RITUAL, ART AND LIFE
In the preceding chapters we have seen ritual emerge from the practical
doings of life. We have noted that in ritual we have the beginning of a
detachment from practical ends; we have watched the merely emotional
dance develop from an undifferentiated chorus into a spectacle performed
by actors and watched by spectators, a spectacle cut off, not only from
real life, but also from ritual issues; a spectacle, in a word, that has
become an end in itself. We have further seen that the choral dance is
an undifferentiated whole which later divides out into three clearly
articulate parts, the artist, the work of art, the spectator or art
lover. We are now in a position to ask what is the good of all this
antiquarian enquiry? Why is it, apart from the mere delight of
scientific 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 throw
some light on the function of art, that is on what it has done, and
still does to-day, for life. Now in the case of a complex growth like
art, it is rarely if ever possible to understand its function--what it
does, how it works--unless we know something of how that growth began,
or, if its origin is hid, at least of the simpler forms of activity that
preceded it. For art, this earlier stage, this simpler form, which is
indeed itself as it were an embryo and rudimentary art, we found to
be--ritual.
Ritual, then, has not been studied for its own sake, still less for its
connection with any particular dogma, though, as a subject of singular
gravity and beauty, ritual is well worth a lifetime's study. It has been
studied because ritual is, we believe, a frequent and perhaps universal
transition stage between actual life and that peculiar contemplation of
or emotion towards life which we call art. All our long examination of
beast-dances, May-day festivals and even of Greek drama has had just
this for its object--to make clear that art--save perhaps in a few
specially gifted natures--did not arise straight out of life, but out
of that collective emphasis of the needs and desires of life which we
have agreed to call ritual.
* * * * *
Our formal argument is now over and ritual may drop out of the
discussion. But we would guard against a possible misunderstanding. We
would not be taken to imply that ritual is obsolete and must drop out of
life, giving place to the art it has engendered. It may well be that,
for certain temperaments, ritual is a perennial need. Natures specially
gifted can live lives that are emotionally vivid, even in the rare high
air of art or science; but many, perhaps most of us, breathe more freely
in the _medium_, literally the _midway_ space, of some collective
ritual. Moreover, for those of us who are not artists or original
thinkers the life of the imagination, and even of the emotions, has been
perhaps too long lived at second hand, received from the artist ready
made and felt. To-day, owing largely to the progress of science, and a
host of other causes social and economic, life grows daily fuller and
freer, and every manifestation of life is regarded with a new reverence.
With this fresh outpouring of the spirit, this fuller consciousness of
life, there comes a need for _first-hand_ emotion and expression, and
that expression is found for all classes in a revival of the ritual
dance. Some of the strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances of to-day
are of the soil and some exotic, but, based as they mostly are on very
primitive ritual, they stand as singular evidence of this real recurrent
need. 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 the
function of art? How do we relate it to other forms of life, to science,
to religion, to morality, to philosophy? These are big-sounding
questions, and towards their solution only hints here and there can be
offered, stray thoughts that have grown up out of this study of ritual
origins 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 some
form or another, bulks large in the national life. We have theatres, a
National 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 do
not simply go and admire the beauty of the past in museums; a movement
towards or about art is all alive and astir among us. We have new
developments of the theatre, problem plays, Reinhardt productions,
Gordon Craig scenery, Russian ballets. We have new schools of painting
treading on each other's heels with breathless rapidity: Impressionists,
Post-Impressionists, Futurists. Art--or at least the desire for, the
interest in, art--is assuredly not dead.
Moreover, and this is very important, we all feel about art a certain
obligation, such as some of us feel about religion. There is an "ought"
about it. Perhaps we do not really care much about pictures and poetry
and music, but we feel we "ought to." In the case of music it has
happily been at last recognized that if you have not an "ear" you cannot
care for it, but two generations ago, owing to the unfortunate cheapness
and popularity of keyed instruments, it was widely held that one half of
humanity, the feminine half, "ought" to play the piano. This "ought"
is, of course, like most social "oughts," a very complex product, but
its existence is well worth noting.
It is worth noting because it indicates a vague feeling that art has a
real value, that art is not a mere luxury, nor even a rarefied form of
pleasure. No one feels they _ought_ to take pleasure in beautiful scents
or in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don't. The first
point, then, that must be made clear is that art is of real value to
life 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, because
we have seen art, by way of ritual, arose out of life. And yet the
statement is a sort of paradox, for we have seen also that art differs
from ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or the
creator, the "motor reactions," _i.e._ practical life, the life of
doing, is for the time checked. This is of the essence of the artist's
vision, that he sees things detached and therefore more vividly, more
completely, and in a different light. This is of the essence of the
artist'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 from
action they are focussed and intensified. Life is enhanced, only it is a
different kind of life, it is the life of the image-world, of the
_imag_ination; it is the spiritual and human life, as differentiated
from the life we share with animals. It is a life we all, as human
beings, possess in some, but very varying, degrees; and the natural man
will always view the spiritual man askance, because he is not
"practical." But the life of imagination, cut off from practical
reaction as it is, becomes in turn a motor-force causing new emotions,
and so pervading the general life, and thus ultimately becoming
"practical." No one function is completely cut off from another. The
main function of art is probably to intensify and purify emotion, but it
is substantially certain that, if we did not feel, we could not think
and should not act. Still it remains true that, in artistic
contemplation and in the realms of the artist's imagination not only are
practical motor-reactions cut off, but intelligence is suffused in, and
to some extent subordinated to, emotion.
* * * * *
One function, then, of art is to feed and nurture the imagination and
the 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 give
pleasure. Art does usually cause pleasure, singular and intense, and to
that which causes such pleasure we give the name of Beauty. But to
produce and enjoy Beauty is not the function of art. Beauty--or rather,
the sensation of Beauty--is what the Greeks would call an _epigignomenon
ti telos_, words hard to translate, something between a by-product and a
supervening perfection, a thing like--as Aristotle[54] for once
beautifully says of pleasure--"the bloom of youth to a healthy young
body."
That this is so we see most clearly in the simple fact that, when the
artist begins to aim direct at Beauty, he usually misses it. We all
know, perhaps by sad experience, that the man who seeks out pleasure for
herself fails to find her. Let him do his work well for that work's
sake, exercise his faculties, "energize" as Aristotle would say, and he
will find pleasure come out unawares to meet him with her shining face;
but let him look for her, think of her, even desire her, and she hides
her head. A man goes out hunting, thinks of nothing but following the
hounds and taking his fences, being in at the death: his day is
full--alas! of pleasure, though he has scarcely known it. Let him forget
the fox and the fences, think of pleasure, desire her, and he will be in
at pleasure's death.
So it is with the artist. Let him feel strongly, and see raptly--that
is, in complete detachment. Let him cast this, his rapt vision and his
intense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that form
will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call
beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation
too rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a "sense of
beauty." But let the artist aim direct at Beauty, and she is gone, gone
before we hear the flutter of her wings.
* * * * *
The sign manual, the banner, as it were, of artistic creation is for the
creative artist not pleasure, but something better called joy.
Pleasure, it has been well said, is no more than an instrument contrived
by Nature to obtain from the individual the preservation and the
propagation of life. True joy is not the lure of life, but the
consciousness of the triumph of creation. Wherever joy is, creation has
been.[55] It may be the joy of a mother in the physical creation of a
child; it may be the joy of the merchant adventurer in pushing out new
enterprise, or of the engineer in building a bridge, or of the artist in
a masterpiece accomplished; but it is always of the thing created.
Again, contrast joy with glory. Glory comes with success and is
exceedingly _pleasant_; it is not joyous. Some men say an artist's crown
is glory; his deepest satisfaction is in the applause of his fellows.
There is no greater mistake; we care for praise just in proportion as we
are not sure we have succeeded. To the real creative artist even praise
and glory are swallowed up in the supreme joy of creation. Only the
artist himself feels the real divine fire, but it flames over into the
work of art, and even the spectator warms his hands at the glow.
We can now, I think, understand the difference between the artist and
true 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 and
scanty. In this he differs from the artist; he does not feel so strongly
and see so clearly that he is forced to utterance. He has no joy, only
pleasure. He cannot even feel the reflection of this creative joy. In
fact, 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, but
for pleasure of that rarefied kind that we call a sense of beauty. The
æsthete, like the flirt, is cold. It is not even that his senses are
easily stirred, but he seeks the sensation of stirring, and most often
feigns it, not finds it. The æsthete is no more released from his own
desires than the practical man, and he is without the practical man's
healthy outlet in action. He sees life, not indeed in relation to
action, but to his own personal sensation. By this alone he is debarred
for 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 we
cannot really represent it at all. The profligate thinks he knows women.
It is his irony, his curse that, because he sees them always in relation
to 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 part
of life, the spiritual, image-making side. But this side, wonderful
though it is, is never the whole of actual life. There is always the
practical side. The artist is always also a man. Now the æsthete tries
to make his whole attitude artistic--that is, contemplative. He is
always looking and prying and savouring, _savourant_, as he would say,
when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to
_savourer_. All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towards
life, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional reality
in 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 and
Morality? Is Art immoral, or non-moral, or highly moral? Here again
public opinion is worth examining. Artists, we are told, are bad
husbands, and they do not pay their debts. Or if they become good
husbands and take to paying their debts, they take also to wallowing in
domesticity and produce bad art or none at all; they get tangled in the
machinery of practical reactions. Art, again, is apt to deal with risky
subjects. Where should we be if there were not a Censor of Plays? Many
of these instructive attitudes about artists as immoral or non-moral,
explain themselves instantly if we remember that the artist is _ipso
facto_ detached from practical life. In so far as he is an artist, for
each and every creative moment he is inevitably a bad husband, if being
a 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 from
motor-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 and
that even ritual is one remove from practical life. In the censor's
world the spectacle of the nude leads straight to desire, so the dancer
must be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court,
therefore it must be censored. The normal censor apparently knows
nothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house made
without hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens.
The censor is not for the moment a _persona grata_, but let us give him
his due. He acts according to his lights and these often quite
adequately represent the average darkness. A normal audience contains
many "practical" men whose standard is the same as that of the normal
censor. Art--that is vision detached from practical reactions--is to
them 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 statement
would be misleading, since, as we have seen, art is in its very origin
social, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, in
their final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out of
which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that
is, it unites. "Art," says Tolstoy, "has this characteristic, that it
unites people." In this conviction, as we shall later see, he
anticipates the modern movement of the Unanimists (p. 249).
But there is another, and perhaps simpler, way in which art is moral. As
already suggested, it purifies by cutting off the motor-reactions of
personal desire. An artist deeply in love with his friend's wife once
said: "If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I could
bear it." His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it has
the peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing in
human nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side of
art. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had
brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt,
a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, through
detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace. To
some natures this instinct after art is almost their sole morality. If
they find themselves intimately entangled in hate or jealousy or even
contempt, so that they are unable to see the object of their hate or
jealousy or contempt in a clear, quiet and lovely light, they are
restless, miserable, morally out of gear, and they are constrained to
fetter or slay personal desire and so find rest.
* * * * *
This aloofness, this purgation of emotion from personal passion, art has
in common with philosophy. If the philosopher will seek after truth,
there must be, says Plotinus, a "turning away" of the spirit, a
detachment. He must aim at contemplation; action, he says, is "a
weakening of contemplation." Our word _theory_, which we use in
connection with reasoning and which comes from the same Greek root as
_theatre_, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very
near in meaning to our _imagination_. But the philosopher differs from
the artist in this: he aims not only at the contemplation of truth, but
at the ordering of truths, he seeks to make of the whole universe an
intelligible structure. Further, he is not driven by the gadfly of
creation, he is not forced to cast his images into visible or audible
shape. 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 own
near akin to beauty, and the secret of that spell is the same detachment
from the tyranny of practical life. The essence of art, says Santayana,
is "the steady contemplation of things in their order and worth." He
might have been defining philosophy.
* * * * *
If art and philosophy are thus near akin, art and science are in their
beginning, though not in their final development, contrasted. Science,
it seems, begins with the desire for practical utility. Science, as
Professor Bergson has told us, has for its initial aim the making of
tools for life. Man tries to find out the laws of Nature, that is, how
natural things behave, in order primarily that he may get the better of
them, rule over them, shape them to his ends. That is why science is at
first 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 solid
ground of practical action, her head, too, sometimes touches the
highest heavens. The real man of science, like the philosopher, soon
comes to seek truth and knowledge for their own sake. In art, in
science, in philosophy, there come eventually the same detachment from
personal desire and practical reaction; and to artist, man of science,
and philosopher alike, through this detachment there comes at times the
same peace that passeth all understanding.
Attempts have been often made to claim for art the utility, the
tool-making property, that characterizes the beginnings of science.
Nothing is beautiful, it is sometimes said, that is not useful; the
beauty of a jug or a table depends, we are often told, on its perfect
adaptation to its use. There is here some confusion of thought and some
obvious, but possibly unconscious, special pleading. Much of art,
specially decorative art, arises out of utilities, but its aim and its
criterion is not utility. Art may be structural, commemorative, magical,
what-not, may grow up out of all manner of practical needs, but it is
not till it is cut loose from these practical needs that Art is herself
and comes to her own. This does not mean that the jugs or tables are to
be bad jugs or tables, still less does it mean that the jugs or tables
should be covered with senseless machine-made ornament; but the utility
of the jug or table is a good in itself independent of, though often
associated with, its merit as art.
No one has, I think, ever called Art "the handmaid of Science." There
is, indeed, no need to establish a hierarchy. Yet in a sense the
converse is true and Science is the handmaid of Art. Art is only
practicable as we have seen, when it is possible safely to cut off
motor-reactions. By the long discipline of ritual man accustomed himself
to slacken his hold on action, and be content with a shadowy counterfeit
practice. Then last, when through knowledge he was relieved from the
need of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for a
moment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born. He can never
quit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances and
life gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold for
longer spaces. Man subdues the world about him first by force and then
by reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck,
he needs brute force no longer, and needs reason no more to make tools
for conquest. He is free to think for thought's sake, he may trust
intuition once again, and above all dare to lose himself in
contemplation, dare to be more and more an artist. Only here there lurks
an almost ironical danger. Emotion towards life is the primary stuff of
which art is made; there might be a shortage of this very emotional
stuff of which art herself is ultimately compacted.
Science, then, helps to make art possible by making life safer and
easier, it "makes straight in the desert a highway for our God." But
only rarely and with special limitations easily understood does it
provide actual material for art. Science deals with abstractions,
concepts, class names, made by the intellect for convenience, that we
may handle life on the side desirable to us. When we classify things,
give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience that
certain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it is
convenient for us to know and register. These class-names being
_abstract_--that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actual
objects, do not easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easily
become material for art whose function it is to express and communicate
emotion. 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 like
horse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remains
a practical utility for science.
The abstractions, the class-names of science are in this respect quite
different from those other abstractions or unrealities already
studied--the gods of primitive religion. The very term we use shows
this. _Abstractions_ are things, qualities, _dragged away_ consciously
by the intellect, from actual things objectively existing. The primitive
gods are personifications--_i.e._ collective emotions taking shape in
imagined form. Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than the
abstract horse. But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect for
practical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, he
re-begets it. He and all the other gods are, therefore, the proper
material for art; he is, indeed, one of the earliest forms of art. The
abstract horse, on the other hand, is the outcome of reflection. We
must honour him as of quite extraordinary use for the purposes of
practical life, but he leaves us cold and, by the artist, is best
neglected.
* * * * *
There remains the relation of Art to Religion.[56] By now, it may be
hoped, this relation is transparently clear. The whole object of the
present book has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, how
art is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form of
ritual. We saw further that the primitive gods themselves were but
projections or, if we like it better, personifications of the rite. They
arose straight out of it.
Now we say advisedly "primitive gods," and this with no intention of
obscurantism. The god of later days, the unknown source of life, the
unresolved mystery of the world, is not begotten of a rite, is not,
essentially not, the occasion or object of art. With his relation to
art--which is indeed practically non-existent--we have nothing to do. Of
the other gods we may safely say that not only are they objects of art,
they are its prime material; in a word, primitive theology is an early
stage in the formation of art. Each primitive god, like the rite from
which he sprang, is a half-way house between practical life and art; he
comes into being from a half, but only half, inhibited desire.
* * * * *
Is there, then, no difference, except in degree of detachment, between
religion and art? Both have the like emotional power; both carry with
them a sense of obligation, though the obligation of religion is the
stronger. But there is one infallible criterion between the two which is
all-important, and of wide-reaching consequences. Primitive religion
asserts that her imaginations have objective existence; art more happily
makes no such claim. The worshipper of Apollo believes, not only that he
has imagined the lovely figure of the god and cast a copy of its shape
in stone, but he also believes that in the outside world the god Apollo
exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not
correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and
science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such
fictitious objectivities; they are _eidola_, idols, phantasms, not
objective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because the
worshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of _the_ reality that he and his
church or group have projected the god. He knows that _prier, c'est
élaborer Dieu_; or, as he would put it, he is "one with" his god.
Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actual
practical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists on
its actuality and objectivity.
Why does the conception of a god impose obligation? Just because and in
so far as he claims to have objective existence. By giving to his god
from the outset objective existence the worshipper prevents his god from
taking his place in that high kingdom of spiritual realities which is
the imagination, and sets him down in that lower objective world which
always compels practical reaction. What might have been an ideal becomes
an idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritual
reactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though another
and a more exacting and commanding fellow-man were added to the
universe. But a moment's reflection will show that, when we pass from
the vague sense of power or _mana_ felt by the savage to the personal
god, to Dionysos or Apollo, though it may seem a set back it is a real
advance. It is the substitution of a human and tolerably humane power
for an incalculable whimsical and often cruel force. The idol is a step
towards, not a step from, the ideal. Ritual makes these idols, and it is
the business of science to shatter them and set the spirit free for
contemplation. 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 not
be broken till the transit is made. And the time is not yet. We must not
pull down the ladder till we are sure the last angel has climbed. Only
then, at last, we dare not leave it standing. Earth pulls hard, and it
may be that the angels who ascended might _de_scend and be for ever
fallen.
* * * * *
It may be well at the close of our enquiry to test the conclusions at
which we have arrived by comparing them with certain _endoxa_, as
Aristotle would call them, that is, opinions and theories actually
current at the present moment. We take these contemporary controversies,
not implying that they are necessarily of high moment in the history of
art, or that they are in any fundamental sense new discoveries; but
because they are at this moment current and vital, and consequently form
a good test for the adequacy of our doctrines. It will be satisfactory
if we find our view includes these current opinions, even if it to some
extent 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 creation
or pursuit or enjoyment of beauty. The other view falls readily into two
groups:
(1) The "imitation" theory, with its modification, the idealization
theory, which holds that art either copies Nature, or, out of natural
materials, improves on her.
(2) The "expression" theory, which holds that the aim of art is to
express the emotions and thoughts of the artist.
The "Imitation" theory is out of fashion now-a-days. Plato and Aristotle
held it; though Aristotle, as we have seen, did not mean by "imitating
Nature" quite what we mean to-day. The Imitation theory began to die
down 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 "like
trying to make music by sitting on the piano." But, as already noted,
the Imitation theory of art was really killed by the invention of
photography. It was impossible for the most insensate not to see that in
a work of art, of sculpture or painting, there was an element of value
not to be found in the exact transcript of a photograph. Henceforth the
Imitation theory lived on only in the weakened form of Idealization.
The reaction against the Imitation theory has naturally and inevitably
gone 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 _arises
from_ ritual, and ritual is in its essence a faded action, an
imitation. Moreover, every work of art _is_ a copy of something, only
not a copy of anything having actual existence in the outside world.
Rather it is a copy of that inner and highly emotionalized vision of the
artist which it is granted to him to see and recreate when he is
released from certain practical reactions.
* * * * *
The Impressionism that dominated the pictorial art of the later years of
the nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicate
imitation. Breaking with conventions as to how things are _supposed to
be_--conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing or
imagining--the Impressionist insists on purging his vision from
knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really
_look_. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself
to his eyes. It was a most needful and valuable purgation, since
painting is the art proper of the eye. But, when the new effects of the
world as simply _seen_, the new material of light and shadow and tone,
had been to some extent--never completely--mastered, there was
inevitable reaction. Up sprang Post-Impressionists and Futurists. They
will not gladly be classed together, but both have this in common--they
are Expressionists, not Impressionists, not Imitators.
The Expressionists, no matter by what name they call themselves, have
one criterion. They believe that art is not the copying or idealizing of
Nature, or of any aspect of Nature, but the expression and communication
of the artist's emotion. We can see that, between them and the
Imitationists, the Impressionists form a delicate bridge. They, too,
focus their attention on the artist rather than the object, only it is
on the artist's particular _vision_, his impression, what he actually
sees, not on his emotion, what he feels.
Modern life is _not_ simple--cannot be simple--ought not to be; it is
not for nothing that we are heirs to the ages. Therefore the art that
utters and expresses our emotion towards modern life cannot be simple;
and, moreover, it must before all things embody not only that living
tangle which is felt by the Futurists as so real, but it must purge and
order it, by complexities of tone and rhythm hitherto unattempted. One
art, beyond all others, has blossomed into real, spontaneous,
unconscious life to-day, and that is Music; the other arts stand round
arrayed, half paralyzed, with drooping, empty hands. The nineteenth
century saw vast developments in an art that could express abstract,
unlocalized, unpersonified feelings more completely than painting or
poetry, the art of Music.
* * * * *
As a modern critic[57] has well observed: "In tone and rhythm music has
a notation for every kind and degree of action and passion, presenting
abstract 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 to
supply definite thought, arguments driving at a conclusion, ideas
mortgaged to this or that creed or system; and to give force to these
can command only a few rhythms limited by the duration of a human breath
and the pitch of an octave. The little effects worked out in this small
compass music sweeps up and builds into vast fabrics of emotion with a
dissolute freedom undreamed of in any other art."
It may be that music provides for a century too stagnant and listless to
act out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, a
shadowy pageant of sense and emotion, that serves as a _katharsis_ or
purgation.
Anyhow, "an art that came out of the old world two centuries ago, with a
few chants, love-songs, and dances; that a century ago was still tied to
the words of a mass or an opera; or threading little dance-movements
together in a 'suite,' became in the last century this extraordinary
debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or
worshipped a god, may not only ideally, but through the response of his
nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of
struggle, rapture, and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an
anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility, unheard of. An amplified
pattern of action and emotion is given: each man may fit to it what
images he will."[58]
* * * * *
If our contention throughout this book be correct the Expressionists are
in one matter abundantly right. Art, we have seen, again and again
rises by way of ritual out of emotion, out of life keenly and vividly
livid. The younger generation are always talking of life; they have a
sort of cult of life. Some of the more valorous spirits among them even
tend to disparage art that life may be the more exalted. "Stop painting
and sculping," they cry, "and go and see a football match." There you
have life! Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is the
stuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limited
notion of what life is. It must, it seems, in the first place, be
essentially physical. To sit and dream in your study is not to live. The
reason of this odd limitation is easy to see. We all think life is
especially the sort of life we are _not_ living ourselves. The
hard-worked University professor thinks that "Life" is to be found in a
French _café_; the polished London journalist looks for "Life" among the
naked Polynesians. The cult of savagery, and even of simplicity, in
every form, simply spells complex civilization and diminished physical
vitality.
The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays on
emotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of its more
elementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, in
making life and art in any sense coextensive. Art, as we have seen,
sustains and invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from these
very same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuous
reactions.
* * * * *
In another matter one section of Expressionists, the Futurists, are in
the main right. The emotion to be expressed is the emotion of to-day, or
still better to-morrow. The mimetic dance arose not only nor chiefly out
of reflection on the past; but out of either immediate joy or imminent
fear or insistent hope for the future. We are not prepared perhaps to go
all lengths, to "burn all museums" because of their contagious
corruption, though we might be prepared to "banish the nude for the
space of ten years." If there is to be any true living art, it must
arise, not from the contemplation of Greek statues, not from the revival
of folk-songs, not even from the re-enacting of Greek plays, but from a
keen emotion felt towards things and people living to-day, in modern
conditions, including, among other and deeper forms of life, the haste
and hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes.
There are artists alive to-day, strayed revellers, who wish themselves
back in the Middle Ages, who long for the time when each man would have
his house carved with a bit of lovely ornament, when every village
church had its Madonna and Child, when, in a word, art and life and
religion went hand in hand, not sharply sundered by castes and
professions. But we may not put back the clock, and, if by
differentiation we lose something, we gain much. The old choral dance on
the orchestral floor was an undifferentiated thing, it had a beauty of
its own; but by its differentiation, by the severance of artist and
actors and spectators, we have gained--the drama. We may not cast
reluctant eyes backwards; the world goes forward to new forms of life,
and the Churches of to-day must and should become the Museums of
to-morrow.
* * * * *
It is curious and instructive to note that Tolstoy's theory of Art,
though not his practice, is essentially Expressive and even approaches
the dogmas of the Futurist. Art is to him just the transmission of
personal emotion to others. It may be bad emotion or it may be good
emotion, emotion it must be. To take his simple and instructive
instance: 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 to
the wood feeling happy and light-hearted and the wolf came, and what the
wolf looked like, and how he began to be frightened. This is, according
to Tolstoy, art. Even if the boy never saw a wolf at all, if he had
really at another time been frightened, and if he was able to conjure up
fear in himself and communicate it to others--that also would be art.
The essential is, according to Tolstoy, that he should feel himself and
so represent his feeling that he communicates it to others.[59]
Art-schools, art-professionalism, art-criticism are all useless or worse
than useless, because they cannot teach a man to feel. Only life can do
that.
All art is, according to Tolstoy, good _quâ_ art that succeeds in
transmitting emotion. But there is good emotion and bad emotion, and the
only right material for art is good emotion, and the only good emotion,
the only emotion worth expressing, is subsumed, according to Tolstoy, in
the religion of the day. This is how he explains the constant affinity
in nearly all ages of art and religion. Instead of regarding religion as
an early phase of art, he proceeds to define religious perception as the
highest social ideal of the moment, as that "understanding of the
meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that
society have attained, an understanding defining the highest good at
which that society aims." "Religious perception in a society," he
beautifully adds, "is like the direction of a flowing river. If the
river flows at all, it must have a direction." Thus, religion, to
Tolstoy, is not dogma, not petrifaction, it makes indeed dogma
impossible. The religious perception of to-day flows, Tolstoi says, in
the Christian channel towards the union of man in a common brotherhood.
It is the business of the modern artist to feel and transmit emotion
towards this unity of man.
Now it is not our purpose to examine whether Tolstoy's definition of
religion is adequate or indeed illuminating. What we wish to note is
that he grasps the truth that in art we must look and feel, and look and
feel forward, not backward, if we would live. Art somehow, like
language, is always feeling forward to newer, fuller, subtler emotions.
She seems indeed in a way to feel ahead even of science; a poet will
forecast dimly what a later discovery will confirm. Whether and how long
old channels, old forms will suffice for the new spirit can never be
foreseen.
* * * * *
We end with a point of great importance, though the doctrine we would
emphasize may be to some a hard saying, even a stumbling-block. Art, as
Tolstoy divined, is social, not individual. Art is, as we have seen,
social in origin, it remains and must remain social in function. The
dance from which the drama rose was a choral dance, the dance of a band,
a group, a church, a community, what the Greeks called a _thiasos_. The
word means a _band_ and a _thing of devotion_; and reverence, devotion,
collective emotion, is social in its very being. That band was, to
begin 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 its
collective, social origin. We feel about it, as noted before, a certain
"ought" which always spells social obligation. Moreover, whenever we
have a new movement in art, it issues from a group, usually from a small
professional coterie, but marked by strong social instincts, by a
missionary spirit, by intemperate zeal in propaganda, by a tendency,
always social, to crystallize conviction into dogma. We can scarcely,
unless we are as high-hearted as Tolstoy, hope now-a-days for an art
that shall be world-wide. The tribe is extinct, the family in its old
rigid form moribund, the social groups we now look to as centres of
emotion are the groups of industry, of professionalism and of sheer
mutual attraction. Small and strange though such groups may appear, they
are 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 to
mean self-expression only--utterance of individual emotion. Utterance
of individual emotion is very closely neighboured by, is almost
identical with, self-enhancement. What should be a generous, and in part
altruistic, exaltation becomes mere _megalomania_. This egotism is, of
course, a danger inherent in all art. The suspension of motor-reactions
to the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him off from his
fellow-men, makes him in a sense an egotist. Art, said Zola, is "the
world seen through a temperament." But this suspension is, not that he
should turn inward to feed on his own vitals, but rather to free him for
contemplation. All great art releases from self.
* * * * *
The young are often temporary artists: art, being based on life, calls
for a strong vitality. The young are also self-centred and seek
self-enhancement. This need of self-expression is a sort of artistic
impulse. The young are, partly from sheer immaturity, still more through
a foolish convention, shut out from real life; they are secluded, forced
to become in a sense artists, or, if they have not the power for that,
at least self-aggrandizers. They write lyric poems, they love
masquerading, they focus life on to themselves in a way which, later
on, life itself makes impossible. This pseudo-art, this
self-aggrandizement usually dies a natural death before the age of
thirty. If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientific
attitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering the
relations of things among themselves, not their personal relation to us.
The study of science is a priceless discipline in self-abnegation, but
only 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, not
necessarily the haunting of _cafés_, or even the watching of football
matches, but strenuous activity in the simplest human relations of daily
happenings. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
* * * * *
There is always apt to be some discord between the artist and the large
practical world in which he lives, but those ages are happiest in which
the discord is least. The nineteenth century, amid its splendid
achievements in science and industry, in government and learning, and
above all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way.
To literature, an art which can explain itself, the great public world
lent on the whole a reverent and intelligent ear. Its great prose
writers were at peace with their audience and were inspired by great
public interests. Some of the greatest, for example Tolstoy, produced
their finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readers
and admirers probably by the million. Writers like Dickens, Thackeray,
Kingsley, Mill, and Carlyle, even poets like Tennyson and Browning, were
full of great public interests and causes, and, in different degrees and
at different stages of their lives, were thoroughly and immensely
popular. On the other hand, one can find, at the beginning of the
period, figures like Blake and Shelley, and all through it a number of
painters--the pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists--walking like aliens
in a Philistine world. Even great figures like Burne-Jones and Whistler
were for the greater part of their lives unrecognized or mocked at.
Millais reached the attention of the world, but was thought by the
stricter fraternity to have in some sense or other sold his soul and
committed the great sin of considering the bourgeois. The bourgeois
should be despised not partially but completely. His life, his
interests, his code of ethics and conduct must all be matters of entire
indifference or amused contempt, to the true artist who intends to do
his own true work and call his soul his own.
At a certain moment, during the eighties and nineties, it looked as if
these doctrines were generally accepted, and the divorce between art and
the community had become permanent. But it seems as if this attitude,
which coincided with a period of reaction in political matters and a
recrudescence of a belief in force and on unreasoned authority, is
already passing away. There are not wanting signs that art, both in
painting and sculpture, and in poetry and novel-writing, is beginning
again to realize its social function, beginning to be impatient of mere
individual emotion, beginning to aim at something bigger, more bound up
with a feeling towards and for the common weal.
Take work like that of Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Masefield or Mr. Arnold
Bennett. Without appraising its merits or demerits we cannot but note
that the social sense is always there, whether it be of a class or of a
whole community. In a play like _Justice_ the writer does not "express"
himself, he does not even merely show the pathos of a single human
being's destiny, he sets before us a much bigger thing--man tragically
caught and torn in the iron hands of a man-made machine, Society itself.
Incarnate Law is the protagonist, and, as it happens, the villain of the
piece. It is a fragment of _Les Misérables_ over again, in a severer and
more restrained technique. An art like this starts, no doubt, from
emotion towards personal happenings--there is nothing else from which it
can start; but, even as it sets sail for wider seas, it is loosed from
personal moorings.
Science has given us back something strangely like a World-Soul, and art
is beginning to feel she must utter our emotion towards it. Such art is
exposed to an inherent and imminent peril. Its very bigness and newness
tends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process of
creation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost in the
reformer, and the play or the novel turn tract. This does not mean that
the artist, if he is strong enough, may not be reformer too, only not at
the moment of creation.
The art of Mr. Arnold Bennett gets its bigness, its collectivity, in
part--from extension over time. Far from seeking after beauty, he almost
goes out to embrace ugliness. He does not spare us even dullness, that
we may get a sense of the long, waste spaces of life, their dreary
reality. We are keenly interested in the loves of hero and heroine, but
all the time something much bigger is going on, generation after
generation rolls by in ceaseless panorama; it is the life not of Edwin
and Hilda, it is the life of the Five Towns. After a vision so big, to
come back to the ordinary individualistic love-story is like looking
through the wrong end of a telescope.
Art of high quality and calibre is seldom obscure. The great popular
writers of the nineteenth century--Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson,
Tolstoy--wrote so that all could understand. A really big artist has
something important to say, something vast to show, something that moves
him and presses on him; and he will say it simply because he must get it
said. He will trick it out with no devices, most of all with no
obscurities. It has vexed and torn him enough while it was pushing its
way to be born. He has no peace till it is said, and said as clearly as
he may. He says it, not consciously for the sake of others, but for
himself, to ease him from the burden of big thought. Moreover, art,
whose business is to transmit emotion, should need no commentary. Art
comes out of _theoria_, contemplation, steady looking at, but never out
of _theory_. Theory can neither engender nor finally support it. An
exhibition of pictures with an explanatory catalogue, scientifically
interesting 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 collective
emotion, fashioning their own language, obscure sometimes to all but
themselves. They are right so to fashion it, but, if they appeal to a
wider 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 of
social as contrasted with merely individualistic instincts that a
younger generation of poets, at least in France, tend to form themselves
into small groups, held together not merely by eccentricities of
language or garb, but by some deep inner conviction strongly held in
common. Such a unity of spirit is seen in the works of the latter group
of thinkers and writers known as _Unanimists_. They tried and failed to
found a community. Their doctrine, if doctrine convictions so fluid can
be called, is strangely like the old group-religion of the common dance,
only more articulate. Of the Unanimist it might truly be said, "_il
buvait l'indistinction_." To him the harsh old Roman mandate _Divide et
impera_, "Divide men that you may rule them," spells death. His dream is
not of empire and personal property but of the realization of life,
common to all. To this school the great reality is the social group,
whatever form it take, family, village or town. Their only dogma is the
unity and immeasurable sanctity of life. In practice they are Christian,
yet wholly free from the asceticism of modern Christianity. Their
attitude in art is as remote as possible from, it is indeed the very
antithesis to, the æsthetic exclusiveness of the close of last century.
Like St. Peter, the Unanimists have seen a sheet let down and heard a
voice from heaven saying: "Call thou nothing common nor unclean."
Above all, the Unanimist remembers and realizes afresh the old truth
that "no man liveth unto himself." According to the Expressionist's
creed, as we have seen, the end of art is to utter and communicate
emotion. The fullest and finest emotions are those one human being feels
towards another. Every sympathy is an enrichment of life, every
antipathy a negation. It follows then, that, for the Unanimist, Love is
the fulfilling of his Law.
It is a beautiful and life-giving faith, felt and with a perfect
sincerity expressed towards all nature by the Indian poet Tagore, and
towards humanity especially by M. Vildrac in his _Book of Love_ ("Livre
d'Amour"). He tells us in his "Commentary" how to-day the poet, sitting
at home with pen and paper before him, feels that he is pent in, stifled
by himself. He had been about to re-tell the old, old story of himself,
to set himself once more on the stage of his poem--the same old dusty
self tricked out, costumed anew. Suddenly he knows the figure to be
tawdry and shameful. He is hot all over when he looks at it; he must out
into the air, into the street, out of the stuffy museum where so long
he has stirred the dead egotist ashes, out into the bigger life, the
life 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 who
has no army, the Knight who rides afoot, the Crusader without breviary
or scrip, the Pilgrim of Love who, by the shining in his eyes, draws all
men 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 the
Confession of Faith published in the catalogue of the Second
Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912, p. 21) reproduces, consciously or
unconsciously, Tolstoy's view: _We have ceased to ask, "What does this
picture 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 by
S.H. HOOKE, 1933.]
For the Greek Drama, as arising out of the ritual dance: Professor
GILBERT MURRAY'S _Excursus on the Ritual Forms preserved in Greek
Tragedy_ in J.E. HARRISON'S _Themis_, 1912, and pp. 327-40 in the same
book; and for the religion of Dionysos and the drama, J.E. HARRISON'S
_Prolegomena_, 1907, Chapters VIII and X. For the fusion of the ritual
dance and hero-worship, see W. LEAF, _Homer and History_, 1915, Chapter
VII. For a quite different view of drama as arising wholly from the
worship of the dead, see Professor W. RIDGEWAY, _The Origin of Tragedy_,
1910. An important discussion of the relation of _tragedy_ to the winter
festival 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 on
p. 129, which gives the psychological basis of a similar view of the
nature of art. My own theory was formulated independently, in relation
to the development of the Greek theatre, but I am very glad to find that
it is in substantial agreement with those of two such distinguished
authorities on æsthetics. For my later conclusions on art, see _Alpha
and 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
* * * * *
Printed in Great Britain by The Camelot Press Ltd., London and
Southampton
End of Project Gutenberg's Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane Ellen Harrison