The Invention of Nature

The man who had first instilled these ideas in him was Goethe. Humboldt had not forgotten how much his time in Jena had influenced him and how Goethe’s views of nature had shaped his thinking. That nature and imagination were closely interwoven in his books was the ‘influence of your work on me’, he told Goethe later. In appreciation Humboldt dedicated the Essay on the Geography of Plants to his old friend. The Essay’s frontispiece showed Apollo, the god of poetry, lifting the veil off the goddess of nature. Poetry was necessary to comprehend the mysteries of the natural world. As a return favour, Goethe had Ottilie, one of the main protagonists in his novel Elective Affinities, say, ‘How I should enjoy once hearing Humboldt talk.’

Goethe ‘devoured’ the Essay when he received it in March 1807, and reread the book several times over the next few days. Humboldt’s new concept was so revelatory that Goethe couldn’t wait to talk about it.² He was so inspired that he gave a botanical lecture in Jena based on the Essay two weeks later. ‘With an aesthetic breeze,’ Goethe wrote, Humboldt had lit science into a ‘bright flame’.

Frontispiece of Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants and his dedication to Goethe (Illustration Credit 10.1)

By the time the Essay was published in Germany in early 1807, Humboldt’s plans to return to Paris were shattered. Politics and war had once again interfered. For more than a decade, since the Peace of Basle in April 1795, Prussia had kept clear of the Napoleonic Wars as King Friedrich Wilhelm III had remained determinedly neutral in the tug-of-war that pulled Europe apart. Many had regarded this decision as a weakness and it had gained the king no popularity among the European nations fighting against France. After the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, which had brought about the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon had created the so-called Confederation of the Rhine in the summer of 1806. It was an alliance of sixteen German states with Napoleon as their ‘protector’ which functioned almost like a buffer between France and central Europe but Prussia – which was not part of the Confederation – was increasingly worried about the French encroachment on its territory. Then, in October 1806, after some border skirmishes and French provocations, the Prussians stumbled into a war against France but with no allies to support them. It was a disastrous step.

On 14 October Napoleon’s troops annihilated the Prussian army in two battles at Jena and at Auerstedt. This single day halved the size of Prussia. With Prussia defeated, Napoleon reached Berlin two weeks later. In July 1807, the Prussians signed the Treaty of Tilsit with France, whereby France gained Prussia’s territory west of the River Elbe and parts of the eastern territories. Some of these lands were absorbed into France but Napoleon also created several new states that were independent only in name – such as the Kingdom of Westphalia that was ruled by his brother and bound to France.

The Brandenburg Gate through which Napoleon entered Berlin triumphantly in 1806, after the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt (Illustration Credit 10.2)

Prussia was no longer a major European power. The immense reparations imposed by the French in the Treaty of Tilsit brought the Prussian economy to a standstill. With its much reduced territory, Prussia also lost most of its centres of learning, including its largest and most famous university in Halle which was now part of the new Kingdom of Westphalia. There were only two universities left in Prussia: one in Königsberg which, after Immanuel Kant’s death in 1804, had lost its only famous professor; and the provincial institution Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder in Brandenburg where Humboldt had studied for a semester as an eighteen-year-old.

Humboldt felt ‘buried in the ruins of an unhappy fatherland’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Why did I not stay in the forest at the Orinoco or on the high ridges of the Andes?’ In his misery he turned to writing. In his little garden house in Berlin and surrounded by piles of notes, by his journals from Latin America and books, Humboldt was working on several manuscripts at the same time. But the one that helped him most through this difficult time was Views of Nature.

This would be one of Humboldt’s most widely read books, a bestseller that was eventually published in eleven languages. With Views of Nature, Humboldt created a completely new genre – a book that combined lively prose and rich landscape descriptions with scientific observation in a blueprint for much of nature writing today. Of all the books he would write, this remained Humboldt’s favourite.