Letters Of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892 1910

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Gift of
YALE UNIVERSITY

With the aid of the

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

1949

Jitters of

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Jitters of

RAINER MARIA RILKE

1892 I9IO

translated by

JANE BANNARD GREENE

and
M. D. HERTER NORTON

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W W NORTON * COMPANY INC

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1945, by

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
70 Fifth Avenue, New York u, N. Y.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS

CONTENTS

TRANSLATORS' NOTE 7

INTRODUCTION 9

THE LETTERS 15

NOTES 365

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS 400

ILLUSTRATIONS

IN THE LIVING ROOM OF THE WESTERWEDE HOUSE (1902)
From Earner Maria Rilke by Lou Andreas-Salome Frontispiece*

FACSIMILE OF LETTER TO HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
Reproduced from that in the first edition of the Brief e 27O f

FACSIMILE OF LETTER TO DR. MARTIN ZICKEL
From the collection of Richard von Mises, Cambridge, Mass. 2OO-1

TRANSLATORS' NOTE

UNLESS otherwise indicated in the Notes, all these letters have
been taken from the two editions of the general collection of
Rilke's Letters, edited by his daughter and son-in-law, Ruth
Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber, and published by Insel-Verlag,
which differ not greatly yet enough to make them complemen-
tary.

Our thanks go to Richard von Mises, of Harvard University
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his generous
interest and, help, and to Paul Graham, of Smith College, who
kindly read much of the text.

We owe particular gratitude to Herbert Steiner, formerly edi-
tor of Corona, who has been for us a keen critic in the larger sense,
giving many patient hours to discussion of difficult passages in
the translation, and allowing us to draw for guidance in points
of interpretation upon his knowledge of the background of
Rilke's life and creative activity.

INTRODUCTION

MANY of the letters in Rilke's extraordinary correspondence have
an artistic validity of their own and are to be enjoyed for them-
selves, even by one unacquainted with his poetry or with his life.
While the letters in this volume have been chosen principally for
their intrinsic beauty or wisdom, others have been included be-
cause they are psychologically revealing in a more personal sense,
or because, like those of the very young Rilke, they contain a first
statement of characteristic themes, or because they give the con-
tinuity that helps to make of the collection a kind of spiritual
autobiography. To piece together a complete biographical story
would not have been possible at this time. Rilke made it clear in
his will that since a part of his creative energy had gone into his
letters there would be no objection to their being published; but
many people who were closest to him are still alive and much of
a personal nature has inevitably been left out of the two editions
of the Letters, prepared by his daughter and son-in-law, which
still remain the principal source we have to draw on.

Both in his life and in his artistic development, 1910, when he
had finished the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, offers a logi-
cal year in which to close this first of two volumes of Rilke's let-
ters. The period from his seventeenth year until this time em-
braces all the great experiences of his early adult life, and these,
save for his friendship with Lou Andreas-Salome which was life-
long, were rounded out by now or just entering upon a new
phase. Russia no longer dominated his conscious thinking but
had become embedded, as he was to put it, in the substructure of
his life; there are later few letters to his wife, the sculptress Clara
Westhoff, to whom so many of the present pages are addressed;
Paris, with which he had wrestled so desperately, had become
the stern but benevolent guardian of his work; the overwhelm-
ing impact of Rodin's art and personality had passed over the
rapids and come down to a quiet stream, and he had made his
discovery of Cezanne and his paintings. With all this, the springs

IO

of his own inspiration, while they did not go dry, seemed to
disappear underground; he became prey to a distressing inner
restlessness that was to outlast even the war years and not again
be overcome by the great flow of his creative genius until 1922,
the year of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

These strands of experience wove significant patterns in the
poet's art. "In reality," he wrote in 1899, "one seeks in every-
thing new (country or person or thing) only an expression to
help some personal confession to greater power or maturity.
All things are there in order that they may become pictures for
us." So Russia gave him pictures for the Stories of God, the
Book of Pictures, and the Book of Hours; Paris gave him pic-
tures (many of them painful) for the Book of Pictures, the third
part of the Book of Hours, the New Poems, and the Notebooks.

Only his approach to the pictures changed. "Nature," he had
written of the time before he met Rodin, "was still a general
stimulation for me, an evocation, an instrument on whose strings
my fingers found themselves again; I did not sit before her; I
let myself be carried away by the soul that went out of me; she
came over me with her great immense existence, as prophecy
came over Saul, just that way. I went along with her and saw,
not Nature, but the faces she inspired in me." Already in his
contact with the Worpswede painters he had been made aware
of a different relationship to Nature, "this daily attentiveness,
alertness, and readiness of the out-turned senses, this thousandfold
looking and always looking away from oneself . . . this being-
only-eye," as he noted in his journal. Rodin too believed in look-
ing, observing, seeing, in drinking things in with his eyes and
letting them speak for themselves in a word, in objectivity.
This Rilke set himself to learn in his own field, and the effort in-
volved in fixing his attention on an external object, in keeping
the music within him so muted that, as it were, the thing itself
could speak and be heard, proved to be a rigorous discipline for
himself and his art. The New Poems, the product of this new
seeing, are firmer, more plastic than anything he had written
hitherto.

II

Rodin gave him more than pictures and more than an under-
standing of observation plastically rendered. Rodin, through in-
cessant work, was always in touch with the unconscious sources
of his creative power. Rilke, subject to spells of inspiration in-
terrupted by arid periods when he was burdened with the un-
easiness of living the Cornet was written in a single night, the
three sections of the Book of Hours in twenty-four, ten, and
eight days, respectively, in three different years , learned the
value of this "always working" and tried hard to attain it himself.
That he never did, his correspondence is there to testify, as well as
the completing of the Elegies and the coming of the Sonnets, again
all in a few days' hurricane. His nearest approach to it was per-
haps between May, 1908, and January, 1910, a time spent almost
continuously in Paris, when he wrote New Poems //, the
Requiems, and the Notebooks.

After the New Poems he was no longer so consciously preoccu-
pied with seeing.

Work of sight is done,

now for some heartwork

on those pictures within you . . .

he wrote in a poem called "Turning," in a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salome. In the Notebooks he rid himself of many fears; for it is a
book of fear, of the fears of his childhood, of great cities, of
loneliness, of death, of love, of losing himself. And in 1910, the
ordeal of that writing over, he was able to declare that "almost
all songs are possible."

Letters were to Rilke at once a means of communication and
a channel for artistic expression. Like Donne, he found that

. . . more than kisses, letters mingle Soules;

For thus friends absent speake. This ease controules

The tediousness of my life: But for these

I could ideate nothing, which could please,

But I should wither in one day, and passe

To 'a botde'of Hay, that am a locke of Grasse.

12

To those who knew him his presence and conversation were un-
forgettable, but he himself was easily exhausted by personal con-
tacts. His aloofness, his constant insistence upon solitude should
not mislead one into believing that he was by nature cold or in-
different; he was, on the contrary, too responsive for his own
peace of mind. The letters may fail to give the whole picture of
his personality, in that the lighter side the humor of which all
his friends speak, the courtesy that sometimes hid a cutting wit
is not in evidence. But they are a monument not only to his
capacity for friendship but also to his great need of imparting the
life within him to those he loved.

He took pains with his letters, not only with their content but
with their appearance as well. The pages are exquisitely neat, for
he wrote naturally in a regular, elegant, calligraphic hand. Often
he would patiently recopy an entire page rather than mar it
by a change of word or phrase; and if he regarded a letter as
important, he would copy it down for his own reference before
sending it.

Rilke must have derived from letter-writing some of the same
satisfaction that came from his work. In the Requiem for Count
Kalckreuth he speaks of fate passing into verses and not return-
ing, implying that once an experience has been poured into an
artistic mold, the weight and pain of it leave the artist. Letters
provided a release of the same sort, a means of easing the pressure
of life; but the release would have been only partial, the expres-
sion provisional. To find out why this was so would take one to
the heart of that strange necessity that inhabits an artist's soul.
Perhaps in letters his experiences had not finally come to rest,
had not passed totally into the picture beyond, into the pure
image they became in verse. Perhaps fate could still return to
him from the letters.

Particularly when inspiration lagged he turned to his corre-
spondence, for in it he "could ideate" much that pressed for re-
lease. It became his handicraft, the tool that could keep him at
work in constant preparation for the creative moments. One
feels he could scarcely have survived the unproductive periods

[2

without it. The best of the letters, indeed, were written in these
times.

Revealing his mind as they do, it is natural that the letters
should illuminate and enrich one's interpretation of Rilke's
poetry. The interplay between the two is active at almost every
level of experience. Over and over again, as our Notes attempt
in some measure to indicate, the letters tell of some incident, of
something seen or read, which became also the subject of a
poem. The fresh transcript of the experience, or his revival of
the memory, enhances one's appreciation of the heightened and
universalized reality of the verse. For the Notebooks, further-
more, he seems to have used the letters as a kind of proving ground,
particularly" those to Lou Andreas-Salome about Paris, which
startlingly resemble certain pages of the book.

Since the drama of Rilke's life was largely an inner one, it
lent itself well to this kind of record. For the letters reflect the
emotional and spiritual struggles he underwent, and a compre-
hension of them often gives a key to the poems which are, in a
sense, the resolution of those tensions. In them one constantly
meets with Rilke's exceedingly individual ideas those ideas on
love, on death, on art that are familiar from the poetry and be-
comes acquainted with the soil from which they grew.

Rilke has said many profound things about living, yet the
words of Euripides come to mind:

Wisdom is full of pity, and thereby

men pay for too much wisdom with much pain.

The letters show that the springs of Rilke's wisdom lay not in
cool detachment but in deep anguish of spirit. They reveal the
tangled root as well as the tranquil flower, and they are evi-
dence that his words are spoken in the deepest humility. "Who
speaks of victory? To endure is everything."

The Jitters

C ' 3

To Franz Keim i 5 b/I Wassergasse, Prague

[1892]

I deem it my duty, upon receipt of your friendly lines, to
thank you immediately for your great kindness. I prize your
opinion most highly and learn it the more gladly as it is a good
one. So with all my heart, thanks for your kind letter.

Today \ must only add the request that you will always keep
the good will and the kind friendliness you have shown me, for
more distant days as well.

Severe with myself, as you, most esteemed master, advise, I
want always to be and to remain. A firm, beautiful, and shining
goal before my eyes, striving toward that goal; not on the road
along which ordinary people senselessly stagger, not on the
broad-trodden highway of the millions! to press upward on
roads one has oneself laid, to the one unclouded light on high!
For my view is:

A genius, so noble observers of men suppose,

Is often doomed to ruin.

No! If the period creates no great men for itself,

Then the man will create himself a great period! . . .

no

To Valery David-Rhonfeld December 4, 1894

before midnight

Vally mine, mine, mine!

Over there in the dining room my aunt is sitting at her eve-
ning meal; I renounced my share of supper, withdrew from the
to me dismal atmosphere into my room and there, not from
need, rather to have a certain taste frankly, from a mortal crav-
ing for sweets ate three pieces of the cake in question. My heart

i8

was oppressed and out of sorts without my knowing the reason
at first. Then, as I sat across from Tame G. in the dining room
for a few minutes, it became evident to me that the abrupt ex-
change of the light-flooded sphere of your presence for the
dreary, humdrum atmosphere of my so infinitely remote rela-
tives was the weighty cause of that bad mood. But that has
vanished now. My heart is light and my mind is clear. Your
letter, your dear letter, has banished the clouds. It is bright. The
heaven of our love shines out of the quiet flooding of my soul.
Sweet sensations murmur softly like strong reeds, and longing
like a rustling tree in blossom spreads out its arms within me.
I don't know how often I have read your lines. I don't know
what so overwhelms me. Is it alone the consciousness that they
come from you, or is it rather the aroma of a deep, warm feel-
ing that is wafting toward me, that intoxicates me. Vally, your
dear words have poured a holy magic into my soul, yes, in it
glimmers that worshipful, trembling earnestness that must have
pervaded the hearts of the oracle-questioning Greeks when they
awaited at the temple gate, half in hope, half in trepidation, the
answer of the mysterious god. For to me too it is as though my
eyes were seeing farther than usual as though the dimming walls
of the cramped little room were betaking themselves away , as
though today I were permitted to take a look into the future! But
before I look out into that colorful rolling sea of mists, let me
first of all gaze within myself. In this night, about half past eleven,
it will be exactly nineteen years that I have been alive. You know
the lack-luster story of my frustrated childhood and you know
those persons who are to blame for my being able to note nothing
or little that is joyous in those days of growth. You know that for
the greater part of the day I was entrusted to a serving-girl, im-
moral and of few scruples, and that the woman whose first and
most immediate care I should have been loved me only when it
came to bringing me out in a new little dress before a few mar-
veling acquaintances. You know how I acquitted myself with
varying success at the Primary School of the Piarists and a
stupid boy in the main avenue of the Baumgarten decided my

own fate with a childish word. If in my father's house love was
shown me with both care and concern only by my papa, I was
in general thrown entirely upon my own resources and for the
most part could not share with anyone my little sufferings and
blisses, in the new phase of my young life I was very well ac-
quainted with that cowardly, undisguised heartlessness which
does not shrink even from being brutal out of pure bestial lust
for murder (the expression is not too strong). My heart, apart
from this inclined through the loneliness of my earliest days to
quiet endurance and courageous resignation, trembled at the sight
of these injustices, and bore with a submission not proper to its
years the torments of that treatment. Yes, bore them . You often
call me idealistic. Dearest Vally, if I am still that now, think what
pure feeling must have shone in that little soul which, always lost
in itself, was averse even to the simple, gay, innocent games of
rowdy boys in the Primary School, and consider further, my love,
how frightfully the onslaught of such wild, undeserved crudities
must have echoed in the undefiled sanctuary of that childish spirit.
What I suffered in those days may be compared to the worst pain
in the world, although I was a child, or rather because I was one.
Because neither the strength of resistance nor the fullness of en-
lightened reason were mine, with which to recognize in it com-
mon knavishness and nothing more. I endured blows without ever
having returned a blow or so much as repaying it with an angry
word, I suffered and bore. I believed the will of an infinite, un-
alterable destiny required of me this heroic endurance had I
known, recognized, that instead of this inevitable fate it was only

the whim of a pitiful, pleasure-seeking creature (Mother).

How was I to suspect that! By the same necessity by which I
saw day yield to night, I believed my torments to exist and took
a certain pride in bearing them. In my childish mind I believed
myself through my patience near to the virtues of Jesus Christ,
and once when I received a hard blow in the face, so that my
knees shook, I said to my unjust assailant in a quiet voice I still
hear it today : "I suffer it because Christ suffered it, silently and
without complaint, and while you were hitting me, I prayed my

20

good God to forgive you." For a while the pitiable coward stood
there, dumb and motionless, then he broke out into the derisive
laughter with which all to whom he imparted my outcry of
desperation chimed in howling. And I always fled back then into
the farthest window niche, bit back my tears which would then
break out violent and hot only in the the night, when the regular
breathing of the boys sounded through the wide dormitory. And
it was in the very night in which I was arriving at I don't know
which anniversary of my birth that I knejt on my bed and with
clasped hands prayed for death. A sickness at that time would
have appeared to me a sure sign of response, only it didn't come.
To compensate, there developed at that time the urge to write,
which even in its childish beginnings provided me consolation.
"Maritana," a tale of a heroically courageous maiden whose char-
acter resembled that of Jeanne d'Arc was, after several poems I
no longer remember, the first work of any size. "The war horse
rears and the trumpets sound." That was the end of a fiery mono-
logue from this remarkable fantasy. That that period was filled
above all with religious songs, which thanks to Providence have
all been lost, needs no confirmation in view of the above-men-
tioned soulful frame of mind. Isn't that so? You also know how
furthermore it became ever clearer to me that to remain in the
hated military school was no longer possible and, only too often
already, have I told you of the years of hesitation and the final
development of the decision. During this time, which for the
most part I spent in the sickroom more spiritually exhausted than
physically ill, my poetic attempts developed greater clarity and
independence, and I mention especially the two thoughts, "Satan
on the Ruins of Rome" and "Exorcism," with joyful recollection.
So in these troubled days for the first rime the often stifled urge
for consolation shot up freely; simultaneously, however, my mind
growing older, my heart growing lighter, felt the chilling empti-
ness of isolation. After all, it had never, never yet met with
friendly response, let alone love, and yet seemed to be demanding
love. Once more I became deeply attached to a comrade, by the
name of Fried. This time my heart should not go empty away.

21

There developed a truly brotherly affection based on mutual
sympathy, and with kiss and handclasp we sealed a bond for life.
As children do. We understood each other well, and I blossomed
out in the knowledge that the scarcely varied events of my soul
were sounding and ringing on in the like-tuned soul of my friend.
I was jealous, as he was of me; he admired my poetic thoughts
and I begged him to try his hand too, and heartily rejoiced in the
timid success of his stories. Fried's grandmother, for whom he
had a tremendous admiration, died suddenly, he went to her
funeral, and I spent two tearful nights tortured by worry, know-
ing my beloved friend far away. He returned at last, longingly
awaited by me and was another. Later I learned that fellow pu-
pils had dragged our pure bond into the mud and besides this
Fried had received orders from higher up not to associate so much
with the f ooL After that my heart never became attached to any-
one again. But even the friend who had so easily fallen away I did
not shun and spoke officially with him, without ever reproaching
him, but I did reject the offer of reconciliation he made me once
more, without pride, but with earnest firmness; and my heart went
on being orphaned. It seems perhaps to be the confession of a
weakling. Yet I shall never be ashamed that my heart was empty
before I found you, Vally, and leave the shame to those who had
scorned to earn a place in it. Then came the time that you know
(Linz Commercial School), whose bitter disillusionments and
errors are buried in your forgiveness. Then came the fourth big
division of my existence: the period of study. I was already pre-
pared to renounce my scholastic future, weary of the everlasting,
unsuccessful and aimless work, when I met you, beloved, dearest
Vally, when you strengthened, healed, comforted me and gave
me life, existence, hope, and future. On December 4th of the year
in which I entered upon my high-school career in Schonfeld, I
renounced this plan and, exhausted with work, wanted to fling
myself into the arms of destiny's stream, to go under or to land
somewhere or other. But that today I am not straying through
the world a purposeless wanderer, but rather as a confident fighter
my breast full of love, gratitude, and hope am striding toward

22

our happiness, our union, could I thank anyone but you for that,
my divine Vally? My whole previous life seems to me a road
to you, like a long unlighted journey at the end of which my re-
ward is to strive toward you and to know you will be all mine in
the near future. And now, as that spirit, that oracular courage
wafting from your letter proclaims: this future is ours. Is ours
under the protection of our dear, loved dead, of your good grand-
mama, and under the shielding power of our own strength and
the steadfastness of our love. Let us still, dearest heart, with the
help of your noble grandmama, whom I so honor and esteem, sur-
vive well this year's troubles as also the extraordinary things of
next year then will come, if all goes off according to plan and
hope, the university years which grant us much more time still
and will besides lead us so blissfully near to our happiness. Then
let us found the longed-for household on whose solid foundation
our inner contentment is to rest as on a strong substructure.
Then let us create, industrious in the practice of our arts, helping
each other, taking counsel like two sturdy, blissful human beings
who over their love and their work forget the world and pity or
despise people. Then in six years, in the first year of the twenti-
eth century, probably in the first or second of our official en-
gagement, you will get, my much beloved panicka, another letter
like this which will contain a little backward glance over the
worse rimes surmounted and a prophecy for better ones!

Eleven o'clock at night it has already struck out there, and
before I complete and read over this letter, nineteen years will
certainly be full. When I look briefly over them once more,
the brightest point is that you stepped into my orbit and for life,
as long as it beats, have given my poor heart, a stranger to love,
the most worthy object of adoring, grateful devotion in your-
self!

Rene

To Dr. Bauschinger i 5 b/I Wassergasse, Prague

December 2, 1895

... Is it not strange that almost all great philosophers and
psychologists have always devoted their attention to the earth
and to the earth only? Would it not be more sublime to turn one's
eyes away from the little clod and to consider not a tiny grain
of dust in the universe but the universe itself? Think, dear sir,
how small and insignificant earthly hardships would appear the
moment our earth had to shrivel up to the tiniest, whirling, will-
less little part of an endless world! And how man would have
to grow on his "little earth"!

Strange. Every bird that makes its dwelling under the shelter
of the roof beams first investigates the place it has chosen and
over which a part of its diminutive life is now to trickle away.
And man is quite content to know the earth halfway and scantily,
and lets the faraway worlds above wander and roam. Does it not
seem as if we were very deep down still, since our gaze clings so
persistently to the ground? Could not that be the only true
philosophy which claws its strong roots into infinity instead of
into the slime of the earth? ! . . .

To Bodo Wildberg

(H. von Dickinson-Wildberg) March 7, 1896

. . . Thiel develops his strictly German patriotic idea as op-
posed to my world enthusiasm, and it seems to me the story of
our two philosophies of life is that of the two parallel lines that
cross at infinity! For in the end they are running toward the same
goal. Only Thiel thinks that this goal will be reached by a tight
closing together of each nation and hostile severing of that na-
tion from the outside world, because this eternal battling and
worrying wakens and exercises their powers, while I am of the
opinion that this natural and paltry advance takes place of itself

and needs at most the help of workers but not the power of kings.
Those who tower clear-eyed above the tumult should not look
toward the way stations where our weary successors will rest,
but should marvel freely and proudly at the golden sun-goal
beyond, which late grandchildren will enjoy in full radiance.
Even Moses was permitted to gaze on the Promised Land and
before his failing eyes lay its blossoming splendor and not the
thousandfold danger through which his people had to wrestle
its way!

Hence Thiel seems not to want to dedicate his powers for the
present to the "League of Genuine Moderns," which is much
to be deplored. I like the idea very well, and I should be glad if
it would take shape in reality. In that case one should not beat
the advertising drum, one would have to search quietly for like-
minded and like-feeling people . . . wouldn't one? . . .

15 3

To Bodo Wildberg

(H. von Dickinson-Wild berg) i$b/l Wassergasse, Prague II

[1896]

. . . Your opinion of Thiel's letter which, for lack of time, I
still haven't answered certainly agrees more or less with mine.
A league does not, after all, bear the stamp of a perfect herdlike
similarity among its members, as Thiel seems to suppose. On the
contrary: the more different its individual components, the more
full-toned and rich will be the result of their combined sound, if
only they are tuned to one fundamental tone, that of genuine,
deep, true feeling for art. One should not confuse league with
school. While it is the tendency of the latter to narrow the course
of the creator by certain rigid norms, the league enables each, ac-
cording to his own peculiarity, to express himself without con-
cern for petty interests and advantages. . . .

To Karl Baron Du Frel 8/1 Bliitenstrasse, Munich

February 16, 1897

It may be an awkward token of my respect, if I offer you my
latest book of poems.

But I can give my feelings no other expression. You are the
most significant investigator in the domain of hypnotism and
will pardon an interested layman the following request, which
is: by what road does one become a worthy initiate? There are
plenty of pamphlets which deceive and mislead the novice by
their charlatanish falsehood, and the unpracticed eye does not
know how to differentiate them from those genuine guides which
direct one intelligently into the dark lands of clarity and of the
future.

Apart from the charm of the mysterious, the domains of spirit-
ualism have for me an important power of attraction because in
the recognition of the many idle forces and in the subjugation of
their power I see the great liberation of our remote descendants
and believe that in particular every artist must struggle through
the misty fumes of crass materialism to those spiritual intimations
that build for him the golden bridge into shoreless eternities.

If I may penetrate into the nature of your science, it will per-
haps be vouchsafed me sometime to become with word and pen
one of the adherents of the new faith that towers high above
church-steeple crosses and shines like the first hint of morning
on the princeliest peaks.

Please give me your advice, my dear Baron. What works should
I go through and where can I (who am not in a position to buy
them) get hold of them?

Do not let this be a burden to you; it seems to me that in my
"Visions of Christ," appearing this year, I shall come a big step
nearer to your group. . . .

til

To Ludivig Ganghofer 8/1 Bliitenstrasse, Munich

April 1 6, 1897

. . . Dearest, much honored master, when one has a very dark
childhood behind one, in which the everyday resembles walking
in dank cold streets and a holiday is like a resting in some narrow,
gray, inner court, one becomes diffident. And eveti more diffi-
dent if, at the age of ten, from these troubled and yet enervated
days one is deposited in the rough activity of a military institu-
tion where, above the longing for love that has scarcely come to
consciousness, an icy, wild duty rages away like a winter storm,
and where the lonely, helpless heart after unhealthy coddling
experiences unreasonable brutality. Then comes the crisis: the
child becomes either indifferent or unhappy. I became the latter.
A strong disposition toward excessive piety grew to a kind of
madness under the influence of the spiritual loneliness and the
coercion of an odious duty hard as fate. The blows I often en-
dured from mischievous comrades or coarse superiors I felt as
happiness and went in for the idea of a false martyrdom. The
continual excitement of this almost ecstatic joy in torment, the
passing of the hours of recovery in the institution chapel, the
excruciating sleeplessness of nights frantic with dreams all that
together was bound finally to exercise a detrimental influence
upon my resistless growing organism. After an added inflamma-
tion of the lungs, I was sent for six weeks as "highly nervous" (! )
to Salzburg for a salt cure. Had I been allowed to leave then! But
everybody thought it perfectly natural that, having borne it four
years, I should remain for the six to come, which would be better,
in order to become a lieutenant and to provide for myself.

In the fifth year of my military training (the fifteenth of my
life) I finally forced my departure. Things didn't get much bet-
ter. They put me in a commercial school in Linz, where I saw a
cheerless office future darkening before me. After scarcely a
year's time, I tore myself away against everyone's will by an act
of violence and have since been accounted a kind of prodigal son.

They wanted to try the last resort. Since in both previous in-
stitutions and in my family it was noticed with scorn and uneasi-
ness that I "made poems," they wanted to make college possible
for me. At that time it was my father's brother, who played a
considerable role in Prague as lawyer and deputy to the assembly
of Bohemia, who put in a good word for me and with generous
financial assistance made -possible the costly private study my
father could never have afforded. For that I thank him far be-
yond the grave. After three years of serious but joyous work I
had gone through the entire eight-grade grammar school so well,
even after the thoroughly defective preparatory training of the
military school, that in the summer of '95 I passed my entrance
examination with distinction. Unfortunately my uncle could no
longer look upon this success . . . and he probably took with
him under the earth the opinion that I would not amount to
much. He left no stipulations of any kind in his will save that his
daughters, my cousins, should allow me to study up to the en-
trance examination and, under certain circumstances, the uni-
versity years.

Now it seems to me that all people do not give alike. And in
the two years of my university study I have got the feeling rather
strongly that I am a burdensome duty to the two ladies. Much
more burdensome to me is the feeling of slavery in such helpless
dependence at my age when others may already support their
parents. And then: on this road I have no objective at all. For I
keep costing more and more money, and if I become a doctor
and do not want to pine away as a high-school instructor then
I shall be costing money again until I get some professorship or
other which, however, I* do not in the least desire.

With every day it becomes clearer to me that I was right in
setting myself from the start against the phrase my relatives like:
Art is something one just cultivates on the side in free hours,
when one leaves the government office, etc. That to me is a
fearful sentence. I feel that this is my belief: Whoever does not
consecrate himself wholly to art with all his wishes and values
can never reach the highest goal. He is not an artist at all. And

28

now it can be no presumption if I confess that I feel myself to be
an artist, weak and wavering in strength and boldness, yet aware
of bright goals, and hence to me every creative activity is seri-
ous, glorious, and true. Not as martyrdom do I regard art but
as a battle the chosen one has to wage with himself and his en-
vironment in order to go forward with a pure heart to the greatest
goal, the one day of celebration, and with full hands to give to all
successors of the rich reconciliation finally achieved. But that
needs a whole man! Not a few weary leisure hours.

I do not know, dearest master, in how far you agree with me
and whether you are perhaps wisely smiling at the impetuous-
ness of this youthful resentment; then you will forgive too.
Now I am free of the university. The time has come. Dear sir,
you yourself once offered to give me help if I needed it. Now
then: today I have come to you.

I would like through agreement with a publisher or some
steady engagement on a newspaper to earn enough to be able
to live soon and well on my own. I would like to spare my cousins
their wanting-to-give-gladly and, by grateful renunciation of
my monthly allowance, to enable my dear father, who is some-
what ailing, to allow more for his health. I cannot work in peace
before that happens. I myself, of course, need little. . . .

Full of profoundest trust I lay this whole avowal in your
kind hands and sincerely beg you: counsel me, help me. . . .
Be assured that I shall never and nowhere bring discredit upon
your recommendation . . . and to you all the gratitude I can
prove to you through deeds for a lifetime.

en

To Frieda von Billow Munich

August 13, 1897

. . . We are reading in the most various books on Italian
Renaissance art and seeking an opportunity to get as independent
a judgment as possible on this interesting period. From the early
golden age of Florence we want to push forward by degrees to

_ 29

the Caraccis. As a matter of fact, I am especially fascinated by
one Florentine master of the quattrocento Sandro Botticelli,
whom I now want to go into somewhat more deeply and per-
sonally. His Madonnas with their weary sadness, their great
eyes asking for release and fulfillment, those women who dread
growing old without a holy youth, stand at the heart of the long-
ing of our time. I do not know whether you had the opportunity
to see Botticelli and how you stand toward his works. It is inter-
esting in any case to meet this man in a period when the Bible
and the holy legends constituted the subject matter for all paint-
ers and each was seeking to do as much justice as possible to the
religious motif, to narrate the legendary version without wanting
anything for himself in so doing save at most the solution of
some problem of color technique or of pure form; along comes
Sandro Botticelli and in his naive longing for God perceives that
the Madonna, in her deep sympathy ennobled and sanctified by
her strange motherhood, can quite well become the herald of his
own sadness and of his weariness. And in fact all his Madonnas
look as if they were still under the spell of a melancholy story,
quite bare of hope, that Sandro has been telling them; but they
are utterly tender in feeling and keep his avowals in confessional
sanctity and meditate on their obscurities and gaze on much,
much misery and have nothing but that little playing boy upon
their laps who wants to become the Redeemer. . . .

To Adolf Bonz * Im Rheingau, Berlin- Wilmersdorf

[December] 25, 1897

. , . I want to speak to you in all sincerity now . . . about the
poems. You see, my view on this point is purely subjective, and
it must be and must remain so. It is not my way to write poems
of epic or lyric style that can stand five to ten years of desk air
without becoming deathly sick. Short stories and dramas are re-
sults that do not age for me, poems, which accompany every
phase of my spiritual longing, are experiences through which I

ripen. Short stories are chapters, poems are continuations, short
stories are an appeal to the public, courtings of its favor and inter-
est, poems are gifts to everyone, presents, bounties-, with a short-
story book in my hand, I am a petitioner before those who are
empty, with poems in my heart, I am king of those who feel. A
king, however, who would tell his subjects in ten years how he
felt ten years ago, is a sham. Seven sketchbooks full of things I
am burning to utter await my choice, and they must be said
either now or never. But because I knew that I would want to
say them, I have undertaken to mark each lyric period by a book.
Since the Dreamcroivned period seven sketchbooks have come
into being and an eighth is begun which seems to me to indicate
an entirely new stage. So it is my plain duty to settle accounts
with these ripe riches, that is, to commit what is good in them
either to the fire or to the book trade. I prefer the latter, for my
books have had success, that is, they have awakened here a smile,
there a love, there a longing, and have given me an echo of that
love, the reflection of that smile and the dream of that longing
and have thereby made me richer and riper and purer. Please
understand me, I grow up by them, they are my link with the out-
side, my compromise with the world. Now I can defend the
verses as episodes, as little moments of a great becoming, as real,
deep spring: if ever I have a name, they would be misunderstood
as final products, as maturities, mistaken for summer. I cannot
keep my springtime silent in order to give it out some day in sum-
mer, old and faded, and were I untrue to my resolve, which for
four years has been fulfilled in Life and Songs, Wild Chicory,
Offerings to the Lares, Dreamcroivned, all further publication,
seeming to me a betrayal then, would probably cease too. But I
am earnestly sworn to persevere, and this whole attitude is so
bound up with my life that I cannot dismiss it. Quite the con-
trary, if I ever have a name, that is, have become (and the be-
coming is much too glorious for me to long for that) , then the
poems will be entirely superfluous; a selection can then be made,
a complete edition which will then also have something about it
of a comprehensive result but then they will be blossoms,

memories of spring, lovely and warm with the summer that lies
over their stillness. Until then is further than from today until
tomorrow. What I am saying today is nothing but the word
"heart's need" of the other day, a rocket sent into the air, burst-
ing into these thousand words of my innermost conviction. And
valued and dear as your advice is to me, you will now not take
it amiss any more if I do not follow it, but do everything to con-
secrate a new book of poems, Days of Celebration, to young '98.
I cannot do otherwise, so help me God. . . .

C 'O

To Frieda von Billow Ligowka 35, St. Petersburg

v May 27 (June 7), 1899

An intention to write never turns into a letter. A letter must
happen to one like a surprise, and one may not know where
in the day there was room for it to come into being. So it is that
my daily intentions have nothing to do with this fulfillment of
today. They were concerned with much that I am now saving up
to tell personally. For the many experiences and impressions are
still heaped up in me in such disorder and chaos that I do not want
to touch them. Like a fisherman who comes home late at night, I
can guess only vaguely at my catch from the burden of the nets
and must wait for the morrow in order to count it and enjoy it like
a new discovery. As I think over the immediate future, it seems
to me it will be in Meiningen that the sun will first rise on my
wealth. Accordingly you will be able to witness my greater or
lesser prosperity, and I do well to be silent about it before I can
show it fully.

Only this much: I feel my stay in Russia as a strange comple-
ment to that Florentine spring of whose influence and success I
have told you. A friendly Providence led me to the next thing,
further into the depths, into a greater simplicity and toward an
ingenuousness that is finer. Florence seems to me now like a
kind of prefiguration of and preparation for Moscow, and I am
thankful that I was permitted to see Fra Angelico before the beg-

gars and supplicants of the Iberian Madonna, who all create their
God with the same kneeling power, again and again, presenting
him and singling him out with their sorrow and with their joy
(little indefinite feelings), raising him in the morning with their
eyelids, and quietly releasing him in the evening when weariness
breaks the thread of their prayers like rosaries. At bottom one
seeks in everything new (country or person or thing) only an
expression that helps some personal confession to greater power
and maturity. All things are there in order that they may, in
some sense, become pictures for us. And they do not suffer from
it, for while they are expressing us more and more clearly, our
souls close over them in the same measure. And I feel in these days
that Russian things will give me the names for those most timid
devoutnesses of my nature which, since my childhood, have been
longing to enter into my art! . . .

in the old book of which you so kindly wrote me, there are
already weak attempts at it. And I believe the goal is worthy of not
growing weary in the attempt. . . .

n " 3

To Frieda von Billow Villa Waldfrieden

Schmargendorf bei Berlin
September 14, 1899

Neither from you nor from our dear house, nor from Troll,
the black, have I really and truly taken leave: read this letter,
therefore, as audibly as possible.

My leave-taking is a great and warm gratitude for everything
in that homelike house in which so much that was joyous and in-
dustrious happened to me; in which I was physically so peaceful
and lived full of a new health and won a new courage through
definite study. The Bibersbcrg days will be for me the expres-
sion for a past that will long influence all the happenings and in-
cidents and successes of my day and that will endure in my feeling
more and more richly (not through reflection) but because of its
having been.

3?

The high park, the quiet, listening house in the midst of its
broad rustlings, the gentle lamp-lit evenings in the living room
all of that willingly unites with my dearest thoughts. I still
recall the first evening when the high, red lilies were so vigilant
before the Gothic door, and the park grew so deep with the
night, and the cellar lay there distant and uncertain like an en-
trance into something new, visible only in premonition; and I
remember with pleasure how much like a guest of a hundred se-
crets I felt then, and I rejoice that the feeling of the first evening
somehow always hung over the known things, so that even now
I must lay my gratitude before many closed doors.

But in any case to you, the finder and discoverer of that house,
I am thankful for many things. Had we come to your house as
brief visitors for idleness and enjoyment, you would have re-
ceived more visible signs of our gratitude. But since we came as
fellow inhabitants, occupied with a life of our own, with the pur-
pose of completing (as we actually did) something very definite
in that country summer, we accepted the good in simple, quiet
enjoyment which also means a form of thanks (the best per-
haps!).

Anyway you will be moving down to Meiningen soon now; the
weather makes the park sad and the otherwise so sunny house
seem strange: but then go with a good feeling for the things that
were really dear and common to us in many a deep sense. You will
have time to take your leave; we were prevented from doing that
by the sudden necessity of returning home. Greet, therefore, in
our name too all the rooms and the Bibersberg sun that goes down
behind the great hall! . . .

C "3

To Sofia Nikolaevna Schill Villa Waldfrieden

Schmargendorf bei Berlin
March 5, 1900

. . . The translation of the Chaika is finished. I have enjoyed
working on it and learned a great deal in the process. A week ago

34

Sunday I read the play aloud at Frau Lou's, and now for the first
time I can look at it clearly and cannot help seeing that its per-
formance here is not without danger, for many characters are
brought right to the verge of exaggeration, and it is quite possible
that the public here would take them for caricatures, although
they are intended and felt seriously. It is also striking that the
three acts with the long conversations contain scarcely any
progress and that during the course of them the characters in-
volved are lightly sketched in the style of a comedy, in weak sug-
gestive contours, until in the last act the stirring action appears
as the closing catastrophe of events in the storms of which persons
other than those of whom we know something from the first
three acts must have stood. If one takes the characters in the sense
of the first act, namely as comedy, they are incapable of setting
foot in the fourth act; on the other hand, I scarcely believe one
will be able to come through the hesitant scenes of that first part
with a serious conception.

I am saying all this because it seems to me important that we
should introduce Chekhov in the theater with a sure success for
which Uncle Vanya (so far as I know its content) is perhaps
more suited. . . .

. . . Russian people seem to live fragments of endlessly long
and powerful life-spans, and even if they linger in them only a
moment, there still lie over these minutes the dimensions of gi-
gantic intentions and unhurried developments. . . . And just
that it is which out of all their lives affects us as so eternal and
of the future. . . .

n *3i

To Sofia Nikolaevna Schill Villa Waldfrieden

Schmargendorf bei Berlin
March 16, 1900

... I simply cannot tell you how much I look forward to see-
ing Russian pictures, wandering through the Tretiakov Gallery,
and catching up on everything I had to lose a year ago because
of haste and strangeness.

, 35

That is all so sympathetic and familiar to me, and awakens in
me as things never have before good feelings of home. Also
you must not think that the Chaika has become distasteful to me
or that I have regretted having taken pains with it. I am convinced
that the impression you describe would be very similar to mine,
had I had a chance to see the play at the Moscow theater. There
it certainly had a strong effect, and all its merits were in any case
brought out by an understanding interpretation, in such a way
that its defects had no room to make themselves apparent. I en-
tirely agree with you that Chekhov is in every case a modern
artist when he has the intention of portraying in artistic form
the tragedies of the commonplace with their banal breadth, be-
hind which the great catastrophes develop. To our dramatic
artists too it is quite clear that all catastrophes have a relatively
smaller effect amid great events and highly emotional people,
while they tower terribly high above the commonplace and col-
lapse over it with endless din.

But if it is necessary to portray everyday life on the stage
with all its trivialities and conventional gestures, empty words,
tedious give-and-take and the stale falsities of daily intercourse,
all these manifestations on the stage must be differentiated by the
tempo of their development from the actual examples from which
they are copied. Just consider: everyday living as it really hap-
pens counts on one life and gives itself time, everyday living
on the stage must be completed in one evening. All the proportions
must be shifted accordingly. The scenes on the stage may under
no circumstances be as long as the scenes in reality which are
their prototypes, and the public ought not to receive from the
stage the feeling of this reality, since this reality is, after all,
accessible to everyone anyhow. The sensation of tedium, for ex-
ample, is evoked not by scenes which are actually tedious, but
only by those highly interesting moments in which the charac-
teristics of tedium occur in a condensed form: through these
then is conveyed to the spectator not the feeling of tedium well
known to him but a superlative of this feeling which excites and
surprises him. And similarly with all portrayed emotions. As also,

36

for example, from a picture, ugliness may not be experienced by
the beholder as ugliness, but rather as the new expression, wrung
from beauty, for an indecisiveness of form, for a necessary transi-
tion to another possibility of beauty as yet unexperienced by us.
Before the portrait of an ugly man, we ought to have only the
impression that his features were unfinished, on their way to a
new unity which we can sense through the disorder of his face.
And as the artist, through his absorption in the details of this
face, experienced nothing of its ugliness, so the ordered relation-
ship of this detail must transfigure the whole in such a way that
the beholder takes it in with satisfaction and no thought of ugli-
ness. Artist and beholder behave toward each other in this case
like two children who tell each other in whispers about an event
grownups think is sinful. They tell about it, and it is beautiful and
pure: between them is no knowledge of sin. And that is what I
have against Chekhov's first three acts, that he gives the everyday
.at the tempo of the everyday, without artistic recasting, without
force. The artist who succeeds in showing us the tones of long,
empty days all in one hour on the stage will evoke in us the suffer-
ing of a dreary eternity, while the chance section of the every-
day simply transferred to the stage has merely the effect of the
original tedious and unpleasant. A great deal may be said about
it, since this tempo of events is of great importance in every art.
What makes Resurrection, for example, so wonderful is that in
an.hour on the march or in prison, we review the outline of many
days, and involuntarily through the nature of the events men-
tioned (superfluous ones are never enumerated) feel that we are
experiencing centuries of human development. Moreover,
Resurrection is a very significant book, full of artistic values; and
when one reflects that it did not arise from his putting to use this
great art of his, but progresses in a constant battle against it, then
one can measure the superhuman power of this artistic force
which, despite all resistance on the part of the aged Tolstoy, still
so wonderfully controls individual parts of the work. We have
just come to know it from the only complete German (but alas,

37

very bad) translation. I shall order the complete London edition
(Russian) for you and bring it to you with great pleasure. . . .

[ '4 3

To Lou Andreas-Salome St. Petersburg, 1900

Saturday morning

I have your letter, your dear letter that does me good with every
word, that touches me as with a wave, so strong and surging, that
surrounds me as with gardens and builds up heavens about me,
that makes me able and happy to say to you what struggled
stupidly with my last difficult letter: that I long for you and
that it was namelessly dismaying to live these days without any
news, after that unexpected and quick farewell and among the
almost hostile impressions of this difficult city, in which you could
not speak to me out of the distance through any thing at all. So it
came to that ugly letter of recently which could scarcely find its
way out of the isolation, out of the unaccustomed and intolerable
aloneness of my experiences and was only a hurrying, a perplex-
ity and conf usedness, something that must be alien to you in the
beauty to which your life has immediately rounded itself out
again under the new circumstances.

Now I can scarcely bear it that in the great song around you, in
which you are finding again little childrens' voices, my voice
should have been the strange, the only banal one, the voice of
the world among those holy words and stillnesses of which days
about you are woven. Wasn't it so? I fear it must have been so.
What shall I do? Can I drown out the other letter with this one? In
this one your words echo, the other is built upon your being
away, of which I learned nothing, and now that I am informed no
longer has the right to exist ... but does, doesn't it?

Will you say a word to irce? That in spite of it, everything is as
you write; that no squirrel has died of it and nothing, nothing has
darkened under it or even remained in shadow behind it.

You know, I have often told you of my squirrels that I raised

38

in Italy, as a child, and for which I bought long, long chains so
that their freedom might come to an end only in the very high
treetops. It was certainly very wrong to force oneself at all as a
power into their light lives (when they had already grown up,
that is, and no longer needed me), but it was also a little their in-
tention to go on reckoning with me too, for they often came run-
ning after me, so that at the time it seemed to me as if they wanted
a chain.

How they will miss you, the good youngsters! And will they
be mature enough to go without you into wood and world? High
up in the firs of Rongac their childhood will sometimes occur to
them, and on a branch that is still rocking from the burden of
the leap, you will be thought of. And though they are only three
little squirrels, in whose little eyes you have no room, still some-
where in them it is so big that you can be in their lives. You dear
one.

Come back soon, come back as soon as you can leave them.
Lead them out into the wood, tell them with your voice how
beautiful it is, and they will be the happiest little squirrels and the
most beautiful wood.

Yes, please, be here by Sunday! You won't believe how long
the days in Petersburg can be. And at that not much goes into
them. Life here is a continuous being underway, whereby all
destinations suffer. One walks, walks, rides, rides, and wherever
one arrives the first impression is that of one's own weariness.
To add to this, one almost always makes the longest excursions
for nothing. Nevertheless I already know this much, that we
still have a few beautiful things to see when you come. In any
case for two weeks everything I have thought has ended with:
when you come.

The moonlight night of Wednesday to Thursday I also love.
I went along the Neva quite late, by my favorite place, across
from St. Isaac's Cathedral, where the city is simplest and greatest.
There I too (and indeed quite unexpectedly) felt peaceful, happy,
and serious, as now since having your letter. I hasten to send off
these lines so that what you send me Monday (and you will surely

39

send one or two words by your brother? Only a few words, I
shall understand them all! ) is already an answer to this. Answer
to the one question: are you happy? I am, behind all that bothers
me, so fundamentally, so full of trust, so unconquerably happy.
And thank you for it. Come soon! . . .

C '*}

To Sofia Nikohevna Schill Tula

May 20, 1900

The lovely hour with you was the last little stone in the gay
mosaic of our Moscow days. Next day everything was colored by
the haste of departure, and Moscow, dear as it is to us, paled be-
fore the anticipation of the many things ahead. We had no idea
how close our dearest fulfillment was to us. On the train, we
found Professor Pasternak who was traveling to Odessa, and
when we spoke to him of our indecision as to whether we should
after all try to see Tolstoy now, he informed us that there should
be on the train a good acquaintance of the Tolstoy house, a Mr.
Bulanshe, who should be apprised of the present whereabouts of
the Count. And it was actually Mr. Bulanshe who was most kindly
willing to advise us. We decided to remain in Tula, and to go
next morning to Lasarevo, and thence by carriage to the estate
of the Obolenskys at Pirogovo where, in all likelihood, Mr. Bu-
lanshe thought, the Count must still be. Two days before, Mr,
Bulanshe had accompanied the Countess to Yasnaia, and so the
possibility was at any rate good that one of these days he might
ride to Yasnaia. Therefore Mr. Bulanshe sent a telegram to the
Countess from Serpukhov inquiring where the Count would be
on Friday. The answer was to come by telegram to our hotel in
Tula. We waited for it in vain and went on, as had been agreed,
early yesterday to Lasarevo, completely at a loss. There we found
a station employee who informed us that the Count had accom-
panied Tatiana Lvovna to the station yesterday, and had then
departed with his luggage for Koslovka. So it became a question
for us of reaching as quickly as possible (by freight train) a place

40

from which Yasnaia was accessible. We drove back to Yasinki,
hired a carriage there, and raced with breathless bells to the rim
of the hill on which stand the poor huts of Yasnaia, driven to-
gether into a village, yet without coherence, like a herd standing
about sadly on exhausted pastureland. Groups of women and
children are only sunny, red spots in the even gray covering
ground, roofs and walls like a very luxuriant kind of moss that has
been growing over everything undisturbed for centuries. Then
the hardly discernible street dips down, forever flowing past
empty places, and its gray streamer glides gently into a green
valley foamy with treetops, in which two little round towers on
the left, topped with green cupolas, mark the entrance to the
old, overgrown park in which lies hidden the simple house of
Yasnaia Poliana. Before this gate we dismount and go quietly like
pilgrims up the still woodland road, until the house emerges
gradually whiter and longer. A servant takes in our cards. And in
a while we see behind the door in the dusky front room of the
house the figure of the Count. The eldest son opens the glass door,
and we are in the vestibule facing the Count, the aged man, to
whom one always comes like a son, even when one does not want
to remain under the sway of his fatherliness. He seems to have
become smaller, more bent, whiter, and his shadowlessly clear
eyes, as though independent of his aged body, await the strangers
and deliberately scrutinize them and bless them involuntarily
with some inexpressible blessing. The Count recognizes Frau Lou
at once and greets her very cordially. He excuses himself and
promises to be with us from two o'clock on. We have reached
our goal, and, minds at ease, we remain behind in the great hall
in the son's company; with him we roam through the spacious
wild park and return after two hours to the house. There in the
front room is the Countess, busy putting away books. Reluctantly,
with surprise, and inhospitably she turns to us for a moment and
explains briefly that the Count is unwell. . . . Now it is fortu-
nate that we can say we have already seen him. That disarms
the Countess somewhat. She doesn't come in with us, however,
throws the books about in the front room, and shouts to someone

in an angry voice: We have only just moved in! ... Then
while we are waiting in the little room, a young lady arrives too,
voices are heard, violent weeping, soothing words from the old
Count who comes in to us, distraught, and excitedly asks a few
questions, and leaves us again. You can imagine, we stay behind
in the little room, in great fear of having come at the wrong
time. But after a while the Count comes in again, this time alert,
turning his entire attention upon us, encompassing us with his
great gaze. Just think, Sofia Nikolaevna, he proposes a walk
through the park. Instead of the general meal, which we had
dreaded and at most hoped for, he gives us the opportunity of
being alone with him in the beautiful countryside through which
he carrieci the heavy thoughts of his great life. He doesn't par-
ticipate in the meals, because, indisposed again for the last two
days, he takes almost nothing but cafe au lait, and so this is the
hour he can easily withdraw from the others in order to lay it in
our hands like an unexpected gift. We go slowly along the long,
thickly overgrown paths, in rich conversation which, as formerly,
receives warmth and animation from the Count. He speaks Rus-
sian, and when the wind doesn't cover up the words for me, I
understand every syllable. He has thrust his left hand under his
wool jacket in his belt, his right rests on the head of his walking
stick without leaning on it heavily, and he bends down now and
then to pick some herb, with a gesture as if he wanted to capture
a flower with the fragrance surrounding it; from his cupped
hand he drinks in the aroma, and then, as he talks, heedlessly lets
fall the empty flower into the great profusion of the wild spring,
which has become no poorer thereby. The talk passes ovei
many things. But all the words do not pass by in front of them,
along externals, they penetrate the darkness behind the things*
And the deep value of each is not its color in the light, but the
feeling that it comes out of the obscurities and mysteries out of
which we all live. And every time something not-shared became
apparent in the tone of the talk, a view opened up somewhere
on to light backgrounds of deep unity.
And so the walk was a good walk. Sometimes in the wind the

figure of the Count grew; his great beard fluttered, but the grave
face, marked by solitude, remained quiet, as though untouched
by the storm.

As soon as we had entered the house, we took leave of the
Count with a feeling of childlike thankfulness and rich with gifts
of his being. We did not want to see anyone else on that day. As
we went back on foot to Koslovka, we enjoyed and understood
the country of Tula in which wealth and poverty are side by
side, not like contrasts, but like different, very sisterly words for
one and the same life, jubilantly and carelessly fulfilling itself
in a hundred forms. . . .

n '* 3

To Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf bei Berlin

October 18, 1900

Do you remember, dear Clara Westhoff, the evening in the
little blue dining room? You told me then about those days that
piled up before your journey to Paris.

At your father's wish you had to delay your departure and try
to model his mother. Your eyes, full of presentiment, already
caught up in distances and new beauties, had to turn back and
accustom themselves to the very near face of a grave, dignified,
old lady, and every day go weary ways over furrows and wrinkles.
The quiet work subdued your hands, already outstretched, ready
for all there was to grasp. And instead of changing amid the many
great chance happenings of a foreign land, you grew, rising by
the daily work. Instead of your art, thirsty for the friendly
strangeness of new things, your human feeling and trust un-
folded in these unexpected days, your love gathered itself to-
gether and went out to meet the quiet, peaceful face that offered
itself to you, enigmatically rich, as though it were the counte-
nance of many, having neither expression, nor head, nor hands.
As though things sometimes joined together to lift a collective
face as if it were theirs and hold it before a beholder . . . and
before a creator! You see, I was so struck then by your humility:

43

suddenly your eye, which was already preparing itself for larger
dimensions, goes about willingly with little, hesitating, hearken-
ing steps over the many overgrown paths of a long dead experi-
ence and stands still by all its landmarks reverently and respect-
fully. And has forgotten the world, and has no world but a face.
I know exactly everything you said then. The figure of the old
lady who speaks rarely and reservedly, who hides her hands when
a gesture of tenderness would move them, and who only with rare
caresses builds bridges to a few people, bridges that no longer
exist when she draws back her arm and lies again like an island fan-
tastically repeated on all sides in the mirror of motionless waters.
My eyes too were already caught up in the radiance and bound
to great and deep beauties. Your home was for me, from the first
moment, more than just a kindly foreign place. Was simply home,
the first home in which I saw people living (otherwise everyone
lives abroad, but all homes stand empty . . .) . That struck me so.
I wanted at first to be a brother beside you all, and your home
is rich enough to love me too and to uphold me, and you are so
kind and take me in as a real member of the family, and initiate
me trustfully into the abundance of your work weeks and holi-
days. And I am entirely devoted to the great beauty of which I
am, after all, only an enjoyer (I did not join in the work of con-
templating this beauty) . . . : So I all but forgot it, the quiet
face of life, which waits for me and which I must shape with
humble, serving hands. I was all the time looking out beyond it
into radiance and greatness and am only now accustoming myself
again to the near and solemn sternness of the great face which
must have been shaped by me before I may receive something
more distant, new. You worked for a month; I shall perhaps have
to work for years before I may devote myself to something which
down deep is friendly, and yet is unexpected and full of surprise.
Much of the mood of those weeks of work, of which you told, is
in me. For a while now, I have felt myself to be in the presence
of the stillest hour, but only when I resolved to stay here, to
study, to make full use of all the means Berlin offers for my plans,
and merely to serve, then only did I begin to model. I still think

44

much and with longing of Worpswede, of the little house in
which there will be black evenings, day in, day out, and cold lonely
days ... of our Sundays and of unexpected hours so full of
unforgettable beauty that one can only bear them with both
hands, only behind me, my work is already growing in the
great sea of the background like a wandering wave that will soon
seize me and envelop me utterly, utterly. . . .

That is what, above all, I must let happen. You will under-
stand it, since I began with your little story and yet from the
first moment have spoken only of myself, as is justifiable in a
letter which comes to you in my stead. I myself cannot go away
from the "face/* I am arranging my whole winter to make the
most of every day, and perhaps as early as January 1901 I shall
go to Russia again. There all the features of life become clearer
and strangely simplified for me; there I can more easily work
ahead, improve, complete. . . .

I have always known that one of the events which you told me
about would be especially significant for me . . . now your No-
vember days of last winter stand almost symbolically over me.
And if I had not received this wonderfully beautiful picture out
of your memory and out of your feeling, I should not have
known 'what I am now living through, and that what I am now
living through is good.

It is good, isn't it?

I am not saying farewell to you. I feel gratefully near to you,
and it does me good not to have taken leave. . . . Leave-takings
are a burden on feeling. Distance remains stressed behind them,
acts and grows and becomes mighty beyond all that is shared,
which should be spontaneous even between those who are widely
separated.

How beautiful your letter was! It was very full of you and it
is wonderful that you write as you are. Very few can do that, and
many who only write never learn it (what a bad word "learning"
is for it!) as long as they live. And with you writing isn't even
the main thing. I could readily believe that it is. With your pen
too, you would create people.

45

Before what little figure are you sitting by your warm stove?
Before the stiffly standing child that you separated from the
cowering girl? And the boy with the tightly drawn-up knees
that I like so much, is he all finished? Whenever you write
of such things, and of everything you want to, you do me good.

I thank you so much and think of you in connection with
only nice things.

(half past one at night)

To Paula Becker Schmargendorf

October 18, 1900

Your letter . . . found me here, and it would still have done
so after two weeks and even after four weeks; for I cannot begin
the Worpswede winter about which I was so happy day after
day. Here it has become clear to me: my studies require me to
stay here in the neighborhood of the big city, t in communication
with all the helps and helpers, like one intent on a single pur-
pose, who is serving.

You know what these studies, which I have set up beside my
most personal work, mean to me; the everyday, the enduring, the
path on which I return from every flight, the life above which
one can raise oneself only when one has and rules it, the stillness
and the shore of all my waves and words. To me Russia has really
become that which your landscape means to you: home and
heaven. About you, in tangible form, stands all that is yours;
reality and warmth are about you, with clouds and winds and
waters all love of life lives toward you and surrounds you with
sympathy and ennobles the least detail of your everyday life. My
surroundings are not placed about me. Far away on distant paths I
have seen the cities in which I dwell, and the gardens that rustle
over me are many rivers away from me. Churches that stand by
the Volga and are repeated in the rolling stream in softer white and
with duller gold on their cupolas, ring out to me morning and

evening with their great standing bells, and songs that blind men
and children sing move about me like lost spirits and touch my
cheeks and my hair. Such is my landscape, dear friend. And I may
not desire to supplant these surroundings, which are like fragrance
and sound about me, by a broader reality; for I want indeed to live
and create in such a way that that which, half memory, half in-
tuition, surrounds me now, may gradually rhyme itself into
space and really encircle me, still and sure, like something that
has existed forever and for which my eyes have only just become
sufficiently strong. Do you understand that it is an infidelity if I
behave as though I had found hearth and home already fully real-
ized elsewhere? As yet I may have no little house, may not yet
dwell. Wandering and waiting is mine.

That somewhere there is a home about fine growing people,
so that one can feel and grasp it with all one's senses, that what
to me is remote and accessible only with extended senses some-
where became reality for grateful people, this it was that strongly
swayed me and so impressed me that I resolved to stay. Every
home has a warm and good influence, like every mother. Only I
must seek my mother, mustn't I? ...

It is an evening hour as I write to you. No great golden one.
One that is hemmed in on all sides by rain, and I am not yet in
my own home, which is still being fitted out, but still I have a
warm feeling, as sometimes in your beautiful twilight that is
unforgettably dear to me. We haven't taken leave, so really we
are still together whenever we meet anywhere in related thoughts
or my gratitude otherwise seeks you out among the dear figures of
my recent past. . . .

n *n

To Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf

October 23, 1900

That evening, as we sat together in the little blue dining room,
we also spoke of other things: In the cottage there would be
light, a soft, veiled lamp, and I would stand at my stove and pre-

47

pare a supper for you: a fine vegetable or cereal dish, and heavy
honey would gleam on a glass plate, and cold, ivory-pure butter
would form a gentle contrast to the gaiety of a Russian table-
cloth. Bread would have had to be there, strong, coarse-grained
bread and zwieback, and on a long narrow dish somewhat pale
Westphalian ham, streaked with bands of white fat like an eve-
ning sky with long-drawn-out clouds. Tea would stand ready for
the drinking, gold-yellow tea in glasses with silver holders, ex-
haling a delicate fragrance, that fragrance which blended with the
Hamburg rose and which would also blend with white carnations
or fresh pineapple. . . . Great lemons, cut in disks, would sink
like suns into the golden dusk of the tea, dimly shining through
it with the radiant flesh of their fruit, and its clear, glassy surface
would tremble from the sour, rising juices. Red mandarins should
be there, in which a summer is folded up very small like an Italian
silk handkerchief in a nutshell. And roses would be about us, tall
ones, nodding on their stems, and reclining ones, gently raising
their heads, and the kind that wander from hand to hand, like
girls in the figure of a dance. So I dreamed. Premature dreams;
the cottage is empty and cold, and my apartment here too is
empty and cold: God knows how it is to become habitable.
But even so I cannot believe that reality is not to achieve some
relation to what I dreamed. I sent you yesterday a little package
of a very excellent oat cereal to try. Directions on the package.
Only it is good to let it cook somewhat longer than the fifteen
minutes prescribed. Before eating put a piece of butter in it, or
take applesauce with it. I like best to eat it with butter, day in
and day out. In fifteen minutes, the whole meal is ready, that is,
boiling water must already have been made; it is put on hot then,
and cooks fifteen to twenty minutes. If you send for a patent
"all purpose" double boiler from a big household-goods store,
you hardly need to stir it; the danger of burning is very slight
then. Try it, give me a report. The big California firm has other
glorious preparations also. I will send the catalogue shortly.
For the rest, you know that I imagined an industrious day before
that richly dreamed of supper. Isn't that so?

C >9l

To Otto Modersohn Schmargendorf bei Berlin

October 23, 1900

. . . when winter comes, I shall have memories, gentler,
richer, and more splendid than ever. I feel that. As if I had costly
fabrics in chests that I cannot open because days not yet in order
stand like heavy vessels on their lids. Sometime there will be
order, and I shall raise the lids and reach through heavy scent for
the materials which it is a festival to unfold.

I do not know now what is woven into these cloths; what
destinies had to come to pass in what landscapes so that pictures
should be there for this manifoldness of threads and folds . . .
but I have the dark feeling of an age of greatness and goodness
whose days are preserved therein, interwoven and well turned
to use.

Dear Herr Modersohn, I have such a beautiful and good time
behind me, and I turn to all who came so strangely close to me
in that time, with thanks. I am not trying to say what I am
thanking for, indeed, to explain that I am saying thank you is
already too much, is something else altogether. I want to do thanks
to all of you and to your country and your art. Remember that
afternoon when you showed me the confidence of which I am
just a little proud: you showed me the little evening pages, and I
feel how from each sketch, in black and red, more than reality
grew out toward me; that being, which only the deepest art is
able to produce in deep hours, was fulfilled in these sketches be-
fore which I had the feeling that in each one, veiled by the flight
of the strokes, was everything one can experience and become in
that mood. It thrilled me so to hold those brimming little pages
in my hands, to look into their secret as into creation itself: I was
like one who steps into many darkening rooms and recognizes
that there before his slowly accustoming eyes stands everything
beautiful that he had ever thought up or remembered. So it must
be for a child that goes in a dream from room to room and in
each keeps finding its mother again, who apparently has entered

__ _ 49

everywhere a moment before it. The child has the comforting
feeling: she is preceding me, she is everywhere. There is no pic-
ture without her. So in every page there was that warm and
eternal quality, that atmosphere which is about young mothers
in the evening. That most peaceful thing in the world, that one
thing which is not chance, that moment of eternity about which
everything we think and do circles like birds about clock
towers. . . .

Then I thought: sometime I would like to have hours like these
pages. Dark and yet more than clear, with rich, not countable
things and figures around which lovely patience flows. Now I
know that I am living toward such hours, toward such poems.
Almost every day in Worpswede brought an experience for me
I often told you so: but I have only been as pious and reverent as
before your little pictures two or three other times in my life;
for it doesn't often happen that what is very great is crowded
together into a thing that one can hold all in one's hand, in one's
own powerless hand. As when one finds a little bird that is thirsty.
One takes it away from the verge of death, and its little heart beats
increasingly against the warm, trembling hand like the very last
wave of a gigantic sea whose shore you are. And you know sud-
denly, with this little creature that is recovering, life is recover-
ing from death. And you are holding it up. Generations of birds
and all the woods over which they fly and all the heavens to
which they will ascend. And is all that so easy? No: you are very
strong to carry the heaviest in such an hour. . . .

To Frieda von Billow Schmargendorf

October 24, 1900

... in order not to alienate peaceful, sober daily work, I have
given up in these autumn days a very dear plan. I had rented a
little house in Worpswede (where I was for five weeks) ... it
turned out, however, that I would really be too far away from
all the helpers and helps which my labors need (particularly the

Russian ones) and would run the danger of losing all touch with
my laboriously achieved study.

Added to that is the fact that Worpswede has too strong an
influence: its colors and people are overwhelmingly big, rich,
and capable of dominating every other mood. But although my
stay there momentarily took me away from Russian things, I
still do not regret it; I am even thinking with some homesickness
of my little deserted house and of the dear people there to whom
I must seem faithless somehow. I have lots to tell you. . . .

To Paula Becker Schmargendorf

November 5, 1900

How splendid it has become in my rooms. Just think, dear Paula
Becker, I had a copper pitcher on my desk, in it dahlias the color
of old ivory, slightly yellowing dahlias, are standing in just such
a way that it needed only the fantastic, wonderful leaves of the
cabbage stuck in with them for a miracle to happen. It has hap-
pened and is operating. On the bench built onto the book-
case a tall slender glass with a few branches of dog rose had been
set, and there the heavy umbels of the mountain-ash berries
worked in, and fir branches harmonized with the big yellow and
gold leaves, those great chestnut leaves that are like outspread
hands of autumn wanting to grasp sunrays. But now, when sun-
rays no longer walk but have wings, no chestnut leaf catches a
sunray. Everything in my place (I mean to say with this enu-
meration) was prepared to receive the autumn with which you
surprised and presented me. For every bit of your rich autumn
a place was already destined, predestined by Providence. For the
chestnut chain too. Only here it doesn't always hang on the wall,
but I get it sometimes and let it slide through my fingers like a
rosary (you know those Catholic prayer-chains, don't you?). At
every bead of those rosaries one must repeat a certain prayer; I
imitate this pious rule by thinking at every chestnut of something

nice that has to do with you and Clara Westhoff. Only then it
turns out there are too few chestnuts.

These first November days are always Catholic days for me.
The second day of November is All Souls' Day which, until my
sixteenth or seventeenth year, wherever I may have been living,
I always spent in graveyards, by unknown graves often and
often by the graves of relatives and ancestors, by graves which
I couldn't explain and upon which I had to meditate in the grow-
ing winter nights. It was probably then that the thought first
came to me that every hour we live is an hour of death for some-
one, and that there are probably even more hours of death than
hours of the living. Death has a dial with infinitely many figures.
. . . Fof years now I have visited no more graves on All Souls'.
These days it is my custom to drive out only to Heinrich von
Kleist in Wannsee. Late in November he died out there; at a
time when many shots are falling in the empty wood, there fell
also the two fateful shots from his weapon. They were hardly
distinguished from the others, perhaps they were somewhat more
violent, shorter, more breathless. . . . But in the oppressive air,
noises all become alike and are dulled by the many soft leaves
that are sinking everywhere.

But I see this is no letter for you and not really one for me
either. I am full of longing, my friend. Farewell!

To Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf

Sunday, November 18, 1900

... I am not ashamed that, as already once before, it is your
pictures, your words almost, with which I am trying to express
myself, as if I wanted to present you with your own possessions.
But so it is, Clara Westhoff, we receive many of our riches only
when they come to meet us borne by the voice of another; and
had this winter become as I dreamed it, my daily duty would have
been to lade my speeches with your possessions and to send my

sentences to you, like heavy, swaying caravans, to fill all the
rooms of your soul with the beauties and treasures of your un-
opened mines and treasure chambers.

Do you remember . . . (doesn't that appear in each of my
letters?), do you remember that you spoke of how eagerly you
experienced that period when for the first time autumn and
winter were to meet you not in the city, but among the trees
whose happiness you knew, whose spring and summer rang in
your earliest memories and were mingled with everything warm
and dear and tender and with the infinitely blissful melancholies
of summer evenings and of long, yearning nights of spring. You
knew just as much of them as of the dear people in your sur-
roundings, among whom also summer and spring, kindness and
happiness were dedicated to you and whose influence held
sway above your growing up and maturing, and whose other ex-
periences would touch you only by report and rarely like a shot
in the wood of which superstitious folk tell for a long time. But
now you were to remain out in the country house that was grow-
ing lonely and were to see the beloved trees suffer in the rising
wind, and were to see how the dense park is torn apart before
the windows and becomes spacious and everywhere, even in very
deep places, discloses the sky which, with infinite weariness, lets
itself rain and strikes with heavy drops on the aging leaves that
are dying in touching humility. And you were to see suffering
where until now was only rapture and anticipation, and were to
learn to endure dying in the very place where the heart of life
had beaten most loudly upon yours. And you were to behave
like the grownups who all at once may know everything, yes,
who become grown up just because of the fact that even the dark-
est and saddest things do not have to be hidden from them, that
one does not cover up the dead when they enter, nor hide those
whose faces are sawed and torn by a sharp pain. And you, Clara
Westhoff , how simply and well you endured, lived through the
experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence!
So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying,
and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in

53

all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that
all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under
which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as
the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar
transfiguration of its half -released little face, so without concern
you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust
in eternity.

Dear Clara Westhoff, if autumnal things or wintry come in
your life, or a dread like that which ushers in springs: be corn-
forced: it will be like that time in Oberneuland. You will only
receive new beauties, the beauties of pain and of greatness, and
you will enter more richly into the summer days which sound
their hymns once more behind all troubled heavens. Bless you!
Amen. . . .

1*3 3

To Paula Becker Schmargendorf

Night, (De . . .) January 24, 1901

Twenty-fourth of December I was about to write up there!
That is how I feel, just like that. Now I need not go on wooing
words and pictures for what I wanted to tell you right away, my
dear friend: I have had a present, and you were wrong when you
wrote that at the time you were sending flowers to Worpswede
you wanted to send me something too although, as you said,
only something borrowed. But nevertheless in reading your
journals I couldn't help taking from the shells of your words a
great deal that I cannot return. It is like strings of pearls breaking.
The pearls weren't counted, and although one thinks one has
found them all again, in the most secret corners some remain
that have rolled away, a silent, if you will illegitimate treasure
of the room in which the string broke. I am room and culprit
alike. Seeker of all pearls that were scattered through my im-
patient seizing of the beautiful ornament, finder and uncon-
scious concealer of those that were not recovered. What to do?
Admit it and beg for mercy. Am I doing it? Well, I promise that

54

any part of your jewel garland I happen to find here, I shall give
back, set in the hour in which the discovering light makes the
rolled-away pearl smile. Set in the joy of the finding. That is
how it really was in Worpswede too. It seems to be a way of
mine, to hide pearls and sometime in a good hour to forge a beau-
tiful ornament in which I can secretly bring back the hidden one,
lost in the procession of richly clad words that accompany the
homecomer with a thousand triumphs. I feel Christmassy. From
all the light too that I have looked at. For in the end all the anx-
ieties of this book are only like those final anxious moments be-
fore the doors open to the decorated and gift-filled room which
the strong radiant tree makes bigger, deeper, and more festive
than one knows it. And always on the next page the doors are open
into a Christmas or into a landscape, into something simple, dear,
big that one may trust. Even in Paris that is so. And that isn't just
temperament. You have made that out of yourself, or the things
into whose hands you have put yourself with such quiet and rev-
erent patience have helped you to it. Life has helped you to life, to
your life. That that, your life, is something apart, something that
stands in roots of its own and has its fragrance and its blossom
that I did know (and I feel as if I had known it a long time al-
ready) . But now I know more than the one spring in which I see
you; I know of the earlier springs and of the winters in which they
were prepared. I see better into the past. Into your childhood that
is still like yesterday, or again like yesterday. Your glad and joyous
colors repeat themselves in the later pages, applied to the new
things and possessions that come to you, as the light of the sun
repeats itself over every new little child that was born in the
night. I couldn't help thinking again (as so often and on vari-
ous occasions) of the Worpswede evenings, when such a glad
and grateful feeling awoke in me through the certainty with
which you loved life, took delight in it, and greeted it, without
becoming confused by it; now I have felt intuitively the rising
shaft of that certainty with whose quiet, eye-dark blossom I was
acquainted, and know how gently and slowly, imperiled rather
than protected by you (Maria Bashkirtseff!), it has grown in

55

lovely slenderness, brought up by winds that wished it well.
"Life": Often, on the margin of your simply animated verse-
pictures and rhythmic consolations, this word stands, alone, as a
slender figure stands against the sky, against which you under-
stand and love things. It speaks to you, it means to you the
reality toward which all fairy tales (may their effect be never so
rich and fantastic) really do yearn, as toward the something
higher, toward the greater miracle that still surpasses them, be-
cause it happens so simply and in such variety and to human be-
ings! What a growth from the fairy tale at the end of the first
book to the reality of the second. And within this reality: how
much motion, will, warmth, longing and take it in your own
sense how much reverence! It is as in my Stories of God. God
appears everywhere; I found him in it, and children would find
him too!

And to you, the artist, I also came. Here a regret comes to me:
in Worpswede I was always at your house in the evening, and
then here and there in the conversation I did see a sketch (a canal
with a bridge and sky still stands clearly before my memory),
until words came from you that I also wanted to see, so that I
forbade my glances the walls and followed your words and saw
the vibrations of your silence that seemed to gather about Dante's
brow above the lily, in its concentrated fragrance, when twi-
light was falling. So I saw almost nothing of yours; for you your-
self never showed me anything, and I didn't want to ask you to
because such things must come from an inner necessity, inde-
pendent of asking and being asked. And I did think that I would
be in Worpswede for a long time, long enough to wait for the
hour in which this suppressed wish (for that matter I did express
it softly two or three times in the beginning) would be fulfilled.
Now I suddenly lack much, and who knows whether later in
life I shall not ask for many things for fear of their passing me
by without having spoken to me? Lucidly I remember quite ac-
curately the ring of girls about the big tree. Even before the
color. But already completely finished as to movement. I can
recall almost every figure (as movement) in this garland of

56

girls which, lightly wound, came out of the hands of joy into
those of the wind and now draws flickering circles about the big
quiet trunk. And with this single memory I don't seem poor
to myself; it is wonderful and good to think that my eyes, un-
consciously almost, drank in this picture once while you were
getting tea ready, and that it was perhaps at work in me when
we spoke later of something dear and of life.

You haven't lost your "first twenty years," dear and serious
friend. You have lost nothing that you could ever miss. You didn't
let yourself be bewildered by the eyes in the veils of the Schlach-
tensee that look out of the space which is not water and not sky.
You went home and created. Only a great deal later will you
feel how much. In your art you will feel it. And someone is going
to feel it in your life, the person who receives and enlarges it and
will lift it into new and broader harmonies with his ripe, rich,
understanding hands.

Such was my evening tonight. So it ends as though in prayer.
I thank you for it, today and always.

Midnight

To Emanuel von Bodman Westerwede bei Bremen

August 17, 1901

I thank you for your letter and for the verses, those marks of
affectionate and genuine confidence. I can indeed appreciate your
being able to write to me out of such serious days, and you will
not feel it importunate if from this I assume the right to impart
to you something of my own thought about struggles of this
kind.

In a case like this, the thing is (in my own opinion) to draw
back upon oneself, and not to strive after any other being, not
to relate the suffering, occasioned by both, to the cause of the
suffering (which lies so far outside) but to make it fruitful for
oneself. If you transfer what goes on in your emotion into soli-

57

tude and do not bring your vacillating and tremulous feeling into
the dangerous proximity of magnetic forces, it will, through its
inherent flexibility, assume of its own accord the position that
is natural and necessary to it. In any case, it helps to remind one-
self very often that over everything that exists there are laws
which never fail to operate, which come rushing, rather, to mani-
fest and prove themseves upon every stone and upon every
feather we let fall.

So all erring consists simply in the failure to recognize the natural
laws to which we are subject in the given instance, and every
solution begins with our alertness and concentration, which gently
draw us into the chain of events and restore to our will its balanc-
ing counterweights.

For the rest, I am of the opinion that "marriage" as such does
not deserve as much emphasis as it has acquired through the con-
ventional development of its nature. It does not occur to anyone
to expect a single person to be "happy," but if he marries, peo-
ple are much surprised if he isn't! (And for that matter it really
isn't at all important to be happy, whether single or married.)
Marriage is, in many respects, a simplification of one's way of
life, and the union naturally combines the forces and wills of two
young people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into
the future than before. Only, those are sensations by which one
cannot live. Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seri-
ousness, a new challenge to and questioning of the strength and
generosity of each partner and a great new danger for both.

It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a
quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all
boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each ap-
points the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this
confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness
between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, never-
theless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which
robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and de-
velopment. But, once the realization is accepted that even be-
tween the closest human beings infinite distances continue to

58 _

exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed
in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for
each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

Therefore this too must be the standard for rejection or choice:
whether one is willing to stand guard over the solitude of a per-
son and whether one is inclined to set this same person at the
gate of one's own solitude, of which he learns only through that
which steps, festively clothed, out of the great darkness.

This is my opinion and my law. And, if it is possible, let me soon
again hear good and courageous things from you.

To Helmuth Westhoff [Westerwede

November 12, 1901]

You wrote me a very fine letter and thought of me so kindly,
although I still hadn't sent you the poem about the "Peacock-
feather" I promised you long ago; but see, now I will go right
away and copy it neatly out of the book in which it is printed.
I composed this little poem several (it must have been at least
five) , several years ago in the city of Munich where in October
there is something like your free market. A whole field of booths.
And while the other people went about laughing and teasing
each other and trying to touch and tickle each other with the
long peacockfeathers (which amused them very much), I went
about alone with my peacockf eather which was much too proud
to tickle anybody, and the longer I carried it about with me thus,
the more the slenderness of its form engaged me as it balanced on
its elastic shaft, and the beauty of its head from which the "pea-
cock eye" looked out at me dark and mysterious. It was as though
I were seeing such a feather for the very first time, and it seemed
to me to hold a whole wealth of beauties that no one was notic-
ing but I. And out of this feeling came the little poem that I dedi-
cated at that time to a dear friend, a painter, who I knew loved
peacockfeathers too. You can imagine what a peacockfeather
means to a painter, who has a different, far more intimate rela-

59

tionship with colors than we have, how much he can learn from
it and how much the harmony in the variety, and the multitude
of colors all together there on such a little spot, can give him.

But do you know what the principal thing was for me, dear
Helmuth: that I saw once again that most people hold things in
their hands to do something stupid with them (as, for example,
tickling each other with peacockf eathers) , instead of looking
carefully at each thing and asking each about the beauty it pos-
sesses. So it comes to pass that most people don't know at all how
beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the
smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a
birch leaf. Grown-up people, who have business and cares and
worry about a lot of trifles, gradually lose their eye entirely for
these riches which children, when they are alert and good chil-
dren, soon notice and love with all their hearts. And yet the
finest thing would be if all people would always stay in this rela-
tionship like alert and good children, with simple and reverent
feelings, and if they would not lose the power to rejoice as deeply
in a birch leaf or in the feather of a peacock or the pinion of a
hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a splendid palace.
The small is as little small as the big is big. There is a great and
eternal beauty throughout the world, and it is scattered justly
over the small things and the big; for in the important and essen-
tial there is no injustice on the whole earth.

This, dear Helmuth, all hangs together somewhat with the
poem of the peacockfeather in which I could only express badly
what I meant. I was still very young then. But now I know it
better every year and can tell people better all the time that
there is a great deal of beauty in the world almost nothing but
beauty.

That you know as well as I, dear Helmuth. And now,
thank you again, dear Helmuth. It doesn't matter that to-
day isn't my birthday but only my name day, which you
really don't celebrate at all. With us in Austria that is a festive
day. There everyone has a saint whose name has been given to
him, and on the day that is dedicated to that saint, he receives

6o

for him, wishes and words and gifts which he may keep for
himself, and doesn't have to pass on to the saint. It is quite a
beautiful and sympathetic custom.

Yes, it is too bad you aren't with us, with Friedrich and your
parents, for then I would be able to talk to you and tell you
something nice, and what is more, I could offer you the cake
I g t a very beautiful cake , which without help the two of
us alone can finish up only with great difficulty.

I gave our black dog your greeting. Then he stood up, settled
himself on his hind legs, laid his front paws on my shoulders and
tried to give me a big, black kiss which I naturally don't allow.

He is strong and has a voice that rings out fearfully if one
hasn't a good conscience. But we always have one.

Clara sends you many affectionate greetings, but above all,
dear Helmuth, greetings, and thanks from

Your faithful

Rainer

Peacockfeather
[from the book Advent]

Matchless in your delicacy,
how I loved you even as a child.
I held you for a lovetoken
which by silver-silent pools
elves in cool night hand each other
when children all are sleeping.

And because good little Granny

often read to me of wishing-wands,

so it was I dreamt: frail spirit,

in your delicate fibers flows

the cunning power of the enchanted rod

and sought you in the summer grass. , . .

6i

To Gustav Pauli Westerwede bei Bremen

January 8, 1902

... In the middle of 1902, through family circumstances, I
shall lose an allowance from home which is not large but on
which we have lived remarkably well and are living (under vari-
ous difficulties). What will happen then, I don't know. For
weeks I haven't had a single moment of peace under the pressure
of this colossal new fear. At first I kept hoping I could take on
something that would enable me to remain out here with my dear
ones in the quiet home we have scarcely established, of whose
quiet I am not to be able to take full advantage for my work.
The interest of a publisher who made possible for me a year of
quiet work would have sufficed to offer me the opportunity for
that progress which I know I could now make if my powers
might remain concentrated and my senses within the quiet world
that has been rounded out in such a wonderfully beautiful way
by the dear child. For me, marriage, which from the ordinary
point of view was an act of great foolishness, was a necessity. My
world, which has so little connection with mundane existence,
was, in my bachelor room, abandoned to every wind, unpro-
tected, and needed for its development this quiet house of its own
under the wide skies of solitude. Also I read in Michelet that life
for two is simpler and cheaper than the life open to betrayal on
all sides, the exploited existence of the single person and I gladly
believed the belief of that dear child Michelet. . . .

It is an extremely cruel fate that now, when I am surrounded
by all the conditions that were as desirable and necessary to my
art as bread, I must probably leave everything in midstream
(for what other way out remains!), to go away from all that is
dear to all that is alien. I am trying daily to accustom myself
to the thought of the approaching departure by taking it every
evening in stronger and stronger doses. But where am I to go?
Of what work am I capable? Where can I be used and so used
that that which, in the end, remains and must remain my life, my

62

task, even my duty, is not destroyed! My father, in his remote
generosity, wants to procure for me the post of an official at a
bank in Prague, but that means giving up everything, making
an end, renouncing, returning to the conditions from the prox-
imity of which I fled even as a child. From the spiritual point of
view alone, that is a sort of resignation, a frost, in which every-
thing would have to die. This my good father, who was always
an official, does not sense, and thinks anyway that beside an art
like mine there is room for any occupation. If it were a ques-
tion of a painter, he would understand that such a position would
mean the ruin of his art, my activity I could still pursue satis-
factorily (so he thinks) in a few evening hours. And moreover,
I especially, who haven't too much strength at my disposal, must
live out of a unified and collected state and avoid every hin-
drance and division which diverts the resultant in the parallelo-
gram of forces from its direction, if I want to reach my
objectives (so unexplainable to others, even to my dear father).
And that I want that, and that I want it although the objectives
are great, is not arrogance and worldly vanity which I am choos-
ing for myself; it is imposed on me like a task, like a mission
and in everything in which I succeed, I am, more than anyone, the
willing and humble executor of lofty commands, whose device
in his finest hours, may read, "I serve.'' And finally it would, after
all, be irresponsible, at the moment when the necessity of earn-
ing my own living presents itself close at hand and energetically,
to forsake the path which, obeying urges and longings of my
own, I have trod since boyhood, and to leave lying on the old
building site the hewn building stones of a life which bear only
the traces of my chisel, in order, with no heart for the work,
to help build with manufactured bricks, in the pay of a little
man, someone else's house next door, to which I am indifferent.

Wouldn't that mean jumping out of my own skiff, which will
perhaps touch on my own shore after a few strong strokes of the
oar (if I may be permitted to give them), and continuing on a
big steamer, lost among hundreds of people, to a common place,

as indifferent and banal as a coffeehouse garden on Sunday after-
noon?

I would rather starve with my family than take this step, which
is like a death without the grandeur of death.

Isn't it much more to the point to draw practical results from
what I have already done, to make out of a poetic art a literary
art-craft which would support its follower? This literary art-
craft could be journalism, but isn't. The roads to it are closed, or
at least made very difficult for me by my own disinclination. But
there must be other points at which my honest powers could get
started; to be sure, I am the last to find these points I don't even
know whom I could ask about such points. . . .

If nothing presents itself anywhere (a collaboration of a regu-
lar kind or something of the sort) I shall probably have to leave
Westerwede in the course of this year, and I wonder if in Bremen,
where as a stranger I have found such a land and trusting recep-
tion, there wouldn't be some position in which I could prove
myself useful. Doesn't the enlarging of the Art Museum neces-
sitate any filling out of the personnel, or isn't there some other
collection or an institution in which I could work? I haven't got
my doctorate, and now there isn't any money to go on studying;
I think that title (which I have gladly avoided like all titles)
couldn't help me anyway at this moment! If I succeeded in giving
a series of lectures yearly, and if my wife were to take over the
school, perhaps it would then be possible to survive the first,
most difficult years, as each could live on his own earnings. With
the inexpensive requirements of our farmhouse, and the trifling
needs we both have, an income of about 2 50 marks monthly would
suffice us together, so that each would have to earn about 125
marks.

Shouldn't that be possible somehow? ,

If, without disturbing our own work, we could last out a year
in this way, I am convinced that that work would have grown
strong enough during this year to take us on its shoulders and
carry us along. But if you think this cannot be managed by

6*

any means, may I beg of you to give me, for some city in which
you have connections, be it Munich or Dresden or another, some
advice or a good word which I can use when the time comes?

Forgive me for writing this presumptuous letter. Since the fall,
all my days and nights have been a continual, anxious battle with
the morrow, and in the face of your generosity it seems to me
dishonest to hide from you a situation which everyone really
should know who wishes me well. And I know that you do, my
dear doctor.

Should my disclosures be a burden to you, take no further no-
tice of them, without therefore changing your friendly attitude
toward me; I know that it is inconsiderate to take someone into
one's confidence so forcibly at the eleventh hour, but I am at the
point where I think that for once I may be inconsiderate of peo-
ple I trust: as when one's clothes are burning, or someone is
dying, one would certainly awaken a friend whose sleep one
would otherwise never have dared to disturb. . . .

C'73

To Paula Modersohn-Becker Bremen

February 12, 1902

Permit me to say a few words about your letter to my dear
wife: it concerns me very closely as you know, and if I were
not in Bremen, I would seek an opportunity to discuss the mat-
ter with you in person, the . . . indeed, what matter? Will you
believe me that it is hard for me to understand what you are ac-
tually talking about? Nothing has happened really or rather:
much that is good has happened, and the misunderstanding is
based on the fact that you do not want to grant what has hap-
pened. Everything is supposed to be as it was, and yet every-
thing is different from what it has been. If your love for Clara
Westhoff wants to do something now, then its work and task is
this: to catch up with what it has missed. For it has failed to see
whither this person has gone, it has failed to accompany her in
her broadest development, it has failed to spread itself out over

65

the new distances this person embraces, and it hasn't ceasdd look-
ing for her at a certain point in her growth, it wants obstinately
to hold fast to a definite beauty beyond which she has passed,
instead of persevering, confident of new shared beauties to come.
The confidence you proved to me, dear friend, when you
vouchsafed me a little glance into the pages of your journal, en-
titles me (as I believe) to remind you how strange and distant
and incomparable Clara Westhoff 's nature seemed to you in the
beginning, how surrounded by a solitude whose doors you didn't
know. . . . And this first important impression you have been
able so far to forget as to accompany only with blame and warn-
ing the entering of this person, whom you began to love because
of her differentness and solitude, into a new solitude, the rea-
sons for which you are even better able to examine than the
reasons for that first seclusion, which you certainly didn't regard
with reproach then, but rather with a certain admiring recogni-
tion. If your love has remained vigilant, then it must have seen
that the experiences which came to Clara Westhoff derived their
worth from the very fact that they were tightly and indissolubly
bound up with the inner being of the house in which the future
is to find us: we had to burn all the wood on our own hearth in
order to warm up our house for the first time and make it livable,
Do I have to tell you that we had cares, heavy and anxious cares r
which might not be carried outside any more than the few hours
of deep happiness? . . . Does it surprise you that the centers
of gravity have shifted, and is your love and friendship so dis-
trustful that it wants constantly to see and grasp what it possesses?
You will continually have to experience disappointments if you
expect to find the old relationship; but why don't you rejoice
in the new one that will begin when someday the gates of Clara
Westhoff's new solitude are opened to receive you? I too am
standing quietly and full of deep trust before the gates of this soli-
tude, because I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between
two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of
the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the
crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are

66

there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity
for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which
rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation. . . . Think of
the time when you came to know Clara Westhoff : then your
love waited patiently for an opening gate, the same love which
now raps impatiently on the walls behind which things are be-
ing accomplished of which we have no cognizance, of which
I know just as little as you, only that I have faith that they will
touch me deeply and closely when they reveal themselves to me
someday. And cannot your love grasp a similar faith? Out of
this faith alone will joys come to it by which it will live with-
out starving.

To Countess Frantiska ReventhlV Westerwede bei Worpswede

April ii, 1902

I haven't written you, my very dear friend, for such an end-
lessly long time; there were so many external living worries,
earning, earning, earning, and that isn't at all easy from Wester-
wede. I had to write and do a lot of things in order to help my
outward circumstances, and since they have not been basically
helped yet, I shall have to write and do much more still, if it
does any good anyway. . . . But things are going well with
my family, and little Ruth is growing wonderfully well, already
has quite incredibly serious and thoughtful hours which alter-
nate harmoniously with very happy and few crying ones. My
wife is growing with her, rejoicing in the charming example of
the dear little creature! And so my house is standing upright
as never before in the spring that wants to come, . . . And if it
weren't for those daily worries. . . .

6j

To Oskar Zivintscher Westerwede

April 24, 1902:

. . . Yes, it has become spring, and this time, since we see a
little garden coming up under our hands, we feel in some near
degree related to it. Tulips and narcissus, beside a big peony, are
already growing, two little arbors are already hung with the
twigs of young birches as with green lace veils, and a few tall-
stemmed roses are already sprouting, something one can't forget
at all and feels as a most delightful promise.

On the neighbors' roof a stork appeared recently and the minute
investigation of the roof in which he was engaged permits the
hope that he is thinking of settling there: that naturally would be
a great joy.

Very beautiful is the spring here in its coming. In the morn-
ing the day is released from thousands of bird voices, and the
evenings deepen at the beginning of the first sound of the
nightingale, which makes the stillness stiller and more full of
portent. And the moonlight nights are unusually bright, and if
they darken, a rain begins to fall; tender, soft, and warm, idle
like a dream and yet full of veiled happening. . . .

To Clara Rilke Schloss Haseldorf in Holsteii*

June 5, 1902

Dearest and best, I thank you for your big letter. I can imagine
that the day of travel was difficult and oppressive and the night
in the Amsterdam hotel not pleasant; on that day, Hamburg
(where I had indeed about two hours) didn't appeal to me at all
either; it was as hot and airless as any inland city. . . . And my
first night in Haseldorf was no less sultry than yours at the Van
Gelder. And since then, there have been a lot of such days,
burning, breathless days that sometimes dissolved only toward
evening in the slowly darkening air. Today (for the first time)

there is a cloudy sky and some rain. The park is beautiful. It is
especially entrancing to stand at one of the tall windows of the
dining hall. There one sees the high stretches of lawn that are
growing wild and are already so high that a few rosebushes almost
disappear in the green billows. In these meadows stand two in-
finitely beautiful blossoming trees, resembling apple trees. They
call them Crataegus (thornless Crataegus) ; I don't know what that
is, but anyway it won't be unfamiliar to you. Otherwise, when
I walk in the garden, I always enjoy recognizing one or another
of the flowers or a bush which you have named for me. The
loveliest are the paths along the castle moat. There the old chest-
nuts now stand, built up like mountains, with their branches all
the way down to the earth and with a whole world of shadows
under the thousand hands of their leaves. They are blossoming
now. And it is quite wonderful the way those blossom-cones rise
up at rhythmic intervals to the highest branches. By day that is
all rather too green, but recently, in the evening about ten-thirty
(it was still twilight), these old trees were like dark mantles with
embroidered, regularly recurring patterns. The white of the
blossoms became wonderfully mysterious and sometimes one of
the blossom-pyramids had the appearance of raised, clasped hands
coming out of a dark cloak. Unfortunately the murky, sluggish
moat gave back no reflection of these wonderful trees. Lilacs and
rhododendrons also grow at a similar height on ancient bushes
that suddenly display rich blooms somewhere high up in the tree-
crowns. Flesh-colored azaleas stretch out their fragrance, and
the magnolias already have leaves beside the great water-lily-like
blossoms. Today I also discovered a tall tree covered with broad
cool green leaves and strange silver-gray closed buds that were
very dignified. I take it to be a nut tree . . . but I am not very
often in this garden, because the heat makes it heavy and being
shut in by the dike evokes a kind of close sadness. Also, there are
so many black, houseless wood snails on the paths that one goes
about in continual fear of crushing one.

I am a great deal in my room where it is warmest and pleasantest
and where I feel tolerably alone. . . . Now I go over some-

times into the archives, rummage in old books and read a few
lines here and there: whether I shall find something I can use is
questionable. The letters I had in mind are so impossible to glance
through that one would have to read for a year to get any in-
sight into them, and in addition the difficult old script, the bad
air, and the dust in the archives are no encouragement to it. So
in this connection too I must confine myself to what is already
printed; I am browsing in the histories of the von Ahlefeldt and
von Oppen-Schilden families who formerly resided at Haseldorf,
and it is not impossible that I will run into some interesting biog-
raphy there, although I lack talent and practice as a discoverer of
good book passages. What interests me very much meanwhile is
looking through old editions just for the sake of their type and
their frontispieces, rummaging through old portfolios with en-
gravings from the end of the eighteenth century and smiling a lit-
tle at the long, almost inquisitive profiles of deceased chamber-
lains and knights of the Danebrog. In somewhat cooler weather I
would certainly have been disposed to somewhat more activity,
but certainly too it is a reaction from my recent work period which
won't allow me to get at anything real. There is no harm; and the
weeks here still have their sense, even if they consist merely in
the reading of a few books I wouldn't otherwise have laid hands
on. . . .

1 31 3

To Frau Julie Weinmann for the present

Schloss Haseldorf (Holstein)
June 25, 1902

. . . The last time I wrote (somewhat over a year ago) I an-
nounced to you my marriage. The person who is so fondly bound
up with and indispensable to my life is a young sculptress who
has worked with Rodin in Paris, a girl full of power and artis-
tic ability, an artist, from whose growth I expect the greatest
conceivable results. That and a limitless, mutual faith brought
us together. Since December we have a dear little daughter, Ruth,

7

and life has become much richer with her. For the woman
according to my conviction a child is a completion and a liber-
ation from all strangeness and insecurity: it is, spiritually too, the
mark of maturity; and I am filled with the conviction that the
woman artist, who has had and has and loves a child, is, no less
than the mature man, capable of reaching all the artistic heights
the man can reach under the same conditions, that is, if he is an
artist. In a word, I consider the woman in whom lives deep
artistic striving the equal of the masculine artist from the moment
of her maturity and fulfillment on, entitled and summoned to the
same ambitious goals in which he in his best hours may solitarily
believe. I am saying this only so that I may now say that the mean-
ing of my marriage lies in helping this dear young person to find
herself, her greatness and depths, in so far as one human being
can help another. Clara Westhoff has for a long time been no
beginner: she has proved by my portrait-bust, by the bust of
Heinrich Vogeler (which was purchased by the Bremen Art
Museum) and several smaller works that have been exhibited,
that she can hardly be mistaken for anyone else now and can be
seen beside the best. All this, however, is not the matter about
which I want to speak, although it leads me to the subject of this
letter, to myself.

It is clear to me that I need help in order to continue on my
way. I need the opportunity to be allowed to absorb quietly, to
learn for a year or two, without having to write. The course of
my education was broken by a variety of accidents, and in the
end that is not a misfortune; for in those years one has not really
the ability to choose one's education, which later makes the win-
ning of knowledge and truth so precious. Now I know what I
need; two great journeys to Russia which I have taken in recent
years have given me wide ranges and tasks and have strengthened
and confirmed me in myself. And now in the fall I want to go to
Paris, in order, guided by the connoisseur of Russian things, the
Vicomte de Vogue, to work in the libraries, to collect myself, and
to write about Rodin whom I have loved and revered for a long
time. That is the external side of what I want for the immediate

future, a little portion of that deep wanting which goes toward
my work and toward its continuous realization.

What can one who wants a great deal say of this wanting with-
out betraying it and becoming a boaster? Here every word in-
volves a false note and an affront to what it means. One can only
say that one comes more and more to protect this wanting which
goes toward deep and important things, that one longs more
and more sincerely and wholeheartedly to give it all one's strength
and all one's love and to experience worries through it and not
through the little harassing accidents of which life in poverty is
full. I am very poor. I do not suffer from poverty because at bot-
tom it refuses me nothing. But this winter, for the first time, it
stood before me for months like a specter, and I lost myself and
all my beloved aims and all the light out of my heart and came
near taking some little official post, and that would have meant:
dying and setting out on a spiritual transmigration full of home-
lessness and madness. I deliberated at the last moment and
clung to what, even as a child, I had begun dimly and longingly
to want. I am indeed no longer a beginner who throws himself
at random into the future. I have worked, for years, and if I
have worked out anything for myself, it is the belief in the right
to raise the best I have in me and the awareness of the treasures
in the sesame of my soul which I can no longer forget. And after
all I know that my pen will be strong enough to carry me: only
I may not misuse it too early and must give it time to attain its
full growth.

My dear lady, I am speaking to you because I know of no one
who could understand and feel the meaning of words like this,
despite all the omissions, no one who would be generous enough
to pardon them, and kind enough to see what lies behind them. I
am gathering all my confidence together and begging you to ac-
cept it, because my memory of you, of your husband and of the
spirit of your kindly house brings before me people who do not
consider the striving for artistic fulfillment as something super-
fluous, but rather as a great law which awakens in those who
love life most deeply.

7*

Perhaps you remember me: perhaps one of my verses will ex-
cuse me for approaching you out of my distance, perhaps some-
thing in your heart will believe that I am not presuming too much
when I beg for my best, as for a child that I do not want to let die.

In the past year I have had a little household with my wife
(in a little village near Worpswede) ; but the household consumed
too much, and so we have promised each other to live for our
work, each as a bachelor of limited means, as before. That also
gives to each the possibility of being wherever his work happens
to require. For, since work must be quite uppermost, we are also
prepared to bear a geographical separation from time to time if it
is necessary. We have lost a good deal of time, but this year must
take us both further along. Will you help me to my goal, dear
lady? Will you and your husband make it possible for me to work
on myself this year in Paris, in quiet and peace of mind, without
this continual fear that insinuates itself into all thoughts and into
every quiet of my heart? Not without poverty, only without fear!
And only for a year?

I have never begged from anyone; you see I don't know how
it is done, nor do I know whether I can thank: but I believe I can.

My wife will probably obtain an artist-fellowship and only
accept a very small subsidy from me which I can easily afford
from what I earn on the side. What I desire so ardently, however,
and consider so important for my development, is what I have
never actually had: a single year of quiet, fear-free work. A
little peace and composure from which so much future can come.

I know of no fellowship for which I could apply, no person
whom I may really ask. And so I come to you, quite unashamed,
as to old friends.

Perhaps, dear lady, none of the books I have written in recent
years has come to your notice. Fortunately a new book of poems
is coming out in the next few weeks, so that I can at least tell you
where I stand and whither I have gone in these years; that I will
do at all events.

I am writing this letter in a still, lonely evening hour and not
reading it over because perhaps then I wouldn't send it off . Not

73

that I am ashamed of it; but I am afraid, dear lady, of losing or
offending you the moment the picture you have of me shifts un-
der its influence. If it could have such an effect, then please
let it be nothing, let it not have been, for beyond everything the
assurance is precious to me that you still think kindly of me and
that I may kiss your hand in unaltered respect.

I 32 3

To Friedrich Huch Schloss Haseldorf in Holstein

[July 6, 1902]

... I rejoice in all the activity that lies before you, in the
new position yOu will have in Lodz, which is so wonderful, so fine
and human in the most forward-looking sense, that I cannot con-
gratulate you enthusiastically enough on it. Congratulate, un-
fortunately not envy; for although I quite share your knowledge
and feeling that the world belongs to young youth, the world
in its breadth and reality, there is nevertheless between me and
every young person a perpetual embarrassment which does not
allow a mutual influencing and relationship to arise. I suffer under
this ban which sometimes makes my great solitude (which since
early boyhood I have otherwise borne so gladly and thankfully)
raw at the borders; but that is why my Stories of God also had
the subtitle: told to grownups for children, because I knew that
only over those swaying bridges and through those dark ravines
can I get to the dear creatures who can understand me if I try
to say something about God. . . .

But alas, this burden of the monograph has been demanding
and has used up or dulled the strength and joy for thousands of
things. I am so little made to write for money, and otherwise noth-
ing remains for me but to take an obscure little official post in
Prague, with a killing monotony. Which really would be death
for me. I don't believe I would still be permitted then to think
of writing anything, although the unsaid stands weeping about
me. An official's life is an official's life.

To my verses, to the health of soul out of which they rise.

74

belongs the country, long roads, walking barefoot in the soft
grass, on hard roads or in the clean snow, deep breathing, listen-
ing, stillness, and the reverence of wide evenings. Without that:
shut up in a writing room with other people and stale air and
condemned to a senseless manual work consisting of inanity and
habit, I would never again venture to write down a word, dis-
trustful of the altered voice of my lazy, misused blood, deaf to
the dearest words of my soul whose truth I would no longer be
allowed to feel and live.

For months already, dear Friedrich Huch, I have been resisting
this fate, this death without an hour of dying, I have looked
about for everything possible, but nowhere is there anyone who
can use me as I am. Not being able to say what I "can do/' I have
difficulty in making what I am looking for intelligible to people.
I hoped, asked, waited for some correspondence, but in vain.
Now, with difficulty enough, we have already made the decision
to dissolve our little household, because it became evident that
it (this so-called household) was sitting as a third at our table and
taking from our plates what we wanted to eat. In so doing we
enable each to live better for his work, for our marriage was
made in order that each might better help the other to his work
and to himself. I hope it will be possible for us to settle not too far
from one another. But Clara Westhoff (of whose art I expect the
greatest things! ) has to think of Ruth as well as of herself and
her development, think, that is, with concern and care, and must
not in any way suffer in poverty as one of the concomitants of a
marriage. Next winter then is somehow to be arranged accord-
ingly. Clara Westhoff (she and our dear little child, who are still
in Westerwede now) must choose for herself the place to stay
which she considers good and useful for her work, and I hope
very much she will obtain a fellowship which will help her to
peace and composure. (She had, by the way, quite a good deal
of success at the exhibitions: the portrait bust of Heinrich Voge-
ler a very good work was purchased twice in bronze.) If then
the dearest person I have in the world again has her life and her

75

work, I too may think seriously of myself and make one more
attempt to come to terms with circumstances.

I want first (at the beginning of September perhaps) to go to
Paris; for I have undertaken to write the book on Rodin in the
new publications instigated by Muther. At first I thought I
might perhaps be able to keep myself there somehow, but now I
scarcely believe any more in this possibility. I urgently need
besides my most intimate work, which is gift and miracle every
time it happens, something I can always do in order to live over
the in-between times to new work hours to come. My Russian
study was welcome to me for that; but now the necessity of
earning continually comes over both, wipes out the boundaries,
makes one as well as the other vain, and imposes a third thing
on me and fear and suffocation. To change this at last, I am think-
ing of going to a university, to Muther, who is a friend of mine,
of working for a while quite objectively, of writing something
only now and then (enough to be able to study, no more), of
doing my doctorate as soon as may be ... and? . . . The title
is of some help after all, but I believe that above all the quiet,
objective work will make me of more use for taking some position
later that will not make me too miserable. I know so little, and I
lack the magic word at which books open, I would like so much
to read and learn many things, some need in me runs parallel to
that plan of study. I have done three or four semesters at vari-
ous universities, in which I could give a satisfactory account of
myself, so ought surely to be able (circumstances being what they
are) to obtain the "doctorate" in a year to a year and a half.
Do you understand how I mean that? It seems to me not so com-
pletely hopeless: externally the way to a title that does after all
help, inwardly: work. . . . Tell me, dear Friedrich Huch, what
you think of this decision. Can I in my situation look for anything
different or better? Advise me as you would advise a child, for I
deserve to be thus advised. Here in the still summer days my plan
grew up out of a great deal of anxiety, and besides you only
Muther, whom it closely concerns, knows of it. But when your

76

kind letter came today, I decided to tell you how things are with
me. That is how they are, if I see correctly. And now tell me, do
I see correctly? . . .

I Ml

To Arthur Holitscher Westerwede bei Worpswede

July 31, 1902

... I am ... utterly absorbed in Rodin who is growing and
growing for me the more I hear and see of his works. Does anyone
exist, I wonder, who is as great as he and yet is still living; (it often
seems to me that death and greatness are only one word; I remem-
ber how, when I read Niels Lyhne for the first time years ago
in Munich, I planned to look for the person who had written
it ... later I heard him spoken of as of one long dead . . .) and
Rodin is still living. I have the feeling that, quite aside from his art,
he is a synthesis of greatness and power, a future century, a man
without contemporaries. Under such circumstances, you can
imagine that I am impatiently awaiting the first of September, the
day when I shall go to Paris. . . .

I 3*1

To AugUSte Rodin Worpswede bei Bremen

[in French] August i, 1902

My Master,

... I wrote you from Haseldorf that in September I shall be
in Paris to prepare myself for the book consecrated to your work.
But what I have not yet told you is that for me, for rny work (the
work of a writer or rather of a poet), it will be a great event to
come near you. Your art is such (I have felt it for a long time)
that it knows how to give bread and gold to painters, to poets,
to sculptors: to all artists who go their way of suffering, desiring
nothing but that ray of eternity which is the supreme goal of the
creative life.

I began to write (when still quite young) and there are already

__ 77

eight or nine books of mine: verses, prose, and a few dramas
which, played in Berlin, found only irony in this public which
loves the opportunity of showing its disdain for the solitary man.

To my sorrow there exists no translation of my books so that
I could ask you to give them just one glance; nevertheless I shall
bring you, when I come, one or another in the original language,
for I need, to know some of my confessions among your things,
in your possession, near you, as one puts a silver heart on the
altar of a miraculous martyr.

All my life has changed since I know that you exist, my Master,
and that the day when I shall see you is one (and perhaps the
happiest) of my days.

... It is the most tragic fate of young people who sense that
it will be impossible for them to live without being poets or
painters or sculptors, that they do not find true counsel, all
plunged in an abyss of forsakenness as they are; for in seeking a
powerful master, they seek neither words, nor information: they
ask for an example, a fervent heart, hands that make greatness.
It is for you that they ask.

To Clara Rilke n rue Toullier, Paris

Tuesday, September 2, 1902

. . . Yesterday, Monday afternoon at three o'clock, I was at
Rodin's for the first time. Atelier 182 rue de 1'Universite. I went
down the Seine. He had a model, a girl. Had a little plaster ob-
ject in his hand on which he was scraping about. He simply quit
work, offered me a chair, and we talked. He was kind and gentle.
And it seemed to me that I had always known him. That I was
only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more power-
ful, more kindly, and more noble. That forehead, the relationship
it bears to his nose which rides out of it like a ship out of harbor
. . . that is very remarkable. Character of stone is in that fore-
head and that nose. And his mouth has a speech whose ring is
good, intimate, and full of youth. So also is his laugh, that em-

78

barrassed and at the same time joyful laugh of a child that has
been given lovely presents. He is very dear to me. That I knew
at once. We spoke of many things (as far as my queer language
and his time permitted). . . . Then he went on working and
begged me to inspect everything that is in the studio. That is
not a little. The "hand" is there. C'est une main comme-ga (he
said and made with his own so powerful a gesture of holding and
shaping that one seemed to see things growing out of it) . C'est
une main comme-ga, qui tient un morceau de terre glaise avec
des . . . And indicating the two figures united in such a won-
derfully deep and mysterious fashion: c'est une creation ga, une
creation. . . . He said that in a marvelous way. . . . The French
word lost its graciousness and didn't take on the pompous heavi-
ness of the German word Schopfung ... it had loosed itself,
redeemed itself from all language . . . was alone in the world:

creation . . .

A bas-relief is there; "Morning Star" he calls it. A head of a
very young girl with a wonderfully young forehead, clear, de-
lightful, bright, and simple; and deep down in the stone, a hand
emerges which protects from the brightness the eyes of a man, of
one who is awakening. Almost those eyes are still in the stone (so
marvellously is the not-yet-having-waked expressed here so
plastically) : One sees only the mouth and the beard. There is a
woman's portrait. There is more than one can say, and everything
small has so much bigness that the space in studio H seems to
stretch into the immeasurable in order to include everything.

And now today: I took the train at nine o'clock this morning
to Meudon (Gare Montparnasse, a twenty-minute ride from
there) . The villa, which he himself called un petit chateau Louis
XIII is not beautiful . It has a three-window f agade, red brick
with yellowish framework, a steep gray roof, tall chimneys. All
the "picturesque" disorder of Val Fleury spreads out before it,
a narrow valley in which the houses are poor and look like those
in Italian vineyards. (And there are probably vineyards here too,
for the steep dirty village street through which one passes is called
rue de la Vigne . . .) ; then one walks over a bridge, along an-

79

other stretch of road past a little osteria, also quite Italian in
appearance. To the left is the door. First, a long avenue of chest-
nuts, strewn with coarse gravel. Then a little wooden latticed
door. Another little latticed door. Then one rounds the corner
of the little red-yellow house and stands before a miracle be-
fore a garden of stone and plaster figures. His big pavilion, the
same one that was in the exposition at the Pont Alma, has now
been transported into his garden which it apparently fills com-
pletely, along with several more studios in which are stonecutters
and in which he himself works. Then there are in addition rooms
for baking clay and for all kinds of manual work. It is an im-
mensely great and strange impression, this great, light hall with
all its white, dazzling figures looking out of the many high glass
doors like the inhabitants of an aquarium. The impression is great,
colossal. One sees, even before one has entered, that all these hun-
dreds of lives are one life, vibrations of one power and one will.
What a lot is ttiere everything, everything. The marble of
La Priere; plaster casts of almost everything. Like the work
of a century ... an army of work. There are gigantic show-
cases, entirely filled with wonderful fragments of the Porte de
TEnfer. It is indescribable. There it lies, yard upon yard, only
fragments, one beside the other. Figures the size of my hand and
larger ... but only pieces, hardly one that is whole: often only
a piece of arm, a piece of leg, as they happen to go along beside
each other, and the piece of body that belongs right near them.
Once the torso of a figure with the head of another pressed
against it, with the arm of a third . . . as if an unspeakable storm,
an unparalleled destruction had passed over this work. And yet,
the more closely one looks, the more deeply one feels that all
this would be less of a whole if the individual bodies were whole.
Each of these bits is of such an eminent, striking unity, so pos-
sible by itself, so not at all needing completion, that one forgets
they are only parts, and often parts of different bodies that cling
to each other so passionately there. One feels suddenly that it is
rather the business of the scholar to conceive of the body as a
whole and much more that of the artist to create from the parts

So

new relationships, new unities, greater, more logical . . . more
eternal. . , . And this wealth, this endless, continual invention,
this poise, purity, and vehemence of expression, this inexhaust-
ibleness, this youth, this still having something, still having the
best to say . . . this is without parallel in the history of men.
Then there are tables, model-stands, chests of drawers . . . com-
pletely covered with little figures golden-brown and yellow-
ochre baked clay. Arms no bigger than my little finger, but filled
with a life that makes one's heart pound. Hands one can cover
with a ten-pfennig piece and yet filled with an abundance of wis-
dom, quite exactly worked out and yet not trivial ... as if a
giant had made them immeasurably big: so this man makes them
to his proportions. He is so great; when he makes them very small,
as small as he can, they are still even bigger than people . . .
among these little things which are all about and which one can
take into one's hand, I felt the way I did that time in Petersburg
before the little Venus from the excavations*. . . . There are
hundreds and hundreds of them there, no one little piece like
another each a feeling, each a bit of love, devotion, kindness,
and searching. I was in Meudon until about three o'clock. Rodin
came to me from time to time, asked and said many things, noth-
ing important. The barrier of language is too great. I brought
him my poems today if he could only read them. ... I think
now that the "Last Judgment" would mean something to him.
He leafed through them very attentively. The format surprised
him, I think, especially in the Book of Pictures. And there stand
those stupid languages, helpless as two bridges that go over the
same river side by side but are separated from each other by an
abyss. It is a mere bagatelle, an accident, and yet it separates. . . .
After twelve Rodin invited me to dejeuner, which was served
out of doors; it was very odd. Madame Rodin (I had already seen
her before he did 720* introduce me) looked tired, irritable,
nervous, and inattentive. Across from me sat a French gentle-
man with a red nose to whom I was also not introduced. Be-
side me a very sweet little girl of about ten (I didn't learn who
she is either . . .). Hardly were we seated, when Rodin com-

8i

plained of the tardiness of the meal; he was already dressed to go
to the city. Whereupon Mme. Rodin became very nervous. Com-
ment puis-je etre partout? she said. Disez-le a Madelaine (prob-
ably the cook), and then out of her mouth came a flood of hasty
and violent words which didn't sound really malicious, not dis-
agreeable, but as though they came from a deeply injured person
whose nerves will all snap in a minute. An agitation came over
her whole body she began to shove everything about a bit on
the table, so that it looked as if dinner were already over. Every-
thing that had been laid out so neatly was left, as after a meal,
lying scattered about anywhere. This scene was not painful,
only sad. Rodin was quite quiet, went on saying very calmly
'why he was complaining, gave very exact reasons for his com-
plaint, spoke at once gently and firmly. Finally, a rather dirty
person came, brought a few things (which were well cooked),
carried them around and, in a very good-natured way, forced
me to help myself when I didn't want to: he apparently thought
me extremely shy. I have hardly ever been present at such a singu-
lar dejeuner. Rodin was fairly talkative, spoke sometimes very
rapidly, so that I didn't understand, but on the whole clearly.
I told about Worpswede about the painters (of whom he knew
nothing) ; he knew, as far as I could see, only Liebermann and
Lenbach as illustrator. . . . The conversation was not con-
ventional, also not out of the ordinary, just soso. Sometimes
Madame also took part, always speaking very nervously and pas-
sionately. She has gray curls, dark, deep-set eyes, looks thin,
listless, tired, and old, tormented by something. After lunch she
spoke to me in a very friendly manner only now as house-
keeper , invited me always to have dejeuner whenever I am in
Meudon etc. Tomorrow just as early I am going out again and
perhaps a few days more: there is a very great deal. But it is
fearfully taxing in the first place because of the quantity, sec-
ondly, because everything is white; one goes about among the
many dazzling plaster casts in the very bright pavilion as through
snow. My eyes are hurting me, my hands too. . . . Forgive this
smudged letter. You can surely read it. I had to write down for

82

you just quickly all that I have lived today. It is important. Fare-
well, my dear! dear and good one. I am glad that there is so much
greatness and that we have found our way to it through the wide
dismayed world. The two of us. Kiss our Ruth with my kisses.

To Clara Rilke 1 1 rue Toullier, Paris

September 5, 1902

... I believe much has now been revealed to me at Rodin's
recently. After a dejeuner that passed no less uneasily and
strangely than the one I last mentioned, I went with Rodin into
the garden, and we sat down on a bench which looked out won-
derfully far over Paris. It was still and beautiful. The little girl
(it is probably Rodin's daughter), the little girl had come with
us without Rodin's having noticed her. Nor did the child seem
to expect it. She sat down not far from us on the path and looked
slowly and sadly for curious stones in the gravel. Sometimes she
came over and looked at Rodin's mouth when he spoke, or at
mine, if I happened to be saying something. Once she also brought
a violet. She laid it bashfully with her little hand on that of Rodin
and wanted to put it in his hand somehow, to fasten it somehow
to that hand. But the hand was as though made of stone, Rodin
only looked at it fleetingly, looked past it, past the shy little hand,
past the violet, past the child, past this whole little moment of
love, with a look that clung to the things that seemed continually
to be taking shape in him.

He spoke of art, of art dealers, of his lonely position and said a
great deal that was beautiful which I rather sensed than under-
stood, because he often spoke very indistinctly and very rapidly.
He kept coming back to beauty which is everywhere for him
who rightly understands and wants it, to things, to the life of
these things de regarder une pierre, le torse d'une femme. . . .
And again and again to work. Since physical, really difficult man-
ual labor has come to count as something inferior he said, work
has stopped altogether. I know five, six people in Paris who really

83

work, perhaps a few more. There in the schools, what are they
doing year after year they are "composing." In so doing they
learn nothing at all of the nature of things. Le modele (ask your
Berlitz French woman sometime how one could translate that,
perhaps it is in her dictionary). I know what it means: it is the
character of the surfaces, more or less in contrast to the contour,
that which fills out all the contours. It is the law and the rela-
tionship of these surfaces. Do you understand, for him there is
only le modele ... in all things, in all bodies; he detaches it
from them, makes it, after he has learned it from them, into an
independent thing, that is, into sculpture, into a plastic work of
art. For this reason, a piece of arm and leg and body is for him
a whole, an entity, because he no longer thinks of arm, leg, body
(that would seem to him too like subject matter, do you see, too
novelistic, so to speak), but only of a modele which completes it-
self, which is, in a certain sense, finished, rounded off. The follow-
ing was extraordinarily illuminating in this respect. The little girl
brought the shell of a small snail she had found in the gravel. The
flower he hadn't noticed, this he noticed immediately. He took
it in his hand, smiled, admired it, examined it and said suddenly:
Voila le modele grec. I understood at once. He said further:
Vous savez, ce n'est pas la forme de Tobjet, mais: le modele. . . .
Then still another snail shell came to light, broken and crushed
. . . : Cest le modele gothique-renaissance, said Rodin with
his sweet, pure smile! . . . And what he meant was more or
less: It is a question for me, that is for the sculptor par excellence,
of seeing or studying not the colors or the contours but that which
constitutes the plastic, the surfaces. The character of these,
whether they are rough or smooth, shiny or dull (not in color
but in character!). Things are infallible here. This little snail re-
calls the greatest works of Greek art: it has the same simplicity,
the same smoothness, the same inner radiance, the same cheerful
and festive sort of surf ace. . , . And herein things are infallible!
They contain laws in their purest form. Even the breaks in such
a shell will again be of the same kind, will again be modele grec.
This snail will always remain a whole, as regards its modele, and

4

the smallest piece of snail shell is still always modele grec. . . .
Now one notices for the first time what an advance his sculpture is.
What must it have meant to him when he first felt that no one had
ever yet looked for this basic element of plasticity! He had to
find it: a thousand things offered it to him: above all the nude
body. He had to transpose it, that is to make it into his expression,
to become accustomed to saying everything through the modele
and not otherivise. Here, do you see, is the second point in this
great artist's life. The first was that he had discovered a new
basic element of his art, the second, that he wanted nothing more
of life than to express himself fully and all that is his through
this element. He married, parce qu'il faut avoir une femme, as
he said to me (in another connection, namely when I spoke of
groups who join together, of friends, and said I thought that only
from solitary striving does anything result anyway, then he said
it, said: Non, c'est vrai, il n'est pas bien de faire des groupes,
les amis s'empechent. II est mieux d'etre seul. Peut-etre avoir une
femme parcequ'il faut avoir une femme) . . . something like
that. Then I spoke of you, of Ruth, of how sad it is that you
must leave her, he was silent for a while and said then, with
wonderful seriousness he said it: ... Oui, il faut travailler, rien
que travailler. Et il faut avoir patience. One should not think of
wanting to make something, one should try only to build up one's
own medium of expression and to say everything. One should
work and have patience. Not look to right nor left. Should draw
all of life into this circle, have nothing outside of this life. Rodin
has done so. J'ai y donne ma jeunesse, he said. It is certainly so.
One must sacrifice the other. Tolstoy's unedifying household,
the discomfort of Rodin's rooms: it all points to the same thing:
that one must choose either this or that. Either happiness or art.
On doit trouver le bonheur dans son art ... R. too expressed it
something like that. And indeed that is all so clear, so clear. The
great men have all let their lives become overgrown like an old
road and have carried everything into their art. Their lives are
stunted like an organ they no longer need.

. . . You see, Rodin has lived nothing that is not in his work.

85

Thus it grew around him. Thus he did not lose himself; even in
the years when lack of money forced him to unworthy work, he
did not lose himself, because what he experienced did not remain
a plan, because in the evenings he immediately made real what
he had wanted during the day. Thus everything always became
real. That is the principal thing not to remain with the dream,
with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always for-
cibly to convert it all into things. As Rodin did. Why has he pre-
vailed? Not because he found approbation. His friends are few,
and he is, as he says, on the Index. But his work was there, an
enormous, grandiose reality, which one cannot get away from.
With it he wrested room and right for himself. One can imagine
a man who tad felt, wanted all that in himself, and had waited
for better times to do it. Who would respect him; he would be
an aging fool who had nothing more to hope for. But to make, to
make is the thing. And once something is there, ten or twelve
things are there, sixty or seventy little records about one, all made
now out of this, now out of that impulse, then one has already
won a piece of ground on which one can stand upright. Then one
no longer loses oneself. When Rodin goes about among his things,
one feels how youth, security, and new work flow into him
continually from them. He cannot be confused. His work stands
like a great angel beside him and protects him ... his great
work! . . .

I 37 3

To Clara Rilke Paris, u rue Toullier

September n, 1902

... [in Meudon] I sat all day in the garden in a quiet spot
before which the distance is magnificently opened up, had a box
of newspapers in front of me, and read the marked passages
about Rodin. He has this whole material together, but it doesn't
contain much, no more than was finally collected in La Plume.
We again took dejeuner together, and afterward there was a good
hour of serious conversation when the others had risen. It is quite

86

wonderfully reassuring when he speaks, answers, judges. He is so
tremendously balanced, his words go so confidently, and even
those that come all alone don't falter and hesitate. Then I stayed
on until after five in the garden over my work and then went into
the Meudon wood where it was cool and lonely. When I came out
again, the houses were shining on the slopes, the green of the
vineyards was undulating and dark, and the skies were wide and
filled with stillness. The bells were ringing and spreading out
high up and nestling into the narrow Val Fleury and were
everywhere in every stone and in the hand of every child. For a
long time I haven't felt land, sky, and distance thus. As if I had
sat for a year in a city or in a prison that is how I was thankful
to these things for their loneliness and moved by every little leaf
that took part, subservient and still, as the smallest member in the
greatness of this evening. Very, very near I was to you. I went
on for a long time looking over at the house with the steep roof
and at the hall beside it in which lives an ineffable world, a world
that has many hours like this evening. Then I rode heavily back
into the city. Oh, these heavy summer evenings! They aren't at
all as in the open any more: walled up in odors and respirations.
Heavy and fearful as under heavy earth. I sometimes press my
face against the grating of the Luxembourg in order to feel a
little distance, stillness, and moonlight but there too is the same
heavy air, heavier still from the scents of the many too many
flowers they have crowded together into the constraint of the
beds. ... All that can make one very fearful. . . . And if you
are glad now and happy at the liberation, never forget that you
are going toward difficult days and that there will perhaps be
no hour for a long time when you will have the courage to buy
yourself a rose. This city is very big and full to the brim of sad-
ness. And you will be alone and poor in it and very unhappy
unless from the first hour on you cultivate through your work
a happiness, a stillness, a strength. . . . Heavy your life will
be. ... But it is true: it will then be your own heaviness that
you have to carry, the heaviness of your heart, of your longing,

_ 87

the burden of your work. And therefore be happy, deep inside,
behind words and thoughts rejoice . . .

To Auguste Rodin n rue Toullier, Paris

[in French] September u, 1902

My dear Master,

It doubtless seems somewhat strange that I am writing you,
since (in the greatness of your generosity) you have given me
the possibility of seeing you so often. But always in your presence
I feel the imperfection of my language like a sickness that sepa-
rates me from you even at the moment when I am very near.

Therefore in the solitude of my room I spend my time pre-
paring the words I want to say to you next day, but then, when
the time comes, they are dead and, beset by new sensations, I
lose all means of expressing myself.

Sometimes I feel the spirit of the French language, and one eve-
ning, walking in the Luxembourg Gardens I composed the fol-
lowing verses which are not translated from German, and which
came to me by I don't know what secret path, in this form:

Ce sont les jours ou les fontaines vides
mortes de faim retombent de 1'automne,
et on devine de toutes les cloches qui sonnent,
les levres f aites des metaux timides.

Les capitales sont indiff erentes.
Mais les soirs inattendus qui viennent
font dans le pare un crepuscule ardent,
et aux canaux avec les eaux si lentes
ils donnent une reve v6nitienne . . .
et une solitude aux amants . . .

Why do I write you these verses? Not because I dare to believe
that they are good; but it is the desire to draw near to you that
guides my hand. You are the only man in the world who, full of

88

equilibrium and force, is building himself in harmony with his
work. And if that work, which is so great, so just, has for me be-
come an event which I could tell of only in a voice trembling with
awe and homage, it is also, like you yourself, an example given to
my life, to my art, to all that is most pure in the depths of my
soul.

It was not only to do a study that I came to be with you, it
was to ask you: how must one live? And you replied: by work-
ing. And I well understand. I feel that to work is to live without
dying. I am full of gratitude and joy. For since my earliest youth
I have wanted nothing but that. And I have tried it. But my work,
because I loved it so much, has become during these years some-
thing solemn, a festival connected with rare inspirations; and there
were weeks when I did nothing but wait with infinite sadness for
the creative hour. It was a life full of abysses. I anxiously avoided
every artificial means of evoking the inspirations, I began to
abstain from wine (which I have done for several years), I tried
to bring my life close to Nature itself. . . . But in all this which
was doubtless reasonable, I didn't have the courage to bring back
the distant inspirations by working. Now I know that it is the
only way of keeping them. And it is the great rebirth of my life
and of my hope that you have given me. And that is also the
case with my wife; last year we had rather serious financial wor-
ries, and they haven't yet been removed: but I think now that
diligent work can disarm even the anxieties of poverty. My wife
has to leave our little child, and yet she thinks more calmly and
impartially of that necessity since I wrote her what you said:
"Travail et patience." I am very happy that she will be near you,
near your great work. One cannot lose oneself near you. . . .

I want to see if I can find a living in some form here in Paris,
(I need only a little for that). If it is possible, I shall stay. And
it would be a great happiness for me. Otherwise, if I cannot suc-
ceed, I beg you to help my wife as you helped me by your work
and by your word and by all the eternal forces of which you
are the Master.

It was yesterday in the silence of your garden that I found

myself. And now the noise of the immense city has become more
remote and there is a deep stillness about my heart where your
words stand like statues. . . .

To Clara Rilke Paris

September 26, 1902

. . . This last week, every day from ten o'clock until five in
the afternoon, I have been in the Bibliotheque Nationale and
have read many books and seen many reproductions of cathe-
drals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My dear, that was a
great, great art. The more one concerns oneself with its creations,
the more deeply one feels the value and exquisiteness of the work:
for these cathedrals, these mountains and mountain ranges of
the Middle Ages, would never have been finished if they had had
to grow out of inspirations. One day had to come like another and
set to work, and if each one wasn't an inspiration, still each was
a road to it. Everything has already been said about these great
churches; Victor Hugo has written a few wonderful pages about
Notre-Dame de Paris, and yet these cathedrals still have their
effect, strangely alive, unbetrayed, mysterious an effect greater
than words can tell. ... I think they are in the midst of this
great city like a forest or like the sea; a bit of Nature in this city
in which the gardens are Art. They are solitude and stillness,
refuge and quiet in the change and jumble of these streets. They
are the future as they are the past; everything else runs, flows,
races and falls . . . they tower and wait. Notre Dame grows
with every day; the more often one returns to it, the greater one
finds it. At sunset almost every day I go past there at the hour
when the Seine is like gray silk into which the lights are falling
like polished gems. Then I am also looking for paths to an-
tiquity. I have seen wonderfully beautiful things in the Louvre,
and many I understand better now, although I am just at the very,
very beginning.

The Venus of Milo is too modern for me. But the Nike of

22

Samothrace, the Goddess of Victory on the ship's hull with the
wonderful movement and wide sea-wind in her garment is a
miracle to me and like a whole world. That is Greece. That is
shore, sea and light, courage and victory. Then on the gravestones,
there are modelings of a wonderful land, profiles and hands,
hands, groups of hands which are felt quite incomparably deeply
and artistically and almost: wisely. And then Tanagra. That is a
spring of imperishable life!

And with all this, Botticelli, the glorious frescoes opposite the
Nike of Samothrace, and Leonardo; again and again Leonardo.
Rodin I haven't seen for a long time. He is working on a por-
trait, is very deep in this work, does everything else as though in
a dream. And I have the feeling that one disturbs him even on his
Saturday. ... Of the journey he doesn't speak, so you will
probably still find him when you come. And now you are coming
soon, aren't you? I am waiting.

C 4*1

To Clara Rilke n rue Toullier, Paris

September 27, morning [1902]

. . . One can learn much here, I think, but one must have a
certain maturity, otherwise one sees nothing, on the one hand
because there is too much here, and then because such a variety
of things speak simultaneously. From all sides. I have already
told you that I am trying to get closer in feeling to antiquity and
am even succeeding now and then in finding a new and deep joy
in its things. Rodin has a tiny plaster cast, a tiger (antique), in
his studio in the rue de TUniversite, which he values very highly:
Cest beau, c'est tout ... he says of it. And from this little
plaster cast I saw what he means, what antiquity is and what links
him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the
modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide,
and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides
like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are
all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with

this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the high-
est degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the
same time, that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that
noiselessness. . . . You will see this little thing, and we mustn't
fail to pay a visit to the original either (a little bronze) , which is
in the medal cabinet of the Bibliotheque Nationale. When one
comes from such things to the sculpture of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, one often misses there that peaceful and
quiet completedness and animation of the surface and finds only
the same force of expression and something new, conscientious,
and thorough that seeks for types and generalizes the model. And
yet the surface here in these things has become, through the in-
fluence of time, of the wind and the rain, the sun and the night of
centuries, just as alive, just as plastic, and without the slightest
emptiness.

The Trocadero Museum is very interesting; it contains tolerably
good plaster casts and copies of old portals from Provence, from
Chartres, from Rouen and other cities, fragments, details, col-
umns, in which one can see how the whole of life with all its
things and figures passed through the hand of the sculptor into
the stone, as if it belonged there. One feels, even more than in
the Renaissance, how people's eyes were opened, how they sud-
denly saw everything and tried their hand at everything. And
Rodin has many connections with that too. I am convinced, for
example, that the flowers on the pedestal of the woman's bust in
the Luxembourg came into his sculpture the way they came into
the works of the masters of the twelfth century. As a thing that
was also an experience for him, also driven along in the great
stream that is perpetually pouring into his art.

Today I will try again to see him. Then I go mostly by the little
steamer on the Seine as far as the Pont de Jena (opposite the
Trocadero), that is the shortest way from whatever quarter I
happen to be in. The afternoons now are often beautiful and
just slightly veiled and withdrawn; and then it has such a gentle
way of becoming evening. One might say there is a moment when
the hours cease going, one no longer feels their step, they mount

upon some animal which carries them along on its broad back.
So quietly they bear themselves, and only beneath them is some-
thing big and dark that moves, slips away, takes them with it.
Until five o'clock I am for the most part in the Bibliotheque
Nationale, then they close there, and I go and experience this
growing into evening somewhere on the Seine bridge, or on the
Quai; sometimes I get as far as the Luxembourg Gardens, which
even then are beginning to grow dusky, gently warding off the
darkness with their many red flowers. Then suddenly from some-
where a drum-roll begins, rolling up and down, a soldier all in
red passes through the avenues. And then everywhere people
emerge, happy, laughing, high-spirited people, serious, sad, si-
lent, and lonely people, people of all kinds, of today, of yester-
day and day before yesterday. Some who have sat for many hours
on a remote bench, like people who wait and into whose brains
it is now being drummed that they have nothing to wait for, and
then some who, as long as it is day, live, eat, sleep, and read a
newspaper on the benches: all manner of people, faces, and hands
many hands pass by then. It is something like a Last Judgment.
And behind those who pass, the garden grows ever bigger: big.
And Paris becomes close, light, noisy, and begins again one of
its insatiable nights stimulated by spice, wine, music, and the
clothes of women. . . .

To Otto Modersohn Paris

New Year's Eve, 1902

My dear Otto Modersohn, my intention of laying the mono-
graph on your Christmas table has been badly thwarted. Two
days before the twenty-fourth, I learned that the publishers of
this book (because of technical difficulties unknown to me) will
not finish printing before January. I am very sorry about this, for
I had long been looking forward with joy to sending you the
monograph for the Christmas celebration in your dear lonely
country. Even to the last minute I hoped to, and now I miss the

93

joy this gift would have given me, everywhere. I have in mind
your birthday and wish Velhagen may have finished by then.

So we did nothing further on Christmas; for it was no proper,
vajid festival for us either, only a kind of quiet day of remem-
brance that passed gently away for us in solitude. Of our dear
child very good news comes to us: that made our hours bright and
gave them a good confidence. But of you two also we thought
with warm wishes, on this holiday eve, and again today as a multi-
farious year finally dies out. We wish you and your dear wife may
in these hours begin a good year well, a rich year for your art so
full of future, dear Otto Modersohn, for each of you and for your
life together, in short: in every sense and by every standard a
good year.

When on this last dying day I look over the past, I am impelled
to say to you, dear Otto Modersohn, that to the best memories
and attainments it has brought and vouchsafed belongs the close
relationship I have found with your art. I have received so much
that is good and great from you that my gratitude will not fade;
the path through your work led me at many places nearer to my-
self, much became clear to me through it, much is thereby linked
together for me forever, and I can well say when I recognized
it in those spring days: I grew along with it for a stretch. All the
blessing of my loyal trust upon your further path!

In the meantime my little book dealing with Rodin's work has
also been finished. It may even come out in the first half of 1903.
I was deep in work that is why I simply haven't written. I really
wanted to tell you about Paris. Dear Otto Modersohn, stick to
your country! Paris (we say it to each other daily) is a difficult,
difficult, anxious city. And the beautiful things there are here do
not quite compensate, even with their radiant eternity, for what
one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets
and the monstrosity of the gardens, people, and things. To my
anguished feeling, Paris has something unspeakably dismaying.
It has lost itself utterly, it is tearing like a star off its course
toward some dreadful collision. So must the cities have been of
which the Bible tells that the wrath of God rose up behind them

94 _

to overwhelm them and to shatter them. To all that, Rodin is a
great, quiet, powerful contradiction. Time flows off him, and as
he works thus, all, all the days of his long life, he seems in-
violable, sacrosanct, and almost anonymous. He and his work
are of the same nature and essence as the old cathedrals, as the
things in the Louvre and: as the days with you, Otto Modersohn,
in your big, simple, grand country that you have earned for your-
self with lively love. I always feel, when I think of you, that you
have everything there and that if sometime you come again to
Paris, it will be only for a short time. For whoever really has a
home must care for it and love it, and he should go from it but
rarely. The world is not outside for him; he must wait in pa-
tience and work for it to come to him from all distances and to
fill the things of his home with all manifoldness, greatness, and
splendor. . . .

To Clara Rilke Hotel Florence, Viareggio presso Pisa

March 27, 1903

... I want and need these days only for rest. When I have
that, something heavy begins to fall off me, very slowly; but if I
move too soon, it quickly climbs back up on me again.

And yet gently, very gently I am already beginning sometimes
to feel a benefit I haven't known in years ... no, no, dear, I
wiM 720* worry and will think only good things. When anxious,
uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea
drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with
its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is
bewildered and confused. And mudi is so. I feel that I must build
my powers anew from the ground up, but I feel too that this
difficult thing is possible here, if I have patience and faith. . . .

95

I 43 3

To Friedrich Huch (Hotel Florence)

Viareggio presso Pisa (Italy)
April i, 1903

. . . Dear Friedrich Huch, there is something in me that gladly
lets itself be spoiled; and spoiled (perhaps in the not good sense)
I was by your Peter Michel, which was so entirely joy and
pleasure to me, along with all the fine shocks of surprise. And
this softening must have made me sensitive to any other air, so
that I at once cried draught when the healthy winds of some
transition blew in your new book. I am no critic, and I will not,
will not (for* heaven's sake, for heaven's very great sake!) will
not be one; I measure a work of art by the happiness it gives me,
and because I believe that my understanding of happiness (of real
happiness, that broadens) is ripening with life, becoming greater,
more ambitious and at the same time more grateful, I am of the
opinion that this measure for works of art could in time acquire
something just and clarifying, if I grow. And perhaps it is so.
But you see (since the book drifted into your hands) how even
to the Worpswede artists I came not as a critic but by the paths
of a personal and cautious love that was happy in being allowed
to go to all those places where before it lonely joys of growing
blossomed, smiled, and lived. But in my long letter to you, Fried-
rich Huch, there was something (now I believe I know it in my
heart's core), something, perhaps a trifle only, of the critic's in-
solence, rashness, and hypocrisy, something that doesn't belong
to me and that, even if it should look brilliant and of .value, I
would want to reject in any case. And that made mischief. Had I
the letter now, I could indicate the place where it got in, that
little grain of f oreignness that spread its poisonous smell over the
whole letter. But how it could have got in? Perhaps I wrote the
letter too soon, it ran along, so to speak, ahead of my own words
which were not yet done; perhaps the reason lies in the bad state
of mind I was in this winter in Paris (with the heaviest of all cities
on my heart). Finally, almost simultaneously with the new year,

9*

influenzalike torments began to set in that kept me for months
equally far removed from sickness and from health, upon a nar-
row strip of dizzy discomfort, to walk on which was a continual
anxiety and a desperate impatience. In the end (although it was
difficult to accomplish this with my always too limited means) I
came via Turin and Genoa to this little place, which, from by-
gone happy days, I have honored with something like filial
love, adorning it in my grateful memory from year to year with
all the jewelry of my wishes and all the treasures of my remem-
brance. So that it was not without danger to come and to make
clear to an unsuspecting reality here that it would have to raise
itself to the high level of my grateful imagination. Meanwhile
the disappointment has not been too violent, no greater than with
almost any seeing-again, and if I cannot yet rejoice as I once re-
joiced in the wideness of the woods, in the size of the sea, and
the grace of all this glory, that is because of my hesitant health,
which still lacks the strength for joy, that superabundance that
is necessary in order to take heart, beyond the little hindrances,
in the great glories. . . .

1441

To Ellen Key Hotel Florence, Viareggio presso Pisa (Italy)

April 3, 1903

How shall I thank you, dear Ellen Key, for your two so inex-
pressibly loving letters? I would like- most to write you a long,
long letter, a whole book, and tell you how everything was, how
my childhood was, my difficult, difficult childhood. But I cannot
now! Finally after a difficult decision I have left Paris, wanted
first to stay on the Riviera di Levante which, however, I found
overcrowded like a full close room. So I pushed still farther to
this quiet village, which lies between Pisa and the marble moun-
tains of Carrara, by a lively, spirited sea. In summer it is a big
society seaside resort but now nothing more than a little town
with empty streets, enclosed by pine woods, and wide open be-

97

fore a mighty sea. I was here once five years ago, and those were
days full of benefit that were given me here then, days of sun,
that were the advent of many songs. That is why I trust this place
and want to try to live here for a while.

You too are under way in the meantime, carrying your dear,
towering and summoning word to many who hunger for it. My
thoughts and wishes accompany you on this trip, and I send
this letter after you and: the Rodin book that now at last has
come out. May it give you joy. You won't believe how happy I
am about your understanding, your encouragement, and your
love, and how I return all this to you from out of my deepest
depths, dear friend. I feel as if my books had never, never yet
been so well off as with you. Rarely has anyone received them
thus, so spoiled them with warmth.

I thank you!

Your second letter was sent after me here from Paris. I had al-
ready gone when it came. But my wife opened it there and con-
veyed everything to the Bojers that you wanted to have known.
She sees the Bojers often, is very busy, and I have good news
of her.

Yes, dear Frau Ellen Key, you shall have pictures of us as soon
as possible; we have, I believe, a few more copies to give away t
and we also want you to know us soon! Ruth's little picture will
naturally come too. Should there be no more copies of the last
pictures, I shall have some taken: then you must be patient a few
more weeks.

It will be harder with the old books; I believe that of most of
them I myself have no more copies, and the publishers no longer
exist! And those of the old books that I may possess are still lying
in boxes in Worpswede, and I cannot get at them. But Wilhelm
Michel who wrote the article in Zeit has some more material;,
and I will look and see to it that in time you come to know
everything; I am so glad and happy that you want to.

Oh, and to tell you otherwise who I am; that is difficult. I have
a hope that we will meet sometime soon (and perhaps it will be

98

in Italy! ) : then I will tell you much about myself, to make up,
in a way, for what you really should have known long ago: for
I feel as if you had always been close to me!

Yes, my family is old. As early as 1376 it belonged to the
ancient Carinthian nobility, later it emigrated (at least in part)
to Saxony and Brandenburg, and in the seventeenth and in the
first decades of the eighteenth century it blossoms richly into
three powerful branches. Then comes the decline, lawsuits that
wipe out the entire fortune and loss of all estates and lands and:
poverty, almost obscurity. After almost a century, which passed
in darkness, my great-grandfather again came into power. He was
lord of Kamenitz an der Linde (a castle in Bohemia, whither the
family had emigrated in the anxious transition period). He col-
lected the old traditions, he rescued from oblivion what was on
the point of dying away, the family's ancient name. But imme-
diately behind him the depths close again. My grandfather, who
still spent his childhood at Kamenitz, was later steward of some-
one else's estate. My father began the career of officer (following
a family tradition) but then switched over to that of official. He
is a railroad official, holds a fairly high post in a private railroad,
which he has earned with infinite conscientiousness. He lives in
Prague. There I was born. Twenty-seven years ago. (In the
Catholic baptism I received the name Rene Maria.) Of my
mother's family I know nothing. Her father was a wealthy mer-
chant whose fortune went to pieces on a prodigal son. My child-
hood home was a cramped rented apartment in Prague; it was very
sad. My parents' marriage was already faded when I was born.
When I was nine years old, the discord broke out openly, and
my mother left her husband. She was a very nervous, slender,
dark woman, who wanted something indefinite of life. And so
she remained. Actually these two people ought to have under-
stood each other better, for they both attach an infinite amount
of value to externals; our little household, which was in reality
middle class, was supposed to have the appearance of plenty, our
clothes were supposed to deceive people, and certain lies passed
as a matter of course. I don't know how it was with me. I had to

99*

wear very beautiful clothes and went about until school years
like a little girl; I believe my mother played with me as with a
big doll. For the rest, she was always proud when she was called
"Miss." She wanted to pass for young, sickly, and unhappy. And!
unhappy she probably was too. I believe we all were.

Soon after she left the house, I was put in one of our big
officers' training establishments. I was ten years old. After the
worst coddling, I (who had never known brothers, sisters, or
playmates hitherto) found myself among fifty boys who all met
me with the same scornful hostility. Noncommissioned officers
trained us. What I suffered in those five years (for I remained
that long in spite of sickness, in spite of opposition in the place)
is a life in itself: a long, difficult life. Even today, my parents
still suspect nothing of it. They could not understand it. When I
came out and took off the uniform, I knew that they were quite
remote from me. And that now manifested itself over and over
again. They put me in a commercial school, in circumstances that
nearly brought about my downfall, until a brother of my father
(I was already sixteen years old then) had me take school studies
privately. By expending all my powers, I got over the eight classes
in three years and passed the final examination. Then I was tired.
There came a time when I hated my parents, especially my
mother. Over the years I got rid of this error. I see my mother
sometimes and feel beyond all strangeness that she is very un-
happy and very alone. And to my father I would like to show a
great, great deal of love. He is of an inexpressible kindness, and
my life, which he cannot understand, is a subject of touching,,
daily anxiety for him. I know that he has an infinite longing ta
know who I am and what I am doing, but, as we are poor, he sees
above all only the one thing: that I cannot earn my own bread, and
therefore he holds no confidence in my ability or has to keep
giving it up. And I am suffering, suffering more and more from
the fact that I still have to live on him, although I know that it
is difficult for him: but I find no other expedient.

For what is mine no one gives me bread, and I know that I
haven't powers enough to divide myself into one who earns arid

IOO

one who creates. And even if I had all the powers in the world,
I would have to give all my powers to the important thing in me:
it has a right to that. Isn't that so?! Tell me, my friend! The last
two years since my marriage I really have tried to earn, con-
tinually, day by day: not much has come of it on the one hand,
and on the other hand in so doing I have forfeited so much. Do
you know, I am sometimes afraid that I have lost everything in
the process! I did know that I can write only out of deepest
necessity but, when I wanted to earn by my writing, I counted
on this deepest necessity coming over me often. But, will you
believe me, dear Ellen Key: since there has been an external com-
pulsion, this necessity has come more and more rarely, and re-
cently it has left off almost entirely. You cannot imagine what
I am suffering and what I have suffered all these last months; I
know I am not exhausted; but the little and continual thoughts
of every day and its most unimportant things confuse me so that
I can no longer recollect my own. How shall I say that to you:
Before I used to hear all my voices in me; now it is as if someone
had closed the window toward the garden in which my songs live:
far, far away I hear something and listen and can no longer dis-
tinguish it. My head is full of ridiculous additions. And hardly
have I been paid for one job and am thinking that I may now
collect myself for my own work, when it is already time again
to think of the next and of where it is to be found and by what
efforts obtained. On that my nervous strength is slipping away,
my time, my courage, and I fail to catch up with myself day after
day, and am somewhere out of reach, full of flowers past their
bloom, whose fading scents fill me with dead weight. It isn't
so new for me, indeed, this feeling. My whole art has grown up
from its first day against opposition: against the laughter and
scorn of the noncommissioned officers, against my father, against
all about me; but this time it is more dangerous than before. For,
with this idea and necessity of earning, the opposition, which
until now always came from others, from outside, has come into
me myself I carry it with me everywhere, I cannot elude it, and
that is why I am so fearful for everything important in me. Bound-

101

lessly fearful. Now I have journeyed here in order to recover
and collect myself, in order perhaps to come to myself again in
this lovely place which is protected by a good past; two weeks
have now passed here, I am not yet well and yet already I ought
really to begin to think, to be concerned again about the future.
. . . And the thought of money, which used not to exist so iso-
latedly for me, has conjured up other worries: this, for example,
that all of a sudden I know now that my education is not suf-
ficient for a single, definite position, scarcely for a journalistic
occupation. And of that particularly I have a nameless horror!
I feel too clearly the apparent kinship between literature and jour-
nalism, of which one is an art and so looks to eternity, and the
other a trade in the midst of the times: more in the times than
any other. And I am so far away from the times, from all their
wishes and all their successes; I cannot participate in them. I have
nothing in them, not even a home. I live not in dreams but in con-
templation of a reality that is perhaps the future. Only in Russia,
on my two extensive journeys through that land, have I felt
home; there I was somehow at home, perhaps, because there one
notices so little of the times, of the temporal, because there it is
always future already and every passing hour closer to eternity. I
always thought I would have to live there sometime. . . .

But now I scarcely have plans any more; now it seems to me
an infinite presumption to have plans, when the very next stage
is so dismaying, so dark, and so full of tiniest questions. It seems
as if I were in the midst of nets; I feel these nets on my hands
with every gesture that would arise freely.

One day I think I must make this gesture in order at last to
be able to live; the next day I believe I should somehow finish
off my studies; then again I look for some person who will under-
stand my need without taking me for a beggar: which I most
fear. And finally no time is left for anything, and when an in-
disposition comes I have scarcely enough resistance left to avert
it among all these pursuing cares, and so everything draws in
about me and sets itself against the flowers in me. . . .

How is that to get better? I have written eleven or twelve

102

books and have received almost nothing for them, only four of
them were paid for at all. The rest of the publishers took my
books without paying. The Worpswede monograph was a com-
mission that was well paid, but the Rodin book, in which I have
lived for months, brought only 150 marks! And still there is
something in my innermost soul that does not at all want these
books to become known; a longing to remain nameless fills me
to the brim, and I would gladly get lost behind my songs like
some bygone people. . . . But that again is "imprudent," as my
father would say. ...

Why am I saying all this to you, dear, dear Frau Ellen Key? To
*whom am I to say it? My dear young wife knows it and is bearing
it loyally with me and in addition is bearing her own lot which
is similar and is bearing the separation from our little child for
the sake of her serious work. But the burden over me has be-
come so great, and I would like so much to speak of it to a near
person and ask this person, who understands and loves me: do
you think there is a way out? Must a miracle happen for me to
find quiet a while and hear what is mine ringing again; and if a
miracle is necessary for it: shall I live and believe that it will come?
Or what shall I do? Am I wrong to be galled by longing day and
night for what is important in me, since the unimportant is call-
ing me with the voice of life? But no, I believe that is not the
voice of life. For I wanted to tell you this too, dear friend: I love
life, and I believe in it! Everything in me believes in it. You have
felt that my letters lie in the shadow of some bitter sorrow, and
that is why there are in your last letter those beautiful, good, bell-
pure words affirming life. As a child, when everyone was always
unkind to me, when I felt so infinitely forsaken, so utterly astray
in an alien world, there may have been a time when I longed to be
gone. But then, when people remained alien to me, I was drawn
to things, and from them a joy breathed upon me, a joy in being
that has always remained equally quiet and strong and in which
there was never a hesitation or a doubt. In the military school,
after long fearful battles, I abandoned the violent Catholic piety
of childhood, made myself free of it in order to be even more,

103

even more comfortlessly alone; but from things, from their
patient bearing and enduring, a new, greater and more devout
love came to me later, some kind of faith that knows no fear and
no bounds. In this faith life is also a part. Oh, how I believe in
it, in life. Not that which makes up our time, but that other, the
life of little things, the life of animals and of the great plains. That
life which endures through the millenniums, apparently without
interest, and yet in the balance of its powers full of motion and
growth and warmth. That is why cities weigh on me so. That is
why I love to take long walks barefoot, in order to miss no
graia of sand and to give my body the whole world in many
forms as feeling, as event, as kinship. That is why I live on
vegetables, where possible, to be close to what is simple, to an
awareness of life intensified by nothing foreign; that is why no
wine goes into me: because I desire that only my own juices shall
speak and stir and shall have bliss, as in children and animals, from
deep within themselves! . . . And that is why I also want to put
all pride far from me, not to raise myself above the very least
animal and not to hold myself grander than a stone. But to be
what I am, to live what was set for me to live, to want to voice
what no one else can voice, to bear the blossoms that are com-
manded of my heart: that I want and surely that cannot be
presumption.

Dear friend, I have such difficult, such difficult days. But also-
it cannot become more difficult, and perhaps, when you read all
this, you will find some word on which I can raise myself up a tiny
bit. My father in his dear, ready kindness, has held out the
prospect, if it just won't work any longer, of procuring me an
official position in Prague. Of course, he doesn't sense that it
would be a new "military school" for me. But I am afraid of this
rescue as of a prison. I know I shall die if I have to write figures
more than three-fourths of the day in cold office rooms; I know
that all, all will then be over and forever. And I am namelessly
afraid of it!

So often I cannot help thinking of Ellen Ljunggren. Will she put
through what she wanted? (Have you news of her?) Ought I

104

too to do something of the sort? For two or three years, only
earn and then . . , but it seems to me that I have already been
away much, much too long from what is mine: there was so
much that still wanted to come! . . .

Now you know much of me, dear Frau Ellen Key, more than
you wanted to know: forgive the presumption that lies in this
confidence; I didn't know, when I began this letter, that I would
tell you all this; it came over me in a way, it dragged me with it;
where was I to leave off?

And then, too, you would continually have felt on each of my
letters the pressure, the shadow of some strange thing you didn't
know about. Now you will understand everything, and that
you should.

In one of your good letters, you pictured my mother as a
beautiful and distinguished woman whose hands came to her
child from among flowers; how often have I longed for such
a woman; for a mother who is greatness, kindness, quietude, and
beneficence ... in my family's past there must have been such
women, for at times I feel something of their presence, like the
light of a distant star, like a dark glance, resting on me. But to
you I have written as I would have written to a mother like that,
or to an older sister who knows more of life and of people than I.

Accept it in your great, great kindness!

And take at the same time the Rodin book. And along with it
one more request; I am putting in a second copy of the Rodin
book; will you, if it does not cause you any inconvenience at all,
see that it reaches the hands of Georg Brandes? I do not know
his address, and I would like so much to have him surely get it.
(My two last books Juncker, I think, sent him, but I do not
know whether he received them.) But only if it is no trouble
to do so. And thank you!

Are you still having snow and winter now? And how will
Easter morning break then? When does spring begin in your
homeland? I think of you, full of love, full of gratitude, full of
trust.

105

To Clara Rilke Hotel de Florence, Viareggio presso Pisa (Italy)

Wednesday, April 8, 1903

. . . here it is again a day full of unrest and violence. Storm
against storm over the sea. Fugitive light. Night in the wood.
And the great noise over all. I was in the wood all morning, and,
after four or five glaring days, the darkness that lived there was
pleasing to all the senses and the coolness and the almost sharp
wind. You must imagine this wood as very, very tall-trunked,
dark, straight pine trunks and high overhead their spreading
branches. The ground all dark with needles and covered with very
tall prickly broom bushes that are all full of yellow blossoms,
blossom upon blossom. And today this yellow shone in the cool,
almost nightlike dusk and swayed and nodded, and the wood
was lit from below and very lonely. I walked (after I had taken
my sun bath and gone barefoot a little) back and forth there
for hours and thought a great deal. ... I can't say what it will
come to, or whether the Spanish plan will materialize or some
other, perhaps not yet mentionable at all. Nor is there any use
talking about it now; I think someday it will be known and done.
And knowing and doing will be one. So much is certain, that
first of all I shall return to Paris, perhaps to write the Carriere
book; it still seems to me that Paris must give me one more
work. . . . Everyone must be able to find in his work the center
of his life and from there be able to grow out in radiate form
as far as he can. And in this no other person may watch him, his
nearest and dearest particularly: for he may not even do so him-
self. There is a kind of purity and virginity in it, in this looking
away from oneself; it is as when one is drawing, one's gaze riveted
on the object, interwoven with Nature, and the hand goes its
way alone somewhere below, goes and goes, takes fright, falters,
is happy again, goes and goes far below the face that stands above
it like a star, not looking, only shining. It seems to me as if I
had always created like that: my face gazing at far-off things,

io6

my hands alone. And so it must certainly be. So I shall again be-
come in time; but for that I must remain as lonely as I am now,
my loneliness must first be firm and secure again like an untrod-
den wood that is not afraid of footsteps. It must lose all emphasis,
every exceptional value, and every obligation. It must become
everyday, the natural and daily; the thoughts that come, even
the most fleeting, must find me all alone, then they will again
make up their minds to trust me; there is nothing worse for me
than to become unaccustomed to loneliness: and I almost was.
That is why I have long ways to go now, day and night, back
through all that is past and confused. And then, if I come to the
crossroads and find again the place where I began to go astray,
then I will begin work and way again, simply and seriously, like
the beginner that I am. It is very big and festive in my heart when
I think that we understand each other in this now and are of one
mind in these dark riddles. I feel ... as if we had gone together
through endless developments, through worlds, and worlds
through us. ...

. . . today a very dear letter came from Rodin (dictated),
very warm and full of interest. ... I shall be so happy to see
his new things: Oh how he grows and grows! (Hokusai, the
great Japanese painter, said somewhere in speaking of the hun-
dred views he painted of the mountain Fujiyama: "Cest a Tage
de soixante-treize ans que j'ai compris k peu pres la forme et la
nature vraie des oiseaux, des poissons et des plantes"). . . .

To CldTd Rilke Hotel de Florence, Viareggio presso Pisa (Italy)

April 24, 1903 (Friday)

... It was well I didn't leave on Wednesday, for the weather
these days has been so unspeakable, so unruly with storms and
downpours that fell thick as webs, half days and whole nights
long, that I would not like to have been in a foreign city and par-
ticularly in one that derives its beauty from the sun and that, all
adjusted to southern days, wants to stand by a blue sea, but not

by one that fetches all its deepest, oldest, and most forgotten
colors out of the depths, spreads them out and then indignantly,
from enormous wave bellies, throws over them the yellow-white
sheepskins of their foam. Nor is it good to be on the train in
such days of upheaval, when, instead of at least staying always
in one rain, one must ride through the rains of all those many
little stations which stand there dripping so peevishly and looking
twice as dirty as usual.

So it was all right, although I am a little impatient and would
gladly be gone already, particularly since with this storm it isn't
comfortable even here, and is variable and noisy; not even in
the wood was it still today, the sea has come much closer, and
the wind snatches its noise in by the hair and winds it about the
trees, which are themselves full of rushing and excitement, and
as if they had already had to watch and blow like that all night.

Yes, it is time to come home. . . .

Here I am still, now in Niels Lyhne, now in the Bible, and
much in your dear, dear letters that are for me the dearest of
all. In my own books, too, I am finding much; am going about in
the Stories of God and rejoice in much and forgive them what
doesn't seem good to me for the sake of the rest which is essen-
tial and beautiful and which also will never be different. Isn't it
as if no one had ever read the book? I would it were all as good
as the best in it; then it could be found later sometime like a
beautiful old object. There wasn't enough patience in me when
I shaped it, that is why it has so many blurted and uncertain
places; but perhaps I shall come soon again to such a book, and
then I will build it with all the reverence I have in my hands, and
will not let go of any passage as long as it is less than I myself,
and will make each into an angel and will let myself be over-
come by him and force him to bend me although I have made
him. . .

io8

To Lou Andreas-Salome Worpswede bei Bremen

July 1 8, 1903

I would like to tell you, dear Lou, that Paris was for me an
experience similar to the military school; as a great fearful as-
tonishment seized me then, so now again terror assailed me at
everything that, as in an unspeakable confusion, is called life.
Then, when I was a boy among boys, I was alone among them;
and how alone I was this time among these people, how per-
petually disowned by all I met; the carts drove right through
me, and those that were hurrying made no detour around me but
ran over me full of contempt, as over a bad place in which stag-
nant water has collected. And often before going to sleep, I read
the thirtieth chapter in the Book of Job, and it was all true of
me, word for word. And in the night I got up and looked for
my favorite volume of Baudelaire, the petits poemes en prose,
and read aloud the most beautiful poem that bears the title: "A une
heure du matin." Do you know it? It begins: Enfin! seul! on n'en-
tend plus que le roulement de quelques fiacres attardes et ereintes.
Pendant quelques heures nous possederons le silence, sinon le
repos. Enfin! la tyrannic de la face humaine a disparu, et je
ne souffrirai plus que par moi-meme. . . . And it ends grandly;
stands up, stands and finishes like a prayer. A prayer of Baude-
laire's; a real, simple prayer, made with his hands, awkward and
beautiful as the prayer of a Russian. He had a long road to go
to get there, Baudelaire, and he went on his knees and crawling.
How far away from me he was in everything, one of the most
alien to me; often I can scarcely understand him, and yet some-
times deep in the night when I said his words after him like a
child, then he was the person closest to me and lived beside me
and stood pale behind the thin wall and listened to my voice
falling. What a strange companionship was between us then, a
sharing of everything, the same poverty and perhaps the same
fear.

Oh a thousand hands have been building at my fear, and out of

109

a remote village it has become a city, a big city, in which un-
speakable things happen. It grew all the time and took the quiet
green out of my feeling that no longer bears fruit. Even in West-
erwede it was growing, and houses and streets arose out of the
fearful circumstances and hours that passed there. And when Paris
came, it quickly became very big. In August of last year I ar-
rived there. It was the time when the trees in the city are withered
without autumn, when the burning streets, expanded by the heat,
will not end and one goes through smells as through many sad
rooms. Then I went past the long hospitals whose gates stood
wide open with a gesture of impatient and greedy compassion.
When I passed by the Hotel Dieu for the first time, an open
carriage was just driving in, in which a person hung, swaying
with every movement, askew like a broken marionette, and with
a bad sore on his long, gray, dangling neck. And what people I
met after that, almost every day; fragments of caryatids on
whom the whole pain still lay, the entire structure of a pain,
under which they were living slow as tortoises. And they were
passers-by among passers-by, left alone and undisturbed in their
fate. At most one took them in as an impression and looked at
them with calm, detached curiosity like a new kind of animal in
whom want had developed special organs, organs of hunger and
death. And they were wearing the comfortless, discolored mim-
icry of the too great cities, and were holding out under the foot
of each day that trod on them, like tough beetles, were enduring
as if they still had to wait for something, twitching like bits of
a big chopped-up fish that is already rotting but still alive. They
were living, living on nothing, on dust, on soot, and on the filth
on their surfaces, on what falls from the teeth of dogs, on any
senselessly broken thing that anyone might still buy for some
inexplicable purpose. Oh what kind of a world is that! Pieces,
pieces of people, parts of animals, leftovers of things that have
been, and everything still agitated, as though driven about helter-
skelter in an eerie wind, carried and carrying, falling and over-
taking each other as they fall.
There were old women who set down a heavy basket on the

no

ledge of some wall (very little women whose eyes were drying
up like puddles), and when they wanted to grasp it again, out of
their sleeves shoved forth slowly and ceremoniously a long, rusty
hook instead of a hand, and it went straight and surely out to
the handle of the basket. And there were other old women who
went about with the drawers of an old night stand in their hands,
showing everyone that twenty rusty pins were rolling around
inside which they must sell. And once of an evening late in the
fall, a little old woman stood next me in the light of a store win-
dow. She stood very still, and I thought that like me she was busy
looking at the objects displayed and hardly noticed her. Finally,
however, her proximity made me uneasy, and I don't know why,
I suddenly looked at her peculiarly clasped, worn-out hands.
Very, very slowly an old, long, thin pencil rose out of those
hands, it grew and grew, and it took a very long time until it
was entirely visible, visible in all its wretchedness. I cannot say
what produced such a terrible effect in this scene, but it seemed
to me as if a whole destiny were being played out before me, a
long destiny, a catastrophe that was working up frightfully to
the moment when the pencil no longer grew and, slightly trenv
bling, jutted out of the loneliness of those empty hands. I under-
stood at last that I was supposed to buy it. ...

And then those women who pass by one quickly in long vel-
vet cloaks of the eighties, with paper roses on antiquated hats
under which their hair hangs down looking as though it were
melteo\ together. And all those people, men and women, who
are in some transition, perhaps from madness to healing, perhaps
also toward insanity; all with something infinitely fine in their
faces, with a love, a knowledge, a joy, as with a light that is
burning only a very little bit troubled and uneasy and could
certainly be made clear again if someone would look and help.
. . . But there is no one to help. No one to help those who are
only just a very little bit perplexed, frightened, and intimidated;
those who are just beginning to read things differently from the
way they are meant; those who are still living in quite the same
world, only that they walk just a little obliquely and therefore

Ill

sometimes think that things are hanging over them; those who
aren't at home in cities and lose themselves in them as in an evil
wood without end ; all those to whom pain is happening every
day, all those who can no longer hear their wills going in the
noise, all those over whom fear has grown, why does no one help
them in the big cities?

Where are they going when they come so quickly through the
streets? Where do they sleep, and if they cannot sleep, what goes
on then before their sad eyes? What do they think about when
they sit all day long in the open gardens, their heads sunk over
their hands which have come together as from afar, each to hide
itself in the other? And what kind of words do they say to them-
selves when their lips summon up their strength and work? Do
they still weave real words? . . . Are those still sentences they
say, or is everything already crowding out of them pell-mell as
out of a burning theater, everything that was spectator in them
and actor, audience and hero? Does no one think of the fact that
there is a childhood in them that is being lost, a strength that is
sickening, a love that is falling?

O Lou, I was so tormented day after day. For I understood all
those people, and although I went around them in a wide arc,
they had no secret from me. I was torn out of myself into their
lives, right through all their lives, through all their burdened
lives. I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of
them, that I would go away again from that horrible city in
which they will die; I said it to myself and felt that it was no
deception. And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were be-
coming worse and heavier from week to week, and saw how they
were slit in many places, I was frightened and felt that I would
belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked
at me and half unconsciously counted me with them. Anyone
could push me down to them with the cursory judgment of a
disparaging glance. And wasn't I really one of them, since I was
poor like them and full of opposition to everything that occu-
pied and rejoiced and deluded and deceived other people? Was I
not denying everything that was valid about me, and was I

112

not actually homeless in spite of the semblance of a room in which
I was as much a stranger as if I were sharing it with someone
unknown? Did I not starve, like them, at tables on which stood
food that I did not touch because it was not pure and not simple
like that which I loved? And did I not already differ, like them,
from the majority about me by the fact that no wine was in me
nor any other deluding drink? Was I not clear like those lonely
ones who were misted over only on the outside by the fumes
and heaviness of the city and the laughter that comes like smoke
out of the evil fires that it keeps going? Nothing was so little
laughter as the laughter of those estranged creatures: when they
laughed, it sounded as though something were falling in them,
falling and being dashed to pieces and filling them up with broken
bits. They were serious; and their seriousness reached out for
me like the force of gravity and drew me deep down into the
center of their misery.

What did it avail that on many mornings I got up happier and
went out with more courage and capable of a quiet industrious
day. . . . Once (it was rather early in the day) I came thus down
the Boulevard St. Michel with the intention of going to the
Bibliotheque Nationale, where I used to spend a great deal of
time. I was walking along rejoicing in all that morning and the
beginning of a new day dispenses, even in a city, of freshness,
brightness, and courage. The red on the wagon wheels that was
as moist and cold as on flower petals gladdened me, and I was
glad that somewhere at the end of the street a person was wear-
ing something light green without my thinking what it might be.
Slowly the water wagons drove uphill, and the water sprang
young and light out of their pipes and made the street dark, so
that it no longer dazzled. Horses came by in shimmering harness,
and their hooves struck like a hundred hammers. The cries of
the vendors had a different ring: rose up more lightly and echoed
high above. And the vegetables on their handcarts were stirring
like a little field and had a free morning of their own above them,
and in them darkness, green, and dew. And when it was still for

a moment, one heard overhead the noise of windows being flung
open. . . .

Then I was suddenly struck by the peculiar behavior of the
people coming toward me; most of them walked for a while
with heads turned to look back, so that I had to be careful not to
collide with them; there were also some who had stopped, and
by following their gaze I arrived, among the people walking
ahead of me, at a slender man dressed in black, who, as he went
along, was using both hands to turn down his overcoat collar
which apparently kept standing up in an annoying way. Because
of this exertion which was visibly taxing him, he repeatedly for-
got to pay attention to the walk, stumbled or sprang hastily over
some little obstacle. When this had happened several times in
quick succession, he did turn his attention to the walk, but it was
remarkable that nevertheless, after two or three steps, he again
faltered and then hopped over something. I had involuntarily
quickened my step and now found myself close enough behind
the man to see that the movements of his feet had nothing at all
to do with the sidewalk, which was smooth and even, and that he
only wanted to deceive those he met when he turned about after
each stumble as if to call some guilty object to account. In reality
there was nothing to be seen. In the meantime the awkwardness of
his gait slowly diminished, and he hurried on quite quickly now
and remained for a while unnoticed. But suddenly the restless-
ness began again in his shoulders, drew them up twice and then
let them fall, so that they hung quite slantwise from him as he
went on. But how amazed I was when I suddenly had to admit
having seen how his left hand moved with indescribable speed
to his coat collar, almost unnoticeably seized it and stood it up,
whereupon he attempted with a great deal of trouble to lay the
collar down with both hands, seeming, just like the first time, to
succeed only with great difficulty. In so doing he nodded to the
front and to the left, stretched his neck and nodded, nodded,
nodded behind his busy upraised hands, as though the shirt collar
too were beginning to trouble him, and as if there were work to be

"4

done up there for a long time yet. Finally everything seemed to
be in order again. He went some ten steps completely unnoticed,
when quite suddenly the rise and fall of his shoulders began again;
simultaneously, a waiter, who was cleaning up in front of a
coffeehouse, stood and looked with curiosity at the passer-by, who
unexpectedly shook himself, stopped and then took up his walk
again in little jumps. The waiter laughed and shouted some-
thing into the store, whereat a few more faces became visible
behind the windowpanes. But the strange man had in the
meantime hung his cane with its crooked handle on his collar
from behind, and now, as he went on, he held it thus, vertically,
just over his spine; there was nothing startling about this, and
it supported him. The new position calmed him considerably,
and he went along for a moment quite relieved. No one paid any
attention to him; but I, who couldn't keep my eyes off him even
for a second, knew how gradually the restlessness was returning,
how it became stronger and stronger, how it tried now here, now
there to express itself, how it shook at his shoulders, how it clung
to his head to tear it out of balance, and how suddenly it quite un-
expectedly overcame and broke up his walk. As yet one hardly
saw all this; it was enacted at short intervals imperceptibly and
almost secretly, but it was really there already, and it was grow-
ing. I felt how this whole man was filling up with restlessness,
how this restlessness which couldn't find an outlet increased, and
how it mounted, and I saw his will, his fear, and the desperate
expression of his convulsive hands pressing the cane against his
spine as though they wanted to make it a part of this helpless
body, in which lay the incitement to a thousand dances. And I
experienced how this cane became something, something im-
portant, on which much depended; all the strength of the man and
his whole will went into it and made it into a power, into a being
that could perhaps help and to which the sick man clung with
wild faith. A god came into being here, and a world rose up
against him. But while this battle was being waged, the man who
bore it was trying to go ahead, and he succeeded for mo-
ments in appearing innocent and ordinary. Now he was crossing

the Place St. Michel, and although the avoiding of carriages and
pedestrians, which were very numerous, might have offered him
the pretext for unusual motions, he remained quite still, and there
was even a strange, stiff quiet in his whole body as he stepped
on to the sidewalk of the bridge beyond. I was now close behind
him, will-less, drawn along by his fear that was no longer dis-
tinguishable from mine. Suddenly the cane gave way, in the mid-
dle of the bridge. The man stood; extraordinarily still and rigid
he stood there and didn't move. Now he was waiting; but it was
as though the enemy in him didn't yet trust this submission; he
hesitated only a minute, to be sure. Then he broke out like a
fire, out of all the windows at once. And there began a dance.
* . . A dense circle of people that had quickly formed, gradu-
ally pushed me back, and I could see no more. My knees shook,
and everything had been taken out of me. I stood for a while
leaning against the bridge railing, and finally I went back to
my room; there would no longer have been any sense in going
to the library. Where is there a book that would be strong
enough to help me out over what was in me? I was as though used
up; as though another person's fear had been nourished out of
me and had exhausted me, that is how I was.

And many mornings were like that one and evenings were
like that. Had I been able to make the fears I experienced thus,
had I been able to shape things out of them, real, still things that
it is serenity and freedom to create and from which, when they
exist, reassurance emanates, then nothing would have happened
to me. But these fears that fell to my lot out of every day stirred
a hundred other fears, and they stood up in me against me and
agreed among themselves, and I couldn't get beyond them. In
striving to form them, I came to work creatively on them; in-
stead of making them into things of my will, I only gave them
a life of their own which they turned against me and with which
they pursued me far into the night. Had things been better with
me, more quiet and friendly, had my room stood by me, and had
I remained well, perhaps I would have been able to do it even so:
to make things out of fear.

u6

Once I succeeded, though only for a short time. When I was
in Viareggio the fears broke loose there, to be sure, more than
before and overwhelmed me. And the sea that was never silent
was too much for me and drenched me with the noise of its spring
waves. But it came nevertheless. Prayers came into being there r
Lou, a book of prayers. To you I must tell it because in your hands
are resting my first prayers of which I have so often thought and
to which I have so often clung out of the distance. Because their
ring is so great and because they are so peaceful with you (and
because no one besides you and me knows of them) that is why
I could cling to them. And sometime I would like to be allowed!
to come and lay the prayers, the others that have since come into
being, with the others, with you, in your hands, in your quiet
house.

For, see, I am a stranger and a poor man. And I shall pass; but
in your hands shall be everything that might sometime have been
my home, had I been stronger.

To Ellen Key for the present, Oberneuland bei Bremen

July 25, 1903

We have come over from Worpswede to Oberneuland for a
few days for a reunion with little Ruth. And now we are about
her day and night and are getting to know her; and she is good
to us. In the morning when she wakes up, she tells us about her-
self in her self-constructed, expressive language and herself initi-
ates us into her little life; and it is as if memories in her were help-
ing her to overcome all strangeness that was between us at first*
She came to us herself, and all at once it was natural to her to say
"Mother," and me she calls "Man/' and sometimes "Good Man,"
and rejoices every morning that I am still there. And the garden
around the quiet house is so beautiful, and we know definitely
now that she is well off and we are drawing a great peace and
strength for ourselves out of these days. . . .

'I?

To Lou Andreas-Salome Worpswede bei Bremen

August i, 1903

. . . Only now that our summer really makes so little sense
and has become so restless, we want to think of leaving before
the end of August. First a reunion with my father is to take place
in Leipzig, and then we shall travel via Munich, Venice, and
Florence to Rome where my wife (at Rodin's wish) is to work
during the next year. I myself will then remain a month or two
in Rome also, for I am most anxious to see antiquity, which I
really don't know at all yet, especially its little things that are
of such full-grown beauty. With them and with Gothic carving
Rodin's work, through which I have gone so deeply and patiently,
has connected me, and I feel an Italian sojourn now as a natural
continuation of the best that Paris gave me to learn. But I do not
want to stay too long in Rome and after a while will go on alone
to some remote place that has a good winter. Where I shall live
then, I do not yet know. The Tuscan country is dear to me, and
I would certainly like to be where St. Francis opened up his
radiant poverty like a cloak into which all the animals came:
in Subiaco or in Assisi; but it is a mountainous country and per-
haps too wild in winter. And I may have to go southward from
Rome, perhaps to the little town of Ravello that lies near Amalfi,
high above the blue gulfs of that happy coast. Perhaps solitude
will come over me there and the great quiet that everything in
me longs for; then I will live quietly in the company of things and
be thankful for everything that keeps the all-too-commonplace
from me. . . . The little book on Rodin's work that I am send-
ing you today will tell you much . . . ; it is sheer personal
experience, a testimonial of that first time in Paris, when in the
shelter of an overgreat impression, I felt somewhat hidden from
the thousandfold fear that came later. . . ,

n8

To Lou Andreas-Salome Oberneuland bei Bremen

August 8, 1903

. . . When I first came to Rodin and lunched with him out
there in Meudon with people to whom one was not introduced,
at the same table with strangers, I knew that his house was nothing
to him, a paltry little necessity perhaps, a roof for time of rain
and sleep; and that it was no care to him and no weight upon
his solitude and composure. Deep in himself he bore the dark-
ness, shelter, and peace of a house, and he himself had become
sky above it, and wood around it and distance and great stream
always flowing by. Oh what a lonely person is this aged man who,
sunk in himself, stands full of sap like an old tree in autumn! He
has become deep; he has dug a deep place for his heart, and its
beat comes from afar off as from the center of a mountain. His
thoughts go about in him and fill him with heaviness and sweet-
ness and do not lose themselves on the surface. He has become
blunt and hard toward the unimportant, and he stands among
people as though surrounded by old bark. But to what is im-
portant he throws himself open, and he is wholly open when he
is among things or where animals and people touch him quietly
and like things. There he is learner and beginner and spectator
and imitator of beauties that otherwise have always passed away
among the sleeping, among the absent-minded and unsympathetic.
There he is the attentive one whom nothing escapes, the lover who
continually receives, the patient one who does not count his time
and does not think of wanting the next thing. For him what he
gazes at and surrounds with gazing is always the only thing, the
world in which everything happens; when he fashions a hand,
it is alone in space, and there is nothing besides a hand; and in six
days God made only a hand and poured out the waters around
it and bent the heavens above it; and rested over it when all was
finished, and it was a glory and a hand.

And this way of looking and of living is so fixed in him because
he acquired it as a handworker: at that time when he attained

"9

the element of his art which is so infinitely simple and unrelated
to subject matter, he attained that great justice, that equilibrium
in the face of the world which wavers before no name. Since it
was granted him to see things in everything, he made his own the
opportunity to build things; for that is his great art. Now no
movement can confuse him any more, since he knows that even
in the rise and fall of a quiet surface there is movement, and since
he sees only surfaces and systems of surfaces which define forms
accurately and clearly. For there is nothing uncertain for him
in an object that serves him as a model: there a thousand little
surface elements are fitted into the space, and it is his task,
when he creates a work of art after it, to fit the thing still more
intimately," more firmly, a thousand times better into the breadth
of space, so that, as it were, it will not move if it is jolted. The
object is definite, the art object must be even more definite; with-
drawn from all chance, removed from all obscurity, lifted out
of time and given to space, it has become lasting, capable of
eternity. The model seems, the art object is. Thus the one is an
inexpressible advance over the other, the calm and rising realiza-
tion of the wish to be that emanates from everything in Na-
ture. And by this the error is confounded that would make of
art the most arbitrary and most vain of occupations; it is the
most humble service and entirely founded on law. But of this
error all creators and all arts are full, and a very powerful man
had to rise up against it; and it had to be a doer who doesn't talk
and who does things unceasingly. His art was from the very be-
ginning realization (and the opposite of music, which transforms
the apparent realities of the everyday world and renders them
still more unreal as easy, gliding appearance. For which reason
too this antithesis of art, this noncondensation, this temptation to
flow out has so many friends and listeners and henchmen, so many
who are unfree and bound to pleasure, who do not take increase
out of themselves and are charmed from the outside , . ,), Rodin,
born in poverty and low estate, saw better than anyone that all
beauty in people and animals and things is endangered by rela-
tionships and time, that it is a moment, a youth that comes and

I2O

goes in all ages, but does not last. What troubled him was just
the semblance of that which he considered indispensable, neces-
sary, and good: the semblance of beauty. He wanted it to be y
and he saw his task in fitting things (for things endured) into
the less menaced, more peaceful and more eternal world of space;
and unconsciously he applied to his work all the laws of adapta-
tion, so that it developed organically and became capable of life.
Already very early he tried to make nothing "on the basis of ap-
pearance"; there was no stepping back with him, but a per-
petual being close to and being bent over what was coming into
being. And today this characteristic has become so strong in
him that one could almost say the appearance of his things is a
matter of indifference to him: so much does he experience their
being) their reality, their release on all sides from the uncertain,
their completedness and goodness, their independence; they do
not stand on the earth, they circle about it.

And as his great work arose from handwork, from the almost
unintending and humble will to make better and better things,
so he stands even today, untouched and free of intent and matter,
one of the simplest among his grown-up things. The great
thoughts, the lofty significances have come to them like laws con-
summated in something good, complete; he .didn't summon them.
He didn't desire them; humbly as a servant he went his way and
made a world, a hundred worlds. But each world that lives radi-
ates its heaven outward and flings starry nights far out into
eternity. This: that he invented nothing, gives to his work that
striking immediacy and purity. The groups of figures, the larger
relationships of forms he did not put together in advance while
they were still ideas; (for the idea is one thing and almost
nothing but the realization is another and everything). He
promptly made things, many things, and only out of them did he
form or let grow up the new unity, and so his relationships have
become intimate and logical, because not ideas but things have
bound themselves together. And this work could only come
from a worker, and he who has built it can calmly deny inspira-
tion; it doesn't come upon him, because it is in him, day and night,

121

occasioned by each looking, a warmth generated by every ges-
ture of his hand. And the more the things about him grew, the
rarer were the disturbances that reached him; for all noises broke
off against the realities that stood about him. His very work has
protected him; he has lived in it as in a wood, and his life must
have lasted a long time already, for what he himself planted has
become a tall forest. And when one goes about among the things
with which he dwells and lives, which he sees again every day
and every day completes, then his house and the sounds in it are
something unspeakably trivial and incidental, and one sees it only
as in a dream, strangely distorted and filled with an assortment
of pale memories. His daily life and the people that belong in it
lie there like an empty stream-bed through which he no longer
flows; but there is nothing sad in that; for near by one hears the
great roar and the powerful flow of the stream that would not
divide into two arms. . . .

And I believe, Lou, that it must be so. ... O Lou, in one
of my poems that is successful, there is much more reality than
in any relationship or affection that I feel; where I create, I am
true, and I would like to find the strength to base my life entirely
on this truth, on this infinite simplicity and joy that is sometimes
given to me. Even when I went to Rodin, I was seeking that;
for I had had a presentiment for years of the endless example
and model of his work. Now, since I have come from him, I
know that I too may ask and seek for no other realizations than
those of my work; there my house is, there are the women I
need, and the children that will grow up and live a long time.
But how shall I begin to go this road where is the handwork of
my art, its deepest and lowest point at which I might begin to
be proficient? I shall go back over every path to that beginning,
and all that I have done shall be nothing, less than the sweeping
of a doorstep to which the next guest brings traces of the road
again. I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though
my time were very big. I will collect myself out of all distractions,
and I will bring back and save up what is mine from too quick
applications. But I hear voices that bode well, and steps that are

122

coming nearer, and my doors are opening. . . . And when I
seek out people, they do not counsel me and don't know what I
mean. And toward books I am just the same (so clumsy), and
they do not help me either, as though even they were still too
human. . . . Only things speak to me. Rodin's things, the things
on the Gothic cathedrals, the things of antiquity all things that
are complete things. They directed me to the models; to the
animated, living world, seen simply and without interpretation
as the occasion for things. I am beginning to see something new:
already flowers are often so infinitely much to me, and excite-
ments of a strange kind have come to me from animals. And
already I am sometimes experiencing even people in this way,
hands are living somewhere, mouths are speaking, and I look at
everything more quietly and with greater justness.

But I still lack the discipline, the being able to work, and the
being compelled to work, for which I have longed for years. Do
I lack the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that
hinders all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life going.
And still nothing has happened, still there is nothing real about
me; and I divide again and again and flow apart, and yet would
like so much to run in one bed and grow big. For, it's true, isn't
it, Lou, it ought to be this way: we should be like one stream
and not enter canals and lead water to the pastures? It's true,
isn't it, that we must hold ourselves together and go surging on?
Perhaps when we are very old, sometime, at the very end, we
may give in, spread ourselves out and flow into a delta. . . .
Dear Lou!

To Lou Andreas-Salome Oberneuland bei Bremen

August 10, 1903

To learn that my little Rodin book means a lot to you, Lou, was
an unspeakable joy to me. Nothing could fill me so with cer-
tainty and with hope as this yea-saying of yours to the most full-
grown of my works. Now for the first time it stands for me,

now for the first time it is completed, acknowledged by reality,
upright and good.

And what your letter contained besides of elucidation
illumined me infinitely helpfully and brightly with quiet light;
my letter of Saturday (which you have surely received) at-
tempted to find similar ways and to trace the event Rodin was for
me. He is one of the most important, a sign high above the times,
an uncommon example, a miracle visible far and wide and yet
nothing but an unspeakably lonely old man, lonely in a great old
age. See, he has lost nothing, he has collected and gathered about
him for a great life long; he has left nothing in uncertainty and
has given reality to everything; out of the flight of a frightened
feeling, out of a dream's fragments, out of the beginning of a
presentiment even, he has made things and has placed them about
him, things and things; so a reality grew around him, a wide calm
relationship of things that linked him with other and older things,
until he himself seemed to stem from a dynasty of great things;
his quiet and his patience comes from thence, his fearless, endur-
ing age, his superiority over people who are much too mobile,
too vacillating, playing too much with the equilibriums in which,
almost unconsciously, he rests.

You are so wonderfully right, Lou: I suffered from the too
great example which my art offered no means of following di-
rectly; the impossibility of fashioning things physically became
pain in my own body, and even that fearfulness (whose sub-
stance was the close proximity of something too hard, too stony,
too big) arose from the impossibility of uniting two worlds of
art: the way you feel it and clarify it with your great knowledge
of the human: you prophetess . . .

But just because you have helped me with this lighting up, with
this indescribably helpful, pertinent understanding, it is becom-
ing apparent to me that I must follow him, Rodin: not in a sculp-
tural reshaping of my creative work, but in the inner disposition
of the artistic process; I must learn from him not how to fashion
but deep composure for the sake of the fashioning. I must learn
to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! II faut toujours

travailler tou jours he said to me once, when I spoke to him
of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days;
he could hardly understand it any longer; he, who has become all
work (so much so that his gestures are homely movements taken
from manual work!). Perhaps it is only a kind of clumsiness
that hinders me from working, that is, from accumulating from
all that happens; for I am equally perplexed when it comes to
taking what is mine from books or from contacts; I scarcely
recognize it: external circumstances disguise and conceal it from
me, and I no longer know how to separate the important from
the superfluous and am bewildered and intimidated by all there
is. For weeks I sat in Paris in the Bibliotheque Nationale and read
books I had long wished for; but the notes I made then help me to
nothing; for while I read, everything seemed extraordinarily new
and important to me, and I was strongly tempted to copy out the
whole book since I couldn't take it with me; inexperienced with
books, I go about in them like a country boy, in continual, stupid
admiration and come out confused, laden with the most su-
perfluous objects. And I am similarly clumsy about events that
come and go, without the gift of selection, without the calmness
for reception, a mirror turned this way and that, out of which
all images fall . . . that is why it is so frightfully necessary for
me to find the tool of my art, the hammer, my hammer, so that it
may become master and may grow above all noises. There must
be a handwork beneath this art too; a loyal, daily work that makes
use of everything must after all be possible here too! Oh that I had
workdays, Lou, that my most secret heart chamber were a
workroom and cell and refuge for me; that all this monkishness
in me might become cloister-building for the sake of my work
and reverence. That I might lose nothing more and might set up
everything about me according to kinship and importance. That
I might rise again, Lou! For I am scattered like some dead man
in an old grave. . . .

Somehow I too must manage to make things; written, not plas-
tic things, realities that proceed from handwork. Somehow I
too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art,

125

the tangible medium of presentation for everything, irrespective
of subject matter: then the clear strong consciousness of the
tremendous work that lay before me would coerce and bend me
to it: then I would have so infinitely much to do that one work-
day would resemble another, and I would have work that Would
.always be successful because it would begin with the attainable
and small and yet from the beginning would be in the great. Then
everything would suddenly be distant, disturbance and voices,
and even what is hostile would fit in with the work as sounds
pass into a dream, gently guiding it to the unexpected. The
subject matter would lose still more of its importance and weight
and would be nothing but pretext; but just this apparent indiff er-
'Cnce to it would make me capable of shaping all subject matter,
to find and to form pretexts for everything with the right and dis-
interested means.

Does the handwork lie perhaps in the language itself, in a better
recognition of its inner life and will, its development and past?
(The big Grimm dictionary, which I once saw in Paris, put me
on to this possibility.) Does it lie in some specific study, in the
more exact knowledge of a matter? (For many this is certainly
.so without their knowing it, and the subject is the daily task,
the handwork for them.) Or does it lie in a certain well-inherited
and well-increased culture? (Hofmannsthal would speak for
that. . . .) But with me it is different; toward everything in-
herited I have to be hostile, and what I have acquired is so slight;
I am almost without culture. My continually renewed attempts
to begin a definite course of study broke down pitifully; for ex-
terior reasons, and because of the strange feeling that always
surprised me during it: as if I were having to come back from
an inborn knowledge by a wearisome road that again led to it
by many windings. Perhaps the sciences at which I tried my hand
were too abstract, and perhaps new things will come out of
others? . . . But I lack books for all that and guides for the
tooks. But my knowing so little often distresses me; perhaps
only my knowing so little of flowers and of animals and of simple
procedures. . . .

126

To Lou Andreas-Salome Oberneuland bei Bremen

August u, 1903 (Tuesday)

. . . Even I do not want to tear art and life apart; I know that
sometime and somewhere they have the same meaning. But I am
a clumsy fellow at life, and that is why, as it closes in about me t
it is so often a stopping place for me, a delay that makes me lose
a great deal; rather as in a dream sometimes when one cannot
finish dressing and on account of two obstinate shoe buttons
misses something important that will never come again. And it is
indeed true, too, that life goes by and really doesn't grant time for
experiences missed and for many losses; especially for one who
wants to have an art. For art is far too great and too difficult and
too long a thing for one life, and those who are of a very great
age are only just beginners in it. "Cest a Page de soixante-treize
ans que j'ai compris a peu pres la forme et la nature vraie des
oiseaux, des poissons et des plantes," wrote Hokusai, and Rodin
feels the same way, and one can also think of Leonardo who grew
very old. And they always lived in their art and, concentrated on
the one thing, let all the rest become overgrown. But how then
is a man not to become anxious who only rarely comes into
his sanctuary because outside in refractory life he gets caught in
every snare and bumps himself stupid against all obstacles. That
is why I want so ardently and so impatiently to find work, the
workday, because life, if only it has first become work, can be-
come art. I know that I cannot cut my life out of the destinies
with which it has become intertwined; but I must find the strength
to lift it up wholly, as it is, with everything, into a peace, into a
solitude, into the stillness of deep workdays: only there will
everything find me that you have prophesied for me, and you too,
Lou, will be looking for me there. Be indulgent with me if I keep
you waiting; you have gone like a wise man, but I move as ani-
mals move when the closed season is over.

127

C 53 3

To Lou Andreas-Salome Oberneuland bei Bremen

August 15, 1903

Dear Lou, behind the park that surrounds this house the fast
Hamburg trains go by, and their noise is great and drowns out all
the wind in the trees; and it becomes daily more meaningful, for
already the leaves are falling from the little bit of peace that has
surrounded us, and one can see through to the impending jour-
ney, and feels approaching, mingled with hardships to come, the
promises of distant cities and the spirit of remote regions, the
New. Next Friday perhaps, or Saturday, we start on our journey;
the first stdp is Marienbad (where a meeting with my father has
been agreed upon), and then we stop in Munich to admire a
great picture of a friend we made in Paris. It is the family of a
bullfighter which Ignacio Zuloaga has painted, and the Spanish
painter as a person too impressed us as so big and simple that
we look forward to seeing this picture, into which he put much
of himself, as eagerly as to a reunion. In Venice also (which
means the next pause in our journey) we shall see pictures of his;
perhaps as the only reality in that dreamlike city whose exist-
ence is like a reflection. Then, after a short stay, we travel toward
Florence, toward the bright and lovely country that called forth
so much adoration, praise, and joy. Even there we shall be given
only a few days' respite, for: Rome is imminent, the great, sum-
moning Rome that is still only a name to us, but soon to be a thing
made of a hundred things, a great shattered vessel out of which
much past has trickled into the ground, Rome the ruin we want to
build up again. Not the way she may once have been, but as
seekers of the inner future in that past in which was included much
of the eternal. As descendants of those solitary things, lost out
of their time, about which science errs when it burdens them with
names and periods, to which admiration does injustice when it
sees in them a specific and describable beauty; for they held their
faces into the earth and shed all name and meaning; and when
they were found, they rose up, light, over the earth and became

128

almost as the birds, so very much beings of space and standing
like stars above inconstant time. Therein, I believe, lies the in-
comparable value of these rediscovered things, that one can look
at them so entirely as things unknown; one does not know their
intention, and no subject matter attaches itself to them (at least
for the unscientific), no unessential voice breaks the stillness of
their concentrated existence, and their permanence is without
retrospect and fear. The masters from whom they derive are
nothing, no misunderstood fame colors their forms which are
pure, no history overshadows their naked clarity : they are.
And that is all. That is how I imagine the art of antiquity. That
little tiger at Rodin's is like that, and the many fragments and
broken pieces in the museums (that one carelessly passes by for a
long time, until someday one reveals itself, shows itself, shines
like a first star beside which suddenly, when one notices it, hun-
dreds arrive, breathless, from out of the depths of the sky ) are
like that, and so is the very great Nike, standing on its driving
ship-fragment in the Louvre like a sail full of joyful winds,
and much that seems trivial to one who is still mistaken in looking
for sculpture in the subject matter, in the pretext, lives in this
lofty perfection among men, broken off and sketchy as they
are. Of like greatness are of course the Gothic things which, al-
though they stand much nearer in time, are just as remote, just
as anonymous, just as independent in their solitude, without
origin, like the things in Nature. These, and what came from
Rodin's hands, led us to the most distant works of art, to the pre-
Greek, in whose nature lies a sculptured ruthlessness, a thing-like-
ness, heavy as lead, mountainlike and hard. Relationships were
uncovered which no one*at all had yet felt, connections formed
and closed the streams that go through the ages, and the history
of endless generations of things could be divined beneath human
history, like a stratum of slower and more peaceful developments
that come about more deeply, more intimately, and more un-
confusedly. Into this history, Lou, the Russian will perhaps fit
sometime, who, as one becoming and enduring, is descended
from things and related to them, the way Rodin is as a creator,

1*9

related by blood. The biding quality in the character of the Rus-
sian (which the German's self-important busyness with the
unimportant calls indolence ) would thus receive a new and
sure enlightenment: perhaps the Russian was made to let the
history of mankind pass by in order later to chime into the har-
mony of things with his singing heart. He has only to endure, to
hold out and like the violinist, to whom no signal has yet been
given, to sit in the orchestra, carefully holding his instrument
so that nothing may happen to it. ... More and more, and filled
with a deeper and deeper sympathy, I bear within me my affec-
tion for this wide, holy land; as a new ground for solitude, and as
a high hindrance against others . . . : I always fall right away
with the whole burden of my love to the very bottom of the sea
and frighten people, as with a too quick (almost awkward) con-
fidence, when I begin at once to tell of what is deepest and most
secret; toward people that is a mistake, a rudeness almost, which
astonishes them, and in me it is a lack, a mania, that makes real
(that is, fruitful and useful) association with people impossible;
for me it is difficult to the point of unbearableness to believe that
a conversation that begins somewhere in the insignificant can end
in the important; some accident will certainly intervene or a di-
version or a misunderstanding unimportant in itself, on which
further continuance of course breaks off: that is why everything
in me continually plunges toward the final, ultimate, most im-
portant, and my interlocutor of the moment no longer attempts
to keep step with me at all; superior to my impoliteness, he re-
mains behind, and when I look around breathless at the end of
my course, I see him far off, very small, but smiling in a friendly
way and wholly occupied with acting as if nothing had hap-
pened. . , .

But it is not from any wisdom in me that this economy of the
important springs. It is a defect in my nature to forget all roads
that lead anywhere, yes, even all arrivings, up to whatever is
the latest arriving, of which alone I am then able to speak. Does
that happen perhaps because I fly to so many destinations or reach
them walking blindfold, so that with its end I am not likewise

given the way? Or is it simply a negligence of my memory, which
retains only the results, letting slip the advancing steps of cal-
culation from which they flow? From this defective tendency
comes my continual poverty, my possessions, so slight in pro-
portion to the daily intake, the emptiness and inactivity of many
days; for since I carry nothing in me but some last-acquired
product, while the calculation itself, in which this again becomes
a factor, goes on illegibly in me, waiting period after waiting
period occurs from one result to another. And also, that so often
I seem to open disproportionately wide to people who are more
or less strangers is not alone a weakness of the spiritual closing
muscles, as I long thought; there is only one thing in me, and I
must either stay locked up (that is, be silent or prattle ) or else
open myself, whereupon my sole inhabitant becomes visible.
This inner constitution of mine, which is faulty, really shuts me
off from all association, since in this form it leads only to dispari-
ties and misunderstanding and pushes me into unwanted relation-
ships in which I suffer and from which many a dangerous reper-
cussion can come. It is characteristic that I have acquired all my
"friends" in this dishonest way, for which reason also I possess
them only badly and without a good conscience. Only thus is it
possible (as for example in the pre-Worpswede period three
years ago) that I should have acquired a whole crowd of friends
who could give nothing in return for my continual expenditure,
and that no one can respond to me anyway, because I give ruth-
lessly and brutally, without regard to others, unloading at this
place and that, instead of offering, of showing and bestowing with
fine selection from an ordered store. In these past years I have
been coming to a better and better insight into my illnesses, even
into this one; and I now touch people with greater caution and
intend, for my part, each time to be the one to wait, wherever
possible the one to respond and not the one to take the initiative.
On this new foundation a few relationships have been formed
in which I can more honorably rejoice than in the earlier ones;
on it is based a correspondence with Ellen Key (who wants to
help me in a practical way), a cordial association with Gerhart

Hauptmann which has brought me beautiful letters from the heart
of his creative activity, the contact with Zuloaga and the great
acquisition of Rodin; in both the latter cases I feel it especially
good that no too-impetuous and too-blind opening up on my
side can have been the cause of one disappointment after another;
for the language stood in the way of that. In both cases only a
rather laborious understanding through French was possible,
yes, even my books (to which I would so gladly have entrusted
it) were deprived of the chance to speak for me and about me;
and that in spite of all resistance, inherent in the circumstances,
quiet relationships with these solitary people grew up, relation-
ships which perhaps need not be put to work at all because they
rest on an already conclusive knowledge of a few great common
experiences, gives me somewhat more confidence with people.
But a tendency like mine is a danger, especially when it is ac-
companied by a practical clumsiness toward others and by the
intimidating feeling of being among a lot of people who are su-
perior at life; such tendencies aren't easily overthrown, and the
highest one can achieve is to use them more generously and more
diffidently, to apply them more maturely and with more experi-
ence. Even in the innermost processes of my creative activity
there are traces of this tendency; in the extremely unscientific
developments which every subject matter and every provocation
to work experiences in me anyway, whenever the synthesis, the
thing that is last and most remote appears as the point of departure,
going backward from which I must invent precedents and paths,
utterly uncertain of their course and initiated only into the goal,
into the ultimate, final summation and apotheosis.

And this ignorance of the way, this being sure only in the most
extreme and most remote, makes all going so difficult for me and
scatters over me all the sadness of those who have got lost, even
while I am in the process of finding myself. That Russia is my
home is one of the great and mysterious certainties out of which
I live, but my attempts to go there, through journeys, through
books, through people are as nothing and are more a putting
to use than a getting closer. My efforts are like the crawling of

a snail and yet there are moments when the unutterably distant
goal is reflected in me as in a near-by mirror. I live and learn in so
much distraction that I often cannot see at all to what purpose
it will all sometime have been. In Paris I didn't get appreciably
nearer to Russia, and yet somehow I think that even now in Rome,
in the presence of antique things, I'll be preparing for things Rus-
sian and for returning thither. If I didn't know that all develop-
ments pursue circular paths, I should become anxious, knowing
myself again sent out into the temptation of a foreign land that
calls, that will speak to me of its own in an intoxicating lan-
guage. More than once already Italian life has enraptured me and
misled me into ascents from which I painfully fell; but for that
reason it is perhaps good that this young artist will be beside me
now, this woman who neither as a creator nor for the sake of life
has ever longed for this southern land, because her northern feel-
ing mistrusted the too open quality of its radiant splendor and her
receptivity, already overladen with the taciturn accent of the
serious moors, had no need of more loquacious persuasion. Now,
at a mature point in her art, she is attempting this journey on
Rodin's advice, after acquaintance with antique remains in Paris
has inspired her with a certain need to see Italy, not Italy as it
presses about any particular idler or an art student indiscrim-
inately abandoned to all impressions, but Italy as it is about one
quietly trying to carry on his work there, in order to raise his
eyes in the pauses to the new that surrounds him. In these pauses
we shall see many things together; but I, in any case, shall first
learn to live entirely for looking and for the receiving of many
things; for in Rome (where Clara Rilke will work the entire
winter) I want to hold out only a little while and, before I feel
the pressure of the city, to find a lonely little place (perhaps by
the sea) which has both a gentle winter and an early spring. If
only the days would come there, Lou, in which I would learn to
work deeply and collectedly; if only I might find a high room,
a terrace, an avenue in which no one walks, and nights without a
neighbor; and if the worry about the everyday would vouchsafe
me only for a little while this life for which I cry out, then I

_ [33

will never again permit a complaint to escape me, whatever may
come later.

Out of this stillness, if it is given to me, I will sometimes raise
myself to you, as to the saint of that far-off home that I cannot
reach, deeply moved that you, bright star that you are, stand
right over the place where I am darkest and most fearful.

To Lou Andreas-Salome Via del Campidoglio, Rome

November 3, 1903

Do you still remember Rome, dear Lou? How is it in your
memory? In mine sometime there will be only its waters, those
clear, exquisite, animated waters that live in its squares; its steps,
built on the pattern of falling water, so strangely thrusting stair
out of stair like wave out of wave; its gardens' festiveness and
the splendor of great terraces; its nights that last so long, still and
filled to overflowing with great constellations.

Of the past that laboriously holds itself erect, I shall perhaps
know nothing more; nothing of its museums full of meaningless
statues, and little of its pictures; the bronze statue of Marcus
Aurelius on the Capitol square I shall remember, a beautiful mar-
ble thing in the Ludovisi Museum (the throne of Aphrodite), a
pillar in some little, forgotten church, some quite unknown things,
a view out over the poor Campagna, a lovely walk toward eve-
ning and much sadness in which I was living.

In which I am living.

For I am dissatisfied with myself, because I am without daily
work, tired, although not sick, but in anxiety. When, Lou, when
will this miserable life begin to be effective, when will it grow
out over inability, inertia, and opacity to the simple, reverent
joyousness for which it longs? Is it growing at all? I scarcely dare
ask about my advancing steps, because I am afraid (like that
man in Tolstoy) to find that their tracks run in a circle, keep
coming back to that notorious disconsolate spot from which I
have already so often started out.

*34

From which even now I want to start out again, under un-
speakable effort and with only a little courage.

So begins the Roman winter. I shall try to see much, want to
go to the libraries and read; and then, when it begins to grow a
little lighter in me, I want to be much at home and to collect
myself around the best that I have not yet lost. For my time
and my strength, as things stand with me, can have but one task,
but this one: to find the road on which I shall come to quiet,
daily work in which I can dwell with more security and stability
than in this uncertain sickly world that is collapsing behind me
and before me does not exist. The question whether I shall find
such a road is not new but the years are passing, and it has
become urgent, and I must be able to answer. . . . You do know
too from my Oberneuland letters how things stand. They are
not good.

From the middle of November on, I have a very quiet place to
live: the last, furthermost house deep in a big old garden of Porta
del Popolo, beside the Villa Borghese; built as a summerhouse, it
contains just one single simple high-windowed room, and from
its flat roof one looks out over the garden to countryside and
mountains. There I will try to arrange my life on the pattern
of my Schmargendorf Woodpeace days; to be as quiet, as patient,
as turned away from everything external, as in that good, ex-
pectant, joyous time: so that they may become days of garden-
peace. ...

But now I am utterly without books and being so clumsy in
dealing with libraries, I cannot easily get on; so I come asking you
for something: Can you recall a modern, scientifically good Ger-
man translation of the Bible of which you once spoke, and if
possible, give me the name of the translator and publisher so
that I can try to get the book here? And if I am not asking too
much of you: perhaps give me the name of some new book or
other that you have read: it might help me very much now.

But above all I need a letter from you, Lou.

I have thought of you so much during the journey and here and
with many wishes have wanted you to return healthy from the

mountains. For of all my thoughts that of you is the only one in
which I find repose, and sometimes I lie in it wholly and sleep
in it and get up out of it. ...

Now it is autumn with you, and you walk in the wood, in the
big wood into which one can already see so far, in the wind that
is transforming the world. I think of the little pool, to the left of
the Dahlem road, that always grew very big and lonely about this
time. I think of the evenings after which comes the stormy night,
taking all that is withered from the trees, and think of the storm
itself, of the night flying past the stars into the morning. Into
the empty, new, clear, stormed-out morning. . . . But here noth-
ing alters; only a few trees are changing, as if they were coming
into yellowish blossom. And the laurel stays.

C 55*1

To Arthur Holitscher 5 via del Campidoglio, Rome

November 5, 1903

. . . We have been in Tre Fontane, we have stood before the
Tartarughe Fountain and seen in the churches the beautiful mo-
saics you love. To us too the Borghese Gardens were a familiar
place of refuge even in the first days and we had need of a re-
treat, as the museums especially, with their many wretched statues,
made us desolate, so to speak tore hope and home from our bodies.
Perhaps that will change, but I have the feeling now that the Ro-
mans had very excellent painting but quite second-rate, decora-
tive, superficial sculpture; that the Greeks were great sculptors I
learned in the Louvre and from Rodin, not here; apart from the
throne of Aphrodite and a few little fragments, there seems to
me to be nothing more here that speaks of them, and what a lack
of paintings of the good period there is here, where everything is
full of Renis and Guercinos. . . .

But the sadness that arises from the fact that Rome is, for the
most part, a bad museum you felt too and predicted to me; natu-
rally there still remains enough to live on here; the fountains
alone in all the squares, those bright, youthful fountains, and the

steps that are so wonderfully built, as if on the pattern of waters.

The ascent to the Capitol (when, in motion like one riding,
the beautiful, simple bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius mounts,
from step to step, from stair to stair) is among my favorites here;
I make it every day, for I am still living now in the Via del
Campidoglio, in the last house on the little terrace that faces
the Forum. Only until the middle of this month; then I shall
move into a little house, the last and most remote in the great
wild garden of the Villa Strohl-Fern (where for several weeks
already my wife too has had her studio and apartment) . I don't
know whether you know this garden? Perhaps. Very deep within
it behind high laurel bushes, there lies a little red building on the
arch of a bridge that spans the main path of the garden, before it
drops steeply for the descent (to Villa di Papa Giulio). Built
years ago as a summerhouse, it contains a single simple high-
windowed room and has a flat roof from which one can see Ro-
man landscape far and wide. There I shall live, and I rejoice at
the prospect of such great and remote solitude deep in the wide
park. It is a kind Providence that permitted me to discover this
room, and I think I shall rejoice in it, in the evenings that can
pass there, in the great open nights with the noise of animals
moving, fruits falling, winds stirring. . . . The most important
thing for me will be as soon as possible to get to some kind of
work there whose regular, daily return I must simply force in
case it won't establish itself of its own accord. I will then get into
the city relatively seldom, will be out there often for days, and
will myself prepare my little meals in my hermitage and be all
alone with my hands.

Thus I will try to build a winter for myself. . , .

To Ellen Key Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

December 22, 1903

After many long rainy days with heavy, falling skies, a kind
of spring is beginning here; fragrance comes from the bushes,

and the laurel trees, warmed by noonday, smell of first summer
days. There are shrubs from which the long catkins are hanging,
and other shrubs that will blossom tomorrow, if the night is as
gentle as these last nights that have passed slowly and mildly in
the waxing moon. And yet Christmas is near; so people say at
least, and if one happens of an evening into the too bright streets
of the city, the crowd is big, and the display windows glitter.
But here in the big garden in which we live, it will not be Christ-
mas; a day will come, bright and shining, and will pass, and there
will be a spring evening an evening with distant, darkening
skies out of which all the stars break suddenly, all the many stars
that live over southern gardens.

But for us this evening will be only a quiet hour, nothing more;
we shall sit in the remote little gardenhouse and think of those
who are having Christmas; of our dear little Ruth and of our-
selves, as if somewhere we were still the children we once were,
the waiting, joy-frightened Christmas children, whom great
surprises approach like angels from within and without; like
children who feared and loved the darkness of those evenings
that preceded the one evening; who felt how small, in those De-
cember days that prepared the festival, was the circle of lamplight
and how more and more mysteriously the room round about was
lost, so that one couldn't say at all where its walls were, and
whether one were not sitting at a round table in the middle of
the woods. . . . Until all the dark was changed into radiance,
so that one could see even the least things shining.

But for all this to happen, there must have been great winds;
one must have lived through long nights in which the storm was
everything nights and days that were veiled, half -lit and faint,
like a delaying of the morning merely until early evening, every-
thing, even to that great, still snowfall that fell and fell and caused
the world to move more gently, the day to pass more noiselessly,
and night to come more secretly . . .

i: J73

To Lou Andreas-Salome (November 9, 1903)

Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome
January 15, 1904

Lou, dear Lou, I am writing the date of your last letter over
mine, only because I want to know that nothing you have
written has been lost; the Italian postal service continually and in
every possible way lends support to such distrust.

Now, dear Lou, I am in my little gardenhouse, and after much
unrest it is the first quiet hour in it; now everything in the simple
room has its place, dwells and lives and lets day and night befall
it; and outside, where there was so much rain, is a spring after-
noon, are the hours of some spring that tomorrow perhaps will
no longer be, but that now seems to come from eternity: so very
poised is the light slender wind whose motion the leaves follow,
the laurel's shiny leaves and the modest leaf -bundles on the scrub-
oak bushes, so confident are the little reddish buds on the scarcely
emptied trees, and so great is the fragrance that arises from the
light grey-green narcissus field in my quiet garden valley that
the arch of an old bridge meditatively spans. I have swept the
heavy dregs of the rain from my flat roof and cleared withered
oak leaves off to one side and that has made me warm, and now,
after the little real work, my blood is ringing as in a tree. And for
the very first time in a long while I feel just a tiny bit free and
festive and as if you might walk into my home. . . . This happy
feeling too will pass again, and who knows whether, behind the
distant mountains, a rainy night is not in preparation that will
again flood over my roof, and a wrenching wind that will again
fill my ways with clouds.

But that this hour may not pass without my having written
you I do feel; for the few moments when I can write to you,
when I am peaceful, clear, and lonely enough to draw near you,
I may not lose, because I have much, much to say. In Paris, at
Durand-Ruel, once in the spring of last year, antique paintings
were exhibited, murals from a villa near Boscoreale being shown

once again in their fragmentary, interrupted continuity before
the hazard of auction tore them quite apart; they were the first an-
tique pictures I had seen, and I have seen no more beautiful ones
here, and they say that even the museum of Naples has no better
paintings of that almost completely vanished time which must
have had such great painters. Of these picture fragments one was
preserved whole and undisturbed, although it was the biggest
and perhaps the most sensitive; in this a woman was portrayed
quietly sitting with serious, calm countenance, listening to a man
who was speaking softly and lost in thought, speaking to him-
self and to her with that dark voice in which destinies that have
been are reflected like shores at dusk; this man, if I remember
rightly /had laid his hands on a staff, folded them on the staff,
with which he had long walked through distant lands; they were
resting while he spoke (as dogs lie down to sleep when their
master begins his tale and they see that it will last a long time ) ;
but although this man was already deep in his tale, probably had
a great stretch of memory before him still (level memory in which,
however, the path often turned unexpectedly), yet one knew
even at first glance that he was the one who had come, the traveler
to this quiet, stately woman, the stranger to this tall, home-filled
woman: so much was the quality of coming still in him, as it is
in a wave upon the beach, still, even when it is already withdraw-
ing, flat, shining like bright glass; the haste from which even a
riper wanderer is not quite free had not yet fallen entirely from
him; his feeling was still focused upon the unexpected and
changing, and the blood was still going in his feet which, more
excited than his hands, couldn't go to sleep. Thus were rest and
movement juxtaposed in this picture, not as contrast, rather as
an allegory, as a final unity that was slowly closing like a healing
wound; for even the movement was already rest, laying itself
down as quietly falling snow lies down, becoming landscape,
as snow does when it spreads itself over the shapes of distance, and
now the past, as it returned, took on the aspect of the eternal, re-
sembling those events that comprised and transfigured the life
of the woman.

140

I shall always know the way in which that great simple pic-
ture gripped me, that picture which was so very much painting
because it contained only two figures, and was so significant be-
cause those two figures were filled with themselves, heavy with
themselves, and joined together by an unparalleled necessity. As
the content of traditional legends is self-evident in good pictures,
so I understood the meaning of this picture at the first moment.
In that so thoroughly confused Paris time, when every painful
and difficult impression fell into my soul as from a great height,
the meeting with that beautiful picture acquired its decisive ac-
cent; as if, beyond all that was impending, I had been permitted
to look at something final, thus did the sight of it affect me and
uphold me. Then the courage to write you, dear Lou, came into
being; for it seemed to me as if every path, even the most con-
fused, could acquire sense through such a final return to a woman,
to the one woman dwelling in maturity and quiet, who is big
and, like a summer night, knows how to hear everything: the
little noises frightened of themselves and calls and bells. . . .

But 1, Lou, your somehow lost son, for a long, long time to
come I can be no teller of tales, no soothsayer of my way, no
describer of my past fortunes; what you hear is only the sound of
my step, still going on, still on undefined ways retreating, I do not
know from what, and whether it is drawing near to anyone I do
not know. Only that my mouth, when it has become a great
river, may sometime flow into you, into your hearing and into
the stillness of your opened depths that is my prayer, which I
say to every hour that is powerful, to every anxiety, longing, or
joy that can guard and grant anything. If my life is insignificant
even now and often and often seems to me like an untilled field
on which the weed is master and the birds of chance that search
fastidiously through its untended seed, it will be only when I
can tell it to you, and will be as you hear it!

To Lou Andreas-Salome Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

March 17, 1904

... I cannot help wondering every day whether the Russian
war has not brought terror and danger to your family: your
nephews, your mother, and you. That this evil had to come, this
burden, this suffering for thousands who all feel war the way
Garshin felt it: as calamity inflicted.

God, had I strength, strength-savings were I not living, as
I am, meagerly and fearfully enough even in this quiet, remote
life, on the daily bread of strength, had I become something real
(a doctor, which fundamentally I should have been ) , nowhere
but in those dressing stations where Russians are grievously and
terribly dying would be the place and the calling now for one
who might use and bow himself . . . .

"To Lou Andreas-Salome Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

Last day of March, 1904

Christos voskres! . . .

Ivanov and Gogol once wrote those words from here, and
many are still writing them now from here into their eastern
homeland. But alas, this is no Easter city and no country that
knows how to lie beneath great bells. It is all display without
.reverence, festival performance without festival.

For me it was Easter just once; that was the time in that long,
extraordinary, uncommon, excited night when people were all
milling about, and when Ivan Veliky struck me in the darkness,
stroke after stroke. That was my Easter, and I believe it will suffice
for a whole life; the message was given to me writ strangely large
in those Moscow nights, given into my blood and into my heart.
I know it now:

Christos voskres!

Yesterday they sang Palestrina in Saint Peter's. But it was noth-

ing. Everything dwindles away in that haughtily big, empty house
that is like a hollow chrysalis out of which a dark giant butterfly
has crept. But today for many hours, I was in a little Greek
church; a patriarch was there in a great robe, and through the
imperial door of the iconostas in a long file they brought him his
ornaments: his great crown, his staff of ivory, gold and mother-
of-pearl, a vessel with holy wafers and a golden chalice. And he
accepted everything and kissed the bearers, and they were all old
men who brought him those things. And later one saw them, those
old men with their golden mantles and their beards, standing in
the holy of holies about the great, simple, stone table reading for
a long time. And outside, before the wall of pictures stood to
right and left, facing one another, young convent pupils singing
to each other with heads uplifted and throats stretched, like black-
birds on spring nights.

Then, dear Lou, I said Christos voskres to you.

And then right afterward, when I came home, your card was
there on which it was written. I thank you.

And for the letter I thank you and for the dear picture. Much
more was fulfilled by them than the one request; past things
that were lost, and things to come that could not come, hold on
to them and climb up by them, dear Lou.

The war our war is almost like a physical unrest in me
but I read little about it because I am quite unused to newspapers
and they are abhorrent to me and because they do distort every-
thing. In the Zeit (daily sheet of the Zeit) there was a few days
ago the letter of a Russian officer which I am enclosing; of course
they didn't even have the tact to print this simple, tremulous
piece of news without an annoying introduction. Once I read
too that the war would probably last for years; Kuropatkin was
supposed to have said so; but that cannot really be possible! . . .

It is good that you are in your house with the flowers that want
to come; you are so near to your family too, and are after all at
home and having the spring of the winter that you have lived. But
your having been ill . . . ?

Be well, dear Lou, for yourself and for those who need you.

To Ellen Key Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

Easter Saturday, 1904 [April 2]

I am answering all in one your good letter to Clara Rilke and
the list of questions; I would like to have done it even earlier,
two days ago, but the changeable warm-cold beginning of spring
has, despite all precautions, again brought health disturbances, a
cold and pains, so that I couldn't write.

First, of the fact that to both of us, to Frau Clara and to me,
your dear letter was a great joy; it was in every respect full of the
way you are always and always so sweet and kind in thinking of
us did us good with every word.

You were sweet, so sweet to have had that thought about little
Ruth, my dear friend. We have pondered much over it and
spoken about it, and although we have finally had to see that the
carrying out of such a plan would be impossible for us and for
our feeling . . , still it was a joy to feel that you and your help
are always near and alert! Thank you!

It would be impossible, for one thing, on account of our now
being able to use only space, peace, and work and not being far
enough along even for a joy, not yet. But also on the little girl's
account this daring change would not be possible. In the end
it is really above all a question of her, of Ruth, of the growth of
her little life being as untransplanted and quiet as possible, and
not of us, of our joy in her. And we feel that in her present home
in the quiet country house and the big garden she has everything
that she needs and that we would give her if we could. There she
has the healthful and vegetarian way of life that suits her well;
as circumstances have now shaped themselves she has, over and
above the most necessary, the precious abundance of quiet coun-
try life, summer and winter, has my wife's little fourteen-year-
old brother for friend and playmate, and lastly is not in the
strangest of hands with my mother-in-law (a sensible and en-
ergetic woman who loves her above everything) . We believe too
that her little existence has already struck root in this ground and

*44

in the people who are about her, that one may not transplant her,
not for the sake of bringing her into more uncertain circum-
stances and to strangers. If Ruth were here, she would also have
to be entirely with us, and since that is impossible for both
parties, we must believe in that distant time when that will some-
how happen of itself which would now seem premature and
imprudent because, while it would indeed be the fulfillment of
our wish and our longing, it would not correspond to our reality
and to the necessary things that must now be done.

We may now think only of work, not of other things, not of
joy. Work itself must be the way that sometime will quietly and
naturally bring the three of us together again, through it every-
thing must happen, little by little and in long patience. For the
present the knowledge that our dear little girl has everything her
life needs for its best growth must make us happy and peaceful,
and so it does to a certain degree. . . . That is the way we think
and feel, dear Ellen Key, about all this, and you will understand
how we have to live it and carry it through. But we thank you
from our hearts for the care and love of your thought, which does
us good even by itself, through its mere effect. . . .

Now I will answer the question list:

I first read Jacobsen in 1896-97 in Munich. I was very im-
mature then and read sensing rather than observing, first Niels
Lyhne, later Maria Grubbe. Since then these books, to which
were added in 1898 the "six short stories" and the letters, have
been influential in all my developments; and even today my ex-
perience with them is that, wherever I may be standing, always,
every time I want to go on, I find the next, the next higher, the
approaching stage of my growth sketched out and already created
in them. In these books much of what the best people are seeking
even today is already found, derived from one life, at least.
Jacobsen and Rodin, to me they are the two inexhaustible ones,
the masters. Those who can do what I would sometime like to
be able to do. Both have that penetrating, devoted observation
of Nature, both the power to transform what they have seen into
reality enhanced a thousandfold. Both have made things, things

145

with many sure boundaries and countless intersections and pro-
files: that is how I feel their art and their influence. . . .

Immortality? I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.
But I believe that many people are not real. Many people and
many things. But that is hard to say, and I would like to avoid
stating that I share this or that opinion, because in every such
finished view something conclusive lies, whereas I nowhere feel
myself concluded and finished, am rather nothing but change.
I would like sometime to have an expression o] my very own for
all that and, as long as I cannot yet find it, to attach myself to no
opinion but simply to be silent and say: I do not know.

Similar is the answer with regard to the black monk in the
"White Princess." I meant nothing definite by him, I just
wanted to make a black monk in the landscape, against the sea;
I believe that the best figures are those which come into being
for their creator without ulterior motive, simply as figures. The
interpretation always rests with the reader and must be free and
unlimited by any preconceived name; with Rodin's figures, for
example, it is always so. He says: I make men and women, and
that is how it must be. One must, I believe, make men and women
without bothering about what they mean; the more meanings
there is room for in them, the broader and more real they are.
... I cannot say more; I felt that I had to have a figure for
something inexpressible, for the stage needs a figure where
otherwise perhaps words, verses, pauses might be : the figure
came and was the black monk, because once years ago in Viareg-
gio I had been deeply affected by the appearance of a begging
black monk. I was standing at the window, and when he stepped
into the garden, with his back toward the sea, a singular fear
came over me; it seemed to me that I must not move because,
having noticed me, he would interpret any movement as a beck-
oning, as a call, and would come . . . .

It is not impossible that among the women of my house were
also some of Slavic blood; though not in recent times. Since the
family settled in Bohemia, it was emphatically German in conse-
quence of the situation there which compels a clear distinc-

146

tion. But in earlier days at any rate (I still don't know enough
about it) a number of alliances may very well have taken place
through marriage with families of Bohemian stock. Much in me
speaks for it. The Czechs, it is true, are not close to me, nor are
the Poles (the union of Slavdom with the Catholic element has
for me something intolerable in it ). But you do know what
Russia is to me; what an event it was, finding it! And when I first
came to Moscow everything there was known and long familiar;
around Easter it was. And it touched me like my Easter, my
spring, my bells. It was the city of my oldest and deepest mem-
ories, it was a continual meeting again and greeting: it was
home. . . .

All, all kind things to you on your kind journey, dear friend.
Tell people that I need patience and forbearance, but that I am
all longing to do something good and important, something in
the deepest sense necessary! . . .

16* 3

To Lou Andreas-Salome Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

April 15, 1904

When as sometimes happens you are in a dream of mine,
then that dream and its afterring on the following day are more
real than all daily reality, are world and happening. I am thinking
about it because the night before the eleventh and that day (the
same on which you wrote your card) passed thus: in your pres-
ence which makes me peaceful, patient, and good.

There has been a lot of disturbance lately, and I had a presenti-
ment too that disturbance after disturbance would come when
I began my new work on the eighth of February; it became ap-
parent then that my mode of working (as well as my much more
receptive observation) had altered, so that I shall probably never
again manage to write a book in ten days (or evenings), shall
rather need for each a long and uncounted time; that is good, it
is an advance toward the always-working that I want to achieve
at any price; perhaps a first preliminary step in it. But in this

147

change lies also a new danger; to hold off all external disturbances
for eight or ten days is possible : but for weeks, for months?
This fear oppressed me, and perhaps that in itself was primarily to
blame for my work faltering and early in March breaking off,
And what I took for a little disconnection and pause has, in spite
of me, become a burdensome vacation that is still going on.

My mother came to Rome and is still here. I see her only rarely,
but as you know every meeting with her is a kind of setback.
When I have to see this lost, unreal woman who is connected
with nothing, who cannot grow old, I feel how even as a child
I struggled to get away from her, and fear deep within me lest
after years and years of running and walking I am still not far
enough ' from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make move-
ments that are the other half of her embittered gestures, bits of
memories that she carries about broken within her; then I have
a horror of her distraught pieties, of her obstinate faith, of all
those distorted and perverted things to which she has clung, her-
self empty as a dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her
child; that some scarcely recognizable wallpaper door in this
faded wall that doesn't belong to anything was my entrance into
the world (if indeed such an entrance can lead into the world
at all . . .) !

That is difficult and confusing for me who have so much to
make up and keep losing my courage. But there were other things
too. People, who were coming to Rome and (though I have no
social relations at all) expressed the intention of seeing me or
making my acquaintance. A few even had introductions to me,
and it cost me letters and apologies on all sides to hold them off.
... At the same time the spring was growing in abrupt shifts
of wind, and every day rose steeply from the frosty morning to
its noon overheated by the sun, in such a way that naturally I
did not escape a cold and the influenza-feeling. Ants in swarms
broke out of all the walls of my little house and attempted in-
vasion upon invasion. The first scorpions appeared, unusually
big and early. And finally the painter came from whom we had
taken over furniture in the fall (as a loan, unfortunately with

1 48

only a verbal and not sufficiently explicit understanding, accord-
ing to which we would be able to buy it later if necessary), this
painter returned to Rome and without further ado, forgetting
any agreement, wanted his property back, so that now my little
house, at one stroke, is almost empty. And after all I had looked
out for those things all winter, they were my family, and I
already had little roots in them. Now 1 am comforting myself
with the fact that for the present I have been allowed to keep a
bookcase and a bed, -that my standing desk belongs to me and
that it fits with summer not to have many things about me.

For what is going on here, heaven knows, has for three or four
days not been spring any more, has been dense, young summer.
The hyacinths in my little bed, which have long been hesitating,
are flinging open their blossom eyes like one hammered awake
by an alarm clock, and have already been standing there quite long
and straight. The elms and oaks by my house are full, the Judas
tree has shed its blossoms, and all its leaves will be ready over-
night; and a syringa tree that stretched out its clusters only three
days ago is already in process of fading and scorching. The
nights are scarcely cool any more, and the busy clamor of frogs
is their voice. The owls call less often, and the nightingale still
hasn't begun. Will she still sing now that it is summer?

Summer in Rome. That is a new misery. I thought it was still
far off and was longing, now when my mother will be gone again,
to have one or two not too oppressive months of work. And I am
still hoping that it is possible, that it will still be spring again after
a few trial summer days. (Aloreover I shall probably have to stay
on here in summer too, for I have scarcely any possibility of going
away, wouldn't know where to go, either. But that will only
be the question after next; the next is about work and composure
and I want to see that it is soon decided.)

It is beautiful here in the big garden, even though not much is
blooming there and though what is peculiarly Roman is perhaps
too loud, too penetrating, to be called spring. Even these meadows
full of anemones and daisies are too dense, too heavy, too tight-
meshed, and in the skies are none of those gray days behind still

_ ______ _ J49

empty trees, those wide, transforming winds and the softly fall-
ing rains that are for me the depth of all spring. It is, alas, a spring
for foreigners who have only a little time, obvious and loud and
exaggerated. But still there is a tree in the garden that might also
be standing in the Tuscan scene, in an old cloister: a tall old
cypress, all interleaved with a trail of wisteria that is now letting
its light blue-violet pendants climb and fall everywhere, even to
way up, out of the darkness of the tree; that is joy. That and
the glorious fig trees, like altar candlesticks out of the Old Testa-
ment standing there with their upward-curving branches and
slowly opening their light-green leaves.

And that I can now observe and learn all this calmly and pa-
tiently Is, I feel, a kind of progress and preparation; but, you
know, my progress is somehow like the faint steps of a convales-
cent, uncommonly weightless, tottering, and beyond measure
needing help. And the help is lacking. A help it would be to talk
to you of many things and to see you listening and keeping silent;
to read you something sometime. . . . But that writing you is
also a help, dear Lou, I know if I think of the years when I did
not have this refuge.

Please: And now do get well!

To Friedrich Westhoff Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

April 29, 1904

Through Mother we have heard of you often lately, and with-
out knowing anything more specific about you, we nevertheless
feel that you are having a hard time. Mother will not be able to
help you, for at bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life;
this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every
perplexity: that one is alone.

That isn't as bad as it may at first glance appear; and again it
is the best thing in life that each should have everything in him-
self: his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world. There
are moments, to be sure, when it is difficult to be in oneself and

to persist within one's own ego; it happens that at the very in-
stants when one should hold faster and one would almost have
to say more obstinately than ever to oneself, one attaches one-
self to something external, during important events transfers one's
own center out of oneself into something alien, into another
person. That goes against the very simplest laws of equilibrium,
and only difficulty can come of it.

Clara and I, dear Friedrich, have found ourselves and come to
an understanding in the very fact that all companionship can con-
sist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes,
whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by
nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons
himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give
themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no
longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a
continual falling. We have learned such things, my dear Fried-
rich, not without great pain, have learned what everyone who
wants his own life gets to know somehow or other.

Sometime when I am older and more mature I shall perhaps
get around to writing a book, a book for young people; not by
any means because I think I have been able to do anything better
than others. On the contrary, because from childhood on and
during my entire youth everything became so much more diffi-
cult for me than for other young people.

So I learned over and over again that there is scarcely anything
more difficult than to love one another. That it is work, day la-
bor, Friedrich, day labor; God knows there is no other word for
it. And look, added to this is the fact that young people are
not prepared for such difficult loving; for convention has tried
to make this most complicated and ultimate relationship into some-
thing easy and frivolous, has given it the appearance of every-
one's being able to do it. It is not so. Love is something difficult
and it is more difficult than other things because in other con-
flicts Nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take
themselves firmly in hand with all their strength, while in the
heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

But just think, can that be anything beautiful, to give oneself away
not as something whole and ordered, but haphazard rather, bit
by bit, as it comes? Can such giving away, that looks so like a
throwing away and dismemberment, be anything good, can it be
happiness, joy, progress? No, it cannot. . . . When you give
someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don't you? But
young people who love each other fling themselves to each other
in the impatience and haste of their passion, and they don't notice
at all what a lack of mutual esteem lies in this disordered giving
of themselves, they notice it with astonishment and indignation
only from the dissension that arises between them out of all
this disorder. And once there is disunity between them, the
confusidn grows with every day; neither of the two has anything
unbroken, pure, and unspoiled about him any longer, and amid
the disconsolateness of a break they try to hold fast to the sem-
blance of their happiness (for all that was really supposed to be
for the sake of happiness) . Alas, they are scarcely able to recall
any more what they meant by happiness. In his uncertainty each
becomes more and more unjust toward the other; they who
wanted to do each other good are now handling one another in
an imperious and intolerant manner, and in the struggle somehow
to get out of their untenable and unbearable state of confusion,
they commit the greatest fault that can happen to human rela-
tionships: they become impatient. They hurry to a conclusion,
to come, as they believe, to a final decision, they try once and
for all to establish their relationship, whose surprising changes
have frightened them, in order to remain the same now and
forever (as they say). That is only the last error in this long
chain of errings linked fast to one another. What is dead can-
not even be clung to (for it crumbles and changes its character) \
how much less can what is living and alive be treated definitively,
once and for all. Self -transformation is precisely what life is, and
human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most
changeable of all, rising and falling from minute to minute, and
lovers are those in whose relationship and contact no one mo-
ment resembles another. People between whom nothing accus-

tomed, nothing that has already been present before ever takes
place, but many new, unexpected, unprecedented things. There
are such relationships which must be a very great, almost un-
bearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich
natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly
ordered and composed; they can unite only two wide, deep, in-
dividual worlds. Young people it is obvious cannot achieve
such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life
properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare them-
selves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are
beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love, must learn love,
and that (like all learning) wants peace, patience, and composure!

To take love seriously and to bear and to learn it like a task,
this it is, Friedrich, that young people need. Like so much else,
people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have
made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play
and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing
happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happi-
ness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try
to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go
into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must
work; he must become something!

For, Friedrich, believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that
one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his
life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

One must never despair if something is lost to one, a person or
a joy or a happiness; everything comes back again more glori-
ously. What must fall away, falls away; what belongs to us re-
mains with us, for everything proceeds according to laws that are
greater than our insight and with which we are only apparently
at variance. One must live in oneself and think of the whole of
life, of all its millions of possibilities, expanses, and futures, in
the face of which there is nothing past and lost,

We think so much about you, dear Friedrich; our conviction
is this: that in the confusion of events you would long ago, by
yourself, have found your own solitary way out, which alone

can help, were not the whole burden of your year of military
service still lying upon you. ... I remember that after my
locked-up military school period my craving for freedom and
my distorted consciousness of self (that had to recover only
gradually from the bendings and bruises that had been admin-
istered to it) would drive me into perplexities and desires that da
not belong at all to my life, and it was my good fortune to have
my work: in it I found myself and I am finding myself in it daily
and am no longer looking for myself elsewhere. That is what we
both do; that is Clara's life and mine. And you will also come
to that, very certainly. Be of good courage, all is before you,.
and time passed in the difficult is never lost. . . .

To Ellen Key Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

April 29, 1904

My friend, is it very indiscreet of me to long so much to hear
from you again? Please, when a more quiet hour comes for you,
write me a few words about how it was in Goteborg and in Co-
penhagen what it meant to you and how people received it. You
did send me a newspaper, but in the first place, it is in Swedish,
and in spite of industrious spelling out and guessing, we did not
grasp much of its account, and in the second place, I would
like to know not about the external course of your lectures,
rather about the inner life that was in you, dear Ellen Key, and
that you felt in those to whom you spoke. How did you feel it?
How was it? Is it indiscreet of me to ask about it?

In the meantime I have received through the Insel publishing
house the proofs of that translated fragment of your lecture that
was to go in front of the book about God. Let me tell you first
of all that those loving words which so delicately trace out my
delicate seeking touched me infinitely; if now (in agreement with
the publishers) I nevertheless do not want to place this fragment
in front of the Stories of God, it happens from the following
feeling:

Those words, which are built up over passages from my recent
letters like a quiet little church, lead and point too far out beyond
the God book, which came into being four years before, clarify
it too much, are keys to all its doors. Now I believe that this
book, in which everything is anticipation (anticipated fear and
anticipated joy), cannot well stand such an elucidation, that it
must remain as it is, in all its darkness, that it must be alone with
itself. The more so as with those words that point out beyond it
not only is the old storybook about God placed in too bright a
light (so that one sees its cracks and defects) but also a new
book I am writing and with which I shall perhaps have to wrestle
for a long time yet would appear too soon given away and dis-
cussed. All of a sudden it seems to me dangerous to see my newer
letter passage beside the clumsier, shyer words of the book about
God; just because they stem from a so much further stage of
development of the same thought cycle, they are hostile to the
earlier transitions and do not look well beside them, rather the
way with many plants it hurts to see blossoms and fruits side by
side on the same stem. Above all then, for the sake of those
<words of mine I shall not use that fragment as introduction to the
new edition of the storybook; the book about God will come
out alone, 'without a foreword, as it did the first time! You will
understand my reasons no differently than as I mean and say
them, dear Ellen Key, and you did also give me the right to tie
and loosen and be master of the words that were destined for
this purpose.

Remarkably strongly the words of that fragment point to my
growing book which will also be a book about God; this came
about in part through the letters I wrote you from the midst of
work, but also your kind and deep understanding of those
passages led you close to the ways that, laboriously and with dif-
ficulty, I am now trying to go. Again I have had bad weeks,
from indisposition, hindrances, scribbling of all sorts and from
the sudden high midsummer heat that broke in upon us with full
force about ten days ago, crippling and destructive, heavy as lava.

Now it has turned cooler again and I hope to become capable

of work and effective again; for I long to get on with my
work which is dear to me above everything, and to get through
at least a section before the big Roman heat comes and with it
the necessity of going away from here. . . .

My wife sends you, dear Ellen Key, the most cordial of greet-
ings. We rejoice in the good news of you and both think of you
a great deal, gratefully and with love!

Postscript:

My wife is very depressed by the climate, and (in spite of the
fact that Italy has its benefits) I believe we (I too) do need the
north soon again, distance, wind! It is sad for us to see this
rapid, redundant, galloping spring that is a continual fading
and burning up, and all our longing is with the slow, hesitant
coming of northern spring days, with the great and heavy trans-
formations of northern Nature in whose existence each little
flower is a life, a world, a beginning, a destiny: a great deal. What
is one little flower here where there are millions of blossoms! . . .

To Lou Andreas-Salome Villa Strohl-Fern, Rome

May 12, 1904

Your letter, dear Lou, I have read often; it was just and good.
When it came there was a great, quiet evening over the garden,
and I read it slowly on the flat roof of my little house and pon-
dered over it a long time. Perhaps, said something in me, I shall
begin something good tomorrow morning, perhaps. And amid
much suppressed hope there was a little bit of gladness in me :

That was not to blossom; for the burden of my vacation time
increased with every day. It had gradually grown cooler, and the
disturbances had receded, and nevertheless things wouldn't be-
gin to get better in me. . . .

With this clear experience is linked the necessity for new de-
cisions, and before I set about making one or another, I would
like to tell you, dear Lou, a few things about myself, as well as
I am able in these ineffectual days. Perhaps you will say some-

J56

thing to me in connection with this or that; which would mean a
great deal to me; you know how much. (But if you are now in
work, at your beloved work, put this letter aside, because it
comes from a restless man; he can wait; he can wait as long as
you want.)

And then see:

I have rented my little gardenhouse in the park of the Villa
Strohl-Fern until fall (until October). I hoped to be able to stay
on in it all summer (or at least the greater part of it); now I
know that is not to be thought of. But I had the further intention
of keeping the house for still a year more: for where should I
ever find such another? A tiny little house, all to myself, with big
windows and flat roof -terrace, containing a spacious bright simple
room, and situated deep, deep in a private garden, inaccessible
and secluded, and far removed from traffic and noise a feeling
advised me to hold on to this place where all that can be mine,
as long as the otherwise so uncertain and intolerable external
circumstances of life in any way permit it; but now this same
feeling tells me that I might persist in such favorable living pos-
sibilities only if it all lay under a healthier sky, under which one
may live all year without fear and dread. The fall was bad here,
the winter^ with so much sirocco and the long rain, oppressive,
and the spring everybody extols so is only a hastening into the
dangerous summer, like a descent without a stopping place.
What is more, people who live here maintain that one gets along
with the Roman climate best as a novice, later worse and worse
from year to year, and that one becomes more and more defense-
less against the seasickness-mood of the sirocco days.

And in addition (something that I already felt a year ago in
Viareggio, where I attributed it to other circumstances ) I
must in the past years have got far, far away from things Italian.
My feeling everything so differently now from formerly is per-
haps contributed to by my being in Rome and not in the Tuscan
country which, with Botticelli and the Robbias, with marble-
white and sky-blue, with gardens, villas, roses, bells, and foreign
girls, spoke so intimately to me : but speak it did (and Rome

'57

speaks too), it did not keep silent and did not bluster: it spoke.
It talked until my cheeks glowed (and I sometimes wonder
whether that was the good and important thing for me and
whether my first Viareggio, which closed with so great an ex-
penditure into nothing, with such fireworks, was not already a
proof that Italian influence is not among the things that really
advance me) .

However that may be, in any case more northern and more
serious countries have since educated my senses to the subdued
and simple, so that they now feel what is glaring and strong,
schematic and uninflected in Italian things as a relapse into picture-
book instruction. It came about quite of itself that I received and
learned this very obvious and showy spring from a purely bo-
tanical point of view, with the objective and quiet attentiveness
which my observation is more and more assuming, that its move-
ments and voices and the upward flight and course of its birds
interested me quite objectively, without my ever sensing it as
something entire, living, mysterious, as soul alive and bordering on
my soul. I noted details, and since I have heretofore observed so
little and in mere looking, as in so much, am a beginner I was
content with such occupation, making progress in it. But if once
it happened that I expected or needed something from the whole,
I opened up and shut again, empty, and hungered deeply. As it
would for a lung in a stuffy room, so it became difficult for my
soul in an exhausted world into which nothing new comes with
the spring, nothing distant and incalculable. I felt the great pov-
erty that lies in richness: how with us a flower, a little first flower
that struggles and comes, is a world, a happiness, to participate
in which is infinitely satisfying, and how here herds of flowers
come without anything stirring in one, without anything partici-
pating and feeling akin and sensing its own beginning in other
things. Here everything is given over to the easy, to the easiest
side of the easy. Flowers come and blossoms, anemones bloom
and wisteria, and one says it to oneself and says it again, as to
someone hard of hearing. But it is all so ensnaringly sham and
make-believe; colors are there, to be sure, but they always sub-

ordinate themselves lazily to some cheap shade and do not de-
velop from out of themselves. The Judas tree bloomed., bloomed,
and bloomed, its redundant, unfruitful bloom welling even out
of its trunk like blood-sodden mesentery, and in a few weeks
everything: anemones and clover and syringas and starflowers,
everything was purple with its purple, for God knows what rea-
sons from laziness, from accommodation, from lack of original
ideas. And even now the red roses, fading, are taking on this
corpselike purple, and the strawberries have it if they stand for
a day, and the sunsets puff it out, and it appears in the clouds in the
evening and in the morning. And the skies in which such cheap
plays of color take place are shallow and as if choked with sand;
they are not everywhere, they do not play about things like the
skies of the moor, of the sea, and of the plains, are not endless
beginning of distance, are finish, curtain, end; and behind the
last trees, which stand flat like theater wings against this indiffer-
ent photographic background, everything ceases. It is indeed a
sky over something past; drained, empty, forsaken sky, sky-shell
from which the last sweetness has long ago been drunk. And as
the sky is, so are the nights, and as the nights are, so is the voice
of the nightingales. Where nights are vast, their tone is deep, and
they bring it from infinitely far away and carry it to the end.
Here the nightingale is really just a little lustful bird with a
shallow song and an easily satisfied longing. In two nights even
one becomes accustomed to its call, and one notes it with an in-
ner reserve, as if fearing to hurt one's own memories by any
more interest, the memories of nightingale-nights that are quite,
quite different.

Exhibition atmosphere, so typical of the city, is also the most
obvious characteristic of the Roman spring: it is spring exhibi-
tion that takes place here, not spring. The foreigners indeed en-
joy it and feel themselves honored like little sovereigns in whose
honor everything is shined up; for these respectable Germans,
Italy must always have been a kind of royal journey with tri-
umphal arches, flowers, and fireworks. But, in a certain sense, they
are right: they come down here, weary of having winter, of

making fires and of darkness, and find ready-made here all that
is sunny and comfortable. More they do not ask. And of this sort
too was probably the effect I sometimes used to get from Arco or
from Florence and the benefit connected with it. But if as a
native one has seen the whole winter here (full of the morose
persistence of that which cannot die), then the miracle that is
supposed to come fails. One knows that that isn't a spring, for
one has seen none coming, that these blossoms have had as little
difficulty in appearing at this place or that as decorations, for
instance, have in being put up somewhere. And one compre-
hends so well the illusory life of this past people, the empty phrases
of its descendant-art, the garden-flower-beauty of D'Annunzio's
verses. '

It is good that I have experienced all this so slowly and so con-
cretely, for Italy had still been a summons for me and an un-
finished episode. But now I can leave it, comforted, for the
end is here.

It will be hard for me, to be sure, because this little house stands
on this spot and cannot be taken along and set up again in an-
other, more northern garden; hard, because the new break comes
unexpectedly and leads into the uncertain; hard because I am
tired anyway of breaking off and starting again,

... As to the question of earning a living, which bobs up
again, threatening and demanding, with every change, there is
this to say: that I am not closing my eyes to it and am not putting
it off until it returns more urgently; I see it and always know
that it is there. If nevertheless in the present choice of place I do
not give it the most important voice, this is from the ever-growing
conviction that my bread must one day come to me out of rny
work; for it is work and as such necessary, and it must be possible
(or become possible) to do it and to live, if only it is done well.
Art is indeed a longest life-path, and when I think how trifling
and elementary is what I have heretofore done, it does not sur-
prise me that this achievement (which resembles a foot-wide strip
of half-tilled land) does not nourish me. Plans do not bear, and
what is prematurely sovm does not come up. But patience and

i6o

work are real and can change at any moment into bread. . . .

That is why, everything else aside, I want to decide on my
next place of sojourn by my work and only by it. ...

The works I have in mind and which are to occupy me in turn
are:

1. The "Prayers," which I want to continue.

2. My new book (whose firm, close-knit prose is a schooling
for me and an advance that had to come so that later sometime
I could write everything else the military novel too),

3. An attempt at a drama.

4. Two monographs:

The Poet: Jens Peter Jacobsen.
The Painter: Ignacio Zuloaga.

Both of these necessitate trips. The first a trip to Thisted and
a stay in Copenhagen, the second a trip through Spain. (Zuloaga
was, beside Rodin, the only person with whom I was closely and
long in contact during my stay in Paris and whose importance
and worth I feel and can say. Or shall be able to say. Sometime
I will tell you about him.)

But there is no hurry about these travels and books; probably
I shall get first to Jacobsen. You can't imagine how necessary he
has become to me; by always new paths I have gone to him, often
alone, often with my wife (who reads him so well and so lov-
ingly) ; indeed, it is even true that when one goes anywhere in
the important one can be sure of coming out at a place where
he too is (if one goes far enough) ; and how singular it is to find
that his and Rodin's words agree often to the point of congruity:
then one has that crystal-clear feeling one gets in mathematical
demonstrations the moment two distant lines, as if out of eternity,
meet at one point, or when two big complex numbers, that do
not resemble each other, simultaneously withdraw in order,
jointly, to acknowledge a single simple symbol as the thing that
matters. Singularly untouched joy comes from experience of
that sort.

Besides these works, to accompany and supplement them, I
have in mind several studies. I am already beginning to learn

Danish, chiefly so that I can read Jacobsen and various things
of Kierkegaard in the original.

Then I began something in Paris that I would like to con-
tinue: reading in the big German dictionary of the Grimm
brothers, from which, it seemed to me, a writer can derive much
wealth and instruction. For indeed one really ought to know
and be able to use everything that has once entered into the lan-
guage and is there, instead of trying to get along with the chance
supply that is meager enough and offers no choice. It would be
good if a pursuit like this led me now and then to read a me-
dieval poet; that Gothic, which architecturally had so much to
give that is unforgettable and vast, shouldn't it also have had and
worked on a plastic language, words like statues and sentences
like rows of pillars? I know nothing, nothing of it. Nothing, I
feel, of all that I would like to know. There are so many things
some old man should tell one about while one is little; for when
one has grown up, knowing them would be a matter of course.
There are the starry heavens, and I don't know what people have
already learned about them, why, not even the order of the
stars do I know. And so it is with flowers, with animals, with the
simplest laws that are operative here and there and go through
the world in a few strides from beginning to end. How life
comes into being, how it functions in lower animals, how it
branches and unfolds, how life blossoms, how it bears: all that I
long to learn. Through participation in it all to bind myself
more firmly to the reality that so often denies me, to exist, not
only through feeling but also through knowledge, always and
always: this it is, I believe, that I need in order to become more
secure and less homeless. You will feel that I do not want sci-
ences, for any one of them require a lifetime, and no life is long
enough for its beginning; but I would like to stop being a person
shut out, one who cannot read the deeper tidings of his time,
that point further on and reach further back, a prisoner who
senses everything but hasn't the little certainty of whether it is
at the moment day or evening, spring or winter. I would like,
somewhere where it can be done, to learn that which I probably

1 62

would know if I had had a chance to grow up in the country
and among more essential people, and that which an impersonal
and hasty schooling failed to tell me, and the rest, since discovered
and recognized and belonging to it. It is not art history and other
histories, not the nature of philosophic systems that I would like
to learn, I want a chance to get and earn for myself just a few
great and simple certainties that are there for everyone; I want a
chance to ask a few questions, questions such as children ask,
unrelated for those outside, but full of family likeness for me who
know their birth and genealogy to the tenth generation.

May 13, 1904

Up to now universities have given me so little every time; I
seem to feel such an aversion to their ways. But it lies also with
my clumsiness which never and nowhere understands how to
take; with my not having the presence of mind to recognize
what I need; and of course one thing I haven't yet had either,
the most important: patience. Perhaps that has all improved
now; I shall no longer lack patience, at least, in anything. And if
I don't attempt as before to hear disciplines read, in which one
can be of this or that opinion words about words, conceptions
of conceptions , but hear something real said, something new, to
which all that is premonition in me says yes, I shall not even
notice any unpleasantness in the external conditions or shall
quietly endure it for the sake of what is important. I miss a
learning-time of that sort more than anything else, not only be-
cause I do not know so much that is simple and essential, but also
because I always imagine that for me it must be the path on
which I shall finally be able to help myself alone to what I shall
later need in each case. That I am unable to do this, that I am
helpless when left alone among books, a child whom one must
lead out again, continually holds me up, dismays me, makes me
sad, perplexed. If the pursuit of some scientific study were slowly
to result in my learning to survey a subject, to sift and read the
existing bibliography (not even to mention the finding), if I
were to make my own the ability to study older books and old

163

manuscripts too in short, if I might acquire on the side a little
of the historian's craft and the archivist's patience and might hear
spoken a few real truths and perceptions , then any place would
suit me which would afford me such. It seems to me that without
acquisitions of this kind I cannot take my next forward steps;
after the Rodin monograph I thought of one on Carpaccio, later
of one on Leonardo: what I lack for these is not an art historian's
knowledge (which is just what I would like to avoid), but rather
the simple craft of the research worker, the technical assurance
and practice for which I must often envy quite young people; to
the great libraries here and in Paris I lacked the key, the inner
directions for use (to put it tritely), and my reading was fortui-
tous reading because, for want of preparation, it couldn't turn
into work. With my education, over which no plan lay, and with
the intimidation in which I grew up (everywhere running into
laughter and superiority and pushed back by everybody into my
own clumsiness), it came about that I never got to learn at all
much preparatory matter and most of the technical material
of life, which later are effortless for everyone; my feeling is full
to the brim of memories of moments when everyone about me
knew and could do something and did it mechanically without
thinking, while I, embarrassed, didn't know how to go about
anything, wasn't even capable of watching and copying others.
Like one who finds himself in a game the rules of which he doesn't
know , I feel like a knot in the thread on thousands of occa-
sions. Then I am a hindrance to others and a cause of annoyance
but the same deficiencies hold me back myself and disconcert
me.

Once I sat a whole summer on the Schonaich's estate, alone
in the family library whose archives are crammed with old
correspondence and records and documents; I felt in every nerve
the immediate proximity of destinies, the stirring and rising of
figures from which nothing separated me but the foolish inability
to read and decipher old symbols and to bring order into the un-
sifted confusion of those papers. What a good, industrious sum-
mer that could have been had I understood a little of the archi-

164

vist's craft; something like a Maria Grubbe would perhaps have
been given me in substance; at any rate I would have learned and
gathered much from such close contact with the still untold hap-
penings while as it was I only got new proof every day of my
unfitness, of that being shut out, which life keeps making me ex-
perience whenever I want to approach it anywhere.

And not for work on monographs alone, for every work I do t
I shall more and more miss such preparation and perspective;
for my plans connected with things Russian, for instance, it has
always been a hindrance and the reason why I progress so slowly
in them. But wouldn't a schooling such as I have in mind (without
being able to picture it exactly) enable me more surely to attack
and hold on to all my work, wouldn't it too be a means of reach-
ing that "tou jours travailler" which is what matters?

So in sum my study projects read thus:

1. I want to read books on natural sciences and biology and
hear lectures that will stimulate the reading and learning of such
things. (See experiments and preparations.)

2. I want to learn work with archives and history, in so far as
this is technique and craft.

3. I want to read the Grimm brothers' dictionary, simultane-
ously with medieval writings.

4. I want to learn Danish.

5. To continue reading Russian and now and then to trans-
late from the Russian.

6. To translate from the French a book of the poet Francis
Jammes.

And to read carefully the following books: Michelet's natural-
history studies and his history of France; the Eighteenth Century
of the Goncourts . . . and other things.

I thought for a while of attempting all this in Copenhagen; of
going there in the fall and working there.

But against it is

the fact that I make my projected studies more difficult for
myself if I go into a country with a foreign language, where hear-

165

ing lectures has less sense and everything practical (such as the use
of libraries, collections, and laboratories) also becomes compli-
cated.

The fact that Copenhagen is a very big city and perhaps not
beneficial to my health.

. . . Do you know besides that just now in Copenhagen (in
the Student Club, before a very full hall) someone spoke about
my books? Yes, it really came about that Ellen Key, with a big
lecture manuscript dealing only with my works, traveled to
Stockholm, to Copenhagen and into God knows what Swedish
cities on my account! There she told people about me, and
now, she writes me, many are beginning to buy and read my
books; and through this it was that she wanted to be useful and
to help me. But not satisfied with that, she wants to have pub-
lished in a Swedish periodical, and (translated) in a German one,
a big essay which grew out of those lectures. She is a dear and
capable person and has gradually become an indispensable friend
to both of us, to my wife and to me (yes, even to little Ruth). I
understand well and with heartfelt gratitude the nature of her
help and activity, although I distinctly feel that such intercession
for me is in no way justifiable; just now, while it is going on,
I am watching her undertaking (confidentially speaking) with
terror : for in reality and to less charitable eyes, nothing has
actually been done, nothing demonstrable. A few things in the
Book about God, in In My Honor and in The Book of Pictures
(of the "Prayers" she knows nothing) could speak for me; but
I am afraid she has presented all that as much less mixed and has
given everything a semblance of conclusiveness which it doesn't
possess and in which people will feel cheated when they buy my
books now. Also she has based much of what she said (as it seems
I am not acquainted with the essay yet, only a small fragment
of it) on passages from my letters of recent years and has found
out the sort of things that cannot be deduced from my thus far
published works. And over and above all this I feel: if anybody
needs seclusion, it is I. (Every line and every perplexity of this

i66

letter, but also that in which it is determined, speaks for it .)
Nevertheless, I do see that I must agree to everything that can
support my existence and prolong the possibility of remaining
at my work. And for that such a being named and proclaimed is
surely good. Furthermore that has all come through the lips of
a refined and discreet person and (even if it has happened much
too early) can have no bad consequences. It also turned out in
due course that there were young people here and there in Sweden
who already knew about me, even some who could recite verses
from my books by heart; and it came to light incidentally that
one of the young Swedish writers was just in the process (in-
dependently and without knowledge of Ellen Key's intention)
of collecting material for an essay on my work. . . .

Dear Lou, if it were possible to meet you this summer, do,
please, let it be possible. I see for miles around no thought, no
confidence, in which I believe so much that they would help me.

Meantime comes this letter, running through two days with
its length and making many presumptuous demands upon you;
be very indulgent toward it. The writing of it has helped me
infinitely; it has been like an activity after all these weeks of im-
mobile inner numbness. There are, as I come to think of it,
certain little animals, beetles, and insects, that fall into such states
of arrested life if one touches them or comes near them; often I
have watched them, have noticed that they let themselves be
rolled along like things, that they do everything to be as like
things as possible: they do this when they see a danger's bigness
coming toward them and want to save themselves. Has my
condition like causes? Is this becoming numb and keeping still
that goes to my very core, up to the very entrance of my heart's
chambers, an instinctive defense by which something that can
annihilate me is to be deceived? Who knows?

I will trust and not count the time and will wait for it to pass,
But then bestir myself, for nothing has yet been done. . . .

i6 7

To Clara Eilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
July 9, 1904

... a big wind is coming over from the Sund, the garden is
foaming, and when one looks up, one sees very bright little
patches of distant meadows appearing and vanishing behind the
flickering leaves of the bushes. In the beds the roses are begin-
ning to blossom, rather stunted roses for which no one really
has time, blossom and fade, very quickly it seems to me. Today's
storm is casting off many that yesterday were not yet there, and
now they lie in the grass like torn-up letters. In the wallflower
bed a spray of blossoms has been open for days, but big mallows,
dahlias, and many other things are all still to come. In the many-
branched, wonderfully drooping laburnum tree, are hanging
the little grey-violet pod-bundles of its fruits and their pallor
permeates the whole tree and withdraws it from all the rest,
makes it recede, veils it almost. In the round, tower-high haw-
thorn shrub the little rose-blossom bouquets have turned brown,
but behind it the white jasmine is still blooming in single dense-
white blossoms, visible from way off, that are grouped together
like constellations, far apart for all their nearness. And very large,
like the beginnings of some piece of yellowish Brussels lace, lie the
large, flat blossom-patches of the elder bushes in their taffeta-
dull foliage. And their smell on still mornings (when their scent
is not torn and can collect and concentrate itself) is like the
strong scent of the sweat of young girls who have chased each
other and have run over meadows and are now arriving hot and
disheveled, with a strained, almost angry seriousness in their faces
and quite exhausted laughter. But today, in the blow, every
scent is thin, fluid, passes by, comes back weak and mingled with
distance and again goes by. From the walnut tree and from the big
full chestnuts, torn-off fruits strike with a hard, startling clang,
and down below the little river is all combed up on its surface
and ruffling up against the Sund that pushes it back into its mouth.

i68

The bulls, far away on the westward pasture, are quiet, multi-
colored, massive things, but the calves yonder are merry and play-
ful, and sweep along with them the horses that suddenly come gal-
loping up, turn, trot and assemble with sturdy action. And above,
sky in misty, distant, transparent white that has slowly formed out
of mounting clouds, while the sun kept breaking through and
disappearing, so that the day already seems very long.

Fraulein Larsson went to Lund this morning, and I am sitting
under the big walnut tree (as long as it isn't raining yet) and am
quite alone at Borgeby gard, of whose history and inhabitants I
already know a great deal now; much from old descriptions la-
boriously picked out in Swedish, still more that is conjecture and
much that I merely sense. Before me stands Bishop Birger's tower,
quite spoiled by the restoration of the next to last owner, but still
his tower, a thing known and discussed among the people of
all Skane. In the church, under the bell-loft, is preserved (care-
lessly enough) a triptych portraying Hans Spegel, knight and
chamberlain of Frederick II, and the two so very dissimilar mis-
tresses of his house. And in the narrow, prisonlike crypt, under
the nave, three skulls and a few strong masculine bones lie be-
tween crumbled bits of coffin and belong perhaps to the picture
under the bells. And on the western gable of the house, simply
wrought like iron fastenings, are still the initials of Hans Spegel's
heirs: <B,"Otto Lindenow and his wife Elsa Juel 1638." Then
came owner after owner, many from Sweden's greatest families,
Counts von Trolle, von Bonde, Barons von Ramel, von Hastfer,
Counts De Geer and von Wachtmeister (from whom Hanna
Larsson acquired the castle). It passed from name to name, be-
cause it was always handed down as an inherited estate on the
maternal side from daughter to daughter and with each of their
husbands got a new master. Nevertheless the women were always
the real proprietors, whether it was that they were more indus-
trious and more often in residence than the foreign lords to whom
they gave themselves, whether (as happened mostly) it was that
they outlived them, long outlasted them: for they were all of an
upright, sturdy house that bore aging. Of all these no sign nor

169

evidence has remained here; it is to be assumed that the last counts
who were its lords, allied by marriage to those old families, took
off everything in any way relating to them. Only for that one
lady of the house of Hastfer there are two old, weather-beaten
memorial stones in the park that speak gently of a life gently
passed. The one stone was erected by Colonel Carl Bergenstrahle
for Brita Sophie Hastfer who, after a long maidenhood, became
his wife at the age of 43, and also records her death, which took
place 1 3 years later. The other stone (without date) comes from
the son of a sister of Brita Sophie (who was childless) and only
says once more that she was dear and good and that they cannot
forget her.

So it was always women's destinies that passed away at Borgeby
gard, flowed along, or hesitated to pass on. And strangely: again
(after Fraulein Larsson's father bought it) it has come into a
daughter's hands; again, as five and six centuries ago, a strong,
prudent woman is residing at Borgeby, of an old peasant family,
energetic and good and capable of outliving perhaps many suitors.

And in the tops of the old beech trees dwell the tribes of ravens,
hundreds and hundreds of them; and when in the evening they
fly in, in flocks, screaming, the treetops grow small under them;
and when swarm upon swarm goes up once more and mounts and
circles, there is a noise as of many dresses and fans, only much
louder. And surely there is one among them, an old one with a
good memory for tradition, who in his thoughts is continuing
the chronicle of Borgeby and (in the foreshortening in which
he sees her) comparing Hanna Larsson with Brita Sophie, with
Vivika Bonde, and with Elsa Maltesdotter Juel! . . .

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
July 19, 1904

. . . Saturday toward eight, we drove in the carriage to
Bjerred (station for the train to Lund), which is at the same

time a little seaside resort, and from a wooden bridge built far
out into the quiet sea watched the evening dying away in many
cloudy and watery grays. Yesterday, Monday, I was in Lund and
on the way home in the evening spent another hour alone on
that wooden bridge. It was the evening of a very windy day, and
the broad storm thrust a tremendous night-gray cloud-continent
over the sky and set free the sun that was sinking , so that two
seas lay beneath it, separated by a strip of dazzling radiance: a
wholly shadowed, gray, restrained, heavy one and a light, ani-
mated, shiny one that quivered far and wide and without ceasing
and whispered excitedly to itself.

After two days of great warmth we are having a big, powerful
wind; unfortunately one doesn't feel it in the windows because
the house stands behind its walls of tree and bush as in a room.
But outside, on the road that forms the margin of the park toward
the meadows, it is very big, and the rustling and shaking of the
trees is full of passion.

Today, toward morning, a little horse was born in the pasture.
I think I on my early walk was the first to see it. Little, light
brown, scrubby, with a short neck, slightly dizzy head motions,
narrow little body bound about the ribs, it stood on four stiff,
much too long legs very close by its brown, relieved mother who
slowly and cautiously began to graze. . . .

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
July 24, 1904, Sunday, toward evening

... I am not idle, and there is nothing lazy in me; all sorts
of currents and a stirring that through depth and surface is the
same. A very good stirring. I am not even writing a journal,
just keep hoping to get through all sorts of letters yet to be
written and to read my way through all sorts of books yet to be
read. That I am making attempts to read Danish, three to four
hours a day, is something too and wants time and gets it, and

111

wants strength. In spite of all this it seems to me that I am
building; at the invisible, at the most invisible, at some founda-
tion; no that is too much; but that I am breaking ground for
something that is to be erected there sometime; a perfectly in-
conspicuous activity for which day laborers and hod carriers
suffice (one thinks).

That is only to say how matters stand here; it is said without
complaint and without regret. Perhaps it would be best if I
christened this time recreation, and lived it that way (one
shouldn't mix recreation and work, half and half, as is always
happening out of faintheartedness and failing strength), but for
that I do lack the zest, lack something or other that I ought to
have done beforehand. A point of departure, a testimonial, an
examination passed before myself.

Well, even so, the way it is and is going, this time will be good
for me, if not in collecting, still in preparing to collect myself.
Summer was really never and nowhere my high time. Always and
everywhere the point was to live through it; but the autumn this
year should be mine again. If I were then living in a quiet room
among great autumnal broadleaved trees, near the sea, alone and
well and left in peace (and this might all by most fortunate chance
be found near Copenhagen and the Sund), a great deal could
alter in my life, much good could then be brought into the
world.

. . . Petri. Yes, I too remember an excellent conversation with
him about Edgar Allan Poe. A lot in it was vital, though in a
temperamental direction especially there were disagreements we
did not clear away. He is growing without doubt, which is why
he is in great straits too, and that is the sympathetic thing about
him: that he remains in great straits. For years in continually new
straits, in genuine (even if perhaps self -sought, invoked) straits.
May he never find his way out of them: musicians are full of ways
out, corresponding to the easy solutions their art puts at their
disposal. Only when they despise and reject solution after solu-
tion, as Beethoven did in his living or Bach in his praying, do they
grow. Otherwise they simply increase in circumference.

. . . Taken absolutely, without regard to the inferior con-
versation that fills up the whole world, even the most admirable
conversation now seems to me like a dissipation. I thought this
recently of an evening here when (in French to boot) I was
talked into saying a few important things, felt it after the exhaust-
ing conversations with Norlind at the beginning of my stay here.
What a bitter taste, what a spent feeling, what a morning-after-
the-night-before mood remains! And how guilty one feels! I
always used to believe it came from a regret that one had given
oneself out to someone not quite fine, mature; but no, it comes
simply from the fact that giving oneself out is sin, is music, is
surrender. At bottom one must lock oneself up before one's best
words and go into solitude. For the word must become flesh. That
is the world's secret! , . .

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
July 27, 1904, evening

. . . For a while at least, I have begged out of having to take
supper; so near bedtime it is one meal too many for me and then:
for the most part we end by staying together afterward, going
out together, talking; good for one who by evening has had his
day's work (although for him too silence and solitary celebra-
tion would be more important than the wearier ring of words),
but bad for me, to whom the evening means the core, the fruit
and fullness of the day. To have to talk in the evening, not to be
alone in the evening, to laugh in the evening : to me that means
unraveling a day thread by thread, seam by seam; the whole pat-
tern dissolves into long threads, all the work pours back into
my hands, and I begin a difficult, a reproachful night. For that
reason and in order to use this time here, as much as I can, for
my soul's best hunger , I have taken the evenings for myself.

. . . Now it is ... Thursday morning, there are still torn

night clouds in the light sky, little .bird-sounds are stirring every-
where; perhaps rain is coming. (They want it very much, that is,
the people connected with the land need it. For three weeks there
has been sunny dryness, and the corn that promised such good
things is spoiling; it is ripening, ripening, but without quite de-
veloping inside, which is indeed a misfortune.)

. . . Thanks for Kappus' letter. He is having a hard time. And
that is just the beginning. And he is right in this: in childhood
we have used up too much strength, too much strength from
grownups, that is perhaps true of a whole generation. Or is
true over and over again for individuals. What is one to say to
this? That life has infinite possibilities of renewal? Yes, but this
too: that the using up of strength is in a certain sense still an
increase of strength; for fundamentally it is only a matter of a
wide circle: all the strength we give away comes back over us
again, experienced and transformed. It is so in prayer. And what
is there that, truly done, would not be prayer? . . .

And one more thing with reference to the thoughts of re-
covery. There are here, in among the field-kingdoms, spots of
dark, untilled land. They are empty, and yet they lie there as if the
light stalks round about were there for their sake, rows of pickets
for their protection. I asked what these dark strips of land were
all about. They told me: c'est de la terre en repos. So beautiful,
you see, can resting be, and that is how it looks alongside work.
Not disquieting, but such that one acquires a deep trust and the
feeling of a big time. . . .

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
July 29, 1904, Friday

... So it didn't rain yesterday; toward evening a blow came
up; high above, inaccessible and destined for another earth, clouds
passed by, cloud after cloud, and by nightfall everything far and

wide was free again, almost empty in its clarity, like a maneuvei
field after the review. Then the moon rose again, and I went once
more through the park, over whose great silence flocks of crows
were describing their last circles ... I walked and didn't stop
until the edge of the park, before the dark grazing-meadows,
from which through the great stillness comes the crunch of
chewing and warm, subdued munching. And powerful fragrance
and distance and absence of human beings. . . . Every moment
I see something. I have also learned a lot from Hokusai in this
looking through the Mangiva. A path, the ground dark, rhyth-
mically strewn with the twin fruits of a maple tree : that would
have become one of his thousand prints. The laburnum bush with
its fruit husks hanging there like old-fashioned earrings, the jas-
mine that won't stop blooming and whose stars form whole
milky ways in the darkening green; and the fruit trees, these
above all, with their work-boughs that give one to see their over-
burdened existence and the laborious summer; and the meadows
on which their shadows unfold like plays with many disguises.
And farther on the flowers in the bed that have nothing to bear,
that are only lighted for a while and burn like candles . . .(it
occurs to me, don't night butterflies think lights are flowers?).
And the ornamental trees that have been growing for ever
and ever, the chestnuts that have space for whole halls under
them, and the one old blooming linden opposite the entrance,
whose round cupola is the last gold of the evening when every-
thing grows dark : there is enough to look at, for there is much
more still. The world is like that, but here and there are painters
searching for motifs, painters who break five little stones out of
the great mosaic in order to combine them in some harmony. And
perhaps it is not only painters who are like that (for then they
would be the most Godforsakei) people alive), perhaps people
in general are like that : haven't they made even life out of little
motifs, aren't their joys and their troubles, their professions and
riches merely motifs? Alas! and real life is like the real world.
And lies there like a pasture from which, in the evening, comes
warm breath and scent and absence of human beings. . . .

'75

To Tora Holmstrom Borgeby gird

August 2, 1904

That you, Fraulein Holmstrom, thought of me with kind re-
gards does me a lot of good; I have sometimes thought, since
you left us, that our talks might have troubled and disturbed
rather than refreshed you; for the things we said were frag-
ments, detached at random from large contexts, without begin-
ning and without conclusions, without issue.

So I am glad that yesterday in Lund I found a little book, which
(seems to me) carefully takes up many threads that we let fall
and weaves them into a lovely pattern. That it is by Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, whom you wanted to read, and can serve very
well as introduction to Stephan George's poetry, is an added
agreeable circumstance.

But what also quite especially makes me want to put this book
in your hands is the way in which in both its essays the figure of
Goethe as a poet has been treated. Through its being / who am
allowed to transmit to you these distinguished words of. great
admiration for Goethe, I hope to tear up, like a letter that has
become worthless, the memory of a certain evening talk that
must be irksome to you. You must ascribe it to my loneliness,
to my small experience in expressing myself in conversation, that
I was able to carry on so absurdly that time; for I have no right
to say more than this: that I lack the organ for receiving from
Goethe; more I really do not know.

And that I respectfully acknowledge what life has taught you
to call Goethe, the breadth and clarity that begin for you with
this name, that is what I should have said (as I knew imme-
diately afterward) instead of all those childish words.

If the little book becomes acceptable to you in the days by
the sea, I beg you to keep it. It is against Nature to part from
books with which one has an understanding, just as it is im-
portant in similar case not to keep people too long. . . .

I 7 6

tv 3

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
August 10, 1904

. . . We are again amidst wind which is almost cold and with-
out limit. (What skies it built yesterday evening! )

I walk about a great deal in this bluster, only sometimes I
stand by the wallflowers, by the mallows (many have already
opened . . . ) or in the scent of the phlox. And am thought-
ful ...

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
August 12, [1904] Friday

... see the wind is so big and wide and does not cease; it
roars all night and only quiets down when a rain falls, and the
rain grows heavier and heavier and roars too. Autumn? Why
not; for everything is ready, the fruit is big, and the little storks
are no longer distinguishable from the big ones. And along by
the highway there is a part of the park that is not swept and not
raked on Saturday; there are weeds there, all burned and droop-
ing, and the half -grown chestnuts have many yellow leaves and
are shedding them one by one; not when it storms: then they
summon up their strength and hold on as tight as they can; but
afterward, when it becomes so expectantly still, then they scat-
ter, leaf by leaf, a lot of great, yellow, twisted leaves. There are
decayed thistles there with sad little purple heads, thistles that
have grown tall like that without thinking; birches are there
that are all tremulous, and perhaps they have been so all sum-
mer , but now it looks as if they were intentionally and joy-
fully so, and the clouds pass behind them, and one can see right
through them everything that happens in the skies. And a kind
of pensive, faded fragrance goes about, as from flowers the sun
has dried and the wind has pressed, and it is autumn. And so I

_ IT?

often walk up and down there now and avoid the place under
the walnut tree and all my summery paths; for I want the autumn!
Doesn't it seem as if autumn were the real creator, more creative
than spring, which all at once is, more creative, when it comes
with its will to change and destroys the much too finished, much
too satisfied, indeed almost bourgeois-comfortable picture of
summer? This great glorious wind that builds sky upon sky; into
its land I would like to go, and along its roads. And perhaps you
have it about you too in your own home garden and see its image
of a morning in the trees it stirs. . . .

I 13 3

To Lou Andreas-Salome Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
August 1 6, 1904

. . . I haven't done much; I have learned to read a little Danish
from books by Jacobsen and Hermann Bang and from the letters
Soren Kierkegaard wrote to his fiancee; translating these letters
has been almost my only work. ... I feel as if I had had much
too much summer and too much sun. Everything in me is wait-
ing for the trees to strip themselves and for the distance beyond
them to become visible with its empty fields and with the long
roads into winter. . . .

To Arthur Holitscher Borgeby gard, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
August 17, 1904

. . . You must not upset the Roman plan for my sake, dear
friend; it has in it so much that is good. The other, concerning
London, I cannot judge. Everything English is far away and for-
eign to me; I don't know the language of that country, almost
nothing of its art, none of its poets; and London I imagine as
something very distressing. You,know my fear of very big cities;

also I shall probably never go farther west, since after all every-
thing keeps calling me to Russia. If sometime, somewhere, any-
thing like home could be given me, it will be there in that wide
sorrowful land. ...

To Clara Rilke Borgeby gird, Fladie

Province of Skane, Sweden
August 17, 1904

... it is Wednesday today, and I think a letter will come
from you, written Monday; have been thinking so since getting
up and look forward to it.

Here the big storm is still on; in the park on the quieter private
paths one can hear it, and when one rounds a corner into the
open, the whole country rushes upon one, the roads come run-
ning, and the little river comes back all ruffled from the sea,
instead of going toward it. It is strange then, in all this activity,
to see the calm of the grazing animals; the grass blows under their
feeding and stirs, but they are calm and dark and self-absorbed.
Even the little foal is out on the windiest meadow with its brown
mother (who is nourishing herself vigorously); already it is a
regular little rocking horse, when it jumps up and down with its
long stiff legs and rejoices. But mostly it lies in the grass, flat on
its side and motionless. Only its thin tail flips from time to time
across its flank. From the distance one sees only its body in the
green, and then it looks, in form and color, like a very large, ripe
hazelnut.

Torsten Holmstrom, the student, is here again now; he goes
hunting with Norlind, and last evening they shot a seagull. A
big seagull. You ought to see it ... maybe you would draw one
of its wings. They are magnificently constructed, so sure and
compact and all of gray silk; but you should draw the under side
which is more beautiful by far; everything is more delicate there
and as ineffably untouched as a young cloud. And those con-
tours: so sure and necessary, feather upon feather, and yet as

m _ J79

delicate as in a Rodin drawing. Or in Japanese prints; of them the
color of the whole too reminds one. There is white and gray.
But from the last white to the gray's first beginning there is still
a world of color, a thousand transitions that have no name. There
is hesitant white that, hard before the gray, turns back into itself
again, and gray that flashes and wants to turn white. There is
the gray of fish scales and the gray of water and the tremulous
gray of damp air : as though the mirror of this outspread pinion
had preserved everything that happened below it.

It is the time anyway when one sees many things flying: as
though the great wind were drawing the birds with it, so they
come up sometimes in its current and drift away off over the
park.

[7*3

To Tora Holmstrdm Borgeby gard, Fladie

August 24, 1904

... I have so often asked myself whether the days on which
we are compelled to be idle aren't the very ones we spend in the
deepest activity? Whether our actions themselves, when they
come later, are not merely the last af terring of a great movement
that takes place in us on inactive days?

In any case it is very important to be idle with trust, whole-
heartedly, if possible with joy. The days when even our hands
do not stir are so uncommonly still that it is scarcely possible to
live them without hearing a great deaL . . .

To Lou Andreas-Salome Furuborg, Jonsered

October 19, 1904

... I see that I can't get on with my work this way; that I
must open up new tributaries to it, not because the tributaries of
all happening and existence are too meager, only: because I
cannot order, cannot combine them. I must learn to grasp and

i So

hold: I must learn to work. I have been telling myself that for
years and yet go bungling on. Hence the guilty conscience; all
the guiltier when others have confidence in me. My immediate
family; my father, who is patient with me now in such a sad way;
Ellen Key; the people here in the house. I cannot be happy in
my own eyes, and that is why I am never happy.

I lack perhaps just a few knacks and helps. If only the first
door were opened to me, then I think I would know all right how
to handle the mechanism of the others. And if water now, a great
deal of water, suddenly came over my wheels, some tributary
that knows how to plunge and roar, perhaps the whole misery
of this sluggish milling would be over forever. . . .

To Clara Rilke Furuborg, Jonsered

October 28, 1904 (Friday)

. . . Only now is the big birch bare that one saw from the win-
dows of Furuborg hanging against the lake-distance; only now
are all the paths quite covered with leaves, only now does one
see the white house from afar. Everything is brown, reddish-
brown, and brown in brown. At intervals one sees pale green
strips of meadow, and the firs and pines are a dense dark winter-
dress green. Only now and then a quite golden birch is held up
high above everything, like a monstrance, into the sunset. . . .

I 791

To a young girl November 20, 1904

My greeting you with only a few words, out of much occupied
days, will seem ungrateful to you; since you managed to find
time to tell me such nice things?

Your words were a welcome message to me. I will write you
only that. I am happy to know about you, in order to imagine
you sometimes and to surround you with wishes: may life open
up to you, door by door; may you find in yourself the ability

to trust it, and the courage to give to the difficult most confi-
dence of all. To young people I would always like to say just
this one thing (it is almost the only thing I know for certain up
to now) that we must always hold to the difficult; that is our
part. We must go so deep into life that it lies upon us and is
burden: not pleasure should be about us, but life.

Think: isn't childhood difficult in all its unexplained connec-
tion? Aren't girlhood years difficult do they not like long
heavy hair pull your head into the depths of great sadness? And
it must not become otherwise; if for many life suddenly becomes
easier, lighterhearted and gayer, that is only because they have
ceased to take it seriously, really to carry it and feel it and fill
it with their own entity. That is no progress in the meaning
of life. That is a renunciation of all its breadths and possibilities.
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to
deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that
work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our
happiness, our dreams: there, against the depth of this back-
ground they stand out, there for the first time we see how beau-
tiful they are. And only in the darkness of the difficult does our
smile, so precious, have a meaning; only there does it glow with
its deep, dreamy light, and in the brightness it for a moment
diffuses we see the wonders and treasures with which we are
surrounded. That is all I know how to say and to advise. What-
ever else I have known or grasped beyond all knowing is in my
verses, which you read with so much affection.

It is so natural for me to understand girls and 'women; the deep-
est experience of the creator is feminine : for it is experience
of receiving and bearing. The poet Obstfelder once wrote, when
describing the face of a strange man: "it was" (when he began
to speak) "as if there were a woman in him "; it seems to me
that would fit every poet who begins to speak. . . .

182

To Clara Rilke Furuborg, Jonsered

Thursday, December i, [1904], evening

. . . now for the first time I really know what winter is and
winter- joy. And think you must have it someday, this real winter
gladness, white in white and soft and fresh. Or we must both
have it together, here in this dear northern land or in Russia some-
time. Must sit in a little, completely fur-covered sleigh, just like
the one in which I drove out today with Frau Lizzi. Only two
people in that little gliding seat and before us one of the tall
horses with a three-belled chime on the harness and connected by
a white, wide-meshed, protecting net trimmed with tufts of wool
to the dashboard of the little sleigh-seat (so that the snow tossed
up by the horse's hoofs won't fall into the sleigh). And behind
us, in front of his little seat, the good Strandberg standing on the
runner, and the reins above us, and high over us now and then
the flick of a whip. And white, white country roundabout, up
and down and again high up and into the distance, shadowy and
radiant white in variously inclined planes as far as the dark
near-by wood and farther on again to the distant, gray-blue
wooded hills, behind which an early, yellow-green sunset is going
on at a place where the dense gray of approaching snow is torn.
And here and there in the skies are other such opened places.
And it is blue behind, gray thin blue, or else a light glassy green
in which the pink of a cloud is slowly turning to white. That
was my farewell to Furuborg, for today is my last evening in
the golden room which has not become confused even by trunks
and boxes and still has so much space and peace that I could work
in the midst of all this packing. Tomorrow I shall be on the
way to Copenhagen. I shall get out in Charlottenlund and live
there. . . .

I** a

To Lou Andreas-Salome Villa Charlottenlund

Charlottenlund near Copenhagen
December 4, 1904

Dear Lou, now at last I am on the way back after a long, good
time at Furuborg; long: for it seems to me as if I had had summer,
autumn, and winter there and each one wholly; for the last sum-
mer days with which it began were so thoroughly summery, and
then each autumn day was an autumn festival, and finally, it also
became regular deep winter with sleigh rides into the soft coun-
try, in which everything had become distance, along the cold
lake, over toward strange blue-darkening mountains. And there
came a whole journey, white in white, seven hours on the train
into Smaland, and it changed into a sleigh ride through a sound-
lessly snowing afternoon and ended in the early dusk on a lonely
estate. Amid the ringing of ten little bells we went through a
long, old avenue of linden trees the sleigh swung out and there
was the castle yard, enclosed by the little side wings of the
castle. But there, where four steps rose with weary effort out of
the snow of the yard to the terrace and where this terrace,
bounded by a vase-ornamented railing, thought it was preparing
for the castle, there was nothing, nothing but a few snow-sunken
bushes, and sky, gray, trembling sky, out of whose twilight fall-
ing flakes were being loosed. One had to say to oneself, no, there
is no castle there; one did remember too having heard that it was
burned down years ago, but one felt nevertheless that something
was there, one had somehow the sensation that the air behind
that terrace had not yet become one with the rest, that it was
still divided into passages and rooms and in the middle still formed
a hall, an empty, high, deserted, darkening hall. But at that mo-
ment, out of the side wing to the left, stepped the lord of the
manor, big, broad, with a blond mustache, and rebuked the four
long dachshunds for their sharp barking; the sleigh drove past
him in the curve up to the tiny little right wing, and out of its
little door stepped the good Ellen Key, a modest figure in black,

but all joyous under her white hair. For it was Oby, her brother's
estate, and in this right wing is the old-fashioned room where,
sitting on a red sofa of her grandmother's, she is writing the sec-
ond part of her Lifslinjer and answering her countless letters to a
lot of young girls and young women and young men, who want
to know from her where life begins. . . ,

To Countess Luise Schiverin Worpswede bei Bremen

June 5, 1905

It happens, dear and kind Countess, that your generous letter
found me still here in Worpswede, where all sorts of circum-
stances (my still hesitant health too) have held me fast week
after week; spring week after spring week, and now for the last
few days it has been summer, flung open, like a quickly unfolded
fan that now waves gently with its many-colored surface, stirring
air and fragrance. The old chestnuts are holding up their towers
of blossom, black alder and lilac have thrown out their fragrances
like nets, and here and there a little golden laburnum rain falls
across the path. And the houses, which a while ago were every-
thing, are now nothing, now that they stand withdrawn so far
back in the clear, transparent shadow of trees and tree groups.

So much has happened to overtake me here, while I lagged be-
hind it all; I had to sacrifice to my weariness so much time which
with idle hands it plucked to bits and scattered; but the few hours
in which I was collected, I was so to good purpose about
Meister Eckehart's purple darkness, collected by his words that
are so penetrating. How I thank you, dear friend, for this book;
how gladly I owe it to you, how fitting it is that this master
should have been shown me by you and that it happened at just
this moment in my development, when I needed his sanction
and his blessing in much. You will someday see ... how much
I, without knowing about him, have for years been his pupil and
proclaimer. Somewhere (I feel it in all humility) I have grown
out beyond him: at the places where he established, stood still,

gave definitive form; but where he flowed, torrential, and fell
down in great waterfalls to God, there I am only a small piece,
torn along by him, the stream that with the broad delta of the
Trinity moves out into eternity. . . .

That such a human being ever spoke to humanity, to the needy
and the helpless that is an inexpressibly beautiful thing. And yet
no consolation, when one thinks that centuries have gone our
from this man, not (as might be possible) out beyond him, but
passing away under him, passing him by.

Just last evening (while a thunderstorm was slowly coming
up) I read Clara my two favorite sermons: the homily on St.
Luke "The Kingdom of God Is at Hand" and the sermon "On
the Going Forth and Returning Home of the Spirit/' which 1
would like to call that of the never-said. It was solemn and wide
about us. We thought of just a few people: of you, of two or
three others; and this being alone was full of vision and distance.

Clara Rilke, who is all day in her studio, charges me with affec-
tionate messages for you, dear Countess. I am also to say that the
material, which we chose together at the time, . . . pleases her
very much (there is so much summeriness in its light-and-dark
harmony, something soft and unspoken, as it should be in summer
dresses, whose beauty lies in their being more unreal than flower
petals and the whole background of summer which seems long to*
outlast their fluttering fugitiveness).

We are so glad you are enjoying things and resting, as your
dear letter so well tells. I am glad, my kind friend, of every word
and happy to hear from your sister too, so that I may now think
of and write to both of you. The promised account of a festival
on your island I would very much like to have, if it is not too*
presumptuous to expect something beyond your letter which is.
wholly what you, in an enhanced and fulfilled sense, called
"stimulating."

I expect to go from here after Whitsuntide; first to Gottingen
to an experienced and dear friend, with whom I want to discuss
the Berlin plan again. ... Of all decisions and arrangements I
will keep you informed; for what I don't want to miss in any-

i86

thing important are your and your sister's sympathetic thoughts
and the helpful kindness of your generous feeling.

To Clara Rilke Gottingen auf dem Hainberg

June 1 6, 1905

. . . Your dear letter with the pinks brought me something
dear and quiet from you. . . . With all the good I have here
your words joined in like consent. Thanks. ... I will not tell
you much about it all, how I am living now, how I am being
given strength here and composure and encouragement. Often
we wish you were with us when we sit in the garden and read or
speak of all the things with which I have often bothered you and
which are now becoming so much easier or at least more bearable
in their difficulty; yesterday especially, you were so much missed
when I showed Lou the throne of Venus from the Ludovisi col-
lection; she gets such inexpressible joy, so much happiness from
it; without being in any way prepared for looking at such things,
she enjoyed from within herself by some path of her very own
the glory of the antique piece, and exactly as she enjoyed my
"Rodin" and a few days ago, the "Panther."

How good ... it was that I came here. It is so much more
beautiful than I could ever have divined, because it had an even
greater necessity than I thought. And if everything here rejoices
and helps me now, there is among the most real joys a confidence
scarcely to be suppressed any longer: that to you too this dear
person here, with her breadth of soul, can someday become dear;
that the possibility of it is there, I feel every moment now, and
all that is needed is that the aimless paths of life shall sometime
lead to the necessity, to the place where it becomes a matter of
course for this person, who plays such a big part in my inner
history, to be (and not only for my sake) indispensable and essen-
tial to you too. Without this hope I could not be entirely here nor
become entirely happy; but this way I am so, and I believe it will
be noticeable for a long time to come that I once was so.

I love my little room with a few books that I know, with a few
things from which memories emanate, with the little wooden
platform and the steps into the long, narrow garden that goes glid-
ing down the hillside into a dense field of fruit trees. And the
landscape is friendly too: to the one side, the wide valley with
the tiny, quite factory-free city of learning, to the other, be-
yond a wooded hill's rim, valleys, and hills in broad, large, green
waves, from forest to forest right up into the Harz. Avenues and
quiet paths everywhere, up and down which I walk for hours
alone (Lou cannot take much exercise), sunk in my own
thoughts, like one of the Hainbund poets perhaps, and yet quite
different, without allies, in far wider alliances. . . .

To Clara Rilke ' Marburg a.d. Lahn

July 27, 1905

... I have been in Marburg now since eleven-thirty; have
walked up and down the little crooked town as far up as the castle
and as far down as St. Elizabeth's, built around and over the
miracles of the sainted countess. Delightful German Gothic
enacted in the way a hand is held, in the way a head is bent,
in a fold drawing up slender and steep along a narrow figure. And
in the one side wing, stone tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, men lying in iron, the right leg slightly retracted, the
iron gloves laid one upon the other. And the face deep within
between hauberk and visor, shadowed and shone upon by
both. . . .

To Clara Rilke Friedelhausen, Lollar, Hesse

August 23, 1905

. . . Yesterday, on a glorious, full summer's day with many
radiant and colorful hours, we drove out again as before, the
lunch basket on the box: first to the Rabenau and from there,

i 88 _ ^___

almost without a stop, on to Appenborn, the old family seat of
the one main Rabenau line. A little rustic-seignorial manor with
an outside staircase and old, oaken pillars; the farmyard round
about, so that one overlooks it from the hall, and with an old,
terraced garden sloping down toward the house, in which the
tenant-farmer's wife raises all kinds of flowers. And the phlox
stands tall beside the old shored-up apple trees and dahlias and
asters and gladioli and the tobacco's blossom star that is closed
Iby day. . . . On the drive back Hassan struck again, which re-
sulted in our having an evening and a nightfall in "Grandfather's
garden," in the old Londorf pavilion, where the chandelier was
'burning, shimmering out with a radiant festiveness into the gar-
den walks from which, as if from many sides, came the noise of
the fountain. Those hours were very beautiful and full of memo-
ries that came and went without being ours. In the wood by
the Rabenau family vault, I saw a fox that sprang past me slender
:and wild, his face with the quick eyes turned full upon me. . . .

Clara Rilke Schloss Friedelhausen, Lollar, Hesse

September 7, 1905

... I shall live at Rodin's in Meudon. Just think. For day be-
fore yesterday afternoon came the following letter (written by
his secretary) : "Monsieur Rodin me charge de vous faire savoir
qu'il sera heureux de vous voir; Monsieur Rodin vous attendra
-a Paris a partir du 7 courant. Monsieur Rodin me charge en outre
*de vous faire savoir que vous pourrez demeurer chez lui, a Meu-
<lon, pendant la duree de votre sejour a Paris. Agreez Monsieur
<etc . . ." (signed by the secretary and underneath: Aug. Rodin
in his own hand.) Then, on the back, a postscript by the secre-
tary with his signature once again, reading: "Monsieur Rodin
tient a ce que vous restiez chez lui pour pouvoir parler." Isn't
that kind, that further corroboration and confirmation Rodin had
him add? In answer I wrote yesterday: j'accepte, for he does
mean it that way, it is his will, and it will be good. For the moment,

1 89*

as I wrote, I accepted only for a few days, because I was afraid of
causing Madame Rodin too much trouble; but it will become
apparent in the simplest way how long I can stay with him out
there without anyone's suif ering from it. Of the great nearness
and intimacy of his daily life I think with deep joy, and as gladly
of the little Villa des Brillants and its garden looking out far
and wide. . . .

To Countess Luise Schiverin Wacholderhohe, Godesberg;

September 10, 1905

. . . out of the last swift days in the dear gray castle many
thoughts came to you from me; a letter would gladly have come;,
but there was so much, outside and in; life had to go on in its*
own way: that was the surest means of being close to you. We
had to sit at breakfast as though you might at any moment walk
in, and at noon gather in your high workroom and evenings be-
quietly together in your dear name. And in between were vari-
ous things; the first two proof signatures of my Book of Hours
came and insisted on being read, and the afternoon brought our
Kant hour, which on the last day too led to finishing the book
that we had undertaken. Two most beautiful drives we made;
each into a different world and country, with distant views over
bright fields and the shining river and on beyond to the quietly
full contours of dense wooded hills : to Salzboden first through*
the village as far as a big mill and then across a bridge and cir-
cling back through Odenhausen, and the second drive, to the Neb
bridge, from which one sees Marburg, medieval and as if with
the light of another star, on a gray afternoon, when everything-
distant was wonderfully gently toned down within the grayness.
And then I tried to achieve now and then an hour of quiet in*
which I did nothing but walk up and down on the terrace be-
low, with eyes that really contemplated and found repose in-,
everything, with which I sought to take once more, and deep in
the taking to hold, all the dearness, all the reality that I so gladly

190

owe to your daily giving. How often, I feel, how often in all
that is to come, picture after picture out of it all will return to
me, the castle, that moment or some particular movement that
took place in one of the rooms grown dear: and when such a
return comes toward me out of deep-sunk recollection full of
memories, it will be significant every time and related to much
and evoking the future with a new noble name. My life, every-
thing that I am, has gone through Friedelhausen the way a whole
river goes through the warmth of a sunny countryside, wider
spread and broader as it were and gleaming with all its waves.

And yesterday, on the journey, I saw Weilburg for an instant,
built up on its mildly commanding mountain, and when that
was past, nothing came for a long time save forests and curved
forest valleys like long-echoing afterrings of the tone it had
awakened in me. Past robust Limburg too we went and past a
steep strong castle of Runkel and past ruins that went on looking
with but a single arched window out of the forests, as though
they had gone down to destruction in their green, agitated dark-
ness.

And are now amid the von der Heydts' cordial, quietly gener-
ous hospitality.

Tomorrow I go on, far from all this, but still not out of the
nearness that includes and holds me with you and your dear ones.
And I shall come to the great man, dear as a father, the Master, of
whom I shall still tell you much. He wants me to live with him,
and I could not do otherwise than accept; so I shall be allowed to
share all his days, and my nights will be surrounded by the same
things as his. And I shall not have the city about me with its
voices and violence, but him and the stillness of his house in the
country that from the heights of Meudon overlooks with quiet
eyes distant Paris and the near valley of Sevres. Thence my aff ec
donate thoughts will seek you and bless you. . . .

To Clara Rilke Rodin, Meudon

September 15, 1905

... he received me, but it means nothing if I say cordially; in
the way a beloved place receives one, to which one returns by
paths that have become more overgrown: a spring that, while one
was away, has sung and lived and mirrored, day and night, a
grove above which birds of passage have flown back and forth,
spreading shadows over its tracery, a path lined with roses that
hasn't ceased leading to those remote places; and like a big dog he
greeted me, recognizing me with exploring eyfes, contented and
quiet; and like an eastern god enthroned, moved only within his
sublime repose and pleasure and with the smile of a woman and
with a child's grasping gesture. And led me about. Now things
are well with him; much more world has grown about him; he has
built several little houses from the museum downward on the
garden slope. And everything, houses, passages, and studios and
gardens: everything is full of the most wonderful antiquities that
associate with his dear things as with relatives, the only ones they
have, happy, when the thousand eyes in their bodies open, not
to be looking out into an unfamiliar world. And he is happy and
strokes their beautiful shoulders and cheeks and from afar
reads on their lips the inexpressible. And with him everything
is in blossom. How all that has grown! And how one under-
stands and loves all the new as that which had to come, the
most necessary, most inward, decreed, destiny! He moves like
a star. He is beyond all measure. About my book, which was
carefully translated for him only recently, he said the greatest
things one can say: placed it beside his things, very big. ... I
have a little cottage all to myself: three rooms: bedroom, work-
room, dressing room, with enchanting things, full of dignity, and
the main window with all the glories of the Sevres valley, the
bridge, the distances with their villages and objects. . , .

I 9 2

To Clara Rilke Chez Rodin, Meudon-Val-FIeury

Wednesday, September 20 [1905]

. . . what are all times of rest, all days in wood and sea, all at-
tempts to live healthily, and the thoughts of all this: what are
they against this wood, against this sea, against the indescribably
confident repose in his holding and carrying glance, against the
contemplation of his health and assurance. There is a rush of
forces streaming into one, there comes over one a joy in living,
an ability to live, of which I had no idea. His example is so with-
out equal, his greatness rises up before one like a very near tower,
and at the same time his kindness, when it comes, is like a white
bird that circles, shimmering about one, until it lights trustfully
upon one's shoulder. He is everything, everything far and wide.
We speak of many, many things. It is good for him to talk about
many things, and though I can't always keep up with him very
well, being hindered by the language, still I am doing better and
better every day with the listening. And just imagine the last
three mornings: we got up very early at five-thirty,' yesterday
even at five o'clock, and went out to Versailles; at the Versailles
station we take a carriage and drive into the park, and in the park
we walk for hours. And then he shows one everything: a dis-
tance, a motion, a flower, and everything he evokes is so beau-
tiful, so understood, so startled and young, that the world is all
one with the youth of this day that begins in mists, almost in soft
rain, and quite gradually becomes sunny, warm, and weightless.
Then he tells a great deal about Brussels where he had his best
years. The model for the "Age d'airain" was a soldier and he used
to come quite irregularly, sometimes at five o'clock in the morn-
ing, sometimes at six o'clock in the evening; [Rodin's] col-
league on the other works forced him out from jealousy, and so
he was left with almost all his time to himself. And he spent it in
the environs of Brussels, always on the move with Madame Rodin
(who is a good, loyal person), in the woods, always wandering.
At first he would set up his paintbox somewhere and paint. But

'9?

he soon noticed that in doing this he missed everything, every-
thing alive, the distances, the changes, the rising trees and the
sinking mist, all that thousandfold happening and coming-to-
pass; he noticed that, painting, he confronted all this like a hunter,
while as observer he was a piece of it, acknowledged by it,
wholly absorbed, dissolved, was landscape. And this being land-
scape, for years, this rising with the sun and this having a part
in all that is great, gave him everything he needed: that knowl-
edge, that capacity for joy, that dewy, untouched youthfulness
of his strength, that unison with the important and that quiet
understanding with life. His insight comes from that, his sensi-
tivity to every beauty, his conviction that in big and small there
can be the same immeasurable greatness that lives in Nature in mil-
lions of metamorphoses. "And if today I were to paint from
Nature again, I would do it just as I do my sculptures, a very
quickly sketched contour that I would improve at home, but
otherwise I would only gaze and unite with and be the same as
everything about us." And while we speak thus of many things,
Madame Rodin picks flowers and brings them to us: autumn
crocuses or leaves, or she draws our attention to pheasants, par-
tridges, magpies (one day we had to go home earlier because she
had found a sick partridge that she took with her to care for),
or she collects mushrooms for the coachman, who is sometimes
consulted too when it appears that none of us knows a tree. Thar
was in the elm avenues that go around by the edge of the Versailles
park outside the Trianon. A twig was broken off: Rodin looked
at it for a long time, felt its plastic, strong-veined leaves and finally
said: so, I know that forever now: c'est Tonne. Thus in everything
he is receptive as a goblet, and everything becomes wellspring T
wherever he proffers himself and shines and mirrors. Yester-
day I lunched in the city with him and Carriere and an author,
Charles Morice; but usually I see no one but him. In the evening,
at twilight, when he comes back from the rue de TUniversite,
we sit at the rim of the pool near his three young swans and look
at them and talk of many and serious things. Also of you. It is
beautiful the way Rodin lives his life, wonderfully beautiful. We

194

were to meet Carriere at the studio in the rue de 1'Universite;
we were there promptly at twelve o'clock. Carriere kept us wait-
ing. Rodin looked at the clock a few times while he was attending
to some of the mall he had found there, but when I looked up
again, I found him deep in his work. That is how he spends his
waiting times! . . .

Soon after supper I retire, am in my little house by eight-
thirty at the latest. Then the wide blossoming starry night is be-
fore me, and below, before the window, the gravel walk goes up
a little hill on which, in fanatic silence, an effigy of Buddha rests,
dispensing with quiet reserve the inexpressible self-containedness
of his gesture beneath all the skies of day and night. Cest le centre
du monde, I said to Rodin. And then he looks at one so kindly, so
wholly a friend. That is very beautiful and a great deal. . . .

1 901

To Karl von der Heydt Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)
November 20, 1905

. . . only the very great are artists in that strict yet only true
sense, that art has become a way of life for them : all the others,
all of us who are still only just busying ourselves with art, meet
on the same wide roads and greet each other in the same silent
hope and long for the same distant mastery. . . .

I 91 3

To Clara Rilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)
November 24, 1905

. . . yesterday in the great storm, read Verhaeren whom I
visited Wednesday with Ellen's greetings and found sweet and
simple, reminding me somehow of Otto Modersohn, . . .
nevertheless I await die Master with impatience; he is work and

nourishment, and when he is here, the day has many more hours
and sleep more industry.

To Clara Eilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)
December 2, 1905

. . . yesterday it was like this: the Master and I went early to
Versailles (for the first time again, though it was raining) and
walked about slowly two gray, gentle hours in the garden of the
Grand Trianon which belonged entirely to us and was so new
and odd, with a row of palaces and pavilions which even the
Master had never seen like this, and courts overgrown with grass
and forgotten, and water mirrors of big darkened panes against
which a hand of chestnut leaves held itself now and then, while
the misty rain approached it all from afar. Then we returned
quickly for lunch (Madame Rodin had not been with us) and
went right afterward into the city and up to Notre Dame, entering
on the dot of two o'clock with the petitioners of the first Advent
Sunday. There Madame Rodin set in place two chairs for us by
a pillar near the big left-hand grillwork gate that leads into the
middle between main nave and high altar, . . . there we sat still,
quite still for two hours on end, and there was a singing over
us and for us and for God, singing and booming and roaring in
the dark treetops of the organ, out of which now and then, scared
up by voices, the soprano flew up like a white bird and mounted
and mounted.

And Rodin was as though he had once done all that five hun-
dred years ago; became so lost and was yet so much there and so
initiated into everything and so recognized by the shadows that
stepped up to him out of the pillars and reverently accompanied
him.

Later we walked slowly, the three of us, in the falling mist
and light, first past the antique dealers, then against the stream

196

of all the Sunday strollers (as we often did too) up the Boul d
Saint-Michel, bought cakes at the little pointed corner of the rue
Racine and its sister street on the right side of the Boulevard,
the very cakes that Rodin showed us from outside through the
bright windows, walked the rue Racine, through under the
Odeon, into the already quite dense-gray Luxembourg, stopped
a while before the Fontaine Medicis and finally came through
the Avenue de TObservatoire on to the B d Montparnasse, which
.also for Rodin and Madame Rodin is full of memories of their
very early days. . . . That was Sunday and already quite a
^birthday, altogether. . . .

I 93 3

To Arthur Holitscher Villa des Brillants, Meudon-Val-Fleury

December 13, 1905

... a constellation of dear people stands above me and above
;all this that makes me light and heavy, and again and again heavy;
-they are the people from whom I do not often hear, about whom
I rarely ask (I am so sure of them), and when I look up, they are
always in the same place, always above me: you are of these
people, dear friend. All the silence is like space between us, but
mot like time: it does not separate us, it only determines the ex-
tent of what we have in common and makes it very wide. Isn't
that so? Where did you last leave me? Now you find me again
in a little cottage that belongs to Rodin and stands in his garden
on the slopes of Meudon, facing the skies, before which, far, far
off, Saint-Cloud rises, with the window always on that part of
the Seine which through the Pont de Sevres has become a stanza.
And there my life is. A little as Rodin's secretary, writing very
reprehensible French letters, but above all among his grown-up
things and in his great serene friendship learning, slowly learning
this: to live, to have patience, to work, and never to miss an in-
ducement to joy. For this wise and great man knows how to find
joy, friend; a joy as nameless as that one remembers from child-
hood, and yet full to the brim with the deepest inducement; the

_ '97

smallest things come to him and open up to him; a chestnut that
we find, a stone, a shell in the gravel, everything speaks as though
it had been in the wilderness and had meditated and fasted. And
we have almost nothing to do but listen; for work itself comes-
out of this listening; one must lift it out with both arms, for it
is heavy. My strength often fails, but Rodin lifts everything and
lifts it out beyond himself and sets it down in space. And that is-
a nameless example. I believe in age, dear friend. To work and
to grow old, this it is that life expects of us. And then someday
to be old and still not by any means to understand everything,
no, but to begin, but to love, but to sense, but to link up with
what is distant and inexpressible, even into the stars. I say to<
myself: how good, how precious life must be, when I hear this-
old man so grand in his speaking of it, so torrential in his silence.

Often indeed we do not know this, we who are in the difficult,
up over our knees, up to our chests, up to our chins. But are we
then happy in the easy, aren't we almost embarrassed in the easy?
Our hearts lie deep, but if we are not pressed down into them,
we never go all the way to the bottom. And yet it is necessary to
have been to the bottom. That is the point.

Bon courage, Rodin says to me sometimes, for no apparent
reason, when we part in the evening, even when we have been
talking of very good things; he knows how necessary that is, every
day, when one is young.

To Clara Rilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)
[postmarked January 26, 1906] Friday morning

. . . We came home tired, the weather was too much against
us, after brisk cold rawness and then snow and right after that
thaw and east wind and glare ice; all in one day and on this par-
ticular one, and the most impracticable weather for our road from
the station. So we arrived tired. Perhaps also because it is sad-
dening to see all that ruin and that bad restoration which is even

198

more intolerable, in its stiffness and hardness and ugliness, than
the loss of a beautiful thing. Chartres seems to me much more
ravaged even than Notre-Dame de Paris. Much more hopeless;
much more abandoned to those who destroy. Just the first im-
pression, the way it rises up, as in a great cloak, and the first de-
tail, a slim weatherbeaten angel holding out a sundial exposed to
the day's whole round of hours, and above it one sees, infinitely
beautiful still in its fading, the deep smile of his joyfully serving
face, like sky mirroring itself. . . . But that is nearly all. And
the Master is the only one (it seems) to whom all that still comes
and speaks. (If it spoke to others even a little, how could they,
one wonders, how would they be allowed to miss it?) He was
quiet as in Notre Dame, fitting in, infinitely recognized and
received. Speaking softly of his art and confirmed in it by the
great principles that reveal themselves to him wherever he looks.
And it was very beautiful; from the station we got to the cathedral
about nine-thirty; there was no longer any sun, there was gray
frost, but it was still quiet. But when we arrived at the cathedral,
around the angel's corner a wind came suddenly, like some very
large person, and went pitilessly right through us, sharp and cut-
ting. "Oh," I said, "here's a storm suddenly coming up." "Mais
vous ne savez pas," said the Master, "il y a toujours un vent, ce
vent-la autour des grandes cathedrales. Elles sont toujours en-
tourees d'un vent mauvais agit6, tourmente de leur grandeur.
C'est Pair qui tombe le long des contreforts, et qui tombe de
cette hauteur et erre autour de 1'eglise. . . ." Something like that
the Master said it, briefer, somewhat less elaborate, more Gothic
too. But something of the sort was the sense of what he meant.
And in this vent errant we stood like damned souls compared
with the angel holding out his dial so blissfully to a sun that he
always saw. . . .

199

To Clara Rilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise) (France)
February 8, 1906, Thursday, toward evening

... I am writing, I should say, a hundred letters every day,
morning for the Master and afternoon for myself, and if any-
thing is then left over that isn't yet night, I hearken to my poems
that still want to go into the Book of Pictures. Slowly I listen to
each one and let it die away into its farthest echo. Few will stand
up in the stillness in which I place them, several will recast them-
selves, of many only a piece will be left and will wait until, one
day perhaps, something joins it. ...

To Clara Rilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)
Thursday evening, February 15, 1906

. . . yesterday we lunched once more at Troubetzkoi's (three
vegetarian lunches in succession), and afterward (he lives in
Boulogne-sur-Seine) we walked to the Jardin d'Acclimatation
through a more quiet part of the Bois de Boulogne, out of whose
depths now and then a light deer face had been looking at us for
a while; we landed first in a kind of exhibition, the way you and
I once did too, beside which is an enclosure with monkeys; the
fearful hamadryads were furious as before, bit into their hands,
and beat themselves against the wall, as if out of their minds over
the unspeakable ugliness in which cruel Nature had left them, as
it passed on to the next. (All this she had to make, continually
trying new combinations, in order to get to us, said the Master.)
In the same enclosure, in a cage opposite, were three monkeys the
size of little dogs, with pale sick faces and the great dreamy eyes
of consumptives. Infinitely forlorn and hopeless, they had joined
fast together in a sad merging-into-each-other, each expecting
comfort from the warmth of the other, the three faces, each sepa-

200

rate, each different, set into the whole, as sometimes in Minne's
woodcuts, or less firmly drawn and given over to the total effect,
as sometimes in Carriere. But then we stepped out again under
the afternoon skies that were wintry, and into the wind that came
off snow, and it was almost painful in that air to see the rose and
red flamingos blooming. Rodin lingered for the most part near
the precious Chinese pheasants that seemed to be of enamel and
finished with so much care that it was surprising to find on one
or another a gray head, as if only in underpainting and never
carried out. (How often Nature has probably gone on thus to the
next thing, driven by what comes to her mind and by the joy of
beginning that next thing! ) The last we saw was a marabou, holy,
but ugly, full of wilderness in his feeling and utterly hopeless in his
meditation: (first sketch perhaps for a hermit, abandoned and
not taken up again until much later). . . . There is so much now
for the Master to do; we are already at a "discours" again; he
sent one as a letter for the opening of the first exhibition, at the
time of my return; now he has to speak himself at his banquet
on the twenty-first, and he has a lot of nice and fruitful ideas,
of which he wants to hand over all that is best. I must only see to
it that each idea is glad to stay beside the other; I may add noth-
ing, but just that is not easy. And letters upon letters. . . .

[ 971

To Clara Rilke Villa des Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise)

February 22, 1906

. . . With this letter I ought to bring bread into the house for
you, into the new one; but again my fields are not yet that far
along. There is scarcely a shimmer even of what is to come next,
and the sun is still hidden behind the gray of my activities and
can almost never shine on it, on the little green. Alas ... 1
could copy out your long letters with all their questions about
what life wants of us, I could copy them out and they would be
my letters, word for word.

2OB

There are mornings, all the birds call so specially, and a singu-
lar agitation is in the air, and I can scarcely contain myself with
yearning to be long alone, for anything that is so absolutely mine
as those Roman days, of which I often cannot help thinking be-
cause in the garden now it sounds so like that sometimes. And
mornings, and afternoons with the Bible on the reading desk, and
boundless evenings, and nights that seem to rise up out of one's
own heart, and all mine. And tomorrow another day. I have
thought what to do, but the time here is already as good as up t
Sunday I leave and -- . But life wills it thus, your life and
mine . . . our life, to which we have always had to give way:
its way. . . .

I am thinking of so much now, and the practical jostles with
the limitless in me as in dreams sometimes. Everything that in-
sists on being thought of and attended to, and all the rest that
wants to be beside some sea and wants to sing, days on end, nights
on end. . . .

To Clara Rilke Thursday, April 5, morning

[postmarked April 5, 1906]

. . . Here it is spring. There is only the one word for it. And
already it is no longer premature to say so. The violets are past
their bloom, the blue periwinkle looks large-eyed out of its dark
green (the pervenche Francis Jammes loves so), the primroses are
standing side by side in big groups, as though they had run to-
gether from everywhere, and the wallflower (girofle) is as if
darkened by its own heavy perfume. All that is full of memory,.
but it is a memory without heaviness, that rises up and away from
the things into the sky. And against the skies stand the bearing
gestures of the plum trees, as if ashamed of the easiness of their
blossoms that will open fully tomorrow by the hundreds. And
yet as in wisdom already bearing this ease, as later the burden.
And the little valley is beautiful and as though it lay further away
from the house than usual, being so set into the spring. And the

2O2

antiquities standing out there are as if they too were to put forth,
so full, so full of rising life.

Day before yesterday we were in the woods, toward Jouy-en-
Josas and Velisy, and there everything was full of little white
anemones, the whole floor of the forest full of anemone-stars
and constellations. . . .

I 991

To Karl von der Heydt Meudon-Val-Fleury, Seine et Oise

April 7, 1906

In me is all the restlessness of these unbelievably blissful spring
days which, like a hall that goes up several stories, reach through
the whole sky; the birds are singing, already the periwinkle in the
shadowy green is opening its gazing blue eye, and the scent of
wallflowers fills the whole morning. And the plum trees are in
bloom. And I lack nothing but that little bit of freedom to be by
myself and to listen down inside myself and to consider some
work of my own. Will you understand that every day I have
to exercise all my common sense not to climb aboard a train and
go to Viareggio, there on the coast of the Ligurian Sea, where
the third part of the Book of Hours came into being, all embedded
in the great noise of the lonely sea? So strong is the feeling in me
that I could do, should do something now, something that may
perhaps never come again like this, but that cannot come here,
stifled by the correspondence I must do and diverted from me
through the continual qui vive of my function, through this never
being able to be inwardly alone. . . . My God, I have to say that
to someone, just in order to have said it, and I say it to you be-
cause you, on your journey that will quickly pile up again new
.and diff erent things over this letter, can best forget it again. . . .

203

[ '00 ]

To Karl von der Heydt Villa <ks Brillants

Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise) France
Wednesday after Easter 1906

I thank you for the question. Only my father could have
asked like that. And I feel that I can answer you, as I would have
answered him, honestly, without hesitation. I am seriously re-
flecting and thoroughly took counsel in myself last night: What
can you do for me? Dear friend:

What I would need, according to my feeling and my con-
science, is: to be able to work for myself alone for a year or two,
under conditions such as I had for a while that time in Rome;
alone, with only my wife in the neighborhood, who was working
too, so that we did not see each other every day by any means,
yet were helping each other. Without a function, almost with-
out outside contacts. (Then the Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, to which I have not yet returned, came into being, and
other things wanted to come. But my stay had to be cut short.) I
went then to my friends in Sweden who offered me everything
the most generous hospitality can give, but still could not give
me this, this limitless solitude, this taking each day like a life-
time, this being-with-everything, in short, space, to the end of
which one cannot see and in the midst of which one stands,
circled about by the innumerable.

So the time in Sweden became more a receptive time, as Friedel-
hausen was later, in all its legendary beauty, and as, in still an-
other way, Meudon is now. But after all that and after certain
anxious and profound occurrences that have peculiarly linked and
interpreted everything that went before, a time should, must come
for me, to be alone with my experience, to belong to it, to re-
shape it: for all that is unconverted is already oppressing and
confusing me; it was only an expression of this state that I should
have been longing more than ever to take upon myself, like a
vocation, this spring that reached out to and touched everything:
since it would have become the highest inducement for so much

204

that is only awaiting a start. I don't believe I am fooling myself
when I think that my age (I shall be thirty-one this year) and
all other circumstances speak for the fact that, if I might now
collect myself for my next advance, I could produce a few works
that would be good, that would help me along inwardly and per-
haps also pave the way outwardly for giving to my life a se-
curity which my so-far published books have not given, but which
seems not quite excluded for later.

But: I cannot possibly leave Rodin now; that is just as clear
to me. My conscience would not be light enough for work of
my own if I went away from him like that, unexpectedly. Espe-
cially as he has been sick all these weeks and still feels tired and
low and has need of my support, insignificant as it is, more than
ever. I shall now have to hit upon some kind of compromise with
my great longing. I am convinced that patience is always good
and that nothing that in the deepest sense is justified in happen-
ing can remain unhappened. I shall some day take up and bring
to an end the work for which conditions are now lacking, if it
is really as absolutely necessary and organically demanded of
me as I believe. I shall carry on this life with good will and ab-
solute readiness to serve a while longer, as well as I can, and give
it up some day when we have considered whether that is possible
and in what way it is to happen. To think that out, slowly to think
it out ahead of time for next fall perhaps, that is the only thing,
dear friend, that you can do for me now. . . . But it will alter
my life and my position very much if I can just hope to be able
to return to my own work and task in the not too distant future.
Then I shall at once have joy in the patience now required of
me, imposed on me by circumstances, in a certain sense difficult
but yet not hostile, by this great old Master who wants it thus. I
am incessantly called and interrupted and will let matters rest for
today with having spoken these few words to you: which to me
has been an indescribable relief. . . .

205

To S. Fischer Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise) France

April 19, 1906

... A few days ago Rodin began the portrait of one of your
most remarkable authors, which promises to become something
quite extraordinary.

And yet hardly ever has a portrait been so much aided in its
making by the subject it represents as this bust of Bernard Shaw.
Not only that he stands excellently (with an energy in his keep-
ing still and with such an absolute giving of himself to the hands
of the sculptor), but he knows too how to collect and concen-
trate himself to such a degree in the part of his body which,
within the bust, will after all have to represent so to speak the
whole Shaw, that the nature of the man springs over from it
with unbelievably heightened intensity, feature by feature, into
the bust.

This personality of Shaw's and his whole manner makes me
desirous of reading a few more of his books, of which I think I
know only the Man of Destiny. Would sending me a few of his
books be justified if I say that I am hoping to write a little thing
about him (though without blindly obligating myself to it)?

I would be deeply grateful to you, you may be sure, if you
would send me some of his things. I could also relay something
of them to Rodin; he wants to become acquainted with Shaw's
books, but since there are as yet no French translations in exist-
ence, the only source for him would, for the present, be what I
could tell him of them.

Madame Shaw, who brought about the making of this portrait
over her husband's head in the most charming way, is a solicitous,
quietly attentive good woman, full of zeal and enthusiasm for
beautiful things, hovering about her husband with all this as the
spring wind plays about a billy goat. This by way of information
about your remarkable author. . . .

206

I

To Clara Rilke Meudon-Val-Fleury (Seine et Oise) France

Thursday after Easter 1906 [postmarked April 19, 1906]

. . . The summer is moving fast. Here at least it seems to be
approaching with great rapidity. Can you imagine that the Ave-
nue de FObservatoire is thick and green, as it was that time when,
returning from Viareggio, I walked up and down there. And in
the Luxembourg it is all shadow on the upper terraces, the shim-
mer of the girls* dresses is now more subdued, with more nuances,
under the full chestnuts : no longer in their very shiny spring-
bright whiteness. And here in the garden already yesterday a blue
iris opened; the strawberries are blooming, the currant bushes
too I saw out there in blossom. The little new light-green heraldic
eagles are set up by the round fig bushes. And now, since yes-
terday (after many, many summer- warm, radiant days) there is
falling, day and night, a soft, quiet rain, thick, gentle, and full,
as from the rose of a watering can: comme tombant d'un arrosoir,
one would like to say, because that sounds and falls still darker
and fuller on the ear. And the green is growing under this rain:
swelling and pushing up, and here and there opening all fresh and
new. . . . (And I think of Rome.)

Bernard Shaw comes out daily with his wife, we see each other
often, and I was present at the first sittings and saw for the first
time how Rodin tackles his work. First there is a firmly shaped
clay dummy, consisting of nothing but a ball set on something
that supports it like a shoulder. This dummy is prepared for him
and contains no armature at all; it only holds together by firm
kneading. He begins his work by first placing his model at a very
short distance, about half a step from the stand. With a big iron
compass he took the measurement from the top of the head to
the tip of the beard, and immediately established this proportion
on the clay dummy by lumps of clay. Then in the course of the
work he took measurements twice more: nose to back of head,
and ear to ear from behind. After he had further cut out the eye
sockets very'quickly, so that something like a nose was formed,

and had marked the place for the mouth with an indentation such
as children make on a snowman, he began, with his model standing
very close, to make first four profiles, then eight, then sixteen,
having his model turn after about three minutes. He began with
the front and back views and the two full side-profiles, as though
he were setting four different drawings vertically against the clay
ball, then fitted half -profiles, etc., between these contours. Yes-
terday, at the third seance, he seated Shaw in a cunning little
child's armchair (that ironic and by no means uncongenial scoffer
was greatly entertained by all this) and cut off the head of the
bust with a wire (Shaw, whom the bust was already remarkably
like, in a superior sort of way, watched this decapitation with
indescribable joy) and worked on the recumbent head, partially
supported by two wedges, seeing it from above, at about the same
angle as the model sitting low down a step away. Then the head
was set on again and the work is now going along in the same
fashion. In the beginning Shaw stood, often very close to the
stand, so that he was somewhat higher than the bust. Now he sits
right next it, exactly as high as the work, parallel with it. At some
distance away a dark cloth has been hung up, so that the profiles
always stand out clearly. The Master works rapidly, compressing
hours into minutes, it seems to me, executing stroke after stroke
at very short intervals, during which he absorbs indescribably,
fills himself with form. One seems to feel how his quick, bird-of-
prey-like clutch is always carrying out only one of these faces
that are streaming into him, and one comprehends his working
from memory after the sitting is over. . . .

Be of good cheer and earnest confidence. Should this blessed
life, which indeed never does anything twice but still might come
back to letting us work side by side, give us a chance once more
like the one in Rome, we shall be much further ahead and more
capable and will do a lot of good things. . . .

208

C 103 1

To Elisabeth von der Heydt Meudon-Val-Fleury,

Seine et Oise, France
April 26, 1906

. . . Do you know, does v.d. Heydt know Shaw's works?
There is a man who has a very good way of getting along with
life, of putting himself into harmony with it (which is already
something). Proud of his works, like Wilde or Whistler, but
without their pretentiousness, proud as a dog is proud of his
master. . . .

To Clara Rilke Meudon-Val-Fleury, Seine et Oise

May 3, 1906

. . . there is no nightingale in the garden here, not even
many bird voices; on account of the hunters probably who come
by here every Sunday; but sometimes in the night I waken with
the calling, a calling somewhere below in the valley, calling out
of a full heart. That sweet ascending voice that does not cease
to mount, that is like an entire being transformed into voice,
all of which its form and bearing, its hands and face has become
voice, nocturnal, great, adjuring voice. From afar it sometimes
bore the stillness to my window, and my ear took it over and
drew it slowly into the room and, across my bed, into me. And
yesterday I found them all, the nightingales, and in a mild, cur-
tained night wind walked past them, no, right through the midst
of them, as through a throng of singing angels that only just
parted to let me through, and was closed in front of me and shut
to again behind me. Thus, from quite near, I heard them. (I had
been in town, to eat with passing friends of the Elberf eld von der
Heydts, and came back to Val-Fleury by train toward ten.)
Then I found them: in all these old, neglected parks (in the one
with the beautiful house whose walls are slowly falling in, as
though some artillery of time were aimed directly at them, the

209

one that is cut through the middle by the road and like a fruit
that has fallen apart shows its interior, withered and moldy; and
a little further over in a thickly wooded stretch of park) and be-
hind and above in the closed gardens of the Orangerie. And from
the other side it came across over the walls of the old Mairie and
then suddenly beside me out of a dense little garden full of hedges
and lilac bushes : came so recognizably and so interwoven with
the little garden lying withdrawn into itself under the half-light
night, as when in a piece of lace one recognizes the picture of a
bird spun of the same threads that signify flowers and blooming
things and densest superfluity. And that was noise and was about
me and drowned out all thoughts in me and all my blood; was
like a Buddha of voices, so big and commanding and superior, so
without contradiction, vibrating so, up to the very boundary of
the voice, where it becomes silence again, vibrating with the
same intensive fullness and evenness with which the stillness vi-
brates when it grows large and when we hear it. . . .

To Clara Rilke Meudon-Val-Fleury, Seine et Oise

Thursday evening [postmarked May u, 1906]

. , . this will only be a little Sunday letter, because I have a big
task: this, to pack up and move out of my little house into the
old freedom with all its cares, with all its possibilities, with the
great possession of all its hours. I am full of anticipation and
happy. About how it came, there is not much to tell, and what
there is to say I do not want to write. It probably had to come and
it came so of itself. I bore everything, even this last period, with
quiet, introspective absorbed patience, and I would probably have
borne it that way for a month or two longer. But the Master must
have felt that I was suffering . And now the end has come so
quickly, doubtless more quickly even than he expected, because
he wants to go to the country for a while and close up the house
and garden completely. So I plan to move into the city on Satur-
day; I have rented a room in the little hotel in the rue Cassette

2IO

( No. 29 ) in which we once visited Paula Becker, the room on
the entresol under hers, that still, over the opposite wall, looks out
on and tells of the presence of the green convent trees. I have
rented it without obligation from week to week. There I shall now
be and shall meditate upon myself and remain alone a little with
what is in me. And go on, at once, getting the Cornet ready
and arranging the Book of Pictures. And see the Louvre and the
Cluny now and then and walk in the avenues, by now so dark, of
the Luxembourg gardens toward the gray sun outside. . . .

Don't be anxious about what is to come. There are ways, and
we shall surely find them and make good plans in the course of
the next weeks.

C *o61

To Auguste Rodin Paris

[in French] May 12, 1906

My Master,

I cannot begin the unforeseen life you have prescribed for me,
without having placed in your hands a short exposition of the
facts as I most sincerely feel them to be.

M. Thyssen's letter was addressed to me, as your secretary;
nor did I withhold it from you in speaking to you that very eve-
ning and first thing next morning and in then proposing to you
to send the letter prepared several days before to M. Thyssen
and to add a postscript relative to his German letter. If I was at
fault in this matter, it is that I judged the letter of little importance,
being built on a false supposition and therewith no longer valid.
You thought otherwise, though I remain convinced that my point
of view was excusable in regard to a letter that was not meant to
take rather indelicate advantage of the implied mistake and of
your absence.

M. Rothenstein's letter was the reply to a purely personal
letter I had addressed to him; it was (I must remind you) as your
friend that you introduced me to M. Rothenstein, and I could
see nothing improper in accepting the little personal relation

211

that had been established between your friend and me across our
conversations, the more so as we had very dear mutual friends.
But you no longer wished to remember that it was as a friend
that you invited me to come to you and that the function into
which you introduced me after a few weeks was at first only a
means of procuring for a poor friend some quiet time favorable
to his work. It was thus that you formulated your proposition, the
morning we were walking in the avenue deliberating this pos-
sibility which made me happy in the extreme.

"You will help me a little; that will not take much of your
time. Two hours every morning." Those were your words.

Moreover, I did not hesitate to give you, instead of two hours,
almost all my time and all my strength (unfortunately, I haven't
much) for seven months. My work has been neglected for a long
time; but how happy I was nevertheless to be able to serve you,
to be able slightly to lessen the preoccupations that disturbed
your admirable labors.

You yourself opened your intimacy to me and I entered timidly
there, in the degree that you wished it; never making any other
use of that unforgettable preference than to take comfort in it
deep in my heart and that other use, legitimate and indispensable
to accomplishing your affairs the way you wanted under your
eyes. If I felt that I ought to penetrate those intentions in order
someday truly to help you, by knowing your decisions in ad-
vance, that feeling need not be blamed; it was bound to waken
in one who ardently wished to relieve you and to render you
fully the service you had confided to him.

Nevertheless, I have all appearances against me at the moment
when you see fit to shift my sincere efforts to a basis of suspicious
mistrust.

Here I am, dismissed like a thieving servant, unexpectedly,
from the little house where, before, your friendship had gently
installed me. It was not to your secretary that you gave those
familiar quarters. . . .

I am profoundly hurt by this.

But I understand you. I understand that the wise organism of

212

your life must immediately repel that which seems to it harmful,
in order to keep its functions intact: as the eye repels the object
that disturbs its sight.

I understand that, and do you remember? how well I under-
stood you often in the happiness of our contemplations? I am con-
vinced that there is no man of my age (either in France or else-
where) who is endowed as I am (by temperament and by work)
to understand you, to understand your great life, and to admire it
so conscientiously.

(My wife, from a slightly greater distance and in another way,
has a similar feeling for you. I am distressed that you did not
think of her in dismissing me, not by a single word, although she
(who has such need of your help) has not offended you; why must
she share this disgrace of fortune into which I have fallen? )

You have now, great Master, become invisible to me, as though
by some ascension carried up into skies of your own.

I shall not see you any more but, as once for the apostles who
were left behind saddened and alone, life is beginning fpr me,
the life that will celebrate your high example and that will find in
you its consolation, its justification, and its strength.

We were agreed that in life there is an immanent justice that
fulfills itself slowly but without fail. It is in that justice that I
put all my hope; it will one day correct the wrong you have
seen fit to inflict on him who no longer has the means nor the
right to show you his heart.

Rilke

C '07 3

To Ellen Key 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

May 19, 1906

... So now: you are coming and I am very happy about it.
It is true to forestall disappointment you must give up Rodin,
at least seeing him 'with me. Since six days ago, I am no longer
with him. At his wish I left him rather unexpectedly, serving
him up to the last moment with all my powers; I would not have
been able to go on doing it for long anyway, for in the end there

2*2

was no time left for myself, none at all. Only it would have been
difficult for me to take my departure, on the one hand without
leaving him in the lurch with all the writing, on the other because
of my own uncertain situation. But now that he has taken the
step I have no reproaches to make myself, and must assume that
all is for the best. My longing for my own things too was already
great enough ; they shall now have their turn again; externals
and the conditions of life will simply have to take on some sort
of form. Things must go on somehow, as they have gone up to
now.

Of the further particulars of my parting with Rodin, I cannot
speak; I can only tell you, because you must know it, that I
cannot go with you to him, and would also have to ask you, in
case you see him which I hope and desire very much not to
speak of me.

Perhaps you will go to him with Verhaeren ; what a pity: all
these months I have rejoiced in this one thing, above all in this:
taking you about among his things and into my little house; now
everything has come about otherwise.

But please do not conclude from this that I do not feel for
Rodin all that I ever felt of admiration and love; my inner rela-
tion to him is unaltered, only I can give it no outward expression
for the moment, and I must leave it to time to bring about an ad-
justment that will again reinstate me in the rights of my feeling.
Will these circumstances keep you from coming to Paris? I
hope this will not be the case. Paris is so beautiful now and I
would derive so much consolation and encouragement from see-
ing you now and talking with you. (Tell me when you are coming
and where you are going to live) ....

n >n

To Baroness Gudrun Uexkull 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

Ascension Day [May 24] 1906

. . . Several days ago now I left Rodin to come home to my
own work, to myself, to all that has long been repressed. Ah,

how very alien any service is if it is not one's very own, the spon-
taneous service that goes straight from the heart and hands toward
what is greatest, if it is not service to God, without an inter-
mediary. Now everything must slowly come to me again, the
whole widely scattered herd of my tasks and labors, which has
been without supervision. The Cornet is once more, finally, to
be recast and tested tone by tone down to every echo, and the
new edition of the Book of Pictures, which will be published with
many additions, awaits its assembling. . . .

[ '09 3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

Friday morning [May 25, 1906]

... I am still far from Make Laurids; the Cornet and the
B. of P. must first be all ready for the press. And there it is, in
the Cornet, the passage in question that holds me up. I am almost
afraid, in spite of everything, it will have to stand as it is. The
same superficial, unperceptive presentation is actually in the
whole work (only not in the rewritten passages any longer), and
that obtrudes intolerably only in the passages about the "brown
maiden," while elsewhere it is hidden. Don't you think so? It
is so very much a work of youth and requires much forgiveness,
The entire arrangement of the B. of P. also is still before me and
will not be easy. , . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

Tuesday morning [May 29, 1906]

... I understand your letter as if I had written it myself, and
if I did not talk about all that in mine, which you got Sunday, it
is because I believe we must still have patience: you, as long as
your work is going ahead and coming to a close, and I, until my
Cornet at least and my B. of P. can go to press and until the mo-
ment when I feel I am somewhat organized and clear in mind and

inwardly resolute. My leaving Rodin is still too close to me,
there is much here I would still like to see, this seeing and this
being alone must still do much in me. . . . Despite the feelings
that, in me too, have become impatient, urgent, and relentless,
already more than once, I think that your work, your beautiful
and important work, must, since for the moment I am involved in
none, be the gauge for us: when you have come to some stopping-
place in it, let us make up our minds and act without delay.
Either you come here then, have a few days with me (my last)
in Paris and we go from here somewhere by the sea, or I come to
W[orps]wede into your dear house, into your summery room,
and we go from there to some small, inexpensive beach. (Ah, if
we could only save, and only had the knack of living on next
to nothing, of holding back everything and letting go only the
most necessary, unwillingly and with bad grace. Ellen Key is
almost offended if she is asked for money anywhere, and in-
credibly distrustful of the person who takes it. As a bowler his
ball, so, with her whole feeling, she keeps following her franc
piece for a long time, expecting each one to make all nine. She
is stingy, I notice, our good Ellen. She has probably had to be;
it was her mimicry for getting by in various years. But it is not
pretty to watch. Since she has been here I live in quite unfamiliar
poverty whenever I am with her. We wait on the most diverse
corners for the most diverse buses, we eat in a Duval in between,
secretly as it were, and I suspect she gets her nourishment princi-
pally from what is set before her during some visit. This indigence
is sad, but has as consequence a freedom we could well use. One
can do a great deal, one can always manage this way .)

But she is good and honest, our dear Ellen, and convinced and
so touchingly untouched by all experience. With her, although
she is practical, one cannot discuss practical things because she
assumes, if it is a question of plans, that one mentions only those
for which the means are already at hand, counted out exactly.
Then she naturally says yes and amen to the fine plans. One lives
within the money one has, she thinks, and makes one's plans
within this enclosure (which would yield pretty poor little vege-

216

table gardens) . And also one can scarcely talk with her of inward
things, because she still has certain holiday ideals and such un-
alloyed sentiment that with warmth promptly turns into emo-
tion. So little can be done with that. But do not conclude from
all this that I am not pleased to be with her: I am really fond
of her in many ways and for much have a quite natural, spon-
taneous admiration. Out of an unsuccessful life she has made
something happy; she has made contact with very important
things, and has fallen in love with life and put her trust in life
with a pure readiness and a careless serenity like the bird which
"has not this care." She will be here for a fortnight (during
which I naturally do not always want to devote myself to her
with complete regularity) , and already the first day, the Sunday,
was of course thoroughly organized. First in turn was the Louvre,
in which she looks at and interprets everything in an entirely
emotional way, so undisturbed in her points of view: this was
really strange before the Mona Lisa, who on that day was of a
forbidding haughtiness, deep and clear in the shadow and with
all the blue light behind her on water courses and falls and the
blue flames of the animated mountains. Before many things this
reaction was banal, sometimes it was of a Goethian comprehen-
siveness, sometimes very inadequate, and a thing like the St. Anne
withdraws utterly from such a familiar approach and treatment.
The Venus of Milo, which we saw only from a distance (I
finally had to go to lunch), would have been the most ad-
mirable subject for such interpretations, and down there before
her curtain, she seemed to be just waiting for emotional photo-
graphs of that sort. (To me, this way of looking is of course
fatal: I feel like the young dog with his nose pressed into the
little bit of past one should not do in the room.) Then in the
afternoon, on the way back from Jouven, Ellen was in my room
for a moment (we sent a card to you) . She told about Worpswede
and is still very amazed at Ruth and indescribably proud of her.
At four we arrived by the most various buses at Verhaeren's
who, because of his annually recurring hay fever, must now avoid
the country and stay on in a little attic lodging in Batignolles.

We had a very lovely hour with him and his wife to which at the
end, unfortunately, came Madame G . . . R . . . , the poet's
widow, of whom one very well understood her surviving him.
But most remarkable was the evening of this already very long
day. We saw Ibsen's Wild Duck at the Antoine. Excellently
rehearsed with a great deal of thought and shaping-up: amazing.
Naturally distorted, twisted, misconstrued in detail through cer-
tain differences of temperament. But the play itself. Thanks to
the circumstance that both female characters (Hjalmar Ekdal's
wife and the fourteen-year-old Gina) were simple, without
French make-up, all their brilliance came from within almost to
the surface. There was something very great, deep, essential.
Doomsday and judgment. Something ultimate. And suddenly,
the hour had come when Ibsen's majesty deigned to look upon
me, for the first time. A new poet to whom we shall go by path
after path, now that I know one. And again a man misunderstood
in the midst of fame. An entirely different person from what one
hears. And still another experience: the unspeakable laughter of
the French audience (a very inferior one, to be sure) at the most
delicate, most tender, most painful places, where even the moving
of a finger would have hurt. There: laughter. And again I under-
stood Make Laurids Brigge and his northernness and his being
wrecked by Paris. How he saw and felt and suffered it. Yes-
terday, Monday, the most important thing was the Faillet private
collection with all the most important Van Goghs and Gauguins
reproduced and praised in Meier-Graef e. There is something most
important there beneath arbitrariness and next to insanity. 1
don't yet know what. It was very remarkable. And I could take
that very seriously, while a Gustave Moreau exhibition only gave
me the feeling of not belonging there. So I am, after all, somewhat
further along than four years ago. . . .

2l8

C "' 3

To Clara Rilke Friday, June i [1906], morning

. . . now we have had a few days of bright sun again and today
there is rain, and across the way, over the wall, a light wind is
turning the leaves of the chestnut trees and acacias so that they
get and feel the rain from all sides and are shining with it. And it
is one of those rainy days that are not for the city. That one
should experience outside, to see all the darkened green, all the
meadows mirroring gray, all the beech leaves that are in motion
and more variegated in their green since the lights are no longer
there (the bright, melting, dissolving lights), leaves that have
only reflections, green that sees itself again in green, green that,
set against green, has green shadows, green that has become deep
and finally has a bottom somewhere, a bottom of green. And sud-
denly all the color is taken out of the scent too, as if the sun
in leaving had let it sink into the flowers. Now the leaves are
fragrant, the little beech leaves especially, and the old-fashioned
leaves of the elms and the little tipped-over leaves of the balsam
poplars are flowing slowly out into the air. Yesterday we saw
this rain in preparation out in the country, in beech-tree paths,
over broad meadows and water surfaces, in the windows of an
old castle: in Chantilly. This was not a really royal castle, and it
isn't like one. It belonged to the Condes and it is different, more
intimate than Saint-Cloud or Versailles or Saint-Germain, ducal
only, but full of decorum and quiet, not dominating and arrogant
in its feeling, but proud in its reserve and conscious worldly dig-
nity. From the castle (of which only a small wing is old and
good) no views out into an empire that goes up to the sky. But
within the roomy circle of trees which is or seems to be the
boundary, a spreading out, an unfolding with roads and ave-
nues, with water mirrors and rose parquetry, with steps that,
flowing out of balustrades, seem to follow the ascending palace
like its train, with scarcely dipping meadow slopes and scarcely
rising roads, with nuances of movement, with a play of advance
and retreat, of hasty approach and withdrawal, of faltering rise

and swift fall, with this whole minuet of space that is sometimes
reflected in one of the high windows and is blotted out by the
sky which, out of the depths of this mirror, shimmering like
mother-of-pearl, comes plunging, light gray and exaggerated,
spilling over everything. Inside, a magnificence spoiled in later
times. A series of pictures; little portraits of women and men,
black- white-yellow on a jade green background; little Clouets,
exquisite and awkwardly elegant, set on an escutcheon-blue back-
ground, Fouquet miniatures (legends of Christ and the saints)
taken from the livre d'heures of Etienne Chevalier; a drawing of
Rembrandt, drawings of Watteau and Prud'hon; Botticelli, Pol-
laiuolo, and Raphael with pictures; ornaments: among them a
Benvenuto Cellini; a very beautiful, dew-bright, liquidly trem-
bling amethyst, surrounded with brilliants, belonging to the
greatest member of the house of Conde and suddenly, looming
large in a passageway, that remarkable drawing of Leonardo's for
the Mona Lisa, which looks too dark on the card; its tone is that
of calf's leather and is rather light against the background spot-
tily covered with brown. . . .

C ' 3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

June 14, 1906

... it is strange that for us beginnings perpetually all but
coincide with changes. That interruptions almost always im-
pend when the sap is rising; as with grapevines pruned too late, it
pours out then and what should have been a mouth has become a
wound. La vigne pleure they said of it in Meudon in an old
gardener's expression. I too have now a slight fear of moving.
Being occupied with the B. of P. (it was sent off today at last)
has brought me back, if not literally into work, at least (after
an incalculable interim) into warmth, into the body temperature
of my soul (to be so rudely graphic) , and that is already something
and something which, after long coldness, I know how to ap-
preciate. To go on living like this without any change: much in

22O

me would like that now in spite of the fact that my room is ntnt
without its defects, etc. Now perhaps that is both possible and,
in the interests of both of us, the most advisable. We are indeed
in the same situation ... so let us perhaps, each in his place,
keep on doing his own work, as long as it continues and circum-
stances permit, without thinking of anything beyond. Then both
our invitations will wait and can become eif ective when necessary.
I haven't written there yet, but I think we could go as early as
the second half of July to the Baron and Baroness von der Heydt
who are already at Konigs-Hohe, while the Karl von der Heydts,
as far as I remember, are expecting us in August. . . ,-Stina
Frisell has, in the meantime, gone away again with her little
Karin who is now to be introduced "into life," eighteen years old
and in the midst of it as she is. Stina Frisell is a dear, simple, loyal
person . . . and she was wonderfully comforting beside Ellen
Key, of whom scarcely anything seems to be left, she is so gnawed
and eaten away by all those rat-souls that cling to her. Ah, it is
really sad. How she is nothing but a little shred of old-fashioned
ideals worked into a Secessionist armchair and quite delighted
with her own use. How she sees and hears nothing any more,
neither the human drama incessantly being unloaded upon her,
nor works of art, which she analyzes like a schoolteacher without
taking or needing anything from them, nor her own memories
which, dissolved in her discolored activity, have lost all local
color. How, with a certain propensity to take her own life seri-
ously (that was perhaps all), she has yet made it almost ridiculous:
into the life of a good aunt to all the world, who has her pockets
full for those who find pleasure in sugar lumps and cheap candies,
but who cannot appease the hunger of a single person with her
miserable, already slightly stale fare. And how natural and right
that it happened thus. One cannot desire to make something out
of the ordinary (and what is more exceptional and unusual than
to be able to help someone ? ) into an everyday matter and into
a profession. And only someone who looked at human life so
little directly, so goodheartedly and, at bottom, so old-maidishly
as Ellen, could fall (with such complete conscientiousness and

221

conviction) into this error. That is just Ellen Key. Remark-
able, isn't it; almost a little weird? Oh, all these noiseless trans-
formations of life. The being no longer this and no longer that,
while one still believes one is getting to that stage. This pouring
out, gently, like an upset bottle that is lying on its side and feel-
ing quite well and yet is already as worthless as a broken one.
How these gentle things simply go away if we offend them with
any kind of demand; how they lack any attachment whatever,
how completely unsentimental they are, simply go away, fly
off , are seen no more.

Ellen's metier is contrary to nature. But I know its charm and
intoxication, which our good Ellen has perhaps felt only rarely,
because she was too modest and because, alas, because she could
not even give what arouses, as a reflex, this intoxication in the
giver: that absolute, ultimate something which at times attracts
this or that young person to us, to you or to me, that something
learned and suffered in the making of things, which is our pres-
tige and our wealth. Some such young person will speak out to
us and not know why it helps him so much. Oh that we might
find the means, without stingily shutting ourselves up, of saving
and keeping back. I think we must listen a great deal and atten-
tively, then gradually we will answer more and more prudently
and better and better. . . . Just think: two days ago in a studio
(rue Campagne-Premiere) (scarcely three steps wide and three
long) I read my Rodin essay to six young people. It just came
about: I knew only one of them slightly (Dora Herxheimer, of
whom I told you, who makes the big lions) , but it was lovely and
serious and warm.

How has it been in Oberneuland? I got a dear warm letter
from our little girl, with rose leaves that felt like herself. It was
quite well "written," in spots condensing into lines. I am so
stupid that I don't know at all how to answer her nicely, but I
shall write her today or tomorrow, as best I can. With rose leaves.
And it strikes me that she should be the first to learn a piece of
news which . . . will interest her. To you I shall only say that
it is connected with the fact that soon now (in Ellen Key's book)

222

a series of pictures of me will be published and that I myself am
quite pleased with a certain alteration which I undertook for that
and also for other reasons. However, enough of that, otherwise
you will guess it and I would rather Ruth told you. . . .

C "3 3

To Clara Rilke Friday morning, June 21, 1906

. . . Ellen Key left on Sunday for Switzerland; I accompanied
her as far as Fontainebleau and we spent some not very profitable
hours there, driven by flunkies at full speed through the castle
in the midst of a Sunday pack (since E.K., with her inexhaustible
receptivity, must always see everything), and passing a few
afternoon hours in the big forest which, with its enormous
beeches, ferns, and solitary birches in quiet glades, almost made
one think of Danish forests. We were in the end wholly without
contact and our mutual expressions of friendship had become
mere social forms and were worked with a couple of handles like
a machine. In the little station of Fontainebleau- Avon from which
our trains went out in different directions at almost the same
time, this situation rose of its own accord into a symbol and thus,
having become real, lost its oppressiveness: just as in a poem, a
situation taken up into a metaphor loses its transitory, painful
and unstable quality, and becomes full of significance and inner
validity, the moment it passes wholly into an image; so life pro-
vided us (or me: since E.K., accustomed and practiced in replac-
ing all actuality with the "ideal" of the actual long since ready
within her, must have noticed scarcely anything of all this )
with the kindly satisfaction of relieving us of what was unspoken
in our situation through a complete expression of it. Just think,
it couldn't be better done: two people on two opposite platforms,
separated by a pair of tracks on which, in a while, two trains
going in opposite directions will come in to take one away to
this place and the other to that. My platform just a platform,
with people, impatience, departure: nothing to stay for. Ellen's,
almost exaggeratedly peaceful: wholly in the sun, with rosebeds,

nice benches, and a certain imaginary happiness: like a little gar-
den city. And then between us this legally prescribed impossibility
of crossing : so that really nothing had been left out or forgotten.
And now that life had taken everything upon itself so literally,
trait for trait, in the presence of this superior transfiguration, so
finely developed with every means at hand, it was not difficult
for me to look over in a friendly and open way now and then (the
trains were a little too long in coming) and to return warmly the
loyal and feeling gaze that encircled me from over there. With real
warmth in my look. Now I understood how this old maid was
only one of the many old maids who lay up memories in a room,
memories and memories of memories and all only memories of
one thing: of that love the once vague, mounting possibility of
which had already been so exuberantly taken up by their hearts
that the experience no longer needed to come at all. And all the
accumulated things that always signify this one state and derive
from it, from unlikely parents, from an error, from chance per-
haps, have something uncertain in their look and something shy
in their behavior, are themselves inclined to consider that they
are not quite legitimate, while the old maid does nothing but weep
over the indescribable respectability of her ancestry. Are certain
people marked to fall into certain destinies, not to get beyond the
type? And then if, as with Ellen, unusual power is added, resolu-
tion, perhaps also a certain desperate determination to grow
out of the fate to which she dimly felt herself committed, then in
spite of everything, doesn't just the same destiny result, as if it
were lived in a larger room, with disproportionately extensive
memories which make that nullity of experience even more evi-
dent? Perhaps the conventions of such wasted lives must be exag-
gerated like that in individual destinies in order to be noticed. Per-
haps that is their way out: this once more becoming as tragic in
the great and obvious as they often were in the minute. But how
good life is. How just, how incorruptible, how not to be cheated:
not by force, not by will, not even by courage. How everything
remains what it is and has only this choice: to fulfill itself or to
exaggerate itself. . . .

I "4 3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

Friday morning [June 29, 1906]

... I am thinking only remotely of the visiting journeys;
though I occasionally Believe it possible that they could offer us
the frame and setting for very dear reunion (of the two and the
three of us). ... For the rest, I am absolutely decided to shut
myself up for a certain number of hours every day, and no mat-
ter where and under what exterior conditions . . . for the sake
of my work: whether it really comes now or whether I only
make the appropriate gestures, unfilled. For haven't I known
with such great conviction ever since Russia, that prayer and its
season and its gesture passed on reverently and unabbreviated was
the condition God made and that of his return to this person and
that, who scarcely expected it and only knelt down and stood
up and was suddenly full to the brim . . . ? So will I kneel
down arid rise up, every day, alone in my room, and I will con-
sider sacred what happened to me in it: even the not having
come, even the disappointment, even the forsakenness. There
is no poverty which would not be fullness if one took it seri-
ously and worthily and did not make it into an exasperation and
abandon it.

For the present do not count, for this (and many other) rea-
sons, on my coming soon. My room is good to me and keeps itself
about me and the heat seems to me so unusually bearable that I
haven't yet complained of it at all. To be sure, there are already
really hot days (like yesterday), but toward evening, the wind
comes up of itself, without rain and storm, or at least it comes
at night and the next day is a beginning again and has distance
before it. As long as it is so bearable I will hold out and only run
the risk of change when it becomes necessary. Nonetheless, it
helps me to calm and cheerfulness to feel and to have before me
the possibility of coming to you, the way you have indicated.
It is to be hoped the change in diet, which may be in prospect,
will not cause you any inconvenience. I believe that these things

will in time prove less and less difficult for us, that in the end we
shall have a joyful way of taking them as they come. I am eating
at Claire's now at noon (completely vegetarian all these weeks) t
and in the evening drink two cups of milk in a cremerie : that
is all, with fruit evening and morning, and it is excellent and
nourishes me as easily and naturally as sap does a tree, ... I
would like to send you with this, because I cannot write more, a
little poem; a little sketch from life. . . .

To Clara Rilke Friday morning [July 6, 1906)

... I must see about something to read and hear on the Rem-
brandt celebration; is it connected with an important exhibition?
If we could only go on from where we left off looking in Kassel
and Frankfurt last year; and I think it would surely be like that;
how beautiful it was before the Samson; we ought to have written
down a few words then and there. Didn't you do it? Later? That
was such a good day, when one apprehended and understood.
And the joy in such great things happens so entirely in nuances
that one cannot later say it was of this color or that. And one
recalls almost nothing of it if one hasn't a few notes out of the
immediate experience that might help. It is the same for me with
the last year's portrait in Berlin. Looking at such things a meta-
phor ought to come to one, something like a little entrance of one's
own through which one can always get in. It seems to me as if all
that could be better if one put oneself into that state of mind
of which I wrote recently, and it strikes me also that one must
be able to reach and evoke it, because it is perhaps nothing but
attentiveness. I tried that in the Louvre recently. I had been there
a few times and it was like looking at great activity; thus things
kept happening and happening there before me. And then, a
short time ago, there were only pictures and many too many
pictures, and everywhere someone standing, and everything was
disturbing. And then I asked myself why it was different today.
Was I tired? Yes. But wherein did this tiredness consist? In the

226

fact that I let everything possible come into my mind; in that
everything possible went right through me like water through
a reflection, dissolving all my outlines into flux. And I said to
myself: I will no longer be the reflection but that which is above.
And I turned myself over so that I was no longer upside down,
and closed my eyes for a brief moment and drew myself about
me and stretched my contours, as one stretches violin strings,
until one feels them taut and singing, and suddenly I knew I
was fully outlined like a Diirer drawing, and I went thus before
Madonna Lisa: and she was incomparable. So, do you see . . . ,
it is this that one must sometime be able to do. Not to wait
(as has happened until now) for the strong things and the good
days to make something like that out of one; to anticipate
them, to be it already of oneself: that is what one must some-
time be able to do. And won't everything be work then? For
what in that state is unfruitful? It is precious black earth in us,
and our blood has only to go ahead like the plow and make
furrows. Then, while we are at the harvesting, the sowing will
already have started again in another spot. . . .

c <n

To Karl von der Heydt Hotel de la noble Rose, Furnes, Belgium

last day of July, 1906

My dear friend, I no longer propose to be burdened by still,
day after day, not having thanked you for your little letter and
the fulfillment of what it had to announce. You know : thanks
with all my heart.

This last period has been confused, the leave-taking from Paris
difficult and inwardly complicated. I am sitting in a strange little,
old city in the midst of a Teniers kermis, my eyes full of swings
and round games, my ears full of hawkers, my nose filled with
the smell of beer, honey cake, and peasantry, on my tongue the
dust and dryness of this activity, and the pressure of indescrib-
able summer warmth on all my feeling. (It is in keeping with

227

Flemish taste to count with all five senses and to enumerate them
all.)

In Furnes the tram line begins by which the whole Belgian
coast is tied together from knot to knot; at intervals I am looking
for the town it is to be. But most of them, alas, are already
real "bains de mer" with distractions, courses, etc. (Heavens,
where is it going to, the solitude of earth?)

C "73

To Countess Mary Gneisenau Friedelhauscn bei Lollar

September 11, 1906

How are we to thank you for the delightful correspondence
you keep up with such unforgettable and charming tokens? This
summer seems to us in retrospect almost like a fairy tale, the way
it stands about your figure and behind it, enhancing it to yet
deeper significance; or rather, to put it differently, opening life
up to us, riches and expanse, pictures behind pictures, contacts
and understandings; how much has come to us unawares through
you, things real and given, and how new things are continually
being given into our hands out of your letters and journals. How
are we to thank you?

That Sister Marianna's letters returned to me from your hands
adds to the letters themselves that by which the book had been
enriched when I got it back: the equilibrium that lies in a rose
like that being so inexpressibly beautiful, a rose that has slowed
the joyful and princely rhythm of its prime till it became
transiency, evanescence, a series of slowly descending tones.
But, as we somehow need the rose in its coming and its opening,
how very necessary this is for us too, how closely this too is
bound up with our hearts, and how we cling to it: to this faded-
ness and to the tender, slightly plaintive nuances of fadedness:
those yellows in the yellow, ah yes, they are in us too, and we
come to find them beautiful and to rejoice in them; we come to
let count everything in life's hands, in a waiting, a willing, still a

228

little bit elementary impartiality. For fading and fadedness and
giving oneself over to them is one beauty more beside the beauty
of what comes and burgeons and bears, just as lamentation is a
beauty, and fearfulness, and self-surrender, and futile and self-
abasing entreaty, when it comes so violently, rushing on so irre-
sistibly over a heart's declivity, as it did with the Portuguese nun:
"A wee bit small and indiscreet" it was indeed, that supplica-
tion and belittling and abasing of self in love disdained; and yet
it was so rich, so creative, so very much this heart's progress and
glory to have become didn't you feel it too? great and valid
beyond its object, exhaustless and beautiful. Only in comparison
with that dull and insignificant object was it wrong and unfitting
to show such devotion. Gauged by the measure of the devotion
itself, its object no longer exists; it has become space, and the im-
mense ardent lamentation goes right through it and toward no
one any more. And at this point it becomes manifest that it has
entered again into a majesty beyond its apparent humbleness.

That is why loneliness, which so often increases their sorrows
beyond number, is so suited to the lot of women: because only
within this seclusion is such a transfiguration possible; this being
way down deep not implicated in the suffered wrong, this in-
ability ever to become vulgar, this intactness, is this too heavily
paid for by all that women have borne? A voice is lifted, ah, a
small, a weak voice in utter distress and wants only to cry out; a
betrayed little heart wants to rest, two eyes seek their pasture
and no impatient straining arises from it and no distortion: the
eyes look out more and more clear-sightedly, the heart grows, and
already there is no longer anyone there: no one so big that he
might follow the prodigious calling that goes forth from that
lamenting mouth. Who can pity women that has ever seen how
they grow beyond wrong and pettiness, how they are something
untouched, an untapped store. Perhaps the man doesn't pass by
"uncomprehending and unsuspecting," perhaps it is they, ex-
alted as they are, whose fate it is, even there where they kneel
before him, to grow immeasurably out beyond him. , . .

n n

To Karl von der Heydt Schloss Friedelhausen

September n f 1906

. . . Clara is thinking seriously of Berlin and wants to try
transferring her Worpswede studio thither and to begin an in-
dustrious winter there. And I I am thinking in all seriousness
and hardihood of Greece. You have indeed suggested all kinds
of things to me which really appeared not much less daring, but
for which no justified urge spoke in me; but now here is a coun-
try that in climate would offer everything those southern places
promised, of which we thought. And besides, there are voices in
me counseling this so unconditionally and honestly that I would
still feel this choice to be less forced and arbitrary and finical,
despite the rather more complicated trip and greater distance, and
that this decision appears to me simpler, more direct, more sober
than any other. What I learned with Rodin of bearing and capacity
and joy: where could I better test and apply it and become one
with it than in the presence of those unforgettable things back to
which, up many branches, the blood of his own things goes?
Should it not be of special value to write there the second volume
of the little Rodin book, which is indeed to be the very next thing
I begin? I feel that much in me could broaden there and that other
things that were perhaps growing one-sidedly could there ex-
perience the correction and restraint that can emanate from the
age-old experiences of that land. . . .

c *:i

To Gudrun Baroness Uexkull Friedelhausen

September 12, 1906

... I only want to tell you today how beautiful it is here:
how animated and spacious these days are, autumn days, as one
must admit; but the vistas between the full trees are deep and
radiant, the clouds are built up into great shapes on the horizon

and if one looks up, one sees a poplar glittering against blue air.
The day is already divided for one's feeling, like a bicolored flag,
into cool and warm. Sun is one thing and shadow is another, and
they seem to have nothing more to do with each other. Only be-
low in the nursery garden it is still different. There it is still
summer from morning to evening. There sap is still rising in the
stalks and stems, and there things still confidently go on growing.
There each warms the other, and an old-fashioned blanket of
fragrance is lying over the asters and gilliflowers and "marvels
of Peru" which stand close beside each other, holding color
against color, full of simplicity and joy. All this greets you
through us and so much in us joins in the greeting. . . .

To Countess Mary Gneisenau Friedelhausen bei Lollar

September 20, 1906

No, there is nothing I would not like to write you about; only
it seems to me so immodest and unsuitable to talk about the "per-
son" after whom you, kindly, ask. That person is something very
helpless and his growth and progress is slow and hesitant and
full of relapses ; it cannot be a question of his becoming some-
thing worth talking about, rather everything depends only on
how much and how completely he will be able to transpose him-
self into artistic matter. That is why, particularly in less good
periods, I have almost no means of letting him express himself;
that is why I was silent about myself, although I wish nothing
more urgently than to feed the relationship between us with the
best: yes, for that very reason. Moreover my recent letter was
conceived as the first part of a communication the second part of
which was to contain more personal matters. Then it didn't
come to that: so far in advance did what came send its dismay
and depression; I could only have talked of vague fear, of much
sadness, of how much this gray autumn breaking in swiftly upon
us frightens me with its manner and makes all the cold and

hardness coming up with winter seem colossal to me, as to a little
bird. Should I have written about all that?

Then little Ruth fell ill here in the unfamiliar house and all that
kept working on us in the same direction. She had a few distressing
days, while the illness was asserting itself; since it has become mani-
fest, not only does most of the discomfort seem to be past, but
the little girl is applying her energy and nature so bravely now
to becoming well again that we really have no more reason to
worry. But however quickly she may get through with it all,
we must still count on remaining in Friedelhausen at least until
the end of this month. This new delay is strange when one con-
siders how very much we wanted soon to get at carrying out
those decisions which even now haven't been made.

Just think (ah, how I long at heart to tell you about everything)
that to the possibilities we thought we faced, a new, very tempt-
ing one was added: the renewed invitation of our present kind
hostess to pass the winter with her in complete freedom for work
in her villa on Capri. You can imagine that that appealed to us.
We spoke much about it, but now it does seem to us that Clara
would do best to choose the most courageous among all the pos-
sible decisions, the one that looks least like an evasion of what
will, after all, one day have the upper hand in some form; your
dear letter and everything you have already begun to do for
her coming to Berlin helped her very much to this good inclina-
tion in which (as far as I can see) she is now becoming strength-
ened from day to day. . . .

May I too find some most courageous one among my coming
decisions. Occasionally I think of going to Greece now, of writ-
ing or at least preparing there the second volume of my Rodin
book and of accepting the Capri invitation for the rest of the
winter. But it may still come out quite differently. At present
everything seems unreal to me: one plan as well as another, and
also much that is past, like the time on Wacholderhohe which in
us too has sunk into such a dreamlike haze. And which already
seems distant. A distant summer. . . .

n

To Ellen Key 16 Hubertusallee, Grunewald bei Berlin

November 6, 1906

. . . Off and on, by roundabout ways, I have had good news
of you, and so I didn't feel entirely separated from you, although
I did nothing at all to give you a visible sign of all the good greet-
ings and thoughts that are accustomed to go to you. I heard
just now that you are well and am very happy about it.

There would be many things to say now about myself, but
perhaps so I hope I shall be able to deliver to you personally
a supplement to all that has happened.

I am for the nonce skipping everything up to the moment (a
month ago now) when we arrived here. Clara (you will already
have heard about it) wants to try to get pupils and commissions
here and to undertake a trial winter in this (alas, so loathsome!)
city. I helped her a little in the preparation for it, had myself a
few steps and paths to take here besides, finally had to go in for
a troublesome dental treatment which led to a great deal of dis-
tress and has so weakened me that my whole constitution is in a
state of severe exhaustion which I am only now hoping to get
out of again. The summer was not very good for me anyway, not
as regards health, and not otherwise. According to my inner
need, I would now like best to go to Paris again, where I woilced
well and industriously until the first of August. But the means
are lacking, so I am snatching at a kind and friendly invitation
that calls me to Capri, where I hope to concentrate on serious
work. It is the sister of Countess Schwerin who died last year
(Frau Alice Faehndrich von Nordeck-Rabenau) , who means
to arrange a little room for me in her villa on Capri. With a heavy
heart I am renouncing Paris, which was so favorable to my work,
but it is of course a great joy that there is the other possibility
permitting me to hope for a good winter. So as soon as I feel
a little stronger I shall travel (and indeed without stopping) to
Naples in order to get very quickly to work (the last months
have taken me very far away from it) .

Now let me tell you at once, dear Ellen, that my friend and
hostess would be very happy to receive you in her house on
Capri. Note that down, also that I expect you there, and arrange
your plans so that if in the course of the winter you go farther
south, you stop off with us!

So, now I have acquainted you somewhat with everything,
and now comes a request. I have already voiced it once before
in similar form and am repeating it now at the present moment
in all frankness. Dear Ellen, wouldn't you do me the favor not
to let your essay on my books be published for the present as a
book? I asked you that once before. Then you said you had
promised Bard something and had nothing else suitable for him.
Now this reason does not hold, since the little book has been
taken away from the publishing house, and I am making use of
the opportunity once more to tell you quite honestly that it
would be a relief to me if the little book were not published, not
now. It is so profoundly necessary for me now not to be shown
and recommended, it is quiet and obscurity that I need above all
in order to take my next steps. The essay, which is based largely
on passages from letters for which no evidence as yet exists in
my books, outstrips me in a certain sense, while on the other hand
it also fixes my religious developments at a stage beyond which
they have, t in part, already been shifted. I have no publication
now which in that sense would speak for itself, it is by no means
a moment to call attention to me and I am more and more
anxious to have my books speak for themselves ; dear and valua-
ble as your helpful voice is to me; it has certainly had its effect
too, and indeed no slight one, but there is no reason at present
for again attempting any influence. In addition the place with
Fischer is a very conspicuous and exposed one in which the
book would necessarily and rightly provoke considerable opposi-
tion that is unnecessary. In short: all in all: I beg you (relying
on your not misunderstanding me) not to bring about a book
edition of the essay immediately, perhaps to postpone it until
some one of my future works is at hand which might then justify
the publication of such a brochure, for which there is now no

occasion at all. It only disturbs me to be thus exhibited now, and
you are really aiming at just the opposite, aren't you?

So let us wait, please, let me work and let time do its part. You
will give me the deepest joy if you respect my request. May I
count on it? . . .

Duse is in Berlin. We shall see her play tonight (I hope) in
Rosmersholm.

t 122 ]

To Clara Rilke Hotel Hassler, Naples

Thursday morning [November 29, 1906]

If one went (you remember) up our Strada Santa Lucia a few
houses to the left, and then, instead of to the square with the
fountain, out the other side toward the sea , there began to
the right, following the curve of the shore, a street on the left
side of which only the sea remained and the castle (Castello del
Ovo) jutting out at the bend, while on the right it was bordered
by a long line of hotels . One of these hotels recedes a little
in order to thrust out before it a whole edifice of terraces: that
is the Hassler; my room with its high door gives directly on these
terraces, which run out to the right of the house into a little
garden, in which I am now sitting; to be sure, its last flowers
(purple asters) are faded, but over a wall hangs clematis in
blossom, sun lies on the sea, and behind the sun, just opposite
me, beside Sorrento's foothills, is visible the contour of Capri.

The journey was really not bad; when I arrived I thought:
it could go on that way for five days more, I almost wanted it
to; because the feeling for the very foreign, for the unknown,
was strong and decided in me. But now the trip already seems
long ago, although there is nothing in between but a supper alone
in the empty dining room (there seem to be only a few people
here), a warm bath, a night under the zanzariere, in deep sleep,
a breakfast with very pale yellow-green honey, and finally this
moment here in the terrace garden while I have been writing.
And five more days of travel might well have preceded it, it is

so unfamiliar here: foreign in such a good way. There is the bay,
now and then little silhouettes of oarsmen against it in such
beautiful restraint of movement and just what makes a living
creature of the boat ; sailing ships in the distance. Then the
bend toward Posilipo, this whole rim as if just flung out, and
to the left the protruding castle, as if in a cloak and placed against
the sun like one of Rembrandt's figures against the light. And
foreign the sounds; this swift trotting of little horses, this clatter-
ing turn of primitive wheels, the little bells on the horses' necks,
echoing the trot once more in diminished form, cries in between,
shouts, music, children's voices, and cracking whips : every-
thing foreign even to the cracking of live-oak fruits under my
steps in the little garden. If it could only go on, this being
known by no one. Your telegram was brought to me imme-
diately upon my arrival; I was just washing up a little when they
came with it, and right to me, actually, although I hadn't yet given
my name at all. It now seems to me conceivable that I shall re-
main here two or three days before I sail across into the new
over there: into that contour which it will behoove me to fill
out. . . . The sea has already changed twenty times while I
have been writing, Now I am stopping and want to look. . . .

To Clara Rilke Hotel Cocumella, Sorrento

Friday morning [November 30, 1906]

Today I saw Naples for the first time from the sea. But I haven't
yet gone to Capri, only toward it in order to stay, halfway, in
Sorrento. I was expecting to see Vollmoeller and was happy about
this meeting after years. But it fell through. It turned out that
he had gone to Florence and would not return until April. But
the villa. One approaches from behind, driving up through a
thick, dark, half-grown orange grove through which little deep-
laid paths go out in all directions. Then comes the country-
house, with the land in front running toward the sea one sees
an arborway and at the end, the outline of a railing behind which

it becomes vast and light: the sea. The road thither from Sorrento
between walls, old houses with quite black entrances and in-
teriors. Now and then overtaken by little wagons that pass
breathlessly by. Above the walls, toward the sky, many orange
trees at their greatest bearing, heavy, the colors pieced together
like stained-glass windows. Reapers here and there. Women
carrying too full baskets upright on their heads come gravely and
solemnly toward one. And ever and again this fullness of fruit
against the light sky. Sometimes an autumnal live-oak in be-
tween, a great olive or, spread out over all, a solitary pine.

Even on sailing in one saw those pines opened out here and
there over the flat houses that rise, terrace after terrace, up to
the little piazza at the very top. There is wonderfully much nature
in this architecture; arriving in Sorrento one sees even more, when
one leaves Naples behind in the morning on the ship: then it
takes on more and more the character of an enormous quarry
that is reddish and bright on its fresh surfaces between old, steep,
long-unbroken gray. The deeper-lying parts finally fade away
completely into reddish mist, but the castle remains, stands, shim-
mers and still creates in the distance the impression of rock.
Mont Valerien (opposite Meudon) could often give this im-
pression toward evening; or also early in the day; then even the
houses of Meudon could recede or stand out like that on the op-
posite slopes. That is due to the plans. For a while then the ship
gives a close view of Vesuvius, whose contours are so animated,
one could tell by the look of them that they had just recently
been altered again. I didn't have my glass with me. But I noticed
how strangely the upper part of the mountain is marked by all
the lava flows, which give this peak the character of being not yet
completed. The light behaves strangely on this material and
something self -illuminating results from it, so that one can a little
bit imagine Fuji.

And again and from somewhat nearer I saw Capri's contour,
like a signature I have already read often. I would like to show
you a little of all this, . . . therefore I write these few words
quickly before I go back.

237

C 1*4 1

To C/dtni JR*7& [Picture postcard with "Fauno con otre" (Porripeii)

dated Naples, December 2, 1906]

Was finally in the museum today. Have seen many things
again, only not the one little Pompeian tablet with the slender
figures against the sea. Little fragments, single bronzes, Orpheus,
Eurydike, Hermes; a great deal that is confirming, helpful . . ,
Monday I expect to go to Capri. . . .

C "53

To Clara Rilke Hotel Hassler, Naples

[December 2, 1906]

. . . Naples too, as indeed everything Italian, is more beau-
tiful in the summer, as that time we were first here; now it has
surrendered much of its character and peerlessness, now, since,
as my barber said today: the bad weather is coming. I tried to
modify his definite expression a little, unnoticeably, in my favor;
but no, he would not let it be changed, now it would come and
there would be nothing to do about it. "Pioggia, scirocco
eh ." And he was right. Yesterday toward evening the wind
must have shifted or it had already shifted (my sense of direc-
tion is nothing to boast of), in short, something had changed
after all the radiance that seemed so secure; the sea came on more
powerfully, rose up white on the breastworks, far out was green,
and as surface looked calm, as if grown heavy, but from across
it came a wind, an agitated something, and, over the rising city,
dazzling with the light that fell over it, piled up clouds, heed-
lessly, clouds which didn't fit upon each other at all, so that
empty places were left between or bits of light sky, squeezed in;
piled and piled, while the evening continued to shine on every-
thing from over there, so that the dark became always darker and
the light more and more sudden and dazzling and the red of the
blind arcades of the Pizzofalcone (first elevation by the sea be-
low the castle) which are built up on top of each other, dissolved

238

into red and redder and extreme, scarcely credible reds, which
one believed could last only a moment. All that made quite with-
out contour, simply out of a mass, like one of those powerful
Goyas in which figures and trees and buildings and mountains
are rolled into shape with the same energy (look at the Cucafia
(Maypole), the little picture upstairs on the very top floor of the
National Gallery, where there are also the beautiful Manet
Hunter that looks like a Turgenev, and Rodins, four or five of
them, to be seen again) . Then came the night and brought
frightful storms; Sunday then began with a rather piercing sun,
turned to rain, wind, change; the dull primed green of the sea,
now and then the white (what white! ) of a seagull fading out
against it: those are Pompeian values. It might have become clear
to us even then that a painter could come into being here with all
this; for painters do develop out of color, the real ones and
color is here, and indeed in every gradation. At the corner of
one of the black side alleys that branch off the Via Roma (the
long, narrow main street leading up to the museum), I saw yes-
terday the stand of a lemonade seller. Posts, roof, and back of
his little booth were blue (of that animated blue dulling toward
green of certain Turkish and Persian amulets) ; it was evening,
and the lamps fastened to the back wall opposite caused every-
thing else to stand out very resolutely before this color; even
the earth-brown of the clay pitchers with a thin coat of water
constantly gliding over them; the yellow of single lemons, and
finally the smooth, glassy, ever-turning red in several big and
little goldfish bowls. That was certainly strong, too obvious, pos-
sibly, but nevertheless well worth noticing. Van Gogh would
have gone back to it. Perhaps I see all this because I have been
reading his letters (in the complete book edition, which I pro-
cured back in Munich and which were my favorites on the long
journey and are really beautiful, not mature in some things but
unutterably earnest, unutterably moving, and for painters really
like a good, helpful voice.) Title: Vincent Van Gogh, Let-
ters. . . .

239

c

To Elisabeth and Karl von der Heydt Villa Discopoli, Capri

December u, 1906

I have been here a week, and that long at least I wanted to
wait, so that, besides the greetings I often think in your direc-
tion, I could report to you something of what has impressed me
and that not too unjust and momentary. But now I shall at-
tempt a few impressions. There are first of all my immediate sur-
roundings, and they are full of friendliness. The mistress of the
house in a very kind way does everything for my well-being
and gives me so much freedom and right to go my own way
that I am able to arrange much solitude, half-days at a time and,
if it becomes necessary, more. (My inner life really had been
dislocated for months, I notice, and being alone provides primarily
only a kind of psychic plaster cast, in which something is heal-
ing.) But nothing is so important as that; already on the long trip
I felt it. There is perhaps nothing so jealous as my profession;
and not for me a monk's life in the close association and isola-
tion of a cloister, but rather I must see to it that little by little I
myself shall grow into a cloister and stand there in the world,
with walls about me, but with God and the saints within me, with
very beautiful pictures and furnishings within me, with courts
around which moves a dance of pillars, with fruit orchards, vine-
yards, and wells whose bottoms are not to be found. But to con-
tinue with essentials. My solitude is supported by the circum-
stance that the room I live in is quite separate, in a little house
by itself, some fifty steps from the villa proper. For the present
I am the only guest. . . . My room is simple and very congenial
and already has a natural attachment to me for which I am grate-
ful to it.

... no one but you knows what being completely alone,
being unobserved, unseen, invisible means to me. For three days
in Naples I went about with it as with a treasure in all the glori-
ously foreign world. . . .

240

And now Capri. Ah yes. I really have nothing more to learn
there. Jacobsen says somewhere: "It requires so infinitely much
tact to handle enthusiasm." Well, this place has got its stamp
from a very ill-exercised enthusiasm; the foreigners are away, for
the most part, but the traces of their stupid admiration that
always falls into the same holes are so obvious and cling so fast,
that even the huge storms that from time to time take the island
in their jaws do not tear them away. I am always saddened in
such landscape exhibitions, before this evident, prize-crowned,
unassailable beauty: since it is almost too much even to pick up
a stone on the path, a chestnut, a withered leaf, since even the
beauty of a little, insignificant and ordinarily trivial thing (once
one has recognized it) makes the heart overflow, what is one to
do in such concerts of beauty, where everything is a program
number and rehearsed and intentional and selected? It may be
that with these picture-books of beauty one could begin learning
to see and to love, but I am a little bit too advanced to say Ah and
Oh before them. Rapture-spelling is far behind me and per-
haps my whole life joy and life task really lies in this: that, though
very much of a beginner, I am one of those who hear the beau-
tiful and recognize its voice, even where it scarcely lifts above
the noises; that I know God did not set us among things in order
to select, but rather so thoroughly and largely to keep on taking
that in the end we can simply receive nothing else at all but beauty
in our love, our alert attentiveness, our not to be pacified admira-
tion. And to grow in this feeling here is not the place. The name
Paris must have taken shape in me under the influence of this
longing, even if I had never heard it (I believe).

Truly, what people here have made out of a beautiful island is
close to hideous. But that doesn't speak against them; there were
in any case serious and thorough and significant people among
the thousands who have collaborated here at Capri. But did you
ever see that people arrived at agreeable results when they let
themselves go or were active in the direction of pleasure, relaxa-
tion, enjoyment? Neither bullfights nor music halls nor any other
institutions of amusement, from the dance hall to the beer gar-

den up and down, are beautiful or pleasing or ever have been
so. The heaven of which I once heard an excited preacher speak
in San Clemente was replete with dubious happiness, in bad taste
and boring. But in all seriousness, isn't even Dante evidence for
it, whose Paradise is filled with such helplessly heaped-up bliss,
with no gradations in light, formless, full of repetition, made of
smiling, angel-pure perplexity, as it were, of not-knowing, of
not-being-able-to-know, of pure, blissful mendacity. And the
Inferno beside it. What a compendium of life. What knowing,
hailing, judging. What reality, what particularization even into
darkest darkness; what a meeting again with the world. From this
it does not follow that suff ering is more right than happiness and
its surrender and expression and admission; only, so far man-
kind has not yet attained in bliss that depth, that urgency, that
necessity which has already become accessible to it in suffering.
(And therefore Capri is a monstrosity.)

For the rest, one can see Diefenbach coming to the surface
now and then, gray in gray, of those grays that old wood of
wooden palings takes on under the influence of sun and rain.
And Gorky has settled down here, feted by the socialists and
scattering money about him. I close, dear friends, in the con-
sciousness of having spent an evening hour with you, which I
needed. . . .

C

To Countess Mary Gneisenau Villa Discopoli, Capri (Italy)

December 15, 1906

The rose is here with me and the wreath of everlasting (Clara
has contrived a careful bed for them in which they can go all
over with me without suffering ) and from both, whenever I
find them again, comes a reminder, a summons, no, a gentle
monitory calling-by-name of a few unsayable things I must mas-
ter, deep in my work. You had a great faith in me, an uncon-
scious disposition to expect valid things of me, and what you ex-
pected of me was something you long felt must one day come.

Out of all this, out of such a remarkably wrought context comes
to that wonderfully placed yellow rose, comes to that small
wreath returning a little bit resignedly into itself, the power they
both have over me and that superiority, at the same time that
curious being-older, which enables them to accompany me as
it were protectively. You should see this rose a moment. Do you
still remember it? It is little altered. I would like to be able to
describe it to you, and perhaps I can some day. It has become, I
can express only this much at the moment, more final, more
inward, more withdrawn. Its fullness has not dwindled, but the
rose seems no longer filled with itself, but rather, like an Egyp-
tian queen, all filled out with dainty and exotic delicacies, with
an alien fragrance, so that it no longer has to give out fragrance
itself. There is a deep repose in it; it lies on the very bottom of
its name, rose, there where the word grows dark, rose, and
everything that is contained in it of movement, of memory com-
ing and going, of swiftly ascending longing, flows away over it,
up above, and touches it no more. But what there is in it of
heaviness, of fate, of heaven as it were and earth, of starry night,
of stillness, of loneliness (for how often was it alone and gave
away beauty of its awakening, mouth of its dewy coolness, the
way it could look out from itself toward evening, and the dif-
fused, no longer to be contained pallor of its nights, gave away,
gave back, to no one, to nowhere ) , but what was in it of things
thus unsayable, of things never taken by us and yet not lost to
us, has remained in it, no longer imperiled now, secure, come
home, as forces have come home in a talisman, collected, as we
are collected in our hearts, held back by nothing, yet without
inclination to stream out, quite absorbed, as it were, in the en-
joyment of our own equilibrium. You should see this rose a mo-
ment. Were you to see what I am trying to evoke here, only for
the little while your eyes spend over this letter, were you to see
how it has retained your gesture, the movement by which your
beautiful hands compelled it to lie thus (there was a little,
tenderly-impatient compulsion in that), you would understand
that you gave me indescribably much that time, extravagantly

_ H3

much, so that, my hands still all filled with this rose, I was unable
later, in meeting again, to grasp anything at all. Have I let some-
thing fall? Has something broken? Your image stands before me,
Countess Mary, in all the innate, lovely pride you bear so grandly
and are so equal to, and for which we first began to admire you.
(Ah, what a long, thousandfold admiration, how many eve-
nings we have spent, Clara and I, enumerating your beauties, and
could not find an end nor get to sleep for doing it.) And now
your image stands before me just like that in the solitude (and
now, please, don't be angry) that so well becomes it. If I prayed
for you, I would pray for you not to break through it, this soli-
tude, not now, not impatiently, not at any price. It is difficult,
certainly; but it seems more difficult to you because you take it
for an empty space, while it must be there, as space for the
radiance that emanates from your figure. Was I permitted to say
that? Where may you be? . . .

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

Monday, December 17, 1906

I could read your letter (the fifth) . . . over and over again.
Hearkening anew each time in my heart. ... If Lou knew how
many such letters I write to myself in thought. Long letters, with
just such objections. They are all quite familiar to me. I know
their faces into which I have looked for hours, I know how they
come nearer and nearer and straight and blindly at me. And yet
there is something new in the way they came this time, some-
thing that made me more attentive than perhaps I ever was to
them. I thank you ... for this handing on of words which
merely to take, to arrange and, where you thought best, to re-
ject, must have been laborious and exacting enough for you, . . .
So that too came on top of the many, many things you are in
the midst of. Came and used you, used all your strength, your
memory of words, of facts, of sorrows, of the ruthless, almost
desperate exaggerations by which I sometimes try to get to the

M4

very bottom of sincerity, thereby causing pain to you and to
myself. You had to see all that rise up before you, with all the
menace, hardness, momentary hopelessness that comes up with
it, and had to find the determination, this clearheaded superiority,
to set yourself above it, confronting Lou, and to defend what has
so often attacked you when you yourself were without defense.
. . . With me it is like this: I am all eagerness not to miss any
of these voices that are to come. I want to hear each one, I want
to take out my heart and hold it in the midst of the condemning
and censuring words so that it is not touched by them on one side
only and from a distance. But at the same time I will not give
up my hazardous, so often irresponsible position and exchange
it for a more explainable, more resigned post until the last, the
ultimate, final voice has spoken to me; for only in this situation
am I accessible and open to them all, only in this situation shall
I be found by all I am to meet of destiny, appeal, or power, only
from here can I one day obey, obey as absolutely as I am now
absolutely resisting. By each premature compliance with that
which in the guise of "duty" tries to subdue me and make me
useful, I would indeed shut out of my life a few uncertainties
and the semblance of that constant desire for evasion, but I feel
that thus also the great, wonderful aids that take hold in me
in almost rhythmical succession would be shut out of a fore-
seeable order, directed by energy and a sense of duty, in which
they no longer belong. Lou thinks one has no right to choose be-
tween duties and to shirk the immediate and natural ones; but my
immediate and natural ones have always, even in my boyhood,
been these on the side of which I keep trying to stand, and if I
wished to take on others, it was not as a new task added to that
first, already too great one, but because I believed I discerned in
certain duties a point of support, an aid, something that would be
a firm place in the instability of my homelessness, something un-
shiftable, lasting, real. I didn't actually plan to do anything for
the inception and existence of this reality, I thought it would
come, as everything wonderful comes, out of the depths of our
union, out of its tremendous necessity and purity. I really couldn't

with a good conscience take on any new work, a new profession,
and if I said responsibility, I meant and desired responsibility for
the deepest, most inward existence of a reality dear and inde-
structibly related to me. And have I shirked this responsibility?
Am I not trying, as well as ever I can, to bear it and, on the other
hand, hasn't my longing been, on the whole, infinitely fulfilled?
What does misfortune in trivial matters prove against it; how can
the circumstance refute me that we must keep postponing our
life together, which practically too is one of mutual support, since
only with you two did my world grow into the nameless, did
it begin to grow outward in those days, from that little, snow-
covered house in which Ruth was born, and since then has been
growing and growing, out from that center upon which I can-
not narrow my attention as long as the periphery is pushing for-
ward ahead on all sides into the infinite? But has there not only
since then been a center, something immovable, a star from whose
position I could for the first time determine the movement of
my heaven and could name the constellations that before were
but a throng? Aren't you two now the one tree in the indescrib-
ably wide plain of my journeying to which I always find my way
back, toward which I often look in order to know where I am
and whither I must go on? If we are living thus separated from
each other by days of travel, and trying to do that which our
hearts require of us day and night (are we not turning away from
the difficult for the sake of the difficult? Have I not this con-
sciousness at least for myself, as I am trying to live this lonely
life?), tell me: isn't there a house about us after all, a real one,
for which only the visible sign is lacking so that others do not
see it? But do we not see it most clearly for just that reason, this
dear house in which we are together as from the very first, and
out of which we shall go some day only to step into the garden?

This orderly course, into which in minor matters we would
have to be policed (I understand very well and quite seriously
what Lou meant by that) , have not angels already held us to it
with the deep, convinced inexorability that is given to angels?

Ah, . . . you understand that I would like to make iny powers

246

and my standard measure up to big things; even as a boy, I had
the feeling of being attached to great and mature people as to
older brothers and sisters, for I never believed that one becomes
worthy of associating with them by dealing first with the medi-
ocre and inferior. It may often seem, therefore, as if I were living
life in reverse; the majority take it on the other way round, and
they also manage to rise by the ordinary up to the beginning of
the extraordinary, yes, even into the extraordinary. That may
hold and remain valid for them. For me, the ascent from that
side was an impossibility. Spiritually overstrained and physically
spent as I was from early days, I would have stuck in the begin-
nings of the ordinary and died one way or another. But then for
the first time those powers came into play which, in lifting me
over the immediate obstacles, set me at the beginning of greater
and less temporal tasks, for which I had in a remarkable way be-
come ripe and not yet disheartened. Then, in that Beyond as it
were, I began my work (and of course Lou was the first person
who helped me to it), not lifted away over the weight of life, but
over the difficulties; there, outside of all my anxieties, I became
established in the feeling to which I would never have found a
way below: in the love of life, grown out of the experience, so
indispensable to me, that the hostile thing is not life but myself,
I myself, and with me all the rest; then I received from inde-
scribably knowing hands the right to that devotion which, below,
would have become an annihilation for me, while above, among
the great powers, it became my beauty, my growth, that on
which I may boundlessly rely.

And if I persevere up there where I have now spent the greater
part of my mature life, am I not in the real, in the difficult, among
duties? And mustn't there come a place, if only I go far enough,
where above and below pass into each other as unnoticeably as
also happens one day with those who have gone the other, the
lower way, honestly and loyally to the end?

I feel a little like the Russian people, of whom also outsiders or
persons who have become distrustful say that it must eventually
be drawn out of its previous development over to the normal

M7

path of growth and must fix its eyes upon reality, in order to come
to anything. And it would come to something then too, most
certainly. As western people have come to something, to this
and that, from one thing to another. But would it come to the
one thing for which alone, beyond everything, its soul longs? I
believe it would then be completely cut off from it and forever.
May nobody at all then go toward this one thing, which even
those who renounce it, in their very renunciation, crave so
much?

For the Russian people the "chances" do seem to have come
to an end. I have one more. I know I have not always made use
of all of them as I should, I have perhaps even wasted one or two,
but still I accept them each time more like very great tasks and
demands, and if God gives me so very many and always one more
it is not too many, so long as he believes it necessary; perhaps
he will not stop, because I do understand him better and better
and in the taking of these chances am making little advances, for
which I would offer him my little book as proof, if he required
one. . . .

C "*]

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

December 19, [1906] evening

. . . can one read a letter on Christmas Eve; but above all:
how is one to write one four days ahead that can be read on that
evening? I am not writing to Ruth. It is not I who should speak
to her, nor is it you, although you will be beside her and will feel
her fine, soft hair against your cheek when you look together
into the tree that is to speak to you both, to her especially, to the
dear, dear child who now, when you see her again, will already
reach up a little farther on you and deeper into your hand. Look
at her well when you see her again ... see her again not only
as a mother, see her also with your serious worker's eyes: then you
can be quite happy. Before those eyes that evening will be com-
plete, and if you do not let yourself be confused, it will not seem

248

strange and disturbing that I am not really standing beside you:
. . . indeed nothing, nothing can keep me from being about
you so that you feel me; and when I really used to be there,
there still was (except for that first Christmas Eve in Wester-
wede) always much of me that only reproachfully stood by, that,
if not at the last moment, yet even an hour before, would gladly
have been alone, far away, God knows where. This face that
met yours and was sometimes taken by Ruth's dear little hands:
and held against a firm, warm, happy cheek, this face felt itself
so unfinished, even on that evening, and was so too. This face
ought to be in solitude, much behind its hands, much in the dark.
It ought to be there for its thoughts and from its thoughts to
look out toward no one, finding a bit of sky, a tree, a path, some-
thing simple with which it can begin, something that is not yet
too difficult for it; how often when you looked at it ... it was
a face distraught in its unfinishedhess, one that had not gone
deeply enough inward and not far enough outward, a face that
had stopped halfway, like an only partly silvered mirror, re-
flecting in some places, in others transparent, and you never
saw in it the greatness of your trust and the whole of your love
which it was not capable of receiving. But if it is sometime to be
given back to you better, it must be worked on for a long time
yet, night and day. For this Christmas it has not been finished.
But it is in good hands, and when it is a little farther along you
shall see it again, and then, each time, there will also be some-
thing like Christmas; each time, even in the middle of the year.

Do you remember . . . our two restrained Christmas Eves?
(the one in the rue de PAbbe de Fpee, the one in Rome in the
Studio al Ponte, both of which were so much less authentic be-
cause neither of us could be with Ruth, where everything turns
into Christmas of itself when the hour comes) ; how much we felt
even then that we must mingle our work so deeply with ourselves
that its workdays would lead out of themselves to holidays, to
our true holidays. Everything else is indeed only a schedule such
as we had in school; many, many set things and the empty places
for Sunday and for Christmas and Easter. Empty places one fills

up with something that is in contrast to the other, the fixed; and
so we have still gone on accepting all those periods that came
up with the calendar somewhat like vacations, finding distraction
in them and always gladly putting off the end, although we
already had an inkling of those holidays that spring from one's
own heart, that are no contrast to the weeks that unnoticeably
bring them along, and no distraction and no loitering away of
vague days. Only once perhaps since we have been together did
the two fall at the same time. You know when. On the twelfth
I relived so strongly that indescribable feeling of Christmas which
filled our lonely house then and went on increasing in it, so that
one might have believed it must be reaching far out beyond it into
cold days, into the long nights of Advent; that it must be visible
even for those who passed at a distance, must have changed every-
thing so that people far away came over and looked. But no one
came, and what stood there was nothing but a little house, over-
burdened with an enormous thick roof that seemed common-
place to human beings, but of which the angels perhaps knew
that it had the right measurements, those with which they measure
the great space surrounding it. It was like the smallest part of that
endless scale, the unit of measure, which keeps recurring and
with which one can reach to the end, without adding anything
else but the same thing over and over.

You know . . . what Christmas was to me in my early child-
hood; even when the military academy made a hard, unbelievably
malicious life, devoid of wonders, appear so real that no other
reality seemed possible to me beside that undeserved one; even
then Christmas was still real and was that which approached with
a fulfillment that went out beyond all wishes, and when it was
out beyond the very last, never even wished ones, then only did it
really begin, then what had hitherto walked, unfolded wings
and flew, flew till it was no longer to be seen and one knew only
its direction, in the great flowing light. ,

And all that still, still had power over me. And in each of those
years when I built up a Christmas for us or for Ruth, I rather
scorned what I had built because it fell so far short of that wonder

which I knew had not just grown spontaneously and unhindered
in my imagination: so great, so indescribable had it always been.

And then I sat a long time on the twelfth and thought; thought
of the whole deep time of grace that went through our hearts
then. Felt again the evening before in the living room; the morn-
ing, the early one first, by candlelight, in which the New rose up,
spreading fear like a flood and terror; then the later morning in
the winter light with its entirely new order, with its impatience,
its anticipation strained to the limit, which through the little,
momentary and tangible fulfillments grew to ever stronger ten-
sion; then that whole steep forenoon, as if one had to go up a
mountain quickly, much too quickly, and finally, in all that was
uncertain, not conceivable, not possible: something real, a reality
which, fabulously bound up with the wonderful, was hardly to
be distinguished from it and yet real. And after that at last, spread-
ing gradually out, a relief that was at first received like that which
comes when a pain ceases, and yet was a quite different, lasting
relief, as it turned out later. And then suddenly, a life on which
one could stand; now it carried one and was conscious of one
while it carried. What would I be without the stillness which
arose in me then; what, without that whole experience in which
reality and miracle had become identical; what, without those
weeks of surrender in which, for the first time, I did not lose;
what, without those simple services which awoke in me a readi-
ness I hadn't known; what, without those night vigils: when the
night, the winter night lay cold upon my eyes, which I closed,
drawing into this closing, too, through the tendril tracery of the
grape arbor, a distant star outside; when there was simply still-
ness, stillness of that greatest stillness that I did not yet know,
while against this background, the smallest of the incompre-
hensively new sounds stood out clear and distinct.

Hardly ever has anyone who wasn't working kept watch so
justly and with so much zeal, holding so profoundly still, as I
did then, when, as I now know, work was being done on me.
Like a plant that is to become a tree, so was I taken then out of
the little container, carefully, while earth ran off and some light

came to my roots, and was planted in my place for good, there
where I was to stand until my old age, in the great, whole, real
earth.

And when I thought further of the twelfth, and thought that
then Christmas was coming, only that Christmas came to my
mind, only the hall which was so big and so shadowy up to the
bright, big tree to which you drew near for a while, quickly,
with an uncertainty that was quite girlish again, more girlish
than anything, holding the tiny head against your lovely face
and together with it into the radiance which neither of you could
see, each filled with her own life and the other's.

Then only did I notice that for me that Christmas was still
there and not like one that once was and has passed, but rather
like an everlasting, eternal Christmas celebration to which one's
inner eye can turn as often as it needs. All at once, joy and bliss
and anticipation of other Christmases had become small behind it;
as if those had rather been my good, loyal father's Christmases, his
anxious, provident heart's own holiday. But this was mine: all light
and dark, and still, and unrepeatable. . . .

Out of all this too arose my ability for once to be alone this
Christmas and yet not anxious or sad. Now I'll not write more,
but shall just go on thinking, and you two will feel it. ...

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri (Italy)

January i, 1907

, . . This morning began so radiantly, now it is becoming a
gray day; but first there was a shining as from a brand-new, never
used year. And the night was a bright, distant one that seemed to
rest above far more than just the earth; one felt that it lay above
oceans and far out beyond, above space, above itself, above stars
that looked toward its own stars out of endless depths. All that
was mirrored in it and held by it above the earth and hardly
even held any longer: for it was like a continual overflowing of
heavens.

I thought there would perhaps be midnight Mass and went out
after eleven; the streets and footpaths between the walls lay there
long, like lowered outspread banners, black and white, made of
a strip of wall shadow beside a strip of light; for it was the first
night after full moon, and the moon stood very high in the sky
and sharply outshone all the stars, so that only here and there a
distant very big one flared so strongly that some darkness was
formed about it. How the illumined rims of the walls dazzled,
how the leaves of the olives were made entirely of night, as if cut
out of skies, old, no longer used night skies. And the mountain
slopes had such an air of lunar decay and towered up out of
the houses like something unmastered. And the houses were dark,
and where the wooden shutters had not been closed over them,
the windows had the faded, translucent look of blind eyes. Fi-
nally, on the little piazza under the clock tower, there was stand-
ing a crowd of Capri youths in rendezvous. Out of a little coffee-
house with red curtains, which was set into the blackest corner,
came now and then the impatient rattling of a tambourine. The
arch of a gate spanned a narrow street leading upward and
snatched in a bit of sky with its curve and held it against the street.
A step in wooden shoes clattered along by the houses, the clock
began and struck the last quarter before midnight. But the church
was shut, as if it had been closed for decades. And what rang out
from over there, far off and yet oddly penetrating, from the olive
slopes and from the vineyards, was no Christian singing. Heavy
voices full of old wavering laments, long drawn out, without be-
ginning, not as if they were suddenly starting, only as if one's
ear were unexpectedly tuned to some continuously held tone;
voices seemingly fetched out again from the hearing of remote
mountain-faces; voices that come into being of themselves, as
though night wind were caught in the soul of an animal; long,
heavy, wavering voices, calls and series of calls of a primeval
natural drunkenness, dull, unconscious, more tolerated than
willed, and intermittently, laughter breaking out flamelike and
quickly consuming itself, short, alert, and warm as out of a sum-
mer night, and then again, moonlight; paths, walls, houses, an

_ 253

earth of moonlight, of moon shadow, that keeps still while with
strange meaningfulness New Year's midnight strikes, slowly lay-
ing stroke on stroke: each all smooth, all spread out, foldless, as
if it were to be preserved like that.

I had gone back again to my little house and stood up on its
roof and wanted to see a good end in all that and to find a good
beginning in myself. And now let us believe in a long year that
is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never
been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims,
and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting
fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of
it necessary, serious, and great things.

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

January 18, 1907 (Friday)

. , . My trip back was like the back of a book cover whose
title was that first morning, when I took the trip I described (a
week ago today) . Between the two our reunion lies like a single
long light day: out of it I have so much memory of waking, so
little of sleep. At the top of the title page stood the little moon-
end, on the back of the jacket the beginning of a new moon,
shining very bright and sharp, as I drove up evening before last
from the Grande Marina. Then I intended to climb up very
early on the heights of the Tiberio to see the "Oceana" once more
from there; but then nothing came of it, I was too tired,
couldn't refrain, though, from climbing up later at least, in the
forenoon that was warm and radiant and full of the seduction of
spring. On top there stands a little santuario beside a tall-columned
statue of Mary, and a young monk lives beside it; he told me
he had seen the lights of a big ship in the middle of the night,
and then we stood and looked southward into the glittering of
the sun, in which, far away already, it must have been moving
on somewhere with all its windows flashing, dazzling far and
wide with its high white prow .

254

I couldn't begin anything at all yesterday; I was merely con-
tinuing to live what had just been, and let myself go into the
sun and be a thing shone upon among the many over which the
day was passing inexhaustibly. I looked at the fig trees against
the blue sea and found rosemary, which I know now and
couldn't even get to this letter, which I originally wanted to
write immediately. . . .

C 'JO

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

Sunday, January 20, 1907

... it is again a Sunday, and I am still so much in the holiday
feeling of our dear reunion that it seems to me I should be calling
for you in a while down there in the Villa Pagano. But when I
look up, my glance falls on the opened atlas, always on the same,
now familiar plate which looks like a genealogical tree represent-
ing the tremendous, long life of an ancestor, and which at the
very end branches and spreads far and wide. Again and again I
take a look at this stream that performs miracles, and more and
more it seems to me to represent the history of the gods of that
land; the mysterious, never known origin of the deity from the
exhaustless stores of high-lying lakes, its long, powerful, growing
course in which it always worked the same way on everything it
encountered, and finally its disintegration into arms and branches,
into the many lesser gods with which every culture disembogues,
fades out, becomes unrecognizable.

I have brought over the big Andree and am deep in this re-
markably unified page; I admire the course of this stream's line
which, rising like a Rodin contour, contains a profusion of varied
movement, recessions, and turns like a coronal suture, millions
of tiny gestures with which it turns to the right and to the left,
like someone who goes through a crowd distributing and sees one
more person here and one more there who has need of him, and
progresses but slowly. For the first time I feel a river thus, so in
its essence, so real to the verge of personification, so as if it had

2-55

a destiny, a dark birth and a great, spread-out death, and between
the two a life, a long, tremendous, princely life that kept every-
one in its neighborhood busy, for millenniums; it was so big, so
demanding, so little to be mastered. (How impersonal the Volga
was by contrast, how much only an immense road through that
other sublime land whose God is everywhere still in the process
of becoming .) But while I follow the holy worker of miracles
on its way past names heavy with a sediment of ancient meanings,
the desert, like a counterpart to its visibleness and security, rises
up uncertain, without end and without beginning, like something
uncreated; expanses that sometimes stand up and are everywhere,
destroying the heavens with their nothingness, a tissue of ancient
roads canceling each other, a sea whose ebb goes to the very bot-
tom and whose flood to the stars, rising like wrath, incalculable,
incomprehensible, not to be stemmed. When one has seen the
sea and has become accustomed to the endless presence of the
skies mirroring the flat earth, sides against which that earth else-
where braces itself with the buttresses of its mountain ranges,
when one has grasped a beginning of all that, there still remains
this one thing, not included: the desert. You will see it. Will see
the head of the great Sphinx that with effort holds itself up out
of the desert's continual swell, that head and that face which
men began in its shape and size, whose expression, however, and
gaze and knowledge were completed unspeakably slowly and so
entirely differently from our countenance. We take our inner
images and place them outside us, we avail ourselves of every
opportunity to shape a world, we set up object after object
around our inner selves : but here was a reality that thrust
itself from without into these features that are nothing but stone.
The mornings of millenniums, a people of winds, the rising and
setting of countless stars, the great presence of the constellations,
the glow of these skies and their spaciousness were there and
were there again and again, working on it, not ceasing before
the deep indifference of this face, until it seemed to gaze, until
it showed every sign of a gazing at just these images, until it lifted
itself up like the face to some inside in which all this was con-

tained and occasion and desire and need for it all. And then, at
the moment when it was full of all that confronted it, and formed
by its surroundings, then its expression too had already grown
out beyond them. Now it was as though the universe had a face
and this face flung images out beyond it, out beyond the farthest
stars, thither, where images had never yet been . . . Tell me
. . . isn't it like that? I imagine it must be like that: endless
space, space that goes on beyond the stars must, I believe, have
come into being round about this image ...

C '33 1

To Elisabeth von der Heydt Villa Discopoli, Capri

February 10, 1907

... I have already given up counting on the weekdays; their
program is completely taken up with what I want or should or
would like to do and of which at best only a hundred and seventy-
second part is ever carried out. But that Sunday after Sunday
passes by without my at last getting around once more to asking
about you with a few words and reporting to you with a few
others what there may be to report, that I no longer wish to
countenance ... I have intended to send you a little sign, if
not before, at least when there was something really good to
impart. That is now the case. Not so good, I admit, as I hoped
in time to be able to write, but still something good that closely
affects me personally and that you especially ought to know.
Namely: the Book of Hours is sold out (five hundred copies in
something over a year! ) , and we are setting about printing a new
edition, eleven hundred copies this time. That is a great, very
unexpected joy for me: and a hope: and an agreeable strength-
ening of my relations with the Insel-Verlag, which in this way
bestows on me more and more confidence. Since I have had this
news, I am looking a little more assured again. The last weeks
have been good and not good: according to the way you look at
it. Good: because I want for nothing; I have everything neces-
sary and our little circle, as it has finally been rounded out, shows

257

me every kindness. . . . There is no longer anything casual in
our companionship, we have many and interesting things to say
to each other . . . not good: because, being the way I am, the
talent for light, merely refreshing conversation is entirely lacking
in me and every association, especially every good association,
inveigles me into conversational expenditures that cause a deficit
which makes itself felt in my work.

I have done all kinds of things and some that are good. But I
have again stored up so very much longing for complete solitude,
for solitude in Paris. How right I was when I considered that the
next necessity, and how much harm I did myself when, contrary
to all understanding, I half missed, half wasted this opportunity.
Will it come again? On that, it seems to me, everything depends,
and that is the question and worry which greatly occupies and
bothers me, the more so as I myself have not yet done much about
it since I have been here.

I can already foresee a little that I shall have learned much
here and also done many things, but perhaps shall have brought
no single work far enough along for it to be converted at once
into money. So much is growing, quite organically, I feel, but
very slowly, and I destroy everything if I push and hurry. To
the poems in the Rundschau ("Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes," etc.)
new ones are being added; something like a new Book of Hours
is beginning^ But what will be ready at the end of these weeks?
Not much, I fear.

So, I am working as well as I can, and you will feel, dear Frau
v.d. Heydt, that this is not meant as a complaint, much rather
as a short bulletin which your valued friendship surely allows
me or expects of me. . . .

C 'W3

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

February 18, 1907

. . . Evening has come, and I am tired because this evening's
day was very beautiful, an endlessly shining, blue, soaring day,

the first of its kind; one of those which in Rome too I remem-
ber well, even at this season sometimes surprised and over-
whelmed us: one is planning this or that, something quite definite,
perfectly ordinary, specified, that is a continuation of some-
thing of yesterday, but then a day dawns that has no yester-
day (still less a tomorrow), a leap day so to speak, and one no-
tices* it on waking, right away, even before looking out, as if
it had penetrated one's very sleep. And besides this Antonio came
in to me and with: e splendida la giornata (and at the splen . . .
his smile burst open like a fruit over those south-Italian teeth) .
Then I already knew I would have to take a walk, a long walk;
in order to distribute guilt and conscience somewhat (guilt and
conscience for so frivolous a decision distracting me from my
desk), I asked the Countess to go out with me, and we went up
on Monte Solaro and looked at the island like birds and felt quite
as if next moment we could be high above the sea too; for Monte
Solaro, at its extreme peak, pressed but slightly against the soles
of our feet, and what bore and surrounded one was, above all,
that which belongs to the birds: that deep glittering blue which,
on its front so to speak, was warm and full and mild and seemed
to be lined with sea wind as with silk, when it turned over from
time to time and, blowing, touched one with its underside. I am
beginning to discover Anacapri, the farthermost Anacapri that
lies beyond that last point we reached together. It gets very
lonely and wild there and goes on like that by itself for a long
time, and if one sees a shepherd that is a great deal. And the
houses are left behind, and where the few stony paths can finally
go no farther, there is the sea again, or rather, there is another
sea, one through which Odysseus might come again at any mo-
ment, an ancient Grecian sea, beginning deep, deep down below
one and out of sight. It really is here too (I read recently) that
Odysseus came by, and today from Monte Solaro we saw
lying in the Gulf of Salerno the three islands of the Sirens (strange
rocks, obstructing the way, that looked as though they had once
been gilded), past which, lashed to the mast and only by this co-

ercion safe from the inavertible force that came ringing across,
distilled in the light wind, he sailed along, much too slowly for
his safety, an infinitely long time, as it must have seemed to him.
And on such days and removed from the inquisitiveness and
pettiness of the foreigner's town, up there in the mountain
lands of a shepherd's world, there grows upon one slowly and
blurring ever and again, an inkling of that southernness of an-
tiquity of which Uexkiill wrote recently. When you come we
must be up there a lot; up there you must tell, up there I will
listen. By then, of course, the days that are now an exception
will have become daily ones and yet, I am assured, for that
reason no less lonely in those regions that are under the protec-
tion of their own remoteness and being-half-accessible (unless
a hereditary something still preserves them untouched).

We were back again for lunch, but the afternoon passed rather
with the echo of all that; I sat by my little house in half sunlight
and walked up and down in front of it till the stars came out.
I wanted to tell you a lot more today about your words, with
which you evoked the desert, the indescribable desert; . . . you
will already know how keenly I felt it, how here it burst your
hasty expression of it, into which it (or something of it) had
been compressed, and was there before me, infinite again and
unsayable, as it is. More wanted to be written to all this, but
now too much new sun is vibrating in me, from today, and I
cannot rightly recognize anything within me.

C wl

To Clara Rilke [Capri, February 22, 1907]

. . . with a few words only I come to thank you for your let-
ter, the fifth; I can well understand it in everything and go with
you even into your sadness, that sadness so deeply familiar to me,
for which one can naturally find reasons . . . and which is
nevertheless only a sensitive spot in us, always the same, one of
those spots which, when they hurt, can no longer be identified,

26o

so that in all the dull feeling of pain we do not know how to
recognize and treat them. I know all that. And there is a happi-
ness too, which is similar and perhaps one must still somehow
manage to get beyond both. I thought so just recently when
several days in succession I climbed up into the lonely mountain
slopes of Anacapri and was so happy up there, so painfully happy
in my soul too. But always one lets them fall again, the one and
the other: this happiness, that sadness. One has neither as yet. And
what is one, so long as one gets up and a wind out there, a bright-
ness, a melody of bird voices in the air can take one and do
with one what it will? It is good to hear and to see and to take
all that, not to be blunted by it, on the contrary: to feel it ever
more thousandfold in all its variation, yet without losing oneself
through it.

Once I said to Rodin on an April day that was full of spring:
"how it releases one, the way one must collaborate with all the
sap and exert oneself till one is tired . Don't you know that
too? " And he, who surely knew of his own accord how to take
spring, with a quick glance: "Ah Je n'y ai jamais fait atten-
tion." That is what we have to learn, to not pay attention to cer-
tain things; to be too collected to touch them with some sensitive
side when one can never come close to them with one's whole
being. To feel everything only with one's 'whole life; then much
(that is too slight) remains shut out, but all the important things
happen. ...

To Gudrun Baroness Uexkiill Villa Discopoli, Capri

February 24, 1907

. . . for a week now Walter Gale's book has been here in my
hands, and I haven't yet acknowledged its arrival or given you
any word of thanks. I would like to have added at once to such
thanks a comment on my relationship to those notebooks; but at
present I have not read far enough to be able to speak in more

26l

than general terms; a vague sympathy arises in me for this man
quickly and resolutely departed, but as yet after a few poems
it is not sufficiently positive and fixed for me to be able to
define it. I wonder whether here just a fleeting thought a
person quickly matured by loneliness and doubt has not mistaken
the call to understanding for the task of the artist? Whether it
wasn't in this that his doom kept hidden, that which finally
would no longer be moved and came forth and overpowered
him? Much maturity comes together in this young man, in him
the transitory it seems to me is transposed into the simultane-
ous, as in a painting: but the absence of development implied in
such conditions corresponds so little with the calling which be-
gins every day anew, every day with nothing of the artist, who
may take neither the burden of knowledge nor the denying
doubts of ignorance with him on his way, which leads him from
miracle to miracle. Too quickly and too easily for an artist this
man whose life was cut off masters the tasks in which one still in
process of becoming slowly learns to value patience and love and
devotion according to their difficulty. He remains too general; his
love enters too little into the particular, into the unimportant,
the unassuming, to win from them the unit of measure that al-
ready in the next greater occurs a million times. He rides too
much in the express trains of thought, in the luxury trains of
modern, fast, dizzy thinking, from one end of philosophy to the
other. If he had only insisted more (I wish inwardly) on walk-
ing, walking barefoot where possible, taking in every little stone,
the edge of every grass-blade, and now and then stooping over
some modest find: because then I would have met him, while
like this he always drives past me, impatient, restless as he is. ...
But perhaps I feel it this way because I was rash enough to
read both the introductions, which are only misleading and of
which the one by his friend especially makes one feel with dis-
may how unalterably lonely the man was who wrote thus and
thought thus and in the end wanted to do neither any more. , . .

262

C >37 1

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

February 25, 1907

. . , You wish me "Spring at last," and your wish has been
immediately and very well fulfilled: even a week ago I was able
to report to you the kind of walks I am taking and with what
joy I find them. Those remote paths up there in Anacapri, those
views out on the ancient Grecian sea, the being alone beside the
little locked-up church and among the broad mountain slopes
which at one place enclose something like an amphitheater, on the
open side of which Vesuvius looks in, with the snow-mountains
standing a little back on either side : I have often sought all
that out again in the past week, the first half of which completely
fulfilled your wish. Spring was suddenly so very much here, and
this going-into-it was so very like something important that my
conscience remained light, although I consumed many hours for
it, all the mornings almost. This being-in-the-sun and breathing-
in-spring-sky and this listening to the little bird voices that are so
well distributed one seems to feel how in every spot in the air
that can bear, there is one, and the confirmation of the sense of
belonging that increases in one from it all: this, I think, can lead
to no losing or missing anything. And however much reason I
may have to force myself to my desk, yet again and again I go
with it, if the morning suddenly calls somewhere outside in a
way that makes one feel there must be another morning some-
where, a very big morning, the morning of the seagulls and of
the island birds, the morning of the slopes and of the inaccessible
flowers, that ever the same eternal morning that has not yet to
reckon with human beings, who blink at it dubiously, mistrust-
fully, and critically out of their before-breakfast mood. And one
need only walk for half an hour, with those quick, light, early
steps that take one so incredibly far, to have it really around one,
the sea-morning that is sure everything in it is with it and noth-
ing against it; that in its opening its own gesture repeats itself
thousands and thousands of times, till it slows down in the little

flowers and as it were collects itself. And with it all, I certainly
feel what you wrote recently: that such spring mornings belong
to a foreign spring, that my own . . . would be infinitely more
cautious and hesitant and less obvious. Don't you remember how
much I came to miss in Rome that spring which keeps pace with
our hearts? How shocked I too was at the frivolous simultaneous-
ness of all that blossoming, at its showiness, its impatience, cor-
rected by nothing and so effortlessly put through? How we
scorned that soon appeased nightingale, in whose badly composed
song could no longer be recognized at all the yearning that we
knew so well. Yes, I understood it then, and now too I know very
well what you mean, and that you are right. It is possible that our
nature really often avenges itself for the inappropriate alien things
we expect of it, and that between us and our environment rifts
occur that do not remain entirely on the surface. But why did our
forebears read about all these foreign things: while they let them
grow to dreams within them, to desires, to vague fantastic pic-
tures, while they suffered their hearts to change pace, spurred on
by some adventurousness, while, boundless and misunderstood dis-
tance within them, they stood at the window with a gaze that
almost scornfully turned its back upon the court and the garden
out there, they quite literally conjured up that which we now
have to do and, as it were, to make good. With their surround-
ings, which they no longer saw, they lost sight of all reality, the
near seemed to them boring and commonplace, and what dis-
tance was depended on their mood and imagination. And in the
process near and far passed into oblivion. So it has fallen to us
not to differentiate at all between the two, to take upon ourselves
and to restore both again, as the one reality which in truth is
nowhere divided or closed off and which is not ordinary close
around us and romantic a little further on, and not boring here
and full of variety yonder. They distinguished so spasmodically
in those days between the foreign and the accustomed; they did
not notice how both are everywhere in densest interpenetration.
They saw only that the near did not belong to them, and so they
thought that what was really possessable and valuable would be

264

abroad, and longed for it. And they considered their unconfined
and inventive longing a proof of its beauty and greatness. For
they still fully believed that we can fetch something into our-
selves, draw it in, swallow it, whereas really we are so filled up
from the start that not the smallest thing could be added. But
things can all exercise influence. And they all do exercise it from
afar, near as well as distant things, none touches us, all communi-
cate with us across separations, and the ring on my hand can no
more enter into me than the farthest stars can into us: only as with
rays can all things reach us, and as the magnet evokes and sets in
order the powers in some Sensitive object, so they can create a
new order in us as they act upon us. And before this insight do
not near and far vanish? And isn't it our insight? This as pro-
visional answer to your beautiful letter. . . .

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

March 4, 1907

. . . my windows and my doors are open, and I can hear how
it is turning to evening outside. I recognize the stillness of this
coming of evening, which is composed of many small sounds, of
many verse beginnings of little bird songs, now opening up more
and more like all things round about. Do you remember that
from Rome? I can't help thinking often of my little house there;
much in my present living resembles it, and there is always more
to recognize again, now that spring is growing. It seems to me I
am seeing many things a little better and more maturely and more
justly than that time in Rome, and as if the years had come with
things that have worked on me. Although there is no end to the
unfinished places about me; indeed, there seem to be more and
more of them. But it is comprehensible of course that they are
becoming clearer, the more separate spots here and there come
to a modele. And patience and patience, I keep saying to myself t
saying it more confidently and more modestly than ever before.

265

And if I stop saying it, there are now always enough things on
hand persuading me with that same word.

It is remarkable how far just what we imagined and planned
on a walk together in Friedelhausen when we needed comfort-
ing, is now really coming to fulfillment: that I would see Greece.
For no landscape can be more Greek, no sea more filled with the
expanses of antiquity, than land and sea as it is given me to see
and experience them on my walks in Anacapri. Here is Greece,
without the Greek world's works of art, but almost as before they
came into being. The stony slopes lie up there as if all that were
yet to come, and as if all the gods too were yet to be born that
Greece's abundance of horror and beauty called forth. And you
should hear the kind of language the people speak up there. 1
have never heard any so ancient on human lips. You ask them the
name of the region in which you are and they tell you something
big, powerful, sounding like the name of a king, of a first, early,
legendary king, and you think you have already divined his
name before in the storms and in the muffled swell of the heavy
sea. You see, it has fortunately proved true that there is a world
up there and much reality. . . .

C '39 1

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

March 8, 1907

. . . my letter crossed your beautiful description of those
evening excursions, of which I received more through the keen-
ness of your words than you perhaps hoped to include in them
in the quick jotting down. Your notes are very good and sure
and positive, and when you read them again here with me, you
will be surprised to see so much stored up in them. Then a lot
else, completing and expanding all the rest, will find its way to
them, and perhaps we can compile from the whole an Egyptian
journey such as no one has ever been able to make and to tell
about. Only collect many more impressions; don't think of letters
that have to give information and be easily understood; keep

266

taking in with swift capturing gestures one thing and another:
something that passes quickly by, glimpses, brief flashing revela-
tions that last a second in you under the influence of some occur-
rence; all the unimportant that often becomes significant through
a passing intensity of our vision or because it happens at a place
where it is perfected in all its fortuity and perpetually valid and
of deep import for some personal insight which, appearing in us
at the same moment, coincides meaningfully with that image.
Gazing is such a wonderful thing, of which we still know so
little; with it we are turned completely outward but just when
we are most so, things seem to be going on in us that have waited
longingly to be unobserved, and while they, untouched and
curiously anonymous, achieve themselves in us without us,
their meaning is growing up in the object outside, a name con-
vincing, strong, the only one possible for them, in which we
blissfully and reverently recognize the event within us, though
we ourselves do not quite reach to it, only quite faintly, quite from
afar, comprehending it under the sign of some thing, strange a
moment ago and already next moment newly estranged. It
often happens to me now that some face affects me like that; in
the morning, for example, as they begin here now for the most
part; one has already had lots of sun very early, an abundance of
brightness, and if then suddenly in the shade of a street a face
is held out to one, under influence of the contrast one sees its
character with such distinctness (distinctness of nuance) that
the momentary impression is spontaneously heightened to the
symbolic. More than ever I wish for someone here who could
paint; seriously paint. Just recently again. Picture to yourself: a
green rectangular field, flat against the curving, deep-blue sea
beside which it was set, without one's seeing the vertical drop of
ancient substructions that alone separated one from the other.
On this field a woman sitting, in rhubarb red and orange, another
in a faded green going back and forth among the white sheets
and tablecloths hung out to dry on lines and moved in most varied
fashion by the wind, now hollow and drawn in, full of translucent
shadow, now dazzlingly billowed out, ever and again interrupted

_ 267

by the distinct blue of the sea and overflowed by the sky con-
tinually coming down over everything . . . and so forth.
Wouldn't that give P.B. pleasure? It is a real sin to write it down
in ink. Why doesn't some painter come and drive the money-
changers from the temple and do what would be so necessary and
so natural to do?

So once more then, make many notes, even if you don't read
them over (for in reading over one is unjust, and much then
seems impossible that is plainly necessary), and if you can, make
drawings of the same sort with all uncompromising directness of
the instant stroke. All this only as material we will then sift here,
discussing it and joining the natural breaks. You will see, it will
fit. Only there must be lots, so that we can really pour it out be-
fore us and reach into it. The more the better. . . . Write
only briefly and save up for your notes and sketches. (Looking
into interiors of houses as into fruit-meat is an experience for me
from somewhere. From Rome? ) Look, look, look, . . .

To Clara Rilke [Villa Discopoli, Capri]

March 11, 1907, Monday

... I always write it Monday, the "Oceana" letter, and it gets
to you only the next Sunday, at ten-thirty: so your cards in-
form me, which I do indeed consider as a letter (the tenth).
How lovely those cards really are, and again: how well you told
what they confirm. The avenue up to the Pyramids you evoked
in me just that way, only with everything the card can't give
besides, with the luminosity and the movement toward that lu-
minosity. But the disposition and distribution of the whole had
arranged itself in me on your indications just as the card now
gives it. You wish "again and again, to be alone more," you say.
Yes, how much and in how little considerate a manner I would
surely wish it if I came back from such expeditions and such
things and from that market place into the dreary boredom that
looms under the influence of parlor games. . . . Our upbring-

268

ing is probably to blame for our managing social affairs so badly.
The Heluan people, in so far as they aren't professional sitters-
about (for of walking there is no question) , have probably learned
from childhood up to reckon with this excess of social incon-
veniences as with the unavoidable. That is the canvas on which
they have worked their embroidery again and again. Whereas I:
I did indeed really live in the little churchyard corner in the
school garden, where I was safe from my contemporaries, and in
the extremely unsocial environment of their ruthlessness, which
like paper scissors cut one very sharp and clear out of the group
picture of that unattractive throng. And later it was so again
and again, and it was the little narrow room in Tante Gabriele's
apartment, and each time it was a separation and singleness and
an obligation to accept and somehow come to terms with it. ...
People, before they had become properly acquainted with work,
invented distraction as relaxation from and opposite of false
work. Had they waited, ah, and been long patient, real work
would have become a little more accessible to them, and they
would have come to understand that it can as little have an op-
posite as the world itself has one, or God or any living soul. For
it is everything, and what is not work neither is nor is anywhere.
Renan once noted down: "Travailler, a repose." I shall put it as
motto in the new Rodin volume (which I shall not begin before
we have talked about Egypt). . . .

C '*' 3

To Paula Modersohn-Becker Villa Discopoli, Capri

March 17, 1907

I looked forward to your letter more than I can say. ... I
do think your life has powers, to replace and to retrieve and to
come to itself at any price. And if outward circumstances turned
out differently from what we thought in those days, still only
one thing is decisive: that you bear them courageously and have
won through to the possibility of finding within the given con-
ditions all the freedom that in you needs which must not be

269

destroyed in order to become the utmost that it can become.

For solitude is really an inner affair, and the best and most help-
ful step forward is to realize that and to live accordingly. It is a
matter, after all, of things that do not lie entirely in our hands,
and success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up
of thousands of things, we never fully know of what.

For the rest, just leave me to my expectation, which is so great
that it cannot be disappointed. Where one expects something big,
it is not upon this or that that one counts, one cannot count or
counsel at all; for it is a matter of the unexpected, the unf orseeable.
And the slowness of a course could disconcert no one less than
myself, whose daily experience is of the great units of measure by
which artistic growth increases.

It only saddens me that I shall not see you again now; I think
of getting to Paris soon and remaining there as long as possible.
But you will already be gone then. This time I shall look for a
studio and furniture, for it is to be a serious settling down to all
the work there will be to do. Even the summer, about which you
ask, I shall probably spend entirely there, in some corner of that
tremendous solitude for which I am longing.

Here I have thought much, much of you. Such remarkable
color experiences are possible here: unprecedented. And again,
it is all never seen, never made; only that bad painters cover it up
now and then with their backs : that is all. Still I wouldn't have
wanted to call you or disturb you. My admiration for Paris is too
great for that, and my conviction that there one can become every-
thing, too sincere. And then: even one's whereabouts are more an
internal than an external question, otherwise real pictures would
already have had to come into the world here. . . .

P.S. Clara will soon be able to receive your greetings, when
she comes through here on the return journey. Her letters are
beautiful and remarkable. Just as when our grandparents traveled
and wrote, and a letter was long on the way and contained much
that was strange and foreign when it finally arrived. Only that
everything foreign is near to us, because we apprehend it and have
need of it as expression for things within.

270

T0 Ctovf Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

Monday, March 18, 1907. Afternoon

. . . Thanks for everything you share with me in such a loyal
way; it seems to me you are handing me the bigger half of it all.
I gather so much from passages in your letters and from pictures,
especially from the former, and when everything is added by
word of mouth, as it arises in our talks, I shall have some sort
of whole that I can remember and look forward to enjoying. . . .
And remarkable, to feel this sublimely carried sphinx-head in-
serted into space with the whole tremendous persevering of its
existence. Remarkable, so remarkable that that word recovers its
literal worth for one. Again and again I am forced to think: what a
world for a section in a new Book of Hours > in and before which to
let figures rise up in all their size. And how close all that has come
to me. Even should I not get there for years, how far I have
already been initiated and am in contact with it all. And when I
read a chapter in A Thousand and One Nights ... the details
I know about from you take on a life of their own, get up out of
their corners, come together and form associations that look or-
ganic and viable when one heightens the conditions and dimen-
sions of life to the colossal. The caliphs' graves had already sur-
prised me on a recent card; but on the one enclosed this time the
earlier impression is heightened to the incredible. Before I found
your remarks on the back, I thought of the fruit and fruit-stone
quality of those plastic cupolas, which are great sculpture, the
height of plastic art with their nowhere interrupted, nowhere
weakened or neglected modele. Of them you must tell me much.
How everything is indeed always one. When a path turns toward
greatness, how one sees again and again, as one proceeds in that
direction, everything else one has already known: as though there
sat together at the end of it a circle of gods, silent, in quiet
similarity and eternal kinship.

Your saying that you cannot draw much now, I can under-
stand. No, how would that be possible with everything, since you

have your work and have to talk with and adapt yourself to
everybody. I am not afraid you might bring too little with you.
When you spread it out here, you will be amazed yourself at
all there is. And just go on living it quietly and whole and with-
out limitation. The weeks go so quickly here it is hard to keep
up with them, and all of a sudden you will be here. But do not
let yourself be disturbed by what is to come; rather, be in that
which is still around you and which enters with an immeasurable
past into the present that is yours. That is why I too am post-
poning everything I would like to tell you of myself until it can
be told verbally. Only this much: while Ellen Key was here it
was half decided that I will be able to go to Paris with the same
opportunity offered again that I lost and frittered away in the
fall. So, if everything comes as I think and am with full hope
planning, I shall go from here directly to Paris and there resume
my solitude and work again a year later, exactly where it eluded
me when I went to Belgium. And this time I will hold out and
not go away again so soon, and bring something to conclusion. I
have promised the Insel-Verlag a new book of poems in time for
Christmas (with all the reservations with which that sort of thing
can be promised), but I would like really to carry it through and
multiply the beautiful new things until they are a book, the book
that must come now. That is now my concern and my confident
hope, and to that my immediate living must adjust and regulate
itself. . . .

C

To Hugo von Hofmannsthal Villa Discopoli, Capri, Italy

March 21, 1907
My dear Hofmannsthal,

You will know how much the approval of my work that your
letter contains concerns and touches me; I will not stop now to
assure you of it. I simply want to add that your words came to
me almost like spoken ones (with all the vibration that can be
about words) . In the last few days I had been taken up again and

again with your lecture on the poet and these times , and so
I was accustomed to your voice and as it were prepared to hear
it again.

I have recently been several times on the point of writing you.
That too you will understand. But for the moment (although the
impression I received from your fine lecture has strongly concen-
trated me) I still do not find the inner calm for grateful discus-
sion. Rather will I, not to keep you waiting, reply to your kind
and special invitation, accepting, as you can well imagine, en-
tirely accepting. For in this case all reasons I might otherwise
have advanced against the publication of lyrical contributions
in periodicals become invalid, and other decisive ones appear to
which I yield when I beg you to count absolutely upon my par-
ticipation. That is, in so far as I have finished things on hand.

I believe I shall be able to fulfill your wish when I put at your
disposal shortly (in the course of the next weeks, if it can wait
that long) two poems of the type of those that Bie published some
time ago ("The Rosebowl," "Alkestis")- For later on I shall
prepare single poems out of a cycle the conclusion of which is in
sight.

You see that I am anxious to prove my readiness most sincerely,
in this case as in any other that may come up.

Your Rilke

C *44 3

To Clara Rilke Capri, Villa Discopoli

March 25, 1907, Monday afternoon

. . . once more we are set in the midst of the storms that are
jostling the spring all the way in among the many people who
now belong to Capri. Remarkable was the night of the spring
equinox, a moonlight night with many leaf-shadows being chased
over the paths (made of white light) . The scent of the wallflowers
had no rest over its blossoms and suddenly found itself above
quite different bushes, to which it didn't belong, and all the hard
trees, prepared for sea wind, became audible again in all their

273

hardness as their leaves turned and struck against each other. But
the wind (one could see) no longer reached so far up into the
night, it was now only a stream of wind, a road of wind, above
which, deep and silent, blossoming sky stood motionless, spring
sky with single, great, open stars . . . The last week of March
is beginning, and I am sure it will pass quickly, like all the others.
This last one has left me two more things to report: This year's
Insel-Almanach, which they are already preparing, will have
three poems as a sample of the new book, together with a little
essay on the letters of Marianna Alcof orado, with which I have
again been having a good deal to do and from which the moving
figure of the w Portuguese nun seems to me to rise more clearly
each time, like that of a Spanish madonna almost: so large and
oppressive and set with stones is the habit of this love, in which
her yearning face is only one little place. And Hofmannsthal
wrote me a very, very kind letter, occasioned by the founding
of a new weekly in which a special and fastidiously arranged lyric
section will be under his charge; his intention was to tell me this
and to say he would like to count quite particularly on my col-
laboration, but you will see in what a kind way he knew how
to express it. ...

I am writing only this today, because, on account of the wind
perhaps, I have something of a headache, with which I never-
theless have to write a few more things. ... I already feel a
little the beginning of the end here and sit before the coming
weeks like one pondering how a whole garment may still be
squeezed out of a tapering remnant. . . .

C w3

To Tora Holmstrdm Villa Discopoli, Capri, Italy

March 29, 1907

Dear Fraulein Tora Holmstrom: I naturally rejoice from my
heart for you, that you are going to Paris and could think of
taking up your work there. I am only worried that you may want
to take it upon yourself with too great energy and vehemence,

*74

together with all the tremendous thing that Paris is: for one
doesn't know that till later: that Paris is itself a task, a very great,
a well-nigh exhausting task, which one accomplishes without
noticing it. The claim that city makes on one is immeasurable
and uninterrupted. (I am grateful to it for the best I have been
able to do heretofore.) That is why it doesn't help one imme-
diately and directly in artistic activity, doesn't at first, as it were,
affect the work one does, but it transforms, heightens, and de-
velops one continually, it gently takes from one's hand the tools
one has been using and replaces them with others, indescribably
finer and more precise, and does a thousand unexpected things
with one, like a fairy who delights in seeing a creature take on all
shapes the possibilities of which are hidden within it. When one
has Paris around one for the first time, one must let it act more
like a bath, without trying to do too much about it oneself: save
to feel and let it happen to one. . . .

C *tf 3

To Clara Rilke Villa Discopoli, Capri

April 8, 1907 (Monday)

... it is remarkable how spring still keeps us waiting here;
or actually, it isn't keeping us waiting; it has begun, but it is like
the opening of a show: nothing has been finished. One goes from
exhibit to exhibit across the worst holes and amid great disorder.
(How this southern spring display always forces such compari-
sons upon one.) Freezing has still not been discarded and only
once was the morning such that bird voices woke me: the starting
in of a nightingale, who here likes best to try her skill in the early
hours, as though she weren't determined, as with us, to keep
vigil for her longing's sake, but at most to get up somewhat
earlier than the others. Of course everything is blooming most
recklessly: if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an
unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. But in spite of
the days with much rain, the air keeps letting the scent fall as
if its hands were still too cold for it. Most spacious of all are the

275

starry nights that blossom out moonless in the dark and scatter
shooting stars out of sheer exuberance: some that fall quickly
and suddenly and, as if they were falling into water, unexpectedly
go out; burning ones that spring out of a star and, as if they had
gauged their spring, into another star, and quiet ones that soar in
a flat arc obliquely through the sky like birds with outspread
wings, emerging between two stars, vanishing between two
others, as if these skies were only something to pass through
not to stay in. Thus we saw it yesterday evening from the bal-
cony of the studio and good Frau Nonna was quite moved to
have all the magnificence before her departure. . . . She is
genuinely fond of us and we are all asked, Ruth too, to settle
down sometime for a while in great-grandfather's pavilion in
Londorf.

... If the Monday letters are really still not reaching you
until the next Saturday (that would be the fourteenth), this
will be the last to find you in Heluan. It wishes you a good fare-
well, unhurried like the closing of a book which one has finished
alone in the night and which, in laying the cover over the last
page, one seems for a second to encompass in an indescribably
broadened feeling. . . .

C '47 3

To Ernst Norlind [Capri, 1907]

... I can understand your desire, better than anyone. Have I
not sometimes attempted Russian poems at moments when an
inner experience seemed able to clarify itself only in that form.
And I am still from time to time compelled to write certain
things in French to be able to bring them to form at all. But in so
doing I have also come to the realization that one must not yield
too much to this urge, rather one must keep applying one's
powers to finding everything in one's own language, to saying:
everything with it: for this, to which we are related even deep
into our unconscious, and only this, can in the end, if we take
pains with it, give us the opportunity of delineating with it, very

precisely and exactly and definitely, even to the echo of every
echo, the ultimate validity of our experience. The material of
the writer is no more yielding than that of any other art and
no easier to encompass! You won't believe how much I still
feel in German like a beginner who is very far from reaching
surely and resolutely for the words which each time are the
only right ones. My experience and knowledge in this connection
are too clear and basic to let me withhold them from you at the
moment when you write of your hope and intention to publish
sometime in German. The attraction a "great cultural language"
has for you will also fall away when you consider how accessible
the great thoughts of all languages have become to us, and how
Swedish especially has been able to draw attention to itself when-
ever your poets have grown out beyond national significance.
And it has often seemed to me that something great has only to
be thought in order to exist indestructibly! Feeling like this, there
is no sense in choosing a language because it is widespread; much
rather should it be our task to reach the ultimate in clarity in that
which one has. (If you knew furthermore what small prospect
one has just now of finding among readers of German people
who understand when one tries to write in this language of the
great final things, of the most important, the ultimate, the most
profound you would not wish to grow into this language!
I say this quite without bitterness; for works of art can wait: in-
deed, they do nothing but that and do it passionately .)

About your new books, of which through Ellen Key I hear
such very good things quoted Bonnier's opinion namely , I am
heartily glad, dear friend. It is only too bad: Danish I read fairly
easily, as I tried out just recently (Helge Rode's new drama
Morbus Tellermanri), while I can adjust myself less easily to
Swedish. Nevertheless I shall naturally make an effort to read
you, and all the inexpressible that passes back and forth between
us will certainly help me here and there to grasp something by
feeling and intuitive groping.

Besides your kind letter I have also to thank you now for what
you sent: the lithograph and the photograph of your new picture.

^77

In both I find the landscape and arrangement of space extraor-
dinarily fine and successful; the birds aren't so convincing at first
glance. I have the feeling that you often spoil your real knowledge
of form and movement by a too conscious attempt at stylization.
The mood emanating from these pictures is certainly very strong
in spite of this, but the effect it spontaneously produces on one is
again and again interrupted by a certain surprise at the bird-forms,
which do not evoke movement along with their gesture. But
without qualification I admire your more and more energetic
mastery of space, executed with ever simpler means. . . .

C *4* 3

To Gudrun Baroness Uexkiill Villa Discopoli, Capri

April 15, 1907

. , . I have behind me a daily task I was fond of, a translation
of the forty-four beautiful Sonnets fro?n the Portuguese of Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning, the carrying out of which I owe to my
hostess here. Someday a little book will come of them, and I look
forward quite particularly to laying it in your hands! These Eng-
lish love sonnets are of a perfection and precision of expression:
crystals of feeling they are: so clear, so ordered, so transparently
mysterious, and grown up in such a deep untroubled place. And
it was somehow possible for me to let the German version take
shape in similar depths, so that the translation pleases me, the
way it has succeeded. . . .

C *49 3

To Karl von der Heydt Villa Discopoli, Capri

May 3, 1907

. . . Perhaps it will amuse you that ... I have seen Gorky.
One evening I sat up there in his house about a round table. The
sad lamp shed its light quite evenly, without bringing anyone into
prominence: on him, his present wife, and a couple of discon-
solate Russian men who took no notice of me. We managed to

understand each other first in Russian, of which a certain amount
returned to me under stress of the moment; later I spoke German
and Madame Gorky translated. You know my opinion, that the
revolutionary is the direct antithesis of the Russian: that is, the
Russian is admirably suited to be one, rather as a cambric hand-
kerchief is very nice for wiping up ink, provided you completely
misuse and ruthlessly misjudge its real attributes. Add to this that
neither can I in any respect imagine the artist, obedient, patient,
fitted for slow development as he is, among the insurrectionists,
and you will understand that the preliminary conditions for our
getting on together were not exactly propitious. And this was in
general confirmed. He speaks even of art as a democrat, as a dis-
contented man, narrowly and hastily judging; with judgments
in which the errors are completely dissolved, so that one cannot
fish them out. But then he is of a great, moving kindness (of that
kindness which again and again makes it impossible for Russians
to remain artists) , and it is very moving to find upon a face quite
unprepared the traces of very great thoughts and a rare smile
that breaks out of it laboriously, as though it had a hard, unre-
sponsive surface to push up through from deep down. Remark-
able was the atmosphere of nameless, anonymous egalite into
which one fell as soon as one sat down at the round table. It was
like some Beyond in which these exiles were lingering, and their
eyes seemed to be turned back to the earth which is Russia, re-
turn to which seems so utterly impossible. . . .

C iw 3

To Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski Hotel de Russie, Rome.

En route, May 29, 1907

... I admire Stefan George's poems, and my having met the
poet nine years ago in the Boboli Gardens belongs to my most
cherished memories.

He spoke at that time against young people publishing too soon
and too hastily, not without reference to myself; this voice
counseling patient work that expects nothing from without had

279

its effect, together with other earlier voices, and strengthened
me in an attitude for which I must have had the necessary pre-
disposition. If you wish to call that an influence, designate it as
such.

The effect of works of art seems to me in no way measurable.
Their influence is so much dissolved in memory and experience
and interwoven with them, that it cannot be presented separately.
According to my experience, the effect of George's poems, like
that of other serious works of art, consists in their developing
one's ability to admire and to work and obligating one absolutely
to Nature.

That is all I can say on the subject. . . .

C IJTI 3

To Clara Rilke Hotel du Quai Voltaire [Paris]

Monday, June 3, 1907

. . . how much seeing and working differ elsewhere; you see,
and think: Later . Here they are almost the same. You are here
again: that isn't odd, not remarkable, not startling: it isn't even a
celebration; for even a celebration would be an interruption. But
here this takes you and goes on with you and goes with you
toward everything and right through everything, through the
small and the great. Everything that was arranges itself differ-
ently, falls into line, as if someone stood there giving orders; and
what is present is in all fervency present, as if it were on its knees
and praying for you. I have already lived a long life here since
Friday morning and countless memories. You can imagine. On
Saturday (June i ) I took my first Turkish bath with complete
enjoyment and without any discomfort. It was glorious to sit in
the good warmth, for which I was of course prepared by our
warmth down there. I even wished there were some of it outside
the bathhouse; the green is far along here, but the air changeable,
cold in spots when it moves, and where it is still, insipidly warm,
so that one feels mistreated by it and by the dreadful sharp dust
one of those sudden snatches of wind tosses up; I have never found

that so bothersome as this time; (am I especially sensitive to it
after all the sea air?) But what is that to the principal thing. The
way everything is here again, reality right into the smallest part.
You go somewhere and simply are happy and feel in the mood,
and your tasks go on before you with their delicate, winged feet
and linger a little and are not at all unattainable, only very
proud. Yesterday I was in Notre Dame and heard again the sing-
ing that streams into that wonderful mold and everywhere takes
on its interior shape.' Spent a curious hour this afternoon in the
Carriere exhibition. ... It really is singular, this work, and not
at all as though one might soon shake it off. Dora has looked at
studios for me that are listed at Colarossi's as "furnished": but the
dirt that goes with them each time is insuperable. And I do have
a horror of settling an empty studio and of time and money going
in the process. So it will probably again be rue Cassette. . . .
And that will be an upper room, the one right above Paula
Becker's, that looks on the little church through the chestnuts of
the convent garden: that I look forward to. And then? Last year
cannot come again, though much chimes in so similarly: but it will
after all be a quite new one, and to that too I look forward. Today
I saw Mathilde Vollmoeller at Jouven's; she was as always simple
and sympathetic. And everything leaves one so gloriously in
peace. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

Friday afternoon [June 7, 1907]

. . . Here I have already been to many places again. Tuesday
in the little Bagatelle Palace where there is an exhibition of
women's portraits from 1870 to 1900. A wonderful Manet re-
wards one superabundantly for all the rest. That is a painter; he
is beginning to open up to me all over again after this portrait and
after the incredible "Dejeuner sur Pherbe" that I saw today in the
Louvre in the newly installed Moreau-Nelaton collection. That
is a painter, still, and again and again and all the more. Carriere

_ _ 28l

9

was wrong after all and Van Gogh is something else, something
inexorably obsessed with expression that bends painting to its
will. With him the never before painted came in, but with Manet
everything paintable. (That sounds strange; for by the meaning
of painting everything actually must be paintable; yes, but it
isn't yet, and Van Gogh wanted it to be, to be, to be.) At Bern-
heim jeune, I saw Van Goghs: a night cafe, late, dreary, as if one
were seeing it with sleepless eyes. The way he has made the old
lamplit air (by drawing circles concentrically about the hanging
lamps, which seem gradually to dissolve in the room), is far
from being painting any longer, but is forcibly won with colors,
and it overpowers: one becomes positively old, wilted, and
drowsily disconsolate before it. There are Maillols there too:
very, very beautiful ones. The torso of a girl, still in clay (to be
baked), which is indescribable. And at the same time another
well-known Japanese collection is shortly being sold at auction
which one should also see!

. . . But the difficult, the anxious is somehow still here too
indeed everything is again: as always in Paris.

Thank you for the notes written en route. Perhaps you are
right in many respects. I thought so today at two pictures of
Berthe Morisot: they were painted for Manet's sake, and Bash-
kirtseff painted for Bastien-Lepage out of him, for his sake*
What we do for the sake of God, do women always do for a man?
But the human and the divine are equally unattainable: so their
task could for that reason still become broad and personal and
their own? And now a good Sunday to you. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

June 13, Thursday evening [1907]

... a variety of circumstances (unpleasant neighbors in the
next room and such), which someone else would more easily
conquer, is responsible for my still not being at home here and
not taking Paris as it continually offers itself (extravagantly) ,

282

but probably above all it is because I am not working. . . . Yes,
the study plan is falling through, item by item, for that will come
which has to come, and not that which we put on the program;
let us just take what comes and has a right to come well and
firmly in hand. And may it come soon, so that there will be no
pauses. . . .

I was in the Jardin des Plantes all morning yesterday, looking
at the gazelles. Gazella Dorcas, Linne. There are two of them
and a single female besides. They were lying a few feet apart,
chewing their cuds, resting, gazing. As women gaze out of pic-
tures, so they gaze out of something with a mute, conclusive
turn. And when a horse neighed, one of them listened and I saw
the radiance from ears and horns about her slender head. Were
the ears of those in Al Hay at just as gray (as tin to gold in rela-
tion to the tone of the other hair) with a soft, dark, ramified
marking inside? I only saw one get up for a moment, she lay
right down again; but I saw, while they stretched and tested
themselves, the magnificent work of those hind legs: (they are
like guns out of which leaps are shot) . I couldn't go away at all,
they were so beautiful, and exactly as I felt before your delicate
photograph: as though they had only just been changed into
this shape. . . .

C '3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

June 19, 1907

... I do not know why I am so slow this time in adapting and
settling in. The neighbors, are not bad, and yet it is again the Paris
that consumed Make Laurids. A student studying for his exam-
inations for years. Then just before the tests an ailment mani-
fests itself: his face becomes troubled over his books, the lines
dance and one eyelid closes down, simply closes down like a shade
whose cord is broken. This condition made him nervously misera-
ble, and then, at the time I moved in, he was going about in his
room, stamping with every turn and even late into the night, in

a kind of bleary resentment, throwing things on the floor, some
kind of tin things made as if for the purpose, which rolled along
in order to be picked up and thrown down again and again. You
know one couldn't have provided a more susceptible neighbor
for this young man. How that kept me engrossed and breathless
the first nights, before I knew what it meant. Alas: because I at
once grasped the rhythm in that madness, the weariness in that
anger, the task, the despair you can imagine. That ate into
me a little and confirmed and occupied me in my dreadful melan-
choly. And a person like that, when he is at the end of his powers,
takes some for himself through the wall. Instinctively, what
does it matter to him. That is all. And now they are operating
on his eyelid (the muscular exhaustion of which naturally can-
not be surgically removed). But it is so in keeping with this
misery to have the hospital mixing in and the clever gentlemen
who for a moment are certainly taking an interest in this ob-
stinate eyelid. Today, I believe, he will be operated on for the
second time, and then he is supposed to leave soon for home
somewhere. His mother came at the worst time. To hear her
step outside, ah, she had no idea how much that step had to stand
by me too. One had only to hear it outside in the corridor when
she came and went. One heard: a mother has a sick son heard
it as if one saw it depicted on ten bas-reliefs in various stages:
that is how one heard it. ...

C

To Julie

Baroness von Nor deck zur Rabenau 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

June 20, 1907

... it is a mistake, I know, to live with such self -surrender that
one is always getting lost in one's surroundings of the moment.
This mistake would be more pardonable if I were already in a
position to utilize it wholly for my art; but even that I do not as
yet understand, and so only long and cumbersome acclimatizations
come out of it, periods of transition that remove me forcibly from

284

my fellows, without permitting me even a tangible connection
with the next new thing. I am in the midst of such days. For Paris,
which I admire so much and which I know I must go through as
one goes through a school, is something continually new, and
when it gives one the feeling of its greatness, its almost limitless-
ness, that is when it becomes really ruthless and so completely
annihilates one that one must quite diffidently start in all over
again with an ardent attempt at living. Now Italy is already so
far off, Capri with its good, even, sheltered days, with the house
about everything that one did and thought and dreamed, so that
doing and thinking and dreaming became something mild and
almost noiseless and Naples, the glorious city, princely in its
layout: as if gifts had been set out along that bay, mountains of
gifts for a king whose ship, the most dazzling in a retinue of ships,
may appear shimmering out there at any moment , all that is
already far away. ...

n 'j* 3

To Clara Rilkc 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

June 21, 1907

... I still owe you the explanation of what I meant by God
himself having taken it into his hands to teach me economy.
(Alas, he underestimates the difficulty in any case.) But see how
he began it. It started in Naples. We were riding with Tante Alia
and the Countess to the museum; I sat behind you and was on
the point of paying with one lira (the fare for four people) in
my hand and a ten centesimi piece which I wanted to put with
it and give away too. My neighbor became interested in my hand
and did not let it out of his sight; when the conductor appeared
over at the edge of the bench, he took my lira with perfect calm
and made me put away the two soldi, while he gave me to under-
stand that it cost four times twenty-five and basta. A porter on
the journey functioned similarly when I, in some desperation over
the emigrants, was in the process of paying goodness knows what
extra for goodness knows what transportation, and he simply

fetched me back from the office (after he had patiently observed
my intentions for a while) and sat me down in second class under
my baggage, with sharply bent legs, as is proper. That was clear.
And I have taken it to heart. I have crossed out everything, i . car-
riages, 2. tea drinking, 3. buying books (alas), and still it is more
difficult than ever. Why? What a stupid clumsy person I am; all
the others about me can and could do it, even Mile, de Lespinasse t
when the Count de Guibert complained to her of certain wor-
ries, answered: "Paris est le lieu du monde ou Ton peut etre pauvre
avec le moins de privations: il n'y a que les ennuyeux et les sots
qui ont besoin d'etre riches." That too is clear. And nevertheless
I have done a*lot of calculating again these last days, and haven't
arrived at understanding how it will turn out. For the present,
it seems to me, I can neither stay here nor travel, but if I can
just work: wouldn't that after all be the solution?

If only one of us had a little of the practicality and shrewd-
ness that money develops in those who know how to handle it.
Ruth? Ah, better she should have the health and the security and
the inner gayety which for sheer innate wealth feels no want,
what with so much deciding and doing. . . .

c >m

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

Monday, June 24, 1907

. . . this morning [came] your long letter, with all your
thoughts. . . . Works of art are indeed always products of
having-been-in-danger, of having-gone-to-the-very-end in an
experience, to where no man can go further. The further one
goes, the more one's own, the more personal, the more unique
an experience becomes, and the work of art, finally, is the neces-
sary, irrepressible, most valid possible expression of this unique-
ness. . . . Herein lies the tremendous help of the work of art for
the life of the person who must make it: that it is his rallying
of strength; the knot in the rosary at which his life speaks a
prayer, the ever-recurrent proof of his unity and trueness, but

286

directed only toward himself and to the outer world working
anonymously, unnamed, as necessity only, as reality, existence .
We surely have no choice then but to test and try ourselves out
to the extreme, but also we are probably bound not to express,
to part, to impart this extreme before it enters into the work of
art: for as something unique that no one else would or should
understand, as personal insanity so to speak, it has to enter into
the work in order to become valid there and to show the law,
like an inherent design which becomes visible only in the trans-
parency of the artistic sphere. Two freedoms of communica-
tion there are, nevertheless, and they seem to me the utmost of
what is possible: the one face to face with the thing completed
and the one within our daily life itself, in which we show each
other what we have become through our work and thereby mu-
tually support and help and (in the humblest sense of the word)
admire each other. But in the one case as in the other one must
show one another results, and it is no lack of trust, no missing
something in each other, and no excluding, if one does not dis-
play the instruments of development, which have in them so
much that is bewildering, distressing, and only in its personal
application valid. I so often think how insane it would have been,
how destructive for him, if Van Gogh had had to share the
uniqueness of his vision with anyone, had had to examine the
motives with someone before he made his pictures out of them,
those existences that justify him with their whole soul, that an-
swer for him, that swear to his reality. In letters he probably some-
times thought that he needed this (although there too, he is treat-
ing largely of things already done), but scarcely had Gauguin
appeared, the longed-for companion, the likeminded friend be-
fore he had to cut off his ears in desperation, after they had both
previously resolved to hate each other and at a good opportunity
to send each other out of this world. But that is only one thing:
felt from artist to artist. The woman and her share are something
else. And a third thing (but thinkable as a task only for later
years), the complication of the woman being an artist. Ah, that

_ 287

is an entirely new question, and thoughts bite at one on all sides
if one takes only a few steps into it. On that I shall write no more
today my relationship to my "models" is certainly still false, espe-
cially as I really can't use any human models at all yet (the proof:
I am not making any yet) and shall be occupied with flowers, ani-
mals, and landscapes for years to come. (The opening scene of
"Alkestis" is perhaps my first reach into the world of "figures".)
You see ... I am writing hurriedly in order to have time for
other things. You will not misunderstand the haste in my hand-
writing: the content is not so hurried and neither is that which
prompts me to write. I quite obstinately go on asking for some-
thing about the Rodin conversation; I don't know why I think
that it would be valuable for me to have a little share in it. ...

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

June 26, Wednesday [1907]

. . . How will it be sometime with Rodin? It is too much to
write about it now, it leads too far in all directions. Also it is not
time for it yet. It pains me not to be able simply to go out to see a
few things again and Rodin himself. Naturally even I understand
something of those objections. And yet something is not right
about them; this whole emphasis that turns against what is
literary and literature-ish in other arts is itself literature and
emanates from litterateurs. That is suspicious; I would rather hear
a plain craftsman, of Maillol's simplicity for instance, taking Rodin
to task. And didn't I have with him the very experience for which
you prepared me years ago: that of the immaterial, the uninten-
tionally formed "like the worm that makes its way in the dark
from place to place -- "? in a word: of the modele? And couldn't
you think him so calm and confident in Egypt before those tre-
mendous things? But no, if I go on writing now, I must go up to
the stars and down to the bottom of the sea and can leave nothing
unpacified: for then what is left out? Till later.

288 _

Today there is a banquet in honor of Diriks (do you remember
the Norwegian painter whom we always thought so congenial,
to look at; in celebration of his being decorated with the Legion
of Honor). By chance I received an invitation; I might almost
have gone, but Rodin will be there, and what according to my
whole feeling would have been an urgent reason for being there
becomes through the circumstances just as decisive a one for
staying away. Strange. Life takes pride in not appearing un-
complicated. With simplicity it would probably not bring us
to all those things to which we are not easily brought. . . .

Today I sent you "registered" something unexpected. My new
book. In recent days I have been copying and putting together
like the girl "who still doesn't know what will come out of it
all." And it almost seems to hold and bear itself and be a book?
It is to remain in your care until we send it to the Insel. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI-

June 28, 1907

... I must still keep my head somewhat clear as long as
the second part of my Rodin book is not written. In this,
certain shifts in point of view may as yet play no part; they would
destroy much that was of a simple order, and still not be familiar
enough to me yet to allow of a new, equally clear and, in the
deepest sense, right relationship of insights. Naturally this second
part will be the present lecture, hardly or not at all changed
for it is by no means the moment to say anything new about Rodin
now. But I must simply be allowed to let the lecture stand in its
entirety still while I am preparing it for publication. I can still
understand it fully, it seems to me, although I am already be-
ginning to see too that many of its perceptions belong perhaps to
the demands Rodin taught us to make, not to those w^ich his
work realizes in each case. But I know nothing of that as yet,
and that Rodin does not "think," but rather remains within his

289

work, within the attainable, that was just what we felt to be his
advantage, his humble, patient road into reality: and I still have
no other belief to put in place of this belief. One can only remain
in the "realized" in art, and by reason of remaining in it, it
grows and continually leads out beyond one. The "final intui-
tions and insights" draw near only to him who is and remains
in his work, I believe, and he who considers them from afar ac-
quires no power over them. But all that belongs so much already
in the sphere of personal solutions. At bottom it does not co^n-
cern us how someone manages to grow, if only he grows and if
only we are on the track of the law of our own growth. . . 1

c '^3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

last day of June, Sunday [1907]

What a rain; is it like this with you too, today, Sunday . . . ?
I don't know, I had no intention whatsoever of going out, and
yet I stand at the window and act as if the bad weather had kept
me from something. Over there in the convent church behind
the tall chestnuts they are singing to the organ, and from time to
time one feels the rising of tones right through the noise of the
falling, which makes the whole afternoon into a single long hour
that heeds no stroke of the clock and simply lasts on and on, as
in childhood sometimes the afternoons one spends reading, one's
head between one's two fists. . . .

n iti 3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

July 9, 1907 (Tuesday)

. . . Just think, here in the Luxembourg, back of the museum,
in front of the ball-game courts, an enormous bed of low-growing
roses has been laid out, with paths inside on which one unfortu-
nately cannot walk; by each rose stands its name, and a few days

290

ago I read on one of the tablets: Baronne Louise d'Uexkiill. Who
could that have been?

But the most beautiful is the La France bed, the floor of which
is sometimes all covered with fallen petals; a bed like that I would
like to have sometime, when I am old, and sit before it and make
it, of words in which everything is that I then know. . . .

C ,62 n

Td Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

July 12, Friday morning [1907]

. . . Don't worry about the laboriousness of my work: it is
naturally bound up with the unusual circumstances which do not
allow one simply to go out, to see, to hear . But I have indeed
had more time than anyone to see, to hear, to be outside. . . .
Only I have forgotten much, and all my memories, which were
so suddenly broken off one day, have got a crack; it goes right
across them. All that makes this occupation somehow distressing.
To postpone, however, would be of no use; that only makes it
worse. And I have promised myself to work off all my arrears
one after the other. It is the great quantity of what is not done
that lies with all its weight on what wants to come out of the
soil. So do not worry. Everything that is work is good and is
justified, is even justified in being difficult. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

August 9, 1907

... A thousand thanks for your trouble over the new book.
It is as you say: as soon as I see it in print, I shall go over several
things once more from a disinterested distance, and shall still
substitute for "Gazelle" and "Marionette Theater" other, less
dubious things. It is a book: work, the transition from the inspira-
tion that comes to that which is summoned and held fast. What
shall we call it? . . .

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Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

August 10, 1907

. . . Time passes so quickly, and I have long ago given up
running a race with it. More and more (and to my joy) I am liv-
ing the existence of the seed in the fruit which disposes every-
thing it has round about it and outward from itself in the dark-
ness of its working. And more and more I see it is my only way
out to live thus; otherwise I cannot transform the sourness around
me into the sweetness that I owe to God from eternity. In a
word: I stand army standing desk and nothing else. . . .

To Dr. Martin Zickel 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

August 27, 1907
My dear Doctor,

in order not to have made you all the trouble for nothing, I agree
to divide the evening as you propose in your last letter; on the
assumption of course that the fee remains as agreed upon (350
mks. including traveling expenses) and that, should Baron von
Gleichen-Russwurm not take over the remainder of the evening,
you will inform me whom you have invited in his stead.

It naturally interests me very much to get word through you
of the way Daily Life went (against which much can be said and
actually is said). Since I never read criticisms and no newspapers
at all, I thus learned of that Breslau performance for the first
time, riot without a feeling of gratefulness for your friendly at-
titude.

I now await word from you, my dear Doctor, whether the
matter may be considered settled and whether we can keep to
November 5.

With high regard

the greetings of:

Rainer Maria Rilke

2 9 2

T0 C7tfra Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

August 30, 1907

... it was on this day or on the last of August five years ago
that I first arrived in Paris. I still recall exactly my arrival, the
drive from the Gare du Nord to rue Toullier, the arrival there,
strange and frightening right at the first moment and yet full of
expectation and promise and necessity to the smallest detail. I
ordered coffee, was astonished, I still recall, at the big spoon one
got with it went out across the Boulevard Saint-Michel,
obliquely across it to the little post office that no longer exists, by
the outer side of the Palais, where I telegraphed to you. According
to my correspondence book, I wrote you then on September 2.
What can I have written? So that was this Paris, as it is now,
already post-summer and still pre-autumn Paris. Then I didn't
really understand how the city had got into this state, this year I
have seen it coming on; yes, I even feel a little as if I had helped to
produce it and had myself taken the leaves from the chestnuts that
are now quite empty.

. . . Have you read Sabatier's Saint Francis now? It is so long
ago, I still know only very dimly that it was beautiful and his
figure to be well felt, something always achieved somehow by the
French, who know how to arrange the details so much better
than German scholars, with whom little particulars are always
left piled up on top of each other. I am now going almost every
morning to the Bibliotheque Nationale, more for reference than
for reading. Thus there came into my hands a few days ago
translations of wonderfully beautiful Chinese poems of Li Tai Po
and others. What poets those were. They make a sign, and things
come and go; one feels them after a millennium through the late,
foreign language: how light it was, how it came and went, what
they evoked; and how all heaviness passed into the weightless,
there to endure. . . .

2 93

C ''73

T0 Erwrt Ludivig Schellenberg 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

September 2, 1907

... It is very kind of you to meet my silence with so much
consideration in spite of the fact that it must seem very strange
and unfriendly to you. The chief reason lies in a correspondence
that far exceeds my powers; but this does not excuse me. And per-
haps it cannot even exonerate me if I candidly admit that the an-
swering of your letters was put off and could finally pass into
oblivion, because all literary evaluation and discussion that my
works provoke are very remote from me.

You show me so much good will that I owe you at least a few
words on that subject. You have to do here with a personal feel-
ing, a weakness, if you will, which, in admitting, I do not mean
in any way to justify. I am wrpng, perhaps, but I never read any-
thing concerning my work. I did indeed do so years ago as a very
young man, when I didn't yet know any better and was curious.
Now the close relationship which I have with my work prevents
me from ever again looking at a criticism. / must be alone
<with my work, and I have as little need of hearing others speak
about it as, for instance, one would wish to see in print and to col-
lect the opinions of others on the woman one loves. The correct
as well as the incorrect comments some critic is able to make get
between me and the work, are foreign bodies, and were it possible
to assimilate them, it would seem to me a poor way out; for then
what is expressed in them would always expel and replace the
unconscious element in that very intimate and inward relationship
which with such reticence and mystery binds the worker to his
work, to its past and to the future waiting in it. This unconscious
element in one's working and in the continuation of one's own
path (which must not be lost) is endangered by every criticism (to
my way of feeling), and it is doubtless due to my own propensities
that I (personally) feel that criticism is a letter to the public which
the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open
and read.

*94 _

Do not understand that by this I mean to say anything general;
what I say applies only to myself, who am under discussion here
since you wished it so.

Forgive me then if I make no exception even for your little
book and place it unread among my books. Your very favorable
disposition toward me I know from your letter which I had the
pleasure of reading; for however alien and not pertinent to me
much criticism addressed to the outside world may seem, still 1
know nothing kinder and more helpful than an expression of ap-
preciation directed to me, meant only for me, which, when it
falls to my share, I accept with my whole heart and hold in honor.
And in thanking you for it especially, I am also thanking you for
the little book that grew out of your occupation with my work.
In going out, it assuredly does much for me; feel that I am not
overlooking or underrating that; on the contrary, I know very
well how great the influence of a convinced voice can be. I rank
criticism very high; the only qualification being that where it
concerns my work I can, in consequence of a certain inner organi-
zation, have no connection with it whatever.

I am writing in haste, and do not know whether I am compre-
hensible; but I wanted very much to be so, at least enough for you
not to think me moody or ungrateful.

To Paul Zecb 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

September 12, 1907

. . . why should we not talk any more about it? I carried the
article around with me a long time, read this expression and that
sentence over again, and in so doing considered how dangerously
close you have sometimes come. The unerring recognition of my
metamorphoses through your eyes would at other times perhaps
have disconcerted me; for I do not know whether there was ever
enough brightness of day in my consciousness for me to live with
things (of which you stated that they were corporeal) in a neigh-
borhood as aware as though they were within me. Sometimes

(this I often experience) they have gone in a feeling of dream
through my restlessness and were weary of long wandering and
sought a leafy hill: to linger beneath it. Furthermore one cannot
always lay hold of the experience on all sides and feel out whether
it may fit into the vessel of our body. We experience many things
and the ups and downs of what happens with them beyond the real
day. And it would be unbearable to live that way if the noisy and
industrious day lay always at our door. You, to whom the weight
of reality is closer by how many degrees than I feel it: desire that
all glass shall be transparent. And of that I would not disapprove;
yet is not the misted distance built infinitely further out into eter-
nity? Still I would be able to fill out many of your questions. But
since you also promised me that we shall meet on November 5,
the living word had better help us over any contradictions. Or do
you believe: that here too physical proximity would create that
confusion which makes the meaning of the real unreal?
Write me a line about it. ...

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

September 13, 1907 (Friday)

. . . never has heather so touched and almost thrilled me as
recently, when I found those three twigs in your sweet letter.
Since then they have been lying in my Book of Pictures and have
permeated it with their strong stern odor, which is really only the
scent of autumn earth. How glorious it is, though, that fragrance.
Never, it seems to me, can the earth be thus inhaled in a single
smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that means no less than the smell
of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honey-
sweet where one feels it must be impinging on the beginnings of
tone. Containing depth within it, darkness, the grave almost, and
yet again wind too; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious
and shabby like the smell of a begging friar and yet again resinous
and hearty like costly frankincense. And to behold: like embroi-
dery, gorgeous; like three cypresses embroidered into a Persian

296

rug with violet silk (a violet as vehemently moist as if it were the
complementary color of the sun). You ought to see it. I think the
little twigs couldn't have been so beautiful yet when you sent
them off: else you would have said something surprised about
them. By chance one of them is lying now on the dark blue velvet
of an old writing box. It is like fireworks; no, just like a Persian
rug. Are really all, all those millions of branchlets of such wonder-
ful workmanship? Look at the coloring of the green in which
there is a little gold, and the sandlewood-warm brown of the little
stems and the break with its new, fresh, inner scarcely-green.
Ah, for days now I have been admiring the splendor of these three
little fragments and am really ashamed that I wasn't happy when I
was able to walk about in it, in all the profusion. One lives so
badly because one always comes into the present unready, unfit,
and distraught for everything. I can think back on no time in my
life without such reproaches and even greater ones. Only the ten
days after Ruth's birth, I think, did I live without waste; finding
reality as indescribable, even to the smallest detail, as it doubtless
always is. But probably this city summer I have lived through
has also made me so susceptible to the splendor of those little bits
of heather coming from the array of the northern year. Not for
nothing probably has one gone through a room-summer like that,
where one is lodged in the smallest of those boxes, one of which
always fits into another, twenty times. And one is in the very
last, crouching. Heavens: how well I managed last year; seas,
parks, wood, and woodland meadows: my longing for all that is
sometimes indescribable. Now, with winter already threatening
here. Already the misty mornings and evenings are beginning,
when the sun is only like the place where the sun used to be, and
when in the parterres all the summer flowers, the dahlias, and great
gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums scream the contradic-
tion of their red into the fog. That makes me sad. It brings up
disconsolate memories, one doesn't know why: as though the
music of the city summer were ending with a dissonance, in a
mutiny of all the notes; perhaps only because already once before

97

one had looked all this so deep into oneself and interpreted it and
united it with oneself, yet without ever making it. ...

To Julie

Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI 6

September 17, 1907

I really must tell you at last how glad 1 was at the good news
from your new work. What work could be finer than this which,
like no other, needs love and absorbs it, love, which in all those
little, expectant and future hearts is transformed into life, into
deeds that some day will be there, into resolutions to the good,
into courage, into patience, into earnest simple reality. Now they
all press about you, flowers and children, almost with the same
need, and how ripe and moving must the experience be for you of
seeing the inner loneliness of many years rewarded through the
dependence and affection of this environment that has grown to
be yours. Now you will daily give and give, and the great stores
of your love will not lessen thereby: for this is the miracle that
happens every time to those who really love: the more they give,
the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which
flowers and children have their strength and which could help all
human beings if they would take it without doubting. . . .

n '?' 3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

Sunday [September 29, 1907]

. . . What you felt with the Portuguese grape, I know so well;
I am experiencing it at the moment with two pomegranates
I bought recently at Potin's: how magnificent they are in their
massive heaviness, still with the back-curved ornament of the
pistil on top; princely in their golden rind, through which red
underpainting comes through, strong and genuine, as on the

298

leather of old Cordovan wall-coverings. I haven't yet tried to open
them; they are probably not ripe either, for usually, I think, they
split open easily of themselves over their own fullness and have
purple-lined slits, like noblemen in full dress. At sight of them,
desire and anticipation of foreignness and southernness arose in
me too and the charm of great journeys. But how much one really
has all that in one beforehand, the more, the tighter one shuts one's
eyes over oneself. I felt that again when I wrote the Corrida which
I never saw: how I knew and saw it all! . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris 'VI*

October 3, 1907

... if only you were sitting in my room on this cold rainy
day, which is passing unwillingly and for no one, which now at
last (as I saw at Jouven's) is filling other people too with surprise
and perplexity. Sitting with me before the Van Gogh portfolio
(which I am taking back with a heavy heart). It has done me so
much good these two days: it was the right moment. . . . You
probably wouldn't have read at all the little biographical notice
of at most ten lines that precedes the table of contents, relying
simply on your looking. It is, nevertheless, very, very factual and
yet so strangely suggestive to read. Art dealer, and when after
three years he somehow saw it wasn't that, small school teacher
in England. And in the midst of it the resolve: to become a clergy-
man. He comes to Brussels to learn Greek and Latin. But why the
detour? Aren't there people anywhere who ask neither Greek
nor Latin of their minister? So he becomes what is called an
evangelist, and goes into the coal region and tells the people the
gospel. In telling he begins to draw. And finally he doesn't notice
at all how he is growing silent and doing nothing any more but
draw. And from then on he does nothing else, even up to his
last hour, until he resolves to stop everything, because for weeks
perhaps he would not be able to paint; so it seems natural to him
to give up everything, life above all. What a biography. Is it

_ 299

really true that all the world acts, now, as though it understood
this and the pictures that come out of it? Shouldn't art dealers
and equally so art critics really be more perplexed or more in-
different about this dear zealot, in whom something of Saint
Francis too came to life again? I marvel at his swift fyme. Ah,
how he too had discarded and discarded. His self-portrait in the
portfolio looks needy and tormented, desperate almost, and yet
not catastrophic: as when a dog is having a bad time. And holds
out his face, and one sees, in fact, that he is having a bad time
day and night. But in his pictures (the arbre fleuri) the poverty
has already become rich: a great radiance from within. And so
he sees everything, as a poor man; one need only compare his
Parks. Those too he says so quietly and simply, as if for poor peo-
ple, so that they can understand; without going into the showiness
that lies in the trees; as if even that would indicate partiality. He
takes no sides, not the side of the parks, and his love for all that
goes toward the nameless and has thus become hidden by him-
self. He doesn't show it, he has it. And puts it out of himself
quickly into his work, into the most inward, unceasing part of the
work: quickly: and no one has seen it! So one feels him in these
forty pages: and haven't you after all been beside me a little and
looking through the portfolio? . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

October 4, 1907 (Friday)

... it is still as if one were in a wet sponge someone is tossing
about. What a strange effect it can have, being thus lifted out of
order! The seasons are usually just so beautiful and helpful
through continuity and contrast, one can rely on them; but this
time everything that began was abrupt, as though one suddenly
turned over in an encyclopedia to another letter and went on
reading, after something quite different, under Th or Y.

To be sure, if one were as secure in one's work as one should
be, that would not disconcert one, even in conjunction with a

300

cold: one would simply see and make things out of this state of
mind. (It was a similar one in Schmargendorf which once made
me, quite unexpectedly, as I remember, write the "Pages from a
Stormy Night" in a single evening.) But one is still so far from
being able always-to-work. Van Gogh could perhaps lose his
composure, but the work was still behind the composure, he
couldn't fall out of it any more. And Rodin, when he is unwell, is
very close to his work, writes beautiful things on countless slips
of paper, reads Plato and thinks along those lines. But I have a
feeling that that is not mere discipline and compulsion, to be that
way with one's work (for then it would tire one, as it has tired
me these last weeks) ; it is sheer joy; it is the natural well-being in
this one thing which nothing else equals. Perhaps one must still
more clearly perceive the "task" one has, more tangible still,
recognizable in hundreds of details. I do feel what Van Gogh
must at a certain point have felt, and feel strongly and greatly:
that everything is still to be done: everything. But I am not good
at giving myself to what is nearest, or at least only in the best
moments, while it is just in the worst that one needs it most. Van
Gogh could make an interieur d'hopital and painted on the most
dismaying days the most dismaying subjects. How else would he
have survived. At that one must arrive and, I certainly feel, not by
compulsion. Out of insight, out of desire, out of inability to post-
pone, considering all there is to be done. Alas, if only one hadn't
those memories of not-having-worked that even now do one
good. Memories of lying still and sensing one's well-being. Memo-
ries of hours waited through, turning over old illustrations, over
the reading of some novel : and such memories in heaps way
back into childhood. Whole regions of life lost, lost even for
the retelling, through the seduction that can still issue from their
idleness. If only one had memories of work from early days: how
firm the ground would be beneath one; one would stand. But
this way one sinks in somewhere at every moment. This way
there are two worlds 'within one too, that is the worst of it. Some-
times I go past little shops, in the rue de Seine perhaps; dealers in
antiques or little secondhand booksellers or vendors of engrav-

ings with very, very full windows; no one ever goes in to them,
they apparently do no business; but one looks in, and they sit
reading, unconcerned (and yet aren't rich); they are not con-
cerned for the morrow, don't worry about a success, have a dog
that sits in front of them, in good humor, or a cat that makes the
stillness about them still greater, as it prowls along the rows of
books as though it were wiping the names off the backs.

Ah, if that were sufficient: I would sometimes like to buy my-
self a full window like that and to sit behind it with a dog for
twenty years. In the evening there would be light in the back
room, in the front everything quite dark, and the three of us
would sit and eat, back there; I have noticed, seen from the street,
it always looks like a Last Supper, so big and solemn through the
dark room. (But this way one has all the worries, the great and
the small.) . . . You know how I mean that: without complain-
ing. And it is good this way and will get still better. . . .

C '743

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

Sunday afternoon [October 6, 1907]

. . . Noise of rain and striking of hours: it makes a pattern,
a Sunday one. If one didn't know it: it has to be Sunday. That is
how it sounds in my silent street. But how much it was Sunday
in the old aristocratic quarter through which I walked this morn-
ing. The old closed-up hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with
their white-gray window shutters, the discreet gardens and courts,
the grillwork gates screened close behind their bars and the heavy
well-shutting entrances. A few were very haughty and preten-
tious and inaccessible. Those must have been the Talleyrands, the
de la Rochefoucaulds, unapproachable personages. But then came
an equally silent street with somewhat smaller houses, no less
dignified in their quality and absolutely aloof. One of the gates
was in the act of shutting; a manservant in morning livery turned
back once again and looked at me attentively and thoughtfully.
And at the same moment it seemed to me that only a trifle need

have been different at some time, for him to recognize one and
step back and hold open the door. For an old lady to be up there,
a grand'mere, who was making it possible to receive her favorite
grandson even at this early hour. With a smile, herself a little
affectionate, the confidential lady's maid would take care of it
and precede one through the draped apartments, inwardly looking
back and hurrying out of zeal and out of uneasiness at having
to go ahead. A stranger would understand nothing in thus pass-
ing through; but one would feel the presence of all those things
filled with associations: the glance of the portraits, the faces of
the musical clocks and the contents of the mirrors, in which the
clear essence of this dusk is preserved. One would have recog-
nized in a second the light salons that are quite bright within the
darkness. And the one room that seems darker because the family
silver at the back has taken all the light to itself. And the solemnity
of it all would pass over to one and would carefully prepare one
in advance for the old lady in violet white, whom one cannot
picture from one time to the next, because there is so much be-
longing with her.

I went along through the silent street and was still in my fancies,
when in the display window of a confiseur in the rue de Bour-
gogne I saw beautiful old silver. Pitchers with slightly drooping
full silver flowers on their lids and fantastic reflections in their
flaring curves.

Now it is scarcely credible that this should have been the way
leading to the Salon d'Automne. But I did finally come to the
gaily colored picture-mart which, much as it strives to impress,
still did not dispel my inner mood. The old lady held her own,
and I felt how much beneath her dignity it would be to come and
see these pictures. I thought whether I mightn't still find some-
thing I could tell her about, and found a room with pictures by
Berthe Morisot (Manet's sister-in-law) and a wall with things
by Eva Gonzales (Manet's pupil). Cezanne simply wouldn't do
for the old lady; but for us he counts and is moving and impor-
tant. He too (like Goya) painted the walls of his studio in

Aix with fantasies (of which there were a few Druet photo-
graphs). . .

C '753

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

October 8, 1907

... it is remarkable, after two days of Salon d'Automne, to
go through the Louvre: one first notes two things: that every in-
sight has its parvenus, who, when they have it, become vocal,
and then, that it is perhaps not so much a question of insights at
all, which bring up too much consciousness. As if those masters
in the Louvce had not known that color is what matters in paint-
ing. I looked at the Venetians: they are indescribably consistent in
their coloring; one feels how far it goes in Tintoretto. Almost
further than in Titian. And so until into the eighteenth century,
where they become wanting only in the use of black, to arrive
at a Manet scale. Guardi has it, of course; it was unavoidable in
the midst of the brightness, after the laws against display had
prescribed black gondolas. But he uses it rather more as a dark
mirror than as color; Manet first sets it thus on a par with every-
thing else, emboldened to do so anyhow by the Japanese. Con-
temporaneously with Guardi and Tiepolo a woman too was paint-
ing, a Venetian, who came to all the courts and whose reputation
was one of the most widespread of her day, Rosalba Camera. Wat-
teau knew of her, and they exchanged a few pastels, their own
portraits perhaps, and mutually held each other in tender esteem.
She traveled a great deal, painted in Vienna, and a hundred and
fifty of her works are still preserved in Dresden. In the Louvre
are three portraits. A young woman, her face lifted from her
straight neck and then turned naively to the front, holds against
her low-necked lace dress a little, clear-eyed, capuchin monkey,
which below, at the edge of the half-length picture, looks out just
as eagerly as she does above, only a tiny bit more indifferently.
With its perfidious little black hands, it is reaching for hers and
by one of its slender fingers draws the delicate, distraught hand

into the picture. That is so full of one period, it v is valid for all.
And is charmingly and lightly painted, but really painted. A blue
shawl appears in the picture furthermore and a whole white-
lavender spray of stock which oddly provides the breast orna-
ment. And seeing the blue, it occurred to me that it is that special
blue of the eighteenth century which is to be found everywhere,
in La Tour, in Peronnet, and which, even in Chardin, does not
cease to be elegant, although there, as the band of his curious cap
(in the self-portrait with the horn-rimmed glasses), it is already
used quite regardlessly. (It is conceivable that someone might
write a monograph about blue; from the thick waxy blue of- the
Pompeian frescos to Chardin and further to Cezanne: what a life
story! ) For Cezanne's very peculiar blue has this parentage, comes
from the blue of the eighteenth century that Chardin divested of
its pretentiousness and that now, with Cezanne, no longer carries
with it any secondary significance. Chardin was, on the whole,
the intermediary; even his fruits are no longer thinking of dinner,
they lie about on the kitchen table and care nothing for being
nicely eaten. With Cezanne, they cease entirely to be edible, they
become such very real things, so simply indestructible in their
obstinate existing. When one sees Chardin's portraits of himself,
one thinks he must have been an old eccentric. How much so and
in what a sad way Cezanne was, I shall tell you tomorrow perhaps.
I know a few things about his last years when he was old and
shabby and every day on the way to his studio had children after
him throwing stones at him as at a bad dog. But within, deep
within, he was most beautiful, and now and then would furiously
shout something quite magnificent at one of his rare visitors. You
can imagine how that would happen. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

October 9, 1907

. . . today I wanted to tell you a little about Cezanne. As far
as work was concerned, he maintained he had lived like a Bo-

hemian until his fortieth year. Only then, in his acquaintance
with Pissarro, did the taste for work open up to him. But then so
much so, that he did nothing but work for the thirty latter years
of his life. Without joy really, it seems, in continual fury, at
variance with every single one of his works, none of which
seemed to him to attain what he considered the most indispensable
thing. La realisation, he called it, and he found it in the Venetians
whom he used to see and see again in the Louvre and had uncon-
ditionally acknowledged. The convincing quality, the becoming
a thing, the reality heightened into the indestructible through his
own experience of the object, it was that which seemed to him
the aim of his innermost work; old, sick, every evening exhausted
to the point of faintness by the regular daily work (so much so
that he would often go to bed at six, as it was growing dark, after
an insensibly eaten supper), ill-tempered, distrustful, laughed at
every time on the way to his studio, jeered at, mistreated, but
observing Sunday, hearing Mass and vespers like a child, and very
politely asking his housekeeper, Madame Bremond, for some-
what better fare : he still hoped from day to day, perhaps, to
reach the successful achievement he felt to be the only essential
thing. In so doing (if one may believe the reporter of all these
facts, a not very congenial painter who went along for a while
with everybody),' he had increased the difficulty of his work in
the most obstinate way. In the case of landscapes or still life, con-
scientiously persevering before the subject, he nevertheless made
it his own by extremely complicated detours. Starting with the
darkest coloring, he covered its depth with a layer of color which
he carried a little beyond that and so on and on, extending color
upon color, he gradually came to another contrasting pictorial
element, with which he then proceeded similarly from a new
center. I think that in his case the two procedures, of the observant
and sure taking over and of the appropriation and personal use
of what he took over, strove against each other, perhaps as a
result of becoming conscious; that they began to speak at the
same time, as it were, interrupted each other continually, con-
stantly fell out. And the old man bore their dissension, ran up and

306

down in his studio, which had bad light because the builder
didn't deem it necessary to listen to the eccentric old man, whom
they had agreed not to take seriously in Aix. He walked back
and forth in his studio, where the green apples lay about, or in
despair seated himself in the garden and sat. And before him lay
the little city, unsuspecting, with its cathedral; the city for re-
spectable and modest citizens, while he, as his father, who was a
hatmaker, had foreseen, had become different; a Bohemian, as
his father saw it and as he himself believed. This father, knowing
that Bohemians live and die in misery, had taken it upon himself
to work for his son, had become a kind of small banker to whom
("because he was honest," as Cezanne said) people brought their
money, and Cezanne owed it to his providential care that he had
enough later to be able to paint in peace. Perhaps he went to the
funeral of this father; his mother he loved too, but when she was
buried, he was not there. He was "sur le motif," as he expressed
it. Work was already so important to him then and tolerated no
exception, not even that which his piety and simplicity must cer-
tainly have recommended to him.

In Paris he gradually became even better known. But for such
progress as he did not make (which others made and into the
bargain how ), he had only distrust; too clearly there remained
in his memory what a misunderstood picture of his destiny and of
his intent Zola (who knew him from youth and was his com-
patriot) had sketched of him in Oeuvre. Since then, he was
closed to writing of all sorts: "travailler sans le souci de personne
et devenir fort ," he screamed at a visitor. But in the midst of
eating he stood up, when this person told about Frenhofer, the
painter whom Balzac, with incredible foresight of coming de-
velopments, invented in his short story of the Chef cTOeuvre
inconnu (about which I once told you), and whom he has go
down to destruction over an impossible task, through the dis-
covery that there are actually no contours but rather many vi-
brating transitions , learning this, the old man stands up from
the table in spite of Madame Bremond, who certainly did not
favor such irregularities, and, voiceless with excitement, keeps

pointing his finger distinctly toward himself and showing himself,
himself, himself, painful as that may have been. It was not Zola
who understood what the point was; Balzac had sensed long ahead
that, in painting, something so tremendous can suddenly present
itself, which no one can handle.

But the next day he nevertheless began again with his struggle
for mastery; by six o'clock every morning he got up, went through
the city to his studio and stayed there until ten; then he came back
by the same way to eat, ate and was on his way again, often half
an hour beyond his studio, "sur le motif" in a valley, before which
the mountain of Sainte Victoire with all its thousands of tasks rose
up indescribably. There he would sit then for hours, occupied
with finding and taking in plans (of which, remarkably enough,
he keeps speaking in exactly the same words as Rodin) . He often
reminds one of Rodin anyway in his expressions. As when he
complains about how much his old city is daily being destroyed
and disfigured. Only that where Rodin's great, self-confident
equilibrium leads to an objective statement, fury overcomes
this sick, solitary old man. Evenings on the way home he gets
angry at some change, arrives in a rage and, when he notices how
much the anger is exhausting him, promises himself: I will stay
at home; work, nothing but work.

From such alterations for the worse in little Aix he then deduces
in horror how things must be going elsewhere. Once when present
conditions were under discussion, industry and the like, he broke
out "with terrible eyes": a va mal . . . C'est eifrayant, la vie!

Outside, something vaguely terrifying in process of growth; a
little closer, indifference and scorn, and then suddenly this old
man in his work, who no longer paints his nudes from anything
but old drawings he made forty years ago in Paris, knowing that
Aix would allow him no model. "At my age," he said "I could
get at best a fifty-year-old, and I know that not even such a person
is to be found in Aix." So he paints from his old drawings. And
lays his apples down on bedspreads that Madame Bremond cer-
tainly misses one day, and puts his wine bottles among them and
whatever he happens to find. And (like Van Gogh) makes his

308

"saints" out of things like that; and compels them, compels them
to be beautiful, to mean the whole world and all happiness and
all glory, and doesn't know whether he has brought them to doing
that for him. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of
this work which calls him again and beats him and lets him go
hungry. And yet with it all clings to this incomprehensible master,
who only on Sunday lets him return to God, as to his first owner,
for a while. And outside people are saying: "Cezanne," and
gentlemen in Paris are writing his name with emphasis and proud
at being well informed .

I wanted to tell you all this; it is related to so much about us
and to ourselves in a hundred places.

Outside it is raining copiously, as usual. Farewell . . . tomor-
row I will speak again of myself. But you will know how very
much I have done so today too . . .

n '773

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

October 12, 1907

. . . Taking walks is less difficult now than last week. How
much a little moon like that can do. These are the days in which
everything is about one, clear, light, scarcely indicated in the
bright air and yet distinct; even nearby things have the tones of
distance, are taken away and only shown, not set down as usually,
and what has relation to space the river, the bridges, the long
streets and the lavish squares has taken this space to itself, holds
it to itself, is painted on it as on silk. You will feel what a light-
green wagon can be then on the Pont Neuf or some red or other
that cannot contain itself, or a placard simply on the fire-wall
of a pearl-gray group of houses. Everything is simplified, ar-
ranged on a few bright real plans, like the face in a Manet portrait.
And nothing is trivial or superfluous. The bouquinistes along the
quai open up their cases, and the fresh or faded yellow of the
books, the violet brown of the bindings, the green of a portfolio:

309

everything fits, counts, takes part, and sounds in the unity of the
bright combinations.

I recently asked Mathilde Vollmoeller to go through the Salon
with me sometime, in order to see beside my own an impression
that I take to be calm and unswayed by literary considerations.
We were there together yesterday. Cezanne prevented us from
getting to anything else, I notice more and more what an event
that is. But imagine my amazement when Fraulein V., trained and
observing quite as a painter, said: "He sat in front of it like a dog
and simply looked, without any nervousness or ulterior motive."
And she said more that was very good about his method of work
(which one can see from an unfinished picture). "Here," she
said, pointing to one place, "this he knew, and then he said it (a
place on an apple) ; close by it is still empty, because he didn't
yet know it. He did only what he knew, nothing else." "What a
good conscience he must have," I said. "Oh yes: he was happy,
way inside somewhere . . ." And then we compared "artistic"
things, which he may have made in Paris while associating with
others, with his most individual things, in the matter of color. In
the first, color was something per se; later he takes it somehow,
personally, as no human being has yet taken color, only to make
the thing with it. The color disappears completely in the realiza-
tion of the thing; no remnant is left. And Fraulein V. expressed
it very well: "It is as though laid on scales: the thing here, the
color there; never more, never less than the equilibrium demands.
That may be much or little, accordingly, but it is exactly what
the object requires." That last would not have occurred to me;
but it is eminently right and enlightening as regards the pictures.
It also struck me very much yesterday how unaffectedly differ-
ent they are, how little concerned with originality, sure, in every
approach to thousand-sided Nature, of not losing themselves,
rather of discovering earnestly and conscientiously her inexhaus-
tibility through the manifoldness without. All that is very
beautiful. . . .

3 io

C

T0 C7#r0 Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

October 13, 1907 (Sunday)

. . . it is raining again in the same way I have already described
to you so often; as if the sky had glanced up brightly for just an
instant, only to go right on reading in the even lines of rain. But
it is not to be so easily forgotten that under the turbid coating is
that light and that depth which one saw yesterday: now one
knows it at least.

I had read about your autumn right away in the morning, and
I could feel all the colors you had put into the letter changing
back in me and filling my consciousness to the brim with strength
and radiance. While I was admiring the distilled clear autumn
here yesterday, you were going through that other one at home
that is painted on red wood, as this one here is on silk. And the
one reaches through to us as well as the other; so deep at the bottom
of all change are we placed, we most changeable ones, who go
about with a disposition to understand everything and who make
of the too great (while we don't really grasp it) the action of our
hearts, so that it shall not destroy us. If I came up to you two, I
would assuredly also see anew and differently the pageant of
moor and heath, the floatingly light green of the meadow strips
and the birches; indeed this transformation, when I once fully
experienced and shared it, called forth a part of the Book of Hours;
but in those days Nature was still a general incitement for me,
an evocation, an instrument on whose strings my fingers found
themselves again; I did not yet sit before her; I let myself be
carried away by the soul that issued forth from her; she came
over me with her breadth, with her great, exaggerated existence,
as prophecy came over Saul; just that way. I went along with
her and saw, saw not Nature, but the faces she inspired in me.
How little I could have learned then before Cezanne, before
Van Gogh. From the amount Cezanne gives me to do now, I no-
tice how very different I have grown. I am on the road to becom-

ing a worker, on a long road perhaps and probably just at the first
milestone; but nevertheless I can already comprehend the old man
who has gone on somewhere far ahead, alone, only with children
after him who throw stones (as I once described it in the fragment
on the Lonely) . I went to see his pictures again today; it is re-
markable what a company they form. Without looking at any
single one, standing between the two rooms, one feels their pres-
ence joining in a colossal reality. As if those colors took away
one's irresolution once and for all. The good conscience of those
reds, of those blues, their simple truthfulness educates one; and
if one places oneself among them as ready as possible, they seem
to do something for one. One also notices better each time how
necessary it was to go even beyond love; it is of course natural
for one to love each of these things, when one makes it: but if one
shows that, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying
it. One ceases to be impartial; and the best, the love, stays outside
the work, does not go into it, remains unconverted beside it: that
is how mood-painting arose (which is in no way better than
subject-painting). One painted: I love this; instead of painting:
here it is. Whereupon everyone must then look well for himself
whether I have loved it. That is in no way evident, and many
will even declare there is no question of love. So without residue is
it consumed in the act of making. This consuming of love in
anonymous work, out of which such pure things arise, no one
perhaps has so fully achieved as this old man; his inner nature,
which had become mistrustful and sullen, supported him in this.
He would certainly never again have shown his love to any human
being, if he had had to love; but with this disposition, which had
been fully developed through his isolated eccentricity, he now
turned to Nature too and knew how to repress his love for each
single apple and to store it in a painted apple forever. Can you
conceive how that is and how one experiences it through him?
I have the first proofs from the Insel. In the poems there are in-
stinctive tendencies toward similar objectivity. I am also letting
the "Gazelle" stand: it is good. . . .

3'*

C '7*3

T0 C7tfr0 K/7e 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI e

October 16, 1907 (Wednesday)

. . . How human beings do play with everything. How blindly
they misuse the never observed, never experienced; distracting
themselves with that which is infinitely collected and which they
displace. It is not possible that a time, in which aesthetic de-
mands of this sort somewhere get their satisfaction, should admire
Cezanne and grasp anything of his devotion and hidden magnifi-
cence. The dealers make a noise, that is all; and those who have
need to cling to these things could be counted on two hands, and
they are aloof and reticent.

You have only to see, of a Sunday say, the people going
through the two galleries: amused, irritated to irony, indignant,
furious. And when it comes to expressing conclusions, they stand
there, these monsieurs, in the midst of that world, with the
pathos of despair, and one hears them assert: il n'y a absolument
rien, rien, rien. And how beautiful the women think themselves
as they pass by; they recall that they have just seen themselves,
with complete satisfaction, in the glass doors on entering, and
conscious of that reflection, they place themselves for a moment,
without looking at it, beside one of those touching attempts at a
portrait of Madame Cezanne, so as to exploit the odiousness of
this painting in a comparison so extremely favorable (as they
think) to themselves. And someone told the old man in Aix that
he was "famous." He, however, knew better inside and let them
talk. But before his things one comes again upon the idea of how
mistrustful all recognition (with quite isolated, unmistakable ex-
ceptions) must make one toward one's own work. Actually, if
it is good one cannot live to see it recognized: or it is only just
half good and not sufficiently ruthless. . . .

c

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI*

October 18, 1907 (Friday)

. . . You must have known, while you were writing, how
much good that insight of yours would do me which sprang spon-
taneously from comparing the blue slips with my Cezanne ex-
periences. What you say now and warmly confirm, I somehow
suspected, although I could not have indicated how far that de-
velopment, which corresponds to the immense advance in the
Cezanne paintings, is already realized in me. I was only convinced
that it is inner personal reasons that make me more observant
before pictures which a while ago I would perhaps still have
passed by with momentary interest, without returning to them
any more eagerly or expectantly. It is not the painting at all that
I am studying (for despite everything I am still uncertain about
pictures and am only with difficulty learning to differentiate good
from less good ones, and am always confusing the early with the
late). It is the turning point in this painting that I recognized be-
cause I had just reached it myself in my work or at least had come
somehow near to it, probably having been long prepared for this
one thing, on which so much depends. That is why I must be
cautious in trying to write about Cezanne, which naturally tempts
me greatly now. Not the person (I really ought to see that at
last) who takes in pictures from so private an angle is justified
in writing about them; one who could quietly confirm them in
their existence, without experiencing through them more or other
than facts, would surely be fairest to them. But within my own
life this unexpected contact, coming and making a place for itself
as it did, is full of confirmation and pertinence. Another poor man.
And what progress in poverty since Verlaine (if Verlaine wasn't
already a relapse), who under "Mon Testament" wrote: Je ne
donne rien aux pauvres parce que je suis un pauvre moi-meme,.
and in almost all of whose work this not-giving was, this em-
bittered displaying of empty hands, for which Cezanne during
the last thirty years had no time. When should he have shown his

hands. Malicious glances did often find them, whenever he was
on his way, and lewdly uncovered their indigence; we, however,
are given to know from the pictures only how massive and genu-
ine the work lay in them to the end. This work, which had no
preferences any more, no inclinations, no fastidious indulgences;
whose smallest component had been tested on the scales of an
infinitely sensitive conscience and which with such integrity re-
duced the existent to its color content that it began, beyond color,
a new existence, without earlier memories. It is this unlimited
objectivity, which declines to interfere in any other sphere, that
makes Cezanne's portraits so outrageous and absurd to people.
They apprehend, without realizing, that he was reproducing
apples, onions, and oranges with sheer color (which to them may
still seem a subordinate device of pictorial practice), but when
they come to landscape, they miss interpretation, judgment, su-
periority, and where portraiture is concerned, why, the rumor
of intellectual conception has been passed on even to the most
bourgeois, and so successfully that something of the kind is al-
ready noticeable even in Sunday photographs of engaged couples
and families. And here Cezanne naturally seems to them quite
inadequate and not worth discussing at all. He is actually as alone
in this salon as he was in life, and even the painters, the young
painters, already pass him by more quickly because they see the
dealers on his side. . . .

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

October 19, 1907

You surely remember . . . from the Notebooks of Make
Laurids the passage that has to do with Baudelaire and with his
poem: "The Carcass." I could not help thinking that without this
poem the whole development toward objective expression, which
we now think we recognize in Cezanne, could not have started;
it had to be there first in its inexorability. Artistic observation had
first to have prevailed upon itself far enough to see even in the

horrible and apparently merely repulsive that which is and which,
with everything else that is, is valid. The creator is no more al-
lowed to discriminate than he is to turn away from anything that
exists: a single denial at any time will force him out of the state
of grace, make him utterly sinful. Flaubert, retelling with so much
discretion and care the legend of Saint-Julien-rhospitalier, gave
it that simple credibility in the midst of the miraculous, because
the artist in him made the saint's resolves along with him and
happily assented to them and applauded them. This lying down
beside the leper and sharing with him all his own warmth, even
to the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must sometime have
been in the existence of an artist, as something overcome toward
his new blessedness. You can imagine how it moves me to read
that Cezanne in his last years still knew this very poem Baude-
laire's "Charogne" entirely by heart and recited it word for
word. Certainly one would find among his earlier works some ia
which he forcefully won from himself the extreme possibility
of love. After this devotion begins, first with small things, holi-
ness: the simple life of a love which has endured, which, without
ever boasting of it, comes to everything, unaccompanied, un-
ostentatious, speechless. Real work, abundance of tasks, all begin
only after this enduring, and he who has been unable to go that
far will probably get a glimpse in heaven of the Virgin Mary, ai
few saints and minor prophets, King Saul and Charles le Teme-
raire : but of Hokusai and Leonardo, of Li Tai Po and Villon,
of Verhaeren, Rodin, Cezanne and of God himself, they will
be able even there only to tell him.

And all at once (and for the first time) I understand the destiny
of Make Laurids. Isn't it this, that this test surpassed him, that he
did not stand it in the actual, though of the idea of its necessity
he was convinced, so much so that he sought it out instinctively
until it attached itself to him and did not leave him any more?
The book of Make Laurids, when it is written sometime, will
be nothing but the book of this insight, demonstrated in one for
whom it was too tremendous. Yet perhaps he did stand it: for he
wrote the death of the Chamberlain; but like Raskolnikov he was

left behind, exhausted by his deed, not continuing to act at the
moment when action ought just to have begun, so that his newly
won freedom turned upon him and rent him, defenseless as he was.

Alas, we count the years and make divisions here and there and
stop and begin and hesitate between the two. But how very much
of one piece is what befalls us, in what a relationship one thing
stands to another, has given birth to itself and grows up and is
brought up to itself, and we in reality have only to exist, but
simply, but ardently, as the earth exists, assenting to the years,
light and dark and altogether in space, not desiring to be at rest
in anything save in the net of influences and forces in which the
.stars feel themselves secure.

Now someday time and peace of mind and patience must also
be at hand, in order to continue writing the Notebooks of Malte
Laurids; I know much more about him now, or rather: I shall
Toiow it when it becomes necessary. . . .

c '*o

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

October 21, 1907

. . . But I really wanted to say further about Cezanne: that it
has never before been so demonstrated to what extent painting
takes place among the colors themselves, how one must^ leave
them completely alone so that they may come to terms with each
other. Their intercourse with one another: that is the whole of
painting. Whoever interrupts, whoever arranges, whoever lets
his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual
agility deal with them in any way, has already disturbed and
troubled their performance. The painter (any artist whatever)
should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the
way round through his mental processes, his advances, enigmatic
even to himself, must enter so swiftly into the work that he is
unable to recognize them at the moment of their transition. For
him, alas, who watches for them, observes, delays them, for him

they change like the fine gold in the fairy tale which can no
longer remain gold because some detail went wrong. That one
can read Van Gogh's letters so well, that they contain so much
speaks in fact against him, as it also speaks against him as a painter
(when set beside Cezanne) that he intended this and that, knew
it, had found it out; that blue summoned orange and green, red:
that he, the inquisitive, secretly listening at his eye's interior, had
heard such news in there. So he painted pictures on a single con-
tradiction, taking into consideration besides the Japanese simpli-
fication of color, which sets a plane on the next higher or next
lower tone, summed up under a collective value; which again
leads to the drawn and outlined (that is, found) contour of the
Japanese as a frame for the equalized planes: to sheer design, to
sheer arbitrariness, in a word, the decorative. Cezanne too was
brought by the letters of a writing painter, not a real one, that is t
to express himself in reply on painters' concerns; but when one
sees the old man's few letters, what an awkward attempt at expres-
sion, most repugnant to himself, they remain. Almost nothing
could he say. The sentences with which he tried become long
and involved, resist, get into knots, and finally, beside himself
with fury, he lets them be. On the other hand, he succeeds ia
writing very clearly: "I believe that the best thing is work." Or:
"I am advancing daily, though very slowly." Or: "I am almost
seventy years old." Or: "I shall answer you through pictures.'**
Or: Thumble et colossal Pissarro " (the man who taught him
to work), or: after some beating about (one feels how relieved,
and how beautifully written) the signature, unabbreviated: Pictor
Paul Cezanne. And in the last letter (of September 21, 1905),
after complaining of his bad health, simply: "Je continue done
mes etudes." And the wish that was literally fulfilled: "Je me suis-
jure de mourir en peignant." As in some old Dance of Death
picture, Death reached from behind for his hand, painting the
last stroke himself, trembling with pleasure; his shadow had been
lying a while on the palette and he had had time to choose from
the open round of colors the one that pleased him best; when its.

turn came, he would seize the brush and paint . . . there it was:
he took hold and made his stroke, the only one he knew how to
make.

To Herr von W. 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI'

October 21, 1907

I would gladly take time and quiet to do justice to your con-
ifidence down to the smallest detail; but when you hear that I am
just managing to get through the last very busy days before a
rather long journey, you will look with indulgence on my making
the answer short. Short, not easy. For it remains difficult in any
case, whether one determines to say much or little, and is an im-
measurable responsibility.

Experience leads me to believe that nothing is to be learned
and prognosticated from the works of certain early years, unless
one is bent on a presumptuous prophecy or on circumlocutions
that are so out of place in the face of artistic realizations, before
which (despite all criticism) only yes and no can stand.

It makes no difference what one writes as a very young person,
just as it makes almost no difference what else one undertakes.
The apparently most useless distractions can be a pretext for
inwardly collecting oneself; yes, they can even be instinctively
seized upon by Nature to lead the examining observation and at-
tention of an inquisitive intellect away from spiritual processes,
for which it is important to remain unknown. One may do any-
thing; this alone corresponds to the whole breadth life has. But
one must be sure not to take it upon oneself out of opposition, out
of spite toward hindering circumstances or, with others in mind,
out of some kind of ambition. One must be sure to act out of
desire, out of strength, courage or high spirits: to have to act so.

It often struck me later how much art is a matter of conscience.
In artistic work one needs nothing so much as conscience: it is
the sole standard. (Criticism is not one, and even the approval or
rejection of others active outside of criticism should only very

seldom, under unmistakable conditions, acquire influence.) That
is why it is very important not to misuse one'$ conscience in those
early years, not to become hard at the place where it lies. It must
remain light through everything; one may feel it just as little as
any inner organ that is withdrawn from our will. The gentlest
pressure emanating from it, however, one must heed, else the
scale on which one will later have to test every word of the verses
to be written will lose its extreme sensitivity.

I hardly know what more to say than this, which is valid in
every case. Perhaps to add the advice to take solitude seriously
and, whenever it comes, to feel k a good thing. That others give
you no relief lies less in your indifference and reserve than in the
fact that we are really, every one of us, infinitely alone, and in-
accessible save with very rare exceptions. To that one has to
accommodate oneself.

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

October 24, 1907

... I said: gray yesterday, in giving the background of the
self-portrait, light copper obliquely crossed with a gray pattern;
I should have said: a particular metallic white, aluminium or
something similar, for gray, literally gray, cannot be shown in
Cezanne's pictures. To his eye, most intensely that of a painter,
it did not stand up as a color: he got to the bottom of it, and found
it to be violet there or blue or reddish or green. Violet especially
(a color never before opened up so extensively and in such varia-
tion) he likes to recognize where we expect only gray and are
content with that; then he doesn't let up but fetches out the so-
to-speak wrapped-up violets, just as some evenings do, autumn
evenings especially, that address the graying of faades directly
as violet, so that it answers them in every tone, from light, floating
lilac to the heavy violet of Finnish granite. When I made this
observation, that there was nothing really gray in these pictures
(in the landscapes the presence of ocher and unburnt and burnt

earths is too palpable for gray to occur), Fraulein Vollmoeller
pointed out to me how much, nevertheless, when one stood among
them, an atmosphere of soft, mild gray emanated from them, and
we agreed that the inner equilibrium of Cezanne's colors, which
nowhere stand out and obtrude, evokes this quiet, as-it-were al-
most velvet air, that certainly does not come easily into being in
the hollow inhospitality of the Grand Palais. Though it is one
of his peculiarities to use chrome yellow and burning red lacquer
quite pufe for his lemons and apples, he still knows how to keep
their loudness within the picture: all of it, as if into an ear, sounds
into a listening blue and thence gets a mute answer, so that no one
outside need feel spoken to or called to. His still lives are so won-
derfully occupied with themselves. The often employed white
cloth in particular, that miraculously soaks up the preponderant
local color, and the objects placed therein, that now, each with its
whole heart, comment on this and speak their minds. The use of
white as a color was from the first a matter of course to him: with
black it formed the two ends of his wide open palette, and in the
very beautiful composition of a black stone mantelpiece with its
pendulum clock, black and white (the latter in a cloth that covers
part of the slab, hanging down) behave quite coJorlike beside the
other colors, on equal terms and as if long acclimated. (Differently
than in Manet, where the black acts like the interruption of a
current and yet, as if coming from elsewhere, still contrasts with
the colors.) In the white cloth there brightly assert themselves a
coffee cup with a very dark blue stripe around the rim, a fresh,
fully ripened lemon, a cut glass goblet with indented edge and, at
the extreme left, a large baroque triton shell, peculiar and eccen-
tric looking, with its smooth red mouth facing forward. Its inner
carmine, swelling out into the light, provokes the wall behind it
to a thunderstormy blue, which the gold-framed mantel mirror
near by repeats once again deepened and more ample; here in the
reflection it again meets with a contradiction: with the milky
pink of a glass vase which, standing on the black clock, twice
(actually and, a little more yieldingly, in the reflection) makes its
contrast tell. Room and mirror-room are by this double stroke

conclusively defined and musically differentiated as it were, and
the picture contains them as a basket contains fruit and leaves:
as though that were all as simple to grasp and to give. But there is
yet another object there, on the bare slab, pushed up to the white
cloth; for this I would like to look the picture through again. But
the salon is no more; in a few days it will be followed by an ex-
hibition of automobiles which, each with its fixed idea of speed,
will stand there long and stupidly. . . .

C '*J3

To Clara Rilke 29 rue Cassette, Paris VI

October 26, 1907 (Saturday)

. . . it's no use, though enmity has already been sown among
my things and they are treading on each other's heads and one
is on the other's heels, I must write anyway before I go at my
packing again. Yesterday almost nothing happened: there are
letters and they want to be put in order; there are those things
that take delight in repeatedly turning up at certain intervals,
until at the crucial moment they hide and watch from somewhere
how they, whom before one had wished out of the way, are
being sought and needed. There are all the remarkable forma-
tions of the breakup, bastards sprung from the association of im-
possible objects, in a word: misery, hell; you know it. And one
plays at foresight and fancies one can provide and select for in-
definite future contingencies. I am fortunate meanwhile, in that
Fraulein Vollmoeller (who has recently moved into a big new
studio) is taking my standing desk and above all my books and
housing them there, so that I won't have to consider them at least
individually and yet through her can always have whatever I
come to need in the course of the winter.

Also it doesn't get light in the room until toward ten o'clock
and grows dark again by around four, so that one hardly has time
to see everything that is there.

It seems to me I am oversensitive; even about the weather. But
you must imagine something late. November, about the time

when, in the rue de 1'Abbe de PEpee, we had already lit the stove
several times, the time when one thinks of Verlaine, of how the
corner of a coffeehouse seems to him a refuge, something mag-
nificent with its mirrors covered with a tepid film of steam and
smoke.

And yet, however cold and harassed one may be, one is still
much too well off; if (as I have just done again, for the first time
in a long, long time) one goes through the Luxembourg and in
the dense, close air sees the rise of the fountains (like a woman
in a Japanese print) and a dahlia that melts like a dark berry as
one looks at it, and geranium-red and yellow in begonias and
colors and colors (the light ones as if they had turned fluid, the
dark ones on a black ground), all fraternizing with each other
on gray one is after all compensated, over and over, and can
scarcely tear oneself away. . . .

c '*<n

To Clara Rilke Hotel Erzherzog Stefan, Wenzelsplatz

Prague [November i, 1907]

. . . will one be here someday and able to see even this, see it
and say it, from one stage of existence to another? Will one no
longer have to bear its weight, the immense significance it took
on when one was little and it was already big and growing out
beyond one; in those days it used one in order to feel itself. There
was a child, and all this felt itself through him, saw itself mirrored
in him large and fantastic, became haughty and ominous toward
his heart. All this it may no longer be. Degraded below itself,
come back again like one who has long done violence, it is some-
how ashamed before me, exposed, confined, as if it were now
meeting justice and retribution. But I cannot rejoice to see badly
treated that which once was hard and overbearing toward me and
never condescended to me and never explained to me what differ-
ence is decreed between us, what hostile kinship. It makes me sad
to see these house corners, those windows and entrances, squares
and church roofs humbled, smaller than they were, reduced and

altogether in the wrong. And now in their new state they are just
as impossible for me to master as they were then in their arrogance*
And their weight has turned into the reverse of what it was, but
how much, place for place, it has remained weight. More than
ever since this morning I feel the presence of this city as some-
thing incomprehensible and confused. It should either have passed
away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed
off it later, leaving it behind, real beside all reality, to see and
express objectively like a Cezanne object, incomprehensible so
far as I am concerned, but tangible. But this way it is ghostly, like
the people who belong to it and to me from earlier days and who
bring us together and speak of us in the same breath. I have
never felt it so oddly, my aversion was never so great as this time
(probably because meanwhile my disposition to see and to
take everything I look at with an eye to my work has greatly
developed). . . .

C ''73

To Clara Rilke November 4 [1907], morning

on the Prague-Breslau train

. . will you believe that I came to Prague to see Cezannes?
That beside your letter there was a letter from Rodin in my pocket
when I drove to the lecture? (Last evening at five.) So every-
thing comes and comes, and one has only to be there with all
one's heart. First: Rodin's letter. The salutation: Cher Monsieur
Rilke, at the close, greetings and quite special greetings and warm
remembrances for you. The whole written by Mr. Cherny, in
his polite tone, and only signed by Rodin. The contents factual,
concerning an exhibition of the drawings in Vienna at Heller's,
the very bookdealer's where I shall read and stay; inquiring
about his reliability. But I am happy, happy. It has been so diffi-
cult just lately not to be able to get into communication with him
on practical matters; this exhibition in Vienna was to be done;
Kunst und Kunstler wanted to reproduce drawings, and all I
could do was admit that I was not in a position to be of the least

324

use. Once this practical connection is established, however, I can
attend to all that whenever occasion requires: which is so natural
for me. You will understand that I am happy. I answered imme-
diately, just as factually, but spoke of all the matters that had
accumulated. He is just having translated for himself (so he
wrote) the extract of my new Rodin work reprinted in Kunst
und Kunstler (October issue, which I am bringing along). And
Cezanne. Out in the Manes Pavilion, where Rodin's exhibition
was in its day, there was (as I luckily learned in time) a show of
modern pictures . . . That and the two hours in Schloss Jano-
vic were the best and most peaceful. Of Janovic too there would
be much to tell. The carriage ride itself through the hard glazed
autumn afternoon and the naive country was so beautiful. I drove
alone from the train and back to the train. And that was Bohemia
as I knew it, hilly like light music and all at once level again be-
hind its apple trees, flat without much horizon and divided up
through the plowed fields and rows of trees like a folk song from
refrain to refrain. And suddenly one went gliding out of all that
(as if passing in a skiff through a weir) through a park gate, and
park it was, old park, and came up quite close to one with its moist
autumn. Until after several turnings, bridges, vistas, separated by
an old moat, the castle rose up, old, its upper part bending back-
ward as if in haughtiness, scattered over with windows and coats
of arms, with balconies and oriels, set up around courts as if no
one were to be allowed to see them. The Baroness, who is
widowed, remained (it was All Souls' Day) in retirement; the
beautiful young Baroness (who looks like a miniature that was
made a year before the great Revolution, at the last moment) came
to meet me on the castle bridge with her two very attractive
young brothers; we went through the park, then as it was already
turning dusk, through the extraordinary castle (with an unfor-
gettable dining hall), while two menservants with heavy silver
candelabra shed light into the deep apartments as into courts. So
we remained quite by ourselves and (which with the shortness
of time was especially pleasant) finally drank tea (there were
pineapple slices with it) and were happy together, each enjoying

_ 3^5

the other. It was a little like a children's party, only that there
were no grownups and one unpacked and packed the toy boxes
in imagination. In the course of conversation the remarkable fact
came out that Kamenitz an der Linde, the castle in Bohemia that
belonged to our great-grandfather, was at another time (perhaps
afterward) the property of an ancestor of these Nadhernys, a
direct forebear. Prague itself was confused. Everyone wanted to
have me, as though I were edible, but once they had me, I found
them not hungry and as if they had to diet. My mother took lots
of trouble to do everything possible. But . . . The reading dull;
again the awful old ladies, whom as a child I used to marvel at,
still the same and no more amusing now that the marveling was
on their side. A few litterateurs, also the same, dustier, shabbier,
and more worn-out with every year, inquisitive and too kind-
hearted and too easygoing to be envious. (I shall still get to dramas
sometime. I am beginning to see people, even noticing the "animal
faces" Ibsen saw, the snouts and sets of teeth, but am not stopping
there; for only back of that does it really begin to get interesting
and, over and above all aversion and antipathy, just.) ... I first
read poems from the B. of P., then Christine Brahe. Then new
things: except for the "Carrousel," nothing was even picked up. It
all remained lying where it fell. The program will be similar
everywhere. . . .

To Clara Rilke Hotel Monopol, Breslau

November 6, 1907, evening

Thanks for your poste restante letter. So we walk, as though
side by side, in the same stiff, icy wind; for here too it is like that,
clear and cold; one could easily write December.

Again my trunks are standing packed, already for the third
time since Paris, and are making the nature morte I drew for Ruth.
The Breslau evening yesterday before those many people went
off well; they were better than their reputation, and it was need-
less bragging to threaten me with them. They were the usual sort

who subscribe to everything and want something for their money.
They couldn't say they weren't getting anything. So they sat
still, coughed at judicious intervals, and behaved as the better
ones among them had learned to do. Some contact was even
established, here and there, so that I liked reading better than in
dull Prague. "The Carrousel" again found its friends. And Ivan
the Terrible developed into a kind of dramatic performance
that kept everyone in suspense quite far back. . . .

C **9 1

To Clara Rilke Hotel Matschakerhof, Vienna I

November 9, 1907

. . . now we are each in a big city, each seeing people and
certainly being surprised a hundred times a day. It is remarkable
here, with the seeing people and all; it is such that it finds me
totally unprepared, not the least bit of it reaches the point of
being expressible: so little can I master as yet; here is a city, an
old, self-assured, individual city, lying about me, standing there
with its ancient churches and groups of houses, crossing back and
forth twenty times with its bridges over the too little river and
its canals, streaming with people, driving with fast carriages, with
carriages that turn the corners noiselessly on the asphalt, preceded
by a rapid trotting, a very light ring of hoofs quickly and variously
intermingled, as of bobbins in lace-making; a city in which every-
thing is different from the way one knows it, without this dif-
ferentness lying in anything visible; rather it hovers about what
is here merely like a convention of old, like a still surviving
tradition, orally passed on, interpreting even the most remote
in a way that is intimate and somehow unexpected: speaks fa-
miliarly to it, names it, knows it, adapts itself to it, makes it
popular, draws it into the habitual (while Paris leaves everything
outside), associates with it as with everyday things, concerns
itself goodnaturedly and loyally with it ; here is this city, and
one is not able to give an inkling of what makes these old streets

so special, these squares so old-fashioned, the old Hofburg with
its courtyards so ceremonious and formal, the Rings so dazzling,
the gardens so ample, the baroque fountains so indispensable,
and the columns of the Virgin so native: and yet the coher-
ence and the existence of it all is condensed to the point of
becoming a fragrance; one feels it as in childhood one felt a bak-
ery, a butcher shop, or a grocery store; so entirely pervaded with
itself, recognizable at every point and to be grasped in every
characteristic by all one's senses: here too atmosphere has come
into being, environment irradiated and darkened from within, in
which people are at home and which as a stranger one shares,
wards off, touches, tastes with every movement.

But my evening is over too. Well. To be sure, as a result of
the rapid traveling, the many intense conversations, the attentive
observation of people (which is still the most difficult use of
observation), I had too much blood in my head, so much that
after reading the first two poems, suddenly (I had expected and
hoped for it before) I felt my nosebleed coming: my precious
constitution didn't realize where I was, and seized, as it has a
way of doing, on this simple way out. I wasn't angry with it:
what are people to it. I told the people to have patience for a
while and why, went into the authors' stall, like a goat, settled
myself there as always with water, wash basin, let it bleed (every-
one came and said, put your head back, etc. but I knew that the
blood would then flow behind and that would be the end of my
voice), so let it bleed without nervousness, came out again re-
freshed and read well and clearly the entire evening (as prose
selection the death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge).
During the mishap Hof mannsthal came behind, spoke to me, was
charming. In case of necessity I will read, he said. But fortunately
it wasn't necessary. Everyone was very attentive, everyone
wanted to see me, to shake my hand. Today many flowers are
coming, as is in keeping with the temperament here. But the first
were sent by Sidie Nadherny (who for some other reason was in
Vienna for the day without my seeing her). I had the feeling

that you had instructed everyone to bring me flowers for once.
That I should need them. Which was the case. Right Mter the
lecture, Heller gave me your letter. At night, home at las*,t, I read
it; it is so beautiful. I shall read it over every day. How \\yell you
feel and say all that. You dear one, who do not feel too soorV; who
only feel when the feeling has become mature. You can't tJhink
how good it was, at last alone in the night to know you thinking
and feeling and believing all those things.

C *9 3

To Clara Rilke H. Mayreder's Hotel Matschakerhof, Vienna

[November n, 1907]

. . . And on the same evening Heller gave me a letter from
Rodin: long and affectionate: All is 'well again. I could hardly
believe it and read it over and over. But the close of the letter
leaves no doubt. It reads: "venez, quand vous etes a Paris me voir.
Des choses, des choses. Nous avons besoin de la verite, de la poesie
tous deux et d'amitie." The dear, just man who lives things so
honestly from his work outward! The just man. I have always
known that he is that, and you knew it too. He thinks affection-
ately of you. He tells about his drawings containing the story of
Psyche. He writes that he had thought of me: that I would have
to rewrite this ancient myth just as he had to draw it; it had lifted
him out beyond everything he had as yet attained: "c'est 1'histoire
si delicieuse de la f emme et de son entree dans la vie " Through
my agency then, over sixty drawings are to be exhibited here at
Heller's. They are already on the way. The essay in Kunst und
Kunstler pleased him: "votre etude . . . je la trouve tres belle
de verite."

Better things I couldn't have written to you in the big city, in
which every bit of good news is even more desirable than else-
where! Isn't that so?

I am on the way to Hof rnannsthal at Rodaun where I am lunch-
ing today. More tomorrow. . , .

3*9

To Clara Rilke Zattere 1471, Venice

(chez Mile. Romanelli) November 20, 1907

. . . already I must add to my letter, that I think it was a good
thing to come here in all this strangeness. Do you remember how
great it is, how incalculable? And it is even more so now in this
gray cold that makes no effort: This Venice seems to me almost
hard to admire; it has to be learned over again from the beginning.
Ashen its marble stands there, gray in the grayness, light as the
ashy edge of a log that has just been aglow. And how unexplained
in its selection is the red on walls, the green on window shutters;
discreet and yet not to be surpassed; bygone, but with a fullness
of transiency; pale, but as a person turns pale in excitement. And
this not from a hotel: from a little house, with old things, two
sisters and a maid; before which the water now lies, black and
gleaming, a couple of sailboats in which the hawsers creak; and in
an hour the full moon is bound to come across from the Riva. I
am full of expectancy . , .

To Countess Lili KanitZ-Menar 17 nie Campagne-Premiere, Paris

July 1 6, 1908 (evening)

I thank you, dear friend, for having written. I have wanted to
fifty times since your letter and couldn't get to it. I have so much
to overcome this time, in my work I mean, and am not as vigorous
as I should be. And then added to everything came this incongru-
ous event. What is one to say, how is one to classify it? it is
always the same question. I have had to put it to myself several
times in recent years. The death of Countess Schwerin and my
father's death (through both of whom I experienced infinite
bigness and generosity) have brought about my no longer fearing
the question. Nevertheless it is hard to have it so close about one

330

again, even in brightest day. And in this last case it is complicated
by so much: who was this woman, who lived for others and yet,
behind everything and without knowing or admitting it, carried
within her, as though unbroached, a whole lifetime's claims: so
that it could often occur to one that she was also the opposite of
what she wanted to be, and both would be equally genuine and
equally unreal. And finally, what sort of relationship did one have
with her, in which sympathy, yes even admiration, was so re-
markably matched with resistance and rejection and condemna-
tion that one never had the courage to balance it up and carry it
along as the final sum. I have moreover for a long time received
the kindness she tendered to me and which finally began to be
called friendship, I don't know when, more as a beautifully ful-
filled legacy from the magnificent sister who preceded her than
as a gift really her own: whereby I only got further and further
from any insight into this personality. And now my attitude
toward death is such that it frightens me more in those whom I
have missed, who have remained unexplained to me or fateful
than among those whom I loved with certainty while they lived,
even though they shone forth only for a moment in the trans-
figuration of that closeness which love can attain. Given a
certain naivete and joy in the real (which in no way depends on
time) , people need never have come upon the idea that they could
ever lose again that with which they had truly linked themselves:
no constellation stands together thus; no act performed is so ir-
revocable as a human relation, which indeed, in the very instant of
its visible formation, goes on more strongly and powerfully in
the invisible, in the farthest depths: there where our existence is as
lasting as gold in rock; more constant than a star.

For this reason I agree with you, dear friend, when you say you
mourn for those "who go away." Alas, only those can go away
from us whom we never possessed. And we cannot even grieve
at not having properly possessed this person or that: we would
have neither time nor strength nor justness for that; for even the
most momentary experience of a real possession (or of a com-
panionship, which is but double possession) throws us with such

momentum back into ourselves, gives us so much to do there, re-
quires of us so much loneliest development: that it would suffice
to occupy us each by himself forever.

C in 3

To Clara Rilke 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

Thursday, September 3, 1908

What you tell does not detract from the lovely flowers. They
came as though alone and had their own quality, as you yours.
And now I want to tell you that you are right in your feeling
that I had better not come. After the experiences filling these last
two days to the brim, I can't help feeling that for the future I shall
always have to decide on staying: it is decidedly the more fruitful.
Be prepared to learn of a whole lot of new things, good ones, that
is, such as are well in hand and will now have to be guided and
realized.

Rodin actually did announce himself, just after I had moved in,
came yesterday morning, spoke from his heart, without complain-
ing, objectively. I won't let it bother me, and will be as kind to
him as I always was. It would certainly be the richest thing that
could come about if he were to need us now a thousandth as much
as we once needed him. Perhaps you feel differently for yourself.
Do so. To me it would be like a miracle if this so far-flung road,
which I pursued even into being misunderstood, where it sadly and
bewilderingly lost itself, should not only be found again but also
were to round itself out to a wide circle through his dear, earnest
need.

We sat in your high room; he went and placed and turned the
mask: it pleased him again. I read aloud to him what Beethoven
had said to Bettina Arnim: "No friend have I, I must live with my-
self alone; but I know well that God is closer to me than to others
in my art, I go about with him without fear, I have always recog-
nized and understood him; I am also not at all afraid for my
music, that can have no ill fate; he to whom it makes itself intelli-
gible must become free of all the misery with which others are

33f

encumbered." How he loved it. He knew it: someone had sent
him the whole passage when the Balzac was exhibited. He knows
all that better than anyone else, and what we discovered yesterday
has lived with him for a long time already and he has children by
it. And now I also see his fate, which may lie in the race. I spoke
fo him of northern people, of women who do not want to hold
on to the man, of possibilities of love without deceit: he listens
and listens and cannot believe that that exists, and yet wishes to
experience it. That woman is the obstruction, the snare, the trap
on those paths that are the most lonely and most blessed: that
seems to him fated. To be sure, he also thinks that the sensual must
so spread out and transform itself that it is equally strong and
sweet and seductive at every point, in every thing. That each
thing transcends the sexual and in its mpst sensuous fullness passes
over into the spiritual, with which one can lie together only in
God. But woman remains apart for him and beneath all that. She
does not, like things, resolve into something more demanding:
she wants to be satisfied and is satisfied. And so she is like nourish-
ment for the man, like a drink which flows through him from time
to time: wine. He believes in wine. And I mention the Nun to
him and speak to him of all the transformed bliss here and there
and of the will of the woman out beyond satisfaction; he does not
believe in that; and unfortunately he has for his opinion so many
saints who, it can be shown, used Christ like a bedfellow: as a
sweet substitute for the masculine, as the tenderest loves that was
to be had, after all in the end to be had. And against that I have
my Nun again. And show how in her few letters she has grown
out beyond her beloved, and knows it too. And swear that if the
Count de Chamilly, cette bete, yielding to the last letter, had re-
turned, she could not have taken cognizance of him at all, as one
cannot see a fly below from the balcony of a tower. And I am
inexorable and yield nothing of my Nun.

This is a situation from our yesterday's and today's conversa-
tions, a position on the chessboard which you can picture from
this description. I am so happy that we have come unexpectedly to
these subjects, which were probably always in the way. The mo-

333

ment was sure to come when he would see the miscalculation in
his prodigious sums. And it testifies to the order in the world
that at that very moment, when the maliciousness of this ever-
recurring danger is preoccupying him perhaps because of a mo-
mentary difficulty, the man was again beside him who himself has
every need of understanding and classifying it according to his
wisest knowledge. He is like a god of antiquity bound to the rites
traditional in him, even to those which are not meant for us and
yet were necessary in the cult of his soul in order to mold him. I
shall not change him. But the voice did speak beside him. It is in
his reality and will not drop out of it again. And that is a great
deal.

Our lunching together again today was an exception and had
the following reason: Rodin will be your housemate here in your
palace. He has rented all the lower rooms, the whole right corner
on the ground level, with the square middle room that I wanted
perhaps to take. They are rooms such as he has always wished for
in vain, so much so, that he finally began to build some out there.
He wants to set up many things there and to come sometimes to
be with them and to look out through the stately windows into
the garden, in this place where no one will find him or think he
could possibly be. In my joy at all that, I went out again yesterday
and bought the beautiful wooden Christopher that looks like him
and gave it to him today for a good omen and said: Cest Rodin
portant son oeuvre, tou jours plus lourd, mais qui tient le monde.
(The sweet, straight-sitting child holds a globe possessively in his
left hand, and the tall old man moves along magnificently under
him and has plans. It is a good work of the sixteenth century.) It
pleased him and the interpretation pleased him, he was happy as
a child and eager in taking it. To him it was a good sign.

But I still haven't come to the end of the surprises: I too am
continuing to be your housemate; I have just rented the left cor-
ner under Mademoiselle Gourvitch for myself; the circular struc-
ture with two rooms and direct opening on the terrace. It is much
too expensive for me, five hundred more than I should have spent:
but I do want to work. I shall not travel and shall work continu-

334 _

ally, so five hundred francs must be possible to make up. Mustn't
they? And I think I shouldn't postpone it and wait until Fraulein
Vollmoeller's difficulties become acute up there. So I have a place
and will take it on in the winter. Mr. Duval will have a tremendous
amount to do to get Rodin's rooms in order, so that I shall have
to wait for mine; but for the present I am in splendor in your
rooms. I feel easy and well after these decisions, whatever comes
now will be all right. To take action is better even than doing
exercises. Moreover it is raining and behaving like autumn, as
though it were already October, but now it can be as it pleases; if
only God remains firm. Farewell, dear, and thank you for your
thought. It was certainly there in everything. Good days and
health.

To Clara Rilke 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

September 4, 1908

Postscript to yesterday's:

There was so much, that I forgot to tell you how well I under-
stand your joy and new interest in the fine bust of Paula Becker;
the other day I thought of it all of a sudden quite intensively,
saw it, when I discovered up on the second floor of the Louvre
collection a royal sandstone bust of the eighteenth dynasty. It
resembled it so strangely in bearing and composition and expres-
sion: it made me think how much that is big must after all lie in
your early work if such an unpredictable impression can forcibly
call it up in one, the way the mirror image one notices of an object
at once evokes that object, even if one doesn't see it. This, in
the boundless heavens of work, is the first state of bliss: when a
much earlier thing is given back to one so that one may grasp it
and take it to oneself with a love meantime become more just.
Here begins the revision of categories, where something past
comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly ac-
complished as something to be completed. And this is the first
experience that sets one, removed out of sequence, upon one's

335

own heart-site, which is in space and is always equidistant from
everything and knows rising and setting through the endless mo-
tion about it.

I am reading Goethe's Correspondence 'with a Child, that
strong, most urgent evidence against him which confirms all my
suspicions. You understand, that is meant according to the ex-
treme standard, without prejudice to his universality. Make
Laurids noted about it: "Goethe and Bettine: a love is growing
up there, irresistible, in the fullness of its time and right, like the
tide of ocean, like the rising year. And he does not find the one
gesture to direct her out beyond himself, there whither she is bent.
(He is the^court of highest appeal); he accepts her, magnani-
mously, without using her properly; chidden, embarrassed, occu-
pied elsewhere with a love affair ."

Make Laurids is right; but, since yesterday, I think that Rodin
would in like case have failed similarly, only with a more sympa-
thetic gesture; and how rash it is to condemn where such powers
fail, dissolving like a little cloud where they touch on the con-
ventions of love: without anger, without storm, without fertiliz-
ing shower over the thirsting earth .

How magnificent this Bettine Arnim is; once I met a woman
who was like that up to a point. At the time I fell into an inde-
scribable admiration and noted down the expression about sensu-
alite d'ame, which since Sappho has been one of the great transfor-
mations through which the world slowly becomes more real. And
now I see in Bettine that this has already existed in its entirety
(while Goethe stared at it and didn't believe it and felt frightened
by it). What an elemental creature she is; what a transfigurer,
what a storm breaking in the air of her time. How we would have
loved each other, face en face. I should indeed have liked to an-
swer her letters; that would have become like a heavenly ascen-
sion, without shame, before the eyes of all.

Perhaps this too shows how our ways are for the moment run-
ning counter to each other, that I am learning from this book
while Buddha must wait. Don't condemn this. Please take me as I
am and have trust. Ask nothing else of me, not even in your mind.

336

I would feel it otherwise, and it would lay itself on a part of my
heart that should be guileless.

You are now going so straight toward the divine; no, you are
flying toward it, over everything, in straightest flight which noth-
ing opposes. And I have been there, always, even as a child, and
am on my way walking thence and am sent out (not to proclaim) ,
to be amidst the human, to see everything, to reject nothing,
none of the thousand metamorphoses in which the extreme dis-
guises and blackens itself and makes itself unrecognizable. I am
like one who gathers mushrooms and medicinals among the herbs;
one looks bent and busied with very small things then, while the
tree trunks round about stand and worship. But the time will come
when I shall prepare the potion. And that other time, when for
its strength's sake I shall take it up, this potion in which all is
condensed and combined, the most poisonous and most deadly;
take it up to God, so that he may quench his thirst and feel his
splendor streaming through his veins. . . .

You mustn't put me down as boastful and wordy on account of
all this. It is forced out of me because I am alone and yet was not
alone these last months, and a little as though under supervision.
Don't be afraid but I am so exaggeratedly sensitive, and no
sooner does an eye rest on me than it has paralyzed me somewhere.
I would like ever and again to know that only the constellations
dwell above me, which from their distance see everything at once,
as a whole, and so bind nothing, rather leave all things free in
every way . . .

Good-by, dear. Have the little casts sent soon for Rodin to see
here next time. It will please him. , . .

n wn

To Clara Rilke 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

September 8, 1908

I just received, my deaf, such a very beautiful copy of The
Discourses; with a black buckskin back that bears the titles on two
strips of malachite-green leather. I thank Anna Jaenecke and you

337

from my heart for this great gift; and in connection with what I
wrote recently, I would like to say further: I know what I was
getting. I opened it, and even at the first words, just the words I
happened to open to, a shudder came over me, as though doors
were opening into a golden hall in which there is nothing but
symmetry. Why I hold back before this quiet door that is only
on the latch: why this new hesitant gesture rises in me that sur-
prises you so much? it may be that it is happening for the sake
of Make Laurids, whom I have too long postponed. Until then I
am one with him so far as I must be for keeping the necessary
state toward him and the acquiescence in his going under. Too far
out beyond^ his suffering I may not go, else I shall no longer under-
stand him, else he will fall away and fail for me, and I can no
longer give him the whole fullness of his death.

Not my insights do 1 want to limit, but his, in the orbit and
direction of which I must still be able to believe. For actually, I
feel now, I should have written him last year; after the Cezanne
letters, that offered so close and stern an analogy, I had arrived at
the contours of his figure: for Cezanne is nothing else but the first
primitive and bare achievement of that, which in M.L. was not
yet achieved. Brigge's death: that was Cezanne's life, the life of
his last thirty years. And now I understand too my being lost last
year, when I was continually in the wrong place because I did not
dwell upon that figure, for which nothing was lacking save my
power to concentrate and organize; save for my heart to strike
like a hammer against the bell-bowl of that existence, the bowl out
of which vibrates, along with every Ave Maria and every Kyrie
of heaven, the neighboring-tone of a crack that seeks to heal in
me. Can you imagine that?

Now I know too that I have only one thing to beg of you two:
help me, as far as you can, to quiet time, so that I can make my
Make Laurids: I can go on only through him, he stands in my
way: that is why you found me dammed up like this beside your
quiet stream and saw me staying behind, as if out of obstinacy,
and couldn't understand it.

I don't want to move but to strike root and do this belated work

338 _

this winter until into the spring; I think to myself: I must stay
healthy over it, for it; through it, not least. Oh that you two
understood it.

Just think, near the shop in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs a
regular, very nice vegetarian restaurant has been set up, which has
nothing at all of the usual shabbiness, but rather is quite clean and
ample and like a new toy the children haven't yet investigated,
shining as it moves. I have lunched there twice with pleasure. And
right here and now let an invitation be extended to you and Anna
Jaenecke for a dejeuner I would like to offer you there. . .

To Elisabeth

Baroness Schenck zu Schiveinsberg 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

September 23, 1908

You have done a really good work in receiving my letter, de-
spite all its lateness, without reproach and as naturally as I needed,
for a long time, to write it. Although your insight and great fair-
ness go so far as to release me from all writing, my joy over your
letter of this morning is so great that I would have to break out
for myself, even from the most compactly pressed time, the
quarter of an hour for a short, gratefully meant reply, in order to
set it as a small, inconspicuous stone in the ring of thoughts that
have formed around your news.

It is after my own heart that it should be good news, given out
from a stable inner center that seeks to keep its station and its
strength in the face of everything. What you say of the passing
of your dear aunt accords entirely with my feeling: that we must
not be sad for her. But as to the influence of the death of someone
near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this
should be no other than that of a higher responsibility; does not
the person who passes on relinquish to those who survive him the
hundredfold things he had begun, as something to be carried on,
if they were to any extent inwardly bound to him? In recent years
I have had to master so many near experiences of death, but no one

_ _ _ _ 339

has been taken from me without my having found the tasks about
me more numerous. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps
greatest of all experiences, which only through a misunderstand-
ing has acquired the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel,
presses us (so I increasingly believe) more evenly and deeply into
life and lays the utmost obligations on our slowly growing powers.

What a sweet turn you gave though to my own sad recollec-
tions through the glimpse of that little childhood picture, which
I have looked at quite attentively. I am sending it right back to
you; because one doesn't like to think of such objects out of the
house and on the way.

How much childhood there is in it and how settled everything
is in it, in the quiet, the so indescribable loneliness of being a
child, at the time when seated on the chair one feels no floor and
sits there so bravely in the very large space that begins everywhere
around one and goes on and on. It is a very sweet, significant lit-
tle picture: I thank you for letting me see it.

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and with your
work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you
cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and world
go forth from it.

To Rosa Schobloch 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

September 24, 1908

. . . Your understanding of the situation confronting the artist
is more than merely generous; it is just. You cannot possibly know
how rare it is. How hard everything tries to interrupt, divert, and
hinder the artistic worker from going into himself; how every-
thing condemns him when he wants to tend and to round out his
inmost world, so that one day it may be able to hold in balance
and, as it were, to set on a par with itself the whole external uni-
verse, all of it, even to the stars. And even the friends who look
on compliantly at such an inner existence, how often even they,
in giving, fall into the error of expecting from the creative worker

34

a spiritual return outside of his work. From this I have had to
suffer the more since there persists in my nature a great, almost
passionate inclination toward every kind of giving: I have known,
since childhood, no more tumultuous joy than to keep back noth-
ing and to begin the giving-away with the dearest. I know that this
is more a kind of instability and almost sentimental pleasure-seek-
ing and no kindness whatsoever. For it to turn into a virtue, I
must acquire the power to gather together all my giving in the
one thing, the difficult, the laborious: in work. And the friends
who through their selflessness and mature insight help me toward
such progress I must consider my most precious and best and ac-
cordingly must lay your note with its kind and great confession
among my most important documents.

I thank you for your good wishes for my further way; I do not
fear the hardness of these learning years: my heart longs to be
hammered and ground: if only it is my hardness, that which be-
longs to me, and not, as during so many years of my youth, a use-
less cruelty from which I could learn nothing. (And yet perhaps
did learn, but with how much waste of strength.)

I reciprocate once more with wishes for your winter. Dresden
can certainly do and hold in readiness for you much that is pleas-
ant.

I have seen it under three different circumstances: as a child,
from the beautiful Hotel Bellevue, later for hours, going in from
the Weisser Hirsch, and two years ago on the occasion of a lecture
in the literary society. Each time they were not the best conditions
for getting to know it. The treasure in the Green Vault I have
never seen, and I remember the gallery only very fragmentary
and superficially. I wish very much to devote a few days sometime
to all those beautiful objects and portraits; recently, just as your
letter was brought to me, my imagination was there in the Pastel
Room with Rosalba Camera's pictures. If chance permits you to
go in there sometime, think of me. Unhappy, like almost all
women who in producing works of art had to make visible by
force their inner intimate vocation (the works of art still not at-
taining the intensity of their inner experience and suffering ),

she seems to me one of the most remarkable and courageous
figures, the way she passes right through almost fabulous fame,
unspoiled, into the blindness of her last years, at its extreme limit,
with already failing sight, painting perhaps that dying St. Theresa
which is held in honor in Chioggia at the house of the Abbe
Bellemo and attributed through oral tradition to her. . . .

n '9*1

To AugUSte Rodin 77 rue de Varenne [Paris}

[in French] October 16, 1908

I am just back from the Salon where I spent an hour before
Greco's "Toledo." This landscape seems to me more and more
astonishing. I must describe it to you as I saw it. Here it is:

The storm has burst and is falling violently behind a city which
on the slope of a hill climbs hastily up toward its cathedral and on
higher toward its fortress, square and massive. A light all in tatters
is belaboring the earth, stirring it, ripping it, and making the pale-
green fields behind the trees stand out here and there, like sleep-
less hours. A narrow river issues motionless from the pile of hills
and terribly menaces with its black and nocturnal blue the green
flames of the bushes. The startled and affrighted city rises in a last
effort as though to pierce the anguish of the atmosphere.

One should have dreams like that.

Perhaps I am mistaken in clinging with a certain vehemence to
this painting; you will tell me when you have seen it.

II *99 3

To AugUSte Rodin 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

[in French] December 29, 1908

As for New Year's Day, I would almost like to avoid the word
of greeting that is making the rounds, to speak to you more of my
work. I must have told you again the other day that I am managing
more and more to make use of that long patience you taught me

34f

by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate
to everyday life that seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with
all that surpasses us.

Now indeed I feel that all my efforts would be vain without it.
In writing poetry one is always aided and even carried away by
the rhythm of external things; for the lyric cadence is that of
Nature; of the waters, of the wind, of the night. But to make prose
rhythmic one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous
and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose wants to be built like a
cathedral; there one is truly without name, without ambition,
without help: among scaffoldings, with only one's conscience.

And just think, in that prose I now know how to make men
and women, children and old men. I have evoked women in par-
ticular by carefully making all the things about them, leaving a
blank which might be only a void, but which, fashioned amply
and with tenderness, becomes vibrant and luminous, almost like
one of your marbles.

I would have to explain myself at length to anyone else. But
you, my dear and only friend, you will know what that means.

Your joy and mine differ only in degree; yours having been
for a long time blessed and stigmatized.

Also I am sure I am not mistaken in the wishes I bring you; there
are at bottom few essential ones and on those, I believe, we are
infinitely in accord. . . .

P.S. The chandelier fits in well with the ensemble, and on my
New Year's gift table the candy box presides with its handsome
blue which is still that of the eighteenth century.

C 200 ]

To Countess Lili KanitZ-Menar 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

January 2, 1909

Forgive me, dear friend, if I left everything so entirely to the
book, and let holiday and year pass without a direct word of re-
membrance. It will dispose you to leniency to hear that this time

343

the cause was really our friend Make Laurids, whose memoirs
have been claiming me intensively all these last months. Now I
know so much about him and his, so many sure and remarkable
tidings have reached me inwardly, that it is a joyous and difficult
obligation to be there day after day entirely for his memory. Be-
sides which, quite against my will, recent days have brought vari-
ous interruptions, and the old intrusive holiday does somehow get
through cracks and crannies when one wants simply to overlook
it and shut it out. Perhaps weariness too accounts in part for one's
letting oneself be promptly carried away and changed by a few
letters and parcels and this or that outgoing thought: the same
weariness of , which you speak. But just think, much as this weari-
ness often upsets me and places me in a state of uncertainty : if
I chance to look at someone who doesn't know it, who has gone
on evenly in what he has once begun, I often think he achieves
this only because his nature insists less honestly upon itself or be-
cause his hearing has become dulled toward it. And really we are
quite well off in being kept thus inwardly informed; perhaps in
this striving and being drawn back is hidden the tendency and the
possibility for a life rhythm that brings us into most intimate ac-
cord with ourselves, provided only we have the patience to per-
ceive it. Nor should failure be a disappointment for those who are
beginning the ultimate and do not settle down in something of
modest proportions; it is the graduated measure of our undertak-
ings and ought not to be referred to our feelings at all nor to testify
against our achievement, which after all is continually being put
together out of thousands of new beginnings.

Of this and of similar and quite different things we would per-
haps have spoken before your lovely fireplace. We shall do so, I
hope, some day at one of my glorious high windows, when spring
comes outside in the garden. Do not forget that this is one of the
friendly anticipations with which I am furnishing my new year.
And now a hearty good-by and take all my wishes for your new
year: good ones. . . .

344

To Anton Kippenberg 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

January 2, 1909

Your so thoroughly cordial letter dictated on December 3 1 of
the old year is one reason the more for me to hope that mine
written on the same day, with its not too modest assumptions, can-
not have surprised you. You understand, do you not, that a per-
son whose strength always suffices just for one thing is at times
quite bluntly and inconsiderately concerned about that one thing;
especially at a moment when he is experiencing in it such singular
joys and progress as my present work has been affording me all
these last weeks. I could tell you so much that is fine about it.
Sometimes it seems to me I could die when it is done: so to the
very end do all difficulty and sweetness come together in these
pages, so finally does it all stand there and yet so boundlessly ca-
pable of the transformations inherent in it that I have the feeling of
transmitting myself with this book, far and surely, beyond all
danger of death. Now I have only the one thing, you see, at heart:
to be able to live as long as this is in process, and to be allowed to
live entirely for it alone, locked in in this work and fed from with-
out through a little sliding window, like a prisoner by whom all
things, down to the humblest and most insignificant, are only now
really appreciated.

And if I think so calmly of no longer existing after this work,
it is because I do not yet dare at all to promise myself the fullness
I am gradually achieving with it: for now I am training for myself
(this is certain, even if I overestimate some other things) a mas-
sive, enduring prose, with which it will be possible to make abso-
lutely everything. It would be glorious after that to continue or
daily to begin anew with life's whole boundless task. . . .

345

To Hugo Heller Paris, j une I2 , I909

I thank you for your frank and cordial words. The destiny I at-
tempted to relate and to lament in the "Requiem" (the inevitable
fate of which you too recognized at painful proximity) is perhaps
the real conflict of the artist: the opposition and contradiction be-
tween objective and personal enjoyment of the world. That is
all no less dangerously and conclusively demonstrated in a man
who is an artist by necessity, but in a woman who has resolved
upon the infinite transpositions of the artist's existence, the pain
and danger of this choice increases to an unforgettable visibility.
Since she is physical far into her soul and is designed for bringing
forth living offspring, something like a slow transformation of all
her organs must take place in her so that she may reach a vital
fruitfulness of soul.

The birth processes which in a purely spiritual way the man
artist enjoys, suffers, and survives, may also broaden and be exalted
into the most highly spiritual in the woman capable of artistic ges-
tation, but in this they really undergo only a gradual intensifica-
tion, still remaining, in unlimited ramifications, within the physical
(so that, exaggerating, one might say that what is most spiritual in
woman is somehow still body, body become sublime). Hence
for her any relapse into a more primitive and narrow kind of suf-
fering, enjoying, and bringing-forth is an overfilling of her
organs with the blood that has been increased for another greater
circulation.

This destiny I sensed long ago, but I actually experienced it
only when it grazed me personally and stood so big and close
before me that I couldn't close my eyes because of it.

Forgive me for not giving you back the book until today. I
am involved in many arrears for which all the months of bad
health I had to go through are to blame,

To Karl Bonder Hey dt 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

August 5, 1909

Need I assure you that your affectionate solicitude and what-
ever misgiving you wrote of was not written on water? I have
taken it to heart, and if I am not at once going in search of a
doctor, still my own will is doctoring me, better than before, into
becoming healthy and sound again. A doctor : it is not a ques-
tion of any as things stand with me. Only I myself, who know
their cause and the basis of their confusion, am able to break up
this complicated interaction of physical and spiritual depressions:
like Herr von Miinchhausen of yore I must pull myself out of
the swamp by my own wig, or God will see to it at the last mo-
ment that some clever bird sets me down tenderly on better
terrain. To endure and have patience, to expect no help but the
very great, almost miraculous: that has carried me along from
childhood up; and so this time too, although the distress is last-
ing somewhat longer than usual, I would like not to move my
nature along by shoves from the outside, but, as one of the last,
to wait until it takes the decisive leap of itself: only then shall
I know that it was my own strength and genuine, and not bor-
rowed or just a foreign ferment that bubbles up only to sink back
again among cloudy sediment. . . .

C *<>4 3 .

To Jakob Baron Uexkull 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

August 19, 1909

... If I did not write ... it was due to a succession and
combination of various hindering circumstances. Almost simul-
taneously with the year there began for me a period of exhaustion,
of sickliness, finally of sickness, which, though I did not stop going
about, reading, and spending regular hours at my desk, must, as I
notice more and more, have been real: for even now my best
moments are those of a convalescent, and I have a great many less

347

good and a lot of bad ones. But not of that. I only bring it in by
way of explanation; for your letter being what it was, you might
well in the long pause have been confirmed in the assumption
that it somehow hit a sensitive spot in me. I liked it, as I like all
your letters. Nevertheless I grant it was not easy to answer. In
conversation, which you too, as I read in it, would probably have
preferred, a glance, a simultaneous silence would have brought
us sooner to an understanding. Confined now to the limitations
of writing, all I can do is beg that you continue to consider me
as the person from whom the books have come which seem to you
to be in the right. Those books (the Book of Hours particularly)
paid as little heed and had as little reference to a reader as anything
I have since let go out; so that the passage in your letter where you
expect of me an art that is conscious of readers surprised me. It
is possible that we diverge widely here. But this is not one of the
essential points. More essential, it seems to me, is that, concerning
those more recent books, I can assure you of my good, clear con-
science: every word, every interval between the words in those
poems came into being from extreme necessity, in the conscious-
ness of that ultimate responsibility under whose inner tribunal
my work is carried out. Perhaps shortcomings in my nature or
omissions to be made up for in my development are the cause of
that hard objectivity and unfeeling quality of what is portrayed:
perhaps more pleasing ways are conceivable: I must continue on
mine, difficult as it is.

Do you not believe, dear friend, that even the Book of Hours
was all filled with the determination in which (one-sidedly, if you
will) I have been growing? To consider art not as a selection from
the world, but rather as its total transformation into the glorious.
The marveling with which art flings itself upon things (all things,
without exception) must be so impetuous, so strong, so radiant,
that the object has no time to think of its own ugliness or de-
pravity. In the sphere of the terrible there can exist nothing so
renunciatory and negative that the multiple action of artistic
mastery would not leave it behind with a great, positive surplus,
as something that affirms existence, wants to be: as an angel. In the

343 _

Book of Hours you believed in this transformation, you under-
stood it; in the later books, however, in which He is not mentioned
for whose sake it takes place, you would incline to consider as a
game what is still the same great need: and what therefore must
be right, not for the onlookers, but for him who suffers and longs
to survive. This is more or less what I would say, dear friend, for
my own justification, incidentally. For above all I would ask
about you and yours and listen at length, had I at last the joy of
seeing you again.

To Lou Andreas-Salome 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

October 23, 1909

Dear Lou, I don't want to postpone writing you any longer,
and wherever you are I want to find you and talk to you for these
two pages. Lizzie Gibson wrote me once that they may perhaps
expect you in Furuborg: is it there that you are reading this letter,
in the autumn-wood air that rises from the lake up to the com-
fortable country house, in which my "golden room," as it is called,
often awaits me?

How was your summer, how is your autumn going: I have
often thought of it.

I have been traveling around since September. First in the
Schwarzwald, at the old mineral springs of Rippoldsau, where I
took a kind of cure (pine-needle-air-baths, good food, but excel-
lent the plain piny air itself and the sound and coolness of pure
springs from all the hillsides: that was a big change that ought to
work). . . .

These last weeks, up to about ten days ago, I have been living
in Provence, in Avignon; that was one of my most remarkable
journeys. Almost daily, for seventeen days, I saw the immense
Papal Palace, that hermetically sealed castle, in which the Papacy,
finding itself going bad at the edges, thought to conserve itself,
boiling itself down in a last genuine passion. However often one
sees that desperate house, it stands upon a rock of unlikelihood,
and one can enter it only by a leap across everything traditional

349

and credible. From the other bank of the Rhone, seen from Ville-
neuve, the city, God knows why, made me think of Novgorod,
the great, and I did not then suspect that in this landscape, a few
hours further on, I would find the marvelous place that was per-
haps your earliest home. Have you never heard of Les Baux? One
comes from Saint-Remy, where the earth of Provence bears field
upon field of flowers, and suddenly everything turns to stone. An
absolutely undisguised valley opens up, and barely is the rough
road inside when it closes to behind it, shoves three mountains
forward, mountains slantingly piled up one behind the other, three
springboards so to speak, from which three last angels, with a
terrified dash^ have leaped. And opposite, laid far into the heavens
like stone into stone, rise up the borders of the strangest settle-
ment, and the way thither is so barricaded and tumbled with the
huge fragments (mountain or tower fragments, one does not
know which) that one thinks one will oneself have to fly up, in
order to carry a soul into the open emptiness up there. That is Les
Baux. That was a castle, those were houses around it, not built,
hollowed out of the limestone layers, as though people through
obstinate will to dwell had there found room, as the drop that
rolls first off the gutter pays no heed to where it falls and finally
stays and dwells with its own kind. Those who in particular re-
mained there were the first of that almost legendary race of the
lords of Les Baux, which, with an eccentric in Naples in the seven-
teenth century, went out uneasily, convulsively, smoking, like a
candle-end that accumulates strange drippings. But from him who
founded the house, in those old days, tradition came down to the
last of them that he was the great-great-grandson of King Balthasar
out of the Orient and the true progeny of the three holy kings.
And the crazy old Marchese in Naples still used his sixteen-rayed
star as a seal.

From the hard bed of Les Baux this race arose after centuries of
repose. Its fame had difficulty following it, and in the turbulence
of the ascent the most brilliant names were left hanging on its
crown. They became lords of seventy-nine cities and villages;
they were counts of Avelin. viscounts of Marseilles, princes of

Orange, and dukes of Andria and had hardly time to notice that
(according to the title) they had become kings of Jerusalem. The
reality of them is so fantastic that the troubadours give up invent-
ing; they crowd to this court which they depict, and stimulated by
their songs, the lords grow ever bolder and the women achieve
the unparalleled beauty that became so great in Cecile des Baux
around 1240 that in remotest regions they knew of her and con-
curred in calling her Passe-Rose she who surpasses the roses.
But in those days the first Giovanna, Queen of Naples, was the
contested heiress of Provence; the family, now for, now against
her, went on and on. It flung itself so high and wide that it never
fell back to itself again. In Naples the court gnawed at it and the
jealousy of the San Severini; it threw out only single wild shoots
now, thorny shoots at the ends of which rebellions opened up,
poisonous blossoms without desire for fruit, the smell of which
made even the Emperor's head swim. But clinging and unspoiled
as the fig tree, it got on better where it had fallen harder: in Dal-
matia and Sardinia it grew robust dynasties.

At Les Baux itself, however, only governors now sat, first of
Provence, then of France, after the district had fallen to the King.
All their names are known and one involuntarily retains those of
the House of Manville, under whom protestantism established it-
self in castle and city. Claude II of Manville was still protecting
the Protestants when it had become dangerous to take their part:
he kept a chapel for them in his palace. But already his successor
was faced with the choice of leaving his religion or his post. He
decided for the extreme renunciation, and with him all Protes-
tants were driven from Les Baux. Now there were probably
akeady Salomes among these banished souls: grandchildren or
sons of the notary Andre Salome, who wrote his recollections
under the first Manville governor; notebooks that may have been
used since and that are now (I am assured) in the safekeeping of
a notary at Mouries, Maitre Laville.

Now you understand, dear Lou, at the end, the sense of my
whole story, which has become so circumstantial. I was in Les
Baux, for a day. The distant view from up there, of which the

guide told me, I did not have: it is supposed to be infinitely large
and beautifully spread out and to reach all the way to the sea and
to the church tower of Saintes-Maries. But the near view was
the grander the more the day grayed in and closed about it. I was
soon rid of the custodian, the innkeeper too, after I had lunched.
And from then on I went about just with a shepherd, who said
little. We just stood side by side and both kept gazing at the
place. The sheep grazed far apart on the sparse ground. But now
and again, when they brushed against the sturdy weeds, the fra-
grance of thyme came up and stayed awhile about us.

n *o< 3

To Clara Rilke Paris, November 3, 1909 (Wednesday)

. . . last week I went to see Rodin, who is still doing his
Americans and really has a series of good strong portraits there
now. How good it is that he has to do people in whom Nature still
keeps him very close to the job, so that he has to graze around
near by, like a tightly tethered goat that has no choice farther
afield. Now he has a phonograph. The Marquise winds it up, and
the thing buzzes round in a circle. I was scared when I saw I was
invited to hear it. But it was glorious; they have bought a few
records of old Gregorian chants which nobody wants and which,
outside of the dealer, only the Pope possesses. And when a castrato
voice shrieked out, sobbed out a thirteenth or fourteenth century
requiem, like a wind out of a joint in the world, one forgot all
the absurdity of the instrument, all the stupid mechanical tones
accompanying it, and even the Marquise who (said Rodin) "ouvre
et ferme le robinet d'harmonie." He himself was magnificent,
quite silent, quite closed and as before a great storm. He couldn't
breathe for listening and only drew a little air in quickly when the
violence of the voice relaxed for a few measures. I said when it
was over: "Cest large comme le silence." That made him happy.
"Rilke dit: Cest large comme le silence; c'est vrai . . ." he called
to Mme. de Choiseul and looked quite serious and happy. Then
there was singing again: howling out of the great funnel: "The

35* _

people in hell," said Rodin, "are pushing someone forward, lift-
ing him out over themselves so that he may say what it is like
where they are," and it was just about like that too and continually
renewed itself in the wailing: kept having fresh breaks out of
which it issued like the sap of a branch. One felt after it as after
hard work physically and in one's soul, as though one should now
do one's utmost, the hardest of all. It then became apparent what
the Marquise is there for: to lead slowly back down from the
heights, by some path of blithe declivity. Perhaps Rodin really
needs that now, someone like that to go down with him cautiously
and rather like a child from all the peaks on which he is always
getting himself. He used to stay up on top, and God knows how
and where and through what sort of night he finally got back.
Now, seeing him carried away so beyond his strength, one really
felt something like fear for him, and annoyed though I was, I
understood that the Marquise was putting on more and more
stupid records and that we had finally arrived at a music-hall waltz-
whistler; and then all the silly noises of the pinched needle really
were audible, and the whole thing was fit to be, thrown out. But
after that, through my carelessness there came another Gregorian
song, a prodigious one; only in Russia have I heard anything like
it; even the chants in the Armenian church were still newfangled
and feeble beside that first unpremeditated music: I believe one
could not endure even Beethoven right afterward. But to end
now. I really must use only cards in future, otherwise I write as
good rain rains: endlessly. Good-by, my dear. And do you too
write only briefly, we each have so much else to do. ...

To Elisabeth

Baroness Schenk zu Schweinsberg 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

November 4, 1909

Every time it is a joy for me to read you, and my first impulse
is always to answer you immediately. And this time I shall really
do so.

353

You really must, by disposition, be a good painter; for even
in writing you use for everything you have to say pure, strong
primary colors, setting each so clear and sure beside the other.
And then quite apart from painting: this ability to grasp the things
of life unmixed and simple in the great primary tones seems to me
a happy one in other respects; for one feels that every compre-
hensive experience, like a crystal lens, must then reconstruct
pure sunlight for you again out of all the details and set you down
in the midst of its unity and warmth.

This departure of your sister, of which you are feeling the
effect, touches me more closely than you can know. Why people
who love each other part before it is necessary? well: perhaps
because at any moment this necessity may step forth and demand
it. Because it is after all something so very provisional: to be to-
gether and to love one another. Because behind it there really
waits in everyone often admitted, often denied the remark-
able certainty that everything that reaches out beyond a mean,
beautiful but by nature incapable of transcending itself, must in-
deed be received and borne and mastered entirely alone, as by an
infinitely single (almost unique) individual. The hour of dying,
which wrests this insight from everyone, is only one of our hours
and not exceptional: Our being is continually undergoing and
entering upon changes that are perhaps of no less intensity than
the new, the next, and next again, that death brings with it. And
just as at a certain point in that most striking of changes we must
leave each other altogether, so we must, strictly speaking, at
every moment give each other up and let each other go and not
hold each other back. Does it appall you that I can write all this
down like a person copying a sentence in a foreign language with-
out knowing what most painful thing it means? That is because
this fearful truth is probably at the same time also our most fruit-
ful and most blessed. If one associates with it frequently, it loses
indeed none of its hard sublimity (and if one laid oneself about it
weeping, one would not warm and soften it) ; but trust in its
sternness and difficulty increases every day, and all at once, as
through clear tears, one seems to sense the distant insight that even

354

as a lover one needs aloneness, that one suffers pain but not wrong
when it overtakes and encloses one amid a rush of emotion toward
a person beloved: yes, even that only by oneself, apart, can one
fully develop and to a certain extent consummate this seemingly
most shared experience that love is; if only because in the union
of strong affections we generate a current of enjoyment which
carries us away and finally casts us forth somewhere; while for him
who is enclosed in his feeling, love becomes a daily work on him-
self and a continual setting up of daring and generous demands
on the other person. People who love each other thus call up
about them endless dangers, but they are safe from the petty perils
that have raveled and crumbled so many great beginnings of
feeling. Since they are prone continually to wish and to expect
from each other the ultimate, neither can do the other injustice
through limitation; on the contrary, they perpetually generate
space and distance and freedom for one another, just as in all ages
the lover of God has for God cast forth fullness and power out of
his own heart and established them in the depths of heaven. This
illustrious Beloved has employed the prudent wisdom, yes (it can-
not be misunderstandable to say it thus) the noble cunning never
to show himself; so that the love of God could indeed, in indi-
vidual ecstatic souls, lead to imaginary moments of enjoyment,
and yet has remained, by the nature of it, wholly and entirely
work, the hardest day labor and most difficult commission.

But now measure against this love, against its grandeur and its
harvest through the ages, every attempt at love that was less
lonely, less desperate, if you will more satisfied: then (no longer
frightened, no, indescribably assenting, at most in happy fright)
you will admit that even between human beings only this most
powerful love is justified, the only one that deserves the name.
Is not only here does my circle finally close the presentiment
of such insight perhaps the reason why people who love each
other leave each other ?

Forgive me, I too thought it would be an easy path, and now
I have suddenly taken you up with me into high mountains where
it is cold and brilliant and without familiar vegetation . But you

355

had asked, and I had to climb so far in order to show you my an-
swer in the context in which alone it does not look comfortless,
but (you do feel it) good, or simply existing beyond all judg-
ment, as Nature exists, who does not want to understand and yet
supports us and helps us.

On the other hand, there is something else I do not know. Do
you know it? How someone, a young man, a young girl, can go
away to care for sick strangers? I would like to admire this very
much, and I feel that one cannot possibly admire it enough. But
in this conviction something disturbs me, like uneasiness, that our
time should have become guilty of such incongruous resolves;
isn't there* something disintegrating in it which deprives many
great-willed powers of their natural points of attack? You see,
this affects me exactly like the circumstance that all the greatest
paintings and works of art are now in museums and no longer
belong to anyone. It is said, to be sure, that there they belong to
everyone. But I cannot get used to all this generality; I shall never
be able to believe it. Is everything that is most valuable to pass
into the general like that? It is, I can't help it, as if one were to
open a flacon of rose oil out of doors and leave it open: certainly
its strength is somewhere in the atmosphere but so dispersed and
diluted that this heaviest of perfumes must really be counted as
lost to our senses. I don't know whether you understand what
I mean.

Rodin, of whom you are thinking, often comes to me for an
hour and then that is naturally always a very beautiful one.
Nevertheless his face would not at first glance make you as un-
equivocally happy as even two years ago: it is sometimes tired
now; it even has constellations of sadness which I didn't know in
him. With this the superb life-mask becomes certainly no less
great, but it does become how shall I express it? more tragic,
in the sense of that antique conception of the tragic whose domain
encompassed even gods and heavenS, but which nevertheless
closed at last in the terrestrial, as a circle whose nature and eternity
it is to find no way out of itself.

For you I picture it as fine that you sometimes see our Capri

356 _

priest (I can say but not write his name) and so can feel pulsating
across to you the vibrations of an existence serious and bent on the
profound. He has probably always been rich in inner develop-
ment, even in those days on Capri, and people like that, who go
about in themselves sincerely, cannot disappoint. He certainly
would not have written a book had he not felt it would be a
necessary and good one; one that it would have been impossible
for him not to write. So now it is there and has reality. When it
will get among people is not important in comparison. That un-
suppressible books are made, that they are in existence, that one
can no longer consider them mere imaginings: that always seems
to me the decisive point.

But now, as after an indiscreetly long-protracted visit, I must
say the shortest farewell to you; forgive me for letting myself
go to so much writing; weeks may easily come again when I must
deny myself letters even those I like to write and if this one
is too much for you in one swallow, put it aside and partake of it
as if it were arriving little by little. . . .

To Clara Rilke [Paris, November 19, 1909]

. . . for this Sunday, which is called November 21, I really
must write you a little letter. . . .

Well then, many affectionate wishes: that you may begin a
good year of your own, one still so young, it seems to me, when
I think of other people: most of them, all those one can think
of and that come to mind, are old now and as if they had always
been; I know none at all younger than you and Ruth.

Paris you would recognize very, very easily as it looks now:
with a sudden yellow sun between seven-thirty and eight-thirty
and from there on grayer and grayer, gray seen against gray and
gray through gray. I just took a quick walk to the big boulevards,
as long as the skies had not quite closed: it was indescribably
beautiful; the city-statues at the far corners of the Place de la
Concorde gave off medium tones between the fine brightness of

357

objects and of space and the bronze centers of the two fountains,
in which the shallow water moved in little wrinkly folds, to feel
itself again before freezing over. The stone horses rearing up at
each other at the entrance of the Tuileries Gardens looked heavy
and wintry under so much opaque sky, and the trees behind them
already had the violet overtone of a winter day. To the right on
the "Strasbourg" the wreaths and piles of flowers took on re-
markable lightnesses and darknesses that were no longer colors,
and the tricolor of the little flags was now like no more than the
just-made discovery of three new grays, the extreme of what, in
three different directions, could be achieved in gray. The Avenue
des Champs-Elysees flowed slowly and uncertainly toward the
square, and if one faced about, one saw behind, as the last thing
in the indefiniteness, the golden chargers of the Pont Alexandre III
flinging open their wings.

This is the text, my dear Clara, to the melody of the few flowers
I sent you yesterday; they come not from this region but from
the neighborhood of the vegetarian restaurant, from among those
one looks at every day in passing: but they are the ones now to be
seen in all florists' windows, with the exception of the few plate-
glass panes of the rue Royale behind which seasonless roses and
spotted orchid specimens display themselves.

Among the vegetarians, practically everything is unchanged;
the handsome Spaniard or Italian now and then brings com-
patriots worth seeing and otherwise, deep in the "Matin/' follows
his special regime. The monsieur was for a long time silent and
ate reading, but yesterday he reopened his communicativeness
and overflowed with sheer knowledge; among other things, he
said: "La Theosophie c'est une mangeuse d'hommes," and ex-
plained that in detail to the girl who listened with her round, dark
eyes and very hot face. You see, this too you would recognize at
first glance.

The brown woman with the crutch sends you her greetings
and M. Rudier wants to be remembered to you; at a street cross-
ing recently, sheer fate drove me to a cab from which he un-
expectedly held out his hand to me from the reins. So, now you

358

have for your birthday as much familiar Paris as I can muster.
Good-by . . . have a fine day of good, confident thoughts and
dear memories.

C 2 9 3

To Georg Brandes 77 rue de Varenne, Paris

November 28, 1909, Sunday

. . . since receiving your letter, I have been turning over in
my mind how I could contribute something to the spiritual short-
ening of your hospital days. Today at last something occurs to
me: it is unfortunately just another book, and a sad one at that,
but it is of such excellent craftsmanship that it can nevertheless
be somehow gladdening.

I read very little, and so I do not know whether the impression
I got from Gide's Porte fctroite is dependent very much upon my
state of mind, upon the reading having been an opportune excep-
tion, finally upon a certain natural affinity (on account of which
a close acquaintance brought the book to my house) . But I shall
be much mistaken if the book with its intimate precision does not
give you even more pleasure than it did me, since your reading
ability will doubtless reveal to you subtleties that eluded my spell-
ing out. Gide's means, which I had a chance to admire here for
the first time, have remarkable command of the world he sets up;
they fulfill his intentions it seems to me completely, and from
this there results a finely ramified assurance which nourishes the
book calmly and as it were vegetatively, even to its incommensur-
able borders. Also one has only to imagine how one-sidedly
Rodenbach, say, would have developed this conflict, in order to
watch with delight the greater artist who, behind the aberration,
the pathology, the fate of the individual case, allows one again
and again to discern the very great task of love, which none of us
has been able to accomplish.

I go so far as to conjecture that this book somehow steps out of
the rotation of the French conception of love and, under the in-
fluence of a deeper force of gravity, attempts a new curve of its

359

own into the open. But my very insignificant reading background
makes me incompetent there. (Wouldn't Kierkegaard have recog-
nized these journals and held them in honor?) . . .

To Anton Kippenberg Hotel de Russie, Rome

Good Friday [1910]

When I reflect, my dear Dr. Kippenberg, how necessary your
Sundays are to you after the long week, I am touched that, after
your dictation of the nineteenth, you have written this letter
besides in which I recognize all the goodness that is at home
wherever you are.

It was a real satisfaction for me to read your kind pages. When
one has been extremely well off for a time, as I was with you, the
indifferent strangeness of strange places is hard to understand; I
was spoiled, I notice. But the next stage is to discover the supplies
of strength and joy that have been stored up in one through
being spoiled like that; for this I am now waiting patiently, it will
not delay, and when it gets to that point, occasion enough appears
here to enjoy and exert oneself.

I am not very well in the first place, probably forgot too that I
should be coming to such a full Rome; even the beautiful Hotel
de Russie, which I remembered pleasantly from a few lonely
summer days, is now just a loud mass of lodgings, with music and
other racket, and all other places are overfull wherever one in-
quires; there are even emergency beds in the bathrooms, it is a
disgrace, and all of it for nothing, for none of these many too
many travelers sees anything, believes in what he sees, or in any
way needs it.

Forgive the mood in which I have let myself go. There is an-
other beneath it, which just hasn't found expression yet and which
is all admiration. The parks, the fountains, what one remembers
of it all, much as one may often exaggerate it in hankering after
it, is nothing, nothing compared to their totally incommen-
surable existence. Perhaps too I have made some further progress

360

in observing, as everything overwhelms me so; but, I keep think-
ing, how old one must become in order really sufficiently to
marvel, to remain nowhere behind the world; how much one
still undervalues, overlooks, misconstrues. Heavens, how many
opportunities and examples for becoming something, and over
against them, how much laziness, distraction, and half-will on
our side. A lament, a lament .

Yesterday I sent back the end of the Make Laurids proofs
(galleys), registered too (the earlier sheets, likewise, on the
twenty-second). It was singularly difficult to go through this
book with that object: I felt as sadly tickled as the fool of Charles
the Bold when he sits and sees how they are verifying the coarse
externals of his master's body. The page proof, which is here up
to page 128, I shall leaf through easily, with an eye to certain
passages and as one reads a book, and from there on rely on a kind
Providence for everything to go through without disturbing
errors. I am so very glad to see by this page proof how excellent
and appropriate everything now appears on the small pages; it
pleases you too, doesn't it, we really couldn't have chosen better,
whichever page one looks at: it is a book, as though it had long
been one, had never been anything else. Please, let me indicate
in the page proof where the first volume should end; determine
it yourself if possible, or, in case of doubt, give me two places to
choose from.

You see, I am writing business in between the other like this
for lack of inner order; actually I ought to write several times
how much I wish that the mistress of the house and of the Insel
may recover quickly from the irksome influenza, so often does
this wish come up new and strong in me as I write. . . .

My wife seems to have something of a cold too, according to
the latest news; but she has begun to read Make Laurids and
writes more of that than of her health and her circumstances. It
is very fine the way she takes him from the start as an individual
and accepts him and motivates his existence from away back. You
two, dear friends, and this first reader: Make Laurids is not

doing badly, he is being taken thoroughly to heart. I am becom-
ing downright eager too and impatient to face him entirely as a
reader. Much will go on taking shape in me now, I think; for
these journals are something like an underpinning, everything
reaches farther up, has more space around it, as soon as one can
rely on this new higher ground. Now everything can really
begin for fair. Poor Make starts so deep in misery and, in a strict
sense, reaches to eternal bliss; he is a heart that strikes a whole
octave: after him almost all songs are possible. . . .

There would be still much to write, dear friend. But it is cold,
I have an east room which gets just a little faint sun of a morning
in passing^ and over there, beyond the afternoon wind, the hill-
side now lies in full sun: I must go warm myself. . . .

n

To Countess Manon zu Solms-Laubacb Hotel de Russie

Rome, April n, 1910

This is only to catch up, but still you must know how much I
enjoyed your kind letter of January 23. It reached me in Berlin,
where (you will remember) I never like being; among the things
that come together on such rare visits, there are always some that
are warm, good, yes, quite indispensable: I don't want to com-
plain. But there are always too many then for me (who am adher-
ing more and more to an aloof and solitary life), and Berlin
hasn't the way of feeding one things one after the other; one gets
everything thrown into one's house at once, one is supposed to
see and accomplish everything without coming to one's senses;
it is assumed that one has a freshness, an uninterrupted capability,
a prompt presence of mind, which I can muster only occasionally
and only way inside for my work. So in Berlin I always fare like
a bad schoolboy who is behind in everything and ends by no
longer grasping from his place of punishment what is going on
at the blackboard.

Think how in such days your letter was bound to give me
double pleasure; with it I could keep step, I became positively
peaceful and happy over it.

For it too was happy. I read in and between the lines how much
your beautiful work, which deals with so much reality, future,
and life, is affording you joy and inner progress. On the whole
I really don't believe it is important to be happy in the sense in
which people expect it, but I can so infinitely understand this
laborious happiness which lies in arousing by some determined
work powers that themselves begin to work upon one. For any-
one who conceives the task that now fills you in such a way as to
experience this in the process, it must become boundlessly fruitful
and joyful.

Beside these best tidings of you it was your interest in Make
Laurids Brigge and in me that did me so much good. The Note-
books are now concluded, I was in Germany on their account,
we are in the process of printing them. Make Laurids has, since
you have not been hearing of him, developed into a figure which,
quite detached from me, acquired existence and personality, and
interested me the more intensely the more differentiated it be-
came from myself. I do not know how far one will be able to
deduce a whole existence from the papers. What this imaginary
young man inwardly underwent (through Paris and through his
memories reanimated by Paris), led so far in all directions: more
and more journals could have been added; what now constitutes
the book is by no means anything complete. It is only as if one
found disordered papers in a drawer and just happened for the
present to find no more and had to be content. That, viewed
artistically, is a poor unity, but humanly it is possible, and what
arises behind it is nevertheless the sketch of an existence and a
shadow-network of forces astir. The moving figure of Countess
Julie Reventlow is mentioned only in the passage you know,
and, quite cursorily, once again. Make Laurids has inspired me
with the desire to know more of her (than he knew). You cer-
tainly know the "Letters of the Reventlow Family Circle" pub-
lished by Bobe (Danish), in which she is spoken of and which

also contain a reproduction of a very beautiful portrait of the
Countess in her youth. In the seven or eight volumes of this work
that have come out so far there are no letters in her own hand,
but one more volume is in prospect which will perhaps bring
some. It must mean a great deal, to have known her. , . .

To Marietta

Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau Hotel de Russie, Rome

April 14, 1910

If it is in any way possible: put generosity to the test: forgive
me for letting so much time go by over your kind letter, draw
no conclusions from its having happened. I constantly wanted
to thank you for your affectionate remembrance and for your
not giving me up and for making me secure in the conviction that
I may be allowed to read you again and again. I wish very much
that from time to time a meeting might come about, friendly and
delightful, as the one in Paris was, of which I often think. Your
letter, which made the trip to Paris, finally found me almost in
your neighborhood, in Leipzig; I shall tell you in a moment what
took me there and in the end kept me quite long in Germany, but
first let me go into your news: on the whole it is good, even
though this wish and that (like the work with your violin in
Paris) remains outside and unrealized . I would almost like to
say, do not drown it out too much with the noise of sociability,
there is no harm if it goes on growing and becomes stronger and
stronger. Often it is so with me that I ask myself whether fulfill-
ment really has anything to do with wishes. Yes, as long as the
wish is weak, it is like a half and needs to be fulfilled like a second
half, in order to be something independent. But wishes can grow
so wonderfully into something whole, full, sound, that permits
of no further completion whatever, that goes on growing only
out of itself and forms and fills itself. Sometimes one could be-
lieve that just this had been the cause of the greatness and intensity
of a life, that it engaged in too great wishes, which from within

drove forth effect after effect into life, as a spring does action
upon action, and which scarcely knew any longer for what they
were originally tensed, and only in an elementary way, like some
falling force of water, transposed themselves into activity and
warmth, into immediate existence, into cheerful courage, accord-
ing as the event and the occasion geared them in. I know that I
am taking your little intimation much too importantly and pon-
derously by loading it with so many words; it vanishes altogether
beneath them; but this as an insight had somehow matured in me
(perhaps in the reading of the saints' lives, with which I am much
occupied, again and again), and I could not resist the little im-
pulse to express what was somehow ready. You will know of
course that it was not meant so pretentiously and seriously as it
looks here, . . .

What kept me in Germany (Leipzig and Berlin especially)
from the beginning of January until a few weeks ago was the
final editing of a new book, the Notebooks of that young Dane,
of which I must surely have spoken to you in Capri. They have
finally come to a kind of conclusion, they are being printed now,
there too life is going on. And here, about me, is Rome (which
greets you), Rome which is having its blossom time, with full
hanging wisteria, with thousands of new roses daily, with all its
beautiful fountains that are like eternal life, serenely new, with-
out age, without exhaustion. . . .

NOTES

Rilke was born in Prague, December 4, 1875, and died at
Valmont, near Glion, Switzerland, December 29, 1926.

G.W. stands for Gesammelte Werke (1927), the six-volume standard edi-
tion of collected works; A.W. for Amgewahlte Werke (1938), the two-
volume edition of selected works; B.zt.T. for Brief e und Tagebucher, 1899-
1902 (1931), the volume of early letters and diaries; B.V. for Brief e an
seinen Verleger (1934), the volume of letters to his publisher, all published
by Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, in the years indicated.

(The number in brackets is that of the letter, the page number that of the
page on which the reference occurs.)

[i] p. 17 Franz Keim: Austrian poet (1840-1918), who had been a
teacher at the local high school in St. Polten during Rilke's
days at the military school there, and to whom Rilke had
now sent some poems for criticism. The stanza
Es sei, so wahnen edle Menschenkenner,
Oft ein Genie dem Untergang geweiht.
Nein! Schafft die Zek sich keine grossen Manner,
So schafft der Mann sich eine grosse Zeit!
was published in Rilke's first volume of poetry, Life and
Songs, 1894, most of the poems in which had by now been
written under the title "Fragment" (Splitter) and with "sup-
pose" (wahnen) altered to "complain" (klagen).

[2] p. 17 Rilke met Valery David-Rhonfeld, the daughter of an Aus-
trian officer, in 1892. She was eccentric and Bohemian, with
her red Empire gown and white shepherd's crook, her vase
painting and short-story writing. Though she was older than
Rene they became engaged, remaining so until 1895. It is
difficult to judge the importance of the relationship to Rilke,
but this letter suggests that she moved him deeply at first.
She herself, however, seems merely to have played along
with him, until he slipped away and finally eluded her alto-
gether, whereupoa she became greatly piqued: her bitter
reminiscences, published after his death (C Hirschfeld, "Die
Riike-Erinncrungen Valery von David-Rhonfelds," in Die
Horen, Berlin, 1918-29, VIII, 714 ff.), picture Rene as an
unlovely and pathetir youth incapable of appreciating her
generous pity and love. But the fact remains that she was the
first to give him at least a measure of much needed sympathy
and encouragement, and Life and Songs (see notes to [i]
and [9]) is dedicated to her. This letter, not in either edi-

366

tion of the Letters, was published in Paul Leppin's brief
article, "Der neunzehnjahrige Rilke," (Die Liter atur, Au-
gust, 1927).

p. 1 8 Tante G.: Since his mother had moved to Vienna and his
father's quarters in Prague were too small to house him, Rilke
lived (until 1896) with his aunt (his father's sister) Gabriele
von Kutschera-Woborsky.

my frustrated childhood: [7] and [44] contain further ac-
counts of these early years and of Rilke 's parents, Joseph and
Phia (Sophia) Rilke. (Cf. also the chronicle section in Let-
ters to a Young Poet, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New
York, 1934.)

Primary School of the Piarists: in Prague.

Baumgarten: a park in Prague. Presumably Rilke acquiesced
in his father's plan for a military career.

p. 19 the new phase of my young life: From 1886-90 Rilke at-
tended the military school at St. Polten and its senior branch
at Mahrisch-Weisskirchen, a training for which he was ob-
viously unfitted. He often referred to this time as the worst
of his life; for a while he planned to pour all its fears and
agonies into a military novel, in order to free himself of
them, but never got beyond a few sketches, though as late
as 1920 he wrote one of his old masters that he would never
have been able to live his life had he not suppressed all mem-
ory of these years. Cf. [7] and [44].

in my childish mind . . . : Rilke's mother, in her unbalanced
religious fanatacism, would have the child kiss the wounds
of Christ on the crucifix.

p. 20 the urge to write: A few of Rilke's early literary efforts have
been preserved in the Rilke Archive at Weimar. His mother
seems, if only out of vanity, to have encouraged his childish
attempts at painting and composing heroic tales and verses,
though his father would reprimand her for fostering such
effeminate pastimes.

"The war horse rears . . . ": a line from The Maid of Or-
leans (Prologue, scene 4) often cited as an example of Schil-
ler's rhetoric.

p. 21 bitter disillusionment^ and errors: Rilke's attendance at the
commercial school in Linz (winter 1891-92) ended with an
amorous escapade with a governess.

the period of study: Thanks to the financial assistance of his
Uncle Jaroslav Rilke, Ritter von Riiliken, who was anxious

that his family's only surviving male member of the younger
generation should make something of himself, Rilke pre-
pared (1892-95) for the University of Prague by a course of
private lessons with examinations at the end of each semester.

p. 22 panicka: Czech for "little lady.*'

Rene: Rilke's parents, never reconciled to the loss of their
first child, a little girl, had christened him Rene, and not
until 1897 did he begin using Rainer, the name by which Lou
Andreas-Salome (cf. note to [8]) called him because she
thought it more fitting than a French name for a poet whose
language was German.

[3] p. 23 Rilke had passed his entrance examinations in July and was
now studying at the University. He had been reading Urania
by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer (in the trans-
lation of Carl Wenzel, 1894), and now wrote Dr. Bauschinger
(1860-?), author of many books on astronomy and director
of, among others, the observatories at Strasbourg and Leip-
zig, to ask his opinion of the book.

[4] p. 23 Bodo Wildberg: Rilke's collaborator for the third and last
number of Wild Chicory (see note to [9]), pamphlets con-
taining "songs, given to the people," published at Rilke's
expense and left in hospitals, workers' clubs, etc. as a free
gift. "For the poor everything is too expensive," read the
preface,". . . So if you would give to everyone then give!"

Thiel: Peter Thiel (1870- ), author of Des Schicksals
Tticke.

[5] p. 24 Cf. the stanza from "In Dubiis" in Offerings to the Lares
(p. 65; see note to [9]):

Der erscheint mir als der He appears to me the greatest

Grosste,

der zu keiner Fahne schwort, who pledges himself to no flag,

und, weil er vorn Teil sich and, because he detached him-

loste, self from the part,

nun der ganzen Welt gehort. now belongs to the whole

world.

[6] p. 25 In the fall of 1896, Rilke had left Prague to continue his
studies in Munich.

Baron Karl Du Prel: (1839-99), prolific philosophical writer,
zealous investigator of the occult and a spiritualist, who main-
tained that man is a dual being whose second self appears
in somnambulistic states and reaches into the Beyond.

368

p. 25 "Visions of Christ": These ("Christusvisionen") were not
brought out as Rilke expected and have never been pub-
lished. The manuscript is in the Rilke Archive in Weimar.

[7] p. 26 Ludwig Ganghofer: novelist (1855-1920) noted for his por-
trayal of Bavarian peasant life.

military institution: For biographical details in this letter cf.
[2] and [44] and notes.

[8] p. 28 Frieda von Billow: Rilke had met Baroness von Billow, the
novelist (1857-1909), known for her association with Ger-
man East Africa and the work of Karl Peters, one of its
founders, through Lou Andreas-Salome.

We are reading . . . : Rilke was spending July and August
at Wolfratshausen near Munich with Lou Andreas-Salome,
her husband, and the art-historian Endell. Frieda von Billow
had joined them for a time.

Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937), whom Rilke had met in
Munich, was to become his closest life-long friend. A Russian
by birth, and herself a writer, she is probably best known for
the role she played in Nietzsche's life many years before her
meeting with Rilke. Her husband, Professor Andreas, oc-
cupied the chair of Oriental languages at Gottingen.
That the Italian Renaissance kindled Rilke's imagination is
evident from many sketches and stories among his early writ-
ings.

p. 29 Botticelli: cf. The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch, G.W.
II, 196; A.W. I, 26).

So hat man sie gemalt; vor Thus they painted her; one

allem eincr above all,

der seine Sehnsucht aus der who bore his longing out of

Sonne trug. the sun.

Ihm reifte sie aus alien Ratseln For him she ripened out of all

reiner, riddles purer,

aber im Leiden immer allge- yet in suffering more universal

meiner: always:

sein ganzes Leben war er wie his whole life he was like a

ein Weiner, weeper

dem sich das Weinen in die whose weeping thrust itself

Hande schlug. into his hands.

Er ist der schonste Schleier He is the fairest veil of her

ihrer Schmerzen, sorrows,

der sich an ihre wehen Lippen gently pressing against her

schmiegt, wounded lips,

sich iiber ihnen fast zum curving over them almost to

Lacheln biegt a smile

und von dem Licht aus sieben and the light from seven angel

En^elkerzen candles

wird sein Geheimnis nicht be- is not victorious over his se-

siegt. cret.

[9] p. 29 In the autumn of 1897 Lou moved to Berlin; Rilke followed
her, to continue his studies at the University of Berlin, living
in a furnished room in Wilmersdorf, "Im Rheingau 8, III."

Adolf Bonz: the Stuttgart publisher who brought out two of
Rilke's early short-story collections, On Life's Way (Am
Leben Hin), 1898, and T<wo Tales of Prague (Z<wei Prager
Geschichten), 1899, both now in Erzdhlungen und Skizzen
aus der Fruhzeit, Insel-Verlag, 1928.

p. 30 Seven sketchbooks: in part preserved in the Rilke Archive.

" Rilke's poetry thus far published in book form: Life and
Songs (Leben und Lie der, Strasbourg and Leipzig, G. L. Kat-
tentidt, Jung Deutschlands Verlag, 1894, not reprinted), cf.
note to [2]; Wild Chicory (Wegwarten, published by the
author, Prag, 1896; three issues, not reprinted), cf. note to
W; Offerings to the Lares (Larenopfer y Prag, Verlag von H.
Dominicus (Th. Gruss), 1896; now G.W. I, 9-102); Dream-
er owned (Traumgekront, Leipzig, P. Friesenhahn, 1897;
now G.W. I, 103-160).

p. 31 Days of Celebration (Feiertage): no such book was pub-
lished. This is probably the collection known as Advent
(Leipzig, P. Friesenhahn, 1898; now G.W. I, 161-251).

[10] p. 31 From April to June, 1899, Rilke was in Russia with Lou and
Professor Andreas. They met many eminent Russians, in-
cluding Tolstoy.

Meiningen: Rilke expected to visit Frieda von Billow at the
von Bibra villa on the Bibersberg, a summerhouse of the
former Princess Marie of Meiningen, which had been put at
her disposal.

Florentine spring: the preceding April (1898), which Rilke
had spent in Florence.

p. 32 The Iberian Madonna (or Virgin of Iberia): an ikon in the
Iberian Chapel in Moscow, a copy of the original in the
Iberian monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece. The reproduc-
tion, solemnly executed in 1648 with prayer and fasting by
the monks and presented to Czar Alexis Mikailovitch, was
borne through the streets of Moscow almost every day, until
recent times, in a carriage drawn by six horses, the people
bowing low as it passed. (Cf. Stories of God, G.W. IV, 102.)

[n] p. 32 Rilke had now returned to his studies in Berlin, living this
time at Schmargendorf, just outside the city.

The Bibersberg days: The visit, with Lou, to Meiningen (see
note to [10]) had lasted from the end of July till September
' 12. Of it Frieda von Biilow wrote: "Of Lou and Rainer I have
had extremely little during this six-weeks visit. After the
longish Russian trip they took (incl. Loumann [Lou's hus-
band]), they had dedicated themselves body and soul to the
study of Russian and were learning with phenomenal in-
dustry all day long: language, literature, art history, political
history, cultural history of Russia, as if they had to prepare
for a fearful examination. When we met at meal time, they
were so exhausted and tired that stimulating conversation
could no longer be managed."

[12] p. 33 Rilke probably met Sofia Nikolaevna Schill of Moscow, who
wrote under the pen name of Sergei Orlowski, on his first
trip to Russia.

the Chaika: Chekhov's Seagull. Rilke was anxious to make
Chekhov's work known in Germany. He was planning a
translation of Uncle Vanya as well, and had even interested
a publisher. Nothing came of it, which may have been due
to his own loss of interest, and neither translation is extant.

C*3l P 34 Tretiakov Gallery: of Russian paintings, in Moscow. Rilke
also planned a series of monographs on such painters as
Ivanov (1806-58) and Kramskoi (1837-87).

[14] p. 37 From May to August, 1900, Rilke and Lou (see note to
[8 J ) were again in Russia.

[15] p. 39 In a conversation with Maurice Betz in 1925, Rilke described
this second meeting with Tolstoy rather differently, indi-
cating that the occasion may have been less comfortable
than he was willing to admit, even to himself, at the time.
There seems to have been considerable lack of enthusiasm
not only in the Countess' reception but in the Count's as well.

Professor Pasternak: Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945), painter
and professor at the Moscow Art School, through whom
Rilke had met Tolstoy on his first visit to Russia.

Yasnaia: Yasnaia Poliana, Tolstoy's estate.

[16] p. 42 In August, 1900, on his return from Russia, Rilke paid a visit
to Heinrich Vogeler, the painter (whom he had met in Flor-
ence in 1898), at the artist colony at Worpswede, near
Bremen, and was so enthralled by the colorful countryside of

moors and canals, and by the high seriousness and stimulating
personalities of the artists, that he rented a little house there
for the coming winter. He felt he could learn much from
these painters about "looking" (see Introduction), much
that could contribute to his poetry and enhance his awareness
of life. The published portion of his diary contains the best
available account of his Worpswede impressions. It records
many conversations and vividly describes Sunday evening
gatherings when talk was lively, there was sometimes sing-
ing, and he himself was often asked to read from his poems.
Here also he met the young sculptress, Clara Westhoff, who
was to become his wife. She was about to go to Paris to
study with Rodin. On the evening of October first, 1900,
when he and Vogeler had been at her studio, Clara described
to Rilke this modeling of her grandmother, as he noted in
'his diary for October third (B.u.T., 365-367).

p. 45 Before what little figure . . . : The diary also makes sev-
eral allusions to the figures of children Clara was modeling.

[17] p. 45 Paula (Modersohn-) Becker, the painter (1876-1907), was
an intimate friend of Clara and Rilke. Her work, now re-
garded by some as the most significant to have come out of
Worpswede, had as yet achieved little recognition. She mar-
ried the painter Otto Modersohn in 1901, studied painting
in Paris, and died in childbirth, November 21, 1907. Her
death, which Rilke felt deeply, was the occasion for the
"Requiem for a Friend" ("Requiem," Insel-Verlag, 1909;
now G.W. II, 323-333; A.W. I, 191-201; an English transla-
tion in Rainer Maria Rilke: Requiem and Other Poems by
J. B. Leishman, Hogarth Press, London, 1935). Cf. also [202]
and note.

[19] p. 48 evening pages: Otto Modersohn later wrote (in Rainer Maria
Rilke: Stimmen der Freunde, the' little memorial volume
edited by Gert Buchheit, Urban- Verlag, Freiburg, 1931),
"At that time in Worpswede, filled with inner visions, I was
wont, especially on winter evenings, to give free rein to my
reveries with crayon and red chalk on little sheets of paper."
He later presented Rilke with several of these sketches.

[21] p. 51 Heinrich von Kleist: the great dramatic poet (1777-1811),
* who shot himself and his incurably ill friend Frau Vogel
on November 21, 1811. Rilke describes (to Princess Marie
of Thurn and Taxis, December 27, 1913), how as a young
man he liked to go out to Kleist's grave on the Wannsee,
and quotes the first verse of a poem he wrote there in his
notebook on January 14, 1898:

Wir sind keiner klarer oder None of us is clearer or more

blinder, blind,

wir sind alle Suchende, du all of us are seekers, as you

weisst, know,

und so wurdest du vielleicht and so you became perhaps the

der Finder, finder,

ungeduldiger und dunkler impatient and dark Kleist . . .

Kleist ...

"Heavens," he adds, "I knew little about him and was think-
ing of his death, that strange one, because I only understood
the strange, but now I am thinking of his life, because I am
slowly beginning to have a conception of the beautiful and
of the great, so that soon death will concern me no more."

[22] p. 51 On September 27, Rilke noted in his diary (B.u.T., 348-350)
a similar description Clara had given him of her first winter
at her family's summer home in Oberneuland, continuing:
"... she said I would recognize it as a happy advance that
there are no longer behind us joyous and sad backgrounds
that alternate with indifferent regularity with the seasons.
That we see sad springs and blissful autumn days full of over-
flow and joy, that summer days can be heavy and desolate
and limitless, and that winter can touch us in our feeling like
the ringing of a triangle, like silver on damask, like roses on
a girl's neck . . . This enables us to live along more peace-
fully and in deeper understanding with Nature, that is, more
spontaneously. When behind our sadness a shimmering
spring flickers and moves in high clouds, then our sadness
will be more moving, and great is our crimson feeling when
it fashions garlands for itself of falling leaves and exhausts all
the colors of October, detached from the meaning they have
in their dying."

[23] p. 53 Paula Becker's journals: Brief e und Tagebuchblatter von
Paula Modersohn-Becker (Berlin; edition of 1920).

p. 54 Maria Bashkirtseff: Marie Bashkirtseva (1860-84), tne gifted
Russian writer and painter, who died at 24. Her journal
(Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff) was first published in 1890.

p. 55 my Stories of God: Vom Lieben Gott und Anderes, an
Grosse fur Kinder erza'hlt, Christmas, 1900; republished in
1904 and in subsequent editions as Gescbichten vom Lieben
Gott (English translation by M. D. Herter Norton and Nora
Purtscher-Wydenbruck, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1932.
Cf. note to [32]).

Dante's brow above the lily: Rilke describes (B.B.T., 304)
a corner of Paula's studio in which hung a mask of Dante;

373

against a pile of sketches rested a guitar, in front of this a
lily bloomed. He often calls Paula's studio the "lily studio."

p. 56 "first twenty years": Paula speaks in her journals [p. 62] of
feeling, after reading Marie Bashkirtseva's journal, that she
has idled away (verbummelt) her first twenty years.

the Schlachtensee: a lake outside Berlin, where Paula spent
some time wkh relatives. Her journals record (pp. 128-130)
a kind of symbolic vision in which she sees eyes looking at
her out of a gray veil suspended between lake and sky. These
are the "eyes of longing," and when one looks into them one
forgets everything in life but the "wish of one's heart" (here
her love for Otto Modersohn, to whom she was not yet
married). She shudders as she feels the thrall of this longing,
but the sun cries out to her "Go home to your house and
create. Think of the people who live about you and love
you. And you will recover." She hurls her "dearest wish"
into the lake and goes home to create. This vision takes on
significance in view of Paula's inability to reconcile her art
with her marriage. (Cf. note to [17]; also [202] and note.)

[24] p. 56 In April, 1901, Rilke and Clara Westhoff were married, set-
tling in a little house in Westerwede near Worpswede.

Emanuel von Bodman: South German poet (1874- ), with
whom Rilke had become acquainted in Munich in 1897.

p. 57 laws which never fail to operate: cf. in the "Book of Pil-
grimage" (The Book of Hours, G.W. II, 245), written in
Westerwede a month later:

Wenn etwas mir vom Fenster When I let something fall

fallt from the window

(und wenn es auch das Klein- (though it may be the smallest

stc ware), thing),

wie sttirzt sich das Gesetz der how the law of gravity hurls

Schwere itself,

gewaltig wie ein Wind vom violent as a wind from the sea,

Meere

auf jeden Ball und jede Becre on every ball and every berry

und tragt sie in den Kern der and bears it into the world s

Welt. core.

[25] p. 58 Helmuth Westhoff: Clara's young brother, who was to be-
come a painter.

a dear friend, a painter: "Peacockfeather," published in Ad-
vent, 1898 (G.W. I, 172), was dedicated to Emil Orlik, a
friend of Rilke's youth.

374

[26] p. 61 Gustav Th. Pauli: (1866-1939), art historian, director of the
Bremen A rr /Museum.

my dear ones: Ruth Rilke was born on December 12, 1901.

Michelet: the reference is to V Amour by the historian Jules
Michelet (1798-1874).

[27] p. 64 Paula's letter (published in her letters and journals, pp. 164-
166), to which this is a reply, accuses Clara of shutting her
out of her life and giving all her love to Rilke, who is in
turn reproached for entirely absorbing his wife. Paula, in
her journal (May 2, 1902), comments on Rilke's statement
that married people should guard each other's solitude: "Are
those not superncial solitudes over which one must stand
guard? Do not the true solitudes lie fully open and un-
guarded? And yet no one penetrates to them although they
sometimes wait for someone in order to wander with him
through valley and meadow, hand in hand. But the waiting
is perhaps only weakness, and it makes for strength that no
one comes. For this wandering-alone is good and shows us
many depths and shallows of which one would not become
so aware with another."

[28] p. 66 Rilke had met Countess Franziska Reventlow (1871-1918)
in Munich, his interest aroused by her having gone through
an unhappy love affair which she later made the subject of
a novel, Ellen Olestjerne (included in her Gesammelte
Werke in einem Band, Munich, 1925), which Rilke reviewed
in the Er enter Tageblatt (cf. note to [43]).

[29] p. 67 Oskar Zwintscher: the painter (1870-1916). The previous
year Rilke, with his feeling for tradition, had asked him to
paint Clara's portrait in order that her "first beauty," before
the "second beauty of motherhood," might be preserved for
their children and grandchildren.

[30] p. 67 The allowance from home was discontinued, as Rilke ex-
pected, and no prospect of lucrative literary work had yet
presented itself, but he remained firm in his determination
not to resort to other means of earning his bread. There was
therefore no alternative for the Rilkes but separation. Clara
and Ruth departed for Amsterdam to recuperate from in-
roads on their health, and Rilke accepted an invitation from
Prince Emil zu Schoenaich-Carolath (1852-1908), himself a
poet, to spend the summer on his estate, Schloss Haseldorf
in Holstem, and to use freely the library and archives. Rilke
must have had some acquaintance with the Prince in Prague
for he speaks of him as a contributor to Wild Chicory.

375

[31] p. 69 Rilke had known Frau Weinman^ in Munich. "In the Com-
pany of the Barons" from Advent (" T TA Kreise der Barone,"
G.W. I, 185) is dedicated to her. ^

p. 70 my portrait-bust: a photograph of Clara's bust of Rilke is
reproduced in Stimmen der Freunde (cf. note to [19]).
Vicomte de Vogue: Eugene Melchior, Vicomte de Vogue,.
French critic, author of Le roman russe.

p. 72 new book of poems: the Book of Pictures (Das Bucb der
Wilder, Berlin, Axel Juncker, 1902; G.W. II, 0-169).

[3*] P' 73 Friedrich Huch: (1873-1913), novelist, a cousin of the great
writer Ricarda Huch.

a perpetual embarrassment: cf. in Stories of God, "You see,
I immediately become embarrassed when I have to talk to>
children. That isn't bad in itself. But the children might
lay my confusion to the fact that I feel I am lying . . .
And since the truthfulness of my story means a great deal
tomf "(G.W. IV, 40-41).

p. 73 the subtitle: this was dropped in the subsequent editions of
the book. Cf. note to [23].

the monograph: a series of essays on the Worpswede paint-
ers Mackensen, Modersohn, Overbeck, am Ende, Vogeler
published under the title Worpswede (with 122 illustra-
tions; Bielefeld und Leipzig, Verlag von Velhagen und Kla-
sing, 1903; Introduction reprinted in A.W. II, 221-242).

p. 75 the book on Rodin: Augusts Rodin (published by Julius
Bard, Berlin, 1903, as the tenth volume in Muther's series of
illustrated monographs, with eight illustrations. This is the
first part only. The third edition, Marquardt & Co., Berlin,,
1907, contains also the second part. Cf. [159] and note. Re-
published by Insel- Verlag, 1913, with 96 illustrations selected
with Rodin's approval. Now, without illustrations, G.W. IV,
295-418. An English translation published by Jessie Lemont
and Hans Trausil, Sunrise Turn, Inc., 1919, was recently
issued in a reprint [with an introduction by Padraic Colum}
by The Fine Editions Press). That Rilke's interest in Rodia
antedated his acquaintance with Clara, who was a pupil of
Rodin, is evident from a conversation with her recorded in
his diary on September 21, 1900 (B.u.T., 320-322). A later
entry (November 17, 388-391) shows that Rilke was preoc-
cupied with Rodin long before going to Paris and that the
ground was well prepared for this most fruitful contact.

Muther: Richard Muther (1860-1909), the art historian, edi-
tor of Die Kunst.

37* _ , _

[33] p. 76 Arthur Holittdher: (1869-1941), novelist and essayist, a
friend of "Munich days.

For Rilke's feeling about Rodin's life, cf. Auguste Rodin
(G.W. IV, 300): u for us it is as if it had passed many hun-
dreds of years ago. We know nothing of it."

Niels Lyhne: by J. P. Jacobsen (cf. [do] and note).

[35] p. 77 In August, 1902, Rilke had come to Paris alone, while Clara
remained to break up the Westerwede house, planning to
leave Ruth with her parents and follow him as soon as pos-
sible. "There is no doubt about it:" he wrote Clara (in
French! ), "I am in Paris, although the corner where I live is
full of silence. I am all expectancy: what will happen?" He
was staying in the little hotel in Montparnasse which he was
later to make the address of Make Laurids Brigge of the
Notebooks. His evenings he kept for reading, writing, re-
flection, solitude; but by day he explored the city, visiting
and revisiting the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Luxembourg,
the Cluny, writing to Clara his impressions of the sculpture
and painting that interested him. Even in the first days he
began to feel Paris as a "big, strange city," populated with
"legions of sick, armies of dying, nations of dead." And he
felt that all this would become endurable only if it could
somehow relate itself to Rodin, who was after all his chief
reason for coming to Paris.

p. 78 C'est une main . . . : It is a hand like this, holding a piece of
clay with . . . it's a creation, that is, a creation.

p. 79 exposition at the Pont Alma: the World Exhibition of 1900
at the Pont de 1'Alma in Paris.

La Priere: Rodin's "Prayer."

Porte de 1'Enfer: Rodin's "Gate of Hell." Cf. Auguste Rodin,
G.W. IV, 33 1-338.

p. 80 "The Last Judgment": Book of Pictures (G.W. II, 80-86).

p. 8 1 Mme. Rodin became very nervous: How can I be every-
where? . . . Tell Madelaine. (We retain Rilke's spellings.
His French was far from perfect! )

Liebermann, Lenbach: the painters, Max Liebermann (1869-
1935) an ^ Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904).

36] p. 82 de regarder une pierre, le torse d'une femme: to look at a
stone, the torso of a woman . . .

p. 83 Le modele . . . the law and the relationship of these sur-
faces: cf. Auguste Rodin (Q.W. IV, 309), where this is de-

377

scribed as consisting "of infinitely many meetings of light
with the object, and it became apparent that each of these
meetings was different and each remarkable."

Voila le modele* grec: That is the Greek modele*. . . . You
know, it is not the form of the object, but: the modele" . . .

p. 84 Non, c'est vrai . . . : No, that is true, it is not good to form

froups, friends hinder each other. It is better to be alone,
erhaps to have a wife because one has to have a wife. . . .

Oui, il faut travailler: Yes, one must work, nothing but work.
And one must have patience. ... I have given my life to it.
. . . One must find happiness in one's art.

Tolstoy's unedifying household: cf. [15].

p. 85 not to remain with the dream: "Rodin was a dreamer whose
dream rose up into his hands . . ." (op. cit., p. 307).

[37] p. 85 La Plume; an art periodical, in 1900 devoted a special number
to Rodin. Rilke was gathering material for his monograph.

[38] p. 87 These are the days when the empty fountains

dead with hunger fall back again from autumn,
and one divines of all the bells that ring
the lips made of timid metals.

The capitals are indifferent.

But the unexpected evenings that come

make in the park an ardent twilight,

and to the canals whose waters are so slow

they give a Venetian dream . . ,

and a solitude to lovers.

[39] p. 89 wonderful pages: in Notre Dame de P<mV, Book III, i.

p. 90 even on his Saturday: Rodin received visitors on Saturdays
in his studio at 182 rue de I'Universite.

[40] p. 90 a tiger (antique): probably the little plaster cast of a panther
(Greek) mentioned in the essay on Rodin (pp. 338-339).
"It's beautiful, that's all . . ."

p. 91 the woman's bust in the Luxembourg: Rodin's Peruvian
Woman.

[41] p. 92 Early in October, Clara arrived in Paris and established her-
self in a studio of her own. Rilke had moved to pleasanter
quarters in the rue de PAbbe de 1'Epee because his other hotel
had been "too much in the midst of student life." "My room
au cinquieme." he wrote, "has a balcony and before it, first

gardens, then a layer of houses held together by the dome of
the Pantheon. And sky and morning and evening, distance."
the monograph: Worpsivede, published by Velhagen and
Klasing. See note to [32].

p. 93 my little book: the first part of the essay on Rodin.

[42] p. 94 The Rodin book finished, Rilke, emotionally exhausted and
physically ill, sought the warmth and sun of Italy in Viareg-
gio where he had spent some time in 1898. Disappointments
greeted him at every turn. He could not stay at his former
hotel; the presence in this one of elderly British ladies inter-
fered with his longed for solitude. But though he found
little relief from inner restlessness, he was able to write what
was to become the third book of the Book of Hours, the
"Book of Poverty and Death," in which he gave expression
to much of his feeling about Paris.

[43] p. 95 Peter Michel: Friedrich Huch's first novel (1901), which
Rilke frequently mentioned. During his Worpswede days
he had contributed reviews of books, poetry, plays, art to
the Brewer Tageblatt and other papers. A collection of these
was published in an edition of 100 copies by Richard von
Mises (Rainer Maria Rilke: Biicher, Theater, Kunst; printed
by Jahoda & Siegel, Vienna, 1934), who quotes (p. vi) from a
later letter of Rilke's: "When I write in the Bremer Tage-
blatt, I always do it rather with my tongue in my cheek and
with my left hand over my mouth in addition: it gets more
journalistic that way. But nevertheless read it; it is still the
truth, even if very much diluted." The volume contains,
among others, reviews of Mann's Buddenbrooks, Ellen Key's
Century of the Child, Lagerlofs Jerusalem, Wassermann's
Moloch, as well as three discussions of Peter Michel.

your new book: Rilke had written Huch a long letter about
his new book, Geschivister.

[44] p. 96 Ellen Key: Swedish reformer, feminist and writer (1849-
1926), interested chiefly in the emancipation of women,
problems of love and marriage, the education of children.
Much impressed by Rilke's Stories of God, she had written
the young author. They corresponded frequently, but did
not meet until 1904. Rilke addressed her as "Frau" Ellen Key,
though she was unmarried, because, as he wrote in an earlier
letter, "Fraulein" (Miss; literally, little woman), being a
diminutive, seemed not in keeping with his respect for her.

p. 97 the Bojers: Johan Bojer, Norwegian writer, and his wife.

_ 379*

p. 97 Wilhelm Michel's article in Zeit had appeared on March
21, 1903. His short monograph, Rainer Maria Rilke, was
published by Axel Juncker in 1904.

p. 98 my family is old: For a detailed discussion of Rilke's an-
cestry see Carl Sieber's Rene Rilke (Insel-Verlag, Leipzig,
1932). The family history Rilke relates here is based or*
genealogical research undertaken at his Uncle Jaroslav
Rilke's behest, but later investigations have failed to sub-
stantiate these claims to aristocratic lineage. For biograph-
ical details in this letter, cf. also [2] and notes, and [7],

p. 103 Ellen Ljunggren: a friend of Ellen Key's who was planning-
to go to what Rilke termed "frightful America" in order
to make enough money to continue her own work.

p. 104 Georg Brandes: the Danish literary historian and critic
(1842-1927).

Juncker: Axel Juncker, at this time Rilke's publisher.

[45] P- 10 5 Spanish plan: a projected trip to Spain for material for a
book (never written) on Ignacio Zuloaga, the painter

(l8 7 0- ). 5 * t-

Carriere book: On first going to Paris Rilke had planned
to write on Eugene Carriere, the painter (1849-1906), as
well as on Rodin, but never did so.

p. 106 letter from Rodin: acknowledging Rilke's monograph.

Hokusai: (1760-1849). "It was at the age of seventy-three
that I almost understood the form and the true nature of
birds, of fish and of plants."

[46] p. 107 Niels Lyhne: see note to [60]. Rilke wrote many verses
of the third part of the Book of Hours on the fly leaves of
one of his Jacobsen books.

[47] p. 108 Rilke returned to Paris at the end of April, remaining there
for two months. In July, he and Clara had come to Worps-
wede, where he visited Heinrich Vogeler.

Paris: Compare these impressions with The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge (G.W. V, 48-49, 58 ff.; in the
American edition, known as The Journal of My Other
, 37-39* 50-52, 62 ff.).

military school: see [2] and notes and [7].

Baudelaire's "At one o'clock in the morning": "At last!
alone! one no longer hears anything but the rumbling of
a few belated and broken-down cabs, For some hours we

shall possess silence, if not repose. At last! the tyranny of
the human face has vanished and I shall no longer suffer
through anything but myself . . ."

p. 1 16 a book of prayers: poems written in Viareggio constitut-
ing Book III of the Book of Hours (see note to [42]). The
first "prayers'* were those making up Book I. (Cf. Ruth
Movius, Rainer Maria Rilkes Stundenbuch, Insel-Verlag,
Leipzig, 1937.)

48] p. 116 Clara's parents lived at Oberneuland.

^49] p. 117 St. Francis: cf. the closing verses of Book III of the Book
of Hours, which celebrate St. Francis and his poverty
(G.W. II, 291 ff.; A.W. I, 103-104); also [172] and note.

{50] p. 1 1 8 Compare this letter with the monograph on Rodin.

51] p. 123 II faut toujours travailler: One must always work always
-(cf. [36]).

5*] p **6 Hokusai: see note to [45].

53] p 127 the impending journey: Rilke and his wife were bound
for Rome. Clara had received a scholarship enabling her
to work there, and Rilke had decided to join her for the
winter, though they were not to lodge under the same roof.

p. 131 Gerhart Hauptmann: the German poet and dramatist
(1862- ). Rilke dedicated the first edition of the Book
of Pictures to him (1902).

f54l ? 133 its waters: cf. "the joyful waters of Roman days" in Son-
nets to Orpheus, I, 10 (G.W. Ill, 322; A.W. I, 274; in the
translation by M. D. Herter Norton, p. 35); also "Romische
Fontane" in New Poems (G.W. Ill, 79).

p. 134 Woodpeace: Rilke is here playing on the name of the
villa ( Waldfrieden = Woodpeace) in which he had lived
at Schmargendorf .

p. 135 Dahlem road: Rilke used to walk on this road in his
Schmargendorf days.

57] P 138 Durand-Ruel: the Paris art dealer.

(58] p. 141 Russian war: the Russo-Japanese war, 1904-5.

Garshin: the Russian writer, M. M. Garshin (1855-88),
author of Attalea Princeps, who fought in the Russo-
Turkish war of 1877-78.

^ 3811

p. 141 Still keenly interested in Russia, Rilke had at this time just
finished his translation of the old saga, The Song of Ygor's
Regiment (ms. in Rilke Archive. A part of the translation,
was printed in the Prager Presse, February 16, 1930, and in.
the Inset- Almanack for 1931, pp. 143-146).

[59] p. 141 Christos voskres!: Christ is risen!, the greeting exchanged
by Russians on Easter Day.

Ivanov: Alexander Andreievich Ivanov (1806-58), the
Russian painter, on whom Rilke at one time intended to^
write an essay (cf. note to [13]).

Gogol: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52), the great
Russian writer, author of Dead Souls.

^ Easter just once: Rilke and Lou had spent Easter together
in Moscow in 1899.

Ivan Veliky: the bell-tower of Ivan the Great, which con-
tains thirty-one bells. At exactly midnight on Easter the
big bell used to begin ringing, followed by all the bells of"
Moscow and one hundred and twenty cannon shots fired
from the Kremlin, while throngs of people bearing lighted
candles milled about in the street below.

p. 142 the Zeit: a Vienna weekly, later a daily paper.

Kuropatkin: General Kuropatkin, one of the Russian com-
manders in the Russo-Japanese war.

[60] p. 1 44 Niels Lyhne, Maria Grub be: novels by Jens Peter Jacobsen,,
the Danish poet (1847-85). Rilke read these, as well as the-
"six short stories" in the Reclam edition, in German-
translations (cf. [73]).

p. 145 "White Princess": subtitled "A Scene by the Sea," a dra-
matic sketch Rilke wrote in Viareggio in 1898 and rewrote
in Sweden in 1904 with Duse in mind for the leading role..

[61] p. 146 my new work: parts of the Notebooks of Malte Lauridr
Brigge were written in Rome.

*
i new edition*

[62] p. 149 Friedrich Westhoff: one of Clara's brothers.

[63] p. 153 translated fragment: Rilke had asked Ellen Key to write-
an introductory essay for the Stories of God, a ne^
of which was being brought out by Insel-Verlag.
p. 154 my growing book: see note to [61].

[64] p. 157 my first Viareggio: in the spring of 1898.

p. 1 60 i. The "Prayers": became the Book of Hours. The three
sections were already completed (see note to [42]) and
this continuation was never carried out.

2. My new book: The Notebooks (cf. note to [61]).

3. and 4. None of these were ever carried out.

Thisted: the town in Jutland where J. P. Jacobsen was born.

p. 161 Kierkegaard: Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), the Danish
religious thinker and philosopher.

the big German dictionary: the Deutsches Worterbuch,
the pioneer work in German philology (the first volume
of which appeared in 1854), begun by the brothers Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm.

p. 164 Francis Jammes: South French, Catholic poet (1868-1938),
a favorite of Rodin.

the Goncourts: the brothers de Goncourt, Edmond (1822-
96), who published the famous Journal des Goncourt, and
Jules ( 1830-70), novelists and art historians, who specialized
in studies of eighteenth-century France.

p. 165 Ellen Key's ... big essay: "En oesterikisk Diktare," ap-
peared in Ord och Bild in 1904 (XXX, Nos. 9 and 10), and
ji an authorized translation in Deutsche Arbeit (V, nos. 5
and 6, 1905-6). It was reprinted in her book Verk och
Mdnniskor (Stockholm, 1910), and in the translation of
that volume, Seelen und Werke (S. Fischer- Verlag, 1911),
under the title "Ein Gottsucher." Cf. [121] and note.

(65] p. 167 Thanks to Ellen Key's lectures, which had aroused inter-
est in his writings, Rilke received several invitations to
Scandinavia. Early in June he left Rome for Sweden, stop-
ping to pay his respects to Copenhagen, the city of his
beloved Jacobsen. His first destination was Borgeby gard,
a castle in Skane, the southernmost province of Sweden,
where he was to spend the greater part of his six months'
sojourn in the north (July to December, 1904). While the
castle owned by Miss Hanna Larssen, who also managed
the farm belonging to it lacked its original furnishings
and the flavor of antiquity he loved, Rilke writes at length
of his delight in the country and the farm, the fragrant
meadows, the life of field and stable, the generous table
that more than satisfied his vegetarian tastes.

p. 169 Brita Sophie: cf. "In einem fremden Park" ("In a foreign
Park"), New Poems, G.W. Ill, 61.

[66] p. 170 It was the evening . . . : cf . "Abend in Skane" ("Evening
in Skane"), Book of Pictures, G.W. II, 60; A.W. I, 115.

[67] p. 171 Petri: Egon Petri, the pianist.

p. 172 Norlind: Ernst Norlind, the Swedish painter and writer,
who was also living here, and whom Rilke describes as at
once monkish and Bohemian, yet a man who "has thought
much and has come out somewhere in his thinking where
there is wind and sky as in poems." Mr. Norlind has pub-
lished an account of these days with Rilke and Ellen Key
(in Fontaine, the French literary review published in
Algiers, IV, vol. 5, no. 30, 1943).

[68] p. 1 73 Kappus: Franz Kappus, to whom were addressed the letters
published after Rilke's death as the Letters to a Young Poet.

c'est de la terre en repos: it is land lying fallow.

[69] p. 174 the Mangwa: pictorial encyclopedia of Japanese life, pub-
lished from 1812-75, for which Hokusai (see note to [45])
provided the illustrations. On his way through Germany
to Scandinavia Rilke had spent a day in Diisseldorf looking
at a collection of Japanese prints, perusing in particular
the thirteen volumes of the Mangiva.

work-boughs: cf. "Der Apfelgarten" ("The Apple Or-
chard"), New Poems, G.W. Ill, 248.

[70] p. 175 Tora Holmstrom: the sister of a young zoology-student
friend of Norlind's. To Ellen Key, Rilke describes her as
"a dear and deep kind of person."

Hofmannsthal, George: cf. notes to [143], [150],

[73] P *77 Hermann Bang: the Danish writer (1858-1912).

the letters Kierkegaard wrote to his fiancee: Kierkegaard's
letters to Regina (Olsen) Schlegel had been published,
with other papers, in Kierkegaardske Papirer: Forlovelsen
(Gyldendal, Copenhagen) in 1904. The notebook con-
taining Rilke's translation is in the Rilke Archive.

[77] p. 179 At the end of the summer Rilke had left Borgeby gard for
Furuborg, Jonsered, near Goteborg, a country of fir woods
and sea, where he stayed with a family named Gibson. He
made various trips to Copenhagen where, again through
the good offices of Ellen Key, he met Georg Brandes, Karin
Michaelis, and the painter Hammershoj. While at Jonsered
he became interested in the Samskola, Sweden's first ex-
periment with the community school, publishing an essay

384

on the subject in Die Zukunft (XIII, no. 14, January i, 1905;
now G.W. IV, 221-232). He was happy here, and wrote
Ellen Key that the strength and clarity of the people's souls
and the melancholy and serious happiness of the autumn
were working upon him and transforming him. Clara
joined him here for a few weeks.

[79] p. 1 80 This letter was first published in the Vossische Zeitung
of December 25, 1927.

p. 181 Obstf elder: the Norwegian poet, Sigbjorn Obstf elder
(1886-1906), whose character and writings might suggest
him as a prototype for Malte in the Notebooks.

[80] p. 182 Frau Lizzi: Rilke's hostess, Frau Lizzi Gibson.
Charlottenlund: Ellen Key lived here.

[81] p. 183 Cf, the description of the ghostly burnt-down castle in
the Notebooks (G.W. V, 165-167; A.W. II, 117-119; The
Journal, 131-132).

p. 184 Ellen Key's . . . Lifslinjer: in which she made a restate-
ment, almost a defense of her ideas. The first part had ap-
peared under this title in 1903 (Bonnier, Stockholm); the
two parts later appeared as Karleken ocb aktenskapet.

[82] p. 184 Rilke had returned to Oberneuland in time to spend Christ-
mas with Clara and Ruth, staying on till the end of Febru-
ary, 1905. His health again troubling him, he spent March
and April at the "Weisse Hirsch" near Dresden, taking a
cure. Here he formed a warm friendship with Countess
Luise Schwerin (nee von Nordeck-Rabenau), a poet in her
own right, whom he was later to visit, becoming acquainted
with her circle of friends, many of whom were to be
among his most frequent correspondents. From the end
of April he had been at Worpswede again,

Meister Eckehart: Master Eckhart, one of the great medie-
val mystics (1260?-! 3 27?).

[83] p. 1 86 Rilke was visiting Lou and her husband in Gottingen.
throne of Venus: cf. [54].
my "Rodin": the monograph,
the "Panther": New'Poems, G.W. Ill, 44; A.W. I, 172,

p. 187 Hainbund poets: a school of young poets, admirers of
Klopstock, who in the 1770*5 indulged in idyllic wanderings
in the groves of Gottingen.

_ 3f5

[85] p. 187 Friedelhausen, Lollar: the home of Countess Schwerin.

the Rabenau: the family estate of Julie, Baroness von
Nordeck zur Rabenau, often referred to in the letters as
Frau Nonna, the mother of Countess Schwerin.

[86] p. 1 88 the following letter: "Monsieur Rodin asks me to let you
know that he will be happy to see you; Monsieur Rodin
will expect you in Paris from the seventh of this month.
Monsieur Rodin further asks me to let you know that you
will be able to live with him, at Meudon, for the duration
of your stay in Paris. . . . Monsieur Rodin counts on
your staying with him in order to be able to talk."

[87] p. 189 Wacholderhohe, Godesberg: Rilke was now visiting the
Karl von der Heydts (see [100] and note).

the dear gray castle: Friedelhausen.

[88] p. 191 After a brief visit to his Paris haunts of three years before,
Rilke was now installed in the tiny "Villa des Brillants" in
Rodin's garden at Meudon.

[89] p. 192 "Age d'airain": Rodin's statue, "The Age of Bronze."
p. 193 c'est l'orme: that is the elm.

Charles Morice: poet and writer (1861-1919), founder of
the periodical Lutece.

p. 194 effigy of Buddha: cf. the two poems, "Buddha" and
"Buddha in der Glorie" ("Buddha in Glory"), New Poems

c'est le centre du monde: it is the centre of the world.

[91] p. 194 Verhaeren: Rilke had just met Verhaeren, the Belgian
poet (1855-1916), whose work he greatly admired.

[92] p. 196 already quite a birthday: Rilke's birthday was December 4,
[93] p. 197 Bon courage: good courage.

[94] p. 198 the angel: cf. "L'Ange du me'ridien (Chartres)," in New
Poems (G.W. Ill, 32).

"Mais vous ne savez pas . . .": "But don't you know, . . .
there is always a wind, that wind about big cathedrals.
They are always surrounded by an evil, restless wind, tor-
mented by their grandeur. It is the air falling down along
the buttresses, falling from that height and wandering about
the church. . . ."

$86

[96] p. 199 Troubetzkoi's: Prince Paul Troubetzkoi, the Russian sculp-
tor, whom Rilke had met in Moscow in 1899.

p. 200 Minne: Baron George Minne, Belgian sculptor (1866-
1941).

flamingos: cf. "Die Flamingos" (New Poems, G.W. Ill,
236).

[98] p. 20 1 While on a lecture tour, speaking on Rodin, Rilke had been
called to Prague, to the bedside of his father, who died on
March i jth. He returned to Paris early in April.

Francis Jammes: see note to [64].

[99] p. 202 Rilke had met Karl von der Heydt and his wife Elisabeth
through Countess Schwerin. They were most open-handed
friends, and Rilke expressed his gratitude for their many
kindnesses by dedicating to them the first part of the New
Poems.

[100] p. 203 that time in Rome: September, 1903 June, 1904.

the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: (cf. note to [47] )<
begun in Rome, but not finished until 1910.

[105] p. 209 See [106],

[106] p. 210 M, Thyssen: a writer whom Rilke had introduced to Ro-
din. (For this identification we are indebted to Mr. Joseph
Brummer of the Brummer Galleries, who knew Rilke at
this time.)

M. Rothenstein: the late Sir William Rothenstein (1872-
1945), the English artist, noted for his portrait drawings.

p. 212 justice . . . will correct the wrong: In a postscript to this
letter Rilke added: "I shall tell my relatives and friends
(especially my great friend Ellen Key who is arriving in
Paris in a few days) that it is to return with all my powers
to my own work that I have left you." And in a further
note on the same day: "Once more all my farewells which
the circumstances do not permit me to express. Most af-
fectionately as always yours." (Cf. R. M. Rilke: Lettres a
Rodin, edited by Georges Grappe, Emile-Paul Freres, Paris,
193 1.) The breach with Rodin was healed a year and a half
later (see [187] and [190]).

[108] p< 213 The Baroness, nee Schwerin, was the wife of Baron Jakob
J, Uexkiill, the naturalist. The first edition of The Love
and Death of Comet Christopher Rilke (Axel Juncker
Verlag, Berlin, Leipzig, Stuttgart, 1906), the dramatic poem

written in Schmargendorf in 1899, first published in 1904
(in Deutsche Arbeit, IV, i, October), and which he was
now revising, was dedicated to her. (Now in G.W. IV,
5-34; A.W. II, 309-322.)

p. 214 Book of Pictures: the first edition was published in 1902.
[109] p. 214 the passage in question: Section XI of the Cornet.
[no] p. 215 Duval: well-known chain restaurants in Paris.

p. 216 the bird which "has not this care": the recurrent motive
(based on Matt. Vl y 24-34) f Kierkegaard's "Anxieties of
the Heathen," constituting Part I of the Christian Dis-
courses and the first of which is "The Anxiety of Poverty."
Dr. Walter Lowrie in his translation of the Discourses
(Oxford University Press, 1939) renders the phrase: "This
anxiety the bird has not."

St. Anne: Leonardo's painting of St. Anne with the Virgin
and Child. Ellen Key had mentioned it in an essay on
madonnas, and Rilke had told her (in a letter of January
29, 1903) that when he and Clara saw the picture they
thought of her.

Jouven: restaurant on the Boulevard Montparnasse which
Rilke frequented.

p. 217 Madame G . . . R . . . : the widow of Georges Roden-
bach (1855-98), Belgian writer, author of Bruges la Morte

(1892).

Meier-Graefe: Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935), the art
historian and writer.

[in] p. 2 1 8 Rilke had gone out to Chantilly with Ellen Key, the Bo jers,
and Paula Becker.

p. 219 greatest member of the house of Condi: Louis II, Prince
de Conde (1621-86), called "le grand Conde."

[112] p. 219 La vigne pleure: the vine weeps.

p. 220 K6nigs-H6he: the estate of Baron August and Baroness
Selma von der Heydt in Elberfeld.

Stina Frisell: Rilke speaks elsewhere of spending some quiet
hours, before and after his reading in the Samskola in 1904,
at the beautiful house of Stina Frisell (presumably the wife
of Erik Frisell, a prominent industrialist) in Goteborg.
Secessionist: at that time the modern school of art,

p. 221 Dora Herxheimer: sculptress, one of the friends who con-
tributed reminiscences of Rilke to the little volume Rainer

388

At aria Rilke, Stimmen dcr Freunde (edited by Gert Buch-
heit, Urban- Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1931).

Ellen Key's book: the essay on Rilke (see note to [64])
was about to appear in book form. See note to [121].

p. 222 a certain alteration: Rilke had shaved his goatee.

[i 14] p. 225 a little poem: "Portrait of my Father as a Youth" ("Jugend-
bildnis meines Vaters"), New Poems, G.W. Ill, 69.

[115] p. 225 Rembrandt celebration: in Amsterdam, 1906, the tercente-
nary of Rembrandt's birth.

p. 226 stretched my contours . . . : cf . "The Founder" ("Der
Stifter," New Poems, G.W. Ill, 48):

Viellcicht war dieses alles: so This perhaps was everything:

zu knien to kneel like this

(so wie es alles ist, was wir er- (the way what we have ex-

fuhren): perienced is everything):

zu knien: dass man die ei- to kneel: so as to hold one's

genen Konturen, own contours,

die auswartswollenden, ganz that would strain outward, all

angespannt close-hitched

im Herzen halt, wie Pferde in in one's heart, like horses in

der Hand. one's hand.

[i 1 6] p. 226 Rilke had come for a few weeks to the Belgian coast, where
he was shortly to be joined by Clara and Ruth.

p. 227 Furnes: cf. the little essay, "Fumes" (G.W. IV, 239-252).

[117] p. 227 Countess Mary Gneisenau: poet and author, whom Rilke
had met through Countess Luise Schwerin.
Countess Schwerin had recently died. Rilke, Clara, and
Ruth were staying at Friedelhausen, her home, as guests of
her sister, Frau Alice Faehndrich.

Sister Marianna: the young Portuguese, Marianna Alco-
forado (1640-1723), a Franciscan nun, whose letters to her
unfaithful lover, the Marquis de Chamilly (Rilke refers to
him as the Count), Rilke had translated (first published in
the Insel-Almanach for 1908; now as Portuguese Letters,
G.W. VI, 103-148). An English translation by Donald E.
Ericson of the original letters, which were first published
in Paris in 1669, has recently been brought out under the
title The Portuguese Letters (Bennett-Edwards, New
York, 1941 ).

[120] p. 231 our present kind hostess: Frau Faehndrich (see note to

389

[in] p. 233 now comes a request: Rilke's entreaties seem to have had
at least a temporary effect, for the essay was not published
at this time. See note to [64].

Bard: Julius Bard, the Berlin publisher.

the place with Fischer: in the Neuer Rundschau, published
by Fischer,

[122] p. 234 Rilke was stopping in Naples on his way to Frau Faehn-
drich's on Capri.

zanzariere: mosquito net.

[123] p. 235 Vollmoeller: Karl Vollmoeller (1878- ), poet and sports-
man, now living in this country.

p. 236 plans: planes of composition.

[124] p. 237* seen many things again: The Rilkes had been in Naples for
four days in June, 1904.

Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes: the poem of this title had
been written in that year, and Rilke had read it aloud at
the evening gathering in the Samskola in Sweden in No-
vember.

[125] p. 237 "Pioggia, scirocco ": "Rain, sirocco ."

p. 238 the Cucafia: by Goya, in the National Gallery in Berlin.
Rilke had described his impressions on first seeing this
picture in a letter to Clara (July 5, 1905).

Vincent Van Gogh, Letters: the German edition (edited
by Margarete Mauthner, Cassirer, Berlin, 1906).

[126] p. 241 Diefenbach: the painter, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1837-
1913).

Gorky: Maxim Gorky (pseudonym of A. M. Pyeshkov),
the Russian novelist (1868-1926). Rilke writes elsewhere
(December 14, 1906): "Diefenbach is still here, and every-
one had become accustomed to his caprices just as they
are in process of getting used to Gorky, who allows him-
self to be feted as an anarchist but, agreeably enough, at
the moment occasionally throws money instead of bombs
among the people, in heaps."

[129] p. 248 rue de 1'Abbe" de 1'Epee: in Paris. Rilke lived at No. 3 for
some months in the winter of 1902-3.
Studio al Ponte: the little house on the bridge in the garden
of the Villa Strohl-Fern in Rome, in which he had lived
in 1903-4.

390

[131] p. 253 Clara, on her way to Egypt to join Baroness Knoop, had
stopped to visit her husband.

My trip back: from Naples, where he had seen Clara off
in the "Oceana," the steamer plying between Naples and
Egypt.

[132] p. 2 54 this stream: the Nile.

the big Andre: the general atlas of Richard Andree.

like a coronal suture: cf, the essay, "Urgerausch" (G.W.
IV, 285-294; A.W. II, 274-280), translated into English by
Carl Niemeyer in Rainer Maria Rilke: Primal Sound and
Other Prose Pieces (The Cummington Press, 1943).

[133] p. 256 The Book of Hours: Das Stunden-Buch had been pub-
lished by Insel-Verlag in 1905, with the dedication: "Laid
in the hands of Lou." Of it, Rilke wrote (to Georg Sim-
mel, August 26, 1908) : "It is the only one among my older
books that does not give way under me, that builds a
strong calm spot and helps me along like something that
was long before me and is more than just myself."

p. 257 poems in the Neue Rundschau: In the issue for November,
1905 (XVI, 1 1 ) had been published Three Poems in Prose:
"Graves of the Hetaerae" ("Haetaeren-Graber"), "Or-
pheus. Euridyke. Hermes," "Birth of Venus" ("Geburt der
Venus"), later included in New Poems, Part I (now G.W.
Ill, 96-98, 99-i2 (also A.W. I, 181-184), 103-106). At
the time, Rilke wrote Fischer, the publisher, that these
were among the few things that stood up under his own
judgment.

something like a new Book of Hours: This collection was
to become the first part of New Poems.

[134] p. 258 Antonio came in ... with: "the day is splendid."

the three islands of the Sirens: cf. "The Isle of the Sirens"
("Die Insel der Sirenen," G.W. Ill, 123-124).

[135] p. 260 Rodin's comment: "Ah I never noticed."

[136] p, 260 Walter Gate: young German poet, who committed suicide
(1904) at 23. A collection of snort stories, poems, etc., was
published after his death (5th-6th printing, Berlin, 1920).

[139] p. 267 P.B.: Paula Becker.
[140] p. 267 the "Oceana" letter: see note to [131].
p. 268 Tante Gabriele; see note to [2].

391

p. 268 the new Rodin volume: the second part of the essay on
Rodin. The motto, "To work rests one," was not used.

[142] p. 271 a new book of poems: New Poems. Part I was published in
December, 1907, Part II in 1908.

[143] p. 271 Hugo von Hofmannsthal: (1874-1929), the Austrian poet.
The facsimile of this letter here reproduced is taken from
that in the First Edition of the Letters.

p. 272 your lecture: HofmannsthaFs lecture on the poet and our
time, "Der Dichter und diese Zeit," published in the Neue
Rundschau, March, 1907 (now in Die Beruhrung der
Sphdren, Berlin, 1931,42-71).

"The Rosebowl," "Alkestis": were published in Morgen
(July-December, 1907, No. 14, September 13, 1907; now
G.W. Ill, 110-113, 103-106; A.W. I, 188-190, 185-188), a
weekly for which Hofmannsthal acted as poetry editor
and to which he had asked Rilke to contribute.
Bte: Oskar Bie, writer on music, an editor of Fischer's Neue
Rundschau. For the poems he published see note to [133].

[144] p. 273 three poems as a sample: "The Carrousel," "Abisag," "The
Panther" (now G.W. Ill, 80-8 1, 17, 44; the first and last
also A.W. I, 173-174, 172) appeared in the Ins el- Almanack
auf das Jahr 1908, together with the essay on the Portuguese
nun's letters (cf. note to [117]).

Spanish madonna: Many figures in the pardon processions
Rilke had seen in Belgium were of seventeenth-century
Spanish origin.

Hofmannsthal: see [143] and notes.
[146] p. 275 Frau Nonna: see note to [85].
Londorf: see [85].

[147] P- 275 Ernst Nprlind: see note to [67]. In reply to a request that

he criticize a poem Norlind had written in German, Rilke

begins by commenting, in substance, that as the poem lacks

the feeling of the German language it can never really live,

p. 276 Bonnier: the Stockholm publisher.

[148] p. 277 a daily task: the translation of the Sonnets from the Portu-
guese of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on which Rilke had
worked with his hostess, Frau Faehndrich (Insel-Verlag,
1908; now G.W. VI, 5-50; A.W. II containing only nos.
6 35 39, 22). Cf. [74]. In 1912, Rilke still sees "no prospect
of learning English"!

39*

[149] P'*77 Gorky: see [126] and note.

[150] p. 278 Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski was preparing a lec-
ture on Rilke (delivered before the Literaturhistoriscbe
Gesellschaft of Bonn, July 6, 1907).

my having met the poet: Rilke had met Stefan George
(1868-1933) in Florence in April, 1898.

[151] p. 280 Carriere: see note to [45].

Dora: Dora Herxheimer (see note to [112]).

Colarossi's: atelier for art students in Paris.

Mathilde Vollmoeller: see note to [172].
[152] p. 280 Bagatelle Palace: in the Bois de Boulogne.

newly installed . . . collection: of modern French paint-
ings and drawings, collected by Etienne Moreau-Nelaton,
the painter (1855^- ), was given to the Louvre in 1907.

p. 281 Bernheim jeune: Paris art dealer.

Maillol: Aristide Maillol, the French sculptor (1861-1944).
Berthe Morisot: Manet's sister-in-law.
BashkirtsefF: see note to [23],

[153] p. 282 looking at the gazelles: cf. "The Gazelle" in New Poemt
(G.W. Ill, 45). Clara had modeled some gazelles while
staying at Al Hayat, a sanatorium in Heluan near Cairo,
during her trip to Egypt the preceding winter.

[154] p. 282 A student: cf. The Notebooks (G.W. V, 208-209; AW.
II, 147-149; The Journal, 167-168).

[156] p. 284 Tante Alia and the Countess: Frau Alice Faehndrich and
(presumably) her daughter, Countess Manon zu Solms-
Laubach.

p. 285 Mile de Lespinasse: Rilke was reading, "two or three each
day," the Letters (1809) of Julie de Lespinasse (1732-76),
at whose salon the Encyclopedists used to meet. Her an-
swer: "Paris is the place in the world where one can be
poor with the fewest privations; only bores and idiots need
to be rich."

[157] p. 287 "Alkestis": see note to [143].

The Rodin conversation: Clara had had a talk with Meier-
Graefe about Rodin, in which (as she remembered it) he
had said that Rodin's "always working" had led to a
broadening but not to a higher development of his art.

39J

[158] p. 288 Diriks: Carl Edvard Diriks.

My new book: New Poems, Part I.

[159] p. 288 the present lecture: While acting as his secretary, Rilke
made two tours lecturing on Rodin's work, the first to
Dresden and Prague, the second to Berlin, Hamburg, Bre-
men, and Weimar. The material as drawn up and presented
on these occasions he used for the second part of the book
on Rodin (cf. [32] and note).

[163] p. 290 the new book: New Poems, L The "Gazelle" was re-
tained (cf. [178]; also note to [153]). The "Marionette
Theater" has never been published.

[165] p. 291 Dr. Martin Zickel, the theatrical director, was at this time
in Breslau. We owe this letter to the kindness of Dr. Rich-
ard von Mises; the facsimile is from the autograph in his
collection. The letter concerns the Breslau evening de-
scribed in [188].

Baron von Gleichen-Russwurm: Alexander Freiherr von
Gleichen-Russwurm, a great-grandson of Schiller, shared
the evening with Rilke.

Daily Life: Das tagliche Leben, an early drama of Rilke's
in two acts, unsuccessfully performed at the Residenz-
Theater in Berlin in 1901, had had a friendly reception
at a special matinee performance in Breslau in May, 1907.

[166] p. 292 Sabatier's Saint Francis: Vie de Saint Francois (TAssise,
by Paul Sabatier (1894).

Li Tai Po: (701-762).

[167] p. 294 your little book: Schellenberg's Rainer Maria Rilke. Em
Essay (Beitrage zur Literaturgeschichte, Heft 35. Verlag
fur Literatur, Kunst und Musik, Leipzig, 1907).

[168] p. 294 Paul Zech: author of the first full-length work on Rilke,
Rainer Maria Rilke, der Mensch und das Werk (Wolfgang
Jess, Dresden, 1930), from which this letter is taken.

[170] p. 297 your new work: a school for little children.
[171] p. 297 Potin's: Potin, the Paris grocer.

p. 298 "Corrida": New Poems, G.W. Ill, 213-214.

[172] p. 298 Van Gogh portfolio: Mathilde'Vollmoeller, painter, sister
of the poet, had lent Rilke a portfolio of Van Gogh re-
productions which she had recently brought back with her
from Amsterdam.

394

p. 299 poverty ... a radiance: cf. the line "For poverty is a
great radiance from within . . ." from the Book of Hours
(G.W. II, 282; A.W. 1, 96) (See also [49] and note).

[173] p. 300 "Pages from a Stormy Night": G.W. II, 140-149.

This way there are two worlds: Rilke here wrote "zwei
Welt," apparently thinking this an expression of Jacobsen's.
It would appear, however, that Jacobsen merely used the
abbreviation To Verd. (in a letter to Edvard Brandes,
October 28, 1879) in referring to the title of his short story
To Verdener, much as if one wrote Two Wld. for
Tivo Worlds. Lydia Baer in her able article on Rilke and
Jens Peter Jacobsen (PMLA, LIV, 4, December, 1939)
bears out this view and explains how the misunderstanding
arose through the German translation (Reclam edition) in
which Rilke first read Jacobsen's stories.

little shops: cf. the Notebooks (G.W. V, 54-55; A.W. II,
40; The Journal, 41).

[175] p. 303 Titian (1477-1576); Tintoretto (1518-1594); Francesco
Guardi (1712-1793); Tiepolo (1696^-1770); Rosalba Gio-
vanna Camera (1675-1757).

p. 304 Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788); Peronnet (J. B.
Perronneau, 1715-1788); Chardin (1699-1779).

[176] p. 305 Pissaro: Camille Pissaro (1830-1903), French Impressionist
painter.

reporter of all these facts: femile Bernard, Souvenirs sur
Paul Cezanne, Paris, 1926 (cf. also Ambroise Vollard, Paul
Cezanne, Paris, 1915).

p. 306 Zola: femile Zola, the French novelist, a friend of Cezanne's
youth, had written about him in L'Oeuvre.

he screamed at a visitor: "work without bothering about
anybody and grow strong."

p. 307 plans: see note to [123].

he broke out: "Things are going badly . . . Life is fright-
ening!"

[177] p. 309 Mathilde Vollmoeller: see note to [172].

[178] p. 310 a part of the Book of Hours: the second part had been
written in Westerwede in 1901.

p. 3 1 1 the fragment on the Lonely: unpublished, probably among
the manuscripts lost or auctioned in Paris during the war.

395

p. 3ii the first proofs: of New Poems.

the "Gazelle'*: see [153], [163], and notes.

[179] p. 312 one hears them assert: "there is absolutely nothing, noth-
ing, nothing there."

[180] p. 313 the blue slips: the manuscript pages of New Poems.

Verlaine, who under "My Will" wrote: I give nothing to
the poor because I am myself a poor man.

[181] p. 314 "The Carcass": "Une Charogne," in Fleurs du Mai. Cf.
The Notebooks (G.W. V, 89; AW. II, 64; The Journal,
69).

p. 315 Saint- Julien-l'hospitalier: the legend of this title in Flau-
bert's Trois Contes (1877). Cf. The Notebooks (GW. V,
90; A.W. II, 64; The Journal, 69).

the death of the Chamberlain: in The Notebooks (GW.
V, 15-21; AW. II, 12-17; The Journal, 9-15).

Raskolnikov: the protagonist in Dostoievsky's Crime and
Punishment.

[182] p. 317 And in the last letter: "So I am continuing my studies."

the wish that was literally fulfilled: "I swore to die paint-
ing." Overtaken by a violent rainstorm while sketching,
Cezanne, carrying his heavy equipment, collapsed by the
roadside with a chill. He died a week later.

[184] p. 319 the self-portrait: The catalogue of the Salon d'Automne
of 1907 (which included the retrospective memorial ex-
hibition of Cezanne's works) lists a self-portrait from the
collection of Auguste Pellerin, Paris, and from Rilke's
description of the background this would appear to be No.
286 in Venturi's Catalogue raisonne of Cezanne's works,
from the 1873-76 period (not 1879 as suggested in the origi-
nal edition of the Letters, whose editors did not have access
to the Salon catalogue).

p. 320 in the very beautiful composition: The still life Rilke here
describes would appear to be "La Pendule noire" ("The
Black Clock"), 1869-71, at one time in the collection of
Baron Kohner in Budapest, now in that of Mr. Edward G.
Robinson, Hollywood (Venturi, No. 69).

[185] p. 321 my packing: Rilke was about to leave for a tour covering
Prague, Breslau, and Vienna, speaking again on Rodin and
also reading from his own poems.

p. 322 rue de PAbbe de 1'Epte: see note to [129],

[ 1 86] p. 3 2 2 The feeling Rilke here expresses about Prague reminds one
of a passage about Copenhagen in The Notebooks (G.W*
V, 189-190; A.W. II, 134-135; The Journal, 151-151).

[187] p. 323 Mr. Cherny: Rodin's secretary.

Heller, the bookdealer: see note to [190].

p. 324 the extract of my new Rodin work: from the second part
of the Rodin essay (see notes to [32] and [140], in Kunst
und Kunstler, Jahrg. VI, Heft I, October, 1907, pp. 28-39).

p. 325 Kamenitz an der Linde: see note to [44],
B. of P.: Book of Pictures.

Christine Brahe: from The Notebooks (G.W. V, 31-47;
A.W. II, 24-35; The Journal, 24-35).

"The Carrousel": see note to [144],

[188] p. 325 the Breslau evening: see [165] and note.

p. 326 Ivan the Terrible: in "The Czars," III, from the Book of
Pictures (G.W. II, 99; A.W. I, 124).

[189] p. 327 the death of Chamberlain Brigge: see note to [181].
Sidie Nadherny: Baroness Nadherny (see [187]).

[190] p. 328 Heller: Rilke had been invited by the bookdealer, Hugo
Heller the first in Vienna to arrange such lectures and
exhibitions to give a reading in the small room at the back
of the store.

It reads: "Come to see me when you are in Paris. So many
things, so many things. We have need of truth, of poetry,
both of us, and of friendship." Cf. [106] and note.

the story of Psyche: "it is the story that is so delightful of
woman and of her entrance into life ." In a letter to
Rodin of this same date, Rilke wrote: "I am approaching
the same subject from afar having recently done some
small things on the Portuguese Nun ... on Duse, on
Madame de Noailles. ... I am not sufficiently advanced
to dare go further. I shall do so some day."

The essay: (the extract alluded to in [187] and note) "your
essay ... I find it in truth very beautiful."

Hofmannsthal: Rilke met Hofmannsthal for the first time
on this visit to Vienna.

397

[191] p. 329 chez

: Mile Romanelli: Rilke was staying at the Romanelli's.
His letters to Signorina Romanelli have been published
by Aeschlimann, Milan, but because of wartime conditions
have not yet reached this country.

This Venice: As a young man Rilke had found Venice the
"strangest of all wonders. . , . Venice! I gaze and gaze
and am like a child. Am in accord with everything." (Post-
card to Wilhelm von Scholz, March 30, 1897.)

[192] p. 329 From the end of November, when he left Venice, until
the middle of February, 1908, Rilke was in Oberneuland
with his family; after which he moved about, visiting
friends Berlin, Rome, Naples, Capri, Florence not re-
turning to Paris, or to any kind or sustained work, until
May, 1908.

this incongruous event: the occasion of this letter was the
death of Frau Faehndrich, the sister of Countess Schwerin.
Countess Schwerin . . . and my father: both had died in
1906, in February and March respectively.

C ! 93l P- 33 * On September first Rilke had moved into the Hotel de
Biron at 77 rue de Varenne, into Clara's temporarily vacant
studio from which, on her return, he moved to other rooms
in the same building. A little later Rodin also set up a studio
there, at Rilke's suggestion. It is now the Musee Rodin.
Among other occupants were the actor de Max, the writer
Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan, who used one of the
rooms for dance rehearsals.

p. 332 the Nun: the Portuguese Nun (see [117] and note).

Count de Chamilly: see note to [117].
p. 333 and said: It is Rodin carrying his work, which grows

heavier and heavier, but which holds the world.

plans: see note to [ 1 2 3 ] .

[194] p. 335 Goethe's Correspondence with a Child: a remarkable book
of letters, reminiscences, and hymns to Goethe, by Bettina
(Brentano) von Arnim (1785-1859).

Make Laurids: cf. The Notebooks (G.W. V, 239-241;
A.W. II, 170-171; The Journal, 192-194).
Buddha must wait: see note to [195],

p. 336 The Discourses: The Discourses of Gautama Buddha.
With her friend Anna Jaenecke, Clara was reading Karl
Eugen Neumann's translation (Munich, 1907), which she
had sent Rilke.

398

[196] p. 338 your dear aunt: Baroness Schenck zu Schweinsberg, whom
Rilke had met on Capri, was a niece of Frau Faehndrich.
Cf. [192].

[197] p. 340 Weisser Hirsch: Rilke had taken the cure here in 1905.

Green Vault: famous collection of jewels and objets d'art
in Dresden.

Rosalba Camera: cf. [175] and note.

[198] p. 341 The "View of Toledo" by El Greco which Rilke describes
is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

[201] p. 344 Anton Kippenberg: director of the Insel-Verlag and
Rilke's publisher. (This letter is taken from B.V.)

this work: The Notebooks of Malte t^aurids Brigge (cf.
notes to [47], [61], [100]). <

[202] p. 345 Hugo Heller: cf. [190], We are indebted to Dr. Richard
von Mises for a copy of this letter (firsi: published in the
Berliner Tageblatt, no. 563, Friday, November 29, 1929).

the "Requiem": see note to [17]. \

you too recognized: Heller's first wife, also a painter, had
died in childbirth.

[204] p. 346 Jakob Baron Uexkiill: see note to [108].

[205] p. 348 Lizzie Gibson: Rilke's hostess at Furuborg, Jonsered, in
Sweden, in 1904. \

[206] p. 351 The Marquise: later the Duchesse de Choiseul, an Ameri-
can woman who at this time had a great influence on Rodin.

(said Rodin): "opens and shuts the harmony\ tap." . . .
"Rilke says: it is as wide as silence; that's true . \ ."

[208] p. 357 he said: "Theosophy is an eater of men" ... \

[209] p. 358 Georg Brandes: (1842-1927), the Danish litera\ry critic,
whom Rilke had met in Scandinavia. \

Rodenbach: Georges Rodenbach (cf. note to [IIQ]).

[210] p. 359 The long work period in Paris had ended, its frui v cs New
Poe?ns 11 and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids klrigge.
Rilke had been visiting his publisher in Leipzig, busV with
the dictation of the manuscript of the latter. He wai* now
under way again, beginning with a month's sojourn in
Rome. (This letter is taken from B.V.)

399

p. 360 the fool of Charles the Bold: cf. The Notebooks (G.W.
V, 228-232; AW. II," 162-163; The Journal, 183-186).

[211] p. 362 Countess Julie Reventlow: cf. The Notebooks (G.W. V t
183, 289; A.W. II, 130, 205; The Journal, 147, 234).

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

(The numbers refer to the Letters)

Andreas-Salome, Lou, 14, 47, 49, 50, 51,

5*. 53. 54. 57. 5 8 59. <$i <*4 73. 77.
81, 205

Bauschinger, Dr. Julius, 3

Becker, Paula, tee Modersohn-Becker,

Paula

Bodman, Emanuel von, 24
Bonz, Adolf, 9
Brandes, Georg, 209
Billow, Frieda von, 8, 10, 1 1, 20

David-Rhonfeld, Valery, 2
Du Prel, Karl Baron, 6

Fischer, S., 101

Ganghofer, Ludwig, 7
Gneisenau, Countess Mary, 117, 120,
127

Heller, Hugo, 202

Heydt, Elisabeth von der, 103, 126, 133

Heydt, Karl von der, 90, 99, 100, 116,

118, 126, 149, 203
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 143
Holitscher, Arthur, 33, 55, 74, 93
Holmstrom, Tora, 70, 76, 145
Huch, Friedrich, 32, 43

Kanitz-Menar, Countess Lili, 192, 200
Keim, Franz, i

Key, Ellen, 44, 48, 56, 60, 63, 107, 121
Kippenberg, Anton, 201, 210

Modersohn, Otto, 19, 41
Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 17, 21, 23,
27, 141

Nordeck zur Rabenau, Julie Baroness
von, 155, 164, 170

Nordeck zur Rabenau, Marietta Bar-
oness von, 212

Norlind, Ernst, 147

Oppeln-Bronikowski, Friedrich von,
150

Pauli, Gustav, 26

Reventlow, Countess Franziska, 28

Rilke, Clara, 16, 18, 22, 30, 35, 36, 37,

39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,

71, 72, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89,

91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105,

109, 1 10, III, 112, 113, 114, 115, 122,

123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132,

! 34. 135. *37 138, 139. MO. 14*. *44.
146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158,
159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 169, 171,

*7 2 73. 174. '75* 17 6 177. 17 8 *79.
180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189,
190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198
Rodin, Auguste, 34, 38, 106, 198, 199

Schellenberg, Ernst Ludwig, 167
Schenck zu Schweinsberg, Baroness

Elisabeth, 196, 207
Schill, Sofia Nikolaevna, 12, 13, 15
Schobloch, Frau Rosa, 197
Schwerin, Countess Luise, 82, 87
Solms-Laubach, Countess Manon zu,

211

Uexkiill, Baroness Gudrun, 108, 119,

136, 148
Uexkiill, Baron Jakob, 204

W., Herr von, 183
Weinmann, Frau Julie, 31
Westhoff , Clara, see Rilke, Qara
Westhoff, Friedrich, 62
Westhoff, Helmuth, 25
Wildberg, H, von Dickinson, 4, 5

Young Girl, to a, 79

Zech, Paul, 168
Zickel, Dr. Martin, 165
Zwintscher, Oskar, 29