Chapter V: Cities and Peoples (3)

The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs exclusively to Culture-men. In contrast to verbal language it is conditioned, not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and religious Destinies of world-history. All scripts come into being in the _individual_ Cultures and are to be reckoned amongst their profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive history of script has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and their modifications has never even been attempted. _Writing is the grand symbol of the Far_, meaning not only extension-distance, but also, and above all, duration and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only in proximity and the present,[206] but through script one speaks to men whom one has never seen, who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard centuries after he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing marks of the _historical_ endowment. But for that very reason nothing is more characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If we know as little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two earliest Cultures whose people made use of this system--the Indian and the Classical--were so _a-historic_ in disposition that they not only formed no script of their own, but even fought off alien scripts until well into the Late period of their course. Actually, the whole art of Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear. One read it as if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak everything as though we were reading it--with the result that in the eternal seesaw between script-image and word-sound we have never attained to a prose style that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on the other hand, each religion developed its own script and kept it even through changes of verbal language; the duration of the sacred books and teachings and the script as symbol of duration belong together. The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern Arabia in the Minæan and Sabæan scripts--differentiated, without doubt, according to sect--which probably go back to the tenth century before Christ.[207] The Jews, Mandæans, and Manichæans in Babylonia spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews wrote it in their own characters.[208] Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[209] The growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably, the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language--the latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,[210] and the immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance languages.[211] The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt is the distinction, until we have the gap that to-day separates written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North Chinese--a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally alien languages.

Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history _and therefore without writing_. But, even apart from this, there is in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper, “eternalizes” it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such, not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which shall endure, deed or truth? The archivist’s “sources” preserve facts, the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles and documents mean in the first-named, exegesis and library mean in the second. And thus there is something besides cult-architecture that is not decorated with ornament, but _is_ ornament[212]--the _book_. The art-history of all Cultural springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the cursive script even before the monumental. Here we can observe the essence of the Gothic style, or of the Magian, at its purest. No other ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter-shape or a manuscript page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the Koran texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials, the architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers! In a Koran in the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece of tapestry. A Gothic book of the Gospels is, as it were, a little cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very significant that the one thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the script and the book-roll--an exception founded in its steady hatred of that which endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more than a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of monumental inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred to anybody that a sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a fine edition of the dramas of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the Acropolis.

As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance. With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance, the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form. As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves--though as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact--a new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its fellow, our _stenography_, which means no mere shortening of writing, but _the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly abstract mode of communication_. It is not impossible, indeed, that in the course of the next centuries script-forms of the shorthand kind may displace letters completely.

VIII

May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culture-languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered that there is such a task. Culture-languages are languages of _historical_ men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly limited lifetimes. _Culture languages are historical languages_, which means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. The build of the Latin sentence is yet another consequence of Rome’s battles, which in giving her conquests compelled the nation as a whole to think administratively; German prose bears traces even to-day of the Thirty Years’ War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form like those of the Mandæans. But secondarily it means that world-history is dependent--to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely imagined--_upon the existence of script as the essentially historical means of communication_. The State (in the higher sense of the word) presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought. The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts resist the “letter,” while _truths demand it_--that is the world-historical opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a literature.

The group of Western Culture-languages appeared in the tenth century. The available bodies of language--namely, the Germanic and Romance dialects (monkish Latin included)--were developed into script-languages under a single spiritual influence. It is _impossible_ that there should not be a common character in the development of German, English, Italian, French, and Spanish from 900 to 1900, as also in the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan included) between 1100 and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the area of extension of language-families or races, acquires specific unity from the landscape-limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have Hellenistic and Latin in common after 300--in pronunciation and idiom, metrically, grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German and Italian after 1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and similar questions have never yet been systematically investigated.

Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence of _peasant-languages_, speeches of the cityless countryside, “everlasting,” and almost unconcerned with the great events of history, which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the first manifestation of a waking relation that _has_ Culture, that _is_ Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become Culture-languages, and, more particularly, _talk belongs with the castle, and speech to the cathedral_. And thus on the very threshold of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose sanctity is guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests’ language, so that in the New Empire sacred formulæ were no more understandable than the _Carmen Saliare_ and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan times.[213] In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages--probably in the second century before Christ--indeed on that very account Jews and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the Church, Humanists’ Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.

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, but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to create.

To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings gently between the expression-modes of elegant society and of learning, in the one direction thinking for ever of new turns and words _à la mode_, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas. But in its inner essence it is of a _mercantile_ nature. It feels itself frankly as a class badge _vis-à-vis_ the historyless-changeless phrasing of the “people” which Luther and others employed, to the great scandal of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical κοινή, the child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect and poetry--something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless languages can be learned by every trader and porter--Hellenistic in Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai--and for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics.