PARTISAN REVIEW
He did not want the sacrifice, or rather, he wanted only the
sacrifice of the Old Testament (the fruits of the field, a lamb or
whatever else is dear to man), but not that of the New Testament.
He did not want to find value in sacrifice, or in conversion. Read
the eighth of his
Duino Elegies.
It is dedicated to me and in it he
turns against the idea of conversion which he found in my books.
The animal is not converted-the animal lives in the world of the
Father. The greatness of the Father world was entirely contained in
being,
and that is right. With the Son greatness becomes divorced
from
being.
The Son is great, but the Father
is.
Rilke was not without
rancor towards the Son. Examples of this may be found in a few
poems in the second volume of the "New Poems." In the struggle
between character and conviction- that is, between the inherent, the
intuitive, and the attitude which is formed by judgment-Rilke chose
character. Of Germany's important poets none was less burgherlike
than he. And only insofar as the German spirit is in every way the
most burgherlike of
all
Europe was Rilke un-German. In no other
respect. He loved France because he saw in it the superior character.
It would be entirely wrong to regard Rilke's love for France merely
as the German love for the foreign. Thus the English manner, the
English language always remained strange to him, and he could not
be persuaded to go to London.
An
American seemed to him mon–
strous; the Italian not quite clear and therefore not very important.
Conviction, attitude could never replace for him the absent character.
Character came before convictions. Rilke has been contrasted with
Richard Dehmel. But the basis of all antithesis is equivalence. Richard
Dehmel's entirely overrated work is full of conviction, full-if you like
-<:If titanic conviction, but without character.
The Son has not been here in vain. We cannot disregard him.
Without greatness the world, however glorious its beginning, is bound
to become in the end a place of isolation, of the lonely in the sense
of young Malte, of people with a tic (of the soul). There are two
kinds of humor: one kind is that of Sterne, Jean Paul, Kierkegaard,
that of men of the spirit. The man of the spirit sees both aspects of
things. Those who see the world thus live in the realm of the Son in
spite of everything. Rilke's very definite humor was of a different
kind: of the realm of the Father. There things develop a tic, become
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