Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/11



F THE reader will take a map of the world and draw three lines, one from Venice to Danzig, another from Constantinople to the White Sea, and a third from the Erz Mountains, west of Prague, to Kamchatka, he will be able to form some idea of the vast stretch of territory affected by Slavonic civilization.

No confraternity of nations, not even the Anglo-Saxon, occupies so large a portion of the earth’s surface as the rapidly-increasing Slavonic brotherhood.

On this account alone, if for no other reason, any attempt to bring home to English readers something of the inner life of some of these peoples is worthy of attention. Bohemian literature, moreover, has several special claims upon English readers. In the first place more than once the royal families of England and Bohemia have been united. Then again the country to some extent in its configuration and the variety of its strata, still more in its plethora of coal, iron-stone, and other minerals has much in common with England. Bohemia has never broken entirely with the traditions of feudalism, and in the flourishing condition of its principalities and great estates, the richness of its woodland, the abundance of its game, its fine breed of horses, and the excellence of its beer, we seem to see a copy of old England, and are reminded that similar causes produce similar effects: not that this is exactly true of the last item, however, which is at once milder and of purer quality than our own. Lastly, the religious struggles of the Reformation were fought out in Bohemia much on the same lines as in England, and while we may proudly claim some spiritual affinity between our own Protestant martyrs and the victims of papal power in Prague, we are also reminded that in the national hero of Bohemia, John Hus, more than in any other of the great Protestant martyrs, were exhibited the most spotless purity of life, the most complete absence of self-seeking or worldly ambition, the most loyal devotion to duty, and the most simple and ready self-sacrifice in the cause of truth. The literature of a country which has produced the most perfect type of Christian piety which the world has yet seen, a man who of all others approximates most in his life and death to the originator of the Christian cult, merits something better than neglect at the hands of Christians steeped in the flimsy rhetoric of French triviality; and the latest production of a civilization which was of no mean order while England still revelled in barbarism, might occasionally be exchanged with advantage for the endless verbiage of our own school of novels or the edifying lucubrations of Emile Zola. Goethe, in a conversation with Eckermann, speaks with admiration of the simplicity and purity