RAINER MARIA RILKE

and lift you up ; a feeling is impure which takes hold of only one
side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you could
think in the light of your childhood is good. Everything which
makes more of you than you have previously been in your best
hours, is right. Every exaltation is good if it is in your whole
blood, if it is not intoxication or turbidness, but joy into whose
depths you can see. Do you understand what I mean :

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it.
It must become aware, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever
it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly,
demand proofs from it, test it, and you will perhaps find it
helpless and nonplussed, perhaps also aggressive. But do not
give way, demand arguments and conduct yourself thus care-
fully and consistently every single time, and the day will dawn
when it will become, instead of a subverter, one of your best
workmen,—perhaps the cleverest of all who are building at
your life. ;

That is all, dear Herr Kappus, that I am able to say to you
today. But I am sending you by the same post the off-print
of a little composition 22 which has just appeared in the Prague
Deutsche Arbeit. There I speak to you further of life and of death,
and of the greatness and splendour of both.

Yours :
RAINER MARIA RILKE.

X

Paris,* the second day of Christmas 1908.

You must know, dear Herr Kappus, how glad I was to have
that beautiful letter from you. The news which you give me,
real and expressible as it now again is, seems to me good, and
the longer I have considered it, the more I have felt that it is

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