Defender of Democracy: Masaryk of Czechoslovakia

Front matter

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(From a portrait by Edward C. Caswell)

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Foreword

Foreword

THE following conversations were held in the German language at the Château of Lany, near Prague. The written text was subsequently revised by President Masaryk, who made only very few alterations; but he expanded the text considerably by the introduction of long passages dealing with theoretical problems. Where the spoken word has been maintained unaltered, the character of the speaker is reflected in it. For, as is usual with me, on this occasion also I was not interested so much in describing the attitude of the statesman toward the various questions which he has to solve in his everyday work, but rather in giving a sketch of his character. This is done best, here as everywhere else, by direct oral expression. The large number of original and vernacular turns of expression, which still remain after the revision of the written text, show how quick and spontaneous were the President’s replies to my questions.

Despite his circumlocution with philosophical categories, a great simplicity of expression will be found in these conversations. The average boy of sixteen years will find every page in this book intelligible. But it will not appeal so well to literary people and dilettantes. As usual, I have excluded such typical themes of discussion as Socialism, Freedom, Technology and so on. These bring everything to a montonous level and turn a vivid conversation into a formal debate.

After having observed President Masaryk for several years and visited him, I wished to reduce to systematic form my conversations with him on political philosophy. During the past twenty years my written work, especially the political part of it, has consisted of the biographical portraiture of individuals and has left the State as an end in itself out of account. Accordingly, I found myself forced consistently to take the part of the opponent in my talks with Mussolini; but it was quite different with Masaryk. With him I found myself in full agreement on most problems, and so I was able to retire into the background, as it were, during the course of our conversations.

These talks with the wisest European of today are being published at a moment when democracy can do no better than arm itself to the teeth, as Masaryk has done in his own country. Having fought in vain for over fifteen years and having lost the battle at least provisionally, we Europeans must not rest content with the old pacifist slogans; but we must recognize openly that only a menacingly rearmed Europe will probably be able to deter Germany from waging war, because her officially declared aims cannot be achieved except through war. The person who refuses to change his political tactics in the face of such danger belongs to the zoölogical garden of the platonists and not to the wild steppes of our days, where a savage animal may be encountered at any moment.

For this reason it seems to me that Masaryk’s political ideas are for tomorrow rather than for today, and that they throw light on a future which for the moment is lost to us.

E. L.

Portrait of a State-Builder

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Portrait of a State-Builder

ONCE upon a time there were a coachman and a maid, servants upon one of the mighty Emperor’s estates; and after their master had given them permission, they were duly married. For he was a freedman; that is to say, while he might not be put to death or sold like a slave, he still could make no decision of his own with regard to changing his residence or his occupation, without his master’s consent. Such was the East European law and custom which, ninety years ago, even in the tumultuous year marked by formidable upheavals, in which this marriage took place, was as yet observed.

Upon their first-born the young couple bestowed the name of Thomas, little knowing how right they were in doing so; for he was destined to be an unbelieving believer, a questing spirit, one who, while accepting God-given law, was none the less to bring the searching light of reason to bear upon all that men had handed down from generation to generation. As his mother taught him to say his pray- ers and imparted to him the little that she herself knew, her own prayer was that she might live to see him lifted out of the cramped circumstances that his parents had known; and it is altogether likely that she dreamed he would one day be a gentleman, the administrator of an estate, or even a clergyman.

But she had no intimation of the fact that, as a white-haired man in Vienna, he would play a leading part in driving out the apostolic Emperor and would later take up his residence in the royal castle at Prague, as lord of the land and the head of the Czech race. The miraculous part of this legend is that if it occurred without the aid of miracles, it at the same time took place without the opposing will of man. It was, in all truth, a work of Providence; for he who cannot discern in this life’s story the guiding hand of Providence may be left to spend his days in the outer darkness of mere chance. It may be that the loveliest legends are those whose full import is only to be grasped at the end, when the Poet’s hidden plan, so long thought out and worked over, at last takes on the roundness of a significant whole.

Masaryk, who by parentage was a Czech on one side and a Slovak on the other, was born in Southern Moravia, near the frontier separating the two racial stocks; and it was as a Slovak that he was reared. As we behold him at this time, he is longer than he is broad, lithe-built rather than strong, versatile and changeable rather than pigheaded; and if it be true that these qualities are characteristic of both races alike, our hero for all of that would appear to be the typical Slovak. From boyhood on, he must have been possessed of a doubting, inquisitive, fearless disposition. From what he tells us of his early years, to which he is ever referring, we are enabled to form a picture of a spirited if not what might be termed an adventurous young chap, an upward-striving if not precisely an ambitious one. Seldom is a life-line so clean-cut, so unbroken as his, and the character-reader might do well to have a look at his well-shaped palm, which displays a labored symmetry on the part of nature. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century, he in youth exhibits already a clear and legible handwriting; and when we look at his first photograph, even allowing for the usual retouchings, what we behold is a handsome, well-proportioned, young little face, with eyes that look out earnestly and trustfully upon a world which for all of eighty years has kept faith with him, as he has with it.

Here once again is to be made out that logic in accordance with which the right sort of man reaps what he sows; and he who would realize the meaning of a consistency that is part of a man’s very body and soul will do well to make a study of this long and, one might say, blessed life.

Blessed with struggle, also. For here, as on a much larger scale with Goethe, we have a vision of struggle, of a life-race happily run, with poise of soul as the prize awarded the victor at the end. From such a point of view, Masaryk’s was an evangelical life. We see him at the age of sixteen, a young blacksmith’s apprentice, as he goes to the fountain to draw the morning water for the forge, dragged back to school by one of his former teachers, that he might there become an instructor and himself earn just what was what. Up to this time, he had received but a limited and, even for that day, a badly directed education. And so he was not too elated at first at the prospect of being taken away from a manual trade which he had been at the trouble to master, for another calling of which he knew nothing.

That he would not be able to get along with the Emperor, whose subject he was, as well as being the son of one of His Imperial Majesty’s lowliest servants, was a thing that he himself could see at the early age of ten; and this conviction was borne in upon him as news of Austria’s defeats and victories in the war with the Prussians and the Italians made its way to the humble village where he lived. Then came the Prussian advance; and in order to keep the invader away from the hamlet—for the soldier then, as in the Seven Years’ War, took whatever he could lay hands on—young Masaryk went at once to the first house one came to on entering the village, and chalked up the words, “Cholera here!” The troops, needless to say, kept a respectful distance, and the peasants had a good laugh over it afterwards.

It was at this time that the young teacher began studying Latin with a clergyman; but as there was no grammar at hand, all he could do was to memorize the words from a lexicon. In a short while, he had so extensive a Latin vocabulary that it won him admission to the Gymnasium, which was by way of being quite a come-up in the world for a mere freedman’s son. We must remember, however, that the latter, in addition to possessing a good mind of his own, had been fortunate enough to encounter a couple of individuals who had lent him a helping hand in bridging the gap between manual toil and intellectual labor. And to this day, a photograph of the clergyman is to be seen in the eighty-year-old President’s study.

In the city, Providence sent him to a third person who was to be of assistance along his path. A police superintendent is an important personage and in a position to do much. And when such a one sees fit to entrust his son to a lad who is but little older, it must be due to his policeman’s habit of sizing up those with whom he comes into contact. What was it he saw in this young fellow, of no visible means? There must have been something about the latter that was confidence-inspiring. In any event, this was a friendship which was to stand young Masaryk in good stead.

In the Gymnasium of the bilingual city of Brünn, our bilingual hero for the first time became acquainted with that jealousy which the politically more powerful Germans cherished toward the numerically superior Czechs. In an ancient Greek class, he held out for giving the Czech pronunciation to a language which is variously spoken all over the world, whereas the German instructor insisted on the German pronunciation. They both were wrong, so far as that goes, being unfamiliar with the theories of Erasmus on the subject. This served to bring Masaryk under suspicion; and seeing, moreover, that he cut but a sorry figure on the field of gallantry, they were about to pack this penniless young man off and send him back to his native village and the blacksmith’s shop, and would have done so, had it not been for the intervention of the police official who, with his knowledge of human nature, felt that his son’s friend was too valuable a one to lose. But just then, the official in qustion was transferred to Vienna; and in this fashion did the son of a coachman on the Emperor’s estate come to find himself in the Emperor’s capital city.

What a cunning thread of circumstance it was which had brought him here, and which at last—for he had lost a number of years—had made of him, at the age of twenty-two, a full-fledged student! How much, in the course of it all, had he learned of the world of men, of the classes and conditions of men, the tongues they speak and the like?

“In that household,” he tells us, “I heard much talk of what a police superintendent has to do, and thus I was early given an initiation into administrative questions. I was led to revise considerably the impressions I had formed in school.”

He also learned what a rich man’s home was like, and made the acquaintance of yet another race, by becoming domestic tutor to the son of a Jewish banker. He looked about him; and while he was able to make out certain little weaknesses, he could not but discern great and overshadowing virtues. Some time before this, in coming home from an outing one day, he had caught sight of a Jewish lad as the latter left off playing to say his prayers at sundown. This had made a deep impression upon his youthful mind; it was the beginning of a lifelong sympathy for the Jews. As a Czech, he himself knew what it meant to be a member of a downtrodden race!

And further, as the son of a proletarian, he knew what it meant to come from a downtrodden class. When his father’s coachman’s uniform with the brass buttons was cut down to make a garment for the son, the other lads had laughed at him and he had wept. And when, in the hunting season, the lords of creation came down to the estate, he would see them toss their fur coats at his mother. And after the door had closed and the family was alone, he would hear his father cursing through his clenched teeth. In this manner, our young observer early came to know—had opportunity to see at close up—what dependency meant, what freedom might mean, to an individual or to a race.

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Knowledge! In the university in Vienna, he listens to philosophers and economists, explores ancient literature, and is attracted into the provinces of biology and physiology—all as a result of his acquisitive mind; for he is determined not to think in mere categories but to fare as far afield as possible. When he grows tired of “the cackling over old Roman authors,” he closes his book and goes out into the world of objective phenomena. When one really sees this world, when he goes a-journeying in it, with eyes that are capable of taking things in, how much fuller then do his books become! One is also better able, thereby, to grapple with the question of dominant and subject peoples, and consequently of statecraft.

As for young Masaryk, he proposes to become a diplomat, and starts learning Arabic with a view to entering the Oriental Academy. The thing that dangles before his gaze is not the title of Excellency and a star on his dress coat; he even overlooks the fact that these are inducements for many who would embark upon a diplomatic career; but most of all, he forgets that, for five hundred years past, the House of Habsburg has been accustomed to send out into the world as its ambassadors men of distinguished, knightly bearing, or else men with world-weary and crafty eyes. How is a worker’s son to master the art of descending a flight of stairs with dignity? He is to discover that none but the scions of nobility are destined to tread those stately halls; and he accordingly goes back to his Plato.

In this young man of ours, the short of it is, there is an admirable admixture of the intellectual realist and the man of action, and is to be to the end of his days. He is afforded fleeting glimpses of the life of the ruling class, as it goes on behind doors in the capital; and when, as a twenty-six-year-old doctor of philosophy, he publishes his first work—in a yearbook, on the subject of Plato—he at the same time takes up his pen to write a series of articles on practical theology and politics as a science. His first article, sent to a review a year before, had been rejected; it had dealt unfavorably with Schopenhauer. The sense of life that was in him revolted against a fatalistic passivity; whereas Plato’s life served to provide a desiderated equipoise for his own. From the very beginning, this youthful thinker strove for a comprehension of the time spirit in conjunction with the spirit of eternal things, seeking to bolster one with the other.

His friends were few in number. A great walker, who throughout the whole of his eighty years has spent more and more time out of doors each day, as if in search of a solace for his meditative spirit, he has had the disadvantage of not being a party man or belonging to any one clique or coterie, but has remained very much alone—a lonely and a busy man. And as his eyes wander out through his study window over an ever broadening field of knowledge, he permits them to come to rest on all sorts of men and things, in an insatiable thirst for new facts and relationships.

It was within a few years of this time that he collected his impressions of the world and put them into a book. It was a book on death, one that handled the subject as a hygienist might, being concerned with the ever present question: How can one put death off, diminish its causes? His treatise on suicide, which Masaryk today looks upon as a fundamental confession of faith on his part, and even as something like a compendium of his life’s garnered wisdom, must necessarily convey a weird impression of its author’s temperament and cultural background, with its long, dry tables of statistics alongside passionate excursions into the realm of social morality. For the young writer does become passionate, and more than passionate, vehement, in his rhapsodies aimed at a badly planned society, passages which stand out like the Overture to Tannhäuser amid the brassy chime of statistics.

While the book contains outbursts against war and alcohol, capitalism, sexual aberrations, etc., it is hauled up short at one astounding fact: that a man can bring himself to snip the thread of his life with his own hands. No species of suicide, however pure the motives, finds here any sort of justification.

“He who is in love with death,” Masaryk once observed to me, “is psychically ill, out of his head; for he thinks the universe revolves about himself.”

But what, I ask you, is a solemn-minded faculty to make of such a book as this? Did the fellow think to become a professor through such a work? A calculator without mathematics, a thinker without a system, a believer without a religion: such its author was, and such he still is. The learned gentlemen were quite right in their objection, that he was all the time wandering from his subject. There was, certainly, no place in Vienna for so irritating an individual. Yet after half century, Masaryk’s book is still quoted by physicians and philosohers.

At Leipzig, where he went for a year that he might have the benefit of listening to Fechner, Avenarius and Wundt, a pale-faced young man came up to Masaryk one day, following a lecture on suicide, and confessed that he had been on the verge of taking his own life, but had been held back by the young professor’s reasoning. This young man, who lived to a ripe old age, is a fitting symbol of Masaryk’s life-work. This practical outcome of a theoretical speculation, together with the personal confidence implied, on the part of a highly distraught youth whose case, one might have said, was hopeless—a confidence reposed in one who was neither a physician nor a clergyman, but a devotee of abstract thought—all this for the first time shows us, operating in the realm of practical results, one who all his life long was to preserve the aspect of a great humanitarian, whether on the political or the Platonic plane.

In Leipzig, too, Masaryk met the girl he was to marry. “Charlie” Garrigue had come over from Boston to study music. The daughter of a very beautiful, maternal and altogether admirable lady of French descent, she could trace her ancestry as far back as St. Louis; the name is borne today by a French mountain range, and if one goes to buy oranges in Paris in the wintertime, one will now and then find it in blue letters on the reddish-yellow peel. That is the best kind of family tree, better than any escutcheon or coat-of-arms. In this particular American family, the Saintly King must have been more of a curiosity than anything else; for the head of the house, a gentleman in the book trade and a democrat at heart, left his eleven offspring full freedom of belief, as a result of which eight or nine religious sects were represented about the family board. “Charlie,” the third child, was a Unitarian, thus manifesting at an early age a passion for spiritual unity. In a photograph taken at the age of seventeen, we see a young girl looking out on the world with mingled hope and fear; at the age of seventy, that same gaze had turned to one of mingled hope and belief.

It was not the pretty miss of seventeen whose acquaintance Masaryk made; for they were both twenty-six when they met. But from what he as an old man has to tell of this first meeting of theirs, it was the call of heart to heart, a true spiritual affinity that he felt toward this foreign comer, who by her coming appeared to arouse his highest expectations. They read the English philosophers together, after which she continued her travels. He wrote her a letter proposing marriage, and she gave him an indefinite answer. He thereupon set out, traveling fourth-class to reach her and lay his suit before her in person. From that day forth, they were inseparable, despite the fact that there were not a few obstacles in their path. For one thing, he must take his bride back to America at frequent intervals; and in the seventies, this was a journey that was much less lightly undertaken than it is at the present time.

They lived together after that for fifty years, in an intimacy which held much for both of them, and which for him, assuredly, was priceless.

“I think she had the finer mind of the two,” he said to me, stressing his words. “I taught her much, but she formed me.”

Their hearts beat in unison, and they had in common a passion for perfection here upon earth and a belief in immortality. Neither of them longed for gold or worldly fame; but they did have one ambition, and that was to belong, morally and intellectually, to the advance-guard of their generation. In other respects they differed, complemented each other. His was the more cheerful disposition; she was the more musically inclined. He was an active type; she was femininely protective. So that it might be said that masculine and feminine qualities were evenly and naturally shared between the two. She especially, from the beginning, or at least from the earliest years of their married life, would seem to have lived in the enjoyment of a great spiritual poise, one which must have represented the acquisition of years, and which she might never have acquired, had it not been for her saving sense of humor.

While still in the flush of youth, they had two daughters and two sons, and upon the later destinies of all of these their father’s career was to leave its mark. The wife and mother herself was to take an active part in his struggle, even when, as during the War years, she was compelled to live apart from her husband.

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In his prime, Masaryk was a handsome man; and if he did not cultivate this trait, he must have been conscious of it; for a good part of the strong influence which he exerted over his fellow men, especially over the young, was to be attributed to this physical characteristic. He has preserved to an advanced age an inner and outward elegance of movement, a combination of charm and dig- nity such as I have never found in any other man; and I could not help remembering that this was the man who had written of Goethe’s old age. In his pictures taken between the ages of thirty and forty, with his short, dark brown full-beard, he looks like the typical professor of the era, and a German profesor at that. See him in a group picture, and he stands out from his colleagues by that refinement of physique which one would not expect to find in the son of a proletarian who for whole decades had had to get along with little or no money. In Vienna, the young married pair lived in one room and took their meals in a restaurant. When Masaryk entered the Vienna Reichsrat, one of the dandified young nobility bestowed upon him the title of the best dressed man in Parliament.

This too is a symbol for the worldly, practical half of his life, which from now on is to develop swiftly and hand in hand with the intellectual side. A seeming chance circumstance has something to do with the matter here, by bringing him to the intellectual center of the racial struggle, namely, to Prague.

“I should in all likelihood never have become a politician, had I not been compelled to experience our national problem so strenuously in terms of my own life.”

Once again, what happened was not in the normal course of things. It was the year 1882, and a Czech university was being founded. And it was not owing to his philosophical studies but to an occasional lecture or article on a subject that was not properly his own that Masaryk received a call to this institution; it was not as a philosopher of note but as an authority on music that he was invited to join the new faculty. As is the case with all worth while newcomers, it was only through a misunder- standing that he could prove acceptable to the by no means infallible powers that be. Just how the prudence of those same powers worked out is to be seen from the confidential wording of the resolution to summon the young scholar to Prague: “On the Czech faculty, the said Masaryk would provide a desirable element of balance.”

In Prague, Masaryk learned to know his own nation. Half German by early upbringing and almost wholly German by education and cultural background, his first book having been published in that language, he had been during his years in Vienna far removed from the struggles and strivings of the Czechs, and his attention had been distracted by a host of supra-national problems. But here, where from now on there were to be two rival institutions of learning, and where the two races rubbed elbows in trade and in governmental administration, it was to be expected that a man of ethical and at the same time practical turn of mind would take it all in, and before long be taking sides. This Masaryk was to do in his capacity of scholar, by founding first a review and later on a newspaper; and although he was neither polemical nor aggressive, he was soon drawn into the fray in spite of himself; for the question as he saw it was one with deep-going ethical implications, involving a summons to truth and justice.

In addition to all this, he introduced a revolutionary method of dealing with students. Only some ten years older than the latter, with an open mind and the true teacher’s inner and inborn sense of the dignity of his calling, Masaryk wanted to be a leader and even a tempter of youth; and the young readily followed him, for the reason that he was not an academic mole; his method always was to lay a subject open, take it apart and analyze it. Who had ever heard of a professor who whistled underneath a student’s window, by way of summoning the chap to come down and go walking with him? What other profesor appeared to own a library only that he might lend his books to any poor collegian who had need of them? Who was the other instructor to whom a fellow might go with his troubles, by day or night, and be sure of finding encouragement, advice, money, or even a winter overcoat?

As with the Russians, there was always tea in the Masaryk home, someone was always coming or going, fetching or bringing something, and there was usually an argument going on with the host and hostess over Kant, Hume or someone else. Penniless youths were free to come, and the professor would give them an article to do or a book to translate. One of these, but a schoolboy at the time, was destined to become one of Europe’s leading statesmen. His name was Eduard Benes. Must not the authorities have been a trifle uneasy, when word reached them of these unwonted carryings-on? And what must have been the astonishment of Masaryk’s listeners, when they heard him in all seriousness insisting that they must have a new encyclopedia, and proposing that they should all, himself included, work upon it for a whole year and then destroy, throw in the fire, everything they had written?

If he had only belonged to a party, that would have been some protection! But his habit of going his own way made it impossible for him to maintain any associations of the sort over a protracted period; there was sure to be a withdrawal, followed by an official censure, disciplinary measures, and even formal proceedings. The trouble was, the enthusiastic Czechs felt they could never depend on this new fellow-combatant of theirs. His whole character being one built on morality and decency, it not only seemed to Masaryk that truth was something to be put above either race or party, but he also found any form of boasting exceedingly distasteful, whether it came from a professional man, from a party or from a race. It was not as the result of a constructive impulse, nor was it by any means due to ambition; it was rather from moral motives that he was led to enter the field of nationalist conflict. He it was who had termed justice the basis of the state, the “arithmetic of love.” His purpose was neither to ameliorate nor to mold; he came neither as an artist nor as a prophet; and the paradox of the thing was carried so far that he at first had the appearance of being on the enemy’s side, that is, against his own race and people.