R ——

RAINER MARIA RILKE

 

and nourished on sensuous emotionalism, and his battle-cry (if
one can speak of anything so energetic and direct as a battle in
connection with this subtle, world-weary, gently ironical writer)
—his challenge “There is no God, and Man is his prophet”
naturally endeared him to the rebellious young, and the book
became the Bible of the growing poets and painters of the day.
As a piece of literary history it is certainly important, and a critic
so little schwarmerisch as Tbsen solemnly declared it to be the best
book of the century. Jacobsen died in his native town at the age
of thirty-eight, just as little René Rilke was being sent off to
school.

It was the novelist Jakob Wassermann who first recommended
Jacobsen to the poet, then in his early twenties, and the effect on
him was immediate, profound, and lasting. He read the novels
and tales in German translation, and his prose style clearly owes
much to his literary idol. But it was not only the fastidious choice
of words and the artistic purity and integrity of the Danish writer
that appealed to Rilke; it was not only that the two men were
trying to solve the same aesthetic problem—the combination of
accurate, objective, almost plastic solidity of description with
complete freedom from the clichés of conventional realism ; the
germs of some of Rilke’s most important ideas are to be found
in Jacobsen’s books, in particular those of solitude and of
“personal” death (though Lou Andreas-Salomé, in her memoir
of Rilke, maintains that it was the death by apoplexy of an uncle
that gave rise to his “childish fantasy” of the private death).
Just before she died, Maria Grubbe had said that “everyone lives
his own life and dies his own death” ; and the concluding words
of Niels Lyhne are “at last he died his death, his difficult death”—
a phrase which bore fruit in the superb deathbed description at
the beginning of Malte Laurids Brigge.

It is impossible to regard Rilke’s estimate of Jacobsen to young
Kappus as a balanced literary judgment: Jacobsen’s talent was
real, but not finally important. Yet it was of seminal importance
for Rilke himself, and for his artistic development ; nor was it a
transient enthusiasm—fifteen years later we find him recom-
mending Niels Lyhne to correspondents, known and unknown,
with the warmth of his approval undiminished. Jacobsen was a

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