Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/435
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