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LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
RAINER MARIA RILKE
LONDON
Langley & Sons, Ltd., The Euston Press, N.W.I
Translated by K. W. Maurer.
University College, London,
Gower Street, W. C. I.
June 1943.
To the memory of
MARTIN PETRIE
a student of University College, London,
from 1936 to 1939,
who died on active service in 1941,
aged 25.
INTRODUCTION
IT was in the late autumn of 1902—I was sitting under some
century-old chestnut trees in the park of the Military Academy
in Wiener-Neustadt reading a book. I was so engrossed in my
reading that I hardly noticed that the only one of our masters
who was not an officer, the learned kindly chaplain of the
Academy, Horaček, had joined me. He took the volume out of my
hand, considered the binding, and shook his head. "Rainer
Maria Rilke's Poems"? he asked thoughtfully. Then he turned
over the leaves here and there, scanned a few verses, looked
thoughtfully into the distance, and finally nodded. "So young
René Rilke has become a poet."
And I heard about the small, pale boy, whom his parents had
sent more than fifteen years before to the military
Unterrealschule in Sankt-Pölten, intending that he should
afterwards become an officer. At that time Horaček had been
working there as chaplain of the establishment, and he still
remembered the boy of those days perfectly. He painted him as
a quiet, earnest, extremely clever young fellow, who liked
keeping to himself, put up patiently with the discipline of
the boarding school and after his fourth year passed on with
the others to the military Oberrealschule, which was in
Mährisch-Weisskirchen. Then his constitution showed itself
definitely not to be strong enough, so that his parents
removed him from the school and let him continue his studies
at home in Prague. Horaček could tell me nothing more of the
course which his outward life had taken since then.
After all that, I think it is easy to understand that I
decided at that very moment to send my efforts in poetry to
Rainer Maria Rilke and to ask him for his verdict. I was not
yet twenty years old and I was just on the threshold of a
career which I felt to be directly opposed to my inclinations.
From the author of "Mir zur Feier," if from anyone at all, I
hoped for sympathetic understanding. And though I had not so
intended, I came to write a letter with my verses, in which I
opened my heart without reticence, as never before or since to
another human being.
Many weeks passed before an answer came. The blue, sealed
letter had a Paris post-mark and felt heavy in my hands; the
envelope bore the same beautiful, clear handwriting as that in
which the whole text from the first lines to the last had been
written. That was the beginning of my regular correspondence
with Rainer Marie Rilke, which continued till 1908 and then
gradually came to an end, because my life drove me into the
very paths from which the poet's warm, affectionate and moving
concern had wished to preserve me.
But that is of no importance. Alone important are the ten
letters which follow, important for the knowledge of the
world, in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and created, and to
many human beings of to-day and to-morrow, who are growing and
coming into being. When a great and exceptional man speaks,
the insignificant must be silent.
FRANZ XAVER KAPPUS.
Berlin, June 1929.
* * *
Paris,
17th February, 1903.
Dear Sir,
Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I should like to
thank you for its great and touching confidence. I can do
little more. I cannot go into the nature of your verses, for
any intention to criticise is too foreign to me. Nothing can
touch a work of art so little as words of criticism: they
always result in more or less happy misunderstandings. Things
are not all so easy to grasp and to express as most people
would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, and take
place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most
inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of
secrets whose life continues alongside ours, whilst ours is
transitory.
Only when I have first drawn your attention to that fact, can
I then tell you that your verses have no special nature of
their own, yet show a quiet and concealed inclination towards
the personal. I have that feeling most strongly in the last
poem, "My Soul." There it is something of your own that is
trying to find expression in words and melody. And in the
beautiful poem, "To Leopardi," I think a kind of relationship
with this great solitary man may be growing up. Yet your
poems, even the last one and the one to Leopardi, are as yet
nothing in themselves, nothing independent. Your kind letter
which accompanied them does not fail to explain to me many
deficiencies which I felt in reading your verses without being
able to put a name to them.
You ask me if your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked
others before me. You send them to journals. You compare them
with other poems and you worry if certain editors refuse your
efforts. Now, as you have given me permission to advise you, I
beg you to give up all that. You are directing your thoughts
outwards, and that above all is what you should not do at
present. No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only
one way. Withdraw into yourself. Explore the reason that bids
you write, find out if it has spread out its roots in the very
depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would
have to die, if writing should be denied to you. Above all,
ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, "Must I
write?" Dig deep into yourself for an answer. And if this
answer should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this
solemn question with a simple strong "I must," then build up
your life according to this necessity. Your life right down to
its most indifferent and unimportant hour must be a token and
a witness to this compulsion. Then approach nature. Try to
express what you see and experience and love and lose as if
you were the first man alive. Do not write love-poems. Avoid
those forms which are too trite and commonplace: they are the
hardest, for a great and mature power is needed to give of
one's own where good and often brilliant traditions throng
upon one. Therefore betake yourself from the usual themes to
those which your everyday life offers you. Paint your
sadnesses and your desires, your passing thoughts and your
belief in some kind of beauty—paint all that with quiet and
modest inward sincerity; and to express yourself use the
things that surround you, the pictures of your dreams and the
objects of your recollections. When your daily life seems
barren, do not blame it; blame yourself rather and tell
yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its
riches; for the creative worker knows no barrenness and no
poor indifferent place. And even if you were in a prison,
whose walls prevented all the bustle of the world from
reaching your senses, even then would you not still have your
childhood, that precious, kingly wealth, that treasure-house
of memories? Turn your attention towards it. Try to recall the
forgotten sensations of that distant past; your personality
will strengthen itself, your loneliness will extend itself and
become a dusky dwelling and the noise of others will pass by
it far away. And when from this turning inwards, from this
retreat into your own world verses come into being, then you
will not think of asking anyone, whether they are good verses.
Nor will you try to get journals interested in these works,
for you will see in them your own loved and natural
possession, a part and an expression of your life. A work of
art is good, when it is born of necessity. In this question of
its origin lies the criterion according to which it may be
judged. There is no other. Therefore, dear Sir, I would give
you no advice but this—to retire into yourself and sound the
depths in which your life has its source; at its source you
will find the answer to the question whether you must create.
Accept it just as it is, without trying to interpret it.
Perhaps it will be shown that you are called to be an artist.
Then take your destiny upon your shoulders and bear it with
its burden and its greatness without ever asking for the
reward which might come from without. For the creator must be
a world in himself and must find everything in himself and in
nature, to whom he has attached himself.
But perhaps even after this retreat into yourself and into
your solitude you will have to renounce the idea of becoming a
poet. As I said, the feeling that one could live without
writing is enough to prove that one should not write at all.
But even so, this contemplation which I beg you to make will
not have been in vain. In any case your life will thereafter
find out its own course, and I hope for you more sincerely
than I can say that it may be good, rich and wide.
What else am I to say to you? I think I have given every point
the right emphasis; finally I should like to give you just
this one other piece of advice, to follow quietly and
earnestly the course of your development. You cannot disturb
it more drastically than if you direct your thoughts outwards
and expect from without the answer to questions which probably
only your innermost feeling in the quietest hour of your life
can answer.
It was a joy to me to find the name of Professor Horaček in
your letter. For that lovable scholar I have cherished a
respect and a gratitude which lasts through the passing years.
Will you please tell him of my feeling for him. It is very
kind of him to remember me still and I know how to value it.
At the same time I give you back again the verses which you
were kind enough to entrust to me, and again I thank you for
your great and affectionate confidence. By this sincere
answer, which I have given to the best of my ability, I have
tried to make myself a little worthier of it than, as a
stranger, I really am.
With all respect and sympathy,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Viareggio, near Pisa, Italy,
5th April, 1903.
You must forgive me, my dear Sir, that it is only to-day that
I remember with gratitude your letter of the 24th February. I
was unwell the whole time, not exactly ill, but suffering from
a kind of influenza-weakness, which rendered me incapable of
doing anything. Finally, as my health would not change at all,
I came to this salutary southern sea, which helped me once
before, but I am not yet returned to health and I find writing
difficult, so you must take these few lines for more.
Naturally you must know that every letter of yours will always
delight me; you must only be indulgent about the answer, which
will probably often leave you empty-handed; for at bottom, and
just in the profoundest and most important matters, we are
inexpressibly alone, and for one man to be able to advise or
even help another, many things must happen, many things must
succeed, a whole constellation of circumstances must converge,
for it once to turn out happily.
I should only like to say two things to you to-day. First:
Do not allow yourself to be mastered by irony, especially in
uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it,
but only as one more means to grasp hold of life. If its use
is pure, it is itself pure also, and one must not be ashamed
of it. If you feel that you are too familiar with it, if you
are afraid of your growing familiarity with it, then turn to
great and solemn objects, before which it becomes small and
helpless. Seek the depth of things, for irony never penetrates
there—and when you go thus to the edge of what is great, find
out at the same time whether this form of comprehension arises
from a necessity of your being. Under the influence of solemn
events, it will either fall away from you, if it is a thing of
chance, or, if it really belongs to you and is innate in you,
it will grow stronger and become a serious tool and take its
place among the means by which you will have to build up your
art.
And the second thing I should like to tell you to-day is this:
Of all my books there are only a few which are indispensable
to me, and two of them are actually always among my
belongings, wherever I am. I have them with me here, too, the
Bible and the books of the great Danish poet, Jens Peter
Jacobsen. I wonder whether you know his works. You can easily
get hold of them, for some of them have appeared in a very
good translation in "Reclams Universal Bibliothek." Get hold
of the little volume, "Six Stories," by J. P. Jacobsen and of
his novel, "Niels Lyhne," and in the first little volume begin
the first story which is called "Mogens." A world will come
over you, a happiness, a wealth, a world of inconceivable
greatness. Live for awhile in these books, learn from them
what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them.
This love will be repaid a thousandfold, and, whatever may
become of your life will, I am convinced of it, run through
the fabric of your being as one of the most important among
all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.
If I am to speak of the sources from which I learnt anything
concerning the nature of creative work, concerning its depths
and its everlastingness, there are only two names which I can
mention: that of Jacobsen, that great, great poet, and that of
Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all
the artists who are living to-day.
And may happy fulfilment in everything attend upon the paths
of your life.
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Viareggio, near Pisa, Italy,
23rd April, 1903.
Your Easter letter, my dear Sir, has caused me much joy; for
it spoke much good of you, and the manner in which you spoke
of Jacobsen's great and lovely art, showed me that I have not
been wrong in leading your life and its many questions to this
well of plenteousness.
Now "Niels Lyhne" will disclose itself to you, a book of the
things of grandeur and of depth. The more one reads it, the
more it seems to contain everything from the most delicate
fragrances of life to the full and grand flavours of its
hardest fruits. In it there is nothing that has not been
understood, grasped, experienced and recognised in the
vibrating echoes of the memory; no experience has been too
small, the slightest occurrence unfolds itself like a destiny.
Destiny itself is like a wonderful broad web in which each
thread is pulled by an infinitely tender hand and is laid by
the side of another and held up and borne along by hundreds of
others. You will experience the happiness of reading this book
for the first time, and will pass through countless surprises,
as in a new dream. But I can tell you that later, too, one
always remains the same wonderer when going through these
books, and that they lose nothing of the wonderful force and
relinquish nothing of the fabulousness with which they
overwhelm the reader the first time.
The enjoyment of them and the gratitude only grows ever
greater, and one's way of looking at things becomes somehow
better and simpler, one's belief in life deeper and one's life
itself more blessed and more significant.
Later you must read the wonderful book of the fate and the
yearning of "Marie Grubbe," and Jacobsen's letters and journal
and fragments, and finally his verses, which though only
moderately translated live in unending music. [For that
purpose I should advise you to buy at your convenience the
beautiful edition of Jacobsen's collected works, which
contains all that. It appeared in Leipzig in three volumes in
a good translation at Eugen Diederichs and, I think, only
costs 5 or 6 marks a volume.]
In your opinion about "Here should roses stand . . ." —that
work so incomparable in its delicacy and form—you are of
course quite, quite indisputably in the right against the man
who wrote the introduction. And I may as well make this
request of you here: read as few works of aesthetic criticism
as possible—there are in them either partisan opinions which
have become petrified and meaningless in their lifeless
obduracy, or else a clever play of words, with which to-day
one view finds favour and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art
are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so
little as criticism. Only love can grasp them and keep hold of
them and be just to them. Always trust yourself and your own
feelings as opposed to any such analysis, review or
introduction; if you should be wrong, then the natural growth
of your inner life will lead you slowly and in time to new
realisations. Allow your judgments their own quiet,
undisturbed development, which like all progress must come
from deep within you and cannot be forced or hastened by
anything. The whole thing is to carry the full time and then
give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a
feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that
which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by
your own intelligence, and to await the hour of the delivery
of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an
artistic life, in understanding, as in creating.
In that there is no measuring with time; no year is of any
value and ten years are as nothing. To be an artist is this:
not to count or to reckon: to ripen like a tree which does not
force its sap, but in the storms of spring stands confident
without being afraid that afterwards no summer may come. The
summer comes all right. But it only comes to the patient, to
those who are there as carefree and quiet and immense, as if
eternity lay before them. Daily I learn, learn it through my
sufferings [to which I am grateful] that patience is
everything.
Richard Dehmel: His books—and I may say the same thing
of the man, whom I know slightly—have the following effect
upon me, that, when I have found one of his beautiful pages, I
am always afraid of the next, which may upset everything again
and pervert the lovable into the unworthy. You characterised
him very well with the expression: "sensual life and sensual
poetry"—and it is undoubtedly a fact that artistic experience
has such an inconceivably close connection with sexual
experience, with its pain and its desire, that the two
phenomena are actually nothing but two different forms of one
and the same yearning and bliss. And if instead of sensuality
one could say sex—sex in its great, wide and pure sense, free
from the suspicion cast upon it by errors of the Church—then
his art would be very great and infinitely important. His
poetical power is great and strong as a primeval impulse. It
has its own independent rhythms, and breaks forth from him
like a stream from the mountains.
But I think that this power is not always quite sincere and
without pose [this is actually one of the severest tests for
the creator: he must always remain unconscious, without an
idea of his greatest qualities, if he does not want to rob
them of their naiveté and their virginity!] And then, when
rushing through his being it comes to the sexual, it finds
there a man who is not so utterly pure as it needed him to be.
Here is a sexual world that is not quite ripe and pure, one
that is not human enough but only male, one that is
sensuality, intoxication and restlessness, burdened with the
old prejudices and insolence with which man has deformed and
burdened love. Because he only loves as a man and not as a
human being, therefore there is in his sexual sensibility a
narrowness, an ostensible wildness and hate, something
transient and mortal, which detracts from his art and renders
it ambiguous and undecided. It is not without defect, it is
marked by time and by passion and little of it will last and
endure. [But most art is like that!] But in spite of that, one
can get deep enjoyment, from what is great in it, and must
only take care not to lose oneself in it and not to become an
adherent of Dehmel's world, which is so infinitely frightened,
full of adultery and confusion, and far removed from those our
actual destinies, which cause more suffering than these
transient troubles, but at the same time give more opportunity
for greatness and more courage for eternity.
Lastly as far as concerns my books, I should have liked best
of all to send you all those that could give you any pleasure,
but I am very poor, and, once they have been published, my
books no longer belong to me. I cannot myself buy them, and,
as I should so often like, give them to those who would handle
them with affection.
So I have written down for you on a scrap of paper the titles
and publishers of my latest books—of the most recent only—in
all I have published about 12 or 15—and I must leave it to
you, dear Sir, to order some of them for yourself at your own
convenience.
I like to know that my books are in your hands.
Farewell,
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Worpswede, near Bremen,
16th July, 1903.
I left Paris about ten days ago, thoroughly unwell and tired,
and travelled to a great northerly plain, whose expanse, quiet
and sky are to return me to health again. But I met with a
long period of rain, which is trying to-day for the first time
to clear up over the restlessly storm-driven land. I make use
of this first moment of brightness to greet you, dear Sir.
My very dear Herr Kappus, I have left a letter of yours long
unanswered—not that I had forgotten it; on the contrary it was
of the kind which one reads again, when one finds it among
one's letters, and in it I seemed to get to know you, as it
were, most intimately. It was the letter of the 2nd May and I
am sure that you remember it. When I read it as now in the
great stillness of these distant parts, then your beautiful
concern for life moves me, moves me even more than it moved me
in Paris, where everything strikes the ear differently and
fades away before the excessive, the earth-shaking noise.
Here, where a mighty land is about me, here I feel that no
human being can answer for you those questions and feelings
which have a life of their own in the depth of your heart, for
even the best use words wrongly when they want to give them
the most delicate and almost inexpressible meaning. But, for
all that, I think that you cannot remain without a solution,
if you attach yourself to objects like those with which my
eyes are now regaling themselves. If you attach yourself to
Nature, to the simple and small in her, which hardly anyone
sees, but which can so unexpectedly turn into the great and
the immeasurable, if you have this love for what is slight and
try quite simply as a servant to win the confidence of what
appears to you poor, then everything will become easier for
you, more uniform and somehow more reconciling, not perhaps in
the understanding, which holds back in amazement, but in your
innermost consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. You are
so young, all beginning is so far in front of you, and I
should like to beg you earnestly to have patience with all
unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the
questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are
written in a foreign tongue. Do not search now for the
answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live
them. That is the point, to live everything. Now you must live
your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you
will live your way into the answer some distant day. Perhaps
you actually have in you the possibility of moulding and
shaping, as a particularly blessed and pure form of life;
train yourself in it—but take what comes in complete trust,
and, as long as it comes from your own will, from some need or
other of your inner self, then take it for itself and hate
nothing. Sex is difficult, yes, it is difficult. But the
things with which we have been charged are difficult, almost
everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If
only you realise that and manage out of yourself, out of your
predisposition and nature, out of your experience and your
childhood and your own resources, to win a relation to sex
entirely your own and free from the influence of convention or
custom, then you must no longer fear to lose yourself and to
become unworthy of your best possession.
Bodily pleasure is an experience of the senses, exactly like
pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit
fills the tongue; it is a great and infinite experience which
is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fulfilment and
glory of all knowledge. And it is not our receiving it that is
bad; what is bad is that nearly everybody misuses and
squanders this experience and, instead of storing it up for
supreme moments, uses it as an allurement and a distraction at
the tired moments of his life. Eating, too, has been turned by
mankind into something else; want on the one hand and excess
on the other have rendered turbid the clearness of this need,
and all the deep and simple necessities in which life renews
itself have in like manner become turbid. But the individual
man can make them clear for himself and live clearly [or if
not the individual who is too dependent, at any rate the
solitary man]. He can remember that all beauty in animals and
plants is a quiet and lasting form of love and longing, and he
can see the animal, as he sees the plant, patiently and
willingly synthesising and increasing itself and growing net
out of physical desire or physical pain, but bending to
necessities which are greater than desire and pain and
mightier than will and resistance. Oh, that mankind would
receive more humbly this secret, of which the earth right down
to its smallest things is full, and would bear it and endure
it more seriously, and would feel how terribly difficult it
is, instead of taking it so lightly! If he would only show
respect towards his fruitfulness, which is only one and the
same whether its manifestation be spiritual or physical; for
spiritual creation, too, springs originally from the physical,
is of one essence with it, and is simply like a more delicate,
more enraptured, and more eternal, repetition of bodily
pleasure. "The thought of being a creative worker, of
begetting, of shaping" is nothing without its great and
lasting confirmation and realisation in the world, nothing
without the thousand-fold assent of animals and things—and
only for this reason is its enjoyment so indescribably lovely
and rich, that it is full of inherited recollections of the
begetting and bearing of millions. In one thought of a
creative worker a thousand forgotten nights of love come to
life again and fill it with loftiness and sublimity. And
those, who come together in the night and are twined in
quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are
heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some
coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible
ecstasies. Therewith they call to the future, and if ever they
err and embrace blindly, the future comes all the same, a new
man arises, and on the ground of Chance, which here appears
ratified, there awakes the law by which the more resistant and
more powerful seed makes its way to the open cell which
advances towards it. Do not be led astray by the surface of
things; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who
live this secret falsely and badly—and they are very many—lose
it only for themselves and still hand it on unconsciously like
a closed letter. Do not be led astray by multiplicity of names
and the complicatedness of occasions. Perhaps there exists
over everything a mighty motherhood in the form of universal
yearning. The beauty of the young virgin woman, a being who,
as you so beautifully put it, has not yet performed her task,
is motherhood, which has a presentiment of itself and prepares
itself, is anxious and yearns. The mother's beauty is serving
motherhood, and in the old woman it is a mighty recollection.
And I think that there is motherhood in man too, bodily and
spiritual motherhood; his begetting is a kind of bearing, too,
and bearing it is, when he creates out of his innermost
abundance. Perhaps the sexes are more related to each other
than is supposed, and the great renovation of the world will
perhaps consist in this, that men and women, freed from all
confused feelings and aversion, will seek each other out not
as contrasts but as brothers and sisters and as neighbours,
and will work together as human beings to bear seriously and
patiently in common this heavy burden of sex which has been
laid upon them.
But everything that will perhaps some time be possible for
many, the solitary man can already prepare and build up with
his hands, which err less than others. Therefore, dear Sir,
love your solitude, and bear the pain which it causes you with
euphonious lament. For you say that those who are near to you
are far away, and that shows that your outlook is beginning to
be wide. And if your foreground is far from you, then your
horizon is already beneath the stars and very great. Rejoice
in your growth, into which you can take no one with you, and
be good to those who remain behind. Be assured and peaceful in
their presence, do not torture them with your doubts and do
not frighten them with your confidence or your joy, which they
could not comprehend. Seek some kind of simple, true communion
with them, which need not change as you yourself become ever
different. Love in them life in a form unknown to you, and be
indulgent towards those who, as they grow old, fear that
solitude in which you have confidence. Avoid adding new
material to that strained drama which is ever played between
parents and children. It uses up much of the children's
strength and consumes the love of the parents, which is always
active and warm, even if it does not understand. Do not ask
them for any advice and reckon on no understanding from them,
but believe in a love which is stored up for you as a
heritage, and have confidence that in this love there is a
force and a blessedness, which you need never leave behind
even in your furthest journeys.
It is a good thing that you are now entering upon a career
which makes you independent and sets you entirely on your own
feet in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your
innermost life feels itself limited by the nature of this
career. I consider that it is very difficult and makes very
many claims upon one, for it is burdened with great
conventions and leaves hardly any room for a personal
interpretation of its duties. But your loneliness will be a
support and a home to you in the midst of unsympathetic
surroundings, and out of it you will find all the ways of your
life. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my
confidence is with you.
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Rome, 29th
October, 1903.
My dear Sir,
I received your letter of the 29th August at Florence, and it
is only after two months that I now speak to you about it.
Please forgive me this tardiness, but I do not like writing
letters on a journey, because for letter-writing I need
something more than the necessary tools—a little quiet and
solitude and a not too unfriendly hour.
We reached Rome about six weeks ago, at a time when it was
still the empty, hot Rome notorious for its fever, and this
circumstance, together with other practical difficulties in
our arrangements, helped to bring it about that our
restlessness would have no end and that the foreign country
weighed upon us with the burden of homelessness. I must add,
that, if one does not know it, Rome has an oppressive and
saddening effect during the first days because of the lifeless
and unhealthy atmosphere of museums which it exhales, because
of the numberless monuments of the past, which have been
hauled out and laboriously restored, and from which a tiny
present draws nourishment, and because of the dreadful
over-estimation of these deformed and ruined objects, which is
supported by philologists and copied by the conventional
Italian tourists; though at bottom they are nothing more than
the chance remains of another epoch and of a life which is
not, and should not be, ours. Finally, after weeks of daily
self-defence, though still a little bewildered, one comes to
oneself again and one says, "No, there is no more beauty here
than elsewhere, and all these objects, which generation after
generation has continued to admire and which the hands of
jobbers have repaired and restored, mean nothing, are nothing,
and have no heart and no value"; but there is plenty of beauty
here, because there is plenty of beauty everywhere. Waters
infinitely full of life flow over the old aqueducts into the
great town. They dance in its many squares over white stone
bores and spread themselves out in broad roomy basins. They
murmur by day and lift up their murmuring by night, which is
vast here and starry and soft with breezes. And there are
gardens here, unforgettable avenues and staircases, staircases
thought out by Michelangelo, staircases which are built in the
likeness of downward-gliding waters—the steps in their broad
descent-giving birth one to the other like waves. By such
impressions does one pull oneself together and win oneself
back from all the claims of the many things which talk and
chatter here—and how talkative they are!—and one learns slowly
to recognise the few things in which there dwells eternity,
which one can love, and solitude, in which one can quietly
share.
I am still living in the town on the Capitol, not far from the
most beautiful image of a horseman which has remained
preserved for us from Roman art—that of Marcus Aurelius. But
in a few weeks I shall move into a quiet and simple room, an
old gallery lying deep in the heart of a large park, hidden
from the town with its noise and incidents. I shall live there
the whole winter and rejoice in the great quietness, from
which I am hoping for the gift of good and profitable hours.
From there, where I shall be more at home, I will write you a
longer letter, in which I will also talk about your writing.
To-day I must only tell you what I have perhaps been wrong in
not telling you earlier, that the book whose despatch you
announced in your letter, and which should contain some of
your work, has not arrived here. Did it go back to you from
Worpswede? Because one is not permitted to forward parcels to
foreign countries. That is the best thing that can have
happened to it, and I would be glad to hear it confirmed. I
hope it is not a question of loss, which is unfortunately far
from being an exceptional occurrence with the Italian postal
system.
I should have been glad to receive this book, as indeed
anything which gives an indication of yourself, and if you
entrust to me any verses that have come into being in the
meantime, I will read them as well and truly from my heart as
I can.
With good wishes and greetings,
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Rome,
23rd December, 1903.
My dear Herr Kappus,
You shall not be without a greeting from me at Christmastime,
when in the midst of this festivity your loneliness weighs
more heavily upon you than usually. But when you notice that
it is great, rejoice in it; for you must ask yourself what
that loneliness would be, that had not greatness; there is
only one kind of loneliness. It is great and not easy to bear,
and there comes to nearly everyone the hours, when he would
gladly exchange it for any intercourse however common-place
and cheap, for the semblance of a slight understanding with
the next best, with the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps those
are just the hours when the loneliness grows; for its growing
is as painful as the growing of boys and as sad as the
beginning of spring. But that should not confuse you. It is
still only loneliness that is necessary—great inner
loneliness. To retreat into oneself and meet nobody for hours
on end—that is what one must be able to attain. To be alone,
as one was alone as a child, when the grown-ups walked about
involved in things which seemed great and important, because
big people looked so busy and because one could comprehend
nothing of their doings. And when one day one realises that
their affairs are paltry, their professions benumbed and no
longer connected with life, why not still like a child look
upon them as something strange from without the depth of one's
own world, regarding them from the immunity of one's own
loneliness, which is itself work, position and profession? Why
desire to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for
self-defence and disdain? Incomprehension is loneliness, but
self-defence and disdain are participation in that from which
one is trying to separate oneself by these means.
Consider the world which you carry within you, and call this
consideration what you like; let it be recollections of your
own childhood or yearning for your own future—only be
attentive to that which rises up within you, and place it
above everything that you see around you. The events of your
innermost self are worthy of your whole love. You must somehow
work at them and not lose too much time or too much spirit in
elucidating your position with regard to mankind. Who, pray,
says that you have any such position? I know that your
profession is hard and full of opposition to yourself; I
foresaw your complaint and knew that it would come. Now that
it has come I cannot soothe it. I can only advise you to
consider whether all professions are not like that, full of
claims, full of enmity for the individual, and at the same
time fully imbued with the hate of those who submit dumbly and
surlily to monotonous duty. The position in which you must now
live is no more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices
and errors than other positions, and if there are some which
carry with them a greater outward freedom, there is none that
in itself is wide and spacious and connected with the great
things of which real life consists. Only the individual, who
is lonely, is like a thing placed under obscure laws, and
whether a man goes out into the morning as it rises, or looks
out into the eventful evening, and feels what is happening
there, all position falls away from him as from a dead man,
although he is standing in the middle of real life. What you
are experiencing now as an officer, you would have felt in
like manner in any of the existing professions, and even if
apart from any position, you had sought easy and independent
contact with society alone, this feeling of constraint would
still not have been spared you. Everywhere it is the same, but
that is no reason for anxiety or sadness. If there is no
intercourse between you and mankind, try to get nearer to
"things." They will not desert you; there are still the nights
and the winds which blow through the trees and over many
lands; with "things" and with animals, everything is still
full of happenings in which you can take part; and children
are still the same as you were as a child, so sad and so
happy—and when you think of your childhood, then you live
again among them, among the lonely children, and the grown-ups
are nothing and their dignity has no value.
And if it makes you anxious and torments you to think of
childhood and the simplicity-and quiet which goes together
with it, because you can no longer believe in God, who is
always appearing in it, then ask yourself if you have really
lost God. Is it not much more, that you have never possessed
Him? For when should that have been? Do you believe that
children can contain Him, whom men can only bear with labour
and the burden of whom weighs down the grey-haired? Do you
believe that he, who possesses Him, could lose Him like a
little stone, or do you not rather think with me that he who
had Him, could only be lost by Him? But if you come to
realise, that He did not exist in your childhood, nor
beforehand; if you suspect that Christ was deceived by his
yearning and Mohammed betrayed by his pride—if you feel with
horror, that now in this hour in which we speak of Him He does
not exist—what entitles you then to regret as a dead man Him
who never existed, and to seek Him as if He had been lost?
Why do you not think that He is He who is coming, who from
eternity has been at hand, the being of the future, the final
fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from
putting His birth into the times of the future and living your
life as a painful but beautiful day in the history of a mighty
pregnancy? For do you not see that everything that happens is
ever beginning, and would it not be His beginning, since
beginning is in itself always so beautiful? If He is the most
complete, must not smaller things exist before Him, so that He
can choose from plenteousness and superfluity? Must He not be
the last in order to grasp everything to Himself? And what
meaning would our lives have, if He for whom we are longing
had already been?
As the bees bring together their honey, so do we take the
sweetest from everything and build Him. Even with what is
slight and unpretentious, as long as it comes to pass out of
love, we begin; with work and with rest after work, with a
silence of a little lovely joy, with everything that we do
without participation or followers, we begin to form Him, whom
we shall no more experience than our forefathers could
experience us. Yet they are in us, those long-departed, as
potentialities, as a burden upon our fate, as blood that flows
murmuring in us, and as a countenance, that rises from out of
the depths of time.
Is there anything that can take from you this hope some day to
be in Him, at any rate in the furthest and uttermost part of
Him?
Celebrate Christmas in this holy feeling, that perhaps He
needs this very anxiety for life from you, in order to begin.
These very days of your transition, when everything in you is
working at Him, are perhaps just the same as those when as a
child you worked breathlessly at Him. Be patient and without
vexation, and remember that the least we can do is not to make
His coming into being more difficult for Him than the earth
makes it for the spring, when it wishes to come.
Be joyful and of good hope,
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Rome,
14th May, 1904.
My dear Herr Kappus,
It is a long time since I received your last letter, but do
not hold that against me. First work, then troubles and
finally ill-health, have been keeping me from this answer,
which, as I wished it, was to come to you from good peaceful
days. Now I feel somewhat better—here, too, I was affected by
the beginning of spring with its evil, ill-humoured
transitions—and now I manage, dear Herr Kappus, to greet you,
as I am so heartily glad to do, and to tell you to the best of
my ability one or two things concerning your letter.
You see, I have copied out your sonnet, because I considered
it to be beautiful and simple and born in the form in which it
runs with so much quiet grace. It is the best of your verses
that I have been permitted to read. And now I give you that
copy, because I know that it is important and makes for new
experience to find one's own work again in someone else's
hand-writing. Read the verses as if they were someone else's,
and you will feel in your innermost being how utterly they are
your own.
It has been a joy to me to read, again and again, this sonnet
and your letter. I thank you for both of them.
And you must not be led astray in your loneliness, because
there is something in you that desires to come out of you. If
you think of it quietly and use it as an instrument, this very
desire will help you to extend your loneliness over the broad
lands. With the help of conventions, people have solved all
problems according to what is easy and according to the
easiest side of what is easy, but it is clear that we must
attach ourselves to what is difficult. All living things
attach themselves to it, everything in nature grows and
defends itself after its manner and is an entity in itself,
and strives to be so at any price and against all resistance.
We know little, but that we must attach ourselves to what is
difficult is a certainty that never deserts us. It is good to
be lonely, for loneliness is difficult. The fact that a thing
is difficult must be for us the more reason for doing it.
To love, too, is good, for love is difficult. Loving between
human being and human being, that is perhaps the most
difficult thing with which we have been charged, the extreme
possibility, the last test and trial, the work for which all
other work is but preparation. Wherefore young people, who are
beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they
must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength
collected about their lonely, timid, upward straining hearts
they must learn to love. Apprenticeship always a long time of
seclusion, and so love, too, is for a long time right far into
life, just loneliness, increased and deepened solitude for him
who loves. Love is not at first anything that can be called
merging or surrender or union with another, for what would the
union be of what is unclean, unready, and still subordinate?
It is an exalted occasion for the individual to ripen, to
become something in himself, to become a world, to become a
world in himself for another's sake; it is a great and even
arrogant claim upon him, something that chooses him out and
calls him to what is far. Only in this sense, as a duty to
work at themselves ["to hearken and to hammer day and night"]
should young people use the love that is given to them.
Surrender and sacrifice and every kind of fusion is not for
them, who must save up and collect a long, long time yet; it
is that which comes at last, that perhaps, for which a
life-time is still hardly sufficient.
But it is in this that young people go so often and so badly
astray. It is in their nature to have no patience, so they
throw themselves together when love comes over them, and spend
themselves just as they are in all their disorder, confusion
and perplexity. What is to happen then? What is life to do
with the heaps of half-battered life, which they call their
fusion, and which, if possible, they would gladly call their
happiness and their future? Each one loses himself for the
other's sake and loses the other, too, and many others who
wanted to come afterwards. And each loses the immensity of his
possibilities, and exchanges the coming and going of delicate
things full of portent for a fruitless perplexity, of which
nothing more can come; nothing but a little nausea,
disappointment, poverty and flight into one of the many
conventions which have been set up in great numbers like
public shelters on this most dangerous of paths. No sphere of
human experience is so well provided with conventions as this.
Life-belts of the most different devices are there, boats and
air-bladders. The conception of society has been able to
create all kinds of refuges, for, as it was inclined to take
the life of love as a pleasure, it had to make it easy, cheap,
secure and safe, as public pleasures always are.
It is true that many young men, who have a false love—that is
to say one that surrenders itself and is not lonely—and that
is where the average will always remain—feel the oppression of
a transgression and want to make the circumstance in which
they find themselves capable of life and fruitful after their
own personal manner. For nature tells them that the problems
of love are less than anything else of importance, capable of
a public solution according to some convention or other, that
there are problems, intimate problems between one human being
and another, which in each case need a new, a particular and a
personal answer. But having already thrown themselves
together, they no longer recognise any boundaries or any
distinction between each other, and therefore have no longer
any possessions of their own, so how should they be able, out
of their own selves, out of the depth of their loneliness, to
find a way out?
They act in common helplessness, and, even if with the best
intention they want to avoid the convention—perhaps
marriage—which opens itself to them, they fall into the
clutches of another conventional solution, which may be less
public, but which is just as deadly; that is all that
surrounds them far and wide—convention; for, when it is a
question of a troubled union which has been formed early,
every treatment is conventional; every situation, to which
such confusion leads, has its convention, however unusual,
that is to say, however immoral in the ordinary sense of the
word it may be; yes, even separation would then be a
conventional step, an impersonal and chance decision without
force and without fruit.
He, who considers it seriously, finds that as for death, which
is difficult, so for love, which is difficult, too, no
explanation or solution, no hint or path has yet been found
out; and for these two charges, which we carry covered up and
hand on afterwards without opening them, no common rule based
on an agreement can possibly be discovered. But in proportion
as we begin to try to live as individuals, so will these great
things come nearer to meet us as individuals. The claims which
the difficult task of love lays upon our development are
beyond the possibilities of our life, and as beginners we are
not yet equal to them. But if we endure and take this love
upon ourselves as a burden and apprenticeship instead of
losing ourselves in all the easy and thoughtless play, behind
which men have hidden themselves in the presence of the most
serious of the serious things of their existence, then those,
who come long after us, will perhaps feel the effects of a
little progress and a little alteration; which would be a
great deal.
We are actually the first to come to the point of considering
objectively and without prejudice the relationship of one
individual human being to another, and in our attempts to live
such a relationship we have no model before us, and yet there
has already come to pass much in the course of time to help us
in our timid beginnings.
In their new personal development the girl and the woman will
only be for a short time imitations of the good and bad
manners of man and reiterations of man's professions. After
the uncertainty of this transition it will appear that women
have passed through those many, often ridiculous, changes of
disguise, only to free themselves from the disturbing
influence of the other sex. For women, in whom life tarries
and dwells in a more incommunicable, fruitful and confident
form, must at bottom have become richer beings, more ideally
human beings than fundamentally easy-going man, who is not
drawn down beneath the surface of life by the difficulty of
bearing bodily fruit, and who arrogantly and hastily
undervalues what he means to love. When this humanity of
woman, borne to the full in pain and humiliation, has stripped
off in the course of the changes of its outward position the
old convention of simple feminine weakness, it will come to
light, and man, who cannot yet feel it coming, will be
surprised and smitten by it. One day—a day of which
trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining forth
especially in northern lands—one day that girl and woman will
exist, whose name will no longer mean simply a contrast to
what is masculine, but something for itself, something that
will not make one think of any supplement or limit, but only
of life and existence—the feminine human beings.
This advance, at first very much against the will of man who
has been overtaken—will alter the experience of love, which is
now full of error, will change it radically and form it into a
relationship, no longer between man and woman, but between
human being and human being. And this more human love, which
will be carried out with infinite consideration and gentleness
and will be good and clean in its tyings and untyings, will be
like that love which we are straining and toiling to prepare,
the love which consists in this, that two lonely beings
protect one another, border upon one another and greet one
another.
Just this much more: do not think that great love, which was
entrusted to you as a boy, has been lost. Can you tell,
whether great and good wishes did not ripen within you at that
time and resolutions on which you still live to-day? I believe
that that love lives so strongly and powerfully in your memory
because it was your first deep solitude and the first inner
work which you did at your own life. All good wishes to you,
dear Herr Kappus!
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Borgeby Gård, Flãdie, Sweden,
12th August, 1904.
I should like to talk to you again for a little while, though
I can say hardly anything that will be helpful and but little
that will be useful. You have had many great sorrows, which
have passed. And you say that this their passing, too, was
difficult and discordant for you. But I beg you to consider
whether these griefs have not rather gone right through you?
Whether there has not been much change within you; whether,
while you were sad, you did not alter in some point or other
of your being? Only those sorrows are dangerous and bad which
one carries with one to the company of other men in order to
drown them. Like illnesses, which are superficially and badly
treated, they only retreat into the background and break out
again after a short interval worse than ever. They collect in
one's innermost being and are life, unlived, rejected, lost
life of which one can die. If it were possible for us to see a
little further than our knowledge can reach, to see out a
little farther over the outworks of our surmising, we should
perhaps bear our griefs with greater confidence than our joys.
For they are the moments when something new, something unknown
enters into us. Our feelings are dumb with embarrassed shyness
and everything in us retreats into the background. A stillness
grows up, and the new thing, that nobody knows, stands in the
middle of it and is silent.
I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of suspense,
which we experience as paralysis, because we can no longer
hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with
that foreign thing, which has entered into us; because
everything in which we have confidence and to which we are
accustomed is for a moment taken away from us; because we are
in the midst of a state of transition, in which we cannot
remain. The grief, too, passes. The new thing in us, that
which has been added to us, has entered into our heart and
penetrated to its innermost chamber, and is no longer there
even—it is already in our blood. We do not experience what it
was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing had
happened, and yet we have changed just as a house changes into
which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come and
perhaps we shall never know, but there are many signs to
assure us that the future enters into us in this way, so as to
transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why
it is so important to be alone and attentive, when one is sad;
because the apparently eventless and motionless moment, when
our future enters into us, is so much nearer to life than that
other manifestly chance point of time, when it actually
happens to us as if from without. The quieter, the more
patient, the more open we are in our grief, the deeper and the
more unerringly does the new thing enter into us, the better
do we make it our own, and the more does it become our fate;
and when some day it happens [that is to say, when it passes
out of us to others], we will feel ourselves in our innermost
being related and near to it. And that is necessary. It is
necessary—and this is the direction that our development
gradually takes—that nothing strange to us should fall to our
lot, but only that which has been in us for a long time. Men
have already had to change their conceptions of many
processes, and they will gradually come to realise that what
we call fate comes out of human beings themselves and does not
come upon them from without. It is only because so many did
not absorb their fate while it lived in them, and did not make
it into part of themselves, that they did not recognise what
was coming out of them. It was so strange to them, that in
their confused terror, they thought it must just that moment
have come upon them, for they could take their oath that they
have never found anything similar to it in themselves. Even as
men long deceived themselves over the movement of the sun, so
are they still deceiving themselves over the movement of what
is to come. The future stands fast, Herr Kappus, but we are
moving in infinite space. How should we not find it difficult?
And if we speak once more of loneliness, it becomes even
clearer that that is not a thing which one can choose or
reject. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself over it and
behave as if it were not so. That is all. But how much better
it is to realise that we are lonely and candidly to make that
realisation our starting point. It is, of course, certain to
make us giddy; for all the points upon which our eyes used to
rest are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near
to us, and that which is distant is infinitely distant. A man
who had been transported from his room, with hardly any
preparation or transition, to the peak of a great mountain,
would be bound to have a similar feeling, a feeling of
insecurity without parallel, a feeling of abandonment to
nameless powers would almost annihilate him. He would imagine
that he was falling or would believe that he had been hurled
out into space or that he had burst asunder into a thousand
fragments. What monstrous lies his brain would have to invent
in order to come up with the situation of his senses and
explain it! In like manner do all distances and all measures
alter for him who becomes lonely. Of these changes many may
happen suddenly, and then as with the man on the mountain-top,
there arise strange fancies and unusual feelings, which seem
to become greater than he can bear. But it is necessary for us
to experience that, too. We must accept existence as far as
ever it is possible. Everything, even the most unheard of
things, must be possible in it. That is in fact the only kind
of courage that is demanded of us—to be courageous in face of
the strangest, the most astounding and the most inexplicable
thing that can confront us. The fact that mankind has been
cowardly in this sense has done infinite harm to life, for the
experiences which men call "phenomena," the so-called "world
of spirits," death—all these things that are so closely
related to us, have been so thoroughly crowded out of life by
man's daily self-defence, that the senses with which we could
grasp them have become stunted. Let us not speak of God. But
the anxiety men feel before the inexplicable has not only
impoverished the existence of the individual. Through it the
relations of human being to human being have been limited,
lifted as it were from a river-bed of infinite possibilities
on to a fallow bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not
only laziness that brings it about that human relationships
repeat themselves from one occasion to the next with such
unspeakable monotony and staleness, but it is also shyness of
any new experience whose end cannot be foreseen, to which men
do not think they are equal. But only he who is prepared for
everything and does not exclude anything, even the most
enigmatical, will live his relationships with another as
something really living and with himself get right to the
bottom of his own existence. For, if we think of this
existence of the individual as a room—be it large or small—it
is evident that most people only get to know a corner of their
room, a corner by the window, a strip on which they walk up or
down. In this way they have a certain security: yet far more
human is that perilous insecurity which drives the prisoners
in Poe's stories to take hold of the shapes of their fearful
prison and not to be strangers unfamiliar with the unspeakable
horrors of their sojourn there. But we are not prisoners, no
traps or snares are set around us and there is nothing that
should frighten us or torment us. We have been sent into life
as being the element to which we most nearly correspond, and,
moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation to this
life, we have become so like it that, when we stay still,
through a happy mimicry we are hardly distinguishable from
everything that surrounds us. We have no reason to be
mistrustful towards our world, for it is not against us. If it
has horrors, they are our horrors, if it has precipices, those
precipices are ours, and, if there are dangers there, we must
try to love them. And if we adjust our life to the principle
which advises us that we must always attach ourselves to what
is difficult, then that which now still appears to us most
strange, will become our most familiar and loyal friend. How
can we forget that old myth, which is to be found at the
beginning of all peoples—the myth of the dragon, which at the
last moment changes into a princess? Perhaps all the dragons
of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to
show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at very bottom every
horror is something helpless, that wants help from us.
And so, my dear Herr Kappus, you must not be horrified, if a
grief rises up before you greater than any you have seen
before. If over your hands and all your doings there passes an
uneasiness, like light and cloud-shadows, you must bethink
yourself, that something is happening to you, that life has
not forgotten you, that it is holding you in its hands, and
will not let you fall. Why do you want to exclude any
disturbance, any woe or sadness from your life, seeing that
you do not know what work their presence is performing in
yourself? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the
question, whence has come all that and whither is it going?
Seeing that you know that you are in a state of transition and
there is nothing you could desire more than to transform
yourself. If something in your present life is sickly,
remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees
itself of foreign elements. Then one must just help it to be
sick, to have its sickness in its entirety and to let it come
right out, for that is its means of progress. So much is
happening in you now, dear Herr Kappus, that you must be
patient like a sick man and confident like a convalescent, for
perhaps you are both these two. And you are still more, you
are also the doctor, who must watch over himself. But in every
sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing
but wait, and that is above all what you must do now, in so
far as you are your own doctor.
Do not watch yourself too closely, do not be too quick to draw
conclusions from that which is happening to you. Simply let it
happen, otherwise you will come too easily to look,
reproachfully—that is to say, from a moral point of view—upon
your past, which naturally takes part in everything that is
happening to you now. But what you remember and condemn is not
that part of the confusions, desires, and yearnings of your
boyhood which is effective within you. The extraordinary
circumstances of a lonely and helpless childhood are so
difficult and complicated, exposed to so many influences and
at the same time so cut off from any really coherent scheme of
life, that, when a vice enters into it, one cannot simply
speak of it as vice. One must always be so careful with names;
it is often by the name of a crime that a life is shattered
and not by the nameless and personal action itself, which was.
probably a perfectly definite necessity of that life and could
without difficulty be accepted by it as such. The consumption
of strength only seems to you to be so great, because you
over-estimate the victory; it is not the victory that is the
"great thing" you think you have performed, although you are
right in your feeling. The great thing is this, that there was
already something there which you could put in the place of
that deception, something true and real. Without that your
victory would only have been a moral reaction without any
further meanings: as it is it has become an epoch in your
life—your life, dear Herr Kappus, of which I think with so
many good wishes. Do you remember how this life of yours
yearned to pass out of childhood, and come to the state of "a
big man"? I can see that it is now longing to leave the "big
man" for the "bigger man." Therefore it does not cease to be
difficult, but for that very reason it will also not cease to
grow.
And if I am to say one thing more to you, it is this: do not
believe that he who is trying to console you lives without
troubles among the simple and quiet words which often do you
good. His life is full of troubles and griefs and is not to be
compared with yours. Were it not so, he could never have been
able to find those words.
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Furuborg, Jonsered, Sweden,
4th November, 1904.
My dear Herr Kappus,
During this time, that has passed without a letter from me, I
have been partly travelling and partly so busy, that I could
not write. To-day, too, I find it difficult to write, because
I have already had to write so many letters that my hand is
tired. If I could dictate, I would say a great deal to you,
but as it is you must take a few words only for your long
letter.
I think of you often, and with good wishes so concentrated
upon you that I am sure it must somehow have helped you. I
often doubt whether my letters can really be a help to you. Do
not say: "Yes, they are." Accept them quietly and without much
thanks, and let us wait and see what will come of them. It is
perhaps useless for me to go into your words in detail, for
what I could say about your tendency to doubts and your
inability to harmonise your outward and inward life, or about
anything else that is afflicting you, is always the same as
what I have already said; the wish that you may find enough
patience in yourself to endure, and enough simplicity, to
believe, that you may gain more and more confidence in that
which is difficult, and in your loneliness among other men.
And for the rest let life happen to you. Believe me, life is
right in every case.
Concerning feelings: all these feelings are pure which
comprehend your whole being and lift it up; impure is the
feeling that only grasps one side of your being and thus
distorts you. All thoughts you can have with regard to your
childhood are good. Everything that makes of you something
more than you were beforehand in your best moments, is right.
Every elation is good as long as it pervades your whole being,
is not intoxication and confusion, but joy so clear that one
can see to its very depth. Do you understand what I mean?
Your doubt can become a good quality if you educate it. It
must gain knowledge and power of criticism. If it wants to
destroy anything, ask it why that something is worthy of
destruction: demand proofs from it, test it, and you will
perhaps find that it is at a loss and embarrassed, perhaps
even rebellious. But do not give in. Demand arguments and deal
in this way attentively and consistently with each separate
occasion, and the day will come, when instead of being
destructive, it will become one of your best workers—perhaps
the most skilful of all the workers, who are engaged in the
building up of your life.
That is all I can say to you to-day. But I send you at the
same time the copy of a little poem, which has now appeared in
the Prague "German Work." There I speak further to you of life
and death and of how both are great and powerful.
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
* * *
Paris,
26th December, 1908.
You must know, dear Herr Kappus, how glad I was to get your
beautiful letter. The news which you give me, tangible and
substantial as it is once again, appears to me to be good, and
the longer I thought of it, the more did I feel that it really
was good. As a matter of fact I wanted to write this to you
for Christmas Eve; but in the midst of the varied and
uninterrupted work, in which I have spent this winter, the old
festival came upon me so suddenly, that I hardly had time to
attend to the most necessary matters, much less for writing
letters.
But I have often thought of you during these festival days and
have pictured to myself how quiet you must be in your lonely
fort among the empty mountains, over which those mighty
southern winds hurl themselves, as if they wanted to swallow
them up in large pieces.
The stillness in which there is room for such noises and
movements must be immense, and when one thinks that to all
that is added the distant presence of the sea, joining in with
its note, perhaps the innermost note in this prehistoric
harmony, then one can only wish for you, that you may
confidently and patiently let this mighty loneliness work upon
you. Nothing will be able to strike it out of your life
afterwards. In every experience and action that lies before
you it will, as a nameless influence, have a continued and
imperceptibly decisive effect upon you, something after the
manner in which our forefathers' blood stirs unceasingly
within us and joins itself to our own to form that unique and
unrepeatable thing, that we ourselves are in all the changes
of our life.
Yes, I rejoice that you have this solid, definite existence,
the title and the uniform, the service and all those tangible
and limited things, which, in such surroundings, in the
company of a handful of men alike isolated, assume an
earnestness and become a necessity, which above and beyond the
game and pastime of a military career constitute an employment
that demands vigilance, and which do not only leave room for,
but actually themselves train an independent watchfulness.
That we should be in situations, which work upon us and bring
us from time to time face to face with the great things of
nature—that is all that is necessary.
Art, too, is only a form of life, and by living in no matter
what way one can be unconsciously preparing oneself for it; in
every real career one is nearer to art and more its neighbour
than in those unreal half-artistic careers, which pretend to
be near to art, but in practice deny and attack the existence
of all art—somewhat in the manner of all journalism and nearly
all criticism, and three-quarters of what is and would like to
be called literature. In a word I rejoice that you have
overcome the danger of falling into those professions, and
that somewhere in a hard reality you are lonely and
courageous. May the year that lies before you keep you and
strengthen you in it.
Ever yours,
R. M. RILKE.