The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

  Views of Nature again described nature as a web of life, with plants and animals dependent on each other – a world teeming with life. Humboldt highlighted the ‘inner connections of natural forces’. He compared the deserts in Africa with the Llanos in Venezuela and the heaths of northern Europe: landscapes far removed from each other but now combined into ‘a single picture of nature’. The lessons that he had begun with his sketch after the ascent of Chimborazo, the Naturgemälde, now became broader. The concept of a Naturgemälde became Humboldt’s approach through which to explain his new vision. His Naturgemälde was not just a drawing any more – it could also be a prose text such as Views of Nature, a scientific lecture, or a philosophical concept.

  Views of Nature was a book written against the backdrop of Prussia’s desperate political situation and at a time when Humboldt felt miserable and stranded in Berlin. Humboldt invited his readers to ‘follow me gladly into the thickets of the forest, into the immeasurable steppes, and out upon the spine of the Andes range … In the mountains is freedom!’, transporting them into a magical world far from war and ‘the stormy waves of life’.

  This new nature writing was so seductive, Goethe told Humboldt, ‘that I plunged with you into the wildest regions’. Similarly, another acquaintance, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, thought the writing was so extraordinary that ‘you believe you are surfing the waves with him, losing yourself with him in the depths of the woods’. Views of Nature would inspire several generations of scientists and poets over the next decades. Henry David Thoreau read it, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson who declared that Humboldt had swept clean ‘this sky full of cobwebs’. And Charles Darwin would ask his brother to send a copy to Uruguay where he hoped to pick it up when the Beagle stopped there. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, science-fiction writer Jules Verne mined Humboldt’s descriptions of South America for his Voyages Extraordinaires series, often quoting verbatim for his dialogues. Verne’s The Mighty Orinoco was an homage to Humboldt and in his Captain Grant’s Children a French explorer insisted that there was no point in climbing Pico del Teide in Tenerife after Humboldt had already been up there: ‘What could I do,’ Monsieur Paganel says, ‘after that great man?’ It was no surprise that Verne’s Captain Nemo in his famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was described as owning the complete works of Humboldt.

  Stuck in Berlin, Humboldt continued to yearn for adventure. He wanted to escape from Berlin, a city that according to him was ornamented not by knowledge but only by ‘flourishing potato fields’. Then, in the winter of 1807, politics for once dealt him a good hand of cards. Friedrich Wilhelm III asked Humboldt to assist a Prussian peace mission to Paris. The king was sending his younger brother, Prince Wilhelm, to renegotiate the financial burdens imposed on Prussia by the French with the Treaty of Tilsit. Prince Wilhelm would need someone who knew people in powerful positions to open the doors for the diplomatic talks – and Humboldt with his Parisian connections was thought the perfect candidate.

  Humboldt happily accepted and left Berlin in mid-November 1807. Once in Paris he did what he could, but Napoleon was not willing to compromise. When Prince Wilhelm returned to Prussia after several unsuccessful months of negotiations, he arrived without Humboldt, who had decided to stay in Paris. Humboldt had come prepared and had brought all his notes and manuscripts to France with him. In the midst of a war that saw Prussia and France as hardened enemies, Humboldt ignored politics and patriotism, and made Paris his home. His Prussian friends were horrified, as was Wilhelm von Humboldt who could not understand his brother’s decision. ‘I don’t approve of Alexander’s stay in Paris,’ he told Caroline, thinking it unpatriotic and selfish.

  Humboldt didn’t seem to care. He wrote to Friedrich Wilhelm III, explaining that the lack of scientists, artists and publishers in Berlin made it impossible for him to work and publish the results of his travels. Surprisingly, Humboldt was allowed to remain in Paris – still quietly pocketing his salary as the Prussian king’s chamberlain. He would not return to Berlin for another fifteen years.

  1 In the Essay Humboldt explained plant distribution in great detail. He likened the conifers in high altitudes in Mexico to those in Canada; compared the oaks, pines and flowering shrubs in the Andes to those from ‘northern lands’. He also wrote about a moss on the banks of the Río Magdalena that was similar to one in Norway.

  2 Goethe’s only problem was that the all-important drawing – the Naturgemälde – had not been delivered with his copy of the book. He decided to paint his own and then sent Humboldt his sketch, ‘half in jest, half in seriousness’. Goethe was so excited when the missing Naturgemälde finally arrived, seven weeks later, that he packed it when he went on holiday to nail it on the wall so that he could look at it all the time.

  3 These annotations, however, were gems in themselves: some were little essays, others were fragments of thoughts or pointers towards future discoveries. Here Humboldt, for example, talked about evolutionary ideas long before Darwin published his Origin of Species.

  11

  Paris

  IN PARIS, HUMBOLDT quickly fell back into his old routines of sleeping little and working at a ferocious pace. He was tormented by the feeling of not being fast enough, he wrote to Goethe. He was writing so many different books at the same time that he often failed to meet deadlines. Humboldt began giving his publishers desperate excuses which ranged from running out of money to pay his engravers whom he had commissioned to illustrate the books, to ‘melancholy’ and even ‘painful haemorrhoidal incidents’. The botanical publications were also delayed because Bonpland was now the head gardener for Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, at Malmaison, her country estate just outside Paris. Bonpland was so slow that when it took him eight months to write up a mere ten plant descriptions, Humboldt complained that ‘any botanist in Europe could do this in a fortnight’.

  In January 1810, a little more than two years after his return to France, Humboldt finally completed the first instalment of Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. This was the most opulent of his publications – a large folio edition of sixty-nine gorgeous engravings of Chimborazo, volcanoes, Aztec manuscripts and Mexican calendars among many others. Each plate was accompanied by several pages of text explaining the context, but the stunning engravings were the main focus. This was a celebration of Latin America’s natural world, its ancient civilizations and people. ‘Nature and art are closely united in my work,’ Humboldt wrote in a note when he dispatched the book with a Prussian courier to Goethe in Weimar on 3 January 1810. When Goethe received it a week later, he couldn’t put it down. Over the next evenings, no matter how late he arrived home, Goethe leafed through Vues to enter Humboldt’s new world.

  When Humboldt was not writing, he was conducting experiments and comparing observations with those of other scientists. His correspondence was prodigious. He bombarded colleagues, friends and strangers with queries on topics as wide-ranging as the introduction of potatoes to Europe, detailed statistics on the slave trade or the latitude of the most northern village in Siberia. Humboldt corresponded with colleagues across Europe but also received letters from South America about the growing resentment against Spanish colonial rule. Jefferson dispatched reports about advances in transportation in the United States and added that Humboldt was regarded as one of the ‘great worthies of the world’ – and in r
eturn Humboldt sent Jefferson his latest publications. Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society in London, whom Humboldt had met in London two decades previously, remained another faithful correspondent. Humboldt sent him dried plant specimens from South America and his publications, while Banks used his own international network whenever Humboldt needed some information.

  In Paris Humboldt rushed from one place to another. He lived, as a visiting German scientist remarked, in ‘three different houses’ – so that he could work and rest whenever and wherever he needed. One night he slept at the Paris Observatory, grabbing a few hours’ sleep between gazing at the stars and taking notes, while the next he stayed with his friend Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac at the École Polytechnique or with Bonpland.1 In the mornings Humboldt made his rounds between 8 and 11 a.m., visiting young savants all over Paris. These were Humboldt’s so-called ‘garret-hours’, as one colleague teased, because these impoverished scientists usually lived in cheap attic rooms.

  One such new friend was François Arago, a talented young mathematician and astronomer who worked at the observatory and the École Polytechnique. Like Humboldt, Arago had a taste for adventure. In 1806, at the age of twenty, self-taught Arago had been sent by the French government on a scientific mission to the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, but had been arrested by the Spanish who had suspected him of espionage. For a year Arago had been incarcerated in Spain and Algiers but had finally escaped in summer 1809 – with his precious scientific notes hidden under his shirt. When Humboldt heard about Arago’s daring escape, he wrote to him immediately in order to arrange a meeting. Arago quickly became Humboldt’s closest friend – perhaps not coincidentally at the exact moment when Gay-Lussac married.

  Arago and Humboldt saw each other almost every day. Working together and sharing results, they had heated discussions that sometimes ended in fights. Humboldt had a big heart, Arago said, but occasionally also a ‘malicious tongue’. Their friendship could be tempestuous. One of them would storm off ‘sulking like a child’, a colleague observed, but they never remained angry for long. Arago was one of the few people whom Humboldt trusted unconditionally – he could show him his fears and self-doubts. They were like ‘Siamese twins’, Humboldt later wrote, and their friendship was the ‘joy of my life’. They were so close that Wilhelm von Humboldt became concerned about their relationship. ‘You know his passion to be only with one person,’ Wilhelm told his wife Caroline, and now Alexander had Arago ‘from whom he did not want to be separated’.

  This was not the only issue that Wilhelm had with his brother. He continued to disapprove of Alexander’s decision to stay in Paris, the heart of enemy territory. Wilhelm himself had returned to Berlin from Rome in early 1809 when he had been made Minister of Education. By then Alexander had moved to Paris but Wilhelm had been furious when he had seen that the family’s estate at Tegel had been plundered by French soldiers after the Battle of Jena and that his brother hadn’t even bothered packing up the house to protect its contents. ‘Alexander could have rescued everything,’ he complained to Caroline.

  Wilhelm was upset with his brother. Unlike Alexander, Wilhelm was serving his country. First he had left his beloved Rome to overhaul the Prussian education system and establish Berlin’s first university, and then, in September 1810, Wilhelm had moved to Austria as the Prussian ambassador in Vienna. Wilhelm was fulfilling his patriotic duty. He was helping to draw Austria closer as an ally to Prussia and Russia to renew the fighting against France.

  To Wilhelm’s mind, Alexander ‘had stopped being German’. Most of his books were even written and published first in French. Wilhelm tried many times to lure his brother home. When he had been sent to Vienna for his diplomatic posting, Wilhelm had suggested Alexander as his successor as Minister of Education in Berlin. But Alexander’s answer was clear: he had no intention of being buried in Berlin while Wilhelm was having a great time in Vienna. After all, he joked, Wilhelm himself seemed to prefer being abroad.

  Not only were Wilhelm and his fellow Prussians dubious about Humboldt’s chosen home – Napoleon himself was concerned. Napoleon had expressed his displeasure already by belittling Humboldt during their first meeting just after his return from South America. ‘You are interested in botany?’ Napoleon had sneered. ‘I know, my wife is also occupied with it.’ Napoleon disliked Humboldt, a friend said later, because his ‘opinion cannot be bent’. Initially Humboldt had tried to placate Napoleon with copies of his books, but he was ignored. Napoleon, Humboldt said, ‘hates me’.

  For most other savants it was a good time to be in France because Napoleon was a great supporter of the sciences. With reason as the reigning intellectual force of the age, science had moved to the nexus of politics. Knowledge was power and never before had the sciences been so close to the centre of government. Many scientists had held ministerial and political posts since the French Revolution, including Humboldt’s colleagues from the Académie des Sciences, such as naturalist Georges Cuvier and mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Pierre-Simon Laplace.

  For a man who loved the sciences almost as much as his military exploits, Napoleon was extremely unhelpful towards Humboldt. One reason may have been jealousy because Humboldt’s multi-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was in direct competition with Napoleon’s own pride and joy: the Description de l’Égypte. Almost 200 scientists had accompanied Napoleon’s troops to Egypt in 1798 in order to collect all the available knowledge there. Description de l’Égypte was the scientific result of the invasion and, like Humboldt’s publications, it was an ambitious project, eventually consisting of twenty-three volumes with some 1,000 plates. Humboldt, though, with neither the might of an army, nor the seemingly bottomless coffers of an empire behind him, was achieving more – his Voyage would have more volumes and plates. Napoleon did read Humboldt’s work, however, and reputedly even just before the Battle of Waterloo.

  Publically, though, Humboldt never received any support from Napoleon, who remained suspicious. Napoleon accused Humboldt of being a spy, instructing the secret police to open his letters, bribing Humboldt’s valet for information and on more than one occasion even had his rooms searched. When Humboldt mentioned a possible expedition to Asia shortly after his arrival from Berlin, Napoleon instructed a colleague from the Académie to write an undercover report about the ambitious Prussian scientist. Then, in 1810, Napoleon ordered Humboldt to leave the country within twenty-four hours. For no obvious reason, and just because he could, Napoleon informed Humboldt that he was not allowed to stay any longer. It was only after the chemist Jean Antoine Chaptal (then the treasurer of the Senate) intervened, that Humboldt was allowed to stay in Paris. It was an honour to France to have the famous Humboldt living in Paris, Chaptal told Napoleon. If Humboldt were to be deported, the country would lose its greatest scientist.

  Despite Napoleon’s distrust, Paris adored Humboldt. Scientists and thinkers were impressed by his publications and lectures, fellow writers adored his adventurous stories, while the fashionable world of Parisian society was delighted by his charm and wit. Humboldt dashed from one meeting to another and from one dinner to the next. By now his fame had spread so fast that when he breakfasted in the Café Procope, near the Odéon, he would find himself surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Cab-drivers didn’t need an address, just the information ‘chez Monsieur de Humboldt’ to know where to take visitors. Humboldt was, an American visitor remarked, the ‘idol of Paris society’, attending five different salons every evening, giving a half-hour performance at each, talking quickly and then disappearing again. He was everywhere, a Prussian diplomat commented, and, as the president of Harvard University noted during a visit to Paris, ‘at home on every subject’. Humboldt was ‘drunken with his love for the sciences’, one acquaintance remarked.

  In salons and at parties he met scientists but also the artists and thinkers of his age. As so often the handsome and unmarried Humboldt attracted the attention of women. One, despera
tely in love with him, described a ‘layer of ice’ behind his constant smile. When she asked him if he had never loved, he said that he did ‘with a fire’ – but it was burning for the sciences, ‘my first and only love’.

  As he hurried from one person to another, Humboldt talked faster than anybody else but with a gentle voice. He never lingered but was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, as one hostess recounted, there one minute and absent the next. He was ‘thin, elegant and nimble like a French-man’, with unruly hair and lively eyes. Now in his early forties, he looked at least ten years younger. When Humboldt arrived at a party, it was, another friend recalled, as if he opened a ‘sluice’ of words. Wilhelm, who sometimes had to endure a few too many of his brother’s stories, told Caroline after one particularly long session that it ‘tired the ears as his flow of words whooshed past relentlessly’. Another acquaintance compared him to an ‘overcharged instrument’ that played incessantly. Humboldt’s way of speaking was ‘actually thinking out loud’.

  Others feared his sharp tongue so much that they did not want to leave a party before Humboldt departed, worried that once they had gone they would be the object of his snide comments. Some thought Humboldt was like a meteor that whizzed through the room. At dinners he held court, jumping from one subject to another. One moment he was talking about shrunken heads, one acquaintance remarked, but by the time a dinner guest, who had asked his neighbour quietly for some salt, had returned to the conversation, Humboldt was lecturing on Assyrian cuneiform script. Humboldt was electrifying, some said, his mind was sharp and his thoughts free of prejudice.

  Throughout these years, wealthy Parisians did not feel much affected by the ongoing European wars. With Napoleon’s army marching across the continent as far away as Russia, Humboldt’s life and that of his friends and colleagues remained the same. Paris was thriving and growing in tandem with Napoleon’s victories. The city had become one giant building site. New palaces were commissioned and the foundations of the Arc de Triomphe were laid, though only completed two decades later. The population of the city rose from just over 500,000 at the time of Humboldt’s return from Latin America in 1804 to about 700,000 a decade later.