Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/801

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 785

general commercial use until that year. The cheapening of this process started the wave of popular illustrated magazines from other centers, which has since become an inundation. But in Chicago this turn toward emphasis on illustrations was quickened by the Fair, which even prosaic visitors from western prairie soil likened to the ''heavenly vision." Men ambitious to be publishers went into ecstasies over its suggestions. In imagina- tion they saw heaps of gold as the reward for publishing pic- tures, supplemented with literary material.

Besides the effect of the panorama, there was the finer influence from the exhibitions of the fine arts. The subtleties of architectural decoration, even though done in ephemeral staff; the grace of form from the hands of the great sculptors, although the statues were but casts; and, above all, the original paintings from the brushes of Old and New World masters, hanging in hall after hall of the Fine Arts Building, revealed to the people of Chicago and the West the beauty of universal art. Foreign members of the artist group inspired in their Chicago hosts en- thusiasm for art in all of its manifestations; and the judging for awards stimulated the habit of criticism on the basis of merit, tending to suppress praise from local pride. Magazines devoted to the fine arts, and literary magazines edited in the spirit of the artist class, followed the Fair.

The World's Columbian Exposition also brought historic per- spective to the new and still crude western metropolis. On one bright day during that summer the vessels from Chicago harbors were, as usual, marking the sky-line of the lake to the east with their clouds of smoke, the pennants of commerce. Three caravels, picturesque imitations of those in which Columbus had sailed to America in 1492, and, like those of the discoverer, having come slowly over from old Spain, moved past the lake craft and into the Jackson Park lagoon, where they still stand moored today. These caravels, and the exposition in nearly all its sections, gave to the people of the new western market-metropolis the vivid impres- sion that the life of their community is but a chapter in the epic of world-wide civilization. Nearly all the general literary and