East European Quarterly/Volume 15/Number 1/Palacký and Czech Culture in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

by Josef Hanzal

PALACKÝ AND CZECH CULTURE
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

 

Josef Hanzal
Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague

Nearly all nations have experienced historical periods of universal decline and recession, which were succeeded by eras of flourishing, manysided prosperity. As a rule, the prosperous stages give birth to great creative personalities who affect and even alter the fates of their nations. In the modern history of Bohemia, it was František Palacký who influenced the course of the Czech National Revival in such a decisive way. The stormy century that has elapsed since his death has proved the merits and the modern values of his work. Today there is no doubt that Palacký was one of the important “founding fathers” of the modern Czech nation and the chief author of the cultural, political, and moral program of the National Revival. This evaluation of Palacký’s historical role has prevailed, although in the past opinions relating to his importance have varied.¹

Before March, 1848, when Palacký was formulating his political program, a significant part of it dealt with those cultural questions which were of special importance in the objective historical situation of Bohemia. Until now, historical research has been greatly interested in the culture of the Czech Revival, its ideological sources, forms, connections, and consequences. Palacký’s significance in this development has already been successfully analyzed. Nevertheless, many problems still remain unclear or have been explained in different ways.²

Palacký’s extensive and far-reaching activity, reflecting the complicated and contradictory epoch of feudal decay and the rise of the bourgeoisie, has not received balanced study. The chronological stages, the internal structure, and the total meaning of Palacký’s work have been analyzed with diverse results. The early period in Bratislava (Pressburg), which became so decisive for Palacký’s growth and spiritual development, has for the most part been thoroughly unfolded. However, Palacký’s relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism and the significance of the two currents for his thought, feelings, and experience remain to be interpreted. Although this task cannot be attempted here, it must be stressed that not only the Enlightenment but also Romanticism intermittently affected young Palacký, their force varying in different spheres and periods. Romanticism, especially, cannot be excluded from Palacký’s early work. The attempts of some authors to do so in recent studies are, I think, unacceptable.

In the same way as Romanticism and the Enlightenment influenced the early formation of Palacký’s personality, the whole of his later work was harmoniously pervaded by his artistic and scholarly methods. However, the scholarly principles proved to be stronger and decisive. Palacký, like the majority of educated Czech patriots of the National Revival, longed to become a poet. Soon, however, he recognized his inadequacy of talent and came to the conclusion that the national culture needed something more than poetry. As an eighteen year old student, he wrote to his friend Pavel Šafařík: “Leaving Pressburg I lost the last spark of my affection for poetry . . . . Look at the whole of our literature. What gaps need to be filled? . . . And we, whose duty is to correct the deficiencies of our literature in accord with our gifts, are, for shame, not worthy of our country! In the end we shall always be only poets and lunatics. Do we not have a legion of Czech poets (relatively)? And where is a geographer? Where is a naturalist? Where is physicist? How many historians do we have? . . . We want to make people love our unworthy literary works in place of loving the better literature of other nations.”³

Palacký’s greatest desire was to serve the Czech nation with his literary work, and feelings of subjective satisfaction were clearly secondary. National needs became the focal point of his interest even during the brief period of his poetic activity. Unlike the multitude of Czech patriots who uncritically and ineffectually championed the Czech language, history, and culture, Palacký had a realistic and concrete program. Not merely passive knowledge but an active understanding of contemporary European science and culture became his primary objective.

Virtually from the beginning, Palacký, influenced by his sojourn in Bratislava and governed by his extraordinary talent, critical thinking, and high criteria, adopted European cultural standards for his nation. He understood very early that it was necessary to emancipate the language, the spirit, and the structure and methods of Czech belles-lettres and scientific and popular literature from German dependence. He wrote to Jan Kollár: “My greatest endeavor is to stress by means of examples our need to think and act in a Slavic way, discarding German spelling-books.”⁴ Palacký already pursued this intention in his essay, “The Beginnings of Czech Poetry, Particularly of Prosody,” which he wrote in collaboration with Šafařík. This essay exercised its influence primarily by means of its strong sympathetic belief in the national revival.

The collection of Palacký’s esthetic studies of the 1820’s became an important segment of the history of Czech scholarship and culture. This research aimed toward the formation of an independent Czech esthetics based on European philosophical and esthetic literature. Palacký understood esthetics in a broad philosophical context. Employing a psychological approach, he attempted to define beauty and to discover the laws governing the perception of the external world by the human mind. In his formulation of the rules of esthetics, Palacký stressed the active role of the perceiving subject. Palacký’s philosophical system of esthetics is composed of three basic elements: truth, benevolence, and beauty. Palacky named their synthesis božnost. He characterized this concept in his own words as the “resemblance to God or the participation of the divine nature and the reflection of God in the human being.”⁵ The search for truth, beauty, and benevolence is the main purpose of human existence. Palacký clearly applies idealistic philosphy to esthetics. However, he does not conceive the chosen ideas as absolute and static but attempts to portray them as dynamic and evolutionary. The older literature sees the system of Palacký as being mechanically based on the concepts of Bacon, Herder, and Kant. In fact, Palacký did not mechanically accept their theses. Studying various ideas and principles, Palacký attempted to apply them in his own system, for his own purposes, in his own creative and characteristic way.

Always pursuing the interests and the benefits of the nation and the national culture, Palacký never regarded his scholarly work as purely L’art pour l’art. He shows this even in his short articles and reports, e.g., in his review of Palkovič’s Dictionary and Sychra’s Czech Phraseology, making an effort to analyze the history of the Czech national idea with regard to the history of the Czech language, literature, and people. One cannot be surprised that for a long time Palacký was dissatisfied with the level of Czech literature, since he did not find it to have the characteristic features of a definite national culture.

After his arrival in Prague in 1823, Palacký, pondering the purposes of national culture and attempting to define his own cultural program, had to adopt a standpoint toward J. Dobrovský and J. Jungmann.⁶ It is impossible to emphasize sufficiently that the ideas of both Dobrovský and Jungmann, the founders of the Czech National Revival, constitute a significant part of Palacký’s program. Jungmann’s influence was decisive. Palacký recognized that Jungmann had expressed the needs and aspirations of the nation more accurately than Dobrovský.

However, Palacký’s cultural program could not be merely a synthesis of existing notions. It had to be deeper and possess a more far-reaching perspective. Even Jungmann’s progressive and realistic postulates and aims, being prevailingly limited to linguistic aspects, proved to be too narrow and too nationalistic. The Czech nationalist movement was fortunate to find a man of Palacký’s type, a scholar with a European outlook and education, capable of understanding the historical situation of a small nation in the given historical epoch. Palacký also possessed the unique ability to envisage cultural, national, linguistic, and other problems as parts of the whole evolutionary process.

By the turn of the twenties and thirties, a period of prevailing political reaction and deathlike calm in Europe, Palacký clearly understood that, politically, the old world was in ruins and that a new period was rising on the horizon. Palacký believed that political freedom and nationalism had become the two dominant concepts in the world and foresaw an even more decisive role for them in the future. The individual as well as social groups would not be willing to remain permanently under feudal subjection, but desired to liberate themselves. Nations would refuse to be merely the subjects of the state’s will and would insist upon being governed “not by a stick like children but by the principles of reason and justice.”⁷

Palacký considered education, culture, and ethics to be the chief means for the destruction of existing political structures and the establishing of democracy as well as individual and collective freedom. He participated in all of the important cultural and scholarly activities in Bohemia before March, 1848. However, the circle of educated patriots was still small. Practically all of the national demonstrations and other activities of the period had to be organized by the same tiny group of people. Even in 1832 Palacký noted with bitterness that only a few individuals from among the six million Slavs constituting the population of Bohemia, Moravia, and Upper Hungary were taking an active part in Czech literature. The masses of the people were “dead” in their national consciousness.

Since the situation could be changed only by means of systematic educational and cultural efforts, Czech patriots, with Palacký at their head, were anxious to achieve the best results and highest goals in their public activity. Palacký was not satisfied with the mere existence of the Czech literary language. He strove to raise Czech literature and art, formally and spiritually, to the world standard. This was the intrinsic sense of each of the more important actions of the period that are connected with Palacký’s name, e.g., the founding of the National Museum, the editing of its journal, the plans to publish a Czech encyclopedia, the proposals for the improvement of the Czech school system, etc.

Political developments in Bohemia were not always favorable to these endeavors. Palacký himself encountered many obstacles, disagreements, and misunderstandings. By means of compromises, he attempted to unite feuding patriots. Many times, however, he met with no success. Palacký characterized the situation in the preface to Volume XI of the Časopis musea Království českeho in 1837. This essay is significant testimony to Palacký’s opinions with regard to questions of contemporary cultural politics. Describing the unfortunate conditions prevailing in Bohemia during the twenties, such as the disuse of the Czech language in science and public affairs, Palacký censured the division within the handful of Czech writers: “In Bohemia there have been two cultural streams. The German one, being connected with modern Europe, was broad, prosperous, and flourishing. . . . The Czech one was antiquated, narrow, poor, inadequate for the needs of our time, primitive, and based on the masses.”

Czech patriots were severely divided, and the conflicts among them had to be overcome. Conservative patriots considered the pre-White Mountain Czech language a binding and obligatory pattern, while the intellectuals, connected with European culture, endeavored to establish a modern language. Palacký understood the core of the problem, and while sympathizing with the younger generation of patriots, he refused their neologist tendencies: “We attempted to save the spirit that could revive the nation by dispensing with quarrels about letters, syllables, and words. These disputes almost killed us. Primarily, we sought literature for the educated middle classes of the Czech population, who would love it, defend it, and take care of it. We dismissed literature designed exclusively for the common people or a few select scholars. This has been the vital question of our literature.” The second decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a significant growth of Czech culture. With great success “old Bohemia was introduced into modern Europe and domesticated there.” But Palacký was convinced that the nation should aim at even higher goals. Competition in agriculture, industry, science, and culture with the developed world would not only yield benefits to the Czechs but also to the entire world. Palacký believed that “the epoch when local spiritual boundaries among the nations are disappearing has arrived. In spite of many existing languages, the free, rapid, and perpetual exchange of ideas and feelings in Europe is leading to the foundation of a higher, united European and, eventually, world literature.”

Palacký emphasized that every nation had not only its place among other nations, but also a specific mission which it was expected to complete and thereby bring a specific gift into the treasury of world culture. Filling gaps in knowledge with regard to the Slavs was the chosen task for the Czechs. Therefore, Palacký founded and edited a scientific journal for the purpose of improving the level of Czech science and culture, without avoiding sharp and fundamental criticism and by informing its readers about European affairs.

Modern Czech culture has not yet seen a more sophisticated program, one so closely intertwined with the world and domestic affairs as the one realized by Palacký. His conception could compete with that of other European cultures. Moreover, the program proved to be stimulating even in periods after Palacký.

Palacký was vigorous in proving the truth of his ideas through his own scholarly and literary work. His History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia and his publications of valuable documents of old Czech literature were concrete attempts to introduce ancient Bohemia into modern Europe. Palacký always realized that only cultural work could defend Bohemia against the expansive German world and in merciless international competition.

František Palacký was a spokesman for the whole of the national movement which, even before the Revolution of March, 1848, was anxious to liberate Bohemia from foreign cultural oppression and to return her to her ancient glory. The incentive was provided by an extreme form of Czech nationalism which was impoperly regarded as chauvinism by Palacký’s opponents and later by some German historians. The whole of Palacky’s activity clearly proves his aversion to the very limited, uncritical, and megalomanic form of nationalism. Preferring the “universally human” principle of liberty and truth to nationalism, Palacký was always an apostle of humanity and national tolerance. Even in the face of injustice, he appealed to the nation: “Let us be moral and avoid injustice.” Palacký refused the ideology of the chosen nation. He felt that every nation lived and acted in dependence on other nations. No nation had been founded or lived in isolation. The fate of the Czech nation confirmed this notion. Czech culture reached the peak of its development under the direct influence of Western civilization during the reign of Charles IV.

Palacký struggled for genuine and high national consciousness because he considered it the bridge between primitive egoism and morality and humanity. Therefore, Palacký regarded national consciousness as an important cultural and moral factor and a prerequisite of a nation. It is logical that Palacký’s concept of art was always connected with a nation. Literature supported a nation, and a nation, in turn, determined its literature: the origin of Czech literature had been closely connected with the love of nation.

People were to be led by literature, not in the direction of national hatred or contempt for foreign culture, but toward understanding real values, whatever their origin. Palacký always held Slavic culture in high esteem and sometimes even accepted the Romantic illusions of the beauty and perfection of the ancient Russians and other Slavs. Although he was less realistic than Havlíček, Palacký was decidedly a critical Russophile. Palacký was aware that the czarist regime had led to many deficiencies and imperfections in Russia. He was alarmed by the deep Russian national apathy. Palacký also realized that the Czech nationality might be endangered by the programs of some Russian political groups and individuals. He saw no difference “between the pan-Russians and German or Hungarian fanatics. All of them are anxious to devour and destroy our nation.”

In harmony with the general trends of the Czech National Revival, Palacký regarded culture as a significant political and moral factor that could protect the nation and accelerate its growth. “Ignoring partisan disputes, we sought the rational and moral encouragement and improvement of the nation. Only the whole educated nation will be capable of understanding its own needs in every period of its development. In this connection, one should stress that during the period of National Revival no writer, with the exception of Havlíček, criticised the negative features and improper aspects of Czech culture and Czech national character as strongly as Palacký. He wrote of them in his papers, letters, and articles. Two years before the revolution of 1848, while dealing with the geography of ancient Bohemia, Palacký deemed it necessary to present his views about these questions. Describing the attempts of foreign and especially German literature to deny the basic national rights of the Czechs and even to question their existence, Palacký refuted this polemic. He regarded scientific and literary achievements, a way of life, as the most powerful form of defense: “. . .He who desires to live has to adapt to all forms of life and to fight his natural enemies.”⁸ Thinking about Czech national character, he addressed his nation with a reproach: “. . .The Czechs and the Slavs behave well during unhappy periods. A Czech is skillful, industrious, sagacious, zealous, and stubborn in an unhappy situation, and vain, unsteady, and unable to care about the future when the circumstances take a turn for the better.”

A full understanding of the Czech past and a historical perspective on events was an integral and basic part of František Palacký’s cultural program. His comprehension of history was neither uncritical nor provincial. Although Palacký accepted the Romantic illusion of the democratic and free development of the old Slavic societies, he was at the same time able to recognize the negative features of Czech history, e.g., during the period of Jan Hus.

Palacký’s interpretation of history was able to become an important part of the national program because he explained the Czech past truthfully, effectively, and in accord with the needs of contemporary knowledge and culture. The logic of historical development in the first half of the nineteenth century showed that Palacky’s program for a national culture was an integral and major segment of the national political program, developing with increasing clarity. The Czech peoples, demanding for themselves the rights of a free nation, openly manifested their political aspirations and goals during the revolution of 1848. Palacký developed similarly. As a cultural representative and a scholar, he ultimately became one of the leaders of the Czech nation.

Before 1848, František Palacký was already the chief author of the Czech cultural program. He united the pure naiveté and the zealous self-sacrifice of the first period of the Czech National Revival with broad European knowledge and an understanding of the historical trends of his time. Palacký successfully formulated a program expressing the needs of his nation and reflecting the actual tendencies of the contemporary world.

NOTES

1. In general, see: J. Pekař, František Palacký (Prague, 1898); J. Goll, “František Palacký,” Český časopis historický, IV (1898), pp. 211–79; Památník na oslavu 100. narozenin F. Palackého (Prague, 1898); J.F. Zacek, Palacký: The Historian as Scholar and Nationalist (The Hague, 1970).

2. O. Králík, “Palackého božné doby,” in F. Kutnar, ed., Tři studie o F. Palackém (Olomouc, 1948); F. Vodička, Cesty a cíle obrozenské literatury (Prague, 1958).

3. V.J. Nováček, ed., F. Palackého korrespondence a zápisky. (3 vols., Prague, 1898–1911), 11, p. 8.

4. Ibid., p. 50 ff.

5. “Krasověda čili o kráse a umění knihy patery,” Časopis Českehó musea (1827); see also O. Hostinský, “Fr. Palackého estetické studie, 1816–1821,” in Památník (1898), pp. 367–90; L. Čech, “Palacký jako estetik,” Ibid., pp. 391–442. For an analysis of Palacký’s philosophy, see J. Fischer, Myšlenka a dílo F. Palackého (2 vols., Prague, 1926–27).

6. Goll, “František Palacký”; J. Vlček, Dejiny slovenskej literatúry (Turčanský Sv. Martin, 1890).

7. V.J. Nováček, ed., F. Palackého korrespondence a zápisky, 1, p. 51.

8. “Ohlídka ve staročeském místopisu, zvláště krajů již poněmčilých.” Časopis Českého musea, XX (1846), pp. 55–83.