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114 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to which the style is to be applied. Even the church itself is now such a house. A Gothic cathedral is ornament, but a Baroque hall-church is a building clothed with ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth century is completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house and its ornament are separated for good and all, so completely that even the master-works amongst eighteenth-century churches and monasteries cannot mislead us — we know that all this art of theirs is secular, is adornment. With Empire the style transforms itself into a " taste," and with the end of this mode archi- tecture turns into a craft-art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression- language, and of art-history with it. But the peasant-house, with its unaltered race-form, lives on.

III

The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to be ap- preciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul — as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a "thoroughbred," when we see one. But what are the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the material that would be required ! How much of it is irretrievably lost by destruction, and how much more by corruption! In the most favourable cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a skeleton not tell us ! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its naive zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves of the War in northern France, in which we know that men of all races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their na- ture, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investi- gator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact. It is the living body that carries nine-tenths of the expression — not the articulation of the parts, but their articulate motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien. And, for that matter, how much potentially interpretable race-expression is actually observed even by the keenest-sensed contemporary? How much we fail to see and to hear ! What is it for which — unlike many species of beasts — we lack a sense-organ?

The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the anatomy of the discoveries —