Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/50

 44 solemn vow to be faithful, in the keeping of which vow he takes upon himself the responsibility of the happiness of one of God's creatures, a pure and trusting woman, who loves him well. A husband and a father, he breaks his oath. Tempted by the phantom of a long-lost love,—the Ideal under the form of a maiden,—he deserts the real duties he has assumed to pursue this Ideal,—personated indeed by Lucifer himself, and which becomes—true and fearful lesson for those who seek the infinite in the finite—a loathsome skeleton as soon as grasped! From the false and disappointing search into which he had been enticed by the Demon, he returned to find the innocent wife, whom he had deserted, in a mad-house. False to human duties, his punishment came fast upon the heels of crime.

In the scene which occurs in bedlam, we find the key which admits us to the meaning of much of the symbolism of this drama. We accompany the husband into the mad-house to visit the broken-hearted wife, and are there introduced into our still-existing society,—formal, monotonous, cold, and about to be dissolved. Our hero had married the Past, a good and devout woman, but not the realization of his poetic dreams, which nothing could have satisfied save the infinite. In the midst of this strange scene of suffering, we hear the cries of the Future, and ail is terror and tumult. This future, with its turbulence, blood, and demonism, is represented as existing in its germs among the maniacs. Like the springs of a volcanic mountain, which are always disturbed before an eruption of fire, their cries break upon us; the broken words and shrill shrieks of the madmen are the clouds of murky smoke which burst from the explosive craters before the lava pours forth its burning flood. Voices from the right, from the left, from above, from below, represent the conflicting religious opinions and warring political parties of this dawning Future, already hurtling against those of the dissolving Present.

Into this pandemonium, by his desertion of her for a vain ideal, our hero has plunged his wife, the woman of the Past, whom he had sworn to make happy. It is to be observed that she was not necessarily his inferior, but.