?

The answer is simple--

The object of this book, as stated in the preface, is to try to throw
some light on the function of art, that is on what it has done, and
still does to-day, for life. Now in the case of a complex growth like
art, it is rarely if ever possible to understand its function--what it
does, how it works--unless we know something of how that growth began,
or, if its origin is hid, at least of the simpler forms of activity that
preceded it. For art, this earlier stage, this simpler form, which is
indeed itself as it were an embryo and rudimentary art, we found to
be--ritual.

Ritual, then, has not been studied for its own sake, still less for its
connection with any particular dogma, though, as a subject of singular
gravity and beauty, ritual is well worth a lifetime's study. It has been
studied because ritual is, we believe, a frequent and perhaps universal
transition stage between actual life and that peculiar contemplation of
or emotion towards life which we call art. All our long examination of
beast-dances, May-day festivals and even of Greek drama has had just
this for its object--to make clear that art--save perhaps in a few
specially gifted natures--did not arise straight out of life, but out
of that collective emphasis of the needs and desires of life which we
have agreed to call ritual.

* * * * *

Our formal argument is now over and ritual may drop out of the
discussion. But we would guard against a possible misunderstanding. We
would not be taken to imply that ritual is obsolete and must drop out of
life, giving place to the art it has engendered. It may well be that,
for certain temperaments, ritual is a perennial need. Natures specially
gifted can live lives that are emotionally vivid, even in the rare high
air of art or science; but many, perhaps most of us, breathe more freely
in the _medium_, literally the _midway_ space, of some collective
ritual. Moreover, for those of us who are not artists or original
thinkers the life of the imagination, and even of the emotions, has been
perhaps too long lived at second hand, received from the artist ready
made and felt. To-day, owing largely to the progress of science, and a
host of other causes social and economic, life grows daily fuller and
freer, and every manifestation of life is regarded with a new reverence.
With this fresh outpouring of the spirit, this fuller consciousness of
life, there comes a need