The Autobiography of an Idea

Once upon a time there was a village in New England called South Reading. Here lived a little boy of five years. That is to say he nested with his grandparents on a miniature farm of twenty-four acres, a mile or so removed from the center of gravity and activity which was called Main Street. It was a main street of the day and generation, and so was the farm proper to its time and place.

Eagerly the grandparents had for some time urged that the child come to them for a while; and after a light shower of mother tears⁠—the father indifferent⁠—consent was given and the child was taken on his way into the wilderness lying ten miles north of the city of Boston. The farm had been but recently acquired, and the child appeared, shortly thereafter, as a greedy parasite, to absorb that affection, that abundant warmth of heart which only Grandma and Grandpa have the intuitive folly to bestow. In short they loved him, and kept him bodily clean.

To the neighbors, he was merely another brat-nuisance to run about and laugh and scream and fight and bawl with the others⁠—all bent on joy and destruction. The peculiar kink in this little man’s brain, however, was this: he had no desire to destroy⁠—except always his momentary mortal enemies. His bent was the other way.

He loved to look out of the window; to see people moving to and fro. But it was when first he saw the street-cleaners at work that there upsprung a life-fascination⁠—the sight, the drama of things being done. South Bennett Street ran from Washington Street to Harrison Avenue, a short block, but for him a large world. The street was paved with cobble stones; the sidewalks were of brick. He was there at the window when the work began. Came on the front rank; four men armed with huge watering cans painted red; these they swung in rhythm one-two, one-two. The thrill began, the child breathed hard. Then followed the second rank⁠—four men with huge brooms made of switches; they also, two-fisted, swung one-two, one-two, shaping a windrow in the gutter. Then came the glory of it all, the romantic, the utterly thrilling and befitting climax⁠—an enormous, a wonderful speckled gray Normandy horse, drawing a heavy tip cart, and followed as a retinue by two men, one sweeping the windrows into hillocks, the other with shovel and with mighty faith, moving these mountains into the great chariot. Thus appeared from Washington Street, thus passed in orderly action, thus disappeared into Harrison Avenue the Pageant of Labor, leaving the child, alone, thrilled with a sort of alarm of discovery, held by an utter infatuation. He had missed nothing; he had noted every detail. He had seen it whole and seen it steady. It is a close surmise that what actually passed in the child’s mind, aside from the romance, was a budding sense of orderly power. Indeed, the rhythm of it all!

So thinking he wandered downstream along the water’s edge, musing about South Reading, recalling his rivulet, his dam, his marsh. How small they seemed. And then there arose his tall, slender elm, his great ash tree to comfort him. Mechanically he ascended a hill, entered a heavy grove, musing, as he went, upon the great river Merrimac; lost in the thought that the world about him was growing so large that it seemed out of proportion to him⁠—too great for his little size, too bewildering for his untutored mind. Meanwhile something large, something dark was approaching unperceived; something ominous, something sinister that silently aroused him to a sense of its presence. He became aware; he peered through the foliage. What was it? He could not quite see; he could not make out; except that it was huge, long and dark. He thought of turning back, for he was but a little boy, alone in the woods bordering a dark-running river whose power had stilled him, and the lonely grove that stilled him; he was high strung with awe; he could glimpse the river; he was moving forward, unthinkingly, even while he thought of turning back. The dark thing came ever nearer, nearer in the stillness, became broader, looming, and then it changed itself into full view⁠—an enormous terrifying mass that overhung the broad river from bank to bank.

Louis was amazed. So this was the way: The workmen stood behind their boss, their boss stood behind the archeetec⁠—but the building stood in front of them all. He asked the man if there had been an “archeetec” for the Masonic Temple, and the man said: “Sure, there’s an archeetec for every building.” Louis was incredulous, but if it were true it was glorious news. How great, how wonderful a man must have been the “archeetec” of his beloved temple! So he asked the man how the architect made the outside of the temple and the man said: “Why, he made it out of his head; and he had books besides.” The “books besides” repelled Louis: anybody could do that; but the “made it out of his head” fascinated him.

How could a man make so beautiful a building out of his head? What a great man he must be; what a wonderful man. Then and there Louis made up his mind to become an architect and make beautiful buildings “out of his head.” He confined this resolve to the man. But the man said:

He made up his mind that next day he would enter the employ of said Furness & Hewitt, they to have no voice in the matter, for his mind was made up. So next day he presented himself to Frank Furness and informed him he had come to enter his employ. Frank Furness was a curious character. He affected the English in fashion. He wore loud plaids, and a scowl, and from his face depended fan-like a marvelous red beard, beautiful in tone with each separate hair delicately crinkled from beginning to end. Moreover, his face was snarled and homely as an English bulldog’s. Louis’s eyes were riveted, in infatuation, to this beard, as he listened to a string of oaths yards long. For it seems that after he had delivered his initial fiat, Furness looked at him half blankly, half enraged, as at another kind of dog that had slipped in through the door. His first question had been as to Louis’s experience, to which Louis replied, modestly enough, that he had just come from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. This answer was the detonator that set off the mine which blew up in fragments all the schools in the land and scattered the professors headless and limbless to the four quarters of earth and hell. Louis, he said, was a fool. He said Louis was an idiot to have wasted his time in a place where one was filled with sawdust, like a doll, and became a prig, a snob, and an ass.