All these thoughts have flowed from the one word, Personality, with which we began.
At Louis’s age upon reaching Chicago, personality meant little as a formal word. He recognized by sight and feeling, by observing action and appearances, many of the phases of the powers of man upon which a word is built for use.
For words in themselves he had come to form a passing aversion, since he had noted their tendency to eclipse the vibrant values of immediate reality. Therefore, he preferred to think and feel and contemplate without the use of words. Indeed, one of his favorite pastimes was deliberately to think and feel and contemplate without the use of words, to create thus a wordless universe, with himself, silent, at the center of it all. Thus came about a widening clarity; an increased sensitiveness to values; a separate isolation of the permanent and the ephemeral; and it seemed, also, as though within his small, self-created silence he listened to the strident noises of the world as coming from without. All this Louis did with buoyant jocularity, for fun, for “practice” as he called it. And yet now and then a word came to him of a sudden, in surprise, a sort of keyword that unlocked, that opened and revealed. Among such was the word self-expression
, which gave him a rude shock of hilarity and wonder. He said: “What!”—which expressed quite well what he meant.
For the first week in the strange city, Louis was the prodigal returned; and the fatted calf was offered up in joy. The next week he spent in exploration. As everybody said: “Chicago had risen phoenix-like from its ashes.” But many ashes remained, and the sense of ruin was still blended with ambition of recovery. Louis thought it all magnificent and wild: A crude extravaganza: An intoxicating rawness: A sense of big things to be done. For “Big” was the word. “Biggest” was preferred, and the “biggest in the world” was the braggart phrase on every tongue. Chicago had had the biggest conflagration “in the world.” It was the biggest grain and lumber market “in the world.” It slaughtered more hogs than any city “in the world.” It was the greatest railroad center, the greatest this, and the greatest that. It shouted itself hoarse in reclame. The shouters could not well be classed with the proverbial liars of Ecclesiastes, because what they said was true; and had they said, in the din, we are the crudest, rawest, most savagely ambitious dreamers and would-be doers in the world, that also might be true. For with much gloating of self-flattering they bragged: “We are the most heavily mortgaged city in the world.” Louis rather liked all this, for his eye was ever on the boundless prairie and the mighty lake. All this frothing at the mouth amused him at first, but soon he saw the primal power assuming self-expression amid nature’s impelling urge. These men had vision. What they saw was real, they saw it as destiny.
The elevated wooden sidewalks in the business district, with steps at each street corner, seemed shabby and grotesque; but when Louis learned that this meant that the city had determined to raise itself three feet more out of the mud, his soul declared that this resolve meant high courage; that the idea was big; that there must be big men here. The shabby walks now became a symbol of stout hearts.
The pavements were vile, because hastily laid; they erupted here and there and everywhere in ooze. Most of the buildings, too, were paltry. When Louis came to understand the vast area of disaster, he saw clearly and with applause that this new half-built city was a hasty improvization made in dire need by men who did not falter. And again spread out in thought, the boundless prairie and the mighty lake, and what they meant for men of destiny, even as the city lay stretched out, unseemly as a Caliban.
In spite of the panic, there was stir; an energy that made him tingle to be in the game.
So he bethought him he would enter the office of some architect; for a few buildings showed talent in design, and a certain stability. Outstanding among these was the Portland Block, a four-story structure of pressed brick and sandstone at Washington and Dearborn Streets. So he inquired concerning the architect of this structure and was told the name was Jenney: Major Jenney; or in full, Major William Le Baron Jenney. There were still some buildings under way, or arranged for, on the momentum of pre-panic days, though the town was otherwise badly hurt. A great fire, and a panic in finance, certainly made load enough for any community to carry, but Chicago, hard hit, bore up bravely.
Louis learned incidentally that the Portland Block had in fact been designed by a clever draftsman named Cudell. This gave him a shock. For he had supposed that all architects made buildings out of their own heads, not out of the heads of others. His experience in the office of Furness & Hewitt, in Philadelphia, it seems, had given him an erroneous idea. Yet the new knowledge cheered him in this hope: That he might some day make buildings out of his head for architects who did not have any heads of their own for such purpose.
He had once supposed that the genius for creating ugliness was peculiarly a Yankee monopoly; but he later found in New York and Philadelphia that almost all the buildings in these cities were of the same crassness of type; a singularly sordid, vulgar vernacular in architectural speech. So when he found the same thing almost universally in evidence in Chicago, he assumed that this illiteracy was general, and a jargon peculiar to the American people at large. The only difference he could see between the vernacular of the East and
