The Undivine Comedy, and Other Poems/Analysis of the Undivine Comedy
ANALYSIS OF THE UNDIVINE COMEDY.
[In this very remarkable work, by Adam Mickiewicz, written in French, and which, by some strange oversight, has not yet appeared in English, no less than four lectures are devoted to a criticism upon "The Undivine (or Infernal) Comedy." The Essay of Julian Klaczko has been found so long and exhaustive, that it is the intention of the Translator to give but a few condensed extracts from the analysis of Mickiewicz. The whole course of Lectures is recommended to the reader, as full of information not elsewhere to be found; and, although in the latter portion somewhat blemished by the elaboration of certain futile theories, containing a mine of brilliant, deep, and highly original thoughts.—Translator.]
The word "Undivine" is used in preference to "Infernal" (the term employed in the French translation) as better expressing the relation of the drama to the "Divine Comedy" of Dante. The word is so appropriate that its coinage may be pardoned.—Editor.
It is my intention now to place before you the analysis of a very remarkable work which appeared in 1834, entitled "The Undivine or Infernal Comedy."
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; it alone gives them fixity or reality; it alone generates ideas, institutions, literature,—the only things truly real, the only things which penetrate the soul, become incorporated with it, and constitute the living traditions of the human race. Every work which causes the chords of souls to vibrate, which generates new views of life, must be considered real; and foreign writers render but justice to Polish Poetry in declaring it, so regarded, as very real;—and there is nothing more palpitating in its strange actuality than the work we are now about to consider.
The time, the place, the characters of "The Undivine Comedy" are all of poetic creation. The scene of the drama is laid in the future; and, for the first time in the history of art, an author has attempted to construct a prophetic play,—to describe places, introduce persons, recount actions which are yet to be. The struggle of the dying Past with the vigorous but immature Future forms the groundwork of the drama. The coloring is not local nor characteristic of any country in particular (though we recognize it to be Polish by the melancholy contrast felt rather than seen between the state of the nation and that of the individuals who compose it), because the truths to be illustrated are of universal application, and are evolving their own solution in all parts of the civilized world.
The soul of the hero. Count Henry, is great and vigorous; he is by nature a poet. 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. But in this he finds no rest, and is involved in perpetual struggles and contradictions. 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. The drama opens when he is about to contract marriage. The Angels desire to aid him, to open a way into the Future for him through the accomplishment of his duties; the Demons tempt him to embrace falsehood.
Voice of the Guardian Angel. "Peace be to men of good will! Blessed
is the man who has still a heart: he may yet be saved!
Pure and true wife, reveal thyself to him! And a child be born to their
House!"
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.
To instill new life and hope into the disappointed man, the Angel ordains that a pure and good woman shall join her fate with his, and that innocent young souls shall descend and dwell with them. Domestic love and quiet bliss are the counsel of the heavenly visitant.
Immediately after the chant of the Angel, the voice of the Demon is heard seducing the Count from the safe path of humble human duties. The glories of the ideal realm are spread before him; Nature is invoked with all her entrancing charms; ambitious desires of terrestrial greatness are awakened in his soul; he is filled with vague hopes of paradisiacal happiness, which the Demon whispers him it is quite possible to establish on earth. In the temptations so cunningly set before him by the Father of Lies, three widely-spread metaphysical systems are shadowed forth: 1st. The Ideal or Poetic; 2d. The Pantheistic; 3d. The Anthropotheistic, which deifies man. The vast symbolism of this drama is recommended to the attention of the reader.
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Abiding by the counsel of the Angel, our hero marries, thus involving another in his fate. He makes a solemn vow to be faithful, in the keeping of which vow he takes upon himself the responsibility of the happiness of one of God's creatures, a pure and trusting woman, who loves him well. A husband and a father, he breaks his oath. Tempted by the phantom of a long-lost love,—the Ideal under the form of a maiden,—he deserts the real duties he has assumed to pursue this Ideal,—personated indeed by Lucifer himself, and which becomes—true and fearful lesson for those who seek the infinite in the finite—a loathsome skeleton as soon as grasped! From the false and disappointing search into which he had been enticed by the Demon, he returned to find the innocent wife, whom he had deserted, in a mad-house. False to human duties, his punishment came fast upon the heels of crime.
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. This future, with its turbulence, blood, and demonism, is represented as existing in its germs among the maniacs. 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. 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.
Into this pandemonium, by his desertion of her for a vain ideal, our hero has plunged his wife, the woman of the Past, whom he had sworn to make happy. It is to be observed that she was not necessarily his inferior, but. in the world of heart, superior to himself. 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.
An admirable picture of an exhausted and dying society is given us in the person of the precocious, but decrepit child; the sole fruit of this sad marriage. Destined from its birth to an early grave, its excitable imagination soon consumes its frail body. Nothing could be more exquisitely tender, more true to nature, than the portraiture of this unfortunate but lovely boy.
After the betrayal of our hero by his Ideal, the Guardian Angel again appears to him to give him simple but sage counsel:
"Return to thy house, and sin no more!
Return to thy house, and love thy child!"
But vain this wise advice! 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; seeking from her dumb lips oracles to be found only in the fulfillment of sacred duties; for thus alone is to be solved the perplexing riddle of human destiny,—"Peace to men of good will." Roaming through the wilderness, sad and hopeless, and in his despair about to fall into the gloomy and blighting sin of caring for no one but himself, he hears the angel, who once more chants to him the divine lesson that only in self-sacrificing love and lowly duties can the true path to the Future be found:
"Love the sick, the hungry, the despairing!
Love thy neighbor, thy poor neighbor, as thyself, and thou wilt be
redeemed!"
In the third part of the comedy we are introduced into the "new world." The old world, with its customs, prejudices, oppressions, charities, laws, has been almost destroyed. 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. His mission is to destroy. 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.
This man of intellect succeeds in grasping power. His appearance speaks his character. His forehead is high and angular, his head is entirely bald, his expression cold and impassible, his lips never smile,—he is of the same type as many of the revolutionary leaders during the French reign of terror. His name is Pancras, which name, from the Greek, signifies the union of all material or brute forces. It is not by cliance he received that name. The profound truth in which this character is conceived is also manifested in his distrust of himself, in his hesitation. 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.
His monologue is very fine; perhaps it stands next in rank to that of Hamlet. 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. It was those very doubts and fears which led him to see and re-see so frequently the dethroned Charles, and which at last drove the conscience-stricken Puritan into the sepulchre of the decapitated king, that he might gaze into the still face of the royal victim whose death he had himself effected. Did the sad face of the dead calm the fears of the living?
It is well known that Danton addressed to himself the most dreadful reproaches. 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.
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. In the interview which occurs between the two antagonistic leaders of the Past and Future, the various questions which divide society, literature, religion, philosophy, politics, are discussed. 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 idea of bringing two vast systems face to face through living and highly dramatic personifications is truly great, suggestive, and original.
But as the Truth is neither in the camp of Pancras nor in the feudal castle of the Count our hero, the victory will profit neither party!
The opening of the last act is exceedingly beautiful. No painter could reproduce on canvas the sublime scenery sketched in its prologue; more gloomy than the pictures of Ruysdael, darker than those of Salvator Rosa. Before describing the inundation of the masses, our author naturally recalls the traditions of the Flood. 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. Through these straits and passes once howled and swept the waters of the deluge. 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. The last and only banner of the Cross now raised upon the face of the earth streams from the highest tower of the Castle of the Holy Trinity; it alone pierces through and floats above the cold, vague, rayless heart of the sea of mist,—naught save the mystic symbol of God's love to man soars into the unclouded blue of the infinite sky!
After frequent defeats, after the loss of all hope, the hero, wishing to embrace for the last time his sick and blind son, sends for the precocious boy, whose death-hour is to strike before his own. I doubt if the scene which then occurs has, in the whole range of fiction and poetry, ever been surpassed. This poor boy, the son of an insane mother and a poet-father, is gifted with supernatural faculties, with second or spiritual sight. Entirely blind, consequently surrounded by perpetual darkness, it mattered not to him if the light of day or the gloom of midnight was upon the earth; and in his rayless wanderings he had made his way into the dungeons, sepulchres, and vaults which were lying far below the foundations of the castle, and which had for centuries served as places of torture, punishment, and death for the enemies of his long and noble line. In these secret charnel-houses were buried the bodies of the oppressed, while in the haughty tombs around and above them lay the bones of their oppressors. The unfortunate and fragile boy, the last scion of a long line of ancestry, had there met the thronging and complaining ghosts of past generations. Burdened with these dreadful secrets, when his vanquished father seeks him to embrace him for the last time, he shudderingly hints to him of fearful knowledge, and induces him to follow him into the subterranean caverns. 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; he is dragged to that fatal bar, he sees him wring his hands in anguish, he hears his dreadful groans as he is given over to the fiends for torture,—he hears his mother's voice calling him above, but, unwilling to desert his father in his anguish, he falls to the earth in a deep and long fainting fit, while the wretched father hears his own doom pronounced by that dread but unseen tribunal: "Because thou hast loved nothing but thyself, revered nothing but thyself and thine own thoughts, thou art damned to all eternity!"
It is true this scene is very brief, but, rapid as the lightning's flash, it lasts long enough to scathe and blast; — breaking the darkness but to show the surrounding horror, to deepen into despair the fearful gloom. Although of bald and severe simplicity, it is sublime and terrible. 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.
Nor is the close of the drama less sublime. Because the Truth was neither in the camp of Pancras nor in the Castle of the Count, IT appears in the clouds to confound them both.
After Pancras has conquered all that has opposed him—has triumphantly gloated over his Fourieristic schemes for the material well being of the race whom he has robbed of all higher faith—he grows agitated at the very name of God when it falls from the lips of his confidant, Leonard: the sound seems to awaken him to a consciousness that he is standing in a sea of blood, which he has himself shed; he feels that he has been nothing but an instrument of destruction, that he has done certain evil for a most uncertain good. All this rushes rapidly upon him, when, on the bosom of a crimson sunset cloud, he perceives a mystic symbol, unseen save by himself: "The extended arms are lightning flashes; the three nails shine like stars,"—his eyes die out as he gazes upon it,—he falls dead to the earth, crying, in the strange words spoken by the apostate Emperor Julian with his parting breath, "Vicisti Galilæe!" Thus this grand and complex drama is really consecrated to the glory of the Galilean!
Nothing more intensely melancholy than this poem has ever been written. The author could only have been born in a country desolated for ages! Therefore this drama is eminently Polish. The grief is too bitter to express itself oratorically. Its hopeless perplexity of woe has also its root in the character and depth of the truths therein developed. 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; as gloomy as death and judgment! The style is one of utter, nay, bald, simplicity. The situations are merely indicated; and the characters are to be divined, as are those of the living, rather from a few words in close connection with accompanying facts, than from eloquent utterances, sharp invectives, or bitter complaints. 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!
The characters are not fleshed into life; they pass before us like shadows thrown from a magic lantern, showing only their profiles, and but rarely their entire forms. 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. Thus we are enabled to form a vivid conception of all who figure in these pages; we know the history of their i)ast, we divine the part they will play in the future. We know the friends; the stilted godfather with his stereotyped speeches; the priest, in whom we recognize an admirable sketch, the original of which could only be found in a decomposed and dying society.
Our author also stigmatizes the medical art of our day as a science of death and moral torture. 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! Immediately after the annunciation of this fearful sentence, he turns to the distressed parent to ask him if he would like to know the name of this malady,—that in Greek it is called αμαυρωσις.
Through the whole of this melancholy scene, only one human being manifests any deep moral feeling—a woman: a servant! Falling upon her knees, she prays the Holy Virgin to take her eyes, and place them in the sightless sockets of the young heir, her fragile but deeply-loved charge! Thus it is a woman of the people who, in the midst of the corrupt and dying society, alone preserves the sacred traditions of sympathy and self-sacrifice.
The cruel tyranny of Pancras and the mob is also full of important lessons. 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!