Letters To A Young Poet

The Letters (3)

Three

Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy), 

April 23rd, 1903

You gave me much joy, my dear sir, with your Easter Letter; for it said many good things about yourself, and the way you spoke of Jacobsen's great and beloved art showed me that I had not erred in guiding your life and its many questions to this source of plenty. 

Now Niels Lyhne will open up before you, a book of glories and of the deeps; the oftener one reads it-- there seems to be everything in it from life's very faintest fragrance to the full big taste of its heaviest fruits. There is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, grasped, experienced and recognized in the tremulous after-ring of memory; no experience has been too slight, and the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinite tender hand and laid alongside another and held and borne up by a hundred others. You will experience the great happiness of reading this book for the first time, and will go through its countless surprises as in a new dream. But I can tell you that later too one goes through these books again and again with the same astonishment and that they lose none of the wonderful power and surrender none of the fabulousness with which they overwhelm one at a first reading. 

One just comes to relish them increasingly, to be always more grateful, and somehow better and simpler in one's contemplating, deeper in one's belief in life, and in living happier and bigger. 

And later you must read the wonderful book of the destiny and desire of Marie Grubble and Jacobsen's letters and pages from his diary and fragments and finally his poems, which ( even if they are only fairly well translated ) live in everlasting sound. (For this purpose I would advise you to buy when you have a chance the beautiful complete edition of Jacobsen's works which contains all these. It appeared in three volumes, well translated, brought out by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig, and costs, I believe, only 5 or 6 marks a volume. ) 

In your opinion of "There should have been roses..." ( that work of such incomparable delicacy and form ) you are of course quite, quite unassailably right as againts the writer of the introduction. And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism-- such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impressions and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating. 

There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything! 

Richard Dehmel: His books affect me ( and, incidentally, so does the man whom I know casually ) in such a manner that when I have found one of his beautiful pages I am always afraid of the next, which may upset everything again and turn what is attractive into something unworthy. You characterized him very well with the term: "living and writing in heat." -- And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight. And if instead of heat one might say-- sex, sex in the great, broad, clean sense, free of any insinuation of ecclesiatical error, then his art would be very grand and infinitely important. His poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out of him as out of mountains. 

But it seems that this power is not always honest and without pose. ( But this again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he would not rob them of their ingenuousness and untouchness! ) And then, where, as it rushes through his being, it comes to the sexual, it finds not quite so pure a man as it might require. Here is no thoroughly mature and clean sex world, but one that is not sufficiently human, that is only male, is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this reason there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time-bound, uneternal, that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate, it is marked  by time and by passion, and little of it will survive and endure. ( But most art is like that! ) Nevertheless one may deeply rejoice in what there is of greatness in it, only one must not lose oneself in it and become an adherent of that Dehmelian world which is so unspeakably apprehensive, full of adultery and confusion, and so far from the real destinies that cause more suffering than these temporal afflictions but also give more opportunity for greatness and more courage for eternity. 

Finally, as to my books, I would like best to send you all that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, when once they have appeared, no longer belong to me. i cannot buy them myself-- and, as I would so often like, give them to those who would be kind to them. 

So I am writing you on a slip the titles ( and publishers ) of my most recent books ( the latest, in all i believe i have published some 12 or 13 ) and must leave it to you, dear sir, to order some of them when occasion offers. 

I like to think of my books as in your possessions. 

Farewell. 

Yours: 

Rainer Maria Rilke