Goethe stood behind the friends as the quiet genius loci, giving his blessing to all who worked in his spirit on the old spot. Nor was the place itself without influence. “Much,” Haeckel writes, “may have been even the outcome of the common uplifting enjoyment of nature that was afforded us by the artistic lines of the Jena hills, as they brought before us once more at sunset the magic of the Calabrian mountains by the colour-harmony of their purple and gold banks of cloud and their violet shadows.”
“What are the hopes, what are the plans, that man, the creature of a day, builds up?”
The words were written by a poet, in his fatal illness, at the spot where the two strong spirits now worked. In the midst of all his hopes and plans Haeckel was struck by a Niobe-shaft. On February 16th, 1864, just on his thirtieth birthday, his wife, only in her twenty-ninth year, in the full force of mind and of love, succumbed to blood-poisoning.
I turn to the thick volume of Haeckel’s Monograph on the Medusæ. Part I.: “System of the Medusæ:” with an atlas of forty beautiful plates: published by Gustav Fischer, of Jena, in 1879. Few people except zoologists with a technical interest in it have ever opened this voluminous work—why should they? It is a heavy work, with dry diagnoses. The author seems to be far away from all general questions, if ever he was, in the utter stillness of his study. This pure accumulation of matter for truth’s sake does not reach the ear of the world. It lays up material for remote days, before which the individual fades away; it is merely catalogued material of the most technical character. Yet, as I turn over the pages, I seem to see a little image from time to time that is almost like the rose-red or golden-brown medusæ in the sterile, illimitable ocean. In truth neither ocean nor book is sterile; but they are grey and broad. And just as the swimming medusa gladdens me in the one, so a little personal trait of the author does in the other. It is in the choice of the Latin names. A little crown is woven that unites æsthetics and science. I find splendid names, invented by the Professor, on all sides. But I notice that his heart was in these things. He has discovered new species of medusæ, and must christen them. As he turns over his Latin or Greek lexicon a ray of humanity steals into the most severe scientific soul at such moments. I read that a disco-medusa is called the Nausicaa phæacum: “I observed the Nausicaa phæacum in April, 1877, at Corfu, on the shore of Phæaca, in the heart of the Nausicaa.” A cyaneid is given the fine name of the Melusina formosa. It is noted, with great regret, that “so fine and classic a name for a medusa” as Oceania must be struck out on scientific grounds. Amongst descriptions of species in a severe scientific tongue that unnerves the timid reader, amongst gonods, styles, perradial bundles of tentacles, and ocellar bulbs, we find, apropos of the medusa, Lizzia Elisabethæ: “As Forbes dedicated the pretty genus Lizzia blondina to a ‘blond Elizabeth,’ I do the same, and wish to honour, not only St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, but also the ‘blond Elizabeth’ of Immermann and my own dear daughter Elizabeth.”
Then, in the middle of the large volume, we find the following passage on page 189. A medusa is given the name of Mitrocoma Annæ. The name was given at Villefranche, near Nice, in April, 1864 This medusa had “a fairy-like appearance” to its discoverer; its tentacles hung down “like a mass of blond hair!” A note to the name tells us that it was given “in memory of my dear, never-to-be-forgotten wife, Anna Sethe. If it is given to me to do something during my earthly pilgrimage for science and humanity, I owe it for the most part to the blessed influence of my gifted wife, who was torn from me by a premature end in 1864.” In the Art-forms in Nature, Haeckel’s work of 1899, we find a medusa Desmonema Annasethe similarly—after thirty-five years—apostrophised: “The specific name of this pretty disco-medusa, one of the most beautiful and interesting of all the medusaæ, immortalises the memory of Anna Sethe, the gifted and refined wife (born 1835, died 1864) to whom the author of this work owes the happiest years of his life.”
If one would fathom the depths of human emotion one must reflect what these words, in such a context, contain; it is the last gentle vibration of a most deep inner experience breaking out into this prosaic, scientific material. A medusa is a trivial, possibly a funny thing, to the layman. The man of science looks deeper into it, and sees a wonderful revelation of nature; the eye of Goethe’s God shines on him from it. But when he has devoted years to the most careful study of it, it assumes also a naïve individual interest for him, as the companion of his solitary hours of observation in the heart of nature, far from all the whirl and bustle of the world. Only the deepest and most intimate feelings break out in such moments. And here they have left their monument—in a Latin name that science will go on coldly entering in its catalogues for ages to come. It seems to me that this simple fact tells us more of the character of this true-hearted man, in whom nothing human was lacking, than long narratives could.
When the aged Sethe saw the break-up in 1806 of the State of Prussia, in the invulnerability of which he had believed as a gospel, he sought refuge in the comfort of work. “I succeeded in benumbing my mind: I experienced in myself that hard work is a soothing balsam, co-operating with our tardy healing force.” The grandson, wounded in a more terrible way and cut to the very heart, tried the same remedy.
Thirty years afterwards, when crowns were prepared and speeches delivered in honour of Haeckel’s sixtieth birthday, when the whole of Jena fêted him as their own, and the veil fell from his marble bust in the Zoological Institute, to which seven hundred of the best known names in German and foreign science had contributed, the hero of it all went back to that dark hour. “I thought at the time that I could not survive the blow, thought my life was closed, and purposed to bring together all the new ideas that Darwin’s theory of evolution had evoked in me in a last great work. That was the origin, amid bitter struggles, of the Generelle Morphologie. It was written and printed in less than a year. I lived the life of a hermit, gave myself barely three or four hours sleep a day, and worked all day and half the night. My habits were so ascetic that I really wonder I am alive and well before you to-day.”
In his hour of collapse Haeckel sat down and wrote “the book of his life.” There were only two alternatives for a book written in such circumstances. It would be either very bad or very good. When a young man in his thirties throws himself into a great effort of this kind and writes a work that he conceives as a testament—a work in which he will speak for the last time, but will say everything—it is a desperate test of all that he has done in his three decades of life and is about to give to the world. In this case the test succeeded beyond all expectation.