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,[1] 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
- ↑ Hans Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), architect of the Opera House, the Altes Museum, and the Königswache of Berlin. Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850), sculptor (statues of Frederick II, Zieten, etc.; Quadriga of Brandcnburger Tor), a classicist malgré lui (not to be confused with two other artists of the same name, quasi-contemporaries). — Tr.
