The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! When the Goetheanum in Dornach, before its actual completion, organized autumn courses on the various sciences and on various branches of human life last fall, the aim was not to focus exclusively on spiritual science as such in these courses, but to let the individual sciences express themselves in such a way that what they themselves could experience as a fertilization through spiritual science would have to come to light. For this reason, it was considered important that experts from the individual scientific fields were able to express themselves at this event, that they were heard, and that personalities from practical life, from commerce, industry and so on, were also heard, in other words, from thoroughly practical life. The idea was that those people who are either directly involved in science or those who have experienced the hardships and challenges of life and at the same time have truly penetrated into that which is to emerge as spiritual science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, should be able to discuss the experiences they have with the introduction of spiritual science into their particular field. But it has also been used to highlight what is supposed to be the actual origin of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented by the Goetheanum. What is to be represented here is not something that even remotely has the intention, say, of founding some new religion. Nor is it about wanting to set up some kind of sectarian movement, but the starting point of spiritual science is taken entirely from the scientific life of modern times and especially of the present.

I would like to express myself through a comparison, as what is to be represented as Anthroposophy from Dornach is particularly related to the scientific life of modern times and the present. If I make such a comparison, it is only to explain something. Please do not think – I hardly need to mention this – that with this comparison, spiritual science itself is to be compared with the world-historical event that I am citing. That could be left to some cheap quip or the like. But I would like to point out to you – just to explain something – the views with which the discoverers of America set out, these discoverers of America who found the courage to sail across the ocean that had not yet been crossed. They believed they were arriving in India, reaching India from the other side, so to speak, hence the term West India and so on. So what did they predict? They predicted that by venturing out across the ocean, they would reach something familiar.

This is also how I would like to try to go further and further within modern science, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries. You are well aware that serious, conscientious researchers strive for this ever-advancing progress of science, and that extraordinarily conscientious researchers, it should be recognized, then speak of the fact that one must come to the insurmountable limits of human knowledge. But on the other hand, when one comes to these limits, all kinds of assumptions are made about the atomic and molecular world, and so on and so forth. One assumes, when working methodically in the laboratory, when doing research in the clinic, when trying to fathom the secrets of the world at the astronomical observatory, that somehow, through the sea of the scientific method, one must arrive at something that is either an insurmountable limit or something similar to what is already known. Just as Columbus more or less predicted that he would have to find something already known, so it is also assumed in science that one must find something already known. After all, molecules and atoms are nothing more than, I would say, penetrating into the smallest, into that which one also sees with ordinary eyes, making sense.

But this experience of the scientist seems perfectly understandable to someone who is immersed in scientific life, understandable because when you work further and further with modern methods, you don't actually arrive at a solution to important life and human riddles, as you might expect. If you believe that, you are indulging in an illusion. On the contrary, anyone who approaches science with an open mind, or rather, I should say, who conducts methodical research, especially if they not only pursue the natural sciences, but also want to transfer the scientific method to history, to the so-called humanities, will find that no solutions arise, but that the number of puzzles instead increases. You only really learn to recognize how mysterious the world around us is when you get to know it through the methods of modern science. But there is one thing we have to acknowledge when we reflect on ourselves in our research: What is it that we apply, regardless of whether we are conducting research in the laboratory or in the astronomical observatory or in the clinic? Well, my dear audience, however much some people, I would say through a radical materialism, may be mistaken about this, it is nevertheless not even a very high truth, but rather a trivial one, that if one wants to do scientific research, one must apply spirit, that in some way the spirit must be active in man.

And now it is a matter of combining these words, the spirit must be active in man when he researches externally, in the sensual-scientific, with these words, some real, scientific meaning. You cannot do this any differently than by researching what this spirit is. You cannot find it in the external world. You have to apply it to the knowledge of the external world, you have to get the spirit out of yourself. If we want to express ourselves at all about what science is, we speak of the spirit all the time. But we also have to be able to come to it through some particular way of knowing: What is this spirit actually? And by now trying to make the journey, I would like to say through the sea of modern science, one finally discovers that one does not arrive at something known, but that one arrives precisely at that which is previously in consciousness when one utters the word “spirit” or by saying, “The spirit searches,” one does not arrive at something known, but one arrives at that unknown and actually experiences something similar to what Columbus experienced when he discovered America between Europe and India.

On the journey to the world's mysteries, one actually experiences what the spirit is. Only, in a sense, science has lost it. And this is shown, I would say quite bitterly, in life that this science has lost it. This newer natural science recognizes the spirit only in thoughts, in ideas, in abstractions. And this view has been adopted by millions and millions of people, who call everything that arises through the spirit in life - morality, religion, science, law, and so on - an ideology, that is, something that would only arise as smoke from what is either sensual truth, or what some material production processes are, or the like. But this is what one discovers, not through any kind of belief, but through a real scientific observation within anthroposophical spiritual science, what the spirit is as a real being, what the spirit is as a living being, like what one observes through the outer senses in all its liveliness.

Now, my dear audience, to arrive at this view, one needs a certain starting point. And I would like to call this starting point: “intellectual modesty”. First of all, a moral quality is necessary, albeit an intimate moral quality, if one wants to find the right starting point for the spiritual science meant here.

To characterize this starting point in intellectual modesty, I would like to choose the following comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethean poetry. What will he do with the volume of Goethean poetry? He would perhaps tear it up or play with it in some way, but in any case he would not do what the volume of Goethean poetry is actually there for, which one can do when one is in a different state than the one in which the child will be when he is ten or fifteen years older. He will do something different with the volume of Goethean poetry than he would at five years of age. What is the reason for this? The reason for this is none other than that the child's soul has developed in the meantime, developed from within. The child is now capable, because it has developed those qualities that it did not have at five years of age, of discovering something that was already there in the volume of poetry when the child was five years old. He was just the same externally in the eyes of the child as he might be when the child is twenty years old. But because something has taken place within the child, because something has been brought out of the child's inner being, purely because of this, the child treats everything it now does with the volume of Goethean lyric poetry quite differently.

Nowadays, especially in science, but also in life in general, we take the view that we develop those qualities in people that are, let us say, inherited, that can be acquired through ordinary education, and then we are usually ready for today's life and for scientific life. This is the point of departure, especially in scientific life. One regards oneself as more or less complete in a certain way, in terms of one's ordinary inherited qualities and one's education, and one looks at the world, so to speak, from this completed point of view. One combines what the mind and the senses provide and, without going deeper, one might say that one only considers what is missing in the area one wants to explore. One expands, one also expands by perhaps arming the eye with a telescope or microscope or [spectroscope] or X-ray machine. But in this way one attains nothing more than, I would like to say, even if indirectly, by means of the spectroscope or the X-ray apparatus or the telescope, one sees the same thing that one otherwise has before the senses and the other senses. But what one needs to have for spiritual science is intellectual modesty. That means that at some point in life one must simply say to oneself: Man can develop abilities from the age of five to the age of twenty. In a sense, he draws out of his inner being what is latent in him. And only because he has drawn something out of his inner being does the world now look different to him. If one merely describes the external senses: It is no longer there, but it is now more present for him because he has brought abilities and qualities out of the depths of his soul. So one says to oneself: There could be other abilities in this soul, abilities that do not come through the ordinary inherited qualities in their natural development and through ordinary education, but that perhaps only come through taking the soul life intimately inwardly — albeit with the appropriate modesty, because it is only a sensualization —, deeply inwardly, and that one brings it beyond the point of view that can otherwise be obtained in life and in ordinary science.

This is what must naturally take as its starting point the intellectual modesty just characterized, the view that there may still lie in the soul something as yet undeveloped, but which can still be developed. From this point of view, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? From this point of view, it really seeks to shape out of the soul that which is latent in the soul. The methods it uses for this cannot really be compared with any external measures. They are methods that are intimately applied to the inner life of the soul itself. But one should not think that what comes about through the development of intimate inner soul abilities is somehow easier than research in the laboratory or clinic or astronomical observatory. Rather, what I am now briefly indicating to you in principle requires years and years of inner, serious and dedicated soul work. This dedicated soul work is not appreciated by some people who know little about the subject. And so they believe that what is said in the field of spiritual science is something fantastic, plucked out of the blue. But that is not the case at all.

What I am now going to mention very briefly, you will find more fully described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Of course I cannot give all the details here, but I would like to suggest in principle that the matter at hand when researching the spiritual worlds, as meant in anthroposophy, is not at all something that has been miraculously brought forth or the like, but that it is only a continuation, a further development of the ordinary human soul abilities. Please excuse me, therefore, if I explain in a somewhat elementary way how one can move from the ordinary soul abilities to those through which, in science, one can look deeper into the reasons for existence than is the case with the ordinary external senses and with the combining mind.

You are all familiar with two human abilities. If I speak to you about a development in the first ability, perhaps not so many people will take offense at it, because they will at least admit that what comes about through such an ability can still be called science. But when I speak to you about the development of the second ability, then, of course, the objections will increase, which is quite understandable. The objections, ladies and gentlemen, are well known. Then, in particular, the scientific people will initially rebel against something like this, but only as long as the full transformation of the corresponding abilities is not envisaged.

The two abilities – there are, of course, many others, but these are the two main abilities that I want to characterize – these two abilities of the human soul, which, so to speak, have to be taken up at the point where they are in ordinary life and from there have to be further developed, just as the mental abilities of a five-year-old child have to be further developed. These two abilities are, on the one hand, the human ability to remember and, on the other hand, what we call love in our ordinary and social lives. The ability to remember and the ability to love – we apply them in science at least as aids. Memory and love play an enormous role in our ordinary and social lives. However, both abilities can be developed further than they are in the ordinary life of the human soul.

As you know, the ability to remember is what brings coherence into our lives. Initially, we have this ability to remember in such a way that we can conjure up an event that we may have experienced many years ago at a certain later point in our lives. At that time, we were fully immersed in this event with our whole being. At that time we touched, so to speak, that which was the cause of a certain experience in the external world. At that time our senses were exposed to this experience. In later periods of life, perhaps through an external cause, perhaps through an inner cause or something similar, we evoke in the soul itself in the form of an image that which was once an experience. And if we have healthy soul powers, we know quite precisely, simply inwardly through what is formed in the life contexts for our soul existence, whether we are imagining some kind of fantasy, whether we are merely thinking up something or whether what arises in our soul is only the image, so to speak, the imagination of what we have experienced in the outer sense world.

Those who have studied the significance of the ability to remember for the human soul in more depth know that our self is never truly healthy if something is wrong with this memory – going back to the point in time to which we can usually remember going back in the first years of life. If there is a period of life that cannot be reached in memory, where the thread of life is interrupted, something will show up that disturbs the self so much that the self, the center of the human soul, cannot feel healthy. And you also know how morbid conditions can intervene in the ego and how, through the rupture of memory, quite terrible mental illnesses can arise. There are people – you will have heard of them, my dear audience – who got on a train somewhere and rode it to some point. Then they got off. They only found their way again later. They have completely severed the thread of life. And afterwards? They cannot remember what they have been through. This thread of memory is what holds our ego together.

What is actually the basis for remembering any event? Yes, by going through the experiences, they are, so to speak, in front of us in the moment. We can relive what we experience in them inwardly over and over again. And what we have done over and over again can be inwardly revived in our soul as an image. I do not need to dwell today on what actually takes place in the human being's inner life; you can find that in my works on spiritual science literature. The fact of the matter is that we can bring forth images of experiences we have had, and that in this way the experience becomes a lasting one in our soul. You see, we have to hold on to this quality of permanence and, I would say, learn to experiment with it, just as one experiments with external things in a chemical laboratory. We must actually learn to think about these inner things in the same way that we have acquired skills in science, in modern science, whose merits should not be overshadowed by spiritual science. Just as we set out to do certain things in modern science, so we come to a different conclusion about what we can only observe in nature. Just as one goes from observing nature to conducting experiments and thereby arriving at certain things that could not be inferred from observation itself, but are only inferred from this artificially arranged observation of the experiment, so too can certain human soul abilities not be developed if one does not, so to speak, resort to inner work on the soul abilities themselves.

What is characteristic of memory images is duration, and that is what one absorbs. One forms easily comprehensible images, images that cannot be mixtures, that cannot emerge from some subconscious, that would be the complicated images. No, one forms easily comprehensible images, the individual components of which one can see quite well. You put them into your consciousness, just as you would otherwise put a memory into it. You now dwell on such images for a long time. But don't think that it is enough to do this twice. Such exercises must be continued for years, just as one must research serious science for years. Because one must gradually bring up the abilities that lie in the depths of the soul and can thus animate such ideas and sustain them in this way.

And in addition to this, a certain training must also be undertaken, I would like to say, of inner life experiences. Because, my dear attendees, you will have heard that there are all kinds of mystics and the like who are now also striving for inner vision. What is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science is by no means such nebulous mysticism. Quite the opposite! The one who works in this way on the inner life of his soul sets himself a very conscious ideal in this work. He also sets himself the ideal in this work that one can also acquire in a science, but only if one really devotes oneself to this science with full clarity and independence, with inner freedom.

This is the methodology that Goethe had in his research: although he was not actually a mathematician, he wanted to conduct research in the field of nature in such a way that he could give an account of his method to any strict mathematician. This is also how the humanities scholar does it. In mathematics, one works with transparent concepts. One does not describe the Pythagorean theorem in nebulous mysticism; one has everything one needs to see in order to arrive at this Pythagorean theorem. Those concepts that one constantly works with must be presented to the soul with such inner clarity and light. I call this resting on such ideas “meditation”, and I ask you not to imagine anything else by this meditation but firstly: this resting on easily comprehensible ideas that cannot have anything nebulous about them. They will have less nebulousness the more you acquire the ability, through a certain inner soul experience, to recognize such nebulousness and subconsciousness as soon as it arises.

Modern science has also dealt a great deal with this subconscious, which rises up from the depths of the soul and then lives in us. We do not really know its cause, but it belongs to the life of the soul. It is precisely about these things that anyone who wants to become a true spiritual scientist must first know.

Let me give you an example that you can also find in ordinary literature. A professor of zoology is walking down the street. He passes a bookstore, looks into the shop window and sees a book about lower animals. The title of the book is something about the lower animals. And you see, it happens to the good professor – just imagine: a professor of zoology! It happens to him, just by looking at this book title – it's a very serious book title about earthworms or something like that – that he has to start laughing. So, a professor of zoology who has to laugh at a perhaps very serious book title! He can't believe it himself. So he decides to tell himself: I'll maybe close my eyes to try to figure out why it has to happen to me that I laugh at this serious book title. He closes his eyes. And lo and behold, by not seeing, he hears better. And he hears a melody in the distance, played by a barrel organ grinder. And now he remembers: decades ago, he had danced his first dance to this same melody, which the barrel organ grinder is now playing. What he had experienced back then had not crossed his mind since, but had been lying dormant in his subconscious. But now, as he looks at a book title, he hears and does not hear – as if in an intermediate state between hearing and not hearing – and the melody brings it back to his memory. And he has to smile, as he laughed when he had his dancer in front of him and he danced his first dance to the same melody.

You see, by becoming acquainted with something like this — and there is an enormous amount of such things in human life —, one experiences how many so-called reminiscences can be found in the soul, and how easily illusions and fantasies can arise when one gives oneself over to some kind of imagination. That is why some mystics are like that. They believe that by constantly emphasizing, they look into the soul and find all kinds of things in it, which they then often characterize with lofty words that they think they find in the soul. But what one has once absorbed in this way in the soul does not always have to come up in the same way. It can also change. And when someone talks about all kinds of great opportunities and experiences that he claims to have had himself, it may just be the transformed tones of the melody of the barrel organ that he heard decades ago. Please excuse this comparison, but I hope I am being understood.

So what is actually present in the soul, what the possibilities of limitation are, must first be thoroughly and clearly understood by anyone who wants to be a spiritual researcher. He must have these experiences. Only then will he be able to feel correctly. I would now like to characterize it from my use of words, if these words are not misunderstood.

This inner experimentation, this resting on clear ideas, which cannot be reminiscences, of which one knows that only what is present in consciousness is effective, ultimately brings up certain powers from the depths of the soul, which develop through such practice in the same way as muscular strength develops when one works physically. The soul powers develop and one attains a faculty that goes far beyond mere remembering. Mere remembering brings experiences to mind in the form of images that we have gone through in this physical life. But what one now develops as a soul ability through a further development of the ability to remember, that teaches one so well that the human being, as he stands there in the world, is indeed born out of the whole of nature and the universe. It teaches us that everything that is spread out in the world and everything that has ever been spread out in this time, in this world that surrounds us and in which we ourselves are, that all this is in some developmental context with the human being.

It is certainly never my intention to resurrect any old ideas, but one can use expressions – even if one is easily misunderstood by those who want to misunderstand – but one can use old expressions to describe something that one has directly observed.

For example, it is an old idea that the human being is a small world, that is, a microcosm. This means that everything that exists in the world in some way is also present in the human being in its own way. It is interesting that the most recent researchers have repeatedly pointed out that when we look at our machines in terms of their principle, we are actually looking at nothing other than transformed human sensory organs or other human organs. You can prove in almost every machine how it is formed in principle, how something is in the human being. That which is observed externally can, when truly observed internally, come to full consciousness.

When this developed capacity for memory occurs, one brings forth, so to speak, something different from the human soul in terms of effects than one can bring forth from this soul through the ordinary capacity for memory, which conjures up images of what we have experienced before the soul. Through the faculty of memory of which I have just spoken, through the developed faculty of memory, what comes to the soul is in fact what is unknown to the soul itself, what precisely represents the connection of the human being with the whole environment, with the great world, with the macrocosm. And what also comes to the soul is what actually forms this physical body inwardly, because it is nothing other than the instrument of the soul. We need only look.

And when we have a sense of what is at work in the human being, I would say of inner plastic power, even after birth – one need only look with the necessary devotion and with the necessary seriousness and impartiality at the developing child, how it develops from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, how its movements become more and more articulated, how the marvelous happens, it is something marvelous for the one who looks at it impartially – that speech develops. When one sees an unknown person's work at first – but as if from a plastic-engraving principle – in the child at first, one continues to research. And that which works in man from within, which has already worked before he was born or conceived, which shapes his physical existence out of the spiritual world, that is what now shoots into our soul just as in later years a memory of experiences that we have gone through.

The spiritual researcher, ladies and gentlemen, cannot, like a spiritualist, present to your external sensory perception what he has researched. He can only hint at how, through the development of the soul from a point of intellectual modesty, through the ever-increasing unfolding of such powers as memory, one comes to see what initially passes through life as a great unknown.

One simply looks at things with this inner consciousness, with which one otherwise only looks into one's physical life through the ability to remember. Just as images of a mathematical nature arise before the soul, but these have no existence, so when the soul works from its inner being and does not work out something empty or fantastic, but something in which it recognizes reality when the image is there, and the soul works this out of itself and recognizes reality as in ordinary memory, where she also knows, you are not imagining anything, there is something in this image that is connected to reality – then you know that through this further developed ability to remember, you also have images in your soul that are connected to realities, that are built up in your soul in exactly the same way as the images, let's say, of geometry, but which, as I said, lack existence, while one now plunges into an inner, soul-like experience, which, however, through its own essence, indicates how it is connected with existence, and with spiritual existence, from which man is born just as he is born from physical existence, how it is connected with spiritual existence. It is truly not a fantasy, but rather, through the same efforts, whereby one gradually comes to understand the mathematical structures in their secret relationships, through efforts - but which go much further - to develop such inner abilities that, to a certain extent, give a world tableau, an internally constructed world tableau that provides world knowledge.

This is simply a fact that one arrives at by starting from intellectual modesty. And one must simply deny the human being the ability to develop if one does not want to admit at first that something like this is possible. The rest then depends only on whether one really tries. Everyone is free to try things out. Others prove that they are leading people to the microscope, and it is said that this is not based on blind faith, because everyone can see for themselves.

It is no different with spiritual science; it just has to demand different things. Everyone can see for themselves what spiritual science claims. But just as one must really look into the microscope in physical science, so in spiritual science one must actually go through that which the spiritual researcher shows must be developed if one wants to look into the spiritual worlds. Then one does not merely acquire a belief from the spiritual worlds, but one actually acquires real knowledge, an insight into the spiritual worlds. Then one beholds that which one can call the eternal aspect of human nature, for one does not just see that which is produced in life, which stands before our sensory eyes as a human body, but one sees the producing spiritual-soul aspect, that which forms this human body, but also that which, at the same time, takes care of the breakdown of this physical aspect in the moment when the physical is formed. Because, however, my dear audience, one also sees that! From such starting points, one actually penetrates certain secrets of our brain structure quite differently than with external anatomy or physiology.

Above all, through inner observation, one gets to know how thinking, how imagining, is connected with the structure of our brain, with our nervous system. Materialists believe that the ordinary growth process that otherwise builds our body also continues in the brain, and that such an organic process of building, which, for example, underlies our growth or our nutrition, also underlies our brain when we think. This can only be believed as long as one fantasizes about these things. This can no longer be the case when one looks at these things inwardly. Then you know that the brain must be well nourished. But why? Because it is constantly destroying itself. And it is this process of destruction, not the process of building, that is connected to what we call thinking and imagining. We could not think if the brain were constantly growing, constantly feeding and building.

What the building process is – you can observe it when you observe twilight or sleep states, where the growth processes become too strong. That which is growth, that which is building processes, leads to unconsciousness, not to conscious ideas. Conscious imagining occurs precisely in the breakdown of the brain, in the breakdown of the nerves. And that which is the building of the nerves is precisely the retroactive process. This in turn forms the nerves, it forms them out of the organic process. But if thought is to take place, if something of the soul is to develop in a person, then the brain must degrade. In a sense, the brain must first make room for the soul to unfold. If one understands this process, then one can never arrive at the view that the brain thinks. The brain only thinks to the extent that it destroys itself as a brain.

The brain thinks just as little as one can say – let me express myself with a comparison: someone walks along a muddy road, or a car drives along a muddy road, and the footsteps or wheel tracks that one steps or drives into the ground become visible. Now someone comes along and says: There are all kinds of shapes in the ground, so I have to assume that below the ground there are forces at work that shape forms, footsteps. Anyone looking for these forces in the ground will, of course, search in vain. They must assume that something completely different is involved, something that has nothing to do with the ground, except that the ground must be there, because otherwise one would sink into the abyss. The ground must be there, but it is only the foundation. However, what causes the forms in the ground is something that has nothing to do with the ground. In the same way, thinking and imagining have nothing to do with the brain other than the brain provides the physical substrate on which the soul-spiritual develops, making its impressions. No wonder when the physiologist or anatomist comes and says: Yes, everything that takes place in the soul can also be seen in the brain. You see it, but the soul is what does it in the first place, the soul is expressed there. And it needs the brain for nothing other than to provide a kind of resistance, just as I need the ground when I cross the street. This is expressed by a comparison.

But what can really be seen through spiritual science, as one sees, I would like to say the emergence of man out of the spirit through the developed ability to remember, I cannot go into it further now, as I said the methods are described in “How to Know Higher Worlds.” — one comes to say to oneself: Basically, one begins to die by being born, because this process of degradation is constantly there. And what happens at death is nothing more than that the body, which can no longer be created, is torn away from the spiritual soul. This spiritual-mental now seeks out other worlds. One learns to recognize the passing through of the spiritual-mental, of the eternal in human nature, through the fragile body, by watching the process of dying itself in thinking, I would say from hour to hour, by constantly dying in the small things, I would say, when we think. So everything that one finds in life appears in such a way that one sees it in its true form through spiritual science.

I must first describe [this] to you – my dear audience – in very elementary terms, because this is the only way we can communicate. In every science, one must start from the first principles. I would just like to mention in parenthesis that I have said that what is developed memory is a tableau, comparable to the mathematical tableau, that it calls up before our soul, but that this tableau introduces us to the [spiritual-soul life] from which we are formed.

The names are not important – my dear attendees – what you can perceive there must also have a name. In my books, I have called this the “Akasha Chronicle” because it actually has something to do with chronicling. Just as memory itself has something to do with chronicling, so that which leads us out of it has, like memory, only into ordinary life, into the life of the world. Therefore, I would say, if we simply call the spiritual 'ether' or 'akasha', we can speak of an 'ether chronicle' or an 'akasha chronicle'. These words do not have any kind of mystical meaning. Nor is there any kind of mystical meaning to these words, any more than there is any mystical meaning to the whole of geometry. It can certainly be compared to the totality of geometry, which, however, does not apply to time but to space. Therefore, geometry cannot be called a chronicle. But this can certainly be understood that way. The things meant here must not be taken out of context, but only considered in context. If you look at them in this way, you will find that they actually mean something quite different from what may appear to you if you tear them out of context. Nowhere is it a matter of nebulous mysticism, but everywhere of emerging from the sources of the soul's existence, which can be followed piece by piece, and in such a way that the individual pieces stand before the soul with mathematical clarity.

The second faculty of the soul – honored attendees – that needs to be cultivated so that one does not merely have images, because all that I have described to you so far are basically only images. One knows, as with memory images, that they are about life, but one does not have life. You know full well that you do not live in a fantastic world. You have imaginations, imaginations of reality, but you do not stand in this reality. In order to live in this reality, in order to have this direct experience of the spiritual-real, it is necessary to experience the power that is otherwise only bound to our human organization, which, by confronting us in life, always equips us with a good deal of egoism, so that we develop this ability further and further, so that we can indeed gradually come to look at things in such a way that we can completely forget ourselves, can completely immerse ourselves in each individual thing, and in each individual being. It is necessary to develop this ability more and more.

This training is based on a very simple thing: human attention, in that I take an interest and turn my attention to some thing or process. I can pay attention to what I am actually doing inwardly by turning my attention away from other things and turning it to a new being. I have to become aware of how this attention works. And by training this ability, which in turn takes years of training, I grasp inwardly, as it were, the capacity of attention. I transform it into the power to devote myself to a thing, to become completely absorbed in a thing or process. In short, what one otherwise experiences only as an abstract ability to pay attention can be increased to become devoted love.

By developing this love more and more, one comes close to what I described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as 1893, showing that only the person who truly has this love can be free, whereby he also does not carry out his actions out of his capacity for desire, but out of loving immersion in the things of the world. He finds that something has to happen. He is completely indifferent to what his desire is. From objectivity, he realizes that something has to happen. This development of the ability to see that something has to happen leads, on the one hand, to real human freedom and, on the other hand, to the power of love.

And then, when you have developed this ability, my dear audience, you can not only receive such images that arise within and depict a reality, but you can also remove these images from your consciousness at will. Just as in physical matters one must have the ability to look at a thing and then look away, otherwise one would not have a healthy soul life, so one must develop the ability, when one has inner vision, to have the images and then not to have them. One must become completely inwardly master of having these images. And by being able to alternate between the things that live in the soul and the completely empty state of the soul, by learning this alternation in the soul, one also learns to have an image and then to let the image disappear in the soul. Then one lives on. The image is gone, but one has the experience of the inner reality of things. One experiences the spiritual. You experience it through the power you have acquired, through the development of love. Just as you learn the spiritual anew through the development of your ability to love, so you learn to experience the spiritual through the increase, through the ever-increasing increase of the power of love.

I know how much is opposed to the scientist when he is to regard the ability to love itself as a power of knowledge. The scientist demands that what is to apply objectively in the scientific should only be attainable to the exclusion of love. But in doing so, he reaches the limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge arise from the fact that one does not enter into the inner workings of things with one's soul, but stops and fantasizes all kinds of things, all kinds of molecules and atoms. If you experience through the increased power of love what comes to you from the surface of things, and then you experience what you can have in images through the increased ability to remember, then you know where images come from in the [increased] depths of existence. For one can compare what one sees in the picture with that into which one then submerges with the experience. And one practices, so to speak, if I want to use these expressions so simply, being constantly in being, as one otherwise inhales and exhales. That is what really leads one into the spiritual world, what allows one to get to know what actually underlies the human being.

Now, my dear attendees, what develops in this way in man as certain abilities to look into the spiritual world can now be applied in every single science. It is not at all that what happens in the laboratory, in the observatory and so on, or in the clinic, is despised. But now one learns to look at it in such a way that one can observe every detail at the same time as that which reveals itself as spiritual. And one does not fantasize, as the German natural philosophers did, for example, but one researches just as objectively as one searches with one's eyes objectively, as one combines with the outer mind objectively — although one can certainly err. But in the inner vision, those things simply come before the soul's eye that otherwise cannot appear at all, just as little as what is in Goethe's book of poetry can appear before the soul of a five-year-old child. And so, in all the individual sciences, one arrives precisely at that which these individual sciences are currently lacking. This is not just something that can be spoken about only in abstract generalities. In this way, light can be brought into the science that is closest to human life, into medical science, for example. And we are now in the process of setting up such institutions in individual places, which deal with the science of therapy in a spiritual scientific sense. It is primarily a matter of deepening scientific life. That is what it is about in Dornach, not to meddle with the sphere of any religion, not to engage in anything sectarian, but to engage in serious science, as this science allows itself to be engaged with by deepened powers of cognition, which are just as deepened as I have stated.

I myself experienced that epoch, esteemed attendees, that epoch of science, in a formerly most important medical faculty, where the capacities were just piling up – Oppolzer, [Rokitansky] and so on. I myself experienced how that remarkable therapeutic direction emerged, which was then called medical nihilism. This medical nihilism no longer prevails to the same extent as it did when I was young – a long time ago – but what emerged back then as medical nihilism denied medicine at the time the ability to move from the pathological examination of the clinical picture to the healing process, to therapy. They did not want to find a bridge between pathology and real therapy. And this cannot be found if one proceeds with mere external natural science. One can explain this in a very popular way, why it cannot be found.

Is this not the case, the healthy human organism undergoes certain processes that we call natural processes. And we can say: Let us look at the healthy person in terms of his physical nature. We perceive natural processes. But is the sick person, what takes place in the illness, not just as much a natural process? Do we not have a natural process in the healthy and in the sick person? Do we have two natures? How does one natural process relate to the other? If we speak of causality in the one natural process, we must also speak of causality in the other.

Spiritual science shows us that whatever enters the world spiritually always gives rise to the opposite natural process. The natural process of human growth is initially a constructive one. The process that must occur for the spiritual to simply intervene is a destructive one. We do indeed get to know processes from different directions when we immerse ourselves in spiritual science. We learn to look inside this remarkable structure that is the human organism and we get to know that there are indeed two opposing processes. And we then learn to recognize the human being in his connection with the rest of nature, learn to recognize how the rest of nature works on the human being. And from all this, the spiritual view of the world then arises that there is a connection between certain healing processes or substances and what happens in the human being, who is connected to the whole world. One can say: one can indeed come to a real healing art through spiritual science. I am giving this as an example, I could just as easily have mentioned another science. That is what matters.

You learn to recognize, especially when you are immersed in this modern scientific life – and truly experienced, level-headed scientists already admit this today – that science today does not offer solutions to riddles, but on the contrary, piles up riddles more and more. The further you research with the microscope, you research all the more riddles in the small, but you research just as few real riddles with the telescope. These riddles can, however, be solved to a certain extent by calculation.

But it is necessary not to assume that we will find something known, but to be open to finding that unknown, as America was between Europe and India at that time, that unknown that the mind finds as its own essence when it reflects on itself. We apply the mind in the individual sciences. Even a materialist must do this. The spiritual researcher is only trying to understand himself. He applies the spirit, seeks to discover what this spirit is, and actually comes to realize that this spirit is not connected with the anabolic processes – with which it would have to be connected if the materialistic view were correct – but that the spirit is connected with the catabolic processes, that the spirit presents precisely that as fact, which directly runs counter to the material process, breaks it down, undermines it. These are the significant experiences that are made in spiritual science, for example.

This is how it is with spiritual science. The other science basically works on the human mind, only in such a way that the human being can develop what intelligence is. Now, many people are already saying, especially in the field of contemporary education, that what has emerged from more recent scientific life as school education actually trains the intellect too much and not the mind. It does not want to take hold of the will, not the whole person. But to ensure that this is the case, one does not just have to declaim that it should be so, that the mind should be formed again. Rather, just as the more recent period has ultimately formed the outer science, one also needs a spiritual science that does not just speak to the intellect, but that could take hold of the whole person.

This can also be seen from the fact that we have recently been able to introduce this spiritual science into existence as an element in individual areas. One of these attempts is our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt, initially for the children of his factory. But since then it has already doubled in size! Pupils have flocked to this school from all walks of life and from all sides. This school is not a school of world view; it is only a slander when it is said that it is. It is not about grafting anthroposophical world view or some new religion into children. When this school was founded, I myself agreed to run the school. It was established from the very beginning that the religious education to be given to the children – to Catholic children by the Catholic priest and to Protestant children by the Protestant pastor – should be given by the children's respective religious teachers. We completely refrain from any kind of world view in this school. Only those children whose parents belong to no confession or the like, who therefore do not want to send their children to any religious education, should be free to attend religious education that we can provide ourselves. Otherwise, these children would have no religious education at all if it were not given to them. But those who want a particular religious education, based on the life they have grown up in, will receive such instruction from their religious teacher.

This should prove to you that we, while not standing on anthroposophical ground, do not want to found a new religion or somehow graft a world view onto people. Rather, what should guide us, for example, is this: Anyone who has a science like anthroposophical spiritual science has something that seizes the whole person, that makes him skillful, that above all makes his soul skillful, that makes him a judge of character, also a judge of children, a judge of the developing human being, the child. [And that is why we have brought it about in the Waldorf school that we only work through the method, through the didactics, through the art of education, which can be developed out of anthroposophy, in the way we teach, and that is what matters, not the inculcation of some religious creed that is somehow supposed to be new compared to the others. We take great care to ensure that the child is treated in the way that is appropriate to him or her, which is only possible if we really take into account the totality of the soul and spirit, and I would say every year, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, in its particular abilities.

Now, my dear attendees, in this school, precisely because the teachers are imbued with spiritual science and bring this atmosphere into the classroom, there is, I might say, an atmosphere of love. Of course, people may not take it particularly deeply when I say something like that. But every time I come to Stuttgart to audit this school, I ask the children in each class and in the assembly hall: Dear children, do you also love your teachers? You can tell by the way the children behave and the way their eyes light up whether they really mean it or not. And that is something that always gives one great joy, that something has happened after all, that such a didactics has been formed out of anthroposophy: when the children respond with their whole being, with a “yes” that comes from the whole soul, that has not been rehearsed.

Dear attendees! When we handed out the school reports after the first school year, there was nothing in them of the usual. Otherwise, they say: “satisfactory”, ‘almost satisfactory’, ‘less than satisfactory’, ‘almost satisfactory’ and so on. Rather, for each child, despite the fact that some classes are quite large, there was something in it that was or is entirely appropriate to the child's individuality, so that the children repeatedly pick up these reports and, I would like to say, repeatedly see themselves reflected in them. Again and again they read what the teacher gives them as a force of life, so a single saying or the like, not something out of a scheme that tends to be, I would say, “less satisfactory” and the like. It is, of course, a bit radically expressed, but it can be done if you enter the class with some knowledge of children, even in large classes, so that the individuality of the child comes into its own.

This is an example of how anthroposophy can become an integral part of life, that is, it can be applied in human life. And after all, schooling and teaching are a very important part of human life. [But now, this is only one part, the part that has been brought to us by the more intellectual education of recent times.

Let us look – esteemed attendees – at what has become great. Certainly, anyone who wants to deepen science into a spiritual science will not underestimate the great triumphs and the importance of modern science – on the contrary! In speaking to you here, I fully recognize the importance of modern science for our external lives. But on the other hand, they only educate the head, they only educate that which arises from the head in social life. And so, in modern times, we have developed what we know as the great, significant technology that surrounds us everywhere out of this scientific approach. But in this modern age, in which technology has developed to such an extent that it has become an external-mechanical technology in the entire world economy, in all world traffic, at the same time it has grown into all of modern life, what we call the social question.

It must be said that modern science has indeed come to terms with the external mechanism, with that which can be composed of external natural forces, that which can serve human life. But we see this in the chaos that has emerged to the present day, and which has led to millions of people being shot dead and beaten to cripples in recent years. We see that modern science, as soon as it wants to be active in social life in any way, fails. It can't help. It goes as far as the machine, as far as the mechanism, it can go that far with what it borrows from nature. But just as the machine has been introduced between the account book in the office and the cash book and what is produced in production, and an intimate connection has been formed, no such intimate connection has been formed in recent times between those who were leading personalities in the course of the last [decades] and those who are in the outer work. Man has found his way to the machine, but he has not found his way to the human being.

We will only find our way to the human being through a humanly deepened science that grasps the human being as deeply as the spiritual science meant here, because that will also be a life-oriented science for social life. [That which is based on it — as a conception, as a theoretical view —, only destroys the human organism, the transfer to the outer world, it becomes destruction.] Today you only need to see how people are creating something so devastating in Eastern Europe today, that it would almost have to lead to the downfall of civilization, if it lasts as it is in Russia. How these people, who are doing this, are acting in good faith and believe that in Marxism and the like they are only extending modern science to social life. But it becomes the death of social life. It must be a different science, a science that does not arise from the human mind alone, but from the human being as a whole. It is a science that does not arise merely from a contemplation of the physical world and from there forms its methods, but that is drawn from the human-spiritual being itself, as spiritual science is. If one studies this spiritual science, if one attempts to build up, as I have attempted — however contestable it may be in detail — in these two books, 'The Core Points of the Social Question' or 'In Implementation of the Threefold Social Organism', if one attempts to arrive at a social view from this spiritual science, then it is a thoroughly constructive one. This then proves itself in social thinking, which can truly lead the human being to the human being, as a life-giving treasure.

And so I could cite many examples to you — such as this in general, as well as the school system in particular — where this spiritual science proves to be a vital asset. It is absolutely necessary that, in order to cope in social life, we first and foremost deepen our understanding of the human being, help him to see the spiritual and soul life within him.

If we begin by characterizing spiritual science in these elementary terms, we have the goal towards which it strives. We can only assess its details if we enter into its interrelationships. I could go on talking for hours, but I just want to say one more thing today in conclusion. Just as it was thought centuries ago that Copernicanism, by coming into the world, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity, so it is also believed today that spiritual science, as it is seeking to enter the world today through the Goetheanum in a more intensive way, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity.

Dear attendees! When I am confronted with something like this, I always remember what a friend of mine did many years ago. I was very close friends with Professor Müllner, who at the time was a professor of Christian philosophy at the Vienna Faculty of Theology. When he took up his year as rector, he spoke about Galileo in his inaugural speech as rector of the university. And this Professor Müllner – he died a long time ago – spoke in such a way that his last spoken word was that he died as a loyal son of his church. And yet, what did he say when he gave his rectorate speech about Galileo? He said: Today, within Christianity, when we look at the things of this world with a truly open mind, we view Galileo's ideas differently than the Church did during Galileo's lifetime.

The Church today must realize that no new scientific discovery can in any way detract from the deep human forces of Christianity. On the contrary, the Church today must look at these things in such a way that it says to itself: Through every new scientific discovery, the glories of divine spiritual life become visible and evident to humanity only to a higher degree. This is what Professor Müllner said at the time – I cannot quote it to you in full today – this professor of Christian theology, the Catholic Christian at the Vienna Catholic Theological Faculty, who before his death spoke the word that he wanted to die as a loyal son of his church. It was still the pontificate of Leo XIII. Today, we look down on the grave of Galileo differently than his contemporaries in Rome at the time looked up at Galileo.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when Professor Laurenz Müllner spoke in this way, he knew that he was using these words not to endanger Christianity, which he himself represented, but to create an even firmer foundation for Christianity from a scientific point of view. This is how a Christian priest spoke. I often have to remind myself of that. I also had many private conversations with him and with other theologians who were frequent visitors to his house.

Dear attendees! I will not talk about the relationship between anthroposophy and Christianity today, but I would like to say just one thing in conclusion: that one can follow the development of Christianity through philology, one can follow the development of Christianity through history. One can also follow the development of Christianity through anthroposophical spiritual science, and one comes thereby to certain truths about Christianity, which one can find only through this spiritual science. But the truths about Christianity that one comes across in this way are truly not suitable to endanger Christianity in any way. And anyone who believes that Christianity as such could be endangered by any new cognitive truths, whether in the physical or spiritual realm, I would like to believe that he does not have a high enough opinion of Christianity. The one who has a high opinion of Christianity and the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, when he recognizes what Christianity is in the spiritual-scientific sense, says to himself: Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha have given the development of the earth its true meaning.

I have often said that it is only a comparison, and that nothing is to be said about the inhabitants of any other worlds. If any inhabitant of Mars were to descend, he would see much of our world – it is my innermost conviction, which I have acquired precisely through spiritual science – much that would be incomprehensible to him. But if he were to see what has come down to us as Leonardo's painting 'The Last Supper' – Christ among his apostles – if he were to see only that which is there (he needs nothing more than this painting), then he would say to himself: 'I have come upon a strange plan. What is depicted by this image points to those deeds within earthly life that are not mere earthly facts, but are a fact of the whole world, and without which all life on earth would have no meaning; the meaning of the earth lies in this fact. This is something one learns to recognize more and more, precisely by immersing oneself spiritually in Christianity and in the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Truly, one must have too low an opinion of Christianity to believe that it could be endangered in any way by a new discovery. Truly – even if it is not written in the Bible – just as Christianity was not endangered by the discovery of America, so too neither can any physical or spiritual truth, be it the Galilean truth or the repeated lives on earth, which I have not spoken about today but But you can follow from the literature as being in the straight line starting from what I have spoken today, just as little can one endanger Christianity in any way if Christianity remains in its inner truth, and may millions and millions of physical or spiritual insights still go through the world. On the contrary, through all these realizations, the Christian truth is deepened and more accurately recognized, and more thoroughly introduced to the human souls, when these truths are really taken out of the Spirit of Truth itself.

But, my dear audience, the different times need such views on all the things of the world, arising out of their spiritual needs, as they arise out of the age. Therefore, I may tell it again and again: I once spoke on the subject of “Bible and Wisdom” in a southern German city that is no longer in southern Germany today. There were also two Catholic theologians at this lecture. It was precisely in this lecture not just something that they could somehow dispute. They came to me and said: “Well, what you said - we could indeed subscribe to it, but the way you say it, we cannot admit it. Because it is not for all people, it is for some prepared people. But we speak for all people.” At the time, I could only say: Reverend, it goes without saying that you think you speak for all people. That corresponds to the natural feeling that we must have as human beings. But through that which is spiritual science, one gradually works one's way through to a different point of view. One comes away from oneself. You no longer believe that you can shape things the way you want to shape them within your environment. You learn to look at what time demands, what objective facts demand. And now I ask you what the objective facts demand, how you treat it. It remains the case that you believe you speak for all people, but that does not decide anything. The only thing that matters is whether all people still go to your sermons. And you see, you cannot answer “yes” there. Among those who do not go to church, there are also those who seek the path elsewhere. I am not speaking to those who go to church with you, but to those who also want to find the path to Christianity and who do not go to you. This is clear from the facts. But the fact that we have religious education in the Waldorf School given to the children by the respective pastors under the given circumstances, and that we have set up religious education only for those who would otherwise have no religious education, proves that this is not something that detracts from religion. So we are not harming anyone [by doing what is desired under the circumstances, but on the contrary, we are imparting something to the 'dissident children' that can lead them to a genuine religious experience] while they would otherwise hear nothing of a religious nature in the best years of their development.

All this might lead one to point out that this Goetheanum and this spiritual science is not just some fantastic product of human willfulness, but something that as a scientific grasp of the spiritual in an age that would otherwise remain unbelieving, at least where science would have to remain at the mere external grasp of things, while people want to develop further. Because if the present chaos wants to bring civilization more and more into decadence, then out of the circumstances of the time itself that great teaching will come, which basically wants to be followed by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And the truth will prevail, no matter how many obstacles are put in its way. In the short term, the aims of spiritual science can be suppressed, perhaps even destroyed for a time, but the truth has paths that can be found through everything. And that these paths can be followed if the methods by which the spirit is seen are honestly and sincerely sought, one can decide for one's conviction in a certain way.

For anyone who really gets involved, not just with their heads but with all their senses, and who engages with everything human, with the individual human being, with the individual life, will always come to the point where they have to say to themselves: science must not just remain on the surface, it must also progress as science, as knowledge, to the spirit. Because

For an upward development, people need what is being sought there – they need the spirit! And without the spirit, humanity will not progress. Spiritual science does not pursue an abstract spirit with ideas and fantasies, but the living spirit, which is to enter into the souls in a living way. And let it be said once again: humanity, if it wants to progress, needs the spirit. Therefore, we must ask for the spirit.

Discussion and Closing Words

Ulrich [Dikenmann]: Dear speaker, dear attendees! Dr. Steiner has made an effort this evening to make anthroposophy more accessible to us and to inspire confidence in us. And we are very grateful for the additions that have been presented to us this evening compared to the lecture that would have been given eight days ago. I would now like to ask a question about what Dr. Steiner has presented and which perhaps can be touched on a little more from his side.

Dr. Steiner spoke of two different ways of attaining higher knowledge, of spiritual experiences, which perhaps many of us are only superficially familiar with. He spoke of a deepened ability to remember that yields results for spiritual science, and he spoke of love. I now see a gap in that there is something about these two methods that we should still be enlightened about before we can have deeper trust in the matter. As far as I remember from his books, it can be read there that before the goal in these spiritual results, light phenomena appear before the eye of those who deal with anthroposophical science – it could also have been color phenomena, I do not remember exactly – at a certain level of spiritual science. I would now be grateful if Dr. Steiner would tell us a little more about this.

Because, you see, dear attendees, when we or our younger friends turn to anthroposophy, we may have to allow ourselves to be guided by empirical, in-depth psychology. What else is the nature of spiritual science if someone, after a long period of self-reflection, begins to experience such light phenomena? Is this what he is experiencing, ecstasy, or is it something like a spiritual presentiment, which still lies in the realm in which we can examine scientifically, in which logic and understanding and reason are applied?

Secondly, we have learned from Dr. Steiner's remarks that those who aspire to the highest levels must surrender themselves to a spiritual leader to a great extent, that they cannot draw entirely from themselves. From my point of view as a Protestant theologian, this seems to me to be a somewhat serious matter. For, as is well known, there are always two dangers associated with excessive devotion to a personality. Either the person who surrenders too much to his leader becomes spiritually dependent and lethargic, and he is no longer sure what his own conviction is or what has been placed more in his soul, placed in his soul by suggestive means. And on the other hand, the person who enjoys the extensive trust of a second person is subject to a powerful temptation that only highly developed, highly spiritual personalities can resist: namely, the temptation to be pleased with the power he has gained over the other person, and then easily exert too much influence over him in all things. This is not meant to imply that I have any mistrust of the lecturer, who has spoken so excellently to us, in this regard. But it has been proven throughout world history, even if one only surveys it in a certain way, as I survey it, that there is a certain danger here, which we must be careful of and to which we must be attentive when we want to encourage one or the other of our acquaintances to take an interest in spiritual science. Incidentally, I am pleased to note that what Dr. Steiner said this evening about his religious views has been very beneficial for me personally.

Roman Boos: Dr. Steiner has the final word, if there are no further questions?

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! Of course, I would have been very happy to take any questions. I am particularly pleased about the two questions that have been put to me today, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to address them to you this evening.

It is necessary that what lives in the soul when one has progressed to what I have characterized today as seeing, that if one wants to express it, it must be named in some way, and that one has very different words, a certain terminology. If you follow my writings, some of which have already appeared in very large print runs, you will see, if you follow the individual print runs, how I have endeavored from print run to print run – or at least always over several print runs – to formulate the sentences sentences in such a way that what needs to be said about such a subject, which, after all, is not easy to put into words, is said with a certain clarity and distinctness.

We must not forget that our language, especially as it has developed among civilized peoples today, is to a large extent already something extraordinarily conventional and that, above all, it has incorporated the meaning that has entered the world view through the materialism of the last few centuries. Therefore, today, when using words, it is extremely difficult to strip these words of their materialistic meaning and to give something that is meant spiritually the appropriate meaning. Nevertheless, I have tried again and again, and especially in the fundamental books you will find a struggle for expression. By this I do not mean to say that in the last editions this struggle has everywhere led to an ideal — of course not! But now, the special characteristic that I have given of what one sees, by using [to characterize the color perceptions] – isn't it true that I am saying that one is dealing with imaginations; these imaginations are completely different from what one can have in the sensory world. Now I would like to choose the following approach so that we can understand each other.

If you study Goethe's Theory of Colors – perhaps some of you, esteemed attendees, know that for forty years I have been endeavoring to present the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in relation to today's physics. Well, in Goethe's Theory of Colors you will find an extraordinarily significant chapter at the end about the sensual-moral effect of colors. This chapter will perhaps meet with the least opposition from physicists and, when read, it is an extraordinarily stimulating read. What is written here can also be found elsewhere; but so wonderfully beautifully compiled, it can actually only be found in Goethe.

What do we find there, in the characterization of external colors? We also find the emotional experience of color mentioned. We find the experience that one has, for example, with yellow, this peculiar aggressiveness of yellow, the excitement of yellow, similar to red. We then find the balancing of green, the devotion of violet. We have these soul experiences when we let the sensual colors affect us. If you ever visit Dornach, you will see that an attempt has been made there in the Goetheanum to paint entirely from color, to create the picture from the color. In particular, you will find this in the small dome, for example, where an attempt has been made to shape what then leads to the transformation of the picture entirely from the color experience.

Now, on the one hand we have the sensory experience of color, and on the other hand we have the inward spiritual experience, which, however, quite clearly belongs to the experience of color. If we are fully human, we cannot have the sensory experience of color without having the corresponding spiritual experience. This is what Goethe described in his theory of colors.

When one enters the spiritual world, one has experiences that are truly not ecstatic — just as little as the life in geometric representations is an ecstasy. If one were not fully aware that one is in one's psychological state exactly as one is when mathematically imagining, then one would not be on the right path. So, one experiences something that is completely in line with the pattern of mathematical experience in the soul, but one experiences a real spiritual world. And by experiencing this real spiritual world, one does not initially experience colors, but rather those experiences that we inwardly experience in the sensual colors. Of course, one must now have developed to the point where one pays attention to these experiences.

You see, a certain presence of mind is required for spiritual experience. So, one must have this inner experience, which is otherwise experienced with color. The best way to characterize this experience is to remember the color, to really have the color in front of you. Just as one has, let us say, the triangular experience by drawing the triangle inwardly, so one has that which one experiences inwardly best when it is before one, not by drawing a geometric figure, but by painting a colored picture. This colored image is then as adequate to the spiritual experience as, let us say, drawing a triangle with its 180° and angles is identical to the triangular experience, while you have to know that it is a kind of sensualization, then, if you express it in Goethean terms, it is also a supersensory-sensory representation of what is actually experienced.

This, of course, points to subtle experiences, so that one should not draw them out roughly, but one should really go into them. But then one will find that a real thing has indeed appeared by describing it in colors. I have tried to develop this very precisely in the last editions of my basic books. You can't help but describe what you experience in just such a way; otherwise you would become even more materialistic if you described it, and would describe it too symbolically.

But in this way, one describes by actually covering that which is an inner experience through the experience of color. One is always aware of this – that one proceeds in a certain way, as in the presentation of the mathematical – and there is nothing of ecstasy in any way.

I am extremely grateful to the previous speaker for touching on this question. Because I have had to experience it, that I have been told from many sides: what is experienced in the imaginations is repressed ideas, repressed nervous forces, which then come up and represent something fantastic, unhealthy. You see, if someone wanted to maintain such an assertion, at most the proof would have to be provided that the person who speaks of such things cannot, just as the other person who accuses him of such things, speak in a strictly scientific sense. If one has not lost one's scientific sense on the one hand, but is firmly grounded in the scientific sense, and then consistently goes out to something else, then such an accusation cannot be made.

Nor can the objection be raised that it is merely a matter of suggestion. I have already indicated today how it essentially belongs to the schooling of the spirit that one can, I might say, enter into all the special processes of the subconscious life of the soul, so that one can compensate for and exclude every source of error that presents itself. You will see, when you read my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', how I have tried to describe all the precautionary measures that need to be taken into account.

Now, I have often been asked: How can one easily distinguish suggestions from non-suggestions, from the truth? For example, it can happen in life that someone only has to think of lemonade and they taste lemonade in their mouth. I readily admit this, since these things are well known. But—and this is addressed to those of you who are present—anyone who is an epistemologist knows that a real experience can only be determined through life. Only through life and the context of life can we determine whether anything we imagine corresponds to reality — but it is only from the context of life that we can be certain [of it]. It is the same in relation to the higher worlds; there too, we can only determine it from the context of the whole. If one wants to go from the suggestion of the taste of lemonade to the totality of the experience, then the comparison no longer applies. One must now say: It is nice to have the taste of lemonade in one's mouth through suggestion, but the question arises as to whether anyone has quenched their thirst with such an image of lemonade. You cannot claim that. There you have the transition to the totality of phenomena. And that is what must always be borne in mind: reality cannot be decided by remaining with the partial phenomenon, but the phenomena of life always have something that signifies their transition to totality.

I would like to draw attention to something that may seem rather remote, but which can be very usefully applied to the sensitization of the matter. You see, if you have a salt crystal, a salt cube, it is in a sense a closed reality. It can exist for a certain period of time, a very, very long time on earth, as a salt cube in front of you. Take a rosebud. A rosebud is not really a reality as we see it, because it can only be conceived as a reality in connection with the totality of the rose bush, the roots and so on. Realities have very different degrees, different meanings. If we do not go into this, we will not arrive at clear, luminous concepts.

And so it is also necessary, in the face of such descriptions as those given by the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me, to bear in mind that the totality of the experience is taken as a basis. Then one will already notice how such color appearances are meant. One does not lose the connection with ordinary consciousness at all, does not go over into foolishness, but the opposite is the case for the paths that are chosen to get into anthroposophy. This lies precisely on the opposite path to the pathological; they lead precisely away from the pathological, they make the human being inwardly consolidated. Therefore, they can not only make drawings, especially in mathematical forms, but also see certain drawings in colors, that is, have a supersensible experience. I don't know if that satisfies you.

Regarding the second question, I would like to say: You are absolutely right in both directions, but I must emphasize that wherever I have the opportunity to talk about these things, you will find that I myself have pointed out that these two dangers can indeed arise, but that they must also be recognized and avoided in genuine spiritual research. If you do not avoid them, you cannot achieve what spiritual research is supposed to achieve. They are avoided precisely when you are aware of them, when you know that such dangers can be present. And if you also have a sense of responsibility, you will certainly try to avoid them.

Regarding the so-called student, I have to say that in spiritual research, what can be described as the relationship between the student and the teacher is basically nothing more than the transfer, only to a different area, of the same relationship that also exists when someone learns something from someone else. It is true that the guidance for spiritual training reaches somewhat more intimately into human life, but, you see, there is a corrective, I would say. It is actually not at all correct that there are no dangers for the student in the outer life in current science.

Just think about how little students are actually immune from blind faith in authority, and especially from that which is initially there as a constraint but which, over the years, becomes something that is very strongly inculcated – [the compulsion to say what is] and so on. There are also dangers for the independent development of the student or listener, which can be described in the same way as those that are present in those who want to advance in spiritual science.

But in addition, there is a corrective, especially when one strikes more intimate chords of the human soul with spiritual science, I would like to say, by wanting to learn something. In this way, an extraordinary sensitivity for independence also develops, especially when one awakens the soul's abilities. And experience shows that such a sense of authority, as it sometimes exists in external science – such swearing by the words of the master, such going away with the notebook and swearing by what one has written in the notebook after hearing it – does not take place in a truly responsible handling of the method of spiritual training.

A sensitivity given by experience shows one – especially when one has to deal with something that deeply intervenes in the soul life of the human being – that the urge for freedom is thereby definitely increased. And in any case, in my experience, those who come into consideration as serious spiritual students soon even move on to accepting something not in good faith, but only after sometimes very extensive examination; so that one can say that it is precisely the sense of freedom that awakens to a particular degree.

Now, of course, there is the other side, where I absolutely have to agree with the esteemed previous speaker that there is a very real danger for the person who is to take on such a role – let us just say that they have to advise someone based on their own experience, because it is almost impossible to do otherwise – and say: you will be able to develop your memory or your love through this or that. Then a temptation can approach the teacher – we know that this temptation can approach. And if I may tell you my own conviction in this regard – my dear audience: when you are in the middle of what spiritual research is about, there is actually nothing more repugnant than what could somehow be called personal adoration or the like. Even though the people who want to slander you keep pointing to such stuff. That is not at all what it is really like; it is actually something that you fundamentally find very repulsive. If you are even a little advanced on the path – which spiritual science indicates – then the truth cannot escape you. The truth cannot escape one that to the same extent as one exercises an unauthorized power, one loses the ability to recognize. That is just the way it is, that is an objective fact, and one recognizes it when one walks the path in spiritual science, through direct experiential knowledge.

Isn't it true that the path to spiritual science is a subtle one, one that must be kept alive through constant inner experience of the soul? To the same extent that one now practices things that correspond to the capacity for desire, that correspond to vanity or the sense of power, to that same extent one obscures precisely those forces that want to spread. Just think, it takes an enormous amount of work to develop what I have called the ability to love. It is the greatest unkindness that one can fall into when one develops feelings of power. I don't know if I am being given a context from your side in this way, but it is true that the feeling of power actually obscures the real feeling of love.

And so there are opportunities everywhere to see clearly how to reject such temptations. And yet, although it is absolutely right that this temptation can approach me, I would say, countless times, the one who has some kind of guidance to give also knows that succumbing to it – this temptation – is what can bring him down the most. For it can only be explained by vanity, by a hunger for power. But these are things that lead away from the paths one must follow if one really wants to achieve something.

I do believe that the distinguished gentleman who spoke before me was also referring to these things in his remarks, based on his own profound experience. Such things have occurred, of course, and will continue to occur, naturally. But there is no reason for this – my dear attendees – to refrain from the path of development just because there are dangers lurking somewhere; rather, if there are dangers lurking somewhere, this can be a reason to avoid the dangers if one recognizes the necessity of the matter in a healthy way. Is that perhaps a sufficient answer to the question that has been asked? If it is not, then I would be happy to elaborate further.

Now, esteemed attendees, since no other questions have been asked, I have nothing special to add on this matter. I would just like to point out very briefly that the spiritual science as it is meant here does not want to be a religion.

The question has been raised: It may explain the position of anthroposophy in relation to denominations if you tell us what you teach children of non-denominational parents in religious education.

You see, my dear audience, my opinion is this – but in the sense that I have gained it entirely from spiritual science – that something as intimate as religious education can only be taught within the framework of that which fills one's soul completely. This refers to religious education for children of non-denominational parents or those who are expected to be regarded as non-denominational at school. In this intimate area, therefore, only that which one carries in one's soul, that one is completely filled with, can come into question. And that is what is taught. And what it is about is that the anthroposophical direction that I follow is, in the first place, actually a method, a path, a living life. And that is why it can have an effect on all the individual sciences, and why it can also have an effect on the art of education, and indeed on art itself, as the artistic conception of the Dornach building shows. But ultimately, what is being researched is the living spirit, and that can only lead to a deepening of religious life.

Now, we are of course dependent on imponderables to a great extent, and I prefer to make things clear by means of concrete details rather than speaking in abstract generalities. You see, we try to show the children the way to the Christ in such a way that this way leads out of the rest of human life. However much it is claimed by some denominational sides – or rather by representatives of certain sides – it is not true that anthroposophy wants anything other than to show the way to the Christ in this religious field in its own way, to those who need to find him in this way.

You can certainly be a follower of anthroposophy and want nothing more than a deepening of the sciences, biology, psychology and so on. You don't need to establish any kind of relationship between anthroposophy and religion. But there are a great many people here today who, on the basis of anthroposophy, of spiritual science, are seeking a religious deepening in the same way that people, on the basis of materialism, have sought a religious deepening, albeit perhaps an older religion, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß, the author of 'Der alte und der neue Glaube' and the like. Not true, as at that time a number of such people tried and sought a kind of materialistic religion, so one finds a truly spiritual religion and also the way to Christ - among many others - on the way to spiritual science. In addition to medicine, psychology, philosophy, biology and so on, which one can deepen, one also acquires, I might say, a certain knowledge of those peculiar paths that must be followed.

Let us assume that we first need to teach children the concept of the immortality of the soul. We try to do this – as I said, I am talking about an example, it could easily be explained differently – but let us assume that we try to teach the child through an image. We point to the butterfly pupa. The butterfly emerges. We then try to show how the soul of a human being also leaves the body at death and enters a [different] world, albeit now in the invisible, and so on. You can think up something like that. But if you just make it up, you will notice – you need pedagogical experience to do so, but if you have it, you will notice: if you have just thought up this point of view – I am so clever and the child is so stupid, I have to bring it to the child, then in reality you are not teaching it to the child. You teach it to the brain, to word recognition, but not to the heart. You only teach the heart what you can believe in yourself; then you teach it, I might say with joy, if there really is something real in it, if you can say to yourself, 'Yes, I have a correspondence there; I believe in it.' That is precisely what is formed in our spiritual science, but not in a nebulous, hazy way. For that is something that is rejected by spiritual science, as it is meant here.

It is again a slander when we are accused of phantasms. What we seek is not an abstract spiritual reality, but a concrete spirituality is contained in the details. And so, for those who recognize the spirit in nature, this process of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is the same at a lower level as what is death with the immortal soul of man at a higher level, a reality. It is not I who makes the picture, but the phenomena of the world themselves make the picture. And when I stand in them and judge the phenomena of the world in such a way that nature becomes, as it were, for me the living vision of what I can bring forth from the whole world as the understanding of the divine essence, then I am also able to teach it to the child. For then not only, I might say, the ordinary relations to the child are formed. There are imponderables, forces that work from person to person. And it is these imponderable forces that lie within, that make it possible to teach another person only that in which one can believe with all one's strength. And the basic truths that present themselves to us, the awareness of religious truths on the path that can be taken through spiritual science, that is what makes religious education possible, where it is necessary to give to the child.

We have put a great deal of effort into finding a method for teaching religion. And I have to say that it is actually something that works very well. And I have been able to emphasize again and again at the various school celebrations what seems to me to be a truth now, that in our Waldorf School the Christian spirit is not only present in the religion lessons, but it is there when you enter the school or leave class. It is present in everything, without one always saying “Lord, Lord” or constantly pointing to that which somehow is religiosity with words. That which is the religious spirit is something quite different, when the rest flows into objectivity.

That is what underlies it. And when I say that our paths lead to Christ, then perhaps despite all the hostility that comes from various sides, I may also recall a Bible verse that is truly important to me not only because it has been handed down, but because it is daily proving to be true and has certainly become a valuable Bible verse. This is the one that is put into the Savior's mouth:

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Thus He is not only present during the time of His life on earth, but He is always present. And if one is willing, one can always experience what the living Christ wants among people. This living understanding of Christ is especially important – this ever-present Christ – which, of course, does not exclude the Mystery of Golgotha as an historical event from us. And in order to avoid misunderstandings, I emphasize that it is understood as a supersensible event and that it has even been possible to lead Protestant clergymen, who were dissatisfied with the existing presentation, which has become quite rationalistic – the journal literature already shows this today – back to a real, supersensible understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, precisely through anthroposophy.

All this shows you that our religious education is looking for a method that brings it into connection with all other aspects of the world, with all other human activity and with human life in general, and on the other hand, that the matter does not lead away from Christianity.

And you see, dear ladies and gentlemen, we do not force anyone from any religious community or any other community, but we have nevertheless managed to have Jewish children sitting in our Waldorf School who listen to the knowledge of Christianity with complete inner soul and with truly religious fervor, without this being anything extraordinary.

Education can be such that, for example, the following occurred with us at the Waldorf School, but it was not a merit of the Waldorf School, the boy had already done that before he came to the Waldorf School. A Jewish boy who was later sent to the Waldorf School received Jewish religious education before the school was established. When he came to our school and heard what goes on here, he compared it with the way religion is approached in his parents' home. And he simply ran away, just walked out the door and went into the other class where free Christian religious education was being taught, and stayed inside. So if the claim is that Christianity is not being cultivated, that is not true. Although we have to say: we are not a sect, we do not compete with any religious community; our sources lie first and foremost in science, as I have explained today. So it would be a completely unjustified accusation to claim that Christianity is not being cultivated.

And if you look at real life, you will see how far we have already been able to go in the most diverse fields using the anthroposophical method of understanding the world. It will become clear to you how unfounded what is already being said against anthroposophy in a somewhat indefinable way from some quarters is. But that is not what is worthy of discussion in the first place. Rather, it is important to know that this spiritual science does not want to remain in the sphere of mere theoretical development, in the sphere of mere theoretical knowledge, because that is ultimately something that alienates people from the world and keeps them far removed from it. Rather, it seeks to penetrate the sphere of the will, into all of human life, and is therefore far removed from any nebulous mysticism, any mysticism that seeks to withdraw from life.

There are, of course, people who, in complete good faith, believe that this world is too bad after all, that one must withdraw into another, mystical world. I have met many such people; they were quite good people, but they were not the kind of people that today's difficult times need. Today's world needs people who not only believe in the spirit in knowledge and abstract theories, but today's difficult times need people who absorb this spirit in such a way that they can carry it into matter and into life themselves.

Dear attendees! We have experienced it – and the deeper connections show it to a deeper understanding – these things have led us into disaster. We have experienced it that people were religious on the one hand according to their own view, and then they had nothing from religion in their external actions during the whole week, except that in the bookkeeping in the ledger it still says on the first page: “With God”. I don't know if that is true or not. But in any case, something has occurred that I would call a kind of double way of life: on the one hand, one can be a follower of any confession, and on the other hand, nothing can be brought into one's life from that confession. Likewise, there are already a great many scientists today who pursue their science in such a way that they handle it on the one hand, and then they grasp life quite differently on the other. They make two things out of these things that should actually be one. But we must come to a unified life, not just a conception of life, but a way of life.

That is what is striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract, mystical contemplation and immersion, and believe that one has the spirit when one withdraws from the external life but to absorb the spirit into the soul in such a way that one can then carry it into matter, into external matter, and thus deepen the external life. The human being must not only work as a knower of the spiritual order of the world, but as a realizer of the spiritual order of the world. And that is the basis of the impulse of spiritual science:

is based: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract ideas and to be able to speak of it, but to take this spirit so fully within oneself that one is able not only to carry it in concepts, but to carry it in one's mind and will, so that one oneself belongs to those powers in the world that actualize the spirit, that one can become a servant for the realization of the spirit in the world order.

Our present age, inartistic as it is, shows little awareness of the fact that recitation stands midway between speaking, or reading, which are not artistic, and artistically developed singing. In many circles there is a feeling that really anyone can recite – and this, of course, is not unconnected with the fact that in these same circles everyone flatters himself that he can also write poetry. It would not so easily enter anyone's head that someone could be a musician, or a painter, without having previously undergone any sort of artistic training. When we consider current views on the art of recitation, we are obliged to admit that, just as in people's ideas about the real nature of poetry, there is also a certain lack of clarity as to the nature of the art of recitation. As to how this art of recitation must use its instrument – the human voice in connection with the human organism – even for this there is no clear understanding. This is undoubtedly connected with the fundamental absence, in our present age, of any earnest feeling for the true nature of poetry. There is no doubt that poetry stands in a relationship with the whole being of man quite different to that of ordinary prose, of whatever kind this may be; everything that man must recognize as that higher world to which he belongs with the soul and spiritual parts of his being poetry must also stand in a certain connection with all this. Along with the lack of clarity which gradually invaded ideas concerning man's relationship with the super-sensible world, there also came about another partial lack of clarity, concerning man's relationship with that world which is expressed in the art of poetry. I should like to draw attention to two facts – things which resound to us from ancient times, though from quite different peoples, with quite differently evolved characters.

One fact, though one which today is passed over so lightly, is something to which Homer, the great writer of Greek epic, draws our attention at the beginning of both his poems: namely, that what he wished to convey to the world as his poetry did not come from himself.

‘Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...’

It is not Homer, but the Muse who is singing. Our age can no longer take this seriously – for the understanding that lies hidden behind the opening of the Homeric poem had, in fact, already been extinguished by the eighteenth century, with its intellectual conceptions. When Klopstock began his Messiah, he did indeed look at the beginning of the Homeric poems; but in this respect he lived entirely in abstract ideas, intellectualistic ideas, and these could only lead him to say: the Greeks still believed in gods, in the Muses – modern man can replace this only by his own immortal soul. Thus, Klopstock begins with the words:

‘Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's redemption.’

Now this opening of the Messiah, for anyone who can see into these things, is a document of the very greatest significance. And in the nineteenth century, too, all feeling had been completely lost for what Homer meant to convey – that when I reveal myself in poetry, it is really something higher that is revealed in me: my “I” withdraws, my ego withdraws, so that other powers make use of my speech-organism; divine-spiritual powers make use of this speech-organism in order to reveal themselves. One must, therefore, regard what Homer placed at the opening of his two poetic creations as something worthy of more serious consideration than is usually accorded to such things today.

It is remarkable how something similar, and yet quite different, resounds to us from a certain period in the development of Central Europe, a period to which the Nibelungenlied points – although it was not written down until a later date. This begins in a manner similar to, yet quite different from Homer:

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told’

“In olden maeren” – what are maeren, for those who still have a living feeling and perception for such things? I cannot go into all this in detail, but I need only allude to the real meaning of this expression, maer – Nachtmar (nightmare): for this same expression is used to describe certain dreams which are caused by being oppressed, as it were, by an Alp – by a nightmare. In this nightmare, this Alp, we have the last atavistic traces of what is indicated in the Nibelungenlied, when it says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told…”; something is here related which does not come out of normal day-time ego-consciousness, but from a kind of perception which proceeds in the manner of the consciousness we possess in an especially vivid dream such as the nightmare, the maeren. Here again our attention is directed not to ordinary consciousness, but to something which is revealed, through ordinary consciousness, from super-sensible spheres. Homer says: “Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...”; and the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told.” What is referred to in the first instance? To that which is, in reality, brought forth by the Muse, when she makes use of the human organism, begins to speak through the human organism, to vibrate musically; our attention is directed to something musical which permeates the human being, and which speaks from greater depths than are reached by his ordinary consciousness. And when the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told …” – it is something which permeates human consciousness as a perception similar to seeing, as something like visual perception, to which we are referred. The Nibelungenlied indicates something plastic and formative, something imaginative; in the Homeric epic we are given something musical. Both, however, from different sides, show us what wells up in poetry from the profounder depths of human nature, something which takes hold of the human being and finds utterance through him. One must have a feeling for this, if one is to experience the way in which true declamation gives expression in poetry, and takes hold of the human instrument of speech – though, as we shall see later, this involves the entire human organism.

The manner, the whole way in which a human being is built up is an outcome of the forces of the spiritual world. And again, the whole manner in which a human being is able to bring his organism into movement when he declaims or recites poetry – this, too, must be the result of a spiritual force holding sway in the human organism. One must learn to trace this working of the spirit in the human organism when the art of poetry is expressed through recitation or declamation. Declamation then becomes what the human organism can be, when it is tuned in the most various ways. In order to gain a practical, artistic realization of these things in some detail, we would now like to show you what must live in declamation when something more of the nature of folk-poetry, or folk-song, is taken into consideration; we shall then proceed to something which is more definitely art – poetry. We hope to show you how fundamentally different the effect of declamation must be, depending on whether it sounds forth from those depths of human nature from which earnestness, or tragedy, resound; or whether it comes from those surface realms of the human organization from which gaiety, satire and humour emanate. Only when we have learned to apprehend these things quite concretely today will I permit myself to give certain intimations of the connection between poetry and recitation and declamation. From these, we will then show how there results an exact method of educating oneself in artistic recitation and declamation.

We will ask Frau Dr. Steiner to declaim a poem of Goethe: a folk-poem in its whole tone and mood – Goethe's “Heidenröslein”.

HEIDENRÖSLEIN

Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn,

Röslein auf der Heiden,

War so jung und morgenschön,

Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,

Sah's mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich

Röslein auf der Heiden,

Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,

Dass du ewig denkst an mich,

Und ich will's nicht leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach

's Röslein auf der Heiden;

Röslein wehrte sich und stach,

Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,

Musst' es eben leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[Comparable in English in many respects is:

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North;

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth:

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlandsfor ever I love. –

Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow;

Farewell to the straths and green valleys below:

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. –

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlandsa-chasing the deer:

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Robert Burns (1759-1796.]

We will now ask Frau Dr. Steiner to recite to us “Erlkönigstochter”, which gives opportunity for a quite special style in the rendering of folk-poems.

Herr Oluf reitet spät und weit,

Zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut':

Da tanzten die Elfen auf grünen Land,

Erlkönigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.

‘Willkommen, Herr Oluf, was eilst von hier?

Tritt her in den Reihen und tanz mit mir.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Zwei güldne Sporen schenk' ich dir;

Ein Hemd von Seide, so weiss und fein,

Meine Mutter bleicht's im Mondenschein.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Einen Haufen Goldes schenk' ich dir.’ –

‘Einen Haufen Goldes nahm’ ich wohl;

Doch tanzen ich nicht darf, noch soll.’

‘Und willt, Herr Oluf, nicht tanzen mit mir,

Soll Seuch' und Krankheit folgen dir.’ –

Sie tät einen Schlag ihm auf sein Herz,

Noch nimmer fühlt er solchen Schmerz.

Sie hob ihn bleichend auf sein Pferd:

‘Reit heim zu deinem Bräutlein wert.’

Und als er kam vor Hauses Tiir,

Seine Mutter zitternd stand dafür.

‘Hör’ an, mein Sohn, sag’ an mir gleich,

Wie ist dein' Farbe blass und bleich?’ –

‘Und sollt’ sie nicht sein blass und bleich?

Ich traf in Erlenkönigs Reich.’ –

‘Hört an, mein Sohn, so lieb und traut,

Was soll ich nun sagen deiner Braut?’ –

‘Sagt ihr, ich sei im Wald zur Stund’,

Zu proben da mein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Frühmorgen als es Tag kaum war,

Da kam die Braut mit der Hochzeitschar.

Sie schenkten Met, sie schenkten Wein.

‘Wo ist Herr Oluf, der Bräutigam mein?’ –

‘Herr Oluf, er ritt in Wald zur Stund’,

Er probt allda sein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Die Braut hub auf den Scharlach rot,

Da lag Herr Oluf, und er war tot.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).

[Comparable in style in English is:

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither'd from the Lake,

And no birds sing.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look'd at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said –

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elf in grot,

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dream'd – Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream'd

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid darning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge has wither'd from the lake,

And no birds sing.

John Keats (1795-1821).]

Now we will present Goethe's two poems “Olympos” and “Charon”, where we shall find an opportunity to demonstrate recitation or declamation as the case may be. In the Poem “Olympos”, which is drawn more from the pictorial element, we have the art of declamation; while the more metrical “Charon” is drawn more from the musical element.

OLYMPOS

Der Olympos, der Kissavos,

Die zwei Berge haderten;

Da entgegnend sprach Olympos

Also zu dem Kissavos:

‘Nicht erhebe dich, Kissave,

Turken – du Getretener.

Bin ich doch der Greis Olympos,

Den die ganze Welt vernahm.

Zwei und sechzig Gipfel zähl ich

Und zweitausend Quellen klar,

Jeder Brunn hat seinen Wimpel,

Seinen Kämpfer jeder Zweig.

Auf den höchsten Gipfel hat sich

Mir ein Adler aufgesetzt,

Fasst in seinen mächt'gen Klauen

Eines Helden blutend Haupt.’

‘Sage, Haupt! wie ist's ergangen?

Fielest du verbrecherisch?’ –

Speise, Vogel, meine Jugend,

Meine Mannheit speise nur!

Ellenlänger wächst dein Flügel,

Deine Klauen spannenlang.

Bei Louron, in Xeromeron

Lebt' ich in dem Kriegerstand,

So in Chasia, auf'm Olympos

Kämpft’ ich bis ins zwölfte Jahr.

Sechzig Agas, ich erschlug sie,

Ihr Gefild verbrannt’ ich dann;

Die ich sonst noch niederstreckte,

Türken, Albaneser auch,

Sind zu viele, gar zu viele,

Dass ich sie nicht Ahlen mag;

Nun ist meine Reihe kommen,

Im Gefechte fiel ich brav.

CHARON

Die Bergeshöhn, warum so schwarz?

Woher die Wolkenwoge?

Ist es der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Der Regen, Gipfel peitschend?

Nicht ist's der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Nicht Regen, Gipfel peitschend;

Nein, Charon ist's, er saust einher,

Entführet die Verblichnen;

Die Jungen treibt er vor sich hin,

Schleppt hinter sich die Alten;

Die Jüngsten aber, Säuglinge,

In Reih' gehenkt am Sattel.

Da riefen ihm die Greise zu,

Die Junglinge, sie knieten:

‘O Charon, halt! halt am Geheg,

Halt an beim kühlen Brunnen!

Die Alten da erquicken sich,

Die Jugend schleudert Steine,

Die Knaben zart zerstreuen sich

Und pflücken bunte Blümchen.’

Nicht am Gehege halt’ ich still,

Ich halte nicht am Brunnen;

Zu schöpfen kommen Weiber an,

Erkennen ihre Kinder,

Die Männer auch erkennen sie,

Das Trennen wird unmöglich.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[A similar contrast is presented within the work of Donne, between the vivid, declamatory style of “The Sunne Rising” and the more sustained, metrical “Elegie: His Picture”:

THE SUNNE RISING

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the ‘India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor^'s mimique; All wealth alchimie.

Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

ELEGIE: HIS PICTURE

Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell,

Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwels, shall dwell.

‘Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more

When wee are shadowes both, than 'twas before.

When weather-beaten I come backe; my hand,

Perhaps with rude oares torne, or Sun beams tann'd,

My face and brest of hairecloth, and my head

With cares rash sodaine stormes, being o'rspread,

My body'a sack of bones, broken within,

And powders blew staines scatter'd on my skinne;

If rivall fooles taxe thee to 'have lov'd a man,

So foule, and course, as, Oh, I may seeme then,

This shall say what I was: and thou shalt say,

Doe his hurts reach mee? doth my worth decay?

Or doe they reach judging minde, that hee

Should now love lesse, what hee did love to see?

That which in him was faire and delicate,

Was but the milke, which in loves childish state

Did nurse it: who now is growne strong enough

To feed on that, which to disused tasts seemes tough.

John Donne (1573-1631).]

We will now pass on to a more highly-wrought verse-form – the sonnet; and sonnets by Hebbel and Novalis will now be recited.

DIE SPRACHE

Als höchstes Wunder, das der Geist vollbrachte,

Preist ich die Sprache, die er, sonst verloren

In tiefste Einsamkeit, aus sich geboren,

Weil sie allein die andern möglich machte.

Ja, wenn ich sie in Grund und Zweck betrachte,

So hat nur sie den schweren Fluch beschworen,

Dem er, zum dumpfen Einzelsein erkoren,

Erlegen wäre, eh' er noch erwachte.

Denn ist das unerforschte Eins und Alles

In nie begrifftnem Selbstzersplitt‘rungsdrange

Zu einer Welt von Punkten gleich zerstoben:

So wird durch sie, die jedes Wesenballes

Geheimstes Sein erscheinen lässt im Klange,

Die Trennung vollig wieder aufgehoben!

Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863).

ZUEIGNUNG

I

Du hast in mir den edeln Trieb erregt,

Tief ins Gemüt der weiten Welt zu schauen;

Mit deiner Hand ergriff mich ein Vertrauen,

Das sicher mich durch alle Stürme trägt.

Mit Ahnungen hast du das Kind gepflegt,

Und zogst mit ihm durch fabelhafte Auen;

Hast als das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen,

Des Jünglings Herz zum höchsten Schwung bewegt.

Was fesselt mich an irdische Beschwerden?

Ist nicht mein Herz und Leben ewig dein?

Und schirmt mich deine Liebe nicht auf Erden?

Ich darf fier dich der edlen Kunst mich weiten;

Denn du, Geliebte, willst die Muse werden, –

Und stiller Schutzgeist meiner Dichtung sein.

II

In ewigen Verwandlungen begrusst

Uns des Gesangs geheime Macht hienieden,

Dort segnet sie das Land als ew'ger Frieden,

Indes sie hier als Jugend uns umfliesst.

Sie ist's, die Licht in unsre Augen giesst,

Die uns den Sinn für jede Kunst beschieden,

Und die das Herz der Frohen und der Müden

In trunkner Andacht wunderbar geniesst.

An ihrem vollen Busen trank ich Leben:

Ich ward durch sie zu allem, was ich bin,

Und durfte froh mein Angesicht erheben.

Noch schlummerte mein allerhöchster Sinn;

Da sah ich sie als Engel zu mir schweben,

Und flog, erwacht, in ihrem Arm dahin.

Novalis (1772-1801).

[The following three poems show some characteristics of the English sonnet:

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper's – he takes the lead

In summer luxury, – he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

John Keats

SONNET

O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray

Warbl'st at Eve, when all the Woods are still,

Thou with fresh hope the Lovers heart dost fill,

While the jolly hours lead on propitious May,

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of Day,

First heard before the shallow Cuckoo's bill,

Portend success in love; O if Jove's will

Have linkt that amorous power to thy soft lay,

Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate

Foretell my hopeless doom in som Grove ny:

As thou from year to year hast sung too late

For my relief; yet hadst no reason why:

Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate,

Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

John Milton (1608-1674).

SONNET

\

My galy charged with forgetfulnes

Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghtes doeth pas

Twene Rock and Rock; and eke myn ennemy, Alas,

That is my lorde, sterith with cruelnes;

And every owre a thought in redines,

As tho that deth were light in suche a case.

An endles wynd doeth tere the sayll apase

\

Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes.

A rayn of teris, a clowde of derk disdain,

\

Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce;

\

Wrethed with errour and eke with ignoraunce.

The starres be hid that led me to this pain;

\

Drowned is reason that should me consort,

And I remain dispering of the port.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542).]

And now, in order to show how another, the very opposite mood must be drawn from quite different realms of the human organization when this serves as the instrument for poetry and declamation, we will end with something humorous and satirical – choosing a poem by Christian Morgenstern.

ST. EXPEDITUS

Einem Kloster, voll von Nonnen,

waren Menschen wohlgesonnen.

Und sie schickten, gute Christen,

ihm nach Rom die schönsten Kisten:

Äpfel, Birnen, Kuchen, Socken,

eine Spieluhr, kleine Glocken,

Gartenwerkzeug, Schuhe, Schürzen...

Aussen aber stand: Nicht stürzen!

Oder: Vorsicht! oder welche

wiesen schwarzgemalte Kelche.

Und auf jeder Kiste stand ‘Espedito’, kurzerhand.

Unsre Nonnen, die nicht wussten,

wem sie dafür danken mussten,

denn das Gut kam anonym,

dankten vorderhand nur IHM,

rieten aber doch ohn’ Ende

nach dem Sender solcher Spende.

Plötzlich rief die Schwester Pia

eines Morgens: Santa mia!

Nicht von Juden, nicht von Christen

Stammen diese Wunderkisten –

Expeditus, o Geschwister,

heisst er und ein Heiliger ist er!

Und sie fielen auf die Kniee.

Und der Heilige sprach: Siehe!

Endlich habt ihr mich erkannt.

Und nun malt mich an die Wand!

Und sie liessen einen kommen,

einen Maler, einen frommen.

Und es malte der Artiste

Expeditum mit der Kiste. –

Und der Kult gewann an Breite.

Jeder, der beschenkt ward, weihte

kleine Tafeln ihm und Kerzen.

Kurz, er war in aller Herzen.

II

Da auf einmal, neunzehnhundert-

fünf, vernimmt die Welt verwundert,

dass die Kirche diesen Mann

fürder nicht mehr dulden kann.

Grausam schallt von Rom es her:

Expeditus ist nicht mehr:

Und da seine lieben Nonnen

längst dem Erdental entronnen,

steht er da und sieht sich um –

und die ganze delt bleibt stumm.

Ich allein hier hoch im Norden

fühle mich von seinem Orden,

und mein Ketzergriffel schreibt:

Sanctus Expeditus – bleibt.

Und weil jenes nichts mehr gilt,

male ich hier neu sein Bild: –

Expeditum, den Gesandten,

grüss’ ich hier, den Unbekannten

Expeditum, ihn, den Heiligen,

mit den Assen, den viel eiligen,

mit den milden, weissen Haaren

und dem fröhlichen Gebaren,

mit den Augen braun, voll Güte,

und mit einer grossen Düte,

die den uberraschten Kindern

strebt ihr spärlich Los zu lindern.

Einen güldnen Heiligenschein

geb’ ich ihm noch obendrein

den sein Lacheln um ihn breitet,

wenn er durch die Lande schreitet.

Und um ihn in Engeiswonnen

stell’ ich seine treuen Nonnen:

Mägdlein aus Italiens Auen,

himmlisch lieblich anzuschauen.

Eine aber macht, fürwahr,

eine lange Nase gar.

Just ins ‘Bronzne Tor’ hinein

spannt sie ihr klein Fingerlein.

Oben aber aus dem Himmel

quillt der Heiligen Gewimmel,

und holdselig singt Maria:

Santo Espedito - sia!

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914).

[An excerpt from “The Rape of the Lock” shows the great English satirist in a comparatively rare mood of good humoured and friendly mocking. It comes from Canto II:

But now secure the painted vessel glides,

The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides;

While melting music steals upon the sky,

And soften'd sounds along the waters die;

Smooth flow the waves, the Zephyrs gently play,

Belinda smil'd, and all the world was gay.

All but the Sylph – with careful thoughts opprest,

Th' impending woe sat heavy on his breast.

He summons strait his Denizens of air;

The lucid squadrons round the sails repair:

Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe,

That seem'd but Zephyrs to the train beneath.

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,

Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;

Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,

Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light.

Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,

Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,

Dipt in the richest tincture of the skies,

Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes,

While ev'ry beam new transient colours flings,

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Amid the circle, on the gilded mast,

Superior by the head, was Ariel plac'd;

His purple pinions op'ning to the sun,

He rais'd his azure wand, and thus begun.

Ye Sylphs and Sylphids, to your chief give ear,

Fays, Fairies, Genii, Elves, and Daemons hear!

Ye know the spheres and various tasks assign'd

By laws eternal to th' aerial kind.

Some in the fields of purest Aether play,

And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.

Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,

Or roll the planets thro' the boundless sky.

Some less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light

Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,

Or suck the mists in grosser air below,

Or dip their pinions in the painted bowl

Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,

Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.

Others on earth o'er human race preside,

Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide:

Of these the chief the care of Nations own,

And guard with Arms divine the British Throne.

Our humbler province is to tend the Fair,

Not a less pleasing, tho' less glorious care;

To save the powder from too rude a gale,

Nor let th' imprison'd essences exhale;

To draw fresh colours from the vernal Flow'rs;

To steal from rainbows e'er they drop in show'rs

A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,

Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs;

Nay oft, in dreams, invention we bestow,

To change a Flounce, or add a Furbelow.

This day, black Omens threat the brightest fair

That e'er deserv'd a watchful spirit's care;

Some dire disaster, or by force, or slight;

But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)]

Now the art of recitation must undoubtedly follow the poetry. Recitation introduces the human element into poetry, for the human organization itself furnishes the instrument of artistic expression. How this instrument is used in singing and in recitation – that is something which has indeed been much investigated: we have already taken the opportunity here of pointing out, in response to certain questions, how many methods (one method after another!) exist in our present age, to singing and recitation. For in a certain sense we have entirely lost the deeper, inner relationship between poetic utterance or expression and the human organization. I will take as_. a starting-point next today something apparently quite physiological – and next time, after our detour through physiology, we shall be able to show you what poetry, as expressed in recitation and declamation, really demands.

Let us look first at something which has been frequently mentioned during the lectures of the last few days: the human rhythmic system. The human being is organized into the system of nerves and senses – the instrument for the thought-world, for the world of sense-representations, and so on; the rhythmic system – the instrument for the development of the feeling world, and for all that is mirrored from the feeling-world and plays into the world of mental representations; and the metabolic system – through which the will pulsates, and in which the will finds its actual physical instrument. [Note 4]

First, let us look at the rhythmic system. In this rhythmic system, two rhythms interpenetrate each other in a remarkable way. In the first place, we have the breathing-rhythm. This is essentially regular – though everything living is different in this respect, and it varies from individual to individual – so that in the case of healthy people, we are able to observe 16-19 breaths per minute. Secondly, we have the pulse-rhythm, directly connected with the heart. Naturally, when we take into account that in this rhythm we are dealing with functions of a living being, again we cannot cite any pedantic number; but, generally speaking, we may say that the number of pulse-beats per minute, in a healthy human organism, is approximately 72. Hence we can say that the number of pulse-beats is about four times the number of respirations. We can thus represent the course of the breath in the human organism, and how while we take one breath, the pulse intervenes four times. Now let us devote our minds for a moment to this interaction of the pulse-rhythm and the rhythm of the breath to this inner, living piano (if I may so express myself) where we experience the pulse rhythm as it strikes into the course of the breathing-rhythm. Let us picture the following: one breath inhaled and exhaled; and a second inhaled and exhaled; and, striking into this, the rhythm of the heart. Let us picture this in such a way that we can see that in the pulse-rhythm, which is essentially connected with the metabolism, which touches on the metabolic system, the will strikes, as it were, upwards; thus we have the will-pulses striking into the feeling-manifestations of the breath-rhythm. And let us suppose that we articulate these will-pulses, in such a way that we follow the will-pulses in the words, inwardly articulating the words to ourselves. Thus we have, for instance: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short – one breath-stream; then we make a pause, a kind of caesura, we hold back; then, accompanying the next drawing of the breath, we have the heart-rhythm striking into it: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short.

¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È || ¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È ||

Then, when we allow two breaths to be accompanied by the corresponding pulse-beats, and between them we make a pause, a pause for breath – we have the hexameter. [Note 5] We can ask: what is the origin of this ancient Greek verse metre? It originated from the harmony between blood-circulation and breathing. The Greek wished to turn his speech inward, so that, having suppressed his “I”, he orientated the words according to the pulse-beats, allowing these to play upon the stream of breath. Thus he brought his whole inner organization, his rhythmic organization, to expression in his speech: it was the harmony between heart-rhythm and breath-rhythm that resounded in his speech. To the Greek, this was more musical – as if it resounded up from the will, resounded up from the pulse-beats into the rhythm of the breath.

You know that what remained as the last, atavistic remnant of the old clairvoyant images – the Alp, the nightmare – found expression in pictures, and is connected with the breathing-process: and there is still a connection between the pathological form of the Alpdruck and breathing.

Now let us assume – for me it is more than an assumption – that in those primaeval times when his experience was more closely connected with the internal processes, man went out more with the breath; the movement was more from above downwards. And then he put into one breath:

¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren'

Again, three high-tones: three times the perception of how the pulse beats into the breathing, and how this brings to expression an experience that is more visual, finding expression in the light and shade of the language, in the high and low tones. In the Greek we have something metrical long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short; whereas in the Nordic verses we have something with more declamatory impetus – high-tone and low-tone:

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Of praise-deserving heroes, of labours manifold ...'

It is the interaction of the breathing-rhythm and the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the pulse. Just as the Greek experienced a musical element and expressed this in metre, so the Nordic man experienced a pictorial element, which he expressed in the light and shade of the words, in the high-tones and low-tones. But there was always the knowledge that one was submerged in a state of consciousness where the “I” yielded itself up to the divine-spiritual being which reveals itself through the human organism – which forms this human organism so that it may be played upon as an instrument through the pulsation of the heart, through the breathing-process, through the stream of exhaled and inhaled breath:

È ¾ È ¾ È ¾ È || ¾ È ¾ È ¾

You know that many breathing-techniques have been discovered, and much thought given to methods of treating the human body to facilitate correct singing or recitation. It is much more to the point, however, to penetrate the real mysteries of poetry and recitation and declamation: for both of these will proceed from the actual, sensible-super-sensible perception of the harmony between the pulse, which is connected with the heart, and the breathing-process. As we shall see next time, each single verse-form, each single poetic form including rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, may be understood when we start from a living perception of the human organism, and what it does when it employs speech artistically. This is why it was quite justified when people who understood such things spoke, more or less figuratively, of poetry as a language of the gods: for this language of the gods does not speak the mysteries of the transient human “I”; it speaks in human consciousness, speaks musically and plastically the cosmic mysteries – it speaks when the super-sensible worlds play, through the human heart, upon the human breath.

It is through declamation and recitation that the art of poetry is accorded its true value. So I shall allow myself – not, however, out of allegiance to any abstract principle or any wish to claim that a world-view which springs from the needs of our time must cast its reforming light in some way or other over everything – I shall allow myself on quite other grounds to say a little about recitation and declamation from the vantage-point of the life- and world-conception represented at this Congress. We shall only recapture an inner, a genuine soul-understanding of poetry when we are in a position to find our way to the real homeland of poetic art. And this real homeland of poetic art is in fact the spiritual world – though it is not that intellectual, that conceptual or ideational factor in the spiritual world particularly cultivated in our own time. For this more than anything else has a paralysing effect on poetry.

We shall see most clearly what is meant by this when we are reminded that one of the most significant products of this art resounds to us out of the revolutions of time along with a particular avowal on the part of its creator, or perhaps creators. The Homeric epics invariably begin with the words “Sing, O Muse...” Nowadays we are only too inclined to treat such a phrase as more or less a cliché. But when it was first coined it was no cliché – it was an inner experience of the soul: whoever it was that conceived the poem out of the spirit, whence this phrase was also drawn, knew how he was immersed through his poetic faculty in a region of human existence and experience different to that in which we stand in immediatesense-perception, or when our power of intellect takes hold conceptually of sense-impressions. The poet knew that his inner being was seized by an objective spiritual force. That human consciousness has indeed undergone a change in this respect in the course of evolution has, I would say, been documented historically.

When Klopstock, drawing upon the German spiritual life, wished to sing of the great deed of the Messiah, as Homer had sung the past events of Hellas, he did not say “Sing, O Muse...”, but “Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man’s redemption.” Here something of greater intensity is indicated, something connected directly with the human and its self-reliance. Here man has come to himself in his individual personality.

Yet we can add: if the mode of consciousness which lives in our modern world of ideas and observations were the sole criterion, we should lose poetry and art altogether. All the same, it is necessary that here, too, what was suitable for mankind at one time should now assume other forms. But these new forms can only arise if the way into the spiritual world is rediscovered; for such a path alone makes it possible for the human “I” to be laid hold of again by the spiritual world – not as in former times, in an unconscious, dreamy fashion, but in accordance with the needs of the present day: in full consciousness. That this need not be bound up with a crippling of imaginative activity – this is not generally recognized today. It will come to be understood, however, as the world and life-conception put forward here gains more and more ground. If we enter into the spiritual world with circumspection – in full consciousness and with a developed feeling of personality – it will exert no crippling effect on our direct perception or on the vital participation in things and beings so necessary to poetry and art in general. If, however, we abstract ourselves from things in ideas, standing aside from them in purely intellectual concepts, our knowledge will yield nothing that can become a direct artistic creation. But if we plunge down into what pervades the world as a vibrant spiritual essence we will find again, along this spiritual path what poetry and art as a whole were fundamentally seeking all along.

From such a spiritual approach the poet will have before his soul what recitation and declamation must re-create for his audience. The poet must submerge himself in the element of speech. This experience of submersion was still to be found among the Greeks, and even in earlier forms of Central European spiritual life, such as the Germanic. In primaeval ages of humanity, if one wished to receive the divine-spiritual and bring it to expression as it spoke in the soul, one dived down not only into the element of speech, but also into what flowed within speech, like the waves of the sea – into the breath. And in earlier times, when the ancient spiritual life was still valued above science, art or religion in isolation, in the period when that spiritual life came into being, poetry, too, was not isolated. It grew isolated at the stage when the felt vitality of the breath (as manifestation of the efficacy of man’s innermost will) was taken up into more exalted regions of organic life: into the element of speech.

In due course today we have arrived at the element of thought. And from the thought-element we can experience only a sort of “upthrust” of the breath. What held sway in ancient times in Central Europe in the form of an unconscious feeling whenever man felt the poetic urge was the pulsating of the blood. Taking hold with the will, this formed the breathstream from within, into tone; whereas when the man of Greek or Graeco-Roman times waxed poetic he lived more in what flowed from the breathing-rhythm in the way of a picture or conception, and in what musically formed the sound, tone and line through metre, number and syllable.

Goethe’s whole being, his essential soul-nature, was born from the spirit of Central Europe. The writings of his youth derived their imaginative, pictorial form from an experience, an instinctive feeling of how human breathing pushes up, through the will-pulsating waves of the blood, into the formation of tone and sound – and so into the expressivity of the human soul. In this way he attained the qualities we admire so much in his youth, even when he appears to be speaking in prose. We have the prose-poems of Goethe’s youth, like the marvellous Hymn to Nature, where the ruling principle is that where we feel the language permeated by a kind of breathing which pulsates on the waves of the blood. It was from some such sense that the young Goethe initially composed his Iphigeneia. In this composition we feel how something from the Nibelungenlied, or the Gudrunlied, still lives and weaves in the prose, welling up and working in its high and low intonations. It calls attention to the upward thrust of the will into what comes to be man’s head-experience. This rhythm, thrown upward into configurations of thought, is what we can admire in the poems of Goethe’s youth, including the first version of his Iphigeneia.

But Goethe longed to get away to Italy. A time came when he could no longer come to terms with himself without undertaking a journey to Italy, which he did in the ’eighties. What was it that he longed for in his innermost being at that time? He longed to enter more deeply into human individuality – to enter into the whole human being with what lived in the high and low tones, creating in speech-formation an effect like the forms of a Gothic cathedral. He wanted to blend this with the even-measured flow he was seeking and believed was accessible only in the south, in Italy, in the wake of what had lived in Greek culture. Out of this, stemming from his feeling for such art as was still to be seen, came an understanding of Greek art He understood that the Greeks created their art in accordance with the same laws that govern the productions of nature; and of this he believed himself to have uncovered the clue. He believed, too, that he had traced these laws in speech-formation. He brought speech into a deeper connection with the breath. Then, in Rome, he refashioned his Iphigeneia accordingly. We must distinguish sharply between the northern Iphigeneia as first conceived and what came about when he refashioned it in Rome – even though the difference between the original and the Roman verse-Iphigeneia is really quite slight. It turned it into a poem that no longer lives simply in high and low tones; it became a work where in quite a different way – and not in any trivial sense, but as regards the whole of its speech-formation - the psychical experience of the blood-rhythm, the circulation with its deeper rhythm, plays over into the tranquil metre of the breathing-rhythm and the element of thought. In this way, what represented a declamatory form in the Nordic Iphigeneia is transformed in the Roman version into recitation.

By juxtaposing the one Iphigeneia with the other in this way, we can clearly discern the difference between declamation and recitation. Recitation leads us more deeply into human nature, and creates, too, more from its depths, seizing upon the whole blood-circulation as well as the breathing. But because in declamation the will (as it surges in the depths) is caught up into the highest part of man’s spiritual and soul-being, into the breath, it appears to us as the more forceful – living as it does in high and low tones. It does not only engage the flow of rhyme and verse, but evokes something which goes out into the world – perhaps even with a certain belligerence – as alliteration. In this there is a beauty that is peculiar to the north.

We do not wish today to give theoretical explanations, but to make known what should be present in an artistic sensibility. We will therefore firstly present the declamatory, in Goethe’s Nordic Iphigeneia; and then contrastingly the recitative, in the Roman composition. [Note 25]

[The magnificent language of the Authorized Version puts it on a different level to any other translation in English. There can be no doubt of its own high literary qualities, and it furnishes us with fine examples of poetry for declamation, as in this version of the ninetieth Psalm:

Lord, thou hast bene our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountaines were brought forth,

or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world:

even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction: and sayest,

Returne yee children of men.

For a thousand yeeres in thy sight

are but as yesterday when it is past:

and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood, they are as a sleepe:

in the morning they are like grasse which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up:

in the evening it is cut downe, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger:

and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee:

our secret sinnes in the light of thy countenance.

For all our dayes are passed away in thy wrath:

we spend our yeeres as a tale that is told.

The dayes of our yeeres are three-score yeeres and ten,

and if by reason of strength they be fourescore yeeres,

yet is their strength labour and sorrow:

for it is soone cut off, and we flie away.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger?

even according to thy feare, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our daies: that wee may

apply our hearts unto wisedome.

Returne (O LORD) how long?

and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

O satisfie us early with thy mercie:

that we may rejoyce, and be glad all our dayes.

Make us glad according to the dayes wherein thou hast afflicted us:

and the yeeres wherein we have seene evil.

Let thy worke appeare unto thy servants:

and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beautie of the LORD our God be upon us,

and establish thou the worke of our hands upon us:

yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Metrical translations of the Psalms are numerous; but many of them have no aims beyond fitting the verses to a tune. The version begun by Sir Philip Sidney and completed by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, however, brought all the literary resources of the classical tradition in Renaissance poetry to bear on the problem of making an authentically poetic translation. The result is that the ninetieth Psalm is here drastically transformed into a recitative vein:

DOMINE REFUGIUM

Thou’our refuge, thou our dwelling,

O Lord, hast byn from time to time:

Long er Mountaines, proudly swelling,

Above the lowly dales did clime:

Long er the Earth, embowl’d by thee,

Bare the forme it now doth beare:

Yea, thou art God for ever, free

From all touch of age and yeare.

O, but man by thee created,

As he at first of earth arose,

When thy word his end hath dated,

In equall state to earth he goes.

Thou saist, and saying makst it soe:

Be noe more, O Adams heyre;

From whence ye came, dispatch to goe,

Dust againe, as dust you were.

Graunt a thousand yeares be spared

To mortall men of life and light:

What is that to thee compared?

One day, one quarter of a night.

When death upon them storm-like falls,

Like unto a dreame they grow:

Which goes and comes as fancy calls,

Nought in substance all in show.

As the hearb that early groweth,

Which leaved greene and flowred faire

Ev’ning change with ruine moweth,

And laies to roast in withering aire:

Soe in thy wrath we fade away,

With thy fury overthrowne

When thou in sight our faultes dost lay,

Looking on our synns unknown.

Therefore in thy angry fuming,

Our life of daies his measure spends:

All our yeares in death consuming,

Right like a sound that, sounded, ends.

Our daies of life make seaventy yeares,

Eighty, if one stronger be:

Whose cropp is laboures, dollors, feares,

Then away in poast we flee.

Yet who notes thy angry power

As he should feare, soe fearing thee?

Make us count each vitall hower

Make thou us wise, we wise shall be.

Turne Lord: shall these things thus goe still?

Lett thy servantes peace obtaine:

Us with thy joyfull bounty fill,

Endlesse joyes in us shall raigne.

Glad us now, as erst we greeved:

Send yeares of good for yeares of ill:

When thy hand hath us releeved,

Show us and ours thy glory still.

Both them and us, not one exempt,

With thy beauty beautify:

Supply with aid what we attempt,

Our attempts with aid supply.

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621).]

Goethe followed up his incursion into the new poetic sphere of his remodelled Iphigeneia with works like his “Achilleis”, from which a passage will now be recited. Here in Goethe we find something that shows us how poetry springs from the whole man, how it should emerge from the whole man and take shape as recitation and declamation.

I might seem, at first glance, to be propounding a mechanical interpretation of reciting and declaiming, if I were to point to something in the nature of man as the origin of recitation and declamation: this something is to be found, however, precisely along the spiritual path.

As an art, poetry has the task of enlarging again what prose has atomized and contracted into the single word. The harmony of sounds, the melodious flow of sound in the picture-formation of speech, of mundane speech, is in this way “canopied over,” as we might say, by a second, spiritual speech. The prose-speaker clothes in words those thoughts he wants to convey, along with whatever of individual experience he can. The poet draws back from such rhetoric, to a much more profoundly inward human experience. [Note 26] He reverts to a level at which (as I have already indicated) the rhythms of breathing and the circulatory system become perceptible, as they vibrate through the language of poetry. We shall only get to the bottom of rhyme, metre, the pictorial and the melodic in speech, by comprehending human nature spiritually, even down to the physical. We have, then, as one pole of the rhythmical in man, the breathing; and as the other pole, circulation. In the interaction of breathing and circulation is expressed something which is first given, in its simplest ratio, when we attend to the resonance of breathing and circulation in the flow of human speech. In breathing, we draw a particular number of breaths every minute – between sixteen and eighteen. And over the same period we have, an average, about four times as many pulse‑beats. Circulation and breathing interact, so that the circulation plays into the breath, and the breath in turn weaves into the circulation its slower rhythm. It is an apprehension of such an harmonious interchange between pulse-beat and breathing that echoes on in speech. Formed and transformed in various ways, it produces the after-effect of a pictorial or a musical speech-formation, which is then brought to expression by the poet.

I said – and the point has actually been raised – that the fundamental law of poetry, the interaction of breathing and circulation that I have elicited from human morphology might be considered mechanical and materialistic. But the spiritual life that holds sway and works in the world can only be grasped if we trace that life right into its material formations; only if the life of man’s spirit and soul is pursued to those depths where it lives out its expression in corporeal functions. These bodily workings will then act as a firm wall to hurl back, like an echo, what derives from the laws of a profounder spirituality – a spirituality of direct experience pouring itself out into speech.

Goethe sensed how in earlier stages of human culture man stood in a deeper relation, as it were, to his own nature. He too sought to enter into an earlier epoch’s feeling for poetic forms and revivify them. It is actually of deep significance that at the highest point in the development of German poetry, Goethe pointed away from the crude, prosaic stress popularly taken for recitation and declamation, to a special kind of what can be called – and deservingly – a real speech-formation. To rehearse the iambics of his Iphigeneia, Goethe stood in front of the actors with his baton. He knew that what had to be revealed was, above all, the imagery he wanted to incorporate, while the prose-content was there merely as a ladder by which to scale the heights of the full, spiritual sense – the sound and the picture-quality of speech that must evolve from it. We must pierce through the given prose-content of a poem into the truly poetic. Schiller’s experience in his best creations, of an initially indefinable melody, a musicality onto which he then threaded the prose-content, was not a personal peculiarity. As regards the words, some of Schiller’s poems could even have had a different content to the one they currently possess. In a true poet there is everywhere, in the background of the rhetorical speech, a quality that must simply be felt. And only when it does justice to the musical in speech-formation will true poetry stand revealed.

If we turn to what is often taught today as recitation and declamation, it is with a keen sense of something having, in these uncultured times, gone amiss. The voice itself is strengthened, and great value is attached to technical adjustment of the organism: this is because no-one is any longer able to live in a direct relationship with recitation and declamation (not to mention singing), and we transfer to material tampering with the body what should be experienced on a quite different plane. The important thing in teaching recitation and declamation is that the pupil should on no account be made to do anything but live with speech-formation as such and the soul-resonance of living with speech-formation, in such a way as to bring him to listen properly. For anyone who is capable of listening correctly to what may come over in poetry, the appropriate breathing, proper disposition of the body, etc., will come about of their own accord – as a response to proper listening. It is important to let the pupil live in the actual element of declamation and recitation, and leave all the rest to him. He must become absorbed in the objective realities of tone, in “musical pictoriality” and in authentically poetic formations. In this way alone, paradoxical as it may sound, can we get the pupil to develop an ear for what he hears declaimed to him and thereby sensitivity to what moves spiritually over the waves of sound he hears. Only when he experiences something in his surroundings, we might say, and not in himself – and even though to begin with this experience is illusory, it must be cultivated – only then will he be able to refer back to himself what he feels vibrant in the world around him. It is only through the recital of certain aesthetically fashioned word-sequences, which have a special relation to human morphology, that we ought to learn breath-control or anything else connected with the adjusting of the voice. In this way we shall best meet the requirements of Goethe’s artistic perception and the sensitivity we value so greatly.

By way of illustration – not of any theory, but of the foregoing remarks there will now be recited a passage from Goethe’s “Achilleis”. [Note 27]

[Since the hexameter in its true, classical form can only occasionally be reproduced successfully in English, C. Day Lewis performed the service of devising a metre which sounds convincingly like it. He used it to evoke the heroic and epic associations of classical poetry in relating, for example, an episode from the Spanish Civil War in “The Nabara”. This extract is from “Phase One”:

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage

Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad

Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made

In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage

But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:

She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird

To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:

Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes

The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

I see man’s heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.

As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone

Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one –

So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation

To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.

Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting

For those I tell of – men used to the tolerable joy and hurt

Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;

But history’s hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting

Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.

C. Day Lewis (1904-1972)

An earlier solution to the problem was a rather more radical departure from the hexameter for a five-foot line, and the blank-verse pentameter remains the natural epic metre in English. Milton employed it in recreating many of the features of classical epic in Paradise Lost, as may be illustrated from the following passage (Book VI, 189-214):

So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,

Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell

On the proud Crest of Satan, that no sight,

Nor motion of swift thought, less could his Shield

Such ruin intercept: ten paces huge

He back recoild; the tenth on bended knee

His massie Spear upstayd; as if on Earth

Winds under ground or waters forcing way

Sidelong, had push’t a Mountain from his seat

Half sunk with all his Pines. Amazement seiz’d

The Rebel Thrones, but greater rage to see

Thus foil’d their mightiest, ours joy find, and shout,

Presage of Victorie and fierce desire

Of Battel: whereat Michaël bid sound

Th’ Arch-angel trumpet; through the vast of Heav’n

It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung

Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze

The adverse Legions, nor less hideous join’d

The horrid shock: now storming furie rose,

And clamor such as heard in Heav’n till now

Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray’d

Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles

Of brazen Chariots rag’d; dire was the noise

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss

Of fiery Darts in flaming vollies flew,

And flying vaulted either Host with fire.

John Milton.]

And now, to illustrate declamation, Goethe’s “Hymnus an die Natur” (abridged, as occasion demanded, for a Eurythmy performance).

Natur! Wir sind von ihr umgeben und umschlungen –

unvermögend aus ihr herauszutreten, und unvermögend,

tiefer in sie hinein zu kommen. Ungebeten und ungewarnt

nimmt sie uns in den Kreislauf ihres Tanzes auf

und treibt sich mit uns fort, bis wir ermüdet sind

und ihrem Arm entfallen.

Sie schafft ewig neue Gestalten; alles ist neu, und

doch immer das Alte. Sie baut immer und zerstört

immer.

Sie lebt in lauter Kindern; und die Mutter, wo ist

sie? – Sie ist die einzige Künstlerin; sie spielt ein

Schauspiel; es ist ein ewiges Leben, Werden und

Bewegen in ihr. Sie verwandelt sich ewig, und ist

kein Moment Stillestehen in ihr.

Ihr Tritt ist gemessen, ihre Ausnahmen selten, ihre

Gesetze unwandelbar. Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig.

Die Menschen sind alle in ihr, und sie in allen.

Auch das Unnatürlichste ist Natur, auch die plumpste

Philisterei hat etwas von ihrem Genie.

Sie liebt sich selber; sie freut sich an der Illusion.

Ihre Kinder sind ohne Zahl.

Sie spritzt ihre Geschöpfe aus dem Nichts hervor.

Leben ist ihre schönste Erfindung, und der Tod – ihr

Kunstgriff, viel Leben zu haben.

Sie hüllt den Menschen in Dumpfheit ein und spornt

ihn ewig zum Lichte. Man gehorcht ihren Gesetzen,

auch wenn man ihnen widerstrebt; man wirkt mit ihr,

auch wenn man gegen sie wirken will.

Sie macht alles, was sie gibt, zur Wohltat.

Sie hat keine Sprache noch Rede, aber sie schafft

Zungen und Herzen, durch die sie fühlt und spricht.

Ihre Krone ist die Liebe.

Sie macht Klüfte zwischen allen Wesen, und alles will

sie verschlingen. Sie hat alles isoliert, um alles

zusammenzuziehen.

Sie ist alles. Sie belohnt sich selbst und bestraft

sich selbst, erfreut und quält sich selbst. Vergangenheit

und Zukunft kennt sie nicht. Gegenwart ist ihr Ewigkeit.

Sie ist gütig, sie ist weise und still.

Sie ist ganz, und doch immer unvollendet.

Jedem erscheint sie in einer eignen Gestalt. Sie

verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und ist immer dieselbe.

Sie hat mich hereingestellt, sie wird mich auch

herausführen. Ich vertraue mich ihr. Alles hat

sie gesprochen. Alles ist ihre Schuld, alles ist

ihr Verdienst!

[Perhaps the nearest parallel in English is the unrestricted and freely expansive rhythm of Blake. He celebrates not Nature, but the spirits (the Sons of Los) in Nature in these extracts from his Milton pl. 27,66 – 28,12; pl. 31, 4 – 22:

Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & wondrous Night:

They rise in order and continue their immortal courses

Upon the mountains & in vales with harp & heavenly song,

With flute & clarion, with cups & measures fill’d with foaming wine.

Glitt’ring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude,

And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths his awful waves:

These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the Vintage.

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer

Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance

Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:

Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,

To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return:

These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains,

The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom sky,

Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons

Of men: These are the Sons of Los: These are the Visions of Eternity,

But we see only as it were the hem of their garments

When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions.

The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of Los:

And every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place

Standing on his own roof or in his garden on a mount

Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe:

And on its verge the Sun rises & sets, the Clouds bow

To meet the flat Earth &the Sea in such an order’d Space:

The Starry heavens reach no further, but here bend and set

On all sides, & the two Poles turn on their valves of gold;

And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move

Where’er he goes, & all his neighbourhood bewail his loss.

Such are the Spaces called Earth & such its dimension.

As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner

As of a Globe rolling thro’ Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro.

The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope: they alter

The ratio of the Spectator’s Organs, but leave Objects untouch’d.

For every Space larger than a red Globule of Man’s blood

Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los:

And every Space smaller than a Globule of Man’s blood opens

Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow.

William Blake.]

And now we will adduce some examples of the lyric – to be precise, from two poets, both Austrian: Robert Hamerling and Anastasius Grün.

The lyric diverges from epic and dramatic poetry in that, as far as speech-formation is concerned, its aesthetic quality must be experienced directly. In a way, all lyric strives to obliterate the immediate content of consciousness – at any rate to some degree. It would restore to man’s being a sense of universal participation. One might say that in lyric there is always a damping down of conscious experience. With a poet like Hamerling, a once widely influential poet who compared with then is now largely forgotten, we can indeed observe how personal experience passes over into a lyrical experience. Here we have a personality whose soul wants to share inwardly with every fibre of its being in the entire life of the world. He wants to share in the life of colour that meets him from the world. And thus the unconscious elements of human life come to play a part in him. We can still see the after-effects of this colourful experience in him when he tries to give it shape by casting it in antique forms. Particularly in Hamerling’s lyric poetry we can feel the true Austro-German lyricism. He is in a sense perhaps the most representative of Austro-German poets. The German spoken in Austria, deriving as it does from several dialects to become the common parlance and also the so-called “literary language” of Austrian poetry – this language has something which marks it off from the other forms of German language, fine discriminations which are of special interest to poetry and speech-formation. Compared with other varieties of German we might say that Austrian German has a subdued quality: yet in this quality there lingers a delicate sense of humour; this language became that of Austrian poetry. This soft humorous sound and intimate soul-quality that comes across in Austrian speech is not readily found in other forms of German – except possibly dialects. And here we have something which brings us, so to speak, close to antiquity.

It is at any rate remarkable that so outstanding a poet as Joseph Misson should have resorted to Austrian dialect for his “Da Naz, a niederösterreichischer Bauerbui geht in d’Fremd”, and that he arrived at a type of hexameter in which he felt artistically at home. We might add that the idealism of thought natural to someone who lives with Austrian German imparts an idealistic tinge to all the German inner feeling in this little piece of Central Europe.

We encounter this even in the formation of speech in Hamerling’s lyrics, which convey the feeling as if on the wings of a bird, while continually catching the bird again in powerfully moulded forms. This is really possible only with the soft humour of Austrian German. If we recapture this in declamation by taking what lives in Hamerling’s lyrical poetry and allow it to be heard elsewhere, it strikes a German from a different region as being cornpletely German and yet he feels what is German in the language to have been idealized. This is what gives Hamerling’s lyricism its nobility and what makes his verve and colour genuinely artistic as well as spontaneous.

How differently this appears in our other poet, Anastasius Grün! In accordance with the unique character of the Austrian disposition, he had a real feeling for what ought to mediate between East and West – for the mutual understanding of people all over the earth. The mood of 1848 finds expression most nobly and beautifully in Anastasius Grün’s poem Schutt – and in other of his poems too. It is this prologue to Schutt that will be recited. So, on the one hand we have, in Hamerling, a poet who really created more for declamation, yet found for it a metrical form and in Anastasius Grün a poet who takes over a recitative principle straight from the language. We would now like to demonstrate this in a poem by Anastasius Grün which, from its contents, might be entitled “West und Ost”; and in two poems by Robert Hamerling: “Nächtliche Regung” and “Vor einer Genziane”.

WEST UND OST

Prolog zu ‘Schutt’

Aug’ in Auge lächelnd schlangen

Arm in Arm einst West und Ost;

Zwillingspaar, das liebumfangen

Noch in einer Wiege kost’!

Ahriman ersah’s, der Schlimme,

Ihn erbaut der Anblick nicht,

Schwingt den Zauberstab im Grimme,

Draus manch roter Blitzstrahl bricht.

Wirft als Riesenschlang’ ins Bette,

Ringelnd, bäumend, zwischen sie

Jener Berg’ urew’ge Kette,

Die nie bricht und endet nie.

Lässt der Lüfte Vorhang rollend

Undurchdringlich niederziehn,

Spannt des Meers Sahara grollend

Endlos zwischen beiden hin.

Doch Ormuzd, der Milde, Gute,

Lächlend ob dem schlechten Schwank,

Winkt mit seiner Zauberrute,

Sternefunkelnd, goldesblank.

Sieh, auf Taubenfitt’chen, fächelnd,

Von der fernsten Luft geküsst,

Schifft die Liebe, kundig lächelnd;

Wie sich Ost and Westen grüsst!

Blütenduft und Tau und Segen

Saugt im Osten Menschengeist,

Steigt als Wolke, die als Regen

Mild auf Westens Flur dann fleusst!

Und die Brücke hat gezogen,

Die vom Ost zum West sich schwingt,

Phantasie als Regenbogen,

Der die Berge überspringt.

Durch die weiten Meereswüsten,

Steuernd, wie ein Silberschwan,

Zwischen Osts und Westens Küsten

Wogt des Lieds melod’scher Kahn.

Anastasius Grün (1806-1876).

[The poem that follows demonstrates the English sense of delicacy and restraint, and the subtle humour to which the language was in its own way particularly suited – perhaps especially around Marvell’s time:

ON A DROP OF DEW

See how the Orient Dew,

Shed from the Bosom of the Morn

Into the blowing Roses,

Yet careless of its Mansion new;

For the clear Region where ’twas born

Round in its self incloses:

And in its little Globes Extent,

Frames as it can its native Element.

How it the purple flow’r does slight,

Scarce touching where it lyes,

But gazing back upon the Skies,

Shines with a mournful Light;

Like its own Tear,

Because so long divided from the Sphear.

Restless it roules and unsecure,

Trembling lest it grow impure;

Till the warm Sun pitty it’s Pain,

And to the Skies exhales it back again.

So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray

Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day,

Could it within the humane flow’r be seen,

Remembring still its former height,

Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green;

And, recollecting its own Light,

Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express

The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.

In how coy a Figure wound,

Every way it turns away;

So the World excluding round,

Yet receiving in the Day.

Dark beneath, but bright above:

Here disdaining, there in Love.

How loose and easie hence to go:

How girt and ready to ascend.

Moving but on a point below,

It all about does upwards bend.

Such did the Manna’s sacred Dew destil;

White, and intire, though congeal’d and chill.

Congeal’d on Earth: but does, dissolving, run

Into the Glories of th’ Almighty Sun.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).]

NÄCHTLICHE REGUNG

Horch, der Tanne Wipfel

Schlummertrunken bebt,

Wie von Geisterschwingen

Rauschend überschwebt.

Göttliches Orakel

In der Krone saust,

Doch die Tanne selber

Weiss nicht, was sie braust.

Mir auch durch die Seele

Leise Melodien,

Unbegriffne Schauer,

Allgewaltig ziehn:

Ist es Freudemahnung

Oder Schmerzgebot?

Sich allein verständlich

Spricht in uns der Gott.

VOR EINER GENZIANE

Die schönste der Genzianen fand ich

Einsam erblüht tief unten in kühler Waldschlucht.

O wie sie durchs Föhrengestrüpp

Heraufschimmerte mit den blauen, prächtigen Glocken:

Gewohnten Waldespfad

Komm’ ich nun Tag um Tag

Gewandelt und steige hinab in die Schlucht

Und blicke der schönen Blume tief ins Aug’...

Schöne Blume, was schwankst du doch

Vor mir in unbewegten Lüften so scheu,

So ängstlich?

Ist denn ein Menschenaue nicht wert

Zu blicken in ein Blumenantlitz?

Trübt Menschenmundes Hauch

Den heiligen Gottesfrieden dir,

In dem du atmest?

Ach, immer wohl drückt Schuld,

Drückt nagende Selbstanklage

Die sterbliche Brust und du, Blume, du wiegst

In himmlischer Lebensunschuld

Die wunderbaren Kronen:

Doch blicke nicht allzu vorwurfsvoll mich an!

Sieh, hab’ ich doch Eines voraus vor dir:

Ich habe gelebt:

Ich habe gestrebt, ich habe gerungen,

Ich habe geweint,

Ich habe geliebt, ich habe gehasst,

Ich habe gehofft, ich habe geschaudert;

Der Stachel der Qual, des Entzückens hat

In meinem Fleische gewühlt;

Alle Schauer des Lebens und des Todes sind

Durch meine Sinne geflutet,

Ich habe mit Engelchören gespielt, ich habe

Gerungen mit Dämonen.

Du ruhst, ein träumendes Kind,

Am Mantelsaum des Höchsten, ich aber;

Ich habe mich emporgekämpft

Zu seinem Herzen,

Ich habe gezernt an seinen Schleiern,

Ich habe ihn beim Namen gerufen,

Emporgeklettert

Bin ich auf einer Leiter von Seufzern,

Und hab’ ihm ins Ohr gerufen: ‘Erbarmung!’

O Blume, heilig bist du,

Selig und rein;

Doch heiligt, was er berührt, nicht auch

Der zündende Schicksalsblitz?

O, blicke nicht allzu vorwurfsvoll mich an,

Du stille Träumerin;

Ich habe gelebt, ich habe gelitten!

Robert Hamerling (1830-1889).

[Something of the same fusion of lyric flight and precision of form can be felt in the following poem:

THE MORNING-WATCH

O Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres,

And shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds!

All the long houres

Of night, and Rest

Through the still shrouds

Of Sleep, and Clouds,

This Dew fell on my Breast;

O how it Blouds,

And Spirits all my Earth! heark! In what Rings,

And Hymning Circulations the quick world

Awakes, and sings;

The rising winds,

‘And falling springs,

Birds, beasts, all things

Adore him in their kinds.

Thus all is hurl’d

In sacred Hymnes, and Order, The great Chime

And Symphony of nature. Prayer is

The world in tune,

A spirit-voyce,

And vocall joyes

Whose Eccho is heav’ns blisse.

O let me climbe

When I lye down! The Pious soul by night

Is like a clouded starre, whose beames though said

To shed their light

Under some Cloud

Yet are above,

And shine, and move

Beyond that mistie shrowd

So in my Bed

That Curtain’d grave, though sleep, like ashes, hide

My lamp, and life, both shall in thee abide.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).]

And to close, we shall introduce part of the Seventh Scene from my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation.

One is in a unique position when trying to give poetic form to the life of the super-sensible. For, to begin with, one seems to be withdrawing far from the solid ground of external reality. One is thus exposed to the additional danger, that anyone not readily familiar and quick with spiritual matters takes our intention to be allegorical or symbolic. Neither symbol nor allegory has any place in the aesthetic viewpoint arising from the sort of perception we advocate here. It is assuredly no more the abstractions of symbolism than it is a straw-stuffed allegory that we attempt, but a living portrayal of perceptions actually more distinct than our ordinary sense-perceptions, because apprehended by the soul directly, unmediated by bodily organs. Only for someone unable to rouse these perceptions to life in himself do they seem abstract or hollow. I hope to limit my remarks on this subject to a few words, for it does not do to dwell over much on one’s own accomplishments. These Mystery Plays concern the spiritual and soul development of Johannes Thomasius, who is to be brought little by little to a direct super-sensible experience of the spiritual world. This has to a certain extent been achieved when once he has succeeded in overcoming a range of inner obstacles, and made various advances. There then comes a moment at which he finds, in what has hitherto been known to him as the external world of the senses and the intellect (which infiltrates the senses only as the thinnest and most abstract spirituality), he comes upon a pervading activity of concrete spiritual beings and concrete spiritual events. The occurrences in a human soul who reaches this stage of initiation are complex. Everything so far experienced in light or sound, or in the other elements of the external world, figures for the higher mode of experience in a different guise. It is actually like a transformation in which the world is experienced as a drawing together and struggling up of the soul-forces of thinking, feeling and willing to another form of existence. As to how these soul-forces share in such a transformation of man, and how this participation stands in intimate relation to the entire cosmos – that is what is presented in the scene from the Mystery Drama.

One of the characters – Maria – who has raised her life up into the spiritual, describes first how those forces come together which are to inspire the soul’s individual forces. Philia, Astrid and Luna are seen as the powers of the soul which hold sway in real, living people, and play a part in inspiring the man Johannes Thomasius. What the human soul may come to be, out of the whole world, out of the totality of the world what it can become in the moment that true understanding of spiritual life arises there: that is the subject of this representation. While one apparently withdraws in such a representation more than ever from the ground of reality, yet (as who should know better than their creator?) the characters formed in this way actually stand before the soul no less concretely than any external thing. Many people, of course, will not be drawn into such matters: they call everything allegorical that leads beyond sense-perception. In defence, Hamerling asked in his Ahasver: Can anyone help me out of this predicament – that Nero stands here and symbolizes cruelty? We introduce symbolism only to the extent that reality itself is a kind of symbol. It is exactly when we come to shape spiritual forms that we feel how every detail, down to the minuter shades, has been directly experienced. And we perceive a spiritual entity of this kind not in concepts, but in words, in nuances of sound. No-one, I believe, could create out of the energies of the spirit and attain to that degree of life who cannot himself enter vitally into language. He may then employ the spirit of language, with its wonderful inner wisdom, its wonderful formation of feeling and its impulses of will, to that end – so as to grasp things in their particularity. If he cannot put to use those unconscious spiritual pulsations which proceed from everyday life, he will not be able to avail himself of the language to present the spiritual world. We need not grow less poetic because our presentations take us into the spiritual world. For there we enter the native country of poetry and art.

All poetry has originated from the soul and spirit. Since, therefore, man finds himself confronted by the spiritual essences of things, the lyric flight, the epic power and the dramatic form that live in him can never be lost. These cannot be destroyed if the art of poetry returns, as to its own proper home, to the realm of the spirit.

From The Soul’s Probation, Scene 2: [Note 28]

MARIA: Ihr, meine Schwestern, die ich

In Wesenstiefen finde,

Wenn meine Seele sich erweitet,

Und in die Weltenfernen

Sich selbst geleitet,

Entbindet mir die Seherkräfte

Aus Aetherhöhen,

Und führet sie auf Erdenpfade;

Dass ich im Zeitensein

Mich selbst ergründe,

Und die Richtung mir geben kann

Aus alten Lebensweisen

Zu neuen Willenskreisen.

PHILIA: Ich will erfüllen mich

Mit strebendem Seelenlicht

Aus Herzenstiefen;

Ich will eratmen mir

Belebende Willensmacht

Aus Geistestrieben;

Dass du, geliebte Schwester,

In alten Lebenskreisen

Das Licht erfühlen kannst.

ASTRID: Ich will verweben

Sich fühlende Eigenheit

Mit ergebenem Liebewillen;

Ich will entbinden

Die keimenden Willensmächte

Aus Wunschesfesseln

Und dir das lähmende Sehnen

Verwandeln in findendes Geistesfühlen;

Dass du, geliebte Schwester,

In fernen Erdenpfaden

Dich selbst ergriinden kannst.

LUNA: Ich will berufen entsagende Herzensmächte,

Und will erfestigen tragende Seelenruhe;

Sie sollen sich vermählen

Und kraftendes Geistesleuchten

Aus Seelengründen heben;

Sie sollen sich durchdringen,

Und lauschendem Geistgehör

Die Erdenfernen zwingen;

Dass du, geliebte Schwester,

In weitem Zeitensein

Die Lebensspuren finden kannst.

MARIA (after a pause):

Wenn ich mich entreissen kann

Verwirrendem Selbstgefühl,

Und mich euch geben darf:

Dass ihr mein Seelensein

Mir spiegelt aus Weltenfernen:

Vermag ich zu lösen mich

Aus diesem Lebenskreise

Und kann ergründen mich

In andrer Daseinsweise.

(a longer pause and then the following)

In euch, ihr Schwestern, schau’ ich Geisteswesen,

Die Seelen aus dem Weltenall beleben.

Ihr könnt die Kräfte, die in Ewigkeiten keimen

Im Menschen selbst zur Reife bringen.

Durch meiner Seele Tore dürft’ ich oft

Den Weg in eure Reiche finden,

Und Erdendaseins Urgestalten

Mit Seelenaugen schauen.

Bedürftig bin ich eurer Hilfe jetzt,

Da mir obliegt, den Weg zu finden

Von meiner gegenwärtigen Erdenfahrt

In langvergangne Menschheitstage.

Entbindet mir das Seelensein vom Selbstgefühl

In seinem Zeitenleben.

Erschliesset mir den Pflichtenkreis

Aus meiner Vorzeit Lebensbahnen.

From The Soul’s Probation, Scene 2:

MARIA: You, my sisters,

I find when in the depths of being

my soul, expanding, guides itself

into the reaches of the universe.

Release for me the powers of seeing

out of etheric heights

and lead them down to earthly paths

so that I may explore and find myself

in course of time

and give direction to myself

to change old ways of life

into new spheres of will.

PHILIA: I will imbue myself

with striving light of soul

out of the heart’s own depths;

I will breathe in

enlivening power of will

out of the spirit’s urging;

that you, beloved sister,

within old spheres of life

may feel and sense the light.

ASTRID: I will weave into one

a selfhood’s feeling of itself

with love’s forebearing will;

I will release

the burgeoning powers of will

from fetters of desire,

transform your languid yearning

to certainty of spirit sensing;

that you, beloved sister,

on paths of earth far distant

explore and find your Self.

LUNA: I will call forth renouncing strength of heart

and will confirm enduring soul-repose.

These shall unite and raise

empowering spirit light

out of the depths of soul;

they shall pervade each other

and shall subdue far distances of earth

to the listening spirit ear;

that you, beloved sister,

in time’s wide ranges

may find the traces of your life.

MARIA (after a pause):

When I can tear myself away

from the bewildering sense of Self

and give myself to you

so that you reflect to me my soul

from world-wide distances:

then I can free myself

out of this sphere of life

and can explore and find myself

in other states of being.

(a long pause, then the following)

In you, my sisters, I see spirit beings

that quicken souls out of the cosmos’ life.

You bring to full maturity in man himself

the forces germinating in eternities.

Through portals of my soul I often

could find my way into your realm

and could behold with inner eyes

the archetypes of earth existence.

I now must ask your help:

it has become my duty

to find the way that leads

from present life on earth

to long past ages of mankind.

Release my soul-life from its sense of self

in time-enclosed existence.

Open for me the sphere of duty, brought

from my life journey in ancient days.

Trans. R. and H. Pusch.