The Invention of Nature (47 page)

Darwin was exactly as Haeckel had envisaged him. Older, softly spoken and kind, Darwin exuded an aura of wisdom, Haeckel thought, much as he imagined Socrates or Aristotle. The whole Darwin family welcomed him so warmly that it had felt like coming home, he told friends in Jena. That visit, Haeckel later said, was one of the most ‘unforgettable’ moments of his life. When he left the next day, he was more than ever convinced that nature could only be seen as ‘one unified whole – a completely interrelated “kingdom of life” ’.

Then it was time to leave. Haeckel had arranged to meet the three assistants whom he had hired to help with his research (one scientist from Bonn and two of his students from Jena) in Lisbon from where they sailed to the Canary Islands. Once the four men landed in Tenerife, Haeckel rushed to see the sights that Humboldt had described. And of course he had to follow Humboldt’s footsteps up to the summit of Pico del Teide. As Haeckel climbed through snow and icy winds, he fainted from altitude sickness, and his descent was half stumbling, half falling. But he had made it, he proudly wrote home. That he had seen what Humboldt had seen was ‘highly satisfying’. From Tenerife, he and his three assistants then sailed to the volcanic island of Lanzarote, where they spent three months working on their various zoological projects. Haeckel concentrated on radiolarians and medusae, while his assistants investigated fish, sponges, worms and molluscs. Though the landscape was barren, the sea here was alive, Haeckel said, it was ‘a great animal soup’.

When Haeckel returned to Jena, in April 1867, he was calmer and at peace. Anna would remain the love of his life and even many years later, after he had remarried, the anniversary of her death always made him mournful. ‘On this sad day,’ he wrote thirty-five years later, ‘I am lost.’ But he had learned to accept and live with Anna’s death.

Over the next few decades Haeckel travelled a great deal – mainly within Europe but also to Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Java and Sumatra. He still taught students at Jena, but he was happiest when travelling. His passion for adventure never disappeared. In 1900, aged sixty-six, he went on an expedition to Java, the mere prospect of which, his friends commented, ‘rejuvenated’ him. During these explorations, he collected specimens but also sketched. Like Humboldt, Haeckel thought that the tropics were the best place to understand the fundamentals of ecology.

A single tree in Java’s rainforest, Haeckel wrote, illustrated the relationships of animals and plants with each other and with their environment in the most striking way: with epiphyte orchids that clung with their roots to the tree’s branches and insects that had become perfectly adapted pollinators or climbers that had won the race for light in the tree’s crown – they were all proof of a diverse ecosystem. Here in the tropics, Haeckel said, the ‘struggle of survival’ was so intense that the weapons that flora and fauna had developed were ‘exceptionally rich’ and varied. This was the place to see how plants and animals lived together with ‘friends and enemies, their symbionts and parasites’, Haeckel wrote. It was Humboldt’s web of life.

During the years in Jena, Haeckel also co-founded a scientific magazine in honour of Humboldt and Darwin. Dedicated to evolutionary theory and ecological ideas, it was called Kosmos. He also wrote and published lavish monographs about sea creatures such as calcareous sponges, jellyfish and more on radiolarians, as well as travel accounts and several books that further popularized Darwin’s theories. Many of Haeckel’s books included his sumptuous illustrations, mostly presented as a series rather than as individual images. For Haeckel these depictions showed the narrative of nature – his compelling way of making evolution ‘visible’. Art had become a tool through which Haeckel conveyed scientific knowledge.

At the turn of the century, Haeckel published a series of booklets called Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) – taken together it was a collection of one hundred exquisite illustrations that would shape the stylistic language of Art Nouveau. For more than fifty years, Haeckel told a friend, he had followed Humboldt’s ideas but Art Forms in Nature pushed them even further by introducing scientific subjects to artists and designers. Most of Haeckel’s illustrations revealed the spectacular beauty of tiny organisms that were only visible through the microscope – ‘hidden treasures’, as he wrote. In Art Forms in Nature, Haeckel instructed craftsmen, artists and architects how to use these new ‘beautiful motifs’ correctly by adding an epilogue with tables in which he graded the different organisms according to their aesthetic importance, adding comments such as: ‘extremely rich’, ‘very diverse and meaningful’ or ‘of ornamental design’.

Published between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature became hugely influential. At a time when urbanization, industrialization and technological advance distanced people from the land, Haeckel’s drawings provided a palette of natural forms and motifs that became a vocabulary for those artists, architects and craftsmen who tried to reunite man and nature through art.

By the turn of the century, Europe had entered the so-called Machine Age. Factories were powered by electric engines and mass production was driving economies in Europe and the United States. Germany had long lagged behind Britain, but after the creation of the German Reich in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and with the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, as the German emperor, the country had caught up at a dizzying speed. By the time Haeckel published the first issue of Art Forms in Nature in 1899, Germany had joined Britain and the United States as an economic world leader.

By then the first automobiles were driving along German roads and a web of railways connected the industrial centres at the Ruhr with the large port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. Coal and steel were produced in ever growing quantities and cities were mushrooming around the industrial hubs. The first electric power station had opened in Berlin in 1887. Germany’s chemical industry had become the most important and advanced in the world, producing synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers. Unlike Britain, Germany had polytechnics and factory research laboratories which nurtured a generation of new scientists and engineers. These were institutions that focused on the practical application of science rather than on academic discovery.

Many of the growing numbers of city-dwellers, Haeckel wrote, were desperate to get away from the ‘restless hustle and bustle’ and from the ‘factories’ murky clouds of smoke’. They escaped to the seaside, to shaded forests and to rugged mountain slopes in the hope of finding themselves in nature. The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented. The introduction of these nature motifs into interiors and architecture became a redemptive step that brought the organic into the increasingly mechanical world.

The famous French glass artist Émile Gallé, for example, owned Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature and insisted that the ‘marine harvest’ from the oceans had turned scientific laboratories into studios for the decorative arts. The ‘crystalline jellyfish’, Gallé said in May 1900, brought new ‘nuances and curves into glass’. The new stylistic language of Art Nouveau infused everything with elements borrowed from nature: from skyscrapers to jewellery, from posters to candlesticks and from furniture to textiles. Sinuous ornaments twisted in tendrilled floral lines on etched glass doors and furniture makers crafted table legs and armrests in branch-like curves.

These organic movements and lines gave Art Nouveau its particular style. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí magnified Haeckel’s marine organisms into banisters and arches. Giant sea urchins decorated his stained-glass windows, and the huge ceiling lamps that he designed looked like nautilus shells. Enormous clumps of seaweed intertwined with algae and marine invertebrates gave shape to Gaudí’s rooms, staircases and windows. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of skyscrapers’, also turned to nature for inspiration. Sullivan owned several of Haeckel’s books and believed that art created a union between the artist’s soul and that of nature. The façades of his buildings were decorated with stylized motifs from flora and fauna. American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany was also influenced by Haeckel. The almost ethereal diaphanous qualities of algae and jellyfish made them perfect for his glass objects. Ornamental medusae were slung around Tiffany vases, and his design studio even produced a gold and platinum ‘seaweed’ necklace.

Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the Paris World Fair in 1900 (Illustration Credit 22.2)

Haeckel’s radiolarians that inspired Binet’s gate – in particular, those in the middle row (Illustration Credit 22.3)

In late August 1900, when Haeckel travelled from Jena to Java, he stopped briefly in Paris to visit the World Fair where he walked through one of his radiolarians. The French architect René Binet had used Haeckel’s images of the microscopic sea creatures as an inspiration for the Porte Monumentale, the huge metal entrance gate that he had designed for the fair. In the previous year Binet had written to Haeckel that ‘everything about it’ – from the smallest detail to the general design – ‘has been inspired by your studies.’ The fair made Art Nouveau famous across the world, and almost 50 million visitors walked through Haeckel’s magnified radiolarian.

Binet himself later published a book called Esquisses Décoratives (Decorative Sketches) which showed how Haeckel’s illustrations could be translated into interior decoration. Tropical jellyfish became lamps, single-celled organisms transmuted into light switches and microscopic views of cell tissues turned into wallpaper patterns. Architects and designers, Binet urged, should ‘turn to the great laboratory of Nature’.

Corals, jellyfish and algae moved into the home, and Haeckel’s half-joking suggestion to Allmers, four decades previously, about using his radiolarian sketches from Italy to invent a new style had become true. In Jena, Haeckel had named his house Villa Medusa6 after his beloved jellyfish and decorated it accordingly. The ceiling rosette in the dining room, for example, was based on his own drawing of a medusa that he had discovered in Sri Lanka.

As humankind dismantled the natural world into ever smaller parts – down to cells, molecules, atoms and then electrons – Haeckel believed that this fragmented world had to be reconciled. Humboldt had always talked about the unity of nature, but Haeckel took this idea a step further. He became an ardent proponent of ‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world. Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most important ersatz religion at the turn of the twentieth century.

Binet’s designs for electric light switches which borrowed heavily from Haeckel’s drawings (Illustration Credit 22.4)

Haeckel’s drawing of the medusa that was painted on the ceiling at Villa Medusa (Illustration Credit 22.5)

Haeckel explained the philosophical foundation of this view of the world in his book Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe) which was published in 1899, the same year as the first issue of his Art Forms in Nature. It became a huge international bestseller, with 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone. Welträthsel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and became the most influential popular science book at the turn of the century. In Welträthsel Haeckel wrote about the soul, the body and the unity of nature; about knowledge and faith; and about science and religion. It became the bible of monism.

Haeckel wrote that the goddess of truth lived in the ‘temple of nature’. The soaring columns of the monistic ‘church’ were slender palms and tropical trees embraced by lianas, he said, and instead of altars they would have aquaria filled with delicate corals and colourful fish. From the ‘womb of our Mother Nature’, Haeckel declared, flows a stream of ‘eternal beauties’ that never runs dry.

He also believed that the unity in nature could be expressed through aesthetics. To Haeckel’s mind, this nature-infused art evoked a new world. As Humboldt had already said in his ‘brilliant Kosmos’, Haeckel wrote, art was one of the most important educational tools as it nurtured the love for nature. What Humboldt had called the ‘scientific and aesthetic contemplation’ of the natural world, Haeckel now insisted, was essential for the understanding of the universe, and it was this appreciation that became a ‘natural religion’.

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.

1 Haeckel’s reputation received the harshest blows in the second half of the twentieth century when historians blamed him for providing the Nazis with the intellectual foundation for their racial programmes. In his biography The Tragic Sense of Life, Robert Richards argued that Haeckel, who died more than a decade before the Nazis came to power, was not an anti-Semite. In fact Haeckel had placed Jews next to Caucasians on his controversial ‘stem-trees’. Though not acceptable today, Haeckel’s racial theories of a progressive path from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’ races were shared by Darwin and many other nineteenth-century scientists.

2 Allmers replied to Haeckel that his cousin had appropriated one of the radiolarian drawings as a ‘crochet pattern’.

3 Haeckel’s books on Darwin’s evolutionary theory were translated into more than a dozen languages and sold a greater number of copies than Darwin’s book itself. More people learned about evolutionary theory from Haeckel than from any other source.

4 Generelle Morphologie also provided a general scientific overview to counterbalance the hardening divisions between the disciplines. Scientists, Haeckel wrote, had lost the understanding of the whole – the huge number of specialists had thrown the sciences into ‘Babylonian confusion’. Botanists and zoologists might be collecting individual building blocks but they had lost sight of the blueprint of the whole. It was one great ‘chaotic pile of rubble’ and no one had a clue any more – except for Darwin … and Haeckel, of course.