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.