CZECH FOLKLORE
OUR national lyric just as our national epic carries you away by the power of its simplicity and the directness of its art. By small means it attains ends which even a most profound poetry seldom attains. Here is not the naive simplicity of poverty, but the restraint of an already fully matured refinement. It is difficult not to learn from these great masters of prose, and it will come to it that our folklore, just as our national song, will form a starting-point for a real understanding of the inner substance of stylistic art.
The Bohemian folklore or national tales about "St. Peter" or "Our Lord" (collected by Bozena Nemcova) are masterly products, showing not a God—or a St. Peter in some cosmopolitan meaning of these words, but rather beings of our flesh and blood—yet fully enshrined in the nobleness of their traditional meaning.
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