The Meaning of the Struggle.
Otokar Březina. Translated by Jar. Císař.
Otokar Brezina, whose real name is Vaclav Jebavy, is the greatest living Czech poet. He was born in 1868, and since 1895, when his first poems were published, he has given to his countrymen a large number of books of a mystic and symbolic character. He is the poet of the elect souls. He is a deep student not of poetry only, but of philosophy fom Plato down to today. Modern French and English poetry has influenced him greatly, especially Shelly, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Mallarme, Verlaine, Przybyszewski, Maeterlinck.
Brezina created the new Czech verse, free, rhythmic and wondrously musical. He is a mystic who wants to get at the substance of things. The relation of the eternal to the passing, of life beyond to this life, the mysteious maturing of the soul through pain for the great end to which it is destined, the deep mystery of death and what lies beyond it, such are some of the subjects of his poems.
We shall bring in our next issue an essay on Brezina fom the pen of his able translator, Mr. Jaroslav Císař, secretary to Professor Masaryk.
New conquerors, unknown to the masses but advancing in all parts of the world, came among nations, invisible and omnipresent. Their ships meet in all harbors and on all seas; like over the maps of battlefields their countenance bends over continents amidst the oceans. They estimate future harvest under the burning suns of all zones; they know the wealth of all coal-strata, iron-mountains, gold-bearing waers, deposits of copper and tin; into primeval forests and tropical deserts resounds the cannonade of the continual warfare in which like hunters they encircle their prey. Unaware of it, all nations are in their bondage; invisible, they sit in the councils of all princes; those vanquished by them die in hiding as if stricken by a mysterious disease which slowly consumes their life; but their subtlest victories are those in which invisible blows, coming from the luminous infinities of spirit and ideas, cover all horizons with dead. Each step of their way and their dreamings is myteriously followed by slaves on both hemispheres. Even creative spirits, inventors, conquerors of the elements, artists, are hired to work in their fields. Him who has conquered the Earth even the Sun seems to serve, like a jealous overseer of the work of the clouds and the winds.
But every force like a cry striking into the very depths of life is waking thousands of dormant forces. Against this power, on which the hands of the dead were working for ages, and whose only tragical beauty lies in the fact that thru it for the first time man embraced the whole earth by the burning net of his will, against this power there is rising just as mysterious, omnipresent an enemy. The masses, for thousands of years the humble bestowers of splendour and of bread, have moved. In the first shudders of horror that comes with every new truth we are beginning to realize that all our sorrows and joys are shared by beings whom we do not see all our life, and that we are being struck by blows without knowing the hand which is dealing them out. The mystery of unity is glowing from the depths of matter; distance ceases to exist; the sorrow through which we realize our omnipresence on the Earth is transformed into a natural force working on the transformation of all life. The spirit enslaved in the service of he conquerors is rising against them. In the most fiery focus of the economic and social struggle spiritual matters are decided, a new relation of the heart to millions of hearts, a new vision of joy and beauty. A new man is announced on the earth. The landlord looking over his fields sees before him all oceans and continents, with all the chains of mountains, treasures, brotherly nations and cities. In the depths of spirit there is already prepared for him his kingdom and a new order of things; and from the fact that the inner truth in the millions of human beings is different from the truth of visible reality, grief is born, and the disquieting beauty of the present. Man trembles before the horizons that open before him at every step of his hallucination; he is frightened by the majestic silence in which the cry of his astonishment is lost without answer; he trembles, unwonted, before the gales that bring to him the song of all seas, suddenly opened, the voice of all metropoles, harbors and workshops, as well as the scents that rise from the primeval forests and are drifting over the equatorial lakes. Like at a sudden ascent, his breath is stopped in the sweet wafting of ether that strikes his countenance from the motion of the earth. For ages brought up in distrust and struggle, he trembles before the unexpected contact of millions of spirits, whose burning presence he is beginning to feel even in the depths of his being, where his most secret thoughts expected
