No More Learning

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? CHAPTER III
THE POET OF A NATION'S SUFFERING:
ADAM MICK1EWICZ
HE genius of Adam Mickiewicz has
raised him above all other Polish poets.
M. His fame has travelled the furthest
beyond his native land. But it is not merely as
the chief glory of their literature that his com-
patriots honour him with an affection and vener-
ation undimmed by time. He lives in the national
history as the man who devoted all his life--a life
sad as the annals of his country--to the cause of
Poland. The beauty of his moral character and
the charm of his personality have endeared him
almost as one alive and beloved to the generations
which have come after him. '
Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania in
1798. He lived the simple life of a wild and remote
countryside, where patriarchal customs and
ancient traditions still prevailed. As a boy he
wandered in forests, as old as time, whose remoter
recesses have never to this day been trodden by
human foot; about the marshes listening to the
cries of the geese and wild birds, gathering the
folk-lore of the peasants and the fishermen. When
a lad of fourteen, he witnessed the transports of
patriotic hope with which all Poland hailed in
1812 the march of Napoleon to Russia. He saw
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? 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.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 47
None knew it when alive, or knows its death. It
is the egotist. 1/
"Oh, youth! The nectar of life is only sweet
when it is shared with others. Heaven's joys
inebriate our hearts when they are bound
together by one golden thread.
"Together, youthful friends! The happiness
of each one is the aim of all, mighty in union, in
enthusiasm standing steady. Together, youthful
friends! And happy is he who, fallen in the midst
of his career, makes of his dead body a rung of the
ladder for others to attain the garden of glory.
Together, youthful friends! Although the road
be slippery and steep, and violence and weakness
defend the entrance, let violence hurl violence
back, and let us learn to conquer weakness in our
youth.
"He who a child in the cradle smote off the
Hydra's head, in youth shall slay the Centaurs,
shall tear its victim out of hell and ascend t<a^
heaven on laurels. Reach where the eye does not
reach. Break what the reason will not break. Oh,
youth! thy flight shall be as the strength of
eagles, as a thunder-bolt thine arm.
"Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle
the little circle of the earth with the chains that
bind us to each other. To one end let aim our
thoughts, and to one end let aim our souls. Leave
thy foundations far, thou earthy world! We will
force on thee new paths till, shaking off thy rotten
skin, thou shalt remember thy past verdant years.
"And as in the lands of chaos and of night, of
elements at war, at one ' Let it be,' spoken from
the power of God, the living world stood forth,
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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 themes7 The
ballads took life from Lithuanian legend. The
Ancestors has as its setting the half pagan and very
ancient Lithuanian feast of the dead, against
which Mickiewicz places his hopeless love for
Maryla Wereszczak. I shall return to this play.
In Grazyna, Mickiewicz tells the tale of the
princess who, rather than submit to a disgraceful
peace with the national enemy, dons her husband's
armour and leads the Lithuanians to battle. This
again played its part in the Rising of 1830, for
under its inspiration the girl heroine of the war,
* J. Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewtcx. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 49
Emilia Plater, fought and died as a soldier in its
ranks.
These were the productions of Mickiewicz's
early youth. What he next wrote came after he
had passed through the ordeal first of imprison-
ment, then of parting for life from his friends and
country. Novosiltzov's persecution of the student
societies swept Zan and Mickiewicz, with their
associates, into prison. The two former were
arrested on October 23rd, 1823. For six months
Mickiewicz and his comrades were incarcerated
in Wilna. Years afterwards, the poet described
the scenes of his prison, with the power alike of
genius and of fidelity to the actual events, in the
third part of the Ancestors: scenes which had
branded themselves indelibly on his mind. The
brotherhood stood firm, through floggings that to
some of their number resulted in death, through
solitary confinement in rank dungeons, through
the infliction of foul air and putrid food, through
the mental torture of harassing judicial inquisitions
where any word might send the speaker or his
friends to their end. Boys, many of them mere
children, were transported in chains to the mines:
others condemned to serve in the ranks of the
Russian army; exiled, like Zan, to Siberia or to
Russia. Mickiewicz himself, after waiting six
months in Wilna when released from prison, was
banished in the first instance to Petersburg.
In 1824 he left the country which he never
saw again, for which he pined with a homesick-
ness that thirty years of poverty and sorrow could
not quench. For the following five years he lived
in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa. His life was
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? POLAND
more or less that of a prisoner at large, watched
by Russian spies, dependent on the pleasure of
the police. Wherever he went, he gained the hearts
of all who knew him. Much as he detested the
system of the Russian autocracy, his soul was too
great and his nature too sweet to harbour any
rancour against a Russian as such. He was bound
by ties of intimate friendship with many a Russian,
and especially with the Liberals and poets. In
future years, from the land of his freedom he sent
them words of mournful remembrance, a farewell
to those who had perished for their ideals, an
impassioned rebuke to others who had abandoned
them {To my Russian Friends).
The galling conditions of his life in Russia
could not stifle his poetic genius, fretted though
it was by its bondage. The Crimean Sonnets, Farys,
which is a wild, glad cry of the desert, Konrad
Wallenrod, which latter placed Mickiewicz among
the great poets of Europe, were all written at this
time. . .
The Crimean Sonnets have for their motive a
journey that the poet took with the Government's
permission in the Crimea. Grief for a lost country
throws the shadow of sorrow even over these
delicate and exquisite vignettes of a southern,
semi-Oriental landscape, painted with the in-
timate knowledge and love of nature that is such
a charming feature in Mickiewicz's poetry. He is
in the steppes:
"Already the night falls fast. There is nowhere
a road or a knoll. I look to the skies and seek for a
guiding star. There, far off, glitters a cloud, there
rises the star of dawn. There the Dniester glitters.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 51
There the lights of Akerman shine. Halt! Ah,
how still! I hear the flight of the cranes which
even the eyes of the hawk reach not. I hear where
the butterfly rocks in the grass; where the snake,
with its slippery breast, lightly brushes a plant. "
And through that silence it is for a voice from
Lithuania that he strains his ear (The Steppes of
Akerman). Among the nightingales, his heart
turns to his native forests and marshes (The
Pilgrim). He stands by the grave of a Polish lady,
dead in Tartar slavery, and the stars that shine
above it point the road to Poland, whither she
gazed, as he gazes, in fruitless yearning. (Potocka's
Grave).
But the epic Konrad Wallenrod ranks above all
else that Mickiewicz wrote in Russia, not only as
a literary achievement, but still more by reason of
its moral significance that gave to Polish psycho-
logy the new word of Wallenrodism. Mickiewicz
published this poem into which he put an exile's
sorrow, the dumb rage of a Samson, in 1828. What
he could not say openly where discovery stood
for Siberia, he said under a tale of the struggle
between Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights.
The poem has thejtrong romantic flavour that
with Byron and Scott had come into vogue in
Mickiewicz's youth. Minstrels, monks, ladies in
towers, are the dramatis personae. Konrad Wallen-
rod is one of the military monks. No one knows
his origin. He has but one confidant in the monk,
Halban. No smile is ever seen on his lips. Some
gloomy mystery envelops him. His prowess in
battle and in the lists raise him to the Grand
Mastership; but instead of carrying war into
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Lithuania he remains passive, allowing the Lith-
uanians to wreak their will upon the territories
of the Order. A feast is held by the Knights; A
minstrel enters--in reality, Halban, disguised.
He sings of a Lithuanian boy whom the
Knights took captive and brought up in their
fortress; who, escaping to his natal country, gave
up for her sake all that he loved, to return and work
revenge upon her enemies by stealth. This is, of
course, Konrad's own history, and the mystery is
explained. He has schemed to gain the Grand
Mastership for patriotic ends, and will use it to
serve Lithuania.
The song of the minstrel has a peculiar pathos.
We realize that it is Mickiewicz's lament for his
exile and for many a Polish boy who would never
more see his home.
The Lithuanian child--Konrad--is carried off
from his father's house by the Knights. He thus
tells his story when in his manhood he has regained
his freedom.
"I know not my race or my name, for, as a
child, I was taken by the Germans into slavery.
Once in the night a loud clamour woke us from
slumber. A dawn of fire flashed in the windows.
The window-panes crashed, clouds of smoke burst
through the building. We ran to the gate. Flames
wreathed through the streets, sparks scattered
like hail. A terrible cry rang out: 'To arms! The
Germans are in the town. To arms! ' My father
rushed out with a weapon, rushed out and returned
no more. The Germans fell on my home. One
carried me off. He tore me away on his horse.
I
know not what happened next. Only I long, long
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 53
heard the shriek of my mother. In the midst of
the clashing of arms, the crash of the houses that
fell, that shriek followed me long, that shriek
rang in my ears. Even now when I see a fire, even
now when I hear a cry, that shriek still wakes in
my sotd. This is all that from Lithuania, that
from my parents, I carried away. Sometimes I
see in my dreams when I sleep the dear forms of
my mother, my father, my brothers; but ever
further away, a mist ever darker, ever denser, has
hidden their features. The years of my childhood
passed on. As a German I lived among Germans.
The name they gave me was German. My Lith-'
uanian soul remained. My grief for my family, ,
my hatred for the aliens, remained.
"Among the Germans there was a Lithuanian
minstrel, taken prisoner years ago. When he knew
that I was an orphan and Lithuanian, he often
lured me to his side. He spoke of Lithuania. He
comforted my yearning soul with the caress and
the music of my native speech and of song. Often
he led me to the banks of the gray Niemen, whence
I loved to gaze towards the dear hills of my fathers.
When we returned to the castle, the old man
dried my tears not to awaken suspicion. He dried
my tears, and inflamed my vengeance against the
Germans. Later, in the years of my youth, I often
went with the old man in a boat down to the
Lithuanian banks. I plucked my native flowers,
and their enchanting scent breathed to my soul
some old and dim remembrance. I was a child
once more, playing with little brothers in the
garden of my parents. "
The minstrel teaches him the love of his native
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land and a thirst for revenge on those who have
wasted it with fire and sword:
"Thou art a slave, and the only weapon of the
slave is treachery. Stay still and learn the art of
warfare from the Germans. Strive to win their
trust to thee. "
He does so, and in the next foray escapes to
Lithuania. Trained by his enemies, he returns in
the course of time to live among them as a traitor,
employing against them the arms they have them-
selves put into his hand.
All this is told at the banquet, where the Knights
suppose that they are listening to some romance,
and only Konrad knows that it is intended as a
spur to rouse him to the action from which his
conscience shrinks. He completes the unfinished
history. He calls the Knights to arms, and leads
them into Lithuania. The inhabitants of the
Order's citadel see from the walls the fires of the
burning villages glowing on the horizon. The
Knights move ever further into the forest fast-
nesses of the enemy. Winter comes on, and still
the watchers wait in vain for the return of the
army. It never returns. A band of stragglers find
their way back, bringing as a prisoner the Grand
Master who has betrayed them to the Lithuanians.
The sentence of death is pronounced upon him.
He refuses to die at the hands of his nation's
to the last in the revenge that he has taken for
the sake of Lithuania.
"Gaze," is his dying cry, "on the thousands
who have perished, on towns in ruins, on homes
in flames. Hear ye the hurricane ? It drives before
and drinks
of poison, exulting
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ
55
it clouds of snow. The remnants of your ranks
freeze there. Hear ye? The troops of hungry-
dogs howl there. They quarrel for the morsels
of the feast. This is my doing, and I glory in it.
As Samson, with one shaking of a pillar, the whole
building I destroy, and perish in the fall. "
"I will live," says Halban at his side, " to keep
the glory of thy deed before the world, to proclaim
it to the ages. I will travel through the hamlets,
the castles and the towns of Lithuania; and
whither I cannot hasten my song will fly. It shall
be as a bard to the knights in battle, and the
mother shall sing it for her children in the home.
She will sing--and some day in the future from
this song shall rise the avenger of our bones. "
Such was the cry of Mickiewicz's captive soul
that, by a feat of strange daring, he uttered under
the eyes of the Russian police. It seems well nigh
incredible that it passed the censor; but it was
only after it had been published a year that the
authorities saw through the allegory. Then a
devoted Russian friend hurried Mickiewicz on a
ship bound to Germany. A few hours later, and
the poet would have been on his way to Siberia.
The term Wallenrodism stands in the Polish
language for duplicity of life, the self-defence by
cunning and treachery that is enforced by oppres-
sion. Yet it is impossible to believe that Mickiewicz
advocated a system of national Machiavellism
that has never, be it said to her honour, found any
favour in the eyes of Poland, or ever formed part
is irreconcilable with the high moral tendency of
Mickiewicz's work for his fellow-Poles, with that
of her programme or methods. Such
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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 Byrojiism 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. f Konrad recoils at the thought of the deed
he is called upon to perpetrate. His conscience
wars against his outraged patriotism. This--its
bearing upon the terrible position of the Polish
nation--is the tragedy of Konrad Wallenrod.
It was in 1829 that Mickiewicz escaped from
Russia. Henceforth he could give his inspiration'
* M. Zdziechowski, Myron and His Age. Cracow, 1897 (Polish).
+ Ibid.
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? ADAM MICK1EWICZ 57
its free and full expression. From 1829 till
1832 he wandered between Germany and Italy.
Wherever he went he was followed by the love
and admiration--the worship almost--of those
who came across him. He appears to have possessed
some extraordinary fascination, a power all his
own of winning hearts. To his great genius he
united a captivating simplicity, a single-hearted
straightness and idealism of aim, a large generosity
in dealing with his fellow men. Splendid as were
his mental gifts, mere intellect had no attraction
in his eyes. The fire of the soul, spiritual insight,
the appeal of the heart, were to him the factors
of life that counted.
Mickiewicz was wintering in Rome when, on
the night of November 29th, 1830, the Polish
Rising broke out. It is said that from the hour
the news reached him he never again knew what
it is to feel lightness of heart. Unlike the majority
of his compatriots, who hailed the war as Poland's
certain liberation, Mickiewicz foresaw the worst.
On the eve of the insurrection, racked by pre-
science of what must and did come, he poured
out his grief in his famous poem To the Polish
Mother.
"Oh, Polish mother! when from thy son's
eyes the light of genius shines; when from his
childish brow the noble pride of the Poles of old
looks forth:
"When, spurning his little band of playmates,
he runs to the aged man who will sing to him his
nation's songs; when with bowed head he listens
to the history of his sires:
"Oh, Polish mother, ill are these pastimes for
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POLAND
thy son. Kneel thou before the image of the
Mother of Dolours, and gaze upon the sword
that has transfixed her bleeding heart. With a
like blow the foe shall pierce thy bosom.
"Because, though all the world shall bloom in
peace; though nations, rulers, minds shall be
at one; thy son is called to battle without glory,
to martyrdom without a resurrection.
"Then bid him early choose for his musing
place a lonely den, where he shall breathe the wet
and rotten air, and share his couch with noxious
reptiles.
"There shall he learn to hide with anger under-
ground, to make his mind impenetrable as a deep
abyss, slowly to poison speech as a putrid exhal-
ation, to bear his cringing form even as a slimy
snake.
"Our Saviour, when a child in Nazareth,
fondled a little cross on which He saved the
world. * Oh, Polish mother! I would fain amuse
thy child with his future playthings.
"So must thou early wreathe his little hands
with chains, bid him be harnessed to the convict's
barrow, so that he shall not pale before the
executioner's hatchet or redden to behold the
hangman's cord.
"For he shall not go as the knights of old to
plant in Jerusalem the victorious cross, nor as the
soldiers of a new world to till the field for freedom
and water the earth with his life's blood.
"His future challenge will be that of an
* The presentment in Italian art of the Blessed Virgin handing
a toy cross to the Divine child, of which Mickiewicz saw many
examples in a journey he took on the Italian coast shortly before
the outbreak of the Rising-, was in part the motive of this poem.
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? ADAM MICKIEWICZ 59
unknown spy. A perjured government will wage
war with him. A secret dungeon will be his
battlefield, and a strong enemy shall pronounce
his doom.
"And to the vanquished shall remain the dry
wood of the gallows for his tombstone, for all his
glory the short weeping of a woman, and the long
night talks of his compatriots. "
Thus did Mickiewicz mourn for his nation.
His sorrow gathers volume till it finds its culmin-
ating point in the unfinished Ancestors. He wrote
it--or rather, he wrote the Third Part--in Dresden,
in 1832. With its strange, ghostly atmosphere of
the Lithuanian feast of the dead that gives its
name to the play, its memories of the comrades
of his youth in the Russian prison, its outburst of
a Pole's despair, it stands among the greatest
creations of national literature.
II
Mickiewicz had written the first, second, and
fourth parts of the Ancestors when a schoolmaster
at Kowno. Steeped in the romantic traditions of
Lithuania, he chose the Lithuanian ghost feast
of which he had heard from his peasant nurse,
and which still lingered here and there in the
countryside during his childhood, as the back-
ground, first, for the poetical version of his dis-
appointment in love, later, for that of his imprison-
ment. Hailing from the days of antiquity, the
ceremony of the Ancestors was held on All Souls'
night in some lonely dwelling adjacent to a
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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 flaming pitch! Ye
who freeze 'neath beds of rivers! Ye who, for more
grievous penance, prisoners in the logs of wood
that the flames gnaw on the stoves, weep and
whistle mournfully ! * Hasten all to this our
meeting! Let us all meet here together. Lo, we
keep the Ancestors. Come ye to the holy precincts.
Here are alms and here are prayers. Here is food
and here is drink. "
He takes a handful of incense from the peasants.
"I will light it. You shall quickly, when the
flamelet shoots on high, drive it with the lightest
breathing. Thus, oh, thus, and further, further.
Let it burn upon the air. "
Then the fluttering of wings breaks through
the darkness and silence. The ghosts float in. First,
two little children who cannot enter Paradise
because they have known no bitterness in life.
The wizard lays upon their lips a bitter grain so
* According-to Polish folk-lore, when the wood on the fire hisses
or seems to wail, it is the voice of a soul fulfilling' there its Purga-
tory and begging' prayers.
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