The book closes with these words and a quotation from Goethe. It had opened with a quotation from Goethe. Goethe runs through the whole of the two energetic volumes like an old and venerable anthem. The stalwart fighter not only traces his whole Monistic philosophy to Goethe: not only owes to him the very idea of morphology. In front of the second and more strictly Darwinistic volume he has a dedication “to the founders of the theory of evolution,” and between Darwin and Lamarck we find the name of Goethe. It was Haeckel’s firm conviction that Goethe not only believed in the unity of God and nature, but literally in the natural evolution of the various species of animals and plants from each other. In this conviction, which claims Goethe explicitly for Darwin, he has never been shaken, although his own friends and convinced evolutionists (Oscar Schmidt, for instance) have often opposed him on the point.
Much has been written since the days of the General Morphology both for and against this Goethe-Darwin theory, but I cannot see that we have got much further with it. I still find that a candid study of some of Goethe’s smaller writings, such as the History of my Botanical Studies, the criticism of D’Alton’s Sloths and Pachyderms (which is very important), and several others, compels us to think that Goethe really believed, in a strikingly Darwinian way, in a slow transformation and evolution of animal and plant species in virtue of purely natural laws; and that he always laid great stress on this idea of his as an original notion, far in advance of the professional science of his time. We not only have several clear passages, but the whole point of his argument really rests on this idea. Hence, apart altogether from the pedantry that tries to make a cabalistic mystery out of Goethe’s works, and always reads B for A and C for B, it does seem that there was truth in Haeckel’s first view of the matter, in spite of all the ink that has been shed over it and the vast amount of word-splitting exegesis. Darwinism has, in a certain sense, its German side, even apart from all that Haeckel has done for it.
This was the book, then, that the deeply afflicted author wrung from himself as his “testament.” It was written and printed with unprecedented speed. When the first copies were issued, the author had a feeling that he had nearly “done for himself.” He could not sleep. The state of his nerves gave great concern to his friends, who were watching him most anxiously. With a stolid fatalism, as if nothing mattered now, he yielded to their pressing advice, and decided to travel for a time. Far away on the blue Atlantic, at the gate to all the glories of the tropics, there is an island, Teneriffe, that was counted one of “the isles of the blest” in the old Roman days. A huge volcano rises from it, and on its flanks we find all the zones of the geography of plants, as in a model collection. Humboldt has given us a splendid description of it, as the first station of his voyage to the tropics. “The man who has some feeling for the beauty of Nature,” he says, “will find a more powerful restorative than climate on this lovely island. No place in the world seems to me better calculated to banish sorrow and restore peace to an embittered soul.” Haeckel went there.
It was not an expensive journey, but it came as a fresh greeting from Nature. It was a new ocean after the long studies on the Mediterranean. What might it not afford in the way of medusæ and other zoological prizes when the general beauty of the landscape, that had enchanted Humboldt, had been fully enjoyed. With a mingling of his overflowing passion for Nature, and the gloomy fatalism that told him this would be his “last voyage” after his “last book,” he asked permission to leave Jena in the autumn of 1866, when the printing of the Morphology was completed, and set out. It was no more to be his last voyage than the Morphology to be his last testament. Although still subdued with resignation in his inner life, he came home in the spring of 1867 with a new elasticity of body and mind, restored by the influence of the palms and bananas and spurge, and braced for the great struggle of his life that was now to begin in earnest.
The voyage had really two aims. To see the volcano above a palm-clad coast, with the Atlantic Ocean bringing its medusæ; and to work for Darwin.
A personal connection between the two had already been formed as a matter of course. Darwin, almost confined for years to his isolated home at Down owing to his constant ill-health, had received a copy of the Radiolaria, and the correspondence had begun. The work had as yet met with little encouragement from the ranks of exact scientists. It cannot have been a matter of indifference to Darwin personally that so distinguished a work, a real model of professional research, had come over to him. Proofs of the Morphology were sent over to Down before the book was ready for publication. Darwin read German with difficulty, but in this case he was stimulated to make an unusual effort. At last Haeckel himself made his appearance at the master’s home. It seemed as though he had to visit him in person to receive his blessing. It was, at all events, a happy moment in the history of Darwinism when the two men first met whose names will be inseparable in literature.
This was in October, 1866; Darwin had sent his carriage to bring Haeckel from the station. A sunny autumn morning smiled on the homely and beautiful English landscape with its bright woods and golden broom and red erica and evergreen oaks. Haeckel has described their first meeting. “When the carriage drew up before Darwin’s house, with its ivy and its shadowy elms, the great scientist stepped out of the shade of the creeper-covered porch to meet me. He had a tall and venerable appearance, with the broad shoulders of an Atlas that bore a world of thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual work. The tender and friendly eyes were overshadowed by the great roof of the prominent brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long, silvery white beard. The noble expression of the whole face, the easy and soft voice, the slow and careful pronunciation, the natural and simple tenor of his conversation, took my heart by storm in the first hour that we talked together, just as his great work had taken my intelligence by storm at the first reading. I seemed to have before me a venerable sage of ancient Greece, a Socrates or an Aristotle.”
They were delighted to meet each other, for they were like natures, in their best qualities. Darwin had more passion in him than he ever expressed, and behind all Haeckel’s impetuosity there was the naïve and yielding temper of the child. He poured out his anger against the stubborn and bewigged professors who still held out against the luminous truth of the theory of evolution. Darwin put his hand on his shoulder, smiled, and said they were rather to be pitied than blamed, and that they could not keep back permanently the stream of truth. At heart, however, he was delighted with his fiery pupil. They were to fight their battle shoulder to shoulder for seventeen years. During all those years there was never the slightest disturbance of their friendship. Darwin knew well what an auxiliary he had in Haeckel. It is true that he wrote him a wonderful letter occasionally, in which he used the right of a senior to warn Haeckel not to deal so violently with his opponents. Violence only had the effect of making onlookers side with the party you attacked. We must be careful not to be too hasty in setting things up as positive truths, as we see every day people starting from the same premises and coming to opposite conclusions. But he was generally at one with Haeckel, and had the good spirit to acknowledge it openly. When Haeckel’s History of Creation raised up the most extreme parties, and started the cry that a distinction must be drawn at once between Darwin’s real scientific ideas and Haeckel’s desperate excursions into natural philosophy, Darwin said, in the Descent of Man, which he had begun much earlier, but did not publish for some time, that he would never have written his book if he had then known Haeckel’s History of Creation. Haeckel had anticipated so much that he wished to say. And when Virchow attacked Haeckel in 1877, Darwin spoke very severely of the opponents who would make the eternal freedom to teach the truth dependent on the accidental conditions of a modern State. Haeckel visited him twice at Down. On February 12, 1882, he sent Darwin his congratulations on his seventy-third birthday from the summit of Adam’s Peak in Ceylon. This was his last greeting. Darwin died two months afterwards. There was a touch of romance in this last communication of the two great warriors. On the summit of the mountain, almost as sharp as a needle, and 2,500 yards above the Indian Ocean, a tiny temple of Buddha hangs like a stork’s nest suspended by chains. Buddha is believed to have left his footprints on the rocks here. The Mohammedan tradition, however, says it was done by Adam as he stood on one foot and bemoaned the loss of Paradise. In front of this holy trace, a depression in the rock about a foot long, Haeckel made a speech to his travelling companions, and they broke the neck of a bottle of Rhine wine to Darwin’s health. It is no little stretch of humanity’s pilgrimage, from Adam to Buddha and on to Darwin.
