Ancient Art and Ritual

by Jane Ellen Harrison

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.