"The flowering of poetry is a thing of infinite variety. There must be variety in a masque if the masque is to continue to be a worthy and popular art form. Standardization would be fatal to the masque, and I have stood out against it with all the power I possess. The masque and the pageant must not degenerate into traveling shows, done according to a fixed receipt. There must be the vision in it, and when the people see the vision they respond marvelously."
Percy MacKaye is the son of Steele MacKaye, the author of Hazel Kirke and other popular plays. From the very beginning of his literary career his chief ambition has seemed to be to bring about a closer rapprochement between poetry and the drama.
When Mr. MacKaye was graduated from Harvard, in 1897, there were in that university no courses, technical or otherwise, in the modern drama. The official acceptance of his own commencement part On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of To-day was the first official sanction of the subject, which was commented upon by the Boston Transcript as something unprecedented in the annals of university discussion, especially of Harvard. It was not until seven or eight years had passed that Prof. George P. Baker began his courses in dramatic technique.
The development of the pageant and the masque has been for years the object of Mr. MacKaye's tireless endeavors. He has spoken of the masque as "the potential drama of democracy." Two years ago in St. Louis he had his first technical opportunity on a large scale to experiment in devising this sort of communal entertainment. There, during five performances, witnessed by half a million people, some seven thousand citizens of St. Louis took part in his masque, in association with the pageant by Thomas Wood Stevens.
"The outgoing cost of the St. Louis production," said Mr. MacKaye, "was $122,000; the income, $139,000. The balance of $17,000 has been devoted to a fund for civic art. If these seem large sums, we must look back to the days of the classic Greek drama and remember that the cost of producing a single play by Sophocles at Athens was $500,000.
"The St. Louis production was truly a drama of, for, and by the people, a true community masque. Caliban by the Yellow Sands is a community masque, given as the central popular expression of some hundreds of supplementary Shakespearian celebrations.
"I call this work a masque, because it is a dramatic work of symbolism, involving in its structure pageantry, poetry, and the dance. But I have not thought to relate its structure to a historic form; I have simply sought by its structure to solve a problem of the art of the theater. That problem is the new one of creating a focus of dramatic technique for the growing but groping movement vaguely called 'pageantry,' which is itself a vital sign of social evolution—the half-desire of the people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by specialists, but to take part themselves in creating it; the desire,—that is, of democracy consistently to seek expression through a drama of and by the people, not merely for the people.
"Six years ago, after the pageant-masque of the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, I wrote, in Scribner's Magazine, an article in which I said that I found in the three American pageant-masques which I had seen recently, the Gloucester Pageant, the Masque at Aspet, and the California Redwood Festival, the expression of community spirit focused by co-operating artists in dramatic form. I said then, what I feel even more strongly after my work with the St. Louis Pageant and the Shakespearian Masque, that pageantry is poetry for the masses.
"The parade of Election Day, the processions of Antics and Horribles on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day, the May-Queen rituals of children—these make an elemental appeal to every one. What is this elemental appeal? Is it not the appeal of symbolism, the expression of life's meanings in sensuous form? Crude though it may be, pageantry satisfies an elemental instinct for art, a popular demand for poetry. This instinct and this demand, like other human instincts and demands, may be educated, refined, developed into a mighty agency of civilization. Refinement of this deep, popular instinct will result from a rational selection in correlation of the elements of pageantry. Painting, dancing, music, and sculpture (the last as applied to classic groupings) are appropriately the special arts for selecting those elements, and drama is the special art of correlating them.
"The form of pageantry most popular and impressive in appeal as a fine art is that of the dramatic pageant, or masque. It is not limited to historic themes. All vital modern forces and institutions of our nation might appropriately find symbolic expression in the masque.