box-like
compartment such as the audience faces in the usual theater, the
hillside or the village green may be the stage. In the place of a few
accurately balanced characters, whole congregations of worshipers,
audiences of citizens, or armies of soldiers, may assemble, flocks of
faeries may fly by, unreal spirits of the winds and very real spinsters
or bachelors may hold conversation with each other, and throughout the
whole structure of the work the fancy may have its way with the actual
and disport itself freely with the romantic.

It is not many years since the pageant began to be taken up in this
country as a form of artistic expression. When we began to realize how
strangely romantic our course of history as an American people had
been, when we viewed our past struggle to subdue the soil and overcome
the difficulties of pioneering as a most tragic story, as a heart-moving
tale fitted for the great epic and for the great tragic drama, then we
felt the impulse to place these tales of old-time heroism in fitting
artistic form before the eyes of the people.

It was not without meaning that the desire to express in dramatic form
the pictures of our historic past had its earliest origins not in the
metropolitan square but on the village green, with a background not of
skyscrapers but of sequoia groves. Again we see rural conditions more
favorable to the budding powers of human genius. There our newly
awakened enthusiasm for community betterment promptly seized the pageant
as a fitting means of expressing its urgent emotion. Looking forward
into the future we desired to express our hopes for enlargement as we
had expressed our vision of the meaning of past struggles.

There are plain reasons why this loose and easy dramatic form is
especially adapted for the use of a town or village when it wishes to
portray dramatically its own historic and community experiences. In
fact, American pageantry has had from the earliest attempts a distinct
reference to the welfare of the community and to the development of the
rich resources of fellowship to be found in concerted action. This was
amply shown at Thetford, Vermont, where one of the earliest and most
successful pageants was given. That was as late as 1911. The author of
the text frankly stated that the pageant seemed to him the expression of
a movement for the general development of the resources of the town,
agricultural, educational and social. The work should become, then