“Promptly at 5,” he wrote in December, “I am awakened by the bells of the church hard by. I write continuously until 12. After a frugal lunch and a short rest, the afternoon is devoted to a walk or to water-colour sketches. The longer days allow me to sit and paint in the open air until five. Our quiet evenings, from 5 to 10, are spent in reading and in writing letters. The interruption for dinner, from 7 to 8, gives us an opportunity to exchange jokes over our ‘cloistral life.’” Thus the veteran naturalist, of “notoriously licentious life” (the words of the Glasgow preacher were spoken at this very period), approached his eighth decade of life—of work.
He remained at Rapallo until the birthday had passed, but his address had meantime become widely known, and the miniature postal arrangements at Rapallo were severely taxed. Letters, telegrams, flowers, and other gifts—mostly spontaneous expressions of gratitude from “unknown readers of the Riddle of the Universe“—reminded him of the larger world that now appreciated him. A still larger number of letters and gifts reached Jena from all parts of the world. Hundreds of German journals and periodicals devoted long and generous articles to the distinguished worker, and little festive commemorations were held at many of the universities. At Zurich, Professor Conrad Keller and Professor Arnold Lang delivered speeches which have since been published. Jena sent a deputation consisting of a number of its professors to visit the hero in person at Rapallo. Reflecting on these remarkable demonstrations and the extraordinary correspondence that continually reaches Haeckel, one is disposed to repeat of him the phrase applied to a great heretical teacher of the Middle Ages, Peter Abélard: “Never was man so loved—and so hated.”
A feature of the commemoration that peculiarly gratified him was the special festive number of the German students’ lively periodical, Jugend, published at Munich. On February 16th it appeared as a “Haeckel number,” full of sprightly anecdote and generous appreciation, and bearing on its cover a striking reproduction in colour of the Lenbach portrait. His letter of thanks to the journal shows that the repose and the beauty of Italy, and the outburst of affection his birthday has provoked, have set him perfectly atune to life once more. “Ah! Prithee stay, thou art so fair,” he almost says in the Goethe phrase, as he “hails the moment fleeing.” He goes on to deprecate the effort to make “a learned man” of him. “That, alas, I am not. We have in Germany many professors and teachers who are more learned, and have read far more books than your poor Jena schoolmaster. But from my earliest youth, since I tore up flowers and admired butterflies in my fourth year, I have yielded to the inclination of my heart and studied incessantly one great book—Nature. This greatest of all books has taught me to know the true God, the God of Spinoza and Goethe. Then as physician I saw human life in all its heights and depths, and in my many travels through half the globe I learned the inexhaustible splendour of the earth. And I have honestly tried with all my modest powers, to reproduce with pen and pencil a part of what I saw, and reveal it to my fellows. I have had to fight many a hard fight, and in my hatred of lies and hypocrisy and decaying traditions I have at times struck a sharp note. But I trust, dear Youth, that thou wilt not judge all that harshly in so old and storm-tried, a warrior, and that thou wilt go on to stand with me, shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the spiritual progress of humanity, fighting in the cause of the great trinity of the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
The work he had composed in four months at Rapallo, The Wonders of Life, was issued on his return. It has not had the stormy success of its predecessor. The fact is instructive. This work contains a fuller proof of the chief scientific positions of the Riddle. It is, therefore, more technical and more difficult to read. Amongst other matters, it contains a fine summary of those speculations on the mathematical forms of organisms and the idea of individuality of which Professor Bölsche has written so appreciatively. It must be recognised that Haeckel has fulfilled a duty in thus providing the general reader with a fuller biological proof of his theses. If that estimable person, the general reader, betrays less eagerness for the fuller proof, we must remember that for ages he has been taught to disregard such a thing as “proof.” It is the general reader that makes Haeckel didactic. It is Haeckel’s opponents who made the general reader. However, the great bulk of The Wonders of Life is true to its title. It is an intensely interesting summary of biological facts. For the rest, if it contains speculations that run beyond the evidence (though based on it) who is better qualified to open up these new paths than men with the enormous range of knowledge that Haeckel has? “I agree with you,” one of the first biologists in England wrote to me recently, “that Haeckel is one of the first living biologists. There are not any others who have the same wide knowledge and experience and consequent ‘point of view.’ He knows his zoology, botany, physiology, and pathology, also geology, and has travelled, and has a keen interest in and knowledge of no small degree of philology, archæology, and ethnography.”
Haeckel was in Italy once more in the autumn of 1904, and although he did little quiet travel and no fishing for radiolaria it is probable that no visit to the country ever afforded him such satisfaction. One great shadow lay over the beautiful land and its genial race whenever he visited it—a gross and almost impenetrable superstition. Turn off the great routes of Italy, with their splendid cathedrals, and visit the small towns and villages. See the scum of Naples tearing the clothes from each other to kiss the “blood of St. Januarius.” Peer into the abysses of vice and grossness that are covered effectually by this formal and unlovely practice of religion. Haeckel had seen all that with sad eyes for many a year.
In 1904 a little institution that called itself “The International Congress of Freethinkers” announced that it would hold its annual gathering at Rome. The pope—the new pope, friend of the royal house—lodged a feeling protest with the authorities. The priests poured inflammatory rhetoric over their people until violence seemed inevitable. The Italian Government’s only reply was to grant the heretics all the privileges that were ever given to the great Catholic pilgrimages: to put at their disposal its finest institution, the Collegio Romano, and to send its Minister of Public Instruction to open the Congress. Veteran warriors such as Haeckel, Berthelot, Salmeron, Sergi, Denis, and Björnsen, gladly announced their adhesion. Paris sent a thousand delegates; Spain nearly a thousand; Italy her thousands. Whole municipalities in Italy and France (even that of Paris) took part. The Latin world was aflame with rebellion. We met, seven thousand strong, in the heart of Rome, and Rome—the jade—smiled prettily as we marched up the Via Venti Settembre, as it had smiled once on processions of Cybele, and then on processions of Catholics.
Haeckel was greeted with a wild demonstration as he stepped on to the platform in the great Cortile of the College. Straight and proud, white with age but pink with more than the freshness of a young man, he adjured them in futile German, in his thin, inaudible voice, to form themselves into a new Church, the great Association of Monists. Few heard and less understood him, but his name was on every heart and his reception superb.
A week afterwards I picked up a London journal in an Italian hotel, and read—as hundreds of thousands had done—that a miserable Freethought conference had been held at Rome: that its rowdy proceedings had disgusted the scholars who had, in a misguided moment, lent their names to it. Thus are we informed at times. I remembered Sergi’s enthusiastic comments at the close. “E magnifico, e magnifico,” was all he could gasp. I remembered Haeckel’s exultation as we walked home to his Albergo Santa Chiara, and Berthelot’s deep joy. The same scholars, except Björnsen, took part in the Congress at Paris, in 1905, when 100,000 of us were nobly received by the Conseil Municipal. But Haeckel was too unwell to come. Nature has laid her hand on him at length, and bade him hang his weapons on the wall. He can but hope to remain a passive spectator for a few years more of that vast stirring of the Latin peoples which he has so much contributed to bring about.
His last active effort was the delivery of three lectures at Berlin in the spring of 1905. He has always avoided public lectures as much as possible. His poor voice and comparative nervousness make the work unattractive. A severe attack of influenza sapped his strength in the winter of 1905, and he has been unable to eliminate its unpleasant consequences. But the opportunity of enforcing his gospel in the capital of the Empire, where the Virchows and Du Bois-Reymonds had ruled so long made him deaf to the counsels of prudence. He chose as his theme the controversy in regard to evolution, and gave three spirited lectures. The changed world came home to him vividly enough. A vast and enthusiastic gathering of admirers in one of the finest halls in Berlin: outside, at the very door, his clerical opponents distributing handbills that offered a choice selection of the most venemous attacks on his person and work. The lectures are now available in English under the title of Last Words on Evolution.
The present state of Haeckel’s health forbids him to hope that he will do any more active work. As I write, he lies in his villa, in “Haeckel Street,” overlooking the handsome Zoological Institute, which he raised, and the little university town that he has made known to the world. Beyond the graceful hills that cradle it, he sees the dark waves tossing that he has worked so hard to set in motion. In Germany the alliance of the Emperor with the Catholics saddens him, but—the Jesuits are accepting evolution, over the fresh grave of Virchow. Abroad his ideals, even his ideas, are making triumphant progress. He thinks of the vast changes that have taken place since he stood out, almost alone, reckless of all but honour and truth, at the Stettin Congress in 1863. “Das Leben ist schön,” he still repeats. What will men say of him when the lines of history draw in, and the critic will have the proper perspective? I believe no great worker ever thought less about it. Through inexorable labour, through constant sacrifice, through storms of painful obloquy, he has lived his ideals, if he has made mistakes—been mortal. Those ideals are an enduring contribution to the good. The first, the motto of his young days, was Impavidi progrediamur—“Let us march on fearlessly.” The second, the motto of his later years, was: “The good, the true, and the beautiful, are the ideals, yea the gods, of our Monistic philosophy.”