No one can understand the greatness of a man like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this melody. Nature is not a flat surface: it is an ocean. When Columbus crossed the seas in his three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards beneath his keel—worlds of the deep-sea, into which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges. So we in turn may run our eye over the blue surface of nature, and think of its mysterious gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of all that outspreads beneath our keel. Yet that glorious day on which Columbus found “his land” is an inspiration to us, his remote grandchildren. The life we are going to examine will bring before us such a morning of discovery. Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he called Japan), and he found America. Not one of us, however gifted he be, can be quite sure that, in leading humanity, he is not sailing into another such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all, friends and opponents. America or Zipangu—let it be so. Perhaps any man might have found Zipangu, while only the genius could reach America.
When Gustav Freytag, who had a most happy quality for writing memoirs, was composing his admirable Pictures from the Past of Germany, he sought in each period some prominent man of plain and downright character, yet who had something typical of his age in his sentiments, as if the time-spirit spoke through him. In this quest he twice (in the fourth volume, for the period from the close of the eighteenth century to the Wars of Freedom) lit upon earlier members of Haeckel’s family. The first was Haeckel’s grandfather on the mother’s side, Christoph Sethe; the second was his father, Councillor Haeckel.
This simple fact shows the stuff of Haeckel’s race. The older Sethe was an important man in his time. He left to his children manuscript memoirs of his eventful life, which have, unfortunately, been only sparsely used by Freytag, though the whole deserved to be regarded as a source of history. The general facts in relation to him were collected by Hermann Hüffer, who was not merely interested in the jurist because he was one himself, but was brought into touch with him as a result of his brilliant study of Heine. Sethe’s eldest son, Christian, the uncle of Ernst Haeckel, is the well-known friend of Heine’s youth to whom the poet dedicated the “Fresco-sonnets” in his Book of Songs and wrote the finest of his early letters. This Christian Sethe (he died on May 31, 1857, being then Provincial Director of Revenue at Stettin), was a lawyer, like his father, and the father himself came of a legal family. Haeckel’s own father, moreover, the husband of one of Christian’s sisters, was a State Councillor at the time of his death, and his elder brother was a Provincial Councillor. Thus Haeckel’s genealogical tree spreads into the legal profession in a curiously complex way.
We naturally reflect for a moment if we could fancy Haeckel himself as a lawyer. It is hardly possible. He would at least have been a very rebellious member of the profession, and have been sadly lacking in respect for the venerable traditions and powdered wigs of the court—assuming, of course (which a mere layman has no right to question), that there ought still to be such traditions and costumes in the profession. In his vigorous Riddle of the Universe he has, from his scientific point of view, brought strictures against the legal profession that leave nothing to be desired in the way of candour, when we recollect the long tradition of his family. In its lingering in the rear of the progress of the times the whole science of law seemed to him to be a “riddle of the universe.” The jurist is apt to be respected as an embodiment of our highest culture. In reality that is not the case. The distinctive object of his concern, man and his soul, is only superficially studied in the preparation for the law, and so we still find amongst jurists the most extraordinary views as to the freedom of the will, responsibility, and so on. “Most of our legal students pay no attention to anthropology, psychology, and evolution, the first requisites for a correct appreciation of human nature. They ‘have no time’ for it. It is unfortunately all absorbed in a profound study of beer and wine and the ‘noble art’ of fencing; and the rest of their valuable time is taken up in learning some hundreds of paragraphs from the books of law, the knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the jurist to fill any position whatever in the State.”
The student of psychology, however, cannot fail to see that the disposition that led so many members of Haeckel’s family into the legal profession was also developed in himself to some extent. There is perhaps no other scientist of his time with such an imperious craving for clearness, for clean lines and systematic arrangement. At least in the whole of the Darwinian period no other has made so great an effort to convert the scattered flight of phenomena in the realm of life into the even course of so many fixed “laws.” In many of his writings this tendency to formulate laws is so pronounced that the layman instinctively has an impression of dogmatism on the part of the author. This has been grossly misunderstood, and made to play an important part in the controversial work of his opponents. The truth is that this sharp outlook and pronounced tendency to formulate clear and unambiguous “laws” in the animal and plant worlds is a matter of temperament as much as of judgment. It is very possible that we have here an hereditary trait, an innate aversion for disorder and confusion—for a thoughtless rushing ahead without clear ideas and plan. The trait was the more important and helpful as a man of Haeckel’s type was sure to be one of the most active revolutionaries in his science, even apart from Darwinian ideas. It would be difficult to find another reformer in any great province of thought who, immediately after effecting a complete overthrow of the older ideas, has hastened so quickly to build up the new, to devise a nomenclature and a classification down to the smallest details, and hand on at once to his successors a splendid order once more. Zoology, which seemed to crumble into chaos after Darwin’s victory and the collapse of the old framework, came out of Haeckel’s hands, after barely two years’ work, in the shape of a new and graceful Darwinistic structure—not, indeed, perfect and finally completed, but entirely habitable for the young generation. They could add new stones as they thought fit, or pierce new windows, and so on; but at all events the chaos was terminated at a critical moment by this iron man of order. I will only add, to complete the picture, that one of the three doctorates that Haeckel holds to-day is that of law (an honorary degree), in addition to his qualifications in philosophy and medicine. He now only lacks the theological degree, but I fear that he will neither take the trouble to secure it nor have it conferred on him as an honorary distinction for his merit in that department.
The Sethes and Haeckels of the earlier generation were not merely zealous jurists, but also characteristic figures of Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Prussia. Christoph Sethe, the patriarch of the maternal line, was Privy Councillor of the Prussian Government at Cleve at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century, though he was then young. When the French occupied the country he accompanied the Government to Münster, in 1802, which had become a Prussian town. But the stalwart German was pursued even there by the detested Napoleonists. He was sent to Düsseldorf as General Procurator in 1808, and came into dangerous conflict with the French authorities shortly before the Emperor’s fall. The mobilisation of the troops for the campaign of 1812 had led to a disturbance amongst the workers. Sethe’s sense of patriotism and justice was affronted by the arbitrary proceedings of the French. He was summoned to give an account at Paris, the chief object being to retain him—the most powerful official in the Rhine district and not a very safe man—as a hostage during the crisis. It was at Paris that he made the finest phrase of his life. Roederer, the minister, tried to intimidate him with the threat that the Emperor might have a dangerous man like him shot at any moment. “You will have to shoot the law first,” replied Sethe. We are often reminded of this saying in the biography of Sethe’s grandson. If Haeckel had been burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, he would have thought of nothing but the “law”—the law of truth and freedom that they would burn with him.
Christoph Sethe continued to play an important part in the service of Prussia, to which, of course, he returned, together with the Rhinelands, after Napoleon’s fall. He was destined to live through the terrible reaction under Frederic William the Third, and the fiery outburst under his successor. After the early death of his wife their youngest daughter, Bertha, managed his house and large family.
She lived until her death (April 1, 1904) in her quiet, unpretentious home in one of the large empty streets behind the Tiergarten at Berlin, reaching the age of ninety-two, but never losing her freshness of mind and memory. In my many happy talks with the aged lady the succeeding periods seemed to melt together. The small, old furniture and the ancient, ever-ticking clock made me forget, in dreamy twilight hours, that the red glare in the sky above the houses beyond, that faintly lit up the old-time room, was the reflection from the twentieth century of the electric flames that flashed on the great modern city. On the table lay the latest part of Haeckel’s (her nephew) fine illustrated work for artistically minded scientists and scientifically minded artists—the Art-forms in Nature. The dear old lady spoke with pride of her knowledge of the “radiolaria,” the mysterious unicellular ocean-dwellers, described in Haeckel’s splendid monograph, the flinty shells of which are amongst the finest artistic treasures of nature. She called them the “dear radiolaria” with all the tenderness of the emotional man of science who had felt a sort of psychic relation, a living affinity, to the tiny microscopic strangers he had been the first to arrange and describe in their thousands. Smiling, with quiet pride, she told me how her nephew visited her, when he came to Berlin; how, with the unassuming ways of this sound stock, he chose to sleep in the clothes-drying loft; how he invited his friends to come and hear of his voyages and work, bringing thirty of them to share a single dish of herring-salad in his naïve way, and how, as they continued to pour in, he made seats for them of boards and tubs, and fed them with his wonderful genius for anecdote so that none went away fasting. She dwelt with entire satisfaction on the last, the “zoological” phase, of the Haeckel-Sethe house. Yet it all blended softly with the old and the past of nearly a century ago. Over the patriarchal furniture hung the oil painting of Christoph Sethe, with the large Roman nose that runs through the family down to Ernst Haeckel himself, and gives the chief feature to his otherwise soft profile. Under a glass shade, in the old fashion of our grandfathers that we perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate, was a fine bust of Schleiermacher. He was a friend of the Sethes. Bertha Sethe was confirmed by him. He died four days before Ernst Haeckel was born, on February 12, 1834. The sister came from the grave to attend the mother of the new-born child. A little fact of that character seems to pour out a broad stream of light. The religious sense was strong in the Sethes, but it was not of the rigid conventional character. It came from the depths of human destinies, of individual experience. In those depths it is always found associated with that other fundamental quality of human experience and inner life—a zeal for the truth. Schleiermacher, the Good, had endeavoured within the limits of his time (if not of our time) to erect a new and firmer Christendom. Darwinism might very well have adjusted itself to this new Christendom, that needed no record of miracles from disputed historical works to support it, but sought the holiest ideal prophetically in the symbolic conception and the development of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Had Schleiermacher read the Natural History of Creation, or later theologians shared his temper, one wonders how much exaggeration and bitterness might have been spared on either side. But religion was not prepared to dissociate itself from “the Church,” and with the Church there could be no compromise. Thus one’s thoughts travelled from the radiolaria in Haeckel’s latest publication and the old bust of Schleiermacher, which was protected by its glass shade, in this home of old-world piety, from the wicked flies of the twentieth century.
An elder sister of Bertha Sethe and daughter of the old Christoph Sethe had married the much older lawyer, Karl Haeckel, in the twenties. The first-fruit of this marriage was Ernst Haeckel’s elder brother, the Provincial Councillor Haeckel who died a few years ago, a high-minded and sensitive man. He remained throughout life faithful to the strict traditional forms of religious experience, in spite of all his admiration for his gifted zoological brother.