ere,
too, there is a leader. More and more this dance becomes a spectacle,
less and less an action. Then from the periodic _dromenon_, the ritual
enacted year by year, emerges an imagined permanent leader; a daemon, or
god--a Dionysos, an Apollo, an Athena. Finally the account of what
actually happens is thrown into the past, into a remote distance, and we
have an "aetiological" myth--a story told to give a cause or reason. The
whole natural process is inverted.

And last, as already seen, the god, the first work of art, the thing
unseen, imagined out of the ritual of the dance, is cast back into the
visible world and fixed in space. Can we wonder that a classical
writer[49] should say "the statues of the craftsmen of old times are the
relics of ancient dancing." That is just what they are, rites caught and
fixed 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 the
dance 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 truth
will 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 classical
sculpture are always imaged in human shape. This was not of course
always the case with other nations. We have seen how among savages the
totem, that is, the emblem of tribal unity, was usually an animal or a
plant. We have seen how the emotions of the Siberian tribe in Saghalien
focussed on a bear. The savage totem, the Saghalien Bear, is on the way
to be, but is not quite, a god; he is not personal enough. The
Egyptians, and in part the Assyrians, halted half-way and made their
gods into monstrous shapes, half-animal, half-man, which have their own
mystical grandeur. But since we are men ourselves, feeling human
emotion, if our gods are in great part projected emotions, the natural
form for them to take is human shape.

"Art imitates Nature," says Aristotle, in a phrase that has been much
misunderstood. It has been taken to mean that art is a copy or
reproduction of natural objects. But by "Nature" Aristotle never means
the outside world of created things, he means rathe