But I hear the quick retort of a poet friend:—"My dear MacKaye, stick to your subject. You are writing introductory remarks to a book on 'Our Poets of Today'—not our dramatists, nor our community architects. I, for one, am simply a poet, and I prefer to stick to my last. That, I assure you, has its own infinite variety. As to entering the lists of community uplift—please excuse me."
P. M.: Please excuse me. I express myself very blunderingly.
Amicus: Frankly, you do. For all that, I gather your meaning. You want to inveigle me from my own clear task and métier—the writing of verse—into a vague maelstrom of fanfaring trumpets, bewildering lights, chaos of costumes, enigmatical actors, untangoing dancers, all helplessly entangled in frescos of civic reform; pageantry, in short.
P. M.: An apt picture of a popular conception of pageantry—and some pageants.
Amicus: Well, you should know. You write pageants yourself, do you not?
P. M.: No; I have designed some works involving pageantry. Masques, I call them, for want of a better name. Community drama is perhaps a clearer designation for the genus. But, of course, community drama is not written any more than architecture is written. It is designed; and the design may (and, I think, should) involve words—all splendid forms of spoken, sung and chanted poetry—amongst other elements. The primum mobile is imagination.
