To a business so beautiful and pleasant as Greek sculpture we shall gladly come, but a word must first be said to explain the reason of our long delay. The main contention of the present book is that ritual and art have, in emotion towards life, a common root, and further, that primitive art develops normally, at least in the case of the drama, straight out of ritual. The nature of that primitive ritual from which the drama arose is not very familiar to English readers. It has been necessary to stress its characteristics. Almost everywhere, all over the world, it is found that primitive ritual consists, not in prayer and praise and sacrifice, but in mimetic dancing. But it is in Greece, and perhaps Greece only, in the religion of Dionysos, that we can actually trace, if dimly, the transition steps that led from dance to drama, from ritual to art. It was, therefore, of the first importance to realize the nature of the dithyramb from which the drama rose, and so far as might be to mark the cause and circumstances of the transition. Leaving the drama, we come in the next chapter to Sculpture; and here, too, we shall see how closely art was shadowed by that ritual out of which she sprang. FOOTNOTES: [35] See Bibliography at end for Professor Murray's examination. [36] Mr. Edward Bullough, _The British Journal of Psychology_ (1912), p. 88. [37] II, 15. [38] See my _Themis_, p. 289, and _Prolegomena_, p. 35. [39] _De Cupid. div._ 8. [40] V, 66. [41] _Athen._, VIII, ii, 334 f. See my _Prolegomena_, p. 54. [42] Thanks to Mr. H.M. Chadwick's _Heroic Age_ (1912). CHAPTER VI GREEK SCULPTURE: THE PANATHENAIC FRIEZE AND THE APOLLO BELVEDERE In passing from the drama to Sculpture we make a great leap. We pass from the living thing, the dance or the play acted by real people, the thing _done_, whether as ritual or art, whether _dromenon_ or _drama_, to the thing _made_, cast in outside material rigid form, a thing that can be looked at again and again, but the making of which can never actually be re-lived whether by artist or spectator.