Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/145

 the close union of song, instrumental music, dance and mimetic action in early Greece.

As the dancer speaking the epilogue at the end of Shakspere's Henry IV., Part II, or the allegorical herald Rumour "painted full of tongues" at the beginning of the same play, or the Vice "with his dagger of lath" in Twelfth Night, or the Shaksperian clowns with their tag-ends of popular songs, carry us back to the rude beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, so in these choral dance-songs we may see survivals from the rude efforts of literary art in early Greece. How far these combinations of dance, and song, and symbolic gesture were infant dramas our scanty means of information do not now enable us to decide. But we are by no means left to picture their nature from choral songs of early Greeks alone. Among the Hebrews, for example, we find a similar connection between music, dance, violent gesticulation, and choral song. Early Hebrew, like early Greek song, discloses itself in the form of the choral lyric. Indeed, the dance-song seems to have occupied a more prominent place in Hebrew than in Greek literature, just as the clan and tribe retained a stronger hold on Hebrew than on Greek life.

From the days of tribal and local worship to those in which the centralised religion of Yahveh had cast its shadow over old local associations and traditions, the dance-song is the choral hymn of Israel. Thus, in the early days of tribal federalism, at the feast of Yahveh held from year to year in Shiloh, the maidens of the town come out to "dance in the dances;" and, long after the worship of Yahveh has been centralised and organised, his worshippers are exhorted in one of the choral lyrics collected in the books of psalms "to praise