Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  But Alexander, though intensely anxious over the safety of his brother and nephew, had no particular patriotic feeling for Prussia, and he felt no compunction about refusing his country’s call. “German patriotism is a high-sounding phrase,” he later wrote a friend. “In 1813 it served to fire the hearts of German youth. . . . And what has resulted from that infinite waste of blood and treasure? The probable outcome was already evident in 1814, when the crowned heads congregated in Paris” to restore the Bourbon dynasty in France and to stifle democratic reform across the continent. When Wilhelm was awarded the Iron Cross for his wartime service, Alexander quipped, “I would have preferred the Southern Cross.” Yet despite his lingering disapproval, Wilhelm, who had been Prussian minister of education, intervened on his brother’s behalf and secured a generous grant from the king, which helped to alleviate Alexander’s financial crisis and to underwrite the ongoing publication program.

  However, by 1827, Charles X was on the throne of France, the ultramonarchists held sway, and the French government had instituted press censorship and other instruments of political repression. Finding this reactionary climate increasingly untenable, Humboldt at last considered a return to Berlin, though he had earlier compared the city to a desert and had confidently written Kunth, his old tutor, “You can be sure that I shall never find it necessary to set eyes on the spires of Berlin again.” Eager to secure Humboldt’s return, King Friedrich Wilhelm offered him a generous stipend and permission to spend several months a year in Paris, if he would only agree to return to the Prussian capital. In fact, the king’s position wasn’t as much of an offer as an ultimatum. “My dear Herr von Humboldt!” he wrote. “You must by now have finished the publication of the works you considered could only be finished in Paris. I therefore cannot allow you to extend your stay any further in a country which every true Prussian should hate. I accordingly await your speedy return to the Fatherland. Yours affectionately, Friedrich Wilhelm.”

  On his return to his native city, Humboldt accepted the title privy councilor and became the king’s primary advisor on all matters scientific and artistic. When Friedrich Wilhelm III died in 1840 and was succeeded by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the new monarch proved even more dependent on Humboldt, appointing him to his state council, having him review all his personal correspondence, and even demanding he spend several evenings a week with the royal family. The irony of a famous and vocal proponent of republican government finding himself an intimate member of a royal court did not go unnoticed, and Humboldt suffered some rebuke on account of it, especially after some of his private correspondence was made public in which he satirized the monarch.

  Thus Swiss-American naturalist and Humboldt protégé Louis Agassiz later found it necessary to defend his mentor for this compromise. Humboldt “has been blamed for holding his place at court,” Agassiz noted, “while in private he criticized and even satirized severely everything connected with it. . . . We may wish that this great man had been wholly consistent, that no shadow had rested upon the loyalty of his character, that he had not accepted the friendship and affection of a King whose court he did not respect and whose weaknesses he keenly felt. But,” he went on, “let us remember that his official station there gave him the means of influencing culture and education in his native country, in a way which he could not otherwise have done, and that in this respect he made that noblest use of his high position. His sympathy with the oppressed in every land was profound.”

  In fact, Humboldt did use his position at court to further scientific and cultural projects, such as the building of a new observatory in Berlin, and to steer the monarch toward a liberal course whenever possible. Besides persuading the king to modify academic restrictions on Jewish intellectuals in Germany, Humboldt helped to push through a (largely symbolic) law granting automatic freedom to any slave entering Prussia. He also warned the king to implement reforms in order to avoid the popular revolts that rocked Europe in 1848. His counsel was ignored, but during the ensuing unrest Humboldt remained unmolested by the mob, despite his position at court. After the revolt was crushed, he even led the huge funeral march for the fallen revolutionaries—certainly a distinction unique among members of a royal court in those turbulent days. As Humboldt himself wrote, somewhat defensively, “I have always sustained the firm conviction that a fancy uniform must never prevent me from defending the eternal principles of political freedom and constitutional institutions, a faith that I continuously expressed in my writings, speeches, and friendships.”

  But Humboldt’s sense of malaise during these years in Europe ran deeper still. In fact, all the honors, all the soirées and salons, even the compulsive work schedule, were never enough to dispel his essential loneliness. “I live in the past rather than the present,” he confided to Wilhelm, “and find it difficult to get used to a life without love and attention.” His older brother’s early prediction—“Happy he will never be, and never tranquil, because I cannot believe that any real attachment will ever steal his heart”—appeared to be coming to pass. Indeed, after his return to Europe, Alexander began to experience periods of depression, just as he had as a youth. In a letter to Caroline, he confessed to “frequent fits of melancholy and annoying stomach pains.” And he expressed the dire opinion “There is no really deep feeling in man which is not painful. Such is our lot.”

  Humboldt once described his life as “agitated yet not really fulfilled,” and there is a real sense that his manic activity—the brutally long hours, the frenetic social schedule, even the journey that made him famous—was intended to mask an underlying anxiety. “Alexander is not only unique in his great knowledge, but of truly good disposition, warm, helpful, and capable of sacrifice,” Caroline wrote. “But he lacks the quiet satisfaction of his inner self and of his ideas. . . . Because of that, he does not understand people, though he craves their company.” For his part, Wilhelm believed that Alexander never overcame his painful early years with their cold and domineering mother. “Neither he nor I will ever alter fundamentally,” he suggested, “considering that both of us were subjected in our youths to an austere and lonesome upbringing, so that the influence of later years can count for nothing. . . .” But if that were true, why, in middle age, was Wilhelm happily surrounded by family while Alexander was still alone? “From his boyhood on,” Wilhelm explained to Caroline, “Alexander strove toward outer activities, whereas I chose a life dedicated to the development of the inner man. Believe me, dearest, in this lies the true value of life.”

  Another explanation is that, as one whose primary attraction was to other men, Humboldt in his time and place simply didn’t have the same opportunities for establishing lasting relationships or enjoying the usual pleasures of home and family. Still, after his return to Europe, Humboldt attempted to fill his life with people, just as he tried to fill his hours with work. He formed numerous friendships with gifted, generally younger men, such as historian and future statesman François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, who would later lead France’s constitutional monarchists.

  We should be careful not to read too much into the fact that these scientific friendships were exclusively with men, since at the time that field of endeavor was not open to women. In addition, there were two notable exceptions in his life where Humboldt seems to have been drawn to members of the opposite sex. The first was a harmless adolescent infatuation with Henriette Herz, the beautiful wife of physician Marcus Herz, who had been a mentor to Alexander and Wilhelm in Berlin. The second was in 1808, when judging from a surviving letter, the thirty-nine-year-old Humboldt had a short-lived but intimate relationship with a woman named Pauline Wiesel. “You know my joys and sorrows,” he wrote her. “We were very happy here [Paris] for two long weeks, but I could have guessed that it wouldn’t last for very long. . . . I embrace you intimately. Everything here is so empty and desolate. I’d walk for twelve hours just to see you. We will be close to each other for ever. You know me. Please write to me soon.”

  What, if anything,
do these attractions tell us about the nature of Humboldt’s relationships with men? The consensus view is that, in all likelihood, none of these male friendships was overtly sexual. However, some of his later relationships do exhibit a particular intensity reminiscent of the feverish bonds that Humboldt formed as a schoolboy. His first intimate friendship after his return to Paris was with the French physicist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, to whom he gave the facetious nickname “Potash.” Nine years Humboldt’s junior, Gay-Lussac traveled with him to Italy and Berlin, and the two shared a one-room apartment in the French capital for several years. Eventually, Humboldt took up residence near a new friend, the handsome, twenty-three-year-old German painter Carl von Steuben. Visiting Steuben every day, he reveled in the young man’s company, which he called his “only joy.” Generous with him, as with all his friends, Humboldt advanced Steuben’s career by commissioning botanical illustrations and a life-size portrait of himself, arranging commissions from the royal family, and even dedicating a book to him.

  In a similar vein, Humboldt later became attached to the young, impecunious German mathematician and self-proclaimed genius Gotthold Eisenstein, whom he supported for a time and on whose behalf he shamelessly pestered the king for grants. “My affection for you is not merely grounded on your remarkable gifts,” Humboldt wrote Eisenstein. “My heart is drawn to you by your gentle, amiable character, and by your proneness to melancholy, to which you must not yield, I implore you for heaven’s sake.” Humboldt’s championship eventually won Eisenstein a place in the German Academy of Science, and when the young man contracted consumption soon afterward, Humboldt paid his medical bills, then mourned bitterly when his friend succumbed to the disease.

  But the man with whom Humboldt would share his most intimate friendship, beginning in 1809 and stretching over nearly five decades, was the brilliant French mathematician and physicist Dominique-François Arago, who was fifteen years younger than he. It was “an affection,” in the words of one biographer, “which, without any sexual overtones, can only be described as the great passion of Humboldt’s life.”

  Born in the small city of Perpignan, near Toulouse in southern France, Arago won admission to the École Polytechnique and was later appointed director of the Paris observatory and permanent secretary of the Institut National. In 1806, he was with Jean Biot making geographical measurements near the Spanish border, when war broke out between the two countries, and he was imprisoned in Spain and Algiers for nearly three years. Incredibly, during his long confinement, Arago managed to conceal his sheaf of notes under his shirt, and when he was finally repatriated in 1809, he triumphantly submitted the tattered pages to the French authorities. Hearing of the young man’s pluck, Humboldt sent him a note, and when Arago later came to Paris, he looked up the older man to thank him. Shortly thereafter, the two became inseparable. As Wilhelm wrote in 1814, “You know [Alexander’s] passion always to cling to one person who strikes his fancy temporarily. Right now it is the astronomer Arago, from whom he cannot be separated. . . .”

  Though Arago shared Humboldt’s liberal political views, he wasn’t willing to make the same kind of compromise with authority that the other had, and more than once Humboldt found himself in difficult circumstances due to their friendship. On one occasion, when King Friedrich Wilhelm III was visiting Paris, Arago refused on principle to show the monarch around the observatory, despite Humboldt’s repeated pleadings. Finally, the king took the extraordinary step of disguising himself as a commoner and, with Humboldt in tow, managed to get his tour. But as he conducted them through the building, Arago made a scathing attack on Prussia for its shabby treatment of France after Napoleon’s defeat. Humboldt pulled Arago aside and warned, “Moderate your tone; you are speaking to the king.” To which Arago replied, “I thought so; that’s why I’ve been so frank.”

  After his return to Berlin, Humboldt missed Arago desperately. By now occupied with his wife and young family, his friend didn’t have the same emotional need for Humboldt that the older man had for him, and Arago proved an unreliable correspondent. Humboldt hung on his infrequent letters, begging for just a few lines. He also greatly anticipated his periodic journeys to Paris, when he could visit him. “I am longing to see you again . . . ,” he wrote in 1841, when Prussia was threatening war with France once more, this time over Egypt; “if my health remains good, I should like to start for Paris early in the spring and stay for some months; I am saddened by the uncertainty that this stay which promises so much pleasure for me . . . could be inconvenient for you and less agreeable than at former times in our lives . . . ,” he continued. “Incapable of doing anything that could displease you in the complicated situation, accustomed to look upon your slightest wish as an order, I should be happy if you would have the kindness to send me three lines. . . . Can you refuse me this kindness? It would be the nicest present from you for the new year. . . .”

  Arago’s reply came three months later: “I cannot, I will not believe that you can ask seriously whether I should find pleasure in your journey to Paris. Do you really feel doubt in my attachment? Any uncertainty on this point would be cruelly wrong. Apart from my family, you are beyond comparison the person I love most in the world.” Though on this unequal basis, their friendship endured until Arago’s death in 1853.

  After his return from South America, Humboldt also experienced a number of personal losses. The first was in 1811, when Carlos Montúfar, who had followed him to Paris, returned to Ecuador to join the rebellion against Spanish rule. Enlisting in a revolutionary army raised by his father, who had been such a kind host to Humboldt and Bonpland in Quito, the young Montúfar was captured by the colonial authorities and shot.

  Aimé Bonpland also met a hard fate in South America. After their return to Paris, Humboldt secured an annual pension for Bonpland from the French government. He listed him as coauthor of the thirty-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, and he was relying on him to classify and prepare for publication their huge botanical collection. However, Humboldt was repeatedly frustrated by Bonpland’s lack of attention to the work. Finally, in September 1810, he wrote him: “You haven’t sent me a line on the subject of botany. I beg and beseech you to persevere until the work is complete, for . . . I have received only half a page of manuscript. . . . It’s an object of the greatest importance, not only in the interests of science but for the sake of your own reputation and the fulfillment of the contract you entered into with me in 1798. So do pray send us some manuscript . . . ,” he implored. “The public is under the impression that you have lost all interest in science over the last two years. . . . I embrace you affectionately, and in the course of a month I shall know whether you still love me sufficiently to gratify my wishes.”

  The source of Bonpland’s apparent lack of interest isn’t clear. It may be that his forte lay in fieldwork rather than desk work. Or perhaps his botanical acumen simply wasn’t equal to the daunting prospect of classifying three thousand species new to science. Bonpland had always been the junior partner in the relationship, and some have suggested that he grew resentful after their return to Europe, when Humboldt captured the lion’s share of acclaim. Then again, maybe Bonpland was simply occupied with other work, having been placed in charge of the empress Josephine’s extensive gardens at Malmaison. Whatever the reason, he edited only four of the seventeen botanical volumes published from the journey, and Humboldt was forced to retain Karl Sigismund Kunth, the nephew of his and Wilhelm’s old tutor, to finish the work.

  Over the next few years, Bonpland grew very close to Josephine Bonaparte, and was said to be with her at her deathbed in 1814. At the age of forty, having lost his patron and dear friend, Bonpland married a twenty-four-year-old Frenchwoman of dubious reputation. Two years later, he and his young wife left Paris and returned to South America, where he had been offered a professorship of natural history at Buenos Aires.

  However, in December 1821, while on a plant-collecting expedition in the southern An
des, Bonpland passed into the disputed frontier between Argentina and Paraguay. Though he had official permission to enter the area, he and his party were attacked by Paraguayan cavalrymen, who suspected them of spying. Everyone else was killed, and Bonpland, having suffered a sword wound to the head, was taken prisoner and held under house arrest in a remote outpost. His young wife deserted him. In Europe, Humboldt worked desperately to elicit his friend’s freedom, marshaling other celebrities to intervene on his behalf and even writing the Argentine president, all without success.

  When Bonpland was finally released in 1830, he settled in an out-of-the-way part of Uruguay, where he continued his botanical studies, created a museum, and ultimately received a ranch from the Uruguayan government in recognition of his services. Settling down with an Indian woman, with whom he had several children, he never totally gave up the idea of returning to Paris. But by the time of his death, in 1858 at the age of eighty-five, Bonpland hadn’t set foot in Europe for forty-two years.

  In March 1829, Humboldt sustained another blow, when his sister-in-law, Caroline, whom he considered “the common bond of our family,” died of cancer. Wilhelm himself died not long after, in April 1835. Though he didn’t achieve the worldwide celebrity of his younger brother, Wilhelm, hewing closer to the path that his mother had planned for both her sons, became a distinguished linguist and influential government official. As Prussian minister of education, he was responsible for modernizing the nation’s educational system and founding Berlin University (now known as Humboldt University). In fact, he managed to exert an important liberalizing influence on the nation before leaving public service in 1819 in response to the government’s increasingly reactionary policies.