Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City Read Online Free PDF Page A

laid head to foot,' the novelist Gustav Meyrink notes in his accustomed cheery fashion. The sun was gone now, and a sky bearing a bellyful of snow loured over the afternoon. The great church reared above us, 'ornate and mad', in Philip Larkin's fine description of churches in general, like a vast, spired ship run aground and sunk here in the midst of the castle complex, clamoured about on all sides by the reefs of Baroque palaces, coral-coloured. The cathedral is yet another of the gifts lavished on Prague by the munificent Charles IV. Work began on it in 1344, and was not completed until 1929, if such a building can ever be said to be finished. The first architect was Matthew of Arras. Here is the Golden Portal, held aloft on the delicate webbing of Peterthree Gothic arches. When one looks up, the entire building seems to be speeding massively through the brumous air, going nowhere. See the gargoyles, 'these caricatures, these apings-at', as Rilke, another of Prague's unwilling sons, has it; I always feel a pang of pity for gargoyles. In 'View from the Charles Bridge', Seifert writes:
    There are days when the Castle
and its Cathedral
are gloomily magnificent,
when it seems
they were built of dismal rock
brought back from the Moon.
    We enter into a huge, reverberant silence, shadowed, ancient air. The rose window above us dimly glows, feeding upon the wan winter light; the stained glass, I silently observe, is distinctly gaudy. In 'Zone’, the poet ApoUinaire, 'montant au Hradchin’, experienced here a moment of Modernist dread:
    Epouvante tu te vois dessine dans les agates
      de Saint-Vit
Tu etais triste a mourir le jou ou tu t'y vis
Tu ressembles au Lazare affole par le jour
    Which Samuel Beckett renders as:
    Appalled you see your image in the agates of
      Saint Vitus
That day you were fit to die with sadness
You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight
    My footsteps ring on the floor of the nave and fetch back reproachful echoes. I enter St Wence-slas's Chapel, into which one could wander freely then but which nowadays is barred to the public by a velvet rope, international tourism's ubiquitous, polite but unvaultable hurdle. Buried in this chapel is Wenceslas I, that hymned good king, fourthruler to hold the throne, supposedly assassinated on this holy ground at the behest of his bad brother Boleslav in or about 935. The interior walls, so my guidebook tells me, are studded on their lower levels with 'c.1372' precious stones; I am impressed by that laconic V. On the north door of the Wenceslas Chapel there is a bronze ring, gripped firmly in the mouth of what I am told is a lion, 6 to which the dying king is said to have clung as the assassins struck.
    I am always surprised to think that churches should be considered places of comfort and sanctuary. On the contrary, they seem to me, especially the big, Catholic ones, soulless memorials of anguished atonement and blood rites, gaunt, unwarmed and unwelcoming, heavy with Wallace Stevens's 'holy hush of ancient sacrifice'. Years ago, in Salisbury Cathedral, eavesdropping one twilit eve on the cathedral choir at rehearsal, I was appalled to notice that beside me my seven-year-old son was weeping silently in terror. As I tried to comfort him I looked about - 1 , who was compelled by a devout mother to spend extended stretches of my childhood in places such as this and saw it all suddenly from the perspective of a little boy born to godless parents: the grimacing statues, the cross-eyed martyrs in stained glass, the shot-torn regimental banners, the maniacally carved pulpit, all quite mad - Larkin was right and hideously menacing. What frightened my son most, he later confessed, were the sotto voce comments and encouragements that the choir master breathed into his microphone in the pauses between verses; they must have sounded like the celestial chidings of weary, terrible old Yahweh himself.
    Yet it occurs to me that a few centuries ago my son in