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.

A modest yet welcome addition to the literature surrounding the German world traveler and his extraordinary accomplishments.