Haeckel

CHAPTER VIII. The Crowning Years 294

THE CROWNING YEARS 294

BIBLIOGRAPHY 323

INDEX 329

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List of Illustrations

HAECKEL Frontispiece From the painting by Franz von Lenbach.

JENA 42

A FISHING PARTY IN HELIGOLAND IN 70 1865 Ernst Haeckel, Anton Dohrn, Richard Greeff, Max Salverda, Pietro Marchi.

A RADIOLARIAN 94

HAECKEL 128 From the bust by G. Herold.

HAECKEL IN 1880 154

HAECKEL IN 1890 178 From a relief by Kopf.

HAECKEL’S VILLA AT JENA 216

HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT 244 MIKLUCHO-MACLAY AT LANZAROTE, IN THE CANARIES, 1867

A SIPHONOPHORE 248

HAECKEL IN 1874 272

HAECKEL IN 1896 292 From a photograph by Gabriel Max.

HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN 300 PROFESSORS AT GENOA, 1904

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Introduction

One of the admirable maxims that crystallises the better sense or experience of men reminds us that we must “say nothing but good of the dead.” Unhappily, we have taken the words of our sage fathers in too large a sense. A feeling has grown amongst us that we should “say nothing good except of the dead,” at least as regards those who differ from us. So has many a man gone from the world with little suspicion of the appreciation that might have warmed him in the last chill years; many a man sunk into the grave with the harsh echo of dishonouring words still rumbling in his ears. It may be that our ideas, our truths, would not suffer greatly if we could patiently endeavour to trace the community of humane feeling that lies beneath the wide gulfs that often separate us intellectually from each other.

Professor Ernst Haeckel is one of those combative figures of all time who take misunderstanding as a part of their romantic career. If he had shut himself within the laboratory, as some of his gifted colleagues did, all the world would honour him to-day. His vast range of biological knowledge, almost without parallel in our specialist days, fitted him for great scientific achievements. His superb special contributions to biology—his studies of radiolaria, sponges, medusæ, &c.—give ample evidence of it. As things are, he has, Professor Hertwig says, “written his name in letters of light in the history of science.” He holds four gold medals for scientific research (Cothenius, Swammerdam, Darwin, and Challenger), four doctorates (Berlin, Jena, Edinburgh, and Cambridge), and about eighty diplomas from so many universities and academic bodies. But he was one of those who cannot but look out of the windows of the laboratory. His intense idealism, his sense of what he felt to be wrong and untrue, inflamed by incessant travel and communion with men, drove him into the field of battle. In the din and roar of a great conflict his name has passed on to a million lips and become the varied war-cry of fiercely contending parties. A hundred Haeckels, grotesque in their unlikeness to each other, circulate in our midst to-day.

The present work is a plain study of the personality of Haeckel and the growth of his ideas. The character of Haeckel was forged amid circumstances that have largely passed away from the scientific world of our time. The features, even, of the world he has worked in of recent years in Germany are so different from our own that no Englishman can understand him without sober study of his life. He has often been called “the Darwin of Germany.” The phrase is most misleading. It suggests a comparison that is bound to end in untruth and injustice. In the same year that Haeckel opened his Darwinian campaign in Germany he won the prize for the long jump—a record jump. It is the note of much in his character. He was no quiet recluse, to shrink from opposition and hard names, but a lusty, healthy, impetuous, intrepid youth, even when his hair had worn to grey. A story is told of how, not many years ago, the Grand Duke of Weimar playfully rallied him, in the midst of a brilliant company, on his belief in evolution. To the horror of the guests, he slapped the powerful noble on the shoulder, and told him to come to Jena and see the proofs of it. In his seventy-first year we find him severely censuring his Emperor—the emperor of many fortresses—in a public lecture at Berlin.

How his vigour and his resentment arose as barrier after barrier was raised before him: how his scorn of compromise was engendered and fed: how he accumulated mountains of knowledge in obscure, technical works before he formulated his sharp didactic conclusions: all this is told in the following story. For good or ill he has won an influence in this country, and his story should be read. It is, in itself, one of rare and varied interest, and it is told by one of the most brilliant penmen of modern Germany, his former pupil, now a distinguished biologist, Professor Wilhelm Bölsche.

The time seems to have come in England for the publication of some authoritative picture of the great biologist and controversialist. One work of his circulates by the hundred thousand amongst us, and has had a deep and lasting influence on the thoughts of large classes of men. His influence is hardly less in France and Italy, as well as in Germany; his doctrines have, in fact, been translated into fifteen different tongues. The deep, sometimes bitter, controversy that they have engendered must have led to a desire to know more of the man and his making. The attempts that have been made here and there to “construct” him from his ideas and literary manner are, as the reader will see, very far removed from the reality. Behind all the strained inferences from doctrines, behind all the dishonouring epithets, there is a genial, warm, deeply artistic, intensely idealist nature, sung with enthusiasm by poets who have known him. Once, in playful scientific mood, Haeckel tried to explain his own character in his familiar terms of heredity and environment. He came of a line of lawyers, straight, orderly, inexorable men. He had lived and worked in quiet Jena, in the beautiful valley of the Saale. But he did not speak of that larger environment—the field of battle, stretching far away, beyond the calm Thuringian hills, to the ends of Europe. We must place Haeckel’s ardent and high-minded nature in that field, face to face with his opponents, if we would understand him.

For the supplementary chapter I have drawn freely on another biographical sketch by one of Haeckel’s pupils, Dr. Breitenbach, and other sources. For the illustrations I am indebted chiefly to Professor Haeckel himself, and can only offer him in return this grateful effort to lift his inspiring and impressive personality above the dust and cloud of a great controversy.

JOSEPH McCABE.

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CHAPTER I. Early Youth

EARLY YOUTH

“I am wholly a child of the nineteenth century, and with its close I would draw the line under my life’s work.” Thus does Professor Haeckel speak of himself. There is a note of gentle resignation in the words, but the time is coming when men will give them a different meaning. Whatever greater achievements may be wrought by a future generation in the service of truth and human welfare, their work will be but a continuation of the truth of our time, as long as humanity breathes. On the intrepid, outstanding figures of the nineteenth century will shine a light that is peculiarly theirs, an illumination that men will dwell on for ever—as we look back, in personal life, on the young days of love. It was a strong love that brought our century to birth.

The soul of humanity has for four centuries been passing through a grim crisis.

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the noble painting by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter revelation of the power of man’s mind! But, we ask, what material did the genius of humanity choose in those days for the manifestation of its giant power? The last judgment: the Christ descending at the blare of the last trumpet, to reward the faithful and banish the sinner into everlasting pain: the Almighty, breathing His spirit into Adam, or mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib of the man. There was no “symbolic” intention in the picture; the deepest feeling of hundreds—nay, thousands—of years was embodied in it. The artist merely gave an imperishable external form to the most treasured truth of his time.

Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty change has come about!

Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the framework of the heavens. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars, and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating, mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn. Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every “fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them.

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