gladness blends with the native melancholy of the theme in a most delicate harmony. An analogous combination was present in the more robust and somewhat coarser ritual of Dionysus. And, as the waking-dream which haunts the play-time of a gifted child reflects the colours of reality, so that his likings and aversions, the habits of his daily round, his tasks and penalties, his simple but awe-stricken imaginations of worlds beyond his own, are mirrored in the prompt imaginings to which "the little actor frames his part," so the worshipper of Iacchus, exhilarated at once and awed in representing to himself the sufferings of the god, threw more and more of human experience into the work.
Thus winning an outlet for itself, and claiming all things for its food, the strong imaginative tendency acquired new forces.
I. And, first, tragedy proper became differentiated from the satyr-drama.
The springs of joy and grief lay near together in the orgiastic ecstasy, and, at first, what we should call tragic and comic elements were confused. But some exceptional spirit, touched to finer issues than the rest, and finding a peculiar charm in the tones which expressed human struggle and sorrow, desired to have them freed from the grosser elements, and varied from the conventional limitations that threatened to choke their music. From such beginnings we may imagine the tragic poet to have gradually become conscious of his peculiar function—that of stirring and soothing men by idealising for them the sadness of human life.
"I come no more to make you laugh; things now
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high and working, full of state and woe,
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,
We now present; those that can pity, here
May, if they think it well, let fall a tear:
The subject will deserve it."
Yet the vein of rustic naïveté was not wholly
