BUT NEXT evening, when I should have been finding somewhere to sleep after the first day’s march in Hungary, Hans and I were unfolding our napkins under the pink lampshades of the dining-car while the night train to Prague whirled us full tilt in the opposite direction. Hans, who had taken my Central European education in hand, said it would be a shame to go gallivanting further east without seeing the old capital of Bohemia. I couldn’t possibly afford the trip but he had abolished all doubts by a smile and a raised hand enjoining silence. I had been gaining skill, when involved in doings above my station, at accepting this tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb. The banknote I flourished in restaurants, like Groucho Marx’s dollar-bill on a length of elastic, grew more tattered with each airing. I strove to make my protests sound sincere, but they were always brushed aside with amiable firmness.
Falling asleep after dinner, we woke for a moment in the small hours as the train came to a halt in a vast and silent station. The infinitesimal specks of snow that hovered in the beam of the station lamps were falling so slowly that they hardly seemed to move. A goods train at another platform indicated the sudden accessibility of Warsaw. PRAHA—BRNO—BRESLAU—LODZ—WARZAVA. The words were stencilled across the trucks; the momentary vision of a sledded Polack jingled across my mind’s eye. When the train began to move, the word BRNO slid away in the opposite direction. Then BRNO! BRNO! BRNO! The dense syllable flashed past the window at decreasing intervals and we fell asleep again and plunged on through the Moravian dark and into Bohemia.
At breakfast time, we climbed down into the awakening capital.
* * *
Stripped of the customary approach on foot, Prague remains distinct from all the other towns of this journey. Memory encircles it with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine. I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream. The trajectory had carried Hans and me back into the middle of winter. All the detail—the uprush of the crockets, the processions of statues along the coping of bridges and the levitated palaces—were outlined with snow; and, the higher the buildings climbed, the more densely the woods enfolded the ancient town. Dark with nests, skeleton trees lifted the citadel and the cathedral above the tops of an invading forest and filled the sky with cawing and croaking.
It was a bewildering and captivating town. The charm and the kindness of Hans’s parents and his brothers were a marvellous enhancement of it, for an articulate enthusiasm for life stamped them all; and, in borrowed evening plumage that night, among the candle-lit faces of an animated dinner party, I first understood how fast was the prevailing pace. Hans we know. Heinz, the eldest brother, a professor of political theory at the University, looked more like a poet or a musician than a don and the ideas he showered about him were stamped with inspiration. Paul, the youngest and a few years older than me, was touched by the same grace. Those candles, rekindled now for a moment, also reveal their kind parents, and Heinz’s dark and beautiful wife. There is also a remarkable relation-in-law of hers, a man of great age and originality, called Pappi, or Haupt zu Pappenheim. His talk, rooted in a picaresque life all over the world, emerged in a headlong rush of omniscience and humour. (My seventeenth-century obsession connected the name at once with the great cavalry commander in the Thirty Years War, one who had sought out Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen, as Rupert had sought out Cromwell at Marston Moor, to be struck down at the same moment as the King in another part of the field. His relation’s discourse had some of the same dash.)
Much later the scene shifted from these candles to a cave-like nightclub where silhouettes floated past on a tide of cigarette smoke, and the talk—abetted by syphon-hiss and cork-pop, and encouraged rather than hindered by the blues and the muted cymbals and the wailing saxophone—flowed unstaunchably on. It culminated in marvellously abstruse and inventive theories, launched by Heinz, about Rilke and Werfel and the interrelation of Kafka’s Castle—as yet unread by me—and the actual citadel that dominated the capital. When we emerged, the great pile itself was still wrapped in the dark, but only just.
* * *
As I followed Hans’s zigzag and switchback course all over the steep city, it occurred to me that hangovers are not always harmful. If they fall short of the double-vision which turns Salisbury Cathedral into Cologne, they invest scenery with a lustre which is unknown to total abstainers. Once we were under the lancets of St. Vitus’s Cathedral, a second conviction began to form. Prague was the recapitulation and the summing-up of all I had gazed at since stepping ashore in Holland, and more; for that slender nave and the airy clerestory owed spiritual allegiance far beyond the Teutonic heartland, and the Slav world. They might have sprung up in France under the early Valois or in Plantagenet England.
The last of the congregation were emerging to a fickle momentary sunlight. Indoors the aftermath of incense, as one might say with a lisp, still floated among the clustered piers. Ensconced in their distant stalls, an antiphonal rearguard of canons was intoning Nones.
Under the diapered soffits and sanctuary lamps of a chantry, a casket like a brocaded ark of the covenant enclosed the remains of a saint. Floating wicks and rows of candles lit up his effigy overhead: they revealed a mild mediaeval sovereign holding a spear in his hand and leaning on his shield. It was Good King Wenceslas, no less. The confrontation was like a meeting with Jack the Giant Killer or Old King Cole... English carolsingers, Hans told me as we knelt in a convenient pew, had promoted him in rank. The sainted Czech prince—ancestor of a long line of Bohemian kings, however—was murdered in 934. And there he lay, hallowed by his countrymen for the last thousand years.
Outside, except for the baroque top to the presiding belfry, the cathedral itself might have been an elaborate gothic reliquary. From the massed upward thrust of its buttresses to the stickle-back ridge of its high-pitched roof it was spiked with a forest of perpendiculars. Up the corner of the transepts, stairs in fretted polygonal cylinders spiralled and counter-spiralled, and flying buttresses enmeshed the whole fabric in a radiating web of slants. Borne up in its flight by a row of cusped and trefoiled half-arches, each of them carried a steep procession of pinnacles and every moulding was a ledge for snow, as though the masonry were perpetually unloosing volleys of snowfeathered shafts among the rooks and the bruise-coloured and quick-silver clouds.
A spell hangs in the air of this citadel—the Hradcvany, as it is called in Czech; Hradschin in German—and I was under its thrall long before I could pronounce its name. Even now, looking at photographs of the beautiful lost city, the same spell begins to work. There was another heirloom of the old Bohemian kings hard by the cathedral: the church of St. George, whose baroque carapace masked a Romanesque church of great purity. The round arches that we call Norman plunged through bare and massive walls, flat beams bore up the ceiling; and a slim, gilt mediaeval St. George gleamed in the apse as he cantered his charger over the dragon’s lanced and coiling throes. He reminded me of that debonair stone banneret at Ybbs. It was the first Romanesque building I had seen since those faintly remembered Rhenish towns between Christmas and the New Year.
And, at this very point, confusion begins. The city teems with wonders; but what belongs where? Certainly that stupendous staircase called the Riders’ Steps, and all that lay beyond them, were part of the great castle-palace. The marvellous strangeness of the late gothic vaults enclosing this flight must have germinated in an atmosphere like the English mood which coaxed fan-tracery into bloom. The Winter Queen, in her brief snowy reign, was equally astonished, perhaps; her English renaissance upbringing—those masques and their fantastic stage-sets by Inigo Jones—may have been a better preparation. I kept thinking of her as I peered up. These vaults are almost impossible to describe. The ribs burst straight out of the walls in V-shaped clusters of springers. Grooved like celery stalks and blade-shaped in cross section with the edge pointing down, they expanded and twisted as they rose. They separated, converged again and crossed each other and as they sped away, enclosed slender spans of wall like the petals of tulips; and when two ribs intersected, they might both have been obliquely notched and then half-joggled together with studied carelessness. They writhed on their own axes and simultaneously followed the curve of the vault; and often, after these contorted intersections, the ribs that followed a concave thrust were chopped off short while the convex plunged headlong and were swallowed up in the masonry. The loose mesh tightened as it neared the rounded summit and the frantic reticulation jammed in momentary deadlock. Four truncated ribs, dovetailing in rough parallelograms, formed keystones and then broke loose again with a wildness which at first glance resembled organic violence clean out of control. But a second glance, embracing the wider design, captured a strange and marvellous coherence, as though petrifaction had arrested this whirling dynamism at a chance moment of balance and harmony.
Everything here was strange. The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostrich-plumes under the freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep the bright paint that spiralled them unchipped. But in King Vladislav’s vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close to the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling: parting, crossing, re-joining, and—once again—enclosing those slim subdivided tulips as they climbed. Then they cast their intertwining arcs in wider and yet wider loops with the looseness and the overlap of lassoos kept perpetually on the move, accelerating, as they ascended, to the speed of coiling stockwhips... Spaced out along the wide ridge of the vault, their intersections composed the corollas of marguerites and then fled away once more into wider patterns that needed another shift of focus to apprehend. Travelling the length of that arched vista of ceiling, the loops of the stone ribs expanded and crossed and changed partners, simultaneously altering direction and handing on the succession of arcs until the parabolas, reaching the far limit of this strange curvilinear relay-race, began to swing back. Nearing home and completing the journey in reverse, they re-joined their lost companions at their starting point and sank tapering and interlocked. The sinuous mobility entranced the eye, but it was not only this. Lit by the wintry chiaroscuro of the tall windows, the white tulip-shaped expanses that these stone ribs enclosed so carelessly seemed to be animated by an even more rapid and streamlined verve. Each of these incidental and sinuous facets reflected a different degree of white, and their motion, as they ascended the reversed half-cones of the vault and curled over into the ceiling, suggested the spreading and upward-showering rush of a school of dolphins leaping out of the water.
It was amazing and marvellous. I had never seen anything like it. One can imagine a draughtsman twiddling arcs and marguerites with his compass and elaborating them for fun in vast symmetrical tangles—only to push them aside with a sigh. It is the high-spirited audacity of their materialization that turns everything to wonder. Hans was telling me as I gazed how Count Thurn and a party of Protestant nobles had tramped under these vaults on the way to their fateful meeting with the councillors of the Holy Roman Emperor, all in full armour: the word ‘armour’ suddenly offered a solution. It seemed, all at once, the apt analogy and the key to everything here. The steel whorls and flutings, those exuberant wings of metal that adorned the plate-armour of Maximilian’s Knights! Carapaces which, for all their flamboyance and vainglory, withstood mace-blows and kept out arrows and the points of swords and lances. In the same way the flaunting halls and the seven hundred rooms of this castle have maintained thousands of labyrinthine tons of Kafka masonry against fire and siege for centuries. These vaults and these stairways were concave three-dimensional offshoots of the Danubian breakout, and shelter for Landsknechts. Altdorfer’s world!
Heraldry smothered the walls and the vaults that followed. Shield followed painted shield and aviaries and zoos and aquaria supplied the emblems that fluttered and reared and curvetted among the foliage on the helmets. We were in the very heart of the Landsknecht century. Reached by a spiral, the last of these castle-interiors was an austere and thick-walled room, roofed with dark beams and lit by deeply embrased leaded windows; a sturdy old table was set on the waxed flag-stones. It was in this Imperial aulic council chamber, on May 23, 1618, that Thurn and those mail-clad Czech lords had pressed their claims on the Imperial councillors and broken the deadlock by throwing them out of the window. The Defenestrations of Prague were the penultimate act before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The last was the arrival of the Elector Palatine and his English Electress to be crowned.[1]
It was time to seek out one of the wine cellars we had noticed on the way up.
* * *
I climb about the steep city in retrospect and re-discover fragments one by one. There are renaissance buildings, light arcaded pavilions and loggias on slim Ionic pillars that could have alighted here from Tuscany or Latium, but the palaces on the squares and the citadel and the steep wooded slopes belong to the Habsburg afternoon. Troops of Corinthian pillars parade along half-façades of ashlars rusticated like the nail-head patterns on decanters, and symbols and panoplies overflow the pediments. Branching under processions of statues, shallow staircases unite before great doorways where muscle-bound Atlantes strain under the weight of the lintels, and the gardens underneath them are flocked by marble populations. Nymphs bind their collapsing sheaves, goddesses tilt cornucopias, satyrs give chase, nymphs flee, and tritons blow fanfares from their twirling shells. (The snow in the folds of their flying garments and the icicles which seal the lips of the river gods are there till spring.) Terraces climb the hillside in a giant staircase and somewhere, above the frosty twigs, juts a folly like a mandarin’s hat; it must have been built about the time when Don Giovanni was being composed a mile away. Looking-glass regions succeed each other inside the palaces—aqueous reaches under vernal and sunset pastorals where painters and plasterers and cabinet-makers and glaziers and brasiers have fused all their skills in a silence that still seems to vibrate with fugues and passacaglias and the ghosts of commiserating sevenths.
Where, in this half-recollected maze, do the reviving memories of the libraries belong? To the Old University perhaps, one of the most ancient and famous in Europe, founded by the great King Charles IV in 1384. I’m not sure. But I drive wedge-shaped salients into oblivion nevertheless and follow them through the recoiling mists with enfilading perspectives of books until bay after bay coheres. Each of them is tiered with burnished leather bindings and gold and scarlet gleam on the spines of hazel and chestnut and pale vellum. Globes space out the chessboard floors. There are glass-topped homes for incunables. Triangular lecterns display graduals and antiphonals and Books of Hours and coloured scenes encrust the capitals on the buckled parchment; block-notes and lozenges climb and fall on four-line Gregorian staves where the Carolingian uncials and blackletter spell out the responses. The concerted spin of a score of barley-sugar pillars uphold elliptic galleries where brass combines with polished oak, and obelisks and pineapples alternate on the balustrades. Along the shallow vaulting of these chambers, plasterwork interlocks triangular tongues of frosty bracken with classical and allegorical scenes. Ascanius pursues his stag, Dido laments the flight of Aeneas, Numa slumbers in the cave of Egeria and all over the ceiling draped sky-figures fall back in a swoon from a succession of unclouding wonders.
Floating downhill, memory scoops new hollows. Churches, echoing marble concavities dim as cisterns in this cloudy weather, celebrate the Counter-Reformation. Plinths round the floor of rotundas hoist stone evangelists aloft. With robes spiralling in ecstasy and mitres like half-open shears, they hover halfway up the twin pillars from whose acanthus-tops the dome-bearing semi-circles fly. In one of these churches, where the Tridentine fervour had been dulled by two centuries of triumph, there were saints of a less emphatic cast. The figure of St. John the Divine—imberb, quizzically smiling, quill in hand and at ease in a dressing-gown with his hair flowing loose like an undress-wig, he might be setting down the first line of Candide instead of the Apocalypse; perhaps the sculptor has confused his Enlightenments. Seen from a fountain-square of the Hradcvany, the green copper domes, where each snow-laden segment is pierced with a scrolled lunette, might belong to great Rome itself. The pinnacles on all the cupolas are tipped with monstrances shooting rays like golden fireworks; and when these and the gold balls on the tips of the other finials are touched by a rare sunbeam, the air glitters for a moment with a host of flying baubles.
* * *
A first glance, then, reveals a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars. It celebrates the Habsburg marriage-claims to the crown of Bohemia and reaffirms the questionable supercession of the old elective rights of the Bohemians; and alongside the Emperor’s temporal ascendancy, this architecture symbolizes the triumph of the Pope’s Imperial champion over the Hussites and the Protestants. Some of the churches bear witness to the energy of the Jesuits. They are stone emblems of their fierce zeal in the religious conflict. (Bohemia had been a Protestant country at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. It was Catholic once more at its close and as free of heresy as Languedoc after the Albigensian crusade, or the sea-shore of oyster-response at the end of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’)[2]
But in spite of this scene, a renewed scrutiny of the warren below reveals an earlier and a mediaeval city where squat towers jut. A russet-scaled labyrinth of late mediaeval roofs embeds the baroque splendours. Barn-like slants of tiles open their rows of flat dormers like gills—a mediaeval ventilation device for the breeze to dry laundry after those rare washing-days. Robust buildings join each other over arcades that are stayed by the slant of heavy buttresses. Coloured houses erupt at street corners in the cupola-topped cylinders and octagons that I had first admired in Swabia and the façades and the gables are decorated with pediments and scrolls and steps; teams of pargetted men and animals process solemnly round the walls; and giants in high relief look as though they are half immured and trying to elbow their way out. Hardly a street is untouched by religious bloodshed; every important square has been a ceremonious stage for beheadings. The symbolic carved chalices, erased from strongholds of the Utraquist sect of the Hussites—who claimed communion in both kinds for the laity—were replaced by the Virgin’s statue after the re-establishment of Catholicism. Steel spikes, clustered about with minor spires, rise by the score from the belfries of the older churches and the steeples of the riverside barbicans, flattened into sharp wedges, are encased in metal scales and set about with spikes and balls and iron pennants. These are armourers’ rather than masons’ work. They look like engines meant to lame or hamstring infernal cavalry after dark. Streets rise abruptly; lanes turn the corners in fans of steps; and the cobbles are steep enough to bring down dray-horses and send toboggans out of control. (Not now; the snow has been heaped in sooty banks, deep and crisp but uneven; the real Wenceslas weather was over.)
These spires and towers recalled the earlier Prague of the Wenceslases and the Ottokars and the race of the Prvemysl kings, sprung from the fairy-tale marriage of a Czech princess with a plough-boy encountered on the banks of the river. The Czechs have always looked back with longing to the reigns of the saintly sovereign and of his descendants and to the powerful and benevolent Charles IV—a golden age when Czech was the language of rulers and subjects, religious discord unknown and the rights of crown and nobles and commons and peasants all intact. These feelings gained strength during the Czech revival under the last hundred years of Habsburg ascendancy. Austrian rule fluctuated between unconvinced absolutism and liberalism soon repented and it was abetted by linguistic pressures, untimely inflexibility and all of the follies that assail declining empires, for knavery was not to blame. These ancient wrongs must have lost much of their bitterness in the baleful light of modern times when the only evidence to survive is an heirloom of luminous architectural beauty.
It took me a little time to realize that the Vltava and the Moldau were the Czech and the German names for the same river. It flows through the capital as majestically as the Tiber and the Seine through their offspring cities; like them, it is adorned with midstream islands and crossed by noble bridges. Among crowding churches and a mist of trees, two armoured barbicans prick their steeples like gauntlets grasping either end of a blade and between them flies one of the great mediaeval bridges of Europe. Built by Charles IV, it is a rival to Avignon and Regensburg and Cahors and a stone epitome of the city’s past. Sixteen tunneling spans carry it over the flood. Each arc springs from a massive pier and the supporting cutwaters advance into the rush of the current like a line of forts. High overhead and every few yards along either balustrade stand saints or groups of saints and as one gazes along the curve of the bridge, the teams unite in a flying population; a backward glance through one of the barbicans reveals the façade of a church where yet another holy flock starts up from a score of ledges. At the middle of one side and higher than the rest, stands St. Johannes Nepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 1393—he is said to have refused, under torture, to betray a confessional secret of Queen Sophia. When the henchmen of Wenceslas IV carried him here and hurled him into the Vltava, his drowned body, which was later retrieved and entombed in the Cathedral, floated downstream under a ring of stars.[3]
It was getting dark when we crossed the bridge. Leaning on the balustrade, we gazed upstream and past an eyot towards the river’s source; it rises in the Bohemian forest somewhere north of Linz. Then, looking over the other side, we pieced together the river’s itinerary downstream. If we had launched a paper boat at the quay she would have joined the Elbe in twenty miles and entered Saxony. Then, floating under the bridges of Dresden and Magdeburg, she would have crossed the plains of Old Prussia with Brandenburg to starboard and Anhalt to port and finally, battling on between Hanover and Holstein, she would have picked her way between the ocean liners in the Hamburg estuary and struck the North Sea in the Bight of Heligoland.
* * *
We shall never get to Constantinople like this. I know I ought to be moving on; so does the reader. But I can’t—not for a page or two.
Prague seemed—it still seems, after many rival cities—not only one of the most beautiful places in the world, but one of the strangest. Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, tempered in the end by the milder impulses of munificence and learning and douceur de vivre, had flung up an unusual array of grand and unenigmatic monuments. The city, however, was scattered with darker, more reticent, less easily decipherable clues. There were moments when every detail seemed the tip of a phalanx of inexplicable phantoms. This recurring and slightly sinister feeling was fortified by the conviction that Prague, of all my halts including Vienna itself, was the place which the word Mitteleuropa, and all that it implies, fitted most aptly. History pressed heavily upon it. Built a hundred miles north of the Danube and three hundred east of the Rhine, it seemed, somehow, out of reach; far withdrawn into the conjectural hinterland of a world the Romans never knew. (Is there a difference between regions separated by this ancient test? I think there is.) Ever since their names were first recorded, Prague and Bohemia had been the westernmost point of interlock and conflict for the two greatest masses of population in Europe: the dim and mutually ill-disposed volumes of Slavs and Teutons; nations of which I knew nothing. Haunted by these enormous shadows, the very familiarity of much of the architecture made Prague seem more remote. Yet the town was as indisputably a part of the western world, and of the traditions of which the West is most justly vain, as Cologne, or Urbino, or Toulouse or Salamanca—or, indeed, Durham, which—on a giant scale, mutatis mutandis, and with a hundred additions—it fleetingly resembled. (I thought about Prague often later on and when evil times came, sympathy, anger and the guilt which the fate of Eastern Europe has justly implanted in the West, coloured my cogitations. Brief acquaintance in happier times had left me with the vision of an actual city to set against the conjectured metamorphosis and this made later events seem both more immediate and more difficult to grasp. Nothing can surprise one in the reported vicissitudes of a total stranger. It is the distant dramas of friends that are the hardest to conjure up.)
* * *
I was glad Hans had given me the Good Soldier Svvejk to read, but I only realized its importance later on. After Don Quixote, Svvejk is the other fictitious figure who has succeeded in representing—under one aspect and in special circumstances—a whole nation. His station in life and his character have more in common with Sancho Panza than with his master, but the author’s ironic skill leaves it doubtful whether ruse or innocence or merely a natural resilience under persecution, are the saving talisman of his hero. Jaroslav Hasvek was a poet, an anti-clerical eccentric and a vagabond full of random learning and his adventures paralleled the picaresque wanderings of his creation. In and out of jail, once locked up as insane and once for bigamy, he was an incessant drinker and his excesses killed him in the end. He had a passion for hoaxes and learned journals. Until he was found out, his description of imaginary fauna in the Animal World attained wild heights of extravagance; and his fake suicide, when he jumped off the Charles Bridge, at the point where St. John Nepomuk was thrown in, set all Prague by the ears.
Some of Hasvek’s compatriots disliked his fictional hero and disapproved of the author. In the rather conventional climate of the new Republic, Svvejk seemed an unpresentable travesty of the national character. They needn’t have worried. The forces that Svvejk had to contend with were tame compared to the mortal dangers of today. But it is the inspiration of his raffish and irrefragable shade that has come to the rescue.
* * *
In this late attempt to recapture the town, I seem to have cleared the streets. They are as empty as the thoroughfares in an architectural print. Nothing but a few historical phantoms survive; a muffled drum, a figure from a book and an echo of Utraquists rioting a few squares away—the milling citizens, the rushing traffic vanish and the voices of the bilingual city sink to a whisper. I can just remember a chestnut-woman in a kerchief stamping beside a brazier to keep warm and a hurrying Franciscan with a dozen loaves under his arm. Three cab-drivers nursing their tall whips and drinking schnapps in the outside-bar of a wine cellar materialize for a moment above the sawdust, their noses scarlet from the cold or drink or both, and evaporate again, red noses last, like rear lamps fading through a fog.
What did Hans and I talk about in the cask-lined cave beyond? The vanished Habsburgs for sure, whose monuments and dwelling-places we had been exploring all day. My Austrian itinerary had infected me long ago with the sad charm of the dynasty. I felt that this comforting grotto, with its beams and shields and leaded windows and the lamplight our glasses refracted on the oak in bright and flickering discs, might be the last of a long string of such refuges. We were drinking Franconian wine from the other side of the Bohemian-Bavarian border. In what glasses? The bowls, correctly, were colourless. But by the Rhine or the Mosel, as we know, the stems would have ascended in bubbles of amber or green, and tapered like pagodas. Perhaps these stalks were ruby alternating with fluted crystal, for these, with gentian blue and underwater green and the yellow of celandines, are the colours for which the Prague glass-makers have always been famous... We had gazed with wonder at the astronomical instruments of Emperor Rudolf II. A celestial globe of mythological figures in metal fretwork turned in a giant foliated egg-cup of brass. Chased astrolabes gleamed among telescopes and quadrants and compasses. Armillary spheres flashed concentrically, hoops within hoops... More of a Spanish Habsburg than an Austrian, Rudolf made Prague his capital and filled it with treasures; and, until the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War began, Prague was a Renaissance city. Deeply versed in astronomical studies, he invited Tycho Brahe to his Court and the great astronomer arrived, noseless from a duel in Denmark, and lived there until he died of the plague in 1601. Kepler, promptly summoned to continue Brahe’s work on the planets, remained there till the Emperor’s death. He collected wild animals and assembled a court of mannerist painters. The fantasies of Arcimboldi, which sank into oblivion until they were unearthed again three centuries later, were his discovery. Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-platonic magic, astrology and alchemy. His addiction to arcane practices certainly darkened his scientific bent. But Wallenstein, who was one of the ablest men in Europe, was similarly flawed. In fact, an obsession with the supernatural seems to have pervaded the city. A whole wing of the Italianate palace which Wallenstein inhabited with such mysterious splendour was given over to the secret arts; and when Wallenstein inherited Kepler from Rudolf, the astronomer took part in these sessions with an ironic shrug.[4]
As well as astrology, an addiction to alchemy had sprung up, and an interest in the Kabala. The town became a magnet for charlatans. The flowing robes and the long white beard of John Dee, the English mathematician and wizard, created a great impression in Central Europe. He made the rounds of credulous Bohemian and Polish noblemen and raised spirits by incantation in castle after castle. He arrived in Central Europe after being stripped of his fellowship at Cambridge.[5] (One wonders how the Winter Queen, arriving a few decades later, reacted to this odd atmosphere; we have mentioned, earlier on, her contacts in Heidelberg with the early Rosicrucians.) The Jews, who had been settled in Prague since the tenth century, fell victims in the eighteenth to a similar figure called Hayan. He was a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, a Kabalist and a votary of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi; he convinced the trusting Ashkenazim. With Elijah’s guidance, he proclaimed in private séances that he could summon God, raise the dead, and create new worlds.
Our wanderings had ended under a clock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the time in Hebrew alphabetic numbers. The russet-coloured synagogue, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe; yet it was built on the site of a still older fane which was burnt down in a riot, in which three thousand Jews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1389. (The proximity of the Christian festival to the Feast of the Passover, coupled with the myth of ritual murder, made Easter week a dangerous time.) The cemetery hard by was one of the most remarkable places in the city. Thousands of tombstones in tiers, dating from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, were huddled under the elder branches. The moss had been scoured from the Hebrew letters and the tops of many slabs bore the carved emblems of the tribes whose members they commemorated: grapes for Israel, a pitcher for Levi, hands raised in a gesture of benediction for Aaron. The emblems on the other stones resembled the arms parlant which symbolize some family names in heraldry: a stag for Hirsch, a carp for Karpeles, a cock for Hahn, a lion for Löw; and so on. A sarcophagus marked the resting place of the most famous bearer of the name of Löw. He was Rabbi Jehuda ben Bezabel, the famous scholar and miracle-worker who died in 1609. His tomb is the most important memento of Prague’s involvement with the supernatural, for it was the Rabbi Löw who constructed the many-legended robot-figure of the Golem, which he could secretly endow with life by opening its mouth and inserting slips of paper on which magic formulae were inscribed.
* * *
My last afternoon was spent high above the river in the library of Heinz Ziegler’s flat. I had had my eye on those book-covered walls for a couple of days and this was my chance. I was in pursuit of links between Bohemia and England, and for a specific reason: I had taken my disappointment over the topography of The Winter’s Tale very hard, and it still rankled: Shakespeare must surely have known more about Bohemia than to give it a coast... So I stubbornly muttered as I whirled through the pages. He needn’t have known much about Peter Payne, the Yorkshire Lollard from Houghton-on-the-Hill who became one of the great Hussite leaders. But he was full of knowledge about my second Anglo-Bohemian figure, Cardinal Beaufort. He was not only John of Gaunt’s son and Bolingbroke’s brother and Bishop of Winchester, but one of the chief characters in the first and second parts of Henry VI. Before completing his cathedral and being buried there, Beaufort took part in a crusade against the Hussites and slashed his way across Bohemia at the head of a thousand English archers. A third connection, John of Bohemia, must have been equally well known, for he was the blind king who fell in the charge against the Black Prince’s ‘battle’ at Crécy. (His putative crest and motto—the three silver feathers and Ich dien—were once thought—wrongly, it appears—to be the origin of the Prince of Wales’s badge.) This remarkable man, famous for his Italian wars and his campaigns against the Lithuanian heathen, was married to the last of the Prvemysl princesses and one of his children was the great Charles IV, the builder of bridges and universities and, almost incidentally, Holy Roman Emperor as well; and here the connecting thread with England suddenly thickens; for another child was Princess Anne of Bohemia, who became Queen of England by marrying the Black Prince’s son, Richard of Bordeaux.[6] But my last discovery clinched all. Sir Philip Sidney’s brief passage across the sixteenth century glowed like the track of a comet: he seemed unable to travel in a foreign country without being offered the crown or the hand of the sovereign’s daughter, and his two sojourns in Bohemia—once after his Viennese winter with Wotton and a second time at the head of Elizabeth’s embassy to congratulate Rudolf II on his accession—must have lit up the Bohemian Kingdom, for even the most parochial of his distant fellow countrymen, with a flare of reality.[7] Ten years younger than Sidney, Shakespeare was only twenty-three and quite unknown when his fellow poet was fatally wounded at Zutphen. But Sidney’s sister was married to Lord Pembroke and Pembroke’s Players were the most famous acting company in London: they must have been friends of the playwright. Their son William Herbert could not—as some critics used rashly to maintain—have been Mr. W.H., but when the posthumous First Folio was published, he and his brother were the dedicatees; their cordial links with the poet are carefully stressed by the publishers. Shakespeare must have known everything about Sir Philip Sidney. It became plainer every minute that Bohemia can have held no secrets for him.
This was the point I had reached when Heinz came into the room. He was amused by the earthwork of books which the search had flung up on the carpet, and I explained my perplexity. After a thoughtful pause, he said: “Wait a moment!” He shut his eyes for a few seconds—they were grey with a hazel ring round the pupil—tapped his forehead slowly once or twice with a frowning effort of memory, opened them again and took down a book. “Yes, I thought so!” he said in an eager and cheerful voice as he turned the pages, “Bohemia did have a coast line once,”—I jumped up—“but not for long...” He read out the relevant passages: “Ottokar II... Yes, that’s it... Victory over Béla II of Hungary in 1260...enlarged the frontiers of Bohemia... Kingdom expands over all Austria...yes, yes, yes...southern border extended to both sides of the Istrian peninsula, including a long stretch of the north Dalmatian shore...! Failed to become Emperor, perhaps owing to anti-Slav prejudice among the Electors... Yes, yes,... Defeated and slain by Rudolf of Habsburg at Dürnkrut in 1273, when the country shrank once more to its old frontiers...” He shut the book. “There you are!” he said kindly. “A coast of Bohemia for you! But only for thirteen years.”
It was a moment of jubilation! There was no time to go into detail, but it looked as though my problems were solved. (The lack of time was a boon; for, once again, disappointment lay in wait. None of the historical characters, even by the boldest feat of literary juggling, could be made to fit. Worse, I discovered that when Shakespeare took the story of The Winter’s Tale from Robert Greene’s Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time, he light-heartedly switched the names of Sicily and Bohemia! It was total defeat. I felt as though the poet himself had reached from the clouds to checkmate me by castling the pieces in a single unorthodox move. I understood at last what I should have divined at the outset: punctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town—Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights—the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids.)
But, it was an instant of seeming triumph in which Heinz and his wife and Paul and Hans all joined. Heinz was soon filling glasses of celebration from a decanter cut in a nail-head pattern as bold as the façade of the Czernin palace. It was a valedictory drink as well, for the night train was taking Hans and me back to Bratislava and I planned to cross the Danube into Hungary next day.
The windows of the flat looked down on the whole of Prague. Towards the end of my search, the pale sun had set among those silver and purplish clouds and at lighting-up time all the lamps of the city had leapt simultaneously to life. Now, though the towers and pinnacles and the snow-covered domes were swallowed by the night, their presence was reaffirmed by the city-wide collusion of bells. Picked out by the embankment lights and the rushing headlamps of the traffic, the river was a curving band of darkness crossed by the many-beaded necklaces of the bridges. Directly below, between clusters of baroque lamp-brackets, the grouped statues dimly postured along the balustrades of the Charles Bridge. The lights grew scarcer as they climbed the citadel and dispersed round the steep dark wastes where the rooks had assembled for the night in the invading woods. It was a last glimpse of Prague which has had to last me from that evening to this.
[1] They lost their kingdom forever when the Bohemian army was routed by Maximilian of Bavaria, Chief of the Catholic League, at the battle of the White Hill—only a mile from the citadel—on 8th November 1620.
Question: Who is the most unexpected private soldier to be fighting as a volunteer in Maximilian’s army? Answer: Descartes.
[2] These were bad decades for religious toleration in Europe. They include the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, the expulsions beyond the Shannon and Cromwell’s resolute attempts to stamp out the Catholic Church in Ireland.
[3] Other versions exist. There are several instances of defenestration in Czech history, and it has continued into modern times. The Martyrdom of St. Johannes is the only case of depontication, but it must be part of the same Tarpeian tendency.
[4] The Waldstein Palace (as I learnt that it was more correctly called) was still owned by the family, and it harboured, among more usual heirlooms, the stuffed charger which had carried Wallenstein at Lützen. An eighteenth-century descendant befriended Casanova, who spent his last thirteen years as librarian composing his memoirs in Waldstein’s Bohemian castle. Another descendant was the friend to whom Beethoven dedicated the Waldstein Sonata. He was the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years’ War. Suspected by the Emperor of intriguing with the Swedes before actually changing sides—and perhaps planning, it was rumoured, to seize the Bohemian crown—he fled to a snow-bound castle near the Bavarian border. Four soldiers-of-fortune from the British Isles—Gordon, Leslie, Devereux and Colonel Butler of Butler’s Irish regiment of Dragoons—cut down Wallenstein’s henchmen over the dinner table. Then they sought out the great duke and Devereux ran him through with a pike. By far the best and most exciting book on the whole period is C.V. Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War. Dame Veronica delivers an adverse verdict on the last part of Wallenstein’s career; ruthlessness and megalomania and increasing trust in astrology had dimmed his earlier genius. He was tall, thin and pale with reddish hair and eyes of a remarkable brilliance.
[5] The cause of his downfall was a public demonstration of the device by which Trygaeus, the hero of The Peace of Aristophanes, flew to the crest of Olympus to beg the Gods to end the Peloponnesian War. As this vehicle was a giant dung-beetle from Mount Etna which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent, the exhibition may well have caused a stir. I would like to have seen it.
[6] She died young and her tomb is in Westminster Abbey. It is her successor, the French Princess Isabelle, who, in Richard II, overhears the gardeners talking of the King’s fall as they bind up the dangling apricocks. She was only eleven when Richard was murdered. Back in France as a Queen Dowager, she married her cousin, the poet Charles d’Orléans, who was later captured at Agincourt by Henry V and held prisoner in England for a quarter of a century. She was only nineteen when she died.
[7] Edmund Campion was also in Prague at the time, teaching at a Jesuit seminary. The two had long meetings and they liked and respected each other. Once, in honour of a state occasion, Campion wrote a long tragedy on the theme of Saul and the city produced it at vast expense; it was produced with great magnificence and although it lasted six hours, Rudolf ordered a special repeat performance. In England four years later, secretly ministering to harried recusants under the new penal laws, Campion was captured and after the customary tortures and a rushed trial, condemned to die at Tyburn. He endured the barbarous penalty with the courage of a saint.