Arriving in Germany in 1829, Mickiewicz travelled through Switzerland to Italy. His residence in Rome, with its sacred associations, and the meeting with new friends of a deeply religious temperament, brought about within him a new birth of Catholic faith that [pg xii] strongly affected bis later writings, notably Pan Tadeusz. In Rome also he became intimate with the family of the rich Count Ankwicz, for whose daughter Eva he conceived an affection that is reflected in the passion of Jacek Soplica for the Pantler's only child. On the outbreak of the insurrection in Warsaw, at the end of the year 1830, the poet meditated returning home to join the national forces; but he delayed his departure, and never came nearer the scene of action than Posen and its vicinity. The grief and discouragement caused by the failure of the insurrection, instead of crippling Mickiewicz's powers, seemed to spur him on to new activity. During 1833 he wrote a continuation of The Forefathers, in an entirely different tone from that of his youthful poem of ten years before. The action is based on the persecution by the Russian authorities of the Polish students in Wilno; the lovelorn Gustaw of the earlier poem is transformed into the patriotic martyr Konrad. In this same year he settled in Paris, along with many other Polish exiles or “emigrants,” who were made homeless by the downfall of the national cause, and who, if the truth be said, were split up into bitterly hostile factions. Mickiewicz was now beginning to assume the role of prophet and seer. For the reproof and instruction of his fellow-countrymen he composed his Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrimage, a mystical work, written in biblical prose, and intended to bring comfort and harmony to the distracted exiles. In Paris also, in the course of about fourteen months (1832-34), he wrote Pan Tadeusz, his greatest poem—and (with insignificant exceptions) his last.
The story of Mickiewicz's closing years may be passed [pg xiii] over very briefly. In 1834 he married; his wife was subject to attacks of insanity, and all his later life was saddened by the struggle with misfortune and poverty. In 1840 he was called to a newly founded professorship of Slavic literature at the Collège de France. His lectures as holder of this chair are the only literary work of great importance that he produced during this last period of his life. Soon after the completion of Pan Tadeusz he had become absorbed by a religious mysticism that caused him to turn entirely aside from poetry. In 1841 he fell under the influence of Andrzej Towianski, a teacher who announced himself as the prophet of a new religion. His acceptance and promulgation of a doctrine which was pronounced heretical by the Catholic Church, and which inculcated a religious reverence for Napoleonic traditions, made it impossible for the French government to retain his services in a government institution, and in 1844 he was deprived of his professorship. The accession to power of Napoleon III. filled him with new hopes. In 1855 he journeyed to Constantinople, wishing to aid in the war against Russia, and there he died of the cholera. His remains, first laid to rest in Paris, were transferred in 1890 to the cathedral at Cracow.[4]
Pan Tadeusz was not the result of a momentary inspiration, but grew gradually under the author's hand. On December 8, 1832, he wrote to a friend: “I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style of Hermann and Dorothea. I have already [pg xiv] jotted down a thousand verses.” He had evidently planned a village idyl of no great length, probably based on the love of Thaddeus and Zosia. In a draft of the first book that is still preserved, Thaddeus sees on the wall a picture of Joseph Poniatowski at the battle of Leipzig (October 19, 1813), “riding a mettled steed” but “stricken with a mortal wound.” Thus the action of the poem could not have taken place earlier than 1814. Later, Mickiewicz threw back the time of his action to the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812; thus, by giving his poem a political background in the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, he transformed his village idyl into a national epic. The Monk Robak, or Jacek Soplica, and not his commonplace son Thaddeus, now became the real hero of the poem.[5] Nor was this hero wholly a product of the writer's invention. There has recently been discovered a petition by Mikolaj Mickiewicz, the father of the poet, praying the authorities to grant him protection from one Jan Soplica, “a man of criminal sort,” who had slain the uncle of the petitioner and was now threatening to kill the whole Mickiewicz family and burn their house. With the character of this person the description of Jacek Soplica's early years agrees as closely as his name. Mickiewicz even mentions his own kindred as the ancestral enemies of the Soplicas (page 45). Yet one of that hated family he now made the hero of his greatest poem. By introducing him in the guise of Father Robak, repentant and striving to atone for past misdeeds through heroic service to his country, he infused into his poem a [pg xv] romantic charm. The mystery surrounding this figure connects Pan Tadeusz, an epic that is truly classic in its dignified elevation and restraint of feeling, with Konrad Wallenrod, a romantic tale conceived in the spirit of Byronic passion.
In the work of Mickiewicz as a whole two characteristics predominate: a great intensity of feeling, which sometimes sinks into sentimentality, and at others rises into lyric fervour; and a wonderful truth, not only to the general impressions of his experience, but to the actual concrete facts of it, even to such trifles as the names of persons and places. Thus The Forefathers, despite all its fantastic elements, reproduces many incidents in which the poet himself was concerned. Furthermore, in certain works, as in his early tale Grazyna, Mickiewicz had shown a wonderful ability suddenly to detach himself from passing currents of emotion and to rise into regions of Olympian calm, giving to his work a classic, rounded completeness worthy of Grecian art. All these aspects of his genius are present in Pan Tadeusz. Echoes of the poet's personal emotion are heard in Jacek's tale of his passion for Eva; and an ardent love of country permeates the poem and breaks out again and again with lyric force. On the other hand the book is faithful to reality in its picture of Lithuanian manners and customs; the great romantic poet is at the same time the first realistic novelist of Poland. Minor details beyond number are introduced from the writer's personal recollections; “even the Jew's playing of the dulcimer the poet had heard in St. Petersburg from the famous Silbermann.”[6] Through the whole book runs a humour [pg xvi] not often found elsewhere in Mickiewicz; the reports of the debates in Jankiel's tavern and in Dobrzyn hamlet are masterly in their blending of kindly pleasantry with photographic fidelity to truth. The poet sees the ludicrous side of the Warden, the Chamberlain, the Seneschal, and the other Don Quixotes who fill his pages, and yet he loves them with the most tender affection. In his descriptions of external nature—of the Lithuanian forests or of the scene around Soplicowo on the moonlight night just before the foray—Mickiewicz shows a genius for throwing a glamour of poetic beauty over the face of common things such as has never been surpassed. Finally, the whole poem is perfect in its proportions; from its homely beginning, with pictures of rural simplicity and old-fashioned hospitality, it swells into rustic grandeur in the panorama of the hunt, and at last reaches the most poignant tragedy in the scene about the death-bed of Jacek Soplica: then, lest the impression should be one of total sadness, the narrative concludes with the magnificent epilogue of the last two books, full of hopes of rescue for Poland, full of gaiety and courage. A large epic calm pervades the whole. The age-long conflict between Pole and “Muscovite” is the theme of the epic, but the tone is not that of passionate hatred and revolt such as fills The Forefathers; human kindliness breathes through the whole work; not indignation and rebellion, but faith, hope, and love are at its foundation.
This brief introduction may fitly close with some verses that Mickiewicz wrote as an epilogue for Pan Tadeusz, but which he never finally revised and which were never printed during his lifetime. Since his death [pg xvii] they have most frequently been inserted as a prologue to the poem rather than as an epilogue.
“What can be my thoughts, here on the streets of Paris, when I bring home from the city ears filled with noise, with curses and lies, with untimely plans, belated regrets, and hellish quarrels?
“Alas for us deserters, that in time of pestilence, timid souls, we fled to foreign lands! For wherever we trod, terror went before us, and in every neighbour we found an enemy; at last they have bound us in chains, firmly and closely, and they bid us give up the ghost as quickly as may be.
“But if this world has no ear for their sorrows, if at each moment fresh tidings overwhelm them, reverberating from Poland like a graveyard bell; if their jailers wish them an early doom and their enemies beckon them from afar like grave-diggers; if even in Heaven they see no hope—then it is no marvel that they loathe men, the world, themselves; that, losing their reason from their long tortures, they spit upon themselves and consume one another.
* * * * * *
“I longed to pass by in my flight, bird of feeble wing—to pass by regions of storm and thunder, and to search out only pleasant shade and fair weather—the days of my childhood, and my home gardens.