ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

A brief life of the influential scientist and explorer, the most
renowned of his day.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s
birth, which explains the arrival of Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher’s
entertaining graphic book The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (2019),
building on Wulf’s earlier Invention of Nature (2015). This
comparatively slender life by Times Literary Supplement editor
Meinhardt adds only a little materially to the facts surrounding the explorer
and polymath. What it does successfully is place him not so much in the
tradition of the ongoing Enlightenment as at the vanguard of the romantic movement,
blending art and science as an exaltation of the human mind. “In each part of
the world,” writes the author, Humboldt “stressed, nature had its own,
distinctive character, and the very thing that was singular about it eluded the
power of comparison.” In other words, the world is made up of distinctive
entities rather than great forces, individuals acting rather than the grinding
of the Hegelian dialectic, all susceptible to sentiment and sensation but hard
to describe, requiring the poet as much as the practitioner of the dawning
scientific method. Small wonder that, later in life, Humboldt wrote not just of
the places he saw as he traveled around the world, but also of “the moral
disposition of Humanity” as he encountered it. Meinhardt also adds a little
sizzle to the steak with her suggestion that Humboldt was likely not ascetic in
matters corporeal, as evidenced by his attachment to a 22-year-old Ecuadorian
named Carlos Montúfar: “There were rumors that the association was not merely
scientific,” she writes with nice circumspection. Wulf’s is the more
comprehensive book, but Meinhardt delivers a useful commentary on Humboldt and
his age.