Around the clock in Europe

by Charles Fish Howell

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.