The Invention of Nature

In Views of Nature Humboldt conjured up the quiet solitude of Andean mountaintops and the fertility of the rainforest, as well as the magic of a meteor shower and the gruesome spectacle of catching the electric eels in the Llanos. He wrote of the ‘glowing womb of the earth’ and ‘bejewelled’ riverbanks. Here a desert became a ‘sea of sands’, leaves unfolded ‘to greet the rising sun’, and apes filled the jungle with ‘melancholy howlings’. In the mists at the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek – ‘optical magic’, as he called it. Humboldt created poetic vignettes when he wrote of strange insects that ‘poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk upon the turf’.

This was a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism. For Humboldt the prose was as important as the content and he insisted that his publisher was not allowed to change a single syllable lest the ‘melody’ of his sentences would be destroyed. The more detailed scientific explanations – which took up a large part of the book – could be ignored by the general reader because Humboldt tucked them away in the annotations at the end of each chapter.³

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

Views of Nature again described nature as a web of life, with plants and animals dependent on each other – a world teeming with life. Humboldt highlighted the ‘inner connections of natural forces’. He compared the deserts in Africa with the Llanos in Venezuela and the heaths of northern Europe: landscapes far removed from each other but now combined into ‘a single picture of nature’. The lessons that he had begun with his sketch after the ascent of Chimborazo, the Naturgemälde, now became broader. The concept of a Naturgemälde became Humboldt’s approach through which to explain his new vision. His Naturgemälde was not just a drawing any more – it could also be a prose text such as Views of Nature, a scientific lecture, or a philosophical concept.

Views of Nature was a book written against the backdrop of Prussia’s desperate political situation and at a time when Humboldt felt miserable and stranded in Berlin. Humboldt invited his readers to ‘follow me gladly into the thickets of the forest, into the immeasurable steppes, and out upon the spine of the Andes range … In the mountains is freedom!’, transporting them into a magical world far from war and ‘the stormy waves of life’.

This new nature writing was so seductive, Goethe told Humboldt, ‘that I plunged with you into the wildest regions’. Similarly, another acquaintance, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, thought the writing was so extraordinary that ‘you believe you are surfing the waves with him, losing yourself with him in the depths of the woods’. Views of Nature would inspire several generations of scientists and poets over the next decades. Henry David Thoreau read it, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson who declared that Humboldt had swept clean ‘this sky full of cobwebs’. And Charles Darwin would ask his brother to send a copy to Uruguay where he hoped to pick it up when the Beagle stopped there. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, science-fiction writer Jules Verne mined Humboldt’s descriptions of South America for his Voyages Extraordinaires series, often quoting verbatim for his dialogues. Verne’s The Mighty Orinoco was an homage to Humboldt and in his Captain Grant’s Children a French explorer insisted that there was no point in climbing Pico del Teide in Tenerife after Humboldt had already been up there: ‘What could I do,’ Monsieur Paganel says, ‘after that great man?’ It was no surprise that Verne’s Captain Nemo in his famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was described as owning the complete works of Humboldt.