Page:Modern Czech Poetry, 1920.djvu/14

XII is considerable, and although his collected verses fill 70 volumes, he maintained a surprisingly high standard. His historical significance lies in the fact that he fixed the future course of Czech literature. He stands at the cross-roads which mark the separation of Czech culture from the German variety. To this process he contributed an enormous store of translations (the whole of Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, together with a good deal of Shelley, Victor Hugo, Whitman, Calderon and Mickiewicz, forms only a fraction of them), and in this direction he set an example which has been cultivated by numerous successors. The result is that the present generation of Czechs has been emancipated from the need for German versions of European literature. Vrchlický's occupation with foreign models, which left inevitable traces in his own poetry, was unjustly taken amiss by a number of Czech critics; unjustly, because they overlooked his achievement in raising the whole plane of Czech literature, whose national capacity he paradoxically extended by introducing international elements. Moreover, his creative influence on the Czech language was of the utmost value even to those poets who had no great regard for his artistic tendencies.

The most prominent among the many talented Czech poets of today are J. S. Machar, Antonín Sova and Otakar Březina. J. S. Machar (b. 1864) is a poet (and prose-writer) of revolt. He has not altogether escaped the national bent for melancholy brooding and sentimental elegy, which indeed, form the chief contents of his early poems. But it is the pugnacity in his temperament that has dictated his most characteristic work; and the prominent objects of his satire are chauvinists and priests. In his "Tractate on Patriotism", for example, he coldly analyses and rejects the attitude of the average nationalist towards his native country. Only a man of considerable courage could have ventured to publish such a poem in Bohemia, where feeling ran very high on such matters. The same applies to his "Golgotha", a vivid and non-clerical interpretation of the death of Christ, which did, in fact, arouse a storm of indignation on its appearance in 1893. Under the general title of "The Consciousness of the Ages", Machar has issued a series of volumes in which