See Vol. II, p. 342; Borchardt, _Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri_; Ed. Mayer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, 251. Footnote 205: “Relief en creux”; compare H. Schäfer, _Von ägyptischer Kunst_ (1919), I, p. 41. Footnote 206: See Vol. II, pp. 350 et seq. Footnote 207: O. Fischer, _Chinesische Landmalerei_ (1921), p. 24. What makes Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the fact that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese art” corresponds, say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chóu and Vedic times. Footnote 208: C. Glaser, _Die Kunst Ostasiens_ (1920), p. 181. Footnote 209: Glaser, _op. cit._, p. 43. ----- III All art is _expression-language_.[210] Moreover, in its very earliest essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one active existence speaking for itself only, and it is unconscious of witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art- makers who _all_ dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history. It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as the supreme witness.[211] This expression is either _ornament_ or _imitation_. Both are _higher_ possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen im); whereas ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar to man.