Bohemia, from the earliest times to the fall of national independence in 1620 / With a short summary of later events

by C. Edmund Maurice

The relation of literary patron to protected man of genius has never been an easy or a happy one; and Comenius often found that De Geer complained of the slowness of his work, and, still more, perhaps, of that wide range of sympathies which often distracted him from the interests to which his patron desired him to confine himself. Once De Geer even withdrew his support, for a time, from the needy Bohemian; and Comenius must have felt this desertion the more keenly, because his applications for money had been far oftener made on behalf of others than for his own needs. But a bitterer blow awaited him in 1648. He had hoped that the enthusiasm of Gustavus Adolphus for the Protestant Cause had been shared by his Councillors, and by his countrymen generally; and that they would insist on the restoration of the Protestant Bohemians to their country, before the final conclusion of the peace. It was, therefore, a terrible shock to find that Oxenstierna cared more for the possession of Pomerania than for the liberties of German or Bohemian Protestants; and Comenius bitterly reproached the Swedish Chancellor with his desertion of the cause of the exiles.

But this year of disappointment brought one consolation. Comenius was elected Chief Bishop of the Bohemian Brotherhood; and his exhortations and encouragements seemed for a time to put new life into the Society. More noteworthy still is the effect which these addresses produced in the following century; for it was they that decided Count Zinzendorf to welcome the Brethren to Herrnhut, and to inaugurate that later period of their career during which they have been known by the name of “Moravians.” It is interesting, too, to find that Comenius was actuated by that Slavonic feeling which was always so powerful in Bohemia; and that he conceived the idea of translating the Bible into Turkish, so that, by turning the Sultan to the true faith, he might secure an easier life for those Slavs who were suffering under the Mahommedan tyranny. His educational labours were also carried on with some effect in Poland and Hungary; and it should be specially remembered that the German Real-Schule is as much due to the inspiration of Comenius as the Universities of Leipzic and Wittenberg are to the model provided for them, and the scholars trained in the University of Prague.

But, though the career of Comenius shows that there were still Bohemians who tried to keep alive the intellectual and moral life of their nation, such instances are but rare interruptions to the dreary record of stifling tyranny which stretched over the last years during which the male line of the Hapsburgs governed Bohemia. Doubtless, occasionally, energetic students, like the Jesuits, Balbin and Pes̆ina, give hopes of an ultimate revival of interest in the national history; sometimes an insurrection of the peasantry, like that of 1680, seems to hint that tyranny may become intolerable at last. Joseph I., indeed, is credited with a desire for reform; but at any rate there is no sign of a realisation of his ideas; and it is only when the male Hapsburgs make way for the one female ruler of their race that a day of better things seems just about to dawn. Even that dawn was very slow in breaking. Some encouragement was given to culture by Maria Theresa, and a literary society was founded; but it soon became apparent that even literary discussions involved an awkward revival of the past; and the censors again interfered to check intellectual progress. The Empress-Queen relaxed the feudal oppression of the peasantry; but only enough was granted to excite, without satisfying, the desire for liberty. One step, however, was gained during this reign, which cleared the ground for future progress. Popes and kings at last realised that that great Order, before which they had bowed, might become as dangerous to them as to the people whom they governed; and, in 1773, Clement XIV. dissolved the Society of Jesus. This dissolution struck a blow at that monopoly of education which had stunted the intellectual life of Bohemia, and it prepared the way for the changes of the following reign.

In 1780, Joseph II. of Germany, the first king of the House of Lorraine, succeeded his mother as ruler of all the dominions of the House of Austria. He at once signalised his accession to power by an Edict of Toleration, which allowed all Protestants to return to Bohemia, and to settle there freely. But, with all his zeal for enlightenment, Joseph was hampered by those old traditions of uniformity which he had received from his mother’s family. He soon found that Protestants could not be all rolled together in compact bundles and kept quiet there. Not only the Bohemian Brothers, but a number of very strange sects, would come in under the new Edict. Some of these did not even profess Christianity; and Joseph was yet more irritated to find that men who had special convictions sometimes wished to express them in ways of which their neighbours disapproved. The Protestants were therefore called upon to accept either the Augsburg Confession or the Calvinistic Formulæ; and, when he at last realised that there was a growing body in the country who refused to accept any definite Christian creed, Joseph’s feelings of toleration gave way. Children were torn from their parents to be educated in sounder principles, and the parents were banished to Transylvania.

A blot, that created even more general indignation in Bohemia, stained Joseph’s schemes of educational reform. Here, too, he wished to remove restrictions and to extend knowledge; but here again the Hapsburg instinct was too strong for eighteenth-century enlightenment. The Latin of the Jesuits was, indeed, to be deposed from its supremacy. Printing-presses were to be established. Studies previously rejected were to be encouraged. But the tyranny of Latin only made way for the tyranny of German. That was to be the one recognised language of education; and Bohemian was to yield to it even more completely than it had yielded to the language of an older civilisation.

Nor had Parliaments or municipalities any chance of life. No laws were to be passed by the Bohemian Estates without the sanction of an Austrian Board; the censorship of Bohemian books was to be conducted from Vienna; a brand-new municipal code was to check the free play of the old Town Rights. Only in one matter was freedom to be unhampered in its progress, and untainted by any of those inconsistent arrangements which took back with one hand what the other hand had given. The power of the lord over the serf was to be completely broken; and the freed peasants might move as they pleased from place to place, and might choose whatever trade or study they desired, unhampered by the authority of their former masters.

But the opposition to the denationalising plans of Joseph, which assumed so violent a form in Hungary and the Netherlands, encouraged the Bohemians also to protest in a milder fashion; and, when Leopold succeeded Joseph as King of Bohemia, he was forced to reconsider his brother’s policy, to convoke the Bohemian Assembly once more, and to make concessions to the national feeling in the matter of language. For, in spite of all repressions and discouragements, that feeling had never ceased to have its influence in Bohemia; and it was well illustrated by three men of very different type, who had begun their efforts in the discouraging times of repression, and who lived on into more hopeful days.

Of these the eldest was Frantis̆ek Pelc̆el, who was born at Rychnov (Reichenau) in 1735. He was a man of obscure birth, and he was intended by his parents for the medical profession. But he did not like this occupation; so he went to Prague to study in the High School, where he partly supported himself by teaching the children of rich citizens. Finding, however, that logic was better taught at Králové Dvůr (Königinhof), he went there to study; but, while he was there, the school was placed more completely under Jesuit control. The strange mixture of repulsion and attraction which that wonderful Society seems generally to excite in its pupils, had its influence over Pelc̆el; and the attraction proving, for the time, the stronger feeling, he was inclined to give himself to theology; but the Seven Years War cut short his studies, and he left Bohemia for Vienna.

It was on his return to Prague that he fell in with the second of the men who were to be the great promoters of the new movement. This was Count Caspar of Sternberg, the son of an officer who had served under Maria Theresa. He, like Pelc̆el, had been attracted to the study of theology; but his audacious speculations had startled the professors at the German College in Rome, and the Jesuits had produced on him a purely repellent effect. After the dissolution of the German College, Sternberg had returned to Prague, and had given himself to the study of art. He soon took notice of Pelc̆el, and entrusted to him the education of his children. This turned Pelc̆el from his theological speculations; but it was not till his transfer to the family of another nobleman that he devoted himself wholly to the study and writing of history. His life of Charles IV. and his short history of Bohemia may be wanting in the wide views and deeper insight of later historians; but the evidence of enormous industry and hearty interest in the subject make a distinct mark in the progress of national feeling.

The most remarkable of the leaders of the movement, and the one who seems to be the most looked back to by the historians of the present day, was Josef Dobrovsky. He, too, was intended by his Jesuit teachers for a theological career; and it was only the suppression of that Order which turned him for a time to the study of the language. He did not, however, abandon theology. In 1778 he brought out a commentary on Bohemian literature; and in 1779 he began to edit a journal in which contemporary Bohemian literature was noticed and criticised. Curiously enough, his conclusions about Bohemian history were rather opposed to those of modern national historians. He threw doubts on the existence of the common Slavonic language; and he rather discredited the extent of the influence of Cyril and Methodius, as compared with that of the Roman Church. But for the Bohemian language he was keenly zealous, and when, in 1790, Leopold appeared at a meeting of the Bohemian Society of Sciences, Dobrovsky appealed to him to protect his countrymen in the use of their mother-tongue. The Emperor was so much impressed by this appeal, that he sent six thousand gulden to the society, for the promotion of journeys for inquiry into the Bohemian history and language. Dobrovsky was chosen to travel in Sweden and Russia, both for the recovery of lost manuscripts and for the collection of further information about Slavonic literature.