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certain. The amazing development of the fifth-century drama is just
this, the old vessel of the ritual Dithyramb filled to the full with the
new wine of the heroic _saga_; and it would seem that it was by the hand
of Peisistratos, the great democratic tyrant, that the new wine was
outpoured.
* * * * *
Such were roughly the outside conditions under which the drama of art
grew out of the _dromena_ of ritual. The racial secret of the individual
genius of AEschylus and the forgotten men who preceded him we cannot hope
to touch. We can only try to see the conditions in which they worked and
mark the splendid new material that lay to their hands. Above all things
we can see that this material, these Homeric _saga_, were just fitted
to give the needed impulse to art. The Homeric _saga_ had for an
Athenian poet just that remoteness from immediate action which, as we
have seen, is the essence of art as contrasted with ritual.
Tradition says that the Athenians fined the dramatic poet Phrynichus for
choosing as the plot of one of his tragedies the Taking of Miletus.
Probably the fine was inflicted for political party reasons, and had
nothing whatever to do with the question of whether the subject was
"artistic" or not. 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. In the case of the sorrows of others this standing back
is all too easy. We not only bear their pain with easy stoicism, but we
picture it dispassionately at a safe distance; we feel _about_ rather
than _with_ it. The trouble is that we do not feel enough. Such was the
attitude of the Athenian towards the doings and sufferings of Homeric
heroes. They stood towards them as spectators. These heroes had not the
intimate sanctity of home-grown things, but they had sufficient
traditional sanctity to make them acceptable as the material of drama.
Adequately sacred though they were, they were yet free and flexible. It
is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to
recast the myth of your local daemon--that is fixed forever--his
conflict, his _agon_, his death, his _pathos_, his Resurrection and its
heralding, his Epiphany. But the stories of Agamemnon and Achilles,
though at home these heroes were local _daimones_, have already been
variously told in their wanderings from place to place, and you can
mould them more or less to your will. Moreover, these figures are
already personal and individual, not representative puppets, mere
functionaries like the May Queen and Winter; they have life-histories of
their own, never quite to be repeated. It is in this blend of the
individual and the general, the personal and the universal, that one
element at least of all really great art will be found to lie; and just
here at Athens we get a glimpse of the moment of fusion; we see a
definite historical reason why and how the universal in _dromena_ came
to include the particular in drama. We see, moreover, how in place of
the old monotonous plots, intimately connected with actual practical
needs, we get material cut off from immediate reactions, seen as it were
at the right distance, remote yet not too remote. We see, in a word, how
a ritual enacted year by year became a work of art that was a
"possession for ever."
* * * * *
Possibly in the mind of the reader there may have been for some time a
growing discomfort, an inarticulate protest. All this about _dromena_
and drama and dithyrambs, bears and bulls, May Queens and Tree-Spirits,
even about Homeric heroes, is all very well, curious and perhaps even in
a way interesting, but it is not at all what he expected, still less
what he wants. When he bought a book with the odd incongruous title,
_Ancient Art and Ritual_, he was prepared to put up with some remarks on
the artistic side of ritual, but he did expect to be told something
about what the ordinary man calls art, that is, statues and pictures.
Greek drama is no doubt a form of ancient art, but acting is not to the
reader's mind the chief of arts. Nay, more, he has heard doubts raised
lately--and he shares them--as to whether acting and dancing, about
which so much has been said, are properly speaking arts at all. Now
about painting and sculpture there is no doubt. Let us come to business.
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.
Moreover, we come to a clear threefold distinction and division hitherto
neglected. We must at last sharply differentiate the artist, the work of
art, and the spectator. The artist may, and usually indeed does, become
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