There are plenty of very strenuous students, later Privy Councillors as well as archæologists and zoologists, who find a year in Italy a very simple matter. They arrive, make the due round of sights, and then at once disappear into some library or institute, burying themselves like moles in some special work or other, just as they would do at home. The only time you can see them is over their Munich beer in the evening; and if there are a number of them together they smoke their cigars and sing a German student’s song, as they would do at home. These good folk have very different dispositions behind their goggles, but they have never been lit up by the fire of Goethe. They are quite content to write home like the churlish Herder; Italy is pretty enough in Goethe’s writings, but one ought not to go there oneself. The modern scholar of this type may add that the cigars are bad and beer dear. Very different was Haeckel’s verdict. “In Sicily I was nearly thrown out of my line and made a landscape-painter.” The æsthetic man in him was the first to lift up his arms with vigour under this new, free, inspiring sun. His words are no idle phrase. The moment he tried it Haeckel discovered that he had a genius for landscape-painting. Even in regard to this gift we see the truth of what I have already said in other connections; the sternest materialists and scientific revolutionaries of the nineteenth century were men of considerable artistic power. There was the solid Vogt, a painter and poet; Moleschott, the soul-comrade of Hermann Hettner; Strauss, who wrote some poems of great and lasting beauty; Feuerbach, and others. Even Büchner, the boldest and most advanced of them all, has written poetry under a pseudonym.[[1]] Darwin took only two books with him in the little cabin of his ship, Lyell’s Geology and Paradise Lost. There is a complete gallery of fine water-colours in Haeckel’s house to-day that have been brought from three quarters of the globe. His son Walter has inherited the artistic gift, and become a painter. It might be said that a good landscape-painter would hardly recompense us for the loss of the philosopher and scientist that Haeckel became in the nineteenth century. The simple steel pen, the inspired pencil of the thinker, did more for humanity in his hand than could have been done by the most splendid colour-symphonies of the most inspired landscape-painter. I have often thought this as I looked over, in the evening at Haeckel’s house, the then unpublished treasures of his artistic faculty. A work like his History of Creation has counted for a stratum in the thought of humanity. What are even the masterpieces of a Hildebrandt in comparison with it! Yet there was undoubtedly the note of genius in these drawings; some of them showed more than Hildebrandt’s cleverness (we know to-day that Hildebrandt’s highly coloured pictures did not even approximate to the real natural light of southern scenes) and glow of colour. It seemed to me that here again the man had dreams of a lost love: a dream of the gay, wandering pittore, who asks nothing but a sunset in violet, carmine, and gold, instead of being the sober unriddler of the world’s problems. Since that time the house of Fr. Eugen Köhler, to which we owe the fine new edition of Naumann’s classic work on birds, with its coloured plates, has undertaken to publish Haeckel’s water-colours, as “Travel Pictures,” in a splendid and monumental work.

[1]. Büchner’s brother tells how, when Ludwig furtively brought to him the manuscript of Force and Matter, he at once guessed it was a romance or an epic that so much secret work had been expended on. [Trans.]

During the year in Italy all these gifts were employed together. Italy was exactly the land for Haeckel’s temperament, with its mixture of lofty classic elements and natural beauty and simple, naïve unpretentiousness. For the first time he felt that he was a cosmopolitan student. He had never been a devotee of the student’s beer-feasts. He had no need of alcoholic stimulant. Gegenbaur of Würtzburg, the insatiable smoker, once said to him in joke, “If you would only smoke, we might make something out of you.” It was done, in any case. His personal inclinations were in his favour: an illimitable love of travel, good spirits that rose in proportion to the absurdity of his accommodation, and a simple delight in everything human that enabled him to talk and travel with the humblest as if they were his equals. He spent a night with a young worker in a haystack, and when he was asked what he was, he pointed to his paint-box and brush: “House-painter.” “I thought so when I saw you,” said the youth, and he asked Haeckel to start a workshop together with him. Italy was the ideal land for a visitor of that type. There was no part of the world from which he was so pleased to receive recognition in his years of fame as Italy; and he received it in abundance, for the appreciation was mutual.

I will add a page here that was supplied for the present work by a friendly hand, a man who is as well known to thousands as Haeckel himself—Hermann Allmers, “the poet of the fens, chief of Frisia, and splendid fellow,” as Haeckel has called him. He died in the spring of 1902 at an advanced age. He met Haeckel in Italy, and tells the story in his verse and prose. Forty years after their meeting he wrote me that Haeckel was “the finest man he ever met.”

“TO ERNST HAECKEL.

Dost thou remember the magic night,

A night I never cease to see,

That brought us both to Ischia?

How smooth the boat sailed gently in,

How silent was the great broad bay