59. Eurythmy Performance

But it was not entirely foolish, even in the time when, about a century ago, people were really striving again, especially in Central Europe, to really feel the artistic in poetry, it was not at all foolish for people to sit down together and listen to beautiful poems in languages they did not know, just absorbing intonation, rhythm, meter and so on – in other words, the formative, pictorial, musical element of language. But it is precisely that which underlies the linguistic as the actual artistic that can be brought out of poetry through this silent language, which we are striving for here with eurythmy and which does not consist of arbitrary gestures invented to what is musically based, but is based on a careful study of what happens in the separate organs of the larynx, the palate, and so on when speaking. Of course, the small tremors that are transmitted to the air and then form the basis of tone hearing cannot be expressed in any other way than through speech itself; but the tendencies that lie within, the tendencies of movement, can be transferred to the whole person according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.