The building business was again under full swing, and a series of important mercantile structures came into the office, each one of which he treated experimentally, feeling his way toward a basic process, a grammar of his own. The immediate problem was increased daylight, the maximum of daylight. This led him to use slender piers, tending toward a masonry and iron combination, the beginnings of a vertical system. This method upset all precedent, and led Louis’s contemporaries to regard him as an iconoclast, a revolutionary, which was true enough—yet into the work was slowly infiltrated a corresponding system of artistic expression, which appeared in these structures as novel and to some repellent, in its total disregard of accepted notions. But to all objections Louis turned a deaf ear. If a thousand proclaimed him wrong, the thousand could not change his course. As buildings varying in character came under his hand, he extended to them his system of form and function, and as he did so his conviction increased that architectural manipulation, as a homely art or a fine art must be rendered completely plastic to the mind and the hand of the designer; that materials and forms must yield to the mastery of his imagination and his will; through this alone could modern conditions be met and faithfully expressed. This meant the casting aside of all pedantry, of all the artificial teachings of the schools, of the thoughtless acceptance of inane traditions, of puerile habits of uninquiring minds; that all this mess, devoid of a center of gravity of thought, and vacant of sympathy and understanding, must be superseded by a sane philosophy of a living architecture, good for all time, founded on the only possible foundation—Man and his powers. Such philosophy Louis had already developed in broad outline in the course of his many dissatisfactions and contemplations. He wished now to test it out in the broad daylight of action, and to perfect its form and content. This philosophy developed will be set forth in these closing chapters.
It is not to be supposed that Louis arrived directly at results as though by magic. Quite the contrary, he arrived slowly though boldly through the years, by means of incessant thought, self correction, hard work and dogged perseverance. For it was his fascinating task to build up a system of technique, a mastery of technique. And such a system could scarcely be expected to reach its fullness of development, short of maturity, assuming it would reach its fullness then, or could ever reach it; for the world of expression is limitless; the theory so deep in idea, so rich in content, as to preclude any ending of its beneficent, all-inclusive power. And we may here recall Monsieur Clopet, the book of descriptive geometry that went into the waste basket, and the thunderclap admonition: “Our demonstrations shall be such as to admit of no exception.”
XIV
Face to Face
If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.
One will be equally amazed to note that the philosophers, the theologians, of all times turned their backs upon Man; that, from the depths of introspection, fixing their gaze in all directions save the real one, they have uniformly evolved a phantasm, or a series of phantoms, and have declared such to be man in his reality—and such reality to be depraved. A small feature, however, was overlooked by them in the neglect to observe that their man, in his depravity, had created the gods. Their insistent view of man—a further product of their fantasy—lay in the dogma, protean in form, that man is creature.
Meanwhile the real man was always at their elbow, or moving in groups or multitudes about them, or even looking them in the eyes and holding converse with them. But they did not see him; he was too near, too commonplace—too transparent. The gods were far away and could be understood.
The mighty man of war also turned his back. Yet the wise man, the warrior and the priest differed in no valid sense from the multitude enfolding them as in a genesis; for man in his state of depravity as creature, created these also, as his demigods.
Thus man, not knowing himself, and none else knowing him, lived as a mirage, within a world of mirage which he fancied real. It was real for him; for such is the habit of man’s imagination in playing tricks with him in his credulity.
The careful reader and observer again may be astonished to note that to the multitudes imagination, as such, is unknown—that the multitudes are unconscious of this power within themselves. Hence the reader, the observer, who is not so completely unconscious of himself, becomes aware of the imposing phenomenon that the huge and varied superstructures of the civilizations of all times have rested for support on so tenuous a foundation as the fabric of the radiant dream of the multitudes. That in such dream he will clearly see Imagination playing its clandestine role. The mass imagination of the multitudes is thus seen to be the prime impelling and sustaining power in the origins and growth of the civilizations. Let the mass imagination withdraw
