No More Learning

In 1824 he left the country which he never
saw again, for which he pined with a homesick-
ness that thirty years of poverty and sorrow could
not quench. For the following five years he lived
in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa. His life was
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more or less that of a prisoner at large, watched
by Russian spies, dependent on the pleasure of
the police. Wherever he went, he gained the hearts
of all who knew him. Much as he detested the
system of the Russian autocracy, his soul was too
great and his nature too sweet to harbour any
rancour against a Russian as such. He was bound
by ties of intimate friendship with many a Russian,
and especially with the Liberals and poets. In
future years, from the land of his freedom he sent
them words of mournful remembrance, a farewell
to those who had perished for their ideals, an
impassioned rebuke to others who had abandoned
them {To my Russian Friends).
The galling conditions of his life in Russia
could not stifle his poetic genius, fretted though
it was by its bondage. The Crimean Sonnets, Farys,
which is a wild, glad cry of the desert, Konrad
Wallenrod, which latter placed Mickiewicz among
the great poets of Europe, were all written at this
time. . .
The Crimean Sonnets have for their motive a
journey that the poet took with the Government's
permission in the Crimea. Grief for a lost country
throws the shadow of sorrow even over these
delicate and exquisite vignettes of a southern,
semi-Oriental landscape, painted with the in-
timate knowledge and love of nature that is such
a charming feature in Mickiewicz's poetry. He is
in the steppes:
"Already the night falls fast. There is nowhere
a road or a knoll. I look to the skies and seek for a
guiding star. There, far off, glitters a cloud, there
rises the star of dawn. There the Dniester glitters.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 51
There the lights of Akerman shine. Halt! Ah,
how still! I hear the flight of the cranes which
even the eyes of the hawk reach not. I hear where
the butterfly rocks in the grass; where the snake,
with its slippery breast, lightly brushes a plant. "
And through that silence it is for a voice from
Lithuania that he strains his ear (The Steppes of
Akerman). Among the nightingales, his heart
turns to his native forests and marshes (The
Pilgrim). He stands by the grave of a Polish lady,
dead in Tartar slavery, and the stars that shine
above it point the road to Poland, whither she
gazed, as he gazes, in fruitless yearning. (Potocka's
Grave).
But the epic Konrad Wallenrod ranks above all
else that Mickiewicz wrote in Russia, not only as
a literary achievement, but still more by reason of
its moral significance that gave to Polish psycho-
logy the new word of Wallenrodism. Mickiewicz
published this poem into which he put an exile's
sorrow, the dumb rage of a Samson, in 1828. What
he could not say openly where discovery stood
for Siberia, he said under a tale of the struggle
between Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights.
The poem has thejtrong romantic flavour that
with Byron and Scott had come into vogue in
Mickiewicz's youth. Minstrels, monks, ladies in
towers, are the dramatis personae. Konrad Wallen-
rod is one of the military monks. No one knows
his origin. He has but one confidant in the monk,
Halban. No smile is ever seen on his lips. Some
gloomy mystery envelops him. His prowess in
battle and in the lists raise him to the Grand
Mastership; but instead of carrying war into
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Lithuania he remains passive, allowing the Lith-
uanians to wreak their will upon the territories
of the Order. A feast is held by the Knights; A
minstrel enters--in reality, Halban, disguised.
He sings of a Lithuanian boy whom the
Knights took captive and brought up in their
fortress; who, escaping to his natal country, gave
up for her sake all that he loved, to return and work
revenge upon her enemies by stealth. This is, of
course, Konrad's own history, and the mystery is
explained. He has schemed to gain the Grand
Mastership for patriotic ends, and will use it to
serve Lithuania.
The song of the minstrel has a peculiar pathos.
We realize that it is Mickiewicz's lament for his
exile and for many a Polish boy who would never
more see his home.
The Lithuanian child--Konrad--is carried off
from his father's house by the Knights. He thus
tells his story when in his manhood he has regained
his freedom.
"I know not my race or my name, for, as a
child, I was taken by the Germans into slavery.
Once in the night a loud clamour woke us from
slumber. A dawn of fire flashed in the windows.
The window-panes crashed, clouds of smoke burst
through the building. We ran to the gate. Flames
wreathed through the streets, sparks scattered
like hail. A terrible cry rang out: 'To arms! The
Germans are in the town. To arms! ' My father
rushed out with a weapon, rushed out and returned
no more. The Germans fell on my home. One
carried me off. He tore me away on his horse. I
know not what happened next. Only I long, long
?
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 53
heard the shriek of my mother. In the midst of
the clashing of arms, the crash of the houses that
fell, that shriek followed me long, that shriek
rang in my ears. Even now when I see a fire, even
now when I hear a cry, that shriek still wakes in
my sotd. This is all that from Lithuania, that
from my parents, I carried away. Sometimes I
see in my dreams when I sleep the dear forms of
my mother, my father, my brothers; but ever
further away, a mist ever darker, ever denser, has
hidden their features. The years of my childhood
passed on. As a German I lived among Germans.
The name they gave me was German. My Lith-'
uanian soul remained. My grief for my family, ,
my hatred for the aliens, remained.
"Among the Germans there was a Lithuanian
minstrel, taken prisoner years ago. When he knew
that I was an orphan and Lithuanian, he often
lured me to his side. He spoke of Lithuania. He
comforted my yearning soul with the caress and
the music of my native speech and of song. Often
he led me to the banks of the gray Niemen, whence
I loved to gaze towards the dear hills of my fathers.
When we returned to the castle, the old man
dried my tears not to awaken suspicion. He dried
my tears, and inflamed my vengeance against the
Germans. Later, in the years of my youth, I often
went with the old man in a boat down to the
Lithuanian banks. I plucked my native flowers,
and their enchanting scent breathed to my soul
some old and dim remembrance. I was a child
once more, playing with little brothers in the
garden of my parents. "
The minstrel teaches him the love of his native
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land and a thirst for revenge on those who have
wasted it with fire and sword:
"Thou art a slave, and the only weapon of the
slave is treachery. Stay still and learn the art of
warfare from the Germans. Strive to win their
trust to thee. "
He does so, and in the next foray escapes to
Lithuania. Trained by his enemies, he returns in
the course of time to live among them as a traitor,
employing against them the arms they have them-
selves put into his hand.
All this is told at the banquet, where the Knights
suppose that they are listening to some romance,
and only Konrad knows that it is intended as a
spur to rouse him to the action from which his
conscience shrinks. He completes the unfinished
history. He calls the Knights to arms, and leads
them into Lithuania. The inhabitants of the
Order's citadel see from the walls the fires of the
burning villages glowing on the horizon. The
Knights move ever further into the forest fast-
nesses of the enemy. Winter comes on, and still
the watchers wait in vain for the return of the
army. It never returns. A band of stragglers find
their way back, bringing as a prisoner the Grand
Master who has betrayed them to the Lithuanians.
The sentence of death is pronounced upon him.
He refuses to die at the hands of his nation's
to the last in the revenge that he has taken for
the sake of Lithuania.
"Gaze," is his dying cry, "on the thousands
who have perished, on towns in ruins, on homes
in flames. Hear ye the hurricane ? It drives before
and drinks
of poison, exulting
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
55
it clouds of snow. The remnants of your ranks
freeze there. Hear ye? The troops of hungry-
dogs howl there. They quarrel for the morsels
of the feast. This is my doing, and I glory in it.
As Samson, with one shaking of a pillar, the whole
building I destroy, and perish in the fall. "
"I will live," says Halban at his side, " to keep
the glory of thy deed before the world, to proclaim
it to the ages. I will travel through the hamlets,
the castles and the towns of Lithuania; and
whither I cannot hasten my song will fly. It shall
be as a bard to the knights in battle, and the
mother shall sing it for her children in the home.
She will sing--and some day in the future from
this song shall rise the avenger of our bones. "
Such was the cry of Mickiewicz's captive soul
that, by a feat of strange daring, he uttered under
the eyes of the Russian police. It seems well nigh
incredible that it passed the censor; but it was
only after it had been published a year that the
authorities saw through the allegory. Then a
devoted Russian friend hurried Mickiewicz on a
ship bound to Germany. A few hours later, and
the poet would have been on his way to Siberia.
The term Wallenrodism stands in the Polish
language for duplicity of life, the self-defence by
cunning and treachery that is enforced by oppres-
sion. Yet it is impossible to believe that Mickiewicz
advocated a system of national Machiavellism
that has never, be it said to her honour, found any
favour in the eyes of Poland, or ever formed part
is irreconcilable with the high moral tendency of
Mickiewicz's work for his fellow-Poles, with that
of her programme or methods. Such
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POLAND
of his private life, and with his conception of the
sacred function of a poet. He was the first to realize
that the course of a Konrad Wallenrod would
bring moral death upon the nation that adopted
it. That Mickiewicz's countrymen, those for
whom he wrote it, whose temper he understood
and who understood his as no other can, did not
look upon Konrad Wallenrod as a summons to base
conduct we know. On the contrary, it is a fact that
they were inspired to a noble patriotic devotion
by a poem, in which the note of Byrojiism is sunk
in a tenderness and passion of love for a lost and
unhappy country, that lifts it into the dignity
and pathos of a human revelation.
Mickiewicz wrote the epic under the unbearable
circumstance of his life in Russia, more as a relief
to his own pain than with any definite purpose. *
It was written, moreover, as an illustration of
the intolerable dilemma forced upon his com-
patriots. An oppressed nation may be goaded to
turn upon a persecutor, not in the open warfare
which is forbidden her, but with the underground
craft of the fox. Mickiewicz, therefore, sent out
in Konrad Wallenrod a warning to the conqueror,
no less than a cry for sympathy to the Russian
people. f Konrad recoils at the thought of the deed
he is called upon to perpetrate. His conscience
wars against his outraged patriotism. This--its
bearing upon the terrible position of the Polish
nation--is the tragedy of Konrad Wallenrod.
It was in 1829 that Mickiewicz escaped from
Russia. Henceforth he could give his inspiration'
* M. Zdziechowski, Myron and His Age. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
+ Ibid.
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? ADAM MICK1EWICZ 57
its free and full expression. From 1829 till
1832 he wandered between Germany and Italy.
Wherever he went he was followed by the love
and admiration--the worship almost--of those
who came across him. He appears to have possessed
some extraordinary fascination, a power all his
own of winning hearts. To his great genius he
united a captivating simplicity, a single-hearted
straightness and idealism of aim, a large generosity
in dealing with his fellow men.
Splendid as were
his mental gifts, mere intellect had no attraction
in his eyes. The fire of the soul, spiritual insight,
the appeal of the heart, were to him the factors
of life that counted.
Mickiewicz was wintering in Rome when, on
the night of November 29th, 1830, the Polish
Rising broke out. It is said that from the hour
the news reached him he never again knew what
it is to feel lightness of heart. Unlike the majority
of his compatriots, who hailed the war as Poland's
certain liberation, Mickiewicz foresaw the worst.
On the eve of the insurrection, racked by pre-
science of what must and did come, he poured
out his grief in his famous poem To the Polish
Mother.
"Oh, Polish mother! when from thy son's
eyes the light of genius shines; when from his
childish brow the noble pride of the Poles of old
looks forth:
"When, spurning his little band of playmates,
he runs to the aged man who will sing to him his
nation's songs; when with bowed head he listens
to the history of his sires:
"Oh, Polish mother, ill are these pastimes for
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POLAND
thy son. Kneel thou before the image of the
Mother of Dolours, and gaze upon the sword
that has transfixed her bleeding heart. With a
like blow the foe shall pierce thy bosom.
"Because, though all the world shall bloom in
peace; though nations, rulers, minds shall be
at one; thy son is called to battle without glory,
to martyrdom without a resurrection.
"Then bid him early choose for his musing
place a lonely den, where he shall breathe the wet
and rotten air, and share his couch with noxious
reptiles.
"There shall he learn to hide with anger under-
ground, to make his mind impenetrable as a deep
abyss, slowly to poison speech as a putrid exhal-
ation, to bear his cringing form even as a slimy
snake.
"Our Saviour, when a child in Nazareth,
fondled a little cross on which He saved the
world. * Oh, Polish mother! I would fain amuse
thy child with his future playthings.
"So must thou early wreathe his little hands
with chains, bid him be harnessed to the convict's
barrow, so that he shall not pale before the
executioner's hatchet or redden to behold the
hangman's cord.
"For he shall not go as the knights of old to
plant in Jerusalem the victorious cross, nor as the
soldiers of a new world to till the field for freedom
and water the earth with his life's blood.
"His future challenge will be that of an
* The presentment in Italian art of the Blessed Virgin handing
a toy cross to the Divine child, of which Mickiewicz saw many
examples in a journey he took on the Italian coast shortly before
the outbreak of the Rising-, was in part the motive of this poem.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 59
unknown spy. A perjured government will wage
war with him. A secret dungeon will be his
battlefield, and a strong enemy shall pronounce
his doom.
"And to the vanquished shall remain the dry
wood of the gallows for his tombstone, for all his
glory the short weeping of a woman, and the long
night talks of his compatriots. "
Thus did Mickiewicz mourn for his nation.
His sorrow gathers volume till it finds its culmin-
ating point in the unfinished Ancestors. He wrote
it--or rather, he wrote the Third Part--in Dresden,
in 1832. With its strange, ghostly atmosphere of
the Lithuanian feast of the dead that gives its
name to the play, its memories of the comrades
of his youth in the Russian prison, its outburst of
a Pole's despair, it stands among the greatest
creations of national literature.
II
Mickiewicz had written the first, second, and
fourth parts of the Ancestors when a schoolmaster
at Kowno. Steeped in the romantic traditions of
Lithuania, he chose the Lithuanian ghost feast
of which he had heard from his peasant nurse,
and which still lingered here and there in the
countryside during his childhood, as the back-
ground, first, for the poetical version of his dis-
appointment in love, later, for that of his imprison-
ment. Hailing from the days of antiquity, the
ceremony of the Ancestors was held on All Souls'
night in some lonely dwelling adjacent to a
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cemetery, and in secret to avoid the censure of
the priests. Behind barred doors at midnight
food was spread for the spirits whom the incanta-
tions of the wizard summoned. These rites were
characterized by a curious mingling of paganism
and the Catholic doctrine on Purgatory.
We are in a chapel on All Souls' night. The
doors and windows are fastened and shrouded.
The peasants are gathered round the wizard,
craving for a sight of their dead.
The wizard cries:
"Souls from Purgatory! Wherever in the
world ye be! Ye who burn in flaming pitch! Ye
who freeze 'neath beds of rivers! Ye who, for more
grievous penance, prisoners in the logs of wood
that the flames gnaw on the stoves, weep and
whistle mournfully ! * Hasten all to this our
meeting! Let us all meet here together. Lo, we
keep the Ancestors. Come ye to the holy precincts.
Here are alms and here are prayers. Here is food
and here is drink. "
He takes a handful of incense from the peasants.
"I will light it. You shall quickly, when the
flamelet shoots on high, drive it with the lightest
breathing. Thus, oh, thus, and further, further.
Let it burn upon the air. "
Then the fluttering of wings breaks through
the darkness and silence. The ghosts float in. First,
two little children who cannot enter Paradise
because they have known no bitterness in life.
The wizard lays upon their lips a bitter grain so
* According-to Polish folk-lore, when the wood on the fire hisses
or seems to wail, it is the voice of a soul fulfilling' there its Purga-
tory and begging' prayers.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 61
that the entry to heaven is opened to them. At
midnight, when the glare of a pitcher filled with
flaming brandy sends a lurid light through the
chapel, a horrible ghost looks in at the window.
He is the cruel master, tortured by those he ill-
treated under the shape of birds of prey. Nothing
may be given to him because he showed no mercy,
and shall find none.
So the phantoms come and go. The cock crows.
The rites must end with the dawn. One last
spectre enters behind his time. He will utter no
word, and only points in silence to his bleeding
heart. He is the lover, rejected by one of the
women who is present, and who stands for Mickie-
wicz himself. Whether the wound in Gustavus'
heart means that he has literally killed himself, or
whether it stands merely for the metaphorical
death of his first love, is never made clear.
The Fourth Part is entirely taken up with
Gustavus' raving of his betrayal by the girl he
loved. He pours it forth to an old man in a lonely
cottage. But here again we cannot tell if he is of
the spirit world or of ours. As each hour strikes
he pauses to count, and when midnight sounds he
disappears. This mystery adds its ghostly touch
to a play where supernatural visitants hover all
about us.
Between these parts and the third many waters
had rolled beneath the bridges. Mickiewicz had
endured imprisonment and exile. Upon his nation
had fallen calamities which, as the poet wrote
the Third Part of the Ancestors, came near to
breaking his heart. Mickiewicz had entered his
prison a disappointed lover, to try his soul against
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POLAND
the hardest realities of a Pole's life. His love for a
woman died in the prison walls, giving place to
the master passion of his soul--devotion to his
country.
The Third Part is dedicated to the three
Philomathians who were the first to die in exile:
"To my fellow-students, fellow-prisoners, fellow-
exiles, who died of yearning for their country, in
Archangel, in Moscow, in Petersburg. "
The scene opens in Konrad's prison cell. Konrad,
a sort of re-incarnation of Gustavus, is sleeping
there. His dreams are troubled. Angels and demons
are whispering alternately to his ear as a sign of
the moral struggle that is close upon him. He
wakes to realize that exile will be his lot. Rising,
he writes with a piece of coal on the wall:" D. O. M.
Gustavus. Hie natus est Conradus. " The Byronic
Gustavus, the lover of a woman, is no more.
Konrad, the lover of a nation, is born in his
stead. It is obvious throughout the play that
Mickiewicz puts his own personality into Konrad.
i -There follows the famous Christmas Eve meet-
ing in the prison. The prisoners, seizing the
opportunity of the guard being drunk and abetted
by the Polish corporal, an old Napoleonic
legionary who is said to be the only fictitious
figure of the group, assemble in Konrad's cell by
way of making such festivity as they can. This
Christmas Eve gathering is, not a fiction. It took
place in Mickiewicz's celh The youths, with their
strong, brotherly affection7~playing the game to
the end, chaffing and jesting, striving to keep up
their spirits where death or Siberia awaited them,
are no creatures of a poet's fancy. They are flesh
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 63
and blood, Mickiewicz's beloved and lost friends,
here under their own names. jSo strong was the
truth with which Mickiewicz portrayed them
that one of their band, reading the Ancestors in
after days, said that he was transported back
through the intervening years to the prison as
though he had never left it. To the modern reader
they seem living companions in a room, not those
who have long since gone from this world.
The prisoners meet, greet the new-comers,
and exchange conjectures as to their future fate.
One of them, Zegota--Mickiewicz's life-long
friend, Domeyko--has that day been arrested in
the farm in which he takes a youthful landowner's
pride, little guessing that he will never see it
again. Another has been torn from a young wife.
A third cannot tell how long he has languished
in a cell where no ray of light ever enters. Zan
himself has been half-poisoned by foul food and
rank air in a subterranean dungeon. But:
"I would rather be underground there," cries
Zan, who, from the beginning, had offered to bear
the whole penalty if only his followers might go
free. "I would rather be there in hunger and
sickness, rather endure flogging and, what is
worse than flogging, going before the Commis-
sion, than be in a better cell to find you all here. "
With what grief and affection, as Mickiewicz
wrote these words, must his heart have gone out
to Zan, the guide of his youth who, while the poet
thus recorded his devotion, was working out its
price in Siberia.
In spite of all the efforts after mirth made by
Frejend, here, as in reality, the jester and the
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? 64 POLAND
I
musician of the imprisoned Philomathians, the
talk turns to the doom that has already fallen
upon numbers of their comrades and will fall
upon them. One of the prisoners tells how, as he
returned from his examination before the Com-
mission, he saw a procession of the young men and
boys they know starting on their journey to
Siberia.
"The drum gave the signal. The prison was
opened. I saw them. Behind each one walked
guards with a bayonet. Young boys, wasted and
worn, with shaved heads and chains on their legs.
The youngest, a child of ten years, complained
he could not lift up his chain, and showed his bare,
bleeding leg. They brought out Janczewski. He
was disfigured, he had grown haggard, he had
grown thin, but somehow strangely ennobled.
He who, a year ago, had been a mischievous, pretty
little boy, to-day gazed out from his prison cart,
as that emperor gazed from his desert rock,* with
proud, dry and calm eyes. Now he seemed to be
comforting the sharers of his bondage. Now he
bade farewell to the people with a bitter but
gentle smile, as though he would tell them: 'I
do not mind much. ' The cart started, they lashed
up the horse. He took his hat from his head, he
stood up, and shouted three times: 'Poland hath
not perished yet. 't They disappeared in the
crowd; but that hand raised to heaven, that
shaved head, proud, unashamed, that proclaimed
to all its innocence and its disgrace, remained
before my eyes and will remain in my mind, and
* Napoleon.
t The first line of the song- of the Polish legions.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 65
IS) ti on the road of my life they shall be as my compass
falk pointing and leading me to virtue. If I forget them,
ill1 oh, God in heaven, forget Thou me. "
as In To which his hearers reply by a general Amen.
Con He resumes:
n>> "The other carts had driven up in one long
:j tf row. They were drawn up one after the other. I
cast a glance at the closely pressed throngs of the
W people. Each face had grown pallid as death. And
ill- in that great crowd such was the heavy silence
it- that I heard each step, each clank of the chains.
tp- They brought out the last of the prisoners. It
neJ looked as if he were resisting, but it was because
irf. the poor boy could not walk. He tottered each
ft moment, he staggered slowly down the steps, and
ml hardly had he reached the second step when he
& fell his whole length. It was Wasilewski. He had
17 been here in the prison near us. The day before
t yesterday they flogged him so much that not one
1 drop of blood remained in his face.