Both men were German-American Romantics. Both followed Goethe and Humboldt in affirming—in Strecker’s words—“that all that is great and sublime in nature and art is more or less intimately connected” and that beauty was an elemental feature of the natural world, not contingent but basic. Strecker believed that Humboldt “far exceeds in rank all of earth’s potentates, of whom a monarch of Europe once said, ‘Der grösste Mann seit Noah’ [‘The greatest man since Noah’].”8 Grote’s awareness of the relationships among all natural phenomena derived in large part from Humboldt. He practiced “aesthetic entomology,” a discipline rooted in German traditions.9 “Entomology,” he wrote in 1886, “combines Art and Science in a peculiarly seductive manner. Even in flowers we have no more beautiful patterns and colors. Tints which we do not find in Art often brought together, are here harmoniously blended.”10 He considered “the larger species” of moths “the most beautiful objects one can wish to see.”11 Grote and Strecker also shared a Sehnsucht characteristic of the German lyrical tradition, Grote expressing his literally in his own poetry, and Strecker in his lifelong craving of butterflies. “I have such a terrible Sehnsucht,” he would say to his friends, meaning literally longing (das Sehnen) to addiction (die Sucht), but more poetically a “heart yearning” for some unreachable object, an exotic butterfly or rare moth.12
To a degree matching the British influence, the German Romantic naturalist outlook had an impact on all American naturalists, not merely on the Germans who came to American shores. William Henry Edwards owed a lot to such men as Weidemeyer, Akhurst, and Morris, and he also absorbed Humboldt’s Personal Narrative before retracing Humboldt’s trail down the Orinoco. Scudder got his feel for instruments of measurement and exploration and for the kindred affinities of all natural phenomena directly from German-trained Louis Agassiz, who, in turn, got them in part from Humboldt, his own great hero. Before the Civil War and for some time after it, many American naturalists—perhaps the majority—believed that the study of art and science were not only compatible but should be integrated. In places like Philadelphia and Boston, many an evangelist preached the aesthetic distinctiveness of nature—Titian Peale for one, Audubon, for another.13 At the same time, in the early 1870s, Grote and Strecker felt a stronger loyalty to German Romanticism than did most of their contemporaries. Romanticism helped bring them together, as did their desire to make major contributions to the American science of butterflies and moths. And they, too, had to meet the European charge that America really had no unique species of its own and not much by way of a science of butterflies, either.
Herman Strecker was besotted with the beauty of butterflies. He was an antinomian of butterflies, willing to break laws to capture the fire inside the wings. The family religion was Lutheranism, but he had no interest in it or in any church. Neighbors knew him in his maturity as a “blatant agnostic,” and sometimes, in jest, he called himself “one of the Devil’s favorite children.”14 He was born on March 24, 1836, in Philadelphia, the son of an expert stone carver, Ferdinand Strecker, who, the year before, had immigrated from Stuttgart, the home of many artists and artisans, among them Herman’s uncle Wilhelm and his two daughters, “artist-painters by choice,” who remained in Germany, where they practiced a venerable European tradition that connected a variety of visual expertise—from glass and window design in churches and cathedrals to skilled drawing using brush and color—to nature study, including of lepidoptera.15 Herman’s mother, Anna Kern, was a second-generation German-American, the daughter of the deputy collector of the port of Philadelphia, with three brothers, Benjamin, Richard, and Edward, explorers who joined John Frémont on his missions to the Far West. Edward and Richard Kern excelled as artists, were self-taught in topography and in the use of instruments of exploration, and were able to identify a wide range of plants and animals.16 Yet despite these enticing uncles, whom he admired but would never meet, Strecker himself had mostly a “dreary” childhood with no close or loving kin. “At the death of my parents,” he wrote later in life, “we all scattered—brothers and sisters—one to California, another down South and so on, and for years I have heard no word, none having had any sympathy in common with the other.”17
Herman Strecker. Courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois.
When Herman was eleven, his father abruptly moved the family—Herman and two brothers and two sisters—from Philadelphia to Reading, Pennsylvania, a tinier world where he might stake a bigger claim. He built a marble business. He made Herman an apprentice stone carver and then a full carver, or Bildhauer (maker of images), work he would do all his life, usually under other master stone carvers, except for a brief time after his father died in 1856, when he owned his own business.18 “I make my living,” he told a friend, “by sculpturing statues, monuments, and other memorials for the dead.”19 He specialized, as he put it, in cutting marble angels for children’s graves. He took pride in the work, but it was demanding, exhausting, and dirty. He sometimes dropped heavy marble on his feet or got flint in his eyes.20 At the same time, he did artistic pieces of high quality, such as diminutive illuminated color pictures, inspired by medieval prototypes and only fully viewable with a hand lens, which he sold in the Philadelphia art market.21 In 1867 Joseph Drexel, a prosperous commercial banker in Philadelphia and an avid butterfly collector, and his wife, Lucy, commissioned the young Strecker to sculpt a bas-relief of Poe’s raven for their new home, urging him to “do something better than tombing.”22 Strecker would also make a special art out of his butterflies, sketching and coloring pictures of them to integrate into what became one of the most provocative catalogs on lepidoptera ever done by an American.
He started collecting at five. His father tried to beat it out of him with a strap, but he stood his ground, befriending a Philadelphian taxidermist, Charles Wood, popularly known as the “butterfly man,” who taught him about lepidoptera and later sold him butterflies as well as stuffed birds and birds’ eggs, which Strecker collected with the same fervor as had William Henry Edwards.23 Christian Sproesser, a chronically drunk German apprentice of Strecker’s father, in a sober moment gently placed in young Herman’s hands a small board on which was pinned a moth specimen of Catocala amatrix, vernacularly called the “sweetheart underwing.” (The genus name is Greek for “beauty,” the species Latin for “mistress”; together, “mistress of beauty.”) Strecker rotated it around in his hand, marveling at its long gray forewings and hind wings slashed with scarlet; he treated Sproesser to lemonade (but the apprentice wanted more beer) and always remembered him. “If living, I hope he is well,” Strecker later reflected, “or, if dead, has gone to where he belongs. For all have had their day/the grave and the gay,/Then blow to the devil and vanish away.”24 Sometimes, too, along the docks of the port where his grandfather worked, Strecker would get to see the many boxes of butterflies from China, brought by merchant ships from the port city of Canton. They “seemed to come over in loads” and “sometimes with good things in them,” he would later say.25
Strecker never got beyond grammar school and, unlike the Yankees Edwards and Scudder, never had a natural history course, but Philadelphia was the mecca for natural history in America up to the 1850s and the home of its first natural history society, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812. At ten already a seasoned butterfly collector, Herman visited the academy’s basement library, admitted by a curator, Joseph Leidy, and gawked at the butterfly pictures in the mighty catalogs from England and Europe, among them Pieter Cramer’s Papillons Exotiques (1779), Edward Donovan’s The Epitome of the Natural History of Insects of India (1800), Jacob Hübner’s Sammlung exotischer Schmetterlinge (1806), and Dru Drury’s Illustrations of Exotic Entomology (London, 1770, 1837). Each had hand-painted illustrations—in Donovan, the iridescent blue Papilio ulysses; in Drury, the “exceedingly rare” Papilio antimachus, which proved to be the largest butterfly in Africa; in Hübner, an exquisitely drawn and colored South American Morpho ac
hilles; and, most stunning of all, in Cramer, the iridescent gold-and-green Ornithoptera priamus (Latin for the “first birdwing,” called such because it looked like a bird when European collectors first saw it, high up in the forest canopy). The earliest known of all the birdwings of southeast Asia, priamus was “the Ur-birdwing” of the entire genus. Strecker may have actually seen it years before he visited the academy’s library, when he was only five years old, and it would become his lodestar, sinking into his consciousness, always there to be savored, as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world.
Today, photographs of butterflies—and of other natural forms—have become so seductive as to sometimes serve as substitutes for the real things, interrupting or even blocking contact with the living natural world, a counter-world against which the real one is measured or ignored. In the nineteenth century, pictures were more often allies of contact, inspiring the collector or explorer to pursue nature. Humboldt was perhaps the first modern naturalist to recognize the way pictures of nature drew people into nature (in his case, landscape pictures). “By showing all the diversity of form of the external world,” he wrote in his Cosmos, “landscape painting incites men to a free communion with nature.” Strecker probably knew and understood this passage well. “Great God what a Heaven opened to me!” he later wrote of his time in the basement library. “How I gazed wonder-struck on [these insects] depicted by the old authors, never dreaming that I should ever become the happy possessor of such treasures.”26 The pictures exposed him to the aesthetic-sensual core of natural history, and with enough primal force to make him “think of nothing else, dream of nothing else,” for the rest of his life.27
In Reading, Herman hunted butterflies in neighborhood fields and especially on Neversink Mountain, a perfect natural paradise of living things for boys and girls, rising only nine hundred feet but covering many hundreds of acres, with evergreens at the top and dense vegetation, streambeds, and the Klapperthal Glen at the bottom, the whole of it “undeveloped” until the railroads were driven through in the 1890s, bringing the vacation hotels.28 Memorable butterflies and moths were everywhere, and sometimes Strecker took an ally with him, Russell Robinson, and the two would collect together. Robinson was a grandson of the engineer who built the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, the full line completed in 1839, among the first such roads in the country. Strecker “fired” him up “with the collecting zeal,” according to Robinson’s grandson Wirt Robinson, and the two became buddies—Herman, at sixteen, the individual in charge, and Russell, at ten or so, an apprentice assistant. Their paths would diverge, then cross again at the end of their lives.29
In the early 1850s, still in his teens, Strecker ran off to Mexico and Central America and, for a month or so, rejoiced in fantastic Aztec temples and unknown butterflies, heightening his already refined sense of the exotic. Back in Reading, he slipped the bounds further and may have fathered children out of wedlock, alienating his parents as well as his two sisters; after they married and returned to Philadelphia to live, neither sister had anything to do with him. In 1855, he began courting a Louisa Roy in nearby Altoona, Pennsylvania. Even Strecker’s mother warned her against marrying such a “crazy man.” He did look bizarre, apparently, with his high brow, long neck and torso, irregular beard, and brown, gentle, bespectacled eyes, glittering with energy. In a letter to Louisa, fuming with grievances, Strecker called his mother “a devil spirit” for messing in his affairs; defiant, he married Louisa in 1856, the year his father died, and his mother left Reading for Philadelphia to join her daughters.30 Strecker’s marriage was passionate but blighted, beginning with the deaths of two baby boys and ending with Louisa’s death, from malaria or miscarriage, on the same day in 1869 that his mother died. (Samuel Scudder lost his own wife around the same time, and so, too, would Strecker’s fellow German-American Augustus Grote.) Strecker was now alone, wifeless, childless, and kinless. As he said to a friend, “I am an isolated old fellow”—he was only thirty-four when he wrote this—“with no family or ties whatever.”31 Although matters of death and disease were constants in Strecker’s life, he wrote of them seldom, and when he did, only offhandedly, as if they concerned no one.32 The effect of it all was to propel him decisively into his collection, where he stayed, his erotic energies radiating mainly through the butterflies, despite a new marriage two years later, this time to a practical “hausfrau” from Prussia; two children were born, and both survived.33
Around the time of his second marriage, Strecker began to follow a daily regime that would last until he died. “I get up at 6 a.m.,” he told a friend, “dress, eat, go to the Post Office”; then “I work at the shop cutting marble angels, etc., until 1 o’clock—to the Post Office, eat dinner, write letters, back to the shop at 2 p.m.”34 The U.S. Post Office in Reading was to him what Paint Creek and the White Mountains were to William Henry Edwards and Samuel Scudder: the source of his butterflies, sent by hundreds of people from around the country and the world; without it, his butterfly life would have died. At six p.m. he went home from the marble yard and his shop to begin the rest of his ritual regime, climaxing between eight or nine and midnight, when he turned wholly to his “things of endless joy,” pursuing them with the fervor of a crazed monk.35 If the day often felt like night, with all the dead children to sculpt for, the real night was alive. Here, groggy and worn out in his butterfly room, Strecker examined the packages from the post office, arranged his insects, wrote his letters (usually unpunctuated and unedited, flushed out of his brain like mere smears on the page), and read those sent to him, many thousands over the years, from all sorts and classes of people, united by a common delight in butterflies.
“Mine has been such a life of ups and downs,” Strecker wrote a friend in 1872, “that I take things rather philosophically, for after all there is in our favorite science a balm for all worldly ills, and when night comes and I can get to my butterflies, cities and nations may rise and fall for all I care.” Three months later: “What a life of pain, toil, and trouble this is, in my own case. Were it not for the butterflies, it would have been indeed almost ‘one drear night long’ but the delight to be found in the study of nature compensates for the many miseries.” And two years later: “my circumstances are wretched now, but I don’t want to complain, as the powers that be allow me more pleasure with my beloved butterflies, than most men could have with their money.”36
He differed from Edwards and Scudder not only in his lack of privilege and formal education but on account of his unbuttoned Sehnsucht. “Unusual in that he was interested in everything,” as a friend said of him, he wanted both moths and butterflies—“omnium,” he said, no distinctions.37 He loved butterflies principally because of their beauty and specialized, therefore, in the adult insect. “I only care for the perfect butterfly or moth,” he wrote a fellow butterfly man, “and do not want ova or caterpillars.”38 Unlike the others, he wanted exotic insects as well as American ones, a taste he nursed as a boy when he kept a loosely bound notebook, recording the names and habits of moths and butterflies, American and foreign.39 Thus: “Papilio swallowtails are first class diurnal Lepidoptera. The larvae have sixteen feet. Chrysalides are always naked and attached by tail and commonly angular.” Or: “There are about 250 species distributed over all the world” (but this was the 1850s, and some 530 species were known, so Strecker was off by 280). The notebook contained his drawings based on butterflies he may have seen in Mexico and Central America (or in pictures), such as one of his favorites, the morphos of Brazil, “a magnificent genus in which the superior surface of the wings is invariably of some shade of brilliant blue and the under surface is generally dark and invariably ornamented with numerous ocelli” (or eyespots).40
Around 1870 Strecker began systematic collecting, at the very time when Edwards and Scudder had launched their own investigations (Strecker did not fight in the Civil War; why I do not know). In a few years he had “an immense collection of Lepidoptera,” upwards of thirty thousand specime
ns, patched together mostly through exchanges that stretched throughout the country and abroad. He was no longer isolated in Reading, as a host of naturalists —including Samuel Scudder and Theodore Mead—traveled the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad to see his acquisitions.41 He exchanged as well as bought and sold for cash with others via his post office, strategies that brought him in contact with butterfly people from San Francisco to Dresden, Germany.
Buying and selling outright was always treacherous for Strecker, forcing him to walk a fine moral line, as well as to deny himself everything else, including food (after his first wife died, he didn’t mind this suffering; things changed a bit once he remarried).42 He dreamed (it was only a dream) of never going into debt and never buying on credit in lieu of cash payment. The better way was to dispense with money altogether by exchanging his insects for the insects of others, so long as he gave as much as he took; if it turned out he didn’t, then he had to face the heat and, sometimes, the moral fury of others, but at least money was not directly at stake, something he feared and could not easily finesse. Nevertheless, changes in the character of the economy, coupled with his appetite for the exotic and tropical, made it harder and harder for him to escape money transactions. In 1876, Strecker’s friend George Hulst, a “beginner” collector longing for specimens from the “far West and pacific Coast,” urged Strecker to “sell on the ‘one price’ system, so there can be no occasion for haggling.”43 But how did one set a standard price for a butterfly? Increasingly, as a result of the rise and development of the railroad and of faster ocean transportation, one could get lepidoptera from great distances, and Strecker found market forces inescapable, though at every step they compromised his quest for beauty, whose value transcended price. “The law of supply and demand,” he would later write, “regulates the prices” under conditions where “there is no set value; a species that you may get today for a dollar may be worth, in a week, five, or what may be five today may in a short while fall to one.”44 In any case, all prices offended many naturalists; they refused payment for nature’s progeny, viewing monetary transactions as inherently degrading. “Buying seems like desecration,” wrote H. Landis, a German-American physician from Columbus, Ohio, to Strecker, “when compared to catching butterflies in one’s own net.”45
Butterfly People Page 9