Zawis and Kunigunde/Preface
PREFACE.
The restricted limits prescribed for this book have prevented as full a detail of minor events as the writer had proposed.
The chief incidents are all historically true. The grouping and the sequences present a revival picture of the age in which the events occurred without distortion of fact or exaggeration of statement.
Replete with strong contrasts of light and shade as the age was; rugged as the life of every people long continued; yet amid the fiercer passions arose, in vividly distinctive beauty, the gentler virtues, the loftier motives, and the purer sentiments of multitudes of individuals. Not only the essential tendencies of human nature, but the constant recurrence of human sympathies, and the ineffaceable marks of these on the surface of human life wherever peace and security permitted their display, strongly prove that women and men were not then worse than at other times, but that the prevalence of delusions more or less plausible, and all springing from ignorance of natural facts,had for a time usurped the place of better inspiration. One of the most lamentable perils to which we are all subject is the readiness we exhibit to employ the best motives for the worst purposes. A terrified imagination, a sensitive nature, and a confusion of ideas that buries an act under a feeling, will render a man or woman, essentially good, temporarily a fiend.
When a long era, under apparently divine sanction, devotes itself to the cultivation of such excitable feelings, and associates them with supernatural agencies, the result must be, and always has been, to fill the world with virtuous frenzy that destroys all virtue but that of its own distorted character. Such was the age here depicted.
The chief personages are real; the inter-play of their associations, as herein set down, is such as most naturally arose out of their historical relation with each other. No false position, improbable sentiment, or excessive coloring has been adopted.
Real life, such as this book recalls, is more replete with records containing evidence of the good oppressed, sometimes rewarded, and the evil exalted and glorified, than can be presented by the fictitious annals of ingenious invention, however skillfully or elaborately drawn.
Bohemian history contains an accumulation of such historic memorials, and here is one.