Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/61

Rh one iota of its own claim to glare, to celebrity, if even but for a day; where is the name which will refuse to be bruited abroad, however ephemeral the worthless echo? Yet here is a man of the most incontestable genius, whose precepts have modeled the soul of a nation; a writer applauded by a whole people, and yet who through life steadfastly declined to receive the homage so sincerely offered; who never suffered the confession of that which was his glory to be torn from him even by his most intimate friends, and who preserved until death sealed his eloquent lips his position of renunciation and abnegation. In times so full of personal infatuation, so eager for success, so intoxicated with the incense of vanity, is not this renunciation of self calculated to excite our astonishment? But astonishment turns to sympathetic emotion, when we learn that this act of absolute self-abnegation was at the same time an act of painful expiation; that by this silence constantly kept with regard to himself, the author in a manner implored silence with regard to another;—that it was a son who thus magnanimously immolated his own memory to win the boon of forgetfulness for that of a guilty father!

Reserve is a duty toward him who, during his whole life, tried to hide himself from all public notice. Let us, however, endeavor to reanimate this noble figure by some of those general and almost impersonal traits of which he himself made use in portraying more than one of the heroes of his dramas. He assigned them no dates, he gave them no family names, they were rather symbols than persons. To present him thus to our readers will be to give them a type rather than a person. Let us imagine, then, a man of large fortune, of ancient family, allied even with some of the reigning sovereigns; a man who numbered among his ancestors leaders in a national war held in perpetual veneration, and who was brought up to reverence his own father, then dear to the country, and illustrious in many famous battles. A day came when that idolized father, so intrepid in the fire of combat, gave proof of pusillanimity in civil life, and deviated from the