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.