erated nerves and
muscles can bear it no longer; it breaks out into mimetic anticipatory
action. But, and this is the important point, the action is mimetic, not
of what you see done by another; but of what you desire to do yourself.
The habit of this _mimesis_ of the thing desired, is set up, and ritual
begins. Ritual, then, does imitate, but for an emotional, not an
altogether practical, end.

Plato never saw a savage war-dance or a hunt-dance or a rain-dance, and
it is not likely that, if he had seen one, he would have allowed it to
be art at all. But he must often have seen a class of performances very
similar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art. He must
have seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed up
as Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly have
claimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition. Here
were men _imitating_ birds and beasts, dressed in their skins and
feathers, mimicking their gestures. For his own days his judgment would
have been unquestionably right; but again, if we look at the beginning
of things, we find an origin and an impulse much deeper, vaguer, and
more emotional.

The beast dances found widespread over the savage world took their rise
when men really believed, what St. Francis tried to preach: that beasts
and birds and fishes were his "little brothers." Or rather, perhaps,
more strictly, he felt them to be his great brothers and his fathers,
for the attitude of the Australian towards the kangaroo, the North
American towards the grizzly bear, is one of affection tempered by deep
religious awe. The beast dances look back to that early phase of
civilization which survives in crystallized form in what we call
_totemism_. "Totem" means tribe, but the tribe was of animals as well as
men. In the Kangaroo tribe there were real leaping kangaroos as well as
men-kangaroos. The men-kangaroos when they danced and leapt did it, not
to _imitate_ kangaroos--you cannot imitate yourself--but just for
natural joy of heart because they _were_ kangaroos; they belonged to the
Kangaroo tribe, they bore the tribal marks and delighted to assert their
tribal unity. What they felt was not _mimesis_ but "participation,"
unity, and community. Later, when man begins to distinguish between
himself and his strange fellow-tribesmen, to realize that he is _not_ a
kangaroo like other kangaroos, he will try to revive his old faith, his
old sens