From a Terrace in Prague

by B. Granville Baker

For those who do not feel drawn towards the furtive corners of the town, there are many other opportunities of recreation. One of these was built by the city itself, and is called the Obecni Dum, which means Town House, I believe; anyway, when asking your way to it linger on the last word and pronounce it as if written "doom." This was built about the site of the palace where Wenceslaus IV held his revels, but it is informed of a more sober spirit. You come upon this building as you pass along the broad street, formerly the moat of the Old Town defences, until you arrive at the street-junction I have already mentioned. Here stands one of the most beautiful monuments to Prague's former glory, the "Powder Tower." When first you come upon this, rising serenely in all its ornate loveliness out of the roar and rattle of the traffic, the sight of it catches your breath. King Vladislav II caused it to be erected—one of the gates of the old city. An unhappy King this latter, I should say; at least his lot was cast in unhappy times. One of the last Slavs to occupy the throne of Bohemia—he was a Prince of Poland—Vladislav succeeded one of the most popular of Bohemian monarchs, George Podiebrad. The times in which Vladislav reigned were evil; the internal religious struggles of Bohemia had reached a desperate stage; all attempts to reunite the Utraquists with Rome had failed, and Alexander Borgia was Pope. The reign of this King, for all the glory of the monuments that commemorate it, seems as it were illumined by the false light that presages disaster. His son Louis was drowned while leaving the battlefield of Moháč, which reduced the greater part of Hungary to a Turkish province, and anarchy held the lands of the Bohemian Crown until in 1526 Ferdinand of Habsburg bribed his way to the throne; one noble Bohemian is said to have accepted fifty thousand gulden for his kind offices.

The "Powder Tower" looks out directly at a somewhat shabby building opposite to it. I have mentioned it before as standing on the site of an early monastic institution founded by those Irish monks who did so much towards bringing Central Europe into the fold of the Church. They were, in fact, the only missionaries, these pilgrims from the Isle of Saints, who took up the task in the fifth and sixth centuries, wandering far afield, through the German forests, along the great rivers Danube and Main, to Italy and Switzerland, where St. Fridian at Lucca and St. Gall in the hills above the Bodensee are still held in pious memory. The Saxon monk Winfrith, better known as St. Boniface, also deserved well of the people of Central Europe, for it was his zeal and energy which assisted Charles the Great in his colonizing achievements. In our own times other missionaries of Anglo-Saxon race, or at least English-speaking, penetrated to the darkest recesses of the Continent, even to Bohemia. They started as soon as the war was over and Europe again a safe place to travel in. They took their toilsome way, by train de luxe and at Government expense, to such distant places as Prague and Vienna, even Buda-Pesth. They were of those who were indispensable while men were fighting, whose services could be spared when danger no longer threatened. They came deeply imbued with the importance of their mission, their commission, diplomatic, economic, hygienic, whatever it was. They came in scores, accompanied by willing and well-paid workers, to bring relief to those who had suffered in the war. They bought up the scanty supplies of the countries to which they brought the blessing arising out of their own high rate of exchange. They came in their hundreds to spread the light of learning in matters hygienic to Prague, the old university town famous for its school of medicine. They taught the young the blessing of western guilds or associations, the young of a country which forged its weapon of social defence, the Sokol, some seventy years ago. They expect a deal of gratitude for all this; they are also entirely devoid of any sense of humour, or they would all go home and keep quiet.

Of real use to the good relations which have existed, intermittently perhaps, but never clouded by misunderstanding, was the mission of the English Singers who came to Prague. They sang to us in the large hall of the Obecni Dum, the building dedicated to the townsfolk's recreation. They sang us old-time motettes, madrigals, ballads, and we were taken back to our own country by the soothing harmonies of Weelkes. We saw Winchester Cathedral, its long nave and squat tower, standing in lush meadows in the shade of ancient elms, the College Gate, its pillars so artfully, invitingly rounded by William of Wykeham, drew us in again. We were stirred by William Byrd's "Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles," and taken to Oxford by Gibbons's "What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth? The music of division." Purcell recalled our gracious English landscape, and English life, "When Myra sings we seek the enchanting sound"; and Thomas Morley with "Now is the month of maying." Then there was rollicking Tom Bateson, of Dublin, with his alluring "Come follow me, fair nymphs!" And the Bohemian audience were loud in generous applause.

You may well believe that a land which has given to the world Smetana, Dvořak, Ševček, and so many other famous musicians, will concentrate all that is good in music in Prague, its capital. There are two opera-houses to start with; one of them, the National Theatre, throws its reflections on the surface of the river at the end of the Narodni Třida; the German Theatre stands on the rising ground between the Museum at the top of the Václavské Naměsti and the Wilson Station. There are numerous concert-halls, and every restaurant of any repute has a good little orchestra of its own. Then there is a quaint old theatre down in the centre of the Old Town; you will find it standing comfortably among old red-roofed houses, between two open spaces, market-places bright with fruit and flowers in their season. It was in this theatre that Mozart's Don Giovanni was performed for the first time.

It is one of the most interesting parts of Prague, just around this old theatre, and among the crooked lanes and dark corners; it lets you in to the intimacy of the city if you set about your investigations in the right spirit. Alongside of this old theatre, the Mozarteum, divided only by a narrow alley, runs the front—I suppose it is the front—of the Carolinum, the collegiate buildings of Charles's foundation. There is little left outwardly of this building's former aspect, just one glorious Gothic projection which almost touches the balcony of the theatre. Within the Carolinum are spacious halls devoted to all manner of academic functions. In one of these halls I witnessed a scene which struck me with a sense of incongruity that I have not been able to explain to myself. The Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Thagore, was received here by the University of Prague. Learned professors read lengthy addresses of welcome in Czech, and to their own entire satisfaction; the Indian poet spoke in English and recited poetry in his own language, let us hope also to his own satisfaction. Thereupon Rabindranath Thagore, his hands folded meekly inside his wide sleeves, his head drooping and eyes half closed as becomes a poet of the tender kind, passed out from among us—to travel to Paris in an aeroplane. I do not know whether it was this latter event, or the expression of a philosophy so entirely at variance with my own, or perhaps the sound of the high-pitched plaintive voice, that gave me the sense of incongruity, but there it was undoubtedly.

In your wanderings about the Old Town you will come upon all manner of quaint corners, old houses with courtyard and balconies, churches of all sizes and dedicated to many saints, and among these one which to my thinking deserves particular interest. It is the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Wall, very old—how old I cannot tell you—much mutilated and disfigured by restorers whose heads should have gone into the decorative scheme over the gateway of the Mala Strana bridge-tower; but here in this church the Sacrament was first given in both forms, sub utraque.

There are many little backwaters in the Old Town; you may people them with the shades of all those who for centuries have toiled to restore Bohemia to her rightful place among the States of Europe. You may see flitting figures in the twilight, cloaked and obvious conspirators to your discerning eye. These men were probably among those marked down by the secret police as "patriots." Men who were working for freedom of thought what time Jungmann and Kalina, another national poet, died, and twelve thousand of the people joined in the funeral procession as it passed the Town Hall where Arnold, Kalina's friend, was imprisoned. This was in 1847. Then the Slav Congress in 1848, and its stirring scenes, the meeting for Divine Service under the statue of St. Wenceslaus, the scuffle with a sentry caused by an agent provocateur, the charge of troops on an unarmed mob. Followed the erection of barricades, over a hundred in half an hour, and street fighting in various quarters of the city. Ruthless slaughter of citizens as at the Polytechnic School, where an attack by ten thousand troops with artillery was repulsed by seven hundred students of the Clementinum. Then the despair of the vanquished. But the spirit fostered by Bohemia's great men lived on; the people had their museum, containing books and records of their National Society, they had their associations, Sokols, and above all, their music. And so they waited, and not in idleness, for the better days which came to them out of the Great War.

The Sokol movement should interest you; it has taken a firm hold among Slavonic nations, and has in it something of the spirit of Freemasonry. Sokol means "falcon"—no doubt the original badge favoured by Slavonic societies. You will find the falcon, sometimes eagle, cropping up in various places. There is a distinguished Order, that of the White Eagle of Serbia, for instance; then the Poles also have started an Order with an eagle or a falcon in it—I am not acquainted with this Order. Members of Sokol societies wear an eagle's feather, or perhaps a falcon's, in the saucy little head-dress, somewhat like our old cavalry forage-cap, when in their becoming full dress. But Sokol means a great deal more than this.

A year or so ago I witnessed a Sokol display on that flat-topped height called Letna; it is, as it were, an eastward prolongation of the Castle Hill. Here is a large recreation ground for the use of such bodies as Sokol societies. In the arena, before a large and appreciative but critical public, the Socialist Sokols gave their display of gymnastic exercises on the occasion I have in mind. It was a stirring sight: ten to twenty thousand young men and maidens went through their graceful movements in perfect unison to the strains of their national music. It must be borne in mind that those exercises have not only physical value but are useful memnonic training. There is much discipline bred of these exercises; the captain goes through the movements by himself, the team repeats them after him. Then again, the Sokol is, and has been from the beginning, a political union. Surely Socialists who submit themselves to this training, to such discipline, are a powerful asset to a young State that has got to make its mark in the world.

By the way, what is a Socialist? I take it that any man who has a flowerpot in his window, whereas his neighbour has none, is no Socialist. But this is, no doubt, a matter of taste or political conviction, I am not quite clear which.