Part 12 (2/2)

Keller was a writer of great independence, and cannot be cla.s.sed with any of the schools. The closeness of his observation and his fidelity in rendering both the good and the bad sides of life ally him with the realists; but his imagination was too much alive to allow of his being properly described by their label. He knew the Swiss of his own time intimately, and he has portrayed them in their homely provincialism as well as in their st.u.r.dy self-respect and love of freedom.

”The Banner of the Upright Seven,” one of the stories from ”The People of Seldwyla,” is an excellent example of the faculty which made him the greatest of German humorists. The story has genuine sentiment, but sentiment restrained as always in his books; it has sympathy for youthful ambition and youthful love, as well as for the political enthusiasm of the delightful old fellows whose name it bears; but both sentiment and sympathy are overshadowed by the rich humor which pervades the whole. Pure Swiss it no doubt is, but its appeal is to all hearts open to wholesome human affection and aspirations.

W. A. N.

CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS

I By John Firman Coar

Schiller has been criticised for letting the Swiss peasants in ”William Tell” speak as they do. What peasants, it is asked, would utter such thoughts? The peasants and simple burghers of the life that Keller studied and depicted is the reply. To a German these peasants seem curiously unreal. But Keller was no idealist when he depicted peasant and burgher life. His people speak as they think and they think as they speak, and they do both as Keller knew them to do it in everyday life.

Theirs was the inestimable benefit of democratic government and democratic culture. A compact nationality, self-educated to the duties and privileges of citizens.h.i.+p, leaders in the widest possible dissemination of knowledge as the best guaranty of civic progress and justice--could Keller, a Swiss, depict the life of this people as anything else than a civic and intellectual democracy?

This perspective gives to situations, characters, and actions their true proportions. They are supremely real. His individuals are not equal in civic worth and intellectual capacity, but shade off in wonderfully fine lines, thereby enhancing the effect. Paragons and deep-dyed villains do not challenge our credulity, nor are we wearied by the persistent greetings of familiar faces in new garments. One of the triumphs of Keller's art is the ever new form in which humanity presents itself. And this is the glory of his social democracy, that it recognizes the inviolable right of individuality, since it founds state and society upon the achievement of individual worth. Ethic manhood is something that neither state nor society can impart. It lies in the power of the individual to make or unmake his life, and he alone can solve the secret of his personality. Easier it is for him to do so amid surroundings that open his heart to the great glory of life, but still he alone can do so. That is Keller's doctrine.

Keller grew to manhood in surroundings which were as nearly identical with Schiller's philosophic ideal of freedom as human conditions can well be. The Switzerland of his manhood days was the best possible justification of the ideal picture that Schiller drew in ”William Tell.” Therefore the optimism of Keller is so st.u.r.dy, so free from sentimentality, and so thoroughly human. His poetry is the n.o.blest consummation of Heine's gospel of the divine beauty of life.

Keller believed with all his soul in the self-redemption of society, and used the word society in its broadest signification. And his belief was vitalized by that which he saw in Swiss life. The germs of the past were bearing fruit in the present, and in the present the germs of a future harvest were swelling. He was not one of those complacent optimists who cannot discern with critical eye and whose complacency deadens the best impulses and stands in the way of energetic striving.

Swiss life in his stories is by no means a paradise. His words to B.

Auerbach (June 25, 1860) betoken the att.i.tude he took toward this life, as they also reveal the genuine democracy of his artistic striving: ”Here in Switzerland we have, to be sure, many good qualities, and in respect to public character, evidently at present an honest purpose to acquire respectable and inspiriting forms of living, and the people is proving itself plastic (mobile), happy, and buoyant; but all is not gold that glitters by any means. However, I consider it the duty of a poet not merely to glorify the past, but to strengthen the present, the germs of the future, and beautify it in such a manner that people may still be able to believe: yes, we are like that, and that is the course of our life. If poets do this with a certain measure of kindly irony which deprives their productions of false pathos, then I am convinced that the people will come to be in fact and in appearance what it good-naturedly imagines itself to be and what even now it really is in its inmost disposition.”--From ”Studies in German Literature” (1903).

II By Calvin Thomas

Up to a dozen years before his death Keller had received little attention in Germany; to-day there is a library of books about him, and he is universally considered a fixed star of high magnitude. While he was an ardent Swiss republican, and while the life that he depicts is almost exclusively Swiss, the Germans of the empire have pretty generally accepted him as their greatest master of prose fiction since Goethe.

Keller was a romantic realist with the soul of a poet, the eye of a man of science, and the temperament of an artist who loves life in all its manifestations. But this leaves his humour out of the account, and his humour is precisely the best part of him. In a broad sense he is didactic--like Goethe; that is, he felt that it was his mission to comprehend and describe the character of his Swiss countrymen, to the end of furthering them toward higher ideals of communal life. But this att.i.tude never clouds his vision for the facts. He sees at every pore, as Emerson said of Goethe. He does not select ugliness for special or angry scrutiny, any more than he avoids it through excess of daintiness, but takes all things as they come. What he offers is not medicine but food--the nourishment of sane and delightful art. But no one should go to him for an exciting narrative. His spell is not in his plot. In ”Green Henry,” particularly, his pace is so very leisurely that one sometimes wishes there were not so many little things to be taken note of by the way.--From ”A History of German Literature”

(1909).

THE BANNER OF THE UPRIGHT SEVEN

Kaspar Hediger, master tailor of Zurich, had reached the age at which an industrious craftsman begins to allow himself a brief hour of rest after dinner. So it happened that one beautiful March day he was sitting not in his manual but in his mental workshop, a small, separate room which for years he had reserved for himself. He was glad that the weather was warm enough for him to occupy it again. In winter neither the old customs of his cla.s.s nor his income permitted him to have an extra room heated simply that he might sit there to read. And this was at a time when there were already tailors who went shooting and rode their horses daily, so closely do the gradations of culture dovetail into one another.

Master Hediger, however, might have been proud of the appearance he presented in his neatly kept little back room. He looked almost more like an American settler than a tailor. A strong and intelligent face with heavy whiskers, surmounted by a powerful, bald dome was bending over ”The Swiss Republican,” while he read the leading article with a critical expression. There were at least twenty-five well-bound folio volumes of this ”Republican” in a little walnut bookcase with a gla.s.s door, and they contained scarcely anything that Hediger, for twenty-five years, had not lived and fought through. The case also held Rotteck's ”Universal History,” a Swiss history by Johannes Muller, and a handful of political brochures and such like; a geographical atlas and a portfolio full of caricatures and pamphlets--mementoes of bitterly pa.s.sionate days--lay on the lowest shelf. The wall of the little room was adorned with the portraits of Columbus, Zwingli, Hutten, Was.h.i.+ngton, and Robespierre; for Hediger was not to be trifled with and sanctioned the Reign of Terror, after it was over. Besides these world-famous heroes, there were portraits of several progressive Swiss to which were affixed in their own handwriting highly edifying and discursive inscriptions, regular little essays. Leaning against the bookcase was a well-kept, s.h.i.+ning musket with a short side-arm hanging on it and a cartridge-pouch in which, at all times, there were thirty cartridges. That was his fowling-piece with which he went out, not for hares and partridges, but for aristocrats and Jesuits, for breakers of the const.i.tution and traitors to the people. Until now his lucky star had kept him from shedding any blood, owing to lack of opportunity; nevertheless more than once he had seized his musket and hurried to the square. That was at the time of the riots, when he kept the gun standing between the bed and the wardrobe and would not allow it to be moved, ”for,” he used to say, ”no government and no battalions can protect justice and liberty where a citizen is not able to step out of doors and see what is going on.”

While the stout-hearted master was absorbed in his article, now nodding approvingly, now shaking his head, his youngest son Karl, a fledgling clerk in a government office, came in.

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