University of Virginia Library

Prelude

High buildings, drenched with light, flank an amphitheatre where,
to festival music, gather the alumni of the University of Virginia. Beyond
a green lawn dimly shows the façade of a low building. When the people
have assembled, the music changes, the lights all about grow dim, and the
façade ahead whitens into beauty. Against it forms with increasing distinctness,
the shadow of the Galt statue of Thomas Jefferson. And then the
shadow fades, leaving only its pedestal, a real, unfinished Corinthian capital
of coarse stone.

(Across the lawn come workmen. They fall to work; and as they pound
their hammers and scrape their trowels, they sing:)
(Gorman, a workman of great stature, coming up from the lawn, goes
to the blunt, half-shaped capital and inspects it in mock appreciation.)
GORMAN

Copied right out of one of Mr. Jefferson's pretty picture-books, every
leaf curled just so.

A WORKMAN
(Laying down his trowel and smiling sarcastically.)

But Signor Raggi is an artist, Gorman. He's no clumsy American
stonecutter with thumbs for fingers.

(Gorman leans against the stone and, lighting his pipe, indulges in un-

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couth mimicry punctuated by puffs of smoke. His audience drop
tools and relax into attitudes of enjoyment.)

GORMAN

Ah, Signor Jefferson, how the American stone is brittle. It crumbles
like cheese. In Italy, signor—

(Such acclaim and laughter greet the intonation of this evidently familiar
phrase that Gorman's voice is quite drowned; and only the exaggerated
shrug of his great shoulders carries on the imitation. Raggi,
a stone-carver of Leghorn, comes lightly up the steps from the lawn,
blithely whistling a scrap of opera melody. He is a nervous person,
whose jaunty breeches and scarlet cap atilt, stamp him as alien as his
every syllable, liquid, vivacious.)

RAGGI

Good-morning, signori. You rest? Signor Gorman entertains you with
a bit of pantomime. Yes? (He does not seem to notice that his airy greeting
meets but surly, half-articulate response.)
I must warn you: I have passed
the proctor.

(He smiles at the general scramble to resume work.)

GORMAN
(Alone scorning to stir.)

Mr. Brockenbrough knows we are not loafers—Mr. Jefferson, too.

(Raggi resumes his whistling, softly, and falls to chiselling the capital.)

RAGGI

Pardon. Just a little aside, signor, you delay my chisel.

GORMAN

Delay? Hm. And you trying stone from every quarry in Virginia for
nearly twelve months—at so much a day.

(Raggi's chisel slips. A sliver of stone cracks off and goes rattling to
the floor. He whirls upon Gorman, mallet uplifted, face dark with
anger.)

RAGGI

Me, an artist! You accuse!

(Brockenbrough comes up from the lawn and steps between them. He
is evidently weighted with a thousand cares.)

BROCKENBROUGH

What is this?

RAGGI

An infamy on my art! A cruel infamy!

GORMAN

Mister Raggi has spoiled another capital.—But he is used to that.
Why should he get excited?

(A shadow falls upon them, the natural, morning shadow of Thomas
Jefferson who has come silently up the steps at the end of the terrace.
Jefferson is a tall, old man in an old-fashioned, snowy stock, and suit
of homely gray broadcloth. Before his steady gaze Gorman drops
his eyes swiftly and turns away. The workmen doff caps in ready
respect.)

JEFFERSON

Ah, Gorman. Good-morning, Mr. Brockenbrough. More trouble,
signor?

RAGGI
(The angry attitude relaxing, his tone dropping to a plaint.)

Madonna! The coarse stone, like cheese. I but tap it once, so. Crack!
The work of weeks gone.

(Cornelia, the granddaughter of Jefferson, following him, exclaims with
sympathy at Raggi's ill luck. She is a wistful young person with
great earnest eyes and she carries, as if it were most precious, a great
portfolio in her arms. Going to the rough-hewn stone, she lays the
portfolio down and touches with her finger tips the scar.)

CORNELIA

Is it quite spoiled?

BROCKENBROUGH

Chop off the curl of the leaf, Raggi. It will never be noticed—thirty
feet aloft.

RAGGI
(Appealing to Jefferson in a shocked tone.)

It will never be noticed. Yes? I shall—chop it?

(Jefferson's only reply is a slow, sympathetic smile and an almost imperceptible
shake of the head. He turns with a smile to the men at
work and at the same time speaks to Brockenbrough.)

JEFFERSON

No holiday, Mr. Brockenbrough, even to welcome Lafayette!

BROCKENBROUGH

Every hour counts so—with all these buildings under way.

JEFFERSON

But it is here our neighbors of Charlottesville are coming to honor Lafayette.

(Brokenbrough dismisses the men with a gesture. Pouring down on
the lawn they clap each other on the back like hulking schoolboys
turned out for the day. Raggi lingers uncertainly. Jefferson extends
a hand to Cornelia.)

My dear, let us give Mr. Brockenbrough the specifications and drawings
we promised him.

CORNELIA
(Opening the big portfolio with immense precision and giving several
drawings to Brockenbrough.)

All except the Temple of Fortuna Virilis. That I have to shade.

JEFFERSON
(Smiling indulgently.)

We are as jealous of presenting our conception in true artistic form as a
Raphael, Mr. Brockenbrough.

(Brockenbrough smiles, too, and bows his thanks to the serious young
artist, but his manner is quite abstracted from the pleasantries of the
moment.)

BROCKENBROUGH
(Anxiously.)

Doesn't the work drag, sir?

JEFFERSON

Why, Mr. Dinsmore is putting up the modillions in his pavilion.

BROCKENBROUGH

At last. But Mr. Perry can't go on with the foundations of his until
he has blasted that rock out of the way. Mr. Ware has not begun to burn
his bricks. And now this! (He touches the capital with the sheaf of drawings.)

JEFFERSON

Remember, Mr. Brockenbrough, we are building not what shall perish
with ourselves but what shall remain to be respected and preserved through
other ages. If we do not finish this year or next or even in our life—

BROCKENBROUGH

But the months pile up so and I want to see the University open.

JEFFERSON

And I—if I might live to see it on its legs, (His voice trails wistfully
into mild humor,)
my bantling of forty years' nursing and growth, ah, then,
my friend, I could sing with serenity my "nunc dimittis."

(Brockenbrough seems much moved. He clears his throat twice and then
abruptly changes the subject.)

BROCKENBROUGH

Shall I have Raggi try to redeem this—

JEFFERSON
(Firmly.)

No.

BROCKENBROUGH

—or put him to helping Gorman hack out those door-sills?

JEFFERSON
(Smiling at Raggi's movement of horror.)

Not on Lafayette's day. Wait. Some of the Visitors of the University
will be here. Let us have their advice.

(Brockenbrough goes off. Raggi comes forward eagerly.)

RAGGI

In Italy, signor, we use such coarse stone only for paving or for—how
do you say?—what the big Gorman hacks out, ah, door-sills. The feet do
not care. But the eyes, signor, the eyes are different. They look up to
the capital. It is the crown of the house. It must be fair. It must be
delicate, white—

(He breaks off with a gesture of despair at the futility of English words.)

CORNELIA

Like clouds.

RAGGI
(Gratefully.)

She understands. The capitals for your beautiful academy, signor,
should be of marble.

JEFFERSON

Marble! (He begins a gesture of negation, but the suggestion plainly
fascinates him. Back of them dawns an other-worldly light. Jefferson looks
straight ahead of him, but his eyes are illumined. Cornelia's gaze, too, seems
to change and soften. Raggi, alone unconscious of the vision, leans absently
against the rejected stone. Shadows move through the radiance behind them,

The Pageant: Jefferson and his Granddaughter

shadows of such figures as might wreathe a Greek vase. There is the sound of
foot-falls as light as falling leaves, a strain of far-heard pipes and timbrels.
Then the shadows vanish, the light fades, and the timbrels are still.)
No, Signor
Raggi, no. Go before you tempt me!

(He paces away along the terrace. Raggi goes off, but Cornelia follows
Jefferson.)

CORNELIA

Marble capitals would be beautiful. (Shadows move again, and then the
lovely shapes that made them, dancers, beautiful, undulating. When they are
gone, Cornelia sighs gently and insists, half in statement, half in puzzled query,
looking up into Jefferson's face.)
And marble would be best. (Jefferson only
smiles at her and leads her back toward the rejected stone where he seats her on
the little campstool which up to now has masqueraded in whimsical wizardry
as Jefferson's cane. She as by habit sits down to begin drawing. Her movements
are absent, and even as her hands busy themselves with the paper her eyes
follow Jefferson. He again walks away along the terrace. When he has reached
the far end, she repeats her puzzled words.)
Marble would be best.

JEFFERSON
(Halting to turn and look back at her as she sits, eyes grave, pencil
poised.)

But, my dear, how the very word would reverberate in legislative halls.
Consider Mr. Cabell.

CORNELIA

Mr. Cabell would not mind. Is it not his "holy cause"? And Mr.
Madison and President Monroe always—

JEFFERSON

Humor me. But—

CORNELIA
(Shutting the portfolio and going to him.)

It is your dream. You cannot make it true with stone too coarse to be
shaped. Think of the Pantheon. When it rises there at the end of your
lifting line of colonnades, must it wear (Her voice breaks)
for its crown
chipped and broken stones?

JEFFERSON

Ah, Cornelia, I am not Pericles with tribute from a chain of subject
states to buy me beauty.

CORNELIA

Just the capitals. Everything else of brick and wood and rough stones.
But the capitals of marble.

(They are standing at the farthest point of the terrace. Jefferson takes
a little notebook from his pocket and computes rapidly, speaking the
while more to himself than to her.)

JEFFERSON

Perhaps thirty all told. A small thing to a great state, something more
than a score of marble capitals. But it would mean—more waiting. I
could hardly hope to live to see it finished, our Athenæum—I have longed
to hear it hum with an ordered throng of youths like those in the antique
poet who sat so seemly as they read their Homer and so lightly ran their
"laps beneath the olive trees."

(Light, far footfalls, pipes and timbrels, moving shadows, and a row
of swaying dancers, hands linked. Two youths come out on the terrace.
One, the younger, runs down upon the grass to dance. The other
drops to the steps where he half reclines as he looks on. Socrates, a
bearded man with a long staff, strolls in and stands meditatively regarding
the dance. Both youths nod to him affectionately; and the
dancer moves in ever-decreasing arcs nearer and nearer to him.)

SOCRATES

The dance of Lysis has a meaning, I suppose, Phædrus, a meaning and
a name?

PHÆDRUS

The Moth-dance.

SOCRATES

And the flame?

PHÆDRUS

You, to be sure. Are you not a purveyor of wisdom?

SOCRATES
(Sitting down and bestowing his draperies comfortably as for a long
talk.)

So it is wisdom the Athenian youth crave.

PHÆDRUS

Indeed. And their fathers for them. Men spend vast sums to get their
sons education.

SOCRATES

What! Exchange solid drachmas for such a vapor! Dear, dear. And
the men who receive all this money, the teachers—I suppose they but sit
and hark to the boys con their Hesiod and Homer.

(Lysis laughs aloud as he drops breathlessly to the steps at Socrates'
feet.)

LYSIS

Oh, Socrates.

PHÆDRUS

Hardly. They must be men of learning and high purpose. Otherwise
the youth would be corrupted.

SOCRATES

True. (He tells off one finger of his uplifted hand.)
Learning and
high purpose granted. Then the father, having found such philosophers
and driven his bargain may go his way in peace. Of course the sages will
seek out the young son, perhaps in the market place, and there, vying
with cackling fowls and hucksters crying their fish and myrtles, they will
press at the youth's elbow and pour wisdom in his ear. —No? Why not?
It is paid for. A bargain is a bargain.

PHÆDRUS
(Moving his shoulders fastidiously.)

But to learn in the noise and dust of the market-place!

SOCRATES

Then where? (Several youths come up. They stand listening while
their attendant crouches apart, as by custom.)
Phædrus here is about to
tell us where it is meet that youth shall be educated.

PHÆDRUS
(In some embarrassment.)

I hardly know. But the place must be beautiful, an academy of cool
colonnades and—

SOCRATES
(Prompting.)

Yes?

PHÆDRUS

And a lawn where (softly quoting)
"the plane-tree whispers to the
linden."

SOCRATES
(Telling off two more fingers.)

A fair colonnade, whispering trees, learned teachers,—then surely the
fathers may be easy now. All the sons will be wise.

(The youths all laugh, and others press nearer. The terrace is filling
with men of various ages, flowingly suggestive, in their easy grouping,
of Raphael's School of Athens. Phædrus springs to his feet in his
eagerness.)

PHÆDRUS

But, Socrates, a great deal depends upon the sons themselves.

SOCRATES

Why, they are only the vessels into which the oil is to be poured.

(Low laughter from the listeners.)

PHÆDRUS

Even so, they must be good vessels, not leaky or—hideous.

(Murmurs of approbation.)

SOCRATES

Beautiful vessels, too! O, Phædrus, how may we hope to make the
students beautiful?

PHÆDRUS

By trainers, of course, by the wrestling-school, by racing, by jumping—

(His words are drowned in the general applause. Socrates, with a
good-natured gesture, admits himself worsted and turns away toward
an elderly man, who promptly rolls up the papyrus he is reading
to make ready for delectable talk. The boys toss off their mantles and
run down upon the lawn. A trainer with his official staff and wearing
a vivid striped mantle selects from the crowding youths a half-dozen
to compete in a race. Slaves with oil-flasks make the contestants
ready. They withdraw to the beginning of the race-course. There is a
hum of eager talk and speculation. A host of youths pour in to see the
sport. They crowd the lawn, but are pressed back from the line of the
race-course by trainers. The contestants come running into view.
Lysis is winner, and is at once caught up and borne back with bravos
to the steps of the terrace to be crowned with laurel by a red-robed judge
waiting there. The enthusiastic crowd presses in upon the little knot
of athletes singing jubilantly:)
(The terrace empties. The youths still singing mount to the slopes
above the amphitheatre. The light on the amphitheatre grows dim,
but the rosy glow holds.)