Nevertheless, a flame broke out at one spot in this monograph. In a very short time Haeckel’s whole figure would stand out in the red reflection of its glow—a figure really great, solitary, suddenly deserted by all the bewigged and powdered professors—Haeckel himself, as the world has come to know him.
CHAPTER IV
DARWIN
We still celebrate, at a distance of centuries, the return of the birthday of great men. In reality it is a mistake. We ought to celebrate the hour when not merely life, but the idea of their life, quickened them. That is the really important birth that calls for commemoration. Luther’s real birthday was when he nailed his theses to the church door. Then was born the Luther that belongs to the world. Over the world-cradle of Columbus shines, not the trivial and evanescent planet given in his horoscope, but the little red flickering star of Guanahani, the light that he saw from the shore on the night before he landed on an island of the New World.
Life is a voyage of discovery to the man who passes through it. He looks out with his child-eyes and discovers the world—at the bottom, discovers only himself. But one day a greater veil is torn from before his self. Genius, the greater I, stirs within him like the butterfly in its narrow pupa-case. For the world at large that is the hour when the great man is born who will leave his mark on it.
Haeckel’s biography only begins on a certain day, if we look at it rightly and broadly. Until that day he is merely a young man, an outgrowth from a rich old civilisation: a young man who has felt in him a struggle between artistic and scientific tendencies, like so many: who has vacillated between the choice of a “paying profession” and research for its own sake, and has decided for the former, like so many: who has chosen zoology, and begun to work hard on professional lines at his science: and who has been told prophetically that he will one day do something, though along a line where much has been done already. In the whole of this development we have as yet no indication of the real tenor of his life.
It comes first with the name of Darwin. The arabesque of a very different life begins to blend with that of his own.
In the February of the year in which Haeckel was born (1834), twenty-eight years before the point we have arrived at, Charles Darwin was on a scientific expedition to South America. There is a romantic element in the earlier story of this journey. The naked Fuegians had stolen a boat from an English Government ship that was engaged in making geographical measurements, towards the close of the twenties, on the wild coast of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy, the captain, arrested a few of the natives, brought them on board as hostages, and in the end took them with him to England. They were to be instructed in morality and Christianity and then taken back to their people, in order to introduce these elements of civilisation, for the advantage of shipwrecked sailors or distressed travellers who might fall in with them. We feel a breath of the spirit of Rousseau in it. As a fact nothing came of the device. The good Fuegians were clothed and improved by civilised folk for a year or two, returned home, immediately abandoned their trousers and their Christianity, and remained naked savages. But the bringing home of these hostages led, in the early thirties, to a new expedition of FitzRoy to Tierra del Fuego. The Government directed him to draw up further charts, and he looked about for a man of science to accompany him.
The man proved to be Charles Darwin, then in his twenty-second year.
The son of a prosperous provincial physician, he had begun to study medicine without much success, and was transferred to theology, only to find after three years of study that he was as little fitted to become a country clergyman as a country doctor. He had an unconquerable love of scientific investigation. He collected all kinds of things, and desired to travel, without any very clear idea of his destiny. A chance introduction came to the young man as a godsend, and he joined FitzRoy’s expedition to South America. Once more, it was this journey that made him “Darwin,” the mighty intellectual force in the nineteenth century.