84 HAECKEL 



and scientist that Haeckel became in the nine- 

 teenth century. The simple steel pen, the inspired 

 pencil of the thinker, did more for humanity in his 

 hand than could have been done by the most 

 splendid colour-symphonies of the most inspired 

 landscape-painter. I have often thought this as I 

 looked over, in the evening at Haeckel's house, the 

 then unpublished treasures of his artistic faculty. 

 A work like his History of Creation has counted 

 for a stratum in the thought of humanity. What 

 are even the masterpieces of a Hildebrandt in 

 comparison with it ! Yet there was undoubtedly the 

 note of genius in these drawings ; some of them 

 showed more than Hildebrandt's cleverness (we 

 know to-day that Hildebrandt's highly coloured 

 pictures did not even approximate to the real 

 natural light of southern scenes) and glow of 

 colour. It seemed to me that here again the man 

 had dreams of a lost love : a dream of the gay, 

 wandering pittore^ who asks nothing but a sunset 

 in violet, carmine, and gold, instead of being the 

 sober unriddler of the world's problems. Since that 

 time the house of Fr. Eugen Kohler, to which we 

 owe the fine new edition of Naumann's classic 

 work on birds, with its coloured plates, has under- 

 taken to publish Haeckel's water-colours, as 

 ^^ Travel Pictures," in a splendid and monu- 

 mental work. 



During the year in Italy all these gifts were 

 employed together. Italy was exactly the land for 

 Haeckel's temperament, with its mixture of lofty 

 classic elements and natural beauty and simple. 



