snugly the old city nestles along the river and up the hillsides of
the valley, and with what a natural and comfortable air; not at all as
though trying, as newer cities do, to shoulder its suburbs out of the
way. It seems a perfect type of the mediæval town, with buildings of
solid stone of an agreeable and universal creamy tone, four-square
and enduring. It abounds in quaint, high pitched roofs; in curious,
turreted spires; in red tiles and green copper domes; and in objects of
antique and archaic fascination. Shade trees are everywhere. Indeed,
from the thickly wooded heights of the surrounding hills right down to
the river quays the gray of the houses and the red and green of the
roofs make beautiful color combinations with the feathery foliage.
One stands on the old Karlsbrücke and looks upstream and there he
sees the rocky heights of the Wyschehrad Hill on which the fair and
wise Libussa reared her castle when she laid the foundations of the
city, thirteen centuries ago, and which he will want to visit later to
look over the fortifications and to study the glowing frescoes on the
cloister walls of the Benedictine monastery of Emmaus. In the elbow of
the Moldau, downstream, he will observe the old sections of Prague
huddled together in cramped confusion, with no sign left of the ancient
separating walls that once defined the original seven districts, though
he is to learn, by and by, that the early names remain unchanged—the
Aldstadt, and the Jewish Josephstadt, and around and above them the
Neustadt, which, of course, from an American time-point, is really not
“new” at all. On his left, along the river, he sees the Kleinseite
spread out, and on the hillside above it that far-famed acropolis, the
redoubtable Hradschin, with its dusty, barracks-like royal and state
palaces, and the great bulk of the cathedral of St. Vitus rising out of
it like some man-made mount. Such is the first bird’s-eye impression
of Prague, set in its wooded slopes, stolid and softly colored.
Later on one can scrape acquaintance with its rambling, flourishing,
modern suburbs, to the eastward and downstream, and wrestle at his
pleasure with such impressive nomenclature as Karolinenthal and
Bubna-Holeschowitz.
[Illustration: PRAGUE, THE CASTLE FROM THE OLD BRIDGE]
Between four and five o’clock the visitor will find an especial
pleasure in noting the activities that prevail in the several little
green islands that fret the impetuous Moldau as it hurries through
this “hundred-towered, golden Prague.” The dearest of these to the
sentimental Czech is bright Sophien-Insel, that you could almost leap
onto from the stone coping of the neighboring Kaiser-Franzbrücke. It
always wears a gay and inviting appearance, with café tables set under
fine old oaks, but precisely at four, summer afternoons, the leader of
its military band lifts his baton and launches some crashing prelude,
and the noisy company instantly stills and with nervously tapping
fingers and glowing eyes abandons itself to that music passion which is
the deepest and most intense expression of the Bohemian temperament. It
gives the _dilettante_ a new conception of the power of this inspiring
art to observe the significant and varying expressions that play over
the faces of a Prague audience under its influence. He witnesses
then the profoundest stirring of the Slavic nature and the moving of
emotional depths beyond the conception of the reserved and impassive
Anglo-Saxon. Especially is this so when the music is of a national
character, such as the “Ma Vlast” symphonic poems of Smetana, or a
Slavic dance of Dvorak’s. These Bohemian masters, with their fellow
countryman, Fibich, constitute a trinity that is reverenced in their
native land to an extent that almost passes belief, and that has done
so much in making Prague one of the foremost centres of Europe.
The music from the Sophien-Insel floats down the river to our
vantage-point on Karlsbrücke, mellowed and softened, and contributes
just the right pleasing note to the agreeable mood these picturesque
surroundings excite. The ponderous, antique old structure on which
we stand has the appearance of some full-page color illustration for
a charming Middle-Age romance. For half a millennium it has dug its
broad arches into the bottom of the Moldau, stoutly defiant of flood
or storm. Its massive buttresses are crowned with heroic statues so
deeply revered that pilgrimages are made by the faithful to pay their
devotions before them. For a third of a mile this old veteran strides
the stream, and at each end he lifts an amazing mediæval tower well
worth a journey to stare at. These ponderous structures, weathered
by centuries of storm to a rich brownish black, are pierced by a
deep Gothic archway through which the street traffic pours all day.
Their sides are decorated with colonnades and traceries, armorial
bearings and statues of ancient heroes of the city, and their tops
are incredible creations of slender turrets and of pointed roofs so
desperately precipitate that they seem like long narrow paving-stones
tilted end to end.
Catholic legend and ceremonial run riot on the old bridge. The statues
are almost altogether of a religious character, and two of them,
the Crucifixion Group and the bronze one of St. John Nepomuc, are
practically never passed without the sign of the cross and the raising
of hat or cap; in the case of the latter the devout will touch the
tablet that marks the spot from which he is said to have been cast
into the river, and then kiss their fingers and bless themselves. For
St. John Nepomuc, of all the holy martyrs, was Prague’s very own. The
legend is dramatic. Father John was the queen’s confessor, five hundred
years ago, and when he declined to oblige the king by revealing what
the queen had told under the seal of the confessional, his Majesty had
him summarily cast into the Moldau, from just where we are standing at
the centre of this bridge. The result was far from the expectations
of the king, for not only was the poor priest preserved from sinking,
but—which is quite as hard to believe of so swift a stream as this—he
actually remained floating for four days at the very spot where he
fell, and five bright stars hung above him all the while! When they
took him out he was dead, and to this extent only did the king succeed.
As was perfectly natural, the amazed Praguers could see nothing in
all this but an astounding miracle; and when Catholicism had finally
displaced the Protestantism that followed the Hussite wars for two
hundred years, their clamor for the canonization of Father John
eventually resulted in placing the name of St. John Nepomuc in the
catalogue of Rome. Equipped with a saint all their own, they adroitly
converted the statues of the Protestant John Huss, that stood here and
there about town, into St. John Nepomucs by the simple expedient of
adding a five-starred halo to each.
Now, if to-day were the sixteenth of May, St. John Nepomuc’s special
day, we should behold the greatest festival of all the year. An altar
would be erected beside his statue, here on the bridge, and mass
celebrated before enormous kneeling crowds. Bohemian peasants would
flock into town from miles and miles around, in all the picturesque
finery of the national dress, gala performances would be given at the
theatres, an especial illumination of the city made at public expense,
and fireworks displayed to-night on Schutzen-Insel. It would be an
orderly celebration, too, for the Czechs are more fond of dancing than
drinking; and religious enthusiasm would be practically universal, for
Prague, which for two centuries was exclusively Protestant, now numbers
at least nine Catholics out of every ten of its people.
As we look about us this afternoon we derive a vivid consciousness
of being very far from home, set down in an environment that is, for
Europe, oddly foreign and unfamiliar. The soft, sibilant prattle of
the Czechish speech is heard on every hand, and the names on cars and
corners are outlandish to us, with their profusion of consonants and
curious accent marks like our o and v. One sees a great disproportion
in numbers between the German and Czechish population; only thirteen
to the hundred are said to be German, but in the opinion of Bohemians
that is too many, for the stubborn struggle for the existence of the
old national speech and spirit against the threatening usurpation
of the Teutonic invaders is a real matter of life and death. As we
watch the crowds throng along the bridge the prevalence of the Slavic
type is very noticeable: short of body, heavy of head, and with high
cheek bones and coarse features. The general expression is one of
settled melancholy, bred of their peculiar fatalism. Having heard the
“Bohemian Girl” and read the foundationless libels of popular French
literature, one looks about for gypsies; he will be lucky if he finds
one. Bohemia, as he should have known, is one of the leading industrial
countries of Europe, and Prague is made up of hard-working, skillful
mechanics. Energy and resolution are stamped on these serious, rugged
faces; on the powerful men, the tall, strong women, and even on the
little black-eyed children. And they can do many worthy things well:
they market the country’s rich coal and iron deposits, make garnets
to perfection, and manufacture beet-sugar by thousands of tons. Who
has not heard of Bohemian glass, or Pilsener beer? And shall we
belittle the resourcefulness of Bohemia, with the prosperous resorts of
Karlsbad and Marienbad well within the western boundary of the Böhmer
Wald? If this does not convince, one has only to run over to Dresden,
seventy-five miles away, which he can reach by rail in four hours at
an outlay of but eight florins, and ask any one where the finest farm
produce comes from and what section yields the best fruit and honey,
butter and eggs, milk and cheese.
If now we can manage to look away from the bridge and its crowds,
we shall observe that the afternoon activities of the river-life of
Prague are manifold and highly interesting. There is a prodigious
bustling about of longshoremen on the fine, broad quays, and boats of
many descriptions and diversified cargoes are laboriously struggling
upstream or drifting guardedly down. From time to time huge, unwieldy
rafts pass along to the din of vigorous shouting and hysterical
warnings. Bathers at the riverside establishments are adding their
share of laughter and frolic, their diversions watched with vast
amusement by the afternoon idlers loitering along the embankments. On
our right the shaded walks and trim lawns of the popular Rudolfs-Quai
are comfortably filled with a leisurely company of promenaders and of
nursemaids airing their charges. All this contributes an agreeable note
of homeliness and contentment and seems eminently in harmony with the
prevailing serenity and peace of the surrounding groves. There is at
hand a little chain footbridge which they call the Kettensteg, and in a
beautiful clump of lindens at its end rise the sculptured porticoes of
the classic Rudolfinum, Prague’s noble home of the arts and industries.
Enter it, and you find whole halls devoted to the work of Bohemian
artists, with the school of old Theodoric of Prague represented in
surprising completeness, an entire cabinet filled with the engravings
of that famous Praguer, Wenzel Hollar, and many of the most beautiful
paintings of such celebrated Bohemians as Gabriel Max, Václav Brozǐk
and Josef Mánes.
With artistic bridges arching the river in whichever direction you
look, with music and soft voices welling up from the gay islands, and
with a full and virile life at cry along the quays, you find yourself
about as far removed as possible from the atmosphere of Longfellow’s
“Beleaguered City”:—
“Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream,
With the wan moon overhead,
There stood, as in an awful dream,
The army of the Dead.”
Assuredly, there is no “army of the dead” at this hour beside the
Moldau, whatever there may be under the “wan moon” in a poet’s eye.
On the contrary, there is an army of the living, a quarter-million of
them, and it marches without resting, day in and day out, along the
Graben and the stately Wenzels-Platz, and through the venerable Grosser
Ring and the narrow, crooked alleys of old Josephstadt.
Walk east across Karlsbrücke, pass under the Gothic arch of the
somnolent Aldstadt Tower, with the stony statue of Karl IV on your
left, and you will shortly emerge on the Grosser Ring and can settle
the matter for yourself. This fantastic Ring is the oldest and most
famous square of the city, still preserving its ancient appearance.
You find it an irregular quadrilateral, surrounded by quaint, gloomy,
colonnaded houses, churches, and dilapidated palaces. There towers
in its centre a sombre memorial column, called the Mariensäule,
commemorating Prague’s liberation from the Swedes at the close of
the Thirty Years’ War. The very first thing to catch the eye is the
singular Teynkirche—the old Gothic church where John Huss so often
preached, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe lies entombed in red marble,
and in whose shadows, through five centuries, many of the bloodiest
events of the city had their inception and execution. The influence of
Huss on the Europe of his day was so great and has continued so long
that it is hard to realize that he had only reached his forty-sixth
year when the Council of Constance sent him and his friend, Jerome of
Prague, to the stake. The old Teynkirche, where he so often attacked
the doctrines of Rome, still rears its battered and darkened bulk
from behind a melancholy row of colonnaded houses and gazes solemnly
and patiently over them at the noisy Ring, its lofty spires curiously
clustered with airy turrets like hornets’ nests on some old tree.
Directly opposite, the modern Gothic Rathaus shoulders up to the
moldering tower of its predecessor whose famous clock has delighted
its thousands with the surprising things the automatic figures do
when the hours and quarters roll around. Just at hand, a portion of
the old Erkerkapelle still stands in excellent preservation, and you
could not find more beautiful Gothic windows in all Prague, nor finer
canopied saints nor more richly sculptured coats of arms. Before this
building—a place of hideous history—the best blood of the city was
spilled after the fall of Bohemian independence at the fateful battle
of the White Hill, three centuries ago, when twenty-seven nobles
were butchered here on the scaffold. A dozen years passed, and again
blood soaked this earth, with the stony-hearted Wallenstein executing
eleven of his chief officers for alleged cowardice at the battle of
Lutzen. Prague still shows the palace of Wallenstein, and those of the
other two famous generals of his period, Gallas and Piccolomini. The
Clam-Gallas Palace is just at hand, in the Hussgasse, distinguished for
its beautiful portal flanked with colossal caryatids and sculptured
urns, and surmounted by a marble balustrade wrought with the perfection
of life. A final note in the Old-World charm of the Grosser Ring is
contributed by the ancient Kinsky Palace, adjoining the Teynkirche,
in the elaborate baroque architecture despised of Mr. Ruskin. People
in the manner and seeming of to-day walk and talk, barter and sell
under the nodding brows of these historic buildings, but the visitor
stands among them unconscious of their noisy presence in the spell such
storied surroundings cast on every phase of fancy and imagination.
There is a peculiar fascination about aimless rambles in Prague. Modern
improvements have come, of course, but many an old and rare landmark
has been reverently preserved, with the result that you can scarcely
turn a corner or cross a square without coming face to face with
some fantastic and blackened architectural fragment that holds you
spellbound with wonder and delight. Whole sections, indeed, are of such
a character; as you would find were you to fare forth from the Grosser
Ring and seek adventures by crossing the Kettensteg and invading the
region beyond the Rudolfinum. With almost the suddenness of tumbling
into a river you would find yourself groping, even at this bright hour
of the afternoon, in the black and twisting mazes of the old Jewish
Ghetto that still goes by the name of Josephstadt. Here you have at
once all the detail and color of a romance of the crusades. Everything
appears aged and eccentric. The time-weary, saddened, ramshackle houses
project their upper stories feebly and seek to rest their wrinkled
foreheads on one another; tortuous, winding alleys that you can
almost span with your outstretched arms reel giddily all ways from a
straight line, plodding wearily uphill and sliding helplessly down. On
all sides there seems to be a general feeling that nothing matters,
that everything comes by accident or caprice. Over the frowzy heads of
slovenly children quarreling in the doorways, glimpses are to be had of
dark and filthy interiors, from which foul odors escape to the street.
Long-coated, unkempt patriarchs of Israel lope solemnly by, with
rounded shoulders and hands clasped behind; and if you follow in their
wake you will sooner or later arrive at a curious, melancholy Rathaus
that is a rare jumble of architectural orders and has an extraordinary
steeple that might once have done time on a Chinese temple. This very
inclusive structure, persisting in its oddities to the end, makes a
great point of staring down at the gaping crowds out of a big belfry
clock that has one dial Hebrew and one Christian. But a single marvel
is as nothing in this old wonderland where, as Alice would have
remarked, things become “curiouser and curiouser.” If your eyes popped
at the Rathaus what will they do at the gaunt, barnlike synagogue next
door! Here is the thing that every visitor to Prague goes straight to
see. Its early history is lost in legends, but you will be disposed to
credit them all—even to that one about the Prague Jews fleeing from
Jerusalem to escape the persecutions of Titus—once you have seen its
doleful walls and breakneck roof, and have passed through the narrow
black doorway into that shadowy tomb of an interior. Brass lamps
depend by long chains from the smoky ceiling, but they only intensify
the gloom with their feeble light and deepen the feeling of creepy
depression. Visitors are told that during the horrors of the Hussite
wars this black hole was literally packed with the bloody corpses of
Jews and that, in a bitter spirit of defiance, no attempt was made for
three hundred years to efface the frightful stains. Little wonder that
the Prague Jews evolved out of their hatred an ancient malediction that
ran: “May your head be as thick as the walls of the Hradschin, your
body grow as big as the city of Prague; may your limbs wither away to
birds’ claws, and may you flee around the world for a thousand years!”
It is like escaping from a sick-bed to come out of this chamber of
horrors and cross the street to the quiet and hush of the wonderful
old Ghetto cemetery. Here we have another of the “sights” of the
Josephstadt. In the refreshing coolness of its elder-trees one looks
about on as extraordinary a three acres as can be found anywhere in
all Europe. The Jews insist that they have buried here for twelve or
fourteen hundred years, and inscriptions can be found that date back
at least half that far. By the simple process of spreading new layers
of earth, this plot has been packed with graves six deep; and all
that was accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the cemetery not
having been in use since the middle of the eighteenth century. The
closeness of the black, mossy tombstones, and their toppled and huddled
look, suggest the troubled shouldering of some gigantic, ghoulish mole
at work deep down in the horror-crowded darkness underground. The
ancient tribal insignia of Israel are found graven on these tottering
slabs,—the Hands of Aaron, the Cup of Levi, the Double Triangle of
David, the Stag, the Fish, etc.,—and here and there you come across
those little piles of stones heaped on graves that mark a Jewish act of
reverence for the resting-place of some long-buried ancestor.
Hold to a generally southern direction in your afternoon stroll through
the narrow Ghetto alleys, and shortly you will meet with a fine reward
in the shape of a face-to-face contemplation of one of Prague’s most
cherished antiquities, the Pulverturm. They may have once stored powder
here, as the name implies, or they may not; but almost anything looks
to have been possible to this sturdy, brown survivor of the Middle
Ages, under whose broad Gothic archway the twentieth-century crowds
are passing day and night. Set solidly down in the thickest stream
of traffic, it has the look of those unconquerable obstructions that
have to be tunneled through. It looms above you, a great, dark, dusty
mass, out-of-time in every particularity of design and decoration.
Stubbornness and defiance are expressed in every line; and with its
atmosphere of drowsy aloofness and mystery there is such an element
of loneliness among such modern surroundings that one could almost
believe he sometimes hears the old veteran sigh. Certainly you would
say it is brooding over memories centuries dead, so incongruous and
distrait is its seeming, so anachronous are its whimsical turrets,
fantastic roof, statues, arms, and sculptured traceries. This
impression of isolation is enhanced as one reflects that the most
ultra-modern of Prague’s new buildings all stand within easy range,
could one of the Pulverturm’s ancient archers take up a position in any
of those lofty turrets and wing an arrow from his stout crossbow toward
what quarter of the heavens he chose.
When you have passed under the arch of the Pulverturm, you have entered
the Graben, and so reached the business heart of the city. The Graben
has nothing to-day to suggest the “Ditch” that its derivative source
implies, unless you fancifully regard it as a moat of the modern
commercial ramparts. On the contrary, it presents a busy array of all
the leading hotels, shops, restaurants, and cafés. Overhead-trolley
cars splutter along it, and you see gray stone buildings of irregular
roof-lines with skylight dormers in the tiles, and Venetian blinds in
the windows, narrow sidewalks decorated in mosaic designs, and active
throngs of strong-featured men, and bareheaded, vigorous women whose
chief pride of dress concerns itself with capacious aprons elaborately
embroidered. Were you to visit the second-story cafés, whose gay
window-boxes look so inviting from the street, you would find games of
chess and checkers in progress at this hour, and more than one merchant
who had stolen from his shop to have a look at the “Prager Tagblatt”
over a glass of Pilsener or “three fingers” of the plum brandy they
call _slivovitz_ or a dram of _tshai_—which is tea and rum—or a cup
of _tee_—which is just plain tea and cream. Coffee and chocolate, of
course, would be found in general demand.
One passes out of the Graben into the fine boulevard of the
Wenzelsplatz, and at once exchanges bustle and uproar for the quiet
and dignity of the most beautiful and stately avenue of the city. It
is broad and well-paved, with buildings of elaborate design, with
shop fronts protected by bright awnings and with fine shade-trees
every few yards along its entire length. At the corner of the Stadt
Park, one finds a beautiful cascade fountain, and beside it a noble
building which is the centre of all that is best and most intense in
the new movement for the reviving and vitalizing of the national spirit
among Bohemians—the new Bohemian Museum. Were you to enter it you
would doubtless be astonished to see how many souvenirs of Bohemian
history have already been assembled there,—autographs and documents,
ancient musical instruments, art objects, flails of the Hussites, and
scientific collections. Such is the intellectual Bohemia of to-day.