Page:Magdalen by J S Machar.pdf/12

 literary career in Vrchlický’s style, but he showed from the very start a strong tendency to neglect mere form and to treat reality in a straightforward and sober way, hence his poems lose little by being rendered in prose form. In his earnestness of purpose he is not unlike Tolstoy, from whom he differs by his advocacy of a life full of vigor, and not of asceticism. With Tolstoy, however, he shares a hatred of all shams; hence, though an ardent patriot, he despises the banality of the demagogues and of political charlatanism. This attitude is expressed most trenchantly in his “Tristium Vindobona,” considered by his countrymen as having killed jingoism and the high-sounding patriotic phrase in Bohemia.

In 1894 appeared his “Magdalen,” in which he mercilessly attacked those provincial philistines who would block the fervent endeavors of a fallen woman to be restored to a life of decency. Of his later poems probably the most remarkable is “Golgotha,” in which he glorifies Christ, as he appeared to him to have been in reality, and not in St. Paul’s philosophic transmutation.