Without Dogma by Henryk Sienkiewicz

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WITHOUT DOGMA.

A NOVEL OF MODERN POLAND.

BY

HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ

AUTHOR OF
"WITH FIRE AND SWORD," "THE DELUGE," "QUO VADIS," ETC.

TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY

IZA YOUNG.

1893

"A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided
they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and
writers, giving them not only a faithful picture of the times, but
likewise human documents that can be relied upon."

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

In "WITHOUT DOGMA" we have a remarkable work, by a writer known
only in this country through his historical novels; and a few words
concerning this novel and its author may not be without interest.

Readers of Henryk Sienkiewicz in America, who have known him only
through Mr. Curtin's fine, strong translations, will be surprised to
meet with a production so unlike "Fire and Sword," and "The Deluge,"
that on first reading one can scarcely believe it to be from the pen
of the great novelist.

"Fire and Sword," "The Deluge," and "Pan Michael" (now in press) form,
so to speak, a Polish trilogy. They are, first and last, Polish in
sentiment, nationality, and patriotism. What Wagner did for Germany in
music, what Dumas did for France, and Scott for all English-speaking
people, the great Pole has achieved for his own country in literature.
Even to those most unfamiliar with her history, it grows life-like and
real as it speaks to us from the pages of these historical romances.
Only a very great genius can unearth the dusty chronicles of past
centuries, and make its men and women live and breathe, and speak to
us. These historical characters are not mere shadows, puppets, or
nullities, but very real men and women, our own flesh and blood.

His warriors fight, love, hate; they embrace each other; they laugh;
they weep in each other's arms; give each other sage counsels, with a
truly Homeric simplicity. They are deep-versed in stratagems of love
and war, these Poles of the seventeenth century! They have their
Nestor, their Agamemnon, their great Achilles sulking in his tent.
Oddly enough, at times they grow very familiar to us, and in spite of
their Polish titles and faces, and a certain tenderness of nature that
is almost feminine, they seem to have good, stout, Saxon stuff in
them. Especially where the illustrious knights recount their heroic
deeds there is a Falstaffian strut in their performance, and there
runs riot a Falstaffian imagination truly sublime.

Yet, be it observed, however much in all this is suggestive of the
literature of other races and ages, these characters never cease for a
moment to be Poles. Here is a vast, moving panorama spread before us;
across it pass mighty armies; hetman and banneret go by; the scene
is full of stir, life, action. It is constantly changing, so that
at times we are almost bewildered, attempting to follow the quick
succession of events. We are transported in a moment from the din
and uproar of a beleaguered town to the awful solitude of the vast
steppes,--yet it is always the Polish Commonwealth that the novelist
paints for us, and beneath every other music rises the wild Slavic
music, rude, rhythmical, and sad.

There is, too, a background against which these pictures paint
themselves, and it reminds us not a little of Verestchagin,--the same
deep feeling for nature, and a certain sadness that seems inseparable
from the Russian and Lithuanian temperaments, tears following closely
upon mirth. At times, after incident upon incident of war, the reader
is tempted to exclaim, "Something too much of this!" Yet nowhere,
perhaps, except from the great canvases of Verestchagin, has there
ever come a more awful, powerful plea for peace than from the pages of
"Fire and Sword."

In "Without Dogma" is presented quite another theme, treated in a
fashion strikingly different. In the historical novels the stage
is crowded with personages. In "Without Dogma," the chief interest
centres in a single character. This is not a battle between contending
armies, but the greater conflict that goes on in silence,--the battle
of a man for his own soul.

He can scarcely be considered an heroic character; he is to some
extent the creature of circumstances, the fine product of a
highly complex culture and civilization. He regards himself as a
nineteenth-century Hamlet, and for him not merely the times, but his
race and all mankind, are out of joint. He is not especially Polish
save by birth; he is as little at home in Paris or at Rome as in
Warsaw. Set him down in any quarter of the globe and he would be
equally out of place. He folds the mantle of his pessimism about him.
Life has interested him purely as a spectacle, in which he plays no
part save a purely passive one. His relation to life is that of the
Greek chorus, passing across the stage, crying "Woe, woe!"

Life has interested, entertained, and sometimes wearied him. He muses,
philosophizes, utters the most profound observations upon life, art,
and the mystery of things. He puts mankind and himself upon the
dissecting-table.

Here is a nature so sensitive that it photographs every impression,
an artistic temperament, a highly endowed organism; yet it produces
nothing. The secret of this unproductiveness lies perhaps in a certain
tendency to analyze and philosophize away every strong emotion that
should lead to action. Here is a man in possession of two distinct
selves,--the one emotional, active; the other eternally occupied in
self-contemplation, judgment, and criticism. The one paralyzes the
other. He defines himself as "a genius without a portfolio," just as
there are certain ministers-of-state without portfolios.

In such a character many of us will find just enough of ourselves to
make its weaknesses distasteful to us. We resent, just because
we recognize the truth of the picture. Leon Ploszowski belongs
unmistakably to our own times. His doubts and his dilettanteism are
our own. His fine aesthetic sense, his pessimism, his self-probings,
his weariness, his overstrung nerves, his whole philosophy of
negation,--these are qualities belonging to this century, the outcome
of our own age and culture.

If this were all the book offers us one might well wonder why it
was written. But its real interest centres in the moment when the
cultivated pessimist "without dogma" discovers that the strongest and
most genuine emotion of his life is its love for another man's wife.
It is an old theme; certainly two thirds of our modern French novels
deal with it; we know exactly how the conventional, respectable
British novel would handle it. But here is a treatment, bold,
original, and unconventional. The character of the woman stands out in
splendid contrast to the man's. Its simplicity, strength, truth, and
faith are the antidote for his doubt and weakness. Her very weakness
becomes her strength. Her dogmatism saves him.

The background of the book, its lesser incidents, are thoroughly
artistic, its ending masterly in its brevity and pathos; here again is
the distinguishing mark of genius, the power of condensation. The man
who has philosophized and speculated now writes the tragedy of
his life in four words: "Aniela died this morning." This is the
culmination towards which his whole life has been moving; the rest is
foregone conclusion, and matters but little.

One sees throughout the book the strong influence that other minds,
Shakespeare notably, have produced upon this mind; here its attitude
is never merely pessimistic. It does not criticise them, it has
absorbed them.

One last word concerning this novel. It does not seek to formulate, or
to preach directly. Its chief value and the keynote to its motive lie
in the words that Sienkiewicz at the beginning puts into the mouth of
his hero:--

"A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided
they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and
writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise _human
documents_ that may be relied upon."

A _human document_--the modern novel is this, when it is anything at
all. If Mr. Crawford's canons of literary art are true, and we believe
they are, they give us a standard by which to judge; he tells us that
the heart in each man and woman means the whole body of innate and
inherited instincts, impulses, and beliefs, which, when quiescent, we
call Self, when roused to emotional activity, we call Heart. It is to
this self, or heart, he observes, that whatever is permanent in the
novel must appeal; and whatever does so must live and find a hearing
with humanity "so long as humanity is human." If this be a test, we
cannot doubt as to what will be the reception of "Without Dogma."

A few words concerning the novelist himself. The facts obtainable
are of the most meagre kind. He was born in 1845, in Lithuania. The
country itself, its natural and strongly religious and political
influences, its melancholy, seem to have left their strong, lasting
impression upon him. He has a passionate fondness for the Lithuanian,
and paints him and his surroundings most lovingly.

His student days were spent at Warsaw. He devoted himself afterward to
literature, writing at first under a pseudonym. He does not seem to
have won immediate recognition. He spent some years in California;
a series of articles published in this connection in a Polish paper
brought him into notice.

In 1880, various novelettes and sketches of his production were
published in three volumes.

In 1884 were given to the Polish public the three historical novels
which immediately gave their author the foremost place in Polish
literature. It is a matter of pride that the first translation of
these great works into English is the work of an American, and offered
to the American public.

He is a prolific writer, and it would be impossible to attempt to give
even the names of all his minor sketches and romances. Some of them
have been translated into German, but much has been lost in the
translation.

Sienkiewicz is still a contributor to journalistic literature. He has
travelled much, and is a citizen of the world. He is equally at home
in the Orient or the West, by the banks of the Dnieper, or beside the
Nile. Probably there is scarcely a corner of Poland that he has not
explored. He depicts no type of life that has not actually come under
his own observation. The various social strata of his own country, the
condition of its peasantry, the marked contrast between the simplicity
of that life and the culture of the ecclesiastic and aristocratic
bodies, the religious, poetic, artistic temperament of the
people,--all these he paints in a life-like fashion, but always as an
artist.

So much of the writer. Of the man Sienkiewicz there is little to
be obtained. Like all great creative geniuses, he is so completely
identified with his work that even while his personality lives in
his creations it eludes them. He offers us no confidences concerning
himself, no opinions or prejudices. He does not divert the reader with
personalities. He sets before us certain groups of men and women, whom
certainly he knows and loves, and has lived among. He sets them in
motion; they become living, breathing creations; they assume relations
in time and space; they speak and act for themselves. If there be a
prompter he remains always behind the scenes. Admire or criticise or
love the actors as you will, you cannot for a moment doubt that they
are alive.

This is the supreme miracle of genius,--the fine union of dramatic
instinct, the aesthetic sense, and an intense, vital realism; not the
realism of the cesspool or the morgue, but the realism of the earth
and sky, and of healthy human nature. We are inclined to believe that
Henryk Sienkiewicz has answered an often discussed question that has
much exercised the keenly critical intellect of this age. One school
of thought cries out, "Let us have life as it is. Paint anything, but
draw it as it is. Let the final test of all literary works be, 'Is it
real and true?'"

To the romantic school quite another class of ideas appeals; to it
much of the so-called realistic literature seems very bad, or merely
"weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." The profoundest utterances of
realism do not impress it much in themselves. It insists that art has
something to say to literature, that in this field as elsewhere
holds good the law of natural selection of types and survival of the
fittest.

While each school has its down-sittings and up-risings, its supporters
and its critics, neither school has yet exhausted the possibilities of
literature. The novel's aim is to depict Life, and life is neither all
romance nor all realism, but a curious mixture of both. Man is neither
a beast nor a celestial being, but a compound. Though he can crawl,
and may have clinging to him certain brute instincts that may be
the relics of his anthropoidal days, he has also, thank God, divine
desires and discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither
school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La
Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither
realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to
its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the
two much perhaps might come.

We believe that just here lies the value of the novels of Henryk
Sienkiewicz. He has worked out the problem of the modern novel so as
to satisfy the most ardent realist, but he has worked it out upon
great and broadly human lines. For him facts are facts indeed; but
facts have souls as well as bodies. His genius is analytic, but also
imaginative and constructive; it is not forever going upon botanizing
excursions. He paints things and thoughts human.

The greatest genius assimilates unconsciously the best with which
it comes in contact, and by a subtle chemistry of its own makes new
combinations. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and the realists, as well as
all the forces of nature, have helped to make Henryk Sienkiewicz; yet
he is not any one of them. He is never merely imitative. Originality
and imaginative fire, a style vivid and strong, large humor, a
profound pathos, a strong feeling for nature, and a deep reverence
for the forms and the spirit of religion, the breath of the true
cosmopolitan united with the intense patriotism of the Pole, a great
creative genius,--these are the most striking qualities of the work of
this modern novelist, who has married Romance to Realism.

* * * * *

WITHOUT DOGMA.

ROME, 9 January.

Some months ago I met my old friend and school-fellow, Jozef
Sniatynski, who for the last few years has occupied a prominent place
among our literary men. In a discussion about literature Sniatynski
spoke about diaries. He said that a man who leaves memoirs, whether
well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service
to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful
picture of the times, but likewise human documents that can be relied
upon. He seemed to think that most likely the novel of the future
would take the form of diary; finally he asserted that anybody who
keeps a diary works for the common good, and does a meritorious thing.

I am thirty-five, and do not remember ever having done anything for my
country, for the reason, maybe, that after leaving the University, my
life, with slight intervals, was spent abroad. This fact, so lightly
touched upon, has given me, in spite of all my scepticism, many a
bitter pang; therefore I resolved to follow my friend's advice. If
this indeed means work, with some kind of merit in it, I will try to
be of some use in this way.

I intend to be perfectly sincere. I enter upon the task, not only
because of the above-mentioned reasons, but also because the idea
pleases me. Sniatynski says that if a man gets accustomed to put down
his thoughts and impressions it becomes gradually one of the most
delightful occupations of his life. If it should prove the contrary,
then the Lord have mercy on my diary; it would snap asunder like a
string too tightly drawn. I am ready to do much for my community; but
to bore myself for its sake, oh, no! I could not do it.

Nevertheless, I am resolved not to be discouraged by first
difficulties, and shall give it a fair trial. "Do not adopt any style;
do not write from a literary point of view," says Sniatynski. Easier
said than done. I fully understand that the greater the writer, the
less he writes in a purely literary style; but I am a _dilettante_,
and have no command over any style. I know from experience that to one
who thinks much and feels deeply, it often seems that he has only
to put down his thoughts and feelings in order to produce something
altogether out of the common; yet as soon as he sets to work he falls
into a certain mannerism of style and common phraseology; his thoughts
do not come spontaneously, and one might almost say that it is not the
mind that directs the pen, but the pen leads the mind into common,
empty artificiality. I am afraid of this for myself, for if I am
wanting in eloquence, literary simplicity, or picturesqueness, I am
not wanting in good taste, and my own style might become distasteful
to myself, and thereby render my task impossible. But this I shall see
later on. I begin my diary with a short introductory autobiography.

My name is Leon Ploszowski, and I am, as I said before, thirty-five
years of age. I come from a wealthy family which has been able to
preserve its fortune. As to myself I shall not increase it, and at the
same time I am not likely to squander it. My position is such that
there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling
humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who
knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not
worth anything.

My mother died a week after I was born. My father, who loved her
more than his life, became affected with melancholia. Even after he
recovered from this, at Vienna, he did not wish to return to his
estates, as the memories associated with them rent his very soul; he
left Ploszow under the care of his sister, my aunt, and betook himself
in the year 1848 to Rome, which, during thirty-odd years, he never
left once, so as to be near my mother's tomb. I forgot to mention that
he brought her remains to Rome, and buried her on the Campo Santo.

We have our own house on the Babuino, called Casa Osoria, from our
coat of arms. It looks more like a museum than anything else, as
my father possesses no mean collections, especially from the early
Christian times. In these collections his whole life is now absorbed.
As a young man, he was very brilliant in appearance as well as in
mind; his wealth and name added to this, all roads were open to him,
and consequently great things were expected from him. I know this from
his fellow-students at Berlin. He was deeply absorbed in the study of
philosophy, and it was generally believed his name would rank with
such as Cieszkowski, Libelt, and others. Society, and his being a
favorite in female circles, diverted him somewhat from scientific
studies. In society he was known by the nickname of "Leon
l'Invincible." In spite of his social success he did not neglect his
philosophical researches, and everybody expected that some day he
would electrify the world with a great work, and make his name
illustrious. They were disappointed in their expectations.

Of the once so beautiful appearance there still remains up to this day
one of the finest and noblest heads. Artists are of the same opinion,
and not long ago one of them remarked that it would be difficult to
find a more perfect type of a patrician head. As to his
scientific career, my father is and remains a cultured and gifted
nobleman-dilettante. I almost believe dilettantism to be the fate of
all Ploszowskis, to which I will refer later on, when I come to
write about myself. As to my father, there is in his desk a yellow
manuscript about Triplicity in Nature. I perused it, and it did not
interest me. I only remember a comparison between the transcendental
belief of Christianity in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and
the natural triplicity of oxygen, hydrogen, and ozone, with many other
analogous triplicities from absolute truth, goodness, and beauty,
to the syllogism of the minor premise, the major premise, and the
conclusion,--a quaint mixture of Hegel and Hoene-Wronski, and utterly
useless. I am quite convinced that my father did not intend to have
it published, if only for the reason that speculative philosophy had
failed in him even before it was set aside by the world. The reason
for this failure was the death of my mother. My father, who in spite
of his nickname, "Leon l'Invincible," and reputation of conqueror of
hearts, was a man of deep feelings and simply worshipped my mother,
put many terrible questions to his philosophy, and not obtaining
either answer or comfort, recognized its utter emptiness in the
presence of a great sorrow. This must have been an awful tragedy of
his life, since it almost shattered its foundations,--the brain
and heart. His mind became affected, as I said before, and when he
recovered he went back to his religious convictions. I was told that
at one time he prayed night and day, knelt down in the street when he
passed a church, and was carried away by his religious fervor to such
an extent that he was looked upon by some as a madman, by others as a
saint. It was evident he found more consolation in this than in his
philosophical triplicities, for he gradually calmed down and began
to lead a more rational life. His heart, with all his power for
affection, turned towards me, and his aesthetic bent found employment
in the study of early Christianity. The lofty, restless mind wanted
nourishment. After his first year in Rome he took up archaeology, and
by dint of hard study acquired a thorough knowledge of the antique.

Father Calvi, my first tutor and at the same time a great judge of
Roman antiquities, gave him the final impulse towards investigation of
the Eternal City. Some fifteen years ago my father became acquainted
and subsequently on terms of friendship with the great Rossi, in
whose company he spent whole days in the catacombs. Thanks to his
extraordinary gifts he soon acquired such consummate knowledge of Rome
as to astonish Rossi himself. Several times he began writing treatises
on the subject, but never finished what he had begun. Maybe the
completion of his collections took up too much of his time, but most
likely the reason he will not leave anything behind him except his
collections is that he did not confine himself to one epoch or any
specialty in his researches. Gradually mediaeval Rome began to
fascinate him as much as the first era of Christianity. There was a
time when his mind was full of Orsinis and Colonnas; after that he
approached the Renaissance, and was fairly captivated by it. From
inscriptions, tombs, and the first traces of Christian architecture he
passed to nearer times; from the Byzantine paintings to Fiesole
and Giotto, from these to artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and so on; he fell in love with statues and pictures; his
collections certainly increased, but the great work in Polish
about the three Romes remained forever in the land of unfulfilled
intentions.

As to these collections my father has a singular idea. He wants to
bequeath them to Rome under the condition they should be placed in
a separate gallery named after him, "Museum Osoria Ploszowski." Of
course his wishes will be respected. I only wonder why my father
believes that in doing this he will be more useful to his community
than by sending them to his own country.

Not long ago he said to me: "You perceive that scarcely anybody there
would see them, and very few derive any benefit, whereas here the
whole world can study them, and every individual that benefits thereby
carries the benefit to other communities." It does not befit me to
analyze how much family pride and the thought of having his name
engraved in marble in the Eternal City has to do with the whole
scheme. I almost think that such must be the case. As to myself, I
am perfectly indifferent where the collections are to remain. But my
aunt, to whom by the bye I am shortly going to pay a visit at Warsaw,
is very indignant at the idea of leaving the collections out of the
country, and as, with her, thought and speech go always together, she
expresses her indignation in every letter. Some years ago she was at
Rome, and they wrangled every day over the matter, and would have
quarrelled outright had not the affection she has towards me subdued
her temper.

My aunt is older than my father by several years. When my father,
after his great sorrow, left the country, he gave up the Ploszow
estate to her, and took instead the ready capital. My aunt has managed
the property for thirty years, and manages it perfectly. She is of a
rather uncommon character, therefore I will devote to her a few lines.
At the age of twenty she was betrothed to a young man who died in
exile just when my aunt was about to follow him abroad. From that time
forth she refused all offers of marriage and remained an old maid.
After my mother's death she went with my father to Vienna and
Rome, where she lived with him, surrounding him with the tenderest
affections, which she subsequently transferred to me. She is, in the
full meaning of the word, _une grande dame_, somewhat of an autocrat,
haughty and outspoken, with that self-possession wealth and a high
position give, but withal the very essence of goodness and kindliness.
Under the cover of abrupt manners she has an excellent and lenient
disposition, loving not only her own family, as for instance my father
and myself and her own household, but mankind in general. She is so
virtuous that really I do not know whether there be any merit in
it, as she could not be otherwise if she tried. Her charities are
proverbial. She orders poor people about like a constable, and tends
them like a Saint Vincent de Paul. She is very religious. No doubts
whatever assail her mind. What she does, she does from unshaken
principles, and therefore never hesitates in the choice of ways and
means. Therefore she is always at peace with herself and very happy.
At Warsaw they call my aunt, on account of her abrupt manners, _le
bourreau bienfaisant_. Some people, especially among women, dislike
her, but generally speaking she lives in peace with all classes.

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