HAECKEL:
HIS LIFE AND WORK
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[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL.
From the Painting by Franz von Lenbach, 1899.
(Reproduced in “Jugend.”)
]
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HAECKEL:
HIS LIFE AND WORK
BY
WILHELM BÖLSCHE
WITH INTRODUCTION AND SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BY THE TRANSLATOR,
JOSEPH McCABE
WITH THIRTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
PHILADELPHIA
_GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO_.
PUBLISHERS
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(_All rights reserved._)
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Contents
-------
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER I
EARLY YOUTH 15
CHAPTER II
AT THE UNIVERSITY 51
CHAPTER III
THE RADIOLARIA 82
CHAPTER IV
DARWIN 102
CHAPTER V
THE SCIENTIFIC 144
CONGRESS OF 1863
CHAPTER VI
THE “GENERAL 172
MORPHOLOGY”
CHAPTER VII
GROWTH OF IDEAS 252
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWNING YEARS 294
BIBLIOGRAPHY 323
INDEX 329
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List of Illustrations
HAECKEL _Frontispiece_
_From the painting by Franz von
Lenbach._
JENA 42
A FISHING PARTY IN HELIGOLAND IN 70
1865
_Ernst Haeckel, Anton Dohrn,
Richard Greeff, Max
Salverda, Pietro Marchi._
A RADIOLARIAN 94
HAECKEL 128
_From the bust by G. Herold._
HAECKEL IN 1880 154
HAECKEL IN 1890 178
_From a relief by Kopf._
HAECKEL’S VILLA AT JENA 216
HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT 244
MIKLUCHO-MACLAY AT LANZAROTE,
IN THE CANARIES, 1867
A SIPHONOPHORE 248
HAECKEL IN 1874 272
HAECKEL IN 1896 292
_From a photograph by Gabriel
Max._
HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN 300
PROFESSORS AT GENOA, 1904
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Introduction
One of the admirable maxims that crystallises the better sense or
experience of men reminds us that we must “say nothing but good of the
dead.” Unhappily, we have taken the words of our sage fathers in too
large a sense. A feeling has grown amongst us that we should “say
nothing good except of the dead,” at least as regards those who differ
from us. So has many a man gone from the world with little suspicion of
the appreciation that might have warmed him in the last chill years;
many a man sunk into the grave with the harsh echo of dishonouring words
still rumbling in his ears. It may be that our ideas, our truths, would
not suffer greatly if we could patiently endeavour to trace the
community of humane feeling that lies beneath the wide gulfs that often
separate us intellectually from each other.
Professor Ernst Haeckel is one of those combative figures of all time
who take misunderstanding as a part of their romantic career. If he had
shut himself within the laboratory, as some of his gifted colleagues
did, all the world would honour him to-day. His vast range of biological
knowledge, almost without parallel in our specialist days, fitted him
for great scientific achievements. His superb special contributions to
biology—his studies of radiolaria, sponges, medusæ, &c.—give ample
evidence of it. As things are, he has, Professor Hertwig says, “written
his name in letters of light in the history of science.” He holds four
gold medals for scientific research (Cothenius, Swammerdam, Darwin, and
Challenger), four doctorates (Berlin, Jena, Edinburgh, and Cambridge),
and about eighty diplomas from so many universities and academic bodies.
But he was one of those who cannot but look out of the windows of the
laboratory. His intense idealism, his sense of what he felt to be wrong
and untrue, inflamed by incessant travel and communion with men, drove
him into the field of battle. In the din and roar of a great conflict
his name has passed on to a million lips and become the varied war-cry
of fiercely contending parties. A hundred Haeckels, grotesque in their
unlikeness to each other, circulate in our midst to-day.
The present work is a plain study of the personality of Haeckel and the
growth of his ideas. The character of Haeckel was forged amid
circumstances that have largely passed away from the scientific world of
our time. The features, even, of the world he has worked in of recent
years in Germany are so different from our own that no Englishman can
understand him without sober study of his life. He has often been called
“the Darwin of Germany.” The phrase is most misleading. It suggests a
comparison that is bound to end in untruth and injustice. In the same
year that Haeckel opened his Darwinian campaign in Germany he won the
prize for the long jump—a record jump. It is the note of much in his
character. He was no quiet recluse, to shrink from opposition and hard
names, but a lusty, healthy, impetuous, intrepid youth, even when his
hair had worn to grey. A story is told of how, not many years ago, the
Grand Duke of Weimar playfully rallied him, in the midst of a brilliant
company, on his belief in evolution. To the horror of the guests, he
slapped the powerful noble on the shoulder, and told him to come to Jena
and see the proofs of it. In his seventy-first year we find him severely
censuring his Emperor—the emperor of many fortresses—in a public lecture
at Berlin.
How his vigour and his resentment arose as barrier after barrier was
raised before him: how his scorn of compromise was engendered and fed:
how he accumulated mountains of knowledge in obscure, technical works
before he formulated his sharp didactic conclusions: all this is told in
the following story. For good or ill he has won an influence in this
country, and his story should be read. It is, in itself, one of rare and
varied interest, and it is told by one of the most brilliant penmen of
modern Germany, his former pupil, now a distinguished biologist,
Professor Wilhelm Bölsche.
The time seems to have come in England for the publication of some
authoritative picture of the great biologist and controversialist. One
work of his circulates by the hundred thousand amongst us, and has had a
deep and lasting influence on the thoughts of large classes of men. His
influence is hardly less in France and Italy, as well as in Germany; his
doctrines have, in fact, been translated into fifteen different tongues.
The deep, sometimes bitter, controversy that they have engendered must
have led to a desire to know more of the man and his making. The
attempts that have been made here and there to “construct” him from his
ideas and literary manner are, as the reader will see, very far removed
from the reality. Behind all the strained inferences from doctrines,
behind all the dishonouring epithets, there is a genial, warm, deeply
artistic, intensely idealist nature, sung with enthusiasm by poets who
have known him. Once, in playful scientific mood, Haeckel tried to
explain his own character in his familiar terms of heredity and
environment. He came of a line of lawyers, straight, orderly, inexorable
men. He had lived and worked in quiet Jena, in the beautiful valley of
the Saale. But he did not speak of that larger environment—the field of
battle, stretching far away, beyond the calm Thuringian hills, to the
ends of Europe. We must place Haeckel’s ardent and high-minded nature in
that field, face to face with his opponents, if we would understand him.
For the supplementary chapter I have drawn freely on another
biographical sketch by one of Haeckel’s pupils, Dr. Breitenbach, and
other sources. For the illustrations I am indebted chiefly to Professor
Haeckel himself, and can only offer him in return this grateful effort
to lift his inspiring and impressive personality above the dust and
cloud of a great controversy.
JOSEPH McCABE.
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CHAPTER I
EARLY YOUTH
“I am wholly a child of the nineteenth century, and with its close I
would draw the line under my life’s work.” Thus does Professor Haeckel
speak of himself. There is a note of gentle resignation in the words,
but the time is coming when men will give them a different meaning.
Whatever greater achievements may be wrought by a future generation in
the service of truth and human welfare, their work will be but a
continuation of the truth of our time, as long as humanity breathes. On
the intrepid, outstanding figures of the nineteenth century will shine a
light that is peculiarly theirs, an illumination that men will dwell on
for ever—as we look back, in personal life, on the young days of love.
It was a strong love that brought our century to birth.
The soul of humanity has for four centuries been passing through a grim
crisis.
Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the noble painting by
Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter
revelation of the power of man’s mind! But, we ask, what material did
the genius of humanity choose in those days for the manifestation of its
giant power? The last judgment: the Christ descending at the blare of
the last trumpet, to reward the faithful and banish the sinner into
everlasting pain: the Almighty, breathing His spirit into Adam, or
mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib of the man. There was no
“symbolic” intention in the picture; the deepest feeling of
hundreds—nay, thousands—of years was embodied in it. The artist merely
gave an imperishable external form to the most treasured truth of his
time.
Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty change has come about!
Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies
in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth
roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law.
Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting
Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the
framework of the heavens. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars,
and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating,
mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks
on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars
lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn.
Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament;
every “fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing
heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours
throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate
close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is
in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore
fade from them.
The seventeenth century, opening amid the last glare of the
martyr-fires, quickens with a vague yearning and expectation.
In the eighteenth century the old world breaks up. From the new stars,
from the new world, new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and roar
of conflict. Dread flames break out in the social, moral, and æsthetic
life of men. But the century ends in the birth of a greater artist than
Michael Angelo.
Goethe, on the morn of the nineteenth century, paints a new Sixtine
Chapel in his poetry. But he no longer depicts the old ideas. He speaks
of God-Nature. To him God is the eternal force of the All. His thoughts
turn no longer on Creation and the Last Judgment. An eternal evolution
is the source of his inspiration. He regards the whole universe as a
single, immeasurable revelation of spirit. But this spirit is the
rhythmic outflow of infinite developments. It becomes Milky Way and sun
and planet, blue lotus-flowers and gay butterfly. At last it takes the
form of man, and reads the stars as an open book. In Homer and Goethe it
directs the style and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Raphael it guides
the pencil and the brush.
All this unfolds in Goethe, as in a vision with yet half-opened eyes.
Then the nineteenth century begins. Nature is its salvation, the
salvation of its most practical, most real need. It must struggle for
its existence, like any other century, but it has new and improved
weapons for the struggle. All the earlier ages were but poor blunderers.
The lightning flashed on the naked savage, and he fell on his knees and
prayed, powerless as he was. In the eighteenth century it dawned on
men’s minds that this might be some force of nature. The nineteenth
century sets its foot on the neck of the demon of this force, presses
him into its service, plays with him. Its thoughts and words flash along
the lightning current, as if along new nerve-tracks, that begin to
circle the globe. Man becomes lord of the earth, from the uppermost
azure down into the dark, cold abysses of the ocean, from the icy pole
to the burning tropical desert. And at length man turns his thoughts
upon himself.
Man, his arm resting on the splendid instruments of modern research,
raises his hand to his brow, and turns philosopher. He becomes at once
more bold and more modest than ever.
What Goethe had seen in vision rises before him now in sharp, almost
hard outline from his own real life-work. He has succeeded in bringing
nature and its forces to his feet, because it was flesh of his flesh and
blood of his blood. He is its child. A thousand tongues proclaim the
truth to him, a naïve, almost simple, revelation of reality. He digs in
the earth, and ancient bones and skulls tell him vaguely of the past.
Such once was he, devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal
world. He searches his frame through and through for further light.
There is the brain, where the thoughts crowd together. There is the
cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that so closely resembles
the lowest of all living things, not yet distinct enough to be either
animal or plant. Here are the forms that he successively assumes in his
mother’s body, before he is born—forms that can hardly be distinguished
from those of the animal at the same stage of development. From almost
divine heights he has sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell—nay,
deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled matter of the universe.
But this early picture dissolves at once in an ennobling and inspiring
truth. Nature becomes man. In this he presses once more to the heart of
the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang of God-Nature. The new God
pulses in every wave of man’s blood. In Michael Angelo’s picture God
breathes his spirit into Adam. The new Adam of the nineteenth century is
God’s spirit, in body and soul, from the very first, for he is Nature.
He needs no more. When he looks up to the shining stars, he looks into
the eyes of God and his own. He has come down from those stars like the
bright dew in which they are now mirrored. He belongs to them, but they
also are in him. All-Nature: and he is a part of Nature.
All-development: and he is a phase of the development.
That is the great philosophical dream of the nineteenth-century worker.
His hand is black with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the
light of the stars and of the world.
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.
The second and last child did not appear until ten years later. Ernst
Haeckel was born on the 16th of February, 1834, shortly after the death
of Schleiermacher, as I have explained. Most of what I know of his
earliest years was told me by his venerable aunt Bertha.
His father died long ago, in 1871. Gustav Freytag has pointed out how
eagerly he drank in the morning air of the dawning freedom before 1813.
For many years he was at a later date a very close friend of Gneisenau.
He was an earnest, conscientious, upright man, with no particular
artistic arabesques to his life, and at the same time no errors. The
victories of 1870 lit up the red sunset of his days. He was one of those
happy folk who thought that _all_ was accomplished in the great
achievements of those days, and had little suspicion of what was still
to come. The mother survived him for many years. Her son’s _Indian
Travels_ was dedicated to her on her eighty-fourth birthday, November
22, 1882. The dedication ran: “Thou it was who from early childhood
fostered in me a sense for the infinite beauties of nature: thou hast
ever watched my changeful career with all the ceaseless care and thought
that we compress in the one phrase—a mother’s love.”
Ernst Haeckel was born at Potsdam, but in the same year the father was
transferred to Merseburg, where the child was brought up. It was not his
destiny to be a child of Berlin. Saxony remained essentially his home in
many respects. We can always see in him something of this home that
looks down on its children from its great green hills. The cold lines of
the streets of the metropolis and the melancholy of the Brandenburg
pine-forests cannot be traced in him. In later years Berlin assumed more
and more in his thoughts the shape of an antipodal city. His works are
full of the sharpest strictures on Berlin science. It was at an earlier
date the city of Ehrenberg and Reichert, whom he did not love; later it
was associated with Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, who gradually became
his bitterest opponents. But he detested it generally as the home of
Privy Councillors, of science in the Procrustean bed of official
supervision. When he compared what he himself had done at Jena with the
slenderest possible appliances, and what, in his judgment, had been done
by the heads of the Berlin schools in their princely institutes, he
would humorously—though it has been taken very seriously—lay down the
“natural law” that the magnitude of the scientific achievement is in
inverse proportion to the size of the scientific institute. The official
people at Berlin did not fail to make a biting retort to these Radical
strictures—that in 1881, when he wanted to go to Ceylon, he was formally
refused assistance by the Berlin Academy from the travelling-fee (then
at liberty) attached to the Humboldt foundation. He made the journey
without their assistance, and had the splendid revenge of giving us, in
the description of this very voyage, the most brilliant account of the
tropics that has appeared in Germany since the time of Humboldt. It was
a finer contribution to the general ideal of the Humboldt foundation
than the timid payment of a hundred pounds could have secured. However,
we are anticipating. Before that time he was to spend a short but happy
period at Berlin in the fifties, in the best days of his youth—a Berlin
of a different scientific character from the present city, being at once
less pretentious and more profound, whichever the reader chooses to
dwell on.
Certain traits could be recognised unmistakably in the boy. He had a
great love of nature, of light, colour, and beauty, of flowers and trees
and butterflies, of the sun and the blue heavens. There was also a
strong sense of independence and individuality. This did not imply that
he was lacking in gentler feeling. It is said that he would do anything
that he was asked but nothing that it was sought to compel him to do.
The little fair, blue-eyed lad would sit quietly if they gave him a
daisy to pull to pieces. First he would, as if he were a student
analysing it, detach the white leaves from the central yellow ground.
Then he would carefully replace them, piece by piece, round the yellow
centre, clap his little hands and cry out, “Now it’s all right again.”
It is a very pretty trait that tradition has preserved. In the play of
the child we seem to see the chief lines of the man’s character like two
branches of a tree; the analytic work of the scientist and the
reconstructive tendency of the artist who restores the dissected world
to harmony.
His excellent training in those early years fostered his feeling for
nature and his sense of independence with wise adaptation to the
personal character of the boy. The mother gladly cultivated his love of
nature. On the deeper development of his character a decisive influence
was exercised, with every regard for freedom, by a friend of the family,
the physician Basedow. His ideal was education without compulsion, by
means of a sort of constant artificial selection and cultivation of the
good that grew up spontaneously in the soul of the child. The father, a
great worker, was content to give a word of praise occasionally; to urge
him to go to the root of things always, and never to coquet idly with
his own soul. If the young dreamer stood at the window and looked up at
the clouds, his father would pat him on the shoulder and say, “Every
minute has its value in this world. Play or work—but do something.” It
was, in a sense, the voice of the restless nineteenth century itself
that spoke. The whole life of the youth and the man was to be an eternal
proof that he had heard the message. He has pressed unwearyingly
forward, as few other men have done. There was ever something in him of
the mountaineer, hurrying on and watching every hour that he may reach
the summit. The day of rest may come afterwards, down below in the
valley. In truth, it never came. It is well known that the man wrote
some of his most difficult, most widely read, and most controverted
works subsequently in a few months, encroaching upon his night’s rest
until his health was endangered. In a remote Cingalese village in
Ceylon, where the enervating tropical climate forces even the strongest
to indulge in the afternoon siesta, he tells himself that, in view of
the great expense of the journey, each day is worth a five-pound note.
He refuses to sleep long hours or take the siesta, rises at five in the
morning, and uses the hottest hours of the day, from twelve to four, for
“anatomical and microscopic work, observing and drawing, and for packing
up the material collected.” He met to the full the claim of the
nineteenth century, for all the inner poetic tendency of his character.
Such a character he must have had to become a philosopher, as he has
done; but it lay, as it were, in deeper recesses of his being. To the
eye of the observer he seemed to be ever rushing on with a watch in his
hand until old age. When we think of the enormous number of problems and
the vast range of interests that brought him into the front rank in the
nineteenth century, we may say that he advanced at a pace that would
have given concern to the aged adviser of his youth in his small world.
In the long run we may say of all education as of the physician in the
old saying, “The best doctor is the one we don’t need, because we are
not ill.” Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg. This instruction
came to a close in his eighteenth year. He thought of some of his old
teachers with affection forty years afterwards. On the whole his later
opinion of the usual schooling was as severe as that of many of his
contemporaries. In his _General Morphology_ (1866), his most profound
work, he speaks of the “very defective, perverse, and often really
mischievous instruction, by which we are filled with absurd errors,
instead of natural truths, in our most impressionable years.” Sixteen
years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach) he hopes that the
triumphant science of evolution “will put an end to one of the greatest
evils in our present system of education—that overloading of the memory
with dead material that destroys the finest powers, and prevents the
normal development of either mind or body.” “This overloading,” he says,
“is due to the old and ineradicable error that the excellence of
education is to be judged by the quantity of positive facts committed to
memory, instead of by the quality of the real knowledge imparted. Hence
it is especially advisable to make a more careful selection of the
matter of instruction both in the higher and the elementary schools, and
not to give precedence to the faculties that burden the memory with
masses of dead facts, but to those that build up the judgment with the
living play of the idea of evolution. Let our tortured children learn
only half what they do, but learn it better, and the next generation
will be twice as sound as the present one in body and soul. The reform
of education, which, we trust, will be brought about by introducing the
idea of evolution, must apply to the mathematical and scientific, as
well as the philological and historical sections, because there is the
same fault in them all, that far too much material is injected, and far
too little attention is paid to its digestion.” Seventeen years later
again, in the _Riddle of the Universe_, the elementary schools are
severely handled. Science is still the Cinderella of the code. Our
teachers regard it as their chief duty to impart “the dead knowledge
that has come down from the schools of the Middle Ages. They give the
first place to their grammatical gymnastics, and waste time in imparting
a ‘thorough knowledge’ of the classical tongues and foreign history.”
There is no question of cosmology, anthropology, or biology; instead of
these “the memory is loaded with a mass of philological and historical
facts that are quite useless either from the theoretical or the
practical point of view.” In these expressions, which recur constantly
throughout the whole of a thoughtful life, we can clearly see a very
intense general experience of youth, and this is a more valuable
document than any individualised complaint against this or that bad
teacher in particular.
However, Haeckel (who, in point of fact, took everything seriously and
would have all in the clearest order) made a very thorough appropriation
of his Latin and Greek. When the new Darwinian zoology and botany needed
several hundred new Latin-Greek technical terms in after-years, he
showed himself to be an inventor of the first rank in this department.
No other scientist has made anything like the same adroit use of the
classic vocabulary for the purposes of the new system and created a new
terminology for the entirely new science. His creations were certainly
ingenious, and not without grace at times; in other cases, as was almost
inevitable, they were less pleasing. And to this we must add thousands
of names of new species which he had to coin, as the discoverer of
radiolaria, medusæ, sponges, &c. In the radiolaria alone he has formed
and published the names of more than 3,500 new species. I fancy that
even the oldest pastor of the most fertile congregation has never
conducted so many christenings. In each case it was necessary to impose
two names, the generic and specific. We may well expect to find a few
that will not last, but the reader is amazed at the philological
creative power of this busy godfather and the inexhaustibility of his
vocabulary; they show far more than the usual training in humanities.
His real predilection was pronounced enough in those early years. It was
what the classical pedagogue would regard as child’s play and waste of
time—zoology and botany. A large double window in his parents’ house was
fitted up as a conservatory, and plants were gathered very zealously.
His love of botany was so great that any one would have pronounced him a
botanist in the making. But fate determined that he was to be a
zoologist. In his eleventh year the boy, while paying a visit to his
uncle Bleek (a professor of theology!) at Bonn, spent a whole day
searching the remotest corners of the Siebengebirg for the _Erica
cinerea_, which he had heard could not be found in any other part of
Germany. At the Merseburg school he had two excellent teachers, Gandtner
and Karl Gude, who fostered his inclination, and changed it from a mere
collector’s eagerness into the finer enjoyment of the scientific mind.
The young student wrote a contribution to Garcke’s _Flora Hallensis_.
The professional decision gives many a troubled hour.
It is significant to find that as the novice tended his herbarium it
dawned on him that there was a weak point somewhere in the rigid
classification given in the manuals of botany. The books said that there
were so many fixed species, each invariably recognisable by certain
characters. But when the youth tried to diagnose his plant-treasures in
practice by these rules, there seemed to be always a few contraband
species smuggled in, like the spectres in the Wahlpurgis night to which
the sage vainly expostulates, “Begone: we have explained you away.”
Often the individual specimens would not agree with the lore of the
books. There were discrepancies; sometimes they cut across one type,
sometimes another, and at times they shamelessly stretched across the
gap between one rubric and another. What did it mean? Were there really
no fixed species? Was “species” only an idea, and was the reality of the
plant-world in a state of flux like the sea? Teachers and books insisted
that the “species” is, in its absolute nature, the basis of all
botanical science, the great and sacred foundation that the Moses of
botany and zoology, Linné, had laid down for ever. How could it be so?
The mature worker would look back on this dilemma of his youth with a
smile of satisfaction thirty years afterwards. He would know then what
sort of a nut it was that he was trying to crack in his early
speculations. It was nothing less than the magnificent problem that
presented itself to Darwin, the crucial question of the fixity or
variability of species. “The problem of the constancy or transmutation
of species,” he wrote, “arrested me with a lively interest when, twenty
years ago, as a boy of twelve years, I made a resolute but fruitless
effort to determine and distinguish the ‘good and bad species’ of
blackberries, willows, roses, and thistles. I look back now with fond
satisfaction on the concern and painful scepticism that stirred my
youthful spirits as I wavered and hesitated (in the manner of most ‘good
classifiers,’ as we called them) whether to admit only ‘good’ specimens
into my herbarium and reject the ‘bad,’ or to embrace the latter and
form a complete chain of transitional forms between the ‘good species’
that would make an end of all their ‘goodness.’ I got out of the
difficulty at the time by a compromise that I can recommend to all
classifiers. I made two collections. One, arranged on official lines,
offered to the sympathetic observer all the species, in ‘typical’
specimens, as radically distinct forms, each decked with its pretty
label; the other was a private collection, only shown to one trusted
friend, and contained only the rejected kinds that Goethe so happily
called ‘the characterless or disorderly races, which we hardly dare
ascribe to a species, as they lose themselves in infinite varieties,’
such as rubus, salix, verbascum, hieracium, rosa, cirsium, &c. In this a
large number of specimens, arranged in a long series, illustrated the
direct transition from one good species to another. They were the
officially forbidden fruit of knowledge in which I took a secret boyish
delight in my leisure hours.”
These little scruples, however, did not interfere with what he felt to
be the chief interest of botany. The collecting of plants harmonises
well with a general love of nature and a passion for wandering over hill
and valley. Long walks had already become a feature of his life. The
scientific interest made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany went
with him everywhere as his lady-love, and remained ever faithful to him.
“I have preferred to travel alone most of my life,” he used to say to
me; “I never feel _ennui_ when I am alone. My love of and interest in
nature are much better entertainment than conversation.” One of the
features in this interest at all times, even in later years, was
botanical research. The material for it is found everywhere. Darwin, a
great traveller with an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery,
has said that the traveller who would combine the pursuit of knowledge
with æsthetic satisfaction must be above all a botanist(in the closing
retrospect of his _Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World_, one of the
finest passages in the work). Whenever Haeckel spoke in later years of
his adopted Jena, he never failed to explain, amongst the other
excellent qualities of the little university town, that so many fine
orchids grew in its woods. When he left Jena to make the long voyage to
Ceylon, his last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like pearls
“in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with their tender lashes,
that so richly decked the grass-covered sides of the railway cutting.”
The _Letters from India_, that described his voyage, owes a good deal of
its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical description. I know no
other work that approaches it in conveying so effective an idea of the
luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.
In those early years there was one particular point of close union
between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before
Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse
new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.
It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of
the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind
of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in
the century can be traced back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a
dark stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here and there the flanks
open and the stream becomes visible; not a restless bubbling spring, but
a broad mirror. There is, however, a closer following of Goethe. There
are a few strong spirits that have been consciously inspired by him from
the first in all their thoughts; have throughout life felt themselves to
be the apostles of the “gospel of Goethe”; and in every new creation of
their own have held that they did but reflect or expand his ideas, did
but carry on his principles to these further conclusions. Haeckel is, in
his whole work, one of this smaller band; his whole personality is, in
fact, one of its most conspicuous manifestations in the second half of
the century.
In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philosophy. Goethe took from
him his God, and gave him a new one: took from him the external,
transcendental God of the Churches, and gave him the God that is in all
things, in the eternal development of the world, in body and soul alike,
the God that embraces all reality and being, beside whom there is no
distinct “world,” no distinct “sinful man,” no special beginning or end
of things. When Haeckel found himself, at the highest point of his own
path, by the side of Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that
Darwin was but a stage in the logical development of Goethe’s ideas.
Fate decided that Haeckel should be even externally in some sense an
heir of the Goethe epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had regarded
with such affection, and at which Schiller had toiled with his heart’s
blood in “sad, splendid years,” owes its fame in the last third of the
century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of adulation, but a simple
truth, to say that among the general public and abroad the reputation of
Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte to Haeckel. His
name stands for an epoch in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies
between is forgotten and unknown. In the district itself it is as if the
old epochs and the new came into direct touch.
[Illustration:
JENA.
_From “Jena in Wort und Bild” (Frommann’sche Hofbuchhandlung, Jena)._
]
I shall never forget the hour when this thought came upon me in all its
force. It was on a snowless December day, when the dying fire of autumn
still lingered on the trees and bushes where the blackbirds sang in
front of the observatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood out
bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of Goethe’s, that Schiller had
dwelt there. It was there that the Wallenstein was born. There the two
often sat in conversation—the conversation of two of the greatest minds
of the time, each in his way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of
the observatory looks down on the spot; it is not a luxurious building,
but it is a stage in the onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth
century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little farther off rises the
modern structure of the Zoological Institute. In Goethe’s day no one
dreamed that such a building would ever be seen. It was opened by
Haeckel in 1884. The zoological collection it houses was chiefly brought
together under his direction. Amongst its treasures are, besides
Haeckel’s corals and the like, the outcome of the travels of Semon and
Kükenthal in Australia and New Guinea—lands whose very outline could
barely be traced in the mist when Schiller was a professor at Jena. At
the entrance there are two stuffed orangs, our distant cousins. One wall
of the lecture-hall is covered with huge charts depicting the
genealogical tree of life, as it is drawn up by Haeckel. With what eyes
Schiller would have devoured them! Yet classic traits are not wanting.
From Haeckel’s fine study in the Institute the eye falls on the
Hausberg, “the mountain-top from which the red rays stream.” It is the
room in which the deep-sea radiolaria of the _Challenger_ Expedition
were studied, a zoological campaign in depths of the ocean that were
stranger to Schiller’s days than the surface of the moon is to us.
Behind this Goethe-Schiller seat at the observatory there is a natural
depression full of willows that reminds us of the time when all was
country here. But just beyond it is a modern street—“Ernst Haeckel
Street,” as it was named, in honour of him, on the occasion of his
sixtieth birthday. Close to it is the villa where he has lived for many
years with his devoted family, full of wonderful reminiscences
(oil-paintings and water-colours from his own hand) of his many travels.
In Schiller’s day a voyage to Ceylon would have been a life’s work.
To-day it is an episode in an infinitely richer and broader life. On the
stone seat now we see the proud and handsome figure of the man himself,
recalling pleasantly the masters who have stood here before him, the
wide hat covering the white hair that is belied by the rosy cheeks; a
straight and strong figure, yet revealing in the finer lines of the face
the sensitive, æsthetic temper that does not look on scientific
investigation as a brutal power of the dissecting knife, but remembers
he is the heir of Goethe, even in the Zoological Institute yonder. Over
my mind came the feeling of a strange rebirth of things. I felt that
life is an eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasurably more
wonderful and profound than all the crude ideas of resurrection that
have yet prevailed. A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in
our ideal of the future historian must seek the eternal and constant
features in all change, even in two epochs that are so distinct and in
the men who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible schoolmaster
disposition that divides things. In the real world there must be one
straight line of development. To-day the highest is sought in the melody
of immortal verse: to-morrow a Zoological Institute rises on the spot
where the poet had stood.
It is said that the boy did not come under the influence of Goethe
without some difficulty. His mother did not like Goethe; she preferred
Schiller. Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow him in his
arduous path. Weimar itself had more than once been disposed to desert
him. How much more the general public in its conventional fetters! How
many fell away from him when he published the _Roman Elegies_, and again
when he brought out the _Elective Affinities_. In Haeckel’s youth people
remembered Börne’s narrow and hostile strictures. Goethe began to
penetrate into the German family as a classic in spite of the general
feeling. But the German family was still far below him. He had gradually
to lift it up from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled against
him, as every stubborn level does against a peak. It was his aunt Bertha
that first put Goethe’s works into the boy’s hands. He received them as
a delightful piece of moral contraband.
Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the same period, in his
_Green Henry_, the effect of such a revelation on a sensitive young man.
A bookseller brings to the house the whole of Goethe’s works, fifty
small volumes with red covers and gilded titles. The young Swiss
Heinrich, Keller’s picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly for
thirty days, when they are taken away because his mother cannot pay for
them. But the thirty days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to see
new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as he looks up. When the
books are removed, it is as if a choir of bright angels have left the
room. “I went out into the open air. The old town on the hill, the rocks
and woods and river and sea and the lines of the mountains lay in the
gentle light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on them I felt a pure
and lasting joy that I had never known before. It was a generous love of
all that lives, a love that respects the right and realises the import
of each thing, and feels the connectedness and depth of the world. This
love is higher than the artificial affection of the individual with
selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and caprice; it is higher even
than the enjoyment and detachment that come of special and romantic
affections; it alone can give us an unchanging and lasting glow.
Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms.
I began to see and to love, not only the outer form, but the inner
content, the nature, and the history of things.” The poet compresses his
experience into one episode. In real life it comes slowly, step by step.
In fine, a third element was born in the young botanist and lover of
beauty—Goethe’s view of life behind all else: that which Goethe himself
called “objective.” The mystic might call it a return to God: but it was
Goethe’s God.
Three other books influenced Haeckel in his school-days, besides the
works of Goethe. The first was Humboldt’s _Aspects of Nature_. This is
another work that has had an effect on all the sensitive spirits of the
nineteenth century. It is most unjustly depreciated by the young,
_blasé_ generation of our time, which dislikes the older style. In the
first two volumes of the _Cosmos_ we see the play of a great mind
wherever we look for it.
Then came Darwin’s _Naturalist’s Voyage round the World_. The ardent
youth had as yet on suspicion what the name would one day mean to him.
Darwin was then regarded as a completed work on which final judgment had
been rendered. He was appreciated as a traveller, a student of the
geology of South America, and especially as the gifted investigator of
the wonderful coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. His name stood thus in
all the manuals, close even to that of Humboldt. Probably the young
reader thought he had died long before. At all events, no one had a
presentiment that this quiet naturalist and student of corals was about
to light a torch that would flame over the world. The chief advantage
that Haeckel drew from the two works was an ardent desire to see the
tropics, with their virgin forests and blue coral seas. It has come to
so many after reading these works, and persisted in their lives as the
vivid image of a dream, like that which drove Goethe to Italy—the dream
of a home of the soul that must one day be sought.
The third book was Schleiden’s _The Plant and its Life_. Matthias Jacob
Schleiden was then in the best of his power, and had an influence that
amounted to fascination on many of the younger men. Behind him lay a
terrible struggle. He had begun his career as a lawyer, and had been so
unfortunate that he even attempted his life. With his interest in botany
a new life began, and he worked with the energy of one raised from the
dead. He was certainly an original thinker. His name is known to us
to-day especially as the founder of the cell-theory. This is the
greatest distinction that he has earned. But at that time he had a much
more general importance as a leader in the struggle to introduce a
certain method of scientific research. A somewhat obscure epoch was
coming to a close, a more or less superficial natural philosophy having
sought to replace sound investigation. The struggle had ended with the
decisive victory of the simple discovery of facts. There was everywhere
a vague feeling that the progress of science was best secured by a bald
enumeration and registration of bones, of the joints in the limbs of
insects, or of pollen-filaments, rather than by the romantic and
spirited leaps of natural philosophy over all the real problems into the
heavens above. The question now arose whether this narrow method really
exhausted the nature of things; whether scientific specialism, with its
laurels of victory, would not prove in the end an equally dangerous
enemy. What was “better” for the time being might be very far from
really “good.” It was here that Schleiden stepped in. He fought against
the prevailing specialism, at first in his own particular province of
botany. He did not, indeed, take up the cause of the exploded
pyrotechnics of the older natural philosophy, but pleaded for more
general critical-philosophical methods. These must be preserved in any
circumstances. The great botanist, he said, is not the man who can
determine ten thousand species of plants according to the received
models, but the man of clear logic and wide deductions from his lore.
Botany must be conceived as a distinct branch of general thought;
otherwise it is worthless, and its herbarium may rot unnoticed in the
corner and its discoveries be the outcome of blind hazard. Schleiden
himself had no perception of the great idea that Darwin was to bring
into his province afterwards—the idea of the variability of species and
of evolution, which brought to a critical stage the question whether the
botanist was to be merely a subordinate museum-secretary or a creative
thinker, a prophet of nature to whom plants would be part of a general
philosophy, a part of God in the ideal sense of evolution. Yet
Schleiden’s simple warning cry made a deep impression on many of the
young men especially. There was a note of aspiration in it, an assurance
that they were waiting for a sun that _must_ rise somewhere. He was a
master of language. There was the stuff of the poet in him. His works
strayed out far beyond the range of his own province. Haeckel himself
did the same work in later years. It is no wonder that Schleiden had a
magical influence over him. In this case, indeed, it seemed as if the
attraction was to determine his own career.
Schleiden taught botany at Jena University. Haeckel was still in the
higher forms of his school at Merseburg, and remained there when his
father resigned his position in the State service, and eventually
removed to Berlin. At this time the ardent botanist decided to adopt the
science of plants as his life-study when his final examination was over.
Schleiden would teach him how to combine philosophy with botany. Then he
would try to roam over the world as a practical botanist and visit the
far-off zones where Mother Earth poured out her cornucopia of forms so
generously.
While still in the higher form at school he made a preliminary visit to
Jena. Everything seemed so pleasant and charming. He made the journey on
foot. These long walks have always been his pride—to start out like a
travelling scholar, with hardly anything in his pocket, to live on bread
and water, and sleep in the hay at night; but to enjoy to the full all
the incomparable delights that the great magician, nature, provides for
the faithful novice—scenery, beautiful orchids, thoughts of God, Goethe,
and the world. It was in 1849 that he visited Jena. He has described it
himself: “After I had reverently admired the Goethe-room in the castle
of Dornburg, I wandered, on a hot July day, over the shady meadows to
Jena, singing lustily with my gay comrades. As I entered the venerable
old market-place I found a troop of lively students in front of the
Burgkeller, with coloured caps and long pipes, singing, and drinking the
famous Lichtenhain beer from wooden tankards. It made a great impression
on me, and as I took a tankard with them I made up my mind that I would
some day be one of them.”
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