From a Terrace in Prague

by B. Granville Baker

The block of buildings including the tall Church of St. Nicholas, which fills up the middle of that irregular place, the Mala Stranské Naměsti, or Place of the Small Side, would be new to Vladislav were he to repeat his progress to-day. There was a church—a very old one—on this spot, dating back to the thirteenth century; it is said that the martyrs of 1621 communicated here in utraque on the morning of their execution. The tall, imposing Church of St. Nicholas replaced the older edifice—a typical monument this of Jesuit pride of conquest over the fallen National Church of Bohemia. Seen from my terrace, the copper dome of St. Nicholas, its tall and slender campanile, stand up dominant over sleepy red-tiled roofs where linger memories of much earlier days. It is indeed a splendid building, this master-work of Ignatius and Kilian Dienzenhoffer. I must admit this, little as I admire baroque and for all my loathing of the spirit of triumphant intolerance and bigotry which informed the builders of this great monument to the enslavement of a nation's soul.

In former years, before the war, there stood here in the narrowest part of this place, a monument to another triumph over Bohemia's freedom, a monument to Field-Marshal Radecky, whose figure was supported by types of Austrian soldiery of his time. This monument has been removed—destroyed, I believe, by the Pragers when they regained their freedom in October 1918. The removal of this monument leaves a blank, not a sentimental one, merely an artistic one, and has led to an unexpected and probably undesired effect. It has given undue prominence to a little building that stands some way up the place, a building of strict utility with no pretensions to architectural consideration, a building which now stands out exposed as it were, trying to hide its confusion under a mask of gaudy advertisement posters.

The singularly characteristic houses on the north side of this square, with their deep arcades, were probably rebuilt or renovated in the seventeenth century; they must be of considerable antiquity, for one of them, a corner house called "Montagu," has its place in history. The name, by the way, is not derived from the Italian, but from the simple German Montag, Monday; and it has by way of embellishment a Slavonic suffix. It was in this Montagu House that the discontented members of the Bohemian Estates were wont to meet in 1618, and here they hit upon the bright idea of throwing the two lieutenants, go-betweens or whatever they were, of their Habsburg ruler, out of a window. So here on this Mala Stranské Naměsti you may see the very spot from which the War of Thirty Years started.

This Mala Stranské Naměsti is divided into an upper and a lower part by the block of buildings I have already mentioned. The palaces all round here are probably different of aspect from the burgher houses which stood here before the baroque irruption of the seventeenth century, so Vladislav on his way to coronation would have been greeted by a homelier sight; neither could he have seen the plague memorial. The plague commemorated visited Prague in 1715; the man who committed this pyramid, dedicated to Holy Trinity, was one Giovanni Battista Alliprandi, an Italian architect, but not of the Renaissance spirit. This peculiar group of sculpture fails to impress me; the figures, of saints, I believe, are not convincing; they are seen holding emblems of piety, but only for decorative purposes, not as if they in the least knew what to do with them; one or other would have appeared much happier with a knife and fork.

Vladislav's farther way would take him up that steep road that leads past Strahov out into the country. It was formerly called the Street of Spurs, I believe; it has since been named Nerudova Třida, after John Neruda, the father of Bohemian literature, who spent his early days here. This street has rather a reputation for mild-mannered men of letters and lights of learning, patrons of art and science. There was, for instance, Baron Brettfeld, who entertained young Mozart, da Ponte and Casanova. But all this happened well after the days of Vladislav of Poland, King of Bohemia, who wound up by the narrow streets of Prague's Mala Strana to his coronation on the Hradšany. The Royal Castle had not been regularly inhabited by royalty for nearly a century, and as Vladislav chose to make it his residence, he found much to do in putting the place in order. The part that still shows strong traces of Vladislav's work is beyond the view from my terrace. You may recognize it some way off by a number of heavily mullioned windows in contrast to the very plain setting of the endless rows of other windows all along the front of the castle buildings. This palatial part of the castle—it is that nearest to the cathedral—was begun by Vladislav as soon as he had settled down to his kingship, and was finished in 1502. The chief feature of this building was a vast hall, which you may see still. It has suffered, of course, has been damaged by fire and also by restorers; just at present some archæologist is at work upon it, and he is, I believe, discovering all sorts of beauties in the decorative Gothic style peculiar to this King of Polish descent and exquisite taste. It seems to me that Gothic in Prague is of finer spiritual quality than the German variant, is of that noble sincerity of which you find many instances in France, in several examples in Portugal, and when it became decorated, never went into the excesses of the Manuelesque style such as you may see it in old Lusitania. Successive Habsburgs who followed on these Polish rulers of Bohemia, Vladislav and his son Louis, benefited by the magnificent work which these two scions of the Royal House of Jagoilla left to posterity. Louis, we know, was drowned just after the battle of Moháč, and the short-lived Polish dynasty made way definitely for Kings of the House of Habsburg. Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, having married Anna, daughter of Vladislav II, laid claim to the throne of Bohemia. He was not alone in this ambition; in fact, there was a greater number of aspirants to the vacant seat than there had ever been before—thirteen in all, among them Francis I of France. However, Ferdinand secured the throne, and reigned as King of Bohemia right royally it would seem. His coronation took place in the great hall built by Vladislav, and the solemn ceremony was followed by a tournament, also held in the same hall—a tournament on horseback, mind you, and ending up with a mêlée in which thirteen knights a-side took part. There was a banquet too, and the waiting was done by squires on horseback. A great ball brought the festivities to an end. The great fire in Prague in 1541, which destroyed all the State documents, may have been the one which also did much damage to Vladislav's great hall, and Ferdinand's restoration of the same probably did something towards impairing its original beauty. We have reason, however, to be grateful to this Ferdinand, first of the name, for another building which graces the neighbourhood of the Hradšany. This is the Belvedere which stands at the far end of a lovely garden called the Chotkovy Sady. Ferdinand built this Belvedere for Anna, his Queen, with its airy loggias, its wrought architraves and long domed roof. It is one of the most beautiful works of early Renaissance spirit that I have ever seen. All honour to its architect, Giovanni di Spazzio.

Ferdinand I proved to be no such moody bigot as his brother Charles V, yet he was bent on stemming the tide of Protestantism, the floods of which flowed over from the Germany of Luther's way of thinking to mingle with the growing religious sects in Bohemia. This was not done without torture and bloodshed, so the Hradšany witnessed the sufferings, under the rack, of Augusta, the Bishop of the Unity of Bohemian Brethren, and the execution of several prominent citizens of Prague for defying royal authority in matters of conscience. Ferdinand, on the abdication of his father, succeeded him as Emperor, and left his son Maximilian to rule his turbulent Bohemian subjects. Maximilian stands out in history as a picturesque figure, but I cannot see that he did Bohemia any useful service. The fact that he had inherited the old dominions of the House of Habsburg, Upper and Lower Austria, and was also King of Hungary, kept him away from Bohemia a good deal. He called occasionally upon the Diet of this his richest possession for support against the Turks. The Diet thereupon called for religious freedom, and no interference with their spiritual affairs. The discussions that ensued seem to have led to no results. So we find one Habsburg after another on the throne of Bohemia, trying to coerce its people, and each one reducing the country to a state of greater discontent and disorder, until the crash came in 1618, when King Matthias had roused the Bohemian Estates to such a pitch of desperation that they proceeded to the act which precipitated the Thirty Years' War.

The Hradšany did not see much of Matthias, whereas his predecessor on the throne of Bohemia, Rudolph II, lived in the Royal Castle as a matter of habit. True he was dethroned occasionally by his younger brother Matthias, and no doubt Rudolph as King was hopelessly ineffective. He was probably rather mad. Nevertheless, a certain amount of interest can be drawn out of this Habsburg's connection with Prague, and the Hradšany can show you some traces of his peculiarities. So, for instance, you will find a quaint little alley of tiny houses scooped out of the stout north wall of the castle to eastward of St. George's Church.

Rudolph was unmarried; perhaps it was this fact that enabled him to waste money on all sorts of hobbies instead of going to his office with his little black bag and behaving generally as a "weel tappit" husband and king would do. Rudolph's hobbies were alchemy and astronomy. The chief object of the former extremely inexact science seems to have been to make gold by the synthetic process. Any charlatan who came along with a declared conviction that he could produce gold was welcomed by the King. It was for these his guests that Rudolph prepared those tiny dwellings in the narrow alley called "The Alchemists" or the "Gold Makers." They are snug, those tiny dwellings, so small that you should be able to open your front door without getting out of bed; you look down out of the deep embrasure of your window on to the tree-tops in the "Stag's Moat." The height of the wall from your window to the ditch does not invite you to try a leap by way of escape, so Rudolph's alchemist guests had to produce something or suffer from the King's displeasure. This, for instance, happened to two gentlemen from the British Isles, Dr. John Dee and Mr. Kelly. Both these visitors were going to supply Rudolph with wonders of alchemy, gold in profusion. They failed to give satisfaction, and were imprisoned—another injustice to Ireland! Did the fairy chorus that thrilled the listeners at the foot of Dalibor's strong dungeon chant that plaintive cry, "Has anyone here seen Kelly"?