Part 31
HEEM, JAN DAVIDSZ VAN (or JOHANNES DE), (c.1600-c.1683), Dutch painter. He was, if not the first, certainly the greatest painter of still life in Holland; no artist of his class combined more successfully perfect reality of form and colour with brilliancy and harmony of tints. No object of stone or silver, no flower humble or gorgeous, no fruit of Europe or the tropics, no twig or leaf, with which he was not familiar. Sometimes he merely represented a festoon or a nosegay. More frequently he worked with a purpose to point a moral or illustrate a motto. Here the snake lies coiled under the grass, there a skull rests on blooming plants. Gold and silver tankards or cups suggest the vanity of earthly possessions; salvation is allegorized in a chalice amidst blossoms, death as a crucifix inside a wreath. Sometimes de Heem painted alone, sometimes in company with men of his school, Madonnas or portraits surrounded by festoons of fruit or flowers. At one time he signed with initials, at others with Johannes, at others again with the name of his father joined to his own. At rare intervals he condescended to a date, and when he did the work was certainly of the best. De Heem entered the gild of Antwerp in 1635-1636, and became a burgher of that city in 1637. He steadily maintained his residence till 1667, when he moved to Utrecht, where traces of his presence are preserved in records of 1668, 1669 and 1670. It is not known when he finally returned to Antwerp, but his death is recorded in the gild books of that place. A very early picture, dated 1628, in the gallery of Gotha, bearing the signature of Johannes in full, shows that de Heem at that time was familiar with the technical habits of execution peculiar to the youth of Albert Cuyp. In later years he completely shook off dependence, and appears in all the vigour of his own originality.
Out of 100 pictures or more to be met with in European galleries scarcely eighteen are dated. The earliest after that of Gotha is a chased tankard, with a bottle, a silver cup, and a lemon on a marble table, dated 1640, in the museum of Amsterdam. A similar work of 1645, with the addition of fruit and flowers and a distant landscape, is in Lord Radnor's collection at Longford. A chalice in a wreath, with the radiant host amidst wheatsheaves, grapes and flowers, is a masterpiece of 1648 in the Belvedere of Vienna. A wreath round a Madonna of life size, dated 1650, in the museum of Berlin, shows that de Heem could paint brightly and harmoniously on a large scale. In the Pinakothek at Munich is the celebrated composition of 1653, in which creepers, beautifully commingled with gourds and blackberries, twigs of orange, myrtle and peach, are enlivened by butterflies, moths and beetles. A landscape with a blooming rose tree, a jug of strawberries, a selection of fruit, and a marble bust of Pan, dated 1655, is in the Hermitage at St Petersburg; an allegory of abundance in a medallion wreathed with fruit and flowers, in the gallery of Brussels, is inscribed with de Heem's monogram, the date of 1668, and the name of an obscure artist called Lambrechts. All these pieces exhibit the master in full possession of his artistic faculties.
CORNELIUS DE HEEM, the son of Johannes, was in practice as a flower painter at Utrecht in 1658, and was still active in his profession in 1671 at the Hague. His pictures are not equal to those of his father, but they are all well authenticated, and most of them in the galleries of the Hague, Dresden, Cassel, Vienna and Berlin. In the Staedel at Frankfort is a fruit piece, with pot-herbs and a porcelain jug, dated 1658; another, dated 1671, is in the museum of Brussels. DAVID DE HEEM, another member of the family, entered the gild of Utrecht in 1668 and that of Antwerp in 1693. The best piece assigned to him is a table with a lobster, fruit and glasses, in the gallery of Amsterdam; others bear his signature in the museums of Florence, St Petersburg and Brunswick. It is well to guard against the fallacy that David de Heem above mentioned is the father of Jan de Heem. We should also be careful not to make two persons of the first artist, who sometimes signs Johannes, sometimes Jan Davidsz or J. D. Heem.
HEEMSKERK, JOHAN VAN (1597-1656), Dutch poet, was born at Amsterdam in 1597. He was educated as a child at Bayonne, and entered the university of Leiden in 1617. In 1621 he went abroad on the grand tour, leaving behind him his first volume of poems, _Minnekunst_ (The Art of Love), which appeared in 1622. He was absent from Holland four years. He was made master of arts at Bourges in 1623, and in 1624 visited Hugo Grotius in Paris. On his return in 1625 he published _Minnepligt_ (The Duty of Love), and began to practise as an advocate in the Hague. In 1628 he was sent to England in his legal capacity by the Dutch East India Company, to settle the dispute respecting Amboyna. In the same year he published the poem entitled _Minnekunde_, or the Science of Love. He proceeded to Amsterdam in 1640, where he married Alida, sister of the statesman Van Beuningen. In 1641 he published a Dutch version of Corneille's _The Cid_, a tragi-comedy, and in 1647 his most famous work, the pastoral romance of _Batavische Arcadia_, which he had written ten years before. During the last twelve years of his life Heemskerk sat in the upper chamber of the states-general. He died at Amsterdam on the 27th of February 1656.
The poetry of Heemskerk, which fell into oblivion during the 18th century, is once more read and valued. His famous pastoral, the _Batavische Arcadia_, which was founded on the _Astree_ of Honore d'Urfe, enjoyed a great popularity for more than a century, and passed through twelve editions. It provoked a host of more or less able imitations, of which the most distinguished were the _Dordrechtsche Arcadia_ (1663) of Lambert van den Bos (1610-1698), the _Saanlandsche Arcadia_ (1658) of Hendrik Sooteboom (1616-1678) and the _Rotterdamsche Arcadia_ (1703) of Willem den Elger (d. 1703). But the original work of Heemskerk, in which a party of nymphs and shepherds go out from the Hague to Katwijk, and there indulge in polite and pastoral discourse, surpasses all these in brightness and versatility.
HEEMSKERK, MARTIN JACOBSZ (1498-1574), Dutch painter, sometimes called Van Veen, was born at Heemskerk in Holland in 1498, and apprenticed by his father, a small farmer, to Cornelisz Willemsz, a painter at Haarlem. Recalled after a time to the paternal homestead and put to the plough or the milking of cows, young Heemskerk took the first opportunity that offered to run away, and demonstrated his wish to leave home for ever by walking in a single day the 50 miles which separate his native hamlet from the town of Delft. There he studied under a local master whom he soon deserted for John Schoreel of Haarlem. At Haarlem he formed what is known as his first manner, which is but a quaint and _gauche_ imitation of the florid style brought from Italy by Mabuse and others. He then started on a wandering tour, during which he visited the whole of northern and central Italy, stopping at Rome, where he had letters for a cardinal. It is evidence of the facility with which he acquired the rapid execution of a scene-painter that he was selected to co-operate with Antonio da San Gallo, Battista Franco and Francesco Salviati to decorate the triumphal arches erected at Rome in April 1536 in honour of Charles V. Vasari, who saw the battle-pieces which Heemskerk then produced, says they were well composed and boldly executed. On his return to the Netherlands he settled at Haarlem, where he soon (1540) became president of his gild, married twice, and secured a large and lucrative practice. In 1572 he left Haarlem for Amsterdam, to avoid the siege which the Spaniards laid to the place, and there he made a will which has been preserved, and shows that he had lived long enough and prosperously enough to make a fortune. At his death, which took place on the 1st of October 1574, he left money and land in trust to the orphanage of Haarlem, with interest to be paid yearly to any couple who should be willing to perform the marriage ceremony on the slab of his tomb in the cathedral of Haarlem. It was a superstition which still exists in Catholic Holland that a marriage so celebrated would secure the peace of the dead within the tomb.
The works of Heemskerk are still very numerous. "Adam and Eve," and "St Luke painting the Likeness of the Virgin and Child" in presence of a poet crowned with ivy leaves, and a parrot in a cage--an altar-piece in the gallery of Haarlem, and the "Ecce Homo" in the museum of Ghent, are characteristic works of the period preceding Heemskerk's visit to Italy. An altar-piece executed for St Laurence of Alkmaar in 1538-1541, and composed of at least a dozen large panels, would, if preserved, have given us a clue to his style after his return from the south. In its absence we have a "Crucifixion" executed for the Riches Claires at Ghent (now in the Ghent Museum) in 1543, and the altar-piece of the Drapers Company at Haarlem, now in the gallery of the Hague, and finished in 1546. In these we observe that Heemskerk studied and repeated the forms which he had seen at Rome in the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, and in Lombardy in the frescoes of Mantegna and Giulio Romano. But he never forgot the while his Dutch origin or the models first presented to him by Schoreel and Mabuse. As late as 1551 his memory still served him to produce a copy from Raphael's "Madonna di Loretto" (gallery of Haarlem). A "Judgment of Momus," dated 1561, in the Berlin Museum, proves him to have been well acquainted with anatomy, but incapable of selection and insensible of grace, bold of hand and prone to daring though tawdry contrasts of colour, and fond of florid architecture. Two altar-pieces which he finished for churches at Delft in 1551 and 1559, one complete, the other a fragment, in the museum of Haarlem, a third of 1551 in the Brussels Museum, representing "Golgotha," the "Crucifixion," the "Flight into Egypt," "Christ on the Mount," and scenes from the lives of St Bernard and St Benedict, are all fairly representative of his style. Besides these we have the "Crucifixion" in the Hermitage of St Petersburg, and two "Triumphs of Silenus" in the gallery of Vienna, in which the same relation to Giulio Romano may be noted as we mark in the canvases of Rinaldo of Mantua. Other pieces of varying importance are in the galleries of Rotterdam, Munich, Cassel, Brunswick, Karlsruhe, Mainz and Copenhagen. In England the master is best known by his drawings. A comparatively feeble picture by him is the "Last Judgment" in the palace of Hampton Court.
HEER, OSWALD (1809-1883), Swiss geologist and naturalist, was born at Nieder-Utzwyl in Canton St Gallen on the 31st of August 1809. He was educated as a clergyman and took holy orders, and he also graduated as doctor of philosophy and medicine. Early in life his interest was aroused in entomology, on which subject he acquired special knowledge, and later he took up the study of plants and became one of the pioneers in palaeo-botany, distinguished for his researches on the Miocene flora. In 1851 he became professor of botany in the university of Zurich, and he directed his attention to the Tertiary plants and insects of Switzerland. For some time he was director of the botanic garden at Zurich. In 1863 (with W. Pengelly, _Phil. Trans._, 1862) he investigated the plant-remains from the lignite-deposits of Bovey Tracey in Devonshire, regarding them as of Miocene age; but they are now classed as Eocene. Heer also reported on the Miocene flora of Arctic regions, on the plants of the Pleistocene lignites of Durnten on lake Zurich, and on the cereals of some of the lake-dwellings (_Die Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten_, 1866). During a great part of his career he was hampered by slender means and ill-health, but his services to science were acknowledged in 1873 when the Geological Society of London awarded to him the Wollaston medal. Dr Heer died at Lausanne on the 27th of September 1883. He published _Flora Tertiaria Helvetiae_ (3 vols., 1855-1859); _Die Urwelt der Schweiz_ (1865), and _Flora fossilis Arctica_ (1868-1883).
HEEREN, ARNOLD HERMANN LUDWIG (1760-1842), German historian, was born on the 25th of October 1760 at Arbergen, near Bremen. He studied philosophy, theology and history at Gottingen, and thereafter travelled in France, Italy and the Netherlands. In 1787 he was appointed one of the professors of philosophy, and then of history at Gottingen, and he afterwards was chosen aulic councillor, privy councillor, &c., the usual rewards of successful German scholars. He died at Gottingen on the 6th of March 1842. Heeren's great merit as an historian was that he regarded the states of antiquity from an altogether fresh point of view. Instead of limiting himself to a narration of their political events, he examined their economic relations, their constitutions, their financial systems, and thus was enabled to throw a new light on the development of the old world. He possessed vast and varied learning, perfect calmness and impartiality, and great power of historical insight, and is now looked back to as the pioneer in the movement for the economic interpretation of history.
Heeren's chief works are: _Ideen uber Politik, den Verkehr, und den Handel der vornehmsten Volker der alten Welt_ (2 vols., Gottingen, 1793-1796; 4th ed., 6 vols., 1824-1826; Eng. trans., Oxford, 1833); _Geschichte des Studiums der klassischen Litteratur seit dem Wiederaufleben der Wissenschaften_ (2 vols., Gottingen, 1797-1802; new ed., 1822); _Geschichte der Staaten des Altertums_ (Gottingen, 1799; Eng. trans., Oxford, 1840); _Geschichte des europaischen Staatensystems_ (Gottingen, 1800; 5th ed., 1830; Eng. trans., 1834); _Versuch einer Entwicklung der Folgen der Kreuzzuge_ (Gottingen, 1808; French trans., Paris, 1808), a prize essay of the Institute of France. Besides these, Heeren wrote brief biographical sketches of Johann von Muller (Leipzig, 1809); Ludwig Spittler (Berlin, 1812); and Christian Heyne (Gottingen, 1813). With Friedrich August Ukert (1780-1851) he founded the famous historical collection, _Geschichte der europaischen Staaten_ (Gotha, 1819 seq.), and contributed many papers to learned periodicals.
A collection of his historical works, with autobiographical notice, was published in 15 volumes (Gottingen, 1821-1830).
HEFELE, KARL JOSEF VON (1809-1893), German theologian, was born at Unterkochen in Wurttemberg on the 15th of March 1809, and was educated at Tubingen, where in 1839 he became professor-ordinary of Church history and patristics in the Roman Catholic faculty of theology. From 1842 to 1845 he sat in the National Assembly of Wurttemberg. In December 1869 he was enthroned bishop of Rottenburg. His literary activity, which had been considerable, was in no way diminished by his elevation to the episcopate. Among his numerous theological works may be mentioned his well-known edition of the _Apostolic Fathers_, issued in 1839; his _Life of Cardinal Ximenes_, published in 1844 (Eng. trans., 1860); and his still more celebrated _History of the Councils of the Church_, in seven volumes, which appeared between 1855 and 1874 (Eng. trans., 1871, 1882). Hefele's theological opinions inclined towards the more liberal school in the Roman Catholic Church, but he nevertheless received considerable signs of favour from its authorities, and was a member of the commission that made preparations for the Vatican Council of 1870. On the eve of that council he published at Naples his _Causa Honorii Papae_, which aimed at demonstrating the moral and historical impossibility of papal infallibility. About the same time he brought out a work in German on the same subject. He took rather a prominent part in the discussions at the council, associating himself with Felix Dupanloup and with Georges Darboy, archbishop of Paris, in his opposition to the doctrine of Infallibility, and supporting their arguments from his vast knowledge of ecclesiastical history. In the preliminary discussions he voted against the promulgation of the dogma. He was absent from the important sitting of the 18th of June 1870, and did not send in his submission to the decrees until 1871, when he explained in a pastoral letter that the dogma "referred only to doctrine given forth _ex cathedra_, and therein to the definitions proper only, but not to its proofs or explanations." In 1872 he took part in the congress summoned by the Ultramontanes at Fulda, and by his judicious use of minimizing tactics he kept his diocese free from any participation in the Old Catholic schism. The last four volumes of the second edition of his _History of the Councils_ have been described as skilfully adapted to the new situation created by the Vatican decrees. During the later years of his life he undertook no further literary efforts on behalf of his church, but retired into comparative privacy. He died on the 6th of June 1893.
See Herzog-Hauck's _Realencyklopadie_, vii. 525.
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770-1831), German philosopher, was born at Stuttgart on the 27th of August 1770. His father, an official in the fiscal service of Wurttemberg, is not otherwise known to fame; and of his mother we hear only that she had scholarship enough to teach him the elements of Latin. He had one sister, Christiana, who died unmarried, and a brother Ludwig, who served in the campaigns of Napoleon. At the grammar school of Stuttgart, where Hegel was educated between the ages of seven and eighteen, he was not remarkable. His main productions were a diary kept at intervals during eighteen months (1785-1787), and translations of the _Antigone_, the _Manual_ of Epictetus, &c. But the characteristic feature of his studies was the copious extracts which from this time onward he unremittingly made and preserved. This collection, alphabetically arranged, comprised annotations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works of the period. In this way he absorbed in their integrity the raw materials for elaboration. Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he never lost. His chief amusement was cards, and he began the habit of taking snuff.
In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tubingen as a student of theology; but he showed no interest in theology: his sermons were a failure, and he found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy.
As a student, his elderly appearance gained him the title "Old man," but he took part in the walks, beer-drinking and love-making of his fellows. He gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contemporaries, the two best known of whom were J. C. F. Holderlin and Schelling. With Holderlin Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted the doctrines of freedom and reason. The story which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is an anachronism, though in keeping with their opinions.
On leaving college, he became a private tutor at Bern and lived in intellectual isolation. He was, however, far from inactive. He compiled a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern, but the main factor in his mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct and sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the transgressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust.
The interest of these ideas is twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality: he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the opposition of the temporal mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than all its incidents is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity. But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the medieval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the heroes of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God.
During these years Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Holderlin. Schelling, already on the way to fame, kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant's postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics. Meanwhile, Holderlin in Jena had been following Fichte's career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel.
It is pleasing to turn from these vehement struggles of thought to a tour which Hegel in company with three other tutors made through the Bernese Oberland in July and August 1796. Of this tour he left a minute diary. He was delighted with the varied play of the waterfalls, but no glamour blinded him to the squalor of Swiss peasant life. The glaciers and the rocks called forth no raptures. "The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea, 'Es ist so.'"
Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Fortunately his friend Holderlin, now tutor in Frankfort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of Herr Gogol, a merchant (January 1797). The new post gave him more leisure and the society he needed.