So slowly did the work proceed—creating on one day an Agricultural Society, on another day starting the navigation of the Vistula—sometimes forming banks, at another establishing a Temperance League—recalling the country to a sense of its own interests, and drawing men together by making them co-operate in the same undertakings. Now, let us observe what were the effects of a labour so patient, so modest, so often crossed, and yet so efficacious. Instead of conspiracies, we learnt the habit of acting in legal ways, and we acquired a sense of the power which there is in regular, persistent, and pacific action. Such questions as the emancipation of the peasants, and others which have divided the public mind, and kept up divisions even among emigrants—such questions, mischievous while only a strife of theories, have now found their natural solution in practice; for the Agricultural Society has taken the initiative in this matter, and proposed a system by which the peasant is made an owner, and by which, through an ingenious combination of credit given, an indemnity is secured to the actual possessor; and this indemnity the peasant pays up in successive and limited annuities, without having to give more than he had formerly done. This may be called the Polish solution of the difficulty, as opposed to the Russian one. Finally, and what is most important, this secret regeneration of the country has done what we have just seen. No longer are parties embittered against each other, after a common defeat, nor do they dispute over a distant victory; but we have a compact mass—a nation welded together by one thought—where there is no distinction of classes, and of which the union has been cemented by the bloodshed of the 27th of February, 1861—the day on which Russia made the first attempt to put it all down. Those intelligent Russian bullets did more than they were aware of; for they helped to cement the alliance by striking, as they did, victims of every rank, of every condition, of all religions, almost of every age.
One man, as I have said, personifies in himself all that is most serious and practical in this movement, and he has left upon it the stamp of his own character. This is Count Andrew Zamoyski, whom the people speaking his language simply call ‘Monsieur André.’ He is not the only one; but he has been, from the very first, one of the most active promoters of all that could awaken the land. By birth he is connected with one of the oldest Polish families—with the family of that grand-constable, John Zamoyski, of the sixteenth century, who laboured to constitute a body of lesser nobles, in the face of our aristocratic oligarchy, and who was one of the greatest of Polish captains. The family is one which has long been eclipsed, and which only reappears at certain epochs. There was another Zamoyski, who was Chancellor in 1772, but who laid down his office because he would not set his seal to the first division; and of this Zamoyski, Count Andrew is the grandson, as he is also the brother of the general who, at one time, was to have headed a Polish legion, at the time of the Crimean war. Count Andrew naturally found himself mixed up with the revolution of 1831. He was first Minister of the Interior at Warsaw, and then was sent on a mission to Vienna, to M. de Metternich, who, it was said, was, at the time of the last battle, inclined for an intervention. When that revolution was, at last, quelled by the Russians, he would not leave the country. He remained in obscurity, cherishing no deceptive hopes, but soon seeking how best to raise her, after her great defeat. No very great career offered itself to him; but he turned to material interests and pursuits, and he brought to the work an activity not the less singular, because it was narrowed by conditions which were strait and uncertain. He established breeding-stables (studs), helped to introduce steam-navigation on the Vistula, which was a tie with Galicia, and laboured to organise the ‘Crédit foncier.’ He it was who started the little paper, ‘Annals of Agriculture,’ who afterwards became the principal promoter of the Agricultural Society, and who, up to the present time, has continued to be its President.
Count Zamoyski is characterised in all that he has done by his practical sense, by the clearness of his views, and by a moderation in action, which is joined to great natural dignity. The situation of Count Andrew is, moreover, a sufficiently singular one; for, by his moderation, he excites the suspicions of the more hot-headed among the Poles, who expect nothing except from revolutions, and, by his activity, he makes himself suspected by the Russians. The curious and difficult problem, how to live between these two, is the one which he has to solve. He has to be master over himself, and he cannot suffer himself to be led away by useless rashness; while he must not, on the other hand, sink the dignity and the name of a Pole. His secrets are hid in his actions. He never revealed them to anyone; and, to speak truly, is it perfectly certain that he had any secrets? He simply put in practice the old word ‘laboremus;’ and though constantly obliged to have dealings with the Government, he never yielded his ground; and he kept up an obstinate struggle against the venality of the Russian officials, to which he would not submit upon any terms. More than once he has had to go through some very thorny trials; but he has always acquitted himself well. On the day of the foundation of the Agricultural Society, a dinner took place, at which, of course, the Director of the Interior, M. Muchanof, was present. At last, the toast in use at all Polish dinners, ‘Let us love each other,’ was given by him. All eyes were immediately turned upon Count Zamoyski, who, calmly and simply, and with scarcely a perceptible smile, replied, ‘Yes: but at home!’ There was nothing more to be said. The spirit of this policy, if policy it can be called, is to do all that it is possible to do, to go as far as may be, and to measure one’s steps according to the necessities of the day. It breathes no agitation; but it is to be an activity according to the laws, taking advantage of everything, making use of everything, and communicating life unawares to the country—this is precisely what has appeared in the late events, and this remains the character of the new crisis.
Are men aware of what it is that gives to this movement the weight of a true national manifestation? It is that it has nothing in it which is either artificial or evanescent. It is the work of the few, and also the work of all. Like all deep movements, it is at once simple and complex, it is sincere as is the passion of a whole nation; and far from resolving itself into a mere series of efforts for physical order, which have suddenly issued in a political question, it has a moral side, which agrees wonderfully with what I have said of its characteristics of practical and lawful action. One thing in these occurrences at Warsaw, interspersed, as they are, with scenes of bloodshed, is very striking, and that is, the passive attitude of a people, which appears unarmed and offers no resistance—which persists, and, though dispersed, constantly reassembles—which offers itself as a defenceless victim, and which refuses the arms which are left within its reach. And under such an attitude, there must be something more than mere obedience to a watchword or to an order. No conspirator could have been clever enough to have imagined it. It is the sign of a thorough revolution in the minds and in the souls of men, a revolution to which the mind of one poet was no stranger—I mean Krasinski, whose works have appealed to all Polish imaginations, and which will be imprinted on all hearts, even of the lowest orders of the people. He is that anonymous poet from whom we formerly had a few poems, all full of deep meaning, all marked by gloomy and ardent mysticism. Sigismund Krasinski is dead now; but he had endured the bitterest trials of spirit, both as a patriot and as a son. He was born in 1812, and was held at the font of baptism by Napoleon, for his father was that Vincent Krasinski (a descendant of one of the chiefs of the Confederation of Bar) who, at the end of the empire, replaced Prince Poniatowski in the command of the Polish army, and who subsequently played a part in the Chambers of the kingdom of Poland, after the Restoration. Unhappily, General Krasinski irritated public feeling by the vote he gave in the Senate, in regard to the conspiracy of 1828; and his son Sigismund received, in the public square, such a marked and cutting insult from his school-fellows, that he was obliged to leave the country. He travelled, and went to Rome. When the revolution of the 29th of November, 1830, broke out, he set out immediately for Poland; but, at Berlin, he had to stop. His father had been taken, at Warsaw, by the insurgents, and had only saved himself by promising devotion to the national cause; and now he had fled to St. Petersburg. Sigismund despaired; he never could bring himself to remain in his own land, and the rest of his life, spent among strangers, was devoted entirely to the composition of his poems, which he published without ever acknowledging their authorship. Through him, Polish patriotism found a fresh voice.
When Mickiewicz addressed the revolutionary and warrior youth of Poland, he said, ‘Strong through union, wise through self-denial, forwards! my young friends!’ Krasinski said, in a song now as popular as once were Mickiewicz’s words, ‘No man can build with mud, and highest wisdom still is highest virtue.’ These are the watchwords of two different epochs.
The ruling inspiration of the whole of the poetry of Krasinski is the abjuration of all hatred and of all vengeance—that force alone will not enable us to contend successfully against force, but that the weapons of our warfare must be superior powers of soul—that, in order to conquer one’s enemy, it is not enough that we have the right on our side, unless that right rests upon strong and pure moral sentiments; that the most powerful levers are love, and the virtues of self-sacrifice and of heroic patience. One of the heroes of his ‘Infernal Comedy’ is Pancrace, the type of that brutal strength which yields and quails in helplessness before a superior power. The same inspiration reigns in his Greek poem ‘Iridion,’ where the Christian hero is a passive martyr, with a horror of vengeance, who triumphs over Rome, and confounds the patriotism of Iridion, a man who had no thoughts beyond revenge, and who makes shipwreck in spite of the justice of his complaints and of his cause. This is also the thought embodied in ‘Aurora,’ in the ‘Psalms of the Future.’ In all these songs the Polish soul thrills with mystic ardour, glows with enthusiasm, and with inexhaustible youth. ‘Lord!’ says Krasinski, in one Psalm, ‘what we crave is not hope, since she descends upon us like rain upon flowers. It is not the death of our foes, since that death is written in the clouds of to-morrow. It is not arms, since they are placed in our hands by Thee. It is not help, for Thou hast opened a free path before us; but we implore, put a pure spirit in our inmost hearts. O Holy Spirit! who dost teach us that our great strength doth lie in sacrifice, grant that we by love may lead the nations to the ends we seek!’ But in a fragment of his ‘Aurora,’ Krasinski has still better described this part of heroic expiation:—‘Is it then required that we should be murderers with murderers, and criminals with criminals? Must we lie, hate, slay likewise, and blaspheme? The world cries: At this price you may have power and liberty; without it, nothing! but nay, my soul! nay; not with such arms as these. The weight of sacrifice alone can in its turn crush down the weight which crushes us. In the world’s story, sacrifice is lionlike and unconquered still; but crime is as the chaff which the wind in passing sweeps away.
‘No! my country; yours is rather the patience which doth show, how stone by stone the building can be reared: yours rather the will inflexible, which, abiding humbly, prepares for future victory. Rather yours is calmness amid the storms, and harmony amid discordant cries: rather yours, eternal loveliness amid abhorrent shapes: rather yours to heap on cowards and Pharisees that mournful silence which doth overwhelm. Be yours the strength which lifteth up the weak; and yours the hope of those who cease to hope. For thy strife against this world’s hell, be thine the peace and strength of love, against which hell itself cannot prevail...!
‘The nations are all sought by God: all in Thy Grace, O Jesus, are concerned! to each from high a calling Thou hast given; in each a sense profound from Thee doth live, and weaves the woof of all their destinies; but some among the nations Thou hast chosen to defend the cause of Heavenly Beauty, and to give to the world an example, while they bear, through the long day, a heavy cross, and walk the world’s paths red with blood. These by their sublime strife shall at last, O Lord, give to man a feeling higher and more divine, a holier charity, and a larger brotherhood, in exchange for that sharp sword which men have plunged into their breast. Such is this Polish land of thine, O Jesu Christ! Our love of man has caused our death, and men have seen the corpse of Poland carried to the tomb; but when the third day comes, the light shall shine, and shine through all the ages yet to be. Think you, that he who loves, in dying, disappears for evermore? Yes, to our fleshly eyes; but the whole world, through the soul’s eyes, beholds him still. He who in love expires, leaves in his hour of martyrdom his soul to all his brethren. He abides in the sanctuary of human hearts, and every day, every hour, he lives, though buried; grows, though in the tomb!’
This thought of the power of sacrifice, and of passive heroism, has filtered through our youth, and permeated even the masses; and this it is which is visible in the Poland of to-day, for the inspiration of the poet has become the feeling of the people. One other cause, and it is a strange and curious one, has also helped, during the last few years, to spread and to popularise these ideas, by suddenly throwing a new element into Polish society. When the Emperor Alexander II. ascended the throne, he signalised his accession by an amnesty, which, however incomplete, opened the gates of their fatherland to a multitude of exiles. Some came from the West, the others (and these the most numerous) came from Siberia. Those who had lived in France, or in England, naturally returned to their country embittered by thirty years of sufferings, accustomed to a Western atmosphere, nourished with all sorts of revolutionary ideas; in short, half strangers in their mind and manners. But with that tribe of exiles, called in Poland ‘Siberians,’ it was not so. They returned hardened and strengthened by habits of secret and solitary suffering. Calm and resigned, they were mystics to a certain extent, but their mysticism was of that grave and gentle kind, which has nothing fierce or hateful in its nature. It is a remarkable thing that, among these exiles returned from Siberia, the country has for the last years found its best men, the most apt for journalism, for professorships, for the administration of private and national establishments, such as the Agricultural Society. There are writers of talent who could not, it is true, sign their works with their names; but their names were not, therefore, the less well known. One brought back from Siberia a translation of ‘Faust,’ and is one of our most eminent critics; another has translated Shakespeare. A newspaper in Warsaw published a series of sketches of Caucasus, and of Asia, which were the work of ‘Siberians,’ and in which there was an indefinable mixture of freshness and resignation.
These men spread over the country, and had a singular effect upon it. Thence the serious and religious tinge of striking originality, in all the popular demonstrations which have since happened, and in all those manifestations which are so thoroughly free from the revolutionary phraseology of the West. Theirs is, on the contrary, a nervous and sober speech, and except in its religious accent it has nothing exaggerated in it. The influence of the Siberians is peculiarly visible in that strange address by the artizans of Warsaw: ‘Death is alike for all. Without sparing our persons, it is necessary that we should go to the slaughter, and show to the world what it is we wish. This is why we have walked in processions, and sung of the constitution, and we will do so again whenever it shall be necessary; if there are to be victims, it will be seen that that is according to the will of God, if more is required we are ready to draw lots for the one who is to be sacrificed—ready even to give our throats to the knife, or to expire under the knout, as did those three victims whom the waters threw up near Zakroczym, and which wrapped in straw were flung from the castle into the Vistula. Only if then there is no pity for our country, it will be ill!...’ Should one not say that this is the same obstinate idea of sacrifice, which has passed through the imagination of Krasinski, and through the action of the ‘Siberians,’ into the popular mind?