CITIES AND PEOPLES
(B)
PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES
I
Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history
was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate
brought to a point by, Romanticism--the idea of the “People” in the
moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier
time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a
new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to
the investigator thus--What was the name of the _people_ who produced
the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the
Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so
false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of
events must necessarily be erroneous. “The people” as the absolute
basic form in which men are historically effective, the original home,
the original settlement, the migrations of “the” peoples--all this is
a reflection of the vibrant idea expressed in the “_Nation_” of 1789,
of the “_Volk_” of 1813, both of which, in last analysis, are derived
from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism. But the very
intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only too
well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it
cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that
“peoples” have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood
unit-quantities by which all history is _made_. For us, to-day,
world-history means--what it cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently,
or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks and the Chinese--the history of
Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech, wit, religion, is created by
the peoples. The State is the form of a people.
The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception.
What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not “peoples.”
In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the
bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms
natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a
landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited
field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested
with a character of duration. This I call _race_. Tribes, septs, clans,
families--all these are designations for the fact of a blood which
circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.
But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of
life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the
form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation
with that of another I call _language_, which begins by being a mere
unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but
gradually develops into a conscious _technique of communication_ that
depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.
In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every
language[161] the efficient form of _one_ great waking-consciousness
that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the
ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and
constantly brought into comparison with one another.
But, further, we shall never understand man’s higher history if we
ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor
of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an
understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that
of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of
his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language
side are _completely independent of one another_. Race is _something
cosmic and psychic_ (_Seelenhaft_), periodic in some obscure way, and
in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.
Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the
polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit
of a language. But they are two distinct _worlds_. To Race belong the
deepest meanings of the words “time” and “yearning”; to language those
of the words “space” and “fear.” But all this has been hidden from us,
hitherto, by the overlying idea of “peoples.”
There are, then, _currents of being_ and _linkages of waking-being_.
The former have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race,
as seen in the picture of the world-around, is the aggregate of all
bodily characters so far as these exist for the sense-perceptions of
conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops
and fulfils from childhood to old age the specific inner form that
was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at the
same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is
perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually
remains in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of
this all that we know is so much as presents itself in the world of
waking-consciousness. Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the
impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears
in the light-world of his eye, so that for him race is essentially
a sum of _visible_ characters. But even for him there are not
inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters
such as smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities
of human speech. In the other higher animals, on the contrary, the
capacity to receive the impression of race is decidedly _not_ dominated
by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the animals have modes of
sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is, however, only
men and animals that can _receive the impression of race_, and not
the plants, and yet these too _have_ race, as every nurseryman knows.
It is, to me, a sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers,
craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright
splendour attract one another, or even see one another, but must have
recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours and these scents
exist.
“Language” I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm
in so far as it brings something to expression _for others_. Plants
have no waking-being, no capacity of being moved, and therefore no
language. The waking-consciousness of animal existences, on the
contrary, is through and through a speaking, whether individual
acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious or the
unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A
peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten
playing with a cotton-reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through
the quaint charm of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there
is in one’s movements according as one is conscious or unconscious of
being observed; one suddenly begins to speak, consciously, in all one’s
actions.
This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction
between two genera of language--the language which is only an
_expression for the world_, an inward necessity springing from the
longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses,
to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is
meant to be _understood by definite beings_. There are, therefore,
_expression-languages_ and _communication-languages_. The former assume
only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings.
To understand means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with
one’s own feeling of its significance. To understand one another, to
hold “conversation,” to speak to a “thou,” supposes, therefore, a
sense of meanings in the other that corresponds to that in oneself.
Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an
“I,” but communication-language postulates a “thou.” The “I” is that
which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the
speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a
“thou.” Every deity is a “thou.” In fairy-tales there is nothing that
cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves
in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize
that anything can become a “thou” for us even to-day. And it is by some
“thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore,
is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.
It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier
between religious and artistic expression-languages and pure
communication-languages. This is true also (and indeed specially)
of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their
form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting
into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has
nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the
other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to “say”
something that he could have said equally well or better in an
exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct,
warn, or improve--the picture-series in any Greek Orthodox church,
which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making
the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says
nothing; or Hogarth’s substitute for sermons; or, for that matter,
even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by
the performance before one’s eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one
intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art
rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression-language should in
no wise be a communication-language, and the phenomenon of priesthood
is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language
in which man can communicate with God.
All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of
Waking-Being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every
genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the
history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye),
holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech
in general--indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now
know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring.
But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race
and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as
Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue
something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for
points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and
choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above
the tree-top--or something of religious world-feeling in the song of
the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the
utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and tension, form an
uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms
of every modern Civilization.
And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were
discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the
world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly
moving up into the foreground of research--“_totem_” and “_taboo_.”
The more enigmatic and indefinable these words became, the more it was
felt that in them we were touching upon an ultimate life-basis which
was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as the result of the
above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us. Totem and
Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny
and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear,
pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is
plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal
and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem
organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our
Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem
has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic
resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream
of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a
fact, _the_ fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other
hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is
learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret
by cult-communities, philosophers’ schools, and artists’ guilds--each
of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.[162]
But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas
the reverse is not the case--i.e., there are race-beings without
language, but no languages without race. All that is of race,
therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any
kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This
expression--not to be confounded with the expression-_language_ which
consists in an _active alteration_ of the expression--is not meant
for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it
stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant
the word “living”!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is
learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old
vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in
melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression;
in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to
distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself
a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with
the signs.[163] When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a
language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its
flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit,
and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and
inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for
the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know
the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan
Latin we know approximately the sound-values of the letters and the
meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration of Cicero
sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke
their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian market-place was
really like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again,
it was as a new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass
from the formation of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but
which our imagination to-day cannot recapture, any more than those of
old Latin) to encroachments upon the word-meanings and the syntax as
well. But the anti-Gothic Latin of the Humanists, too, which was meant
to be Ciceronian, was anything but a revival. The whole significance of
the race-element in language can be measured by comparing the German of
Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French of Diderot and of Napoleon, and
observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing are much closer together
than Lessing and Hölderlin.
It is the same with the most telling of all the expression-languages,
art. The Taboo side--namely, the stock of forms, the rules of
convention, and style in so far as it means an armoury of established
expedients (like vocabulary and syntax in verbal language)--stands
for the language itself, which can be learned. And it is learned
and transmitted in the tradition of the great schools of painting,
the cottage-building tradition, and generally in the strict
craft-discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of
course and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command
of the idiom that at a particular time is quite definitely living
idiom of that time. For in this domain, too, there are living and dead
languages. The form-language of an art can only be called living, when
the artist corps as a whole employs it like a mother tongue, which one
uses without even thinking about its structure. In this sense Gothic
in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both dead languages.
Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects and musicians
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves
with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost
self-taught, _philological_ art of Schinkel and Schadow,[164] the
manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled
experimentalism of present-day artists.
In an artistic form-language, as presented to us by its products, the
voice of the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less
so in individual artists than in whole generations of artists. The
creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those
of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and
so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian
Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of the cosmic cycles--the
importance of which in the structure of art-history has hardly been
suspected, let alone established--and the creative times of spring and
love-stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in
imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the
conceptions. The formalists are explained by depth of world-fear or by
defect of “race,” and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or
defect of discipline. We comprehend that there is a difference between
the history of artists and that of styles, and that the language of an
art may be carried from country to country, but mastery in speaking it,
never.
A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant
takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we
can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but
it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently
to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and
soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the
race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and
their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but
the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them,
and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the
extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and
Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither
_as_ Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there _as_
Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has
made its mark upon them--generation by generation they become more and
more like the people they eradicated. Gould and Baxter have shown that
Whites of all races, Indians, and Negroes have come to the same average
in size of body and time of maturity--and that so rapidly that Irish
immigrants, arriving young and developing very slowly, come under this
power of the landscape within the same generation. Boas has shown that
the American-born children of long-headed Sicilian and short-headed
German Jews at once conform to the same head-type. This is not a
special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us
very cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which
we know nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of
languages (e.g., Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achæans, and Dorians). As
to the race of these “peoples” we can conclude nothing whatever. That
which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names
of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But
already by Renaissance times it had completely grown itself into the
root characters of the Provençal, Castilian, and Tuscan soil.
Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the
accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its
inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from
tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are,
exchanged--indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not,
and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such
speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the speaking
of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives
are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with
perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times
the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling
that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce
others to give up their own language and--with genuinely religious
awe--to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes
of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and
Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever ready
to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue--the very
term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness
of our ever-recurring language-battles--is a trait of the _Late_
Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and
entirely so for the primitive. Unfortunately, our historians not only
are sensible of this, but tacitly extend it as a postulate over their
entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious conclusions
as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of
“peoples”--think of the reconstruction of the “Dorian migration,”
argued from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible,
therefore, to draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side
of peoples from mere place-names, personal names, inscriptions, and
dialects. Never do we know _a priori_, whether a folkname stands for
a language-body, or a race-part, or both, or neither--besides which,
folk-names themselves, and even land-names, have, as such, Destinies of
their own.
II
Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment
when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter
and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance
and marks off, within the race “man” (which is the element of the
_biological_ world-picture[165]) the human races of world-history
proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual
significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of
feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the
nautilus, the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate
self-evidentness, and every trait of original custom and form of being,
of marriage, of family life, and of tribal order is reflected in the
place and in the room-organization of parterre, hall, wigwam, atrium,
court, chamber, and gynæceum. One need only compare the lay-out of the
old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men
and the soul of the house were in each case identical.
This domain art-history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was
an error to treat the building of the dwelling-house as a branch of the
art of architecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses
of being and not for the eye that looks for forms in the light; no
room-scheme of the boor’s hovel was ever thought out by an architect as
the scheme of a cathedral was thought out. This significant frontier
line has escaped the observation of art-research--although Dehio[166]
in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do
with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently--and
the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the
art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His
science gathers, indiscriminately in all the “pre-” and “primitive”
periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments,
and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well
as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes
to the _organic_ history of painting, sculpture, and architecture
(i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds
himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier
between two worlds, that of soul-_expression_ and that of visual
expression-_language_. The house, and like it the completely unstudied
basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear,
belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of
fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset
of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an extension of the
supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament,
the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to
the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and
motives on these things possess even magical properties.[167] We all
know the Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental
ornamentation, and the Mycenæan strongholds with their Minoan artistry.
It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech,
_politics and religion_.
There is, in fact, as yet no world-history of the House and its Races,
and to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks
of the researcher. But we must work with means quite other than those
of art-history. The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of
all _art_-history, something constant and “eternal” like the peasant
himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher
history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the spacial
limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally,
throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in
which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still
found in Imperial times.[168] The form of the Roman rectangular house,
the existence-mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in
the Imperial palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed
from the Orient, but no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian
house,[169] any more than the Hellenistic city-architect tampered with
the megaron form of Mycenæ and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house
described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant-house kept its
essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the
burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings
of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and
Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from
cellar to garret with _their_ essences, but never perverting the Soul
of the House. And the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which
we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic
treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat-furniture
is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of race-history and not
of what is called style-history. Every other character can deceive us
as to the fortunes of race--the Etruscan names amongst the “Sea-folk”
defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the
wall-paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the
bodily connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone
Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region
east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded
race there. If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains
for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the
least inkling of the event that we know as the “great Migrations.”
But the presence of an oval house in the Ægean region[170] and of
another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia,[171] and the
much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the
Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when
a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is
only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament
means no more than a change of language, _but when a house-type
vanishes it means that race is extinguished_.
It follows that art-history, besides taking care to begin properly with
the Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race
side carefully from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture
two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant
village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They
are the _castle_ and the _cathedral_.[172] In them the distinction
between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises
to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the
Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the
home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage,
and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying,
lie outside all art-history. The history of the German _Burgen_ is a
piece of race-history throughout. On them both, early ornament does
indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here the beams, there
the door, and there again the staircase, but it can be so, or so, at
choice, or omitted altogether, for there is no inward bond between the
structure and the ornament. The cathedral, on the other hand, is not
ornamented, but _is itself ornament_. Its history is coincident with
that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and
all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in
the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it
has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict
architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is
entirely confined to religious building. All the beauty of architecture
that there is in Gelnhausen, Goslar, and the Wartburg has been _taken
over_ from cathedral art; it is decoration and not essence. A castle or
a sword or a pitcher can do without this decoration altogether without
losing its meaning or even its form.[173] But in a Cathedral, or an
Egyptian pyramid-temple, such a distinction between essence and art is
simply inconceivable.
We distinguish, then, the building that _has a style_ and the building
_in which_ men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is
the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in
its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength
of the countryman’s and the knight’s life that forms the building forth
from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too,
there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and
consists in the strict nature and stable form _of manners and customs_.
We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. But, just
as the power of this living form lays hands on the priesthood also,
creating in Gothic and in Vedic times the type of the knightly priest,
so the Romanesque-Gothic _sacred_ form-language seizes upon everything
pertaining to this secular life--costume, arms, rooms, implements, and
so forth--and stylizes their surface. But art-history must not let
itself lose its bearings in this alien world--it is only the surface.
In the early cities it is the same; nothing new supervenes. Amongst
the race-made houses, which now form streets, there are scattered
the handful of cult-buildings that _have_ style. And, as having it,
they are the seats of art-history and the sources whence its forms
radiate out on to squares, façades, and house-rooms. Even though the
castle develops into the urban palace and patrician residence, and the
_palatium_ and the men’s hall, into guild-house and town-hall, one
and all they receive and carry a style, they do not _have_ it. True,
at the stage of real burgherdom the metaphysical creativeness of the
early religion has been lost. It develops the ornament further, _but
not the building as ornament_, and from this point art-history splits
up into the histories of the separate arts. The picture, the statue,
the house, become particular objects to which the style is to be
applied. Even the church itself is now such a house. A Gothic cathedral
_is_ ornament, but a Baroque hall-church is a building clothed with
ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth
century is completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house
and its ornament are separated for good and all, so completely
that even the master-works amongst eighteenth-century churches and
monasteries cannot mislead us--we know that all this art of theirs is
secular, is adornment. With Empire the style transforms itself into
a “taste,” and with the end of this mode architecture turns into a
craft-art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression-language,
and of art-history with it. But the peasant-house, with its unaltered
race-form, lives on.
III
The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to
be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of
approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence,
its soul--as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all
know a man of race, a “thoroughbred,” when we see one. But what are
the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we
recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the
domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues
belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the
material that would be required! How much of it is irretrievably lost
by destruction, and how much more by corruption! In the most favourable
cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much
does a skeleton _not_ tell us! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric
research in its naïve zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from
a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves
of the War in northern France, in which we _know_ that men of all
races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie
together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature,
it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research.
In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without
the investigator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of
the fact. It is the _living_ body that carries nine-tenths of the
expression--not the articulation of the parts, but their articulate
motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien. And, for that matter,
how much potentially interpretable race-expression is actually observed
even by the keenest-sensed contemporary? How much we _fail_ to see and
to hear! What is it for which--unlike many species of beasts--we lack a
sense-organ?
The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy
assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception
with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an
aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the
anatomy of the discoveries--that is, characters that even a corpse
displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no
question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very
little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only in
so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not
the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it
is to classify races, not according to their _way of speaking_, but
according to the grammatical _structure of the speech_, which is just
anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that
the investigation of these _speech-races_ is one of the most important
tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily
experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one
of the most distinctive traits in present-day man--examples are legion;
each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was
spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day
from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak
exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in
Indian. What in the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the
land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race-trait
of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their
hosts, in their speaking of any of the European “mother”-tongues? What
in detail are the relations of the sound-formations, the accentuations,
the placing of words?
But science has completely failed to note that race is not the
same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the
microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that
for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that
a completely different significance must be attached to “races” when
the word denotes subdivisions _within the integral race “Man.”_ With
its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal
concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that
here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are
expressing themselves--secrets that cannot be inspected and measured,
but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.
Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these
superficial characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the
races of man according to skull-forms, Friedrich Müller (as a true
German) by hair and language-structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman)
by skin-colour and shape of nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by,
so to say, sport characteristics. This last is undoubtedly in itself a
very suitable criterion, but any judge of horses would tell him that
breed-characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific terminology.
These “descriptions” of races are without exception as worthless as
the descriptions of “wanted” men on which policemen exercise their
theoretical knowledge of men.
Obviously, the _chaotic_ in the total expression of the human body
is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the
Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound
(the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables
us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific
method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly
rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner
vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects
is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these
traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each
their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure
(and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the
expression of the fleshy parts--i.e., the face--becoming different.
The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost
every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet
the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone
who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build
accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression--I need only
mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock,
like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city-stock.[174]
But besides the energy of the blood--which coins the same living
features (“family” traits) over and over again for centuries--and
the power of the soil--evidenced in its stamp of man--there is that
mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions.
What is called the “_Versehen_” of a pregnant woman[175] is only a
particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very
deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the
race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married
people become strangely like one another, although probably Science
with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It
is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse,
this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The
feeling for race-beauty--so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe
urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty--is immensely
strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into
their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly
moulded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and more
definitely on _one bodily ideal_, so that it would have been quite
unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The
same is true of any ancient nobility--filled with a strong and deep
sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal.
Comradeship breeds races. French _noblesse_ and Prussian _Landadel_
are genuine race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred
the types of the European Jew, with his immense race-energy and his
thousand years of ghetto life; and it always will forge a population
into a race whenever it has stood for long together spiritually firm
and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a race-ideal exists,
as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture--the Vedic,
the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen--the yearning of
a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just _so_ and not
otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives)
towards actualizing this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further,
there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less
attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there
were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D.
1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a
blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that
the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely
close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty
generations or less the population of a land grows together into _one
single family_; and this, together with the choice and voice of the
blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners
into one another’s arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or
forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that
in utter unconsciousness fulfil the _will of the race_.
Primarily, this applies to the vegetal race-traits, the “physiognomy
of position,” as apart from movement of the mobile--i.e., everything
which does _not_ differ in the living and in the dead animal-body
and cannot but express itself even in stiffened members. There is
undoubtedly something cognate in the growth of an ilex or a Lombardy
poplar and that of a man--“thickset,” “slim,” “drooping,” and so forth.
Similarly, the outline of the back of a dromedary, or the striping of
a tiger- or zebra-skin is a vegetal race-mark. And so, too, are the
motion-actions of nature _upon and with a creature_--a birch-tree or a
delicately built child, which both sway in the wind, an oak with its
splintered crown, the steady circles or frightened flutterings of birds
in the storm, all belong to the plant side of race. But on which side
of the line do such characters stand when _blood and soil contend for
the inner form of the “transplanted” species_, human or animal? And how
much of the constitution of the soul, the social code, the house, is of
this kind?
It is quite another picture that presents itself when we attune
ourselves to receive the impressions of the purely animal. The
difference between plantwise being and animalwise waking-being (to
recall what has been said earlier) is such that we are here concerned,
not simply with waking-being itself and its language, but with the
combination of cosmic and microcosmic to form a freely moving body,
a microcosm _vis-à-vis_ a macrocosm, whose independent life-activity
possesses an expression peculiar to itself, which makes use in part of
the organs of waking-consciousness and which--as the corals show--is
mostly lost again with the cessation of mobility.
If the race-expression of the plant consists predominantly in
the physiognomy of position, the animal-expression resides in _a
physiognomy of movement_--namely, in the form as having motion,
in the motion itself, and in the set of the limbs as figuring the
motion. Of this race-expression not very much is revealed in the
sleeping animal, and far less still in the dead animal, whose parts
the scientist explores; we have practically nothing to learn now
about the skeleton of the vertebrate. Hence it is that in vertebrates
the limbs are more expressive than the bones. Hence it is that the
limb-masses are the true seat of expressiveness in contrast to the
ribs and skull-bones--the jaw being an exception in that its structure
discloses the character of the animal’s food, whereas the plant’s
nutrition is a mere _process of nature_. Hence it is, again, that the
insect’s skeleton, which clothes its body, is fuller of expression
than the bird’s, which is clothed by its body. It is pre-eminently
the organs of the outer sheath that more and more forcefully gather
the race-expression to themselves--the eye, not as a thing of form
and colour, but as _glance_ and expressive _visage_; the mouth, which
becomes through the usage of speech the expression of understanding;
and the head (not the skull), with its lineaments formed by the
flesh, which has become the very throne of the non-vegetable side
of life. Consider how, on the one hand, we breed orchids and roses
and, on the other, we breed horses and dogs--and would like human
beings to be bred, too. But it is not, I repeat, the mathematical
form of the visible parts, but exclusively the expression of the
movement, that displays this physiognomy. When we seize at a glance
the race-expression of a motionless man, it is because our experienced
eye sees the appropriate motion already potentially in the limbs.
The real race-appearance of a bison, a trout, a golden eagle, is not
to be reproduced by any reckoning of the creature’s plane or solid
dimensions; and the deep attractiveness that they possess for the
creative artist comes precisely from the fact that the secret of race
can reveal itself in the picture _by way of the soul_ and not by any
mere imitation of the visible. One has to see and, seeing, to feel
how the immense energy of this life concentrates upon head and neck,
how it speaks in the bloodshot eye, in the short compact horn, in the
“aquiline” beak and profile of the bird of prey--to mention one or two
only of the innumerable points that cannot be communicated by words and
are only expressible, by me for you, in the language of an art.
But with such hall-marks as those quoted, characterizing the noblest
sorts of animals, we come very near to the concept of race which
enables us to perceive within the type “mankind” differences of a
higher sort than either the vegetable or the animal--differences that
are spiritual rather, and _eo ipso_ less accessible to scientific
methods. The coarse characters of the skeletal structure have ceased
to possess independent importance. Already Retzius (d. 1860) had put
an end to the belief of Blumenbach that race and skull-formation are
coincident, and J. Ranke summarizes his tenets in these words:[176]
“What in point of variety of skull-formation is displayed by mankind
in general is displayed also on the smaller scale by every tribe
(_Volksstamm_) and even by many fair-sized communities--a union of
the different skull-forms with the extremes led up to through finely
graduated intermediate forms.” No one would deny that it is reasonable
to seek for ideal basic forms, but the researcher ought not to
lose sight of the fact that these are ideals and that, for all the
objectivity of his measurements, it is his taste that really fixes his
limits and his classification. Much more important than any attempts
to discover an ordering principle is the fact that within the unit
“humanity” all these forms occur and have occurred from the earliest
ice-times, that they have never markedly varied, and that they are
found indiscriminately even within the same families. The one certain
result of science is that observed by Ranke, that when skull-forms are
arranged serially with respect to transitions, certain averages emerge
which are characteristic not of “race,” but of the land.
In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself
with any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the
bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of
Romanticism we have spoken of an “Indogermanic” race. But is there such
a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and
Frankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the
earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which
not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain! How unimportant
these are for that which we call race in higher mankind can be shown
by a drastic experiment. Take a set of men with every conceivable
race-difference, and, while mentally picturing “race,” observe them in
an X-ray apparatus. The result is simply comic. As soon as light is let
through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely.
It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is
really illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape
and never a function of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von
Luschen in Crete have examined an immense material yielded by graves
ranging from the Stone Age to the present day. From the “Sea-peoples”
of the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks
one human stream after another has passed over this region, but the
average bone-structure has remained unaltered. It would be true, in
a measure, to say that “race” has travelled as flesh over the fixed
skeleton-form of the land.[177] The Alpine region to-day contains
“peoples” of the most diverse origins--Teuton, Latin, Slav--and we
need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also.
Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the
region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards
the plains, does it gradually disappear in favour of other forms,
which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the
race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric
bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some
conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they
merely indicate the basic land-form that is found there to this day.
Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once
in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of
the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from
the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly--i.e.,
botanically--changed. But in this instance “race” can be determined in
other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern
and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the
products of every different site on every different hill-side; and the
same holds good for every other high-grade vegetable “race,” such as
tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the country-side, is one
of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they cannot be
measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in
just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element,
only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form,
that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the
Renaissance in Tuscany,[178] and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500
B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.
None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs.
It exists for the feelings--with a plain certainty and at the first
glance--but not for the savant’s treatment. And the conclusion to which
I come is that Race, like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in
every question of life, something which everyone knows clearly and
definitely so long as he does not try to set himself to comprehend it
by way of rational--i.e., soulless--dissection and ordering. Race,
Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought
approaches them, the word “Time” acquires the significance of a
dimension, the word “Destiny” that of causal connexion, while Race,
for which even at that stage of scientific _askesis_ we still retain a
very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and
heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture,
stock) interpenetrate without end and without law. Some adhere toughly
and permanently to a stock and are transmissible; others glide over a
population like mere cloud-shadows; and many are, as it were, dæmons
of the land, which possess everyone who inhabits it for as long as he
stays in it. Some expel one another, some seek one another. A strict
classification of races--the ambition of all ethnology--is impossible.
The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contradicts this very
essence of the racial, and every systematic lay-out always has been
and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the
nature of its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic
through and through. In the last resort every individual man and every
individual moment of his existence have their own race. And therefore
the only mode of approach to the Totem side is, not classification, but
physiognomic fact.
IV
He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin
by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a
hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He
listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head--this
kind of man-speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two
sentences to indicate _his_ idea; he stands still and barks, which
in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what
Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure
at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not
really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another.
When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman, he looks
at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence
that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic
mode of expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are
capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of
speech--adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.
If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of
Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and
expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression--he barks--and finally an
expression of attitude--he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the
obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.
Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted
every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master,
he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of
the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here--the immediate
contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of
waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the
dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the
eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.
Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of
the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word,
and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary
meanings of the words he or she is using--that is, the sound-forms in
this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words.
Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be
learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to
us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it
do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language.
Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost
incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in
the form of punctuation.
It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses
language in general with human word-language--and that not merely
theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its
investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the
vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common
use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole,
is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone
(an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more
modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin
of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the
problem. Verbal speech--for that is what is meant--never had origins
at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not
unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain
stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the
history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly
ought not to begin with man.
But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous.
Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in
contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular
creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless.
To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having
a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning
of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic
existences are _in plurality_ is a matter of simple self-evidence. To
speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that
Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of
ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there,
still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly
and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for
linkages of waking-consciousness.
Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed
activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm
and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the
plant-state--i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition,
procreation, defence, attack--one side of it regularly consists in
getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether
it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or
the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is
a definite _will to receive impression_; this we call orientation. But,
besides, there exists from the beginning a _will to produce impression
in the other_--what we call expression--and with that, at once, we have
_speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness_. Since
then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of
high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of
potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed
impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.
But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear.
The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space
between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is
one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive
impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure
oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious
connexion with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the
being-alone. _The discovery of the Thou_, the sense of another self
resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien,
is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon
animals _are_. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny
world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the
discovery of the Thou, and _with it that of the I_ has been taking
place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know
not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely
waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness,
and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an
expression-_speech_.
It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great
speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims
purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as
a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive
impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on
this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech,
art, depends.[179] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation,
postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same
as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before
witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of
all expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced
for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the
elementary unit of all communication-technique--including, therefore,
at the highest level, human speech.