The Invention of Nature (36 page)

Humboldt was in charge of the general overview, while his helpers provided the specific data and information he needed. He had the cosmic perspective and they were the tools in his grand scheme. Intensely meticulous about accuracy, Humboldt always consulted several experts about each subject. His thirst for facts was insatiable – from questioning a missionary in China about the Chinese dislike of dairy products to querying another correspondent about the number of palm species in Nepal. It was his obsession, he admitted, ‘to pursue one and the same object until I can explain it’. He dispatched thousands of letters and questioned visitors. A young novelist who had recently returned from Algiers, for example, was terrified when Humboldt bombarded him with enquiries about rocks, plants and strata of which he knew absolutely nothing. Humboldt could be relentless. ‘This time you won’t escape,’ he told another visitor, for ‘I have to plunder you.’

As his contacts responded, waves of knowledge and data rolled towards Berlin. Each month new material arrived that had to be read, understood, sorted and integrated. The work expanded as Humboldt went along. With the ever increasing flood of knowledge, he explained to his publisher, ‘the material grows under my hands’. Cosmos was ‘a kind of impossible enterprise’, Humboldt admitted.

The only way to handle all this data was to be perfectly organized about the research. Humboldt collected his material in boxes which were divided by envelopes into different subjects. Whenever he received a letter, he cut out the important information and placed it in the relevant envelope together with any other scraps of material that might be useful – newspaper cuttings, pages from books, pieces of paper on which he scribbled a few numbers, a quotation or a little drawing. In one such box, for example, which was filled with material related to geology, Humboldt kept tables of mountain heights, maps, lecture notes, remarks from his old acquaintance Charles Lyell, a map of Russia by another British geologist, as well as engravings of fossils and information from classicists on geology from ancient Greece. The advantage of this system was that he could collect materials for years, and when it came to writing, all he needed was to grab the relevant box or the envelope. As untidy as he was in his study or chaotic about his finances, when it came to his research Humboldt was unremittingly exact.

Sometimes he scribbled ‘very important’ on a particular note or ‘important, to follow up in Cosmos’. At other times he glued pieces of paper with his own thoughts on to a letter, or tore out a page from a relevant book. One box might contain newspaper articles, a dried piece of moss and a list of plants from the Himalaya. Other boxes included an envelope evocatively entitled ‘Luftmeer’ – air ocean, which was Humboldt’s beautiful term for the atmosphere – as well as materials on antiquity, long tables of temperatures, and a page with citations about crocodiles and elephants found in Hebrew poetry. There were boxes on slavery, meteorology, astronomy and botany among many others. No one but Humboldt, a fellow scientist claimed, could so dexterously tie together so many ‘loose ends’ of scientific research into one great knot.

Usually Humboldt was gracious about the assistance he received, but once in a while he let his famously malicious tongue rule. Johann Franz Encke, the director of the observatory in Berlin, for example, was treated rather unfairly. Encke worked particularly hard, spending many weeks collecting astronomical data for Cosmos. In return, though, Humboldt told a colleague that Encke ‘had become frozen like a glacier in his mother’s womb’. Nor did Humboldt spare his brother the occasional barb. When Wilhelm tried to help his brother’s precarious financial situation by suggesting him as the director of a new museum in Berlin, Alexander was outraged. The position was below his standing and reputation, Alexander told his brother, and he had certainly not left Paris to become the director of a mere ‘picture gallery’.

Humboldt had become used to admiration and flattery. The many young men who gathered around him formed something like his own ‘royal court’, one of the Berlin University professors noted. When Humboldt entered a room it was as if everything was recalibrated and the centre changed – ‘all turned to him’. In silent reverence, these young men listened to Humboldt’s every syllable. He was the greatest attraction Berlin had to offer and he took it for granted that he was the focus of attention. No one was ever able to interject a single word when Humboldt spoke, one German writer complained. His penchant for talking incessantly had become so legendary that the French writer Honoré de Balzac immortalized Humboldt in a comical sketch that featured a brain stored in a jar from which people extracted ideas, and a ‘certain Prussian savant known for the unfailing fluidity of his speech’.

One young pianist who had considered an invitation to play for Humboldt a great honour quickly discovered that the old man could be very rude (and that he had no interest in music whatsoever). As the pianist began to play, there was a moment of silence but then Humboldt continued to talk so loudly that no one could listen to the music. He was lecturing the audience as he always did and as the pianist played his crescendos and fortes, Humboldt raised his voice in tandem, always outdoing the music. ‘It was a duet,’ the pianist said, ‘which I did not sustain long.’

Humboldt remained an enigma for many. On the one hand he could be haughty, but at the same time he humbly admitted that he needed to learn more. The students at the University of Berlin were astounded to see the old man shuffle into the auditorium with his folder tucked under his arm – not to present a lecture but to listen to one of the young professors. Humboldt attended lectures on Greek literature to catch up on what he had missed during his own education, he said. As he was writing Cosmos, he followed the latest scientific developments by watching the experiments conducted by a chemistry professor and by listening to geologist Carl Ritter’s lectures. Quietly, always sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the auditorium, near the window, Humboldt took notes just like the young students next to him. No matter how bad the weather was, the old man always came. Humboldt was only absent when the king requested his presence, leaving the students to tease that ‘Alexander is skipping lectures today because he’s having tea with the king.’

The university in Berlin which Wilhelm von Humboldt had founded in 1810 and where Alexander von Humboldt attended lectures (Illustration Credit 18.1)

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’. One of the main consolations of his life there was Wilhelm. Over the past years the two brothers had become close, spending as much time together as possible. After Caroline’s death in spring 1829, Wilhelm had withdrawn to Tegel, but Alexander had visited whenever he could. Only two years older than Alexander, Wilhelm was ageing fast. He seemed older than sixty-seven, and had grown increasingly weaker. He was blind in one eye, his hands shook so badly that he couldn’t write any more and his painfully thin body stooped. Then, in late March 1835, Wilhelm caught a fever after visiting Caroline’s grave in Tegel’s park. Alexander spent the next days at his brother’s bedside. They talked about death and Wilhelm’s wish to be buried next to Caroline. On 3 April Alexander read one of Friedrich Schiller’s poems to his brother. Five days later, Wilhelm died with Alexander at his side.

Bereft, Humboldt felt lonely and abandoned. ‘I never had believed that these old eyes had so many tears left,’ he wrote to an old friend. With Wilhelm’s death, he had lost his family and, as he said, ‘half of myself’. One line in a letter to his French publisher summed up his feelings: ‘Pity me; I am the unhappiest of men.’

Humboldt felt miserable in Berlin. ‘Everything is bleak around me, so bleak,’ he wrote a year after Wilhelm’s death. Luckily one of the employment conditions that he had negotiated with the king allowed Humboldt to travel to Paris every year for a few months in order to collect the latest research for Cosmos. The thought of Paris was the only thing that cheered him up, he admitted.

In Paris, he easily fell back into his rhythm of intense work, networking and evening entertainments. After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’, as Humboldt called it – he worked all day and in the evening went on his usual tour of salons until 2 a.m. He visited scientists across town – prodding and poking to learn about their latest discoveries. As much as Paris stimulated him, he always dreaded his return to Berlin, that ‘dancing carnivalesque necropolis’. Each visit to Paris expanded Humboldt’s international network and each return to Berlin was accompanied by trunks filled with new material that needed to be incorporated into Cosmos. But with each discovery, new measurement or bit of data, the publication of Cosmos was delayed yet again.

It didn’t help that in Berlin Humboldt had to juggle his scientific life with his court duties. His financial situation remained difficult and he needed his chamberlain salary. He was required to follow the king’s every move from one castle to another. The king’s favourite palace was Sanssouci in Potsdam about twenty miles from Humboldt’s apartment in Berlin. For Humboldt it meant travelling with the twenty to thirty boxes of material that he needed to write Cosmos – his ‘mobile resources’, as he called them. Some days it seemed he spent more time on the road than anywhere else: ‘yesterday Pfaueninsel, tea at Charlottenburg, comedy and dinner at Sanssouci, today Berlin, tomorrow to Potsdam’ was not an unusual routine. Humboldt felt like a planet moving along its orbital path, always in motion, never stopping.

His court obligations took up too much of his time. He had to join the king for meals and had to read to him, while his evenings were filled with the king’s private correspondence. When Friedrich Wilhelm III died in June 1840, his son and successor Friedrich Wilhelm IV demanded even more time from his chamberlain. The new king called him affectionately ‘my best Alexandros’ and used him as his ‘dictionary’, as a visitor at court observed, because Humboldt was always at hand to answer questions on topics as varied as the different heights of mountains, the history of Egypt or the geography of Africa. He furnished the king with notes on the size of the biggest diamonds ever found, the time difference between Paris and Berlin (44 minutes), dates of important reigns and the salary of Turkish soldiers. He also advised the king on what to buy for the royal collections and library as well as suggesting explorations to be funded – often appealing to his royal master’s competitive spirit, reminding him not to be outdone by other countries.

Subtly, Humboldt also attempted to exert some influence – ‘as much as I can, but like an atmosphere’ – although the king was interested neither in social reforms nor European politics. Prussia was going backwards, Humboldt said, much like William Parry, the British explorer who had believed that he was marching towards the North Pole when in reality he was drifting away from it on the moving ice.

Most evenings it was midnight before Humboldt arrived at his small flat in Oranienburger Straße which was a little less than a mile north of the king’s city palace, the Stadtschloss. Even here, though, he didn’t get the peace he needed. Visitors were constantly ringing the bell, Humboldt complained, almost as if his flat were a ‘liquor store’. To get any writing done, he had to work through half the night. ‘I don’t go to bed before 2.30am,’ Humboldt assured his publisher who had begun to doubt that Cosmos would ever be finished. Again and again Humboldt postponed the publication because he constantly found new material that he wanted to include.

In March 1841, more than six years after he had first declared his intention to publish Cosmos, Humboldt promised – but once again failed – to send the manuscript for the first volume. He jokingly warned his publisher of the danger of getting ‘involved with people who are half fossilised’, but he would not be rushed. Cosmos was too important, he insisted, his ‘most scrupulous work’.

Once in a while, when Humboldt became too frustrated, he left his manuscripts and books unopened on his desk and drove the two miles to the new observatory which he had helped to establish after his return to Berlin. As he peered through the large telescope into the night sky, the universe unfolded – here was his cosmos in all its glory. He saw the dark craters on the moon, colourful double stars that seemed to flash their light at him and distant nebulae scattered across the vault of heaven. This new telescope brought Saturn closer than he had ever seen it, the rings looking as if someone had painted them. These snatched moments of intense beauty, he told his publisher, inspired him to continue.

During those years when he was writing the first volume of Cosmos, Humboldt went to Paris several times, but in 1842 he also accompanied Friedrich Wilhelm IV to England for the christening of the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) at Windsor Castle. The visit was a rushed affair of less than two weeks, Humboldt complained, with little time for scientific matters. He couldn’t even squeeze in a visit to the observatory in Greenwich nor to the botanic garden at Kew, but he did manage to meet Charles Darwin.

Humboldt had asked the geologist Roderick Murchison, an old acquaintance from Paris, to organize a gathering. Murchison was happy to oblige, even though it was the hunting season and he would be ‘losing the best shooting of the year’. The date was set for 29 January. Nervous and excited about being introduced to Humboldt, Darwin left home early that morning, rushing to Murchison’s house in Belgrave Square, just a few hundred yards behind Buckingham Palace in London. Darwin had so much to ask and discuss. He was working on his evolutionary theory and was still thinking about plant distribution and species migration.

In the past Humboldt had used his ideas about plant distribution to discuss the possible connection between Africa and South America but he had also talked of barriers, such as deserts or mountain ranges, that stopped the movement of plants. He had written about tropical bamboo that had been found ‘buried in the ice-covered lands in the north’, arguing that the planet had changed and so too had plant distribution.