Because of centuries of political and economic subjection, the very existence of the nation has been lost sight of by the Anglo-Saxons. In the interval between the catastrophal defeat of the Bohemians in 1620 and 1848, the year of revolutionary changes, nothing has occurred in Bohemia to attract the attention of the world to the Bohemian nation. The Seven Years’ War, and later the Napoleonic Wars, were events that concerned not Bohemia as an independent state, but the whole of the Hapsburg Empire. The Russians acquired renown in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by their defeat of Napoleon. Later, during the Crimean War, Russia again came into prominence in the Anglo-American press. Kosciuszko and Pulaski were names to be conjured with by the Polish immigrant. The uprisings in 1830 and in 1863 made sufficiently known to the Americans the ideals and the miseries of Poland. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Berlin Congress following it made the English reader familiar with the geography and political ambitions of the Balkan Slavs. The Serbs, the Bulgars, the Montenegrines were successively introduced to the newspaper man and through him to the public at large. Alone the Bohemians remained undiscovered, unknown.
Before the war the average reader did not know where Bohemia was located with respect to Austria-Hungary. That ethnically, there might be a difference between a Čech, Hungarian and an Austrian he suspected, yet it was not wholly clear to him wherein the dissimilarity lay. One could cite countless instances of astonishing naiveté concerning the history of the nations which inhabit central and southeastern Europe. Four years ago a journalist and a writer who served on the western front in the capacity of a war correspondent made the astounding discovery that “the ancient Czech (Bohemian) language still continues to be spoken in Prague.” It would no doubt amuse a Dutchman to read that “Dutch is still spoken in Amsterdam”; yet transpose Dutch for Bohemian and Prague for Amsterdam and the analogy is precise. When one remembers with what fine scorn an American looked down upon that corner of Europe, which in his opinion exhibited altogether too many superfluous boundary dots, one begins to realize what thankless, almost futile task it was to talk to him of the trials, ambitions and triumphs of the Bohemian O’Connells, Emmets, Shelleys, Macauleys and Hallams. With the rest, the Bohemians had to pay the penalty of being thought a small nation.
Again there are the Bohemians and bohemians and how to differentiate between the two is still a puzzle to a considerable portion of the public. Are all the Bohemians artists, who “secede from conventionality in life and art”? That even cultured—let us not hope educated—Americans and Englishmen entertain the weird notion that there exists some distant relationship between Bohemians, bohemians and gypsies, is, alas, too true. In the novel Strathmore, Louise de la Ramée (Ouida) for instance, asserts quite seriously that gypsies in Bohemia have Slavonic features, that their language is a dialect of the Bohemian and that the “lawless, vagrant, savage race” is a Slavic tribe domiciled in Bohemia.
Not a few are misled by the term Czech, thinking it probably signifies a people other than the Bohemians. A New York paper, in enumerating the disaffected races of Austria-Hungary, named the Bohemians and the Czechs. This is precisely like saying Yankees and Americans or Germans and Teutons, for, as informed readers are aware Bohemians and the Czechs are one and the same.[1]
Of the continental nations, Germany excepted, the French were the first to look inquiringly into the queer Austrian household. No doubt they were led to study Slavic Austria largely because of their alliance with Russia and because of their historical friendship for the Poles. Due to the labor of three pioneers, Saint-René
Taillandier (1817-1879), Louis Leger (1843-) and Ernest Denis (1849-) La Nation Tchèque is no longer unknown in France. Other and younger Frenchmen,—to name one, André Chéradame, the author of the widely quoted volume, The Pangerman Plot Unmasked,—continue the apostolary work in France; but Taillandier, Leger and Denis will always be honored as the pioneers of this propaganda. Of the trio, Ernest Denis, Professor of the Sorbonne, stands closest to the Bohemian heart. Denis’ monumental researches, Huss et la Guerre des Hussites, La Bohême depuis la Montagne Blanche, and Fin de l’indépendance Bohême, when published, may be said to have caused a sensation. Unhampered by the censor, Denis was able to bring out facts of Bohemia’s past which were a revelation to the Bohemians themselves.
The Anglo-Saxon who visited the Hapsburg dominions thirty or forty years ago was yet unable to see anything but Teuton Austria; that is to say, he looked at Bohemia and the other Austrian states wholly from the official viewpoint of Vienna.
As a sample of the notions of Bohemia and the Čechs professed in America and England a generation ago, suffice it to cite a passage or two from Bayard Taylor’s Views A-Foot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff: “The very name of Bohemia is associated with wild and wonderful legends, of the rude barbaric ages. The civilized race, the Saxon race, was left behind; I saw around me the features and heard the language of one of those rude Slavonian tribes whose original home was on the vast steppes of Central Asia(!)” Again: “In passing the shrines by the wayside, the poor degraded peasants always uncovered or crossed themselves, but it appeared to be rather the effect of habit than any good impulse for the Bohemians are noted all over Germany for their dishonesty....”
Taylor’s grossly distorted appraisal of Bohemia was not shared by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as appears from the following lines by the famous American poet:
“Hold your tongues! both
Swabian and Saxon,
A bold Bohemian cries;
If there’s a heaven upon this earth,
In Bohemia it lies.”