I
There are some labours to which we sit down with a sigh, conscious of having undertaken more than we are able to accomplish, while at the same time the thought of it attracts us and we do not like to give it up. I have never yet read anything about Gottfried Keller which seemed fully to grasp the real nature of the man with the secret of his separateness, and to place him before us with a certainty of comprehension such as cannot be gainsaid. He is something so complete in himself, so apart from others, that like all good things there is no getting round him. For the essence of good things consists in being so sound that there is no use in coaxing or persuading them, or in trying to discover a fault in them; and for that very reason these old jesters studied the noble art of rendering themselves inaccessible. As an author he wrote only when he felt inclined, and when he was not in the mood he waited—whether for months or years it was all the same to him. As a man he was so reserved that hardly a single one of his personal experiences found their way to publicity, and after his death it might have been supposed that he had never had any, if Jacob Bächtold had not published a collection of his letters under the title of Gottfried Keller’s Life, in which he speaks to us as one more alive than the living who are still among us. In reading his books we notice that the purer incidents are mingled with others of a more confidential nature, and it dawns upon us that he understood how to choose his incidents, so that afterwards they should not tell tales. This fact proves, in the first place, that he had nothing to do with those whom Nietzsche would call “literary women,” this being a silent memorial to his good taste and noble character. Secondly, it proves that he understood how to choose his society, and that, like a prudent Swiss, he never thoughtlessly confided in any one, but remembering that the world is not so good and particularly not so refined as it might be, he preferred to keep his confidences to himself. Thirdly, that he, like a righteous man, was pleased to live until those who had known him in his foolish youth had died before him with all they knew.
A vase filled with anemones, violets, ranunculuses and other spring flowers is standing on the table in front of me as I write; I took the trouble to fetch them out of the wood so that I might have something alive and sweet-smelling near while I think of Keller. Otherwise it would have been impossible to write about him, for his books are the essence of life and gladness.
The spirit of playfulness which, as he tells us in Green Henry, drove him when a child to try all kinds of experiments, has followed him through life in the treatment of his literary characters, who, by the way, are never inventions, but always studied portraits. Suddenly he seizes them by one leg, swings them round, and sends them flying into a purely fantastical no-man’s-land, oblivious of past events and present circumstances and such-like limitations. All his stories, or at any rate the majority of them, are marked with this feature, and the maddest confusion reigns side by side with some of the greatest psychological realities; take, for example, the end of The Poor Baroness. How to account for it? Is it that he had inherited the æstheticism of the romantic school? But considering that he was a man of sober temperament and not in any way romantic, it is more probable that the true reason to account for it is that he wrote only for himself and for his own satisfaction. In his youth he had been afraid of Providence and had fought a duel to prove the existence of God; in riper years he amused himself by trying to improve Providence, to put the crooked straight, to punish the wicked and reward the good, and act as though he were himself a more practical and zealous Providence. If, when he had finished, the public read it, what had that to do with Gottfried Keller? The public might rejoice if now and again he played at being its teacher and gave it a sound thrashing on that part of the human body which was especially intended for the purpose. Besides he was a Swiss, and it never entered his mind to trouble himself about the rest of the world. There is one special feature in Gottfried Keller’s productions which, since the publication of his letters, has found expression in words, and which offers a very drastic contrast to the works of later authors. It is this—that he never allowed dust to be thrown in his eyes by any one, least of all by foreigners.
When he, in the person of “Green Henry,” forsook the narrow surroundings of his home life and went out into the wide world, he believed that everything good, strong, free and new was to be found abroad.
After a long journey, undertaken for the sake of his education, “Green Henry” returned to his home wiser than when he left it. He became a Swiss in the superlative case—the Swissest of the Swiss. But although he had occasion to see all the frailties and follies of Europe disporting themselves in his beloved native land, he did not include foreign countries in the blame. He possessed the same sensible, confident self-assertion that characterises his honest fellow-countrymen who, while they are ever ready to assist strangers in a polite and blameless manner to rid themselves of their superfluous coin, always remain in their behaviour towards them as unaffectedly, great-grandfatherly, considerate and true-hearted as before.
In that Keller is quite old-fashioned. All other writers, at home and abroad, are anxious to change their skin, and complain bitterly because they cannot. Keller stretched himself in his with an expression of well-being that was positively annoying, and declared that it was a very good skin. He was still more old-fashioned in that he never sought for a problem, and never made anything of one, although he produced them by the bushel and left the precious gems lying scattered throughout his novels. Wherever he went, the strangest, most profound things seemed to cling to him like burs from roadside ditches. But the only use he made of them, when he did not immediately throw them away, was to play a little game of football with them. Three such problems, as he squandered by the dozen, would be sufficient excuse nowadays to call forth a new German literature with a new set of publishers, but he was so essentially old-fashioned in those matters that he was quite unconscious of the scope of his material, and was certainly not what we should call an “earnest” writer. He was old-fashioned in other ways also—for instance, in his best moments he possessed an individual language of his own which was quite unmistakable, and which seemed to have fallen from the clouds, no one knew how. Our modern authors, on the contrary, are always working in the sweat of their brows in the hope of obtaining an original style, and that without the smallest chance of success.
Keller was like a ploughed field where the rooks hop about in search of nourishment, and he has enough left still to fatten many rooks.
Yet there is one point in which our good little Keller is more modern than the most modern men of our time, and that is in his knowledge of women. It pleased the old Pankraz, the Cynic, to write a great deal about women, although he never allowed himself to be secured in visible chains.
Of all German writers, Keller is the one whom we are least able to understand with our unaided intellect. For in order to understand him, we must feel him, and he is far too reserved to admit of every one’s feeling him. Special qualifications are needful, and our modern society takes good care that these special qualifications should not exist for the great mass of sensitive readers.
Both as a man and as an author, Keller is distinctly a lover of fresh air, and for that reason he keeps all genuine townsmen at a suitable distance. It is true that they snuffle round him and become intoxicated with the strong scent of the woods and meadows, but it is just this exaggerated enthusiasm which forms as it were a Chinese wall between him and them. Keller needs to be passively enjoyed, in a waking sleep, like the peasant following his plough, or a person wandering in the mid-day sunshine, or a child resting in the arms of its mother. Keller as an author is the personification of the quiet equanimity of natural health.
At the same time he is by nature a recluse. He is that in spite of the patriotic social duties during the fulfilment of which the majority of his books were written, and even in spite of his zeal for Swiss assemblies. He is an eavesdropper; not in the sense in which a lyric poet may be called one, to whom every outward movement becomes an inward emotion, but rather as the born thinker whose sympathies live in all that moves around him, and whose own life is such still water that every picture cast upon it is clearly reflected. His affections are no dangerous whirlpool, but a quiet sympathetic companionship, to which meeting and parting are not the cause of any heartbreaking commotions.
This is the reason why Keller is not a writer suited for summer sportsmen who breathe in the country air as though they would like to lay in a store, and who wish the sun to shine full upon them.
His chosen confidants are those who are accustomed to spend their lives in the open air.
This devotee of the open air had his circle whom he described and his circle whom he did not describe. The circle whom he did not describe consisted of those who were born ladies, and them he left severely alone. But if, on a special occasion, he finds them necessary for some incident which must be told, he arranges it so that he may have the opportunity of rebuking them, as with Lucie in the book already mentioned, Pankraz, the Cynic, or as in the case of the busybodies in the story of poor Regina. When he describes ladies with sympathy, as in The Governor of Greifensee, he transfers them into a period at least a century ago and places them in the open air.
The women with whom Keller consents to have any dealings must allow themselves to be placed in the open air. Freshness by candle-light has no attraction for him, and as for beauty in a drawing-room—he is suspicious of it. Out they must go, without gloves and veils, stiff collars or steeled stays, without any of the paraphernalia to which modern literature is generally so much addicted. If you can allow yourself to be looked at full in the eyes, with sleeves tucked up and crumpled—then and only then Gottfried Keller may perhaps stop to consider whether it is possible to write about you.
Gottfried Keller’s portraits are nearly all open-air studies, and Gottfried Keller’s women are nearly all lovers of the open air.
There are wonderful disclosures in his great portrait gallery; we find there the women whom he loved as well as the women whom he hated. Wherever he describes a virtuous, happy, loving, teasing, laughing woman; wherever he pictures Eve in whom Adam finds his happiness, or Eve who finds her happiness in Adam, the decisive moment is sure to take place in the open air, for the scenes out of doors are the principal points in his writings, the principal points in the soul-harmonies of his characters, the moments when love steps forth from her concealment and the lovers understand one another. Romeo and Juliet in the Village spend their wedding day out-of-doors; the neighbour’s children in The Company of the Seven Just Men devise their plan of association out-of-doors; the married couple in The Lost Smile meet again out-of-doors, after having been separated by various domestic circumstances; in the Misused Love Letter, the innocent little woman comes to the still more innocent little schoolmaster out-of-doors; the heroine in Ursula regains her senses during the fearful night spent out-of-doors; in Dietegen, the situation between the hero and his lady-love reaches its climax out-of-doors; Fran Amrain, when she has an affair of importance to discuss with her son, always goes to look for him out-of-doors; and nearly every time that Green Henry feels his heart beat for a woman, it is out-of-doors. With Keller all good people are lovers of the open air.
Sedentary natures, on the contrary, are generally characteristic of persons in whom it is wisest not to place much confidence. There is always something ludicrous connected with them, and they are always unfortunate in one way or the other. They are often jealous, conceited, vulgar, pale-faced and dirty, whereas fresh cheeks are always accompanied by a pleasant atmosphere. The three Just Comb-Manufacturers with their miserable follies were all sedentary people; The Maker of His Fortune and Herr Litumlei were provincials, while all the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler sit in absolute idleness in their little workshops; the tailor, in Feathers make the Bird, became an extraordinary creature in consequence of the sedentary life which he led; and whenever Keller wishes to draw the character of an insignificant woman, he makes her sit in her room doing nothing, or engaged in some silly occupation, or else running in and out of other people’s houses. The story of poor Regina is the only one of Keller’s stories in which a good and beautiful creature is misunderstood and made to suffer, and there all the principal scenes are enacted in large and gloomy town houses, where the heavy front door serves as a symbol to show the impossibility of escaping out of a bewitched circle into the light of truth and freedom. Regina, who was a true child of the outer air, would never have gone to her ruin if she had been placed in different surroundings.
Fresh air is the one condition which Keller takes as the starting-point for his portraits of women, and it is a condition which is quite original in its way, for it is not as decidedly expressed in the writings of any other author, least of all a modern one. His women must have plenty of air, fresh air, air in which they can move their limbs and which penetrates their clothing. His women are not the productions of culture, nor the fruit of education, they do not belong to the species of “clever daughters,” but neither are they idealised country girls, they are not phantoms, and they are not discoveries, they are living human beings whom he has seen and known, they are personified reality like the trees, the meadows, the cows—they are fragments of nature placed in the midst of other fragments of nature.
They are not Keller’s ideal of what a woman should be, they are exact descriptions according to his knowledge of what women really are, as it pleased him to write them down for his own amusement during idle evenings when he sat over his wine.
It is human nature as the Swiss understand it, human nature personified and at the same time purified, which moves him to describe women whom he has known or whom it would have amused him to know, and he describes them with lively little flourishes here and there.
They came upon him unawares, and he let them do as they pleased and write themselves down as best they could, but gently and slily he held them fast by the hair, lest they should try to mystify him. And if they began to throw dust in his eyes, he gave their hair a gentle pull so that they might know that he was watching them.
Gottfried Keller was a just man who gave every one their due, including women.
Here I should like to make a disgraceful confession, and to remark that, in my unworthy estimation, he—in the great forest of German authors—is the first, the last, and the only one who thoroughly and entirely understands the natural woman.
Keller’s woman is nothing but nature, unadorned and unfalsified; it is true she is not the whole of nature, but she is a genuine part of it. In order to discover this woman, he journeyed in a circle round the towns to every road which marks the boundary where town and country meet. There he sometimes met with women who had a natural disposition to live, without having learned anything from books. According to him it was the sign of a praiseworthy woman that she should know where to find her husband, and as to those who were more or less bunglers in the matter, he refused to waste his time upon them. He went straight to the root of the question, like a man who will not allow himself to be deceived, and according to his knowledge of human nature the principal business of every young woman was to find the man who was best suited to her, and having found him, to win him. This is just what Keller’s young women were busily engaged in doing, and they accomplished it in various ways, without being in the least aware of it, or, if the reader prefers it, though it comes to the same in the end, they did it out of their moral consciousness. But it was not enough for Keller that they should have proved their true womanliness by these means alone, more was necessary; they must be able to keep their husbands, and that again without conscious effort (“moral consciousness” would be quite out of place here), they must be able to keep him by means of their personal attractions and that magic charm of womanhood which it is impossible to analyse, by which the man is made too happy and too contented to have any wish to escape. When our honest author had got them thus far, he took delight in adding to the story the welcome intelligence that they lived long, had many children, and that their race prospered and increased.