No More Learning

A native country no longer plays any part. Material
happiness is everything. Those who possess it desire peace;
those who have it not desire war to acquire it. . . So I believe
in a vast desolation. Everything must crumble into ruins. . .
and then only I hope for regeneration, but not before.
He adds he is not far from the conviction, which
became his national faith, that his nation shall bring
1 Given by J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 74 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
new life when there "is nothing left in Europe except
silence and ruins1. "
During his solitary rambles, Krasinski continually-
pondered over these matters. One day, entering a
wretched inn near Geneva to clean his pipe, he talked
there to two peasant girls of the workmen's riots then
going on in Lyons. He told Reeve the profound im-
pression made upon him by the class hatred of one
girl, driven to rage by hunger, and by the terror of the
other, a gentle and timid soul, at the prospect of the
bloodshed that must come. This occurrence strongly
influenced certain scenes of The Undivine Comedy.
Now begins with sad reiteration Krasinski's apolo-
gies for breaking off abruptly in his letters: these he
will repeat all his life. The pain in his eyes will not
let him write, he says; or he is nearly blind. Reeve
joined him in the February of 1832; but the joy of their
meeting was soon shattered by Wincenty Krasinski's
summons to his son to join him in Poland. "God only
knows what may happen"," wrote Reeve to his mother
in well founded apprehension: for the position was
fraught with peril to a youth like Krasinski, devoured
with patriotism, incapable, as he had written months
ago to Reeve, of bearing in silence the spectacle that
awaited him of his nation ground down under the fate
of the conquered. "I cannot dissimulate," he had said,
"and from Warsaw the road is all ready, all mac-
adamized to Siberia3. " Although he wrote to his father
what a son was obliged to write, that he longed to see
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Dec. 1, 1831.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Geneva, Oct. 7 (wrongly
dated for November, Dr Kallenbach points out), 1831.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 75
him and the home of his childhood, he told him frankly
that when outside the doors of his country house only
pain awaited him, and that he shuddered at the pros-
pect of beholding the misery which had overwhelmed
Poland. The real confidants of his heart, Reeve and
Gaszynski, knew that the thought of his return to his
country was agony which, were it not for his father's
command, he would have refused to face1. Gaszynski
especially must have understood, without the words that
Zygmunt could not bring himself to utter, what life in
Poland would henceforth mean to the son of Wincenty
Krasinski.
Gaszynski now re-enters Zygmunt's life, never
again to leave it. The two had been completely cut off
from each other by the Rising: Krasinski had in vain
endeavoured to find out through his father what had
become of his old schoolfellow. Exiled from Poland,
Gaszynski joined the Polish emigration in Paris; and
in the spring of 1832 was at last able to communicate
with Krasinski. When Zygmunt saw once more his
friend's familiar handwriting, he wrote back:
It is long since I have shed one tear. I believed that their
source had dried within me, for my brain is long since parched;
but to-day I wept when I received your letter, when I read the
writing of a friend.
That friend, as Krasinski reminds him, had been
his defender in the University scene. He had shared
with him the sports and studies of their boyhood, gone,
Zygmunt mournfully asks, whither?
Then, sadly and tersely, so tersely that Dr Kallen-
bach ascribes this unusual restraint to the state of the
1 See the letter to Reeve above quoted, where Krasinski states plainly
that he will not go back to Warsaw, even if his father returns there.
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? 76 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
writer's eyesight, Zygmunt gives his friend the account
of his year and a half of silence.
If you hear them calumniate me, do not defend me, but
think: "It is a lie. " You know me. Know me still. I have lived
out bitter moments. As I unhappily began life, so it continues
still in that same fashion. . . All this time I have been driven
mad, I suffered to extremity, I sickened again and again. I
used every means to reach you [to fight with Gaszynski in the
war], but obstacles stronger than my strength closed the way
to me. . . In the beginning I spent the days and nights in fever,
later in madness. . . In two months I must return where fetters
clank, "to the land of graves and crosses. " Siberia awaits me.
I shall find compatriots there.
Now tell me, Konstanty, what do you think of doing?
Do you need anything? Money? I have not got much, but
what I have is at your disposal1.
The generosity with which Krasinski gave financial
assistance to his brother-Poles, whether friends of his
or no, was always a marked feature in his character.
Later in his manhood, when in command of great wealth,
he had but to suspect that a Polish poet or some other
Polish exile was in need, and, even if the relations be-
tween himself and the man in question were not cordial,
he at once sent help. He always handed over these
sums of money anonymously, generally through the
intermedium of one of his friends. Not only his own
delicacy of feeling, but the peculiar difficulty of his
position among his fellow-countrymen, impelled him to
the same unbroken secrecy in his contributions to either
private or national causes that ruled over every other
department of his life2.
The conviction of which he speaks in the above
letter, and of which he had often written to Reeve, that
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 9, 1832.
2 Preface to Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Stanistaw Matachowski,
Cracow, 1885 (Polish).
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? The Sowing of the Seed 77
every journey of his to Poland meant one longer still,
and for ever, to the mines, now haunted Krasinski's
mind. The fear of Siberia, where, should his authorship
have been discovered, he would in all probability have
been sent, became one of the nightmares of his life.
Every time he set out for his country, he bade farewell
to his friends as one on the eve of an eternal parting.
"I have changed much, Konstanty," wrote Krasin-
ski again to the friend who had last known him as an
ambitious, wayward boy. "I have despaired of happi-
ness. " Summarizing in a few words the ideals of
greatness he had learnt in suffering and his loss of love
and glory, he tells Gaszynski who, in the past, had
been his literary sponsor:
I have written a great many things this year, all stamped
with fever and despair ; but now the time is coming to betake
myself to the poetry of deeds. . . I have not sufficient strength
of soul to become a Cooper spy; but I will be what God created
me, a good Pole, always and everywhere.
"I am half blind, I scarcely see my letters " : but he
scrawls a few more words of deep thankfulness that
Gaszynski still loved him and had not misjudged him1.
A few days later he wrote with the same difficulty,
repeating to Gaszynski what was now his faxed idea.
Do not be so carried away by hope in happiness and faith
in success. A great work is never accomplished in a short time.
Thousands of sufferings are needed to save a nation. . . There is
nothing good, nothing noble in this world without long pain,
without long toils.
"Konstanty, write often to me," he adds in a transport of pain,
hinting at what he would not say openly of the meeting be-
tween him and his father, and his future position in his country.
"Oh! if you knew what I have suffered, what I suffer, what is
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 17, 1832.
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? 78 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the fate that is awaiting me, what weariness, what difficulties;
but I trust in God that the day will come when you will know
that my love for Poland did not end in words1. "
His mournful anticipations preyed upon his mind
and body with such injury to his eyesight that the doc-
tors cut him off from his two chief solaces, reading and
writing.
"You are happy," he tells Gaszynski in his letter of April 2nd,
"to have escaped the sight to which I must hasten back ;. . . you
will not gaze on the tears and execrations of the vanquished.
To one used to live a European life it will be terrible to return
again. . . to dissimulation, to the concealment of one's thoughts.
"If it is possible to write anything in Poland, I will write.
I feel the source throbbing in me, and I could inundate the
hearts of my countrymen by many a wave of poetry, but
under the censure, but amidst constraints, I cannot write. The
poet must have freedom2. "
Yet the Anonymous Poet was inspired with Iridion
in Petersburg and with his first Psalms in the Warsaw
palace.
"God saved all the world by His own sufferings,"
he says a few days afterwards, returning again and
again with the reiteration of one sick at heart to the
only thought in which he could find comfort in his grief
for Poland.
We will save our country by our sufferings. It seems that
this is the eternal law, and that salvation cannot be without
suffering, without pain, without blood. And when yearning
falls on you, when sadness burdens you, when on a foreign soil
it befalls you to curse your fate and to sigh for Poland, think:
God also suffered for us! And that thought will reconcile you
with the world, not with that transient, little world which
passes away before our eyes, and each moment can sink from
beneath our feet, but that great, only world, embracing all the
order of creation, spirits, man and the Creator Himself. And
then you will feel that you are walking towards immortality,
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 22, 1832. 2 Ibid. April 2, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 79
that your aim is suffering and greatness on this earth, but on
the other side of the grave greatness and happiness.
But because I am preaching you a sermon, do not think
that I have reached that rest of which you speak. On the con-
trary, each day I sink deeper into rage and despair. . . I have
sought and I have not found, I have dreamed and have gained
nothing by my dreams1.
In May, with Reeve as his companion for part of
the way, Krasinski started for Poland. His father had
ordered him to present himself at Turin to Carlo Al-
berto, his cousin, at which, writes Reeve, "he is much
annoyed and I much amused. . . I shall grin on seeing
him return from an interview with the man who be-
trayed Santa Rosa and sought to hang Prandi and Co. 2"
Reeve, however, did not enjoy this spectacle, for the
interview failed to come off. In a condition near blind-
ness, Krasinski made the journey by slow stages, halting
at Venice for an unsuccessful treatment on his eyes.
He . parted with Reeve at Innsbruck. It was the
farewell of their youthful friendship3. They still corre-
sponded for a few years longer, with as great affection
as before--on Krasinski's side at all events : all Reeve's
letters from this time are missing, probably destroyed
by Krasinski for caution's sake--but with ever increas-
ing lapses into silence. They met each other again ; but
they were never more to each other what they had once
been. Propinquity had been the chief motive of their
intimacy in Krasinski's young loneliness; but the life
of Henry Reeve, the successful politician, the prosperous
man of affairs, and that of the Polish poet, working for
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
April 6, 1832.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 "I never lived in his intimacy again" : thus Reeve, op. cit.
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? 80 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
his nation in secrecy and pain, drifted too far apart for
the affection of their youth to be able to survive1. In
all likelihood, even before they said good-bye at Inns-
bruck, the months of mental torture that Zygmunt had
endured during the Rising had already morally parted
him from the young Englishman who had known no
struggle: for Krasinski, writing from Vienna to Reeve,
prophesied that the latter would end by falling into
materialism, and complained that he had become very
English2--which we regret was not intended as a com-
pliment.
For several weeks Krasinski remained in Vienna
under the oculist. Unable to read or go out until his
evening drive, he sat the whole day in a darkened room,
a prey to all his old griefs and harrowing anticipations.
On the eve of his entry into his country where, under
the iron rule of Nicholas I, all correspondence with the
exiles of the Rising must cease, Krasinski wrote his
farewells to Gaszynski, brief by reason of his suffering
eyes, begging him in the uncertainty whether they
might ever meet again never to doubt that he was his
friend and a true Pole.
He reached Warsaw in the August of 1832. He
had left it in 1829. He returned to find the Cossacks
and Russian police in the streets where three years ago
he had seen the Polish uniforms he would never see
there again: to be reminded at each step that the
Poland he had lived in as a boy was gone from him for
ever. He went on at once to his country home, where
his father awaited him. Reading between the lines of
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski. See also Dr Kallenbach's Preface
to Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski et de Henry Reeve.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Vienna, July, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
81
a short note in English which Krasinski wrote from War-
saw to Reeve, it is apparent that he looked forward with
dread to a meeting, the pain of which must have far
outweighed any joy it could have brought him. Upon
what passed between him and his father when they saw
each other again he kept absolute silence: only telling
Reeve of his father's tears and blessing when he em-
braced him, and of the affection that had prepared every
comfort and luxury for the son who had been long
absent.
Amelia Zatuska was also at Opinog6ra. Henrietta
Willan was by now little more than a memory for Kra-
sinski, and, with the impressionability of his nature, his
love for the woman who had fascinated him as a boy
re-awoke. He hung upon her music, and wrote his
usual style of fragments in poetical prose, addressed to
her. But he was only permitted to be a few weeks at
his home. His father intended to spend the winter in
Petersburg, and insisted on his son accompanying him.
Nothing could have been so ill judged as to expose a
half blind boy, whose nerves and health were shattered,
to the rigorous winter of the Russian capital, to the long
journey by carriage over the bad roads at so late a
season, and still more to the false and intolerable posi-
tion of residence under the shadow of Nicholas I, among
those to whom the misery of Poland was a triumph.
Whether Wincenty Krasinski, who from first to last
never succeeded in understanding his son's character,
decided upon this proceeding with the ambition of
securing for Zygmunt some post in the Russian govern-
ment1; or whether, as Count Tarnowski surmises, the
1 Stanistaw Maiachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski (Polish). Being privately printed, I have been unable
G. 6
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? 82 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
General had received a mandate from the Tsar, to dis-
obey which meant Siberia1, is a matter of conjecture.
It was one step further in the road that the Anonymous
Poet trod for his father's sake.
All Krasinski's letters to Reeve from the moment
that he crossed the frontiers are worded with great cau-
tion. With his correspondence opened by the Russian
police, he could say no word of any Polish matters, of
the things that most went to his heart. In a letter to
Reeve, sent after he had started for Petersburg, he
writes, with irony pointed to deceive those through
whose hands the words might pass, both a covert warn-
ing to the Englishman to be careful what he wrote to
him2 and his own vow to be ever faithful to Poland.
If you ask me "What shall you do there? " I will answer:
/ don't know [in English]. However, you know me, and you
know that I love eating, drinking, etc. , and that nothing in this
world can make me change my opinion on that point, nothing,
nothing3.
Krasinski spent five months in Petersburg, too ill
to leave his room. He passed his time between his bed
and walking restlessly about his luxurious apartment,
hung with green and silver tapestry, which looked out
on a courtyard and a sky heavy with snowclouds. His
solitude was only broken by the visits of his father who,
says he to Reeve, was "an angel" to him, and by the
occasional calls of the few uncongenial acquaintances he
had in the city. His eyes were on fire, and the doctors
doubted whether they could save them. He was obliged
to see the original, and in this instance quote Dr Kallenbach's reference.
J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Correspondence. Dr Kallenbach's note, Vol. II, p. io.
3 Ibid. Krasinski to Reeve. Knyszyn, Sept 22, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 83
to live with closed eyes, to dictate his letters, to employ
a secretary to read aloud. In later years he confided to
a Polish friend that these months in Petersburg were
the saddest of his life; practically blind as he was, in
acute fear of totally losing his eyesight, alone in his
singularly painful position, cut off from all to whom he
could unburden his mind1. But that dreary winter of
moral loneliness was filled for Krasinski with one ab-
sorbing occupation: thought.
"I have learned to think," he wrote to Reeve2. Ut-
terly cast upon the resources of his own soul, he not
only collected clearly his thoughts on the strife between
past and present that were to become The Undivine
Comedy, but it was during this winter that Iridion took
being. Dr Kallenbach points out the analogy between
the two great Polish poets, Adam Mickiewicz and the
Anonymous Poet, whose genius rose above the same
conditions of slavery, and who were, by those very con-
ditions, inspired to speak under a veil the words for
their nation that could not be said openly3.
"A few days ago," Krasinski told Reeve, " during the night
the idea of a poem came to me, a great idea. I leapt from
my bed, and cried: AncK io sonopittore*"
This idea was his Iridion. Three months later he
tells Reeve in a dictated letter that his Iridion Amphilo-
chides is " a Greek in Rome : et dulces moriens reminis-
citur Argos6. " More he dared not say.
That the motive of Iridion was already sufficiently
1 St. Maiachowski, op. cit. Quoted by Count Tarnowski and Dr
Kallenbach in their monographs on Krasinski.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. I, 1832.
3 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
4 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Oct. 22, 1832.
6 Ibid. Jan. 20, 1833.
6--2
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? 84 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
developed for the play to be begun proves what point
Krasinski had reached in the conflict between his
craving for revenge and what was to the young Pole,
watching his country's agony, the hardest word of Christ-
ianity. Three years more passed before Iridion was
finished: its creator wavered before he could attain to
his sublime conclusion at the foot of the cross in the
Coliseum. But the fact remains that it was in the heart
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction. As a son of the conquered race in the enemy's
city, Krasinski was in moral kinship with the Greek
Iridion, gazing on the triumph of Rome. He fought
his battle out in the silence and solitude of his room,
while, as a relief from the monotonous snows of the
northern capital, his memory returned to translucent
blue Italian skies, to the roses of the Palatine, the glowing
colours of classical Rome among which walks Iridion1.
While he was thus developing in Petersburg the
problem of Iridion he also reflected on those that, touch-
ing the innermost emotions of his heart less intimately,
were, as we see from his letters to Reeve, fast ripening
for expression in The Undivine Comedy.
Reeve had made a new friend in an Englishman,
who, as the man of the future, evolved into the Pan-
kracy of The Undivine Comedy. Krasinski mistrusted
him.
Henry! every man, if he be weak, finds his Mephistopheles
like Faust. [These words show how Krasinski's conception both
of the Mephistopheles in Iridion and of Pankracy was seething
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
85
in his brain. ] It begins with enthusiasm, it finishes with disgust
or despair. There is nothing to fear from a heart we love; but
the ascendancy of a strong head is a very different thing. For
some time we struggle, then we become a slave1.
There are two parts in man: thought and action [writes
the creator of Henryk] : one as noble as the other, and dividing
life turn and turn about between them. Those who never act
are called fakirs; those who never think and always act are
called machines; those who think and work are called men.
It is obvious that in this last class there are individuals in whom
the element of thought predominates, in others that of action.
But if there is to be greatness or beauty there must always be
a proper quantity of both one and the other2.
I know better than anyone there must be a future. I un-
derstand the triumphal procession of that future. . . I know that
we will all pass to dust, having admired nothing, loved nothing
real, hated much. And, if we do love something, it is only a
world of dreams, of emptiness: the past.
When I consider the matter as a philosopher, I see only
an admirable and eternal order; but when I consider the
matter as a man who has the heart of a man, the feelings of a
man, ties on this earth, I see only disorder. . . Then, when we
have perished, let them arrange the earth in their own way, as
they like; and here I think that a day will come when love
will again prevail. For God is justice and beauty, the universe
is harmonious, and I am immortal*.
Before Krasinski left Petersburg he told Reeve that
since he had last seen him he had thought so deeply
that the work of several years seemed to have taken
place within him.
God forgive me for having reached a conclusion degrading
to humanity. It is that the masses have nothing but appetite,
and never make use of reason; that man is everything, and
that by him all things are done, and that men are nothing.
Still the man is always obliged to sacrifice himself for men,
and never to sacrifice them for him. Even though he himself
be convinced that happiness is impossible on this earth, he
ought to believe in it for others and walk with all his strength
to that chimerical end4.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. 17, 1832.
2 Ibid. Nov. 21, 1832. 3 Ibid. Jan. 6, 1833.
* Ibid. Feb. 5, 1833.
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? 86 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Though Krasinski was barely twenty-one, by now
his youth seems far behind him. He reminds Reeve of
the "fabulous time of life" when they both dreamed
and hoped, and had faith in men.
Formerly we wanted to become poetical beings; to-day we
must become moral beings, live in the bosom of reality, that is
to say, sustain each moment a struggle that burns by slow fire,
a struggle which is waged between our ideas and facts, which
produces the modification of our ideas, the concessions that
our soul, formerly absolute and superb, is forced to make to
the world of matter, action, interest, etc. etc.
He sees in that very conflict poetry ; but the poetry of
duty done in darkness, of work unrewarded save by the
sentiment of personal dignity1. This is the language of
one who is no more young. There is in these letters of
Krasinski a growing pessimism. At this time he began
the study of German philosophy that for years contri-
buted to darken his spiritual outlook. In the first letter
he was free to write to Gaszynski after he had left Russia
he told him that he still wrote: "but not with a like
faith as of old. Where are all my faiths gone2? "
One significant incident cut across the manner of
Krasinski's life in Petersburg. He was presented by
his father to Nicholas I. He stood face to face with
the man at whose hand the Polish nation suffered a fate
that has made the history of Poland the tragedy of
modern Europe; whose treatment of the vanquished
was one of such pitiless cruelty that Mickiewicz could
find no greater blasphemy to place on the lips of his
Konrad, driven mad by the tears of his people, than
the taunt that God was no father to His creatures, but
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Jan. 25, 1833.
2 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Vienna, July 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 87
their Tsar1. Krasinski, being the son of a Pole who
had thrown in his lot with Russia, was received by the
Tsar with a graciousness that was in itself the bitterest
affront to a Polish heart, and offered a post at court or
in the diplomatic service. The danger of the moment,
when a refusal might have involved the gravest con-
sequences, was only averted by the condition of Zyg-
munt's health that won him the imperial permission to
leave Russia for a better climate.