art, a _dromenon_
became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized and
expressed by the addition of the _theatre_, or spectator-place, to the
orchestra, or dancing-place. We have also tried to analyse the meaning
of the shift. It remains to ask what was its cause. Ritual does not
always develop into art, though in all probability dramatic art has
always to go through the stage of ritual. The leap from real life to the
emotional contemplation of life cut loose from action would otherwise be
too wide. Nature abhors a leap, she prefers to crawl over the ritual
bridge. There seem at Athens to have been two main causes why the
_dromenon_ passed swiftly, inevitably, into the drama. They are, first,
the decay of religious faith; second, the influx from abroad of a new
culture and new dramatic material.

It may seem surprising to some that the decay of religious faith should
be an impulse to the birth of art. We are accustomed to talk rather
vaguely of art "as the handmaid of religion"; we think of art as
"inspired by" religion. But the decay of religious faith of which we now
speak is not the decay of faith in a god, or even the decay of some high
spiritual emotion; it is the decay of a belief in the efficacy of
certain magical rites, and especially of the Spring Rite. So long as
people believed that by excited dancing, by bringing in an image or
leading in a bull you could induce the coming of Spring, so long would
the _dromena_ of the Dithyramb be enacted with intense enthusiasm, and
with this enthusiasm would come an actual accession and invigoration of
vital force. But, once the faintest doubt crept in, once men began to be
guided by experience rather than custom, the enthusiasm would die down,
and the collective invigoration no longer be felt. Then some day there
will be a bad summer, things will go all wrong, and the chorus will
sadly ask: "Why should I dance my dance?" They will drift away or become
mere spectators of a rite established by custom. The rite itself will
die down, or it will live on only as the May Day rites of to-day, a
children's play, or at best a thing done vaguely "for luck."

The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the rite
itself, the actual mould, persists, and it is this ancient ritual mould,
foreign to our own usage, that strikes us to-day, when a Greek play is
revived, as odd and perhaps chill. A _chorus_, a band of dancers there
must be, because the drama a