.

RAINER MARIA- RILKE

and it was all true of me, word for word” (Letters 1902-1906,
p. 98). He had a lifelong horror of machines ; he found railway
tunnels “agonizing” and had a “deep dread of enormous
towns”’. He often longed for Russia, which Maurice Baring
somewhere sums up as “a plain, a church and a mill”. Years
afterwards his horror was distilled in the alembic of Malte
Laurids Brigge into descriptions of disease, abjectness, and violence
that have their only parallel in the depths of Dostoevsky. He
had been in Paris for some five months when the correspondence
with Kappus begins, and the young man may now be left to
introduce the letters in his own modest fashion.