffice it" to say that,
with a whole-hearted faith in Towianski's mission,
Mickiewicz sacrificed poetic genius, position,
friendship. Since the hour that he felL^n with
Towianski, the creator of the Ancestors an&Thaddeus
couldnever again enrich theliteratureof his mother-'
tongue with his splendid poetry. His lectureship
in the College de France became a pulpit for his
mysticism. His adherence to Towianism lost him
* See my Adam Miikiewia, tht National Poet of Poland.
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? 92
POLAND
this, his last remaining, self-expression and only
means of livelihood, for, part of the Towianskian
doctrines being a semi-deification of Napoleon-
ism, the French Government expelled him from
his chair. For the best years of his manhood he
gave himself up to the propagation of a neurotic
form of mysticism because he believed it would
bring salvation to Poland and the human race.
Before his death he emerged from the ordeal of
a religion that exacted of its followers a perpetual
state of ecstasy, prematurely aged, broken by
spiritual strain; but with his moral grandeur
unimpaired. None of the bitter disillusions and
disappointments that dogged his life could ever
weaken his hope in the resurrection of his nation
or his faith in the ideal. He died as he had lived,
a sacrifice for his country, his last hours spent in
her service. During the Crimean War, he went to
Constantinople to organize a Polish legion to
fight for Turkey. Filled with sadness at the failure
of this enterprise on which he had built a
patriot's dream, he was stricken down by Asiatic
cholera, and died on November 26th, 1855. A
Polish village in the outskirts of Constantinople
bears his name, and his memory still lingers in
the xapital of Turkey. His mortal remains now
lie in Cracow among the dead whom his nation
honours most.
/ '. . IV
Thaddeus (1834) is as great a national expression
as the Ancestors, albeit under a different aspect.
Artistically it is Mickiewicz's masterpiece. Where
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 93
the Ancestors is the tragedy of a nation and of
the soul suffering in that nation's suffering,
Thaddeus is an idyll of the Lithuania that Mickie-
wicz had lived in as a boy, told by the pen of
one who had loved and lost her.
The poem, said to be the finest epic of the nine-
teenth century, runs into twelve cantos. The
finished beauty and brilliance of the style, its
magnificent word-paintings of nature, were alone
enough to give it the place it holds in the history
of Poland's literature. But, apart from this, it has
always spoken directly to Polish sympathies.
There is scarcely any plot in the story. A
Lithuanian boy--the Thaddeus who gives his
name to the poem--returns to the country house
of his uncle Soplica, after completing his studies.
A sort of hereditary feud concerning the right
over a ruined castle is dragging on between this
family and another, of whom the last represen-
tative' is a sentimental young Count, a lover of
French fashions and of the pseudo romanticism
of his day. The quarrel is more nominal than
real; but a more serious question is behind it.
The father of Thaddeus, Jacek, was'in his youth
a suitor for the hand of Horeszko's daughter,
whom Mickiewicz, in memory of his own love,
calls Eva. His suit was rejected, according to the
old Polish custom, by a dish of dark soup being
handed to him at the table of the lady's father.
In a fury of revenge, he took to a wild lifef^ and
seized the moment of the Russian attack on the
Horeszko mansion during Kosciuszko's rising to
shoot the magnate dead. He then fled abroad,
fought by way of reparation in the Polish legions
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? 94 - POLAND
for Napoleon, and became a Bernardine monk.
Under the cowl and a feigned name he, through
the poem, serves as a national emissary from the
Polish legions to Lithuania. The Count, the last
remaining male scion of the Horeszko family, is
urged on by the" old retainer of the latter to fight
it out with the Soplicas. In the Lithuania of old,
where there were no police to enforce the decision
of the courts, the pleader had recourse to the
nobles, who summoned their armed friends and
the private armies that the more powerful of
them had at their disposal, and, with a legal officer
in their number, marched on the offender to exact
justice. The Count leads a like movement against
the Soplicas. While they are at blows with each
other, the Russians fall upon both with the result
that the Poles unite against their common foe.
Thaddeus and the Count go off to enrol them-
selves under the banners of the Polish legions.
They return with Napoleon's armies on that
march to Moscow, which the Poles hailed as the
herald of their country's resurrection. Every
quarrel is reconciled, and, with Thaddeus' marriage
to the granddaughter of the murdered Horeszko,
the family feud and the poem are happily ended.
Such is the outline of Thaddeus: but its power
and its charm lie in the wealth of its national
colouring, the vividness with which Mickiewicz
reproduced the types of his youth that, even
when he wrote the work, had gone for ever, the
magnificent descriptions of nature in wild and
romantic Lithuania, all set to the patriotic hope
that filled Poland in the last days of Napoleon's
glory. Men of a dead past rise again as though in
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 95
the flesh, with their picturesque, many-coloured,
semi-Oriental costume, their hospitable ways,
their hunting and shooting in the forest, their
open-air and simple, joyous country life. When
the sun goes down, work on the estate ends too;
for the master of the mansion ordains that " the
Lord of the world knows how long we must work.
When the sun, His day-labourer, departs from
the sky, it is time for the husbandman to with-
draw from the field. " So, at sunset, there is a long
procession streaming home from the forest and
meadows; servants, labourers, horses, sheep, and
oxen with bells at their necks, and the guests and
inmates of the house, walking according to pre-
cedence in the order that the master decrees. The
guest of honour, the " Chamberlain "--the Polish
manor was a miniature court with corresponding
titles--as, at each meal, he takes the place of
honour, " bowed to the ladies, the old men and
youths. " Manners have a patriarchal simplicity
strongly dashed with a quaint ceremonial and
punctilious courtesy.
The effect of Thaddeus is that of a blessed*. '
tranquillity, glorified, as the poem ends, with
the promise of the nation's deliverance. It was
written for those Poles among whom the poet's
exile was passed and whose sorrows he shared, in
order to transport their minds from the carking
cares, we might in truth say the horrors, that
surrounded them. Respite from their troubles
could but be known, says the poet--in lines dis-
covered after his death and intended as an intro-
duction to Thaddeus--in the "only land in all
the past and all the future, where the Pole can
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? 96 POLAND
find one spark of joy; the country of our childish
years. " Overwhelmed with grief for Poland and
in the fresh agony of bereavement at the death
of his dearest friend, Mickiewicz wrote a poem
that is, as Dr. Kallenbach expresses it, eternally
young. * At the thought of the tears and blood
in which his nation was drowned, he confesses he
could find no heart to sing of anything except of
things that are tender and serene.
Yet the note of mourning is not entirely absent
from Thaddeus. The yearning of the exile that
tore Mickiewicz's soul till his life ended cannot
be wholly kept under. It breaks out again and
again, mingling with the sighs of the forest and
the cries of the marsh birds which the poet might
hear no more.
"Lithuania, my country," are the first words
of his Lithuanian epic. " Thou art as health. How
to prize thee he only can tell who hath lost thee.
To-day the whole charm of thy beauty I see and
I sing, for I pine after thee.
"Holy Virgin, who dost guard bright Czens-
tochowa, f and who shinest over the Ostrian
gate," he continues in the invocation that is one
of his famous passages, and which was pronounced
over his coffin when laid in foreign soil. J " Thou
who dost defend the castled town of Nowogrodek
with her faithful people! Even as by a miracle
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewicz.
+ The famous Polish shrine of the Blessed Virgin. In these latter
days this spot, so peculiarly sacred to Polish national and religious
feeling, has been desecrated, as we know, by the presence of the
Kaiser and his Prussian hordes, who committed there outrages
that are unnamable.
X Mickiewicz's remains rested in Paris till 1890 when they were
removed to Cracow.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
thou didst restore me when a child to health,
when by my weeping mother I was offered to thy
protection, and I opened my dying eyes, and
went on foot to thy shrine to thank God for my
recovered life: even so thou wilt restore us by a
miracle to the bosom of our land! Till then,
carry my yearning soul to those wooded hills,
those green meadows stretching wide on the blue
Niemen's shores; to those fields painted with
many-hued grains, golden with wheat, silver
with rye; where grow the amber rape and buck-
wheat, white as snow, where with a maiden blush
the medick flames. "
In the heat and glare of the Paris pavements,
the son of a wild, spacious country, to whom a
noisy city was always insupportable, remembered
with longing the breath of his native forests, the
sounds of the Lithuanian evening.
"The sky seemed ever to droop and draw
nearer the earth till, both shrouded 'neath a
dark veil, like lovers they began secret talk, plead-
ing their loves with faint sighings,f with whispers
and murmurs and half-uttered words, whence
arose the enchanting music of night.
"In the field the evening concert had scarcely
begun. Now the musicians began to tune up.
Then the landrail screamed three times, the first
violin of the meads. Then afar in the marshes the
bitterns reply on the bass. Then the snipes, as
they rise and they wheel, cry again and again like
the beating of little drums.
"As the finale to the murmurs of flies and the
clamour of birds, the two ponds answer with
double choirs, like the Caucasian mountain lakes
H
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? 98
POLAND
that, enchanted, are silent by day and play in the
night. One pond, transparent of wave and sandy
of shore, gave out from its deep blue breast a low,
solemn sigh. The other pond, with its muddy
depths and its troubled voice, replied with a cry
of passion and grief. In both of the ponds sang
numberless hordes of frogs, both choirs united
in two great chords. One sang fortissimo, but the
other softly was warbling. One seemed to complain,
but the other one only to sigh. Thus, over the
fields, did the two ponds converse with each other
like two Aeolian harps alternately playing. "
(Thaddeus, Book VIII. )
Another time it is the music of the buffalo horn,
wielded by the Wojski,* that the poet describes,
ringing through glade and thicket.
"He played. The horn, as a blast of wind, on
its eddying breath carried music into the depths
of the forest, and the echoes repeated the sound.
The hunters were dumb, the prickers stood still,
amazed at the power and the pureness and the
strange harmony of those strains. He filled, he
gave life to the woods and the oaks. 'Twas as
though he let the dogs loose and started the
chase, for there rang in his playing the whole tale
of the chase. First, a ringing glad call, the reveille.
Then growls, and, after growls, whining, the cries
of the dogs. And here and there sharper notes as
of thunder--the shots.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played.
* An old title of office surviving from the independent days of
the Republic,
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
"And again he blew. You would think that the
horn changed shape, and that 'twixt the Wojski's
lips it waxed and it waned, feigning cries of the
beasts. Now, long drawn as the voice of the wolf,
it howled long and shrill. Again, it spread widely
its throat, and roared like a bear. Then the wind
gave out the urus' cry.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played.
Oaks repeated the sound
to the oaks, and the beech to the beech.
"Again he blew; and it seemed as though in
the horn a hundred other horns played. You
heard the confused, mingled noise of the chase, of
anger, of fear, of the hunters, the dogs, and the
quarry, till the Wojski lifted the horn on high,
and the hymn of triumph smote on the skies.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played. All the trees in the forest
were so many horns that carried the song to each
other, as from choirs unto choirs. And the music
travelled ever wider, ever farther, ever softer,
ever purer, ever perfect, till it died far, far, some-
where far off on the threshold of heaven. "
(Thaddeus, Book IV. )
Mickiewicz is a master of the Polish language.
The natural richness of the Polish tongue, its
peculiar delicacies of word shading, its onomato-
poeia that is one of its chief characteristics, are
handled by Mickiewicz with the skill of a musician
whose instrument obeys his every call. The sounds
of the woodland life of Lithuania, the roaring of
the tempest through the forests, the whisper of
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? IOO
POLAND
the wind over meadows and marshes, the cries of
bird and beast, fill the pages of Thaddeus with
the harmonies of a wild and romantic land.
/ "My native trees! " he says in one place,
hailing the giants of the forest whose age was as
long as time. " If Heaven grant I shall return to
gaze on you, my friends of old, shall I still find you?
Are you still living? Ye, around whom I wandered
once, a child.
"How much I owe you, oh, my native trees!
I, a poor shot, escaping from the mockery of my
friends for my missed quarry, how often, in your
stillness, I hunted dreams when, in the wild hunt-
ing grounds, I forgot the chase and sat me on a log.
And around me the earth was silver with the hoary-
bearded moss mingled with the deep blue of black
and rotten berries. And, further, flamed heathery
knolls decked with red berries, like a rosary's coral
beads. All darkness round me. Branches swung
on high like green, thick, drooping clouds. Some-
where above their tranquil arch the gale raved,
wailing, roaring, howling, crashing, thundering.
Strange deafening uproar! It seemed that over-
head was rocking a roaring sea. " (Thaddeus,
Book IV. )
While the ear is satisfied in Thaddeus, the eye
dwells on the pageantry of sunset and sunrise on
the marshes, on the storm sweeping over the wide
Lithuanian skies. As a painter of nature, exquisite
and true to detail, Mickiewicz stands unrivalled
in his native literature. There are few, says Dr.
Kallenbach, his equal in any literature. * Such is
the veracity of his descriptions that a Pole whom
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickieaicz,
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ v 101
years of exile had separated from his country-
could say: "I read Thaddeus aloud, and often
had to break off the readings, so moved was I
by that absolute transportation of body and
soul into our native Polish plains. "*
The background of these tranquil and lovely*^
Lithuanian scenes is the war that was changing
the face of Europe, for:
"The rest of the world was drowned in tears
and blood; when that man, that god of war, girt
with a cloud of regiments, armed with a thousand
cannons, having yoked to his car of triumph the
gold with the silver eagles, flew from the Libyan
plains to the sky-reaching Alps, hurling thunderbolt
after thunderbolt, in the Pyramids, in Thabor,
Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz. Before him and after
him ran victory and conquest. The glory of those
deeds, pregnant with warriors' names, went
roaring to the north, till, on the Niemen's banks,
it was flung back as from a rock, by the ranks of
Muscovy defending Lithuania with their walls
of iron from news, terrible for Russia as the
plague. " (Tbaddeus, Book I. )
Even the remote hamlets in Lithuania beat to ^
the pulse of the events that shook the world.
Thaddeus tells us--and amidst such scenes Mickie-
wicz's boyhood had been passed--how a beggar
who had lost a leg or an arm would arrive at the
manor, and whisper, looking round to see that
no Russian soldier was near, that he was a legion-
ary, come to die in his own land. Then the whole
household, masters and servants alike, would
* Correspondence of Adam MickiewicM, Paris, 1872. Letter of
Stanislas Worcell, Nov. 7th, 1838 (Polish).
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? io2 w POLAND
press about him, overcome by weeping, while he
told them the tales they were forbidden to hear
of the valour of the Polish legions, and of the
victories of Napoleon. His stories were secretly
repeated over the countryside. Then many a boy
vanished from his home, and, escaping through
the forests, swam the Niemen to the other bank
where, in the Duchy of Warsaw, he might enrol
himself under the Polish flags. Or a wandering
fri4r from a foreign convent would appear at
the country house, unrip his scapular, and show
the war gazette that he had smuggled through.
Parents then learnt for the first time after years
of absence the death or glory of the son who had
left them. The family went into mourning; it
was guessed, but could not be told, for whom; and
their obvious grief or equally obvious joy was as
the war news for the district. (Tkaddeus, Book I. )
I This undercurrent of national hopes, the echo
of Napoleon's trumpets, vibrate through Thaddeus
till the end. The year 1812 is now here. The
campaign, when Napoleon's armies were about
to march on Russia, was greeted by the Polish
nation with boundless joy, for the hour of resur-
rection seemed close at hand. That spring when
the fields were green with unwonted promise,
when the birds of passage returned early with
strange clamour to their haunts in Lithuania,
and the voice of war was heard in the land, was
Mickiewicz's greatest memory.
"Oh, year! " he sings in the eleventh canto
of Thaddeus. "To this day the people call thee
the year of harvest, and the soldier the year of
war. To this day, the aged love to tell tales of
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? ^ ADAM MICKIEWICZ 103
thee, to this day song dreams of thee. Long wast
thou heralded by heavenly marvel,* and preceded
by low rumours among the people. With the sun
of spring some strange presentiment' filled Lithu-
anian hearts as of the end of the world; some
yearning expectation full of joy.
"Oh, spring, who saw thee in our land, memor-
able spring of war, and spring of harvest! Oh,
spring! who saw thee flowering with corn and
grass, brilliant in men, fertile in deed, pregnant
with hope! Still do I see thee, fair dream of a
night! Born in captivity, fettered in my swad-
ling-bands, only one such spring have I known in
my life. " . .
Amidst this exultation and martial ardour,
Thaddeus' wedding takes place. He has returned
with the Polish legions for his marriage, on the ad-
vance to the Russian campaign. Side by side with
the gorgeous national costume flash the accoutre-
ments of the soldiers of the legions. Dombrowski,
the hero of many a battlefield, and his fellow-
generals are here. The Count, from being a
weaver of fantastic fancies, has become a soldier,
and sits in his Lancer uniform a guest under the
roof against which he had fought. Every heart is
throbbing with that patriotic rapture that, to-
gether with the glowing local colour, make the last
scenes of Thaddeus one brilliant song of rejoicing.
The banquet is carried out with all the old
national traditions. The officers compete in sword-
play. The patriotic Jew plays, as none other can,
the zimbala.
"He dropped the sticks on the strings. First
* A comet that appeared in 1811.
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? POLAND
he beat out a tune of triumph. Then, louder, he
swept on the strings like a tempest of rain. It was
only to test them, for soon he broke off, and he
lifted the sticks on high.
"He played. Now trembled the sticks as though
a fly's wing quivered over a string, giving forth a
humming scarce heard. He lifted his hands;
together they fell, and he smote with both sticks.
"All at once the tune burst forth from all
strings as though a Janissaries' band played on
the bells, on triangles, on drums; the Polonaise
of the Third of May rings out ! * The gay notes
breathe joy, make the ear drunk with joy. The
girls would fain dance, the young men spring
from their seats. . . .
"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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? io6
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
? ?
? 90
POLAND
Lord. For the independence, integrity and free-
dom of our country, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. "
Mickiewicz's last and greatest poem followed
the Book of the Pilgrimage by two years; but, in
order not to interrupt the narrative that yet
remains of the rest of the poet's life, I will return
to Thaddeus later. \Poverty, domestic griefs,
sorrow for his nation, an endless yearning to behold
his native land again; such is the private history
of Adam Mickiewicz. Moments came when he
and his wife were almost starving. Yet through
all he maintained an unshaken composure of soul,
jhe confidence in Providence of one to whom the
unseen matters more than the vicissitudes of
earth. j
Before Mickiewicz moved to Lausanne, and
again after he returned to Paris to take up the
professorship of Slavonic literature at the College
de France, madness fell upon his wife.
. ^Dusjng his first year at the College, Mickie-
wicz compared each of his lectures to a hard-
fought battle. In the intervals of tending his wife
in her paroxysms of insanity he prepared the
lectures, on which his family of young children
depended for their maintenance, as best he might
out of a mind racked with suffering. Weighed
down by the tribulation of his home and the
national sorrows that had by now driven all joy
from his heart, he stood before his audience in
which sat the most brilliant men and women in
Paris, his sad face worn and wearied, but with the
fire behind it leaping forth whenever he spoke of
the nation he loved. In the summer of 1841, his
domestic troubles reached their climax, and it
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 91
x was found necessary to remove his wife to a mad-
house.
On his return from accompanying his wife to
the asylum, Mickiewicz sat alone in his desolate
home, broken with grief. A stranger from Lith-
uania entered his room. He told Adam that he""'
had words of great import, that he was endowed
with a message from God that should save both
the human race and their country, and that as a
proof of what he said he was able to cure the poet's
wife. In grievous doubt, Mickiewicz spent *he
night wrestling with his conscience as to whether.
he should accept the leading of this man, Andrew
Towianski, or no. He decided finally to go with
Towianski to the asylum. The result was that his
wife was restored to health, probably by a species
of magnetism, and that Mickiewicz became the
chief apostle of the mystic system inaugurated
by the new prophet.
The scope of this book does not permit me to
dwell upon this episode of Mickiewicz's life, or
upon the personality and teaching of the mystic
Towianski, which latter have been a fruitful sub-^
ject for controversy. I have t^ild the story more
fully in a different place. * Suffice it" to say that,
with a whole-hearted faith in Towianski's mission,
Mickiewicz sacrificed poetic genius, position,
friendship. Since the hour that he felL^n with
Towianski, the creator of the Ancestors an&Thaddeus
couldnever again enrich theliteratureof his mother-'
tongue with his splendid poetry. His lectureship
in the College de France became a pulpit for his
mysticism. His adherence to Towianism lost him
* See my Adam Miikiewia, tht National Poet of Poland.
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? 92
POLAND
this, his last remaining, self-expression and only
means of livelihood, for, part of the Towianskian
doctrines being a semi-deification of Napoleon-
ism, the French Government expelled him from
his chair. For the best years of his manhood he
gave himself up to the propagation of a neurotic
form of mysticism because he believed it would
bring salvation to Poland and the human race.
Before his death he emerged from the ordeal of
a religion that exacted of its followers a perpetual
state of ecstasy, prematurely aged, broken by
spiritual strain; but with his moral grandeur
unimpaired. None of the bitter disillusions and
disappointments that dogged his life could ever
weaken his hope in the resurrection of his nation
or his faith in the ideal. He died as he had lived,
a sacrifice for his country, his last hours spent in
her service. During the Crimean War, he went to
Constantinople to organize a Polish legion to
fight for Turkey. Filled with sadness at the failure
of this enterprise on which he had built a
patriot's dream, he was stricken down by Asiatic
cholera, and died on November 26th, 1855. A
Polish village in the outskirts of Constantinople
bears his name, and his memory still lingers in
the xapital of Turkey. His mortal remains now
lie in Cracow among the dead whom his nation
honours most.
/ '. . IV
Thaddeus (1834) is as great a national expression
as the Ancestors, albeit under a different aspect.
Artistically it is Mickiewicz's masterpiece. Where
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 93
the Ancestors is the tragedy of a nation and of
the soul suffering in that nation's suffering,
Thaddeus is an idyll of the Lithuania that Mickie-
wicz had lived in as a boy, told by the pen of
one who had loved and lost her.
The poem, said to be the finest epic of the nine-
teenth century, runs into twelve cantos. The
finished beauty and brilliance of the style, its
magnificent word-paintings of nature, were alone
enough to give it the place it holds in the history
of Poland's literature. But, apart from this, it has
always spoken directly to Polish sympathies.
There is scarcely any plot in the story. A
Lithuanian boy--the Thaddeus who gives his
name to the poem--returns to the country house
of his uncle Soplica, after completing his studies.
A sort of hereditary feud concerning the right
over a ruined castle is dragging on between this
family and another, of whom the last represen-
tative' is a sentimental young Count, a lover of
French fashions and of the pseudo romanticism
of his day. The quarrel is more nominal than
real; but a more serious question is behind it.
The father of Thaddeus, Jacek, was'in his youth
a suitor for the hand of Horeszko's daughter,
whom Mickiewicz, in memory of his own love,
calls Eva. His suit was rejected, according to the
old Polish custom, by a dish of dark soup being
handed to him at the table of the lady's father.
In a fury of revenge, he took to a wild lifef^ and
seized the moment of the Russian attack on the
Horeszko mansion during Kosciuszko's rising to
shoot the magnate dead. He then fled abroad,
fought by way of reparation in the Polish legions
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? 94 - POLAND
for Napoleon, and became a Bernardine monk.
Under the cowl and a feigned name he, through
the poem, serves as a national emissary from the
Polish legions to Lithuania. The Count, the last
remaining male scion of the Horeszko family, is
urged on by the" old retainer of the latter to fight
it out with the Soplicas. In the Lithuania of old,
where there were no police to enforce the decision
of the courts, the pleader had recourse to the
nobles, who summoned their armed friends and
the private armies that the more powerful of
them had at their disposal, and, with a legal officer
in their number, marched on the offender to exact
justice. The Count leads a like movement against
the Soplicas. While they are at blows with each
other, the Russians fall upon both with the result
that the Poles unite against their common foe.
Thaddeus and the Count go off to enrol them-
selves under the banners of the Polish legions.
They return with Napoleon's armies on that
march to Moscow, which the Poles hailed as the
herald of their country's resurrection. Every
quarrel is reconciled, and, with Thaddeus' marriage
to the granddaughter of the murdered Horeszko,
the family feud and the poem are happily ended.
Such is the outline of Thaddeus: but its power
and its charm lie in the wealth of its national
colouring, the vividness with which Mickiewicz
reproduced the types of his youth that, even
when he wrote the work, had gone for ever, the
magnificent descriptions of nature in wild and
romantic Lithuania, all set to the patriotic hope
that filled Poland in the last days of Napoleon's
glory. Men of a dead past rise again as though in
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 95
the flesh, with their picturesque, many-coloured,
semi-Oriental costume, their hospitable ways,
their hunting and shooting in the forest, their
open-air and simple, joyous country life. When
the sun goes down, work on the estate ends too;
for the master of the mansion ordains that " the
Lord of the world knows how long we must work.
When the sun, His day-labourer, departs from
the sky, it is time for the husbandman to with-
draw from the field. " So, at sunset, there is a long
procession streaming home from the forest and
meadows; servants, labourers, horses, sheep, and
oxen with bells at their necks, and the guests and
inmates of the house, walking according to pre-
cedence in the order that the master decrees. The
guest of honour, the " Chamberlain "--the Polish
manor was a miniature court with corresponding
titles--as, at each meal, he takes the place of
honour, " bowed to the ladies, the old men and
youths. " Manners have a patriarchal simplicity
strongly dashed with a quaint ceremonial and
punctilious courtesy.
The effect of Thaddeus is that of a blessed*. '
tranquillity, glorified, as the poem ends, with
the promise of the nation's deliverance. It was
written for those Poles among whom the poet's
exile was passed and whose sorrows he shared, in
order to transport their minds from the carking
cares, we might in truth say the horrors, that
surrounded them. Respite from their troubles
could but be known, says the poet--in lines dis-
covered after his death and intended as an intro-
duction to Thaddeus--in the "only land in all
the past and all the future, where the Pole can
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? 96 POLAND
find one spark of joy; the country of our childish
years. " Overwhelmed with grief for Poland and
in the fresh agony of bereavement at the death
of his dearest friend, Mickiewicz wrote a poem
that is, as Dr. Kallenbach expresses it, eternally
young. * At the thought of the tears and blood
in which his nation was drowned, he confesses he
could find no heart to sing of anything except of
things that are tender and serene.
Yet the note of mourning is not entirely absent
from Thaddeus. The yearning of the exile that
tore Mickiewicz's soul till his life ended cannot
be wholly kept under. It breaks out again and
again, mingling with the sighs of the forest and
the cries of the marsh birds which the poet might
hear no more.
"Lithuania, my country," are the first words
of his Lithuanian epic. " Thou art as health. How
to prize thee he only can tell who hath lost thee.
To-day the whole charm of thy beauty I see and
I sing, for I pine after thee.
"Holy Virgin, who dost guard bright Czens-
tochowa, f and who shinest over the Ostrian
gate," he continues in the invocation that is one
of his famous passages, and which was pronounced
over his coffin when laid in foreign soil. J " Thou
who dost defend the castled town of Nowogrodek
with her faithful people! Even as by a miracle
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewicz.
+ The famous Polish shrine of the Blessed Virgin. In these latter
days this spot, so peculiarly sacred to Polish national and religious
feeling, has been desecrated, as we know, by the presence of the
Kaiser and his Prussian hordes, who committed there outrages
that are unnamable.
X Mickiewicz's remains rested in Paris till 1890 when they were
removed to Cracow.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
thou didst restore me when a child to health,
when by my weeping mother I was offered to thy
protection, and I opened my dying eyes, and
went on foot to thy shrine to thank God for my
recovered life: even so thou wilt restore us by a
miracle to the bosom of our land! Till then,
carry my yearning soul to those wooded hills,
those green meadows stretching wide on the blue
Niemen's shores; to those fields painted with
many-hued grains, golden with wheat, silver
with rye; where grow the amber rape and buck-
wheat, white as snow, where with a maiden blush
the medick flames. "
In the heat and glare of the Paris pavements,
the son of a wild, spacious country, to whom a
noisy city was always insupportable, remembered
with longing the breath of his native forests, the
sounds of the Lithuanian evening.
"The sky seemed ever to droop and draw
nearer the earth till, both shrouded 'neath a
dark veil, like lovers they began secret talk, plead-
ing their loves with faint sighings,f with whispers
and murmurs and half-uttered words, whence
arose the enchanting music of night.
"In the field the evening concert had scarcely
begun. Now the musicians began to tune up.
Then the landrail screamed three times, the first
violin of the meads. Then afar in the marshes the
bitterns reply on the bass. Then the snipes, as
they rise and they wheel, cry again and again like
the beating of little drums.
"As the finale to the murmurs of flies and the
clamour of birds, the two ponds answer with
double choirs, like the Caucasian mountain lakes
H
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? 98
POLAND
that, enchanted, are silent by day and play in the
night. One pond, transparent of wave and sandy
of shore, gave out from its deep blue breast a low,
solemn sigh. The other pond, with its muddy
depths and its troubled voice, replied with a cry
of passion and grief. In both of the ponds sang
numberless hordes of frogs, both choirs united
in two great chords. One sang fortissimo, but the
other softly was warbling. One seemed to complain,
but the other one only to sigh. Thus, over the
fields, did the two ponds converse with each other
like two Aeolian harps alternately playing. "
(Thaddeus, Book VIII. )
Another time it is the music of the buffalo horn,
wielded by the Wojski,* that the poet describes,
ringing through glade and thicket.
"He played. The horn, as a blast of wind, on
its eddying breath carried music into the depths
of the forest, and the echoes repeated the sound.
The hunters were dumb, the prickers stood still,
amazed at the power and the pureness and the
strange harmony of those strains. He filled, he
gave life to the woods and the oaks. 'Twas as
though he let the dogs loose and started the
chase, for there rang in his playing the whole tale
of the chase. First, a ringing glad call, the reveille.
Then growls, and, after growls, whining, the cries
of the dogs. And here and there sharper notes as
of thunder--the shots.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played.
* An old title of office surviving from the independent days of
the Republic,
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
"And again he blew. You would think that the
horn changed shape, and that 'twixt the Wojski's
lips it waxed and it waned, feigning cries of the
beasts. Now, long drawn as the voice of the wolf,
it howled long and shrill. Again, it spread widely
its throat, and roared like a bear. Then the wind
gave out the urus' cry.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played.
Oaks repeated the sound
to the oaks, and the beech to the beech.
"Again he blew; and it seemed as though in
the horn a hundred other horns played. You
heard the confused, mingled noise of the chase, of
anger, of fear, of the hunters, the dogs, and the
quarry, till the Wojski lifted the horn on high,
and the hymn of triumph smote on the skies.
"Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All
thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it
was the echo that played. All the trees in the forest
were so many horns that carried the song to each
other, as from choirs unto choirs. And the music
travelled ever wider, ever farther, ever softer,
ever purer, ever perfect, till it died far, far, some-
where far off on the threshold of heaven. "
(Thaddeus, Book IV. )
Mickiewicz is a master of the Polish language.
The natural richness of the Polish tongue, its
peculiar delicacies of word shading, its onomato-
poeia that is one of its chief characteristics, are
handled by Mickiewicz with the skill of a musician
whose instrument obeys his every call. The sounds
of the woodland life of Lithuania, the roaring of
the tempest through the forests, the whisper of
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? IOO
POLAND
the wind over meadows and marshes, the cries of
bird and beast, fill the pages of Thaddeus with
the harmonies of a wild and romantic land.
/ "My native trees! " he says in one place,
hailing the giants of the forest whose age was as
long as time. " If Heaven grant I shall return to
gaze on you, my friends of old, shall I still find you?
Are you still living? Ye, around whom I wandered
once, a child.
"How much I owe you, oh, my native trees!
I, a poor shot, escaping from the mockery of my
friends for my missed quarry, how often, in your
stillness, I hunted dreams when, in the wild hunt-
ing grounds, I forgot the chase and sat me on a log.
And around me the earth was silver with the hoary-
bearded moss mingled with the deep blue of black
and rotten berries. And, further, flamed heathery
knolls decked with red berries, like a rosary's coral
beads. All darkness round me. Branches swung
on high like green, thick, drooping clouds. Some-
where above their tranquil arch the gale raved,
wailing, roaring, howling, crashing, thundering.
Strange deafening uproar! It seemed that over-
head was rocking a roaring sea. " (Thaddeus,
Book IV. )
While the ear is satisfied in Thaddeus, the eye
dwells on the pageantry of sunset and sunrise on
the marshes, on the storm sweeping over the wide
Lithuanian skies. As a painter of nature, exquisite
and true to detail, Mickiewicz stands unrivalled
in his native literature. There are few, says Dr.
Kallenbach, his equal in any literature. * Such is
the veracity of his descriptions that a Pole whom
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickieaicz,
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ v 101
years of exile had separated from his country-
could say: "I read Thaddeus aloud, and often
had to break off the readings, so moved was I
by that absolute transportation of body and
soul into our native Polish plains. "*
The background of these tranquil and lovely*^
Lithuanian scenes is the war that was changing
the face of Europe, for:
"The rest of the world was drowned in tears
and blood; when that man, that god of war, girt
with a cloud of regiments, armed with a thousand
cannons, having yoked to his car of triumph the
gold with the silver eagles, flew from the Libyan
plains to the sky-reaching Alps, hurling thunderbolt
after thunderbolt, in the Pyramids, in Thabor,
Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz. Before him and after
him ran victory and conquest. The glory of those
deeds, pregnant with warriors' names, went
roaring to the north, till, on the Niemen's banks,
it was flung back as from a rock, by the ranks of
Muscovy defending Lithuania with their walls
of iron from news, terrible for Russia as the
plague. " (Tbaddeus, Book I. )
Even the remote hamlets in Lithuania beat to ^
the pulse of the events that shook the world.
Thaddeus tells us--and amidst such scenes Mickie-
wicz's boyhood had been passed--how a beggar
who had lost a leg or an arm would arrive at the
manor, and whisper, looking round to see that
no Russian soldier was near, that he was a legion-
ary, come to die in his own land. Then the whole
household, masters and servants alike, would
* Correspondence of Adam MickiewicM, Paris, 1872. Letter of
Stanislas Worcell, Nov. 7th, 1838 (Polish).
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? io2 w POLAND
press about him, overcome by weeping, while he
told them the tales they were forbidden to hear
of the valour of the Polish legions, and of the
victories of Napoleon. His stories were secretly
repeated over the countryside. Then many a boy
vanished from his home, and, escaping through
the forests, swam the Niemen to the other bank
where, in the Duchy of Warsaw, he might enrol
himself under the Polish flags. Or a wandering
fri4r from a foreign convent would appear at
the country house, unrip his scapular, and show
the war gazette that he had smuggled through.
Parents then learnt for the first time after years
of absence the death or glory of the son who had
left them. The family went into mourning; it
was guessed, but could not be told, for whom; and
their obvious grief or equally obvious joy was as
the war news for the district. (Tkaddeus, Book I. )
I This undercurrent of national hopes, the echo
of Napoleon's trumpets, vibrate through Thaddeus
till the end. The year 1812 is now here. The
campaign, when Napoleon's armies were about
to march on Russia, was greeted by the Polish
nation with boundless joy, for the hour of resur-
rection seemed close at hand. That spring when
the fields were green with unwonted promise,
when the birds of passage returned early with
strange clamour to their haunts in Lithuania,
and the voice of war was heard in the land, was
Mickiewicz's greatest memory.
"Oh, year! " he sings in the eleventh canto
of Thaddeus. "To this day the people call thee
the year of harvest, and the soldier the year of
war. To this day, the aged love to tell tales of
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? ^ ADAM MICKIEWICZ 103
thee, to this day song dreams of thee. Long wast
thou heralded by heavenly marvel,* and preceded
by low rumours among the people. With the sun
of spring some strange presentiment' filled Lithu-
anian hearts as of the end of the world; some
yearning expectation full of joy.
"Oh, spring, who saw thee in our land, memor-
able spring of war, and spring of harvest! Oh,
spring! who saw thee flowering with corn and
grass, brilliant in men, fertile in deed, pregnant
with hope! Still do I see thee, fair dream of a
night! Born in captivity, fettered in my swad-
ling-bands, only one such spring have I known in
my life. " . .
Amidst this exultation and martial ardour,
Thaddeus' wedding takes place. He has returned
with the Polish legions for his marriage, on the ad-
vance to the Russian campaign. Side by side with
the gorgeous national costume flash the accoutre-
ments of the soldiers of the legions. Dombrowski,
the hero of many a battlefield, and his fellow-
generals are here. The Count, from being a
weaver of fantastic fancies, has become a soldier,
and sits in his Lancer uniform a guest under the
roof against which he had fought. Every heart is
throbbing with that patriotic rapture that, to-
gether with the glowing local colour, make the last
scenes of Thaddeus one brilliant song of rejoicing.
The banquet is carried out with all the old
national traditions. The officers compete in sword-
play. The patriotic Jew plays, as none other can,
the zimbala.
"He dropped the sticks on the strings. First
* A comet that appeared in 1811.
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? POLAND
he beat out a tune of triumph. Then, louder, he
swept on the strings like a tempest of rain. It was
only to test them, for soon he broke off, and he
lifted the sticks on high.
"He played. Now trembled the sticks as though
a fly's wing quivered over a string, giving forth a
humming scarce heard. He lifted his hands;
together they fell, and he smote with both sticks.
"All at once the tune burst forth from all
strings as though a Janissaries' band played on
the bells, on triangles, on drums; the Polonaise
of the Third of May rings out ! * The gay notes
breathe joy, make the ear drunk with joy. The
girls would fain dance, the young men spring
from their seats. . . .
"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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? io6
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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