The Invention of Nature

The next morning in Germany, tens of thousands of mourners followed Humboldt’s state funeral procession from his apartment along Unter den Linden to Berlin Cathedral. Black flags fluttered in the wind and the streets were lined with people. The king’s horses pulled the hearse with the simple oak coffin which was decorated with two wreaths and escorted by students who carried palm leaves. It was the grandest funeral that the citizens of Berlin had ever seen for a private individual. University professors and members of the Academy of the Sciences came, as did soldiers, diplomats and politicians. There were craftsmen, tradesmen, shopkeepers, artists, poets, actors and writers. As the hearse slowly progressed, Humboldt’s relatives and their families followed with his servant Johann Seifert. The line of mourners stretched for a mile. Church bells rang through the streets and the royal family waited in Berlin Cathedral for the final goodbyes. That night the coffin was brought to Tegel where Humboldt was buried in the family cemetery.

The Humboldt family grave at Schloss Tegel (Illustration Credit 20.4)

When the steamer that carried the news of Humboldt’s death reached the United States in mid-May, thinkers, artists and scientists alike grieved. It was as if he had ‘lost a friend’, Frederic Edwin Church said. One of Humboldt’s former protégés, the scientist Louis Agassiz, delivered a eulogy to the Academy of Art and Sciences in Boston during which he claimed that every child in America’s schools had its mind fed ‘from the labors of Humboldt’s brain’. On 19 May 1859 newspapers across America reported the death of the man whom many called the ‘most remarkable’ ever born. They had been lucky to have lived in what they now called the ‘age of Humboldt’.

For the next few decades Humboldt’s reputation continued to loom large. On 14 September 1869 tens of thousands of people celebrated the centennial of his birth with festivities around the globe – in New York and Berlin, in Mexico City and Adelaide, and countless others. More than twenty years after Humboldt’s death, Darwin still called him the ‘greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’. Darwin never stopped using Humboldt’s books. In 1881, aged seventy-two, he picked up the third volume of Personal Narrative once again. When he was done, Darwin wrote ‘April 3rd 1882 finished’ on the back cover. Sixteen days later, on 19 April, he too was dead.

Darwin was not alone in admiring Humboldt’s works. Humboldt had scattered the ‘seeds’ from which new sciences grew, one German scientist claimed. Humboldt’s concept of nature also spread across disciplines – into the arts and literature. His ideas seeped into the poems of Walt Whitman and into the novels of Jules Verne. Aldous Huxley referred to Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain in his own travel book, Beyond the Mexique Bay, in 1934, and in the mid-twentieth century his name appeared in the poems of Ezra Pound and Erich Fried. One hundred and thirty years after Humboldt’s death, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez resurrected him in The General in his Labyrinth, his fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar.

For many, Humboldt was, as the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV had said, simply ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’.

¹ The origin of the German colours black, red and gold is not entirely clear but a particularly independently minded group of Prussian soldiers who had fought against Napoleon’s army between 1813 and 1815 had worn black uniforms with red facings and golden brass buttons. Later, when radical student fraternities were banned in many German states, the colours became a symbol for the fight for unity and liberty. The 1848 revolutionaries used them widely and the colours would later be adopted for the German flag.

² Humboldt liked Americans and always welcomed them warmly. ‘To be an American was an almost certain passport to his presence,’ one visitor recalled. There was a saying in Berlin that the liberal Humboldt would rather receive an American than a prince.

³ Only two years later, in August 1858, the first telegraphic message between England and the United States was exchanged through the first transatlantic cable – but within a month the cable failed. It would take until 1866 to lay a new working line.

⁴ There was nothing Humboldt could do about the United States, but he succeeded in getting a law passed that freed slaves the moment they set foot on Prussian soil – one of his few political achievements. The draft bill was completed in November 1856, and was passed into law in March 1857.

21

Man and Nature

George Perkins Marsh and Humboldt