Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/225

 spectacles was carried still farther by Phrynichus ( 512), who made this actor play female parts for the first time. Meanwhile the chorus itself was becoming more flexible; the old chorus of Satyrs, the appropriate accompaniment of the Bacchic festival, was being displaced by choruses suited to the particular subject of the play, and in the time of Chœrilus (524 ) the Satyric drama seems to have been separated from regular tragedy. Thus, on the one hand, the old group of worshippers are being gradually transformed into a group personage with a general character conformable to the particular play, while, on the other hand, the individual actor is introducing dramatic personality distinct from groups or abstract personages. The Bacchic festal costume of the actors, their "stiff angular movements," their tragic masks, the monotonous kind of chant in which the dialogue is rather sung than spoken, may remind us still of theatres so slightly developed as the Japanese, but the progress of dialogue and character is rapidly carrying us towards a dramatic region into which Japanese, Chinese, and even Indian dramatists, compared with the Athenian masters, have hardly ever penetrated. For the Athenian dramatists, becoming secular artists instead of religious teachers, are learning to depict personality with all its shades of thought and sentiment even through the hackneyed heroic personages of their sacred spectacle, and the vigorous growth of Athenian life is beginning to supply them, perhaps unconsciously, with new types of human nature.

But though the, or character-drawing of individuals, marks the master-hand of the Athenian