Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/139

Rh 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. 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