Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/48

42 of the visible world; it alone gives them fixity or reality; it alone generates ideas, institutions, literature,—the only things truly real, the only things which penetrate the soul, become incorporated with it, and constitute the living traditions of the human race. Every work which causes the chords of souls to vibrate, which generates new views of life, must be considered real; and foreign writers render but justice to Polish Poetry in declaring it, so regarded, as very real;—and there is nothing more palpitating in its strange actuality than the work we are now about to consider.

The time, the place, the characters of "The Undivine Comedy" are all of poetic creation. The scene of the drama is laid in the future; and, for the first time in the history of art, an author has attempted to construct a prophetic play,—to describe places, introduce persons, recount actions which are yet to be. The struggle of the dying Past with the vigorous but immature Future forms the groundwork of the drama. The coloring is not local nor characteristic of any country in particular (though we recognize it to be Polish by the melancholy contrast felt rather than seen between the state of the nation and that of the individuals who compose it), because the truths to be illustrated are of universal application, and are evolving their own solution in all parts of the civilized world.

The soul of the hero. Count Henry, is great and vigorous; he is by nature a poet. Belonging to the Future by the very essence of his being, he becomes disgusted with the debasing materialism into which its exponents, the new men, have fallen; he then loses all hope in the possible progress of humanity, and is soon presented to us as the champion of the dying but poetic Past. But in this he finds no rest, and is involved in perpetual struggles and contradictions. Baffled in a consuming desire to solve the perplexing social and religious problems of the day by the force of his own intellect; longing for, yet despairing of, human progress; discerning the impracticability and chicanery of most of the modern plans for social amelioration; finding nowhere his ideal; he determines to throw himself into common life,—to bind