Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/535

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO S 1 9

paper men, as well as those of " the old guard," in avowed and democratic freedom and simplicity, has imparted his point of view to others. Men from other places in America having distinct local color have brought other variations in point of view. The attraction of such men was specially notable in the eighties. Since then more men trained to the cosmopolitan view of letters and art derived in Europe have come to the Chicago field. But in that decade these various local view-points, along with the atti- tude of men versed in classic English literature, such as Mr. Browne of the Did, fused with the virile mercantilism through which those in the roar of Chicago's busy streets saw life into a new composite metropolitan outlook. It affected the writers and publishers of Chicago in the eighties.

The conspicuous patronage of artistic endeavor, in various mediums, by citizens who had acquired wealth with the city's growth into rank as a great mart, worthy of satire as it was in some aspects, was another factor in creating a metropolitan attitude. The Art Institute by 1882 had a brick building, and in 1887 erected for school and museum the excellent four-story Romanesque structure of brown stone, on Michigan Boulevard, at the southwest corner of Van Buren Street, now occupied by the Chicago Club. There, in the heart of the market city, on a boulevard which was fast becoming the fine-arts avenue of Chi- cago, was a material temple fixing in the public mind the idea of art. Theodore Thomas and his orchestra, besides filling winter engagements in Chicago, had been giving long series of summer- night concerts in the Exposition Building which stood on the Lake Front until 1887. Grand opera was annually presented by foreign companies, and the drama, exceptionally well patronized for years, was presented by the best of visiting American and English actors. All this told on the attitude of the literary workers and publishers of periodicals.

But the most interesting expression of the growing metro- politan literary consciousness of the decade was "the Saints' and Sinners' Corner." Engene Field, the poet and prose humorist, who had been in newspaper work in Missouri and Colorado for ten years before he was drawn to Chicago, in 1883, was the