Ancient Art and Ritual

nt from practical ends; we have watched the merely emotional dance develop from an undifferentiated chorus into a spectacle performed by actors and watc

rts, the artist, the work of art, the spectator or art lover. We are now in a position to ask what is the good of all this antiq

wer is

omplex growth like art, it is rarely if ever possible to understand its function-what it does, how it works-unless we know something of how that growth began, or, if its origin is hid, at l

we believe, a frequent and perhaps universal transition stage between actual life and that peculiar contemplation of or emotion towards life which we call art. All our long examination of beast-dances, May-day festivals and even of Greek drama

um, literally the midway space, of some collective ritual. Moreover, for those of us who are not artists or original thinkers the life of the imagination, and even of the emotions, has been perhaps too long lived at second hand, received from the artist ready made and felt. To-day, owing largely to the progress of science, and a host of other causes social and economic, life grows daily fuller and freer, and every manifestation of life is regarded with a new reverence. With this fresh outpouring of t

to morality, to philosophy? These are big-sounding questions, and towards their solution only hints here and there can be offered, stray thoughts that ha

olours." Moreover, all this is not a matter of mere antiquarian interest, we do not simply go and admire the beauty of the past in museums; a movement towards or about art is all alive and astir among us. We have new developments of the theatre, problem plays, Reinha

but we feel we "ought to." In the case of music it has happily been at last recognized that if you have not an "ear" you cannot care for it, but two generations ago, owing to the unfortunate cheapness and popularity of keyed

feels they ought to take pleasure in beautiful scents or in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don't. The first point, then, that must be made clear

ffers from ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or the creator, the "motor reactions," i.e. practical life, the life of doing, is for the time checked. This is of the essence of the a

s human beings, possess in some, but very varying, degrees; and the natural man will always view the spiritual man askance, because he is not "practical." But the life of imagination, cut off from practical reaction as it is, becomes in turn a motor-force causing new emotions, and so pervading the general life, and thus ultimately becoming "practical." No one function is completely cut off from a

ly cause pleasure, singular and intense, and to that which causes such pleasure we give the name of Beauty. But to produce and enjoy Beauty is not the function of art. Beauty-or rather, the sensation of Beauty-is what the Greeks wo

or that work's sake, exercise his faculties, "energize" as Aristotle would say, and he will find pleasure come out unawares to meet him with her shining face; but let him look for her, think of her, even desire her, and she hides her head. A man goes out hunting,

a statue or a painting; that form will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation

.55 It may be the joy of a mother in the physical creation of a child; it may be the joy of the merchant adventurer in pushing out new enterprise, or of the engineer in building a bridge, or of the artist in a masterpiece accomplished; but it is always of the thing created. Again, contrast joy with glory. Glory comes with success and is exceedingly pleasant; it is not joyous. Some men say an artist's crown is

. He seeks for pleasure, for sensual pleasure as his name says, not for the grosser kinds, but for pleasure of that rarefied kind that we call a sense of beauty. The ?sthete, like the flirt, is cold. It is not even that his senses are easily stirred, but he seeks the sensation of stirring, and most often feigns it, not finds it. The ?sthete is no more released from his own desires than the practical man, and he is without the practical man's healthy outlet in action.

s also a man. Now the ?sthete tries to make his whole attitude artistic-that is, contemplative. He is always looking and prying and savouring, savourant, as he would say, when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to savour

wallowing in domesticity and produce bad art or none at all; they get tangled in the machinery of practical reactions. Art, again, is apt to deal with risky subjects. Where should we be if there were not a Censor of Plays? Many of these instructive attitudes about artists as immoral or non-moral, explain themselves instan

nude leads straight to desire, so the dancer must be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court, therefore it must be censored. The normal censor apparently knows nothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house made without hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens. The censor is not for the moment a persona grata,

tive. Moral and social are, in their final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out of which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that is, it

ble cruelty of the artist, seeing in human nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side of art. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt, a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, through detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace. To so

theatre, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very near in meaning to our imagination. But the philosopher differs from the artist in this: he aims not only at the contemplation of truth, but at the ordering of truths, he seeks to make of the whole universe an intelligible structure. Further, he is not driven by the gadfly of creation, he is not forced to cast his images into visib

ractical utility. Science, as Professor Bergson has told us, has for its initial aim the making of tools for life. Man tries to find out the laws of Nature, that is, how natural th

I'll do, a

, like the philosopher, soon comes to seek truth and knowledge for their own sake. In art, in science, in philosophy, there come eventually the same detachment from personal

some obvious, but possibly unconscious, special pleading. Much of art, specially decorative art, arises out of utilities, but its aim and its criterion is not utility. Art may be structural, commemorative, magical, what-not, may grow up out of all manner of practical needs, but it is not till it is cut loose from these practical needs

e was relieved from the need of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for a moment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born. He can never quit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances and life gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold for longer spaces. Man subdues the world about him first by force and then by reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck, he

o us. When we classify things, give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience that certain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it is convenient for us to know and register. These class-names being abstract-that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actual objects, do not easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easily becom

ng. The primitive gods are personifications-i.e. collective emotions taking shape in imagined form. Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than the abstract horse. But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect for practical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, he re-begets it. He and all

k has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, how art is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form of ritual. We saw f

sion or object of art. With his relation to art-which is indeed practically non-existent-we have nothing to do. Of the other gods we may safely say that not only are they objects of art, they are its prime material; in a word, prim

e worshipper of Apollo believes, not only that he has imagined the lovely figure of the god and cast a copy of its shape in stone, but he also believes that in the outside world the god Apollo exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such fictitious objectivities; they are eidola, idols, p

What might have been an ideal becomes an idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritual reactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though another and a more exacting and commanding fellow-man were added to the universe. But a moment's reflection will show that, when we pass from the vague sense of power or mana felt by the savage to the personal god, to Di

be broken till the transit is made. And the time is not yet. We must not pull down the ladder till we are sure the last angel has climbed. Only

We take these contemporary controversies, not implying that they are necessarily of high moment in the history of art, or that they are in any fundamental sense new discoveries; but because they are at this moment current and vital,

rt to be the creation or pursuit or enjoyment of b

idealization theory, which holds that art either copies

ds that the aim of art is to express t

the artist. Whistler dealt it a rude, ill-considered blow by his effective, but really foolish and irrelevant, remark that to attempt to create Art by imitating Nature was "like trying to make music by sitting on the piano." But, as already noted, the Imitation theory of art was really killed by th

at art arises from ritual, and ritual is in its essence a faded action, an imitation. Moreover, every work of art is a copy of something, only not a copy of anything having actual existence in th

ing his vision from knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really look. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself to his eyes. It was a most needful and valuable purgation, since painting is the art proper of the eye. But, when the new effects of the world as simpl

re, but the expression and communication of the artist's emotion. We can see that, between them and the Imitationists, the Impressionists form a delicate bridge. They, too, fo

ly that living tangle which is felt by the Futurists as so real, but it must purge and order it, by complexities of tone and rhythm hitherto unattempted. One art, beyond all others, has blossomed into real, spontaneous, unconscious life to-day, and that is Musi

ithout place, actors, circumstances, named or described, without a word spoken. Poetry has to supply definite thought, arguments driving at a conclusion, ideas mortgaged to this or that creed or system; and to give force to these can command only

act out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, a shad

ecame in the last century this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god, may not only ideally, but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack,

re exalted. "Stop painting and sculping," they cry, "and go and see a football match." There you have life! Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is the stuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limited notion of what life is. It must, it seems, in the first place, be essentially physical. To sit and dream in your study is not to live. The reason of this odd li

ementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, in making life and art in any sense coextensive. Art, as we have seen, sustai

hope for the future. We are not prepared perhaps to go all lengths, to "burn all museums" because of their contagious corruption, though we might be prepared to "banish the nude for the space of ten years." If there is to be any true living art, it must arise, not from the contemplation of Greek statues

and religion went hand in hand, not sharply sundered by castes and professions. But we may not put back the clock, and, if by differentiation we lose something, we gain much. The old choral dance on the orchestral floor was an undifferentiated thing, it had a beauty of its

and meets a wolf, he is frightened, he comes back and tells the other villagers what he felt, how he went to the wood feeling happy and light-hearted and the wolf came, and what the wolf looked like, and how he began to be frightened. This is, according to Tolstoy, art. Even if the boy never saw a wolf at all, if he had really at another time been frightened, and if he w

f regarding religion as an early phase of art, he proceeds to define religious perception as the highest social ideal of the moment, as that "understanding of the meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that society have attained, an understanding defining the highest good at which that society aims." "Religious perception in a society," he beautifully adds, "is like the d

nd feel, and look and feel forward, not backward, if we would live. Art somehow, like language, is always feeling forward to newer, fuller, subtler emotions. She seems indeed in a way to fe

, it remains and must remain social in function. The dance from which the drama rose was a choral dance, the dance of a band, a group, a church, a community, what the Greeks called a thiasos. The word means a band and a thing o

essional coterie, but marked by strong social instincts, by a missionary spirit, by intemperate zeal in propaganda, by a tendency, always social, to crystallize conviction into dogma. We can scarcely, unless we are as high-hearted as Tolstoy, hope now-a-days for an art that shall be wo

most identical with, self-enhancement. What should be a generous, and in part altruistic, exaltation becomes mere megalomania. This egotism is, of course, a danger inherent in all art. The suspension of motor-reactions to the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him

aggrandizers. They write lyric poems, they love masquerading, they focus life on to themselves in a way which, later on, life itself makes impossible. This pseudo-art, this self-aggrandizement usually dies a natural death before the age of thirty. If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientific attitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering the relations of things among themselves, not their personal r

t, for example Tolstoy, produced their finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readers and admirers probably by the million. Writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Mill, and Carlyle, even poets like Tennyson and Browning, were full of great public interests and causes, and, in different degrees and at different stages of their lives, were thoroughly and immensely popular. On the other hand, one can find, at the beginning of the period, figures like Blake and Shelley, and all through it a number of painters-the pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists-walking like aliens

ded with a period of reaction in political matters and a recrudescence of a belief in force and on unreasoned authority, is already passing away. There are not wanting signs that art, both in painting and sculpture, and in poe

f, he does not even merely show the pathos of a single human being's destiny, he sets before us a much bigger thing-man tragically caught and torn in the iron hands of a man-made machine, Society itself. Incarnate Law is the protagonist, and, as it happens, the villain of the piece. It

minent peril. Its very bigness and newness tends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process of creation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost i

t a sense of the long, waste spaces of life, their dreary reality. We are keenly interested in the loves of hero and heroine, but all the time something much bigger is going on, generation after generation rolls by in cea

it said. He will trick it out with no devices, most of all with no obscurities. It has vexed and torn him enough while it was pushing its way to be born. He has no peace till it is said, and said as clearly as he may. He says it, not consciously for the sake of others, but for himself, to ease him from the burden of big thought. Moreover, a

still collective emotion, fashioning their own language, obscure sometimes to all but themselves. They are right so to fas

nd a community. Their doctrine, if doctrine convictions so fluid can be called, is strangely like the old group-religion of the common dance, only more articulate. Of the Unanimist it might truly be said, "il buvait l'indistinction." To him the harsh old Roman mandate Divide et impera, "Divide men that you may rule them," spells death. His dream is not of empire and personal property but of the realization of life, common to all. To this school the great reality is the social group,

we have seen, the end of art is to utter and communicate emotion. The fullest and finest emotions are those one human being feels towards another

t home with pen and paper before him, feels that he is pent in, stifled by himself. He had been about to re-tell the old, old story of himself, to set himself once more on the stage of his poem-the same old dusty self tricked out, costumed anew. Suddenly he knows the figure to

f deeds done

f voyages in

wrought by stro

auty made u

ed of lying

k lying t

able to con

ng sweet

ring smell that

ht who rides afoot, the Crusader without breviary or scrip, the Pilgrim of Love who, by the

came in

f the Grea

eople with

hreshold o

h towards

ime came i

fill all

thing but so

anced about

e and one

s where it began, w

hics,

d Consciousness, Huxle

the worship of some form of god, as

D. S. M

Nineteenth Century

gue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912, p. 21) reproduces, consciously or unconsciously, Tolstoy

IOGR

ve Ritual the best gene

ances in the present manual are taken. Part IV of The Golden Bough, i.e. the s

lier, epoch

Semites, 1889 [3rd edition, 1927]. For certain funda

n ritual: Myth and Ritual,

nysos and the drama, J. E. Harrison's Prolegomena, 1907, Chapters VIII and X. For the fusion of the ritual dance and hero-worship, see W. Leaf, Homer and History, 1915, Chapter VII. For a quite different view of drama as arising wholl

ard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy,

imitiv

ves to be inadequate, but it contains an excellent collection of facts relating to Art,

ago Anthropological Series. Valuable for its full i

Primitive

Theory

Translated by Aylmer Ma

?sthetics, in the New Quar

ogical basis of a similar view of the nature of art. My own theory was formulated independently, in relation to the development of the Greek theatre, but I am very glad to f

Illusion and

advanced

gles esthétiques et les

s, R. Psychologi

N

actio

19, 20, 54-56 --

tree sp

ylus

not arti

on

s, or reco

spring festiv

Belvede

le on a

y, 213 -- and

moral

natur

relig

onal fact

elements

on fest

no festi

dances

and a

n on a

tes of ne

onia,

ring, 85 --, festi

e, as magic

function

spring fe

Greek dram

rk, 30-31 --,

memorat

ephor

nd wint

way of l

sis,

y Child, 103 --

ung man,

ramb,

d Dromen

n Modern

sion

, Athen

meaning

sionis

rist

s fertil

uence on dr

r seas

nd ide

sionis

--, ceremonies

dualis

ceremonies,

e-Green, 6

os, dan

e, art o

rlinc

at Cambr

he, 57-61 --, k

meanin

sis,

functio

rth, 1

an god

meaning o

ites of,

unge

henai

ermia

on frie

strat

of Athe

on reli

ion and conc

on art

e not j

ressioni

r dis

ion, mean

distance

ntation

ion, rite

eriodici

ms in dram

na on a

bringing

affron Walden, 5

r scene

ringing i

rites

te of grow

e, 10-

s ritual

and th

oor at danci

n art, 13

d beast dan

orms in, 119-122

, among Es

ism, 2

ion spi

rrying out

sacr

-soul

of, 189 --, at G

on ar

by The Camelot Press Lt