s, it ends not with a
"curtain," not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of
a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or
reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself,
strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and
somehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long
dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the
action does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead of
beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit
about the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the whole
thing in the prologue. Prologues we feel, are out of date, and the
Greeks ought to have known better. Or again, of course we admit that
tragedy must be tragic, and we are prepared for a decent amount of
lamentation, but when an antiphonal lament goes on for pages, we weary
and wish that the chorus would stop lamenting and _do_ something.

* * * * *

At the back of our modern discontent there is lurking always this queer
anomaly of the chorus. We have in our modern theatre no chorus, and
when, in the opera, something of the nature of a chorus appears in the
ballet, it is a chorus that really dances to amuse and excite us in the
intervals of operatic action; it is not a chorus of doddering and
pottering old men, moralizing on an action in which they are too feeble
to join. Of course if we are classical scholars we do not cavil at the
choral songs; the extreme difficulty of scanning and construing them
alone commands a traditional respect; but if we are merely modern
spectators, we may be respectful, we may even feel strangely excited,
but we are certainly puzzled. The reason of our bewilderment is simple
enough. These prologues and messengers' speeches and ever-present
choruses that trouble us are ritual forms still surviving at a time when
the _drama_ has fully developed out of the _dromenon_. We cannot here
examine all these ritual forms in detail;[35] one, however, the chorus,
strangest and most beautiful of all, it is essential we should
understand.

Suppose that these choral songs have been put into English that in any
way represents the beauty of the Greek; then certainly there will be
some among the spectators who get a thrill from the chorus quite unknown
to any modern stage effect, a feeling of emotion heightened yet
restrained, a