Jane Ellen Harrison

“ The distinction between art and ritual, which has so long haunted and puzzled us, now comes out quite clearly, and also in part the relation of each to actual life. Ritual, we saw, was a re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life, but,—and this is the important point,—always with a practical end. Art is also a representation of life and the emotions of life, but cut loose from immediate action. Action may be and often is represented, but it is not that it may lead on to a practical further end. The end of art is in itself. ”

“ Through the twisted streets of modern Athens the beautiful Tower of the Winds is his constant land-mark; Hadrian, with his Olympieion, with his triumphal Arch, with his Library, confronts him at every turn; when he goes to the great [2] Stadion to see ‘Olympian’ games or a revived ‘Antigone,’ when he looks down from the Acropolis into the vast Odeion, Herodes Atticus cannot well be forgotten. Moreover, if he really cares to know what Athens was in Roman days, the scholar can leave behind him his Murray and his Baedeker and take for his only guide the contemporary of Hadrian, Pausanias. ”

“ Are not man and wife the primitive unit of civilisation? From the primitive pair, you will urge, arises the family, from the family the tribe, from the tribe the state, from the state the nation, from the nation the federation, from the federation the brotherhood of all humanity. Alas, alas! To the roots of that fair Family Tree, whose leaves were for the healing of the nations, anthropology, sociology, and psychology have combined to lay the axe. ”

“ Man, on the other hand, is by nature apt for society. He is naturally drawn to artificial associations made, not under the compulsion of sex, but by free choice, through sympathy, equality of age, similarity of temperament. Woman is the eternal guardian and champion of the union of the sexes. She sets her face always against comradeship, against the free association of equals, which leads to advanced social complexes, to clubs, brotherhoods, artificial societies of every sort. In fact, broadly speaking, woman is of the individualistic instincts; man is of the herd-sentiments. ”

“ The Impressionism that dominated the pictorial art of the later years of the nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicate imitation. Breaking with conventions as to how things are supposed to be—conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing or imagining—the Impressionist insists on purging his vision from knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really look. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself to his eyes. It was a most needful and valuable purgation, since painting is the art proper of the eye. ”

“ There is always the practical side. The artist is always also a man. Now the æsthete tries to make his whole attitude artistic—that is, contemplative. He is always looking and prying and savouring, savourant, as he would say, when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to savourer. All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towards life, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional reality in the spectator. The æsthete leads at best a parasite, artistic life, dogged always by death and corruption. ”

“ Sex, then, like other strong instincts, is anti-social and individualistic. In its primal form it induces, perhaps more than any other instinct, pugnacity; in its later and more diffused form, as the emotion of love, it is exclusive through its intensity of focus.
Now, this intensity of focus, this egotism, is often confused with altruism, and is labelled "Devotion to another." Society, it will be urged, may suffer from the exclusiveness of sex, but is it not ennobled by the spectacle of utter self-devotion, the devotion of the lover to his mistress, of the wife to her husband. ”

“ A man’s ghost when he dies does not abide in its grave ready to rise at springtime and help the seeds to sprout; it goes to a remote and shadowy region, a common, pan-Hellenic Hades. And so with the gods themselves; they are cut clean from earth and from the local bits of earth out of which they grew—the sacred trees and holy stones and rivers and still holier beasts. There is not a holy Bull to be found in all Olympus, only figures of men, bright and vivid and intensely personal, like so many glorified, transfigured Homeric heroes. ”

“ Dare we say as much of "woman"? The whole Woman's Movement is, to my mind, just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man's prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman's privilege of womanhood: it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity. On the banners of every suffrage society, one motto, and one only, should be blazoned ”

“ He does not eat; the cycle is not completed, and, because he does not eat, the sight of those cherries, though perhaps not the smell, is altered, purified from desire, and in some way intensified, enlarged. If he is just a man of taste, he will take what we call an “æsthetic” pleasure in those cherries. If he is an actual artist, he will paint not the cherries, but his vision of them, his purified emotion towards them. He has, so to speak, come out from the chorus of actors, of cherry-eaters, and become a spectator. ”

“ Sex, we have found, is a splendid and vital instinct with a singular power of inter-penetrating and reinforcing other energies. But it is an instinct that has for its attendant characteristics, among primitive peoples, pugnacity, in later civilisation, intense egotism. Always and everywhere it tends to be exclusive and individualistic. This exclusiveness of sex seems permanently and inexorably imposed by ineluctable nature. Now, if the object of life were the reproduction, the handing on of life, we should say, and rightly say, to woman: "Be womanly: be wife and mother." ”

“ But the story may stand, and indeed was later understood to be, a sort of allegory as to the attitude of art towards life. To understand and still more to contemplate life you must come out from the choral dance of life and stand apart. In the case of one’s own sorrows, be they national or personal, this is all but impossible. We can ritualize our sorrows, but not turn them into tragedies. We cannot stand back far enough to see the picture; we want to be doing, or at least lamenting. ”

“ The institution of the Man's House was unquestionably an advance in civilisation; but what is good for a time is not therefore good for all time. The full reasons for its breakdown are too complex for discussion here, but one cause of inadequacy is clear. Good and useful though the Man's House was for man, it left out half of humanity, woman. It civilised man by releasing him from sex, or, rather, by balancing his sex instincts which gather round his home with his "herd" instincts, his comradeship which centred round the Man's House. ”