This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art-research — although Dehio[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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,[4] any more than the
- ↑ Gesch. d. Deutsch. Kunst (1919), pp. 14, et seq.
- ↑ This practice of inscription survives till deep into the Civilization. Even in 1914 the guns of the German Army, true products of the advanced machine-shop though they were, carried a Latin threat to the foe. From the magic rune of the blade it is a step to the motto on the shield, and then to the motto alone as unity-charm of the regiment or the Order. — Tr.
- ↑ W. Altmann, Die ital. Rundbauten (1906).
- ↑ A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. See Vol. I (English edition), p. 185, foot-note. — Tr.
