63. Eurythmy Performance

Now, you see, you feel this too if you want to let the individual human being work. You feel it in language when you are to pour that which is the content of the will into the word forms. Perhaps it seems paradoxical to many of the honored listeners, but it is nevertheless the case: for those who have a certain fine empathy for what one can feel today at an advanced stage of human development, what one can experience inwardly when one wants to express it in conventional language, then it is as if what one experiences more or less gets stuck in one's throat. Only people who have a certain talent for merging into the conventional, even if they are poets, find satisfaction in the phonetic language as a whole. One can say: this spoken language compels us to become inartistic everywhere, because it enters into the thought element, which becomes more and more conventional as civilization advances, because it favors the thought element. This conceptual element is only present in the accompanying recitation, but this must also go back to the artistic element, otherwise it would not be able to keep pace with the eurythmic performance. In contrast, in the eurythmic performance, we have the human will of a poem or a musical element, and we have the possibility to express the purely artistic.