The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I tried to show how the anthroposophical world-conception stresses, more intensively than is possible under the influence of materialism, the artistic element; and how Anthroposophy feels about architecture, about the art of costuming (though this may call forth smiles), and about sculpture as dealing artistically with the form of man himself, whose head, in a certain sense, points to the whole human being.

Let us review the most important aspects of this threefold artistic perception of the world. In architectural forms we see what the human soul expects when it leaves the physical body at death or otherwise. During earth life the soul is (so I said) accustomed to enter into spatial relations with its environment through the physical body, and to experience spatial forms. But these are only outer forms. When at death the human soul leaves the physical world, it tries, as it were, to impress its own form on space; looks for the lines, planes and forms which can enable it to grow out of space and into the spiritual world. These are the forms of architecture insofar as they are artistic. Thus, if we would understand architecture's artistic element we must consider the soul's space-needs after it has left the three-dimensional body and three-dimensional world.

The artistic element in costuming represents something else; and I have described the joy of primitive people in their garments, and their sense—on dipping down into the physical body—of finding in it a sheath which did not harmonize with what they had experienced during their sojourn in the spiritual world; and how out of this deprivation there arose an instinctive longing to create clothes which in color and pattern corresponded to their memory of pre-earthly existence. The costumes of primitive peoples represent what might be called an unskillful copying of the astral nature of man as it existed before he entered earthly life.

Thus a contrast. Whereas architecture shows the human soul's striving on its departure from the body, the art of costuming shows the human soul's striving after descent into the physical world.

Which brings us to a consideration of sculpture.

If we feel, intimately, the significance of the formation of man's head (my last point yesterday) as a metamorphosis of his entire body formation minus head, during his previous incarnation; if we see it as the work of the higher hierarchies on the force relationship of a previous life, then we understand the head, especially its upper part. If, on the other hand, we see correctly the middle of man's head, his nose and lower eyes, then we understand how this part is adapted to his chest formation, for the nose is connected with the chest's breathing. And if we see correctly the lower head, mouth and chin, then we understand that, even in the head, there is a part adapted to the purely earthly. In this way we can understand the whole human form. Furthermore, the super-sensible human being manifests himself directly in the arching of the upper skull, and the protrusion or recession of the lower skull, the facial parts. For an intimate connection exists between the vaulting of the head and the heavens; also an inner connection between the middle of the face and everything circling the earth as air and ether; also between mouth and chin and man's limb and metabolic system, the last an indication of how man is fettered to earth. In this way we can understand the whole human form as an imprint of the spiritual on the immediate present; which means seeing man artistically.

To sum up: in sculpture we behold, spiritually, the human being as he is placed into the present; in architecture we behold something connected with his departure from the body; and in the art of costuming something connected with his entrance into that body. Which means a sharp contrast: whereas architecture begins with the erection of tombs, sculpture shows how man, through his earthly form's direct participation in the spiritual, constantly overcomes the earthly-naturalistic element, how, in every detail of his form and in its entirety, he is an expression of the spiritual.

Thus we have considered those arts which are concerned with spatial forms and which illustrate the different ways in which the human soul is related to the world through the physical body.

If we approach a step nearer the spaceless, we pass from sculpture to painting, an art experienced in the right way only if we take into full account its special medium.

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantean age, painting has assumed a character leading to naturalism. Its prime manifestation is the loss of a deeper understanding for color. The intelligence employed in contemporary painting is a falsified sculptural one. Painters see even human beings this way. The cause is space-perspective, an aspect of painting developed only after the fifth post-Atlantean period. Painters express through lines the fact that something lies in the background, something in the foreground; their purpose being to conjure up on canvas an impression of spatially formed objects. But in doing so they deny the first and foremost attribute of their special medium. A true painter does not create in space, but on the plane, in color, and it is nonsense for him to strive for the spatial.

Please, do not believe me so fantastic as to object to a feeling for space; in the evolution of mankind the development of spatial perspective on the plane was a necessity; that fact is self-evident. But it must now be overcome. This does not mean that in the future painters should be blind to spatial perspective, only that, while understanding it, they should return to color-perspective, employ color-perspective.

To accomplish this we must go beyond theoretic comprehension; the artistic impulse does not spring from theory; it requires something more forceful, something elemental. Fortunately it can be provided. For that purpose I suggest that you look again at some words of mine about the world of color as reported excellently by Albert Steffen in the weekly Das Goetheanum.¹ (The report reads better than the original lectures.) This is the first aspect.

I shall now deal with the second problem.

In nature we see objects which can be counted, weighed and measured; in short, objects dealt with in physics. They appear in various colors. Color, however—this should have become perfectly clear to anthroposophists—color is something spiritual. Now we do see colors in certain natural entities which are not spiritual; that is, in minerals. Recent physicists have made matters easier for themselves by saying that colors cannot inhere in dead substances because colors are mental; they exist within the mind only; outside, material atoms vibrating in dead matter affect eye, nerve, and something else undetermined; as a result of which colors arise in the soul.

This explanation shows physicists at a loss in regard to the problem of color. To throw light on it, let us consider from a certain aspect the colorful dead mineral world.

As pointed out, we do see colors in purely physical things which can be counted, measured, weighed on scales. But what is perceived in physics does not give us colors. We may employ number, measure and weight to our heart's content: we will not arrive at color. That is why physicists say that colors exist only in the mind.

I would like to explain by way of an image. Picture to yourselves that I hold in my left hand a red sheet, in my right a green one, and that with these colored sheets I carry out certain movements. First I cover the red with the green, then the green with the red, making these motions alternately; and in order to give them more character do something additional: move the green upward, the red downard. Say I have today carried out this maneuvre. Now let three weeks pass, at which time I bring before you not a green and red sheet, but two white sheets, and repeat the movements. You immediately remember that, contrary to my present use of white sheets, three weeks ago I produced certain visual impressions with a red and a green sheet. For politeness' sake let us assume that all of you have such a vivid imagination that, in spite of my moving white sheets, you see before you, through recollecting phantasy, the colored phenomenon of three weeks ago, forget all about the white sheets and, because I carry out the same motions, see the same color harmonies called forth, three weeks ago, with the red and green. Because I carry out the same gestures, by association you see what you saw three weeks ago.

The case is similar when we see in nature, for instance, a green precious stone. Only, the jewel is not dependent on this moment's soul-phantasy; it appeals to a phantasy concentrated in our eye, for this human eye with its blood and nerve fibers is in truth constructed by phantasy; it is the result of an effective imagination. And inasmuch as our eye is an organ imbued with phantasy, we cannot perceive a green gem in any other way than that in which, in the immeasurably distant past, it was spiritually constructed out of the green color of the spiritual world. The moment we confront a green precious stone, we transport our eye back into ages long past, and green appears because at that time divine-spiritual beings created this substance through a purely spiritual green. The moment we see green, red, blue, yellow, or any other color in a precious stone, we look back into an infinitely distant past. For (to repeat for emphasis) in beholding colors, we do not merely perceive what is contemporary, we look back into distant time-perspectives. Thus it is quite impossible to see a colored jewel merely in the present, just as it is impossible, while standing at the foot of a mountain, to see in close proximity the ruin at its top; being removed from it, we have to see it in perspective.

In confronting a topaz, say, we look back into time-perspective; look back upon the primal foundation of earthly creation, before the Lemurian epoch of evolution, and see this precious stone created out of the spiritual; that is why it appears yellow. Physics (I have characterized a recent stand) does something absurd. It places behind the world swirling atoms which are supposed to produce colors within us, when all the time it is divine-spiritual beings, creative in the infinitely distant past, who call forth, through colored minerals, a living memory of primeval acts of creativity.

And we can press on to the plant world.

Every spring, when a green carpet of plants is spread over the earth, whoever is able to understand this emergence of greenness sees not merely the present, but also the ancient Sun existence when the plant world was created out of the spiritual, in greenness. We see both mineral and plant colors in the right way when they stimulate us to see in nature the gods' primeval creative activity.

This requires an artistic living with color, which involves experiencing the plane as such. If someone covers the plane with blue, we should sense a retreat, a drawing back; if with red or yellow, we should feel an approach, a pressing forward. In other words, we acquire color-perspective instead of linear perspective: a sense for the plane, for the withdrawal and surging forward of color. In painting, the linear perspective which tries to create an impression of something essentially sculptural upon the plane falsifies; what must be acquired is a sense for the movement of color: intensive rather than extensive. Thus, if a true painter wishes to depict something aggressive, something eager to jump forward, he uses yellow-red; if something quiet, something retreating into the distance, blue-violet. Intensive color-perspective! A study of the old masters reveals that some early Renaissance painters still had what belonged to all pre-Renaissance painters: a feeling for color-perspective. Only with the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean period did linear perspective displace color-perspective.

It is through color-perspective that painting gains a relationship to the spiritual. Strange that today painters chiefly ask themselves: Can we by rendering space more spatial transcend space? Then they try to depict, in a materialistic manner, a fourth dimension. But the fourth dimension can exist only through annihilation of the third, somewhat as debts annihilate wealth. For we do not, on leaving three-dimensional space, enter a four-dimensional space; or, better said, we enter a four-dimensional space which is two-dimensional, because the fourth dimension annihilates the third; only two remain as reality. If we rise from matter's three dimensions to the etheric element, we find everything oriented two-dimensionally, and can understand the etheric only if we conceive of it so. Now you may demur: Yes, but in the etheric I move from here to there, which is to say three-dimensionally. Very well, but the third dimension has no significance for the etheric, only the other two dimensions. The third dimension expresses itself through red, yellow, blue, violet, in the way explained; for in the etheric it is not the third dimension which changes, but color. Regardless of where the plane is placed, the colors change accordingly. Only then can we live with and in color; live two-dimensionally; rise from the spatial arts to those which, like painting, are two-dimensional. We overcome the merely spatial. Our feelings have no relation to the three space-dimensions; only our will. By their very nature, feelings are bound within two dimensions. That is why they are best represented by two-dimensional painting.

You see, we have to struggle free from three-dimensional matter if we would advance from architecture, costuming as an art, and sculpture. Painting is an art which man can experience inwardly. Whether he creates as a painter or just lives in and enjoys a painting, it is a soul event. He experiences inner by outer; experiences color-perspective. We cannot say, as in the case of architecture, that the soul is striving to create the forms it needs when it gazes back into the body; nor, as in the case of sculpture, that the soul is trying to depict man's shape in such a way that it is placed into space full of present meaning. None of this concerns painting. It makes no sense in painting to speak of anything as inside or outside; of the soul as inside or outside. In experiencing color the soul is within the spiritual. Really, what is experienced in painting—despite the imperfections of pigments—is the soul's free moving about in the cosmos.

With music it is different. Now we do not merge inner with outer, but enter directly into that which the soul experiences as the spiritual or psycho-spiritual; leave space entirely. Music is line-like, one-dimensional; is experienced one-dimensionally in the line of time. In music man experiences the world as his own. Now the soul does not assert something it needs upon descending into or leaving the physical; rather it experiences something which lives and vibrates here and now, on earth, in its own soul-spirit nature. Studying the secrets of music, we can discover what the Greeks, who knew a great deal about these matters, meant by the lyre of Apollo. What is experienced musically is really man's hidden adaptation to the inner harmonic-melodic relationships of cosmic existence out of which he was shaped. His nerve fibers, ramifications of the spinal cord, are marvelous musical strings with a metamorphosed activity. The spinal cord culminating in the brain, and distributing its nerve fibers throughout the body, is the lyre of Apollo. Upon these nerve fibers the soul-spirit man is “played” within the earthly sphere. Thus man himself is the world's most perfect instrument; and he can experience artistically the tones of an external musical instrument to the degree that he feels this connection between the sounding of strings of a new instrument, for example, and his own coursing blood and nerve fibers. In other words, man, as nerve man, is inwardly built up of music, and feels it artistically to the degree that he feels its harmonization with the mystery of his own musical structure.

Thus, in devoting himself to the musical, man appeals to his earth-dwelling soul-spirit nature. The discovery by anthroposophical vision of the mysteries of this nature will have a fructifying effect, not just on theory, but upon actual musical creation.

In discussing the various arts I have not been theorizing. It is not theorizing when I say: In beholding the lifeless material world in color we stir cosmic memory: and through anthroposophical vision learn to understand how in precious stones, in colored objects of all kinds, we call to mind the creative acts of the primordially active gods; and feel, therefore, the enthusiasm which only an experience of the spiritual kindles. This is no theorizing; this permeates the soul with inner force. Nor does any theory of art emerge therefrom. Only artistic creation and enjoyment are stimulated. For true art is an expression of man's search for a relationship with the spiritual, whether the spiritual longed for when his soul leaves the body, or the spiritual which he desires to remember when he dips down into a body, or the spiritual to which he feels more related than to his natural surroundings, or the spiritual as manifested in colors when outside and inside lose their separateness and the soul moves through the cosmos, freely, swimming and hovering, as it were, experiencing its own cosmic life, existing everywhere; or (our last consideration) the spiritual as expressed in earth life, in the relationship between man's soul-spirit and the cosmic, in music.

Which summary brings us to the world of poetry and drama.

Often in the past I have called attention to the way poetry was felt in ancient times when man still had a living relationship to the spirit-soul world, when poetry, including poetic dramas, by reason of that fact, was artistic through and through. Yesterday I pointed out that in artistic ages it would not have been considered sensible for playwrights to copy on the stage the way Smith and Jones move in the market place of Gotham or at home, inasmuch as their movements and conversation, there, are much richer than in any stage representation; that it would have seemed absurd, for instance, to the Greeks of the classical age; they never could have understood naturalism's strange attempt to imitate nature right down to “realistic” stage sets. Just as it would not be true painting if we tried to project color into three-dimensional space instead of honoring its own dynamics, so it is not stage art if we have no artistic feeling for its own particular medium. Actually a thorough-going naturalism would preclude a stage room with three walls and an audience in front of it. There are no such rooms; in winter we would freeze to death in them. To act entirely naturalistically one would have to close the stage with a fourth wall and play behind it. But how many people would buy tickets to a play enacted on a stage closed on four sides? Though speaking in extremes, I refer to a reality.

Now I must draw your attention again to the way Homer begins his Iliad: “Sing, oh Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, Son of Peleus.” This is no mere phrase. Homer experienced in a positive way the need to raise himself up to the level of a super-earthly divine-spiritual being who would make use of his body in artistic creation. Epic poetry points to the upper gods, those considered female because they transmitted fructifying forces: the Muses. Homer had to offer himself up to these upper gods in order to bring to expression, in the events of his great poem, the thought element of the cosmos. Epic poetry always means letting the upper gods speak; means putting one's person at their disposal. Homer begins his Odyssey this way: “Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who wandered afar,” meaning Odysseus. Never would it have occurred to him to impose upon the people something which he himself had seen or thought out. Why do what everybody can do for himself? Homer put his organism at the disposal of the upper divine-spiritual beings that they might express through him how they perceived earthly human relationships. Out of such a collaboration arises epic poetry.

And the art of the drama? It originated—we need only to think of the period prior to Aeschylus—from a presentation of the god Dionysus working up out of the depths. At first it was Dionysus alone, then Dionysus and his helpers, a chorus grouped around him as a reflection of what is carried out, not by human beings, but by the subterranean gods, gods of will, making use of human beings to bring to manifestation not the human but divine will. Only gradually, in Greece, as man's connection with the spiritual fell into oblivion, did the divine action depicted on the stage turn into purely human action. The process took place between the time of Aeschylus, when divine impulses still penetrated human beings, and the time of Euripides, when men appeared on the stage as men, though still bearing super-earthly impulses. Real naturalism became possible only in modern times.

In poetry and drama man must find his way back to the spiritual.

Thus we may say in summary: Epic poetry turns to the upper gods, drama to the lower gods. True drama shows the divine world lying below the earth, the chthonic world, rising up onto the earth for the reason that man can make himself into an instrument for the action of this netherworld. In contrast, epic poetry sees the upper spiritual world sink down; the Muse descends and, making use of man through his head, proclaims man's earthly accomplishments or else those out in the universe. In drama the subterranean will of the gods rises up from the depths, making use of human bodies in order to give free reign to their wills.

One might say: Here we have the fields of earthly existence: out of the clouds descends the divine Muse of epic art; out of earthly depths there rise, like vapor and smoke, the Dionysian, chthonic divine-spiritual powers, working their way upward through men's wills. We have to penetrate earth regions to see how the dramatic element rises like a volcano, and the epic element sinks down from above, like a blessing of rain. And it is right here on this same plane with ourselves that the cosmic element is enticed and made gay, joyous, full of laughter, through nymphs and fire spirits; right here that the messengers of the upper gods cooperate with the lower: right here in the middle region that man becomes lyrical. Now man does not feel the dramatic element rising up from below, nor the epic element sinking down from above; he experiences the lyrical element living on the same plane as himself: a delicate, sensitive, spiritual element, which does not rain down upon forests nor erupt like volcanoes, splitting trees, but, rather, rustles in leaves, expresses joy through blossoms, wafts gently in wind. In whatever on our own plane lets us divine the spiritual in matter, stretching hearts, pleasantly stimulating breath, merging our souls with outer nature, as symbol of the soul-spiritual world—in all this there lives and weaves a lyrical element which looks up, with happy countenance, to the upper gods, and down, with saddened countenance, to the gods of the underworld. The lyrical can tense up into the dramatic-lyrical or quiet itself down into the epic-lyrical. For the hallmark of the lyrical, whatever its form, is this: man experiences what lives and weaves in the far reaches of the earth with his middle nature, his feeling nature.

You see, if we really enter the spirituality of world phenomena, we gradually transform dead abstract concepts into a living, colorful, form-bearing weaving and being. Because what surrounds us lives in the artistic, mere intellectual activity can, almost unnoticed, be transformed into artistic activity. That is why we constantly feel a need to enliven impertinently abstract conceptual definitions—physical body, ether body, astral body, all such concepts, these impertinently rigid, philistine and horribly scientific formulations—into artistic color and form. This is an inner, not merely outer, need of Anthroposophy.

Therefore the hope may be expressed that all mankind will extricate itself from naturalism, drowned as it is in philistinism and pedantry through everything abstract, theoretical, merely scientific, practical without being really practical. Man needs a new impetus. Without this impulse, this swing, Anthroposophy cannot thrive. In an inartistic atmosphere it goes short of breath; only in an artistic element can it breathe freely. Rightly understood, it will lead over to the genuinely artistic without losing any of its cognitional character.

• 1. Vol. II, 1922, No. 7-9: Vortraege Rudolf Steiner's ueber das Wesen der Farbe, (Rudolf Steiner's Lectures Concerning the Nature of Color.)

The last two lectures concentrated on artistic feeling and creation. I wished to call attention to the fact that anthroposophical contemplation leads to a particular manner of beholding the world, which must lead, in turn, to an inner vitalization of the arts, present and future. At the end of yesterday's lecture I stressed the fact that, by gaining a direct relation to the spiritual, a person can acquire the forces necessary for the creation, out of his innermost core, of true art. It has always been so. For true art stands beside real knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, genuine religious life. Through knowledge and religion man draws closer to the spiritual element in thought, feeling and will. Indeed, it is his inward experience of knowledge and religion, during an earth life, that brings about a sense of the validity of all that I discussed during the last two lectures. Looking at the physical surroundings akin to his physical body, he comes to realize that physicality is not the whole of his humanness. In all artistic and religious ages he has recognized this truth, saying to himself: Though I stand within earth existence, it contradicts that part of my human nature which was imaged forth from worlds quite different from the one in which I live between birth and death.

Let us consider this feeling I have just described in respect to cognition. Through thinking man strives to solve the riddles of existence. Modern man is very proud of the naturalistic knowledge which, for three or four centuries, now, while marvelous relationships in nature were traced out, has been accumulating. But, precisely in regard to these relationships, present-day natural science must say to itself on reflection, with all intensity: What can be learned through the physical senses leads to a door which locks out world mysteries and cosmic riddles. And we know from anthroposophical contemplation that, to pass this door, to enter the realms where we may perceive what lies behind the outer world, we must overcome certain inner dangers. If a human being is to tread the path leading through this door, he must first attain, in his thoughts, feelings and will, a certain inner steadiness. That is why entering this door is called passing the Guardian of the Threshold. If real knowledge of the spiritual-divine foundation of the world is to be acquired, attention must be called not only to the dangers mentioned, but also to the fact that no person penetrates this door in the state of consciousness brought about between birth and death by merely natural conditions.

Here we should consider the tremendous seriousness of cognition. Also the abyss lying between the purely naturalistic world and the world we must seek if we would enter our true home and discover what bears a relationship to our inmost being. For in the merely naturalistic world we feel ourselves strangers in regard to this inmost being. On entering physical existence at birth, inevitably we carry with us our eternal-divine being; but if its source is to be recognized, we must first become aware of the abyss lying between earth life and the regions of cognition which we must enter in order to know our own being.

An understanding of cognition highlights, on the one hand, the gravity of the search for a true relationship with the spiritual world; on the other, it helps us to recognize that, if earthly existence were immediately satisfactory, if what modern naturalism dreams to be the case were so, namely, that man is merely the highest pinnacle of natural phenomena, there would exist no religious human beings. For in such circumstances man would have to be satisfied with earthly existence.

Religion aims at something entirely different. It presents a reality which reconciles man to earthly existence, or consoles him beyond earthly existence, or perhaps awakens him to the full meaning of earthly existence by making him aware that he is more than anything which earthly existence implies.

Thus the anthroposophical world-conception is capable of giving a strong impetus to cognition as well as to religious experience. In the case of cognition it stresses the fact that one must travel a road of purification before passing the gate to the spiritual world. On the other hand, it stresses the truth that religious life leads far beyond the facts observable by a person with only ordinary earthly consciousness. For Anthroposophy recognizes that the Mystery of Golgotha, the earth-life of Christ Jesus, though placed among historical events comprehensible to the senses, can be comprehended in its fulness only supersensibly.

Fortunately the abyss on the edge of which man lives, the abyss opening out before him in religion and cognition, can be bridged. But not by contemporary religion, nor yet by a cognition, a science, derived wholly from the earth.

It is here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms, colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance. What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out, spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the physical-earthly.

This became evident at that moment of world-evolution when human beings were faced in all seriousness with the great question of art; became evident in the grand style during the time of Goethe and Schiller. A glance at their struggles will corroborate this statement. Much that is pertinent, here, has already been quoted in past years, in other connections. Today—to provide a basis for discussion—I shall cite only a few instances.

During the eighteenth century there emerged a guiding idea which Goethe and Schiller themselves accepted: namely, the differentiation between romantic and classical art. Espousing classicism, Goethe tried to become its nurturer by familiarizing himself with the secrets of great Greek art. His Italian journey was fulfilment of his longing. In Germany, that northern land, he felt no possibility of reconciling, artistically, the divine-spiritual hovering, before his soul and the physical-sensory standing before his senses. Greek art, so abundant in Italy, and now deeply perceived, taught him the harmonization he lacked when he left Weimar for Italy. The impression he makes in describing his experience is—I must coin a paradoxical expression—at once heroic and touching.

In art Goethe was a classicist in the sense (if we use words which satisfactorily express his own idea) that he directed his gaze primarily toward the external, the sensory-real. But he was too profound a spirit not to feel a discrepancy between the sensory and that which derives from other realms, home of his soul. Sense-evidence should be purified, elevated through shaping, through an appropriate treatment. Thus Goethe the artist distilled from natural forms and human actions an element which, although presented imperfectly in the sensory-physical, could be brought to clarity without infidelity to the physical. In other words, he let the divine-spiritual shine through purified sensory forms. Always it was his earnest endeavor not to take up the spiritual lightly in his writings, not to express the divine-spiritual offhandedly. For he was convinced that romanticism can make only a facile, all-too-easy introduction of the spiritual into the physical; not deal with it comprehensively and effectively.

Never was it his intention to say: The gods live; I resort to symbolism to prove my conviction that the gods live. He did not feel thus. On the contrary, he felt somewhat as follows: I see the stones, I behold the plants, I observe the animals, I perceive the actions of human beings. To me all these creations have fallen away from the divine-spiritual. Nevertheless, though their earthly forms and colors show a desertion from the divine-spiritual, I must, by my treatment, lift them to a level where they can reflect, out of their own natures, that same divine-spiritual. I need not become unfaithful to nature—this Goethe felt—just purify seceded nature by artistic fashioning; then it will express the divine-spiritual. This was Goethe's conception of classicism; of the main impulse of Greek art, of all true art.

Schiller was unable to go along with this viewpoint. Because his gaze was directed idealistically into the spiritual world, he used physical things as indicators only. Thus he was the dayspring of post-Goethean romantic poetry. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the reversal of method. For romantic poetry, as opposite pole to the classicism striven for by Goethe, despaired, as it were, of elevating the earthly-sensory to the divine; being satisfied to use it only as a more or less successful way of pointing to the divine-spiritual.

Let us look at the classicism of Goethe, composer of these beautiful lines:

Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well:
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.
(“Wer Wissenschaft and Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.”)

Goethe, permeated by a conviction that every artist harbors the religious impulse, Goethe, to whom the trivially religious was repulsive because there lived in him a deep religious impulse, took the greatest pains to purify artistically the sensory-physical-earthly form to a point where it became an image of the divine-spiritual. Let us look at his careful way of working. He took up what was robustly earthly without feeling any necessity of changing it greatly to give it artistic form.

Consider, in this respect, his Goetz von Berlichingen. He treated the biography of this man objectively and with respect while dramatizing it, as demonstrated by the title of the first version: Geschichte Gott friedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert (History of Gottfried of Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, Dramatized). In other words, by changing only slightly the purely physical, he led it over into the dramatic; wishing, as artist, to part with the earth as little as possible; presenting it as a manifestation of the spiritual-divine world order.

Take another instance. Let us see how he approached his Iphigenie, his Tasso. He conceived these dramas, shaped their subject matter, poetically. But what happened then? He did not dare to give them their final form. In the situation in which he found himself, he, Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt and studied in Leipzig and Strassburg before going to Weimar, he, the Weimar-Frankfurt Goethe, did riot dare to finish these dramas. He had to go to Italy and walk in the light of Greek art to elevate the sensory-physical-earthly to a level where it could image forth the spiritual. Imagine the battle Goethe went through in order to bridge the abyss between the sensory-physical-earthly and divine-spiritual. It was like an illness when he left Weimar under cover of night, saying nothing to anybody, to flee to an environment in which he could master and elevate and spiritualize, as never in the north, the forms he worked with. His psychology is deeply moving. As I said before, it has about it something that might be called heroic-touching.

Let us go further. It is characteristic of Goethe—the paradox may strike you as peculiar—that he never finished anything. He began Faust in one great fling, but only the philistine Eckermann could induce him, in his old age, to bring this drama to a conclusion, and then it was only just barely possible for the author. For Goethe to bring his Faust to artistic form was a tremendous struggle which required the help of somebody else. Then take Wilhelm Meister. After its inception, he did not wish to finish. It was Schiller who persuaded him to do so. And if we scrutinize the matter, we might say: if only Schiller had not done so. For what Goethe then produced was not on the same level as his first sketch which would have remained a fragment. Take the second part: episodes are assembled. The writing is not all of a piece; it is not a uniform work of art. Now observe how—as in Pandora—Goethe strove to rise to the pinnacle of artistic creation by drawing his figures from the Greek world which he loved so much. Pandora remained a fragment, he could not complete it; the project was too vast for him to round it out. The serious, difficult task of the artist weighed upon his soul, and when he tried to idealize human life, to present it in the glory of the divine-spiritual, he could complete only the first part of the trilogy, the first drama: Die Natuerliche Tochter.

Thus in every possible way Goethe shows his predilection for the classical; always endeavoring, in his works, to purify the earthly physical to the point where it could spread abroad the radiance of the divine-spiritual. He struggled and strove, but the task was such that, apprehended deeply enough, it surpassed human forces, even Goethe's. We must say, therefore, that precisely in such a personality the arts with their grave world-mission appear in their full grandeur and power. What appeared, later, in romanticism is all the more characteristic when considered in the light of Goethe.

Last Thursday was the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Tieck, who was born on May 31, 1773, and died on April 28, 1853. Tieck—unfortunately little known today—was in a certain respect a loyal pupil of Goethe. He grew out of romanticism, out of what at the University of Jena during the nineties of the eighteenth century was regarded as as the modern Goethe problem. In his youth he had experienced the publication of Werther and of the first part of Faust. At Jena, together with Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, he struggled to solve the riddles of the world. In his immediate environment Ludwig Tieck felt the breath of Goethe's striving toward the classical, and in him we can see how spiritual life was still active at the end of the eighteenth, and during the first half of the nineteenth, century. With Schlegel, Tieck introduced Shakespeare into Germany; and as a personality he illustrates how Goethe's tremendous efforts were reflected in certain of his prominent contemporaries. Tieck felt the grandeur and dignity of art as a mighty cultural ideal. He looked about; he did not gather his life experiences in a narrowly circumscribed spot. After sitting at the feet of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the University of Jena, he journeyed through Italy and France. Then, after becoming acquainted with the world and philosophy, he strove, in a true Goethean manner, artistically to bridge the abyss between earthly and heavenly existence.

Of course he could not compete with Goethe's power and impetus. But let us look at one of Tieck's works: Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald's Journeys), written in the form of Wilhelm Meister. What are these Sternbald journeys? They are journeys of the human soul into the realm of art. The question pressing heavily upon Sternbald is this: How can I raise sense-reality to the radiance of the spiritual? At the same time Tieck—whose hundred-and-fiftieth birthday we ought to be celebrating—felt the seriousness which streams down upon art from the region of cognition and that of religious life. Great is the light which falls, from there, upon Ludwig Tieck's artistic creations. A novel which he wrote comparatively early in life bears the title William Lovell; and this character is under Tieck's own impression (received while sitting at the feet of Schelling and Fichte in Jena) of the extreme seriousness of the search for knowledge. Imagine the effect of such teachings upon a spirit as receptive as Tieck's. (Differently, though not less magnificently, they influenced Novalis.) In his younger years Tieck had passed through the rationalistic “free spirit” training of Berlin's supreme philistine Nikolai. It was therefore an experience of the very greatest importance when he saw how in Fichte and Schelling the human soul relinquished, as it were, all connection with outer physical reality and, solely through its own power, endeavored to find a path through the door to the spiritual world. In William Lovell Tieck depicts a human being who, entirely out of the forces of his own soul, subjectively, seeks access to the spirit. Unable to find in the physical-sensory the divine for which Goethe constantly strove through his classical art, William Lovell seeks it nevertheless, relying entirely on his own forces, and thereby becoming confused, perplexed in regard to the world and his own personality. Thus William Lovell loses his hold on life through something sublime, that is, through the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. In a peculiar way the book points out the dangers of cognition, through which, of necessity, men must pass. Tieck shows us how the cognitionally-serious can infuse the artistically-serious.

In his later years Ludwig Tieck created the poetic work: Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen (The Uprising in the Cevennes). What is his subject matter? Demonic powers which approach man, nature spirits which lay hold of him, possess him, drive him into religious fanaticism, and cause him to lose his way through the world. Oh, this Ludwig Tieck certainly felt what it means, on the one hand, to be dependent solely upon one's own personality and, on the other, to fall prey to elementals, gods of the elements. Hence overtones of gripping power in Tieck's works; for example in his Dichterleben (Life of the Poet) in which he describes how Shakespeare, as a thoroughly poetic nature, enters the world, how the world puts obstacles in his path, and how he stumbles into pitfalls. In Dichterleben Tieck discusses a poet's birth and all that earthly life gives him on a purely naturalistic basis. In Tod des Dichters (Death of the Poet) which deals with the last days of the Portuguese poet Camoens, he describes a poet's departure from life, his path to the gate of death. It is deeply moving how Tieck describes, out of the seriousness of the Goethe age, the beginning and end of an artist's life. What was great in Tieck was not his own personality, but rather his reflection of Goethe's spirit. Most characteristic, therefore, is his treatment of those “really practical people” who want to stand solidly on the earth without spiritual impulse in artistic presentation. Oh, there exists no more striking satire on novels about knights and robber barons than Tieck's Blaubart (Bluebeard). And, again, no more striking satire on the mawkishly emotional trying to be artistic than Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots). The woeful excess of sentiment which mutters of the divine-spiritual (a sentimentality illustrated by the affected Ifliand and babbling Kotzebue) he sends packing.

Ludwig Tieck reveals how the Goetheanism of the first half of the nineteenth century was mirrored in a receptive personality; how something like a memory of the great ancient periods played into the modern age; periods in which mankind, looking up to the divine-spiritual, strove to create, in the arts, memorials of the divine-spiritual. Such a personality represents the transition from an age still spiritually vital, at least in memory, to an age blinded by a brilliant natural-scientific world-conception and less brilliant life-practice; an age which will never find the spirit without the impetus which comes from direct spiritual perception, which is to say, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, as striven for by Anthroposophy.

Look, from this point of view, at the tremendous seriousness ensouling these writers. Not only Goethe but many others despaired of finding their way into the spiritual world through contemporary cultural life. Goethe did not rest until, in Italy, he had acquired an understanding of the way the Greeks penetrated the secrets of existence through their works of art. I have often quoted Goethe's statement: “It seems to me that, in creating their works of art, the Greeks proceeded according to nature's own laws, which I am now tracing.” Clearly, he believed that in their art the Greeks received from the gods something which enabled them to create higher works of nature, images of divine-spiritual existence. The followers of Goethe, still under his direct influence, felt compelled to return to ancient times, at least to ancient Greece, to attain to the spirit.

Herman Grimm, who in many ways still felt Goethe's living breath (I mentioned this in my last article in Das Goetheanum), said repeatedly that the ancient Romans resembled modern human beings; though they wore the toga, walked like moderns; whereas the ancient Greeks all seemed to have had the blood of the gods flowing through their veins. A beautiful, artistically felt statement! Indeed, it was only after the fifteenth century (I have often mentioned this) that man entered into materialism. It was necessary. We must not berate what the modern age brought. Had things stayed as they were, man would have remained deterministically dependent upon the divine spiritual world. If he was ever to become free, his passage into a purely material civilization was an historical necessity. In the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have described modern man's attitude in this respect. But the evening glow of the ancient spiritual life was still lighting up the sky in Goethe's time, indeed, right up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore his longing for Italy, his hope of finding there, through an echo from ancient Greece, something unattainable in his own civilization: the spirit. Goethe could not live without having seen Rome and a culture which, however antiquated, still enshrined the spiritual in the sensory-physical.

He was preceded in this mood by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a kind of personification of that evening-glow of ancient spiritual life. Goethe's appreciation of Winckelmann comes out in his marvelously beautiful book on this man and his century: a glorious presentation of the strivings of a personality longing for the spirit. Through this book one senses what Goethe felt vividly: that Winckelmann went to the south, to Rome, to find in ancient spirituality the spirit he missed in the present and restore it. Winckelmann was intoxicated by his search for spirituality: Goethe could feel that. And his book is superb precisely because he was permeated with that same longing. In Rome both men sensed, at last, something of the breath of ancient spirituality. There Winckelmann traced the mysteries of art to remnants of Greek artistic impulses and absorbed them into his soul; there Goethe repeated the experience. Thus it was in Rome that Goethe rewrote Iphigenie. He had fled with his northern Iphigenie to Rome in order to rewrite it and give it the only form he could consider classical. Here he succeeded. Which cannot be said of the works written after he returned home.

In all this we see Goethe the artist's profoundly serious struggle for spirituality. Only after he had discovered in Raphael's colors and Michelangelo's forms the results of what he considered genuine artistic experience could his own search come to fruition. Thus he represents the evening glow of a spirituality lost and no longer valid for modern man.

Permit me, now, to make a personal remark. There was a certain moment when I felt deeply what Winckelmann said when he traveled south to discover the secrets of art, and how Goethe followed in his footsteps. At the same moment I could not but feel strongly that the time of our surrender to the evening glow had passed; we must now search with all our might for a new unfolding of spiritual life, must give up seeking for what is past. All this I experienced at the destiny-allotted moment when, years ago, I had to deliver some anthroposophical lectures about the evolution of world and man in the very rooms where Winckelmann lived during his Roman sojourn; the very rooms where he conceived his thoughts about Italian and Greek art, and enunciated the comprehensive ideas which filled Goethe with the enthusiasm expressed in his book on Winckelmann. Here in Winckelmann's quarters the conviction permeated me that something new must be stated on the path to spiritual life. A strange connection of destiny.

With this personal remark I conclude today's observations.

I should like to supplement last week's lectures on art. Often I had to emphasize that the spiritual evolution of mankind has proceeded from the unity of science, art and religion. In present-day spiritual life we have science, art and religion separated, yet can look back into the time when these three streams flowed from a common source. That source is seen most clearly if we go back four or five thousand years to poetry during the primeval ages; or, rather, to what would today be called poetry. To fathom the poetry of the bearers of ancient culture (it is nonsense, our looking for this culture in present-day primitive peoples) we must study the spiritual development of mankind in those ancient times through the Mysteries.

Let us examine the times when human beings did not look to the earth, but out into the cosmos to find a content for their spiritual life, or to satisfy the deepest needs of their souls. At that period those with clairvoyant faculties, seeing the fixed stars and movements of the planets, considered everything on earth a reflection of events taking place in its cosmic environment. We need only remind ourselves how the ancient Egyptians measured by the rising of Sirius the significance for their lives of the river Nile; how they considered the Nile's influence a result of what could be fathomed only by studying the relationship between stars out there in the cosmos. To the Egyptians their interplay in cosmic space was mirrored, on earth, by the activity of the Nile. This is but one example among many. For the conception held sway that occurrences in definite locations on earth imaged forth the observable mysteries of the starry heavens. We must also be clear about the fact that in ancient times human beings beheld in the heavens things quite different from those now being investigated and calculated with so-called astro-mechanics and astro-chemistry.

Today we shall direct our attention to the way people expressed themselves through poetry during the period when they received spiritual content for their souls in the manner described.

I refer to an age when all the arts, except poetry, were but little developed. The other arts existed, to be sure, but in only a rudimentary state because the human beings of that time were deeply conscious of the fact that with the word, created out of their organisms' innermost secret, they could express something super-sensible, that language was fitted to express what appears in star-constellations and star-movements; far better fitted than the art-mediums using substances taken directly from the earth. For language originates in spiritual man—this they felt—and is therefore eminently adapted to what, from cosmic reaches, manifests here on earth. Poetry, then, was not an offspring merely of phantasy but of spiritual perception; and it was by this means that man learned what he in turn poured into the other arts. Poetry, which finds expression through words, was the medium by which man entered into soul-communion with the stars, the extra-earthly.

This soul-communion constituted the poetic mood. Through it man saw how thoughts not yet separated from objects gain pictorial expression in his vault-like head, a head resembling the firmament; how thought represents a spiritual firmament, a celestial vault; how thought is inherent throughout the cosmos. Individual thoughts were expressed through the relative positions of the stars, by the way the planets moved past each other. In those ancient times man—unlike the free man of a later age—did not think merely by virtue of his own inner force. In every thought-movement he felt the after-image of some star-movement, in every thought-form the after-image of a constellation. Thus his thinking transported him into stellar space. The sunlight which illumined the day, and which would seem to be blinding out in the cosmos, was not considered the guide to wisdom, not the guiding force of thought, but, rather, sunlight as reflected by the moon. The following is ancient Mystery wisdom: During the day we see light with the physical body, at night we do more; we see it gathered up by the silver chalice of the moon. And this sunlight, collected by the moon, was regarded as the soul's Soma drink. Enspirited thereby, the soul could conceive those thoughts which were the result, the image, of the starry heavens.

Thus man as thinker felt as though the force of his thinking were located not in his earthly organism, but out where the stars were circling and forming constellations; he felt his soul poured out into the entire universe. If he had investigated combinations and separations of thoughts, he would have looked, not for laws of logic, but for the paths and constellations of the stars in the nightly firmament. The laws and images of his thinking existed in the heavens.

When he became aware of his feeling, it was not the abstract feeling of which we speak today in our abstract time, but rather the concrete feeling closely united with such inner experiences as that of breathing and blood circulation, the vital interweaving of the interior of the human body. Thus he felt himself existing not only upon the physical earth, but in planetary space. He did not say: In the human organism millions of blood corpuscles circle, but rather: Mercury and Mars are crossing Sun and Moon. To repeat: he felt his soul poured out into the universe; felt that, while with his thoughts he abode among the fixed stars and their constellations, with his feelings he lived within the sphere of the moving planets. Only with his will did he feel himself on earth. Considering the terrestrial an image of the cosmic he said to himself: When the forces of Jupiter, Moon, Venus and Sun strike the earth and penetrate its soil in the solid, liquid and aeroform elements, then from these elements will impulses penetrate into the human being, just as thought impulses penetrate into him from the fixed stars, and feeling impulses from planetary movements.

By such awareness, man could transplant himself into the time of the beginnings of primeval art. What is primeval art? It is nothing other than speech itself (a fact little understood today). For our speech is fettered to the material-earthly; it no longer manifests what it was when human beings, feeling transported into the Zodiac, incorporated into themselves from zodiacal constellations the twelve consonants, and from the movements of the planets past the fixed-star constellations, the vowels. At that time human beings did not intend to express through speech what they experienced upon earth, but rather what the soul experienced when it felt transported into the cosmos; which is why, in ancient times, speech flowered into poetry. The last remnants of such poetry are contained in the Vedas and, more abstractly, in the Edda. These are after-images of what, in greater glory, in much greater sublimity and majesty, had arisen directly out of the formation of languages during those ages when human beings could still feel their own soul life intimately united with cosmic movement and experience.

What is felt of all this in present-day poetry?

Poetry would not be poetry—and in our time much poetry is no longer poetry—if certain aspects of man's communion with the cosmos had not been kept. What remains is whatever in speech-formation passes beyond the prose meanings of words into rhythm, rhyme and imagination. For true poetry never consists of what is stated literally. Into the prose content of a poem, whether written down or, better, recited or declaimed, there must sound rhythm, beat, imagination. This points to elements not contained in prose; to a background which, in every true poetic work, cannot be understood but must be guessed at, divined. It is only the prose content which can be understood by the mind. The fact that poetry conveys something lying outside its words, for which the words are but a means, the fact that poetry's aura of mood echoes cosmic harmony, melody, imagination, this fact, even today, makes poetry poetry. We still can divine what it meant for Homer when he said: “Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” It was not the poet singing; it was the soul which has communion with cosmic movements singing through him. In the planets live the Muses. The epic Muse lives in one particular planet. It was into this planet that Homer felt transported: Sing, oh Muse, resound for me, celestial melody of the planets; relate the deeds of earthly heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Idomeneus, Menelaus; sing of how events appear, not from the limited standpoint of earth, but when the gaze is directed from stellar space. Could one ever believe that the magnificent, comprehensive images of the Iliad stemmed from a “frog-perspective”? No, they have not even air-perspective; they have star-perspective. For that reason, the Iliad story could not be told as though man had solely to do with man, for the gods influence actions; side by side with human agents, they perform their deeds. This is not frog-perspective, this is the stellar-perspective to which the soul of the poet longed to rise when he said: “Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

From all this it can be clearly seen that the earthly medium which art—in the present case, poetry—makes use of is only a means to an end. The artistic element comes from treating the medium in such a way that the spiritual background, the spiritual worlds, may be divined; word, color, tone, form, being but pathways. If we wish to reawaken in mankind the true artistic mood, we must, to a certain degree, transport ourselves back into those ancient times when the celestial, the poetic mood, lived in the human soul. Then we will receive an impression of how best to use other media to carry art to the world of the spirit; which is what must happen if art wants to be art. Today our feeling has coarsened; we no longer sense what, in the not so distant past, has made art what it is.

For example, say that we see a mother carrying a little child: an elevating sight. We are familiar with the fact that the immediate form impression received therefrom is fixed only for a moment. The very next moment the mother's head position changes, the child in the mother's arms moves. What we have before us in the physical world is never still very long. Now let us look at Raphael's Sistine Madonna: the Mother and Child. Now, an hour from now, a year from now, it remains what it was; nothing has changed, neither child nor mother move. The moment has been fixed. That which in the physical world is still only a moment is here, so to speak, paralyzed. But it only seems so. Today we no longer feel what Raphael most certainly felt, asking, Am I allowed to do that? to fix with my brush a single moment? It is not a lie to convey an impression that the mother holds her child in the same manner today as yesterday? Is it right to impose upon anybody a prolongation of one particular moment? At present such a question appears paradoxical, even nonsensical. But Raphael asked it. And what answer arose in him? This artistic obligation: You must atone in a spiritual way for your sin against reality, must lift the moment out of time and space, for within time and space it is a palpable untruth; must, through what you paint on the plane of your canvas, bestow eternity, arouse feelings which transcend the earthly plane.

This is what is called today, abstractly, Raphael's idealistic painting. His idealism is his justification for so unnaturally fixing the moment. What he invokes through the depths of his colors, through color harmony, he attains by precluding—spiritualizing—the third dimension. His use of colors elevates to the spiritual what is otherwise seen, materialistically, in the third dimension. Thus that which is not on but behind the plane through blue, not on but in front of the plane through red, that which steps out of the plane in a spiritual way (whereas the third dimension steps out of the plane only in a material way), bestows eternity on the moment. Which is precisely what must be bestowed upon the moment. Without the eternal, art is not art.

I have known people—artists, mainly—who hated Raphael. Why? Because they could not understand what is stated above; because they wanted to stop short with an imitation of what the moment presents but which, the next moment, is gone. Once I became acquainted with a Raphael hater who saw the greatest progress in his own painting in the fact that he was the first who had dared to stop sinning against nature; that is, had dared to paint all the hairy spots of the naked body really covered with hair. How inevitable that a man who considered this great progress should have become a Raphael hater. But the episode also shows how badly our time has forsaken the spirit-borne element in art, the element which knows why painting is based on the plane. Spatial perspective must be comprehended; it was necessary in our freedom-endowed fifth post-Atlantean period to learn to understand spatial perspective, that which conjures up on the plane not the pictorial, but the sculptural. The real thing, however, is color-perspective which over-comes the third dimension not by foreshortening and focusing, but by a soul-spiritual relationship between colors, say, between blue and red, or blue and yellow. Painting must acquire a color-perspective which overcomes space in a spiritual fashion. Thus can the artistic be brought back to what it was when it linked man directly to spiritual worlds.

At that time man felt the harmony between science, religion and art. This perception must again be aroused. An echo of it lived in Goethe; that was what made him so great. True, man in his freedom had to experience those three as separated: science, art, religion. But the division has made him lose the profundity of all three; above all, he has lost communion with the cosmos.

One need only exaggerate today's relation between art and science, between poetry and science. You may say I need not carry the problem to extremes to show the contemporary mis-relationship between poetry, art and science. But in a radical case the whole mis-relationship becomes clear. So I cite a radical case:

Once, in a certain city, there took place a meeting of scientists to discuss some great materialistic problems. You know the tremendous seriousness with which such meetings deal with scientific problems; a seriousness so great, no individual dares to approach it with his personality. He therefore places a lectern in front of him, lays his manuscript on it, and reads a paper; or rather, one scientist after another reads a paper. Personality is shoved aside. So strongly does this seriousness act, it is withdrawn from the individual and placed on the lectern; extremely serious! At such meetings every face looks grave. To be sure, they look like reflections of the lectern; but very serious indeed! At this particular meeting the chairman turned to a group of poets with the request that they create, out of their art, poems which could be launched, between courses, at the banquet to follow. Thus the gentlemen—perhaps there were also ladies—went from this serious meeting to a dinner party where poems were presented making fun, satirically, of the various sciences. You see the misrelation between science and art. First the scientists dealt very seriously with the position of a June bug's mandible, or the chromosomes of a June bug's sperm; then, between meat and dessert, poems were read which satirized this very research. First the gentlemen went to extremes of seriousness, then laughed. There was no inner relationship. You might criticize my citing so extreme an example of our civilization. I cite it because it is characteristic, because it shows in a radical manner the present-day relationship between cognition and art, namely, no relationship at all. The gentlemen who made poems for the banquet understood nothing of the scientific papers. It is not quite possible to state the reverse, namely, that the worthy scientists did not understand the poems, although the poets assumed this, for they considered their work profound. But there is not much to be understood in such poetry and it may, therefore, be inferred that even the illustrious gathering understood it in some degree.

It is highly important for our time to observe how a homogeneous human spiritual life has been split into three parts which have fallen away from each other. For there is now a most urgent necessity to recompose the whole. If a philosopher speculates today about unity and doubleness, monism and dualism, he does so with a neutral mind, marshaling abstract concepts in defence of the one or the other. Both viewpoints can be proved equally well. In the ages whose relationship to art has just been sketched, a discussion of unity or duality, of the one with or without the other, aroused all the forces of men's soul. Whether the world sprang from an undivided source, or whether, on the contrary, good and evil are two divided original powers, the battle between monism and dualism was in bygone ages an artistic-religious concern which aroused all the forces of the human soul, and upon which man felt that his welfare, his bliss, depended. Though in former times he considered these questions closely bound up with his salvation, today he speaks of them with indifference. If we do not acquire a breath of the artistic-religious-cognitional soul mood which once held sway, there will be no impulse toward the truly great in art.

Still another feeling lived in those ages. People spoke of the Soma drink, of sunlight poured into the silver moon-chalice, the reality with which they filled their souls in order to understand the secrets of the cosmos. Speaking of the Soma drink, they felt themselves in direct soul communion with the cosmos. Soul experiences took place simultaneously on earth and in the cosmos. People felt that the gods revealed themselves through fixed stars and orbiting planets. By forming images of themselves on earth, the fixed star constellations and planetary movements made it possible for the soul to experience a cosmic element. If it drank the Soma drink and carried out sacrifices in a ritualistic-artistic-cognitional manner, the soul gave back to the gods, in the rising smoke to which it entrusted the religious-artistic-poetic, word, what the gods needed for continued world creation. For the gods did not create man in vain; he exists on earth in order that something which can be achieved only by man may be used by the gods for further world creation. Man is on earth because the gods need him. He is on earth so that he may think, feel and will what lives in the cosmos. If he does it in the right way, the gods can take this changed thing and implant it into the configuration of the world.

Thus man—if in sacrifice and art he gives back what the gods gave him—cooperates in building the cosmos. He has a soul-connection with cosmic evolution.

If we permeate ourselves with a conception of this relationship within spiritual-physical cosmic evolution, we can apply it to the present world. There we see a cognition which wishes only to fashion matter, and which applies earthly laws and calculations even to astro-chemistry and astronomy; a cognition—the so-called scientific one—which holds good only for earth evolution. But this cognition will cease to be of significance to the degree that the earth is transformed into Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. To repeat: today “science” has only an earthly meaning; its purpose is to help human beings to become free here on earth; but the gods cannot use this science for the continued cosmic creation.

Abstract thoughts are the ultimate abstraction, the corpse of the spirit world. What is carried out scientifically has meaning only for the earth. Having acted on earth as thought, it is shattered, buried; it does not live on.

In truth, what Ursula Karin, grandmother of the poet Adalbert Stifter, told him about the sunset glow belongs more intensively to the cosmos than what is to be read today in scientific books. Take everything in those books about the way sunlight acts on clouds to produce the evening glow, collect everything described there as natural laws: it has an earthly significance only. The gods cannot gather it up from earth to use it in the cosmos. Adalbert Stifter's grandmother said to the boy: “Child, what is the evening glow? Child, when it appears, the Mother of God is hanging out her clothes; she has so many to hang out on the heavenly dome.”

This is an utterance on which the gods can draw for the further development of the world. Modern science tries to describe in precise concepts what exists now. But this will never become future; it is of the present. But Adalbert Stifter's grandmother, having preserved much of what lived in ancient souls, said something about which a modern scientist could only smile. He might consider it beautiful, but would have no inkling of the fact that her words are of greater significance for the cosmos than all his vaunted science. From whatever is useful in this sense, from whatever creates not space-and-time thoughts but eternally-active thoughts, all true art has arisen. Just as the imagination of Adalbert Stifter's grandmother, which made him a poet, is related to a dry materialistic conception, so Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which transcends the moment, which seizes the moment for the eternal, is related to any mother with her child seen here on the physical earth.

This is what I wished to add to our previous considerations, hoping to deepen them.

Today I would like to examine certain other aspects of our subject.

I have often dealt with the genius of language, and you know from my book Theosophy that we refer to real spiritual entities when we speak of spiritual beings in an anthroposophical context. Thus “genius of language” designates the spiritual entity behind any specific language, an entity with whom man can become familiar and through whom he can receive, from the spiritual world, strength to express his thoughts which, at the outset, are present in his earthly self as a dead heritage from that higher world. It is, therefore, appropriate for anthroposophical students to seek, in the formation of language, a meaning which is independent of man because rooted in the spirit.

I have already drawn attention to the peculiar way the German language designates the beautiful and its opposite. We speak of the opposite of the beautiful (das Schoene) as the ugly or hateful (das Haessliche). Were we to denote the beautiful in the same way we would call it—since the opposite of hate is love—the lovely or loving. As it is, we make a significant difference. In German the word beautiful (das Schoene) is related to shining (das Scheinende). The beautiful shines; brings its inner nature to the surface. It is the distinguishing quality of the beautiful not to hide itself, but to carry its essence into outer configuration. Thus beauty reveals inwardness through outer form; a shining radiates outward into the world. If we were to speak, in this sense, of beauty's opposite, we would call it the concealed or non-radiant, that which holds back its being, refusing to disclose it in any outer sheath. To put it another way, “the beautiful” designates something objective. If we were to treat its opposite just as objectively, we would have to speak of concealment, of something whose outer aspect belies what it really is. But here subjectivity enters, for we cannot love what conceals itself, showing a false countenance; we must hate it. In this way the ugly calls up quite a different emotional reaction than the beautiful; we do not respond to it out of the same recesses of our nature.

Thus the genius of language reveals itself. And we should ask: When in the broadest sense we strive for the beautiful in art, what is our goal? The very fact that the German word for “beautiful” proceeds outward (as its opposite suggests a remaining within our emotions, our hate) means that the beautiful bears a relation to the spiritual outside us. For what shines? What we apprehend with our senses does not need to shine for us; it exists. It is the spiritual that shines, radiating into the sensory, proclaiming its being even in the sensory. By speaking objectively of the beautiful, we take hold of it as a spiritual element which reveals itself in the world through art. The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Proceeding from this truth, let us consider one of the arts: painting. Recently we dealt with it insofar as it reveals the spiritual-essential through shining color. In ancient times man, by surrendering in the right way to the genius of language, showed his inner knowledge of color in his vocabulary. When an instinctive clairvoyance prevailed, he felt that metals revealed their inner natures in their colors, therefore gave them, not earthly names, but names connecting them with the planets. Otherwise people would have felt ashamed. For man looked upon color as a divine-spiritual element bestowed upon earthly substances only in the sense of our recent lectures. Perceiving the gold in gold's color, he saw not merely the earthly in that metal but the sun proclaiming itself from the cosmos in its gold color. Indeed, from the very start man saw something transcending the earthly in the colors of earthly objects. But it was only to living things that particular colors were ascribed, for living things approach the spirit in such a way that the spiritual shines forth. Animals were felt to have their own colors because in them the spirit-soul element manifests directly.

In ancient times, when man's artistic sense was not outward but inward, he painted not at all. To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object's surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun's colored light; catch the sun.

In the case of a person, this can be done still more spiritually. To paint a human forehead the way one believes it should look is nonsense; this is not painting. But to observe how the sun rays strike that forehead, how color shows up in the ensuing radiance, how light and darkness intermingle, to capture with one's paint brush all that interplay: this is the task of the painter. Seizing what passes in a moment, he relates it to the spiritual.

If, with a sense for painting, we look at an interior view, the matter of most importance is not the figure or figures therein. I once accompanied a friend to an exhibition where we saw a painting of a man kneeling before an altar, his back toward us. The painter had given himself the task of showing how sunlight falling through a window struck the man's back. My friend remarked that he would much rather see a front view. Well, this was only material, not artistic, interest. He wanted the painter to show the man's character, and so forth. But one is justified in doing this only if one expresses all perceptions through color. If I wish to paint a human being sick in bed with a certain disease, and study his facial color in order to apprehend how illness shines through the sensory, this may be artistic. If I want to show, in totality, the extent to which the whole cosmos manifests in the human flesh color, this may also be artistic. But if I try to imitate Mr. Lehman as he sits here before me, I will not succeed; moreover, this is not the task of art. What is artistic is how the sun illumines him, how light is deflected through his bushy eyebrows. Thus for a painter the important thing is how the whole world acts upon his subject; and his means of holding fast to a transitory moment are light and darkness, the whole spectrum.

In times not so long ago one could not imagine a presentation of Mary, the Mother of God, without a face so transfigured it had passed beyond the ordinary human state; a face overcome by light. One could not imagine her clothed otherwise than in a red garment and blue cloak, because only so is the Mother of God placed rightly into earthly life; the red garment depicting all the emotions of the earthly, the blue cloak the soul element which weaves the spiritual around her; the face permeated and transfigured by spirit, overcome by light as a revelation of the spirit. We do not, however, properly and artistically take hold of these truths if we stop with what I have just described. For I have translated the artistic into the inartistic. We feel them artistically only if we create directly out of red and blue and the light by experiencing the light, in its relationship to colors and darkness, as a world in itself. Then colors speak their own language, and the Virgin Mary is created out of them.

To achieve this one must live with color; color must become emancipated from the heavy matter opposing its innermost nature. Palette colors are alien to true painting in that, when used on a plane surface, they have a down-dragging effect. One cannot live with oil-based colors, only with fluid colors. When a painter puts fluid colors upon a plane, color—owing to the peculiar relationship between man and color—springs to life; he conceives out of color; a world arises out of it. True painting comes into being only if he captures the shining, revealing, radiating element as something living; only if he creates what is to be formed on the plane out of this element. For to understand color is to understand a component part of the world.

Kant once said: Give me matter, and out of it I shall create a world. Well, you could have given him matter endlessly without his ever being able to make a world out of it. But out of the interplaying medium of color a world of sorts can indeed be created, because every color has direct relationship with something spiritual. In the face of present-day materialism, the concept and activity of painting have—except for the beginnings made by impressionism and, still more, by expressionism—been more or less lost.

For the most part modern man does not paint, he imitates figures with a kind of drawing, then colors the surface. But colored surfaces are not painting for the reason that they are not born out of color and light and darkness.

We must not misunderstand things. If somebody goes wild and just lays on colors side by side in the belief that this is what I call “overcoming drawing,” he is mistaken. By “overcoming drawing” I do not mean to do away with drawing, but to let it rise out of the colors, be born from the colors. Colors will yield the drawing; one simply has to know how to live in colors. Living so, an artist develops an ability—while disregarding the rest of the world—to bring forth works of art out of color itself.

Look at Titian's “Ascension of Mary.” This painting stands at the boundary line of the ancient principle of art. The living experience of color one finds in Raphael and, more especially, in Leonardo da Vinci, has departed; only a certain tradition prevents the painter from totally forsaking the living-in-color.

Experience this “Ascension of Mary.” The green, the red, the blue, cry out. Now take the details, the individual colors and their harmonious interaction, and you will feel how Titian lived in the element of color and how, in this instance, he really created out of it all three worlds.

Look at the wonderful build-up of those worlds. Below, he has created out of color the Apostles experiencing the event of Mary's ascension. One sees in the colors how these men are anchored to the earth; colors which convey, not heaviness in the lower part of the painting, only a darkness which fetters the watching ones to earth. In the color-treatment of Mary one experiences the intermediate realm. A dull darkness from below connects her feet and legs with the earth; while, above her, light preponderates. This third and highest realm receives her head and radiates above it in full light, lifting it up. Thus are set forth, through inner color experience, the three stages of lower realm, middle realm, and the heights where Mary is being received by God the Father.

To understand this picture we must forget everything else and look at it solely from the standpoint of color, for here the three stages of the world are derived from color not intellectually but artistically. True painting takes hold of this world of effulgent shining, of splendid manifestation in light and darkness and color, in order to contrast what is earthly-material with the artistic. But the artistic is not permitted to reach the spiritual. Otherwise it would be not “shine” but wisdom. For wisdom is no longer artistic, wisdom leads into the formless and therefore undepictable realm of the divine.

With artistry like Titian's in “The Ascension of Mary,” we feel, on beholding the reception of Mary's head by God the Father, that now we must go no further in the treatment of light; we must halt. For we have reached the limit of the possible. To carry it further would be to fall into the intellectualistic, the inartistic. We must not make one stroke beyond what is indicated by light, rather than contour. The moment we insist on contour, we become intellectualistic, inartistic. Near the top this picture is in danger of becoming inartistic. The painters immediately after Titian fell prey to this danger. Look at the depiction of angels right up to the time of Titian. They are painted in heavenly regions. But look how carefully the painters avoided leaving the realm of color. Always you can ask yourself in regard to these angels of the pre-Titian age, and of Titian too: Couldn't they be clouds? If you cannot do that, if there is no uncertainty about existence, being, or semblance, shine, if there is an attempt fully to delineate the essence of the spiritual, artistry ceases.

In the seventeenth century it was otherwise, for materialism affects the presentation of the spiritual. Now angels began to be painted with all kinds of foreshortenings, and one can no longer ask: Couldn't that be clouds? When reason is active, artistry dies.

Again, look at the Apostles below: one has a feeling that in this “Ascension of Mary” only Mary is really artistic. Above, there is the danger of passing into the formlessness of pure wisdom. If one attains the formless one attains, in a certain sense, the zenith of the artistic. One has dared to press forward boldly to the abyss where art ceases, where the colors disappear in light, and where, if one were to proceed, one could only draw. But drawing is not painting. Thus the upper part of the picture approaches the realm of wisdom. And the more one is able to express, in the sensory world, this wisdom-filled realm, and the more the angels might be taken for billowy clouds shimmering in light, the greater the art.

Proceeding from the bottom of the picture to the really beautiful, to Mary herself rising into the realm of wisdom, we see that Titian was able to paint her beautifully because she has not yet arrived at, but only soars up toward, the realm of wisdom; and we feel that, were she to rise still higher, she must enter where art ceases. Below stand the Apostles. Here the artist has tried to express their earth-fettered character. But now a different danger threatens. Had he placed Mary further down, he could not have depicted her inward beauty. If Mary were to sit among the Apostles, she could not appear as she does as a kind of balance between heaven and earth; she would look different. She simply does not fit among the Apostles with their brownish tones. Not only are they subject to earthly gravity; something else has entered: the element of drawing takes hold. This you can see in Titian's picture. Why is it so?

Well, brown having already left the realm of color, it cannot express Mary's beauty; something not belonging entirely to the realm of the beautiful would be injected. If Mary stood or sat among the Apostles and were colored as they are, it would be a great offense. I am now speaking only of this picture and do not maintain that when standing on earth Mary must be in every instance, artistically speaking, an offense. But in this picture it would be a blow in the face if Mary stood below. Why?

Because if she stood there colored like the Apostles we would have to say that the artist presented her as virtuous. This is the way he presents the Apostles; we cannot conceive of them otherwise than looking upward in their virtue. But this for Mary would he inappropriate. With her, virtue is so self-evident that we must not express it. It would be like presenting God as virtuous. If something is self-evident, if it has become the being itself, we must not express it in mere outer semblance. Therefore Mary soars up into a region beyond all virtues, where we cannot say of her, through colors, that she is virtuous, any more than we can say of God that He is virtuous. He may, at most, be virtue itself. But this is an abstract, philosophical statement having nothing to do with art. With the Apostles, however, the artist succeeded in representing, through his color treatment, virtuous human beings. They are virtuous.

Let us look at how the genius of language reflects this truth. Tugend (virtue, in German) is related to taugen (to be fit, in German). To be fit, to be able to cope with something morally, is to be virtuous. Goethe speaks of a triad: wisdom, semblance and power. Art is the middle term: semblance, the beautiful; wisdom is formless knowledge; virtue is power to carry out worthwhile things effectively.¹

Since ancient times this triad has been revered. Once, years ago, a man said to me—and I could appreciate his point of view—that he was sick and tired of hearing people speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, for anyone in search of an idealistic expression mouthed the phrase. But in ancient times these realities were experienced not externally but with complete soul participation. Thus in the upper region of Titian's picture we see wisdom not yet transcendent, radiating artistically because of the way it is painted. In the middle, beauty; below, virtue, that which is fit. What is the inner nature of the fit? Here is manifest the genius, the profundity, of the languages active among men. If we proceeded in an exterior way we might be reminded of a certain hunchback who went to church and listened to a priest describing quite externally how everything in the world is good and beautiful and fit. Waiting at the church door, the hunchback asked the priest: You said the idea of everything is good—have I, too, a good shape? The priest replied: For a hunchback you have a very good shape.

If things are considered as externally as this, we shall never penetrate to the depths. In many fields modern observation proceeds so. Filled with external characteristics and definitions, men do not know that their ideas turn round and round in circles.

In respect to virtue it is not a question of fitness for just anything, but of fitness for something spiritual, so that a person places himself into the spiritual world as a human being. Whoever is a complete human being by reason of his bringing the spiritual not merely to manifestation but to full realization through his will is—in the true sense—virtuous. Here we enter a region which lies within the human and religious, but no longer within the artistic, sphere, and least of all within the sphere of the beautiful. Everything in the world contains a polarity. Thus we can say of Titian's picture: Above Mary he is in danger of passing beyond the beautiful, there where he reaches the abyss of wisdom. Below, he comes to the brink of the other abyss. For as soon as a painter represents the virtuous, meaning that which man realizes through his own being, out of the spiritual, he again leaves behind the beautiful, the artistic. The virtuous human being can be painted only by characterizing virtue in its outer appearance, let us say by contrasting it with vice. But an artistic presentation of virtue as such is no longer possible.

Where in our age do we not forsake the artistic? Simple life conditions are reproduced crudely, naturalistically, without any relation to the spiritual, and without this relation there is no art. Hence the striving of impressionism and expressionism to return to the spiritual. Though in many cases clumsy, tentative, exploratory, it is better than the inartistic copying of a model.

Furthermore, if one grasps the concept of the artistically-beautiful, one can deal with the tragic in its artistic manifestations. The human being who acts in accordance with his thoughts, who lives his life intellectualistically, can never become really tragic. Nor can the human being who leads an entirely virtuous life. The only tragic person is one who in some way leans toward the daimonic, that is to say, toward the spiritual, whether in a good or bad sense. Today in this age when man is in the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is man under the influence of tutelary spirits, is an anachronism. That man should outgrow the daimonic and become free is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. But as he progresses in freedom the possibility of tragedy diminishes and finally ceases. Take ancient tragic characters, even most of Shakespeare's: they have a daimonism which leads to the tragic. Wherever man had the appearance of the daimonic-spiritual, wherever the daimonic-spiritual radiated and manifested through him, wherever he became its medium, tragedy was possible. In this sense the tragic will have to taper off now; a free mankind must rid itself of tutelary spirits. This it has not yet done. On the contrary, it is more and more falling prey to such forces.

But the great task and mission of the age is to pull human beings away from the daimonic towards freedom. The irony is that the more we get rid of the inner daimons which make us tragic personalities, the less do we get rid of external ones. For the moment modern man enters into relation with the outer world, he encounters something of the nature of daimons. Our thoughts must become freer and freer. And if, as I say in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, thoughts become will impulses, then the will also becomes free. These are polaric contrasts in freedom: free thoughts, free will.

Between lies that part of human nature which is connected with karma. And just as once upon a time the daimonic led to tragedy, so now the experiencing of karma can lead to inmost tragedy. Tragedy will flourish when man experiences karma. As long as we live in our thoughts we are free. But the words with which we have clothed our thoughts, once spoken or written, no longer belong to us. What may happen to a word I have uttered! Having absorbed it, somebody else surrounds it with different emotions and sensations, and thus the word lives on. As it flies through the world it becomes a power proceeding from man himself. This is his karma. Because it connects him with the earth, it may burst in on him again. Even the word which leads its own existence because it belongs not to us but to the genius of language may create the tragic. Just in our present time we see mankind at the inception of tragic situations through an overestimation of language, of the word. Peoples wish to separate themselves according to language, and their desire provides the basis for the gigantic tragedy which during this very century will break in upon the earth. This is the tragedy of karma. If past tragedy is that of daimonology, future tragedy will be that of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if in everything artistic there is some relationship to the spiritual, you will understand that with the artistic we place ourselves, creatively or through enjoyment, in the spirit world. A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert. He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture. A person may be an artist in complete loneliness. Yet he cannot become one without bringing, by means of his creation, something spiritual into the world, so that it lives in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this basic connection, art becomes non-art.

To create artistically is possible only if the work has a relationship to the world. Those ancient artists who painted pictures on the walls of churches were conscious of this fact; they knew that their murals stood within earth life insofar as this is permeated by the spirit; that they guided believers.

One can hardly imagine anything worse than painting for exhibitions. It is horrible to walk through a picture or sculpture gallery where completely unrelated subjects appear side by side. Painting lost meaning when it passed from something for church or home to an isolated phenomenon. If we paint or view a picture in a frame, we can imagine ourselves looking out through a window. But to paint for exhibitions—this is beyond discussion. An age which sees value in exhibitions has lost its connection with art. By this can be seen how much waits to be done in culture if we would find our way back to the spiritual-artistic. Exhibitions must be overcome. Of course some individual artists detest exhibitions. But today we live in an age when the individual cannot achieve very much unless his judgment grows out of a world-conception permeating fully free human beings; just as world-conceptions permeating people in less free ages led to the rise of genuine cultures. Today we have no real culture.

Only a spiritual world-conception can build up true culture, the indubitably artistic.

• 1. The English word virtue, derived from the Latin vir, man, carries a similar connotation of power. (Translators)

You will perhaps allow me to say just a few short words before our attempt to give a performance of Eurythmy. It is not my purpose to try to explain the content of this performance, for the very reason that all that is of the nature of Art must speak for itself. An explanation of any kind is not in itself “artistic” and would consequently be out of place here. It is, however, necessary to say some few words, because what we here call the Art of Eurythmy is derived from sources hitherto unfamiliar to the world of Art, and makes use of an artistic language whose forms are likewise rather unusual.

Eurythmy is the Art of Movement in Space carried out by individuals and groups of individuals in reciprocal relationships and positions. These movements are not mere gestures, nor are they miming. Eurythmy as we here give it cannot therefore be regarded as anything in the nature of dancing; it is a new Art, having as its instrument Man himself, and its movements are absolutely in accordance with law. The movements which are made in the larynx and the other organs of speech when a man expresses himself in sound have been studied by a kind of perception which is at the same time “sensible” and yet “super-sensible”—if I may use the expression of Goethe. But in speech those inner movements, or, better, those underlying principles of movement which it is the function of the larynx and the other organs of speech to bring into expression, are arrested as they arise and are transformed into finer vibratory movements which by means of the air carry the sound so that it can be heard. In Eurythmy, then, a process as yet within the human organs of speech is interpreted by one individual or by groups of individuals. Goethe's teaching of Metamorphosis forms the basis of this Art. Everything that we do here is founded an Goetheanism, and Eurhythmic Art is just one detail of it.

Goethe developed his teaching of Metamorphosis out of his universal world-conception. The following rather abstract remarks about the simple way in which Goethe applied this teaching of the Metamorphosis of plants are not made with the purpose of evolving a theory, but only of making myself clear.

Goethe sees in principle a complete plant in each single leaf, so that a plant as a unit originates from the right development of what lies as idea within each single leaf. The whole plant is, in principle, an elaborated leaf, and each individual leaf is a primitive plant. What Goethe worked out with regard to organic metamorphosis—for he expanded the range of his conception to cover all organisms—can be applied to organic functions and development and then transformed into Art. So that if we turn what exists in principle and as Idea in a single group of organs—such as the larynx, and other organs of speech—into movements carried out by the individual, making him or a group of individuals into a living larynx in movement, as it were, we get a visible speech. And what lies at the basis of our Eurythmy is this visible speech.

It is obvious, of course, that there will be opposition to an Art like this, employing, as it does, methods that are unfamiliar, but this opposition will all disappear in the course of time. The gestures are not accidental in our Eurythmy; there is no mere chance connected between some movement of the arms, for instance, and a certain emotion of the soul. Just as a definite shade of tone in speech corresponds to a psychic or soul process, and vice versa, do you find in our Eurythmy the logical sequence of movements. That which comes into expression in speech, in song, in music, is represented in Eurythmy by means of a different artistic medium, by a different form of speech. Hence, as you will see, Eurythmy can be accompanied by music, for that which in music is expressed in tone is there and then expressed by the movements of individuals. This visible speech of Eurythmy can also be accompanied by audible speech, such as recitation, or declamation. The poem is recited and the real artistic content of it is translated into Eurythmy into visible speech. We can in this way see how Eurythmy in this somewhat inartistic age may be able to develop a true artistic understanding and rendering of recitation and declamation.

To-day in reference to recitation and declamation it is the verbal content of the poem which is considered specially important. But the real artistic value of poetry is not determined by this verbal content so much as by the plastic-figurative, or musical element to be found in it. When recitation or declamation is to accompany Eurythmy, therefore, special care must be taken that they shall bring out the artistic element, the rhythm, the metre, and the inner form of the language used. In that way we shall get back to the understanding of the art of recitation as it existed in epochs which were truly artistic. It is interesting in this connection to remember that when Goethe studied his Iambic dramas with the actors, he always used a baton as if he were conducting music, showing that he attached more importance to the Iambic formation of his verses thin to their verbal content. Eurythmy will also have an influence upon recitation because the art of recitation must accompany that which forms the artistic basis of Eurythmy.

As the months have gone by we have developed the subject. At first we expressed the poetical content by the visible speech of Eurythmy while the recitation itself was going on. Now we are trying to impart the essential content of a poem, for instance, by means of evolutions which precede and follow it, so that the visible but unaccompanied language of Eurythmy can also be displayed to advantage by itself.

That, briefly, is the artistic side of the question, and it represents one aspect of Eurythmy as we practise it. The other is the pedagogic, didactic element, shall I call it. Our Eurythmy, besides being of the nature of Art, is a kind of spiritualised gymnastics. As such, it is used in the Waldorf School which was founded in Stuttgart by Emil Mott and arranged and directed by me. Eurythmy, as well as Gymnastics, has been introduced there as a compulsory subject in all the classes. It is true to say that in epochs more artistically impartial than ours, there will be a quite different way of judging Gymnastics. Just recently a famous modern physiologist came here, heard what I said as an introduction to the Eurythmy, and also saw the performance. His opinion was that from a physiological point of view ordinary gymnastics were not a method of education at all, but so much barbarism. Remember, it is not I who say that, but a modern physiologist for whose name people have a tremendous respect. I do not myself go nearly so far; I say that Gymnastics are carried out according to corporeal laws, built up upon a physiological basis merely, whereas when a child is allowed to carry out the movements of Eurythmy, all of which are full of meaning, then the whole of its being, body, soul and spirit, is affected and not the body only. We have already been able to see, by a year of experience in the Waldorf School, with what delight the children have made this Eurythmy Art their own. They really feel that these movements proceed from the human constitution itself. The natural joy of a child learning to speak may be compared with that of children between the ages of seven to fifteen who are beginning to practise these eurhythmic movements. They find that the human element in them is being guided into a course that is a right one. Out of the four hundred children in the Waldorf School there were at the very most two or three who did not enter into the thing as joyfully as was the case with all the others; the number of children who for some fundamental reason took to Eurythmy with difficulty was quite negligible, the remainder taking the very greatest delight in their Eurythmy lessons. I say without hesitation that Eurythmy develops in children something that is really needed; and that is initiative of soul and of will, which gymnastics, as such, cannot do.

We ask everybody to remember that we ourselves are the most severe critics of what we are attempting to do. Eurythmy is still at its most elementary stage; but while we realise that we are only attempting to make a beginning, we yet can affirm from association with this work that, by further development brought about either by ourselves or by others, Eurythmy will become ever more and more perfect, and will one day take up its rightful position as a young sister-art among the older and fully established ones.

In the short lecture before the eurythmy performance this morning, I pointed out how modern man’s relation to the celebration of the festivals has gotten ever deeper into materialism. Of course, in order to see this a much deeper view of materialism must be taken. The most threatening symptom is not that man is infected by materialism but he is infected by the superficiality of our time, and this is far more dangerous.

This superficiality exists not only in relation to the spiritual views of the world, but also in relation to materialism itself. One usually only pays attention to its most superficial phenomena. In this regard I pointed out this afternoon, for example how, in olden times people were still receptive to the moods which could be experienced in the course of the year and which came to be expressed in the festival celebrations. These moods were embodied in the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John’s festival and the Michael festival—these were embodied in ritual-like celebrations in which these moods were embedded, and they took hold of man as he consciously experienced the course of the year.

Thereby something was given to the soul which today is only given to man’s body. We all still participate in the course of the day. When the sun sends its golden rays announcing the dawn we eat our breakfast. When it is at its highest point and pours out its warmth and light with special love over mankind, we eat lunch, and so on through midday, snack, and supper. In those daily festival events, we accompany the course of the sun through the day by co-experiencing in our souls the fiery trip of the sun around the world. We participate in this fiery ride around the world by overcoming the craving for food with the contentment of feeling satiated. And so the mood for the physical organism exists in a very decided and definite way at different times of the day. We can call breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper, the festivals of the day. The human physical organism accompanies what takes place between earth and cosmos.

In a similar way the course of the year was experienced intensively in the soul in olden times through instinctive clairvoyance. Actually, certain things played from one sphere over into the other. You need but remember what has been left as remnants of these festivals: Easter eggs, stuffed geese, etc. The lower bodily region plays into the soul region which ought also to experience the course of the year. Well, the easiest way to stimulate interest in the course of the year in our materialistic time would be by making available—I do not want to say “Easter eggs”,—but “stuffed turkeys.”

But this is not the way it was meant in olden times with regard to festival moods. They were attuned, rather, to soul-hunger and soul satisfaction. The soul of man needed something different at Christmas, Easter, St. John’s, and Michaelmas time. And one can really compare the content of the celebration to a kind of satisfying the hunger of the soul at different seasons.

So as we look at the daily path of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the body; as we look at the yearly course of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the soul.

If festivals are to become alive again, it would have to happen out of a much more conscious condition, out of an awakening of the soul as it is striven for in anthroposophical endeavors. We cannot just base a renewal of the Festivals on old history; we would have to rediscover them through a new knowledge, a new world-conception, out of our own soul-being. But, besides the body and soul, we also differentiate the human spirit.

However, for modern man it is already difficult enough to have a clear picture when someone speaks of the soul. Everything becomes a sort of indefinite fog. Already in the nineteenth century when they began to speak of psychology, they began to speak of a soul-science without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great language critic, found that we really do not know anything about the soul, we only experience something indefinite, certain thoughts and feelings, but really nothing of a soul reality. We ought not, therefore, to use in the future the world “soul” but “dis-soul” (Geseel). Mauthner advises, that in the future, when a poet intends to write a real work he ought not to say: “Sing immortal Soul, the sinful man’s redemption,” but rather, “Sing immortal What-cha-macall-it, the sinful men’s redemption”—if in the future it still would make sense to speak of something like that.

Today we can really say that modern man knows nothing more of the connection of his soul with the sun’s yearly course. He became a materialist in this region, also. He sticks to the festivals of the body which follow the daily course of the sun. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional habits but no longer experienced. Yet we have, besides a body, also a soul, and yes, also a spirit.

Let us now take into consideration the historical epochs. Those epochs, which reach far beyond the course of the year, encompassing centuries, are co-experienced by the human spirit, if it experiences them at all. In olden times they were most certainly experienced. He who knows how to enter, carried by the spirit, into the way the course of time was followed in the past knows how it was said: at this or that time some personality appeared out of the heights of the world and revealed the spirit again. And this spirit entered as the sunlight enters the physical. If such an epoch then entered its twilight phase, something new appeared.

Historical epochs are related to the evolution of the human spirit, as the course of the sun through the year is related to the soul evolution. Of course, wherever such metamorphoses, such changes in spirit evolution occur, it must happen through fully conscious cognition. Today, one would like to ignore such metamorphoses completely. One is outwardly touched by the effects, but one does not wish to consider seriously those changes emanating from the spirit which are nevertheless expressed in the outer events.

It would be helpful to pay attention to a certain direction of thinking and feeling appearing in children and young people, which was unknown to earlier generations, and which, when looked at properly in the course of the development of humanity, can really be compared to the course of the year. Therefore it would be good to listen to what the different ages proclaim as a need, to listen to the way in which a new age arises and how human beings demand something different from what might have been demanded in ages gone by. But just for this contemporary man has a very inadequate organ.

When we approach the festival mood in the right way out of a contemporary consciousness, the great relationships of life can again fill our souls. When we, for example, let something like the St. John’s mood really enter our soul, then we try to gain for our soul what will be met by the cosmos.

Certainly, the great world connections have become a matter of indifference for modern mankind. There is no heart for getting to know the great world relations. It is quite evident how the spirit of littleness, narrowness, I would like to say, the spirit of the microscope, the spirit of atomizing appears, which, when mentioned in the way I do, seems paradoxical.

I would like to point to something definite in relation to the St. John’s mood which, however, seems quite far-fetched. What is more obvious (even if one has not developed an organ for the course of the year) than the impression of growing plants, growing trees: when spring comes, things sprout, grow, everything goes from leaf to blossom. All this growing makes the impression as though the cosmos, with its sun forces, calls upon the earth to open itself to the cosmos, and this happens at St. John’s time.

Then begins a retreat of the sprouting, and we approach the time when the earth collects the growing forces into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How obvious it is that from the received impressions one gets the picture that the snow-cover belongs to winter, when the being of the plants crawls, so to speak, into the earth; that it belongs to summer for the plants to grow towards the cosmos. What is more natural than to get this idea—although in a deeper sense the opposite is correct—that the plants sleep in winter and wake in summer.

I do not wish to speak now about the correctness of this sleeping and waking. I wish to speak only of the impression one receives, which leads to the thought that summer belongs to growing vegetation, and winter to the withdrawal of growth. In any case, a kind of world-feeling develops in which one is engaged in relating to the warming, bright force of the sun when seeing this force again in the greening, blossoming plant-cover of earth, and immersing into the feeling of being an earthly hermit with regard to the cosmos when the plant cover is replaced with snow in winter. In short, by so feeling, one tears oneself free with one’s consciousness from earth existence. One places oneself in a larger relation to the universe.

Now comes modern research—and what I am saying now is in no way critical, on the contrary—now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders whenever great cosmic connections are referred to. Why should one feel elevated to divine radiating warming forces of the sun when the trees are shooting, becoming green, when earth covers itself with a cover of plants? Why should one have to sense a cosmic relation on seeing this plant cover? It is disturbing. One cannot bring such sentiments into harmony with a materialistic consciousness. Plant is plant. It seems like stubborness of the plant to blossom only in spring, or to be ready in summer to bear fruit. How does this actually work? One is supposed to be concerned not only with the plant but with the whole world? If one is to feel, to know, one is supposed to be concerned with the whole world, not only with the plant? That doesn’t sit right. Is one not already making an effort to avoid dealing with substances existing in powder or crystal forms, but rather just to deal with atomic structures, atomic cores, with electromagnetic fields, etc.? One tries to deal with something enclosed, not with something that points in so many directions. In the case of the plant is one supposed to admit that a sensing is needed that reaches to the whole cosmos? It is really awful if one cannot narrow one’s view to a singular object! One is used to, when using the microscope, to have everything limited to a narrow view. Everything takes place in the small enclosure. It must be possible to look at a plant by itself, not in connection to the whole cosmos!

And look, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century the scientists succeeded to an extraordinary degree in this region. It was known, of course, from some plants in hothouses, greenhouses, that the mere summer and winter aspects of the plant could be overcome. But on the whole, not enough could be discovered about the plant needing a certain winter rest. Discussions about tropical plants occurred. The researcher, who did not want to know about plants being connected with the cosmos, maintained that the tropical plant grows throughout the year. The others, more conservative, said: one thinks this because plants have their winter rest at different times, some only for eight days. This being so, makes it imperceptible when a certain species is dormant. Long detailed discussions concerning tropical plants took place. In short, one became aware of a tremendous discomfort concerning the relation of plants to the cosmos.

But the most interesting and grandiose experiments in this direction were made exactly at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when one succeeded in driving the stubborness out of the plants in the case of a great number of not only annuals, but also trees, which are much stronger: to drive out the cosmic stubborness from the plant. It was possible to do this in plants known as annuals by creating certain conditions. In the case of most of the trees growing in the temperate zone, conditions could be established which caused them to remain green all year round, to give up their winter sleep. This then provided the basis for certain materialistic explanations. In this way really magnificent accomplishments were achieved.

It was discovered that the cosmic element could be driven out of trees if they were brought into enclosed spaces, given enough nourishing minerals, making it possible that plants in winter-time, when the soil is poor in minerals, can find this nourishment. If enough moisture, warmth, and light is supplied, the trees will grow. However, one tree in Central Europe was defiant: the Blood Beech. It was approached from all sides to give up its independence and subjected to isolation in a prison. It was provided with everything necessary, but remained stubborn, and demanded nevertheless its winter rest. But it was the only one that still resisted.

And now we must record that in the twentieth century, in 1914, the beginning of the war, another great historical event occurred: the immense, mighty accomplishment of the most capable researcher, Klebs, who was able to compel the Blood Beech to give up its independence. He simply was able to bring it into an enclosed space, provide the necessary nutrients, warmth and light, which could be measured, and the Blood Beech submitted to the demands of research.

I am not mentioning this phenomenon in order to criticize it, for who can help but wonder at this most diligent scientific labor. Besides, it would be silly to try to disprove the facts. They exist and are there. It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, but something quite different.

Why should it not be possible if somewhere on neutral ground the necessary condition for hair-growing existed, to grow hair outside the human or animal realms? Why not? One need only bring about the conditions. I know many would rather have hair growing on their heads than in some culture, but we can imagine it to be possible. Then it would no longer be necessary to bring anything that happens on earth together with what happens in the cosmos.

With all due respect to research, one must look deeper. Aside from what I said recently about the being of the elements, I would like to say something more today. One must be clear that, for example, the following is the case: we know that once earth and sun were one body. Of course this is long ago, during the Saturn and Sun periods. Then there was also a short repetition of those periods during the Earth period. But something remains behind which still belongs there. And this we bring forth again today. And we bring it forth from the repetitious condition on earth not only by heating our rooms with coal, but we bring it forth by using electricity. For, what remains from those times after Old Saturn and Old Sun, when the sun and earth were one, that provided the basis for what we have today on earth as electricity. We have in electricity a force which is sun-force, long connected with the earth, a hidden sun-force in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn Blood Beech, when approached forcefully enough, be induced to use not the sun that radiates from the cosmos, but to use the sun force retained within the earth, the Old Sun force, electricity?

Looking in this way we become aware of the necessity of deeper knowledge. As long as man could believe that the sun force comes only from the cosmos, man arrived at the perception of the relationship of the plant world to the cosmos. Today, when from a materialistic point of view, one would like to separate from the cosmos what so easily can be seen as cosmic effect, one must, if one looks at the seeming independence of the plant, have a science which recalls that cosmic relation between earth and sun which once existed, but in a different form. By being narrowed on the one hand by the microscope, we simply need a much wider expansion on the other hand, and especially the details show how much we need an expanded view.

The problem is not a dilettantic anthroposophical opposition to progress in research. But since progress in research necessarily leads through one’s own nature, it can bring us to the often mentioned “night-crawler view” and prevent that wide view of the great cosmic historic connections between earth and sun, which enables us to be conscious not only of the present sun, but also of the Sun of long past conditions. Everywhere we need the polarity, the counter-pole: not opposition to research, but the spiritual counterpole is what is needed. This is the position we need to take. And I would like to say it is also the mood of St. John’s time. When we inscribe clearly into our sentiment that we now have to live in a world-historic St. John’s mood, we carry our gaze into cosmic distances. That is what we need in spiritual cognition. Nothing is gained by mere talking about spirit; what is important is real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What we bring forth by pointing to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions, etc., has a tremendous supporting force regarding historic cognition.

When our attention is called to such brilliant results of materialistic science as those discovered by Klebs, that even the stubborn Blood Beech can be compelled to grow with electric light, this will lead us, without spiritual science, to the point where we will shatter everything into pieces and have a very narrow view. The Blood Beech will stand before us, growing in electric light, and we will know nothing except what this very narrow picture tells us.

With spiritual science, however, we can say something else: Klebs took the sunlight from the Blood Beech. He then had to give her electric light, which is actually ancient sun light. Our view is not narrow, but greatly enlarged. So, those who do not want to know of the soul experience will say glibly that one day is just like the next. There is breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper,—it is even nice when at Christmas time we get a nice cake—but basically every day is a repetition of the previous day. In fact material man sees only the day. But what about cosmic connections? Let us free ourselves of such a world view. Let us become clear that the stubborn Blood Beech no longer needs the sun. If we imprison her and give her enough electricity, she will grow without the sun. No! She will in fact not grow without the sun. But we need to seek the sun in the right way when we do something like that. And we must be clear that it is different when the Blood Beech grows in the sunlight or when ahrimanic sunlight, originating from long-past, is forced upon her. And we recall what has often been mentioned as the two polarities of Lucifer and Ahriman.

With an adequately wide view of these things we will not admire our brilliance at having overcome the stubbornness of the beech, but go much further. We will progress on to the sap of the beech, and investigate its effect on the human organism, investigate both the beech we permitted to be stubborn and the one which we treated with electric light, and we might discover something very special about the healing forces of one as opposed to the other. But we must do this by considering the spiritual!

But of what concern is this to people today? One has an admirable interest in research. One sits in the classroom, is an experimental psychologist, writes down all kinds of words which must be remembered, examines memory, experiments with children, and arrives at most interesting information. Once the interest is awakened, everything is interesting, depending on the subjective point of view. Why should it not be possible that a stamp collection is more interesting than a botanical collection? Since this is so, why not also in other realms? Why should the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented with, be not interesting? But the question everywhere is, whether or not there are higher responsibilities, and whether it is really justified to experiment with children at a certain age. The question arises: what is one ruining? And the greater question: what damage is done to the teachers, when instead of asking of them a living, heartfelt relation, one asks of them an experimental interest out of the results of experimental psychology. So everything depends, in such research, on whether or not one has the right relation to the sense world, and also to the supersensible world.

Now certain people who emphasize the necessary objectivity of research will assert that there are some who find it immoral when Klebs takes the stubbornness out of the Blood Beech. This would not occur to me. I wouldn’t dream of it. Everything that is done ought to be done, but one must have a counterweight for it. In the time when one emancipates oneself with regard to the growing beech tree from the cosmos, one must on the other hand, in a civilization which does such things, also have a sense for how the spiritual progress of man takes place. One must have a sense for the epochs of time, like ours. I do not want to limit research, but one must feel the necessity of a counter measure. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times spiritual impulses want to reveal themselves. When on the one hand materialism takes over and great achievements result, then those who are interested in such achievements should also be interested in the achievements of research about the spiritual worlds.

This lies in the inner nature of Christianity. A true view of Christianity sees, after the Mystery of Golgotha, the continuing of the Christ being in the earth, in the Christ force, the Christ impulse. And this means that when autumn comes, when everything dries up, when the growing and sprouting in nature ceases, ceases for the senses, then one can see the growing and sprouting of the spirit which accompanies man during the winter time.

But in the same way one must learn to sense how, although justifiable, the view for detail is narrowed in a certain way, the view for the totality for the great whole is narrowed. With regard to Christianity this is the St. John’s mood. We must sense with understanding that the St. John’s festival mood is the starting point for that occurrence which lies in the words: He must increase, I must decrease.

This means that the impressions upon man of everything that is accomplished by empirical research must decline. As the sense details are ever more enhanced, the impression of the spirit must be more and more intensified. And the sun of the spirit must shine more and more into the human heart, the more the impressions of the sense world decline.

The St. John’s mood must be experienced as the entrance into spirit impulses and as exit from the sense impulses. In the St. John’s mood we must learn to sense wherein something weaves and wafts like a soft wind, wafts the spiritually demonic out of the sensible into the spiritual, and from the spiritual into the sensible. And through the St. John’s mood we must learn to form our spirit light so that it does not stick like tar to the solid contour of ideas, but finds itself in weaving, living ideas. We must learn to notice the lighting up of the sensual, the dimming of the sensual, the lighting up of the spiritual in the dimming sensual. We must learn to experience the symbol of the June bug: the lighting up has its meaning as does the dimming of the light.

The lightning bug lights up, dims down, but by dimming down it leaves behind in us the living life and weaving of the spirit in the twilight evening, in the dusk. And when we see in nature everywhere the little waves as in the symbolic lighting up and dimming of the lightning bug, we will find the right St. John’s mood if it is experienced with clear, bright, full consciousness. And this St. John’s mood is necessary, for we must in this way pass through our time if we do not want to fall into the abyss, pass through in such a way that the spirit becomes glowingly alive and that we learn to follow it.

The St. John’s mood:—towards the future of the earth and mankind! No longer the old mood which understands only the growing and sprouting on the outside, which is pleased when it can imprison this growing and sprouting under electric light what otherwise was thriving in the sunlight. Rather we must learn to recognize the lighting up of the spirit so that the electric light becomes less important than it is today, so that the St. John’s gaze becomes sharpened for that old sunlight which will appear when we open ourselves to the great spiritual horizon, not only to the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light of the great horizon to shine in the right way, then all the trivialities of our time will appear in this light, then we will go forward and upward; but if we cannot make this decision we will go backward and downward.

Today everything revolves around human freedom, human will. Everything revolves around the independent decision of either going forward or backward, upward or downward.

Speech eurythmy has been developed up to a certain stage, and it may be said that we have achieved something in this domain. Until now tone eurythmy has only been developed in its very first elements, and due to a remarkable fact which has recently come to my notice, I have been led to give this short course of lectures. From various quarters it is strongly apparent that people have frequently found tone eurythmy more pleasing than speech eurythmy and comparatively easy to appreciate, whereas speech eurythmy has seemed much more alien to them. This sad fact, that more significance is attached to something still in its infancy than to something more fully developed, is really a proof that at the present time the understanding for eurythmy has not made much headway. It is of the utmost importance that this understanding should be fostered, and therefore I should like today to begin with certain introductory remarks which in the light of such understanding may enable you to work for eurythmy.

If we try to develop tone eurythmy out of eurythmy in the more general sense, the opportunity will arise of speaking about this understanding at least in an introductory way. It cannot be denied that on the part of eurythmists themselves, much can be done with a view to increasing a right understanding of eurythmy, for above all what is perceived by the onlooker must be borne in mind. The onlooker not only perceives the movement or gesture that is presented by the eurythmist, he also perceives what the eurythmist is feeling and inwardly experiencing. This makes it essential that the eurythmist actually experiences something while engaged in eurythmy, and especially that which is to be presented. In speech eurythmy this is the portrayal of the sound, and in tone eurythmy the portrayal of the musical sound.

So far [1915–24], with the exception of the forms [Note 1] which have been created for certain pieces of music, this portrayal of musical sound has consisted of nothing but the bare notes, nothing but mere scale [Note 2] If in speech eurythmy we had no more than we have today in tone eurythmy, this roughly would amount to the range of the vowels ah, a, ee, o, oo.

Just think how little we would have achieved artistically in speech eurythmy, if until now we had only been able to make use of the vowel sounds, ah, a, e, o, oo! But so far artistically we have actually had no more than this in tone eurythmy. This is why there is something depressing about the kind of judgements about tone eurythmy that reach us, which I have mentioned. And this is also why I believe it to be necessary that now we should at least begin to lay down the foundations of tone eurythmy.

It is necessary, above all, that in eurythmy we should get beyond the mere making of gestures and producing of movements, and that in the realm of tone eurythmy, and in speech eurythmy too, the actual sounds should be really felt. You must permit me to make this introduction, for in our speech today, and especially in our writing, we no longer have any conception of what a sound really is. This is because we no longer give the sound a name, but at the most briefly touch it.

We say ah. The Greek language was the last to say alpha. Go back to the Hebrew—aleph. The sound as such had a name then; the sound was something real. The further back we go in language, the more essentially real we find the sounds. When we name the first letter in the Greek alphabet, alpha, and trace back the significance of this word alpha (it is a word which really encompasses the sound), we find that even in the German language many words still exist closely related to what lies in the sound alpha or aleph—as, for instance, when we say Alp, Alpen—Alp, the Alps. And this leads us back to Alp-Elf, [the] Alp, [the] elf [but see Appendix 7. Translator's note], to a being in a state of constant activity, of becoming, of coming-into-being, of lively movement. The ah sound has completely lost all this because we no longer say alpha or aleph.

If the alpha or aleph is applied to the human being, then we can really experience the sound ah. And how do we experience ah? A snail could neither be an aleph, nor yet an alpha. But a fish could be an alpha, an aleph. Why? Because the fish has a spine, and because the spine is really the starting point for the development of such a being as an aleph. It is from the spine that those forces proceed which embrace an alpha-being.

Now try to understand that the spine is the point from which rays forth that which constitutes an alpha or aleph. Then you could roughly experience it by imagining that, as a human being, you could not receive much benefit from your spine [alone], if there were no ribs that go out from it, forming the body. If you then picture the ribs as detached and capable of movement, you get the arms. And then, if you consider it, you arrive at the eurythmic ah.

Fig. 1

Now you must not think that anyone watching eurythmy sees only this forked angle; if this were so, instead of stretching out your arms you might just as well open out a pair of scissors, or the firetongs! You cannot do this, however, for the onlooker must have a human being before him. And the human being has really to feel the alpha, the aleph, inside. He has to feel that he is opening himself to the world. The world approaches him and he opens himself to it. How do you open yourself to the world? You open yourself to the world most purely when you stand before the world in wonder. All knowledge, said the Greeks, begins with wonder, with amazement. And when you stand before the world in wonder you break out with the sound ah.

When you have made the eurythmy movement for ah, you have brought your astral body into that position which is indicated by the angle formed by the stretched arms. But this gesture will not ring true if you have never tried to experience the feeling of this fork-like movement of the arms, as has already been mentioned in earlier instructions. Feeling must be in it. You actually have to feel that the sound ah is an abbreviation in the air, some sort of abstraction as opposed to the living reality which the human being experiences.

When, let us say, we encircle something with rounded arms, we encircle it with love. When we open ourselves in the form of an angle, we receive the world in wonder. And this mood of wonder is felt by the astral body (contained as it is within the physical body, within the whole human being). This mood of wonder must be felt in practising, once or even repeatedly, if the ah is to be true. The making of signs is not the essential thing, but the feeling that it cannot be otherwise (corresponding to a specific inner experience) than that the arms assume a forked angle as you stand confronting the world.

Let us pass on to the sound a. [Presenting this sound accurately] depends on being able to feel the a—which means holding yourself upright while facing something. In ah we open ourselves to the world in wonder; we let the world approach us. When we experience a we do not simply allow the world to approach us, but we offer some resistance; we confront the world. The world is there and we stand facing it. This is why the movement for a demands that we touch ourselves (crossed hands [in Austrian dialect die Hand can begin at the shoulder; consequently it can mean ‘arm’. Translator's note.]). We touch ourselves. We say, as we experience the a sound: ‘I too am here confronting the world’. And you will learn to understand the a when, in making the gesture, you feel: ‘I too am here confronting the world, and I want to feel that I too am here.’ The bringing of one limb into contact with the other awakens this feeling that I too am here.

Now I would have liked things to have developed so that first what we call the letters or sounds would have been given, and then the urge would have inwardly arisen to develop these experiences out of the letters themselves, for then you would get hold of it. And certainly this has frequently happened subconsciously with many people, though it is not always definitely apparent. But the study of eurythmy must proceed from such things as these, too.

Let us take o. In making the gesture for o, you form a circle with both arms. You must feel that while experiencing the o-gesture, you cannot experience a. With a you confirm your presence: I too am here confronting the world. With o you go out of yourself, enclosing something within yourself You embrace something. It is important in the a that that which you are addressing stays outside and you are inside, within yourself With o there is a kind of going to sleep while awake, in that you allow your whole being to go for a little walk into the space which you enclose with the o-gesture. But now that other thing you are addressing is also within this space. Thus, when experiencing the o, your feelings are such as these: I approach a tree; I embrace this tree with my arms, but I myself am the tree; [Note 3] I have become a tree-spirit, a tree-soul. There is the tree, and because I myself have become a tree-soul, because I have become one with the tree, I make this gesture. I go out of myself. That which is important for me is enclosed in my arms. This is the feeling of o.

The feeling of oo is that of being bound up with something, yet wishing to get away from it; following the movement you make and going somewhere else, leaving yourself and preparing your way. I run along my arms when I make the movement for oo. I am convinced of it, that in oo I stream away, away, away—away in this direction.

You see that this is speech. Speech poses questions. ‘How does the human being relate to the things of the world?’ Speech always asks: ‘How does the human being relate to the things of the world? Does the world fill him with wonder? Does he stand upright confronting the world? Does he embrace it? Does he flee before it?’ Speech is the relationship of the human being to the world. Music is the relationship of the human being, as a being of soul and spirit, to him- or herself.

When, in the way I have just indicated, you try to enter into what may be experienced in the vowel sound o, let us say, or oo, then you have a distinct going-out of the soul from the body. This is also expressed in the pronunciation. Think of the way in which the sound o is spoken, right forward on the lips and with the lips clearly rounded: o. Oo is spoken with the lips pushed somewhat outwards: oo = away. We have, then, in the gestures made in the air by speech, this going-out-of-ourselves in the sounds o and oo.

The musical element presents the exact opposite of speech. When you are going out of yourself in speech, the astral body and ego leave the etheric and physical bodies, even if this only occurs partially and imperceptibly. It really is a falling-asleep while still awake when we utter a or oo, or when we do a or oo in eurythmy. It is a falling asleep when awake. When you are going out of yourself in o or in oo, you really are going with your soul into the element of soul. And when I say that with the sounds o and oo I am going with my astral body out of my physical body, I am speaking in terms of speech.

When I say: ‘In what I am now experiencing I am going with my soul into my spiritual being’ (for in spite of the fact that I go out, I am entering into my spiritual being; just as when falling asleep I enter into my spiritual being too, while forsaking my physical body), this is just the opposite [of what happens in speech]. Thus when I say: ‘I am entering into my spiritual being in o or in oo, I am speaking in musical terms. [Note 4]

Now when I reflect upon the sound o or oo, I am naturally denying the musical element. But the point in question is: what is the musical experience in this going-out-of-ourselves of o and oo? What is it in music itself that corresponds to the out-going connected with o and oo? The musical experience which is contained in o and in oo is, in the most comprehensive sense, the experience of the major mood.

In speaking of the experience of the major mood, it is certainly true that we experience this in the sounds o and oo. I cannot say that we change our interpretation into an experience of speech, but we change the way we live in this experience. Whenever the sounds o or oo are uttered, or when a word is uttered in which either of these two sounds is predominant, then, underlying the speech, we musically experience the major mood.

When we reflect upon ah and a, where we may very clearly perceive the experience, underlying the sounds, of the astral body remaining within the physical body (indeed, we are here made particularly aware of the physical body), this produces a different musical experience. Pay attention, then, to this growing awareness of the physical body. When you speak the sound ah, or fashion it in eurythmy, you cause your astral body to sink down as much as it can into your physical body. This entails a feeling of well-being. It is as if you could feel your astral body flowing through your limbs like—I will say ‘sparkling wine’ for the less abstemious people, while for the more abstemious I ought perhaps to say lemonade’! Thus in uttering the sound ah you actually sense something like the flowing of some sparkling fluid through your physical body. What is the kind of feeling that now arises in the physical body? Ah—a feeling of comfort or well-being arises.

Let us take the other sound. You stand upright confronting your surroundings and say: ‘I too am here.’ Now it is as if, let's say, you were to shelter from the cold by means of a protecting garment. You increase the intensity of your own existence. This feeling of being aware of something outside yourself and defending yourself against it, this reliance on yourself in the face of some other element, lies in the sound a. In both cases, in ah and in a, the physical body is taken hold of by the astral body.

The same thing can be experienced musically, too. Musically this can occur in the experience of the minor mood in the most comprehensive sense. The minor mood is always a retreat into yourself with the soul and spirit part of your being; it is a laying hold of the bodily by the soul and spirit. You will most easily discover what is to be felt in the eurythmic gestures as the differentiation between the major and the minor moods when you draw the experience of the major out of the living experience of the sounds o and oo, and when you draw the experience of the minor, again with feeling, out of the experience of the sounds ah and a—not out of the sounds themselves, but out of the experience.

When you enter into these things you will feel how little people today know about the nature of the human being. It must be said that in our modern world the understanding for such things is remarkably limited. But without this understanding, absolutely nothing productive can be achieved in so many realms. Unless such understanding is acquired, we shall never be able to stand with our whole being within the realm of art. Something artistic which has not been permeated with the whole human being is nothing; it is a farce. Something artistic can only endure when the whole human being has poured himself into it.

But then we really have to feel the connection between the world and the human being; we must feel how speech brings us into a relationship with the outer world, and music into a relationship with ourselves; how, in consequence, all the movements of speech eurythmy are, as it were, drawn from the human being and transplanted into the outer world, whereas the gestures of music [eurythmy] have to flow back into the human being. Everything which goes out in speech eurythmy has to lead back into the human being in tone eurythmy. [Note 5]

Today, as you know, the whole world of thought is chaotically fragmented. There is no living picture of anything. Take a person of what we call a sanguine temperament, one who lives intensely in what is outside himself. A sanguine person pleases us, that is, he makes an agreeable impression upon us, only when he utters the sounds o and oo. We get quite a bitter taste in the mouth when anyone of sanguine temperament speaks the sounds ah and a; it doesn't quite work. But people today do not possess such vivid perceptions, and this is why contemporary people create so little from the depths of their being.

Now let us take a person of melancholic temperament. To anyone who has understanding for such things, a melancholic person seems to be an absolute caricature when he speaks the sounds o and oo. It only seems right when he speaks the sounds ah and a. Here we have the going over into the everlasting major mood of the sanguine person and into the everlasting minor mood of the melancholic person.

Now let us think of a person who is simply bursting with health, as we say. Such an overwhelmingly healthy person is in the major mood, and for the most part his astral body makes movements which correspond to o and oo. His step is light; that is to say, he lives in a continuous oo. He takes on everything, because it pleases him; he can endure anything. He is continually in the feeling of oo; he is the major mood incarnate.

Let us take a sick person. He is continually in a state in which, without the element of wonder, but through the very fact of his illness, he imitates the mood of ah or the mood of a—more especially the latter. A sick person is perpetually in the minor mood. And it is not exactly a metaphor or something of an analogy when we ask: What is fever? Fever is the sound ah transposed into the physical realm, which a eurythmist or someone who speaks the ah produces in the astral realm. The mood of the minor projected into the physical plane produces fever; it is the same process which takes place when you utter the sound ah, but in speaking this process takes place on a higher level—the level of soul and spirit. The sound ah is a fever. Either it is fever or it is tears, but it is always a process which the human being produces in himself.

These things lead to a true knowledge of the human being only when they are understood through the feelings. And because the human being is partially healthy and partially ill, the development of that which is superabundantly healthy (which must be inherent in art) and the development of movements imbued with the power of healing are closely interwoven. The latter exists in the case of ill people. This close relationship exists because, in reality, the major and the minor moods are, on a higher plane, the same as health and illness—that is to say, the experience of health and illness. Now we must not think that because the minor mood is [connected with] illness, it is therefore something bad or in some way inferior. Being ill in the soul-world always signifies something quite different from being ill in the physical world. From all this, you will see that the moods of major and minor, when developed eurythmically, may in time bring about therapeutic results.

So you see there is actually a bridge between speech eurythmy and music eurythmy. And when in speech eurythmy we experience the vowel sounds rightly, in the way I have described for ah and a on the one hand and for o and oo on the other hand, we really have something that leads us towards the experience of major and minor. But the important fact we could seriously bring home to ourselves is that we tend to push (schieben) the musical element more inwards, whereas the movements of speech eurythmy we have to push away (abschieben).

Imagine the following: Take a step forwards with the right foot, trying to feel this step as vividly as you can; do it in such a way that you also express in feeling the involvement of the head: you take a step forward (your head not too far back, but more forward). This is the first gesture. Now we carry out a second gesture. Try to accompany the gesture you have just made with a movement of the right hand, palm outwards, as much as possible in the direction of the foot taking the step. Now you have made a second gesture.

Take the first gesture: the stepping. Take the second: the movement. And now try to add a third gesture by making a light movement of the left arm, touching the right arm as if you wanted to push it away (left arm slightly pushing the right). You take a step forwards, following in the same direction with the right arm, and finally pushing the right arm with the left. Here you have a certain gesture in its most extreme form. You have the step and the movement, with what you add with the left arm bringing about a forming gesture—for when you follow on with the left arm, you arrest what you have poured into the movement in the right arm and hold fast the movement. We then have:

Step,
Movement,
Formation.

Here you are really involved in something threefold, and you are so much within this threefold occurrence that you will actually be able to feel this as a threefold occurrence. In the stepping you are in a position to discover an intimation of the outgoing of your astral body. In the following on of the movement, which you make with the right arm, this outgoing feeling is intensified. And in what I have described as the formation, you can feel how the movement is held fast.

Now if you really feel what I have indicated in this gesture, if you put yourselves into it, having no other wish than to enter with your whole being into this step, movement and formation, then you have something that is threefold. And you will easily realize that the step is the foundation of everything; it is the starting point. The movement is felt as the continuation, and must be in harmony with the foundation. And the formation establishes the whole process.

You must experience all this yourselves. You can experience it in the most varied ways if you take the notes into consideration; you can make the gesture in the upper, lower or middle zones. If you do it in such a way as to have C below, the E in the middle (thus beginning with the step, leading the movement over into E, and trying to confer the G in the formation) then in this step, movement and formation you have presented the major triad. Fashion the major triad quite naturally and objectively, and put the experience of the major triad into what you yourself present as a human being in the world. Just as in the gestures presenting the sounds of speech you have to feel the inner content of the sound, so here, in step, movement and formation, you have to experience the chord. This is a first element.

Step: C
Movement: E
Formation: G

Now let us try to step backwards with the left foot, allowing the head to follow [in the same direction]. And now try to follow this with the left arm. You must follow your backward step with the left arm, taking care to hold the palm of the hand inwards. Be really relaxed as you start. Make the backward step together with the movement of the head and arm (hand on the chest) trying to achieve completion by putting the right arm across. Try to hold fast this position. The whole gesture should be done in such a way that it can actually be seen how the left arm is led inwards towards the body, the left hand being brought to the body, and how the right hand is carried over towards the left hand as though to hold it fast [Hand is probably Austrian dialect for ‘arm’. Translator's note].

Here you have presented in the step:
C in the movement: Eb
and in the formation: G

You have presented the minor triad, and when you keep these gestures in view and have repeatedly tried to keep them in view, you will come to the conclusion that these basic elements of music, the major triad and the minor triad, can be presented in no other way. It is only when you have become convinced that there is absolutely no other way of expressing the matter that you will really have felt it. You may try as you like to find some other way of doing it; it is only when another method pleases you less than the gestures shown here that you can really be said to have realized what dwells in them.

Now you see, you have basically expressed in the realm of music what is expressed for the vowel sounds in speech eurythmy. If I ask you to produce an ah in speech eurythmy it is really the same (in speech eurythmy) as when I asked you just now to produce a major, or a minor, triad. It is simply doing vowels.

Now there is one thing which I have not yet characterized. I said that we can experience the major mood as such in o and oo, and the minor mood as such (which unlikely as it appears, is really the case) in ah and a, but I have not yet mentioned the fact that there can be something which lies between. Consider the transition. Try to experience the transition from the mood of wonder to the embracing feeling in the sound o, or, vice versa, the transition from the embracing feeling of o to the mood of wonder. Here you go from without inwards; you pass from the ‘going out’ of the astral body to a ‘diving down’ of the astral body. Here you pass from illness to health, from health to illness. This is the ee. Ee is always the neutral feeling of yourself between the experience of going outwards and the experience of being within—both in relation to the physical body. Thus ee stands between ah and a on the one side, and o and oo on the other side.

And now try (you can think these things over before tomorrow and apply them for yourselves) to pass over from the experience of minor to the experience of major by simply changing [direction]. You first produce the experience of the minor, then you change it by placing yourself forward. Simply incline the head somewhat forward (in the minor experience it lies in a backward direction), and incline yourself forward, thereby changing the whole movement of the muscles. Instead of the step backwards with the left leg, you would now have to step forwards with the right leg; you simply bring that which you have in front out of the minor into the major; that is to say, you pass out of the major into the minor mood, or out of the minor into the major mood. The experience underlying this transition corresponds to the experience of ee in speech eurythmy. You will already sense the interesting variety of life underlying this transition from the major to the minor mood if you really carry out what I have just indicated.

You see, the point is this. When we initially enter into the nuances which lie in the major and the minor moods and the transition between them, we are really entering into what, in the realm of music, corresponds to the vowel sounds. You must take deeply into your soul this first principle, as I have described it. The gestures you have made for the major and the minor moods and the transition from the one to the other are the musical way of doing the vowels. The starting point is taken from the major and the minor moods.

The musical realm carries the fundamental moods corresponding to the vowels throughout its entire tonal configuration, through tension, resolution, and so on. [Note 6] And just as we can pass over from the spoken vowel sounds into words, so we may also pass over from the understanding of the elements of music (as, for instance, the simple chordal nature of the major and minor triads) into eurythmic understanding of the musical realm, the inner musical configurations.

Tomorrow at this time we shall continue.

Gesture which is to be used for the expression of music must be gesture rising out of actual experience, and this can only be an experienced gesture if the underlying experience is there first.

You will understand this if you once more place before your soul the origin of music and speech in the human being. [7] Music and language, that is to say, the sounds of music and of speech, are connected with the whole human being. When the human being sings or speaks, the experience of the singing or speaking is in the astral body and ego.

Now everything that lives in the astral body and ego has its physical manifestation in air and warmth. Let us suppose that someone is singing or speaking. Imagine to yourselves as vividly as possible how the sound-formation of speech or music comes about. The formations of speech and music live purely as soul-element in the astral body and ego. Along with the astral body and ego they are then imparted to the air, to the organs of breathing and everything connected with them; they are imparted to the air and the organs of breathing by and through the astral body.

But you know that when any body, [like] a volume of air, is compressed, it becomes warmer. It becomes inwardly warmer. Compression causes an increase of inner warmth. When such a body expands, it uses this warmth again in the process of expansion. In the oscillating air, that is to say, in the alternation between condensed and rarefied air, there are continual fluctuations of temperature: warm, cold; warm, cold; warm, cold.

Thus there enters into the stream of singing or speaking the element of warmth. The ego lives in this element of warmth, and singing and speech gain their inwardness through this. Musical sound and the sounds of speech actually acquire their inner quality of soul from the warmth that, as it were, is carried on the waves of this air (which form the sound purely outwardly); warmth is carried on the actual flowing waves of the air. The astral body is active in the flowing air itself, and the ego lives in the warmth which flows on the waves of the air. But the astral body and ego are not only present in the air and warmth, they are also present in the fluid and solid elements of the human body. When a human being speaks or sings, the astral body and ego are partially withdrawn from there, and limit themselves to the air and warmth. Singing and speaking do in fact entail a withdrawal of the astral body and ego from the structure of the human body, but not completely, as in sleep. This is a partial withdrawal from the solid and fluid elements of the human body, which then remain behind. From this you will see that when someone speaks or sings, something takes place in his whole body.

We will now try to become aware of how the human being perceives what is taking place here. We know that the sounds of speech and of singing are activated by the larynx and all that is connected with it. The human being perceives by means of the ear. Here we have two organs clearly placed at the periphery of the body. Feeling is poured into these organs. In the senses there is the actual active feeling, active feeling of the soul. We feel with the eye; we feel with the ear. But it is also feeling which stimulates activity in the larynx and its neighbouring organs. Feeling is at work here. The imagination (Vorstellung) is merely pushed into the feeling. It is feeling which is at work. The human being, as it were, is specialized in the organs connected with hearing, speech and singing when he sings or takes in what is sung, or speaks or takes in what is spoken. Hence the actual experiences remain in the ear and larynx, and do not really enter into consciousness. [8]

Everything that can be laid hold of by the senses, and everything that can be expressed through the organs of speech, can also be expressed by the entire body, by the entire human being. In the movements of eurythmy, the whole human being becomes a sense-organ. The whole range of feeling, as it streams and strongly pulsates through the body, becomes incitement and an organ of perception—the whole range of feeling with the human being as the instrument. And so what otherwise remains an experience of the ear or larynx only, now has to become an experience of the whole human being. When it becomes an experience of the whole human being, it quite naturally becomes gesture. Once the experience is understood, is laid hold of, then the experience becomes gesture. Let us make this clear with a few examples. Think of a musical sound as such, and in order to have a starting point, take any note as keynote.

The connection of the sound with feeling will become clear to you when you recall that the animal (which is of a lower order than man) breaks forth into sound as the result of a sensation of well-being, of pleasure, or of some sort of pain. Now pleasure, comfort and pain are experiences of feeling. Ultimately every sound uttered by the human being originates from some such basic source. When the human being experiences pleasure or well-being, he feels impelled to utter sounds. Why? Why does the human being utter sound? You might say he could also remain silent. Why does the human being break out into sound when he is overcome with delight?

What does a feeling of pleasure imply? To be overcome with pleasure really means that we lose ourselves in our surroundings. Everything which induces pleasure means that the human being is losing himself. And everything painful means an excessive awareness of himself. You are aware of yourself too strongly when you are in pain. Just think how much more aware of yourself you are when you are ill, or experience some kind of pain, than you are when the whole body is free from pain. When we are in pain we are too strongly within ourselves, and we are excessively aware of ourselves. In pleasure, on the other hand, we nearly, or even utterly, are losing ourselves. Harmonious feeling is brought about by the balance between pleasure and pain, by giving ourselves up entirely to neither the pleasure nor the pain.

Why does the human being give vent to sound when experiencing pleasure, pain, or any other nuance of feeling—each of which in the last resort leads back either to pleasure or pain? Why does he produce sound? He does so in order to keep a hold on himself when he is at the point of losing himself in pleasure. The sound enables him to keep hold of himself; otherwise in this pleasure his astral body with his ego would leave him. By giving vent to sound he is able to keep hold of himself. This is at the root of all phenomena in which sound is produced by a living being. (For instance, the moon works very strongly upon certain creatures, such as dogs. It threatens to tear away a dog's astral body. And the dog barks at the moon because by this means it anchors its astral body.)

When the human being gives vent to sound for itself (and any note may be regarded as the keynote) it means that he is resisting this tendency to lose himself in pleasure. He is holding fast to his astral body.

And when the ego and astral body sink down into pain, then, because the human being is too intensely aware of himself, he quite rightly tries to tear himself away from himself by the utterance of some note or sound. In the plaintive sound of the minor mood there is an effort to tear free from an excessive awareness of self.

When we think of it, by saying this we are already speaking in gesture. There is not the least need to interpret anything artificially, because we speak in gesture. We need only to understand what occurs here, and we speak in gesture. If I say: ‘I have sunk too deeply into myself and must tear myself out of myself- then indeed it is beyond doubt that some sort of gesture which proceeds from me is a natural gesture, and is the actual expression of what I experience. It expresses what the experience is. And so the understanding of such an experience already indicates the gesture. You cannot do otherwise when describing the experience than to describe the gesture. For this reason the movements of eurythmy are not arbitrary, but actually reveal what is experienced.

Now let us suppose that someone, either in pleasure or pain, has produced a sound which we will regard as the keynote. The underlying mood is unfinished; it cannot stay like that, for if it did, the person in question would be constantly obliged to sing the keynote or to utter a sound. When experiencing pleasure he would never be able to cease uttering this sound; he would have to sustain it forever if the sound itself did not exert a certain calming influence. The human being cries out into the world as a result of pleasure or pain, and here is an incomplete condition of human experience, an unfinished condition of soul for human experience.

Let us now take the transition from keynote to octave. In the transition from keynote to octave, the octave simply falls into the keynote. It is as if you stretched out your hand and came into contact with an object. Through this external touch the longing you felt for something outside yourself is satisfied. In the same way the octave comes to meet you from the world in order to calm the prime within itself. That which was unfinished to begin with is now complete. When the octave is added to the prime, a wholeness is created again. In the course of these lectures you will see how the gestures come about by themselves if we penetrate to a true understanding of the underlying experience. [9]

Let us consider [the interval of] the fifth—the fifth which is united in some way to the keynote. It is essential here truly to acquire the experience of the fifth. The remarkable thing about the fifth is that when the human being holds the keynote and the interval of the fifth from it, he feels he is a completed human being. The fifth is the human being.

Naturally such things can only be expressed in the language of feeling—nevertheless, [we can say] the fifth is the human being. It is exactly as if the human being inwardly extended as far as his skin, as if he laid hold of his own skin and enclosed himself off within it. The fifth is the skin as it encloses the human being. And never, in the realm of musical sounds, can the human being feel his humanity so strongly as he does when he is experiencing the fifth in relation to the keynote. What I have just said may be more intelligible in the following considerations.

Let us now compare the experience of the fifth with that of the seventh and the third. The experience of the seventh (sounding either harmonically or melodically) involves those sounds which were especially favoured in the world of ancient Atlantis; it was the interval that gave them special delight. [10] Why was this? It was because in the epoch of ancient Atlantis, people's experience of going outside themselves was still a positive one. In the seventh we really do go out of ourselves. In the fifth we go as far as the skin; in the seventh we are outside ourselves. We leave ourselves in the seventh. Indeed in the seventh as such there is absolutely nothing soothing. It might be said that when a person cries out in the keynote because he is being hurt, and then adds the seventh to it, he is really crying out about the crying, in order to escape from it again. He is quite outside himself. Whereas the fifth is experienced at the surface of the skin, and the human being feels his humanity, in the seventh there is the feeling of breaking through the skin and going into his surroundings. He goes out of himself; he feels he is in his surroundings.

In the third there is a distinct feeling of not reaching as far as the skin, but of remaining within yourself. The experience of the third is very intimate. You know that what you settle with the third you settle with yourself alone. Just try out how unfamiliar the experience of the fifth is compared to the experience of the third. The feeling of the third is an intimate one which you settle with yourself in your heart. In the fifth you feel that other people too can see what you experience, because you go as far as the skin. It is only by means of feeling that such things can be experienced. And in the experience of the seventh you are outside yourself.

And now recollect what I said yesterday. The gesture which characterizes the keynote is the step. This step gives us the position. The third is characterized either by an accompanying or a following gesture of one arm, indicating an entering into movement, while following in the direction of this gesture. The direction of the gesture is followed in such a way that if it is the major third, you still remain within your arm. You remain within it. I have characterized the fifth as something that you form. You return, just as the skin forms the human being on all sides. In the triad, regardless of whether it is major or minor, we have:

Inner activity: the step
Remaining within yourself: the movement
Closing off what is outside: the formation

Now the point is this: When trying to give clear expression to the remaining-within-yourself in the third, it is possible to vary the movement. In order to introduce some variety, you might, for instance, stretch out your arm and, while continuing the direction of the gesture, move in some way such as this (right arm stretched out, the hand moving up and down). Now you are within yourself. Thus the interval of the third is well expressed when you first take up the position, and then make the movement—continuing, however, to move within the movement. Now you have inwardness.

Suppose that you are dealing with a major third. Then you will show inwardness by making the arm movement go away (out) from yourself. If you express the minor third, you remain more within yourself, which you indicate with your arm back towards yourself (inwards). You have a gesture that really expresses the experience of the third. [11]

If you want to experience these things you must repeatedly practise the corresponding gesture and try to see how the experiences of the intervals actually flow from the gesture, and how they are within it. Then the corresponding experience will grow together with the gesture, and you will possess that which makes the matter artistic. The experience will grow with the gesture. Only then will the matter become artistic.

In the experience of the seventh this is especially apparent. With the seventh, the essential thing is that you go out of yourself, for it is a going-out-of-yourself. Somehow the gesture has to show that you go out of yourself (you stretch out the arm, turning the hand while shaking it). The natural expression of the seventh is a movement which you do not follow, but in which the hand is allowed to be shaken. And when you compare the experience of the fifth with that of the seventh, you will feel in the fifth the necessity of closing off, of giving it form, of making so to speak an enclosing movement. This is not possible in the experience of the seventh, for in the seventh it is as if your skin disappears while experiencing the seventh, and you stand there as a sort of flayed Marsyas. [12] The skin flies away and the whole soul goes out into the surroundings. If you want to introduce the other arm as well into the movement to support the seventh experience, you can do so, of course, for there is never a question of pedantry or retaining something schematic. In such a case you would have somehow to indicate the seventh with the other hand. Of course this must be beautifully done.

Thereby you will experience, when you enter deeply into the matter in this way, that the experience itself becomes gesture. And eurythmy will only prosper when the experience itself becomes gesture.

A eurythmist must become in some respects a new human being compared to what he or she was before, because in general, through the fact that we speak or sing, we have brought about a certain attentiveness to what we actually want in the gesture. We lead over what we want in gesture into speech and song. When we retrieve it, gesture arises. And a professional eurythmist (if I may use such a philistine expression)* has to feel it absolutely natural to translate everything into gesture. Indeed, when mixing in ordinary, polite society, a eurythmist cannot help feeling a sense of restraint and restriction at not being able to eurythmize all sorts of things in front of people. Isn't it true, that just as the painter itches to paint when he sees something and is unable to (for he would like to paint everything but cannot always be at it, and thus has to restrain himself), so too a tired eurythmist is actually something terrible? A eurythmist cannot manifest fatigue as something natural. It is really dreadful to see a eurythmist sitting down tired during a rehearsal, for it is exactly (isn't it?) as if someone suddenly became rigid or got paralysed. I have sometimes observed in eurythmy rehearsals that eurythmists sit down when there is a little pause. Such things do not, I believe, happen in Dornach, but here and there it does occur. I probably turn quite pale, for my blood runs cold at this quite impossible sight of a tired eurythmist. There is no such thing! In life, of course, there is such a thing, that is the paradox, but you must sense that this is so. So I do not say you must not sit down if you are tired, but I do say: If you do, you must regard yourself as a caricature of a eurythmist!

These things must be said in order that the fundamental mood of the artistic process may be brought into the matter, for art has to be based upon the mood, upon that which runs through everything like a connecting thread. And especially such an art as eurythmy, where the whole human being is involved, can never prosper if this mood is lacking, if this mood does not permeate everything.

When these things have become real experiences, you will simply and truly feel eurythmy as you do speaking and singing. You must accustom yourselves, however, just as you experience the sounds of language, to experience singing too for the activity of eurythmy. It is quite true to say that the eurythmist must experience the musical element in a fuller sense than, for instance, a singer does. With a singer it depends upon his entering right into the musical sound, taking hold of it, being able to hear it, and living in an element in which his body comes to his assistance to a marked degree. The body does not come to the assistance of the eurythmist; for in eurythmy it is the soul which must engage in the gesture what the senses or larynx have to do in singing and speaking.

It is necessary to preface the description of the actual movements by this somewhat lengthy introduction, for these things are especially important for the whole feeling of the eurythmic element. The eurythmic element will not be understood if such things are not entered into with intensity. An understanding must be acquired by the eurythmist for all that I have stressed when giving introductions to performances, but which in the present time is rarely correctly understood. I often say that the prose content of the words do not make for the poetical element, the artistic and poetic element. There are people today who read a poem as though it were prose. You do not have the poem there. The prose content does not constitute the poem. The poem is what lives in the musical, sculptural and pictorial element of the words, in their melodic motifs, rhythm and beat, and so on. Anyone who wishes to express what should be expressed in poetical form, must be vividly aware that the words must not be used merely on account of their meaning, but arranged according to the beat, the rhythm, the melodic motifs, or that which is pictorial in the formation of the sounds, and similar things.

We have, consequently, to go one stage beyond the mere content of language, for in so far as its actual content is concerned, language is inartistic. It exists for prose. This is the inartistic element in language. Not until language is fashioned, not until it is given shape and form, does it become artistic.

What has been said here about language is quite obvious for singing, of course. We can see that our age does not care much for real artistic creation, for it happens that modern music [1924] too exhibits the tendency that does not allow the actual music, the progression of notes, to speak for itself, but tries to express something quite different by this means.

Now you must not misunderstand me, for it is not my intention to make any anti-Wagnerian propaganda. Time and again I have emphasized Wagner's significance in the culture of our age. This, however, is not because I regard his music as being ‘musical music’, but rather because we have to admit the demand of the present age for ‘unmusical music’. It is apparent to me that unmusical music has its justification in our age. Fundamentally speaking, Wagner's music is unmusical. [13] And it is really necessary in an age like ours, when music should also become gesture, to point the way to musical experience as such, when musical experience is to be expressed in gesture, and to show how the interval of the third represents inwardness, and the fifth a boundary, the seventh a going-out-of-yourself. And what is it that gives the feeling of inner satisfaction in the octave? The inner satisfaction in the octave is due to the fact that here, I would like to say, we get away from the danger inherent in the seventh. We escape from this danger inherent in the seventh and re-find ourselves outside.

With the octave it is like this, as if—with the seventh—you had become a flayed Marsyas, without your skin, the soul departing, the skin flying off and is getting away; but now you feel in the octave: ‘I am stripped of my skin, but it is coming, returning, I'll have it in a moment, it is about to return, it is there approaching and yet it is still outside.’ You have indeed grown somewhat, you have expanded and become fuller. It is as though you grow while experiencing the octave.

Obviously, then, the movement for the experience of the octave is not the same as that for experiencing the seventh. The experience is attained by turning round the whole hand outside yourself. The interval of the octave is expressed by turning the hand, starting with the palm facing outwards. If you wish to give full expression to the octave, you can of course make the same movement in this way too (in the same way, but carried out with both arms and hands). Here again it is self-evident that these things must be practised so well that they become second nature. Just as the musician has to get the producing of the notes into his fingers, so the eurythmist must get the corresponding gestures into his or her whole body.

This is why it is so necessary for the basic elements of eurythmy to be repeatedly practised. Such elementary movements as those I have briefly indicated (and shall develop further in the course of the next few days) must become second nature so it is no longer necessary to think about them, any more than it is necessary to think about the letters of a word that is spoken. If we say the word ‘letter’ we do not need to think, for we know quite well how its component sounds have to be pronounced. And so we have to reach the point where the movements for the intervals, triads, and so on, are produced out of ourselves quite naturally. You will then see how easily the other things arise. And above all you will increasingly realize how the experience passes over into gesture.

In order to understand this, let us deal with the difference between concords and discords. As you know, triads are concordant or discordant; a four-note chord is actually always discordant.

You will have realized yesterday from the movements for the triads, that in order to give expression to the experiences of the triad, the assistance of the whole human being must be invoked. In the first place we have what I characterized as the step. The step essentially entails the use of one leg. Then, with both major and minor chords, we have the movement with one arm, and the forming with the other. You may say: ‘I have nothing else to use.’ Well, as you do have two legs, you have a means of expressing a chord of four notes. And now you may say: I really cannot step forwards with one leg and backward with the other, simultaneously. And yet you can do this if you jump. You see, we arrive at this quite naturally.

There is no other means of presenting a four-note chord than by jumping somewhat, moving one leg forwards and the other backwards. This is how a four-note chord is presented. But think for a moment what happens here. It would be difficult, as well as not looking particularly beautiful, to jump without bending the knees. You cannot jump easily with totally stiff legs, quite apart from the ungraceful appearance. In jumping you must bend at the knees, so that in the jumping movement necessary for the four-note discord (because of the nature of the body and its relation to the environment) you really get the bending of the knees as the gesture for the discord. The natural movement for a discord is the bending of the knees entailed by jumping.

From this, however, something else arises. If you have a discordant triad you can again apply the same principle. With a concordant triad you take a step forwards; with a discordant triad you must also make a bending movement. There is no necessity to bend as with jumping, but you can bend. And so you express the discordant triad by moving with bended knees. You can discover this from the fact that a four-note chord (which is always a discord) can only be done by a jump in order to set both legs into movement; for you just do not have four members of your body in order to express a discord of four notes, so you have to jump, coupled with bending. This gives us, therefore, bending as the expression of the discord.

Now just as a musician has to practise his exercises, a tremendous inner liveliness is attained by practising the alternation between discords and concords, passing from one to the other simply with a view to experiencing in their gestures the change of mood, the change in the actual feeling.

If you think of all I have just said, you will find the experience of the fourth of particular interest. In the third we are intimately within ourselves. In the fifth we come just to the boundary of the body. The fourth lies between. And the fourth has this striking characteristic, that here the human being experiences himself inwardly, although not so intimately as in the third. But he does not even reach his surface. He experiences himself beneath this surface. He remains, as it were, just beneath it. He separates himself from the surrounding world, and creates himself within himself. He does not form himself, as in the fifth, where the external world also compels this forming, but he forms himself out of the needs of his own soul. The experience of the fourth is such that the human being feels his humanity through his own inner strength, whereas in the fifth it is through the world that he feels his humanity. In the fourth he says to himself ‘You are really too big; you cannot experience yourself because you are so big. Make yourself a little smaller, yet stay as important as your size.’ In the fourth you make yourself into a snug, comfortable dwarf Thus the fourth demands a very strong relation to yourself. You can achieve this when, instead of simply going outwards or inwards as in the third, you draw the fingers sharply together as if to concentrate the strength of the hand in itself In this way the fourth is expressed and revealed.

These, then, are the principles which have to be considered before entering more deeply into the gestures of the musical element, for without the experience of these principles no truly artistic gestures can come about. I am sure you will have plenty to do when you come to work through all these details. It is better therefore not to give too many gestures in one session, for what has been given must first be assimilated. So we shall continue tomorrow.

#160;

Notes:

1. It has a bourgeois ring in German. Translator's note.

Let us first see if you can manage the following exercise. With the right arm, try to make a movement similar to the one I gave for the forming of the seventh; now try to hold the arm still whilst stepping forwards, so that the arm remains stationary, the body following the direction of the arm. To do this you must bend your arm as you step. The arm, the hand that is, must remain in the same place while you step forwards. This exercise must be carried out in such a way that the arm, the hand, remains where it is, while you come up and join it. This must be practised.

Now try another exercise: While stepping forwards try to draw the hand back somewhat—not too strongly, however. Now we have two exercises. Try to experience in succession seventh and prime, and sixth and prime. The first movement just shown expresses the succession of notes: seventh—prime; and the second movement for the experience sixth—prime; the sound [of each interval] imagined in succession. They can, however, also be imagined simultaneously; I will speak about this a little later on. In this way you are able to bring movement into the gesture.

The movement first shown is one which, in a certain way, throws life back into the lifeless. And indeed, as may be seen from yesterday's description of the seventh, this is also the case in regard to its relationship to the keynote. If you picture the keynote as the embodiment of calmness and quiet, and the seventh as actually lying outside the physical body, so that in the seventh the human being goes out of himself, then it will be possible for you to imagine that by your going out, the seventh brings back the spiritual quickening element into the resting, bodily part.

You see, these things become vividly real when we pass over from the musical element to the eurythmical element. Music naturally is something perceived, as it is produced in the first place in order to be heard, whereas eurythmy brings the whole human being into movement. And you will best recognize the inner reality of what has just been said about the relationship of the seventh to the keynote, from the fact that this can be therapeutically effective. When for instance a hardening process in the lungs or some other organ in the chest is diagnosed, it will be found that this very exercise, as it has now been demonstrated, will have a healing, re-vitalizing effect, helping to bring the condition back to normal.

It is precisely tone eurythmy in all its elements, when suitably carried out, which is a factor in eurythmy therapy. Only it is necessary to penetrate into the nature of the musical sounds in a really living way, as we endeavoured to do yesterday, and as we shall try to continue.

In this connection let me also say the following. If, in a similar way to that which I have just indicated, you go on from the seventh to the sixth in relation to the keynote, you will find in this interval a noticeably weakened relationship, and it is strikingly characteristic that the hand, which is held stationary from outside in the case of the seventh, here goes backwards. This does not express the relation of the living to the lifeless, but the sixth in relation to the keynote is so expressed that you feel it merely as motion, as a setting into activity. It may be compared to a stimulation of feeling rather than to something which imparts life. The sixth in relation to the keynote induces a picture of feeling. The seventh in relation to the keynote induces a picture of life; it imparts life to the lifeless.

And now, bearing in mind these gestures (which will have shown you that in its essential being, tone eurythmy must be movement), I will ask you to consider how tone eurythmy, just as speech eurythmy, may after all provide a correcting influence upon art as a whole.

It was necessary to tell you that speech eurythmy has a corrective artistic influence upon recitation and declamation. In introductions to public performances, for instance, it is difficult to make use of the necessary drastic expressions which are demanded if we are to describe the inartistic nature of our modern age, for people would only be shocked, and very little would be gained. Things have to be put mildly, as indeed I try to do. But the truth of the matter is that in our inartistic age, recitation and declamation have become completely degenerate. The laws of true art are no longer observed in recitation and declamation. Everything is read like prose in a thoroughly materialistic way. People think it must be felt out of the gut instinctively; emphasis is determined by pathos, or something of the sort, indeed by anything that makes an appeal to sensation or sense-impression. Now true recitation and declamation must be based upon the forming and shaping of the actual language, upon making speech musical, and upon a sculptural, pictorial treatment of speech. And when on the one hand we have a eurythmy performance, and on the other hand recitation, then it is not possible to make use of recitation and declamation in their present degenerate state. Attention must be paid to speech.formation. I always describe this as a ‘hidden eurythmy’, for eurythmy is indicated in recitation and declamation. Attention must be paid to the shaping and forming of speech. In such a way eurythmy can also exert a corrective influence upon everything that is musical.

We are actually living (this is naturally still more shocking) in a terribly inartistic age where music is concerned, too. This cannot be denied—we are living in a terribly inartistic age. For today there is an exceedingly widespread tendency to drive music as such into mere noise. [14] We have gradually ceased to be musical in the real sense, and instead we now make use of music in order to portray all sorts of sounds which are meant to represent something or other; the listener cannot always be sure what actually is intended, but at any rate it is a question of portraying something or other. Now please do not regard me as one of those Philistines who are only out to denegrate all that is being produced today in the sphere of music—doubtless with the most honest intentions! But it is necessary, when dealing with an art such as eurythmy, to raise it upon the foundations of what is really artistic, and to be able to speak about such things radically, too. It is impossible to do otherwise. Thus it is easy to see how eurythmy can work correctively upon musical taste.

You must forgive me if I now introduce something in the nature of an exercise; I have to do so in order to show how something can be built out of the fundamentals of art. Try first of all to become inwardly completely quiet, indifferent to sense impressions, as well as to any inward passions. Having achieved this state of indifference, sit down at the piano and play one of the middle notes (any note will do) and try while going up the scale to the octave really to experience the progression of notes. [15]

Having experienced this in peace and quiet, stand up and try to realize in eurythmy gestures what you have experienced. You will arrive at much, both in regard to what I have already mentioned and to those things about which I have still to speak. Endeavour, when attempting to reproduce in gesture what you have just played (single notes in an ascending progression) to bring into the eurythmy gestures (into the gestures for the triad, for instance) something similar to the gestures we have been discussing during these last few days. You will find it comparatively easy to feel a very strong connection between what you produce, feel and experience as gesture, and the notes as you play them successively on the piano.

Try striking a chord and try to reproduce in eurythmy the harmony of the notes. You will now discover that something within you does not want to go along with this. When striking a chord you are faced with the problem of having to carry out the step and movements of both arms simultaneously, as I indicated, let's say, for the movements for the major triad. You are impelled to do this, but it will certainly arouse in you a feeling of inner opposition. A certain tendency will become apparent in your soul to transform the chordal, harmonic element into the melodic element, to transform the notes sounding simultaneously into a progression. And you will only feel really satisfied when, as it were, you release the chord, when you actually lead it over into Melos, making three movements for the three notes, one after the other.

It may be plainly stated as a law that eurythmy actually compels us to release continually the harmonic element into Melos. This is the corrective element about which I now want to speak. When you feel this in the right way you will come to the conclusion that, drastic as it sounds, the chord is really a burial. The chord may be likened to a burial. The three notes which are played together, and which are thus dependent upon space and not upon time—these notes have died in the chord. They only live when they appear as melody. When you really feel this you will discover the actual musical element is only to be found in the melodic element, the effect of the notes living in time.

You will then realize how senseless it is to ask: ‘What do the notes express?’ Today people have gone so far in this direction that they try to make music represent the rippling of water, the sighing of the wind, the rustling of leaves, and all sorts of things. This, of course, is really apalling. Naturally, it is not my intention to campaign against this kind of thing, nor to detract from the pleasure anyone may take in it; I am only concerned that we correctly understand the matter out of the fundamentals. The notes, or progressions of notes, speak for themselves. They are indeed only there to speak for themselves, to express what the third says to the fifth, what the third says to the prime, or what the three of them say together when played in succession. Otherwise we find ourselves in the position of the distinguished European musician who once played a most complicated piece of many voices to an Arab. The Arab got into a terrible state of agitation, and said: ‘But why go so quickly? I should like to hear each song in its turn.’ He wanted each voice to be played separately, for he could not take in that the piece represents something quite other than a basically unmusical, noisy conglomeration of quite different things. [ 16]

I want to make clear to you the fact that in the musical element a real world is present, wherein we rediscover the impulses of the rest of the world.

Let us consider one fact. We die. The physical body remains, but it disintegrates. Why does it disintegrate? Why does it dissolve? The process of dissolution begins after death; up to that point the body does not disintegrate but remains intact. Why? Because previously we bore time within ourselves. From the moment when death occurs, the corpse lives only in space; it cannot participate in time. Because it can no longer participate in time, because it exists only in space and is subject to the laws of space, this fact makes it dead, this makes it fade away. We become a corpse because of the impossibility of bearing time within ourselves; we live, during earthly existence, because we are able to carry time within ourselves, to allow time to work within ourselves, because time is active in the material which extends in space. Melody is manifest in time. The chord is the corpse of melody. Melody dies in the chord.

As far as the understanding of music is concerned, our present age is in a sorry state. All these discussions about tone-colour in the overtones, and so on, are really only an attempt to make the single note into a kind of chord. People today have an innate tendency to find the harmonic element even in a single note. In reply to various questions as to how music ought to be developed, I have frequently answered that we must become aware of the melody in the single note; [ 17] in the single note we must become aware of the melody, not of the chord, but of the melody. One note conceals within itself a number of notes—every note at all events contains three. With the one note that you actually hear as sound, which is produced by an instrument and is actually audible, we have the present. Then there is another note within it, which is as if we recalled this second note. And there is a third note within it, which is as if we expected this third note. Every note really calls forth recollection and expectation as adjacent, melodic notes. This will come to be presented one day. [18] People will surely discover the possibility to deepen music by the single note becoming deepened into melody. Today people look for the chord in a single note and think about how this chord exists in the overtones. This, however, actually points to their materialistic conception of music.

Now the following question is unusual, but from the point of view of eurythmy it is fully justified: Where does the musical element really lie? Today there would be no doubt that the musical element lies in the notes, because such a terrific effort is required in the schools to put down these notes correctly, to arrange them in the right way. As you know, it all depends on mastering the notes. But the notes are not the music! Just as the human body is not the soul, so the notes are not the music. The interesting thing is that the music lies between the notes. We only need the notes in order that something may lie between them. The notes are necessary, of course, but the music lies between them. It is not the C nor the E which is essential, but what lies between the two. Such an element lying in-between, however, is only possible in the melodic element. In the chord it would be quite senseless. In harmony, such a lying in- between would be quite senseless. The transition from Melos to the harmonic element is really a stepwise transition from the musical to the unmusical realm. For through this the music is buried, through this the music is killed.

I could give you a somewhat peculiar definition of music. Naturally I should not want to give it in a music school, but I have to give it to eurythmists, for anyone really wishing to promote tone eurythmy has to understand these things. It is a negative definition, certainly, but nevertheless correct: What is the musical element? It is what you do not hear! [19] That which you hear is never musical. If you take the experience which exists in time, which lies between two notes of a melody, then you hear nothing, for it is only the notes themselves which are audible. What you inaudibly experience between the notes, that is music in reality, for that is the spiritual element of the matter, whereas the other is the sensory manifestation of it.

You see, this enables you in the most eminent sense to bring the human personality, the human personality as soul, into the musical element. [20] The more you are able to bring out that which cannot be heard, the more you use the audible as the vehicle for the inaudible, so much the more is the music permeated with the soul. To feel this in the musical element is precisely the task of the eurythmist. And this is why, in the gestures of eurythmy, in the manner we saw earlier (or as we have otherwise already seen them, or shall be showing them) with these gestures he or she should feel delight not in the position, but in the bringing about of the positions, that is, in the movement. In the whole extent of eurythmy, the essential thing is not in the making of poses, but in the movement.

You may never say (I have frequently emphasized this, but frequently see the opposite conception in practice), you may never say: This is an ee (stretched arm). For now it is an ee no longer. It is only an ee as long as it is being formed, as long as the arm is in movement; so long is it ee. Nothing in eurythmy ever retains its meaning once it has come into being. In eurythmy, the significance lies in the process of coming into being.

Consequently, the eurythmist has to pay great attention to the forming of the movement, directing the greatest care to that movement through which a form arises. And consideration must be taken, as soon as one form arises, to transform it as quickly as possible, to lead it over into the subsequent form. The eurythmist regards movement as his element, neither standing in, nor holding on to, the form.

Anyone sensitive to these things in eurythmy will especially feel the sort of things which we have already done, in the following way. Some piece of music has just finished; the piece is over and you stand in the last position until the curtain falls. (I have asked for this to be done in performances, but it must be felt too.) It is quite finished. The final position, the final figure has come to rest, and the curtain is drawn. What feeling should live here; what should we feel? That the eurythmist seizes up! We actually arrive at the annulling of the artistic, eurythmic activity. It is finished. We say, as it were, to the audience: [21] ‘Friends, we have now killed the performance so that you may come to yourselves and think about it a little.’ Standing still may certainly have this significance. That is why it is justified in relationship to the audience, but only in this relationship.

All this serves to show you how much it matters in every possible form to make a study of the human being in movement. There are three observations we can make about the human being. We know the human being exists in space, but that which is spatial in him does not belong to eurythmy. But what can manifest in space as movement; that is what belongs to eurythmy. And it is clear that the human being lives in space in a threefold manner.

Fig. 2

We have thus the human being extended from above downwards, and from below upwards. But we have also the human being extended in the directions right-left and front-back, back-front. The other directions of space may be related to these three directions, which are so clearly to be distinguished in the human being. [23]

When the human being carries musical experience over into eurythmy, he carries it into movement. And he has no choice in his movements but to enter, in some way or other, into these three different directions. He has to find some way of making use of these three directions if the musical element is to be carried into movement, for they represent him and [all] his possibilities of movement. In eurythmy [all] the human possibilities of movement should become apparent.

When you take the directions of up-down and down-up (you will have gathered this from the still relatively primitive tone eurythmy we have had hitherto), when you take the directions up-down and down-up (also taking into account what I have said about the major and the minor triads, and so on, and in connection with the foot and the head), then you will be able to feel: The height of the human being, the up-down and the down-up, corresponds to pitch. We have no other means of expressing pitch than the upwards and downwards movement of the arms, of the hands, and indeed, if you like, the upwards and downwards movement of the legs or head. When making pitch visible, we move in the vertical direction (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Now let us take right-left. This direction immediately carries us over into the gesture of movement. Where is it that the direction right-left makes itself especially apparent? The right-left is especially apparent when someone walks. Walking really is the bringing-into-movement of the right-left: right leg, left leg, right leg, left leg. And the direction right-left will remain lifeless just so long as you walk in life in a philistine manner; there will be no life in the right-left. But life is immediately introduced when we make some differentiation between the right-left, as nature does in that people usually write with the right hand and not with the left. A differentiation may also be shown simply by taking a strong step with the right leg, the left leg being drawn back, before placing it again. Everything that comes about in this way through the differentiation between right and left is connected with beat (see Fig. 3). Beat in music is carried over into eurythmic movement by means of the right-left.

There still remains the front-back. The point here is that the front- back is inwardly taken hold of, and in order to do so we must look at the human being a little more closely.

Now, you know, the front-back is not merely, let's say, as if some signpost is written with ‘front’ on the one side and ‘back’ on the other. The essential element of the front-back is that we see in front of us, but do not see behind us. Behind us is a world of darkness, in fact, of which we have scarcely an inkling, whereas in front of us lies the whole visible world opening out. And in our movement, we can turn the ‘front’ to the whole visible world, and then we are dealing with that which is in front. And when we turn to this ‘front’, it means that we make the movement short. We are right in the midst of the world. We make the movement short.

When we are not able to enter this world, when we are held back, stuck, as it were, to the darkness lying behind us and unable to get out of it, we make the movement long. And so we may simply differentiate the relationship between front and back by means of ‘short-long’. We have then u—or—u, iambus and trochee (see rhythm in Fig. 3). That means, we have rhythm; front-back confers the rhythm.

Now we possess three of the musical elements, and these may be used in your musical forms. If I may thus express it: you step the beat, you express the rhythm by means of quick-slow, and you express the actual musical element, Melos, leading the movements up or down accordingly. The entire human being is engaged in eurythmy by means of beat, rhythm and Melos.

Fundamentally speaking, music is the human being. And indeed it is from music that we may rightly learn how to free ourselves from matter. For if music were to become materialistic, it would actually be lying: it is not ‘there’ Every other form of matter is present in the world and is insistent. But musical sounds originally were not to be found in the material world. [8] We have to devise a means of producing them; they must first be made. The soul element, which lies between the notes, this lives in the human being. But today, because the world has become so unmusical, people are scarcely aware of it.

This will once again be taken into account when people realize that the note corresponds to the calm posture of the eurythmist. Let us now look at the major triad. (This was demonstrated.) Now you are no longer engaged in eurythmy, for eurythmy lies in the process of arriving at this position. The major triad lies in the going forwards, in the tending-towards, the coming-into-being, not in the accomplished fact. But the note as such corresponds to the completed posture. That means, the very moment a note is completed, the musical element ceases.

In this connection the following is of special interest: We have to be able to feel a relationship between the musical element and speech. If you endeavour in your listening to draw out the scale from the main vowels, most interesting things result:

C may be said to correspond to u (‘oo’ )
D to o (‘o’)
E to a (‘ah’ )
F to ö (‘ir’) (English equivalent as in: birth)
G to e (‘a’)
A to ü (‘eu’) (English equivalent as in: feud)
B to i (‘ee’)

This is the approximate correspondence between the scale and the main vowels, purely according to their sound. [24]

Now I would like you to make an oo with the legs. That is the keynote, as you all know. And now try to make the movement of a major or minor triad in the way we have already discussed, marking the third with its completing fifth. If you relate the movements and push them somewhat across, the fifth will be expressed in the movement of the a; it will become an a of its own accord.

After this try to make an ah; and now try most strongly to make a third, not with one hand as we otherwise do, but do the movement for the third with both arms, after imagining the keynote. Then you will find yourself in the eurythmy movement for the sound ah, with the third.

You see something very striking from this. If we listen very attentively it is almost possible to hear approximately this correspondence between the main vowels and the scale; if the sounds are articulated properly they do approximate to the scale. The movements of eurythmy bring this about of themselves. These movements rendering the formations of the musical sounds, also indicate those of the formations for the sounds of speech. This means that we cannot do otherwise in eurythmy than, when doing the right movements, to introduce the right conditions between the musical sounds and the sounds of speech, too.

We have never considered this other aspect of the movements that we have been studying all these years from the point of view of the sounds of speech and their formation; now we must try to realize them in their relationship to the form of the musical sounds. We have to become clear about the approximate correspondence between the scale and the formation of the sounds of speech. And when we compare the formation of the musical sounds with those for the sounds of speech, we find that their resemblance corresponds to the same degree as that between the musical sounds and the speech sounds as such. Of course, it's not the same; there is simply a resemblance. Neither in eurythmy are the two identical.

You see from this how naturally what we call eurythmy arises out of the very essence of speech on the one hand, and of the musical element on the other. That is quite plainly to be seen. And when you have entered into these things, you will be able to feel in no other way than: A musical sound or sound of speech can have only one gesture; it cannot be expressed in a variety of ways.

Let us continue tomorrow.

As you will have gathered from yesterday's lecture, a proper presentation of eurythmy has to take its start from Melos, from the melodic element, or we could also say, from the motif or phrase. [25] It is the progression of the motif, the musical motif in time, which indicates the path which eurythmy must take on the basis of the musical element.

Let us concentrate on this today. Here again you will see how necessary it is to pay special attention to the actual musical element. Now, the musical element makes sense in the progression of the motifs—that is, the musical element as such, not as it manifests in expression. And this sense has absolutely to be brought out in a presentation of eurythmy. The question, then, is how the progression of a musical phrase must be treated in eurythmy.

Usually in music itself, even when listening.to it, people fail to observe the musical sense progressing within the motif itself You all know that a motif frequently includes the bar line [American: bar]; indeed this is generally the case. The bar, the change of bar that is, interrupts the motif And when passing from one completed motif to the following formation you often feel that something like a ‘dead interval’ lies between them (musicians frequently even use this expression). It is further said that such a dead interval corresponds to the progression from the end of one spoken word to the beginning of the next. The matter is frequently regarded in this way. But this very comparison, as I said yesterday, demonstrates that people have no feeling for the fact that the true musical element actually is that which is inaudible. When the dead interval is spoken about, and is compared with what lies between two spoken words, the comparison is not valid. Anyone wishing to speak out of an understanding of art really should not speak of the ‘dead interval’ between two words, but on the contrary should place the greatest value upon the way the transition proceeds from one word to another.

Just think that in speech, in the treatment of speech, we can observe the following fundamental difference between good and bad treatment. You can treat each word separately, but this is quite different from a clear feeling that one word ends in a specific way and the next begins in a specific way. And you look for meaning between what is apparent to the senses (that is to say, between the end of one word and the beginning of the next), where the spirit lies, which you are endeavouring to express. The spirit also lies between the words. Furthermore, the sounds we hear in words are only the sensory impression; when we speak, too, the spirit lies in the inaudible realm. It is sad that people today have so little feeling for the inaudible realm, and are no longer able to listen between the words. A lecture on spiritual science can never be understood when you follow merely the actual words; you have to listen between the words, even listen into the words, discovering in the words what lies behind them. In this case words at all times are an aid to express what cannot be heard.

The question, then, is to find some means of differentiating in eurythmic movement the position of a bar line in a motif, and the transition from one motif to the next. This difference may be shown by holding the movement at the bar line, so that whoever carries the movement does it, so to speak, within himself, wherever possible indicating through the position of the arms and hands that he is pushed together, and especially in moving a form by contracting the movement of the form into himself—in other words, becoming stuck whilst in the form. Conversely, in the transition from one motif-metamorphosis to the next, we are dealing with a swinging-over (Schwung) from the one metamorphosed motif to the other. We swing in a spirited manner from one metamorphosed motif to the next; in the actual bodily movement itself we have a kind of upward swing. And where the bar line appears within a motif we aim for a rigidly upright posture.

Try to practise this until it becomes a matter of course when moving. This will be of great significance. It would be quite good to make sure that the matter is clear. Let us take the following to clarify this. (It is important to make a beginning with the very simplest of examples, and it is no matter if this simplicity is somewhat home-baked.)

Here, then, we will select as simple a phrase as possible to make clear to ourselves the real significance of what I have been speaking about. The phrase starts with a G and progresses to B, returns to G, progresses to F#, and so on. Thus we have the first motif, then the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth, and the question is: How should this progression of motifs be carried out in eurythmy? In the first motif we hold ourselves back, in the second we boldly swing onwards to the next motif: the curve is first up, then down, and between we have the bar lines. The phrase continues (see Fig. 4) with holding ourselves back, boldly swinging onwards, holding ourselves back.

Fig. 4

Thus, if I draw the whole thing: up, down, up, down, up, down—we always find the bar line in between, and in the fifth and sixth motifs, two bar lines each. The progression is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight restraining-ourselves, and one, two, three, four, five swinging-onwards. Try to be quite upright, but go together with the whole movement; to be upright at the bar line and boldly swinging onwards at the transition from one motif to its following metamorphosis. The bar line must be strongly indicated by means of a strong holding-on to yourself. This may never take place simultaneously with the notes, however, but must always occur between them.

This, hopefully, is clearly understandable. Always show the bar line, and its holding-on movement, very distinctly. This, of course, is something I ask you to ponder about, what it means for the various forms of phrasing. I wanted to show you this with as simple an example as possible. You see, the presentation of eurythmy reveals that the melody receives the actual spirit and carries it on. Fundamentally speaking, everything else does not add the spirit of the musical element, being at all events a more or less illustrative element. But in order to gain a real conviction of this for yourselves, I ask you to try first and foremost to seek the whole human being in the musical element. The eurythmist is really obliged to study the way in which the human being streams out, as it were, into the musical element.

It is a fact that when we stand with our physical form, whether slim or short, fat or thin (that part of us which is actually visible), this is really the very least part of us. It even remains, in fact, for a short period after we have gone through the portal of death. But yet how much of the human being is present in the corpse? When we look at the human being as he stands before us in the physical world it is only the corpse, or hardly more than the corpse, that may be seen. Now in music, the physical form of man corresponds to what may be called the least significant of the musical elements; it represents the beat. It is therefore quite natural that with the bar line there should be an emphasis of the physical form, a holding-on to yourself. [26]

When you pass over to rhythm, presenting the ‘short-long’, you already go beyond what is represented by the human bodily form. In rhythm you already show a very considerable part of the life of your soul. With beat in eurythmy, you always feel that a person's heaviness is the determining factor in its expression. When the beat is shown in eurythmy, you always feel (as you just saw from these attempts) that it becomes evident how heavy a person is. A heavier person will be able to mark the beat in eurythmy better than a lighter person. This is less apparent in the case of rhythm. Rhythm brings the human being into movement. And here already it is quite easy to differentiate whether the movement has artistic taste or is tasteless, whether the movement is permeated with soul: slow—quick, slow—quick. You see, here the etheric element in the human being makes its appearance. It is the etheric human being which is revealed in rhythm.

If, however, we turn our attention to melody, which conveys the actual spirit in the musical element, then the astral being of man is revealed. When you are active in the musical element the whole human being, with the exception of the ego, is brought into play. It is really true to say: ‘As physical human being I mark the beat; as etheric human being, the rhythm; as astral human being I am the evolver of Melos: it is thus that I appear before the world.’ And, you see, the moment when you pass over from the musical realm to that of speech, the ego steps in. Naturally, speech is then transmitted into the astral element and even into the etheric, but its original impulse lies in the ego. [27]

At the end of yesterday's lecture I indicated the hidden parallel between the scale and the vowels, and we even saw how the musical element enters eurythmically into the vowel element. Now we must also be clear about the fact that in singing the realm of the pure musical element is already exceeded. The pure and real musical element is expressed in the astral make-up of the human being. This is why singing becomes more essentially musical in proportion to the degree in which it holds to what is purely musical—the more it follows Melos. And indeed this following of Melos will be the most sympathetic in singing.

Passing from singing to speech (to declamation and recitation), we find marked disharmony between Melos and something that has also to be borne in mind by the reciter, namely the sense of the words. It ought to be emphasized that the musical element has to be active in recitation and declamation, but an inner conflict will always exist, a conflict which the singer can only solve in the musical element. The more musical a singer, the more he will enter into the sphere of the astral, into Melos, thus solving for himself the problem of how to remain musical in singing. Consequently it requires greater skill to remain musical in singing than for instance it is to remain musical in instrumental music.

But now let us consider the following. I think everyone must feel that a certain poem of Goethe's produces an extraordinarily musical effect. I refer to the poem:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh;
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch. [28]

Let us take the principal words from this poem: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh: Gipfeln, ist Ruh, Wipfeln, Hauch, auch, warte, balde.

If you enter into this poem with your feeling, you will find that what is appealing and musical (for it is extraordinarily appealing and musical) lies in the use of the words Gipfel, Wipfel, ist Ruh, Hauch, auch, warte, balde. It is in these words that the actual musical element lies. Now I ask you, what have we got here? Let us compare this with what I told you yesterday of the correspondence of the vowel sounds, with the scale. I always write the scale thus (naturally any note can be written on a C [i.e. tonic]) but I write C in the usual way, as the note from which the scale starts. Of course, the matter is not dependent on this way of writing it, but when you write in the way I did yesterday, then we have in the word Gipfel B G, BAG—a descending third. It has the effect of a minor third (Moll-Terz). It is the mirror image of a third. And it is the repetition of this mirrored third in Wipfel and Gipfel which initially renders this wonderfully subtle musical effect.

Going further, we have ist Ruh. In ist Ruh, according to the model I described yesterday, we first have a B, and the u [‘oo’] represents C: B C. We find the seventh relating back to the prime, and in this relationship we have an example of everything I said both yesterday and the day before. When the human being enters into the seventh he goes out of himself. There is a relating back when he returns from the seventh to the keynote; he regains himself, as it were. You can feel this in ist Ruh, because it is inherent in the words.

Now it is especially interesting that in balde and warte we have E G—once more a kind of third, but the other third which moves in the opposite direction; it is the mirror image of the previous third, a kind of major third (Dur-Terz). Consequently we have a marvellous correspondance here: thirds which relate to each other as mirror images and the descending seventh chord, seventh harmony, in which the human being is given back to himself.

And now we will go further. Hauch and auch are words in which the diphthong makes its appearance. What are diphthongs? Where may we look for them in music? Here, you see, we may reverse our usual process. We have often found a transition from music to speech, and now we will pass over from speech into the diphthong element, into the musical element. If you possess an ear for such things, applying the principle about which I have often spoken, you will ask: Where does the essence of the diphthong lie? - of ei, for instance, or au? Does it lie in the e or the i, in the a or the u?[1] No, it lies between them. The actual sounds ei, au, are uttered (Ausgesprochene), but the ‘essence’ (Ausgegeisterte, ‘spirited out’) of the diphthong lies between them, and for this reason we must look in the diphthong not for notes, but for intervals. Diphthongs are always intervals. And the interesting thing about Goethe's poem is that Hauch (au, that is to say) is truly the interval of the third. You only need call to mind yesterday's model Wipfel—B G, ist Ruh—B C, Gipfel—B G, Hauch—third, auch—third, warte—E G, balde—E G. In this way Goethe not only makes use of clear thirds and their mirror images, but in order to employ every possibility in this matter, he adds true intervals of the third in the diphthongs. Here you have what matters.

When someone reads or recites this poem of Goethes, it does not matter that he should think it contains intervals of the third and even the seventh. Of course he does not think about it! Nevertheless, when the poem is rightly felt, something of this will be expressed by the reciter. It will find its way through. But what have we here? What is it that is almost as spiritual as the meaningful utterance of the ego, and which yet remains unknown? It is the astral element. And so behind the meaning of the poem there is a deeper, unconscious meaning for the human being, which is the musical meaning to be found in the astral element; this is especially effective in this poem. In this poem Goethe has transferred the effect of the poem, as far as this is possible, from the ego back into the astral realm.

Now you will best express this poem in eurythmy when you actually manage to emphasize the separate sounds less, but rather to indicate them wherever possible, without finishing them. Thus the i (‘ee’) in Wipfel and Gipfel is not quite finished, but left hovering in the air. This whole poem is most beautifully expressed, both eurythmically and musically, when the movements for the vowels are left hovering, and the eurythmist pulls back before completing them.

These are the things I have in mind when I say that eurythmy should be studied with feeling. Feeling should not be allowed to disappear while you are engaged in eurythmy, but rather cultivated. For the onlooker can clearly differentiate (he is not aware of this, for it does not reach his consciousness, but unconsciously the onlooker can tell quite clearly) whether a eurythmist automatically goes through the motions in eurythmy, or whether feeling is poured into the forms he or she creates. And two eurythmists, one of whom is an intellectual, only presenting the meaning of what has been learned, whereas the other feels through everything down to the details of curved or stretched arm movements, feeling through the finger movements—two such eurythmists will really be as different as the virtuoso is from the artist. A person can know perfectly well how to be a virtuoso, but is not therefore an artist. These things, when brought to full consciousness, will be apparent in the beauty of your eurythmic movements. Consequently it should not be a matter of indifference whether or not you know the relationship that exists between a eurythmic presentation of music and a eurythmic presentation of recitation. Through a knowledge derived from feeling- experience you will assume the attitude which must be embraced if eurythmy is increasingly to develop into a real art.

Just consider how the sense of the words actually destroys melody. It might be said that the necessity of attending to the meaning of the words entails a certain fear lest the melody be destroyed. The result is that speech does violence, as it were, to the musical element. These words are naturally somewhat drastic, but speech does do violence to the musical element. Must this be so? Can it be confirmed anywhere in the world?

Yes, how this is confirmed in the world may be seen from the following: Speech consists, on the one hand, of the vowel sounds, which mainly serve to express what lives within. In the vowel sounds, as we have seen, it is easy to see that the musical element leaves its mark, whereas in the consonants this is very difficult to find. But you also know how often I have emphasized the fact that the vowels have been wrested from man's inner being. They are the direct expression of feeling, of the inner essence of the soul; wonder, amazement, shrinking back in fear, holding yourself in relation to the outer world, self- assertion, giving way, loving embrace—all this is clearly expressed in the vowels.

The consonants are entirely adapted to the outer world. If you study a consonant you will find that it always imitates some thing or process existing in the outer world. When someone speaks i [‘ee’], you can feel quite definitely that here someone asserts himself. Certain German dialects even use i instead of ich, and here the human being feels his own being the strongest, as I know, for until my fourteenth or fifteenth year I myself spoke in dialect: ‘Na, nit du, i!’ [‘No, not you, me!’]; I know how one's own being asserts itself when one says i [‘ee’]. When speaking this sound i, you first jump into the air and then you stand on the ground. This is what has to be felt.

Now for the consonants—let us take l—you can picture the sound, but i has to be heard; ah has also to be heard. At most they may be pictured astrally. But you can quite well picture l or r. L—if someone creeps along, you straightaway have l. The r. someone skips while running; you have r, which is a process. An ordinary wheel creeps along, it l’s, so to speak, but a cog-wheel r’s along! You can immediately picture it. If you have ever noticed a stake being driven into the ground with a hammer, you cannot picture anything else but a t; it is a t. An external process is a consonant. It is always an external process. Thus the consonantal formations of speech plainly point to the world outside. The vowels fit themselves into the consonants.

You know, of course, that in [certain] languages the consonants are interchangeable with the vowels. Every consonant has something of the vowel about it, and every vowel something of the consonant. We need only remember that in some languages the l becomes i; a consonant becomes a vowel. In certain German dialects, for instance, the final l is always pronounced i. When speaking dialect ‘Dörfl’ is always pronounced ‘Dörfi’, [approximately, ‘Dirfee’]. The sound is i, and the l is very softly indicated in it; it is the i which is really pronounced.

But this also brings the vowel sounds towards the outside, towards the outer world. Speech is something which comes into contact with the outer world; in a certain sense it may be said to be an image of the outer world.

This is why speech does violence to the musical element, and why great skill is necessary if we are to retrieve the musical element in recitation. Great skill is necessary in order to strive back to the musical element, and we will only find the melodic element in speech if the musical element in the poet comes to meet us; indeed rhythm and beat have to be taken into account when reciting any passage of poetic language. If we neglect this, we sin against rhythm and beat (which in the musical realm itself do tend, of course, more towards the outside), and this results in incorrect recitation. The nearer you approach the musical element itself, the more you enter into Melos. Melos is the musical element.

When you examine everything I have just said, you will find that in the world outside the human being, the musical element is only present to a limited degree. By proceeding from within outwards, passing from musical experience to the experience of speech, we ourselves retreat ever further from the realm of music. Why do we retreat ever further? Because speech has to lean on external nature. But external nature can only be laid hold of by speech when an element is introduced into speech which is really foreign. For nature scorns beat, rhythm, and indeed our melodic speech. And a purely naturalistic materialist deems poetic speech of any sort, that is, artistic speech, affected and sentimental.

I once knew a fellow student, for example, who regarded himself as highly gifted. This was at the time of certain lectures held by Schröer, of which I wrote in The Course of My Life. [29] The classes took the form of practical exercises in lecturing and essay-writing. This student arrived one day, saying that he was prepared with subject-matter of the very greatest, indeed world-shaking, importance. He went on to tell us what these world-shaking ideas were. They amounted to the following: All metrical, poetic language is fundamentally wrong. People write in iambic, trochaic rhythms; they write in rhyme. This, however, is entirely wrong, for it is not natural but artificial. It must all be abolished from poetry. Such was the discovery he had made. He declared that a new poetry must make its appearance—without rhythm, without iambus or trochee, and without rhyme. Later on I even experienced that such poetry is actually written. At that time my fellow student only put it forward as theory. We thrashed him so thoroughly that he never held his lecture!

You will see from all this that it is perfectly obvious that what comes from nature does not form the basis of the musical element, for the musical element itself is a creation of the human being. And if we examine the inner nature of music and speech, we shall realize why it is that the musical element is so far removed from anything naturalistic. It is the self-creating force in the human being, and imitating nature is an aberration of the musical path.

As I said before, I do not mean to cast aspersions on the imitation of ‘rustling forests’, soughing winds, bubbling springs, ‘a brook in March’, [30] and so on. It is far from my intention to criticize these things in any way; but there does lie behind them the urge to pass out of the actual musical element, to enrich music by the introduction of something unmusical. In certain circumstances the result may be very agreeable, for it is possible to enlarge the sphere of every art in every direction, but because eurythmy demands that music be taken still more musically than it already is, terrible difficulties will arise if attempts are made to express in the right way in eurythmy something that is not purely musical.

Yet another thing can be understood from this, and that is the beneficial effect of tone eurythmy therapy; for this must gradually be developed side by side with usual tone eurythmy. Why is this? Fundamentally speaking, a large number of illnesses are caused by the fact that people have an inward tendency to turn into nature in some way, instead of remaining human. We always turn into a piece of nature when we are ill. Now we are human beings through the very fact that we inwardly do not tolerate natural processes to remain as they are, but instantly subject them to an inner transformation; we instantly make them inwardly human. There is no process in the human being (with the exception of the dissolving of salt, the metamorphosis of salt) [31] which is not a transformation of some process of nature. We become ill when we are powerless against natural processes in this inner transformation, if we cannot metamorphose them (a process they have to undergo within the human being), and when they still run their course as natural processes. If in any part of the human organism a natural process preponderates over the human, and we then make the person practise tone eurythmy, this is a therapeutic factor; for by this means we lead the part of the body in question away from nature and back into the human realm. When we let someone do tone eurvthmy because nature in him is too strong, it is as though we said to the natural process in the organ: ‘Out you go!’—for these movements are solely human and have nothing of nature about them. The musical element belongs only to man, not to nature. [32]

In earlier times the musical element itself was recognized as a means of healing, and music in such times did bring about many cures. But because the musical element comes especially to the fore in eurythmy, so the therapeutic forces of the musical element must also come to the fore with an efficient therapy. This is what I wanted to tell you today. Tomorrow at the same time we shall continue.

Notes:

1. For pronunciation of German vowels, see p. xiv. (Translator's note.)