CHAPTER XXVI
PAGEANTRY AS A COMMUNITY RESOURCE
The swiftly awakening artistic energies of the Country Girl are finding an outlet in the new national interest in pageantry. The farm, meadow or field makes an ideal stage.
The swiftly awakening artistic energies of the Country Girl are finding still another outlet in the new national interest in pageantry.
Now that we realize our puritanic mistake about the God-given powers for artistic enjoyment, we are taking to our heart the ravishing delight that the quick and vivid sense of beauty can yield. The pageant is one expression of this; along with Old Home week, and other celebrations of local history, it is also a blossoming of our quickening historic sense. We see that there is a great deal of education to be found in the pageant itself, and a great deal of community spirit in the making and in the representing of this form of dramatic art.
The pageant is a form of drama in which the greatest freedom is allowed as to the dimensions of the stage, the number of the actors, and all the provisions of properties and scenery. Instead of a constricted box-like compartment such as the audience faces in the usual theater, the hillside or the village green may be the stage. In the place of a few accurately balanced characters, whole congregations of worshipers, audiences of citizens, or armies of soldiers, may assemble, flocks of faeries may fly by, unreal spirits of the winds and very real spinsters or bachelors may hold conversation with each other, and throughout the whole structure of the work the fancy may have its way with the actual and disport itself freely with the romantic.
It is not many years since the pageant began to be taken up in this country as a form of artistic expression. When we began to realize how strangely romantic our course of history as an American people had been, when we viewed our past struggle to subdue the soil and overcome the difficulties of pioneering as a most tragic story, as a heart-moving tale fitted for the great epic and for the great tragic drama, then we felt the impulse to place these tales of old-time heroism in fitting artistic form before the eyes of the people.