But we must never forget that ritual is the bridge by which man passes, the ladder by which he climbs from earth to heaven.  The bridge must not be broken till the transit is made.  And the time is not yet.  We must not pull down the ladder till we are sure the last angel has climbed.  Only then, at last, we dare not leave it standing.  Earth pulls hard, and it may be that the angels who ascended might descend and be for ever fallen.

* * * * *

It may be well at the close of our enquiry to test the conclusions at which we have arrived by comparing them with certain endoxa, as Aristotle would call them, that is, opinions and theories actually current at the present moment.  We take these contemporary controversies, not implying that they are necessarily of high moment in the history of art, or that they are in any fundamental sense new discoveries; but because they are at this moment current and vital, and consequently form a good test for the adequacy of our doctrines.  It will be satisfactory if we find our view includes these current opinions, even if it to some extent modifies them and, it may be hoped, sets them in a new light.

We have already considered the theory that holds art to be the creation or pursuit or enjoyment of beauty.  The other view falls readily into two groups: 

(1) The “imitation” theory, with its modification, the idealization theory, which holds that art either copies Nature, or, out of natural materials, improves on her.

(2) The “expression” theory, which holds that the aim of art is to express the emotions and thoughts of the artist.

The “Imitation” theory is out of fashion now-a-days.  Plato and Aristotle held it; though Aristotle, as we have seen, did not mean by “imitating Nature” quite what we mean to-day.  The Imitation theory began to die down with the rise of Romanticism, which stressed the personal, individual emotion of the artist.  Whistler dealt it a rude, ill-considered blow by his effective, but really foolish and irrelevant, remark that to attempt to create Art by imitating Nature was “like trying to make music by sitting on the piano.”  But, as already noted, the Imitation theory of art was really killed by the invention of photography.  It was impossible for the most insensate not to see that in a work of art, of sculpture or painting, there was an element of value not to be found in the exact transcript of a photograph.  Henceforth the Imitation theory lived on only in the weakened form of Idealization.

The reaction against the Imitation theory has naturally and inevitably gone much too far.  We have “thrown out the child with the bath-water.”  All through the present book we have tried to show that art arises from ritual, and ritual is in its essence a faded action, an imitation.  Moreover, every work of art is a copy of something, only not a copy of anything having actual existence in the outside world.  Rather it is a copy of that inner and highly emotionalized vision of the artist which it is granted to him to see and recreate when he is released from certain practical reactions.