It is the
bitterest
curse on
poetry1.
poetry1.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
See my Adam Mickie-
wicz, where I have given a translation of the scene in question.
2 Stanistaw Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski, quoted by Count Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski,
and by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 88 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
never know what the love of a woman really is; because, for
him, everything is himself. He loves his masterpieces ; but he
loves nothing else. That is why reality is poison to him. That
is why he can find nowhere any fulfilment of his desires, any
end to his dreams. Everything that is not himself disgusts him
and drives him to despair. . . So long as he is alone he is happy
. . . That is why a great artist is never either a good husband or
a good father. . . One pays dearly for having been admitted to
the secrets of the gods. One only drop fallen from on high on
your brow renders you incapable of living here below1.
In our dreams [writes the idealist, tormented by the eternal
quest], in those sublime conceptions which yet must often
seem ridiculous to the masses, we never feel the most simple
difficulties, our courage is ready to brave the thunderbolt of
heaven; but if we have to take but two steps, say a few words,
approach, in fact, earthly life in its daily occurrences, we sink
with fatigue. . . To dream is to be of another world, but it is not
to be ignorant or mad. There is only madness if we think we
can apply the laws of our dreams or of our synthesis to the
analysis of life down here; but everyone is obliged to fall into
that mistake in the beginning. Some stay in it, and those are
feeble, incomplete beings, but full of gentle poetry and misfor-
tunes. Others, having recognized their youth, and not under-
standing this sublime warning of Heaven, imagine that all is
finished; that the true world is wretchedness and analysis.
These are also feeble and incomplete beings, who end by the
corruption of materialism. There are few men who have
strength enough to bear difficulties and obstacles, to decide to
enter practical life by facing it--the only one that leads to
some results--and to keep at the same time an unshakable
faith in the promises that were made to them in the day of
their delirium, when they caught a glimpse of luminous
spheres that they have never since been able to attain. They
only will do something3.
Konstanty Danielewicz, the friend who had stood
by Krasinski wTTeli~n~e~was~mobbed at the University,
joined Zygmunt in Warsaw, and went on with him to
Vienna. From this time Danielewicz, until his death,
was the devoted companion of Krasinski in his wan-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw, April 4, 1833.
2 Ibid. April 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
89
derings, and the one that the poet seems to have loved
best of all his friends. The misfortunes of his life were
a bond that knit Krasinski, with whom to pity was to
love, very closely to him. His philosophical intellect
strongly influenced, not altogether for the good, the
trend of Krasinski's mind during the years that they
lived together. He was a finished musician, though no
poet; and in his playing, Krasinski, who was passion-
ately fond of music, found inspiration for the struggle
of the spirits in The Undivine Comedy over Henryk's
soul1. His somewhat severe candour, and a certain want
of sympathy with Zygmunt's nervous and highly strung
temperament, never chilled their friendship, or dimin-
ished the enthusiastic admiration that Krasinski, an
idealist in his affections as elsewhere, lavished upon him.
Krasinski spent the summer in Vienna with Daniele-
wicz, undergoing medical treatment. He was in wretched
health, and the days went by for both youths in exter-
nal monotony, but, for Krasinski, in creation. He and
Danielewicz sat talking for hours of the social problems
which were at the time convulsing Europe: and it was
then that Krasinski, only able to write a few words at
a stretch in his blind condition, committed to paper The
Undivine Comedy. To antedate the words he wrote to
Gaszynski, with their foreshadowing of the promises of
Dawn, soon after The Undivine Comedy was completed:
I know that our civilization is nigh to death: I know that
the times are near when new crimes will come to punish the
old, and themselves be condemned in the sight of God--but
I know that they will create nothing, will build nothing. They
will pass like the horse of Attila, and, after them, silence. Then
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish). See also Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw,
April 9, 1833.
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? 90
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
only, that which neither you nor anyone knows or understands
will come upon us, rise from the chaos, and build the new
world from the Divine Will, from the predestiny of the human
race; but then both your and my bones shall be somewhere
dust1.
In the October of 1833 Krasinski published under
false initials his Agay Han.
He had begun this story in Geneva. The Tartar
page, Agay Han, is in love with Maryna, the widow
of the false Demetrius. After her husband's death,
Maryna has taken refuge in a castle, where the Mus-
covite boyars capture her, and cast her into prison.
She is rescued by the page; but she gives her hand to
Zarucki, who had defended the castle before it fell.
Panting for revenge, Agay Han follows them with
Russian troops, slays the husband, and drowns both
Maryna and himself.
This, the last work of Krasinski's immaturity, lacks
interest. Begun when the author's nerves had gone to
pieces during his sufferings in Geneva2, the style of the
first part is weak and over coloured. Before the story
ends the errors of manner are pruned away, and after
the earlier chapters the rest of the work, says Dr Kal-
lenbach, shows a decided step forward in the poet's
powers3. There is, however, so great a gulf between
Agay Han and its successor--the masterpiece of
matured genius which as The Undivine Comedy will live
with the Polish language--that it is hard to realize
they were written, and with no intermediate degrees,
by the same hand.
In the autumn Krasinski wandered, still with
1 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Rome, Jan. 17, 1834.
s J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 91
Danielewicz, by slow stages from Vienna through Italy,
till he reached Rome. We find this journey with its
memories of Krasinski's dead companion in the Un-
finished Poem. The Undivine Comedy was finished
during the halt at Venice. In a letter written from
Rome to Reeve, between whom and Krasinski some
cause of coolness had arisen which had put an end to
their correspondence for several months, Zygmunt
details the plot of the play. To Gaszynski he wrote
telling him that he was sending him the manuscript, to
which he first gave the name The Husband, charging
him by everything that was holy to guard the secret
of the authorship, to get it published in Paris if possible, 1
and to accept as a friend's gift whatever financial gains
came of it. But for some reason Krasinski changed
his mind, and left the manuscript alone. More than a
year after he had told Gaszynski that the work was
ready, he wrote, speaking darkly for fear of unwar-
ranted eyes discovering his identity:
If you should find in Paris a recently published work, The
Undivine Comedy, tell me your opinion of it. . . Then I also will
give you my remarks and observations1.
But psychologically The Undivine Comedy belongs
to the year in which Krasinski wrote it. Therefore we
have now reached that chapter of the poet's life.
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, March 29, 1835.
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? CHAPTER V
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY: THE
DOMESTIC DRAMA
The Undivine Comedy is the drama of a perishing world.
It was written little more than forty years after the
French Revolution, at a time of widespread social up-
heaval and universal unrest. A Polish boy of twenty-
one voiced the problems and apprehensions which are
still ours with the penetration of genius that places The
Undivine Comedy amongst the masterpieces of the
world's literature.
The Undivine Comedy is written in prose, the finest
that ever came from Krasinski's pen. It stands alone
among his creations. The gravity and restraint of the
style, its strange terseness, unique in the work of one
whose tendency is to over elaboration, have been in
part ascribed to the conditions under which Krasinski
wrote the play, forced as he was by practical blindness
to concentrate much into brief phrases1. We never,
says Mickiewicz, see the dramatis personae full figure.
The situations and characters are not developed: they
are only indicated2. Yet such is the strength of the
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmuni Krasinski.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. Paris, 1849. Vols. IV and V, the
former of which contains the fine analysis of The Undivine Comedy, have
been republished in one volume by the Musee Adam Mickiewicz, Paris,
1914.
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? The Undivine Comedy
93
few strokes with which Krasinski draws them that they
stand out sharp, living. The nurse speaks once: and in
her one cry over the blind child the Polish peasant, with
her simplicity, her piety, her devotion to her nursling, is
in the flesh before us1. To the godfather falls a part that
does not fill a page; but how well we know him and
his stupid, pompous complacency! The whole story of
the wife, who has nothing except the limitations of a
woman's heart to pit against the restless egoism of
a poetic genius, is played out in scarcely half a dozen
short scenes, as remarkable for their power and un-
swerving truth to human nature as for their reserve.
The atmosphere of the play is profoundly pessi-
mistic. Its gloom is unrelieved. The domestic tragedy,
the ruin of a wife and son, is the theme of the first part:
the universal tragedy, where the war of class against
class, past against future, ends also in ruin, but the
ruin of all the world, is the theme of the second.
Although by birth and tradition, and, to a certain extent,
conviction, which was however not nearly so pronounced
in his youth as later, Krasinski belonged to the aristo-
cratic party; yet in The Undivine Comedy he gauges
each class alike with icy impartiality, or, to speak more
correctly, with a severity that effectually withholds the
reader's sympathy from either. His aristocrats are
wholly without moral fibre: decadent, flabby inheritors
of a doomed cause. Their opponents, revenging them-
selves for years of oppression, . are not demons--the
colour of the drama is not lurid or stained with crim-
son, but grey: they are merely brutalized human beings
taking the heads of their tyrants in cold blood. The
champion of the past, or of the aristocracy, plays his
1 J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? 94 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part without conviction out of a heart no longer capable
of nursing any spark of the living fire. Faith and en-
thusiasm are wanting likewise to his antagonist, the
leader of the revolution. In Iridion we have the mar-
tyrs of the catacombs, the lovely lineaments of Cor-
nelia, grandeur in the figure of Iridion himself, who,
although he sinned, sinned because he had "loved
Greece. " But in The Undivine Comedy there is no one
even approaching heroic proportions: no one for whom
we can feel a spark of whole-hearted admiration. The
fact that these morally negative men and women are
not abnormal, but human characters whom we have
met in our daily lives, is among the most painfully
true aspects of The Undivine Comedy.
For the sadness of The Undivine Comedy is not that
of a young pessimism. There is no touch of youth about
the drama. It is the work of one who had passed
through a rude shock, a bitter awakening. The tragedy
of Poland was too recent, his own wounds were too
fresh, for the Anonymous Poet to be able as yet to
speak the language of Dawn and Resurrecturis. As
Dr Kallenbach observes, The Undivine Comedy, with
its brooding melancholy, its presages of woe, was one
of the first fruits of the disastrous Polish Rising1.
"I know nothing more painful than all this drama," said
Mickiewicz, speaking in Paris to his audience of Poles and
Frenchmen, who were all ignorant as to who the author of The
Undivine Comedy might be. "The poet who composed it could
only have been born in the bosom of a nation that has suffered
for centuries. Grief is not exhaled here in pompous phrases.
I have no tirades to quote. But each word is a drop drawn
from one great mass of suffering and painV
Beyond the fact that it is written in the Polish
1 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 95
language The Undivine Comedy is not national. There
is no mention, even indirectly, of Poland. There is no
indication of place except that to the last rampart of
the besieged nobles is given the name of an old fortress
of the heroic days of the Polish Republic. Were it not
for the nurse's invocation to " Our Lady of Czenstoc-
howa," and the typical characteristics of the servants
who are at once recognizable as Poles, whereas all the
other personages in the play are cosmopolitan, not Polish,
types, we should not know that the scene of The Un-
divine Comedy is laid in Poland. All Krasinski's later
work was spoken directly to his people, and through
them to the world. His earliest, the first that gave him
his rank among the great poets of his race, is spoken
to the world, and then to his nation.
In front of each of the four parts into which Kra-
sinski divides the play he places a short preliminary
prose poem, by way of introduction. The first is the
surest indication of the unyouthful despair which filled
Krasinski's heart at this time. He writes, says one of
his biographers, in the flower of his age a work of
genius unique of its kind in Europe; and his opening
is the antithesis to the rapture and sublime faith in
self of a young poet.
It is the bitterest curse on
poetry1.
There are stars around thy head [he addresses poetry]; the
waves of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rainbow
runs on the waves of the sea, and cleaves asunder the darkness.
What thou beholdest is thine. . . The heavens are thine. There
is nought equal to thy glory.
Thou playest to strange ears of unconceived delights. . .
Thou drawest forth tears. But thou thyself, what feelest thou?
What dost thou create? Through thee floweth a stream of
beauty, but thou art not beauty. Woe unto thee! The child
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 96 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that weeps on its nurse's bosom, the flower of the fields that
is unconscious of its own fragrance, have more merit before the
Lord than thou.
Whence hast thou arisen, empty shadow, that givest to man
to know the light, and knowest not the light thyself, hast not
seen it, shalt not see it? Who created thee in irony or wrath?
Who gave thee thy futile life, so false that thou canst feign an
angel's moment, ere thou wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent
thou goest to crawl and stifle in the slime? Thine and the
woman's is the same beginning1.
Yea, but thou dost suffer, albeit thy pain shall create
nought, shall avail nought. . . Thy despair and thy sighs sink to
the earth, and Satan gathers them and, rejoicing, adds them
to his lies and deceptions--and the Lord will one day deny
them, as they denied the Lord.
Not that I complain of thee, poetry, mother of beauty and
salvation. Only he is unhappy who, in worlds in womb, in
worlds that are to die, must remember or foresee thee: for
thou only destroyest those who have consecrated themselves
to thee, who have become the living voices of thy glory.
Blessed is he in whom thou hast dwelt, as God dwelt in
the world, unseen, unheard, mighty in each member, great, the
Lord, before whom creation humbles itself, and saith: "He is
here. " Such a one shall carry thee as a star on his brow, and
will not depart from thy love with a chaos of words. He will
love mankind, and come forth as a man among his brethren.
But he who keepeth thee not secretly in his heart, who be-
trayeth thee before the time and giveth thee forth as an empty
delight to men, upon his head thou shalt scatter a few flowers
and turn away, and he amuseth himself with withered flowers
? and weaveth a funeral wreath for himself through all his life.
His and the woman's is the same beginning.
If poetry, for art's sake, had once tempted Krasinski,
as, from his boyish letters to Reeve, we know that it
had done, it did so no more. He was himself a poet:
and he saw the danger, the false outlook on life and its
1 The meaning is that woman, a being of the earth, rises high only
to sink low. J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Lw<5w, 1912 (Polish). The aspersion Krasinski here casts upon women is
very unlike him, for his ideal of woman was a singularly high and spiritual
one. It illustrates again the pessimistic condition in which The Undivine
Comedy was written.
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? The Undivine Comedy 97
ruinous consequences, engendered by poetry taken as
the worship of form and the dramatization of emotion
and passion, without the soul's stern realities behind
them. "For him," to quote Mickiewicz, "poetry is not
an art, not an amusement. " It is:
a serious inspiration. . . True poetry, among the Greeks them-
selves, signified nothing else except action. What does the
Polish author ask? That the most initiated souls, the highest,
the strongest, those that communicate with the Divinity, should
reserve all their strength to act instead of speaking. . . He has
painted here the picture of poetical power, the power of a soul
which flings itself entirely into its imagination. . . and which
believes it possesses all things, but is lost because it uses this
gift of heaven for its own pleasure1.
This brings us straight to the conception of Henryk
and the first part of The Undivine Comedy.
Henryk is a poet who, setting out with some noble
aspirations, has consumed his life in poetic dreams and
worship of the imagination. He has toyed with his
emotions so long as a thing of art that, by the time the
drama opens, his heart is little more than a worn-out
husk. Genuine passion is dead: he poses, unaware that
he is posing. Believing he has at last found the woman
of his fancies, he decides to "descend to earthly mar-
riage. " On the eve of his wedding, an angel flying over
his house with the message, "Peace to men of good
will," utters the warning: "Blessed be he among crea-
tures who has a heart. He may still be saved," and pro-
mises Henryk salvation in his fulfilment of a husband's
and father's duties. At the same moment a chorus of evil
spirits make ready to capture the soul that will be an
easy prey, under the guises of poetic love, ambition,
and nature. The third of these Krasinski never worked
out.
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
G. 7
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? 98 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
The wedding feast takes place with high rejoicing.
The bride, half fainting with fatigue in the dance, but
lovely in her pallor, is gazed upon with rapture by her
poet husband.
"Oh, eternally, eternally thou shalt be my song," he tells
her; to which she:
"I will be thy faithful wife, as my mother told me, as my
heart tells me. "
She implores him to let her leave the dance, for she
is weary to death. No, he entreats her to remain, and
to go on dancing, so that he can stand and feast his
eyes on her beauty.
For a short time the husband lives more or less
contentedly. Then comes the inevitable reaction. His
old poetical longings seize upon him. Krasinski sym-
bolizes them by the figure of the evil spirit that, clothing
itself in the form of the ideal woman of Henryk's
dreams, appears to him at night while he is asleep.
Husband (waking up). Where am I? Ha! by my wife.
This is my wife. He gazes at his wife. I thought you were
my dream, and behold! after a long interval it has returned
and is different from you. You are good and agreeable, but
the other Oh, God, what do I see?
The Maiden. Thou hast betrayed me. She disappears.
Husband. Cursed be the moment when I married a woman,
when I forsook the beloved of my young years1.
The wife wakes, sees something amiss, and, sup-
posing her husband to be ill, entreats that he will take
this or that remedy.
Husband {starting up). I must have fresh air. Remain here.
For God's sake don't come with me.
He escapes to the moonlit garden. Loathing for
1 All through The Undivine Comedy, long after the wife has disappeared
from the scenes, it is always as the "Husband" that Henryk is introduced.
In like manner, Marya is always the " Wife. "
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? The Undivine Comedy
99
the domestic fetters that have taken the place of poetry
in his life fills his being. He abhors the thought of the
clinging, loving wife, in whom he can find no fault ex-
cept that the soul of a poet is wanting in her.
Since the day of my marriage I have slept the sleep of the
torpid, the sleep of a German shopkeeper by the side of a
German wife. I have gone about after relations, after doctors,
in shops; and because a child is going to be born to me I have
had to think about a nurse. Two o'clock strikes from the church
tower. Come to me, my old kingdom, subject to my thought.
Once the sound of the night bell was your signal. He walks
about and wrings his hands. God, is it Thou Who hast sanc-
tified the union of two bodies? Thou Who hast decreed that
nothing can part them, though their souls discard one another
and leave their bodies like two corpses beside each other?
Again thou art near me. Oh, my own, my own, take me
with thee.
Maiden. Wilt thou follow me in whatsoever day I come
for thee?
Husband. At each instant I am thine.
The colloquy is cut short by the sound of the window
being thrown up in Henryk's house, and the wife's
voice begging him to beware of the night <jold and to
come back.
By the next scene the child has been born. It lies
asleep in its cradle. Henryk reclines on a chair, his
head buried in his hands. Dry " Thank you's " fall from
his lips as his wife deluges him with the tiresome details
of her preparations for the christening feast. Krasin-
ski's whole depictment of this injured woman, sweet,
lovable, and weak of soul, has a truth and tender-
ness of touch that is remarkable in a youth of his age.
She is, indeed, the only sympathetic figure in the
drama: yet hers too is that same want of staying power
that is hurrying her class to their doom. She can make
no stand against the misery of her marriage save by
7--2
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? ioo The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the disordered imagination that destroys herself and
her child.
Caressing her baby, soothing her "little one, her
pretty one," to sleep, her husband's morose gloom as
he sits apart attracts her attention. She seats herself
at the piano. Her hands run vaguely over the keys.
She can bear her fears in silence no longer.
Wife. To-day, yesterday, ah! my God! and all the week
and now for three weeks, for a month, you have not spoken a
word to me--and everyone I see tells me I look ill.
Husband. On the contrary I think you look well.
Wife. It is all the same to you, for you don't look at me
any more, you turn away when I come in. Yesterday I went
to confession, and called to mind all my sins--and I could
find nothing that could have offended you.
Husband. You have not offended me.
Wife. My God! My God!
Husband. I feel I ought to love you.
Wife. You have given me the finishing stroke with that
one: "I ought. " Ah, it would be better to stand up and say:
"I do not love yt>u. " At least I would then know all--all.
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle. Do not
forsake him, and I will sacrifice myself to your anger. Love
my child--my child, Henryk. She kneels down.
Husband. Don't pay any attention to what I said. I often
suffer from bad moments--ennui.
Wife. I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him.
Husband. You and him too.
He kisses her; and as she throws her arms about
him a peal of thunder rolls through the room. Then
wild and strange music is heard; the demon maiden
appears, luring Henryk to follow her. Calling on the
name of Mary, the frenzied wife, clasping her child to
her breast, clings to her husband.
wicz, where I have given a translation of the scene in question.
2 Stanistaw Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski, quoted by Count Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski,
and by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 88 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
never know what the love of a woman really is; because, for
him, everything is himself. He loves his masterpieces ; but he
loves nothing else. That is why reality is poison to him. That
is why he can find nowhere any fulfilment of his desires, any
end to his dreams. Everything that is not himself disgusts him
and drives him to despair. . . So long as he is alone he is happy
. . . That is why a great artist is never either a good husband or
a good father. . . One pays dearly for having been admitted to
the secrets of the gods. One only drop fallen from on high on
your brow renders you incapable of living here below1.
In our dreams [writes the idealist, tormented by the eternal
quest], in those sublime conceptions which yet must often
seem ridiculous to the masses, we never feel the most simple
difficulties, our courage is ready to brave the thunderbolt of
heaven; but if we have to take but two steps, say a few words,
approach, in fact, earthly life in its daily occurrences, we sink
with fatigue. . . To dream is to be of another world, but it is not
to be ignorant or mad. There is only madness if we think we
can apply the laws of our dreams or of our synthesis to the
analysis of life down here; but everyone is obliged to fall into
that mistake in the beginning. Some stay in it, and those are
feeble, incomplete beings, but full of gentle poetry and misfor-
tunes. Others, having recognized their youth, and not under-
standing this sublime warning of Heaven, imagine that all is
finished; that the true world is wretchedness and analysis.
These are also feeble and incomplete beings, who end by the
corruption of materialism. There are few men who have
strength enough to bear difficulties and obstacles, to decide to
enter practical life by facing it--the only one that leads to
some results--and to keep at the same time an unshakable
faith in the promises that were made to them in the day of
their delirium, when they caught a glimpse of luminous
spheres that they have never since been able to attain. They
only will do something3.
Konstanty Danielewicz, the friend who had stood
by Krasinski wTTeli~n~e~was~mobbed at the University,
joined Zygmunt in Warsaw, and went on with him to
Vienna. From this time Danielewicz, until his death,
was the devoted companion of Krasinski in his wan-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw, April 4, 1833.
2 Ibid. April 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
89
derings, and the one that the poet seems to have loved
best of all his friends. The misfortunes of his life were
a bond that knit Krasinski, with whom to pity was to
love, very closely to him. His philosophical intellect
strongly influenced, not altogether for the good, the
trend of Krasinski's mind during the years that they
lived together. He was a finished musician, though no
poet; and in his playing, Krasinski, who was passion-
ately fond of music, found inspiration for the struggle
of the spirits in The Undivine Comedy over Henryk's
soul1. His somewhat severe candour, and a certain want
of sympathy with Zygmunt's nervous and highly strung
temperament, never chilled their friendship, or dimin-
ished the enthusiastic admiration that Krasinski, an
idealist in his affections as elsewhere, lavished upon him.
Krasinski spent the summer in Vienna with Daniele-
wicz, undergoing medical treatment. He was in wretched
health, and the days went by for both youths in exter-
nal monotony, but, for Krasinski, in creation. He and
Danielewicz sat talking for hours of the social problems
which were at the time convulsing Europe: and it was
then that Krasinski, only able to write a few words at
a stretch in his blind condition, committed to paper The
Undivine Comedy. To antedate the words he wrote to
Gaszynski, with their foreshadowing of the promises of
Dawn, soon after The Undivine Comedy was completed:
I know that our civilization is nigh to death: I know that
the times are near when new crimes will come to punish the
old, and themselves be condemned in the sight of God--but
I know that they will create nothing, will build nothing. They
will pass like the horse of Attila, and, after them, silence. Then
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish). See also Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw,
April 9, 1833.
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? 90
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
only, that which neither you nor anyone knows or understands
will come upon us, rise from the chaos, and build the new
world from the Divine Will, from the predestiny of the human
race; but then both your and my bones shall be somewhere
dust1.
In the October of 1833 Krasinski published under
false initials his Agay Han.
He had begun this story in Geneva. The Tartar
page, Agay Han, is in love with Maryna, the widow
of the false Demetrius. After her husband's death,
Maryna has taken refuge in a castle, where the Mus-
covite boyars capture her, and cast her into prison.
She is rescued by the page; but she gives her hand to
Zarucki, who had defended the castle before it fell.
Panting for revenge, Agay Han follows them with
Russian troops, slays the husband, and drowns both
Maryna and himself.
This, the last work of Krasinski's immaturity, lacks
interest. Begun when the author's nerves had gone to
pieces during his sufferings in Geneva2, the style of the
first part is weak and over coloured. Before the story
ends the errors of manner are pruned away, and after
the earlier chapters the rest of the work, says Dr Kal-
lenbach, shows a decided step forward in the poet's
powers3. There is, however, so great a gulf between
Agay Han and its successor--the masterpiece of
matured genius which as The Undivine Comedy will live
with the Polish language--that it is hard to realize
they were written, and with no intermediate degrees,
by the same hand.
In the autumn Krasinski wandered, still with
1 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Rome, Jan. 17, 1834.
s J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 91
Danielewicz, by slow stages from Vienna through Italy,
till he reached Rome. We find this journey with its
memories of Krasinski's dead companion in the Un-
finished Poem. The Undivine Comedy was finished
during the halt at Venice. In a letter written from
Rome to Reeve, between whom and Krasinski some
cause of coolness had arisen which had put an end to
their correspondence for several months, Zygmunt
details the plot of the play. To Gaszynski he wrote
telling him that he was sending him the manuscript, to
which he first gave the name The Husband, charging
him by everything that was holy to guard the secret
of the authorship, to get it published in Paris if possible, 1
and to accept as a friend's gift whatever financial gains
came of it. But for some reason Krasinski changed
his mind, and left the manuscript alone. More than a
year after he had told Gaszynski that the work was
ready, he wrote, speaking darkly for fear of unwar-
ranted eyes discovering his identity:
If you should find in Paris a recently published work, The
Undivine Comedy, tell me your opinion of it. . . Then I also will
give you my remarks and observations1.
But psychologically The Undivine Comedy belongs
to the year in which Krasinski wrote it. Therefore we
have now reached that chapter of the poet's life.
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, March 29, 1835.
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? CHAPTER V
THE UN DIVINE COMEDY: THE
DOMESTIC DRAMA
The Undivine Comedy is the drama of a perishing world.
It was written little more than forty years after the
French Revolution, at a time of widespread social up-
heaval and universal unrest. A Polish boy of twenty-
one voiced the problems and apprehensions which are
still ours with the penetration of genius that places The
Undivine Comedy amongst the masterpieces of the
world's literature.
The Undivine Comedy is written in prose, the finest
that ever came from Krasinski's pen. It stands alone
among his creations. The gravity and restraint of the
style, its strange terseness, unique in the work of one
whose tendency is to over elaboration, have been in
part ascribed to the conditions under which Krasinski
wrote the play, forced as he was by practical blindness
to concentrate much into brief phrases1. We never,
says Mickiewicz, see the dramatis personae full figure.
The situations and characters are not developed: they
are only indicated2. Yet such is the strength of the
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmuni Krasinski.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. Paris, 1849. Vols. IV and V, the
former of which contains the fine analysis of The Undivine Comedy, have
been republished in one volume by the Musee Adam Mickiewicz, Paris,
1914.
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? The Undivine Comedy
93
few strokes with which Krasinski draws them that they
stand out sharp, living. The nurse speaks once: and in
her one cry over the blind child the Polish peasant, with
her simplicity, her piety, her devotion to her nursling, is
in the flesh before us1. To the godfather falls a part that
does not fill a page; but how well we know him and
his stupid, pompous complacency! The whole story of
the wife, who has nothing except the limitations of a
woman's heart to pit against the restless egoism of
a poetic genius, is played out in scarcely half a dozen
short scenes, as remarkable for their power and un-
swerving truth to human nature as for their reserve.
The atmosphere of the play is profoundly pessi-
mistic. Its gloom is unrelieved. The domestic tragedy,
the ruin of a wife and son, is the theme of the first part:
the universal tragedy, where the war of class against
class, past against future, ends also in ruin, but the
ruin of all the world, is the theme of the second.
Although by birth and tradition, and, to a certain extent,
conviction, which was however not nearly so pronounced
in his youth as later, Krasinski belonged to the aristo-
cratic party; yet in The Undivine Comedy he gauges
each class alike with icy impartiality, or, to speak more
correctly, with a severity that effectually withholds the
reader's sympathy from either. His aristocrats are
wholly without moral fibre: decadent, flabby inheritors
of a doomed cause. Their opponents, revenging them-
selves for years of oppression, . are not demons--the
colour of the drama is not lurid or stained with crim-
son, but grey: they are merely brutalized human beings
taking the heads of their tyrants in cold blood. The
champion of the past, or of the aristocracy, plays his
1 J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? 94 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
part without conviction out of a heart no longer capable
of nursing any spark of the living fire. Faith and en-
thusiasm are wanting likewise to his antagonist, the
leader of the revolution. In Iridion we have the mar-
tyrs of the catacombs, the lovely lineaments of Cor-
nelia, grandeur in the figure of Iridion himself, who,
although he sinned, sinned because he had "loved
Greece. " But in The Undivine Comedy there is no one
even approaching heroic proportions: no one for whom
we can feel a spark of whole-hearted admiration. The
fact that these morally negative men and women are
not abnormal, but human characters whom we have
met in our daily lives, is among the most painfully
true aspects of The Undivine Comedy.
For the sadness of The Undivine Comedy is not that
of a young pessimism. There is no touch of youth about
the drama. It is the work of one who had passed
through a rude shock, a bitter awakening. The tragedy
of Poland was too recent, his own wounds were too
fresh, for the Anonymous Poet to be able as yet to
speak the language of Dawn and Resurrecturis. As
Dr Kallenbach observes, The Undivine Comedy, with
its brooding melancholy, its presages of woe, was one
of the first fruits of the disastrous Polish Rising1.
"I know nothing more painful than all this drama," said
Mickiewicz, speaking in Paris to his audience of Poles and
Frenchmen, who were all ignorant as to who the author of The
Undivine Comedy might be. "The poet who composed it could
only have been born in the bosom of a nation that has suffered
for centuries. Grief is not exhaled here in pompous phrases.
I have no tirades to quote. But each word is a drop drawn
from one great mass of suffering and painV
Beyond the fact that it is written in the Polish
1 J. Kallenbach, op. tit.
2 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 95
language The Undivine Comedy is not national. There
is no mention, even indirectly, of Poland. There is no
indication of place except that to the last rampart of
the besieged nobles is given the name of an old fortress
of the heroic days of the Polish Republic. Were it not
for the nurse's invocation to " Our Lady of Czenstoc-
howa," and the typical characteristics of the servants
who are at once recognizable as Poles, whereas all the
other personages in the play are cosmopolitan, not Polish,
types, we should not know that the scene of The Un-
divine Comedy is laid in Poland. All Krasinski's later
work was spoken directly to his people, and through
them to the world. His earliest, the first that gave him
his rank among the great poets of his race, is spoken
to the world, and then to his nation.
In front of each of the four parts into which Kra-
sinski divides the play he places a short preliminary
prose poem, by way of introduction. The first is the
surest indication of the unyouthful despair which filled
Krasinski's heart at this time. He writes, says one of
his biographers, in the flower of his age a work of
genius unique of its kind in Europe; and his opening
is the antithesis to the rapture and sublime faith in
self of a young poet.
It is the bitterest curse on
poetry1.
There are stars around thy head [he addresses poetry]; the
waves of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rainbow
runs on the waves of the sea, and cleaves asunder the darkness.
What thou beholdest is thine. . . The heavens are thine. There
is nought equal to thy glory.
Thou playest to strange ears of unconceived delights. . .
Thou drawest forth tears. But thou thyself, what feelest thou?
What dost thou create? Through thee floweth a stream of
beauty, but thou art not beauty. Woe unto thee! The child
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 96 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that weeps on its nurse's bosom, the flower of the fields that
is unconscious of its own fragrance, have more merit before the
Lord than thou.
Whence hast thou arisen, empty shadow, that givest to man
to know the light, and knowest not the light thyself, hast not
seen it, shalt not see it? Who created thee in irony or wrath?
Who gave thee thy futile life, so false that thou canst feign an
angel's moment, ere thou wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent
thou goest to crawl and stifle in the slime? Thine and the
woman's is the same beginning1.
Yea, but thou dost suffer, albeit thy pain shall create
nought, shall avail nought. . . Thy despair and thy sighs sink to
the earth, and Satan gathers them and, rejoicing, adds them
to his lies and deceptions--and the Lord will one day deny
them, as they denied the Lord.
Not that I complain of thee, poetry, mother of beauty and
salvation. Only he is unhappy who, in worlds in womb, in
worlds that are to die, must remember or foresee thee: for
thou only destroyest those who have consecrated themselves
to thee, who have become the living voices of thy glory.
Blessed is he in whom thou hast dwelt, as God dwelt in
the world, unseen, unheard, mighty in each member, great, the
Lord, before whom creation humbles itself, and saith: "He is
here. " Such a one shall carry thee as a star on his brow, and
will not depart from thy love with a chaos of words. He will
love mankind, and come forth as a man among his brethren.
But he who keepeth thee not secretly in his heart, who be-
trayeth thee before the time and giveth thee forth as an empty
delight to men, upon his head thou shalt scatter a few flowers
and turn away, and he amuseth himself with withered flowers
? and weaveth a funeral wreath for himself through all his life.
His and the woman's is the same beginning.
If poetry, for art's sake, had once tempted Krasinski,
as, from his boyish letters to Reeve, we know that it
had done, it did so no more. He was himself a poet:
and he saw the danger, the false outlook on life and its
1 The meaning is that woman, a being of the earth, rises high only
to sink low. J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
Lw<5w, 1912 (Polish). The aspersion Krasinski here casts upon women is
very unlike him, for his ideal of woman was a singularly high and spiritual
one. It illustrates again the pessimistic condition in which The Undivine
Comedy was written.
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? The Undivine Comedy 97
ruinous consequences, engendered by poetry taken as
the worship of form and the dramatization of emotion
and passion, without the soul's stern realities behind
them. "For him," to quote Mickiewicz, "poetry is not
an art, not an amusement. " It is:
a serious inspiration. . . True poetry, among the Greeks them-
selves, signified nothing else except action. What does the
Polish author ask? That the most initiated souls, the highest,
the strongest, those that communicate with the Divinity, should
reserve all their strength to act instead of speaking. . . He has
painted here the picture of poetical power, the power of a soul
which flings itself entirely into its imagination. . . and which
believes it possesses all things, but is lost because it uses this
gift of heaven for its own pleasure1.
This brings us straight to the conception of Henryk
and the first part of The Undivine Comedy.
Henryk is a poet who, setting out with some noble
aspirations, has consumed his life in poetic dreams and
worship of the imagination. He has toyed with his
emotions so long as a thing of art that, by the time the
drama opens, his heart is little more than a worn-out
husk. Genuine passion is dead: he poses, unaware that
he is posing. Believing he has at last found the woman
of his fancies, he decides to "descend to earthly mar-
riage. " On the eve of his wedding, an angel flying over
his house with the message, "Peace to men of good
will," utters the warning: "Blessed be he among crea-
tures who has a heart. He may still be saved," and pro-
mises Henryk salvation in his fulfilment of a husband's
and father's duties. At the same moment a chorus of evil
spirits make ready to capture the soul that will be an
easy prey, under the guises of poetic love, ambition,
and nature. The third of these Krasinski never worked
out.
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
G. 7
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? 98 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
The wedding feast takes place with high rejoicing.
The bride, half fainting with fatigue in the dance, but
lovely in her pallor, is gazed upon with rapture by her
poet husband.
"Oh, eternally, eternally thou shalt be my song," he tells
her; to which she:
"I will be thy faithful wife, as my mother told me, as my
heart tells me. "
She implores him to let her leave the dance, for she
is weary to death. No, he entreats her to remain, and
to go on dancing, so that he can stand and feast his
eyes on her beauty.
For a short time the husband lives more or less
contentedly. Then comes the inevitable reaction. His
old poetical longings seize upon him. Krasinski sym-
bolizes them by the figure of the evil spirit that, clothing
itself in the form of the ideal woman of Henryk's
dreams, appears to him at night while he is asleep.
Husband (waking up). Where am I? Ha! by my wife.
This is my wife. He gazes at his wife. I thought you were
my dream, and behold! after a long interval it has returned
and is different from you. You are good and agreeable, but
the other Oh, God, what do I see?
The Maiden. Thou hast betrayed me. She disappears.
Husband. Cursed be the moment when I married a woman,
when I forsook the beloved of my young years1.
The wife wakes, sees something amiss, and, sup-
posing her husband to be ill, entreats that he will take
this or that remedy.
Husband {starting up). I must have fresh air. Remain here.
For God's sake don't come with me.
He escapes to the moonlit garden. Loathing for
1 All through The Undivine Comedy, long after the wife has disappeared
from the scenes, it is always as the "Husband" that Henryk is introduced.
In like manner, Marya is always the " Wife. "
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? The Undivine Comedy
99
the domestic fetters that have taken the place of poetry
in his life fills his being. He abhors the thought of the
clinging, loving wife, in whom he can find no fault ex-
cept that the soul of a poet is wanting in her.
Since the day of my marriage I have slept the sleep of the
torpid, the sleep of a German shopkeeper by the side of a
German wife. I have gone about after relations, after doctors,
in shops; and because a child is going to be born to me I have
had to think about a nurse. Two o'clock strikes from the church
tower. Come to me, my old kingdom, subject to my thought.
Once the sound of the night bell was your signal. He walks
about and wrings his hands. God, is it Thou Who hast sanc-
tified the union of two bodies? Thou Who hast decreed that
nothing can part them, though their souls discard one another
and leave their bodies like two corpses beside each other?
Again thou art near me. Oh, my own, my own, take me
with thee.
Maiden. Wilt thou follow me in whatsoever day I come
for thee?
Husband. At each instant I am thine.
The colloquy is cut short by the sound of the window
being thrown up in Henryk's house, and the wife's
voice begging him to beware of the night <jold and to
come back.
By the next scene the child has been born. It lies
asleep in its cradle. Henryk reclines on a chair, his
head buried in his hands. Dry " Thank you's " fall from
his lips as his wife deluges him with the tiresome details
of her preparations for the christening feast. Krasin-
ski's whole depictment of this injured woman, sweet,
lovable, and weak of soul, has a truth and tender-
ness of touch that is remarkable in a youth of his age.
She is, indeed, the only sympathetic figure in the
drama: yet hers too is that same want of staying power
that is hurrying her class to their doom. She can make
no stand against the misery of her marriage save by
7--2
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? ioo The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the disordered imagination that destroys herself and
her child.
Caressing her baby, soothing her "little one, her
pretty one," to sleep, her husband's morose gloom as
he sits apart attracts her attention. She seats herself
at the piano. Her hands run vaguely over the keys.
She can bear her fears in silence no longer.
Wife. To-day, yesterday, ah! my God! and all the week
and now for three weeks, for a month, you have not spoken a
word to me--and everyone I see tells me I look ill.
Husband. On the contrary I think you look well.
Wife. It is all the same to you, for you don't look at me
any more, you turn away when I come in. Yesterday I went
to confession, and called to mind all my sins--and I could
find nothing that could have offended you.
Husband. You have not offended me.
Wife. My God! My God!
Husband. I feel I ought to love you.
Wife. You have given me the finishing stroke with that
one: "I ought. " Ah, it would be better to stand up and say:
"I do not love yt>u. " At least I would then know all--all.
She starts up and takes the child from the cradle. Do not
forsake him, and I will sacrifice myself to your anger. Love
my child--my child, Henryk. She kneels down.
Husband. Don't pay any attention to what I said. I often
suffer from bad moments--ennui.
Wife. I ask you for only one word, only one promise.
Say that you will always love him.
Husband. You and him too.
He kisses her; and as she throws her arms about
him a peal of thunder rolls through the room. Then
wild and strange music is heard; the demon maiden
appears, luring Henryk to follow her. Calling on the
name of Mary, the frenzied wife, clasping her child to
her breast, clings to her husband.
