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.