RAINER MARIA RILKE

(Letters 1902-1906, p. 131). It was not the only queer habitation
that the poet was to know, until his death in a tiny Swiss castle.
Clara, whom Rodin had advised to study in Rome, had lodgings
and a studio in the same gardens, and the two occasionally met.
Rilke later referred to himself as having been “alone, with no
one in the neighbourhood but my wife, who was also working,
so that we didn’t see each other as often as once a day, and yet
were helping one another”” (Letters 1902-1906, pp. 308-9).

NOTE 15, PAGE 27

Rilke had written of Jacobsen that he “had no experience, no
love, no adventure and no wisdom, only a childhood. A great,
immensely coloured childhood in which he found everything
that his soul needed in order to disguise itself fantastically”’
(Journal Sept. 29th 1900).

NOTE 16, PAGE 28

Perhaps Thing should carry a capital letter, for it meant to
Rilke much more than an object. A full exegesis is impossible
here ; it must be sufficient to say that Dinge have a long and
respectable ancestry in German literature, as indeed in European
philosophy generally. This notion of the visible as somehow a
paradigm of the invisible is as old as Plato, though Rilke would
have energetically repudiated any form of philosophical idealism,
in which he was as little interested, and as ill read, as Goethe.
(Purely as an artist, it appears that he never appreciated that
greatest of Germans—he himself said that he “lacked the
receptive organ for Goethe”, and, incredible as it may seem, he
had never read Faust, though he came to understand and revere
the hieratic art of one who is at least Goethe’s peer, and possibly
his superior, simply as a poet—Friedrich Hélderlin, whom oddly
he did not discover till his fortieth year.) One of the letters from
Rome runs : *“You know what the presence of things says to me ;
and I am the whole day in conversation with things. . . . My
practice of seeing and reading from things as they are, my faith-
fulness in letting my eyes be my light, my total repudiation of

all pretension, are standing me in good stead once again. . . s
This was written not by Rilke, but by Goethe more than a

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