Adam Mickiewicz

“ I will not call this work a fantastic Drama, although it is now customary to give this name to all compositions in which the characters and scenes are not immediately derived from the world of prosaic reality. Utility and Reality are indeed the boast of our century; but what can be more variable, more contingent, than what we choose to call solid reality,—that visible and material world which is ever on the wing, which is always yet to be, and which has no Present? It is through the soul alone that we are able to seize the connections and relations of the visible world ”

“ In the scene which occurs in bedlam, we find the key which admits us to the meaning of much of the symbolism of this drama. We accompany the husband into the mad-house to visit the broken-hearted wife, and are there introduced into our still-existing society,—formal, monotonous, cold, and about to be dissolved. Our hero had married the Past, a good and devout woman, but not the realization of his poetic dreams, which nothing could have satisfied save the infinite. In the midst of this strange scene of suffering, we hear the cries of the Future, and ail is terror and tumult. ”

“ The poet-hero aspires for the Future; it disappoints him;—he then grasps the dying Past, because, as he himself says, "God has enlightened his reason, but not warmed his heart." His thoughts and feelings cannot be brought into harmony. The tortures and agonies of struggling with pressing but insoluble questions are not manifested in artistic declamations, in highly-wrought phrases, nor in glowing rhetorical passages proper for citation. The Drama is as prosaic and bitter as life itself ”

“ Thus the words once heard by the shepherds, and which then announced a new epoch to humanity, open the Drama. They are words spoken only to men of good will,—men who sincerely seek the truth,—who, in great or new epochs, are able to comprehend it, or willing to embrace it. The number of those who have preserved a heart during the excited passions of such eras is always very small, and without it they cannot be saved, for love and self-abnegation are the essence of Christianity. ”

“ As if driven to the desert to be tempted, we again meet our hero in the midst of storm and tempest, wildly communing with Nature, trying to read in her changeful phenomena lessons he should have sought in the depths of his own soul ”

“ While the anguished father tries to penetrate the decrees of Providence, and in his agony demands from God how the innocent and helpless infant can have deserved a punishment so dreadful as the loss of sight, the doctor admires the strength of the nerves and muscles of the blue eyes of the fair child, at the same time pedantically announcing to his father that he is struck with total and hopeless blindness! ”

“ A true and pure character, feeling its inferiority, and anxious to advance, cannot long remain in the background; it has sufficient power to attain the height of self-abnegating greatness. God sometimes deprives men of the strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of progress, of spiritual elevation. Meanness and groveling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it: thus all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes really needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval root of baseness. ”

“ It is so concise that our hearts actually long for more, unwilling to believe in the reality of the doom of that ghostly tribunal. It repeats the awful lessons of Holy Writ, and our conscience awakes to our own deficiencies, while the marrow freezes in our bones as we read. ”

“ The love and deification of self in the delusive show of military and political glory is the lowest and last temptation into which a noble soul can fall, for individual fame is preferred to God's eternal justice, and men are willing to die, if only laurel-crowned, with joy and pride even in a bad cause. ”

“ From it we gather that despotism does not consist in the fact of the whole power being vested in the hands of one or many, but in the fact that the government is without love for the governed, whatever may be its constitutional form. One or many, an assembly of legislators or a king, an oligarchy or a mob, may be equally despotic, if Love be not the ruling principle! ”

“ Baffled in a consuming desire to solve the perplexing social and religious problems of the day by the force of his own intellect; longing for, yet despairing of, human progress; discerning the impracticability and chicanery of most of the modern plans for social amelioration; finding nowhere his ideal; he determines to throw himself into common life,—to bind himself to his race by stringent laws and duties. ”

“ Belonging to the Future by the very essence of his being, he becomes disgusted with the debasing materialism into which its exponents, the new men, have fallen; he then loses all hope in the possible progress of humanity, and is soon presented to us as the champion of the dying but poetic Past. ”

“ The nobles, the representatives of the Past, with their few surviving adherents, have taken refuge in their last stronghold, the fortress of the Holy Trinity, securely situated upon a high and rocky peak overhanging a deep valley, surrounded and hedged in by steep cliffs and rocky precipices. ”

“ There are no highly-wrought amplifications of imaginative passions to be found in its condensed pages, but every word is in itself a drop of gall, reflecting from its sphered surface a world of grief,—of voiceless agony! ”

“ Flitting rapidly o'er our field of vision, they leave us but a few lines; but so true are the lines to nature, so deeply significant, that we are at once able to produce from the shifting and evanescent shadows a complete and rounded image. ”

“ As wild an inundation is now upon them, for the valley is almost filled with the living surges of the myriads of the "New Men," who are rolling their millions into its depths. But everything is hidden from view by an ocean of heavy vapor, wrapping the whole landscape in its white, chill, clinging shroud. ”

“ Like the springs of a volcanic mountain, which are always disturbed before an eruption of fire, their cries break upon us; the broken words and shrill shrieks of the madmen are the clouds of murky smoke which burst from the explosive craters before the lava pours forth its burning flood. ”

“ Is it not a profound truth that in the real world also mental encounters always precede material combats; that men always measure their strength, spirit to spirit, before they meet in external fact, body to body? ”

“ The details of the struggle, which must have been long and dreadful, are not given to us; they are to be divined. Several years are supposed to have passed between the end of the second and the beginning of the third part; and we are called to witness the triumphs of the victors, and the tortures of the vanquished. The character of the "idol of the people" is an admirable conception. All that is negative and destructive in the revolutionary tendencies of European society is skillfully seized upon and incarnated in a single individual. ”

“ He then recounts to him the scenes which are passing before his open vision among the dead. The spirits of those who had been chained, tortured, oppressed, or victimized by his ancestors appear before him, complaining of past cruelties. They form a mystic tribunal to try their old masters and oppressors; the scenes of the dreadful Day of Judgment pass before him; the awe-struck and loving boy at last recognizes his own father among the criminals ”

“ A feeling of this nature urges Pancras to seek an interview with his most powerful enemy, the Count; he is anxious to gain the confidence of his adversary, because he cannot feel certain of his own course while a single man of intellectual power exists capable of resisting his ideas. ”

“ He possesses a great intellect, but no heart. He says: "Of the blood we shed to-day, no trace will be left to-morrow." In corroboration of this conception of the character of a modern reformer, it is well known that most of the projected reforms of the present century have proceeded from the brains of logicians and philosophers. ”

“ Voices from the right, from the left, from above, from below, represent the conflicting religious opinions and warring political parties of this dawning Future, already hurtling against those of the dissolving Present. ”

“ Even at the epoch of his greatest power, Robespierre was greatly annoyed because he could not convince his cook of the justice and permanence of his authority. Men who are sent by Providence only to destroy, feel within them the worm w^hich gnaws forever: it constantly predicts to them, in vague but gloomy presentiments, their own approaching destruction. ”

“ It opens to us the strange secrets of the irresolution and vacillation which have always characterized the men who have been called upon by fate alone to undertake vast achievements. In proof of this, it is well known that Cromwell was anxious to conceal the doubts and fears which constantly harassed him. ”

“ As he is acting from false principles, he cannot deceive himself into that enthusiastic faith with which he would fain inspire his disciples. He confides in Leonard because he is in possession of that precious quality. ”