The Invention of Nature

After a month in London, Humboldt returned to Paris with his head buzzing but still without permission to travel to India. With no official records existing about Humboldt’s application, it is not clear which arguments the East India Company used to refuse him but some years later an article in the Edinburgh Review explained that it was because of an ‘unworthy political jealousy’. Most probably the East India Company did not want to risk a liberal Prussian troublemaker investigating colonial injustice. For the time being Humboldt was not going anywhere near India.

Meanwhile his books were selling well in England. The first English translation had been the Political Essay of New Spain in 1811 but even more successful was Personal Narrative (the first of seven volumes had been translated in 1814). It was a travelogue – albeit with extensive scientific notes – that appealed to the general reader. Personal Narrative followed Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s voyage chronologically from their departure from Spain in 1799.¹ It was the book that would later inspire Charles Darwin to join the Beagle – and one ‘which I almost know by heart’, as Darwin said.

Personal Narrative, Humboldt explained, was unlike any other travel book. Many travellers just measured, he said – some merely collected plants and others were only interested in the economic data from trading centres – but no one combined exact observation with a ‘painterly description of landscape’. By contrast, Humboldt took his readers into the crowded streets of Caracas, across the dusty plains of the Llanos and deep into the rainforest along the Orinoco. As he described a continent that few British had ever seen, Humboldt captured their imagination. His words were so evocative, the Edinburgh Review wrote, that ‘you partake in his dangers; you share his fears, his success and his disappointment’.

There were a few bad reviews but only in magazines that were critical of Humboldt’s liberal political opinions. The conservative Quarterly Review didn’t approve of Humboldt’s sweeping approach to nature and criticized that he was not following a particular theory. He ‘indulges in all’, the article read, ‘sailing with every wind, and swimming in every stream’. But a few years later, even the Quarterly Review praised Humboldt’s unique talent of combining scientific research with ‘a warmth of feeling and a force of imagination’. He wrote like a ‘poet’, the reviewer admitted.

Over the next years Humboldt’s descriptions of Latin America and his new vision of nature seeped into British literature and poetry. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which was published in 1818 – only four years after the first volume of Personal Narrative – Frankenstein’s monster declared a desire to escape to ‘the vast wilds of South America’. Shortly afterwards Lord Byron immortalized Humboldt in Don Juan, ridiculing his cynometer, the instrument with which Humboldt had measured the blueness of the sky.

Humboldt, ‘the first of travellers,’ but not

The last, if late accounts be accurate,

Invented, by some name I have forgot,

As well as the sublime discovery’s date,

An airy instrument, with which he sought

To ascertain the atmospheric state,

By measuring ‘the

intensity of blue

’:

O, Lady Daphne! let me measure you!

At the same time the British Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey also began to read Humboldt’s books. Southey was so impressed that he even visited Humboldt in Paris in 1817. Humboldt united his vast knowledge with ‘a painters eye and a poets feeling’, Southey declared. He was ‘among travellers what Wordsworth is among poets’. Hearing this praise, Wordsworth asked to borrow Southey’s copy of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative shortly after it was published. At the time Wordsworth was composing a series of sonnets on the River Duddon in Cumbria and some of the work that he produced after reading Humboldt can be viewed in this context.

Wordsworth used Humboldt’s travel account, for example, as source material for the sonnets. In Personal Narrative Humboldt described questioning an indigenous tribe at the Upper Orinoco about some carvings of animals and stars high up on the rocks at the banks of the river. ‘They answer with a smile,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘as relating a fact of which a stranger, a white man only, could be ignorant that “at the period of the great waters, their fathers went to that height in boats.” ’

In Wordsworth’s poem Humboldt’s original became:

There would the Indian answer with a smile

Aimed at the White Man’s ignorance the while

Of the GREAT WATERS telling how they rose

…

O’er which his Fathers urged, to ridge and steep

Else unapproachable, their buoyant way;

And carved, on mural cliff’s undreaded side