Green Henry

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Wikipedia article

'Green Henry' is a partially autobiographical novel by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller, first published in 1855, and extensively revised in 1879. Truth is freely mingled with fiction, and there is a generalizing purpose to exhibit the psychic disease that affected the whole generation of the transition from romanticism to realism in life and art. The work stands with Adalbert Stifter's 'Der Nachsommer' as one of the two most important examples of a Bildungsroman.

Plot

'Green Henry' details the life of Heinrich Lee from childhood through his first romantic encounters, his fledgling attempts at becoming a painter in Munich, and his eventual installation as a chancery clerk. The story gets its name from the color that Heinrich affected in dress.

Heinrich is a Swiss burgher's son, brought up too tenderly by a widowed mother. After youthful pranks and experiences, and a not altogether justified dismissal from school, he idles away some time in his mother's village. He determines to be a painter, and goes to Munich's artistic Bohemia. From there, he finds his way to a count's mansion, and then he returns home to his dying mother and an all-too-tardy and brief repentance.

The much revised second version has Heinrich abandoning art to enter the civil service. This experience affords occasion for extended political reflections. The tone of the reminiscences makes it clear that Keller would have the reader understand that Heinrich has lived through and risen out of his instability and irresolution and sees life steadily and cheerfully at last.

Development

Evaluation

Keen insight, fresh humor and instinct for realistic narration are its outstanding merits; its faults are lack of proportion, occasional garrulity and obtruded moralizing, but most of all the doubt that it leaves in the reader whether the Heinrich who had shown such persistent lack of character, especially in his relations with his mother, would so quickly be capable of discovering, rather than recovering, a normal balance of mind.

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References