Part 13

"All the little literary and artistic cults are dead or dying. The idea of literature as a thing distinct from life is dead. Writers can never again think of themselves as a race separate from the rest of humanity. All the artificial Bohemias have been destroyed, and can never again exist; for now at last the new world is about to dawn. Christ is coming.

"And yet this war has made evident the importance of literature. It has made words real again. It has shown that men cannot live forever on a lie, written or spoken. God has come upon us like a thief in the night, and He has judged by our words. Some of us He has turned to madness and the vain babblings of heathendom. I am no wild chauvinist; though a man, English-born, it gives me no joy to speak of Germans as Huns, and to heap up hate and indignation against them. Nor in my wildest flights of romanticism can I dream that an England yet possessing Lord Northcliffe and the present Government can be all that God might call delightful. Mr. Superman has invaded England right enough, that I sadly know; and Prussianism is not all in Potsdam.

"Yet it is significant, in view of the Superman's birthplace, in view of the fact that the German people have very largely accepted his doctrine and ideal, that the men who stand for speech among them, in their public manifestoes have been delivered over unto confusion and a lie. The logician has been illogical, the literary artist rendered without form and void. Their very craft has turned to impotence and self-destruction. I repeat, this is no happiness to me. Rather, I think of the Germany I have loved, and I weep for the pity of it all. I am no friend of kings and kaisers and bankers and grocers and titled newspaper editors, that I should make their bloodiness mine. But I cannot help but see the sign of God written across the heavens in words of living fire.

"As I said in _The Terrible Meek_: 'There is great power in words. All the things that ever get done in the world, good or bad, are done by words.'

"What we'll have to rediscover is that literature, like life, begins with the utterance of a word. And until people realize once again that a word is no mere dead thing buried in a dictionary, but the actual, awful, wonderful Life of God Himself, we shall neither have nor deserve to have a literature!"

_THE MASQUE AND DEMOCRACY_

PERCY MACKAYE

The community masque, _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, is primarily intended to honor the memory of Shakespeare on the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. But its significance goes further than the purpose of commemoration. Mr. Percy MacKaye, the author, tells me that he sees his masque as part of a movement which shall bring poetry to the service of the entire community, which shall make poetry democratic, in the best sense of the word, and that the result of this movement will be to create conditions likely to produce out of the soil of America a great renascence of the drama.

Mr. MacKaye undoubtedly is the busiest poet in the United States of America. When he talked to me about the significance of the community masque, rehearsals of the various groups that are to take part in it were going on all over the city. Every few minutes he was called away to confer with some of the directors of the masque, or some of the actors taking part in it. For a while Mr. John Drew was with us, talking of his appearance, in the character of Shakespeare, in epilogue. Mr. Robert Edmund Jones, the designer of the inner scenes, brought over some new drawings, and there were telephone conversations about music and costumes and other important details of the monster production.

"The fact," said Mr. MacKaye, "that the masque is a poem primarily intended to be heard rather than to be read, is itself a movement toward the earlier and more democratic uses of poetry. Poetry appeals essentially to the ear, and is an art of the spoken word, yet, on account of our conditions of life, the written word is considered poetry.

"This was not true in Shakespeare's time. And in the sort of work that I am doing is shown a return to the old ideal. A masque is a poem that can be visualized and acted. First of all it must be a poem, otherwise it cannot be anything but a more or less warped work of art.

"With much of the new movement in the theater I am heartily in sympathy; but the movement seems to me one-sided. A large part of it has to do with visualization. Emphasis is laid on the appeal to the eye rather than the appeal to the ear, because the men of genius, like Gordon Craig, who have been leaders in the movement, have been interested in that phase of dramatic presentation.

"Now I think that this one-sidedness is regrettable. When Gordon Craig called his book on dramatic visualization _The Art of the Theater_ he was wrong. He should have called it 'An Art of the Theater.'

"These men have neglected part of the human soul. They have forgotten that the greatest part of the appeal of a drama is to the ear. The ear brings up the most subtle of all life's associations and connotations. By means of the ear the motions and ideas are conjured up in the mind of the audience.

"Now, while the new movement in the theater is visual in character, the new movement in poetry is, so to speak, audible. The American poets are insisting more and more on the importance of the spoken word in poetry, as distinct from its shadow on the printed page. Whether they write _vers libre_ or the usual rhymed forms, they appreciate the fact that they must write poems that will be effective when read aloud. Surely this is a wholesome movement, likely to tend more and more toward definite dramatic expression on the part of the poets, whether to audiences through actors on the stage, or to audiences gathered to hear the direct utterances of the poets themselves.

"This being so, the stage tending more toward visualization, and poetry tending more and more toward the spoken word, where shall we look for the co-ordinating development? I think that we shall find it in the community masque. The community masque draws out of the unlabored and untrammeled resources of our national life its inspiration and its theme. It requires our young poets to get closely in touch with our national life, with our history and with contemporary attitudes and ideals. To do this it is first of all necessary to have the poetic vision. The great need of the day is of the poet trained in the art of the theater.

"The pageant and the masque offer the ideal conditions for the rendering of poetry. The poet who writes the lyric may or may not ordinarily be the one to speak it. In the masque the one who speaks the poem is the one chosen to do so because of his special fitness for the task. I have chosen my actors for the Shakespeare masque with special reference to their ability to speak poetry."

"But what has this to do," I asked, "with making poetry more democratic?"

"For one thing," Mr. MacKaye answered, "it gives the poet a larger audience. People who never read poetry will listen to poetry when it is presented to them in dramatic form. I have found that the result of the presentation of a community masque is to interest in poetry a large number of people who had hitherto been deaf to its appeal. In St. Louis, when I started a masque, that queer word with a 'q' in it was understood by a comparatively small number. But after the masque was produced nearly every high-school boy and girl in the town was writing masques.

"No one can observe the progress of the community masque without seeing that it is surely a most democratic art form. I read my St. Louis masque before assemblies of ministers, in negro high schools, before clubs of advertising-men, at I. W. W. meetings--before men of all conditions of life and shades of opinion. It afforded them a sort of spiritual and intellectual meeting-place, it gave them a common interest. Surely that is a democratic function.

"The democracy of the masque was forcefully brought to my attention again at the recent dinner by Otto Kahn to the Mayor's Honorary Committee for the New York Shakespeare Celebration. After James M. Beck had made a speech, Morris Hillquit, also a member of the committee, arose and addressed the company. He pointed out more clearly than I have heard it done before that in this cause extremes of opinion met, that art was producing practical democracy.

"And yet," said Mr. MacKaye, hastily, "the masque stands for the democracy of excellence, not the democracy of mediocrity. What is art but self-government, the harmonizing of the elements of the mind? There can be no art where there is no discipline, there can be no art where there is not a high standard of excellence.

"As I said," he continued, "the original appeal of poetry was to the ear as well as to the eye. In the days when poetry was a more democratic art than it has been in our time and that of our fathers, the poet spoke his poems to a circle of enthralled listeners. The masque is spoken through many mouths, but it might be spoken or chanted by the bard himself.

"There has never before been so great an opportunity for the revival of the poetic drama. Ordinarily when a poetic drama is presented the cast has been drawn from actors trained in the rendition of prose. Inevitably the tendency has been for them to give a prose value to the lines of poetry. In selecting a cast for a masque, special attention is given to the ability of the actors to speak poetry, so the poem is presented as the poet intended.

"It may be that the pageant and masque movement represents the full flowering of the renascence of poetry which all observers of intellectual events have recognized. But these movements are perennial; I do not like to think of a renascence of poetry because I do not think that poetry has been dead. I feel that it is desirable for the poets to become aware of the opportunities presented to them by the masque, the opportunities to combine the art of poetry with the art of the theater, and thus put poetry at the service of mankind.

"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 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.

"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 noblest 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 noble national drama. The present theaters cannot develop a public art, since they are dedicated to a private speculative business. The association 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 subtitle 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 lust, has been botched in its ideal aims, and has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence. Caliban is in this masque that passionate 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 spacious 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

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

The duplicate book title and chapter titles have been removed. Also the following misprints have been corrected:

TOC: put in "Tippecanoe" without a hyphen (in "Tippecanoe County, Indiana")

TOC: "Mackaye" changed to "MacKaye", as in all other instances ("Percy Mackaye was born in New York City...")

p. 56: "countinent" changed to "continent" ("Yet in their time these men set the whole countinent in a roar.")

p. 75: period is added after the middle initial W (ROBERT W. CHAMBERS)

p. 78: period is added the following sentence: The most imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life.

p. 107: put in "dive-keeper" with a hyphen (no other instance in the text)

p. 112: put in "soulless" without a hyphen (no other instances in the text)

p. 178: opening double quote changed to single quote ('If ye had not plowed with my heifer....)

p. 218: put in "catch-words" with a hyphen (no other instances in the text)

p. 243: put in "motion-picture" with a hyphen (no other instances in the text)

p. 247: put in "off-hand" with a hyphen ("I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers....")

p. 283: put in "Dooryards" without a hyphen ("When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed")

p. 293: put in "everywhere" without a hyphen ("heresy is sin always and everywhere;")

p. 294: "Of couse" changed to "Of course" ("Of course, I'm not orthodox.")