CHRONICLE, 1903–1908
The life of one that laboureth and is contented shall be made sweet.
—Ecclesiasticus
INTRODUCTION
When the Young Poet made his appeal to Rilke, he must have had some inkling of the sort of sympathy he might look for, but he could scarcely have realized what discords of bitter memory he had jarred. Perhaps no single episode of his youth had left such lasting impress upon Rilke’s development as his experience at military school; hence its importance in relation to that later period in which the Letters to a Young Poet fall. He had been sent to Sankt-Pölten as a matter of course by a conventional officer father and a self-absorbed, religious-fanatical mother who in her letters only excited him to further unhappiness with expressions of sympathy and seemed to have no idea of mending the situation either by strengthening him to endure the ordeal or by removing him. Although he entered in good condition, sunburned and well after summer holidays and of normal development for his age, he was by temperament totally unfitted to stand the physical discipline of any such establishment and, which was even worse, soon became the victim of his comrades’ active and often cruel contempt. Doubtless they found him a romantic sentimentalist and prig, for which his early childhood would have been much to blame. Any ten- or twelve- or fourteen-year-old boy who, on being vigorously struck in the face, could say “in a quiet voice . . . ‘I endure it because Christ endured it, silently and without complaint, and while you were hitting me I prayed my good God to forgive you,’” need have expected nothing but the derisive laughter of his contemporaries. But this sort of thing drove him to nights of weeping, to far too many days in the infirmary, “more spiritually afflicted,” he says himself, “than physically ill.” It drove him also to writing poetry “which already in its childish beginnings comforted” him—very fiery and noble and not at all original poetry, but still his most natural form of response to his environment and refuge from it.
Many years later, in the fall of 1920, Rilke received a letter from a Major-General Sedlakowitz, who had taught him German at the Sankt-Pölten school and who, having recently heard Ellen Key lecture on the prominent lyric poet, ventured to express his admiration and to recall his early sympathy (even though he had applied considerable red ink to the imaginative essays of his pupil). He hoped for an answer—even a short answer. Rilke’s reply covers, against his two pages, eight.* It is uncompromising and courageous and truthful, charming and kind; such a letter as only one who cared for honesty and had a fine sense of delicacy in human relationships would have troubled to write. He is grateful for his correspondent’s desire to renew acquaintance, but tells him straight from the shoulder that he feels he would never have been able to make what he has of his life had he not totally suppressed for decades all recollection of those five years at military school; there were times when the least memory of them threatened the new creative consciousness for which he strove, and he has never been able to understand this visitation of his childhood. If his attitude seems exaggerated he begs the Major-General to remember that he had left the school exhausted, physically and spiritually misused and retarded at sixteen, deprived of strength for the great task ahead of him, totally misprepared, and growing always more aware of how different an introduction to life he should have had, suffering from the sense that the time and effort spent in those preparatory years were irretrievable. He would like to acknowledge any friendly incident that chanced to befall him during that time, but anything of the sort was so scarce that it seems only natural he should have sought protection in later moments of his youth by including the whole experience “in the feeling of one single terrible damnation.”
Rilke never put through the military novel he had it in mind to write and the only descriptions he left, outside of his letters, are fragments.* But this mature statement is evidence enough that the experiences of Sankt-Pölten and Mährisch-Weisskirchen amounted to more than childish discomfort, to much more than mere uncongeniality. One might ask, who knows to what extent they caused the crystallizing out of his individual characteristics? For it is to be noted that he showed a typical loyalty to duty and self-discipline, and no inconsiderable strength of will, in enduring them. Furthermore, they did not embitter him, much as he shrank and was appalled; they seem only to have opened up—as counterbalance perhaps to his ultimate sensitivity and exaltation of thought—his peculiar awareness of human misery, that most acute misery of mind and spirit which despair and fear of whatever sort, psychological if not bodily, may engender.
INTERIM
He left, with his father’s approval, in the spring of 1891 (at fifteen and a half) to found himself “a new career” in a more congenial manner. It is not surprising that a youth with the makings of a poet, and especially a Rilke, should have been a misfit in such a place. But it is surprising that Rilke himself should have taken it for granted he was to become an officer even during the first part of the ensuing study years, while external influences, it is to be assumed, were stronger with him than his awareness of himself; or perhaps it would be truer to say, before his conviction of his own singularity—for it did uphold him even during the school time, this knowing that he was not of or for the life of others—had stamped itself undeniably upon his external world. While staying now with his Uncle Jaroslav in the suburb of Smichov, lying in the garden and wandering en flâneur about Prague, he still wore uniform on his walks “because in these villages one is more respected.” In the next winter at Linz, where he went to attend the business academy, he composed his first poem to be printed, a swinging, martial glorification of war in answer to the Baroness von Suttner’s “Lay Down Your Arms!” No human individuality ever underwent greater change than Rilke’s did in the next ten years. This partly explains why at twenty-eight, with all his artist’s wisdom, he was still searching for his own foothold; how throughout his life, while so determined, he was still so unestablished.
Back in Prague, he studied, privately at first and later at the Carl-Ferdinand University: religion, philosophy, German, history of art and of literature, and even the beginnings of the law. He also read enormously: Goethe, Rückert, Lenau, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Tolstoi. He seems to have been busy and happy on the whole. His first love affairs fall in this period: an amorous escapade with a governess in Linz which he soon saw as an “alberne Liebelei” (silly flirtation) of which he was well rid; and the three years’ association of stimulating companionship, work, inspiration, and romance with Valery David-Rhonfeld, significant for him, whatever it may have meant to her, since under her influence (daughter of an Austrian artillery officer living in the Weinberge section of Prague, she “painted vases and wrote stories and combined the two with the eccentric behavior of genius,” says Sieber) he reacted definitely and forever away from the conventional class-consciousness of the army in his desire to become an artist. All the time he was writing. First, at the second volume of a history (not extant) of the Thirty Years’ War, the significance of which he apparently saw as the revealing of great men, heroes, against the background of events. Then always poems, very reminiscent, only here and there characteristic of himself because he could not bear to publish the things he really cared for and put forth only the least personal. One volume, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs), was published in 1894 with money Valery put up; and two issues of Wegwarten (Chicory, which “Paracelsus says turns every hundred years into a living being,” so Rilke hopes his poems “may wake to higher life in the soul of the people”), he published himself and with a sentimental-idealistic gesture gave away to hospitals and free libraries; and he also published* in various periodicals, on one of which he acted for a time as editor. Finally, and with great seriousness, dramatic sketches of a theatric-emotional kind, which totally failed. The only product of these years which Rilke thought worthy of inclusion in the Gesammelte Werke is Larenopfer (Offerings to the Lares) originally published at Christmas 1896 while he was studying in Munich, a collection of poems for the most part only conventional German-lyric in form and content but colored by feeling for his native Bohemia and here and there already more personal. Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) he published in 1897, and Advent in 1898.
After some brief but contented study at the University of Berlin, Rilke set out in the spring of 1899 for Moscow with his fried Lou Andreas-Salomé. Twice he went to Russia, the second time just a year later. These two trips, during which he not only traveled and drank deep of the scene and atmosphere of the country, but met Tolstoi, and Droschin the peasant poet, and many other people in the intellectual and artistic world, left an impression upon him (he was twenty-three and twenty-four) which so penetrated his creative imagination that its influence is to be sensed in his concepts throughout and to the last. “Russia was reality and at once the deep, daily perceiving that reality is something distant that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience. Russia, the land where the people are solitary people, each with a world in himself, each full of darkness like a mountain, each deep in his humility, without fear of abasing himself, and therefore reverent. People full of distance, uncertainty and hope: evolving people. And over all a never defined, ever changing, growing God.” Some of the Stories of God* give evidence of what he felt.
On his return from the second trip (1900) Rilke visited Heinrich Vogeler, the painter, in Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen. Here he wrote many of the poems that were to appear in Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Pictures), the first edition of which came out in the spring of 1902. The associations of this time have been credited with much influence upon Rilke’s point of view, and not without justification. But in any such consideration it should be borne in mind that “the essential nature of ‘influence’ in his case implies an expansion of what is already present in his genius, not the imposition from without of the artistic creed of others, a fact which is of supreme importance in all Rilke criticism, and one which tends to be obscured by his characteristic fashion of giving himself up entirely, for the time being, to each great new experience in his artistic life.”†
While at Worpswede he met the young sculptress Clara Westhoff, of a Bremen family, to whom he was married in the following year, making his home with her in nearby Westerwede, where in December their daughter Ruth was born. Here he wrote his book on the group of Worpswede painters, published in 1902. During this period it was, and undoubtedly owing in part to his interest in his wife’s work, that he came upon the idea which led him to undertake for Richard Muther’s series of monographs a study of Rodin.
LETTER ONE
He went to Paris toward the end of August 1902 with the purpose of preparing himself for this agreeable task, and incidentally of studying at the libraries under the guidance of the Vicomte de Vogüé, the French historian and critic, who was a connoisseur of things Russian. Rilke at this time spoke French only haltingly, although he had been brushing up at the Berlitz School in Bremen before coming, and this caused him to be shy at first of meeting people and gave him particular embarrassment when he first met Rodin. He says that the omnipotence of the language saddened him, but it must have been a challenge, for he was already writing verse in French.
We know from the poignant observation in his descriptions that he was busy taking in all the external details that make the charm of that irresistible city—bridges, streets, soft skies, smells, sounds and sights, buildings, populace—and that in later years and in other moods he felt drawn to Paris. But his first impressions were little short of terrible. He found the city strange, inimical, resembling in its excitements, its iniquities and beauties, those biblical cities which the Lord rose up to destroy. He felt alone and rejected of these people, frightened in the foreign turmoil and all the implications of their lives, yet through his sympathy and interest in humanity’s concerns torn out of himself into their existences. The newspapers shocked him with their exciting accounts of crime, show-windows with pictorial expositions of disease; he understood why “hospitals are always occurring in Verlaine and Baudelaire and Mallarmé.” Much of this feeling about Paris is of course recorded in the Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,* and many of the episodes there noted are, notwithstanding Rilke’s wish that the book as a whole should not be so regarded, directly autobiographical. Before going to sleep, for example, he would read the 30th chapter of Job, which he says entirely expressed his own state, and in the night he would seek consolation in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, especially that one which runs “Enfin! la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même,” and closes with the paragraph “Mécontent de tous . . .” quoted in the Notebooks. Paris, he wrote only a few months later, “was for me a similar experience to the military school; as in those days a great fearful astonishment seized me, so now the terror seized me again before all that which, as in an indescribable confusion, is called life.”
He lived at first at number 11 rue Toullier—a brief little street close above the Sorbonne—the address which heads the opening of the Notebooks. Undoubtedly some of the gloom of these early impressions must have been encouraged by his surroundings: a dingy little Latin Quarter hotel, too much in the midst of the student world, in a depressingly narrow street which brought many opposite windows too near to his own, his evenings lighted by a smelly and wavering kerosene lamp. He moved after a few weeks to another little hotel nearby, at number 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, where he was living at the time of the first of these Letters to a Young Poet, and whence from his fifth-floor balcony he looked over gardens, then rows of houses, to the dome of the Panthéon, “. . . and sky and morning and evening, space. . . .” But even here the atmosphere oppressed him as much as before. In judging of his susceptibility to what are sometimes called morbid impressions, it is to be remembered that Rilke came—not strong and certainly hypersensitive by disposition to noise, to ugliness, to the physical wear of complex surroundings—from the quiet of a German-speaking lowland country to live, practically for the first time, alone to begin with and but a step removed from poverty, in the heart of one of the world’s great cities; which fact by itself would account for a good deal of his sense of confusion and shock and dread. For he was not yet anchored in himself and in his work; he was one of those to whom such anchorage was forever being denied.
He had come with a purpose, however, and the difficulties made him only the more determined to stay, because he felt that if he once got into work there, it would be very deeply, and for this he was waiting, preparing. His hours had been full of occupation. He would spend days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, reading French literature and history, or examining reproductions of twelfth- and thirteenth-century cathedrals. Other days he would spend in museums studying pictures and sculpture, acquainting himself in preparation for his work on Rodin with the antique, the classic, the modern, seeing for the first time the great Botticellis and Leonardos, the Venus de Milo (which was “too modern” for him), the Nike of Samothrace (which, on the other hand, expressed the true Greece to him), the graceful world of Tanagra. The Panthéon he found a “kindly place”; Notre Dame grew upon him every day. It was a most important period in his development.
And to all the disturbance Rodin was a “great, quiet, powerful contradiction.” Behind his own restless unease Rilke was experiencing the influence that radiated from the immense calm strength of this great creative personality, that seemed to shelter him under its colossal impress “from the thousandfold fears that came later.” Perhaps the most important single element for him in their association at this time, came through Rodin’s philosophy of “toujours travailler” which Rilke so touchingly, and ever and again so vainly, sought to exemplify in his own life. For occupation however intent, study, reading, the pursuit of education or of information, have not for the artist that utmost satisfaction which both elates and calms, both inspires and exhausts, and which comes only with his own creative activity. Here was Rodin, in daily and continuous preoccupation hewing and molding the visions of near a lifetime with that lifetime’s acquired skill, while the poet Rilke was passing through a period of frustration.
“. . . very alone and very forsaken I go my way; and of course that is good: I never wanted it otherwise. But all the fear and worry that came and grew with the happiness and the largess of the past year, has made that in me which creates weak and uncertain and timid. . . . But I am a very defenseless creature (because I was a very timid, lost, defenseless child), and when fate cries out to me I always grow quite, quite still for a long time and must remain so, even though I suffer unspeakably day and night from the no-longer-sounding. . . . Should one perhaps seek rescue in some quiet handicraft and not be fearful for whatever fruit may be ripening deep within one, behind all the rouse and stir? Sometimes I think it would be a way out, because I see always more clearly that for a person like me nothing is harder and more dangerous than trying to earn his living by writing. I cannot force myself like that to write at all; and the consciousness alone that some relation exists between my writing and the nourishment and needs of the day is enough to make work impossible for me. I must wait in stillness for the sounding. I know that if I force it it will not come at all. (It has come so seldom in the last two years.) . . . on bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse-heavy that I cannot write with them, not even a letter. Is that bad, weak? And yet God wills it so with me. . . .”
Thus he wrote to Ellen Key on February 13th, 1903, four days before the first of these Letters to a Young Poet. What notion of this state of mind could the youthful Kappus possibly have had? There may be by nature little in common between an artist who weaves his visions into words and one who transfers his through the sturdy and concrete technicalities of sculpture, yet something like the guiding assurance that Rilke could hold before young Kappus he was himself drawing now from Rodin.
LETTER TWO
As the Parisian winter worked no good to his health, he fled in March to a warmer climate, to the sea at Viareggio, not far from Pisa—the spot near which almost a hundred years earlier, after the sad wrecking of the Ariel, Shelley’s body was cast upon the pine-trimmed sandy shore. Rilke had been here before, in the spring of 1898, and had at that time written the Lieder der Mädchen (Girls’ Songs) and the first draft of the Weisse Fürstin (The White Princess). During the present sojourn he was to be seen wandering about with his Bible and his Jacobsen (Niels Lyhne), in retreat from the persistent English and German tourist chatter of the Hotel Florence, finding solitary refreshment in sunbaths and ocean plunges and barefoot walks along untenanted stretches of the beach. He describes his costume as a black-and-red-striped bathing-suit of which he wore only the trunks, keeping the top “to pull on in case of emergency, and the emergency is the Englishwoman who may bob up anywhere.” The sea did him good; “it cleanses me with its noise and lays a rhythm upon everything in me that is disturbed and confused.” When at times, to his surprise, it seemed not so beneficial, “too loud and too incessant,” he would withdraw into the woods where he had found a great reclining tree root on which he “sat for hours as alone as on the first day of the world.” He very soon wrote to Clara: “I already feel my solitude again a little and suspect that it will deny me nothing if I hearken to it with new strength.” And again, a fortnight later: “Everyone must find in his work the center of his life and thence be able to grow out radially as far as may be. And no one else may watch him in the process . . . for not even he himself may do that. There is a kind of cleanness and virginity in it, in this looking away from oneself; it is as though one were drawing, one’s gaze bound to the object, inwoven with Nature, while one’s hand goes its own way somewhere below, goes on and on, gets timid, wavers, is glad again, goes on and on far below the face that stands like a star above it, not looking, only shining. I feel as though I had always worked that way; face gazing at far things, hands alone. And so it surely ought to be. I shall be like that again in time.”
LETTER THREE
This awakening creative urge found its outlet in the writing of parts of the Stundenbuch (Book of Hours). He delayed his return to Paris because of it, feeling that however slight it might prove to be it would not be good “to go with it in the great railway train and to new impressions in Genoa and Dijon”; while if it came to nothing it would be “better to experience the little disappointment here, knowing that it was not one’s own fault.” He went back at the end of April, having “done nothing here but write a few letters and read Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and a bad boring book by the Russian Merejkowski on Leonardo.”
LETTER FOUR
The plan to write a monograph on Eugène Carrière which was now in his mind, never came to anything. He did not stay long this time, although he “kept feeling that Paris must present me with another work.” Summer drove him thence again, with Clara, to a few peaceful weeks in the flat lands of Worpswede, spent in the white house of their friend Vogeler. He now, on July 18th, two days after writing Letter Four, set down in a long account to Lou Andreas-Salomé what was, as it were, filling another segment of his consciousness, a detailed description of the effects Paris had had on him, giving us the first sustained intimation of what was to come in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Three weeks later—having gone at the end of July to visit “our little Ruth who has her little life not far from here,” at Oberneuland, where she lived with Clara’s parents—he wrote to this same great friend, to whom he revealed many of his inner dilemmas and much concerning the stages of his growth: “. . . O Lou, in one poem that I succeed with there is more reality than in any relation or inclination that I feel. Where I create I am true, and I want to find the strength to build my life wholly upon this truth, upon this infinite simplicity and joy that is sometimes given me. . . .But how shall I begin . . . ?” He knows—he is now twenty-seven—that he still lacks the discipline for which he longs in order to work. “Have I not the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that hampers all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life going. And still nothing has happened yet, nothing real is around me yet.”
Is it in the language itself that he must seek the tools of his art? Is it in some special study, closer knowledge of a subject? Or is it in a culture part inherited, part learned? But he is conscious of having to fight everything in his inheritance, while what he has achieved for himself is negligible; he is almost without education. His efforts at any given study were always broken off, partly because of the curious and surprising sense that he had to go back from an innate knowledge by laborious ways that finally, with much circumambulation, wound back to it. He needed books, but when in the Bibliothèque Nationale he found himself among those he had long coveted, everything in them seemed so important that he nearly succumbed to copying the whole text, and came away confused and full of superfluous information, his notes proving of little use to him afterward. “And I am similarly helpless in the face of those occurrences that come and go, without gift of choice, without composure of assimilation, a mirror turned this way and that out of which all the reflections fall . . . that is why I need so terribly to find the working material of my art. . . . Somehow I must arrive at making things; not plastic, written things—realities, that emerge out of the handiwork.” All the while he feels himself “awkward in life,” losing precious moments. Hokusai, Leonardo, Rodin lived in their art and everything in them and their lives grew toward that only. “How shall one not be fearful who but seldom comes into his sanctuary, because out there where life is reared against him he catches himself in every trap and stubs himself blunt against every obstacle.”
While this was his inner state of mind, he was nevertheless planning new work for the fall, in Italy. By the middle of August he was ready to move on once more, fond as he was of this moorland country, the stillness of its wide distances, the sweep and fullness of its winds. The house of his parents-in-law stood in a park at the back of which the Hamburg expresses passed, and their noise overriding that of the wind in the trees seemed, now that his thoughts were elsewhere, to disturb the quiet of his surroundings with a forewarning of travel and cities and new experiences to come. Now, at the wish of Rodin with whom she was studying, Clara was to spend a year in Rome and to a sojourn in the Eternal City Rilke was himself nothing loath. It would be his first visit. His deep interest in art had been intensified by the association with Rodin; and all the long background of such an artist’s work had made him aware, beneath human history, of a more peaceful undercurrent in the history of the construction of “endless generations of things,” and he was eager for fresh contact with the manifestations of antiquity. He theorized very beautifully upon what he was about to see, imagined himself a seeker of the “inner future in this past in which so much that is eternal was enclosed.”
In the latter part of August 1903, then, he and his wife set out. They were to meet his parents in Marienbad. His father scarcely approved of the move: they lived so casually, was René really thoughtful of a secure future? nor of their vegetarianism; and as for their attire, fearing “abnormalities,” he bids René order a suit from his Prague tailor and hopes that Clara will also be properly dressed. (René, at least in later years, was particular about his clothes: they were simple and they might be old, but they had an air of quality and comfort.) Thence they proceeded over Munich and Venice, in both of which cities Rilke particularly enjoyed the pictures of Zuloaga, whom they had met in Paris; and so over Florence to reach Rome a month later.
His disappointment of the first few days he expressed in many letters. Rome was “for the most part a bad museum,” full of “senseless statues,” lacked the expected Greek glories, had too many Renis and Guercinos—and he suffered much distress on observing the Italian talent for abusing animals. But gradually he found the valuable things, and he was able to throw off what troubled him about the city as he had not been able to do in Paris. The climate also, despite inclemencies, he felt to be less harmful. The Borghese Gardens provided a refuge. And he speaks again and again of the fountains and the steps which were to him a constant source of refreshment and joy.
LETTER FIVE
He was now living at 5 via del Campidoglio, the last house (no longer standing) on a little terrace overlooking the Forum. The mood of Oberneuland was still upon him: he found it easier to collect himself sitting in the narrow circle of lamplight in his little room than out in the moonlight night, for which “one must first have become something again in order to feel it as space in which one is alone and in which one belongs.” But he was not averse to his surroundings. A favorite walk he made every day included the ascent to the Capitol, “when, with the movement of one riding, the fine smooth bronze likeness of Marcus Aurelius mounts up stride by stride, from stair to stair.” The little house he mentions, into which he was planning to move and where he hoped to “build a winter” for himself, was a former summer-house—of one high-windowed room, with a flat roof from which one had a wide view of the Roman landscape—”the last and most remote in the large wild garden” of the Villa Strohl-Fern, adjoining the Borghese gardens. Here Clara was already installed in living quarters and a studio. “It is a happy circumstance that brought me to discover this place, and I think I shall take pleasure in it, in the evenings that may be spent there, in the great wide-open nights with the sound of animals that move, fruits that fall, winds that stir. . . . The most important thing to me will be to get to some sort of work there as soon as possible, the regular daily recurrence of which I may simply have to achieve by force if it does not want to come of its own accord. Then I shall go into the city comparatively seldom, often spend days on end out there and get my own little meals in my hermitage and be quite alone with my hands.”
LETTER SIX
In the middle of November he moved in. But now he complained of prolonged rains, of inability to get to work, of waiting for the propitious hour, and how this waiting makes it always harder to begin, “and the happiness of being a beginner, which I hold to be the greatest, is small beside the fear of beginning. . . .” He wrote on December 19th: “I am now pretty well installed in the little house, it lacks nothing save that which I cannot give it—save life, which is in all things and in me; save work, which binds one thing to another and links everything with the great necessity; save joy, which comes from within and from activity; save patience, which can wait for what comes from afar.”
Christmas brought the beginnings of “a sort of spring” after the long rains, but to Rilke and his wife its eve was to be “only a quiet hour, no more; we shall sit in the remote little garden house and think of those who are having Christmas; of our small dear Ruth and of ourselves, as though somewhere we were still the children we once were—the expectant, glad-timid Christmas children, upon whom great surprises descend like angels from within and without. . . .” It was not till the middle of January that one day, after a bit of “real work” sweeping the heavy pools of rainwater from his roof and clearing away the dried and fallen oak leaves, with the blood singing in him “as in a tree,” he felt for the very first time after a long spell “a tiny little bit free and festive.” He had now resumed after a considerable pause the translation of “The Song of the Host of Igor,” an ancient Russian epic, and at this he was working every morning. Some reading, a book review or so—he did not want for occupation.
The good mood continued in February. He wrote to Ellen Key on the 6th: “It really seems as though things were quieting down around me, and even if my nerves, which are jumpy, sometimes dread disturbance from outside or uncertainty in health, there is yet much in me that is gathering itself together, and my longing to do something good, something really good, was never so great as now. I feel as though I had been sleeping for years or had been lying in the lowest hold of a ship that, loaded with heavy things, sailed through strange distances—— Oh to climb up on deck once more and feel the winds and the birds, and to see how the great, great nights come with their gleaming stars . . .”
He had embarked upon “a sort of 2nd Part to the Stories-of-God book”; but by the middle of March (having also finished the Russian translation, which remains in manuscript) he was “stuck somewhere in the middle of it” and didn’t know whether he would continue it or not.
LETTER SEVEN
Whatever its up and downs, this Roman winter proved an important one in his own growth. With his new work—whether he refers only to the second part of the Stories, or includes here the beginning of the Notebooks, which took place some time during this period—came the discovery that his way of working had changed, his powers of observation had grown more absorptive so that he would probably never again manage to write a book in ten days or evenings (as he had the Stories of God), but would spend a long time over each endeavor. “This is good,” he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé on April 15th; “it marks progress toward that always-working which at any cost I must achieve for myself; perhaps a first step toward it. But in this change there lies a new danger too; to hold off outside disturbances for eight or ten days is possible—; but for weeks, for months? This fear pressed upon me, and is perhaps itself primarily to blame for the fact that my work wavered and with the beginning of March broke off. And what I took to be a little break and pause has become like heavy holidays hanging over me, that still continue. . . . My progress is somehow rather like the steps of a convalescent, uncommonly weightless, tottering, and beyond all measure needing help. And the help is lacking.”
By May he was already suffering from the heat, feeling good-for-nothing with headache, longing for more northerly realms, yet having no plan, no place to turn to. “Alas, that I have no parental country home, nowhere in the world a room with a few old things in it and a window looking out into great trees. . . .”
Yet his awareness of the alteration in himself had been leading him to a more positive attitude, a more practical sense of what he wanted to go after, of his own relation to life and work. The following, dated May 12th from Rome, and again to Lou Andreas-Salomé, marks a considerable change from the thoughts he had expressed to Ellen Key from Paris fifteen months earlier: “Art is . . . a longest road through life, and when I think how slight and beginnerish what I have done till now is, I am not surprised that this production (which resembles a strip of half-tilled field a foot wide) does not sustain me. For plans bear no fruit, and seed prematurely sown does not sprout. But patience and work are real and can at any moment be transformed into bread. ‘Il faut toujours travailler,’ said Rodin whenever I attempted to complain to him about the schism in daily life; he knew no other solution, and this of course had been his. . . . To stick to my work and have every confidence in it, this I am learning from his great and greatly given example, as I learn patience from him; it is true, my experience tells me over and over that I haven’t much strength to reckon with, for which reason I shall, so long as it is in any way possible, not do two things, not separate livelihood and work, rather try to find both in the one concentrated effort: only thus can my life become something good and necessary and heal together out of the tattered state for which heredity and immaturity have been responsible, into one bearing trunk.
“Therefore I shall determine my next place of abode, all else aside, from the point of view of work and that only. I want this the more, since I feel myself in the midst of developments and transitions (changes that affect observation and creation equally), which may slowly lead to that toujours travailler with which all outer and inner difficulties, dangers and confusions would really be in a certain sense overcome . . . for whoever can always work, can live too, must be able to.”
He now had definite projects providing him with a variety of work. The first item he enumerates is the carrying on of the Book of Hours. The second is his new book, the Notebooks, “the close-knit prose of which is a schooling for me and an advance that had to be made so that I may be able later some day to write everything else—including the military novel.” He seems to have been somewhat awed by this problem of writing prose, for four years later, in allusion to the same book, he expressed himself thus: “In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of exterior things; for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night. But to write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral; there one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help: on scaffoldings, alone with one’s consciousness.” In addition to these two important works, he lists, further, an attempt at drama, and two monographs, one on Jacobsen, the other on Zuloaga. In connection with the latter, he planned to go to Spain, while for the sake of the former he was already studying Danish. Neither ever came to anything, nor, as we know, did the novel, which was apparently to have dealt with his Sankt-Pölten impressions.
That he realized the shortcomings of his own education has already been shown. “With my bringing up, conducted according to no plan, and with the intimidation from which I suffered in my growing years (everywhere encountering laughter and superiority, in my awkwardness repulsed by everyone) I never had a chance to learn much of the preparatory training, and most of the technicalities of living, which later are easy to everyone; my awareness is full to the brim with recollections of moments when all the people about me could do something and knew things and acted mechanically without thinking how to go about it, while I, embarrassed, didn’t know where to begin, wasn’t even able to imitate them by watching.”
He now drew up, in addition to his writing plans, a list of studies for himself which implied no idle ambition. In order to carry them out he wanted to attend lectures in natural science and biology, to read and to see experiments; to learn to work with archives and historical documents “in so far as this is a technique and a handicraft”; to read the Grimm Brothers’ Dictionary together with mediaeval literature; to go on with his Danish; to continue to read and translate Russian; to translate a book of Francis Jammes; and to read, among others, Michelet’s studies in natural history, and his history of France; also the Goncourts’ on the eighteenth century. He thought of going to one of the smaller German universities to have access to the necessary books and lectures.
The most significant thing about this list in the clue it gives us to the inner workings of his mind, is the interest in science, a new interest and based not so much on the desire to pursue any special branch of knowledge, any science as such, as on a craving for the knowable as a hold on life. He wrote—again to Lou Andreas-Salomé on May 12th—:
“There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course. There are the starry skies, and I do not know what mankind has already learned about them, not even the order of the stars do I know. And so it is with flowers, with animals, with the simplest laws, that function here and there and go through the world in a few strides from beginning to end. How life occurs, how it operates in ordinary animals, how it ramifies and spreads, how life blossoms, how it bears: all that I long to learn. Through participation in it all to bind myself more firmly to reality—which so often denies me—to be of it, not only in feeling but also by knowledge, always and always; that I believe is what I need, to become more sure and not so homeless. You sense that I do not want sciences; for each one requires a lifetime and no life is long enough to master even its beginnings; but I want to cease to be an exile, one who cannot read the deeper record of his time that points farther forward and reaches farther back, a prisoner who senses everything but has not the small certainty whether just now it is day or evening, spring or winter. I should like somewhere, where that can be done, to learn that which I should probably know if I had been allowed to grow up in the country and among more vital people, and that which an impersonal and hasty school failed to tell me, and whatever else has since been found and recognized and belongs to it. Not art history and other histories, not the nature of philosophic systems do I want to learn—I want to be allowed to acquire, to achieve only a few great and simple certainties, that are there for all: I want to be allowed to ask a few questions, questions such as children ask, irrelevant to the outsider but full of a family likeness for me who know their birth and descent unto the tenth generation.”
He hoped in this way to gain a more certain grasp of any work he might undertake, to have resources that would always stand him in good stead; and to save himself from that “daily evidence of my inefficiency, of that being excluded, which life makes me feel again and again, whenever I try to draw near it at any point.”
At this time he was still so acutely aware of not yet having done anything important, anything demonstrable, that, although he very well recognized the necessity of earning where he could and the privilege of being sponsored by so fine a person, he looked “(in confidence) with terror” upon the efforts of his good friend Ellen Key to attract attention to his work. He feared that in her earnestness and enthusiasm, in confusing her knowledge of him through his letters with that which she had drawn from what she knew of his poems, she would make unjustified claims and give an impression of finality to his expression of ideas which his so-far published works did not possess. “And over and above all this I feel: if anyone needs seclusion, it is I.”
LETTER EIGHT
These efforts of Ellen Key, however, brought him some “sympathetic invitations in the North” and one of these he promptly accepted, traveling, when he finally left Rome in the month of June, 1904, to Sweden via Copenhagen. Borgeby gård, Flãdie, was a great farming estate in the southern province of Skåne. Rilke had soon found out the whole long history of the old castle, a tower of which had been rebuilt into living quarters; he enjoyed the gardens and the orchards and ate with pleasure and benefit their vegetables, fruits and berries, served at a well-set table; he loved the fields and the peace of pasturing creatures (“we have 200 cows,” he wrote on the night of his arrival), the horses, oxen, dogs; found entertainment in the weak-jointed endeavors of a new foal to get about, and the learning of young storks to clapper; took delight in the great trees of the park and the long well-kept chestnut-bordered driveways, in the winds and the storms as they passed over this fertile land. His letters are full of feeling for the productive life about him and reflect a contentment of spirit that goes with it; it was one of the most tranquil episodes of his life. No wonder he spent the whole summer here. He was not creatively occupied: “Summer was never my high time.” But he read and wrote letters, taught himself Danish largely by reading Jacobsen and Hermann Bang and translating Sören Kierkegaard’s letters to his fiancée, made acquaintance with Scandinavian literature generally, while inwardly he felt himself building, preparing something invisible but fundamental. He deliberately thought it best to look upon this time really as one of recreation and live it accordingly, although the old sense of not having achieved what he was bound to do sometimes creeps through: “I miss the gladness, miss something or other that I should have previously done. A point of departure, some evidence, the passing of a test in my own eyes.”
He wrote to Clara on the evening of July 27th: “. . . Thanks for Kappus’ letter. He has a hard time. And this is only the beginning. And he is right about it: in childhood we have used up too much strength, too much grown-people’s strength,—that may be true for a whole generation. Or true over and over again for individuals. What shall one say about it? That life has unending possibilities of renewal. Yes, but this too: that the using of strength in a certain sense is always increase of strength also; for fundamentally we have to do only with a wide cycle: all strength that we give away comes over us again, experienced and altered. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there, truly done, that is not prayer?
“And another thing, with regard to the recreation idea. There are here, amid this realm of fields, spots of dark ploughed land. They are empty, and yet lie they here as though the bright culms round about them were there for their sakes, rows of fencing for their protection. I asked what was doing with these dark acres. They told me: c’est de la terre en repos. So lovely, you see, can rest be, and so it looks alongside work. Not disquieting, but so that one gathers a deep confidence and the feel of a big time. . . .”
LETTER NINE
When after this prolonged sojourn he went in the autumn to visit other friends of Ellen Key in their country house near Göteborg, he had still not settled to anything that in his own eyes amounted to a specific piece of work. This does not mean that he was ever idle. He continually worked, writing letters, articles, book reviews, always following to some extent the outlines of study he had made for himself. Two visits to the Samskola, a modern community school for boys and girls, made such an impression upon him that he wrote an essay on it which he was later asked to read at the school and which had a wide influence when it was soon afterward published. He cared enough about it to consider whether he and his wife could not start something of the sort in North Germany, but doubted whether they were the right people to do it “with our small strength which should not be divided. And I with my great ignorance and never having learned anything! . . . But it was good for us to see the Samskola; an encouragement goes forth from it in far-reaching waves as from a fine, happy future that is sure.” During November he finished the Weisse Fürstin in its final form.
He still fostered the idea of studying somewhere: “Since I cannot arrive from within at the solution for work, it will probably have to come from without.” He needs to open up his work to new tributaries; not that he lacks experiencing and living but he has not the power to arrange, coördinate: must learn to seize and hold, must learn to work. The not having achieved this bothers him like a bad conscience. Still, he senses an advance and hopes that he can now make certain resolves to lead a more industrious and conscious life than heretofore.
This state of mind remains characteristic of him for some time to come, with the fluctuations inevitable to such a temperament, such a physique. For the next four years, which concern this chronicle only because at their expiration he once more communicated with the Young Poet, Rilke moved about without any fixed abode, much as we have seen him do within the time discussed and as he was to do for most of his life. This condition of affairs often oppressed him: “It costs so much effort and good will and imagination to set up anywhere an appearance of four walls out of the contents of a few trunks, and I would like so much to use what I have of such equipment directly for work, not on the preparation for it.” Oberneuland and Worpswede, Capri, Berlin, visits to friends in various parts of Germany; lecture tours including Dresden and Prague, Vienna and even Venice; and for the most part Paris. He takes a growing interest in Cézanne; he is in touch with Hammershöj, Bojer, Verhaeren, von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig; meets Bernard Shaw, who comes to pose for Rodin; sees something of Zuloaga and Bourdelle. Meanwhile he has been adding poems to the Buch der Bilder for its second edition. In October 1907 the essay on Rodin appears; a new volume of verse, Neue Gedichte (New Poems), about the same time. He is now more closely thrown with Rodin, even living in a little stone house in the garden at Meudon and acting as “a sort of secretary.”
The value of Rodin’s example for Rilke lay, as we have seen before, in its showing him the possibility of taking hold, of persisting, in bringing him finally to realize that he must and could do the same in his own way, making him eager to get at his own labors again. The very dominance of the personality which as a living precept taught him this, made him restive, full of desire for a year or two of hard work by himself. For behind all his hesitations and delays there was the persevering will that held him to his purpose. In May 1906 a misunderstanding over some small matter of Rodin’s correspondence caused a break in their relations, which, however, was healed again in November 1907. It greatly distressed Rilke, but in the light of his own development it fell perhaps as a fortunate coincidence. Aware of the irritability of the aging artist, who had not been well just then, he took a large view of it from the start, and it did not injure the roots of the profound influence Rodin’s way of working and of living had had upon him.
LETTER TEN
To Rodin, “mon cher et seul Ami,” Rilke wrote on December 29th: “I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.”
He is making good use of that patience. His task is the writing of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, “that difficult, difficult book” which, despite the intense effort and the mental anguish it has cost him, he is now bringing through. It is a good moment at which to leave him, calmer, more content, because he is working.
* Both letters are given in full in Carl Sieber’s René Rilke (Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1932). Rilke’s reply is included in both editions of the Briefe (Insel-Verlag, Leipzig), and in Volume II of the Letters, translated by J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1948).
* See “Die Turnstunde,” chief of these, in Gesammelte Werke, IV (Insel-Verlag, 1927) and, together with an earlier version, in Sämmtliche Werke, IV (1961). Carl Sieber’s René Rilke (Insel-Verlag, 1932) gives it (also “Pierre Dumont” and “Erinnerung”) as written in the Schmargendorf Diary, Nov. 5, 1899. Carl Niemeyer’s R. M. Rilke: Primal Sound and Other Prose Pieces (Cummington Press, Cummington, Mass., 1943) contains an English translation, “Gym Period.”
* The short stories are to be found in Erzählungen und Skizzen aus der Frühzeit (Insel-Verlag, 1928) and, with a few not before published, in Sämmtliche Werke, IV (1961).
* Geschichten vom lieben Gott, first published at Christmas, 1900, under the title Vom lieben Gott und Anderes (An Grosse für Kinder erzählt).
† G. Craig Houston, “Rilke’s Buch der Bilder,” Modern Language Review, XXIX, 3, July, 1934.
* The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1949), formerly translated as The Journal of My Other Self.