# The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/University of Prague (2)

Second part of the English translation of the commencement speech University of Prague. For the first part see The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/University of Prague (1).
University of Prague
By ERNEST DENIS.
(Concluded.)
II.
At this moment there begins a long period of sadness; it lasts nearly three centuries, from 1622 to 1880.
As early as 1555, emperor Ferdinand I. called in the Jesuits to Bohemia, and they established there a college which became soon the headquarters of Catholic reaction. After the White Mountain the moment came to erase from the surface of the earth and from the cognizance of history that insolent nation which for two centuries had been defending its nationality against Germany and its liberty against the papacy. The nobility, which represented the most conscious and active section of the nation, was driven out and proscribed; the towns men were ruined, the ministers expelled and the peasants were turned over to the exploitation of foreign adventurers which flocked to the dead body of crucified Bohemia. The constitution was mutilated as a preparation to its suppression. But nothing seemed complete as long as the University remained; University, that is to say the thought, the soul of the people.
In 1622 Ferdinand ordained that the University of Prague should become attached to the Jesuit College. They alone will teach in the faculties of theology and philosophy; they will select professors for the faculties of law and medicine; the rector and chancellor will be taken from their order. The Company takes over the direction of public instruction which belonged to the University of Charles, decides on the course of study and issues licenses to teach. The rector reprimands and discharges suspect professors. The Jesuits obtain the sole control of censoring, inspect libraries and printing houses, confiscate dangerous books. The government of spirits is completely in their hands.
In 1651 Ferdinand III., to complete the work of his father, placed the University under a director, a veritable commissioner of police, whose duty it was to watch and denounce students and professors. Under that double tyranny, political and religious, intellectual life disappeared: there was no longer any thought, there was no University of Prague, no Bohemia. Science was suspected and muzzled; all things combined to keep the professors in a state of pitiable mediocrity; they were forbidden to devote themselves to special studies. Condemned to a thankless task, reduced to beggarly pay, the teachers neglected their duties and cut down their courses; public lectures were so empty that the students had to take private tuition, thus enabling the professors to augment their meager salaries.
Philosophy was treated in the most approved scholastic manner. Long discussions were held about the problem, at what hour the last judgment would begin and how long it would last.
There was no instruction in history and geography; mathematical courses consisted of half an hour per week for just one year. The Jesuit order produced more than one remarkable scholar, and even in Bohemia there are to be found among its members distinguished writers and choice spirits. Nevertheless their influence has been deplorable, because they feared science and life. Libenter carebo poculo in quo suspicio veneni, said one of their most illustrious representatives. To avoid poison they would keep knowledge away from man; thought, reflexion, research was in their eyes nothing but what the devil tenders to man. Their effort was to repair the mistake which Providence committed when it gave liberty to the creature. Their work is summed up in the missions of Konias, who went from town to town, from village to village, tracking down the heretics and burning their books.
They pushed their zeal so far that even their protectors, the Hapsburgs, began to feel uneasy. Charles VI. came to the conclusion that their instruction was perhaps somewhat insufficient and asked them whether they did not think it advisable to modify their methods. The Company was astounded by these criticisms. What were the complaints? About their methods? They have been applying them for 158 years; have they not made good? They are asked to teach geometry, algebra. Why, ​those studies were invented by Descartes, and is it not said that Descartes smells of the fagot? Nevertheless the Jesuits will make concessions: the mathematical course is now half an hour a week; it will be three-quarters of an hour. The Hapsburgs have never been too insistent in the cause of liberalism. Charles VI. did not press the matter and things continued as they were. Even the suppression of the order in 1773 did not make much change in the situation.
In 1791 the first national impulse made itself felt, and under the influence of the opposition to the reforms of Joseph II. a chair of Czech language was created in the University of Prague. But when calm was restored to spirits, Francis I. returned to former practices.
Recollect that we are at one of the most stirring periods of history; never has life been so impetuous, thought so bold; an intense fever shook human souls; it was the period of romanticism; science pushed into all corners its adventurous researches; old barriers were crashing down. But at Prague the Hapsburgs had but one thought: to strengthen and tighten the chains, to stupefy the spirit more completely. One would think that they were haunted by shadowy terrors, pursued by the ghosts of their crimes. They saw that the Czech people which they had believed suppressed could not be annihilated; they feared to see it emerge from the tomb; they inquired anxiously of the guards which searched for the body of the Savior in the tomb and did not find it there. To stifle the idea of revenge, to postpone the day of reckoning, the successors of Ferdinand redoubled zeal and activity. The students were placed under specially strict regulations, treated like schoolboys.
The first year they were obliged to go to confession once every three months and to attend the lectures of the professor of theology, who in the first semester taught the verities of religion with reason and the second semester the same truths with out reason. The courses remained sterile, the professors lazy and mediocre. Of the great men of Czech revival, Dobrovský, Jungmann, Šafařík, Palacký, not one belonged to the University. During that first half of the 19th century, so full of life, so fruitful, so big with future, life centered in free societies, founded by individual initiative: Scientific Society, Museum Society, Matice. The Hapsburg University did nothing for the country.
This situation had certain advantages; above all it exalted patriotism. Students left to themselves, without direction, without guides, abandoned by professors who did not love them and whom they did not love, had to rely on themselves. They abandoned themselves to the ardor of their dreams, lived in a mystical adoration of the past and contemplation of an apocalyptic future. Czech Prague in 1840 is a kind of holy city in which the apostles surrender their souls to a feverish ecstasy. “One can speak only with tenderness of the scholars of Prague,” writes Pogodin, the Russian; “resembling the Christians who in the catacombs kept alive holy traditions, they attempt to keep up national consciousness in the people; and for that they sustain all sacrifices, resign themselves to greatest privations, do not recoil before the hardest effort, fear no prejudice.” . . . . The students, like the shadows that gather at the call of God, wander “in Zion, once glorious, now desolate. Their feet tremble with joy when they ascend Vyšehrad; their eyes fill with tears when they arrive at Bílá Hora.”
They are ready for devotion and sacrifice. They are not ready for life. That was made plain in 1848; at the first appeal of the fatherland the young men came forward in a body and students of the University took a prominent part in the labor of the revolution. But when it came to the point of taking advantage of victory gained over the old regime, the men failed at the task for which they were not sufficiently prepared. The generation lacked the habit of persevering and constant work, lacked method, experience, the sense of reality; that is to say, precisely the qualities that young men should acquire during their attendance at the University. They were surprised by events, and the partisans of reaction, the Schwarzenbergs and Bachs, profited by it to re-establish their authority.
Certain facts, however, burned themselves so deeply into the souls that nobody could efface their memory. The gains of the revolution were not all lost. Among the men who came to power after the triumph of the reaction some, like Count Thun, felt a certain sympathy for the Czech nation; they regretted its downfall; they were disposed to concede to it certain liberty; they timidly opened the door to ​Czech professors. Two of these in particular exercised a profound influence on the young men—the historian, Tomek, and the jurist, Randa. With them there penetrated into the Hapsburg institution a critical sense and a passion for truth laboriously pursued. With them opens truly a new era.
Around these teachers a group of young men commenced to gather, at first few in numbers, but growing rapidly; they were inspired by their principles, and under this inspiration prepared themselves for the service of their country. The romantic generation was succeeded by a generation also passionate, but more practical, more capable of sustained effort, not discouraged by reverses, a generation which advances, in spite of obstacles, step by step, toward their goal. This period witnesses the appearance of men who have been the founders of present Bohemia, men like Kaizl, Pekař, Kramář and Masaryk. What the Czechs demanded before all was a University all their own. From 1864 on the great orator, Rieger, voices in the Reichsrat the claims of his people. Never was a demand better founded; but it took a fight of twenty years before it was carried. For twenty years Germans who ruled Austria, and who wanted to keep the Slavs in an eternal guardianship, opposed with a furious obstinacy the Czech demands. They claimed for the German science a privileged position. In vain did Rieger denounce the stupidity of their sophisms. What is that German science? There is no German science, French science, English science or Czech science; science is based on free and loyal research, and it aims at the emancipation of spirits and the development of souls. It must be made accessible to all. No people can appeal to special privileges and demand a monopoly of science; and no people is to be kept away from science.
The Germans shut their ears to these arguments, so self-evident, so clear. Before the Czechs attained the satisfaction of their demands it almost took a revolution; the Germans by their awkwardness lost the favor of Francis Joseph. To punish their opposition to his own will the emperor made Taaffe minister, and in order to obtain the support of Czech deputies in the Reichsrat he ordered the division of the Prague University into a German and a Czech University. That is the opening of the last period, University Triumphant.
Triumphant, but not by reason of favor it found at the hands of the government. The concession made necessary by circumstances the government tried to make of as little value as possible by favoring the Germans, reducing the number of chairs to a minimum, refusing to laboratories the most badly needed credits. But what did it matter? It could not lower the spirit of the men or abase their teaching. Due to their science, to the strength of their methods, to their devotion, the University of Prague was at the beginning of war one of the most active and most famous schools of the world.
I should like to indicate here the whole field of its activities, and I must at least cite the names of some of its most illustrious teachers: Besides the jurists, Randa, Tilsch and Kadlec; the economist, Bráf; the philologue, Gebauer, who practically created the history of the Czech language; Niederle, the continuator of Šafařík; Jaroslav Vlček, who rewrote the history of national literature; Pekař, whose labor threw a vivid light on the society of the Middle Ages; Novotný, who wrote anew the history of Hussitism; and in the sciences, in the narrower meaning of the term, the physiologist, Mareš, and the physician, Thomayer. And how many more names rise to memory, how long would be the list of those that should be named.
But what characterized the young University even better than the men has been the unity of spirit and soul, absolute faith in science, devotion to truth.
Recently I read an admirable passage in the great poet, Machar. In a dark night, looking out through the bars of his prison, Hus contemplates stars that shine brilliantly; his hour of suffering comes upon him, sister to the night of Gethsemane; he sees his life, pure, blameless, but condemned by hatred to terrible death; he thinks of his country, the love he has for his native land, and his anguished soul turns toward the Father, and he prays with the words of the Savior: Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.
On the day following the night of agony four bishops come to him to take him to the hall of the Council. They call on him to retract and confess his errors. Before he can answer, Lord of Duba, who came with him to Constance with some Bohemian friends, takes his hand and says: Master John, we here, your friends and ​companions, are ignorant; it is not for us to advise, it is for you to decide. If you think that you have erred, retract openly. But if you are innocent, persevere to death, to your last breath, in the truth that you have found.
The master looks through tears at Duba. But in his soul he feels fixed upon him innumerable eyes of his friends over at home, students and preachers, noble ladies and their servant women, peasants and professors, knights and doctors who came to him to seek the truth; eyes that were fastened on him, as he preached in his chapel of Bethlehem, eyes of simple men and women who came to him for the way of salvation. To all of them he spoke of the light, the faith, the life; he showed them the way; they believed in him. Could he betray them? To retract! To abjure a truth that does not belong to him alone! Rather than denounce truth the master goes to the stake.
The University Militant, University Triumphant received that sacred inheritance, the unqualified, full veneration of truth. This is, I believe, what professor Masaryk always told his students: examine and judge; judge without prejudice, without any other rule but conscience. Serve the truth, love it sincerely, and be sure that thereby you will serve the country.
The true, living, active faith always triumphs. That is the second great lesson taught us by the University of Prague—confidence, optimism, love, love of the people, love of the simple, the ignorant, the humble, of all those whose constant labor created the fatherland and sustains it. Truth, democracy, country—that is the tri-color of the University of Prague, the banner which it has flown from its first day and which it has preserved intact during storms, the flag that floats today victoriously over the young Czechoslovak Republic.
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