Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/38

32 affirm with the same certainty, now when its ruin is consummated, its approaching resurrection? In this faith, opposed to nature and fact, is there not something resembling a pledge from Providence, something like a sacred promise made to the oppressed? 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.

"To be a Pole 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. 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. We have placed ourselves in this double point of view in publishing these translations. The alliance between France and Poland, consecrated by blood, will be cemented by related ideas. We hope it will be fertile, for to it we owe that system of international justice, acknowledged by France, which is summed up in the principle of the nationalities. It is impossible to deny that the initiative in this movement belongs to the reclamations of Poland. However warped this principle may have been in Germany or elsewhere, it cannot be gainsaid that it constitutes a moral progress which will benefit all Europe.

It may be reserved for the history of Poland under her present circumstances to introduce another motive-power, as yet too little heeded public life, the principle of Duty