In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M. Meyer calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulterated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Army died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two kinds of love in his heart--the idea and the sensual, very independent--the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the conflict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of his own poems, Max Müller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He played the piano well, heard everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau, but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society, was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years. When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period, but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From twenty his struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went to Oxford.