“Science represents idea, art its expression; theatrical art its expression in forms best adapted to convened numbers of the people. The forms of popular art, therefore, are limited only by the ideas of man.”
It is thus as an illustration of one of the multiform genres of the civic theatre’s potential art that this little masque has its main significance.
Before the actual establishment of the Civic Theatre among us, the opportunities of the working dramatist to make tangible contributions by his art to its repertory are, of course, very scant and at best groping and experimental. One such as the present may serve, however, to suggest certain immediate, practical possibilities.
If, for instance, every bird sanctuary were to possess its stage and auditorium for bird masques—if every Natural History Museum had its outdoor theatre, equipped to set forth the multitudinous human meanings of its nature exhibits to the crowds that frequent its doors in their hours of leisure—if the directors of every Zoölogical Park were to provide for it a scenic arena, and seek the civic cooperation of the dramatic poet and theatrical expert, to vivify by their art the tremendous life stories of wild nature to the receptive minds of the human thousands convened to listen and behold—by such means, would not the disciples of nature study not simply adopt for their own ends a means of education and publicity a thousandfold more dynamic, imaginative and popular than any of the static means of exhibits, lectures and published volumes on which they now rely: would they not also thereby splendidly assist in enlarging the civic scope of the theatre’s art, still cramped, as for generations, within the walls of speculation and commercialism?
These suggestions speak for themselves.
If this Bird Masque shall help, in the slightest degree, to illustrate them, it will do its ephemeral service in the only permanent sanctuary of men as of birds—imagination.
Percy MacKaye.
Cornish, New Hampshire,
October, 1913.