742 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns to Apollo ; 

 and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating 

 their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. 

 Modern civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than 

 ever, has mostly cut off the sacred dance. To see this near its old 

 state, the traveler may visit the temples of India, or among the 

 lamas of Thibet watch the mummers in animal masks dancing 

 the demons out, or the new year in, to wild music of drums and 

 shell trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies, come down from 

 the religion of England before Christian times, are still sometimes 

 to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the midsummer 

 bonfire, or of the mummers at Yuletide; but even these are 

 dying out." 



The writers on the origin of the drama derive the tragedy of 

 Greece, and indeed the dramatic art of the world, from simple 

 mimetic dances, such as Tylor has described, which are found 

 among all savage races. As Ellen Russell Emerson has said, in 

 her curious book, Masks, Heads, and Faces : " Panoplied with the 

 mask, representative of deity, the actor in religious rite with care- 

 ful step moved in the order of the ceremonial. In the Innuit robe 

 of evergreen boughs, or in the garment of tufted grass of the 

 Dorian mummer, his countenance disguised with lees of wine or 

 painted with ochre, he danced in enthusiastic mimicry of his 

 divinity. Innuit or Greek, the same aspirations attuned the cith- 

 ara or drum, the same ambition dictated the wild or solemn move- 

 ment. Wheeling in weird rotation, the Selenii and satyr encir- 

 cled the blazing altar on the plains of Greece. The citharist 

 struck the measures which the mimic gestures of the chorus em- 

 phasized. Springtime, autumn, or winter, these wild ceremonies 

 were performed in praise or appeal to the gods, in the lands of the 

 East and of the West; with both peoples the principal object 

 was to anthropomorphize the divinity dwelling in air or earth. 

 Holding forth innumerable arms of appeal, barbaric Indian and 

 barbaric Greek called on the coming of the gods." 



If now we pause for a moment to consider the conditions of 

 primitive society, we shall see that they were not such as to favor 

 the cultivation of the independent arts, like sculpture and paint- 

 ing, or even architecture. The playtime of primitive man was 

 not long enough for this. But the recurrent festival, celebrating 

 some exploit in the chase or in war, or commemorating some de- 

 parted chief, would furnish an occasion toward which men would 

 look, for which they would prepare, and in which they would ex- 

 perience that pleasure which the excitement of a crowd affords, 

 especially to the dependent mind, without resources of its own. 

 Accordingly, it is in the festival that we must seek for those con- 

 ditions in which early art was developed, and we shall find that 



