by Andrea Wulf
What interested those in the Jena circle most was this relationship between the internal and the external world. Ultimately it led to the question: How is knowledge possible? During the Enlightenment the internal and the external world had been regarded as two entirely separate entities, but later English Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would declare that man had once been one with nature – during a long vanished Golden Age. It was this lost unity that they strove to restore, insisting that the only way to do so was through art, poetry and emotions. According to the Romantics, nature could only be understood by turning inwards.
Humboldt was immersed in Kant’s theories and would later keep a bust of the philosopher in his study, calling him a great philosopher. Half a century later, he would still say that the external world only existed in so far as we perceived it ‘within ourselves’. As it was shaped inside the mind, so did it shape our understanding of nature. The external world, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’, Humboldt would write.
Goethe was also grappling with these ideas of the Self and nature, of the subjective and the objective, of science and imagination. He had developed, for example, a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner. Goethe insisted that objective truth could only be attained by combining subjective experiences (through the perception of the eye, for example) with the observer’s power of reasoning. ‘The senses do not deceive,’ Goethe declared, ‘it is judgement that deceives.’
This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking. It was the time in Jena that moved him from purely empirical research towards his own interpretation of nature – a concept that brought together exact scientific data with an emotional response to what he was seeing. Humboldt had long believed in the importance of close observation and of rigorous measurements – firmly embracing Enlightenment methods – but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that ‘vivid phantasy confuses me’, but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks ‘will never get close to it’.
It was also around this time that both read Erasmus Darwin’s popular poem Loves of the Plants. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus was a physician, inventor and scientist who in his poem had turned the Linnaean sexual classification system of plants into verses crowded with lovesick violets, jealous cowslips and blushing roses. Populated by horned snails, fluttering leaves, silver moonlight and lovemaking on ‘moss-embroider’d beds’, Loves of the Plants had become the most talked-about poem in England.
Four decades later, Humboldt would write to Charles Darwin how much he had admired his grandfather for proving that a mutual admiration for nature and imagination was ‘powerful and productive’. Goethe was not quite as impressed. He liked the idea of the poem but found its execution too pedantic and rambling, commenting to Schiller that the verses lacked any trace of ‘poetic feeling’.
Goethe believed in the marriage of art and science, and his reawakened fascination with science did not – as Schiller had feared – remove him from his art. For too long poetry and science had been regarded as the ‘greatest antagonists’, Goethe said, but now he began to infuse his literary work with science. In Faust, Goethe’s most famous play, the drama’s main protagonist, the restless scholar Heinrich Faust, makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for infinite knowledge. Published in two separate parts as Faust I and Faust II in 1808 and 1832, Goethe wrote Faust in bursts of activity that often coincided with Humboldt’s visits. Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by a relentless striving for knowledge, by a ‘feverish unrest’, as he declares in the play’s first scene. At the time when he was working on Faust, Goethe said about Humboldt: ‘I’ve never known anyone who combined such a deliberately channelled activity with such plurality of the mind’ – words that might have described Faust. Both Faust and Humboldt believed that ferocious activity and enquiry brought understanding – and both found strength in the natural world and believed in the unity of nature. Like Humboldt, Faust was trying to discover ‘all Nature’s hidden powers’. When Faust declares his ambition in the first scene, ‘That I may detect the inmost force / Which binds the world, and guides its course’, it could have been Humboldt speaking. That something of Humboldt was in Goethe’s Faust – or something of Faust in Humboldt – was obvious to many; so much so that people commented on the resemblance when the play was finally published in 1808.2
There were other examples of Goethe’s fusion of art and science. For his poem ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’, he translated his earlier essay about the urform of plants into poetry. And for Elective Affinities, a novel about marriage and love, he chose a contemporary scientific term as a title that described the tendency of certain chemical elements to combine. Because of this inherent ‘affinity’ of the chemicals actively to bond with another, this was also an important theory within the circle of scientists who discussed the vital force of matter. The French scientist Pierre- Simon Laplace, for example, whom Humboldt greatly admired, explained that ‘all chemical combinations are the result of attractive forces’. Laplace saw this as nothing less than the key to the universe. Goethe used the properties of these chemical bonds to evoke relationships and changing passions between the four protagonists in the novel. This was chemistry translated into literature. Nature, science and imagination were moving ever closer.
Or as Faust says, knowledge could not be wrenched from nature by observation, instrument or experiment alone:
We snatch in vain at Nature’s veil,
She is mysterious in broad daylight,
No screws or levers can compel her to reveal
The secrets she has hidden from our sight.
Goethe’s descriptions of nature in his plays, novels and poems were as truthful, Humboldt believed, as the discoveries of the best scientists. He would never forget that Goethe encouraged him to combine nature and art, facts and imagination. And it was this new emphasis on subjectivity that allowed Humboldt to link the previous mechanistic view of nature as promulgated by scientists such as Leibnitz, Descartes or Newton with the poetry of the Romantics. Humboldt would thus become the link that connected Newton’s Opticks, which explained that rainbows were created by light refracting through raindrops, to poets such as John Keats, who declared that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’.
The time in Jena, Humboldt later recalled, ‘affected me powerfully’. Being with Goethe, Humboldt said, equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to see and understand the natural world. And it was with those new organs that Humboldt would see South America.
1 It was the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta who proved Humboldt and Galvani wrong, showing that animal nerves were not charged with electricity. The convulsions that Humboldt had produced in animals were in fact triggered by the contact of the metals – an idea that led Volta to invent the first battery in 1800.
2 Others also made connections between Humboldt and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s niece said that ‘Humboldt seemed to her as Mephistopheles did to Gretchen’ – not the nicest compliment since Gretchen (Faust’s lover) realizes at the end of the play that Mephistopheles is the devil and turns to God and away from Faust.
3
In Search of a Destination
AS HUMBOLDT TRAVELLED across the vast Prussian territory, inspecting mines and meeting scientific friends, he continued to dream of faraway countries. That longing never disappeared but he also knew that his mother, Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt, had never shown any patience with his adventurous dreams. She expe
cted him to climb the ranks of the Prussian administration and he felt ‘chained’ to her wishes. All that changed when she died of cancer in November 1796 after battling the disease for more than a year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Wilhelm nor Alexander grieved much for their mother. She had always found fault in whatever her sons did, Wilhelm confided to his wife, Caroline. No matter how successfully they had completed their studies or excelled in their careers, she had never been satisfied. During her illness, Wilhelm had dutifully moved from Jena to Tegel and Berlin to look after her, but he had missed the intellectual stimulation in Jena. Oppressed by his mother’s dark presence, he couldn’t read, work or think. He felt paralysed, Wilhelm had written to Schiller. When Alexander briefly visited, he had left as soon as possible, leaving his brother in charge. After fifteen months Wilhelm had not been able to bear the vigil any longer and returned to Jena. Two weeks later their mother died, with neither son at her bedside.
The brothers did not attend her funeral. Other events seemed of greater importance; Alexander was more excited about the attention that his new miner’s lamps were receiving, along with his experiments in Galvanism. Four weeks after his mother’s death, Alexander was announcing his preparations for his ‘great voyage’. Having waited for years for the opportunity to control his own destiny, he finally felt unshackled at the age of twenty-seven. Her death didn’t affect him much, he confessed to his old friend from Freiberg, because they had been ‘strangers to each other’. Over the previous few years Humboldt had spent as little time as possible at the family home and whenever he left Tegel, he had been relieved. As one close friend wrote to Humboldt: ‘her death … must be particularly welcomed by you.’
Within a month Alexander had resigned as a mining inspector. Wilhelm waited a little longer but moved a few months later to Dresden and then to Paris where he and Caroline turned their new house into a salon for writers, artists and poets. Their mother’s death had left the brothers wealthy. Alexander had inherited almost 100,000 thalers. ‘I have so much money,’ he bragged, ‘that I can get my nose, mouth and ears gilded.’ He was rich enough to afford to go anywhere he liked. He had always lived relatively simply because he was not interested in luxuries – lavishly printed books, yes, or expensive new scientific instruments, but he had no interest in elegant clothing or fashionable furniture. An expedition, on the other hand, was something very different, and he was willing to spend a large part of his inheritance on it. He was so excited that he couldn’t decide where to go and mentioned so many possible destinations that no one knew what his plans were: he spoke of Lapland and Greece, then Hungary or Siberia, and maybe the West Indies or the Philippines.
The precise destination didn’t yet matter because first he wanted to prepare, and now did so with pedantic drive. He had to test (and buy) all the instruments he needed, as well as travel through Europe to learn everything he could about geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. His early publications and growing network of contacts opened the doors – and he had even had a new plant species named after him: Humboldtia laurifolia, a ‘splendid’ tree from India, he wrote to a friend, ‘isn’t that fabulous!!’
Over the next months he interviewed geologists in Freiberg and learned how to use his sextant in Dresden. He climbed the Alps to investigate mountains – so that he might later compare them, as he told Goethe – and, in Jena, he conducted more electrical experiments. In Vienna he examined tropical plants in the hothouses of the imperial garden, where he also tried to convince the young director, Joseph van der Schot, to accompany him on his expedition, declaring that their future together would be ‘sweet’. He spent a cold winter in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, where he measured the height of the nearby Austrian Alps and tested his meteorological instruments, braving icy rains as he held his instruments in the air during storms to detect the electricity of the atmosphere. He read and reread all the travellers’ accounts he could get hold of, and pored over botanical books.
As he rushed from one learned centre in Europe to another, Humboldt’s letters exuded a breathless energy. ‘This is just the way I am, I do what I do, impetuously and briskly,’ he said. There was no one place where he could learn everything, and no one person could teach him everything.
Humboldtia laurifolia (Illustration Credit 3.1)
After about a year of frantic preparations, it dawned upon Humboldt that although his trunks were stuffed with equipment and his head was filled with the latest scientific knowledge, the political situation in Europe was making his dreams impossible. Much of Europe was embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars. The execution of the French king, Louis XVI, in January 1793, had united the European nations against the French revolutionaries. In the years following the revolution, France had declared war on one country after another, in a roll-call that included among others Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal and Britain. Gains and losses were made on both sides, treaties signed and then overthrown, but by 1798 Napoleon had gained Belgium, the Rhineland from Prussia, the Austrian Netherlands and large parts of Italy for France. Wherever Humboldt turned, his movements were hampered by war and armies. Even Italy – with the tantalizing geological prospects of the volcanoes Mount Etna and Vesuvius – had, thanks to Napoleon, been closed off.
Humboldt needed to find a nation that would let him join a voyage, or which would at least grant him passage to their colonial possessions. He begged the British and the French for help, and then the Danes. He considered a voyage to the West Indies, but found his hopes dashed by the ongoing sea battles. Then he accepted an invitation to accompany the British Earl of Bristol to Egypt, even though the old aristocrat was known as being rather eccentric. But again these plans came to nothing when Bristol was arrested by the French, suspected of espionage.
At the end of April 1798, one and a half years after his mother’s death, Humboldt decided to visit Paris where Wilhelm and Caroline now lived. He hadn’t seen his brother for more than a year and turning his attention to the victorious French also seemed the most practical solution to his travel dilemma. In Paris he spent time with his brother and sister-in-law, but also wrote letters, contacted people, and cajoled, filling his notebooks with the addresses of countless scientists, as well as buying yet more books and instruments. ‘I live in the midst of science,’ Humboldt wrote excitedly. As he made his rounds, he met his boyhood hero, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer who had first set foot on Tahiti in 1768. At the grand old age of seventy, Bougainville was planning a voyage across the globe to the South Pole. Impressed by the young Prussian scientist, he invited Humboldt to join him.
Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 3.2)
It was also in Paris that Humboldt first ran into a young French scientist, Aimé Bonpland, in the hallway of the house where both were renting a room. With a battered botany box – a vasculum – slung across his shoulder, Bonpland was obviously also interested in plants. He had been taught by the best French naturalists in Paris, and, as Humboldt learned, was a talented botanist, skilled in comparative anatomy, and had also served as a surgeon in the French navy. Born in La Rochelle, a port town on the Atlantic coast, the twenty-five-year-old Bonpland was from a naval family with a love for adventures and voyages in his blood. Bumping into each other regularly in the corridors of their accommodation, Bonpland and Humboldt began to talk and quickly discovered a mutual adoration for plants and foreign travels.
Like Humboldt, Bonpland was keen to see the world. Humboldt decided that Bonpland would be the perfect companion. Not only was he passionate about botany and the tropics, but he was also good-natured and charming. Stoutly built, Bonpland exuded a solid strength that promised resilience, good health and reliability. In many ways, he was Humboldt’s exact opposite. Where Humboldt spread frantic activity, Bonpland carried an air of calmness and docility. They were to make a great team.
In the midst of all the preparations, Humboldt now seemed to experience flashes of guilt about his late mother. There were rumours,
Friedrich Schiller told Goethe, that ‘Alexander couldn’t get rid of the spirit of his mother’. Apparently she appeared to him all the time. A mutual acquaintance had told Schiller that Humboldt was participating in some dubious séances in Paris involving her. Humboldt had always been afflicted by a ‘great fear of ghosts’, as he had admitted to a friend a few years previously, but now it had got much worse. No matter how much he cast himself as a rational scientist, he felt his mother’s spirit watching his every move. It was time to escape.
The immediate problem, though, was that the command of Bougainville’s expedition was given to a younger man, Captain Nicolas Baudin. Though Humboldt received reassurances that he could join Baudin on his voyage, the whole expedition foundered due to a lack of government funds. Humboldt refused to give up. He now wondered if he could join the 200 scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s army which had left Toulon in May 1798 to invade Egypt. But how to get there? Few, Humboldt admitted, ‘have had greater difficulties’.
As the quest for a ship continued, Humboldt contacted the Swedish consul in Paris who promised to procure him a passage from Marseille to Algiers, on the North African coast, from where he could travel overland to Egypt. Humboldt also asked his London acquaintance, Joseph Banks, to obtain a passport for Bonpland in case they encountered an English warship. He was prepared for all eventualities. Humboldt himself travelled with a passport issued by the Prussian ambassador in Paris. Along with his name and age, the document gave a rather detailed, though not exactly objective, description stating that he had grey eyes, a large mouth, a big nose and a ‘well-formed chin’. Humboldt scribbled in the margins in jest: ‘large mouth, fat nose, but chin bien fait’.
