The Invention of Nature

Wilhelm lost himself in Greek mythology and histories of ancient Rome, but Alexander felt restless with books. Instead he escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants, animals and rocks. When he returned with his pockets full of insects and plants his family nicknamed him ‘the little apothecary’, but they didn’t take his interests seriously. According to family lore, one day the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, asked the boy if he planned to conquer the world like his namesake, Alexander the Great. Young Humboldt’s answer was: ‘Yes, Sir, but with my head.’

Much of his early life, Humboldt later told a close friend, was spent among people who loved him but who didn’t understand him. His teachers were demanding and his mother lived withdrawn from society and her sons. Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt’s greatest concern was, Kunth said, to foster the ‘intellectual and moral perfection’ of Wilhelm and Alexander – their emotional wellbeing was seemingly of no interest. ‘I was forced into a thousand constraints,’ Humboldt said, and into loneliness, hiding behind a wall of pretence because he never felt that he could be himself with his stern mother watching his every step. Expressions of excitement or of joy were unacceptable behaviour in the Humboldt household.

Alexander and Wilhelm were very different. Where Alexander was adventurous and enjoyed being outside, Wilhelm was serious and studious. Alexander was often torn between emotions, while Wilhelm’s overriding character trait was self-control. Both brothers withdrew into their own worlds – Wilhelm into his books and Alexander on lonely walks through Tegel’s forests, great woods that had been planted with imported North American trees. As he wandered among colourful sugar maples and stately white oaks, Alexander experienced nature as calming and soothing. But it was also among these trees from another world that he began to dream of distant countries.

Humboldt grew up a good-looking young man. He stood five feet eight, but carried himself straight and proud, so that he seemed taller. He was slight and agile – quick on his feet and nimble. His hands were small and delicate, almost like those of a woman, as one friend commented. His eyes were inquisitive and always alert. His looks very much conformed to the ideals of the age: tousled hair, full expressive lips and a dimpled chin. But he was often ill, suffering from fevers and neurasthenia which Wilhelm believed was a ‘kind of hypochondria’, for ‘the poor boy is unhappy’.

To hide his vulnerability, Alexander built a protective shield of wit and ambition. As a boy, he had been feared for his sharp comments, with one family friend calling him ‘un petit esprit malin’, a reputation he would live up to for the rest of his life. Even Alexander’s closest friends admitted that he had a malicious streak. But Wilhelm said that his brother was never really spiteful – maybe a little vain and driven by a deep urge to shine and excel. From his youth Alexander seemed to have been torn between this vanity and his loneliness, between a craving for praise and his yearning for independence. Insecure, yet believing in his intellectual prowess, he see-sawed between his need for approval and his sense of superiority.

Born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, Humboldt was raised in an increasingly global and accessible world. Fittingly, the months before his birth had seen the first international scientific collaboration when astronomers from dozens of nations had coordinated and shared their observations of the transit of Venus. The problem of calculating longitude had finally been solved, and the empty areas of eighteenth-century maps were filling up fast. The world was changing. Just before Humboldt turned seven, American revolutionaries declared their independence, and shortly before his twentieth birthday the French followed suit with their own revolution in 1789.

Germany was still under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as the French thinker Voltaire once said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Not yet a nation, it was made up of many states – some tiny principalities, others ruled by large and powerful dynasties such as the Hohenzollern in Prussia and the Habsburgs in Austria, which continued to fight for dominance and territories. In the mid-eighteenth century, during the reign of Frederick the Great, Prussia had emerged as the greatest rival to Austria.