So it went, until it seemed that the whole town waited to be taught by Agassiz. The parents roused themselves out of their humdrum round to find out what all this excitement was about, and to be included in it. Neuchâtel was rediscovered. Children walked with Agassiz and saw with his eyes the wonders of the earth. Students bent over microscopes, or searched on the mountains, while he directed them. Neighbors listened to him in the old town hall, and went away through doors that opened an amazing world to them. Agassiz poured out his splendid stores of wisdom and knowledge before them, and they carried away all that they could bear.
Yet such was the vigor of his life that teaching did not use all of its power. Indeed, for the first time in his life, Agassiz felt himself a free man. His salary of four hundred dollars made him, he felt, independent. The new museum in the Orphans’ Home, through the influence of Humboldt with the government, was actually buying his collections for nearly three thousand dollars. Agassiz had never seen so much money together before. He made up his mind that the time had come at last to be married.
Cecile Braun still waited for him in Carlsruhe. While she waited she painted her Fra Angelico pictures, and grew, perhaps, to look more like them. She was twenty-four now, fragile with a dark delicacy and fineness. She should have been gifted with the German placidity to give her the tolerance which her Louis needed in his harum-scarum life. She was high strung as a racing horse, and as unadapted to the plow.
Her brother, Alex, who knew them both so well, advised her to break her engagement as he himself had done to Arnold Guyot’s sister, and as the other member of the trio, Schimper, had to his own sister, Emmy. For the three boys had all fallen in love and out again as part of their growing up. Unsettled, Alex told her of her Louis, no head for business, no real attention for anything but his work; what chance had Cily as a wife? But Cecile had not waited since she was a young thing of eighteen to lose her man now. Perhaps she did not want to love him, this feckless maker of magic. But Cily knew, what brother Alex could not know, that when Louis took your heart he kept it. And so she married him.
Louis carried her back to Neuchâtel in high feather. He had rented him a small apartment which he did not know how to furnish, but that, after all, was the work of a wife. The young wife looked about her in horror. A dull ugly town with none of the green freshness of Carlsruhe, plain houses shut in by high vineyard walls, an apartment so unlike home that she could not endure its harsh walls. And all around her the spatter of the French speech which she could not understand, and people speaking it who were so cold and foreign to her that she disliked them at once. A sorry set-up for a happy home at the end of her six years’ wait!
For Cily was homesick, bitterly homesick. And she had a handsome young husband who hadn’t the faintest idea what it was all about. The capacity for homesickness was not part of his equipment. Whenever he had left a place, it was to take along with him projects of such importance to him that he had no room left for personal regrets. Rose Agassiz could have told Cily of the high heart with which he had left her again and again. She could have told her, too, of his love that never wavered, however absorbed he might be. “That,” she might have told her, “is what you get for marrying a genius. It is what I got for bearing one, and I have no regrets.” But Cily would have to find this wisdom for herself if she was to get it.
Louis, quickened by his happiness, poured all of his new vitality into work, and more work. It was as if he gratefully borrowed money from a bank to spend without stint, with no thought ever of putting any of it back. It was good to have a comfortable home and a wife whom he loved; it set free in him so much more energy for the work which he must do. Because of all the men on earth, the genius is the greatest egoist.
The fall dragged into winter for Cily, and for Louis it walked with great strides. When February came and she had cooked, and washed dishes, and stared out at the snow-bitten village until her heart had felt its frost, she had as reward a share in Louis’ pride and delight in his first real prize. The Geological Society of London had bestowed upon her husband the Wollaston Prize of thirty guineas, and what meant more to the young scientist, if not to his wife, a subscription to his “magnificent work,” and a cordial invitation to come over and meet the English naturalists. He would indeed come, just as soon as he could get away, perhaps that very summer. (But surely, Cily, when the weather is good and you can get out of doors, you can manage…)
When spring peered over the mountains, and withdrew, and the roads flowed mud, while down there in Carlsruhe the hills were blanketed with pale green starred with flowers, Cily was rewarded again with a share in the glory that poured upon Louis because at last the first number of his Poissons Fossiles had come out. From everywhere Louis received the congratulations of zoologists and geologists who had not dared themselves to attack so great and so difficult a work. Nothing but praise, and Cily who had helped with the drawings, and who knew the import of the book, was proud enough and happy enough to be willing to stay alone when August came and Louis left for England.
The book was his passport to the great scientists of England. Here was a man, though not of English blood, and though filled with convictions which would make him a thorn in the flesh of their Darwin, here was a man who was dedicated to their science and who had made a contribution to it. He was welcome to their country. Traveling by coach, they told him, was so rapid, easy, and cheap that in six weeks he could visit all of the museums, the fossils in Scotland’s clay, and the private collections here and there; a crowded itinerary which Louis Agassiz was quite capable of handling.
The green hills and soft air of England filled Agassiz with delight. He was never one to insist upon beauty only in the terms of the home country to which he was used. His recognition of fresh interests and fresh beauties was perhaps a part of his inability to understand homesickness. England was a new specimen which filled him with excitement to find out all about it. His zest and appreciation gave him a warm place at once in the hearts of the English scientists who had no small opinion, themselves, of England. They would show him that his enthusiasm was valid. If he thought this collection was marvellous, wait until he saw that! The appreciation of the young Swiss was his open sesame.
Of all the English scientists who gathered to greet Louis Agassiz, one was missing. He had sailed out of England two years before and was at that moment on the high seas sailing a seasick voyage which was to last him five miserable profitable years. A young man, two years younger than Louis, but with none of his vitality. Yet with a curious resemblance in his persistent following where his genius led. The two young fellows would have liked to talk together about how their fathers and grandfathers wanted them to be doctors, and the thin, quiet lad might have explained to the friendly Louis about how he could not bear the sound of that child’s cry under an operation which could offer nothing to ease the pain. Or perhaps with his English reserve, he would have said only that he didn’t care for medicine. He might have hinted gently about how dull he found the ministry, and Louis would have understood. They would have agreed, the one with passionate fire, the other with tense tranquillity, upon the man who had been one of the forces to bring Agassiz to England and to send the other out of it, the great scientist, Humboldt. That book, Travels, had started the English lad on the seasick voyage, for after all, why couldn’t he, too, do something for science? They would have agreed, these two eager young scientists with extraordinary accord, and then would have left each other to tread paths which led them as wide apart as the poles. For the quiet young man was Charles Darwin. And his Beagle voyage would bring him ideas of evolution to which the religion of Agassiz would never let him agree.
But Darwin was only twenty-five now, and none of the great men who greeted Agassiz had any interest in him, nor would they have for many years while he mulled over the amazing truths which his work had revealed to him. For while the exuberant Louis shared every exciting step he took, and got credit for it, young Darwin let the years go by unheeded whi
le he proved and vindicated his proof.
So that now Louis Agassiz, the brilliant young Swiss, was the bright new star of the scientific skies. And Louis liked that position very much. Professor Buckland invited him with his baggage to his house in Christ Church and offered himself as a guide. If you like us so much, wait until you see what we really are! But indeed there was reason for the enthusiasm of Louis. The quiet, the dignity, the ordered life of Oxford after crude Neuchâtel, the well-housed museum collections grouped and labeled after his struggles with masses of unrelated specimens, the fine scholarly men with their unshakable English assurance; Louis did well to like England, and to leave it. But before he left he had all planned in high imagination such a fine museum of comparative anatomy that a student might within its walls find everything that he needed instead of traveling about as Agassiz had, baffled because he could not get his material together where he might study it as a unit. He carried that plan about with him until America took it over at last and built his great museum at Harvard. Louis never let a good thing go.
Now he found so much new material for his work that he felt almost like beginning over again. And he gazed so longingly at it that the pleased Englishmen offered him his choice of sixty collections, whereupon Louis picked out two thousand specimens and sent them to a room in Somerset House. Here he established the faithful Dinkel and set him to drawing specimens which kept him busy there for several years. There is no record about what the Englishmen did without their specimens during this period.
As always the great and remote men were won by Louis’ friendliness and admiration: the polished Charles Lyell, who was astonished at Agassiz’s knowledge of natural history; Adam Sedgwick, who lost patience with him when he lectured about what Sedgwick called moonshine, and who had great admiration for his real knowledge; the Earl of Enniskillen, who helped to pay for Mr. Dinkel. When Louis left England he took with him a rich harvest.
9. NO MAN IS FREE FROM ANOTHER
A man should never be judged by himself, alone on a pedestal. We have wronged too many of our great men that way. Who of us would have been the same person if he had come in Shakespeare’s time, or in Plato’s time, or Martin Luther’s time, or in the time of some great man who is as yet unborn? A man need not come in direct contact with a scientist, a poet, an explorer, to be influenced by him. He need only to live in his time to become swept along in the same great wave of thought and feeling. If we are to make a fair estimate of a man, we must realize him in his own setting. A hundred years before, or a hundred years after, he would, even with all his qualities intact, be quite a different person with perhaps less, perhaps more, achievement. Our very adjective is made of our recognition of the need to see a man among his fellows; he cannot be outstanding unless he stands out from them.
Louis Agassiz was a nineteenth-century product. He ranged through it from its beginning until its last quarter. And no man was ever more closely identified with his times. Darwin, shut into his quiet home in Down, mulling over his small, earth-shaking experiments, and telling nobody about them, was a man who made futures for humanity. Agassiz was always a part of the lusty present. The past had small interest for him, the future could take care of itself. He plunged joyously into the wave of life as it was now, and swam and dived and explored, until he knew well the substance of which it was made. No man more than Louis Agassiz needs to be judged as part of his period.
Nor can we view Agassiz against the background of a single country as we see Darwin in his England. It mattered to Agassiz that Switzerland brought him forth, that Germany educated him, that France gave him Cuvier and Humboldt, that England opened wide to him her resources, that America adopted him as her own. It mattered to him, though he probably thought very little about it, whether these countries were at war with all their resources devoured by death, or at peace with an eager outlook for new evidences of life. Louis was fortunate in that respect. The world was fairly free from fighting and he shared the freedom and profited by it. No part of the world, no matter how completely at peace, could ever have supplied him enough money for his projects, but at least he had all there was. And what was as important to him, he was able to keep and depend upon attention for his work which never would have been his in a war-racked world.
Louis, absorbed in science, had small time or consideration for the poets, the writers, the painters, who were also changing the fabric of life about him. But because they were altering that fabric, they were of importance to him. The weaving of life is not achieved by a group of authors at one corner of it, scientists at another, and ordinary human beings huddled in the middle. We all mull around it together, and do what we can with it; and no man is free from another.
The great Goethe had added to the wisdom and beauty of life’s tapestry, and left it to other hands. It was still warm from his touch, and Agassiz could never have been the German scholar he was without knowing and cherishing Goethe’s contribution. He died the year that Agassiz plunged into his new work at Neuchâtel, where as he dashed from lectures to his book on fossil fishes to plans for a bride, he probably had only a regret for the passing of that great spirit. But Goethe had made possible some of his achievement.
If the boy Louis had not sprung from a long line of hard-headed Swiss ministers who held without swerving to belief in the absolute creation of God, and if he had not been part of Paris when Cuvier could uphold him with absolute certainty in the rectitude of his conviction, the man Agassiz would perhaps have been more open to the Darwinian ideas of evolution.
If the world had not become just a little tired of its long eighteenth-century emphasis from poets, scholars, essayists, upon the wonders of city existence, it might not have been so friendly now to the young naturalist. But the nineteenth century back-to-nature reaction was under way. The jaded senses of the town were turning to the country for restoration, for some kind of new birth which would lift their worn emotions to freshened sensitivity.
Artists were painting grazing cows instead of beautiful women. Corot’s lovely soft landscapes gave the world the awareness of countryside beauty which it needed. Turner, Constable, Millet, and soon Rousseau, were producing the kind of pictures which brought people out of the crowded cities and set them to wandering over the hills and by the rivers where they found strange evidences of new life about which they knew nothing. And one of the human instincts happens to be curiosity!
Up in the quiet lake region Wordsworth still lived, a man in his sixties who had seen depart the bright spirits of the youths, Shelley and Keats; who had marked this year, not as the time of the arrival of Agassiz, but as the date when Coleridge had gone away. Poets of nature, influencing their times or being influenced by them. Who shall say? For there may have been as ardent nature lovers under the veneer of that gorgeously sinful eighteenth century, but they dared say little about their longings. Now the poems said nothing else, and men began to believe that natural life must have something in it. They quite honestly wanted to know more about it. And who could tell them better than a naturalist? Especially one who was master of magnetic speech like Louis Agassiz!
Even the musicians were reflecting the sunshine, the sweet air, the glory and the strength of unspoiled life. Schubert, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and the Strauss pair, gave to music a fresh singing quality which we still cherish. Even Wagner thundered the music of its storms. Whether the young scientist, Agassiz, preoccupied with the overtones of his own genius, ever heard or cared to hear these masters, does not matter. They were singing in his key.
Nor was Agassiz entering his field just as the game was finished and the fickle crowd had drifted away to fresh interests. Scattered over England in the year that he entered it were some youngsters as brilliant as ever he, himself, had been in the early days of Motier. Little Tom Huxley was only nine, and convinced that he wanted to be a mechanical engineer. In a few years he was to know Carlyle, now working on his French Revolution, and transfer his interest to the human machine. Alfred Wallace at e
leven was training for his race with Darwin. Herbert Spencer who would so disagree with Agassiz later, was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy who had never heard of his famous elder. Charles Kingsley was a tall boy of fifteen living on the steep cliff of lovely Clovelly. John Ruskin, another gangly adolescent, was going to day school at Pecksam. England was breeding torchbearers who would let the light of no man dim.
And perhaps of more consequence than all of them to the future was a little girl of fifteen growing up in England under the careful eye of her mother who would see to it that in a few years she could take over with pride and assurance, to have and to hold for a long lifetime, the royal scepter under which all of these brilliant young people were to live. To the independent Swiss scientist, a queen meant nothing. But Louis was to live a long life, too, colored and bound by Victorian conventions, even as our conventions hold us. The young princess about whom he knew little and cared less, was a factor of his development even as air and water were to his productive specimens.
Nor was all the promise of England bound up in its youth. These older men who welcomed Agassiz so courteously to all they possessed were men of distinction. Sir Charles Lyell, who like many naturalists had abandoned an established profession for the drama of the science of life, was now a polished man in his thirties with all the poise which Louis so admired in Cuvier. He already had under way the first of his twelve editions of The Principles of Geology. And like the urbane Cuvier he capitulated to the genuine admiration of the impulsive young Swiss, and saw to it that he met the right people and examined the right collections.
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