ART, TRADITION, AND TRUTH
17
realizable"
(Nietzsche und das Christentum).
In fact, Nietzsche's
praise is neither intransitive nor does it invert "the tradition"; rather,
the man he envisages invites comparison with the visions of Plato,
Aristotle, and Shakespeare.
III
The one major charge that is still lacking in this orthodox
indictment of Nietzsche and Rilke is their abandonment of some–
thing that is usually called, rather vaguely, "realism." Heller does not
require this cliche and spells out the charge in some detail. For
Nietzsche and Rilke, he says, "the separation between art and
reality appears to be complete. Reality is the death of the spirit and
art its salvation. Where does truth reside? Is it in the deadly real
world or in the saving vision of the artist? The question lingers on
the all but imperceptible border-line between delusion and lunacy, be–
tween Nietzsche's madness and Rilke's prophetic pose, tenaciously
maintained even beyond the confines of poetic inspiration. Nietzsche,
believing that truth was insufferable and that poetry was an illusion,
continually suspected that at least some of his thought was merely
poetry. Rilke, on the other hand, succeeded most of the time in con–
vincing himself that the thought behind his poetry was the mind
of truth."
Rilke's facile belief that his elegies and sonnets were gifts of in–
scrutable inspiration undoubtedly reflects a lack of strength and a
sense of his own inability to effect any improvements. There are lines
in the elegies which appear to be the mere padding of pathos, and
many passages in the sonnets make little sense. Again and again the
mood and the verve must sustain the lines, and the lines fail to sustain
the mood. Here the poet's appeal to inspiration cannot hide the
failure of inspiration. Rilke's elegies sometimes share the fault of
Whitman's long poems, though Rilke's obscurity makes it harder to
find him out. Most of the sonnets too are marred by a lack of suffi–
cient insight or perception to fill fourteen lines. But the same is surely
true of Shakespeare's sonnets, and even some of Shakespeare's best
achieve excellence only in the opening lines and end rather lamely.
The above mentioned 94th sonnet
is
one of the most notable excep–
tions. Many weaknesses of Rilke's
Sonnets to Orpheus
are explained
