We see now why in the history of all ages and every place art is what is called the “handmaid of religion.”  She is not really the “handmaid” at all.  She springs straight out of the rite, and her first outward leap is the image of the god.  Primitive art in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria,[47] represents either rites, processions, sacrifices, magical ceremonies, embodied prayers; or else it represents the images of the gods who spring from those rites.  Track any god right home, and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath, from which he slowly emerges, first as a daemon, or spirit, of the year, then as a full-blown divinity.

* * * * *

In Chapter II we saw how the dromenon gave birth to the drama, how, bit by bit, out of the chorus of dancers some dancers withdrew and became spectators sitting apart, and on the other hand others of the dancers drew apart on to the stage and presented to the spectators a spectacle, a thing to be looked at, not joined in.  And we saw how in this spectacular mood, this being cut loose from immediate action, lay the very essence of the artist and the art-lover.  Now in the drama of Thespis there was at first, we are told, but one actor; later AEschylus added a second.  It is clear who this actor, this protagonist or “first contender” was, the one actor with the double part, who was Death to be carried out and Summer to be carried in.  He was the Bough-Bearer, the only possible actor in the one-part play of the renewal of life and the return of the year.

* * * * *

The May-King, the leader of the choral dance gave birth not only to the first actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the god, be he Dionysos or be he Apollo; and this figure of the god thus imagined out of the year-spirit was perhaps more fertile for art than even the protagonist of the drama.  It may seem strange to us that a god should rise up out of a dance or a procession, because dances and processions are not an integral part of our national life, and do not call up any very strong and instant emotion.  The old instinct lingers, it is true, and emerges at critical moments; when a king dies we form a great procession to carry him to the grave, but we do not dance.  We have court balls, and these with their stately ordered ceremonials are perhaps the last survival of the genuinely civic dance, but a court ball is not given at a king’s funeral nor in honour of a god.

But to the Greek the god and the dance were never quite sundered.  It almost seems as if in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers there lingered some dim half-conscious remembrance that some of these gods at least actually came out of the ritual dance.  Thus, Plato,[48] in treating of the importance of rhythm in education says:  “The gods, pitying the toilsome race of men, have appointed the sequence of religious festivals to give them times of rest, and have given them the Muses and Apollo, the Muse-Leader, as fellow-revellers.”