“He saw a meadow-clearing in his father’s forest. Two elks were fighting. They struck at each other with their large horns, separated, and made another terrific lunge. Their horns interlocked. In great leaps they tried to disentangle themselves, turning round and round. There was a crunching of horns. One elk succeeded in freeing himself and ran his horns into the other’s breast. He drove them in deeper and deeper, tore ferociously at his flesh and entrails. The blood spurted.... And near the fighting animals a female elk was pasturing unmindful of the savage struggle of the passion-mad males.... In the centre stood the victor trembling and gory, yet proud and mighty. On his horns hung the entrails of his rival.” The epitomy of the sex-problem, heh-heh. * * * * * “I don’t envy the ox his enjoyment.” Przybyszewski despises happiness as something unworthy of an artist. A happy soul, he believes, is a miracle, the squareness of a circle, a whip made of sand. The soul is sombre, stormy, for it is the aching of passion and the madness of sweeps, living over ecstacies of boiling desire, the stupendous anxiety of depths and the boundless suffering of being. For the artist who creates the world not with his brain, but with his soul, all life is one “sale corvée,” a filthy burden, eternal horror, despair, and submission, fruitless struggle and impotent stumbling. For this reason love, the greatest happiness for ordinary males, becomes for the artist the profoundest disastrous suffering. Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you read his _Poems in Prose_ you face a soul writhing in hopeless despair, in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poem _At the Sea_, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic dimensions. Only one other poem approaches it in its surcharged grief—Ben Hecht’s _Night-Song_, if we overlook the latter’s redundancy. Allow me to give you a pale translation of the “Introibo” to _At the Sea_:—may the Pole’s spirit forgive me my sacrilegious impertinence. INTROIBO Thou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur, with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,— Radiant mine! How many pangs have passed as if in a dream, since I saw Thee for the last time, and yet mine heart doth shine amidst the stars which Thou hast strewn in my life, yet the thirsting hands of my blood yearn for the bliss Thou didst once kindle in my soul.