Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas

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.