The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Worldview of a Contemporary Cultural Scholar, Herman Grimm, and Spiritual Research

[ 1 ] It might easily seem as if what is presented here as spiritual science stands entirely isolated within contemporary cultural life and has no connection to what otherwise prevails in contemporary intellectual life and, in a certain sense, sets the tone. However, this can only appear so to those who view this spiritual science or spiritual research in a certain narrow-minded way and see in it nothing more than a collection of specific doctrines and theories. But anyone who sees in it a spiritual current that seeks to encompass everything to which spiritual life leads from the sources that are now opening up today will come to realize that lines can be drawn from this spiritual current toward various directions of modern spiritual life, and that this way of viewing life, called spiritual science, is applicable to other spiritual currents that are more or less closely related to it. Today we shall discuss one such spiritual current—a spiritual current that can be represented to us by a strikingly prominent figure in modern spiritual life: the modern scholar of culture and art, Herman Grimm.

[ 2 ] Herman Grimm, who was born in 1828 and died in 1901, appears in reality as a particularly distinctive embodiment of modern intellectual life on the one hand, and yet at the same time so uniquely individual, standing out as a special figure, that today’s perspective can be particularly well connected to this personality. To those who have studied him, Herman Grimm appears as a kind of bridge between the intellectual life of the recent past—associated with the name Goethe—and our own modern intellectual life.

[ 3 ] Herman Grimm is connected in a very special way to everything associated with the name Goethe through his marriage to the daughter of the woman who was so close to Goethe’s circle—the sister of the Romantic poet Brentano, Bettina Brentano. Herman Grimm was thus related to her, she was his mother-in-law—that Bettina Brentano who edited Goethe’s remarkable correspondence with a child, that Bettina Brentano from whom that unique monument to Goethe originates, in which we see Goethe seated, enthroned like an Olympian, a musical instrument in his hand, with a child plucking the strings—a child in whom Bettina Brentano portrayed herself. This figure, who hailed from the La Roche circle in Frankfurt, felt like a child in her relationship with Goethe, and she was able to immerse herself in Goethe’s spirit as few others could. And even if some may find certain inaccuracies in the letters Bettina Brentano has shared—fiction and truth colorfully intermingled—one must still say: everything we find in this remarkable book, *Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child*, has sprung intimately from Goethe’s spirit and, in a truly wondrous way, echoes that very spirit. Bettina Brentano, in turn, was married to the poet Achim von Arnim, who was involved in the publication of the beautiful collection of folk poetry *Des Knaben Wunderhorn*. Through her connection to this circle—as mentioned, Herman Grimm’s wife, Gisela Grimm, was a daughter of Bettina Brentano or Bettina von Arnim—through this kinship, Herman Grimm had, so to speak, grown up from his youth among figures who were very close to Goethe, who imparted to him, in everything he absorbed during his upbringing, something akin to a personal and immediately elemental spiritual breath of Goethe. Thus, from his youth onward, Herman Grimm felt he belonged among all those who had been personally close to Goethe, even though he had been just a child at the time of Goethe’s death. And Herman Grimm did not stand there as someone who had “studied” Goethe and Goetheanism, but as someone who had absorbed Goethe’s essence—all of Goethe’s living magic and his entire living humanity—directly, fundamentally, and personally.

[ 4 ] Herman Grimm thus experienced the development of German life in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with deep involvement. He experienced it in such a way that he, so to speak, established his own realm within this German life. One might call him a spirit who, in the most individual way, threw himself into whatever was stimulating to him at the moment, whatever was fruitful for the development of his own intellectual powers. In this way, from the entire scope of cultural life, what was appropriate for Herman Grimm emerged: an intellectual realm in which he felt at home. Within this intellectual realm, in which Herman Grimm felt at home, he recognized himself, in a sense, as Goethe’s intellectual heir. To him, Goethe’s spirit appeared as a living, enduring entity. And wherever he sought out and allowed himself to be influenced by those currents of intellectual life that were in harmony with his own, it was always, to a greater or lesser extent, the Goethean essence that he not only sought to perceive but which became his standard for everything he encountered in intellectual life.

[ 5 ] Herman Grimm lived through decades of turmoil in German cultural life. These were decades in which, after Goethe’s death, the Goethean spirit had largely receded, and in which people had to concern themselves with so many other matters—one might say matters more directly relevant to the present day—rather than with the currents emanating from Goethe. During that time, when many other matters within Germany were making quite a stir but things had grown somewhat quiet around Goethe, Herman Grimm—through his direct connection to the Goethean spirit—likely regarded himself as a man who, though quiet within, yet vibrantly, to nurture the Goethean spirit and carry it forward into an era he was confident would come—an era in which Goethe’s star would once again shine more brightly in the European intellectual firmament.

[ 6 ] Just as Herman Grimm regarded himself, in a sense, as Goethe’s spiritual viceroy—the guardian of his spiritual realm—so, in a natural way, Herman Grimm was somewhat unique in his entire approach to spiritual life, in the very way he related to spiritual matters. He possessed a certain distinctiveness, like that of an intellectual prince, and it seemed natural to regard him, in a sense, as such. Even in his outward appearance, his physiognomy, his gestures, and his entire demeanor, he had the air of an intellectual prince. And one may say: even if one was not, so to speak, accustomed to looking up to a personality in this regard as to a “princely” one, Herman Grimm’s entire demeanor compelled one to acknowledge the rank just described for him. Thus, I still recall with fondness a gathering with Herman Grimm in Weimar, where he came so often and so gladly. At that time, he had invited me as his sole guest to a luncheon. We spoke about various matters that were close to his heart. We also spoke—and it was gratifying to me that he wished to have this conversation with me—about his far-reaching intellectual plans for life. And when some time had passed after lunch, he said, in his characteristic manner—humorous, to be sure, but at the same time so natural that one accepted it from him simply as something natural: “Well, my dear Doctor, now I shall graciously dismiss you!” It was indeed something that struck me at the time as entirely natural, because Herman Grimm’s demeanor was such that one attributed to him a certain intellectual nobility.

[ 7 ] This is the essence of Herman Grimm’s entire life’s work. One cannot allow any of his writings—whether major or minor—to sink in without, as these sentences—so wonderfully harmonious on the one hand and so concisely constructed on the other—flow into one’s soul, at the same time having the sensation that all of this affects the soul that surrenders to it as if the author’s personality were always standing behind it, looking at you, and sending into your soul—with immense soulfulness and personal involvement—what it has to say to you. What makes the deeply moving, soulful resonance in Herman Grimm’s writings so wonderful is that they are, throughout, the most beautiful expression of his entire soulful personality and have an immediate effect as such. His entire style, however, thereby takes on the character of a certain justified, refined pathos. But this refined pathos is tempered everywhere by the personal element that one feels bursting forth from it. Despite its refinement, one accepts this style as something natural, and one senses throughout that it derives from a deep absorption of elements of Goethe’s spirit, yet one also feels that this origin is not the only one. One senses that the Goethean element has permeated the romantic essence of German intellectual development. In Herman Grimm’s style, we sense a certain detachment from everything that can be called, in the broadest sense, the everyday and the folk, a withdrawal into a singular personality, a wholly individual being, and a wholly individual manner.

[ 8 ] Perhaps this approach, in the spirit of Herman Grimm, might have led to a certain one-sidedness, had it not been for another current at work within him—one that reconnected him so deeply with all things folk, allowing him to put down roots deep within the spirit of folk culture. For Herman Grimm himself was, after all, the son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jacob Grimm. These are the two men who laid the foundations for modern German philology, the men who collected those German fairy tales that have since penetrated so deeply into German intellectual life, the men who listened to the legends and fairy tales told by ordinary people of the common folk; legends and fairy tales that had lived on in the simplest folk consciousness for many centuries, that had been almost forgotten, carried into modern times by only a few individuals, but which are alive again today because they have been revived by the Brothers Grimm.

[ 9 ] If Herman Grimm, despite the refinement of his style in everything he produces, once again reveals a certain affinity with all things folk, then we must further emphasize something that harmoniously connects a school of thought—which might otherwise have become one-sided—with another current, so that everything in him appears to us as a kind of inner, harmonious totality. For when we allow Herman Grimm’s work to take effect upon us, we perceive in his entire style something like a certain softness, a malleability toward all the intellectual phenomena into which he has immersed himself over the course of his life. A certain isolation as a human being is necessary if one wishes to immerse oneself so deeply in the intellectual phenomena and intellectual realities of various centuries. However, this gentleness acquires its backbone, its firmness, in Herman Grimm through another element that was woven into his upbringing: after all, his father and his uncle were among the “Göttingen Seven,” who in 1837 lodged a protest against the abolition of their state’s constitution and were consequently expelled from the University of Göttingen. Thus, even as a boy, Herman Grimm witnessed an act of a rare kind and experienced its various consequences. For there were indeed many consequences for his father and uncle in their daily lives as well, since they had lost not only their positions but also their livelihoods at that time. And Herman Grimm often emphasized how, even back then as a nine-year-old boy, he came into contact with the impulses of historical development—not through a “book,” but through a significant historical event.

[ 10 ] This is how Herman Grimm stands before us as a personality. He likely saw himself as a kind of bearer of the Goethean spirit during a time when that spirit had fallen silent in Germany and people had turned their attention to other things. But he witnessed the revival of this Goethean spirit and was able to contribute in various ways to its revival. He experienced, at the beginning of the 1870s, the opportunity to deliver his famous “Goethe Lectures” at the University of Berlin—the very lectures that are also included in his significant book on Goethe. And what a book this Goethe book is! Anyone who picks it up as a young person and is able to approach it in the right way will undoubtedly speak of it later in life as something significant. And just as has been expressed in this book, Herman Grimm stands before us as one who is able to engage with Goethe, as one who has penetrated the various ramifications of Goethe’s inner life. Thus, work by work, he unravels what passed through Goethe’s own soul while Goethe was creating these works.

[ 11 ] Here we can now hear Herman Grimm reflect on a figure such as Goethe was to him. There is none of the petty scrutiny of a biographer; there is no digging up of all sorts of more or less trivial details of his life. Instead, there is a deep immersion in all those aspects of Goethe’s life that were significant and important for the development of his soul. There is an effort to trace: how does that which was an experience for Goethe—what worked and lived within his soul—transform itself so that it takes on form, becomes an image, becomes a creation of Goethe’s imagination; and Goethe himself, forgetting everything that the matter was merely in life, is completely absorbed in that new thing that has become, in the imaginative creation, from the experience—in the imaginative creation that is now itself an experience?

[ 12 ] Thus, whenever Herman Grimm interprets a work by Goethe, he elevates Goethe’s experiences to a higher level, lifting them directly into a sphere of pure spiritual contemplation. Herman Grimm demonstrates in each and every one of Goethe’s works how Goethe ascended from his life into spiritual experience and spiritual existence. And we are always so happy to accompany him on this journey he undertakes, precisely because nothing ever occurs in Herman Grimm’s work that can so easily arise in such a presentation: that, as it were, a single faculty of the soul—the intellect or the imagination—takes over the reader, leaving one no longer feeling connected to immediate life. No, Herman Grimm never goes further, but always goes as far as he himself, as an immediate personal individuality, can go—while still being able to follow the entire work. In the end, wherever Herman Grimm has led one to the point where Goethe’s experience has become the work itself, one feels transported into a purely spiritual life. Goethe becomes a being whose essence is purely spiritual, a sum of purely spiritual impulses. This breath of the spiritual pervades every portrayal in Herman Grimm’s book on Goethe.

[ 13 ] What Herman Grimm applied to Goethe in this way was deeply rooted in Herman Grimm’s entire mindset. Long before he embarked on the reflections that would eventually take shape as his “Goethe Lectures,” a grand, colossal idea had already taken shape in his mind: the idea of examining Western intellectual life as a whole in the same way that he had examined it individually in relation to Goethe. The idea stood before him: to trace three millennia of Western intellectual life in such a way that it becomes evident everywhere how the everyday events and facts existing in the physical world derive their true value from being transformed by human reason and the human spirit into that which the human soul experiences when it ascends into the realm of what Herman Grimm “creative imagination.” Thus, Herman Grimm became a historian of a very unique kind. For him, history was, in a sense, something entirely different than it was for all other modern historians.

[ 14 ] History is usually studied by collecting documents and materials and then attempting to construct a picture of human development from these materials. For Herman Grimm, materials and external facts were indeed immensely important, but by no means the main thing. He often let the thought cross his mind: Could it not be that, for a given historical epoch, the very most important documents—the ones that are decisive for studying the impulses of the time—have vanished without a trace, have been lost, so that precisely when one examines the documents most closely and most faithfully, one misses the truth the most? — That is why he was convinced that anyone who adheres most faithfully to external documents can, in the slightest sense, provide a true picture of human development. Only a distorted picture of human development, Herman Grimm believed, could result from relying on external documents.

[ 15 ] But something else has emerged in the spiritual life of humanity: what happened externally, what unfolded as external events, has been reborn spiritually within the appropriate individuals; it has found its full expression in those personalities who have artistically transformed it and spiritually assimilated it. Herman Grimm, for example, looked back at the Greek era. He said to himself: There are all sorts of documents available about this Greek era. From these documents, one can gain insight into the essence of Greek culture only in a figurative sense. But what the Greeks experienced has found its rebirth in the works of Greek art; it has been revived in individual Greek personalities. If one delves deeply into them, if one allows Greek culture to take effect through the medium of the individual, then one has a truer picture of this Greek culture than if one merely compiles the facts superficially.—And so, for Herman Grimm, these facts themselves, as it were, disappeared. One might say that they melted away from his worldview, and what remained in his worldview was a continuous stream of what he called the creations of the national imagination.

[ 16 ] When he considered Julius Caesar, for example, he did not merely allow the historical documents to sink in; rather, he believed that what Shakespeare had made of Caesar contained something just as significant for Caesar as what was found in the historical documents. Through people, he looked back at the times. Not only did the course of human development become for him a succession of personalities, each passing the torch to the next, but the entire course of human development itself became for him a spiritual process—one which he believed, however, to have been exhausted in what he called the creative imagination. From this perspective, he sought to form in his soul an ever-growing picture of the creative folk imagination found in Western cultures; he wanted to take in the course of Western human development in such a way that he could say to himself: Just as the individual currents of Western cultures merge into one another, just as they succeed one another from the earliest times—to which he wished to go back—all the way up to his own, the Goethe era, so too are they a continuous stream of the weaving of the folk imagination among the peoples of the West.

[ 17 ] Driven by this impulse, his gaze turned early on to that magnificent manifestation of Western intellectual life, which occupied him for a time and about which he wrote, in the 1890s, a book of such unparalleled beauty as his *Homer*, his description of the *Iliad*. This book, which one is always happy to pick up again and again when one wishes to delve into the beginnings of Greek civilization from a modern intellectual standpoint, reveals Herman Grimm to us once more—assuming we take his general intellectual perspective as a given—from a very special angle. His gaze wanders to the gods and the divine realms depicted in Homer’s *Iliad*; his gaze wanders to the warring Greek and Trojan heroes, and the question arises in his soul: What is the nature, after all, of this interplay between the divine realm and the ordinary human world of the warring Greeks and Trojans? — This becomes a question for him. He notices what a vast difference exists in the Homeric depiction between humanity walking the earth and those beings described as immortal gods. And Herman Grimm now attempts to show how, in a sense, the gods, in Homer’s understanding, represent an “older” layer of beings walking the earth. Even though Herman Grimm, in his more realistic manner, sees these beings as “humans,” he is nevertheless looking back at a culture that had long since lost its significance by Homer’s time—a culture that had been superseded by another, to which the Trojan and Greek heroes belong. Herman Grimm has an older and a younger history of humanity interact within Homer’s *Iliad*, and what remains of the living effects of a previously existing layer of beings plays a role, for Herman Grimm, in what unfolds between Greece and Troy in Homer’s work.

[ 18 ] In this way, Herman Grimm views the progress of human development as a continuous process in which older—we might say cultural spheres or cycles—are superseded by newer ones, and in which the old influence the new. Each new cultural cycle has a specific task: to introduce something new into the general development of humanity. The old then remains present for a while, influencing the new.

[ 19 ] One might say that, to the extent that a person in the last third of the nineteenth century could gain insight into what must once again be advocated today from the perspective of modern spiritual science, Herman Grimm gained insight to that extent. He did not go back beyond the Greek era. Therefore, he could not provide what modern spiritual research describes in its return to the purely spiritual beings of pre-humanity, beings that are sublime in relation to human beings. But he touched upon these findings of modern spiritual research everywhere, coming as close to them as a person who had not yet been immersed in spiritual research himself could come.

[ 20 ] In spiritual research, we seek to show that when we trace human evolution back, we do not arrive at the animal kingdom in the sense of Darwinian theory—which is interpreted materialistically today—but rather that we arrive at spiritual, purely spiritual ancestors of humankind, and how, beyond that cycle of human history in which human souls live embodied in physical bodies, there is another cycle of human history in which human beings are not yet embodied in physical bodies. Herman Grimm leaves the question, as it were, open: What was the nature of the “gods” before human beings set foot on Earth? — But he acknowledges the lawful succession of such cycles of human history. This provides a significant point of contact with the insights of spiritual research. The very fact that he recognizes such regular, periodic progress brings him particularly close to us, so to speak.

[ 21 ] For over three millennia, he has sought to expand his intellectual reflections. For him, the first millennium is the Greek millennium. One might say that a certain undertone comes through in Herman Grimm’s work when one hears him characterize the Greeks as if he were saying: Yes, when one looks up to the Greeks—especially in their earliest period—they do not yet appear to us as fully formed human beings as people do today. Even a figure like Alcibiades still strikes one as a sort of fairy-tale prince. One is looking into something that is superhuman. Nevertheless, from this spiritual world of the Greeks—which Herman Grimm, as mentioned, depicts as unlike the later human world—everything that blossomed as an impulse in the Greek world extends, even in his view, into the later world, so that it constitutes the most important element within our spiritual life right up to the present day. And at the end of the first millennium, which Herman Grimm examines, the most important impulse he recognizes in human development stands before his soul: the Christ impulse.

[ 22 ] Herman Grimm is, in a certain sense, reserved precisely when he speaks of the figure of Christ—just as he is reserved in many other matters. But the frequent remarks he makes about Christ show us that he would be no more inclined to side with those who, so to speak, would like to reduce Christ to a mere mental impulse, nor would he side with those who wish to see in the personality of Jesus Christ only something generally human. He emphasizes how two distinct impulses emanate from the figure of Christ: one of colossal strength, which—even for Herman Grimm—continues to work throughout the entire subsequent development of humanity, and the other of immense gentleness. Herman Grimm finds that the entire second millennium of Western cultural development unfolds in such a way that Hellenism is, as it were, absorbed by the Christ impulse and, with this blend of Christianity and Hellenism, now enters the Roman world, overwhelms it, and brings forth something quite unique. This is his second millennium—the first Christian millennium. For him, it is not the Roman influences that are the main focus, but the Christian ones. Everything political, everything outwardly factual, disappears in this millennium from Herman Grimm’s perspective, and everywhere he traces how the Christ impulse forces its way in, and how multifaceted this Christ impulse is. Yet his conception of Christ is not narrow, not limited, but broad. When Ernest Renan’s book *The Life of Jesus* was published, Herman Grimm offered a remarkable reflection on it in his journal *Artists and Works of Art*, which was being published at the time. He sought to show how the visual representations of the figure of Christ have changed over the centuries, both in the visual arts and in literature. He thus sought to demonstrate the variability and malleability of the Christ impulse, and he showed how people have always interpreted this Christ impulse according to their own spiritual disposition. And then he sees in Ernest Renan someone who, in the nineteenth century, is striving to reinterpret Christ in a certain narrow way.

[ 23 ] It took Christianity about a millennium—according to Herman Grimm—to infuse its impulses into the rivulets and currents of Western intellectual life. Then came its third millennium—the second Christian one, in which we ourselves still find ourselves—that millennium in whose dawn figures such as Dante and Giotto were active, along with artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and so on, which then led to the intellectual works of Shakespeare and Goethe. For Herman Grimm, these cycles in human development were always distinctly separate, in accordance with universal laws. He perceived spiritual laws at work in human development, addressing the flowing current of that development through the creative essence of the imagination. Time and again, Herman Grimm sought to present this structure of the stream of human development to his students in his lectures, in order to show how individual spiritual creation fits into this overall stream.

[ 24 ] Just as Michelangelo, Raphael, Savonarola, Shakespeare, and others; Goethe, too, was for him, as it were, a source of spiritual substance that becomes understandable when viewed against the backdrop of that ever-flowing, all-encompassing stream of creative imagination, which for Herman Grimm became particularly vivid at its source in Homer, whose work dates back to the ninth or perhaps even the tenth century B.C. And that is why Herman Grimm speaks so deeply to the soul: because he often, when he leads one in a completely elemental and direct way to an interest in a work of art—for example, to Raphael’s “Marriage of Mary and Joseph,” to any of the Madonna paintings or other works, to any of Leonardo da Vinci’s creations, or when he guides you toward something he observes in Goethe—because he leads you in such a way that you feel as though you are standing right inside the most intimately individual aspect of that work of art. When one then observes with him how a single color or gesture is placed within the artwork, and feels as though one is standing isolated before the artwork, something suddenly emerges—like a tableau encompassing the entire progress of humanity, a fragment of that ever-flowing stream of creative imagination that spans three millennia and encompasses every detail within itself.

[ 25 ] In this way, Herman Grimm guides us into the intimate details of the works of art in question, and then leads us up to the summit from which the overall current can be viewed. But this was not something Herman Grimm considered in a purely theoretical way. It seemed so natural that Herman Grimm viewed the entirety of the flowing spiritual current of human development in this way—as he discussed with me, as mentioned, explained to me back then over lunch—because he truly lived within this spiritual current himself, quite naturally and with his whole soul, and he simply could not view a single phenomenon as anything other than a fragment cut out of this mighty current of human development.

[ 26 ] The entire development of Western thought as the development of the collective imagination—that is how it appeared to his soul, not as a general, abstract idea, but filled with the most concrete content. He felt so deeply connected in his soul to this content, which has shone through the millennia, that everything he wrote actually appears to be like the individual small sections and excerpts of a gigantic work. Even when reading just a book review by Herman Grimm, one gets the impression that it has actually been cut out of a colossal work that portrays the entire development of humanity as a creation of the imagination. One feels as if one were standing before such a colossal work—as if one had opened it and were reading a few pages from it—whenever one reads an essay, article, or anything else by Herman Grimm about any book. And one now understands, as Herman Grimm himself put it when he wrote the preface to his collection of fragments in his twilight years, that what he had envisioned was a depiction of the continuous flow of the people’s imagination, and that in it the depiction of the entire Western culture had appeared to him. One understands that the individual elements he pursued appeared as if he had taken individual pieces out of a finished work. In doing so, he never attached more value to what he had published than to what he had written down, and to what he had written down, never more value than to everything that lived in his thoughts.

[ 27 ] When one hints at something like this, one wishes—without reducing the matter to an abstract formula—to have said something about the feeling one has about it when one has loved and still loves Herman Grimm, and appreciates his intellectual legacy and his manner: that Herman Grimm was never able to truly bring to fruition what stood so beautifully, so colossally, so magnificently before his mind—that even his works on Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Goethe appeared to us as fragments of this unwritten, all-encompassing work. It is with a certain sense of wistfulness that one reads those lines from the aforementioned introduction to the “Fragments,” where he says that what he had to tell his students year after year about the development of European intellectual life, rewrote anew every year, and that it might indeed be appropriate to adapt the final form these lectures had taken into a book, which would then, in a certain sense, depict the progress of European cultural development—but that, unfortunately, this adaptation would likely never come to pass. Reading these lines today is all the more poignant because this adaptation did indeed never come to pass, and we have seen Herman Grimm pass away, knowing what lived in his soul, and having to watch as what lived there for the sake of contemporary culture was buried with him.

[ 28 ] This illustrates the intellectually comprehensive perspective from which every individual work by Herman Grimm is written. If spiritual research aims to be precisely what can be gained through the expansion of one’s spiritual horizon, then it must be said that whoever immerses themselves in Herman Grimm’s spirit and mode of presentation has the most beautiful guide from modern spiritual life for gradually entering into the entire way of viewing the world that is characteristic of spiritual research. But even if one sets aside the breadth of his perspective and looks into Herman Grimm’s very soul—how he sought to approach phenomena, how his feelings and thoughts led him to everything he wrote in his comprehensive works on Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Goethe, and if one considers what he presented in his other writings, then one finds that Herman Grimm differs significantly from other minds, and that he possesses something that belongs to that deepening of the soul of which we have spoken here, when describing the path the soul must take to enter the spiritual worlds themselves.

[ 29 ] We have been able to emphasize that the intensity of the soul’s powers must increase for the spiritual path; that if deeper soul powers—which otherwise lie dormant—are to be brought to the fore, the soul must draw upon more inner strength, more inner courage and boldness than it otherwise displays in ordinary life, that it must grasp its concepts more sharply, and identify more closely with its own essence—with the powers of thinking, feeling, and willing. In Herman Grimm, the seeds of this are present everywhere—seeds that, admittedly, took a different path in his case, seeds that enabled him to describe works of art in such an intimate and personal manner as he did those of Raphael or Michelangelo, but which are on their way to shedding even deeper light into the spiritual world. For it is not what is today called “objectivity” that underlies Herman Grimm’s historical research, but rather a connection with the phenomena of spiritual life that he depicts—this connection forms the foundation of his descriptions. Thus, his own soul, completely forgetting itself, and yet at the same time conscious of itself in a rare way, immerses itself in the corresponding spiritual phenomena.

[ 30 ] This is particularly evident when he first guides his own soul toward a specific spiritual manifestation—for example, Raphael—and then elevates that specific spiritual manifestation back into the overall current of human spiritual life. There his feelings become bold, powerful ideas, and what many others did not dare to express in such nuances of feeling or in such nuances of thought, Herman Grimm dares to express, thus becoming an interpreter of the spirit who, in terms of the boldness of his presentation, stands before us in such a way that we are sometimes truly reminded of the authors who wrote the Gospels. Except that those authors wrote with more mysticism, while Herman Grimm wrote with a more modern spiritual perspective. And just as those authors rise to the horizon of all humanity, so too does Herman Grimm, with his *Raphael*, rise to the horizon of all humanity.

[ 31 ] It is marvelous when, in his bold manner—as if tearing his soul from within himself and striding alongside Raphael’s soul as in a stream of universal development—he bursts forth with words that can truly mean more to us than anything a mere depiction of world history could: “Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the belief of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise.” When one allows such a sentence to sink in, one indeed learns something entirely different about Herman Grimm’s relationship to Raphael than one would otherwise know about the relationship of many other writers to any given phenomenon.

[ 32 ] Thus, for Herman Grimm, individual personalities converge with the overall current of spiritual life. One could also say that he brings the highest spiritual sphere down to the most personal level. And what a wealth of spiritual phenomena comes to meet us when Herman Grimm speaks the following words from the depths of his soul, expressing his attitude toward the corresponding spiritual realities:

[ 33 ] “If Michelangelo were miraculously brought back from the dead to live among us again, and I were to encounter him, I would step aside reverently to let him pass; but if Raphael were to cross my path, I would follow behind him, hoping to catch a few words from his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo, one can limit oneself to recounting what they once were in their own time; with Raphael, one must start from what he is to us today. A faint veil has settled over those others, but not over Raphael. He belongs to those whose development is far from over. It is always conceivable that future generations will emerge to whom Raphael will present new enigmas.”

[ 34 ] This is a mood of character—not objective in the sense so often demanded today—but one that depicts the corresponding phenomena in such a way that we feel immediately drawn into their presence when we can sense a hint of what lived in Herman Grimm’s soul as he wrote such sentences. Then one also understands how this spirit was able to grapple with a phenomenon of world history—with Raphael himself. Curiously—as he himself recounts—his experience with Raphael was quite different from what he experienced, for example, when he sought to portray Michelangelo. Herman Grimm’s portrayal of Michelangelo’s life is a wonderful book, even though in many respects it may be considered outdated today. How significantly the figure of Michelangelo stands out against the backdrop of the entire medieval world of that time, and how he distinguishes himself from the other figures who emerge so vividly! How does he stand out from the utterly unique portrayal of Florence itself, or how does he stand out from that tableau that Herman Grimm creates by allowing two intellectual constructs to rise before our minds—Athens and Florence—and thereby making the interweaving of the three millennia he characterizes appear like a mighty backdrop against which figures such as Dante, Giotto, and the other painters of that era, followed by figures such as Savonarola, and finally Michelangelo himself.

[ 35 ] All of this also gives the impression that, while Herman Grimm’s attitude toward Raphael and his circle was certainly different from his attitude toward Goethe, he nonetheless conveyed all of this to us with no less intimacy. In Herman Grimm’s portrayal of Goethe, we sense throughout how he grew up as Goethe’s spiritual grandson. Even in his portrayal of Michelangelo, we sense how he personally immerses himself in everything—how he personally, one might say, enters every palace in Florence, how he walks through the streets of Florence, how he personally comes to know other connections, and how he ultimately stands before Michelangelo to portray his work. But everything he has painted in this way—we feel—is as if cast from a single mold.

[ 36 ] The situation is different with regard to what he wrote about Raphael. There we sense a struggle with the subject matter, with the intellectual image; there we sense how Herman Grimm could never be satisfied with his own work. He himself recounts how he had revisited the subject time and again, how nothing he had already published was ever enough for him. Indeed, his final works should include what he attempted one last time to present as a portrayal of Raphael’s personality—though it remained a fragment and was later published in his collection of essays: “Raphael as a World Power,” from which the sentences just read aloud are taken.

[ 37 ] Why did Herman Grimm struggle so much with his subject matter, particularly in the case of Raphael? Because he could only create something—for his own satisfaction—when he could become completely one with the subject matter. In Raphael, however, he saw a spirit that he characterized as expressed in the sentence just read aloud: “Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the belief of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise.” And so Raphael himself grew to gigantic proportions in Grimm’s eyes with every sentence he wrote about him. Thus, he could never be satisfied with his own work, because he himself could not capture this “world force” within a book. While the works of Homer, Michelangelo, or Goethe reveal the comprehensiveness and yet gracefulness of their spirits, what stands out in Raphael is the profound sincerity, the profound honesty of this spiritual personality.

[ 38 ] Anyone who picks up his book on Homer may find it lacking in scholarly depth. But Herman Grimm states right on the first page that this book is not intended to be a contribution to Homeric scholarship. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, Herman Grimm could certainly behave like a prince of the intellect in these and similar matters. So it also seems natural that, when he set out to compile his ideas on Goethe, he boldly proceeded from the standpoint that everything else that might be said about Goethe was inadequate. This may strike some as audacity, yet it seemed only natural given his literary and artistic approach.

[ 39 ] This was his attitude toward all intellectual life. That is why Herman Grimm’s book on Homer may be unbearable to some who approach the subject from a scholarly standpoint. Whatever has been argued about Homer—whether Homer lived or not, whether the Iliad was compiled from so many or so few individual details, and so on—none of that concerned him. He accepted it as it was. Through this, however, it became clear to him how wonderfully it is composed internally, how what comes later always relates to what came before, so that everything that reveals this inner composition appears to us as internally coherent. But apart from that, it seems to me that the greatest thing is precisely what does one so immense good as a researcher of the spirit: the immersion in the inner life of the Homeric heroes. Everywhere we see Herman Grimm’s soulful nature poured out even upon the inner lives of Homer’s heroes. Everywhere we see captured—yet against a world-historical backdrop—the soul of Achilles, the soul of Agamemnon, the soul of Odysseus, and so on. A book that has an overwhelming effect as a portrayal of the soul, despite the intimacy of its stylistic presentation! Throughout the book, we are not only led up to the heights of historical reflection, but we are also led deep, deep into the souls of the individual Homeric figures. Yes, some scholars might now say that Herman Grimm took the *Iliad* without regard for the entire body of Homeric scholarship or any actual preliminary research, and then simply took it verse by verse! That is indeed what he does, in a rather “layman-like” manner, and one could then sum up the whole thing in this dry formula: Here is a man who wrote a book without any preliminary studies.

[ 40 ] Did Herman Grimm write this book without any preliminary studies? Anyone who delves into Herman Grimm’s spiritual life will find these preliminary studies; they simply look different from those of ordinary scholars. Herman Grimm’s preliminary studies lay in the study of the soul, in a deep immersion in the human soul and its mysteries. And one can be convinced that no one else could have shed such a marvelous light on the souls of the Homeric heroes as the one who had undertaken such preliminary studies. On the surface, Herman Grimm seems to be seeking out what reigned in Homer’s imagination. But what he says reveals him everywhere to be the most subtle connoisseur of the soul, about whom we might suspect the most extraordinary things, if we only observe how he contemplates the souls of the Homeric heroes—from Achilles to Agamemnon to Odysseus. How did he come to write, in his book on Homer or in his other works, certain words that strike the spiritual researcher as so extraordinarily spiritual? He came to do so because he had conducted very special preliminary studies. And the spiritual researcher will seek out these preliminary studies in the works from Herman Grimm’s early period.

[ 41 ] Above all, we have that wonderful collection of short stories, which may be read less today than many modern works of this kind, but which should be read precisely by those interested in spiritual life—a collection that can be described as an intense endeavor throughout to get to know human souls, to fathom human mysteries, and to explore the workings of the human soul beyond the physical world. Right before us is the very first of these novellas, which appeared as early as the first period of his literary career: “The Singer.” It depicts how a man develops a deep, passionate affection for a woman—a woman of a profound spiritual nature. We are shown, however, how these two personalities can never come together, how the woman removes the ardently loving man from her social circle, and how all the impulses within this man’s soul continue to live on—impulses that, on the one hand, draw him toward the woman, and on the other hand, from the depths of his soul, consume his entire physical being. We see how he then wastes away emotionally—one might say—portrayed in a way characteristic of spiritual science. And once again we see him, when he is taken in at a friend’s estate, entangled in the woman’s webs. The friend realizes that it is high time to summon the very person to whom the friend is deeply attached. She does come—but too late. While she is standing in front of the house, the man in question shoots himself.

[ 42 ] And now comes something that Herman Grimm has so often touched upon in artistic depictions, but which he has always left vague in those contexts where it is readily embraced by spiritual research. Here, it is described briefly and concisely how the deceased lives on in the singer’s imagination. Unforgettable will be the scene where she—who feels entirely responsible for this man’s death—sees him approaching night after night, acting from the realm of the dead, and how this approach by the deceased now becomes part of the woman’s innermost being. This is not depicted as a mere figment of the imagination, but rather as if by a man who knows that there are mysteries that extend beyond a person’s death. The description is marvelous—where the friend places himself before the woman, and where she says the dead man is coming to her—right up to the woman’s final letter to her friend, in which she expresses that she now feels herself facing death, that the deceased, to whom she was so closely bound, has drawn her from his realm of the dead into his own realm. — Perhaps no modern actor has found the right notes with such depth to touch the spiritual world.

[ 43 ] In spiritual research, we describe how, when a person passes through the gate of death, that which otherwise remains united with the person even during sleep—the so-called etheric body—rises out of the physical body together with the higher soul elements and passes into the spiritual world. In the field of spiritual research, we sketch a picture of how the physical body remains behind, how the human being then, with his etheric body, detaches himself piece by piece, limb by limb, from the physical body, and how the etheric body then continues for a time to serve as the envelope for the higher soul elements of the human being. This is a concept that can become increasingly familiar to those who engage with spiritual research. In what follows, we will now be able to consider the marvelous way in which the artistic soul of Herman Grimm touches upon these realities of the spiritual world, and this consideration will in turn lead us to the question of why, for deeper reasons, Herman Grimm did not complete his cultural portrayals in a comprehensive work.

[ 44 ] In addition to his short stories, Herman Grimm wrote another work of fiction, the novel *Unüberwindliche Mächte* (*Insurmountable Forces*), in which—as in his entire body of work—we encounter a refined style that consistently elevates the reader to a contemplation of the world and life. Everything else about it is magnificent as well. In particular, what one might call the clash of two eras of humanity on a small scale. One world is one that values only titles, rank, and honors and feels completely at home within them. From this world comes a count of ancient lineage who has fallen on hard times but still lives entirely in the echoes and sentiments of his countly status. This novel beautifully contrasts the “new world” with the world of old prejudices and hierarchies. American perspectives come into play. It is Americans who confront the man—whom Herman Grimm calls Arthur—who lives entirely within his class prejudices and sensibilities. This count is confronted by Emmy, the daughter of Mrs. Forster, who has grown out of the American way of life, and we see this count inflamed with passionate love for Emmy.

[ 45 ] It is impossible to even begin to describe the rich content of this novel. After all, we are confronted with the entire contrast between Europe and America, the entire contrast between the old Prussian character and the Prussian character reshaped by the wars—an immensely significant cultural tableau into which the characters are imprinted and from which they emerge again. All that can be hinted at is that, as a result of the forces arising from the convergence of these various currents, Count Arthur meets a tragic death just as he is about to marry Emmy. A man who, though a member of his extended family, in his delusions considers himself the rightful heir to the count’s lineage and regards the true heir, Count Arthur, as a bastard—this man confronts Count Arthur, driven by envy and jealousy, and circumstances unfold in such a way that, on the eve of his wedding, Count Arthur is shot by this man.

[ 46 ] One may perhaps never find an opportunity to consider the phrase “insurmountable forces” — which some who wish to view this novel purely rationally might regard merely as the insurmountable nature of class prejudices — to be more justified than precisely when one sees how Herman Grimm, without intending to, unravels the idea of karma—the idea of the causal interconnection of destinies expressed in human life— weaves knot upon knot and brings them to fruition, and how he in fact portrays in this process forces that can only act if they are working their way over from earlier incarnations, from earlier earthly lives. He does not describe this by speaking theoretically of “forces” or “karma,” but rather by simply letting the facts speak for themselves and giving expression to these forces, so that they strike us everywhere as the ideas of spiritual research. We see a karmic destiny unfolding, we see insurmountable karmic forces expressing themselves, and we see something else as well.

[ 47 ] Emmy stays behind. The last glance that fell upon Arthur’s fading eyes as he lay there with a bullet through his heart was when she bent over the dying man, and her eyes took on a determined expression. A remark by Herman Grimm himself remains unforgettable, in which he speaks here of how the spirit receded from the eyes at the very moment when the eyes took on that peculiar quality that makes them appear merely as physical instruments. But now we are once again confronted with Herman Grimm’s reaching out toward the worlds that lie beyond death—that, one might say, chaste reaching out toward the worlds from which the souls that have remained real exert their influence once they have passed through the gate of death.

[ 48 ] In a brief concluding chapter, Herman Grimm shows us Emmy as she gradually wastes away and dies. The way he depicts Emmy’s approaching death is truly characteristic of how deeply Herman Grimm’s soul was connected to spiritual and intellectual issues. She is taken to Montreux. Montreux itself is described in a unique way, as is the entire setting in which Emmy dies. But he does not describe Emmy’s death like some other writer who is far removed from spiritual life; rather, he describes it as one who approaches the very point where the mysteries of death and the mysteries of the realm beyond death speak to the souls, and my account would be incomplete if I did not conclude by adding the words that Herman Grimm himself wrote about Emmy’s death:

[ 49 ] “But this is Emmy’s dream.

[ 50 ] Between midnight and dawn, she thought she was waking up.

[ 51 ] Her first glance at the window, through which a dim light streamed in, was clear and unobstructed, and she knew where she was. She could also hear her mother, who was sleeping beside her, breathing. But a moment later, however, and with a pressure she had never felt before, an overwhelming fear seized her. It was no longer those individual thoughts that had tormented her in recent days, but rather as if a giant hand were holding all the mountains of the earth above her by a thin thread, and at any moment the fingers holding it might open, causing the mass to crash down and remain upon her for all eternity. Her gaze wandered aimlessly, both within and without, searching for a glimmer of light, but nothing presented itself; the glow from the window had gone out, her mother’s breathing was no longer audible, and suffocating loneliness surrounded her, as if she would never again reach anything alive. She wanted to call out, but she could not; she wanted to move, but not a single limb obeyed her. It was completely silent, completely dark; she could no longer even form thoughts in this terribly monotonous fear—even her memory had been taken from her—when at last a thought returned: Arthur!

[ 52 ] And now, something wonderful happened: it was as if that single thought had transformed into a point of light that became visible to the eyes. And as the thought grew into boundless longing, this light grew, drew near, and expanded, and suddenly—as if it were bursting apart—it unfolded and took shape—Arthur was standing before her! She saw him; she finally recognized him. It was certainly him. He was smiling and standing right next to her. She couldn’t tell if he was naked or clothed—but it was him; she knew him all too well. It was him, not just a phantom that had taken his form.”

[ 53 ] Just as Herman Grimm brings the one who has long since passed through the gates of death closer to the woman who becomes a seer, so, at the moment of her death, she draws so close to the dead man that she addresses his soul thus: “She did not see whether he was naked or clothed; but it was he—she knew him all too well—he himself, not merely a phantom that had taken on his form.”

[ 54 ] “He held out his hand to her and said, ‘Come.’”) Never had his voice sounded as sweet and alluring as it did today. With all the strength she could muster, she tried to raise her arms toward him, but she could not. He came even closer and reached his hand out toward her: “Come,” he said once more.

[ 55 ] Emmy felt as if the force with which she was trying to utter at least one word should be capable of moving mountains, yet she was unable to say that one word.

[ 56 ] Arthur looked at her, and she looked at him. If only she could have moved a finger, she would have touched him. And now the most terrible thing: he seemed to be receding again! “Come,” he said for the third time. And she, sensing that he had spoken for the last time, that the terrible darkness would once again descend upon his heavenly countenance—now filled with a fear that tore her apart as frost splits trees—made one last attempt to raise her arms toward him. But it was impossible to overcome the heaviness and cold that held her bound—yet then, like a bud bursting open to reveal a flower growing before our eyes, other arms emerged radiantly from her arms, other gleaming shoulders from her shoulders, and these arms rose to meet Arthur’s, and he, taking her hands in his, slowly floating back, drawing her toward him, and with her the entire magnificent figure that rose from Emmy’s.”

[ 57 ] There is no more wonderful way to describe the emergence of the etheric body from the physical body than by undertaking such a description with the chaste soul of an artist. That was a spirit, that was a soul that lived within Herman Grimm, of which we may say that it came very close to what we so earnestly seek in spiritual research. That was a soul, that was a spirit, of which we may say that it serves as proof of how the modern soul, as it approached the twentieth century, sought the paths to spiritual life.

[ 58 ] So we gladly turn to Herman Grimm, whom we listen to as he walks the path that we wish only to continue following. And so we see how he elevates Raphael’s creations, how he elevates Michelangelo’s creations, how he elevates Goethe’s experiences, and how he elevates the Greek soul of Homer up to the stream that flows through the millennia as “creative imagination” for his spirit. We then realize how close Herman Grimm, with all his feelings and sensibilities, was to the living weaving and working of the spiritual-soul aspect that lies behind all physical reality. For we are not dealing with abstractions when Herman Grimm speaks of his “creative imagination.” To the extent that we may still encounter a hint of abstractions in his work, to that extent the necessity may also become apparent to us that we must break through the thin wall that still separates Herman Grimm from the living spirit—a spirit that not only works as creative imagination but lives in the immediate spiritual activity behind the entire sensory world. It strikes one as a kind of chastity that does not yet dare to say more in its soul than it actually says, when we see Herman Grimm speaking of humanity’s imagination, which has continued to work through the millennia—even though, as an artist, he has come so close to the soul that has remained alive after passing through the gate of death. Thus, it will not be difficult for us, when Herman Grimm speaks of creative imagination, to see there the living spiritual beings whom we, as spiritual researchers, seek behind the sensory world.

[ 59 ] Perhaps it will not seem unjustified, then, to even assert that for such a mind—which struggled so honestly and sincerely for the truth—this creative imagination, even as he sought to approach it again and again, was ultimately too abstract for him; that his soul was driven to grasp the living spiritual realm, and that the intended great work could not come to be because, had it been written, it would have had to be a work that portrayed the spiritual world not merely as creative imagination, but as a world of creative beings and individualities.

[ 60 ] Spiritual research in modern times was not arbitrarily introduced by this or that individual, but was called for by the seeking souls of modern times—those seeking souls to whom Herman Grimm so clearly and characteristically belonged, as we have seen. Therefore, it is precisely through this remarkable personality that we can realize how spiritual research does not leave us alienated and isolated within modern intellectual life. We have been able to look upon a figure such as Herman Grimm as a kindred spirit. Even if he does not yet fully share our point of view, we are—or at least can be—infinitely close to him, And when considering such a figure, it is also better to focus less on every detail and more on his wholeness, viewing him with all that harmony of the soul with which he can affect us, and with all that gentleness and yet bold sharpness and strength of the soul’s life with which he can also affect us. Whether we now address this or that question of life in a manner that deviates more or less from Herman Grimm’s—I know that it does not entirely fall outside his style when I summarize what I actually intended to express. One might arrive at the thought—let us call it, for my sake, a delusional thought—which can then live in the soul as a beautiful delusion: If higher spirits—spirits detached from the earth—wished to familiarize themselves through reading with what is happening on earth, they would most readily read works such as those in which Herman Grimm has depicted the earthly destinies of human beings.

[ 61 ] This feeling resonates from almost every line of Herman Grimm’s writings, and it lifts one’s entire personality—one might say—into a sphere detached from the earth. Yet one feels so close to this personality that, when trying to characterize what has been said today about Herman Grimm, a beautiful phrase comes to mind—one that he himself spoke in the grave for a friend, his friend Treitschke, whom he held in such high esteem:

[ 62 ] “How joyfully this man embraced life. How courageous he was. How readily language served him. How fresh his latest book always was. How little even those who bore a grudge against him—those who felt his elbows in the hustle and bustle of intellectual life—could truly hold a grudge. Even they will join in saying: ‘Yes, he was one of us!’

[ 63 ] These words are also the last that Herman Grimm wrote and had published, as we know from the editor of his works, Reinhold Steig. And I would like to conclude this evening’s reflection by summarizing it in these words: How joyfully this man, Herman Grimm, embraced life—how gentle—and yet how unique! And how harmoniously his entire life’s work resonates! How readily language served him! How fresh his latest book always was! How little even those who differ from him in certain ideas and in certain ways can be distant from him, provided they understand themselves properly! And how close must those feel to him who, setting out from any field of intellectual inquiry, seek the paths to the spirit! How close must they feel to him, and how much would they like, when his figure—shining so gently in spirit—appears before them, to burst out with the words: “Yes, he was ours, too!”