Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

  • Jane Ellen Harrison
Date:
[1913]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    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 stum- bling-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
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