THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS 13

more childlike, and more reasonable. He was Dionysus the
liberator of men from Promethean chains.

Priests prepared his sanctuary as a screen to exhibit
the vision of the music-borne god—for the act of a god sound-
ing himself in the depth of matter is harmony in time, and
matter being thus played upon is music taking formasa vis-
ion—a screen to intercept and render intelligible his word
of hght Dionysus’music was thus the seed of his life planted
in the people of his precinct, whose fruit was the vision
of the god himself spread as their sacramental feast. In this
vision Dionysus, entoned by his priests as the “life-giver,”
would come to revivify in his precinct the divine scene,
conjuring the. time when men had once walked with their
gods, a scene which, though mere imitation, was a true ar-
tistic medium for the double-natured god-man to root his
vine. His “scene,’” accordingly, was no scene of man’s own con-
trivance or familiarity. Man’s natural, Promethean scene
is the landscape of infinite matter, space unbounded and un-
godly, a shifting ground without sure place howeversofar pene-
trated. The god’s precinct would be a fixed point, a place of
return, a sun around whence the universe could be moved.

Dionysus was the sacrament that purged the spectator-
Teasters of their enslavement to the Promethean world. He
was their purifier. His wine was their new blood. He delivered
them from the Titan curse of brotherhood. He reconciled them
to the paternal order and placed them in a state of grace to
receive the luminous Olympian crown. Dionysus came with a
long line of heroes who brought Olympian gifts to weath Pro-
metheus’ work for man. They bestowed the higher Self, the
human ego’s proper desire, rational social order, which, like
light, is external to things but discriminates and encompasses
all in its unity; and they planted the roots of rational sci-
ence as its eternal and true theology.

The Athenian audience therefore expected from tragic
drama the real gain that they required from all art. Art was
for them the bridge to the higher, sacramental man. In this,