No More Learning

He kisses her; and as she throws her arms about
him a peal of thunder rolls through the room. Then
wild and strange music is heard; the demon maiden
appears, luring Henryk to follow her. Calling on the
name of Mary, the frenzied wife, clasping her child to
her breast, clings to her husband. Where she sees
a horrible ghost and smells the foul air of the grave,
he sees the beautiful incorporation of his poems. In
vain is her cry of anguish and terror. Her husband
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? The Undivine Comedy
IOI
turns savagely upon her. She is nothing more to him
than the "woman of clay and mire," while the appari-
tion is the heavenly ideal for whose sake he will cast
off his home. He disappears with the demon. His
wife, shrieking out his name, falls senseless.
The guests assemble for the christening. They
whisper and wonder. Where is the father? Why is
the mother so pale and wild? Krasinski's Polish critics
rank this scene as one of the most powerful of the drama
for its concentrated bitterness, for the irony with which,
in a few words, the author exposes the characters of
each of the spectators who are to be the defenders of
the world against the coming deluge. An idle curiosity
is the only sensation of the men and women who watch
the unhappy mother. The priest, as Mickiewicz notices,
confronted with grief where surely a minister of God
might have offered some word of spiritual comfort,
contents himself with performing the function for which
he was summoned, and there his part ends1.
First Guest {under his breath). It's a queer thing where
the Count has got to.
Second Guest. He is gaping about somewhere or is writing
poetry.
First Guest. And Madam is pale and looks as if she has
not slept. She hasn't said a word to anybody.
Fourth Guest. I have left a charming princess. I thought
there would be a good lunch, and instead there is, as the
Scriptures say, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Priest. George Stanislas, dost thou accept the holy oil?
Godparents. We do accept it.
One of the Guests. Look. She has got up, and walks as if
in her sleep.
Second Guest. She has stretched out her hands in front of
her, and, tottering, is going up to her son.
The Priest. George Stanislas, dost thou renounce Satan
and all his pomps?
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? io2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Godparents. We do renounce them.
The Wife {laying her hands on the child? s head). Where is
your father, George?
Priest. Please do not interrupt.
Wife. I bless you, George, I bless you, my child. Be a
poet so that your father may love you and never cast you off.
He will be pleased with you, and then he will forgive your
mother.
Priest. Have respect for the things of God, Madam.
Wife. I curse you if you are not a poet. She faints and
the servants carry Iter out.
The Guests {all together). Something unusual has happened
in this house. Let us go away.
They retire with haste. The christening proceeds.
When it is concluded the godfather makes over the
cradle a speech that has obviously been made very
often before, and as obviously will be made very often
again1.
George Stanislas, you have just been made a Christian
and entered human society, and later you will become a citizen,
and by the efforts of your parents and the grace of God an
eminent holder of office. Remember that you must love your
country, and that it is fine even to die for your country.
So he speaks who in the end of the play is the first
to leave the sinking ship.
In the meanwhile, Henryk has been pursuing his
will-o'-the-wisp in the mountains. She decoys him to
a precipice she bids him leap, and there shows herself
in her true form, a hideous fiend. The devils are
thrusting him down over the brink: and even in that
dread moment Henryk's cry is rather that of the actor's
monologue than of a human soul about to face its
eternal fate. He is falling without a struggle, for his
is never a moral conflict. Invariably he yields without
a stand. Then the angel guardian rises over the sea.
Henryk has thrown away the chance of salvation the
1 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves.
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? The Undivine Comedy 103
same angel had offered him on his marriage eve. He
is now given another: "to return to his house and sin
no more; to love his son. "
He goes home. His wife is there no longer. The
servant falters out that she has been taken to the mad
asylum. And now the husband realizes what he has
done.
"All that I have touched I have destroyed," he cries, "and
I shall destroy myself in the end. On what pillow will she lay
her head to-day? What sounds shall surround her in the night?
The howls and songs of the insane. "
So he raves on.
A voice from somewhere. Thou composest a drama.
That voice, says Count Tarnowski, is not an ex-
ternal voice: it is the voice of Henryk's conscience1.
For even now Henryk must poetize. He--and his
son--are the only two who ever talk poetically in a play
where stern simplicity is the rule. The son's poetry
is spontaneous, as the song of a bird: but it is patent
that Henryk has always his eye on an imaginary audi-
ence. He reproaches himself for his wife's madness:
but his language does not convey that sense of agony
and measureless remorse which would have been evoked
from another man in the like circumstances. How
much of it is real sorrow, how much of it the pose that
is now an integral part of the nature of a man who has
for years used emotion as the tool of poetry, who has
lived as an actor greedy for dramatic settings, the
speaker himself is incapable of telling2. It is part of
the genius of Krasinski's creation that, except in one
later episode, the reader with no explanation of the fact
1 St Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 Op. cit.
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? 104 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
remains perfectly cold when Henryk holds forth, how-
ever passionate to outward semblance his utterances
may be: while on the other hand Marya's words,
simple, unstudied, dictated by love and grief, speak
straight to the heart.
Henryk rushes to the asylum. Klaczko and Dr
Kallenbach dwell upon the mastery with which Kra-
sinski treats the scene in the madhouse. One shade
less restraint would have overstepped the bounds of
tragedy and turned it into the grotesque: but all is
grave and moving1. Krasinski unites his personal im-
pressions of a madhouse, where he had visited a friend,
with the great world convulsion for which the first part
of The Undivine Comedy is preparing us. We are con-
scious of uneasiness and dark forebodings as within
these lugubrious walls Henryk, sitting by his wife's
couch, hears resound from the rooms above, the rooms
below, the rooms on either side, mad cries: one blas-
pheming, another clamouring for the heads of kings
and the liberties of the people, a third shrieking that
the comet is already flashing in the skies which is to
bring "the day of terrible judgment. "
Here Henryk's eloquence leaves him. We feel
that he is more or less genuine, constrained and in-
efficient as he is in an ugly situation that can appeal
to no poetic sense, but only to the strength of soul that
is not in him.
Husband. Do you know me, Marya?
Wife. I have sworn to be faithful to you to the grave.
Husband. Come, give me your hand. We will go away.
Wife. Let me have a few minutes more, and then I will
be worthy of you. I have prayed three nights, and God has
heard me.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Undivine Comedy 105
Husband. I don't understand you.
Wife. From the time I lost you a change came over me.
"Lord God," I prayed, and beat my breast. "Send down upon
me the spirit of poetry": and the third day in the morning
I became a poet.
Husband. Marya! /
Wife. Henryk, you will not despise me now. I am full of
inspiration. You will not forsake me now in the evenings.
Husband. Never, never.
Wife. Look at me. Have I not made myself your equal?
I understand everything, I will give it out, I will play it, I will
sing it. Sea, stars, storm, battle. Yes, stars, storm, sea--ah!
something still escapes me--battle.
She breaks into doggerel lines.
Husband. The curse! the curse!
Wife (throwing her arms round him and kissing him). My
Henryk, Henryk, how happy I am!
Seeing his gloom, she tells him what will surely
drive the cloud from his brow, namely, that his son
will be a poet.
At the christening the priest gave him for his first name--
Poet, and you know the others, George Stanislas. I did this.
I blessed him, I added a curse--he will be a poet. Ah! how
I love you, Henryk!
Then the wildness of the prophecies that are ringing
from every side of the asylum while she and her husband
talk together falls upon her also. She babbles incoher-
ently, but ever gently, of what would befall the world
if God went mad; soon returning to her favourite
thought of the poet child who will bring joy to his
father. Her brain gives way: and she dies, happy,
says she, because it is in Henryk's arms that she dies.
Here ends the first part of the domestic drama.
How much of its peculiar dreariness may be ascribed
to the shadows of Krasinski's own childhood we can
but conjecture; but possibly the picture was, if only
subconsciously, coloured by a sensitive and observant
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? 106 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
child's impressions of a home where there had been
little sympathy between husband and wife. Certain it
is that George, the son of Henryk and Marya, is to
a great extent Krasinski himself.
There is a further point to observe in this unsparing
portrayal of a poet's marriage, or, in other words, of
the dreamer mated with reality.
Krasinski spoke here
not merely out of his knowledge of human nature in
general, but out of his knowledge of his own self. The
marriage of Henryk is the curious foreshadowing of
Krasinski's marriage. Krasinski was to be the indiffer-
ent husband whose heart when he married was turned
with passion in another direction. The resemblance
does not end there. Morbid introspection, love of a
situation, a tendency to self-dramatization, were the
chief faults of Krasinski's character. Henryk is, in fact,
Krasinski at the latter's potential worst--but a worst
that he never reached: for Henryk erred through want
of heart, Krasinski through too much. Yet in Henryk
we have the clear vision of what the Anonymous Poet
might have been, and what his innate nobility of soul
withheld him from becoming.
Henryk's marriage, then, thus wretchedly ends. He
has failed as a husband; but he is still a father.
With the son something of the ruthlessness of Greek
tragedy enters the play. The poetical prologue to the
second part is entirely devoted to this strange child.
He gazes to the skies and sees something, hears some-
thing, that no one but himself knows. His father looks
at him in silence, with eyes that fill with tears. A gypsy
refuses to reveal what she reads in his hand, and goes
away, wailing. Beautiful, pure, mysterious, he is like
some flower in Eden before the fall of man.
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? The Undivine Comedy 107
Thus the introduction. The figure of the sad child
who never plays like other children, whom his father's
friends visit and to whom they promise some great
future, whose nerves destroy his fragile body, is Krasin-
ski's recollection of his boyhood in his father's house,
told poetically as he tells all such scraps of his autobio-
graphy. And, passing beyond Krasinski's childhood,
not only is the blindness of George the blindness in
which Krasinski wrote the play, but, says Dr Kallen-
bach, "all this second part is full of personal memories
and personal sorrows. " So openly does the Anonymous
Poet expose in these few pages the wounds of his heart,
his sacred domestic tragedies, that this were alone
sufficient to account for the elaborate precautions which
he took so that the authorship of The Undivine Comedy
should never be discovered1.
The action opens with Henryk and George praying
at the mother's tomb. This beautiful and artistic scene
is the reminiscence of Krasinski's visits in his childhood
with his father to his mother's grave2.
Husband. Take off your hat and pray for your mother's
soul.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, Queen of heaven, Lady
of all that flowers on the earth, in the fields, on the banks of
streams.
Husband. Why do you change the words of the prayer?
Pray, as you have been taught, for your mother who died ten
years ago at this very hour.
George. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among angels, and each of them, when thou
passest by, plucks a rainbow from his wings and casts it at
thy feet.
Husband. George!
George. But those words rush on me and pain my head so
much that, please, I must say them.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmmit Krasinski.
1 Op. cit.
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? io8 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Husband. Get up. A prayer like that does not reach God.
You do not remember your mother. You cannot love her.
George. I see Mother very often:
and he tells his father that she appears when he is be-
tween sleeping and waking, and that the last time she
was white and wasted, and sang to him this song:
I wander everywhere,
I enter everywhere,
In the confines of the worlds,
Where there are angels' songs:
I gather up for thee
The throngs of countless forms,
Thoughts and inspired words,
Oh, little child of mine!
And from the highest souls,
And from the lowest souls,
Colours and shadowings,
Sweet sounds and rays of light,
I gather up for thee,
That thou, my little son,
Shalt be like those in heaven,
And by thy father loved.
Husband {leaning on a pillar of the tomb). Marya, would you
destroy your own child, burden me with two deaths? What
am I saying? She is in heaven, tranquil and peaceful as she was
during her life on earth. The poor child is only dreaming.
George. And now I hear her voice, but I see nothing. . .
from those two larches on which the light of the setting sun
is falling.
I'll give thy lips to drink
Of sound and power,
I will adorn thy brow
With ribands of bright light,
And with a mother's love
I'll wake in thee
All that is beauty called
By angels in heaven and man on earth,
So that thy father may
Love thee, my little son.
Husband. Do the last thoughts at death accompany the
soul even when it reaches heaven? Can a spirit be happy, holy
and mad at the same time?
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? The Undivine Comedy
109
George. Mother's voice is growing faint. It is nearly dying
away behind the wall of the charnel house. Oh, there--there
--she is still repeating:
So that thy father may
Love thee, my little son!
Husband. God, have pity on our child to whom it seems
Thou in Thy wrath hast destined madness and an early death.
Lord, tear not reason away from Thine own creation. Look
on my torments, and do not give this little angel up to hell.
Me at least Thou hast endowed with strength to bear up
against a throng of thoughts, passions, and feelings, but Thou
hast given him a body like a spider's web which each great
thought shall tear asunder--oh, Lord God! oh, God! For ten
years I have not had one day of peace. Thou hast sent down
upon me a hail of sorrows and evanescent images, feelings and
dreams. Thy grace has descended on my brain, not on my
heart. Grant me to love my child in peace, and let there be
harmony henceforth between the Creator and creature. Son,
cross yourself and come with me. "Eternal rest. "
This is the one moment, says Dr Kleiner, when
it seems as though Henryk's heart were for once to
guide him1. Henryk is no monster. He is not ab-
normal. His character throughout is drawn with the
truth and consistency that give The Undivine Comedy
its terrible power. Henryk is the idealist whose ideals
remain on his lips, and who is ignorant of the struggle
that, as Krasinski said in another place, of itself ennobles.
Krasinski was too great an artist to drive Henryk into
the unnatural extremity of a man without love for his
one son2. He was also too close an observer of human
nature to lend himself to such a situation. The in-
difference of a man of Henryk's stamp to his wife was
a foregone conclusion: but the son was flesh of his
flesh, the inheritor of his name. There is egoism, there
is pose, in Henryk's intercourse with his son: but there
is unfeigned love. His cry of anguish, when he calls
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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? no The Anonymous Poet of Poland
upon the doctor to tell him if all hope is gone, rings
true enough. And in this presentment of a father's love
for the son whose life he yet ruined, Krasinski draws
very tenderly upon his own father's relations with
himself: the only intimacy of family affection that he
who, as he once told Reeve, scarcely remembered what
it was to have a mother, had ever known. Yet such
paternal sentiment as is Henryk's cannot save him.
In it he seeks himself, not his son. Self-dedication to
a child suffering for the father's sin is no part of Henryk's
programme.
We gather that in the years which are supposed to
succeed the scene in the cemetery Henryk seeks for
mental rest in the study of philosophy, and fruitlessly.
Then we see him once more wandering in the moun-
tains. The desires of his heart are returned in bitter-
ness to his lips. H is wife's prayer for her son is granted:
the child is a poet, in whose madness the father must
ever gaze upon the curse of poetry, the disordered
adjustment of mental perception, that have ruined the
lives of husband, wife and son.
"For many years," thus complains Henryk as he walks
among the hills, " I have worked at the discovery of the last
end of knowledge, thought and pleasure, and I have found--
the emptiness of the grave in my heart. I know every feeling
by name, and there is no desire, no faith, no love left in me.
Only a few presentiments cross the waste--that my son will
be blind, that the society in which I have grown up will be
dissolved. And I suffer in the same way as God is happy,
alone in myself, alone for myself. "
Voice of the Angel Guardian. Love the sick, the starving,
the despairing, and thou shalt be saved.
He does not listen. He still wanders, lamenting,
in carefully picked words, that his child "for the sins
of the father, the madness of the mother, is destined to
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? The Undivine Comedy
in
eternal blindness. " The demon, in the form of a black
eagle, sweeps upon him, bidding him gird on the sword
of his fathers and fight for their honour and power:
promising him that his enemies, his "mean enemies,"
will crumble to dust before him. Here is the anticipa-
tion of the war of the universe, in which Henryk is to
be the champion of his class. This is the lure of all
others most calculated to ensnare him.
"Be thou what thou mayest," cries he, his vanity on fire:
"false or true, victory or destruction, I will believe in thee,
emissary of glory. "
He flings away a viper that crosses his path.
"Go, mean reptile," says he contemptuously, re-
garding it as the emblem of the lower orders that are to
rise against those who have held them in thrall. They
shall be crushed, and perish unmourned and ingloriously
even as this adder.
But before Henryk takes up his part as a soldier
and leader of men, his domestic drama, together with
the curse that has fallen upon the child, must be worked
out. The short remaining scenes of this division of the
play could not have been what they are were it not
that Krasinski put into the figure of the blind, dis-
traught child two facts of his own life. Almost blind
himself while he was writing The Undivine Comedy,
and under the terror of the lifelong and total darkness
that then threatened him, Krasinski describes George's
blindness from the internal evidence of personal ex-
perience. The other point, the son's inheritance from his
mother of a sick brain, touched him closely also, al-
though in the play he presented it under dimensions that
were never approached in his own case. He, too, in-
herited from his mother an overstrained nervous fancy,
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? ii2 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
that was the cause of intense suffering to him, and
against which he was strongly warned by his father as
against a hereditary disease. The Undivine Comedy may
be looked upon, apart from its many other aspects, as a
painful study of heredity.
The father has summoned the doctor to examine
George's eyes. This doctor, with his formalism and his
dry want of sympathy with what he considers merely
an interesting case, is of a piece with the other per-
sonages in the grey world of Krasinski's drama.
Husband. Nothing has done him any good. My last hope
is in you.
Doctor. I am greatly honoured. -
Husband. Tell the gentleman what you feel.
George. I can't see you, father, or this gentleman any
more. Sparks and black threads are running before my eyes1.
Sometimes a thing like a little, thin snake comes out from
them--and then it becomes a yellow cloud. The cloud flies
up, then falls down, a rainbow breaks out of it. And that
doesn't hurt me at all.
Doctor. Stand in the shade. He looks at his eyes. Now
turn to the window. (To George) You can laugh at this.
You will be as sound as I am. (To the Husband) There is
no hope. There is an entire failure of the optic nerve.
George. A mist has come over everything--everything.
Doctor. His brain has ruined his body. Catalepsy is to be
apprehended.
Husband {leading the doctor aside). All you ask--half my
fortune.
Doctor. Disorganization cannot be reorganized.
Husband.