The supreme problem of every age is that of finding its consummate
artistic expression. Before this problem every other remains of
secondary importance. History defines and directs its physical course,
science cooperates in the achievement of its material aims, but Art
alone gives to the age its spiritual physiognomy, its ultimate and
lasting expression.
The process of Art is on the one hand sensuous, the conception having
for its basis the fineness of organization of the senses; and on the
other hand it is severely scientific, the value of the creation being
dependent upon the craftsmanship, the mastery over the tool, the
technique.
Art, like Nature, its great and only reservoir for all time past and all
time to come, ever strives for elimination and selection. It is severe
and aristocratic in the application of its laws and impervious to appeal
to serve other than its own aims. Its purpose is the symbolization of
Life. In its sanctum there reigns the silence of vast accomplishment,
the serene, final, and imperturbable solitude which is the ultimate
criterion of all great things created.
To speak of Poetry is to speak of the most subtle, the most delicate,
and the most accurate instrument by which to measure Life.
Poetry is reality's essence visioned and made manifest by one endowed
with a perception acutely sensitive to sound, form, and colour, and
gifted with a power to shape into rhythmic and rhymed verbal symbols the
reaction to Life's phenomena. The poet moulds that which appears
evanescent and ephemeral in image and in mood into everlasting values.
In this act of creation he serves eternity.
Poetry, in especial lyrical poetry, must be acknowledged the supreme
art, culminating as it does in a union of the other arts, the musical,
the plastic, and the pictorial.
The most eminent contemporary poets of Europe have, each in accordance
with his individual temperament, reflected in their work the spiritual
essence of our age, its fears and failures, its hopes and high
achievements: Maeterlinck, with his mood of resignation and his
retirement into a dusky twilight where his shadowy figures move
noiselessly like phantoms in fate-laden dimness; Dehmel, the worshipper
of will, with his passion for materiality and the beauty of all things
physical and tangible; Verhaeren, the visionary of a new vitality, who
sees in the toilers of fields and factories the heroic gesture of our
time and who might have written its great epic of industry but for the
overwhelming lyrical mood of his soul.
Until a few years ago, known only to a relatively small community on the
continent but commanding an ever increasing attention which has borne
his name far beyond the boundary of his country, the personality of
Rainer Maria Rilke stands to-day beside the most illustrious poets of
modern Europe.
* * * * *
The background against which the figure of Rainer Maria Rilke is
silhouetted is so varied, the influences which have entered into his
life are so manifold, that a study of his work, however slight, must
needs take into consideration the elements through which this poet has
matured into a great master.
Prague, the city in which Rilke was born in 1875, with its sinister
palaces and crumbling towers that rose in the early Middle Ages and have
reached out into our time like the threatening fingers of mighty hands
which have wielded swords for generations and which are stained with the
blood of many wounds of many races; the city where amid grey old ruins
blonde maidens are at play or are lost in reverie in the green cool
parks and shady gardens with which the Bohemian capital abounds, this
Prague of mingled grotesqueness and beauty gave to the young boy his
first impressions.
There is a period in the life of every artist when his whole being seems
lost in a contemplation of the surrounding world, when the application
to work is difficult, like the violent forcing of something that is
awaiting its time. This is the time of his dream, as sacred as the days
of early spring before wind and rain and light have touched the fruits
of the fields, when there is a tense bleak silence over the whole of
nature, in which is wrapped the strength of storms and the glow of the
summer's sun. This is the time of his deepest dream, and upon this dream
and its guarding depends the final realization of his life's work.
The young graduate of the Gymnasium was to enter upon the career of an
army officer in accordance with the traditions of the family, an old
noble house which traces its lineage far back to Carinthian ancestry.
His inclinations, however, pointed so decisively in the direction of the
finer arts of life that he left the Military Academy after a very short
attendance to devote himself to the study of philosophy and the history
of art.
As one turns the pages of Rilke's first small book of poems, published
originally under the title _Larenopfer_, in the year 1895, and which
appeared in more recent editions under the less descriptive name _Erste
Gedichte_, one realizes at once, in spite of a lack of plasticity in the
presentation, that here speaks one who has lingered long and lovingly
over the dream of his boyhood. As the title indicates, these poems are a
tribute, an offering to the Lares, the home spirits of his native town.
Prague and the surrounding country are the ever recurring theme of
almost every one of these poems. The meadows, the maidens, the dark
river in the evening, the spires of the cathedral at night rising like
grey mists are seen with a wonderment, the great well-spring of all
poetic imagination, with a well-nigh religious piety. Through all these
poems there sounds like a subdued accompaniment a note of gratitude for
the ability to thus vision the world, to be sunk in the music of all
things. "Without is everything that I feel within myself, and without
and within myself everything is immeasurable, illimitable."
These pictures of town and landscape are never separated from their
personal relation to the poet. He feels too keenly his dependence upon
them, as a child views flowers and stars as personal possessions. Not
until later was he to reach the height of an impersonal objectivity in
his art. What distinguishes these early poems from similar adolescent
productions is the restraint in the presentation, the economy and
intensity of expression and that quality of listening to the inner voice
of things which renders the poet the seer of mankind.
The second book of poems appeared two years later and like the first
volume _Traumgekrönt_ is full of the music that is reminiscent of the
mild melancholy of the Bohemian folk-songs, in whose gentle rhythms the
barbaric strength of the race seems to be lulled to rest as the waves of
a far-away tumultuous sea gently lap the shore. The themes of
_Traumgekrönt_ are extended somewhat beyond the immediate environment
of Prague and some of the most beautiful poems are luminous pictures of
villages hidden in the snowy blossoming of May and June, out of which
rises here and there the solitary soft voice of a boy or girl singing.
In these first two volumes the poet is satisfied with painting in words,
full of sonorous beauty, the surrounding world. From this period dates
the small poem _Evening_, which seems to have been sketched by a
Japanese painter, so clear and colourful is its texture, so precious and
precise are its outlines.
With _Advent_ and _Mir Zur Feier_, both published within the following
three years, a phase of questioning commences, a dim desire begins to
stir to reach out into the larger world "deep into life, out beyond
time." Whereas the early poems were characterized by a tendency to turn
away from the turmoil of life--in fact, the concrete world of reality
does not seem to exist--there is noticeable in these two later volumes
an advance toward life in the sense that the poet is beginning to
approach and to vision some of its greatest symbols.
Throughout the entire work of Rilke, in his poetry as well as in his
interpretations of painting and sculpture, there are two elements that
constitute the cornerstones in the structure of his art. If, as has been
said with a degree of verity, Nietzsche was primarily a musician whose
philosophy had for its basis and took its ultimate aspects from the
musical quality of his artistic endowment, it may be maintained with an
equal amount of truth that Rilke is primarily a painter and sculptor
whose poetry rests upon the fundaments of the pictorial and plastic
arts.
Up to the time of the publication of these volumes, Rilke's poems
possessed a quietude, a stillness suggested in the straight unbroken yet
delicate lines of the picture which he portrays and in the soft, almost
unpulsating rhythm of his words. The approach of evening or nightfall,
the coming of dawn, the change of the seasons, the slow changes of light
into darkness and of darkness into light, in short, the most silent yet
greatest metamorphoses in the external aspects of nature form the
contents of many of these first poems. The inanimate object and the
living creature in nature are not seen in the sharp contours of their
isolation; they are viewed and interpreted in the atmosphere that
surrounds them, in which they are enwrapped and so densely veiled that
the outlines are only dimly visible, be that atmosphere the mystic grey
of northern twilight or the dark velvety blue of southern summer nights.
In _Advent_, the experience of the atmosphere becomes an experience in
his innermost soul and, therefore, all things become of value to him
only in so far as they partake of the atmosphere, as they are seen in a
peculiar air and distance. This first phase in Rilke's work may be
defined as the phase of reposeful nature.
To this sphere of relaxation and restfulness in which the objects are
static and are changed only as the surrounding atmosphere affects them,
the second phase in the poet's development adds another element, which
later was to grow into dimensions so powerful, so violently breaking
beyond the limitations of simple expression in words that it could only
find its satisfaction in a dithyrambic hymn to the work of the great
plastic artist of our time, to the creations of Auguste Rodin. This
second element is that which the French sculptor in a different medium
has carried to perfection. It is the element of gesture, of dramatic
movement.
This might seem the appropriate place in which to speak of Rilke's
monograph on the art of Rodin. To do so would, however, be an undue
anticipation, for it will be necessary to trace Rilke's development
through several transitions before the value of his contact with the
work of Rodin can be fully measured.
The gesture, the movement begins in _Advent_ and _Celebration_ to
disturb the stillness prevailing in the first two volumes of poems. Even
here it is only gentle and shy at first like the stirring of a breath of
wind over a quiet sea; and gentle beings make this first gesture,
children and young women at play, singing, dancing or at prayer.
Particularly in the cycle _Songs of the Maidens_ in the book
_Celebration_, the atmosphere is condensed and becomes the psychic
background of the landscape against which the gesture of longing or
expectation is seen and felt. It is the impatience to burst into
blossoming, the longing for love which pulsates in these _Songs of the
Maidens_ with the tenseness of suspense. _The Prayers of the Maidens to
Mary_ have not the mild melody of maidenly prayer; they vibrate with the
ecstasy of expectant life, and the Madonna is more than the Heavenly
Virgin, their longing transforms her into the symbol of earthly love and
motherhood. This expectation, in spite of its intensity, is subdued and
is only heard like the cadence of a far off dream:
"How shall I go on tiptoe
From childhood to Annunciation
Through the dim twilight
Into Thy Garden?"
Mention should be made of some prose writings which Rilke published in
the year 1898 and shortly afterward. They are _Two Stories of Prague_,
_The Touch of Life_ and _The Last_; three volumes of short stories; a
two-act drama, _The Daily Life_, points to a strong Maeterlinck
influence, and finally _Stories of God_. With both beauty of detail and
problematic interest, the short stories show an incoherence of treatment
and a lack of dramatic co-ordination easily conceivable in a poet who is
essentially lyrical and who at that time had not mastered the means of
technique to give to his characters the clear chiselling of the epic
form.
* * * * *
A sojourn in Russia and especially the acquaintance with the novels of
Dostoievsky became potent factors in Rilke's development and served to
deepen creations which without this influence might have terminated in a
grandiose æsthesia.
Broadly speaking, Russian art and literature may be described as
springing from an ethical impulse and as having for their motive power
and _raison d'être_ the tendency toward socio-political reform, in
contradistinction to the art and literature of Western culture, whose
motives and aims are primarily of an æsthetic nature and seek in art the
reconciliation of the dualism between spirit and matter.
Dostoievsky, whom Merejkovsky describes somewhere as the man with the
never-young face, the face "with its shadows of suffering and its
wrinkles of sunken-in cheeks ... but that which gives to this face its
most tortured expression is its seeming immobility, the suddenly
interrupted impulse, the life hardened into a stone:" this Dostoievsky
and particularly his _Rodion Raskolnikov_ cycle became a profound
artistic experience to Rilke. The poor, the outcasts, the homeless ones
received for him a new significance, the significance of the isolated
figure placed in the mighty everchanging current of a life in which this
figure stands strong and solitary. In the poem entitled _Pont Du
Carrousel_, written in Paris a few years later, Rilke has visioned the
blind beggar aloof amid the fluctuating crowds of the metropolis.
Of Russia and its influence upon him, Rilke writes: "Russia became for
me the reality and the deep daily realization that reality is something
that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience. Russia is the
country where men are solitary, each one with a world within himself,
each one profound in his humbleness and without fear of humiliating
himself, and because of that truly pious. Here the words of men are only
fragile bridges above their real life."
The great symbols of Solitude and of Death enter into the poet's work.
* * * * *
In the first decade of the new century Rilke reached the height of his
art and with a few exceptions the poems represented in this volume are
selected from the poems which were published between the years 1900 and
1908. The ascent toward the acme of Rilke's art after the year 1900 is
as rapid as it is precipitous. Only a few years previous we read in
Advent:
"That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things,
To have no home in the present.
And these are wishes: gentle dialogues
Of the poor hours with eternity."
With _Das Buch der Bilder_ the dream is ended, the veil of mist is
lifted and before us are revealed pictures and images that rise before
our eyes in clear colourful contours. Whether the poet conjures from the
depths of myth _The Kings in Legends_, or whether we read from _The
Chronicle of a Monk_ the awe-inspiring description of _The Last Judgment
Day_, or whether in Paris on a Palm Sunday we see _The Maidens at
Confirmation_, the pictures presented stand out with the clearness and
finality of the typical.
It is a significant fact that Rilke dedicated this book to Gerhart
Hauptmann, "in love and gratitude for his Michael Kramer." Hauptmann,
like Rilke in these poems, has placed before us great epic figures and
his art is so concentrated that often the simple expression of the
thought of one of his characters produces a shudder in the listener or
reader because in this thought there vibrates the suffering of an entire
social class and in it resounds the sorrow of many generations.
* * * * *
In _The Book of Pictures_, Rilke's art reaches its culmination on what
might be termed its monumental side. The visualization is elevated to
the impersonal objective level which gives to the rhythm of these poems
an imperturbable calm, to the figures presented a monumental erectness.
_The Men of the House of Colonna_, _The Czars_, _Charles XII Riding
Through the Ukraine_ are portrayed each with his individual historical
gesture, with a luminosity as strong as the colour and movement which
they gave to their time. In the mythical poem, _Kings in Legends_, this
concrete element in the art of Rilke has found perhaps its supreme
expression:
"Kings in old legends seem
Like mountains rising in the evening light.
They blind all with their gleam,
Their loins encircled are by girdles bright,
Their robes are edged with bands
Of precious stones--the rarest earth affords--
With richly jeweled hands
They hold their slender, shining, naked swords."
There are in _The Book of Pictures_ poems in which this will to
concentrate a mood into its essence and finality is applied to purely
lyrical poems as in _Initiation_, that stands out in this volume like
"the great dark tree" itself so immeasurable is the straight line of its
aspiration reaching into the far distant silence of the night; or as in
the poem entitled _Autumn_, with its melancholy mood of gentle descent
in all nature.
In _The Book of Hours_, Rilke withdraws from the world not from
weariness but weighed down under the manifold conflicting visions. As
the prophet who would bring to the world a great possession must go
forth into the desert to be alone until the kingdom comes to him from
within, so the poet must leave the world in order to gain the deeper
understanding, to be face to face with God. The mood of _Das
Stunden-Buch_ is this mood of being face to face with God; it elevates
these poems to prayer, profound prayer of doubt and despair, exalted
prayer of reconciliation and triumph.
_The Book of Hours_ contains three parts written at different periods in
the poet's life: _The Book of a Monk's Life_ (1899); _The Book of
Pilgrimage_ (1901), and _The Book of Poverty and Death_ (1903), although
the entire volume was not published until several years later. _The Book
of Hours_ glows with a mystic fervour to know God, to be near him. In
this desire to approach the Nameless One, the young Brother in _The Book
of a Monk's Life_ builds up about God parables, images and legends
reminiscent of those of the 17th century Angelus Silesius, but sustained
by a more pregnant language because exalted by a more ardent visionary
force. The motif of _The Monk's Life_ is expressed in the poem beginning
with the lines:
"I live my life in circles that grow wide
And endlessly unroll."
Through the grey cell of the young Monk there flash in luminous
magnificence the colours of the great renaissance masters, for he feels
in Titian, in Michelangelo, in Raphael the same fervour that animates
him; they, too, are worshippers of the same God.
There are poems in _The Book of Pilgrimage_ of the stillness of a
whispered prayer in a great Cathedral and there are others that carry in
their exultation the music of mighty hymns. The visions in this second
book are no less ecstatic though less glowingly colourful; they have
withdrawn inward and have brought a great peace and a great faith as in
the poem of God, whose very manifestation is the quietude and hush of a
silent world:
"By day Thou art the Legend and the Dream
That like a whisper floats about all men,
The deep and brooding stillnesses which seem,
After the hour has struck, to close again.
And when the day with drowsy gesture bends
And sinks to sleep beneath the evening skies,
As from each roof a tower of smoke ascends
So does Thy Realm, my God, around me rise."
The last part of _The Book of Hours_, _The Book of Poverty and Death_,
is finally a symphony of variations on the two great symbolic themes in
the work of Rilke. As Christ in the parable of the rich young man
demands the abandonment of all treasures, so in this book the poet sees
the coming of the Kingdom, the fulfilment of all our longings for a
nearness to God when we have become simple again like little children
and poor in possessions like God Himself. In this phase of Rilke's
development, the principle of renunciation constitutes a certain
negative element in his philosophy. The poet later proceeded to a
positive acquiescence toward man's possessions, at least those acquired
or created in the domain of art.
In our approach through the mystic we touch reality most deeply. It is
because of this that all art and all philosophy culminate in their final
forms in a crystallization of those values of life that remain forever
inexplicable to pure reason; they become religious in the simple,
profound sense of that word. Before the eternal facts of Life doubt and
strife are reconciled into faith, will and pride change into humility.
The realization of this truth expressed in the medium of poetry is the
significance of Rilke's _Book of Hours_. A distinguished Scandinavian
writer has pronounced _Das Stunden-Buch_ one of the supreme literary
achievements of our time and its deepest and most beautiful book of
prayer.
In his subsequent poetic work Rilke did not again reach the sustained
high quality of this book, the mood and idea of which he incorporated
into a prose work of exquisite lyrical beauty: _The Sketch of Malte
Laurids Brigge_.
* * * * *
In _New Poems_ (1907) and _New Poems, Second Part_ (1908) the historical
figure, frequently taken from the Old Testament, has grown beyond the
proportions of life; it is weightier with fate and invariably becomes
the means of expressing symbolically an abstract thought or a great
human destiny. _Abishag_ presents the contrast between the dawning and
the fading life; _David Singing Before Saul_ shows the impatience of
awakening ambition, and _Joshua_ is the man who forces even God to do
his will. The antique Hellenic world rises with shining splendour in the
poems _Eranna to Sappho_, _Lament for Antinous_, _Early Apollo_ and the
_Archaic Torso of Apollo_.
The spirit of the Middle Ages with its religious fervour and
superstitious fanaticism is symbolized in several poems, the most
important among which are _The Cathedral_, _God in the Middle Ages_,
_Saint Sebastian_ personifying martyrdom, and _The Rose Window_, whose
glowing magic is compared to the hypnotic power of the tiger's eye.
Modern Paris is often the background of the _New Poems_, and the crass
play of light and shadow upon the waxen masks of Life's disillusioned in
the Morgue is caught with the same intense realistic vision as the
flamingos and parrots spreading their vari-coloured soft plumage in the
warmth of the sun in the Avenue of the Jardin des Plantes.
Almost all of the poems in these two volumes are short and precise. The
images are portrayed with the sensitive intensity of impressionistic
technique. The majestic quietude of the long lines of _The Book of
Pictures_ is broken, the colours are more vibrant, more scintillating
and the pictures are painted in nervous, darting strokes as though to
convey the manner in which they were perceived: in one single,
all-absorbing glance. For this reason many of these _New Poems_ are not
quite free from a certain element of virtuosity. On the other hand,
Rilke achieves at times a perfect surety of rapid stroke as in the poem
_The Spanish Dancer_, who rises luminously on the horizon of our inner
vision like a circling element of fire, flaming and blinding in the
momentum of her movements. Degas and Zuloaga seem to have combined their
art on one canvas to give to this dancer the abundant elasticity of
grace and the splendid fantasy of colour.
* * * * *
Many of the themes in the _New Poems_ bear testimony to the fact that
Rilke travelled extensively, prior to the writing of these volumes, in
Italy, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. His book on the five painters
at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where he remained for a time,
entirely given over to the observation of the atmosphere, the movement
of the sky and the play of light upon the far heath of this northern
landscape, is an introduction to every interpretation of the work of
landscape painters and a tender poem to a land whose solitary and
melancholy beauty entered into his own work.
More vital than the influence of the personalities and the art treasures
of the countries which Rilke visited and more potent in its effect upon
his creations, like a great sun over the most fruitful years of his
life, stands the towering personality of Auguste Rodin. The _New Poems_
bear the dedication: "A mon grand ami, Auguste Rodin," indicating the
twofold influence which the French sculptor wielded over the poet, that
of a friend and that of an artist.
One recalls the broad, solidly-built figure of Rodin with his rugged
features and high, finely chiselled forehead, moving slowly among the
white glistening marble busts and statues as a giant in an old legend
moves among the rocks and mountains of his realm, patient, all-enduring,
the man who has mastered life, strong and tempered by the storms of
time. And one thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke, young, blond, with his
slender aristocratic figure, the slightly bent-forward figure of one who
on solitary walks meditates much and intensely, with his sensitive full
mouth and the "firm structure of the eyebrow gladly sunk in the shadow
of contemplation," the face full of dreams and with an expression of
listening to some distant music.
From no other book of his, not excepting _The Book of Hours_, can we
deduce so accurate a conception of Rilke's philosophy of Life and Art as
we can draw from his comparatively short monograph on Auguste Rodin.
Rilke sees in Rodin the dominant personification in our age of the
"power of servitude in all nature." For this reason the book on Rodin is
far more than a purely æsthetic valuation of the sculptor's work; Rilke
traces throughout the book the strongly ethical principle which works
itself out in every creative act in the realm of art. This grasp of the
deeper significance of all art gives to the book on Rodin its well-nigh
religious aspect of thought and its hymnlike rhythm of expression. He
begins: "Rodin was solitary before fame came to him, and afterward he
became perhaps still more solitary. For fame is ultimately but the
summary of all misunderstandings that crystallize about a new name." And
he sums up this one man's greatness: "Sometime it will be realized what
has made this great artist so supreme. He was a worker whose only desire
was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and the difficult
significance of his tool. Therein lay a certain renunciation of life but
in just this renunciation lay his triumph--for Life entered into his
work."
Rodin became to Rilke the manifestation of the divine principle of the
creative impulse in man. Thus Rilke's monograph on Auguste Rodin will
remain the poet's testament on Life and Art.
* * * * *
Rilke has lived deeply; he has absorbed into his artistic and spiritual
consciousness many of the supreme values of our time. His art holds the
mystic depth of the Slav, the musical strength of the German, and the
visual clarity of the Latin. As artist, he has felt life to be sacred,
and as a priest, he has brought to its altar many offerings.