even begin to
suspect they may have a common origin. We have now to ask, what is it
that links art and ritual so closely together, what have they in common?
Do they start from the same impulse, and if so why do they, as they
develop, fall so widely asunder?

It will clear the air if we consider for a moment what we mean by art,
and also in somewhat greater detail what we mean by ritual.

* * * * *

Art, Plato[3] tells us in a famous passage of the _Republic_, is
imitation; the artist imitates natural objects, which are themselves in
his philosophy but copies of higher realities. All the artist can do is
to make a copy of a copy, to hold up a mirror to Nature in which, as he
turns it whither he will, "are reflected sun and heavens and earth and
man," anything and everything. Never did a statement so false, so
wrong-headed, contain so much suggestion of truth--truth which, by the
help of analysing ritual, we may perhaps be able to disentangle. But
first its falsehood must be grasped, and this is the more important as
Plato's misconception in modified form lives on to-day. A painter not
long ago thus defined his own art: "The art of painting is the art of
imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments." A
sorry life-work! Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close and
realistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if not
slain, that error; but many people still regard art as a sort of
improvement on or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the part of the
artist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature, and
from these to build up, as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps,
only by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to
ritual that we come to see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception.

Take the representations of Osiris that we have just described--the
mummy rising bit by bit from his bier. Can any one maintain that art is
here a copy or imitation of reality? However "realistic" the painting,
it represents a thing imagined not actual. There never was any such
person as Osiris, and if there had been, he would certainly never, once
mummified, have risen from his tomb. There is no question of fact, and
the copy of fact, in the matter. Moreover, had there been, why should
anyone desire to make a copy of natural fact? The whole "imitation"
theory, to which, and to the element of truth it contains, we sha