Lecture 9
The Mission of Art
Berlin,
12th May 1910
This last lecture of the winter series will be devoted to that
realm in the life of the soul which has been enriched by so many of the
greatest treasures that spring from man's inner life. We will consider
the nature and significance of art in the evolution of mankind. Since the
field is so wide, we will confine ourselves to the art of poetry, and you
will understand that we have time to consider only the highest achievements
of the human spirit in this realm.
Now someone might
say: “The lectures this winter have been concerned with various aspects
of the human soul, and their central purpose has been to seek for truth and
knowledge in relation to the spiritual world — what have these studies
to do with the human activities which strive, above all, to give expression
to the element of beauty?” And in our time it would be easy to take the
view that everything connected with truth and cognition should be kept far,
far apart from the aims of artistic work. A widely prevalent belief today is
that science in all its branches must be subject to strict rules of logic and
experiment, whereas artistic work follows the spontaneous promptings of the
heart and the imagination. Many of our contemporaries, accordingly, would say
that truth and beauty have nothing in common. And yet, the great leaders in
the realm of artistic creation have always felt that true art should flow
from the same deep sources in the being of man as do knowledge and
cognition.
To take one example,
only, we will turn to Goethe, a seeker both for beauty and for truth. As a
young man he strove by all possible means to acquire knowledge of the world
and to find answers to the great riddles of existence. Before the time of his
journey to Italy, which was to take him to a country enshrining longed-for
ideals, he had pursued his search for truth, together with his Weimar
friends, by studying, for example, the philosopher Spinoza,
[ 59 ]
who sought to find a uniform substance in all the phenomena of life. Spinoza's
dissertations on the idea of God made a deep impression on Goethe. Together
with Merck
[ 60 ]
and other friends he believed he could hear in Spinoza
something like a voice which spoke through all surrounding phenomena and
seemed to give intimations concerning the sources of existence — an
idea which could appease in some way his Faustian aspirations. But
Goethe's soul was too richly endowed for him to gain from a conceptual
analysis of Spinoza's works a satisfying picture of truth and
knowledge. What he felt about this, and what his heart longed for, will
emerge most clearly if we accompany him on his travels in Italy where he
beheld great works of art and caught in them an echo of the art of antiquity.
In their presence he experienced the feeling he had hoped in vain to draw
from the ideas of Spinoza. Thus he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “One
thing is certain: the ancient artists had as much knowledge of Nature, and as
sure an idea of what can be represented and of how it should be done, as
Homer himself. Unfortunately, works of art of the highest order are all too
few. But when one contemplates them, one's only desire is to get to
know them rightly and then to depart in peace. These supreme works of art
have been created by men as the highest products of Nature in accordance with
true natural laws. Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there
is necessity, there is God.”
[ 61 ]
Goethe believed he
could discern that the great artists who had created works of art of this
high order had drawn them out of their souls in accordance with the same laws
that Nature herself had followed. This can mean only that in Goethe's
view of the laws of Nature, which operate in the mineral, plant and animal
kingdoms, are raised to a new level and gain new strength in the human soul,
so that they come to full expression in the soul's creative powers.
Goethe felt that in these works of art the laws of Nature were operative
again and thus he wrote to his Weimar friends: “Everything arbitrary or
merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” At such
moments, Goethe's heart is stirred by the recognition that art in its
highest manifestations comes from the same sources as do knowledge and
cognition, and we realise how deeply Goethe felt this to be true when he
declares: “Beauty is a manifestation of Nature's secret laws,
which would otherwise remain forever hidden.”
[ 62 ]
Thus Goethe sees in
art a revelation of Nature's laws, which in its own language confirms
the findings of cognition in other fields of investigation. If now we turn
from Goethe to a modern personality who also sought to invest art with a
mission and to bestow on mankind, through art, something related to the
sources of existence — if we turn to Richard Wagner, we find in his
writings, where he tries to clarify for himself the nature and significance
of artistic creation, many similar indications of the inner relationships
between truth and beauty, cognition and art. In writing of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony, for example, he says that these sounds convey something like
a revelation from another world something quite different from anything we
can grasp in merely rational or logical terms.
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Of these revelations
through art, one thing at least can be said with certainty. They act upon the
soul with convincing power and permeate our feeling with a conviction of
their truth, in face of which all merely rational or logical considerations
are powerless.
Again, in writing
about symphonic music, Wagner says that something resounds from it as though
its instruments were an organ for revealing the feelings that went into the
primal act of creation, when chaos was ordered and harmonised, long before
any human heart was there to echo those feelings. Thus in the revelations of
art Wagner saw a mysterious truth that could stand on an equal footing with
knowledge gained by the intellect.
Something else may
be added here. When we make acquaintance with great works of art in the sense
of spiritual science, we feel that they communicate their own revelation
concerning man's search for truth, and the spiritual scientist feels
himself inwardly related to this message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to
say that he feels more closely related to it than he does to many of the
so-called spiritual revelations that people accept so light-heartedly
today.
How is it, then,
that truly artistic personalities attribute to art a mission of this kind,
while the spiritual scientist feels his heart so strongly drawn to these
mysterious revelations of great art? We will approach an answer to this
question by bringing together many things that have come before our souls
during these winter lectures.
If we are to study
the significance and task of art from this point of view, we must not go by
human opinions or the quibblings of the intellect. We must consider the
development of art in relation to the evolution of man and the world. We will
let art itself speak to us of its significance for mankind.
If we wish to trace
the beginnings of art, as it first appears among men in the guise of poetry,
then according to ordinary ideas we have to go back very far indeed. Here we
will go back only as far as the extant documents can take us. We will go back
to a figure often regarded as legendary — to Homer, the originator of
Greek poetry, whose work has come down to us in the two great epics, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey.
Whoever was the
author — or authors, for we will not go into that question today
— of these two poems, the remarkable thing is that both poems begin on
a quite impersonal note:
Sing,
O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles ...
With those words the Iliad, the first Homeric poem, begins and
Sing,
O Muse, of much-travelled man ...
are the opening words of the second Homeric poem, the
Odyssey.
The author thus wishes
to indicate that he is indebted to a higher power for his verses, and we need
only a little understanding of Homer to realise that for him this higher
power was not a symbol but a real, objective Being. If this invocation to the
Muse means nothing to modern readers, this is because they no longer have the
experiences from which a poem as impersonal as Homer's could derive.
And if we are to understand this impersonal element in early Western poetry,
we must ask: What preceded it? Whence did it arise?
In speaking of human
evolution, we have often emphasised that in the course of millennia the
powers of the human soul have changed. In the far-distant past, beyond the
reach of external history but open to spiritual-scientific investigation,
human souls were endowed with a primitive dreamy clairvoyance. In times
before men were so deeply embedded in material existence as they came to be
later on, they perceived the spiritual world as a reality all around them. We
have pointed out also that the ancient clairvoyance was different from the
trained, conscious clairvoyance that can be attained today, for this is bound
up with the existence of a firm centre in the life of the soul, whereby a man
takes hold of himself as an ego. This ego-feeling, as we now have it after
its gradual development through long ages, was not present in the far-distant
past. But for this very reason, because man lacked this inner centre, his
spiritual senses were open and with his dreamy, ego-less clairvoyance he
looked into the spiritual world from which his true inner being had emerged
in the primal past. Powerful pictures, like dream-pictures, of the forces
behind our physical existence came before his soul. In this spiritual world
he saw his gods, he saw the actions and events that were played out among
them. And present-day research is quite wrong in supposing that the sagas of
the gods, found in various forms in different countries, were the product
merely of popular fantasy. If it is thought that in the remote past the human
soul functioned just as it does today, except that it was more prone to
imagine things, including the imaginary gods of the sagas
that
is sheer fantasy and it is those who
believe it who are imagining things. For people in that remote past, the
events described in their mythologies were realities. Myths, sagas, even
fairy-tales and legends, were born from a primeval faculty in the human soul.
This is connected with the fact that man had not yet acquired the firm
central point in his soul which now enables him to live within himself and in
possession of himself. In the far past he could not shut himself up in his
ego, within the narrow boundaries of his soul, separated from his
environment, as he came to do later on. He lived in his environment, feeling
that he belonged to it, whereas a modern man feels that he stands apart from
it. And just as man today can feel in his bodily organism the inflow and
outflow of the physical strength he needs to sustain his life, so primeval
man, with his clairvoyant consciousness, was aware of spiritual forces
flowing in and out of him, so that he lived in inward reciprocity with the
forces of the great world; and he could say: “When something takes
place in my soul, when I think, feel or will, I am not a separate being. I am
open to forces from the beings who come before my inward sight. By sending
their forces into me, they stimulate me to think and feel and will.
“That was the experience of man when he was still embedded in the
spiritual world. He felt that spiritual powers were active in his thinking,
and that when he accomplished anything, divine-spiritual powers had poured
into him their willing and their purpose. In those primeval times, man felt
himself to be a vessel through which spiritual powers expressed
themselves.
Here we are looking
back to a period far away in the past, but this period extended, through all
sorts of intermediate stages, right up to the time of Homer. It is not
difficult to discern how Homer was giving continued expression to the
primeval consciousness of mankind: we need only look at some features of the
Iliad.
Homer describes a great armed struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans, but
how
does he do this? What did the struggle signify for the Greeks of that
time?
Although Homer may
not start out from this aspect, there was more in this struggle than the
antagonism generated by the passions, desires and ideas which stem from the
human ego. Was it merely the personal and tribal emotions of Trojans and
Greeks that clashed in this fighting? No! The legend which provides a
connecting link between primeval and Homeric consciousness tells how three
goddesses, Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite, competed at a festival for the
prize of beauty, and how a human connoisseur of beauty, Paris, son of the
king of Troy, was appointed to judge the contest. Paris gave the prize to
Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his
wife. The woman was Helen, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta. In order to gain
possession of Helen, Paris had to abduct her by force. In revenge for this
outrage, the Greeks armed themselves for war against the Trojans, whose
country lay on the far side of the Aegean sea, and it was there that the
struggle was fought out.
Why did human
passions flare up in this way, and why did all the events described by
Homer's Muse take place? Were they merely physical events in the human
world? No. Through the consciousness of the Greeks we see depicted the
antagonism of the goddesses behind the strife of men. A Greek of that time
could have said: “I cannot find in the physical world the causes which
have brought human beings into violent conflict. I must look up to a higher
realm, where the gods and their powers are set against one another.”
The divine powers, as they were seen at the time in the images which we have
just described, were actively involved in human conflicts. Thus we see the
first great work of poetic art, Homer's
Iliad,
growing out of the primeval
consciousness of mankind. In Homer we find presented in metrical form, from
the standpoint of a later consciousness, an echo of the clairvoyant vision
which came naturally to primeval humanity. And it is precisely in this
Homeric period that we must look for the first time when clairvoyant
consciousness came to an end for the Greek people, and only an echo of it
remained.
A primeval man would
have said: “I can see my gods battling in the spiritual world, which
lies open to my clairvoyant consciousness.” In Homeric times this was
no longer possible, but a living memory of it endured. And just as primeval
man had felt inspired by the divine worlds wherein he had his being, so the
author of the Homeric epics felt the same divine forces holding sway in his
soul. Hence he could say: “The Muse that inspires me inwardly is
speaking.” Thus the Homeric poems are directly connected with primeval
myths, if these are rightly understood. From this point of view, we can see
arising in Homer's poetic imagination something like a substitute for
the old clairvoyance. The ruling cosmic powers withdrew direct clairvoyant
vision from man, and gave him, instead, something that could live similarly
in the soul and could endow it with formative power. Poetic imagination is
compensation for the loss of ancient clairvoyance.
Now let us recall
something else. In the lecture on Conscience we saw that the withdrawal of
the old clairvoyance occurred in quite different ways and at different times
in various countries. In the East the old clairvoyance persisted up to a
relatively late date. Over towards the West, among the peoples of Europe,
clairvoyant faculties were less widely present. In the latter peoples, a
strong ego-feeling came to the fore while other soul-powers and faculties
were still relatively undeveloped. This ego-feeling emerged in the most
varied ways in different parts of Europe — differently between North
and West, and notably different in the South. In pre-Christian times it
developed most intensively in Sicily and Italy. While in the East men
remained for a long time without an ego-feeling, in these regions of Europe
there were people in whom the ego-feeling was particularly strong because
they had lost the old clairvoyance. In the proportion that the spiritual
world withdraws externally from man does his inward ego-feeling light
up.
Hence there was
bound to be a great difference at certain times between the souls of the
Asiatic peoples and the souls living in the parts of Europe we are concerned
with here. Over there in Asia we see how the cosmic mysteries still rise
before the soul in great dream-pictures, and how man can witness the deeds of
the gods as they unroll externally before his spiritual eye. And in that,
which such a man can relate, we can discern something like a primeval account
of the spiritual facts underlying the world. When the old clairvoyance was
succeeded in Asia by the substitute for it, imagination, this gave rise
especially to visionary symbols in picture form.
Among the Western
peoples, in Italy and Sicily, a different faculty, arising from a
firmly-grounded ego, produced a kind of excess of strength, an enthusiasm
that broke forth from the soul, unaccompanied by any direct spiritual vision
but inspired by a longing to reach up to things unseen. Here, therefore, we
find no recounting of the deeds of the gods, for these were no longer
evident. But when with ardent devotion, expressed in speech and song, the
soul aspired to the heights it could only long for, primitive prayer and
chant were born, addressed to powers which could not now be seen after the
waning of old clairvoyant consciousness.
In Greece, the
intermediate country, the two worlds meet. There we find men who are
stimulated from both sides. Pictorial vision comes from the East; from the
West comes the enthusiasm which inspires devotional hymns to the unseen
divine-spiritual powers. This intermingling of the two streams in Greek
culture made possible a continuation from Homeric poetry, which we can locate
in the 8th or 9th century BC, to the works of
Aeschylus, three or four hundred years later.
Aeschylus comes
before us as a personality who was certainly not open to the full power of
Eastern vision, the convincing power we find in Homer as an echo of the old
clairvoyant vision of the deeds of the gods and their effect on mankind. This
echo was always very weak, and in Aeschylus so weak that he came to feel a
kind of unbelief in the pictorial visions of the world of the gods that
ancient clairvoyance had brought to men. Homer, we find, knew very well that
human consciousness had once been open to these visions of the
divine-spiritual powers which stand behind the interplay of human passions
and emotions in the physical world. Homer, accordingly, does not describe
merely a human conflict. Zeus and Apollo intervene where human passions are
involved, and their influence is apparent in the course of events. The gods
are a reality which the poet brings into his poem.
How different it all
is with Aeschylus. The stream of influence from the West, with its emphasis
on the human ego and the inward isolation of the human soul, had a
particularly strong effect on him. For this reason he was the first dramatist
to portray man as acting from out of his ego and beginning to release his
consciousness from the inflow of divine powers. In Aeschylus, in place of the
gods we find in Homer, the independent man of action appears, though still at
an initial stage. As a dramatist, Aeschylus puts this kind of man at the
centre of things. The epic had to emerge under the influence of the pictorial
imagination that came from the East, while Western influence, with its
emphasis on the personal ego, gave rise to drama, wherein the man of action
is the central character.
Let us take, for
example, Orestes, who is guilty of matricide and as a consequence sees the
Furies. Yes, that is still Homer: things do not pass away so quickly.
Aeschylus is still aware that the gods were once visible in picture form, but
he is very near to giving up that belief. It is characteristic that Apollo,
who in Homer acts with full power, incites Orestes to kill his mother, but
after this no longer has right on his side. The human ego begins to stir in
Orestes, and we are shown that it gains the upper hand. The verdict goes
against Apollo, he is repudiated, and we see that his power over Orestes is
no longer complete. Aeschylus was thus the right and proper poet to dramatise
the figure of Prometheus, the divine hero who titanically opposes the might
of the gods and represents the liberation of mankind from them.
Thus we see how the
awakening ego-feeling from the West mingles in the soul of Aeschylus with
memories of the pictorial imagination of the East, and how from this
conjunction drama was born. And it is decidedly interesting to find that
tradition wonderfully confirms the findings derived entirely from
spiritual-scientific research.
One remarkable
tradition partly acquits Aeschylus of the charge that he had betrayed certain
secrets of the Mysteries; he replied that he could not have done so, for he
had not been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. It certainly never was
his intention to present anything derived from temple secrets, from which
Homer's poems had originated. In fact, he stood somewhat apart from the
Mysteries. On the other hand, the story goes that at Syracuse, in Sicily, he
had gained knowledge of secrets connected with the emergence of the human
ego. This emergence took a particular form in regions where the Orphic
devotees cultivated the older form of ode, the hymn, addressed to the
divine-spiritual worlds that could no more be seen but only aspired to. In
this way art took a step forward. We see it emerging naturally from ancient
truths and finding its way to the human ego. Inasmuch as man, after living
predominantly in the outer world, took possession of his own inner life, the
figures in the Homeric poems became the dramatic characters of Aeschylus; and
so, side by side with the epic, drama arose.
Thus we see primeval
truths living on in another form in art, and the achievements of ancient
clairvoyance reproduced by poetic imagination. And whatever was preserved
from ancient times by art was applied to the human personality, to the ego
becoming aware of itself.
Now we will take an
immense step forward in time — on to the 13th and 14th centuries of the
Christian era. Here we encounter the great mediaeval personality who leads us
so impressively to the region which the human ego can reach when, by its own
endeavours, it ascends to the divine-spiritual world. We come to Dante, whose
Divine Comedy
(1472)
was read and re-read by Goethe. It affected him so strongly that when an
acquaintance sent him a new translation of it, he wrote his thanks to the
sender in verse:
Great
gratitude is due to him
Who brings us freshly to this book once more,
The book which in a glorious manner makes us cease
All our searchings and complaints.
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How did art progress
from Aeschylus to Dante? How does Dante bring before us a divine-spiritual
world once again? How does Dante lead us through its three stages, Inferno,
Purgatory and Heaven — the worlds which lie behind our physical
existence?
Here we can see how
the fundamental spiritual impulse that guides human evolution has continued
to work in the same direction. Aeschylus, quite clearly, is still in touch
with spiritual powers. Prometheus is confronted by the gods, Zeus, Hermes and
so on, and this applies also to Agamemnon. In all this we can discern an echo
of the ancient clairvoyance. With Dante it is quite different. He shows us
how, solely through immersing himself in his own soul, developing the forces
slumbering there and overcoming all the obstacles to this development, he was
able, as he says, in “the middle of life” — which means his
thirty-fifth year — to gaze into the spiritual world. Where as men
endowed with the old clairvoyance directed their gaze to their spiritual
environment, and whereas Aeschylus still reckoned with the old divinities, in
Dante we see a poet who goes down into his own soul and remains entirely
within his personality and its inner secrets. By pursuing this path of
personal development he enters the spiritual world, and is thus able to
present it in the powerful pictures we find in the
Divine Comedy.
Here the soul of Dante is quite alone with his personality; he is not
concerned with external revelations. No one can imagine that Dante could have
taken over from tradition the findings of the old clairvoyance. Dante relies
on the inner development that was possible in the Middle Ages, with the
strength of human personality as its only aid; and he brings before us in
visionary pictures something often emphasised here — that a man has to
master everything that clouds or darkens his clairvoyant sight. Whereas the
Greeks still saw realities in the spiritual world, Dante here sees pictures
only — pictures of the soul-forces which have to be overcome. Such are
those lower forces of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the
consciousness soul which tend to hold the ego back from higher stages of
development. The good, opposite forces were already indicated by Plato:
wisdom for the consciousness soul, self-reliant courage for the intellectual
soul, moderation for the sentient-soul. When the ego goes through a
development which enlists these good forces, it comes gradually to higher
soul experience which lead into the spiritual world; but the hindrances must
first be overcome.
Moderation works
against intemperance and greed, and Dante shows how this shadow-side of the
sentient soul can be met and mastered.
He depicts it as a
she-wolf. We are then shown how the shadow-side of the intellectual soul,
senseless aggression, depicted as a lion, can be overcome by its
corresponding virtue, self-reliant courage. Finally we come to wisdom, the
virtue of the consciousness soul. Wisdom which fails to strive towards the
heights, but applies itself to the world in the form of mere shrewdness and
cunning, is pictured as a lynx. The “lynx-eyes” are not the eyes
of wisdom, able to gaze into the spiritual world, but eyes focused only on
the world of the senses. After Dante has shown how he guards against the
forces which hinder inner development, he describes how he ascends into the
world which lies behind physical existence.
In Dante we have a
man who relies upon himself, searches within himself, and draws from out of
himself the forces which lead into the spiritual world. With him, poetry
takes closer hold of the human soul and becomes more intimately related to
the human ego. Homer's characters are woven into the doings of the
divine-spiritual powers, as indeed Homer felt himself to be, so that he says:
“Let the Muse sing the story I have to tell.” Dante, alone with
his soul, knows that the forces which will lead him into the spiritual world
must be drawn from within himself. We can see how it becomes less and less
possible for imagination to depend on external influences. A small fact will
show that on this point we are concerned not with mere opinions but with
forces deeply rooted in the human soul. Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock
[ 65 ]
was a deeply religious man and a profounder spirit even than Homer. He wished
to write a sacred epic poem, with the conscious intention of doing for modern
times what Homer did for antiquity. He sought to revive Homer's manner,
but without being untrue to himself. Hence he could not say, “Sing for
me, O Muse,” but had to open his
Messias
with the words:
“Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful man.” Thus
we see how progress in artistic creation does indeed occur among men.
Now let us take a
further giant stride over several centuries, from Dante to another great
poet, Shakespeare. Here again we see a remarkable step forward in the sense
of a progression. We are not concerned with criticism of Shakespeare or with
setting one poet above another, but solely with facts that point to a
necessary, legitimate advance.
What was it about
Dante that specially impressed us? He stands there by himself, with his own
revelations of the spiritual world, and describes the great experience that
came to him from within his own soul. Can you imagine that Dante would have
given so effective expression to the truth as he saw it if he had described
his visions five or six times over in various ways? Do you not feel that the
world into which Dante has transposed himself is such that it can be
described once only? That is indeed what Dante did. The world he describes is
the world of one man at the moment when he feels himself to be at one with
what the spiritual world is for him. Hence we must say: Dante immerses
himself in the element of human personality, and in such a way that it
remains his own. And he sets himself to traverse this human-personal aspect
from all sides.
Shakespeare, on the
other hand, creates an abundance of all possible characters — a Lear,
Hamlet, Cordelia, Desdemona; but we have no direct perception of anything
divine behind these characters, when the spiritual eye beholds them in the
physical world, with their purely human qualities and impulses. We look only
for what comes directly from their souls in the form of thinking, feeling and
willing. They are all distinct individuals, but can we recognise Shakespeare
himself in them, in the way that Dante is always Dante when he immerses
himself in his own personality? No — Shakespeare has taken another step
forward. He penetrates still further into the personal element, but not only
into one personality but into a wide variety of personalities. Shakespeare
denies himself whenever he describes Lear, Hamlet and so on; he is never
tempted into presenting his own ideas, for as Shakespeare he is completely
blotted out; he lives entirely in the various characters he creates. The
experiences described by Dante are those of one person; Shakespeare shows us
impulses arising from the inner ego in the widest diversity of characters.
Dante's starting-point is human personality; he remains within it and
from there he explores the spiritual world. Shakespeare has gone a step
further: he, too, starts from his own personality and slips into the
individuals he portrays; he is wholly immersed in them. It is not his own
soul-life that he dramatises, but the lives of the characters in the outer
world that he presents on the stage, and they are all depicted as independent
persons with their own motives and aims.
Thus we can see
here, again, how the evolution of art proceeds. Having originated in the
remote past, when human consciousness was devoid of ego-feeling, with Dante,
art reached the stage of embracing individual man, so that the ego itself
became a world. With Shakespeare, it expanded so far that other egos became
the poet's world. For this step to be possible, art had to leave the
spiritual heights from which it had sprung and descend into the actualities
of physical existence. And this is just what we can see happening when we
pass on from Dante to Shakespeare. Let us try to compare Dante and
Shakespeare from this point of view.
Superficial critics
may reproach Dante for being a didactic poet. Anyone who understands Dante
and can respond to the whole range and richness of his work will feel that
his greatness derives precisely from the fact that all the wisdom and
philosophy of the Middle Ages speak from his soul. And for the development of
such a soul, endowed with Dante's poetic power, the totality of
mediaeval wisdom was a necessary foundation. Its influence worked first on
Dante's soul and was again evident, later on, in the expansion of his
personality into a world. We cannot properly understand or appreciate
Dante's poetic creation unless we are familiar with the heights of
mediaeval spiritual life. Only then can we come to appreciate the depths and
subtleties of his achievement.
Certainly, Dante
took one step downwards. He sought to bring the spiritual down to lower
levels, and this he did by writing in the vernacular, not in Latin as some of
his predecessors had done. He ascends to the loftiest heights of spiritual
life, but descends into the physical world as far as the vernacular of his
place and time.
Shakespeare descends
still further. The origin of his great poetic characters is nowadays the
subject of all sorts of fanciful speculation, but if we are to understand
this descent of poetry into the everyday world — still often looked
down on by the highly placed — we must bear in mind the following
facts.
We must picture a
small theatre in what was then a suburb of London, where plays were produced
by actors who, except for Shakespeare, would not be rated highly today. Who
went to this theatre? The lower orders. It was more fashionable in those days
to patronise cockfights and other similar spectacles than to go to this
theatre, where people ate and drank and threw eggshells to mark their
disapproval and overflowed on to the stage itself, so that the players acted
in the midst of their audience. Thus it was before a very low-class London
public that these plays were first performed, although many people today
fondly imagine that from the first they were acclaimed in the highest circles
of cultural life. At best, unmarried sons, who allowed themselves to visit
certain obscure resorts in disguise, would go now and then to this theatre,
but for respectable people it would have been highly improper. Hence we can
see that poetry came down into a realm of the most unsophisticated
feelings.
Nothing human was
alien to the genius who stood behind Shakespeare's plays and the
characters in them. So it happened — in respect even of external
details — that art, after having been a narrow stream flowing on high
levels, descended into the world of ordinary humanity and broadened into a
wide stream running through the midst of everyday life. And anyone who looks
more deeply into this will see how necessary it was that a lofty spiritual
stream should be brought down to lower levels in order that such vital
figures as Shakespeare's highly individual characters should
appear.
Now we will move on
to times nearer our own — to Goethe. We will try to connect him with
his own creation — the figure of Faust target=_blank>Faust, in whom were embodied all his
ideals, endeavours and renunciations during the sixty years he worked on his
masterpiece. Everything he experienced in his innermost soul in the course of
his rich life, while he climbed from stage to stage of knowledge in his
search for higher answers to the riddles of the world — all this is
merged in the figure of Faust that we encounter today. What sort of figure is
he in the context of Goethe's poetic drama?
Of Dante we can say
that what he describes is portrayed as the fruit of his own vision. Goethe
had no such vision: he makes no claim to having had a special revelation at a
particularly solemn time, as Dante does with regard to the
Divine Comedy.
Everywhere in
Faust
Goethe shows that he has
worked inwardly on what he presents. And whereas the experiences that came to
Dante could be described only in his own one-sided way, Goethe's
experiences were no less individual but they were translated into the
objective character of Faust. Dante gives us his most intimate personal
experience; Goethe, too, had personal experiences, but the actions and
sufferings of Faust are not those of Goethe's life. They are free
poetic transformation of what Goethe had experienced in his own soul. While
Dante can be identified with his
Divine Comedy,
it would take almost a literary historian
to identify Goethe with Faust. Faust is an individual character, but we
cannot imagine that an array of Faust-like figures could have been created,
as numerous as the characters created by Shakespeare. The ego depicted by
Goethe in his
Faust
can be created once only. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare created Lear, Othello,
and so on. Goethe, it is true, also wrote
Tasso
and
Iphigenia,
but the difference between them and Faust is obvious. Faust is not
Goethe; fundamentally he is every-man. He embodies Goethe's deepest
longings, but as a poetic figure his is entirely detached from Goethe's
own personality. Dante brings before us the vision of one man, himself; Faust
is a character who in a certain sense lives in each one of us. This marks a
further advance for poetry up to Goethe.
Shakespeare could
create characters so individualised that he immersed himself in them and
enabled each one of them to speak with a distinctive voice. Goethe creates in
Faust an individualised figure, but Faust is not a single individual; he is
every-man. Shakespeare entered into the soul-natures of Lear, Othello,
Hamlet, Cordelia and so on. Goethe entered into the highest human element in
all men. Hence he creates a representative character relevant to all men. And
this character detaches himself from Goethe's personality as a poet,
and stands before us as a real objective figure in the outer
world.
Here is a further
advance of art along the path we have outlined. Starting from the direct
spiritual perception of a higher world, art takes hold of man's inner
life to an ever-increasing degree. It does so most intimately when — as
with Dante — a man is dealing with himself alone. In
Shakespeare's plays the ego goes out from this inwardness and enters
other souls. With Goethe, the ego goes out and immerses itself in the
soul-life of every-man, typified by Faust. And because the ego is able to go
out from itself and understand other souls only if it develops its own
soul-powers and sinks itself in another's spirituality, so it is in
line with the continued advance in artistic creation that Goethe should have
been led to depict not only physical acts and experiences in the outer world,
but also the spiritual events that everyone can experience if he opens his
ego to the spiritual world.
Poetry came from the
spiritual world and entered the human ego; with Dante it took hold of the ego
at the deepest level of the inner life. With Goethe we see the ego going
forth from itself again and finding its way to the spiritual
world.
The spiritual
experiences of ancient humanity are reflected in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey;
and in Goethe's
Faust
the spiritual world comes
forth again and stands before man. That is how we should respond to the great
final tableau in
Faust,
where man, after having descended into the depths, works his way up again
by developing his inner forces until the spiritual world stands open to him
once more. It is like a chorus of primal tones, but ever-renewed in
ever-advancing forms. From the imperishable spiritual world resounds the
imagination, bestowed on man as a substitute for spiritual vision and given
form in the perishable creations of human genius. Out of the imperishable
were born the perishable poetic figures created by Homer and Aeschylus. Once
more poetry ascends from the perishable to the imperishable, and in the
mystical chorus at the very end of
Faust
we hear:
Everything
transient is but a parable ...
[ 66 ]
And so, as Goethe shows us, the power of man's spirit
ascends from the physical world into the spiritual world again.
We have seen
artistic consciousness advance with great strides through the world and in
representative poets. Art emerges from the spiritual, its original source of
knowledge. Spiritual vision withdraws more and more in proportion as the
sense-world commands ever-wider attention, thereby stimulating the
development of the ego. Human consciousness follows the course of world
evolution and so has to make the journey from the spiritual world to the
world of the ego and the senses. If man were to study the world of the senses
only through the eyes of external science, he would come to understand it
only intellectually in scientific terms. But in place of clairvoyance, when
this passes away, he is granted imagination, which creates for him a kind of
shadowy reflection of what he can no longer perceive. Imagination has had to
follow the same path as man, entering eventually into his self-awareness, as
with Dante. But the threads that link humanity to the spiritual world can
never break, not even when art descends into the isolation of the human ego.
Man takes imagination with him on his way; and when
Faust
appears, we see the spiritual world created anew out of imagination.
Thus Goethe's
Faust
stands at the beginning of an epoch during which man is to re-enter the
spiritual world where art originated. And so the mission of art, for all
those who cannot reach the spiritual world through higher training, is to
spin the threads that will link the spirituality of the far-distant past with
the spirituality of the future. Art has indeed already advanced so far that
it can give a view of the spiritual world in imagination, as in the second
part of
Faust.
Here we have an intimation that man in his evolution is at the point when he
must learn to develop the powers which will enable him to re-enter the
spiritual world and to gain conscious knowledge of it. Moreover, having led
man towards the spiritual world with the aid of imagination, art has prepared
the way for spiritual science, which presupposes clear vision of the
spiritual world, based on full ego-consciousness. To point the way towards
that world — the world that human beings long for, as we have seen in
the examples drawn from the realm of art — that is the task of
spiritual science, and it has been the task also of this winter's
lectures.
Thus we see how
great artists can be justified in feeling that reflections of the spiritual
world are what they have to give to mankind. And the mission of art is to
mediate these revelations during the time when direct revelations of the
spiritual world were no longer possible. So Goethe could say of the works of
the old artists: “There is necessity, there is God!” They bring
to light the hidden laws of nature which would otherwise never be found. And
so could Richard Wagner say that in the music of the Ninth Symphony he could
hear revelations of another world — a world which a mainly intellectual
consciousness can never reach. The great artists have felt that they are
bearers of the spirit, the original source of everything human, from the
past, through the present, into the future. And so with deep understanding we
can agree with words spoken by a poet who felt himself to be an artist:
“The dignity of mankind is given into your hands.”
[ 67 ]
In this way we have
tried to describe the nature and mission of art in the course of human
evolution, and to show that art is not as separate from man's sense of
truth as people today may lightly suppose. On the contrary, Goethe was right
when he refused to speak of the idea of truth and the idea of beauty as
separate ideas. There is, he said,
one
idea, that of the necessary workings of the divine-spiritual
in the world, and truth and beauty are two revelations of it.
Everywhere among
poets and other artists we find agreement with the thought that the spiritual
foundations of human existence find utterance in art: or there are artists
with deeper feelings who will tell you that art makes it possible for them to
believe that their work carries a message to mankind from the spiritual
world. And so, even when artists are most personal in expression, they feel
that their art is raised to a universal human level, and that in a true sense
they speak for humanity when the characters and revelations of their art give
effect to the words spoken by Goethe's Mystical Chorus:
Everything
transient is but a parable ...
And on the strength of our spiritual-scientific considerations
we may add: Art is called upon to transfuse the transient and the perishable
with the light of the eternal, the imperishable. That is the mission of
art.