I 
 
 i 
 
TOLAND 
 
 A Study in 
 National 
 Idea I i s m 
 
POLAND 
 
 *A Study in 
 National Idealism 
 
 <BY MONICA 
 M. GARDNER 
 
 sAuthor of 
 " tAdam Mic\ieVoicz n 
 
 
 %% 
 
 
 
 NOSNECE55ES 
 
 
 
 
 BURNS &> OATES, LTD. 
 
 28 Orchard Street 
 
 London W 
 
 1915 
 
 Ht 
 
ft 3 
 
 Printed in England by The Westmtnstet Press, 
 411a Harrow Road, London, W. 
 
LA race slave n'a pas encore bati ses cathed- 
 rales ni fait ses croisades. La France, dans 
 l'histoire des croisades, pourrait trouver 
 la mesure de sa force morale. L'AUemagne doit 
 etudier sa cathedrale de Cologne, et s'humilier 
 devant ce monument du passe ; mais la Pologne 
 n'a qu'a consulter sa tradition vivante, son Ame. 
 
 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. 
 
 35787., 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface ix 
 
 Note on the Pronunciation of Polish xii 
 
 Chapter I : The Last Hundred Years I 
 
 Chapter II : The National Literature of 
 
 Poland 32 
 
 Chapter III : The Poet of a Nation's Suffer- 
 ing : Adam Mickiewicz 45 
 
 Chapter IV : The Anonymous Poet of 
 
 Poland : Zygmunt Krasinski 107 
 
 Chapter V : The Mystic Pilgrimage in 
 
 Siberia 176 
 
 Chapter VI : The Spirit of the Steppe 198 
 
 Chapter VII : The Ideals of Kornel Ujejski 208 
 
 Table^of Various Dates in Polish History 228 
 
 Index 235 
 
 VI 
 
PREFACE 
 
 AT this moment, the eyes of England are 
 once more turned towards Poland. The 
 object for which I have written this book 
 is to give the English reader some faint conception 
 of the idealism and the patriotism by which 
 Poland has preserved her life through more than 
 a hundred years of suffering and oppression. The 
 literature that was born of her sorrows has been, 
 as I have endeavoured to point out in the follow- 
 ing pages, one of the chief factors in the main- 
 tenance of that life, and almost the only method 
 of self-expression that has been possible to a 
 country, debarred as Poland has been from normal 
 existence. The production of the Polish poets is 
 a splendid form of art : but even more is it a 
 great movement of national aspiration. Hence 
 my book is not so much a study in Poland's liter- 
 ature as an attempt to illustrate the soul of a 
 nation which, were it only for her devoted 
 patriotism and fidelity to her ideals under over- 
 whelming difficulties, should command universal 
 sympathy. For this purpose, I have in the first 
 chapter given a brief account of the condition of 
 Poland since the partitions. 
 
 A word must be said as to my mode of dealing 
 with Russia's past treatment of Poland. It is a 
 subject that is necessary to be faced in a work on 
 Poland if any sort of justice is to be done to the 
 
 ix b 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 Poles. The Russian nation, now that she has shaken 
 herself free from Prussian influence, has promised 
 to redress the wrongs that Poland has suffered at 
 her hands. The greater these wrongs have been, 
 the more profound will be the admiration of 
 Europe when she beholds their reparation. 
 
 It has been impossible in a book of this scope to 
 give more than a sketch of such poets and teachers 
 as Mickiewicz and Krasinski. I have already pub- 
 lished a monograph on the former {Adam Mickie- 
 wicz, the National Poet of Poland, London, 191 1), 
 and I have in preparation a study on the life and 
 work of Krasinski. 
 
 For the sake of the English reader unacquainted 
 with the Polish language, I have generally trans- 
 lated the Polish Christian names into their 
 English equivalents. As the Polish crossed 1 is a 
 complicated matter for printers and readers 
 ignorant of Polish, I have — although it is incorrect 
 to do so — replaced it where it occurs by the 
 simple 1, according to the custom of many French 
 and English writers on Poland. Certain letters of 
 the Polish alphabet that present special difficulties 
 I have rendered phonetically ; but as it has not 
 been always possible to do this, I have indicated 
 a few rules on the pronunciation of Polish that 
 may be useful to the reader. 
 
 Chapters V. and VII. and portions of my first 
 and second chapters have already appeared in 
 the Quest. Through the courtesy of the editor, 
 Mr. G. R. S. Mead, I am enabled to reprint them 
 here. With the exception of the chapters on 
 Anhelli and Ujejski, the present book has been 
 written after the outbreak of the war. I have 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 therefore been cut off from communication with 
 my friends and correspondents in Poland. But the 
 generous assistance which they gave me in the past 
 and in my work on Krasinski, about which I was 
 able to consult them before the cataclysm swept 
 down upon us, has been of the greatest help to 
 me in what I have been writing during these 
 terrible months, while their country has been 
 devastated by all the horrors of war. I therefore 
 express my deeply grateful thanks to my friend, 
 Mr. Edmund Naganowski, to Dr. Kallenbach, 
 and to Professor Zdziechowski. I am also much 
 indebted to Mr. Ladislas Mickiewicz, the son of 
 Adam Mickiewicz, and to my brother, Dr. 
 Edmund Gardner. 
 
 My earnest hope in offering this little book to 
 English readers is that it may arouse their sympathy 
 for the Polish nation. 
 
 1915. M. M. G. 
 
 Note. — Since the above words were written, 
 the news reached me of the death in Poland of 
 my friend, Edmund Naganowski. With him his 
 country loses one whose labour in her behalf was 
 unceasing. To those who, like myself, were hon- 
 oured with his friendship, and who found in him 
 the strongest, the most devoted and sympathetic 
 of friends and advisers, his loss can only be a life- 
 long and irreparable bereavement. 
 
NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF 
 POLISH 
 
 The Polish C — an English ts, but has a softer 
 and somewhat hissing sound when it precedes i, 
 or when it is accented as in 6. 
 
 Ch — strongly aspirated h, as in the Scotch loch. 
 
 Cz — ch in cherry. 
 
 Dz — j, as in jam. 
 
 J-y- 
 
 O — oo as in rood. 
 Rz — the French j, as in Jean. 
 S, Si — a very soft hissing form of sh. 
 Sz — sh. 
 W— v. 
 
 Z, Zi— French j. 
 
 The accent in Polish is almost invariably on the 
 penultimate as, Mickie'wicz. 
 
 Xll 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 
 
 FOR more than a hundred years, Poland 
 has presented to Europe the spectacle 
 of a nation rent asunder. Her nationality 
 has been proscribed and oppressed. The common 
 rights of race possession have been denied to her. 
 She has risen in arms for her liberties, only to be 
 crushed. She has suffered the basest treachery 
 and the bitterest disillusions. Eighty years ago, 
 Montalembert, in a famous phrase, gave her the 
 name of the " nation in mourning." That title 
 has never lost its application. 
 
 In 1772 and 1795^ the first two partitions of 
 Poland were effected : the first between Austria, 
 Russia and Prussia, the second between Russia 
 and Prussia. After the second partition Kosciuszko, 
 arming the peasants with scythes, rose at the 
 head of the nation in a desperate attempt to save 
 the national independence. The armies of Russia 
 and Prussia „were too strong for him. He was 
 carried, a wounded prisoner, from the lost field 
 of Maciejowice. Suvorov, the Russian commander, 
 then marched on Warsaw. The city was taken after 
 an appalling massacre of the inhabitants of its 
 suburb, Praga, in which thousands perished by 
 the sword or by fire, or were drowned in the river 
 as they fled, with a broken bridge before them, 
 from Suvorov's soldiers. The cause of Poland was 
 
2 POLAND 
 
 vanquished ; and >he third partition of Poland 
 between Austria, Russia and Prussia followed in 
 1795. By this proceeding, a crime almost un- 
 paralleled in history, assuredly without a shadow of 
 political or moral justification, Poland as a state 
 ceased to exist. 
 
 But the Polish nation never gave up the hope 
 of resurrection. She lived on, as she has lived to 
 the present hour, struggling for her nationality, 
 clinging to it, and preserving it. 
 
 After the third partition, what remained of 
 , the Polish army enrolled itself under Napoleon's 
 banners. Led by the national flags, commanded 
 by their own officers, the Polish legions shed their 
 blood in torrents for the man who they believed 
 would give them back their country. Napoleon's 
 betrayal of the Polish cause was only one among 
 the many deceived hopes and broken pledges of 
 which the unhappiest of nations has been the 
 victim. The Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 has been 
 called by the Poles the fourth partition of Poland ; 
 for, on this occasion, Napoleon did nothing more 
 for those whose loyalty remained with him till his 
 death than to create, under his protection, the 
 Duchy of Warsaw. Ruled by the French laws 
 that Napoleon imposed upon it, its army, with 
 Joseph PoniatowsH at its head, was, however, 
 national, and did brilliant service on the side of 
 France. For nine years the little state was swept 
 by the war, till, at last, peace was restored to 
 Europe. 
 
 At the congress of Vienna that met in 1815 to 
 readjust the political balance, the question of 
 Poland was one that came prominently forward, 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 3 
 
 as it will do again. The ancient Republic of Poland 
 was not re-established. It was once more divided 
 between the three original partitioning powers. 
 To Austria fell Galicia, with the exception of 
 Cracow. Prussia kept the Duchy of Posen, West 
 Prussia, Thorn, and Danzig. Russia secured the 
 rest of the Duchy of Warsaw, Lithuania, and 
 those eastern provinces of Poland that stand be- 
 tween the Muscovite empire and Western Europe. 
 The express stipulation was made that in each of 
 these three divisions the language, religion, and ' 
 nationality of the Poles were to be maintained 
 and respected in their entirety. But two further 
 attempts were made to give at least some measure 
 of fuller independence to the Polish nation. 
 Cracow was erected into a tiny stateship under 
 the protection, the irony of which subsequent 
 events fully proved, of. Austria, Prussia, and 
 Russia. A part of the Duchy of Warsaw passed, 
 it is true, to Russia ; but under the condition 
 that she should be an autonomous state with 
 the Tsar as her crowned king, Her army, her 
 administration, every branch of her life, were to 
 be Polish and exclusively Polish. And to this day, 
 long after her privileges have been swept away, 
 that part of Poland is spoken of by every Pole as, 
 the Kingdom of Poland. 
 
 The admirable organization of the newly- 
 founded kingdom proved how rapidly the Poles 
 had learned in the school of adversity. Picked 
 officials filled the posts of trust. The military chiefs, 
 the army, were the soldiers who had been trained 
 by Napoleon. Much was hoped of the Tsar, 
 Alexander I. When an unhappy heir at the court 
 
4 POLAND 
 
 of Catherine II., he had formed a warm friendship 
 with young Adam Czartoryski, son of a princely 
 Polish house, who was retained as a hostage 
 at the same court. In their intimate conversations 
 Alexander promised the Pole that he would restore 
 Poland, and it was through Czartoryski's influence 
 on the Tsar that the Kingdom of Poland owed 
 its foundation. But unfortunately the viceroy 
 whom Alexander chose for the new Polish state 
 was a man of little worth and small patriotism, 
 mistrusted by his fellow-countrymen. The com- 
 mander-in-chief, appointed likewise by the Tsar, 
 was the latter's brother, the Grand Duke Con- 
 stantine. This semi-madman, in his transports of 
 mingled insanity and brutality, subjected the 
 proud and high-spirited Polish officers to indig- 
 nities that drove more than one of them to commit 
 suicide rather than serve under such a leader. 
 In addition to the viceroy and commander-in- 
 chief, a Russian Commissioner was nominated 
 \ whose office was to play spy upon the Poles. It 
 was this man, Novosiltzov, who brought about 
 the state of things that goaded the Polish nation 
 into the rising of 1 830. His spies filled the country. 
 Any careless word resulted in the speaker's arrest. 
 The prisons were filled. 
 
 In 1825 Alexander I. died, and was succeeded 
 by his brother, Nicholas I. Two years earlier the 
 famous affair of the Lithuanian student societies 
 took place. Led by the devoted and high-minded 
 Thomas Zan, an association had been formed 
 \ among the young men at the University of Wilna, 
 under the title of the Philomathians. Their ends 
 were the moral and philanthropic ideals of ardent 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 5 
 
 and generous youths ; patriotic rather than 
 revolutionary. The suspicions of the Russian 
 Government fell upon the society. Its members 
 were imprisoned and many of them put to torture. 
 Numbers were banished to Siberia, while others 
 were exiled to various outposts in Russia. Among 
 the latter was the poet, Adam Mickiewicz, the 
 fast friend of Thomas Zan. He has immortalized 
 the scenes of the imprisonment of himself and the 
 comrades of his youth, most of whom he never 
 saw again, in his drama the Ancestors. 
 , These proceedings of Novosiltzov's aroused 
 'the resentment of the whole nation. The liberties 
 guaranteed to the Kingdom were now being 
 rapidly trampled underfoot. The country was 
 ^treated as a conquered province. The situation 
 of the Poles was intolerable ; and on the night of 
 November 29th, 1830, they rose in arms for their 
 treaty rights. 
 
 The Rising of 1830 was ill prepared, chiefly by 
 a handful of young men. It was badly organized. 
 There were dissensions among its leaders, lack of 
 discipline. These are its weak points, redeemed 
 by the heroic courage of a people that laid down 
 their lives by thousands rather than see their 
 country perish. The Poles fell, says an eye-witness, 
 like grain before the scythe.* Boys from colleges 
 and schools who, we are told, kept up their studies 
 in the camp in the intervals when they were not 
 fighting, young poets whose songs were sung by 
 the soldiers and who wrote their poems with a 
 baggage waggon for their table, high-born women, 
 
 * Quoted by Count Stanislas Tarnowski in Our History in the 
 Nineteenth Century. Cracow, 1901 (Polish) 
 
6 POLAND 
 
 hunters armed with old hunting-guns, peasants 
 with their scythes, seasoned legionaries from the 
 Napoleonic wars, all fought side by side. The 
 Poles held out for ten months against the Russian 
 armies. They won victory after victory. Then 
 came the inevitable hour of defeat by superior 
 forces. At Ostrolenka, where not a Polish gunner 
 but died at his gun, and thousands fell with the 
 national hymn on their lips, the heroism of the 
 Poles was only equalled by their appalling losses. 
 From that hour the Polish arms met nothing but 
 reverses. The Russians marched on Warsaw. In 
 its defence, men and women fought alike. Ordon 
 blew up the fort he was commanding, and Russian 
 and Pole found there a common death. Entrench- 
 ments were defended, fought for inch by inch, 
 till not a Pole was left alive. The city could hold 
 out no longer and surrendered, and in September, 
 1 83 1, the war was ended. 
 
 In the interest of historical truth and in justice 
 to the Poles, the sequel of the rising, however 
 painful, must be told in a book that professes to 
 deal with the psychology and the aspirations of 
 the Polish nation. The world is now looking to 
 Nicholas II. to inaugurate a new epoch in the 
 relations between Poland and Russia. 
 
 Since the failure of the Rising in 1831, the con- 
 stitution of the Kingdom of Poland has existed 
 no more except on paper. Her treaty rights were 
 destroyed, her army abolished, her administration 
 taken from her and removed to Petersburg. The 
 universities of Warsaw and Wilna were closed. 
 Schools were shut, and the Russian language 
 enforced on those that still were allowed to remain. 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 7 
 
 Russian officials took the place of Poles. The 
 libraries and artistic treasures of the nation were 
 transferred to Russia. Confiscations and fines 
 brought Polish families to ruin. Transportation 
 of forty-five thousand families into the Caucasus 
 and other Russian provinces parted husbands and 
 fathers from their homes for ever. Hundreds of 
 innocent persons suffered the penalty of death. 
 The numbers of those who were sent for life to 
 dungeons or to the mines of Siberia are said to 
 exceed computation. Children were torn from 
 the country and carried off by the Cossacks to 
 Russia, never to be seen again. 
 
 Yet the strong national spirit lived on in every 
 part of Poland and wherever, in their enforced 
 wanderings over the world, her exiles went. Hope- 
 less attempts at a fresh rising, mainly instigated 
 by young Poles stealing secretly into the country 
 from abroad, continued, always to be discovered 
 and punished with Siberia or death. 
 
 Then it was, in the years following the Rising 
 of 1830, that the movement known as the Polish 
 ^Emigration set in. Those who were banished from 
 Poland, or who escaped death only by flight, or 
 who chose to live beyond the frontier to carry on 
 the work in their nation's behalf that was im- 
 possible in the country itself, took refuge in foreign 
 lands, and especially in Paris. Every class was 
 represented ; aristocrats like Adam Czartoryski, 
 who had in happier days influenced for good the 
 policy of Alexander I, the friend of his youth, 
 and who had now lost all for Poland ; the generals 
 and soldiers of the Rising, artisans, priests, the 
 poets who gave Poland the magnificent literature 
 
8 POLAND 
 
 that might not be heard within her boundaries. 
 All degrees of mental and physical wretchedness 
 were to be found among their ranks. They were 
 exiled for ever from their country and from those 
 they loved. Too often they could not learn the 
 fate of their families or communicate with those 
 members of them who still remained in Poland. 
 Most of them were plunged in dire poverty ; all 
 of them in constant suspense and harrowing 
 anxiety as to what terrible news, whether personal 
 or national, the next post from Poland would 
 bring them. They shared one common certainty : 
 that they would live to return and see Poland free. 
 Their death in the foreign city, where their graves 
 are still piously visited by their fellow Poles, was 
 the only end to their desire. 
 
 I shall deal with the condition of the Poles in 
 
 .w Prussian Poland later in this chapter. 
 
 X Under Austria the Galician Poles were treated 
 as the victims of a brutal war rather than as a 
 nation whose rights had been ratified in a European 
 congress. The policy of Metternich was to crush 
 : every Polish element underfoot. The stipulations 
 of the Treaty of Vienna were regarded as non- 
 existent. The offices of the national government 
 were filled by Austrians or Czechs. Punishment 
 by death was inflicted with appalling frequency 
 on those who held Polish aspirations. The Polish 
 language was abolished in the schools. It was a 
 penal offence for the Polish students to be heard 
 speaking Polish to each other even out of lesson 
 hours, or to be caught reading in Polish. House 
 to house inquisitions were made for Polish books. 
 Those who possessed them, read them or lent 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 9 
 
 them, went to prison. The publication of Polish 
 writings was attended with almost prohibitive 
 difficulties on account of the heavy censorship. 
 Public works, such as the maintenance of hospitals, 
 roads, and so on, were completely neglected by 
 the Government. The country, ruinously taxed, 
 became poorer day by day. 
 
 Here, as to Russian Poland, came emissaries 
 from Paris, urging insurrection. The prisons were 
 filled with those whose implication the Govern- 
 ment discovered or only suspected. Matters were 
 ripening for a rising in the three divisions of 
 Poland; when the year i8^6_beheld, not the 
 war originally planned, but one of the most 
 lamentable catastrophes in Polish history. 
 
 Certain of the Poles in Paris were preparing a 
 rising on democratic lines. Their representatives 
 endeavoured to persuade the Galician peasants 
 to take up arms, and to compel their landowners, 
 even by force if necessary, to join the movement. 
 Following these came certain agitators, wander- 
 ing from village to village, playing upon the 
 ignorance of the peasantry, instigating them to 
 turn their weapons, not against the oppressors 
 of their country, but against the Polish nobility. 
 These, it is now known, were the agents of the 
 Austrian government. They were but too suc- 
 cessful. Duped and deceived, maddened by drink, 
 the peasants rose against the Polish nobles ; fired 
 their mansions, and massacred the inhabitants. 
 
 In the same year, Cracow lost her last vestige 
 of independence. The first years of her existence 
 as a separate state had been tranquil. Her trade, 
 her schools and University, had flourished. But 
 
io POLAND 
 
 in a city where three official residents represented 
 the three Powers to which the rest of Poland was 
 subjected, liberty could not last long. When, in 
 1846, a general Polish rising seemed imminent, 
 the Austrian army retired from the town, and 
 the insurgents, believing that all was in readiness, 
 instituted a government and issued a call to arms. 
 That rising was abortive ; and, in the autumn of 
 the year, Austria seized the city which she has 
 since retained. 
 
 The wave of unrest that in 1848 ran through 
 the countries under Austrian rule brought an 
 expectation of better things to Poland, that was 
 not immediately fulfilled. In the general ferment, 
 on the pretext of a chance quarrel between a few 
 soldiers and workmen, the Austrian army bom- 
 barded Cracow, thus adding another chapter to 
 the chequered history of the city which, the 
 sepulchre of Poland's kings and of her greatest 
 dead, may be called the sanctuary of the nation. 
 I t was not till 1861 that Austria reversed her 
 Polish policy. The first Galician Diet was then 
 opened, and a species of autonomy was granted, 
 with the result that Galicia became, and has con- 
 tinued till this day, the centre of Polish national 
 life. 
 
 v The Crimean War, upon which the Poles 
 founded brilliant hopes, had passed, leaving be- 
 hind it none of the results for which they had 
 confidently looked. Italy had won her deliverance, 
 Hungary her constitution. To the Poles it seemed 
 as if their hour must also be approaching. While 
 this thought was seething in the hearts of the 
 Polish youth, events happened in Warsaw that 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS n 
 
 •-precipitated the rising of 1863. On the 25th of 
 February, 1861^ the Poles were celebrating in a 
 pacific ancTferigious fashion the anniversary of 
 the battle of Groch6w, one of the victories in 
 the last rising. Two days later, on February 27th, 
 a similar peaceful demonstration led to a collision 
 between the Russian troops and the people. The 
 soldiers fired upon the unarmed crowd outside 
 the church of the Bernardines, with the result that 
 five Poles were killed. All appeals to the Viceroy 
 were in vain. Then, on April 8th, occurred that 
 terrible scene outside the castle when a crowd 
 of unarmed Polish men and women, who stood 
 there in a silent protestation against their wrongs, 
 were massacred in cold blood by order of 
 Gortchakov. 
 
 It had been urged upon the Tsar, Alexander II, 
 that, if a rising were to be averted, the severity 
 with which the nation had been treated since 
 183 1 must be relaxed. The Tsar refused to renew 
 the constitution of the Kingdom ; and instead 
 appointed the Pole, Wielopolski, as the minister 
 of religion and education. In some respects, such, 
 for instance, as the improvement of the schools, 
 and the re-opening of the University of Warsaw, 
 Wielopolski did much for the amelioration of 
 the country ; but, on the other hand, his desire 
 for conciliation with Russia led him into deplor- 
 able acts of injustice that effectually exasperated 
 the Polish youth. The people were on fire with 
 patriotic and mystic fervour. Singing on their 
 knees the national hymn, they were shot down 
 where they knelt, slain in their churches. In 1863 
 a drastic conscription was levied in order to remove 
 
12 POLAND 
 
 the youths of Poland from the country. Two 
 thousand of them were seized in their beds at 
 night, and despatched to Siberia and the Cau- 
 casus. This was the match to the explosion. The 
 young men who were left escaped to the woods 
 and flew to arms. 
 
 Doomed from the beginning, the Rising of 
 ^ 1863 was a disastrous attempt. It dragged on for 
 a year in the nature of guerilla war ; a struggle 
 in the woods, carried on by small bands of Polish 
 youths, armed with any weapon upon which they 
 could lay their hands. Beaten wherever the 
 Russian regiments and cannon came in force 
 against them, they then reappeared in some other 
 place, frequently victorious over small detach- 
 ments, fighting on in the certainty that Europe 
 would come to their help. Those who were 
 captured were shot, hung, or sent to Siberia. The 
 farms and dwellings of any person who had 
 sheltered them or given them provisions were 
 burnt to the ground, and the inhabitants killed 
 or imprisoned. 
 
 Napoleon III, England, and Austria all addressed 
 their remonstrances to Alexander II. That he 
 could afford to disregard them is owing to the 
 rising influence of Bismarck. The latter entered 
 into a secret understanding with Russia. England, 
 with the threat of the Prussian annexation of 
 Schleswig-Holstein, retired definitely from the 
 championship of Poland. Napoleon's proposal 
 that a congress should be held to ameliorate the 
 condition of the Poles fell to the ground ; and 
 henceforth Europe abandoned the Polish nation 
 to her fate. To the policy that then began may 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 13 
 
 be ascribed the disasters that are now ravaging 
 the world. 
 
 The penalty that desolated Russian Poland, 
 when the insurrection was at last stamped out, 
 resolved itself into something little short of a war 
 of extermination against every semblance of 
 Polish nationality. We will confine ourselves to 
 such facts of this terrible story as are necessary to 
 tell ; we trust, as a closed chapter. 
 
 Henceforth the Kingdom was no longer ruled 
 even by a viceroy who was Russia's nominee, but 
 by a governor-general, and as a conquered dis- 
 trict known by the name of the Vistula province. 
 The nation groaned under a bondage to which 
 modern history offers nothing similar. The Poles 
 were sent by thousands, on the merest suspicion, 
 with no attempt at a judicial inquiry, to languish 
 in the mines of Siberia. Women and innocent 
 children were deported there, as convicts, in 
 convict dress. The reign of terror established by 
 Muraviev in Lithuania was such that the Russians 
 refused to touch his hand in friendship on his 
 return to Petersburg ; and it is with the sobriquet 
 of the " Hangman," which his countrymen gave 
 him, that his name has gone down to posterity. 
 Students were expelled from school for speaking 
 their mother tongue in the streets to their school- 
 fellows. Polish was forbidden in the churches, in 
 every public place, in private talk. In the hospitals, 
 including those devoted to the care of children 
 and foundlings, the sick were not allowed to hear 
 their own language. The University of Warsaw 
 was, and has remained, entirely Russianized. 
 Russian masters were placed in every school. 
 
14 POLAND 
 
 Even in the village schools the Polish children 
 might only learn in Russian. The childish minds 
 were taught falsification of the two dearest in- 
 heritances of a patriotic and devout race — their 
 faith and national history. Bishops were driven 
 from their dioceses, parishes were deprived of 
 priests, and the church of Poland subjected to a 
 systematic oppression that has continued ever 
 since. The Polish landowners were dispossessed 
 of their estates ; Poles forbidden to buy land. 
 Enormous taxation completed their ruin. 
 
 With the course of fifty years, the rigour of 
 some of these measures has been abated. Others 
 stand as they were. Others have been added. 
 When, in 1906, the Russian Duma was opened, 
 and the Poles granted representation, to Poland, 
 as to all Russia, it seemed as though a new era of 
 freedom had dawned. Once more this most tragic 
 of nations passed through a bitter disillusion. 
 That the sorrows of Poland will now be a thing 
 of the past is the hope of Europe and the world. 
 
 We will now turn to the Polish subjects of 
 Prussia. They have suffered from a rule which, 
 for its drastic brutality, no less than for its galling 
 pettiness, is, say the Poles, more intolerable than 
 any other. We are now unhappily familiar with 
 Pan Prussian methods. It is that machinery which, 
 since the days of Bismarck, has been employed in 
 the vain task of crushing out Polish nationality. 
 
 The favourite anti-Polish colonization scheme 
 of the Prussian Government dates from the years 
 following the third partition. From 1799 to 1807 
 a fund, paid out of the taxes levied on the Poles, 
 and a crown grant were devoted to the purpose of 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 15 
 
 settling Germans on Polish soil. The Napoleonic 
 wars diverted the attention of Prussian policy for 
 a time into other directions, and it appeared as 
 though Prussia were prepared to respect the rights 
 of the Poles she governed. But at the time of the 
 Polish insurrection of 1830 a change set in. Polish 
 soldiers who had crossed the Russian frontier into 
 Prussia were handed over by the latter to Russia 
 and to their death, or shot in cold blood by the 
 Prussian authorities ; and the Prussian Govern- 
 ment began to treat its Polish subjects more 
 severely than it had hitherto done. When the 
 Polish rising broke out in 1863, Prussia entered 
 into agreement with Alexander II. Not only were 
 those Polish insurgents who had taken refuge in 
 Prussia imprisoned and sent back into Russia, 
 but, at the instigation of Bismarck, Prussia under- 
 took to support Russia in her reprisals against 
 Poland. Hence the similarity between the measures 
 of repression adopted by the Russian and Prussian 
 governments against the Poles in their respective 
 dominions. During the Franco-Prussian war, 
 Germany made a bid for Polish support by per- 
 mitting the military bands to play the Polish airs 
 as the Poles went to battle, which concession is 
 now withdrawn. But when she found herself 
 victorious, she had no further object in conciliat- 
 ing the Poles. She then, led by Bismarck, pro- 
 ceeded to the persecution which, in flagrant 
 violation of the Treaty of Vienna and of Frederick 
 William IV's solemn promise to protect the 
 liberties of his Polish subjects, has continued to 
 gather volume till it has reached its present 
 lengths. 
 
16 POLAND 
 
 The Kulturkampf that, in the seventies of the 
 nineteenth century, Bismarck directed against 
 the Catholic Church in Germany fell upon Prus- 
 sian Poland with the double violence of an attack 
 upon religion and nationality. The Archbishop 
 of Gnesen and Posen, Ledochowski, was thrown 
 into prison for refusing to allow the Polish children 
 to be taught their faith in German. He remained 
 two years there, and was then banished. Priests 
 were expelled from their parishes, penalized for 
 administering the sacraments. Over two hundred 
 thousand Polish Catholics were left without a 
 priest to minister to them the consolations of 
 their religion. Convents were closed and re- 
 ligious orders banished, several of which have 
 never been permitted to return. The Kulturkampf 
 died out. Then Bismarck opened his direct war 
 upon the Polish nation. 
 
 In 1885 forty thousand Poles, men, women, 
 and children, were ruthlessly deported from 
 Prussian Poland at forty-eight hours notice, be- 
 cause they were Poles who were not Prussian 
 subjects. They were turned out into the world, 
 homeless and friendless, to find a living as best 
 they could. Soon the Government was faced with 
 a serious shortage of labour in consequence of 
 the thousands of Polish labourers it had lost : and 
 it proposed to import Chinese coolies into the 
 heart of Europe to supply the place of the hard- 
 working, frugal Pole who might work no longer 
 in his country. 
 
 In the following year — 1886 — the Colonization 
 Bill was passed. Enormous grants of money 
 went to the foundation of the Commission of 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 17 
 
 Colonization, by which Polish land is bought up 
 and parcelled out at small rates to German settlers. 
 The Poles parried this attack by founding their 
 own land-bank, by which they in their turn bought 
 up land and let it out to Polish peasants. Again 
 and again immense sums have been voted by the 
 Prussian Government for German colonization 
 of Polish lands ; and yet it was proved that the 
 Poles bought more rapidly than the Germans, and 
 that this attempt at Prussianization was a failure. 
 In 1896, therefore, the Government established 
 its own first right of purchase. From thenceforth 
 no Pole can ever re-acquire land that has passed 
 into the possession of the Commission. The 
 struggle for the soil, between those to whom it has 
 belonged for centuries and the Germans who are 
 determined to drive them out, continuously pro- 
 ceeds. In the centre of the Polish population Ger- 
 man colonists are planted, with German schools, 
 Lutheran churches and parsonages, for which the 
 Pole pays by heavy taxation — thus forced to 
 contribute to his own ruin. And yet, as the Pole 
 still continued to gain ground instead of losing it, 
 the German Government went further. A bill of 
 1907 prohibited Poles from building dwellings 
 even on their own land. The poor Polish peasant, 
 whose dearest dream is to possess some portion 
 of his mother earth as his own, who will toil for 
 that cherished desire during a life-time, thus found 
 himself brought up against the bitter fact that the 
 simple joys for which he had striven so long, the 
 ihome on his own plot, were snatched away from 
 him just as he had won them. The cases con- 
 sequent on this law, that occurred shortly before 
 
1 8 POLAND 
 
 the outbreak of the present war, illustrate at once 
 the tragedy and the absurdity of Prussian methods. 
 A peasant was compelled to sleep in a caravan on 
 his own field, as he might not build a house. A 
 miller was driven to dig a cave to shelter himself 
 and his fourteen children on the river banks. He 
 might not have any other resting place, nor even 
 sleep in his mill. 
 
 Then came the Expropriation law, passed in 
 j 1908, by virtue of which the Polish landowner is, 
 at the bidding of the government, evicted from 
 his estate. The year before this measure became 
 law the great Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, 
 himself a Russian subject, addressed an appeal to 
 the whole civilized world against the oppression 
 of which his fellow Poles under the Prussian 
 Government are the victims. It runs as follows : 
 
 " Sir, — The twentieth century has seen an 
 unheard of act carried out, an insult against 
 civilization, against right, against justice, and 
 against all those humanitarian conceptions which 
 are the foundation of life and of the intellectual 
 culture of modern society. 
 
 " For a long time, a Commission of Colonization 
 has existed in Prussian Poland, with the object of 
 buying Poles' estates in order to settle Germans 
 on them, and which pays for these properties 
 with funds to which the Poles themselves, Prussian 
 subjects, have been forced to contribute by taxes. 
 If to that we add the martyrdom of Polish children 
 in the German schools and the recently projected 
 law forbidding the use of the Polish language in 
 public assemblies, it seems impossible that iniquity 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 19 
 
 and the contempt of equality before the law could 
 be pushed further. And yet the Government, 
 whose principle is that ' might is right,' has not 
 been content with this. 
 
 " In fact, a bill for compulsory expropriation has 
 been presented to the Prussian Diet. The Poles, 
 who are subjects of the Prussian sceptre, will be 
 at last driven forth from that soil which is their 
 native land, that beloved earth where, for cen- 
 turies, long generations have been born, have 
 lived, and are buried. 
 
 " The part of Poland which the monarchy of 
 the Hohenzollerns has seized has never lit the 
 flames of revolution. She bears herself pacifically, 
 she strictly fulfils the painful duties that events 
 have imposed upon her. She pays the taxes, and 
 furnishes a military contingent whose valour 
 Bismarck himself more than once admired. Thus, 
 when the first news of this enforced expropriation 
 appeared in the European press, the project was 
 universally looked upon as a savage and mad 
 lucubration of some fanatics bereft not only of 
 moral sense but of all reason. Men felt sure that 
 a civilized state, which recognizes the right of 
 property as the corner stone of the social edifice, 
 would never go so far as to trample underfoot with 
 such brutality both that principle itself and the 
 most elementary conceptions of justice. Nobody, 
 believed such a crime possible in a society that 
 calls itself Christian and considers itself as 
 such. 
 
 "And yet the Chancellor Biilow has presented 
 to the Prussian Diet a bill for the compulsory ex- 
 ropriation of the Poles, and the Diet, instead of 
 
 f " 
 
20 POLAND 
 
 sending the Chancellor to the study of law and 
 morality, sent on the bill to the Commission. 
 
 " The official news of this act has now been 
 spread abroad through all the world ; and, to 
 the honour of humanity, it must be stated that 
 everywhere it has called forth a unanimous cry 
 of protestation and indignation. The European 
 press without distinction of side and party — and 
 with it all the independent German press — has 
 condemned the action of the Prussian Govern- 
 ment as a shameful attack on the natural rights of 
 humanity and against the Constitution that is in 
 force in the kingdom of Prussia. 
 
 " Every government, even the one in question, 
 is obliged to reckon with that universal indig- 
 nation and that universal contempt. 
 
 " But we Poles would wish this protest against 
 barbarism to endure as long as possible, and to 
 take on the vastest proportions. This is why we 
 do not consider the voice of the press sufficient, 
 obliged as it is to be occupied each day with new 
 events. This protest will not obtain durability, 
 and at the same time an immense authority, unless 
 the most eminent representatives of science, litera- 
 ture, and art throughout the whole world consent 
 to express their opinion individually. That would 
 be the final judgment of the universal conscience 
 in the face of a crime that is without precedent ; 
 and it would also be the most powerful plea for 
 the defence of an important portion of a civilized 
 nation which has deserved well of humanity. 
 
 " There is no question here of interfering with 
 the internal affairs of the Hohenzollern monarchy. 
 The question is a matter on which every civilized 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 21 
 
 man has the right to speak, and, above all, those 
 who are among the nations the pillars of civiliza- 
 tion and intellectual culture. 
 
 " It is for this reason that, Sir, we address 
 ourselves to you, earnestly begging you to pro- 
 nounce your opinion upon the bill presented by 
 the Prussian Government, the object of which 
 is to tear their land from the Poles by means of 
 compulsory expropriation. Naturally we do not 
 suppose for a single moment that your opinion 
 can be anything else than a word of indignation 
 and reprobation ; but a public reproach, coming 
 from a man like you, will be the condemnation 
 of the greatest infamy in the history of the twen- 
 tieth century. Your answer will fill the Polish 
 nation with ardour and with hope, and will also 
 be a powerful support to all upright men in 
 Germany who, unwilling to see their country 
 dishonoured in the eyes of the whole universe, 
 fight steadily against the odious design of the 
 Prussian Government." 
 
 The Expropriation Bill was first put into ex- 
 ecution in October, 191 2, when four Polish land- 
 owners were given orders to quit their homes. 
 The so-called compensation that they received 
 was so inadequate that they found their fortunes 
 reduced by one quarter or one third. On the eve 
 of the war a bill was under consideration which, 
 if passed, will disqualify every Pole from holding 
 property in that part of his country that at 
 present belongs to Prussia. 
 
 The battle for the Polish language proceeds on 
 equal lines with the struggle for the land. 
 
22 POLAND 
 
 In 1887 the Polish language was forbidden in 
 the elementary schools, with the exception of the 
 prayers and religious instruction, which remained 
 Polish. In 1905 that exception was withdrawn ; 
 and from that time the Polish child has been 
 compelled to learn its religion and to recite its 
 prayers in German. The children refuse to pray 
 or to be taught their faith in the language which 
 they do not understand, which is forced upon 
 them instead of their own mother tongue. They 
 are punished by detention or flogged ; and the 
 instances of Polish children beaten to death by a 
 brutal Prussian master are unhappily not uncom- 
 mon. A parent whose boy is in a high fever after 
 such a flogging is fined if he does not send the 
 sick child to the house of detention, to which he is 
 condemned because he would not say his prayers 
 in German. The affair at Wreschen is still fresh 
 in the mind of every Pole. The children refused 
 to recite the prayers in German instead of Polish. 
 They were mercilessly flogged. The parents, 
 hearing their children's screams, ran to the school- 
 house and protested. Several of them — bread- 
 winners of the family — were sent to prison. Their 
 number included a poor woman, the mother of 
 young children, who was expecting her confine- 
 ment. She was condemned to prison for two years, 
 because, maddened at the sight of her children's 
 sufferings, she had abused the schoolmaster. 
 Fines, loss of employment, are the answers that 
 the parents' protests receive. 
 
 Polish ladies, determined that the children of 
 their nation shall not be deprived of their birth- 
 right, secretly gather them together and teach 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 23 
 
 them gratuitously the truths of their religion in 
 their own language. When discovered, these 
 ladies are thrown into prison, and treated there 
 as common malefactors. 
 
 No word of Polish may be uttered in class, or 
 between the children, in the elementary school. 
 The German master refuses to explain his meaning 
 in the only language that the children know, 
 because it is Polish. He illustrates the German 
 word he is teaching by pictures, by signs, in any 
 way rather than allow the pupils to hear their 
 own tongue spoken. 
 
 In the secondary schools Polish is proscribed ; 
 Polish history, Polish subjects are dismissed from 
 the curriculum. But here the language may still be 
 taught as an extra lesson, once or twice a week 
 for three-quarters of an hour, and for two years 
 only. Even this concession, meagre enough when 
 we consider the peculiar difficulty and intricacy 
 of the Polish grammar, is hedged round with 
 vexatious hindrances. The Polish boy in the 
 grammar-schools, however marked his abilities, 
 is debarred from scholarships and the government 
 stipends granted to successful scholars, and for 
 which, of course, his parents are taxed. Bullied 
 and persecuted by his German masters and school- 
 fellows, he leads the life of a dog. He is compelled 
 to sit and listen in indignant silence while, before 
 the whole class, the teacher calumniates his nation, 
 and expends his coarse ridicule on the beautiful 
 Polish language and on all that is Polish. For the 
 crime of having founded a private society among 
 themselves for the study of their literature and 
 history, a band of high-class Polish schoolboys 
 
24 POLAND 
 
 were some years ago expelled from school, con- 
 demned to exclusion from every other school in 
 Germany, which involved the ruin of any such 
 career as is open to the Pole, with the added 
 penalty of three years service as privates in the 
 Prussian army. Likewise, schoolboys found with 
 Polish histories and works on Polish literature in 
 their possession run the same danger of ex- 
 pulsion. 
 
 The war upon the Polish language is not con- 
 fined to the limits of the school. Polish parents 
 are not permitted to have Polish tutors and 
 governesses for their children. German officials 
 are authorized to enter a private house at any 
 moment to ascertain if the children are being 
 taught in Polish. The patriotic Polish mother will 
 not desist from teaching her children in their 
 native tongue their country's history and tra- 
 ditions ; but she is driven to do so in the shelter 
 of her bedroom, as the one place in her house 
 which the German inspector is not allowed 
 to investigate. 
 
 The Polish language is forbidden in public 
 Polish assemblies. At the ticket office the Pole must 
 ask for his ticket in German ; and, if he does not 
 know German, he must bring an interpreter with 
 him. A Polish waiter speaking Polish in a restaurant 
 is liable to instant dismissal. The peasant who 
 requires some remedy in the chemist's shop is not 
 allowed to ask for it in his own language. The 
 label Poison must not be written in Polish over the 
 medicine purchased by a Pole. The evidence of 
 the Pole in the law-courts must go through the 
 medium of a German interpreter. A poor Polish 
 
m 
 
 THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 25 
 
 man or woman who cannot take his or her oath in 
 a language not their own is sent to prison. The 
 Polish soldier, forced to serve in the German 
 army, may not speak Polish with a brother Pole 
 in uniform. The names of the Polish towns and 
 villages, the Polish streets, are rechristened by 
 some German title, as unrecognizable as senseless 
 to the Polish ear. The Polish infant, after being 
 baptized by the name its parents choose, is entered 
 on the register by the German officials under a 
 German name. Letters addressed in Polish are 
 detained at the post-office until the recipient 
 pays a fine. Telegrams may be sent in any and 
 every language — but not in Polish. 
 
 What has been well described as " Pole worry- 
 ing " extends to every branch of existence, small 
 or great. The diplomatic career, rank in the army 
 above a major's, municipal office, the jury, respon- 
 sible posts on the railway, are all closed to the 
 Pole, unless he will forswear his nationality. The 
 Polish national tunes may not be played. The 
 Polish colours — red and white — may not be worn 
 or used in public decorations. If a Pole happens 
 to wear a red and white tie, he is fined. Boys 
 laying wreaths on the statue of Adam Mickiewicz 
 in Posen — which statue is only permitted to 
 stand in a sequestered spot behind railings — are 
 fined. Priests who allow grown-up persons to 
 join a school excursion are fined. The Polish 
 miners who work the coalfields in Silesia were, 
 till 1 91 3, paid one-half of the wages received by 
 other miners in Germany, besides being the 
 objects of gross tyranny on the part of the German 
 
 ineowners. Only a determined strike compelled 
 
z6 POLAND 
 
 the German Government to redress their griev- 
 ances. 
 
 The Pole is, in fact, treated as the despised and 
 detested alien in the country that has belonged 
 to him centuries before Prussia rose into exist- 
 ence. When Chancellor of the German Empire, 
 Biilow launched a studied insult against the 
 Polish subjects of William II, comparing their 
 high birth-rate to the propagation of a rabbit 
 warren, rabbits in Germany being regarded as 
 vermin. Prussian officers, hearing fellow-travellers 
 talking to each other in Polish, bid them cease 
 speaking " that dogs' language." The teacher in 
 the elementary school brands the language of the 
 pupils in terms that, in this country, children are 
 neither permitted to employ or hear. It may be 
 said with truth that every day of these latter 
 years has increased the weight of Prussia's iron 
 hand on the Poles within her rule. And yet the 
 Poles have not lost ground. They have gained it. 
 They have stood shoulder to shoulder, presenting 
 a front of mingled strength and spirit, with the 
 result that four million people have proved them- 
 selves stronger than a great military autocracy. 
 Every attack of the Prussian Government they 
 have parried with a counter thrust. The German 
 buys out the Poles from their land. The Poles 
 buy out the Germans and divide their estates 
 among Polish tenants. The Government boycotts 
 Polish goods. The Poles retaliate by boycotting 
 German goods. The upper class Poles are debarred 
 from ordinary professions. They overcome their 
 old prejudices, and take to trade with admirable 
 results to their nation. Poles are forbidden to 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 27 
 
 speak Polish in their meetings : so they hold 
 meetings over the frontier in Holland — before 
 the war, of course. So invariably is it the case that 
 in a mixed marriage between a Pole and a German 
 the German becomes Polish, and all the children 
 grow up Poles, that the German Government 
 has forbidden its functionaries to marry Polish 
 wives. 
 
 It might have been supposed that while Germany 
 is fighting for her existence she would have re- 
 laxed her oppression of the Poles. She has scattered 
 broadcast proclamations and promises that the 
 Poles take at their worth as " scraps of paper." 
 And, in the meantime, her treatment of her Poles 
 at home continues on its old lines : so that the 
 Polish deputies have boldly refused to vote the 
 war subsidies. One instance may be recorded here. 
 The Poles in Prussian Poland organized a relief 
 fund for the assistance of their starving and 
 destitute brother Poles in those parts of Poland 
 over which the war has swept. That fund has been 
 confiscated and its originators punished by the 
 Prussian Government. 
 
 Abroad, the Polish cities that have fallen into 
 the hands of the German soldiers have all alike 
 suffered from the brutality of Prussian warfare. 
 Czenstochowa has been the scene of unnamable 
 outrages. Kalisz has been destroyed, its women 
 and children deliberately butchered. Warsaw 
 groans beneath the tyranny of the conqueror, 
 who has introduced there the same methods that 
 the citizens of Posen know too well. 
 
 Between the Pole and Prussian there is no single 
 bond of sympathy, similarity, or union. Polish 
 
28 POLAND 
 
 idealism, the Polish soul, the Polish tradition, are 
 all at absolute antagonism with the principles of 
 the Bernhardis and Bismarcks and their disciples. 
 And yet — greatest of all the tragedies of this 
 war ! — Polish youths, placed by their German 
 rulers in the post of danger, the vanguard, are 
 forced to fight in defence of a cause that is abhorrent 
 to them, and whose triumph would ensure the 
 ruin of their beloved nation. Commanded, in the 
 beginning of the war, to fire upon the Belgians, 
 who were struggling to defend their homes and 
 country, the Polish soldiers, rather than obey the 
 order, shot wide. That Polish boy may be taken 
 as typical who, as the Germans advanced upon 
 Louvain, ran to the hall of the University, tore 
 down the Polish flag and carried it under his 
 clothes on his flight to France, delivered from 
 Prussian capture. 
 
 Such is the rough outline of the last hundred 
 years of Poland's history. 
 
 Through unparalleled misfortune, against odds 
 under which a less vivid and less heroic people 
 must have gone down, the Polish nation, battling 
 for dear life, has preserved an intense national 
 existence, has kept her ideals unimpaired. Her 
 soul remains, not merely alive, but passionate 
 and invincible. She represents a great principle. 
 She has proved, against fact, that the idea can 
 prevail over brute force ; that the hope, the 
 spiritual conscience of a race, shall save her. Her 
 language, the noblest of Slavonic tongues, lives 
 on the lips of twenty- two million men and 
 women. Her literature, one of the most powerful 
 means by which patriotism and confidence were 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 29 
 
 kept alive in the hearts of an oppressed nation, 
 stands among the magnificent expressions of art 
 and idealism in European history. Beset within 
 and without, exposed to all the deadly moral 
 perils of the conquered and persecuted, she has 
 emerged triumphant from her long ordeal. We 
 may confine ourselves here to one testimony alone, 
 that of a political study published in 191 3 by a 
 Polish writer who, far from pronouncing a pane- 
 gyric upon his nation, does not hesitate to point 
 out her faults with unsparing frankness ; faults, 
 which, as he says : 
 
 " Have been redeemed and compensated by 
 . . . nobility of sentiment, chivalrous spirit, 
 uprightness, love of liberty, patriotism, respect 
 for traditions, tolerance, faith in the future, all 
 virtues, which, after our disasters, have preserved 
 us from destruction, and which were like a cuirass 
 against which the arms of our enemies lost the 
 edge. They have not prevented our blood from 
 flowing, but they have saved us from hatred. 
 
 " Sweetness and nobility of character, while 
 rendering the work of enfranchisement more 
 difficult, have permitted the Poles to resist the 
 evil influences of servitude, and have guaranteed 
 them against demoralization and degradation. 
 That degradation, that servility, that hypocrisy, 
 that contempt of right, that hatred, those vices 
 of all sorts that are the fruit of oppression, Poland, 
 sweet and noble Poland, has not known them."* 
 
 The same writer has stated that the political 
 
 * E. Starczewski, L Europe et la Pologne. Paris, 1913. 
 
30 POLAND 
 
 decadence of Poland which, in part, contributed 
 towards her fall may be traced back to the ex- 
 cessive ease with which the nation expanded. Her 
 conquest of Lithuania and Ruthenia was blood- 
 less. It was without effort that she became the 
 leading power of Eastern Europe. The exact 
 reverse has been her record since her partition. 
 It is by unending sacrifice and struggle that she 
 will have purchased her resurrection. Every great 
 national stake, every detail of homely life with its 
 perpetual background of large issues behind it, 
 from the general principle that Poland must and 
 shall rise again to the incident of a child in Prussian 
 Poland refusing to lisp her prayers in German 
 instead of in the tongue learnt at her mother's 
 knee, has been wrestled for with the heart's blood 
 of a nation. An immense spiritual and mental 
 strength must lie behind such a combat. This 
 strong and set purpose gives the clue to the whole 
 of Polish history, Polish thought, Polish art, since 
 the dismemberment of Poland. Kosciuszko, that 
 noblest of national heroes, fought for it. The 
 Polish legions, to their war-cry " Poland hath not 
 perished," fought for it. The youth of Poland, in 
 their two hopeless risings, died for it. It is this that 
 has enabled the Poles in Prussian Poland to stand 
 out, undismayed and unyielding, against the 
 forces of a great military empire. It has inspired 
 the literature of Poland that is its mouthpiece 
 and its messenger. It glows from Matejko's great 
 canvases of Polish history. It speaks through 
 Grottger's pictures of a nation's suffering, through 
 the symbolism of Polish contemporary painters. 
 The mingled fire and sadness of Chopin is but the 
 
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 31 
 
 voicing of the sorrows, the hopes, the heroic 
 memories of his mother country. 
 
 While these words are written, Poland is the 
 battlefield of Eastern Europe. Her fields are laid 
 waste, her towns, her villages, her dwellings, are 
 in flames and ruin. Her sons, compelled to serve 
 under one or another of the three powers that 
 partitioned their nation, are forced to fight, 
 brother against brother, friend against friend, to 
 lay down their lives by thousands without the 
 consolation of dying for their country. Devastated 
 by a war in which her all is at stake and in which 
 she has no voice, the condition of Poland is the 
 most tragic in all Europe. 
 
 "Three days later," wrote in 1846 the poet 
 Zygmunt Krasinski to a fellow Pole, " the resur- 
 rection shall come ; but during those days how 
 many hearts shall break." * 
 
 * Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I, Lw6w, 1882. To Con* 
 •tantine Gaszynski, March 30, 1846 (Polish). 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE NATIONAL LITERATURE OF 
 POLAND 
 
 AFTER the Rising of 1830, the story of 
 Poland becomes that of the long agony 
 of an idealistic and profoundly patriotic 
 race, and of its protracted battle for existence. 
 On one side, in the country itself, the prisons and 
 the mines were the price the Pole paid for remain- 
 ing a Pole. On the other, beyond the frontiers, 
 there were the throngs of Polish exiles, dragging 
 out lives of poverty, homesickness, and grief. The 
 nation lived on ; but her life was mutilated, 
 abnormal, unlivable. 
 
 And yet those years when Poland had no 
 history except a monotony of suffering, no life 
 except that life jealously preserved against pro- 
 scription and penalty in the heart of every Pole, 
 coincided with the splendid outburst of Polish 
 literature. Unlike the three great empires of the 
 world, Rome, Spain, and England, whose pros- 
 perity inspired their golden age of letters, it was 
 the sorrows of Poland that gave birth to her great 
 romantic song which, for its tragic power, its 
 idealism, no less than its haunting beauty, ranks 
 among the noblest productions of European art. 
 Great as is the literature of Poland from an 
 artistic point of view, it stands on another plane 
 than that of literary value alone. In the first half 
 
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 33 
 
 of the nineteenth century, the Polish poets rose 
 as the national teachers and moral leaders. They 
 spoke to the people held in bondage by the bitterest 
 facts of life, of the hope that would save them. 
 The youths of Poland were prohibited from learn- 
 ing their nation's history, her spirit, her aims in 
 the ordinary channels. They learnt them, there- 
 fore, of the poets who taught them the lessons of 
 devotion and self-immolation for a native country ; 
 whose writings kept alive the fires of patriotism, 
 the Polish ideality and moral health, in young 
 souls beset by peril. The national literature was 
 no mere art, an element disconnected with the 
 deep things of life, written for recreation or re- 
 laxation. It spoke straight to a stern purpose. It 
 was a weapon, and as powerful a weapon as any 
 that she could have chosen, in the cause of Poland. 
 In this light the Polish poets regarded the poetry 
 they gave their people. The literature they brought 
 forth is, said Mickiewicz, speaking in the College 
 de France, " above all things true. Each work is 
 at the same time an action." * Poland's poets 
 were more than her poets. They were her 
 patriots. 
 
 The Pole in Poland might not read the master- 
 pieces of his native literature in normal ways. 
 These works were banned by the censor. They 
 were published abroad, often at no little risk to 
 the author. Colporteurs smuggled them into the 
 country. Boys read them behind barred doors, 
 with one of their number posted in the street to 
 give the alarm should the police be near. After 
 one hurried but intense perusal they were thrown 
 * Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, 
 
34 POLAND 
 
 into the fire. Prison and Siberia were the lot of 
 those readers who were discovered. The possession 
 of Mickiewicz's Ancestors sent a boy of seventeen 
 to the dungeon, where, maddened with terror 
 lest under the knout he should betray the names 
 of his companions, he burnt himself to death. 
 Hundreds of young men went to Siberia for 
 having read Krasinski's Temptation. Often the 
 only means by which the Polish poet could speak 
 to his nation, with any degree of safety to himself 
 or to the reader, was under the protection of an 
 allegory or some sort of veiled meaning, where 
 the Pole could read between the lines. Mickiewicz, 
 in the heart of Russia, wrote an epic of the revenge 
 of the Lithuanian, Konrad Wallenrod, on the 
 Teutonic knights, the oppressors of his country. 
 Every Pole knew for whom the Teutonic knights 
 stood. Krasinski bade his compatriots abjure the 
 weapons of vengeance, and work by love alone; 
 but he did so under the figure of a Greek 
 in the Rome of Heliogabalus. He warned 
 the Polish women against marriage with the 
 enemies of their nation ; and the language of his 
 Summer's Night is so obscure as almost to fail in 
 its aim. He sought to arm the Polish youth 
 against those seductions of the Imperial Court 
 that had laid their siege to his own soul in vain ; 
 yet the elaboration with which he designedly 
 disguised his point could not avert the conse- 
 quences to his readers. Even in a poem as objective 
 as Slowacki's Father of the Plague-stricken, the 
 lamentation of the father over his children dying 
 in the desert is said to represent the desolation of 
 a bereaved country. 
 
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 35 
 
 Poland, then, was assailed from every side. In 
 anguish of mind her poets and her thinkers sought 
 for some explanation of her tragedy to justify 
 the working of Providence, to save their country 
 from the atrophy and despair that would destroy 
 her as certainly as all exterior persecution. So 
 arose the dreams of a Polish national mysticism, 
 I known by the name of Messianism. Its strange 
 and mournful glory casts over Poland's poetry, in 
 the days of Mickiewicz and Krasinski, a faint 
 spiritual kinship with the prophecies of those who 
 saw Sion irradiated with a mystical splendour as 
 the adored of the nations. Poland, says Messianism, 
 was rent asunder that her destruction might bring 
 salvation to the human race. Out of the mysteries 
 of pain and death are born new life and resur- 
 rection. Death is the condition of resurrection. 
 The Saviour of mankind redeemed us by embracing 
 death, and after three days in the grave rose again. 
 So, in the political world, one nation has been 
 signalled out to lay down her life. Her sufferings 
 are the price by which the new and better epoch 
 of humanity shall come about. She will rise 
 gloriously to be the spiritual leader of that world, 
 where all nations and governments will be united 
 in Christ and rule in the spirit of Christ. Violence 
 against that spirit of Christ was committed 
 when so hideous a crime against man's rights as 
 the blotting out of a free nation from the land 
 of the living was perpetrated. The restoration of 
 that nation will therefore logically be a return to 
 the ideals of Christ, the first step to their realisa- 
 tion. Various of the Messianists looked to that 
 future period as the third epoch, the reign of 
 
< 
 
 36 POLAND 
 
 the Holy Ghost, thus presenting a curious link 
 with the tenets of Joachim of Flora. 
 
 Pushed to its extreme limits, the doctrines of 
 Polish Messianism tended to an exaggeration and 
 a falsity of outlook that were likely to prove in- 
 jurious to those for whose welfare they were 
 intended. But in its best form, propagated by 
 such a teacher as Krasinski, who made its promises 
 conditional on each individual's purity of soul, 
 it may be taken as a sublime spiritualization of 
 national suffering. The workings of Providence 
 were made clear. The dignity of a great calling 
 was conferred upon a downtrodden people. The 
 Poles were given an end for which to strive. The 
 light of hope was shed over the dark places of 
 grief. 
 
 " You all know, my brothers, that we were 
 born in the womb of death," says Krasinski in 
 his prose preface to Dawn, " Hence the eternal 
 pain that gnaws your hearts ; hence the incerti- 
 tude that has become your life. But every end 
 contains already in itself the successive beginning ; 
 the day of death but precedes the hour of waken- 
 ing. Look closely, and the signs of death will 
 suddenly change for you into the signs of resur- 
 rection. Our death was necessary ; necessary will 
 be our resurrection ; and the Word of the Son 
 of Man, the eternal word of life, shall be shed 
 through the social circumference of the world. 
 By our very nationality crucified on the cross of 
 history will be manifested to the conscience of 
 the human spirit that the political sphere must 
 be changed into a religious sphere. The Lord in 
 the whole political sphere, where hitherto He 
 
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 37 
 
 was absent, will be present ; and the vessel of 
 His providence to this end will be no other than 
 the Polish nation." 
 
 " One of the two — either the blessed future of 
 humanity is forfeited, or the condition of its 
 fulfilment is the life of Poland." 
 
 This idea of the chosen race is the keynote of 
 ' the great Messianistic poetry of Poland. As in 
 the Hebrew prophets, Jerusalem is the mystic 
 city, the object alike of patriotic and spiritual 
 passion : so the prophet poets of Poland looked 
 towards their country, not solely as the earthly 
 home for which they pined with the human long- 
 ing of the exile, but as the transfigured heavenly 
 mistress of the soul. Poland is the instrument of 
 God's future favours. She is set apart, therefore, 
 and consecrated. Thus we have Mickiewicz draw- 
 ing up a manual of religious guidance for those 
 whom he regarded as the apostles of the new 
 civilization. His Books of the Polish Pilgrimage, 
 with their curious blending of Biblical flavour, 
 almost homely detail, and the yearning of a man 
 whose face was set to a Jerusalem on a far-off 
 horizon, were addressed to exiles to whom he 
 would not suffer the name of exile to be given. 
 For he would have men know by their demeanour 
 that they were pilgrims in whose hands lay the 
 future of a hallowed country and a new race. 
 Thus we have Krasinski apostrophizing Poland 
 as " The holy one," " Holy Poland." She is no 
 longer to him merely a native land. She is his 
 faith, his idea (Dawn). He will liken, to mark the 
 great capital difference, his nation to but one 
 other : Jerusalem, who fell because she spurned 
 
38 POLAND 
 
 the love that would have saved her {Psalm of 
 Good Will). " The Jerusalem of our return for 
 which we sigh," is the language in which Mick- 
 iewicz expresses to a friend the weariness of his 
 banishment. " O God of Israel," prays Severvn 
 Goszczynski ; " Thou Who for forty years led 
 him by the way of victories and pain, through 
 pathless deserts to the promised land, behold 
 to-day Israel of the new covenant, the Polish 
 nation, travels to her promised land. Forsake her 
 not, O Lord, strengthen her with Thy grace. 
 Still lead her, as till now Thou ledst her by Thy 
 girdle till, fed by the blessed word of life Thou 
 gavest her, she, in the strength of youth, fulfils 
 her road. And lo ! this year may be the year of 
 her espousals. And I, who lift these prayers to 
 Thee to-day, pray if only for one moment I may 
 be at my people's bridal feast " {The Prayer of a 
 Poet). And the poet who watched the fires of the 
 incendiary blacken his native Galicia placed the 
 expression of his grief on the lips of a Jeremias, 
 lamenting over the desolation of the chosen city 
 (Kornel Ujejski, The Complaints of Jeremias). 
 
 The poetic symbolization of Poland takes 
 differing guises. She is the mother, weeping for 
 her sons. She is the great heavenly archangel of 
 Krasinski's vision, crowned with the purple of 
 her sorrows, whose eyes are of the eternal blue, 
 whose brow flashes with the lightning of God, 
 before whom the future new-born ages to whom 
 her suffering has given their being cast down their 
 wreaths in homage. She is — again and again — 
 the beloved dead, sleeping in a grave from which 
 she will rise again. The last word of Messianism 
 
THE NATIONAL LITERATURE 39 
 
 confers on her the lineaments of a Christ of 
 the nations, dying on the cross of expiation for 
 the sins of humanity (Mickiewicz, The Ancestors, 
 Part III.) A less usual conception is Bohdan 
 Zaleski's repentant Magdalen {The Spirit of the 
 Steppe). But behind all these types there is always 
 the same figure of one beautiful and haloed by 
 grief ; inexpressibly dear to the heart of him who 
 wrote ; the one who, in Krasinski's dreams, calls* 
 him, " and I went forth and I go, I know not 
 where, but that voice I will follow if needs be 
 even to the end of the world " (The Dream of 
 Cezara). If on one hand Poland is the ethereal, 
 star-encircled image of a mystic's desire, yet she 
 is at the same time the living love, spoken of in 
 the passionate and endearing tones of human 
 affection. 
 
 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 
 
40 POLAND 
 
 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, 
 
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 
 
42 POLAND 
 
 Warsaw,* and the second day passed with the 
 second taking of Warsaw,t 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). 
 
 " 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. f In 1831. 
 
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. t 
 
 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 of Krasinski. Cracow (Polish), 
 t E. Statczewski, L Europe et la Pologne. Paris, 1913. 
 
44 POLAND 
 
 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. 
 
# - CHAPTER III 
 
 THE POET OF A NATION'S SUFFERING : 
 ADAM MICK1EWICZ 
 
 THE genius of Adam Mickiewicz has 
 raised him above all other Polish poets. 
 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 
 1 812 the march of Napoleon to Russia. He saw 
 
46 POLAND 
 
 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. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 47 
 
 None knew it when alive, or knows its death. It 
 is the egotist. 
 
 " 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 to 
 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, 
 
48 POLAND 
 
 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 themes. 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 Mickiewicz. Cracow, 1897 (Polish). 
 
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 
 
50 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 
 Wallenrody 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. 
 
ADAM MICKIEW1CZ 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. (Potockd'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 the strong 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 
 
52 POLAND 
 
 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 
 
ADAM MICK1EWICZ 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 soul. 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 
 
54 POLAND 
 
 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 
 conquerors, and drinks a cup of poison, exulting 
 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 I It drives before 
 
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 W allenrodism 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 
 of her programme or methods. Such a supposition 
 is irreconcilable with the high moral tendency of 
 Mickiewicz's work for his fellow-Poles, with that 
 
S6 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. On the contrary, it is a fact that 
 they were inspired to a noble patriotic devotion 
 by a poem, in which the note of Byronism is sunk 
 in a tenderness and passion of love for a lost and 
 unhappy country, that lifts it into the dignity 
 and pathos of a human revelation. 
 
 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. t 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, Byron and His Age. Cracow, 1897 (Polish), 
 t Ibid. 
 
ADAM M1CK1EW1CZ 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 
 
58 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. } 
 
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 
 
60 POLAND 
 
 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 naming 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. 
 
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 
 
62 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. 
 
 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 cell. The youths, with their 
 strong, brotherly affection, 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 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 63 
 
 and blood, Mickiewicz's beloved and lost friends, 
 here under their own names. So 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 
 
64 POLAND 
 
 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. 
 
 f The first line of the song- of the Polish legions. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 65 
 
 on the road of my life they shall be as my compass 
 pointing and leading me to virtue. If I forget them, 
 oh, God in heaven, forget Thou me." 
 
 To which his hearers reply by a general Amen. 
 
 He resumes : 
 
 " The other carts had driven up in one long 
 row. They were drawn up one after the other. I 
 cast a glance at the closely pressed throngs of the 
 people. Each face had grown pallid as death. And 
 in that great crowd such was the heavy silence 
 that I heard each step, each clank of the chains. 
 They brought out the last of the prisoners. It 
 looked as if he were resisting, but it was because 
 the poor boy could not walk. He tottered each 
 moment, he staggered slowly down the steps, and 
 hardly had he reached the second step when he 
 fell his whole length. It was Wasilewski. He had 
 been here in the prison near us. The day before 
 yesterday they flogged him so much that not one 
 drop of blood remained in his face." 
 
 The soldier, furtively wiping his tears, lifted 
 him into the cart. 
 
 " And, as if he had been taken down from the 
 cross, his hands were stretched out on the soldier's 
 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 quivered a.s if in farewell," 
 
66 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 
 prisoners all rush to their cells, leaving Konrad 
 lying 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 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 67 
 
 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 
 
68 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 at the trails 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 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- 
 I standing cannot be the motive power of the 
 I world's salvation. To him the heart, love, feeling, 
 k 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. 
 
70 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 1 890 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 brother ed 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, Lift of Adam Mickiewic*. Posen, 1890 (Polish). 
 
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 
 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 ! Thou art 
 silent ! Thou wilt not give it to the heart, oh, 
 give it to the brain ! Thou seest that I am the 
 first of men and of the crowd of angels. Worthy 
 I am that Thou shouldst share half of Thy power 
 
72 POLAND 
 
 with me. If I have not divined Thee right, reply. 
 Thou art silent, and Thou trustest that Thou 
 hast a might v hand. Know that feeling will burn 
 what the mind will not break. Thou seest that 
 feeling is my burning-glass. 
 
 " Answer me, for I will shoot against Thy 
 nature ! If I do not overthrow it into ruins, then 
 I will shake the whole space of Thy dominions. 
 For I will shoot forth my voice through all the 
 boundaries of creation, that voice which shall 
 descend from generations to generations ; I will 
 cry out that Thou art not the father of the world, 
 but ." 
 
 The voice of the demon puts his thought into 
 words as he hesitates : 
 
 " The Tsar." 
 
 We realize the point when we remember that 
 the Tsar of Mickiewicz's day, Nicholas I, was the 
 man whose vengeance on Poland was sending 
 thousands of Polish men and women to hopeless 
 and lifelong misery. 
 
 Hearing the culmination of his blasphemy, 
 Konrad staggers, then falls in a dead faint. With 
 wild cries, the demons rush upon him, to claim 
 their prey. 
 
 The key is turned. The corporal enters, accom- 
 panied by a friar whom he has fetched, being 
 disquieted by the sounds he has heard issuing from 
 Konrad's cell. There before them lies Konrad, 
 insensible, moaning out broken words. 
 
 " The pit ... a thousand years . . . empty 
 . . . still more. I shall last out ten thousands of 
 thousand years. . . . Pray. . . . Here prayer 
 availeth nought. . . . And was there such a 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 73 
 
 bottomless and boundless pit ? I knew not . . . and 
 there was." 
 
 " Thou nearest how he sobs," says the corporal. 
 
 " Son," says the priest, who has raised Konrad 
 in his arms, " thou art on a heart that loves thee." 
 
 But there is something unusual here, and the 
 priest bids the corporal leave him alone with the 
 prisoner. Then, still unconscious, Konrad, out 
 of his broken heart, sobs out his fathomless despair. 
 
 " I see hence, yea, even hence, though it is 
 dark . . . deep. I see thee, Rollison ! * Brother ! 
 thou, too, art in the prison, scourged, all stream- 
 ing with blood. And God has not listened to thee, 
 and thou art in despair. Thou seekest a knife, 
 thou tryest to dash thy head against the walls : 
 * Help ! ' God does not give it, I cannot give it 
 thee. But I will show thee the way to death. Thou 
 hast a window. Dash it open, leap, leap down, 
 and break thy neck.f And fly with me to the deep, 
 to the dark. Let us fly to the pit, the abyss. That 
 abyss is better than the vale of earth. There, 
 there are no brothers, mothers, nations, tyrants." 
 
 The priest perceives that Konrad is in the 
 possession of the demon. He begins the rites of 
 exorcism. The evil spirit, speaking in Konrad's 
 tones, answers in a meaningless and foolish poly- 
 glot, till the friar drives him forth. Konrad wakes. 
 
 " Dost thou raise me ? Who art thou ? Be- 
 ware lest thou thyself shalt fall into this pit. He 
 gives me his hand. Let us fly ! Like a bird I fly 
 to the heights. I breathe sweet scents, I shine 
 
 * A fellow-prisoner who has been flogged in another cell. 
 f Here again Mickiewicz draws on a real incident. One of his 
 brother prisoners flung - himself from his window. 
 
74 POLAND 
 
 with light. Who gave me his hand ? Good men 
 and angels. Whence your pity that for me descen- 
 ded to this pit ? Men ? I despised men, the 
 angels I have not known." 
 
 " Pray," answers the priest, " for the hand of 
 the Lord hath terribly touched thee. The lips 
 with which thou hast outraged the Eternal 
 Majesty, those lips the evil spirit hath polluted 
 with hideous words. God grant that the words of 
 folly, heaviest punishment for the learned lips, 
 be counted as thy penance, God grant thou shalt 
 forget them." 
 
 Konrad : " They are there — hammered in." 
 
 The Priest : " God grant, oh, sinner, that 
 thou thyself shalt never more decipher them, that 
 God shall never ask thee an account of them." 
 
 He kneels, as Konrad falls asleep. " Thy mercy, 
 Lord, is without bounds," he cries. Prostrating 
 himself on the ground, he implores the divine 
 forgiveness, offering himself as a victim in ex- 
 piation of Konrad's sin. Even as on the Christmas 
 Eve which Mickiewicz and his companions spent 
 in Adam's prison cell, they heard the Polish 
 Christmas carols ringing out from a church near by, 
 which, says a fellow-prisoner of the poet, " trans- 
 ported us to our firesides where our mothers 
 and sisters were weeping for us " ;• so now into 
 the dungeon where the priest and prisoner are 
 alone penetrates the music of these hymns. 
 Above them resound the voices of alternate choirs 
 of angels, crying the one for mercy, the other for 
 justice, on the sinner. 
 
 * Ignacy Domeyko, The Philaretians and Philomathians y quoted 
 by L. Mickiewicz, Life of Adam Mickiewicz. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 75 
 
 The first archangel : " Oh, Lord, he hath 
 sinned, he hath grievously sinned against Thee." 
 
 The second archangel : " But Thy angels are 
 weeping for him, Thy angels are praying for 
 him."* 
 
 The first archangel : " Tread down, .oh, Lord, 
 break to fragments, oh, Lord, those who despise 
 Thy holy decrees." 
 
 The second archangel : " But forgive those who 
 have not understood Thy holy decrees." 
 
 An angel : " When, flying with the star of 
 hope, I shone upon Judea, the angels sang the 
 hymn of birth. The wise men saw us not. Kings 
 hearkened not to us. But shepherds saw, and ran 
 to Bethlehem. Poor, simple, lowly men first 
 welcomed the Eternal wisdom, and owned the 
 Eternal rule." 
 
 The first archangel : " When the Lord saw 
 pride and craft in the hearts of His servant arch- 
 angels, the Lord did not forgive the eternal spirits, 
 the pure angels. Bands of angels fell like a rain of 
 stars from the heavens, and the rain of the minds 
 of learned men fall with' them every day." 
 
 The second archangel : " He did not search into 
 Thy decrees as one curious to know. Nor was it for 
 human wisdom that he sought, nor yet for fame." 
 
 The first archangel : " He knew Thee not, he 
 revered Thee not, oh, our great Lord. He did not 
 love Thee, he did not call upon Thy name, oh, 
 our Redeemer." 
 
 * This is said to refer to the prayers of two Polish girls with 
 whom Mickiewicz had formed a close spiritual intimacy when in 
 Rome. With the one of these who lives in his poetry as Eva, he 
 fell in love, but the opposition of the father intervened, and they 
 never married. 
 
76 POLAND 
 
 The second archangel : " But he honoured the 
 name of Thy most holy Mother. He loved a 
 nation, he loved much, he loved many." 
 
 Both choirs of archangels : " Lift Thou his head. 
 He shall arise from the dust, he shall reach to the 
 heavens, and of his own will he will fall and 
 honour the cross. May the whole world with him 
 prostrate itself at the foot of the cross ; and let it 
 praise Thee for Thy justice and Thy mercy, our 
 Lord and our God." 
 
 Thus Mickiewicz's Ancestors rises above the 
 mere sceptical drama. Love saves the sinner. The 
 heart breaks down the barrier of intellectual 
 pride. Heaven replies to Konrad's agonized appeal ; 
 but not by language that could convince his 
 reason : rather by the charity that sought the 
 blasphemer in his cell, that drove the demon 
 forth, that took upon itself the penalty. 
 
 The remainder of the incomplete Part III. is 
 only connected by the slenderest of threads with 
 what has passed. Konrad leaves the scene until 
 the closing episode is reached. One link binds the 
 drama together — Poland's sufferings and the 
 supernatural presences with their power on the 
 soul for good or ill. The maiden, who is the 
 idealization of Mickiewicz's love for " Eva," 
 prays for the prisoner unknown to her, and beholds 
 a vision of angels which, with its grace and light- 
 ness, breaks into the stern tragedy of the Ancestors 
 like a strain of celestial music. On the other hand, 
 the vision of the friar that immediately follows it, 
 with no apparent connection, is entirely national. 
 He gazes, and he cries out in horror : 
 
 " What see I ? Long, white, the course of the 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 77 
 
 highway. Long are those roads we cannot see, 
 o'er wastes, o'er snows, all leading to the north. 
 There, there to a distant land like streams they 
 flow. They flow. Straight runs that road to a gate 
 of iron. See ! o'er those roads is rushing a band of 
 carts, like clouds driven by the winds. All to one 
 goal. Ah, Lord, those are our youths who go there 
 to the north. Lord, Lord, exile is their fate ! 
 And wilt Thou suffer them all to perish in their 
 youth ? And wilt Thou destroy our generation 
 to the end ? " 
 
 He foretells Poland's salvation by a child 
 who will grow to be her defender, her restorer, 
 whose name " shall be forty and four. Lord, wilt 
 Thou not deign to hasten his advent, to comfort 
 my nation ? " He sees that nation arraigned at 
 the world's tribunal as a Christ : and all this 
 
 \ passage, likening Poland to the Christ of the 
 nations, dying as Christ on the Cross for humanity, 
 victorious before all eyes, is Messianism in one of 
 its most pronounced forms. The vision ends by 
 the friar beholding the white robe of Poland 
 clothing the whole universe, as she, whom he fondly >\ 
 calls his beloved, ascends to heaven and to her 
 glory. Then again rises before his thought the 
 same mysterious saviour, the " vicegerent on the 
 vale of earth, blind, but led by an angel page, the 
 man of three faces whose footstool is three cities, 
 at whose call three ends of the world tremble. 
 He, himself, is uncrowned, though he stands over 
 kings and peoples. And his life is toil of toils, and 
 his name forty and four." 
 
 What is the clue to this allusion we do not 
 know. Was that restorer of the nation a curious, 
 
78 POLAND 
 
 foreshadowing of the advent of the mystic Towi- 
 anski to whose spiritual authority Mickiewicz gave 
 himself up for years of his life, and from whom he 
 expected the regeneration of humanity ? The 
 threefold face is said to refer to the triple message 
 that Towianski considered himself empowered 
 from on high to bring to Slavonia, France, and 
 Israel. It is a fact, moreover, that Towianski was 
 in his youth blind as the man of the friar's dream. 
 Or it has been suggested from a play on the Roman 
 figures that forty-four stands for Louis Napoleon, 
 who at one time seemed prepared to deliver 
 Poland. But these are conjectures, and we have 
 no means of interpreting what was passing in a 
 mind so strongly impregnated with mysticism as 
 Mickiewicz's. In moments of exaltation Mickie- 
 wicz uttered things that are not possible to 
 explain by ordinary laws. f&u«fth^ > ' / fc*»l~ v } 
 
 Next come the dreams of Novosiltzov, and 
 these are horrible nightmares provoked by demons. 
 The scene shifts to the Warsaw salons where the 
 talk runs on what is happening in Lithuania. 
 Here one of the guests tells the history of his 
 friend Cichowski. The strong simplicity of the 
 language in which Mickiewicz relates this story 
 adds to the pity of its tragedy. I cannot attempt 
 to present this celebrated passage in anything 
 more than a prose translation which, while giving 
 no conception of the art of Mickiewicz's poem, 
 will, at least, reproduce its facts. 
 
 " I knew him when I was a child. He was young 
 then, lively, witty, and gay, famous for his good 
 looks. He was the life of the company. He amused 
 everyone with his stories and jokes, He loyed 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 79 
 
 children, and took me often on his knee. Then he 
 married. I remember that he brought to us 
 children presents from his betrothed, and invited 
 us to his wedding. Then for a long time he never 
 came, and it was said in my home that he had 
 disappeared, no one knew where. The government 
 sought for him, but could find out no trace of 
 him. At last it was said that he had killed himself, 
 that he was drowned. The police found his cloak 
 on the banks of the Vistula. They brought the 
 cloak to his wife. She recognized it. He was dead. 
 They did not find his body — and so a year passed 
 away. Why did he kill himself ? This was asked, 
 was inquired into. He was mourned, he was wept 
 for. Finally, he was forgotten. And two years 
 went by. One evening they were taking prisoners 
 to the Belvedere from another prison. The even- 
 ing was rainy and dark. Some one, whether by 
 chance or on purpose, was a spectator of this 
 procession. Perhaps it was one of the brave youths 
 of Warsaw who keep a watch on the whereabouts 
 and names of the prisoners. Patrols were in the 
 streets, dead silence in the town. Then someone 
 cried out from behind a wall : ' Prisoners, who 
 are you ? ' A hundred names answered. Among 
 them his name was heard : and the next day his 
 wife was told. She wrote and she ran, she begged, 
 she implored; but she heard nothing save that 
 one name. And again three years passed on with 
 no trace, with no news. But, in some unknown 
 way, it was spread through Warsaw that he was 
 alive, that he was being tortured, that he refused 
 to tell anything, and that so far he had told 
 nothing ; that for many nights they would not 
 
80 POLAND 
 
 allow him to sleep ; that they fed him on herrings 
 and gave him nothing to drink ; that they drugged 
 him with opium, and sent horrible apparitions 
 and monsters upon him ; that they tickled his 
 soles and his armpits. But soon other prisoners 
 were taken, the talk began about others. Only 
 his wife wept, all the others forgot. 
 
 " Till, not long ago, they rang at his wife's 
 house one night. The door was opened. An officer 
 and a gendarme, armed, and a prisoner. It was 
 he ! They ordered pen and paper for him to sign 
 that he had returned alive from the Belvedere. 
 They took the note, and threatened him with their 
 fingers : i If you let out . . . . ' and they did not 
 finish. They went as they came. It was he. I ran 
 to see him. A friend warned me, ' Do not go to- 
 day, for you will find a spy at the gate.' The next 
 day I went. There were the soldiers of the police 
 in the hall. I went in a week's time. It was he who 
 would not receive me : he was ill. Then, not long 
 ago, I met him driving outside the town. They 
 told me it was he, for I did not know him. He had 
 grown fat, but it was a horrible fatness. He was 
 swollen by bad food and poisonous air. His cheeks 
 were puffy, yellow, and pale. His forehead was 
 wrinkled as if he were half a century old ; he had 
 lost all his hair. I bade him welcome. He did not 
 know me. He did not wish to speak to me. I told 
 him who I was. He looked at me without seeing me. 
 When I spoke of the details of our old acquaintance, 
 he fixed his eyes inquiringly on me. Ah ! all that 
 he had suffered in his torments by day and all that 
 he had thought through in his sleepless nights, 
 J knew it all in that one minute from his eyes. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 81 
 
 " In a month's time I went again. I thought 
 that by then he would have been able to look 
 about in the world, and to call back his memory. 
 But he had been so many thousand days under 
 the ordeal of the inquisition, so many thousand 
 nights he had communed alone with himself, so 
 many years tyrants had carried on the inquiry by 
 torture, so many years he had been surrounded 
 by walls that had ears, when his only defence was 
 silence, and his only companion darkness, that a 
 gay city could not blot out in one month the 
 lesson of so many years. To him the sun is a spy, 
 the day his traducer, his servants his jailors, each 
 guest is his enemy. If a visitor comes to his house, 
 at the sound of the bolt being unshot, he immedi- 
 ately thinks : ' They are coming for the in- 
 quisition.' He turns his back, he leans his head on 
 his hand. It appears he is gathering together his 
 presence of mind, all the powers of his brain. He 
 compresses his lips, so that no words shall escape 
 them. He casts down his eyes that the spies may 
 guess nothing from his eyes. If the visitors ask 
 him a question, he, still believing he is in prison, 
 rushes to the other end of the room, and escapes 
 there in the shadows, crying out always two 
 phrases : ' I know nothing. I shall say nothing.' 
 And these two phrases are his watchword. And 
 his wife and child weep long on their knees before 
 him, till he can conquer his fear and his horror." 
 J We pass back again to Wilna : to Novosiltzov, 
 giving a banquet, spurning the blind mother, as 
 she implores him to let her visit her prisoner son 
 who is being flogged to death, and whose fate 
 haunted Konrad as he lay unconscious. But where 
 
82 POLAND 
 
 all this time is Konrad ? The friar has stood 
 before Novosiltzov warning him that upon him 
 and his ministers God's vengeance is about to 
 fall — and it is a fact that sudden death and dis- 
 aster overtook the prime movers in the persecu- 
 tion of the Lithuanian youths. On his way from 
 Novosiltzov's rooms, the priest meets Konrad, 
 who is being conducted by soldiers to his examin- 
 ation. Konrad stops and gazes, bewildered. He 
 believes he has never seen the priest as a living 
 man. It must have been in a dream that the friar 
 came to his aid. He hails him therefore as the 
 friend of a dream, and thanks him for a gift of 
 which, so he thinks, only his own conscience is 
 aware. 
 
 " Thou shalt go," says the priest, " on a far 
 and an unknown road. Thou wilt be in the crowd 
 of the great, the rich, the learned. Seek thou the 
 man who knoweth more than they. Thou wilt 
 know him, for he will be the first to greet thee in 
 the name of God." 
 
 This is supposed to be a further reference to 
 Towianski. 
 
 " What is this ? " cries Konrad, struck by the 
 familiar sound of the voice that had consoled him 
 in the hour of his agony. " Is it thou ? What may 
 this be ? Stop a moment for the love of God." 
 
 " Farewell, I cannot," replies the priest ; and 
 Konrad is hurried off by the soldiers. 
 
 His next and last entry into the strange, mystic 
 drama is shrouded in the veils of mystery. The 
 feast of the Ancestors is being held again as in the 
 beginning of the play. The wizard and the woman 
 whom Gustavus loved are in the cemetery. The 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 83 
 
 woman entreats the phantom that appeared with 
 his bleeding heart in the past to show himself to 
 her once more. The songs of the incantations are 
 wafted to their ears. Graves open. Spirits float 
 about them. Only the lover does not come. The 
 hour of cock-crow is here. The night of the Ances- 
 tors is run. The two who watch cry in vain upon 
 the name of Gustavus. 
 
 " Thy lover," says the wizard, " hath either 
 changed the faith of his fathers, or hath changed 
 his old name. See how the dawn draws nigh. The 
 wizard's powers are gone. Thy lover will not 
 come." 
 
 But from the west a band of prison carts 
 appears amidst clouds of snow, rushing to the 
 north. The lover is there. He turns back to gaze — 
 only once, but what a look is that farewell to 
 Lithuania ! His heart is bleeding with a thousand 
 wounds which have now entered his soul — the 
 wounds of his country, which death only can 
 heal. On his forehead he carries a black stain 
 which, says the wizard, even death may not cure 
 — his self-inflicted wound, his blasphemy. 
 
 " Ah, great God, cure him," cries Gustavus' 
 love ; and the play ends. 
 
 To the irreparable loss of literature, the drama 
 was never finished. Mickiewicz intended to have 
 brought it down to the events following the 
 Rising of 1830, and to have developed the action 
 in the Russian prisons and Siberia. His poetic 
 genius was tragically silenced, and the Ancestors 
 stands as a magnificent and incomplete monument 
 to the sufferings of Poland. " I read the poem on 
 my knees," wrote Bohdan Zaleski. " Since the 
 
84 POLAND 
 
 tears and the imprecations of the prophets of 
 Sion," so said George Sand, " no voice has been 
 raised with a like power to sing a subject as vast 
 as that of a nation's fall." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Shortly after Mickiewicz had written the Third 
 Part of the Ancestors, he joined the Polish Emigra- 
 tion in Paris. From that date, i&J^, his home was 
 in Paris for the rest of his life, with the exception 
 of the year and a half — 1839 to I ^4° — wnen ne 
 held the chair of Latin Literature at the Univer- 
 sity of Lausanne. He devoted himself to the exiles 
 and outcasts of his nation. He laboured for them 
 without stint, giving ungrudgingly out of his 
 own dire poverty, harbouring the homeless when 
 he himself could scarcely keep a roof above his 
 head, conferring strength and consolation, not 
 only by his written word, but by the moral force 
 of his life and by his rare gift of influence over 
 the souls of others. He became the chief moral 
 leader of his people and the object of their im- 
 passioned affection. He taught them that only 
 by personal regeneration could they hope to see 
 their country restored ; that true patriotism 
 must reform the individual to secure the nation's 
 redemption. For the guidance of his fellow exiles 
 he wrote the Book of the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickie- 
 wicz had a deep-seated conviction that Poland 
 was the chosen emissary of the higher future of 
 mankind, and that therefore her sons were to be 
 the apostles of the future. It thus followed that 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 85 
 
 the Polish Emigration was a providential means of 
 spreading the new light over the face of the world. 
 The Polish exiles were, therefore, exiles no more, 
 but pilgrims. They must prove themselves worthy 
 of that calling. So in his Book of the Polish Pil- 
 grimage he puts together in a species of Biblical 
 prose a string of counsels for the Polish pilgrim. 
 Material strength meant little to a man like 
 Mickiewicz. The power of the idea was every- 
 thing. It mattered nothing that at the moment 
 he wrote this book no visible sign of Poland's 
 resurrection could be discerned on the political 
 horizon. He believed with full confidence that the 
 moment of her triumph and the consequent 
 spiritual rebirth of the universe was approaching. 
 
 It is on these lines that his instructions for the 
 Polish exiles run : worded in pithy aphorisms, or 
 in parables. 
 
 " The greatness and the strength of the war- 
 ships are good, but. without stars and the compass 
 they are nought. And the star of the pilgrimage 
 is heavenly faith, and the magnetic needle is the 
 love of your country. The star shineth for all, 
 and the needle pointeth ever to the north. And 
 of a surety, with that needle, we may sail on the 
 eastern and western seas, and without it even on 
 the northern sea there will be wandering and 
 shipwreck." 
 
 " Why has the power of resurrection been given 
 to your nation ? Not because she was powerful," 
 like Rome, nor wise as Greece, glorious as Venice 
 and Genoa, for they have all fallen and will not 
 rise again. " But you will be woken from the 
 grave, as having faith, hope, and love." 
 
86 POLAND 
 
 " Polish pilgrim, thou wast rich, and lo ! thou 
 sufferest poverty and need, that thou mayest 
 know what are poverty and need, and that when 
 thou returnest to thy country thou shalt say : 
 4 The poor and needy are my co-heirs.' " 
 
 Wisdom is not with the great ones of this earth. 
 It has been lost from public life. " And the wise 
 among you," cries he whose soul was on fire with 
 hunger and thirst for the things that make for 
 righteousness, " are not those who have enriched 
 themselves selling their learning, and have bought 
 for themselves goods and houses, and have won 
 gold and favours from kings : but they who have 
 announced to you the word of freedom, and have 
 suffered imprisonment and rods. And they who 
 shall seal their doctrine with their death shall be 
 blessed." 
 
 Then must the pilgrim of the country to which 
 Mickiewicz looked for the world's spiritualization, 
 the unarmed pilgrim face to face with the govern- 
 ments of Europe, take heart, for a few poor fisher- 
 men were victorious over Rome. Let the Polish 
 pilgrims beware of confounding civilization in its 
 ordinary signification — the cult of the luxury 
 and materialization that have overspread Europe 
 — with the higher civilization of Christian self- 
 sacrifice. They must not be overwhelmed by 
 the strength that lies behind that so-called civili- 
 zation ; for it is their lot to inculcate upon the 
 nations that have lost all faith, and whose only god 
 is gross materiality, the civilization of Christ. 
 Malaria in a fever-stricken district must be 
 stamped out by searching for its cause. The man 
 who sits at home, instead of leaving it to fight 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 87 
 
 against evil, will be attacked by that evil in his 
 own dwelling-place. 
 
 The deadliest foes of the Polish nation are not 
 those who destroyed Poland, but the worshippers 
 y of power and interest. The talent of the Pole is 
 not for himself : all must be given to his country. 
 High posts, official dignities, earthly lordships, 
 what are these for the Poles among whom there 
 must be brotherly love alone ? 
 
 " In your pilgrimage in a strange country you 
 are as the people of God in the desert." Those 
 who complained, even in the secret of their heart, 
 perished without seeing the promised land. " So 
 beware ye of the sin of lamentation and doubt, 
 that you shall not lengthen the days of your 
 pilgrimage." And that Pole who does not believe 
 in the resurrection of Poland shall be banished, 
 till he repents, from the ranks of the pilgrimage. 
 
 " As in the city of the Jews, Christ and His 
 religion arose, so in the cities of Europe will arise 
 your religion, the new religion of self-sacrifice 
 and love." 
 
 " The nations shall be redeemed by the merits 
 of a martyred nation, and shall be re-christened 
 in the name of God and liberty. And who is thus 
 christened shall be your brother." 
 
 " Sow ye the seed of the love of your country 
 and the spirit of self-sacrifice, and be ye sure that 
 the Republic will grow forth mighty and fair. 
 . . . Truly I say unto you inquire not what the 
 government in Poland will be. It is enough for 
 you to know that it will be better than any of 
 which you know. Nor ask as to her boundaries, 
 for they will be greater than ever before. And 
 
88 POLAND 
 
 each of you has in his soul the seed of the future 
 laws and the measure of the future boundaries. 
 For inasmuch as you make your soul greater and 
 better, so much will you better your laws and 
 increase your boundaries." 
 
 These extracts may give some general impres- 
 sion of what is not the most poetical, but one of 
 the frankest expressions of Polish Messianism. 
 The poet finished his book of rules for the pilgrim 
 with a cry from his heart, the prayer and the 
 litany of the Pole. 
 
 " Lord God, Who canst do all things ! The 
 children of a warrior nation lift up to Thee their 
 disarmed hands from all the ends of the world. 
 They cry to Thee from the depths of the mines 
 of Siberia and from the snows of Kamchatka,* and 
 from the deserts of Algeria, and from France, a 
 foreign land. But in our own fatherland, in 
 Poland, faithful to Thee, they may not call upon 
 Thee ; and our old men, our women, and our 
 children pray to Thee in secret with their thoughts 
 and tears. God of the Jagiellos !t God of Sobieski ! 
 God of Kosciuszko ! have pity on our country 
 and on us. Grant us to pray again to Thee as 
 our fathers prayed, on the battlefield with weapons 
 in our hands, before an altar made of drums and 
 cannons, beneath a canopy of our eagles and our 
 flags. And grant that our families may pray in the 
 churches of our towns and hamlets, and our 
 
 * Kamchatka is a convict settlement for the Poles. The 
 reference to Algeria is explained by the large number of Poles 
 who since the days of Napoleon served in the French Foreign 
 Legion. 
 
 f The Jagiello line of sovereigns under whom Poland attained 
 to her greatest power. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 89 
 
 children on our graves. But not our will but Thine 
 be done." 
 
 " God the Father," run the supplications in 
 his litany, " Who didst lead Thy people forth 
 from the captivity of Egypt and didst restore 
 them to the Holy Land, restore us to our native 
 land. 
 
 " God the Son, Redeemer, Who wast tortured 
 and crucified, Who didst rise again from the dead 
 and Who dost reign in glory, raise our country 
 from the dead. 
 
 " Mother of God, whom our fathers called the 
 queen of Poland and of Lithuania, save Poland 
 and Lithuania . . . 
 
 " From Russian, Austrian and Prussian bondage, 
 deliver us, oh, Lord. By the martyrdom of thirty 
 thousand knights of Bar, who died for faith and 
 freedom, deliver us, oh, Lord.* By the martyr- 
 dom of twenty thousand citizens of Praga, slaugh- 
 tered for faith and freedom, deliver us, oh, Lord. 
 By the martyrdom of the youths of Lithuania, 
 slain by the knout, dead in the mines and in exile, 
 deliver us, oh, Lord. By the wounds, tears and 
 sufferings of all Polish prisoners, exiles, and pil- 
 grims, deliver us, oh Lord. 
 
 " For a universal war for the freedom of the 
 nations, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. For the 
 national arms and eagles, we beseech Thee, oh, 
 Lord. For a happy death on the field of battle, 
 we beseech Thee, oh, Lord. For a grave for our 
 bones in our own earth, we beseech Thee, oh, 
 
 * The Confederation of Bar, headed by Casimir Pulawski, fougfht 
 Russia for four years (1768-1772), in defence of their country's 
 existence. 
 
90 POLAND 
 
 Lord. For the independence, integrity and free- 
 dom of our country, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord." 
 
 Mickiewicz's last and greatest poem followed 
 the Book of the Pilgrimage by two years ; but, in 
 order not to interrupt the narrative that yet 
 remains of the rest of the poet's life, I will return 
 to Thaddeus later. Poverty, domestic griefs, 
 sorrow for his nation, an endless yearning to behold 
 his native land again ; such is the private history 
 of Adam Mickiewicz. Moments came when he 
 and his wife were almost starving. Yet through 
 all he maintained an unshaken composure of soul, 
 the confidence in Providence of one to whom the 
 unseen matters more than the vicissitudes of 
 earth. 
 
 Before Mickiewicz moved to Lausanne, and 
 again after he returned to Paris to take up the 
 professorship of Slavonic literature at the College 
 de France, madness fell upon his wife. 
 
 During his first year at the College, Mickie- 
 wicz compared each of his lectures to a hard- 
 fought battle. In the intervals of tending his wife 
 in her paroxysms of insanity he prepared the 
 lectures, on which his family of young children 
 depended for their maintenance, as best he might 
 out of a mind racked with suffering. Weighed 
 down by the tribulation of his home and the 
 national sorrows that had by now driven all joy 
 from his heart, he stood before his audience in 
 which sat the most brilliant men and women in 
 Paris, his sad face worn and wearied, but with the 
 fire behind it leaping forth whenever he spoke of 
 the nation he loved. In the summer of 1841, his 
 domestic troubles reached their climax, and it 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 91 
 
 was found necessary to remove his wife to a mad- 
 house. 
 
 On his return from accompanying his wife to 
 the asylum, Mickiewicz sat alone in his desolate 
 home, broken with grief. A stranger from Lith- 
 uania entered his room. He told Adam that he 
 had words of great import, that he was endowed 
 with a message from God that should save both 
 the human race and their country, and that as a 
 proof of what he said he was able to cure the poet's 
 wife. In grievous doubt, Mickiewicz spent the 
 night wrestling with his conscience as to whether 
 he should accept the leading of this man, Andrew 
 Towianski, or no. He decided finally to go with 
 Towianski to the asylum. The result was that his 
 wife was restored to health, probably by a species 
 of magnetism, and that Mickiewicz became the 
 chief apostle of the mystic system inaugurated 
 by the new prophet. 
 
 The scope of this book does not permit me to 
 dwell upon this episode of Mickiewicz's life, or 
 upon the personality and teaching of the mystic 
 Towianski, which latter have been a fruitful sub- 
 ject for controversy. I have told the story more 
 fully in a different place.* Suffice it to say that, 
 with a whole-hearted faith in Towianski's mission, 
 Mickiewicz sacrificed poetic genius, position, 
 friendship. Since the hour that he fell in with 
 Towianski, the creator of the Ancestors and Tbaddeus 
 could never again enrich the literature of his mother- 
 * tongue with his splendid poetry. His lectureship 
 in the College de France became a pulpit for his 
 mysticism. His adherence to Towianism lost him 
 
 * See my Adam Mickieivicat, the National Peel of Polmnd. 
 
92 POLAND 
 
 this, his last remaining, self-expression and only 
 means of livelihood, for, part of the Towianskian 
 doctrines being a semi-deification of Napoleon- 
 ism, the French Government expelled him from 
 his chair. For the best years of his manhood he 
 gave himself up to the propagation of a neurotic 
 form of mysticism because he believed it would 
 bring salvation to Poland and the human race. 
 Before his death he emerged from the ordeal of 
 a religion that exacted of its followers a perpetual 
 state of ecstasy, prematurely aged, broken by 
 spiritual strain ; but with his moral grandeur 
 unimpaired. None of the bitter disillusions and 
 disappointments that dogged his life could ever 
 weaken his hope in the resurrection of his nation 
 or his faith in the ideal. He died as he had lived, 
 a sacrifice for his country, his last hours spent in 
 her service. During the Crimean War, he went to 
 Constantinople to organize a Polish legion to 
 fight for Turkey. Filled with sadness at the failure 
 of this enterprise on which he had built a 
 patriot's dream, he was stricken down by Asiatic 
 cholera, and died on November 26th, 1853. A 
 Polish village in the outskirts of Constantinople 
 bears his name, and his memory still lingers in 
 the capital of Turkey. His mortal remains now 
 lie in Cracow among the dead whom his nation 
 honours most. 
 
 IV 
 
 Tha&deus (1834) 1S as g reat a national expression 
 as the Ancestors, albeit under a different aspect. 
 Artistically it is Mickiewicz's masterpiece. Where 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 93 
 
 the Ancestors is the tragedy of a nation and of 
 the soul suffering in that nation's suffering, 
 Thaddeus is an idyll of the Lithuania that Mickie- 
 wicz had lived in as a boy, told by the pen of 
 one who had loved and lost her. 
 
 The poem, said to be the finest epic of the nine- 
 teenth century, runs into twelve cantos. The 
 finished beauty and brilliance of the style, its 
 magnificent word-paintings of nature, were alone 
 enough to give it the place it holds in the history 
 of Poland's literature. But, apart from this, it has 
 always spoken directly to Polish sympathies. 
 
 There is scarcely any plot in the story. A 
 Lithuanian boy — the Thaddeus who gives his 
 name to the poem — returns to the country house 
 of his uncle Soplica, after completing his studies. 
 A sort of hereditary feud concerning the right 
 over a ruined castle is dragging on between this 
 family and another, of whom the last represen- 
 tative is a sentimental young Count, a lover of 
 French fashions and of the pseudo romanticism 
 of his day. The quarrel is more nominal than 
 real ; but a more serious question is behind it. 
 The father of Thaddeus, Jacek, was in his youth 
 a suitor for the hand of Horeszko's daughter, 
 whom Mickiewicz, in memory of his own love, 
 calls Eva. His suit was rejected, according to the 
 old Polish custom, by a dish of dark soup being 
 handed to him at the table of the lady's father. 
 In a fury of revenge, he took to a wild life, and 
 seized the moment of the Russian attack on the 
 j Horeszko mansion during Kosciuszko's rising to 
 ft shoot the magnate dead. He then fled abroad, 
 ' fought by way of reparation in the Polish legions 
 
94 POLAND 
 
 for Napoleon, and became a Bernardine monk. 
 Under the cowl and a feigned name he, through 
 the poem, serves as a national emissary from the 
 Polish legions to Lithuania. The Count, the last 
 remaining male scion of the Horeszko family, is 
 urged on by the old retainer of the latter to fight 
 it out with the Soplicas. In the Lithuania of old, 
 where there were no police to enforce the decision 
 of the courts, the pleader had recourse to the 
 nobles, who summoned their armed friends and 
 the private armies that the more powerful of 
 them had at their disposal, and, with a legal officer 
 in their number, marched on the offender to exact 
 justice. The Count leads a like movement against 
 the Soplicas. While they are at blows with each 
 other, the Russians fall upon both with the result 
 that the Poles unite against their common foe. 
 Thaddeus and the Count go off to enrol them- 
 selves under the banners of the Polish legions. 
 They return with Napoleon's armies on that 
 march to Moscow, which the Poles hailed as the 
 herald of their country's resurrection. Every 
 quarrel is reconciled, and, with Thaddeus' marriage 
 to the granddaughter of the murdered Horeszko, 
 the family feud and the poem are happily ended. 
 Such is the outline of Thaddeus : but its power 
 and its charm lie in the wealth of its national 
 colouring, the vividness with which Mickiewicz 
 reproduced the types of his youth that, even 
 when he wrote the work, had gone for ever, the 
 magnificent descriptions of nature in wild and 
 romantic Lithuania, all set to the patriotic hope 
 that filled Poland in the last days of Napoleon's 
 glory. Men of a dead past rise again as though in 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 95 
 
 the flesh, with their picturesque, many-coloured, 
 semi-Oriental' 7 costume, their hospitable ways, 
 their hunting and shooting in the forest, their 
 open-air and simple, joyous country life. When 
 the sun goes down, work on the estate ends too ; 
 for the master of the mansion ordains that " the 
 Lord of the world knows how long we must work. 
 When the sun, His day-labourer, departs from 
 the sky, it is time for the husbandman to with- 
 draw from the field." So, at sunset, there is a long 
 procession streaming home from the forest and 
 meadows ; servants, labourers, horses, sheep, and 
 oxen with bells at their necks, and the guests and 
 inmates of the house, walking according to pre- 
 cedence in the order that the master decrees. The 
 guest of honour, the " Chamberlain " — the Polish 
 manor was a miniature court with corresponding 
 titles — as, at each meal, he takes the place of 
 honour, " bowed to the ladies, the old men and 
 youths." Manners have a patriarchal simplicity 
 strongly dashed with a quaint ceremonial and 
 punctilious courtesy. 
 
 The effect of thaddeus is that of a blessed 
 tranquillity, glorified, as the poem ends, with 
 the promise of the nation's deliverance. It was 
 written for those Poles among whom the poet's 
 exile was passed and whose sorrows he shared, in 
 order to transport their minds from the carking 
 cares, we might in truth say the horrors, that 
 surrounded them. Respite from their troubles 
 could but be known, says the poet — in lines dis- 
 covered after his death and intended as an intro- 
 duction to Thaddeus — in the " only land in all 
 the past and all the future, where the Pole can 
 
96 POLAND 
 
 find one spark of joy ; the country of our childish 
 years." Overwhelmed with grief for Poland and 
 in the fresh agony of bereavement at the death 
 of his dearest friend, Mickiewicz wrote a poem 
 that is, as Dr. Kallenbach expresses it, eternally 
 young.* At the thought of the tears and blood 
 in which his nation was drowned, he confesses he 
 could find no heart to sing of anything except of 
 things that are tender and serene. 
 
 Yet the note of mourning is not entirely absent 
 from Thaddeus. The yearning of the exile that 
 tore Mickiewicz's soul till his life ended cannot 
 be wholly kept under. It breaks out again and 
 again, mingling with the sighs of the forest and 
 the cries of the marsh birds which the poet might 
 hear no more. 
 
 " Lithuania, my country," are the first words 
 of his Lithuanian epic. " Thou art as health. How 
 to prize thee he only can tell who hath lost thee. 
 To-day the whole charm of thy beauty I see and 
 I sing, for I pine after thee. 
 
 " Holy Virgin, who dost guard bright Czens- 
 tochowa, t and who shinest over the Ostrian 
 gate," he continues in the invocation that is one 
 of his famous passages, and which was pronounced 
 over his coffin when laid in foreign soil.t " Thou 
 who dost defend the castled town of Nowogrodek 
 with her faithful people ! Even as by a miracle 
 
 * J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewicz. 
 
 f The famous Polish shrine of the Blessed Virgin. In these latter 
 days this spot, so peculiarly sacred to Polish national and religious 
 feeling, has been desecrated, as we know, by the presence of the 
 Kaiser and his Prussian hordes, who committed there outrages 
 that are unnamable. 
 
 X Mickiewicz's remains rested in Paris till 1890 when they were 
 removed to Cracow. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 97 
 
 thou didst restore me when a child to health, 
 when by my weeping mother I was offered to thy 
 protection, and I opened my dying eyes, and 
 went on foot to thy shrine to thank God for my 
 recovered life : even so thou wilt restore us by a 
 miracle to the bosom of our land ! Till then, 
 carry my yearning soul to those wooded hills, 
 those green meadows stretching wide on the blue 
 Niemen's shores ; to those fields painted with 
 many-hued grains, golden with wheat, silver 
 with rye ; where grow the amber rape and buck- 
 wheat, white as snow, where with a maiden blush 
 the medick flames." 
 
 In the heat and glare of the Paris pavements, 
 the son of a wild, spacious country, to whom a 
 noisy city was always insupportable, remembered 
 with longing the breath of his native forests, the 
 sounds of the Lithuanian evening. 
 
 " The sky seemed ever to droop and draw 
 nearer the earth till, both shrouded 'neath a 
 dark veil, like lovers they began secret talk, plead- 
 ing their loves with faint sighings, with whispers 
 and murmurs and half-uttered words, whence 
 arose the enchanting music of night. 
 
 " In the field the evening concert had scarcely 
 begun. Now the musicians began to tune up. 
 Then the landrail screamed three times, the first 
 violin of the meads. Then afar in the marshes the 
 bitterns reply on the bass. Then the snipes, as 
 they rise and they wheel, cry again and again like 
 the beating of little drums. 
 
 " As the finale to the murmurs of flies and the 
 clamour of birds, the two ponds answer with 
 double choirs, like the Caucasian mountain lakes 
 
98 POLAND 
 
 that, enchanted, are silent by day and play in the 
 night. One pond, transparent of wave and sandy 
 of shore, gave out from its deep blue breast a low, 
 solemn sigh. The other pond, with its muddy 
 depths and its troubled voice, replied with a cry 
 of passion and grief. In both of the ponds sang 
 numberless hordes of frogs, both choirs united 
 in two great chords. One sang fortissimo, but the 
 other softly was warbling. One seemed to complain, 
 but the other one only to sigh. Thus, over the 
 fields, did the two ponds converse with each other 
 like two Aeolian harps alternately playing." 
 (Tkaddeus, Book VIII.) 
 
 Another time it is the music of the buffalo horn, 
 wielded by the Wojski* that the poet describes, 
 ringing through glade and thicket. 
 
 " He played. The horn, as a blast of wind, on 
 its eddying breath carried music into the depths 
 of the forest, and the echoes repeated the sound. 
 The hunters were dumb, the prickers stood still, 
 amazed at the power and the pureness and the 
 strange harmony of those strains. He filled, he 
 gave life to the woods and the oaks. 'Twas as 
 though he let the dogs loose and started the 
 chase, for there rang in his playing the whole tale 
 of the chase. First, a ringing glad call, the reveille. 
 Then growls, and, after growls, whining, the cries 
 of the dogs. And here and there sharper notes as 
 of thunder — the shots. 
 
 " Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All 
 thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it 
 was the echo that played. 
 
 * An old title of office surviving" from the independent days of 
 the Republic. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 99 
 
 " And again he blew. You would think that the 
 horn changed shape, and that 'twixt the Wojski's 
 lips it waxed and it waned, feigning cries of the 
 beasts. Now, long drawn as the voice of the wolf, 
 it howled long and shrill. Again, it spread widely 
 its throat, and roared like a bear. Then the wind 
 gave out the urus' cry. 
 
 " Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All 
 thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it 
 was the echo that played. Oaks repeated the sound 
 to the oaks, and the beech to the beech. 
 
 " Again he blew; and it seemed as though in 
 the horn a hundred other horns played. You 
 heard the confused, mingled noise of the chase, of 
 anger, of fear, of the hunters, the dogs, and the 
 quarry, till the Wojski lifted the horn on high, 
 and the hymn of triumph smote on the skies. 
 
 " Here he ceased, but the horn went on. All 
 thought that the Wojski was playing still, but it 
 was the echo that played. All the trees in the forest 
 were so many horns that carried the song to each 
 other, as from choirs unto choirs. And the music 
 travelled ever wider, ever farther, ever softer, 
 ever purer, ever perfect, till it died far, far, some- 
 where far off on the threshold of heaven." 
 (Tbaddeus, Book IV.) 
 
 Mickiewicz is a master of the Polish language. 
 The natural richness of the Polish tongue, its 
 peculiar delicacies of word shading, its onomato- 
 poeia that is one of its chief characteristics, are 
 handled by Mickiewicz with the skill of a musician 
 whose instrument obeys his every call. The sounds 
 of the woodland life of Lithuania, the roaring of 
 the tempest through the forests, the whisper of 
 
ioo POLAND 
 
 the wind over meadows and marshes, the cries of 
 bird and beast, fill the pages of Thaddsus with 
 the harmonies of a wild and romantic land. 
 
 " My native trees ! " he says in one place, 
 hailing the giants of the forest whose age was as 
 long as time. " If Heaven grant I shall return to 
 gaze on you, my friends of old, shall I still find you ? 
 Are you still living ? Ye, around whom I wandered 
 once, a child. 
 
 " How much I owe you, oh, my native trees ! 
 I, a poor shot, escaping from the mockery of my 
 friends for my missed quarry, how often, in your 
 stillness, I hunted dreams when, in the wild hunt- 
 ing grounds, I forgot the chase and sat me on a log. 
 And around me the earth was silver with the hoary- 
 bearded moss mingled with the deep blue of black 
 and rotten berries. And, further, flamed heathery 
 knolls decked with red berries, like a rosary's coral 
 beads. All darkness round me. Branches swung 
 on high like green, thick, drooping clouds. Some- 
 where above their tranquil arch the gale raved, 
 wailing, roaring, howling, crashing, thundering. 
 Strange deafening uproar ! It seemed that over- 
 head was rocking a roaring sea." (Tkaddeus, 
 Book IV.) 
 
 While the ear is satisfied in Thaddeus, the eye 
 dwells on the pageantry of sunset and sunrise on 
 the marshes, on the storm sweeping over the wide 
 Lithuanian skies. As a painter of nature, exquisite 
 and true to detail, Mickiewicz stands unrivalled 
 in his native literature. There are few, says Dr. 
 Kallenbach, his equal in any literature.* Such is 
 the veracity of his descriptions that a Pole whom 
 
 * J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickipwic*. 
 
ADAM MICK1EWICZ xoi 
 
 years of exile had separated from his country- 
 could say : " I read fhaddeus aloud, and often 
 had to break off the readings, so moved was I 
 by that absolute transportation of body and 
 soul into our native Polish plains."* 
 
 The background of these tranquil and lovely 
 Lithuanian scenes is the war that was changing 
 the face of Europe, for : 
 
 " The rest of the world was drowned in tears 
 and blood ; when that man, that god of war, girt 
 with a cloud of regiments, armed with a thousand 
 cannons, having yoked to his car of triumph the 
 gold with the silver eagles, flew from the Libyan 
 plains to the sky-reaching Alps, hurling thunderbolt 
 after thunderbolt, in the Pyramids, in Thabor, 
 Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz. Before him and after 
 him ran victory and conquest. The glory of those 
 deeds, pregnant with warriors' names, went 
 roaring to the north, till, on the Niemen's banks, 
 it was flung back as from a rock, by the ranks of 
 Muscovy defending Lithuania with their walls 
 of iron from news, terrible for Russia as the 
 plague." (Tkaddeus, Book I.) 
 
 Even the remote hamlets in Lithuania beat to 
 the pulse of the events that shook the world. 
 Tbaddeus tells us — and amidst such scenes Mickie- 
 wicz's boyhood had been passed — how a beggar 
 who had lost a leg or an arm would arrive at the 
 manor, and whisper, looking round to see that 
 no Russian soldier was near, that he was a legion- 
 ary, come to die in his own land. Then the whole 
 household, masters and servants alike, would 
 
 * Correspondence of Adam Micktewtcz, Paris, 1872. Letter of 
 Stanislas Worcell, Nov. 7th, 1838 (Polish). 
 
X02 POLAND 
 
 press about him, overcome by weeping, while he 
 told them the tales they were forbidden to hear 
 of the valour of the Polish legions, and of the 
 victories of Napoleon. His stories were secretly 
 repeated over the countryside. Then many a boy 
 vanished from his home, and, escaping through 
 the forests, swam the Niemen to the other bank 
 where, in the Duchy of Warsaw, he might enrol 
 himself under the Polish flags. Or a wandering 
 friar from a foreign convent would appear at 
 the country house, unrip his scapular, and show 
 the war gazette that he had smuggled through. 
 Parents then learnt for the first time after years 
 of absence the death or glory of the son who had 
 left them. The family went into mourning; it 
 was guessed, but could not be told, for whom ; and 
 their obvious grief or equally obvious joy was as 
 the war news for the district. (Tbaddeus, Book I.) 
 
 This undercurrent of national hopes, the echo 
 of Napoleon's trumpets, vibrate through Tbaddeus 
 till the end. The year 1812 is now here. The 
 campaign, when Napoleon's armies were about 
 to march on Russia, was greeted by the Polish 
 nation with boundless joy, for the hour of resur- 
 rection seemed close at hand. That spring when 
 the fields were green with unwonted promise, 
 when the birds of passage returned early with 
 strange clamour to their haunts in Lithuania, 
 and the voice of war was heard in the land, was 
 Mickiewicz's greatest memory. 
 
 " Oh, year ! " he sings in the eleventh canto 
 of Tbaddeus. " To this day the people call thee 
 the year of harvest, and the soldier the year of 
 war. To this day, the aged love to tell tales of 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 103 
 
 thee, to this day song dreams of thee. Long wast 
 thou heralded by heavenly marvel,* and preceded 
 by low rumours among the people. With the sun 
 of spring some strange presentiment filled Lithu- 
 anian hearts as of the end of the world ; some 
 yearning expectation full of joy. 
 
 " Oh, spring, who saw thee in our land, memor- 
 able spring of war, and spring of harvest ! Oh, 
 spring ! who saw thee flowering with corn and 
 grass, brilliant in men, fertile in deed, pregnant 
 with hope ! Still do I see thee, fair dream of a 
 night ! Born in captivity, fettered in my swad- 
 ling-bands, only one such spring have I known in 
 my life." 
 
 Amidst this exultation and martial ardour, 
 Thaddeus' wedding takes place. He has returned 
 with the Polish legions for his marriage, on the ad- 
 vance to the Russian campaign. Side by side with 
 the gorgeous national costume flash the accoutre- 
 ments of the soldiers of the legions. Dombrowski, 
 the hero of many a battlefield, and his fellow- 
 generals are here. The Count, from being a 
 weaver of fantastic fancies, has become a soldier, 
 and sits in his Lancer uniform a guest under the 
 roof against which he had fought. Every heart is 
 throbbing with that patriotic rapture that, to- 
 gether with the glowing local colour, make the last 
 scenes of Thaddeus one brilliant song of rejoicing. 
 The banquet is carried out with all the old 
 national traditions. The officers compete in sword- 
 play. The patriotic Jew plays, as none other can, 
 the zimbala. 
 
 " He dropped the sticks on the strings. First 
 
 * A comet that appeared in 1811. 
 
104 POLAND 
 
 he beat out a tune of triumph. Then, louder, he 
 swept on the strings like a tempest of rain. It was 
 only to test them, for soon he broke off, and he 
 lifted the sticks on high. 
 
 " He played. Now trembled the sticks as though 
 a fly's wing quivered over a string, giving forth a 
 humming scarce heard. He lifted his hands ; 
 together they fell,, and he smote with both sticks. 
 
 " All at once the tune burst forth from all 
 strings as though a Janissaries' band played on 
 the bells, on triangles, on drums ; the Polonaise 
 of the Third of May rings out ! * The gay notes 
 breathe joy, make the ear drunk with joy. The 
 girls would fain dance, the young men spring 
 from their seats. . . . 
 
 " The master ever hurries the time, and strains 
 at the strings. Then he struck a false chord like 
 the hiss of a snake, like a knife grinding on glass. 
 He plucks at the traitorous note, he confuses the 
 tune ; tearing loud and more loud on the sullen 
 conspirator chord that destroys the sweet sound 
 of the strings. Then it burst with a crash, that 
 string of ill omen." 
 
 That was how the player told in music of the 
 conspiracy of Targowica, formed by a handful of 
 Polish traitors, which played into the hands of 
 Catherine II. before the second partition of Poland. 
 He passes to the storming of Warsaw by Suvorov. 
 
 " The musician runs to the treble. He draws 
 out a tune. The tune is confused. He casts off the 
 treble, and runs with his sticks to the bass. Hear 
 
 * The day on which the liberal constitution of the Republic of 
 Poland was passed, in 1791. This, the last great act of what 
 remained of independent Poland, would have saved her, had her 
 exterior enemies not been too powerful for her. 
 
ADAM MICKIEWICZ 105 
 
 thousands of clamours ever louder, the sound of 
 a march, and of battle, of attack, of the storming 
 and shots, the wailing of children, and weeping of 
 mothers. The peasant women trembled, recalling, 
 with tears of grief, the slaughter of Praga which 
 they knew from song and from story. They re- 
 joiced when at last the master thundered on all 
 the strings, then silenced their sounds as though 
 they sank to the earth. 
 
 " Then other music. At first, light and low 
 humming. A few slender strings sigh : " 
 
 And, after playing the songs of the legions : 
 
 " He sounded another strain, he measured the 
 strings with his eye, and, joining his hands, he 
 smote with both hands and both sticks. That 
 blow was so full of art, that blow was so full of 
 power, that the strings rang out like trumpets of 
 brass, and like trumpets blew to the skies the 
 famous song, the triumphal march : Poland hath 
 not perished. Dombrozoski, march to Poland ! And 
 all applauded and all cried out in chorus, ' March, 
 oh, Dombrowski ! ' The player let the sticks fall 
 from his fingers, and lifted his hands on high. . . 
 1 General,' said he, ' long hath our Lithuania 
 awaited thee, long as we Jews await our Messiah. 
 Live thou and combat, oh, thou who art ours.' " 
 (Thaddeus, Book XII.) 
 
 This whole passage, with its wonderful imita- 
 tions of the sound of a musical instrument to 
 which the Polish language is so peculiarly adapted, 
 is one of the masterpieces of Thaddeus. My rough 
 prose rendering can do no sort of justice to the 
 original. 
 
 Then the company dances the Polish national 
 
106 POLAND 
 
 dance, the Polonaise with its intricate character 
 figures. 
 
 " Couples followed couples, noisy and gay. 
 They unwind ; then they turn again in a wheel, 
 like a great snake twirling in a thousandfold scroll. 
 The many-hued colours of the costumes of the 
 ladies and soldiers and lords change like the flash- 
 ing scales of a fish, gilt with the setting sun's rays. 
 Whirls on fast and furious the dance, the music 
 rings out, ring out the plaudits and toasts." 
 
 The festivity is carried on far into the night, 
 with Vivats to the bridegroom and bride, to 
 Napoleon and the leaders of the legions. 
 
 " And I " : these are the last words Mickiewicz 
 adds to the poem : " was with the guests. I drank 
 the wine and mead, and what I saw and heard I 
 have gathered in this book." 
 
 The dream of the poet, who had no literary 
 ambition, and whose thought was always with 
 his country, was that this song of manners and 
 tradition should penetrate to the cottage hearths 
 of his nation, and be sung by the lips of the peas- 
 ants. He had his desire. To this day Thaddeus 
 remains the most beloved of poems to the Polish 
 heart. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ANONYMOUS POET OF POLAND : 
 ZYGMUNT KRASINSKI 
 
 IN 1812, during the tempest of the Napoleonic 
 wars, Zygmunt Krasinski was born into the 
 world ; he who, as the Anonymous Poet of 
 Poland, was to stand second only to Mickiewicz 
 in the history of his nation's literature. He was 
 the only child of a noble house, allied by mar- 
 riage to the royal family of Savoy. His father, 
 Vincent Krasinski, played a distinguished part 
 among the officers of the Polish legions, and 
 Zygmunt was brought up in strong patriotic 
 traditions. Despite the utter dissimilitude of their 
 characters, the father and son were all their lives 
 united by the strongest mutual affection, undes- 
 troyed even by the tragic circumstance that rose 
 between them. 
 
 After the death of his mother, from whom he 
 inherited his melancholy temperament and his 
 highly strung nerves, Zygmunt led a lonely and 
 precocious childhood in the family palace in 
 Warsaw. The tension between the Poles and the 
 Russian Government was then near the breaking 
 point. The Russian Decembrist revolution took 
 place in 1825. It was discovered that the Russian 
 Liberals were in communication with patriotic 
 
108 POLAND 
 
 Polish societies. The members of the latter were, 
 at the demand of Nicholas I., tried by the Polish 
 Senate. The opinion of the Polish nation and of 
 the judges was universally in favour of the accused, 
 who were acquitted. Vincent Krasinski alone 
 voted for their death. In 1829 the senator who 
 had presided over the trial died. The whole of 
 Warsaw attended the funeral as a great patriotic 
 demonstration. All the students from the Univer- 
 sity followed the bier — with one exception, and 
 that exception was young Krasinski. Compelled 
 by Vincent Krasinski he, and he alone, presented 
 himself in the lecture-hall that day, maddened 
 with pain and rage against his father. From that 
 moment dates the struggle, between his love for 
 his father and his passionate devotion to his 
 country, that was the tragedy of his life. The next 
 day, when the class met as usual, he was mobbed 
 as a renegade by his fellow students ; and the first 
 to lay hands on him was one of his personal 
 friends. 
 
 That scene branded itself for life into the soul 
 of the proud and sensitive boy. His position in 
 Warsaw then became impossible, and his father 
 sent him to study at Geneva. Sad and lonely as 
 he was, he found a warm friend in young Henry 
 Reeve, who was completing his education in the 
 same town. Devoured with literary ambition, 
 Krasinski spent his time in writing essays and 
 sketches in French and Polish prose, studying with 
 the zest of a highly gifted youth, riding and sail- 
 ing with Reeve. So passed nearly a year. He then 
 went to Rome, and there he heard the news of 
 the Polish Rising. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 109 
 
 In an agony of suspense Krasinski awaited his 
 father's summons to fight by his side. His fears 
 were realized. The summons did not come. 
 Already suspected by his compatriots, Vincent 
 Krasinski now incurred their odium by taking no 
 part in the national movement. He ended by 
 yielding to the dictates of ambition and wounded 
 vanity ; he went to Petersburg, in his heart still 
 clinging to his country, and accepted favours at 
 the hand of Nicholas I. His son's impassioned 
 appeals were made in vain. Zygmunt now saw 
 himself compelled, either to be at open war with 
 his father in the sight of all the nation should he 
 join the Rising, whither his whole heart and the 
 traditions of his patriotic and famous house 
 called him ; or to remain seemingly faithless to 
 his country in the hour of her need, branded and 
 dishonoured. 
 
 We cannot enter here into the details of the 
 long and painful duel between father and son. At 
 last, the latter, recoiling from the rupture that 
 would have put Vincent Krasinski even more 
 hopelessly in the wrong with his nation than he 
 was already, yielded to his father's command. The 
 anguish of mind that the boy of nineteen under- 
 went through all this episode shattered his weak 
 bodily frame, and laid the roots of the disease that 
 brought him in his prime to the grave.* His tears 
 caused the semi-blindness and threatened total 
 loss of eyesight that from that time repeatedly 
 recurred, cutting him off from book and pen. 
 He never again returned of his own will to Poland, 
 where his situation under his father's roof was 
 
 * J. I^all(enbach ? Zygmi^nt ftrasinsJii. Lw6w, 1904 (Polish). 
 
no POLAND 
 
 unendurable. For the rest of his life, racked by 
 mental and physical sufferings, haunted by the 
 terror of Siberia, he wandered abroad under the 
 supervision of the Russian Government, only 
 going back to his native land at rare intervals for 
 a few months, when compelled by Vincent Kras- 
 inski or by the Russian authorities. Loyalty to 
 his father imposed upon him the concealment 
 of his love and grief for his nation ; the accept- 
 ance of something akin to disgrace in the eyes of 
 many of his fellow Poles. The poet who, when a 
 brilliant boy, had longed for literary fame, now 
 surrendered even his name. The poems and plays 
 that he wrote, with the one intention of his 
 country's welfare, appeared anonymously under 
 pseudonyms, or under the names of his friends. 
 Only his most intimate confidants knew that the 
 Anonymous Poet was Zygmunt Krasinski. Of 
 the many acts of self-devotion that the sons of 
 Poland have been called upon to offer in her 
 service, that of Zygmunt Krasinski has been one 
 of the most bitter. He bore in silence the ruin of 
 his life and the burden of allegiance to his father 
 that he only laid down on his deathbed at the age 
 of forty-seven. Unable to speak, unable to act, as 
 he would, he was forced to hide his friendships, 
 his opinions, his fondest predilections. He remained 
 faithful to the two antagonistic claims that tore 
 his heart between them ; and yet he sacrificed 
 neither. In the part that lie was driven to play, 
 he sacrificed no principle, no person, except one 
 — and that one was himself.* 
 
 There is nothing more in a short sketch like 
 
 * S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. Cracow, 1892 (Polish)^ 
 
ZYGMUNT KRASINSKI in 
 
 this to tell of his outward life. The history o* 
 Zygmunt Krasinski does not lie in exterior things? 
 but in the battlefield of a tortured soul, and in the 
 evolution of his mystic thought which became 
 the highest moral teaching ever given to the 
 Polish nation. As a poet, Krasinski is not equal to 
 Mickiewicz. For pure artistic beauty he ranks 
 below Slowacki. But for the nobility of the phil- 
 osophy, which he spoke out of a suffering soul to 
 a suffering country, he stands alone. 
 
 He dedicated his sad and frustrated life to 
 Poland. He could do nothing for her except in 
 one way, the way he chose. In his poetry and his 
 dramas he taught her what he considered was her 
 only means of salvation. Love, purity that spurns 
 all evil weapons, pain borne for the redemption 
 of humanity, is the language he incessantly speaks. 
 Krasinski's idea was to adapt the principles of 
 individual morality to that of a nation and of 
 mankind. * His words were said ostensibly and 
 mainly to a pain-stricken country ; but they 
 speak with the strongest actuality and with pierc- 
 ing spiritual directness to every human soul. It is 
 this that gives Krasinski his great power, and that 
 places him among the poets whose inspiration is 
 a beacon light to suffering and struggling man. 
 
 Krasinski sought for the answer to the enigma 
 of his nation's suffering until he found it. He ex- 
 acted of his countrymen nothing that he himself 
 had not given first. He did not merely watch the 
 battle from a distance. His was the heat and 
 burden of the field. Those who have studied 
 
 * J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. 
 Lw6w, 1912 (Polish). 
 
ii2 POLAND 
 
 Krasinski's letters, which are scarcely less fine an 
 exposition of his thought than his poetical work, 
 are often tempted to halt astounded at the insight 
 with which, even as a young man, he goes straight 
 to the heart of the problems of pain and struggle. 
 Only personal grief could have given him a like 
 knowledge. In his youth, between the writing of 
 Irydion and Dawn — that is, from 1836 to 1842 — 
 the sight of the fate that had befallen Poland 
 drove him into a gulf of despair and religious- 
 doubt. He wandered for seven years in spiritual 
 darkness, seeking always for that explanation of 
 the wrong before his eyes which would at once 
 save his nation and his own soul. He won to his 
 triumph only after having, as he tells us in Dawn, 
 passed through the sorrows of hell. 
 
 The masterpieces of Krasinski in which we 
 may follow the course of his leading ideas are The 
 Undivine Comedy, Irydion, Dawn, The Psalms of 
 the Future, and Resurrecturis. As a boy of twenty- 
 one, Krasinski wrote the sociological prose drama 
 to which, in ironical antithesis to -Dante's Divina 
 Commedia, he gave the title of the Undivine Comedy. 
 It is an interesting fact in Krasinski's psychology 
 that this — the first work by which he proved his 
 genius — is not directly national. The subject is 
 " the future class revolution to which in the poet's 
 \* y v outh Europe appeared to be hastening. T hat the 
 scene is laid in PoIand~we only gather from chance 
 allusions. The characters, with the exception of 
 the servants, are cosmopolitan rather than Polish. 
 And yet, said Mickiewicz, who devoted several 
 lectures in the College de France to its analysis, 
 this play, with its heavy sadness, its atmosphere 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 113 
 
 of ruin and approaching cataclysm, could have 
 been written by none other than a Pole. " Its 
 grief is not exhaled in pompous phrases ; but 
 each word is drawn from one great mass of suffer- 
 ing and pain."* 
 
 The play reads as the expression of one who had 
 gone through a great shock. Krasinski wrote it 
 shortly after the failure of the Polish Rising, and 
 fresh from the agony of what the Rising had 
 brought on his personal life. There is nothing 
 youthful in its pessimism, nothing even Byronic 
 in its want of confidence in men. Its laconism, 
 strangely different from the rest of Krasinski's 
 work, is in part explained by the fact that the 
 author was half blind when he wrote it, and had 
 to set down his ideas on paper as briefly as he 
 could. t The situations and characters, says Mickie- 
 wicz, live by indication rather than by develop- 
 ment. A hint here : a half uttered phrase there ; 
 short passages that bite into the memory like acid 
 for their cruel curtness, their concentrated irony, 
 their pitiless truth to one side of human nature. 
 These things were taught by pain to the boy of 
 twenty-one. 
 
 The Undivine Comedy has seemingly little con- 
 nection with Krasinski's national philosophy. 
 Indeed, at this period of his youth the poet had 
 not discovered his spiritual bearings. Yet it fore- 
 shadows, as we shall see, some highly important 
 elements in Krasinski's life-work. The piece of 
 poetical prose that introduces the first part throws 
 light on Krasinski's whole attitude to the poet's 
 
 * Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. 
 f J. Kallenbach, op. cit. 
 
ii4 POLAND 
 
 calling, an attitude which, according to Mickie- 
 wicz, is Slavonic. He curses the poetry that 
 expresses itself only in words, and that is dead to 
 the deed that alone could ennoble it. 
 
 " There are stars around thy head, the waves 
 of the sea beneath thy feet. Before thee the rain- 
 bow runs on the waves of the sea, and cleaves 
 asunder the darkness. What thou beholdest is 
 thine. The heavens are thine. There is nought 
 equal to thy glory. But thou thyself, what feelest 
 thou ? What dost thou of thyself create ? Woe 
 unto thee ! Who gave thee thy base life, so false 
 that thou canst feign an angelic moment ere thou 
 wallowest in the mire, ere as a serpent thou 
 descendest to crawl and stifle in the slime ? Thou 
 sufferest, albeit thy pain shall create nought, shall 
 avail nought. Thou destroyest only those who 
 have consecrated themselves to thee, who have 
 become the living voices of thy glory. Blessed is 
 he in whom thou hast dwelt, invisible, unheard. 
 He will love man, and stand out as a man amidst 
 his brothers." 
 
 For the author of the play, said Mickiewicz, 
 while commenting on this description of poetry, 
 " poetry is not an art, not an amusement. He 
 has painted here the picture of [the power of a soul 
 which flings itself entirely into its imagination, 
 and which believes it possesses all things, but 
 which is lost because it uses this gift of heaven 
 for its own pleasure. . . . True poetry, among the 
 Greeks themselves, signified nothing else except 
 action. What does the Polish author ask ? That 
 the most initiated souls, the highest, the strongest, 
 those that communicate with the Divinity, 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 115 
 
 should reserve all their strength to act instead of 
 speaking."* 
 
 This preface, then, not only explains the ideals 
 which actuated Krasinski, but it gives the clue to 
 his conception of Henryk, the poet, the egotist, 
 the dreamer, who is the chief character in the 
 Undivine Comedy. The first part of the drama, 
 with its subdued threatenings of the tempest that 
 is to engulf the world, is the domestic tragedy 
 of Henryk. The second part is the war of the 
 classes, where Henryk is the champion of an effete 
 and doomed aristocracy, and that culminates in 
 a universal ruin. *S 
 
 Henryk has lived upon his impressions and 
 cultivated his imagination at the expense of his 
 heart, till he has become nothing more than a 
 moral decadent, a poseur incapable of discerning 
 between true and false emotion. He marries, or, 
 as he expresses it, " descends to earthly marriage " 
 from his dreams. " Peace to men of good will," 
 an angel proclaims over his roof on the eve of his 
 marriage ; and Klaczko has pointed out that 
 Krasinski's first word to his people was this 
 message of good will, as, in his fifth Psalm of the 
 Future, it was to be well-nigh his last.f Salvation 
 is promised to Henryk on the condition that he 
 loves his wife : but the end of the marriage may 
 be easily foretold. Henryk soon wearies of the 
 loving, domestic woman, in whose soul no spark 
 of poetry resides — except, as Klaczko observes, the 
 poetry of a woman's devotion, a poetry truer than 
 
 * Adam Mickiewicz, op. cit. 
 
 + Julian Klaczko, Le Pokte Anonyme de la Pologne. Revue des 
 Deux Mondes, Jan. ist, 1862. 
 
n6 POLAND 
 
 any to which Henryk can lay claim. A demon 
 maiden who stands for Henryk's old poetic ideals 
 appears to him, tempting him from the side of 
 his wife. 
 
 " From the day of my marriage I have slept 
 the sleep of the torpid," says Henryk, turning 
 with loathing from the earthly woman ; " the 
 sleep of a German manufacturer with a German 
 wife. I have gone round after relations, doctors, 
 shops ; and because a child is going to be born to 
 me, I have had to think about a nurse." 
 
 When the child is born it is the same story. 
 Henryk sits, morose and brooding, uttering short 
 thanks as his wife unwittingly plagues him with 
 the domesticities of the christening feast that is 
 to be celebrated. It is with a mingling of tender- 
 ness and fidelity to fact, strange in a boy of Kras- 
 inski's years, that he paints the wronged wife; 
 \ the one sympathetic figure, for all her want of 
 balance that ruins herself and her child, in a play 
 which exposes on one side a rotten aristocracy, on the 
 other savage and lawless revolutionaries. She is 
 pierced to the heart by her husband's indifference. 
 
 " To-day, yesterday," says she, " ah, my God, 
 and all the week, and now for three weeks, for a 
 month, you have not said a word to me, and 
 everybody I see tells me I look ill." 
 
 " On the contrary, I think you look well." 
 
 " It is all the same to you, because' you don't 
 look at me now. You turn away when I come in, 
 and cover your eyes when I sit near you. Yester- 
 day I went to confession, and remembered all my 
 sins, and I could find nothing that could have 
 offended you." 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1 117 
 
 " You have not offended me." 
 
 " My God ! My God ! " 
 
 " I feel I ought to love you." 
 
 " You have given me the last blow with that 
 one ' I ought.' Ah, better stand up and say, ' I 
 do not love you.' At least I would then know all." 
 She starts up and takes the child from the cradle. 
 " Do not forsake him. Love my child, my child." 
 
 " Don't pay any attention to what I said. I 
 often have bad moments." 
 
 " I ask you for only one word, only one promise. 
 Say that you will always love him." 
 
 " You and him too." 
 
 He kisses her, and she clings to him. The demon 
 maiden again enters, still the symbolization of 
 Henryk's poetical fancies. The wife shrieks in 
 terror. Henryk thrusts her aside, and disappears 
 after the ghost. 
 
 The christening feast is held : a lugubrious 
 festivity, for the father is absent, no one knows 
 where, and the guests look curiously at the wild 
 and pallid aspect of the mother. No softer or 
 pitying thought can be discerned in these vapid, 
 selfish spectators — the men who will be called to 
 defend their order in a perishing world. The 
 distraught mother invokes upon the infant's head, 
 as he is baptized, her curse if he does not become 
 a poet, so that he may gain the father's love which 
 has been refused to her. The guests see that some- 
 thing unpleasant has occurred, and promptly 
 leave the disagreeable scene. The pompous, 
 stupid godfather — one of the most admirably 
 drawn types in the play — utters a conventional 
 speech over the baby's cradle, exhorting him to 
 
n8 POLAND 
 
 civic virtues, and to the love of his country. The 
 orator himself does his best to save his own life 
 in the end by abandoning a sinking cause. 
 
 In the course of time Henryk returns. He has 
 been lured by the demons to the brink of a preci- 
 pice, and there abandoned amidst their laughter. 
 He comes back to find his house desolate, his wife 
 in a lunatic asylum. The scene in the madhouse 
 between him and the wife is handled with an 
 extraordinary power. On all sides, above and 
 below, ring the cries of the insane ; wild and blas- 
 phemous ravings, prophetical of the convulsion 
 ofjthe world which will be the second part of the 
 Undivine Comedy. Into these break the gentle, 
 incoherent babblings of the wife. She tells Henryk 
 that she has won the gift of poetry by her prayers. 
 She falters out limping verses of her composition. 
 She promises him that his son will be a poet. 
 Finally, she dies in her husband's arms, happy 
 because she breathed her last with him by her 
 side. The characterization of Henryk is throughout 
 true and consistent. He is shocked at the result 
 of his conduct to his wife. He does what he r can 
 as he sits beside her in the asylum ; and the genius 
 of Krasinski in the portrayal of a character is 
 perhaps never more manifest than when he shows 
 what that passionless and inefficient best of 
 Henryk's amounts to. Outbursts of remorse or 
 of enthusiasm can be heard from Henryk's 
 lips at the appropriate moments ; and across 
 them cuts a hidden voice from somewhere with 
 the taunt or the admonition, whichever it may 
 be : " Thou composest a drama." The fact is 
 that Henryk has so long toyed with emotion that 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 119 
 
 he himself cannot by now distinguish between 
 genuine and false feeling. The reader instinctively 
 suspects and remains unmoved, even in Henryk's 
 apparently impassioned speech ; whereas every 
 word of the wife's is spoken out of the depths of 
 a woman's heart, carrying its sure appeal. In this 
 lies part, at least, of the strange and subtle force 
 of the Undivine Comedy. 
 
 I There is one more test left in Henryk's domestic 
 life. The angel, on the eve of his wedding, had 
 promised him salvation if he loved his wife. The 
 same angel, when he stood on the brink of the 
 abyss whither the demon had led him, promised 
 
 ( him salvation if he returned and loved his son. 
 There remains, then, the child, the strange, mourn- 
 ful child who sees visions and talks to his dead 
 mother. He is said to be the reminiscence of 
 Krasinski's own shadowed childhood. His blind- 
 ness is described with the psychology of intimacy, 
 for while Krasinski wrote the play he was nearly 
 blind himself. The son's hallucinations are the 
 embodiment before his father's eyes of the latter's 
 punishment, of the spirit of poetry in its destruc- 
 tive form. The child is the type of a soul that is 
 too weak to cope with a difficult world, whose only 
 refuge is in dreams, and whose death is as unneces- 
 sary as his life had been futile.* 
 
 Whatever Henryk's egoism, Krasinski was too 
 great an artist to paint him without affection for 
 an only son.f His knowledge of human nature 
 rather chose to represent the decadent husband, 
 who wearied of an uninteresting and domestic 
 wife, as a selfish but not indifferent father of a son 
 
 * J. Klaczko, op. cit. + J. Kleiner, op. cit. 
 
120 POLAND 
 
 who was, after all, part of himself. The child is 
 doomed by the physician to incurable blindness. 
 " Thy son is a poet," calls the unknown voice. 
 " What more couldst thou desire ? " But for 
 once Henryk's grief rings true. There is no pose 
 in his cry : " Is there no, no hope ? " 
 
 He wanders in the mountains. What is left to 
 him ? His family happiness, through his doing, is 
 shattered. His only child, the inheritor of his 
 house, is blind, and more or less mad. He has 
 tried philosophy, and all in vain. The society in 
 which he has been brought up is dissolving. He 
 has known every feeling " by name, and there is 
 no faith, hope or love left in me." He has, indeed, 
 loved his son, but with the love of self that could 
 not save him. Then the* demon again appears to 
 him, this time under the form of an eagle repre- 
 senting ambition ; and henceforth Henryk is 
 dominated by the lust of power. 
 
 Now begins the second part of the Undivine 
 Comedy. The revolution is let loose upon the 
 world. The remnants of the aristocracy-, wretched, 
 boneless specimens, are making their last stand in 
 the fortress of the Trinity. Once, in the long past, 
 as we know from a poem of Krasinski's which, 
 written after the Undivine Comedy, was intended 
 to be its introduction, and which remains un- 
 finished, Henryk had had his dreams of a people's 
 liberties. Now, not from conviction, for he is not 
 convinced, not from enthusiasm to a cause, for 
 his heart is too worn out to harbour enthusiasm, 
 but from the desire to play the part of a leader of 
 men and to go out with all eyes upon him, he is 
 the champion and the commander of the nobles. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1 121 
 
 Opposed to him is Pancracy, the head of the 
 revolutionaries. No softening element has ever 
 entered Pancracy's life. Nameless, he has grown 
 up in misery, hunger, toil. He will stop short of 
 nothing. His camp is a shambles, given up to 
 orgies of bloodshed and licence, described in 
 scenes that are in part founded on the excesses 
 of the French revolution, and in part on certain 
 of the tenets of Saint-Simonism. That Krasinski 
 had no want of sympathy with the oppressed 
 classes is obvious, from the pathos which he put 
 into the complaints of the men and women whose 
 whole existence had been a round of treadmill 
 labour, unsweetened by any joy. But he saw no 
 hope for the future either in the effete ruling 
 class, or in a revolution Vhere violence was the 
 mistress. Where love is not and where the heart 
 is absent there can be no victory, according to 
 Krasinski. So he presents both aristocrat and 
 democrat with a like cold severity. So he figures 
 Pancracy as having his moments of wavering, 
 even as Henryk has. He can convince others, but 
 not himself. Should he be able to win Henryk 
 over his confidence will be assured, and the one 
 impediment to his triumph will be removed. 
 And so the two meet secretly in Henryk's 
 castle. 
 
 In this scene, Henryk's self-dramatization comes 
 out with startling clearness. His family escutcheons 
 hang on the walls about him. He summons now 
 the shades of his ancestors, now the God of his 
 fathers, to assist him in the interview. Pious 
 sentiments flow from his lips. He has assumed 
 the attitude of the defender of Christianity. 
 
122 POLAND 
 
 Religion is his aristocratic heritage — and it counts 
 for nothing else in his life. 
 
 Pancracy enters. 
 
 " I greet Count Henryk. That word ' Count ' 
 sticks in my throat. If I am not mistaken, these 
 red and blue badges are called coats of arms in 
 the language of the dead. There are ever fewer 
 of such little dots on the face of the earth." 
 
 Henryk : " With the help of God you will soon 
 see thousands of them." 
 
 Pancracy : " There is my old nobility. Always 
 sure of themselves. Haughty, obstinate, flourish- 
 ing with hope, and without a farthing, without a 
 weapon, without soldiers, believing, or pretending 
 they believe, in God ; for it would be difficult to 
 believe in themselves ! " 
 
 Henryk : " Atheism is an ancient formula, and 
 I expected something new from you." 
 
 Pancracy : " I have a stronger, a mightier faith 
 than yours. The groans torn by despair and pain 
 from thousands of thousands, the hunger of 
 workmen, the misery of peasants, the shame of 
 their wives and daughters. That is my faith and 
 my God for to-day." 
 
 Henryk : " I have placed my strength in the 
 God Who gave the government to my fathers." 
 
 Pancracy : " And all your life you have been 
 the plaything of the devil. As for the rest, I 
 leave this discussion to theologians, if some pedant 
 of the trade still exists in the country. To business ! 
 I came here because I wanted to know you, and, 
 in the second place, to save you." 
 
 He attempts to move Henryk. The latter en- 
 trenches himself behind his sworn oath. ^ 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 123 
 
 " Knightly honour has come upon the scene," 
 sneers Pancracy. " That is a faded rag on the 
 banner of humanity. Oh, I know you. You ally 
 yourself with the dying because you want to 
 deceive yourself, because you want to believe still 
 in caste, in the bones of your great-grandmothers, 
 in the word my country ; but in the bottom of 
 your heart you know that the punishment is 
 owing to your brethren, and, after the punish- 
 ment, oblivion." 
 
 Henryk : " And what else is there for you and 
 yours ? " 
 
 Pancracy : " Victory and life. I only recognize 
 one law. That law is your destruction, and through 
 my lips it cries : ' Decrepit worms, full of food 
 and drink, yield to the young, the hungry and the 
 strong.' " 
 
 Then Pancracy paints the golden age which the 
 revolution will bring about. He speaks alike to the 
 nobler dreams that had been Henryk's in his 
 youth and to the poseur's weakest side : 
 
 " If you know how to reach immortality, if you 
 love truth and have sought it sincerely, if you are 
 a man in the pattern of humanity and not of 
 nursery rhymes, do not throw away this moment 
 of salvation. If you are what you once seemed to 
 be, rise up and follow me." 
 
 For the moment, Henryk wavers. Pancracy's 
 words sound to his ear as the murmuring of the 
 " dead sea-shell " of his lost days. Even his spent 
 heart experiences a stab at the recollection of the 
 ideals that had gone from him. Meanwhile Pancracy 
 looks on with the sarcastic comment — a sufficient 
 index that his appeal to Henryk was not that of a 
 
1 24 POLAND 
 
 deeply felt truth : " I have touched the nerve of 
 poetry." 
 
 But neither can win over the other. The Un- 
 divine Comedy is the drama of negation. No con- 
 version to an opposing side can enter within its 
 scope.* 
 
 Driven by hunger and panic, Henryk's adher- 
 ents, feeble to the end, drop away from his side. 
 The avenging, innocent witness, against whom' the 
 husband and father can have no redress, leads 
 Henryk into the vaults of the castle, and recounts 
 to him the vision he sees of his father's damnation. 
 Voices of invisible spirits wail ; " Because thou 
 hast loved nought save thyself, because thou hast 
 .worshipped nought save thyself, thou art damned 
 — damned for all eternity." All hope is gone. The 
 enemies are at the gate. The son is slain by a 
 chance shot at his father's feet ; but Henryk can 
 still exult that his own life will go down in a blaze 
 of glory. The fortress is captured. Henryk stands 
 poised for a moment in the sight of his foes on 
 the ramparts above the precipice. " Poetry, be 
 thou cursed by me, as I shall be cursed for all 
 eternity," is his last cry ; and, with hands out- 
 stretched as a swimmer about to plunge, he leaps 
 down into the darkness. 
 
 The victory, then, is with Pancracy. One by 
 one, he sweeps off the miserable survivors of the 
 old order to the death, which they face with the 
 same want of fortitude that characterized their 
 lives. He stands, as Henryk stood, on the ramparts. 
 Wherever his gaze rests he beholds the new world 
 he has created. Then, on a sudden, he cries aloud 
 
 * St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 125 
 
 to his companion. For, above the cloud on fire 
 with the light of the setting sun, appears to him, 
 and him alone, a sign of terror. He sees One Who 
 rises : ■ 
 
 " As a pillar of snow-white brilliance above 
 the precipices. Both hands lean on the cross as the 
 avenger's on his sword. Of wreathed thunderbolts 
 is the crown of thorns. From the lightning of 
 that glance he must die who lives. Put thy hands 
 on my eyes. Smother my eyeballs with your fists. 
 Part me from that look that shatters me to dust. 
 Thy hands are transparent as water, transparent 
 as glass, transparent as air. I see still ! Give me if 
 only a crumb of darkness ! Darkness — darkness ! 
 Galilaee, vicisti ! " 
 
 He falls dead, and the Undivine Comedy ends. 
 
 What remains ? Nothing except a ruined world, 
 where every living thing has gone down in the 
 waters of destruction and desolation. Klaczko has 
 said that the Undivine Comedy is " a farewell 
 rather than a greeting addressed by the poet to 
 humanitarian inspirations, a strong protest against 
 the fatal illusion of the age which believes it can 
 regenerate humanity without having first regen- 
 erated the man, and establish universal right 
 without having first strengthened the individual 
 in his duties."* It is this moral, deep down be- 
 neath the surface, and the dramatic conclusion, 
 told in a few scathing sentences, that redeem the 
 Undivine Comedy from being an expression of 
 unrelieved pessimism, and that give the link without 
 which Krasinski's subsequent work might seem 
 a far cry from the play of his youth. He saw 
 
 * J. Klaczko, op. cit. 
 
126 POLAND 
 
 a world where two opposing forces disputed for 
 its mastery. He saw, albeit he does not speak in 
 the Undivine Comedy with that certainty of his 
 maturer years which suffering taught him, still 
 he saw that final triumph lay with neither, but 
 beyond.* 
 
 The Undivine Comedy resembles nothing that' 
 Krasinski ever wrote again. Not only does its 
 curious terseness give it a place apart in the pro- 
 duction of a poet, whose literary sin is a tendency 
 to over ornamentation and elaboration ; but its 
 unbroken dreariness, its pessimism, are not charac- 
 teristic of Krasinski as a writer. Devoured by 
 sadness all his life, never expecting and never 
 finding personal happiness, he yet looked with 
 confidence to the resurrection of his nation ; and, 
 deep as are the accents of sorrow that breathe 
 through his poetry, the keynote of that poetry is 
 hope.f 
 
 II 
 
 The idea of Irydion came to Krasinski before 
 that of the Undivine Comedy ; but the latter was 
 finished first. During the years that the poet was 
 writing Irydion his life was racked with passion, 
 and he could not complete it till 1836. 
 
 In 1830, in the days preceding the Rising, he 
 wandered about the Coliseum, then the most 
 
 * Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. 
 
 t Lord Lytton's Orval is a sort of paraphrase of Krasinski's 
 Undivine Comedy. Taken from a French rendering - , it is in no 
 sense a translation, but rather a version of Krasinski's story with 
 scarcely any resemblance to the Polish original. 
 
 I may add that I am preparing- a translation of the Undivine 
 Comedy direct from the Polish. 
 
ZTGMUNT KR A SIN SKI 127 
 
 poetical of ruins, dreaming by moonlight. His 
 dreams slowly took shape in the form of the Greek 
 who plotted in Rome for the overthrow of the 
 empire that had enslaved his country, and who 
 was given his sentence at the foot of the cross in 
 the Flavian amphitheatre. The first time that 
 Krasinski returned to Poland, after he had left it 
 as a boy, was in 1832. He stayed a few weeks in 
 his home ; and was then obliged by his father to 
 spend the winter with him in Petersburg. That 
 winter was one of Krasinski's dreariest remem- 
 brances. He was overcome with grief at the fate 
 of Poland, lonely and desolate of soul in the 
 capital of Russia, parted from all his friends with 
 whom — Polish exiles as they were — he might not 
 correspond. To Reeve alone could he write, albeit 
 with strict reserve, because the letters were read 
 by the censor, and also because the condition of 
 his eyes frequently compelled him to dictate his 
 correspondence. More or less blind, he could do 
 nothing but remain all the winter shut up in one 
 room, with no occupation or distraction except 
 his father's visits and his own meditations, and 
 that one painful and perilous audience with 
 Nicholas I., which he has told under an allegorical 
 form in his Temptation. Under these circumstances, 
 he evolved the conception of Irydion, his Thought, 
 as he always called it. The Pole in Petersburg put 
 his feelings into the son of Hellas who trod the 
 streets of Rome with rage in his heart. Yet the 
 teaching of Irydion is that hatred for the oppressor 
 will compass the destruction of the nation that 
 employs it, and that love, and only love, is the 
 constructive force of a downtrodden people. 
 
\ 
 
 128 POLAND 
 
 Unable for his father's sake to speak openly, 
 unable for his own sake to do so in days when 
 frank language was liable to send writer, as well 
 as reader, to Siberia, Krasinski couched his mean- 
 ing under a symbolism where he who ran might 
 read. 
 
 !( The morals that Krasinski urges upon his 
 Countrymen are invariably forgiveness and love ; 
 but his confidences to his intimate friends lay 
 bare the nature of the battle that he fought against 
 himself. His heart, as a young man, was swept by 
 a storm of hatred for those who had brought 
 misery upon his nation. He wrote — in 1831 — to 
 Henry Reeve : 
 
 (^ " You, a free man, a man born free, you cannot 
 understand the feelings of a man whose ancestors 
 were as free as you, but who is himself an oppressed 
 slave. You have never seen a young and beautiful 
 woman weeping hot tears for the loss of her 
 honour, torn from her by the brutality of a con- 
 queror. You have never heard the chains quiver- 
 ing around the arms of your compatriots. In the 
 night, the sounds of lamentations have not made 
 you start from your sleep, you have not risen on 
 your pillow, you have not listened half asleep to 
 the wheels jolting on the pavement, the wheels 
 of the cart that carried your relation, your friend, 
 to the snows of Siberia. You have not been forced 
 to hear a hard, rough language thrust on a people 
 who did not understand it. You have not caught 
 a glimpse of the haggard faces of your brothers 
 through the grating of a prison. Round the winter 
 hearth, you have never been told how such a one 
 disappeared, how another was condemned, how 
 
ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 129 
 
 this village was burnt, that town sacked, and all 
 Praga drowned in the blood of its inhabitants, 
 children flung palpitating on the frozen, stiff 
 breasts of their mothers. . . You have not followed 
 on the map the desolation of your country, till 
 it was at last overwhelmed under the weight of 
 the oppressors. To you everything has spoken of 
 peace, happiness, forgetfulness. That is why 
 hatred appears so hideous to you. Hatred was the 
 companion of my childhood. I hated with all the 
 strength of my little heart before I loved either 
 a woman or friend. It is an element which has 
 mingled with my nature and which has become x 
 a part of my being."* ^ 
 
 To a Polish friend, better able than the pros- 
 perous young Englishman to understand the 
 strength of the temptation, Krasinski confided 
 that his sympathies were with Irydion, the hater 
 and the avenger, and that only logic and necessity 
 led him to the conclusion of love triumphant 
 that makes the moral grandeur of the play. 
 " What is, is," he added. " It is not our caprices 
 that rule the world, but the mind of God."t 
 Irydion represents the victory of Krasinski's 
 higher self, a life-giving truth spoken from the 
 anguish of one Pole to the anguish of thousands 
 of Poles. 
 
 The length of the drama, the elaboration of 
 the style, the wealth of detail that, indeed, at times 
 somewhat overlays the main purpose, are in 
 
 * Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski et de Henry Reeve, 
 Paris, 1902. Letter of Krasinski to Reeve, Nov. 18, 1831. 
 
 t Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski, Vol. I ? To, Constantine Gasz- 
 ynski, June 6, 1837. 
 
 K 
 
130 POLAND 
 
 strong contrast with the Undivine Comedy. Irydion 
 glows with the colour and pageantry of Imperial 
 Rome. It was Krasinski's mental refuge to picture 
 the blue skies of the south, as he thought out 
 Irydion during the long winter in a snow-bound 
 city, where all that his half-blind eyes could see 
 from his window were white roofs and a gray pall 
 of clouds.* 
 
 Irydion is the son of Amphilochus the Greek 
 and of a Scandinavian priestess. The touch of 
 northern blood is required in order to give Kras- 
 inski's " Thought " its mystic link with the north, 
 and also as foretelling the direction from which 
 Rome's fall was to come upon her. The scene is 
 laid in the reign of Heliogabalus. Both of Irydion's 
 parents are dead when the drama, which is written 
 in prose, begins. He and his sister, Elsinoe, are 
 alone, under the tutelage of a majestic and mys- 
 terious old man, called Masinissa, in reality, 
 Mephistopheles. Nursed in hatred of Rome, 
 Irydion has been brought up with the one idea of 
 compassing, not his nation's resurrection, but the 
 ruin of her conqueror. To that end he is stealthily 
 proceeding. Every weapon, however ignoble, 
 suits his purpose if only it can bring about the 
 desired result. On all sides he sows treachery, 
 destruction, disgrace — for the sake of finally 
 destroying Rome. 
 
 His master move is to sacrifice his sister's honour 
 to Heliogabalus, and, through her, to play on the 
 fears and caprices of the half-childish emperor, 
 till the latter becomes a tool in the Greek's hands. 
 The farewell of Irydion and Elsinoe on the evening 
 
 * J. Kallenbach, op. cit. 
 
ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 131 
 
 when the imperial slaves are coming to fetch her 
 away is the first scene of the drama. Here, as in 
 the madhouse episode in the Undivine Comedy, 
 Krasinski handles a terrible situation with artistic 
 power and restraint. The beautiful child, for she 
 is little more, throws herself weeping on the 
 mercy of her brother. 
 
 " Thou knowest," is his reply, " that thou art 
 no more my sister, thou art not the golden- 
 haired Elsinoe, the hope of thy father's house, 
 the darling of my heart. Thou art the victim 
 appointed for the suffering of many and for the 
 shame of thy fathers." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Yea. You all have taught me this 
 from childhood, and I am ready. But still not to- 
 day, not to-morrow — a little later, when I have 
 gathered strength, when I have heard more of 
 Masinissa's teaching and thy commands, when I 
 have drunk to the bottom of the chalice of your 
 poison." 
 
 Irydion : " Thou art chosen. We needs must 
 hasten on the road we tread." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Remember when we played on the 
 grass-plots of Chiara, I loved thee so. Oh, have 
 mercy on me ! " 
 
 Irydion : " Woman, thou temptest me to pity 
 in vain, in vain." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Why so many prayers and tears ? 
 It was possible in times of old to save oneself by 
 death from men and gods. See, thy dagger flashes 
 there, Irydion. Let us hasten annihilation for 
 ourselves, Irydion." 
 
 Irydion : " Thou blasphemest against thy 
 father's thought. Of old the life of one man 
 
132 POLAND 
 
 sufficed for the salvation of nations. To-day the 
 times are otherwise. To-day the sacrifice must be 
 of honour." He clasps her in his arms. "To-day 
 thou shalt be wreathed with roses, decked with 
 smiles. Oh, unhappy child, lay here thy doomed 
 head. For the last time in thy father's house thy 
 brother presses thee to his bosom. Take thy fare- 
 well of me in all the beauty of thy maiden fresh- 
 ness. Never again shall I behold thee young — 
 never, never again." 
 
 Then he, too, fails at the thought of what he is 
 doing. He cries to Masinissa for support. His 
 hesitation, Elsinoe's prayers and tears, all alike die 
 at the entrance of the old man. Adorned as a 
 bride, weeping and swooning, the girl is carried 
 off by the slaves of Heliogabalus ; but Irydion's 
 end is gained. He, and Elsinoe acting under his 
 orders, assume entire dominion over the young 
 emperor, the mad, childish degenerate whose 
 personality stands out in vivid colours in Krasin- 
 ski's drama. Irydion soon convinces him that he, 
 the Greek, is his only friend, and that no safety 
 will be his till he abandons the city and retires to 
 build up another in the east. In the meanwhile, 
 the traitor tampers with the Praetorians, and 
 lures the barbarians and gladiators to his side. 
 They only wait Irydion's signal to fall upon Rome ; | 
 but Irydion is not ready yet. He believes that 
 Rome cannot be destroyed unless he wins the 
 adhesion of the Christians, and they, he knows, 
 will not consent to fight against their persecutory 
 whom their Founder bade them forgive. Masinissa 
 persuades him to go down into the catacombs, to 
 feign the profession of Christianity and receive 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 133 
 
 baptism and then, seemingly as a fervent neophyte, 
 by all the craft in his power to sow dissension among 
 
 I the Christians, and convince the more restless and 
 impetuous that it is their duty to take up 
 arms. Irydion is baptized by the name of Hieron- 
 imus. He attempts to work his will with the 
 Christians. But the task is a difficult one. Masi- 
 nissa counsels him to dupe some Christian virgin, 
 
 I and to play upon her religious exaltation till it 
 
 /turns into love for him. Then, when she is his, 
 victory will follow. For once, Irydion shrinks. 
 He has in his mind Cornelia, the pure and 
 beautiful maiden, vowed to Christ, who has 
 talked to him of his soul. 
 
 " Must all that is holy and dear to others be 
 ever a sacrilege for me ? Who made me miserable 
 and vile ? She, who is the murderess of all my 
 moments, whose name is Rome." 
 
 " There is another Rome," answers Masinissa, 
 " that cannot perish. Not on seven hills, but on 
 millions of stars have her feet rested." Against 
 that Rome Irydion must swear eternal enmity. 
 And Irydion, calling on " unhappy Hellas," con- 
 sents for love of her to destroy another's joy, "to 
 tear hope away from one who hoped," 
 
 / Masinissa is Satan. Krasinski's conception of a 
 Mephistopheles is unusual. He is grand, majestic, 
 and, save in certain moments when he speaks or acts 
 / openly as the minister of hatred, passionless. His 
 attitude with Irydion is less that of a tempter 
 than of a conspirator on equal terms. He incites or 
 encourages Irydion to vile deeds, such as the 
 sacrifice of the two women in the play ; but it is 
 I in the name of a sacred cause that he does so, for 
 
134 POLAND 
 
 the love of Hellas. He will ruin souls by his appeal, 
 not to their baser, but to their higher, desires.* 
 Krasinski's idea in the presentment of this Mephis- 
 topheles is that he is the satan of the world's 
 policy ; the evil spirit of humanity that thrusts 
 governments and peoples back from the road of 
 spiritual progress, that would warp a nation's 
 love to destroy her by that love itself.f 
 
 Irydion has already brought disunion and con- 
 fusion where before all was brotherly charity and 
 steadfast purpose. He has set the young men 
 among the Christians on fire for battle in the 
 name of God. The old men, headed by the Pope, 
 Victor, seek to hold them back, appalled at the 
 thought of taking the blood of their persecutors. 
 If only Cornelia, who is venerated as a saint by 
 her fellow-believers, will persuade them to listen 
 to Irydion, his cause is won. He, therefore, sets 
 himself to deceive her by every wile of diabolical 
 craft that his cunning can suggest, into which 
 against his will the touch of human passion on his 
 side now and again steals. They stand together 
 alone in the bowels of the earth, among the cor- 
 ridors of the dead stretching as far as eye can 
 reach. The maiden, in whose portrayal there is 
 the tenderness of touch, the strange, elusive charm 
 peculiar to Krasinski's women, trembles for 
 Irydion's soul. The Greek, dark and gloomy, 
 watches her as with the eyes of a snake on the bird 
 he is ensnaring. She entreats him to desist from his 
 thirst for bloodshed that she can only look upon 
 as sin. 
 
 * J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygtnunt Krasinski. 
 t St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 135 
 
 " Alas ! Art thou the same with whom I knelt 
 in the cemetery of Eufemia, to whom I taught 
 my prayer ? Hieronimus, is this thou ? I have 
 prayed so much, I have done such hard penance 
 for so many days and nights." 
 
 Irydion : " And thou shalt reach heaven. Who 
 could doubt it ? " 
 
 Cornelia : " Oh, it was not for myself, not for 
 myself." 
 
 Irydion : " Then for whom ? " 
 
 Cornelia : " One of my brothers." 
 
 Terrified at the frenzy, whether real or feigned, 
 of a jealous lover which she in her innocence 
 takes for a delirium she does not understand, she 
 confesses that this brother was he. Little by 
 little, Irydion lets sink into her ear the idea that 
 she is dishonouring her God, Who is his God too, 
 by not desiring the warfare for His glory that 
 Irydion desires. 
 
 " Oh, Lord, for mercy, mercy on him do I call," 
 pleads Cornelia. " Thou wilt not suffer him to be 
 lost before my eyes. Ah ! what am I saying ? 
 Where am I ? Surely, oh, Lord, I have vowed my 
 whole heart to Thee. How dark and gloomy is it 
 here ! For the first time terror of the dead falls 
 
 on me." 
 
 Irydion : " Lean on me." 
 
 Gradually the hints of the tempter do their 
 work. Trouble and doubt enter the soul of the 
 innocent girl. Irydion weaves the story of the vow 
 to revenge himself on Rome, to which his father 
 trained him, with the vision of Christ's kingdom 
 triumphing, till she can no longer distinguish 
 issues. She only knows that a mortal face has 
 
136 POLAND 
 
 fastened itself into her thoughts where Christ 
 alone reigned before ; " and as a prophet, a saint, 
 an archangel, he stands before me and speaks, and 
 I listen to him, oh, Lord, and I would fain die. Have 
 mercy on me ! " 
 
 She strives to defend him against his temptation 
 to vengeance, herself against the unknown forces 
 that are carrying her away. Overcome with detesta- 
 tion of the deed he is about to do, Irydion bids 
 her leave him. No, she will not leave him to his 
 sin. She implores him to kneel and pray by her 
 side. 
 
 " You are my witness, bones of the dead," 
 murmurs he, " and thou, mother earth, I would 
 fain have spared her, and her only." 
 
 He hears the voice of Simeon, the leader of the 
 Christian youths whom he has gained over, 
 calling him to the battle. Then he tears the 
 veil from Cornelia's head, and implants his kisses 
 on her forehead. With the cry that she is damned 
 with him for ever, she swoons. She wakes, mad, to 
 find Irydion standing by her. He tells her he is 
 Christ, come to claim His victory with arms. His 
 end is secured. Cornelia runs frenzied through 
 the catacombs, crying out : " To arms ! " 
 
 All is now clamour and discord. Victor tries in 
 vain to restrain Simeon's band. Irydion, surrounded 
 by his barbarians, urges them forward by all that 
 is sacred to them, and which he pretends is equally 
 sacred to himself. Cornelia's wild cries " To arms !" 
 ring above the tumult, and, coming from the lips 
 of the saint of the catacombs, seem a summons 
 from heaven. Masinissa, at this moment appearing 
 openly as the demon, rises in the midst of columns 
 

 ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 137 
 
 of fire, exulting in the ravages that have been, and 
 will be, wrought in the souls of the followers of 
 Christ. 
 
 " Faith, hope and love ! Trinity, which wast 
 to last for ever, I have torn Thee to shreds in the 
 hearts of the most beloved children of Thy bene- 
 diction ! In Thy name they shall slay and burn. 
 In Thy name they shall oppress. Thou shalt be 
 crucified alike in their wisdom and their ignorance, 
 alike in the sleepy humility of their prayers and in 
 the blasphemies of their pride." 
 
 And now the moment for which Irydion has 
 schemed so long is close at hand. Irydion wrings 
 from the terror-stricken emperor his command 
 over the Praetorians. Alexander Severus is march- 
 ing on Rome ; and the avenger has sworn his death 
 no less than that of Heliogabalus, with an equal 
 certainty that neither of them must live to prolong 
 the life of Rome. Elsinoe, throwing herself into 
 her brother's arms, entreats him : 
 
 " Let those eyes die beneath which I withered. 
 Let the arms which crawled about my neck fall 
 as two worn-out vipers. Let the lips which first 
 touched mine perish in ashes." 
 
 Irydion : " On the same heap and at the same 
 moment, both he and Severus." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Not so, not so. Let me finish my 
 last desire. Spare Alexander on the field of battle. 
 He with one look calmed my despair. He alone 
 guessed. Ah, why hast thou turned thy face away 
 from me ? " 
 
 Irydion : " He is the only one who is now 
 tearing Rome from the clasp of my hatred." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Then once more press thy sister to 
 
138 POLAND 
 
 thy bosom. Feelest thou how this heart throbs ? 
 Ere thou returnest, it will have broken, son of 
 Amphilochus ! But remember Elsinoe desired no 
 blood of thee. Let live all, all — even he, the 
 Syrian, the abominated — let him live." 
 
 Voices outside the falace : " Forward, in the 
 name of the Fortune of Irydion the Greek." 
 
 Irydion : " Away with untimely mourning, 
 when Nemesis already holds the crown of ven- 
 geance for us in each hand. Victory descends into 
 my soul. In those clashings of arms, in those shouts, 
 leaps my life, and must thou die ? Rather be 
 happy and proud. What thy father invoked, what 
 long ages have asked of the gods with tears, 
 approaches as the thunderbolt." 
 
 Voices : " Irydion, Irydion ! " 
 
 Irydion : " Farewell." 
 
 Elsinoe : " Go. Be thou happy and mighty ; 
 and if ever thou shalt sail on the Aegean waters 
 cast a handful of my ashes on Chiara's banks." 
 
 They part for ever. When Alexander Severus' 
 troops rush into the palace. Heliogabalus is hold- 
 ing to his lips the cup of poison he dares not 
 drink, and is despatched by the soldiers. Elsinoe, 
 garbed in imperial robes, sits calmly waiting. As 
 the curtains of her apartment are torn aside, she 
 pierces her heart with a dagger, preferring death 
 rather than the love that might be hers of the 
 saviour of Rome, Alexander Severus. 
 
 But we anticipate. Alexander is not victorious 
 yet. The night that Irydion hails as the last night 
 of Rome is here. His armies are awaiting his 
 signal. Masinissa is at his side. With wild fury 
 Irydion exults in the thought that, before the 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSK1 139 
 
 morning is upon them, Rome shall be in flames — 
 if, and upon this condition all depends, the 
 Christian auxiliaries join him. They delay. They 
 are singing their hymns, says Masinissa sardon- 
 ically. A messenger from Simeon summons Irydion. 
 He hastens to the catacombs. He finds Victor and 
 the priests on the altar steps, Simeon and his 
 youths in arms, panting for the fray, Cornelia 
 still uttering her frenzied war-cry. Irydion bursts 
 upon this assembly. He calls to Cornelia as to his 
 beloved ; but pitted against him is Victor who 
 stands forth and, in the presence of all, exorcises 
 Cornelia. She returns to herself. She bears witness 
 that she and her fellow Christians have been 
 duped by an evil spirit that has possessed her and 
 spoken through her lips. In vain Irydion, with 
 one despairing effort, calls to her in the language 
 of love for the last time. She turns to him without 
 fear and with forgiveness. " Hieronimus, I 
 pardon thee. Hieronimus, pray to Christ " ; and 
 so she dies, breathing the fragrance of the flowers 
 of Paradise. 
 
 Her testimony turns the Christians, loathing 
 and horror-stricken, from him whom they now 
 see in his true colours. The maddened Irydion 
 tears the cross he wears from his armour and, 
 dashing it to the ground, departs, doomed, as he 
 well knows, to failure. In the catacombs the 
 avenger has been brought up against the only 
 life-giving element in Rome. With that force 
 behind him, he can conquer. With it against 
 him, he can do nothing. AH that is now left to 
 him is to fight a losing battle " more like a demon 
 than a mortal man." The envoy of Alexander 
 
140 POLAND 
 
 Severus brings him overtures of peace. He rejects 
 them with a certain noble contempt. His nation 
 has loved, and lived on, an idea. What has she 
 to do with an empire that has maintained herself 
 by blood and by the tears of the conquered ? 
 
 So Irydion fights on ; but ever and again his 
 sword falters in his hand and he turns pale, for he 
 hears Cornelia calling to him in the name of 
 Christ. He is defeated, and abandoned by all. 
 He steps on Elsinoe's funeral pyre and prepares to i 
 perish in the flames. Masinissa descends, and 
 carries him away to a mountain top. In the dis- I 
 tance lies Rome. The enemy of Irydion's race 
 stands out on her hills, her marbles flashing in 
 the sun, proud and invincible. 
 
 " Oh, thou whom I loved for thy sorrows, wast 
 thou but a shade ? " What now remains to Iry- 
 dion ? The voice of the Christian maiden, whom 
 he sacrificed at Masinissa's bidding, wails in his 
 ear. He sees the cross at which she prayed. If her 
 God were indeed a God above all gods, it is on 
 Him that he would now call. 
 
 " Our Father, Who art in heaven," sneers 
 Masinissa, " give long days to Rome. Save those 
 who through all time have oppressed my native 
 land." 
 
 " Nay," is Irydion's reply. " Our Father Who 
 art in heaven, love Hellas as I have loved her." 
 He then adjures Masinissa to tell him if Christ 
 is indeed the " Lord of heaven and earth." 
 Masinissa confesses Him, but as his immortal 
 enemy. He bids Irydion gaze at the " city of his 
 hatred." Who shall tear it from the hands of 
 Irydion's northern brothers when their hordes 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 141 
 
 overwhelm Italy ? The Nazarene. But Irydion 
 must not despair. A day will come when " on the 
 Forum only dust shall remain, in the Circus only 
 ruins, on the Capitol only shame." That day is so 
 distant that Masinissa himself can hardly foresee 
 it ; but, if Irydion will consent to renounce Christ I 
 for ever, Masinissa will cast him into a slumber/ 
 of centuries till he awakes to behold the ruin of 
 Rome. A voice once known to Irydion cries in 
 anguish and entreaty : but he agrees to the bond, 
 and sinks into a deep sleep in a cavern in the hills 
 outside Rome. 
 
 Here the dramatic form of Irydion ends, and 
 the conclusion is told in an epilogue. 
 
 The ages roll over Irydion's head. 
 
 " Oh, my Thought " — the poet thus address- 
 ing Irydion — " thou hast lasted out the centuries ! 
 Thou didst slumber in the day of Alaric and in 
 the day of the mighty Attila. Neither the ring of 
 the imperial crown on the rough brow of Char- 
 lemagne, nor Rienzi, the tribune of the people, 
 woke thee — and the consecrated lords of the 
 Vatican one after the other passed before thee, as 
 shades before a shade. But to-day thou shalt 
 arise, oh, my Thought ! " 
 
 He rises in the strength of his youth at the 
 appointed hour — the days of Krasinski. 
 
 " Thou didst stand in the Roman Campagna. 
 She hath nought with which to hide her shame 
 before thy gaze. The aqueducts running to the 
 city, finding no city, have halted. The stones 
 fallen from them lie in graveyard heaps. 
 
 " The son of the ages saw and rejoiced in the 
 justice of his vengeance. Each ruin, and the plains, 
 
142 POLAND 
 
 widowed of amphitheatres, and the hills, orphaned 
 of temples, were his recompense." 
 
 He passes on to Rome, guided by Masinissa. 
 He beholds the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, 
 the Appian way laid waste, the Forum a mass of 
 fragments. He halts in the Coliseum. As he stands 
 in the arena, surrounded by the gaping walls 
 about which festoons of greenery cling, some 
 strange emotion stirs within the Greek. He looks 
 upon the cross that stands there — as it stood in 
 Krasinski's youth — with some far off recollection 
 of a maiden's face ; and he knows that now he no 
 longer desires war with the cross, for it seems to 
 him as though that cross is " weary as he, sorrow- 
 ing as once Hellas sorrowed — and holy for ever- 
 more." 
 
 Then begins in the Coliseum, at the foot of the 
 cross, the judgment upon Irydion's soul — a scene 
 that had developed in Krasinski's heart since 
 he had wandered, when little more than a boy, 
 about the ruin in the moonlight. The amphi- 
 theatre resounds with the sighs of the martyrs 
 who shed their blood there, with the wailing of 
 the angels above. Below the cross stands Irydion 
 with prayerless lips. Masinissa claims the damned 
 soul for his own. In the light of the moon shines 
 a beautiful face, angelic wings flash, as Cornelia 
 battles for the salvation of him who wronged her. 
 " Immortal Enemy," is the cry of Masinissa, " he 
 is mine, for he lived in revenge, and he hated 
 Rome." " Oh, Lord, he is mine," rings the cry 
 of Cornelia, " for he loved Greece." 
 
 The plea of love prevails, as in the scheme of 
 Irydion it must prevail. Irydion had hated ; but, 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 143 
 
 unlike Henryk of the Undivine Comedy, who was 
 damned because he had loved nothing, Irydion 
 had loved Greece. He had sinned, but sinned 
 because he had loved. He is, therefore, saved, but 
 not without a long expiation. He who had worked 
 in hatred, and whose work had therefore resulted 
 only in its own destruction, is now sent to a labour 
 of love for a fallen country that will surely save 
 both him and her. In the sentence pronounced by 
 heaven upon Irydion — Krasinski's mystic and 
 national Thought — the poet throws off, in part, the 
 allegory, and speaks more plainly to his brother 
 Poles. Irydion is bidden : 
 
 " 'Go to the north in the name of Christ. Go 
 and halt not till thou standest in the land of graves 
 and crosses. Thou shalt know it by the silence of 
 men and the sadness of little children, by the 
 ruined huts of the poor and the destroyed palaces 
 of the exiles. Thou shalt know it by the sighs of 
 My angels, flying over it by night.' 
 
 " ' Go and dwell among the brothers that I 
 give thee. There, is thy second trial. For the 
 second time thou shalt behold thy love trans- 
 pierced, dying — and the sorrows of thousands 
 shall be born in thy one heart.' 
 
 " ' Go and trust in My name. Ask not for thy 
 glory, but for the good of those whom I entrust 
 to thee. And, after long martyrdom, I will give ye 
 what I gave My angels — happiness — and what I 
 promised to mankind on the heights of Golgotha 
 — freedom.' 
 
 " ' Go and act. Although thy heart shall faint in 
 thy bosom, although thou shalt doubt thy brethren 
 although thou shouldst despair of Mq Myself? 
 
144 POLAND 
 
 act ever and without rest. And thou shalt rise, 
 not from sleep as erst, but from the work of 
 ages — and thou shalt be the free son of heaven.' 
 
 " And the sun rose above the ruins of Rome. 
 And there was none whom I might tell where 
 were the traces of my Thought — but I know that 
 it lasts and lives." 
 
 Irydion is the confession of one who knew the 
 onslaughts of despair and hatred, and who over- 
 came them, both for himself and his nation, by 
 holding fast to the principles of an unflinching 
 national morality. Criticising his drama from the 
 ethical standpoint, which was the only aspect 
 under which Krasinski ever spoke of his work in 
 his correspondence with his friends, the poet said : 
 
 " To prove its truth, the author might call 
 upon the shades of the dead and the tears of the 
 living. He might ask many a one : ' Didst thou 
 not feel this, didst thou not dream thus ? ' And 
 many a one would answer : ' It is so.' Not many 
 a one, but a whole nation?'* 
 
 Ill 
 
 The development of Krasinski's thought was 
 not, as might have been imagined, a triumphal 
 progress from Irydion onwards. After the com- 
 pletion of the latter, darkness and confusion 
 swept down upon the poet. From his own testi- 
 mony in the opening lines to Dawn, we know that 
 it was his grief for his country that shook both his 
 
 * Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I. To Constantine 
 Gaszynski, June 6, 1837. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 145 
 
 religious and national faith, always closely inter- 
 woven in Krasinski's soul. At this time he wrote 
 but little, and nothing that was worthy of his 
 genius, chiefly obscure allegories in poetic prose, 
 overladen with excessive imagery, tinged here 
 and there with pantheism, and indicative of the 
 spiritual perplexity in which he dwelt. Yet 
 through The Temptation, The Summer Night, 
 through the strange, nightmare visions of the 
 Three Thoughts, there runs the one thread that 
 nothing could ever destroy or weaken in Kras- 
 inski's life, which was at once his ruling passion 
 and the chief source of all his suffering : devotion 
 to Poland. They are the cry of one bewildered 
 with pain, unable to see with certainty his nation's 
 deliverance. 
 
 Curiously enough, Krasinski, the dreamer, the 
 poet, the mystic, was above all things a logician. 
 His national philosophy must be founded on a 
 rational system, it must convince his mind no less 
 than his heart, before it could satisfy him. Through 
 the years of mental suffering that stretched be- 
 tween the writing of Irydion and Dawn, he was 
 seeking a theory that would give the key to the 
 mystery of Poland's tragedy, provide her with a 
 hope, proclaim a vocation for her in the future. 
 Every philosophical development, every political 
 event, was significant in this connection alone. At 
 last, he found what his soul had asked. Dawn is 
 the hymn of his spiritual and patriotic victory. / 
 
 His idea may be thus roughly summarized. 
 The signs of the times that immediately preceded 
 the birth of Christ — religious doubt, moral de- 
 cadence, strange faiths — are almost identical with 
 
146 POLAND 
 
 those of Krasinski's age. The conquests of Julius 
 Caesar paved the way for the coming of Christ by 
 obliterating the frontiers between nations. In 
 the nineteenth century we have the Napoleonic 
 conquests ; and these, in their turn, prepared the 
 world for Christ's second and spiritual advent. 
 Not again in our flesh. But as He christianized 
 the individual, so now He will christianize govern- 
 ments, and harmonize the relations between them 
 and their subjects, between nation and nation. 
 As long as the dismemberment of Poland, that 
 crime against law and right, is permitted to be 
 an established fact, so long is Christ's intention 
 violated. Her restoration will be the herald of 
 the transfiguration of the political sphere into 
 the religious sphere, an earnest of the higher epoch 
 of the world's history. 
 
 Thus Krasinski in his prose introduction to 
 Dawn* And hence the mystic rapture with which 
 he can announce to his people that Poland's 
 death leads to her resurrection, her shame to the 
 glorious re-birth of the human race. 
 
 " Hodie scietis quia veniet Dominus et salvabit 
 nos et mane videbitis gloriam ejus." These words 
 from the office of his Church for Christmas Eve, 
 Krasinski places at the head of the poem that is 
 one of the noblest expressions in literature of a 
 nation's suffering and a nation's hope. 
 
 As Dante's Divina Commedia is the spiritual 
 apotheosis of a woman, so Dawn is the idealization 
 of her whom Krasinski etherealized as his Beatrice, 
 and who likewise inspired Poland's greatest 
 
 * See Chapter II. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 147 
 
 musician — Delphina Potocka.* In the lines which 
 open Dawn the poet sings how he was driven forth 
 from the land of his fathers to tread strange soil, 
 hearing from afar the triumphal cries of those who 
 had laid his country low. 
 
 " Like Dante, during life, I passed through hell. 
 
 " At first, I trusted that the pitying God, Who 
 is proud to the proud, to the faithful full of faith ; 
 at first, I trusted after days but few He would 
 send avenging angels from above, and burst that 
 grave that stands before the world. But the days 
 passed by, and passed away the years. In vain 
 dawn struggled with the blinded strength of 
 night. No sun arose above the grave of saints ; 
 and ever more abased did this earth of ours be- 
 come. Then sank my soul into that chaos of doubt, 
 where all light is changed into eternal night : 
 and, from all the circle of those lived out days, one 
 inscription standeth : There is no hope here. 
 
 " Ah, I dwelt, dwelt long in that abyss, driven 
 by wild rage and a measureless despair. My death 
 would then have seemed to me but my second 
 death. Like Dante, during life, I passed through 
 hell. But, to aid me also, a lady hastened down, 
 before whose very look the evil spirits fear. Me, 
 too, an angel from the pit redeemed. And I too 
 had a Beatrice of my own. 
 
 " Oh, beautiful as she ! From this world of 
 gloom thou didst not wing thy way, leaving me 
 alone, to ascend to heaven — heavenly — to dwell 
 there without pain. Oh, beautiful as she, thou wast 
 more Christian far ! For there, where sorrow 
 
 * Chopin dedicated a piano concerto to Delphina Potocka ; and 
 it was she who came and sang to him when he lay dying. 
 
148 POLAND 
 
 groweth, there, where tears are born, there, thou 
 with thy brother didst remain upon this earth. 
 Together walked we, wearing the self-same crown 
 of thorns. Blood from my hands with blood 
 empurpled thine. And the same empoisoned 
 draught of one hellish spring, we did drink to- 
 gether, oh, Beatrice of mine. 
 
 " And yet, and yet my groaning and thy sighs, 
 mingled with each other, they passed away to 
 song. From two sorrows linked in bridal of the 
 soul, one only voice was raised — and oh ! that 
 voice was joy. Ah ! joyousness of faith, ah ! mighty 
 strength of hope, that into my heart returned by 
 thy look ! So do clouds of darkness, full of tears 
 above, meet each other for a funeral in the skies. 
 Light is torn forth from their weeping by a blast 
 of thunder ; and the mist becomes the golden 
 house of God." 
 
 Dawn consists of a series of lyrics. Their sub- 
 jects are love, self-sacrifice, and suffering, considered 
 as a road of glory that leads to Poland's mystic 
 triumph. But though the application is to Poland, 
 Krasinski's nationalism, as I have already pointed 
 out, touches so closely the mysticism of the 
 human soul that Dawn does not speak only to one 
 nation. Its message is universal. 
 
 Krasinski and his Beatrice are alone together 
 in a boat on an Italian lake. Above them are the 
 eternal snows of the Alps, the skies of Italy. 
 
 " There is one beauty and one God," cries the 
 poet, in joy that was rarely his. With harp in hand 
 and inspired eyes, Beatrice stands silvery, trans- 
 figured, as though rapt to heaven, in the light of 
 the moon rising over the snows. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 149 
 
 " Thou with me and we alone. 
 Oh, the angels cannot feel 
 What I feel now in this hour. 
 Sister mine, to me it seemeth 
 That our holy one* ariseth 
 At this moment from the coffin." 
 
 If only a dream, let him dream on. Let him and 
 her be of good heart, for, before the miracle shall 
 descend that will save them, they will not allow 
 their hearts to bleed for doubt, their brows to 
 grow heavy with fear. In the inspiration of their 
 common dreams, driven by the storm of pain in 
 the sorrows of this changing life, " within, beyond 
 them, we feel God." 
 
 " We are the children of a mother slain, we 
 who never have beheld how a mother's eyes shine 
 as an angel's on her child." They look to heaven 
 as an orphan looks. Moon, stars, and sun, nature's 
 beauty which is about them, as the boat cleaves 
 its way through the water, all make up one great 
 harp. Only the name of Poland is wanting to the 
 harmony of the universe. But, as God is in heaven, 
 even so will He restore her once again. 
 
 " To-day or to-morrow Thou wilt grant it to 
 us, Lord ! Oh, grant it for Thy justice sake ; 
 because Thou owest it, not to us, but to Thyself." 
 
 " When I spoke thus, thou wast kneeling, 
 Wailing with thy harp's stringed wailing ; 
 For thou leanedst thy snow-white forehead 
 On the strings the moon made shiver 
 All around in streams of gold. 
 
 • Poland. 
 
150 POLAND 
 
 And, thus kneeling, thou wast sighing. 
 Pray, oh, sister, with thy sighing. 
 God knows well that in this day 
 Sighing is thy country's name." 
 
 That country died a victim for the world's sin. 
 
 " Think you that who loves and dies can 
 perish ? To your eyes, to eyes of dust, but not 
 in sooth, nor to the universal life. Who died in the 
 hour of sacrifice has but passed into the lives of 
 others, and dwells in the hiding place of human 
 hearts ; and with each day, each little moment, 
 living, shall grow within that tomb, giving to all 
 and giving self." Invisible, she shall " burn with 
 fire the stones of hearts, soften with tears the 
 rocks of souls, and, by the sorrows and toils of the 
 grave, by the harmonious song of death, she shall, 
 though herself torn asunder, unite the nations in 
 one love." 
 
 The body has been slain. But " know you not 
 that in the world of the spirit love and death are 
 one ? Eternal is he who by his death gives birth 
 to life. But whoso by his life gives death he when 
 he dies shall rise no more." 
 
 Then the apostle of the ideal, of spiritual forces, 
 pours forth his wrath upon the wielders of brute 
 might and those who seek to corrupt the soul. 
 
 And now begins the series of his visions. He had 
 been parted, as he once said to a friend, by the 
 sword of Damocles from the land of his youth ; 
 and he asks of Beatrice : 
 
 " Knowest thou the love which eternally lures 
 the soul into the land of memory ? Does the cry 
 of the angel of thy country call thee by night, and 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 151 
 
 bid thee gaze into the living faces of those long 
 dead ? " He leads her in fancy to the snow- 
 covered steppe where the bones of his ancestors 
 rest, above which shine the moon and one star 
 — the Polar star of the north. 
 
 11 'Neath the earth is mournful ringing. 
 The burial place is trembling, living. 
 From the graves blow prayers and wailing. 
 Somewhere, swords are rattling hollow. 
 Clash of armour stern I hear, 
 As if our fathers, life remembering, 
 Turning on their sides, were dreaming 
 In death's sleep of Poland's sorrows." 
 
 The tombs give up their occupants. Kings, 
 knights, senators arise. The poet falls upon his 
 face before them, weeping. What did they do 
 with their lives that they left to their descendants 
 neither power nor inheritance, only instead of a 
 country a dismembered body ? A loud cry of 
 wrath goes up from the ghosts. The wraith of 
 Czarniecki, the great soldier of John Casimir's 
 days, answers that he grew, not from ease and 
 pleasure, but through pain. " To whom the Lord 
 gives torments He lays down His promises." It 
 is not for the poet to seek the fault in his fathers. 
 They lived in their age as guests of other ages. 
 Fate was driving them to a higher calling : " To 
 the Poland which shall be. And from our blood 
 and from our sins, before this age shall pass away 
 shall rise the one people of the peoples." 
 
 The steppe and the sky tremble and fade into 
 dreamland. The poet and Beatrice again float 
 
152 POLAND 
 
 upon the lake. The moon has sunk under a pall 
 of clouds. Surely that murmur they hear Is no 
 sigh of the wind. A voice is weeping. The night 
 breeze carries to their ears a thousand wails. The 
 shores, the heights, become one prayer. The 
 spirits of the Polish dead are to appear to them 
 once more. 
 
 i 
 "On the waters there before us, 
 Like light dreams, a fluttering throng, 
 On the rocks and crags they float. 
 As will-o'-the-wisps, as wavering flamelets, 
 Now they sink, and now they rise." 
 
 The poet cries to Beatrice to strike upon her 
 harp ; to tear from the strings with the sound of 
 thunder the song of the legions : Poland hath not 
 perished. The voice of the harp rushes over the 
 water, throbbing in Krasinski's verse with the 
 music and the word echoes of the Polish language, 
 that make the passage impossible for English 
 rendering. The vast army appears to the watchers' 
 eyes. There wave the insignia of Poland's warfare, 
 the horsetails, the white plumes, terrible in many 
 a Polish charge, shields, banners, and coats of 
 arms, with the cross towering above all. In the 
 midst, the face of the Mother of Christ : 
 
 " As a star upon the darkness, 
 On high, on high suspended, rises, 
 Waning, glimmering, quivering, flaming. 
 Lo ! her veil of blue and crimson 
 Shines about her as a rainbow. 
 Set with pearls, and set with flowers, 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 153 
 
 Flashes out her crown of diamonds. 
 Welcome, welcome ! to the Queen, 
 Long a widow of her people, 
 To-day returning to her kingdom 
 Which, in Polish Czenstochowa, 
 Once our fathers gave to her. 
 And these fathers o'er the billows, 
 Lo, she leadeth." * 
 
 Let the harp cease. Its power sinks silenced 
 before that celestial rainbow. God's light has 
 touched the army of spirits. Dawn sparkles on 
 their helmets. The wings on their armour shine 
 as those of angels. In their glittering battle array 
 they sweep, with swords upraised in her defence, 
 after their queen. She has descended to crush the 
 serpent's head for the second time. The hour of 
 mercy has struck. " Now, oh, now, and for all ages, 
 God will wipe our tears away." 
 
 The heavenly hosts pass, and disappear into the 
 east, the dawn. They have gone, with their hope 
 and the light as of a more splendid day that lit 
 the lake and mountains. All is now dark, as before. 
 But in the poet's heart they have left faith and 
 joy. " All is mine," cries he to Beatrice ; " all is 
 fair. Mine the earth, the plains of heaven. I ring 
 forth the voice of life, for God's word is in my 
 heart. My Poland, Poland shall be ! Praised be 
 
 * In gratitude for the repulse of the Swedes in 1655 at the walls 
 of Czenstochowa, which saved Poland, John Casimir proclaimed 
 the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Poland, and under that title she is 
 still addressed by the Polish nation. The ancient Byzantine 
 Madonna in the church of Czenstochowa has been for centuries 
 specially venerated by the Poles, and is described by Krasinski in 
 the above passage. 
 
154 POLAND 
 
 all and everything. Praised be through the ages 
 unto ages God, the spirits, man, and thou, and 
 praised the dead within their graves, and praised 
 be all who are alive, and praised the universal 
 world for ever, evermore ! And to the skies 
 will I repeat : • Praise to Thee, Lord, I am 
 happy.' " 
 
 The third vision follows : neither on the waters 
 or mountains or clouds, but in some fathomless 
 region, where no man can say. We have here a 
 piece of pure Messianism. Krasinski sees his 
 country, immortal, glorious, as the archangel of 
 humanity. The purple garland of dolorous 
 memories engirdles her brow ; but her pain is 
 over, and the spirit of God flashes as lightning 
 from her countenance, and her fetters hang shat- 
 tered. Beyond her is the countless multitude of 
 the nations to which her sufferings shall give birth, 
 crowned with the verdure, not of the things that 
 are past, but of new hope and life, all doing homage 
 to Poland as their queen. God's voic e proclaims 
 that she, who descended to the grave as a unit, 
 rises in the day of victory re-baptized by the name 
 of all humanity, with God's thought entrusted 
 to her, by which she shall lead the world to its 
 higher spirituality. As one god-like thought, the 
 poet beholds the universe flame, the all-present, 
 formless, endless glory of God, stars upon stars, 
 suns upon suns. Through worlds of light, where 
 one great hymn of praise thunders forth, lies the 
 path of the nations to their Creator : and the 
 poet looks upon his Poland leading the procession 
 on this road, till she is lost to sight in the im- 
 mensity of God. 
 
ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 155 
 
 " Whose eye 
 Can overtake her to those heights ? 
 Who shall bow his earthly forehead 
 On the feet of the Creator ? 
 Who shall soar with the archangel 
 Where humanity takes flesh ? 
 Now my heart faints in my bosom. 
 The image fades, my thought is failing. 
 Oh, so madly I entreated, 
 Oh, so long I prayed to God 
 For that one, that only moment : — 
 And I saw ! 
 
 "In that hour, 
 Oh, remember that we were 
 On the highest height of souls — 
 There, whence flows the source of life. 
 At the source of life we drank. 
 With our very eyes we grasped 
 What is still without a name. 
 Sister mine, we, in that moment, 
 Lived in our eternity. 
 
 " Throw off sadness, throw off terror. 
 Well I know what toil remaineth 
 On the road ; what pain, what sorrow. 
 Trust thee to the poet's vision. 
 The dawn of victory now shines. 
 
 " In our native land, immortal, 
 On that soil so dearly loved, 
 On that soil, that soil of ours, 
 Shall arise a race renewed," 
 
156 POLAND 
 
 to work the will of God in the government of the 
 universe, to bring back brotherly love, to trans- 
 form the earth. 
 
 " Then that new world all rejoicing, 
 As a church shall flower to God. 
 The Polish land, the Polish Eden, 
 The desert of an agelong sadness, 
 Is desolate no more nor mourning. 
 Nor behind me nor before me 
 Is there darkness any more. 
 All is light and all is justice. 
 Clear is now our hallowed past, 
 Clear our purgatorial anguish, 
 And our sorrows and our bondage." 
 
 Poland cannot die, for she has risen above the 
 storms of this world to the land of the idea. They 
 who do not live by the idea shall perish without 
 hope. All that is visible to the eye alone must be 
 destroyed, " but the idea shall not pass away." 
 Therefore, she who is the representative and the 
 torchbearer of the idea is to him no longer merely " a 
 country, a place, a home," but " faith and truth." 
 
 So, at last, he has found that answer to which 
 he had journeyed through the fires of mental 
 travail and distress. God's ways are justified. The 
 sufferings of the nation that had wrung the hearts 
 of those who loved her are sanctified, and made 
 fruitful and glorious for herself and all mankind. 
 
 " God Eternal of our fathers ! 
 Thou, Who high and far away, 
 Ever clearer through the ages 
 Descendest to us, and, dawn-like, strewest 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 157 
 
 From the eternal gates Thy sparks 
 O'er time's waves until time flameth ! 
 Now, again, Thy dawn is dawning 
 Which Thou in Thy love dost grant us. 
 In the graves the bones shall tremble 
 Sighing in a hymn to Thee. 
 
 " For our souls' and bodies' sufferings, 
 For our hundred years of torment, 
 We do give Thee thanks, oh, Lord. 
 We are poor and weak and feeble, 
 But, from this martyrdom of ours, 
 Has begun Thy reign on earth." 
 
 And the poet ends his poem in a paean of 
 ecstasy and joy, which is doubtlessly inspired not 
 only by a national hope, but by the deliverance 
 of his own soul from the shadow of death in which 
 he had dwelt. The might of Satan's rule is no 
 more. The weak are oppressed no longer. Earth 
 is one song of harmony and rejoicing. The dark 
 [days behind us were only a dreadful dream. 
 
 " Long the power of that dream. 
 We believed it. We believed 
 In eternal pain and toil. 
 They were but the sanctuary's entrance ; 
 But one step upon the stairway. 
 They were but the night of merit. 
 
 " Human heart, where now thy shame ? 
 Look into thyself, oh, gaze ! 
 Where of old was rage and weeping, 
 Groans and cries and lamentation, 
 Lo, to-day of heaven's high mercy 
 Is the second house of God." 
 
158 POLAND 
 
 Forbidden by the censor, this poem yet found 
 its way into Poland, and was watered with the 
 tears of those who read.* 
 
 IV 
 
 In Dawn Krasinski had found his standpoint 
 and never modified it. His subsequent teaching 
 was rather in the nature of crystallizing his warn- 
 ings to his people in special moments of national 
 necessity ; of reducing his general principles to 
 practice. He had in his epilogue to Dawn said he 
 would sing no more, for the only prayer worthy 
 of the Creator knows no division between thought 
 and deed. " Never, never again will I string my 
 harp. Other are the roads that lie open before us. 
 Perish, my songs ! Arise, my deeds ! " But in 
 Krasinski's relations with his nation his poetry 
 was his deed. He wrote not so much from a poet's 
 inspiration as from a patriot's. He had no vision 
 of literary fame. When the voice of Poland called, 
 he wrote for her sake. At other times he remained 
 silent. 
 
 The Psalms of the Future, which followed Dawn, 
 are, therefore, in a manner episodical. But Kras- 
 inski is never merely topical or individual. He 
 spoke seventy years ago. While these words are 
 being written during the most terrible convulsion 
 of modern times, the language and the tenets of 
 the Polish poet rise instinctively to the mind, as 
 almost strangely apposite to the needs and events 
 of the hour. 
 
 * S. Tarnowskji, Zygmunt Krasinski. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 159 
 
 The first in order of date in the cycle of the 
 Psalms is the Psalm of Love. The Psalm of Faith 
 and the Psalm of Hope were written shortly after- 
 wards as a sort of introduction to the third Psalm. 
 We will therefore take them first. The occasion of 
 all three Psalms, and most especially of the Psalm 
 of Love, was Krasinski's foreboding of the danger 
 that threatened his country from the democratic 
 propaganda that was then proceeding. 
 
 As the title implies, the Psalm of Faith (1845) 
 is Krasinski's confession of personal and national 
 faith, and of his belief in the relations of God 
 with the future of humanity. 
 
 The soul casts off the body and mind, worn out 
 by a thousand trials. Men call that moment 
 death ; but it is her second birth. She does not 
 die. Taking to herself new and " unwearied wings," 
 she soars into a higher region, leaving behind her 
 the waning tracts of the past, with before her the 
 endlessly stretching fields of measureless space, 
 till she reaches " Him Who is all and enfoldeth all, 
 the beginning and the end of Heaven and of 
 earth." 
 
 " To Him I travel without pause. Thither 
 must I first go through the pains of hell, through 
 the toils of Purgatory, till I begin to put me on 
 body and soul more radiant, and ascend to the 
 other world. There, is eternal life and life un- 
 ceasing." Hymning Paradise, as the desire of God, 
 " love without bounds, that is life without end," 
 he turns to the contemplation of Him Who is 
 " Being, Thought, and Life, the Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. And we in His image must live im- 
 mortally, must live together with Him, born of 
 
i6o POLAND 
 
 His bosom to live in His eternity." As He created 
 us, we must create and draw from ourselves that 
 which He has given to us to create. " Inasmuch 
 as we can, poor, in angelic lowliness, that which 
 Thou gavest us of Thy mercy, we must give back 
 to Thee, oh, God, and thus live eternally in Thee 
 by eternal love." 
 
 This, then, leads up to Krasinski's national and 
 political mysticism. " The history of humanity 
 is the school of the soul." Christ will judge the 
 nations on the day of resurrection ; for to each 
 of these nations has been given some deep thought 
 from the heart of the Creator, as their special 
 predestined work for the human race. " And some 
 are chosen before all others to combat for Thy 
 beauty on the earth ; to carry the cross in a 
 bloodstained track ; to give out the more love 
 and greater brotherhood in exchange against the 
 murderer's knife." 
 
 " Such a one, oh, God, is Thy Polish nation. 
 Tho' the world gives her such pain that she could 
 even doubt of hope, may she hold out in this 
 unheard of suffering. For she is surely anointed in 
 Thy spirit, for she is surely Thy high priest on 
 this earth, if she will understand that Thou lovest 
 without bounds those sons whom Thou dost 
 crown with thorns ; for the thorn, steeped in 
 blood, is the everlasting flower, and with it Thou 
 shalt renew the youth of all humanity." 
 
 He concludes with a mystical analogy between 
 the history and the calling of the human race, and 
 the Divine pattern of Him Who came to save it. 
 
 " Christ ever dwelleth in thee, oh, humanity. 
 His blood is thine. His body is thy body. With 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 161 
 
 thee shall be what did befall to Him. He bore all 
 thy vicissitudes within His flesh. To thee He 
 manifested all thy hopes. Whence art thou born ? 
 From a pure virgin womb, because from God's 
 own thought in godly likeness. Whither dost thou 
 go ? To thy Father's city. By what road must 
 thou pass ? Through pain and labour. And when 
 Christ on the summit of Mount Thabor was 
 wrapped around with the eternal dawn, seest 
 thou not what that sign to thee foretelleth ? 
 Thou, too, oh, human race, shalt be transfigured. 
 Thou shalt leave at the foot of the dark moun- 
 tains all that deceives, and all that is of sorrow ; 
 and thou shalt take spiritual knowledge with thee, 
 and the eternal, unending love of hearts. And, in 
 the strength of these two holy powers, as Christ 
 shalt thou ascend to globes of light. All sin shall 
 be erased from thy forehead. Light as feathers 
 shall thy wings be. Thy hands shalt thou stretch 
 forth on the white air, and in it shalt thou poise — 
 as air thyself." 
 
 Having enunciated his dogma of faith, Krasinski 
 proceeded to its natural sequence — the Psalm of 
 Hope. Here, for once, there is scarcely a trace of 
 the sadness, which overshadows the work of the 
 poet whose heart was broken with sorrow for his 
 nation. 
 
 " Long enough," thus opens the Psalm of Hope, 
 " has the grief of the poets sounded the strings. 
 Now is it time to strike on a second string, on the 
 steel of deeds." 
 
 The poem is instinct with life, freshness and 
 joy. The Revealer, the promised Paraclete, is nigh. 
 With Him will begin the third and spiritualized 
 
162 POLAND 
 
 epoch. It is not the thrones or crowns who 
 will be the first to perceive the advent of the 
 Consoler, but she who, guiltless, is martyred. 
 Then neither the merchant's cupidity, nor the 
 executioner's hand, can prevail against Him Who 
 is to change the universe. 
 
 " Oh, come more quickly, spring of the world ! 
 Oh, come more quickly, God the Spirit ! Fare- 
 well, oh, earth, with thy pain and with thy 
 mourning. The new Jerusalem is shining on the 
 vale of this old earth. The road was long, and the 
 toil heavy. A sea of tears and blood has flowed. 
 But the angelic time draws near. Poland ! thy 
 grave was only as the cradle of the dawn. 
 
 " Tear aside the cloud of ages. Let us praise 
 the Lord Who comes. Strew ye palms and strew 
 ye psalms, flowers below and songs on high. Oh, 
 cast songs and cast ye flowers ! Lo, He comes, the 
 Lord is coming. Now no more the Man of sorrows, 
 choosing thorns and nails and wounds " ; but 
 " transfigured, from beyond the starred walls of 
 the universe, as the blue all-horizon," He comes. 
 
 " Oh, drink ye with your souls that heavenly 
 blue. Though you are tortured, you are tempted, 
 oh, believe ye in my hope." 
 
 But neither here nor elsewhere in Krasinski's 
 teaching will he allow that hope to be anything 
 but conditional. It is to be proved in the fires of 
 action. It is to be secured only at the price of 
 individual and national self-discipline. " From 
 your faith shall your will be, from your will shall 
 your deed be." And on his trumpet note, " It is 
 time to strike on the steel of deeds," the Psalm 
 of Hofe concludes. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 163 
 
 We know how the Polish Rising, projected in 
 the forties of the nineteenth century on democratic 
 lines, was pushed by Austrian machinations into a 
 different movement, and ended in the Galician 
 massacres. Krasinski's piercingly clear political 
 acumen was never obscured by the mystic tend- 
 ency of his mind. He saw whither a class agitation 
 would be likely to lead a nation groaning as 
 was Poland under abnormal and intolerable con- 
 ditions. Before the disaster befell, trembling for 
 the moral danger that threatened his country, 
 Krasinski sent forth a passionate cry to those of 
 his fellow Poles, who were working a national 
 rising as a social revolution, to stay before it was 
 too late. That warning is his Psalm of Love. The 
 Psalm of Love is a plea to the human race, no less 
 than to one people, to shun the works of bloodshed 
 and violence : the poet's attestation that one 
 only element can save a nation, namely, love. 
 
 " Carry your arms against hell. Slay the black 
 brood of demons. The guillotine and pillage are 
 the weapons of the human race in its infancy ; rage, 
 the liberty, not of man, but of the beast. Now is 
 the time to take to oneself the toil of angels, the 
 time to cast off every stain, and by that very act 
 to conquer slavery. Destruction is not action. 
 There is but one truth, divine, fruitful in deed jj 
 transfiguration through love." ' 
 
 With his soul's whole strength, he pleads that the 
 Poland he loved to call holy, who he believed was 
 to prove to mankind that virtue and love are 
 stronger than brute force, must never, by stooping 
 to unworthiness and violence, lose her destined 
 vocation. 
 
1 64 POLAND 
 
 " Who changeth sorrow into crime, who forgeth 
 fetters into knives, not into swords, cursed be he." 
 
 " When geniuses have descended to this world, 
 they have led their cause by a different road. No 
 one of them was a dictator of the ages through 
 murder and the torture chamber. Rather, they 
 live in peril, in the end they die, but their victory 
 lasts for ever. Only the weak soul chooses butchery. 
 His name is Marius, his name is Robespierre." 
 
 Then he bids such of his countrymen who 
 would sweep away the ancient nobility of Poland 
 to look upon what the latter have done for their 
 country. They have died for Poland in battle. They 
 have perished for her in Siberia. And who, asks 
 the poet, could we find who are faultless ? " Only 
 one, He only Who was man and God ; and from 
 the sinner another man soars upward through 
 suffering, changed as the phoenix, and immortal." 
 Search the world ; the Alps, the waters of the 
 Mediterranean, the Spanish sierras, the snows of 
 Russia, the battlefields of France, where the 
 Polish nobles have sown " the seed of future 
 Poland, the god-like grain, their own blood ; 
 and you are the children of that pain." They 
 lead that nation which, far from thrusting men 
 down to the pit, is to uplift them as she mounts 
 ever higher. But near her stands the tempter. 
 Evil thoughts " grow where there are chains." 
 Siberia and the knout are nothing to the poison 
 sown by slavery. " But the corrupted spirit of a 
 nation, that only is the pain of pains " ; conscience 
 warped by a mass of suffering, reason confused by 
 the wandering of perverted pride, crime repre- 
 sented as virtue, children taught to look on murder 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSK1 165 
 
 as a glorious deed, the sister bidding the brother 
 take up the assassin's dagger, the native country- 
 turned into a hell. 
 
 " Oh, my holy one, abjure these delusions, the 
 phantoms of an evil moment. Thou wilt not rid 
 thee of thy ancient faith, that he only can cut 
 through his chains who is anointed with the sign 
 of virtue, that to be a Pole upon this earth is to 
 live nobly and to God." 
 
 The Anonymous Poet reads hope from the 
 very afflictions that thronged around his nation 
 on every side. 
 
 " My Poland ! Holy Poland ! Thou standest 
 on the threshold of thy victory. This is the last 
 term of thy sorrows. Let it be only seen that thou 
 art the eternal foe of evil. Then shall the chains of 
 death be shattered, and thou wilt be assumed to 
 heaven, because even in death thou wast with 
 God." 
 
 In the final moment when death struggles with 
 life, when dying lips sob out the last accents of 
 doubt and lamentation : 
 
 " In the strength of thy martyrdom overcome 
 that moment, conquer that pain ; and thou shalt 
 rise again, thou shalt rise as the queen of the 
 Slavonian fields." 
 
 Then the poet turns to the ideal of Messianistic 
 longings ; the celestial vision of a spiritualized 
 country. 
 
 " Let them who love thee gaze on thy face as 
 on the spring. Be the mistress who straightens 
 the crooked things of the world, the leader of 
 universal love. Blot out all sin, dry all tears, rule 
 over the world of souls, spurn the government 
 
166 POLAND 
 
 of flesh. Unpolluted, carry the breath of the 
 Lord." 
 
 But that spiritual conquest is not reached yet. 
 The powers of darkness are still close at hand. 
 " Fling away your murderous weapons," is the 
 reiteration that tolls all through the concluding 
 verses of the psalm. " Against hell carry your 
 arms. Slay the black brood of demons." And, when 
 the word of the Lord shall thunder forth, " then 
 forward in the name of God" to the holy rising, 
 from which " God will not turn away His face." 
 
 So ends the poem which Count Tarnowski 
 places among the world's splendid failures of 
 patriotic pleading,* written to save a nation, and 
 written in vain. 
 
 The catastrophe, greater even than what Kras- 
 inski had foretold, came to pass in 1846. Krasinski 
 beheld the country, whose purity and suffering 
 he had promised would confer upon her the 
 heralding of a new spiritual epoch, dragged down 
 to shame. His anguish brought him to the point 
 of death. From that time he was prematurely 
 aged. Rent by the distress of his soul under which 
 his bodily frame came near to sinking, in the 
 agony of those days when Galicia was soaked in 
 blood spilt by her own children, he could still, 
 he did still, cling to the conviction of his heart. 
 He could still tell the beloved friend to whom he 
 poured out his thoughts that the idea would 
 conquer. t He could still, apparently a dying man, 
 tear from his pain words of consolation for his 
 
 * S. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. 
 
 f Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski.\ "©1. I. To Constantine Gaszynski, 
 March 1st, 1846. 
 
ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 167 
 
 people. And so he gave his nation her Psalm of 
 Grief. 
 
 Slowacki, formerly Krasinski's friend, had, in a 
 poem of extraordinary artistic beauty, made 
 mockery, not untouched by a personal gibe at 
 the Anonymous Poet's private tragedy, of the 
 anti-revolutionary tendency of the Psalm of Love. 
 The Psalm of Grief is Krasinski's justification 
 against his brother-poet's attack. In grave and 
 dignified accents, with the generosity of one who 
 passed over the bitterness of an individual wound, 
 Krasinski answers the poem that he himself 
 praised as an ornament to the Polish language. 
 Would, says he, that he had been the false prophet, 
 and that his challenger had been the true one ! 
 On the lines of the Psalm of Love, he refutes the 
 revolutionary tenets that he believed could only 
 bring a nation to ruin. The spirit and the flesh 
 ever war, the idea against the brute beast, the 
 angel against the tiger. In the combat and con- 
 vulsion of the world, who shall redeem us ? Who 
 shall bring harmony into a disordered chaos ? 
 He Who knows neither the burden of the body 
 nor the sickness of the soul : the Holy Ghost. 
 Beneath His rule blood will be shed no more. " In 
 the morning He waketh to hope the people 
 who slumber." He shall make the very shadows 
 " as silver, till dawn becomes midday." 
 
 Brotherly love will save those who are trembling 
 on the very brink of the abyss. Parted from each 
 other, they are damned. United, they are redeemed. 
 The radiance of the Holy Ghost conquers the 
 curse of centuries. The soul, ruled by Him, "shall 
 feel the love of toil and the courage of suffering." 
 
168 POLAND 
 
 She shall " lift men from the mire and hide their 
 shame. Unabased in the midst of vileness, loving 
 ever in the midst of trials, her heart will become 
 as steel, and her eyes shall weep for every human 
 grief." Thus through love and pain shall the soul 
 work her way to God. Even with the horror of 
 what had recently befallen fresh upon him ; when 
 to keep hope alive, where every exterior event 
 incited to despair, meant a life and death struggle, 
 the Anonymous Poet spoke a message of virility 
 and life. He bade his people be the nation to rise 
 above moral stain, whose weapon shall not be the 
 assassin's but Christ's, and who will therefore 
 conquer in the power of Christ ; whose triumph 
 shall be commensurate with her anguish and her 
 love. " Thus she riseth from the dead " : are the 
 last words of the Psalm of Grief, 
 
 With the Psalm of Good Will— 1848— Kras- 
 inski's Psalms of the Future close. This, the noblest 
 of Krasinski's poems, is the seal of his life's work, 
 the culmination of the great prophetical poetry 
 of Poland. His own pain had taught Krasinski his 
 message to his nation. The Psalm of Good Will 
 breathes the sadness and majesty of a farewell to 
 his people, from one who had won to his haven 
 after suffering and struggle. In its long, sweeping 
 cadences the hymn reveals that the poet had 
 looked into the mysteries of grief only to rise 
 victorious above them ; that he had found in 
 death no sting but resurrection. His prayer is not 
 for his nation's glory, not for her material triumph, 
 but for that which will bring her both : for good 
 will. 
 
 " Now that Thy judgment has thundered in 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 169 
 
 heaven on the two thousand years that have past, 
 amidst that judgment, grant us, oh, Lord, that 
 by our holy deeds we may rise from death." 
 
 This is the petition of which the poet cannot 
 weary, to which the stanzas of the Psalm modu- 
 late as into some grand closing chord. 
 
 " Thou hast given us all that Thou couldst 
 give, oh, Lord," sings the son of the unhappiest 
 of nations. With the eyes of mystical devotion, 
 he reads in her past a history of love. " Thou hast 
 given us all that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord"; 
 for, when thrust down from the land of the living 
 by dismemberment, " Thou didst keep us who 
 were dead living in the field of war. We were not, 
 and we were. . . . Thou hast given us all that 
 Thou couldst give, oh, Lord; a pure life, there- 
 fore worthy of the cross, and the cross that brings 
 us to Thy stars. Earth Thou didst take from us, 
 and send down heaven, and Thy heart shelters 
 us on every side. But our free will Thou hadst to 
 leave to us. Without ourselves, even Thou canst 
 not save us ; for so hast Thou ennobled man and 
 every nation that Thy thought, suspended in 
 heaven, awaits the choice of man or nation for 
 their several roads." " Thou hast given us all that 
 Thou couldst give, oh, Lord " ; the example of 
 Jerusalem, " in whom Thy love for so long dwelt," 
 and who is throneless and widowed because she 
 desired revenge, and does not understand the 
 might of Christ's cross. " Thou hast given us all 
 that Thou couldst give, oh, Lord " ; for we have 
 seen how the works of death bring destruction, 
 not on those against whom they are directed, but 
 on those who handle them. 
 
170 POLAND 
 
 Here ends the tranquil and devout hymn of 
 praise. Behind Krasinski's promises, there is always 
 the reality of an exacting warfare. If Poland is to 
 be a chosen nation, the harder must be her struggle 
 to justify her calling. The Psalm becomes a sup- 
 plication for victory in the battle. 
 
 " We are above the abyss, on the narrow 
 straits. Our wings are sprouting to the resurrec- 
 tion, our lips are parted for the cry of joy. From 
 the blue skies, as though from Thy bosom, golden 
 shafts of dawn, as though Thy sheltering arms, are 
 spreading from the heavens to us on earth below, 
 to take from our foreheads the load of agelong 
 sorrow. All is ready, and the east is all aflame, and 
 angels watching." 
 
 But from the other side, heaving to our feet, 
 rises the darkness : " the pit, eternal death, where 
 Thou art not," where are all things evil. If we 
 turn^one backward glance towards it, one step to 
 meet it, then " the light of dawn will pale upon 
 our brows, Thy Son shall shed no tear for us, and 
 the Holy Spirit shall not console us." 
 
 " Have mercy, Lord, defend us, be with us ! " 
 We stand alone to face the final moment. None 
 may help us. Our destiny is in our own hands. 
 
 Then the name, with which " upon their lips 
 millions of Polish souls have gone to death," rises 
 in the poet's heart : the name of Mary. He sees 
 her, not with the rapture of his earlier vision in 
 Dawn, leading in triumph a host of warriors, but 
 as a suppliant, kneeling at the throne of her Son, 
 pleading for a suffering nation. He sees her above 
 the stars that turn to her in prayer, above suns 
 and the Milky Way, and behind her, weeping, are 
 
ZrGMUNT KRASINSKI 171 
 
 the souls of the Polish dead. Below is the pit, 
 echoing with the mocking laughter of hell. Its 
 winds roar in our ears, the foam of its waves 
 blinds our eyes by which it would drag us down to 
 death. " Oh, vain one, it seeth not what is being 
 wrought on high. Oh, vain one, it seeth not that 
 its rage is nought when such a heart for us is 
 wrung." And the poet then pours out his last 
 prayer for his people : 
 
 " Oh, Lord, Lord, then not for hope — as a 
 flower is it strewn : then not for the destruction of 
 our foes — their destruction dawns on to-morrow's 
 clouds : not for the weapons of rule — from the 
 tempests they will fall to us : not for any help — 
 Thou hast opened already the field of events 
 before us : but amidst the terrible convulsion of 
 these events, we beseech Thee only for a pure will 
 within ourselves, oh, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 
 
 " Oh, Thou most dear, hidden but visible 
 beyond the veils of the transparent worlds, Thou 
 present everywhere, immortal, holy ! Thou Who 
 commandedst the being of man that, poor in 
 strength, and little in his birth, he should to an 
 angel grow by might of sacrifice ; and to our 
 Polish nation didst ordain that she should lead 
 the nations into love and peace ! We beseech Thee, 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we, suspended 
 between Thy kingdom and the pit, we beseech 
 Thee with our foreheads sunk to earth, our temples 
 bathed in the breathing of Thy spring, surrounded 
 with the wheels of shattered times and perishing 
 governments, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ! we 
 beseech Thee create in us a pure heart, make 
 new our thoughts within us, root out from our 
 
172 POLAND 
 
 souls the tares of sacrilegious falsehood, and give 
 us the gift, eternal among Thy gifts — give us 
 good will ! " 
 
 One only word more remained to Krasinski to 
 speak to his people, and then his work was done. 
 In the thick of the terrible events of 1846, when, 
 weighed down by physical weakness and mental 
 agony, he could scarcely set pen to paper, he had 
 struggled to send his nation the message she 
 needed. 
 
 " Oh, pray for me to God," he wrote to Delfina 
 Potocka, as his spirit wrestled against a mind and 
 body too wearied to obey its bidding. " I feel 
 nothing egotistic in that desire. For Poland " — 
 whom even in a private letter he calls by a feigned 
 name — " is bent beneath all the winds. She 
 implores, she implores for counsel."* Dissatisfied 
 with what he wrote, Krasinski did not publish 
 the poem in question till 1851, when it came out 
 under the title Resurrecturis. It stands forth as his 
 supreme victory over pessimism and despair. 
 What, he asks, is this world but a " cemetery of 
 tears, of blood and mire ? This world is an eternal 
 Golgotha to each. The spirit writhes in vain 
 against its pain. There is no halting place in the 
 tempest of this life. Fate mocks us every moment. 
 Death is close ; and only far away, somewhere on 
 a later wave of ages, resurrection. 
 
 " Then must we grow numb, be petrified, be 
 without heart, become as murderers among the 
 murderers, among the criminals be criminal our- 
 selves ? Lie, hate, and slay, and mock. We will 
 
 * Works of Zy^munt Krasinski. Jubilee Edition, Cracow, 1912. 
 Vol. VI. p. 369. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRASINSKI 173 
 
 give back to the world what it gives us. Let us 
 eat and drink, caress the body and abase the mind. 
 So shall we be counted among the stupid and the 
 happy. 
 
 " Oh, let it not be so ! My soul, draw back, oh, 
 stay ! Not such a weapon for those who would 
 shorten evil. Only one power in the world, the 
 quiet strength of sacrifice, conquers an oppressive 
 fate. 
 
 " Oh, know thyself for what thou art. Crave 
 not for the mastery which is His in heaven, nor 
 choose to be as the brute beast fattening on the 
 fields of pasture. On this side the grave, before 
 the resurrection dawns, be thou an unbroken 
 masterpiece of will, be patience, mistress of mis- 
 fortune, that slowly buildeth up an edifice from 
 nought. Be that defeat, of distant aim, but which 
 at last shall conquer for all ages. Be peace amidst 
 the raving of the storm, and harmony in discord. 
 Be thou eternal beauty in the eternal war of life. 
 Be as a sister's tears to those who sorrow, the 
 voice of manhood to those whose courage faints, 
 a home to the exile, hope to those who have lost 
 their hope. In the struggle with this hell of earth, 
 be ever, everywhere, the strength that against 
 death prevails with the stronger strength of love ; 
 be thou the hell of love.* 
 
 " In word and in example give thyself freely 
 to thy brothers. Multiply thy one self by living 
 deeds, and from thy one self a thousand shall 
 come forth. Be thou even in chains by toil 
 
 * The critics took exception to the expression "hell of love." 
 Krasinski defended it, saying- he had taken it from the writings of 
 St. Teresa. Letters of Z- Xmsinski to Stanislas Kozmian, Lw6w, 
 1912 (Polish). 
 
(s 
 
 174 POLAND 
 
 unwearied. Let every pain, though it shall pain, 
 not pain thee. Be sanctity in bondage. 
 
 " What the world called dream and mirage, 
 make living, make of them a faith, a law, a cer- 
 tainty, a truth, till the world, thy murderer, 
 shall kneel and own that God and country are as 
 the conscience of the nations. Thy thought shall 
 be the stream of light, God's judgment flashing 
 on the heights, above the throng of godless here 
 below. Nor men nor cannon shall keep it back, 
 nor falsehood, nor deception, genius, praise, nor 
 kings, nor peoples." 
 
 Thus the Anonymous Poet, who began his 
 career with an Undivine Comedy, ended it with 
 a Resurrecturis* He was surrounded all his days 
 by the tragedy of his nation, tormented within 
 and without by the intolerable bitterness of a life, 
 which to him, and to every Pole of his generation, 
 brought nothing but the spectacle of all that was 
 sacred and beloved trampled underfoot and 
 unavenged. Every incitement to despair, revenge, 
 negation of God and hatred of man, might well 
 have been his. Yet he pointed without faltering 
 to one great moral : to the triumph of hope, love, 
 and pain over evil, to salvation through purity 
 of aims and means. " In spite of all visible events," 
 he wrote to his friend Gaszynski at a time when no 
 ray of light pierced the cloud of tribulation that 
 hung over Poland, and over his own life, " believe 
 
 * In a short sketch of this nature, I have been obliged to 
 confine myself entirely to Krasinski's masterpieces, which are at 
 the same time those that chiefly show the development of his idea. 
 It is enough to say here, that those writings of his that I have had 
 to pass over carry out the same thoughts, and breathe the same 
 devoted patriotism. 
 
ZTGMUNT KRJSINSKI 175 
 
 me a better dawn is near, a second spring in 
 our lives, another youth. Poland will give us back, 
 will give us back what we have lost for her, joy, 
 enthusiasm, the heart's health."* In each defeat 
 he bade his nation see but the promise of her 
 future victory. He believed against the cruellest 
 evidence of circumstance. S-peravit contra sfem. 
 
 * Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski, Vol, I f To Constantine 
 Gaszynski, June I, 1843. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 
 
 AMONG the greatest of Poland's poets 
 stands Julius Slowacki. Inferior to his 
 contemporaries, Mickiewicz and Krasinski, 
 in depth of thought or moral beauty, he is a 
 master of style and language. He began his poetical 
 life as a follower and warm admirer of Byron. He 
 ended it — death took the brilliant, egotistic poet 
 in the flower of his years — as a mystic. 
 
 " Place on his grave for all inscription : To the 
 author of Anhelli ; and that will be enough to 
 secure his fame in future generations." So wrote 
 Krasinski after Slowacki's death.* And Anhelli ', 
 that strange mystical and poetic journey through 
 Siberia, stamped with the eternal despair of the 
 prison-house of the Pole, ranks with the most 
 striking and most tragic productions of the great 
 prophetic-national Polish literature. 
 
 " When I read it," said Krasinski — and it 
 should be remembered that one of Krasinski's 
 lifelong tortures was his terror of Siberia added to 
 his conviction that he would be banished there — 
 " I yearned, God help me ! for Siberia. For many 
 nights, Siberia appeared to me in my dreams as 
 a melancholy Eden."t " The stamp of his 
 
 * A. Maleck'u Julius SloTvacki. Lw6w, 1901 (Polish), 
 t Letters of Zygmunt Kras'vski. Vol. III. Lw6w, 1887. To 
 jRoman Zaluski, May 13th, 1840 (Polish), 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 177 
 
 [Slowacki's] poetry," he goes on to say, " is 
 that marvellous mingling of horror and of 
 charm." 
 
 The impression made by Anhelli on the reader's 
 mind is that of a desolation as unending as those 
 dreary snow-bound wastes that Slowacki unrolls 
 to our gaze ; a despair which the pale light of the 
 vague mysticism that gleams through the work 
 seems but to enhance. The white deserts, their Q 
 sameness only broken by the figures of the doomed 1 
 Polish exiles ; the fires of the Northern lights ; 
 the strange brilliance of the Siberian winter stars, 
 are a fit setting for Anhelli, the youth who passes 
 through the prisons and the mines, as the type of 
 his people's sufferings, till his heart breaks with his 
 anguish. 
 
 It is not our intention to describe Slowacki's 
 Anhelli) but to let this exquisite prose-poem speak 
 for itself in extracts which can, unfortunately, 
 convey but a meagre impression of the beauty of 
 the Polish original. But we would first note one 
 or two of its characteristics. Inspired in part by 
 Slowacki's wanderings in the Holy Land, it is 
 written in a species of Biblical prose. It is in no 
 wise intended as a closely exact presentment of 
 Siberia. More than one of the episodes introduced 
 into it belong, not to Siberia, but to Poland. 
 Various of the Poles whom Anhelli meets in 
 Siberia never in reality went there. But Slowacki 
 chose to place the poem consecrated to the sorrows 
 of his nation, and into which he poured his own 
 sadness and weariness of life, in Siberia, that land 
 watered by the tears of thousands of Poles, which, 
 at the time that the poet was writing, stood before 
 
178 POLAND 
 
 Polish minds as the large factor with which they 
 were compelled to reckon.* 
 
 Although, from time to time, Anhelli touches 
 upon the Messianistic theory of Poland's salvation 
 and exaltation, yet its general tone is that of a 
 profound melancholy that borders on despair, of 
 something, indeed, not far removed from pessi- 
 mism that, as we have seen, is unusual in the Polish 
 poetry of Slowacki's generation. We have called 
 Anhelli a mystical poem ; but its mysticism is of 
 a peculiarly indeterminate and unsatisfying de- 
 scription. In fact, with a few exceptions here and 
 there, the supernatural element in Anhelli strikes 
 the reader as being more of a fairy-like than, 
 strictly speaking, a spiritual nature. This feature 
 weakens the work as a great national expression ; 
 but from the artistic standpoint it creates that 
 weird and unearthly atmosphere that for long 
 haunts our vision, as though we had wandered 
 to some far distant and unutterably mournful 
 dream-land. 
 
 " The exiles came into the land of Siberia," (so 
 Anhelli begins). " And, clearing a wide place, they 
 built them a wooden house, that they might dwell 
 together in harmony and brotherly love. For 
 some time there was great order among them and 
 great sadness, because they could not forget that 
 they were exiles, and would see their country no 
 more, unless it pleased God." 
 
 Here Slowacki has the Polish Emigration in 
 mind.f He describes how dissensions break out 
 | in their midst. Then : 
 
 " They saw a great flock of black birds flying 
 
 * A. Malecki, op, cit, t A. Malecki, op cit. 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 179 
 
 from the north. And beyond the birds there 
 appeared, as it were, a caravan, and a tribe of 
 people, and sledges drawn by dogs, and a herd of 
 reindeer with branching horns, and men on skates 
 carrying spears. And at their head went the king 
 of the tribe, who was also their priest, clad in 
 furs and in corals. 
 
 " Then that king, as he drew nigh to the crowd 
 of exiles, said to them in the language of their 
 own country : ' Welcome ! Lo, I knew your 
 fathers, unhappy like you ; and I beheld how 
 they lived in the fear of God and died, saying, 
 Oh, my country ! my country ! ' " 
 
 This king, the Shaman, the Siberian wizard- 
 priest, stays with the exiles to comfort them. He 
 is the Virgil of the poem, who leads Anhelli through 
 the journey where he is confronted, not so much 
 with individuals, as in the Divina Commedia, but 
 with the symbolizations of the national suffer- 
 ings.* 
 
 " Then the Shaman, gazing into the hearts of 
 that band of exiles, said within himself : ■ Verily, 
 I have not found here what I sought. Their hearts 
 are weak, and they will be vanquished by sadness. 
 They would have been worthy men in the midst of 
 happiness, but misery will change them into evil 
 and dangerous men. Oh, God, what hast Thou 
 done ? Dost Thou not grant to every flower to 
 bloom where it finds its own life and its own soil ? 
 Why, then, must these men perish ? I will, there- 
 fore, take one from among them, and I will love 
 him as a son, and when I die I will lay upon him 
 my burden, and a greater burden than others can 
 
 * A. Malecki, op. tit* 
 
1 8c POLAND 
 
 bear, that in him there shall be redemption. And 
 I will show him all the sorrows of this earth, and 
 then I will leave him alone in a great darkness, 
 with the load of thought and of yearning in 
 his heart.' 
 
 " When he had said this, he called to him a 
 youth of the name of Anhelli and, laying his 
 hands upon him, he poured into him heartfelt 
 love and pity for men. And, turning to the crowd 
 of exiles, he said : ' I will depart with this youth 
 to show him many sorrowful things, and you shall 
 remain alone to learn how to bear hunger, misery 
 and sadness. But keep hope. For hope shall go 
 forth from you to the future generations and will 
 give them life : but, if it dieth within you, then 
 the future generations will be as dead men. Keep 
 watch upon yourselves, for you are as men stand- 
 ing upon a height, and they who are to come will 
 behold you. But I say unto you, be at rest, not 
 about the morrow, but about the day which will 
 be the morrow of your death. For the morrow of 
 life is more bitter than the morrow of death.' ' 
 
 " You are as men standing on the height," said 
 Slowacki. Here we have the Messianistic theory 
 of the Pole's vocation. The poet's insistence on 
 hope is also characteristic of the mystic national 
 literature and of the whole temper of his nation. 
 Hope preserved the life of Poland. 
 
 The hour has struck for Anhelli to set forth on 
 his pilgrimage through the house of bondage of 
 his people. The Shaman summons him from 
 slumber, bidding him " ' Sleep not, but come with 
 me, for there are things of import in the desert.' 
 
 " Then Anhelli, clothing himself with a white 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 181 
 
 robe, followed the old man, and they walked in 
 the light of the stars. . . . 
 
 " And the Shaman passed with Anhelli through 
 the desert ways of Siberia where were the prisons.*- 
 And they saw faces of prisoners, pallid and sorrow- 
 ful, looking through the gratings to the sky. And 
 near one of the prisons they met men carrying 
 biers, and the Shaman stayed them, bidding 
 them open the coffins. When, then, they had 
 taken the lids off the coffins, Anhelli shudderegl, 
 beholding that the dead were still in their fetters, 
 and he said : ' Shaman, I fear lest these mar- 
 tyred men shall not rise from the dead. Awaken 
 one of them, for thou hast the power of working 
 miracles. Wake that old man with the hoary beard 
 and white hair, for it seems to me that I knew 
 him when he was alive.' And the Shaman, with a 
 stern look, said : ' Wherefore ? I will raise him 
 from the dead, and thou wilt slay him again. 
 Verily, twice will I raise him up, and twice he 
 will die at thy hands. But let it be as thou wilt, 
 that thou mayest know that death shelters us 
 from sorrows which were waiting for us on the 
 road, but which found us dead.' 
 
 " Speaking thus, the Shaman looked upon the 
 old man in his coffin, and said : ' Arise ! ' And the 
 body in chains rose and sat up, gazing at the 
 people like a man that sleeps." 
 
 But as Anhelli repeats to this man — Niemojow- 
 ski, a well-known figure in the Polish history of 
 Slowacki's time, and one whom the poet knew 
 personally — some of the tales that were told 
 against him, " he who had risen from the dead 
 died again, wailing." 
 
1 82 POLAND 
 
 " Then the Shaman said : ' Anhelli, thou hast 
 slain him by repeating men's slanders and calum- 
 nies, of which he knew not before his death. But 
 I will raise him up a second time, and do thou 
 beware lest thou bring him a second time to his 
 death.' 
 
 " He awoke the dead man, and he rose in his 
 coffin, with tears streaming from his open eyelids." 
 
 Mindful of the wizard's warning, Anhelli begs 
 the dead man's forgiveness, and speaks words of 
 praise both of him and of his equally famous 
 brother. " ■ Oh, unhappy ye,' " he ends. " ' Lo, one 
 seeketh rest in a Siberian graveyard, and the other 
 lies under the roses and cypresses on the Seine — 
 separated and dead.' 
 
 " When he had heard these words, the man who 
 had risen from the dead cried out : ' Oh, my 
 brother ! ' and he fell back in the coffin, and died. 
 And the Shaman said to Anhelli : ' Why didst 
 thou tell him of his brother's death ? One 
 moment, and he would have known it from God, 
 and he would have met his beloved brother in the 
 heavenly land. Let them close the coffins and 
 carry them to the cemetery. And ask me no more 
 to raise from the dead those who are asleep and 
 at rest.' 
 
 " And so the Shaman with Anhelli made their 
 journey through the sorrowful land, and through 
 the desert ways and beneath the murmuring 
 forests of Siberia, meeting the suffering people 
 and comforting them. 
 
 " And one evening they passed near still-stand- 
 ing water, where grew many weeping willows and 
 a few pines." 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 183 
 
 And as the Shaman watched the little fish 
 " leaping to the afterglow," he conjures Anhelli 
 to bear in mind that melancholy " ' is a mortal 
 disease.' 
 
 " ' For there are two melancholies. One is 
 from strength, the other from weakness. The first 
 is as wings to men of high mind, the second a 
 stone to drowning men. I tell thee this because 
 thou art yielding to sadness, and thou wilt lose 
 hope.' 
 
 " While he still spoke, they came upon a throng 
 of Siberians who were catching fish in the lake. 
 And when the fishers had seen the Shaman, they 
 ran to him, saying : ' Oh, our king ! Thou hast 
 forsaken us for strangers, and we are sad because 
 we see thee among us no more. Stay with us this 
 night, and we will make thee a banquet.' 
 
 " But after the supper, when the moon rose 
 and threw her light over the smooth water," 
 the Shaman, to revive the faith of these children 
 of the desert, works a miracle for them. He casts 
 Anhelli into a trance : 
 
 " Calling a little child from the crowd, he placed 
 him on the breast of Anhelli, who had laid him 
 down as though to sleep, and he said to the child : 
 1 Lay thy hands on the forehead of this youth, 
 and call him three times by the name of Anhelli.' 
 And it befell that at the call of the child the soul 
 went forth from Anhelli, and it was of a fair form 
 and many hued colours, and had white wings on 
 its shoulders. And beholding itself freed the 
 spirit went on the water, and it fled across the 
 column of the moon's light towards the south. 
 
 " But when it was afar off and in the middle 
 
1 84 POLAND 
 
 of the lake, the Shaman bade the child call upon 
 the soul to return. And the bright spirit looked 
 back at the cry of the child, and it returned slowly 
 over the golden wave, dragging after it the ends 
 of its wings which were drooping for sorrow. And 
 when the Shaman bade it descend into the body 
 of the man, it wailed like a shattered harp and 
 trembled, but it obeyed. And Anhelli, awaking, 
 sat up and asked what had been wrought with 
 him. The fishermen answered : 6 Lord, we have 
 seen thy soul. The Chinese kings are not clothed 
 in such splendour as the soul that belongs to thy 
 body. And we have seen nothing brighter on the 
 earth save the sun, and nought glittering more 
 brightly save the stars. The swans flying over 
 our land in May have not such wings. Yea, and 
 we even smelt scent like the scent of a thousand 
 flowers.' 
 
 " ' What, then,' (asks Anhelli of the Shaman), 
 * did my soul when she was free ? ' The Shaman 
 answered him : ' She went over that golden road 
 that is cast on the water from the moon, and she 
 fled to yonder side like one that is in haste.' And 
 at these words Anhelli drooped his head, and, 
 musing, he began to weep, and he said : ' She was 
 fain to return to my country.' " 
 
 Having comforted Anhelli, the Shaman leads 
 him on, he himself working fresh miracles, till, 
 says he : 
 
 " ' Lo, we will show miracles no more nor the 
 power of God that is in us : but we will weep, for 
 we have come to the people who do not see the 
 sun. We may not teach them wisdom, for sorrow 
 has taught them more. Nor will we give them 
 
MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 185 
 
 hope, for they will not believe us. In the decree 
 that condemned them was inscribed : For ever ! 
 Here are the mines of Siberia.' 
 
 " ' Step carefully here, for the earth is paved 
 with sleeping men. Dost thou hear ? They 
 breathe heavily, and many moan and talk in their 
 sleep. One speaks of his mother, another of his 
 sisters and brothers, and a third of his home and 
 of her whom he loved in his heart, and of the 
 meadows where the corn bowed to him as to its 
 lord. And they are happy now in their sleep — but 
 they will wake. In other mines criminals wail ; 
 but this is only the grave of the sons of the nation, 
 and is filled with silence. The chain that rattles 
 here has a sorrowful sound, and in the vault there 
 are many echoes, and one echo which says : I 
 mourn for you.' 
 
 " While the Shaman was speaking thus piti- 
 fully, there came wardens and soldiers with lanterns 
 to awaken the sleepers to labour. Then all rose 
 up from the ground, and woke, and they went like 
 sheep with bent heads, except one who rose not, 
 for he had died in his sleep " — 
 having swallowed poisonous lead that he had 
 picked up from the floor of the mine in the hope 
 of ending his misery. 
 
 The pilgrims wend their way through the depths 
 of the mines : 
 
 " Till they saw many men, pallid and tortured, 
 whose names are known in our country. And they 
 came to a subterranean lake, and trod the banks 
 of its dark water which stirred not, and here 
 and there was yellow from the light of 
 the lanterns. And the Shaman said: ' Is this the 
 
1 86 POLAND 
 
 Sea of Galilee ? * And are these the fishers of 
 woe ? ' 
 
 " Then, one of those who sat sadly by the banks 
 of the black water said : ' To-day they allow us 
 to rest, because it is the Tsar's name-day. So we 
 sit here over the dark water to dream and think 
 and rest ; for our hearts are more weary than our 
 bodies. And, not long since, we lost our prophet,t 
 whose favourite place was this rock, and to whom 
 these waters were dear. And seven years ago on 
 a certain night the spirit of prophecy took posses- 
 sion of him, and he felt the great convulsion that 
 there was in our country,! and he told us the 
 whole night what he saw, laughing and weeping. 
 And only at dawn did he wax sad, and he cried : 
 Lo, they have risen from the dead, but they 
 cannot roll away the stone from the sepulchre : 
 and having said this, he fell dead.' 
 
 " And the Shaman, turning him to Anhelli, 
 said : * Why art thou thus lost in thought above 
 this black water, which is of human tears ? ' 
 
 " When he had spoken, there resounded a 
 great echo from an explosion in the mine, and it 
 was prolonged above their heads, beating like a 
 subterranean bell. And the Shaman said : ' Be- 
 hold the angel of the Lord for those who see the 
 
 * Slowacki wrote Anhelli under the influence of his journey in 
 Palestine, dedicating" the poem to the Pole who had been his 
 fellow-traveller there. The Sea of Galilee was one of the spots that 
 h« had visited, and certain of his descriptive passages, such as the 
 lake where Anhelli's soul is shown to the fishermen, are said to be 
 the poet's impressions of the scenery of the Holy Land. 
 
 f Slowacki said that this prophet was an imaginary figure, but 
 that at the same time he had Thomas Zan in his mind. When the 
 poet wrote Anhelli, Zan was still in exile, but he returned in later 
 years to end his days in his own country. 
 
 % The Rising: of 1830, which took place eight years before 
 Anhelli was published. 
 
MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 187 
 
 sun no more. Oh, God, oh, God, we pray Thee 
 that our sufferings may be our redemption. And 
 we will not entreat Thee to restore the sun to 
 our eyes and the air to our lungs, for we know 
 that Thy judgment has fallen upon us — but the 
 newborn generation is guiltless. Have mercy, oh, 
 God ! And forgive us that we carry our cross 
 with sadness and that we rejoice not as martyrs ; 
 because Thou hast not said if our suffering will 
 be reckoned to us as our expiation. But speak the 
 word, and we shall rejoice. For what is life that 
 we should mourn for it ? Is it the good angel that 
 leaves us in the hour of death ? Happy are they 
 who may sacrifice themselves for the nation ! ' " 
 
 The Shaman and Anhelli pass on where all is 
 sorrow. Here, they see an old man knouted to 
 death, there, a Russian prince toiling as a felon, 
 with his devoted wife ministering to him. At 
 last, like a second Virgil with his Dante, the guide 
 carries Anhelli up from the pit ; and Anhelli 
 opens his eyes once more on the Siberian stars 
 and snow, asking himself if what he had beheld 
 was but a dreadful dream. 
 
 The scope of the poem now somewhat changes. 
 The national sufferings recede further into the 
 background, and the grief of Anhelli himself fills 
 the poem ; a grief which, however, never ceases 
 to be that of the Pole, eternally mourning for his 
 nation. It is curious to notice that, as the poet 
 departs from those great tragedies with which 
 the heart of the Pole was filled when Slowacki 
 wrote, and lingers instead on a more individual 
 and restricted note, the artistic beauty of the 
 work seems to increase rather than to bejimpaired. 
 
188 POLAND 
 
 In the forlorn figure of the youth, desolate and 
 alone in the Siberian night, and painted with an 
 almost terrible power, there is much of Slowacki 
 himself. The tale of his own sad and lonely soul 
 is told here. 
 
 As he gazes at the angel Eloe, who sits watch- 
 ing the graves of those who have died in Siberia, 
 Anhelli falls like a dead man. When recalled to 
 life by the Shaman, bidding him arise, for the 
 time of his rest has not yet come, Anhelli confesses 
 that the face of the angel reminds him of one whom 
 he had loved in his own country. 
 
 " ' Therefore am I flooded with my tears when 
 I think of her and of my youth. To-day that is all 
 a dream. Yet the sapphire sky and the pale stars 
 look down on me : are those stars in truth the 
 same as those that saw me young and happy ? 
 Why does not a gust of wind arise to tear me from 
 the earth, and to carry me into the land of peace ? 
 Why do I live ? There is not one hair on my head 
 of those that there were of old, even the bones 
 within me are renewed — and yet I still ever re- 
 member. And there is not one bird in the sky who 
 cannot sleep, if but one night of its life, in a quiet 
 nest. But God has forgotten me. I would fain die.' " 
 
 Thus he complains, wandering among the graves 
 of those who died far from their country, and whose 
 names are already forgotten. In the poet's first 
 conception, Eloe was to represent fame ; not 
 mere renown, but rather the spiritualized memory 
 of the dead. But towards the end of Anhelli, 
 Slowacki's idea modified her into a more human 
 shape.* 
 
 * A. Malecki, •/. cit. 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 189 
 
 The Shaman and Anhelli then leave the 
 graveyard. 
 
 " And, when they came to the house of the 
 exiles, they heard a great tumult and laughter 
 and clamour, and the rattling of cups and foul 
 songs : and the Shaman stood at the windows and 
 listened, ere he entered that pit of misery. And, 
 when he appeared amidst the band, they were 
 silent, because they knew that man who was 
 mighty in God, and they dared not defy him. And 
 lifting his flashing eyes, the Shaman spoke, on fire 
 for grief : ' What have ye done without me ? I 
 have seen your Golgotha. Woe unto you ! The 
 stormy winds scatter the seeds of the oak and 
 strew them over the earth ; but cursed shall be 
 the wind that carries your speech and your counsel 
 to your country. You shall die. The great day* is 
 drawing nigh, and none of you shall live to behold 
 the eve of that day. The Siberian day and the sun 
 of destruction draw nigh. Why have you not 
 hearkened to my counsels, and lived peacefully 
 in harmony and brotherly love, as befits those 
 who have no country ? ' " 
 
 Where, in Anhelli, Slowacki describes, as he does 
 more than once, the evils reigning among the 
 exiles, it is his note of warning, for all its some- 
 what fantastic setting, against those moral dangers 
 threatening a nation suffering and living in 
 abnormal ways.f 
 
 In answer to his reproaches, the exiles set upon 
 the Shaman and slay him. As he lies dying, he 
 calls Anhelli and gives him his last charge. 
 
 " ' Take my reindeer and go to the north. Thou 
 
 * The day of Poland's resurrection. f Op. cit. 
 
190 POLAND 
 
 wilt find a dwelling and peace in the snow. And 
 thou shalt live on the milk of the reindeer. Be not 
 sorrowful unto death for the destruction of thy 
 country : but weep at the thought that thou 
 shalt see her no more. All is a sorrowful dream.' " 
 
 He further tells Anhelli to take with him 
 Ellenai, a woman once a sinner, who had minis- 
 tered to the wizard's last moments, and to live 
 with her as with a sister. 
 
 " As he spoke thus, Anhelli heard a trampling 
 on the snow, and said : ' Some one approaches ; 
 or is it death that walks heavily ? ' But it was a 
 reindeer that stood above his dying master, and 
 whose wondering eyes filled with great tears ; 
 and the Shaman turned away from him, weep- 
 mg. 
 
 He dies : and Anhelli leads Ellenai away : 
 
 " Both turned to the north, and behind them 
 went the Shaman's reindeer, knowing that they 
 were following new masters. But Anhelli was 
 silent, for his heart was full of tears and of grief. 
 So they went, Anhelli with the woman and with 
 the Shaman's reindeer to the far northern desert ; 
 and, finding an empty hut hewn out in the ice, 
 they dwelt in it." And the heart of the woman 
 " from continual prayer was full of tears, sadness, 
 and heavenly hopes." 
 
 " Then the Siberian day came on, and the sun 
 did not set, but ran through the sky like a horse 
 at the race with a fiery mane and a white brow. 
 The terrible light never ceased, and the noise of 
 the ice was like unto the voice of God speaking 
 on the heights to the sorrowful and forsaken 
 people. 
 
MYSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 191 
 
 " And her long sadness and yearning led the 
 exiled woman to her death, and she laid her down 
 on a bed of leaves among her reindeer to die. And 
 it was at the setting of the sun, because for some 
 time past nights had begun in the land of Siberia, 
 and the sun remained ever longer beneath the 
 horizon. Turning her sapphire eyes filled with 
 tears on Anhelli, Ellenai said : ' I loved thee, my 
 brother, and I leave thee. I loved thee, but the 
 grave ends all. Forget me not, for who will re- 
 member me after death save one reindeer which 
 I milked ? ' 
 
 " Then the dying woman began to recite 
 litanies to the Mother of God and, even as she 
 uttered the words Rose of gold, she died. And a 
 fresh rose fell on the white bosom of the dead 
 woman and lay there, and the strong fragrance 
 of the rose filled the hut. But Anhelli sat at the 
 side of the couch and wept. And lo, at midnight I 
 came a great rustling, and Anhelli thought that 
 the reindeer made this rustling, drawing out 
 moss to eat from under the bed of death ; but a 
 cloud, as of the spirits of darkness, poised over the 
 hut with loud laughter, and dark faces appeared 
 through the clefts of the ice roof and cried : ' She 
 is ours.' But that wondrous rose put on the wings 
 of a dove and flew on high, and looked upon them 
 with the eyes of a pure angel. So those dark spirits 
 and the cloud of them arose from the roof, crying 
 sad curses into the dark sky ; and again there was 
 silence as befits the place where a dead body 
 rests. 
 
 " And three hours after midnight Anhelli heard J 
 a knocking at the door, which was of ice, and, 
 
192 POLAND 
 
 putting aside the block of ice, he went out under 
 the moon. And he saw the angel who had recalled 
 to him his love for a woman and his first love on 
 the earth. And Eloe said to him : ' Give me thy 
 dead sister : I will take her and bury her pitifully. 
 She is mine.' And Eloe, kneeling over the sleeping 
 figure, laid under her the ends of her swan wings, 
 and, soaring to the moon, departed. Anhelli, 
 therefore, returned to the empty hut, and mourned 
 because she was there no more. 
 
 " Then about the time when the earth begins 
 to turn from the sun and sleeps in darkness, 
 Jehovah called two of the eternal Cherubim before 
 His throne, and said : c Go ye to the plains of 
 Siberia.' And they went down into the misty 
 land, hiding their brightness within them. And 
 they came to the place where the shed of the exiles 
 had been, but they found no trace of it, for the 
 storms had brought it to the ground. And of 
 those thousand men there remained but ten, pale 
 and terrible to behold." 
 
 Starving in the snow, they had eaten human 
 flesh, the bodies of their comrades. The leader of 
 the survivors, with the blood of his countrymen on 
 his lips, cries : " ' Has God remembered us ? Has 
 He granted us to die in our land and on the earth 
 where we were born ? ' 
 
 " ' Return,' [reply the angels], ' and pray to 
 God, for we will show you the sign of His wrath 
 which was once the sign of pardon.' And, stretch- 
 ing out their hands, the angels pointed to a mighty 
 rainbow which ran across half of the clouded skies. 
 And a terrible fear took possession of the man- 
 eaters at the sight of this beautiful and flashing 
 
MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 193 
 
 thing. And, marvelling, they pronounced the 
 name of Christ, and fell dead. 
 
 " That same day, before the setting of the sun, 
 . Anhelli sat on a block of ice in a desert place, and 
 \ he saw two youths drawing nigh. Because of the 
 light wind that came forth from them, he felt 
 that they were from God, and he awaited what 
 they would announce to him, expecting that it 
 was death. And when they had greeted him like 
 unto mortal men, he said : * I know you. You 
 are angels. Do you come hither to console me ? 
 Or to quarrel with my sadness which I have learned 
 in the solitude of silence ? ' 
 
 " And the youths said to him : ' Behold, we 
 have come to announce to thee that the sun of 
 to-day will rise again, but to-morrow's shall show 
 itself no more over the earth. We have come to 
 announce to thee the winter darkness and a greater 
 horror than any men have ever known, solitude 
 in darkness. We have come to announce to thee 
 that thy brothers are dead, having eaten of human 
 corpses and being maddened with human blood : 
 and thou art the last. And we are the same who 
 ages ago came to the hut of the wheelwright,* 
 and sat at his table in the shade of the sweet 
 smelling lime-trees. Your nation was then as a 
 man who waketh and saith to himself : Lo, a 
 fair thing awaits me at midday, and in the evening 
 I shall rejoice. We announced hope unto you, 
 and now we have come to announce the end and 
 sorrow, and God hath not bidden us reveal the 
 future.' 
 
 " And Anhelli, answering, said to them : ' Are 
 
 * Pifcst, tho founder <*f toe first Polish dynasty, 
 
194 POLAND 
 
 you not making mockery of me, speaking of Piast 
 and the beginning now when I look for death, and 
 have seen only misery in my life ? Have ye come 
 to terrify me, crying : Darkness is coming ? Why 
 would you terrify one who suffers ? Is not the 
 terror of the grave enough ? Depart ! and tell 
 God that if the sacrifice of my soul is accepted I 
 will give it, and will agree that she shall die. My 
 heart is so sorrowful that the angelic lights of the 
 future world are abhorrent to me, and I am 
 indifferent as to Eternity, and I would fain 
 sleep.' 
 
 " And the angels interrupted him, saying : 
 i Thou dost ruin thyself. The desire of a man is 
 his judgment upon him. And knowest thou not 
 that perchance some life, yea, perchance the life 
 and the fate of millions may depend on thy calm ? ' 
 And Anhelli humbled himself and said : ' Angels, 
 forgive me ! I will suffer as of old. My native 
 language and human speech shall be silent within 
 me as a harp with torn strings. To whom shall I 
 speak ? Darkness shall be my companion and my 
 country. But the horrors of the earth are nought, 
 my anguish for my country is a greater horror. 
 Why have I struggled and suffered torment for a 
 thing that was madness ? Why did I not live at 
 rest 7 I cast myself into a river of woe, and its 
 waves have carried me far, and now I shall return 
 no more.' 
 
 " And again the angels interrupted him, saying : 
 1 Thou didst blaspheme against thine own soul, 
 and now thou blasphemest against the will which 
 was in thee when thou didst consecrate thyself 
 to thy country. Therefore we warn thee from the 
 
MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 195 
 
 Will of God that within a few hours thou shalt 
 die : so be of more tranquil heart.' 
 
 " Hearing this, Anhelli bowed his head, and 
 submitted to the Divine Will. And the angels 
 departed. And when he remained alone, Anhelli 
 cried out with a sorrowful voice : ' This, then, is 
 already the end ! What have I done on earth ? 
 Was it a dream ? ' 
 
 " And while Anhelli pondered upon the hidden 
 things of the future, the sky reddened and the 
 glorious sun burst forth ; and, halting on the 
 horizon, it arose no further, crimson as fire. Then 
 the birds of the air and the white mews, which 
 God had bidden flee before the darkness, availed 
 them of the short day, and flew in great crowds, 
 wailing. Then Anhelli looked on them, and said : 
 6 Whither do you fly ? ' And it seemed to him that 
 in the plaint of the birds he heard a voice answer- 
 ing him : ' We are flying to thy native land. Dost 
 thou bid us greet anyone there ? Or, as we sit on 
 some roof dear to thee, shall we sing in the night 
 the song of sorrow, so that thy mother shall wake, 
 or one of thy kin, and weep in the darkness for 
 fear, thinking of the son whom the land of the 
 grave hath swallowed, and the brother whom 
 sorrow hath consumed ? ' 
 
 " Such was the voice of the birds ; and Anhelli's 
 heart broke within him, and he fell. And the sun 
 sank under the earth, and there were only the 
 birds flying ever higher, shining on the sapphire 
 sky like wreaths of white roses, flying to the south. 
 
 " Anhelli was dead. 
 
 " In the darkness that then befell, there shone 
 a great dawn from the south, and a fire of clouds. 
 
196 POLAND 
 
 And the tired moon sank into the flame of the 
 skies, like a white dove falling at eventide on a hut 
 red with the setting of the sun. 
 
 " Eloe sat by the body of the dead Anhelli. 
 And lo ! on a sudden a knight on a horse, all in 
 armour, came forth from the fiery dawn, and he 
 fled with a terrible rattle of hoofs. The snow ran 
 before him and before the breast of the horse, like 
 the foam of the waves before a boat. And in the 
 hand of the knight was a banner, and on it burned 
 three letters of fire.* And the knight reached in 
 his flight Anhelli's dead body, and he cried out 
 with a voice of thunder : * Here is one who was a 
 soldier. Let him rise ! Let him mount on my 
 horse, and I will carry him swifter than the storm. 
 Lo, the nations are rising from the dead ! Lo, the 
 streets of cities are paved with dead bodies ! He 
 who hath a soul let him arise, let him live, for it 
 is the hour for strong men to live.' 
 
 " Thus spoke the knight ; and Eloe, rising from 
 the dead body, said : ' Knight, wake him not, for 
 he sleeps. He was predestined to sacrifice, even 
 the sacrifice of his heart. Knight, ride on, wake 
 him not. This body belongs to me, and this heart 
 was mine. Knight, thy horse stamps on his hoofs. 
 Ride on ! ' 
 
 " And the fiery knight fled away with the sound 
 of a mighty storm ; and Eloe sat near Anhelli's 
 dead body. And she was glad that his heart did 
 not wake at the voice of the knight, and that he 
 still slept." 
 
 So ends this strange and painful poem on that 
 
 * L U D, the Polish for Nation, People. 
 
MTSTIC PILGRIMAGE IN SIBERIA 197 
 
 same deep note of melancholy that is the unre- 
 lieved setting of the whole work. He who has 
 been the chosen victim for his nation may not 
 even arise to behold her resurrection. In this 
 figure of Anhelli, Krasinski sees the " generation 
 which is languishing away in tears, in sorrow, in 
 vain desires; and which will die on the day pre- 
 ceding the day in which those desires of theirs 
 , are to be fulfilled."* 
 
 * Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski. Vol. I. To Constantine 
 
 Gaszynski, Nov. 18th, 1838. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 
 
 THE patriotic mysticism of Bohdan Zaleski, 
 whom Mickiewicz termed the nightingale 
 of Polish literature, takes a different tone 
 to that of Messianism. 
 
 He was born in the Ukraine; the land whose 
 immense, flower-strewn plains, sighing to the 
 winds, inspire those who visit her as strangers 
 with an intense melancholy, but those to whom she 
 gives birth with an eternal nostalgia when parted 
 from her. Zaleski, brought up in the steppes as a 
 child, drew in the Ukrainian poetry and legends 
 with the air he breathed. The Rising of 1830, in 
 which he took part, drove him like so many 
 others from his country : and he lived out half 
 a century of exile in that incessant yearning for 
 his native Ukraine that gives its wild and mournful 
 music to his verse. He survived by thirty years 
 his beloved friend, Adam Mickiewicz. Unlike the 
 great trio of Polish poets who all died in their 
 prime, he reached the extremity of bereaved and 
 infirm old age. It was only in 1886 that he closed 
 a singularly devout and pure life.* 
 
 Polish literature offers nothing quite similar 
 to that one poem of Bohdan Zaleski's that stands 
 distinct from all the rest of his work : the Spirit 
 of the Steppe (1836). Obscure as it is, its beauty is 
 
 * S. Zdziarski, Bohdan Zaleski. Lw6w (Polish). 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 199 
 
 mystical, ethereal, elusive. It is imbued with the 
 magic and mystery of the steppes. The Ukraine 
 lures her nursling back, as flesh of her flesh, after 
 he has lost her for ever, to gaze on the successive 
 pageants, sweeping over her plains and skies, of 
 nations chosen by God and faithless to their 
 calling. Then he beholds his own country, Poland, 
 not in the triumph foretold to her by Messianism, 
 but rather as one who has sinned, entering at 
 last the everlasting gates. 
 
 A bald English rendering can but feebly reflect 
 the exquisite opening of the poem. I only 
 venture to offer it to the reader to whom the 
 Polish language is not accessible by way of giving 
 him some idea of its general drift. 
 
 " And my mother, mother Ukraine, 
 And the mother, me, her son, 
 Cradled singing at her bosom. 
 Oh, the enchantress ! in the aerial 
 Dawn, she saw the winged life 
 For her son, and, pitying, cried : 
 * Nurse this child of mine, oh, Naiad ! 
 With songs' milk and flowers' marrow 
 Nourish for flight this tender body. 
 Give him pictures in his dreams, 
 The centuries of my fair glory. 
 Let the folksongs of my people, 
 In hues of gold and hues of azure, 
 In a rainbow, flower about him.' 
 
 u Sweet she was to me, oh, sweet ! 
 No one, ever, anywhere, 
 Tenderer mother has caressed. 
 
200 POLAND 
 
 Those short years and days unknown, 
 Wrapped in miracle and secret, 
 Lie within my soul ensealed. 
 There my memory ever turneth, 
 Ever are my senses seeking 
 What has passed, a distant dream. 
 
 11 Oh, the naiads of my mother, 
 With their kiss that rang in song, 
 Fired my blood for evermore. 
 To-day amid my country's torments, 
 Sad my heart and soul to death, 
 Still that blood forbids me sleep. 
 
 ^And the mother, mother Ukraine, 
 When the star from heaven signalled, 
 Me, her son, her winged son, 
 Took she from the naiad's hand : 
 Stripped she off my down and feathers, 
 Bade my wings rise from the nest, 
 Tender omens and entreaties 
 Wailed she on her nestling's trail. 
 
 11 i I the handmaid of the Lord, 
 Day by day my dearest children, 
 By the will of the earth's Father, 
 Send I as the snowdrift's plaything. 
 Now again my loved one flieth, 
 Knowing not as yet his cross. 
 Free his thought, and swift as wind, 
 To marvels clings and thirsts for song. 
 May he his life dream in the steppes, 
 The steppes, the world's destroyers' road. 
 There the wrath of God passed by. 5 " 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 201 
 
 She is seen no more, and only the enchant- 
 / ment of her memory remains to her son. " The 
 moment eternally great and holy sweetens, with a 
 breath of Paradise," his tears and sufferings 
 under the cross, " Blessed be he who remembereth, 
 somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet, 
 strange, pure, and winged life, his first beginning. 
 He who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his 
 hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly 
 memories." 
 
 These " ghostly memories " of the " winged 
 life " on the steppes veil the whole poem with 
 an atmosphere of mystery that enhances at once 
 its romance and its charm. The mother of 
 the poet's fancy has gone. But, ere he descends 
 to the turmoil of life, he is caught up on his 
 wings to the skies, " God's tent of molten gold." 
 He is among the choirs who sing Hosanna before 
 the throne. The angels are praying for him whose 
 trial on earth is about to begin. He spreads his 
 wings for the flight to the highest things ; but, 
 for the first time, his thought knows bewilderment, 
 and he returns " sad, to the abyss " of earth. 
 
 Then succeeds the poetical description of 
 Bohdan's orphan boyhood and of his youth till the 
 cry resounds from afar : " Poland, thy country ! " 
 With tears, he, who " with each breath draws in 
 the music of the steppe," says farewell to his 
 family and to those same steppes. He is swept by 
 the Rising into exile and into the tempest of the 
 world. Poverty, temptation, sadness surround 
 him. Toiling for his daily bread, he finds himself 
 following in the secret of his thoughts the flight 
 of the crane, living the life of the birds in the 
 
202 POLAND 
 
 free, untrammelled steppes. Ghosts of ages pass 
 x' dimly before him. He feels called to praise God 
 in a new song. An angelic voice summons him, as 
 with a blast of thunder, from on high : " Return, 
 oh, exile, to thy country." He wakes, weeping. 
 To which country, that on earth or the one in 
 heaven ? He returns to the land he loves ; but 
 not in the flesh, only in a vision, 
 
 Once more, then, his is the " winged life." 
 
 11 Breath of God, eternal breathing, 
 Wind of steppes, blowing light and dry, 
 Spreadeth as a couch beneath me, 
 Blows the down about my shoulders, 
 Swaddles me in its warm bosom." 
 
 It rocks him above the graves of those fallen in 
 the Ukraine, which was for centuries the scene of 
 border warfare in Polish history. He sees the 
 Black Sea, glittering as a counterfeit of the splen- 
 dours of dawm " I see marvels, I hear marvels." 
 In a burst of light and music, the wizard-singer, 
 Bojan, the patriarchal poet of the Slav peoples, 
 sings to his golden- stringed zither his country's 
 welcome. Its sounds ring high and low over the 
 steppes, and the buried ages wake, till the fire and 
 the song alike fade into mist. 
 
 Floating on the wind, the £>oet then has a series 
 / of visions, unrolling themselves over the steppes, 
 of the nations that have risen and fallen since the 
 beginning of the world. He begins with Eden and 
 the fall of man, reaches the Crucifixion, the 
 mission of the apostles, the ruin of Israel. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 203 
 
 " Slept my spirit. I dreamed sweetly 
 In a light, blest spirit dream. 
 Shoreless time and time in space 
 Shineth by the word of God, 
 Singeth out the mighty epic. 
 Million lights and million shadows, 
 Worlds in flowers — the world's history — 
 Blow in incense to the Lord." 
 
 He thus prefaces each stage of the chronicle 
 of the world that he passes in review. Hoofs 
 thunder in the steppes across which the hordes 
 sweep to the destruction of Rome. The wind 
 whispers mysterious messages to the forefathers 
 of his race. Rome falls, and the Rome of the 
 i Papacy rises in her stead. The poet gives a rapid 
 j summary of the centuries that follow, coloured 
 I by his deep religious sense. Men sin repeatedly, 
 • and the penalty ever descends afresh upon human- 
 ity. Then his spirit sleeps, and in his dream struggles 
 to escape as though to home. The voice of an 
 angel sighs in his ear : " The time of thy trial is 
 fulfilled. Behold this country, thine own land"; 
 and with the eyes, not of the body : 
 
 " I see, I see a lovely land, 
 Spaces stretching of broad meads, 
 Mountains, forests, and two seas ; 
 And a loved and mighty race, 
 Sad and yearning, gaze through tears." 
 
 " Their great mother is in mourning. The 
 Poland of the Piasts, of the Jagiellos, once mistress 
 
20 4 POLAND 
 
 of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Silesia, has now no corner 
 of her soil free." 
 
 " Silent everywhere our language, 
 Language in our hearts beloved. 
 As the instrument of angels, 
 Even so fair its melodies. 
 Must it then be whispered only ? 
 Hear, oh, Lord, our little children 
 Wailing from a hiding place. 
 Saddest fate ! they learn to fear 
 Their foe before they fear their God. 
 
 * And our women, weak and fainting, 
 For long years weep in the dust. 
 Their sons, their brothers, lie in graves, 
 Or wander at the world's far ends." 
 
 And the prophet-poets cry aloud with all their 
 strength the Polish songs : their voices are as 
 the wailing of the orphaned. 
 
 The singer is carried again on the wings of the 
 wind of the steppe, and swept to the Tatry — the 
 Carpathians — into the vision up to which the 
 whole poem has been leading. He sees on the summit 
 of the Polish mountains his mother Poland, but 
 a figure far removed from that under which 
 Mickiewicz and Krasinski delighted to symbolize 
 her. Here she is the beautiful repentant sinner. 
 " She has loved and she has wandered. She has 
 knelt for years in ashes." Her hair streams in 
 grief and penitence, dishevelled, to the wind. 
 Her cheek has faded for mourning. Beside her sit 
 her sisters who have shared her fate : Lithuania, 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 205 
 
 taking refuge in her bosom, the Ukraine, " beauti- 
 ful, incarnate song," who weeps, and through her 
 tears looks upon " me, her son." The procession 
 of Poland's dead heroes gathers about her : and 
 her sisters, kneeling, cry to heaven the word so 
 beloved by Zaleski : 
 
 " Great her sins, but surely, Lord, 
 Greater still Thy mercy is." 
 
 Rainbows flash from heaven, and ever louder 
 is the song of the angels and of the apostles of 
 Slavonia : " Honour and glory to the Magdalen. 
 We carry the absolution of the Lord. Raise the 
 penitent's head. The Lord is arming the arch- 
 angel. The time of the Holy Ghost draws nigh. 
 The world shall gather strength in the grace of 
 the cross. From the seed of repentant Poland the\ 
 future generations shall flower in fruit to the 
 Lord. The archangel himself at their head shall 
 lead them to the last battle with evil." Amidst 
 the hosannas of numberless multitudes of the 
 saints, the poet beholds his nation arise from the 
 dust of her repentance, her youth given back to 
 her. " I see marvels, I hear marvels." In this 
 supreme moment he returns to the mystic note of 
 the Ukraine. The same light and music that 
 flashed around the steppe when he returned there 
 in spirit from his exile, now beat from the heavenly 
 fires. Once more the voice of the wizard and the 
 sound of his zither peal over the Ukraine. " Glory, 
 honour ! She shall rise ! " is the song of Bojan. 
 He stretches his instrument over all the countries 
 of Slavonia ; and the sweet melody streams 
 forth. 
 
206 POLAND 
 
 "The flock, the snow-white flock, is floating, 
 The wizard-singer's swan-like song 
 Sounds one long prophetic word 
 To the future, hope in song. 
 Still that word rings in my ear, 
 Ever dwells within my heart, 
 In my heart for ever fondled. 
 
 " Let our Poland rise for ever ! 
 At the day of the great banquet, 
 In the choir I will, Slavonia, 
 Repeat to you the song of Bojan. 
 Suffering in one flash shall pass." 
 
 Again, on the " wind of the steppe, the breath 
 of God, his aerial couch," he is carried in the mists 
 that are gathering about him. Through the- 
 whistle of the winds, he hears a sad, wild melody. 
 The third cock crows. Voices of the dead un- 
 baptized children who, in the Ukrainian legends, 
 wander through the snow and storm, crying for 
 baptism and Paradise, wail in the tempest. Like 
 them the poet, a son of earth, hungers too early 
 for the " angelic bread " he may not touch yet. 
 Like them, he is unable to enter heaven, for he is 
 fettered by the vesture of flesh. He returns to his 
 own place in a hard world. He sees no more the 
 p vision, the memory of which wakes eternal sad- 
 ness in his soul. 
 
 "Where that flight, that far, wide flight ? 
 Where heard I that mighty epic ? 
 Worlds in flowers, the world's history ? 
 Where that golden-stringed singer ? " 
 
THE SPIRIT OF THE STEPPE 207 
 
 He has gazed on the miracles of the universe, 
 and they cannot perish from his eyes or heart. 
 Man may call what the poet saw a dream. "Are 
 the tears of my life a dream ? Poland, the 
 Ukraine, a dream ? " he asks, with the mingled 
 passion of the patriot and the mystic who, in the 
 body or out of the body, had beheld things unseen 
 by mortal eyes. " Blessed be he who remembereth 
 somewhere in the years gone by, the sweet, strange, 
 pure, and winged life, his first beginning. He 
 who, in the torment of fleshly fetters, lifts his 
 hands to heaven daily, yearneth to his ghostly 
 
 memories." 
 
 " According to Zaleski," said Mickiewicz in 
 the College de France, " it is not the desire to 
 sing the exploits of some celebrated chief, it is 
 not the love of popularity, it is not the love of art 
 that can form a poet. You must have been pre- 
 destined, you must have been attached by myster- 
 ious bonds to the country that you are to sing 
 one day : and to sing is nothing else than to reveal 
 the thought of God, which rests on that country 
 and on the people to which the poet belongs."* 
 
 Adam Mickiewicz, Le§ StfavfSf 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 
 
 BY the year i860, the great triad of Polish 
 poets, Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and Slowacki, 
 had passed from the world. But, in a 
 certain measure, their mantle may be said to have 
 fallen upon a poet of the succeeding generation, 
 whose poetry has appealed so strongly to the 
 hearts of his countrymen that his famous Chorale 
 has passed into the treasury of Polish national 
 songs. Kornel Ujejski — born in 1823, dead in 
 1 897 — -can scarcely, in point of birth, be considered 
 as belonging to a younger generation than Zygmunt 
 Krasinski, who was only eleven years his senior ; 
 but he survived him by nearly forty years, wrote 
 under different conditions, and had been, 
 moreover, a mere child during those disasters of 
 the thirties that changed the lives of Mickiewicz, 
 Krasinski, and Slowacki. Thus his work, from a 
 
 I literary and moral standpoint, reads as that of 
 one who came later. 
 He was the son of a noble house in Austrian 
 Poland. The poet's private life, with the exception 
 of the year of massacre in 1846, was outwardly 
 prosperous, and experienced none of the afflictions 
 which fell to the lot of Mickiewicz and Krasinski. 
 And yet over the greater part of his poetry, and 
 especially over its finest portion, hangs a not less, 
 perhaps even deeper, sadness than that stamped 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 209 
 
 on the writings of his predecessors. So terrible 
 was the ordeal through which every devout son 
 of Poland passed in the early years of her mourn- 
 ing, the thirties of the nineteenth century, that 
 an inheritance of profound melancholy was the 
 inevitable birthright even of those Polish poets 
 who were only children at the time. The Polish 
 child was of necessity not only brought up on a 
 chronicle of sorrow, but those sorrows were living, 
 were present to him. Dismembered Poland was 
 harassed by oppression. Ujejski said of himself 
 that from his early childhood an atmosphere of 
 tragedy enveloped him ; that his first impres- 
 sions of the world were such as to banish from his 
 heart all childish joy, and to make his poetry a 
 song of grief.* " Bitter is the condition of the Pole 
 in every part of the wide earth," wrote Krasinski. 
 This of itself alone would suffice to explain the 
 general tone of Ujej ski's work ; and when we 
 remember that, after he had reached manhood, he 
 beheld the calamities of 1846 and of the sixties 
 overwhelm his nation, it is little wonder that his 
 poems are among the saddest in Polish literature. 
 Like the other great poets of his race, Ujej ski's 
 poetical ideal, early conceived and put into 
 practice equally early, was that of a moral and 
 national teacher. We have seen how Poland looked 
 to her poets for help and guidance. Ujejski, then, 
 chose his calling, and remained faithful to it all 
 his life. His prayer was, so he sings in his poem on 
 the death of Mickiewicz, to follow in the latter's 
 footsteps, and speak to his people of the same 
 national faith that Mickiewicz taught, albeit he 
 
 * A. Mazanowski, Kornel Ujtjski (Polish). 
 
210 POLAND 
 
 confesses he cannot do so with a power like to 
 that of the greater poet ; to use the Polish lyre, 
 however heavy the burden to himself, as an 
 instrument of blessing, and never of evil, to his 
 nation. 
 
 His love for his country soon found its way 
 into verse. In one of his first poems — The Song of 
 the Grain (1843) — the never-dying hopes of 
 nature can teach him and his nation, for all their 
 weary hearts, the moral of a new life to be born 
 again. The sun sets, and with it the symbol of 
 liberty. But the stars rising remind him that there 
 are other stars, the stars, that is, of the faith and 
 homely virtue of the peasants tilling the fields, 
 that shall be as guiding fires to all Poland* 
 
 " And our grief grows lighter, our hearts ache 
 less, knowing that the flame trembles in every 
 little spark," and that great luminaries may be 
 fashioned in time out of united stars. 
 
 Then, going out into the meadows at daybreak 
 to sow the grain, when " all the air is singing like 
 a lark," he learns the lesson of the wheat. The 
 reader will remember how in Frank Norris' noble 
 novel The Octopus : The Epic of the Wheat, after 
 long anguish Vanamee, wandering through the 
 night, sees the dawn flaming over ranchos once 
 bare, now white with wheat, and reads therein 
 that life springs from death, immortality from 
 corruption, joy from pain, even as the seed 
 fructifies out of dark places. To the young Pole, 
 writing half a century earlier, the wheat speaks in 
 like manner and, as he watches the peasants 
 sowing the grain, he consoles himself in his heavy 
 sorrow by the thought that the sons will reap 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 211 
 
 where the fathers sowed. The sower will pass to 
 the grave with the words on his lips : 
 
 " * I die, but the seed will not die.' Oh, it 
 were sweet to dream thus in the hour preceding 
 death ! " 
 
 And another will take his place who can sow in 
 fc his turn, and who will not spare his toil. Storms 
 may beat upon the furrows ; but Mother Earth 
 shields the seed in her bosom, and slowly the spirit 
 breathes and gives it life. And at last the poet 
 beholds the fields golden with the harvest while 
 the reapers load the waggons, singing songs of 
 joy and freedom. 
 
 A year after he had written this poem, Ujejski 
 saw Warsaw for the first time. This visit to the 
 capital of his country, then groaning beneath the 
 heel of Nicholas I., had a far reaching influence 
 on the young poet's subsequent life as a writer. 
 Not only did it lay the foundations of the poem 
 Marathon by which he made his name, but it was 
 in Warsaw, with the spectacle of the nation's 
 suffering before him, that he was inspired with 
 the clear comprehension of his particular vocation. 
 He tells us in the poem The Lyre of Jeremias, 
 which he wrote in Warsaw, that now he casts his 
 old lyre underfoot : 
 
 " For I can sing no longer for myself. I stretch 
 my hand to Jeremias' lyre to string it to the wail- 
 ing of my brothers. I renounce myself. I cast all 
 my own sorrows to the bottom of my heart ; let 
 them perish without echo. My whole nation is my 
 family. Mine are the tears from her eyes, mine 
 the blood from her wounds. Suffering her pain, 
 I will sing. Ah, I suffer ! " . 
 
212 POLAND 
 
 He sits sorrowing and alone, with a city in 
 mourning about him. His friends are gone, slain, 
 or in the living graves of Siberia ; and, as he 
 watches at night, 
 
 " I hear the subterranean hollow drag of chains. 
 I hear far off the beating of the hammer. It is my 
 brothers toiling in the mines." 
 
 He sees his people in the snowy deserts, perish- 
 ing of hunger and cold, dying with no memory 
 left of them. And, likening the tears of Poland 
 to those of Jerusalem, the poet, falling on his face 
 for grief, cries upon the spirit of Jeremias, his 
 favourite type of a national inspirer and prophet, 
 to give him of his strength, for he sinks beneath 
 his sorrow. 
 
 We shall see later with what deep psychological 
 significance this figure of Jeremias is invested in 
 Ujej ski's eyes. 
 
 Up to the year of Ujej ski's visit to Warsaw, his 
 name was scarcely known. Then, after his return 
 to Austrian Poland, as he was taking part one 
 evening in a literary gathering in a friend's house, 
 the boy of twenty-two read aloud a poem that he 
 had just finished writing, entitled Marathon. Such 
 was the patriotic power, the finished artistic 
 beauty, of these lines that the audience sat spell- 
 bound in silent wonder and admiration. From 
 that hour, Ujej ski took his place among the great 
 poets of his nation. 
 
 His purpose in writing Marathon may be gath- 
 ered from the words of stinging reproach to his 
 countrymen which form the preface, and from 
 the quotation out of Byron which he chooses as his 
 motto : 
 
7 HE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 213 
 
 " The mountains look on Marathon, 
 And Marathon looks on the sea ; 
 
 And musing there an hour alone, 
 
 I dream'd that Greece might still be free, 
 
 For standing on the Persian's grave, 
 
 I could not deem myself a slave." 
 
 " You ask a song," so Ujejski flings his poem 
 forth into the world, " of charm and sweetness 
 for your ears ; but, my compatriots, my only 
 , song for you is one that shall remind you of the 
 /Vclanking of your chains. You ask a song as a flower 
 in a garland to give you honour at the banquet ; 
 but I would fain steel your enervated souls in 
 a blush of fire like armour in the flame." 
 
 Then he laments that to him, a youth, has 
 fallen the task of spreading this language of 
 < sarcasm and upbraiding instead of that of love. 
 He has long sought for some means by which he 
 j can infuse manhood into the hearts of men who 
 are growing weak in bondage ; and now he will 
 raise the heroes of ancient history to point the 
 way. 
 
 And so he sings the story of Marathon ; in 
 other words, of the victory of a few routing, by 
 the strength of one common bond of devotion to 
 their fatherland, the hosts of Persia. The poem 
 opens with the burning of Sardis. 
 
 " A slave ran out from the burning town, and 
 behind him ran in pursuit the wails of the dying 
 that rang in his ears. And he fled, veiled by the 
 darkness of night. Oft he cast backward his terrified 
 eyes, and behind him the wind breathed fire on 
 the heights, and carried clamour upon it. He stood 
 
 j 
 
2i 4 POLAND 
 
 and he listened. Perchance even now the enemies 
 butcher his brothers, give the aged mother to 
 drink of the blood of her son, and level the hut 
 with fire and with sword. But tarry he may not. 
 With the satrap's command, oh, runner, speed 
 on, for the way is still long. When thou returnest 
 thou shalt count the corpses in ashes. He fled 
 through the desert with the news he was bearing, 
 and swiftly he ran till the sun had arisen ; and 
 when at the outposts he met with a runner, 
 * Sardis is in flames. To Susa ! To Susa ! ' he 
 cried, and he turned ; and the other, like an 
 ostrich wide spreading its wings, flew, and van- 
 ished before the sun like a spectre of night." 
 
 In a series of virile word-paintings, Ujejski 
 tersely but vigorously depicts the march to war 
 of the Persian armies, the terror in Athens, the 
 victory. 
 
 i " From the four ends of the world the legions 
 march. From the four ends of the world the 
 vultures flock ; until a mighty wind springs up 
 from the fluttering of the flags, and a mighty 
 humming from the rattling of the bows. The 
 earth is blackened with the horses' hoofs." 
 
 Meanwhile, in Athens we have the moral point 
 pi the poem, that is, the speech of Miltiades, 
 bidding him who would prefer to be a slave begone 
 to Darius and to fawn upon him, like a hungry 
 cur, for empty honours. 
 
 " But we others, let us remain, we who are 
 linked in misfortune. Either we will wipe out the 
 foe with this sword, or, by the holy gods, will we, 
 free, find refuge from slavery in death." 
 
 Impressing upon the Athenian crowds that, 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSK1 215 
 
 f united, they are all-powerful against the most 
 \pverwhelming odds, he reminds them that their 
 ancestors are summoning them to the like glorious 
 deeds as theirs. 
 
 Ujejski hardly describes the battle itself except 
 to insist again upon that dominant, and to the 
 Pole most significant, note of a handful confound- 
 ( ing a multitude. The action transfers itself to 
 Athens, to the women and old men awaiting 
 tidings till the night is broken by the sound of 
 hurrying feet, and the messenger, crying victory 
 through the streets, falls dead without a wound. 
 
 " On the battle-field after the murderous day- 
 long game is played, after the bloody toil, the 
 raging war, thousands of men sleep now in peace. 
 The Greek and Persian on one self-same bed lie 
 without anger in eternal brotherhood. Over them 
 ravens stalk and feast, and with hoarse voices bid 
 their brethren to the banquet come." 
 
 Marathon was written in 1845. The following 
 year Poland was stricken by one of the most terrible 
 tragedies that she has ever known, the uprising 
 of the Galician peasantry against the Polish nobles. 
 Their ignorance exploited by secret agents, 
 driven on by the instigations of the Austrian 
 government, the peasants fell upon their land- 
 lords' houses and put the inhabitants to tortures, 
 butchering men, women, and children. Whole 
 families perished together at their hands. Terror 
 reigned over the land. 
 
 Belonging as he did to a noble house, Ujejski, 
 although he himself and his immediate family 
 escaped destruction, lived in the midst of these 
 scenes. The grief and horror of his soul are stamped 
 
216 POLAND 
 
 upon the poems that streamed forth from his pen 
 at this time. Passionately patriotic, devoted to 
 the purest of national ideals, he saw the nation that 
 he loved thrust down into a pit of abasement, 
 dragged from the path of glory and salvation 
 which he and every poet of his race had looked 
 to see her tread, her fair fields become a shambles. 
 For once his heart seems to fail him, and he com- 
 \ plains that he can see God no longer. Nature, 
 that had inspired him with the hope of the wheat, 
 is now only cruel, parading her beauty, indifferent 
 to human anguish. 
 
 " Oh, Earth, there is no heart nor love in thee. 
 As a coquette decking herself at evening, thou 
 dreamest only of ornaments, of splendour. Thou 
 art an egotist. Drowned in thy flowers, thou dost 
 forget thy suffering children. Gladly thou 
 catchest every different voice, except one only — 
 except the voice of pain. 
 
 " Many a time thy treacherous hand has woven 
 from the thorns thou bearest a crown of torment 
 for thy child. That guilty thorn, drunken with 
 innocent blood, blooms again as a white flower 
 in the spring, and the birds sing of it to the world : 
 ' Oh, what a white and stainless flower ! ? 
 
 " And over our flaming homes, when the con- 
 flagrations fling wide their crimson flags, and the 
 mother, with her hair sparkling in the glare, casts 
 herself on the cradle of her child ; then the cloud 
 floating in the dark night skies thus whispers to 
 itself : ' See the gay fires that flame upon the 
 earth. Oh, but they paint my bosom with their 
 beauty ! ' 
 
 " Oh, Earth, thou ever, ever art the same. A 
 
7 HE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 217 
 
 demon of irony flies always over thee that makes 
 our pain thine ornament, thy splendour. They 
 say that amber is a bird's tear, turned to stone. 
 Oh, Earth, our blood is but a ruby to thee, our 
 cry of grief thy music, our whitened bones thy 
 easy couch. 
 
 " To-day I saw a string of cranes fly from across 
 the sea, lured by the spring. And they flew fast, 
 and with a joyful song they hailed the pond where 
 lilies float, and hailed the hills with pine-trees 
 crowned, and the silver rivers on the carpeted 
 meads. And, flying their free trail above this 
 earth, nought, nought they saw or heard — except 
 the spring. I wept, and in my heart I said : ' Oh, 
 Lord, why am I not a bird ? ' Old wish ! Age 
 after age repeats, better to be a bird than be a 
 man " (The Earth, 1846). 
 
 Under the Burden of his own distress of mind 
 and of his country's agony, Ujejski, like the other 
 Polish poets who had gone before him, poured 
 put his soul in poetical inspiration. The figure of 
 Jeremias, lamenting among the ruins of a fallen 
 city, had already, as we have seen, captivated his 
 imagination. In the midst of the fresh national 
 disaster, he now turned again in thought to another 
 oppressed race who had wept by the waters of 
 strange lands — to the Hebrews of old. The pecu- 
 liar part that their prophet-poets had played in 
 raising and inspiring them spoke straight to 
 Ujej ski's heart. His nation was now the outcast 
 of peoples. He would send her a message of counsel 
 and of consolation under the impersonation of a 
 second Jeremias. Thus arose that famous cycle 
 of lyrics that are among the most mournful poems 
 
ti8 POLAND 
 
 even of Poland's tragic literature — Ujej ski's Com- 
 plaints of Jeremias. 
 
 Jeremias, the type of a national guide, flies, an 
 angel of vengeance, over Poland. The land is one 
 lake of blood. The skies are red with the fires of 
 burning homes. The wails of the dying are 
 mingled with the hoarse cries of the murderers. 
 And Jeremias calls upon the nation to retaliate, 
 and avenge her wrongs by bloodshed on her side. 
 She has been patient long enough. Heaven will 
 not take pity on the weak, but gives the victory 
 to brute strength. 
 
 " ' Oh, Lord, Thou, Who weighest in Thy hand 
 our fate, open Thy heavens to this song. And 
 when that day of ours shall come, that yearned- 
 for day, bid Thy angels thunder on brazen trumpets 
 to the four quarters of the world this watchword 
 in that day : Revenge ! Revenge ! Revenge ! ' 
 
 " And the nation trembled and moved : but, 
 dragged down by her chain, she fell once more, for 
 she breathed not the spirit of God, and it was 
 not in God but revenge, that she woke from 
 sleep." 
 
 Then Jeremias repents him of his evil bidding 
 till at last, after long penance, his tongue is loos- 
 ened to sing a higher strain of prayer and praise. 
 
 " Oh, my people ! " cries the poet, in conclu- 
 sion to this, his preliminary poem, The Word of 
 Jeremias : " These songs of mine are my life's 
 blood. Let this one word ring in your inspirations, 
 let it flow in your veins. Let it die not on your 
 lips before the jeering foe, and you shall need no 
 other pillory for the foe — sorest punishment for 
 Satan — than this word, Praised be God" 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 219 
 
 The moral teaching of this poem is the more 
 striking, when we realise not only that it came 
 from the heart of a youth at an age when the blood 
 runs hottest at the sight of wrong, but that he 
 was not, as it were, merely writing on paper, far 
 removed from the passion of the conflict. What 
 he described was a matter that touched his own 
 life to the quick. The deep religious feeling and 
 high ideal with which these lines are impregnated 
 are the key-note of Ujej ski's life-work. 
 
 The succeeding poems of the series continue 
 on the like tone of faith, of pain, of prayer under 
 I intolerable affliction. As the poet keeps vigil on a 
 summer's night, his soul revolts against the beauty 
 and tranquillity of that night, where no trace 
 remains of the tears that have watered it, of the 
 blood with which it has streamed. The leaves 
 are motionless on the trees, and swans dream 
 where the lakes reflect the stars. 
 
 " The earth smells sweet, and the dawn flames. 
 My God ! My God ! " is his horror-stricken 
 refrain. 
 
 At another moment, he will paraphrase the 
 Our Father, turning each of its invocations into 
 a heart-broken entreaty for his nation. 
 
 " Oh, let the nations troubled by eternal war 
 breathe again in brotherhood and peace. Let this 
 earth be engirdled by liberty and love. Let there 
 be one God, one aim, one race. Thy Kingdom 
 come. 
 
 " Oh, then, then it were worth while to live, 
 in liberty beneath Thy care. To-day we knock 
 in vain against the coffin's lid. Thy Will be done" 
 
 In the Chorale^ which Ujej ski wrote before the 
 
220 POLAND 
 
 other poems of the cycle and to which he subse- 
 quently added the latter, 'he reaches the height 
 of power as a national and a moral poet, calling 
 to the deepest things of the heart. One of the 
 finest poems that he ever composed, it is still sung 
 in Poland and at Polish gatherings, and remains 
 among the best loved poems of his country. 
 
 " With the smoke of the burning fires, with the 
 dust soaked with our brothers' blood, this voice 
 oh, Lord, beats up to Thee. Terrible is this our 
 complaint. This is the last sigh of ours. Our hair 
 grows white from such prayers as these. We know 
 no songs now without complaint. The crown of 
 thorns has grown into our brows. Eternally, as a 
 monument to Thine anger, our imploring hands 
 are stretched out to Thee. 
 
 11 How many times hast Thou not scourged 
 us ! And we, not yet cleansed from our fresh 
 bleeding wounds, we cry out again : i He has 
 heard us and pardoned, for He is our Father, for 
 He is our Lord.' And we rise again more firmly 
 hoping, and again by Thy will our enemy crushes 
 us ; and he flings us his gibe like a rock on our 
 bosoms : c Now where is that Father and where is 
 that God P ' 
 
 " And we look to the sky to see if a hundred 
 suns will not fall from its height, as a sign to our 
 foes. All is still, all is still. In the blue the free 
 bird still soars as of old. Then, rent asunder by 
 fearful doubt, ere we can waken again our faith, 
 our lips blaspheme Thee, though our hearts are 
 weeping. Oh, judge us by our hearts, not by our 
 words. 
 
 " Oh, Lord, Lord, to the horror of the world 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 221 
 
 time has brought on us a terrible story. The son 
 has slain his mother, the brother has slain his 
 brother : a multitude of Cains is among us now. 
 Lord, it is not they who are guilty, though they 
 have thrust back our future ; but other demons 
 have done this deed. Oh, punish the hand, not 
 the blind sword. 
 
 " See, in our misery ever the same, to Thy 
 breast, to Thy stars we float on prayer, like birds 
 fain to sleep flying to rest in the nests that are 
 theirs. Shelter us, shelter us with the hand of a 
 father. Give us the vision of Thy mercies to come. 
 Let the flower of martyrdom lull us by its frag- 
 rance, let the light of martyrdom surround us 
 with glory. 
 
 " And with Thy archangel to lead us we will 
 then go on to the mighty battle, and Satan's 
 cowering body transfix with Thy conquering 
 banner. We will open our hearts to our erring 
 brothers ;* the oil of freedom shall cleanse their 
 guilt. And then shall the abject blasphemer hear- 
 ken to our answer : ' God was and God is? " 
 (Chorale, 1846). 
 
 All through Ujej ski's poetry, and most notice- 
 ably in the Complaints of Jeremias, written though 
 they were under such tragic circumstances, the 
 poet's attitude is never pessimistic! Even in the 
 
 * Were it only from his expressions in the Chorale we should 
 learn how completely Ujejski had pardoned the Galician peasantry ; 
 but his whole life, spent in working in their behalf, speaks for itself. 
 
 | It may be said that The Earth and a fragment which he wrote 
 at the same time, during the massacres, and in which he says, 
 14 Terror blanched my face, I saw not God," convey an impression 
 of utter hopelessness. But such language is so unusual with Ujejski 
 that it must be considered as exceptional, and only representing a 
 moment of agony, not the habit of his mind. 
 
 K 
 
222 POLAND 
 
 hours of his deepest desolation, his confidence in 
 a Divine ordering, however terrible the test by 
 which it is tried, does not falter. The ideals that 
 he places before the eyes of the youth of Poland 
 Lare invariably those of faith, moral purity, con- 
 4 vstancy, and hope. His grief, indeed, seems to 
 approach despair in that poem from the Complaints 
 of Jeremias where, at the end of each of the eight 
 stanzas in which the poet commemorates the 
 sufferings of his country, tolls the cry of pain : 
 " Oh, God, we are sorrowful." The nation, he 
 says, has drunk to the dregs of her chalice. Upon 
 the burning pyres of our brethren, on our sons 
 thirsting at the stakes, heaven casts not dew, but 
 thunderbolts. " We are filled with tears and 
 mourning " that our homes know us no more but 
 are given over to the stranger, while our bones 
 are scattered over the wide world. The swallows 
 chirp in their own tongue, but the Polish child 
 no longer hears his language. Birds of passage 
 may return, with the spring, to their country ; 
 the Pole, driven to the snows of Siberia, 
 may never return again, and only the dead 
 bodies of those fallen by the wayside mark his 
 road. 
 
 " Then, Lord, wilt Thou never console Thy 
 repentant people ? We wither as leaves before 
 Thine eyes ; and wilt Thou not hasten the hour 
 of redemption ? " 
 
 But even here the poet can still reiterate that 
 his nation kneels before her God. Ujejski, in fact, 
 is always and definitely on the side of the angels. 
 The Act of Faith that closes the Complaints shows 
 us an undismayed soul that rose victorious above 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 223 
 
 the temptations that encompass the children of 
 a suffering and persecuted nation. 
 
 " Long I wept in the garden of Gethsemane. 
 Long I tore the music of my lyre out from my 
 tears. Now I rise me with a wearied body, but with 
 a strong, a mighty and anointed soul." 
 
 Poland, having lain in the dust of humiliation, 
 it soars upward, crowned with stars. Ujejski dictates 
 to her her act of faith. Here he follows more closely 
 in the steps of Krasinski than in any other of his 
 poems. The echoes of the great Messianistic 
 prophecies that reached their noblest confession 
 in Krasinski's Psalm of Good Will cling about the 
 lips of the younger poet likewise. Ujej ski's poetry 
 is never so decided an expression of the theories 
 of Mes ianism as we find in Mickiewicz's Ancestors 
 and Krasinski's Dawn and Psalms of the Future, 
 He is, indeed, far more what we might call 
 Western in his line of thought, more concrete. 
 But this Act of Faith is a clear testimony to Messi- 
 anistic hopes. 
 
 " We believe, Lord, oh, firmly we believe that 
 Thou hast sent us as a torch by night to lead the 
 human race to Thee. We believe that the light of 
 our dawn is already dawning in the skies. We 
 believe that Thou so west stars upon our road. We 
 believe that though Thou dost permit at times 
 the weak to stagger, yet Thou dost shield us all from 
 fall, and that Thou hast set Thy angels round the 
 pit. We believe, oh, Lord, we are the sons of 
 light. We believe that, in some time not far away, 
 our country's bounds shall be from sea to sea, and 
 all the nations will through the ages and the ages 
 gaze on us, as man gazes to the sun* We believe, 
 
224 POLAND 
 
 oh, Lord, that Thou shalt rule us as our 
 King." 
 
 The Complaints of Jeremias touch the highest 
 point of Ujej ski's national aspirations, and 
 created a profound impression in his country. 
 Under the literary aspect, he showed himself here 
 as a master of lyrical form, whose love of music 
 gave his poetry a peculiar rhythmic charm. The 
 patriotic fire that trembles through these poems 
 never died. Using again the image of the chosen 
 ,race, in which so many of the Polish poets saw 
 |the mystic counterpart of their own people, 
 Ujej ski wrote his Biblical Melodies. Albeit the 
 subjects are scriptural, reading between the lines 
 and especially in Super Flumina Babylonis, we 
 know that the Polish singer is in reality writing 
 of no nation of the past, but of his Poland under 
 a veil, letting these lessons of fidelity to a national 
 cause, steadfastness under oppression, hope in the 
 future, speak for themselves. 
 
 But it would be a mistake to imagine that the 
 nature of Ujej ski's patriotism is purely one of 
 resignation and passive endurance. There is a 
 strong martial side to it. The Angelus, peaceful 
 evening picture though it is, has yet a sterner and 
 a rugged colouring. The mists of the coming 
 night droop about the hamlet. Homing birds fly, 
 crying, to their nests. The peasant boy in the 
 hills is piping on his flute. Then the Angelus rings 
 out from the village church. The scent of the 
 flowers, the mist, the murmuring of the stream, 
 the clamour of the birds, the flute of the boy, all 
 join their voices in song and prayer. The sound 
 of the bell reaches the dead in their graves who 
 
"THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 225 
 
 died for Poland, and they, too, pray. Then the 
 poet asks of fate that when he, in his turn, goes 
 down into his grave, after having sung to its 
 depths the sorrow of his nation, with his last 
 tears given to the mother earth he loved so well, 
 these same evening sounds may breathe over him, 
 as his dying lips repeat the Angelus. 
 
 " Let them lay me in my coffin on a bloody 
 shield. Let my songs of war murmur there around 
 me. Let me dream that, dying, I beheld an armed 
 people, radiant in their victory." 
 
 Many years later, he prays that when he has 
 finished his work of song for his nation : 
 
 " May that beloved earth, that natal earth, fall 
 on my bosom as though she mourned for me. She 
 will not lie heavily on me who loved her. Softly 
 as a mother's hand, will she rest upon mine eyes." 
 
 And he bids that his bones shall be laid in a 
 meadow that he knows, where, so popular tra- 
 dition has it, the sons of Poland fell in the past 
 fighting for their country, and where a legend 
 foretells that the final victory of Poland will be 
 fought. There, says the poet, spring blooms earlier, 
 the winds blow more freshly and more sweetly 
 than in any other spot. There, the ghosts of those 
 who gave up their lives for Poland hold nightly 
 procession. 
 
 " Bear me there. Lay my head there beneath 
 the turf. Let that great hope be my glory. I reck 
 not whether they bury me with lamenting and 
 with weeping ; but let that mighty hope be my 
 death monument." 
 
 " Oh, earth of my songs," cries the poet with 
 all the passion of the Pole for the soil. " Oh, thou 
 
 Q 
 
226 . POLAND 
 
 who art my mother ! Thou, who dost lavish 
 comfort on thy faithful sons, thou wilt not drive 
 my yearning soul away from thee." 
 
 There he will lie till above his head resounds 
 the clash of arms, and the peasants rise for Poland, 
 the nation battles for her freedom. In that day of 
 triumph, of a conflict such as the world has never 
 yet seen, in that day " I will arise again." 
 
 The pastoral scenes that he has painted in the 
 AngAus were the setting of most of Ujej ski's life. 
 He married in 1849, anc ^' as ne sm g s m a poem to 
 his wife, found in his happy marriage a refuge 
 from adversity. From that time he spent nearly 
 all of his tranquil days in the country, surrounded 
 by domestic joys, devoting himself to unwearied 
 labour for the welfare of the Galician peasants. 
 From his youth upwards their condition had 
 always been a subject dear to his heart. Their 
 poverty and misfortunes are the theme of more 
 than one of his poems, written to awake sympathy 
 for their lot. For the last seventeen years of his 
 life he wrote little. But his nation was never for- 
 gotten. Not long before his death, on the celebra- 
 tion of his poetical jubilee, he said that life had 
 deceived him, for it had given him what he had 
 neither sought nor wished, fame and honours, 
 but it had withheld from him the one desire of 
 his heart, the resurrection of Poland. His place 
 in Polish literature is that of a great lyric poet, 
 and of a teacher who never ceased to urge the 
 youth of his nation towards the highest ideals, 
 personal and national, and to inspire them with 
 an evergreen hope for the restoration of their 
 beloved and oppressed nation. These two tenets 
 
THE IDEALS OF KORNEL UJEJSKI 227 
 
 of hope and resurrection were his own cherished 
 and life-long beacon-lights. We may, indeed, 
 look upon them as being his last testament, the 
 last words by which he chose to be remembered. 
 For it was he who raised the inscription over the 
 gate of the country graveyard near his home, 
 where his dust was to lie : " They shall rest and 
 they shall rise." 
 
TABLE OF VARIOUS DATES IN POLISH 
 HISTORY 
 
 600. Birth of Cracow. 
 
 842. Foundation of the Piast dynasty, the 
 earliest line of Polish sovereigns. 
 
 963. Conversion to Christianity of Mieczys- 
 law I., which brings about the conversion 
 of Poland. 
 
 992-1025. Reign of Boleslaw I. He unites 
 Poland, is victorious over Bohemia, Ger- 
 many, and Russia, and establishes the 
 archbishopric of Gnesen. 
 
 1079. Murder by Boleslaw II. of St. Stanislas, 
 Bishop of Cracow. 
 
 1 1 39. Poland is divided into duchies. 
 
 1 1 77- 1 1 94. Reign of Casimir II., the Just, who 
 reunites Poland, and founds the nucleus 
 of the Polish senate. 
 
 1 194. Poland again divided into duchies. 
 
 1226. Rise of the Teutonic Knights in Polish 
 history. Summoned by Conrad, Duke of 
 Masovia, to assist him against Prussia, 
 they become the deadliest enemies of 
 Poland and the founders of modern 
 Prussia. 
 
 1 241. First of the Tartar invasions that ravage 
 Poland for centuries and against which 
 she stands as the bulwark of Christendom. 
 
 1295. Poland is again a kingdom. 
 
 1 33 1. First general Diet. 
 
VARIOUS DATES IN POLISH HISTORY 229 
 
 1333. Accession of Casimir III., the Great, 
 whose reign ushers in the golden period 
 of Polish history, and confers peace^and 
 prosperity on the nation. 
 
 1335. Silesia ceded to Bohemia.* 
 
 1340. Lw6w and Red Ruthenia (Eastern Galicia) 
 united to the Polish crown. 
 
 1343. Pomerania with Danzig ceded to the 
 Teutonic Knights. 
 
 1347. Statute of Wislica which codifies Polish 
 laws. 
 
 1352. Volhynia annexed by Poland. 
 
 1364. Foundation of the University of Cracow. 
 
 1370. Extinction of the Piast dynasty with the 
 death of Casimir III. 
 
 1386. The marriage of Jadwiga, Queen of 
 Poland, with Jagiello, Prince of Lithuania, 
 unites Lithuania and Ruthenia to Poland, 
 which latter consequently becomes the 
 greatest state in Eastern Europe. The 
 Jagiello dynasty is thus founded. 
 
 1410. Victory over the Teutonic Knights at 
 Grunwald which has remained one of the 
 favourite episodes of Polish history. 
 
 1466. Peace of Thorn between Poland and the 
 Teutonic Knights. Western Prussia with 
 Danzig revert to Poland, the Teutonic 
 Knights retaining Eastern Prussia as a 
 fief under the Polish King. 
 
 1473. Birth of- Copernicus. 
 
 1525. Albert of Brandenburg, Grand Master of 
 
 * With the exception of two of its duchies that the Poles re- 
 gained in the fifteenth century, Silesia never returned to Poland. 
 But to this day a large Polish population is to be found in Silesia 
 who have remained faithful to their language and their origin. 
 
230 POLAND 
 
 the Teutonic Knights, having embraced 
 Lutheranism, retains Eastern Prussia as 
 a secular and hereditary state held under 
 the Polish crown. 
 
 1 561. Livonia passes to Poland. 
 
 1572. Death of Sigismund II. Augustus closes 
 the Jagiello line, and from being nominally, 
 the Polish crown becomes practically, 
 elective. 
 
 1574. The Pacta Conventa are drawn up by 
 which the rule of the state passes from the 
 hands of the king to those of the nation. 
 
 1 5 76- 1 5 86. Reign of Stephen Batory strengthens 
 Poland. He organizes the Cossacks as a 
 defence to the Polish frontiers, and is 
 victorious over Russia and the Turks. 
 
 1587. Opening of the Vasa dynasty with the 
 accession of Sigismund III., in whose 
 reign Warsaw becomes the capital and 
 wars are waged with Sweden, Russia, 
 Tartars, and Turks. 
 
 1595. Union of Brzesc, which unites the Greek 
 Church of Ruthenia to that of Rome, and 
 is the origin of the Ruthenian Uniates. 
 
 1 62 1. Victory under Chodkiewicz over Turks 
 and Tartars at Chocim. 
 
 1648. Beginning of the Cossack revolt against 
 Poland. 
 
 1648. The disastrous reign of John Casimir 
 begins during which Poland fights Tar- 
 tars, Cossacks, Sweden, Russia, and Prussia. 
 
 1652. First exercise of the liberum veto by which 
 at the word of a single deputy the Polish 
 Diet could be dissolved. 
 
VARIOUS DATES IN POLISH HISTORY 231 
 
 1655. Repulse of the Swedes at Czenstochowa 
 by the prior Kordecki, which saves the 
 whole of Poland. 
 
 1660. Treaty of Oliwa, by which Poland yields 
 most of Livonia to Sweden, and Prussia 
 formally renounces allegiance to Poland. 
 
 1667. Treaty of Andruszowo, by which Smol- 
 ensk, Kiev and the left bank of the Dnieper 
 pass to Russia, and Poland loses her 
 suzerainty over the Cossacks. 
 
 1673. Victory under John Sobieski over the 
 Turks at Chocim. 
 
 1674. Accession of John Sobieski. 
 
 1683. Sobieski delivers Vienna and the whole 
 
 of Christendom from the Turks. 
 1 697- 1 763. Decay of Poland under the rule of 
 
 the Electors of Saxony. 
 1763. With the death of Augustus III. the 
 
 struggle for Poland's existence against 
 
 Russia, Prussia, and Austria enters its 
 j acute stage. 
 ' 1764. Accession of Stanislas Poniatowski, last 
 
 King of Poland;. . 
 1 768-1 772. Confederation of Bar,, led by the 
 
 Pulawskis, fights against Russia in defence 
 
 of the national liberty and religion. 
 1772. First partition of Poland between Russia, 
 
 Prussia, and Austria. 
 1788-1791. The Four Years' Diet, held in what 
 
 remained of independent Poland. 
 1 791. On the third of May the Polish Diet 
 
 passes the Liberal Constitution of Poland. 
 1793. Second partition of Poland between 
 
 Russia and Prussia. 
 
232 POLAND 
 
 1794. Rising led by Kosciuszko for the national 
 independence. 
 
 1794. Defeat at Maciejowice, at which Kos- 
 ciuszko is taken prisoner, massacre of 
 Praga, and capture of Warsaw by Suvorov. 
 
 1795. Third partition of Poland between Russia, 
 Prussia, and Austria. 
 
 1798. Birth of Adam Mickiewicz. 
 
 1807. Treaty of Tilsit, by which Napoleon 
 creates the Duchy of Warsaw. 
 
 18 1 5. Treaty of Vienna, by which Poland is re- 
 divided between Austria, Russia, and 
 Prussia ; autonomous Kingdom of Poland 
 under Russia guaranteed ; and the Free 
 Republic of Cracow established. 
 
 1830. The first Polish Rising. 
 
 1 83 1. Warsaw is taken by the Russians and the 
 Rising ends. 
 
 1846. The Galician massacres. 
 
 1846. Annexation of Cracow by Austria. 
 
 1855. Death of Adam Mickiewicz. 
 
 1 86 1. Species of autonomy granted to Austrian 
 
 1863-64. The second Polish Rising. [Poland. 
 
 1 87 1. Opening of the Kulturkampf by Bismarck, 
 
 and persecution of the nationalj Church 
 
 in Prussian Poland. 
 
 1885. Expulsion by Bismarck of forty thousand 
 Poles from Prussian Poland. 
 
 1886. The Colonisation Bill passed by the 
 Prussian Diet for the purchase and Ger- 
 manization of Polish land. 
 
 1908. Expropriation Bill passed by which the 
 Polish landowner in Prussian Poland is 
 forcibly evicted. 
 
PRESS NOTICES OF 
 
 "ADAM MICKIEWICZ, THE NATIONAL 
 POET OF POLAND " 
 
 " Miss Gardner, a devoted and accomplished 
 student of Polish literature, has performed a con- 
 siderable service in making better known the life 
 and work of the most famous of Polish poets. His 
 pathetic story is told . . . with deep sympathy 
 by Miss Gardner. . . . Some of her prose render- 
 ings are of great beauty — often with the wild and 
 wayward beauty which we associate with Chopin." 
 — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 " Miss Gardner gives us a remarkably true 
 picture of the relations between the poet and his 
 country. . . . Miss Gardner has realized fully 
 what she attempted, and indeed few countrymen 
 of the poet could perform the task better." — 
 Cambridge Review. 
 
 " The work is so admirably done that it would 
 be welcome, though we had other biographies 
 or other critical appreciations of the Polish poet. 
 This remarkable work. . . ." — Tablet. 
 
 " This is the first attempt which has been 
 made in our language to capture the imagination 
 by a critical study of the fine character and high 
 achievements of Adam Mickiewicz. Miss Monica 
 Gardner writes exceedingly well — with know- 
 ledge, with sympathy, and with vision." — 
 Standard. 
 
234 PRESS NOTICES 
 
 " Her sympathies with that oppressed nation- 
 ality, a sinister monument of the triumph of 
 might over right, and her understanding of the 
 Polish spirit, make her pages inspiring reading. 
 Her work will do much to make the fame of a 
 great poet, already well enough known on the 
 continent, spread into England." — Month. 
 
 " One would have been grateful for a moderate 
 biography of Poland's national poet. Miss Gardner's 
 work merits a more distinguished adjective, and 
 therefore is doubly worthy of attention. . . She 
 explains his masterpieces with sympathy and 
 skill, giving at the same time workmanlike trans- 
 lations of the more famous passages." — Athenceum. 
 
 " Miss Gardner has not given us a literary book 
 alone, but the story of a soul, and of a soul which 
 mirrored in itself the travail and agony of a 
 nation. . . . This vivid and sympathetic record 
 . . . . Miss Gardner has done no small service 
 in making his rare nature and gifts known to the 
 English world." — Dublin Review. 
 
 " His life Miss Gardner has admirably described. 
 She is to be congratulated on the courage and 
 perseverance which have produced such a good 
 book on a subject which has been too long neg- 
 lected." — Times. 
 
 " C'est, a notre connaissance, le premier livre 
 anglais qui traite avec tant d'ampleur et tant 
 de conscience une question d'histoire litteraire 
 polonaise. . . . Ce brillant coup d'essai." — 
 
 Bulletin Polonais. 
 
INDEX 
 
 ALBERT, of 
 Brandenburg, 229, 
 230 
 
 Alexander, I, of Russia, 
 Polish hopes of, 3, 
 4 ; his death, 4 ; 
 friendship with Adam 
 Czartoryski, 3, 4, 7; 
 illtreats Poland, 4, 5 
 
 Alexander, II, of Rus- 
 sia, his treatment of 
 Poland, H-15 ; his 
 agreement with 
 Prussia, 12, 15 
 
 Andruszowo, Treaty of, 
 231 
 
 Augustus, III, 231 
 
 BAR, Confeder- 
 ation of, 89 and 
 n, 231 
 
 Batory, Stephen, 230 
 
 Bernhardi, 28 
 
 Bismarck, his influence 
 on Russia, 12 ; his 
 persecution of the 
 Poles, 14-17, 22, 232; 
 directs Kulturkampf, 
 16, 232; 19, 28 
 
 Bojan, in Spirit of the 
 Steppe, 202, 205, 
 206 
 
 Boleslaw, I, 228 
 
 Boleslaw, II, 228 
 
 Brzesc? Union of, 230 
 
 Billow, his anti-Polish 
 policy, 19, 20 ; his 
 insult to the Poles, 
 26 
 
 Byron, influence on 
 Mickiewicz, 51, 56, 
 62 ; 113; influence 
 on Slowacki, 176 ; 
 Ujej ski's use of, 
 212, 213 
 
 C^SAR, Julius, in 
 Krasinski's theory, 
 146 
 
 Casimir, II, 228 
 
 Casimir, III, the Great, 
 229 
 
 Catherine, II, of Rus- 
 sia, 4, 104 
 
 Chocim, battle of, 230 
 
 Chodkiewicz, 230 
 
E 
 
 236 INDEX 
 
 Chopin, his national- 
 ism, 30, 31 ; friend- 
 ship with Delphina 
 Potocka, 146, 147, 
 147 n. ^ 
 
 Colonization, Com- 
 mission of, 16-18, 
 20, 26, 232 
 
 Conrad, Duke of 
 Masovia, 228 
 
 ^Constantine, Grand 
 Duke, his treatment 
 of Poland, 4 
 
 Constitution of the 
 Third of May, 104 n> 
 231 
 
 Copernicus, 229 
 
 Cracow, Free Republic 
 founded, 3, 232 ; 
 condition of Re- 
 public, 9, 10 ; head- 
 quarters of attempted 
 Rising, 10 ; annexed 
 by Austria, 10, 232 ; 
 bombarded by Aus- 
 tria, 10 ; 92, 96 n, 
 228, 229 
 
 Czarniecki, 151 
 
 Czartoryski, Adam, 
 friendship with 
 Alexander I, 4, 7 ; 
 in the Polish Emi- 
 gration, 7 
 
 Czenstochowa, out- 
 raged by William IPs 
 armies, 27, 96 n ; in 
 Tkaddeus, 96 ; in 
 Dawn,iS3; i53 w > 2 3i 
 
 DANTE, in, 146, 
 147, 187 
 Danzig, 3, 229 
 Dombrowski, 103, 105 
 Domeyko, Ignacy,63,74 
 
 XPROPRT 
 ATION, Law of> 
 18-21, 232 
 
 FREDERICK, 
 William, IV, of 
 Prussia, promises 
 Poles justice, 15 
 -Frejend, 63, 64, 66 
 
 G ALICIA, falls to 
 share of Austria, 3; 
 Austria's persecu- 
 tion of, 8, 9 ; at- 
 tempted insurrection 
 in, 9 ; massacres of, 
 9, 38, 163, 166, 168, 
 172, 208, 209, 215- 
 221, 232 ; autonomy 
 granted to, 10, 232; 
 229 
 
INDEX 
 
 237 
 
 Gaszynski, Constantine, Kin gdom, Poland— conU 
 Krasinski's letters ill-treatment of, 4-7, 
 to, 31, 129, 144, 166, n-14, 107 ; her 
 174, 175, 197 ; son- name abolished by 
 net to his mother Russia, 13 
 
 and latter's death, 40 Klaczko, Julian, on the 
 
 Gnesen, 16, 228 Undivine Comedy, 
 
 Gortchakov, his treat- 115, 125 
 
 ment of the Poles, Kosciuszko, Thaddeus, 
 11 his Rising, 1, 30, 93, 
 
 Goszczynski, Severyn, 232 ; 88 
 
 his Prayer of a Poet, Kordecki, 231 
 
 38 
 
 Groch6w, battle of, 1 1 
 Grottger, 30 
 
 JADWIGA, Queen, 
 229 
 Jagiello, marriage with 
 Jadwiga, 229 ; dyn- 
 asty of, 88, 88 n, 203, 
 229, 230 
 Joachim, of Flora, 36 
 John Casimir, King of 
 Poland, 151, 153 n, 
 230 
 
 KALISZ, 27 
 Kallenbach, Dr., 
 on Thaddeus, 96, 100 
 Kingdom of Poland, 
 her foundation, 3, 4, 
 232 ; her organiza- 
 tion, 3, 4 ; Russia's 
 
 Kowno, 46, 59 
 
 Krasinski, Vincent, 
 his part in the Polish 
 legions, 107 ; rela- 
 tions with his son, 
 107- 1 10; attitude 
 before the Rising, 
 108 ; during the Ris- 
 ing, 109 ; relations 
 with Nicholas I, ib. ; 
 winter with son in 
 Petersburg, 127; 128 
 
 Krasinski, Zygmunt, 
 on the resurrection 
 of Poland, 31,36,37, 
 146, 174, 175; his 
 Temptation, 34, 127, 
 145 ; his Irydion, 34, 
 40, 41, 43, 112, 126- 
 145 ; his Summer 
 Night, 34, 145 ; 35 ; 
 his Dawn, 36, 37, 
 
238 INDEX 
 
 Krasinski — continued 
 
 112, I44-I58, 170, 
 
 223 ; his teaching, 
 
 3 6 > 37> 43> 44> IIJ > 
 121, 128, 145, 146, 
 
 158, 162, 170, 174; 
 his Psalm of Good 
 Will, 37, 38, 115, 
 168-172, 223 ; his 
 symbolization of Po- 
 land, 38, 204 ; his 
 grief for Poland, 40, 
 41, no, 112, 144, 
 145, 161 ; his Dream 
 of Cezara, 39 ; trag- 
 edy of position be- 
 tween patriotism and 
 filial allegiance, 40, 
 108-110, 113, 167; 
 moral influence, 43, 
 44 ; his Resurrec- 
 turis, 43, 112, 172- 
 174; birth, 107; 
 childhood, 107, 119; 
 rank as poet, 107, 
 in, 176; episode 
 in University life, 
 108 ; leaves Poland, 
 108, 150 ; life at 
 Geneva and friend- 
 ship with Henry 
 Reeve, 108 ; position 
 during Rising, 109 ; 
 summary of life, 109- 
 
 Krasinski — continued 
 in ; writes for Po- 
 land's sake, no, in, 
 158 ; his search for 
 light, in, 112, 145 ; 
 universal appeal of 
 his work, in, 148, 
 158 ; his sufferings, 
 in, 112, 126, 168, 
 174, 208 ; spiritual 
 wandering, 112, 144, 
 145, 147, 156, 157; 
 his spiritual victory, 
 112, 145, 156-158, 
 168, 174 ; his Psalms 
 of the Future, 112, 
 158, 159, 168, 223; 
 his Undivine Comedy, 
 1 1 2-1 26, 126 n, 130, 
 131, 143, 174; con- 
 ception of poet's call- 
 ing, 113-115 ; mj.; 
 
 his style, 126, 152 ; 
 undaunted national 
 hope, 126, 166, 168, 
 174, 175 ; sadness 
 of poetry, 126, 161; 
 127 ; winter in 
 Petersburg, 127, 130; 
 temptation to hatred, 
 127-129, 144; let- 
 ter to Reeve, 128, 
 1 29 ; on Irydion, 1 29, 
 144 ; conception of 
 
INDEX 239 
 
 Krasinski — continued Lithuania — continued 
 
 Mephistopheles, 133, 
 134; his Three 
 Thoughts, 145 ; his 
 logic, 145 ; his Bea- 
 trice, 146-155 ; his 
 Psalm of Faith, 159- 
 161 ; his Psalm of 
 Hope, 159, 161, 162 ; 
 his Psalm of Love, 
 159, 163-166 ; polit- 
 ical foresight, 163 ; 
 effect on him of Gal- 
 ician massacres, 166, 
 
 172 ; 167 ; his Psalm 
 of Grief, 167, 168 ; 
 
 1 73 n, 1 74 n ; summing 
 
 Mickiewicz's poetry, 
 
 34> 48, Si-55. 59> 
 60, 78, 83, 93-97, 
 
 99-103, 105 ; 39, 45, 
 
 89, 91, 94, 204, 205 
 
 Livonia, annexed by 
 Poland, 230 ; lost by 
 Poland to Sweden, 
 231 
 
 Louvain, 28 
 
 Lytton, Lord, 126 n. 
 
 Lw6w, obtained by 
 Poland, 229 
 
 MACIEJOW- 
 ICE, battle of, 1 
 
 up of career, 174 ; on Matejko, 30 
 
 Anhelli, 176, 177, Messianism, Polish, 
 
 197 ; 208, 209 
 
 LEDOCHOWSKI, 
 Cardinal, 16 
 Liberum Veto, 230 
 Lithuania, obtained by 
 Russia, 3; foundation 
 of its student societ- 
 ies, 4, 5, 46 ; perse- 
 cution of its youth, 
 5, 46, 49, 62-65, 74> 
 77, 82, 89 ; Murav- 
 iev's reign of terror 
 in, 13 ; Polish con- 
 quest of, 30, 229 ; in 
 
 35-39, 4 1 * 77> 8 4> 
 87, 146, 154, 157, 
 
 165, 166, 178, 180, 
 
 198, 199, 223 
 
 Metternich, his treat- 
 ment of Austrian 
 Poland, 8, 9 
 
 Mickiewicz, Adam, his 
 imprisonment, 5, 46, 
 49, 59, 61-63, 74; 
 exile, 5, 38-40, 43, 
 46, 49-52, 61, 90, 95- 
 97 ; his Ancestors, 5, 
 34, 39, 40, 48, 49, 
 59-84, 91-93, 223 ; 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mickiewicz — continued 
 25 ; conception of 
 Polish poets' voca- 
 tion, 33, 56, 114; 
 his Konrad W alien- 
 rod, 34, 50-56 ; 35 ; 
 his Books of the Polish 
 Pilgrimage, ^ 37, 43, 
 84-90 ; his ideals for 
 the Polish Emigra- 
 tion, 37, 43, 44, 84- 
 86 ; his symboliza- 
 tion of Poland, 39, 
 77, 204 ; his grief 
 for Poland, 39-41, 57, 
 59, 61, 66, 67, 70, 
 90, 96 ; his domestic 
 troubles, 39, 84, 90 ; 
 his Book of the Polish 
 Nation, 41, 42 ; in- 
 fluence on Poland, 
 43, 44, 56, 84, 209 ; 
 45 ; his rank in Po- 
 lish literature, 45, 107, 
 in, 176; his life 
 devoted to Poland, 
 45, 46, 62, 84, 92; 
 love of his nation for 
 him, 45, 57, 84 ; char- 
 acter, 45, 50, 57, 84, 
 86, 90, 92, 97 ; birth, 
 45, 233 ; boyhood, 
 45, 46, 101, 102 ; 
 youth, 46, 59 ; his 
 
 Mickiewicz — continued 
 Ode to Youth, 46- 
 48 ; his love for 
 Maryla, 48, 61, 62 ; 
 his Ballads and Graz- 
 yna, 48 ; life in Rus- 
 sia, 49-51, 55; friend- 
 ship with Russian 
 Liberals, 50 ; his To 
 my Russian Friends, 
 ib. ; his Crimean 
 Sonnets, 50, 51 ; his 
 Farys, 50 ; his word- 
 paintings of nature, 
 
 5?> 93> 94> 99" 101 5 
 his high morals, 55, 
 
 56 ; escape from 
 Russia, 55, 56 ; 57 ; 
 his To the Polish 
 Mother, 57-59 ; place 
 of intellect and heart 
 in his scheme of 
 life, 57, 69 ; 58 n ; 
 66 ; his Improviza- 
 tion, 66-72 ; 73 n ; 
 love for " Eva," 75 n, 
 76, 93 ; under 
 Towianski's influ- 
 ence, 78, 91, 92 ; 
 78 ; his style, 78, 
 93, 99, 100, 105 ; his 
 genius silenced, 83, 
 91 ; life in Paris, 
 84, 90 ; his Chair at 
 
INDEX 
 
 Mickiewicz — continued 
 Lausanne, 84, 90 ; 
 confidence in Poland's 
 resurrection, 85, 92 ; 
 his Thaddeus, 90-106; 
 holds Chair in the 
 College de France, 
 90, 91 ; madness of 
 his wife, 90, 91 ; ex- 
 pelled from College 
 de France, 92 ; ab- 
 andons Towian- 
 ism, ib. ; organizes 
 Polish Legion in 
 Turkey, ib. ; death, 
 92, 232; grave, 92, 
 96 n ; 96 ; his recol- 
 lections of 181 2, 102, 
 103 ; 106 ; on the 
 Undivine Comedy, 
 112-115; 198; on 
 the Spirit oj the Steppe , 
 207 ; 208 ; Ujej ski's 
 poem on his death, 
 209, 210 
 
 Mickiewicz 
 70 
 
 Mieczyslaw, I, 228 
 
 Montalembert, 1 
 
 Muraviev, his persecu- 
 
 : * tion of Lithuania, 13 
 
 241 
 
 Napoleon — continued 
 legions under, 2, 3, 
 6 > 93> 94; betrays 
 Poland, 2 ; creates 
 Duchy of Warsaw, 
 2, 233 ; Polish hopes 
 of his Russian cam- 
 paign, 45, 94, 102; 
 64 ; 88 «; passage 
 on him in Thaddeus, 
 101 ; 102, 106 ; in 
 Krasinski's theory, 
 146 
 
 Napoleon, III, relations 
 with Poland, 12, 78 ; 
 possibly foretold in 
 Ancestors, 78 
 
 Nicholas, I, of Russia, 
 4 ; his persecution 
 of Poland, 5-7, 72, 
 211 ; 108, 109, 127 
 
 Nicholas, II, of Russia, 
 6 
 
 Niemojowski, 181, 182 
 
 Norris, Frank, 210 
 Ladislas, Novosiltzov, his perse- 
 cution of Poland, 4, 
 5, 49 ; in Ancestors, 
 78, 81, 82 
 
 N 
 
 A P O L E O N, 
 
 /^VLIWA, Treaty of, 
 
 231 
 
 Ordon, 6 
 
 Bonaparte, Polish Ostrolenka, battle of, 6 
 
242 
 
 p 
 
 INDEX 
 ACTA Conventa, Rising, Polish, of 1863, 
 
 230 
 
 11-13, 15, 30, 209 
 
 Partitions of Poland, Ruthenia, Poland's an- 
 1-3, 14, 30, 35, 104, nexation of, 30, 229; 
 
 129, 146, 151, 154, 
 
 169, 231, 232 
 
 Piast, 193 and n, 194 ; 
 
 dynasty of, 203, 228, 
 
 229 
 
 Plater, Emilia, 48, 49 
 
 Poniatowski, Joseph, 2 
 
 Poniatowski, Stanislaus, 
 
 231 
 Posen, passes to Prus- 
 sia, 3 ; 16, 25, 27 
 
 204, 230 
 
 SAND, George, on 
 Ancestors, 83, 84 
 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 
 his letter on Prussia's 
 treatment of the 
 Poles, 18-21 
 Sigismund, Augustus, 
 
 II, 230 
 Sigismund, III, 230 
 
 Potocka, Delphina, 146- Silesia, 25, 204, 229 
 
 155, 147 n, 172 
 
 and n. 
 
 Praga, massacre of, 1, Slowacki, Julius, his 
 
 89, 105, 129, 232 
 Prussia, her treatment 
 
 of the Poles, 14-28, 
 
 30, 232 
 Pulawski, Casimir, 89 
 
 n, 231 
 
 REEVE, Henry, 108, 
 s 127-129 
 Rising, Polish, of 1830, 
 4-7, 15, 30, 32, 41, 
 42, 48, 49, 57, 58 n, 
 83, 108, 109, 113, 
 126, 186 and n, 198, 
 201, 232 
 
 Father of the Plague- 
 stricken, 34 ; his 
 sufferings, 40, 177 ; 
 his Grave of Agam- 
 emnon and Hymn, 40 ; 
 his rank in Polish 
 literature, III, 176 ; 
 his attack on Kras- 
 inski, 167 ; charac- 
 teristics, 176, 177; 
 his Anhelli, 176-197 5 
 177 ; insistence on 
 hope, 180 ; 186 n ; 
 his personal note in 
 Anhelli, 187, 188, 
 189; 208 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sobieski, John, 88, 231 
 Stanislas, St., 228 
 Starczewski, Eugene, 
 on Poland, 29, 30 ; 
 
 43 
 
 Suvorov, his capture of 
 
 Warsaw and massacre 
 at Praga, 1, 104, 105, 
 232 
 
 TARGOWICA, 
 Confederation of, 
 104 
 
 Tarnowski, Count, on 
 Psalm of Love, 166 
 
 Teresa, St., 173 n 
 
 Thorn, 3, 229 
 
 Tilsit, Treaty of, 2, 
 232 
 
 Towianski, Andrew, 
 foretold in Ancestors, 
 
 77, 78, 82 ; influ- 
 ence on Mickiewicz, 
 
 78, 91, 92 
 
 UJEJSKI, Kornel, 
 his Complaints of 
 Jeremias, 38, 217- 
 224 ; birth, 208 ; 
 death, 208, 226 ; con- 
 ditions under which 
 he wrote, 208, 209 ; 
 private life, 208, 226 ; 
 sadness of his poetry, 
 
 H3 
 
 U j ej ski — continued 
 208, 209 ; his Chor- 
 ale, 208, 219-221, 221 
 n ; his vocation as 
 poet, 209-211, 217 ; 
 poem on Mickie- 
 wicz's death, 209, 
 210 ; Song of the 
 Grain, 210, 211 ; visit 
 to Warsaw, 211, 212 ; 
 his Marathon, 211- 
 215 ; his Lyre of 
 
 Jeremias, 
 effect on 
 Galician 
 
 211, 212 
 
 him of 
 massacres, 
 215-217, 219, 221 n; 
 his The Earth, 216, 
 217 ; inspired by 
 Hebrew prophets, 
 217, 224 ; his moral 
 attitude, 219, 221- 
 
 224 ; work for peas- 
 ants, 221 n, 226 ; 
 lessons to youth, 222, 
 226 ; his Messian- 
 ism, 223 ; literary 
 characteristics, 224, 
 226 ; his Biblical 
 Melodies, 224 ; his 
 Angelus, 9 224-226 ; 
 
 225 ; love'of the soil, 
 225, 226 ; last years, 
 226 ; tenets of his 
 life, 226, 227 
 
244 
 
 Ukraine, 40, 42, 198 
 203, 205-207 
 
 VIENNA, Treaty 
 oi,2, 3, 8, 15,232 
 Volhynia, annexed by- 
 Poland, 229 
 
 WARSAW, taken 
 by Russia in 1794, 
 I, 41, 42, 104, 105, 
 233 ; and in 1831, 
 6, 4 2 > 2 33 ; duchy 
 of, 2, 3, 102, 233 ; 
 passes to Russia, 3 ; 
 6 ; events there pre- 
 ceding Rising of 
 1863, 10, 11; 13, 
 78,79, 107, 108,211, 
 212 ; becomes cap- 
 ital of Poland, 230 
 
 Wereszczak, Maryla, 48 
 
 Wielopolski, his policy 
 in Poland, 11 
 
 William, II, of Ger- 
 many, 26, 96 n 
 
 Wilna, 4, 5, 46, 49, 66, 
 81 
 
 Wislica, Statute of, 229 
 
 Worcell, Stanislas, 
 100, ioi 
 
 Wreschen, affair of, 22 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ZALESKI, Bohdan, 
 his symbolization 
 of Poland, 39, 199, 
 204 ; his Spirit of 
 the Steppe, 39, 198- 
 207 ; his exile, 40, 
 198, 201, 202 ; love 
 for Ukraine, 40, 42, 
 198 ; his Walk be- 
 yond Rome, 42 ; on 
 Ancestors, 83 ; na- 
 ture of patriotic 
 mysticism, 198, 207 ; 
 the " nightingale of 
 Polish literature," 
 198 ; summary of 
 life, ib. ; poetical 
 description of boy- 
 hood and youth, 
 201 ; deep sense of 
 religion, 203; Mickie- 
 wicz, on, 207 
 Zan, Thomas, founds 
 Lithuanian student 
 societies, 4, 46 ; 
 friendship with Mick- 
 iewicz, 5, 46, 63 ; im- 
 prisonment, 49 ; 
 exile, 49, 63, 186 n ; 
 in Ancestors, 63 ; in 
 Anhelli, 186 
 
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