by Mary Shelley
The earliest Reformers sprung up in Prague. John Huss was rector of the University: his tenets were the source of that independent and Protestant spirit which then first began to undermine the Roman Catholic faith. In early times, the Church of Bohemia obtained from the Council of Basle, that the sacramental cup should be administered to the laity; and this of itself was a broad distinction between Catholic Bohemia and the rest of the Papal world.
Although John Huss died at the stake, his influence continued high in his country, where he was reverenced as a saint. The Bohemians, loving their own language and their own customs — a sagacious and intelligent race — were well pleased with any state of things that should conduce to separate them more widely from the surrounding German nations.
The time came when they were to fall. When the rest of Europe was in darkness and enslaved, Bohemia had a pure religion and free institutions: now it is but a province of Austria, and there are not one hundred Protestants in the country. The Emperor Mathias first endeavoured to uproot its liberty, and the Jesuits had been established, to counterbalance, by their insidious system of encroachment, the influence openly possessed by the Protestants. This state of things could not last. The Emperor supported Catholicism, and wished to assimilate Bohemia to his Austrian provinces in language, laws and religion: the national Diet endeavoured to preserve their country as a distinct kingdom. The Emperor insisted on naming his successor, in the person of his brother Ferdinand: the crown had hitherto been elective, and the nobles resolved to preserve their rights. On the death of Mathias, they called to the throne the Elector Palatine, a Calvinist: the Emperor Ferdinand claimed the country as his own, and invaded it.
For one year, Elizabeth of England held a gay and chivalrous court in Prague. Had her husband been a statesman and a soldier, he might have disciplined his brave, enthusiastic subjects, and have repulsed the invasion of Austria. He was vanquished ingloriously, and, forced to fly from the city, he became a wanderer and an exile. Ferdinand triumphed; but a collision between his pretensions and the free institutions of Bohemia was inevitable. The nobles resisted the Emperor’s edicts, and tossed his commissioners out of the windows of the Green Chamber of the palace. This act was the first deed of violence of the thirty years’ war, which hence began, nor ended till all Germany was devastated, and Bohemia enslaved.
We set out on a brief drive round the town, to view the spots where these scenes had taken place. Leaving our hotel, we passed through the crowded and trading Alstadt, and crossed the bridge which connects the Klein Seite with the city. On this stands the statue of St. John Nepomuk, who, the legend says, was thrown from that spot into the Moldau below, for refusing to betray to Wenceslaus IV. secrets confided to him by his Queen in the confessional. A constellation of five stars was observed to hover over the water, exciting the curiosity and terror of the pious; so that at last the river was dragged; the body of the saint was found, and received honourable interment — though not canonization until some centuries after. Such is the legend; but the true history of this saint, as Mr. Reeve relates it, differs materially, and is curious. He tells us, he perished a martyr to church reform:—” During the contests between Wenceslaus IV. and the then Archbishop of Prague (John of Genzstein, afterwards Patriarch of Alexandria), with regard to certain matters of church property, the prelate was vigorously supported by his Vicar-General, Johanko von Pomuk, upon whom the King wreaked his vengeance; and the spot is still shewn where he was thrown into the river. This event took place in 1381, and was soon forgotten by the people. Time, however, rolled on; John Huss perished in the flames at Constance, and, as his schism was followed by the larger portion of the Bohemian nation, St. John Huss became an object of popular reverence. I have seen hymns in his honour, which were sung in churches even towards the close of the sixteenth century. But when the Jesuits were installed at Prague, to extirpate the Bohemian heresies, they found it useful to have a St, John of their own. The legend of St. John Nepomuk was invented; his relics were shewn; an epic poem, the Nepomuceidon, was composed by the Jesuit Percicus in his honour in 1729; he was canonized, and his fame spread with amazing rapidity throughout the Catholic Church. These honours are now so intimately connected with the system in which they originated, that I once heard a distinguished Bohemian declare that no good could befal his country till St. John Nepomuk was once more thrown into the Moldau.” Meanwhile, he has become the guardian saint of bridges; his statue, surmounted by the image of the five miraculous stars, in a more or less rude form, finds a place on almost every bridge of Catholic Germany, as it does here on the Bridge of Prague — on the very spot whence he was thrown.
In the Klein Seite the nobles had their palaces, and we saw that of the princely Wallenstein: “coiled as it were round the foot of the imperial rock,” to make room for which a hundred humbler houses were rased. Wallenstein, who had arrived at mid life in comparative obscurity, first came forward in a conspicuous manner in the Bohemian war. His immense riches were principally derived from the confiscations of the expelled and exiled Hussites. When some years after his command was taken from him, he built this palace, where he lived in princely grandeur, feeding his imagination with dreams of yet higher glory, ministered to him by Seni the astrologer. It was in early life, during his residence at the University of Padua, that Wallenstein first heard from the Professor Argoli that the stars above echoed the cherished dreams of his own heart. There is no trace, we are told, that Wallenstein ever followed any particular directions emanating from the stars; but the knowledge that they predicted greatness biased his imagination, strengthened his resolutions, and made him boldly enter on a career from which a man of lowlier hopes had shrunk.
The stars foretold greatness to Wallenstein; did they foretell, obscurely, so that he could not decipher their true meaning, that he should obtain that, the want of which made Alexander weep — a poet to illustrate his deeds? This greatness was perhaps written in the starry scroll, whose real meaning he could not decipher, and so aimed at a success that ended in defeat, but which, by means of Schiller, has become immortal glory. Such lights as well as shadows lure us on under the form of regarded or despised presentiments.
“I would not call them
Voices of warning that announce to us
Only the inevitable.”
Wallenstein has been peculiarly fortunate in having two poets; for Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s tragedy, giving the German poetry an English poetic form, causes him to belong to both countries.
Dark shadows for centuries have obscured the name of Wallenstein; amidst the uncertain there is enough of certain to form a hero both in good and ill; but the chief good, which places him side by side with his illustrious rival, Gustavus Adolphus, was his religious toleration, in an age of bitter, cruel, unrelenting religious persecution.
Passing this extensive palace, we ascended the height on which the Hradschin is situated; old princely Prague, the native city of the savage Ziska, of the martyred Huss, and of generations of resolute, free, and noble citizens, lay beneath in sleepy decay. It is impossible not to ponder upon the world’s fate. Had the Prince Palatine been a hero; had Wallenstein, by birth a Bohemian, not fallen in his youth into the hands of the Jesuits; had he grown up as he was baptized, a Lutheran, would not Bohemia have been able to maintain its political and religious liberty? Would not the thirty years’ war have been crushed in the egg? would not Germany, which has never recovered the devastation and massacres of that period, have continued flourishing and become free? and might the Huguenots, so supported, not have been quite crushed in France.
But Frederick was an empty coward, Wallenstein a pupil of the Jesuits, and the world is as it is.
Our coachman went a little out of his way up the river, to shew us where a suspension bridge is hung across the Moldau; but disdaining the modern invention, we caused the horses’ heads to be turned, and recrossed the bridge of St. John Nepomuk, that we might view the traces of the bombardment of the gate by the Sw
edes; the defaced ornaments and battered appearance still recall that time. I was very sorry to see no more, but though thus an outside view was all I caught of this picturesque and ancient city, — its mosque-like churches, the dark pile of the old royal palace, its deserted mansions, and noble river, form a living scene in my memory never to be effaced. “ The day we come to a place which we have long heard and read of, is an era in our lives; from that moment the very name calls up a picture.” The stilly evening shed golden rays over dome, tower, and minaret, and brightened the wide waters of the river. I returned with regret to our hotel.
LETTER II.
Miilchen. — Budweis. — Linz.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 2.
WE hired a lohn-kutscher to take us to Budweis — about sixty miles — which was to occupy two days: for this we are to pay, including drink-gelt, forty-four florins. I ought to mention, that the coachman who took us from Dresden to Prague, refunded the overcharge of two thalers made by the fellow employed by him to take us through the Saxon Switzerland.
I must tell you that the Germans look down on the voituriers as people of the lowest grade of society. One German master at Kissingen, who made the bargain with the man who took us to Leipsic, actually spoke to him with the er — the third person singular — than which no greater insult can be imagined. These distinctions are droll, varying as they do in different countries. The Germans do not address each other with the plural you, as is our custom: thou denotes affection and familiarity. The common mode of speaking to friends, acquaintances, servants, shopkeepers — to everybody indeed — is the third person plural, sie, they: your own dog you treat with the du, thou; the dog of your enemy with er, or he. The Germans have a habit of staring quite inconceivable — I speak, of course, of the people one chances to meet travelling as we do. For instance, in the common room of an hotel, if a man or woman there have nothing else to do, they will fix their eyes on you, and never take them off for an hour or more. There is nothing rude in their gaze, nothing particularly inquiring, though you suppose it must result from curiosity: perhaps it does; but their eyes follow you with pertinacity, without any change of expression. At Rabenau, and other country places, the little urchins would congregate from the neighbouring cottages, follow us about, up the hills, and beside the waterfall, form a ring and stare. A magic word to get rid of them is very desirable: here it is — ask one of them, “Was will er?”
“What does he want?” The er is irresistible — the little wretches feel the insult to their very backbone, and make off at once. That the kutchers endure the er is astonishing. I could not address them so: for surely it is the excess of inhumanity as well as insolence to use a form of speech that denotes contempt to persons who have never offended you. With the starers it is otherwise; they do offend grievously, and one has a full right to get rid of them at almost any cost. I will just add, that except the under-driver who had charge of us during our tour through the Saxon Switzerland, we have not had reason to complain of our German kutchers — nor any reason to be pleased: they are quiet to sullenness; never gave up a point; and never seemed to care whether we were pleased or not. However, under this sort of sulky apathy there lurked an aptitude for getting into the most violent rage, if their pockets are touched, which was very startling, as compared with the absence of all expression of kindly feeling.
We set out from Prague in the morning, not quite as early as we ought, which disturbed the order of our travelling — a fact difficult to instil into the minds of some travellers, — but in voiturier travelling the whole comfort depends on an early departure. It seems that if a certain portion of work, with certain rests, are to occupy the day, it does not much matter how these are portioned out. It is not so; and experience shows an early departure in the morning and an early arrival in the evening to be the only arrangement that makes this method of travelling at all comfortable. We set out late, and we had a carriage provided, uncomfortable from its extreme smallness: it was, indeed, a mere hack drosky, taken from the streets; one person only could sit outside, and four were exceedingly confined for room inside.
The weather continued fine and warm; and now in the heart of Bohemia, we looked inquiringly abroad to see how a portion of earth, with a name sounding to our western ears strange and even mysterious, differed from any other. We saw few distinctions — the villages were low-built and dirty; the towns rather pleasing in their appearance, looking airy, with a large square or market-place in the midst, surrounded by low white houses. Hill and dale surrounded us, consisting of a good deal of pasture; but the circumstance that chiefly struck us was, that we saw not a trace of the residence of any landed proprietor, no château, no country seat, no park, nor garden. We saw no house which any but a peasant, or in the infrequent towns, that any but one in an under grade of life, could inhabit. I cannot in my ignorance explain either the meaning or results of this state of things. Perhaps it arises from the circumstance, that the domains of the Bohemian nobility are so large that they are rather small tributary states. The nobles possess ample privileges; and some among them, who belong to the old native families, are truly patriotic, and devote themselves to the good of their tenants, who are almost their subjects; but Prince Swarzenberg and Prince Mettemich, who are among the richest landed proprietors of the province, are certainly absentees; and probably the list of such is considerable. However this may be, and whatever may be the cause, we looked out eagerly, as we crawled slowly along, for traces of the habitations of gentry — a race more important often to the prosperity of a country than the nobility — but we saw none.
We expected to sleep at Tabor — our kutcher had so designed, but our late setting out changed his views. This annoyed us; and one of our party, familiar with German — of no great use, since the man was a Bohemian — sat by him and gave him kirch-wasser and cigars, and used what verbal eloquence he could, to persuade him that we might get on to Tabor. The man drank the kirch-wasser, smoked the cigars, and said nothing; while we hoped, in accordance to the old saying, that silence gave consent. At about ten o’clock we arrived at a miserable-looking village, with a worse-looking inn — such as carters and waggoners might frequent. With difficulty, for the entrance was encumbered and tortuous, we entered the court-yard. We sat in silent despair; but it was necessary to yield. I was taken up a broken staircase to a barn-looking room, with a number of beds in it — it was the only sleeping-room. A handsome, proud-looking girl, the daughter of the house, with a hand-maiden under her, began to arrange my bed. The people in the south of Germany are not disinclined, when generous, to give you a clean under sheet; but the upper one is double and encases the quilt, and this they do not think it necessary to change. I summoned all my German, consisting but of single words; schmuzig, or dirty, applied to the sheet, made the girl angry; but, on my insisting on having another, she complied with the air of an offended empress. My maid slept in the same room. I never dared ask how my companions passed the night — the beds were taken for them out of my room. However, they got an excellent rapper (of which I was too tired to partake) of venison — not a common thing in Bohemia; for usually we only got a disastrous huhn (a fowl), rather drier and tougher than deal chips. The name of this village was Mülchen. Our bill was six florins and a half. I mention these prices; for they show, as they vary from one end of Germany to another, sometimes the value of money, sometimes the inclination to extort. The schein money still continues; so you will understand that a bill was brought in for more than sixteen florins, which, multiplying by two and dividing by five, we reduced to the real demand in florins Münz. This sort of currency probably springs from the Austrian money introduced by conquest being of too high value for the poverty of Bohemia, who adhered to their own inferior coin, with a new name.
The people of Bohemia, such as we saw them, are better-looking than the peasantry of those parts of Germany which we had visited; but there is nothing particularly attractive about them. It is impossible, however, to judge fairly even of the surface of a people who
se language one does not understand. The Bohemians do not expect to be understood by strangers, unless they can themselves speak Germany and they are too little conversant with foreigners to take any sort of interest in them. Their manner was abrupt and decided, with a mixture of sullen disdain; dirty enough they are, and very poor. The Bohemians are, indeed, singularly cut off from the rest of the earth. Their language is exclusively their own — not understood beyond the boundary. Except to visit Prague, and one or two of their Baths, no strangers enter their country, From what I can gather, they bear the marks of a conquered people, adhering to the customs and practices of their forefathers, forgotten everywhere else — satisfied with themselves — averse to improvement, which, indeed; has no avenue by which to reach them — they remember that they were once free, though they have forgotten that they were Protestants.
3RD SEPTEMBER.
We still proceeded, not a little weary — the drosky was so very uncomfortable — over hill and dale, and through miserable villages, or now and then a larger town, with its wide square and long range of low houses. We stopped at a better-looking inn than that of Müchen for our mid-day meal, but fared worse; the only thing they could give us was the unfortunate huhn, against which we had made many violent resolutions, and now entered many vain protests; this, and the absence of bread — for I cannot give that name to the sour, black, damp, uneatable substance they brought as such — made our meals very like a Barmecide feast. Nor was the table graced with clean linen; but to this we had become painfully accustomed.
