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Soon after the completion of Pan Tadeusz he had become absorbed by a religious mysticism that caused him to turn entirely aside from poetry. In 1841 he fell under the influence of Andrzej Towianski, a teacher who announced himself as the prophet of a new religion.
This brief introduction may fitly close with some verses that Mickiewicz wrote as an epilogue for Pan Tadeusz, but which he never finally revised and which were never printed during his lifetime. Since his death they have most frequently been inserted as a prologue to the poem rather than as an epilogue.
His residence in Rome, with its sacred associations, and the meeting with new friends of a deeply religious temperament, brought about within him a new birth of Catholic faith that strongly affected bis later writings, notably Pan Tadeusz.
“No European nation of our day has such an epic as Pan Tadeusz. In it Don Quixote has been fused with the Iliad. The poet stood on the border line between a vanishing generation and our own. Before they died, he had seen them; but now they are no more. That is precisely the epic point of view.
The mystery surrounding this figure connects Pan Tadeusz, an epic that is truly classic in its dignified elevation and restraint of feeling, with Konrad Wallenrod, a romantic tale conceived in the spirit of Byronic passion.
For the chapter on Pan Tadeusz by George Brandes, than whom there have been few more competent judges of modern European literature, is little more than an expansion of Krasinski’s pithy sentences. The cosmopolitan critic echoes the patriotic Pole when he writes: “In Pan Tadeusz Poland possesses the only successful epic our century has produced.”
Had not the wheel of progress suddenly stopped revolving, Russian Jews might have constituted one of the most useful as well as most intellectual elements in the vast empire. As it was, the kindly intention of czar or czarina sufficed to arouse them from the asthenia to which they were reduced for want of freedom. The times were rife with excitement, and the Jewish atmosphere with expectancy. The mighty changes which were taking place in Russia and Poland; the dismemberment of the latter; the annexation of Balta , Lithuania , and Courland to the former; the short-lived yet potent German rule in Byelostok (1793-1807), and the rude but memorable contact with France (1807-1812), these and many other important happenings in a brief span of time had a telling effect upon the diverse races under the dominion of Russia, and among them not the least upon the Jewish race. Everywhere the desire for "liberty, equality, and fraternity" began to manifest itself. In Courland, the most German of Russian provinces, Georg Gottfried Mylich, a Lutheran pastor at Nerft, made a touching appeal (ab. 1787) in German on behalf of the Jews, insisting that the word Jew "should not be taken to indicate a class of people different from us, but only a different religious body; and as regards his nationality, it should not hinder him from obtaining citizen's rights and liberties equal to those of the people of Sleswick, the Saxons, Danes, Swedes, Swiss, French, and Italians, who also live among us." In Poland, Tadeusz Czacki, the historian, wrote his Discourse on the Jews (Rosprava o Zhydakh, Vilna, 1807), in which he deplores that Jews "experienced indulgence rarely, oppression often, and contempt nearly always" under the most Christian governments, and suggests a plan for reforming their condition. But the main appeal for freedom came, as might have been expected, from the Jews themselves. Contemporaneous with, if not before, Michel Beer's Appel
THE principal characters in Pan Tadeusz are as follows. The approximate pronunciation of each proper name is indicated in brackets, according to the system used in Webster’s New International Dictionary. But the English names Thaddeus, Sophia, Eva, Rosa, Thomas, and Joseph have been substituted for the Polish forms Tadeusz, Zofia, Ewa, Roza, Tomasz, and Jozef.
But instead of his description I shall quote a not less true and more picturesque one from the last canto of Mickiewicz's "Pan Tadeusz": It is time to dance the polonaise. The President comes forward; he lightly throws back the fausses manches of his overcoat, caresses his moustache, presents his hand to Sophia: and, by a respectful salute, invites her for the first couple.
No play of Shakespeare, no long poem of Milton or Wordsworth or Tennyson, is so well known or so well beloved by the English people as is Pan Tadeusz by the Poles. To find a work equally well known one might turn to Defoe’s prosaic tale of adventure, Robinson Crusoe; to find a work so beloved would be hardly possible.
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