The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Humboldt had already tried to get their approval in the summer of 1814 when he had accompanied the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, to London where the Allies had celebrated their victory over Napoleon. During two short weeks Humboldt had met politicians, dukes, lords and ladies, scientists and thinkers – in short, anybody who might prove useful – but nothing had been achieved. He encountered hope and enthusiasm, some promises and offers of assistance, but in the end no sight of the all-important passport.

  Three years later, on 31 October 1817, Humboldt was back in London, once again trying to petition the East India Company. His brother Wilhelm, who had just moved to England in his new capacity as the Prussian Minister to Britain, was expecting him at his house in Portland Place. Wilhelm did not like his new home – London was too big and the weather was miserable. The streets were choked with carriages, carts and people. Tourists regularly complained about the dangers of walking in the city, especially on Mondays and Fridays when herds of cattle were driven through the narrow lanes. Coal smoke and fog often gave London a claustrophobic atmosphere. How had the English ever become ‘great with so little day light’, Richard Rush, the American Minister in London, wondered.

  The area around Portland Place where Wilhelm lived was one of the most fashionable in London. That winter, however, it was one great building site because architect John Nash was implementing his grand town planning scheme that would eventually connect the Prince Regent’s London home, Carlton House, in St James’s Park, with the new Regent Park. Part of this was Regent Street which cut through the labyrinthine narrow streets of Soho and then connected to Portland Place. Work had begun in 1814 and there was noise everywhere as old buildings were razed to make space for the new broad streets.

  Alexander’s room had been prepared and Wilhelm was looking forward to welcoming his brother. But as so often, Alexander was travelling with a male companion, this time François Arago. Wilhelm deeply disliked his brother’s intense friendships – probably a mixture of jealousy and a concern for what might have seemed the inappropriate nature of these connections. When Wilhelm refused to accommodate Arago, Alexander decamped with his friend to a nearby tavern. It wasn’t a great beginning for the visit.

  Wilhelm lamented that he only ever saw his brother in the company of others. Not once did they dine at home, just the two of them, he complained, but he also had to admit that Alexander always brought a refreshing whirlwind of activity. Wilhelm still thought him too French and was often irritated by his never-ending ‘flow of words’. Most of the time he just let his brother talk without interrupting him. But even though they had their differences, Wilhelm was glad to see him.

  Despite the chaos around Portland Place, the area suited Alexander. Within minutes he could wander through fields and along winding lanes to the north, yet it was only a quick carriage ride to the headquarters of the Royal Society and a twenty-minute stroll to the British Museum which was one of the most popular attractions that year. Thousands of people flocked there to see the famous Elgin Marbles which the Earl of Elgin had controversially removed from the Acropolis in Greece and which only a few months previously had found a new home in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles were stunning, Wilhelm told his wife Caroline, but ‘no one has robbed like this! It was as like seeing the whole of Athens.’

  There was also a bustle of commerce in London completely unlike that of Paris. London was the largest city in the world and Britain’s economic prowess was displayed in the shops that lined the West End – a glittering show of the country’s imperial reach. With Napoleon’s removal to St Helena and the end of the French threat, Britain was beginning a long period of unchallenged dominance in the world. The ‘accumulation of things’, visitors noted, was ‘amazing’. It was noisy, messy and crowded.

  Just as the shops proclaimed Britain’s commercial might, so too did the magnificent headquarters of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street in the City. At the entrance six enormous fluted columns held an imposing portico that depicted Britannia holding out her hand to a kneeling India who offered her treasures. Inside, the opulent rooms exuded both wealth and power. The marble relief above the mantelpiece in the Directors’ Court Room could not have been clearer – it was called ‘Britannia receiving the Riches of the East’. It portrayed the offerings of the East – pearls, tea, porcelain and cotton – as well as the female figure of Britannia and, as a symbol for London, Father Thames. There were also large canvases of the company’s settlements in India such as Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. It was here, in East India House, that the directors discussed military action, ships, cargo, employees, revenues and, of course, travel permits to their territory.

  Besides seeking permission to explore India, Alexander had a packed schedule in London. He went with Arago to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, he stopped at Joseph Banks’s house in Soho Square, and assisted the famous German-born astronomer William Herschel for two days at his house in Slough, just outside London. By now eighty years old, Herschel was a legend – he had discovered Uranus in 1781 and had brought the universe to the earth with his huge telescopes. Like everybody else, Humboldt wanted to see the giant forty-foot telescope that Herschel had constructed, one of the ‘Wonders of the World’, as it had been described.

  What interested Humboldt most was Herschel’s idea of an evolving universe – one that was not solely based on mathematics but a living thing that changed, grew and fluctuated. Herschel had used an analogy of a garden when he wrote of ‘the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption’ of stars and planets to explain their formation. Humboldt would use exactly the same image years later when he wrote of the ‘great garden of the universe’ in which stars appeared in various stages, just like ‘a tree in all stages of growth’.

  Arago and Humboldt also attended meetings at the Royal Society. Since its foundation in the 1660s ‘for the improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment’, the Royal Society had become the centre of scientific enquiry in Britain. Every Thursday the fellows met to discuss the latest developments in the sciences. They conducted experiments, ‘electrified’ people, learned about new telescopes, comets, botany and fossils. They debated, exchanged results and read letters that had been received from scientifically minded friends and foreigners alike.

  There was no better place for scientific networking. ‘All scholars are brothers,’ Humboldt said after one meeting. The fellows had honoured Humboldt by electing him as a foreign member two years previously, and he was unable to disguise his pride when his old friend and the president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, praised his latest botanical publication in front of the illustrious assembly as ‘one of the most beautiful and magnificent’ ever produced. Banks also invited Humboldt to the even more exclusive Royal Society Dining Club where he reconnected with the chemist Humphry Davy, among others. Used as he was to Parisian cuisine, Humboldt was not so enthusiastic about the food and complained that ‘I have dined at the Royal Society where one gets poisoned.’ No matter how unpalatable the food was, the number of scientists joining the dinners rose significantly when Humboldt was in town.

  The meeting room at the Royal Society (Illustration Credit 13.2)

  As Humboldt went from one meeting to another, Arago tagged along but he gave up on the late evening events. At night, when Arago slept, the indefatigable Humboldt embarked on another round of visits. At forty-eight, he had not lost any of his youthful enthusiasm. The only thing he disliked about London was the rigid formality of fashion. It was ‘detestable’, he grumbled to a friend, that ‘at nine o’clock you must wear your necktie this style, at ten o’clock in that, and at eleven o’clock in another fashion.’ But despite the rigours of fashion, it all seemed worth it because everybody wanted to meet him. Wherever Humboldt went, he was welcomed with the greatest respect. All ‘powerful men’, he said, thought favourably about his projects and his India plans. But all this success did not have the desired effect on the directors of the Eas
t India Company.

  After a month in London, Humboldt returned to Paris with his head buzzing but still without permission to travel to India. With no official records existing about Humboldt’s application, it is not clear which arguments the East India Company used to refuse him but some years later an article in the Edinburgh Review explained that it was because of an ‘unworthy political jealousy’. Most probably the East India Company did not want to risk a liberal Prussian troublemaker investigating colonial injustice. For the time being Humboldt was not going anywhere near India.

  Meanwhile his books were selling well in England. The first English translation had been the Political Essay of New Spain in 1811 but even more successful was Personal Narrative (the first of seven volumes had been translated in 1814). It was a travelogue – albeit with extensive scientific notes – that appealed to the general reader. Personal Narrative followed Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s voyage chronologically from their departure from Spain in 1799.1 It was the book that would later inspire Charles Darwin to join the Beagle – and one ‘which I almost know by heart’, as Darwin said.

  Personal Narrative, Humboldt explained, was unlike any other travel book. Many travellers just measured, he said – some merely collected plants and others were only interested in the economic data from trading centres – but no one combined exact observation with a ‘painterly description of landscape’. By contrast, Humboldt took his readers into the crowded streets of Caracas, across the dusty plains of the Llanos and deep into the rainforest along the Orinoco. As he described a continent that few British had ever seen, Humboldt captured their imagination. His words were so evocative, the Edinburgh Review wrote, that ‘you partake in his dangers; you share his fears, his success and his disappointment’.

  There were a few bad reviews but only in magazines that were critical of Humboldt’s liberal political opinions. The conservative Quarterly Review didn’t approve of Humboldt’s sweeping approach to nature and criticized that he was not following a particular theory. He ‘indulges in all’, the article read, ‘sailing with every wind, and swimming in every stream’. But a few years later, even the Quarterly Review praised Humboldt’s unique talent of combining scientific research with ‘a warmth of feeling and a force of imagination’. He wrote like a ‘poet’, the reviewer admitted.

  Over the next years Humboldt’s descriptions of Latin America and his new vision of nature seeped into British literature and poetry. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which was published in 1818 – only four years after the first volume of Personal Narrative – Frankenstein’s monster declared a desire to escape to ‘the vast wilds of South America’. Shortly afterwards Lord Byron immortalized Humboldt in Don Juan, ridiculing his cynometer, the instrument with which Humboldt had measured the blueness of the sky.

  Humboldt, ‘the first of travellers,’ but not

  The last, if late accounts be accurate,

  Invented, by some name I have forgot,

  As well as the sublime discovery’s date,

  An airy instrument, with which he sought

  To ascertain the atmospheric state,

  By measuring ‘the intensity of blue’:

  O, Lady Daphne! let me measure you!

  At the same time the British Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey also began to read Humboldt’s books. Southey was so impressed that he even visited Humboldt in Paris in 1817. Humboldt united his vast knowledge with ‘a painters eye and a poets feeling’, Southey declared. He was ‘among travellers what Wordsworth is among poets’. Hearing this praise, Wordsworth asked to borrow Southey’s copy of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative shortly after it was published. At the time Wordsworth was composing a series of sonnets on the River Duddon in Cumbria and some of the work that he produced after reading Humboldt can be viewed in this context.

  Wordsworth used Humboldt’s travel account, for example, as source material for the sonnets. In Personal Narrative Humboldt described questioning an indigenous tribe at the Upper Orinoco about some carvings of animals and stars high up on the rocks at the banks of the river. ‘They answer with a smile,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘as relating a fact of which a stranger, a white man only, could be ignorant that “at the period of the great waters, their fathers went to that height in boats.” ’

  In Wordsworth’s poem Humboldt’s original became:

  There would the Indian answer with a smile

  Aimed at the White Man’s ignorance the while

  Of the GREAT WATERS telling how they rose

  …

  O’er which his Fathers urged, to ridge and steep

  Else unapproachable, their buoyant way;

  And carved, on mural cliff’s undreaded side

  Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase and prey.

  Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Coleridge found Humboldt’s work equally stimulating. Coleridge had probably first been introduced to Humboldt’s ideas at Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt’s house in Rome, where he had spent time in late 1805. He had met Wilhelm – the ‘brother of the great traveller’, as Coleridge described him – shortly after his arrival. The salon at the Humboldts’ had been alive with Alexander’s tales from South America but also with discussions of his new concept of nature. Back in England, Coleridge began to read Humboldt’s books and copied sections into his notebooks, returning to them when thinking about science and philosophy because he was grappling with similar ideas.

  Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were ‘walking poets’ who not only needed to be out in nature but also wrote outdoors. Like Humboldt, who insisted that scientists had to leave their laboratories to truly understand nature, Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that poets had to open the doors of their studies and walk through meadows, over hills and beside rivers. An uneven path, or tangled woods were Coleridge’s preferred places to compose, he claimed. A friend estimated that Wordsworth, by the time he was in his sixties, had covered around 180,000 miles. They were part of nature, searching for the unity within but also between man and his environment.

  Like Humboldt, Coleridge admired Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – ‘a truly great man’ as he called him – and enthused initially about Schelling’s Naturphilosophie for its search of unity between the Self and nature – the internal and the external world. It was Schelling’s belief in the role of the creative ‘I’ in the understanding of nature that resonated with Coleridge. Science needed to be infused with imagination or, as Schelling said, they had ‘to give once again wings to physics’.

  Fluent in German, Coleridge had for long been immersed in German literature and science.2 He had even suggested a translation of Goethe’s masterpiece Faust to Humboldt’s publisher, John Murray. More than any other contemporary play, Faust addressed issues that occupied Coleridge intensely. Heinrich Faust saw how everything hung together: ‘How it all lives and moves and weaves / Into a whole! Each part gives and receives,’ Faust declares in the first scene, a sentence that could have been written by either Humboldt or Coleridge.

  Coleridge was lamenting the loss of what he called the ‘connective powers of the understanding’. They lived in an ‘epoch of division and separation’, of fragmentation and the loss of unity. The problem, he insisted, lay with philosophers and scientists such as René Descartes or Carl Linnaeus, who had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting, classification or mathematical abstraction. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Death’. It was the naturalist with his urge to classify, Wordsworth agreed, who was a ‘fingering slave, / One that would peep and botanize / Upon his mother’s grave?’ Coleridge and Wordsworth were turning against the idea of extorting knowledge from nature with ‘screws or levers’ – in Faust’s words – and against the idea of a Newtonian universe made up of inert atoms that followed natural laws like automata. Instead they saw nature as Humboldt did – dynamic, organic and thumping with life.

  Coleridge called for
a new approach to the sciences in reaction to the loss of the ‘spirit of Nature’. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth turned against science itself but against the prevailing ‘microscopic view’. Like Humboldt, they took issue with the division of science into ever more specialized approaches. Coleridge called these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’, while Wordsworth wrote in The Excursion (1814):

  For was it meant

  That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,

  For ever dimly pore on things minute,

  On solitary objects, still beheld

  In disconnection dead and spiritless,

  And still dividing and dividing still

  Break down all grandeur …

  Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics. Humboldt’s works, the Edinburgh Review wrote, were the best proof of the ‘secret band’ that united all knowledge, feeling and morality. Everything was connected and ‘found to reflect on each other’.

  But no matter how successful his books were and how much his work was admired by British poets, thinkers and scientists, Humboldt had still not received permission to travel to India from the colonial administrators. The East India Company remained stubbornly uncooperative. Humboldt, however, continued to make detailed plans. He proposed to stay for four or five years in India, he told Wilhelm, and on his eventual return to Europe he would finally leave Paris. He intended to write his books about his Indian travels in English, and for that he would settle in London.