Władysław Mickiewicz

“ Applying these conclusions to the situation forced upon his country, the Poet teaches her that hate is death to the spirit, and always strikes it with impotence.
To struggle without relaxation is an absolute necessity, and he desires and urges it; but let it be a constant combat of good against evil, of light with darkness; let the love of God and man guide and support it, for such love is the pledge of victory! ”

“ Through poetry alone could he popularize his conceptions by preserving their precision in the frame of an exquisite, imperishable, and easily-retained form: poetry is also the delight of the nation, whose woes are cradled in its magic, and whose soul palpitates in its divine accents, its lyric enchantment. Therefore he bowed his genius to the exactions of rhyme and rhythm. ”

“ All was peril without and confusion within; society was crumbling into ashes, and there was nothing to sustain it save the imperial power, formidable for all who feared it, but weak for those who defied it. Iridion found everywhere fit instruments of vengeance; he oppressed with the oppressors, and conspired with the conspirators. His indomitable energy urged on the conspiring and antagonistic elements to a gigantic and decisive struggle, which he intended should terminate in their mutual destruction. ”

“ The onward path which in their free progress leads men to good, is the Good itself, and it alone, in which, according to the noble words of the Poet, all wisdom is contained! Upon the perfecting of virtue and on its reign depend our salvation in this world and in the next. ”

“ Without an ardent desire that equal justice may be meted out to all, without Christian forgiveness and moral superiority, he sees only champions of passion, or base gladiators in the wide arena.
The future of Poland looms magnificently before him; she is to resume her existence in the reconciliation of extremes and antagonisms, in a reign of peace and happiness. ”

“ Alas! hours of like prostration occur in the history of most nations; hours of gloom and despair, when all that is still living lives only in the feeling of impotence and utter nothingness! Such terrible trials are inevitable in the course of time;—probations which decide upon the life or death of a people, as it shall triumph over its despair or abandon itself to torpor! ”

“ But this victory was necessary to demonstrate that in any struggle undertaken only with the arms of hate, the advantage is always assured to blind force. A still deeper design is also manifest. The defeat of Pancras by Count Henry would have only resulted in the glorification of the genius of man; and the intervention of the divine symbol, instead of originating an instantaneous reaction, would but have strengthened the pride of Count Henry, in such case, invincible. Now neither pride, nor genius, are the supreme arbiters of human destinies! ”

“ If he believes in the cause which he defends, it is because he believes in himself, and when he is defeated, he despairs and rushes into suicide. He kills himself at the very moment that the God of Life has chosen to reveal Himself in the most striking manner to the conscience of the Peoples!
A feeling of astonishment is at first created by the fact that our author gives the victory to Pancras, the cynic and scorner, the unyielding antagonist of the truth whose triumph is announced. ”

“ That the nationalities are really collective individuals, that each one has its part to play in the destiny of this world, and that the lesson to be taught by Poland is the guidance of governments by principles of abstract justice and duty, are favorite themes with the Anonymous Poet. He regards a nation as an entity differing from a merely politically constituted State; the one being merely a human, the other a divine idea founded in the very nature of things. ”

“ They cling to a firm belief in the Resurrection of their Country, but no more than the patriotic feeling which engenders it is this faith confined to themselves, for however irreconcilable it may seem with the actual fate of Poland, it is, nevertheless, found in all Polish souls impressed by an internal conviction far more powerful than the external evidence of the moment. ”

“ It is the duty of nations to translate the designs of God into the world of fact; to incarnate them, to make them useful to the entire humanity. Such should be their aim and the purpose of their existence. Should they fail to fulfill their mission, should they betray it, they must perish as nations; but if they struggle for the truth, material. force alone will not be able to repress their development; their spirit must at last prevail, and they will rise into a higher life. ”

“ So entirely would such a deduction be contrary to fact, that it is precisely through the intuitions of her poetical genius that the close union of the West and Poland—perhaps indeed the dependence of their mutual destiny—is most clearly revealed, the moral and intellectual life which animates both springing from the same sources, and the whole social organism being governed by the same necessities. The works of the Anonymous Poet bear the frequent stamp of this truth. They are full of important lessons even for the most prosperous peoples. ”

“ Is it not indeed truly surprising to see this People, which, in the day of its greatest prosperity, and two centuries before its fall, had the fatal foreknowledge of that fall, affirm with the same certainty, now when its ruin is consummated, its approaching resurrection? ”

“ But the passions of men were already unloosed, and nothing could arrest them. They found even an apologist in a man of genius and a rival of our Poet, who replied to him in poetic tones—a mingling of biblical prophecy and zealous polemics—"that all progress must be bought by blood, and that God renewed the face of humanity as He did that of the earth, by a series of deluges!" The contest of the two poets retains its celebrity among the literary glories of Poland, and we will find its last echo in the final scene of "The Fragment," which was not published until after the death of the author. ”

“ A single force refused to be made use of to serve the hatred of Greece: the persecuted Christianity, which repelled all violence, and placed its sole hope in spiritual arms. Astonished at a resistance which he could not understand, he at first sought to subdue it, but, growing irritated, he moved too rapidly, and precipitated events. ”

“ Humanity, in "The Undivine Comedy," Is severed into two camps, under the leadership of two chiefs, Count Henry and Pancras. Irreconcilable enemies, both having issued from a like critical spirit, the one repels the Future, the other the Past. ”

“ Iridion is a type of the man of antiquity in deadly combat with Fate. The descendant of an illustrious family, which had fought to the last for the independence of Greece, he only lived to pursue victorious Rome with the implacable enmity which had been enjoined upon him by his ancestors. To aid him in the superhuman task to which he had been consecrated from infancy, the intense hate of several generations had been occupied in gathering mighty resources for the hour of struggle. ”

“ Pancras is the personification of human reason, which deifies itself in its own essence, and believes only in finite calculation,—in action as the result of the power of numbers. Count Henry also personifies human reason, which glorifies itself, in his case, in his own individuality, denying all general laws, and, as a rule of conduct, bowing only to his individual fancies. ”

“ Triple and one, identical in its terms which cannot be separated, cause, means, and effect, that good is origin and life, divine order and immortality, for it is the universal bond which links the Spirit of every being to the Spirit of God. ”

“ In the very moment in which accumulated disasters bore his country to the earth, and the wretchedness of slavery consumed it like a leprosy, not suffering himself to be shaken by its apparent decomposition and death, and looking far into the future, he points out how everything is preparing for and aiding in the Advent of Eternal Justice. ”

“ These radicals, while holding up the foreign usurpers to the indignation of the people, also doomed the higher classes of the Polish nation as accomplices in an oppression from which they, however, had been the first to suffer. ”

“ Uniting in the name of their resentments, men often move together in the path of their own interests. Hatred, the savage sentiment of individual egotism, although it may be strong enough to unite men in a common action, is not sufficiently powerful when it becomes necessary to exact obedience from them! ”

“ It proceeds in its manifestations by order, harmony, love, and union, and is the woof in the work of the universe which, in the divine loom. supports and unites the infinite threads of Creation:—threads which all move under its direction, and weft, to which every human effort must be attached, if fertile or imperishable results are to be evolved. Whosoever works otherwise, builds upon the sands; striving to annul the labors of the centuries, he can found nothing true, real, or absolute ”

“ At least the poets have so understood it, and, confiding in this intuition, they have, in the absence of a terrestrial country, created an ideal one, the admission into which is only to be won by devotion and virtue. ”

“ Is to have noble aspirations and a flame divine."
Thus the aim of the Polish poets was essentially national, but it would be a great error to deduce from this that the absorption of the genius of Poland in the sad mysteries of its own existence ever rendered it a stranger to the thoughts and interests of the West. ”