It is the same with the most telling of all the expression-languages, art. The Taboo side--namely, the stock of forms, the rules of convention, and style in so far as it means an armoury of established expedients (like vocabulary and syntax in verbal language)--stands for the language itself, which can be learned. And it is learned and transmitted in the tradition of the great schools of painting, the cottage-building tradition, and generally in the strict craft-discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of course and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command of the idiom that at a particular time is quite definitely living idiom of that time. For in this domain, too, there are living and dead languages. The form-language of an art can only be called living, when the artist corps as a whole employs it like a mother tongue, which one uses without even thinking about its structure. In this sense Gothic in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both dead languages. Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects and musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost self-taught, _philological_ art of Schinkel and Schadow,[164] the manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled experimentalism of present-day artists. In an artistic form-language, as presented to us by its products, the voice of the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less so in individual artists than in whole generations of artists. The creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of the cosmic cycles--the importance of which in the structure of art-history has hardly been suspected, let alone established--and the creative times of spring and love-stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the conceptions. The formalists are explained by depth of world-fear or by defect of “race,” and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or defect of discipline. We comprehend that there is a difference between the history of artists and that of styles, and that the language of an art may be carried from country to country, but mastery in speaking it, never.