BY MARCIA DODWELL

The Jewish scriptures open with a magnificent picture of the Creative Principle of the Universe. "From the Beginning the Elohim created the heavens and the earth." The word Elohim expresses in its sounds something of the majesty of the Creative Principle of God. In his Gospel, written in Greek, St. John says: "In the beginning was the Word.…..and without Him was not anything made that was made."

These are the pictures that are given to man by two of the great religions, that he may glimpse something of the greatness of that Cosmic Word "sounding through the Depths of Time." That same Creative Principle dwells in each human being and thereby Man is raised above the creatures. He has the gift of the word and in him, speech, the vehicle of creative thought, is a faint microcosmic echo of the Divine, the Cosmic Word. In using his words, in his language, Man is exercising, often unconsciously, one of the greatest of his faculties as an embodied soul.

A language is the outcome of the embodiment of the soul of a people, and their literature is one of their great gifts to human culture. Now when a man comes to use consciously his language to express his thoughts, I mean when he uses it with conscious responsibility, it is as though he had taken up a piece of clay to mould with his hands, He finds that he must struggle with it and that in the struggle he brings into play his own individual creative powers and his words are really born out of his energising soul.

Like all languages, English has its own peculiarities. It has, especially, possibilities in two directions. Rudolf Steiner, the great Austrian philosopher and scientist, said of it that unlike older languages, it had lost to a very large extent onomatopoeia. It would therefore have the task of creating a new phase in the use of language. "Here lies the secret of the Western languages," he said, "that in them the physical tone loses its significance, while the spiritual gains it." He also said of English that it rides over its rhythms like a ship riding over the waves of the sea. Besides this, it has a great power of creating imaginative pictures in the soul of man; and English is only being used properly when it does so. I think it must have been some such quality to which Rudolf Steiner referred.

Take for instance a famous speech out of Twelfth Night. Viola says:

Shakespeare was the friend and pupil of the greatest mystic of his time and he seems to have sensed a certain peculiarity of the English folk-soul. It is this: the average Englishman does not enjoy philosophic thought. But if any great lover of humanity will create for him a work of art in which a great truth is enshrined, he will accept it. In a word, an Englishman will accept a new truth more easily if it is presented to him as beauty. So Shakespeare wrote plays; and later Handel wrote for us ‘The Messiah,’ the great musical epic of the Word made flesh. Shakespeare must have seen that a great change was coming over his countrymen, together with the rest of Western humanity. The age of natural science was dawning. In fact, Shakespeare himself was one of the morning stars of this day. For he was the first great writer to use the concrete, pictorial style in its full vigour. The way had been prepared for him by Tyndale’s Bible, but we do not know how accessible it was to Shakespeare. He himself, however, was obviously such a close observer of Nature that he was never at a loss for a metaphor or simile. Men’s minds were to be turned increasingly outwards and from this outer-gazing at the earth and the Kingdoms of Nature was to spring like a flame a great love for the being of the earth itself. It is a characteristic of the English. That is why they are "so crazy on gardening." Apart from his great value as a poet and dramatist, Shakespeare was a figure of the utmost importance for the future of both the English people and of their language. He probably knew that men would have to pay for their powers of observation and knowledge of Nature. That they would lose, except in a few rare souls, those last traces of spiritual-psychic gifts, of mystic apprehension which had warmed their soul-life in the middle ages. Man was to descend to such a low nadir of spiritual life that the physical body and physical surroundings might, at times, seem to be the only reality. In his graciousness Shakespeare described this in such a way that we need not lose sight of the truth. You will remember that in the last act of The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo is warming the starved little soul of Jessica with his love. He says, as they sit on a moonlit bank in Portia’s beautiful garden:

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look! how the floor of heaven

Is thick inLaid with patines of bright gold.

There’s not the smallest orb, which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;

Such harmony is in immortal souls.

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Shakespeare was the great observer and the great creator of imaginative pictures. Now think of this in connection with rhythm. The rhythms of English are akin to the great rhythms of the elemental waters. It is a factor in our language which foreigners often miss. English poetry scans, but a child of ten knows that he must not recite it according to the metre. In this, English parts company with its closest relative, German. And German people generally think that our rhythms are weak because they think in terms of metre. They often miss the rhythms of our prose altogether. But our very rhythms are like the waves of the sea, for the greater waves bear smaller waves on their bosoms and they in their turn carry the innumerable ripples of the surface. So true English proceeds in great periods and I cannot think of a better training for a man who would write or speak English than listening to the sea in all her moods. In fact, this is the Englishman’s idea of a holiday: to sit by the sea, to watch her rolling waves and to listen to their music. It refreshes him and he goes back contentedly to the fifty other weeks of his year’s work in the smoke-laden cities. He bears away with him something of the eternal spirit of the ocean. It is deep in his soul and he is almost certainly quite unconscious of it. But it can come to birth again in his language with its new strength and subtlety of rhythm.

English is rapidly becoming a world-language, and this is happening at a time when humanity itself is approaching a big crisis. We can remember with thankfulness that the average Englishman has some knowledge of Shakespeare. He has absorbed in the poetry some of the great spiritual verities and they work in him instinctively; they have sunk deep into his soul in childhood but have not always come to fruition in his consciousness. But that is also prepared for.

Shakespeare and his friends knew that in wresting from Nature some of her most deeply hidden secrets, the men of the future would come to something of a dead-end. We are exactly at this point now, and the leaders of our culture see two things quite clearly. One is that many human beings are passing through what is called "The dark night of the soul," and that they can only come through this stage (there is no going back) by an effort of the will. They will come to understand that their souls are like scientific instruments that have to be kept polished and adjusted. The more assiduously they are polished the more useful instruments will they become, because the polishing consists in a training in logical thinking, in exercises in meditation, concentration, contemplation, and in prayer. But this very polishing of his soul will lead a man past the dead-end to which natural science is coming. For as he wins back by his own efforts the great spiritual-psychic gifts–the faculties of supersensible cognition–a man will see clearly the new avenues of advance for science and will be spared much abortive effort.

In all English thought, life and language, there is the under-current of Celtic influence and this is wholly beneficent. It comes from a remote and very beautiful past. It is said that as the Manu was leading his chosen people from West to East, he left behind in Ireland some of his followers and from them came the Hibernian Bards and Druids. These were endowed with great spiritual-psychic gifts and their Mystery Schools were centres of great spiritual life and activity. In a later day St. Colomba bore the Celtic Church to Iona, which had been a Mystery centre from time immemorial. From Iona St. Aidan crossed to the mainland and founded the first English Church at Lindisfarne in Northumbria. The first English Church was Celtic, not Roman. It was highly mystical and had spiritual knowledge which has since become overlain with dogma.

But in the soul of the great Celtic people, this fire has slumbered and in the last decade of the nineteenth century it burst into flame again. We had the Celtic Revival. I will mention only two great figures. J. M. Synge, the Irish dramatist, has been said to be second only to Shakespeare in his use of English. The Erse language was dying rapidly and a body of patriots sought to revive it. We know that they have been, to some extent, successful. But strangely enough, it was as though this dying tongue sought to live again in English. For by a simple metamorphosis of the Erse idiom into English, the Irish writers of the turn of the century gave a new impetus to English, comparable only with that which Shakespeare gave. But their inspiration was national. The prophet came, not very surprisingly, from one intimately connected with Iona. He called himself Fiona Macleod.

Synge reaches his greatest height as a writer of English in his play ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows.’ This is the great Ulster love-story. The lovers Deirdre and Naisi flee from Ireland because the King of Ulster seeks to wed Deirdre. They spend seven happy years in Albion (Britain) but are finally lured back by treachery and Naisi meets his death at the hands of the King’s men. Determined not to turn the King’s treachery into victory, Deirdre takes her own life. These are her last words:

"I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that will be envied by great companies. It was not by a low birth I made kings uneasy, and they sitting in the halls of Emain. It was not a low thing to be chosen by Conchubor, who was wise, and Naisi had no match for bravery. It is not a small thing to be rid of grey hairs, and the loosening of the teeth. (With a sort of triumph) It was the choice of lives we had in the clear woods, and in the grave we’re safe surely…..

Once after I had produced this beautiful play, an Indian friend told me how specially he had appreciated the English. "A whole play written in poetry!", he exclaimed. I told him that the whole play was in prose but that the rhythm was so strong, so clear, so pure that it has the effect of poetry. Here again we can see how valuable an instrument this language is for the present century and the future. For it is in a machine age that the feelings of man are most in danger. Only a few can write poetry, but all must needs use prose. And any rhythm is a support to the rhythms of the physical body. They in their turn are the physical basis of the feeling life. So that in an age when man’s soul is most in danger, he is given a world-language which, by its very nature, can help him over the lowest nadir of his spiritual life. I say it can, for English is, alas, capable of being misused. It can become appallingly abstract. This quality is one which all the great stylists warn us against. It has no gift for the soul of man, and it can lead his thoughts away from the realties with which he ought to be grappling. So those who use English have a great responsibility to use the language properly. It is their task to create great panoramas of imaginative pictures such as can live in–the souls of those who hear us speak, or read our writings.

We have a saying that "children and fools speak the truth." We can certainly learn from children. Anyone who has told fairy-stories to children knows that one of the surest ways to hold their attention is to make the story live in pictures before them. Their, little eyes will be riveted on yours and their beaming faces will tell you that you are indeed feeding their souls. Similarly, in later life we can, in some measure, by the use of our language, help to nourish souls, and we can have access to the great healing rhythms in the very core of the language. We can warm feeling and above all help to fulfill the task of our age–to encourage men to forge for themselves, of their own souls, bright instruments of the knowledge of the future.

Let me close with a passage from Fiona Macleod’s "Divine Adventure." Speaking about Iona, he gives us the vision of the future in one of the most beautiful examples of modern English. I think too that those Indians who are hoping for the Kalki Avatar, may be interested in this promise from the soul of the West:

"I believe that we are close upon a great and deep spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken in dreams, and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may yet be a long way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come divinely as a woman to save as Christ saved, but not, as He did, to bring with Her a sword. But whether this Divine Woman, this Mary of so many passionate hopes and dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or as an immortal Breathing upon our souls, none can yet know.

"Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth in a Man, the coming of a new Presence and Power and dream that this may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem. But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul wherein She shall appear white and radiant. Or, that upon the hills where we are wandered, the Shepherdess shall call us home."

"……a young Hebridean priest...told me once how ‘as our forefathers and elders believed, and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace.’

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