These little scruples, however, did not interfere with what he felt to be the chief interest of botany. The collecting of plants harmonises well with a general love of nature and a passion for wandering over hill and valley. Long walks had already become a feature of his life. The scientific interest made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany went with him everywhere as his lady-love, and remained ever faithful to him. “I have preferred to travel alone most of my life,” he used to say to me; “I never feel ennui when I am alone. My love of and interest in nature are much better entertainment than conversation.” One of the features in this interest at all times, even in later years, was botanical research. The material for it is found everywhere. Darwin, a great traveller with an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery, has said that the traveller who would combine the pursuit of knowledge with æsthetic satisfaction must be above all a botanist(in the closing retrospect of his Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World, one of the finest passages in the work). Whenever Haeckel spoke in later years of his adopted Jena, he never failed to explain, amongst the other excellent qualities of the little university town, that so many fine orchids grew in its woods. When he left Jena to make the long voyage to Ceylon, his last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like pearls “in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with their tender lashes, that so richly decked the grass-covered sides of the railway cutting.” The Letters from India, that described his voyage, owes a good deal of its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical description. I know no other work that approaches it in conveying so effective an idea of the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.
In those early years there was one particular point of close union between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.
It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in the century can be traced back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a dark stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here and there the flanks open and the stream becomes visible; not a restless bubbling spring, but a broad mirror. There is, however, a closer following of Goethe. There are a few strong spirits that have been consciously inspired by him from the first in all their thoughts; have throughout life felt themselves to be the apostles of the “gospel of Goethe”; and in every new creation of their own have held that they did but reflect or expand his ideas, did but carry on his principles to these further conclusions. Haeckel is, in his whole work, one of this smaller band; his whole personality is, in fact, one of its most conspicuous manifestations in the second half of the century.
In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philosophy. Goethe took from him his God, and gave him a new one: took from him the external, transcendental God of the Churches, and gave him the God that is in all things, in the eternal development of the world, in body and soul alike, the God that embraces all reality and being, beside whom there is no distinct “world,” no distinct “sinful man,” no special beginning or end of things. When Haeckel found himself, at the highest point of his own path, by the side of Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that Darwin was but a stage in the logical development of Goethe’s ideas.
Fate decided that Haeckel should be even externally in some sense an heir of the Goethe epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had regarded with such affection, and at which Schiller had toiled with his heart’s blood in “sad, splendid years,” owes its fame in the last third of the century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of adulation, but a simple truth, to say that among the general public and abroad the reputation of Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte to Haeckel. His name stands for an epoch in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies between is forgotten and unknown. In the district itself it is as if the old epochs and the new came into direct touch.
Jena.
From “Jena in Wort und Bild” (Frommann’sche Hofbuchhandlung, Jena).
I shall never forget the hour when this thought came upon me in all its force. It was on a snowless December day, when the dying fire of autumn still lingered on the trees and bushes where the blackbirds sang in front of the observatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood out bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of Goethe’s, that Schiller had dwelt there. It was there that the Wallenstein was born. There the two often sat in conversation—the conversation of two of the greatest minds of the time, each in his way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of the observatory looks down on the spot; it is not a luxurious building, but it is a stage in the onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little farther off rises the modern structure of the Zoological Institute. In Goethe’s day no one dreamed that such a building would ever be seen. It was opened by Haeckel in 1884. The zoological collection it houses was chiefly brought together under his direction. Amongst its treasures are, besides Haeckel’s corals and the like, the outcome of the travels of Semon and Kükenthal in Australia and New Guinea—lands whose very outline could barely be traced in the mist when Schiller was a professor at Jena. At the entrance there are two stuffed orangs, our distant cousins. One wall of the lecture-hall is covered with huge charts depicting the genealogical tree of life, as it is drawn up by Haeckel. With what eyes Schiller would have devoured them! Yet classic traits are not wanting. From Haeckel’s fine study in the Institute the eye falls on the Hausberg, “the mountain-top from which the red rays stream.” It is the room in which the deep-sea radiolaria of the Challenger Expedition were studied, a zoological campaign in depths of the ocean that were stranger to Schiller’s days than the surface of the moon is to us. Behind this Goethe-Schiller seat at the observatory there is a natural depression full of willows that reminds us of the time when all was country here. But just beyond it is a modern street—“Ernst Haeckel Street,” as it was named, in honour of him, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Close to it is the villa where he has lived for many years with his devoted family, full of wonderful reminiscences (oil-paintings and water-colours from his own hand) of his many travels. In Schiller’s day a voyage to Ceylon would have been a life’s work. To-day it is an episode in an infinitely richer and broader life. On the stone seat now we see the proud and handsome figure of the man himself, recalling pleasantly the masters who have stood here before him, the wide hat covering the white hair that is belied by the rosy cheeks; a straight and strong figure, yet revealing in the finer lines of the face the sensitive, æsthetic temper that does not look on scientific investigation as a brutal power of the dissecting knife, but remembers he is the heir of Goethe, even in the Zoological Institute yonder. Over my mind came the feeling of a strange rebirth of things. I felt that life is an eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasurably more wonderful and profound than all the crude ideas of resurrection that have yet prevailed. A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in our ideal of the future historian must seek the eternal and constant features in all change, even in two epochs that are so distinct and in the men who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible schoolmaster disposition that divides things. In the real world there must be one straight line of development. To-day the highest is sought in the melody of immortal verse: to-morrow a Zoological Institute rises on the spot where the poet had stood.
It is said that the boy did not come under the influence of Goethe without some difficulty. His mother did not like Goethe; she preferred Schiller. Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow him in his arduous path. Weimar itself had more than once been disposed to desert him. How much more the general public in its conventional fetters! How many fell away from him when he published the Roman Elegies, and again when he brought out the Elective Affinities. In Haeckel’s youth people remembered Börne’s narrow and hostile strictures. Goethe began to penetrate into the German family as a classic in spite of the general feeling. But the German family was still far below him. He had gradually to lift it up from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled against him, as every stubborn level does against a peak. It was his aunt Bertha that first put Goethe’s works into the boy’s hands. He received them as a delightful piece of moral contraband.
Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the same period, in his Green Henry, the effect of such a revelation on a sensitive young man. A bookseller brings to the house the whole of Goethe’s works, fifty small volumes with red covers and gilded titles. The young Swiss Heinrich, Keller’s picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly for thirty days, when they are taken away because his mother cannot pay for them. But the thirty days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to see new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as he looks up. When the books are removed, it is as if a choir of bright angels have left the room. “I went out into the open air. The old town on the hill, the rocks and woods and river and sea and the lines of the mountains lay in the gentle light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on them I felt a pure and lasting joy that I had never known before. It was a generous love of all that lives, a love that respects the right and realises the import of each thing, and feels the connectedness and depth of the world. This love is higher than the artificial affection of the individual with selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and caprice; it is higher even than the enjoyment and detachment that come of special and romantic affections; it alone can give us an unchanging and lasting glow. Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms. I began to see and to love, not only the outer form, but the inner content, the nature, and the history of things.” The poet compresses his experience into one episode. In real life it comes slowly, step by step. In fine, a third element was born in the young botanist and lover of beauty—Goethe’s view of life behind all else: that which Goethe himself called “objective.” The mystic might call it a return to God: but it was Goethe’s God.