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_Ancient Art and Ritual_

JANE ELLEN HARRISON

_Geoffrey Cumberlege_OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSLONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

_First published in 1913, and reprinted in 1918 (revised), 1919, 1927, 1935 and 1948_

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFATORY NOTE

It may be well at the outset to say clearly what is the aim of thepresent volume. The title is _Ancient Art and Ritual_, but the readerwill find in it no general summary or even outline of the facts ofeither ancient art or ancient ritual. These facts are easily accessiblein handbooks. The point of my title and the real gist of my argument lieperhaps in the word "_and_"--that is, in the intimate connection which Ihave tried to show exists between ritual and art. This connection has, Ibelieve, an important bearing on questions vital to-day, as, forexample, the question of the place of art in our modern civilization, its relation to and its difference from religion and morality; in aword, on the whole enquiry as to what the nature of art is and how itcan help or hinder spiritual life. 

 * * * * *

I have taken Greek drama as a typical instance, because in it we havethe clear historical case of a great art, which arose out of a veryprimitive and almost world-wide ritual. The rise of the Indian drama, orthe mediæval and from it the modern stage, would have told us the sametale and served the like purpose. But Greece is nearer to us to-day thaneither India or the Middle Ages. 

 * * * * *

Greece and the Greek drama remind me that I should like to offer mythanks to Professor Gilbert Murray, for help and criticism which has faroutrun the limits of editorial duty. 

J. E. H. 

_Newnham College, Cambridge, June 1913. _

 * * * * *

NOTE TO THE FIFTH IMPRESSION

The original text has been reprinted without change except for thecorrection of misprints. A few additions (enclosed in square brackets)have been made to the Bibliography. 

1947

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

 I ART AND RITUAL 9

 II PRIMITIVE RITUAL: PANTOMIMIC DANCES 29

III PERIODIC CEREMONIES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL 49

 IV THE PRIMITIVE SPRING DANCE OR DITHYRAMB, IN GREECE 75

 V THE TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE _DROMENON_ AND THE DRAMA 119

 VI GREEK SCULPTURE: THE PANATHENAIC FRIEZE AND THE APOLLO BELVEDERE 170

VII RITUAL, ART AND LIFE 204

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 253

 INDEX 255

ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL

CHAPTER I

ART AND RITUAL

The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and evendissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, tothe modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms andceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of achurch or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free inthought and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency istowards licence. Art and ritual, it is quite true, have diverged to-day;but the title of this book is chosen advisedly. Its object is to showthat these two divergent developments have a common root, and thatneither can be understood without the other. It is at the outset oneand the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre. 

 * * * * *

Such a statement may sound to-day paradoxical, even irreverent. But tothe Greek of the sixth, fifth, and even fourth century B. C. , it wouldhave been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following anAthenian to his theatre, on the day of the great Spring Festival ofDionysos. 

Passing through the entrance-gate to the theatre on the south side ofthe Acropolis, our Athenian citizen will find himself at once on holyground. He is within a _temenos_ or precinct, a place "cut off" from thecommon land and dedicated to a god. He will pass to the left (Fig. 2, p. 144) two temples standing near to each other, one of earlier, the otherof later date, for a temple, once built, was so sacred that it wouldonly be reluctantly destroyed. As he enters the actual theatre he willpay nothing for his seat; his attendance is an act of worship, and fromthe social point of view obligatory; the entrance fee is therefore paidfor him by the State. 

The theatre is open to all Athenian citizens, but the ordinary man willnot venture to seat himself in the front row. In the front row, andthat only, the seats have backs, and the central seat of this row is anarmchair; the whole of the front row is permanently reserved, not forindividual rich men who can afford to hire "boxes, " but for certainState officials, and these officials are all priests. On each seat thename of the owner is inscribed; the central seat is "of the priest ofDionysos Eleuthereus, " the god of the precinct. Near him is the seat "ofthe priest of Apollo the Laurel-Bearer, " and again "of the priest ofAsklepios, " and "of the priest of Olympian Zeus, " and so on round thewhole front semicircle. It is as though at His Majesty's the front rowof stalls was occupied by the whole bench of bishops, with theArchbishop of Canterbury enthroned in the central stall. 

The theatre at Athens is not open night by night, nor even day by day. Dramatic performances take place only at certain high festivals ofDionysos in winter and spring. It is, again, as though the moderntheatre was open only at the festivals of the Epiphany and of Easter. Our modern, at least our Protestant, custom is in direct contrast. Wetend on great religious festivals rather to close than to open ourtheatres. Another point of contrast is in the time allotted to theperformance. We give to the theatre our after-dinner hours, when work isdone, or at best a couple of hours in the afternoon. The theatre is forus a recreation. The Greek theatre opened at sunrise, and the whole daywas consecrated to high and strenuous religious attention. During thefive or six days of the great _Dionysia_, the whole city was in a stateof unwonted sanctity, under a _taboo_. To distrain a debtor was illegal;any personal assault, however trifling, was sacrilege. 

Most impressive and convincing of all is the ceremony that took place onthe eve of the performance. By torchlight, accompanied by a greatprocession, the image of the god Dionysos himself was brought to thetheatre and placed in the orchestra. Moreover, he came not only in humanbut in animal form. Chosen young men of the Athenians in the flower oftheir youth--_epheboi_--escorted to the precinct a splendid bull. It wasexpressly ordained that the bull should be "worthy of the god"; he was, in fact, as we shall presently see, the primitive incarnation of thegod. It is, again, as though in our modern theatre there stood, "sanctifying all things to our use and us to His service, " the humanfigure of the Saviour, and beside him the Paschal Lamb. 

 * * * * *

But now we come to a strange thing. A god presides over the theatre, togo to the theatre is an act of worship to the god Dionysos, and yet, when the play begins, three times out of four of Dionysos we hearnothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy, Clytemnestrawaiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of Phædra forHippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: storiesbeautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scarcely, we feel, religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves sometimes complained that inthe plays enacted before them there was "nothing to do with Dionysos. "

If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does itissue in an art profoundly solemn, tragic, yet purely human? The actorswear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinianmysteries. Why, then, do we find them, not executing a religiousservice or even a drama of gods and goddesses, but rather impersonatingmere Homeric heroes and heroines? Greek drama, which seemed at first togive us our clue, to show us a real link between ritual and art, breaksdown, betrays us, it would seem, just at the crucial moment, and leavesus with our problem on our hands. 

Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well despair. The Greeks are apeople of such swift constructive imagination that they almost alwaysobscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are theircloud-capp'd towers that they distract our minds from the task ofdigging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins ofGreek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain ofGreek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, soswiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greekmaterial only to hand, we might never have marked the transition. Happily, however, we are not confined within the Greek paradise. Widerfields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek, but ancient artand ritual. We can turn at once to the Egyptians, a peopleslower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but moreinstructive operations. To one who is studying the development of thehuman mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminatingthan the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, tooadvanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive. 

 * * * * *

Of all Egyptian, perhaps of all ancient deities, no god has lived solong or had so wide and deep an influence as Osiris. He stands as theprototype of the great class of resurrection-gods who die that they maylive again. His sufferings, his death, and his resurrection were enactedyear by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos. In that mystery-play wasset forth, first, what the Greeks call his _agon_, his contest with hisenemy Set; then his _pathos_, his suffering, or downfall and defeat, hiswounding, his death, and his burial; finally, his resurrection and"recognition, " his _anagnorisis_ either as himself or as his onlybegotten son Horus. Now the meaning of this thrice-told tale we shallconsider later: for the moment we are concerned only with the fact thatit is set forth both in art and ritual. 

At the festival of Osiris small images of the god were made of sand andvegetable earth, his cheek bones were painted green and his face yellow. The images were cast in a mould of pure gold, representing the god as amummy. After sunset on the 24th day of the month Choiak, the effigy ofOsiris was laid in a grave and the image of the previous year wasremoved. The intent of all this was made transparently clear by otherrites. At the beginning of the festival there was a ceremony ofploughing and sowing. One end of the field was sown with barley, theother with spelt; another part with flax. While this was going on thechief priest recited the ritual of the "sowing of the fields. " Into the"garden" of the god, which seems to have been a large pot, were put sandand barley, then fresh living water from the inundation of the Nile waspoured out of a golden vase over the "garden" and the barley was allowedto grow up. It was the symbol of the resurrection of the god after hisburial, "for the growth of the garden is the growth of the divinesubstance. "

The death and resurrection of the gods, and _pari passu_ of the life andfruits of the earth, was thus set forth in ritual, but--and this is ourimmediate point--it was also set forth in definite, unmistakable art. Inthe great temple of Isis at Philæ there is a chamber dedicated toOsiris. Here is represented the dead Osiris. Out of his body spring earsof corn, and a priest waters the growing stalk from a pitcher. Theinscription to the picture reads: _This is the form of him whom one maynot name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returningwaters. _ It is but another presentation of the ritual of the monthChoiak, in which effigies of the god made of earth and corn were buried. When these effigies were taken up it would be found that the corn hadsprouted actually from the body of the god, and this sprouting of thegrain would, as Dr. Frazer says, be "hailed as an omen, or rather as thecause of the growth of the crops. "[1]

Even more vividly is the resurrection set forth in the bas-reliefs thataccompany the great Osiris inscription at Denderah. Here the god isrepresented at first as a mummy swathed and lying flat on his bier. Bitby bit he is seen raising himself up in a series of gymnasticallyimpossible positions, till at last he rises from a bowl--perhaps his"garden"--all but erect, between the outspread wings of Isis, whilebefore him a male figure holds the _crux ansata_, the "cross with ahandle, " the Egyptian symbol of life. In ritual, the thing desired, _i. E. _ the resurrection, is acted, in art it is represented. 

No one will refuse to these bas-reliefs the title of art. In Egypt, then, we have clearly an instance--only one out of many--where art andritual go hand in hand. Countless bas-reliefs that decorate Egyptiantombs and temples are but ritual practices translated into stone. This, as we shall later see, is an important step in our argument. Ancient artand ritual are not only closely connected, not only do they mutuallyexplain and illustrate each other, but, as we shall presently find, theyactually arise out of a common human impulse. 

 * * * * *

The god who died and rose again is not of course confined to Egypt; heis world-wide. When Ezekiel (viii. 14) "came to the gate of the Lord'shouse which was toward the north" he beheld there the "women weeping forTammuz. " This "abomination" the house of Judah had brought with themfrom Babylon. Tammuz is _Dumuzi_, "the true son, " or more fully, _Dumuzi-absu_, "true son of the waters. " He too, like Osiris, is a godof the life that springs from inundation and that dies down in the heatof the summer. In Milton's procession of false gods, "Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day. "

Tammuz in Babylon was the young love of Ishtar. Each year he died andpassed below the earth to the place of dust and death, "the land fromwhich there is no returning, the house of darkness, where dust lies ondoor and bolt. " And the goddess went after him, and while she was below, life ceased in the earth, no flower blossomed and no child of animal orman was born. 

We know Tammuz, "the true son, " best by one of his titles, Adonis, theLord or King. The Rites of Adonis were celebrated at midsummer. That iscertain and memorable; for, just as the Athenian fleet was setting sailon its ill-omened voyage to Syracuse, the streets of Athens werethronged with funeral processions, everywhere was seen the image of thedead god, and the air was full of the lamentations of weeping women. Thucydides does not so much as mention the coincidence, but Plutarch[2]tells us those who took account of omens were full of concern for thefate of their countrymen. To start an expedition on the day of thefuneral rites of Adonis, the Canaanitish "Lord, " was no luckier than toset sail on a Friday, the death-day of the "Lord" of Christendom. 

The rites of Tammuz and of Adonis, celebrated in the summer, were ritesof death rather than of resurrection. The emphasis is on the fading anddying down of vegetation rather than on its upspringing. The reason ofthis is simple and will soon become manifest. For the moment we haveonly to note that while in Egypt the rites of Osiris are represented asmuch by art as by ritual, in Babylon and Palestine in the feasts ofTammuz and Adonis it is ritual rather than art that obtains. 

 * * * * *

We have now to pass to another enquiry. We have seen that art andritual, not only in Greece but in Egypt and Palestine, are closelylinked. So closely, indeed, are they linked that we even begin tosuspect they may have a common origin. We have now to ask, what is itthat links art and ritual so closely together, what have they in common?Do they start from the same impulse, and if so why do they, as theydevelop, fall so widely asunder?

It will clear the air if we consider for a moment what we mean by art, and also in somewhat greater detail what we mean by ritual. 

 * * * * *

Art, Plato[3] tells us in a famous passage of the _Republic_, isimitation; the artist imitates natural objects, which are themselves inhis philosophy but copies of higher realities. All the artist can do isto make a copy of a copy, to hold up a mirror to Nature in which, as heturns it whither he will, "are reflected sun and heavens and earth andman, " anything and everything. Never did a statement so false, sowrong-headed, contain so much suggestion of truth--truth which, by thehelp of analysing ritual, we may perhaps be able to disentangle. Butfirst its falsehood must be grasped, and this is the more important asPlato's misconception in modified form lives on to-day. A painter notlong ago thus defined his own art: "The art of painting is the art ofimitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments. " Asorry life-work! Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close andrealistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if notslain, that error; but many people still regard art as a sort ofimprovement on or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the part of theartist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature, andfrom these to build up, as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps, only by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin toritual that we come to see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception. 

Take the representations of Osiris that we have just described--themummy rising bit by bit from his bier. Can any one maintain that art ishere a copy or imitation of reality? However "realistic" the painting, it represents a thing imagined not actual. There never was any suchperson as Osiris, and if there had been, he would certainly never, oncemummified, have risen from his tomb. There is no question of fact, andthe copy of fact, in the matter. Moreover, had there been, why shouldanyone desire to make a copy of natural fact? The whole "imitation"theory, to which, and to the element of truth it contains, we shalllater have occasion to return, errs, in fact, through supplying noadequate motive for a widespread human energy. It is probably this lackof motive that has led other theorizers to adopt the view that art isidealization. Man with pardonable optimism desires, it is thought, toimprove on Nature. 

 * * * * *

Modern science, confronted with a problem like that of the rise of art, no longer casts about to conjecture how art _might_ have arisen, sheexamines how it actually _did_ arise. Abundant material has now beencollected from among savage peoples of an art so primitive that wehesitate to call it art at all, and it is in these inchoate effortsthat we are able to track the secret motive springs that move the artistnow as then. 

Among the Huichol Indians, [4] if the people fear a drought from theextreme heat of the sun, they take a clay disk, and on one side of itthey paint the "face" of Father Sun, a circular space surrounded by raysof red and blue and yellow which are called his "arrows, " for theHuichol sun, like Phœbus Apollo, has arrows for rays. On the reverseside they will paint the progress of the sun through the four quartersof the sky. The journey is symbolized by a large cross-like figure witha central circle for midday. Round the edge are beehive-shaped mounds;these represent the hills of earth. The red and yellow dots thatsurround the hills are cornfields. The crosses on the hills are signs ofwealth and money. On some of the disks birds and scorpions are painted, and on one are curving lines which mean rain. These disks are depositedon the altar of the god-house and left, and then all is well. Theintention might be to us obscure, but a Huichol Indian would read itthus: "Father Sun with his broad shield (or 'face') and his arrows risesin the east, bringing money and wealth to the Huichols. His heat and thelight from his rays make the corn to grow, but he is asked not tointerfere with the clouds that are gathering on the hills. "

Now is this art or ritual? It is both and neither. _We_ distinguishbetween a form of prayer and a work of art and count them in no dangerof confusion; but the Huichol goes back to that earlier thing, a_presentation_. He utters, expresses his thought about the sun and hisemotion about the sun and his relation to the sun, and if "prayer is thesoul's sincere desire" he has painted a prayer. It is not a littlecurious that the same notion comes out in the old Greek word for"prayer, " _euchè_. The Greek, when he wanted help in trouble from the"Saviours, " the Dioscuri, carved a picture of them, and, if he was asailor, added a ship. Underneath he inscribed the word _euchè_. It wasnot to begin with a "vow" paid, it was a presentation of his stronginner desire, it was a sculptured prayer. 

Ritual then involves _imitation_; but does not arise out of it. Itdesires to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce an object. A rite is, indeed, we shall later see (p. 42), a sort of stereotyped action, notreally practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, areminiscence or an anticipation of actual practical doing; it is fitly, though not quite correctly, called by the Greeks a _dromenon_, "a thingdone. "

At the bottom of art, as its motive power and its mainspring, lies, notthe wish to copy Nature or even improve on her--the Huichol Indian doesnot vainly expend his energies on an effort so fruitless--but rather animpulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, togive out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making ordoing or enriching the object or act desired. The common source of theart and ritual of Osiris is the intense, world-wide desire that the lifeof Nature which seemed dead should live again. This common _emotional_factor it is that makes art and ritual in their beginnings well-nighindistinguishable. Both, to begin with, copy an act, but not at firstfor the sake of the copy. Only when the emotion dies down and isforgotten does the copy become an end in itself, a mere mimicry. 

It is this downward path, this sinking of making to mimicry, that makesus now-a-days think of ritual as a dull and formal thing. Because a ritehas ceased to be believed in, it does not in the least follow that itwill cease to be _done_. We have to reckon with all the huge forces ofhabit. The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightestimpulse tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not onlyothers but ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to theact is dead; and then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, itbecomes an end in itself for ritual, even for art. 

 * * * * *

It is not easy, as we saw, to classify the Huichol prayer-disks. Asprayers they are ritual, as surfaces decorated they are specimens ofprimitive art. In the next chapter we shall have to consider a kind ofceremony very instructive for our point, but again not very easy toclassify--the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world, sostriking a feature in savage social and religious life. Are they to beclassed as ritual or art?

These pantomime dances lie, indeed, at the very heart and root of ourwhole subject, and it is of the first importance that before goingfurther in our analysis of art and ritual, we should have somefamiliarity with their general character and gist, the more so as theyare a class of ceremonies now practically extinct. We shall find inthese dances the meeting-point between art and ritual, or rather weshall find in them the rude, inchoate material out of which both ritualand art, at least in one of its forms, developed. Moreover, we shallfind in pantomimic dancing a ritual bridge, as it were, between actuallife and those representations of life which we call art. 

In our next chapter, therefore, we shall study the ritual dance ingeneral, and try to understand its psychological origin; in thefollowing chapter (III) we shall take a particular dance of specialimportance, the Spring Dance as practised among various primitivepeoples. We shall then be prepared to approach the study of the SpringDance among the Greeks, which developed into their drama, and therebyto, we hope, throw light on the relation between ritual and art. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, ^2 p. 324. 

[2] _Vit. Nik. _, 13. 

[3] _Rep. _ X, 596-9. 

[4] C. H. Lumholtz, _Symbolism of the Huichol Indians_, in _Mem. Of theAm. Mus. Of Nat. Hist. _, Vol. III, "Anthropology. " (1900. )

CHAPTER II

PRIMITIVE RITUAL: PANTOMIMIC DANCES

In books and hymns of bygone days, which dealt with the religion of "theheathen in his blindness, " he was pictured as a being of strangeperversity, apt to bow down to "gods of wood and stone. " The question_why_ he acted thus foolishly was never raised. It was just his"blindness"; the light of the gospel had not yet reached him. Now-a-daysthe savage has become material not only for conversion and hymn-writingbut for scientific observation. We want to understand his psychology, _i. E. _ how he behaves, not merely for his sake, that we may abruptlyand despotically convert or reform him, but for our own sakes; partly, of course, for sheer love of knowing, but also, --since we realize thatour own behaviour is based on instincts kindred to his, --in order that, by understanding his behaviour, we may understand, and it may be better, our own. 

Anthropologists who study the primitive peoples of to-day find that theworship of false gods, bowing "down to wood and stone, " bulks larger inthe mind of the hymn-writer than in the mind of the savage. We look fortemples to heathen idols; we find dancing-places and ritual dances. Thesavage is a man of action. Instead of asking a god to do what he wantsdone, he does it or tries to do it himself; instead of prayers he uttersspells. In a word, he practises magic, and above all he is strenuouslyand frequently engaged in dancing magical dances. When a savage wantssun or wind or rain, he does not go to church and prostrate himselfbefore a false god; he summons his tribe and dances a sun dance or awind dance or a rain dance. When he would hunt and catch a bear, he doesnot pray to his god for strength to outwit and outmatch the bear, herehearses his hunt in a bear dance. 

Here, again, we have some modern prejudice and misunderstanding toovercome. Dancing is to us a light form of recreation practised by thequite young from sheer _joie de vivre_, and essentially inappropriate tothe mature. But among the Tarahumares of Mexico the word _nolávoa_means both "to work" and "to dance. " An old man will reproach a youngman saying, "Why do you not go and work?" (_nolávoa_). He means "Why doyou not dance instead of looking on?" It is strange to us to learn thatamong savages, as a man passes from childhood to youth, from youth tomature manhood, so the number of his "dances" increase, and the numberof these "dances" is the measure _pari passu_ of his social importance. Finally, in extreme old age he falls out, he ceases to exist, _becausehe cannot dance_; his dance, and with it his social status, passes toanother and a younger. 

 * * * * *

Magical dancing still goes on in Europe to-day. In Swabia and among theTransylvanian Saxons it is a common custom, says Dr. Frazer, [5] for aman who has some hemp to leap high in the field in the belief that thiswill make the hemp grow tall. In many parts of Germany and Austria thepeasant thinks he can make the flax grow tall by dancing or leaping highor by jumping backwards from a table; the higher the leap the tallerwill be the flax that year. There is happily little possible doubt asto the practical reason of this mimic dancing. When Macedonian farmershave done digging their fields they throw their spades up into the airand, catching them again, exclaim, "May the crop grow as high as thespade has gone. " In some parts of Eastern Russia the girls dance one byone in a large hoop at midnight on Shrove Tuesday. The hoop is deckedwith leaves, flowers and ribbons, and attached to it are a small belland some flax. While dancing within the hoop each girl has to wave herarms vigorously and cry, "Flax, grow, " or words to that effect. When shehas done she leaps out of the hoop or is lifted out of it by herpartner. 

Is this art? We shall unhesitatingly answer "No. " Is it ritual? Withsome hesitation we shall probably again answer "No. " It is, we think, not a rite, but merely a superstitious practice of ignorant men andwomen. But take another instance. Among the Omaha Indians of NorthAmerica, when the corn is withering for want of rain, the members of thesacred Buffalo Society fill a large vessel with water and dance fourtimes round it. One of them drinks some of the water and spirts it intothe air, making a fine spray in imitation of mist or drizzling rain. Then he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground; whereuponthe dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over theirfaces. This saves the corn. Now probably any dispassionate person woulddescribe such a ceremonial as "an interesting instance of primitive_ritual_. " The sole difference between the two types is that, in the onethe practice is carried on privately, or at least unofficially, in theother it is done publicly by a collective authorized body, officiallyfor the public good. 

The distinction is one of high importance, but for the moment whatconcerns us is, to see the common factor in the two sets of acts, whatis indeed their source and mainspring. In the case of the girl dancingin the hoop and leaping out of it there is no doubt. The words she says, "Flax, grow, " prove the point. She _does_ what she _wants done_. Herintense desire finds utterance in an act. She obeys the simplestpossible impulse. Let anyone watch an exciting game of tennis, or betterstill perhaps a game of billiards, he will find himself _doing_ insheer sympathy the thing he wants done, reaching out a tense arm wherethe billiard cue should go, raising an unoccupied leg to help thesuspended ball over the net. Sympathetic magic is, modern psychologyteaches us, in the main and at the outset, not the outcome ofintellectual illusion, not even the exercise of a "mimetic instinct, "but simply, in its ultimate analysis, an utterance, a discharge ofemotion and longing. 

But though the utterance of emotion is the prime and moving, it is notthe sole, factor. We may utter emotion in a prolonged howl, we may evenutter it in a collective prolonged howl, yet we should scarcely callthis ritual, still less art. It is true that a prolonged _collective_howl will probably, because it is collective, develop a rhythm, aregular recurrence, and hence probably issue in a kind of ritual music;but for the further stage of development into art another step isnecessary. We must not only _utter_ emotion, we must _represent_ it, that is, we must in some way reproduce or imitate or express the thoughtwhich is causing us emotion. Art is not imitation, but art and alsoritual frequently and legitimately _contain an element of imitation_. Plato was so far right. What exactly is imitated we shall see when wecome to discuss the precise difference between art and ritual. 

 * * * * *

The Greek word for a _rite_ as already noted is _dromenon_, "a thingdone"--and the word is full of instruction. The Greek had realized thatto perform a rite you must _do_ something, that is, you must not onlyfeel something but express it in action, or, to put it psychologically, you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it. The word forrite, _dromenon_, "thing done, " arose, of course, not from anypsychological analysis, but from the simple fact that rites among theprimitive Greeks were _things done_, mimetic dances and the like. It isa fact of cardinal importance that their word for theatricalrepresentation, _drama_, is own cousin to their word for rite, _dromenon_; _drama_ also means "thing done. " Greek linguistic instinctpointed plainly to the fact that art and ritual are near relations. Tothis fact of crucial importance for our argument we shall return later. But from the outset it should be borne in mind that in these two Greekwords, _dromenon_ and _drama_, in their exact meaning, their relationand their distinction, we have the keynote and clue to our wholediscussion. 

 * * * * *

For the moment we have to note that the Greek word for rite, _dromenon_, "thing done, " is not strictly adequate. It omits a factor of primeimportance; it includes too much and not enough. All "things done" arenot rites. You may shrink back from a blow; that is the expression of anemotion, that is a reaction to a stimulus, but that is not a rite. Youmay digest your dinner; that is a thing done, and a thing of highimportance, but it is not a rite. 

One element in the rite we have already observed, and that is, that itbe done collectively, by a number of persons feeling the same emotion. Ameal digested alone is certainly no rite; a meal eaten in common, underthe influence of a common emotion, may, and often does, _tend_ to becomea rite. 

Collectivity and emotional tension, two elements that tend to turn thesimple reaction into a rite, are--specially among primitivepeoples--closely associated, indeed scarcely separable. The individualamong savages has but a thin and meagre personality; high emotionaltension is to him only caused and maintained by a thing felt socially;it is what the tribe feels that is sacred, that is matter for ritual. Hemay make by himself excited movements, he may leap for joy, for fear;but unless these movements are made by the tribe together they will notbecome rhythmical; they will probably lack intensity, and certainlypermanence. Intensity, then, and collectivity go together, and both arenecessary for ritual, but both may be present without constituting art;we have not yet touched the dividing line between art and ritual. Whenand how does the _dromenon_, the _rite done_, pass over into the_drama_?

The genius of the Greek language _felt_, before it consciously _knew_, the difference. This feeling ahead for distinctions is characteristic ofall languages, as has been well shown by Mr. Pearsall Smith[6] inanother manual of our series. It is an instinctive process arisingindependently of reason, though afterwards justified by it. What, then, is the distinction between art and ritual which the genius of the Greeklanguage felt after, when it used the two words _dromenon_ and _drama_for two different sorts of "things done"? To answer our question we mustturn for a brief moment to psychology, the science of human behaviour. 

 * * * * *

We are accustomed for practical convenience to divide up our humannature into partitions--intellect, will, the emotions, thepassions--with further subdivisions, _e. G. _ of the intellect intoreason, imagination, and the like. These partitions we are apt toarrange into a sort of order of merit or as it is called a hierarchy, with Reason as head and crown, and under her sway the emotions andpassions. The result of establishing this hierarchy is that theimpulsive side of our nature comes off badly, the passions and even theemotions lying under a certain ban. This popular psychology is really aconvenient and perhaps indispensable mythology. Reason, the emotions, and the will have no more separate existences than Jupiter, Juno, andMinerva. 

A more fruitful way of looking at our human constitution is to see it, not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a sort of continuouscycle of activities. What really happens is, putting it very roughly, something of this sort. To each one of us the world is, or seems to be, eternally divided into two halves. On the one side is ourself, on theother all the rest of things. All our action, our behaviour, our life, is a relation between these two halves, and that behaviour seems to havethree, not divisions, but stages. The outside world, the other half, theobject if we like so to call it, acts upon us, gets at us through oursenses. We hear or see or taste or feel something; to put it roughly, weperceive something, and as we perceive it, so, instantly, we feel aboutit, towards it, we have emotion. And, instantly again, that emotionbecomes a motive-power, we _re_-act towards the object that got at us, we want to alter it or our relation to it. If we did not perceive weshould not feel, if we did not feel we should not act. When we talk--aswe almost must talk--of Reason, the Emotions, or the Passions and theWill leading to action, we think of the three stages or aspects of ourbehaviour as separable and even perhaps hostile; we want, perhaps, topurge the intellect from all infection of the emotions. But in reality, though at a given moment one or the other element, knowing, feeling, oracting, may be dominant in our consciousness, the rest are alwaysimmanent. 

When we think of the three elements or stages, knowing, feeling, striving, as all being necessary factors in any complete bit of humanbehaviour, we no longer try to arrange them in a hierarchy with knowingor reason at the head. Knowing--that is, receiving and recognizing astimulus from without--would seem to come first; we must be acted onbefore we can _re_-act; but priority confers no supremacy. We can lookat it another way. Perceiving is the first rung on the ladder that leadsto action, feeling is the second, action is the topmost rung, theprimary goal, as it were, of all the climbing. For the purpose of ourdiscussion this is perhaps the simplest way of looking at humanbehaviour. 

 * * * * *

Movement, then, action, is, as it were, the goal and the end of thought. Perception finds its natural outlet and completion in doing. But herecomes in a curious consideration important for our purpose. In animals, in so far as they act by "instinct, " as we say, perception, knowing, isusually followed immediately and inevitably by doing, by such doing asis calculated to conserve the animal and his species; but in some of thehigher animals, and especially in man, where the nervous system is morecomplex, perception is not instantly transformed into action; there isan interval for choice between several possible actions. Perception ispent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious _representation_. Nowit is, psychologists tell us, just in this interval, this space betweenperception and reaction, this momentary halt, that all our mental life, our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion andour art, is built up. If the cycle of knowing, feeling, acting, wereinstantly fulfilled, that is, if we were a mass of well-contrivedinstincts, we should hardly have _dromena_, and we should certainlynever pass from _dromena_ to _drama_. Art and religion, though perhapsnot wholly ritual, spring from the incomplete cycle, from unsatisfieddesire, from perception and emotion that have somehow not foundimmediate outlet in practical action. When we come later to establishthe dividing line between art and ritual we shall find this fact to becardinal. 

We have next to watch how out of _representation repeated_ there growsup a kind of _abstraction_ which helps the transition from ritual toart. When the men of a tribe return from a hunt, a journey, a battle, orany event that has caused them keen and pleasant emotion, they willoften re-act their doings round the camp-fire at night to an attentiveaudience of women and young boys. The cause of this world-wide custom isno doubt in great part the desire to repeat a pleasant experience; thebattle or the hunt will not be re-enacted unless it has been successful. Together with this must be reckoned a motive seldom absent from humanendeavour, the desire for self-exhibition, self-enhancement. But in thisre-enactment, we see at once, lies the germ of history and ofcommemorative ceremonial, and also, oddly enough, an impulse emotionalin itself begets a process we think of as characteristically andexclusively intellectual, the process of abstraction. The savage beginswith the particular battle that actually _did_ happen; but, it is easyto see that if he re-enacts it again and again the _particular_ battleor hunt will be forgotten, the representation cuts itself loose fromthe particular action from which it arose, and becomes generalized, asit were abstracted. Like children he plays not at a funeral, but at"funerals, " not at a battle, but at battles; and so arises thewar-dance, or the death-dance, or the hunt-dance. This will serve toshow how inextricably the elements of knowing and feeling areintertwined. 

So, too, with the element of action. If we consider the occasions when asavage dances, it will soon appear that it is not only after a battle ora hunt that he dances in order to commemorate it, but before. Once thecommemorative dance has got abstracted or generalized it becomesmaterial for the magical dance, the dance pre-done. A tribe about to goto war will work itself up by a war dance; about to start out huntingthey will catch their game in pantomime. Here clearly the main emphasisis on the practical, the active, doing-element in the cycle. The danceis, as it were, a sort of precipitated desire, a discharge of pent-upemotion into action. 

In both these kinds of dances, the dance that commemorates by_re_-presenting and the dance that anticipates by _pre_-presenting, Plato would have seen the element of imitation, what the Greeks called_mimesis_, which we saw he believed to be the very source and essence ofall art. In a sense he would have been right. The commemorative dancedoes especially _re_-present; it reproduces the past hunt or battle; butif we analyse a little more closely we see it is not for the sake ofcopying the actual battle itself, but for the _emotion felt about thebattle_. This they desire to re-live. The emotional element is seenstill more clearly in the dance _fore_-done for magical purposes. Success in war or in the hunt is keenly, intensely desired. The hunt orthe battle cannot take place at the moment, so the cycle cannot completeitself. The desire cannot find utterance in the actual act; it grows andaccumulates by inhibition, till at last the exasperated nerves andmuscles can bear it no longer; it breaks out into mimetic anticipatoryaction. But, and this is the important point, the action is mimetic, notof what you see done by another; but of what you desire to do yourself. The habit of this _mimesis_ of the thing desired, is set up, and ritualbegins. Ritual, then, does imitate, but for an emotional, not analtogether practical, end. 

Plato never saw a savage war-dance or a hunt-dance or a rain-dance, andit is not likely that, if he had seen one, he would have allowed it tobe art at all. But he must often have seen a class of performances verysimilar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art. He musthave seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed upas Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly haveclaimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition. Herewere men _imitating_ birds and beasts, dressed in their skins andfeathers, mimicking their gestures. For his own days his judgment wouldhave been unquestionably right; but again, if we look at the beginningof things, we find an origin and an impulse much deeper, vaguer, andmore emotional. 

The beast dances found widespread over the savage world took their risewhen men really believed, what St. Francis tried to preach: that beastsand birds and fishes were his "little brothers. " Or rather, perhaps, more strictly, he felt them to be his great brothers and his fathers, for the attitude of the Australian towards the kangaroo, the NorthAmerican towards the grizzly bear, is one of affection tempered by deepreligious awe. The beast dances look back to that early phase ofcivilization which survives in crystallized form in what we call_totemism_. "Totem" means tribe, but the tribe was of animals as well asmen. In the Kangaroo tribe there were real leaping kangaroos as well asmen-kangaroos. The men-kangaroos when they danced and leapt did it, notto _imitate_ kangaroos--you cannot imitate yourself--but just fornatural joy of heart because they _were_ kangaroos; they belonged to theKangaroo tribe, they bore the tribal marks and delighted to assert theirtribal unity. What they felt was not _mimesis_ but "participation, "unity, and community. Later, when man begins to distinguish betweenhimself and his strange fellow-tribesmen, to realize that he is _not_ akangaroo like other kangaroos, he will try to revive his old faith, hisold sense of participation and oneness, by conscious imitation. Thusthough imitation is not the object of these dances, it grows up in andthrough them. It is the same with art. The origin of art is not_mimesis_, but _mimesis_ springs up out of art, out of emotionalexpression, and constantly and closely neighbours it. Art and ritualare at the outset alike in this, that they do not seek to copy a fact, but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion. 

 * * * * *

We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greekword _mimesis_. We translate mīmēsis by "imitation, " and we do verywrongly. The word _mimesis_ means the action or doing of a person calleda _mime_. Now a _mime_ was simply a person who dressed up and acted in apantomime or primitive drama. He was roughly what we should call an_actor_, and it is significant that in the word _actor_ we stress notimitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words_dromenon_ and _drama_. The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears theskin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copysomething or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge, enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic. 

The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother inThrace were, we know, called _mimes_. In the fragment of his lost play, Æschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of theMother, the maddening hum of the _bombykes_, a sort of spinning-top, the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goeson:

 "And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen, fearful _mimes_, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread. "

Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring, " thunder-andwind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The_mimes_ are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making itand enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants awind he makes it, or, as he later says, he whistles _for_ it; when asavage or a Greek wants thunder to bring rain he makes it, becomes it. But it is easy to see that as the belief in magic declines, what wasonce intense desire, issuing in the making of or the being of a thing, becomes mere copying of it; the mime, the maker, sinks to be in ourmodern sense the mimic; as faith declines, folly and futility set in;the earnest, zealous _act_ sinks into a frivolous mimicry, a sort ofchild's-play. 

FOOTNOTES

[5] These instances are all taken from _The Golden Bough, ^3 The MagicArt_, I, 139 _ff. _

[6] "The English Language, " _Home University Library_, p. 28. 

CHAPTER III

SEASONAL RITES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL

We have seen in the last chapter that whatever interests primitive man, whatever makes him feel strongly, he tends to re-enact. Any one of hismanifold occupations, hunting, fighting, later ploughing and sowing, provided it be of sufficient interest and importance, is material for a_dromenon_ or rite. We have also seen that, weak as he is inindividuality, it is not his private and personal emotions that tend tobecome ritual, but those that are public, felt and expressed officially, that is, by the whole tribe or community. It is further obvious thatsuch dances, when they develop into actual rites, tend to be performedat fixed times. We have now to consider when and why. The element offixity and regular repetition in rites cannot be too stronglyemphasized. It is a factor of paramount importance, essential to thedevelopment from ritual to art, from _dromenon_ to drama. 

The two great interests of primitive man are food and children. As Dr. Frazer has well said, if man the individual is to live he must havefood; if his race is to persist he must have children. "To live and tocause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primarywants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of men inthe future so long as the world lasts. " Other things may be added toenrich and beautify human life, but, unless these wants are firstsatisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure bythe performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons. Theyare the very foundation-stones of that ritual from which art, if we areright, took its rise. From this need for food sprang seasonal, periodicfestivals. The fact that festivals are seasonal, constantly recurrent, solidifies, makes permanent, and as already explained (p. 42), in asense intellectualizes and abstracts the emotion that prompts them. 

The seasons are indeed only of value to primitive man because they arerelated, as he swiftly and necessarily finds out, to his food supply. He has, it would seem, little sensitiveness to the æsthetic impulse ofthe beauty of a spring morning, to the pathos of autumn. What herealizes first and foremost is, that at certain times the animals, andstill more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain othersthey disappear. It is these times that become the central points, thefocuses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals. Thesedates will vary, of course, in different countries and in differentclimates. It is, therefore, idle to attempt a study of the ritual of apeople without knowing the facts of their climate and surroundings. InEgypt the food supply will depend on the rise and fall of the Nile, andon this rise and fall will depend the ritual and calendar of Osiris. Andyet treatises on Egyptian religion are still to be found which begin byrecounting the rites and mythology of Osiris, as though these wereprimary, and then end with a corollary to the effect that these ritesand this calendar were "associated" with the worship of Osiris, or, evenworse still, "instituted by" the religion of Osiris. The Nile regulatesthe food supply of Egypt, the monsoon that of certain South Pacificislands; the calendar of Egypt depends on the Nile, of the SouthPacific islands on the monsoon. 

 * * * * *

In his recent _Introduction to Mathematics_[7] Dr. Whitehead has pointedout how the "whole life of Nature is dominated by the existence ofperiodic events. " The rotation of the earth produces successive days;the path of the earth round the sun leads to the yearly recurrence ofthe seasons; the phases of the moon are recurrent, and though artificiallight has made these phases pass almost unnoticed to-day, in climateswhere the skies are clear, human life was largely influenced bymoonlight. Even our own bodily life, with its recurrent heart-beats andbreathings, is essentially periodic. [8] The presupposition ofperiodicity is indeed fundamental to our very conception of life, andbut for periodicity the very means of measuring time as a quantity wouldbe absent. 

Periodicity is fundamental to certain departments of mathematics, thatis evident; it is perhaps less evident that periodicity is a factor thathas gone to the making of ritual, and hence, as we shall see, of art. And yet this is manifestly the case. All primitive calendars are ritualcalendars, successions of feast-days, a patchwork of days of differentquality and character recurring; pattern at least is based onperiodicity. But there is another and perhaps more important way inwhich periodicity affects and in a sense causes ritual. We have seenalready that out of the space between an impulse and a reaction therearises an idea or "presentation. " A "presentation" is, indeed, it wouldseem, in its final analysis, only a delayed, intensified desire--adesire of which the active satisfaction is blocked, and which runs overinto a "presentation. " An image conceived "presented, " what we call an_idea_ is, as it were, an act prefigured. 

Ritual acts, then, which depend on the periodicity of the seasons areacts necessarily delayed. The thing delayed, expected, waited for, ismore and more a source of value, more and more apt to precipitate intowhat we call an idea, which is in reality but the projected shadow of anunaccomplished action. More beautiful it may be, but comparativelybloodless, yet capable in its turn of acting as an initial motor impulsein the cycle of activity. It will later (p. 70) be seen that theseperiodic festivals are the stuff of which those faded, unaccomplishedactions and desires which we call gods--Attis, Osiris, Dionysos--aremade. 

 * * * * *

To primitive man, as we have seen, beast and bird and plant and himselfwere not sharply divided, and the periodicity of the seasons was forall. It will depend on man's social and geographical conditions whetherhe notices periodicity most in plants or animals. If he is nomadic hewill note the recurrent births of other animals and of human children, and will connect them with the lunar year. But it is at once evidentthat, at least in Mediterranean lands, and probably everywhere, it isthe periodicity of plants and vegetation generally which depends onmoisture, that is most striking. Plants die down in the heat of summer, trees shed their leaves in autumn, all Nature sleeps or dies in winter, and awakes in spring. 

Sometimes it is the dying down that attracts most attention. This isvery clear in the rites of Adonis, which are, though he rises again, essentially rites of lamentation. The details of the ritual show thisclearly, and specially as already seen in the cult of Osiris. For the"gardens" of Adonis the women took baskets or pots filled with earth, and in them, as children sow cress now-a-days, they planted wheat, fennel, lettuce, and various kinds of flowers, which they watered andtended for eight days. In hot countries the seeds sprang up rapidly, butas the plants had no roots they withered quickly away. At the end of theeight days they were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis andthrown with them into the sea or into springs. The "gardens" of Adonisbecame the type of transient loveliness and swift decay. 

 * * * * *

"What waste would it be, " says Plutarch, [9] "what inconceivable waste, for God to create man, had he not an immortal soul. He would be like thewomen who make little gardens, not less pleasant than the gardens ofAdonis in earthen pots and pans; so would our souls blossom and flourishbut for a day in a soft and tender body of flesh without any firm andsolid root of life, and then be blasted and put out in a moment. "

Celebrated at midsummer as they were, and as the "gardens" were throwninto water, it is probable that the rites of Adonis may have been, atleast in part, a rain-charm. In the long summer droughts of Palestineand Babylonia the longing for rain must often have been intense enoughto provoke expression, and we remember (p. 19) that the Sumerian Tammuzwas originally _Dumuzi-absu_, "True Son of the Waters. " Water is thefirst need for vegetation. Gardens of Adonis are still in use in theMadras Presidency. [10] At the marriage of a Brahman "seeds of five ornine sorts are mixed and sown in earthen pots which are made speciallyfor the purpose, and are filled with earth. Bride and bridegroom waterthe seeds both morning and evening for four days; and on the fifth daythe seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis, into a tankor river. "

Seasonal festivals with one and the same intent--the promotion offertility in plants, animals and man--may occur at almost any time ofthe year. At midsummer, as we have seen, we may have rain-charms; inautumn we shall have harvest festivals; in late autumn and early winteramong pastoral peoples we shall have festivals, like that of Martinmas, for the blessing and purification of flocks and herds when they come infrom their summer pasture. In midwinter there will be a Christmasfestival to promote and protect the sun's heat at the winter solstice. But in Southern Europe, to which we mainly owe our drama and our art, the festival most widely celebrated, and that of which we know most, isthe Spring Festival, and to that we must turn. The spring is to theGreek of to-day the "ánoixis, " "the Opening, " and it was in spring andwith rites of spring that both Greek and Roman originally began theiryear. It was this spring festival that gave to the Greek their godDionysos and in part his drama. 

 * * * * *

In Cambridge on May Day two or three puzzled and weary little boys andgirls are still to be sometimes seen dragging round a perambulator witha doll on it bedecked with ribbons and a flower or two. That is all thatis left in most parts of England of the Queen of the May andJack-in-the-Green, though here and there a maypole survives and isresuscitated by enthusiasts about folk-dances. But in the days of "GoodQueen Bess" merry England, it would seem, was lustier. The PuritanStubbs, in his _Anatomie of Abuses_, [11] thus describes the festival:

 "They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maiepoole (this stinckying idoll rather), which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round aboute with stringes from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women, and children, following it with great devotion. And thus beyng reared up, with handkerchiefes and flagges streaming on the toppe, they strewe the ground about, binde greene boughs about it, set up summer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect patterne or rather the thyng itself. "

The stern old Puritan was right, the maypole was the perfect pattern ofa heathen "idoll, or rather the thyng itself. " He would haveexterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divinestook the maypole into the service of the Christian Church, and still[12]on May Day in Saffron Walden the spring song is heard with its Christianmoral--

 "A branch of May we have brought you, And at your door it stands; It is a sprout that is well budded out, The work of our Lord's hands. "

The maypole was of course at first no pole cut down and dried. The gistof it was that it should be a "sprout, well budded out. " The object ofcarrying in the May was to bring the very spirit of life and greeneryinto the village. When this was forgotten, idleness or economy wouldprompt the villagers to use the same tree or branch year after year. Inthe villages of Upper Bavaria Dr. Frazer[13] tells us the maypole isrenewed once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetchedfrom the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions withwhich it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark greenfoliage left at the top, "as a memento that in it we have to do, notwith a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood. "

At the ritual of May Day not only was the fresh green bough or treecarried into the village, but with it came a girl or a boy, the Queen orKing of the May. Sometimes the tree itself, as in Russia, is dressed upin woman's clothes; more often a real man or maid, covered with flowersand greenery, walks with the tree or carries the bough. Thus inThuringia, [14] as soon as the trees begin to be green in spring, thechildren assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where theychoose one of their playmates to be Little Leaf Man. They break branchesfrom the trees and twine them about the child, till only his shoes areleft peeping out. Two of the other children lead him for fear he shouldstumble. They take him singing and dancing from house to house, askingfor gifts of food, such as eggs, cream, sausages, cakes. Finally, theysprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food. Such a Leaf Manis our English Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who, as late as1892, was seen by Dr. Rouse walking about at Cheltenham encased in awooden framework covered with greenery. 

The bringing in of the new leafage in the form of a tree or flowers isone, and perhaps the simplest, form of spring festival. It takes littlenotice of death and winter, uttering and emphasizing only the desire forthe joy in life and spring. But in other and severer climates theemotion is fiercer and more complex; it takes the form of a struggle orcontest, what the Greeks called an _agon_. Thus on May Day in the Isleof Man a Queen of the May was chosen, and with her twenty maids ofhonour, together with a troop of young men for escort. But there was notonly a Queen of the May, but a Queen of Winter, a man dressed as awoman, loaded with warm clothes and wearing a woollen hood and furtippet. Winter, too, had attendants like the Queen of the May. The twotroops met and fought; and whichever Queen was taken prisoner had to paythe expenses of the feast. 

In the Isle of Man the real gist of the ceremony is quite forgotten, ithas become a mere play. But among the Esquimaux[15] there is stillcarried on a similar rite, and its magical intent is clearly understood. In autumn, when the storms begin and the long and dismal Arctic winteris at hand, the central Esquimaux divide themselves into two partiescalled the Ptarmigans and the Ducks. The ptarmigans are the people bornin winter, the ducks those born in summer. They stretch out a long ropeof sealskin. The ducks take hold of one end, the ptarmigans of theother, then comes a tug-of-war. If the ducks win there will be fineweather through the winter; if the ptarmigans, bad. This autumn festivalmight, of course, with equal magical intent be performed in the spring, but probably autumn is chosen because, with the dread of the Arctic iceand snow upon them, the fear of winter is stronger than the hope ofspring. 

 * * * * *

The intense emotion towards the weather, which breaks out into thesemagical _agones_, or "contests, " is not very easy to realize. Theweather to us now-a-days for the most part damps a day's pleasuring orraises the price of fruit and vegetables. But our main supplies come tous from other lands and other weathers, and we find it hard to thinkourselves back into the state when a bad harvest meant starvation. Theintensely practical attitude of man towards the seasons, the way thatmany of these magical dramatic ceremonies rose straight out of theemotion towards the food-supply, would perhaps never have been fullyrealized but for the study of the food-producing ceremonies of theCentral Australians. 

The Central Australian spring is not the shift from winter to summer, from cold to heat, but from a long, arid, and barren season to a seasonshort and often irregular in recurrence of torrential rain and suddenfertility. The dry steppes of Central Australia are the scene of amarvellous transformation. In the dry season all is hot and desolate, the ground has only patches of wiry scrub, with an occasional parchedacacia tree, all is stones and sand; there is no sign of animal lifesave for the thousand ant-hills. Then suddenly the rainy season sets in. Torrents fill the rivers, and the sandy plain is a sheet of water. Almost as suddenly the rain ceases, the streams dry up, sucked in by thethirsty ground, and as though literally by magic a luxuriant vegetationbursts forth, the desert blossoms as a rose. Insects, lizards, frogs, birds, chirp, frisk and chatter. No plant or animal can live unless itlive quickly. The struggle for existence is keen and short. 

It seems as though the change came and life was born by magic, and theprimitive Australian takes care that magic should not be wanting, andmagic of the most instructive kind. As soon as the season of fertilityapproaches he begins his rites with the avowed object of making andmultiplying the plants, and chiefly the animals, by which he lives; hepaints the figure of the emu on the sand with vermilion drawn from hisown blood; he puts on emu feathers and gazes about him vacantly instupid fashion like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like thechrysalis of a Witchetty grub--his favourite food, and drags his bodythrough it in pantomime, gliding and shuffling to promote its birth. Here, difficult and intricate though the ceremonies are, and uncertainin meaning as many of the details must probably always remain, the mainemotional gist is clear. It is not that the Australian wonders at andadmires the miracle of his spring, the bursting of the flowers and thesinging of birds; it is not that his heart goes out in gratitude to anAll-Father who is the Giver of all good things; it is that, obedient tothe push of life within him, his impulse is towards food. He must eatthat he and his tribe may grow and multiply. It is this, his will tolive, that he _utters and represents_. 

 * * * * *

The savage utters his will to live, his intense desire for food; but itshould be noted, it is desire and will and longing, not certainty andsatisfaction that he utters. In this respect it is interesting to notethat his rites and ceremonies, when periodic, are of fairly longperiods. Winter and summer are not the only natural periodic cycles;there is the cycle of day and night, and yet among primitive peoples butlittle ritual centres round day and night. The reason is simple. Thecycle of day and night is so short, it recurs so frequently, that mannaturally counted upon it and had no cause to be anxious. The emotionaltension necessary to ritual was absent. A few peoples, _e. G. _ theEgyptians, have practised daily incantations to bring back the sun. Probably they had at first felt a real tension of anxiety, andthen--being a people hidebound by custom--had gone on from mereconservatism. Where the sun returns at a longer interval, and is even, as among the Esquimaux, hidden for the long space of six months, ritualinevitably arises. They play at cat's-cradle to catch the ball of thesun lest it should sink and be lost for ever. 

Round the moon, whose cycle is long, but not too long, ritual very earlycentred, but probably only when its supposed influence on vegetation wasfirst surmised. The moon, as it were, practises magic herself; she waxesand wanes, and with her, man thinks, all the vegetable kingdom waxes andwanes too, all but the lawless onion. The moon, Plutarch[16] tells us, is fertile in its light and contains moisture, it is kindly to the youngof animals and to the new shoots of plants. Even Bacon[17] held thatobservations of the moon with a view to planting and sowing and thegrafting of trees were "not altogether frivolous. " It cannot too oftenbe remembered that primitive man has but little, if any, interest in sunand moon and heavenly bodies for their inherent beauty or wonder; hecares for them, he holds them sacred, he performs rites in relation tothem mainly when he notes that they bring the seasons, and he cares forthe seasons mainly because they bring him food. A season is to him as a_Hora_ was at first to the Greeks, _the fruits of a season_, what ourfarmers would call "a good _year_. "

 * * * * *

The sun, then, had no ritual till it was seen that he led in theseasons; but long before that was known, it was seen that the seasonswere annual, that they went round in a _ring_; and because that annualring was long in revolving, great was man's hope and fear in the winter, great his relief and joy in the spring. It was literally a matter ofdeath and life, and it was as death and life that he sometimesrepresented it, as we have seen in the figures of Adonis and Osiris. 

Adonis and Osiris have their modern parallels, who leave us in no doubtas to the meaning of their figures. Thus on the 1st of March inThüringen a ceremony is performed called "Driving out the Death. " Theyoung people make up a figure of straw, dress it in old clothes, carryit out and throw it into the river. Then they come back, tell the goodnews to the village, and are given eggs and food as a reward. In Bohemiathe children carry out a straw puppet and burn it. While they areburning it they sing--

 "Now carry we Death out of the village, The new Summer into the village, Welcome, dear Summer, Green little corn. "

In other parts of Bohemia the song varies; it is not Summer that comesback but Life. 

 "We have carried away Death, And brought back Life. "

In both these cases it is interesting to note that though Death isdramatically carried out, the coming back of Life is only announced, notenacted. 

Often, and it would seem quite naturally, the puppet representing Deathor Winter is reviled and roughly handled, or pelted with stones, andtreated in some way as a sort of scapegoat. But in not a few cases, andthese are of special interest, it seems to be the seat of a sort ofmagical potency which can be and is transferred to the figure of Summeror Life, thus causing, as it were, a sort of Resurrection. In Lusatiathe women only carry out the Death. They are dressed in black themselvesas mourners, but the puppet of straw which they dress up as the Deathwears a white shirt. They carry it to the village boundary, followed byboys throwing stones, and there tear it to pieces. Then they cut down atree and dress it in the white shirt of the Death and carry it homesinging. 

So at the Feast of the Ascension in Transylvania. After morning servicethe girls of the village dress up the Death; they tie a threshed-outsheaf of corn into a rough copy of a head and body, and stick abroomstick through the body for arms. Then they dress the figure up inthe ordinary holiday clothes of a peasant girl--a red hood, silverbrooches, and ribbons galore. They put the Death at an open window thatall the people when they go to vespers may see it. Vespers over, twogirls take the Death by the arms and walk in front; the rest follow. They sing an ordinary church hymn. Having wound through the village theygo to another house, shut out the boys, strip the Death of its clothes, and throw the straw body out of the window to the boys, who fling itinto a river. Then one of the girls is dressed in the Death's discardedclothes, and the procession again winds through the village. The samehymn is sung. Thus it is clear that the girl is a sort of resuscitatedDeath. This resurrection aspect, this passing of the old into the new, will be seen to be of great ritual importance when we come to Dionysosand the Dithyramb. 

These ceremonies of Death and Life are more complex than the simplecarrying in of green boughs or even the dancing round maypoles. When wehave these figures, these "impersonations, " we are getting away from themerely emotional dance, from the domain of simple psychological motordischarge to something that is very like rude art, at all events topersonification. On this question of personification, in which so muchof art and religion has its roots, it is all-important to be clear. 

 * * * * *

In discussions on such primitive rites as "Carrying out the Death, ""Bringing in Summer, " we are often told that the puppet of the girl iscarried round, buried, burnt; brought back, because it "personifies theSpirit of Vegetation, " or it "embodies the Spirit of Summer. " TheSpirit of Vegetation is "incarnate in the puppet. " We are led, by thisway of speaking, to suppose that the savage or the villager first formsan idea or conception of a Spirit of Vegetation and then later"embodies" it. We naturally wonder that he should perform a mental actso high and difficult as abstraction. 

A very little consideration shows that he performs at first noabstraction at all; abstraction is foreign to his mental habit. Hebegins with a vague excited dance to relieve his emotion. That dancehas, probably almost from the first, a leader; the dancers choose anactual _person_, and he is the root and ground of _personification_. There is nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not"embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From hispersonality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises fromthe only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without_per_ception there is no _con_ception. We noted in speaking of dances(p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations ofactual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and the war dance. So, from many actual living personal May Queens and Deaths, from manyactual men and women decked with leaves, or trees dressed up as men andwomen, arises _the_ Tree Spirit, _the_ Vegetation Spirit, _the_ Death. 

At the back, then, of the fact of personification lies the fact that theemotion is felt collectively, the rite is performed by a band or choruswho dance together _with a common leader_. Round that leader the emotioncentres. When there is an act of Carrying-out or Bringing-in he eitheris himself the puppet or he carries it. Emotion is of the whole band;drama--doing--tends to focus on the leader. This leader, this focus, isthen remembered, thought of, imaged; from being _per_ceived year byyear, he is finally _con_ceived; but his basis is always in actual factof which he is but the reflection. 

Had there been no periodic festivals, personification might long havehalted. But it is easy to see that a recurrent _per_ception helps toform a permanent abstract _con_ception. The different actual recurrentMay Kings and "Deaths, " _because they recur_, get a sort of permanentlife of their own and become beings apart. In this way a conception, akind of _daimon_, or spirit, is fashioned, who dies and lives again in aperpetual cycle. The periodic festival begets a kind of not immortal, but perennial, god. 

Yet the faculty of conception is but dim and feeble in the mind even ofthe peasant to-day; his function is to perceive the actual fact year byyear, and to feel about it. Perhaps a simple instance best makes thisclear. The Greek Church does not gladly suffer images in the round, though she delights in picture-images, _eikons_. But at her great springfestival of Easter she makes, in the remote villages, concession to astrong, perhaps imperative, popular need; she allows an image, an actualidol, of the dead Christ to be laid in the tomb that it may rise again. A traveller in Eubœa[18] during Holy Week had been struck by the genuinegrief shown at the Good Friday services. On Easter Eve there was thesame general gloom and despondency, and he asked an old woman why itwas. She answered: "Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not riseto-morrow, we shall have no corn this year. "

The old woman's state of mind is fairly clear. Her emotion is the oldemotion, not sorrow for the Christ the Son of Mary, but fear, imminentfear for the failure of food. The Christ again is not the historicalChrist of Judæa, still less the incarnation of the Godhead proceedingfrom the Father; he is the actual figure fashioned by his village chorusand laid by the priests, the leaders of that chorus, in the localsepulchre. 

 * * * * *

So far, then, we have seen that the vague emotional dance tends tobecome a periodic rite, performed at regular intervals. The periodicrite may occur at any date of importance to the food-supply of thecommunity, in summer, in winter, at the coming of the annual rains, orthe regular rising of a river. Among Mediterranean peoples, both inancient days and at the present time, the Spring Festival arrestsattention. Having learnt the general characteristics of this SpringFestival, we have now to turn to one particular case, the SpringFestival of the Greeks. This is all-important to us because, as will beseen, from the ritual of this and kindred festivals arose, we believe, agreat form of Art, the Greek drama. 

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Chapter XII: "Periodicity in Nature. "

[8] _Ibid. _

[9] _De Ser. Num. _ 17. 

[10] Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_, ^3 p. 200. 

[11] Quoted by Dr. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, ^2 p. 203. 

[12] E. K. Chambers, _The Mediæval Stage_, I, p. 169. 

[13] _The Golden Bough_, ^2 p. 205. 

[14] _The Golden Bough_, ^2 p. 213. 

[15] Resumed from Dr. Frazer, _Golden Bough_, ^2 II, p. 104. 

[16] _De Is. Et Os. _, p. 367. 

[17] _De Aug. Scient. _, III, 4. 

[18] J. C. Lawson, _Modern Greek Folk-lore and Ancient Religion_, p. 573. 

CHAPTER IV

THE SPRING FESTIVAL IN GREECE

The tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were performed atAthens at a festival known as the Great Dionysia. This took place earlyin April, so that the time itself makes us suspect that its ceremonieswere connected with the spring. But we have more certain evidence. Aristotle, in his treatise on the Art of Poetry, raises the question ofthe origin of the drama. He was not specially interested in primitiveritual; beast dances and spring mummeries might even have seemed to himmere savagery, the lowest form of "imitation;" but he divined that astructure so complex as Greek tragedy must have arisen out of a simplerform; he saw, or felt, in fact, that art had in some way risen out ofritual, and he has left us a memorable statement. 

In describing the "Carrying-out of Summer" we saw that the element ofreal _drama_, real impersonation, began with the leaders of the band, with the Queen of the May, and with the "Death" or the "Winter. " Greatis our delight when we find that for Greek drama Aristotle[19] divined alike beginning. He says:

 "Tragedy--as also Comedy--was at first mere improvisation--the one (tragedy) _originated with the leaders of the Dithyramb_. "

The further question faces us: What was the Dithyramb? We shall find toour joy that this obscure-sounding Dithyramb, though before Aristotle'stime it had taken literary form, was in origin a festival closely akinto those we have just been discussing. The Dithyramb was, to begin with, a spring ritual; and when Aristotle tells us tragedy arose out of theDithyramb, he gives us, though perhaps half unconsciously, a clearinstance of a splendid art that arose from the simplest of rites; heplants our theory of the connection of art with ritual firmly with itsfeet on historical ground. 

 * * * * *

When we use the word "dithyrambic" we certainly do not ordinarily thinkof spring. We say a style is "dithyrambic" when it is unmeasured, tooornate, impassioned, flowery. The Greeks themselves had forgotten thatthe word _Dithyramb_ meant a leaping, inspired dance. But they had notforgotten on what occasion that dance was danced. Pindar wrote aDithyramb for the Dionysiac festival at Athens, and his song is full ofspringtime and flowers. He bids all the gods come to Athens to danceflower-crowned. 

 "Look upon the dance, Olympians; send us the grace of Victory, ye gods who come to the heart of our city, where many feet are treading and incense steams: in sacred Athens come to the holy centre-stone. Take your portion of garlands pansy-twined, libations poured from the culling of spring. .. . 

 "Come hither to the god with ivy bound. Bromios we mortals name Him, and Him of the mighty Voice. .. . The clear signs of his Fulfilment are not hidden, whensoever the chamber of the purple-robed Hours is opened, and nectarous flowers lead in the fragrant spring. Then, then, are flung over the immortal Earth, lovely petals of pansies, and roses are amid our hair; and voices of song are loud among the pipes, the dancing-floors are loud with the calling of crowned Semele. "

Bromios, "He of the loud cry, " is a title of Dionysos. Semele is hismother, the Earth; we keep her name in Nova _Zembla_, "New Earth. " Thesong might have been sung at a "Carrying-in of Summer. " The Horæ, theSeasons, a chorus of maidens, lead in the figure of Spring, the Queen ofthe May, and they call to Mother Earth to wake, to rise up from theearth, flower-crowned. 

You may _bring back_ the life of the Spring in the form of a tree or amaiden, or you may summon her to rise from the sleeping Earth. In Greekmythology we are most familiar with the Rising-up form. Persephone, thedaughter of Demeter, is carried below the Earth, and rises up again yearby year. On Greek vase-paintings[20] the scene occurs again and again. Amound of earth is represented, sometimes surmounted by a tree; out ofthe mound a woman's figure rises; and all about the mound are figures ofdancing dæmons waiting to welcome her. 

All this is not mere late poetry and art. It is the primitive art andpoetry that come straight out of ritual, out of actual "things done, "_dromena_. In the village of Megara, near Athens, the very place whereto-day on Easter Tuesday the hills are covered with throngs of dancingmen, and specially women, Pausanias[21] saw near the City Hearth a rockcalled "_Anaklethra_, 'Place of Calling-up, ' because, if any one willbelieve it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, Demetercalled her up there"; and he adds: "The women to this day perform ritesanalogous to the story told. "

These rites of "Calling up" must have been spring rites, in which, insome pantomimic dance, the uprising of the Earth Spirit was enacted. 

Another festival of Uprising is perhaps more primitive and instructive, because it is near akin to the "Carrying out of Winter, " and alsobecause it shows clearly the close connection of these rites with thefood-supply. Plutarch[22] tells us of a festival held every nine yearsat Delphi. It was called from the name of the puppet used _Charila_, aword which originally meant Spring-Maiden, and is connected with theRussian word _yaro_, "Spring, " and is also akin to the Greek _Charis_, "grace, " in the sense of increase, "Give us all _grace_. " The rites of_Charila_, the Gracious One, the Spring-Maiden, were as follows:

 "The king presided and made a distribution in public of grain and pulse to all, both citizens and strangers. And the child-image of _Charila_ is brought in. When they had all received their share, the king struck the image with his sandal, the leader of the Thyiades lifted the image and took it away to a precipitous place, and there tied a rope round the neck of the image and buried it. "

Mr. Calderon has shown that very similar rites go on to-day in Bulgariain honour of _Yarilo_, the Spring God. 

The image is beaten, insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It isclearly a "Carrying out the Death, " though we do not know the exact dateat which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival atDelphi called _Herois_, or the "Heroine. " Plutarch[23] says it was toomystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know the main gist. 

 "Most of the ceremonies of the _Herois_ have a mystical reason which is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are done in public, one may conjecture it to be a 'Bringing up of Semele. '"

Some one or something, a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet_Charila_, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enactand magically induce the coming of Spring. 

 * * * * *

These ceremonies of beating, driving out, burying, have all, with theGreeks, as with the savage and the modern peasant, but one real object:to get rid of the season that is bad for food, to bring in and revivethe new supply. This comes out very clearly in a ceremony that went ondown to Plutarch's time, and he tells us[24] it was "ancestral. " It wascalled "the Driving out of Ox-hunger. " By Ox-hunger was meant any greatravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the wordtakes us back to days when famine was a grim reality. When Plutarch was_archon_ he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at thePrytaneion, or Common Hearth. A slave was taken, beaten with rods of amagical plant, and driven out of doors to the words: "Out withOx-hunger! In with Wealth and Health!" Here we see the actual sensation, or emotion, of ravenous hunger gets a name, and thereby a personality, though a less completely abstracted one than Death or Summer. We do notknow that the ceremony of Driving out Ox-hunger was performed in thespring, it is only instanced here because, more plainly even than theCharila, when the king distributes pulse and peas, it shows the relationof ancient mimic ritual to food-supply. 

If we keep clearly in mind the _object_ rather than the exact _date_ ofthe Spring Song we shall avoid many difficulties. A Dithyramb was sungat Delphi through the winter months, which at first seems odd. But wemust remember that among agricultural peoples the performance of magicalceremonies to promote fertility and the food supply may begin at anymoment after the earth is ploughed and the seed sown. The sowing of theseed is its death and burial; "that which thou sowest is not quickenedexcept it die. " When the death and burial are once accomplished the hopeof resurrection and new birth begins, and with the hope the magicalceremonies that may help to fulfil that hope. The Sun is new-born inmidwinter, at the solstice, and our "New" year follows, yet it is in thespring that, to this day, we keep our great resurrection festival. 

 * * * * *

We return to our argument, holding steadily in our minds thisconnection. The Dithyramb is a Spring Song at a Spring Festival, and theimportance of the Spring Festival is that it magically promotes thefood-supply. 

 * * * * *

Do we know any more about the Dithyramb? Happily yes, and the next pointis as curious as significant. 

Pindar, in one of his Odes, asks a strange question:

 "Whence did appear the Graces of Dionysos, With the Bull-driving Dithyramb?"

Scholars have broken their own heads and one another's to find a meaningand an answer to the odd query. It is only quite lately that they havecome at all to see that the Dithyramb was a Spring Song, a primitiverite. Formerly it was considered to be a rather elaborate form of lyricpoetry invented comparatively late. But, even allowing it is the SpringSong, are we much further? Why should the Dithyramb be bull-driving? Howcan driving a Bull help the spring to come? And, above all, what are the"slender-ankled" Graces doing, helping to drive the great unwieldy Bull?

The difficulty about the Graces, or Charites, as the Greeks called them, is soon settled. They are the Seasons, or "Hours, " and the chief Season, or Hour, was Spring herself. They are called Charites, or Graces, because they are, in the words of the Collect, the "Givers of allgrace, " that is, of all increase physical and spiritual. But why do theywant to come driving in a Bull? It is easy to see why the Givers of allgrace lead the Dithyramb, the Spring Song; their coming, with their"fruits in due season" is the very gist of the Dithyramb; but why is theDithyramb "bull-driving"? Is this a mere "poetical" epithet? If it is, it is not particularly poetical. 

But Pindar is not, we now know, merely being "poetical, " which amounts, according to some scholars, to meaning anything or nothing. He isdescribing, alluding to, an actual rite or _dromenon_ in which a Bull issummoned and driven to come in spring. About that we must be clear. Plutarch, the first anthropologist, wrote a little treatise called_Greek Questions_, in which he tells us all the strange out-of-the-wayrites and customs he saw in Greece, and then asks himself what theymeant. In his 36th _Question_ he asks: "Why do the women of Elis summonDionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot?" Andthen, by a piece of luck that almost makes one's heart stand still, hegives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, ourearliest "Bull-driving" Spring Song:

 "In Spring-time, [25] O Dionysos, To thy holy temple come; To Elis with thy Graces, Rushing with thy bull-foot, come, Noble Bull, Noble Bull. "

It is a strange primitive picture--the holy women standing in springtimein front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded andfilleted, rushing towards them, driven by the Graces, probably threereal women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked. Butwhat does it mean?

Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confusedfashion, succeeds. "Is it, " he suggests, "that some entitle the god as'Born of a Bull' and as a 'Bull' himself? . .. Or is it that many holdthe god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?" We have seen how akind of _daimon_, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actualtree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree. Did the godDionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoningyear by year of some holy Bull?

First, we must notice that it was not only at Elis that a holy Bullappears at the Spring Festival. Plutarch asks another instructive_Question_:[26] "Who among the Delphians is the Sanctifier?" And we findto our amazement that the sanctifier is a Bull. A Bull who not only isholy himself, but is so holy that he has power to make others holy, heis the Sanctifier; and, most important for us, he sanctifies by hisdeath in the month Bysios, the month that fell, Plutarch tells us, "atthe beginning of spring, the time of the blossoming of many plants. "

We do not hear that the "Sanctifier" at Delphi was "driven, " but in allprobability he was led from house to house, that every one might partakein the sanctity that simply exuded from him. At Magnesia, [27] a city ofAsia Minor, we have more particulars. There, at the annual fair year byyear the stewards of the city bought a Bull, "the finest that could begot, " and at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seedtime theydedicated it, for the city's welfare. The Bull's sanctified life beganwith the opening of the agricultural year, whether with the spring orthe autumn ploughing we do not know. The dedication of the Bull was ahigh solemnity. He was led in procession, at the head of which went thechief priest and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and thesacrificer, and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bullthat nothing unlucky might come near him; the youths and maidens musthave both their parents alive, they must not have been under the_taboo_, the infection, of death. The herald pronounced aloud a prayerfor "the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and thewomen and children, for peace and wealth, and for the bringing forth ofgrain and of all the other fruits, and of cattle. " All this longing forfertility, for food and children, focuses round the holy Bull, whoseholiness is his strength and fruitfulness. 

The Bull thus solemnly set apart, charged as it were with the luck ofthe whole people, is fed at the public cost. The official charged withhis keep has to drive him into the market-place, and "it is good forthose corn-merchants who give the Bull grain as a gift, " good for thembecause they are feeding, nurturing, the luck of the State, which istheir own luck. So through autumn and winter the Bull lives on, butearly in April the end comes. Again a great procession is led forth, thesenate and the priests walk in it, and with them come representatives ofeach class of the State--children and young boys, and youths just cometo manhood, _epheboi_, as the Greeks called them. The Bull issacrificed, and why? Why must a thing so holy die? Why not live out theterm of his life? He dies because he _is_ so holy, that he may give hisholiness, his strength, his life, just at the moment it is holiest, tohis people. 

 "When they shall have sacrificed the Bull, let them divide it up among those who took part in the procession. "

The mandate is clear. The procession included representatives of thewhole State. The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten--toevery man his portion--by each and every citizen, that he may get hisshare of the strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State. 

 * * * * *

Now at Magnesia, after the holy civic communion, the meal shared, wehear no more. Next year a fresh Bull will be chosen, and the cycle beginagain. But at Athens at the annual "Ox-murder, " the _Bouphonia_, as itwas called, the scene did not so close. The ox was slain with allsolemnity, and all those present partook of the flesh, and then--thehide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animalwas set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing. The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all-important. Weare so accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, therenouncing of something. But _sacrifice_ does not mean "death" at all. It means making holy, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive manjust special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was justthat special life and strength which all the year long they had put intohim, and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They couldnot eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So hemust die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killedhim, not to "sacrifice" him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eathim, live _by_ him and through him, by his grace. 

And so this killing of the sacred beast was always a terrible thing, athing they fain would have shirked. They fled away after the deed, notlooking backwards; they publicly tried and condemned the axe that struckthe blow. But their best hope, their strongest desire, was that he hadnot, could not, really have died. So this intense desire uttered itselfin the _dromenon_ of his resurrection. If he did not rise again, howcould they plough and sow again next year? He must live again, heshould, he _did_. 

The Athenians were a little ashamed of their "Ox-murder, " with itsgrotesque pantomime of the stuffed, resurrected beast. Just so some ofus now-a-days are getting a little shy of deliberately cursing ourneighbours on Ash Wednesday. They probably did not feel very keenlyabout their food-supply, they thought their daily dinner was secure. Anyhow the emotion that had issued in the pantomime was dead, thoughfrom sheer habit the pantomime went on. Probably some of the lesseducated among them thought there "might be something in it, " and anyhowit was "as well to be on the safe side. " The queer ceremony had gotassociated with the worship of Olympian Zeus, and with him you mustreckon. Then perhaps your brother-in-law was the Ox-striker, and anyhowit was desirable that the women should go; some of the well-born girlshad to act as water-carriers. 

The Ox-murder was obsolete at Athens, but the spirit of the rite isalive to-day among the Ainos in the remote island of Saghalien. Amongthe Ainos the Bear is what psychologists rather oddly call the main"food focus, " the chief "value centre. " And well he may be. Bear's fleshis the Ainos' staple food; they eat it both fresh and salted; bearskinsare their principal clothing; part of their taxes are paid in bear'sfat. The Aino men spend the autumn, winter and spring in hunting theBear. Yet we are told the Ainos "worship the Bear"; they apply to it thename _Kamui_, which has been translated god; but it is a word applied toall strangers, and so only means what catches attention, and hence isformidable. In the religion of the Ainos "the Bear plays a chief part, "says one writer. The Bear "receives idolatrous veneration, " saysanother. They "worship it after their fashion, " says a third. Have weanother case of "the heathen in his blindness"? Only here he "bows down"not to "gods of wood and stone, " but to a live thing, uncouth, shamblingbut gracious--a Bear. 

Instead of theorizing as to what the Aino thinks and imagines, let usobserve his _doings_, his _dromena_, his rites; and most of all hisgreat spring and autumn rite, the _dromenon_ of the Bear. We shall findthat, detail for detail, it strangely resembles the Greek _dromenon_ ofthe Bull. 

As winter draws to a close among the Ainos, a young Bear is trapped andbrought into the village. At first an Aino woman suckles him at herbreast, then later he is fed on his favourite food, fish--his tastes aresemi-polar. When he is at his full strength, that is, when he threatensto break the cage in which he lives, the feast is held. This is usuallyin September, or October, that is when the season of bear-huntingbegins. 

Before the feast begins the Ainos apologize profusely, saying that theyhave been good to the Bear, they can feed him no longer, they must killhim. Then the man who gives the Bear-feast invites his relations andfriends, and if the community be small nearly the whole village attends. On the occasion described by Dr. Scheube about thirty Ainos werepresent, men, women, and children, all dressed in their best clothes. The woman of the house who had suckled the Bear sat by herself, sad andsilent, only now and then she burst into helpless tears. The ceremonybegan with libations made to the fire-god and to the house-god set up ina corner of the house. Next the master and some of the guests left thehut and offered libations in front of the Bear's cage. A few drops werepresented to him in a saucer, which he promptly upset. Then the womenand girls danced round the cage, rising and hopping on their toes, andas they danced they clapped their hands and chanted a monotonous chant. The mother and some of the old women cried as they danced and stretchedout their arms to the Bear, calling him loving names. The young womenwho had nursed no Bears laughed, after the manner of the young. The Bearbegan to get upset, and rushed round his cage, howling lamentably. 

Next came a ceremony of special significance which is never omitted atthe sacrifice of a Bear. Libations were offered to the _inabos_, sacredwands which stand outside the Aino hut. These wands are about two feethigh and are whittled at the top into spiral shavings. _Five new wandswith bamboo leaves attached to them_ are set up for the festival; theleaves according to the Ainos mean _that the Bear may come to lifeagain_. These wands are specially interesting. The chief focus ofattention is of course the Bear, because his flesh is for the Aino hisstaple food. But vegetation is not quite forgotten. The animal life ofthe Bear and the vegetable life of the bamboo-leaves are thought oftogether. 

Then comes the actual sacrifice. The Bear is led out of his cage, a ropeis thrown round his neck, and he is perambulated round the neighbourhoodof the hut. We do not hear that among the Ainos he goes in processionround the village, but among the Gilyaks, not far away in EasternSiberia, the Bear is led about the villages, and it is held to bespecially important that he should be dragged down to the river, forthis will ensure the village a plentiful supply of fish. He is then, among the Gilyaks, taken to each hut in the village, and fish, brandy, and other delicacies are offered to him. Some of the people prostratethemselves in front of him and his coming into a house brings ablessing, and if he snuffs at the food, that brings a blessing too. 

To return to the Aino Bear. While he is being led about the hut the men, headed by a chief, shoot at the Bear with arrows tipped with buttons. But the object of the shooting is not to kill, only apparently toirritate him. He is killed at last without shedding of his sacred blood, and we hope without much pain. He is taken in front of the sacred wands, a stick placed in his mouth, and nine men press his neck against a beam;he dies without a sound. Meantime the women and girls, who stand behindthe men, dance, lament, and beat the men who are killing their Bear. Thebody of the dead Bear is then laid on a mat before the sacred wands. Asword and quiver, taken from the wands, are hung about the Bear. If itis a She-Bear it is also bedecked with a necklace and rings. Food anddrink, millet broth and millet cakes are offered to it. It is decked asan Aino, it is fed as an Aino. It is clear that the Bear is in somesense a human Bear, an Aino. The men sit down on mats in front of theBear and offer libations, and themselves drink deep. 

Now that the death is fairly over the mourning ends, and all is feastingand merriment. Even the old women lament no more. Cakes of millet arescrambled for. The bear is skinned and disembowelled, the trunk issevered from the head, to which the skin is left hanging. The blood, which might not be shed before, is now carefully collected in cups andeagerly drunk by the men, for the blood is the life. The liver is cut upand eaten raw. The flesh and the rest of the vitals are kept for the daynext but one, when it is divided among all persons present at the feast. It is what the Greeks call a _dais_, a meal divided or distributed. While the Bear is being dismembered the girls dance, in front of thesacred wands, and the old women again lament. The Bear's brain isextracted from his head and eaten, and the skull, severed from the skin, is hung on a pole near the sacred wands. Thus it would seem the life andstrength of the bear is brought near to the living growth of the leaves. The stick with which the Bear was gagged is also hung on the pole, andwith it the sword and quiver he had worn after his death. The wholecongregation, men and women, dance about this strange maypole, and agreat drinking bout, in which all men and women alike join, ends thefeast. 

The rite varies as to detail in different places. Among the Gilyaks theBear is dressed after death in full Gilyak costume and seated on abench of honour. In one part the bones and skull are carried out by theoldest people to a place in the forest not far from the village. Thereall the bones except the skull are buried. After that a young tree isfelled a few inches above the ground, its stump is cleft, and the skullwedged into the cleft. When the grass grows over the spot the skulldisappears and there is an end of the Bear. Sometimes the Bear's fleshis eaten in special vessels prepared for this festival and only used atit. These vessels, which include bowls, platters, spoons, areelaborately carved with figures of bears and other devices. 

Through all varieties in detail the main intent is the same, and it isidentical with that of the rite of the holy Bull in Greece and themaypole of our forefathers. Great is the sanctity of the Bear or theBull or the Tree; the Bear for a hunting people; the Bull for nomads, later for agriculturists; the Tree for a forest folk. On the Bear andthe Bull and the Tree are focussed the desire of the whole people. Bearand Bull and Tree are sacred, that is, set apart, because full of aspecial life and strength intensely desired. They are led and carriedabout from house to house that their sanctity may touch all, and availfor all; the animal dies that he may be eaten; the Tree is torn topieces that all may have a fragment; and, above all, Bear and Bull andTree die only that they may live again. 

 * * * * *

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually_per_ceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer, " or Death, a thing never actuallyseen but _con_ceived. Just so with the Bull. Year by year in the variousvillages of Greece was seen an actual holy Bull, and bit by bit from theremembrance of these various holy Bulls, who only died to live againeach year, there arose the image of a Bull-Spirit, or Bull-Daimon, andfinally, if we like to call him so, a Bull-God. The growth of this idea, this _con_ception, must have been much helped by the fact that in someplaces the dancers attendant on the holy Bull dressed up as bulls andcows. The women worshippers of Dionysos, we are told, wore bulls' hornsin imitation of the god, for they represented him in pictures as havinga bull's head. _We_ know that a man does not turn into a bull, or abull into a man, the line of demarcation is clearly drawn; but therustic has no such conviction even to-day. That crone, his aged aunt, may any day come in at the window in the shape of a black cat; whyshould she not? It is not, then, that a god 'takes upon him the form ofa bull, ' or is 'incarnate in a bull, ' but that the real Bull and theworshipper dressed as a bull are seen and remembered and give rise to animagined Bull-God; but, it should be observed, only among gifted, imaginative, that is, image-making, peoples. The Ainos have their actualholy Bear, as the Greeks had their holy Bull; but with them out of thesuccession of holy Bears there arises, alas! no Bear-God. 

 * * * * *

We have dwelt long on the Bull-driving Dithyramb, because it was notobvious on the face of it how driving a bull could help the coming ofspring. We understand now why, on the day before the tragedies wereperformed at Athens, the young men (_epheboi_) brought in not only thehuman figure of the god, but also a Bull "worthy" of the God. Weunderstand, too, why in addition to the tragedies performed at thegreat festival, Dithyrambs were also sung--"Bull-driving Dithyrambs. "

 * * * * *

We come next to a third aspect of the Dithyramb, and one perhaps themost important of all for the understanding of art, and especially thedrama. _The Dithyramb was the Song and Dance of the New Birth. _

Plato is discussing various sorts of odes or songs. "Some, " he says, "are prayers to the gods--these are called _hymns_; others of anopposite sort might best be called _dirges_; another sort are _pæans_, and another--the birth of Dionysos, I suppose--is called _Dithyramb_. "Plato is not much interested in Dithyrambs. To him they are just aparticular kind of choral song; it is doubtful if he even knew that theywere Spring Songs; but this he did know, though he throws out theinformation carelessly--the Dithyramb had for its proper subject thebirth or coming to be, the _genesis_ of Dionysos. 

The common usage of Greek poetry bears out Plato's statement. When apoet is going to describe the birth of Dionysos he calls the god by thetitle _Dithyrambos_. Thus an inscribed hymn found at Delphi[28] opensthus:

 "Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come. . .. Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring Holy hours of thine own holy spring. . .. All the stars danced for joy. Mirth Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth. "

The Dithyramb is the song of the birth, and the birth of Dionysos is inthe spring, the time of the maypole, the time of the holy Bull. 

 * * * * *

And now we come to a curious thing. We have seen how a spirit, a dæmon, and perhaps ultimately a god, develops out of an actual rite. Dionysosthe Tree-God, the Spirit of Vegetation, is but a maypole once_per_ceived, then remembered and _con_ceived. Dionysos, the Bull-God, isbut the actual holy Bull himself, or rather the succession of annualholy Bulls once perceived, then remembered, generalized, conceived. Butthe god conceived will surely always be made in the image, the mentalimage, of the fact perceived. If, then, we have a song and dance of the_birth_ of Dionysos, shall we not, as in the Christian religion, have achild-god, a holy babe, a Saviour in the manger; at first in originalform as a calf, then as a human child? Now it is quite true that inGreek religion there is a babe Dionysos called _Liknites_, "Him of theCradle. "[29] The rite of waking up, or bringing to light, the childLiknites was performed each year at Delphi by the holy women. 

But it is equally clear and certain that _the_ Dionysos of Greek worshipand of the drama was not a babe in the cradle. He was a goodly youth inthe first bloom of manhood, with the down upon his cheek, the time when, Homer says, "youth is most gracious. " This is the Dionysos that we knowin statuary, the fair, dreamy youth sunk in reverie; this is theDionysos whom Pentheus despised and insulted because of his young beautylike a woman's. But how could such a Dionysos arise out of a rite ofbirth? He could not, and he did not. The Dithyramb is also the song ofthe second or new birth, the Dithyrambos is the twice-born. 

This the Greeks themselves knew. By a false etymology they explained theword _Dithyrambos_ as meaning "He of the double door, " their word_thyra_ being the same as our _door_. They were quite mistaken;_Dithyrambos_, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver. But their false etymology is important to us, because itshows that they believed the Dithyrambos was the twice-born. Dionysoswas born, they fabled, once of his mother, like all men, once of hisfather's thigh, like no man. 

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, theTree-God, arises from a _dromenon_, a rite, what is the rite of secondbirth from which it arises?

 * * * * *

We look in vain among our village customs. If ever rite of second birthexisted, it is dead and buried. We turn to anthropology for help, andfind this, the rite of the second birth, widespread, universal, overhalf the savage world. 

With the savage, to be twice born is the rule, not the exception. By hisfirst birth he comes into the world, by his second he is born into histribe. At his first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk;at his second he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the societyof the warriors of his tribe. This second birth is a little difficultfor us to realize. A boy with us passes very gradually from childhood tomanhood, there is no definite moment when he suddenly emerges as a man. Little by little as his education advances he is admitted to the socialprivileges of the circle in which he is born. He goes to school, entersa workshop or a university, and finally adopts a trade or a profession. In the case of girls, in whose upbringing primitive savagery is apt tolinger, there is still, in certain social strata a ceremony known asComing Out. A girl's dress is suddenly lengthened, her hair is put up, she is allowed to wear jewels, she kisses her sovereign's hand, a danceis given in her honour; abruptly, from her seclusion in the cocoon stateof the schoolroom, she emerges full-blown into society. But the custom, with its half-realized savagery, is already dying, and with boys it doesnot obtain at all. Both sexes share, of course, the religious rite ofConfirmation. 

To avoid harsh distinctions, to bridge over abrupt transitions, isalways a mark of advancing civilization; but the savage, in hisignorance and fear, lamentably over-stresses distinctions andtransitions. The long process of education, of passing from child toman, is with him condensed into a few days, weeks, or sometimes monthsof tremendous educational emphasis--of what is called "initiation, ""going in, " that is, entering the tribe. The ceremonies vary, but thegist is always substantially the same. The boy is to put away childishthings, and become a grown and competent tribesman. Above all he is tocease to be a woman-thing and become a man. His initiation prepares himfor his two chief functions as a tribesman--to be a warrior, to be afather. That to the savage is the main if not the whole Duty of Man. 

This "initiation" is of tremendous importance, and we should expect, what in fact we find, that all this emotion that centres about it issuesin _dromena_, "rites done. " These rites are very various, but they allpoint one moral, that the former things are passed away and that thenew-born man has entered on a new life. 

Simplest perhaps of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised bythe Kikuyu of British East Africa, [30] who require that every boy, justbefore circumcision, must be born again. "The mother stands up with theboy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labourpains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed. "

More often the new birth is simulated, or imagined, as a death and aresurrection, either of the boys themselves or of some one else in theirpresence. Thus at initiation among some tribes of South-eastAustralia, [31] when the boys are assembled an old man dressed in stringybark fibre lies down in a grave. He is covered up lightly with sticksand earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried man holds in hishand a small bush which seems to be growing from the ground, and otherbushes are stuck in the ground round about. The novices are then broughtto the edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goeson, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver. It moves more andmore and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the grave. 

The Fijians have a drastic and repulsive way of simulating death. Theboys are shown a row of seemingly dead men, their bodies covered withblood and entrails, which are really those of a dead pig. The firstgives a sudden yell. Up start the men, and then run to the river tocleanse themselves. 

Here the death is vicarious. Another goes through the simulated deaththat the initiated boy may have new life. But often the mimicry ispractised on the boys themselves. Thus in West Ceram[32] boys at pubertyare admitted to the Kakian association. The boys are taken blindfold, followed by their relations, to an oblong wooden shed under the darkesttrees in the depths of the forest. When all are assembled the highpriest calls aloud on the devils, and immediately a hideous uproar isheard from the shed. It is really made by men in the shed with bambootrumpets, but the women and children think it is the devils. Then thepriest enters the shed with the boys, one at a time. A dull thud ofchopping is heard, a fearful cry rings out, and a sword dripping withblood is thrust out through the roof. This is the token that the boy'shead has been cut off, and that the devil has taken him away to theother world, whence he will return born again. In a day or two the menwho act as sponsors to the boys return daubed with mud, and in ahalf-fainting state like messengers from another world. They bring thegood news that the devil has restored the boys to life. The boysthemselves appear, but when they return they totter as they walk; theygo into the house backwards. If food is given them they upset the plate. They sit dumb and only make signs. The sponsors have to teach them thesimplest daily acts as though they were new-born children. At the end oftwenty to thirty days, during which their mothers and sisters may notcomb their hair, the high priest takes them to a lonely place in theforest and cuts off a lock of hair from the crown of each of theirheads. At the close of these rites the boys are men and may marry. 

Sometimes the new birth is not simulated but merely suggested. A newname is given, a new language taught, a new dress worn, new dances aredanced. Almost always it is accompanied by moral teaching. Thus in theKakian ceremony already described the boys have to sit in a rowcross-legged, without moving a muscle, with their hands stretched out. The chief takes a trumpet, and placing the mouth of it on the hand ofeach lad, he speaks through it in strange tones, imitating the voice ofspirits. He warns the boys on pain of death to observe the rules of thesociety, and never to reveal what they have seen in the Kakian house. The priests also instruct the boys on their duty to their bloodrelations, and teach them the secrets of the tribe. 

Sometimes it is not clear whether the new birth is merely suggested orrepresented in pantomime. Thus among the Binbinga of North Australia itis generally believed that at initiation a monstrous being calledKatajalina, like the Kronos of the Greeks, swallows the boys and bringsthem up again initiated; but whether there is or is not a _dromenon_ orrite of swallowing we are not told. 

In totemistic societies, and in the animal secret societies that seem togrow out of them, the novice is born again as the sacred animal. Thusamong the Carrier Indians[33] when a man wants to become a _Lulem_, orBear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on abearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or fourdays. Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in search parties tofind him. They cry out _Yi! Kelulem_ ("Come on, Bear") and he answerswith angry growls. Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back atlast himself. He is met and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, andthere, in company with the rest of the Bears, dances solemnly his firstappearance. Disappearance and reappearance is as common a rite ininitiation as simulated killing and resurrection, and has the sameobject. Both are rites of transition, of passing from one state toanother. It has often been remarked, by students of ancient Greek andother ceremonies, that the rites of birth, marriage, and death, whichseem to us so different, are to primitive man oddly similar. This isexplained if we see that in intent they _are_ all the same, all apassing from one social state to another. There are but two factors inevery rite, the putting off of the old, the putting on of the new; youcarry out Winter or Death, you bring in Summer or Life. Between them isa midway state when you are neither here nor there, you are secluded, under a _taboo_. 

 * * * * *

To the Greeks and to many primitive peoples the rites of birth, marriage, and death were for the most part family rites needing littleor no social emphasis. But _the_ rite which concerned the whole tribe, the essence of which was entrance into the tribe, was the rite ofinitiation at puberty. This all-important fact is oddly andsignificantly enshrined in the Greek language. The general Greek wordfor rite was _tělětē_. It was applied to all mysteries, and sometimes tomarriages and funerals. But it has nothing to do with death. It comesfrom a root meaning "to grow up. " The word _tělětē_ means _rite ofgrowing up_, becoming complete. It meant at first maturity, then rite ofmaturity, then by a natural extension any rite of initiation that wasmysterious. The rites of puberty were in their essence mysterious, because they consisted in initiation into the sanctities of the tribe, the things which society sanctioned and protected, excluding theuninitiated, whether they were young boys, women, or members of othertribes. Then, by contagion, the mystery notion spread to other rites. 

 * * * * *

We understand now who and what was the god who arose out of the rite, the _dromenon_ of tribal initiation, the rite of the new, the secondbirth. He was Dionysos. His name, according to recent philology, tellsus--Dio_nysos_, "Divine Young Man. "

When once we see that out of the emotion of the rite and the facts ofthe rite arises that remembrance and shadow of the rite, that _image_which is the god, we realize instantly that the god of the spring rite_must_ be a young god, and in primitive societies, where young women arebut of secondary account, he will necessarily be a young _man_. Whereemotion centres round tribal initiation he will be a young man justinitiated, what the Greeks called a _kouros_, or _ephebos_, a youth ofquite different social status from a mere _pais_ or boy. Such a youthsurvives in our King of the May and Jack-in-the-Green. Old men and womenare for death and winter, the young for life and spring, and most ofall the young man or bear or bull or tree just come to maturity. 

And because life is one at the Spring Festival, the young man carries ablossoming branch bound with wool of the young sheep. At Athens inspring and autumn alike "they carry out the _Eiresione_, a branch ofolive wound about with wool . .. And laden with all sorts of firstfruits, _that scarcity may cease_, and they sing over it:

 "Eiresione brings Figs and fat cakes, And a pot of honey and oil to mix, And a wine-cup strong and deep, That she may drink and sleep. "

The Eiresione had another name that told its own tale. It was called_Korythalia_, [34] "Branch of blooming youth. " The young men, says aGreek orator, are "the Spring of the people. "

 * * * * *

The excavations of Crete have given to us an ancient inscribed hymn, aDithyramb, we may safely call it, that is at once a spring-song and ayoung man-song. The god here invoked is what the Greeks call a_kouros_, a young man. It is sung and danced by young warriors:

 "Ho! Kouros, most Great, I give thee hail, Lord of all that is wet and gleaming; thou art come at the head of thy Daimones. To Diktè for the Year, Oh, march and rejoice in the dance and song. "

The leader of the band of _kouroi_, of young men, the real actualleader, has become by remembrance and abstraction, as we noted, adaimon, or spirit, at the head of a band of spirits, and he brings inthe new year at spring. The real leader, the "first kouros" as theGreeks called him, is there in the body, but from the succession ofleaders year by year they have imaged a spirit leader greatest of all. He is "lord of all that is wet and gleaming, " for the May bough, weremember, is drenched with dew and water that it may burgeon andblossom. Then they chant the tale of how of old a child was taken awayfrom its mother, taken by armed men to be initiated, armed men dancingtheir tribal dance. The stone is unhappily broken here, but enoughremains to make the meaning clear. 

And because this boy grew up and was initiated into manhood:

 "The Horæ (Seasons) began to be fruitful year by year and Dikè to possess mankind, and all wild living things were held about by wealth-loving Peace. "

We know the Seasons, the fruit and food bringers, but Dikè is strange. We translate the word "Justice, " but Dikè means, not Justice as betweenman and man, but the order of the world, the _way_ of life. It isthrough this way, this order, that the seasons go round. As long as theseasons observe this order there is fruitfulness and peace. If once thatorder were overstepped then would be disorder, strife, confusion, barrenness. And next comes a mandate, strange to our modern ears:

 "To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and leap for fields of fruit and for hives to bring increase. "

And yet not strange if we remember the Macedonian farmer (p. 32), whothrows his spade into the air that the wheat may be tall, or the Russianpeasant girls who leap high in the air crying, "Flax, grow. " Theleaping of the youths of the Cretan hymn is just the utterance of theirtense desire. They have grown up, and with them all live things mustgrow. By their magic year by year the fruits of the earth come to theirannual new birth. And that there be no mistake they end:

 "Leap for our cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, _and for our young citizens_, and for goodly Themis. "

They are now young citizens of a fencèd city instead of young tribesmenof the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holdsthem together is the bond of social custom, social structure, "goodlyThemis. " No man liveth to himself. 

 * * * * *

Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if thepriest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautifulcarved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facinghim a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armeddancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn. 

We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. ASpring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth;but all this seems, perhaps, not to bring us nearer to Greek drama, rather to put us farther away. What have the Spring and the Bull and theBirth Rite to do with the stately tragedies we know--with Agamemnon andIphigenia and Orestes and Hippolytos? That is the question before us, and the answer will lead us to the very heart of our subject. So far wehave seen that ritual arose from the presentation and emphasis ofemotion--emotion felt mainly about food. We have further seen thatritual develops out of and by means of periodic festivals. One of thechief periodic festivals at Athens was the Spring Festival of theDithyramb. Out of this Dithyramb arose, Aristotle says, tragedy--thatis, out of Ritual arose Art. How and Why? That is the question beforeus. 

FOOTNOTES:

[19] _Poetics_, IV, 12. 

[20] See my _Themis_, p. 419. (1912. )

[21] I, 43. 2. 

[22] _Quaest. Græc. _ XII. 

[23] _Op. Cit. _

[24] _Quæst. Symp. _, 693 f. 

[25] The words "in Spring-time" depend on an emendation to meconvincing. See my _Themis_, p. 205, note 1. 

[26] IX. 

[27] See my _Themis_, p. 151. 

[28] See my _Prolegomena_, p. 439. 

[29] _Prolegomena_, p. 402. 

[30] Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. I, p. 228. 

[31] _The Golden Bough_, ^2 III, 424. 

[32] _The Golden Bough_, ^2 III, 442. 

[33] _The Golden Bough_, ^2 III, p. 438. 

[34] See my _Themis_, p. 503. 

CHAPTER V

TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE DROMENON ("THING DONE") AND THE DRAMA

Probably most people when they go to a Greek play for the first timethink it a strange performance. According, perhaps, more to theirtemperament than to their training, they are either very much excited orvery much bored. In many minds there will be left a feeling that, whether they have enjoyed the play or not, they are puzzled: there areodd effects, conventions, suggestions. 

For example, the main deed of the Tragedy, the slaying of hero orheroine, is not done on the stage. That disappoints some modern mindsunconsciously avid of realism to the point of horror. Instead of a finethrilling murder or suicide before his very eyes, the spectator is putoff with an account of the murder done off the stage. This account isregularly given, and usually at considerable length, in a "messenger'sspeech. " The messenger's speech is a regular item in a Greek play, andthough actually it gives scope not only for fine elocution, but for realdramatic effect, in theory we feel it undramatic, and a modern actor hassometimes much ado to make it acceptable. The spectator is told that allthese, to him, odd conventions are due to Greek restraint, moderation, good taste, and yet for all their supposed restraint and reserve, hefinds when he reads his Homer that Greek heroes frequently burst intofloods of tears when a self-respecting Englishman would have suffered insilence. 

Then again, specially if the play be by Euripides, it ends not with a"curtain, " not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance ofa god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation orreconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself, strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat andsomehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes longdialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which theaction does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead ofbeginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bitabout the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the wholething in the prologue. Prologues we feel, are out of date, and theGreeks ought to have known better. Or again, of course we admit thattragedy must be tragic, and we are prepared for a decent amount oflamentation, but when an antiphonal lament goes on for pages, we wearyand wish that the chorus would stop lamenting and _do_ something. 

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At the back of our modern discontent there is lurking always this queeranomaly of the chorus. We have in our modern theatre no chorus, andwhen, in the opera, something of the nature of a chorus appears in theballet, it is a chorus that really dances to amuse and excite us in theintervals of operatic action; it is not a chorus of doddering andpottering old men, moralizing on an action in which they are too feebleto join. Of course if we are classical scholars we do not cavil at thechoral songs; the extreme difficulty of scanning and construing themalone commands a traditional respect; but if we are merely modernspectators, we may be respectful, we may even feel strangely excited, but we are certainly puzzled. The reason of our bewilderment is simpleenough. These prologues and messengers' speeches and ever-presentchoruses that trouble us are ritual forms still surviving at a time whenthe _drama_ has fully developed out of the _dromenon_. We cannot hereexamine all these ritual forms in detail;[35] one, however, the chorus, strangest and most beautiful of all, it is essential we shouldunderstand. 

Suppose that these choral songs have been put into English that in anyway represents the beauty of the Greek; then certainly there will besome among the spectators who get a thrill from the chorus quite unknownto any modern stage effect, a feeling of emotion heightened yetrestrained, a sense of entering into higher places, filled with a largerand a purer air--a sense of beauty born clean out of conflict anddisaster. 

A suspicion dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies inthemselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beautylargely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange. 

Now by examining this chorus and understanding its function--nay, more, by considering the actual _orchestra_, the space on which the chorusdanced, and the relation of that space to the rest of the theatre, tothe stage and the place where the spectators sat--we shall get light atlast on our main central problem: How did art arise out of ritual, andwhat is the relation of both to that actual life from which both art andritual sprang?

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The dramas of Æschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophoclesand Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the _theatre_, but, strange though it sounds to us, in the _orchestra_. The _theatre_to the Greeks was simply "the place of seeing, " the place where thespectators sat; what they called the skēnē or _scene_, was the tent orhut in which the actors dressed. But the kernel and centre of the wholewas the _orchestra_, the circular _dancing-place_ of the chorus; and, asthe orchestra was the kernel and centre of the theatre, so the chorus, the band of dancing and singing men--this chorus that seems to us so oddand even superfluous--was the centre and kernel and starting-point ofthe drama. The chorus danced and sang that Dithyramb we know so well, and from the leaders of that Dithyramb we remember tragedy arose, andthe chorus were at first, as an ancient writer tells us, just men andboys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested from sowing andploughing. 

Now it is in the relation between the _orchestra_ or dancing-place ofthe chorus, and the _theatre_ or place of the spectators, a relationthat shifted as time went on, that we see mirrored the whole developmentfrom ritual to art--from _dromenon_ to drama. 

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The orchestra on which the Dithyramb was danced was just a circulardancing-place beaten flat for the convenience of the dancers, andsometimes edged by a stone basement to mark the circle. This circularorchestra is very well seen in the theatre of Epidaurus, of which asketch is given in Fig. 1. The orchestra here is surrounded by asplendid _theatron_, or spectator place, with seats rising tier abovetier. If we want to realize the primitive Greek orchestra ordancing-place, we must think these stone seats away. Threshing-floorsare used in Greece to-day as convenient dancing-places. The dancetends to be circular because it is round some sacred thing, at first amaypole, or the reaped corn, later the figure of a god or his altar. Onthis dancing-place the whole body of worshippers would gather, just asnow-a-days the whole community will assemble on a village green. Thereis no division at first between actors and spectators; all are actors, all are doing the thing done, dancing the dance danced. Thus atinitiation ceremonies the whole tribe assembles, the only spectators arethe uninitiated, the women and children. No one at this early stagethinks of building a _theatre_, a spectator place. It is in the commonact, the common or collective emotion, that ritual starts. This mustnever be forgotten. 

[Illustration: Fig. 1. Theatre of Epidaurus Showing Circular Orchestra. ]

The most convenient spot for a mere dancing-place is some flat place. But any one who travels through Greece will notice instantly that allthe Greek theatres that remain at Athens, at Epidaurus, at Delos, Syracuse, and elsewhere, are built against the side of hills. None ofthese are very early; the earliest ancient orchestra we have is atAthens. It is a simple stone ring, but it is built against the steepsouth side of the Acropolis. The oldest festival of Dionysos was, aswill presently be seen, held in quite another spot, in the _agora_, ormarket-place. The reason for moving the dance was that the wooden seatsthat used to be set up on a sort of "grand stand" in the market-placefell down, and it was seen how safely and comfortably the spectatorscould be seated on the side of a steep hill. 

The spectators are a new and different element, the dance is not onlydanced, but it is watched from a distance, it is a spectacle; whereas inold days all or nearly all were worshippers acting, now many, indeedmost, are spectators, watching, feeling, thinking, not doing. It is inthis new attitude of the spectator that we touch on the differencebetween ritual and art; the _dromenon_, the thing actually done byyourself has become a _drama_, a thing also done, but abstracted fromyour doing. Let us look for a moment at the psychology of the spectator, at his behaviour. 

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Artists, it is often said, and usually felt, are so unpractical. Theyare always late for dinner, they forget to post their letters and toreturn the books or even money that is lent them. Art is to mostpeople's minds a sort of luxury, not a necessity. In but recently bygonedays music, drawing, and dancing were no part of a training for ordinarylife, they were taught at school as "accomplishments, " paid for as"extras. " Poets on their side equally used to contrast art and life, asthough they were things essentially distinct. 

 "Art is long, and Time is fleeting. "

Now commonplaces such as these, being unconscious utterances of thecollective mind, usually contain much truth, and are well worthweighing. Art, we shall show later, is profoundly connected with life;it is nowise superfluous. But, for all that, art, both its creation andits enjoyment, is unpractical. Thanks be to God, life is not limited tothe practical. 

When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is _cut loose fromimmediate action_. Take a simple instance. A man--or perhaps stillbetter a child--sees a plate of cherries. Through his senses comes thestimulus of the smell of the cherries, and their bright colour urginghim, luring him to eat. He eats and is satisfied; the cycle of normalbehaviour is complete; he is a man or a child of action, but he is noartist, and no art-lover. Another man looks at the same plate ofcherries. His sight and his smell lure him and urge him to eat. He does_not_ eat; the cycle is not completed, and, because he does not eat, thesight of those cherries, though perhaps not the smell, is altered, purified from desire, and in some way intensified, enlarged. If he isjust a man of taste, he will take what we call an "æsthetic" pleasure inthose cherries. If he is an actual artist, he will paint not thecherries, but his vision of them, his purified emotion towards them. Hehas, so to speak, come out from the chorus of actors, of cherry-eaters, and become a spectator. 

I borrow, by his kind permission, a beautiful instance of what he wellcalls "Psychical Distance" from the writings of a psychologist. [36]

"Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acuteunpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms ofdiscomfort, such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiaranxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listeningfor distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements of the shipand her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the passengers; andthat special, expectant tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associatedwith this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all themore terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for theexpert seafarer no less than the ignorant landsman. 

"Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish andenjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea-fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness; . .. Direct the attention to thefeatures 'objectively' constituting the phenomena--the veil surroundingyou with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines ofthings and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe thecarrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you couldtouch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting itlose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothnessof the water, hypercritically denying as it were, any suggestion ofdanger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from theworld, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and theexperience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, aflavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrastsharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like themomentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of abrighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinaryand familiar objects--an impression which we experience sometimes ininstants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like awire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of someimpending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a merespectator. "

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It has often been noted that two, and two only, of our senses are thechannels of art and give us artistic material. These two senses aresight and hearing. Touch and its special modifications, taste and smell, do not go to the making of art. Decadent French novelists, such asHuysmann, make their heroes revel in perfume-symphonies, but we feelthat the sentiment described is morbid and unreal, and we feel rightly. Some people speak of a cook as an "artist, " and a pudding as a "perfectpoem, " but a healthy instinct rebels. Art, whether sculpture, painting, drama, music, is of sight or hearing. The reason is simple. Sight andhearing are the distant senses; sight is, as some one has well said, "touch at a distance. " Sight and hearing are of things already detachedand somewhat remote; they are the fitting channels for art which is cutloose from immediate action and reaction. Taste and touch are toointimate, too immediately vital. In Russian, as Tolstoi has pointed out(and indeed in other languages the same is observable), the word forbeauty (_krasota_) means, to begin with, only that which pleases thesight. Even hearing is excluded. And though latterly people have begunto speak of an "ugly deed" or of "beautiful music, " it is not goodRussian. The simple Russian does not make Plato's divine muddle betweenthe good and the beautiful. If a man gives his coat to another, theRussian peasant, knowing no foreign language, will not say the man hasacted "beautifully. "

To see a thing, to feel a thing, as a work of art, we must, then, becomefor the time unpractical, must be loosed from the fear and the flurry ofactual living, must become spectators. Why is this? Why can we not liveand look at once? The _fact_ that we cannot is clear. If we watch afriend drowning we do not note the exquisite curve made by his body ashe falls into the water, nor the play of the sunlight on the ripples ashe disappears below the surface; we should be inhuman, æsthetic fiendsif we did. And again, why? It would do our friend no harm that we shouldenjoy the curves and the sunlight, provided we also threw him a rope. But the simple fact is that we _cannot_ look at the curves and thesunlight because our whole being is centred on acting, on saving him; wecannot even, at the moment, fully feel our own terror and impendingloss. So again if we want to see and to feel the splendour and vigour ofa lion, or even to watch the cumbrous grace of a bear, we prefer that acage should intervene. The cage cuts off the need for motor actions; itinterposes the needful physical and moral distance, and we are free forcontemplation. Released from our own terrors, we see more and better, and we feel differently. A man intent on action is like a horse inblinkers, he goes straight forward, seeing only the road ahead. 

Our brain is, indeed, it would seem, in part, an elaborate arrangementfor providing these blinkers. If we saw and realized the whole ofeverything, we should want to do too many things. The brain allows usnot only to remember, but, which is quite as important, to forget andneglect; it is an organ of oblivion. By neglecting most of the things wesee and hear, we can focus just on those which are important for action;we can cease to be potential artists and become efficient practicalhuman beings; but it is only by limiting our view, by a greatrenunciation as to the things we see and feel. The artist does just thereverse. He renounces doing in order to practise seeing. He is by naturewhat Professor Bergson calls "distrait, " aloof, absent-minded, intentonly, or mainly, on contemplation. That is why the ordinary man oftenthinks the artist a fool, or, if he does not go so far as that, is madevaguely uncomfortable by him, never really understands him. The artist'sfocus, all his system of values, is different, his world is a world ofimages which are his realities. 

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The distinction between art and ritual, which has so long haunted andpuzzled us, now comes out quite clearly, and also in part the relationof each to actual life. Ritual, we saw, was a re-presentation or apre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life, but, --and this is the important point, --always with a practical end. Artis also a representation of life and the emotions of life, but cut loosefrom immediate action. Action may be and often is represented, but it isnot that it may lead on to a practical further end. The end of art is initself. Its value is not mediate but _im_mediate. Thus ritual _makes, asit were, a bridge between real life and art_, a bridge over which inprimitive times it would seem man must pass. In his actual life he huntsand fishes and ploughs and sows, being utterly intent on the practicalend of gaining his food; in the _dromenon_ of the Spring Festival, though his _acts_ are unpractical, being mere singing and dancing andmimicry, his _intent_ is practical, to induce the return of hisfood-supply. In the drama the representation may remain for a time thesame, but the intent is altered: man has come out from action, he isseparate from the dancers, and has become a spectator. The drama is anend in itself. 

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We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a _dromenon_became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized andexpressed by the addition of the _theatre_, or spectator-place, to theorchestra, or dancing-place. We have also tried to analyse the meaningof the shift. It remains to ask what was its cause. Ritual does notalways develop into art, though in all probability dramatic art hasalways to go through the stage of ritual. The leap from real life to theemotional contemplation of life cut loose from action would otherwise betoo wide. Nature abhors a leap, she prefers to crawl over the ritualbridge. There seem at Athens to have been two main causes why the_dromenon_ passed swiftly, inevitably, into the drama. They are, first, the decay of religious faith; second, the influx from abroad of a newculture and new dramatic material. 

It may seem surprising to some that the decay of religious faith shouldbe an impulse to the birth of art. We are accustomed to talk rathervaguely of art "as the handmaid of religion"; we think of art as"inspired by" religion. But the decay of religious faith of which we nowspeak is not the decay of faith in a god, or even the decay of some highspiritual emotion; it is the decay of a belief in the efficacy ofcertain magical rites, and especially of the Spring Rite. So long aspeople believed that by excited dancing, by bringing in an image orleading in a bull you could induce the coming of Spring, so long wouldthe _dromena_ of the Dithyramb be enacted with intense enthusiasm, andwith this enthusiasm would come an actual accession and invigoration ofvital force. But, once the faintest doubt crept in, once men began to beguided by experience rather than custom, the enthusiasm would die down, and the collective invigoration no longer be felt. Then some day therewill be a bad summer, things will go all wrong, and the chorus willsadly ask: "Why should I dance my dance?" They will drift away or becomemere spectators of a rite established by custom. The rite itself willdie down, or it will live on only as the May Day rites of to-day, achildren's play, or at best a thing done vaguely "for luck. "

The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the riteitself, the actual mould, persists, and it is this ancient ritual mould, foreign to our own usage, that strikes us to-day, when a Greek play isrevived, as odd and perhaps chill. A _chorus_, a band of dancers theremust be, because the drama arose out of a ritual dance. An _agon_, orcontest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contendswith Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy mustbe tragic, must have its _pathos_, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die. There must needs be a swift transition, a clash and changefrom sorrow to joy, what the Greeks called a _peripeteia_, a_quick-turn-round_, because, though you carry out Winter, you bring inSummer. At the end we shall have an Appearance, an Epiphany of a god, because the whole gist of the ancient ritual was to summon the spirit oflife. All these ritual forms haunt and shadow the play, whatever itsplot, like ancient traditional ghosts; they underlie and sway themovement and the speeches like some compelling rhythm. 

Now this ritual mould, this underlying rhythm, is a fine thing initself; and, moreover, it was once shaped and cast by a living spirit:the intense immediate desire for food and life, and for the return ofthe seasons which bring that food and life. But we have seen that, oncethe faith in man's power magically to bring back these seasons waned, once he began to doubt whether he could really carry out Winter andbring in Summer, his emotion towards these rites would cool. Further, wehave seen that these rites repeated year by year ended, among animaginative people, in the mental creation of some sort of dæmon or god. This dæmon, or god, was more and more held responsible on his ownaccount for the food-supply and the order of the Horæ, or Seasons; so weget the notion that this dæmon or god himself led in the Seasons; Hermesdances at the head of the Charites, or an Eiresione is carried to Heliosand the Horæ. The thought then arises that this man-like dæmon who rosefrom a real King of the May, must himself be approached and dealt withas a man, bargained with, sacrificed to. In a word, in place of_dromena_, things done, we get gods worshipped; in place of sacraments, holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the modernsense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods. The relation of thesefigures of gods to art we shall consider when we come to sculpture. 

So the _dromenon_, the thing done, wanes, the prayer, the praise, thesacrifice waxes. Religion moves away from drama towards theology, butthe ritual mould of the _dromenon_ is left ready for a new content. 

Again, there is another point. The magical _dromenon_, the Carrying outof Winter, the Bringing in of Spring, is doomed to an inherent anddeadly monotony. It is only when its magical efficacy is intenselybelieved that it can go on. The life-history of a holy bull is alwaysthe same; its magical essence is that it should be the same. Even whenthe life-dæmon is human his career is unchequered. He is born, initiated, or born again; he is married, grows old, dies, is buried; andthe old, old story is told again next year. There are no fresh personalincidents, peculiar to one particular dæmon. If the drama rose from theSpring Song only, beautiful it might be, but with a beauty that wasmonotonous, a beauty doomed to sterility. 

We seem to have come to a sort of _impasse_, the spirit of the_dromenon_ is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watcha doing doomed to monotony. The ancient moulds are there, the oldbottles, but where is the new wine? The pool is stagnant; what angelwill step down to trouble the waters?

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Fortunately we are not left to conjecture what _might_ have happened. Inthe case of Greece we know, though not as clearly as we wish, what didhappen. We can see in part why, though the _dromena_ of Adonis andOsiris, emotional as they were and intensely picturesque, remained mereritual; the _dromenon_ of Dionysos, his Dithyramb, blossomed into drama. 

Let us look at the facts, and first at some structural facts in thebuilding of the theatre. 

We have seen that the orchestra, with its dancing chorus, stands forritual, for the stage in which all were worshippers, all joined in arite of practical intent. We further saw that the _theatre_, the placefor the spectators, stood for art. In the orchestra all is life anddancing; the marble _seats_ are the very symbol of rest, aloofness fromaction, contemplation. The seats for the spectators grow and grow inimportance till at last they absorb, as it were, the whole spirit, andgive their name _theatre_ to the whole structure; action is swallowed upin contemplation. But contemplation of what? At first, of course, of theritual dance, but not for long. That, we have seen, was doomed to adeadly monotony. In a Greek theatre there was not only orchestra and aspectator-place, there was also a _scene_ or _stage_. 

The Greek word for stage is, as we said, _skenè_, our scene. The _scene_was not a stage in our sense, _i. E. _ a platform raised so that theplayers might be better viewed. It was simply a tent, or rude hut, inwhich the players, or rather dancers, could put on their ritual dresses. The fact that the Greek theatre had, to begin with, no permanent stagein our sense, shows very clearly how little it was regarded as aspectacle. The ritual dance was a _dromenon_, a thing to be done, not athing to be looked at. The history of the Greek stage is one long storyof the encroachment of the stage on the orchestra. At first a rudeplatform or table is set up, then scenery is added; the movable tent istranslated into a stone house or a temple front. This stands at firstoutside the orchestra; then bit by bit the _scene_ encroaches till thesacred circle of the dancing-place is cut clean across. As the drama andthe stage wax, the _dromenon_ and the orchestra wane. 

This shift in the relation of dancing-place and stage is very clearlyseen in Fig. 2, a plan of the Dionysiac theatre at Athens (p. 144). Theold circular orchestra shows the dominance of ritual; the new curtailedorchestra of Roman times and semicircular shape shows the dominance ofthe spectacle. 

[Illustration: Fig. 2. Dionysiac Theatre at Athens. ]

Greek tragedy arose, Aristotle has told us, from the _leaders_ of theDithyramb, the leaders of the Spring Dance. The Spring Dance, the mimeof Summer and Winter, had, as we have seen, only one actor, one actorwith two parts--Death and Life. With only one play to be played, andthat a one-actor play, there was not much need for a stage. A _scene_, that is a _tent_, was needed, as we saw, because all the dancers had toput on their ritual gear, but scarcely a stage. From a rude platformthe prologue might be spoken, and on that platform the Epiphany orAppearance of the New Year might take place; but the play played, thelife-history of the life-spirit, was all too familiar; there was no needto look, the thing was to dance. You need a stage--not necessarily araised stage, but a place apart from the dancers--when you have newmaterial for your players, something you need to look at, to attend to. In the sixth century B. C. , at Athens, came _the_ great innovation. Instead of the old plot, the life-history of the life-spirit, with itsdeadly monotony, new plots were introduced, not of life-spirits but ofhuman individual heroes. In a word, Homer came to Athens, and out ofHomeric stories playwrights began to make their plots. This innovationwas the death of ritual monotony and the _dromenon_. It is not so muchthe old that dies as the new that kills. 

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Æschylus himself is reported to have said that his tragedies were"slices from the great banquet of Homer. " The metaphor is not a verypleasing one, but it expresses a truth. By Homer, Æschylus meant notonly our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, but the whole body of Epic or Heroicpoetry which centred round not only the Siege of Troy but the greatexpedition of the _Seven Against Thebes_, and which, moreover, containedthe stories of the heroes before the siege began, and their adventuresafter it was ended. It was from these heroic sagas for the most part, though not wholly, that the _myths_ or plots of not only Æschylus butalso Sophocles and Euripides, and a host of other writers whose playsare lost to us, are taken. The new wine that was poured into the oldbottles of the _dromena_ at the Spring Festival was the heroic saga. Weknow as an historical fact, the name of the man who was mainlyresponsible for this inpouring--the great democratic tyrantPeisistratos. We must look for a moment at what Peisistratos found, andthen pass to what he did. 

He found an ancient Spring _dromenon_, perhaps well-nigh effete. Withoutdestroying the old he contrived to introduce the new, to add to the oldplot of Summer and Winter the life-stories of heroes, and thereby arosethe drama. 

Let us look first, then, at what Peisistratos found. 

The April festival of Dionysos at which the great dramas were performedwas not the earliest festival of the god. Thucydides[37] expressly tellsus that on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion, that is in the quiteearly spring, at the turn of our February and March, were celebrated_the more ancient Dionysia_. It was a three-days' festival. [38] On thefirst day, called "Cask-opening, " the jars of new wine were broached. Among the Bœotians the day was called not the day of Dionysos, but theday of the Good or Wealthy Daimon. The next day was called the day ofthe "Cups"--there was a contest or _agon_ of drinking. The last day wascalled the "Pots, " and it, too, had its "Pot-Contests. " It is theceremonies of this day that we must notice a little in detail; for theyare very surprising. "Casks, " "Cups, " and "Pots, " sound primitiveenough. "Casks" and "Cups" go well with the wine-god, but the "Pots"call for explanation. 

The second day of the "Cups, " joyful though it sounds, was by theAthenians counted unlucky, because on that day they believed "the ghostsof the dead rose up. " The sanctuaries were roped in, each householderanointed his door with pitch, that the ghost who tried to enter mightcatch and stick there. Further, to make assurance doubly sure, fromearly dawn he chewed a bit of buckthorn, a plant of strong purgativepowers, so that, if a ghost should by evil chance go down his throat, itshould at least be promptly expelled. 

For two, perhaps three, days of constant anxiety and ceaselessprecautions the ghosts fluttered about Athens. Men's hearts were full ofnameless dread, and, as we shall see, hope. At the close of the thirdday the ghosts, or, as the Greeks called them, _Keres_, were bidden togo. Some one, we do not know whom, it may be each father of a household, pronounced the words: "Out of the door, ye Keres; it is no longerAnthesteria, " and, obedient, the Keres were gone. 

But before they went there was a supper for these souls. All thecitizens cooked a _panspermia_ or "Pot-of-all-Seeds, " but of thisPot-of-all-Seeds no citizen tasted. It was made over to the spirits ofthe under-world and Hermes their daimon, Hermes "Psychopompos, "Conductor, Leader of the dead. 

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We have seen how a forest people, dependent on fruit trees and berriesfor their food, will carry a maypole and imagine a tree-spirit. But apeople of agriculturists will feel and do and think quite otherwise;they will look, not to the forest but to the earth for their returninglife and food; they will sow seeds and wait for their sprouting, as inthe gardens of Adonis. Adonis seems to have passed through the twostages of Tree-Spirit and Seed-Spirit; his effigy was sometimes a treecut down, sometimes his planted "Gardens. " Now seeds are many, innumerable, and they are planted in the earth, and a people who burytheir dead know, or rather feel, that the earth is dead man's land. So, when they prepare a pot of seeds on their All Souls' Day, it is notreally or merely as a "supper for the souls, " though it may be thatkindly notion enters. The ghosts have other work to do than to eat theirsupper and go. They take that supper "of all seeds, " that _panspermia_, with them down to the world below, that they may tend it and foster itand bring it back in autumn as a pot of _all fruits_, a _pankarpia_. 

 "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. "

The dead, then, as well as the living--this is for us the importantpoint--had their share in the _dromena_ of the "more ancient Dionysia. "These agricultural spring _dromena_ were celebrated just outside theancient city gates, in the _agora_, or place of assembly, on a circulardancing-place, near to a very primitive sanctuary of Dionysos which wasopened only once in the year, at the Feast of Cups. Just outside thegates was celebrated yet another festival of Dionysos equally primitive, called the "Dionysia in the Fields. " It had the form though not the dateof our May Day festival. Plutarch[39] thus laments over the "good oldtimes": "In ancient days, " he says, "our fathers used to keep the feastof Dionysos in homely, jovial fashion. There was a procession, a jar ofwine and a _branch_; then some one dragged in a goat, another followedbringing a wicker basket of figs, and, to crown all, the phallos. " Itwas just a festival of the fruits of the whole earth: wine and thebasket of figs and the branch for vegetation, the goat for animal life, the phallos for man. No thought here of the dead, it is all for theliving and his food. 

 * * * * *

Such sanctities even a great tyrant might not tamper with. But if youmay not upset the old you may without irreverence add the new. Peisistratos probably cared little for, and believed less in, magicalceremonies for the renewal of fruits, incantations of the dead. We canscarcely picture him chewing buckthorn on the day of the "Cups, " oranointing his front door with pitch to keep out the ghosts. Very wiselyhe left the Anthesteria and the kindred festival "in the fields" whereand as they were. But for his own purposes he wanted to do honour toDionysos, and also above all things to enlarge and improve the ritesdone in the god's honour, so, leaving the old sanctuary to its fate, hebuilt a new temple on the south side of the Acropolis where the presenttheatre now stands, and consecrated to the god a new and more splendidprecinct. 

He did not build the present theatre, we must always remember that. Therows of stone seats, the chief priest's splendid marble chair, were noterected till two centuries later. What Peisistratos did was to build asmall stone temple (see Fig. 2), and a great round orchestra of stoneclose beside it. Small fragments of the circular foundation can still beseen. The spectators sat on the hill-side or on wooden seats; there wasas yet no permanent _theātron_ or spectator-place, still less a stonestage; the _dromena_ were done on the dancing-place. But forspectator-place they had the south slope of the Acropolis. What kind ofwooden stage they had unhappily we cannot tell. It may be that only aportion of the orchestra was marked off. 

 * * * * *

Why did Peisistratos, if he cared little for magic and ancestral ghosts, take such trouble to foster and amplify the worship of thismaypole-spirit, Dionysos? Why did he add to the Anthesteria, thefestival of the family ghosts and the peasant festival "in the fields, "a new and splendid festival, a little later in the spring, the _GreatDionysia_, or _Dionysia of the City_? One reason among others wasthis--Peisistratos was a "tyrant. "

Now a Greek "tyrant" was not in our sense "tyrannical. " He took his ownway, it is true, but that way was to help and serve the common people. The tyrant was usually raised to his position by the people, and hestood for democracy, for trade and industry, as against an idlearistocracy. It was but a rudimentary democracy, a democratic tyranny, the power vested in one man, but it stood for the rights of the many asagainst the few. Moreover, Dionysos was always of the people, of the"working classes, " just as the King and Queen of the May are now. Theupper classes worshipped then, as now, not the Spirit of Spring but_their own ancestors_. But--and this was what Peisistratos with greatinsight saw--Dionysos must be transplanted from the fields to the city. The country is always conservative, the natural stronghold of a landedaristocracy, with fixed traditions; the city with its closer contactsand consequent swifter changes, and, above all, with its acquired, notinherited, wealth, tends towards democracy. Peisistratos left theDionysia "in the fields, " but he added the Great Dionysia "in the city. "

Peisistratos was not the only tyrant who concerned himself with the_dromena_ of Dionysos. Herodotos[40] tells the story of another tyrant, a story which is like a window opening suddenly on a dark room. AtSicyon, a town near Corinth, there was in the _agora_ a _heroon_, ahero-tomb, of an Argive hero, Adrastos. 

"The Sicyonians, " says Herodotos, "paid other honours to Adrastos, and, moreover, they celebrated his death and disasters with tragic choruses, not honouring Dionysos but Adrastos. " We think of "tragic" choruses asbelonging exclusively to the theatre and Dionysos; so did Herodotus, butclearly here they belonged to a local hero. His adventures and his deathwere commemorated by choral dances and songs. Now when Cleisthenesbecame tyrant of Sicyon he felt that the cult of the local hero was adanger. What did he do? Very adroitly he brought in from Thebes anotherhero as rival to Adrastos. He then split up the worship of Adrastos;part of his worship, and especially his sacrifices, he gave to the newTheban hero, but the tragic choruses he gave to the common people's god, to Dionysos. Adrastos, the objectionable hero, was left to dwindle anddie. No local hero can live on without his cult. 

The act of Cleisthenes seems to us a very drastic proceeding. Butperhaps it was not really so revolutionary as it seems. The local herowas not so very unlike a local _dæmon_, a Spring or Winter spirit. Wehave seen in the Anthesteria how the paternal ghosts are expected tolook after the seeds in spring. The more important the ghost the moreincumbent is this duty upon him. _Noblesse oblige_. On the riverOlynthiakos[41] in Northern Greece stood the tomb of the hero Olynthos, who gave the river its name. In the spring months of Anthesterion andElaphebolion the river rises and an immense shoal of fish pass from thelake of Bolbe to the river of Olynthiakos, and the inhabitants roundabout can lay in a store of salt fish for all their needs. "And it is awonderful fact that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus. Theysay that formerly the people used to perform the accustomed rites tothe dead in the month Elaphebolion, but now they do them inAnthesterion, _and that on this account the fish come up in those monthsonly_ in which they are wont to do honour to the dead. " The river is thechief source of the food-supply, so to send fish, not seeds and flowers, is the dead hero's business. 

Peisistratos was not so daring as Cleisthenes. We do not hear that hedisturbed or diminished any local cult. He did not attempt to move theAnthesteria with its ghost cult; he only added a new festival, andtrusted to its recent splendour gradually to efface the old. And at thisnew festival he celebrated the deeds of other heroes, not local but ofgreater splendour and of wider fame. If he did not bring Homer toAthens, he at least gave Homer official recognition. Now to bring Homerto Athens was like opening the eyes of the blind. 

 * * * * *

Cicero, in speaking of the influence of Peisistratos on literature, says: "He is said to have arranged in their present order the works ofHomer, which were previously in confusion. " He arranged them not forwhat we should call "publication, " but for public recitation, andanother tradition adds that he or his son fixed the order of theirrecitation at the great festival of "All Athens, " the Panathenaia. Homer, of course, was known before in Athens in a scrappy way; now hewas publicly, officially promulgated. It is probable, though notcertain, that the "Homer" which Peisistratos prescribed for recitationat the Panathenaia was just our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and that the restof the heroic cycle, all the remaining "slices" from the heroic banquet, remained as material for dithyrambs and dramas. The "tyranny" ofPeisistratos and his son lasted from 560 to 501 B. C. ; tradition saidthat the first dramatic contest was held in the new theatre built byPeisistratos in 535 B. C. , when Thespis won the prize. Æschylus was bornin 525 B. C. ; his first play, with a plot from the heroic saga, the_Seven Against Thebes_, was produced in 467 B. C. It all came veryswiftly, the shift from the dithyramb as Spring Song to the heroic dramawas accomplished in something much under a century. Its effect on thewhole of Greek life and religion--nay, on the whole of subsequentliterature and thought--was incalculable. Let us try to see why. 

 * * * * *

Homer was the outcome, the expression, of an "heroic" age. When we usethe word "heroic" we think vaguely of something brave, brilliant, splendid, something exciting and invigorating. A hero is to us a man ofclear, vivid personality, valiant, generous, perhaps hot-tempered, agood friend and a good hater. The word "hero" calls up such figures asAchilles, Patroklos, Hector, figures of passion and adventure. Now suchfigures, with their special virtues, and perhaps their proper vices, arenot confined to Homer. They occur in any and every heroic age. We arebeginning now to see that heroic poetry, heroic characters, do not arisefrom any peculiarity of race or even of geographical surroundings, but, given certain social conditions, they may, and do, appear anywhere andat any time. The world has seen several heroic ages, though it is, perhaps, doubtful if it will ever see another. What, then, are theconditions that produce an heroic age? and why was this influx of heroicpoetry, coming just when it did, of such immense influence on, andimportance to, the development of Greek dramatic art? Why had it powerto change the old, stiff, ritual dithyramb into the new and livingdrama? Why, above all things, did the democratic tyrant Peisistratos soeagerly welcome it to Athens?

In the old ritual dance the individual was nothing, the choral band, thegroup, everything, and in this it did but reflect primitive tribal life. Now in the heroic _saga_ the individual is everything, the mass of thepeople, the tribe, or the group, are but a shadowy background whichthrows up the brilliant, clear-cut personality into a more vivid light. The epic poet is all taken up with what he called _klea andron_, "glorious deeds of men, " of individual heroes; and what these heroesthemselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personaldistinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds. When the armiesmeet it is the leaders who fight in single combat. These glorious heroesare for the most part kings, but not kings in the old sense, nothereditary kings bound to the soil and responsible for its fertility. Rather they are leaders in war and adventure; the homage paid them is apersonal devotion for personal character; the leader must win hisfollowers by bravery, he must keep them by personal generosity. Moreover, heroic wars are oftenest not tribal feuds consequent on tribalraids, more often they arise from personal grievances, personaljealousies; the siege of Troy is undertaken not because the Trojans haveraided the cattle of the Achæans, but because a single Trojan, Paris, has carried off Helen, a single Achæan's wife. 

Another noticeable point is that in heroic poems scarcely any one issafely and quietly at home. The heroes are fighting in far-off lands orvoyaging by sea; hence we hear little of tribal and even of family ties. The real centre is not the hearth, but the leader's tent or ship. Localties that bind to particular spots of earth are cut, local differencesfall into abeyance, a sort of cosmopolitanism, a forecast ofpan-Hellenism, begins to arise. And a curious point--all this isreflected in the gods. We hear scarcely anything of local cults, nothingat all of local magical maypoles and Carryings-out of Winter andBringings-in of Summer, nothing whatever of "Suppers" for the souls, oreven of worship paid to particular local heroes. A man's ghost when hedies does not abide in its grave ready to rise at springtime and helpthe seeds to sprout; it goes to a remote and shadowy region, a common, pan-Hellenic Hades. And so with the gods themselves; they are cut cleanfrom earth and from the local bits of earth out of which they grew--thesacred trees and holy stones and rivers and still holier beasts. Thereis not a holy Bull to be found in all Olympus, only figures of men, bright and vivid and intensely personal, like so many glorified, transfigured Homeric heroes. 

In a word, the heroic spirit, as seen in heroic poetry, is the outcomeof a society cut loose from its roots, of a time of migrations, of theshifting of populations. [42] But more is needed, and just this somethingmore the age that gave birth to Homer had. We know now that before thenorthern people whom we call Greeks, and who called themselves Hellenes, came down into Greece, there had grown up in the basin of the Ægean acivilization splendid, wealthy, rich in art and already ancient, thecivilization that has come to light at Troy, Mycenæ, Tiryns, and most ofall in Crete. The adventurers from North and South came upon a landrich in spoils, where a chieftain with a band of hardy followers mightsack a city and dower himself and his men with sudden wealth. Suchconditions, such a contact of new and old, of settled splendour beset byunbridled adventure, go to the making of a heroic age, its virtues andits vices, its obvious beauty and its hidden ugliness. In settled, social conditions, as has been well remarked, "most of the heroes wouldsooner or later have found themselves in prison. "

A heroic age, happily for society, cannot last long; it has about itwhile it does last a sheen of passing and pathetic splendour, such asthat which lights up the figure of Achilles, but it is bound to fade andpass. A heroic _society_ is almost a contradiction in terms. Heroism isfor individuals. If a society is to go on at all it must strike itsroots deep in some soil, native or alien. The bands of adventurers mustdisband and go home, or settle anew on the land they have conquered. They must beat their swords into plowshares and their spears intopruning-hooks. Their gallant, glorious leader must become a sober, home-keeping, law-giving and law-abiding king; his followers must abatetheir individuality and make it subserve a common social purpose. 

Athens, in her sheltered peninsula, lay somewhat outside the tide ofmigrations and heroic exploits. Her population and that of all Atticaremained comparatively unchanged; her kings are kings of the stationary, law-abiding, state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are notsplendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon. Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lainstagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting hertraditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that thiscity of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from thestorm and stress, sheltered from what might have broken, even shatteredher, spared the actual horrors of a heroic _age_, yet given heroic_poetry_, given the clear wine-cup poured when the ferment was over. Shedrank of it deep and was glad and rose up like a giant refreshed. 

 * * * * *

We have seen that to make up a heroic age there must be two factors, thenew and the old; the young, vigorous, warlike people must seize on, appropriate, in part assimilate, an old and wealthy civilization. Italmost seems as if we might go a step farther, and say that for everygreat movement in art or literature we must have the same conditions, acontact of new and old, of a new spirit seizing or appropriated by anold established order. Anyhow for Athens the historical fact standscertain. The amazing development of the fifth-century drama is justthis, the old vessel of the ritual Dithyramb filled to the full with thenew wine of the heroic _saga_; and it would seem that it was by the handof Peisistratos, the great democratic tyrant, that the new wine wasoutpoured. 

 * * * * *

Such were roughly the outside conditions under which the drama of artgrew out of the _dromena_ of ritual. The racial secret of the individualgenius of Æschylus and the forgotten men who preceded him we cannot hopeto touch. We can only try to see the conditions in which they worked andmark the splendid new material that lay to their hands. Above all thingswe can see that this material, these Homeric _saga_, were just fittedto give the needed impulse to art. The Homeric _saga_ had for anAthenian poet just that remoteness from immediate action which, as wehave seen, is the essence of art as contrasted with ritual. 

Tradition says that the Athenians fined the dramatic poet Phrynichus forchoosing as the plot of one of his tragedies the Taking of Miletus. Probably the fine was inflicted for political party reasons, and hadnothing whatever to do with the question of whether the subject was"artistic" or not. But the story may stand, and indeed was laterunderstood to be, a sort of allegory as to the attitude of art towardslife. To understand and still more to contemplate life you must come outfrom the choral dance of life and stand apart. In the case of one's ownsorrows, be they national or personal, this is all but impossible. Wecan ritualize our sorrows, but not turn them into tragedies. We cannotstand back far enough to see the picture; we want to be doing, or atleast lamenting. In the case of the sorrows of others this standing backis all too easy. We not only bear their pain with easy stoicism, but wepicture it dispassionately at a safe distance; we feel _about_ ratherthan _with_ it. The trouble is that we do not feel enough. Such was theattitude of the Athenian towards the doings and sufferings of Homericheroes. They stood towards them as spectators. These heroes had not theintimate sanctity of home-grown things, but they had sufficienttraditional sanctity to make them acceptable as the material of drama. 

Adequately sacred though they were, they were yet free and flexible. Itis impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible torecast the myth of your local dæmon--that is fixed forever--hisconflict, his _agon_, his death, his _pathos_, his Resurrection and itsheralding, his Epiphany. But the stories of Agamemnon and Achilles, though at home these heroes were local _daimones_, have already beenvariously told in their wanderings from place to place, and you canmould them more or less to your will. Moreover, these figures arealready personal and individual, not representative puppets, merefunctionaries like the May Queen and Winter; they have life-histories oftheir own, never quite to be repeated. It is in this blend of theindividual and the general, the personal and the universal, that oneelement at least of all really great art will be found to lie; and justhere at Athens we get a glimpse of the moment of fusion; we see adefinite historical reason why and how the universal in _dromena_ cameto include the particular in drama. We see, moreover, how in place ofthe old monotonous plots, intimately connected with actual practicalneeds, we get material cut off from immediate reactions, seen as it wereat the right distance, remote yet not too remote. We see, in a word, howa ritual enacted year by year became a work of art that was a"possession for ever. "

 * * * * *

Possibly in the mind of the reader there may have been for some time agrowing discomfort, an inarticulate protest. All this about _dromena_and drama and dithyrambs, bears and bulls, May Queens and Tree-Spirits, even about Homeric heroes, is all very well, curious and perhaps even ina way interesting, but it is not at all what he expected, still lesswhat he wants. When he bought a book with the odd incongruous title, _Ancient Art and Ritual_, he was prepared to put up with some remarks onthe artistic side of ritual, but he did expect to be told somethingabout what the ordinary man calls art, that is, statues and pictures. Greek drama is no doubt a form of ancient art, but acting is not to thereader's mind the chief of arts. Nay, more, he has heard doubts raisedlately--and he shares them--as to whether acting and dancing, aboutwhich so much has been said, are properly speaking arts at all. Nowabout painting and sculpture there is no doubt. Let us come to business. 

To a business so beautiful and pleasant as Greek sculpture we shallgladly come, but a word must first be said to explain the reason of ourlong delay. The main contention of the present book is that ritual andart have, in emotion towards life, a common root, and further, thatprimitive art develops normally, at least in the case of the drama, straight out of ritual. The nature of that primitive ritual from whichthe drama arose is not very familiar to English readers. It has beennecessary to stress its characteristics. Almost everywhere, all over theworld, it is found that primitive ritual consists, not in prayer andpraise and sacrifice, but in mimetic dancing. But it is in Greece, andperhaps Greece only, in the religion of Dionysos, that we can actuallytrace, if dimly, the transition steps that led from dance to drama, fromritual to art. It was, therefore, of the first importance to realize thenature of the dithyramb from which the drama rose, and so far as mightbe to mark the cause and circumstances of the transition. 

Leaving the drama, we come in the next chapter to Sculpture; and here, too, we shall see how closely art was shadowed by that ritual out ofwhich she sprang. 

FOOTNOTES:

[35] See Bibliography at end for Professor Murray's examination. 

[36] Mr. Edward Bullough, _The British Journal of Psychology_ (1912), p. 88. 

[37] II, 15. 

[38] See my _Themis_, p. 289, and _Prolegomena_, p. 35. 

[39] _De Cupid. Div. _ 8. 

[40] V, 66. 

[41] _Athen. _, VIII, ii, 334 f. See my _Prolegomena_, p. 54. 

[42] Thanks to Mr. H. M. Chadwick's _Heroic Age_ (1912). 

CHAPTER VI

GREEK SCULPTURE: THE PANATHENAIC FRIEZE AND THE APOLLO BELVEDERE

In passing from the drama to Sculpture we make a great leap. We passfrom the living thing, the dance or the play acted by real people, thething _done_, whether as ritual or art, whether _dromenon_ or _drama_, to the thing _made_, cast in outside material rigid form, a thing thatcan be looked at again and again, but the making of which can neveractually be re-lived whether by artist or spectator. 

Moreover, we come to a clear threefold distinction and division hithertoneglected. We must at last sharply differentiate the artist, the work ofart, and the spectator. The artist may, and usually indeed does, becomethe spectator of his own work, but the spectator is not the artist. Thework of art is, once executed, forever distinct both from artist andspectator. In the primitive choral dance all three--artist, work of art, spectator--were fused, or rather not yet differentiated. Handbooks onart are apt to begin with the discussion of rude decorative patterns, and after leading up through sculpture and painting, something vague issaid at the end about the primitiveness of the ritual dance. Buthistorically and also genetically or logically the dance in itsinchoateness, its undifferentiatedness, comes first. It has in it alarger element of emotion, and less of presentation. It is thisinchoateness, this undifferentiatedness, that, apart from historicalfact, makes us feel sure that logically the dance is primitive. 

 * * * * *

To illustrate the meaning of Greek sculpture and show its close affinitywith ritual, we shall take two instances, perhaps the best-known ofthose that survive, one of them in relief, the other in the round, thePanathenaic frieze of the Parthenon at Athens and the Apollo Belvedere, and we shall take them in chronological order. As the actual frieze andthe statue cannot be before us, we shall discuss no technical questionsof style or treatment, but simply ask how they came to be, what humanneed do they express. The Parthenon frieze is in the British Museum, theApollo Belvedere is in the Vatican at Rome, but is readily accessiblein casts or photographs. The outlines given in Figs. 5 and 6 can ofcourse only serve to recall subject-matter and design. 

 * * * * *

The Panathenaic frieze once decorated the _cella_ or innermost shrine ofthe Parthenon, the temple of the Maiden Goddess Athena. It twined like aribbon round the brow of the building and thence it was torn by LordElgin and brought home to the British Museum as a national trophy, forthe 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 greatimage in gold and ivory; outside the shrine was sculptured her worshipby the whole of her people. For the frieze is nothing but a great ritualprocession translated into stone, the Panathenaic procession, orprocession of _all_ the Athenians, of all Athens, in honour of thegoddess who was but the city incarnate, Athena. 

 "A wonder enthroned on the hills and the sea, A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory, That none from the pride of her head may rend; Violet and olive leaf, purple and hoary, Song-wreath and story the fairest of fame, Flowers that the winter can blast not nor bend, A light upon earth as the sun's own flame, A name as his name-- Athens, a praise without end. "

SWINBURNE: _Erechtheus_, 141. 

Sculptural Art, at least in this instance, comes out of ritual, hasritual as its subject, _is_ embodied ritual. The reader perhaps at thispoint may suspect that he is being juggled with, that, out of thethousands of Greek reliefs that remain to us, just this one instance hasbeen selected to bolster up the writer's art and ritual theory. He hasonly to walk through any museum to be convinced at once that the authoris playing quite fair. Practically the whole of the reliefs that remainto us from the archaic period, and a very large proportion of those atlater date, when they do not represent heroic mythology, are ritualreliefs, "votive" reliefs as we call them; that is, prayers or praisestranslated into stone. 

[Illustration: Fig. 3. Panathenaic Procession. ]

Of the choral dance we have heard much, of the procession but little, yet its ritual importance was great. In religion to-day the dance isdead save for the dance of the choristers before the altar at Seville. But the procession lives on, has even taken to itself new life. It is ameans of bringing masses of people together, of ordering them andco-ordinating them. It is a means for the magical spread of supposedgood influence, of "grace. " Witness the "Beating of the Bounds" and thefrequent processions of the Blessed Sacrament in Roman Catholic lands. The Queen of the May and the Jack-in-the-Green still go from house tohouse. Now-a-days it is to collect pence; once it was to diffuse "grace"and increase. We remember the procession of the holy Bull at Magnesiaand the holy Bear at Saghalien (pp. 92-100). 

[Illustration: Fig. 4. Panathenaic Procession. ]

What, then, was the object of the Panathenaic procession? It was first, as its name indicates, a procession that brought all Athens together. Its object was social and political, to express the unity of Athens. Ritual in primitive times is always social, collective. 

The arrangement of the procession is shown in Figs. 3 and 4 (pp. 174, 175). In Fig. 3 we see the procession as it were in real life, just asit is about to enter the temple and the presence of the Twelve Gods. These gods are shaded black because in reality invisible. Fig. 4 is adiagram showing the position of the various parts of the procession inthe sculptural frieze. At the west end of the temple the processionbegins to form: the youths of Athens are mounting their horses. Itdivides, 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 cavalrygetting denser and denser we come to the chariots, next the sacrificialanimals, sheep and restive cows, then the instruments of sacrifice, flutes and lyres and baskets and trays for offerings; men who carryblossoming olive-boughs; maidens with water-vessels and drinking-cups. The whole tumult of the gathering is marshalled and at last met and, asit were, held in check, by a band of magistrates who face the processionjust as it enters the presence of the twelve seated gods, at the eastend. The whole body politic of the gods has come down to feast with thewhole body politic of Athens and her allies, of whom these gods are butthe projection and reflection. The gods are there together because manis collectively assembled. 

The great procession culminates in a sacrifice and a communal feast, asacramental feast like that on the flesh of the holy Bull at Magnesia. The Panathenaia was a high festival including rites and ceremonies ofdiverse dates, an armed dance of immemorial antiquity that may havedated from the days when Athens was subject to Crete, and a recitationordered by Peisistratos of the poems of Homer. 

 * * * * *

Some theorists have seen in art only an extension of the "playinstinct, " just a liberation of superfluous vitality and energies, as itwere a rehearsing for life. This is not our view, but into all art, inso far as it is a cutting off of motor reactions, there certainly entersan element of recreation. It is interesting to note that to the Greekmind religion was specially connected with the notion rather of afestival than a fast. Thucydides[43] 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 ofrecreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout theyear. " To the anonymous writer known as the "Old Oligarch" the main gistof religion appears to be a decorous social enjoyment. In easyaristocratic fashion he rejoices that religious ceremonials exist toprovide for the less well-to-do citizens suitable amusements that theywould otherwise lack. "As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and festivalsand precincts, the People, knowing that it is impossible for each manindividually to sacrifice and feast and have sacrifices and an ample andbeautiful city, has discovered by what means he may enjoy theseprivileges. "

 * * * * *

In the procession of the Panathenaia all Athens was gathered together, but--and this is important--for a special purpose, more primitive thanany great political or social union. Happily this purpose is clear; itis depicted in the central slab of the east end of the frieze (Fig. 5). A priest is there represented receiving from the hands of a boy a great_peplos_ or robe. It is the sacred robe of Athena woven for her andembroidered by young Athenian maidens and offered to her every fiveyears. The great gold and ivory statue in the Parthenon itself had noneed of a robe; she would scarcely have known what to do with one; herraiment was already of wrought gold, she carried helmet and spear andshield. But there was an ancient image of Athena, an old Madonna of thepeople, fashioned before Athena became a warrior maiden. This image wasrudely hewn in wood, it was dressed and decked doll-fashion like a MayQueen, and to her the great _peplos_ was dedicated. The _peplos_ washoisted as a sail on the Panathenaic ship, and this ship Athena hadborrowed from Dionysos himself, who went every spring in procession in aship-car on wheels to open the season for sailing. To a seafaring peoplelike the Athenians the opening of the sailing season was all-important, and naturally began not at midsummer but in spring. 

[Illustration: Fig. 5. ]

The sacred _peplos_, or robe, takes us back to the old days when thespirit of the year and the "luck" of the people was bound up with a rudeimage. The life of the year died out each year and had to be renewed. Tomake a new image was expensive and inconvenient, so, with primitiveeconomy it was decided that the life and luck of the image should berenewed by re-dressing it, by offering to it each year a new robe. Weremember (p. 60) how in Thuringia the new puppet wore the shirt of theold and thereby new life was passed from one to the other. But behindthe old image we can get to a stage still earlier, when there was at thePanathenaia no image at all, only a yearly maypole; a bough hung withribbons and cakes and fruits and the like. A bough was cut from thesacred olive tree of Athens, called the _Moria_ or Fate Tree. It wasbound about with fillets and hung with fruit and nuts and, in thefestival of the Panathenaia, they carried it up to the Acropolis to giveto Athena _Polias_, "Her-of-the-City, " and as they went they sang theold Eiresione song (p. 114). _Polias_ is but the city, the _Polis_incarnate. 

This _Moria_, or Fate Tree, was the very life of Athens; the life of theolive which fed her and lighted her was the very life of the city. Whenthe Persian host sacked the Acropolis they burnt the holy olive, and itseemed that all was over. But next day it put forth a new shoot and thepeople knew that the city's life still lived. Sophocles[44] sang of theglory of the wondrous life tree of Athens:

 "The untended, the self-planted, self-defended from the foe, Sea-gray, children-nurturing olive tree that here delights to grow, None may take nor touch nor harm it, headstrong youth nor age grown bold. For the round of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of old; He beholds it, and, Athene, thy own sea-gray eyes behold. "

The holy tree carried in procession is, like the image of Athena, madeof olive-wood, just the incarnate life of Athens ever renewed. 

The Panathenaia was not, like the Dithyramb, a spring festival. It tookplace in July at the height of the summer heat, when need for rain wasthe greatest. But the month Hecatombaion, in which it was celebrated, was the first month of the Athenian year and the day of the festival wasthe birthday of the goddess. When the goddess became a war-goddess, itwas fabled that she was born in Olympus, and that she sprang full grownfrom her father's head in glittering armour. But she was really born onearth, and the day of her birth was the birthday of every earthborngoddess, the day of the beginning of the new year, with its returninglife. When men observe only the actual growth of new green life from theground, this birthday will be in spring; when they begin to know thatthe seasons depend on the sun, or when the heat of the sun causes greatneed of rain, it will be at midsummer, at the solstice, or in northernregions where men fear to lose the sun in midwinter, as with us. Thefrieze of the Parthenon is, then, but a primitive festival translatedinto stone, a rite frozen to a monument. 

 * * * * *

Passing over a long space of time we come to our next illustration, theApollo Belvedere (Fig. 6). 

It might seem that here at last we have nothing primitive; here we haveart pure and simple, ideal art utterly cut loose from ritual, "art forart's sake. " Yet in this Apollo Belvedere, this product of late andaccomplished, even decadent art, we shall see most clearly the intimaterelation of art and ritual; we shall, as it were, walk actually acrossthat transition bridge of ritual which leads from actual life to art. 

[Illustration: Fig. 6. The Apollo Belvedere. ]

The date of this famous Apollo cannot be fixed, but it is clearly a copyof a type belonging to the fourth century B. C. The poise of the figureis singular and, till its intent is grasped, unsatisfactory. Apollo iscaught in swift motion but seems, as he stands delicately poised, to beabout to fly rather than to run. He stands tiptoe and in a moment willhave left the earth. The Greek sculptor's genius was all focussed, as weshall presently see, on the human figure and on the mastery of its manypossibilities of movement and action. Greek statues can roughly be datedby the way they stand. At first, in the archaic period, they standfirmly planted with equal weight on either foot, the feet closetogether. Then one foot is advanced, but the weight still equallydivided, an almost impossible position. Next, the weight is thrown onthe right foot; and the left knee is bent. This is of all positions theloveliest for the human body. We allow it to women, forbid it to mensave to "æsthetes. " If the back numbers of _Punch_ be examined for thefigure of "Postlethwaite" it will be seen that he always stands in thischaracteristic relaxed pose. 

When the sculptor has mastered the possible he bethinks him of theimpossible. He will render the human body flying. It may have been theaccident of a mythological subject that first suggested the motive. Leochares, a famous artist of the fourth century B. C. , made a group ofZeus in the form of an eagle carrying off Ganymede. A replica of thegroup is preserved in the Vatican, and should stand for comparison nearthe Apollo. We have the same tiptoe poise, the figure just about toleave the earth. Again, it is not a dance, but a flight. This poise issuggestive to us because it marks an art cut loose, as far as may be, from earth and its realities, even its rituals. 

What is it that Apollo is doing? The question and suggested answers haveoccupied many treatises. There is only one answer: We do not know. Itwas at first thought that the Apollo had just drawn his bow and shot anarrow. This suggestion was made to account for the pose; but that, as wehave seen, is sufficiently explained by the flight-motive. Anotherpossible solution is that Apollo brandishes in his uplifted hand theægis, or goatskin shield, of Zeus. Another suggestion is that he holdsas often a lustral, or laurel bough, that he is figured as Daphnephoros, "Laurel-Bearer. "

We do not know if the Belvedere Apollo carried a laurel, but we _do_know that it was of the very essence of the god to be a Laurel-Bearer. That, as we shall see in a moment, he, like Dionysos, arose in part outof a rite, a rite of Laurel-Bearing--a _Daphnephoria_. We have not gotclear of ritual yet. When Pausanias, [45] the ancient traveller, whosenotebook is our chief source about these early festivals, came to Thebeshe saw a hill sacred to Apollo, and after describing the temple on thehill he says:

 "The following custom is still, I know, observed at Thebes. A boy of distinguished family and himself well-looking and strong is made the priest of Apollo, _for the space of a year_. The title given him is Laurel-Bearer (Daphnephoros), for these boys wear wreaths made of laurel. "

We know for certain now what these yearly priests are: they are the Kingsof the Year, the Spirits of the Year, May-Kings, Jacks-o'-the-Green. The name given to the boy is enough to show he carried a laurel branch, though Pausanias only mentions a wreath. Another ancient writer gives usmore details. [46] He says in describing the festival of theLaurel-Bearing:

 "They wreathe a pole of olive wood with laurel and various flowers. On the top is fitted a bronze globe from which they suspend smaller ones. Midway round the pole they place a lesser globe, binding it with purple fillets, but the end of the pole is decked with saffron. By the topmost globe they mean the sun, to which they 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 pole. The Laurel-Bearer himself, who follows next, holds on to the laurel; he has his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden wreath, and he is dressed out in a splendid robe to his feet and he wears light shoes. There follows him a band of maidens holding out boughs before them, to enforce the supplication of the hymns. "

This is the most elaborate maypole ceremony that we know of in ancienttimes. The globes representing sun and moon show us that we have come toa time when men know that the fruits of the earth in due season dependedon the heavenly bodies. The year with its 365 days is a Sun-Year. Oncethis Sun-Year established and we find that the times of the solstices, midwinter and midsummer became as, or even more, important than thespring itself. The date of the _Daphnephoria_ is not known. 

At Delphi itself, the centre of Apollo-worship, there was a festivalcalled the _Stepteria_, or festival "of those who make the wreathes, " inwhich "mystery" a Christian Bishop, St. Cyprian, tells us he wasinitiated. In far-off Tempe--that wonderful valley that is still thegreenest spot in stony, barren Greece, and where the laurel trees stillcluster--there was an altar, and near it a laurel tree. The story wentthat Apollo had made himself a crown from this very laurel, and _takingin his hand a branch of this same laurel_, i. E. As Laurel-Bearer, hadcome to Delphi and taken over the oracle. 

"And to this day the people of Delphi send high-born boys in processionthere. And they, when they have reached Tempe and made a splendidsacrifice return back, after wearing themselves wreaths from the verylaurel from which the god made himself a wreath. "

We are inclined to think of the Greeks as a people apt to indulge in thesingular practice of wearing wreaths in public, a practice among usconfined to children on their birthdays and a few eccentric people ontheir wedding days. We forget the intensely practical purport of thecustom. The ancient Greeks wore wreaths and carried boughs, not becausethey were artistic or poetical, but because they were ritualists, thatthey might bring back the spring and carry in the summer. The Greekbridegroom to-day, as well as the Greek bride, wears a wreath, that hismarriage may be the beginning of new life, that his "wife may be as thefruitful vine, and his children as the olive branches round about histable. " And our children to-day, though they do not know it, wearwreaths on their birthdays because with each new year their life isre-born. 

 * * * * *

Apollo then, was, like Dionysos, King of the May and--saving hispresence--Jack-in-the-Green. The god manifestly arose out of the rite. Fora moment let us see _how_ he arose. It will be remembered that in aprevious chapter (p. 70) we spoke of "personification. " We think of thegod Apollo as an abstraction, an unreal thing, perhaps as a "false god. "The god Apollo does not, and never did, exist. He is an idea--a thing madeby the imagination. But primitive man does not deal with abstractions, does not worship them. What happens is, as we saw (p. 71), something likethis: Year by year a boy is chosen to carry the laurel, to bring in theMay, and later year by year a puppet is made. It is a different boy eachyear, carrying a different laurel branch. And yet in a sense it is thesame boy; he is always the Laurel-Bearer--"Daphnephoros, " always the"Luck" of the village or city. This Laurel-Bearer, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, is the stuff of which the god is made. The god arisesfrom the rite, he is gradually detached from the rite, and as soon as hegets a life and being of his own, apart from the rite, he is a first stagein art, a work of art existing in the mind, gradually detached from eventhe faded action of ritual, and later to be the model of the actual workof art, the copy in stone. 

The stages, it would seem, are: actual life with its motor reactions, the ritual copy of life with its faded reactions, the image of the godprojected by the rite, and, last, the copy of that image, the work ofart. 

 * * * * *

We see now why in the history of all ages and every place art is what iscalled the "handmaid of religion. " She is not really the "handmaid" atall. She springs straight out of the rite, and her first outward leap isthe 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 gods whospring from those rites. Track any god right home, and you will find himlurking in a ritual sheath, from which he slowly emerges, first as a_dæmon_, or spirit, of the year, then as a full-blown divinity. 

 * * * * *

In Chapter II we saw how the _dromenon_ gave birth to the _drama_, how, bit by bit, out of the chorus of dancers some dancers withdrew andbecame spectators sitting apart, and on the other hand others of thedancers drew apart on to the stage and presented to the spectators aspectacle, a thing to be looked _at_, not joined _in_. And we saw how inthis spectacular mood, this being cut loose from immediate action, laythe very essence of the artist and the art-lover. Now in the drama ofThespis there was at first, we are told, but one actor; later Æschylusadded a second. It is clear who this actor, this _protagonist_ or "firstcontender" was, the one actor with the double part, who was Death to becarried out and Summer to be carried in. He was the Bough-Bearer, theonly possible actor in the one-part play of the renewal of life and thereturn of the year. 

 * * * * *

The May-King, the leader of the choral dance gave birth not only to thefirst actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the god, behe Dionysos or be he Apollo; and this figure of the god thus imaginedout of the year-spirit was perhaps more fertile for art than even theprotagonist of the drama. It may seem strange to us that a god shouldrise up out of a dance or a procession, because dances and processionsare not an integral part of our national life, and do not call up anyvery strong and instant emotion. The old instinct lingers, it is true, and emerges at critical moments; when a king dies we form a greatprocession to carry him to the grave, but we do not dance. We have courtballs, and these with their stately ordered ceremonials are perhaps thelast survival of the genuinely civic dance, but a court ball is notgiven at a king's funeral nor in honour of a god. 

But to the Greek the god and the dance were never quite sundered. Italmost seems as if in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers therelingered some dim half-conscious remembrance that some of these gods atleast actually came out of the ritual dance. Thus, Plato, [48] intreating of the importance of rhythm in education says: "The gods, pitying the toilsome race of men, have appointed the sequence ofreligious festivals to give them times of rest, and have given them theMuses and Apollo, the Muse-Leader, as fellow-revellers. "

"The young of all animals, " he goes on to say, "cannot keep quiet, either in body or voice. They must leap and skip and overflow withgamesomeness and sheer joy, and they must utter all sorts of cries. Butwhereas animals have no perception of order or disorder in theirmotions, the gods who have been appointed to men as our fellow-dancershave given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony. And so theymove us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and indances, and these we call _choruses_. " Nor was it only Apollo andDionysos who led the dance. Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance. "Our virgin lady, " says Plato, "delighting in the sports of the dance, thought it not meet to dance with empty hands; she must be clothed infull armour, and in this attire go through the dance. And youths andmaidens should in every respect imitate her example, honouring thegoddess, both with a view to the actual necessities of war and to thefestivals. "

Plato is unconsciously inverting the order of things, naturalhappenings. Take the armed dance. There is, first, the "actual necessityof war. " Men go to war armed, to face actual dangers, and at their headis a leader in full armour. That is real life. There is then the festalre-enactment of war, when the fight is not actually fought, but there isan 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 ritualenacted year by year, emerges an imagined permanent leader; a dæmon, orgod--a Dionysos, an Apollo, an Athena. Finally the account of whatactually happens is thrown into the past, into a remote distance, and wehave an "ætiological" myth--a story told to give a cause or reason. Thewhole natural process is inverted. 

And last, as already seen, the god, the first work of art, the thingunseen, imagined out of the ritual of the dance, is cast back into thevisible world and fixed in space. Can we wonder that a classicalwriter[49] should say "the statues of the craftsmen of old times are therelics of ancient dancing. " That is just what they are, rites caught andfixed 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 thedance from which they sprang. But imitation is not all, or even first. "The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truthwill encumber and not convince. The dance must control the pantomime. "Art, that is, gradually dominates mere ritual. 

 * * * * *

We come to another point. The Greek gods as we know them in classicalsculpture are always imaged in human shape. This was not of coursealways the case with other nations. We have seen how among savages thetotem, that is, the emblem of tribal unity, was usually an animal or aplant. We have seen how the emotions of the Siberian tribe in Saghalienfocussed on a bear. The savage totem, the Saghalien Bear, is on the wayto be, but is not quite, a god; he is not personal enough. TheEgyptians, and in part the Assyrians, halted half-way and made theirgods into monstrous shapes, half-animal, half-man, which have their ownmystical grandeur. But since we are men ourselves, feeling humanemotion, if our gods are in great part projected emotions, the naturalform for them to take is human shape. 

"Art imitates Nature, " says Aristotle, in a phrase that has been muchmisunderstood. It has been taken to mean that art is a copy orreproduction of natural objects. But by "Nature" Aristotle never meansthe outside world of created things, he means rather creative force, what produces, not what has been produced. We might almost translate theGreek phrase, "Art, like Nature, creates things, " "Art acts like Naturein producing things. " These things are, first and foremost, humanthings, human action. The drama, with which Aristotle is so muchconcerned, invents human action like real, _natural_ action. Dancing"imitates character, emotion, action. " Art is to Aristotle almost whollybound by the limitations of _human_ nature. 

This is, of course, characteristically a Greek limitation. "Man is themeasure of all things, " said the old Greek sophist, but modern sciencehas taught us another lesson. Man may be in the foreground, but thedrama of man's life is acted out for us against a tremendous backgroundof natural happenings: a background that preceded man and will outlasthim; and this background profoundly affects our imagination, and henceour art. We moderns are in love with the background. Our art is alandscape art. The ancient landscape painter could not, or would not, trust the background to tell its own tale: if he painted a mountain heset up a mountain-god to make it real; if he outlined a coast he sethuman coast-nymphs on its shore to make clear the meaning. 

Contrast with this our modern landscape, from which bit by bit the nymphhas been wholly banished. It is the art of a stage, without actors, ascene which is all background, all suggestion. It is an art given us bysheer recoil from science, which has dwarfed actual human life almost toimaginative extinction. 

 "Landscape, then, offered to the modern imagination a scene empty of definite actors, superhuman or human, that yielded to reverie without challenge all 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 of light, the pageantry of clouds above a world turned quaker, the monstrous weeds of trees outside the town, the sea that is obstinately epic still. "[51]

It was to this world of backgrounds that men fled, hunted by the senseof their own insignificance. 

"Minds the most strictly bound in their acts by civil life, in theirfancy by the shrivelled look of destiny under scientific speculation, felt on solitary hill or shore those tides of the blood stir again thatare ruled by the sun and the moon and travelled as if to tryst where anapparition might take form. Poets ordained themselves to this vigil, haunters of a desert church, prompters of an elemental theatre, listeners in solitary places for intimations from a spirit in hiding;and painters followed the impulse of Wordsworth. "

We can only see the strength and weakness of Greek sculpture, feel theemotion of which it was the utterance, if we realize clearly this modernspirit of the background. All great modern, and perhaps even ancient, poets are touched by it. Drama itself, as Nietzsche showed, "hankersafter dissolution into mystery. Shakespeare would occasionally knock theback out of the stage with a window opening on the 'cloud-capp'dtowers. '" But Maeterlinck is the best example, because his genius isless. He is the embodiment, almost the caricature, of a tendency. 

 "Maeterlinck sets us figures in the foreground only to launch us into that limbus. The supers jabbering on the scene are there, children of presentiment and fear, 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 approach of that background power. Omen after omen announces him, the talk starts and drops at his approach, a door shuts and the thrill of his passage is the play. "[52]

It is, perhaps, the temperaments that are most allured and terrified bythis art of the bogey and the background that most feel the need of andbest appreciate the calm and level, rational dignity of Greek naturalismand especially the naturalism of Greek sculpture. 

For it is naturalism, not realism, not imitation. By all manner ofrenunciations Greek sculpture is what it is. The material, itselfmarble, is utterly unlike life, it is perfectly cold and still, it hasneither the texture nor the colouring of life. The story of Pygmalionwho fell in love with the statue he had himself sculptured is as falseas it is tasteless. Greek sculpture is the last form of art to incitephysical reaction. It is remote almost to the point of chillabstraction. The statue in the round renounces not only human lifeitself, but all the natural background and setting of life. The statuesof the Greek gods are Olympian in spirit as well as subject. They arelike the gods of Epicurus, cut loose alike from the affairs of men, andeven the ordered ways of Nature. So Lucretius[53] pictures them:

 "The divinity of the gods is revealed and their tranquil abodes, which neither winds do shake nor clouds drench with rains, nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely around. Nature, too, supplies all their wants, and nothing ever impairs their peace of mind. "

Greek art moves on through a long course of technical accomplishment, ofever-increasing mastery over materials and methods. But this course weneed not follow. For our argument the last word is said in the figuresof these Olympians translated into stone. Born of pressing human needsand desires, images projected by active and even anxious ritual, theypass into the upper air and dwell aloof, spectator-like and all butspectral. 

FOOTNOTES:

[43] II, 38. 

[44] _Oed. Col. _ 694, trans. D. S. MacColl. 

[45] IX, 10, 4. 

[46] See my _Themis_, p. 438. 

[47] It is now held by some and good authorities that the prehistoricpaintings of cave-dwelling man had also a ritual origin; that is, thatthe representations of animals were intended to act magically, toincrease the "supply of the animal or help the hunter to catch him. "But, as this question is still pending, I prefer, tempting though theyare, not to use prehistoric paintings as material for my argument. 

[48] _Laws_, 653. 

[49] _Athen. _ XIV, 26, p. 629. 

[50] D. S. MacColl, "A Year of Post-Impressionism, " _Nineteenth Century_, p. 29. (1912. )

[51] D. S. MacColl, _Nineteenth Century Art_, p. 20. (1902. )

[52] D. S. MacColl, _op. Cit. _, p. 18. 

[53] II, 18. 

CHAPTER VII

RITUAL, ART AND LIFE

In the preceding chapters we have seen ritual emerge from the practicaldoings of life. We have noted that in ritual we have the beginning of adetachment from practical ends; we have watched the merely emotionaldance develop from an undifferentiated chorus into a spectacle performedby actors and watched by spectators, a spectacle cut off, not only fromreal life, but also from ritual issues; a spectacle, in a word, that hasbecome an end in itself. We have further seen that the choral dance isan undifferentiated whole which later divides out into three clearlyarticulate parts, the artist, the work of art, the spectator or artlover. We are now in a position to ask what is the good of all thisantiquarian enquiry? Why is it, apart from the mere delight ofscientific enquiry, important to have seen that art arose from ritual?

The answer is simple--

The object of this book, as stated in the preface, is to try to throwsome light on the function of art, that is on what it has done, andstill does to-day, for life. Now in the case of a complex growth likeart, it is rarely if ever possible to understand its function--what itdoes, how it works--unless we know something of how that growth began, or, if its origin is hid, at least of the simpler forms of activity thatpreceded it. For art, this earlier stage, this simpler form, which isindeed itself as it were an embryo and rudimentary art, we found tobe--ritual. 

Ritual, then, has not been studied for its own sake, still less for itsconnection with any particular dogma, though, as a subject of singulargravity and beauty, ritual is well worth a lifetime's study. It has beenstudied because ritual is, we believe, a frequent and perhaps universaltransition stage between actual life and that peculiar contemplation ofor emotion towards life which we call art. All our long examination ofbeast-dances, May-day festivals and even of Greek drama has had justthis for its object--to make clear that art--save perhaps in a fewspecially gifted natures--did not arise straight out of life, but outof that collective emphasis of the needs and desires of life which wehave agreed to call ritual. 

 * * * * *

Our formal argument is now over and ritual may drop out of thediscussion. But we would guard against a possible misunderstanding. Wewould not be taken to imply that ritual is obsolete and must drop out oflife, giving place to the art it has engendered. It may well be that, for certain temperaments, ritual is a perennial need. Natures speciallygifted can live lives that are emotionally vivid, even in the rare highair of art or science; but many, perhaps most of us, breathe more freelyin the _medium_, literally the _midway_ space, of some collectiveritual. Moreover, for those of us who are not artists or originalthinkers the life of the imagination, and even of the emotions, has beenperhaps too long lived at second hand, received from the artist readymade and felt. To-day, owing largely to the progress of science, and ahost of other causes social and economic, life grows daily fuller andfreer, and every manifestation of life is regarded with a new reverence. With this fresh outpouring of the spirit, this fuller consciousness oflife, there comes a need for _first-hand_ emotion and expression, andthat expression is found for all classes in a revival of the ritualdance. Some of the strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances of to-dayare of the soil and some exotic, but, based as they mostly are on veryprimitive ritual, they stand as singular evidence of this real recurrentneed. Art in these latter days goes back as it were on her own steps, recrossing the ritual bridge back to life. 

 * * * * *

It remains to ask what, in the light of this ritual origin, is thefunction of art? How do we relate it to other forms of life, to science, to religion, to morality, to philosophy? These are big-soundingquestions, and towards their solution only hints here and there can beoffered, stray thoughts that have grown up out of this study of ritualorigins and which, because they have helped the writer, are offered, with no thought of dogmatism, to the reader. 

 * * * * *

We English are not supposed to be an artistic people, yet art, in someform or another, bulks large in the national life. We have theatres, aNational Gallery, we have art-schools, our tradesmen provide for us"art-furniture, " we even hear, absurdly enough, of "art-colours. "Moreover, all this is not a matter of mere antiquarian interest, we donot simply go and admire the beauty of the past in museums; a movementtowards or about art is all alive and astir among us. We have newdevelopments of the theatre, problem plays, Reinhardt productions, Gordon Craig scenery, Russian ballets. We have new schools of paintingtreading on each other's heels with breathless rapidity: Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Futurists. Art--or at least the desire for, theinterest in, art--is assuredly not dead. 

Moreover, and this is very important, we all feel about art a certainobligation, such as some of us feel about religion. There is an "ought"about it. Perhaps we do not really care much about pictures and poetryand music, but we feel we "ought to. " In the case of music it hashappily been at last recognized that if you have not an "ear" you cannotcare for it, but two generations ago, owing to the unfortunate cheapnessand popularity of keyed instruments, it was widely held that one half ofhumanity, the feminine half, "ought" to play the piano. This "ought"is, of course, like most social "oughts, " a very complex product, butits existence is well worth noting. 

It is worth noting because it indicates a vague feeling that art has areal value, that art is not a mere luxury, nor even a rarefied form ofpleasure. No one feels they _ought_ to take pleasure in beautiful scentsor in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don't. The firstpoint, then, that must be made clear is that art is of real value tolife in a perfectly clear biological sense; it invigorates, enhances, promotes actual, spiritual, and through it physical life. 

This from our historical account we should at the outset expect, becausewe have seen art, by way of ritual, arose out of life. And yet thestatement is a sort of paradox, for we have seen also that art differsfrom ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or thecreator, the "motor reactions, " _i. E. _ practical life, the life ofdoing, is for the time checked. This is of the essence of the artist'svision, that he sees things detached and therefore more vividly, morecompletely, and in a different light. This is of the essence of theartist's emotion, that it is purified from personal desire. 

But, though the artist's vision and emotion alike are modified, purified, they are not devitalized. Far from that, by detachment fromaction they are focussed and intensified. Life is enhanced, only it is adifferent kind of life, it is the life of the image-world, of the_imag_ination; it is the spiritual and human life, as differentiatedfrom the life we share with animals. It is a life we all, as humanbeings, possess in some, but very varying, degrees; and the natural manwill always view the spiritual man askance, because he is not"practical. " But the life of imagination, cut off from practicalreaction 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 another. Themain function of art is probably to intensify and purify emotion, but itis substantially certain that, if we did not feel, we could not thinkand should not act. Still it remains true that, in artisticcontemplation and in the realms of the artist's imagination not only arepractical motor-reactions cut off, but intelligence is suffused in, andto some extent subordinated to, emotion. 

 * * * * *

One function, then, of art is to feed and nurture the imagination andthe spirit, and thereby enhance and invigorate the whole of human life. This is far removed from the view that the end of art is to givepleasure. Art does usually cause pleasure, singular and intense, and tothat which causes such pleasure we give the name of Beauty. But toproduce and enjoy Beauty is not the function of art. Beauty--or rather, the sensation of Beauty--is what the Greeks would call an _epigignomenonti telos_, words hard to translate, something between a by-product and asupervening perfection, a thing like--as Aristotle[54] for oncebeautifully says of pleasure--"the bloom of youth to a healthy youngbody. "

That this is so we see most clearly in the simple fact that, when theartist begins to aim direct at Beauty, he usually misses it. We allknow, perhaps by sad experience, that the man who seeks out pleasure forherself fails to find her. Let him do his work well for that work'ssake, exercise his faculties, "energize" as Aristotle would say, and hewill 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 hidesher head. A man goes out hunting, thinks of nothing but following thehounds and taking his fences, being in at the death: his day isfull--alas! of pleasure, though he has scarcely known it. Let him forgetthe fox and the fences, think of pleasure, desire her, and he will be inat pleasure's death. 

So it is with the artist. Let him feel strongly, and see raptly--thatis, in complete detachment. Let him cast this, his rapt vision and hisintense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that formwill have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we callbeauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensationtoo rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a "sense ofbeauty. " But let the artist aim direct at Beauty, and she is gone, gonebefore we hear the flutter of her wings. 

 * * * * *

The sign manual, the banner, as it were, of artistic creation is for thecreative artist not pleasure, but something better called joy. Pleasure, it has been well said, is no more than an instrument contrivedby Nature to obtain from the individual the preservation and thepropagation of life. True joy is not the lure of life, but theconsciousness of the triumph of creation. Wherever joy is, creation hasbeen. [55] It may be the joy of a mother in the physical creation of achild; it may be the joy of the merchant adventurer in pushing out newenterprise, or of the engineer in building a bridge, or of the artist ina masterpiece accomplished; but it is always of the thing created. Again, contrast joy with glory. Glory comes with success and isexceedingly _pleasant_; it is not joyous. Some men say an artist's crownis glory; his deepest satisfaction is in the applause of his fellows. There is no greater mistake; we care for praise just in proportion as weare not sure we have succeeded. To the real creative artist even praiseand glory are swallowed up in the supreme joy of creation. Only theartist himself feels the real divine fire, but it flames over into thework of art, and even the spectator warms his hands at the glow. 

We can now, I think, understand the difference between the artist andtrue lover of art on the one hand, and the mere æsthete on the other. The æsthete does not produce, or, if he produces, his work is thin andscanty. In this he differs from the artist; he does not feel so stronglyand see so clearly that he is forced to utterance. He has no joy, onlypleasure. He cannot even feel the reflection of this creative joy. Infact, he does not so much feel as want to feel. He seeks for pleasure, for sensual pleasure as his name says, not for the grosser kinds, butfor pleasure of that rarefied kind that we call a sense of beauty. Theæsthete, like the flirt, is cold. It is not even that his senses areeasily stirred, but he seeks the sensation of stirring, and most oftenfeigns it, not finds it. The æsthete is no more released from his owndesires than the practical man, and he is without the practical man'shealthy outlet in action. He sees life, not indeed in relation toaction, but to his own personal sensation. By this alone he is debarredfor ever from being an artist. As M. André Beaunier has well observed, by the irony of things, when we see life in relation to ourselves wecannot really represent it at all. The profligate thinks he knows women. It is his irony, his curse that, because he sees them always in relationto his own desires, his own pleasure, he never really knows them at all. 

There is another important point. We have seen that art promotes a partof life, the spiritual, image-making side. But this side, wonderfulthough it is, is never the whole of actual life. There is always thepractical side. The artist is always also a man. Now the æsthete triesto make his whole attitude artistic--that is, contemplative. He isalways looking and prying and savouring, _savourant_, as he would say, when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to_savourer_. All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towardslife, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional realityin the spectator. The æsthete leads at best a parasite, artistic life, dogged always by death and corruption. 

 * * * * *

This brings us straight on to another question: What about Art andMorality? Is Art immoral, or non-moral, or highly moral? Here againpublic opinion is worth examining. Artists, we are told, are badhusbands, and they do not pay their debts. Or if they become goodhusbands and take to paying their debts, they take also to wallowing indomesticity and produce bad art or none at all; they get tangled in themachinery of practical reactions. Art, again, is apt to deal with riskysubjects. Where should we be if there were not a Censor of Plays? Manyof these instructive attitudes about artists as immoral or non-moral, explain themselves instantly if we remember that the artist is _ipsofacto_ detached from practical life. In so far as he is an artist, foreach and every creative moment he is inevitably a bad husband, if beinga good husband means constant attention to your wife and her interests. Spiritual creation _à deux_ is a happening so rare as to be negligible. 

The remoteness of the artist, his essential inherent detachment frommotor-reaction, explains the perplexities of the normal censor. He, being a "practical man, " regards emotion and vision, feeling and ideas, as leading to action. He does not see that art arises out of ritual andthat even ritual is one remove from practical life. In the censor'sworld the spectacle of the nude leads straight to desire, so the dancermust be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court, therefore it must be censored. The normal censor apparently knowsnothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house madewithout hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens. The censor is not for the moment a _persona grata_, but let us give himhis due. He acts according to his lights and these often quiteadequately represent the average darkness. A normal audience containsmany "practical" men whose standard is the same as that of the normalcensor. Art--that is vision detached from practical reactions--is tothem an unknown world full of moral risks from which the artist is _quâ_artist immune. 

So far we might perhaps say that art was non-moral. But the statementwould be misleading, since, as we have seen, art is in its very originsocial, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, intheir final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out ofwhich we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; thatis, it unites. "Art, " says Tolstoy, "has this characteristic, that itunites people. " In this conviction, as we shall later see, heanticipates the modern movement of the Unanimists (p. 249). 

But there is another, and perhaps simpler, way in which art is moral. Asalready suggested, it purifies by cutting off the motor-reactions ofpersonal desire. An artist deeply in love with his friend's wife oncesaid: "If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I couldbear it. " His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it hasthe peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing inhuman nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side ofart. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he hadbrought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt, a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, throughdetachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace. Tosome natures this instinct after art is almost their sole morality. Ifthey find themselves intimately entangled in hate or jealousy or evencontempt, so that they are unable to see the object of their hate orjealousy or contempt in a clear, quiet and lovely light, they arerestless, miserable, morally out of gear, and they are constrained tofetter or slay personal desire and so find rest. 

 * * * * *

This aloofness, this purgation of emotion from personal passion, art hasin common with philosophy. If the philosopher will seek after truth, there must be, says Plotinus, a "turning away" of the spirit, adetachment. He must aim at contemplation; action, he says, is "aweakening of contemplation. " Our word _theory_, which we use inconnection with reasoning and which comes from the same Greek root as_theatre_, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is verynear in meaning to our _imagination_. But the philosopher differs fromthe artist in this: he aims not only at the contemplation of truth, butat the ordering of truths, he seeks to make of the whole universe anintelligible structure. Further, he is not driven by the gadfly ofcreation, he is not forced to cast his images into visible or audibleshape. He is remoter from the push of life. Still, the philosopher, like the artist, lives in a world of his own, with a spell of its ownnear akin to beauty, and the secret of that spell is the same detachmentfrom the tyranny of practical life. The essence of art, says Santayana, is "the steady contemplation of things in their order and worth. " Hemight have been defining philosophy. 

 * * * * *

If art and philosophy are thus near akin, art and science are in theirbeginning, though not in their final development, contrasted. Science, it seems, begins with the desire for practical utility. Science, asProfessor Bergson has told us, has for its initial aim the making oftools for life. Man tries to find out the laws of Nature, that is, hownatural things behave, in order primarily that he may get the better ofthem, rule over them, shape them to his ends. That is why science is atfirst so near akin to magic--the cry of both is:

 "I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do. "

But, though the feet of science are thus firmly planted on the solidground of practical action, her head, too, sometimes touches thehighest heavens. The real man of science, like the philosopher, sooncomes to seek truth and knowledge for their own sake. In art, inscience, in philosophy, there come eventually the same detachment frompersonal desire and practical reaction; and to artist, man of science, and philosopher alike, through this detachment there comes at times thesame peace that passeth all understanding. 

Attempts have been often made to claim for art the utility, thetool-making property, that characterizes the beginnings of science. Nothing is beautiful, it is sometimes said, that is not useful; thebeauty of a jug or a table depends, we are often told, on its perfectadaptation to its use. There is here some confusion of thought and someobvious, but possibly unconscious, special pleading. Much of art, specially decorative art, arises out of utilities, but its aim and itscriterion is not utility. Art may be structural, commemorative, magical, what-not, may grow up out of all manner of practical needs, but it isnot till it is cut loose from these practical needs that Art is herselfand comes to her own. This does not mean that the jugs or tables are tobe bad jugs or tables, still less does it mean that the jugs or tablesshould be covered with senseless machine-made ornament; but the utilityof the jug or table is a good in itself independent of, though oftenassociated with, its merit as art. 

No one has, I think, ever called Art "the handmaid of Science. " Thereis, indeed, no need to establish a hierarchy. Yet in a sense theconverse is true and Science is the handmaid of Art. Art is onlypracticable as we have seen, when it is possible safely to cut offmotor-reactions. By the long discipline of ritual man accustomed himselfto slacken his hold on action, and be content with a shadowy counterfeitpractice. Then last, when through knowledge he was relieved from theneed of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for amoment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born. He can neverquit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances andlife gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold forlonger spaces. Man subdues the world about him first by force and thenby reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck, he needs brute force no longer, and needs reason no more to make toolsfor conquest. He is free to think for thought's sake, he may trustintuition once again, and above all dare to lose himself incontemplation, dare to be more and more an artist. Only here there lurksan almost ironical danger. Emotion towards life is the primary stuff ofwhich art is made; there might be a shortage of this very emotionalstuff of which art herself is ultimately compacted. 

Science, then, helps to make art possible by making life safer andeasier, it "makes straight in the desert a highway for our God. " Butonly rarely and with special limitations easily understood does itprovide actual material for art. Science deals with abstractions, concepts, class names, made by the intellect for convenience, that wemay handle life on the side desirable to us. When we classify things, give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience thatcertain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it isconvenient for us to know and register. These class-names being_abstract_--that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actualobjects, do not easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easilybecome material for art whose function it is to express and communicateemotion. Particular qualities, like love, honour, faith, may and _do_stir emotion; and certain bundles of qualities like, for example, motherhood tend towards personification; but the normal class label likehorse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remainsa practical utility for science. 

The abstractions, the class-names of science are in this respect quitedifferent from those other abstractions or unrealities alreadystudied--the gods of primitive religion. The very term we use showsthis. _Abstractions_ are things, qualities, _dragged away_ consciouslyby the intellect, from actual things objectively existing. The primitivegods are personifications--_i. E. _ collective emotions taking shape inimagined form. Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than theabstract horse. But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect forpractical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, here-begets it. He and all the other gods are, therefore, the propermaterial for art; he is, indeed, one of the earliest forms of art. Theabstract horse, on the other hand, is the outcome of reflection. Wemust honour him as of quite extraordinary use for the purposes ofpractical life, but he leaves us cold and, by the artist, is bestneglected. 

 * * * * *

There remains the relation of Art to Religion. [56] By now, it may behoped, this relation is transparently clear. The whole object of thepresent book has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, howart is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form ofritual. We saw further that the primitive gods themselves were butprojections or, if we like it better, personifications of the rite. Theyarose straight out of it. 

Now we say advisedly "primitive gods, " and this with no intention ofobscurantism. The god of later days, the unknown source of life, theunresolved mystery of the world, is not begotten of a rite, is not, essentially not, the occasion or object of art. With his relation toart--which is indeed practically non-existent--we have nothing to do. Ofthe other gods we may safely say that not only are they objects of art, they are its prime material; in a word, primitive theology is an earlystage in the formation of art. Each primitive god, like the rite fromwhich he sprang, is a half-way house between practical life and art; hecomes into being from a half, but only half, inhibited desire. 

 * * * * *

Is there, then, no difference, except in degree of detachment, betweenreligion and art? Both have the like emotional power; both carry withthem a sense of obligation, though the obligation of religion is thestronger. But there is one infallible criterion between the two which isall-important, and of wide-reaching consequences. Primitive religionasserts that her imaginations have objective existence; art more happilymakes no such claim. The worshipper of Apollo believes, not only that hehas imagined the lovely figure of the god and cast a copy of its shapein stone, but he also believes that in the outside world the god Apolloexists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does notcorrespond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, andscience makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all suchfictitious objectivities; they are _eidola_, idols, phantasms, notobjective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because theworshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of _the_ reality that he and hischurch or group have projected the god. He knows that _prier, c'estélaborer Dieu_; or, as he would put it, he is "one with" his god. Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actualpractical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists onits actuality and objectivity. 

Why does the conception of a god impose obligation? Just because and inso far as he claims to have objective existence. By giving to his godfrom the outset objective existence the worshipper prevents his god fromtaking his place in that high kingdom of spiritual realities which isthe imagination, and sets him down in that lower objective world whichalways compels practical reaction. What might have been an ideal becomesan idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritualreactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though anotherand a more exacting and commanding fellow-man were added to theuniverse. But a moment's reflection will show that, when we pass fromthe vague sense of power or _mana_ felt by the savage to the personalgod, to Dionysos or Apollo, though it may seem a set back it is a realadvance. It is the substitution of a human and tolerably humane powerfor an incalculable whimsical and often cruel force. The idol is a steptowards, not a step from, the ideal. Ritual makes these idols, and it isthe business of science to shatter them and set the spirit free forcontemplation. Ritual must wane that art may wax. 

But we must never forget that ritual is the bridge by which man passes, the ladder by which he climbs from earth to heaven. The bridge must notbe broken till the transit is made. And the time is not yet. We must notpull down the ladder till we are sure the last angel has climbed. Onlythen, at last, we dare not leave it standing. Earth pulls hard, and itmay be that the angels who ascended might _de_scend and be for everfallen. 

 * * * * *

It may be well at the close of our enquiry to test the conclusions atwhich we have arrived by comparing them with certain _endoxa_, asAristotle would call them, that is, opinions and theories actuallycurrent at the present moment. We take these contemporary controversies, not implying that they are necessarily of high moment in the history ofart, or that they are in any fundamental sense new discoveries; butbecause they are at this moment current and vital, and consequently forma good test for the adequacy of our doctrines. It will be satisfactoryif we find our view includes these current opinions, even if it to someextent modifies them and, it may be hoped, sets them in a new light. 

We have already considered the theory that holds art to be the creationor pursuit or enjoyment of beauty. The other view falls readily into twogroups:

(1) The "imitation" theory, with its modification, the idealizationtheory, which holds that art either copies Nature, or, out of naturalmaterials, improves on her. 

(2) The "expression" theory, which holds that the aim of art is toexpress the emotions and thoughts of the artist. 

The "Imitation" theory is out of fashion now-a-days. Plato and Aristotleheld it; though Aristotle, as we have seen, did not mean by "imitatingNature" quite what we mean to-day. The Imitation theory began to diedown with the rise of Romanticism, which stressed the personal, individual emotion of 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 "liketrying to make music by sitting on the piano. " But, as already noted, the Imitation theory of art was really killed by the invention ofphotography. It was impossible for the most insensate not to see that ina work of art, of sculpture or painting, there was an element of valuenot to be found in the exact transcript of a photograph. Henceforth theImitation theory lived on only in the weakened form of Idealization. 

The reaction against the Imitation theory has naturally and inevitablygone much too far. We have "thrown out the child with the bath-water. "All through the present book we have tried to show that art _arisesfrom_ ritual, and ritual is in its essence a faded action, animitation. Moreover, every work of art _is_ a copy of something, onlynot a copy of anything having actual existence in the outside world. Rather it is a copy of that inner and highly emotionalized vision of theartist which it is granted to him to see and recreate when he isreleased from certain practical reactions. 

 * * * * *

The Impressionism that dominated the pictorial art of the later years ofthe nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicateimitation. Breaking with conventions as to how things are _supposed tobe_--conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing orimagining--the Impressionist insists on purging his vision fromknowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really_look_. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herselfto his eyes. It was a most needful and valuable purgation, sincepainting is the art proper of the eye. But, when the new effects of theworld as simply _seen_, the new material of light and shadow and tone, had been to some extent--never completely--mastered, there wasinevitable reaction. Up sprang Post-Impressionists and Futurists. Theywill not gladly be classed together, but both have this in common--theyare Expressionists, not Impressionists, not Imitators. 

The Expressionists, no matter by what name they call themselves, haveone criterion. They believe that art is not the copying or idealizing ofNature, or of any aspect of Nature, but the expression and communicationof the artist's emotion. We can see that, between them and theImitationists, the Impressionists form a delicate bridge. They, too, focus their attention on the artist rather than the object, only it ison the artist's particular _vision_, his impression, what he actuallysees, not on his emotion, what he feels. 

Modern life is _not_ simple--cannot be simple--ought not to be; it isnot for nothing that we are heirs to the ages. Therefore the art thatutters and expresses our emotion towards modern life cannot be simple;and, moreover, it must before all things embody not only that livingtangle which is felt by the Futurists as so real, but it must purge andorder it, by complexities of tone and rhythm hitherto unattempted. Oneart, beyond all others, has blossomed into real, spontaneous, unconscious life to-day, and that is Music; the other arts stand roundarrayed, half paralyzed, with drooping, empty hands. The nineteenthcentury saw vast developments in an art that could express abstract, unlocalized, unpersonified feelings more completely than painting orpoetry, the art of Music. 

 * * * * *

As a modern critic[57] has well observed: "In tone and rhythm music hasa notation for every kind and degree of action and passion, presentingabstract moulds of its excitement, fluctuation, suspense, crisis, appeasement; and all this _anonymously_, without place, actors, circumstances, named or described, without a word spoken. Poetry has tosupply definite thought, arguments driving at a conclusion, ideasmortgaged to this or that creed or system; and to give force to thesecan command only a few rhythms limited by the duration of a human breathand the pitch of an octave. The little effects worked out in this smallcompass music sweeps up and builds into vast fabrics of emotion with adissolute freedom undreamed of in any other art. "

It may be that music provides for a century too stagnant and listless toact out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, ashadowy pageant of sense and emotion, that serves as a _katharsis_ orpurgation. 

Anyhow, "an art that came out of the old world two centuries ago, with afew chants, love-songs, and dances; that a century ago was still tied tothe words of a mass or an opera; or threading little dance-movementstogether in a 'suite, ' became in the last century this extraordinarydebauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, orworshipped a god, may not only ideally, but through the response of hisnerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts ofstruggle, rapture, and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, ananguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility, unheard of. An amplifiedpattern of action and emotion is given: each man may fit to it whatimages he will. "[58]

 * * * * *

If our contention throughout this book be correct the Expressionists arein one matter abundantly right. Art, we have seen, again and againrises by way of ritual out of emotion, out of life keenly and vividlylivid. The younger generation are always talking of life; they have asort of cult of life. Some of the more valorous spirits among them eventend to disparage art that life may be the more exalted. "Stop paintingand sculping, " they cry, "and go and see a football match. " There youhave life! Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is thestuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limitednotion of what life is. It must, it seems, in the first place, beessentially physical. To sit and dream in your study is not to live. Thereason of this odd limitation is easy to see. We all think life isespecially the sort of life we are _not_ living ourselves. Thehard-worked University professor thinks that "Life" is to be found in aFrench _café_; the polished London journalist looks for "Life" among thenaked Polynesians. The cult of savagery, and even of simplicity, inevery form, simply spells complex civilization and diminished physicalvitality. 

The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays onemotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of its moreelementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, inmaking life and art in any sense coextensive. Art, as we have seen, sustains and invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from thesevery same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuousreactions. 

 * * * * *

In another matter one section of Expressionists, the Futurists, are inthe main right. The emotion to be expressed is the emotion of to-day, orstill better to-morrow. The mimetic dance arose not only nor chiefly outof reflection on the past; but out of either immediate joy or imminentfear or insistent hope for the future. We are not prepared perhaps to goall lengths, to "burn all museums" because of their contagiouscorruption, though we might be prepared to "banish the nude for thespace of ten years. " If there is to be any true living art, it mustarise, not from the contemplation of Greek statues, not from the revivalof folk-songs, not even from the re-enacting of Greek plays, but from akeen emotion felt towards things and people living to-day, in modernconditions, including, among other and deeper forms of life, the hasteand hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes. 

There are artists alive to-day, strayed revellers, who wish themselvesback in the Middle Ages, who long for the time when each man would havehis house carved with a bit of lovely ornament, when every villagechurch had its Madonna and Child, when, in a word, art and life andreligion went hand in hand, not sharply sundered by castes andprofessions. But we may not put back the clock, and, if bydifferentiation we lose something, we gain much. The old choral dance onthe orchestral floor was an undifferentiated thing, it had a beauty ofits own; but by its differentiation, by the severance of artist andactors and spectators, we have gained--the drama. We may not castreluctant eyes backwards; the world goes forward to new forms of life, and the Churches of to-day must and should become the Museums ofto-morrow. 

 * * * * *

It is curious and instructive to note that Tolstoy's theory of Art, though not his practice, is essentially Expressive and even approachesthe dogmas of the Futurist. Art is to him just the transmission ofpersonal emotion to others. It may be bad emotion or it may be goodemotion, emotion it must be. To take his simple and instructiveinstance: a boy goes out into a wood and meets a wolf, he is frightened, he comes back and tells the other villagers what he felt, how he went tothe wood feeling happy and light-hearted and the wolf came, and what thewolf looked like, and how he began to be frightened. This is, accordingto Tolstoy, art. Even if the boy never saw a wolf at all, if he hadreally at another time been frightened, and if he was able to conjure upfear in himself and communicate it to others--that also would be art. The essential is, according to Tolstoy, that he should feel himself andso represent his feeling that he communicates it to others. [59]Art-schools, art-professionalism, art-criticism are all useless or worsethan useless, because they cannot teach a man to feel. Only life can dothat. 

All art is, according to Tolstoy, good _quâ_ art that succeeds intransmitting emotion. But there is good emotion and bad emotion, and theonly right material for art is good emotion, and the only good emotion, the only emotion worth expressing, is subsumed, according to Tolstoy, inthe religion of the day. This is how he explains the constant affinityin nearly all ages of art and religion. Instead of regarding religion asan early phase of art, he proceeds to define religious perception as thehighest social ideal of the moment, as that "understanding of themeaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of thatsociety have attained, an understanding defining the highest good atwhich that society aims. " "Religious perception in a society, " hebeautifully adds, "is like the direction of a flowing river. If theriver flows at all, it must have a direction. " Thus, religion, toTolstoy, is not dogma, not petrifaction, it makes indeed dogmaimpossible. The religious perception of to-day flows, Tolstoi says, inthe Christian channel towards the union of man in a common brotherhood. It is the business of the modern artist to feel and transmit emotiontowards this unity of man. 

Now it is not our purpose to examine whether Tolstoy's definition ofreligion is adequate or indeed illuminating. What we wish to note isthat he grasps the truth that in art we must look and feel, and look andfeel forward, not backward, if we would live. Art somehow, likelanguage, is always feeling forward to newer, fuller, subtler emotions. She seems indeed in a way to feel ahead even of science; a poet willforecast dimly what a later discovery will confirm. Whether and how longold channels, old forms will suffice for the new spirit can never beforeseen. 

 * * * * *

We end with a point of great importance, though the doctrine we wouldemphasize may be to some a hard saying, even a stumbling-block. Art, asTolstoy divined, is social, not individual. Art is, as we have seen, social in origin, it remains and must remain social in function. Thedance 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_. Theword means a _band_ and a _thing of devotion_; and reverence, devotion, collective emotion, is social in its very being. That band was, tobegin with, as we saw, the whole collection of initiated tribesmen, linked by a common name, rallying round a common symbol. 

Even to-day, when individualism is rampant, art bears traces of itscollective, social origin. We feel about it, as noted before, a certain"ought" which always spells social obligation. Moreover, whenever wehave a new movement in art, it issues from a group, usually from a smallprofessional coterie, but marked by strong social instincts, by amissionary 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 artthat shall be world-wide. The tribe is extinct, the family in its oldrigid form moribund, the social groups we now look to as centres ofemotion are the groups of industry, of professionalism and of sheermutual attraction. Small and strange though such groups may appear, theyare real social factors. 

Now this social, collective element in art is too apt to be forgotten. When an artist claims that expression is the aim of art he is too apt tomean self-expression only--utterance of individual emotion. Utteranceof individual emotion is very closely neighboured by, is almostidentical with, self-enhancement. What should be a generous, and in partaltruistic, exaltation becomes mere _megalomania_. This egotism is, ofcourse, a danger inherent in all art. The suspension of motor-reactionsto the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him off from hisfellow-men, makes him in a sense an egotist. Art, said Zola, is "theworld seen through a temperament. " But this suspension is, not that heshould turn inward to feed on his own vitals, but rather to free him forcontemplation. All great art releases from self. 

 * * * * *

The young are often temporary artists: art, being based on life, callsfor a strong vitality. The young are also self-centred and seekself-enhancement. This need of self-expression is a sort of artisticimpulse. The young are, partly from sheer immaturity, still more througha foolish convention, shut out from real life; they are secluded, forcedto become in a sense artists, or, if they have not the power for that, at least self-aggrandizers. They write lyric poems, they lovemasquerading, they focus life on to themselves in a way which, lateron, life itself makes impossible. This pseudo-art, thisself-aggrandizement usually dies a natural death before the age ofthirty. If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientificattitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering therelations of things among themselves, not their personal relation to us. The study of science is a priceless discipline in self-abnegation, butonly in negation; it looses us from self, it does not link us to others. The real and natural remedy for the egotism of youth is Life, notnecessarily the haunting of _cafés_, or even the watching of footballmatches, but strenuous activity in the simplest human relations of dailyhappenings. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. "

 * * * * *

There is always apt to be some discord between the artist and the largepractical world in which he lives, but those ages are happiest in whichthe discord is least. The nineteenth century, amid its splendidachievements in science and industry, in government and learning, andabove all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way. To literature, an art which can explain itself, the great public worldlent on the whole a reverent and intelligent ear. Its great prosewriters were at peace with their audience and were inspired by greatpublic interests. Some of the greatest, for example Tolstoy, producedtheir finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readersand admirers probably by the million. Writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Mill, and Carlyle, even poets like Tennyson and Browning, werefull of great public interests and causes, and, in different degrees andat different stages of their lives, were thoroughly and immenselypopular. On the other hand, one can find, at the beginning of theperiod, figures like Blake and Shelley, and all through it a number ofpainters--the pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists--walking like aliensin a Philistine world. Even great figures like Burne-Jones and Whistlerwere for the greater part of their lives unrecognized or mocked at. Millais reached the attention of the world, but was thought by thestricter fraternity to have in some sense or other sold his soul andcommitted the great sin of considering the bourgeois. The bourgeoisshould be despised not partially but completely. His life, hisinterests, his code of ethics and conduct must all be matters of entireindifference or amused contempt, to the true artist who intends to dohis own true work and call his soul his own. 

At a certain moment, during the eighties and nineties, it looked as ifthese doctrines were generally accepted, and the divorce between art andthe community had become permanent. But it seems as if this attitude, which coincided with a period of reaction in political matters and arecrudescence of a belief in force and on unreasoned authority, isalready passing away. There are not wanting signs that art, both inpainting and sculpture, and in poetry and novel-writing, is beginningagain to realize its social function, beginning to be impatient of mereindividual emotion, beginning to aim at something bigger, more bound upwith a feeling towards and for the common weal. 

Take work like that of Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Masefield or Mr. ArnoldBennett. Without appraising its merits or demerits we cannot but notethat the social sense is always there, whether it be of a class or of awhole community. In a play like _Justice_ the writer does not "express"himself, he does not even merely show the pathos of a single humanbeing's destiny, he sets before us a much bigger thing--man tragicallycaught 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 thepiece. It is a fragment of _Les Misérables_ over again, in a severer andmore restrained technique. An art like this starts, no doubt, fromemotion towards personal happenings--there is nothing else from which itcan start; but, even as it sets sail for wider seas, it is loosed frompersonal moorings. 

Science has given us back something strangely like a World-Soul, and artis beginning to feel she must utter our emotion towards it. Such art isexposed to an inherent and imminent peril. Its very bigness and newnesstends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process ofcreation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost in thereformer, and the play or the novel turn tract. This does not mean thatthe artist, if he is strong enough, may not be reformer too, only not atthe moment of creation. 

The art of Mr. Arnold Bennett gets its bigness, its collectivity, inpart--from extension over time. Far from seeking after beauty, he almostgoes out to embrace ugliness. He does not spare us even dullness, thatwe may get a sense of the long, waste spaces of life, their drearyreality. We are keenly interested in the loves of hero and heroine, butall the time something much bigger is going on, generation aftergeneration rolls by in ceaseless panorama; it is the life not of Edwinand Hilda, it is the life of the Five Towns. After a vision so big, tocome back to the ordinary individualistic love-story is like lookingthrough the wrong end of a telescope. 

Art of high quality and calibre is seldom obscure. The great popularwriters of the nineteenth century--Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Tolstoy--wrote so that all could understand. A really big artist hassomething important to say, something vast to show, something that moveshim and presses on him; and he will say it simply because he must get itsaid. He will trick it out with no devices, most of all with noobscurities. It has vexed and torn him enough while it was pushing itsway to be born. He has no peace till it is said, and said as clearly ashe may. He says it, not consciously for the sake of others, but forhimself, to ease him from the burden of big thought. Moreover, art, whose business is to transmit emotion, should need no commentary. Artcomes out of _theoria_, contemplation, steady looking at, but never outof _theory_. Theory can neither engender nor finally support it. Anexhibition of pictures with an explanatory catalogue, scientificallyinteresting though it may be, stands, in a sense, self-condemned. 

We must, however, remember that all art is not of the whole community. There are small groups feeling their own small but still collectiveemotion, fashioning their own language, obscure sometimes to all butthemselves. They are right so to fashion it, but, if they appeal to awider world, they must strive to speak in the vulgar tongue, understanded of the people. 

 * * * * *

It is, indeed, a hopeful sign of the times, a mark of the revival ofsocial as contrasted with merely individualistic instincts that ayounger generation of poets, at least in France, tend to form themselvesinto small groups, held together not merely by eccentricities oflanguage or garb, but by some deep inner conviction strongly held incommon. Such a unity of spirit is seen in the works of the latter groupof thinkers and writers known as _Unanimists_. They tried and failed tofound a community. Their doctrine, if doctrine convictions so fluid canbe called, is strangely like the old group-religion of the common dance, only more articulate. Of the Unanimist it might truly be said, "_ilbuvait l'indistinction_. " To him the harsh old Roman mandate _Divide etimpera_, "Divide men that you may rule them, " spells death. His dream isnot of empire and personal property but of the realization of life, common to all. To this school the great reality is the social group, whatever form it take, family, village or town. Their only dogma is theunity and immeasurable sanctity of life. In practice they are Christian, yet wholly free from the asceticism of modern Christianity. Theirattitude in art is as remote as possible from, it is indeed the veryantithesis to, the æsthetic exclusiveness of the close of last century. Like St. Peter, the Unanimists have seen a sheet let down and heard avoice from heaven saying: "Call thou nothing common nor unclean. "

Above all, the Unanimist remembers and realizes afresh the old truththat "no man liveth unto himself. " According to the Expressionist'screed, as we have seen, the end of art is to utter and communicateemotion. The fullest and finest emotions are those one human being feelstowards another. Every sympathy is an enrichment of life, everyantipathy a negation. It follows then, that, for the Unanimist, Love isthe fulfilling of his Law. 

It is a beautiful and life-giving faith, felt and with a perfectsincerity expressed towards all nature by the Indian poet Tagore, andtowards humanity especially by M. Vildrac in his _Book of Love_ ("Livred'Amour"). He tells us in his "Commentary" how to-day the poet, sittingat home with pen and paper before him, feels that he is pent in, stifledby 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 dustyself tricked out, costumed anew. Suddenly he knows the figure to betawdry and shameful. He is hot all over when he looks at it; he must outinto the air, into the street, out of the stuffy museum where so longhe has stirred the dead egotist ashes, out into the bigger life, thelife of his fellows; he must live, with them, by them, in them. 

 "I am weary of deeds done inside myself, I am weary of voyages inside myself, And of heroism wrought by strokes of the pen, And of a beauty made up of formulæ. 

 "I am ashamed of lying to my work, Of my work lying to my life, And of being able to content myself, By burning sweet spices, With the mouldering smell that is master here. "

Again, in "The Conquerors, " the poet dreams of the Victorious One whohas no army, the Knight who rides afoot, the Crusader without breviaryor scrip, the Pilgrim of Love who, by the shining in his eyes, draws allmen to him, and they in turn draw other men until, at last:

 "The time came in the land, The time of the Great Conquest, When the people with this desire Left the threshold of their door To go forth towards one another. 

 "And the time came in the land When to fill all its story There was nothing but songs in unison, _One round danced about the houses_, One battle and one victory. "

And so our tale ends where it began, with the Choral Dance. 

FOOTNOTES:

[54] _Ethics_, X, 4. 

[55] H. Bergson, _Life and Consciousness_, Huxley Lecture, May 29, 1911. 

[56] Religion is here used as meaning the worship of some form of god, as the practical counterpart of theology. 

[57] Mr. D. S. MacColl. 

[58] D. S. MacColl, _Nineteenth Century Art_, p. 21. (1902. )

[59] It is interesting to find, since the above was written, that theConfession of Faith published in the catalogue of the SecondPost-Impressionist Exhibition (1912, p. 21) reproduces, consciously orunconsciously, Tolstoy's view: _We have ceased to ask, "What does thispicture represent?" and ask instead, "What does it make us feel?"_

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For Ancient and Primitive Ritual the best general book of reference is:

FRAZER, J. G. _The Golden Bough_, 3rd edition, 1911, from which most of the instances in the present manual are taken. Part IV of _The Golden Bough_, i. E. The section dealing with _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_, should especially be consulted. 

Also an earlier, epoch-making book:

ROBERTSON SMITH, W. _Lectures on the Religion of the Semites_, 1889 [3rd edition, 1927]. For certain fundamental ritual notions, _e. G. _ sacrifice, holiness, etc. 

[For Egyptian and Babylonian ritual: _Myth and Ritual_, edited byS. H. HOOKE, 1933. ]

For the Greek Drama, as arising out of the ritual dance: ProfessorGILBERT MURRAY'S _Excursus on the Ritual Forms preserved in GreekTragedy_ in J. E. HARRISON'S _Themis_, 1912, and pp. 327-40 in the samebook; and for the religion of Dionysos and the drama, J. E. HARRISON'S_Prolegomena_, 1907, Chapters VIII and X. For the fusion of the ritualdance and hero-worship, see W. LEAF, _Homer and History_, 1915, ChapterVII. For a quite different view of drama as arising wholly from theworship of the dead, see Professor W. RIDGEWAY, _The Origin of Tragedy_, 1910. An important discussion of the relation of _tragedy_ to the winterfestival of the _Lenaia_ appears in A. B. COOK'S _Zeus_, vol. I, sec. 6(xxi) [1914]. 

[More recent works on Greek drama: A. W. PICKARD-CAMBRIDGE, _Dithyramb_, _Tragedy and Comedy_, 1927; G. THOMSON, _Aeschylus and Athens_, 1941. ]

For Primitive Art:

HIRN, Y. _The Origins of Art_, 1900. The main theory of the book the present writer believes to be inadequate, but it contains an excellent collection of facts relating to Art, Magic, Art and Work, Mimetic Dances, etc. , and much valuable discussion of principles. 

GROSSE, E. _The Beginnings of Art_, 1897, in the Chicago Anthropological Series. Valuable for its full illustrations of primitive art, as well as for text. 

[BOAS, F. , _Primitive Art_, 1927. ]

For the Theory of Art:

TOLSTOY, L. _What is Art?_ Translated by Aylmer Maude, in the Scott Library. 

FRY, ROGER E. _An Essay in Æsthetics_, in the _New Quarterly_, April 1909, p. 174. 

This is the best general statement of the function of Art known to me. It should be read in connection with Mr. Bullough's article, quoted onp. 129, which gives the psychological basis of a similar view of thenature of art. My own theory was formulated independently, in relationto the development of the Greek theatre, but I am very glad to find thatit is in substantial agreement with those of two such distinguishedauthorities on æsthetics. For my later conclusions on art, see _Alphaand Omega_, 1915, pp. 208-220. 

[CAUDWELL, C. , _Illusion and Reality_, 1937. ]

For more advanced students:

DUSSAUZE, HENRI. _Les Règles esthétiques et les lois du sentiment_, 1911. 

MÜLLER-FREIENFELS, R. _Psychologie der Kunst_, 1912. 

INDEX

Abstraction, 224

Adonis, rites of, 19, 20, 54-56----, gardens of, 149----, as tree spirit, 149

Æschylus, 47

Aesthete, not artist, 214-215

Agon, 15

Anagnorisis, or recognition, 15

Anthesteria, spring festival of, 147-149

Apollo Belvedere, 171

Aristotle on art, 198

Art and beauty, 213---- and imitation, 230---- and morality, 215---- and nature, 198---- and religion, 225----, emotional factor in, 26----, social elements in, 241-248

Ascension festival, 69

Bear, Aino festival, 92-99

Beast dances, 45, 46

Beauty and art, 211

Bergson on art, 134

Birth, rites of new, 104-113

Bouphonia, 91-92

Bull-driving in spring, 85----, festival at Magnesia, 87

Cat's-cradle, as magical charm, 66

Censor, function of, 216

Charila, spring festival, 80

Chorus in Greek drama, 121-128

Dancing, a work, 30-31----, magical, 31-35----, commemorative, 44

Daphnephoros, 186

Death and winter, 67-72

Dikè as _way of life_, 116

Dionysis, 12, 150

Dionysis as Holy Child, 103---- as tree god, 102---- as young man, 113-115

Dithyramb, 75-89

Drama and Dromenon, 35-38

Easter, in Modern Greece, 73

Eiresione, 114

Epheboi, Athenian, 12

Euchè, meaning of, 25

Expressionists, 232

Futurists, 232

Ghosts as fertilizers, 149

Homer, influence on drama, 145-166

Horæ or seasons, 116

Idol and ideal, 227

Impressionism, 231

Imitation, 21-23----, ceremonies in Australia, 64

Individualism, 241

Initiation ceremonies, 64, 106-113

Jack-in-the-Green, 60, 187, 190

Kangaroos, dance of, 46

Landscape, art of, 199-201

Maeterlinck, 200

May-day at Cambridge, 57

May, queen of the, 57-61----, king of the, 193

Mime, meaning of, 47

Mimesis, 43-47

Music, function of, 233

New birth, 106-113

Olympian gods, 202

Orchestra, meaning of, 123-127

Osiris, rites of, 15-23, 51

Ox-hunger, 81

Panathenaia, 178

Panspermia, 148

Parthenon frieze, 176

Peisistratos, 146

Peplos of Athena, 180

Pericles on religion, 178

Personification and conception, 70-73

Plato on art, 21-23

Pleasure not joy, 213

Post-impressionists, 238

Prayer discs, 24

Presentation, meaning of, 53

Psychical distance, 129-134

Representation, 34-41

Resurrection, rites of, 100

Rites, periodicity of, 52

Ritual forms in drama, 188-189

Santayana on art, 220

Semelè, bringing up of, 81

Spring song at Saffron Walden, 59---- at Athens, 77

Stage or scene, 142-145

Summer, bringing in of, 67-71

Tammuz, rites of, 18-20

Tělětē, _rite of growing up_, 112

Theatre, 10-13, 136

Themis, as ritual custom, 117

Theoria and theory, 248

Threshing-floor at dancing-place, 124

Tolstoy on art, 132, 238-241

Totemism and beast dances, 46, 47

Tragedy, ritual forms in, 119-122----, origin of, 76

Tug of war, among Esquimaux, 62

Unanimism, 249-252

Vegetation spirit, 72

Winter, carrying out of, 68-72

Wool, sacred, 12

World-soul, 246

Wreaths, festival of, 189----, at Greek weddings, 190

Zola on art, 242

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