had
given them such cause for merry-making, and they caught leaves from the
vine and twined them in their hair, and from the fig-tree and the
fir-tree they snatched branches, and waved them this way and that, as
they danced, in honour of him who was lord of these trees and of this
wondrous vine. Thereafter this dance of joy became a custom, ever to be
observed at certain periods of the year. It took on, beneath its
joyousness, a formal solemnity. It was danced slowly around an altar of
stone, whereon wood and salt were burning--burning with little flames
that were pale in the sunlight. Formal hymns were chanted around this
altar. And some youth, clad in leopard's skin and wreathed with ivy,
masqueraded as the god himself, and spoke words appropriate to that
august character. It was from these beginnings that sprang the art-form
of drama. The Greeks never hid the origin of this their plaything.
Always in the centre of the theatre was the altar to Dionysus; and the
chorus, circling around it, were true progeny of those old agrestic
singers; and the mimes had never been but for that masquerading youth.
It is hard to realise, yet it is true, that we owe to the worship of
Dionysus so dreary a thing as the modern British drama. Strange that
through him who gave us the juice of the grape, 'fiery, venerable,
divine,' came this gift too! Yet I dare say the chorus of a musical
comedy would not be awestruck--would, indeed, 'bridle'--if one unrolled
to them their illustrious pedigree.

The history of the Dionysiac dance has a fairly exact parallel in that
of the 'Morisco.' Each dance has travelled far, and survives, shorn of
its explicitly religious character, and in many other ways 'diablement
change' en route.' The 'Morisco,' of course, has changed the less of
the two. Besides the scarves and the bells, it seemed to me last
May-day that the very steps danced and figures formed were very like to
those of which I had read, and which I had seen illustrated in old
English and French engravings. Above all, the dancers seemed to retain,
despite their seriousness, something of the joy in which the dance
originated. They frowned as they footed it, but they were evidently
happy. Their frowns did but betoken determination to do well and
rightly a thing that they loved doing--were proud of doing. The smiles
of the chorus in a musical comedy seem but to express depreciation of a
rather tedious and ridiculous exercise. The coryphe'es are quit