Wilhelm Minor

GREEN HENRY (706 pp.)--Gottfried Keller, translated by A. M. Holt-Grove ($6.50).

The dust jacket of this 100-year-old novel proclaims it to be "undoubtedly the greatest masterpiece of fiction by a Swiss writer," which is a little like referring ecstatically to the tallest building in Newark, N.J. In the period in which Gottfried Keller was busy being the greatest Swiss novelist (Der Gruene Heinrich was published in 1854), Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, Melville wrote Moby Dick, and Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights. Still, Keller's book, in its first English translation, has enough literary and historical value to make it worth reading. The novel lacks, and needs, a scholarly introduction, but that is asking a great deal; Grove Press deserves credit for publishing the work at all, at a time when most of the publishing industry has abandoned connoisseurship for cost accounting.

Green Henry, Keller's hero, was born in a small Swiss town in the 1820s; his mother is the educated daughter of a pastor, and his father is a peasant who, through great ability and energy, has become a master builder. The father is the embodiment of the century's early surge of humanism; a fearless and optimistic man who taught himself architecture, and who leads his fellow townsmen in the building of schools and the forming of dramatic societies. He dies while Henry is still young, and his widow cuts up his green military uniform to make a suit for the boy. From then on, green is the only color the worshipful Henry will wear, and his schoolmates soon tag him with his nickname.

The Count's Daughter. The boy lacks his father's certainty of purpose, and before long he is thrown out of school for mischiefmaking. He has a knack for sketching and, still in his middle teens, decides to become an artist. The rest of the vast novel is his own rambling, episodic, thoughtful account of his struggles to learn how to paint. Keller is no sentimentalist, but his narration is cluttered with most of the furniture of the sentimental novel--the childhood love who dies of consumption, the mother who starves herself to buy her son's art supplies, and the chance meeting, when all seems darkest, with the count's fair young daughter. Now and then the prose gavottes giddily from its stolid march formation ("Before his sun of life had reached its noonday zenith, he returned to the inscrutable Infinite . . ."), and the author is too fond of teasingly retrieving his hero from the brink of fleshly ruin.

But there is edge to the novel. Green Henry is intelligent enough to discover, eventually, that he is a bit of a fool, and that he is not a very good artist. He gives up the artistic life, as does the hero of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (Keller, though much influenced by Goethe, himself turned to writing only after a futile try at becoming a painter). His wanderings are over, and he returns home in time to see his mother die, and to build a new career as government functionary.

Lust for Lies. The choice is significant; to Keller the state is not necessarily a higher concern than art, but serving the state is a high honor, and bohemianism a worthless existence. It is not hard to see the beginning of Germanic nationalism in the fascination that order, group effort and government have for Keller and the Swiss and German townspeople he describes. The author is at his most rhapsodic as he tells of the incredible organization of a pre-Lenten carnival, or rambles on about a dream in which Identity of the Nation is represented by crowds tramping purposefully over a bridge.

But Keller is too intelligent and too shrewd to delude himself by his enthusiasms, and at times his doubts can echo like mocking prophecies: "I had already forgotten the teaching of history, that great majorities can be poisoned and ruined by a single person and in gratitude will in their turn poison and ruin honest people -- that a majority which has once been lied to can go on wanting to be lied to, and raises ever new liars on its shield, as if it were only one single conscious and resolute scoundrel ..."

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