The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

This evening shall be devoted to analysis of questions which have been sent up by a number of dramatic artists, and the reason why I shall answer them this evening is that our arrangements did not allow any other time for the purpose. That is one reason, the other is that I think I may take for granted that at least something of what I am about to say in regard to these questions will be of interest to all here present. The first question is this: “What is the attitude of the spiritual investigator towards the development of consciousness in dramatic art, and what is the necessary mission in this respect of those connected with the stage and dramatic art in general?”

Much that might perhaps be expected in answer to this question will come out more clearly when taken in connection with later questions. I will ask you therefore to take what I have to say in connection with this question more as a whole. I should like to say first of all that dramatic art, in particular, will certainly have to play a part in every development of the stronger consciousness towards which we are bound to progress during this age. From many different sides the fact is emphasized, that the development of consciousness would take away from the man of artistic taste some of his simplicity and instinctive feeling and the like, it would make him less sure. If we approach these things from the point of view indicated by spiritual science we shall see that these fears are quite unjustifiable. Through what is usually called the contemplative capacity, the capacity of unbiased Judgment of one’s own actions and self-contemplation much is lost of ordinary consciousness, instinctive power and purely intellectual activity. It is also just through thoughtful intellectual activity that all that can be cited as partaking of an artistic nature is simply lost. What is artistic can in nowise be regulated by the intellect. This is certainly the truth, on the other hand it is also true that when knowledge such as is sought here, becomes force of consciousness, then the ability to see things as they are, the complete relation to reality will not be interfered with. Therefore we need have no fear that we shall become inartistic through the acquisition of consciousness, of the conscious mastery of the means and so on. Through Anthroposophical spiritual science which aims at the knowledge of man, what is usually summed up in rules, in abstract forms, extends to vision. One gets at last a true view of the physical, psychic and spiritual being of man. As little as a simple vision can prevent our creating something artistic, just as little does this higher vision do so. The mistake which becomes evident here is really due to the following. In the Anthroposophical Society, which actually came into being for reasons explained in the little pamphlet The Antagonism to the Goetheanum, and developed from a membership which formerly included many members of the Theosophical Society: Especially those who had grown out of the old Theosophy and many things have been done, and what might be called a dreary doctrine of symbols, a confused symbolism, grew up. I still think with horror of the year 1909 when we presented Schuré’s drama The Children of Lucifer (in the next number of the “drei” my lecture which followed on this performance will be reprinted). I am still shocked when I think how at that time a member of the Theosophical Society, who indeed still remained within it, enquired: “Is not Cleonis, the sentient soul?” and are not the other characters the Consciousness-soul and Manas”? In this way all was nicely proportioned. Various terms used in Theosophy, were assigned to different persons. I once read an interpretation of Hamlet in which the characters were also labelled with all the terms of the separate members of man’s being. Now, as I have already mentioned I have really endured a great deal through the symbolic interpretations of my own Mystery Plays, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was when for once a really artistic interpretation of the first drama was given by Herr Uehli. It may have been too flattering if taken personally, but the interpretation was really artistic; that is to say he spoke as one must in criticising anything of the nature of art, then symbolising is out of place; we must take as our starting point the immediate impression that is the point in question. This dreary symbolism would frighten one away if one desired consciousness, for such symbolism is not a sign of any increase of consciousness in this talking round the subject. It signifies a complete digression from the content and labelling vignettes on to it. It should therefore penetrate into what is really living from the aspect of spiritual science, then we shall find that this growth of the consciousness is necessary in every form of art if it is to march with the times. It would simply remain behind in evolution if it did not take part in the growth of consciousness. This is a necessity.

On the other hand it is not proposed that we should be on our guard against the growth of consciousness here intended as though it were a blight, though this warning is certainly necessary with respect to the ordinary intellectual aestheticism and symbolism. On the contrary we can observe how dramatic art is itself acquiring a certain growth of consciousness. I may perhaps be allowed to mention something further. You see, we can say that there is an extraordinary amount of mischief done by interpreters or biographers of Goethe in relation to what has been said about his artistic powers. They might really be said to be in advance of their time, and we can only say that those men—literary historians, aestheticists and so on—who always speak of Goethe’s unconscious power, of Goethe’s simplicity, really only convince us that they are themselves absolutely unconscious of the working of Goethe’s soul. They attribute their own lack of consciousness to him.

How did Goethe’s most wonderful lyrical productions come into being? They were inspired by life itself. It is rather dangerous to speak about Goethe’s love affairs for we may easily be misunderstood; but the psychologist must not shrink from this. Goethe’s relationship to the women he loved in his youth as well as those whom he loved in later years, was such that the most beautiful lyrics were the outcome. How could this be possible? Because Goethe had as it were a dual nature. In all his external experiences, even in the most intimate and soul-stirring experiences he was always a sort of dual personality. There was the Goethe who did not love less devotedly than any other man; and there was the Goethe who at other times could rise above this, who in a sense looked on as a third person at the objective Goethe beside him, as he developed these love affairs with some woman or other. Goethe was able in a sense—psychologically real—to withdraw out of and from himself, and contemplate his own experiences Through this, something very special was formed in his soul. One must indeed look intimately into Goethe’s soul if one wishes to examine this. It was formed because in the first place he was not so much engrossed in the reality, as people who pass through such an experience merely instinctively with their passions and impulses, being unable to withdraw their souls from it, but living blindly and unrestrainedly within it. In the outer world, of course this led to the result that his love affairs often became such as did not necessarily lead to the usual conclusions. In the form in which the question has been put I do not assert that misunderstandings are impossible; what I say is only meant as an interpretation of Goethe. On the other hand it leads to the result that what remained behind in Goethe’s soul and which might appear simultaneously with those outer life experiences, was sometimes not mere remembrance but a picture, a definite image. Thus were created in Goethe’s soul the wonderful pictures of Gretchen of Frankfurt, Friedcriche of Sesenheim about whom Frensicheimer has just written his Ahasuerus which has been considered worthy of a place in the history of German literature. Thus was originated those wonderful characters of “Lili of Frankfurt” that wonderful character we find in Werther. To these also belong “Kätchen of Leipzig” and even such characters as Marianer Willemer, Ulrike Lewitzow and so on, created in Goethe’s old age. We may say that the character of Frau von Stein alone does not belong to this category. This is due to the whole complexity of this relationship. For the very reason that these relationships led to the creation of such characters, which survived more as a residuum than mere remembrance, inspired the wonderful lyrical transformation of the pictures which lived within him. The consequence of this may even be that such a poem becomes dramatic, and in one instance indeed sublimely dramatic. I refer to the first part of Faust. You will find there that the designation “Gretchen” and “Margarita” are interchangeable. And this leads to something deeply connected with the whole psychic origin of the history of Faust. Everywhere you will find “Gretchen” as the designation of that character taken from the Gretchen of Frankfurt. You will find the name “Gretchen” wherever you have a finished picture such as “Gretchen at the Well”; “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” and so on, where the lyrical has gradually passed into the dramatic. On the other hand you will find “Margarita” wherever the character has been formed from the ordinary development of the drama. Everything that bears the name of “Gretchen” is a complete picture in itself that is poetically conceived and developed into a dramatic form. This shows how the poetic element can become intimately objective, so that it can be used for a dramatic combination. The dramatic is created in this way, for the dramatist can always stand above his conceptions. As soon as an author begins to put himself in the place of a character he can no longer make it dramatic. then Goethe created the first part of his Faust, he completely put himself into the personality of Faust and for that reason the character is vague, not definite not rounded off. Goethe did not make it quite distinct and objective, as he did the other characters. How a result of this objectivity is also that one can really enter into the characters, one can really behold them and become as it were, identical with them. That is indeed a gift which certainly was possessed by the author of the Shakespearean dramas. The power of presenting a character in a pictorial objective way as a personal experience in order to enter into it as it were, to draw out something from the character must in a sense pass over to the actor and it will become, when developed, part of his consciousness. Goethe's special form of consciousness enabled him to do this, to embody these picture images in a lyrical and dramatic fore, and this he did best of all in reproducing the Frankfurt Gretchen.

The actor must develop something similar, and there are instances of this. I will give you one such. I do not know how many of you have seen the actor Lewinski of the Vienna Burgtheater. Judging by his appearance and his voice he was really not in the least fitted to become an actor and when he described his connection in his own particular art he did so in somewhat the following way. He said: “Yes, I should of course not be able to act at all”—he was one of the chief actors for a long time at the Vienna Burgtheater, perhaps one of the most distinguished players of character parts—“I should not be able to do anything at all, if I were to depend on what I appear to be on the stage, the little hunchback with the squeaky voice and the dreadfully ugly face.” He could of course be nothing at all, but he said: “I have to come to my own aid, I am really always three people on the stage, first, I am the little hunchbacked croaking man who is so frightfully ugly; the second one who is quite outside the one who croaks, is a pure idealist, a quite spiritual being, I must always keep him before me; and then, then only am I the third, and, with the second, I play upon the first, the croaking hunchback.” This must of course be quite consciously done, it must be something which I might say, has become for me a question of management. Indeed the threefold division is extraordinarily important for the technique of theatrical art. It is even necessary, though this can be expressed otherwise—for the actor to learn to know his own body well, for his own corporeality is after all for the real actor the real instrument on which he plays. He must learn to know his own body as the violinist his violin; this he must know, he must to a certain extent be in the position of listening to his own voice. This can be done. He can gradually be able to hear his own voice as though it was flowing around him. He must practise this, however, while trying to recite dramatic, or lyrical verses, but living verses very strong in form, rhythm and time, as far as possible while adapting himself to the verse form. He will gradually feel, that the spoken word is entirely separated from the larynx, that it hums around in the air, and he will attain a sensible yet supersensible impression of his own speech. In a similar way one can then get a sensible-supersensible view of one’s own personality. Only one must not become too affected. You see, Lewinski did not give himself airs, he called himself a little hunchback, an extremely ugly man. One must certainly not become a prey to illusions. He who wishes to be always beautiful, who will concede nothing at all in this respect, will not so easily acquire a knowledge of his body as an instrument. This is, however, absolutely necessary for the actor, for he must be conscious of how he comes on to the stage, how he plants his foot, how he uses his hands, and so on. The actor must realise whether he has a soft tread or a quiet step in ordinary life. he must know how he bends his knees how he movers his hands etc. He must indeed make an attempt to look at himself while he is studying his part. That is what I should like to call “Throwing' oneself into the part”. Indirectly the speech will help very considerable here because through listening to one’s own voice, one’s own 'words, the contemplation of the human figure as a whole follows instinctively.

Question: How could we help usefully in the fieLd of our own immediate work by looking up and collecting theories of the dramatic art, historical documents, for spiritual investigation, writing biographies for actors and so on? (Question incomplete)

In this respect a society of actors could certainly accomplished, a very great deal, only it must be done in the right way. Histories and theories of the drama and biographies of actors will not help much, for I certainly believe that some very considerable objections would be raised against this. The actor, at any rate when he is in full work, should really have no time at all for studying histories of the theatre, dramatic art, and still less biographies of actors! On the other hand a great deal can be accomplished in regard to the direct perception of man and hie immediate characteristics. Here I can recommend something which may prove very useful for the actor.

There is a science of physiognomy by Aristotle. You will easily find everything sketched there? even to a red or pointed nose, the meaning of a smooth or hairy hand, or a fat or lean body, all peculiarities showing how the spirit and soul of man express themselves, how one has to look at them and so on—a very useful study which has only recently gone out of date. We cannot now observe people as Aristotle did his Greeks; we should get quite false results if we did. The actor has opportunities of observing such things because he must represent different people, and if he is wise he will never mention names when referring to these traits, he will not injure his career and his personal intercourse nor his social relationships, although he becomes thus observant. Mr or Mrs or Miss So-and-So must never in any way play a part when he makes his interesting communications of his observations, but always only when Mr. A Mrs B and Miss C, and so on. What refers to outer reality must of course be suppressed as much as possible. If you really study life in this way, if you really notice the curious expression of the nostrils when people make a joke and the importance of paying attention to such things—speaking generally of course in this way we can learn a great deal. The important thing is not so much the knowledge but the thinking and observing on these lines to help one to reach this point. If one thinks and observes in this way one is no longer using the ordinary observation of today. Our observation of the world nowadays is such that a man may perhaps have seen another 30 times and yet not even then know what sort of buttons he has on his waistcoat. Such want of observation is quite possible today.

I have even known people who have talked to a lady the whole afternoon and did not know what the colour of her dress was—a quite incomprehensible fact—but it does happen. Of course such people who do not even know the colour of a lady’s dress after a long interview with her, are not very fitted to direct their powers of observation in the way they must if they are to be used in action. I have even had the nice experience of people assuring me that they did not know whether the dress of the lady with whom they had spent the whole afternoon, was red or blue, if I may add something personal to that, I have even had the experience that people expected me in a similar case, not to know the colour of the lady’s dress either, after I had been speaking with her for a long time! One sees from this how little value is attached to many faculties of the soul. What we see before us must stand out clearly in its full contours; and if we see it thus, and not merely—I might say—as a sort of external nebulous covering, such a perception already passes over into the possibility of modelling and shaping.

So above all an actor must be a keen observer, and in this respect he must be distinguished by a certain humour. He must take these things from a humorous point of view. For, you see, if he had the experience of the professor who for some time left the concert because immediately in front of him sat a student whose top waistcoat button was torn off, so that the professor referred to was forced to concentrate on the absent button, that would not be the power of observation but of concentration. But now one day the torn off button was in its place, and behold the professor lost his power of concentration from that moment. This is a conception of the world without humour. The actor must not be like this, he must look at things humorously, he must always stand above them. He will then be able to give them form.

That is what must be thoroughly observed, and if we accustom ourselves to formulate such things, and really see certain inner connections in bodily perception, rising above it with a certain sense of humour so that we can give it fora but not in a sentimental way of course, we shall also develop in the handling of such a thing that lightness, which one must always have when one wishes to characterise in the world of appearances. But one must characterise in the world of Make-believe, otherwise one always remains a more imitative amateur. Thus in conversing with one another in this way upon social physiognomy, those who are engaged in dramatic art may collect a great deal of that which is of more value than dramatic theory; and especially more so than biographies of actors and historic accounts of the theatre, which can certainly be left to others. Out of that which can be observed and brought out in his art by the actor, (this would be a very interesting chapter on the art of observing man) he would be able to develop just that naive, conscious handling of dramatic art, in which that art specially consists.

Question. What value for our time has the representation of past epochs, e. g. the Greek dramas, the dramas of Shakespeare, and of recent authors such as Ibsen, Strindberg etc?

In regard to dramatic conception the man of today will of course have to make use of other forms, than those used in Greek dramatic art, but that does not hinder us from staging Greek dramas today, indeed it would be a sin if we did not do so. We should however, have better translations, than those of the pedantic Wilamowiz, who because of his extremely literal translations, loses the spirit of those dramas. It must be clear to us that we must introduce to the man of today an art which satisfies his eye and other perceptive faculties. For that purpose it is of course necessary, as regards Greek dramas, that one should live more deeply in them. I do not think, speaking paradoxically—that one can live in the Greek dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles—though this might be easier with Euripides—without approaching them in the sense of Spiritual Science. The characters in the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles must really become living in this sense, for in spiritual science alone are the elements to be found which our feeling, and impulses of will can recreate in such a way, that we are able to make something of the personages in these dramas. Then, as soon as one can enter into these dramas through spiritual science, it will be possible to make their form live, for spiritual science reveals in a special way the origin of these dramas in the light of the Mysteries. Of course it would be an anachronism if one wished to present them as the Greeks did. This might be done once as a historical experiment, but one would have to be conscious that it was nothing more. The Greek dramas are really too good for that. They can positively live again in the man of today and it would even be a great gain first to re-create them in the sense of spiritual science, and then to transform them into performances.

On the other hand the man of today is able to enter into the particular style of Shakespeare without any special difficulty. That only needs the human feeling of today and absence of prejudice. The characters in Shakespeare should really be looked upon as Hermann Grimm saw them. lie expressed. a paradox which is however, very true; truer than many historical statements; It is really much more sensible to study Julius Caesar in Shakespeare than in a history book. As a matter of fact Shakespeare's imagination makes it possible to enter positively into the character so that it becomes alive, and is more real than any historical representation. It would of course be a pity if we did not desire to perform the Shakeepearean dramas today. It is a question of having the thing so much at heart that one can simply use the ordinary means one has assimilated in the way of technique etc, in impersonating the characters.

Now there certainly lies an abyss between Shakespeare and the French dramatists, whom Schiller and Goethe still took as their model, and the newest dramatists. In Ibsen we really have to do with problem plays and Ibsen should be performed in such a way that we become aware that his characters are really no characters at all. If one wished to make his characters alive in one’s imagination they would be continually hopping round and treading on their own toes! They are not human beings, but the plays are great problem plays, and the problems are such as will always be experienced by people of the time. It is extraordinarily interesting for the actor to try and model himself on Ibsen’s plays today, for if he should try to study the parts he will have to say to himself, “This is indeed no human being? I must create one.” He will have to proceed in an individual manner; he will have to become aware of the fact that when he represents a character of Ibsen’s it may become quite other than when someone else does so. One can bring very much of one’s own individuality into the characters, for they can stand the individual note and being performed in various ways; whereas in Shakespeare, and also in the Greek dramas one should really always have the feeling that there is only one possible conception and towards that one must strive. Certainly one will not always find it at once, but one must have the feeling that there is only one possible interpretation. In Ibsen or even in Strindberg that is not at all the case. These characters must be treated by bringing an individual note into them. It is difficult to express oneself in such matters but I should like to do so metaphorically, you see, with Shakespeare one has wholly the feeling that he is an artist who looks from all sides, that he can see all round, that he really beholds as a complete man and can see others with his whole being. Ibsen could not do that, he could only see superficially. Hence that remarkably drawn character in one of his plays. The hero plants himself behind a chair by the wall where he was separated from everyone, then he allowed his eyes to wander round in order to take a general view. In this way the stories of the world, the people that he sees, are seen superficially. One must first give them substance, and this rests with the individual actor. This is specially the case with Strindberg. I have nothing to say against his dramatic art, I esteem it, but one must look at everything in its own way. Such a play as the Damascus drama is something quite exceptional, yet we must say that the characters are not human, they are mere shapes crammed full of problems. Yes there one can do much, for one can really put one’s whole being into the part, as actor, one must personally add very much to the individual characters.

Question: How does a real work of art, speaking of dramatic art, appear in its effects when seen from the spiritual world, in contradistinction to other activities of man?

The other activities of man are such that one really never sees them as a complete whole. Really men particularly in our day, are formed in a way by their environment, and milieu. Hermann Bahr described this in a lecture in Berlin in a really striking way for he said: “In the nineties of the 19th century something very particular happened to humanity. If one entered a town, a strange town, and met people coming out of the factory in the evening they all looked exactly alike; so that one felt quite anxious. At last one no longer believed that one really saw so many people all alike, but the same one multiplied many times”. He said: "“Then we pass from the nineties into the 20th century”. He alluded coquetishly to the fact that he was very often invited when he came to any town—he said “When I was invited to dinner I always had a lady on my right and on my left, and the next day another lady on my right and left; but I could not tell whether I had a different one each time or not, I did not know if they were the came ladies as yesterday or not” Thus people are a kind of impression of their milieu. This has become particularly so at the present time.

This need not of course be carried so far, but there is something in it. Man in his ordinary activity stands before one in such a way that he must be judged in connection with his whole environment. What a strong impression we can obtain of a man, by knowing his environment! In dramatic art it is a question of really looking at what one sees as something separate, complete in itself. For this, many of the prejudices which play such a part in our inartistic ago must be overcome. To answer this question frankly I shall have to say something which may actually call forth a kind of horror in the aesthetist and carping critics of today.

When it is an artistic representation of persons, we must gradually study and observe that if we are to express passion, sorrow, cheerfulness, to convince or persuade a man, or to scold him, we always feel that it must be accompanied by a quite definite movement of the limbs, with special regard to rhythm. This is still a long way from Eurhythmy, but a quite definite movement of the limbs, a certain kind o slowness or quickness in speaking, is the result of this study. We acquire a feeling that language and movement are independent of each other, that there would be the same cadence, and measure in words, even if they had no meaning, that they have a separate life of their own. We must have the feeling, that the language would be able to flow even if we put together quite senseless words in a definite cadence or measure. We must also feel that we can express our meaning by definite movements. An actor must be able to see himself in his part, he must feel pleasure in making certain movements of his limbs, movements not made for any purpose but to follow a rhythm; for instance, clasping the left arm with the right hand and so on, and he must feel a certain pleasure and satisfaction in this. Further he must say to himself, in rehearsing; “Now as you say this, it takes a tone, a cadence, the movement must be of two kinds”. It must not be supposed that really artistic work would result by laboriously drawing from the poetical content the correct way of speaking, rather must we have the feeling: “The sort of cadence and measure which is appropriate here, you have known a long tine, as well as the movement of the limbs, all you have to do is to remember the right one.” Perhaps he may not have studied it, this signifies that he can certainly discover what he needs; but he must feel that it must be put together out of what he has already studied and he must attain his objective in another way. That is the point.

Question: What is the task of music in dramatic art?

Well, I think we have given the practical answer to that by the way in which we use music in Eurhythmy. I certainly think that it is not to be hastily rejected; atmosphere may be created—even in pure drama—by music before and after; and if the play offers the possibility of music, it should be used. This question is naturally not easy to answer when it is asked in such a general sense; for it is a question of doing the right thing at the right moment.

Question: Is talent a necessary foundation for an actor, or can the equivalent be developed through spiritual-scientific methods in anyone who has love and artistic feeling for dramatic art?

Well, we had a friend at the Weimar Theatre: There, all sorts of people appeared wishing to be tested in this way. Sometimes such aspirations were not encouraged. My friend, who was himself an actor, would very frequently say when asked: “Do you think that something can be made of that man? Well yes if he acquired talent!” There is a certain truth in that. It is indeed quite admissible, and not only admissible, but a deep truth, that one can learn everything if one applies to oneself what flows from spiritual science into the impulses of man. What can be learnt is something which may appear as talent. There is no denying that. But there is a little hitch; we must first live long enough to go through such a development. When by all sorts of means something like the creation of a talent is really acquired in this way, The following may occur. Someone has created a talent, let us say for playing the youthful hero. he may however have taken so long about it that he is now bald and grey. This which is absolutely possible, makes life very difficult. For this reason it is necessary that in regard to the choice of persons suitable for dramatic art—there should be two persons, the one who wishes to become an actor—(there are many of these) and the other, he who has to decide the question. The Latter must have a tremendously strong feeling of responsibility. He must, for instance, be aware that a superficial judgment in this respect may be very wrong, for it is easy to think that a man has no talent for something. It may only be concealed, and if there is any possibility of its coming out in some way, that which was not recognised, can sometimes be brought out comparatively soon, nevertheless, much will depend for practical purposes—life must indeed remain practical—on acquiring a certain capacity for discovering talent; and first of all we must limit ourselves to using what can be acquired through spiritual science—which must be a good deal—in order to make the talent more living and to develop it more quickly. All this is impossible. In the case of people who sometimes take themselves for great dramatic geniuses, it is often necessary to say, that God in his wrath allowed them to be actors; and one must really have the conscientiousness to tell them, kindly of course and without offending them, not to enter the dramatic profession, which after all is not for everyone, as it requires above all the possibility of an inner activity of soul and spirit so as to transfer that easily into the physical body. This is what has specially to be taken into account in this matter.

With regard to exercises for the development of one’s own sense of movement, these cannot be given so quickly. I will occupy myself however, with the matter, and it will also be possible in this direction gradually to approach those who wish to know something about it. These things, if they are to be of any use, must of course be worked out slowly and objectively, from the basis of spiritual science. In this direction I will note the question for a later answer.

Question. Could fundamental and direct limits be given which would lead more deeply into the comprehension and the way of entering into new parts, than can be worked out by practice and tradition? May we also ask for literature in which we can find answers to these and similar questions?

Well, as regards existing literature, I should not like to rely on it too much, for the reasons I have already pointed out in reference to the observation of mankind. You remember what I said before about the buttons and the lady’s dresses! Personal observation is a good preparation. But then well—I believe it is not necessary to say this to the person who asked the Question—but it is indeed rather necessary in regard to the way in which actors perform today. You see, things are such that one is obliged to say, “People who appear on the stage today do not at all want to study their parts”. They mostly just learn them without having any knowledge at all of the content of the whole play. They simply learn their part. This is really a dreadful thing. When I was on the executive committee of the dramatic Society in Berlin and we had to produce dramas such as Maeterlinck’s etc., we formerly bound the actors to listen first of all to a recital of the play, as well as an interpretation of it at a rehearsal. Otherwise the actors would have had to take their parts home, each one would have learnt only his own part, they would have come to the rehearsals, not one would have known what the others could do—it would have been terrible. And then in various other plays in the Burgensisternwal by Max Borcher and in a drama by Julius Gering, which was called, I think, The Seven Loan or Fat Kine, I took pains to introduce into the society at that time, what I called just now an interpretation of the drama, but an artistic interpretation, in which the character became living. We first of all met at a stage gathering, where we tried by all possible mean to make the characters living, through the actor’s own interpretation. When listening to the reciter, it is much easier than when studying by oneself, and all that must be effective if a company is formed from the beginning—namely, the ensemble. I believe this should be recommended in the study of every dramatic, artistic play; above all it should not only be read to the players but interpreted dramatically and artistically. It is absolutely necessary to develop a certain humour and a certain lightness of touch in such matters. Art nearly always needs humour. It must not become sentimental. The sentimental when it has to be represented, as of course it sometimes musty should be first conceived by the actor with humour; he roust always stand above it with full consciousness and not allow his own personality to slip into the sentimental, If the first stage-sittings are occupied in interpreting the play, people will soon cease to look upon the sittings as instructive; if this is done with a certain humour they will see that the time thus saved, and spent in such a way, is well employed, and they will develop a remarkable talent for imitation in the imaginative characters, which they will have to play. That is what I have to say about these things.

Of course speaking of such matters in this way, may seem rather blunt? but the worst point in theatrical representative art is really the desire for realism. Just consider, how could the actors of former times if they had wished to be realistic have represented rightly, let us say, a Lord Chamberlain, whom they had indeed never seen in his full Court dignity, for their social standing made that impossible. But even the precautionary measures customary in Court theatres are really of no assistance here. The various Princes, Grand Dukes, Kings, had perhaps selected a chief stage-manager, because they thought “the theatre people cannot of course know what is done at Court, so we must make some General or perhaps only a Captain who understands nothing of any sort; of art, Stage Manager” These people from precaution, were given the management of the court theatres and had to teach the people a kind of realistic treatment of things as done in Court Society, so that they should know how to conduct themselves, for the theatre people do not go to Court! All that achieves notice, for everything depends on catching the spirit, on the feeling for the bodily movements, for the cadence. One learns from the thing itself what is in question. Thus we can exercise the observance of what proceeds from inner sympathy with the artistic form, without wishing to imitate the exterior. That is what is to be taken into consideration in these things.

For my part I only hope that these indications will not be misunderstood in any way. It is indeed necessary, if one comes to speak on this topic, that it should be treated in such a way that one must take into account the fact that one is concerned with something which must be referred to the realm of balance. Certainly I must say that I shall never forget the great impression made upon me by the first lecture of my honoured old teacher and friend, Carl Julius Schröer, who said of the “aesthetic conscience” of one of these preliminary sittings—“this aesthetic conscience is a living thing”. It brings one to the recognition of the principle that art is not a mere luxury but a necessary adjunct of any existence worthy of man. When that is taken as the fundamental note, then, building upon this key-note one may develop humour and lightness; one can thus reflect as to how one can treat sentimentality humorously, how one can treat sadness by standing completely above it, and the like. This is what must be; otherwise dramatic art cannot fulfil in a satisfactory way the demands which the present age must some day make on man.

I am far from wanting to preach a sermon today on frivolity, not even on artistic frivolity, but I should like to emphasize again and again, that a humorous delicate manner of handling what one has before one, is indeed something which must play a great part in art, and especially in the handling of the technique of art.

Translated by Luke Fischer; commissioned by Neil Anderson

My much revered attendees!

This evening is meant to be devoted to a discussion of questions that have been addressed to me by a circle of artists, dramatic artists. And I’ve chosen to respond to these questions this evening because within the event of this course no other suitable time was available. All the time was occupied. This is one reason; the other reason is that I may nevertheless assume that at least some of what will be said in connection to these questions can also be of interest to all participants.

The first question that has been posed is the following: How does the evolution of consciousness [or ‘development’ of consciousness] present itself to the spiritual researcher in the area of the art of drama, and what tasks arise from this, in terms of future evolutionary necessity, for the dramatic art and those who work within it?

Much that could already be expected as an answer to this question will better emerge in the context of later questions. I therefore ask of you to take that which I have to say in connection to the questions more as a whole. Here I would firstly like to say that in point of fact the art of drama will have to participate in a unique way in the development towards increased consciousness, which we have to approach in our particular time. Isn’t it so, that from the most diverse perspectives it has been emphasised over and over again that through this evolution of consciousness one wants to take away from artistic people something of their naivety, of their instincts — and suchlike—that one will make them uncertain; but if these matters are approached more closely from the point of view that here is validated on the basis of spiritual science, then one sees that these worries are entirely unjustified.

Much does indeed get lost from the faculty of intuitive perception [anschauliches Vermögen] — including the perceptive faculty with respect to what one does oneself, when one thus grasps oneself in self-perception—through what today is normally called awareness or reflection and occurs in merely intellectual activity; what one can call the artistic quality in general [Künstlerisches überhaupt] is likewise precisely lost through the intellectual activity of thought. With the intellect or understanding [Verstand] one cannot in any way direct what is artistic. But as true as this is, it is also true that the full participation in reality is not at all lost through the kind of knowledge that is striven for here, when this knowledge develops into a power or force of consciousness, the power of intuitive vision [Anschauungskfraft]. One need not, therefore, have any fear that one could become inartistic through that which can be acquired in awareness, in the conscious mastery of tools and suchlike. In that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is always directed towards knowledge of the human being that which is otherwise only grasped in laws, in abstract forms, expands into an intuitive vision [Anschauung]. One acquires at last a real intuitive vision of the bodily, psychological, and spiritual constitution [Wesen—‘essence’ or ‘being’] of the human being. And as little as an artistic accomplishment can be inhibited by naïve intuition [or perception], just as little can it be inhibited by this intuition. The error that here comes to light actually rests on the following.

In the context of the Anthroposophical Society, which in fact developed out of a membership [or fellowship], (for reasons, which you can now also find, for example, discussed and reiterated in the short text ‘The Agitation against the Goetheanum’,) and which earlier incorporated many members of the Theosophical Society—in the context of this Society indeed all manner of things were done; and particularly among those who grew out of the old Theosophy something took root that I would like to call a barren symbolism, a barren symbolising. I still have to think with horror of the year 1909, when we produced Schuré’s drama The Children of Lucifer (— in the next issue of Die Drei my lecture will be printed, which then connected itself to this production), with horror I have to think of how at that time a member of the Theosophical Society—who then also remained so—asked: Well, Kleonis, that is really – I think – the sentient soul? ... And the other figures were the consciousness soul, manas ... and so everything was neatly divided; the terminology of Theosophy was ascribed to the individual characters. At one time I read a Hamlet interpretation in which the characters of Hamlet were designated with all of the terms for the individual members of human nature. Indeed, I have also encountered a large number of these symbolic explications of my own Mystery Dramas and I cannot express how happy it makes me when in a truly artistic consideration something essential is articulated in a manner that aims to accord with what an artistic work aims to be [this is a rather awkward sentence in the original German, which I’ve aimed to translate more simply]. In doing so, one must not symbolise; rather, one must take one’s point of departure from the quality of the immediate impression, — that is what it’s a matter of. And this barren, sophistical symbolising is something that would have to become antipathetic if one’s concern is to become conscious. Because this symbolising does not imply consciousness, but rather a supremely unconscious circumlocution of the matter. It entails, namely, a complete abstraction [in the sense of ‘drawing away’ or ‘removal’] from the content and a pasting of external vignettes onto the content. One must, therefore, enter into that which in a spiritual-scientific manner can be livingly real; then, on this basis, one will find that this consciousness is, on the one hand, precisely and entirely necessary for every individual artistic direction, if it wants to go along with evolution. Each artistic direction would simply remain behind the evolution of humanity, if it did not want to go along with this process of becoming conscious. This is a necessity.

On the other hand, there is entirely no need to protect oneself from becoming conscious, in the way that it is here intended, as from a blight, which is, however, justified with respect to the usual intellectual aestheticizing and symbolising. In contrast, it can be observed how the art of drama has in actual fact already been involved in a certain process of consciousness. — In this respect, I may, however, appeal to something further back. You see, it can be said: a great deal of nonsense has been thrown about by interpreters and biographers of Goethe in discussions of Goethe’s artistry. Goethe’s artistry is really something that appears like an anticipation of what came later. And one can actually still only say: those literary historians, aestheticians and so on, who always speak of Goethe’s unconsciousness, of his naïvity, evince, in essence, only that they are themselves highly unaware about that which actually took place in Goethe’s soul. They project their own lack of awareness onto Goethe.

Goethe’s most wonderful lyrical works; how did they in fact emerge? They emerged in an immediate way out of his life. There is a danger in speaking about Goethe’s romantic relationships [or ‘love affairs’], because one can easily be misunderstood; but the psychologist may not shy away from such potential misunderstandings. Goethe’s relationship to those female figures, who he loved in his youth especially, but also in his older age, was of such a kind that his most beautiful creations of lyric poetry arose from these relationships. How is this possible? It was made possible through the fact that Goethe always existed in a kind of split within his own being. For the reason that he experienced in an external manner, even in the most intimate, in his most heart-felt experiences, Goethe always existed in a kind of division of his personality. He was at once the Goethe who truly loved no less than any other and the Goethe, who could, in other moments, stand above these matters, who could, as it were, look on as a third person at how the Goethe objectified beside him developed a romantic relationship to a particular female figure. Goethe could in a certain sense — this is intended in a thoroughly real psychological sense — could always exit and withdraw from himself, could relate to his own experience in a particular way that was at once sensitive and contemplative [Steiner uses the hyphenated expression ‘empfindend-kontemplativ’ which reminds me of how he elsewhere speaks of Goethe as having a ‘sensible-supersensible’ vision of things]. Thereby something wholly determinate formed itself in Goethe’s soul. One must indeed look intimately into his soul [ambiguity in the German about whether it is ‘one’s’ soul or ‘Goethe’s’ soul], if one wants to survey this. The determinate form took shape because, to begin with, he was not as seized by reality as people who are merely instinctively absorbed by such an experience, who are absorbed by their drives and instincts, who cannot actually withdraw with their soul from the experience, but rather are blindly given over to it. There is, of course, the added factor that in the external world the relationship often did not need to lead to the usual conclusions that romantic relationships otherwise must lead ... According to the kind of question that is applied in this respect ... I don’t mean to say anything negative—but among much that is asked in this connection, there stands at times ‘Borowsky-Heck’ [allusion to a poem by Christian Morgenstern] ... In saying this, nothing at all should have been expressed that could be exposed to misunderstanding, but rather what I have said is specifically intended as an interpretation of Goethe).¹ But, on the other hand, this led to the fact that what remained for Goethe—this could even occur at the same time as the actual relationship in his life—was not merely a memory, but rather an image, a real image, a formed image. And in this way there arose in Goethe’s soul the wonderful images of Gretchen from Frankfurt, Friederike from Sessenheim (—about whom Froitzheim specifically wrote his work, which has been appreciated by German literary history).² Then there arose that enchanting, wonderful figure of the Frankfurter Lili, and the wonderful character, which we then find in Werther. Also among these figures there belongs already Kätchen from Leipzig, and there belongs, in addition, even in Goethe’s advanced age, such figures as Marianne Willemer, even Ulrike Levetzow and so forth [Steiner uses the term Gestalt a lot in this lecture. Here I have translated it with ‘figure’. However, it also means ‘character’ and ‘form’.]. One can say that it is solely the figure of Frau von Stein that is not a complete image in this way; this has to do with the whole complexity of this personal relationship. But precisely because these personal connections led to these figures, because more remained than a memory, because a surplus in contrast to mere memory was present, this led to the wonderful lyrical transformation of the images that lived within him.³ And this can itself have the consequence that such lyric poetry becomes dramatic, and in one special case this lyrical formation of an image indeed became dramatic in a wholly exceptional way.

I would like to draw your attention to the first part of Faust; you will find in the first part of Faust that there is an alternation between the designations of the personages of Gretchen and Margarethe. And that leads us into something that is deeply connected to the whole, psychological [seelischen] genesis of Faust. Everywhere you will find ‘Gretchen’ written as a designation of the figure who passed over into Faust from the Frankfurter Gretchen. You will find the name of Gretchen written in every instance where there is a rounded image: Gretchen at the fountain; Gretchen at the spinning wheel—and so on, where the lyrical gradually entered into the dramatic. In contrast, you will find ‘Margarethe’ in every instance where, in the normal course of the drama, the figure is simply composed together with the dramatic action. Everything that bears the name of Gretchen is a self-contained image, which emerged lyrically and formed itself into a dramatic structure. This indicates how even in an intimate way the lyrical can entirely objectify itself such that it can become expedient to the dramatic combination. Now, it is in this way that the general conditions are created that always grant the dramatic artist the possibility to stand above his characters. As soon as one begins to take a personal stand for any character, one can no longer shape it dramatically. Goethe had, namely when he created the first part of Faust, wholly stood for the character of Faust; for this reason the personality of Faust is also hazy, incomplete, not rounded. In Goethe the character of Faust did not become entirely separate and thereby objective. In contrast, the other characters did.

Now, this objectivity also has the consequence that one can in turn fully empathise with them, that one can really see the characters, that one can become in a certain sense identical to them. This is indeed a talent with which the writer of Shakespeare’s dramas was most certainly endowed ... this potential to present a character entirely in the manner of something that is pictorially and objectively experienced and thereby to make it precisely possible to slip [unterkriechen—literally ‘crawl under’] into the character. This art of the dramatist thus to bring the character into relief such that he can, thereby, in turn precisely get inside [hineindringen] the character, this capacity of the dramatist must in a certain sense pass over into the actor, and it is the cultivation of this capacity that will enable that which constitutes the awareness or consciousness [Bewußtheit] of the actor [des Schauspielerischen]. It was particular to the Goethean form of consciousness that he was capable of embodying pictorial characters in a lyrical and dramatic way, which he rendered most beautifully in the Frankfurter Gretchen.

But the actor must cultivate something similar, and examples of this can also be given. I will invoke one such example. I don’t know how many of you were able to become familiar with the actor Lewinski from the Vienna Court Theatre [Wiener Burgtheater]. The actor Lewinski was in his outer appearance and his voice actually entirely unsuited to being an actor, and when he depicted his relationship to his own art of acting, he depicted it, more or less, in the following way. He said: Indeed, I would naturally not have been at all capable as an actor (—and he was for a long time one of the top actors in the Vienna Court Theatre, perhaps one of the most significant so-called character-players [Charakterspieler]), I would have been thoroughly incapable (he said), if I had relied on presenting myself in a particular manner on the stage, the small hunchback with a raspy voice and fundamentally ugly face. This man naturally could not amount to anything. But in this regard (he said) I assisted myself; on the stage I am actually always three people: the first is a small hunched, croaking man who is fundamentally ugly; the second is one who is entirely outside of the hunched, croaky man, he is purely ideal, an entirely spiritual entity, and I must always have him in view; and then, only then do I become the third: I creep out of the other two, and with the second I play on the first, play on the croaky hunchback.

This must, of course, be done consciously, it must be something that has, I’d like to say, become operable [Handhabung]! There is in fact something in this threefold division that is extraordinarily important for the handling [Handhabung] of dramatic art. It is precisely necessary—one could also put it otherwise—it is precisely necessary that the actor gets to know his own body well, because his own corporeality is for the real human being who acts, strictly speaking, the instrument on which he plays. He must know his own body as the violin player knows his violin (—he must know it—) he must, as it were, have the ability to listen to his own voice. This is possible. One can gradually bring it about that one always hears one’s own voice, as in cases when the voice reverberates [umwellte]. This must, however, be practiced through, for example, attempting to speak dramatic — it can also be lyrical — verse which possesses a strong and lively form, rhythm and meter, through adapting oneself as much as possible to the verse form. Then one will gradually acquire the feeling that what is spoken has entirely detached from the larynx and is as though astir in the air, and one will acquire a sensible-supersensible perception [Anschauung] of one’s own speech.

In a similar manner one can then acquire a sensible-supersensible perception of one’s own personality. It is only necessary not to regard oneself all too flatteringly. You see, Lewinski did not flatter himself, he called himself a small, hunched, fundamentally ugly man. One must, therefore, be not at all prey to illusions. Someone who always only wants to be beautiful — there may also be those, who then indeed are — but someone, who only wants to be beautiful, who does not want to acknowledge anything at all concerning their corporeality, will not so easily acquire a bodily self-knowledge. But for the actor this knowledge is absolutely essential. The actor must know how he treads with his soles, with his legs, with his heels, and so on. The actor must know whether he treads gently or sharply in normal life, he must know how he bends his knee, how he moves his hands, and so forth. He must, in truth, make the attempt, as he studies his role, to perceive himself [sich selber anzuschauen—or look at himself]. That is what I would like to call immersion [Steiner’s neologism is literally ‘standing-within’, Darinnenstehen]. And for this purpose precisely the detour through language can contribute a great deal, because in listening to one’s own voice, one’s own speech, a subsequent intuitive perception [Anschauung] of the remaining human form can emerge almost of its own accord.

Question: In what way could we also in our field fruitfully involve ourselves in the work—on the basis of extant external documents (dramaturgies, theatre history and biographies of actors)—of identifying and synthesising historical evidence for the findings of spiritual research, such as in the manner that has already been fostered for the specialised sciences in the concrete form of seminars?

In this respect a society of actors can, in particular, accomplish extraordinarily much, but this must be done in the appropriate way. It will not succeed through dramaturgies, theatre history and biographies of actors, because I genuinely believe that a number of very considerable objections can be made against them. An actor, at least when he is fully engaged, should actually have no time at all for theatre histories, dramaturgy or biographies of actors! In contrast, extraordinarily much can be accomplished through a direct observation of human beings (Menschenanschauung), through perceiving the immediate characteristics of people. And in this regard I recommend something to you that for actors especially can be extraordinarily fruitful.

There is a physiognomics of Aristotle — you will locate it easily — in which details down to a red or a pointy nose, hairy and less hairy hand-surfaces, more or less accumulation of fat, and suchlike, all the peculiarities through which the psycho-spiritual constitution of the human being comes to expression, are initially indicated, along with how this psycho-spirituality can be perceived and so forth: an exceptionally useful tool, which now, however, is outdated. Today one cannot observe in the same manner that Aristotle observed his Greek contemporaries, one would thereby arrive at entirely false conclusions. But precisely the actor has the opportunity to see such qualities in human beings through the fact that he must also portray them, and if he observes the judicious rule of never naming a person in the discussion of such matters, then, if he becomes a good observer of human beings along these lines, this will not harm his career and his personal dealings, his social connections. Mr and Mrs or Miss so and so should simply never be invoked, when he communicates his interesting, significant observations, but rather always only Mr X, Mrs Y, and Miss Z and so on; as a matter of course, that which pertains to external reality should be masked as much as possible. Then, however, if one really gets to know life in this way, if one really knows what peculiar expressions people make with their nostrils as they tell this or that joke, and how meaningful it is to give attention to such peculiar nostrils—this is, of course, only intimated in these words—then one can indeed say that extraordinarily much can be attained on this path. What matters is not whether one knows these things—that is not at all what is important—but rather that one thinks and perceives along these lines. Because when one thinks and perceives along these lines, one takes leave of the usual manner of observing things today. Today one indeed observes the world in such manner that a man, who — for all I know—might have seen another 30 times, has not once known what sort of button he has on his front vest. Today this is really entirely possible. I have even known people who have conversed with a lady for the whole afternoon and did not know what colour her dress was—a wholly incomprehensible fact, but this occurs. Of course, such people who have not once recognized the dress-colour of the lady with whom they have conversed are not very suited to developing their perceptual capacity in the particular direction that it must assume, if it is to pass over into action and conduct. I have even experienced the cute situation in which people have assured me that they know nothing about the clothes of a lady with whom they have interacted for the whole afternoon: not even whether they were red or blue. If I may include something personal in this regard, I have even had the experience of people expecting that I would not know the colour of her clothes, if I spent a long time talking with a lady! One can thereby tell how certain soul-dispositions are valued. That which is in front of one must be beheld in its full corporeality. And if one beholds it in its full corporeality, not merely — I want to say — as an outer nebulous cloak of a name, such a manner of perceiving [Anschauen] then also develops into the possibility of forming, of artistically shaping [Gestalten].

Therefore, above all else the actor must be a keen observer, and in this respect he must bear a certain humour. He must take these things humorously. Because, you see, what happened to that professor must not happen to him, that professor who for a while always lost his train of thought because on a bench right in front of him there sat a student whose top button on his vest was torn off: at that moment this particular professor had to collect himself, in that he was peering at the missing button (—in this regard it was not a matter of the will to observe, but the will to concentrate); but one day the student had sown the torn-off button back on, and you see, the professor repeatedly lost the thread of his concentration. This is to take in a perception of the world without any humour ... this must also not happen to the actor; he must observe the matter humorously, always at the same time stand above it: then he will in turn give form to the matter.

This is, therefore, something that needs to be thoroughly observed—and if one habituates oneself to learning to formulate such things, if one really becomes accustomed to see certain inner connections in what is given to embodied perception, — and if one positions oneself above it through a certain humour, so that one can really give it form ... rather than forming it sentimentally, — one must namely not create in a sentimental manner — then in handling such a matter one will also develop that facility or lightness, which one must indeed possess, if one wants to characterise in the world of semblance. But one has to characterise in the world of semblance, otherwise one always remains an imitating bungler in this regard. In short, through actually conversing with one another in this way about — I’d like to say — social physiognomy, those who are active in the art of drama will be able to bring together a great deal that is more valuable than dramaturgy and, in particular, than biographies of actors and theatre history; the latter is anyhow something that can be left to other people. And all human beings would actually have to take an interest in what can in turn be observed and rendered precisely by the art of the actor, because this would also be a highly interesting chapter in the art of human observation, and out of such an art of observation, which is entirely specific to the art of drama, could develop what I’d like to call—to employ a paradox—naïve, conscious handling [Handhabung] of the art of drama.

Question: Of what value to our time is the performance of works of past epochs, for example, the Greek dramas, Shakespeare’s dramas, as well as dramas of the most-recent past, from Ibsen and Strindberg to the modernists?

Now, it is the case, that with respect to the dramatic conception the contemporary person must employ different forms from those that were employed, for example, in the Greek art of drama. But that does not prevent us, —indeed it would even be a sin, if we were not to do this—from presenting Greek dramas on the stage today. We are only in need of better translations—if we translate them into modern language in the manner of those by the philistine Wilamowitz, who precisely through his lexically literal translation fails to capture the true spirit of these dramas. We must, however, also be sure to present a kind of art for modern people, which is precisely appropriate to their eye and their intelligence [Auffassungsvermögen]. With respect to the Greek dramas, it is, of course, also necessary to penetrate them more deeply. And I don’t think—take this as a paradoxical insight—I don’t think that that one can live into the Greek drama of Aeschylus or of Sophocles (with Euripides it may be easier) without approaching the matter in a spiritual-scientific way. The characters in the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles must actually come to life in a spiritual-scientific way, because in this spiritual science the elements are first given that can render our sensibility and our will-impulses such that we able to make something out of the characters of these dramas. As soon as one lives into these dramas through that which can be communicated by spiritual science (and you can find the most diverse indications about this in our lecture cycles and so on)—through that which can be communicated by way of spiritual science in that it uncovers in a special manner the origin of these dramas in light of the Mysteries—it becomes possible to bring to life the characters in these dramas. It would naturally be an anachronism to want to produce these dramas in the way in which they were produced by the Greeks. One could, of course, do this one time as a historical experiment; one would have to be aware, though, that this would be nothing more than a historical experiment. However, the Greek dramas are actually too good for this end. They can indeed be brought to life for contemporary human beings,—and it would even be a great service to bring them to life in a spiritual scientific sense, through a spiritual scientific approach, and on this basis to translate them into dramatic portrayals.

In contrast it is possible for the contemporary human being to identify with Shakespeare’s specific creation [Gestaltung] without any particular difficulty. To do so one only needs a contemporary human sensibility and impartiality. And the characters of Shakespeare should actually be regarded in the manner that they were, for example, regarded by Herman Grimm, who expressed the paradox, that is nevertheless very true, truer than many historical claims: It is actually much more enlightening to study Julius Caesar in Shakespeare than to study him in a work of history. In actual fact there lies in Shakespeare’s imagination [phantasy] the capacity to enter into the character in such a manner that the character comes to life within him, that it is truer than any historical representation. Therefore, it would naturally also be a shame, for example, not to want to produce Shakespearean dramas today, —and in producing Shakespearean dramas it is a matter of really being so intimate with the matter that one can simply apply to these characters the general assistance, which one has acquired, of technique and so on.

Now between Shakespeare and the French dramatists—whom Schiller and Goethe then strived to emulate—and the most recent, the modern dramatists, there lies an abyss. In Ibsen we are actually dealing with problem-dramas, and Ibsen should actually be presented in such a manner that one becomes aware that his characters are in fact not characters. If one sought to bring to life in the imagination [Phantasie] his characters as characters, they would constantly hop about, trip over themselves [herumhüpfen, sich selber auf die Füße treten] because they are not human beings. Rather, these dramas are problem-dramas, great problem-dramas, and the problems are such that they should, all the same, be experienced by modern human beings. And in this regard it is exceptionally interesting when an actor today attempts to pursue his training precisely with Ibsen’s plays; because in Ibsen it is the case that when the actor attempts to study the role, he will have to say to himself: that is no human being, out of this I must first make a human being. And in this regard he will have to proceed in an individual manner, he will have to be conscious that when he portrays one of Ibsen’s characters, the character can be entirely different from how another would portray the character. In this respect one can bring a great deal from one’s own individuality into play ... because the character allows that one first bring individuality to them, that one portray the character in entirely different ways; whereas in Shakespeare and also in Greek dramas one should essentially always have the feeling: there is only one possible portrayal, and one must strive towards this. One will of course not always find it the same, but one must have the feeling: there is only one possibility. In Ibsen or first in Strindberg, this is not at all the case; they must be treated in such a way that individuality is first carried into them. It is indeed difficult to express such matters, but I would like to give a pictorial description: You see, in Shakespeare it is such that one has the definite feeling: he is an artist who sees in all directions, who can even see backwards. He genuinely sees as a whole human being and can see other human beings with his entire humanity. Ibsen could not do this, he could see only surfaces... And so the stories of the world [Weltgeschichten—literally ‘world histories], the human beings, which he sees, are seen in the manner of surfaces [flächenhaft] ... One must first give them thickness, and that is precisely possible through taking an individual approach. In Strindberg this is the case to an especial extent. I hold nothing against his dramatic art, I cherish it, but one must see each thing in its own manner. Something such as the Damascus play is wholly extraordinary, but one has to say to oneself: these are actually never human beings, but rather merely human skins, it is always only the skin that is present, and it is filled entirely with problems. Indeed, in this regard one can achieve a great deal, because here it first becomes properly possible to insert one’s whole humanity; here, as an actor, it is precisely a matter of properly giving an individuality to characters.

Question: How does a true work of art appear from the perspective of the spiritual world, especially a dramatic work, with its effect on language, in contrast to other pursuits of the human being?

Above all else the other pursuits of human beings are such that one actually never beholds them as a self-contained totality [or ‘complete’ totality]. It is really the case that human beings, especially in our present time, are formed in a certain manner out of their surroundings, out of their milieu. Hermann Bahr once characterized this quite aptly in a Berlin lecture. He said: In the 90’s of the 19th century something rather peculiar happened to people. When one arrived in a town, in a foreign town, and encountered the people who in the evening came from a factory ... well, each person always looked entirely like another, and one literally reached a state that could fill one with angst: because one finally no longer believed that one was dealing with so many human beings who resembled one another, but rather that it was only one and the same person who now and again multiplied himself. — He (Barr) then said: Then one entered from the 90s into the 20th century (— he also coyly alluded that when he arrived in some town, he had quite often been invited, and then said): whenever he was invited somewhere, he always had a hostess on his right and on his left, —on another day he again had a hostess on his right and on his left, and on the next day a completely different person again on his right and on his left ... but he was unable to discern when it was a completely different person; he thus could not tell: whether this was now the person from yesterday or from today! Human beings are thus indeed a kind of imitation of their milieu. This has particularly become the case in the present. Now, one need not experience this in so grotesque a way; nevertheless, there is something in this that also applies more generally to human beings in their miscellaneous pursuits; they must be understood in relation to their whole surroundings. To a great extent human beings must be understood out of their surroundings, isn’t that so! If one is dealing with the art of drama, then it is a matter of really perceiving what one sees as a self-contained whole, as something rounded in itself. In addition, many of the prejudices that play a particularly strong role in our inartistic times must be overcome, and I now have to say some things—because I want to answer this question in all honesty — which in the contemporary context of aestheticizing and criticizing and so on, can well-nigh call forth a kind of horror.

It is the case that when one is dealing with an artistic portrayal of the human being, in the process of study one must gradually notice: If you speak a sentence, which inclines towards passion, which inclines towards grief, which inclines towards mirth, whereby you want to convince or persuade another, through which you want to berate another, in all these instances you can feel: an a very precise kind of movement of the limbs is correlated, especially with respect to the associated tempo. This is still a long way from arriving at Eurythmy, but a very precise movement of the limbs, a very definite kind of slowness or swiftness of speaking comes out. If one studies this, one gets the feeling that language or movement is something independent, that irrespective of the meaning of the words, the same intonation, the same tempo can be conveyed,—that this is a separate matter, that it takes places of its own accord. One must acquire the feeling that language could still function when one combines entirely senseless words in a particular intonation, in a particular tempo. One must also acquire the feeling: you can, in doing so, make very precise movements. One must be able, as it were, to enter into oneself [mit sich selber hineinstellen], must take a certain joy in making particular movements with one’s legs and arms, which, in the first instance, are not made for any reason other than for the sake of certain tendency or direction; for example, to cross one’s left hand with one’s right and so on. And in these matters one must take a certain aesthetic joy, aesthetic pleasure. And when one studies one must have the feeling: now you are saying this ... oh yes, that catches the tone, the intonation, which you already know, this movement catches this intonation ... this must be twofold! One must not think that what is genuinely artistic would consist in first arduously drawing out of the poetic content the manner in which it should be rendered and said, but rather one must have the feeling: what you suggest in this respect for the intonation, for the tempo, you have long possessed, and the movement of your arms and legs too, it is only a matter of appropriately capturing [einschnappen—‘to catch’ or ‘to snap’] what you have! Perhaps one does not have it at all, but one must nevertheless have the feeling of how one has to capture it objectively in this or that.

You see, when I say: perhaps one does not have it, this rests on the fact that one can nonetheless detect

that, with respect to what one is currently practicing, that which is precisely needed has not yet been found. But one must have the feeling: it must be put together out of that which one already has. Or, in another way one must be able to pass over into objectivity. That is what matters.

Question: What task does music have within the art of drama?

Now, I believe that, in this regard, we have given a practical answer through the manner in which we have made use of music in Eurythmy. This does not mean, however, that I think that in pure drama the suggestion of moods—in advance and subsequently—through music is something that should be rejected, —and if the possibility is presented—of course, the possibility must in the first place be given by the poet—to apply music, then it should be applied. This question is naturally not so easy to answer if it is posed at such a general level, and in this respect it is a matter of doing the appropriate thing in the fitting moment.

Question: Is talent a necessary precondition for the actor or can something of equivalent value be awakened and developed through the spiritual-scientific method in every human being who possesses a love and artistic feeling for the art of drama, but not the special, pre-bestowed talent?

Of course—the question of talent! At one time I had a friend on the Weimar stage ... there, all manner of people made an entry onto the stage, who were permitted to try out ... such aspirants are not always welcomed to make an appearance on the stage! If one spoke to this friend, who himself was an actor there, and said to him: Do you believe that something can come of one of them? then he frequently said: Well, if he acquires talent! —That is something that indeed possesses a certain truth. It should certainly be conceded ... indeed, it is even a deep truth that one can really learn anything, if one applies that which can flow from spiritual science right into the impulses of the human being. And what is learned thereby can at times appear as talent. It cannot be denied that this is so. But there’s a small rub in it, and this consists in the fact that one must firstly live long enough in order to go through such a development, and that, if through diverse means something like the formation of the capacity of talent is thereby brought about, then the following can happen: someone has now been, let’s say, taught the talent for a ‘young hero’, but it required so much time to teach him this that he now has a large bald spot and grey hair ... It is in such matters that life makes what is in principle entirely possible into something extremely difficult. For this reason it is indeed necessary to feel a strong sense of responsibility with respect to the selection of personalities for the art of drama. One can roughly say: There are always two: there is one who wants to become an actor, —the other is the one who in some way has to make a decision about this. The latter would have to possess an immense sense of responsibility. He must, for example, be aware that a superficial judgment of this situation can have extraordinarily negative consequences. Because it is often easy to believe that this person or another has no talent for something, —but there is a talent only deeply buried. And if one is given an opportunity to recognize this talent, then that which is present, but which one previously doubted, can indeed be relatively quickly drawn out of the person. But much depends—because practical life must precisely remain practical—on acquiring a certain capacity to discover talent in people; and one must, at first, only restrict oneself to what spiritual science could offer (this can be a great deal) in service of bringing this talent alive, of developing and drawing it out more quickly. All of this can happen. But concerning people, who sometimes regard themselves as possessing a tremendously great Kainzian [Kainzian is after the Austrian actor Josef Kainz] genius for acting, one will nevertheless often have to say that in wrath God allowed them to become actors. And then one must also really have the conscience (—speaking of course in a well-meaning way so as not to snub them) precisely not to urge them into the vocation of acting, which is indeed not for everyone, but specifically demands that above all else a capacity is present for inner psycho-spiritual mobility. That this can easily pass over into the bodily, the physical; this is what must be especially taken into consideration.

With respect to exercises for the development of the sense of self-movement—well, they cannot be given so quickly. I will, however, consider the matter and ensure that it will also be possible to approach those who would like to know something along these lines. These things must, of course, if they are to achieve something worthwhile, be slowly and objectively worked out and developed from the foundations of spiritual science. With regard to this matter, I will note this question for a later response.

Question: Can fundamental and deeper-leading guidelines be given for the comprehension and penetration of new roles than those that we could acquire out of practical experience and out of already available texts? May we also ask for references to such available literature from which we could draw an answer to these and similar questions?

Now, in connection to literature, also in connection to the available literature, I would not like to overemphasise what I already recommended in my previous discussion of human observation: — you know, the buttons and the clothes worn by ladies! This embodied observation is something that provides a good preparation. Then, however ... at this moment, I believe that it is quite necessary to say the following with respect to dramatic portrayals today: people who appear on the stage today generally do not want to penetrate their roles: because most of the time they actually simply assume and learn their roles when they still have no idea about the content of the whole drama ... they learn their roles. That is actually something terrible. When I was on the board of the former dramatic society and we had to produce, for example, Maeterlinck’s The Intruder (l’intruse) ... we—because otherwise in the rehearsals no one would have known the capacities of the other actors, rather only his own — there we literally forced the people to first listen to a reading of the play as well as an interpretation of the play in the reading rehearsal, —and we then also did this with various other pieces—one of them was the Mayoral Election (Bürgermeisterwahl) by Burckhard, another was The seven lean Cows (die sieben mageren Kühe) by Juliane Déry—I endeavoured at that time in the dramatic society in Berlin to introduce the play, which I called precisely an interpretation of the drama—but an artistic interpretation in which the characters come to life. We would first meet for a director’s session whose aim was by all possible means to bring the portrayal and the characters to life purely for the imagination ... In this context people already listen intently, when one penetrates into a person; this happens much more easily than when one is confined to studying alone ... and there, from the beginning, everything takes shape that must be effective in a troupe: namely the ensemble. This is something that I especially believe must be recommended in the study of every dramatic, artistic matter: that truly at the very beginning in front of the players the subject matter is not merely read, but is also interpreted, but interpreted in a dramatic, artistic way. It is entirely necessary that with regard to such things one cultivates a certain humour and a certain lightness or facility [Leichtigkeit].

Art must actually always possess humour, art should not be allowed to become sentimental. The sentimental, when it must be portrayed, —of course one often finds oneself in a position where one must portray sentimental people—this the actor must above all grasp with humour, must always stand above it in full consciousness, —not permit that he himself slips into the sentimental! Along these lines, when the first directoral sessions are actually made interpretative, one can very quickly disaccustom people from finding this didactic. If one does this with a certain humour, then they will not find it didactic, and one will soon see that the time that one devotes to this has been used well, that in such directoral sessions people will thereby develop a particular talent for the imitation of their characters in their imagination. That is what I have to say about such matters.

Naturally, in speaking about such things the matter appears somewhat— I want to say — awkwardly, but, you see, what is actually the worst in the art of dramatic characterisation is the urge towards naturalism. Consider, however, once: how would the actors of earlier times, if they had wanted to be naturalists, have pulled off a fitting portrayal of, let’s say, a Lord Steward of the Household, whom they could never have seen in his entire dignity as Lord Steward? For that they lacked the social standing. And even that precaution which in court theatres—in those theatres that were sufficiently customised—was always met ... even this precaution did not actually have the desired effect. Isn’t it so, the different Princes, Grand Dukes, Kings, placed in the highest direction of the theatre, if they were ‘court theatres’, someone such as a general, because they must have thought to themselves: well now, the acting-people have naturally no idea about how things take place in the court, there one must naturally appoint some general as the artistic director ... who self-evidently did not have the faintest idea about any art! Sometimes it was merely a captain. Therefore, these people were as a precaution then appointed to the directorship of the court theatre and were meant to teach the actors what was a kind of naturalistic handling of things, e.g. in court society, so that one knew how to comport oneself. But all of that does not cut it; it is rather a matter of capturing [Einschnappen], a matter of sensitivity to bodily movement, to intonation. One discovers what is significant out of the matter itself. And this is what one can namely practice: the observation of that which follows from the inner feeling for artistic form, without wanting to imitate what is external. In such matters this is what is to be kept in mind.

For my part, I only hope that these indications that I have given are not susceptible in any respect to misunderstanding. It is indeed necessary in speaking about this area to treat it in such a way that one does justice to the fact of the matter: one is here dealing with something that must be removed from the realm of gravity. I have to say: I recall over and again the great impression that I had at the first lecture of my revered old teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer, who at one point in this first lecture spoke of ‘aesthetic conscience’. This aesthetic conscience is something significant. This aesthetic conscience brings one to the recognition of the principle that art is not a mere luxury, but rather a necessary part of every existence that is worthy of the human being. But then, if one has this fundamental tone, then one may also, building on this undertone, unfold humour, lightness, then one may consider how to treat sentimentality humorously, how to treat sadness in standing entirely above it (Darüberstehen), and suchlike. This is what must be; otherwise the art of drama cannot come to terms in a fruitful way with the challenges that the present age must now present to human beings.

I am far removed from having wanted today to hold, as it were, a sermon on levity, not even on artistic levity; however, I would like to emphasise over and again: a humorous, light manner of proceeding with the task before one; this is nonetheless something that must play a large role in art and especially in the handling of artistic technique.

• 1. See Die Behörde (“The Agency”) by Christian Morgenstern (from Palmström), which was performed in eurythmy at the time.
• 2. J. Froitzheim, senior teacher in Strassburg, Goethe scholar, who considered especially, and in a particularly delicate way, the private life of Friederike Brion.
• 3. See in comparison Dr Steiner’s statements about Karl Julius Schröer’s booklet Goethe and Love in the address “Some Reflections [Einiges] on Wilhelm Meister” from 15 August 1921 (Goetheanum 1935, no. 32).

Recently, I have called attention repeatedly to the fact that, just as one can give a biographical description of man's waking life, so one could offer one of the time spent during sleep. Everything the human being experiences during his waking hours is experienced through his physical and etheric bodies. By virtue of the appropriately developed sense organs in the physical and etheric bodies he is conscious of this world, which, as his environment, is related to the physical and etheric bodies; it is at one with them, so to speak. Since man at his present level of evolution has not similarly developed soul-spiritual organs in his astral body and “I” that would serve as super-sensible sense organs—to coin a paradoxical expression—he cannot bring his consciousness into what he experiences between falling asleep and awakening. Only spiritual vision, therefore, could survey that which would be contained in the biography of this “I” and astral body, which runs parallel to the biography that we come to with the help of the physical and the etheric bodies.

If one speaks of man's waking experiences, they necessarily include what, together with him and caused by him, takes place in his physical-etheric environment. One therefore must speak of a physical-etheric environment or world in which man exists during this waking life. Likewise, man is in another world during sleep; this world, however, is totally different from the physical-etheric world. Just as the physical world is our environment when we are awake, so super-sensible vision is in a position to speak of a world that surrounds us similarly when we sleep. In this lecture we shall bring before our souls some of the aspects that can illuminate that world. The basic elements for it are described in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science. There you will find described in a certain way, though in a sketchy form, how the realms of the physical-etheric world—the mineral, plant, animal, and human realms—continue upward into the realms of the higher hierarchies. We shall now take a closer look at this.

When in the waking state, we turn our eyes or other sense organs in the direction of our physical-etheric environment, we perceive the three, or four, realms of nature, namely, the mineral, plant, animal, and human realms. Ascending to those regions that are accessible only to super-sensible consciousness, we find a continuation, as it were, of these realms: the realms of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and so forth (see following diagram.)

We therefore have two worlds interpenetrating one another, the physical-etheric world and the super-sensible world. We already know that during sleep we are indeed in this super-sensible world and have experiences there, despite the fact that, due to the absence of soul-spiritual organs, these experiences do not reach ordinary consciousness.

To arrive at a more specific comprehension of what the human being experiences in this super-sensible world, one must describe this world in the same way as one describes the physical-etheric world by means of natural science and history. Regarding the super-sensible science that concerns the actual course of events in the world in which we exist as sleeping human beings, we naturally must select particular details to begin with. Today, I shall select one event of profound significance for the whole evolution of humanity in the last few thousand years. We have already discussed this event repeatedly from the viewpoint of the physical-etheric world and its history. Today, we shall discuss it from another viewpoint, that of the super-sensible world. The event to which I refer is one that falls in the fourth century A.D.

I have described how the whole composition of human souls in the West becomes different in that century. Without spiritual scientific insight into this matter, one actually no longer understands how human beings sensed and felt before the fourth century A.D. We have frequently described, however, this composition of soul, this feeling. We have described in different words what human beings experienced in the course of that age. Now we shall take a brief glance at what the beings who belong to the super-sensible realm experienced during that same time. We shall turn to the other side of life, as it were, and take the viewpoint of the super-sensible realm.

It is a prejudice of contemporary, so-called enlightened human beings to believe that their thoughts are confined only to their heads. We would discover nothing of the things around us through thoughts if these thoughts were only within the heads of man. He who believes that thoughts are only in the human head is as prejudiced as one—paradoxical as this might sound—who believes that the drink of water with which he quenches his thirst originated on his tongue instead of flowing into his mouth from the glass of water. It is as ridiculous to claim that thoughts originate in the human head as it is to claim that the drink of water originates in the mouth. Indeed, thoughts are spread out all through the world. Thoughts are forces that dwell in all things. Our organ of thinking is simply something that partakes of the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, absorbing thoughts of itself. We therefore cannot speak of thoughts as if they were the possession only of the human being. Instead, we must be aware that thoughts are world-dominating forces, spread out everywhere in the cosmos. These thoughts, however, do not freely float about, as it were, but are always borne and worked upon by some beings; and, most important, they are not always borne by the same beings.

When we make use of the super-sensible world, we find through super-sensible research that, up into the fourth century A.D., the thoughts with which human beings made the world comprehensible to themselves were borne outside in the cosmos (I could also say, “they flowed out”—our earthly terms are ill-suited for these sublime occurrences and states of being), that these thoughts were borne or flowed from those hierarchical beings that we designate as the Exusiai or beings of form (see following diagram).

If, out of the science of the mysteries, an ancient Greek wished to give an account of how he actually had acquired his thoughts, he would have had to do it in the following way. He would have said, “I turn my spiritual sight up toward those beings who, through the science of the mysteries, have been revealed to me as the beings of form, the forces or beings of form. They are the bearers of cosmic intelligence, they are the bearers of cosmic thoughts. They let thoughts stream through all the world events, and they bestow these human thoughts upon the world so that it can experience them consciously.” A person who, through a special initiation, had gained access to the super-sensible world in those ancient Greek times and had come to experience and behold these form beings, would, in order to form a correct picture, a true imagination of them, have had to attribute to them the thoughts that stream and radiate through the world. As an ancient Greek he beheld how, from their limbs, as it were, these form beings let stream forth radiant thought forces which then entered the world processes and there continued to be effective as the world-creative powers of intelligence.

He thus could say that in the cosmos, the universe, the Exusiai, the forces of form, have the task of pouring thoughts into all the world processes. A material science describes human deeds by noting what people do individually or together. In focusing on the activity of the form forces of that particular age, a super-sensible science would have to describe how these super-sensible beings let the thought forces stream from one to the other, how they received them from one another, and how, in this streaming and receiving, the world processes are incorporated that appear outwardly to man as natural phenomena.

The evolution of humanity now approached the fourth century A.D. In the super-sensible world, thought brought about an extremely significant event; namely, the Exusiai—the forces or beings of form—gave their thought forces up to the Archai, to the primal forces or primal beginnings. (See diagram above) The primal beginnings, or Archai, took over the task formerly executed by the Exusiai. Such things happen in the super-sensible world. This was a particularly sublime and significant cosmic event. From that time on, the Exusiai, the form beings, retained only the task of regulating the outer sense perceptions, therefore ruling with the particular cosmic forces over everything existing in the world of colors, tones, and so forth. Concerning the age that now dawned after the fourth century A.D. a person who can discern these matters must say that he beholds how the world-dominating thoughts are passed on to the Archai, the primal beginnings, how what eyes see and what ears hear, the manifold world phenomena engaged in perpetual metamorphosis, are the tapestry woven by the Exusiai. They formerly bestowed the thoughts on human beings; they now give human beings their sense impressions, while the primal beginnings bestow the thoughts on human beings.

This fact of the super-sensible world was mirrored below in the sense world. In the ancient age in which lived the Greek, for example, thoughts were objectively perceived in all things. Just as today we believe that we perceive the color red or blue streaming forth from an object, so the ancient Greek found not only that he grasped a thought with his brain but that the thought streamed forth out of the things, just as red or blue streams forth. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy, I have described the human side, so to speak, of the matter, how this important process of the super-sensible world is reflected in the physical-sensible world. There, I employed philosophical expressions, because philosophical terminology is a language for the material world. When one discusses the matter from the viewpoint of the super-sensible world, however, one must speak of the super-sensible fact that the task of the Exusiai passed on to the Archai.

Such things are prepared in humanity through whole epochs of time and are connected with fundamental changes in human souls. I said that this super-sensible event took place in the fourth century A.D., but this is only an approximation, a mean point in time, as it were. This transference of a spiritual task took place over a long period of time. It had been prepared already in pre-Christian times and was completed only in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries A.D. The fourth century is just the mean century, which is mentioned so as to pinpoint something definite in the historical development of humanity.

This is also the point of time in humanity's evolution when the view of the super-sensible world began to vanish completely for man. The consciousness of the soul ceased to see supersensibly, to perceive, because this human soul surrendered itself to the earth. You perhaps will understand this more clearly if we shed light on it from yet another angle.

What is really implied here? What am I trying to point out so intensely? It is the fact that human beings feel themselves more and more in their individuality. As the world of thoughts passes from the form beings to the primal beginnings, from the Exusiai to the Archai, man increasingly senses the thoughts in his own being, because the Archai live one level nearer man than the Exusiai. Now, when man begins to see supersensibly, he has the following impression. He realizes that this [see diagram] is the world that he perceives as the sense world. One side [yellow in diagram] is turned toward his senses, the other [red] is already hidden from the senses. Ordinary consciousness knows nothing of the relationships that are to be considered here. Supersensible consciousness, on the other hand, has the impression that between man [see diagram] and the sense impressions there are the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai; they are really on this side of the sense world. Though one does not see them with ordinary eyes, they actually are situated between man and the whole tapestry of sense impressions. The Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes are actually located beyond this realm; they are concealed by the tapestry of sense impressions.

A human being having super-sensible consciousness senses that the thoughts are coming closer to him since having been given over to the Archai. He senses them as being located more in his world, whereas formerly they were located behind the appearance of things; they approached man, as it were, through the red or blue color, or the tone of c-sharp or g. Since this transference of thoughts, man feels a freer association with the world of thoughts. This also gives rise to the illusion that man himself produces the thoughts.

In the course of time, the human being evolved to the point where he could enclose in himself, as it were, what formerly offered itself to him as objective outer world. This came about only gradually in human evolution. Going back into the distant past of human evolution, to the ancient Atlantean time preceding the Atlantean catastrophe, picture to yourselves the human configuration at that time, as described in my books, An Outline Of Occult Science or Cosmic Memory. As you know, human beings of that time were formed completely differently. The substance of their bodies was more delicate than it became later in the post-Atlantean age. For this reason, the soul element also stood in a different relationship to the world—all this is described in the above books—and these Atlanteans experienced the world completely differently. I just wish to point out one aspect of their particular kind of experience. Atlanteans could not yet experience musical intervals of thirds, not even fifths. Their musical experience really began with feeling the sevenths. They then felt further intervals, of which the seventh was the smallest. They missed hearing thirds and fifths; these intervals did not exist for Atlanteans.

The experience of tone structure was completely different, and the soul had a completely different relationship to the tone structure. One who lives musically only in sevenths, with no intervals in between, as naturally as did the Atlanteans does not even perceive the musical element as something that occurs around or within him. The moment he perceives the musical element he feels transported out of his body into the cosmos. This was the case with the Atlanteans. Their musical experience converged with a direct religious experience. Their experience of the seventh did not make them feel that they themselves had something to do with the appearance of the interval of the seventh. Instead, they sensed how the gods, who pervaded and wove through the world, revealed themselves in sevenths. The statement, “I make music,” would have made no sense to them. The only meaningful thing for them to say was, “I live in music made by the gods.”

In a much diminished form, this musical experience still existed in the post-Atlantean age during the period when people lived mainly in the interval of the fifth. This must not be compared to man's present-day feeling for the fifth. Today, the fifth gives man an impression of being something external that lacks content. Man experiences something empty in the fifth, though in a positive sense of the word empty. The fifth has become empty because the gods have withdrawn from human beings.

Still, in the post-Atlantean age too, man experienced in the internal of the fifth that the gods actually lived in these fifths. Only later, when the third appeared in the musical element—both major and minor thirds—the musical element submerged itself, as it were, into human feeling [Gemüt]; hence, man no longer felt transported from his body while experiencing music. Man was definitely transported in musical life during the true era of the fifth. In the era of thirds, however, which as you know dawned only relatively recently, man is within himself when he experiences music. He brings the musical element close to his corporeality. He interweaves it with his corporeality. Along with the experience of the third, therefore, the difference between major and minor keys arises. Man becomes aware of what can be experienced through the major key on the one hand and the minor key on the other. With the third and the appearance of major and minor keys, the musical experience now links itself with uplifting, joyous human moods and with depressed, sad moods, which the human being experiences as a bearer of his physical and etheric bodies. In a manner of speaking, man withdraws his experiences as a bearer of his physical and etheric bodies. In a manner of speaking, man withdraws his experience of the world from the cosmos and unites it with himself. Formerly, his most important experience of the world was such—this was definitely still the case in the “fifth-era,” if I may put it like this, but much more so in the “seventh-era”—that it directly transported him, that he could say, “The world of tones draws my ‘I’ and my astral body out of my physical and etheric bodies. I interweave my earthly existence with the divine-spiritual world, and, on the wings of the tone structure, the gods move through the world. I participate in their moving when I perceive the tones.”

In this specific area you can see how cosmic experience draws near to man, as it were; how the cosmos penetrates man; how, when we go back to earlier ages, we must seek in the super-sensible for the most important human experiences; and how the age is approaching when man as an earthly sense phenomenon must be taken along, as it were, when the most important world events are described. This occurs in the age before which the dominion over thoughts passed from the form beings to the primal beginnings. This is also reflected in the fact that the ancient “fifth-era,” which preceded the above cosmic event, passes on to the “era of thirds” and the experience of major and minor modes.

It is of special interest regarding man's musical experience to go back into a still earlier time, an age of human earthly evolution reaching back into the dimmest primeval past, which can be brought into view by super-sensible vision. We arrive at an age—you find it described as the “Lemurian Age” in my Occult Science—in which generally man cannot perceive the musical element that can become conscious in him in an interval within one octave. In that age, man perceives only an interval that surpasses one octave:

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He perceives only the above interval c to d above c¹. In the Lemurian age we discover a musical experience that excludes hearing any interval within one octave; the interval instead reaches to the first tone of the following octave. It is difficult to put into words what the human being experienced then, but perhaps one can form an idea of it if I say that Lemurian man experienced the second of the next higher and the third of the second higher octave. He experienced a kind of objective third, and there he also experienced both major and minor thirds. It is not a third in our sense, of course, because one has an actual third only when I take the prime in the same octave and the tone that I refer to as being the second-nearest to the prime. Because ancient man was able to experience such intervals, however—we should say today, prime in the first octave, second in the next, third in the third octave—he perceived something like an objective major and minor mode, not one experienced within himself but one that was felt to be an expression of the soul experiences of the gods. One cannot say that Lemurians experienced joy and suffering, exaltation and depression, but one must say that, due to the particular musical sensation of the Lemurian age, when, in a completely transported state, human beings perceived these intervals, they experienced the god's cosmic sounds of joy and lamentation. We thus can look back upon an epoch of the earth actually experienced by human beings when what man experiences today in major and minor modes was projected, so to speak, into the universe. What today he experiences inwardly was once projected out into the universe. What today wells up in his life of feeling [Gemüt], in his sensation, he perceived—transported from his physical body—as the experience of the gods. Our present inner experience of a major musical mood was perceived by Lemurian man, when he was transported from his physical body, as the cosmic song of jubilation, as the cosmic music of jubilation, produced by the gods as an expression of joy over their world creation. What today we know as an inner minor mood experience, man perceived in the Lemurian age as the overwhelming lamentation of the gods concerning the possibility that humanity could fall victim to what subsequently has been described by the Bible as the fall into sin, the falling away from the benevolent divine-spiritual powers.

This is something that sounds forth to us from the wonderful knowledge of the ancient mysteries, which at the same time was in itself artistic; it is not an abstract description of how humanity once passed through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic seduction and temptation and experienced such and such a thing. Human beings actually heard how, in primeval times, the gods made jubilant music in the cosmos because they rejoiced over their cosmic creativity. They also heard how the gods prophetically envisioned man's fall from the divine-spiritual powers and brought this to expression in their cosmic lamentation. This knowledge, which later took on increasingly intellectual forms, resounds as an artistic conception from the ancient mysteries. From this we can gain the profound conviction that it was only a single source from which flowed knowledge, art and religion. From this the conviction must grow in us that we must return to that human soul composition, and it will arise again if the soul perceives [erkennt], through the religious welling up in it, the artistic streaming through it. Such a composition of soul will understand vividly once again what Goethe meant when he said, “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws without which these phenomena would have remained forever hidden.” The secret of human evolution within earthly existence, within earthly becoming, betrays itself to us by this inner unity of everything that man, perceiving religiously and artistically, must go through with the world, so that along with the world he can experience his entire development.

The time has come when man must become conscious again of these matters, because otherwise the soul qualities of human nature will simply deteriorate. Through the increasingly intellectual, one-sided form of knowledge, man of today and the immediate future would have to become arid in his soul; the arts, grown one-sided, would dull his soul; and the one-sided religion would drain him of his soul altogether, if he were unable to find the path that could lead him to an inner harmony and union of these three; if he could not find the way to rise out of himself—in a more conscious way than was formerly the case—and once again to see and hear the super-sensible together with the sense world.

When, with the air of the science of the spirit, one looks back at the ancient, great personalities of the dawning Greek culture, whose descendants were men like Aeschylus or Heraclitus, one finds that, in so far as they were initiated into the mysteries, these personalities all had the same feeling born out of their knowledge and their artistic forces of creativity just as Homer did, who said, “Sing, O Muse, to me of the wrath of Achilles,” not as something personal pervading them but as something they accomplished in their religious experience in community with the spiritual world. It motivated them to say the following: in primeval times, human beings actually experienced themselves as human beings by withdrawing from themselves during their most important human activities—I explained to you that this was in the case of music, but it was like this also in forming thoughts—and communing with the gods. Human beings have lost what they thus experienced. This mood of the loss of an ancient cognitive, artistic and religious treasure of humanity weighted heavily on the deeper Greek souls.

Another mood must come over modern man. By unfolding the appropriate forces of his soul experience he must reach the point where he rediscovers what once was lost. I would like to put it like this: man must develop a consciousness—after all, we live in the age of consciousness—of how that which has become inward can once again find the way out to the divine-spiritual. In one realm, for example, this will be accomplished when the inner wealth of feeling experienced in a melody one day will be discovered in the single tone, at which time the secret of individual tone will be experienced by man. In other words, man not only will experience intervals but will be able to experience the single tone with the same inner richness and inner variation of experience that he can experience today with melody. As yet, today, man can hardly imagine what this will be like.

You see, however, how matters proceed from the seventh to the fifth, from the fifth to the third, and from the third down to the prime, the single tone, and so forth. What was once the loss of the divine must transform itself for human evolution if humanity on earth is not to perish but to continue its development. The loss must transform itself for earthly humanity into a rediscovery of the divine.

We understand the past correctly only if we are able to confront it with the right image for our evolution in the future; if deeply, deeply shaken we are able to feel what a profound person could feel in ancient Greek times, “I have lost the presence of the gods”: if, with a shaken, but intensely and warmly striving soul, we are able to counter this with the resolve, “We shall bring the spirit that is within us like a seed to blossoming and fruition so that we can find the gods once again!”

following the discussion after three lectures by Paul Baumann

On the Expansion of the Tone System

It is only really possible to make a few suggestions, because the questions posed by Mr. Stuten alone could be the subject of weeks of discussion if one wanted to answer them exhaustively. And we will see how far we get today. I would like to start with one topic, so that we can then perhaps move on from a center, so to speak. The extension of the tone system has been mentioned, hasn't it, and various speakers have, I believe, been interested in this extension of the tone system; I think there were also musicians and composers among them.

Now, the whole question is connected, as I believe, with another one that is perhaps not as easy to grasp as is usually thought. And here I would like to say first of all: I myself wanted to address a kind of question first to those personalities who have taken part in this discussion about the expansion of the tone system. I will just make a few preliminary remarks and then ask you to express yourself entirely according to your subjective experience.

There is hardly any doubt that with the point in time that Mr. Baumann characterized so well today as the advent of the seventh, a very significant turning point actually occurred in the musical experience of civilized humanity. I believe that we just do not know enough about the earlier musical experience; that is, theoretically, but we no longer experience it in such a way that we feel this change completely clearly and intensely enough. But what has emerged has not yet run its course, and perhaps we are in the midst of a transformation, if I may say so, of people's musical needs. Of course, such things do not happen so quickly that they can be clearly defined; but they do happen, and they can be recognized to a certain extent in the progressive development of humanity.

And here I would like to ask whether the individual previous speakers, when they reflect on what they experience musically, cannot point to something that signifies a kind of turning point in the whole of musical experience. To formulate the question more specifically: I would like to think that today, in musical experience, one could form an opinion about how different people - I will ignore more of the musical aspect for now - experience a single tone differently. Now, that they experience it differently is, of course, beyond doubt; but they experience it so differently that this different experience plays into their understanding of music in some way.

You can clearly perceive, I believe, that today there is a tendency, especially among people who experience music, to go deeper into the sound, so to speak. Isn't it true that you can stay more on the surface with a sound, or go deeper into the sound.

And now I ask the personalities who were previously involved in the discussion whether they can associate any idea with this when I say: the musical experience of the present is increasingly splitting the individual note in its conception, and, as it were, questioning the individual note as to whether it is a melody or not. I mean, whether any kind of idea can be associated with it? Because it is actually hardly possible to talk about the question of expanding the tone system without having a basis from which to talk.

A comment was made earlier about noises. Perhaps the whole discussion about noises can only be answered if such a prerequisite as I have stated here is first settled. Because if I assume, for example – I don't know whether these things are already being experienced very extensively subjectively today – that the gentleman who has been speaking here for some time, who has been talking about sounds, that he is particularly inclined to answer the question of whether a melody can be perceived in a tone can be perceived in the tone, in the broadest sense, then I understand him, then I completely understand how he enters into the individual tones, or into the individual sounds, which the other person merely perceives as a noise, and how, by delving into the depths of the sound, he does indeed find something in the tones that then form the sound that he can pick out, so that something musical comes about that someone who does not delve into these depths of the sound cannot follow.

This morning, Dr. Husemann pointed out that in another respect, too, present-day humanity is in danger of gradually splitting the personality more and more apart. And so it seems that there are already quite a number of people in the present day who simply have a different sound experience of a single note than musicians who have been very sharply trained in one direction or another. And this is connected with the other question, which has also been asked, namely how spiritual science should relate to the whole matter.

Now I would like to ask the precise question of whether any reasonable idea can be associated with it, if one says that under certain circumstances the individual tone can be felt as a melody by going into its depths, by emphasizing partial tones from the tone, so to speak, partial tones whose relationship, whose harmony can then itself be a kind of melody again?

Paul Baumann: It also emerged from my lecture that I associate noise with harmony, that is, with a summarized melody. Can we understand sound noise as something that is a summarized melody, perhaps a harmony, but that we would also feel musically? In reality, every sound is undoubtedly musical, but we do not need to address it as a musical art. We cannot distinguish it, but it can be felt very clearly in timbre that something particularly musical, something of the mobility of things, is speaking here again, that one can clearly distinguish the mere musical tone, which is not heard in itself, from what it very clearly resonates in.

That is not what I mean. What I mean specifically now is to expand the possibility of experiencing sound itself, that is, to go deeper into the depths when experiencing the sound, or, for that matter, to extract something from the sound, so that you actually experience something in the sound itself.

Paul Baumann: I mean the differentiation between what you need in musical art, what resonates, and what you also feel, something that has a musical effect in things.

I don't mean this now, but what you experience in a tone without it somehow contributing objectively. You split the tone itself and synthesize it again. I mean as a pure experience. From time immemorial, the tone was attributed to the spirit of clay. In layman's terms: at a historical performance of the Passau... play from 1250, the devil is introduced as a seducer right at the beginning, before the play even begins; and to make this atmosphere work properly, the devil has to blow into a fire horn; it sounds so shrill that it scares everyone. That is the basis of this sound spirit I am talking about.

Some opinions will still be expressed.

These are all things that do not apply to what I mean, the experience of a sound that appears as a melody. When a note is struck, a melody actually emanates from the note.

Dr. Stein: It seems to me that one must distinguish between the perception of sound and the sensation of sound. I feel something very deeply in my perception, and this feeling then goes deeper when I feel pain or shock.

I don't mean that we should define the things that already exist, but rather: whether we are living in a transitional period with regard to the sound experience, so that it actually becomes something different. I think that it is still understood in musical terms today as a note that is related to others, that is in a melody and so on, but that there is a possibility with the note to go into the depths, perhaps also to look for something below it and then, if one looks at this, only then is a fruitful examination possible.

Further expressions of opinion.

If you listen to a note for a long time, at the beginning of the “Freischütz” overture, for example, you may have a sensation that I can perhaps illustrate figuratively. So, so to speak, the sound would be: half of a bow – that should be a graphical representation – on this half of the bow, I would draw something like small nerves that go out from it, so that one has a sound sensation on this half of the bow, as if as if it were going in there, then going through again on the other side of the bow, then out again at nerves and veins, so that there is a certain inner movement, which is once on one side of this half bow, then once on the other. You could perhaps also express it dynamically, that you put a greater intensity into it and then back out.

Opinions.

The long hold is only to make it more noticeable. The long hold would also make it possible to notice the changes in tone. I am not so much referring to the illustrative curve, which can be drawn in this way, but rather to the one that is actually drawn here vertically on the board.

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Further comments:... It's the intensity? That's why I say: go deeper into the sound!

Longer comments from a participant.

Mr. van der Pals describes his experiences with a tone; an upbeat to Jacobowski's poems. A tone, indicated by the poem itself, by the content; one had no desire at all to move away from the tone; the tone was there, could just as well have remained there, was a melody in itself – I only moved away because one couldn't play it for half an hour.

Now that we have talked about this a bit, I would like to point out that things that develop sometimes come out very imperfectly in their first stages. For example, it can be pointed out that some things certainly appear in a really quite contestable way as Expressionist art – but that is not meant as a criticism of all Expressionist art, but only of some things that do not get beyond expressions – but that there is certainly an attempt at something in it that will one day mean a great deal.

And so I believe that, in a similar way to how we try to live with color and create from color in painting, this immersion in sound means something today, such as the beginning of progress in music. And if that occurs here or there and you don't like it, I completely agree. But I would like to know how one can actually understand such musical personalities as Debussy if not as a perhaps very vague forerunner of something future that lies in this direction. If we can admit something like that, we come to the conclusion that a certain possibility is indeed presented to us, namely the possibility that composing will be done in a different way than it is now, namely in such a way that the relationship between composer and reproducing artist becomes much freer, that the player, the reproducing artist, is much less determined, that he can become much more productive, that he has much more leeway. But this is only possible in music if the tone system is expanded, if you can really have the variations that are necessary, if you can really vary widely. And I could imagine that, for example, what the composer delivers would be more suggestive in the future, but that because it would be more suggestive, the reproducing artist would need many more variants, many more tones, to express things. If you find your way into the depths of the tone, you can distribute it in the most diverse ways by setting it out again in neighboring tones. In this way, a more flexible musical life would come about. I can only sketch the matter. One could go on talking all night, but we don't want to do that since we are meeting again tomorrow. But a much more flexible musical life will come about. And one can say: Today, this more flexible musical experience can really stand before us.

This is connected in a certain way with the other question that has been asked again and again, namely, how spiritual science should relate to music. In this question, there is always one thing that I dislike. Please, I do not want to offend anyone with what I say, but there is something about this question that I dislike, namely, it is actually posed in an unartistic way! It is actually always posed theoretically and in an unartistic way, even if the person in question does not mean it. And I feel that in a discussion about art, it is very easy to slip out of the artistic realm altogether and into a wild theorizing. Spiritual science, since it is not something intellectual, is not something that only takes hold of one part of the human being, but something that takes hold of the whole human being, will have an essential influence on the whole human being, on thinking, feeling and willing. Whereas our present materialistic-intellectualistic science basically only has an influence on thinking, on the intellectual element in man. Spiritual science will take hold of the human being fully. And the consequence of this will be that the human being becomes inwardly more mobile, that he comes to a greater variability of his partial experience and thus also to a stronger demand for the harmony of his partial experience. And when this happens, it essentially means an enrichment of the whole musical activity and experience. And then, in the case of such personalities, who are so permeated, so imbued, so vitalized by spiritual science, I might say, what can become reality in the field of music out of spiritual science will arise. There is no use theorizing about this. One should not theorize, one should rather feel today how spiritual science actually makes the human being more mobile and how, through this, the human being can also approach a more intense, more nuanced musical experience.

This can be linked to very big questions. You see, the spiritual science movement has often been criticized: Yes, there are mainly ladies there who are always interested in it, you don't see the men in the anthroposophical meetings. — I don't want to decide now to what extent this is statistically true or not. Some people have a newspaper article ready before they have seen the things, and they can't be dissuaded from it even if they then see the opposite of what they have written down. But on the whole – please, it is really not meant so badly – we can say: Because the male world has participated more in education, in the scientific and increasingly scientific education of the last few centuries, something has occurred for masculinity that could be called a solidification, a hardening of the brain. In women, the brain has remained more flexible and softer. These are, of course, radical expressions for the phenomena, but the phenomenon still exists. And so as not to be unfair, I will say: in men, the brain has become more solidified, and as a result they have become more proficient in the use of logic; in women, the brain has remained more agile, lighter, but they have not participated in the education of the last few centuries, which has so solidified the firm logic within itself, and as a result they have become superficial and so on. — Well, you can't just present things one-sidedly. But there is something in the whole matter that can make us aware of the fact that we urgently need to make what has been achieved in our own organization through the stiffening, drying out education of the last centuries, flexible again, by entering into this stronger handling of the ethereal. But here we are entering the musical element again. Here we are entering a completely musical experience. And that will naturally bear fruit.

But one would be quite inartistic if one wanted to create any kind of theory about what is happening. That always seems to me to be the same as if someone wanted to describe the weather of the day after tomorrow very precisely. I am not saying that there is not a state of consciousness in which one can do so to a high degree. But it has no real significance. It is better to let life live than to theorize about it in such a way.

Now, with this train of thought, the consideration has already been diverted from the musical to the human constitution. And so, in a spiritualized physiology, which in itself will already have something artistic about it, one will increasingly associate the musical with the human constitution.

Just think, there is something very deeply justified in Mr. Baumann's assertion of the connection between melos and breathing. Basically, melos and human breathing are two things that essentially belong together.

But now we must not forget: The breathing process is a process that takes place in the rhythmic system. This middle system of the human organization borders on the nervous-sense system, on the brain system, on the one hand. There is an interaction between the rhythmic system and the nervous-sense system. On the other hand, the rhythmic system borders on the entire limb and metabolic system. And this confluence also expresses itself, I would say, in the physical processes. Just think: when we breathe in, we push our diaphragm down, we push the brain water up to the head, so that with the breathing process we have a continuous up and down of the brain water. This means that there is a continuous interplay between the rhythmic movement of the cerebral fluid and that of the organs of imagination. On the other hand, there is a continuous collision of the cerebral fluid, which is going down again, with everything that is going on in the blood, in the metabolic system. More than one would think, the musical element is connected with this inner experience, thought of in organic terms. And in the following way: to the same extent that breathing approaches the head, the nervous-sensory life, with the interplay, the melodious element comes to the fore; to the same extent that the rhythmic system approaches the limb system, the actual rhythmic element comes to the fore; we have only transferred the word there.

And then, if you bear this in mind, you have a guide to answer, I would say, the whole bundle of questions that Mr. Stuten asked at the end, one by one. So what Mr. Stuten has put forward is correct. I would like to go into the one thing he mentioned about the connections between thinking, feeling and willing. This corresponds, in turn, to what I have just explained in terms of the organs. Then we have already discussed, and Mr. Stuten has repeated today, that what the actual musical forms are corresponds to the whole human being, that is, to the synthetic interweaving of thinking, feeling and willing.

Now he has also raised the question of the relationships between the thematic groups. These are, of course, specifically different, depending on whether they come from this or that composer. And now we can say the following: You were quite right to state that the melody corresponds to the imagination, the harmony to the feeling, the rhythm to the will, and the tone form to the whole person. Now we have a partial human being = thinking, a partial human being = feeling, a partial human being = willing, and the whole human being.

But now we not only have the whole human being in real human life, but the human being also lives all the years between birth and death. This whole human being is often present and continuously present, and changes, metamorphoses. And this is where the succession of thematic groupings comes into play. The human life cycle is something specific. And the underlying secret is this: in our consciousness, we do not know what the future holds, but in our feeling consciousness, we are attuned to how the future unfolds. Please observe purely empirically — one does not usually do this, but these things belong to a finer perception of a true anthropology, which then becomes anthroposophy — how the emotional life changes in a person whom one later learns has died. Of course, there are many things that prevent us from pursuing such things, but at least we can pursue them retrospectively. We can see very clearly in a person who died young how the whole emotional life tends towards death, how the future is already contained in the past life. This is also something that is part of the human life cycle.

All this plays a role when the musician lives out in the succession, in the recurrence of thematic groups and so on. The recurrence itself need not surprise you. For you need only look back over your life, if it has already been going on for some time; in particular, the usual periods, which do not cover the same number for everyone but are nevertheless present, could show you exactly the stages, could tell you: in this year a stage ended that lasted until that year, and so on. If someone experiences a phase of life at the age of forty-five, they will experience it again at the age of fifty-two at the next stage. And one can see the recurrence in human experience very clearly when one experiences something at the age of fifty-two, which does not have to be the same, but which, in its inner character, represents something similar to what happened in one's forty-fifth year.

All these things play a part in what is expressed in a musical work of art. For such a musical work of art is, at least at the moment it is created, always an expression of the whole human being. One can only hint at such things.

Some of the other questions that were asked, such as the relationship between Goethe's theory of sound and spiritual science, would really be too much to cover today. I believe that we can still meet on this or a similar occasion. And answering the question about major and minor, about the meaning of Greek music, would also be too much today.

With regard to the one thing that has been mentioned, the theories about breathing, singing and posture, I would just like to note that such things as described in the book mentioned are not without a certain significance if one knows how to take them sensibly.

It is extremely important to consider the human being as a whole. People who write such books do not usually do this, but they do provide material that can be useful even to the scholar, when it is viewed in the right light.

I also do not want to address the question of singing method today, because it can very easily be misunderstood if it is not developed out of some kind of premise, especially since there are so many different singing methods today. And you can meet people who have learned to sing using five or six different methods, which means they have forgotten how to sing altogether! Then, however, one cannot speak in such a simple way about the different singing methods.

Regarding what has been said about temperaments, about thesis, antithesis, synthesis, I must say that it is a rather unfruitful way of looking at things, because as a rule one can really develop anything from such bloodless abstractions. And just as you can say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, which may be in principle, and spiritual science – the synthesis, so could another, who just classified differently, perhaps say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, Mahler – synthesis. That would certainly be said by one or the other if one indulges in such bloodless abstractions.

Yes, I really don't think that we should extend the evening any further today, since we can't stay here overnight after all! Although I am happy to talk in detail about the issues I have noted down at a further get-together.

I would like to touch again today on some of the things I noted yesterday, which could no longer be properly discussed, with a few aphoristic remarks.

First, I would like to say a few words about the relationship between major and minor. If you want to get right into the intimacies of musical life, you have to be absolutely aware of how, in essence, musical life corresponds to a fine organization of our human nature. One could say that what appears in musical facts corresponds in a certain way to the finer inner constitution of the human being.

Yesterday I already hinted at a certain direction, how rhythm, which we experience musically, answers an inner rhythm in the rise and fall of the cerebral fluid and the connection that the cerebral fluid has on the one hand with the processes in the brain, and on the other hand with the processes in the metabolic system through the mediation of the blood system. But one can also point to, I would say, individually graded forms of the human constitution in this respect. Our most important rhythmic system is the respiratory system, and it is basically not difficult for most people, if they pay just a little attention, to experience how the course of thought, both the more logical course of thought and the more emotional, feeling-based course of thought, influence the breathing process. The breathing process is directly or indirectly connected with everything that a person experiences musically. Therefore, the particular breathing pattern of one or the other type of person sheds some light on the musical experience.

You see, there are people who are, so to speak, oxygen voluptuaries. They are constituted in such a way that they assimilate oxygen with a certain greed, absorb oxygen into themselves. Of course, all this takes place more or less in the subconscious, but one can certainly use the expressions borrowed from conscious life for the subconscious. People who absorb oxygen with a certain greed, who, if I may say so, enjoy absorbing oxygen, who are voluptuous in absorbing oxygen, have a very active, strongly vibrating astral life. Their astral body is inwardly active. And because their astral body is inwardly active, it also digs into the physical body with great desire, as it were. Such people live very much in their physical body.

Other people do not have this craving for oxygen. But they feel something, not like a lust now, but like a relief when they give up, exhale the carbonic acid. They are tuned to, as it were, removing the breathing air from themselves and finding a favor in the process that gives them a certain relief.

One can, by speaking the truth, say something that I would like to say, that makes a person feel a little uncomfortable. But that is one of the reasons why people reject the deeper truths, because they do not want to hear them. They then invent logical reasons for themselves. In reality, the reason is that people are subconsciously repulsed by certain truths. So they push these truths aside. And that is why they then find logical reasons for their evasion. It is certainly not so easy, for example, if you are a respected scholar and are opposed to this or that philosophical system because of an unhealthy gall-bladder, to simply say to your students: My gall-bladder does not tolerate this philosophical system! — So you then invent logical reasons, sometimes of an extraordinarily astute nature, and you console yourself with these logical reasons. For those who know life, for those who look deeper into the secrets of existence, sometimes logical reasons that come from this or that side are not quite so valuable. And so, for example, sometimes the melancholic temperament is based merely on the fact that the person concerned is a voluptuary of oxygen. And life more in the sanguine, life that is turned to the outer world, that likes to change with the impressions of the outer world, that is based on a certain love of exhaling, on a certain love of pushing the carbonic acid away from oneself.

However, these are only the external manifestations of the matter. For the rhythm, which we basically perceive only as the physical-secondary in the organism, is actually always a rhythm that takes place in the deeper sense between the astral body and the ether body. And ultimately one can say: we inhale with the astral body and with the etheric body we exhale again, so that in truth there is a rhythmic interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And so now the individual types of people live, so to speak, in such a way that when one type of person's astral body strikes the ether body, a kind of lust occurs; when the ether body strikes back at the astral body, a kind of relief occurs in the other person, a kind of transition into the sanguine, experiencing the sanguine.

And you see, the origin of the major and minor scales is connected with this contrast between types of people, in that everything that can be experienced in minor keys belongs, or corresponds, to the constitution of the person who is based on the lustfulness of oxygen, which is based on the fact that the astral body, when it strikes the etheric body is felt with a certain voluptuousness, while conversely the major scales are based on the fact that there is a feeling of well-being when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body, or there is a certain feeling of elevation, a feeling of relief, a feeling of momentum when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body.

It is interesting that in the outer world things are often designated in the opposite direction. For example, one says: the melancholic person is the deeper person. Seen from the other side, he is not the deeper person, but the greater voluptuary for oxygen.

Since the musical in its intimacies essentially draws on the subconscious, we can associate such things with the very subconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious aspects of the musical experience, without indulging in an inartistic, theoretical approach. You will notice in general that a truly spiritual-scientific consideration of art does not need to become inartistic itself, for one does not arrive at bloodless abstractions and a theoretical web of aestheticizing kind. If we want to understand things spiritually, we come to realities in a certain way, the mutual interaction of which is presented pictorially or even musically in such a way that we, with our description, are ourselves in it in a kind of musical experience.

And I believe that this will be precisely the significant aspect in the further development of spiritual science: that in seeking to comprehend art, it itself seeks to create an art of comprehension, that it seeks to imbue its work and activity in ideas with pictoriality, with reality, and that in so doing, what we have today as such a dry, abstract science will be able to approach the artistic. But if we take something that has been approached purely and simply from a scientific point of view, such as education, and make it relevant to the tasks of our time, as we do in the Waldorf school , then we are in any case leading what used to be scientific pedagogy to the level of pedagogical art and talking about pedagogy in the sense that we actually understand it as an art of educating.

If you read what I wrote in the last issue of “Social Future” about the art of education, you will see how there is an effort to transform the sober science of education into the art of education.

Another thing I noted refers to the interesting comments Mr. Baumann made in his lecture about the relationship between vowels and tones and colors. He described, as you recall, the dark vowels U, O, as those that have the clearest effect in terms of tone. In the middle stands A, and at the other pole, so to speak, stand E and I, the light vowels, which appear the least tonal, which carry something noisy in them.

But then the astonishment was expressed as to how it comes about that precisely the dark vowels also correspond to the dark colors, and the light vowels, I, E, correspond to light colors, but do not actually have the tonal in their characteristic, but rather the noisy. - If I understood correctly, that was the case, wasn't it?

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Now I would like to make the following comment. If we do not write down the color scale in the abstract linearity that we are accustomed to in today's physics, but if we write down the color scale in a circle, as it must also be done in accordance with Goethe's color theory, so that we say: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — if we proceed in this direction (see drawing), if we write down the color scale in this way, then we will naturally be compelled, by bringing to mind the experiential relationships between tone and color, to write U and O towards the blue side. But if we continue in Mr. Baumann's spirit, we will come to A and from this side enter the red and yellow, the light.

So when we move away from the blue in the sense of the accompanying colors of the individual tones, we are actually moving away from the color element and now touching it from behind. And therein lies the reason why we can no longer establish parallelism here in the same way as in the area where the tonal coincides with the color in a very evident way, because on the side of the color scale where the blue, the violet is, we are dealing, so to speak, with a going out of ourselves with the color. There is a sense of immersion in the external world. With sound, however, it is essentially also an outward movement. But when we come over here, we experience an onslaught of color: red and yellow colors rush at us. In this sense, behind this curtain, there is also painting here: it is the ability to paint from within the color. We live ourselves into the color. This is how we actually come out of the nature of the tones. This is the reason for the apparent incongruity that I pointed out to you yesterday.

Then I would also like to make a few comments about something that has been mentioned, that has been found – and it has not only been found by the one person mentioned yesterday, but similar things are being said and spread by a great many people – that one can feel the vowels, the tones, in the organism: I in the head, E more in the larynx, A in the chest, O in the abdomen, U very low down.

Now, these things are indeed correct, and you will no longer be surprised that these things have a certain correctness if you bear in mind that everything that exists in the outside world in the form of sound corresponds to very specific arrangements in our organism. But on the other hand, we must not forget: If such things are proclaimed without proper instruction – and proper in this case means only instruction that can speak from a certain spiritual-scientific experience – if such things are proclaimed without precise knowledge of the very interconnections that I have pointed out in a specific case today, that is, the interrelations between the astral body, the etheric body and so on, if they are trumpeted out into the world without reasonable guidance in the spiritual-scientific sense and people then do all kinds of exercises in this sense, then, indeed, quite embarrassing things can come about. If, for example, someone does breathing exercises of some kind and – as was hinted at yesterday – strongly visualizes the vowel when breathing and in doing so gets the feeling: the I sits in the head, the E in the larynx, and so on – this can certainly be right. But if he is not instructed in a sensible way, it can happen that the I remains in the head and sings continuously at the top of the head, and the E remains in the larynx and rumbles there. And if the A in the chest and abdomen also do their thing, then something similar to what Dr. Husemann has described in an excellent way for Staudenmaier in Munich, who also came up with very strange things because, as a person who has no experience at all in how to use such things, , he has actually gradually accumulated a whole legion of fools in his own organism, so many fools that these fools have simply suggested to him that this breeding of fools should now also be cultivated, that universities and schools should be founded so that all this folly can be taken even further. And you can really imagine that a naive mind has the answer for this: Now I'm supposed to pay taxes for him to live in his monkey cage with his magic, aren't I!

But today there are actually a great many things that simply boil down to the fact that the people who devote themselves to such things – and there is a certain greed even for such things – that these people are really driven crazy, you could say they are actually driven crazy. So such things are not entirely harmless, and it is good when attention is drawn to them.

You see, if you, as was the case with me before the war - now it is just no longer possible - if you had to travel, so to speak, through half of Europe more often, you really found a perpetual phenomenon throughout this half of Europe. I don't know how many people have noticed it, but those who live in spiritual science also acquire a certain talent for observation for external things, they simply see certain things. For example, they cannot simply stay in a hotel and not see all the letters in the porter's lodge for people who have arrived or who have not arrived. Letters are there from people who may have just skipped the city or this hotel due to the necessity of the trip and so on. Now, however, there was one recurring phenomenon in such porter's lodges, also in other places, again and again: these were the postings of a certain, as they were called, psychological-occult center. They sent such announcements to all possible addresses they could get hold of, about an “occult system” through which one could train oneself for all kinds of things. For example, one could train oneself to make a favorable impression on other people. In particular, one could train oneself as a commercial agent to easily persuade people to buy one's goods. Or one could also train oneself to do other interesting things, for example, to make the opposite sex fall in love with you easily and the like. Well, these things were sent out, and these things actually found a great deal of interest in the world. Then the war, didn't it, threw a bit of a wrench into these calculations for the simple reason that it had gradually become unpleasant that these things were being censored. And since censorship has not been abolished today either, at least in most areas, but on the contrary is still in effect in a very strange way, efforts to advocate occultism in this way have not yet been rewarded, and one notices less of these stories today. But I think they are being passed more and more from person to person, without using the postal system and similar things. So I just wanted to say that this vocal breathing game is not without significance and does have an embarrassing side.

Now yesterday various questions were asked that obviously relate to the statements I made in the first recitation lesson, which were only a few remarks for the time being, and that were linked to what Mr. Baumann said about the musical aspect. Well, with regard to the most important thing, of course, I must refer to the following lessons on declamation, but perhaps I can also make some aphoristic remarks there.

For example, the question was asked what changes in the way of speaking, in the art of acting, could be brought about by spiritual science. A term was used, if I understood it correctly – because it is possible that I did not understand it – that was supposed to replace physical eloquence. I think I remember this term, but I have absolutely no idea what is meant by “physical eloquence”!

Interjection: facial expressions are meant.

Oh, facial expressions as physical eloquence? Well, if that is meant, it is a rather occult expression. But perhaps we can also make a few comments on the matter by anticipating some of what still needs to be said in the lessons in context, and which perhaps can only be presented here in somewhat aphoristic form. I would like to say something about the way of speaking and acting in the art of acting, which has also undergone a rich history. One need only recall that Goethe also rehearsed his plays, for example, “Iphigenia,” with his actors in such a way that he had a baton, that he placed the greatest value on meter. And people in the second half of the 19th century would probably have described what Goethe called the beauty of his acting as a kind of chanting or something similar. There was indeed a great emphasis on meter. And one should not imagine that when Goethe himself played Orestes, for example, he went wild in the way that I have seen some Orestes actors go wild in on stages that are not even modern. When a certain Krastel played Orestes, yes, sometimes you felt the need to get a cage to contain his wildness. So one should not imagine that Goethe himself might have played the role of Orestes. On the contrary: he softened and smoothed out the very thing that was present in the content as strength and intense inner life by carefully observing the meter. So that there was moderation and balance in the manner of delivery that Goethe used for his Orestes.

As for facial expressions, it may be said that in earlier times – and these times are not so far back – these facial expressions were much more subject to the laws of theatrical art than they were in the last third of the 19th century. To a certain extent, stereotypical movements were used for certain types of feelings, and these were adhered to. So that it was less important, for example, to see in detail how some hand movement expresses some wild passion, but rather to see how some hand movement is, how it runs, how it has to connect to a previous hand movement, creating a beautiful form, and how it transitions to the next hand movement. So it was the inner shaping that was most important in facial expressions. And to the same extent that this artistry in both speech and facial expressions declined, to the same extent did the naturalistic immersion in the individual gesture and the individual word come about, and what then ultimately became the demand of naturalism for the entire drama was that which cannot actually be followed in the serious sense. Because, if it came down to only showing a front or back room in the stage set, where the same things happened that would naturally happen in a front or back room in three hours, , then one would actually have to say: the stage space would be designed in a completely naturalistic way if the side with the curtain were also closed – and the last naturalistic thing that one has striven for on the stage would actually have been achieved with something like that. It would have been quite interesting if, for example, the aesthetic wishes of Arno Holz had also led to the demand that the stage area be closed off at the front by a wall, so that it would now quite naturally depict a back room. One could have seen what impression such naturalism, such complete naturalism, would have made on the audience.

I know that when you take things to such grotesque extremes, it is very easy to find fault with them. But in the end, extreme naturalism really comes down to the fact that you can't really say anything other than that it is the last consequence.

And so it is with this pushing of the actor into the ordinary naturalistic way of speaking and into the naturalistic gesture. In more artistic times, the other tendency prevailed. There the gesture strove for the beautiful, plastic form, for the moving plastic form. And the spoken word strived more back to the musical. So that in fact the theatrical presentation was also lifted out of the ordinary naturalism, in that the actors moved as they did on stage for the older among us, with those tragedians and tragic actresses whom the younger ones no longer knew, like Klara Ziegler and others. There you could still see the last echoes of decadence. They couldn't do the things anymore, but they still did them with the last remnants of plastic stagecraft, and they still had in their manner of speaking what sound and even tone and even melos had in speaking.

It was interesting: those who, on the one hand, went wild, went wild naturalistically, like Krastel, on the other hand, did not want to become naturalistic – their temperament got the better of them – they did not want to become naturalistic. Therefore, however, they also took their path to the musical in speaking in such a way as the others did to the plastic in movement. I don't know if any of you still remember such things; but if you have seen and heard Krastel on the Viennese stage more than once, you may still have the sound of Krastel's singing in your ears.

So, by returning to earlier forms of acting and mime, we are dealing with a convergence of theatrical performance with the musical and the plastic. And basically, all art is based on the fact that certain archetypes of this art, I would say, split, that the individual forms, the differentiated forms of art emerged from what was a kind of singing art in prehistoric times. And when someone like Richard Wagner came along and directed his whole heart and soul back to the archetypes of artistry, then this striving for the Gesamtkunstwerk emerged from him. But the further we go back in the development of the human spirit, the more we find that what is separate today flows together. For example, at least for the older times of Greek civilization, we can assume that there was only a slight difference between recitation and song. Recitation was very much sung. And song approached recitation. What later became differentiated into recitation and song was thoroughly unified. And it was probably the same with the northern peoples. What the northern peoples had was not one-sided singing and one-sided saying, that is, declaiming; but it was the art of declamation that arose from the Nordic way— just as the art of recitation arose from the southern type. It was the art of declamation and the song of the north, which was based on quite different foundations than Greek song, which in turn were a kind of unity. So we are dealing with a differentiation of the arts. And it must be assumed that in the old form, singing, i.e. music, recitation or declamation and rhythmic movement, the art of dance, were connected in a unified way. They sounded together as a unified whole.

This art of dance was then the older form of eurythmy. And it is absolutely — although this can only be recognized with spiritual scientific research methods — it is absolutely, albeit in a somewhat different form, because everything is of course subject to development, as a eurythmic part in the Greek unity of singing and recitation art, this eurythmy. So that this eurythmy is definitely something that was part of musical life in older times. And basically we are not doing anything different today than going back to earlier forms of artistic expression in eurythmy. Except that we naturally have to take into account the fact that the arts have now advanced so much. So that the close connection between singing, recitation and eurythmy, as it certainly still existed in Greece in the time of Aeschylus, cannot exist. We have to take more account of the fact that we have come to a differentiation. Therefore, the forms of eurythmy today must be sought through real inspiration, intuition and imagination.

They are. I have always mentioned this in a certain way before eurythmic performances, in a kind of introduction: one must not imagine that something has simply been taken over from the old eurythmic forms; but what was previously done more instinctively has been raised into consciousness in the sense in which it must be done in our time. And this visible language of eurythmy is directly sensed and received from the spiritual world. For basically all human beings eurhythmy! All of you eurhythmy, namely your ether body. Then, when you speak, you eurhythmy. The secret of speaking consists in the fact that the entire ether body follows the impulses of the vowel and the consonant, the entire arrangement of the sentence formation. Everything that is presented in eurythmy is mirrored in the movements of the etheric body when people speak. And speaking is based only on the fact that what is spread throughout the entire etheric body in movements is concentrated in the physical through the larynx and its neighboring organs. So that he who can see the etheric body of the person speaking perceives speech twice: in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs and in the etheric body as a whole. And when we practise eurythmy, we do nothing other than cause the physical body to perform the movements that the etheric body performs when a person speaks. The only difference is that we naturally have to round off, shape and transform everything that the ordinary human etheric body does into art, into beauty and the like.

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If every person were to practise eurythmy continually, I can assure you that not everyone would be able to do so artistically! The results are not always beautiful, although the process itself can be extremely interesting. And I once saw an extremely interesting group doing eurythmy. It was in Hermannstadt in 1889, and I was traveling from Vienna to Hermannstadt on Christmas Eve. And I had the misfortune of missing the connecting train in Budapest. So I had to take a train that went via Szegedin instead of Debrecen, and I arrived at the Hungarian-Transylvanian border on that Christmas Eve. There, where I had to wait for twelve hours, I met a group of people playing cards. It was, as they say, a motley crew from all the different nationalities that can be found in this corner of the world. Well, I took up the position of an observer. It was not a pleasant position, because the table at which I was to eat my supper looked so tempting that one would have liked to take out one's pocket knife and scrape off the dirt. And similar things could be observed. But I watched. The first player dealt the cards. Now you should have seen the eurythmy that sprang from the eyes of the others! The second played the cards – there were already two of the company lying on the table. Then the third played the cards, and then two more were lying under the table. And when the other cards were played, there was a colorful jumble: a wonderful but not beautiful eurythmy performed by these etheric bodies!

But there is so much to be learned about the human being and human nature by observing such scenes, where the human being's astral body comes into such a terribly angry movement, expressing all passions and then dominating the etheric body. And then there is the screeching of the etheric body when it screams! You can imagine that they shouted in confusion. And it was precisely this shouting that was then expressed in eurythmy. A lot can be studied from this. But when it comes to beautiful eurythmy, these movements must first be rounded off a little, translated into beauty.

But I am drawing your attention to certain processes that must precede the establishment of eurythmy if this eurythmy is not to be something fantastically contrived, but if it is to be what I have always presented in the introductions to the eurythmic performances. And I say such things in particular because it is very often imagined that everything that is presented in spiritual science and the art that is built up out of it is just pulled out of a hat. It is not pulled out of a hat, but is based on very thorough work.

Now this is, at least in essence, what I noted yesterday in relation to these matters.

There is still something about the Chinese scale. What was mentioned yesterday about the Chinese scale is not uninteresting when considered in connection with what I have just spoken about today. I said: the musical fact that takes place in the outer world corresponds to something in the human constitution. And if it is said today that the human being consists of these and these limbs, which interact in this and that way – physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on – then one can say in a certain way: there is also inner music in it, and this inner music corresponds to our outer musical reality.

But things are constantly changing as humanity develops. And a Chinese person is a different kind of human being from a European. A Chinese still has many connections between the physical body and the etheric body, the etheric body and the sentient soul, the sentient soul and the mind or emotional soul, and so on, which have already completely disappeared in European man. This constitution of the Chinese person now corresponds to the Chinese scale. And if one studies music history in such a way, for example, by taking a sensible approach to the development of the scale system, and if one has an understanding of the connection between the inner human organization and the outer musical facts, one can look back from the scales and from many other musical facts to the constitution of the respective human group or race, and so on.

Now, just a moment ago, I was also made aware of a difference of opinion regarding what I meant by delving into the sound yesterday.

I did not mean that tones are still present in the sequence of time, which might resonate together and then be perceived as one tone. This is not meant. Rather, what is meant is that today, in relation to the evolution of humanity, one begins to speak of an organization within the tone, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and going beyond the tone above, in contrast to what was experienced by many people until our world time simply as one tone. to speak of a division, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and, as it were, going beyond the tone above it to another tone. And then, I thought, when you have the actual tones that have been modified by the two neighboring tones that you have actually developed, when you have these three tones, you can express the varied main tone. It is then a slightly different tone. And you will notice that you have to shift one of the newly emerging tones downwards and the other upwards. But when you do that, you don't come across our usual tones, but tones that our current tone systems don't have. And in this way, I believe, an expansion of our tone system will indeed have to come about.

And it is also the case that, in a sense, an opposite process to our present-day tone system has led to it again. Our present-day tone system has also only come about through all kinds of superimpositions of tone sensations. Our tones would not have been immediately understood in certain ages.

I believe that a change is currently taking place in the way we experience sound, and that just as a very specific kind of music is emerging from the sometimes quite grotesque forms of experimentation, something is also announcing itself that wants to get out. For example, I have to say: either I don't understand Debussy at all, or I can only understand him in such a way that he foresaw something of this living into the sound. It is a completely different kind of musical feeling through Debussy than, for example, even in Wagner. Isn't it, you can say that.

So that is what I actually meant, that you find a kind of melody from the individual tone, which you then just spread out in time. But you only get this melody if you have a different tone system. That is what I meant.

There is still another question about Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone. This is, I would say, a somewhat complicated chapter, for Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone has not only one, but two sources, two starting points. From his correspondence with Zelter, we learn a great deal about the way in which Goethe, at his most mature point of view, thought about tone and music. But that actually had two sources. One source was that he had a certain naive musical understanding. He was not exactly diligent in music lessons. This may well be related to the fact that he was not exactly diligent in other subjects either, where the teachers were quite foolish. And, isn't it true that if we are familiar with Goethe's spelling at a certain age of his life, then we know that if someone were to get their hands on a Goethe manuscript from Goethe's archive today, say from around 1775 – so he was well into his twenties – a modern high school teacher would say of such a manuscript: “quite careless,” it would be full of red lines and “quite insufficient” would be written underneath. And so the one source actually shows more of his naive understanding of music than of what he had learned.

But then there is another source of Goethe's theory of sound: his attempt to gain a view, which could be called a general physical view, from his theory of colors. And, isn't it true, this theory of colors is very original and formed with enormous inner diligence and entirely from the matter at hand. But he could not conduct original research in all fields of physics. And so he formed many of his views on the theory of sound by creating analogies to the theory of colors. He sketched out – he only presented everything schematically – and provided schematics for the theory of sound in which he tried to bring the phenomena of music into an analogy with what he experienced in color, in the phenomena of light. That is the second source.

Now, as a third point — which is not a source but a way of looking at the matter — Goethe adds something else, namely that Goethe already had an instinctive feeling for those paths that we are uncovering today as spiritual-scientific paths. In many of Goethe's writings, one finds a remarkable experience that he then expresses in the most diverse ways, sometimes as theoretically as he did in his theory of colors, sometimes analogously theoretically as in his theory of sound, but also in poetry. What was instinctively present in Goethe's subconscious soul in this way lives its way into his works in a remarkable way. In this connection, those of his poems that remained unfinished, such as 'Pandora', are particularly interesting. Had this 'Pandora' been completed, it would have been something written entirely out of the spiritual world. It would have to be truly observed in the spiritual world.

Now, Goethe did not arrive at spiritual insight, but he was completely true inwardly. Therefore, he did not finish the matter, which remained stuck in this way, out of an inner weighing back and forth. And to study this, how Goethe always got stuck in such things, and because he was a true personality, a true nature, then left the matter alone, is one of the most interesting things in Goethe's poetry. It shows how Goethe had a feeling that, I would say, was of a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical nature. And that was the third thing. So that in fact he saw more in the world of sounds in an ingenious way than would actually have corresponded to his learned understanding of music.

But it was precisely this that helped him to overcome his prejudices. Therefore, a certain spiritual-scientific trait also comes into the schematic representation of Goethe's theory of sound. And what is found in these sound theory schemas, for example, about the relationships, the polar relationships between major and minor, can of course be interpreted in the most diverse ways. There is only a scheme, and there is one parallelized with the other, the other parallelized with the one. So of course you have to know Goethe very well if you want to understand how he thought of it himself. But you can see from it that there are ways to be found to get very favorable results. And Goethe's theory of sound could also be inspiring for a physicist in spiritual scientific terms, just as it would be for a musician. For there is certainly an artistic element at work in Goethe's scientific work. And in his scheme for the theory of sound, there is really something that gives a kind of, I would even say score-like impression. There is something musical in it. Just as you can also find something truly musical in the way Goethe's theory of colors is presented.

Finally, read Goethe's theory of colors with regard to its composition, to the sequence of results, to the sequence in the description of the experiments! I recommend that you do so. And then read any standard physics book, that is, the optical chapter of a contemporary physics book, and you will perceive a huge difference. This difference also has a meaning, because the time will come when one will already feel towards the scientific presentation: That which considers, considers more the how. — It is actually only in the way something is presented that the way it is understood is expressed. And it is also one of the saddest achievements of modern times that, in a sense, the less artistically one can write, the worse the style, the better lecturer one becomes, and the more artistically one writes, the worse the lecturer one is. Of course, this is not stated, but the system is set up accordingly. And what has been achieved in terms of barbarisms in scientific stylization in recent times will no doubt be the subject of interesting cultural-historical chapters in the future, the likes of which present-day humanity can hardly imagine. “Scientific barbarism of style in the 19th and 20th centuries” will probably one day fill many pages of future literary works, if there are still oddballs around who write as much about things as the current oddballs write about some things.

But now I believe that I have essentially exhausted the questions. I don't know if this or that has been left out, but you see, not everything can be exhausted at once. These things are only intended to stimulate here. These lectures and exercises are only intended to provide suggestions! I hope that you will not leave here without the feeling of having received such suggestions, after what I hope will be quite some time.

Question: What is the concept of art that is not art at all, actually? What is the essence of art, and how does it differ from art history?

The question is posed in an extraordinarily abstract way and, in my opinion, in an extraordinarily inartistic way, for the simple reason that a statuary of a relationship to art and art science that boils down to a distinction cannot be properly felt in spiritual science.

You see, if you want to understand how the spiritual scientific stimulates artistic comprehension, then you have to have a sense for the difference between the way some aestheticians have written about architecture, sculpture, music and the like. After all, Moriz Carriere was regarded by many people, not only in Munich, as a great esthete, perhaps not for an art historian in your sense, but that does not matter, one could also bring examples from this region. But when Carriere, the esthete, lived in Munich, there also lived a painter. I met one of those, and on a particular occasion, when I had all sorts of things to show him, we also talked about Carriere. And he said: Oh yes, I still remember quite well how we, when we were young painters, young badgers, were completely absorbed in the artistic, talked about Carriere and called him the “aesthetic grunt of delight”.

Now, one may indeed have great respect for the abstract expression of one's thoughts on the artistic; but to demand - after speaking of an artistic conception of art that one must simply feel - that one should now in turn give a definition of the essence of art, I think that is something that does not go quite well. Of course it would be terribly easy to define the essence of art, because it has truly been defined many dozen times in the course of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. And if necessary, one can still imagine what someone who does not think that the artistic can be grasped through the approach of the humanities means by art science. But the point is not to get stuck with certain prejudices that one has once adopted, but to be able to place oneself in the living movement of intellectual life and go along with what is really demanded today from the depths of humanity: a coming together of science, art and religion, not a furthering of the splitting of these three currents of human spiritual life.

Of course, you can still cause offence today if the way you look at art has to take a completely different form from the traditional, conventional approach of some art scholars. But today we are at the point where we have to move forward in the direction that has been indicated here. And that also means that questions such as What is the essence of art? What is the essence of man? - which, according to the definition, will eventually cease altogether. It is a matter of our having to understand more and more what people like Goethe meant when he says in his introduction to the theory of colors: One cannot really speak about the essence of light; colors are the acts of light. And anyone who gives a complete description of the color phenomena also says something about the essence of light. So anyone who addresses the facts of any field, any field of art, in a form that comes close to the experience of that field of art, gradually provides a kind of consideration of the essence of the field of art in question. But this will be overcome altogether, that definitions are placed at the top or somehow without context, that questions are raised: What is the essence of man, what is the essence of art and the like?

We had such a strange case here yesterday; someone said: Wagner - thesis, Bruckner - antithesis, and spiritual science should now be the synthesis. Yes, you see, something like that, placed in a certain place, if, for example, I said something sensible about Wagner, then said something sensible about Bruckner, and then knew how to say something sensible about something traditional, then, so to speak, summarizing the many, I could use the abstract, bloodless concepts: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to summarize. Then it would make sense. But as a single dictum it is impossible. So you have to have a feeling for something when something is an organism,

I will give you an example from another area: Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. The last chapter is about philosophy itself. Yes, what is said there about philosophy itself is said in addition to everything that has gone before. So that one has absorbed everything that has gone before. It is magnificent, a tremendous architectural conclusion. Please, take this last chapter away and take it for yourself, as something like a definition of philosophy – it is pure nonsense. It is pure nonsense! This is what draws attention to the fact that we must again enter into the experience of the whole from the understanding of the individual, how we must gradually rise from the stick we have been trained in, in terms of individual characteristics, to grasping the whole, to overlooking the whole.

And in this sense, I think that it does lead to a kind of understanding when one shows what is happening externally as a musical fact in its other pole in inner experience; and when one then empathizes with what is going on in the person, then I believe that this is indeed a more artistic conception than that of some musicology! And I would like to add that today, for easily understandable reasons, we cannot go far enough. If we had already progressed so far that we could take it all the way to the imaginations and the description of the imaginations, then we might also be able to create something similar to what the Greeks created when they spoke of Apollo's lyre, actually meaning this inner part of the human being as a living musical instrument that reproduces the harmonies and the melos in the cosmos. We are not even yet so far advanced that we can feel what the Greeks felt when they heard the word Cosmos. This word is not connected with some abstraction of a modern scientist, with a certain description of the universe, but with the beauty of the universe, with the harmony of that in the cosmos which is actually connected with the beauty of the universe.

Humanity once proceeded from a kind of interaction of that which is differentiated today. We must indeed be able to experience these differentiations, but we must in turn have the opportunity to see this differentiation together, to hear it resound together, to work ourselves into a living whole, so that what is the result of knowledge also becomes the content of an artistic work and the revelation of a religious experience.

That is what we must strive for again. That which is wisdom can certainly appear in the form of beauty and reveal itself in the form of a religious impulse. Then we will experience something that still belongs to a more distant future: that we ourselves find a synthesis between an altar and a laboratory bench. When we can stand with the reverence for nature with which we should actually stand before it, then science becomes a form of worship for us. And when we as human beings imbibe those skills, that manual dexterity that corresponds to such an understanding of nature and of the spirit and the soul, then all our dealings with science will also flow into beautiful forms.

Today this still seems like a fantasy. But it is a reality! For it is something that must be striven for and realized, lest humanity descend ever deeper into decadence.

A participant asks about the deeper meaning of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, and whether it has something to do with the context of the human constitutional elements. “But of course I am willing to go without the answer today if Dr. Steiner is too tired.”

That is not the reason, my dear Mr. Büttner, but I would like to say the following about it: I once said some things in Berlin and also gave some examples of the way in which spiritual science can be used to understand fairy tales, and I actually had to apply quite a lot of research effort to get to the bottom of fairy tales. Because, you see, I really don't want to be one of those people who live by the saying:

When interpreting, you are fresh and lively;
because if you don't interpret it, you just interpret it.

That was never my principle. Rather, it always took me a great deal of effort to get to the heart of a fairy tale, sometimes in all possible regions of research. And so I have to say: even if I were even more tired than I am today, it would give me the greatest pleasure to be able to make you happy with an interpretation, an explanation of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians. But I have never studied it and therefore have nothing to say about it. And so I ask you to wait until an opportunity presents itself in this or in a next life, after the matter has been researched.

Question: How does spiritual science view the phenomenon of instinctive so-called absolute hearing?

Dr. Steiner has made it very easy for us to experience the spirit of the living in her declamation. Inspired by this, I would like to ask what kind of singing a student should do? I can assure you that in the new way of practising art that has been entrusted to us, for the establishment of a new art of singing, for example, no teacher can really come into consideration as a helper for a male voice that is to be educated. I would therefore also like to ask whether a woman can also work as a trainer.

There doesn't seem to be much homeopathy in the question today! First, yes, that's right, after all, there is not much to be connected or connected to it, other than what is present in any other human ability. It is quite reasonable to assume, although I can only express this with caution here because it is a question that I have not yet dealt with in a truly research-based way, but it is reasonable to assume that this instinctive presence of an absolute sense of tone consciousness in a number of people – I believe in fewer people than one would usually think – is based on some peculiarity of the etheric or astral body, which is then somehow reflected in the physical body. But it would be necessary to conduct very specific research. It is only very likely to me that this absolute sound consciousness is based on the fact that a very specific configuration of the three semi-circular canals is also present in this case. So that is probable – but as I said, I would only like to express myself with caution here – this organ, which has many functions, including, among other things, an organ of equilibrium for certain equilibrium conditions, that this organ probably also has something to do with an absolute sense of tone.

Now to what was said in connection with Dr. Steiner's declamation. I can assure you, the question is indeed asked, but not actually asked in such a way that one finds out something that the questioner actually wants when he asks: What should be taught in singing, how should it be taught, so that what one has in mind in the spiritual-scientific sense by good vocal art can be achieved as quickly as possible? – Yes, I must say that, in my feeling, there is a great deal of philistinism mixed up in this question. Because it is true that one must seriously admit that spiritual science has a certain influence on people, that it has a certain effect on people and that people are not remodeled by spiritual science – they are not worked on from the outside — but that they come into a position to bring out of themselves certain forces that have so far remained latent in the development of humanity and to reveal a deeper human nature through them.

In this way the most diverse branches of human spiritual life will also be further developed. And among the many things that could be said about such a question, one thing can be said by pointing out that, above all, we should get away from talking about all the many methods of teaching singing. I do not like to say this at all, because the localities where these methods are hatched are so terribly populated that one does not know where to stop when expressing one's opinion about present-day methods of teaching singing! I do not want to dwell on this, but I would like to draw attention to one thing.

I believe that one must begin to understand what it means not to work according to a method, not to ask: How must this and that be placed, how must breathing be arranged, how must the many preparations be made before one even gets around to singing anything? Most of today's methods are actually preparation methods, methods of attitudes, methods of breathing and so on. One must disregard all of this, which actually amounts to regarding the human organism a bit like a machine and oiling it in the right way, bringing the wheels to the right axis height and the like. It is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but you get what I mean. Instead of this, one should see that especially in art lessons an enormous amount depends on the personal, imponderable relationship between teacher and pupil, and one should come to associate with it an idea of what it means to actually lift one's consciousness out of the larynx and everything that produces the sound, and to be more consciously in touch with the surrounding air, to sing more with the environment of the larynx than with the larynx itself. I know that many people today cannot yet connect with what is said, but one must just gain these concepts. More emphasis must be placed on how one experiences, I might say, listening back, by singing but hearing, by learning to listen to oneself, but in such a way that one does not do something while listening, as if one were walking and constantly stepping on one's feet; that would, of course, disturb the singing. So when you come to live less in the physiological and more in the artistic as such, and when the teaching also proceeds more in the intervention of the artistic, then you will come upon the path to which the questioner may have been pointed.

However, I do believe that a pedagogy such as we cultivate through the Waldorf School will also gradually achieve success for art and singing lessons if we are given the external means to do so.

What Mr. Baumann meant yesterday with regard to the Waldorf School is also present in eurythmy and in singing, in the musical element. If it is not yet possible to do with the musical and the vocal as it should be according to his ideal, it is truly not due to our education, not at all to our education, at least not to the education of our teachers , but rather it is more a matter of the education of those who, from completely different backgrounds, could perhaps provide appropriately large rooms in which musical instruments can also be properly accommodated, and well-ventilated rooms for eurythmy and the like. I would like to make a point of mentioning this. And I believe that what could already be achieved in Waldorf schools today, including in the field of music and eurythmy teaching, could be quite different if we only had to deal with the pedagogy of our teachers and not with the pedagogy of other things that are necessary when a school is to be founded.

I was asked today – I don't know if the gentleman is here – whether he has a feeling that schools should also be founded in other places. I said that you just have to start at the beginning. If you have money, then we'll talk further!

Well, that is perhaps also something that hits the nail on the head. Or did you mean it differently? I don't want to ascribe to you, Mr. Baumann, that you couldn't have meant it differently.

Paul Baumann: Now the question about male voices,

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it would be a disappointment if I left it out altogether: Can a woman also work as a creator for a male voice? Since I have already said that it essentially depends on the personal imponderable, I would naturally like to extend this to answering this question, and I do believe that under certain circumstances this could even be a very favorable relationship, that this man could even learn a great deal, much more than if he were to be taught by a man – especially if the woman is still beautiful or otherwise intact!

after a lecture by Professor Franz Thomastik on acoustic problems.

If I myself add just a few remarks, it is to point out, as it were, that this matter should not really be discussed at all, but rather that we should continue to work. I believe I am even expressing Dr. Thomastik's own views. It is indeed extremely important for the realization of the ideas that have been presented here to now really come up with the principles according to which the materials for the instruments must be used.

Now there is a certain difficulty because the materials we use for musical instruments are created in such a way that they represent something secondary. We must be clear about the fact that we do not actually perceive the real sound. In one of the last lectures - I think, as you were already there, I said: We actually perceive the sound as it expresses itself, announces itself in the air. And air is not the most suitable medium for sound among earthly elements. Sound would actually only be perceived adequately in its own ether. Among earthly elements, however, one would actually have to get used to perceiving sound in its own essence, if possible in water or in liquid, moist air, because that is where it actually is in reality.

I do not mention this to express a curiosity – reality is sometimes much stranger than one would think – but because the wood from which we build our instruments are taken from plants, because they are really formed from the clayey part of the moisture, both from the moisture of the earth from which the root grows and from the moisture in the air. And in a certain sense, one can see from the external configuration, let us say, of a tree whether the wood is suitable for a low or high pitch. The wood of a tree with more crenate leaves will always be better for a higher tone than the wood of a tree with different leaves (see illustration). This is because the tree is formed out of the tone; it itself produces the tone. And from this the principle will arise, which I have not yet had occasion to work out, but which will certainly be recognized if Dr. Thomastik's interesting explanations can be followed up further. Much will be able to arise from the things that have been stated here in a truly very spirited way, also in the spiritual-scientific sense.

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So we have to say that it is a matter of studying the tree entirely from its origin and studying the structure of the wood, which essentially originates from what the aqueous element, the moist element, contains, which is the actual sound carrier. For example, one way of doing this would be to study the absorbency of the wood in question purely from the perspective of the situation. One wood absorbs more water, the other less. This would already yield something; but it would still be a very rough processing.

I would like to make one more point. It is extremely interesting how Dr. Thomastik has developed, so to speak, an ideal architecture for musical listening. And this is definitely something that can be pursued further. I would just like to draw your attention to one thing. Reality is actually an extremely complicated thing, and it is extremely difficult, I would say, to construct reality from one corner of the world, so to speak. Let us say, for example, that one could ask: Why are our columns over there in our construction made of different types of wood? And one could relate these types of wood to the types of wood from which the instruments are to be built. That would be wrong, because that is not the function of these types of wood; rather, the function of these types of wood consists in something else, which I will discuss in a moment, when I have said something in advance.

You see, it is easy to imagine how to build if you want to create an ideal listening experience. However, the following would still have to be taken into account: even if you were to copy exactly some existing room, such as a concert hall in a particular location with good acoustics, and then move it to a different location, the acoustics might not be the same at all. That remains the case nonetheless. But one could imagine an ideal room built entirely according to acoustic principles.

Now Dr. Thomastik has explained something extremely important, namely how one is disturbed when sitting in the concert hall, and sitting in front of the orchestra. The bassist sweats profusely, struggles, and you have to watch all of this, you have to see the various contortions and the like. You are completely disturbed in your devotion to the sound by what is visually in front of you, and also disturbed by the construction conditions and so on.

But let us imagine a space that is constructed even more from the acoustic, but I don't even want to say from the acoustic, but rather entirely from the musical corner. Yes, such a space cannot be prevented from being seen from the inside when we are sitting in it. We also have to look at it. If we do not at the same time establish the principle that the room is darkened the moment the music begins, then we cannot, since we also have eyes, merely listen. We cannot build it only acoustically, apart from the fact that we would also have to enjoy it before the music begins; otherwise we would also have to enter in the dark. Rooms built purely according to acoustic principles would not be more beautiful to look at than an orchestra is!

So it is necessary not only to construct reality from one corner, but to have an organ for constructing reality from the most diverse corners. And you see, in acoustics, the combination of observation and perception of a much wider range of factors is necessary to bring about such things, whereby a sound is heard in a room that is supposed to be beautiful at the same time in a way that is appropriate because it is not only reflected by the wall on which it falls, but also absorbed. It always penetrates a certain distance and is only then reflected back. The sense of material is there when you hear the sound in a certain space that has walls made of a certain material. And so, in order to evoke these possibilities of reflection, you have to look at various things together. And the seven different types of wood for the columns were chosen with this in mind. They are there specifically to serve the acoustics, that is, the acoustics that are produced by reflection.

And so it is with many other things. For example, the double dome in the building over there, which provides a soundboard, is constructed from such points of view, as well as possible.

Well, of course, there are other things to consider, especially the fact that you can't always go to the place where the acoustics can be achieved in the simplest way. A lot can be achieved by intuitive observation.

And the organ sunk into the earth is an extraordinarily ingenious idea! But it would present a certain difficulty, because the pipes' relative neutrality with respect to the external air would end at the moment we actually sank the organ into the earth. It would sound quite different in winter than in summer; it would have to be treated and tuned quite differently in winter than in summer. Above all, winter and summer would become intensely noticeable. And many other things come into consideration. So a whole series of extraordinarily difficult problems arise that cannot be solved from the perspective of acoustics alone, or even from the perspective of music alone.

Dr. Thomastik made an extremely interesting comment. It was that Vienna was actually the meeting place for all great musicians, and that these musicians were loyal to Vienna, had a lot in Vienna, even though they were not exactly living in clover there! I will tell you a simple thing that will show you that Vienna was supposed to be a gathering place for certain people. You can study the geological conditions in Europe by going over wide areas, of course this is to be understood cum grano salis, but that is a very small granum: the Vienna Basin, simply the ground on which Vienna stands, and the surrounding area, contains so much of the confluence of all European geological conditions that almost all of European geology can be studied in the Vienna Basin. Now, if you have any idea of what that means, how intimately everything in the spiritual realm is connected with the soil, if you consider what it means that Vienna is actually a compendium of all European soil conditions in Vienna, and if you consider that the substantial as such, the relationships of the substances to each other are actually the scale - no, chemical equivalent weights are actually tone relationships (gap in the transcript) - if you consider all this, you will see that, inwardly, one really does hit the mark based on cosmic relationships when one says that Vienna also has a spiritual and intellectual milieu in which musical geniuses in particular feel at home and are pleasantly touched.

It is also interesting to note that Graz is an unmusical city. Well, I think one need only go over the Murbrücke and listen to the unpleasant rushing of the Mur, in contrast to other rivers, and one will see that nature, in the flowing of the Mur, behaves in an extraordinarily offensive musical way. Isn't that so? It has an enormously unpleasant, especially in the rushing, unpleasant gradient! But that is also due to the very special configuration there. How much more musical it is when, let's say, you take the north-west train towards Vienna! The entire ground structure is already musical there. The mountains and everything are arranged musically. Graz may have many lovers, but the entire Alpine world, including the ground structure, is unmusically placed.

So, if you go beyond the purely musical, then extremely far-reaching problems are suggested. And I would actually like to regard this as a particularly favorable success for Dr. Thomastik's very valuable discussion today, if you, my dear friends, were to suggest as many such problems as possible.

I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that it is truly extraordinarily significant that musical instruments basically arose out of the traditions of the fourth post-Atlantean period. And as the fifth post-Atlantean period is emerging, musical instruments are entering a period of decadence. This is connected with the entire evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period. And basically, this fifth post-Atlantic period is actually an unmusical one. The intellectual and the theoretical, which arose particularly in the 19th century, is something thoroughly unmusical. And it is connected with the whole inner character of the fifth post-Atlantic period that musical instruments have fallen into decadence. And of course it is not that easy to restore them to their former glory. Because – Dr. Thomastik will agree with me – if the demand were to arise for an organ builder to build an organ for him today that meets his ideals, we would have to wait until the next incarnation. I don't think that an organ builder today builds the kind of things that Dr. Thomastik mentioned in his interesting presentation. Dr. Thomastik does use a very beautiful comparison: if musical instruments were placed in the hands of a manufacturer, it would be like placing paints in the hands of a manufacturer. But that is the ideal of today's painters; they get their paints from the manufacturer, they no longer make their own paints. They become more and more dependent on the paint manufacturer, just as musicians have become dependent on organ builders, violin makers, and so on.

Now, from the point of view of spiritual development, it is therefore of very special importance that efforts such as those with this newly built violin emerge. Because the whole question of musical instruments is set in motion as a result. It actually serves the purpose we are seeking from our point of view: to combat the phenomena of decadence, which are so significant in all fields. And from this point of view, one would like to wish such work as that with this violin a really great success. Because this success is entirely in line with our humanistic endeavors.

These are just a few comments on the interesting lecture.

after a lecture by Leopold van der Pals

I would just like to say this: Mr van der Pals has rightly pointed out that, in something like the Chinese legend of the 'Moon Violin', there is no mention of the human being. And I believe he meant, didn't he, that this is something particularly striking, that the human being is thrown out of the human being's own being placed in the whole cosmos, in the musical sense. - This is connected with the inner meaning that such a legend has in oriental literature, including Chinese literature. In a certain sense, the human being is part of it: and what is meant is always a deeply felt, one could say for older times, instinctively clairvoyant knowing of the human being as being together with the whole cosmos.

In Chinese, there is a particularly deep awareness of the connection between the human head and the upper spheres, between the human rhythmic system, the lung-heart system and what is earth, in which man participates by breathing, in that the breath itself sets his rhythmic system in motion. And then it is the human being as a whole, in whom one senses that he is something new within the evolution of the earth, and cannot yet be directly related to anything cosmic, such as his head as a part or his chest organs as parts, but the relationship of the whole human being to the cosmos remains somewhat indeterminate.

But what remains indeterminate in the human being was called the moon in the human being. And there was a fundamental, if instinctive, awareness that what is, so to speak, the third link in a three-part human being is moon-like. This is also the basis of all spiritual scientific conceptions of the human being (see drawing, moon).

Now, we distinguish from this moon-like element that which, as it were, arises out of the entire rhythmic system, which, as it were, floats on the rhythmic system and represents the result of the rhythmic system. This is then the sun-like element (see drawing, sun). This would then have to be found mainly concentrated in the human heart.

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These two limbs of the human being are, as it were, located at the front in human nature. The solar aspect is that which he has not yet fully developed, not in the sense of the old planet, as my “Occult Science in Outline” suggests, but of the present sun shining in the sky.

In addition, there is that in man which is related to the rhythmic system: what is the structure of his nervous system, and what is related to the other planets. So that one has, for example, at the very top of the head, in relation to the entire nervous system, the central nervous system, Saturn (see drawing), that which then lies more towards the sense organs, towards the eyes: Jupiter, that which underlies the speech organs, the singing organs: Mars, that which leads more to the sympathetic nervous system: Venus and Mercury. So one would have the overall nature of the human being, as it came across from the moon, as that which underlies it. And one would have to distinguish five connecting lines that go back to the five planets:

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This would give us the inner organisation of the human being in the sense of an ideal, but very real, musical instrument within the human being.

This musical instrument would, as it were, be built up out of the moon-nature of the human being. And, as you know, in all older views of the human being, it is represented under the image of a tree or a plant. You only need to think of the world ash tree. This view goes back a long way. So you just need to imagine: the five stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, they descend on the human tree and stretch the lyre on it, so that it becomes a musical instrument. Above it all, descending from the spiritual universe, hovers the tuner of this instrument: the bird Phoenix, the immortal human soul.

This Chinese legend does indeed have a very significant meaning. And the reason why the human being stays away is because he is the music itself, because the legend does not talk about what is the main thing. It speaks of the parts that make up the entire musical instrument. It is a bit like when someone builds a violin and talks about the wood, the strings, the bridge, but not about the violin itself. In the same way, this Chinese legend speaks of nothing other than the human being, the becoming of these five stars, of the immortal soul; but precisely because the whole of which it is composed actually points to the human being, the human being is absent. It is this deep awareness of the connection between the actual music and human nature itself that underlies it.

That is why Mr. van der Pals was quite right when he said: anyone looking for the origin of melody is actually going completely astray if they try to find it in the present day. — He who would seek it would have to go back to the sacred scriptures and further and further back, and he would never come to the end of his research, because the melodies are really something that belongs to the ancient stock of an entire human cultural development.

One should actually say: it was not only that it arose from a truly deep feeling that someone like Nietzsche wrote as his first work: “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”, but – even if what what Mr. van der Pals said, that the art of music, as we understand it today, only really emerged at the end of the Middle Ages – musicality as such goes back very deep into the origin of humanity. And one could also say something along the lines of: the origin of all human spiritual life from the musical element. For anyone who has the right feeling for a small child would always want to say: the small child is actually born as a musical instrument. And the musicality of children is based on this primal connection of the melodious element with the human being.

But, as I said, to go into these things in detail today would truly be going too far. I just wanted to point it out. And the expression “moon violin” is also thoroughly justified, grounded in the whole view, for it is precisely the lunar nature of the human being that is appealed to here when one speaks of the fact that the moon violin is being built.

This is the 9th of 12 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities from 1906 to 1923. The series of lectures is entitled: The Essence of Music and the Experience of Tone. Another name of this lecture is: Human Expression through Tone and Word.

I have already pointed out in recent lectures how certain functions or activities of the human being, which emerge in early childhood, are in reality a metamorphosis of activities which belong to man between death and a new birth, i.e. in his pre-earthly life. At birth the child is not yet fully adapted to the earthly gravitation, the earthly conditions of equilibrium. We see the child slowly and gradually adapt himself to these earthly conditions as he learns to stand and walk. Thus the adaptation of the body to the position of equilibrium for earthly life is a faculty which man does not bring with him. He must acquire it during his earthly life.

Now we know that the physical body of man in all its form is the result of a mighty spiritual activity—an activity which man performs in unison with Beings of the Higher Worlds between death and a new birth. Yet that which man forms and creates in this activity—we may call it in a sense the spiritual germ of his future physical earthly body—is not so formed as already to contain the faculty of upright gait and posture. This faculty is only incorporated in man's nature when, after his birth, he gradually finds his way into the conditions of equilibrium, into the forces of earthly existence. For in the pre-earthly life, balance or equilibrium is not the same as it is on earth, where it signifies the power to walk and stand. In the pre-earthly life, balance and equilibrium signify the relation man has to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so forth—to the Beings of the Hierarchies—a relation manifold and differentiated according as one feels oneself drawn more towards one Being or more towards another. This constitutes the state of equilibrium in the spiritual worlds. And this, man loses in a certain sense when he descends on to the earth. In the mother's womb he is neither in the conditions of equilibrium of his spiritual existence, nor is he yet in the conditions of equilibrium of his earthly life. He has left the former and has not yet entered into the latter.

It is similar in the case of speech. The language which we speak here on earth is, of course, essentially adapted to earthly conditions. In the first place it is an expression of our earthly thoughts. These earthly thoughts contain earthly information and earthly knowledge; and to all this our speech or language is adapted during our life on earth. But in the pre-earthly life as I have already explained, man has a very different language—one which does not go from within outwards, which does not mainly follow the out-breathing process, but the spiritual in-breathing or inspiration (which we observe to correspond to breathing in the pre-earthly life). Thus in pre-earthly existence, man's language is a living with the cosmic Logos; it is a living within the cosmic Word—the cosmic language from out of which all things of the world are made.

This too we lose when we descend on to the earth. We lose the life within the cosmic language, and acquire here on earth the language which serves us in the first place to express our thoughts—our earthly thoughts. This earthly language serves our mutual understanding—understanding as between human beings, all of whom are living on the earth.

And so it is with our thoughts themselves—our earthly thinking. Here on earth, our thinking is gradually adapted to the earthly conditions. In pre-earthly existence on the other hand, our thought is a living within the creative thoughts of the Cosmos.

Walking, Speaking and Thinking:—let us now consider, of these three, the middle member—human speech. We may indeed say that in speech there lies a most essential element of all earthly culture and civilisation. By speech, human beings come together here on earth, and one man finds the way to another. Bridging the gulf that lies between, soul meets with soul through speech. We feel that we have in speech something essential to our nature here on earth. And indeed our speech is the earthly reflection of our life in the Logos, in the cosmic Word. Thus it is particularly interesting to understand the connection of what man attains by great efforts here on earth, as speech and language, with the metamorphosis of speech and language yonder in the pre-earthly life. Indeed, when we study this relationship, we are led to perceive how the human being is inwardly constructed and organised out of the very element of spoken sound and music. And it is a happy coincidence at the present moment that in the cosmological studies we have pursued for some weeks, I can to-day insert the chapter on the expression of the human being through the words of speech and the sounds of song. It is our great pleasure in these days to be having so excellent a performance of song, here in our Goetheanum building.¹ Allow me therefore to-day, if I may say so, to express my personal gratitude for this happy artistic event in our midst, by telling you a little of the connection between the speech and song of man here on earth, and his life in that element which corresponds to the Sound in speech and song, in the spiritual world.

If we study the human organism as it stands before us here on earth, we know that it is through and through an image of the spiritual. Everything here—not only what man bears in himself, but also what surrounds him in external nature—is an image of the spiritual. Now when man expresses himself in speech or in song, he is really manifesting his whole nature—body, soul and spirit—not only outwardly but inwardly. In all that he brings forth by way of sound—whether the articulate sounds of speech or the musical notes of song—the full human being is in fact contained. How deeply and fully he is contained, we only begin to see when we understand more in detail what the human being is in that he speaks or sings.

Let us take our start from speech. In the historic evolution of mankind, speech, as we know, proceeded from something which originally was song. The farther we go back into pre-historic ages, the more does speech become recitative and eventually song. In distant ages of human evolution upon earth, the expression of the human being through sound was not really differentiated into song and speech, but these two were one. What is so often referred to as the primeval language of man was such that we might as well speak of it as a primeval song.

But we will now study speech in its present condition, where it has become very far removed from the pure element of song, and is steeped in the prosaic and intellectual quality. If we take speech as we have it to-day, we find in it two essential elements—consonant and vowel, All that we bring forth in speech is composed of a consonantal and of a vowel element. Now, the consonantal element is in reality entirely based upon the finer plastic structure of our body. Whether we pronounce a B or a P, an L or an M, in each case it rests upon the fact that something or other in our body has a certain plastic form. Nor is this confined by any means to the organs of speech and song alone. These organs only represent the highest culmination of what is here meant. For when the human being brings forth a musical note in song or an articulate sound in speech, his whole body really takes part in the process. The process that goes on in the organ of speech or song is but the final culmination of something that is taking place through the whole human being. Our human body therefore, as to its plastic form and structure, may really be conceived as follows. We take all the consonants there are in any language. They are always variations of twelve primary consonants, and indeed in the Finnish language you still find these twelve preserved very nearly in their pure, original nature; eleven are quite distinct, only the twelfth has grown a little indistinct, but it, too, is still present. Now, these twelve original consonants when rightly understood (and each of them can at the same time be conceived as a form), these twelve consonants taken together really represent the entire plastic structure of the human body. We may say therefore, without speaking figuratively in the least:—the human being is plastically expressed by the twelve primeval consonants.

What then is this human body? From the point of view—the musical point of view—we are now taking, the human body is nothing else than a great musical instrument. Even the external musical instruments—the violin or any other instrument of music—even these you can best understand by somehow perceiving in their form and shape a consonant or consonants. You must see them, as it were, built up out of the consonants. When we refer to the consonant element in speech, there must always be something in our feeling reminiscent of musical instruments; and the totality, the harmony of all consonants, represents the plastic sculpture of the human body.

And the vowel element—in this we have the soul which plays upon the instrument. The soul provides the vowel nature. Thus when you embody in speech the consonant and vowel elements, you have in every manifestation of speech or of song a self-expression of the human being. The soul of the human being plays in vowels upon the consonants of the musical instrument—the human body.

Now if, as I said, we are considering the speech that forms a part of present-day civilisation, we find that our soul, whenever it brings forth vowel sounds, makes use to a very great extent of the brain, the system of head and nerves. In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case to the same degree.

Let us consider for a minute the system of head and nerves. The whole structure of the head is permeated by forces which run along the nerve-strands. Now the activity which the nerve-strands here develop is entered and permeated by another activity, namely that which comes about through our breathing-in the air. The air which we breathe in passes through the spinal canal right up into the head, and the impact of the breathing beats in unison with the movements that are executed along the nerve-strands. Pressing upward to the head through the spinal canal, the current of the breath is perpetually meeting with the activity of the nerves in the head. We have not a separate nervous activity, and a separate breathing activity; we have in the head a harmony and mutual resonance of breathing activity and nervous activity. Now the man of to-day, having grown prosaic in his ordinary life, sets more store by the nerve forces than by the breathing impulses. He makes more use of his nervous system when he speaks; he permeates with nerve, if we might put it so, the instrument which through its consonantal nature shapes and forms the vowel currents.

In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case. Man lived not so much in his nervous system; he lived in the breathing system. Hence the primeval language was more like song. Now when the man of to-day sings, he takes what he does in speech—where he permeates it with the nervous activity of the nervous system—and restores it to the current of the breath. He consciously calls into activity this second stream—the breathing. It is the continuation of the breathing into the head which is directly called into activity when, as in song, the uttering of the vowel is added to the bringing forth of the note. But here in song man does not leave the element of breath; he takes back his now prosaic language into the poetic and artistic nature of the rhythmic breathing process. The poet of to-day still strives to maintain the rhythm of the breath itself in the way he shapes and moulds the language of his poems. And he who writes for song takes it all back again into the breathing process (including the breathing process of the head). Thus we may say, the very process which man must undergo here on earth, in that he adapts his language to earthly conditions, is reversed in a certain sense when we pass from speech to song. Song is indeed a. real recollection—though by earthly means—of that which we experienced in the pre-earthly life. For in our rhythmic system we are far nearer to the spiritual world than in our thinking system. And it is of course the thinking system which takes hold of speech when speech becomes prosaic.

When we utter the vowel sounds, we press what is living in our soul down into the body; and the body, by adding the consonantal element, does but provide the musical instrument for our soul to use. You will certainly have the feeling that in every vowel there is something of the soul, immediate and living. The vowel can be taken by itself. The consonant on the other hand is perpetually longing for the vowel, tending towards it. The plastic instrument of the body is in fact a dead thing until the vowel nature—the soul—strikes its chords.

You can see this in detailed examples. Take for instance, in certain dialects of Middle Europe, the word mir as in the phrase Es geht mir gut. When I was a little boy, I simply could not conceive that the word should be written as it is. I always wrote it mia; for in the r the longing towards the a is quite inherent. Thus when we perceive the human organism as the harmony of all consonants, we find in it everywhere the longing for the vowel nature, that is to say for the soul. Now we are driven to ask, what is the origin of all these things?

This human body, in the whole arrangement of its plastic structure here on earth, has to adapt itself to the earthly conditions. It is shaped as it is, because the earthly position of equilibrium and the whole system of the earthly forces would not allow it to be otherwise. And yet all the time it is shaped out of the spiritual world. This matter can be understood only by deeper spiritual-scientific research. The soul-nature, manifesting itself through the vowels, strikes upon the consonantal nature, which is plastically shaped and formed in accordance with earthly conditions.

If we lift ourselves into the spiritual world, in the way I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, we first attain Imagination or Imaginative Cognition, as I have often told you. Now when we reach this point, we find that we have lost the consonants. We still possess the vowels, but the consonants—to begin with at any rate—are lost. In the Imaginative condition, we have in effect lost our physical body—i.e. we have lost the consonants. In the Imaginative world, the consonants no longer appeal to us. To describe what we have in that world adequately in spoken words, our words would have to consist, to begin with, of vowels only.

We have lost the instrument, and we enter a pure world of sound, where the vowels are indeed coloured and shaded in manifold variety, but all the consonants of earth are in effect dissolved away in the vowels.

You will therefore find that in those languages which were not yet so far removed from the primeval, the things of the super-sensible world were named in words consisting of vowels only. The word Jahve for example did not contain our present form of J or V. It consisted only of vowels, and was half-scanned, half-sung. We enter here into a vowel-language which it is only natural to sing. And when we reach from Imaginative to Inspired Cognition—when therefore we receive the direct manifestations of the spiritual world—then all the consonants we have on earth are changed into something quite different. The consonants, as such, we lose. But in place of it, a new thing comes forth in the spiritual perception which comes to us in Inspiration. And this new thing we find to be none other than the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.

But the spiritual counterparts of the consonants are not there between the vowels; they live in them. In your speech here on earth you have the consonants and vowels side by side. You lose the consonants as you ascend into the spiritual world. You live your way into a vowel world of song. To put it truly one must say, “It sings,” for you yourself no longer sing. The World itself becomes cosmic song. But all this vowel world is variedly coloured or shaded in a spiritual sense. In effect, there is something living in the vowels—namely the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.

Here on earth we have the vowel sound A for example, and—if you will the note C sharp in a certain octave. But when we reach the spiritual world, we do not have one A, or one C sharp in a given octave, but countless ones differing in inner quality. For it is another thing, whether a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi speaks A to one, or a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, or some other Being. Outwardly the manifestation is the same, but it is filled in each case with a different inner soul.

We may say therefore:—Here on earth we have our body. The vowel sound strikes into it. Yonder in the spiritual world we have the vowel sound; and the soul strikes into it, and lives in it, so that the sound becomes the body for the soul. You are immersed in cosmic music, cosmic song; you are within the creative sound—within the creative Word.

Let us now consider sound as it is on earth, including spoken sound. Sound has its earthly life in the element of air. It is, however, but a childish conception of Physics to believe that the peculiar forms in the air are the reality of sound. It is really childish. Imagine, for a moment, you have a piece of ground, and on it stands a man. The ground is most certainly not the man, yet the ground must be there for the man to stand on. Without it, the man himself could not be there. It will not therefore occur to you to seek to understand the man by examining the soil beneath his feet.

In the same way the air must be there for the sound to have a basis of support. Just as man stands on the soil—only in a rather more complicated way the sound has its “soil,” its necessary basis or resistance in the air. For the sound itself, the air signifies no more than does the soil for the man who stands on it. The sound presses forward to the air, and the air gives it the possibility to stand. But the sound itself is spiritual. Just as the man is different from the earthly soil on which he stands, so, is the sound different from the air upon which it stands—in which it finds its support though of course in a more complicated way, in a manifold and varied way.

Through the fact that we on earth can only speak and sing by means of the air, we have in the airy forming of the sound the earthly image of a thing of soul and spirit. The soul-and-spirit of sound belongs to the super-sensible world, and that which dwells here in the air is fundamentally the body of the sound. We need not therefore be surprised if we find the sound again in the spiritual world, though shorn of that which comes from the earthly—the earthly consonant-articulation. The vowel only is carried over there. The sound as such in its spiritual content goes with us when we rise into the spiritual world, only there it becomes filled with soul. Instead of being shaped and moulded outwardly by the nature of the consonants, the sound is inwardly ensouled.

Now all this runs parallel with man's entry into the spiritual world in the widest sense. Think for a moment, my dear friends, man passes through the gate of death. The consonants he soon leaves behind, but the vowels—and especially the manifold intonations of the vowels—these he experiences all the more strongly, only with this difference. He no longer feels the sound proceeding from his own larynx, but he feels that there is singing all around him, and that in every sound of the song, he himself is living. It is so in the very first days after man passes through the gate of death. He is dwelling in a musical element, which is at the same time an element of speech; and this musical element reveals ever more and more as it becomes filled with living soul from the spiritual world.

Now, as I have told you, man's going forth into the Universe after he has passed through the gate of death is at the same time a passing from the earthly world into the world of the stars.

When we describe such a thing as this, we seem to be speaking in images, but our images none the less are reality. Imagine here the Earth. Around it are the planets, then the heavens of the fixed stars, conceived from time immemorial—and rightly so—as the Animal Circle or Zodiac. Man standing on the Earth sees the planets and the fixed stars in their shadowed radiance. He sees them from the Earth—or, shall we say, with due respect to earthly man, he sees them “from in front?” (The Old Testament, as you know, expressed it differently.) After death, when man goes farther and farther from the earth, he gradually comes to see the planets as well as the fixed stars “from behind.” But there he does not see these points of light or surfaces of light which are seen from the earth. Rather does he see the spiritual—the corresponding spiritual Beings. On all sides it is a world of spiritual Beings. Wherever he looks back, whether it be towards Saturn, Sun or Moon, or towards Aries, Taurus and the other constellations, he sees from yonder side the spiritual Beings.

But this seeing is at the same time a hearing; and when he says:—Man sees from the other side—or from behind—Moon, Venus, Aries, Taurus and so forth, we might equally well express it thus:—Man hears the Beings, who have their dwelling in these heavenly bodies, resounding forth into the cosmic spaces.

Try to imagine it in its totality. (It really looks as though we were speaking figuratively, but we are not, it is absolutely real.) Imagine yourself out there in the Cosmos—the planetary world farther from you now, the Zodiac with its twelve constellations nearer. From all the heavenly bodies it is singing, speaking as it sings to you, singing as it speaks; and all your perception is a listening to the speaking song, the singing speech of the World. You look out in the direction of Aries, and as you do so, receive the impression of a consonant soul-nature. Behind Aries maybe, is Saturn, a vowel element of soul. And in this vowel element as it radiates out into the cosmic space from Saturn—in it there dwells the soul-and-spirit Consonant:—Aries, or in another instance, Taurus. Thus you have the planetary sphere singing to you in vowels—singing forth into the cosmic spaces; and the fixed stars permeate the song of the planetary sphere with soul from the consonants. Picture it to yourselves as vividly as you can:—the sphere of the fixed stars at rest, and behind it the wandering planets. Whenever a planet in its course passes a constellation of the fixed stars, there bursts forth not a single note, but a whole world of sound. Then as the planet passes on from Aries to Taurus, a different world of sound rings forth. But behind it there follows, let us say, another planet:—Mars. Mars passing through the constellation of Taurus, causes a different world of sounds to ring forth once more. Thus you have in the heavens of the fixed stars, or the Zodiac, a wondrous cosmic instrument of music, while from behind it our planetary Gods are playing upon this instrument.

We may truly say, my dear friends, when man down here on earth takes back his speech (which is now formed for his earthly needs, just as his walking is transformed, for earthly needs, from his spiritual power of orientation in the Cosmos)—when therefore man takes speech back again into the element of song, he really inclines himself to that cosmic pre-earthly existence from out of which he is born for earthly life. And indeed, all Art comes before man in this sense. It is as though, whenever he expresses himself in Art, he were to say, “’Tis human destiny—and rightly so that man as he begins his earthly course of life is placed into the midst of earthly conditions and must adapt himself to these. But in Art he goes back again a little step, leaves the earthly life to take its course around him, and retreating for a moment approaches once more the world of Soul and Spirit—the pre-earthly life from which he has come forth.”

We do not understand Art, my dear friends, unless we feel in it the longing to experience the Spiritual—though it be but manifested, to begin with, in a world of beautiful semblance. Our creative fancy, whereby we develop all artistic things, is at bottom nothing else than the power of clairvoyance in an earthly form. We are tempted to say:—As sound dwells on earth in the element of air, so it is with the nature of the soul itself. That which is truly spiritual in the pre-earthly life has its earthly dwelling in the image of the spiritual. For when man speaks, he makes use of his whole body. The consonant nature becomes in him the plastic sculpture of the human frame, and the Soul makes use of the current of the breath which does not enter into solid form, to play upon this plastic instrument of music and now, in a twofold way we can turn once more to the Divine, what we thus are as human beings speaking upon earth.

Take the consonantal human frame. Suppose we loosen it as it were from the solid form wherein the earthly forces—gravity and the like—or the chemical forces in the foodstuffs have enchained it. Suppose we liberate the consonant nature that permeates the human being for so we may now describe it. When we place a lung on the dissection table we find chemical substances in it, which we can investigate by chemical methods. But this is not the lung. What is the lung? It is a consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos, which has taken plastic form. The heart, if we lay it on the dissection table, consists of cells which we can investigate chemically and find the substances composing it. But this is not the heart. The heart again is a consonant—another consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos. And if we conceive the whole twelve consonants, cosmically spoken and resounding forth, we have in all essentials the human bodily frame.

Thus as we look to the consonants, if we have the necessary clairvoyant power of imagination to see them in their real connection, there arises before us the human body in its plastic shape. If then we take the consonants out of the human being, we have the Art of Sculpture. If on the other hand we take the breath, which the soul uses to play upon the bodily instrument in song—if we take the vowel nature out of the human being, there arises the musical art, the Art of Song.

Once more:—Take the Consonant-nature out of the human being, and there arises Form, which you must mould in plastic art. Take the Vowel-nature out of the human being, and there arises Song—Music, which you must sing. Man as he stands before us here on earth proceeds out of the two Cosmic Arts—a Cosmic Art of Sculpture from the one side, and a cosmic Art of Song or Music from the other. Two kinds of spiritual Beings join their activity together. The one provides the instrument, the other plays upon it; the one forms and moulds the instrument, the other plays upon it.

Can we wonder that in olden time, when things like these were felt, it was said of the greatest of all artists, Orpheus, that his command over the soul was such that he was able, not only to use the ready-moulded human body as an instrument, but to cast even amorphous matter into plastic forms—forms which correspond to the notes of his music.

My dear friends! You will understand that when we describe such things as these we must depart a little in our use of words from what is usual in this prosaic age. Nevertheless what I have said is not intended in a figurative or symbolic but in a most real sense. These things are indeed such as I have described them, albeit to describe them we must sometimes bring our language into greater flow and movement than is customary in its use to-day.

• 1. Song-Recital by Frau Werbeck-Svärdstrom and her sisters.

A thought that may often arise in connection with this building is that of our responsibility to the sacrifices which friends have made for its sake. Those who know how great these sacrifices have been, will realise that the only fit response is a strong sense of responsibility, for the goal at which we must aim is the actual fulfilment of the hopes resting in this building. Anyone who has seen even a single detail—not to speak of the whole structure, for no conception of that is possible yet—will realise that this building represents many deviations from other architectural styles that have hitherto arisen in the evolution of humanity and have been justified in the jugdment of man. An undertaking like this can of course only be justified if the goal is in some measure attained. In comparison to what might be, we shall only be able to achieve a small, perhaps insignificant beginning. Yet, may be, this small beginning will reveal the lines along which a spiritual transformation of artistic style must come about in the wider future of humanity. We must realise that when the building is once there, all kind of objections will be made, especially by so-called ‘experts,’ that it is not convincing, perhaps even dilettante. This will not disconcert us, for it lies in the nature of things that ‘expert’ opinion is least of all right when anything claiming to be new is placed before the world. We shall not, however, be depressed by derogatory criticism that may be levelled at our idea of artistic creation, if we realise, as a compensation for our sense of responsibility, that in our age, the origin of the Arts and of their particular forms and motifs is greatly misunderstood by technical experts. And then, gradually, we shall understand that all we are striving to attain in this building stands much closer to primordial forces of artistic endeavour which are revealed when the eye of the Spirit is directed to the origin of the Arts, than do the conceptions of art claiming to be authoritative at the present time. There is now little understanding of what was once implied by the phrase “true artistic conception.” It need not therefore astonish us if a building like ours, which strives to be in harmony with primordial Will and in accordance with the origin of the arts, is not well or kindly received by those who adhere to the direction and tendency of the present age.

In order to bring home these thoughts to you, I should like to start to-day by considering a well-known motif in art—that of the so-called acanthus leaf—showing the sense in which our aims are in harmony with the artistic endeavours of humanity as expressed in the origin of this acanthus leaf as a decorative motif. Now because our endeavours are separated by many hundreds, nay even thousands of years, from the first appearance of this acanthus motif, they must naturally take a very different form from anything that existed in the days when, for instance, the acanthus leaf was introduced into the Corinthian capital.

If I may be permitted a brief personal reference here, let me say that my own student days in Vienna were passed during the time when the buildings which have given that city its present stamp, were completed—the Parliament Buildings, the Town Hall, the Votivkirche and the Burgtheatre. The famous architects of these buildings were still living: Hanson who revived Greek architecture, Schmidt who elaborated Gothic styles with great originality, Ferstel who built the Votivkirche. It is perhaps not known to you that the Burgtheatre in Vienna was built according to the designs of an artist who in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the leading influence in artistic appreciation and development of form in architecture and sculpture. The Burgtheatre was built according to the designs of the great Architect, Gottfried Semper.

At the Grammar School I myself had as a teacher a gifted admirer and disciple of Gottfried Semper, in the person of Josef Baier, so that I was able to live, as it were, in the whole conception of the world of architectural, sculptural and decorative form as inaugurated by the great Semper.

Now, in spite of all the genius that was at work, here was something that well-nigh drove one to despair in the whole atmosphere of the current conceptions of the historical development of art, on the one side, and of the way to artistic creation on the other. Gottfried Semper was undoubtedly a highly gifted being, but in those days the usual conception of man and the universe was an outcome of the materialistic interpretation of Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution was also apparent in the current ideas of art. Again and again this materialistic element crept into the conceptions of art. It was, above all, considered necessary to possess a knowledge of the technique of weaving and interlacing. Architectural forms were derived in the first place from the way in which substances were woven together, or fences constructed so that the single canes might interpenetrate and hold together. In short, people were saturated with the principle that decoration and ornamentation were forms of external technique. This subject of course might be further elaborated, but I only want to indicate the general tendency which was asserting itself at that time—namely, the tendency to lead everything artistic back to external technique. The standpoint had really become one of ultilitarianism and the artistic element was considered to be an outcome of the use to which things were put. All treatises on the subject of art, and especially on decoration, invariably made mention of the special idiosyncrasies of the different technical experts. This of course was a stream running parallel to the great flood of materialistic conceptions that swept over the 19th century, chief among them being the materialistic conception of art. The extent to which materialism asserted itself in all spheres of life during the second half of the 19th century was enough to drive one to despair. Indeed I still remember how many sleepless nights I had at that time over the Corinthian capital. Now the main feature, the principal decoration of the Corinthian capital—although in the days of which I am speaking it was almost forbidden to speak of such a thing as ‘decoration’—is the acanthus leaf. What could be more obvious than to infer that the acanthus leaf, on the Corinthian capital was simply the result of a naturalistic imitation of the leaf of the common acanthus plant? Now anyone with true artistic feelings finds it very difficult to conceive that a beginning was somewhere made by man taking a leaf of a weed, an acanthus leaf, working it out plastically and adding it to the Corinthian column. Let us think for a moment of the form of the acanthus leaf.

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The basis of all artistic creation is a consciousness that comes to a standstill before the portals of the historical evolution of humanity as depicted by external documents. A certain consciousness that was once active in man, a remnant of the old clairvoyance, belonged to the fourth Post-Atlantean period, the Graeco-Roman. Although Egyptian culture belongs to the third Post-Atlantean epoch, all that was expressed in Egyptian art belongs to the fourth epoch. In the fourth epoch this consciousness gave rise to such intense inner feeling in men that they perceived how the movement, bearing and gestures of the human being, nay even the human form itself, develop outwards into the physical and etheric. You will understand me if you realise that in those times, when there was a true conception of artistic aim, the mere sight of a flower or a tendril was of much less importance than the feeling: ‘I have to carry something heavy; I bend my back and generate with my own form the forces which make me, as a human being, able to bear the weight.’ Men felt within themselves what they must bring to expression in their own postures. This was the sense in which they made movements when it was a question of taking hold of something or of carrying something in the hand. They were conscious of a sense of carrying, of weight, where it was necessary to spread the hands and finger outwards. Then there arose the lines and forms which passed over into artistic creation. It is as though one felt in humanity itself how man can indeed go beyond what he sees with his eyes and perceives with his other senses:—he can go beyond it when he enters into and adapts himself to a larger whole. Even in this case of a larger whole, when a man no longer merely lets himself go as he walks along, but is obliged to adapt himself to the carrying of a load—already here he enters into the organism of the whole universe.

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I have drawn it diagrammatically, from the side view: a number of men are walking one behind the other. They form the procession which then passes round inside the circle; others are sitting in the circle looking on.

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If you think of these two figures in alternation, you have the earth-motif and the sun-motif that were always carried by the people who formed the procession. This was one thing that in olden times was presented in circling procession. The people sat around in a circle and the actors passed around in a procession. Some of them carried emblems representing man's connection with the sun; and they alternated: earth-sun, sun-earth and so on:

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Man sensed this cosmic power: earth-sun, and then he began to think how he could portray it. The best medium for purposes of art proved to be a plant or tree whose forms runs upwards to a point from a wider base. This was alternated with palms. Plants having a form like a wide bud were alternated with palms. Palms represented' the sun forces; bud-forms running upwards to a point, the earth forces.

Feeling his place in the cosmos, man created certain forms, merely using the plants as a means of expression. He used plants instead of having to invent some other device. Artistic creation was the result of a living experience of cosmic connections; this is in accordance with the evolution of the creative urge in man and the process is no mere imitation of outer phenomena of nature. The artistic representation of the elements of outer nature only entered into art later on. When men no longer realised that palms were used to express the sun forces, they began to think that the ancients simply imitated the palm in their designs. This was never the case; the ancients used the leaves of palms because they were typifying the sun forces. Thus has all true artistic creation arisen, from a ‘superabundance’ of forces in the being of man—forces which cannot find expression in external life, which strive to do so through man's consciousness of his connection with the universe as a whole. Now all contemplation and thought both in the spheres of natural science and art, have been misled and confused by a certain idea which it will be very difficult to displace. It is the idea that complexity has arisen from simplicity. Now this is not the case. The construction of the human eye, for instance, is much more simple than that of many of the lower animals. The course of evolution is often from the complex to the simple; it often happens that the most intricate interlacing finally resolves itself into the straight line. In many instances, simplification is the later stage, and man will not acquire the true conception of evolution unless he realises this.

Now all that was presented to the spectators in those ancient times, when it was always a question of portraying living cosmic forces, was later on simplified into the decoration, the lines of which expressed man's living experience when he presented these things.

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This alternation of Sun-motif, Earth-motif, presented itself to the artistic feeling of mankind as a decorative motif in the truest sense. Later on man no longer realised that he must see in this decorative motif a reproduction that had passed into the subconscious realm, of a very ancient dance motif, a ceremonial dance. This was preserved in the palmette motif. Now it is interesting to consider

the following:—On the decorations of certain Doric columns one often finds a very interesting motif which I will sketch thus.

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In Greece, that wonderful land where the fourth Post-Atlantean period was expressed in all its fulness, there was a union of what came over from Asia with all that I have now described and which, as an after-image is there, on Doric columns together with the truly dynamic-architectonic principle of weight-bearing. This union came about because it was in Greece that the Ego was fully realised within the human body, and therefore this motif could find expression in Greek culture.

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Now you need only imagine what is merely indicated in the Ionic pillars, the middle portion, developing downwards to the perfect volute and you have the Corinthian column.

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The essential forms of art can no more arise from an imitation of nature than music can be created by an imitation of nature. Even in the so-called imitative arts, the thing that is imitated is fundamentally secondary, an accessory as it were. Naturalism is absolutely contrary to true artistic feeling. If we find that people think our forms here are grotesque we shall be able to comfort ourselves with the knowledge that this kind of artistic conception sees in the acanthus motive nothing but a naturalistic imitation. The acanthus motif, as we have seen, was created purely from the spirit and only in its late development came to bear a remote resemblance to the acanthus leaf. Artistic understanding in future ages will simply be unable to understand this attitude of mind which in our time influences not only the art experts who are supposed to understand their subject, but all artistic creation as well. The materialistic attitude of mind in Darwinism also confronts us in artistic creation, in that there is a greater and greater tendency to make art into a mere imitation of nature. My discovery of these connections in regard to the acanthus leaf has really been a source of joy to me, for it proves circumstantially that the primordial forms of art have also sprung from the human soul and not from imitation of external phenomena.

I was only able really to penetrate to the essence of art after I had myself moulded the forms of our building here. When one moulds forms from out of the very well-springs of human evolution, one feels how artistic creation has arisen in mankind. It was a strange piece of karma that during the time when I was deeply occupied with following up a certain artistic intuition (this was after the forms for the buildings had already been made)—an intuition that had arisen during the General Congress in Berlin—it happened that I began to investigate what I had created in these forms, in order to get a deeper understanding. One can only think afterwards about artistic forms; if one “understands” them first and then carries them out, they will have no value. If one creates from concepts and ideas nothing of value will ensue, and the very thing that I perceived so clearly in connection with the acanthus leaf, and have shown to be erroneous, is an indication of the inner connections of the art in our building.

I came upon a remarkable example which is purely the result of clairvoyant investigation. At one point I discovered a curious point of contact with Rigl, a fellow-countryman of mine. It is a curious name, not very aristocratic, but typically Austrian. This man Rigl did not achieve anything of great importance but while he was Curator of an Architectural Museum in Vienna he had an intuitive perception of the fact that these architectural decorations had not arisen in the way described by “Semperism” at the end of the 19th century. Rigl hit upon certain thoughts which are really in line with the metamorphosis of the palmette motif into that of the acanthus leaf. Quite recently, therefore, I have discovered a perfect connection between the results of occult investigation, and external research which has also hit upon this development of the so-called acanthus motif from the palmette. ‘Palmette’ is of course merely a name; what is really there in the palmette is the Sun-motif. In the first place, of course, one feels in despair about an idea like that of Rigl. He simply could not realise whence the palmette motif had originated and that it was connected with forces working and moving in man. Rigl remonstrates with the learned art critics who have brought Semper's ideas into everything and are for the most part mere naturalists, but in spite of this he did not get very far. He says that in regard to the acanthus leaf the learned art critics are still feeding upon the old anecdote quoted by Vitruvius. (It cannot be said that they are all feeding upon it, but it is true that they constantly quote it.) Rigl, however, only mentions this anecdote briefly; he does not think it worth while to go into all the details because it is too well known. What he leaves out is very characteristic. He says that Callimachos had seen a basket surrounded by acanthus leaves and that then the idea of the Corinthian column came to him. Rigl, too, leaves something out and this very thing shows that the typical conceptions of our age must despair of ever having real knowledge in this sphere. He leaves out the most important factor in the whole anecdote, which is that what Callimachos saw was over the grave of a Corinthian girl. That is the important thing, for it implies no less than that Vitruvius, although he wisely holds his tongue about it, intends to indicate that Callimachos was clairvoyant and saw, over a girl's grave, the Sun-motif struggling with the Earth-motif, and above this the girl herself, hovering in her etheric body. Here indeed is a significant indication of how the motifs of Sun and Earth came to be used on the capitals of columns. If we are able to see clairvoyantly what is actually present in the etheric world above the grave of a girl who had died, we realise that the palmette motif has arisen out of this, growing, as it were, around the etheric body that is rising like the sun. It seems as though men have never really understood the later Roman statues of Pytri-Clitia for they are nothing else than a clairvoyant impression that can be received over the graves of certain people; in these statues, the head of an extraordinarily spiritual, though not virginal Roman woman, seems to grow upwards as if from a flower chalice. Some time, my dear friends, we shall understand what really underlies the anecdote quoted by Vitruvius, but not until we grow out of the unfortunate habit which makes us perpetually ask, ‘What is the meaning of this or that?’ and is always looking for symbolic interpretations such as, ‘this signifies the physical body, that the etheric body, this or that the astral body.’ When this habit is eliminated from our Movement we shall really come to understand what underlies artistic form—that is to say, we shall either have direct perception of true spiritual movement, or of the corresponding etheric phenomenon.

It is actually the case that in clairvoyant vision the acanthus leaf can be seen, in its true form, above a grave.

If you will consider all these things; my dear friends, you will realise how important it is to understand the forms in the interior of our building, the forms that should adorn it, and to know the artistic principle from which they have arisen. On previous occasions I used a somewhat trivial comparison, but it is only a question of understanding the analogy. Although it is trivial, it does, nevertheless, convey what it is intended to convey. When we are trying to understand what will be placed in the interior of the building in these two different sized spaces, we may with advantage think of the principle of the mould in which German cakes are baked.

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It would have been my wish—only it was not to be—that we should have had no such surfaces as these (pointing to an architrave). They will only be right—when something is taken away from them. This roundness here must be eliminated. It would have been better if from the very beginning we had worked with the graver's chisel for then there would have been no protuberance but only a surface. What we must do is to feel from the models how the interior decoration is the plastic vesture for the Spiritual Science that is given its in the building. Just as the interior decoration has the quality of being ‘in-carved,’ so the outer decoration will seem as though it is ‘laid on.’ The interior decoration must always have the character of being in-carved. One can feel this in the model, for the essential thing is a true inner feeling for form in space. It is this that leaves one unsatisfied even in such writings as those of a man like Hildebrandt. He has a certain idea of the workings of form but what he lacks is the inner feeling of form—the inner feeling that makes one live wholly within the form. He simply says that the eye should feel at home when it looks at form. In our building we must learn to experience the forms inwardly, so that, holding the chisel in a particular way, we learn to love the surface we are creating—the surface that is coming into being under the mallet. I, for my part, must admit that I always feel as if I could in some way caress such a surface. We must grow to love it, so that we live in it with inner feeling and not think of it as something that is merely there for the eye to look at.

Just recently someone told me after a lecture that a certain very clever man had accused us of straining after ‘externalities,’ as instanced by the fact that different kinds of wood have been used for the columns in the interior. This shows how little our work has been understood. Such a thing is considered to be a dreadful externality. This very intelligent man, you see, simply cannot realise that the columns must be of different woods. The real reason why he cannot understand, is that he has not paused to consider what answer he would have to make if he were asked: ‘Why must there be different strings on a violin? Would it not be possible simply to stretch four A strings instead?’ The use of different woods is a reality in just the same sense. We could no more use only one kind of wood than we could have only A strings on a violin. Real inner necessities are bound up with this. One can never do more than mention a few details in these matters. The whole conception of our building and what must be expressed in it, is based upon deep wisdom, but a wisdom that is at the same time very intimate. Of course there will be forms which are nowhere to be found in the outer physical world. If anything bears an apparent resemblance to a form in the animal or human body, this is simply due to the fact that higher Spirits who work in nature, create according to these forces; nature is expressing the same things as we are expressing in our building. It is not a question of an imitation of nature, but of the expression of what is there as pure etheric form. It is as though a man were to ask himself: ‘What idea must I have of my own being when I look away from the outer sense-world, and try to find an environment that will express my inner being in forms?’ I am sure that everyone will be struck by the plastic forms on the capitals and in the rest of the interior. Not a single one of these forms is without its own raison d'étre. Suppose anyone is carving the column just here (pointing to an architrave motif). At another place he will carve more lightly or deeper down into the wood. It would be nonsense to demand symmetry. There must be living progression, not symmetry. The columns and architraves in the interior are a necessary consequence of the two circular buildings with the two incomplete domes. And I cannot express this any more precisely than by saying that if the radius of the small dome were at all larger or smaller in proportion to the large dome, each of these forms would have to be quite different, just as the little finger of a dwarf is different from that of a giant. It was not only the differences in dimension, but the differences in the forms that called forth the overwhelming feeling of responsibility while we were erecting the building; down to the smallest detail it could not be other than it is. Each single part of a living organism has to exist within and in accordance with the whole living organism. It would be nonsense to say: I want to change the nose and put a different organ in the place where the nose now is.' It is a matter of actual fact that the big toe, and the small toe as well, would have to be different if the nose were different. Just as nobody in his senses would wish to re-model the nose, so it is impossible that the form here should be other than it is. If this form were different, the whole building would have to be different, for the whole is conceived in living, organic form. The advance we must make is this: all that was, in the early days of art, a kind of instinctive perception of a human posture transformed into artistic form must now enter with consciousness into the feeling life of man. In this way we shall have, in our interior decorations, etheric forms that are true and living, and we shall feel them to be the true expression of all that is to live in our building. It simply cannot be otherwise.

Now the other day I received two letters from a man who, ten years ago, it is true, did belong to the Anthroposophical Movement, but who since then has left it. He asked me if he could be allowed to make the windows, for he was so well qualified for the work. He was really very insistent. But when you see the windows you will understand that they could only be made by somebody who has followed our work right up to the present. Suppose I were to press my hand into a soft substance: the impress could only be that of my hand, it could not be the head of an ox for instance! It is Spiritual Science that must be impressed into the interior decoration; and Spiritual Science must let in the sunlight through the windows in a way that harmonises with its own nature. The whole building is really constructed—forgive this analogy—according to the principle of the cake mould, only of course instead of a rising cake, it is filled with Spiritual Science and all the sacred things that inspire us. This was always the case in art, and above all it was so in the days when men perceived in their dim, mystical life of feeling the alternation of the principles of earth and sun in the living dance and then portrayed the dance in the palmette motif. So it must be when it is a question of penetrating the outer sense- veil of natural and human existence and expressing in forms things that lie behind the realm of sense perception—if, that is to say, we are fortunate enough to be able to carry this building through. How inner progress is related to the symptoms of onward-flowing evolution—this is what will be expressed in the building, in the dimensional proportions, forms, designs and paintings.

I wanted to place these thoughts before you in order that you may not allow yourselves to be misled by modern conceptions of art, which have put all true understanding on one side. A good example of this is the belief that the Corinthian capital arose primarily from the sight of a little basket with acanthus leaves around it. The truth is that something springing from the very depths of human evolution has been expressed in the Corinthian capital. So also we shall feel that what surrounds us in our building is the expression of something living in the depths of human nature behind the experiences and events of the physical plane.

To-day I only wanted to speak of this particular detail in connection with our building and with a certain chapter in the history of art.

There may be opportunities during the coming weeks to speak to you of other things in connection with some of the motifs in the building. I shall seize every available opportunity to bring you nearer to what is indeed full of complexity, but yet absolutely natural and necessary, in a spiritual sense, for our building.

In our days it is not at all easy to speak about problems of art, for naturalism, the principle of imitation, really dominates the whole realm of art. So far as the artist himself is concerned, naturalism has arisen out of a very simple principle; so far as other people are concerned it seems to have arisen from something less simple. The artist, when he is learning must, of course, copy the productions of his master; he must imitate in order to learn. Man now imitates nature out of instinct—for he has made the principle of pupil into that of master and has then put the master on one side because he will brook no authority. This principle is very convenient for artists, for they do not want to get beyond an artistic reproduction of the models before them. The layman to-day understands the principle of naturalism as a matter of course. Where can he find anything to take hold of when he sees forms like those in our building? How are these forms to stimulate any thought at all? He will tear his hair and ask, with a shrug of his shoulders: ‘Whatever is this?’ And he will be lucky if he finds anything at all to take hold of, for instance, if he discovers that some detail has a slight resemblance, maybe to a nose! Although this may be negative, he is delighted that he has discovered anything at all. To-day the layman is pleased if when he finds in the different arts something that transcends the purely naturalistic element, he can say: ‘This has a resemblance to something or other.’ Art will most certainly be misunderstood if people continue to think that it is only legitimate to express things that resemble something or other in the external world. Real art does not ‘resemble’ anything at all; it is something in itself, sufficient unto itself. And again from this point of view it was despairing to find that as a result of the materialism of the second half of last century, painters (not to speak of sculptors) were asking themselves for instance: ‘How am I to get the effect of that mist in the distance?’ And then all kinds of attempts were made to reproduce nature by pure imitation. It really was enough to drive one to despair! Ingenious things were produced, it is true, but what is the value of them? It is all far better in nature herself. The artists were wasting their time in their efforts to imitate, for nature has it all in a much higher form. The answer to this problem is to be found in the Prologue to “The Portal of Initiation.” [The first of Dr. Steiner's Mystery Plays.]

Not long ago we happened to be going through the Luxemburg Gallery in Paris, and we saw a statue there. At first sight it was exceedingly difficult to make out what it was supposed to be, but by degrees it dawned on one that perhaps it was meant to represent a human figure. It was so distorted .... I will not imitate the posture, for it would be too much of a strain on the shoulders and knees! It is an absolutely hideous production, but I assure you that if it were to meet one in nature it would be much easier to understand than this “work of art.” People to-day do not realise the absurdity of giving plastic form to a motif that has been thought out, for there is, as a matter of fact, no real necessity to give it plastic form. That which is to be given plastic form must from the very beginning be there in itself and only conceived of plastically. No true sculptor will say that Rodin's productions are an expression of true plastic art. Rodin models non-plastic motifs very well, in an external sense, but true artistic feeling will always be prompted to ask if it amounts to anything, for true plastic conception is entirely lacking. All these things are connected, my dear friends. I have told you what happened in my young days, when I was about 24 or 25 years old, when I absorbed the doctrines of Semper. Already then they were enough to drive one to despair and their influence has not been got rid of yet. Therefore I ask you—and more particularly those who are working so devotedly and unselfishly at our building with all the sacrifices that their work entails—always to try to proceed from inner feeling for what this building ought to contain and to feel in life itself the forms which must arise, in order that we may free ourselves from the trammels of much so-called modern “art.” We must realise, in a new sense, that art is born from the depths of man's being. So greatly is this prone to be misunderstood in our age that people have taken the metamorphosis of of the Earth and Sun motifs to be an imitation of the acanthus leaf. If people will stop believing the anecdote quoted by Vitruvius, that Callimachos saw a basket strewn around with acanthus leaves and then used it as a motif on columns, and will listen to what he says about Callimachos having had a vision over the grave of a Corinthian girl, they will also realise that he had clairvoyant sight and they will have a better understanding of the evolution of art. They will realise that development of clairvoyance leads man to the realm lying behind the world of sense. Art is the divine child of clairvoyant vision—although it only lives as unconscious feeling in the soul. The forms that are seen by the clairvoyant eye in the higher worlds cast their shadow pictures, as it were, down to the physical plane.

When people understand all that lives in the Spirit—the Spirit which has the power to impress itself into what surrounds us here in our building, finding its expression in the outer framework around us—they will also understand the goal we have set ourselves, and see in the forms of art the impress of what has to be accomplished and proclaimed in living words in our building. It is a living word this building of ours!

Now that I have tried, scantily, it is true, to indicate something in regard to the interior we shall, before very long, be able to speak of the painting and also of the outside of the building.

Even more than on the last occasion when I spoke to you about our building am I reminded to-day of the attitude we must have to this edifice, dedicated as it is to the cause of Spiritual Science. The sacrifices of those who have befriended the cause of Anthroposophy call for a sense of great responsibility. To-day is a splendid occasion for reminding ourselves of this responsibility, for the first of our auxiliary buildings is to be given over to its own tasks. We can be reminded of this responsibility by studies that arise naturally out of the tasks before us and the goal we are striving to attain.

The immediate use to which these rooms will be put is the production of the glass windows for our building, and we cannot help being moved by the thought that our human faculties are not really mature enough as yet to accomplish the full task before us. I think it is healthy and good that all our work should be permeated by the feeling that we have not as yet grown equal to our task, for only this can enable us to accomplish the highest that lies within our power. We shall be able to create the first beginnings of an artistic vesture for Spiritual Science—to the extent to which our epoch and our means allow—if we are always pervaded by the feeling that we are, in truth, little qualified for the full task. The site on which our building stands is pervaded by an atmosphere which seems to say: “Do the very utmost of which your powers and faculties are capable, for you cannot do nearly enough in comparison with what ought to be achieved; and even when you have done your very utmost, it will not by any means suffice.”

When we look at the site of our building we should be pervaded by an indefinable feeling—a presentiment that a mighty task is hovering before us. And more particularly should this be the case to-day when we are handing over this auxiliary building to our friend Rychter and his workers, in order that they may create something that in the fairest sense may be a living member in the whole organism of our building.

Entering the room through this door, our feeling will be that we are indeed blessed, as individuals, in having the opportunity to co-operate in work like this. And when we think of the functions of the windows in the building, an atmosphere of the soul and spirit will hover around us, whispering of the deep spirituality which we pray may flow like purifying waves of healing through this room.

When the building is once ready we shall again and again be conscious of a feeling which I may perhaps express as follows: ‘How infinitely necessary it is to grow beyond everything personal, if the forms of this framework for our Spiritual Science are to have real meaning for us.’ This again is, in a certain sense, the satisfying element in our building. Our architects, engineers, and all the other workers may well derive strength from the comforting feeling that apart from all the cares and troubles which the building involves, it can itself be for us a wonderful education—an education leading us above everything personal. The building demands a great deal more than the expression of any personal element. As we set about our work, and permeate the single forms with thought and feeling, we become conscious of new tasks of which we previously had no inkling. We feel that a mystery is there around us, calling out to the highest forces of soul, heart and mind to create something that transcends personality. This building can teach us how to fulfil the tasks which arise every day. It brings home to us a feeling that can ring in such sacred tones in the soul: How infinitely greater are the potentialities of the Universe than insignificant human beings! The highest we can create must be infinitely greater if it is to prove equal to the tasks before us in the objective world.' All that can ever be enclosed within the limits of the personal self must be transcended. The building itself, and the auxiliary house we have been able to open to-day can be a means of education for us. Indeed, the more they become a means of education, the greater understanding we shall have. Already now, as we look at the incomplete building and at this house, we cannot help thinking of what our feeling should be as we enter. How often we shall feel, ‘Ah, if only all human beings could be led here!’ Do we really deserve so sacred a framework—a framework we ourselves have helped to create—if we have any desire to exclude other human beings? Shall it not rather be our dearest wish to bring all men into the building? This will certainly be our desire if we realise the mission that such buildings will have to humanity, if they find imitators and followers?

Think for a moment of many buildings erected in our times by clever architects. Some of them, although they show no signs of a new style and are not permeated with any new spirituality, are really creations of architectural genius. Yet they all have one thing in common. We may admire them from outside and think them beautiful inside, but they do not make us feel, as our building will do, that we are enclosed as if by organs of sense. The reason for this is that these other buildings are dumb—they do not speak. This is the thought that I would like to press home to you this evening.

Let us think of buildings which express all the characteristics of our times. People pass in and out without in any way growing into their architecture, forms or art. Everywhere we feel that what ought to be expressed through the forms of art has to-day to be communicated to humanity by other means. In the present age man is more and more compelled to bring about order, stability, peace and harmony by means of external laws, decrees or institutions, definitions in words. This implies no syllable or thought of criticism, for it must be so in our age. But something must be added to this—something that signifies the onward evolution of humanity in a different sense. It is probable that our building will not be able fully to attain its goal—indeed we are only aiming at a primitive beginning. Yet if human culture is able to take what is expressed in our building (in so far as we fulfil the tasks set us by the higher Spirits) and develop it; if the ideas underlying such works of art find followers—then people who allow themselves to be impressed by these works of art and who have learnt to understand their language, will never do wrong to their fellow men either in heart or intellect, because the forms of art will teach them how to love; they will learn to live in harmony and peace with their fellow beings. Peace and harmony will pour into all hearts through these forms; such buildings will be ‘Lawgivers’ and their forms will be able to achieve what external institutions can never achieve.

However much study may be given to the elimination of crime and wrong-doing from the world, true redemption, the turning of evil into good, will in future depend upon whether true art is able to pour a spiritual fluid into the hearts and souls of men. When men's hearts and souls are surrounded by the achievements of true architecture, sculpture and the like, they will cease to lie if it happens they are untruthfully inclined; they will cease to disturb the peace of their fellow men if this is their tendency. Edifices and buildings will begin to speak, and in a language of which people to-day have no sort of inkling.

Human beings are wont to gather together in Congresses to-day for the purpose of putting their affairs in order, for they imagine that what passes from mouth to ear can create peace and harmony. But peace and harmony, and man's rightful position can only be established when the Gods speak to us. When will the Gods speak to us?

Now when does a human being speak to us?—When he possesses a larynx. He would never be able to speak to us if he had no larynx. The spirits of nature have given us the larynx and we make this gift an organic part of the whole cosmos when we find the true forms of art, for they become instruments through which the Gods speak to us. We must, however, first learn how to make ourselves part of the great cosmos, and then our desire to lead all mankind through these doors will be the stronger. Out of this desire—for its fulfilment is not yet—the longing will develop to work so intensely for our spiritual movement that this aim may gradually be attained. Art is the creation of an organ through which the Gods are able to speak to mankind .... I have already spoken of many things in this connection. I have spoken of the Greek Temple and have shown how all its forms express the fact it is a dwelling place of the God. To-day I want to add something to this. If we try to understand the basic nature of the Greek art of building we shall realise that the very being and essence of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch flowed into the Greeks' mode of perception and thence into their art of building.

What is the basis of Greek perception and feeling? It is, of course, a wide subject, but I will only speak of one aspect.

Here (see diagram) we have the wall surrounding the Greek Temple, with the horizontal structure resting upon it. When anything rises above the horizontal it is so constructed that it is upheld by its own forces which balance each other; just as when, in building, we place two beams together.

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The presupposition here is that the earth with its gravity lies beneath. And translating this feeling into words, we may say: ‘In the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch man felt that the site of the earth was a gift of the God; it was as though Divine power overflowed into the creations of art.’ Therefore, by means of the forces in the earth given to man by the Gods, it was felt that gravity could be overcome. In the Greek Temple man controls the force of gravity and thereby creates a dwelling place for the God who has given him the earth.

Neither this “dwelling-place of the God” nor the later Roman Temples can be thought of apart from the surrounding land. The land is part of the Temple itself. A Greek Temple is complete in itself even if nobody is within it, for its whole conception is that of the dwelling-place of the God; it is the sanctuary of the God. Human beings may live for miles around in the district; if nobody enters the Temple, it stands there, none the less, complete in itself—a dwelling-place of the God. In every detail we see how man expresses in the decorative forms of these dwelling- places of the Gods all that his feeling of veneration makes him feel he ought to do for the Gods. In the last lecture I tried to show you that the motif on the capitals has its origin in a dance motif—a dance that was performed as homage to the Gods of nature. And now let us pass on to the forms of the earliest Christian architecture. One thought in particular arises within us when we pass from the Greek Temple to the Church of Christendom. The Greek Temple stands within its surrounding territory, belongs to the territory. Human beings are not necessarily within the Temple; they live around it, outside it. The Temple belongs to the surrounding territory, is thought of as the altar of the land around it. The Temple hallows everything, even the trivial daily occupations of the human beings who live on the land. Service rendered to the earth becomes a divine office because the God stands or is enthroned as Lord and participates in the work on the land and in the pursuits of human beings living around the Temple. Man feels himself united with the God as he works on the land. Worship of the God is not yet separated from service to the earth. The Temple grows out of the human element, sometimes indeed out of the ‘all-too-human,’ and hallows everything around it. ‘Earth, be thou strong!’—This is the prevailing mood of the fourth Post-Atlatean epoch, when human beings are still at one with the earth which the Gods have given into their charge, when the Ego is still slumbering in a kind of dream consciousness, when man still feels himself connected with the Group-Soul of the whole of humanity. Then man grows out of this Group-Soul, becomes more and more individual, and he separates from the land, from daily life and activity, the worship he performs in his spiritual life.

In the early days of Christianity the feelings of men were no longer the same as in the Greek age. Looking into the soul of the Greek, we see him sowing his fields and working at his industrial pursuits, pervaded by this unshakable feeling: There stands the Temple with the in-dwelling God and I am near. I may be carrying out my pursuits and working on the land but all the while the God is dwelling there within the Temple. Then man grows more individual, a strong sense of Ego, of “I” arises within him, and Christendom represents the emergence of something that had been prepared through the course of long ages by the ancient Hebrew civilisation. Out of the human soul arises the need to separate off from the affairs of everyday life the worship that is offered to the God. The building is separated from the land and the Church of Christendom comes into being. The land becomes independent; the building becomes an entity independent of the territory; it is an ‘individuality’ complete in itself. The Greek Temple was still a kind of altar for the whole territory, whereas the walls of the Christian Church now form a space set apart for those who are to worship. The forms of the Churches of Christendom and also of Roman architecture gradually come to express this individual, spiritual need of man, and they can only be understood in this sense. The place of the Greek within earthly existence was such that he said to himself: ‘I can remain here with my flocks, carrying out my occupations, doing my work on the land, for the Temple stands there like an altar for the whole countryside: the God is dwelling within it.’ In Christendom, man says: ‘I must leave my work and repair to this building, for there I must seek for the Spirit.’ The service of earth and the service of heaven are separated and the Christian Church more and more assumes a form where Greek and Roman architecture would no longer be suitable. It is a form which reveals that the community belongs to the church; the church is intended to enclose the community. Then, once again set apart from the community, we find the house of the priests, of those who teach. An image of the universe comes into being; the Spirit speaks to those who seek for the spirit, in precincts where they are enclosed within walls. The whole world was felt by the Greeks and Romans in former times in the same way in which the Christians afterwards felt the precincts of the Church with its enclosing walls.

And what the Greek Temple itself had been now became the chancel. Men sought now for a distinct image of the world whereas formerly they had taken the world itself and only placed within it, visible to outer senses, the Temple as the dwelling-place of God. Gothic architecture is really only a branch of what was already being prepared. The essential feature of Gothic architecture is that the weight is taken away from the walls and placed upon the pillars. What is the origin of this whole mode of construction, where the weight rests on pillars, which are so moulded that they are able to bear it? It is based on a quite different conception from that of the Greek Temple. When we pass to the pillars of Gothic architecture which take away the weight from the walls, we are no longer concerned with the pure force of gravity. Here, man himself is working. In the Greek Temple it is as though he frees himself from the earth's gravity and having gained knowledge of it within the earthly realm, now rises above it. In that man makes use of the force of gravity, he overcomes it. In the weight-bearing Gothic pillars we are no longer concerned with the pure working of the force of gravity; in the Gothic building the art of handicraft is necessary, of higher and lower handicraft. The need for the creation of precincts which enclose the community also gives rise, in Gothic architecture, to the need for something wherein the activity of the community plays a part. In the single forms we see a continuation, as it were, of what the people have learnt. The art of the hand-workers flows into the forms, and in studying these forms we see the art of human beings who have contributed their share, who have worked together. The old Roman Churches are still edifices which enclose the God. The Gothic Church is an edifice built by the community to enclose the God but one where the people have contributed their own handicraft. They do not only enter the Churches but they themselves work at the building as a community. In Gothic architecture this labour of human beings unites itself with the Divine. The souls of men no longer receive the Divine as a matter of course; they do not only come together and listen to the word of the Spirit proceeding from the chancel, but they gather around the God in their labours. Gothic Churches are really crystallised handicraft.

We can quickly pass over what came next, for it really amounted to a revival of classic architecture. In this connection it is not necessary to speak of the Renaissance; we will speak of what the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch demands of us.

Let us consider the element of weight and support, following it to the point where it becomes crystallised handicraft in Gothic architecture.

If we penetrate this with artistic feeling we realise that here is something at rest within itself, at rest within the earthly forces. All the forces of these edifices rest within the earthly element. The Greek Temple everywhere indicates the force of gravity and its own union with the earth. In the Greek Temple we can everywhere observe some manifestation of the force of gravity. Its very forms reveal a union with the earth.

And now let us compare the basic form in our building that will confront everyone even from the outside. I will make a rough diagram of it. What is the characteristic of this motif?

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I should have to speak for a long time if I wanted to show that this is how the art of relief first assumes its real meaning, but I will only give you an indication of what I really have in mind. A certain eminent artist of modern times has spoken a great deal about the art of relief and has said some clever things. He tells us to think of two panes of glass standing parallel to each other and between them an intersected figure. We should then be looking in the direction of the arrow through the panes of glass at the figure ...

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Now there is in the world a relief which is full of meaning, only we pay no proper attention to it. There is a certain relief that has been created in accordance with the true idea—it is the earth with her plant kingdom. We must, however, pass away from the surface of the earth into cosmic space before we can study this relief. The earth is the living surface which brings forth its creatures from its own being. Our own art of relief must be based upon the conception that the wall is a living thing even as the earth brings forth her plants. This is how a true art of relief is attained. To go beyond this principle is to sin against the essence of the art of relief. When we look down upon the great relief of the earth, we see human beings and animals moving upon it, but they do not belong to the relief. They can be introduced into the relief, of course, because the arts can be developed in all directions, but this is no longer the pure essence of the art of relief.

Our building must speak through the forms in its interior, but the speech must be that of the Gods. Think for a moment of the life of human beings on the earth, that is to say, immediately on the surface of the earth. Here we need not draw directly on our teachings—we need only turn to the Paradise Legend. If man had remained in Paradise he would have looked upon the wonderful relief of the earth with her plant kingdom from outside. He himself, however, was transplanted, as it were, into this relief. He could not observe it from outside for he was taken out of Paradise. The speech of the Gods cannot ascend from the earth to men for the speech of the earth drowns the speech of the Gods.

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Nothing in this architecture is there for its own sake alone. The one form leads over into the other; or, if the forms have a threefold character, the central form is the bridge between the other two. Here we have a rough sketch of the forms of the doors and windows.

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Now all that lives in the sculptured forms is three dimensional; relief is a conquest of the second dimension, surface, which is then brought into the third dimension. This is not realised if we merely take the standpoint of an observer or spectator: for we need a living feeling of how the earth allows the plants to grow out of her being.

When I come to speak of the real nature of painting we shall understand the significance of the connection between colour and the inner element of soul in the universe. There would be no sense in painting with colours if colour were not something quite different from what physics imagines it to be. The principles of colour as the speech of the soul of nature, of the soul of the universe, will be the subject of a later lecture.

I will now indicate how our glass windows are to represent the union of the outer with the inner. They will each in themselves be of one single colour, but different colours will be used at the various positions in the building. This expresses the spiritual, musical harmony of the outer with the inner world. And the single coloured window will only express this harmony in the thicker and thinner strata of the glass. That is to say, we shall have surfaces where the glass is thicker, more solid, and surfaces where the glass is thinner. The light will shine more strongly through the thinner places in the windows; it will shine less strongly, and produce darker colours, through the places where the glass is thicker. The connection between spirit and matter will be expressed in the glass windows; but the whole interior will strive to be an organ for the speech of the Gods. The larynx makes it possible for man to speak, and in the same way the whole of our relief-moulding is an organ for the Gods who should speak to us from all sides of the universe. So that when we make an aperture for the windows in the walls which allow the Gods to speak to us, we are seeking the path to the Spirits of the cosmos. These windows are intended to signify in their coloured shadings: ‘Thus, O man, thou findest the path to the Spirit.’ We shall see how the soul is connected with the spiritual world when it sleeps during the night and is living outside the body. We shall see the way in which the soul is connected with the spiritual world between death and a new birth in the disembodied state. The windows will show us how, when man approaches the threshold, he becomes aware of the abyss; the stations on the path to the spiritual world will be revealed. They will arise as light formations from the West, revealing to us the mysteries of Initiation. We are trying to create walls, the forms of which make the wall themselves seem to pass away. The designs must express how we pierce the walls, showing us how we find the path to the spiritual worlds, or traverse these worlds unconsciously, showing us what our relation to the spiritual worlds must be.

The Greek Temple, the dwelling place of the God, and the later edifice, which was built for the community desiring to be united with their God, were building-sheaths which enclosed and shut off. Our building must not shut off anything in the universe; its walls must live, but live in accordance with truth itself. Truth flows into the beauty of our relief-moulding. If we had not been driven out of Paradise we should be conscious of the ' speaking ' relief proceeding from the earth herself in the plant forms, which grow even above the geological formations of the mountains and only allow these strata to be bare in places where it is right that they should be bare. The moment however when we find in our perceptual life the transition from the 'repose' where the Gods speak to us, from that ‘repose’ to our own activity, to what we must do in order to find the way to the Gods—in that moment we must have movement, inner movement; we must pierce the wall. We must have these windows which call to our souls to tread the path to those regions whence the words expressed by the forms of the walls have proceeded. Then each one of us will sit within the building and we shall say to ourselves: “The organs of the great Spirits themselves are round about us; it is for us to understand the language spoken though these forms.” But we must understand it in the heart and not merely be able to grasp it intellectually.

Those who begin to, explain' the meaning of these forms are on the wrong track. They stand on the same ground as those who interpret the old myths symbolically and allegorically, and imagine for instance, that they are advancing the cause of Theosophy. A man who tries to ‘interpret’ the myths and explain external forms may be clever and ingenious but he is like one who tries to look under his chin to explain the symbolism of his larynx. We understand the speech of the Gods by learning how to listen with our hearts, not by using intellectual agility and giving symbolic or allegorical meanings to myths and artistic forms. ‘Here you sit and the Spirits of the Universe are speaking to you’—this must become a living feeling within us. When this becomes a living perception of what the soul must do if it is to find the way to those regions whence the speech of the Spirits proceeds, we shall direct our gaze to where the walls are pierced by the windows; and at those places there will be revealed to us the mysteries enacted in man as he consciously or unconsciously treads the path from the physical to the spiritual.

I have tried to express the feelings of our hearts and souls to-day when this house is being given over to the charge of our friend Rychter and his colleagues for their work. May they feel, as they receive it, the sacred nature of their task and something of the holiness of which I have spoken. Up on the hill itself we are still working at the building which will reveal, to those who seek, organs through which the Gods may speak to them. But there must arise in these seekers a holy longing to find the ways and paths to the realms of the Gods. The work of Rychter and his colleagues in the rooms of this house will be taken up the hill and placed in the positions where the walls are pierced. It will move the souls of those gathered together in the building at the top of the hill and show them the path to the Spirit.

May this holy mood pervade this house; may each drilling in the glass be carried out with the feeling: ‘Here I have to mould something that will lead to the realms of the Spirits those who see it up there in the building. My creations must make the soul's perception so living that the shadings in the coloured glass will represent the channels by which the spiritual worlds are speaking through the forms in the interior.’ The difficulties may be very great, indeed there may be only partial success in many cases and in other cases total failure, but the attitude I have described will be an unfailing help.

I did not intend to-night merely to speak of matters which may help to make art more intelligible. I have spoken as I have because I pray that something of what I feel may flow from my heart to yours. I want your hearts to be livingly permeated with a feeling inwardly vibrant with the sense of the holiness of this work. We dedicate this house of labour most fitly if as we leave the doors we concentrate with all the forces of our hearts on love for the world of man and of spirit, to the end that the way to the Spirit may be found through what is accomplished here—to the Spirit whence peace and harmony can flow among men on the earth. If all our labours are made living by the Spirit, if all the work on this hill is filled with the Spirit of Love—which is at the same time the Spirit of true art—then from our building there will flow out over the earth the spirit of Peace, of Harmony, of Love. The possibility will be created for the work on this hill to find successors; many such centres of earthly and spiritual peace, harmony and love may thus spring up in the world. Let us realise the living nature of our work in this mood of peace and loving harmony, knowing that our labours flow from the Spirit of Life itself. There have been dwelling-places of the Gods, sanctuaries of the community, and there yet will be an organ of speech for the Spirit, a building which points out the way to the Spirit. The God dwelt in the Greek Temple; the spirit of the community may dwell within the Roman or Gothic edifice; but the world of the Spirit itself must speak through the building of the future. We have seen the house of earthly forces and forms arise and pass away in the course of human evolution; we have seen the house of the union of human souls arise and pass away in the spiritual evolution of the earth. It is for us to build the house of speech out of our love for true art, which is at the same time love for true spirituality and for all mankind.