No dream, no aspiration, no prophecy can be saner.
Man shall find his anchorage in self-recognition.
Thus broadens and deepens to our comprehension the power and the glory of the Democratic Vista!
XV
Retrospect
When Louis Sullivan was in his eighteenth year, his mind a whorl of ambitious ideas, and at a time somewhat prior to his departure for Paris, he had occasion one day to pass in the neighborhood of Prairie Avenue and Twenty-first Street, Chicago. There, on the southwest corner of the intersection, his eye was attracted by a residence, nearing completion, which seemed far better than the average run of such structures inasmuch as it exhibited a certain allure or style indicating personality. It was the best-designed residence he had seen in Chicago. He crossed over to examine it in detail, and in passing around the corner of the building to analyze the other frontage he noticed a fine looking young man, perhaps ten years his senior, standing in the roadway absorbed in contemplation of the growing work. Louis, without ceremony, introduced himself, and the young man said: “Yes; it seems to me I’ve heard of you. Glad to meet you. My name’s Burnham: Daniel H. Burnham; my partner, John Root, is a wonder, a great artist; I want you to meet him some day; you’ll like him. The firm is Burnham and Root. We only started a few years ago. So far we’ve done mostly residences; we’re doing this one for my prospective father-in-law, John Sherman; you know him—he’s a big stockyards man—it’s the most expensive one yet. But I’m not going to stay satisfied with houses; my idea is to work up a big business, to handle big things, deal with big business men, and to build up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization.” And so the chat went on for an hour. They exchanged enthusiasms, prophecies, ambitions, and even confidences. Louis found Burnham a sentimentalist, a dreamer, a man of fixed determination and strong will—no doubt about that—of large, wholesome, effective presence, a shade pompous, a mystic—a Swedenborgian—a man who readily opened his heart if one were sympathetic. Soon they were calling each other Louis and Dan, for Dan said he did not feel at ease when formal; he liked to be man to man. He liked men of heart as well as brains. That there was so much loveliness in nature; so much hidden beauty in the human soul, so much of joy and uplifting in the arts that he who shut himself away from these influences and immured himself in sordid things forfeited the better half of life. It was too high a price to pay, he said. He averred that romance need not die out; that there must still be joy to the soul in doing big things in a big personal way, devoid of the sordid. In parting he said spaciously: “Come around and see John. You two men must have much in common; he’ll welcome you as a kindred spirit. I’m proud of John as one man can be of another.”
Years later, probably in the early eighties, Louis met John and grew to know him well. At once he was attracted by Root’s magnetic personality. He, Root, was not of Burnham’s type, but redheaded, large bullet-headed, close-cropped, effervescent, witty, small-nosed, alert, debonair, a mind that sparkled, a keen sense of humor—which Burnham lacked—solidly put together, bull-necked, freckled, arms of iron, light blue sensuous eyes; a facile draftsman, quick to grasp ideas, and quicker to appropriate them; an excellent musician; well read on almost any subject; speaking English with easy exactitude of habit, ready and fluent on his feet, a man of quick-witted all-round culture which he carried easily and jauntily; and vain to the limit of the skies. This vanity, however, he tactfully took pains should not be too obtrusive. He was a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil. His temperament was that of the well groomed freelance, never taking anything too seriously, wherein he differed from his ponderous partner, much as dragon fly and mastiff. Nor had he one tenth of his partner’s settled will, nor of said partner’s capacity to go through hell to reach an end. John Root’s immediate ambition was to shine; to be the center of admiration, pitifully susceptible to flattery; hence, a cluster of expensive sycophants and hangers on, in whose laps it was his pleasure to place his feet by way of reminder, as he allowed himself to be called “John” by the little ones. Nevertheless, beneath all this superficial nonsense Louis saw the man of power, recognized him, had faith in him and took joy in him as a prospective and real stimulant in rivalry, as a mind with which it would be well worth while to clash wits in the promotion of an essentially common cause. Louis, true to his form of appropriating to himself and considering as a part of himself the things and personalities he valued—as he had done with Moses Woolson, Michelangelo, Richard Wagner, et alii—immediately annexed John Root to his collection of assets; or, if one so wills to put it—to his menagerie of personalities great and small.
Architecturally, John Root’s mania was to be the first to do this or that or the other. He grasped at novelties like a child with new toys. He thought them efficacious and lovely—then one by one he threw them away. And the while, Burnham’s megalomania concerning the largest, the tallest, the most costly and sensational, moved on in its sure orbit, as he painfully learned to use the jargon of big business. He was elephantine, tactless, and blurting. He got many a humiliating knock
