At the back, then, of the fact of personification lies the fact that the emotion is felt collectively, the rite is performed by a band or chorus who dance together with a common leader.  Round that leader the emotion centres.  When there is an act of Carrying-out or Bringing-in he either is himself the puppet or he carries it.  Emotion is of the whole band; drama—­doing—­tends to focus on the leader.  This leader, this focus, is then remembered, thought of, imaged; from being perceived year by year, he is finally conceived; but his basis is always in actual fact of which he is but the reflection.

Had there been no periodic festivals, personification might long have halted.  But it is easy to see that a recurrent perception helps to form a permanent abstract conception.  The different actual recurrent May Kings and “Deaths,” because they recur, get a sort of permanent life of their own and become beings apart.  In this way a conception, a kind of daimon, or spirit, is fashioned, who dies and lives again in a perpetual cycle.  The periodic festival begets a kind of not immortal, but perennial, god.

Yet the faculty of conception is but dim and feeble in the mind even of the peasant to-day; his function is to perceive the actual fact year by year, and to feel about it.  Perhaps a simple instance best makes this clear.  The Greek Church does not gladly suffer images in the round, though she delights in picture-images, eikons.  But at her great spring festival of Easter she makes, in the remote villages, concession to a strong, perhaps imperative, popular need; she allows an image, an actual idol, of the dead Christ to be laid in the tomb that it may rise again.  A traveller in Euboea[18] during Holy Week had been struck by the genuine grief shown at the Good Friday services.  On Easter Eve there was the same general gloom and despondency, and he asked an old woman why it was.  She answered:  “Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year.”

The old woman’s state of mind is fairly clear.  Her emotion is the old emotion, not sorrow for the Christ the Son of Mary, but fear, imminent fear for the failure of food.  The Christ again is not the historical Christ of Judaea, still less the incarnation of the Godhead proceeding from the Father; he is the actual figure fashioned by his village chorus and laid by the priests, the leaders of that chorus, in the local sepulchre.

* * * * *

So far, then, we have seen that the vague emotional dance tends to become a periodic rite, performed at regular intervals.  The periodic rite may occur at any date of importance to the food-supply of the community, in summer, in winter, at the coming of the annual rains, or the regular rising of a river.  Among Mediterranean peoples, both in ancient days and at the present time, the Spring Festival arrests attention.  Having learnt the general characteristics of this Spring Festival, we have now to turn to one particular case, the Spring Festival of the Greeks.  This is all-important to us because, as will be seen, from the ritual of this and kindred festivals arose, we believe, a great form of Art, the Greek drama.