Literature in the Making Part 21

"I have felt that the Poetry Society of America, an organization whose activities certainly are stimulating and encouraging to every friend of the art, might serve poetry better if its members were to place more emphasis on creation and less on criticism. At their meetings now criticism is the dominant note. Poems written by the members are read aloud and criticized from the floor. This is excellent, in its place, but its effect is to lay stress on the critical function of the poet, which, after all, is not his main function. What the members of the Poetry Society should do is to seek co-operatively to create something.

And for this the masque offers them a golden opportunity.

"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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociation 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 cla.s.sic 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 ma.s.ses.

"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 cla.s.sic 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 inst.i.tutions of our nation might appropriately find symbolic expression in the masque.

"And in this would be seen the making of art democratic. Thus would the art of poetry and the art of the drama be put at the service of mankind.

Artistic gifts, which now are individualized and dispersed, would be organized to express the labors and aspirations of communities, reviving, for the n.o.blest humanism of our own times, the traditions of Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones. The development of the art of public masques, dedicated to civic education, would do more than any other agency to provide popular symbolic form and tradition for the stuff of a n.o.ble national drama. The present theaters cannot develop a public art, since they are dedicated to a private speculative business.

The a.s.sociation of artists and civic leaders in the organization of public masques would tend gradually to establish a civic theater, owned by the people and conducted by artists, in every city of the nation.

"I expressed these ideas," said Mr. MacKaye, "some years ago, before the pageant movement had reached its present pitch of popularity. All my experiences since that time have given me a firmer conviction that the masque is the drama of democracy, and I believe that the chief value of the Shakespearian masque is as a step forward in the progress of the co-operative dramatic and poetic expression of the people.

"_Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ will be given at the City College Stadium May 23d, 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th. After its New York performance it will be available for production elsewhere on a modified scale of stage performance. After June 1st it is planned that a professional company, which will co-operate with the local communities, will take the masque on tour.

"The subt.i.tle of _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is _A Community Masque of the Art of the Theater_, _Devised and Written to Commemorate the Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare_. The dramatic-symbolic motive of the masque I have taken from Scene 2 of Act I of _The Tempest_, where Prospero says:

It was mine art When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out.

"The art of Prospero I have conceived as the art of Shakespeare in its universal scope--that many-visioned art of the theater, which age after age has come to liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the fetters of brute force and ignorance; that same art which, being usurped or stifled by groping part-knowledge, prudery, or l.u.s.t, has been botched in its ideal aims, and has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence.

Caliban is in this masque that pa.s.sionate child-curious part of us all, groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane of pity and love, reason, and disciplined will, on which Miranda and Prospero commune with Ariel and his spirits.

"The theme of the masque--Caliban seeking to learn the art of Prospero--is, of course, the slow education of mankind through the influences of co-operative art--that is, of the art of the theater in its full social scope. This theme of co-operation is expressed earliest in the masque through the lyric of Ariel's Spirits taken from _The Tempest_; it is sounded, with central stress, in the chorus of peace when the kings clasp hands on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and, with final emphasis, in the gathering together of the creative forces of dramatic art in the Epilogue.

"So I have tried to make the masque bring that message of co-operation which I think all true art should bring. And the masque is the form which seems to me destined to bring about this desired co-operation, to bring back, perhaps, the conditions which existed in the s.p.a.cious days of the great Greek drama. The growth in popularity of masques and pageants is preparing the way for a new race of poet dramatists, of poets who will use their knowledge of the art of the theater to interpret the people to themselves. And out of this new artistic democracy will come, let us hope, our new national poetry and our new national drama."

THE END