Ancient Art and Ritual Part 6

Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn.

We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. A Spring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth; but all this seems, perhaps, not to bring us nearer to Greek drama, rather to put us farther away. What have the Spring and the Bull and the Birth Rite to do with the stately tragedies we know--with Agamemnon and Iphigenia and Orestes and Hippolytos? That is the question before us, and the answer will lead us to the very heart of our subject. So far we have seen that ritual arose from the presentation and emphasis of emotion--emotion felt mainly about food. We have further seen that ritual develops out of and by means of periodic festivals. One of the chief periodic festivals at Athens was the Spring Festival of the Dithyramb. Out of this Dithyramb arose, Aristotle says, tragedy--that is, out of Ritual arose Art. How and Why? That is the question before us.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] _Poetics_, IV, 12.

[20] See my _Themis_, p. 419. (1912.)

[21] I, 43. 2.

[22] _Quaest. Graec._ XII.

[23] _Op. cit._

[24] _Quaest. Symp._, 693 f.

[25] The words "in Spring-time" depend on an emendation to me convincing. See my _Themis_, p. 205, note 1.

[26] IX.

[27] See my _Themis_, p. 151.

[28] See my _Prolegomena_, p. 439.

[29] _Prolegomena_, p. 402.

[30] Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. I, p. 228.

[31] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, 424.

[32] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, 442.

[33] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, p. 438.

[34] See my _Themis_, p. 503.

CHAPTER V

TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE DROMENON ("THING DONE") AND THE DRAMA

Probably most people when they go to a Greek play for the first time think it a strange performance. According, perhaps, more to their temperament than to their training, they are either very much excited or very much bored. In many minds there will be left a feeling that, whether they have enjoyed the play or not, they are puzzled: there are odd effects, conventions, suggestions.

For example, the main deed of the Tragedy, the slaying of hero or heroine, is not done on the stage. That disappoints some modern minds unconsciously avid of realism to the point of horror. Instead of a fine thrilling murder or suicide before his very eyes, the spectator is put off with an account of the murder done off the stage. This account is regularly given, and usually at considerable length, in a "messenger's speech." The messenger's speech is a regular item in a Greek play, and though actually it gives scope not only for fine elocution, but for real dramatic effect, in theory we feel it undramatic, and a modern actor has sometimes much ado to make it acceptable. The spectator is told that all these, to him, odd conventions are due to Greek restraint, moderation, good taste, and yet for all their supposed restraint and reserve, he finds when he reads his Homer that Greek heroes frequently burst into floods of tears when a self-respecting Englishman would have suffered in silence.

Then again, specially if the play be by Euripides, it ends not with a "curtain," not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of a G.o.d who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself, strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and somehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the action does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead of beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit about the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the whole thing in the prologue. Prologues we feel, are out of date, and the Greeks ought to have known better. Or again, of course we admit that tragedy must be tragic, and we are prepared for a decent amount of lamentation, but when an antiphonal lament goes on for pages, we weary and wish that the chorus would stop lamenting and _do_ something.

At the back of our modern discontent there is lurking always this queer anomaly of the chorus. We have in our modern theatre no chorus, and when, in the opera, something of the nature of a chorus appears in the ballet, it is a chorus that really dances to amuse and excite us in the intervals of operatic action; it is not a chorus of doddering and pottering old men, moralizing on an action in which they are too feeble to join. Of course if we are cla.s.sical scholars we do not cavil at the choral songs; the extreme difficulty of scanning and construing them alone commands a traditional respect; but if we are merely modern spectators, we may be respectful, we may even feel strangely excited, but we are certainly puzzled. The reason of our bewilderment is simple enough. These prologues and messengers' speeches and ever-present choruses that trouble us are ritual forms still surviving at a time when the _drama_ has fully developed out of the _dromenon_. We cannot here examine all these ritual forms in detail;[35] one, however, the chorus, strangest and most beautiful of all, it is essential we should understand.

Suppose that these choral songs have been put into English that in any way represents the beauty of the Greek; then certainly there will be some among the spectators who get a thrill from the chorus quite unknown to any modern stage effect, a feeling of emotion heightened yet restrained, a sense of entering into higher places, filled with a larger and a purer air--a sense of beauty born clean out of conflict and disaster.

A suspicion dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies in themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange.

Now by examining this chorus and understanding its function--nay, more, by considering the actual _orchestra_, the s.p.a.ce on which the chorus danced, and the relation of that s.p.a.ce to the rest of the theatre, to the stage and the place where the spectators sat--we shall get light at last on our main central problem: How did art arise out of ritual, and what is the relation of both to that actual life from which both art and ritual sprang?

The dramas of aeschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the _theatre_, but, strange though it sounds to us, in the _orchestra_. The _theatre_ to the Greeks was simply "the place of seeing," the place where the spectators sat; what they called the skene or _scene_, was the tent or hut in which the actors dressed. But the kernel and centre of the whole was the _orchestra_, the circular _dancing-place_ of the chorus; and, as the orchestra was the kernel and centre of the theatre, so the chorus, the band of dancing and singing men--this chorus that seems to us so odd and even superfluous--was the centre and kernel and starting-point of the drama. The chorus danced and sang that Dithyramb we know so well, and from the leaders of that Dithyramb we remember tragedy arose, and the chorus were at first, as an ancient writer tells us, just men and boys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested from sowing and ploughing.

Now it is in the relation between the _orchestra_ or dancing-place of the chorus, and the _theatre_ or place of the spectators, a relation that shifted as time went on, that we see mirrored the whole development from ritual to art--from _dromenon_ to drama.

The orchestra on which the Dithyramb was danced was just a circular dancing-place beaten flat for the convenience of the dancers, and sometimes edged by a stone bas.e.m.e.nt to mark the circle. This circular orchestra is very well seen in the theatre of Epidaurus, of which a sketch is given in Fig. 1. The orchestra here is surrounded by a splendid _theatron_, or spectator place, with seats rising tier above tier. If we want to realize the primitive Greek orchestra or dancing-place, we must think these stone seats away. Threshing-floors are used in Greece to-day as convenient dancing-places. The dance tends to be circular because it is round some sacred thing, at first a maypole, or the reaped corn, later the figure of a G.o.d or his altar. On this dancing-place the whole body of worshippers would gather, just as now-a-days the whole community will a.s.semble on a village green. There is no division at first between actors and spectators; all are actors, all are doing the thing done, dancing the dance danced. Thus at initiation ceremonies the whole tribe a.s.sembles, the only spectators are the uninitiated, the women and children. No one at this early stage thinks of building a _theatre_, a spectator place. It is in the common act, the common or collective emotion, that ritual starts. This must never be forgotten.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1. Theatre of Epidaurus Showing Circular Orchestra.]

The most convenient spot for a mere dancing-place is some flat place.

But any one who travels through Greece will notice instantly that all the Greek theatres that remain at Athens, at Epidaurus, at Delos, Syracuse, and elsewhere, are built against the side of hills. None of these are very early; the earliest ancient orchestra we have is at Athens. It is a simple stone ring, but it is built against the steep south side of the Acropolis. The oldest festival of Dionysos was, as will presently be seen, held in quite another spot, in the _agora_, or market-place. The reason for moving the dance was that the wooden seats that used to be set up on a sort of "grand stand" in the market-place fell down, and it was seen how safely and comfortably the spectators could be seated on the side of a steep hill.

The spectators are a new and different element, the dance is not only danced, but it is watched from a distance, it is a spectacle; whereas in old days all or nearly all were worshippers acting, now many, indeed most, are spectators, watching, feeling, thinking, not doing. It is in this new att.i.tude of the spectator that we touch on the difference between ritual and art; the _dromenon_, the thing actually done by yourself has become a _drama_, a thing also done, but abstracted from your doing. Let us look for a moment at the psychology of the spectator, at his behaviour.

Artists, it is often said, and usually felt, are so unpractical. They are always late for dinner, they forget to post their letters and to return the books or even money that is lent them. Art is to most people's minds a sort of luxury, not a necessity. In but recently bygone days music, drawing, and dancing were no part of a training for ordinary life, they were taught at school as "accomplishments," paid for as "extras." Poets on their side equally used to contrast art and life, as though they were things essentially distinct.

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting."

Now commonplaces such as these, being unconscious utterances of the collective mind, usually contain much truth, and are well worth weighing. Art, we shall show later, is profoundly connected with life; it is nowise superfluous. But, for all that, art, both its creation and its enjoyment, is unpractical. Thanks be to G.o.d, life is not limited to the practical.

When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is _cut loose from immediate action_. Take a simple instance. A man--or perhaps still better a child--sees a plate of cherries. Through his senses comes the stimulus of the smell of the cherries, and their bright colour urging him, luring him to eat. He eats and is satisfied; the cycle of normal behaviour is complete; he is a man or a child of action, but he is no artist, and no art-lover. Another man looks at the same plate of cherries. His sight and his smell lure him and urge him to eat. 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 "aesthetic" 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.

I borrow, by his kind permission, a beautiful instance of what he well calls "Psychical Distance" from the writings of a psychologist.[36]

"Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acute unpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms of discomfort, such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements of the ship and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the pa.s.sengers; and that special, expectant tacit anxiety and nervousness, always a.s.sociated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all the more terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for the expert seafarer no less than the ignorant landsman.

"Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea-fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness; ... direct the attention to the features 'objectively' const.i.tuting the phenomena--the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypercritically denying as it were, any suggestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.

This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like the momentary switching on of some new current, or the pa.s.sing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar objects--an impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a mere spectator."