Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/40

34 by man of a thought of God! He predicts a glorious resurrection to Poland, if she will faithfully guard the principle of life implanted in her, if, surrounded by hate, she can preserve herself from a moral fall.

Such are the ideas which have presided over the creation of all his works, and which he has interpreted with unequaled splendor. He endeavored to present his thought under two aspects:—the sterility of hate, demonstrated in "Iridion" and "The Undivine Comedy;" and the fertility of love, as illustrated in "The Dawn" and "The Psalms of the Future."

We will attempt to give a rapid analysis of these poems.

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. Wealth, influence, rank, relations with the barbarians, alliances with their leaders, etc., had all been skillfully prepared. He, in his own person, seemed created for such a role. To great vigor, manly beauty, and the entrancing fascination of a demigod, he joined the inexorable heart of a hero. He knew neither pity nor weakness. He had left room in his soul for only one thought, one desire,—the destruction of Rome. Whatever this one passionate thought could conceive, he executed without recoiling from any sacrifice. On the other hand, the Eternal City, under the rule of Heliogabalus, was but a corpse, crushing with its inert weight all who sought to live. 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