LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET %

begins to make himself heard ; various early dramas, stories and
sketches, some of these last being of a gothically grisly character ;
and he had written, in a single night, a piece which was to
become his Rachmaninoff C minor Prelude—his famous prose-
poem Cornet.

Before 1903, when young Kappus first wrote to him, Rilke
had been subjected to three further influences which were of
decisive importance for his life : Russia, Worpswede, and Rodin.
Russia was incomparably the most important : it was then that
solitude took on a new and deeper meaning for him, and there
that he discovered the Neighbour God. He learnt enough of the
language to translate Chekhov and Lermontov, and ever after-
wards regarded that “remote and sorrowful land”, with
apparent velleity, as his spiritual home. At Worpswede, an
artists’ colony near Bremen, he met the “fair-haired painter”
Paula Becker, who inspired the most splendid of his Reguiems,
and the sculptor Clara Westhof, a pupil of Rodin’s, whom he
married in 1901, and with whom he settled down to love (and
work) in a cottage. But this idyll did not last long : when their
daughter was only six months old, Rilke’s allowance from his
father suddenly ceased, and he moved to Paris (where Clara
later joined him), with a commission to write a monograph on
Rodin. He had now published his Stories of God, obviously
conceived in Russia, subtle-simple tales told with a humour that
occasionally borders on archness ; his Book of Images, containing
some of his best lyrics, in which his own poetic voice is unmis-
takable all through ; and he had written the first two parts of his
Book of Hours, the Book of Monkish Life and the Book of Pilgrimage,
a catena of meditative poems of great power and beauty about the
meaning and the longing of man for God, and of God for man.

He fell heavily under the spell of Rodin ; but Paris appalled
and terrified him. After the spaciousness and peace of “holy
Russia”, the solemn talk of Art at Worpswede, and the months
of quiet living in his Westerwede cottage, the noise and squalor
and cruelty of a great town were torture to him. Writing a little
later to Lou Andreas-Salomé, he compared it to the Military
Academy—and he could not say worse than that. ““Often before
going to sleep I read the thirtieth chapter of the Book of Job,

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