"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.