'The most splendid city in Germany?' George Eliot and Prague.

IT was in July 1858, a decade after 'the year of revolutions', that the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) and her partner George Henry Lewes undertook a journey that led from London to Dresden by way of Munich. Preoccupied with German culture, Eliot was eager to explore the delights of the Saxon capital, and wrote rapturously in her letters and diaries of the art treasures that she saw there. On the way, however, they travelled through Vienna, and spent a day and a night in Prague, their first visit to the city. Immediately after breakfast, as Eliot explains in her journal, they went out to see as much of 'the grand old city' as possible in one day.

'The most interesting things we saw were the Jewish burial-ground (the alter Friedhof) and the old Synagogue. The Friedhof is unique--with a wild growth of grass and shrubs and trees and a multitude of quaint tombs in all sorts of positions looking like the fragments of a great building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake. We saw a lovely dark eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue with its smoked groins, and lamp for ever burning. An intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the Law. After dinner we took a carriage and went across the wonderful bridge of St. Jean Nepomuck with its avenue of statues, towards the Radschin--an ugly straight-lined building but grand in effect from its magnificent site, on the summit of an eminence crowded with old massive buildings. The view from this eminence is one of the most impressive in the world--perhaps as much from one's associations with Prague as from its visible grandeur and antiquity. The Cathedral close to the Radschin is a melancholy object on the outside--left with unfinished sides like scars. The interior is rich, but sadly confused in its ornamentation, like so many of the grand old churches--hideous altars of bastard style disgracing exquisite Gothic columns. (...) We got our view from a Damen Stift (for ladies of family) founded by Maria Theresa, whose blond beauty looked down on us from a striking portrait. Close in front of us sloping downwards was a pleasant orchard; then came the river with its long, long bridge and grand gateway; then the sober-coloured city with its surrounding plain and distant hills. In the evening we went to the theatre--a shabbily ugly building--and heard Spohr's Jessonda.'

Despite her cool appraisal of what she perceived as the imperfections of some of Prague's buildings, George Eliot was obviously impressed with the beauty of its setting and the nobility and sense of history that she perceived in the city. equally enthusiastic; in a letter to John Chapman of 23 July 1858, he called Prague 'the most splendid city in Germany'--a glowing if now inaccurate description. Their journey had taken them through Salzburg, Ischl, Linz and Vienna, and unpardonable as it might seem to a modem reader, Lewes was simply including Prague in a broad application of 'Germany' which enveloped not only Bohemia but much of the Habsburg Empire. (Lewes was a well-known biographer of Goethe and eventually became editor of The Fortnightly, now incorporated in the Contemporary Review.) Had either of them had any real awareness of the developing consciousness of Czech nationhood or Czech literature, he might not have made this mistake. This was, after all, just five years after the publication of Erben's Kytice (1853) and three since that of Bozena Nemcova's Babicka. Karel Havlicek Borovsky had died two years before, and the 1850s were a reactionary period in which journalism stagnated, as not only political and educational periodicals but literary ones were suppressed. But Jan Neruda had just brought out his Hrbitovni kviti (Graveyard Flowers) the previous year, and Vitezslav Halek was working on his Vecerni pisne (Evening Songs; 1858-59), similarly influenced by Heine. This same year, 1858 was also the year which saw the publication in the Tagesbote aus Bohmen, one of Prague's two major German newspapers, of a series of articles questioning the authenticity of the Dvur Kralove and Zelena Hora manuscripts, 'discovered' in 1817-18 by Vaclav Hanka and Josef Linda and containing fragments of Czech epic and lyric poetry allegedly dating from the 10th-13th centuries. The resulting scandal was to have far-reaching implications for conceptions of the Czech nation and its cultural heritage.

Within two years the revival of constitutional life in the Austrian Empire would bring new vigour to Czech literary culture and allow the generation of young writers who took their name from the almanac Maj to make their voices heard. None of this, however, can be detected in Eliot's impressions of Prague. Within the next decade, too, the theatre which she stigmatized as shabby and ugly (the Kralovske stavovske divadlo or Royal Estates Theatre, renamed in 1949 after Josef Tyl, who managed it from 1846 to 1851) would see the first performances of Smetana's operas instead of the now almost forgotten works of Spohr (Jessonda dated from 1823).

Eliot, however, could know nothing of this. There is no indication that she had any contacts in Prague, unlike in Munich, where she met David Friedrich Strauss, whose Das Leben Jesu she had translated, and Vienna, where she and Lewes visited the anatomist Joseph Hyrtl. The only Czech-born scholar she is known to have met was Dr. Anton Springer, a Bonn-based academic who visited England in 1850 with his English friend Robert Noel, brother of her acquaintance Edward. His abandonment of his Bohemian liberal principles after 1848 had made him unpopular with Czech nationalists.

Cultural links between Britain and Bohemia were relatively undeveloped at that time. In the 1830s and 1840s several pieces of travel writing had appeared: Henry Reeve, editor of the Edinburgh Review, had published an account of a visit to Prague in 1836 in the Metropolitan Magazine, and three years later parts of it were included in the Rev. George R. Gleig's Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. In 1840 Peter Evan Tumbull brought out Austria, a two-volume work which, although pro-Habsburg, recognized the continuing vitality of the Czech language. There were also two anthologies which, had Eliot known of them, would have provided an introduction to Czech literature. In the same week in July 1858 when she and Lewes were in Prague, John Bowring (1792--1872) was travelling through Pest and Vienna on the way home from government business in Turkey. Better known as a diplomat and politician, Bowring had developed an interest in Eastern European literature, corresponded with the poet Celakovsky and schola rs Safarik, Dobrovsky and Kopitar, and in 1832 published Wyborz Bdsnictwi Ceskeho. Cheskian Anthology: Being a History of the Poetical Literature of Bohemia, with Translated Specimens. Celakovsky in particular was disappointed with this compilation, and in 1828 Bowring had aroused controversy with his article 'Bohemian Literature' in the Foreign Quarterly Review, which cast aspersions on Dobrovsky and contained potentially compromising anti-Habsburg material. Bowring's translations appeared in Hanka's 1843 edition of the Rukopis Kralovedvorsky. In the 1852 Polyglotta edition they were replaced by versions by the Rev. Albert Henry Wratislaw (1821--92), Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and subsequently Headmaster of Felsted School, Essex. In 1849 Wratislaw, whose knowledge of Czech was much greater than Bowring's, published Lyra Czecho-Slovanska, a collection of 'Bohemian poems, ancient and modem, translated from the original Slavonic with an introductory essay', but there is no evidence in Eliot's journa ls or letters that she had read either of these anthologies. There was simply no time, either, for her to make more than a superficial acquaintance with Prague itself.

However, the short time she spent there left so strong an impression on her that in the following year, 1859, she published a story, The Lifted Veil, which incorporated her journal entry almost word for word. The only fiction which she ever wrote in the first person, it tells of a young man, Latimer, whose dubious gift of prevision causes him repeatedly to relive the moment of his approaching death. One of the earlier instances of this occurs when his father promises him a trip to the Tyrol and Vienna, returning through Prague. The name induces in Latimer a vision of 'a city . . . unrefreshed for ages by the dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-in woven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal, and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with t heir ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day'. Although he has never seen a picture of Prague, Latimer's vision is minutely detailed, even including 'a patch of rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star'. When he reaches Prague, (like Eliot, en route to Dresden), and prepares to visit the Jewish quarter on a hot, dry August day, he hopes that a late start may prevent the party reaching the places which he had seen in his vision. 'But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of that old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone reached down the Book of the Law and read to us in its ancient tongue--I felt a shuddering impression that this strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered remnant of med ieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those darkened, dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own'. He feels compelled to walk on 'under the archway of the grand old gate leading on to the bridge', gripped by chills and trembling, until he finds the very 'patch of rainbow light on the pavement' that he had seen in his vision. This detail marks the beginning of the inexorable process of dissolution--a doomed marriage to Bertha, the fiancee of Latimer's dead brother Alfred and the one person whose mind he cannot penetrate, an experiment in resuscitation which leads to a terrible revelation by a dead servant, and the growing 'curse of insight' which leaves Latimer with no illusions about the true thoughts and intentions of others or his own inevitable end.

The Lifted Veil was completed on 26 April 1859, and appeared (anonymously, on Eliot's publisher John Blackwood's advice) in the July issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, exactly a year after the journey which inspired it. (Seven years later, the same journal serialised a novel set in Prague, Nina Balatka, by Eliot's friend, Anthony Trollope.) In the intervening months Eliot had suffered family discord, the death of her sister Chrissey, and gossip attributing the authorship of her novels Scenes from Clerical Life and Adam Bede to Joseph Liggins. Not surprisingly, these experiences coloured her view of human nature and even the memories of a city which had impressed her so strongly the previous summer, and are reflected in the brooding atmosphere of the story and the jaundiced outlook of its narrator. For Eliot/Latimer, Prague is a city imprisoned in its past, with no hint of national revival or burgeoning creative vitality, a revolution ten years before or the possibility of independent statehood sixty yea rs later. Fascinated by mesmerism and clairvoyance, Eliot responded to Prague's traditions of mysticism, magic and alchemy, and its rich historical associations, which made it ideal as the setting for the pivotal episode in a story linking scientific experimentation with elements of the supernatural, and the dangers of foreknowledge.

Had she known Erben's Stedry den (Christmas Eve), Eliot might well have chosen its final lines as an epigraph to The Lifted Veil:

Better to dream on in hope mistaken,
Sheer darkness before us, nothing to see,
Than uncover the future, and to awaken,
Knowing its terrible certainty!

This is a slightly amended version of the prize-winning essay by Susan Reynolds of the Taylorian Library of the University of Oxford. Further information about future essay contests can be found on the British Czech and Slovak Association's web-site (www.bcsa.co.uk).