The Invention of Nature

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