III
Symbolism and Phantasy in Relation
to the Mystery Drama,
The Soul's Probation
Let
us consider today the second Mystery Drama, The Soul's
Probation. You will have noticed that in our various stage
performances, and especially in this play, an attempt was made
to bring the dramatic happenings into connection with our
anthroposophical world view. In this play in particular, we
wanted to present on the stage in a very real way the idea of
reincarnation and its effect on the human soul. I need not say
that the incidents in The Soul's Probation are not
simply thought out; they fully correspond with observations of
esoteric study in certain ways, so that the scenes are
completely realistic in a definite sense of the word. We can
discuss this evening first of all the idea that a kind of
transition had to be created, leading from Capesius' normal
life to his plunge into a former life, into the time when he
lived through his previous incarnation.
I
have often asked myself since The Soul's Probation was
written, what enabled Capesius to build a bridge from his life
in a world where he had known — though certainly with a
genial spirit — only what is given by external
sense perception with a world view bound to the instrument of
the brain; how it was, I say, that a bridge could be created
from such a world to the one into which he then plunged, which
could only be revealed through occult sense organs. I have
often asked myself why the fairy tale, with the three figures
at the rock spring (Scene Five) had to be the bridge for
Capesius. Of course, it was not because of some clever idea or
some deliberate decision that the fairy tale was placed
just at this point, but simply because imagination brought it
about. One could even ask afterward why such a fairy tale is
necessary. In connection, then, with The Soul's
Probation there came to me certain enlightening points of
view about the poetry of fairy tales in general and about
poetry in relation to anthroposophy.
A
person could well put into practical use in his life the facts
implicit in the division of the soul into sentient,
intellectual, and consciousness souls, but when he does,
riddles of perception will loom up in a simply elemental-
emotional way with regard to his place in, and
relationship to, the world. These riddles do not allow
themselves to be spoken out in our ordinary language, with our
ordinary concepts, for the simple reason that we are
living today in too intellectual a time to bring to expression
in words, or through what is possible in words, the subtle
distinctions between the three members of our soul.
It
is better to choose a method that will allow the soul's
relationship to the world to seem diversified and yet quite
definite and clear. What moves through the whole of The
Soul's Probation as the connecting link between the events
themselves and what is significant in the three figures,
Philia, Astrid, and Luna, had to be expressed in delicate
outlines; yet this had to call up strong enough soul responses
to bring out clearly man's relationship to the world around
him. It could be presented in no other way than to show how the
telling of the fairy tale about the three women awoke in
Capesius' soul, as a definite preparation for his development,
the strong urge to descend into those worlds that only now are
beginning to be perceived again by human beings as real.
There will now be a recital of the fairy tale, so that we can
reflect upon it afterward.
*
(Scene Five: Tale of the Rockspring Wonder)
Once upon a time there was a boy
who lived — the only child of a poor forester —
within a woodland solitude. He knew
besides his parents hardly any other people.
His build was slender,
his skin almost transparent.
One could look long into his eyes:
they treasured deepest spirit wonders.
And though indeed few people entered
the circle of his life,
he never was in need of friends.
When in the nearby mountains
the golden sunlight glowed and glimmered,
the boy's rapt, musing eye drew forth
the spirit gold into his soul
until his heart resembled
the morning brightness of the sun. —
But when through darkening clouds
the morning sunrays could not pierce
and dreariness hung over mountain heights,
the boy's eye, too, grew dull;
a mood of sadness filled his heart. —
The spirit weaving of his narrow world
took hold of him so fully
that it was no less strange to him
than were his body and his limbs.
The trees and flowers of the woods
were all his friends:
there spoke to him from crown and calyx
and from the lofty tree-tops spirit beings
and what they whispered, he could understand. —
Such wondrous things of worlds unknown
unlocked themselves before the boy
whenever his soul conversed
with what most people would regard as lifeless.
At evening his anxious parents
from time to time missed their beloved child. —
The boy was at a spot nearby
where from the rocks a spring burst forth,
and waterdrops, dispersing thousandfold,
were scattered over stones.
When moonlight's silver glance,
in sparkling colours' sorcery,
was mirrored in the water's misty spray,
the boy could sit for hours on end
beside the rock-born spring.
And figures, formed by spirit-magic,
arose before his youthful vision
in rushing water and in moonlight's glimmer.
They grew into three women's forms
who told him of those things
toward which his soul's desire was turned. —
And when upon a gentle summer night
the boy was sitting at the spring again,
one woman of the three caught up a myriad of drops
out of the glittering spray
and gave them to the second woman.
She fashioned from the tiny drops
a chalice with a silver gleam
and passed it to the third.
She filled it with the moonlight's silver rays
and gave it to the boy,
who had beheld all this
with youthful inner sight. —
Now in the night
which followed this event,
he dreamed that he was robbed
by a fierce dragon of the chalice.
After this night the boy beheld
just three times more the wonder of the spring.
Henceforth the women came no more
although the boy sat musing
beside the rock-born spring in moonlight's silver sheen.
And when three hundred sixty weeks
had run their course three times,
the boy had long become a man
and left his parents' home and forest country
to live in a strange city.
One evening, tired from the day's hard toil,
he pondered on what life had still in store for him,
and suddenly he felt himself a boy,
caught up and carried to his rock-born spring.
Again he could behold the water-women
and this time heard them speak.
The first one said to him:
Remember me at any time
you feel alone in life.
I lure man's eye of soul
to starry spaces and ethereal realms.
And whosoever wills to feel me,
I offer him the draught of hope in life
out of my wonder goblet. —
And then the second spoke:
Do not forget me at the times
when courage in your life is threatened.
I lead man's yearning heart
to depths of soul and up to spirit heights.
And whosoever seeks his strength from me,
for him I forge the steel of faith in life,
shaped by my wonder hammer. —
The third one could be heard:
To me lift up your eye of spirit
when your life's riddles overwhelm you.
I spin the threads of thought that lead
through labyrinths of life and the abyss of soul.
And whosoever harbours trust in me,
for him I weave the living rays of love
upon my wonder loom. —
Thus it befell the man,
and in the night that followed this
he dreamed a dream:
a savage dragon prowled
in circles round about him, —
and yet could not come near him.
He was protected from that dragon by
the beings he had seen beside the rock-born spring
and who with him had left his home
for this far-distant place.
It
seems to me that the world of fairy tales can quite rightfully
be placed between the external world and everything that in
past times man, with his early clairvoyance, could see in
the spiritual world; with everything, too, that he can
still behold today if, by chance, either through certain
abnormal propensities or through a trained clairvoyance, he can
raise himself to the spiritual world. Between the world of
spirit and the world of outer reality, of intelligence, of the
senses, it is the world of the fairy tale that is the most
fitting connecting link. It would seem necessary to find
an explanation for this position of the fairy tale and the
fairy tale mood between these other two worlds.
It
is extraordinarily difficult to create the bridge between
these spheres, but I realized that a fairy tale itself could
construct it. Better than all the theoretical
explanations, a simple fairy tale really seems to build
this bridge, a tale that one could tell something like
this:
Once upon a time there was a poor boy who owned nothing but a
clever cat. The cat helped him win great riches by persuading
the King that her master possessed an estate so huge, so
remarkably beautiful that it would amaze even the King himself.
The clever cat brought it about that the King set forth and
traveled through several astonishing parts of the country.
Everywhere he went, he heard — thanks to the cat's
trickery — that all the great fields and strange
buildings belonged to the poor boy.
Finally, the King arrived at a magnificent castle, but he came
a bit late (as often happens in fairy tales), for it was just
the time when the Giant Troll, who was the actual owner
of this wonderful place, was returning home from his wanderings
over the earth, intending to enter his castle.
The
King was inside looking at all its wonders, and so the clever
cat stretched herself out in front of the entrance door, for
the King must not suspect that everything belonged to the Giant
Troll. It was just before dawn that the Giant arrived home and
the cat began to tell him a long tale, holding him there at the
front door to listen to it. She rattled along about a peasant
plowing his field, putting on manure, digging it in, going
after the seed he wanted to use, and finally sowing the field.
In short, she told him such an endless tale that dawn came and
the sun began to rise. The wily cat told the Giant to turn
around and look at the Golden Maid of the East whom he surely
had never seen before. But when he turned to look, the Giant
Troll burst into pieces, for that is what happens to giants and
is a law they have to conform to: they may not look at the
rising sun. Therefore, through the cat's delaying the
Giant, the poor boy actually came into possession of the
wonderful palace. The clever cat at first had given her master
only hope, but finally, with her tricks, also the great castle
and the vast estate.
One
can say that this simple little tale is extremely significant
for its explanation of fairy tale style today. It is really so
that when we look at men and women in their earthly
development, we can see what most of them are — those who
have developed on earth in the various incarnations they
have lived through and are now incarnated. Each one is a
“poor boy.” Yes, in comparison to earlier
historical epochs, today we are fundamentally “poor
boys” who possess nothing but a clever cat. We do,
however, it's true, have a clever cat, which is our
intelligence, our intellect. Everything the human being
has acquired through his senses, whatever he now
possesses of the outer world through the intelligence limited
to the brain, is absolute poverty in comparison to the whole
cosmic world and to what man experienced in the ancient Saturn,
Sun, and Moon epochs. All of us are basically “poor
boys,” possessing only our intelligence, something that
can exert itself a little in order to promise us some
imaginary property. In short, our modern situation is
like the boy with the clever cat.
Actually, though, we are not altogether the “poor
boy”; that is only in relation to our consciousness. Our
ego is rooted in the secret depths of our soul life, and these
secret depths are connected with endless worlds and
endless cosmic happenings, all of which affect our lives
and play into them. But each of us who today has become a
“poor boy” knows nothing more of this splendor; we
can at best, through the cat, through philosophy, explain the
meaning and importance of what we see with our eyes or take in
with our other senses. When a modern person wants somehow to
speak about anything beyond the sense world, or if he wishes to
create something that reaches beyond the sense world, he does
it, and has been doing it for several hundred years, by means
of art and poetry.
Our
modern age, which in many ways is a peculiarly transitional
one, points up strongly how men and women fail to escape the
mood of being “poor boys,” even when they can
produce poetry and art in the sense world. For in our time
(1911), there is a kind of disbelief in trying to aim toward
anything higher in art than naturalism, the purely external
mirroring of outer reality. Who can deny that often today when
we look at the glittering art and literature expressing the
world of reality, we can hear a melancholy sigh, “Oh,
it's only delusion; there's no truth in any of it.” Such
a mood is all too common in our time. The King of the fairy
tale, who lives in each one of us and has his origin in the
spiritual world, definitely needs to be persuaded by the clever
cat — by the intelligence given to man — that
everything growing out of the imagination and awakened by art
is truly a genuine human possession. Man is persuaded at first
by the King within him but only for a certain length of time.
At some point, and today we are living just at the beginning of
such a time, it is necessary for human beings to find once more
the entrance to the spiritual, divine world. It is today
necessary for human beings, and everywhere we can feel an
urgency in them, to rise again toward the spheres of the
spiritual world.
There has first, however, to be some sort of bridge, and the
easiest of all transitions would be a thoughtful
activating of the fairy tale mood. The mood of the fairy
tale, even in a quite superficial sense, is truly the means to
prepare human souls, such as they are today, for the
experience of what can shine into them from higher,
supersensible worlds. The simple fairy tale, approaching
modestly with no pretension of copying everyday reality but
leaping grandly over all its laws, provides a preparation
in human souls for once more accepting the divine, spiritual
worlds. A rough faith in the divine worlds was possible in
earlier times because of man's more primitive constitution,
which gave him a certain kind of clairvoyance. But in the
face of reality today, this kind of faith has to burst into
pieces just as the Giant Troll did. Only through clever cat
questions and cat tales, spun about everyday reality, can we
hold him back. Certainly, we can spin those endless tales of
the clever cat to show how here and there external reality is
forced toward a spiritual explanation.
In
broad philosophical terms, one can spin out a long- winded
answer to this or that question only by referring to the
spiritual world. One still keeps all this as a kind of memento
from earlier times; with it one can succeed in detaining the
Giant for a short time. What is with us from earlier times,
however, cannot hold its own against the clear language of
reality. It will burst into pieces just as the Giant Troll
burst, on looking at the rising sun. But one has to recognize
this mood of the bursting Giant. It is something that has a
relationship to the psychology of the fairy tale. Because I
find it impossible to describe such things theoretically, I can
get at this psychology only through observing the nature of the
human soul. Let me say the following about it.
Think for a moment how there might appear livingly,
imaginatively, before someone's soul what we recently described
in the lectures about pneumatosophy, [Rudolf Steiner, The
Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit,
Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1971.]
depicting briefly some details of the spiritual world. In
these anthroposophical circles, we certainly speak a good deal
about the spiritual world. Before a person's soul, it should
come at first as a living imagination. There would be
little explicit description, however, if you intended
only to describe what urges itself forward toward the soul,
even toward the clairvoyant soul. A queer sort of disharmony
comes about when one mixes such truths as those about ancient
Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, as described in our last
three anthroposophical meetings, [Rudolf Steiner, Inner
Realities of Evolution, Rudolf Steiner Press, London,
1953.] into the dismal, ghostlike thoughts of modern times.
Over against those things raised up before the soul, one is
aware of man's narrow limits. Those secrets of divine worlds
have to be grasped, it would seem, by something in us
resembling a troll. A swollen, troll-like giant is what one
becomes when trying to catch hold of the pictures of the
spiritual world. Before the rising sun, then, one has
voluntarily to let the pictures burst in a certain way in order
for them to be in accord with the mood of modern times. But you
can hold something back; you can hold back just what the
“poor boy” held back. For our immediate,
present-day soul to be left in possession of something, you
need the transformation, the matter-of-fact
transformation, of the gigantic content of the world of
the imagination into the subtlety of the fairy tale mood.
Then the human soul will truly feel like the King who has been
guided to look at what the soul, this “poor boy”
soul, actually does not possess. Nevertheless, it does
come into possession of riches when the gigantic Troll bursts
into pieces, when one sacrifices the imaginative world in the
face of external reality and draws it into the palace that
one's phantasy is able to erect.
In
former times, the phantasy of the “poor boy” was
nourished by the world of the imagination, but in view of
today's soul development this is no longer possible. If,
however, we first of all give up the whole world of the
imagination and press the whole thing into the subtle mood of
the fairy tale, which does not rely on everyday reality,
something can remain to us in the fairy tale phantasy
that is deep, deep truth. In other words, the “poor
boy,” who has nothing but his cat, the clever intellect,
finds in the fairy tale mood just what he needs in modern times
to educate his soul to enter the spiritual world in a new
way.
It
therefore seems to me from this point of view to be
psychologically right that Capesius, educated so
completely in the modern world of ideas, though certainly
with quite a spiritual regard for this world, should come to
the realm of the fairy tale as something new that will open for
him a genuine relationship to the occult world. So there had to
be something like a fairy tale written into the scene to form a
bridge for Capesius between the world of external reality and
the world into which he was to plunge, beholding himself in an
earlier incarnation.
What has just been described as a purely personal remark about
the reason I had for putting the fairy tale at this very place
in the drama coincides with what we can call the history of how
fairy tales arose in mankind's development. It agrees
wonderfully with the way that fairy tales appeared in human
lives. Looking back into earlier epochs of human development,
we will find in every prehistoric folk a certain primitive kind
of clairvoyance, a capacity to look into the spiritual
world. Therefore, we must not only distinguish the two
alternating conditions of waking and sleeping in those early
times, with a chaotic transition of dream as well, but we must
assume in these ancient people a transition between
waking and sleeping that was not merely a dream; on the
contrary, it was the possibility of looking into reality,
living with a spiritual existence. A modern man, awake, is in
the world with his consciousness, but only with his
sentient consciousness and with his intelligence. He has
become as poor as the boy who had nothing but a clever cat. He
can also be in the spiritual world in the night, but then he is
asleep and is not conscious of it. Between these two
conditions, early man had still a third, which conjured
something like magnificent pictures before his soul. He lived
then in a real world, one that a clairvoyant who has attained
the art of clairvoyance also experiences as a world of reality,
but not dreamlike or chaotic. Still, ancient man possessed it
to such a degree that he could encompass his imaginations
with conscious clarity. He lived in these three different
conditions. Then, when he felt his soul widening out into the
spiritual cosmos, finding its connection with spiritual beings
of another kind close to the hierarchies, close to the
spiritual beings living in the elements, in earth, water, air,
and fire, when he felt his whole being widening out from the
narrow limits of his existence, it must have been for him, in
these in-between conditions, like the Giant who nevertheless
burst into pieces when the sun rose and he had to wake up.
These descriptions are not at all unrealistic. Because today
one no longer feels the full weight of words, you might think
the words “burst into pieces” are put there more or
less carelessly, just as a word often is merely added to
another. But the bursting into pieces actually describes a
specific fact. There came to the ancient human being, after he
had felt his soul growing out into the entire universe and
then, with the coming of the Golden Maid of the Morning, had
had to adapt his eyes to everyday reality, there came to him
the everyday reality like a painful blow thrusting away what he
had just seen. The words really describe the fact.
But
within us there is a genuine King, which is a strong and
effective part of our human nature; he would never let himself
be prevented from carrying something into our world of ordinary
reality out of that world in which the soul has its roots. What
is thus carried into our everyday world is the projection or
reflection of experience; it is the world of phantasy, a
real phantasy, not the fantastic, which simply throws together
a few of the rags and tatters of life, but it is true phantasy,
which lives deep in the soul and which can be urged out of
there into every phase of creating. Naturalistic phantasy goes
in the opposite direction from genuine phantasy. Naturalistic
phantasy picks up a motif here and a motif there, seeks the
patterns for every kind of art from everyday reality and
stitches these rags of reality together like patchwork. This is
the one and only method in periods of decadent art.
With the kind of phantasy that is the reflection of true
imagination, there is something at work of unspecified form,
not this shape nor that, and not yet aware of what the outer
forms will be that it wants to create. It feels urged on by the
material itself to create from within outward. There will
then appear, like a darkening of the light-process, what
inclines itself in devotion to external reality as image-rich,
creatively structured art. It is exactly the opposite
process from the one so often observed in today's art work.
From an inner center outward everything moves toward this
true phantasy, which stands behind our sense reality as a
spiritual fact, an imaginative fact. What comes about is
phantasy-reality, something that can grow and develop lawfully
out of divine, spiritual worlds into our own reality, the
lawful possession, one can say, of the poor lad —
modern man — limited as he is to the poverty of the outer
sense world.
Of
all the forms of literature the fairy tale is certainly least
bound to outer reality. If we look at sagas, myths, and
legends, we will find features in all of them that follow only
supersensible laws, but these are actually immersed in
the laws of external reality as they leave the spiritual and go
into the outside world just as the source material, historical
or history-related, is connected to a historical figure. Only
the fairy tale does not allow itself to be manipulated around
real figures; it stays quite free of them. It can use
everything it finds of ordinary reality and has always used it.
Therefore, it is the fairy tale that is the purest child of
ancient, primitive clairvoyance; it is a sort of return payment
for that early clairvoyance. Let old Sober-sides, the pedant
who never gets beyond his academic point of view, fail to
perceive this. It doesn't matter; he needn't perceive it. The
simple fact is that for every truth he hears, he asks,
“Does it agree with reality?”
A
person like Capesius is searching above everything else for
truth. He finds no satisfaction in the question, “Does it
agree with reality?” For he tells himself, “Is a
matter of truth completely explained when you can say that it
accords with the external world?” Things can really
be true, and true and true again, as well as correct, and
correct and ever correct, and still have as little
relationship to reality as the truth of the little boy
sent to buy rolls from the village baker. He figured out
correctly that he would get five rolls for his ten kreuzers,
but his figuring did not accord with reality; he practiced the
same kind of thinking as the pedant who philosophizes about
reality. You see, in that village, if you bought five rolls,
you got an extra one thrown in — nothing to do with
philosophy or logic, just plain reality.
In
the same way Capesius is not interested in the question
of how this or that idea or concept accords with reality.
He asks first what the human soul perceives when it forms for
itself a certain concept. The human soul, for one thing,
perceives in mere external, everyday reality nothing more than
emptiness, dryness, the tendency in itself continually to die.
That is why Capesius so often needs the refreshment of Dame
Felicia's fairy tales, needs exactly what is least true to
outer reality but has substance that is real and is not
necessarily true in the ordinary sense of the word. This
substance of the fairy tale prepares him to find his way into
the occult world.
In
the fairy tale, there is something left to us humans that is
like a grandchild of the clairvoyant experience of ancient
human beings. It is within a form that is so lawful that no one
who allows it to pour into his soul demands that its details
accord with external reality. In fairy tale phantasy the poor
boy, who has only a clever cat, has really also a palace
obtruding directly into external reality. For every age,
therefore, fairy tales can be a wonderful, spiritual
nourishment. When we tell a child the right fairy tale,
we enliven the child's soul so that it is led toward reality
without always remaining glued to concepts true to
everyday logic; such a relationship to reality dries up the
soul and leaves it desolate. On the other hand, the soul can
stay fresh and lively and able to penetrate the whole
organism if, perceiving in the lawful figures of a fairy tale
what is real in the highest sense of the word, it is lifted up
far above the ordinary world. Stronger in life, comprehending
life more vigorously, will be the person who in childhood has
had fairy tales working their way into his soul.
For
Capesius, fairy tales stimulate imaginative knowledge. What
works and weaves from them into his soul is not their content,
not their plot, but rather how they take their course, how one
motif moves into the next. A motif may induce certain powers of
soul to strive upward, a second motif persuades other powers to
venture downward, still others will induce the soul
forces to mingle and intertwine upward and downward. It is
through this that Capesius' soul comes into active
movement; out of his soul will then emerge what enables
him finally to see into the spiritual world. For many people, a
fairy tale can be more stimulating than anything else. We will
find in those that originated in earlier times motifs that show
elements of ancient clairvoyance. The first tales did not begin
by someone thinking them out; only the theories of modern
professors of folklore explaining fairy tales begin like that.
Fairy tales are never thought out; they are the final remains
of ancient clairvoyance, experienced in dreams by human beings
who still had that power. What was seen in a dream was told as
a story — for instance, “Puss in Boots,” one
version of which I have just related. All the fairy tales in
existence are thus the last remnants of that original
clairvoyance. For this reason, a genuine fairy tale can be
created only when — consciously or unconsciously —
an imagination is present in the soul of the teller, an
imagination that projects itself into the soul. Otherwise, it
is not a true fairy tale. Any sort of thought-out tale can
never be genuine. Here and there today, when a real fairy tale
is created, it arises only because an ardent longing has
awakened in the writer toward those ancient times mankind lived
through so long ago. The longing exists, although sometimes it
creeps into such secret soul crevices that the writer fails to
recognize in what he can create consciously how much is rising
out of these hidden soul depths, and also how much is
disfigured by what he creates out of his modern
consciousness.
Here I should like to point out the following. Nothing put into
poetic form can actually ever be grounded in truth unless it
turns essentially to such a longing — a longing
that has to be satisfied and that longs for the ancient
clairvoyant penetration into the world, or unless it can use a
new, genuine clairvoyance that does not need to reveal itself
completely but can flash up in the hidden depths of the soul,
casting only a many-hued shadow. This relationship still
exists. How many people today still feel the necessity of
rhyme? Where there is rhyme, how many people feel how necessary
it is? Today there is that dreadful method of reciting poetry
that suppresses the rhyme as far as possible and emphasizes the
meaning, that is, whatever accords with external reality. But
this element of poetry — rhyme — belongs to the
stage of the development of language that existed at the time
when the aftereffects of the ancient clairvoyance still
prevailed.
Indeed, the end-rhyme belongs to the peculiar condition
of soul expressing itself since man entered upon his modern
development through the culture of the intellectual or
feeling soul
(Verstandes- oder Gemütsseele).
Actually, the time in which the intellectual or feeling
soul arose in men in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch
(747 B.C. to
1413 A.D.) is just the time when in poetry the
memory dawned of earlier times that reach back into the ancient
imaginative world. This dawning memory found its expression in
the regular formation of the end- rhyme for what was lighting
up in the intellectual or feeling soul; it was cultivated
primarily by what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean
epoch.
On
the other hand, wherever the culture of the fourth epoch had
penetrated, there was an incomparable refreshment through the
effects of Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha. It was
this that poured into the European sentient soul. In the
northern reaches of Europe, the culture of the sentient soul
had remained in a backward state, waiting for a higher stage,
the intellectual soul culture that advanced from the
Mediterranean and Southern Europe. This took place over the
whole period of the fourth epoch and beyond, in order that what
had developed in Central and Southern Europe, and in the Near
East, could enter into the ancient sentient soul culture of
Central Europe. There it could absorb the strength of will, the
energy of will that comes to expression chiefly in the
sentient soul culture. Thus, we see the end-rhyme regularly at
home in the poetry of the South, and for the culture of the
will that has already taken up Christianity, the other kind of
rhyme — alliteration — as the appropriate mode of
expression. In the alliterations of Northern and Central Europe
we can feel the rolling, circling will pouring into the culture
of the fourth epoch at its height, the culture of the
intellectual or feeling soul.
It
is astonishing that poets who want to bring to life, out of
primeval soul forces in themselves, the memory of some primeval
force in a particular sphere sometimes point back to the past
in a quite haphazard fashion. This is the case with Wilhelm
Jordan. [Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904), Nibelungen, Canto
One, Sigfridsage.]
In his Nibelungen he wished to
renew the ancient alliterations, and he achieved a remarkable
effect as he wandered about like a bard, trying to resurrect
the old mode of expression. People did not quite know what to
make of it, because nowadays, in this intellectual time of
ours, they think of speech as an expression only of meaning.
People listen for the content of speech, not the effect that
the sentient soul wants to obtain with alliteration, or that
the intellectual soul wants to achieve with the end-rhyme. The
consciousness soul really can no longer use any kind of rhyme;
a poet today must find other devices.
Fräulein von Sivers
[Marie Steiner] will now let us hear a
short example of alliteration that will characterize how the
artist, Wilhelm Jordan, wished to bring about the renewal of
ancient modes.
Und
es nahten die Nomen, von niemand gesehen,
Zu geräuschlosem Reigen und machten die Runde
Um diese Verlobten. Ein leiser Lufthauch,
Das war die Meinung der Minneberauschten,
Winde sich murmelnd herein zum Kamine;
Doch hinunter zur Nachtwelt, zu Nibelheims Tiefen,
Und hinauf zu den Wolken zu Walhalls Bewohnern
Erklang nun für andere als irdische Ohren
Vernehmlich wie Seesturm der Nomen Gesang:
Dein eigen ist alles,
Dein Heil wie dein Unheil,
Dein Wollen und Wähnen,
Dein Sinnen und Sein.
Wohl kommen, gekettet
In ewige Ordnung
Die Larven des Lebens,
Die Scharen des Scheins.
Sie ziehen die Zirkel,
Sie zeigen die Ziele,
Sie impfen den Abscheu,
Sie wecken den Wunsch;
Doch dein ist das Dünken,
Und wie du geworden,
So wirst du dich wenden,
Wir wissen die Wahl.
Rough English Translation
And the Norns then came nearer but no one could see them;
In soft silent steps they circled and swayed
Around the Betrothed — who, burning with love,
Thought a breath of sweet air was blowing about them;
While down to the night-world, in Nibelheim's nethermost,
And high in the heav'ns to the hosts of Valhalla
The Norns sang their song, for other than earth-ears
As clear as the clamorous raging of sea storms:
All is thine own:
Thy healing or hating,
Desires or delusions,
Thy thought and thy life.
Chained will come, cheerless,
In order eternal,
The hosts of the hidden,
The Larva of Life.
They mark out their measures,
They forecast fulfillment,
They implant raging passion,
Awaken the will.
Yet thine is the thinking,
The fashioning, forming,
The testing and turning:
We challenge thy choice.
Wilhelm Jordan really did bring the alliteration to life when
he recited his poetry, but it is something that a modern person
no longer can relate to completely. In order to agree
sympathetically with what Jordan proposed as a kind of platform
for his intentions, [In the 1925 German edition of this lecture
there is the following footnote: “Translated into the
language of spiritual science, one could say that Jordan wished
instinctively to revive for the consciousness soul as poetry
what the sentient soul had earlier developed quite
naturally.”] one has to experience those ancient
times imaginatively in those of the present. It is much like
bringing to mind all the happenings of these last few
days in our auditorium in the Architektenhaus during the
Annual Meeting, [December 10, 1911. Discussions took place on
December 12, 14, 15.] and perceiving them shrouded in astral
currents that make visible what was spoken there. Then one can
also discover that what in these days repeatedly played into
our efforts for knowledge and understanding is the pictorial
expression of a Jordan idea; that is, one could rightly
understand what he set up as a kind of program to revive
a mood that had held sway in the old Germanic world:
... der Sprache Springquell ...
Bedarf nur der Leitung, um lauter und lieblich
Mit rauschendem Redestrom bis zum Rande
Der Vorzeit Gefäße wieder zu füllen
Und new zu verjüngen nach tausend Jahren
Die wundergewaltige uralte Weise
Der deutschen Dichtkunst.
(The source of speech requires only guidance to fill again to
the brim the ancient vessels with rushing streams of verse,
sonorous and beautiful; and after a thousand years to bring
anew to life the wonder and the power of the ancient German art
of poetry.)
But
to attain this goal, an ear is needed that can perceive
the sounds of speech. This belongs intrinsically to the
imaginations of the ancient clairvoyant epoch, for it was then
that the feeling for sounds originated. But what is a speech
sound? It is itself an imagination, an imaginative idea.
As
long as you say Licht (light)
and Luft (air) and
can think only of the brightness of the one and the wafting
movement of the other, you have not yet an imagination. But the
words themselves are imaginations. As soon as you can feel
their imaginative power, you will perceive in a word like
Licht, with the vowel sound
“ee” predominating, a radiant, unbounded brightness; in
Luft,
with its vowel sound “oo,” a
wholeness, an abundance. Because a ray of light is a thin
fullness and the air an abundant fullness, the
alliterating “I” expresses the family relationship
of fullness. It is not unimportant whether you put together
words that alliterate, such as Licht
and Luft, or
do not alliterate; it is not unimportant whether you string
together the names of brothers or whether you put them
together in such a way that the hearer or reader feels that
cosmic will has brought them together, as in Gunther, Gemot,
Giselher. Such an ancient imagination the sentient soul
could perceive in the alliteration.
In
the end-rhyme the intellectual soul could recognize itself as
part of the ancient imagination. When language is made alive,
its effects can be felt in the soul even into our dreams, where
it can secrete certain imaginations for a person to become
aware of in dream. These imaginations appear also to
clairvoyance, correctly characterizing, for instance, the
four elements. It does not always hold good, but if someone
truly feels what, for example, Licht
and Luft
are, and lets this enter into a dream, there often blossoms out
of the dream-fantasy something that can lead to a
characterization of those elements, light and air. Human beings
will not become aware of the secrets of language until it is
led back to its origin, led back, in fact, to imaginative
perception. Language actually originated in the time when man
was not yet a “poor boy” but also when man had not
yet a clever cat. In a way, he still lived attached to the
Giant, imagination, and out of the Giant's limbs he was aware
of the audible imagination imbuing each sound. When a tone is
laid hold of by the imagination, then the sound originates, the
actual sound of speech.
These are the things I wanted to bring to you today, in a
rather unpretentious and disconnected way, in order to show how
we must bring to life again what mankind once lost but that has
been rescued for our time. Just as Capesius wins his way to it,
we must win it back, so that human beings can grow rightly into
the era just ahead of us and find their way into higher worlds,
thus truly to participate in them.
|