How a Poetic-Enthusiastic Personality Fifty Years Ago Sensed Our Time

Almost half a century has passed since the Austrian literary historian Karl Julius Schröer wrote his book “Die deutsche Dichtung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (Nineteenth Century German Poetry). In it, he summarized a phenomenon that manifested itself in a number of poets under the name “Gelehrte Lyrik” (Scholarly Lyricism). The poets who gave him cause to do so were: Hermann Lingg, Wilhelm Jordan, Robert Hamerling, Victor Scheffel. It is not a negative assessment of these poets that Schröer wanted to express with this. This will be admitted even by those who disagree with this assessment in many ways.

But what Schröer wanted, he expresses sharply in the following words: “If the poets whose works I allowed to be called erudite lyric almost seem to us like testimonies to an age suffering from over-education, it cannot be denied that among the ones mentioned, Hamerling is certainly the one who still has the most in him of the true poet. Indeed, in its seeds, the new education and learning sprout with the last lyric poet we have to deal with, with Victor Scheffel."

Schröer sensed the pressure that “erudite education” exerted on the free momentum of poetic imagination at the time he was writing his observations.

One certainly cannot say that Victor Scheffel wanted to embody “erudition” in his poetry. Nor would one necessarily find it in the other poets mentioned. Least of all in Robert Hamerling.

But Schröer nevertheless points to something that is significant for the past fifty years.

The phrase “for an age suffering from over-education” is particularly striking. It refers to an age in which the forces of decline are already present, and under whose influence humanity must live in the present. And it is precisely these seeds that Schröer senses when he speaks of “over-education”. He senses that there is something in the direction that intellectual education has taken that separates man from the inner sources of life and the world. In saying this, he points back to Goethe, who still carries nature and the world close to his heart.

It is the pressure that arose from the striving for knowledge of that time that puts the words on Schröer's tongue. What has often been said in this weekly magazine may be repeated from a different point of view. One can fully recognize the great achievements of natural knowledge, which that time mastered without limitation; but this must not scare away the insight that the way of thinking that has emerged with these achievements in the development of humanity includes forces of decline. And Schröer sees this when he speaks of the suffering of his time due to “over-education”. He sees how there is only more trust in that activity of the soul that directs the mind to natural processes, insofar as these natural processes reveal themselves through the senses. This results in a content of the soul that, in Schröer's opinion, paralyzes the power of poetry.

Of course it does not have to be that way. And anyone who says, “Yes, should we then, in order not to disturb the poets, renounce the ‘objectivity’ of true knowledge?” is quite right from his point of view. But the thinking that resulted from this “true knowledge” pushed everywhere to recognize its own limitations. “Objectivity” was only found when one adhered to the ‘limits of the knowledge of nature’. Whoever says: this is how much science can recognize, and whoever strives for more is seeking ways beyond the ‘limits of the knowledge of nature’ and will have a beneficial effect. But whoever decrees: knowledge of nature must be accepted unconditionally; it has a right to determine the limits of knowledge in general, brings about ideas through this way of thinking that affect the soul habits of man. And this effect is one that extinguishes everything that arises freely from the soul to reveal itself in human creations of the spirit.

But it is these free human creations that are connected with the nature of man himself. They are the powers transformed into the spiritual, which work in the growth, in the shaping, in the whole formation of the physical man as well. In the free creation of the spirit, man lets that which the world powers bring to life come forth from his soul in a different form, by letting him himself emerge from the mother soil of existence into manifestation. Man can never understand his own nature if he sees in himself a collection of what nature itself allows him to recognize.

The response that is often made is not justified. Those who have adopted the common orientation towards mere natural events believe that they are approaching human beings in order to view them as impartially as nature. But he has not. He has taken into his soul the ideas of nature with their limitations as habits of thought, and these he transfers to man. He believes he is looking at the latter; in truth, the hallucination of a spectre stands before his soul, which he has composed of natural substances and natural forces; and the true human essence falls away from view.

With this hallucination before his soul, man finds himself hampered wherever he would let his free spiritual power rule. He would also like to unfold spiritually in his soul what works in the depths by his own being arising; then “true knowledge” comes and whispers to him, you may do that; but you are in the airy realm of the unreal. One can now theorize that a “true insight” must be based only on itself; that imagination must go its own way, regardless of what “science” determines. But this science does flow into the soul. And it causes what Schröer calls the suffering of “overeducation”. This overeducation lies in the belief that the knowledge of nature that developed in the nineteenth century, with its orientation towards ideas, can approach the human being.

This overeducation becomes undereducation in the intellectual realm. It would be highly misleading if one had to say in truth: anyone who wants to let the human spirit rule freely is obliged to do so regardless of the “findings” of knowledge. If one then sees that free creativity is nevertheless fettered by this, one would have to assume a tragic conflict in the nature of man. One would have to believe that he can only gain knowledge if he stifles his own nature. If this were really the result of conscientious, “exact” research, man would have to resign himself to it. Anthroposophical spiritual knowledge attempts to show that this is not the case. However, it does not take the view that it must be accepted for the sake of humanity, as a kind of hypothesis. Instead, it approaches the spiritual being in the same way that science approaches the natural being. It is not a prerequisite for spiritual science that man should find harmony within himself, for the sake of which it surreptitiously gains its results; but spiritual science gains its results spiritually, just as natural science gains its results naturally. And from these results it may then look up to the harmony within man and cherish the hope that it may also be able to act on this harmony through its impulses.