The Invention of Nature (40 page)

Thoreau’s new approach didn’t mean that his doubts disappeared completely. He continued to question himself. ‘I am dissipated by so many observations,’ he wrote in 1853. He feared that his knowledge was becoming too ‘detailed & scientific’ and that he might have exchanged sweeping prospects as wide as the heavens for the narrow views of the microscope. ‘With all your science can you tell how it is,’ he asked despairingly, ‘that light comes into the soul’ but he still finished this journal entry with detailed descriptions of blossoms, birdsongs, butterflies and the ripening of berries.

Instead of composing poems, he investigated nature – and these observations became his raw material for Walden. ‘Nature will be my language full of poetry,’ he said. In his journal, the tumbling crystal-clear water of a brook was ‘the pure blood of nature’ and then a few lines down, he queries the dialogue between himself and nature but concludes that ‘this close habit of observation – in Humboldt–Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long – this science.’ Thoreau plaited science and poetry into one thick strand.

To make sense of it all, Thoreau searched for a unifying perspective. When he climbed a mountain, he saw the lichen on the rocks at his feet but also the trees far in the distance. Like Humboldt on Chimborazo, he perceived them in relation to each other and ‘thus reduced to a single picture’ – repeating the idea of the Naturgemälde. Or during a winter storm, one cold January morning, as the snowflakes swirled around him, Thoreau watched the delicate crystalline structures and compared them to the perfectly symmetrical petals of flowers. The same law, he said, that shaped the earth also shaped the snowflakes, pronouncing with emphasis, ‘Order. Kosmos.’

Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos from ancient Greek where it meant order and beauty – but one that was created through the human eye. With this Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, ‘I have a little world all to myself’ – his own sun, stars and moon. ‘Why should I feel lonely?’ he asked. ‘Is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ He was no more lonely than a flower or bumblebee in a meadow because like them he was part of nature. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he asked in Walden.

One of Walden’s most famous passages encapsulates just how much Thoreau had changed since he had read Humboldt. For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankments near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, purple streams of sand would be released and seep out, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves: a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing out of the trees and the shrubs in spring.

In his original manuscript, written in the cabin at the pond, Thoreau had described this ‘blooming’ of the sand in an aside of less than 100 words. Now it stretched to more than 1,500 words and became one of the central passages in Walden. The sands, he wrote, displayed ‘the anticipation of the vegetable leaf’. It was the ‘prototype’, he said, just like Goethe’s urform. A phenomenon that had just been ‘unaccountably interesting and beautiful’ in the original manuscript now came to illustrate no less than what Thoreau called ‘the principle of all the operations of Nature’.

These few pages illustrate how Thoreau had matured. When he described the phenomenon on the last day of December 1851, just as he was reading Humboldt, it became a metaphor for the cosmos. The sun that warmed the banks was like the thoughts that warmed his blood, he said. Earth was not dead but ‘lives & grows’. And then, as he observed it again in spring 1854, just as he was finishing the final draft of Walden, he wrote in his journal that earth was ‘living poetry … not a fossil earth – but a living specimen’, words that he included almost verbatim in his final version of Walden. ‘Earth is all alive,’ he wrote, and nature ‘in full blast’. This was Humboldt’s nature, thumping with life. The coming of spring, Thoreau concluded, was ‘like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos’. It was life, nature and poetry all at the same time.

Walden was Thoreau’s mini-Cosmos of one particular place, an evocation of nature in which everything was connected, packed with details of animal habits, blooms and the thickness of ice on the pond. Objectivity or pure scientific enquiry did not exist, Thoreau wrote when he had finished Walden, because it was always twinned with subjectivity and the senses. ‘Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,’ he noted. The foundation of all was observation.

‘I milk the sky & the earth,’ Thoreau said.

1 Thoreau also lived with the Emersons for two years, earning his board by helping as a handyman around the house and garden while Emerson was away on his frequent lecture tours.

2 Thoreau wrote seven drafts of Walden. The first was finished during his time at Walden Pond. He worked on drafts 2 and 3 from spring 1848 to mid-1849. He returned to the manuscript in January 1852 and worked on the next four drafts until spring 1854.

20

The Greatest Man Since the Deluge

IN BERLIN, IN the year after the publication of Cosmos’s second volume, Humboldt’s precarious balancing act between his liberal political views and his duties at the Prussian court was getting increasingly difficult. It became almost impossible when, in spring 1848, Europe erupted into unrest. After decades of reactionary politics, a wave of revolutions swept across the continent.

When economic decline and the suppression of political gatherings sparked violent protests in Paris, a terrified King Louis Philippe abdicated on 26 February, and escaped to Britain. Two days later, the French declared the Second Republic and within weeks more revolutions rippled through Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium, among others. In Vienna the conservative Chancellor of State, Prince von Metternich, tried and failed to control uprisings in which students and the working classes had joined forces. On 13 March Metternich resigned and he too fled to London. Two days later the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand I, promised his people a constitution. Rulers across Europe panicked.

As newspapers reported the revolts in Europe that spring, Prussians read the articles aloud to each other in Berlin’s coffee houses. In Munich, Cologne, Leipzig, Weimar and dozens of other German cities and states people rose against their rulers. They were demanding a united Germany, a national parliament and a constitution. In March the King of Bavaria abdicated and the Grand Duke of Baden bowed to the demands of his people and promised freedom of the press and a parliament. In Berlin protesters rallied too, calling for reforms, but the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was not willing to give up that easily and readied his troops. When 20,000 people gathered to listen to rousing speeches, the king ordered his soldiers to march through the streets of Berlin and to guard his castle.

Prussia’s liberals had long been disappointed by their new king. Humboldt, like so many others, had hoped that Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s accession would have heralded the end of absolutism. In early 1841, during the first months of the new king’s reign, Humboldt had told a friend that he was an enlightened ruler who ‘only had to get rid of a few medieval beliefs’, but he had been wrong. Two years later Humboldt had confessed to the same friend that Friedrich Wilhelm IV ‘does just what he likes’. He adored architecture and all he seemed to care about were schemes for new magnificent buildings, grand parks and great collections of art. When it came to ‘earthly matters’ such as foreign policies, the Prussian people or the economy, he ‘hardly gives them a thought,’ Humboldt complained.

When the king had opened the first ever Prussian parliament in Berlin in April 1847, hopes for reform had been dashed immediately. As people called for a constitution, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had left no doubt that he would never agree. In his opening speech, he had told the delegates that a king ruled by divine right, and never by popular will. Prussia was not going to be a constitutional monarchy. Two months later parliament was dissolved; nothing had been achieved.

In spring 1848, and inspired by the revolutions across Europe, the Prussian people had finally had enough. On 18 March, the revolutionaries in Berlin rolled barrels into the streets, and piled up boxes, planks and bricks to build barricades. They dug up cobblestones and carried them on to the roofs, preparing themselves for a fight. As day turned into evening, the battle began. Stones and tiles were hurled from the rooftops and the first gunshots ricocheted through the streets. Humboldt was at home in his flat in Oranienburger Straße and as the sound of the soldiers’ drums echoed across the city he, like many others, didn’t sleep. Women brought food, wine and coffee to the revolutionaries as the fighting continued throughout the night. Several hundred men died but the king’s troops failed to gain control. That night, Friedrich Wilhelm IV collapsed on a chair and moaned, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, have you abandoned me completely?’

Humboldt believed that reforms were essential but disliked rioting mobs and brutal police intervention – he had envisaged an earlier, slower and therefore more peaceful change. Like many other liberals, he longed to see a united Germany but hoped it would be governed by consent and parliament, rather than by blood and fear. Now, as hundreds died in the streets of Berlin, the seventy-eight-year-old Humboldt found himself caught between the lines.

As the revolutionaries in Berlin took control of the city, a frightened Friedrich Wilhelm IV conceded and promised a constitution and a national parliament. On 19 March he agreed to withdraw his troops. That night the streets of Berlin were illuminated and the people celebrated their victory. Instead of gunshots, there was singing and jubilation. On 21 March, only three days after the fighting had begun, the king displayed his defeat symbolically by riding through Berlin draped in the black, red and gold colours of the revolutionaries.1 Back at the palace where crowds had gathered, the king appeared on the balcony. Humboldt stood behind him in silence and bowed to the people below. The next day Humboldt ignored his obligations to the king and marched at the head of the funeral procession for the fallen revolutionaries.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV had never minded his chamberlain’s revolutionary leanings. He appreciated Humboldt’s knowledge and avoided their ‘differences in political opinions’. Others were less easy with Humboldt’s position. He was called an ‘ultraliberal’ by a Prussian thinker and a ‘revolutionist in court favour’ by one minister, while the king’s brother, Prince William (later Emperor William I) thought Humboldt a threat to the existing order.

Humboldt was used to manoeuvring around different political views. Twenty-five years earlier in Paris, he had smoothly circumnavigated reactionary and revolutionary lines in France without ever really risking his position. ‘He is well aware that while he gets too liberal,’ Charles Lyell had written, ‘he is in no danger of losing the station and the advantages which his birth ensures for him.’

In private, Humboldt criticized European rulers with his usual sarcasm. When Queen Victoria had invited him during one of her visits to Germany, he mocked that she had fed him ‘hard pork chops and cold chicken’ for breakfast as well as displaying complete ‘philosophical abstinence’. After meeting the Crown Prince of Württemberg and the future kings of Denmark, England and Bavaria at Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s palace Sanssouci, Humboldt described them to a friend as a group of heirs apparent that consisted of ‘a spineless pale one, a drunken Icelander, a blind political fanatic and an obstinate feeble-witted’. This, Humboldt joked, was the ‘future of the monarchical world’.

Some admired Humboldt’s ability to serve a royal master while maintaining the ‘courage to have his own opinion’. The King of Hanover, Ernst August I, however, remarked that Humboldt was ‘always the same, always republican, and always in the antechamber of the palace’. But it was probably Humboldt’s ability to inhabit both these worlds that allowed him so much freedom. Otherwise, as he admitted himself, he might have been thrown out of the country, for being ‘a revolutionary and the author of the godless Cosmos’.

As Humboldt watched the revolutions in the German states unfold, there was a brief moment when reform seemed possible but it was over almost as quickly as it had begun. The German states decided to appoint a National Assembly to discuss the future of a united Germany but by the end of May 1848, a little more than two months after the first gunshot had been fired in Berlin, Humboldt wasn’t sure if he was more frustrated about the king, the Prussian ministers or the delegates of the National Assembly that had convened in Frankfurt.

Even those who conceded that reforms were necessary couldn’t agree what this new Germany should be comprised of. Humboldt believed that a united Germany should be based on the principles of federalism. Some power should remain with the different states, he explained, without ignoring the ‘organism and the unity of the whole’ – underlining his argument by using the same terminology as he did when talking about nature.

There were those who favoured a union for purely economic reasons – envisaging a Germany without tariffs and trade barriers – but also nationalists who glorified a shared and romanticized Germanic past. Even if they were to agree, there were different opinions on where the borders should lie and which states were to be included. Some proposed a greater Germany (Grossdeutschland) that included Austria, while others preferred a smaller nation (Kleindeutschland) led by Prussia. These seemingly endless disagreements made for messy negotiations, as arguments were put forward, then overturned and discussions stalled. Meanwhile the more conservative forces had time to regroup.

By spring 1849, a year after the revolts, all the revolutionaries’ gains were repudiated. The prospects, Humboldt thought, were gloomy. When the National Assembly in Frankfurt – after much back and forth – finally decided to offer the imperial crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV so that he could lead a constitutional monarchy of a united Germany, they were squarely rebutted. The king, who only a year earlier had worn the revolutionary German tricolour in fear of the mob, now felt confident enough to decline the offer. The delegates did not have a real crown to give, Friedrich Wilhelm IV declared, because only God was able to do so. This crown was one of ‘dirt and clay’, he told one of the delegates, and not a ‘diadem of the divine right of kings’. It was ‘a dog collar’, he fumed, with which the people wanted to chain him to the revolution. Germany was far from being a united nation, and in May 1849 the delegates of the National Assembly returned home with little to show for their efforts.