Word: offing
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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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...
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...
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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...
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...