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136 just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word — lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the known speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on this occasion. Consequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn. "Understanding" is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the negative ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally valid — the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning — from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to say something, the words "fail" one (versagen, mis-say); that one does not "express oneself aright" and in fact says something other than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art — which is widespread even amongst animals (e.g., cats) — of "using words to conceal thoughts." One says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio) imitates the strophes of small song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter's dodge, but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every religion, every art, every society — we need only refer to the ideas expressed by the words "hypocrite," "orthodox," "heretic," the English "cant," the secondary senses of "diplomat," "Jesuit," "actor," the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day, in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the