, but others suffered. According to his
biographer, his poems were penal contraband, and many of his countrymen
were sent to Siberia for possessing them. What Krasinski sacrificed was
fame, publicity, above all peace of mind. He envied those of his
contemporaries who fought and died for their country. He was not a hero,
and he knew it. The heroes of his poems and plays were always soldiers,
men of action, and in his most original work, the extraordinary
_Undivine Comedy_, he levelled the most damaging indictment against the
self-centred egotism of the poet that has ever been penned by a man of
letters. And the bitterness of the portrait is only heightened by the
fact that it was largely inspired by self-criticism; his letters and his
life afford only too frequent justification for the recurrent comment of
the mocking spirit in the play on the melodramatic pose of the hero:
'Thou composest a drama.'

"_The Undivine Comedy_, a prose drama, though prompted by the events of
1830, makes no mention of Poland. It is a double tragedy in which the
central figure, Henryk, after wrecking his home life by his egotism,
assumes the leadership of his class, aristocratic and decadent, against
a communistic rising led by Pankracy, a Mephistopheles who is not sure
of himself. Henryk goes down in the struggle, but his conqueror falls in
the hour of triumph with the words 'Vicisti Galilaee' on his lips. The
scenes from the domestic tragedy are strangely moving: the sequel, in
which the influence of _Faust_ is obvious, is chiefly noteworthy for the
flashes of prescience in which the _Walpurgisnacht_ of brutal, revolting
humanity fore-shadows with a strange clairvoyance the outstanding
features of the democratic upheaval in Russia. But it is a drama of
hopelessness: 'the cry of despair,' as Mickiewicz called it, 'of a man
of genius who recognizes the greatness and difficulty of social
questions' without being able to solve them. _The Undivine Comedy_ is
'the drama of a perishing world': it was only in his later works that
Krasinski's belief in the ultimate resurrection of Poland emerged. In
_Iridion_, another prose drama, we have his first direct appeal to his
nation, though it is cast in the form of an allegorical romance, in
which the men and women are rather symbols than portraits. The hero is a
Greek in Rome in the time of Heliogabalus, Rome standing for Russia.
Beginning with this drama, and increasingly developed in his later
poems, is