No More Learning

Mickiewicz wrote the epic under the unbearable
circumstance of his life in Russia, more as a relief
to his own pain than with any definite purpose. *
It was written, moreover, as an illustration of
the intolerable dilemma forced upon his com-
patriots. An oppressed nation may be goaded to
turn upon a persecutor, not in the open warfare
which is forbidden her, but with the underground
craft of the fox. Mickiewicz, therefore, sent out
in Konrad Wallenrod a warning to the conqueror,
no less than a cry for sympathy to the Russian
people. f Konrad recoils at the thought of the deed
he is called upon to perpetrate. His conscience
wars against his outraged patriotism. This--its
bearing upon the terrible position of the Polish
nation--is the tragedy of Konrad Wallenrod.
It was in 1829 that Mickiewicz escaped from
Russia. Henceforth he could give his inspiration'
* M. Zdziechowski, Myron and His Age. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
+ Ibid.
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? ADAM MICK1EWICZ 57
its free and full expression. From 1829 till
1832 he wandered between Germany and Italy.
Wherever he went he was followed by the love
and admiration--the worship almost--of those
who came across him. He appears to have possessed
some extraordinary fascination, a power all his
own of winning hearts. To his great genius he
united a captivating simplicity, a single-hearted
straightness and idealism of aim, a large generosity
in dealing with his fellow men. Splendid as were
his mental gifts, mere intellect had no attraction
in his eyes. The fire of the soul, spiritual insight,
the appeal of the heart, were to him the factors
of life that counted.
Mickiewicz was wintering in Rome when, on
the night of November 29th, 1830, the Polish
Rising broke out. It is said that from the hour
the news reached him he never again knew what
it is to feel lightness of heart. Unlike the majority
of his compatriots, who hailed the war as Poland's
certain liberation, Mickiewicz foresaw the worst.
On the eve of the insurrection, racked by pre-
science of what must and did come, he poured
out his grief in his famous poem To the Polish
Mother.
"Oh, Polish mother! when from thy son's
eyes the light of genius shines; when from his
childish brow the noble pride of the Poles of old
looks forth:
"When, spurning his little band of playmates,
he runs to the aged man who will sing to him his
nation's songs; when with bowed head he listens
to the history of his sires:
"Oh, Polish mother, ill are these pastimes for
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POLAND
thy son. Kneel thou before the image of the
Mother of Dolours, and gaze upon the sword
that has transfixed her bleeding heart. With a
like blow the foe shall pierce thy bosom.
"Because, though all the world shall bloom in
peace; though nations, rulers, minds shall be
at one; thy son is called to battle without glory,
to martyrdom without a resurrection.
"Then bid him early choose for his musing
place a lonely den, where he shall breathe the wet
and rotten air, and share his couch with noxious
reptiles.
"There shall he learn to hide with anger under-
ground, to make his mind impenetrable as a deep
abyss, slowly to poison speech as a putrid exhal-
ation, to bear his cringing form even as a slimy
snake.
"Our Saviour, when a child in Nazareth,
fondled a little cross on which He saved the
world. * Oh, Polish mother! I would fain amuse
thy child with his future playthings.
"So must thou early wreathe his little hands
with chains, bid him be harnessed to the convict's
barrow, so that he shall not pale before the
executioner's hatchet or redden to behold the
hangman's cord.
"For he shall not go as the knights of old to
plant in Jerusalem the victorious cross, nor as the
soldiers of a new world to till the field for freedom
and water the earth with his life's blood.
"His future challenge will be that of an
* The presentment in Italian art of the Blessed Virgin handing
a toy cross to the Divine child, of which Mickiewicz saw many
examples in a journey he took on the Italian coast shortly before
the outbreak of the Rising-, was in part the motive of this poem.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 59
unknown spy. A perjured government will wage
war with him. A secret dungeon will be his
battlefield, and a strong enemy shall pronounce
his doom.
"And to the vanquished shall remain the dry
wood of the gallows for his tombstone, for all his
glory the short weeping of a woman, and the long
night talks of his compatriots. "
Thus did Mickiewicz mourn for his nation.
His sorrow gathers volume till it finds its culmin-
ating point in the unfinished Ancestors. He wrote
it--or rather, he wrote the Third Part--in Dresden,
in 1832. With its strange, ghostly atmosphere of
the Lithuanian feast of the dead that gives its
name to the play, its memories of the comrades
of his youth in the Russian prison, its outburst of
a Pole's despair, it stands among the greatest
creations of national literature.
II
Mickiewicz had written the first, second, and
fourth parts of the Ancestors when a schoolmaster
at Kowno. Steeped in the romantic traditions of
Lithuania, he chose the Lithuanian ghost feast
of which he had heard from his peasant nurse,
and which still lingered here and there in the
countryside during his childhood, as the back-
ground, first, for the poetical version of his dis-
appointment in love, later, for that of his imprison-
ment. Hailing from the days of antiquity, the
ceremony of the Ancestors was held on All Souls'
night in some lonely dwelling adjacent to a
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cemetery, and in secret to avoid the censure of
the priests. Behind barred doors at midnight
food was spread for the spirits whom the incanta-
tions of the wizard summoned. These rites were
characterized by a curious mingling of paganism
and the Catholic doctrine on Purgatory.
We are in a chapel on All Souls' night. The
doors and windows are fastened and shrouded.
The peasants are gathered round the wizard,
craving for a sight of their dead.
The wizard cries:
"Souls from Purgatory! Wherever in the
world ye be! Ye who burn in flaming pitch! Ye
who freeze 'neath beds of rivers! Ye who, for more
grievous penance, prisoners in the logs of wood
that the flames gnaw on the stoves, weep and
whistle mournfully ! * Hasten all to this our
meeting! Let us all meet here together. Lo, we
keep the Ancestors. Come ye to the holy precincts.
Here are alms and here are prayers. Here is food
and here is drink. "
He takes a handful of incense from the peasants.
"I will light it. You shall quickly, when the
flamelet shoots on high, drive it with the lightest
breathing. Thus, oh, thus, and further, further.
Let it burn upon the air. "
Then the fluttering of wings breaks through
the darkness and silence. The ghosts float in. First,
two little children who cannot enter Paradise
because they have known no bitterness in life.
The wizard lays upon their lips a bitter grain so
* According-to Polish folk-lore, when the wood on the fire hisses
or seems to wail, it is the voice of a soul fulfilling' there its Purga-
tory and begging' prayers.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 61
that the entry to heaven is opened to them. At
midnight, when the glare of a pitcher filled with
flaming brandy sends a lurid light through the
chapel, a horrible ghost looks in at the window.
He is the cruel master, tortured by those he ill-
treated under the shape of birds of prey. Nothing
may be given to him because he showed no mercy,
and shall find none.
So the phantoms come and go. The cock crows.
The rites must end with the dawn. One last
spectre enters behind his time. He will utter no
word, and only points in silence to his bleeding
heart. He is the lover, rejected by one of the
women who is present, and who stands for Mickie-
wicz himself. Whether the wound in Gustavus'
heart means that he has literally killed himself, or
whether it stands merely for the metaphorical
death of his first love, is never made clear.
The Fourth Part is entirely taken up with
Gustavus' raving of his betrayal by the girl he
loved. He pours it forth to an old man in a lonely
cottage. But here again we cannot tell if he is of
the spirit world or of ours. As each hour strikes
he pauses to count, and when midnight sounds he
disappears. This mystery adds its ghostly touch
to a play where supernatural visitants hover all
about us.
Between these parts and the third many waters
had rolled beneath the bridges. Mickiewicz had
endured imprisonment and exile. Upon his nation
had fallen calamities which, as the poet wrote
the Third Part of the Ancestors, came near to
breaking his heart. Mickiewicz had entered his
prison a disappointed lover, to try his soul against
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POLAND
the hardest realities of a Pole's life. His love for a
woman died in the prison walls, giving place to
the master passion of his soul--devotion to his
country.
The Third Part is dedicated to the three
Philomathians who were the first to die in exile:
"To my fellow-students, fellow-prisoners, fellow-
exiles, who died of yearning for their country, in
Archangel, in Moscow, in Petersburg. "
The scene opens in Konrad's prison cell. Konrad,
a sort of re-incarnation of Gustavus, is sleeping
there. His dreams are troubled. Angels and demons
are whispering alternately to his ear as a sign of
the moral struggle that is close upon him. He
wakes to realize that exile will be his lot. Rising,
he writes with a piece of coal on the wall:" D. O. M.
Gustavus. Hie natus est Conradus. " The Byronic
Gustavus, the lover of a woman, is no more.
Konrad, the lover of a nation, is born in his
stead. It is obvious throughout the play that
Mickiewicz puts his own personality into Konrad.
i -There follows the famous Christmas Eve meet-
ing in the prison. The prisoners, seizing the
opportunity of the guard being drunk and abetted
by the Polish corporal, an old Napoleonic
legionary who is said to be the only fictitious
figure of the group, assemble in Konrad's cell by
way of making such festivity as they can. This
Christmas Eve gathering is, not a fiction. It took
place in Mickiewicz's celh The youths, with their
strong, brotherly affection7~playing the game to
the end, chaffing and jesting, striving to keep up
their spirits where death or Siberia awaited them,
are no creatures of a poet's fancy. They are flesh
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 63
and blood, Mickiewicz's beloved and lost friends,
here under their own names. jSo strong was the
truth with which Mickiewicz portrayed them
that one of their band, reading the Ancestors in
after days, said that he was transported back
through the intervening years to the prison as
though he had never left it. To the modern reader
they seem living companions in a room, not those
who have long since gone from this world.
The prisoners meet, greet the new-comers,
and exchange conjectures as to their future fate.
One of them, Zegota--Mickiewicz's life-long
friend, Domeyko--has that day been arrested in
the farm in which he takes a youthful landowner's
pride, little guessing that he will never see it
again. Another has been torn from a young wife.
A third cannot tell how long he has languished
in a cell where no ray of light ever enters. Zan
himself has been half-poisoned by foul food and
rank air in a subterranean dungeon. But:
"I would rather be underground there," cries
Zan, who, from the beginning, had offered to bear
the whole penalty if only his followers might go
free. "I would rather be there in hunger and
sickness, rather endure flogging and, what is
worse than flogging, going before the Commis-
sion, than be in a better cell to find you all here. "
With what grief and affection, as Mickiewicz
wrote these words, must his heart have gone out
to Zan, the guide of his youth who, while the poet
thus recorded his devotion, was working out its
price in Siberia.
In spite of all the efforts after mirth made by
Frejend, here, as in reality, the jester and the
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? 64 POLAND
I
musician of the imprisoned Philomathians, the
talk turns to the doom that has already fallen
upon numbers of their comrades and will fall
upon them. One of the prisoners tells how, as he
returned from his examination before the Com-
mission, he saw a procession of the young men and
boys they know starting on their journey to
Siberia.
"The drum gave the signal. The prison was
opened. I saw them. Behind each one walked
guards with a bayonet. Young boys, wasted and
worn, with shaved heads and chains on their legs.
The youngest, a child of ten years, complained
he could not lift up his chain, and showed his bare,
bleeding leg. They brought out Janczewski. He
was disfigured, he had grown haggard, he had
grown thin, but somehow strangely ennobled.
He who, a year ago, had been a mischievous, pretty
little boy, to-day gazed out from his prison cart,
as that emperor gazed from his desert rock,* with
proud, dry and calm eyes. Now he seemed to be
comforting the sharers of his bondage. Now he
bade farewell to the people with a bitter but
gentle smile, as though he would tell them: 'I
do not mind much. ' The cart started, they lashed
up the horse.
He took his hat from his head, he
stood up, and shouted three times: 'Poland hath
not perished yet. 't They disappeared in the
crowd; but that hand raised to heaven, that
shaved head, proud, unashamed, that proclaimed
to all its innocence and its disgrace, remained
before my eyes and will remain in my mind, and
* Napoleon.
t The first line of the song- of the Polish legions.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 65
IS) ti on the road of my life they shall be as my compass
falk pointing and leading me to virtue. If I forget them,
ill1 oh, God in heaven, forget Thou me. "
as In To which his hearers reply by a general Amen.
Con He resumes:
n>> "The other carts had driven up in one long
:j tf row. They were drawn up one after the other. I
cast a glance at the closely pressed throngs of the
W people. Each face had grown pallid as death. And
ill- in that great crowd such was the heavy silence
it- that I heard each step, each clank of the chains.
tp- They brought out the last of the prisoners. It
neJ looked as if he were resisting, but it was because
irf. the poor boy could not walk. He tottered each
ft moment, he staggered slowly down the steps, and
ml hardly had he reached the second step when he
& fell his whole length. It was Wasilewski. He had
17 been here in the prison near us. The day before
t yesterday they flogged him so much that not one
1 drop of blood remained in his face. "
< The soldier, furtively wiping his tears, lifted
e him into the cart.
t "And, as if he had been taken down from the
1 cross, his hands were stretched out on the soldier's
I shoulders, his eyes terrible, white, wide-opened.
And the people opened their lips, and simul-
taneously one deep, hollow sigh, torn from a
thousand breasts, groaned all around as if all the
graves groaned under the church. The carts flew
down the street like a flash of lightning. One was
empty, the prisoner was there, but could not be
seen. Only a hand was stretched out to the people
from the straw, a hand, livid, wide-open, dead,
>- that quiyerecj 35 if in farewell,"
1
I
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POLAND
The story ends, and none of the listeners can
speak. Presently they pull themselves together,
and sing and make merry. One of them sings a
blasphemous song, at which Konrad, for all he
declares that he has little faith left, angrily inter-
poses, intimating that he will not allow the name
of Mary to be treated with anything but rever-
ence. He sits apart, as he has sat all the evening,
brooding and gloomy, till his friends lay hold of
him and, with a burst of chaff, insist that he shall
improvize to Frej end's flute. This is one of the
intimate touches that illustrate how close is the
connection of Konrad with his author. Mickiewicz
possessed the gift of improvization and, while he
was waiting in Wilna for his final sentence, im-
provized, always accompanied by the flute of
that same Frej end.
Konrad flings out a wild song breathing revenge
on Russia, for which he is sternly reproved by a
priest among the prisoners and by the corporal.
He sings on in a poetic frenzy that degenerates
into delirium, and ends in a swoon. The corporal
gives the alarm that the guard is returning. The
{>risoners all rush to their cells, leaving Konrad
ying unconscious.
Now enters the great moment of the drama.
Konrad, alone in his cell, sings the Improvization,
the most splendid piece of inspiration that Mickie-
wicz ever reached. On one side, it is the unveiling
of the poet's mind at the actual moment of his
ecstasy: an Adam waking to life, as in Michel-
angelo's fresco, at the finger of his creator. On
the other, the wounds of the Polish soul that sees
his nation suffering, unavenged by either man or
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 6y
God, are here laid open, bare and bleeding, to the
vision.
Konrad is in a dungeon; but what bonds of
man's devising can enchain his spirit?
"My songs, ye do not need men's eyes, men's
ears! Oh, God, oh, nature, hearken unto me!
Worthy of you my music and my song. I am the
master! I, the master, stretch forth my hands, I
stretch them even to the skies, and lay my hands
upon the stars, as on the crystal wheels of an
harmonica. Now fast, now slow, as my soul wills, I
turn the stars. Millions of sounds flow forth.
'Twixt million sounds each sound I caught, each
sound I know. I weave them into rainbows,
harmonies, and verse. I pour them forth in music
and in lightning streamers.
"I have taken away my hands. I have raised
them above the borders of the world, and the
harmonica's wheels are held in their flight. Alone
I sing. I hear my songs. Long, wailing, as the
breathing of the tempest's blast, they moan with
grief, they roar with storm, and the ages answer
with deep echoings. And each sound together
plays and flames. I see each one, I hear each one,
as I hear the flight of the wind when, whistling,
it rocks the waves, as I see it in its robe of cloud.
"Worthy of God and nature such a song!
That song is great, that song is creation, that song
is strength, is power, that song is immortality. I
feel immortality, I create immortality. What
greater couldst Thou do, oh, God? "
Has any other poet, any other wise man, cries
he in the rapture of his inspiration, ever felt:
"As I feel to-night, in this lonely night, when
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POLAND
alone I sing within myself, alone I sing unto myself.
Yea, I feel, and I am mighty, and I understand.
To-night is my zenith, to-night is the crisis of
my power. I will cast off my body, and as a spirit
I will take pinions only. I will fly forth from the
turning-wheel of stars and planets, I will reach to
the boundary of the Creator and of nature.
"And I have them, I have them, I have these
two wings. They will suffice. I will strike the past
with the left, the future with the right, and on
the flames of feeling I will come to Thee. And I
will gaze into Thy feeling, oh, Thou, of Whom
they say that Thou feelest in the heavens. I am
here, I have come here, Thou seest what is my
power, my wings reach even here. But I am man,
and my body is there on earth. There did I love,
and in my country hath remained my heart.
"But that love of mine hath not rested on one
man, not on one family, not on one century. I
love a whole nation. I have gathered in my arms
all her past and future generations. I have pressed
her to my bosom as a friend, a lover, a husband, as
a father. I would fain raise her, give her joy. I
have no power to do it--and I have come here to
find it. I have come armed with the whole strength
of thought, that thought which tore Thy thunder-
bolts from heaven, that tracked Thy planets'
march, and flung open the deep bottom of the
sea. I have more; I have that power men do not
give, for I have feeling.
"I was born a creator. My powers came whence
came Thine to Thee. Thou hast them,Thou fearest
not to lose them--and I fear not. In the moments
of my strength, when I gaze on high a. t- the' trails
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? ADAM MICK1EWICZ 69
of clouds, and hear the wandering birds sailing on
wings scarce seen, I will; and with my eye I
hold them in the snare. Only corrupted man,
weak but immortal, does not serve me, does not
know me--does not know us both, Thee and me.
Here in heaven I seek the means of ruling him.
I would fain wield that power I have on nature
over human souls. Not with weapons, not with
songs, not with learning, not with miracles. I
would fain rule with the feeling that is in me,
rule even as Thou rulest over all. Let men be for
me as thoughts and words from which a house of
song is woven at my will. They say that even thus
Thou rulest. Thou knowest that I have not cor-
rupted thought, that I have not squandered
speech. If Thou wilt give me a like rule over souls,
I will create my nation as a living song, and greater
marvels will I work than Thou; I will entone a
song of joy. Give me the rule of souls ! I would
fain have power like Thou possessest. I would
fain rule souls even as Thou rulest them. "
Here the speaker halts, awaiting God's answer.
Part at least of the extent of Konrad's blas-
phemy will be made clear when we remember
that in Mickiewicz's scheme the brain and under-
standing cannot be the motive power of the
world's salvation. To him the heart, love, feeling,
must be the rulers of the human race. The works
of the intellect without the heart in the eyes of
this man of great mental power stood for brute
force, for militarism with all its consequences.
There is silence. Then Konrad cries:
"Thou art silent! Now I know, I have found
Thee out. He hath lied who called Thee love.
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POLAND
Thou art only wisdom. With the mind, not with
the heart, shall Thy ways be found. Thou hast
given the world to thought, and Thou leavest
the heart in eternal penance. "
The situation now develops its peculiar tragedy.
We have seen the poet carried on by lust of power
and intellectual pride to defy his Creator. But now
that poet merges into the Pole; the Pole who
represents the mental anguish of a nation; the
Pole who has lived among the deep and bitter
things of life, who has from his childhood known
misery and injustice. Konrad's temptation, said
in 1890 the son of Adam Mickiewicz, is the temp-
tation of the whole Polish nation. * Konrad
blasphemes, and it is his country's suffering that
drives him to his blasphemy. He entreats for
power, but for the power that will govern by love
in a world ground down by brute strength, the
power that will at last entone the hymn of joy
for Poland. It is the sorrow of his nation that
maddens him, not his own. Mickiewicz's heart
nearly broke within him as he uttered this cry of
despair. He wrote it in one night. The next
morning, he was found lying like Konrad uncon-
scious on the floor of his room.
"Once more I challenge Thee," goes on Kon-
rad, while around him angels and devils battle
for his soul. " Thou art silent? I challenge Thee.
Despise me not. I am not alone, although I am
raised to these heights alone. On earth my heart
is brothered with a great nation. I will wage with
Thee a bloodier war than Satan. He fought for
the intellect, I challenge for the heart. I have
* L. Mickiewicz, Life of Adam MiekiemicM. Posen, 1890 (Polish).
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 71
suffered, I have loved, I have grown in torments
and in love. When Thou didst tear from me my
personal joy, I did not raise my hand against
heaven.
"Now is my soul incarnate in my country.
I and my country are one. 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
I her bosom the sufferings of her child. I suffer, I
madden--and Thou, wise and happy, ever rulest,
ever judgest, and they say Thou dost not err.
"Hearken! If that be true which I heard with
a son's faith when I came into this world, that
Thou lovest; if Thou, creating it, didst love
the world; if Thou hast a father's heart for what
Thou didst create; if beneath Thy rule love is
not a mere anomaly; if on the millions of men
crying ' Help ! ' Thou dost not look solely as on
the solution of a complicated sum; if love is
necessary for aught in Thy world and is not only
Thy mistaken figure--"
The cries of the angels and demons interrupt
him. Then his last entreaty breaks forth:
"Thou art silent! I have opened the depths
of my heart unto Thee. I implore Thee give me
power, one small part of power, a part of that
which on the earth pride has won. With that
small part what joy I would create!