Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/42

 36 Count Henry and Pancras. Irreconcilable enemies, both having issued from a like critical spirit, the one repels the Future, the other the Past. This absolute exclusion is on both sides the fruit of an utter want of faith. Pancras is the personification of human reason, which deifies itself in its own essence, and believes only in finite calculation,—in action as the result of the power of numbers. Count Henry also personifies human reason, which glorifies itself, in his case, in his own individuality, denying all general laws, and, as a rule of conduct, bowing only to his individual fancies. If he believes in the cause which he defends, it is because he believes in himself, and when he is defeated, he despairs and rushes into suicide. He kills himself at the very moment that the God of Life has chosen to reveal Himself in the most striking manner to the conscience of the Peoples!

A feeling of astonishment is at first created by the fact that our author gives the victory to Pancras, the cynic and scorner, the unyielding antagonist of the truth whose triumph is announced. But this victory was necessary to demonstrate that in any struggle undertaken only with the arms of hate, the advantage is always assured to blind force. A still deeper design is also manifest. The defeat of Pancras by Count Henry would have only resulted in the glorification of the genius of man; and the intervention of the divine symbol, instead of originating an instantaneous reaction, would but have strengthened the pride of Count Henry, in such case, invincible. Now neither pride, nor genius, are the supreme arbiters of human destinies! The onward path which in their free progress leads men to good, is the Good itself, and it alone, in which, according to the noble words of the Poet, all wisdom is contained! Upon the perfecting of virtue and on its reign depend our salvation in this world and in the next. Triple and one, identical in its terms which cannot be separated, cause, means, and effect, that good is origin and life, divine order and immortality, for it is the universal bond which links the Spirit of every being to the Spirit of God. It proceeds in its manifestations by order, harmony, love, and union, and is the woof in the work of the universe which, in the divine loom.