No More Learning

Everything about this unhappy child is weak. Even
his religion, notes Klaczko, is not his mother's deep
piety. It partakes more of the nature of his father's
poetizing, a thin, sentimental stream from which he can
draw no strength either for himself or a battling world3.
His very end is pointless. He falls a useless sacrifice
to a random shot'.
He leads Henryk into the subterranean caverns of
the fortress.
Do you not hear their voices, do you not see their forms?
Husband. There is the silence of the grave, and the torch
lights but a few steps before us.
George. Ever nearer, ever clearer, they come from under
the narrow vaults.
Husband. In your madness is my curse. You are mad,
child: and you are destroying my strength at the moment I
most need it.
George. I see their pale forms assembling for the dreadful
judgment. The prisoner advances. He has wrung his hands.
Husband. Who is he?
George. Oh, father, father!
Choir. Because thou hast loved nought, because thou hast
worshipped nought but thyself, thou art damned--damned for
all eternity.
The eyes of the child then see the vision of Henryk
being tortured.
"I hear your groans," cries he, falling on his knees at his
father's feet. "Father, forgive me. In the middle of the night
my mother came to me and bade me "--He faints.
Husband. Only this was wanting. My own child has led
me to the threshold of hell. Marya! Inexorable spirit! There
begins the eternity of torments and of darkness. I must still
fight with men. Afterwards the eternal war.
1 J. Klaczko, Le Polte Anonyme de la Pologne. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.
G.
9
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? 130 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
He leaves the vaults, while the spirit voices wail
after him:
Because thou hast loved nought, worshipped nought save
thyself, thou art damned--damned for all eternity.
The starving inhabitants of the besieged fortress
throng round the leader, clamouring to him to make
terms. The godfather, who has no mind to face ex-
tremities, has taken upon himself to treat with the
revolutionaries.
All my life has been a true citizen's, and I do not heed your
reproaches, Henryk. If I have undertaken the office of envoy,
it is because I understand my century and know how to appre-
ciate its worth.
Turning to the crowd, the baron, the prince and the
rest of them who are all prepared to save their skins by
going over to Pankracy, he tells them: "The great man
who has sent me promises your lives on the condition
that you join him and acknowledge the tendency of the
age. "
"We do acknowledge it," they cry. Yet it wants
only a few words from Henryk, whose role is that of
the glorious champion who will die but not yield, and
the appearance of an armed band of his soldiers, and
once more the waverers are more or less with him again.
For the moment the enemy is driven off: but it is with
the last shots of the defenders. Henryk's servant comes
to tell him that there is no more powder, no more bullets.
"Then bring me my son," says Henryk, "that I may em-
brace him once again. "
The servant leads in the blind boy.
Come, son. Put your hand in mine. Touch my lips with
your forehead. Your mother's forehead was once as white and
soft.
George. I heard her voice to-day, and she said: "This
evening thou shalt be sitting with me. "
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? The Undivine Comedy 131
/
Husband. Did she so much as mention my name?
George. She said: "This evening I expect my son. "
Husband (aside). Will my strength fail me at the end of
the road? Oh, God, permit it not! For one moment of courage
Thou shalt have me as Thy prisoner for all eternity. (Aloud)
Oh, son, forgive me that I gave you life. You will forget me
among the angelic choirs. Oh, George, George, oh, my son!
A shot resounds, and George lies dead at his father's
feet. The father seizes his sword and, shouting to his
men, rushes into the hopeless combat. The enemy are
in the castle. Henryk's followers are slain: the remain-
ing defenders of the fortress fall on their knees before
the victor, whining for mercy. Pankracy's soldiers run
through the castle, looking for Henryk. Covered with
blood, he stands on the angle of the bastion that over-
hangs the precipice.
I see it all black, floating towards me in spaceless tracts
of darkness, my eternity without shores, without end, and in
its midst God as a sun that shines eternally--and lights nothing.
(He takes a step forward? ) They are running. They have seen
me.
And with the words: "Jesus, Mary ! "--on his lips
the romantic call to battle of his ancestors rather than
the last prayer of the departing soul--crying, " Poetry,
be thou cursed by me as I shall be cursed for all eter-
nity," with his arms flung out as the swimmer about to
take his plunge, he leaps into the abyss.
Pankracy is left apparently the conqueror of the field.
He sits in judgment in the castle court, condemning
to death each wretched survivor of the aristocrats as
they appear before him in chains, in a scene that is the
reflection of the revolutionary tribunals of the French
Revolution. He then leads Leonard to the bastions and,
standing on the spot where Henryk perished, points to
the world he has won.
9--2
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? 132 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Gaze on those vast tracts. I must people those deserts,
tunnel through those rocks, divide out land to each man.
Leonard. The god of liberty will give us strength.
Pankracy. Why do you speak of God? It is slippery here
from human blood. Whose blood is it? We are alone, and it
seems to me as if some third were here.
For now the hour of his defeat is upon him also.
He points to the mountains, and cries in terror:
See you there on high--on high?
Leonard. I see over the rugged mountain peak a drooping
cloud in which the rays of the sun are going out.
Pankracy. A terrible sign is flaming over it. Women and
children have babbled fables that He shall thus appear, but
not until the last day.
Leonard. Who?
Pankracy. Like a pillar of snow-white brilliance He stands
above the precipices. Both hands lean on a cross as an
avenger's on his sword. Of woven thunderbolts is His crown
of thorns. From the lightning of that look he must die who
lives. Lay your hands on my eyes. Smother my eyeballs with
your fists. Part me from that look which shatters me to dust.
Your hands are transparent as water--transparent as glass--
transparent as air. 1 see still.
Leonard. Lean on me.
Pankracy. Give me if only a crumb of darkness.
Leonard. Oh, my master!
Pankracy. Darkness--darkness!
Leonard. Hey, citizens! brothers! democrats! Help, help,
help!
Pankracy. Galilaee, vicisti! (He falls into Leonard's arms
and expires? )
So ends this powerful and painful drama--ruin and
failure are all that is left in a world whence every
known landmark has been swept away. Krasinski dis-
cerned no hope for the future in either of the two hostile
principles between which he saw mankind divided. He
beheld a truth greater than either, and above both1.
Therefore the leader of a cause that held no germ of life
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 133
in its bosom dies in a final act of despair. Therefore
the leader of the opposing cause, at the moment of a
triumph that could not endure because he had nothing
to give the human race in the place of what he had taken
from it, is struck down, witness to a power that had
conquered his. And yet the final, scathing apparition
of the Crucified, terrible to the eyes of the man who had
denied Him, casting a light more lurid than that of the
blood-red sunset over a ruined world, does not remove
that impression of chaos, of universal desolation upon
which The Undivine Comedy closes. Christ here appears
an image of terror: an avenger, not a saviour. Still the
fact that the drama ends with that last testimony to His
triumph holds the link that would otherwise be hard
to find between the Undivine Comedy and Krasinski's
subsequent work--Dawn, the Psalms of the Future,
Resurrecturis--where the weariness and pessimism of
the Anonymous Poet's first great masterpiece are un-
known.
"This poem," said Mickiewicz, "is the cry of des-
pair of a man of genius who recognizes the greatness,
the difficulty of social questions "; without being able
to solve them1. At the moment that Krasinski wrote
The Undivine Comedy socialistic dreams were widespread
among the Polish youth, who saw in some universal
social convulsion the only hope for their nation in the
terrible conditions under which she was then labouring.
Krasinski never shrank from boldly proclaiming what
he deemed a salutary truth, however unwelcome: and
thus in the midst of Utopian theories were heard the
warning accents of an Undivine Comedy*. Years after
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
1 J. Klaczko, Le Poite Anonyme de la Pologne.
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? 134 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
it came out, with the strange impersonality of one who
had spoken sinister prophecies because he was con-
strained to speak them, Krasinski in letters to friends
pointed to the European revolutions through which he
lived as the fulfilment of what he had foretold in his
youth1. Klaczko has finely said that The Undivine
Comedy is:
a farewell rather than a greetingaddressedby thepoettohumani-
tarian inspirations, a strong protest against the fatal illusion
of the age which believes it can regenerate humanity without
having first regenerated man, and establish universal right
without having first strengthened the individual in his duties3.
1 Krasinski seldom in his correspondence alludes to his works, and
when he does so it is almost exclusively under their moral and national
aspect. The Undivine is that one which he most often mentions. There
is a curious passage in one of his letters to Cieszkowski illustrating this
impartial outlook upon his Undivine Comedy. In 1848 he was startled
by hearing his little son repeating prophecies of great evil to befall France
that he told his father he had heard from God during the night. "It
reminded me," says Krasinski, "of the Undivine and George--and I went
away sad. " Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to August Cieszkowski.
Baden, Dec. 3, 1848. Cracow, 1912 (Polish).
2 J. Klaczko, op. cit. There is in English literature a feeble reflection
of The Undivine Comedy in Owen Meredith's Of vol. Lord Lytton read
a French rendering of Krasinski's drama, and made a species of transcrip-
tion from it into English.
The result is that while the plot and the
arrangement of the scenes remain more or less the same, the English play,
particularly in its utter loss of the stern conciseness that gives The Undivine
Comedy its strength, is so unlike the Polish original that it cannot be con-
sidered even in the nature of a rough translation.
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? CHAPTER VII
IRIDION
Krasinski spent the winter of 1833-34 'n Rome. He
had destroyed in Warsaw all that he had already written
of Iridion: but back in the Eternal City, where the
ruins of an empire spoke with eloquence to the Pole's
heart of the downfall of brute force, the figure of his
Greek, nursing implacable revenge under the eyes of
the Caesars, obsessedhim: his "Thought," as he always
called it.
"For a whole year it has given me no rest," he wrote to his
father from Rome. "Here it has appeared to me. Here I have
seen my Iridion, walking in the Forum; I do not create him
any longer, I only observe him. That man walks with me
through all the ruins1. "
He wrote thus in 1833: Dut i* was not until 1836
that Iridion was published. A disastrous passion robbed
its author of the power to finish the play. In the early
months of 1834 he met in Rome Joanna Bobrowa. She
was a married woman, five years his senior and the
mother of two children. His affection for Henrietta
Willan and Amelia Zatuska had been in the nature of
a schoolboy sentiment: but now he fell headlong into
the white heat of passion for her who, as he once told
his father, had first loved him because he was unhappy2.
Giving an account of himself to Reeve the summer
1 Given by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 136 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
after he had first known Mme Bobrowa, he tells him
how he had that spring felt a wild craving for life and
action from which his physical health debarred him,
and that he had found them in his love1.
At this time begins Krasinski's spiritual wavering.
We know from his introductory lines to Dawn that it
was the fate of his country that first shook his religious
faith: but his unlawful love contributed likewise to its
weakening. Both he and the woman who loved him
had too deep-seated a religious sense not to be torn by
bitter self-reproach. Krasinski's remorse and misery
increased with the lapse of time, especially after Mme
Bobrowa was compromised in the eyes of the world and
estranged from her husband. But at the outset it was
the impossibility of reconciling his passion for her
with the precepts of the Church to which he belonged,
and the fact that the tortures of conscience increased
both his, and in a still greater measure Mme Bobrowa's,
sufferings, that combined to turn him to a certain
extent against the faith in which he had been brought
up. Moreover, to justify the falsity of his own moral
position he was driven to warp those high spiritual
precepts in which he had once found strength.
"Physical pain," he writes to Reeve, "makes you return to
God. . . But moral pain repulses, separates, you from heaven. . .
You will be astonished, Henry, to hear the man speak thus
who formerly believed and hoped so much in God; but I have
travelled fast on a fatal road. Oh! if you know where there
is a ray of hope, a new dawn, a faith young and able to fill my
heart, tell me'! "
Yet Krasinski's complex character is a mass of
contradictions. Not long after he had expressed him-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Wiesbaden, Aug 25, 1834.
* Ibid. Rome, Nov. 12, 1834.
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? Iridion 137
self thus to Reeve, to whom earlier in the year he had
written that: "For five months," namely, since he first
loved Mme Bobrowa, " I have not said a single prayer:
and yet I feel no remorse, so strong in me was that
necessity for action which has driven me to love with
all my faculties, to look for salvation where others find
death1" ; he writes to Gaszynski:
What I do congratulate you on from my heart is that you
have returned to God. There is nothing else for man in the
world than to believe and love. . . Since some time I have grown
cold. My faith is not destroyed, but has slept3.
The history of Krasinski's love was retailed in its
fulness to neither Reeve nor Gaszynski3, but to another
Pole, Adam^Softan^ who, through the Radziwifts, was
related to Krasinski. Belonging to a family that had
distinguished itself for generations by its patriotism,
Sottan commanded a regiment during the Polish Rising,
and was driven into exile at its close. The Russian
government confiscated his estates, and took his five
children from him. His young sons--the youngest a
child of three years old--were carried off to Petersburg
to be brought up by the Russian state. His daughters
were placed in a convent of their own religion, where
the Russian authorities kept them under supervision.
Sottan's father, already parted from his son, died of
grief on the loss of his grandchildren. Sottan himself
* Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Wiesbaden, Aug. 25, 1834.
2 Letters to Gaszynski. Naples, March 29, 1835.
3 Krasinski's silence upon the subject in his correspondence with
Gaszynski may be accounted for by Dr Kallenbach's conjecture that
Gaszynski suppressed for publication all those passages relating to it;
for, as Krasinski chose to tell Reeve with whom his friendship was fast
waning part at least of what was filling his heart, it is very improbable that
Gaszynski, one of his dearest friends to the last, was not confided in far
more fully.
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? 138 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
passed his years in exile, bereft of his children, for-
bidden to hold any communication with them, racked
by anxiety for their fate1. His upright character, his
peculiarly sympathetic nature, no less than his sorrows,
gained for him Krasinski's undying affection. The
sufferings of those whom Krasinski loved were as his
own, their interests his. He spared no pains to use the
General's influence in gathering for his friend every scrap
of information that could be gleaned concerning the
sons, and to give the children in their turn news of
their father: and it was he who finally brought about
the restoration to Sottan of the only daughter who
survived. Krasinski's trust in this beloved friend was
unbounded. To him he confided without reserve all
that passage of his life which we have now reached.
Meeting Mme Bobrowa in the summer of 1835, after
the winter's absence: "perhaps," writes Krasinski to
Sottan, "you will be pleased to hear that he who loves
you has reached paradise, and writes to you from
paradise2. " Again to Sottan he wrote in a very different
strain a month later when, the affection between himself
and Mme Bobrowa having become the subject of
public comment, Krasinski compelled himself for the
sake of her good name to leave Ischl where she was
staying. .
I felt a sacred duty, the stern necessity of going away, so as
not to injure her honour. She entreated me to stay, because
above all things she loved. But it had to be: I left, cursing the
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Ibid. Those letters of Krasinski that concern Mme Bobrowa are
not printed in the published collection of the Soltan correspondence,
Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. 11. To Adam Sottan. Lw6w, 1883
(Polish). They are given in the first instance by Count Tarnowski in his
monograph and are quoted also by Dr Kallenbach.
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? Iridion
139
world and the base and wretched people who revenge themselves
on those who feel, because they themselves feel nothing. . . I left
her in despair: such, Adam, is the end of my paradise. I am
as one damned. I never loved before: I did not know what
love is. . . To-day I walk the scorched pavement of this town,
and I would fain lie down on it and die, such pain does each
moment without her cause me. If there were some faults, God
will forgive us. It is hard to struggle as much as she does, to
love and respect as much as I do1.
And a little later, while she was in Trieste, he in
Venice, he writes to Sottan in similar language, exe-
crating those who condemned the woman without
knowing or caring how she had fought against herself,
and acknowledging that he felt driven to suicide3. Then,
shortly before the moment of parting:
You have no idea of what I have suffered. How happy I
was likewise few could know. But it was that kind of happi-
ness which destroys rather than augments strength. From all
this has remained what is dearest to me, namely, the thought
that there is no nobler woman on earth. . . Ah! what is poisoning
my life is that she insists on returning to her house. Her
husband knows all. She herself wrote it to him. So she knows
what is awaiting her. But she considers it her duty to take
her children to her husband and to suffer. She sees in this a
species of expiation8. "
Count Tarnowski here notices that, culpable as both
had been, neither of these "suffering and struggling"
human beings was wanting in nobility. The woman
voluntarily chose her penalty. The man reverenced the
action which destroyed his own happiness4. The short-
lived rapture that Krasinski's love had brought him
was now over. Until the final break in 1838 it was to
be agony and remorse.
During this time Krasinski had written Iridion,
"which," as he told Reeve, "torn up three times, ten
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. * Ibid.
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? 140 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
times broken off either by my sufferings or by my
passions, for three years has not ceased to torture my
brain1. "
From Venice he went in the September of 1835 to
Vienna. While waiting there with Danielewicz to see
once more Mme Bobrowa on her way to her husband
in Poland, before the emotions of those farewell weeks
with her impeded him, aggravated as they were by the
false position in which he stood and by the remon-
strances of his friend, he finished the drama. Both
it and The Undivine Comedy, which latter was written
before he had known her, but published later, were
dedicated to Mme Bobrowa: and it is said that she is
the original of Cornelia in Iridion.
Iridion is the Anonymous Poet's first direct appeal
to his nation. We have seen how the thought of it
flashed across him when, mourning for his country's
defeat alone in Petersburg, he remembered Argos. It
matured through the years while he watched in bitter
grief the tragedy of Poland, and behind the gallows and
endless deportations to Siberia, behind the prohibition
to a Pole of all Polish possessions, saw the danger to
his country that he most dreaded: the moral degrada-
tion of hatred which such an oppression was calculated
to engender. This thought, intensified by Krasinski's
own intimate experience of the warring of the dictates
of vengeance against a higher law, could, as he had
himself expressed it, give him no rest until he sent it
forth as a warning to his people. But if it were to
reach Poland where Siberia was the penalty alike for
the authors of the national Polish writings and their
readers, it could only be told in some veiled form.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Florence, June 3, 1835.
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? Iridion
141
Krasinski therefore allegorized it under the figure of
the Greek, Iridion Amphilochides.
The keynote of the play is that the weapons of
hatred will turn against those who use them, how-
ever sacred their object, and that evil means can bring
nothing but destruction to the cause for which they are
employed. It is evident; from certain expressions in the
prologue that Krasinski began the drama with the
intention that the Greek who, to compass his end, has
ruined everything he touched shall be eternally ruined
himself. As the author closed the work he modified his
idea, and we have the noble conclusion, the first step
of the stairway that leads to the triumph and the
unearthly glory of Krasinski's next great national song:
Dawn.
In style Krasinski's second prose drama bears no
resemblance to his first. Not only are the terseness
and the reserve of The Undivine Comedy entirely absent
from Iridion: but whereas in The Undivine Comedy we
seem to move in an atmosphere of a heavy and op-
pressive greyness, there is the sensation throughout
Iridion of the blue skies of Rome, the glittering marbles
of the temples, the many-hued splendours of the
Imperial City.
Krasinski places his drama in the reign of Helio-
gabalus when the Roman world was profoundly de-
moralized, and the fall of the empire seemed not far
off. He saw, as we know, like elements of dissolution
in the society in which he lived: and thus the applica-
tion of his symbolized national thought to the present
is evident. He pointed, in a few words of introduction,
to the three systems which at that period of Rome's
history stood side by side: paganism, barren of life and
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? 142 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
overlaid by alien religions from the East; Christianity,
hidden and persecuted, but ever growing; and the
barbarians, gradually pressing on Italy like a blinded
and relentless force of nature. On these three elements
the drama of Iridion is built: and all three are to be
found represented in the character of Iridion himself;
Iridion the Greek, who bears the second name of
Sigurd from his Scandinavian mother, and who, to the
Christians, is Hieronimus1.
"The ancient world is now drawing nigh its end":
so the drama begins in a prologue of stately prose that
Count Tarnowski ranks among the masterpieces of the
Polish language2.
All that dwelt therein is rotting, is dissolving, is demented.
Amid the chaos I lift the song that is torn by violence from
my bosom.