RAINER MARIA RILKE

We are really only just beginning to regard the relationship of
a human individual to another individual dispassionately and
objectively, and our attempts to live such a relationship have no
pattern before them. And yet in the passage of time there are

'now several things that are ready to help our shy novitiate.

The girl and the woman in their new, individual unfolding
will be only transient imitators of bad or good masculine
behaviour, and repeaters of masculine professions. After the
uncertainty of such transitions it will be seen that women have
passed through the exuberance and vicissitudes of those (often
ridiculous) disguises, only in order to purify their most essential
being from the distorting influences of the other sex. Surely
women, in whom life tarries and dwells more immediately,
fruitfully and confidently, must have become fundamentally
more mature human beings, more human human beings, than
light man, whom the weight of no body’s fruit pulls down
beneath the surface of life, who, conceited and rash as he is,
underrates what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman,
brought forth in pains and degradations, will come to light when
she has shed the conventions of mere femininity in the altera-
tions of her outward station, and the men who today do not
feel it coming will be surprised and struck by it. One day (for
this there are already reliable signs speaking and shining,
especially in the northern countries ), one day the girl will be
here and the woman whose name will no longer signify merely
the opposite of masculinity, but something in itself, something
which makes us think of no complement or limitation, but only
of life and existence,— : the feminine human being.

This step forward will (very much against the wishes of out-
stripped man to begin with) change the love experience that
now is full of error, alter it fundamentally, refashion it into a
relationship meant to be between one human being and another,
no longer between man and wife. And this more human love
(which will consummate itself infinitely thoughtfully and
gently, and well and clearly in binding and loosing) will be

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