"Where is the purpose of the structure expressed?" another demanded severely. "It would do just as well for the administration building of a fair as for a school!"
"A voluptuous and ornamental design; the space is wickedly wasted in mere display. The money that ought to go into education will be eaten up in this pretentious, flaunting building that will cover all the land." ...
"What have I been telling you?" commented an admiring citizen to his neighbor. "Chicago ain't a village any more. A few buildings like this and the university ones, and the world will begin to see what we are doing out here!"
"What's the dome for?" ...
"I say the people should have the best there is."
"Pull, pull—that's what's written all over this plan! The architect was some sort of relation to the man who gave the school, wasn't he?"
Even Wright, who happened to be in the city, stepped into the Institute to look at the plans. He studied them closely for a few minutes, and then, with a smile on his face, moved off.
Hart had, indeed, "let himself out." It was to be a master work, and by its achievement raise him at once into the higher ranks of his profession. For the first time he had felt perfectly free to create. As often happens, when the artist comes to this desired point and looks into his soul, he finds nothing there. The design was splendid, in a sense—very large and imposing: an imperial flight of steps, a lofty dome which fastened the spectator's eyes, and two sweeping wings to support the central mass. Nevertheless, the architect had not escaped from his training; it was another one of the Beaux Arts exercises that Wright used to "trim." Years hence the expert would assign it to its proper place in the imitative period of our arts, as surely as the literary expert has already placed there the poet Longfellow. Though Hart had learned much in the past six years, it had been chiefly in the mechanics of his art: he was a cleverer architect, but a more wooden artist. For the years he had spent in the workshop of the great city had deadened his sense of beauty. The clamor and excitement and gross delight of living had numbed his sense of the fine, the noble, the restrained. He had never had time to think, only to contrive, and facility had supplied the want of ideas. Thus he had forgotten Beauty, and been content to live without that constant inner vision of her which deadens bodily hunger and feeds the soul of the artist.
So Wright read the dead soul beneath the ambitious design.
Mrs. Phillips came rustling in with friends, to whom she exhibited the plans with an air of ownership in the architect.