[In] Peter Camenzind we have an essentially reflective work; the hero, in recounting his experiences, distances himself from them, mulls them over, extracts lessons from them with which he does not fail to instruct the reader, and uses them as a starting point for a generalizing, rather sententious commentary upon life. To assist in this, the technique is essentially one of retrospect, and the wisdom is one of hindsight…. His self-knowledge, when he painfully achieves it, acquires for him the quality of dogma. Armed with such dogma, he frequently addresses the reader in his didactic style…. And this movement, from the direct communication of recalled experience to detachment from it and eventually to didactic commentary upon it, is one of the most essential features of Hermann Hesse's writing; memory and reflection are aspects of that duality which is the framework of his art. (pp. 2-3)

Peter Camenzind remains even today a very readable book. It establishes the prototype of the characteristic lyrical, monologic style of novel, but gives little indication of the torment and profundity to be found in later works…. [The opening is] an overture to the glorification of nature, specifically the splendor of the Bernese Oberland, for this novel is in conception a return to nature, a fact which partly explains its success. (p. 11)

The language seeks to personify the mountains and to evoke the agony of parturition from which they sprang…. Like the mountains, the trees are fighters, wounded but resolute contestants for life upon the harsh high slopes, locked with the rocks in a tenacious embrace. The passage which describes them is ruminating and reflective rather than evocative of mood. The trees are more masculine, perhaps, than the mosses and the flowers and a symbol of strength and inner-directedness…. An esoteric symbol, then, of the striving for self-perfection, and hence androgynous, trees also come naturally to denote the mother, the source of the self. They are never described objectively, but always acquire human characteristics or else are seen as explicitly or tacitly symbolic of the universal features of evolving being. And Peter Camenzind adds: "Our men and women resembled them"…. In this sentence the novel makes the transition, the narrow leap, from subhuman nature to man.

"Thus I learned to look at people as though they were trees or rocks, to formulate thoughts about them"…. The circumstances of existence, especially the sense of dependence hereabouts upon natural forces, are said to lead to the presence of a melancholic strain, "an inclination to melancholia" …, and with this comment the novel takes a significant further step and penetrates within, toward the psyche. Hesse proceeds with deliberation from nature to man, to show man as at the outset rooted in nature, so that later the unhappy sports of decadence may stand revealed as genuine déracinés. This introduction is a slow, organic narrative development which evokes the desired mood, the all-embracing dominance of nature, with considerable success.

From this background Peter Camenzind is gradually detached and, as the novel proceeds, the peregrinations and vicissitudes of his uprooted existence in the wide world are steadily unfolded…. Desiring to make his way in the great wide world, Peter Camenzind studies on scholarships, makes one great friend, travels a little and falls once or twice unhappily in love. He establishes himself as a journalist and as a writer of short stories for magazines. He spends some time in Paris in dissipations, then in Basel, and then in Italy. Finally he finds peace of mind, first in caring for a helpless cripple, Boppi, in the Swiss city, and then after Boppi's death in a return home to Nimikon, where he apparently proposes to spend the rest of his days.

This straightforward story of the countryman who tries to make good in city life, and even among the intelligentsia, but who in the end is driven to return home, is of course the reverse print of the longing, so obsessive in German literature since Heinrich von Kleist, of the tormented Romantic striving to break out from the entanglements of his own decadence. Its movement, from within a narrow circle out into the great Without, culminating in the return within, is in various disguises, right through to The Glass Bead Game, the characteristic movement of Hesse's novels. (pp. 12-15)

Peter Camenzind's adoration of nature goes through several stages. It is only quite late in the book, in the countryside around Basel, that he eventually discovers what such a love really can mean, a passionate preoccupation in which a man's whole being becomes, and must become, absorbed. (p. 16)

Although the novel mentions a God of independent identity, the feeling throughout is essentially pantheistic, and the fundamental experience is that of the confrontation of the divine in nature with the divine in man, with the soul. Without and Within, nature and the soul—these pairs are the same and the individual terms in each pair are even interchangeable…. In Peter's relationship with nature his repressed soul finds its obverse and thus some sort of expression; in some respects love of nature is a surrogate for love of man, and it discloses also the desire to express a love which cannot possibly be rejected, not a love for any particular or even finite object, but for the infinite…. Love of God is love of nature, love of nature is love of soul, love of soul is love of self—all these are one; thus what might appear at first sight a moving outward is, at least equally, a narcissistic turning inward, or a kind of maternal regression.

Peter Camenzind's nature mysticism is the groundwork of a novel which is, in its other aspect, a sharp attack upon the alleged corruption of civilization. In coming eventually, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, to the study of men, Peter struggles to understand what it is which separates them from nature. It is above all else their hypocrisy, their pose, their love of masks, ultimately their lying, the barrier is "a slippery jelly of lies" …, and the source of the production of this objectionable substance is the need each man has to act a role without first knowing his own real nature. The jelly, then, is a false personality, already acquired by young children…. (p. 17)

[In] Peter Camenzind the wish to escape the charmed circle of decadence, to break out into green pastures, is not at all affected; it is evidently sincere and very strong. (p. 18)

The self-exclusion of "other people" from the experience of natural things, contrasted with Peter's essential integration in nature and myth, is the central arch of the book's satire. It is far from providing, however, a full explanation of the problematics of Peter Camenzind the outsider, even on the author's own terms. Hesse knows well enough that the source of a neurosis never lies in others. Indeed, since the whole novel was conceived as a flight from decadence and a harking after mental health—Peter feels constantly distinct from the species of nervous aesthete with whom he associates, and he aspires himself to create "something deep and good" … one might therefore expect the work to deal in detail with the issues of "outsiderdom," in the hope of offering at least a partial cure. And this, of course, it does. (pp. 18-19)

Peter Camenzind goes to a physician and receives a warning. His mental condition, though as yet not exactly menacing, needs therapy, and this is to come from the direct effort to mingle more with humankind. It is this effort which leads him to the academician's and to his great love, Elisabeth. It is of course inevitably in his love life that the sick strain in Peter's psyche finds both nourishment and expression…. Love of woman, he tells us, has for him something austere, reverential, its symbol is "prayerful hands stretched up to blue heavens."… Under the influence of his mother and of his own instincts he reveres woman as "a strange, beautiful, and baffling sex, which is superior to us through the innate beauty and harmony of its nature, and which we must regard as sacred, because just like stars and blue mountaintops it is far from us and seems to be nearer to God."… Such a view of women, evidently in essence a mother-fixation, leads, as Peter is prepared to admit, to a number of difficulties. (pp. 21-2)

Confession, in this confessional novel, is already itself a motif; later this motif reveals itself as being of structural as well as psychological significance for Hesse's writings. At the academician's house Peter meets the dark-haired Elisabeth…. In the art gallery he sees her as she stands, oblivious of him, and admires a Segantini, in particular the solitary cloud. Contemplation of the work of art brings Elisabeth's soul, the most feminine quality of her psyche, to the surface, as it responds softly, serenely, displacing for one sensitive moment the sophisticated, the intellectual, the austere (herb) masculine traces in her face.

Peter's love for Elisabeth leads, in him also, to a response of the soul, a blossoming of his pinched emotional life; the newly deepened love of nature, in the countryside around Basel, which now arises does not, it is true, entirely cure his melancholy, but it does "ennoble and purify" it. His senses sharpen, an intensified wish to penetrate nearer to the very heart of existence is combined with a simpler reverence for the surface of things. (pp. 22-3)

But as for the lover Peter Camenzind, that perpetual boy, he is thrown back again and again upon himself, upon the uneasy sense of his own inadequacy. Love-sickness pursues him even toward the novel's end…. (p. 24)

In all Hesse's major novels, with but one exception, the friendship theme is an introit—or else is played in counterpoint—to the theme of heterosexual love…. Richard's friendship is of immense value for Peter, if only because it is a remedy for his melancholia…. [Richard] takes his peasant-friend with him, at his own expense, on a tour of northern Italy, now that his semesters are up and they must part. The parting is permanent, since Richard is drowned shortly afterward in a small south German river. Peter blasphemes and curses: all is finished, the universe is desolate. He admits that he should at this point have taken a grip on himself and his life, but he preferred passively to endure and to wait. From the hindsight of later years, however, he was able to see that Providence guided him even then: "Wise, thrifty life … let me play my comedy of pride and knowing better, ignored it and waited, until the errant child should find his mother once more"….

But Peter Camenzind never really finds his mother…. However, his desolation, his Romantic cosmos-hatred, are not wholly convincing; they do not have the emotional charge to be found, for instance, in The Steppenwolf. (pp. 24-6)

[Peter] finds his true release in wine, and his becoming a drinker he regards as more important than anything he has up to that time related…. Wine is a way to paradise, back to origins, to myth and the roots of being…. Moreover, in Peter this divinity serves a double purpose: not only does wine, the androgynous—"the sweet god … with his womanly soft hand" …—restore him to his beginnings, to states of ecstasy and paradise, to a receptive condition in which the wine itself begins "to conjure, to create, itself to write poetry" …, but it also seems, when other people are present, to have the diametrically opposite effect, to accentuate the critical, masculine element in him…. In the dual effect of the hermaphroditic wine god upon Peter Camenzind we find a pointer to the ambivalence of his own psyche, to the conflict of male and female, mother and father, in him…. (p. 27)

The Boppi episode is the culmination of the novel. It is the misanthropist's cure. On a windy night Peter will go out into the storm to visit a solitary tree, his bosom friend, to see how it is faring, but yet he has no love for his own kind…. Peter Camenzind's great works are of that class which never get written, for the moment for them is never fully ripe. He knows that he has only one way of salvation—through love of men, and he determines to experiment with loving his father…. [He] tells us little about it, and its results are inevitably minimal; such a love, indeed, rather goes against the grain in the psychological world of Hesse's works. So Peter turns to Italy again…. On the streets where his idol, St. Francis, himself had walked, Peter feels at home…. The St. Francis experience, gently introduced before, now begins to take over the novel and to bring about the hero's spiritual transformation. (pp. 27-8)

The saint's most outstanding quality for Peter was his childlikeness…. Indeed, the idea of spiritual search is central to the novel, the wish to fulfill the function not merely of the poet but of the seer, to penetrate to the world of the spirit which lies behind phenomena…. Here the Boppi theme sounds strongly; it is the Franciscan doctrine of all-embracing love for all the creatures of the earth, through which comes peace. After his return from Assisi, Peter comes more and more to perceive that happiness has little to do with the fulfillment of external desires and that the sufferings of love-sick youths are normally devoid of all tragedy. He learns to believe in Providence, and that the purpose of pain, disappointment, and melancholy is precisely "to mature and transfigure us."… (p. 29)

The decision to seek "the warning proximity of human life … among the ordinary people" … originated in Italy. Back in Basel, Peter is able to strike up an acquaintance with the carpenter who comes to fit his bookshelves, because he has lived so much among wandering journeymen and he knows their patois…. The satire which springs from all this sentiment is rather more blatant than before; among these simple people we find "instead of drawing room talk, realities" … although their life is harsh (herb) and impoverished, they find satisfaction in it and have no time or inclination to deck it out with fancy, sophistication, and pose. For Peter their true attraction is maybe that he finds here "something of my childhood preserved for me" …, something of that life which the patres in the monastery near Nimikon had broken off when they sent him to school. (p. 30)

Boppi, the younger brother of the carpenter's wife and a hopeless cripple, is left to the family's unwilling care. Peter's reaction to his appearance is at first like theirs, also adverse: why should he allow his, at the moment, relatively serene existence to be darkened with such shadows? The memory of St. Francis comes then like a blinding light of conscience, St. Francis of whom he had boasted to his friends in Assisi, "He had taught me to love all men"…. It is as if God speaks to him, as if in the person of Boppi God had entered the carpenter's home. Peter Camenzind, confronted with this mirror to his own nature, sees himself for what he is, a braggart and a liar. He now becomes "the astonished and grateful pupil of a wretched cripple" …, for Boppi has serenity, inner beauty, a deep humanity, and has also learned how to accept his own weakness and to submit to the will of God. (pp. 30-1)

Through Boppi, Peter Camenzind learns how to love men. He returns to Nimikon…. He takes up manual labor, wears down his soft hands on the harsh wood, and shakes off the corruptions of civilization…. He has found a simple union between love of nature, rootedness in nature, and the service of man in the spirit of St. Francis. Self-love and love of men have coalesced. (pp. 31-2)

Clouds are the particular object of the young Peter's nature worship…. The clouds are the objective correlative of almost every kind of Romantic emotion that Peter Camenzind is able to experience. The language is intensely reflective, and preciosity is sometimes not far away. Direct description is usually avoided, and the figurative meaning is extracted with what might be regarded as overobvious precision…. The poetry of all this first helped to make the novel famous, but it is in fact its abstracting, reflective quality which is its most revealing characteristic. Peter Camenzind's reveries are never naive, they are the sophisticated constructions of a very conscious artist, of a Romantic, a passive, melancholic dreamer, hostile to society and inclined to alcoholism, full of fantasies about poetic genius and contemptuous of the professions of literature and journalism, whose supposed respect for the surface of things conflicts with his longing to burst through to the Infinite, whose suicidal impulses stand in an odd relationship to his cult of health alfresco, who can experience nothing without pondering it, communicate nothing without commentary, and who stands outside all his successive selves except the last one, where the self-insight fails—he is, in fact, for all his protesting, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a rustic Hermann Lauscher.

Fundamentally, therefore, beyond all question, the language of Peter Camenzind reveals that the book, and equally the hero, are prisoners of the Romantic tradition. (pp. 33-4)

Mark Boulby, "Peter Camenzind," in his Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (copyright © 1967 by Cornell University; used with the permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press), Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 1-38.