Rainer Maria Rilke

His Life and Work

F. W. van Heerikhuizen, Fernand Renier, Anne Cliff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000760149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie europee

Originally published in English in 1951, this biography of one of Germany's foremost mystical poets dis-proves many of the myths surrounding Rainer Maria Rilke and examines his life and work from social, historical and psychological perspectives, while all the time referencing Rilke's works to his complex personality. The legacy of his work on younger generations is also examined. All German prose quotations have been translated into English for this edition, existing translations used for the German poetry.

I

TIME

THE nineteenth century, shortly characterized, can be seen as a time of shattered structures, of centrifugal forces, of sharp contrasts in immediate juxtaposition. The various parts of mental and spiritual life that had, until the nineteenth century, been united in one, even if weakening tradition, now began to diverge, to become independent of one another; and each in its own field faced so glorious and yet so formidable an expansion that it was no longer possible for workers in one field to follow developments in others. This expansion was peculiarly glorious in that its possibilities seemed infinite, surpassing all hitherto known forms of adventure; and peculiarly formidable because bridges had to be burnt, the human personality in its ancient harmonious conception to be discarded, and a complete surrender made to the immense richness of the fields of knowledge that were being explored.

The loss of the conception of personality as the centre of the universal forces from which the universe itself was governed presents the psychological aspect of the loss of the traditional world picture, an aspect which exercised great influence on the character of the new world pictures that were in process of formation. Because of this loss, the new pictures were coloured with an extreme optimism or an extreme pessimism, an undue exaggeration of the possibilities inherent in the liberation of mankind, or an equally exaggerated under-estimation of these possibilities. And often these views were held simultaneously, for extremes are mysteriously linked and tend to swing from one to the other with no diminution of their contrasts.

From the middle of the century, the materialistic or positivistic trend, which derived mind from matter and hence led in the direction of a levelling under-estimation of the mind, increasingly prevailed. Visible and tangible reality was proclaimed the basis of all knowledge; metaphysics, springing either from tradition or from individual intuition, were contemptuously labelled fantasies. Man was reduced to a chemical preparation or at least to a predestined product of race, family and social milieu. Followed to its logical conclusion, this total denial of human self-determination led to a weakening of volitional life and on to pessimism, and these were indeed fairly widespread phenomena in intellectual circles. The men of action, the capitalists and industrialists, had, however, left all thought, other than the practical, wholly to others; they rapidly lost their gloomy fears in the intoxication of life, their will-power, rooted in action, giving them a relatively steadier balance. At most, the pessimistic conception of life found with them an outlet in the cynicism with which they warded off social demands; what they regarded as the free play of social forces must be left to run its course and their egocentric claim demanding everything for themselves was accompanied by a scarcely perceived but nevertheless considerable narrowing of individual will-power.

In general, material prosperity was visibly increasing. Technology was making life more and more comfortable as new possibilities were constantly being discovered. The mass of the bourgeoisie was therefore inclined to optimism, to a belief in progress. Admittedly, former fears and speculations still abounded, especially in religious circles and among those who, independent in the past, had now become dependent, but their influence was weaker than it had been in former times when protests against the rising spirit of the age had still been able to affect public opinion. Simultaneously protests were being made by two groups which themselves represented aspects of the spirit of the age: the philosophers and, above all, the artists. Theirs was an ineffectual protest, however, for, whereas in the social sphere, in customs, in architecture, domestic organization and dress, all style was either lost or threatened with extinction, man’s aesthetic sense was being offered a wealth of new perspectives, surrender to which involved estrangement from all that was rooted in the past. The delicacy of senses and nerves was constantly jarred by the ugliness of the coarsening world, leading both to protests and to a more passionate surrender to an isolated enjoyment of life.

The society that was meanwhile coming into being had the aspect of a fairy-tale—a materialistic fairy-tale—with uncharted boundaries, demanding multifold knowledge and adaptational forms, hitherto unnecessary and therefore unknown. Education was also, for the same reasons, undergoing a revolution; instead of the solid and relatively few truths adequate for the past, so great a mass of facts was now confronting students that few were able to digest it. Specialization supervened as a means of self-preservation as soon as the more elementary examinations had been passed. The exact sciences on which attention was mainly focussed on the plea that they were the more useful were losing all living contact with the unity of mental life.

The men of action welcomed the technical intellect, seeing in it infinite possibilities of expansion; the technicians, by delivering themselves without volition into the hands of the men of action, divorced themselves from a more general culture, for the men who held the practical leadership were cultural barbarians, concentrating all their attention on technical progress and the amassing of money. Any other longings that still lingered in their souls found an outlet only in a discontent alternating between an inflamed lust for work and a craving for superficial pleasures with which to provide a rationalized food for the soul, and, occasionally, with an idealism that appeared strained and feverish (Nobel and Carnegie). The great mass, in so far as it was not still guided by tradition, followed these leaders at a distance. The colourless detritus of culture with which the powerful attempted to conceal the deadliness of their purpose could be found, in a humbler form and often cherished with a vague affection, among the smaller bourgeoisie.

The growth of the exact sciences was undoubtedly startling, nor did the social sciences and theology escape transformation. Linguistics, history and ethnography had amassed an enormous number of new facts, of new viewpoints that overwhelmed the comparatively static and surveyable picture held until the end of the eighteenth century. The natural respect in which antiquity and the Bible had hitherto been held was lessening; each had been critically analysed and compared with other newly discovered phenomena and the former was no longer regarded as the authoritative source of wisdom nor the latter as divine inspiration.

An arbitrary human intuition and an intellect that was becoming equally arbitrary were everywhere gaining ground; from the middle of the century, however, the intellect gathered strength and purposefully tore away the connotations of intuitive perception, while intuition tended more and more to eschew all connotations as too restrictive and to diverge ever further from reality. For those in the stream of the modern movement, the religious life tended to become either subjective and unstable or, more usually, to be repudiated altogether. Men lived so much in the world of visible progress that for the time being they needed nothing else. He who wanted more was classed as a dreamer and for dreamers there was no place in society.

This dichotomy, fostering practical men on the one hand and on the other dreamers, entailed the complete undermining of the old style of life and of the firm wholeness of character. Life was no longer governed by the irrefutable doctrine of Christianity, reinforced, as it had been, by the simple and matter-of-fact ethics of the Ancients. Mankind was discovering ever more fantastic norms; desires, regarded as ordinary in the past, were now acquiring enchanting hues. In so far as men were not engulfed by the materialistic pursuit of money and work, they became ‘independent’, ‘deep’, ‘demoniac’ and ‘nervous’.

History was no longer a didactic and naively viewed series of pictures. It had expanded into an unlimited profusion of periods, civilizations, causes and effects, an endless sequence of merging scenes that stimulated the imagination, a provocative wealth replacing the loss of tradition in modern society. Its educative force, its kinship with the contemporary world of action, was lost; it was either harshly denied, intellectually analysed or directed away from reality into a world of imaginative fancy. In his Of the Advantage and Disadvantage of History to Life (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), Nietzsche clearly sets forth the disadvantages of this increase in knowledge: ‘‘Historical knowledge pours over him from sources that are inexhaustible, strange incoherencies merge, memory throws open its gates yet never wide enough, nature occupies herself in receiving all foreign guests, in honouring them and assigning them their places. But they are at war with each other: violent measures seem necessary in order to escape one’s own destruction.

Gradually habituation to this irregular and stormy home-life becomes second nature, though this second nature is unquestionably weaker, more restless, more radically unsound than the first. Modern man carries within him an enormous number of indigestible knowledge-stones that occasionally rattle together in his body, as the fairy-tale puts it. And the rattle signifies the most striking characteristic of this modern man, the opposition of something within him to which nothing external corresponds; and the reverse. The ancient nations knew nothing of this. Knowledge, taken in excess without hunger, even contrary to desire, no longer has the effect of transforming the external life; and remains hidden in a chaotic inner world that modern man takes a curious pride in calling his ‘real personality’.”

This contrast between the inner and the outer life was a marked characteristic of the divided state of the times, a division that found expression in many changing forms. The contrast was apparent both in the lives of individuals and in the great social cleavage between the technological-materialistic and the spiritual life.

Against the one-sided extrovert attitude of the leaders of the material world stood the equally one-sided introvert attitude of the cultural group. Although a certain contrast between thought and action had been discernible at a much earlier date in European culture, in former times there had nevertheless been a marked reciprocal flow between the two, and the profound and tragical cleavage that occurred during the nineteenth century was a new phenomenon. The mental life was contemptuously left to the intellectuals, among whom only the technicians were useful to the men of action; the other intellectuals found themselves confronted with such an overwhelming mass of new facts and new sensations that even amongst them specialization became a necessity. On the one hand, knowledge was pursued for the sake of knowledge, viz., in absolute science, which, by sub-division into innumerable minor fields as well as into spiritual findings, was often lost among the welter of facts; on the other hand, feeling was pursued for the sake of feeling: art for art, a surrender to the newly discovered wealth of intuitive feelings and images. Estranged from social reality, the non-technical intellectuals split up into sharply distinct and mutually hostile major groups composed of fanatical adherents of knowledge on the one side and of feeling on the other, and each of these major groups divided into countless sub-groups. In art, every artist became a law unto himself, a monad. Hence, with regard to modern art, and especially to literature, attempts to show the development of art as a whole and as linked with other fields, were considered heretical. Opposed to this was a ‘scientific’ group which had selected this terrain for its field work and which operated with ‘influences’ and with ‘groups’; although successful attempts to overcome this bias were made, its pertinacity and the causes which gave it rise must not be under-estimated.

In each group and in its subdivisions, a conscious or unconscious attempt to seek a new general connotation underlying the multiplicity of phenomena was apparent, a search which was undertaken in austere isolation from others by either purely empirical or purely intuitive means. The seekers in their separate spheres suffered from guilt feelings which in their turn gave rise to often unadmitted fears of what we shall call ‘the other thing’. ‘The other thing’ was the concept that one excluded from one’s nature and from one’s cosmic vision for the sake of a unilateral expansion, that which one did not know but the existence of which was a disquietening realization. For, apart from the fact that its existence haunted one’s own being, its displacement had to be rigidly enforced since the greatly improved methods of transport and publicity threatened constantly to bring other fields into general focus. Never had the world appeared so unified, never had it been so divided.

The materialism that was so vigorously popularized by a number of writers in the middle of the century was penetrating literature. In the form of naturalism, it propagated the scientifically accurate rendering of social reality in all its phenomena and causal connections. The bete noire against which it seemed necessary to guard came to be idealized misrepresentation, and writers turned to the depiction of the lower orders actuated by poverty and instincts. This infection of anti-spiritual pessimism attacked many, but here and elsewhere, great and valuable enlargements of horizons were being realized, and this optimistically expansive mood of the movement brought with it a continual play of imagination. Sometimes this imagination grew passionate, as in Zola; in him, for example, we find a transition to a socialism inspired by the desire for improvement. When this passion was lacking, naturalism tended to become weak of will and pessimistic; in some cases it was inculcated with a degree of aestheticism or bourgeois moderation which slightly modified the pessimistic element.

In general, the bourgeoisie hated and feared naturalism, for it laid bare the substrata of society that had hitherto been strenuously ignored and that were becoming increasingly disturbing. As a reverse to progress and the notorious policy of ‘laissez faire’ the free handcraftsmen and peasants had become a large propertyless class, the uncultured, traditionless, industrial proletariat. In its indescribable misery, this class, led by its prophets, was seized with the general desire for greater happiness. This was the form in which ‘the other thing’ first presented itself to the bourgeoisie; fateful hands were groping in the dimness for security, for living space. The most threatening guise taken by the menace was that of socialism which aimed at direct interference with social relations. Socialism was also rooted in the materialistic conception of life; according to its tenets, will-power was fiercely directed on the future seizure of social power, and the longing for happiness and brotherly love saw in this millenium so excitingly beautiful a prospect that no room was left for pessimism. Whereas naturalism saw reality as an endless infinitude of phenomena, admittedly permeated by a selfsame drabness, in socialism all phenomena were massed together in one simple scheme which had to serve not only to make knowledge surveyable but also as a battering ram for action. The fatal separation between perception and action appeared here to have been surmounted, but if so it was at the expense of much that was of immense value; and on the whole it remained suspended in theory.

Nevertheless, this theory had for a time a menacing aspect, not only for the bourgeoisie but also for those artists who had surrendered to their individual intuitive wealth. The general levelling that they saw taking place around them was perfected in socialism to a hygienic purity. From this shorn perfection, a new culture was inevitably to arise, but that was a consolation only to the faithful. Meanwhile, the impetus of socialism was so great that choice was very difficult for young people who were in sympathy with the idea of revolution. This we shall observe in the case of Rilke. But the choice had to be made; it was not possible to follow both trends.

The philosophical idealism of the beginning of the century had endowed the human mind in general with the highest achievable capacity for cognition, a capacity which hitherto had been ascribed only to those who had been the recipients of the Christian revelation. This attitude was to return, albeit in a more humble guise, towards the end of the century. Romanticism had reappeared as a main trend in literature, but in a greatly modified form; the reliance on the individual feeling and mood of the moment, had in the first decades of the century been the cause of periods of deep despondency, and the materialistic reaction had sprung partly from a satiety of too highly strung sensibility. The romantic artist, however, had not yet entirely broken away from the mass of the bourgeoisie; his sentimental, revolutionary, or anti-revolutionary, ideals were still largely bourgeois; his discovery of the past succeeded both in inspiring science and in entrancing the bourgeois in much the same way as if by placing before them a gallery of colourful pictures. His language was, still in general intelligible, though this does not apply equally to all the romantics.

The neo-romanticism of the end of the century faced a situation that had changed in many respects. Social leadership had passed irrevocably into the hands of the powerful capitalists. The vague phrases that had hitherto been used against tradition now proved to have no force, the sentiments that had been voiced had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustration
• Preface
• Preface to the English Edition
• Translators’ Preface
• 1. Time
• 2. Youth (1875-1895)
• 3. Growth (1895-1898)
• 4. Vocation (1898-1902)
• 5. The Great Conflict (1902-1908)
• 6. Crisis and Self-Communion (1908-1914)
• 7. The Long Road (1914-1922)
• 8. Fulfilment (1922)
• 9. The Last Years (1922-1926)
• Bibliography
• Index