Man of the Cosmos

Wulf relates that when Humboldt wrote his multivolume masterwork, Cosmos (the “opus of my life”), he relied on a system of boxes with envelopes, each of which contained important letters, annotated by Humboldt himself, pages ripped from books, maps, and other related material. It was a mystery to his friends how his books emerged from such chaos. The unsung heroes of Humboldt’s life are, to my mind, the printers who transformed his hieroglyphs into some of the most glorious works of natural history writing ever published.

When I was working on a biography of the Swiss-American scientist Louis Agassiz, one of Humboldt’s many disciples, I spent hours poring over the latter’s letters in archives. I remember the overwhelming feeling of happiness that took hold of me, as if I had just partaken of a great mystery, when first single letters, then words, then entire sentences emerged from what had originally seemed like an abstract pattern of tiny tracks, as if a small bird had stepped into an inkwell and then performed a madcap dance on the page. Since I had worked so hard to gather their meaning, each of these letters became a precious possession, something I would carry with me for days afterwards. The Humboldt who spoke in these letters was not the man Wulf paints for us, relying mostly on his brother Wilhelm’s and his sister-in-law’s characterizations: insatiable in his thirst for knowledge, oblivious in his personal relationships, and so obsessed with nature that he didn’t mind his loneliness.

“Your glaciers make me shudder,” he told the much younger Agassiz when the latter was spending too much time high up in the Bernese Alps. A creature of the equator, Humboldt was appalled by the mere thought of spending one’s days surrounded by ice. But what he really meant was a different kind of coldness, one that resided inside Agassiz: If he didn’t return home soon, to his family and to his original work—Agassiz was studying fossil fish when he became interested in the movements of glaciers—Humboldt would begin to haunt him, reincarnated as one of Agassiz’s neglected specimens. Be a father to your family, he said to Agassiz, rather than to your students—poignant, tender, moving words coming from someone who never had children himself. No one in Agassiz’s life had ever spoken to him that way, and no one would ever again. (Agassiz didn’t listen, and his wife left him.)

Humboldt’s fame encompassed the world: Mountains, towns, bays, and a river (over 300 miles long, with lots of fish in it, as Humboldt joked), at least three universities, schools, and a dozen species were named after him. Today, contends Wulf, we barely remember him or what he did—a puzzling statement, given that one of the world’s largest academic exchange foundations, with a network of more than 25,000 alumni, is named after him. So many biographies of Humboldt were written during the last 150 years that the Dutch historian Nicolaas Rupke recently published what he called Humboldt’s “metabiography,” a study of the many different versions of the German scientist that had been invented since his death.

Perhaps the problem with remembering Humboldt is that he is not associated with a specific discovery, an iconic moment or powerful story that would define him, like Isaac Newton watching the apple fall or Charles Darwin hopping around on the Galápagos, bagging his finches. Humboldt remains a mystery, even in Wulf’s often-vivid re-creation. Here was a man who barely slept and nevertheless remained hale and hearty well into his old age, who talked incessantly but remained silent about his own personal life, who claimed that he had no need for intimacy yet left us with some of the most sensual descriptions of tropical nature we have.

A hard worker, he would tour the Berlin salons till 2 a.m. and still have enough energy the next morning to resume his writing. Humboldt had seen the world, from Lima to Tobolsk; but back in Berlin, as the Prussian king’s loyal chamberlain, he would follow his ruler around like a child and read to him during meals. When Darwin met him in London, at the house of the geologist Roderick Murchison, Humboldt held forth for three hours. (“The old man just talked too much,” as Wulf acidly observes.) If only the two men had connected that day. During the 1848 unrest in Berlin, Humboldt appeared on the balcony behind his ruler when Friedrich Wilhelm IV surveyed the revolutionaries gathered below. The next day, he led a funeral procession for those who had been killed by the king’s troops.

Readers who expect new revelations about these paradoxes from this biography—which, in its citations, relies largely on published sources—will be disappointed. Wulf only lightly touches on the vexed subject of Humboldt’s sexual orientation, which greatly interested even his contemporaries, taking at face value Humboldt’s own assurances (to his brother and sister-in-law) that he was not the marrying kind and that there was nothing strange about the fact that his associates were buff young men. The Invention of Nature is most effective as a reminder of what a glorious writer Humboldt was. For, as it turns out, the most compelling passages here are paraphrases of Humboldt’s own writings.

Who can forget the alligators lurking on the shores of the Orinoco, the Venezuelan pond filled with electric eels, or Humboldt’s laborious ascent of Chimborazo, when he and his men, dizzy with altitude sickness, their eyes bloodshot and gums oozing blood, were reduced to crawling on all fours? Their fingers frozen into immobility, they nevertheless set up their instruments every few hundred feet, measuring the humidity and temperature at different altitudes. I would have liked to be the proverbial fly—or given the setting, more likely mosquito—on the wall when, in Miass on the southern slope of the Ural Mountains, Humboldt celebrated his 60th birthday with the man whose grandson would be Vladimir Lenin. (Wulf doesn’t tell us that her source for that story, the editor of a volume about Humboldt’s Russian travels, only thinks that such an encounter would have taken place.)

Among the many delights are the quotations taken directly from Humboldt’s letters. What a wonderful, vigorous prose stylist he was, even when he wasn’t writing for publication! “Concentrated sunshine,” he called his black coffee, which he drank every morning, and when he organized an international scientific conference in Berlin (500 scientists from all over the world attended) he—a firm believer in the power of volcanoes—described the event as “an eruption of nomadic naturalists.” More touchingly, when his beloved brother Wilhelm, a world-renowned linguist, died and he couldn’t stop crying, Humboldt wrote to a friend that he was amazed that his old eyes had so many tears left in them.

Juxtaposed with Humboldt’s evocative prose, Wulf’s writing seems slack at times. She has a fondness for the verb “adore,” and altogether too many times we hear that something that Humboldt did or thought was “unlike” anything anybody had ever done, thought, or even dreamed of before. But on another level, Wulf’s intermittent tongue-tied status seems oddly appropriate. How, indeed, can one talk properly about a man with such a comprehensive mind, with such encyclopedic interests in the world, people, and places? When Humboldt saw a multivolume dictionary in Agassiz’s garret in Paris, he laughed; why on earth would he need such an “ass’s bridge”? Humboldt had it all in his noodle.

Take the second volume of –Cosmos, a bestseller like the first, which surveys 2,000 years of human interactions with the universe, “the history of the gradual development of the knowledge of the universe as a whole,” in Humboldt’s own words. This was Humboldt’s real subject: the web of life—a metaphor that would captivate the minds of nature writers from Darwin to Rachel Carson—and the ways in which we are entangled in it. Humboldt’s nature was in flux, and so was our knowledge of it. Darwin might not have been able to talk to Humboldt on that night at Professor Murchison’s house; but a throwaway remark Humboldt made about a river he had seen in Siberia—it had plants of Asian origin on one bank and European plants on the other—confirmed to Darwin that he was on the right track in his own thinking about speciation, and that the details he had observed would guide him to an understanding of the whole.

In a sense, it is irrelevant whether or not Humboldt actually slept with his companions. Clearly, his emotional energies were absorbed by men. Even in old age, he would tell his erstwhile companion Aimé Bonpland, far away in Paraguay, how much he missed him; and the octogenarian Bonpland, in turn, was planning a trip to Europe to see Humboldt again. (He died before he could make the journey.) But these intense male relationships also freed Humboldt to think of nature not as a compliant female, something to be possessed, dominated, and destroyed. Wulf properly seeks to reclaim him as the progenitor of modern climate science, as the first to realize the interconnectedness of nature.

Her prime exhibit is the sketch he drew after visiting Chimborazo: a cross-section of the mountain that linked plants and animals at different altitudes to information about the humidity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure associated with these zones. Instead of taxonomic classification, Humboldt encouraged the viewer to understand nature in terms of location and climate. Notes about other mountains widened the comparative angle in which to view each living thing.

Wulf believes that Humboldt has been unfairly obliterated from modern consciousness because of the current compartmentalization of scientific inquiry and, a little less convincingly, because of anti-German sentiment in 20th-century America. She explains that while modern scientists have discarded Humboldt’s unique blend of science and poetry, environmentalists have remained beholden to Humboldt’s discovery of the web of life—though they do not realize it themselves. What are we to do, then? Invoke Humboldt more frequently and more gratefully, as if rendering tribute to him again would help guide us through our environmental predicaments?

The gallery of Humboldt’s heirs, from Henry Thoreau to John Muir, that Wulf attaches to her biography leaves out the more unpalatable of his disciples—such as, precisely, the stubborn anti-evolutionist Agassiz, whom Humboldt loved as his own son. And it deftly sanitizes those who are included. Thoreau resented the Irish-born laborer John Field, who resisted his attempts to reform his life for him. Muir loved Yosemite but cared more for the animals that lived there than for its indigenous human inhabitants, whose uncleanliness appalled him. And Ernst Haeckel’s desire to find aesthetic inspiration in the “art forms of nature” had him bend the scientific evidence more than a couple of times.

Wulf thus draws attention to the pitfalls of using biography to make a point. For her portrait of Humboldt, too, is an idealized, sepia-colored one: For all his talk about the web of science, Humboldt was a creature of his time, and the second volume of Cosmos ends with a paean to the powers of man. Assisted by ever more refined instruments, humans would, Humboldt believed, finally gain complete control over nature, even over the “delicate cells” of organic tissues, as little as was known about them at the time. Now we see through a glass darkly, but soon we shall see and know all, participating in what Humboldt joyfully envisioned as the “animated recognition of the Universe as a whole.”

Now that’s truly inventing nature. However, at the end, and this is the abiding contribution of Wulf’s biography, what sticks with us is not Humboldt the scientist who sought to hold the keys to the universe but the old man who, on his deathbed, delightedly watched the afternoon sunbeams playing on his bedroom wall. Concentrated sunshine, after all.

Christoph Irmscher, provost professor of English at Indiana University, is the author, most recently, of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.