RAINER MARIA RILKE

   
   
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
 

almost nothing of its art, none of its poets ; and I picture London
as something quite excruciating”’—as well he might if he knew
the descriptions of it in Heine and Dostoevsky (Letter to A.
Holitscher August 1904). He did, indeed, pick up some English
on a visit to Capri in 1907, and even translated the Sonnets from
the Portuguese with the help of a prose crib. But the poet who did
not know Faust did not know Hamlet either (even in German).
He later told his French translator that he had “learnt in a few
months enough English to read Keats and Browning. But dis-
appointed by these poets, he experienced at the same time such
a revulsion against England and the English language that he
forgot almost as rapidly all that he had just assimilated. He had
realized that England was outside the magic circle of his experi-
ence and the possibilities of his nature. His memory thereafter
rejected all that it had gathered, as if it had never existed”
(M. Betz : Rilke Vivant, p. 56). If England was no good, America
was worse ; even the Things that “came crowding in” from
there were etiolated, out-at-elbows and fake.

NOTE 25, PAGE 44

But he did, after all, end up there: the Dichter became an
Unterhaltungsschriftsteller. As he hints in his introduction, Kappus
later worked his way into the world of writing, and became the
author of cheap popular novels, many of which are published
by the Berlin firm of Ullstein. The Man with Two Souls, Martina
and the Dancer, The Artist's Wife, will serve as specimen titles.