Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/12

 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 lucrubations of Emile Zola, Gôethe, in a conversation with Eckerman, speaks with admiration of the simplicity and purity of the Bohemian writers, and since his time there has been a great re-awakening of the national spirit, and the language which had sunk to be a despised dialect of the common people of the towns and the peasantry of the rural districts, now claims half of the University of Prague, has its seat in one of the finest theatres in Europe, and is once more the proud mouthpiece of art and science.

The writer, some of whose stories are here brought to the notice of the English reading public, was one of those who helped on the attainment of this proud result. Palacky and Jungmanns aroused the interest of the people in their own history by publishing historical and antiquarian works in the vernacular. Cajetan Tyl is still remembered as a patriotic dramatist and writer of fiction, and Erben’s Sclavonic folk-lore has a general interest, but none of the Bohemian writers has caught so speaking a likeness of the inner life of the Bohemian people as Viteslav Halek, no one is remembered with such enthusiastic affection by all classes, or strikes so responsive a chord in the feelings of high and low. Already throughout Bohemia societies have been formed for the reading of his works, although he has not been dead fifteen years, and when I lodged in Smichoff with an honest Bohemian stonemason and his wife, I found it difficult to keep their hands off my copy of his stories. The more cultivated classes admire him for the simplicity of his style, and even the Germans are constrained grudgingly to acknowledge his merits. A complete edition of his works has indeed, been lately published in the original language edited by a writer, whom from his name (Ferdinand Schultz), I should judge to be a German.

These works consist of some half dozen dramas drawn chiefly from Sclavonic history, The first of these, Carevic Aleksej, was acted about the year 1860, and is modelled to some extent on Gôethe’s Egmont. For another, composed and brought out about