Louis and elsewhere. One
millionaire's house is modeled on a French chateau, another on an old
Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or
pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money. It is sad to
remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid
architects.
It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens--that great sculptor, whose
work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America--who had most to
do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893.
It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far
more beautiful in its fleeting beauty than the Chicago of the
stock-yards and the Pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The
millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their
thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things
conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though
the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a
year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair always
recalled to me the story of Michael Angelo, who carved a figure in snow
which, says the chronicler who saw it, "was superb.
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