but it is not that it may lead on to a practical further end.  The end of art is in itself.  Its value is not mediate but immediate.  Thus ritual makes, as it were, a bridge between real life and art, a bridge over which in primitive times it would seem man must pass.  In his actual life he hunts and fishes and ploughs and sows, being utterly intent on the practical end of gaining his food; in the dromenon of the Spring Festival, though his acts are unpractical, being mere singing and dancing and mimicry, his intent is practical, to induce the return of his food-supply.  In the drama the representation may remain for a time the same, but the intent is altered:  man has come out from action, he is separate from the dancers, and has become a spectator.  The drama is an end in itself.

* * * * *

We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became 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.”