[ &
i
i
i

 

RAINER MARIA RILKE

perhaps a degree of self-accusation. Rilke had no Faustina to
teach him what Goethe had learnt in Rome ; he could love in
a complicated way, but not simply or spontaneously. It is not
the inadequacy of mankind, but of man, for love that Rilke
laments. In Malte Laurids Brigge he says of women that “they
have for centuries undertaken the whole of love, they have
always played the whole dialogue, both parts. For man has only
repeated their lines, and badly. . . . But now that so much is
changing, is it not for us to change ourselves : Could we not try
to develop ourselves a little, and take upon ourselves slowly, bit
by bit, our share of work in love: . . . We are spoiled by easy
enjoyment like all dilettanti. . . .” He felt keenly the frustration
of “never being one with the beloved”. The cry from one of his
letters : “How is it possible to live, when the very elements of
this life are completely incomprehensible to us: When con-
tinually we are inadequate in loving, uncertain in resolution, and
incapable of facing death, how is it possible to exist 2’ (Letters
1914-1921, p. 86) is surely one of the most despairing to come
from any poet since the terrible epigrams of Palladas. Rilke has
been held to be a fine interpreter of woman’s love ; it certainly
fascinated him, as his translations from Louize Labé and Elizabeth
Browning shew. He had a profoundly sacramental view of
bodily delight, as one more means of that “ transforming™ which
he held to be the highest task of man. He could never rest content
with what he felt to be a mere succedaneum, the apprentice-work
of passion. Like D. H. Lawrence he hymned the body, and like
him he was always disappointed. It will be fitting to close this
note with something that he wrote a few months after he had
married Clara Westhoff. “I am of opinion that ‘marriage’ as
such does not deserve so much emphasis as has fallen to it through
the conventional development of its nature. It nevers enters any-
one’s mind to demand of an individual that he be‘happy’,—but
when a man marries, people are much astonished if he is not!
(And besides, it is really not at all important to be happy, either
as individual or as married man.) Marriage is in many points a
simplification of the circumstances of life, and the joining
together naturally adds up the strengths and wills of two young
people so that they seem when united to stretch further into the

62