But a great counterpoise to these bitter attacks—attacks that forgot, as Gramzow says, that “there is an ethic for the critic as well as for the man of science”—had now been provided. Men like Dr. Schmidt, Dr. Breitenbach, Professor Bölsche, and Professor Verworn rallied to their master, and conveyed a juster image of him and his work to the public. The ominous silence of the great biologists was felt to mean that his views were, in substance, no heresy to them. The man’s warm and enthusiastic zeal for truth and humanity, his earnest efforts to pierce the barriers that shut off the treasures of science from the mass, could not be ignored. A cheaper edition of his work was demanded, and it was soon in the hands of more than 150,000 readers. Country after country imported his “gospel of Monism,” the stirring agitation spread to France, England, America, Italy, and on until it reached Australia and Japan. To-day fourteen translations of the Riddle bear his teaching to the ends of the world.
Little need be said here of the Haeckel controversy in this country. I remember well the day when the German work was submitted to me with a view to publication. It did not seem to have the stuff of a conflagration in it. I hazarded a guess that it would sell a thousand copies, and thought that it contained so valuable a description of the evolution of mind that it should be published. It has sold, with rather less than the usual advertising, with no special machinery for pressing it such as is at the command of religious works—it has sold about 100,000 copies. The success of the work astounded us. While we were being accused of “thrusting it down people’s throats” we could not have arrested its circulation, had we wished, without positively refusing to republish it. Indeed, the last library edition has long been out of print, though still in frequent demand. It has made Haeckel’s a familiar name in circles where even Spencer has been heard to be described as “a great balloonist.” Clergymen have written to their journals saying how they heard the Monistic philosophy discussed by groups of paviors. Sir Leslie Stephen told me, on his death-bed, but with a momentary flash of his old humour, how an Orkney clergyman had written to him for consolation, as it was circulating amongst the fishers of that ultima thule.[[10]]
[10]. The reader who desires a summary of the criticisms passed on the work may consult Dr. Schmidt’s Der Kampf um die Welträthsel for Germany, and my own Haeckel’s Critics Answered for England. The only biologist of competence who has written on it in this country is Prof. Lloyd-Morgan (Contemporary Review, 1903), but his reply is indirect. Sir Oliver Lodge has recently dealt with it at length in his Life and Matter, but the distinguished physicist’s conception of life is in extreme and general disfavour with the biologists of England.
From the seething agitation he had aroused Professor Haeckel cheerfully withdrew in the autumn of 1900 to make his long journey to Java. He now lived under the public eye, and amusing constructions were put on his movements. American journalism arrived, by its peculiar methods, at the knowledge that he had gone in quest of bones of the “missing link.” A few bones of a half-human, half-ape form had been discovered on the south coast of Java a few years previously, and the trained American imagination quickly constructed a theory, which as quickly crystallised into fact. Haeckel had been heavily subsidised by an American millionaire to discover more bones of the ape-man of Java. Not to be outdone, other journals added a rival subsidy (from the American Government) and a rival search. The sober truth was that Haeckel had used his Bressa prize fund, with a subsidy from the Ritter fund at Jena, to make a study of botany and marine life in the tropics. He was within a hundred miles of the spot where Dubois had found his interesting relics, but made no effort to go further. For him the evolution of man rested on too massive a foundation for a few bones to increase its solidity. Once more he brought home huge cases of preparations, a large number of sketches (some of them touched up by Verestchagin, who was returning on the boat from China), and material for the inevitable book. Aus Insulinde is a charming and finely illustrated work of travel, but has not been translated.
Before he left Jena he had, with his characteristic urbanity and diligence, given personal replies to about a thousand letters he had received apropos of his Riddle of the Universe. The epistolary flood rose higher than ever on his return. The struggle had spread to England and France. He had returned to a cauldron of controversy. He quietly resumed his teaching at the university and attacked his still formidable literary programme. Day after day the aged scholar—he was now in his sixty-seventh year—briskly stepped up to the podium at the Zoological Institute and delivered his lectures, drawing his objects with a few quick strokes on the board or exhibiting the plates prepared by Giltsch. He noted with a quiet gleam of satisfaction that a few ladies now ventured into the “Materialist” circle. The new century had begun.
In 1902 he issued the cheap edition of the Riddle, of which 180,000 copies have been sold in Germany, with a reply to its critics. “The great struggle for truth,” he wrote to his friend, Dr. Breitenbach, “grows fiercer and fiercer, the more my work is attacked by the clergy, the metaphysical schoolmen, and the erudite Philistines. I am continually receiving lively and sometimes enthusiastic letters of congratulation from all parts of the world.” In the meantime he was engaged upon two important works, which he published in 1903.
The earlier edition of the Anthropogeny, of which Professor Bölsche has written, was undergoing a thorough revision. New evidence was pouring in every year in support of his sketch of the genealogy of humanity. Dubois had discovered what is now admitted to be an organism midway between the highest ape and the earliest prehistoric man. Selenka had published wonderful studies of the anthropoid apes. Friedenthal and others had shown the literal blood-relationship of the higher apes and man by a series of beautiful experiments. He must once more gather together the enormous mass of facts, and marshal them with his old command. For six months he worked incessantly on the new edition. A hundred pages of matter were added to it, a hundred fresh illustrations. Great and exacting as the task would have been for a younger man, the work appeared in 1903 in a form that silenced criticism. I need only quote a sentence from the notice of it that was published in the Daily Telegraph by one of our leading literary critics, when it was issued in this country. “It is a grand conception, this of the great physiologist, that every man, in the brief term of his prenatal development, should go through these successive changes, by which man has, in countless ages, been evolved from the primitive germ-cell; and it is triumphantly vindicated in The Evolution of Man. It is impossible to do justice in words to the patience, the labour, the specialised skill and industry involved in the preparation of this monumental work.” And one has only to compare this latest edition with the previous one to see at a glance the complete transformation, and realise the freshness and force of mind of the aged biologist.
In the face of such a work, with its towering structure of proof from embryology, comparative anatomy, and paleontology, one must look leniently on some of Haeckel’s references to fellow-anthropologists like Virchow. It is not many years since the great pathologist declared emphatically at a scientific congress that “we could just as well conceive man to have descended from a sheep or an elephant as from an ape.” When a leading anthropologist could say such things in 1894, a strain is laid on our charity. Darwin’s words, written in a letter to Haeckel, press on us once more: “Virchow’s conduct is shameful, and I trust he will one day feel the shame of it.” Professor Rabl has lately contended that his deceased father-in-law (Virchow) admitted the evolution of man in private. We cannot wonder if Haeckel merely retorts: “So much the more shame on his public utterances.” Such things must, at least, be borne in mind when one reads Haeckel’s severe judgment on some of his great contemporaries.
The Evolution of Man not only offers the complete proof of its thesis—a proof accepted by every prominent biologist in England and by many prelates (such as the Bishop of London and the Dean of Westminster)—but affords also interesting proof of Haeckel’s artistic gifts. Some of the best plates in the work are executed by him. But in the same year, 1903, he gave a more popular evidence of it. In detached numbers he published the large and beautiful volume of his Art-forms in Nature. In this work he depicts with remarkable success hundreds of the most beautiful forms that his long study of marine life had brought before him. A fine expression of the man’s dual nature, the work appeals with equal force to the æsthete and the scientist. And during the long hours that he was peering into his microscope and sketching the delicate and graceful forms, the din and roar of the mighty controversy he had aroused was breaking in with every post. By the end of the year he had received more than 5,000 letters in connection with the Riddle of the Universe. Scurrilous letters and idolatrous letters, sober letters and fantastic letters, flowed upon the Zoological Institute, where he worked with pen and pencil, and were duly read. He merely defended himself by posting to each correspondent a printed form that he would soon issue a new work in which the further questions would be answered. He had given his life to science and humanity, and would not withdraw for the well-earned rest. And from a thousand pulpits over Europe and America the aged and self-sacrificing worker was being denounced and caricatured to audiences who had not the remotest knowledge of his aims and his work. A friend of mine heard a minister in an important Glasgow church assure his congregation from the pulpit that “Haeckel was a man of notoriously licentious life;” he had heard it “from a friend of Haeckel’s.” At the very time when Haeckel was buried in his splendid artistic work, the Christian World Pulpit was issuing a sermon in which Dr. Horton was explaining “the personal factor” in Haeckel. “He is an atrophied soul, a being that is blind on the spiritual side,” the popular preacher declared.
From the turmoil Haeckel withdrew once more to his beloved Italy. There was another reason for his flight. His seventieth birthday was approaching. He had declared at the banquet given in his honour on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, that if he lived for the seventieth he would “bury himself in some dark corner of the Thuringian forest, far away from all festivities.” Strenuous and exacting as the ten years had been, he now found himself on the threshold of his eighth decade of life. His wife, also, was ailing, and they both proceeded to the Italian Riviera at the beginning of the winter. Few of his friends were informed where he was. “I want,” he wrote to me, “to pass my seventieth birthday in peace.” He settled at Rapallo, and at once commenced his favourite fishing for the tiny inhabitants of the Mediterranean. The “cloistral quietness” of the little town, the daily prospect of the blue Mediterranean, “the solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines, and the uplifting sight of their forest-crowned mountain-altars” restored his freshness of spirit. Once more a vast labour lay before him. He had promised a work that would answer all biological questions addressed to him in the 5,000 letters of his correspondents. He had all the queries, all the criticisms of his views, all the latest literature of the subject, to digest into a compact volume. The result was a new work of 557 pages, The Wonders of Life, a remarkable summary of his zoological and botanical knowledge, with excursions into psychology, suicide, lunacy, ethnography, theology, and ethics. Its twenty solid and well-arranged chapters were written in four months.