Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/201

Rh customs of many peoples who have become civilised, the practice is one which must have its interest for members of the Folk-Lore Society; and the conjecture that it is in the wearing of masks that the Greek drama had its origin is one which the Folk-Lore Society is especially qualified to appraise.

I have said that masks were worn by the performers in all three kinds of the Greek drama—the tragic, the comic, and the satyric, and were never worn by any other kind of chorus than the chorus of drama. That is my first point. My second point is that in ancient Greece, while some choruses consisted of women and girls and some of men only, the choruses which consisted of male members alone, alone wore masks, and alone gave dramatic performances. Thus we have another and a very significant difference which marks off the chorus of drama from every other kind of chorus that performed in ancient Greece. The choruses from which women were excluded were the choruses which wore and had always worn masks. Custom, from time immemorial, had prescribed that men alone had the right of wearing masks. That is a right which is jealously guarded by the men of all tribes to whom masks are known, and it was a right maintained by the Greek man even to the highest point reached by his most glorious civilisation. That, then, is the third point which I desire to make: the prescriptive right in Greece of men alone to wear masks indicates that the wearing of masks in ancient civilised Greece is the continuance of a custom dating back to times when the forefathers of the Greeks were yet savages.

I repeat that in Greece, though women were allowed to sing in chorus, they never wore masks and never acted. Masks and acting in Greece were inseparable; there was no acting without masks, and there were no masks without acting. To wear a mask was to act a part; and the idea that it was even possible to act a part or to perform in a