by Andrea Wulf
Walden was Thoreau’s mini-Cosmos of one particular place, an evocation of nature in which everything was connected, packed with details of animal habits, blooms and the thickness of ice on the pond. Objectivity or pure scientific enquiry did not exist, Thoreau wrote when he had finished Walden, because it was always twinned with subjectivity and the senses. ‘Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,’ he noted. The foundation of all was observation.
‘I milk the sky & the earth,’ Thoreau said.
1 Thoreau also lived with the Emersons for two years, earning his board by helping as a handyman around the house and garden while Emerson was away on his frequent lecture tours.
2 Thoreau wrote seven drafts of Walden. The first was finished during his time at Walden Pond. He worked on drafts 2 and 3 from spring 1848 to mid-1849. He returned to the manuscript in January 1852 and worked on the next four drafts until spring 1854.
PART V
New Worlds: Evolving Ideas
20
The Greatest Man Since the Deluge
IN BERLIN, IN the year after the publication of Cosmos’s second volume, Humboldt’s precarious balancing act between his liberal political views and his duties at the Prussian court was getting increasingly difficult. It became almost impossible when, in spring 1848, Europe erupted into unrest. After decades of reactionary politics, a wave of revolutions swept across the continent.
When economic decline and the suppression of political gatherings sparked violent protests in Paris, a terrified King Louis Philippe abdicated on 26 February, and escaped to Britain. Two days later, the French declared the Second Republic and within weeks more revolutions rippled through Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium, among others. In Vienna the conservative Chancellor of State, Prince von Metternich, tried and failed to control uprisings in which students and the working classes had joined forces. On 13 March Metternich resigned and he too fled to London. Two days later the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand I, promised his people a constitution. Rulers across Europe panicked.
As newspapers reported the revolts in Europe that spring, Prussians read the articles aloud to each other in Berlin’s coffee houses. In Munich, Cologne, Leipzig, Weimar and dozens of other German cities and states people rose against their rulers. They were demanding a united Germany, a national parliament and a constitution. In March the King of Bavaria abdicated and the Grand Duke of Baden bowed to the demands of his people and promised freedom of the press and a parliament. In Berlin protesters rallied too, calling for reforms, but the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was not willing to give up that easily and readied his troops. When 20,000 people gathered to listen to rousing speeches, the king ordered his soldiers to march through the streets of Berlin and to guard his castle.
Prussia’s liberals had long been disappointed by their new king. Humboldt, like so many others, had hoped that Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s accession would have heralded the end of absolutism. In early 1841, during the first months of the new king’s reign, Humboldt had told a friend that he was an enlightened ruler who ‘only had to get rid of a few medieval beliefs’, but he had been wrong. Two years later Humboldt had confessed to the same friend that Friedrich Wilhelm IV ‘does just what he likes’. He adored architecture and all he seemed to care about were schemes for new magnificent buildings, grand parks and great collections of art. When it came to ‘earthly matters’ such as foreign policies, the Prussian people or the economy, he ‘hardly gives them a thought,’ Humboldt complained.
When the king had opened the first ever Prussian parliament in Berlin in April 1847, hopes for reform had been dashed immediately. As people called for a constitution, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had left no doubt that he would never agree. In his opening speech, he had told the delegates that a king ruled by divine right, and never by popular will. Prussia was not going to be a constitutional monarchy. Two months later parliament was dissolved; nothing had been achieved.
In spring 1848, and inspired by the revolutions across Europe, the Prussian people had finally had enough. On 18 March, the revolutionaries in Berlin rolled barrels into the streets, and piled up boxes, planks and bricks to build barricades. They dug up cobblestones and carried them on to the roofs, preparing themselves for a fight. As day turned into evening, the battle began. Stones and tiles were hurled from the rooftops and the first gunshots ricocheted through the streets. Humboldt was at home in his flat in Oranienburger Straße and as the sound of the soldiers’ drums echoed across the city he, like many others, didn’t sleep. Women brought food, wine and coffee to the revolutionaries as the fighting continued throughout the night. Several hundred men died but the king’s troops failed to gain control. That night, Friedrich Wilhelm IV collapsed on a chair and moaned, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, have you abandoned me completely?’
Humboldt believed that reforms were essential but disliked rioting mobs and brutal police intervention – he had envisaged an earlier, slower and therefore more peaceful change. Like many other liberals, he longed to see a united Germany but hoped it would be governed by consent and parliament, rather than by blood and fear. Now, as hundreds died in the streets of Berlin, the seventy-eight-year-old Humboldt found himself caught between the lines.
As the revolutionaries in Berlin took control of the city, a frightened Friedrich Wilhelm IV conceded and promised a constitution and a national parliament. On 19 March he agreed to withdraw his troops. That night the streets of Berlin were illuminated and the people celebrated their victory. Instead of gunshots, there was singing and jubilation. On 21 March, only three days after the fighting had begun, the king displayed his defeat symbolically by riding through Berlin draped in the black, red and gold colours of the revolutionaries.1 Back at the palace where crowds had gathered, the king appeared on the balcony. Humboldt stood behind him in silence and bowed to the people below. The next day Humboldt ignored his obligations to the king and marched at the head of the funeral procession for the fallen revolutionaries.
Friedrich Wilhelm IV had never minded his chamberlain’s revolutionary leanings. He appreciated Humboldt’s knowledge and avoided their ‘differences in political opinions’. Others were less easy with Humboldt’s position. He was called an ‘ultraliberal’ by a Prussian thinker and a ‘revolutionist in court favour’ by one minister, while the king’s brother, Prince William (later Emperor William I) thought Humboldt a threat to the existing order.
Humboldt was used to manoeuvring around different political views. Twenty-five years earlier in Paris, he had smoothly circumnavigated reactionary and revolutionary lines in France without ever really risking his position. ‘He is well aware that while he gets too liberal,’ Charles Lyell had written, ‘he is in no danger of losing the station and the advantages which his birth ensures for him.’
In private, Humboldt criticized European rulers with his usual sarcasm. When Queen Victoria had invited him during one of her visits to Germany, he mocked that she had fed him ‘hard pork chops and cold chicken’ for breakfast as well as displaying complete ‘philosophical abstinence’. After meeting the Crown Prince of Württemberg and the future kings of Denmark, England and Bavaria at Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s palace Sanssouci, Humboldt described them to a friend as a group of heirs apparent that consisted of ‘a spineless pale one, a drunken Icelander, a blind political fanatic and an obstinate feeble-witted’. This, Humboldt joked, was the ‘future of the monarchical world’.
Some admired Humboldt’s ability to serve a royal master while maintaining the ‘courage to have his own opinion’. The King of Hanover, Ernst August I, however, remarked that Humboldt was ‘always the same, always republican, and always in the antechamber of the palace’. But it was probably Humboldt’s ability to inhabit both these worlds that allowed him so much freedom. Otherwise, as he admitted himself, he might have been thrown out of the country, for being ‘a revolutionary and the author of the godless Cosmos’.
As Humboldt watched the revolutions in the German states unfold, there was a brief moment when
reform seemed possible but it was over almost as quickly as it had begun. The German states decided to appoint a National Assembly to discuss the future of a united Germany but by the end of May 1848, a little more than two months after the first gunshot had been fired in Berlin, Humboldt wasn’t sure if he was more frustrated about the king, the Prussian ministers or the delegates of the National Assembly that had convened in Frankfurt.
Even those who conceded that reforms were necessary couldn’t agree what this new Germany should be comprised of. Humboldt believed that a united Germany should be based on the principles of federalism. Some power should remain with the different states, he explained, without ignoring the ‘organism and the unity of the whole’ – underlining his argument by using the same terminology as he did when talking about nature.
There were those who favoured a union for purely economic reasons – envisaging a Germany without tariffs and trade barriers – but also nationalists who glorified a shared and romanticized Germanic past. Even if they were to agree, there were different opinions on where the borders should lie and which states were to be included. Some proposed a greater Germany (Grossdeutschland) that included Austria, while others preferred a smaller nation (Kleindeutschland) led by Prussia. These seemingly endless disagreements made for messy negotiations, as arguments were put forward, then overturned and discussions stalled. Meanwhile the more conservative forces had time to regroup.
By spring 1849, a year after the revolts, all the revolutionaries’ gains were repudiated. The prospects, Humboldt thought, were gloomy. When the National Assembly in Frankfurt – after much back and forth – finally decided to offer the imperial crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV so that he could lead a constitutional monarchy of a united Germany, they were squarely rebutted. The king, who only a year earlier had worn the revolutionary German tricolour in fear of the mob, now felt confident enough to decline the offer. The delegates did not have a real crown to give, Friedrich Wilhelm IV declared, because only God was able to do so. This crown was one of ‘dirt and clay’, he told one of the delegates, and not a ‘diadem of the divine right of kings’. It was ‘a dog collar’, he fumed, with which the people wanted to chain him to the revolution. Germany was far from being a united nation, and in May 1849 the delegates of the National Assembly returned home with little to show for their efforts.
Humboldt was deeply disappointed with revolutions and revolutionaries. During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’. In the months before the 1848 events in Europe, Humboldt had followed news of the war that the United States had waged with Mexico – shocked, as he said, by America’s imperial behaviour which reminded him of ‘the old Spanish Conquista’. As a young man he had witnessed the French Revolution but also Napoleon crown himself emperor. Later, he had watched Simón Bolívar liberate the South American colonies from Spanish tyranny, only then to see ‘El Libertador’ declare himself dictator. And now his own country had failed miserably. At the age of eighty, he wrote in November 1849, he was reduced to the ‘worn-out hope’ that the people’s desire for reforms had not disappeared for ever. Though it may seem ‘to be asleep’ periodically, he still hoped that their wish for change was in fact ‘eternal as the electromagnetic storm which sparkles in the sun’. Perhaps the next generation would succeed.
As so often before, he now buried himself in work to escape these ‘endless oscillations’. When one delegate from the Frankfurt National Assembly asked Humboldt how he could possibly work through such turbulent times, he stoically replied that he had seen so many revolutions during his long life that the novelty and excitement were wearing off. Instead he concentrated on finishing Cosmos.
When Humboldt had published the second volume of Cosmos in 1847 – which he had originally intended as the final one – he had quickly realized that he had yet more to say. Unlike the first two, though, the third volume would be a more specialized tome about ‘cosmical phaenomena’, ranging from the stars and planets to the velocity of light and comets. As the sciences advanced, Humboldt struggled to be a ‘master of the materials’ but he never had problems admitting when he failed to understand a new theory. Determined to include all the latest discoveries, he simply asked others to explain them to him, urging speed because at his age he was running out of time – ‘those half dead are riding fast,’ he said. Cosmos was like a ‘goblin on his shoulder’.
On the back of the success of the first two volumes of Cosmos, Humboldt also published a new and extended edition of his favourite book, Views of Nature – first in German and then, in quick succession, two competing English editions. There was also a new but unauthorized English translation of Personal Narrative. And in order to make some extra money, Humboldt tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sell the idea of a ‘Micro-Cosmos’ – a more affordable and shorter one-volume digest of Cosmos – to his German publisher.
In December 1850 Humboldt published the first half of the third volume of Cosmos, and a year later the other half. In the introduction he wrote that ‘it remains for the third and last volume of my work to supply some of the deficiencies of the earlier ones.’ But no sooner had he written that, than he started the fourth volume, this time focusing on the earth, covering geomagnetism, volcanoes and earthquakes. It seemed as if he might never stop.
Age had not slowed him. Besides his writing and his duties at court, Humboldt also welcomed a never-ending string of visitors. One was Simón Bolívar’s former aide-de-camp, General Daniel O’Leary, who called at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment in April 1853. The two men spent an afternoon reminiscing about the revolution and Bolívar who had died of tuberculosis in 1830. By now Humboldt was so famous that it had also become a rite of passage for Americans to visit the old man. One American travel writer said that he had come to Berlin not to see museums and galleries but ‘for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man’.2
Humboldt also continued to assist young scientists, artists and explorers, often helping them financially despite his own debts. The Swiss geologist and palaeontologist Louis Agassiz, who emigrated to the United States, profited several times from Humboldt’s ‘usual benevolence’, for example. On another occasion Humboldt gave a young mathematician a hundred thalers and also organized free meals at the university for the royal coffee maker’s son. He brought artists to the king’s attention and encouraged the director of the Neues Museum in Berlin to purchase paintings and drawings. Humboldt told a friend that, since he had no family of his own, these young men were like his children.
As the mathematician Friedrich Gauß said, the zeal with which Humboldt helped and encouraged others was ‘one of the most wonderful jewels in Humboldt’s crown’. It also meant that Humboldt ruled over the destinies of scientists across the world. Becoming one of Humboldt’s protégés could make one’s career. It was even rumoured that he now controlled the outcome of elections at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, with candidates first auditioning at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment before they went to the Académie. A letter of recommendation from Humboldt could determine their future, and those who opposed him came to fear his sharp tongue. Humboldt had studied venomous snakes in South America ‘and learned a lot from them’, one young scientist claimed.
Despite the occasional sneer, Humboldt was mostly generous, and explorers, in particular, profited. He encouraged his old acquaintance and Darwin’s friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, to travel to the Himalaya, and used his London contacts to convince the British government to finance the expedition – as well as equipping Hooker with copious instructions on what to measure, observe and collect. A few years later, in 1854, Humboldt helped three German brothers, Hermann, Rudolph and Adolf Schlagintweit – the ‘shamrock’, as he nicknamed them – to travel to India and the Himalaya where they were to study the earth’s magnetic fields. These explorers became Humboldt’s small army of researchers, providing the global data he needed to complete Cosmos. Alth
ough he had accepted that he was too old to see the Himalaya himself, his failure to climb those great mountains remained his greatest disappointment – ‘nothing in my life has filled me with a more intense regret.’
He also encouraged artists to travel to the remote corners of the globe, helping them to secure funding, suggesting routes and sometimes complaining when they failed to follow his recommendations. His instructions were exact and detailed. One German artist was equipped with a long list of plants that Humboldt had asked him to paint. He was to depict ‘real landscapes’, Humboldt wrote, rather than idealized scenes as artists had done for the past centuries. He even described where exactly the painter should position himself on a mountain in order to capture the best view.
He wrote hundreds of letters of recommendation. And whenever a letter of support from Humboldt arrived at its destination, the ‘business of deciphering’ began. His handwriting – impossible ‘microscopic-hieroglyphic lines’, as he himself admitted – had always been appalling but with age it deteriorated further. Letters were passed between friends, with each one decrypting another word, phrase or sentence. Even when magnifying glasses were applied to his tiny scrawl, it often took days to work out what Humboldt had written.
In return Humboldt received even more letters. In the mid-1850s, he estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 letters arrived each year. His apartment in Oranienburger Straße, he complained, had become a trading place for addresses. He didn’t mind the scientific letters but he was pestered by what he called his ‘ludicrous correspondence’ – midwives and schoolteachers who hoped for royal medals, for example, or autograph hunters and even a group of women who pursued his ‘conversion’ to their particular religious denomination. He received enquiries about hot-air balloons, requests for help with emigration and ‘offers to nurse me’.