Hermann Hesse : Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

Hermann Hesse

My Belief, Essays on Life and Art

Rainer Maria Rilke

1928

THE LITTLE COMMUNITY of German poetry Rilke’s death was the setting of a star, one of the few that still remained in the cloudy skies of this time.

Now that his collected works have appeared, the reader of these works experiences as he leafs through them, searching for favorites with joy and melancholy, a ghostly repetition: he opens volume after volume and finds all the phases and stages in which he knew and loved and kept company with this poet through the decades, often without being able to tell whether the phases and developments were in his own (the reader’s) life or in that of the poet. Often Rilke seemed to change for those who read him over a long period, often he seemed to shed his skin, at times to wear a mask. Now the collected works show an amazingly unified picture. The faithfulness of the poet to his own essential being is far greater, that essential being is far stronger, than what we once called his versatility or even his changeableness.

We pick up volume after volume, turn the pages, humming to ourselves the opening words of beloved poems, first from one and then from another, begin to search out special favorites and lose ourselves again in the wide bright forest of these poems. And in each volume we find imperishable poems that have stood the: test of time, among the very earliest, hesitant works no less than among the latest. In the first volume we rediscover those lovely tones that so gently and deeply entranced us thirty years ago, those quiet simple verses full of astonishment and tremulousness of soul, such verses as:

Mich ruhrt so sehr

boéhmischen Volkes Weise,

schleicht sie ins Herz sich leise,

macht sie es schwer . . .

Songs of the Bohemian folk

Touch me so deeply —

Slipping in silence into my heart,

Make my heart heavy . . .

and the poems of Advent. In the second volume the Book of Pictures reminds us of the powerful impression of correctitude and formal power it once made on us, and we linger for a long time over the Book of Hours, which once was our favorite and that of the girls we knew. In the third volume, the last of the volumes of poetry, is unfurled the classical piety of the New Poems, and in the Duino Elegies the summit of his work is attained. Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry to this point and to Orpheus, remarkable how this poet so consistently begins with what is simplest and as his language grows, as his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.

The two following volumes contain the prose writings, among them that favorite, unforgettable Malte Laurids Brigge. When one considers that this book was published almost | twenty years ago and though not entirely unknown, of course, has nevertheless remained in the shadows, while in the meantime dozens of perishable, fast-blooming, fast-fading successes of our so very hectic and ill-begotten prose fiction have paraded past! Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge remains as splendid as on the first day.

The translations occupy the final volume of the works, and here once more all the poet’s great virtues are displayed: his mastery of form, his certain instinct in selection, and his persistence in the pursuit of complete understanding. Gems like the translation of Guérin’s Centaur are there, André Gide’s Return of the Prodigal Son and Paul Valéry’s poems. And one remembers how his love of Paris and of the French language, together with the suffering he felt from the degradation of the German tongue and the slovenliness of German linguistic usage, even induced the poet in his last years to pay active court to that beloved language and to write French poems.

1927

When the poet Rilke died a few months ago one could tell clearly enough from the attitude of the intellectual world — partly from its silence but even more from what was said — how in our time the poet as the purest type of the inspired human being caught between the mechanical world and the world of intellectual industriousness, is forced as it were into an airless room and condemned to suffocate.

We have no right to denounce the times on this account. These times are no worse and no better than other times. They are heaven for him who shares their goals and ideals, and hell for him who rebeis against them. Now since the poet, if he wishes to be true to his heritage and calling, dare not commit himself either to the success-mad world where lives are dominated by industry and organization, or to the world of rationalized spirituality which seems on the whole to dominate our universities, but since it is the poet’s single duty and mission to be the servant, knight, and advocate of the soul, he sees himself at the present world-instant condemned to a loneliness and suffering that is not every man’s affair.

We all guard ourselves against suffering, each of us would like to receive a little kindness and warmth from the world and would like to see himself understood and supported by those around him. So we observe the majority of our presentday poets (their number is small in any case) in one way or another adapting themselves to the time and its spirit, and it is just these poets who meet with the greatest superficial success. On the other hand, others fall silent and come to destruction in the airless space of this hell.

Still others, however — Rilke belongs among them — take the suffering upon themselves, subject themselves to fate and do not rebel when they see that the crown that other times bestowed on poets has today become a crown of thorns. My love belongs to these poets, I honor them, I would like to be their brother. We suffer but not in order to protest or to curse. We suffocate in the for us unbreathable air of the world of machines and barbaric necessities that surround us, but we do not separate ourselves from the whole, we accept this suffering and suffocation as our part of the world fate, as our mission, as our trial. We believe in none of the ideals of this time, not that of the dictators, nor that of the bolsheviks, not that of the professors, nor that of the industrialists. But we believe that man is immortal and that his image can emerge again, healed of every distortion, freed from every hell. We believe in the soul whose rights and needs, however long and harshly suppressed, can never die. We do not seek to enlighten our time, or to improve it, or to instruct it, but by revealing to it our own suffering and our own dreams we try to open to it again and again the world of images, the world of the soul, the world of experience. These dreams are in part evil dreams of anxiety, these images are in part cruel horror pictures — we dare not embellish them, we dare not disown them. We dare not hide the fact that the soul of mankind is in danger and close to the abyss. But we dare not conceal either that we believe in its immortality.