No More Learning

? ? ? ? ? ?

Plato

The supreme problem of every age is that of finding its consummate
artistic expression. Before this problem every other remains of
secondary importance. History defines and directs its physical course,
science cooperates in the achievement of its material aims, but Art
alone gives to the age its spiritual physiognomy, its ultimate and
lasting expression.

The process of Art is on the one hand sensuous, the conception having
for its basis the fineness of organization of the senses; and on the
other hand it is severely scientific, the value of the creation being
dependent upon the craftsmanship, the mastery over the tool, the
technique.

Art, like Nature, its great and only reservoir for all time past and all
time to come, ever strives for elimination and selection. It is severe
and aristocratic in the application of its laws and impervious to appeal
to serve other than its own aims. Its purpose is the symbolization of
Life. In its sanctum there reigns the silence of vast accomplishment,
the serene, final, and imperturbable solitude which is the ultimate
criterion of all great things created.

To speak of Poetry is to speak of the most subtle, the most delicate,
and the most accurate instrument by which to measure Life.
Poetry is reality's essence visioned and made manifest by one endowed
with a perception acutely sensitive to sound, form, and colour, and
gifted with a power to shape into rhythmic and rhymed verbal symbols the
reaction to Life's phenomena. The poet moulds that which appears
evanescent and ephemeral in image and in mood into everlasting values.
In this act of creation he serves eternity.

Poetry, in especial lyrical poetry, must be acknowledged the supreme
art, culminating as it does in a union of the other arts, the musical,
the plastic, and the pictorial.

The most eminent contemporary poets of Europe have, each in accordance
with his individual temperament, reflected in their work the spiritual
essence of our age, its fears and failures, its hopes and high
achievements: Maeterlinck, with his mood of resignation and his
retirement into a dusky twilight where his shadowy figures move
noiselessly like phantoms in fate-laden dimness; Dehmel, the worshipper
of will, with his passion for materiality and the beauty of all things
physical and tangible; Verhaeren, the visionary of a new vitality, who
sees in the toilers of fields and factories the heroic gesture of our
time and who might have written its great epic of industry but for the
overwhelming lyrical mood of his soul.

Until a few years ago, known only to a relatively small community on the
continent but commanding an ever increasing attention which has borne
his name far beyond the boundary of his country, the personality of
Rainer Maria Rilke stands to-day beside the most illustrious poets of
modern Europe.

* * * * *

The background against which the figure of Rainer Maria Rilke is
silhouetted is so varied, the influences which have entered into his
life are so manifold, that a study of his work, however slight, must
needs take into consideration the elements through which this poet has
matured into a great master.

Prague, the city in which Rilke was born in 1875, with its sinister
palaces and crumbling towers that rose in the early Middle Ages and have
reached out into our time like the threatening fingers of mighty hands
which have wielded swords for generations and which are stained with the
blood of many wounds of many races; the city where amid grey old ruins
blonde maidens are at play or are lost in reverie in the green cool
parks and shady gardens with which the Bohemian capital abounds, this
Prague of mingled grotesqueness and beauty gave to the young boy his
first impressions.

There is a period in the life of every artist when his whole being seems
lost in a contemplation of the surrounding world, when the application
to work is difficult, like the violent forcing of something that is
awaiting its time. This is the time of his dream, as sacred as the days
of early spring before wind and rain and light have touched the fruits
of the fields, when there is a tense bleak silence over the whole of
nature, in which is wrapped the strength of storms and the glow of the
summer's sun. This is the time of his deepest dream, and upon this dream
and its guarding depends the final realization of his life's work.

The young graduate of the Gymnasium was to enter upon the career of an
army officer in accordance with the traditions of the family, an old
noble house which traces its lineage far back to Carinthian ancestry.
His inclinations, however, pointed so decisively in the direction of the
finer arts of life that he left the Military Academy after a very short
attendance to devote himself to the study of philosophy and the history
of art.

As one turns the pages of Rilke's first small book of poems, published
originally under the title _Larenopfer_, in the year 1895, and which
appeared in more recent editions under the less descriptive name _Erste
Gedichte_, one realizes at once, in spite of a lack of plasticity in the
presentation, that here speaks one who has lingered long and lovingly
over the dream of his boyhood. As the title indicates, these poems are a
tribute, an offering to the Lares, the home spirits of his native town.
Prague and the surrounding country are the ever recurring theme of
almost every one of these poems.