Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843/Part 3/Letter 1
LETTER I.
PRAGUE.
Strange and wild legends appertain to Prague, and people the heights that overhang the city. The Bohemians are of Sclavonian race; they were in early times fire-worshippers, and offered victims to their divinity on the Laurenzi Berg, which rises behind the town. On the Hradschin, an eminence that frowns above the Moldau, was built the palace of the old Bohemian kings; and the metropolitan church of Prague stands in the palace-yard, on the highest point of the imperial hill.
The most prosperous period for Prague was the reign of the Emperor Charles IV. He appears in
no favourable light in the pages of Italian history; but he won immortal and deserved renown as King of Bohemia, by his acts of magnificence, and the liberality and sagacity of his government. He caused the Neustadt to be built, marking the width and termination of the streets, and leaving the spaces to be filled up by private individuals, on whom great privileges were bestowed: the size of the streets and open areas interspersed, give it a noble distinction among the ill-built towns of the middle ages. Churches and convents rose around. He built also the grand old Bridge, which spans the broad and curved stream of the Moldau, and he founded the University, which long vied with Paris and Oxford in celebrity.
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 counter-balance, 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[1] 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,”[2] 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[3]; 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 Swedes; 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.”[4] 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.
- ↑ In preparing these letters for the press, I have consulted some papers entitled “Sketches of Bohemia and the Sclavonian Provinces of the Austrian Empire,” by Henry Reeve, Esq., published in the 18th and 19th vols. of the Metropolitan Magazine. They are admirably written, and it is greatly to be regretted that they do not proceed to a greater length, and are lost in a Magazine.
- ↑ Mr. Reeve.
- ↑ Life of Wallenstein by Colonel Mitchell.
- ↑ Rogers’s “Italy.”