I
remember
that he brought to us
children presents from his betrothed, and invited
us to his wedding.
children presents from his betrothed, and invited
us to his wedding.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
.
empty
. . . still more. I shall last out ten thousands of
thousand years. . . . Pray. . . . Here prayer
availeth nought. . . . And was there such a
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
bottomless and boundless pit ? I knew not . . . and
there was. "
"Thou hearest how he sobs," says the corporal.
"Son," says the priest, who has raised Konrad
in his arms, " thou art on a heart that loves thee. "
But there is something unusual here, and the
priest bids the corporal leave him alone with the
prisoner. Then, still unconscious, Konrad, out
of his broken heart, sobs out his fathomless despair.
"I see hence, yea, even hence, though it is
dark . . . deep. I see thee, Rollison ! * Brother!
thou, too, art in the prison, scourged, all stream-
ing with blood. And God has not listened to thee,
and thou art in despair. Thou seekest a knife,
thou tryest to dash thy head against the walls:
'Help! ' God does not give it, I cannot give it
thee. But I will show thee the way to death. Thou
hast a window. Dash it open, leap, leap down,
and break thy neck. f And fly with me to the deep,
to the dark. Let us fly to the pit, the abyss. That
abyss is better than the vale of earth. There,
there are no brothers, mothers, nations, tyrants. "
The priest perceives that Konrad is in the
possession of the demon. He begins the rites of
exorcism. The evil spirit, speaking in Konrad's
tones, answers in a meaningless and foolish poly-
glot, till the friar drives him forth. Konrad wakes.
"Dost thou raise me? Who art thou? Be-
ware lest thou thyself shalt fall into this pit. He
gives me his hand. Let us fly! Like a bird I fly
to the heights. I breathe sweet scents, I shine
? A fellow-prisoner who has been flogged in another cell,
t Here again Mickiewicz draws on a real incident. One of his
brother prisoners flung himself from his window.
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? 74
POLAND
with light. Who gave me his hand? Good men
and angels. Whence your pity that for me descen-
ded to this pit? Men? I despised men, the
angels I have not known. "
"Pray," answers the priest, "for the hand of
the Lord hath terribly touched thee. The lips
with which thou hast outraged the Eternal
Majesty, those lips the evil spirit hath polluted
with hideous words. God giant that the words of
folly, heaviest punishment for the learned lips,
be counted as thy penance, God grant thou shalt
forget them. "
Konrad: "They are there--hammered in. "
The Priest: "God grant, oh, sinner, that
thou thyself shalt never more decipher them, that
God shall never ask thee an account of them. "
He kneels, as Konrad falls asleep. " Thy mercy,
Lord, is without bounds," he cries. Prostrating
himself on the ground, he implores the divine
forgiveness, offering himself as a victim in ex-
piation of Konrad's sin. Even as on the Christmas
Eve which Mickiewicz and his companions spent
in Adam's prison cell, they heard the Polish
Christmas carols ringing out from a church near by,
which, says a fellow-prisoner of the poet, "trans-
ported us to our firesides where our mothers
and sisters were weeping for us " ;* so now into
the dungeon where the priest and prisoner are
alone penetrates the music of these hymns.
Above them resound the voices of alternate choirs
of angels, crying the one for mercy, the other for
justice, on the sinner.
* Ignacy Domeyko, The Philarctians and Philomathians, quoted
by L. Mickiewicz, Life of Adam Mickiemic*.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 75
The -first archangel: "Oh, Lord, he hath
sinned, he hath grievously sinned against Thee. "
The second archangel: "But Thy angels are
weeping for him, Thy angels are praying for
him. "*
The first archangel: "Tread down, oh, Lord,
break to fragments, oh, Lord, those who despise
Thy holy decrees. "
The second archangel: "But forgive those who
have not understood Thy holy decrees. "
An angel: "When, flying with the star of
hope, I shone upon Judea, the angels sang the
hymn of birth. The wise men saw us not. Kings
hearkened not to us. But shepherds saw, and ran
to Bethlehem. Poor, simple, lowly men first
welcomed the Eternal wisdom, and owned the
Eternal rule. "
The first archangel: "When the Lord saw
pride and craft in the hearts of His servant arch-
angels, the Lord did not forgive the eternal spirits,
the pure angels. Bands of angels fell like a rain of
stars from the heavens, and the rain of the minds
of learned men fall with them every day. "
The second archangel: "He did not search into
Thy decrees as one curious to know. Nor was it for
human wisdom that he sought, nor yet for fame. "
The first archangel: "He knew Thee not, he
revered Thee not, oh, our great Lord. He did not
love Thee, he did not call upon Thy name, oh,
our Redeemer. "
* This is said to refer to the prayers of two Polish girls with
whom Mickiewicz had formed a close spiritual intimacy when in
Rome. With the one of these who lives in his poetry as Eva, he
fell in love, but the opposition of the father intervened, and they
never married.
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? 76
POLAND
The second archangel: "But he honoured the
name of Thy most holy Mother. He loved a
nation, he loved much, he loved many. "
Both choirs of archangels: "Lift Thou his head.
He shall arise from the dust, he shall reach to the
heavens, and of his own will he will fall and
honour the cross. May the whole world with him
prostrate itself at the foot of the cross; and let it
Eraise Thee for Thy justice and Thy mercy, our
. ord and our God. "
Thus Mickiewicz's Ancestors rises above the
mere sceptical drama. Love saves the sinner. The
heart breaks down the barrier of intellectual
pride. Heaven replies to Konrad's agonized appeal;
but not by language that could convince his
reason: rather by the charity that sought the
blasphemer in his cell, that drove the demon
forth, that took upon itself the penalty.
The remainder of the incomplete Part III. is
only connected by the slenderest of threads with
what has passed. Konrad leaves the scene until
the closing episode is reached. One link binds the
drama together--Poland's sufferings and the
supernatural presences with their power on the
soul for good or ill. The maiden, who is the
idealization of Mickiewicz's love for "Eva,"
prays for the prisoner unknown to her, and beholds
a vision of angels which, with its grace and light-
ness, breaks into the stern tragedy of the Ancestors
like a strain of celestial music. On the other hand,
the vision of the friar that immediately follows it,
with no apparent connection, is entirely national.
He gazes, and he cries out in horror:
"What see I? Long, white, the course of the
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 77
highway. Long are those roads we cannot see,
o'er wastes, o'er snows, all leading to the north.
There, there to a distant land like streams they
flow. They flow. Straight runs that road to a gate
of iron. See! o'er those roads is rushing a band of
carts, like clouds driven by the winds. All to one
goal. Ah, Lord, those are our youths who go there
to the north. Lord, Lord, exile is their fate!
And wilt Thou suffer them all to perish in their
youth? And wilt Thou destroy our generation
to the end? "
He foretells Poland's salvation by a child
who will grow to be her defender, her restorer,
whose name " shall be forty and four. Lord, wilt
Thou not deign to hasten his advent, to comfort
my nation ? " He sees that nation arraigned at
the world's tribunal as a Christ: and all this
passage, likening Poland to the Christ of the
nations, dying as Christ on the Cross for humanity,
victorious before all eyes, is Messianism in one of
its most pronounced forms. The vision ends by
the friar beholding the white robe of Poland
clothing the whole universe, as she, whom he fondly
calls his beloved, ascends to heaven and to her
glory. Then again rises before his thought the
same mysterious saviour, the " vicegerent on the
vale of earth, blind, but led by an angel page, the
man of three faces whose footstool is three cities,
at whose call three ends of the world tremble.
He, himself, is uncrowned, though he stands over
kings and peoples. And his life is toil of toils, and
his name forty and four. "
What is the clue to this allusion we do not
know. Was that restorer of the nation a curious
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? 78
POLAND
foreshadowing of the advent of the mystic Towi-
anski to whose spiritual authority Mickiewicz gave
himself up for years of his life, and from whom he
expected the regeneration of humanity? The
threefold face is said to refer to the triple message
that Towianski considered himself empowered
from on high to bring to Slavonia, France, and
Israel. It is a fact, moreover, that Towianski was
in his youth blind as the man of the friar's dream.
Or it has been suggested from a play on the Roman
figures that forty-four stands for Louis Napoleon,
who at one time seemed prepared to deliver
Poland. But these are conjectures, and we have
no means of interpreting what was passing in a
mind so strongly impregnated with mysticism as
Mickiewicz's. In moments of exaltation Mickie-
wicz uttered things that are not possible to
explain by ordinary laws.
Next come the dreams of Novosiltzov, and
these are horrible nightmares provoked by demons.
The scene shifts to the Warsaw salons where the
talk runs on what is happening in Lithuania.
Here one of the guests tells the history of his
friend Cichowski. The strong simplicity of the
language in which Mickiewicz relates this story
adds to the pity of its tragedy. I cannot attempt
to present this celebrated passage in anything
more than a prose translation which, while giving
no conception of the art of Mickiewicz's poem,
will, at least, reproduce its facts.
"I knew him when I was a child. He was young
then, lively, witty, and gay, famous for his good
looks. He was the life of the company. He amused
everyone with his stories and jgk^s, He loved
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 79
children, and took me often on his knee. Then he
married.
I remember that he brought to us
children presents from his betrothed, and invited
us to his wedding. Then for a long time he never
came, and it was said in my home that he had
disappeared, no one knew where. The government
sought for him, but could find out no trace of
him. At last it was said that he had killed himself,
that he was drowned. The police found his cloak
on the banks of the Vistula. They brought the
cloak to his wife. She recognized it. He was dead.
They did not find his body--and so a year passed
away. Why did he kill himself? This was asked,
was inquired into. He was mourned, he was wept
for. Finally, he was forgotten. And two years
went by. One evening they were taking prisoners
to the Belvedere from another prison. The even-
ing was rainy and dark. Some one, whether by
chance or on purpose, was a spectator of this
procession. Perhaps it was one of the brave youths
of Warsaw who keep a watch on the whereabouts
and names of the prisoners. Patrols were in the
streets, dead silence in the town. Then someone
cried out from behind a wall: 'Prisoners, who
are you? ' A hundred names answered. Among
them his name was heard: and the next day his
wife was told. She wrote and she ran, she begged,
she implored; but she heard nothing save that
one name. And again three years passed on with
no trace, with no news. But, in some unknown
way, it was spread through Warsaw that he was
alive, that he was being tortured, that he refused
to tell anything, and that so far he had told
nothing; that for many nights they would not
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? 80 POLAND
allow him to sleep; that they fed him on herrings
and gave him nothing to drink; that they drugged
him with opium, and sent horrible apparitions
and monsters upon him; that they tickled his
soles and his armpits. But soon other prisoners
were taken, the talk began about others. Only
his wife wept, all the others forgot.
"Till, not long ago, they rang at his wife's
house one night. The door was opened. An officer
and a gendarme, armed, and a prisoner. It was
he! They ordered pen and paper for him to sign
that he had returned alive from the Belvedere.
They took the note, and threatened him with their
fingers: 'If you let out . . . . ' and they did not
finish. They went as they came. It was he. I ran
to see him. A friend warned me, ' Do not go to*-
day, for you will find a spy at the gate. ' The next
day I went. There were the soldiers of the police
in the hall. I went in a week's time. It was he who
would not receive me : he was ill. Then, not long
ago, I met him driving outside the town. They
told me it was he, for I did not know him. He had
grown fat, but it was a horrible fatness. He was
swollen by bad food and poisonous air. His cheeks
? were puffy, yellow, and pale. His forehead was
wrinkled as if he were half a century old; he had
lost all his hair. I bade him welcome. He did not
know me. He did not wish to speak to me. I told
him who I was. He looked at me without seeing me.
When I spoke of the details of our old acquaintance,
he fixed his eyes inquiringly on me. Ah! all that
he had suffered in his torments by day and all that
he had thought through in his sleepless nights,
J knew it all in that one minute from his eyes.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 81
"In a month's time I went again. I thought
that by then he would have been able to look
about in the world, and to call back his memory.
But he had been so many thousand days under
the ordeal of the inquisition, so many thousand
nights he had communed alone with himself, so
many years tyrants had carried on the inquiry by
torture, so many years he had been surrounded
by walls that had ears, when his only defence was
silence, and his only companion darkness, that a
gay city could not blot out in one month the
lesson of so many years. To him the sun is a spy,
the day his traducer, his servants his jailors, each
guest is his enemy. If a visitor comes to his house,
at the sound of the bolt being unshot, he immedi-
ately thinks: 'They are coming for the in-
quisition. ' He turns his back, he leans his head on
his hand. It appears he is gathering together his
presence of mind, all the powers of his brain. He
compresses his lips, so that no words shall escape
them. He casts down his eyes that the spies may
guess nothing from his eyes. If the visitors ask
him a question, he, still believing he is in prison,
rushes to the other end of the room, and escapes
there in the shadows, crying out always two
phrases: 'I know nothing. I shall say nothing. '
And these two phrases are his watchword. And
his wife and child weep long on their knees before
him, till he can conquer his fear and his horror. "
We pass back again to Wilna: to Novosiltzov,
giving a banquet, spurning the blind mother, as
she implores him to let her visit her prisoner son
who is being flogged to death, and whose fate
haunted Konrad as he lay unconscious. But where
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? POLAND
all this time is Konrad? The friar has stood
before Novosiltzov warning him that upon him
and his ministers God's vengeance is about to
fall--and it is a fact that sudden death and dis-
aster overtook the prime movers in the persecu-
tion of the Lithuanian youths. On his way from
Novosiltzov's rooms, the priest meets Konrad,
who is being conducted by soldiers to his examin-
ation. Konrad stops and gazes, bewildered. He
believes he has never seen the priest as a living
man. It must have been in a dream that the friar
came to his aid. He hails him therefore as the
friend of a dream, and thanks him for a gift of
which, so he thinks, only his own conscience is
aware.
"Thou shalt go," says the priest, "on a far
and an unknown road. Thou wilt be in the crowd
of the great, the rich, the learned. Seek thou the
man who knoweth more than they. Thou wilt
know him, for he will be the first to greet thee in
the name of God. "
This is supposed to be a further reference to
Towianski.
"What is this ? " cries Konrad, struck by the
familiar sound of the voice that had consoled him
in the hour of his agony. " Is it thou? What may
this be? Stop a moment for the love of God. "
"Farewell, I cannot," replies the priest; and
Konrad is hurried off by the soldiers.
His next and last entry into the strange, mystic
drama is shrouded in the veils of mystery. The
feast of the Ancestors is being held again as in the
beginning of the play. The wizard and the woman
whom Gustavus loved are in the cemetery. The
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 83
woman entreats the phantom that appeared with
his bleeding heart in the past to show himself to
her once more. The songs of the incantations are
wafted to their ears. Graves open. Spirits float
about them. Only the lover does not come. The
hour of cock-crow is here. The night of the Ances-
tors is run. The two who watch cry in vain upon
the name of Gustavus.
"Thy lover," says the wizard, "hath either
changed the faith of his fathers, or hath changed
his old name. See how the dawn draws nigh. The
wizard's powers are gone. Thy lover will not
come. "
But from the west a band of prison carts
appears amidst clouds of snow, rushing to the
north. The lover is there. He turns back to gaze--
only once, but what a look is that farewell to
Lithuania! His heart is bleeding with a thousand
wounds which have now entered his soul--the
wounds of his country, which death only can
heal. On his forehead he carries a black stain
which, says the wizard, even death may not cure
--his self-inflicted wound, his blasphemy.
"Ah, great God, cure him," cries Gustavus'
love; and the play ends.
To the irreparable loss of literature, the drama
was never finished. Mickiewicz intended to have
brought it down to the events following the
Rising of 1830, and to have developed the action
in the Russian prisons and Siberia. His poetic
genius was tragically silenced, and the Ancestors
stands as a magnificent and incomplete monument
to the sufferings of Poland. " I read the poem on
my knees," wrote Bohdan Zaleski. "Since the
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? 84
POLAND
tears and the imprecations of the prophets of
Sion," so said George Sand, "no voice has been
raised with a like power to sing a subject as vast
as that of a nation's fall. "
Ill
Shortly after Mickiewicz had written the Third
Part of the Ancestors, he joined the Polish Emigra-
tion in Paris. From that date, 1832, his home was
in Paris for the rest of his life, with the exception
of the year and a half--1839 to --when he
held the chair of Latin Literature at the Univer-
sity of Lausanne. He devoted himself to the exiles
and outcasts of his nation. He laboured for them
without stint, giving ungrudgingly out of his
own dire poverty, harbouring the homeless when
he himself could scarcely keep a roof above his
head, conferring strength and consolation, not
only by his written word, but by the moral force
of his life and by his rare gift of influence over
the souls of others. He became the chief moral
leader of his people and the object of their im-
passioned affection. He taught them that only
by personal regeneration could they hope to see
their country restored; that true patriotism
must reform the individual to secure the nation's
redemption. For the guidance of his fellow exiles
he wrote the Book of the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickie-
wicz had a deep-seated conviction that Poland
was the chosen emissary of the higher future of
mankind, and that therefore her sons were to be
the apostles of the future^ It thus followed that
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 85
the Polish Emigration was a providential means of
spreading the new light over the face of the world.
The Polish exiles were, therefore, exiles no more,
but pilgrims. They must prove themselves worthy
of that calling. So in his Book of the Polish Pil-
grimage he puts together in a species of Biblical
prose a string of counsels for the Polish pilgrim.
Material strength meant little to a man like
Mickiewicz. The power of the idea was every-
thing. It mattered nothing that at the moment
he wrote this book no visible sign of Poland's
resurrection could be discerned on the political
horizon. He believed with full confidence that the
moment of her triumph and the consequent
spiritual rebirth of the universe was approaching.
It is on these lines that his instructions for the
Polish exiles run: worded in pithy aphorisms, or
in parables.
"The greatness and the strength of the war-
ships are good, but without stars and the compass
they are nought. And the star of the pilgrimage
is heavenly faith, and the magnetic needle is the
love of your country. The star shineth for all,
and the needle pointeth ever to the north. And
of a surety, with that needle, we may sail on the
eastern and western seas, and without it even on
the northern sea there will be wandering and
shipwreck. "
"Why has the power of resurrection been given
to your nation? Not because she was powerful,"
like Rome, nor wise as Greece, glorious as Venice
and Genoa, for they have all fallen and will not
rise again. "But you will be woken from the
grave, as having faith, hope, and love. "
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? 86
POLAND
"Polish pilgrim, thou wast rich, and lo! thou
sufferest poverty and need, that thou mayest
know what are poverty and need, and that when
thou returnest to thy country thou shalt say:
'The poor and needy are my co-heirs. '"
Wisdom is not with the great ones of this earth.
It has been lost from public life.
. . . still more. I shall last out ten thousands of
thousand years. . . . Pray. . . . Here prayer
availeth nought. . . . And was there such a
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
bottomless and boundless pit ? I knew not . . . and
there was. "
"Thou hearest how he sobs," says the corporal.
"Son," says the priest, who has raised Konrad
in his arms, " thou art on a heart that loves thee. "
But there is something unusual here, and the
priest bids the corporal leave him alone with the
prisoner. Then, still unconscious, Konrad, out
of his broken heart, sobs out his fathomless despair.
"I see hence, yea, even hence, though it is
dark . . . deep. I see thee, Rollison ! * Brother!
thou, too, art in the prison, scourged, all stream-
ing with blood. And God has not listened to thee,
and thou art in despair. Thou seekest a knife,
thou tryest to dash thy head against the walls:
'Help! ' God does not give it, I cannot give it
thee. But I will show thee the way to death. Thou
hast a window. Dash it open, leap, leap down,
and break thy neck. f And fly with me to the deep,
to the dark. Let us fly to the pit, the abyss. That
abyss is better than the vale of earth. There,
there are no brothers, mothers, nations, tyrants. "
The priest perceives that Konrad is in the
possession of the demon. He begins the rites of
exorcism. The evil spirit, speaking in Konrad's
tones, answers in a meaningless and foolish poly-
glot, till the friar drives him forth. Konrad wakes.
"Dost thou raise me? Who art thou? Be-
ware lest thou thyself shalt fall into this pit. He
gives me his hand. Let us fly! Like a bird I fly
to the heights. I breathe sweet scents, I shine
? A fellow-prisoner who has been flogged in another cell,
t Here again Mickiewicz draws on a real incident. One of his
brother prisoners flung himself from his window.
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? 74
POLAND
with light. Who gave me his hand? Good men
and angels. Whence your pity that for me descen-
ded to this pit? Men? I despised men, the
angels I have not known. "
"Pray," answers the priest, "for the hand of
the Lord hath terribly touched thee. The lips
with which thou hast outraged the Eternal
Majesty, those lips the evil spirit hath polluted
with hideous words. God giant that the words of
folly, heaviest punishment for the learned lips,
be counted as thy penance, God grant thou shalt
forget them. "
Konrad: "They are there--hammered in. "
The Priest: "God grant, oh, sinner, that
thou thyself shalt never more decipher them, that
God shall never ask thee an account of them. "
He kneels, as Konrad falls asleep. " Thy mercy,
Lord, is without bounds," he cries. Prostrating
himself on the ground, he implores the divine
forgiveness, offering himself as a victim in ex-
piation of Konrad's sin. Even as on the Christmas
Eve which Mickiewicz and his companions spent
in Adam's prison cell, they heard the Polish
Christmas carols ringing out from a church near by,
which, says a fellow-prisoner of the poet, "trans-
ported us to our firesides where our mothers
and sisters were weeping for us " ;* so now into
the dungeon where the priest and prisoner are
alone penetrates the music of these hymns.
Above them resound the voices of alternate choirs
of angels, crying the one for mercy, the other for
justice, on the sinner.
* Ignacy Domeyko, The Philarctians and Philomathians, quoted
by L. Mickiewicz, Life of Adam Mickiemic*.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 75
The -first archangel: "Oh, Lord, he hath
sinned, he hath grievously sinned against Thee. "
The second archangel: "But Thy angels are
weeping for him, Thy angels are praying for
him. "*
The first archangel: "Tread down, oh, Lord,
break to fragments, oh, Lord, those who despise
Thy holy decrees. "
The second archangel: "But forgive those who
have not understood Thy holy decrees. "
An angel: "When, flying with the star of
hope, I shone upon Judea, the angels sang the
hymn of birth. The wise men saw us not. Kings
hearkened not to us. But shepherds saw, and ran
to Bethlehem. Poor, simple, lowly men first
welcomed the Eternal wisdom, and owned the
Eternal rule. "
The first archangel: "When the Lord saw
pride and craft in the hearts of His servant arch-
angels, the Lord did not forgive the eternal spirits,
the pure angels. Bands of angels fell like a rain of
stars from the heavens, and the rain of the minds
of learned men fall with them every day. "
The second archangel: "He did not search into
Thy decrees as one curious to know. Nor was it for
human wisdom that he sought, nor yet for fame. "
The first archangel: "He knew Thee not, he
revered Thee not, oh, our great Lord. He did not
love Thee, he did not call upon Thy name, oh,
our Redeemer. "
* This is said to refer to the prayers of two Polish girls with
whom Mickiewicz had formed a close spiritual intimacy when in
Rome. With the one of these who lives in his poetry as Eva, he
fell in love, but the opposition of the father intervened, and they
never married.
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POLAND
The second archangel: "But he honoured the
name of Thy most holy Mother. He loved a
nation, he loved much, he loved many. "
Both choirs of archangels: "Lift Thou his head.
He shall arise from the dust, he shall reach to the
heavens, and of his own will he will fall and
honour the cross. May the whole world with him
prostrate itself at the foot of the cross; and let it
Eraise Thee for Thy justice and Thy mercy, our
. ord and our God. "
Thus Mickiewicz's Ancestors rises above the
mere sceptical drama. Love saves the sinner. The
heart breaks down the barrier of intellectual
pride. Heaven replies to Konrad's agonized appeal;
but not by language that could convince his
reason: rather by the charity that sought the
blasphemer in his cell, that drove the demon
forth, that took upon itself the penalty.
The remainder of the incomplete Part III. is
only connected by the slenderest of threads with
what has passed. Konrad leaves the scene until
the closing episode is reached. One link binds the
drama together--Poland's sufferings and the
supernatural presences with their power on the
soul for good or ill. The maiden, who is the
idealization of Mickiewicz's love for "Eva,"
prays for the prisoner unknown to her, and beholds
a vision of angels which, with its grace and light-
ness, breaks into the stern tragedy of the Ancestors
like a strain of celestial music. On the other hand,
the vision of the friar that immediately follows it,
with no apparent connection, is entirely national.
He gazes, and he cries out in horror:
"What see I? Long, white, the course of the
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 77
highway. Long are those roads we cannot see,
o'er wastes, o'er snows, all leading to the north.
There, there to a distant land like streams they
flow. They flow. Straight runs that road to a gate
of iron. See! o'er those roads is rushing a band of
carts, like clouds driven by the winds. All to one
goal. Ah, Lord, those are our youths who go there
to the north. Lord, Lord, exile is their fate!
And wilt Thou suffer them all to perish in their
youth? And wilt Thou destroy our generation
to the end? "
He foretells Poland's salvation by a child
who will grow to be her defender, her restorer,
whose name " shall be forty and four. Lord, wilt
Thou not deign to hasten his advent, to comfort
my nation ? " He sees that nation arraigned at
the world's tribunal as a Christ: and all this
passage, likening Poland to the Christ of the
nations, dying as Christ on the Cross for humanity,
victorious before all eyes, is Messianism in one of
its most pronounced forms. The vision ends by
the friar beholding the white robe of Poland
clothing the whole universe, as she, whom he fondly
calls his beloved, ascends to heaven and to her
glory. Then again rises before his thought the
same mysterious saviour, the " vicegerent on the
vale of earth, blind, but led by an angel page, the
man of three faces whose footstool is three cities,
at whose call three ends of the world tremble.
He, himself, is uncrowned, though he stands over
kings and peoples. And his life is toil of toils, and
his name forty and four. "
What is the clue to this allusion we do not
know. Was that restorer of the nation a curious
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? 78
POLAND
foreshadowing of the advent of the mystic Towi-
anski to whose spiritual authority Mickiewicz gave
himself up for years of his life, and from whom he
expected the regeneration of humanity? The
threefold face is said to refer to the triple message
that Towianski considered himself empowered
from on high to bring to Slavonia, France, and
Israel. It is a fact, moreover, that Towianski was
in his youth blind as the man of the friar's dream.
Or it has been suggested from a play on the Roman
figures that forty-four stands for Louis Napoleon,
who at one time seemed prepared to deliver
Poland. But these are conjectures, and we have
no means of interpreting what was passing in a
mind so strongly impregnated with mysticism as
Mickiewicz's. In moments of exaltation Mickie-
wicz uttered things that are not possible to
explain by ordinary laws.
Next come the dreams of Novosiltzov, and
these are horrible nightmares provoked by demons.
The scene shifts to the Warsaw salons where the
talk runs on what is happening in Lithuania.
Here one of the guests tells the history of his
friend Cichowski. The strong simplicity of the
language in which Mickiewicz relates this story
adds to the pity of its tragedy. I cannot attempt
to present this celebrated passage in anything
more than a prose translation which, while giving
no conception of the art of Mickiewicz's poem,
will, at least, reproduce its facts.
"I knew him when I was a child. He was young
then, lively, witty, and gay, famous for his good
looks. He was the life of the company. He amused
everyone with his stories and jgk^s, He loved
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 79
children, and took me often on his knee. Then he
married.
I remember that he brought to us
children presents from his betrothed, and invited
us to his wedding. Then for a long time he never
came, and it was said in my home that he had
disappeared, no one knew where. The government
sought for him, but could find out no trace of
him. At last it was said that he had killed himself,
that he was drowned. The police found his cloak
on the banks of the Vistula. They brought the
cloak to his wife. She recognized it. He was dead.
They did not find his body--and so a year passed
away. Why did he kill himself? This was asked,
was inquired into. He was mourned, he was wept
for. Finally, he was forgotten. And two years
went by. One evening they were taking prisoners
to the Belvedere from another prison. The even-
ing was rainy and dark. Some one, whether by
chance or on purpose, was a spectator of this
procession. Perhaps it was one of the brave youths
of Warsaw who keep a watch on the whereabouts
and names of the prisoners. Patrols were in the
streets, dead silence in the town. Then someone
cried out from behind a wall: 'Prisoners, who
are you? ' A hundred names answered. Among
them his name was heard: and the next day his
wife was told. She wrote and she ran, she begged,
she implored; but she heard nothing save that
one name. And again three years passed on with
no trace, with no news. But, in some unknown
way, it was spread through Warsaw that he was
alive, that he was being tortured, that he refused
to tell anything, and that so far he had told
nothing; that for many nights they would not
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? 80 POLAND
allow him to sleep; that they fed him on herrings
and gave him nothing to drink; that they drugged
him with opium, and sent horrible apparitions
and monsters upon him; that they tickled his
soles and his armpits. But soon other prisoners
were taken, the talk began about others. Only
his wife wept, all the others forgot.
"Till, not long ago, they rang at his wife's
house one night. The door was opened. An officer
and a gendarme, armed, and a prisoner. It was
he! They ordered pen and paper for him to sign
that he had returned alive from the Belvedere.
They took the note, and threatened him with their
fingers: 'If you let out . . . . ' and they did not
finish. They went as they came. It was he. I ran
to see him. A friend warned me, ' Do not go to*-
day, for you will find a spy at the gate. ' The next
day I went. There were the soldiers of the police
in the hall. I went in a week's time. It was he who
would not receive me : he was ill. Then, not long
ago, I met him driving outside the town. They
told me it was he, for I did not know him. He had
grown fat, but it was a horrible fatness. He was
swollen by bad food and poisonous air. His cheeks
? were puffy, yellow, and pale. His forehead was
wrinkled as if he were half a century old; he had
lost all his hair. I bade him welcome. He did not
know me. He did not wish to speak to me. I told
him who I was. He looked at me without seeing me.
When I spoke of the details of our old acquaintance,
he fixed his eyes inquiringly on me. Ah! all that
he had suffered in his torments by day and all that
he had thought through in his sleepless nights,
J knew it all in that one minute from his eyes.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 81
"In a month's time I went again. I thought
that by then he would have been able to look
about in the world, and to call back his memory.
But he had been so many thousand days under
the ordeal of the inquisition, so many thousand
nights he had communed alone with himself, so
many years tyrants had carried on the inquiry by
torture, so many years he had been surrounded
by walls that had ears, when his only defence was
silence, and his only companion darkness, that a
gay city could not blot out in one month the
lesson of so many years. To him the sun is a spy,
the day his traducer, his servants his jailors, each
guest is his enemy. If a visitor comes to his house,
at the sound of the bolt being unshot, he immedi-
ately thinks: 'They are coming for the in-
quisition. ' He turns his back, he leans his head on
his hand. It appears he is gathering together his
presence of mind, all the powers of his brain. He
compresses his lips, so that no words shall escape
them. He casts down his eyes that the spies may
guess nothing from his eyes. If the visitors ask
him a question, he, still believing he is in prison,
rushes to the other end of the room, and escapes
there in the shadows, crying out always two
phrases: 'I know nothing. I shall say nothing. '
And these two phrases are his watchword. And
his wife and child weep long on their knees before
him, till he can conquer his fear and his horror. "
We pass back again to Wilna: to Novosiltzov,
giving a banquet, spurning the blind mother, as
she implores him to let her visit her prisoner son
who is being flogged to death, and whose fate
haunted Konrad as he lay unconscious. But where
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? POLAND
all this time is Konrad? The friar has stood
before Novosiltzov warning him that upon him
and his ministers God's vengeance is about to
fall--and it is a fact that sudden death and dis-
aster overtook the prime movers in the persecu-
tion of the Lithuanian youths. On his way from
Novosiltzov's rooms, the priest meets Konrad,
who is being conducted by soldiers to his examin-
ation. Konrad stops and gazes, bewildered. He
believes he has never seen the priest as a living
man. It must have been in a dream that the friar
came to his aid. He hails him therefore as the
friend of a dream, and thanks him for a gift of
which, so he thinks, only his own conscience is
aware.
"Thou shalt go," says the priest, "on a far
and an unknown road. Thou wilt be in the crowd
of the great, the rich, the learned. Seek thou the
man who knoweth more than they. Thou wilt
know him, for he will be the first to greet thee in
the name of God. "
This is supposed to be a further reference to
Towianski.
"What is this ? " cries Konrad, struck by the
familiar sound of the voice that had consoled him
in the hour of his agony. " Is it thou? What may
this be? Stop a moment for the love of God. "
"Farewell, I cannot," replies the priest; and
Konrad is hurried off by the soldiers.
His next and last entry into the strange, mystic
drama is shrouded in the veils of mystery. The
feast of the Ancestors is being held again as in the
beginning of the play. The wizard and the woman
whom Gustavus loved are in the cemetery. The
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 83
woman entreats the phantom that appeared with
his bleeding heart in the past to show himself to
her once more. The songs of the incantations are
wafted to their ears. Graves open. Spirits float
about them. Only the lover does not come. The
hour of cock-crow is here. The night of the Ances-
tors is run. The two who watch cry in vain upon
the name of Gustavus.
"Thy lover," says the wizard, "hath either
changed the faith of his fathers, or hath changed
his old name. See how the dawn draws nigh. The
wizard's powers are gone. Thy lover will not
come. "
But from the west a band of prison carts
appears amidst clouds of snow, rushing to the
north. The lover is there. He turns back to gaze--
only once, but what a look is that farewell to
Lithuania! His heart is bleeding with a thousand
wounds which have now entered his soul--the
wounds of his country, which death only can
heal. On his forehead he carries a black stain
which, says the wizard, even death may not cure
--his self-inflicted wound, his blasphemy.
"Ah, great God, cure him," cries Gustavus'
love; and the play ends.
To the irreparable loss of literature, the drama
was never finished. Mickiewicz intended to have
brought it down to the events following the
Rising of 1830, and to have developed the action
in the Russian prisons and Siberia. His poetic
genius was tragically silenced, and the Ancestors
stands as a magnificent and incomplete monument
to the sufferings of Poland. " I read the poem on
my knees," wrote Bohdan Zaleski. "Since the
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? 84
POLAND
tears and the imprecations of the prophets of
Sion," so said George Sand, "no voice has been
raised with a like power to sing a subject as vast
as that of a nation's fall. "
Ill
Shortly after Mickiewicz had written the Third
Part of the Ancestors, he joined the Polish Emigra-
tion in Paris. From that date, 1832, his home was
in Paris for the rest of his life, with the exception
of the year and a half--1839 to --when he
held the chair of Latin Literature at the Univer-
sity of Lausanne. He devoted himself to the exiles
and outcasts of his nation. He laboured for them
without stint, giving ungrudgingly out of his
own dire poverty, harbouring the homeless when
he himself could scarcely keep a roof above his
head, conferring strength and consolation, not
only by his written word, but by the moral force
of his life and by his rare gift of influence over
the souls of others. He became the chief moral
leader of his people and the object of their im-
passioned affection. He taught them that only
by personal regeneration could they hope to see
their country restored; that true patriotism
must reform the individual to secure the nation's
redemption. For the guidance of his fellow exiles
he wrote the Book of the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickie-
wicz had a deep-seated conviction that Poland
was the chosen emissary of the higher future of
mankind, and that therefore her sons were to be
the apostles of the future^ It thus followed that
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 85
the Polish Emigration was a providential means of
spreading the new light over the face of the world.
The Polish exiles were, therefore, exiles no more,
but pilgrims. They must prove themselves worthy
of that calling. So in his Book of the Polish Pil-
grimage he puts together in a species of Biblical
prose a string of counsels for the Polish pilgrim.
Material strength meant little to a man like
Mickiewicz. The power of the idea was every-
thing. It mattered nothing that at the moment
he wrote this book no visible sign of Poland's
resurrection could be discerned on the political
horizon. He believed with full confidence that the
moment of her triumph and the consequent
spiritual rebirth of the universe was approaching.
It is on these lines that his instructions for the
Polish exiles run: worded in pithy aphorisms, or
in parables.
"The greatness and the strength of the war-
ships are good, but without stars and the compass
they are nought. And the star of the pilgrimage
is heavenly faith, and the magnetic needle is the
love of your country. The star shineth for all,
and the needle pointeth ever to the north. And
of a surety, with that needle, we may sail on the
eastern and western seas, and without it even on
the northern sea there will be wandering and
shipwreck. "
"Why has the power of resurrection been given
to your nation? Not because she was powerful,"
like Rome, nor wise as Greece, glorious as Venice
and Genoa, for they have all fallen and will not
rise again. "But you will be woken from the
grave, as having faith, hope, and love. "
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POLAND
"Polish pilgrim, thou wast rich, and lo! thou
sufferest poverty and need, that thou mayest
know what are poverty and need, and that when
thou returnest to thy country thou shalt say:
'The poor and needy are my co-heirs. '"
Wisdom is not with the great ones of this earth.
It has been lost from public life.
