No More Learning

It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the
patriotic character of the nineteenth century
Polish literature. Devotion to a native country
is one of the most strongly marked features of the
Polish nature. Moreover, the lives of Poland's
poets were, at the time of which we are speaking,
linked with the national cause in an exceptional
manner, difficult of realization by those whose lot
is cast in a land where tradition is the patriotism
of freedom. There was not one of the poets in
the great period of Polish literature whose daily
existence was not ravaged with the personal
afflictions that the public tragedy had brought
upon them. They were nearly without exception
living in exile, penury, loneliness, suspense.
Grinding poverty, domestic trouble, grief at his
absence from his Lithuanian forests, whitened
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J Mickiewicz's hair before his time. Slowacki,
parted for ever from an adored mother, wandered
from country to country, beholding in the ruins
of Greece the likeness of another land, his heart
wrung as he watched the sun set over the Mediter-
ranean by the sadness and the homesickness of
the Pole {'The Grave of Agamemnon. Hymn). The
one craving of Bohdan Zaleski, the poet of the
Ukraine, was that he might see again the steppes
that had nursed his childhood, if but to breathe
his last there; and he died far away from them
after half a century of exile. Gaszynski's prayers
met his mother's in their mutual loneliness on
the Christmas Eve which they could spend to-
gether no more (Constantine Gaszynski, To my
Mother on Christmas Eve). He lived to hear of her
murder by Russian soldiers at her door. From his
nineteenth year till his death at the age of forty-
seven, Krasinski bore a tragedy bitterer than exile,
on which his lips were sealed. The heart-sickness
of the wanderer, pining to return, runs in mourn-
ful undertones through the poetry of Poland,
especially in that of Mickiewicz and Bohdan
Zaleski; but it is a larger grief than individual
deprivation that gives its tragic accents to Polish
literature. Poland's national poetry must of
necessity be profoundly sad. " I and my country
are one," says Mickiewicz in the Ancestors. " My
name is Million, because I love millions and for
millions suffer torment. I look on my unhappy
land as a son upon his father broken on the wheel.
I feel the sufferings of the whole nation, as the
mother feels within her bosom the sufferings of
her child. " Or again, the charge laid upon Irydion,
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 41
the symbolization of Krasinski's national thought,
is: "Thou shalt see thy love transpierced,
dying; and the sorrows of thousands shall be
born in thy one heart. " ) These words of Poland's
two greatest poets may be taken as typical of the
vocation and the attitude of the leaders of her
literature. There is here no room for egoism. The
affliction of their country was to her poets as
their own, more than their own. Their poetry is
written in the tears of their nation. It is the cry
of an inconsolable distress, of a pain personal and
intimate as that of a son mourning for the dearest
of mothers, a lover for the beloved of his heart.
And yet, whatever its deep melancholy, there
is in Poland's patriotic and prophetic song neither
pessimism nor despair. Its hope is as eternal as
its grief; victorious over circumstance, however
adverse. The idealism, the immense vitality of the
Polish race by which it has preserved its life,
speak through the literature that is the direct
outcome of national calamity, whose themes are
built upon a nation's tragedy. Nor is this hope like
that figure familiar in English art of one clinging
to the last string of a broken lyre. It is rather a
radiant certainty, unjustified by a single outward
token, rising unshaken in the midst of disaster and
defeat, glowing with the mysticism which is the
inheritance of the Pole.
"On the third day," writes Mickiewicz when
the downfall of the Rising was scarcely a year old,
"the soul will return to the body, and the nation
will rise from the dead and will free all the nations
of Europe from slavery. And two days have already
passed: one day passed with the first taking of
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POLAND
Warsaw,* and the second day passed with the
second taking of Warsaw,! and the third day will
arrive, but will not pass away. And as with the
resurrection of Christ sacrifices of blood ceased
on the whole earth, so with the resurrection of
the Polish nation wars will cease in Christen-
dom" {Book of the Polish Nation). ' i
"But the day will rise--the day of victory
rises," sang Bohdan Zaleski, as he wandered over
the Roman Campagna, with his heart in the
steppes of the Ukraine. "Oh, to our grand-
children our sorrows shall be told as fables. Christ
is already in our homes. Our youths, living and
strong, new reapers for the harvest, gather
strength by prayer. Blessed are they who believe.
The Lord God, a father in His bounty, visits
more mercifully those whom He orphans. For
them He will fulfil the promise of the Lamb. He
will shake free the earth from its pale, shadowed
husk till it grows green for them, it flowers, it is
the spring. The emissaries from over seas, the
birds of joy, shall make our fields rejoice with
their compelling song. And the heroic, mighty
nation's heart shall inspire the new poet of a
generation new. The burden of his song shall be:
Faith, Hope, and Love. And holy as the sowing
time, so shall the harvest be fruitful, for Poland
reigning queen o'er the Slavonic lands. " {Walk
beyond Rome).
And this resurrection, so dear to the hearts of
the national poets, did not depend merely or
even mainly on outward events. Naturally they,
as every son of Poland has always done, watched
* By Suvorov after the second partition. t In 1831.
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? THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 43
each political event in Europe, either with hope
or in the anguish of disillusion, for what it would
bring upon their nation. But to the great Polish
idealists of the nineteenth century the salvation
of their country lay behind what is visible to the
eye. Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrimage is
a rule of life given to his fellow Polish exiles;
and in that work there is no hint that Poland shall
be restored by the prepotency of earthly powers.
Rather her mission and her resurrection depend
on the fidelity of the Poles themselves to saving
principles. The peculiar spirituality of Krasinski's
teaching we shall consider in a later chapter.
Three generations have passed since the great
prophetical poetry of Poland closed with Kras-
inski's Resurrecturis. Yet Mickiewicz's Book of
the Pilgrimage was, as recently as the late Russo-
Japanese war, found on the bodies of the Polish
soldiers, as they lay dead on the battlefields in a
cause that was not theirs. There are not wanting
countrymen of Krasinski's living now who speak
of the day when they first read his work as the moral
crisis of their lives, who confess that it was upon
his tenets that they henceforth built the edifice
of their souls, and that in them they found their
defence against the temptations of surrounding
evil influences. * A modern political writer appeals
to the conclusion of Krasinski's Irydion as the
basis for an oppressed nation's conduct. f
''' To this day, the poetry of Mickiewicz, Kras-
inski, and the band of poets at whose head they
stand, is the ethical armoury of Poland, the
* M. Zdziechowski, Vision ofKrasinski. Cracow (Polish),
t E. Starczewski, LEurope et la Polognt. Paris, 1913.
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influence that is of paramount consideration in
any study of the mental attitude, whether past
or present, of the Polish nation. The Poles have
seen their country spoliated and desolate, them-
selves the. victims of overwhelming armies and
crushing laws. But their poets point steadily to
the truth that the idea will prevail against the
machinery of war or of autocracy. Resurrection
by spiritual strength, response to a high mission,
the ultimate triumph of moral over material
preponderance, is the inheritance that the poet-
patriots left to their people. Or rather, we will
not give the name of inheritance to what speaks
so directly to the innermost temper and conscious-
ness of the nation that it is indeed part and parcel
of the Polish soul. We might more correctly say
that the voice of the poets fortified what was
already there, raising it to a magnificent expression
which remains the truest index to the Polish
spirit and mind.
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? CHAPTER III
THE POET OF A NATION'S SUFFERING:
ADAM MICK1EWICZ
HE genius of Adam Mickiewicz has
raised him above all other Polish poets.
M. His fame has travelled the furthest
beyond his native land. But it is not merely as
the chief glory of their literature that his com-
patriots honour him with an affection and vener-
ation undimmed by time. He lives in the national
history as the man who devoted all his life--a life
sad as the annals of his country--to the cause of
Poland. The beauty of his moral character and
the charm of his personality have endeared him
almost as one alive and beloved to the generations
which have come after him. '
Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania in
1798. He lived the simple life of a wild and remote
countryside, where patriarchal customs and
ancient traditions still prevailed. As a boy he
wandered in forests, as old as time, whose remoter
recesses have never to this day been trodden by
human foot; about the marshes listening to the
cries of the geese and wild birds, gathering the
folk-lore of the peasants and the fishermen. When
a lad of fourteen, he witnessed the transports of
patriotic hope with which all Poland hailed in
1812 the march of Napoleon to Russia. He saw
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the return of the Grand Army, shattered, fugitive,
starving. All these things gave his future poetry
their strong distinctive colour.
From a home whose atmosphere was that of
simple and homely virtue, domestic affection and
ardent patriotism, Mickiewicz passed on to the
University of Wilna. Here it was that he began
the work for the young men of his country that
led him to imprisonment and exile, and from
which he may be said never to have desisted.
Together with his friend, Thomas Zan, he
founded the famous student societies of the
Philomathians for the moral improvement of the
Lithuanian young men. For them, after he had
left the university and become a schoolmaster at
Kowno, he wrote his first great poem, the Ode to
Youth. With a young and generous scorn of
egotism--he was but twenty-two when he wrote
it--he cries to his comrades:
"Without heart, without soul, those are the
nations of skeletons. Oh, youth, give me wings!
Let me soar above a dead world to the heavenly
home of enchantment, where enthusiasm works
miracles, strews flowers fresh and new, and clothes
hope in golden pictures.
"Oh, youth! Soar thou beyond the horizon's
bounds. Gaze down ! There, where eternal night
darkens the mighty plain submerged in the chaos
of sloth, there is the earth. See how on its stagnant
waters rises a reptile in its shell; rudder and ship
and pilot to itself, feeding upon the smaller reptiles'
lives. It rises, then it sinks into the deep. To it the
wave clings not, it clings not to the wave. And
then it bursts against the fragment of a rock.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 47
None knew it when alive, or knows its death. It
is the egotist. 1/
"Oh, youth! The nectar of life is only sweet
when it is shared with others. Heaven's joys
inebriate our hearts when they are bound
together by one golden thread.
"Together, youthful friends! The happiness
of each one is the aim of all, mighty in union, in
enthusiasm standing steady. Together, youthful
friends! And happy is he who, fallen in the midst
of his career, makes of his dead body a rung of the
ladder for others to attain the garden of glory.
Together, youthful friends! Although the road
be slippery and steep, and violence and weakness
defend the entrance, let violence hurl violence
back, and let us learn to conquer weakness in our
youth.
"He who a child in the cradle smote off the
Hydra's head, in youth shall slay the Centaurs,
shall tear its victim out of hell and ascend t<a^
heaven on laurels. Reach where the eye does not
reach. Break what the reason will not break. Oh,
youth! thy flight shall be as the strength of
eagles, as a thunder-bolt thine arm.
"Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle
the little circle of the earth with the chains that
bind us to each other. To one end let aim our
thoughts, and to one end let aim our souls. Leave
thy foundations far, thou earthy world! We will
force on thee new paths till, shaking off thy rotten
skin, thou shalt remember thy past verdant years.
"And as in the lands of chaos and of night, of
elements at war, at one ' Let it be,' spoken from
the power of God, the living world stood forth,
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the winds roared, the deep seas flowed, and stars
lit up the blue of heaven.
"So in the country of humanity there is still
deep night. The elements, men's passions, are
still at war. Lo, love shall breathe forth fire. From
chaos shall the spiritual world come forth. Youth
shall conceive it in its womb, and friendship bind
it in eternal bonds.
"The insensate ices and the dark prejudice
that hid the light are burst. Hail, dawn of liberty,
behind thee is the redeeming sun. "
The appeal to unity that may be found in these
lines is the poet's protest against the want of
harmony that had been politically fatal to his
country. * It is said that the Ode to Youth acted
as a call of the trumpet to the youth of Poland
when they rose in 1830.
From the time he wrote the Ode to Youth,
Mickiewicz continued in the then new road of
romantic poetry. He wrote ballads, the earlier
part of the Ancestors, and the epic Grazyna. All
these were founded on national themes7 The
ballads took life from Lithuanian legend. The
Ancestors has as its setting the half pagan and very
ancient Lithuanian feast of the dead, against
which Mickiewicz places his hopeless love for
Maryla Wereszczak. I shall return to this play.
In Grazyna, Mickiewicz tells the tale of the
princess who, rather than submit to a disgraceful
peace with the national enemy, dons her husband's
armour and leads the Lithuanians to battle. This
again played its part in the Rising of 1830, for
under its inspiration the girl heroine of the war,
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewtcx. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 49
Emilia Plater, fought and died as a soldier in its
ranks.
These were the productions of Mickiewicz's
early youth. What he next wrote came after he
had passed through the ordeal first of imprison-
ment, then of parting for life from his friends and
country. Novosiltzov's persecution of the student
societies swept Zan and Mickiewicz, with their
associates, into prison. The two former were
arrested on October 23rd, 1823. For six months
Mickiewicz and his comrades were incarcerated
in Wilna. Years afterwards, the poet described
the scenes of his prison, with the power alike of
genius and of fidelity to the actual events, in the
third part of the Ancestors: scenes which had
branded themselves indelibly on his mind. The
brotherhood stood firm, through floggings that to
some of their number resulted in death, through
solitary confinement in rank dungeons, through
the infliction of foul air and putrid food, through
the mental torture of harassing judicial inquisitions
where any word might send the speaker or his
friends to their end. Boys, many of them mere
children, were transported in chains to the mines:
others condemned to serve in the ranks of the
Russian army; exiled, like Zan, to Siberia or to
Russia. Mickiewicz himself, after waiting six
months in Wilna when released from prison, was
banished in the first instance to Petersburg.
In 1824 he left the country which he never
saw again, for which he pined with a homesick-
ness that thirty years of poverty and sorrow could
not quench. For the following five years he lived
in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa. His life was
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? POLAND
more or less that of a prisoner at large, watched
by Russian spies, dependent on the pleasure of
the police. Wherever he went, he gained the hearts
of all who knew him. Much as he detested the
system of the Russian autocracy, his soul was too
great and his nature too sweet to harbour any
rancour against a Russian as such. He was bound
by ties of intimate friendship with many a Russian,
and especially with the Liberals and poets. In
future years, from the land of his freedom he sent
them words of mournful remembrance, a farewell
to those who had perished for their ideals, an
impassioned rebuke to others who had abandoned
them {To my Russian Friends).
The galling conditions of his life in Russia
could not stifle his poetic genius, fretted though
it was by its bondage. The Crimean Sonnets, Farys,
which is a wild, glad cry of the desert, Konrad
Wallenrod, which latter placed Mickiewicz among
the great poets of Europe, were all written at this
time. . .
The Crimean Sonnets have for their motive a
journey that the poet took with the Government's
permission in the Crimea. Grief for a lost country
throws the shadow of sorrow even over these
delicate and exquisite vignettes of a southern,
semi-Oriental landscape, painted with the in-
timate knowledge and love of nature that is such
a charming feature in Mickiewicz's poetry. He is
in the steppes:
"Already the night falls fast. There is nowhere
a road or a knoll. I look to the skies and seek for a
guiding star. There, far off, glitters a cloud, there
rises the star of dawn. There the Dniester glitters.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 51
There the lights of Akerman shine. Halt! Ah,
how still! I hear the flight of the cranes which
even the eyes of the hawk reach not. I hear where
the butterfly rocks in the grass; where the snake,
with its slippery breast, lightly brushes a plant. "
And through that silence it is for a voice from
Lithuania that he strains his ear (The Steppes of
Akerman). Among the nightingales, his heart
turns to his native forests and marshes (The
Pilgrim). He stands by the grave of a Polish lady,
dead in Tartar slavery, and the stars that shine
above it point the road to Poland, whither she
gazed, as he gazes, in fruitless yearning. (Potocka's
Grave).
But the epic Konrad Wallenrod ranks above all
else that Mickiewicz wrote in Russia, not only as
a literary achievement, but still more by reason of
its moral significance that gave to Polish psycho-
logy the new word of Wallenrodism. Mickiewicz
published this poem into which he put an exile's
sorrow, the dumb rage of a Samson, in 1828. What
he could not say openly where discovery stood
for Siberia, he said under a tale of the struggle
between Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights.
The poem has thejtrong romantic flavour that
with Byron and Scott had come into vogue in
Mickiewicz's youth. Minstrels, monks, ladies in
towers, are the dramatis personae. Konrad Wallen-
rod is one of the military monks. No one knows
his origin. He has but one confidant in the monk,
Halban. No smile is ever seen on his lips. Some
gloomy mystery envelops him. His prowess in
battle and in the lists raise him to the Grand
Mastership; but instead of carrying war into
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Lithuania he remains passive, allowing the Lith-
uanians to wreak their will upon the territories
of the Order. A feast is held by the Knights; A
minstrel enters--in reality, Halban, disguised.
He sings of a Lithuanian boy whom the
Knights took captive and brought up in their
fortress; who, escaping to his natal country, gave
up for her sake all that he loved, to return and work
revenge upon her enemies by stealth. This is, of
course, Konrad's own history, and the mystery is
explained. He has schemed to gain the Grand
Mastership for patriotic ends, and will use it to
serve Lithuania.
The song of the minstrel has a peculiar pathos.
We realize that it is Mickiewicz's lament for his
exile and for many a Polish boy who would never
more see his home.
The Lithuanian child--Konrad--is carried off
from his father's house by the Knights. He thus
tells his story when in his manhood he has regained
his freedom.
"I know not my race or my name, for, as a
child, I was taken by the Germans into slavery.
Once in the night a loud clamour woke us from
slumber. A dawn of fire flashed in the windows.
The window-panes crashed, clouds of smoke burst
through the building. We ran to the gate. Flames
wreathed through the streets, sparks scattered
like hail. A terrible cry rang out: 'To arms! The
Germans are in the town. To arms! ' My father
rushed out with a weapon, rushed out and returned
no more. The Germans fell on my home. One
carried me off. He tore me away on his horse. I
know not what happened next. Only I long, long
?
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 53
heard the shriek of my mother. In the midst of
the clashing of arms, the crash of the houses that
fell, that shriek followed me long, that shriek
rang in my ears. Even now when I see a fire, even
now when I hear a cry, that shriek still wakes in
my sotd. This is all that from Lithuania, that
from my parents, I carried away. Sometimes I
see in my dreams when I sleep the dear forms of
my mother, my father, my brothers; but ever
further away, a mist ever darker, ever denser, has
hidden their features. The years of my childhood
passed on. As a German I lived among Germans.
The name they gave me was German. My Lith-'
uanian soul remained. My grief for my family, ,
my hatred for the aliens, remained.
"Among the Germans there was a Lithuanian
minstrel, taken prisoner years ago. When he knew
that I was an orphan and Lithuanian, he often
lured me to his side. He spoke of Lithuania. He
comforted my yearning soul with the caress and
the music of my native speech and of song. Often
he led me to the banks of the gray Niemen, whence
I loved to gaze towards the dear hills of my fathers.
When we returned to the castle, the old man
dried my tears not to awaken suspicion. He dried
my tears, and inflamed my vengeance against the
Germans. Later, in the years of my youth, I often
went with the old man in a boat down to the
Lithuanian banks. I plucked my native flowers,
and their enchanting scent breathed to my soul
some old and dim remembrance. I was a child
once more, playing with little brothers in the
garden of my parents. "
The minstrel teaches him the love of his native
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land and a thirst for revenge on those who have
wasted it with fire and sword:
"Thou art a slave, and the only weapon of the
slave is treachery. Stay still and learn the art of
warfare from the Germans. Strive to win their
trust to thee. "
He does so, and in the next foray escapes to
Lithuania. Trained by his enemies, he returns in
the course of time to live among them as a traitor,
employing against them the arms they have them-
selves put into his hand.
All this is told at the banquet, where the Knights
suppose that they are listening to some romance,
and only Konrad knows that it is intended as a
spur to rouse him to the action from which his
conscience shrinks. He completes the unfinished
history. He calls the Knights to arms, and leads
them into Lithuania. The inhabitants of the
Order's citadel see from the walls the fires of the
burning villages glowing on the horizon. The
Knights move ever further into the forest fast-
nesses of the enemy. Winter comes on, and still
the watchers wait in vain for the return of the
army. It never returns. A band of stragglers find
their way back, bringing as a prisoner the Grand
Master who has betrayed them to the Lithuanians.
The sentence of death is pronounced upon him.
He refuses to die at the hands of his nation's
to the last in the revenge that he has taken for
the sake of Lithuania.
"Gaze," is his dying cry, "on the thousands
who have perished, on towns in ruins, on homes
in flames. Hear ye the hurricane ? It drives before
and drinks
of poison, exulting
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
55
it clouds of snow. The remnants of your ranks
freeze there. Hear ye? The troops of hungry-
dogs howl there. They quarrel for the morsels
of the feast. This is my doing, and I glory in it.
As Samson, with one shaking of a pillar, the whole
building I destroy, and perish in the fall. "
"I will live," says Halban at his side, " to keep
the glory of thy deed before the world, to proclaim
it to the ages. I will travel through the hamlets,
the castles and the towns of Lithuania; and
whither I cannot hasten my song will fly. It shall
be as a bard to the knights in battle, and the
mother shall sing it for her children in the home.
She will sing--and some day in the future from
this song shall rise the avenger of our bones. "
Such was the cry of Mickiewicz's captive soul
that, by a feat of strange daring, he uttered under
the eyes of the Russian police. It seems well nigh
incredible that it passed the censor; but it was
only after it had been published a year that the
authorities saw through the allegory. Then a
devoted Russian friend hurried Mickiewicz on a
ship bound to Germany. A few hours later, and
the poet would have been on his way to Siberia.
The term Wallenrodism stands in the Polish
language for duplicity of life, the self-defence by
cunning and treachery that is enforced by oppres-
sion. Yet it is impossible to believe that Mickiewicz
advocated a system of national Machiavellism
that has never, be it said to her honour, found any
favour in the eyes of Poland, or ever formed part
is irreconcilable with the high moral tendency of
Mickiewicz's work for his fellow-Poles, with that
of her programme or methods. Such
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:09 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? 56
POLAND
of his private life, and with his conception of the
sacred function of a poet. He was the first to realize
that the course of a Konrad Wallenrod would
bring moral death upon the nation that adopted
it. That Mickiewicz's countrymen, those for
whom he wrote it, whose temper he understood
and who understood his as no other can, did not
look upon Konrad Wallenrod as a summons to base
conduct we know.