Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/41

 Rh decisive struggle, which he intended should terminate in their mutual destruction.

A single force refused to be made use of to serve the hatred of Greece: the persecuted Christianity, which repelled all violence, and placed its sole hope in spiritual arms. Astonished at a resistance which he could not understand, he at first sought to subdue it, but, growing irritated, he moved too rapidly, and precipitated events. The outbreak took place, but brought not the anticipated results. Uniting in the name of their resentments, men often move together in the path of their own interests. Hatred, the savage sentiment of individual egotism, although it may be strong enough to unite men in a common action, is not sufficiently powerful when it becomes necessary to exact obedience from them! Heliogabalus perished, but Rome endured. The efforts of the heroic leader, aided by many chances of exceptional success, miserably failed, because the whole enterprise was vitiated by the very idea which inspired it!

The tendency of the poem is still more fully unveiled in the epilogue. Introducing the supernatural into the web of the plot, the Poet transports Iridion into our own epoch, and shows him that very Rome which had oppressed others, itself destroyed and degraded,—fallen as low as even his hate had dreamed it. But these black ruins do not glorify vengeance, for above them rises the Cross, the emblem of those Christians who had renounced the transitory supremacy of power to establish a reign of faith, charity, and forgiveness.

And this Cross, which here appears as the synthesis of the Past, the Poet will once more bring before our eyes in glory, as the supreme hope of the world of the Present! It will shine from the skies in sign of pardon and alliance, and, in seeing it, the guilty conqueror will say, "!" and will be engulfed in his own nothingness! Such is the denouement of "The Undivine Comedy," in which the glowing imagination of the Anonymous Poet has traced the struggle which is to precede that apocalyptic day.

Humanity, in "The Undivine Comedy," Is severed into two camps, under the leadership of two chiefs,