Ancient Art and Ritual

ple, the thing done, whether as ritual or art, whether dromenon or drama, to the thing made, cast in outside material rigid form, a

om artist and spectator. In the primitive choral dance all three-artist, work of art, spectator-were fused, or rather not yet differentiated. Handbooks on art are apt to begin with the discussion of rude decorative patterns, and after leading up through sculpture and painting, something vague is said at the end about the primitiveness of the r

ens and the Apollo Belvedere, and we shall take them in chronological order. As the actual frieze and the statue cannot be before us, we shall discuss no technical questions of style or treatment, but simply ask how they came to be, what human need do th

l trophy, for the price of a few hundred pounds of coffee and yards of scarlet cloth. To realize its meaning we must always think it back into its place. Inside the cella, or shrine, dwelt the goddess herself, her great image in gold and ivory; outside the shrine was sc

oned on the hil

ned with a fo

the pride of he

ive leaf, pur

d story the fa

e winter can bl

arth as the su

as hi

praise wit

: Erechth

n to us, just this one instance has been selected to bolster up the writer's art and ritual theory. He has only to walk through any museum to be convinced at once that the author is playing quite fair. Practically the whole of the reliefs th

g.

. It is a means of bringing masses of people together, of ordering them and co-ordinating them. It is a means for the magical spread of supposed good influence, of "grace." Witness the "Beating of the Bounds" and the frequent processions of the Blessed Sacrament in Roman

g.

cates, a procession that brought all Athens together. Its object was social and politica

s are mounting their horses. It divides, as it needs must, into two halves, one sculptured on the north, one on the south side of the cella. After the throng of the cavalry getting denser and denser we come to the chariots, next the sacrificial animals, sheep and restive cows, then the instruments of sacrifice, flutes and lyres and baskets and trays for offerings; men who carry blossoming olive-boughs; maidens with water-vessels and drinking-cups. Th

Magnesia. The Panathenaia was a high festival including rites and ceremonies of diverse dates, an armed dance of immemorial antiquit

val than a fast. Thucydides43 is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him mainly a "rest from toil." He makes Perikles say: "Moreover, we have provided for our spirit by many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year." To the anonymous writer known as the "Old Oligarch" the main gist of religion appears to be a decorous social enjoyment. In easy aristocr

ng Athenian maidens and offered to her every five years. The great gold and ivory statue in the Parthenon itself had no need of a robe; she would scarcely have known what to do with one; her raiment was already of wrought gold, she carried helmet and spear and shield. But there was an ancient image of Athena, an old Madonna of the people, fashioned before Athena became a warrior maiden. This image was rudely hewn in wood, it was dresse

g.

it, by offering to it each year a new robe. We remember (p. 60) how in Thuringia the new puppet wore the shirt of the old and thereby new life was passed from one to the other. But behind the old image we can get to a stage still earlier, when there was at the Panathenaia no image at all, only a yearly maypole; a bough hung with ribbons and cakes and fruits and the like.

ity. When the Persian host sacked the Acropolis they burnt the holy olive, and it seemed that all was over. But next day it put forth

elf-planted, self-de

turing olive tree that

nor harm it, headstrong

ian Zeus has been it

Athene, thy own se

the image of Athena, made of olive-wood, ju

that she was born in Olympus, and that she sprang full grown from her father's head in glittering armour. But she was really born on earth, and the day of her birth was the birthday of every earthborn goddess, the day of the beginning of the new year, with its returning life. When men observe only the actual growth of new green life from the ground, this birthday wi

e we come to our next illustrati

r art's sake." Yet in this Apollo Belvedere, this product of late and accomplished, even decadent art, we shall see most clearly the intimate

he Apollo

reek sculptor's genius was all focussed, as we shall presently see, on the human figure and on the mastery of its many possibilities of movement and action. Greek statues can roughly be dated by the way they stand. At first, in the archaic period, they stand firmly planted with equal weight on either foot, the feet close together. Then one foot is advanced, but the weight still equ

s artist of the fourth century B.C., made a group of Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying off Ganymede. A replica of the group is preserved in the Vatican, and should stand for comparison near the Apollo. We have the same t

his bow and shot an arrow. This suggestion was made to account for the pose; but that, as we have seen, is sufficiently explained by the flight-motive. Another possible solution is that Apollo

ment, he, like Dionysos, arose in part out of a rite, a rite of Laurel-Bearing-a Daphnephoria. We have not got clear of ritual yet. When Pausanias,45 the ancient trave

d himself well-looking and strong is made the priest of Apollo, for the space of a year. The

s, Jacks-o'-the-Green. The name given to the boy is enough to show he carried a laurel branch, though Pausanias only men

hey actually compare Apollo. The globe beneath this is the moon; the smaller globes hung on are the stars and constellations, and the fillets are the course of the year, for they make them 365 in number. The Daphnephoria is headed by a boy, both whose parents are alive, and his nearest male relation carries the filleted

now that the fruits of the earth in due season depended on the heavenly bodies. The year with its 365 days is a Sun-Year. Once this Sun-Year established and we f

he was initiated. In far-off Tempe-that wonderful valley that is still the greenest spot in stony, barren Greece, and where the laurel trees still cluster-there was an altar, and near it a laurel tr

ey, when they have reached Tempe and made a splendid sacrifice return back, after wea

stom. The ancient Greeks wore wreaths and carried boughs, not because they were artistic or poetical, but because they were ritualists, that they might bring back the spring and carry in the summer. The Greek bridegroom to-day, as well as the Greek bride, wears a wreath, that his m

on. But primitive man does not deal with abstractions, does not worship them. What happens is, as we saw (p. 71), something like this: Year by year a boy is chosen to carry the laurel, to bring in the May, and later year by year a puppet is made. It is a different boy each year, carrying a different laurel branch. And yet in a sense it is the same boy; he is always the Laurel-Bearer-"Daphnephoros," always the "Luck" of the village or c

he ritual copy of life with its faded reactions, the image of the god p

leap is the image of the god. Primitive art in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria,47 represents either rites, processions, sacrifices, magical ceremonies, embodied prayers; or else it represents the images of the go

thing to be looked at, not joined in. And we saw how in this spectacular mood, this being cut loose from immediate action, lay the very essence of the artist and the art-lover. Now in the drama of Thespis there was at first, we are told, but one actor; later ?schylus added a second. It

f the drama. It may seem strange to us that a god should rise up out of a dance or a procession, because dances and processions are not an integral part of our national life, and do not call up any very strong and instant emotion. The old instinct lingers, it is true, and emerges at critical momen

rance that some of these gods at least actually came out of the ritual dance. Thus, Plato,48 in treating of the importance of rhythm in education says: "The gods, pitying the toi

ur fellow-dancers have given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony. And so they move us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and in dances, and these we call choruses." Nor was it only Apollo and Dionysos who led the dance. Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance. "Our virgin lady," says Plato, "de

of war, when the fight is not actually fought, but there is an imitation of war. That is the ritual stage, the dromenon. Here, too, there is a leader. More and more this dance becomes a spectacle, less and less an action. Then from the periodic dromenon, the ritual enacted year by year, em

ancing." That is just what they are, rites caught and fixed and frozen. "Drawing," says a modern critic,50 "is at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper." Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang. But

animal or a plant. We have seen how the emotions of the Siberian tribe in Saghalien focussed on a bear. The savage totem, the Saghalien Bear, is on the way to be, but is not quite, a god; he is not personal enough. The Egyptians, and in part the Assyrians, halted h

means rather creative force, what produces, not what has been produced. We might almost translate the Greek phrase, "Art, like Nature, creates things," "Art acts like Nature in producing things." These things are, first and foremost, human th

ainst a tremendous background of natural happenings: a background that preceded man and will outlast him; and this background profoundly affects our imagination, and hence our art. We moderns are in love with the background. Our art is a landscape art.

s the art of a stage, without actors, a scene which is all background, all suggestion. It is an art giv

l that is in a moral without a creed, tension or ambush of the dark, threat of ominous gloom, the relenting and tender return or overwhelming outburst

ds that men fled, hunted by the s

des of the blood stir again that are ruled by the sun and the moon and travelled as if to tryst where an apparition might take form. Poets ordained themselves to this vigil, haun

n, and perhaps even ancient, poets are touched by it. Drama itself, as Nietzsche showed, "hankers after dissolution into mystery. Shakespeare would occasionally knock the back out of th

to make us aware of a third, the mysterious one, whose name is not on the bills. They come to warn us by the nervous check and hurry of their gossip of the appro

bogey and the background that most feel the need of and best appreciate the calm and lev

who fell in love with the statue he had himself sculptured is as false as it is tasteless. Greek sculpture is the last form of art to incite physical reaction. It is remote almost to the point of chill abstraction. The statue in the round renounces not only human life its

ains, nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they lau

need not follow. For our argument the last word is said in the figures of these Olympians translated into stone. Born of pressing human needs an

II,

694, trans. D

X, 1

y Themis

t the representations of animals were intended to act magically, to increase the "supply of the animal or help the hunter to catch him."

aws,

. XIV, 2

Post-Impressionism," Ninete

Nineteenth Century

cColl, op.

II,