The Worldview of Herman Grimm
GA 62
Berlin, 30 January, 1913
Translated by Peter Stebbing
8. The Worldview of Herman Grimm
It could easily appear as though what is set forth here as spiritual science stood in isolation to what is otherwise proclaimed and of a tone-setting nature in the cultural life of the present. However, it can only appear so to one who conceives of this spiritual science in a somewhat narrow-hearted sense, seeing in it nothing more than a sum of teachings and theories. On the other hand, whoever recognizes it as a spiritual stream open to new sources will become aware that parallels can be drawn to modern cultural life in various ways. It will be seen that this manner of viewing life called spiritual science can be applied to other, in some degree related directions. A direction of this sort is the subject of today's considerations—as represented by a prominent personality of modern cultural life, the art historian and researcher Herman Grimm.
Herman Grimm [the son of Wilhelm Grimm of the Brothers Grimm] was born in 1828 and died in 1901. He appears indeed as a quite characteristic figure of modern life, and yet he is, at the same time, so distinctive and unique as to stand apart. Today's considerations can connect especially well onto this personality. To anyone having occupied himself with Herman Grimm, he appears as a kind of mediator between all that relates to Goethe, and to our own spiritual life.
By reason of his marriage to the daughter of a personality, who stood close to the circle of Goethe, namely the sister of the romantic poet Clemons von] Brentano,[ Bettina Brentano [1785-1859], Herman Grimm was connected in a quite special sense with everything associated with the name of Goethe. Herman Grimm was related to her in that she was his mother-in-law, the same Bettina Brentano who had brought out Goethe's remarkable exchange of letters with a child. Bettina Brentano's unique memorial shows us Goethe enthroned like an Olympian, a musical instrument in his hands, while she presents herself as a child grasping at the strings. From the Frankfurt circle of La Roche, in her relation to Goethe she was able (like few others) to enter into Goethe's spirit. Even if some things as presented in the letters are inexact, being colourfully mixed together in various ways—a combination of poetry and truth—it still has to be said: Everything in this remarkable book, Goethes Brefwechsel mit einem Kinde [Goethe's Exchange of Letters with a Child], grew in a heartfelt manner out of sensing Goethe's whole outlook. In a wonderful way, it grants us an echo of his wisdom-imbued worldview. Bettina Brentano was married to the poet Achim von Arnim [l781-1831], who had contributed to bringing out the fine collection of folk poems called Des Knabens Wunderhorn [1806] [The Boy's Magic Horn]. By virtue of the connection with this circle—as mentioned, Gisela Grimm, Herman Grimm's wife, was one of the daughters of Bettina von Arnim—Herman Grimm grew up from youth onwards, as it were, amid personalities who stood in close proximity to Goethe. In all that he took up in his education, Herman Grimm absorbed something of an immediate, elemental spiritual breath of Goethe. Thus, he felt himself as belonging to all those who had stood personally close to Goethe, even though he was still a child the time of Goethe's death [in 1832J, rather than one who had “studied” Goethe and Goetheanism. Herman Grimm counted as having taken into himself, in a direct and personal way, something of Goethe's essential being, his magical power, his natural humanity.
With inner participation, Herman Grimm experienced the development of German cultural life during the decades of the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, he established, so to say, his own “kingdom” within this German cultural life. He can be called a spirit who, in an individual manner, starts out from whatever stimulated him, that furthered the development of his own powers. In this way, out of the whole range of cultural life, a realm subdivided itself for Herman Grimm that suited his aims, a realm in which he felt at home. Within this domain in which Herman Grimm felt himself at home, he understood himself to be, lo to say, the spiritual “governor” with respect to Goethe. Goethe's spirit appeared to him as though it lived on. And in seeking out what derived from Goethe and what was compatible with him in cultural life, entering into this, it was always the essence of Goethe that he sought. This then became a yardstick for him in evaluating everything in cultural life.
These were decades of struggle in German cultural life, decades in which everything to do with Goethe receded, following his death. So much else of immediate everyday concern stood in the forefront, rather than what proceeded from Goethe. During that period, numerous other things asserted themselves in the cultural life of Germany, while little was heard of Goethe. On account of his connection with Goethe, Herman Grimm regarded himself as one whose task it was, quietly yet actively to cultivate and carry over Goethe's ethos to a future time that he certainly hoped would come, a time in which Goethe's star would shine out once more in the European spiritual firmament.
In that he regarded himself as, so to say, the “governor” of Goethe's spiritual domain, Herman Grimm stood somewhat apart in his relation to cultural matters. It seemed appropriate, if not self-evident to see him as having the air of a “lord.” Even in his stature, his physiognomy, his gestures, in his conduct, there was something about him suggestive of an aristocrat. And, it can be said: For anyone not accustomed to looking up to someone as to a lordly personality, Herman Grimm's whole demeanour as though compelled acknowledgement of the aforementioned status. I still fondly recall being together with Herman Grimm in Weimar, which he often liked to visit. On one occasion, he invited me as his only guest to a midday meal. We spoke about various matters that interested him. We also talked—and I was pleased that he wanted to have this conversation with me—about his comprehensive life-plans. And when a certain time had passed after the meal, he said, in his inimitable, humorous and quite natural manner, such that one accepted it from him as something innate, “Now, my dear Doctor, I wish graciously to dismiss you!” As though a matter of course, it actually made a self-evident impression on me. And it accorded with Herman Grimm's whole manner of conducting himself, so that, one granted him a certain air of lordliness.
Herman Grimm's whole lifework bears something of the same attribute. One cannot take up one of his major or minor writings, with their harmonious and so succinctly constructed sentences without feeling: all this affects one as though the author's personality stood behind it, regarding one with soulful participation. This contributes to the wonderful quality in Herman Grimm's writings. In every respect they are the product of his soul-imbued personality and have their immediate effect as such. In this way, his style takes on a certain justified, noble pathos. However, this noble pathos is mitigated everywhere by the individual, human element that breaks through. One accepts his style despite its elegance. Everywhere, one senses his origins in having sincerely absorbed Goethe's spirit. Yet this is not all; it becomes apparent that with him the Goethean element has undergone something of the development of German Romanticism. We sense in Herman Grimm's style a liberation from all that can broadly be termed “commonplace” or “customary.” We have the impression of a singular personality secluded within himself.
Herman Grimm's orientation could possibly have led to a certain one-sidedness, had something else not played a part, binding him closely to tradition; Herman Grimm was, after all, the, son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm. Known for inaugurating modern linguistic research, these two collected the German fairy tales that have in the meantime profoundly permeated German life. They listened to the sagas and fairy tales told them by simple folk, that were almost forgotten and remembered by only a few remaining souls. Brought to life again by the Brothers Grimm, they now live on.
Despite a refined style in everything he produced, Herman Grimm also had close ties to popular tradition, combining this with what might otherwise have been a one-sided direction. We still have to stress something further by which he appears harmonious and complete. In taking up the works of Herman Grimm, we encounter something of his adaptability—a capacity to connect with the various spiritual phenomena in which he immersed himself in the course of his life. A certain isolation is required for someone to submerge themselves fully in the phenomena and facts of past centuries. This adaptability, this quality of “softness” with regard to Herman Grimm acquires its “skeleton,” however, its necessary “hardness,” by reason of something else that intervened in his upbringing. Both his father and his uncle belonged to the “Göttingen Seven,” who in the year 1837 submitted their proclamation protesting the abolition of their country's constitution. They were consequently expelled from the University of Göttingen. Thus, already as a child, Herman Grimm experienced a significant event and its aftermath. For there were consequences both for his father and his uncle, in that they not only lost their positions, bur their daily bread as well, at the time. Herman Grimm often referred to how he had experienced historical change in this way, even already as a nine-year old boy, and not merely via book-learning.
At a time when little was said of Goethe in Germany, attention having been diverted to other things, Herman Grimm viewed himself as a representative of Goethe's ethos. But he did experience a resurgence of interest in Goethe and was himself able to contribute to it. At the beginning of the seventies of the nineteenth century, he was able to hold his famous Goethe lectures [“Goethe-Vorlesungen” 1874-75] at the University of Berlin, also published in book form. Anyone getting hold of it as a young person, and able to find the right relation to it, will undoubtedly speak of it in later years as being of special significance. And, as set forth in this book, Herman Grimm clearly shows himself as someone who knew the various ramifications of Goethe's soul life.
We gain a clear sense of how Herman Grimm viewed a personality such as Goethe. We find nothing of a small-minded biographical compulsion—to flush out all manner of more or less indifferent traits. Rather do we find an immersion in everything that was important for Goethe's development—the endeavour to pursue what Goethe experienced in life, what lived in his soul, and how this re-constituted itself, taking on form to become a creation, of Goethe's phantasy. How, he asks, in forgetting everything of a particular life experience, did this re-arise for Goethe to become the product of creative phantasy—a new experience?
Thus, in Herman Grimm's interpretation, Goethe raises his life-experiences a stage higher, to a sphere of pure spiritual contemplation. We see Goethe ascend to spiritual experiences. Herman Grimm demonstrates this with regard to each of Goethe's works. And we gladly follow him in pursuing this course, since with Herman Grimm nothing intrudes that can otherwise so easily enter into such a portrayal—that a single soul-force, e.g., reason or phantasy, becomes paramount, as it were, and one no longer feels the connection to immediate life. Herman Grimm goes no farther than he can go as an individual in contemplating Goethe's work. In the end, we are led by Herman Grimm to the point where the work takes its start from Goethe's life experience. One feels oneself transported everywhere into unmitigated spiritual life. Goethe becomes a sum of spiritual impulses. This breath of the spiritual extends throughout Herman Grimm's Goethe book.
What Herman Grimm ascribed to Goethe in this way has its roots deep in Herman Grimm's spiritual configuration. Long before commencing these considerations that led to his lectures on Goethe, a grand, a colossal idea had stood before him—the idea of viewing occidental cultural life as a whole in the same way he had done, individually, with regard to Goethe. The idea stood before his mind's eye of following three millennia of western cultural life so as to reveal everywhere how human sensibility transforms everyday events in the physical world to what the human soul experiences upon ascending to the realm of “creative phantasy,” as Herman Grimm called it. Thus, he becomes a unique kind of historian. For Herman Grimm, history was, so to say, something altogether different from what it is for other modern historians.
History is, after all, customarily studied in that documents, materials, are first collected, and from these the attempt is made to present a picture of humanity's development. Although materials, external facts, were of enormous importance for Herman Grimm, they were nonetheless not at all the main thing. He often entertained the thought: Could it not be that for some epoch or other precisely the most significant documents, the decisive ones, have disappeared without a trace—lost, so that one actually passes by the truth most of all in focussing too conscientiously and exactly on the documents? Hence, he was convinced that, in abiding most faithfully by external documents, one is least of all capable of providing a true picture of human development. Only a falsified picture could arise in keeping strictly to external documents alone.
However, something else has arisen in the cultural life of humanity. What took place outwardly, what happened has, thanks to leading individualities, undergone a spiritual rebirth. This is evidenced by personalities who have transformed it artistically, who have utilized it for cultural purposes. Thus, in looking back for instance to the time of ancient Greece, Herman Grimm said to himself: Some documents exist concerning this Greek age, but these are insufficient to enable one to understand the Greek world. Yet what the Greeks experienced has found its rebirth in the works of Greek art, has been re-enlivened by significant Greek personalities. Immersing oneself in them, letting the Greek spirit affect one, a truer picture of the Greek world is attained than in merely assembling external facts. In this way, the facts themselves disappeared, so to say, for Herman Grimm. One is inclined to say, they melted away from his world-picture. What remained in his world-picture was a continuous stream of what he called the creations of “folk-phantasy.”
In contemplating Julius Caesar, for example, he not only took account of the historical documents, he considered what Shakespeare had made of Caesar as of equal significance, comparable to what is contained in the existing documents. Through characteristic human beings he looked back at the age in question. For Herman Grimm, the course of humanity's development became something always handed on from one personality to another, seeing it as a spiritual process encompassed by what he termed creative phantasy. Proceeding from this point of view, he sought to gain a picture of the creative folk-phantasy at work in western culture—a sense of the actual course of events in the development of humanity, so as to be able to say: The epochs of western culture follow one upon the other, supersede each other—from the earliest epochs up to the present, i.e., from the oldest times to which he wished to return, up to his own period, the age of Goethe. They therefore represent an ongoing stream, the influence of folk phantasy within western cultures.
Starting out from this urge, he turned his attention early on to that grandiose phenomenon of western cultural life, Homer's “Iliad.” This occupied him for a period of time during the 1890s, leading to his truly exemplary book, Homer. One gladly takes up this volume again and again in wanting, from a modern viewpoint, to immerse oneself in the beginnings of the Greek world. Adopting his general standpoint, it shows us Herman' Grimm from another side. His gaze is directed to the world of the gods as depicted in Homer's “Iliad”—to the battling Greek and Trojan heroes, and the question arises for him: How do matters actually stand with regard to this interplay of the world of the gods with the normal human world of warring Greek and Trojan heroes? This becomes a question for him. It is indeed striking, what a tremendous difference there is in the Homeric portrayal, between the humans walking around and the nature of those beings described as immortal gods. And Herman Grimm attempts to present the gods in Homer's sense as portraying, so to say, an “older” class of beings wandering on the earth. Even if Herman Grimm, in his more realistic way, sees these beings as “human beings,” he does look back into a culture that in Homer's time had long lost its significance, a culture that had been superseded by another, to which the Greek and Trojan heroes belong. Thus, Herman Grimm has an older and a younger class of humanity play into one another in Homer's “Iliad;” and what has remained over of real effects of a class of beings that had lived previously, enters for Herman Grimm (in Homer's sense) into what takes place between Greece and Troy.
Herman Grimm saw the further progress of humanity in this way—as a continual supplanting of older cultural cycles by newer ones and an interplay of older cycles with newer ones. Each new cultural cycle has its task, that of introducing something new into the general development of humanity. The old remains extant for a while and still interacts with the new.
It can be said that what Herman Grimm investigated, to the extent possible in the last third of the nineteenth century, has now to be set forth once more from the point of view of spiritual science. He did not look further back than the Greek age. For this reason, he was unable to arrive at what recent spiritual research describes in looking to the lofty, purely spiritual beings of primeval antiquity, exalted above the human being. He did, however, frequently touch upon results of recent spiritual research—as nearly as anyone can without conducting such research themselves.
In going back to earlier stages in the development of humanity, we attempt, in spiritual research, to show that we do not arrive at the animal species in the sense of the Darwinian theory that is interpreted materialistically nowadays. Rather, we attempt to show that we come to purely spiritual ancestors of the human being. Prior to the cycle of humanity in which human souls live in physical bodies, there is another cycle of humanity in which human beings did not yet incorporate themselves in physical bodies. Herman Grimm leaves the question undecided, so to say, as to what was actually involved with the “gods,” before human beings stepped onto the earth. However, he does recognize the ordered sequence of such cycles of humanity. And this results in an important point of contact with what spiritual science presents. That he takes account of such regular periodic stages taking place ~~ brings him especially close to us.
He attempts to extend his spiritual observations over three millennia. The first millennium for him is the Greek millennium. With Herman Grimm, one is inclined to say, there is something like an undertone in his manner of characterizing the Greeks, as though he were to say: In looking to the Greeks, they do not appear constituted like human beings of today, particularly in the oldest periods. Even someone like Alcibiades [ca. 450-404 B.C.] appears to us like a kind of fairy-tale prince, it is as though one beheld what is superhuman. Still, out of this Greek world that, as already mentioned, Herman Grimm presents as being altogether unlike the later human world, there towers ell that arose in the subsequent Greek world end in what follows, becoming the most important constituent of our cultural life. And finally, at the end of the first thousand years contemplated by Herman Grimm, the most significant impulse in humanity's development stands before his soul: the Christ impulse.
Herman Grimm is sparing in what he has to say about the figure of Christ, just as he is restrained in various other matters. But the occasional observations he makes show that he would as little go along with those who would “dissolve” Christ, as it were, to the point of a mere thought impulse, as he would go along with those who want to see Christ Jesus only in human terms. He emphasizes that two kinds of impulses actually proceed from the figure of Christ—one of colossal strength, that continues to work on throughout the further development of humanity—and the other impulse which consists in immense gentleness. Herman Grimm sees the entire second millennium of western cultural development taking shape in such a way that the Greek world is as though absorbed by the Christ impulse and the resulting mixture of Christianity and Greekness is incorporated into the Roman world, overcoming it. Out of this something quite unique arises. That is his second millennium, the first Christian millennium. The Roman element is not the main thing for him, but rather the Christian impulses. Everything of a political or external nature disappears for Herman Grimm in this millennium. He looks everywhere at how the manifold Christ impulse makes itself felt. His conception of Christ is neither narrow. nor small, but broad. When a book on the life of Jesus, La Vie de Jesus [1863], by Ernest Renan was published, Herman Grimm referred to it in the periodical he edited at the time, “Künstler und Kunstwerke” [Artists and Works of Art]; he attempted to show how pictorial representations of the Christ figure had undergone changes over the centuries both in the visual arts and in literature. He sought to demonstrate how the Christ impulse undergoes changes. He pointed out that people had always conceived of the Christ impulse according to their own outlook. In Ernest Renan he saw an instance of someone in the nineteenth century who conceived of Christ once again in a narrow sense only.
In Herman Grimm's view, Christianity needed about a thousand years to send its impulses into the rivulets and streams of western spiritual life. Then came the third millennium, the second Christian one, in which we still find ourselves today. It is the millennium at the dawn of which spirits such as Dante and Giotto arose, as also artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and so on, followed by the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. These cycles in the development of humanity, an ongoing stream, he spoke of as an expression of the being of creative phantasy. Again and again Herman Grimm sought to present in lectures give to his students, this rhythmically subdivided, ongoing stream of humanity's development. Herman Grimm aimed to show how single creations had their place within the unbroken flow.
Thus, for him, Michelangelo, along with Raphael, Savonarola, Shakespeare and others, such as Goethe, were in a manner of speaking the spiritual constituents that become explicable on seeing them against the background of the ongoing stream of creative phantasy. For Herman Grimm this was especially apparent at the source, in the ninth or the tenth century before our era, with Homer. Thus, Herman Grimm addresses himself in an immediate way to the human soul, in drawing our attention to a specific work of art—be it Raphael's “'Marriage of Mary and Joseph,” a painting, of the Madonna, or one of the creations of Leonardo da Vinci, or. later, of Goethe. He grants us the feeling of standing as though directly within the unique qualities of the particular work. In considering with him the arrangement of colours, the figures and their gestures, while standing inwardly before the work of art, there emerges for us something like a tableau of the entire progress of humanity—now called forth by a single entity in that onward-flowing, all-encompassing stream of creative phantasy—over three millennia.
Thus, with Herman Grimm, one is first conducted into the intimate aspects of the work of art in question and is then led up to the summit from which the total stream can be surveyed. However, that is not something he considered in a theoretical manner. It seemed entirely natural for Herman Grimm to look at the totality of the onward flowing spiritual stream of humanity's development in this way. As he explained it to me, as mentioned at a midday meal, with his whole soul. he actually lived, as a matter of course, within this spiritual stream, and he could not look at a single phenomenon in any other way than as though it were excerpted from this mighty stream of humanity's development.
The whole of western cultural development, seen as folk phantasy, stood before his soul, though not as a general abstract idea, but filled with real content. He saw himself as inwardly connected with this luminous content extending over millennia, such that everything he wrote appears to one as individual segments of an enormous work. Even in only reading a' book review by Herman Grimm, one has the impression as though it were cut out from a colossal work setting forth the whole development of humanity. One feels oneself positively placed before such a colossal work, having opened it, and as though one were reading a few pages in it. It is the same with an article or an essay by Herman Grimm. And one comprehends how Herman Grimm could say of himself, in the evening of his life, in writing the preface to his collection of Fragments, that the idea had floated before him of a portrayal of the ongoing stream of folk phantasy, and that therein the whole of western culture had appeared to him, A particular subject he had pursued appeared as if it had been taken out of a finished work. However, he placed no more value on what had been printed than on what he had only written down, and on what he had written down, no more value than on what lived in his thoughts.
In referring to this, one would like to add a further impression, without putting it into an abstract formula—having been fond of Herman Grimm, remaining so, and in valuing his work and the kind of person he was. Herman Grimm was never able to reach the point of actually carrying out what stood before his mind's eye as something so beautiful, so colossal, so magnificent that even his works on Homer, on Raphael, on Michelangelo, on Goethe, appear to us as fragments of this comprehensive, unwritten work. We read the lines of the introduction to the Fragments mentioned above with a certain feeling of wistfulness. He states there that, though it would most likely not come about, it would perhaps be feasible to rework into a book what he had to say to his students year after year—and newly revised every year—concerning the progression of European cultural life in the last form these lectures took. One reads these lines today the more wistfully, as it did indeed not come to such a rewriting. We had to see Herman Grimm pass away, knowing what lived in his soul intended for present-day culture—having this sink with him into the grave.
We have characterized the sweeping cultural horizons underlying Herman Grimm's written works. Spiritual science intends to show what can be gained in widening one's spiritual horizons. It can be said that for the purpose of gradually entering into the whole outlook inherent in spiritual research, anyone immersing himself in Herman Grimm's spirit has the finest precepts. Apart from the breadth of his horizons, we see how he approached the phenomena, how his thoughts and feelings led him to everything he wrote in his comprehensive works on Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo and Goethe. And, bearing in mind what is set forth in his other writings, one sees that Herman Grimm distinguishes himself in significant ways from other spirits, in possessing attributes belonging to the kind of soul-deepening we have spoken of in describing the path the soul has to take in order to enter the spiritual worlds.
We have stressed that for the spiritual path, the intensity of soul-forces has to become greater. Deeper soul-forces are to be called forth that otherwise slumber. Inner strength, inner courage and boldness are required to a greater extent than in ordinary life; concepts are to be grasped more sharply. The soul needs to identify itself more fully with its own being, with the forces of thinking, feeling and willing. Initial signs of this are evident everywhere with Herman Grimm, by which he was, for example, in a position to describe works of art in such an intimate and personal way, as in the case of Raphael and Michelangelo. This is a precursor, however, to further illuminating the spiritual world. The basis of Herman Grimm's historical research does not lie in what is nowadays called “objectivity,” but in his allying himself with the cultural phenomena he portrays, as accords with the spiritual world. In this way, wholly forgetting itself and yet in a rare sense conscious of itself, the soul immerses itself in the corresponding cultural manifestation.
This becomes particularly evident when he directs his attention to a single cultural phenomenon, such as Raphael, elevating this to the overall stream of human spiritual life. His impressions then become bold, powerful ideas—and what others do not venture to say with the same shade of feeling, or with the same subtlety of ideas, Herman Grimm does venture, becoming in this way a representative of the spirit. And he then stands before us with such boldness that we are sometimes reminded of the Gospel writers. It is just that they wrote more in keeping with mysticism, while Herman Grimm wrote in the sense of a modern spiritual discourse. Just as the Gospels reach upward to attain the horizon of mankind as a whole, so Herman Grimm reaches upward with his Raphael book to the horizon of mankind as a whole.
It is miraculous when, in his audacious way—seemingly tearing his soul out of himself and striding as though alongside Raphael—as in an overall stream of evolution—he erupts in words that can truly tell us more than any mere presentation of world history: “Raphael is a citizen of world-history; He is like one of the four rivers that according to the belief of the ancient world flowed out of Paradise.”
In letting such a sentence duly affect one, Herman Grimm's perception of Raphael takes on an altogether different character, compared to what other authors have to say. Hence, for Herman Grimm, the various personalities of history merge into the overall stream of spiritual life. It could also be said, he brings the highest spiritual spheres down to the personal element. And in speaking the following heartfelt words, Herman Grimm further expresses his relation to leading cultural figures:
“If, by some miracle, Michelangelo were called from the dead, to live among us again, and if I were to meet him, I would humbly stand aside to let him pass; if Raphael came by, I would follow him, to see whether or not I might have the opportunity of hearing a few words from his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo one can confine oneself to reporting what they once were in their day; with Raphael one has to start from what he is for us today. Concerning the two others, a slight veil has passed over them, but not over Raphael. He belongs among those whose growth is as yet far from being at an end. we may imagine that Raphael will present ever new riddles to future-generations of humanity.” [Fragments, Vol. II, p.170]
This counts as a characteristic mood, rather than as something normally objective in the sense of what is normally demanded nowadays. But if does describe matters in such a way that we feel ourselves transposed, in an immediate way to what had lived in Herman Grimm's soul in writing- such sentences. It becomes understandable that such a spirit had to struggle in coming to terms with such a world-historical figure as Raphael. Oddly, as he himself relates, it was quite different for him, in describing the life of Michelangelo. The portrayal of the life of Michelangelo by Herman Grimm is a marvellous document, though in some respects perhaps, it counts today as having been surpassed. Seen against the background of the life of that time, the figure of Michelangelo stands out significantly from other figures—as also from the unique description of the city of Florence. Herman Grimm places a tableau before us in contrasting two spiritual entities, Athens and Florence. With that, the weaving together of three millennia as characterized by Herman Grimm, appears as a mighty background upon which Dante and Giotto appear, along with other painters of that time—followed by figures such as Savonarola, and finally Michelangelo himself, evident.
It becomes evident that Herman Grimm responded differently to Raphael and his surroundings than to Goethe, while presenting everything with no less familiarity. In the case of Herman Grimm's Goethe portrayal, we sense everywhere that he had grown up as a spiritual descendant of Goethe. With his Michelangelo portrayal, we feel how he enters into everything personally, wandering the streets, visiting every palace in Florence. ... other matters, as it were. Besides personally acquainting himself with other matters, he succeeds in standing as it were, before Michelangelo, and in depicting his actual manner of working. All this is as though cast from the same mould.
This differs from what he presents concerning Raphael. There we sense a wrestling with the material, with the spiritual image of Raphael. It is as though Herman Grimm were never able to achieve satisfaction. He describes having taken up the material again and again, while nothing appeared adequate to him of what he had already published. That was true even of his last works—of what he finally attempted as a portrayal of Raphael's personality. This remained a fragment, appearing in the collection of essays entitled Raphael as a World Power, from which the sentences derive that were just read out.
Why did Herman Grimm struggle with the material, precisely in the case of Raphael? It is because he could only present something to his own satisfaction in uniting himself completely with the material. In Raphael, however, he saw a spirit characterized in the words quoted: “Raphael is a citizen of world-history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the belief of the ancient world, flowed out of paradise.” And thus, with every statement applied to him, Raphael grew to giant size. Herman Grimm could never be satisfied, since he could not capture this “world-power” in a book. If the comprehensive breadth and grace of his spirit is evident in the portrayals of Homer, Michelangelo and Goethe with his Raphael discourse we see the profound uprightness, the profound honesty of Herman Grimm's personality.
Whoever takes up his book on Homer will possibly find it not scholarly enough. But Herman Grimm states on the very first page, that this book is not meant to be a contribution to Homer research. As already set forth; here, Herman Grimm could conduct himself in this and similar matters much like a spiritual “lord.” Thus, it appears quite natural that, in collecting his ideas on Goethe for publication, he boldly started out from the view that every other book he had come across concerning Goethe fell short. What seems like brazenness to some, can be taken for granted in the context of his literary and artistic abilities.
That is how he relates to everything in cultural life. Hence for those who adhere to the standpoint of erudite scholars, Herman Grimm's Homer book may seem intolerable. All the many questions that have been raised concerning Homer—whether or not he actually lived, whether the “Iliad” was put together from so and so many details, and so forth—all that did not concern him. He took it as it was. In this way, however, it became clear to him how wonderfully it is composed, how what comes later always refers to what preceded it. Everything that shows this inherent composition appears to us inwardly coherent. But apart from that, what appears most salutary for a spiritual researcher, is his immersion in the soul-life of the Homeric heroes. Everywhere, we see Herman Grimm's soul-imbued style extend to the soul-life of Homer's heroes. Everywhere we see the Achilles-soul comprehended, the Agamemnon-soul, the Odysseus-soul, and so on. As a description of souls, this book is overpowering in its effect, in spite of the familiarity of the stylistic presentation! We are led not only to the heights of historical contemplation, but also deep into the souls of the single Homeric figures, some scholars will inevitably say, Herman Grimm has taken the “Iliad” at face value, with disregard for the whole of Homer research and all preliminary study, accepting it verse for verse! Indeed, he does so—quite “amateurishly”—and the dry conclusion could then be: There someone has written a book without any preliminary study.
Did Herman Grimm in fact write this book without any preliminary study? Anyone concerning himself with the works of Herman Grimm will find the preliminary studies, only they look different from the preliminary studies of the usual experts. The preliminary studies of Herman Grimm lay in soul studies, in immersing himself in the secrets of the human soul. And one can convince oneself that no one could have shed such light on the Homeric heroes without those preliminary studies. Herman Grimm looks for what held sway in Homer's Phantasy. But what he says reveals him to be the finest knower of human souls. We may expect remarkable things of him in considering the way viewed Homer's heroes—from Achilles to Agamemnon to Odysseus. How did he find the words to write, in his Homer book and other works, what can seem to the researcher so uncommonly spiritual? He was able to do so on account of quite definite preliminary studies. And these are to be found among the works of Herman Grimm's first period.
Above all, we have the wonderful collection of novellas [1862] that is perhaps less read today than other modern products of its kind. However, these should be read by those who take an interest in spiritual things. As a collection of novellas, it is an intensive attempt to get to know human souls, to fathom human secrets and the soul's activity beyond the physical plane. The first of these novellas, “The Singer,” belongs to Herman Grimm's earliest phase as an author. In this work it is shown how a man acquires a deep, passionate yearning for a woman of a broad spiritual nature. However, these two personalities are never able to come together. The woman sends this ardent man away from her social circle, while everything lives on in the man's soul in the way of impulses that drew him to her. On the other hand, what proceeds from his soul saps at his bodily strength. Set forth as corresponds to spiritual research, we see him gradually destabilized in his soul. He is taken in by a friend to live on his estate, becoming, however, entangled again in the woman's “net.” The friend recognizes that it is high time to fetch this person his friend adheres to so completely. She does come—but too late. Whereas she is in front of the house, the individual concerned shoots himself.
And now comes something, taken up unreservedly in spiritual research, which Herman Grimm so often touches upon in artistic expression, but allows to devolve into indefiniteness. Briefly and succinctly he describes how, in the singer's imagination the deceased lives on. The scene is unforgettable in which, feeling her entire guilt in the death of this man, she sees him approaching from the realm of the dead, night after night. This now fills the content of her soul. It is not described as being a mere figment of her imagination, but in the sense of someone who knows there are secrets that reach beyond the grave. It is a wonderful description, that tells how the friend plants himself in front of the woman when she says the deceased comes to her—continuing right up to her final letter to the friend, in which she expresses that she herself now feels close to death. For her, the deceased, to whom she was so closely bound, had drawn her towards him from the realm of the dead. Probably no modern author has found the right tone, in touching on the spiritual world with such sincerity.
In spiritual research we present how, in going through the portal of death, what otherwise always remains united with the human being—also in sleep—the so-called etheric body, raises itself along with the higher soul-members, out of the physical body, passing over into the spiritual world. In the field of spiritual research, we draw a picture of how the corpse-remains behind and how the human being with his ether body loosens himself, step by step, one member after the other, from the physical body. The etheric body is then for a time the enclosure for the higher soul-members of the human being. That is an idea with which those who approach closer to spiritual research can become more and more conversant. In what follows we shall be able to consider in what an admirable way the artistic soul of Herman Grimm touches upon these facts of the spiritual world. This will lead us again to the question as to why, for deeper reasons, Herman Grimm did not develop his cultural discourse into a comprehensive work.
Apart from his novella, Herman Grimm wrote a further work, a novel, Unüberwindliche Mächte [1867], [Insurmountable Powers], in which, as with his work in general, his refined style leads us to a contemplation of the world and of life. Particularly remarkable is what might be called the clash of two cultures in miniature. The one world adheres to title, status and rank. Deriving from an old lineage, an impoverished count lives in the afterglow of his hierarchical status. Wonderfully contrasted in this novel is the way in which the world of old prejudices and rankings encounters the New World. The quite different views and notions of America play into this. The individual identifying himself with hierarchical prejudices, whom Herman Grimm calls Arthur, encounters Americans. He meets Emmy, the daughter of Mrs. Forster, who has grown up with American values. We see this count passionately enraptured by Emmy.
It would be impossible even to outline the rich content of this novel adequately. We encounter the whole contrast of Europe and America. In addition, there is the contrast of the old Prussian milieu and the newly constituted Prussian milieu arising as the outcome of wars. It is a tremendous cultural “painting” in which the characters are featured, and from which they emerge. Only this much can be indicated: that, as a result of the confluence of these streams, Arthur, the count, dies a tragic death right before he was to marry Emmy. A deluded relative considers himself the rightful heir to the count's lineage, seeing the count as a bastard. Stung with envy and jealousy, he opposes the count, and on the eve of his marriage, the count is shot down by this individual.
Someone wanting to contemplate this novel merely rationalistically might consider it as concerned with the unbridgeable prejudice outstanding, However, the expression “insurmountable powers” can perhaps hardly seem more justified than when Herman Grimm, unintentionally indicates the idea of karma, the idea of the causal connection of destinies in human life—as though knotted together one after another. We see him depict forces at work in destiny that can only come into play in working over from earlier embodiments—from previous earth-lives. He does not describe this in speaking theoretically of “forces” or of “karma,” but in simply letting the facts speak for themselves, giving expression to these powers that, then appear in a certain way corresponding to the ideas of spiritual research. We see a karmic destiny unfold; we see insurmountable karmic powers come to expression. And we see something further:
Emmy remains behind. The final glance that fell into Arthur's eyes as he lay there, his heart shot through, was when she bent over him and their eyes met in a certain expression. An utterance of Herman Grimm remains unforgettable, in saying, the spirit gave way at the moment his eyes assumed the peculiarity of appearing as no more than physical instruments. But now we encounter once more Herman Grimm's penetration of worlds that lie beyond death—what one would like to call his chaste penetration of worlds out of which souls work on, in remaining real once they have gone through the portal of death.
In a brief concluding chapter, Herman Grimm shows us Emmy gradually becoming infirm. It is entirely characteristic of his close connection to matters of soul and spirit, that he describes Emmy's approaching death. She is brought to Montreux. Montreux and its surroundings are uniquely described. However, Herman Grimm does not describe Emmy's passing like authors who have no relation to spiritual matters, but rather as someone taking account of how the secrets of death, of the realm beyond, speak to the soul. I would render something incomplete if I did not add in conclusion Herman Grimm's own words on the death of Emmy:
“This was Emmy's dream.
“Between midnight and morning, she believed she woke up.
“Her initial glance at the window, through which a pale light streamed in, was free and clear and she knew where she was. She also heard her mother, who slept next to her, breathing, However, a moment later, with a sense of pressure she had never felt before, overwhelming anxiety overcame her. It was no longer the thoughts that had tormented her during the last few days, but as though a giant hand were holding all the world's mountains over her by a thin thread, and that at any moment the fingers holding them could loosen, and the whole mass would fall down on her, to remain lying on her eternally. Her eyes wandered hither and thither looking for a glimmer of light, but there was none; the light of the window extinguished, her mother's breathing no longer audible, and stifling loneliness all around, as though she would never come alive again. She wanted to call out, but could not; she wanted to touch herself, but not a limb obeyed her. All was completely silent, completely dark; no thoughts could be grasped in this frightful, monotonous anxiety: even memory was taken from het—and then, at last a thought returned: Arthur!
“And wondrously now, it was as if this one thought had transformed itself into a point of light that became visible to the eyes. And to the extent the thought grew to become boundless longing, this light grew, spreading out, and suddenly, as though it sprang apart and unfolded itself, it took on form—Arthur stood before her! She saw him, she recognized him at last. It was surely he himself. He smiled and was close beside her. She did not see whether he was naked, nor whether he was clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well; it was he himself, no mere phantom that had taken on his form.”
Thus, Herman Grimm has the one who has long since gone through the portal of death approach her, now a seeress; at the moment of her death she approaches the deceased, addressing his soul: “She did not see whether he was naked, nor whether he was clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well; it was he himself, no mere phantom that had taken on his form.”
“He stretched out his hand to her and said, ‘Cornel’ Never had his voice sounded as sweet and enticing as now. With all the strength she was capable of, she tried to raise her arms towards him, but she was unable to do so. He came still closer and stretched out his hand closer to her, ‘Come!’ he said again.
“For Emmy it was as though the power with which she attempted to bring at least a word over her lips, would have been capable of moving mountains, but she was not able to say even this one word.
“Arthur looked at her, and she at him. With only the possibility of moving a finger, she would have touched him. And now, most terrible of all: he appeared to shrink back again! ‘Come!’ he said for the third time. Sensing he had spoken for the last time, that the terrible darkness would break in again upon his heavenly gaze, filled now with a fear that tore at. Her as frost splits trees, she made a final attempt to raise her arms to him. It was impossible to overcome the weight and the cold that held her captive—but then, as a bud bursts open, from which a blossom grows before our eyes, there grew out of her arms, other shining arms, out of her shoulders, gleaming new shoulders. And lifting these arms toward Arthur's arms, his hands grasping her hands, and floating slowly backwards, drawing her after him, the whole magnificent figure with him, rose out of Emmy's.”
The emergence of the etheric body out of the physical body cannot be described more wonderfully, in having been undertaken by a pure artist-soul. That was a spirit, that was a soul that lived in Herman Grimm, of which we may say that it came close to what we seek so eagerly in spiritual research. Herman Grimm provides evidence that, in approaching the -twentieth century, the modern human being sought paths to spiritual life.
So we turn gladly to Herman Grimm, wanting only to continue further on the same path. We see him elevate the creations of Raphael, the creations of Michelangelo, the experiences of Goethe, the Greek-soul of Homer, to the stream that he sees flowing onward as “creative phantasy” through millennia. We then know how close Herman Grimm was, in his entire feeling and perception, to what lives and weaves as the soul-spiritual behind all physical reality. For when Herman Grimm refers to his “creative phantasy” we are not dealing with total abstraction. In so far as it is still perhaps a matter of residual abstraction, to that extent it can seem necessary to break through the thin wall separating Herman Grimm from the living spirit, effective not only as creative phantasy, but living as immediate spirits effective behind the entire sense world. It could appear a form of unwarranted restraint, to say no.- more than Herman Grimm in speaking of the continual onward working of the phantasy of humanity. After all, as an artist, he touched so intimately on the still living soul that has gone through the portal of death. Hence, it will not be difficult for us, where Herman Grimm speaks of creative phantasy, to see the living spirit that, as spiritual researchers, we seek behind the sense world.
Perhaps it will not seem unjustified if it is even asserted that-, for a spirit that struggled so honestly and uprightly for truth—wanting to approach this creative phantasy ever and again—it was, after all, too much of an abstraction for him. It urged him to grasp the living spiritual element, and for that reason the great work he intended could not come about—since if it had been written, it would have had to become a work that portrayed the spiritual world not merely as creative phantasy, but as a world of creative beings and individualities.
Spiritual research has not been placed into the modern age arbitrarily. It is demanded by seeking souls of our time—seeking souls to whom, as we have seen, Herman Grimm.so-clearly and. characteristically belongs. In this way we can become aware that with spiritual research we do not stand as alien and isolated in modern cultural life. We have been able to look to Herman Grimm as to a related spirit. Even if he does not share the same standpoint completely, we do nonetheless stand—or can at least stand, immeasurably near to him. It is better to contemplate such a figure as a whole, rather than scrutinizing every detail—to look at the harmony of soul with which Herman Grimm can affect us, its mildness and then again keenness and strength of soul, with which he can likewise affect us. We may treat this or that question differently from Herman Grimm, but I know that it is not altogether out of keeping with his style, if I summarize what I actually wanted to say in the following words; One could arrive at the thought—let us call it for that matter a delusory thought, one that could be entertained as a beautiful illusion: If higher spirits, other-worldly spirits wanted to acquaint themselves prefer with what happens on the earth by means of reading, they would prefer most of all to read such writings as those in which Herman Grimm depicts the earthly destinies of human beings.
This feeling can reverberate as though from almost every line of Herman Grimm's writings, lifting one upwards to a sphere beyond the earth. One then feels so akin to this personality that, if one were to characterize what has been said today concerning Herman Grimm, a beautiful saying could come to mind that he himself employed in eulogizing his friend Treitschke [Heinrich von Treitschke, German historian, 1834-56] whom he valued so much.
“With what existential joy did this human being stand in life. What courage he showed in battle. What a gift lie had for language. How new his latest book. How little could those take exception to his ‘elbows’ in the general exchange of ideas. They too will join in declaring: ‘Yes, he was one of ours!’”
These words are at the same time the last words that Herman Grimm wrote and had printed, as we know from the publisher of his works, Reinhold Steig. And I should like also, in conclusion, to summarize this evening's considerations with the words: With what existential joy did Herman Grimm stand in life; how mild—and yet how individual! How little can even those distance themselves from him, if they but understand themselves aright, who differ from him in their ideas and in other ways! And, proceeding from whatever field of investigation, how closely allied to him must those feel who seek paths to the spirit! What kinship to him must they feel, when his mild figure appears before them—prompting them to break out in the words: Yes, he was one of ours!
Die Weltanschauung Eines Kulturforschers Der Gegenwart, Herman Grimm, Und Die Geistesforschung
Es könnte leicht scheinen, als ob das, was hier als Geisteswissenschaft vertreten wird, innerhalb des gegenwärtigen Kulturlebens ganz isoliert dastehe und keine Beziehung zu demjenigen hätte, was sonst im Geistesleben der Gegenwart herrscht und in einer gewissen Beziehung tonangebend ist. Das kann aber nur dem so erscheinen, welcher in einer gewissen engherzigen Weise diese Geisteswissenschaft oder Geistesforschung auffaßt und in ihr nichts anderes sieht als eine Summe von gewissen Lehren und Theorien. Wer aber in ihr eine geistige Strömung sieht, die in sich alles aufnehmen will, wozu das Geistesleben aus den nun einmal heute zu eröffnenden Quellen führt, der wird gewahr werden, daß von dieser geistigen Strömung aus sich die Linien zu mancherlei Richtungen des modernen Geisteslebens hin ziehen lassen, und daß diese Geisteswissenschaft genannte Art der Lebensbetrachtung anwendbar ist auf andere, ihr mehr oder weniger nahestehende geistige Richtungen. Von einer solchen geistigen Richtung soll heute die Rede sein, von einer geistigen Richtung, die uns durch eine markant hervortretende Persönlichkeit des modernen Geisteslebens repräsentiert werden kann, durch den modernen Kultur- und Kunstforscher Herman Grimm.
Herman Grimm, der 1828 geboren und 1901 gestorben ist, erscheint in der’Tat wie ein ganz besonders ausgeprägter Typus des modernen Geisteslebens auf der einen Seite, und doch wiederum so individuell eigenartig, so als eine besondere Gestalt dastehend, daß sich an diese Persönlichkeit gerade die heutige Betrachtung ganz besonders gut anknüpfen läßt. Herman Grimm erscheint demjenigen, der sich mit ihm beschäftigt hat, wie eine Art Vermittlungsglied zwischen jenem Geistesleben der neueren Zeit, das mit dem Namen Goethe zusammenhängt, und unserem eigenen modernen Geistesleben.
Auf eine ganz besondere Art hängt Herman Grimm mit alledem zusammen, was an den Namen Goethe angeknüpft werden kann, durch seine Vermählung mit der Tochter derjenigen Persönlichkeit, welche dem Goetheschen Kreise so nahestand, der Schwester des romantischen Dichters Brentano, Bettina Brentano. Mit ihr war also Herman Grimm verwandt, sie war seine Schwiegermutter, jene Bettina Brentano, welche den merkwürdigen Briefwechsel Goethes mit einem Kinde herausgegeben hat, jene Bettina Brentano, von welcher jenes einzigartige Denkmal Goethes herrührt, wo wir Goethe dasitzen sehen, wie ein Olympier thronend, ein Musikinstrument in der Hand, in die Saiten eingreifend ein Kind, in welchem sich Bettina Brentano selber darstellte. Wie ein Kind kam sich diese aus dem Frankfurter Kreise La Roche stammende Persönlichkeit vor in ihren Beziehungen zu Goethe, und aufgehen konnte sie in Goethes Geist wie nur wenige. Und wenn auch so mancher in den Briefen, die Bettina Brentano mitteilt, etwas Ungenaues findet, Dichtung und Wahrheit bunt durcheinandergemischt, so muß man doch sagen: alles, was wir in diesem merkwürdigen Buche «Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde» haben, ist innig herausgewachsen aus Goethes Geistesart, gibt uns in einer ganz wunderbaren Weise ein Echo dieser Goetheschen Geistesart. Vermählt war Bettina Brentano wiederum mit dem Dichter Achim von Arnim, der bei der Herausgabe der wunderschönen Volksdichtungssammlung «Des Knaben Wunderhorn» beteiligt war. Durch die Verwandtschaft mit diesem Kreise — wie gesagt, Herman Grimms Frau, Gisela Grimm, war eine Tochter von Bettina Brentano oder Bettina von Arnim -, durch diese Verwandtschaft war Herman Grimm von Jugend auf sozusagen inmitten von Persönlichkeiten aufgewachsen, die Goethe durchaus nahestanden, die zu ihm in all das, was er in seiner Erziehung aufnahm, etwas herübertrugen wie einen persönlichen und unmittelbar elementaren geistigen Hauch Goethes. So fühlte sich auch Herman Grimm von Jugend auf dazugehörig zu all denen, die Goethe noch persönlich nahestanden, trotzdem er ja bei Goethes Tod ein Kind war. Und nicht wie einer, der Goethe und den Goetheanismus «studiert» hat, stand Herman Grimm da, sondern wie einer, der das Goethe-Wesen, der Goethes ganze lebendige Zauberkraft und Goethes ganzes lebendiges Menschheitswesen unmittelbar, elementar, persönlich in sich aufgenommen hatte.
So durchlebte denn Herman Grimm mit innigem Anteil die Entwickelung des deutschen Lebens in den mittleren Jahrzehnten des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Er durchlebte es so, daß er sich gewissermaßen sein eigenes Reich innerhalb dieses deutschen Lebens begründete. Man kann ihn einen Geist nennen, der in individuellster Art überall auf dasjenige losging, was gerade für ihn anregend war, was fruchtbar war für die Entwickelung seiner eigenen Geisteskräfte. Dadurch gliederte sich für Herman Grimm aus dem ganzen Umfange des Kulturlebens das heraus, was ihm angemessen war: ein geistiges Reich, in welchem er sich heimisch fühlte. Innerhalb dieses geistigen Reiches, in welchem sich Herman Grimm heimisch fühlte, erkannte er sich gewissermaßen als den geistigen Statthalter Goethes an. Ihm erschien Goethes Geist wie ein fortlebendes Wesen. Und wo er die Ströme desjenigen aufsuchte und auf sich wirken ließ, was ihm im Geistesleben konform war, da war es immer mehr oder weniger das Goethesche Wesen, das er nicht nur gewahr zu werden suchte, sondern das ihm Maßstab wurde bei allem, was ihm im Geistesleben entgegentrat.
Es waren Jahrzehnte eines Ringens des deutschen Kulturlebens, die Herman Grimm durchlebte. Jahrzehnte waren es, in denen nach Goethes Tode das Goethe-Wesen ziemlich zurückging, in denen man sich um so viele andere, man möchte sagen mehr den unmittelbaren Tag berührende Dinge zu kümmern hatte, als um die Strömungen, die von Goethe ausgingen. In jener Zeit, in der es von vielen anderen Dingen innerhalb Deutschlands recht laut, von Goethe aber etwas still geworden war, betrachtete sich wohl Herman Grimm durch den unmittelbaren Zusammenhang mit dem Goethe-Wesen als einen Menschen, der auch still in sich, aber lebendig, das Goethesche Wesen zu pflegen und es hinüberzutragen hatte in eine Zeit, von welcher er eigentlich sicher hoffte, daß sie kommen werde, eine Zeit, in welcher der Stern Goethes wieder lebendiger am europäischen Geisteshimmel aufleuchten sollte.
So, wie Herman Grimm sich gewissermaßen als den geistigen Statthalter Goethes, seines geistigen Reiches, betrachtete, so war Herman Grimm auf eine naturgemäße Weise in seinem ganzen Handhaben des geistigen Lebens, in der ganzen Art und Weise, wie er sich zu geistigen Dingen stellte, etwas eigen. Es war ihm etwas eigen wie einem geistigen Fürsten, und man fand es natürlich, ihn so gewissermaßen als einen geistigen Fürsten anzuschauen. Bis in die äußere Gestalt, in die Physiognomie, bis in die Geste und in sein ganzes Auftreten hinein hatte er etwas von einem geistigen Fürsten. Und man darf sagen: Wenn man auch sozusagen nicht gewohnt war, in dieser Beziehung zu einer Persönlichkeit wie zu einer «fürstlichen» aufzusehen, so zwang einem Herman Grimms ganze Art etwas auf, ihm den eben gekennzeichneten Rang zuzuerkennen. So gedenke ich noch mit einem lieben Gedanken an ein Zusammensein mit Herman Grimm in Weimar, wohin er so oft und so gern kam. Er hatte mich damals als einzigen Gast zu einem Mittagsmahl eingeladen. Wir sprachen über verschiedenes, was ihn berührte. Wir sprachen auch — und es war für mich befriedigend, daß er dieses Gespräch mit mir führen wollte — über seine umfassenden geistigen Lebenspläne. Und als eine gewisse Zeit nach dem Mittagessen vergangen war, da sagte er, in seiner Eigenart humoristisch zwar, aber doch wiederum natürlich, so daß man es von ihm hinnahm wie eben etwas Natürliches: «Nun, mein lieber Doktor, jetzt will ich Sie in Gnaden entlassen!» Es war tatsächlich etwas, was mir damals ganz den Eindruck der Selbstverständlichkeit machte, weil Herman Grimms Auftreten eben so war, daß man ihm eine gewisse geistige Fürstlichkeit zugestand.
So etwas trägt das ganze Lebenswerk Herman Grimms an sich. Man kann keine seiner größeren oder kleineren Schriften auf sich wirken lassen, ohne daß man, während diese auf der einen Seite so wunderbar harmonischen und auf der anderen Seite wieder so prägnant gebauten Sätze in die Seele einfließen, daneben die Empfindung hat: das alles wirkt so auf die Seele, die sich ihm hingibt, wie wenn immer die Persönlichkeit des Autors dahinterstünde, einen anschaute und mit ungeheuer seelenvollem, persönlichem Anteil einem das in die Seele schickte, was sie einem zu sagen hat. Dasmacht das ganz wunderbare, seelisch Tönende in Herman Grimms Schriften aus, daß sie allüberall in dieser schönsten Art der Ausfluß seiner ganzen seelenvollen Persönlichkeit sind und unmittelbar auch so wirken. Sein ganzer Stil erhält allerdings dadurch den Charakter eines gewissen berechtigten vornehmen Pathos. Aber dieses vornehme Pathos wird eben überall durch das persönliche Element, das man daraus hervorbrechen fühlt, gemildert. Man nimmt diesen Stil trotz seiner Vornehmheit als etwas Selbstverständlicheshin, und man fühlt ihm überallan, daß er seine Herkunft von der innigen Aufnahme Goethescher Geisteselemente hat, fühlt aber auch, daß diese Herkunft nicht das einzige ist. Man fühlt, daß das Goethesche Element durchgegangen ist durch das romantische Wesen der deutschen Geistesentwickelung. Ein gewisses Losgelöstsein von allem, was man im breitesten Sinne das Alltägliche, Volkstümliche nennen kann, ein Zurückgezogensein in eine einzelne Persönlichkeit, ein ganz individuelles Wesen, eine ganz individuelle Art verspüren wir in dem Stile Herman Grimms.
Vielleicht würde diese Richtung im Geiste Herman Grimms zu einer gewissen Einseitigkeit haben führen können, wenn nicht eine andere Strömung bei ihm mitgewirkt hätte, die ihn wieder so innig verbunden hat mit allem Volkstümlichen, die ihn hat Wurzel schlagen lassen tief hinein in den Geist alles Volkstümlichen. Denn Herman Grimm selber war ja der Sohn Wilhelm Grimms und der Neffe Jacob Grimms. Das sind die beiden Männer, welche die deutsche Sprachforschung in der neuzeitlichen Art begründet haben, die Männer, die jene mittlerweile so tief in das deutsche Geistesleben hineingedrungenen deutschen Märchen gesammelt haben, jene Männer, die hingehorcht haben auf das, was die einfachen Menschen aus dem Volke erzählten an Sagen und Märchen; Sagen und Märchen, die durch lange Jahrhunderte hindurch im einfachsten Volksgemüt gelebt hatten, die fast vergessen waren, nur durch einzelne wenige hinaufgetragen in die neuere Zeit, die aber heute wieder leben, weil sie zu dieser Wiederbelebung gebracht worden sind durch die Brüder Grimm.
Wenn so Herman Grimm, trotz seiner Vornehmheit im Stile in allem, was von ihm kommt, wieder etwas zeigt von Verwachsensein mit allem Volkstümlichen, so müssen wir noch etwas hervorheben, was eine vielleicht sonst zur Einseitigkeit gewordene Geistesrichtung harmonisch mit einer anderen Strömung: verbindet, so daß uns alles in ihm wie eine Art innerer harmonischer Totalität erscheint. Haben wir doch, wenn wir Herman Grimm auf uns wirken lassen, in seinem ganzen Stile etwas wie eine gewisse Weichheit, wie eine Anschmiegbarkeit an alle die Geisteserscheinungen, in die er sich im Verlaufe seines Lebens vertieft hat. Ein Isoliertsein als Mensch ist notwendig, wenn man sich so in die geistigen Erscheinungen und geistigen Tatsachen von mancherlei Jahrhunderten vertiefen will. Diese Weichheit bekommt aber wieder in Herman Grimm ihr Skelett, ihre Härte durch ein anderes, das in seine Erziehung eingeflossen ist: gehörten ja doch sein Vater und sein Oheim zu jenen «Göttinger Sieben», welche im Jahre 1837 gegen die Aufhebung der Verfassung ihres Landes ihren Protest eingereicht haben und deshalb von der Universität Göttingen entfernt worden sind. So erlebte Herman Grimm schon als Knabe eine Tat seltener Art und erlebte diese Tat mit mancherlei Folgen. Denn gar mancherlei Folgen gab es für Vater und Oheim auch im alltäglichen Leben dadurch, daß sie nicht nur Stellung, sondern auch Brot damals verloren hatten. Und Herman Grimm hat es oft hervorgehoben, wie er mit den Impulsen des geschichtlichen Werdens schon damals als neunjähriger Knabe in Beziehung getreten ist, nicht durch das «Buch», sondern durch eine bedeutsame historische Tat.
So steht Herman Grimm als Persönlichkeit vor uns. Wie eine Art von Träger des Goethe-Wesens kam er sich wohl vor in der Zeit, als es von diesem Goethe-Wesen in Deutschland stille geworden war und man sich anderen Dingen zugewendet hatte. Aber er erlebte es, daß dieses Goethe-Wesen wieder auflebte, und daß er selber mancherlei beitragen konnte zur Wiederbelebung dieses Goethe-Wesens. Er erlebte es, daß er im Beginne der siebziger Jahre des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts seine berühmten «Goethe-Vorlesungen» an der Berliner Universität halten konnte, jene GoetheVorlesungen, die auch in seinem bedeutsamen Goethe-Buch vorliegen. Und was ist dieses Goethe-Buch für ein Buch! Wer es als junger Mensch in die Hand bekommt und sich in der rechten Weise zu ihm zu stellen vermag, der darf ohne Zweifel im späteren Leben davon als von etwas Bedeutsamem sprechen. Und so, wie es eben ausgesprochen worden ist in diesem Buch, so steht Herman Grimm vor uns als einer, der sich zu Goethe zu stellen vermag, wie einer, der eingedrungen ist in die verschiedenen Verästelungen des Goetheschen Seelenlebens. So entwickelt er Werk für Werk dasjenige, was durch Goethes eigene Seele gezogen ist, während Goethe an diesen Werken geschaffen hat.
Da können wir nun Herman Grimm belauschen, wie er eine solche Persönlichkeit, wie es ihm Goethe war, betrachtete. Da ist nichts von kleinlicher Biographen sucht, da ist nichts von Aufstöbern von allerlei mehr oder weniger gleichgültigen Lebenszügen. Da ist aber doch wieder eine Vertiefung in alles das in Goethes Leben, was für Goethes Seelenentwickelung von Bedeutung und Wichtigkeit war. Da ist das Bestreben, zu verfolgen: wie wirkt das, was bei Goethe Erlebnis war, was in seiner Seele wirkte und lebte, wie gestaltet sich das um, so daß es Formen annimmt, daß es Bild wird, daß es ein Geschöpf der Goetheschen Phantasie wird, und Goethe selber dann, alles vergessend, was die Sache bloß im Leben war, ganz aufgeht in jenem Neuen, das in der Phantasie-Schöpfung aus dem Erlebnis geworden ist, in der Phantasie-Schöpfung, die selber nun Erlebnis ist?
So hebt sich bei jeder Betrachtung eines Goethe-Werkes durch Herman Grimms Darstellung Goethe in seinen Erlebnissen um eine Stufe höher, hebt sich unmittelbar hinein in eine Sphäre des reinen geistigen Anschauens. Wie Goethe von seinem Leben hinaufstieg in geistiges Erfahren und geistiges Dasein, das zeigt Herman Grimm an jedem einzelnen der Goethe-Werke. Und wir machen mit ihm diesen Gang, den er durchmacht, immer deshalb so gern mit, weil nirgends bei Herman Grimm etwas eintritt, was so leicht bei einer solchen Darstellung kommen kann: daß gleichsam eine einzelne Seelenkraft, der Verstand oder die Phantasie, mit dem Betrachter durchgeht, und man sich dann nicht mehr im Zusammenhange fühlt mit dem unmittelbaren Leben. Nein, Herman Grimm geht nie weiter, aber immer so weit, als er als unmittelbar persönliche Individualität selber gehen kann, und dabei das ganze Werk verfolgen kann. Zum Schlusse fühlt man sich überall, wenn Herman Grimm einen bis zu dem Punkte geführt hat, wo aus dem Goetheschen Erlebnis das Werk geworden ist, in rein geistiges Leben entrückt. Goethe wird einem ein Wesen, dessen Inhalt rein geistig ist, eine Summe von rein geistigen Impulsen. Dieser Hauch des Geistigen breitet sich über alle Darstellung in dem Goethe-Buche Herman; Grimms aus.
Was Herman Grimm so auf Goethe anwandte, das wurzelte nun tief in der ganzen Geistesart Herman Grimms. Wohl längst, als er in jene Betrachtungen eintrat, die sich ihm zu seinen «Goethe-Vorlesungen» rundeten, stand schon vor ihm eine große, kolossale Idee, die Idee, das abendländische Geistesleben im ganzen so zu betrachten, wie er es individuell in bezug auf Goethe betrachtet hat. Die Idee stand vor ihm, drei Jahrtausende des abendländischen Geisteslebens so zu verfolgen, daß sich überall zeigt, wie die alltäglichen, in der physischen Welt bestehenden Ereignisse und Tatsachen ihren eigentlichen Wert dadurch erhalten, daß sie durch Menschensinn und Menschengeist in dasjenige umgewandelt werden, was die menschliche Seele erlebt, wenn sie bis ins Reich dessen hinaufsteigt, was nun Herman Grimm «die schöpferische Phantasie» nannte. So wurde denn Herman Grimm ein Geschichtsbetrachter ganz eigener Art. Für ihn war Geschichte gewissermaßen etwas ganz anderes als für alle anderen modernen Geschichtsbetrachter.
Geschichte wird ja gewöhnlich so studiert, daß man die Dokumente, die Materialien sammelt und dann aus diesen Materialien heraus ein Bild der Menschheitsentwickelung zu geben versucht. Für Herman Grimm waren Materialien, waren äußere Tatsachen zwar ungeheuer wichtig, aber durchaus nicht die Hauptsache. Er hat sich oftmals den Gedanken durch die Seele gehen lassen: Könnte es denn nicht sein, daß für irgendeine Zeitepoche gerade die allerwichtigsten Dokumente, welche die entscheidenden sind, wenn man die Impulse der Zeit studieren will, spurlos verschwunden sind, verlorengegangen sind, so daß man gerade, wenn man die Dokumente am genauesten, am treuesten ins Auge faßt, am allermeisten an der Wahrheit vorbeigeht? — Deshalb war er davon überzeugt, daß derjenige, welcher sich am treuesten an äußere Dokumente hält, im geringsten Sinne ein treues Bild der Menschheitsentwickelung geben kann. Nur ein gefälschtes Bild der Menschheitsentwickelung, so meinte Herman Grimm, könnte herauskommen, wenn man sich an äußere Dokumente hält.
Aber etwas anderes ist im Geistesleben der Menschheit aufgetreten: dasjenige, was äußerlich geschehen ist, was als äußere Tatsachen sich abgespielt hat, das ist in den geeigneten Individualitäten zu einer geistigen Wiedergeburt gekommen, das hat sich ausgelebt in denjenigen Persönlichkeiten, die es künstlerisch umgestaltet haben, die es geistig verwertet haben. So blickte etwa Herman Grimm hin zum Beispiel auf die griechische Zeit. Er sagte sich: Gar mancherlei Dokumente sind über diese griechische Zeit vorhanden. Aus diesen Dokumenten ist nur im uneigentlichen Sinne etwas zu gewinnen für das Verständnis des Wesens des Griechentums. Aber was die Griechen erlebt haben, das hat seine Wiedergeburt gefunden in den Werken der griechischen Kunst, das hat seine Wiederbelebung erfahren in einzelnen griechischen Persönlichkeiten. Vertieft man sich in sie, Jäßt man das Griechentum durch das Medium der Persönlichkeit auf sich wirken, dann hat man ein treueres Bild dieses Griechentums als wenn man nur die Tatsachen äußerlich zusammenstellt.-Und so verschwanden für Herman Grimm gleichsam diese Tatsachen selber. Man möchte sagen, sie schmolzen ab von seinem Weltbilde, und was in seinem Weltbilde zurückblieb, das war ein fortlaufender Strom dessen, was er die Schöpfungen der Volksphantasie nannte.
Wollte er zum Beispiel Julius Caesar betrachten, so ließ er nicht nur die historischen Dokumente auf sich wirken, sondern er meinte in dem, was Shakespeare aus Caesar gemacht hat, etwas ebenso Bedeutsames für Caesar zu haben, als in den historischen Dokumenten vorhanden ist. Durch Menschen blickte er auf die Zeiten hin. Nicht nur, daß ihm der Verlauf der Menschheitsentwickelung etwas wurde, was eine Persönlichkeit immer der anderen reichte, sondern es wurde ihm eben der ganze Verlauf der Menschheitsentwickelung selbst ein geistiger Vorgang, den er allerdings in demjenigen erschöpft zu haben glaubte, was er die schöpferische Phantasie nannte. Von diesem Gesichtspunkte aus wollte er vor seiner Seele immer mehr und mehr ein Bild der in den abendländischen Kulturen schöpferischen Volksphantasie gewinnen, wollte den Hergang der abendländischen Menschheitsentwickelung so in seine Seele hereinbekommen, daß er sich sagen konnte: Wie die einzelnen Strömungen der abendländischen Kulturen ineinander übergehen, wie sie einander ablösen von den ältesten Zeiten her, bis zu denen er zurückgehen wollte, bis hinauf zu seiner eigenen, der Goethe-Zeit hin, so sind sie ein fortwaltender Strom des Webens der Volksphantasie in den abendländischen Völkern.
Von diesem Drange aus ging dann früh sein Blick zu jener grandiosen Erscheinung des abendländischen Geisteslebens hin, die ihn eine Zeitlang beschäftigte, und über die er in den neunziger Jahren ein so beispiellos schönes Buch geschrieben hat wie seinen «Homer», seine Beschreibung der Ilias. Dieses Buch, das man immer wieder gern zur Hand nimmt, wenn man sich vom modernen geistigen Standpunkte aus in den Beginn des Griechentums vertiefen will, es zeigt uns wieder Herman Grimm, wenn wir seinen allgemeinen Geistesstandpunkt voraussetzen, von einer ganz besonderen Seite her. Sein Blick schweift hin auf die Götter und Götterwelten, die in der Ilias des Homer dargestellt werden, sein Blick schweift hin auf die kämpfenden griechischen und trojanischen Helden, und die Frage entsteht vor seiner Seele: Wie ist es denn eigentlich mit diesem Hereinspielen einer Götterwelt in die gewöhnliche menschliche Welt der kämpfenden Griechen und Trojaner? — Das wird für ihn eine Frage. Ihm fällt auf, welch gewaltiger Unterschied in der homerischen Darstellung vorhanden ist zwischen der auf der Erde herumwandelnden Menschheit und denjenigen Wesenheiten, die als unsterbliche Götter geschildert werden. Und Herman Grimm versucht nun darzustellen, wie gewissermaßen die Götter im Sinne Homers eine «ältere» Schichte von auf der Erde herumwandelnden Wesen darstellen. Wenn auch Herman Grimm in seiner mehr realistischen Art in diesen Wesen «Menschen» sieht, so schaut er doch zurück in eine Kultur, die zur Zeit Homers längst ihre Bedeutung verloren hatte, in eine Kultur, die von einer anderen abgelöst worden ist, welcher dann die trojanischen und griechischen Helden angehören. Eine ältere und eine jüngere Menschheitsschichte läßt Herman Grimm für die Ilias Homers zusammenspielen, und was übriggeblieben ist an lebendigen Wirkungen von einer vorher lebenden Schichte von Wesenheiten, das spielt für Herman Grimm bei Homer in das hinein, was sich abspielt zwischen Griechenland und Troja.
In dieser Weise sieht Herman Grimm überhaupt in dem Fortgang der Menschheitsentwickelung ein fortwährendes Abgelöstwerden älterer, wir können sagen Kulturkreise oder Zyklen von neueren, und ein Hereinspielen von alten in neuere. Jeder neue Kulturzyklus hat eine gewisse Aufgabe, die Aufgabe, etwas Neues in die allgemeine Menschheitsentwickelung hereinzubringen. Das Alte bleibt dann eine Weile noch vorhanden, spielt in das Neue hinein.
Man möchte sagen, soweit ein Mensch im letzten Drittel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in dasjenige hineinschauen konnte, was heute auch wieder von dem Gesichtspunkte der modernen Geisteswissenschaft aus vertreten werden muß, so weit hat Herman Grimm da hineingeschaut. Er ist nicht hinter die griechische Zeit zurückgegangen. Daher konnte er nicht geben, was die neuere Geistesforschung schildert im Zurückkommen zu über den Menschen erhabenen, rein geistigen Wesen der Vormenschheit. Aber er streifte überall an diese Ergebnisse der neueren Geistesforschung, streifte so nahe heran, als ein Mensch, der noch nicht selber innerhalb der Geistesforschung gestanden hat, heranstreifen kann.
In der Geistesforschung versuchen wir darzustellen, wie wir, wenn wir in der Menschheitsentwickelung zurückgehen, nicht zu der Tierreihe kommen im Sinn der Darwinistischen Theorie, die heute materialistisch ausgedeutet wird, sondern wie wir zu geistigen, rein geistigen Vorfahren der Menschen zurückkommen, und wie wir hinter jenem Menschheitszyklus, da die Menschenseelen im physischen Leibe verkörpert leben, einen anderen Menschheitszyklus haben, in welchem die Menschen noch nicht im physischen Leibe verkörpert sind. Herman Grimm läßt gleichsam die Frage in der Schwebe: Was war es eigentlich mit den «Göttern», bevor die Menschen die Erde betreten haben? — Aber er erkennt die gesetzmäßige Aufeinanderfolge solcher Menschheitszyklen an. Das gibt einen bedeutsamen Berührungspunkt mit den Darstellungen der Geistesforschung. Daß er aber überhaupt solchen regelmäßigen, in Perioden sich abspielenden Fortschritt anerkennt, das bringt ihn uns sozusagen ganz besonders nahe.
Über drei Jahrtausende sucht er seine geistigen Betrachtungen auszudehnen. Das erste Jahrtausend ist ihm das Griechen- Jahrtausend. Man möchte sagen, es klingt etwas wie ein Unterton bei Herman Grimm durch, wenn man von ihm vernimmt, wie er diese Griechen so charakterisiert, als ob er sagte: Ja, wenn man zu den Griechen hinaufblickt, da kommen sie einem, besonders in der ältesten Zeit, noch gar nicht so gestaltet vor wie heutige Menschen. Selbst ein Mensch wie Alkibiades kommt einem noch wie eine Art Märchenprinz vor. In etwas, was übermenschlich ist, schaut man da hinein. Dennoch ragt aus dieser geistigen Welt der Griechen — die Herman Grimm, wie gesagt, unähnlich der späteren menschlichen Welt darstellt — auch in seinem Sinne alles, was an Impulsen in der Griechenwelt aufgegangen ist, in die spätere Welt hinein, so daß es bis zu unseren heutigen Tagen das wichtigste Element innerhalb unseres Geisteslebens bildet. Und am Ende des ersten Jahrtausends, das Herman Grimm betrachtet, stellt sich vor seine Seele der wichtigste Impuls hin, den er in der Menschheitsentwicklung anerkennt: der Christus-Impuls.
Herman Grimm ist gerade dort, wo er über die Gestalt des Christus spricht, in einem gewissen Sinne zurückhaltend, wie er überhaupt in mancherlei Dingen zurückhaltend ist. Aber die öfteren Bemerkungen, die er über den Christus macht, zeigen uns, daß er ebensowenig mit denjenigen gehen würde, die sozusagen den Christus wie bis zu einem bloßen Gedankenimpuls verflüchtigen möchten, noch möchte er auch mit denjenigen gehen, die in der Persönlichkeit des Christus Jesus nur etwas allgemein Menschliches sehen wollen. Er hebt hervor, wie zweierlei Impulse von der Gestalt des Christus ausgehen, ein Impuls von kolossaler Stärke, der dann, auch für Herman Grimm, durch die ganze folgende Menschheitsentwickelung fortwirkt, und der andere Impuls von einer ungeheuren Sanftmut. Herman Grimm findet, daß das ganze zweite Jahrtausend der abendländischen Kulturentwickelung sich so gestaltet, daß das Griechentum wie aufgesogen wird von dem Christus-Impuls und mit dieser Mischung von Christentum und Griechentum nun einzieht in die römische Welt, sie überwältigt und etwas ganz Besonderes hervorbringt. Das ist sein zweites Jahrtausend, das erste christliche Jahrtausend. Nicht die römischen Impulse sind ihm die Hauptsache, die christlichen sind es. Alles Politische, alles äußerlich Tatsächliche verschwindet in diesem Jahrtausend für den Blick Herman Grimms, und überall verfolgt er, wie der Christus-Impuls sich hineindrängt, und wie vielgestaltig dieser ChristusImpuls ist. Dabei ist seine Christus-Auffassung nicht eng, nicht klein, sondern weit. Als das Buch über das «Leben Jesu» von Ernest Renan erschien, da knüpfte Herman Grimm in seiner damals herausgegebenen Zeitschrift über «Künstler und Kunstwerke» eine merkwürdige Betrachtung an. Er versuchte zu zeigen, wie die bildlichen Darstellungen der Christus-Gestalt durch die Jahrhunderte hindurch sich gewandelt haben sowohl in der bildenden Kunst wie in der Literatur. Er versuchte also, die Variabilität, die Verwandelbarkeit des Christus-Impulses zu zeigen, und er zeigte, wie die Menschen immer diesen Christus-Impuls aufgefaßt haben je nach der Art, wie ihre eigene Geistesart war. Und dann sieht er in Ernest Renan einen, der im neunzehnten Jahrhundert den Christus in einer gewissen engen Art wieder aufzufassen bemüht ist.
Ein Jahrtausend etwa — meint Herman Grimm - habe das Christentum gebraucht, um seine Impulse hineinzusenden in die Rinnsale und Strömungen des abendländischen Geisteslebens. Dann kam sein drittes Jahrtausend, das zweite christliche, in dem wir selbst noch drinnenstehen, jenes Jahrtausend, in dessen Morgenröte dann Geister wie Dante, Giotto gewirkt haben und Künstler wie Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffael und so weiter, das dann hingeführt hat zu den Geisteswerken Shakespeares und Goethes. Ganz gesetzmäßig trennten sich für Herman Grimm diese Zyklen in der Menschheitsentwickelung stets ab. Geistige Gesetze schaute er waltend in der Menschheitsentwickelung, deren dahinfließenden Strom er ansprach in der schöpferischen Phantasie-Wesenheit. Immer wieder suchte Herman Grimm diese Gliederung des Stromes der Menschheitsentwickelung in seinen Vorlesungen vor seine Studenten hinzustellen, um zeigen zu können, wie sich das einzelne geistige Schaffen hineinstellt in diesen Gesamtstrom.
So war ihm Michelangelo, so waren ihm Raffael, Savonarola, Shakespeare und andere, so war ihm Goethe gleichsam ein geistiger Inhalt, der erklärbar wird, wenn man ihn auf dem Hintergrunde jenes fortfließenden Gesamtstromes der schöpferischen Phantasie sieht, die für Herman Grimm ganz besonders anschaulich wurde an ihrer Quelle bei dem bis ins neunte oder wohl zehnte Jahrhundert vor unserer Zeitrechnung zurückliegenden Homer. Und deshalb ist Herman Grimm einem so unendlich zur Seele sprechend, weil er oft, wenn er einen ganz elementar und unmittelbar hinführt zu einem Interesse am künstlerischen Werke — zum Beispiel zu Raffaels «Vermählung der Maria mit dem Josef», zu irgendeinem der Madonnenbilder oder anderen Werken, zu irgendeiner der Schöpfungen Leonardo da Vincis, oder wenn er zu irgend etwas hinführt, was er bei Goethe betrachtet -, weil er einen dann so hinführt, daß man das Gefühl hat, man steht im unmittelbar Individuellsten dieses Kunstwerkes drinnen. Wenn man nun mit ihm betrachtet, wie die einzelne Farbe oder Geste in das Kunstwerk hineingestellt ist, und so isoliert vor dem Kunstwerke zu stehen glaubt, da taucht dann plötzlich etwas auf wie ein Tableau über den ganzen Menschheitsfortschritt, über ein Stück jenes fortfließenden Stromes der schöpferischen Phantasie, der ihm hinübergeht über drei Jahrtausende und in sich alles Einzelne einschließt.
So wird man durch Herman Grimm in das intime Einzelne der betreffenden Kunstwerke hineingeführt, und dann hinaufgeführt auf den Gipfel, von welchem aus der Gesamtstrom betrachtet werden kann. Das war aber nicht etwas, was Herman Grimm in theoretischer Weise betrachtete. Es erschien einem so natürlich, daß Herman Grimm in dieser Weise die Gesamtheit des fortfließenden geistigen Stromes der Menschheitsentwickelung anschaute — wie er es mir, wie erwähnt, damals beim Mittagsmahl auseinandergesetzt hat —, weil er wirklich mit seiner ganzen Seele ganz naturgemäß selber in diesem geistigen Strome drinnen lebte, und er konnte gar nicht eine einzelne Erscheinung anders anschauen, als wie herausgeschnitten aus diesem gewaltigen Strome der Menschheitsentwickelung.
Die ganze abendländische Geistesentwickelung als Entwicklung der Volksphantasie —, so stand sie vor seiner Seele, aber nicht als eine allgemeine abstrakte Idee, sondern erfüllt von konkretestem Inhalt. Er wußte sich mit seiner Seele mit diesem durch Jahrtausende hinleuchtenden Inhalt so verbunden, daß alles, was er schrieb, einem eigentlich erscheint wie die einzelnen kleinen Abschnitte und Ausschnitte eines Riesenwerkes. Selbst wenn man bei Herman Grimm nur eine Rezension eines Buches liest, so hat man den Eindruck, als ob das eigentlich herausgeschnitten wäre aus einem kolossalen Werke, das die ganze Menschheitsentwickelung als Phantasieschöpfung darstellt. Man fühlt sich förmlich vor ein solches Kolossalwerk hingestellt, wie wenn man dieses Werk aufgeschlagen hätte und ein paar Seiten darin lesen würde, wenn man einen Aufsatz oder Essay oder sonst etwas über irgendein Buch bei Herman Grimm liest. Und man begreift nun, wie Herman Grimm selber sagen konnte, als er die Vorrede zu seiner Fragmenten-Sammlung an seinem Lebensabend schrieb, daß ihm vorgeschwebt habe eine Darstellung des fortlaufenden Stromes der Volksphantasie, und daß ihm darin die Darstellung der ganzen abendländischen Kultur erschienen sei. Man begreift, daß das Einzelne, was er verfolgt hat, so erschien, wie wenn er einzelne Stücke aus einem fertigen Werke herausgenommen hätte. Dabei legte er auf das, was er gedruckt hatte, nie mehr Wert als auf das, was er niedergeschrieben hatte, und auf das, was er niedergeschrieben hatte, nie mehr Wert als auf alles, was in seinen Gedanken lebte.
Wenn man so etwas andeutet, dann möchte man, ohne die Sache in eine abstrakte Formel zu bringen, etwas gesagt haben über jene Empfindung, die man darüber hat, wenn man Herman Grimm liebgehabt hat und noch hat, und sein Geisteswerk und seine Art schätzt: daß Herman Grimm niemals hat dazu kommen können, wirklich auszuführen, was so schön, so kolossal, so großartig vor seinem Geiste stand, daß selbst sein Homer-Werk, sein RaffaelWerk, sein Michelangelo-Werk, sein Goethe-Werk, wie Fragmente aus diesem, nichtgeschriebenen, umfassenden Werke uns erschienen. Mit einem gewissen wehmütigen Gefühl kann man jene Zeilen der schon genannten Einleitung zu den «Fragmenten» lesen, wo er sagt, daß er das, was er seinen Studenten Jahr für Jahr zu sagen hatte über die Entwickelung des europäischen Geisteslebens, jedes Jahr wieder neu umarbeitete, und daß es ja vielleicht angängig sei, die letzte Gestalt, welche diese Vorlesungen erhalten haben, zu einem Buche umzuarbeiten, welches dann in einem gewissen Sinne den Fortgang der europäischen Kulturentwickelung darstellen würde — daß es aber leider zu dieser Umarbeitung wohl nicht mehr kommen werde. Man liest heute diese Zeilen um so wehmütiger, als es ja auch wirklich nicht zu dieser Umarbeitung gekommen ist, und wir Herman Grimm haben hinsterben sehen, wissend, was da in seiner Seele lebte, und sehen mußten, wie das, was da in seiner Seele für die Gegenwarts-Kultur lebte, mit ihm ins Grab sinken mußte.
Es ist damit charakterisiert, aus welch geistig-umfassendem Gesichtskreise heraus alles einzelne bei Herman Grimm geschrieben ist. Wenn Geistesforschung gerade das sein will, was gewonnen werden kann durch die Erweiterung des geistigen Gesichtskreises, dann muß man sagen, daß der, welcher sich in Herman Grimms Geist und Darstellungsweise vertieft, die allerschönste Anleitung aus dem modernen Geistesleben heraus hat, um allmählich hineinzukommen in die ganze Art und Weise der Anschauung, die der Geistesforschung eigen ist. Aber auch wenn von der Weite des Gesichtskreises abgesehen wird und hineingesehen wird in Herman Grimms Seele selber, wie.er sich den Erscheinungen zu nähern suchte, wie seine Empfindungen und Gedanken ihn zu allem hinführten, was er in seinen umfassenden Werken über Homer, Raffael, Michelangelo, Goethe geschrieben hat, und wenn man das, was er in seinen anderen Schriften dargestellt hat, ins Auge faßt, dann findet man, daß Herman Grimm sich bedeutsam unterscheidet von anderen Geistern, und daß er etwas hat, was zu jener Vertiefung der Seele gehört, von der hier gesprochen worden ist, als der Weg geschildert wurde, den die Seele zu nehmen hat, um in die geistigen Welten selber einzutreten.
Wir haben es hervorheben können, daß die Intensität der Seelenkräfte für den Geistesweg stärker werden muß, daß, wenn tiefere Seelenkräfte hervorgeholt werden sollen, welche sonst schlummern, die Seele mehr innere Kraft, mehr inneren Mut und Kühnheit anwenden muß, als sie sonst im gewöhnlichen Leben zeigt, daß sie ihre Begriffe schärfer fassen muß, sich mehr mit ihrer eigenen Wesenheit identifizieren muß, mit den Kräften des Denkens, Fühlens und Wollens. Dazu sind bei Herman Grimm überall Ansätze vorhanden, Ansätze, die allerdings bei ihm einen anderen Weg genommen haben, Ansätze, durch welche er in die Lage gekommen ist, in so intimer und persönlicher Art Kunstwerke zu schildern, wie er diejenigen Raffaels oder Michelangelos geschildert hat, was aber auf dem Wege ist, um noch tiefer in die geistige Welt hineinzuleuchten. Denn nicht das, was man heute «objektiv» nennt, liegt der Geschichtsforschung Herman Grimms zugrunde, sondern ein Verbundensein mit den Erscheinungen des Geisteslebens, die er darstellt, liegt seinen Darstellungen zugrunde. So daß seine eigene Seele, ihrer selbst vollständig vergessend, und doch wiederum in seltener Art ihrer selbst bewußt, untertaucht in die entsprechenden geistigen Erscheinungen.
Insbesondere tritt dies schön hervor, wenn er die eigene Seele erst hinführt zu der einzelnen geistigen Erscheinung, zum Beispiel zu Raffael, und dann diese einzelne geistige Erscheinung wieder heraufhebt zu dem Gesamtstrom des menschlichen Geisteslebens. Da werden seine Empfindungen zu kühnen, mächtigen Ideen, und was manch anderer nicht in solchen Empfindungs-Nuancen und nicht in solchen Ideen-Nuancen zu sagen wagte, das wagt Herman Grimm und wird so zu einem Geist-Darsteller, der in bezug auf Kühnheit seiner Darstellung uns so gegenübertritt, daß wir manchmal wahrhaftig erinnert werden an die Darsteller, welche die Evangelien geschrieben haben. Nur daß jene mit mehr Mystik geschrieben haben, Herman Grimm mit mehr moderner Geistesbetrachtung. Und wie jene hinaufwachsen zu dem Horizont der gesamten Menschheit, so wächst Herman Grimm mit seinem «Raphael» hinauf bis zu dem Horizont der gesamten Menschheit.
Wunderbar ist es, wenn er in seiner kühnen Art, wie die Seele aus sich selbst herausreißend und neben Raffaels Seele einherschreitend als in einem Strome der Gesamtentwickelung, in Worte ausbricht, die uns wahrhaftig mehr besagen können als irgend etwas einer bloßen Darstellung der Weltgeschichte: «Raphael ist ein Bürger der Weltgeschichte. Wie einer von den vier Flüssen ist er, die dem Glauben der alten Welt nach aus dem Paradiese kamen.» Wenn man einen solchen Satz auf sich wirken läßt, dann weiß man in der Tat etwas ganz anderes über die Beziehung Herman Grimms zu Raffael, als man sonst weiß über die Beziehung manchen anderen Darstellers zu irgendeiner Erscheinung.
So fließen für Herman Grimm zusammen die Persönlichkeiten mit dem Gesamtstrom des Geisteslebens. Man könnte auch sagen, er bringt die höchste Geistessphäre herunter zu dem persönlichsten Element. Und wie tritt uns eine Summe von geistigen Erscheinungen entgegen, wenn Herman Grimm die folgenden Worte aus seiner tiefsten Seele heraus spricht, indem er ausdrückt, wie er sich zu den entsprechenden geistigen Tatsachen stellt:
«Würde Michelangelo durch ein Wunder von den Toten fortgerufen, um unter uns wieder zu leben, und begegnete ich ihm, so würde ich ehrfurchtsvoll zur Seite treten, damit er vorüberginge; käme mir Raphael aber in den Weg, so würde ich hinter ihm hergehen, ob ich nicht Gelegenheit fände, ein paar Worte aus seinen Lippen zu vernehmen. Bei Lionardo und Michelangelo kann man sich darauf beschränken, zu erzählen, was sie ihren Tagen einst gewesen sind; bei Raphael muß von dem ausgegangen werden, was er uns heute ist. Über jene anderen hat sich ein leiser Schleier gelegt, über Raphael nicht. Er gehört zu denen, deren Wachstum noch lange nicht zu Ende ist. Es sind immer wieder zukünftig lebende Geschlechter von Menschen denkbar, denen Raphael neue Rätsel aufgeben wird.»
Das ist eine Charakterstimmung, nicht objektiv in dem Sinne, wie man es heute so oft fordert, aber die entsprechenden Erscheinungen so schildernd, daß wir uns unmittelbar in ihre Nähe entrückt fühlen, wenn wir einen Hauch verspüren können von dem, was in Herman Grimms Seele gelebt hat, als er solche Sätze hinschreiben konnte. Dann versteht man es auch, wie dieser Geist mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Erscheinung, mit Raffael selber, ringen konnte. Merkwürdig — so erzählt er selbst - ist es ihm mit Raffael gegangen, ganz anders, als es ihm zum Beispiel ergangen ist, als er Michelangelo beschreibend darstellen wollte. Die Darstellung des Lebens Michelangelos von Herman Grimm ist ein wunderbares Buch, trotzdem sie in vielem vielleicht heute als überholt gelten kann. Wie tritt da auf dem Hintergrunde des damaligen ganzen mittelalterlichen Lebens die Gestalt Michelangelos bedeutsam heraus, wie hebt sie sich wieder ab von den anderen Gestalten, die plastisch heraustreten! Wie hebt sie sich ab von der ganz einzigartigen Schilderung von Florenz selber, oder wie hebt sie sich ab von jenem Tableau, das Herman Grimm hinstellt, indem er zwei geistige Gebilde vor unserem Geiste aufsteigen läßt, Athen und Florenz, und damit das Ineinanderweben der von ihm charakterisierten drei Jahrtausende wie einen gewaltigen Hintergrund erscheinen läßt, auf dem sich abheben Gestalten wie Dante, Giotto und die anderen Maler der damaligen Zeit, sodann Gestalten wieSavonarola und endlich Michelangelo selbst.
Das alles erscheint auch so, wie wenn Herman Grimm anders allerdings sich zu Raffael und seiner Umgebung verhalten hätte als zu Goethe, daß er aber darum uns das alles nicht weniger intim gegeben hat. Bei Herman Grimms Goethe-Darstellung fühlen wir überall, wie er als ein geistiger Enkel Goethes herangewachsen ist. Auch bei seiner Darstellung Michelangelos fühlen wir, wie er persönlich in alles hineinwächst, wie er persönlich, man möchte sagen, in jeden Palast von Florenz hineingeht, wie er in den Straßen von Florenz wandelt, wie er andere Beziehungen persönlich kennenlernt und dazu gelangt, sich vor Michelangelo hinstellend, sein Wirken dann darzustellen. Das alles aber, was er so gemalt hat, wir fühlen: es ist wie aus einem Guß heraus.
Anders ist das, was er über Raffael gegeben hat. Da fühlen wir ein Ringen mit dem Stoff, mit dem Geistesbild; da fühlen wir, wie Herman Grimm sich selber nie genugtun kann. Er erzählt selbst, wie er immer wieder und wieder den Stoff aufgenommen hatte, wie ihm nichts genügte, was er schon veröffentlicht hatte. Ja, zu seinen letzten Werken sollte es zählen, was er noch zuletzt einmal versucht hat als eine Darstellung der Persönlichkeit Raffaels zu geben, was aber doch Fragment geblieben ist und dann in der EssaySammlung erschienen ist: «Raphael als Weltmacht», woraus auch die eben vorgelesenen Sätze stammen.
Warum rang Herman Grimm gerade bei Raffael so mit seinem Stoff? Weil er nur etwas darstellen konnte, sich selber zur Befriedigung, wenn er ganz eins werden konnte mit dem Stoff. In Raffael aber sah er einen Geist, den er so charakterisierte, wie es der eben vorgelesene Satz gibt: «Raphael ist ein Bürger der Weltgeschichte. Wie einer von den vier Flüssen ist er, die dem Glauben der alten Welt nach aus dem Paradiese kamen.» Und so wuchs ihm Raffael selber ins Riesengroße mit jedem Satze, den er auf ihn wendete. So konnte er sich selber nie genugtun, weil er selbst diese «Weltenkraft» nicht in ein Buch hineinfangen konnte. Zeigt sich an den Darstellungen Homers, Michelangelos oder Goethes das Umfassende und doch Anmutige seines Geistes, so tritt bei Raffael die tiefe Aufrichtigkeit, die tiefe Ehrlichkeit dieser geistigen Persönlichkeit hervor.
Wer sein Buch über Homer in die Hand nimmt, wird es vielleicht zu wenig gelehrt finden. Aber Herman Grimm sagt gleich auf der ersten Seite, daß dieses Buch nicht ein Beitrag zur Homer-Forschung sein wolle. Ja, Herman Grimm konnte sich in diesen und ähnlichen Angelegenheiten durchaus wie ein Geistesfürst verhalten, wie ich es vorhin erzählte. So erscheint es einem auch natürlich, daß er, als er daranging, seine Ideen über Goethe zur Darstellung zu sammeln, ganz kühnlich von dem Gesichtspunkte ausging, daß alles andere, was an ihn über Goetheherantreten könnte, unzulänglich sei. Es mag das manchem als Dreistigkeit vorkommen, was doch wieder bei seinem literarischen und künstlerischen Gestus als selbstverständlich erschien.
So verhielt er sich zu allem Geistesleben. Daher mag manchem, der vom Gelehrtenstandpunkte ausgeht, Herman Grimms Homer-Buch unerträglich sein. Was alles über Homer vorgebracht worden ist, ob Homer gelebt hat oder nicht, ob die Ilias aus so und so vielen Einzelheiten zusammengetragen ist usw., das alles ging ihn nichts an. Er nahm sie, wie sie war. Dadurch stellte sich ihm allerdings dar, wie wunderbar sie innerlich komponiert ist, wie immer das Spätere sich auf das Vorhergehende bezieht, so daß alles, was diese innere Komposition zeigt, uns innerlich zusammenhängend erscheint. Aber abgesehen davon, scheint mir das Größte das zu sein, was einem gerade als Geistesforscher so ungeheuer wohl tut: die Vertiefung in das Seelenleben der homerischen Helden. Überall sehen wir die seelenvolle Art Herman Grimms auch auf das Seelenleben der Helden Homers ausgegossen. Überall sehen wir erfaßt, aber mit welthistorischem Hintergrunde, die Achill-Seele, die Agamemnon-Seele, die Odysseus-Seele und so weiter. Ein Buch, das als Seelenschilderung überwältigend wirkt trotz der Intimität der stilistischen Darstellung! Überall werden wir nicht nur auf die Höhen der Geschichtsbetrachtung hinaufgeführt, sondern wir werden auch tief, tief in die Seelen der einzelnen homerischen Gestalten hineingeführt. Ja, so könnte nun mancher Gelehrte sagen, da hat Herman Grimm die Ilias hergenommen mit Außerachtlassung der ganzen Homer-Forschung und aller eigentlichen Vor-Forschung, und hat dann Vers für Vers hingenommen! Das tut er ja auch, recht «laienhaft», und man könnte dann das Ganze in die trockene Formel kleiden: Da hat ein Mensch ein Buch geschrieben ohne alle Vorstudien.
Hat Herman Grimm dieses Buch geschrieben ohne alle Vorstudien? Wer sich auf das Geistesleben Herman Grimms einläßt, wird die Vorstudien finden, nur sehen sie anders aus, als die Vorstudien der gewöhnlichen Gelehrten. Die Vorstudien Herman Grimms lagen in Seelenstudien, in Vertiefung in die Menschenseele und ihre Geheimnisse. Und überzeugt kann man sich halten, daß so wunderbar kein anderer in die Seelen der homerischen Helden hätte hineinleuchten können als der, der solche Vorstudien gemacht hatte. Scheinbar sucht Herman Grimm das auf, was in der Phantasie Homers gewaltet hat. Aber was er sagt, zeigt uns überall den feinsten Seelenkenner, von dem wir gar Sonderbares vermuten können, wenn wir ihn nur sehen, wie er so von Achill über Agamemnon bis zu Odysseus die homerischen Heldenseelen betrachtet. Wie kam er dazu, manches Wort, das den Geistesforscher so ungemein vergeistigt anmutet, in seinem Homer-Buche oder auch in seinen anderen Werken zu schreiben? Er kam dazu, weil ganz besondere Vorstudien vorlagen. Und diese Vorstudien wird der Geistesforscher suchen in den Werken aus der ersten Periode Herman Grimms.
Da haben wir vor allem jene wunderbare Novellensammlung, die vielleicht heute weniger gelesen wird als manches moderne Produkt dieser Art, die aber gerade diejenigen lesen sollten, die sich für geistiges Leben interessieren, eine Novellensammlung, die genannt werden kann: überall ein intensiver Versuch, Menschenseelen kennenzulernen, Menschengeheimnisse zu ergründen, das Wirken der Menschenseele zu ergründen über die physische Welt hinaus. Da steht vor uns gleich die erste dieser Novellen, die schon in der ersten Periode seines schriftstellerischen Schaffens erschien: «Die Sängerin». Es wird darin gezeigt, wie ein Mann eine tiefe, leidenschaftliche Neigung zu einer Frau faßt, zu einer Frau von umfassendem geistigen Wesen. Gezeigt wird uns, wie aber diese beiden Persönlichkeiten niemals zusammenkommen können, wie die Frau den glühend liebenden Mann aus dem Umkreis ihrer Gesellschaft entfernt, wie nun in der Seele dieses Mannes alles an Impulsen weiter lebt, die ihn auf der einen Seite zu der Frau hinziehen, die auf der anderen Seite, von der Seele aus, an dem ganzen leiblichen Wesen dieses Mannes zehren. Wie er dann seelisch hinsiecht, das sehen wir, möchte man sagen, in geistesforscherischer Art dargestellt. Und noch einmal sehen wir ihn dann, als er in der Besitzung eines Freundes aufgenommen ist, in die Netze der Frau verstrickt. Der Freund merkt, daß es die höchste Zeit ist, daß jene Persönlichkeit herbeigeholt wird, an welcher der Freund mit aller Seele hängt. Sie kommt auch — aber zu spät. Während sie vor dem Hause ist, erschießt sich der Betreffende.
Und jetzt kommt etwas, was Herman Grimm so oft in künstlerischen Darstellungen gestreift hat, was er aber da, wo es immer gern von der Geistesforschung aufgenommen wird, stets ins Unbestimmte hat fallen lassen. Jetzt wird kurz und prägnant geschildert, wie in der Imagination der Sängerin der Verstorbene lebt. Unvergeßlich wird dieSzene sein, wo sie, die ihre ganze Schuld an dem Tode dieses Mannes fühlt, Nacht für Nacht diesen Menschen, aus dem Totenreiche heraus wirkend, herankommen sieht, wie dieses Herankommen des Verstorbenen nun in der Frau zu ihrem Seeleninhalte wird. Nicht wie ein bloßes Phantasiegebilde wird das geschildert, sondern wie von einem Manne, der da weiß, daß es Geheimnisse gibt, die über den Tod eines Menschen hinausreichen. Wunderbar ist die Schilderung, wo der Freund sich selber hinstellt vor die Frau, und wo sie sagt, der Tote komme zu ihr — bis zu dem letzten Briefe der Frau an den Freund, worin sie ausdrückt, daß sie sich nun selber vor dem Tode fühlt, daß der Verstorbene, mit dem sie so verbunden war, sie aus seinem Totenreiche hingezogen hat in sein Reich. — Vielleicht hat kein moderner Darsteller mit solcher Innigkeit die Töne gefunden, um an die geistige Welt zu rühren.
Wir stellen es in der Geistesforschung dar, wie, wenn der Mensch durch die Pforte des Todes durchgeht, dasjenige, was sonst auch im Schlafesleben immer mit dem Menschen vereint bleibt, der sogenannte ätherische Leib, mit den höheren Seelengliedern des Menschen sich aus dem physischen Leibe heraushebt und in die geistige Welt übergeht. Wir entwerfen auf dem Gebiete der Geistesforschung ein Bild davon, wie der Leichnam zurückbleibt, wie der Mensch dann mit seinem Ätherleibe Stück für Stück, Glied für Glied sich herauslöst aus dem physischen Leibe, und wie der ätherische Leib dann noch eine Zeitlang der Einhüller der höheren Seelenglieder des Menschen ist. Das ist eine Vorstellung, wie sie denen, die der Geistesforschung nahe treten, immer geläufiger werden kann. Im folgenden werden wir nun betrachten können, in wie wunderbarer Weise die Künstlerseele Herman Grimms an diese Tatsachen der geistigen Welt rührt, und wiederum wird uns diese Betrachtung zu der Frage führen, warum aus tieferen Gründen heraus Herman Grimm seine Kulturdarstellungen nicht in einem umfassenden Werk vollendet hat.
Herman Grimm hat außer seinen Novellen noch ein anderes künstlerisches Werk geschrieben, den Roman «Unüberwindliche Mächte», an dem uns, wie überhaupt an seinem ganzen Lebenswerke, der vornehme Stil entgegentritt, der sich überall hinauflenkt zu einer Welt- und Lebensbetrachtung. Auch alles andere ist großartig. Besonders das, was man nennen möchte: das Zusammenstoßen zweier Menschheitszeitalter im kleinen. Die eine Welt ist die, die nur auf Titel, Rang und Würden hält und sich ganz darinnen fühlt. Aus ihr heraus stammt ein Graf aus altem Geschlecht, der verarmt ist, der aber noch ganz im Nachklange und Nachfühlen seines gräflichen Standes lebt. Wunderbar wird nun in diesem Roman kontrastiert, wie der Welt der alten Vorurteile und Rangordnungen entgegentritt die «neue Welt». Es spielen die Anschauungen Amerikas herein. Amerikaner sind es, die dem Manne entgegentreten, der ganz in seinen Standesvorurteilen und Standesempfindungen lebt, und den Herman Grimm Arthur nennt. Es tritt diesem Grafen entgegen Emmy, die Tochter der Frau Forster, die aus amerikanischem Wesen herausgewachsen ist, und wir sehen diesen Grafen in leidenschaftlicher Liebe zu Emmy entflammt.
Es ist unmöglich, den reichen Inhalt dieses Romanes auch nur anzudeuten. Tritt uns doch der ganze Gegensatz von Europa und Amerika entgegen, der ganze Gegensatz des alten preußischen Wesens und des durch die Kriege neugeschaffenen preußischen Wesens — ein ungeheuer bedeutsames Kulturgemälde, in das die Personen hineingeprägt sind, und aus dem sie wieder hervorwachsen. Nur das kann angedeutet werden, daß durch die Impulse, welche aus diesen verschiedenen Strömungen zusammenwachsen, der Graf Arthur, gerade als er davorsteht, sich mit Emmy zu vermählen, eines tragischen Todes dahinstirbt. Ein Mensch, der zwar zu seiner Verwandtschaft gehört, der sich aber in seinen Wahnideen für den berechtigten Erben des gräflichen Geschlechtes hält und den wirklichen Erben, den Grafen Arthur, als einen Bastard ansieht, dieser Mensch tritt dem Grafen Arthur entgegen, von Neid und Eifersucht aufgestachelt, und es fügen sich die Verhältnisse so, daß am Vorabend seiner Hochzeit Graf Arthur von diesem Menschen niedergeschossen wird.
Man kann vielleicht niemals Gelegenheit finden, das Wort «Unüberwindliche Mächte» — das vielleicht mancher, der bloß rationalistisch diesen Roman betrachten will, nur als das Unüberbrückbare der Standesvorurteile hält — für berechtigter zu halten als gerade dann, wenn man sieht, wie Herman Grimm, ohne es zu wollen, die Karma-Idee, die Idee der ursächlichen Verknüpfung der Schicksale, die im Menschenleben zum Ausdruck kommen, Knoten über Knoten schürzen läßt und zu einer Entwickelung bringt, und wie er in der Tat in diesem Wirken Kräfte darstellt, die nur wirken können, wenn sie aus früheren Verkörperungen, aus früheren Erdenleben herüberwirken. Nicht indem er theoretisch von «Kräften» oder von «Karma» spricht, schildert er das, sondern indem er einfach die Tatsachen sprechen läßt und diesen Mächten einen Ausdruck gibt, so daß sie uns überall wie die Ideen der Geistesforschung anmuten. Wir sehen ein karmisches Schicksal sich vollziehen, sehen unüberwindliche karmische Mächte sich zum Ausdruck bringen, und sehen noch etwas anderes.
Emmy bleibtzurück. Der letzteBlick, der in dieverlöschenden Augen Arthurs gefallen ist, als er mit durchschossenem Herzen dalag, war, als sie sich über den Sterbenden beugte, und die Augen in einem bestimmten Ausdruck erschienen. Unvergeßlich bleibt ein Wort von Herman Grimm selbst, indem er hier davon spricht, wie der Geist aus den Augen wich in dem Momente, wo die Augen jene Eigentümlichkeit annehmen, durch die sie nur mehr als physische Werkzeuge erscheinen. Aber nun tritt uns wieder entgegen jenes Herandringen Herman Grimms bis an die Welten, die jenseits des Todes liegen, jenes man möchte sagen keusche Herandringen bis an die Welten, aus denen herein die real gebliebenen Seelen wirken, wenn sie durch die Pforte des Todes gegangen sind.
Es zeigt uns Herman Grimm in einem kurzen Schlußkapitel Emmy, wie sie nach und nach dahinsiecht, wie sie stirbt. Es ist so recht charakteristisch für das Verbundensein der Seele Herman Grimms mit seelisch-geistigen Problemen, wie er diesen herannahenden Tod Emmys schildert. Nach Montreux wird sie gebracht. In einzigartiger Weise wird Montreux selbst geschildert, wird die ganze Umgebung geschildert, in welcher Emmy stirbt. Aber nicht wie ein anderer Darsteller, der dem geistigen Leben fernersteht, schildert er den Tod Emmys, sondern er schildert ihn wie einer, der herangeht bis dahin, wo die Geheimnisse des Todes und die Geheimnisse des Landes jenseits des Todes zu den Seelen sprechen, und ich würde etwas Unvollständiges geben, wenn ich nicht zum Schlusse die Worte hinzufügte, die Herman Grimm selbst über den Tod Emmysgibt:
«Dies Emmys Traum aber.
Zwischen Mitternacht und Morgen glaubte sie zu erwachen.
Ihr erster Blick auf das Fenster, durch das matte Helligkeit einströmte, war frei und klar und sie wußte, wo sie war. Auch ihre Mutter, die neben ihr schlief, hörte sie atmen. Noch einen Moment weiter aber, und mit einem Druck, den sie nie zuvor empfunden, befiel sie überwältigende Angst. Es waren nicht mehr jene einzelnen Gedanken, die sie in den letzten Tagen quälten, sondern als hielte eine Riesenhand alle Gebirge der Erde an einem dünnen Faden über ihr und jeden Moment könnten sich die Finger öffnen, die ihn hielten und die Masse herabstürzen, um ewige Zeiten auf ihr liegenzubleiben. Sie irrte mit den Blicken umher in sich und außer sich, nach einem Schimmer von Licht suchend, nichts aber bot sich dar, der Schein des Fensters erloschen, der Atem ihrer Mutter nicht mehr hörbar, und erstickende Einsamkeit sie umgebend, als würde sie niemals wieder Lebendiges erreichen. Sie wollte rufen, aber sie konnte nicht, sie wollte sich rühren, aber kein Glied mehr gehorchte ihr. Ganz still war es, ganz finster, keine Gedanken selbst mehr möglich zu fassen in dieser furchtbar eintönigen Angst: die Erinnerung sogar ihr fortgenommen — da ein Gedanke endlich zurückkehrend: Arthur!
Und wunderbar jetzt: es war, als hätte sich dieser eine Gedanke in einen Lichtpunkt verwandelt, der den Augen sichtbar wurde. Und in dem Maße, wie der Gedanke anwuchs zu grenzenloser Sehnsucht, wuchs dieses Licht, kam und dehnte sich aus, und plötzlich als spränge es auseinander und entfaltete sich und nähme Gestalt an — Arthur stand vor ihr! Sie sah ihn, sie erkannte ihn endlich. Er war es sicherlich selbst. Er lächelte und war dicht neben ihr. Sie sah nicht, ob er nackt sei, nicht ob er bekleidet sei: er aber war es, sie kannte ihn zu wohl, er selbst, kein Phantom nur, das seine Gestalt angenommen.»
So sehr rückt Herman Grimm den, der längst durch die Pforte des Todes gegangen ist, an die heran, die zur Seherin wird, rückt sie im Momente ihres Hinsterbens so an den Toten heran, daß sie seine Seele so anspricht: «Sie sah nicht, ob er nackt sei, nicht ob er bekleidet sei: er aber war es, sie kannte ihn zu wohl, er selbst, kein Phantom nur, das seine Gestalt angenommen.»
«Er streckte ihr die Hand entgegen und sagte: Komm)» Niemals hatte seine Sprache so süß und lockend geklungen wie heute. Mit aller Kraft, deren sie fähig war, suchte sie ihre Arme zu erheben ihm entgegen; aber sie vermochte es nicht. Er kam noch näher und streckte die Hand näher auf sie zu: «Komm» sagte er noch einmal.
Emmy war, als müsse die Gewalt, mit der sie ein Wort wenigstens über die Lippen zu bringen versuchte, Berge zu verrücken imstande sein, nicht aber dies eine Wort zu sagen vermochte sie.
Arthur sah sie an und sie ihn. Nur die Möglichkeit jetzt, einen Finger zu bewegen, und sie hätte ihn berührt. Und nun das Furchtbarste: er schien zurückzuweichen wieder! «Komm» sagte er zum dritten Male. Und sie im Gefühle, daß er zum letzten Male gesprochen, daß die furchtbare Finsternis wieder hereinbrechen werde auf seinen himmlischen Anblick, von einer Angst jetzt erfüllt, die sie zerriß, wie der Frost Bäume spaltet, machte den letzten Versuch, die Arme zu ihm zu erheben. Unmöglich aber, die Schwere und Kälte zu überwinden, die sie gefesselt hielten — da aber, wie eine Knospe platzt, aus der eine Blüte wächst vor unseren Augen, herauswachsend aus ihren Armen leuchtend andere Arme, glänzende andere Schultern aus ihren Schultern, und diese Arme sich hebend Arthurs Armen entgegen, und er mit seinen Händen ihre Hände fassend, und langsam zurückschwebend sie nach sich ziehend, und die ganze herrliche Gestalt mit ihnen, die sich erhob aus der Emmys.»
Man kann nicht wunderbarer den Hervorgang des ätherischen Leibes aus dem physischen Leibe schildern, wenn man mit keuscher Künstlerseele eine solche Schilderung vornimmt. Das war ein Geist, das war eine Seele, die in Herman Grimm lebte, von der wir sagen dürfen, daß sie nahe herangekommen ist an das, was wir so sehnsüchtig in der Geistesforschung suchen. Das war eine Seele, das war ein Geist, von dem wir sagen dürfen, daß er uns beweisend dafür ist, wie die moderne Seele bei ihrem Herannahen an das zwanzigste Jahrhundert die Wege zum geistigen Leben gesucht hat.
So wenden wir uns gern zu Herman Grimm hin, den wir belauschen, wie er auf dem Wege ist, den wir nur weiter wandeln wollen. Und so schauen wir, wie er dieSchöpfungen Raffaels, wie er die Schöpfungen Michelangelos, wie er die Erlebnisse Goethes, wie er die Griechenseele Homers hinaufhebt bis zu dem Strom, der als «schöpferische Phantasie» für seinen Geist durch die Jahrtausende fließt. Wir wissen dann, wie nahe Herman Grimm mit seinem ganzen Fühlen und Empfinden dem lebendigen Weben und Wirken des Geistig-Seelischen war, das hinter allem physisch 'T’atsächlichen ist. Denn nicht mit Abstraktheiten haben wir es zu tun, wenn Herman Grimm von seiner «schöpferischen Phantasie» spricht. Soweit wir es bei ihm vielleicht noch im Anfluge mit Abstraktheiten zu tun haben, soweit kann uns auch die Notwendigkeit erscheinen, daß wir die dünne Wand durchbrechen müssen, durch die Herman Grimm noch von dem lebendigen Geist getrennt ist, der nicht nur als schöpferische Phantasie wirkt, sondern der im unmittelbaren geistigen Wirken hinter aller Sinneswelt lebt. Es kommt einem vor wie eine Keuschheit, die noch nicht mehr in ihrer Seele zu sagen wagt, als sie sagt, wenn wir Herman Grimm von der durch die Jahrtausende fortwirkenden Phantasie der Menschheit sprechen sehen, da er doch als Künstler so nahe an die lebendig gebliebene Seele gerührt hat, die durch die Pforte des Todes geschritten ist. So wird es uns nicht schwer werden, dort, wo Herman Grimm von der schöpferischen Phantasie spricht, die lebendigen Geistwesen zu sehen, die wir als Geistesforscher hinter der Sinneswelt suchen.
Vielleicht wird es dann nicht ungerechtfertigt erscheinen, wenn sogar behauptet wird, daß einem solchen Geiste, der so ehrlich und aufrichtig nach der Wahrheit gerungen hat, diese schöpferische Phantasie, wenn er sich wieder und immer wieder ihr nähern wollte, ihm doch zu sehr ein Abstraktum war; daß es seine Seele drängte, das lebendige Geistige zu erfassen, und daß deshalb das beabsichtigte große Werk nicht werden konnte, weil es, wenn es geschrieben worden wäre, ein Werk hätte werden müssen, welches die geistige Welt nichtbloß als schöpferische Phantasie, sondern als eine Welt schöpferischer Wesenheiten und Individualitäten hätte darstellen müssen.
Nicht willkürlich hingestellt durch diesen oder jenen ist die Geistesforschung in der neueren Zeit, sondern gefordert von den suchenden Seelen der neueren Zeit, jenen suchenden Seelen, denen Herman Grimm so deutlich und charakteristisch angehörte, wie wir gesehen haben. Daher können wir gerade bei dieser merkwürdigen Persönlichkeit gewahr werden, wie wir mit der Geistesforschung nicht fremd und isoliert im modernen Geistesleben stehen. Wir haben gerade zu einer solchen Gestalt wie Herman Grimm wie zu einer verwandten hinsehen dürfen. Steht er auch noch nicht völlig auf unserem Standpunkte, so stehen wir ihm doch — oder können ihm wenigstens stehen — unendlich nahe, Und besser ist es auch, bei der Betrachtung einer solchen Gestalt, weniger jede Einzelheit ins Auge zu fassen, als ihre Ganzheit, sie anschauend mit all jener Harmonie des Seelischen, mit der sie auf uns wirken kann, mit all jener Milde und doch wieder kühnen Schärfe und Stärke des Seelenlebens auch, mit welcher sie auf uns wirken kann. Mögen wir nun diese oder jene Lebensfrage mehr oder weniger abweichend von Herman Grimm behandeln - ich weiß, daß es nicht ganz aus seinem Stile herausfällt, wenn ich zusammenfassend sage, was ich eigentlich habe ausdrücken wollen. Man könnte zu dem Gedanken, nennen wir es meinetwegen zu dem Wahn-Gedanken, kommen, der als ein schöner Wahn dann in der Seele leben kann: Wenn höhere Geister, erd-entrückte Geister durch Lesen, durch Lektüre sich mit dem bekannt machen wollten, was auf der Erde vorgeht, so würden sie am liebsten solche Schriften lesen wie die, in welchen Herman Grimm die irdischen Schicksale von Menschen zur Darstellung gebracht hat.
Dieses Gefühl kann einem fast aus jeder Zeile von Herman Grimms Schriften entgegenklingen, und dieses Gefühl hebt einem die ganze Persönlichkeit, man möchte sagen zu einer erd-entrückten Sphäre empor. Man fühlt sich dann doch wieder dieser Persönlichkeit so nahe, daß einem, wenn man charakterisieren will, was heute über Herman Grimm gesagt worden ist, ein schönes Wort in den Sinn kommen kann, das er selber einem Freunde ins Grab nachgerufen hat, seinem Freunde Treitschke, den er so sehr schätzte:
«Wie daseinsfroh stand dieser Mensch im Leben drin. Wie kampfmutig. Wie bot die Sprache sich ihm zu Dienst an. Wie neu war immer sein neuestes Buch. Wie wenig konnten selbst die ihm böse sein, die im Gedränge des geistigen Verkehrs seine Ellenbogen zu kosten bekamen. Auch diese werden mitrufen: «Ja, er war unser!»
Diese Worte sind zugleich die letzten, die Herman Grimm geschrieben hat und drucken ließ, wie wir von dem Herausgeber seiner Werke, Reinhold Steig, wissen. Und ich möchte die Betrachtung des heutigen Abends auch wohl zum Schlusse in die Worte zusammenfassen: Wie daseinsfroh stand dieser Mensch, Herman Grimm, im Leben drinnen, wie mild — und doch auch wie individuell! Und wie harmonisch berührt sein ganzes Lebenswerk! Wie bot sich ihm die Sprache zu Dienst an! Wie neu war immer sein neuestes Buch! Wie wenig können selbst jene ihm fernestehen, wenn sie nur sich selbst ordentlich verstehen, die in manchen Ideen und in mancher Art von ihm abweichen! Und wie nahe müssen sich aber diejenigen ihm fühlen, die von irgendeinem Gebiete der Geistesforschung ausgehend, die Wege zum Geiste suchen! Wie nahe müssen sich diese ihm fühlen, und wie sehr möchten sie, wenn seine Gestalt, geistig so milde leuchtend, vor ihnen auftritt, in die Worte ausbrechen: Ja, er war auch unser!
The Worldview of a Contemporary Cultural Researcher, Herman Grimm, and Spiritual Research
It might easily seem as if what is represented here as spiritual science stands completely isolated within contemporary cultural life and has no connection to what otherwise prevails in the spiritual life of the present and sets the tone in a certain way. However, this can only appear to be the case to those who take a somewhat narrow-minded view of this spiritual science or spiritual research and see it as nothing more than a collection of certain teachings and theories. But those who see in it a spiritual current that seeks to absorb everything to which spiritual life leads from the sources that are now opening up today will realize that lines can be drawn from this spiritual current to many different directions in modern spiritual life, and that this way of looking at life, called spiritual science, can be applied to other more or less closely related spiritual directions. Today we will discuss one such spiritual direction, a spiritual direction that can be represented to us by a striking personality of modern spiritual life, the modern cultural and art researcher Herman Grimm.
Herman Grimm, who was born in 1828 and died in 1901, appears to be a particularly distinctive type of modern intellectual life on the one hand, and yet so individually unique, so special a figure, that today's considerations can be particularly well applied to this personality. To those who have studied him, Herman Grimm appears as a kind of link between the intellectual life of the modern era associated with the name of Goethe and our own modern intellectual life.
Herman Grimm is connected in a very special way to everything associated with the name Goethe through his marriage to the daughter of a personality who was so close to Goethe's circle, the sister of the romantic poet Brentano, Bettina Brentano. Herman Grimm was thus related to her, she was his mother-in-law, the Bettina Brentano who published Goethe's remarkable correspondence with a child, the Bettina Brentano who created that unique monument to Goethe, where we see Goethe sitting enthroned like an Olympian, a musical instrument in his hand, a child plucking the strings, in which Bettina Brentano portrayed herself. This personality, who came from the La Roche circle in Frankfurt, felt like a child in her relationship with Goethe, and she was able to immerse herself in Goethe's spirit like few others. And even if some people find something inaccurate in the letters that Bettina Brentano shares, with fiction and truth colorfully mixed together, one must nevertheless say: everything we have in this remarkable book, “Goethe's Correspondence with a Child,” has grown intimately out of Goethe's spirit and gives us a wonderful echo of this Goethean spirit. Bettina Brentano was married to the poet Achim von Arnim, who was involved in the publication of the wonderful collection of folk poetry “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (The Boy's Magic Horn). Through his relationship with this circle — as mentioned, Herman Grimm's wife, Gisela Grimm, was a daughter of Bettina Brentano or Bettina von Arnim — through this relationship, Herman Grimm grew up from his youth, so to speak, surrounded by personalities who were very close to Goethe, who conveyed to him in everything he absorbed in his education something like a personal and immediately elementary intellectual breath of Goethe. Thus, from his youth, Herman Grimm also felt that he belonged to all those who were still personally close to Goethe, even though he was only a child when Goethe died. And Herman Grimm did not stand there as someone who had “studied” Goethe and Goetheanism, but as someone who had absorbed Goethe's essence, all of Goethe's living magic and all of Goethe's living humanity directly, elementally, personally.
Herman Grimm thus experienced the development of German life in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with deep involvement. He experienced it in such a way that he established his own realm within this German life, so to speak. One can call him a spirit who, in the most individual way, sought out everything that was stimulating for him, everything that was fruitful for the development of his own intellectual powers. In this way, Herman Grimm carved out for himself from the whole scope of cultural life what was appropriate for him: an intellectual realm in which he felt at home. Within this intellectual realm, in which Herman Grimm felt at home, he recognized himself, in a sense, as Goethe's spiritual successor. To him, Goethe's spirit seemed like a living being. And wherever he sought out the currents of what was in accordance with his intellectual life and allowed them to influence him, it was always more or less the Goethean essence that he not only sought to become aware of, but which became his standard for everything he encountered in intellectual life.
Herman Grimm lived through decades of struggle in German cultural life. These were decades in which, after Goethe's death, the Goethe spirit declined considerably, in which people had to concern themselves with so many other things, one might say things that were more immediately relevant to everyday life, than with the currents that emanated from Goethe. At a time when many other things within Germany had become quite loud, but Goethe had become somewhat quiet, Herman Grimm, through his direct connection with the Goethe spirit, saw himself as a person who was also quiet within himself, but lively, who had to cultivate the Goethean spirit and carry it over into a time that he actually hoped would come, a time in which the star of Goethe would shine more brightly again in the European intellectual firmament.
Just as Herman Grimm regarded himself, in a sense, as the spiritual representative of Goethe and his intellectual empire, so Herman Grimm was, in a natural way, somewhat unique in his entire approach to intellectual life, in the whole manner in which he related to intellectual matters. He had something unique about him, like a spiritual prince, and it seemed natural to regard him as such. Even in his outward appearance, his physiognomy, his gestures, and his entire demeanor, he had something of a spiritual prince about him. And it is fair to say that even if one was not accustomed to looking up to a personality as a “prince,” Herman Grimm's entire manner compelled one to accord him the rank just described. I still have fond memories of a gathering with Herman Grimm in Weimar, where he came so often and so gladly. At that time, he had invited me as his only guest to a luncheon. We talked about various things that moved him. We also talked—and I was gratified that he wanted to have this conversation with me—about his comprehensive intellectual plans for life. And when some time had passed after lunch, he said, in his characteristic humorous but natural way, so that one accepted it as something natural: “Well, my dear doctor, now I will graciously release you!” It was indeed something that struck me at the time as completely natural, because Herman Grimm's demeanor was such that one attributed a certain intellectual nobility to him.
This is characteristic of Herman Grimm's entire life's work. One cannot read any of his writings, large or small, without feeling, as these wonderfully harmonious and yet concisely constructed sentences flow into the soul, one also has the feeling that all this affects the soul that surrenders to it as if the author's personality were always behind it, looking at you and sending what it has to say to your soul with tremendous soulfulness and personal involvement. This is what makes Herman Grimm's writings so wonderful and soulful, that they are everywhere, in the most beautiful way, the outpouring of his entire soulful personality and have an immediate effect. His entire style, however, takes on the character of a certain justified, distinguished pathos. But this distinguished pathos is softened everywhere by the personal element that one feels bursting forth from it. Despite its nobility, one accepts this style as something natural, and one senses everywhere that it has its origins in the heartfelt reception of Goethean intellectual elements, but one also senses that this origin is not the only one. One senses that the Goethean element has permeated the romantic essence of German intellectual development. In Herman Grimm's style, we sense a certain detachment from everything that can be called, in the broadest sense, the everyday, the popular, a withdrawal into a single personality, a completely individual being, a completely individual manner.
Perhaps this direction in the spirit of Herman Grimm could have led to a certain one-sidedness, had it not been for another current at work in him, which reconnected him so intimately with everything folk, which allowed him to take root deep in the spirit of everything folk. For Herman Grimm himself was the son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jacob Grimm. These are the two men who founded modern German linguistics, the men who collected the German fairy tales that have become so deeply ingrained in German intellectual life, the men who listened to the legends and fairy tales told by the simple people of the nation; legends and fairy tales that had lived on in the simplest folk minds for centuries, that had been almost forgotten, carried into modern times by only a few individuals, but which live again today because they have been revived by the Brothers Grimm.
If Herman Grimm, despite his elegance of style in everything he produces, once again shows something of his affinity with all things folk, we must emphasize something else that harmoniously connects what might otherwise have become a one-sided intellectual direction with another current, so that everything in him appears to us as a kind of inner harmonious totality. When we let Herman Grimm's work sink in, we find in his entire style something like a certain softness, a kind of adaptability to all the intellectual phenomena he has immersed himself in throughout his life. Isolation as a human being is necessary if one wants to immerse oneself in the intellectual phenomena and intellectual facts of many centuries. However, this softness regains its backbone, its hardness, in Herman Grimm through another factor that influenced his upbringing: his father and uncle were among the “Göttingen Seven” who protested against the abolition of their country's constitution in 1837 and were therefore expelled from the University of Göttingen. Thus, even as a boy, Herman Grimm witnessed an act of a rare kind and experienced its manifold consequences. For there were many consequences for his father and uncle in their everyday lives as well, as they had lost not only their positions but also their livelihoods at that time. And Herman Grimm often emphasized how, even as a nine-year-old boy, he had come into contact with the impulses of historical development, not through “books,” but through a significant historical event.
This is how Herman Grimm stands before us as a personality. He felt like a kind of bearer of the Goethe spirit at a time when this spirit had fallen silent in Germany and people had turned their attention to other things. But he experienced the revival of this Goethe spirit and was able to contribute in many ways to its revival. He experienced being able to give his famous “Goethe Lectures” at Berlin University in the early 1870s, lectures that are also available in his significant book on Goethe. And what a book this Goethe book is! Anyone who picks it up as a young person and is able to approach it in the right way will undoubtedly be able to speak of it as something significant later in life. And just as it has been expressed in this book, Herman Grimm stands before us as someone who is able to relate to Goethe, as someone who has penetrated the various ramifications of Goethe's inner life. Thus, work by work, he develops what passed through Goethe's own soul while Goethe was creating these works.
We can now eavesdrop on Herman Grimm as he contemplates a personality such as Goethe was to him. There is nothing of the petty biographer's search, nothing of the unearthing of all sorts of more or less indifferent traits of life. But there is, once again, a deepening of everything in Goethe's life that was significant and important for Goethe's spiritual development. There is an endeavor to pursue: how does what was experience for Goethe, what worked and lived in his soul, transform itself so that it takes shape, becomes an image, becomes a creature of Goethe's imagination, and Goethe himself then, forgetting everything that was merely in life, becomes completely absorbed in that new thing that has become out of the experience in the creation of the imagination, in the creation of the imagination, which is now itself an experience?
Thus, with each contemplation of a Goethe work through Herman Grimm's portrayal, Goethe rises one step higher in his experiences, rising directly into a sphere of pure spiritual contemplation. Herman Grimm shows how Goethe ascended from his life into spiritual experience and spiritual existence in each of Goethe's works. And we are always so happy to accompany him on this journey because nowhere in Herman Grimm's work does something occur that can so easily happen in such a portrayal: that a single soul force, the intellect or the imagination, takes over the viewer, and one then no longer feels connected to immediate life. No, Herman Grimm never goes further than he can go as an immediate personal individuality, and in doing so he is able to follow the entire work. In the end, when Herman Grimm has led us to the point where Goethe's experience has become the work, we feel transported into a purely spiritual life. Goethe becomes a being whose content is purely spiritual, a sum of purely spiritual impulses. This breath of the spiritual spreads over all the representations in Herman Grimm's book on Goethe.
What Herman Grimm applied to Goethe was deeply rooted in Herman Grimm's entire mindset. Long before he embarked on the reflections that culminated in his “Goethe Lectures,” he already had a grand, colossal idea in mind: to view Western intellectual life as a whole in the same way that he viewed it individually in relation to Goethe. The idea stood before him to trace three millennia of Western intellectual life in such a way that it would show everywhere how everyday events and facts existing in the physical world derive their true value from being transformed by human meaning and human spirit into what the human soul experiences when it ascends to the realm of what Herman Grimm “the creative imagination.” Thus, Herman Grimm became a historian of a very special kind. For him, history was, in a sense, something quite different from what it was for all other modern historians.
History is usually studied by collecting documents and materials and then attempting to use these materials to paint a picture of human development. For Herman Grimm, materials and external facts were extremely important, but by no means the main thing. He often pondered the question: Could it be that for a particular era, the most important documents, the ones that are decisive for studying the impulses of the time, have disappeared without a trace, have been lost, so that it is precisely when one examines the documents most closely and faithfully that one misses the truth most? — That is why he was convinced that those who adhere most faithfully to external documents can give the least faithful picture of human development. Only a false picture of human development, according to Herman Grimm, could result from adhering to external documents.
But something else has occurred in the spiritual life of humanity: that which has happened externally, that which has taken place as external facts, has come to a spiritual rebirth in the appropriate individualities; it has been lived out in those personalities who have artistically transformed it, who have spiritually utilized it. Herman Grimm, for example, looked back on the Greek era. He said to himself: There are many documents available about this Greek era. Only in an indirect sense can anything be gained from these documents for understanding the essence of Greek culture. But what the Greeks experienced has found its rebirth in the works of Greek art, has been revived in individual Greek personalities. If you immerse yourself in them, if you allow Greek culture to affect you through the medium of personality, then you have a more accurate picture of this Greek culture than if you simply compile the facts externally. And so, for Herman Grimm, these facts themselves disappeared, as it were. One might say that they melted away from his worldview, and what remained in his worldview was a continuous stream of what he called the creations of the popular imagination.
If, for example, he wanted to consider Julius Caesar, he not only let the historical documents work on him, but he believed that what Shakespeare had made of Caesar was just as significant for Caesar as what was available in the historical documents. He looked at the times through people. Not only did the course of human development become something to him that one personality always passed on to another, but the entire course of human development itself became a spiritual process, which he believed to have exhausted in what he called the creative imagination. From this point of view, he wanted to gain more and more of an image of the creative imagination of the Western cultures in his soul, wanted to take in the course of Western human development in such a way that he could say to himself: “The way the individual currents of Western cultures merge into one another, the way they have succeeded one another from the earliest times, back to those he wanted to go back to, up to his own time, the Goethe era, they are a continuing stream of the weaving of the folk imagination in the Western peoples.”
From this urge, his gaze turned early on to that grandiose phenomenon of Western intellectual life that occupied him for a time and about which he wrote such an unprecedentedly beautiful book in the 1890s as his “Homer,” his description of the Iliad. This book, which one likes to pick up again and again when one wants to delve into the beginnings of Greek civilization from a modern intellectual standpoint, shows us Herman Grimm again, if we assume his general intellectual standpoint, from a very special angle. His gaze wanders to the gods and worlds of the gods depicted in Homer's Iliad, his gaze wanders to the fighting Greek and Trojan heroes, and the question arises in his soul: What is it actually like when a world of gods enters the ordinary human world of the fighting Greeks and Trojans? — This becomes a question for him. He notices the enormous difference in Homer's depiction between humanity walking the earth and those beings who are described as immortal gods. And Herman Grimm now attempts to portray how, in Homer's sense, the gods represent a “older” layer of beings walking the earth. Even though Herman Grimm, in his more realistic way, sees these beings as “humans,” he looks back on a culture that had long since lost its significance in Homer's time, a culture that had been replaced by another, to which the Trojan and Greek heroes belong. Herman Grimm allows an older and a younger layer of humanity to interact in Homer's Iliad, and what remains of the living effects of a previously existing layer of beings plays into what is happening between Greece and Troy in Homer's work for Herman Grimm.
In this way, Herman Grimm sees the progress of human development as a continuous replacement of older, we might say, cultural circles or cycles by newer ones, and an interplay of old and new. Each new cultural cycle has a certain task, the task of bringing something new into the general development of humanity. The old then remains in place for a while, playing into the new.
One might say that, as far as a person in the last third of the nineteenth century could see into what must be represented today from the point of view of modern spiritual science, Herman Grimm saw that far. He did not go back beyond the Greek period. Therefore, he could not give what recent spiritual research describes in its return to the purely spiritual beings of pre-humanity, who were superior to humans. But he touched on these results of recent spiritual research everywhere, coming as close as a person who has not yet been involved in spiritual research himself can come.
In spiritual research, we try to show how, when we go back in human development, we do not come to the animal series in the sense of Darwinian theory, which is interpreted materialistically today, but how we come back to spiritual, purely spiritual ancestors of human beings, and how, beyond that cycle of humanity in which human souls live embodied in physical bodies, we have another cycle of humanity in which human beings are not yet embodied in physical bodies. Herman Grimm leaves the question unanswered, as it were: What actually happened to the “gods” before human beings entered the earth? — But he recognizes the lawful succession of such human cycles. This provides a significant point of contact with the descriptions of spiritual research. But the fact that he recognizes such regular progress, taking place in periods, brings him particularly close to us, so to speak.
He seeks to extend his spiritual reflections over three millennia. For him, the first millennium is the Greek millennium. One might say that there is a certain undertone in Herman Grimm's characterization of the Greeks, as if he were saying: Yes, when one looks up to the Greeks, especially in the earliest times, they do not appear to be shaped in the same way as people today. Even a person like Alcibiades still seems like a kind of fairy-tale prince. One sees something superhuman in them. Nevertheless, from this spiritual world of the Greeks — which Herman Grimm, as I said, depicts as unlike the later human world — everything that arose in the Greek world in terms of impulses also extends into the later world, in his view, so that it forms the most important element in our spiritual life to this day. And at the end of the first millennium, which Herman Grimm considers, the most important impulse he recognizes in human development stands before his soul: the Christ impulse.
Herman Grimm is, in a certain sense, reserved when he speaks of the figure of Christ, as he is reserved in many things. But the frequent remarks he makes about Christ show us that he would be just as unwilling to go along with those who would like to reduce Christ to a mere thought impulse, so to speak, as he would with those who want to see only something generally human in the personality of Christ Jesus. He emphasizes how two impulses emanate from the figure of Christ: one impulse of colossal strength, which then, even for Herman Grimm, continues to have an effect throughout the entire subsequent development of humanity, and the other impulse of tremendous gentleness. Herman Grimm finds that the entire second millennium of Western cultural development is shaped in such a way that Greek culture is absorbed by the Christ impulse and, with this mixture of Christianity and Greek culture, now enters the Roman world, overwhelms it, and produces something very special. This is his second millennium, the first Christian millennium. For him, it is not the Roman impulses that are the main thing, but the Christian ones. Everything political, everything external and factual disappears in this millennium in Herman Grimm's view, and everywhere he observes how the Christ impulse pushes its way in and how multifaceted this Christ impulse is. His conception of Christ is not narrow or small, but broad. When Ernest Renan's book on the “Life of Jesus” was published, Herman Grimm made a remarkable observation in his magazine on “Artists and Works of Art” published at the time. He attempted to show how the pictorial representations of the figure of Christ have changed over the centuries, both in the visual arts and in literature. He thus attempted to show the variability and transformability of the Christ impulse, and he showed how people have always understood this Christ impulse according to their own spiritual disposition. And then he sees in Ernest Renan someone who, in the nineteenth century, is attempting to reinterpret Christ in a certain narrow way.
Christianity took about a millennium, according to Herman Grimm, to send its impulses into the rivulets and currents of Western intellectual life. Then came its third millennium, the second Christian one, in which we ourselves still live, that millennium in whose dawn spirits such as Dante and Giotto worked, and artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and so on, which then led to the spiritual works of Shakespeare and Goethe. For Herman Grimm, these cycles in human development were always clearly separated. He saw spiritual laws at work in human development, whose flowing stream he addressed in his creative imagination. Time and again, Herman Grimm sought to present this structure of the stream of human development in his lectures to his students in order to show how individual spiritual creation fits into this overall stream.
Thus, Michelangelo, Raphael, Savonarola, Shakespeare, and others; Goethe was, as it were, a spiritual content that can be explained when viewed against the backdrop of that flowing overall stream of creative imagination, which became particularly vivid for Herman Grimm at its source in Homer, dating back to the ninth or even tenth century BC. And that is why Herman Grimm speaks so infinitely to the soul, because he often, when he leads one in a very elementary and direct way to an interest in a work of art—for example, to Raphael's “Marriage of Mary and Joseph,” to any of the Madonna paintings or other works, to any of Leonardo da Vinci's creations, or when he leads us to anything he observes in Goethe — because he leads us in such a way that we feel we are standing inside the most immediately individual aspect of this work of art. When one looks with him at how the individual color or gesture is placed in the work of art, and thus believes one is standing isolated before the work of art, something suddenly emerges like a tableau of the entire progress of humanity, of a piece of that flowing stream of creative imagination that passes through him over three millennia and encompasses everything in itself.
Thus, Herman Grimm leads us into the intimate details of the works of art in question, and then up to the summit from which the entire stream can be viewed. But this was not something that Herman Grimm viewed in a theoretical way. It seemed so natural that Herman Grimm viewed the entirety of the flowing spiritual stream of human development in this way — as he explained to me, as mentioned, during lunch at the time — because he himself lived quite naturally in this spiritual stream with his whole soul, and he could not view a single phenomenon as anything other than something cut out of this mighty stream of human development.
The entire Western spiritual development as a development of the popular imagination — this is how it appeared before his soul, not as a general abstract idea, but filled with the most concrete content. He felt so connected with his soul to this content, which had shone through the millennia, that everything he wrote actually appears to be like individual small sections and excerpts from a giant work. Even when reading just one of Herman Grimm's book reviews, one has the impression that it has been cut out of a colossal work that depicts the entire development of humanity as a creation of the imagination. When you read an essay or an essay or anything else about any book by Herman Grimm, you feel as if you have been placed in front of such a colossal work, as if you had opened this work and read a few pages of it. And one now understands how Herman Grimm himself could say, when he wrote the preface to his collection of fragments in his twilight years, that he had envisioned a representation of the continuous flow of popular imagination, and that in it he saw the representation of the entire Western culture. One understands that the individual things he pursued appeared as if he had taken individual pieces out of a finished work. In doing so, he never attached more importance to what he had printed than to what he had written down, and to what he had written down never more importance than to everything that lived in his thoughts.
When one suggests something like this, one wants to say something, without reducing it to an abstract formula, about the feeling one has when one has loved Herman Grimm and still loves him, and appreciates his intellectual work and his character: that Herman Grimm was never able to truly execute what stood so beautifully, so colossally, so magnificently before his mind, that even his Homer work, his Raphael work, his Michelangelo work, his Goethe work appeared to us as fragments of this unwritten, comprehensive work. It is with a certain wistful feeling that one can read those lines from the aforementioned introduction to the “Fragments” where he says that what he had to say to his students year after year about the development of European intellectual life, reworked anew each year, and that it might perhaps be appropriate to rework the final form that these lectures had taken into a book, which would then, in a certain sense, represent the progress of European cultural development — but that, unfortunately, this reworking would probably no longer take place. Today, we read these lines with all the more sadness, since this reworking did not in fact take place, and we saw Herman Grimm pass away, knowing what lived in his soul, and had to watch as what lived in his soul for contemporary culture had to sink into the grave with him.
This characterizes the intellectually comprehensive perspective from which everything Herman Grimm wrote was written. If spiritual research aims to be precisely what can be gained by broadening one's intellectual horizons, then it must be said that those who immerse themselves in Herman Grimm's spirit and style of presentation have the most beautiful guidance from modern intellectual life to gradually enter into the whole way of thinking that is characteristic of spiritual research. But even if we disregard the breadth of his vision and look into Herman Grimm's soul itself, how he sought to approach phenomena, how his feelings and thoughts led him to everything he wrote in his comprehensive works on Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Goethe, and when we consider what he has presented in his other writings, we find that Herman Grimm differs significantly from other minds and that he has something that belongs to that deepening of the soul that has been spoken of here when describing the path the soul must take in order to enter the spiritual worlds themselves.
We have been able to emphasize that the intensity of the soul's powers must become stronger for the spiritual path, that if deeper soul powers are to be brought forth, which otherwise lie dormant, the soul must apply more inner strength, more inner courage and boldness than it otherwise displays in ordinary life, that it must grasp its concepts more sharply, identify more with its own essence, with the powers of thinking, feeling, and willing. Herman Grimm shows signs of this everywhere, signs that have taken a different path in his case, signs that have enabled him to describe works of art in such an intimate and personal way, as he has described those of Raphael or Michelangelo, but which are on the way to shining even deeper into the spiritual world. For it is not what we today call “objective” that forms the basis of Herman Grimm's historical research, but rather a connection with the phenomena of spiritual life that he depicts, which forms the basis of his depictions. So that his own soul, completely forgetting itself, and yet again aware of itself in a rare way, submerges itself in the corresponding spiritual phenomena.
This is particularly evident when he first leads his own soul to the individual spiritual phenomenon, for example to Raphael, and then raises this individual spiritual phenomenon back up to the overall stream of human spiritual life. His feelings become bold, powerful ideas, and what many others did not dare to say in such nuances of feeling and such nuances of ideas, Herman Grimm dares to say and thus becomes a spiritual portrayer who, in terms of the boldness of his portrayal, confronts us in such a way that we are sometimes truly reminded of the portrayers who wrote the Gospels. Only that the former wrote with more mysticism, while Herman Grimm writes with a more modern spiritual perspective. And just as the former rise up to the horizon of all humanity, so Herman Grimm rises up with his “Raphael” to the horizon of all humanity.
It is wonderful when, in his bold manner, as if tearing his soul out of himself and striding alongside Raphael's soul as if in a stream of overall development, he bursts out with words that can truly tell us more than anything in a mere depiction of world history: "Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, flowed from paradise." When you let such a sentence sink in, you realize that you know something completely different about Herman Grimm's relationship to Raphael than you would otherwise know about the relationship of many other artists to any phenomenon.
Thus, for Herman Grimm, personalities flow together with the overall current of spiritual life. One could also say that he brings the highest spiritual sphere down to the most personal element. And how does a sum of spiritual phenomena confront us when Herman Grimm speaks the following words from the depths of his soul, expressing his attitude toward the corresponding spiritual facts:
"If Michelangelo were miraculously brought back from the dead to live among us again, and I were to meet him, I would reverently step aside to let him pass; but if Raphael were to cross my path, I would follow behind him to see if I might have the opportunity to hear a few words from his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo, one can limit oneself to recounting what they once were in their day; with Raphael, one must start from what he is to us today. A thin veil has settled over the others, but not over Raphael. He is one of those whose growth is far from complete. It is conceivable that future generations of people will continue to encounter new mysteries in Raphael."
This is a mood of character, not objective in the sense that is so often demanded today, but describing the corresponding phenomena in such a way that we feel immediately transported into their vicinity when we can sense a hint of what lived in Herman Grimm's soul when he was able to write such sentences. Then one also understands how this spirit could wrestle with a world-historical phenomenon, with Raphael himself. Strange—as he himself recounts—it was for him with Raphael, quite different from what happened to him, for example, when he wanted to describe Michelangelo. Herman Grimm's portrayal of Michelangelo's life is a wonderful book, even though in many ways it may be considered outdated today. How significantly Michelangelo's figure stands out against the backdrop of medieval life as a whole, how it stands out from the other figures that emerge vividly! How does it stand out from the unique description of Florence itself, or how does it stand out from the tableau that Herman Grimm presents, in which he conjures up two spiritual entities before our minds, Athens and Florence, and thus allows the interweaving of the three millennia he characterizes to appear like a powerful backdrop against which figures such as Dante, Giotto, and the other painters of that time, then figures such as Savonarola, and finally Michelangelo himself, stand out.
All this appears as if Herman Grimm had treated Raphael and his environment differently than Goethe, but that he has nevertheless given us all this in no less an intimate manner. In Herman Grimm's portrayal of Goethe, we feel everywhere how he grew up as a spiritual grandson of Goethe. In his portrayal of Michelangelo, too, we feel how he personally grows into everything, how he personally, one might say, enters every palace in Florence, how he walks the streets of Florence, how he personally gets to know other relationships and then, standing before Michelangelo, comes to portray his work. But we feel that everything he painted in this way is as if it were cast from a single mold.
What he wrote about Raphael is different. There we feel a struggle with the material, with the mental image; there we feel how Herman Grimm can never be satisfied with himself. He himself recounts how he took up the subject again and again, how nothing he had already published was enough for him. Indeed, his last works should include what he attempted one last time to portray as a representation of Raphael's personality, but which remained a fragment and then appeared in the essay collection: “Raphael as a World Power,” from which the sentences just read aloud are taken.
Why did Herman Grimm struggle so much with his material, especially in the case of Raphael? Because he could only portray something, to his own satisfaction, if he could become completely one with the material. But in Raphael he saw a spirit that he characterized as follows, as in the sentence just read aloud: “Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.” And so Raphael himself grew to enormous proportions with every sentence Grimm devoted to him. He could never satisfy himself because he himself could not capture this “world power” in a book. While the representations of Homer, Michelangelo, or Goethe reveal the comprehensiveness and yet gracefulness of his spirit, Raphael's work reveals the deep sincerity and honesty of this spiritual personality.
Anyone who picks up his book on Homer may find it insufficiently scholarly. But Herman Grimm states on the very first page that this book is not intended to be a contribution to Homer research. Indeed, Herman Grimm could behave like a prince of the mind in these and similar matters, as I mentioned earlier. So it seems natural that when he set out to collect his ideas about Goethe for publication, he boldly assumed that everything else that could be said about Goethe was inadequate. This may seem presumptuous to some, but it seemed natural given his literary and artistic gestures.
This was his attitude toward all intellectual life. Therefore, Herman Grimm's book on Homer may be unbearable to some who approach it from a scholarly point of view. Everything that has been said about Homer, whether Homer lived or not, whether the Iliad is compiled from so many details, etc., was of no concern to him. He took it as it was. This allowed him to see how wonderfully it is composed internally, how everything that comes later relates to what came before, so that everything that this internal composition reveals appears to us to be internally coherent. But apart from that, it seems to me that the greatest thing is what is so immensely beneficial to a researcher of the human spirit: the immersion in the inner lives of Homer's heroes. Everywhere we see Herman Grimm's soulful nature poured out onto the inner lives of Homer's heroes. Everywhere we see captured, but with a world-historical background, the soul of Achilles, the soul of Agamemnon, the soul of Odysseus, and so on. A book that has an overwhelming effect as a portrayal of the soul, despite the intimacy of the stylistic presentation! Everywhere we are not only led up to the heights of historical observation, but we are also led deep, deep into the souls of the individual Homeric characters. Yes, some scholars might say that Herman Grimm took the Iliad, disregarding all Homer research and all actual preliminary research, and then accepted it verse by verse! He does indeed do this, in a rather “amateurish” way, and one could then sum up the whole thing in the dry formula: Here is a man who has written a book without any preliminary studies.
Did Herman Grimm write this book without any preliminary studies? Anyone who delves into Herman Grimm's intellectual life will find the preliminary studies, only they look different from the preliminary studies of ordinary scholars. Herman Grimm's preliminary studies lay in studies of the soul, in deepening his understanding of the human soul and its secrets. And one can be convinced that no one else could have illuminated the souls of the Homeric heroes so wonderfully as someone who had done such preliminary research. Herman Grimm seems to be searching for what was at work in Homer's imagination. But what he says shows us everywhere the finest connoisseur of the soul, from whom we can expect something quite extraordinary when we see him contemplating the Homeric heroes' souls, from Achilles to Agamemnon to Odysseus. How did he come to write certain words in his Homer book or in his other works that seem so extraordinarily spiritual to the spiritual researcher? He came to do so because he had done very special preliminary studies. And the spiritual researcher will seek these preliminary studies in the works from Herman Grimm's early period.
First and foremost, we have that wonderful collection of novellas, which may be less widely read today than many modern works of this kind, but which should be read by those who are interested in spiritual life, a collection of novellas that can be described as an intense attempt to get to know human souls, to fathom human secrets, to fathom the workings of the human soul beyond the physical world. The first of these novellas, which appeared in the early period of his literary career, is entitled “The Singer.” It shows how a man develops a deep, passionate affection for a woman, a woman of comprehensive spiritual nature. We are shown how these two personalities can never come together, how the woman removes the ardently loving man from her circle of friends, how all the impulses that draw him to the woman on the one hand continue to live on in this man's soul, while on the other hand, from the soul, they consume the whole physical being of this man. We see how he then wastes away spiritually, depicted, one might say, in a spiritual-scientific manner. And once again we see him, when he is taken in by a friend, entangled in the woman's nets. The friend realizes that it is high time to bring in the personality to whom the friend is devoted with all his soul. She comes — but too late. While she is in front of the house, the person in question shoots himself.
And now comes something that Herman Grimm has so often touched upon in artistic representations, but which he has always left vague in those areas where it is readily taken up by spiritual research. Now it is described briefly and concisely how the deceased lives on in the singer's imagination. The scene in which she, who feels entirely responsible for this man's death, sees him approaching night after night, acting from the realm of the dead, and how this approach of the deceased now becomes part of the woman's soul, will be unforgettable. This is not described as a mere figment of the imagination, but as if by a man who knows that there are mysteries that transcend the death of a human being. The description is wonderful, where the friend stands before the woman and where she says that the dead man is coming to her — up to the woman's last letter to the friend, in which she expresses that she now feels herself facing death, that the deceased, to whom she was so connected, has drawn her from his realm of the dead into his realm. Perhaps no modern actor has found the tones to touch the spiritual world with such intimacy.
In spiritual research, we describe how, when a person passes through the gate of death, that which otherwise always remains united with the person even in sleep, the so-called etheric body, lifts itself out of the physical body together with the higher soul members of the person and passes into the spiritual world. In the field of spiritual research, we sketch a picture of how the corpse remains behind, how the human being then detaches itself piece by piece, limb by limb, from the physical body with its etheric body, and how the etheric body then remains for a while the envelope of the higher soul members of the human being. This is an idea that can become increasingly familiar to those who are interested in spiritual research. In the following, we will now be able to consider the wonderful way in which the artistic soul of Herman Grimm touches on these facts of the spiritual world, and again this consideration will lead us to the question of why, for deeper reasons, Herman Grimm did not complete his cultural representations in a comprehensive work.
In addition to his novellas, Herman Grimm wrote another artistic work, the novel “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Unconquerable Powers), in which, as in his entire life's work, we encounter a distinguished style that elevates itself everywhere to a contemplation of the world and life. Everything else is also magnificent. Especially what one might call the clash of two eras of humanity on a small scale. One world is one that values only titles, rank, and dignity and feels completely at home in it. From this world comes a count from an old family who has fallen into poverty but still lives entirely in the echo and reverberation of his count's status. This novel wonderfully contrasts the world of old prejudices and hierarchies with the “new world.” American views come into play. It is Americans who confront the man who lives entirely in his class prejudices and class sentiments, and whom Herman Grimm calls Arthur. This count is confronted by Emmy, the daughter of Mrs. Forster, who has grown out of the American way of life, and we see this count inflamed with passionate love for Emmy.
It is impossible to even begin to describe the rich content of this novel. We are confronted with the whole contrast between Europe and America, the whole contrast between the old Prussian character and the new Prussian character created by the wars—an immensely significant cultural painting in which the characters are imprinted and from which they emerge again. All that can be hinted at is that, due to the impulses that arise from these different currents, Count Arthur dies a tragic death just as he is about to marry Emmy. A man who belongs to his family, but who, in his delusions, considers himself the rightful heir to the count's family and regards the real heir, Count Arthur, as a bastard, confronts Count Arthur, incited by envy and jealousy, and circumstances unfold in such a way that Count Arthur is shot by this man on the eve of his wedding.
One may never find an opportunity to consider the phrase “insurmountable forces” — which perhaps some who want to view this novel purely rationally consider only as the unbridgeable nature of class prejudices — as more justified than when one sees how Herman Grimm, without intending to, allows the idea of karma, the idea of the causal connection between destinies that are expressed in human life, knot after knot and brings it to fruition, and how he in fact depicts forces at work that can only be effective if they carry over from previous incarnations, from previous earthly lives. He does not describe this by talking theoretically about “forces” or “karma,” but simply by letting the facts speak for themselves and giving expression to these powers in such a way that they appear to us everywhere as the ideas of spiritual research. We see a karmic destiny unfolding, we see insurmountable karmic powers expressing themselves, and we see something else.
Emmy stays behind. The last glance that fell on Arthur's fading eyes as he lay there with his heart shot through was when she bent over the dying man and her eyes took on a certain expression. Unforgettable are the words of Herman Grimm himself, as he speaks here of how the spirit departed from the eyes at the moment when the eyes take on that peculiarity that makes them appear only as physical instruments. But now we are confronted once again with Herman Grimm's approach to the worlds that lie beyond death, that chaste approach, one might say, to the worlds from which the souls that have remained real continue to work after they have passed through the gate of death.
In a short concluding chapter, Herman Grimm shows us how Emmy gradually wastes away and dies. The way he describes Emmy's approaching death is very characteristic of Herman Grimm's connection to spiritual problems. She is taken to Montreux. Montreux itself is described in a unique way, as is the entire environment in which Emmy dies. But unlike other writers who are distant from spiritual life, he does not describe Emmy's death as someone who approaches it from afar, but as someone who approaches it from a place where the mysteries of death and the mysteries of the land beyond death speak to the soul. I would be leaving something out if I did not conclude with the words that Herman Grimm himself wrote about Emmy's death:
"But this was Emmy's dream.
Between midnight and morning, she thought she was waking up.
Her first glance at the window, through which a dull light was streaming, was clear and unclouded, and she knew where she was. She could also hear her mother, who was sleeping next to her, breathing. But a moment later, with a pressure she had never felt before, she was overcome by overwhelming fear. It was no longer the individual thoughts that had tormented her in recent days, but as if a giant hand were holding all the mountains of the earth on a thin thread above her and at any moment the fingers holding it could open and the mass could fall down to lie on her for eternity. She wandered with her gaze within herself and outside herself, searching for a glimmer of light, but nothing presented itself, the light from the window extinguished, her mother's breath no longer audible, and suffocating loneliness surrounding her, as if she would never again reach anything alive. She wanted to call out, but she couldn't; she wanted to move, but no limb obeyed her. It was completely silent, completely dark, impossible even to grasp her own thoughts in this terribly monotonous fear: even her memory taken from her — when finally a thought returned: Arthur!
And now, wonderfully, it was as if this one thought had turned into a point of light that became visible to her eyes. And as the thought grew into boundless longing, this light grew, came and expanded, and suddenly, as if it were bursting apart and unfolding and taking shape—Arthur stood before her! She saw him, she finally recognized him. It was certainly him. He smiled and was close beside her. She did not see whether he was naked or clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well, it was him, not just a phantom that had taken his form.
Herman Grimm brings the one who has long since passed through the gates of death so close to the one who becomes the seer that, at the moment of her death, she approaches the dead man in such a way that she addresses his soul: “She did not see whether he was naked or clothed: but it was him, she knew him too well, it was him himself, not just a phantom that had taken his form.”
“He stretched out his hand to her and said, ‘Come.’” Never had his voice sounded so sweet and enticing as it did today. With all the strength she could muster, she tried to raise her arms toward him, but she couldn't. He came even closer and stretched his hand closer to her: “Come,” he said again.
Emmy felt as if the force with which she tried to utter at least one word should be capable of moving mountains, but she was unable to say this one word.
Arthur looked at her, and she looked at him. If she could have moved a finger, she would have touched him. And now the most terrible thing: he seemed to be retreating again! “Come,” he said for the third time. And she, feeling that he had spoken for the last time, that the terrible darkness would descend again upon his heavenly sight, now filled with a fear that tore her apart like frost splits trees, made one last attempt to raise her arms to him. But it was impossible to overcome the heaviness and coldness that held her captive—but then, like a bud bursting open, from which a flower grows before our eyes, other arms grew out of her arms, shining other shoulders out of her shoulders, and these arms rose toward Arthur's arms, and he, with his hands grasping her hands, slowly floating back, pulling her with him, and the whole glorious figure with them, rising from Emmys.
One cannot describe the emergence of the etheric body from the physical body more wonderfully than when one undertakes such a description with a chaste artistic soul. That was a spirit, that was a soul that lived in Herman Grimm, of which we may say that it came close to what we so eagerly seek in spiritual research. That was a soul, that was a spirit, of which we may say that it proves to us how the modern soul, as it approached the twentieth century, sought the paths to spiritual life.
So we gladly turn to Herman Grimm, whom we eavesdrop on as he walks the path that we only want to continue walking. And so we see how he elevates Raphael's creations, Michelangelo's creations, Goethe's experiences, Homer's Greek soul, to the stream that flows through the millennia as “creative imagination” for his spirit. We then know how close Herman Grimm was, with all his feelings and sensibilities, to the living weaving and working of the spiritual-soul, which is behind everything physically ‘real’. For we are not dealing with abstractions when Herman Grimm speaks of his “creative imagination.” Insofar as we may still be dealing with abstractions in his case, insofar as we may also see the necessity of breaking through the thin wall that still separates Herman Grimm from the living spirit, which not only acts as creative imagination, but also lives in the immediate spiritual activity behind the entire sensory world. It seems like a kind of chastity that does not dare to say more in its soul than it does when we see Herman Grimm speaking of the imagination of humanity that has continued to work through the millennia, since as an artist he has touched so closely the soul that has remained alive after passing through the gate of death. Thus, it will not be difficult for us, where Herman Grimm speaks of creative imagination, to see the living spirit beings that we, as spiritual researchers, seek behind the sensory world.
Perhaps it will not seem unjustified to claim that for such a spirit, who struggled so honestly and sincerely for the truth, this creative imagination was too abstract when he wanted to approach it again and again; that his soul urged him to grasp the living spiritual, and that therefore the intended great work could not come into being, because if it had been written, it would have had to be a work that represented the spiritual world not merely as creative imagination, but as a world of creative beings and individualities.
Spiritual research in modern times has not been arbitrarily imposed by this or that person, but has been demanded by the searching souls of modern times, those searching souls to which Herman Grimm so clearly and characteristically belonged, as we have seen. Therefore, it is precisely in this remarkable personality that we can become aware of how we are not alienated and isolated in modern intellectual life with spiritual research. We have been able to regard a figure such as Herman Grimm as a kindred spirit. Even if he does not yet fully share our point of view, we are nevertheless infinitely close to him — or at least we can be — And when considering such a figure, it is better to focus less on every detail and more on the whole, viewing it with all the harmony of the soul with which it can affect us, with all the gentleness and yet bold sharpness and strength of the soul with which it can affect us. We may now treat this or that question of life in a manner more or less different from Herman Grimm's — but I know that it is not entirely out of keeping with his style when I summarize what I actually wanted to express. One might arrive at the idea, let us call it a delusion for my sake, which can then live in the soul as a beautiful delusion: If higher spirits, spirits detached from the earth, wanted to familiarize themselves with what is happening on earth through reading, they would prefer to read writings such as those in which Herman Grimm has portrayed the earthly destinies of human beings.
This feeling can be sensed in almost every line of Herman Grimm's writings, and this feeling lifts one's entire personality, one might say, to a sphere detached from the earth. One then feels so close to this personality that, when one wants to characterize what has been said about Herman Grimm today, a beautiful phrase comes to mind, one that he himself uttered at the grave of a friend, his friend Treitschke, whom he held in such high esteem:
“How joyful this man was in life. How combative. How language served him. How new his latest book always was. How little even those who got a taste of his elbows in the hustle and bustle of intellectual exchange could be angry with him. Even they will join in the chorus: ‘Yes, he was ours!’”
These words are also the last that Herman Grimm wrote and had printed, as we know from the editor of his works, Reinhold Steig. And I would like to conclude this evening's reflection by summarizing it in these words: How joyfully this man, Herman Grimm, lived his life, how gentle — and yet how individual! And how harmonious his entire life's work is! How language offered itself to his service! How new his latest book always was! How little even those who differ from him in some ideas and in some ways can be distant from him, if only they understand themselves properly! And how close must those feel to him who, starting from any field of intellectual research, seek the paths to the spirit! How close must they feel to him, and how much would they like to burst out in words when his figure, shining so gently in spirit, appears before them: Yes, he was ours too!