LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

future than before.—Only, those are sensations that cannot be
lived on. Marriage is above all a new task and a new seriousness,
—a new demand and question for the strength and goodness of
both the people concerned and a great new danger for both.

“The aim of marriage, as I feel it, is not by means of demolition
and overthrowing of all boundaries to create a hasty communion,
the good marriage is rather one in which each appoints the other
as guardian of his solitude and shews him this greatest trust that
he has to confer. A togetherness of two human beings is an
impossibility and, where it does seem to exist, a limitation, a
mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides of their
fullest freedom and development.

“But granted the consciousness that even between the closest
people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by
side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse
between them, which gives them the possibility of secing one
another in whole shape and before a great sky ! (Letters 1899~
1902, pp. 107-8).

NoOTE 20, PAGE 34

Rilke’s chief contacts with the New Woman movement were
through Ellen Key (1849-1926), the celebrated Swedish feminist,
educationalist and reformer, widely known, with a mixture of
affection and derision, as ““Europe’s Auntie”. In his twenties
Rilke had held the view—always a convenient one for a man
who does not want to have to bother about women’s rights—
that women need not be concerned with art since children were
their creative work. As Nietzsche’s influence upon him waned,
he became sympathetic and concerned about the development
of woman as a social being, as this letter to Kappus shews. He
was already in correspondence with Ellen Key, who gave ful-
some lectures on a wide scale about the poet and his work,
and was so enthusiastic a reader of the Stories of God that he
dedicated the second issue of the book to her. She was a large-
hearted (and rather soft-headed) woman, full of sentimentality
and eager to ““manage” and improve people. Her views and her
social writings are today as old-fashioned as those of H. G. Wells ;
but though she may be laughed at by a generation which finds

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