In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles and palaces of assize. Here the _living_ Culture-languages have been formed. Talk is the custom of speech, its manners--“good form” in the intonation and idiom, fine tact in choice of words and mode of expression. All these things are a mark of _race_; they are learned not in the monastery cell or the scholar’s study, but in polite intercourse and from living examples. In noble society, and as a hall-mark of nobility, the language of Homer,[214] as also the old French of the Crusades and the Middle High German of the Hohenstaufen, were erected out of the ordinary talk of the country-side. When we speak of the great epic poets, the Skalds, the Troubadours, as creators of language, we must not forget that they began by being trained for their task, _in language as in other things_, by moving in noble circles. The great art by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of a race and not that of a craft. The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and conclusions. It labours to improve the dialectical capacities of the words and sentence-forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently, an ever-increasing differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of the idiom of intellectual from that of social intercourse. Beyond all divisions of language-families there is a component common to the expression of Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas, of Veda and Mishna. Here we have the starting-point of all the ripe scholar-languages of the West--which, German and English and French alike, bear to this day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars’ Latin--and, therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical expression and logical sentence-form. This opposition between the modes of understanding of “Society” and of Science renews itself again and again till far into the Late period. The centre of gravity in the history of French was decisively on the side of race; i.e., of talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris, the _esprit précieux_ of the Arthurian romances evolves into the “conversation,” the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges. The fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls of the tyrants and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek philosophy: for later on, it was almost impossible to discuss the syllogism in the language of Alcibiades. On the other hand, German prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no central point on which it could rise to excellence, and so even to-day it oscillates in point of style between French and Latin--courtly and scholarly--according as the author’s intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study and their stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived indeed at personal styles, and others are able to imitate these styles,