, we get material cut off from immediate reactions, seen as it were
at the right distance, remote yet not too remote. We see, in a word, how
a 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 a
growing 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 in
a way interesting, but it is not at all what he expected, still less
what 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 on
the artistic side of ritual, but he did expect to be told something
about 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 the
reader's mind the chief of arts. Nay, more, he has heard doubts raised
lately--and he shares them--as to whether acting and dancing, about
which so much has been said, are properly speaking arts at all. Now
about painting and sculpture there is no doubt. Let us come to business.

To a business so beautiful and pleasant as Greek sculpture we shall
gladly come, but a word must first be said to explain the reason of our
long delay. The main contention of the present book is that ritual and
art have, in emotion towards life, a common root, and further, that
primitive art develops normally, at least in the case of the drama,
straight out of ritual. The nature of that primitive ritual from which
the drama arose is not very familiar to English readers. It has been
necessary to stress its characteristics. Almost everywhere, all over the
world, it is found that primitive ritual consists, not in prayer and
praise and sacrifice, but in mimetic dancing. But it is in Greece, and
perhaps Greece only, in the religion of Dionysos, that we can actually
trace, if dimly, the transition steps that led from dance to drama, from
ritual to art. It was, therefore, of the first importance to realize the
nature of the dithyramb from which the drama rose, and so far as might
be 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 of
which she sprang