Slav Epic

In Czechoslovakia there has just been completed The Epic of Slavic History, a series of 20 paintings so enormous that Alfons Mucha, the artist, has been as busy with stepladders as with lexicons. For more than 18 years the work has been under way. The subjects range from earliest Slavic history to allegorical, exuberant prophecy. Sages, religious leaders, rulers appear in glorious pageantry. The most magnificent picture of the series, a canvas as large as the fac,ade of a sizeable barn, depicts the liberation of Russian serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. In a grey, snowy twilight a crowd of the poor are gathered in Moscow's Red Square. Looming through the soft fall of flakes is the ornate Cathedral of St. Basil, multicolored cupolas and towers bedizened with snow. Beyond lie the grim walls and towers of the Kremlin. The people have just heard the ukase. They stand in clusters, joyfully inarticulate, habitually stolid. The bizarre tints of the Cathedral glimmer like a huge lantern of faith above and beyond the awestruck host.

Only a man of prodigious historic imagination could picture to himself the entity of Slavic evolution. Centuries before the bright miracle of Bethlehem the Slavs were a nation of lithe, swarthy wanderers who cultivated the land northeast of the Carpathians. Fearfully they turned to dark hills for sullen, reverberating commandments of Perun the Thunderer. Patiently they awaited lustrous benevolences of Dazbog the Sun God. Then their sweating oxen strained over furrows; hives were loud with bees; joyous honeyed mead was brewed in the glades. With the arching zest of dolphins the Slavs plunged in the waters of the Vistula, Pripet, Upper Dniester rivers. At nightfall they huddled in their river bank encampments, shuddered at the moan of the werewolf, the fleet shadow of Baba-Jaga, man-eating witch. Meanwhile their more venturesome brethren, scowling pirates of the Aegean and Baltic, forgot their ferocity beneath a vibrant pattern of stars.

With the passing years the Slavs solidified in little communistic groups. Perhaps they were not naturally belligerent (not one of Mucha's paintings commemorates a deed of battle), but onslaughts of domineering Goths, the scorbutic spread of Huns under black-hearted Attila, compelled warfare. The Slavs multiplied, mi grated. Westward they journeyed to Poland, Northern Germany. Eastward they thronged Russia, pierced in slim wedges to the Pacific. Southward they trekked to Hungary, Albania, Greece. By the sth century A.D. they had ceased to be a nation, were even losing race consciousness. Gradually the widespread Slavic peoples adopted Christianity. The 15th century martyr, Bohemian John Huss, was their most eloquent devotee of the cross. Today only the esoteric significance of language, as understood by pedants, betrays the Slavic as the most numerous of European races. Miscegenation and environment have destroyed racial semblance, shattered racial pride. There are more than 150,000,000 Russians, Poles, Kashubes, Serbs, Czechoslovaks, Polabs, Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Bulgarians. All are Slavs, despite their differing nationalities, characteristics. Alfons Mucha possessed the requisite imagination and pride to epitomize this development. Proudly is he Czechoslovakian, proudly a Slav. White-haired, rugged, in this man the strain is sharply apparent. His far-off ancestors surely looked on Svetovit, three-headed God of Plenty, symbolized by sun and bull. He has the boundless Slavic intensity and energy which make the leaders of his race indefatigable in labor, irresistible in personal charm. Years ago, in Paris, his posters of Sarah Bernhardt as Gismonda and La Samaritaine took him pyrotechnically to fame. They were graceful of line, palely florescent of decoration, for which he has a penchant at once Pre-Raphaelite, Russian. Feted as he was with Parisian fanfares, he returned regularly to the quietude of central Europe, to that Slavic ridge which is saturated with spontaneous, vivid art.

The Epic of Slavic History is at present on exhibition in Prague, Czechoslovakian capital, where a permanent gallery for it will soon be built. It is fitting that on the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakian independence the country should possess such a Slavic shrine, a goal for pilgrims. Slavs have inspired the shrine, a Slav has peopled it with the painted legion of his forbears, Slavs will visit it with sympathy. But the scheme was fostered by an American, financed with U. S. money. The entrepreneur is grey-haired, goateed Charles Richard Crane, supposedly of Manhattan, in reality most traveled of Americans. He is now 70. He devoted his prime to expansion of the famed Crane valves & fittings business. He has been U. S. Minister to China (1920-21), campaigner for Woodrow Wilson, member of his diplomatic mission to Russia. In 1919 he was commissioner on mandates in Turkey. He is President of Trustees of the American College for Girls in Constantinople. But governmental and business missions are but slight reason for Mr. Crane's voyaging. His wayfaring is that of the perpetual explorer. He is a successful Ponce de Leon who continually finds lost, shining cities. "I discovered Asia in 1878," he says, with the air of one who had hitherto led a purblind, provincial existence. Russia alone has received him 23 times. This week he sails to Arabia.

Particularly fond is he of the Slavic peoples. He has endowed a Slavic chair at the University of Chicago, which for a while was occupied by Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, now President of Czechoslovakia. The successful suitor for the hand of Mr. Crane's daughter Frances was Jan Masaryk, son of the President. It was at a Pan-Slavic dinner in Manhattan that Mr. Crane met Alfons Mucha. Later in their friendship the artist confided his dream of a Slavic Pantheon. This seed had struck the most fertile soil. What Artist Mucha's long, loving labors have cost Mr. Crane is not known. The venerable traveler abjures publicity. He has merely expressed his enthusiasm as a Slavophile.