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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would not be taken to imply that ritual is obsolete and must drop out of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
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