SIGISMUND KRASINSKI, THE POLISH MYSTIC AND POET.

I

SAIAS lifted up his eyes in prophetic vision and beheld light breaking over the land that was heavily burdened and on the people that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. He saw Jerusalem arising from her bondage, her sons and daughters gathering about her, and the Kings and peoples of the East and West walking in her splendor. Twofold was the inspiration of him whose lips were touched with the coal of divine fire, that of the two most mighty, most passionate emotions of the human heart -religion and patriotism. And under their united and intertwining power, blended mystically, the great Hebrew Vates poured forth his exalted utterance-the noblest poetry, the loftiest prophecy that mankind has ever heard.

What Isaias was to his race, so in his lesser degree to the Polish people was Sigismund Krasinski, the poet-prophet of Poland, who at the price of cruelest suffering, through "the pains of hell and toils of Purgatory," to use his own words, conceived and bore that message not only to his nation, but to every human soul, which wedded to an exquisite diction, glowing with rich harmonies of color and music, has forever placed him in the class of poets who, in Klacko's phrase, have consoled humanity at the cost of their own tears and anguish and heart rendings.1

Krasinski was born of a noble house in 1812 and died in 1858. That is to say, he belonged to that period of his nation's history that was rent with struggle as regards her political life, that brought forth not only Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest Polish, the greatest Slavonic poet, but so noble and so numerous a band of singers, inspired by sorrow, as to be justly reckoned the golden age of Poland's literature. Add to these circumstances that the attitude of Krasinski's father, who had formerly played a distinguished part in the Napoleonic wars, but had since transferred his allegiance to Russia, thereby becoming a bye-word of reproach to the whole nation, darkened all Sigismund's career with a strain of peculiar bitterness. So painful was the dilemma between filial duty and an ardent patriotism that the poet left his country and wandered for the most part abroad in so far as the heavy hand of the Russian government permitted his movements. Racked by bodily ill health, consumed by melancholy and torn with mental sufferings, the "Anonymous Poet," for such was the cognomen under which Krasinski always wrote, consecrated his sad life to framing the 1 Causeries Florentines par Julian Klaczko.

poetry of love and sacrifice and sorrow by which he was fain to open a way of light to Poland in the depths of her dejection.

We should remember that at the time that first saw Krasinski taking his place in the ranks of the Polish writers, namely, from 1833 upwards, the life of the nation was dependent on her poets to a degree unprecedented in any history save that of ancient Greece.2

Mondes, Jan. 1, 1862.

The poets led the nation. It was their strains that, written for the most part by exiles and emigrants, smuggled into Poland as Klaczko has so vividly described, devoured by the Polish youth at dead of night behind bolts and bars, with one of their number acting as sentry to give the alarm and knowing all too well that discovery meant imprisonment and Siberia. It was their strains that taught the nation her history, aims and ideals that could be learnt in no other manner under the iron rule of Nicholas I. Under overwhelming difficulties to both reader and writer, the Polish poets carried out the vocation they held so sacred and inculcated the stern lessons of patriotism and self-devotion, all illumined, glorified, etherealized by the unearthly light of that form of Polish mysticism which is known as Mesyanism and which touches its highest level in the work of Krasinski, the most purely spiritual of its exponents.

Weighed down by the misery of their nation, the Polish poets devoted their genius to discovering some theory that might not only explain the working of Providence in the present, but that should give to the nation cut off from all active life another sphere of action, a reason for her being, an object of endeavor, and thus prevent the moral decay that by the very nature of things must result from a paralyzed and hopeless existence. Intense suffering, said they, is sent as a direct preparation to some special calling. The Via Dolorosa leads at last to the glory of the Resurrection. Poland, therefore, has passed through the furnace till, purified by its fires, she reaches a great moral regeneration when she will take the leadership of Christian and more especially of Slavonic nations, and initiate the spiritual revolution of the universe which will behold all governments united in Christ and ruling in Christ. Such, roughly speaking, is the fundamental doctrine of Mesyanism in its purest form, and it inspired the Polish nation with a literature which for artistic beauty, passionate religious feeling and deep pathetic power ranks with the finest productions of European letters.

To races more materialistic than the Slav the theory of Mesyanism might at first sight appear too unreal to be taken seriously. But if we lay aside all preconceived ideas and consider the question from an exclusively Polish standpoint, we shall see how admirably 2 Julian Klaczko, "Le Poéte Anonyme de la Pologne," Revue des Deux 3 Ibid.

adapted this spiritual nationalism was to the moral conditions of Poland at the height of her suffering. On one side we have an enthusiastic and a high-spirited people, with a glorious past behind them, bowed down beneath an intolerable present; a people who have always clung passionately to their faith and nationality and to their rich language; a people, moreover, of a peculiarly mystic tendency of mind. It was to save and to console this nation, withheld from leading the most ordinary life of the Commonwealth, galled by language prohibitions, by a press censorship of the most rigorous description, by the secret police, by imprisonment, by banishment to the mines, oppressed, in short, by all the Asiatic methods of a rule determined to crush every vestige of Polish nationality-it was to this nation that the Polish poets preached Mesyanism.

He saw

Such were the conditions under which Krasinski wrote. his nation an outcast, ravaged by the two great banes of a conquered race-internal factions and temptation to revenge. To the calling, then, of showing Poland her one way of salvation Krasinski gave his life and genius. Gradually, painfully, through disappointment, weariness, perplexity, after a terrible wandering in God-forsaken spiritual darkness, did he learn and proclaim that truth so vital to the very life of a subject people: that the nation that would save herself by hatred and ignoble means must surely perish, for love is the one creating power and suffering the one road not only of redemption, but of glory. Suffering in Krasinski's scheme is the great moral regenerator of the universe and of the individual. It is the road by which humanity, as he says in the "Psalm of Faith," must travel back to its "Father's city." By personal martyrdom shall salvation be procured for others. In his "Psalm of Good Will" he thanks God for His greatest gifts, namely, a pure life, "therefore worthy of the Cross," and the Cross itself, "but such as brings us to Thy stars." He sang in the "Psalm of Love" of man rising Phoenix-like from sin, new-born by pain. He taught the soaring of the soul through suffering to heights of spiritual grandeur unknown to those who walk the paths of pleasantness. The might of sacrifice, he said, is the great strength of the world, stronger than fate itself.

This message he addressed to his country now in the form of allegory, a method largely used at that period of Polish literature for the sake of safety; again, as in his great lyric "Dawn," in the shape of visions, mystical and ecstatic, of the spiritual restoration of Poland; and yet again in the "Psalms of the Future" it became a pointed warning in the particular dangers to which Poland was exposed. But intensely national as Krasinski is, it must not be

imagined that he is any less a poet for all humanity than any of those great figures whose inspiration has become the lawful heritage and the beacon-light of the struggling human race. Dante has said that every work of serious purpose must not only be understood in a literal sense, but in that of allegory also. So spiritual is Krasinski's presentment of the moral struggle and victory of his nation, so peculiarly closely does it touch in many points the story of the travail and temptation of each interior life that as in the pages of Isaias the voice of Sion is the cry of the human soul, "Surge illuminare Jerusalem," the high-water mark of a national and individual mysticism, so we cannot doubt that even in those passages where Krasinski does not deal directly with the particular spirit, but with the sorrow, combat and triumph of Poland, Poland stands as a type not only of the grief, temptation and victory of every child of Eve, but of his own storm-swept heart. For he exacted of his countrymen nothing that he himself had not given. His battle was gained hardly. Needs must be for the soul to wander in exceeding anguish through dark and desolate places without finding any rest till its new life is born at the price of its bitterest pangs. As Dante to reach the Empyrean went down into the pit of never-ending dole, so the great Polish poet only won to peace after he had wrestled long with a spiritual agony, stamped deep, indelibly branded on every line he wrote.

In Krasinski's days the lives of the Polish poets were interwoven with the national history in a peculiar manner. We can, in fact, best realize the agonies of Poland in the terrible years succeeding the hapless Rising of 1830 from the poetry of that period. Hardly could there exist a sadder literature. It is one cry of passionate grief, written, as a Polish author words it, "in tears and blood," revolutionized by a nation's mourning. It was the sufferings of Poland that drove the great Mickiewicz and many another of Poland's most gifted sons into the labyrinths of a strange illusory religious creed, where in the very flower of his splendid genius the magnificent poet of the Lithuanian forests was lost for the rest of his life to Polish literature. It was beneath their weight that, as we shall see, Krasinski sank before he rose redeemed to sing salvation to his people.

It was amidst pain and anguish of no ordinary degree that Krasinski turned his weary eyes to a dream country, pure, beautiful, spiritualized. "My country," he says in "Dawn," "is not to me a home, a country, but is both faith and truth;" in other words, his ideal and something like a religion. And his vision soars far beyond that of an individual nation and her resurrection. He sees before his prophetic gaze the day-spring of humanity-the new

world of which he sings in "Dawn," where there is one God, one love, no sin or bloodshed, the explanation of the long riddle of pain and temptation-ushered in by his nation's suffering. That became Krasinski's one dream. He and his countrymen had no earthly nation; then they should have one, raised to heights of spiritual glory if-and here enters his grave condition-if the nation by heroic bearing of her sorrows, by preserving her shield free from stain, should prove herself worthy of her great destiny. This exalted aspiration, to be realized only by ceaseless and painful striving, at once raises Krasinski to the rank of the great mystic teacher of his people. To a mind that like his could conceive such a mission for his race and so noble an outcome to pain, every national sin and moral weakness would be in the highest degree abhorrent and a direct apostasy from the appointed vocation. Here, then, we have the key to Krasinski's loathing of evil means wherewith to purchase good, to his horror of revenge and violence. Against these he lifted up his voice as long as speech was in him. His nation was to conquer by virtue alone. In his "Psalm of Love" he laments that black thoughts are born of fetters and declares that the torments of Siberia and the barbaric knout pale before those of a "poisoned mind," which he calls the "sorrow of sorrows" of an oppressed people. Hence follows the motive of his great prose drama, "Irydion."

"Irydion" was written in 1836, while Poland was groaning beneath the vengeance of Nicholas I. for the Rising of 1830. Hatred begets hatred, and Krasinski, seeing his nation's peril, sent forth his earnest warning under the figures of the struggle between subject Greece and Rome.

Irydion is the son of a Greek and of a Scandinavian priestess. Nursed on hatred of Rome, brought up from his cradle to the destiny of the avenger, he and his evil genius, Masynissa (in reality Mephistopheles), carry on the plot by their united scheming. No consideration save his enemy's fall is sacred to Irydion's soul; no means to this end too ignoble to employ. Torn by anguish, but relentless to her tears for mercy, he sacrifices his sister's honor to Heliogabalus, thereby working on the fears of the craven Emperor till he is completely in the traitor's power. He successfully undermines the loyalty of the Pretorians; he gathers together the fierce barbarian bands, thirsting for blood. So far all has played into his hands, but the crucial test now comes. Masynissa tells him that the whole enterprise depends on the adhesion of the Christians. Irydion therefore goes down into the Catacombs. There he receives a feigned baptism and afterwards proceeds to dupe in a manner peculiarly offensive to Christian feeling the maiden, Cor