Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/223

 the gradual subordination of the chorus to the actors in the development of the drama, the small number of the actors, the use of masks and splendid dresses, the "statuesque immobility of the actors," the "intonation of the recitative," the representation of several plays in succession, have all their parallels in the famous drama of Athens. The chorus, as is well known, with its combination of dance, and song, and melody, and mimetic action, makes the central figure of the Athenian drama, the figure round which the rude beginnings of that drama take their rise and whose disapperance heralds its decay. Some of the leading differences between the dramas of modern Europe and that of Athens may be attributed to the choral and lyric source of the latter contrasted with the early predominance of dialogue in the former; and it is to be remembered that this Athenian chorus carries us back to those choral songs in which we have previously found the beginnings of literature. When we trace the rise of the Attic drama from sacred mysteries in which priests and priestesses acted the story of Demeter and Cora, or from the betrothal of the second archon's wife to Dionysus at the Anthesteria, or from such festival rites as that in which a maiden "representing one of the nymphs in the train of Dionysus" is pursued by a priest "bearing a hatchet and personating a being hostile to the god," we must not forget that the choral song carries us back from the adult city community of Athens to the village festivals of early Attica. If the ethical ideas of the Athenian drama take their rise, as we have already seen, from the village community and clan, so also does the choral form. The chorus in the rapid progress of Athenian life and art is far more interesting than in the comparatively stationary