ALBERT R. MANN LIBRARY NEW YORK STATE COLLEGES OF “ AGRICULTURE AND HoME ECONOMICS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY Cornell University Library TiO The Landscape Beautiful THE POTATO PATCH Wm. H. Zerbe The Landscape Beautiful A Study of the Utility of the Natural Landscape, Its Relation to Human Life and Happiness, With the Application of These Principles in Landscape Garden- ing, and in Art in General By FRANK A. WAUGH ILLUSTRATED BY MEMBERS OF THE POSTAL PHOTOGRAPHIC CLUB NEW YORK ORANGE JUDD COMPANY 1912 Corrricut, 1910, ar ORANGEUDD COMPANY Printed in U.S. A. To the Postal Photographic Club HE illustrations in the book will seem like old friends to you, I know. The orig- inals are yours. They have all gone the rounds in our albums, and you have criticised and praised them with that candor and generosity so characteristic of our fraternity. Several of them have been prize winners by judgment of your suffrages. In the issue of the book I am deeply grateful to you all, and especially to those particular members who graciously loaned their best pictures for the improvement of my essays. In a large way you have all helped in the making of this book, for the principles, opinions and observations here set down have nearly all borne the heat of discussion with you in the club note-books. These friendly discussions in which I have par- ticipated for more than a decade, have been like a liberal education to me. The Postal Photographic Club has been my school of art,—my photographic alma mater, if I might call myself a reputable graduate,— and you have been at once my teachers and v THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL my classmates. I think I may justly love you a little, and, wishing to earn your indul- gent remembrance, may proffer you this memento of my labors. These essays, if you try to read them, may seem less familiar than the pictures, but even the farthest-fetched of them will not be wholly strange, I hope, seeing how often we have gone over such matters together. Every theme bends to the attempt to see the beauty that is in the world, and to make that beauty visible, worth while, and regnant in the lives of men and women. For we all need to know and follow beauty as we need to know and follow truth and duty. F. A. WAUGH. Amherst, Massachusetts, January, rg1o. vi o roe SS a 10. Ir. 12. ae Program of Essays On the Ministry of Trees On Some Other Elements of Land- scape. On Looking at the Sky On the Weather . & 2 On the Art Which Mends Nature . Concerning the American Land- scape . On American Landscape Gardening As to the Field of Criticism . On American Landscape Gardeners On American Masterpieces of Land- scape Architecture . On the Improvement of the Open Country . On the Ownership of Scenery vii PAGE | . On the Relation of Landscape to Life 11° 25 39 53 67 81-. 95 III - 135 149 - 177 . 203 . 223 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL 14. 15. 16. 17. PAGE On the Decorative Use of Landscape 237 As to Landscape in Literature. . 249 On the Beauty of Landscape Psy- chologically Considered . . . 265 Suggesting Some Practical Applica- HONS. « «< « » © & «© « 809 Summary .... . . . . 321 pe ke oe se. BF Vili List of Mlustrations FACING PAGE The Potato Patch. . . . . Frontispiece Digging Quahaugs . ...... . 16 A Halt for Lunch. . . . .... . #@Y Helping Grandpa. . . ..... . 2% Atthe Well. 2. 2. 2. 2. 1... 88 Edge of the Woods . . . . .. . .~ 32 Pine Trees. «5 « «© *# % # & © = « 98 The Open Sea. . . ...... . 48 River Scene. . 2. 2... 7 ee ee OQ Looking up the Valley . . . . . . =. 56 Afternoon Clouds . ....... . #59 Winter Woods. . . ..... . . 492 Sunlight and Breeze . . . . . . . .) 93 Royal Palm Avenue ....... . 88 Souvenir of Petit Trianon, Versailles . . . 8g The Desert. . . ... . . . . = . 104 The Path Along the Hillside. . . . . . 105 Inthe Park. . . . . . . . . ).) . 6120 Rhododendrons. . . . .. . . . . 21 Returningtothe Fold. . . . . . . . 136 Veterans. «© «© © @ © 8 & © w & « 397 Along the Stream. . . . . . . . . «152 Bend of the River. . . . . . . . . 153 Flood-tide at Duck Island . . . . . . 160 ix THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL FACING PAGE The Frog Pond. . . . . . . . . + 161 The Hillside . . 2. 2. 2... 176 The Four-arch Bridge. . . . . . + + ‘W497 Farm Road in Winter. . . . . . . . 184 Earth’s Awakening . . . . . . . . 185 Where the Waters Meet. . . . . . . 208 Summer Landscape . .. .. . . . 209 In Gloucester Harbor. . . . . . . . 224 Aurora Lake . . . . . . 285 The River Path. . . . . 2. 1... 232 Sand and Sea . 2. . ww www 23 Pine Trees, CapeCod. . . . . . . . 240 APathintheSnow ...... . 241 The Handtothe Plow . . . . . . . 256 Haying Time . . . . . . . . 257 Old Friends. . . . . . . . 264 The Path tothe Woods. . . . . . . 265 Brown October. . . . . . . . . . 272 The Meadow Brook . . . . . . . . 273 “Women Must Wait” . 5 8 es & & « 280 The Charles River. . . . . . .) .) .) o28r The Fragrant Fruit Trees, Blossom Full... 304 The Ford . . . . . 305 Woodland Mist. . . . . . . 2... 312 The Harvest Field. 2. 2. 2. 2 2 1... 3 3 ESSAY NUMBER ONE On the Relation of Land- scape to Life The difference between landscape and land- scape is small, but there is a great difference in be- holders. There is nothing so wonderful in any landscape as the necessity of being beautiful, under which every landscape lies. EMERSON, “*Nature” Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous power of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossomed earth! Smile for your lover comes— Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love! O unspeakable, passionate love! Wat WHITMAN, “Song of Myself” 13 The Landscape Beautiful ON THE RELATION OF LANDSCAPE TO LIFE HAT charming essayist who wrote a lecture on the relation of literature to life did not hesitate to claim every- thing for literature. He made it his thesis that literature is really the whole stream of life so far as the thoughts and passions of mankind have any continuity through the generations. It would be too much to say of landscape that it is the whole of life, but this is true at least, that life, as we know it, could not exist apart from the landscape. Human life has a few fundamentally necessary conditions, such as food, speech, a social organization, a certain conception of the Infinite Power, and a ready contact with the material world. I have not put litera- ture in this category. This may look like taking the negative against Charles Dudley 15 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Warner’s proposition; but, in the first place, the foregoing list is not intended to be a complete one; and, in the second place, I am not convinced that literature is really one of the conditions of life. It seerns to me to be rather one of its products. Landscape is one of the fundamental conditions. The contact with the physical world is threefold—carnal, intellectual and spiritual. Out of the earth we first get sub- sistence for the body; second, our ideas of things and phenomena; and third, our ex- perience of beauty and our clue to the para- dise not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. In the first order of earth contact we may or may not know the landscape. The miner, toiling in the coal shaft, may never realize to himself the existence of the sky, the water and the green rolling hills. But the farmer plows and sows and harvests the landscape, and thus in his carnal strug- gle for food comes into conscious and be- nign relationship with the fields. In the second order of contact with the physical world, the landscape is woven into the very fiber of all our mental processes. Our knowledge of space and number, and all the most elementary ideas psychology has ever 16 YsnOY p yuosT SONVHVNO ONIDDIA HONN1I XOd LIVH V ON LANDSCAPE AND LIFE named, are suggested, illustrated and demonstrated to us by what we see in the external world out-of-doors. But most of all the landscape becomes a necessary con- dition of our human life when we come into contact with it through our aesthetic and spiritual faculties. It is at this point that landscape be- comes indispensable. Robinson Crusoe lived a very human sort of life with the outdoor world and without society. Jeremiah in the pit had human society, but no land- scape. Who would not prefer to be Crusoe? What notion of beauty could any one have who had never seen the landscape? Of her first introduction to society Miranda was able to exclaim, “How beauteous man- kind is!’ But if all her life she had been locked into a dungeon or a palace what might she have cried on her first sight of the beautiful world? In this life we are taught chiefly by three great agencies—by other men, by the printed page, and by the landscape; that is, by what we see of the natural world. Of these three Adam at first had only the landscape, showing this to be the most primitive and elementary of all. And it is 17 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL noteworthy (with all high respect to Mother Eve), that when human society, the next great teacher, entered the world, sorrow came also. So that from the first day till now the one has taught us of pain and sin (and forgiveness, to be sure!), while the other has taught of peace and beauty and hope. It is most simply and emphatically true that the landscape is our chief teacher in the world of beauty. The lake, the river, the hills, the sky, the sunset, these (with the human form) are the great themes of all art. Painting, poetry and music en- deavor to interpret to us what here we may see face to face. And what part of most men’s lives is painting or music, or even poetry and architecture, beside the landscape? Once or twice in a lifetime we visit the great art gallery, or we hear the best music; but every day we have the ever- lasting hills. Occasionally a line of poetry stirs our whole soul; but every breath of wind in the pine-trees can tell the same story. The landscape is omnipresent. All these other things are accidental and escapable. It is like the air that we breathe 18 ON LANDSCAPE AND LIFE sleeping or waking compared with the champagne that we taste once a year at the annual reunion. The champagne costs more: we are apt to notice its effects more. Very likely it gives us a headache. One can take a long ocean trip and rid himself of the newspapers. One can go to Bolivia or Hudson’s Bay and get away from society. But even in New York or Paris it is hard to evade the landscape. Some persons there are in the slums of the great cities who come near doing it; but they are comparatively few, and their wretched condition shows tco well what the penalty is. And, simply enough, those philanthropists who are seeking to help such wretched ones—submerged in society —use as a chief means the introduction of more landscape into their lives. For landscape is one of the greatest curative agencies. Hospitals are built in the country whenever that is possible. The fresh-air fund is established to provide sick and dying ones with some touch of the healing landscape. The fashionable physi- cians prescribe country air and change of scenery for their wealthy patients. The landscape has almost unthinkable 19 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL sanitative power. When a man’s brains or nerves have become so clogged or worn by city excitements that they can no longer perform their functions, he goes back to the fields and woods to be renovated. A wise man takes regular baths to keep his body clean. The mind, which is more sensitive to all disturbances than the body, needs equally regular ablutions. Parks are put into cities for this very sort of sanitative service which they are able to render. The power of environment upon every living species has come to be accepted as a fundamental law of life. There are those, indeed, who read into this principle the whole law, and who assert that it accounts for everything. Environment certainly does exercise an almost unlimited influence, no less upon human life than upon the con- stitution of a mollusk or the form of an orchid. And in this all but all-powerful environment what part does the landscape play for us? Is it not, in fact, the principal part? For we are environed night and day, from birth till death, by the landscape. Its power may be judged further from its effects. Compare the people of Switzer- land with those of Holland. What makes 20 ON LANDSCAPE AND LIFE the differences between them? Is it edu- cation? Education has grown out of his- tory and literature. What have been back of these? Away down at the root the primary and irresolvable difference is chiefly one of landscape and of climate;—and climate is one-half landscape and the other half the result of landscape. We can institute a similar comparison on our own soil. Hardly could men be more unlike than the cowboys of New Mexico and the careful close-fisted sons of New England. Yet the cowboys and the New Englanders are own brothers. Some of them slept together in the same trundle- beds, and went to the same schools. We can see the effects of landscape in our own friends. Mary Winthrop has never been the same since she went to live in Colorado. The large mountains have taught her to regard the great qualities in life; but they have made her neglectful of her manicure set. Paul and Harvey Hud- son were as much alike as two brothers usually are when they used to go to school in Schoharie County, New York; but they are decidedly different now. Paul has lived twenty years in Concord, New Hampshire, 21 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL where he has his garden and all his polite and well-ordered pleasures. Harvey has been twenty-two years in Iowa in the real estate business. There is no need to make an inventory of their present differences. Any one can do that without ever seeing the two men. Harvey’s character is like the broad open plains; Paul’s is like the rich and beautiful, but immovable granite hills. In our own characters, if we will look into them, we may trace yet more plainly the effects of landscape. I know very well what those twenty-five years on the Kansas plains have meant to me, and also the years in the mountains. It is hardly necessary to recall how often the landscape has been the inspiration for the best artists,—especially poets and painters. This ought to be noticed, too, that the best poetry began with love of nature and after men left off flirting with impossible goddesses; and also that paint- ing was stiff and formal till the landscape began to dominate it. So that in all strict- ness one may say that in art the dis- covery of landscape has made humanity more human and divinity more divine. It 22 ON LANDSCAPE AND LIFE gives the former its proper environment, and the latter its material expression. In large part the effect of landscape on human lives is unnoticed and unknown even to the personality affected. The greatest and deepest and most ineffaceable results are probably of this sort. Yet it is no rare thing to find an attachment to landscape, both conscious and powerful, thus acknowledging its influence. My friend Mr. Kinney has a fruit-storage house on the top of which he has built a cupola for the special purpose of viewing the country round. It is hardly possible for a visitor to leave the farm without first fol- lowing Mr. Kinney up the steep and narrow stairs to have a look at the lake and the mountains. There is nothing about the homestead, not even the magnificent apple orchard, that the owner is prouder of or enjoys more. The doctors have discovered a new name for an old disease—the name is nostalgia, which, translated into English, means, “We want to see our home again.” There were dark and terrible days of homesickness for the men and women who went from New England to settle the great 23 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL plains. Many a woman of gentle nurture really died in the trial. And the great longing was not to see the old schoolmates, nor even,—in most cases,—to see parents or brothers and sisters, but to look once more on the peaceful green hills, on the dark pine forests and the quiet clustering houses of the village in the valley. 24 FI0NaM DQ yunsy “sayy VdONVa4D ONIdTHH APONPH “AT TTGM @HL LV ESSAY NUMBER TWO On the Ministry of Trees The pleasing tranquillity of groves hath ever been in high repute among the innocent and refined part of mankind. Indeed, no species of land- scape is so fitted for meditation. The forest at- tracts the attention by its grandeur; and the park scenery by its beauty; . . . but the uniform sameness of the grove leaves the eye disengaged; and the feet wandering at pleasure where they are confined by no path, wani little direction. The mind, therefore, undisturbed, has only to retire within itself. Hence the philosopher, the devotee, the poet, all retreated to these quiet recesses; and from the world retired, conversed with anvels and immortal forms. In classic times the grove was the haunt of gods: Habitarunt dii quoque sylvas. And in the days of Nature, before art had in- troduced a kind of combination against her, man had no idea of worshipping God in a temple made with hands. GILPIN, “Forest Scenery” 27 The groves were God’s first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them—ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, ; **A Forest Hymn’”’ Pour vous, mon ami, pour tout le monde, ce grand tilleul est une tente magnifique, d’un vert transparent; vous y voyez sautiller des oiseaux, vollt- iger quelques faunes ou quelques sylvains, papillons qui aiment l’ombre et le silence; vous respirez la douce odeur de ses fleurs. Mais pour moi, il me semble que le vent qui agite ces feuilles me redise toutes ces choses que j ai dites et entendues au pied d’un autre tilleul, a une époque déja bien éloignée; l’ombre des feuilles de l’'arbre et les ray- ons de soleil qu’elles tamisent forment pour moi des images que je ne revois que la; cette odeur m’enivre, et trouble ma raison, et me plonge dans des extases et dans des réves. ALPHONSE Karr, “Voyage autour de mon Jardin” 29 ON THE MINISTRY OF TREES HARLES DUDLEY WARNER said that until he saw the Annapolis at low tide, he never realized how much it added to the looks of a river to have water in it. One might say the same thing of trees in the landscape. There are, indeed, some landscapes without trees; but they are exceptional, desolate, or vain. It will not do to go too far with this rule. I love the prairies. There is inspira- tion in the view where one can see for twenty miles in every direction without tree or shrub to arrest the eye. I remember when the buffaloes were there, and an occa- sional coyote, and the white-topped prairie schooners crawling along the trail. A tree would be a false note in that picture. Two trees would ruin it. Nevertheless, let God be praised for trees. Even the plains would lose some of their charm if one could not compare them with the mountains and the forests. Western Kansas is beautiful partly by con- 31 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL trast with Colorado and Vermont. It would be terrible to be without trees alto- gether. If there should ever be a dull, monotonous world, where all landscapes must be alike, let it be a world full of trees. A recent magazine story tells of a seven-year-old Arizona girl who stood dancing under a scrubby little cottonwood tree and clapping her hands to the rustling leaves. The stranger said to her mother, “Your little girl seems to be much de- lighted by the tree.” “Ah, yes, she may well be so,” said the mother. “It is the first tree she ever saw.” One might live without art galleries, without theaters, possibly without libraries; but to live to be even seven years old with- out trees seems like the culmination of all hardships. Trees are peculiarly adapted to the landscape. They are suited to it like sails to a boat. They are the most indispensable of materials for landscape-making. Even the landscape architects, in their puny, little works, use thousands of them. Amongst these craftsmen, trees are bought and sold by millions, and they all go to landscape- making. 32 EDGE OF THE WOODS Wm. T. Knox PINE TREES H. F. Perkins THE MINISTRY OF TREES The characteristic note is given to many of the greatest natural landscapes by trees, usually by some particular species. The pine forests of northern Wisconsin, the larches of eastern Quebec, the palm groves of Florida all play this role. In eastern Oklahoma, and through the Ozark Mountains, the whiteoaks and jackoaks, scattered sparsely over the hillside, clothe the landscape with a weird and unforgeta- ble character. What would the White Mountains be without pines or spruce? Just what Niagara Falls would be without water. It is interesting to take a glance at the literature of trees. On my shelves are perhaps fifty books devoted to them. About one-third are scientific or technical works, dealing with botany, arboriculture, or forestry. The remainder were intended to be poetical. A few of this number really have poetry in them; but the significant thing is that so much of the literature of trees should be given to their aesthetic and spiritual appreciation, rather than to the mere technical knowledge of them. It may be well to remember in this connection, what Professor Bailey has 33 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL pointed out, that there are two quite dif- ferent interpretations of Nature, namely, the scientific and the poetical. The two should not be confused. A book on science should not be mixed with poetry; and a book of sentiment should not pretend to be scientific. But both interpretations are legitimate. The beauty of the trees has appealed to artists of all kinds, though more especially to landscape gardeners, painters, and poets. We can quickly see how inevitable this is in the case of the landscape gardener. He works with trees. They are the best of all his picture-making materials. The painters have painted trees ever since they have painted landscape at all, but especially since the days of Corot. The poets have written of trees from the day they discov- ered the natural world,—that is, we may say, from Chaucer down, but particularly from the time of Wordsworth. One of them said, I aes I remember, the fir-trees dark and igh; I deere think their slender tops would almost reach the sky. And another, when the yearning for 34 THE MINISTRY OF TREES the old home was strongest in him, remem- bered first the trees. He said, Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blithen? Though the nature lovers’ cult had no place amongst the old Hebrews, their poets and prophets could find no better images than the trees with which to dress their most vivid revelations of things eternal and divine. The sinless Paradise was a garden full of trees; and in its center the knowl- edge of good and evil grew upon the tree of life. The psalmist said that the righteous shall flourish “like the palm-tree.” The cedars on Mount Lebanon will be re- membered by thousands of generations yet to come. A single tree is beautiful in itself. Next to the human form the most beautiful unit in nature is a tree. The symmetry of the per- fect elm or pine or palm satisfies the eye like the symmetry of a Greek temple. There is something more in the tree, though, than in any piece of statuary or architecture. There is life. And the symmetry of life is always more beautiful than that of any dead or inert thing. A tree is beautiful, too, for texture and 35 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL color, as well as for form. It is beautiful in expression, in the associations that clus- ter around it, or which are gratuitously given to it. There is one elm in Cambridge which we cannot see without vividly imag- ining how the great Washington looked as he stood beneath its early shade. When I find a very old tree in the forest, my mind blossoms full of pictures such as this tree might have seen,—of wigwams and camp fires, and a whole race of men and women now gone forever. Even the imperfect tree is beautiful; or, as Gilpin or Downing would have said, it is picturesque. For this is the figure which these men used to illustrate the difference between the beautiful and the picturesque. A tree which reaches full, perfect, and normal development is beautiful; one which bears upon it the scars of severe struggle, broken by storms and living against partial defeat, is picturesque. A certain school of landscape gardeners used to plant dead and blasted trees in private parks just to give this note of picturesqueness. A tree seems more human than most objects in the world. We more readily ascribe human qualities to it. The oak-tree 36 THE MINISTRY OF TREES stands for strength, and the delicate white birch for feminine fragility. The quaking aspen reminds us of the instability of cer- tain men and women, and the somber pine of the cold serenity of others. The poet or painter may go further,— nay, is even certain to go further,—and is sure to find in trees something quite beyond the suggestion of human character,—some symbolism of the divine mysteries. Ruskin, who speaks often of trees,nearly always rises to this plane, as when he says in the Ele- ments of Drawing, “As you draw trees more and more in their various states of health and hardship, you will be every day struck by the beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for mankind to know, and you will see that this vegetation of the earth, which is neces- sary to our life, first, as purifying the air for us and then as food, and just as neces- sary to our joy in all places of the earth,— what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as we contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or spoken for us, not in frightful, black letters, nor in dull sentences, but in fair, green, and shadowy shapes of waving 37 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL woods, and blossomed brightness of odor- iferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintru- sive wisdom, and playful morality.” We infer the character of God chiefly from our experience of human nature; but of all those things in external nature which speak to us of divine love and care, the trees seem to be the preeminent ministers, —the symbols and the substance of wor- ship. The Druids used to worship the oak- trees, it is said. They must have been a kindly, amiable folk. The Hebrew preach- ers used to object to their people going to the groves for worship, but their objection seems to have been factitious and purely technical. “The groves were God’s first temples,” and it is hard to believe that there could ever be any idolatry there. 38 ESSAY NUMBER THREE On Some Other Elements of Landscape Look! under that broad beech-tree I sat down when I was last this way a-fishing; and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree near to the brow of that primrose hill. There I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently toward their center, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble-stones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam; and sometimes I beguiled the time by viewing the harmless lambs; some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possest my soul with con- tent, that I thought, as the poet has happily exprest it, I was for that time lifted above earth; ..... And possest of joys not promis’d in my birth. IzZAAK WALTON Behold! the Sea, The opaline, the plentiful and strong, Yet beautiful as is the rose in June, Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July; Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds, Purger of earth, and medicine of men; Creating a sweet climate by my breath, Washing out harms and griefs from memory, And, in my mathematic ebb and flow, Giving a hint of that which changes not. RALPH WALpDo EMERSON, “‘Seashore” 41 ON SOME OTHER ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE HOSE who think of the landscape as being diffuse and lacking composi- tion frequently reach their inadequate conclusions from giving too much heed to details. To the child the finest painting may contain nothing but a house, a water- fall and a mountain, while the composition —the relation of part to part—the chief reason of being for the picture—is entirely lost in his curious interest in details. In the larger musical pieces, like the oratorios, it is extremely hard for the unprofessional listener to find anything more than a suc- cession of disconnected airs and recitations. Some passages may be pleasing, some rather flat, many quite unintelligible; but the oratorio as a whole does not stand forth with any form and individuality. So the details of landscape have their own values; certain items please us; a few offend. There are, of course, very few details of landscape which are offensive,—in nat- 43 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL ural scenery probably none. I have seen the alkali plains and the bad lands; but these latter are full of interest, while the former are truly beautiful. Every river is beautiful, big or little. As Mr. Ward said of girls: “I like big girls:—and little ones.” Every mountain is worth knowing and every little hill. Every valley in the world is a panorama of beauty; every plain is a picture; even the desert is an inspiring sight in spite of the physical discomforts which it may yield. In another essay we have talked of trees. They are the most conspicuous liv- ing elements in the landscape and most closely touch our humanity. But the throbbing ocean, the quiet lake, the gossip- ing brook also appeal to our human moods. Each has been personified a thousand times in literature. Each one, indeed, has spoken to my life and to my neighbor’s, and waste, indeed, is that soul where no response has been heard. Who could stand on the deck of the boat in mid-ocean, with a thousand miles of unmarked water on every side inviting the eye to invisible horizons be- yond, and not feel the infinite stretch of his own life? Or who, standing by the peace- 44 ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE ful lake at sunset, could help yearning for an equal peace in his own heart or believ- ing that his soul was truly capable of it? Or who can listen closely to the cheerful songful music of the mountain brook—the brook which “goes on forever”—without longing for the hours when his own human life might run a similarly care-free course? In fact, this is the great glory of the phys- ical world, that it is interpretable into the noblest passions and aspirations of the human heart. Every nature lover has his specialty. One man’s muse rides on “The Seven Seas,” another man fishes quietly along “Little Rivers”; another finds his pastime hunting big game in the Rockies. Stevenson’s love for the tropical ocean was almost pathetic. The mountains have always drawn men. Even the savages resorted to them. Now in the days of a superheated civiliza- tion men and women go back to the moun- tains with a peculiar confidence. The mountains of Colorado annually call to- gether thousands of tourists; but better than the tourists are the thousands of old friends recalled as to a parental home by the mountains of Manitou or Middle Park. 45 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL The White Mountains are visited every summer by hordes of idle pleasure-seekers, some with new clothes to show, and some with budding daughters; but there are many many more who return to the White Moun- tains in summer for a real recreation of body and of spirit, for the renewal of senses worn threadbare and the uplift of souls depressed with the sins of city life. Such people find a heart’s refuge in the hills, as did the poet who remembered them in a beautiful figure, saying As the mountains are roundabout Jerusalem, So the Lord is roundabout them that fear Him. The mountains appeal also to the lust of adventure. Every year a toll of lives is taken by Mt. Blanc and the Matterhorn. The hardiest American explorers are now attacking Mt. McKinley. The noble peaks of the Himalayas are yet unspoken. Even the small mountains excite some appetite for conquest in the mildest breasts. Re- member how Thoreau set out for Wachu- sett. Here in our own neighborhood is the Appalachian Club (and many smaller mountain clubs), composed of lawyers, teachers and parsons bound together as by 46 ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE a pirates’ oath to scale some thousand-foot altitudes. The sense of beauty finds nourishment everywhere in mountain views. I have seen the Presidential Range from the west when the afternoon sun was thrown back from the first soft snow caps; and if there are any lovelier sights in Heaven it will surely be worth a few thousand years to revel in the glory of them. I have seen the Jung- frau from Rugen Park at Interlaken when the bridal veil of mist lifted for a moment from her front revealing one of the most sublime pictures of the mortal world. I have looked for hours in quiet joy upon the tiny Holyoke range; I have climbed Mt. Orford in the rain; I have loved Mt. Marcy from afar; I have viewed Pike’s Peak from many angles; I have walked the dome of Mt. Helena by daylight and by night; and every contact with every one has been a feast of beauty to me. The one I knew best of all was Mt. Mansfield. A strong and rugged profile juts against the east- ern sky, Where human face some likeness finds in mountain imag’ry,— A “nose” and “chin” are certified to each Ver- monter’s eye. 47 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL The morning’s purpling shadows spread along the mountain base, While nearer mists are lifting from Winooski’s silvery trace, And spectrum clouds their hues reflect upon the upturned face. Or evening lights, with gentle touch on wood and field and farm, Reveal the landscape fair and dear with every homely charm, Where good men live and love and die free from the world’s alarm. O Mansfield, firm and steadfast friend! Thy patience still be mine! When cares afflict I’d pattern thee, my life to God resign, With equal peace, with faith as firm, my face upturned like thine! In passing it may be worth remark that the beauty of the mountain is more elusive even than the beauty of the sea. The great painters have caught the spirit and even the movement of the ocean with some suc- cess; but Orizaba and Rainier have not yet been put on canvas. As the mountains, so the rivers. Their appeal lies to the appetite for adventure, to the sense of beauty and to a deeper spiritual sense through which we seem to be next of kin to the physical world. As 48 ourrH “A “T VaS NadO FHL Sao ee ss 7 ANOS AAAIa ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE one stands on the levee at New Orleans and sees the flood of waters coming down from the lap of the continent, he must have a wooden imagination, indeed, if he does not wish to penetrate the country in a dozen states more than a thousand miles away whence these waters come. The early voyageurs who explored the valley of the St. Lawrence were carried forward by this irresistible appetite quite as much as by any holy desire for the conversion of the Indians. Why, even the little brook drives me half insane with its coquetry as it vanishes round the next turn. I long to follow it; and if by good fortune it should be apple-blossom time and I have my hat- band stuck full of trout flies, then I will indeed stifle every other call and follow on from pool to pool as long as I can see the flash of a leaping trout. Every river and every brook is beauti- ful, and each in its own individual way. Some critics disparage the muddy Missouri, but they show a provincial and undeveloped taste in doing so. Some travelers say the Rhine is a disappointment. May Heaven forgive their hardness of heart! Some peo- ple find little joy in the Hudson; but then, 49 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL indeed, there are those who do not care for Handel’s Largo nor for Hamlet. Let Lucy Larcom speak for the Merri- mack: Dear river, that didst wander through My childhood’s path, a vein of blue, Freshening the pulses of my youth Toward glimpsing hope and opening truth, A heart thank-laden hastens back To rest by thee, bright Merrimack! I once knew a brook,—a creek the neighbors called it. It was muddy, its banks were somewhat squalid, and the trees along its borders would not take any prizes at an international competition; but there was a practicable swimming-hole, and I once caught three catfish just above the bend, and my sweetheart used to walk with me through the trees there. Oh, poor and homely creek, with what glorious visions of true and worthy beauty did you fill my ex- panding boyhood! There could not be an unlovely lake, I suppose, just as no woman could ever be unlovely except for her own sins. A lake can not be sinful, of course. Superior has a beauty wild and vast like that of the ocean; Champlain is glorious with a queenly 50 ELEMENTS OF LANDSCAPE majesty; Killarney and Lomond are famous in song and story; and we can never forget how far-away Galilee used to yield rest and inspiration to the homeless Man of Sor- rows. The marshes of Glynn inspired Lanier of fragrant memory, and Walden Pond through Thoreau was the means of enriching our literature forever. The plains seem dreary to some eyes; but I must think that such eyes look out of darkened souls wherein the sense of beauty lies dead or unawakened. Twenty-five years of my boyhood were spent upon the plains. Even in those days of immaturity they seemed beautiful to me; and I will always remember with what poignant joy that beauty all swept back over my soul, when, after some years of wandering, I suddenly found myself once more in the center of the world, with the flat unbroken land stretching out everywhere to kiss the shimmering horizon. When the plains used to be lighted up at night with miles on miles of prairie fires, that was almost the sublimest sight of a lifetime. I never saw the Sahara, but I should like to. That, too, must be magnificent, in sun or in storm. And so whether it be the great moun- 51 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL tain peak or the little hill, the mighty river or the trickling brook, the boundless ocean or the reedy pond, every jot and item of the landscape has its message of beauty, of adventure and of the heart’s uplift. Ina large sense, yet in a near and real truth, they seem to be the voice of God speaking to mankind. And as I believe in humanity, I must think that the message finds a true response in the souls of most men. 52 ESSAY NUMBER FOUR On Looking at the Sky It is strange how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. . . . There is not a moment of any day of our lives when Nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after pic- ture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this done for him constantly. . . . The sky is for all. RUuskKIN, ““Modern Painters’ We nestle in Nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we re- ceive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt away into all that and dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. EMERSON, “‘Nature”’ 55 mossvg "S$ oamoy AGTIVA FHL dN ONIXOOT 244019 ‘dD SdNOTO NOONYALAV ON LOOKING AT THE SKY HIS has been a lovely day. I ask no excuse for the school- girlish adjective. It fits. Even a schoolgirl may state a scientific truth if the fact happens to suit her word. It has been a lovely day, and I have had the opportunity to enjoy it with more than usual freedom. I have run away to a lonely hill to gain a little solitude and to detach myself from too much work. Before me spreads a panorama of New England’s fairest scenery,—sloping green pastures, interspersed with regal centenarian trees, and, almost hidden in the distance, a quiet, homely village. A more engaging and soul-satisfying landscape it would be hard to find. But to-day my eyes wandered continually to the sky, for my soul sought a larger freedom and a deeper rest than could be expressed even in these miles of peaceful Massachu- 57 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL setts hills. The sky is often the best part of the landscape. Every little while I have a quarrel with some too honest friend about my definition of the landscape. In an exhibition of pictures I hung some beautiful marine views (not of my own making). “Why, look here,” said my matter-of-fact friend, “these are not landscapes! There is no land in them. They are all water!” Another friend of mine contributed to a show of landscape photographs, and when it was over said that his own prints were the only landscape pictures shown: the others were only sketches. I recognize no such limited definition. For me the landscape is anything and every- thing visible in the world of out-of-doors. Visible, I say; yet there are times when one can smell the landscape, as at haying time, or the wheat harvest, or the spring plowing. There are times when one can hear the landscape,—in the pine woods; on the sand beach where the breakers fall. Yes, and times when the sense of feeling tells its subtle, sensuous story,—as when the warm August wind sweeps across the Kansas prairies, or the sea breeze salts one’s face, 58 ON LOOKING AT THE SKY or the bracing stillness of a Quebec winter morning sends one’s blood tingling to the surface. With a woman’s logic I defy all critics, judges and lexicographers. If the sea and the wind and the sky are not landscape, what are they? Joshua Bender had a large bowl in which he kept soft soap. When he put it on the inventory for the auctioneer at the vendue he entered it as “1 sope bole.” And when his daughter called him to task for bad spelling he said, “Ef that don’t spell soap bowl what does it spell?” But my case is a better one than Joshua Bender’s. The sky is a necessary part of every complete landscape. The painter paints it with infinite pains, and the photographers insist upon it. One waggish critic of amateur snap-shots long ago called those skyless pictures baldheaded landscapes, and his word has stuck. So common, so varied, and so necessary are these sky pictures that every practical photographer keeps a selection of them in stock, and uses them in making up his landscape views. A representation of scenery without a sky is like a girl without a smile, or like a mug of beer after the foam has died. 59 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL To-day I looked up into the arched heavens and saw them filled with beauties and delights. How delicate, how varied, how splendid are the clouds! One might make a lifetime study of them. Yet it is hardly worth while, and certainly not nec- essary. One need not describe them or name them. The only absolutely essential thing is to enjoy them. I do not care whether they are seven miles high or seven and a half, or whether they are made of ice crystals or peppermint lozenges. I can see for myself that they are supremely beautiful. When I was a very small lad and used to watch the clouds with other children, we used to be forever trying to make out of them pictures of men, animals or ships. We wished to make every cloud represent some earthly and familiar thing. As I remember myself, I think we expected to find such pictures in the heavens, and that this expectation was founded on some sort of philosophy. Our psychology seemed to demand some practical correspondence between the clouds in the sky and the beasts on the earth. But to-day, as I lay on my back and 60 ON LOOKING AT THE SKY looked up into the blue depths, I saw no camel, no dog, no kangaroo. The high wind-blown cirrus was spread against the azure heavens in strands of unspeakable grace, yet in a form of power, and witha feeling of virility. It would be a close com- parison to say that these clouds suggest the sweeping lines in the best paintings of Sargent, or Whistler, or Dewing. So to-day, instead of seeing fanciful animals and birds among the clouds, I could rather imagine that I saw the souls of great artists blown against the sky. That graceful, awkward, powerful trailing shape, spread- ing upward for ten miles opposite the sun, pure, spotless and serene, might be the soul of Lincoln; and the one sporting and laughing in the sunshine might be Robert Louis Stevenson. It is not alone when the sky is warm and full of sunshiny clouds that it is beautiful and greatly to be loved. I have laid on my back, too, when it rained, look- ing up to see where the drops come from. Indeed, one can see. One catches sight of them a great way off, and it is jolly fun to see them hurrying down to find me. They come from far up in the sky, and yet from a 61 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL place very near,—a great space filled with love and tenderness and blessing, whence every sort of gracious ministry falls on a thirsty and sometimes unsatisfied world. The sky is equally beautiful in a snow- fall, and especially so at the beginning of a warm snow, when the air is filled with soft feathery floating craft, each one loaded with pearls and rainbows. The German women tell their children that the old woman is picking her geese. A more poetic little girl said that the angels were throw- ing kisses to the children. Lowell, when he looked out on “The First Snow-Fall,” knew that God was sending the snowflakes to heal the wounds of the earth, both phys- ical and spiritual. It is worth a man’s time to look up into the sky and see where the snowflakes come from. All this is the sky of the day season. But the night cometh, and with it new beauties and beatitudes. There is more of brooding tenderness and the spirit of motherhood in the night sky. The stars are serene and still, yet they sing together like the choirs of the judgment day. How many they are! How far away they are! Yet the Infinite Love reaches to all of them. 62 ON LOOKING AT THE SKY To see the stars well one must make his camp in the desert. There, as he lies rolled for the night in his blankets, sur- rounded only by distance and desolation, he looks up into greater beauties than all the museums, galleries and conservatories of civilization can offer. But these things can be seen in part from any farm, and a little even from the street corner. The wonder is that any man should prefer ser- mons or Sunday papers. The sky is capable of tremendous shifts and changes. I have seen “the cloud battalions wheel and form.” Three times in my life I have seen the cyclone descend upon the earth and sweep everything in its path. Oh, the awful majesty of that sight! The simple memory of it makes a man’s heart stand still. What has the drama or literature or painting, or any art to put beside that picture? Every mood and every temper has its representative in the clouds and the sky. There are afternoons when the heavens frown like Oliver Cromwell, days when they weep like Keats, mornings when they are as fair as Esther. Above, hangs the blue dome, the de- 63 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL spair of painters, the joy of pedestrians. It is as wide as the world, as high as heaven, as infinite as love. Brother, how often do you practise to stand by yourself and take a long look thither? Does not your life need that quiet, that exaltation, that peace? The sky and the sea are twin types of infinity. As we gaze steadfastly upon either, we see plainly how endless are space and time, and how small our present vexa- tions. We understand how much there is still in store for us,—yea, how much is already bestowed upon us. Some persons testify that in such a vision they see their own smallness; but it were better and truer to be able to say that here one sees his own greatness, feels his divine infinity, and lays hold on all space and eternity. It is no mere matter of accident that the ancient words for the Deity are the same as for the sky, such as Deus and Dyaus. When those far aboriginal peoples caught the first glimmering thought of God it was out of the bright, shining sky,— the smiling, overarching, protecting sky,— and they looked up and prayed and called Him Deus, that is, the sky. I look up into the sky. I see it filled 64 ON LOOKING AT THE SKY with delectable beauties and celestial promises. Some men have said that Heaven lies that way. Perhaps. At any rate, I feel sure that if I could realize in my life the largeness, the freedom and the purity that I see there, that would be Heaven. 65 ESSAY NUMBER FIVE On the Weather The sea and the sky are always changing. What appears at first a monotony ts, in fact, an unending diversity. Time was, doubtless, in the infancy of the earth when the beds of the oceans were filled with pestilent gases and vapors, and time may be in the earth’s old age when the seas will be great frozen depths of ice; but to-day they are in their prime, in the heyday of their glory, strong in mass and movement, overwhelming in extent and power, splendid in color and light. J. C. Van Dyke, “Nature for Its Own Sake’’ All that grows has grace,— All are appropriate,—bog and marsh and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. CRABBE 69 ON THE WEATHER HE landscape is inseparable from the weather. Every change in tempera- ture, wind or humidity introduces a corresponding change in the aspect of mountain and lake. To my way of think- ing these changes present differences not of degree, but of quality only. The land- scape always seems to me equally beautiful, whether in rain, or mist, or full sun. I have studied the woods with a camera in all weathers,—have photographed them in the noonday shine, in fog, in silvery mist, in pouring rain and in a driving January blizzard; and while the camera, of course, works better in some atmospheres than in others, the woods themselves are never diminished in beauty by the state of the weather. If we begin to talk about different degrees of merit we shall be forced to admit, of course, that some of the most beautiful effects in landscape are developed in what ignorant and superstitious people call bad weather. The prairies in a snow-squall are 71 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL magnificent; so is the ocean in a storm. Even Broadway is worth seeing in a pour- ing rain. Speaking of “bad” weather, this oppor- tunity cannot pass without a challenge to this pet superstition of civilization. It is too bad that such a foolish notion should have such universal currency. That is a wise aphorism of Professor Bailey’s that the weather cannot be bad, because it is not a human institution. Many persons will still think, perhaps, that certain sorts of weather are disagreeable, the drizzling rain in the city, or the driving storm in the country; but this is really only because of their own negligence in not being prepared for it. The bugaboo of bad weather is kept alive principally on three kinds of diet,—first, a stupid enslavement to conventionalities; sec- ond, a thoughtless neglect of proper clothing; and, third, the truly idiotic habit of making the weather bear the burden of all small con- versation. Some persons dislike the rain because it spoils their clothes. It is true that one can not comfortably wear trailing skirts and silk petticoats on the street on rainy days; but the trailing skirts are an 72 SdOOM YaINIM yInoy ‘py y4uvsy HZaqaxad GNV LHOVINAS ON THE WEATHER abomination under any circumstances, and any one who wears them certainly has no license to blame the rain. Yet people who care more to be comfortable than to be stylish sometimes suffer from inclemencies of weather because they do not provide themselves with proper clothing. Perhaps they try to wear the same underclothing the year round, or they go about carelessly without overshoes. I saw a man once on his first voyage across the Atlantic. He went without any overcoat or blanket, because it was July. He didn’t know any better, and he suffered for it, but even he could not help saying that we had glorious weather on the promenade deck. But what shall we say of those people who, wishing to make talk and having nothing within themselves to draw on, make capital of the weather and call it “nawsty”? Their crime is worse than ordinary slander, because the defamation falls on a great and noble object. In fact, it is worse than lese-majeste, as the sky is higher than any earthly potentate. It is noteworthy, too, that the weather critics are chiefly the people who stay most indoors and really know the least about the weather. 73 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Every kind of weather is good. I well remember a record-breaking blizzard on the plains. All day long and into the night I was out in it working with a herd of insuf- ficiently protected cattle. Some of the cattle suffered, but I was happy and I still look back on that day with joy. It certainly was a glorious spectacle to look at. For six weeks one summer I lay abed with a raging fever in a southern country where the thermometer every day ranged well above one hundred degrees, yet I still remember with delight the wavering, cool- ing breeze that came in at the open window, and the magnificence of the thunder showers that swept over the sky while I lay there. I was not well nor happy those days, but I couldn’t blame the weather for it. I have been on the open ocean when the wind blew a gale, and when every third roller came sweeping over the upper deck. I confess I was miserably sick, but I laid that, not to the wind, but to my stomach. When I could momentarily command that rebel- lious organ, I went on deck and faced the storm, and I thought it was the most glorious weather I ever saw. I envied those old sailors with their waterproof 74 ON THE WEATHER stomachs, who could stand on the bridge and nose it all day long, and I begrudged the sea-gulls their easy enjoyment of it. No; when we Say we are not suited with the weather, it is always some little defect of our own that is to blame, and usually one that could be easily remedied. With Pro- fessor Bailey, I hope the time will soon come when intelligent people will cease to talk about “bad” weather. A twin superstition is the one about “bad” climates. We are forever hearing that this or that district has a bad climate— “an unhealthy climate,” they call it in the vernacular. Science has demonstrated that there is no such thing. Where people used to charge the ague up to the climate, we now know that we are dealing only with mos- quitoes. Even the dreaded yellow fever is not propagated by an untoward climate, but it, too, is spread abroad by insects. Any climate is good if you get enough of it. Men with weak lungs used to go to Colorado and be cured. It was because they were obliged to live out-of-doors in Colo- rado. The men who have done the most to stop the ravages of the white plague have done it by making their patients take the 75 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL weather. On the face of it nothing could look more unpromising than to make a frail and waning woman sleep in the woods, with the temperature at zero, and the snow falling on her couch; yet this is precisely what she needs. And even in the impure air of New York City men and women by hundreds are cured of consumption in its early stages, simply by working and sleeping out-of-doors, and taking the weather as it comes. If one takes this point of view it will be seen that he leaves small praise for those migratory men and women of nerves and lei- sure, who are always flitting about the coun- try in search of a more agreeable climate. They spend two months in Florida or Southern California, a month at Asheville, a fortnight at Old Point, a few days at Atlantic City, and are on the move again for the Adirondacks and the Thousand Islands. In trying to equalize the climate they lose the variety and spice of life, and gain neither health nor comfort in return. Then there are the real estate agents who play on this whim, and who advertise their particular localities as having such remarkably equable climate. They pub- 76 ON THE WEATHER lish temperature charts showing that the thermometer never goes above 70 degrees in the summer, nor below 60 degrees in the winter. I am surprised that anybody cares to live in such a country. I prefer a wider variety in my allotment. I like to run the whole gamut of weather. In our country, where we get three whole octaves, chromatic scale, with trills on high C, and shakes on low G,—sometimes all within the space of a week,—here there is some music to life. Here we see the world in a myriad moods. Here the land- scape panorama moves from scene to scene as season follows season, and even as day treads upon day. The world is new to us every morning, and always fresh and full of loveliness. This much had to be said toward put- ting down silly complainers. It is more to our interest, however, to notice how the changes of the weather multiply the beau- ties of landscape. To-day I saw the river covered by a thick mist, between snow and rain. Yesterday it was under a gray win- try sky, white and solemn, bound in snow and ice. To-morrow it may be flooded with sunshine and flashing back the light 77 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL like the flaming sword of the archangel. It is always the same physical landscape,— the same quiet millpond, the same gurgling rapids below, the same tall pines on the bank beyond and the same old mill in the foreground ;—but it is a hundred different pictures every month as the weather changes. The kaleidoscope turns even with the hours of the day, for the pines are dark in the morning, while they catch the sun in the afternoon, and the millpond, which is bright with the midday light, gathers heavy shadows from the western hills when the sun begins to sink. In a photographic club to which I belong, prints are habitually submitted marked with the dates showing when the negatives were made. Occasionally an artist makes an error in copying his data, and marks December on a picture which was really made in November. But such mistakes are always quickly detected, for the difference in the landscape is so great, even between neighboring months, that any ordinary photograph will show it. Anda picture might as well be untrue to the clouds or the foreground as to distort the calendar or be untrue to the weather. 78 ON THE WEATHER The practical landscape gardener has to have due regard everywhere to the climate and to its habitual traits of weather. He will not make a sun parlor in Arizona, nor will he insist on shady pergolas in Quebec. But even beyond the creature comfort of his clients he should design his landscape pictures with an eye quick to the effects which they are to yield in the round of local meteorologics. An Italian garden, with its terraces, balustrades and statuary, would look sick and lonesome in Kansas during a March wind. The clustering groves of cottonwood and box-elder which look so cheerful and homelike under the glistening sun of Greeley, Colorado, would look tame and flat in the soft, diffused, many-colored light of Kent or Sussex. The fine and dignified terraces which adorn the banks of the Rhine at Cologne would look dreary, or even tawdry, on the banks of the Mississippi at St. Louis. Yes, the landscape and the weather are absolutely interdependent parts of one picture, wherefore they must be adjusted to one another with the utmost nicety; and the man who would enjoy the one must know and love the other. 79 ESSAY NUMBER SIX On the Art Which Mends Nature A novel country; I might make it mine By choosing which,gone aspect of the year Suited mood best, and putting solely that On panel somewhere in the House of Fame, Landscaping what I saved, not what I saw; Might fix you, whether frost in goblin-time Startled the moon with his abrupt bright laugh, Or, August’s hair afloat in filmy fire, She fell, arms wide, face foremost on the world, Swooned there and so singed out the strength of things. Thus were abolished Spring and Autumn both, The land dwarfed to one likeness of the land, Life cramped corpse-fashion. Rather learn and love Each facet-flash of the revolving year! ROBERT BROWNING, “*The Ring and the Book” ON THE ART WHICH MENDS NATURE “This is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature.” N all the old-time debating clubs there were three live issues: the relative destructiveness of fire and water, the joy of pursuit versus the satisfaction of possession, and the comparative beauty of the works of art and the works of nature. Well do I remember how, when our school district was matched against No. 23, adjoining us on the south, I heroically defended the beauties of art against the teacher of the opposing school, who sought to show that only nature was fit to be admired! Oh, those were Homeric days, and the question fitted the times. What think you, my cultured reader, in this year of grace, are the works of art more to be loved than those of nature? 85 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Would it not seem comfortable to com- promise so great a controversy? There is a place where such a compromise can honorably be made. It is in the field of landscape gardening. Here art and nature combine so perfectly that none may say, lo this is art, or see here nature. ‘The art itself is nature.” Indeed, the art of landscape gardening is so near to nature that some have denied it the right to be called an art at all. A certain modern university text-book of sound qualities and high reputation pre- tends to classify all the fine arts and to estimate the scope and power of each. The successive chapters discuss painting, sculp- ture, poetry, etc., down to dancing, which is ably defended for a place in the list; but the art of landscape gardening is unplaced and forgotten. This is certainly surprising, but it illustrates the vulgar neglect of this subject. Landscape gardening is the most recent of the arts, and the least under- stood. It is hardly known as a definite separate thing, even among its practi- tioners; so that a deep and widespread ignorance of its aims and methods may be excused in the laity. 86 ART WHICH MENDS NATURE This chaotic, formative, initiatory state of affairs could hardly be better illus- trated than in the fact that the men most deeply engaged in the art have not decided what to call it. Some call it landscape gardening, some call it landscape architect- ure, and some weakly evade the issue by talking of landscape art. Now, it is not worth quarreling over these names, for not one of them is quite satisfactory. His- torically, the term landscape gardening ought to be preferred,—but, theoretically at least, the art is more closely allied to architecture than to gardening. One can- not avoid the rather mean suspicion, how- ever, that the present fashion among the professional brethren to call themselves landscape architects is promoted by two accidental causes, first, the feeling that architecture sounds bigger than gardening and can command a better fee; and, second, the fact that the architectural style of landscape work is the present vogue among wealthy clients. However, we will let that matter rest now. It is cited here only to illustrate the unsettled state of our ideas. Landscape gardening is a fine art for the same reason that painting or music is; 87 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL namely, because it leads to something beau- tiful. To be more specific, we might say that it is a fine art because it produces organized beauty. Simple objects of beauty, like a rose or a blue tile, are born or made in various ways—not necessarily in the ways of art;—but their combinations into organic schemes wherein each member serves a particular office, and wherein all the members of any one scheme constitute a whole organism, every part duly and organically related to every other part— that is art. And when these various ele- ments happen to be trees, flowers, lawns, and pergolas, the art which organizes them is landscape gardening. Now, this art is fairly entitled to take high place in the general company of fine arts for several reasons; first of all, for the very great difficulties which have to be overcome. The genius of art is in the overcoming of difficulties. The first great difficulty that the land- scape gardener meets lies in the fact that his composition is seen from no fixed point of view. This seems so great an obstacle that Professor Santayana thought it could never be overcome, and this led him to 88 ROYAL PALM AVENUE J. Horace McFarland Susumu, °094) SATIIVSUAA ‘NONVIUL LILAd AO XINZANOS ART WHICH MENDS NATURE speak of the landscape as having no compo- sition. But Olmsted and Vaux made compositions which were satisfying from all points of view. Instead of painting a landscape on canvas to be enjoyed from a point twenty feet exactly in front of the frame, the real landscape,—composed by a proper artist, is enjoyed from every side, and from every distance. The landscape gardener never undertakes anything sim- pler than a cyclorama. Another great test has to be met in the changes brought by passing years. The sculptor’s marble rests in proverbial de- fiance of time, but in the gardener’s picture the elements are always fluent. The trees grow, the flowers die away, and even the paths and water-courses change. Asa rule, the gardener must wait a number of years for Nature to complete the picture which his imagination has planned. Mean- while he presents a series of tentative sketches, changing them every year, every one beautiful and possibly perfect in itself up to the top of the scale. Then for a day the picture is finished. From that point the garden may go slowly down in picturesque decay, and even this may be 89 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL foreseen and turned to account by the artist in landscape. Still more radical and embarrassing are the changes wrought by the succeeding seasons of the year. The garden is one thing in January, and quite a different thing in May, and still another thing in October. The gardener is not dismissed when he composes one picture from one point of view, nor yet when he has com- posed a thousand in one for a thousand points of view, nor yet when he has pro- jected ten thousand pictures for ten successive years: he must make it twelve times ten thousand, so that every month in the year may have its peculiar beauty. It seems like carrying this argument to a ridiculous exaggeration but it is quite true that the landscape gardener must regard also the changes which come from hour to hour during the day. As the sun- shine strikes on one side in the morning, and on the other side in the afternoon, each picture is profoundly modified. The artists who work on canvas,—and who have had such a comparatively easy time of it,— take great pains with the light. It must come from such and such a point, must 90 ART WHICH MENDS NATURE strike at such and such an angle, and must give specified effects of sun and shadow. One whole field of art study (chiaroscuro) is devoted to a consideration of these matters. Yet the landscape gardener has to shift his chiaroscuro with every striking of the clock, and to make it pleasing in twelve different styles every day, for twelve different months in the year, for an indefinite series of years, for the thousand different pictures which first made up his little garden. From painting a cyclorama he has passed to the making of a kaleidoscope. Something has been said by way of comparing the landscape gardener with the painter in the treatment of lights and shadows. In the management of atmos- phere the comparison is equally interesting. The painter rightly takes great pains in this matter. It is a comparatively simple task to draw a tree or a house, but to fill the picture with warm sunshine or wet fog is more to the abilities of a master. Now, the landscape gardener must have atmosphere in his pictures, too. To be sure, Nature supplies it, but the artist cannot stupidly accept what Nature sends, take his chances 91 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL with the weather, and let it go at that. If he cannot make the atmosphere for his picture, he must make his picture to fit the atmosphere, which is a more heroic under- taking truly, and one fit to measure genius. The careless reader may feel that this is a rather fine-spun theory of the land- scape artist’s work, but the critics know it is not. The truly great work has this for its final merit, that it is always true to its atmosphere. And, per contra, some of the mediocre and unsuccessful pieces seem always to have found an atmosphere alien to them and inharmonious with their spirit. This is one great reason why the Italian garden is a failure in England. However, the greatness of art is not so much in meeting obstacles as in overcom- ing them. It is some fair credit to the landscape gardener that he has the courage to attack such difficulties as those which confront him. But it is much more to his praise that he surmounts them. This the best landscape gardeners really do. Consider the work of Frederick Law Olmsted. Study carefully the grounds of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, or the Muddy Brook Parkway, Boston, or 92 ART WHICH MENDS NATURE the grounds of the railway station at Wel- lesley Farms. Here the whole series of obstacles have been frankly met and triumphantly overcome. The more one looks at any one of these pieces of work, changing from one point of view to another, coming again and again at different sea- sons, at different hours of the day, and in different weathers, the surer one grows that the whole series of pictures is good. Such study will reveal, too, the value of premedi- tation in the arrangement of all the parts of the landscape,—will show that the whole thing really came from the hand of an artist, and that it is not a fortuitous con- course of exceptionally agreeable and naturally unrelated elements. The camera is the great detective. Apply the camera to the works of the land- scape gardener and you have one of the severest tests. The photographability (save the word) of the gardener’s work shows the perfection of its composition. When it shows good masses with pleasing lights and shadows from all points of view, we may fairly allow that the work is an artistic success. Wherefore the study of landscape gar- 93 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL dening is altogether worth while, not alone because it offers some aesthetic pleasure, but also because it opens a field for aesthetic self-expression, and a capital opportunity even for the display of the most masterful artistic genius. ESSAY NUMBER SEVEN Concerning the American Landscape Stream of my fathers! sweetly still, The sunset rays thy valley fill; Poured slantwise down the long defile, Wave, wood and spire beneath them smile. I see the winding Powow fold The green hill in its belt of gold, And following down its wavy line, Its sparkling waters blend with thine. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, “The Merrimack” 97 CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE T is an habitual trick of complacency with certain Americans to say that no one should visit Europe until he has seen the sights of this continent. Until he has seen the sights! Ah, yes! The traveler is a sightseer, and he must have a spectacle for his money. There we have the whole vulgarity of it in a word. This unthoughtful phrase shows what such persons unconsciously take to be the landscape. For them it is always Niagara Falls, Old Faithful, the Big Trees, or the Grand Canon. They flit about the con- tinent on the fastest trains, from one great sight to another. On the intervening thousands of miles, they withdraw to their staterooms and read the latest novels. If such persons are put to it they always insist patriotically that we have in America the finest landscape known to any part of the world, just as they will claim the superiority of our political system, or 99 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the pre-eminence of America in literature. Doubtless, they ought to be pardoned for telling the truth with such very good intentions, but it is sad to think that they can give no better reason for the faith that was born in them. Or, to put it differently: we would all like to believe that the American landscape is the best the Creator ever designed, but our faith is forced to rest on a sadly insuffi- cient, unreasoned and uninformed basis of observation. Mr. Kinosuke Adachi, in a delightful essay on Japanese landscape gardening, tells how the apprentice-gardener of Nippon must take his note-book and travel for months through the Flowery Kingdom, ma- king intimate studies from nature, with notes and sketches of all he sees, and feels, and dreams. For he must not only see and know the natural landscape,—he must feel its beauties, and must dream its most inner meaning before he can begin to make land- scapes of his own. It is a fine picture. The young gar- dener with all his best aspirations attune, and with his soul quick to every touch of beauty, going to such an almost holy quest, 100 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE compels our sympathy and enthusiasm. And I wonder if any young American ever went forth to learn and feel and dream Columbia’s beauties, as this Japanese ap- prentice goes to study the loveliness of Nippon. The suggestion is almost overpower- ing. The very word shows us how scant and superficial has always been our thought of the landscape in which we live. What might not one find were he to go to Amer- ica’s fields and lakes and mountains in this spirit? Something different, indeed, from a series of cheap spectacular public exhibits, to be conveniently push-button photo- graphed, to be sent home on souvenir post- cards, or to be trapped out for a summer hotel advertisement. No, the landscape is not a show, to be seen and forgotten. It is the environment in which we live. Out of it we draw breath and without it there would be no breathing. Through it the sun sends us his heat, and the moon her pale mysterious light. We walk on the landscape, we drink of it; in it we live, and move, and have our being. We go a mile, and the landscape goes with us. We are born into it, and not even 101 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL death, nor any other creature can separate us from it. Yet even with its nearness and its per- suasiveness, we disallow it. We forget it. Or, if we catch a glimpse of it in the mirror of temporary sanity, we go away and straightway forget what manner of men we are. We do not feel it, cherish it as we ought, cultivate its intimate acquaintance, nor love it consciously and reasonably. The American landscape is, first of all, large. This sounds like a vulgar claim to make for it; but Aristotle said that any object to be beautiful must have a certain magnitude. Microscopic views, strictly speaking, cannot be beautiful. But height and depth and space in a landscape mean vastly more than in a statue, a painting, or a piece of music. A mountain cannot be a mountain until it is a thousand feet high, and if a river is not large enough, it may be mistaken for a brook. I like Champlain better than Lake George, chiefly because it is larger. The plains of Kansas and Texas are magnificent for their illimitable, unbroken stretch. The great passes of the Rockies lift our souls out of our puny bodies just by virtue of the sheer stupen- 102 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE dous height of the encircling mountains. Yes, mere largeness has its aesthetic value. Size counts. In the beauty of landscape, size plays a more important role than anywhere else, outside of military tactics. The vast breadth of the ocean, and the height of the mountains give us our sense of the sublime. Here we have a whole range of most poignant human emotions opened and measured to us by the big things in the landscape. Outside these things we hardly know sublimity, and if we use the word in any other connection it is usually with apologies. The American landscape is wild. In many places it is truly savage. Here and there it has all the fierce tempestuous wild- ness of the god-like conflict in which the world was made. No one can compare Eng- land with America, for example, without see- ing that the English landscape is cultivated, subdued, humanized, in a sense overcome by the operations of man. The German forests are ordered like gardens, and look no more like the riotous wilds of Canada or Minnesota than a chess-board looks like a battlefield. To be sure, there is some 103 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL subjugation of the landscape in America, and likely to be more; but the great reaches of the American lakes and mountains must stand eternally above the encroachments of man. They will forever express, more per- fectly than other landscapes, the gigantic forces of the creation. Again, the American landscape is diverse. There are all kinds of landscape on our continent. There are big, threaten- ing mountains, and quiet, peaceful little ones; there are broad inland seas; there are vast fertile plains; there are noble rivers and gurgling, gossiping brooks; there are pine forests and palmetto groves. Swit- zerland has one sort of scenery; Holland has another; England, still another: America has all kinds. But more than diversity, the American landscape has versatility. We complain sometimes of our changeable weather and our extremes of climate, but these extremes are responsible, in part, for the kaleidoscopic transformations of our fields and hills. In a great German text-book of botany I saw printed with infinite pains a sketch of autumn colors on Lake Ontario. No other landscape in the world can furnish autumn 104 Lagsad AHL THE PATH ALONG THE HILLSIDE Wm. T. Knox THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE paintings to compare with ours. Then there are our New England winters (not unknown to poetry), and our Arizona sum- mers, and the springtime in Coronado and Palm Beach. : Think of the fields! There are the cotton fields of Alabama, the wheat fields of Kansas, the rolling grass fields of Ver- mont, and the orchard-covered hillsides of New York State. They all cry aloud and clap their hands for joy. That painter would be immortal who could truly picture one of them. I have spent certain happy days in the fields of England; I have stood on the rolling fields of Alsace, when the grain fields stretching away toward the Moselle seemed like the choicest lands of Paradise; but if I have a dispassionate judg- ment left in me, I must still prefer the Shenandoah Valley and the banks of the Hudson. And then what lakes are ours! Su- perior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario —the pentateuch of the continent. Besides them we have thousands of others,— Cayuga, Seneca, and Oneida; Champlain and George; Memphremagog and Winne- pesaukee; Okechobee and the Great Dismal 105 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Swamp. Killarney is, doubtless, a pretty lake, and I would like to go and see it. Neufchatel is a beautiful sheet of water, and the best of all I saw in Switzerland. But one can live with such lakes as Seneca and Winnepesaukee. I lived seven years with Champlain, and loved it better every day. And the landscape was made to be lived in,—not for occasional visits. We have trees in America. It is no vain, boastful Americanism to say we have the greatest trees in the world. The red- woods of California are indeed a sight, and so not proper to the true uses of landscape. But the maples of Ohio, the long-leaf pines of South Carolina, and the elms of Con- necticut are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. I once told an Englishman (under provoca- tion) that the trees in the Connecticut valley were finer than anything in Britain. He upbraided me vehemently for prejudice; but afterward, when he visited Sunderland, Amherst, Old Hadley, and Northampton, he was as fully convinced as I was. The Himalayas must be glorious. I should like to see them before they become fashionable. But meanwhile I enjoy the Rocky Mountains, and with all my heart I 106 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE love the Adirondacks and the Green Moun- tains. If that poet who made such a de- lightful book about Little Rivers had my notions of the world, he would make a better book about Little Mountains. There are the Catskills in New York, and the Wichitas in Oklahoma, and the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana. These little moun- tains are particularly good because men can live with them. There are pastures and hay fields and gardens of potatoes almost to their summits. Here and there one sees a zigzagging road and a farmhouse. Men and women live there, and the landscape grows into their lives. The great geographic regions of the continent have their characteristic land- scape tone. There is the New England landscape, which is of its own sort, best described by naming it. The stretches of flat coast plain scattered with long-ieaf pine make another kind of landscape in the Carolinas. The Great Lakes have their proper beauties and the plains theirs, and the mountains beyond another character. Every one is good in its place. Yet these are only general aspects. The landscape grows better and better as 107 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL we get nearer to it, and know it more intimately through daily association. Thus, the landscape of Litchfield is better than the landscape of Connecticut, and the hills and meadows of my great-grandfather’s farm far better than all the rest of Litch- field. Every old and real farm has its own landscape, which is, indeed, its very physical matter. It has its own stream, or hill, or woodland, with fields, fences, sentinel trees, and eternal stones. Here is where the world begins to have a meaning. I have hinted that I think the American landscape the best in the world; but I must be fair, and say that Europe has some excellences, too. If one great merit can be claimed above all others, it is that in Europe men and women live more inti- mately into the fields and hills than in America. The hills along the Rhine are molded into terraces by the hands and feet of generations. And if the American sight- seer, floating down the river on the Kénigin Victoria, thinks the terraces spoil the spectacle, he should be reminded that the landscape does not exist for him, but for those who are born into it, and who live and marry and die there. 108 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE The American landscape is fit to be admired. It is ours,—our patrimony,—our best inheritance, a greater treasury of beauty than all the art museums of Europe combined, and more truly valuable than all deposits of iron, gold and petroleum. It ought to be loved,—not weakly and from a distance, but intelligently, intimately, and with taste and discrimination. 109 ESSAY NUMBER EIGHT On American Landscape Gardening Upon a southward slope, that stretched away Towards the sea—long since a loving hand, Moved by a heart more loving still, had planned, And safe-enclosed against the salt sea spray, A noble garden. There—shall we not say2— A loving pair walked in the sunshine bland, Breathing the perfumes of their fruit trees, fanned By breezes soft, for many a happy day. Rosert Burns WILSON, “The Old Garden” ON AMERICAN LANDSCAPE GARDENING ARDENS of no mean sort flourished © in America almost from the establish- ment of the first colonies. Even before the Pilgrims on the Massachusetts coast or the settlers at Jamestown had made themselves quite secure from the attacks of the Indians, they began to make their dwellings homelike with such com- forts as their hands could fashion. As soon as the colonies became fixed and in a certain degree prosperous, taste in the matter of gardens developed rapidly. The very earliest shipments of supplies from the old country included quantities of garden seeds, plants and fruit trees. The native fruits were also early impressed into culti- vation. It is probable that the native grapes were grown by Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who was assessed a yearly tax of a hogshead of wine as early as 1634. This was from the vine- yard planted on Governor’s Island in Bos- 115 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL ton Harbor, and granted to Governor Winthrop in 1632 for this special purpose. About the year 1630 the Reverend Francis Higginson, writing back to Eng- land from the settlement at Salem, said that “Our Governor (Endicott) hath already planned a vineyard with great hopes of increase. Also mulberries, plums, raspber- ries, currants, chestnuts, filberts, walnuts, small nuts, huckleberries, haws of white thorn.” Before the War of Independence came there were some really notable gardens in New England, and some almost magnificent estates in Virginia and Maryland. John Bartram’s garden at Philadelphia dates back to 1728, and is still preserved. Mount Vernon, the garden of George Washington, was planted at about the same time. The colonial gardens were almost nec- essarily co-ordinated in their development with colonial architecture, and it is now understood that colonial architecture reached a comparatively high artistic level. The “colonial style” in architecture has had a great vogue in recent years, a favor which has been shared to some extent by colonial gardens also. If the gardens have been 116 ON AMERICAN GARDENING copied and imitated less frequently than the houses, the reason has probably been that the patterns were vaguer and harder to follow, rather than that they were artistic- ally inferior. If there was a special artistic weakness in the schemes of colonial gardens, it lay in their imperfect adaptation to their envi- ronment. They copied too slavishly the styles of the old country, and clung too tenaciously to the plants which had been favorites in the gardens over-seas. The English farm and garden was naturally the chief model, and it is laughable to think of men planting peas, sowing grass, or se- lecting varieties of fruit upon the strict advice of gardeners in Warwick or Kent. The following quotation from one of the best early American garden books, Cob- bett’s “American Gardener,” is characteris- tic. Speaking of the cultivation of the vine, he says; “Vineyards, as Tull observes, must always be tilled, or they will produce nothing of value.” He adds that Mr. Evelyn says that “when the soil, wherein fruit trees are planted, is constantly kept in tillage, they grow up to an orchard in half the time they would do if the soil 117 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL were not tilled.” The idea of quoting Tull and Evelyn to throw light on the cultiva- tion of vineyards in America is laughable enough, but it was the way books were written and gardens were made in that day. This extract, too, is from a book published as late as 1819. These little historical facts sum up easily in a few important conclusions which we may state as follows: First, the colonists had a taste for gardening which they early found time and opportunity to indulge. Second, for many years they were sadly handicapped with the experience, traditions, and prejudice of old-world gardening. Third, we may infer that this slavery to European notions was more effective in the field of taste than in the field of practice. The design of the garden would be more influenced by it than would the selection, planting and cultivation of the plants themselves. There are thus emphatic considerations to show why the first civilized Americans did not promptly develop a distinctive style of gardening on the continent of North America. There are many other reasons, indeed; and chiefly the broad fact that the 118 ON AMERICAN GARDENING production of a characteristic and indi- genous style in literature, art or gardening is the function of a mature and fully accli- matized civilization, something which it has taken two centuries to establish in America, and which, in fact, is not yet fully ripened. It is even now a question whether we have attained to a national character in litera- ture; and landscape gardening certainly lies beyond letters in this respect. But lest all these big reasons may make it seem absurd for us to look for anything American in landscape architecture, it may be noted that there are some very power- ful influences at work on the other side. The greatest of these are soil, climate and the native flora. The methods of managing the land which succeed in England do not succeed in America. The difference in climate is very much more important. An English garden can not grow in America because the climate will not allow it; and the meteorological prohibition is still more insuperable against the French or the Italian garden. But the greatest influence at work upon the gardening of the new world,—or what should have been always the greatest influence,—is the native flora. 119 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Here the Pilgrims found a continent with a store of noble and magnificent trees in- comparable in all the world. Here were new grasses in the meadows, thousands of new shrubs, flowering plants and fruits on plains and hills and mountain sides. Hundreds on hundreds of these have been taken to Europe and naturalized there into their park and garden schemes, showing their attractiveness and adaptability for gardening. In our own country we have been inexplicably slow to recognize the unmeasurable value of this native wealth of trees and fruits and flowers. Only within the last twenty-five years, in fact, has that recognition gained practical headway. When we think of it now it seems very strange that American gardeners have not always turned their energies to the domes- tic plants, rather than to the acclimatization of exotics. But the fact remains, they have not. Landscape gardening in America began to be American with the advent of Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing was an artist, —a real and a great artist,—a genius; and, being a genius, he conceived large things. He gave the country some new ideas; and 120 wavd AHL NI RHODODENDRONS J. Horace McFarland ON AMERICAN GARDENING it is a national misfortune which has not been sufficiently mourned, that he did not live to develop those ideas for us. In order to understand the work of Downing, it is necessary to know something of the circumstances by which he was surrounded, and especially of the ideas brewing in his time among the landscape gardeners of England. Launcelot Brown had passed his vogue, but had left England marked forever with his anti-geometric style. Brown had been succeeded by Repton, a greater artist, who had given the new style a conservative and reasonable cast. Repton was being followed by a mul- titude of honest plodders, like Loudon, Kemp and Milner, who had learned the tricks, and who practiced the new style to the best of their abilities and opportunities. This was the England visited by Downing with childlike wonder and delight, yet with manlike insight and comprehension. The work of Repton evidently made a powerful impression upon him, and the horticultural achievements of the English gardeners equally filled him with new ambitions. In America he continued the story of the development of the natural style. 121 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL If we seek to set forth, in short, what Downing contributed to American garden- ing, we may mention the following: first, a high appreciation of the natural land- scape of our country; second, the develop- ment of all domestic appointments with reference to the enjoyment of the surround- ing landscape; third, the cultivation of gardens full of trees, shrubs and fruits. The last of these contributions seems to me to have been the most important, as it was the most characteristic of Downing. His ideal garden was one filled to over- flowing with splendid full-grown trees, with blooming shrubs and with fertile fruit trees. As we study the plans now, criti- cizing them beside the style of the present day, we say they were too much crowded, and that they lack breadth and dignity. But, at any rate, they were gardens full planted with luxuriant, green growing things, and not with carpentered and ma- soned furniture. This was a great innova- tion in its time,—a real advance,—and Downing’s ideals had a widespread and very powerful influence in America, which it would be interesting to trace if we had the time. 122 ON AMERICAN GARDENING Breadth and dignity came with Frederick Law Olmsted. This man was another genius, and he fortunately lived long enough to give the world what was in him. Olmsted was in every way the proper and timely successor of Downing. He took the ideas of Downing, developed and perfected them, and added to them impor- tant contributions of his own. The love of native landscape was again emphasized; but though this was, perhaps, the great con- trolling principle of all Olmsted’s work, it was not his discovery. Downing’s idea of adapting the scheme of landscape gar- dening to the natural surroundings was so much developed, extended and emphasized by Olmsted that it may fairly be said that it gained a new meaning in his hands. The truly masterly manner in which this one thing was accomplished,—the adaptation of the improvement scheme to the character of the tract in hand,—was the most charac- teristic quality of Olmsted’s work, and the one in which his genius soared to its loftiest flights. Striking examples may be cited in Mount Royal Park, Montreal, and the World’s Fair Grounds, Chicago. Olmsted also discovered the American 123 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL flora. In the landscape-gardening way, he was the first to make free and effective use of it; and this is probably his most truly original contribution to American landscape art. Downing knew some of the native trees, but he cultivated chiefly ex- otics, especially in fruits and shrubs. Olmsted boldly laid these all aside, and, on occasion, used only the commonest and meanest of the native shrubs and herbs. The meadow and pasture weeds became the materials for painting in his greatest triumphs. How important this new idea was may be seen from the wide vogue it has achieved among Olmsted’s followers. Then came Mr. Charles A. Platt and Carrere and Hastings. These men were the center of a group, each member of which added something to the general wealth of Italian gardens in America. Mr. Wilson Eyre, Jr., Mr. Stanford White, Messrs. McKim & Mead, and even the younger Olmsteds, have built gardens in the Italian fashion; and since these gardens in America depend rather on a trick of imitating details than on a genius for originating new ideas, the work of these well-trained men has been about equally 124 ON AMERICAN GARDENING successful. To a certain extent Mr. Platt has been the leader and spokesman of this group; and his work, as much as any, shows a real individuality and a masterly good taste. The progress of the Italian style in America, however, has been one great unified movement. By some it has been regarded as a mere passing cult, an artist’s whim, a temporary aberration of good taste, which would soon give way to saner things. This view is prejudiced, short-sighted, wrong. The appearance of the Italian style on our soil at this time was just as natural, even inevitable, as the Declaration of Independence or the Meat Trust. It has been the outgrowth of our state of civilization. Given, on one hand, a group of architects whose training has been largely European, and whose ideals have been formed in Paris, Rome and Florence, and, on the other hand, a group of excessively wealthy clients who are also fairly well Europeanized, and nothing under the Stars and Stripes could prevent the introduction of those methods which made the gardens of Versailles and of Rome the wonder of the world. 125 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL The attempt to show that the Italian style of gardening is essentially bad, or that it is improper to this continent, even, is quite as futile as to try to prove its accidental development here. The test of centuries has shown that the style is good in itself—very good. There are many argu- ments of expediency and adaptation to be made in its favor anywhere. As to its adaptability to American conditions, that is more nearly a debatable question. Of course, it must be recognized that different materials have to be used to build Italian gardens in America, and various details require important alterations. In these matters mistakes are easy, and it would have been very surprising had the begin- ners not made grave errors; but these errors do not affect the style itself, nor prove its failure, any more than the great abuses of democracy in America prove the failure of our system of government. There is room on this great continent for every style of landscape gardening. It is worth while to notice, by way of illus- tration, that a number of gardens are now being done in the Japanese style. Indeed each and every possible style may have 126 ’ ON AMERICAN GARDENING a real suitability to some special circum- stances. If we inquire which style is gen- erally best adapted to American conditions, we are still away from the point, for adapta- tion does not go by generalities, but has a meaning only in view of concrete condi- tions. Furthermore, all foreign styles, even the well-reputed English style, must be modified to suit American requirements, or it is as much a failure as any other. Is there, then, an American style of landscape gardening? or will there ever be one? These questions cannot be answered categorically and with great confidence. If we have not yet developed a national style in music, painting, literature or archi- tecture, it is quite too much to expect that greater progress should have been made in landscape gardening. Some things have, indeed, been done in a truly American way. We have the park systems of Chicago and of Hartford; we have many magnificent pri- vate estates, like Biltmore and Faulkner Farm; and we have had the Exposition at Buffalo. These are only typical examples, showing the art of landscape architecture in a fairly Americanized form. At least we are no longer dependent on exotic plans, 127 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL plants nor gardeners. With just pride we may label the whole thing “Made in America.” In another chapter some attempt has been made to determine what are the char- acteristic features of the indigenous American landscape. We found that it is built on a very large scale, that it contains a great variety of motifs, and that it pos- sesses a large number of extraordinary and spectacular features. All of these things are more or less,—and at the bottom more rather than less,—related to the present and future status of landscape art in America, especially to the large and the characteristic expressions of it. Niagara Falls must eventually be the center of a national park; and the Big Trees are already reserved for the purposes of scenery. Pike’s Peak, Mt. Washington and Mt. Rainier will some day work into the compositions of American landscape architects; and it is not beyond the reach of a reasonable faith or a good imagination to think that the Great Prairies and the Everglades may some time and somewhere enjoy the mastery of the artist’s touch. Then when Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, Pike’s Peak, the Presidential 128 ON AMERICAN GARDENING Range, the Arizona desert, and the Father of Waters have received the fulness of scenic development, when they have been made the themes of great and adequate park projects, when they have been set forth for human enjoyment, with all the help that art can give to the great achievements of nature, then surely we shall have so much distinctively American landscape architecture. For years we have made ourselves disagreeable boasting about the great un- developed resources of America, meaning coal deposits, iron ore and tillable land: it has seldom occurred to us that our unde- veloped resources of beautiful landscape are even as great, and in their way quite as valuable. If American genius is proud of its native achievements in industry, the field lies open for similar achievements in art. The development of these resources will be the special task of American landscape gardening. There is another way of predicting— perhaps less accurately—the trend of land- scape gardening for the future. This method consists in comparing landscape gardening with the other arts, which have 129 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL already developed much further than landscape art, and proceeding on the fair assumption that the latter will follow some- what the same course that the former have followed. The comparison may be con- veniently made with painting, and for simplicity’s sake may be confined to Amer- ica, though, of course, the same phylogeny would be found anywhere else. The development of painting presents three principal stages,—not to analyze more closely. These may be recorded and sum- marily characterized as follows: 1. The period of the representation of details. Smibert, West and Copley built up their pictures by drawing in every pos- sible detail, seen or unseen. Every button on a coat and every stitch on a cuff were represented as fully and as accurately as the skill and means of the artist would permit. 2. The period of the representation of material masses. The painters early learned that masses are more important than de- tails, and so the effort was turned from the latter to the former. The so-called school of impressionism, while earning an unpopu- lar reputation through extravagances, nevertheless settled the thinking world in 130 ON AMERICAN GARDENING favor of the broad effects of masses in preference to a mere childlike exhibition of curious details. William Morris Hunt, George Inness, John La Farge, and nearly all the most famous of modern American painters exemplify this method. 3. The period of spiritual representa- tion. It is commonly recognized to be one thing to picture the material masses which the eye sees, and quite another to represent the spiritual significance of such masses as they appear to the sympathetic mind. It is understood that some of the most suc- cessful painters of the material world are quite unable to open for us this higher spiritual world. For it is generally recog- nized to be a higher world, and to require higher talents for its communication. Whistler, John H. Twachtman and Mel- chers may fairly be credited with this superior ability. Now let us see what we can find in the field of landscape architecture correspond- ing to this evolution. 1. We have the period of details fully exemplified in Downing and his many fol- lowers. Their gardening dealt almost exclusively with specimen plants. These 131 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL details were to them supremely important. It would be easy to press this story further back, and to show how an earlier generation exhibited a more narrowed and inartistic appreciation of details; but we are not making a complete analysis of this matter, and we are confining ourselves arbitrarily to what has taken place in America within our own knowledge. 2. Then came Olmsted and the su- premacy of the mass. Mass planting has been the watchword ever since. Instead of cultivating one Japanese magnolia, Olmsted planted a carload of roadside dogwood in a single group. While the important prin- ciple herein involved has been very imper- fectly applied, even by Olmsted’s most careful followers—as Manning and Eliot—it has, nevertheless, gained general recogni- tion, at least among professional landscape architects. 3. Where, when, how and from whom shall we see the spiritual treatment of landscape? Music, literature, painting and sculpture are spiritualized. Even utilitarian architecture, in some hands, takes on this higher expression. Shall we not some day see the landscape treated with a touch so 132 ON AMERICAN GARDENING sympathetic, so full of inspiration and mastery, that the whole picture will stand forth with a new meaning? If a painted landscape can suggest human passion or divine mercies, shall not the landscape itself, with its real hills, trees, water and enveloping atmosphere, speak with yet directer and more emphatic language of still higher spiritual themes? 133 ESSAY NUMBER NINE As to the Field of Criticism if ee nee 200: RETURNING TO THE FOLD Wm. H. Zerbe AS TO THE FIELD OF CRITICISM E have taken a brief look at Amer- ri ican landscape gardening. In do- ing so we have glanced hurriedly at certain American landscape gardeners and their works. We have done nothing more, however, than to catch a glimpse, as from the window of a hurrying express train, of a few of the nearest and most outstanding facts. Even yet we have not the long- wished opportunity for a detailed and critical examination of materials; but we must, at least, assume the critic’s point of view. It is a point of view which we have seldom (almost never) yet attained, but a point from which matters of large import may be seen. It will be quite worth our while to consider for a moment what relation criticism bears to art,—the critic to the artist. We do this, of course, with our own special art in mind, but we must take our instruction chiefly from what has been 139 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL done in other fields. In the field of land- scape architecture criticism is almost unknown; and this fact presents unquestion- ably the greatest handicap under which the art labors. The landscape architects themselves appear to be not only blind to this defect, but they seem almost to present an organized opposition to every improve- ment in this direction. Consider, first of all, the refinement to which criticism has been brought in the field of literature. The authenticated works of Shakespeare may be printed in a com- fortable pocket volume, but the books about Shakespeare and his works would fill all the Carnegie libraries between Hyannis, Massachusetts, and Walla Walla, Washing- ton. These treat every conceivable phase of the poet’s life and work, viewed from every possible angle, from the Grecian structure of his plays to the rambles with Ann Hathaway on Sunday afternoons along the shady field-paths of Warwick. Homer has been dead some thousands of years. His nation is dead, and the language in which he wrote is dead; but there meet daily in many classrooms thousands of boys and girls to discuss his qualities of style, 140 THE FIELD OF CRITICISM and to wonder what made Helen act so. A volume of criticism even greater in proportion to the apparent need, washes hourly across the meadows of current liter- ature. Mr. William Dean Howells has writ- ten many books, but his critics have written five pages to his one. The newspapers are full of talk about Kipling, Barry and Mr. Dooley; and if there is a dinner party any- where in the land where novels, plays and biographies are not discussed the guests must be very stupid, or very interesting, for they are very rare. Does all this flood of criticism serve any use? Does it fertilize the soil from which literature springs? or to change the figure, is criticism a mere parasitic growth? A good deal of it does, indeed, represent a cheap parasitism, but proper criticism is nevertheless, the very life of literature. Criticism is to literature what the cultivator, the pruning knife, and the spray pump are to the apple orchard. Apple-trees will grow without care, but the wild pasture trees never bear fruit of any value. It is only when the trees are set in proper soil, in orderly rows, pruned, fertilized and cleansed, and given continual expert care 141 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL by the horticulturist, that they bear full loads of perfect apples. No; a progressive literature without constant criticism is an impossibility. Most productive writers recognize this. They welcome intelligent criticism, even when it rests heavily on their own works. Some writers, and all publishers, industriously cultivate criticism. The actor is, perhaps, as obviously dependent on the critic as is any other artist. In the first place, he works with a company of fellow artists whose judgments he must meet with some precision, in order to make his playing go at all. Next, he is usually supervised by a manager whose keen criticism is supplied with peculiar sanc- tions. In the third place, his acting must pass under the scrutiny of the professional critic who does not hesitate to say in the morning paper that the whole business was a shabby plagiarism of Booth or DeWolf Hopper, without ginger, grace or gumption. Finally, the public, passing in front of the box office, pass a very positive sort of criticism upon the art of both playwright and actor. It is easy to point out instances of able actors who have suffered under the 142 THE FIELD OF CRITICISM unjust strictures of any or all these various critics. It is not so easy to prove, however, that any of them have had their powers permanently impaired by such misunder- standings; and it is all but self-evident that without this ordeal of criticism the art of acting would never rise above the lower levels of mediocrity. In like manner, the arts of painting, sculpture and music enjoy the stimulus and direction of a well-organized criticism. What would be the value of the annual picture salon without criticism? And the great music festivals are partly for present enjoyment, but partly, too, for the sake of future improvement. On every hand, in every art (except only landscape architecture), criticism is wel- comed, and the critic is recognized as filling a position of legitimate service. Not every critic is himself an artist. Probably the best dramatic critics are not actors, nor the best critics of pictures painters, but the field offers attractive employment for high talents. We all allow that landscape gardening is the youngest of the arts, but its ex- ceeding immaturity is in nothing else so 143 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL completely demonstrable, as in the almost childish attitude of the rank and file of landscape artists toward criticism. The contrast which they offer when compared with novelists and actors is discouraging. I have recently organized and con- ducted a somewhat extensive correspond- ence with the landscape architects of America. Naturally, I have written most freely to my own acquaintances, but I have also written personal letters to many others. In this correspondence I have been as polite as my unhopeful expectations could teach me to be; and my direct questions have been as few and as mild as was consistent with getting any information at all. Some data and some valuable expressions of opinion have, indeed, been secured; but the big result of the whole investigation is to show the very general and hearty suspicion in which all such inquiries are held. Some landscape gardeners politely, but firmly, refuse to give any information regarding their own works or anybody else’s. With rare exceptions, information, if given at all, is given grudgingly, as though a favor had been presumptuously and unwarrantably asked. This being the atti- 144 THE FIELD OF CRITICISM tude toward the giving of information, what is to be expected when these men are asked for an expression of opinion? The majority of them refuse flatly to give it. It seems to be considered a crime to say that Mr. Brown’s design for the public park is good, and Mr. White’s design for the college campus inadequate. Indeed, some of these good men appear to feel that it is unprofessional and ungentlemanly to think about such things. Let us understand now and evermore that this attitude is wrong and harmful. The right way is to welcome and assist criticism. Well-informed, intelligent criti- cism will clear the air, will set a standard of taste, will foster a wider and better appreciation of our gracious art, will tend to the improvement of technique, will set , higher ideals before our professional workers, and in a thousand ways will help both the makers and the enjoyers of land- scape pictures. In the field of landscape architecture the critic meets certain practical difficulties which do not exist in other fields, or which elsewhere offer less serious obstacles. It is quite possible to read all the works 145 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL of almost any popular or classic writer, and to know what his entire output has been. The experienced art critic has seen practically all the works of the masters; and before he writes about Dewing’s paint- ings, or of St. Gaudens’ sculpture, he will have seen a majority of the artist’s pro- ductions. Now it is practically impossible for any critic to know the work of any landscape architect in this complete fashion. Mr. Warren Manning—to use a specific example—has undertaken over 750 pieces of work in his professional career. These are scattered all over the continent, from coast to coast, and from Canada almost to the Gulf. And the work of every other landscape architect is only more or less scattered and inaccessible. Nor is this all. Perhaps it is not even the worst. Nearly all of this work exists anonymously. Alfred Henry Lewis and Edith Wharton put their names on their books; and 200,000 copies of “Coniston” repeat the name of Winston Churchill 200,000 times. But when Frederick Law Olmsted works with equal skill and devo- tion to make Franklin Park a place of beauty and of joy forever, there remains 146 THE FIELD OF CRITICISM no sign nor mark to repeat his name to the thousands who thoughtlessly enjoy his labors. It is well-nigh impossible to discover the existing works of particular landscape architects. It would require a directory and a chart to do it; and it seems hardly necessary to remark that such a directory has not yet been compiled. In many places where good works of landscape gardening exist, it seems to be a point of professional etiquette to keep the names of the designers a secret. Another difficulty lies in the fact that a landscape gardener’s picture is not finished when it leaves his hand. Nearly always the lapse of years must be waited for its completion. Sometimes a generation must pass; and it would be hard in any case for the artist himself to say just at what moment his masterpiece gave the fullest expression of his original design. What is even worse is the positive infraction of the design by ignorant or wil- ful meddlers. A gardener, a park superin- tendent, a half-baked engineer, or a thrifty contractor executes the artist’s design. Sometimes he executes it to death. This work is often performed ignorantly, often 147 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL without sympathy, sometimes with uncon- cealed hostility. How, then, shall we judge the designer by the result? It is true that artists, like other people, must be judged chiefly by results; and the best landscape architects provide means for overcoming or mitigating these diffi-;* culties, just as they provide against other technical difficulties in their work. Never- theless, under the best of management these difficulties exist in large measure, and form a serious barrier to the progress of criticism in the field of landscape gardening art. We may here pass over the fact that criticism in the field of landscape archi- tecture has no traditions, no criteria, no background of history. These defects are real and serious, but they are not vital, neither are they permanent. They belong only to the infancy of our art, and will be outgrown in due time. 148 ESSAY NUMBER TEN On American Landscape Gardeners In short, the landscape gardener’s task is to produce beautiful pictures. Nature supplies him with the materials, always giving him vitality, light, atmosphere, color, and details, and often lovely or imposing forms in the conformation of the soil; and she will see to the thorough finishing of his design. But the design is the main thing, and the design must be of his own conceiving. Mrs. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER, “Art Out-of-Doors’’ 151 ALONG THE STREAM Mrs. C. E. Coleman BEND OF THE RIVER C. F. Clarke ON AMERICAN LANDSCAPE GARDENERS AVING in mind now what has been said on the state of criticism in land- scape architecture, let us try to apply our principles briefly to the work of American landscape gardeners. Anything which we can do now will be, of course, only the most meager and fragmentary beginning. To criticise the work of Down- ing, for example, one ought to search out carefully the few places which he designed. These places should then be thoroughly examined to determine what part of their present aspect is due to the plans of Downing, and what to the changes of later gardeners. But, most of all, to judge Andrew Jackson Downing fairly, it would be important to look up the work of those immediately inspired by him. The connec- tion between Downing and Calvert Vaux should be studied, but more especially should the critic investigate the works of 153 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Frank J. Scott. It is hardly necessary to say that the present writer has not done all this with reference to the work of Down- ing, to say nothing of the hundreds of able men who have succeeded to his pro- fession in America. Once more, however, the writer pleads the immeasurable im- portance of this kind of criticism, and the necessity of making a beginning some- where. In undertaking a discussion of Ameri- can landscape gardeners, we are forced to traverse, in part, the same ground which we have already covered in speaking of American landscape gardening. In this case, however, our point of view is alto- gether different. Then we were tracing the development of the art; now we shall try to estimate the characters and achieve- ments of the men. Professor Bailey names Andre Par- mentier as the first professional landscape gardener in America. However, the naming of any man, in advance of Down- ing, as the pioneer must, of course, be very arbitrary; and with all due respect to the excellent gardens and the able gardeners of colonial days, we may fairly dismiss 154 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS them all with the observation that real American landscape gardening did not exist until about 1850. Downing is by all odds the first of American landscape gardeners. He did some little work on private places about Newburgh and in Washington on the grounds about the Capitol, and the Smith- sonian Institution. Very little, if any, of this work has been preserved. Downing’s ability as a student of this art is nearly always judged by one piece of work, namely, his book on Landscape Garden- ing, with occasionally some slight addition for the pleasing essays in the “Horti- culturist.” These writings, indeed, show a man of great refinement of character, a man of rather severely voluptuous tastes, of somewhat aristocratic temper, retiring and sensitive, fond of everything beautiful, but with a taste influenced by the spirit of his time toward the curiosities of beauty, a man highly appreciative of the natural landscape, but still more passionately fond of trees, shrubs and fruits. We must not forget that Downing—like hundreds of his followers—was a nurseryman before he was a landscape gardener, and this fact had 155 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL a marked influence, as we may see, on all his work. If we are to form any fair judgment of Downing, however, we must not stop here. We must rather draw our conclusions largely from the disciples who followed him. Every great artist or teacher leaves a group of disciples behind. These men work over, and put into effect, the ideas of the master. Judged by the number and character of his disciples, Andrew Jackson Downing’s name is the most illustrious in the entire history of American agriculture, horticulture, or landscape gardening. He has been the model and the beau ideal of every pomologist, fruit grower and nursery- man, as well as the direct inspiration of almost every native landscape gardener which our country has produced. Every nurseryman who has grown trees and shrubs in America during the last fifty years has had some fairly definite notions of improving his own grounds, of helping his neighbors to improve theirs, and of help- ing in the beautification of public places. His ideas of these things have been taken “en bloc” from Downing. From the ranks of these nurserymen have come a majority 156 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS of our best landscape gardeners; and the completeness with which they have been controlled by Downing’s ideas would be pitiful had the results been less satisfactory or the leadership less worthy. Other ideas have recently begun to overlie those of Downing, but his work still exercises a tremendous influence. This influence, especially in the recent past, has been so plain, and so easily traced, that we may fairly allow it to be the chief support of Downing’s reputation as a landscape artist. By this same means, better than any other, can we determine also what were the Downing ideas of landscape gardening. For this purpose we may select for special study Mr. Frank J. Scott, who describes himself as Downing’s friend and pupil. In Scott’s “Suburban Home Grounds” are found a considerable number of designs of most excellent draftsmanship, and a large number of engravings corresponding perfectly with the plans. From these plans and pictures we may draw certain definite conclusions as to Scott’s work, and these conclusions may fairly be carried over to the work of Downing. 1. He aimed at an informal or “natu- 157 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL ral” style. His main walks and drives were usually curved, and his trees were not placed in straight rows, except where the circumstances plainly demanded it. This informality, however, was de- cidedly restrained,—we might even say constrained and stiff. It fell far short of the free and easy natural style of the present day. 2. Trees were used chiefly as individ- uals. Each one was given room for its complete development. There were few groups, and no masses. It will be remem- bered that this principle has been most strenuously preached by all the disciples of Downing, though it is now being generally abandoned. 3. Lawns are small and scrappy, the space being taken up very largely with trees and flower beds. Each design, there- fore, presents a somewhat jumbled appearance. 4. Trees of many kinds were used in nearly every place, and, as these were all treated as specimens, the whole assumed the air of an arboretum. This arboretum scheme is highly characteristic of the dis- ciples of Downing. These principles 2, 3 158 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS and 4 in the hands of men of limited taste, led directly to what Professor Bailey has aptly characterized as the “nursery style” of landscape gardening. 5. Considerable numbers of fruit trees were used on the grounds, being placed in such a manner as to become a part of the decorative scheme. We shall see in a moment that modern taste has confirmed and extended Principle 1. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 have been almost reversed, and Number 5 has been neglected. The older and more conservative land- scape gardeners of the present moment, however, hold rather closely to these principles of Downing as here deduced from the work of Scott. Before leaving this discussion of Downing’s methods it is proper to inquire their source. Downing did not originate them, however great his originality may have been. We may easily recall the fact that Downing traveled in England, and that he most cordially admired the land- scape gardening which he saw there. Let us remember further that this was the time of Edward Kemp; and a comparison of the work of these two men will show 159 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL that, though Downing was by far the abler man, the methods of gardening, and the whole point of view of the two men were alike to an extraordinary degree. The state of landscape gardening in England in that day—1835-1840—may be pictured with a few strokes of the pen. The extravagances of Brown and his immediate imitators had been succeeded by the practical common sense and masterful genius of Repton. In the hands of Repton the natural style had been established on a rational basis, and for all future generations. Then had followed the inevitable bevy of copyists, praising Repton’s mastery by constant unimaginative repetition of his tricks,— holding to his methods without his genius, —precisely as Downing’s disciples were to follow Downing one or two decades later. Downing was influenced chiefly by Repton, but this influence came to him largely at second hand, even as you and I began our work under the second-hand inspiration of the genius of Newburgh. Frederick Law Olmsted stands easily as the greatest figure in American landscape gardening. By many good authorities he is rated as the greatest 160 Buspinods sopuoy GNVISI HONa Lv adIL-aoo14 aNOd DOW4d 4HL ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS artist of any sort ever produced in America. In a recent vote taken among leading American landscape architects and students of the craft, Olmsted was awarded the primacy by a majority lacking only one vote of unanimity. There are, indeed, some few persons who show a wish to dispraise his work. These persons say that he took over from another man the design for Central Park, that he enjoyed the credit for a great deal of work done by Calvert Vaux, Ignaz Pilat and others. Every claim of this sort might easily be admitted without shaking his reputation in the least. Many of his later works, if not all of them, are greatly superior to Central Park; and if his reputation over- shadowed those of the men with whom he was associated, it was not because of any personal advantage unfaithfully taken. Olmsted was engaged on many works, of which the following are only a few: Central Park, New York. Prospect Park, Brooklyn. University of California, Berkeley. Washington Park, Brooklyn. South Park, Chicago. Morningside Park, New York. 161 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Muddy Brook Parkway, Boston. Mount Royal Park, Montreal. Capitol Grounds, Washington. Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. Belle Isle Park, Detroit. Capitol Grounds, Albany. Franklin Park, Boston. Charles River Embankment, Boston. Parks of Buffalo. Wood Island Park, Boston. Marine Park, Boston. Lynn Woods, Lynn. World’s Fair, Chicago. Of these, perhaps the best known are the World’s Fair, at Chicago (especially the Wooded Island and Lagoon), Mount Royal Park, Montreal, Biltmore, N. C., and the railway station grounds of the Boston & Albany Railroad. If we add to this list Franklin Park, Boston, and the Muddy Brook Parkway, we have a reasonably representative selection of his best and most characteristic work. However, in any consideration of Olmsted’s work, careful attention should be given to his written reports. Among these should be specially mentioned his report on Franklin Park, and his “Consid- 162 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS erations of the Justifying Value of a Pub- lic Park.” With these various works in hand we may be justified in a few generali- zations regarding his methods and their results. 1. He revitalized the natural style. Brown, Repton, Downing and all their followers had professed the natural style, but the works of Olmsted were so much more truly like the best of Nature’s work, that the whole doctrine of naturalness in landscape art received a new meaning at his hands. To-day, at least in America, the natural style and the Olmstedian style are synonymous, while the works of all his predecessors would be rated artificial. 2. Olmsted introduced a new apprecia< tion of natural scenery. Other men had been gardeners or improvers on Nature. He first taught us to admire Nature in her own dress. Downing was, of course, a lover of natural landscape, but this element of his character was not brought strongly forward in his landscape gardening. 3. Adaptation to site and surroundings was the keynote of Olmsted’s work, and this also amounted to a new discovery in landscape art. In this direction Olmsted 163 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL had a peculiar gift which is everywhere recognized as one of his distinguishing characteristics. It will be readily seen that this faculty was closely associated with his appreciation of natural scenery men- tioned above. 4. He discovered the native flora. Though artistically less important than other contributions of Olmsted, this was the most revolutionary of his innovations. Downing was a collector of plants, with a fondness for what was rare and exotic. Gardeners everywhere were planting Japa- nese magnolias, purple beeches and Cam- perdown elms. Olmsted turned boldly, and not without violent opposition, to the commonest roadside shrubs. He adopted the outcast weeds. Peter after his vision could not have been more completely con- verted to what had previously been thought unclean. Up to this time, strange as it may seem, American plants had been more used in Europe than here. With the richest indigenous flora of any country in the world, we were still planting the species and varieties of European nurseries. We may remark further that this use of the native flora was the one Olmstedian 164 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS principle most quickly acclaimed and adopted by others. It has had a tremen- dous vogue in this country. It is the point in which Olmsted has been most fully, successfully and sometimes slavishly imitated. 5. The native plants were used in large quantities. Common dogwood and viburnums were put in by carloads. For the first time in the history of landscape art, plants were adequately massed. This principle was not carried to an extreme, how- ever; and, in fact, it has not yet received the development which it merits. While it re- ceived less popular approval than item 4 above, its intrinsic importance from the standpoint of good art is much greater. -- 6. Indigenous plants were given their natural environment. Much attention was given to the development of this principle, especially by some of the followers of Olmsted. Up to this time, along with the preference for exotics, had gone the gar- dener’s pride in growing plants out of their altitude, latitude and longitude. The Alpine garden was the gardener’s pet, and Downing himself nursed his lonely fig-trees through the cold New York winters. 165 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Items 4, 5 and 6, though quite inde- pendent, are all closely related. They deal with the use of native plants in a natural way. It is rather odd that these radical changes in landscape-gardening methods should have come from a man who always mourned his ignorance of plants. Another fact is still more curious, viz., that Olmsted should be generally criticised for his weak- ness as a plantsman. And the present writer wishes just here to record his most emphatic dissent from this current criti- cism. It is one thing to know the names of plants, and quite a different thing to know the plants themselves. It is a still greater accomplishment to know how to use plants to make pictures. Every botanizing old maid, male or female, knows plant names. Every good nurseryman knows the plants. Only the artist and the genius know how to blend these materials into pictures of abiding beauty; and here is where Frederick Law Olmsted qualified. 7- Olmsted’s roads were peculiar and characteristic—and peculiarly and charac- teristically successful. A considerable part of their success is due to their adaptation to the contour of the land, and is thus 166 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS related to Principle 3 discussed above. Their striking individuality appears to be largely the result of their nodal treatment, more fully discussed below. As a third characteristic, they were always laid on natural lines. This means that there are no straight lines and no mathematical curves, either in horizontal projection or in profile. In this matter of road design Olmsted has been widely followed, usually without marked success. 8. Olmsted appears to have been the first conspicuously to adopt the principle of rhythm in natural landscape composition, though any artist composing freely, and with a proper feeling for his work will inevitably follow this method more or less. This method cannot be formulated in a sentence, but it may be explained most simply in its application to roads. We may suppose that every road (especially such long “circuit drives” as Olmsted delighted to make) may be composed of a certain number of nodes, connected by corre- sponding internodes. The main features of the landscape composition come at the nodes. Here will be the best views. Here will be the most attractive plantings. Here 167 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the road will make its principal turn; and at the nodes will come the changes of grade. For instance, there would be a node where the drive crosses a small stream. The grade changes from a decline to an incline. There is a promising curve. There is a specially fine view of the stream. There is a bridge to be admired. The plantings along the brookside are altogether different from those on the meadow just passed. Everything marks this for a node. After enjoying this picture to our time’s content, we take the ascent toward the upland beyond, and after traversing a com- paratively featureless internode we come out on the high land above, where gradient and curvature change once more, and where the far outlook blesses us with emotions quite different from those borne to us on the shady bridge over the brook. The same method of composition applies, almost necessarily, to all sorts of landscape work, especially to informal undertakings. Will we design an informal border of hardy herbaceous plants? If there is any logical order at all to the composition we shall find it dividing easily into nodes and internodes. Every row of 168 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS street trees presents a well-marked rhythm like that of martial music. It is not to be assumed that this prin- ciple—or any of these principles—was explicitly formulated by Olmsted himself. Olmsted was too great an artist to operate upon any formula. The idea was first pointed out to me by my friend Mr. George A. Parker, who by acquaintance with Olmsted, by broad knowledge of his work, and by deep sympathy with everything artistic, is peculiarly justified in suggesting such a generalization. Calvert Vaux was born and trained in London. He came to America in 1848, and in this country his life’s work was done. He was commonly considered by his contemporaries to be the ablest land- scape architect in America, this being before Olmsted’s commanding genius was recognized. Vaux furnished, in more than one sense, the connecting bond between Downing and Olmsted. He was first the business partner of the former, and after- ward of the latter. The partnership between Olmsted and Vaux was in many respects fortunate. Olmsted had breadth of view, originality and a practical sympa- 169 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL thy for the outdoor world in its largest aspects. Vaux had the technical skill of the trained architect and a knowledge of European practice. In the various works executed by this firm, as notably in Central Park, many of the most pleasing details were of Vaux’s suggestion and design, while the unity of the scheme considered all together was due to Olmsted’s broader vision. It is an easy inference that, during the period of this partnership, Olmsted learned a great deal from Vaux in the way of technical method which stood him in good service in his later work. The work of Charles Eliot is easier to judge than that of any other American landscape gardener. This is due to various reasons,—(1) to its comparative and lamentable brevity, (2) to its simplicity and consistency, and (3), most of all, to the completeness with which it is set forth in the magnificent memoir by his father. We may say briefly of his work that it follows the Olmstedian methods already outlined, that he showed a great fondness for natural scenery, superior perhaps even to that of Olmsted himself, and that he was a leader in America in the projection 170 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS of large improvement schemes involving wide districts. The Metropolitan Park system in the vicinity of Boston was the first of its kind in this country, and is to be rated as Eliot’s masterpiece. The greatest, most significant and most important development of landscape archi- tecture in America in our own day is presented in the work of civic improve- ment, as it is now commonly called. Though Eliot is frequently named as the pioneer in this field, the work is being done now on a large scale, in many places, by many landscape architects, and with a technical proficiency and success which would surely have surprised and delighted Eliot. As examples may be mentioned Mr. Warren Manning’s work at Harrisburg; Mr. John Nolen’s designs for San Diego, Cal., and Roanoke, Va., Mr. Charles Mul- ford Robinson’s plans for Honolulu, and the plans of Mr. F. L. Olmsted, Jr., for Detroit; also the reports of Mr. Harlan P. Kelsey on Columbia and Greenville, S. C., and especially the magnificent new plans for Chicago, by Mr. Daniel H. Burnham. Literary and dramatic criticism give their best service when applied to the work 171 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL of men still living. In pursuance of our determination to apply similar methods to landscape art, we ought now to say some- thing of the work of contemporary land- scape architects. The difficulties of such an undertaking are only too manifest, and have already been enumerated. From recent and somewhat extended correspond- ence with the best judges, however, I beg permission to sketch a few general observations. A considerable majority of these correspondents place Mr. Warren H. Man- ning and the Olmsted Brothers at the top of the list of practising landscape archi- tects. Mr. Manning, who worked for some time with the elder Olmsted, is mentioned by many as the best representative of that master’s methods. He is particularly strong in his knowledge of native flora over a large part of the continent, and in his ability to bring this flora into effective use. His methods are particularly adapted to large rural places, and there is some suggestion that on small city places he is less successful, owing to this use of too broad a style. 172 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS The firm of Olmsted Brothers is generally praised for its efficient business organization, making it possible to turn out a large amount of work of uniform excellence. Mr. John C. Olmsted is said to be strong on the organization and adminis- tration of parks and municipal projects generally. Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., is credited with unusual artistic gifts. Mr. Percival Gallagher, a member of the same firm, is mentioned by those who know him as a young man of special promise. Various accidents of circumstance have combined to place Mr. Charles A. Platt in the nominal leadership of the American exponents of the Italian style. Mr. Platt is, first of all, an architect (as, in fact, are nearly all the devotees of the Italian style), and lays no claim to a knowledge of gardening. However, he has designed a number of small places with distinguished success. The Larz Andersen Garden at Brookline, Mass., is the most noted example of his work, but some of the smaller things which he has done at Cornish, N. H., are said to be even better. Mr. O. C. Simonds, of Chicago, made his reputation as designer and superintend- 173 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL , ent of Graceland Cemetery. He has since then designed other rural cemeteries, and his name will always be especially asso- ciated with this sort of work. His work seems to be characterized by roads of broad and dignified sweep, and by plantings of large and orderly naturalistic masses conforming admirably to the contour of the land on which they are placed. Mr. Jens Jensen, of Chicago, appeals to my own judgment as one of the ablest men of the hour. He has the advantage of unusual artistic and technical training, and an intimate acquaintance with the best European models. His work is interesting, original, novel, breaking clear away from the formulas now familiar in America, though resembling more the modern work in Germany. His work on the West Park System in Chicago presents many notable features. Many other landscape architects are mentioned with praise. Those most fre- quently named by correspondents are Messrs. Chas. N. Lowrie, H. P. Kelsey, Geo. Kessler, E. W. Bowditch and Frederick G. Todd. But their work is not sufficiently known to the present writer, 174 ON LANDSCAPE GARDENERS nor to his correspondents, who are willing to express any opinion of it, so that it may be characterized in any manner at the present time. It is generally recognized that a great deal is done for the art of landscape gar- dening by those who are not professionally engaged in designing. The park superin- tendents especially have much to do with the progress of the art. In their number Messrs. J. A. Pettigrew, of Boston; George A. Parker, of Hartford, and Theodore Wirth, of Minneapolis, are recognized as men of eminent abilities. Prof. L. H. Bailey has done much through his writings to popularize sound principles of good taste in private gardening. In the same way much was accomplished through the able and courageous preaching of the late W. A. Stiles, of Prof. C. S. Sargent, and that group of enthusiasts who found a pleasant and inspiring exchange for ten years in the weekly issues of “Garden and Forest.” 175 THE HILLSIDE Edwin J. Dow BI0NaM DQ yudsy “ssp a0dIad HOuvV-anod AHL ESSAY NUMBER ELEVEN On American Masterpieces of Landscape Architecture I am sitting on a mossy log with an open book on my knee. At my feet a little spring puts forth its trickling runnel. The well is clear and strong, a voice of nature which says, “Sound, sound, rise and flow on.” Water is not aware of the academies and the obsoletes; possibly this is why its noise is so charming in these cool places of the woods. Overhead the crowded, dusky leaves shake with a sound of multitudinous kissing, and one trim wood-thrush goes like a shadow through the bosket yonder, piping a liquid, haunting phrase, which wavers between the extremes of joy and pain. There is just enough light to read Keats by—the light of neither sea nor land, the soft crepuscule of a thick forest. Maurice THOMPSON, “My Winter Garden” 179 ON AMERICAN MASTERPIECES OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE HE uninitiated person hearing of mas- terpieces easily forms the idea that there is something complete and final about each one. The very word “master- piece” has a big, sonorous and conclusive sound. However, when the critic comes to close quarters with any of the renowned works he finds that they are not without defects. Even the most masterful of the masterpieces, in literature, music or painting, is only a little way in advance of its com- petitors. Or, to state the matter differently, there is no such thing as perfection or finality in the works of human art. In the field of landscape architecture there are special difficulties which have al- ready been hinted at. A piece of work may be left to-day in the very best condition which the landscape architect’s skill can give it, and yet five years from to-day, through neglect or abuse, it may be worthless. An artistic 181 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL effect once achieved in landscape gardening will not stay fixed. The long time required to secure results in the best sorts of land- scape work also brings in difficulties. The situation becomes particularly awkward when, through the lapse of time, several different landscape gardeners are employed successively on the same piece of work. Many of the best things that have been done have been necessarily managed in this way, and in such instances it is a puzzle to decide whether one man or another should have the praise for achievement or the blame for failure. Yet, in spite of difficulties, it seems wise and proper to classify some works of art as masterpieces, whether in literature, painting or landscape architecture. It is always good to recognize merit. It is always worth while to give large attention to the best things. Every masterpiece becomes a standard by which other work is measured. It becomes an example all workers may emulate. It marks the goal toward which every am- bitious artist presses forward. As we seek to promote better work in landscape archi- tecture, particularly by setting up higher standards, we should improve every oppor- 182 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES tunity to call attention to the best works in this art also. It will be recognized, of course, that the selection of any particular works of art for pre-eminent recognition is a matter of per- sonal opinion. If the opinion of a large number of well-trained men can be se- cured, and if they agree to any extent, such a consensus of opinion has a special value. But we have not gone so far in landscape gardening, and it will apparently be some time before we can. The opinions of specific works which follow are entirely my own and must be recorded as partial and tentative. The comparisons made in such opinions, moreover, must not appear to be invidious. Doubtless, some excellent works of land- scape architecture have not been mentioned in the following list. In fact, it will be easy to find other works which are undoubtedly better than some of those here mentioned. The list, in fact, has been made up simply with a view to have it broadly represen- tative of American landscape art. It seems to me eminently important that my students, as they are being introduced to the study of landscape gardening, should 183 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL have set before them a number of typical works which, if not strictly masterpieces, are recognized as of high merit. Some of the masterpieces which I have included in my list are important on ac- count of their historical significance. Circumstances have conspired to give them special influence. This is the case, for instance, with Central Park, New York. The park itself is by no means the best one in the country, and the original design is by no means the best work of its author. Nevertheless, the making of Central Park marks an epoch in American landscape architecture. It was the beginning of the great city park systems which to-day supply the most magnificent examples of the value and beauty to be achieved in the successful practice of this art. Number One. Therefore, let Central Park, New York City, stand as the first masterpiece of American landscape archi- tecture. The idea of this park was broached by Andrew Jackson Downing, and Down- ing lived long enough to see the beginning of its realization. The original design was the first important work of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and it is quite within 184 FARM ROAD IN WINTER IJOL M 119SSRY ONINGAYAVMYV S.HLAVGA AMERICAN MASTERPIECES the facts to say that this piece of work opened to him his career as a landscape gardener. Whatever this opportunity may have made of the land between soth Street and Croton Reservoir, it made a world- renowned landscape architect of Olmsted. This in itself might entitle the project to rank as a masterpiece. Yet, with all its defects, Central Park has many good qualities. After all deduc- tions have been made, it is still a rural park. It brings the important qualities and some of the sentiment of wild nature into the center of the most sophisticated city in America. Moreover, it is actually one of the most useful of parks. Probably more people see it in a year than any other piece of park property in America,—perhaps in the world. For a large majority of these people, Central Park meets a very urgent need. It is more than recreation to them,— it is help and even health or life itself. Every student of landscape architecture ought carefully to consider Central Park. He ought to consider the conditions under which it has been made. These conditions are typical, even when most depressing. The student ought to consider the principle 185 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL on which a large rural park was established in the center of a great commercial city. He ought to consider why curved roads were built on varying levels, why bridle paths were introduced, why open lawns and sheets of water were provided, and why great irregular masses of trees were cul- tivated. There are many things in Central Park worth study besides the social problems there exposed to view. Number Two. The World’s Fair grounds at Chicago in 1893 presented a picture which America will never forget. This was probably the most influential piece of landscape architecture ever de- veloped on this continent. In spite of its short life, it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of the continent, and these were precisely the people most able to bear the influence of such work into their own communities. Besides all that, the country was ready for an artistic awakening. America was thoroughly sick of the disgusting archi- tecture which had prevailed since the Civil War. The country had been undergoing an era of despondency, bordering on in- sanity, in every form of practical art. Home 186 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES furnishings, men’s and women’s dress, and every other form of every-day art had sunk to the lowest possible level. The country was beginning to accumulate wealth and needed only a new leadership in matters of taste. Under such circum- stances, the architecture and gardening of the World’s Fair grounds proved a revela- tion to thousands of persons. These men and women went home inspired with new ideas of beautiful things and with a de- termination to make their own homes more orderly and artistic, their own grounds more beautiful, and to give their home towns and cities something of the grandeur and magnificence of the White City beside Lake Michigan. The design in itself was a good one. It was well adapted to the flat land on which it was built. It was convenient for the purposes of the Exposition. It showed what could be done in the massing and harmonization of architecture. It showed how this could be accomplished in such a large way as to amount to landscape making. The great Court of Honor, sur- rounded by its beautiful white buildings, with Macmonnies’ fountain at one end and 187 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the statue of the Republic at the other, told thousands of people for the first time in their lives what were the possibilities of the architectural style of landscape art. Presently the visitor crossed a beautiful arched bridge at one side. Probably the visitor had never seen a beautiful bridge before, having known only the most vulgar iron truss work or the shabbiest wooden bridges. At the other end of this bridge he found himself in a pleasant wild garden. The path ran through shady trees, it fol- lowed the rushy border of the lagoon, it hid behind masses of shrubbery, it took him by a few steps quite out of sight of the gorgeous White City. He understood with wonder that this Wooded Island, with all its trees and shrubs and its encircling lagoon, had all been lately made; and he felt that this, indeed, was landscape garden- ing. Thus the two great styles of landscape architecture were most emphatically im- pressed upon the knowledge of the American people at the precise moment when they were most ready to respond. Works of greater artistic merit will often be produced hereafter in America, but works of greater influence, never. 188 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES The design of the World’s Fair grounds was largely due to Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. Several other men helped. Mr. Daniel H. Burnham was largely re- sponsible for the architecture and archi- tectural effects in the landscape ensemble. The result, as a whole, is most emphatically entitled to stand as one of the great master- pieces of American landscape architecture. Number Three. Mount Royal, Montreal, is a beautiful mountain. It rises to a height of 740 feet from a broad, level plain. It stands beside an incomparable river and looks down on a busy, modern, picturesque city. It is a most unusual combination. Asa piece of landscape gardening, Mount Royal presents the effect of a remarkable piece of natural scenery most effectively and unaccountably let alone. It was a masterly conception of Frederick Law Olm- sted, in the first instance, that the place should be left in its natural character. For this plan he labored with pain and disap- pointment as though he were shedding his very life blood for a result always to be withheld. And yet, circumstances have co- operated to maintain his design. Or, if his design has not been actually developed, 189 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL it has at least not yet been frustrated. A city government, which might easily have ruined the aesthetic value of the whole magnificent mountain, has fortunately let it alone. There it stands. Upon its top and slopes there are still to be found most of the native species of trees. The drives and paths wind along the slopes in a natural and unconventional manner. And from Observation Point the visitor still looks out up the river over the rapids, down the river to a far, hazy horizon, across to the east where Mount St. Hilaire and Rougemont rise out of the level, fertile plain, while down below spreads the busy city. It is the most inspiring outlook on the continent of North America. It is the climax of Mount Royal Park. Number Four. In Franklin Park, Boston, Olmsted seems to have realized the great opportunity of his life. Every- thing considered, this is perhaps his great- est work. He enjoyed here, to some extent at least, what he did not find in Montreal,— the sympathetic appreciation and encour- agement of those with whom he labored. The native landscape, moreover, while much less spectacular than Mount Royal, was par- 190 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES ticularly dear to him. It was his home landscape. It was native. These were the great qualities in all landscape in his belief, and these were the qualities which he wished to realize in his best landscape gardening. Good fortune attended the en- terprise in another very important respect: the work was carried out with reasonable fidelity, with reasonable appropriations of money. ‘There have been some changes from the original design, and some of which, in my opinion, are not improve- ments; but, on the whole, Franklin Park comes as near being a concrete realization of a landscape architect’s ideas as can often be found. The park is conveniently located for one of its size and purpose; it is adequate in size; it contains a considerable diversity of scenery; it has various sections well suited to the various purposes of such a park; it abounds in pleasing pictorial views of natural scenery; and most of all has a quiet, restful, rural charm which is the very essence of Olmsted’s ideal. Number Five. I have already named four masterpieces, all of them by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. I cannot conclude the 191 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL list, however, without one more. The Muddy Brook Parkway, extending from the aristocratic Back Bay section of Boston out into Jamaica Plain and having its terminus in Olmsted Park, presents a piece of landscape gardening smaller in size and less important than any of the undertakings already mentioned. Nevertheless, it is the opinion of many good critics that this par- ticular territory includes the most success- ful work ever done by the great Olmsted. Here are small but almost perfect natural- istic pictures succeeding upon one another in a veritable panorama. These pictures are usually well composed. In fact, asa piece of pictorial composition, Muddy Brook Park has no superior among American works of landscape architecture done in the natural style. It should be remembered, in weighing the value of this result, that such pictorial composition is precisely what the natural style aims at, and pre- cisely what it so frequently fails to accom- plish. Those who doubt the practicability of landscape composition in the natural style should visit Muddy Brook Park. Number Six. Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, classifies artistically with the 192 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES works of Olmsted. The technical ideas which have prevailed are the same. While Mr. O. C. Simonds has always been a highly independent worker, and while his ideas have been developed largely by him- self, he has still been influenced to a con- siderable extent by the work of the elder Olmsted. Nevertheless, Graceland Ceme- tery is peculiarly his own enterprise. In its present form, he may be said to have established it. He not only designed but constructed it. There is hardly a piece of work to be found anywhere in the United States which is more directly and com- pletely the personal product of one man’s labors. Graceland Cemetery presented a num- ber of technical difficulties. The chief of these was the low, flat, swampy land on which it was built, and which was totally unadapted, in its original state, to the pur- poses for which it was set apart. There was very little natural growth of trees or shrubbery on the ground, and the climate was unfavorable to such growth. These difficulties stood largely in the way of suc- cess in the natural style of gardening, the style adopted for Graceland. 193 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Considerable areas of Graceland to-day present the stone-yard and junk-shop ap- pearance of the usual cemetery. These sections need not be considered in the artistic scheme. They are certainly not part of Mr. Simonds’ design. The eastern section of the present cemetery, however, has been developed and retained fairly within the ideal set by the designer. It has been kept practically clean of archi- tecture, stone masonry and other mortuary gewgaws, and also of canna beds, coleus borders and the other usual vulgarities. It contains a broad, quiet stretch of lake, heavily bordered by luxuriant plantings of shrubbery and comfortable trees. Here and there are quiet stretches of unbroken lawn. From many points there develop strongly composed pictures of quiet, restful, rural scenery. The feeling of peace, quietude and rest which ought to characterize a cemetery is here realized as fully as the art of landscape gardening can realize it. Graceland Cemetery has enjoyed the distinction of being one of the most suc- cessful of landscape cemeteries in America and so has exerted a large influence on other projects of a similar sort. 194 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES Number Seven. The Metropolitan Park Reservation of Boston is one of the most complete and satisfactory to be found in America. In fact, it compares favorably with work of the same sort in the best cities of Europe. The project is largely due to one man, the late Charles Eliot. While not very much has been done in the de- velopment of this region, aside from making some roads and parkways, the main pur- pose was accomplished when the tracts were selected, surveyed and reserved. To a considerable extent, therefore, Eliot saw his project completed. Perhaps he saw it as near its actual completion as the land- scape architect usually sees his work. The value of the Metropolitan Park Reservation of Boston, considered as a work of landscape architecture, consists first in its realization of the landscape needs of a great community. These needs are served for the present and safeguarded for the future in a large and practical way. The second merit’ of this reservation system is shown in the excellent judgment with which the various tracts were selected. The different areas represent all the differ- ent kinds of natural scenery available in 195 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL eastern Massachusetts. A greater variety of beautiful landscape is presented than any ordinary person would have thought existed within driving distance of Beacon Hill. The third point in which Eliot showed his professional skill lay in securing the purchase and reservation of these areas with a practical system for their manage- ment in perpetuity. He was able to present to the community, and to various influential sections of it, his projects with unusual force and persuasiveness. This sort of talent is sometimes lacking among land- scape architects, but it is a professional equipment of the greatest value. Number Eight. Keney Park, Hartford, has many of the characteristics of Franklin Park. It is a large rural park designed in the extreme of the natural style. The original layout was at the hands of the late Charles Eliot. Subsequent developments have been designed by Olmsted Brothers, particularly by Mr. John C. Olmsted, while much of the present charm and interest of the park is due to the sympathetic con- structive work of the superintendent, Mr. George A. Parker. While this park is, therefore, not to be rated as the product 196 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES of any one man’s genius, it is, nevertheless, a masterpiece of American landscape gardening. As such, it should be studied by everyone interested in the art. Number Nine. The city of Chicago has become famous in America for its park systems. It was the first large city in this country to reserve and organize a com- prehensive system of urban parks. Its lead in this field is still maintained. There are large numbers of parks and playgrounds in all parts of the city, and these are every- where connected by pleasant drives and broad boulevards with well-designed park- ings. Some of the landscape architecture in the various parks would hardly be ac- cepted as of the masterpiece order, yet the system as a whole is entirely com- mendable. During the last few years there has been unusual activity in the construction of new parks and playgrounds, and in the improvement of the old parks, in Chicago. Nowhere else has there been so much progressive construction work. Not all of this work has been good, but much of it has been excellent. In that group of parks administered 197 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL as the West Park System, there have been accomplished in late years the most strik- ing and successful examples of park design which it has been my good fortune to see in America or Europe. This work has been done directly by the superintendent of this system of parks, Mr. Jens Jensen. In this case, a man of superior training and marked artistic abilities found the means to accom- plish concrete results. Large enterprises were undertaken. Old parks were re- modeled and new ones built on entirely new lines. I find in this recent work of Mr. Jensen something new, something difficult to analyze and classify. The work is filled with fresh ideas and breaks away freely from the old conventions. One can hardly say that the work is done in the archi- tectural style, nor that it is done in the natural style. We have something here very, very different from what has hitherto been seen in either of these styles, yet it conforms to the best characters of both. It contains some of the elements of Jap- anese art, some of the best ideas of modern German art, and some elements which it is hard to classify. To me it seems to 198 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES represent the principles of the “art noveau” as applied to landscape architecture. Many of the architectural constructions and em- bellishments certainly adopt this color. Mr. Jensen himself says that he has re- ceived his chief inspiration from the Zuni Indians and from the flat, level prairies with their wide, straight horizon lines. This work of Mr. Jensen certainly stands as the most fresh and modern thing in American landscape architecture. Number Ten. One of the most char- acteristic developments of landscape archi- tecture in America during the last decade has been that of city building. Suddenly it has come to be recognized that a city is not a fortuitous aggregation of ugly objects, noisome smells and unpleasant noises. It may just as well be an orderly arrangement of things which are beautiful in themselves, and capable of still greater beauty when harmoniously arranged. Many enterprises in city improvement are now under way, and one or two of these should be men- tioned amongst American masterpieces, in spite of the fact that no one of them has yet reached completion. Unquestionably, Washington stands as 199 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the best of our American cities in point of design. This is largely due to the fact that it was designed at the start, instead of being allowed merely to grow. The work of L’Enfant was so well conceived in the first place, and so well established at the beginning, that it has been proof against meddling or neglect. The city of Wash- ington has always been rather fortunate in all matters connected with its general design. Good architects have been em- ployed on the public buildings (with a few exceptions), and good landscape architects have given what help they could on public grounds. Andrew Jackson Downing in his day did a good work in Washington, and the White House grounds have never been debauched by bad and expensive gardening. In recent years Washington has taken up anew the whole business of civic im- provement and has employed in its behalf many of the best architects and landscape gardeners of America. While it is not possible here to analyze this work, to point out its best accomplishments or its weak- nesses, we may well accept Washington as the American model of city building. 200 AMERICAN MASTERPIECES Number Eleven. One other example of city design should be given, and for this purpose I choose Harrisburg, Pa. Here there has been a comprehensive design prepared by one man, so that Mr. Warren Manning may be credited with this par- ticular masterpiece. Here a city of moder- ate size, favorably situated and enjoying a very attractive topography, has been handled in a thoroughly workmanlike manner. The designs provide for the probable development of the city in the future, providing not only for its need in the way of landscape, but also for many practical conveniences. These things take into account political and social require- ments of the city to a large degree and pro- vide for them in a highly satisfactory manner. There are a great many other pieces of work in America that have been thor- oughly well done. It would be pleasant to describe, analyze or criticise hundreds of them. This will not be possible now, and doubtless it is not necessary. However, I have found it worth while to give my students a list of successful works of land- scape architecture for their further study 201 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL and consideration, just as a teacher of literature recommends a list of good books for his pupils to read after their class- room work is completed. In such a list I naturally include chiefly those things which I have myself seen and enjoyed, or of which I have some specific knowledge. Such a list must be very partial, and even faulty, much more so than the list of books recom- mended by the teacher of literature. In such a list I would include Wash- ington Park, Chicago, by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.; the recent parks and park- ways of Kansas City, Mo., by Mr. George Kessler; the new park system at Seattle, Wash., by Olmsted Brothers; the Larz Andersen garden at Brookline, Mass., by Mr. Charles A. Platt; Maxwell Court, Rockville, Conn., by Mr. Platt; dozens,— even hundreds,—of good private places by Mr. Wilson Eyre, Jr., Carrere & Hastings, Mr. Warren H. Manning, and others; and among city designs (most of them still undeveloped), Mr. John Nolen’s plans for San Diego, Mr. Charles Mulford Robinson’s study of Jamestown, N. Y., and Mr. H. P. Kelsey’s plans for Columbia, S. C. 202 ESSAY NUMBER TWELVE On the Improvement of the Open Country There is a beauty of the lily and a beauty of the pine, a beauty of the mountain and a beauty of the plain, a beauty of wide outlooks, of stately high-walled amphitheaters, and of gentle sequestered corners. One kind necessarily excludes the other kinds; but that does not matter if each arrests the eye, interests the mind, and appeals to the imagination and the heart. Mrs. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER, “Art Out-of-Doors”’ I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you about the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Wat WHITMAN, “Song of Myself’ 205 ON THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE OPEN COUNTRY IVIC art has won a place with archi- C tecture and music. It is a branch of landscape architecture dealing with the making of cities. The civic artist gives his services to build new cities on proper lines or to remodel old cities. His effort is to secure the greatest amount of beauty along with the best sanitary, moral and business conditions. It is a great mistake to limit the opera- tion of this art to the cities. Civics, citizen- ship, and civic art belong also to the villages and to the open country. Village improvement, to be sure, does carry this art into the villages. Village improvement is a movement which has the same ends in view, and it comes to have a different name only because a different organization is demanded to accomplish results in smaller communities. But to-day I want to say a word for 207 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the open country,—the regions that God made. (You remember the saying that God made the country, but man made the city.) Neither civic artist nor rural im- provement society has yet undertaken to bring the country any help. So far as I know, the affair has not been seriously discussed, and probably most persons assume that the country cannot be im- proved. It will appear, however, even on a brief consideration, that the same principles which are being so beneficently worked out in the building of modern cities and the improvement of prosperous towns will apply with equal effect to the enrichment of the rural districts. This essay under- takes only to carry out the comparison. In city planning we hear a great deal about civic centers. The villages and towns are the natural, though inevitable, civic centers of the country-side; and if village improvement will make of them all they ought to be, then rural improvement begins with one problem solved and may pass at once to others. Every country district ought to be reasonably accessible. There should be 208 WHERE THE WATERS MEET Mrs. S. L. Brandt xOUM Lm Ad VOSGNVT YAWNWNS ON THE OPEN COUNTRY some way of getting into it. I know a New England town of rare delights,—one of the most beautiful in America,—which is almost unknown to the wcerld because it is so hard to get there. It*is truly harder to reach than the drawing-room of the most select house on Beacon Street, and fewer there be that find it. "Che town has no trolley and no railway, and the three wagon roads are so steep and »ad that automobiles and loads of wood prefer to go somewhere else. It has been ‘understood for years that this town needs connection with the outside world, but the citizens are poor and discouraged and the improvement has not come. Every country district, of course, needs good roads. The foundation of every improvement is economic; and good roads are the foundation of every economic ad- vance. The value of good roads is so manifest and so universally accepted that it is not denied even by the professional watchdog in town meetings. The man who annually opposes the voting of money for schools and libraries, says nothing against the improvement of roads. What rural improvement must aim at, then, is 209 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL to get the work done more intelligently and effectively. It is well known that much of the money spent on road improvement in the country is wasted. This is partly because of neighborhood jealousies and cross-roads graft, but largely through plain, honest ignorance. It is hardly to be expected that every roud overseer in a country town will be a graduate engineer with up-to-date knowledge of Macadam, Telford and Tarvia. Those states, therefore, which have county road overseers, or state high- Way commissions with good engineers at public service, are in the position to get the best roads. Every effort ought to be made to place the services of these experts within reach of the country neighborhoods where road appropriations, always pitiably small, most need to be economized. Country roads ought to be better built, and any scheme which will build them better is to be encouraged. Very many country roads not only need to be rebuilt, but they ought to be entirely relocated. Present locations were usually determined many years ago, at the time the country was first settled. Com- 210 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY monly roads were placed along farm boundaries, not because that was the best location, but because it was customary, and at the time it made little difference. There is probably not a town in New York state or New England in which consider- able portions of the main roads could not be relocated to advantage. Any intelligent man could sit down with a map of the town spread on the kitchen table and do it after supper. More direct routes could be found between important points, steep hills avoided, swamps and sandy stretches left to one side. In most places there is absolutely nothing to interfere with such radical and far-reaching improvements. Land is cheap, and condemnation proceedings are easy. In many instances, the owners would be glad to give the land. Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the North Atlantic states, where land is hilly and roads crooked. The complacent dwellers on the flat interior prairies, with their checkerboard section-line highways, often imagine that their system is beyond improvement. This is where they are worse off than the New Englander, who knows 211 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL that his roads are imperfect. The most thoroughly inconvenient system possible is the rectangular layout, whether applied to cities or to farming districts. City builders have learned this and are trying ‘to bring city plans more to the style of Washington and Paris. It would be a very great practical benefit to McPherson, Kan., for example, if a good public thoroughfare could be established running 15 miles directly northwest from the town. If, then, with slight deviations to avoid rough land, it could be continued straight to the village of Marquette, so much the better. A similar diagonal road could be run to the southeast of the city, another to the north- east, and another to the southwest, with equally good effect. For twenty years I lived four miles north and four miles west of McPherson. We called it eight miles to town, and traveled the distance without complaint three times a week. As a matter of fact, we were less than six miles from town as the bee flies and were wasting five miles of hard work every trip. I figure that at five miles a trip, three trips a week, for twenty years, I traveled over 15,000 highly 212 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY unnecessary miles, and the thought of it disgusts me so I would like to go back now and sue the county for damages. Just consider that there are 100 busy, hard-working people to-day in that same . neighborhood, going to McPherson, say, twice a week the year round. There are 12,000 miles of travel wasted every year by just those few men and women of that neighborhood. Was such economic waste ever tolerated in anything else? Yet there are thousands and thousands of cities and towns in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Missouri and adjoining states where no diagonal highways exist or were ever thought of. Surely rural improvement finds it easy at this point to propose some- thing better. Something may properly be said here for roadside planting. It is not practicable to have every street lined with trees along every rod of its length. There are stretches which, from various considerations, ought to be left open. But probably more than half the mileage in ordinary sections would be improved if suitably planted with trees. Everyone knows how great a pleasure it is to find a country road shaded by over- 213 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL arching elms, or by giant maples, or even by upstart cottonwoods. Such tree planting in rural districts has always been left to the pride of abutting landowners. But the benefit accrues chiefly to the public, and the public ought to direct the enterprise and pay the bills. The public owns the streets and has the right to say what shall grow in them. Certainly nothing better can be grown than useful and beautiful trees. In some parts of Europe the public routes are planted with fruit trees. The usual custom is to put the fruit up at auction and sell it on the trees to the best bidder. European travelers occasionally recommend this custom for use in America, but it is doubtful if it would succeed any- where in this free country. Still, apple- trees or cherry-trees are sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently appropriate to country roads to find occasional use even in the land of the free and the home of the fruit thief. Anyone who has seen the highways of the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, with their flankings of magnificent apple-trees, will allow that they are quite as beautiful as elms or willows. 214 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY Any intelligent layout of country roads should consider the different purposes to which different roads are put. One is a heavy-traffic thoroughfare for loaded wagons and automobiles. It must have direct lines, easy grades, and well-made roadbeds. Another is a farm road, serving only one or two small back homesteads. It requires less attention. Still other roads will be chiefly valuable because they offer especially attractive scenery. They border on some lake, follow some river, or traverse a tract of fine woodland. Such scenic roads there are, or ought to be, in every country district, and in any fair estimate they are just as valuable as the traffic roads. It ought to be recognized as a public duty to open these up and make them popular. Every man knows that the most attractive scenery in the world clings naturally to the country road. What more enjoyable recreation is there than to explore mile after mile in a comfortable buggy, on bicycle or in a good motor car? Omar thought he could attain the height of earthly bliss if he had his book of verses, “a jug of wine and Thou.” Evidently he had never taken his best girl 215 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL of a pleasant Sunday afternoon or evening in a good Concord buggy with a safe horse to drive mile after mile of shady country lane. Such things in the country take the place of theaters and amusement parks in cities, and are vastly better. They are so much better that their value should be frankly recognized and their beauties fully developed. Such scenery drives are not alone for youthful lovers. If ever I grow so old as not to enjoy a mile of country road with the wife of my maturity, I shall know that I am ready for the divorce courts and the boneyard. The preservation of good scenery is one of the first duties of rural improvers. Every locality has its lake, its river, its favorite picnic ground, its high hill with wide-sweeping prospect, its grove of noble trees, its cave, its gorge, its “devil’s garden,” or its level intervale. Let all such be cherished like a woman’s honor. They are beyond all price. They are usually un- marked and uncared for, and are often ignorantly and cheaply sacrificed. Sometimes there are historic trees to be preserved, or historic spots to be marked. 216 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY One of the most fascinating features of that delightful town of Concord, Mass., is in its memorials of great men and great events. The preservation of rural scenery will certainly mean the suppression of the bill- board nuisance. To see a farm barn flaring with a black and yellow coat of paint, roof and sides screeching the name of some talcum powder or baby poison, all in the midst of what should be peaceable and re- spectable rural scenery, gives one a shock like hearing a man swear in church. And when a man prostitutes his barn to such hire he puts himself in the same class with the woman who sells her character for a fee. It is probably easier to stop the ravages of the billboard shyster in the country than in the city. His profits are relatively less and the damage he does relatively more. All public places in the country, such as school grounds and cemeteries, will, of course, receive the attention of the rural improvement society. We all know how often they are neglected, and without further argument we are all heartily ashamed of it. 217 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL In order to make any given tract of open country appear at its best the in- dividual farms must look their jauntiest. Quite the most attractive thing in any section is to see well-kept farms, with neat and comfortable buildings. Improvement of this sort is hard to accomplish, but substantial progress can be made by efforts of the right sort. The thing can be recom- mended and talked up. Local pride can be aroused. If such an organization as the grange takes hold of this thing in a naturally progressive neighborhood wonders can be accomplished. Some country churches could make a great hit by laying aside their study of foreign missions for a season and preaching farm betterment. The foreign missions would gain by it in the end. The Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture offers prizes for the best-kept farms in the state. Certain railroads offer prizes for the best-looking farms along their lines. District and local agricultural societies may well copy this pattern, and set themselves in all ways to arouse local emulation in such matters. Rural improvement is altogether a 218 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY practicable enterprise in prosperous and progressive communities. It is coming. The rapidly developing love for the country and the immigration hither of well-to-do and cultured people are bound to bring results of this kind. For the most part rural improvement will follow the lines of village improve- ment, already well established. Local societies will be formed for the work, or the matter will be taken up by societies already in existence. Local granges are the best of all organizations for the pur- pose; but agricultural clubs, woman’s clubs, country clubs, even churches or whist clubs, may serve if they have the leaders. It is usually better to have such work taken up by some old and well organized society, even when it seems a little out of line, rather than to waste energy in forming some entirely new club. Such local societies will properly seek the advice of competent landscape architects whenever possible. In a few cases the services of such experts can be secured by private employment and without the inter- vention of a society. If I wanted to do something for my native town, I would 219 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL rather open up such a system of betterments as we have here considered than to leave a five-thousand-dollar drinking fountain, with a basin at the foot for thirsty canines, and my name cut half an inch deep in the marble. We hear a great deal just now about the conservation of our natural resources, meaning coal, lumber and soil fertility. I know a dozen towns where the scenery is worth more than the agriculture, and a thousand where it is worth more than the coal and lumber. Take it from the Pacific to the Atlantic and I am willing to assert that the scenery is worth more than any other item except the fertility of the soil. It is one of our very greatest natural re- sources; and any conservation commission which forgets it has not yet waked up to business. In connection with conservation of resources we must have resource surveys. Let all such surveys make careful inventory of our landscape wealth, and be sure that the items receive something like a just valuation. It would be worth something if a state like Massachusetts or Colorado or Cali- 220 ON THE OPEN COUNTRY fornia would make a full and honest survey of landscape assets. Let the work be put into the hands of an expert landscape architect, just as a survey of coal resources would be assigned to a competent mining engineer, and the results would be of com- parable value. On the basis of such a survey a competent landscape architect could devise improvements for the great advantage of the people of the state. State reservations of all sorts could be better distributed and more successfully placed; the proper routes for state roads indicated; public institutions made accessible; historic localities re- claimed and guarded; neighboring towns and municipalities connected, and many other improvements for the convenience and satisfaction of all citizens suggested with the means for their accomplishment. Finally, we must not forget that all civic improvement must go forward as a fairly unified movement. Improvement of scenery must be accompanied by improve- ment of schools, libraries and churches. There must be mental and moral uplift along with practical and aesthetic advance. Citizenship must be better from center to 221 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL circumference. And at the basis of all lies improvement in economic efficiency. Men must get larger returns from their farms before they can support better schools, and they must have more education before they can organize better churches or make scenery reservations. It is a complex work, but a great and beneficent one, and worth the leadership of the best men and women. 222 ESSAY NUMBER THIRTEEN On the Ownership of Scenery IN GLOUCESTER HARBOR T. Knox Wm. axAVT VaoOunv The beauty of Nature is a state resource; it deserves to be conserved, and one method of doing this—the most available and logical—is by the establishment of state parks. It is hoped that the action of Massachusetts, New York, and Wiscon- sin, already so well justified by results, will be followed by others, until every state in the Union has a comprehensive, well-balanced system, embra- cing its most valuable and characteristic natural scenic resources, set apart forever for the refreshment and uplifting of the people. Mr. JoHN NOLEN 225 ON THE OWNERSHIP OF SCENERY HO owns the earth? God made it with infinite pains and graciously gave it to a needy race, and man- kind has been fighting over it pretty much ever since the beginning. I think I dis- cern a measurable difference of opinion among professors of political economy as to how that fight ought to be settled. Of course, in the past the ownership of the earth has nearly always gone to the strong- est; and though exceptions seem now to be coming in, the rule is far from being outlawed. First the patriarchs and then the leading tribes controlled what they could by physical force; and now the nation with the greatest stand of arms gets the most land. Manchuria hesitates between Russia and Japan, waiting to know which has the superior navy. Between individual men the division follows the same law: the strongest pioneer took the best farm, while to-day the best of the forests, the coal lands, the rivers and the shores belong to those highwaymen admiringly 227 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL called in our vernacular, “captains of in- dustry.” Yet, even the least thoughtful person can see a change coming. It is plain that the civilized peoples of the world are surely learning to think differently. “Public ownership” is a growing idea. It is even popular, in spite of earnest (and some honest) opposition. To be sure, public ownership, in the public mind, means ownership of coal mines and street-car lines, while, curiously enough, the most significant accomplishments are in the public ownership of the implements of edu- cation and the public ownership of scenery, wherein the intuitions of the race and the logic of events have outrun the reasoning of the professors. It often happens so. If there is anything in the big world that ought to belong to the public, surely it is the landscape. The coal mines and the oil fields have to be exploited; and from a certain point of view the Standard Oil Company and the Coal Trust are practical necessities. But the landscape can not be exploited; it can only be enjoyed. It can not be consumed, though it sometimes is destroyed. 228 OWNERSHIP OF SCENERY And so we began blindly several years ago with the Yellowstone National Park, and now we have a certain claim on Niagara Falls, the Big Trees, and a considerable list of national parks. For, though many of these tracts have been reserved ostensibly for forestry purposes, everyone knows that their chief value is their scenic beauty. Besides these national reserves, certain of the states have established similar invest- ments in scenery. Massachusetts, Wis- consin and New York have taken a praise- worthy leadership in this field, but other states are falling into line. No state is so poor and mean that it has not some tracts of seashore, lake shore, river or forest land worth looking at; and if it has such land, then the citizens of the state have an inalienable right (as the Declaration calls it) to enjoy that scenery. A few years ago some public-spirited men in Massachusetts waked up to an un- pleasant discovery. They found that the growing wealth and the increasing popula- tion of the state were crowding heavily upon the ownership of land. Already practically the entire shore line where the Bay State met the Atlantic Ocean was 229 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL taken up on private deeds, so that not one man in a thousand of the population of the state could walk the seashore without paying tribute to some friend or speculator. In like manner, the woods were closed, the hills pre-empted, the brooks owned and posted against trespassers, the rivers farmed out, and every other form of land- scape taken over for private use. Such a condition is plainly intolerable; and so the public-spirited men who made the dis- covery were able to bring public sentiment to the point of recovering to public enjoy- ment a part of the state’s patrimony. The results have been gratifying. In a certain Vermont town there was a great scandal last spring. A leading citizen was arrested, put into the town calaboose and right soundly fined. His crime was beating a boy, not his own. He caught the boy trespassing in his garden. It appeared in the general explanations that the boy was not there stealing straw- berries, but that he wanted to go in swim- ming. Now, there is a beautiful little river running through the town and along the foot of the garden owned by the scandalized leading citizen, but there is not an inch of 230 OWNERSHIP OF SCENERY the shore open to the public. A boy who would go swimming or fishing simply has to trespass upon some leading citizen’s property,—for, of course, the leading citizens have helped themselves to all the beautiful shores of the placid little river. It happened that just a few weeks before this untoward incident I had been employed to make a landscape architect’s report for the improvement of this particular village, and in my recommendations I had vehe- mently urged the injustice of these private holdings. So I sympathized with the boy, and felt that the episode justified my plea for a public river-front park. In a proper public economy we need national reservations of scenery, state parks, county parks, and, in localities where the town is an important administrative unit, town parks or public playgrounds. The movement for national parks is well under way, as is also the acquisition and development of city parks. The two rela- tively neglected fields are those of the state parks and the town or country neighbor- hood centers. State parks ought to be urged in every American state and every Canadian 231 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL province, and largely for the following reasons: 1. They pay dividends in cash. The coming of tourists, campers and vacation- ists is a large source of revenue. The little state of New Hampshire collects about $10,000,000 annually from this source, and is yet so short-sighted and niggardly as not to invest a dollar in a state reservation in the White Mountains. 2. It pays more in dividends of health. All the people of the state need to go camp- ing, to take vacations in the open, to go periodically back to nature. This oppor- tunity they can have only in national or state parks. 3. They may preserve places of his- toric interest. 4. They serve many of the same pur- poses as forest reservations, preserving the woods, regulating stream flow, etc. 5. Most of all the state park offers the best means of preserving types of native landscape, of natural scenery. Have we a beautiful mountain? Let us keep it! Have we a noble river? We would like to . visit its banks. Have we a quiet lake? It is ours: let us use it. All these resources 232 THE RIVER PATH C. S. Luitweiler moq "¢ wnpy VaS NV GNVS OWNERSHIP OF SCENERY belong to the public, and the public ought to have the use of them. They are more valuable than Carnegie libraries, for books can be replaced. They are more beautiful than picture galleries, more elevating than churches, more hygienic than hospitals, and more enduring than systems of philosophy. State parks, then, should be chosen and delimited, first, for the types of natural landscape beauty which they offer; second, for their size, for they ought to be large; third, for their availability for campers and vacationists. Such selections of sites ought to be made only under the advice of expert landscape architects; and the scheme of management ought to be designed by similarly well-trained men. In most states the title to such parks may rest directly in the commonwealth, and this is the sentimentally preferable way. In other states there can be established special boards of trustees or state park commissions, as in Wisconsin. In other states the titles to land and the respon- sibility for management might vest in boards or institutions already established, as in a state board of forestry or of agri- culture, or in a state university. 233 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL It is a curious and anomalous develop- ment of the present situation that private or semi-private corporations should be formed to hold valuable tracts of land in the public behalf. It is merely an example of private philanthropy getting ahead of public opinion; or, perhaps it would be better to say, getting ahead of the organic expression of public opinion, for it is well recognized that in such matters our legis- lators are not so well informed, so public spirited, nor so progressive as the public at large. The National Trust in England is an example of this sort of private cor- poration doing a most excellent work in the preservation for public use of places of beauty or historic interest, and, in doing so, acquiring land titles in the name of the trust. Examples in America are the Appalachian Club and the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. This method, of course, is better than none, but it is objectionable. George Wash- ington’s old home at Mount Vernon is held by a most enterprising and efficient society of women; but there is a wide-spread and growing feeling that the nation, or at least the state, ought to own the place and 234 OWNERSHIP OF SCENERY open it freely to all pilgrims. People do not object to the twenty-five cents ad- mission fee, but to the principle; and in all such cases sentiment is the safest guide. Town parks and playgrounds stand on a somewhat different basis, but they minister to an even more urgent necessity. Boys must play ball. Though this dictum is not found in the Scriptures nor in the Constitution of the United States, it be- longs in both. Also in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Town Charter. Boys must and will play ball; and the village which provides no ball ground is worse than one which has no library and no fire company. I knowa proud and prosperous town which has made a law that boys shall not play ball in the streets. At the same time no place is offered where they can play. The result is perfectly certain. Either they play in the streets or they trespass on private grounds, in either case getting excellent practice in law-breaking. But playgrounds are only one thing. A second thing that towns ought to do is to acquire and protect examples of the best native landscape. Every village 235 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL ought to have—we might fairly say, must have—a picnic ground. Otherwise the young people will spend their evenings in the beer-gardens and their Sundays in the “amusement parks.” Every village also has some spot of historic interest. Such places ought to be acquired by the towns and maintained by the community, instead of waiting for the intercession of the Daughters of the Confederacy or of the American Revolution. One can not too highly praise the work of these societies, but at the same time one may easily see that these are matters of much public im- portance and should be attended to by the people themselves. It is all very well to have someone act as nurse, guardian and first-of-kin to the public as long as the public is too juvenile to take care of itself; but it is a fair wish to hope for the day when the public can button its own shoes and walk alone. To sum it up: the greatest of public utilities is the landscape; and the public ownership of utilities is beginning, where it really ought to begin, with the native scenery. 236 ESSAY NUMBER FOURTEEN On the Decorative Use of Landscape A breezy headland curving parallel with the line of a fair horizon; some cat-boats and luggers leaning against the sky; a smell of acacia whisked along in broken puffs; a wandering sound of un- certain quality passing between the white-capped sea and the dusky pine woods afar; roses tossed about on emerald sprays; great sea-birds winging aloft—and I in the midst of this my Winter Garden, loafing under a yaupon-tree. MAURICE THOMPSON, “‘My Winter Garden” 239 PINE TREES, CAPE COD Frank A. Waugh A PATH IN THE SNOW Schouler RL E ON THE DECORATIVE USE OF LANDSCAPE HERE has been a great cry about art for art’s sake. No phrase of its kind has been more widely bandied. It is a formula of many meanings, some true, some false. The falsity of one of its possible meanings may be widely read in the fact that almost every art has achieved many of its greatest triumphs when acting as a mere accessory to some other art or utility. Mural decoration is one of the noblest branches of painting, and yet it is a mere incident to architecture. Archi- tecture itself is only the beautification of supreme utilities. Sculpture is largely decorative, and designed for application to architecture or gardening. Even music is used largely—one might almost say chiefly —to embellish church services, dinners and social functions. Does not landscape art enjoy similar opportunities? Before proceeding to illustrate the affirmative answer to this question it seems 241 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL necessary to emphasize the propriety, the importance, the dignity, the profound worthiness of this subordinate relationship. It is like the relationship of husband and wife: the husband may be more seen and known by the world, but the wife is equally serviceable and necessary. It is like the partnership of manhood and gentleness: the strong man can be also gentle, and we applaud the fortune of such a union of qualities in every true gentleman. The case should be put more forcibly than this. We must all recognize that art is ever a secondary matter in life, utility having always the prior claim to considera- tion. When the necessities of life have been satisfied then the soul can be touched by the pleasures of beauty. Indeed, it is one of the prime functions of all art, and one of its greatest glories to invest the hard utilities of the material world with aesthetic and spiritual joys. Let us believe, therefore, that decorative art may be the highest of all, in its aims, in its methods and in the value of its results. Unused as we are to bringing land- scape gardening under this point of view, we Shall see at the first glance that much 242 DECORATIVE LANDSCAPE of the best work in this field is of a dec- orative character, and is made secondary to some other art or utility. The planting of trees along a city street is a very common, very simple and very effective decorative scheme. It is at the same time one of the regulation schemes of the landscape archi- tect. As one floats along down the Rhine past Mainz, Coblenz, Bonn and Koln, he is profoundly impressed with the beauty of those Rhine cities. He is struck espe- cially with the water fronts, which he compares with the coal docks and slaughter houses on our American river fronts, greatly to the disadvantage of his patriot- ism. It may seem anti-climactic to compare these beautifully terraced city fronts, with their carefully spaced, symmetrically pruned trees, to the dado round a dining-room; but in the simplicity, directness, and adequacy of the decorative effect the river front and the masterpiece of the house decorator are much alike. Certainly landscape gardening like this is very much unlike the free and easy making of informal pictures for their own sakes as one sees it in Franklin Park, 243 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Boston; Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Druid Hill Park, Baltimore; Washington Park, Chicago, or Mount Royal Park, Montreal. And this difference may be fairly charac- terized by calling the method under dis- cussion the decorative use of landscape gardening. Landscape architects nowadays are studying whole cities or whole counties at once. Mr. Charles M. Robinson goes to Honolulu and makes plans for the improve- ment in beauty of the whole city and its environs; Mr. Harlan P. Kelsey does the same thing for Columbia, S. C.; Mr. Warren Manning goes to Ithaca, N. Y., and plans for the harmonious development of a tract of country fifty miles square, reaching the whole length of Cayuga Lake. When these men make a beautiful boulevard of a useful city street, when they make an in- spiring vista of a necessary canal, when they bring skylines, building fronts and sign-boards into harmonious alignment, then may it reasonably be said that they are applying the principles of decorative art to the ends of their profession. They are decorating cities, just as dressmakers decorate wasted busts, or as the printers, » 244 DECORATIVE LANDSCAPE with their little conventional figures, dec- orate the covers of my pamphlet. It is a common saying among painters that certain of their craft treat landscape in a decorative manner. Some painted landscapes are said to have a decorative effect, by which it is meant that the prin- cipal lines and masses form an arrangement which balances and which is beautiful in itself without regard to the concrete details of the picture. L’Hermite’s “Haymakers” is an example which comes to mind at the moment. Such pictures are apt to be ex- tremely effective. It is still more inter- esting to note that the best artist pho- tographers also exhibit “decorative landscapes” in their salons. Mr. Charles Vandervelde, for example, one of the best landscape artists in America, has a notable penchant for this sort of thing. His camera has depicted for our delight a number of really wonderful pictures of this sort. The significance of this fact lies here, that Mr. Vandervelde’s pictures are taken direct from Nature. If his photographs are “decorative,” therefore it must be that Nature herself also has her decorative aspects. There must be certain landscapes 245 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL which in this proper sense are decorative. The sympathetic observers of land- scape have long ago found this to be true. Rather often do they find special views in which the trees and rocks offer such lines and masses as to form truly decorative arrangements. Such views are always pleasing, and, when otherwise proper, are exceedingly satisfying. Let us make a practical application. Susan and Benjamin have bought two lots in a respectable suburb, and with the help of the building and loan association have put up a neat colonial house. Mr. Billings, the architect, being Benjamin’s intimate friend, has designed the house inside and out to express that spirit of quiet and happy domesticity for which Susan and Benjamin are noted. Now, these delightful young folks have an intelligent taste for gardening, and they are ambitious to have the thirty feet of lawn in front of the house and the fifty feet of garden back of it harmonize fully with the architecture and express the same spirit. Everyone knows, of course, that their sympathetic work in their own garden, their personal choice of each plant, and their constant domestic 246 DECORATIVE LANDSCAPE association with the whole, will make the garden, of absolute necessity, an expression of their own characters. It will thus correspond with the house. The garden and the house will be one home. But the lawns and shrubberies and gardens on this small home lot will really be so much dec- oration applied to the house. The archi- tecture will predominate. The shrubs will be as much subordinate as the wall paper and picture molding in the library. They will be selected and used in the same spirit and according to the same principles of art. It is an every-day phrase to speak of “the decorative arts,” meaning the design of fabrics, wall papers, the ornamentation of house interiors, and the like. These are commonly held in light esteem, though very erroneously so. Their great utilitarian value should give them higher rank, as has been suggested at the opening of this chapter. But whether they stand at the head or at the foot of the list, it will seem proper to include a certain part of the art of landscape architecture with the other “decorative arts.” 247 ESSAY NUMBER FIFTEEN As to Landscape in Literature Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer your- selves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who has mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain. SIDNEY LANIER, “The Marshes of Glynn” Bookish though we may be, and bred in a library though we may have been, there is profit in our getting out of the town which is dramatic into the country which is lyric. Once in a while every bookman ought to subscribe to a fresh-air fund for himself and to seize the first chance to escape from those pulsing cities of ours, where even the grass seems to be living on its nerves. Views afoot may be more significant than even the most instructive of footnotes,—and Nature publishes her poetry in a legible text. BRANDER MATTHEWS, “‘The Independent” 251 AS TO LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE LL the fine arts are closely inter- related. They all rest on the same body of principles. There are strik- ing similarities between painting and music. Certain poetry is said to be musical, and certain statuary poetic. To some ex- tent each art must have inherent possibili- ties of interpretation into the language of every other art. A more fertile fact is that, seeing the various arts are thus apt to intermingle, any one is likely to have an important influence on every other one. In some cases these influences are deep and well marked. In the present state of gardening art, it is too early to say what its influence has been on literature, music or dancing. But, as literature is the most nearly universal of all the arts, the one nearest to all the people, and the one in which many streams of influence are most easily traced, it may be possible to find that landscape has had 253 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL some effect upon it; and it may be curious and profitable, too, to make the analysis. Does landscape have an appreciable influence on literature? We may say con- fidently that it does. What is pastoral poetry, for example, except that in which the rural landscape has yielded the flavor, if not the substance? But the demonstra- tion is much more general, for as literature takes its form and color from all the materials out of which it is wrought, and as landscape is necessarily among these materials, so must it necessarily have its due and proportionate part in the result. Let us consider literature in the mak- ing. A good author, of novels, let us say, sees his characters living and acting before him. The scenes which he depicts are vividly seen before his own eyes. The in- fluence of every part of the environment on each important character must be duly considered. Does it make any difference, therefore, whether Algernon woos Eloise on the rolling prairies of Iowa or amid the snowy mountains of the Engadine? Will John himself, being one and the same man, propose to Mary herself, she being once and always the same girl, amid the wintry 254 LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE snows of the Adirondacks in the same terms he would use were the interesting episode to occur in the fertile valley of the Mohawk under a pleasant summer sun? And will Mary act just the same when the long expected happens? Obviously not. Suppose the whole scheme is one of “human interest,” only with no attempt at a stage setting. Will the characters still behave the same in Texas as in Pennsyl- vania? in Oklahoma as in Maine? And will the difference of behavior, whatever it is, be separable from the physical surround- ings of the actors; that is, from the land- scape? Hardly. Of course, there are writers of fiction, and of other forms of literature, who pay slight heed to the stage settings; we may say, perhaps, none at all. But such writers can hardly be called the best artists in their proper fields. And, by the way, what do the literary critics mean by “local color?” Certainly local color is something which suggests the locality wherein the action takes place. And the presentation of a certain physical locality is the presentation of a certain landscape. There have been those who 255 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL have supposed that local color in literature is chiefly dialect, but an extended considera- tion of the matter, such as we now have no time for, will show that they are quite wrong. A story told in Irish brogue, for example, is not localized thereby. Leaving dialect out of the question, it is certain that some good writers have the power of localizing their stories very vividly. After reading certain good novels one feels thoroughly familiar with the scenes of the events. There are some writers who undertake, with some success, to interest their readers in out-and-out descriptions of the land- scapes in which their actors are moving. Thomas Hardy may be named as an ex- ample. This method is more scientific and less artistic, but it may fairly be called one way of introducing landscape into literature. There are other examples of work, still more scientific and still less artistic, in which the writer aims only at landscape description. Thomas Wheatley, in 1770, published a very proper and interesting work entitled, “Observations on Modern Gardening, Illustrated by Descriptions.” 256 aay “f sumaT GAWIL ONIAVH unuman “MM jasupy MOTd AHL OL GNVH FHL LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE The descriptions were of famous landscapes which he had admired. A good many of the books on landscape gardening and most of those on landscape come in this scientific class, presenting landscape in the form of didactic, descriptive, measured-and-cut pictures. Professor Bailey dropped a wise ob- servation when he said that there are two interpretations of nature (including the landscape, of course)—the scientific and the poetic. The poetic is apt to be the better. In fact, it is bound to be the more artistic, because it is expressed in aesthetic terms; and since the value of landscape is almost wholly aesthetic, such an expression is the only one which can be even measur- ably satisfactory. In poetry, even in the best poetry, the feeling for landscape varies between limits almost infinitely separated. If we take two popular prose poets whose work is often compared—Burroughs and Thoreau —we shall see this fact beautifully illus- trated. Burroughs is a naturalist, and fills our eyes with all sorts of birds and cun- ning beasts and tiny flowers. Thoreau is a man of landscape and weather, and he 257 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL shows us Walden Pond and windy Wachusett and the bean fields. Again, this same difference exists be- tween the metrical poets. Holmes is the naturalist. “The Chambered Nautilus” is a microscopic study, and the very apotheosis of scientific literature. Riley is the land- scapist. “When the frost is on the pump- kin and the fodder’s in the shock” gives us a complete picture of the fields. Perhaps another example will be admissible, in which we may contrast Burns with Lowell and Bryant. The Scotch bard turns up a nest of mice and a touching poem with one stroke of his plowshare. But the poem interprets the sad case of the mice in terms of human experience only. There is no breath of the Scottish landscape in it. On the other hand, Lowell, when he tells of the blackbird’s song, and Bryant, in his classic story of Robert of Lincoln, show us long sweeps of swamp and meadow. Moreover, these landscapes are spread be- fore our senses with all the vividness of a . photograph and all the feeling of a painting. This same principle offers a means of dividing into two groups the thousands of books constituting the modern “nature” 258 LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE literature. Into one group we could put all those that have the outdoor feeling; into the other would fall those descriptive, scientific, technical, inexpressive works which have no atmosphere and no land- scape. The drama is a species of literature which confessedly depends largely on stage settings; that is (in many cases), on land- scape. The careful playwright gives de- tailed attention to this part of his piece, and one of his best allies is the scene painter. We can all remember, for ex- ample, the spectacular production of “Ben Hur,” seen in some of our largest theaters a few years ago; and certainly we would say, without disparagement to the play, that the beautiful landscape settings for the various scenes have over-lived the lines and the acting in our memories. The situation is somewhat different with the plays of Shakespeare. Our familiarity with the lines, and our in- structed enjoyment of them, make us, to a large extent, independent of stage settings. We can do without the concrete back- ground. The plays were produced orig- inally, by Shakespeare and his fellows, 259 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL without scenery. Occasionally we have the Shakespearean method revived in this land and time and the plays are acted on the bare stage. On the other hand, we have witnessed many elaborated productions of “Romeo and Juliet,” “Winter’s Tale,” “Tam- ing of the Shrew,” “Merchant of Venice,” etc., in which the scenery was a series of su- perb pictures well worth seeing for itself and without reference to the lines or the acting. Yet we have never felt that the scenery really interfered with the play itself, or that it detracted from the acting or the value of the lines. Speaking of Shakespeare in this con- nection, we may go yet further. Sitting by the fire and reading the pages for the mere delight of them as pure literature, we still have the landscape, a good part of the time at least, standing plainly before our eyes. The forest of Arden is as plain to us as the salt marshes of Hackensack or the sand- hills of Nebraska. The mental picture which most of us have of Venice was taken from the same book, and it is no mean picture, either. How vividly, too, can we see the island on which Miranda dwelt. And even though the geographers say there 260 LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE is no seacoast for Bohemia, we are alto- gether familiar with the one on which poor Perdita was abandoned. On the whole, we may conclude that the great master of the drama was also a master of landscape painting; and it seems fairly clear, moreover, that it was in part his masterful manner of presenting the scenery in his lines that makes his scenes so lifelike, and that gives us such a feeling of completeness in his work as a whole. The Bible, being the very best of literature, has in it the very best of land- scape. The Jewish people, who gave us the bulk of this literature, were not artists nor landscape gardeners nor nature lovers. But they were poets and prophets and seers, and Jehovah spoke to them daily in the landscape. The Hebrew Psalmist is always in close and sympathetic touch with field and brook and sky. His Shepherd led him in green pastures and beside still waters. To him the heavens declared the glory of God and the firmament showed His handi- work. He had seen, with the fear and joy of an open-hearted boy, the great storms gather on the hills and break over the valleys, for he said: 261 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind— He made darkness his hiding place, his pavilion round about him; Darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies— At the brightness before him his thick clouds passed, Hailstones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the Heavens, And the Most High uttered his voice; Hailstones and coals of fire. Job and the prophets are full of the knowledge of the large and magnificent aspects of nature. In their loftiest passages deep calleth unto deep at the noise of the waterfalls, or the air was filled with snow like wool. They spoke of him that maketh Pleiades and Orion, and turneth deep darkness into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night, that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth. And one who would confound all argument said: Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? Where is the way to the dwelling of light? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof? Hast thou entered into the treasuries of the snow? Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail? When we turn to the words of the lowly Nazarene, of whom it was said that 262 LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE He spoke as never man spake, we find the same intimate pleasure in the landscape and in its phenomena. There is, indeed, a cer- tain important difference between Jesus and the prophets, for while to them nature was often fearful and awesome, to Him it was always near and kindly. Better than they He saw in all of it the immediate expression of His Father’s love. He spoke with great tenderness of the sparrows of the air and the lilies of the field. “Behold a sower went forth to sow; and as he sowed some fell by the wayside, and the birds came and devoured them: and others fell upon rocky places, where they had not much earth; and straightway they sprang up because they had no deepness of earth, and when the sun was risen they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And others fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them; and others fell upon the good ground, and yielded fruit, some a hundred fold, some sixty, some thirty.” “He that hath ears, let him hear” this story of the Syrian fields. Let him enjoy this picture of the barren, stony fields and the thorny, weedy wayside, and let him 263 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL consider ever more that this world-beloved parable of the Savior’s is as perfect in its aesthetic appreciation of the landscape as in its ethical inspiration. In fact, the whole religion of Jesus is a religion of the fields, not of cities nor of camps. His life was spent in the out-of- doors, under the open sky, walking with His disciples through the ripening grain-fields or beside the waters of Jordan, or resting on the shores of Galilee. His infinitely beautiful spiritual character was nourished on the beauty of the world about Him. There were no art galleries nor symphony concerts for Him, except the galleries of the hills and the concerts of the stars as they sang together above his stony pillow. But in all these things His Heavenly Father walked and talked with Him, even as He would daily speak to us in the same lan- guage, would we only listen with quiet de- votion and simple open-mindedness. 264 OLD FRIENDS Washburn E. H. THE PATH TO THE WOODS Wm. H. Zerbe ESSAY NUMBER SIXTEEN On the Beauty of Landscape Psychologically Considered From this fair home behold on either side The restful mountains or the restless sea. So the warm, sheltering walls of life divide Time and its tides from still eternity. Look on the waves—their stormy voices teach That not on earth may toil and struggle cease. Look on the mountains—better far than speech Their silent promise of eternal peace. OLIVER WENDELL Hones, ‘‘La Maison d’Or” “Uns ist heute Freude an der Natur so selbst- verstandlich, dass es fast unbegreiflich scheint, wie es Zeiten geben konnte, die jene Freude nicht kannten, die in der Natur ungeziigelte Wildheit und nur im Menschenwerk massvolle Schénheit erblick- ten. Von einzelnen seit Homer’s Zeit geahnt, ward in der hoheren Kulturschicht unseres Volkes erst eiwa seit Goethe die Schonheit der Landschaft allegemein erkannt. Unter Rousseau’s Einfluss bildete sich eine besondere Vorstellung land- schaftlicher Schonheit, die noch ganz beherrscht wurde von der Meinung eines Gegensatzes zwischen Mensch und Natur—die Schonheit der Kulturland- schaft ward als die einzige anerkannt. Umbuschte Wiesen, sanfte Hiigel, blumige Pfade, murmelnde schlangelnde Bachlein und ‘das Auge der Land- schaft,’ der stille See, in der Ferne unter dem Schultz der Kirche das saubere Dorf und iippige Fel- der und glatte Rinder, von Wohlstand und fried- lichem Behagen zeugend, das war schone Natur.” Wizty Lance, “Die Gartengestaltung der Neuzeit”’ 267 ON THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED HAVE been reading several treatises on art. It will be unnecessary now to give a catalogue of the books, but they covered a wide range. Some dealt with the history of art, some with criticism, some with aesthetics, some with composi- tion, and some there were of special and technical subjects. I found most of them interesting and some truly captivating, but with almost every page the strongest impression in my mind was of what the books did not say. This was all on account of the prejudice with which I began. I had some notions of my own. My mind was full of a subject on which these art books were expected to throw some light; but though there often was, indeed, some agreeable illumination thrown upon my prejudices, it was remarkable how the light seemed always to be directed another way. There 269 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL seemed to be something really purposeful about it. The authors of those books evidently regarded my subject as outside the reach of their inquiries. One writer, indeed, did come squarely up to my subject in a paragraph which I shall refer to again; showing that he realized the pertinence of it, but he promptly veered away to triter things without even waiting to convince one of the generalizations which he drew. The subject which I had in my mind was landscape gardening. Now, I take landscape gardening to be very obviously entitled to a place among the fine arts. It should be practiced and judged according to the same principles which govern in sculpture or music. The fundamental laws of composition (if there be any such) would apparently be alike for all the arts,—or, as we might better say, for all forms of art. And since every kind of art strives after beauty, it is quite as important to landscape garden- ing as to poetry or painting to understand the nature of beauty and the conditions under which it is realized. Now that beauty has been mentioned, we may change the point of view just a little and notice that the natural landscape 270 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED is often beautiful. Whether or not we would call it a work of art, a good native landscape appeals to the same aesthetic faculties and produces the same psycholo- gical effects as does a noble piece of archi- tecture. The landscape gardener ought to know the beauties of natural landscape —that’s plain enough;—but the psycholo- gist studying beauty or the critic studying art ought to learn what there is in land- scape that delights us. The beauty of landscape is capable of this simple demonstration, that men are willing to pay for it. The little railroad carries thousands of persons up Pike’s Peak, whither passengers go to see the world; and a good view of the Sound adds five thousand dollars to the price of a building lot in Greenwich or Stamford, Conn. The money value of landscape in the real estate market is too well known to be dwelt upon further. The professional landscape gardener makes landscapes for his customers as a painter paints portraits. He receives his fee, and he is worthy of his hire. He de- livers to his client, if he is an honest man, something of value; and the value which he 271 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL gives is an aesthetic value. If it is com- mensurable at all it would have to be computed in terms of beauty. Before going any further we ought to assure ourselves that we are not to be confused by talking of different kinds of landscape. The gardener may arrange two trees, a dozen shrubs and a rood of grass in such a manner as to make the whole a satisfying work of art, but such a limited quantity of materials will hardly form a landscape in the same sense in which we use that term when we speak of the view from Interlaken toward the Jungfrau, from the top of the Washington monument, or from any other point of vantage. We are apparently dealing with two different things here, in which elements of beauty may be unlike, and it may be important to bear this distinction in mind. Inasmuch, however, as this inquiry started from the standpoint of the landscape gardener, we cannot now discard his works; and as it is obviously of importance to understand at the same time wherein the beauty of natural landscape consists, we can not drop that part of the subject either. In its broad sense, therefore, a land- 272 24427 -H “wm waadOLIO NMOU THE MEADOW BROOK C. F. Clarke PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED scape ought to be any view of the world out-of-doors. Even a glimpse of Broad- way, or a look at the Illinois River from Randolph Street, might by courtesy be called a landscape. The little compositions of the gardener will be landscapes, too, in so far as they are to be judged upon the principles of aesthetics. At the same time we recognize that the common use of the word limits it to larger fields of natural scenery, or to that scenery in which the works of uninstructed nature predominate. If now we propose the main question and ask what there is in such a landscape that is beautiful, or more simply why it pleases us, we shall find ourselves in deep water immediately. What is beauty, after all? and how does anything beautiful please us? These are the questions which have occupied many, many books, and some of those I have been reading. Turning aside a moment from this inquiry, we may assume the settlement of another interesting point which has been raised. We may look upon it as hardly worth arguing that the beauty of landscape rests finally upon the same ground as the beauty of painting, sculpture and other art 273 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL matters; and more specifically we may con- sider it axiomatically evident that those landscapes that are artificially composed and constructed are to be judged as works of art, according to exactly the same prin- ciples which govern the criticism of archi- tecture, poetry or the drama. And now, what is beauty? Consider- ing how simple and common a word this is, we ought to know. Moreover, when we think what strenuous analysis has been ap- plied to the subject by many of the ablest minds of the world—philosophers, meta- physicians, psychologists,—we should expect that the last word had been said. Yet, when we come to go over the ground and see what all this analysis has yielded, the net result seems to be little short of chaos. With hundreds of books dealing with these matters, more or less directly, only a few definitions of beauty have been seriously attempted, and these are remark- able most of all for their radical disagree- ment. If anyone has ever been able to tell just what beauty is, he has never succeeded in satisfying with his definition even the critics of his own school. One of the most recent and thoroughgoing writers in this 274 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED field has begun his book with the statement that “it would be easy to find a definition of beauty that would give in a few words a telling paraphrase of the word.” The last sentence of the same delightful book asserts that “beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.” How well these two dicta run together! Now we shall be doing Professor Santayana an injustice and neglecting our own opportunity at the same time did we not notice that in the body of the book a set definition of beauty is rendered. This is it: Beauty “is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified; or, in less technical lan- guage, beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” The complete criticism of this definition would involve another book; but with very few words we may fix two important ele- ments—First, “beauty is pleasure,’—that is a feeling within the individual human consciousness, not an objective quality in the thing we call beautiful. And the second phrase of the definition comes back to the same point, for beauty is only “regarded 275 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL as the quality of a thing,” and this regard is a sort of psychic illusion ;—the thing itself does not really possess any quality which may be properly called beauty. Although modern psychologists nearly all take this view of beauty, it is radically different from the popular feeling on the subject which holds beauty to be a sensible ob- jective quality. Some old-time attempts at a definition of beauty ought to be noticed in passing, if only for their curious interest. Beauty has been said to be “the objectification of the Deity,” “the expression of the ideal to sense,” “the sensible manifestation of the good,” “the union of the real and the ideal,” and many more equally sonorous and inconceivable things. Schopenhauer has called music “the objectification of the will.” If it is, so is sculpture and landscape gardening. But none of these definitions helps us to any further understanding of the sub- ject. We may find it a curious and pleasant occupation to compare these dicta with our own experiences of the facts; but after such a comparison we find ourselves still wondering what the objectification of Deity 276 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED is, or wherein we have seen a union of the real and the ideal. The most recent and most successful attempt to bring our knowledge of beauty down to more fundamental grounds has been made in the field of psychology, which is quite certainly the only field in which this investigation can be hopefully cultivated. The most satisfactory statement of the whole matter that I have seen is that given in Miss Puffer’s “Psychology of Beauty,” and the following very brief statement of the matter is made with her work in my mind’s foreground. Let us notice, then, that, according to this psychological theory, all impressions of the world without are experienced in the body in the form of nerve or muscle ten- sions. Probably there is in every case a very close and precise co-ordination of muscle tension with nerve tension, though it is very difficult in common experience to separate them. In fact, the muscular ten- sions are consciously felt only in com- paratively infrequent instances, yet often enough to make this perfectly familiar experience to all of us. Let one receive a whiff of mignonette or hear a single clear 277 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL note struck on the piano and he will be able to observe the muscular tension which immediately ensues. By following such experiments only a little way one may see that the sight of a sphere or of a lamp or a picture immediately produces nerve and muscle tensions, for the nerves some- times make themselves felt more clearly than the muscles. Now, certain of these tensions are agreeable. Perhaps it would be more ac- curate to say that certain degrees of tension are agreeable. Indeed, it is one of the commonest theories of physical pleasure and pain that the former arises from a de- gree of nerve excitation which, if carried beyond certain limits, produces the latter. For the far greatest part, however, our physical and mental experiences consist not in the reception of single isolated im- pressions, as the hearing of one simple note or the seeing of one straight line, but in the reception of very complicated groups and series of impressions. We see a picture all at once with thousands of lines, with various forms and masses, with lights and shadows and, perhaps, with many different colors. These hundreds, or even thousands, 278 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED of items are all taken up and repeated in the body as nerve and muscle tensions; but they are at the same time blended into one complex of experience,—into one single result,—the total effect of the picture. Now, when these various tensions, pulling in all directions, balance one another, there is produced a state of nervous and mus- cular equilibrium or rest. And it is pre- cisely this state of equilibrium in a highly excited muscular and nervous system that gives the organic effect of beauty. And the beautiful object is the one which will produce all these tensions in the highest degree and which will at the same time produce them with such place and direction that they will all fall into a state of perfect equilibrium. As it is a matter of considerable im- portance, especially to the artist (painter, architect, or landscape gardener), to know by what means the effect of beauty is realized, it may pay us to look at the whole subject for a few minutes from another point of view. My students come to my classes in landscape gardening without any previous preparation in psychology, and I am accustomed to present this matter to 279 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL them, approximately, in the following terms: It is important to begin by showing, as may be done by very simple kinder- garten experiments, that the realm of the beautiful is altogether divorced from the realm of the true and the other realm of the good. Everyone is in the habit of considering evidences of fact, and of rendering judgment as to what is true and what untrue, though the majority of per- sons are totally untrained in any method of artistic criticism; that is, in the forma- tion of judgments as to what is beautiful and what is ugly. There are four ways in which men arrive at a knowledge of facts in the world of truth; and there are four corresponding ways in which they arrive at a knowledge of beauty. First of all, either truth or beauty may be recognized by a direct and immediate reaction of the organism. A child touches a hot stove, and immediately recognizes a fact, namely, that the stove is hot. No mental process is involved. An angle-worm would recognize the same fact if it hap- pened to touch the hot stove, and would 280 “WOMEN MUST WAIT” Frank A. Waugh THE CHARLES RIVER PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED draw away from the unpleasant thing just as the child would. An exactly parallel experiment may be made in the realm of the aesthetic. If several colored balls are offered to a creeping infant, certain colors will be chosen in preference to others. The organism reacts immediately and favorably toward these colors. There is no reasoning process here, any more than in determining that the stove is hot. A moth will fly to the light, certain animals will come to certain sounds, the dog howls when the organ plays, the bull resents a bright red color, while the colored coquette at the cake-walk fits herself out with all the red she can carry. In no such case is there any reasoning about what is attractive or repulsive, nor anything at all analogous to reason. The animal, no matter what the species, finds some sights, sounds, smells agreeable and others disagreeable. Perhaps it would be putting this into better terms to say that certain sights, sounds, smells pro- duce agreeable tensions in the body, but in reality this does not let us much further into the secret. Secondly, we learn by experience. Experience is known metaphysically as 281 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL inductive reason. After I have been kicked several times by a mule I learn that a mule is apt to kick. We “learn to like” olives, and we learn to like Wagnerian music; and I have seen New Englanders who at first were disgusted with the land- scape of Kansas, finally learn to like it as well as I do. I know that this last illus- trative example particularly is complicated with other elements, but there is at the bottom a certain quantity of beauty realized through experience. In a some- what different manner, yet in a manner truly exemplifying the accumulation of experience in aesthetic affairs, we learn that blue and orange are agreeable com- binations of color, while red and purple are disagreeable; or we learn that Acan- thopanax pentaphylla makes a better group when combined with Rhus copallina than when used with Van Houtt’s Spirea. Thirdly, we know some things by sheer power of deductive reason. The knowledge which abstract reason gives us in the world of truth has its analogue in the world of beauty. Our knowledge that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles is independent of experience. So there 282 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED are certain abstract relationships in aesthetics which any sane person will acknowledge upon their plain statement, and without argument or illustration. Such is the principle of unity. Let anyone understand what unity is and he will know immediately, and in a sort abstractly and intellectually, that unity is a fundamental requirement in any work of art,—in any painting, poem or garden. What is more, he will be able immediately to relate his concrete experiences to this abstract principle, and from the correspondences which he finds to know whether the object is beautiful or ugly. At this point we come very near to finding pure objective beauty; and in so far as the unity of elements in any work of art may be instantly appre- hended and universally understood and accepted, the object might be said to be beautiful in itself, as well.in the experience which it gives to some person. Lastly, we accept many weighty matters of fact on authority. I know it is “nineteen miles from Schenectady to Albany,” but I never measured it. I know that Abraham Lincoln was very tall and far from handsome, though he died, alas, before 283 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL I was born. Daily, almost hourly, we commit our very lives to the truth of cer- tain propositions which we have never verified and never expect to try to verify. It would be strange, indeed, if we should find nothing corresponding to this in the aesthetic world. Some persons are color blind. For them color schemes must go by authority. Some persons “have a poor ear for music.” The word of a critic must satisfy them as to what is good and what bad. We read Shakespeare long before we really enjoy it, because we believe on authority that it is good. But presently we learn to like Shakespeare or the music which at first did not please us, and herein lies the justification of our application of this principle to the world of aesthetics. The student always reads good books, studies good pictures, listens to good music, under the direction of authority, “in order to improve his taste.” The whole theory of the improvement of taste, therefore, rests upon our willingness to accept as beautiful those objects in which others have found beauty. It is the unpardonable aesthetic sin, of course, to rely always on the judgment of others, and never to know 284 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED from one’s own immediate experience the feelings of beauty. It is better to love a rag-time cake walk honestly and with one’s own heart than to admire Chopin because someone says one ought. Nevertheless, the critics should not be too hard on those who accept aesthetic judgments on authority, for if it were impossible to do just that the critics would be of no further use in the world. All these long theories may be rather tiresome to one who is anxiously waiting to hear something about landscape; and besides that it does seem superfluous to add another discussion of the psychology of beauty to the hundreds already in print. However, no one can consider thoughtfully the question, what is beautiful in landscape, without asking almost immediately the other question, what is beauty itself in the last analysis. The great number of answers already proposed for this last question would be more satisfactory if there was more unanimity among them. And since we can not easily take any one of them as the basis for our study of landscape beauty, it has seemed really necessary to review the problem here. 285 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL When the landscape architect puts his materials together,—his lawns, rocks, trees, shrubs, pergolas and ponds,—he is com- posing pictures in the same sense and in much the same way as does the landscape painter. He arranges the various elements to give certain groupings when seen from certain points of view. From each view- point he imagines a certain picture, com- plete in itself and somewhat definitely framed within certain limits. It is evident that Professor Santayana does not have in mind the landscape architect when he speaks of the landscape as “indeterminate,” and says that “landscape appeals to us as music does to those who have no sense of musical form.” Of course, these pieces of landscape, artificially produced within limited bounds, present the same elements of beauty as those found in a painted landscape. Only we ought to notice that whatever means the painter may have of stimulating the imagination,—of exciting strong and agreeable tensions in the body,—such means are far surpassed by those com- manded by the landscape gardener. The magnitude counts for something, the three 286 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED actual dimensions counts for more, the presence of living elements—grass, flowers, trees, water,—counts for still more. In the real landscape garden there is every- thing to be enjoyed that the painted picture has to give and much besides. It is evident also that the effects, rules and limitations would be alike in the painted picture and in the artificial landscape. Part must be balanced against part, light must balance shade, color must meet and har- monize with color. If a good painting produces a high degree of nervous or muscular stimulation with a feeling of repose, equilibrium, satisfaction, so does the landscape architect’s masterpiece. In my book on landscape gardening I have shown that every good landscape requires unity, variety, propriety, character and finish. These qualities seem to me to be fundamental, and to belong not to the gardener’s landscape alone, but to the sculptor’s statue or the lecturer’s oration. It seems hardly necessary here to define these terms or to demonstrate these qualities in the landscape. The ideas are quite simple, and the application for the most part obvious. 287 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL When we turn to the natural un- tutored landscape we meet conditions con- siderably different. The picture is here, to a large degree at least, indeterminate. It has no bounds and in general has no com- position. If the natural landscape pleases us, therefore, it is not by any balance of parts producing an equilibrium of bodily tensions. The pleasure must come from qualities simpler and more elementary than those of form. Still, the case is not without parallel. Some people, savages at least, enjoy formless music; and elementary tones or colors, quite without form, may produce sensibly agreeable effects even in the most sophisticated of us. So, too, certain kinds of literature are to a large degree formless. Probably in the bulk of our reading we are affected chiefly by content, and only slightly by form. While it seems to imply a contradiction of terms to speak of the natural landscape as a work of art, we can not deny that it does give the true aesthetic experience in a very marked and emphatic way. One great poet said, T will look up unto the hills whence cometh my help. 288 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED And when, at the pinnacle of his inspira- tion, he most clearly shadowed forth the glories of the heavenly world, he said, He leadeth me in green pastures, And beside the still waters. Indeed, if any acquaintance of ours should testify that he had never been moved at the sight of any landscape, we would deny him altogether. He might not understand Beethoven, he might care noth- ing for Shakespeare, he might be ignorant of sculpture and painting, but if he had never known the thrill that landscape can give he would be a savage irreclaimable. For only the brutes and the lowest savages live in the landscape and do not see it. But, though it be true that “the promiscuous natural landscape has no real unity,”—that is, no composition of parts,— it is still able to affect us most agreeably. The “equilibrium of tensions” cannot be secured from the balancing of very diverse and complicated elements, but there is evidently present the same “aesthetic repose.” The beholder of a beautiful landscape also experiences, in a most marked degree, the favorable stimulation— 289 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the muscular and nervous tensions—which accompany the enjoyment of any effective work of art. Though these tensions are evidently less various than those induced by a complicated drama or symphony, they are of the same kind, and they often make up in intensity what they lack in variety. When one stands at a favorable view- point and looks out over a far-reaching landscape, he may easily convince himself of the pleasurable feeling of distance which grows up in his own body. As his eye goes out, from point to point, seeking ever a greater distance, he feels within himself also the tension of reaching forward. Often the whole body itself is unconsciously thrown forward, and one feels an impulse to extend the arms, as though one would reach out and either clasp the whole land- scape physically into one’s hands or else be projected bodily into it. Was it Addison who said that the far outlook on the land- scape is the symbol of freedom? This feeling of distance is extremely powerful. It constitutes one of the most profound stimulations (or tensions) of which the body is capable, yet always within limits which are pleasurable. The feeling is 290 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED almost as wide as humanity. Certainly he would be savage who could stand on Mount Washington or Marcy and be un- moved by the distant view. This feeling, yearning or tension of distance can be even more plainly felt in looking at the stars. When the sky is clear and I look up steadily with peaceful mind into the measureless depths of the heavens, the way pointed off for us into spaces of millions of miles by thousands of twinkling, shining worlds, the tension almost trans- ports me. My lungs expand, I stretch up to my greatest height, and if I were not still too self-conscious I would spread forth my arms and reach for the stars as the baby cries for the moon. I wonder if the dog who howls at the moon is not oppressed by that same sense of the infinity of space. The feeling is wholly immediate and irrational. No reasoning is involved. We do not require an astronomical calculation to tell us that the spaces which our eyes penetrate are far beyond our comprehen- sion. The heavens declared the glory of God and the firmament showed His handi- work before any mathematician ever guessed how far it is to Mars or Saturn. 291 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL The enjoyment which we get from a sunset is very much the same,—immediate, poignant, and characterized by simple but emphatic bodily tensions. A sunset, how- ever, has some sort of composition, for there is a center of interest round which all things else are gathered and to which all the accessories are obviously referred. ‘Then there is likely to be a color develop- ment of almost equal appeal, surpassing almost any other exhibit of colors known to the eye. And we must not forget that color is one of the chief materials for pro- ducing aesthetic enjoyment. While we are speaking of colors in this particular connection, we ought to say just one word about the rainbow. Not since humanity has been human has the rainbow made its appeal in vain. The form of it has an important effect in making it beautiful, but the colors are beyond all other comparison, delightful. Nowhere in poetry or science is there any other measure either for variety or for perfect harmony of colors. The pleasure of it is indisputable, inevitable. We have only to notice that, both in form and coloring, the rainbow is peculiarly adapted to pro- 292 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED duce that “exaltation with repose”—that excitation of tensions brought into equi- librium—which we have learned to think is characteristic of the feeling of beauty. We have still another and a very im- portant quality of landscape to consider. This is the one that psychologists call ex- pression, and that the common people speak of as association. Almost every work of art has these associations which, in our minds, always cluster round it. We can not hear the Doxology sung without think- ing of refreshing hours in church, perhaps of particular churches in which we used to worship, and of dear friends whom we knew there. An old song will sometimes almost move us to tears,—not because it is so beautiful, but because of the flood of recollections which it brings to us. The Angelus suggests to us all the hard toil of the peasants’ life with the faithful piety which ennobles it. So the landscape is capable of a great deal of expression. It may be filled with pleasant or moving associations. The checkered farms spread out upon the hill- sides or snuggling in the valleys suggest to us all the pleasant memories of farm life; 293 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL the little village half hidden among the trees fills our minds with thoughts of the peaceful, busy human lives centered there; the village church, with its aspiring steeple, calls on us to remember the worship of God, and we wonder if He, too, is not in- stantly looking down on the beautiful world that He has made and thinking of those who have purposed thus to praise Him. If the landscape happens to be one with which we are familiar, the associa- tions are multiplied a hundred-fold, or a thousand-fold. And if it happens,—oh, rare joy!—that we come back after years of separation to a landscape once dear and familiar, then, indeed, the tide of recollec- tions may sweep us almost away, and the exaltation of it all is almost too painful to bear. Under such circumstances more than one strong man has given way to tears. When the army of the defeated Cyrus came back from its long and heartrending campaign in Persia, the homesick soldiers fell down and wept when, from the top of a hill, they caught the first view of the sea. We have seen that the landscape is beautiful. Its beauty is of the same sort that we find in music or sculpture,—that 294 PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED is, it affects us in the same way. It pro- duces in us the same physiological tensions, and sometimes the same balance of tensions, produced by an agreeable work of ‘art. The artificial landscape, a product of human thought and invention, has the same quali- ties of composition and purpose which any work of art may have. The natural land- scape, in particular, has unusual power, as, for example, through its effect of distance, of arousing in us the characteristic effects of beauty. And, finally, the landscape more than most works of art is infinitely rich in the beauty of association. 295 ESSAY NUMBER SEVENTEEN Suggesting Some Practical Applications Rich gift of God! A year of time! What pomp of rise and shut of day, What hues wherewith our northern clime Makes autumn’s dropping woodlands gay, What airs outblown from ferny dells, And clover-bloom and sweetbrier smells What songs of brooks and birds, what fruits and flowers, Green woods and moonlit snows, have in its round been ours! JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, “The Last Walk in Autumn” Let the youth make haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from studies, although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods, he will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the concert pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture! R. L. STEVENSON, in “‘Fontainebleau’”’ 299 SUGGESTING SOME PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS HERE are two ways of studying landscape, as there are of studying every art. These may be somewhat accurately called the professional and the amateur methods. The professional art student expects to earn a livelihood by painting pictures or designing buildings. The amateur expects only to learn to enjoy pictures, architecture or music. More strictly speaking, the amateur expects to enlarge his own capacities of enjoyment, and, if he have a proper flavor of altruism in him, he doubtless hopes to make his enlarged capacities and powers transmit some true satisfactions to other lives. An intelligent appreciation of land- scape seems to have been too rare among all sorts of art students, both professionals and amateurs. It has been thought quite necessary that a good actor should know literature and painting and music, but Joseph Jefferson has been almost the only 301 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL one to own a well-trained and vitalizing contact with landscape. The ambitious music student enriches his mind with the best of literature and with frequent visits to the art galleries. He ought also to know the unwritten literature of the forests and the unpaintable pictures of the evening sky. The professional landscape archi- tects certainly, of all the artist-world, ought to make a comprehensive study of the natural landscape in preparation for their careers. Yet, as one reads President Eliot’s memoirs of his son, he feels as though this artist stood almost alone in the breadth and depth of the foundations he laid. We can remember, to be sure, that the two men who did most to advance landscape art in America—Downing and Olmsted—were devoted and lifelong stu- dents of the fields, the hills, the rivers and the trees. Most of all, however, should the land- scape be better appreciated and more generally used as a means of widening and enriching the lives of the laity,—of common men and women,—street-car conductors, farmers and unimaginative real estate speculators. It is one of the crying de- 302 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS ficiencies of our American system of edu- cation that it does so little to develop the aesthetic side of the ordinary citizen. When one goes to Berlin, for example, and sees there the beautiful theaters accessible to the poorest classes, the magnificent art galleries practically free to all, and the wealth of public concerts in which the best classic music is truly popularized, he begins to feel that democratic America still has something to do for her citizens. The best things that have been done in this country, however, have been in the direction of what we may call the popular- ization of landscape. The park systems of Boston, Hartford, New York and Chicago have made beautiful landscape a daily in- gredient in hundreds of thousands of lives otherwise almost untouched on the aesthetic side. This good work ought to be extended, and the good things thus developed ought to be systematized and more widely applied. The schools ought to recognize the value of landscape, as they now recognize the value of drawing, literature and music. We would consider that school very grossly mismanaged which should exist for years beside a great library without 303 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL making use of it, or near a well-stocked art gallery without maturing intelligent plans for bringing its student body into vital touch with such a means of uplift. Some city schools, in fact, are be- ginning to use the parks; but, for the most part, the effort is desultory and lacking any great purpose. The parks are used mostly by way of picnics for primary grades. Occasionally the kindergartners visit the zoological gardens to see the animals. Still more seldom does the botany class study trees and shrubs in the parks, or the geology pupils come to see where the glaciers planed away the rocks. Yet the parks are full of pictures—real living pictures;—and the country roundabout, accessible to most schools, contains larger and sublimer pictures without end. The ordinary school children do not find it a defect that these pictures are not recognized as classics and that they are not classified and set down in the art catalogues. Only the sophisticated teachers think it im- possible, or even unworthy of them, to teach such things, seeing they are not stamped with the authority (and the blight) of conventionality. Some of these 304 ys0q “MY Fusasy TINd WOSSOTd SHAAL LINN INVADVad AHL upuman ' 1as4p quod G@HL PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS people would be afraid to breathe fresh air if they did not find the process tediously described and justified in the text-books of physiology. Yet the natural landscape is full of poetry and of wit, and of a divine beauty. For, in a certain good sense, this beauty is divine, considering its immediate origin from God; and in such a way may claim a pre-eminence over the beauty of music or of sculpture. Does not such beauty have. its pedagogic value? And can it not be turned to educational account as well as could free theaters or concerts? To both questions we may answer yes. The precise methods of turning these resources to account can not be so readily pointed out, seeing they have not been the subject of endless experiments, as have music and art study. Yet, at first sight, it seems that there would be no very great difficulty in adapting the ordinary methods of schoolroom art study to the utilization of our richer resources in landscape. A general direction toward beautiful things is about all that can be given anyway. And it would seem quite as easy to tell the child that the river which he sees and loves 305 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL is beautiful, as to tell him that the Sistine Madonna, of which he has seen only poor copies, is beautiful. Or, if more instruction is required, it would seem to be quite as easy a task to explain to the pupil wherein the rugged sky-line, with its countering points of emphasis, is beautiful as to explain to him the beauties of Dante, written in a language which he knows not, and con- ceived in an age which his own generation can not understand. In any event, the pupil gains nothing until there awakens in his own soul some response to the beauties set before him by his teacher. The success of this sort of teaching is measured exactly by the breadth and depth of this response, and not, as many persons seem to imagine, by the conventional values placed upon certain classic properties (epics, pictures or statues) which are used in the edu- cational processes. And it seems clear to the writer, who has had some experience in teaching, that a quicker and more natural response is to be expected toward the simple and familiar, though sometimes sub- lime, beauties of the neighboring woods, fields and hills than toward the unfamiliar and recondite beauties of literature, 306 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS sculpture or music. As a teacher, I must say that I would like to see the experiment fairly tried of establishing in some good school a course in landscape study on the same basis as the present courses in litera- ture and art. I should expect it to be productive of equally good results; and I should expect the methods, once worked out, to be capable of a much wider applica- tion. For those amiable and practical persons who always prefer a concrete statement, I will append the transcript of a very modest scheme which has already been successfully tried in the schools of Amherst, Mass., and in various other schools. The memo- randum here reproduced is taken directly from the program placed in the hands of the teachers. PROGRAM OF SCHOOL EXERCISES PROLOGUE Amherst is commonly considered to be one of the most beautiful towns in New England; that is to say, one of the most beautiful in America. This being so, we who live here ought to know about the beauties of the place and ought to get some daily enjoyment from these surroundings. 307 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Moreover, every child ought to learn to see the beautiful things in the world. Unfor- tunately, many children see only the pictures in the Sunday papers. The following ex- ercises all call attention to things which are beautiful and call for some judgment on them. METHOD I. 2. At least one exercise each week should be given from the following program. The exercise should be posted on the blackboard, and suggestions given by the teacher. On the following day reports should be made by pupils and discussed in the schoolroom. On the next day pupils should enter the results in their permanent note-books. Pictures should be included wherever practicable. Thus, at the end of the term, each pupil will have a note-book entitled “Beautiful Amherst,” which would be of considerable value. PROGRAM TREES Where is the most beautiful tree in Amherst? What kind of a tree is it? How old? Who planted it? Give any other information. Where is the most beautiful row or group of trees in Amherst? Also the most beautiful piece of woods? BROOKS Make a sketch map of the town of Amherst, locating and naming all the streams, including the smallest brooks, as far as possible. Where is the prettiest stream in Amherst? Why is it the prettiest? 308 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 3. PONDS Name and locate all the ponds in Amherst. Which one is the prettiest? Why? 4. HILLS What are the highest hills in Amherst? How high are they? Which ones are most beautiful? Why do you think so? 5. ROADS Where is the prettiest piece of road or street in Amherst? If there are trees on this street, tell what kind they are. 6. PUBLIC BUILDINGS What is the most beautiful and dignified public building in Amherst? This includes the Town Hall, school buildings, college buildings, etc. Who designed the building which you think best? 7. PRIVATE PLACES What is the prettiest private place in Amherst? What is the prettiest and most dignified dwelling house? Name the most attractive features of these places. 8. FARMS Where is the most attractive looking farm in Amherst? and what makes it so? 9. VIEWS Where can you find the most extensive view in Amherst? What can you see from there? Where is the most attractive spot in town as regards outlook? Name several places which offer specially fine views. 309 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL 10. PICNIC GROUNDS Name and locate all the best picnic grounds in Amherst and tell what attractions each one has. 11. THE COMMONS Draw a map of one of the commons: Center, North Amherst, East Amherst or South Amherst. Tell what could be done to im- prove the common. 12. VILLAGE IMPROVEMENT What things could be done to make Amherst more beautiful? Various teachers who have taken these exercises report gratifying results. The essential value of the work lies in the fact that each exercise calls the attention of the pupil to certain beautiful objects and in such a way as to lead him to compare and discriminate on the basis of beauty. Another form of exercise which I have tested with college students, but which is capable of adaptation to grammar and high schools, consists in studying photographs of landscapes. Of course, it might be assumed at once that no photograph is as good as the landscape from which it is taken, but this assumption is not quite true. 310 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS A clever photographer of artistic tempera- ment, like Mr. Charles Vandervelde or Mr. William T. Knox, will frequently make a photograph which, in important artistic qualities, is better than the landscape itself. But the study of such photographs, supposing them to be well composed and happily rendered, has several advantages over the study of the natural landscape. Each photograph presents a single point of view and a single direction and scope of view. The elementary student, therefore, is not confused by the multiplicity of pictures or the uncertainty of several ele- ments. The pictures being fixed are more easily analyzed or criticised. This careful analysis and specific criticism on the part of the pupil are essen- tial to the success of such exercises. In order to secure these results, I supply my pupils with a number of searching questions, which I require them to answer in con- siderable detail. The answers are made in writing, and are finally read and dis- cussed before the entire class and in the room with the pictures. My last exercise of this sort was based on a photographic salon of about eighty 311 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL pictures, made by a dozen of the best artist photographers in America, and the results were very satisfactory. The pictures were greatly enjoyed; and the analysis and criticism of them not only deepened this present pleasure, but en- larged also the pupils’ capacity for further enjoyment. For the benefit of other teachers, I will add just here a copy of the questions as put into the hands of each pupil. THE COLLECTION IN GENERAL 1. How much material is usually selected for a picture? How does the amount of ma- terial affect the pictorial result? 2. What definite expedients are adopted to secure unity? 3. What is done for the sake of variety? 4. Are any definite schemes of composition preferred? 5. What materials are preferred, as trees, brooks, hills, etc.? 6. What attention is paid to sky line? 7. How are trees treated with respect to group- ing, distance, etc.? 8. What consideration is given to atmosphere? In how many pictures is the condition of the atmosphere or weather distinctly rendered? 9. How many pictures are sharp, clear and realistic? and how many are more or less 312 YOUN “SL uy LSIW GNVIGOOM yIne My yuosd alald LSHAAVH AHL PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS impressionistic? What are the advantages of each method? 10. How many of the compositions shown would it be practicable to reproduce in park con- struction? 11. Classify the compositions as natural, pictur- esque and formal. How many in each class? REGARDING INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS: 1. Characterize the work of each artist. Mention the individualities of each, especially the strong points. 2. Point out individual peculiarities in,— (a) Choice of materials; (b) Method of composition; (c) Method of treatment, as realistic, poetic, etc.; (d) Photographic methods and processes. 3. Do the artists seem to be affected by their landscape surroundings? Is there any local geography apparent in the individual collec- tions? 4. Whose work do you personally prefer? and why? 5. Which do you consider the best and second- best pictures in the entire collection? When the student of landscape has taken to the study of pictures he can well afford to go beyond the photographers. The great landscape painters have many things to tell. For them the landscape has 313 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL always been an inspiration and a reservoir of beauty. From it they have drawn the models for their best works. What is there in the world out-of-doors which has ap- pealed to Turner, Millet, Corot, Inness or Thwachtman? It is worth while for the amateur to try to answer this question. So I have sent my pupils to the painters, and especially to Corot, not be- cause painted landscapes are better than native pictures, but because the selective skill of the trained artist points out what is best in landscape, and because, also, his aptitude in composition often shows what arrangements are most pleasing. Because I happen to have at hand an excellent col- lection of reproductions from Corot, I make their study an annual exercise for my students, and I will give here once more a list of questions which each pupil is re- quired to answer at length from his study. OUTLINE FOR A STUDY OF COROT’S PICTURES LAND AND WATER 1. To what extent does he use water in his landscape? 2. In what forms—ponds, brooks, etc.? 314 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 3. 4. 5. Are his pictures mostly of wild or cul- tivated land? What kind of land does he choose to paint—plains, rough land, mountains, etc.? Does he show any special preferences with respect to contour, grade or topography? GENERAL COMPOSITION AND TREATMENT 6. 7. 8. 9. Are objects scattered or massed? Criticise in detail. What of chiaroscuro? What attention is given to conditions of weather? To the hour of the day? In how many pictures can the hour of the day be fairly known without reference to title? TREES AND THEIR TREATMENT 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. To what extent are trees used in Corot’s landscapes? To what extent are they grouped? How are the groups composed? How many trees? How many species? Are these groups formal or informal? How are the groups placed—background, middleground or foreground? What species are most frequently used? Are the specimens chosen formal, natural or picturesque? To what extent are shrubs used, and in what manner? To what extent and in what manner does he use grass, flowering plants, etc.? 315 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Similar exercises can easily be arranged on the basis of any available material,—for example, an accessible art gallery, or a set of prints kept in the village library. A well- selected collection of Copley prints is ex- cellent, and even a set of Perry pictures cost- ing one cent each will be well worth one or two exercises. In all this study, however, the pupil must not forget the natural landscape. His studies are valuable only in proportion as they open the natural landscape to his un- derstanding and enjoyment. Outdoor exercises are therefore best, and must never be omitted from any course of instruction. For students of some experience and maturity, I have used a form of exercise which we call the “landscape links.” It is modeled on the golf links,—one of the im- portant uses of the golf links being said to be the exhibition of the landscape. For this form of instruction it is neces- sary to choose a tract of land from one mile to ten miles in length and breadth, furnished with a reasonable variety of scenery. The better the landscape and the distant view, the more fully are all purposes fulfilled. On such a territory the leader 316 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS of the exercise will establish a series of stations, say, six to two dozen, correspond- ing to the holes of the golf links. Each station will be chosen with reference to some attractive or instructive bit of land- scape or outlook; and the direction of the view, as well as the precise point of view, will be indicated by a suitable marker. Of course, a great deal depends on the tactful selection of the successive stations. They should offer a pleasing variety of pictures, and, if possible, they should be selected and arranged with relation to some fundamental principle. There ought to be some development, sequence and climax in the series. For example, it is possible to start with restricted views, showing only foreground, then to reach more extensive views in which the principal objects occupy middle ground, thence to views with inter- esting backgrounds, reaching for a climax some point of view offering a far distant outlook. Sometimes it is possible to start with the highly domesticated views in a village street, passing through the more open suburbs, thence through open fields, and reaching a satisfactory climax in some wild ravine or on some wooded hill. 317 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL The educative value of such an exer- cise depends largely on the critical analysis and appreciation of each picture and of the whole series. The following series of ques- tions will show how I have had my own students work on such pastimes. THE LANDSCAPE LINKS PARTICULAR VIEWS 1. . Sketch a ground plan of each view. . Characterize each view and classify the On Wh NO .¢ THE Photograph or sketch each view. series. . Criticise each view and classify the series. Each point of view might have been better chosen; criticise. Which is the most pleasing view? Why? Is the value of any view influenced by extraneous associations? WHOLE COLLECTION . Is there any order, sequence, climax or other relation in the series? . Might any rearrangement, addition or omission improve the series? On what principle should this series of views be organized? GENERAL QUESTIONS 1. Which views are best,—foreground, middle- ground or distance? 318 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 2. At what distance do trees give the best effects? Running water? Still water? Lawn? Meadow? 3. Would different atmospheric or weather conditions make different answers neces- sary to any questions on this sheet? For instance? 4. Would this course of views be worth while in midwinter? Of course, these suggestions will by no means exhaust the subject, and I hope they have not tired the reader. They will show, at any rate, that the native landscape, so far from being diffuse and lacking in. pictorial qualities, is just as capable of critical enjoyment as the works of Whistler or Rodin; or that, instead of being outside the reach of intelligent study, the land- scape, in fact, offers an incomparable and inexhaustible material for the development of the aesthetic faculties. In particular, I hope it will seem that these opportunities are accessible to the pupils of the common schools, who, most of all, lack and deserve aesthetic instruction, and whom I would most gladly serve. 319 Summary SUMMARY F the reader is not in too great haste to lay down this book, the author would ask the privilege of a final word. The seventeen essays which comprise the volume seem to be a trifle discursive in their nature, and the reader, who perhaps has not been hypnotically fascinated with them, may have failed to follow the thread of argument which ought to hold them all together. We begin our talks together under the trees or in the open fields with a prime endeavor to show that the world is filled with beauty and that this beauty is of the very greatest import to us. It is funda- mental to our spiritual and intellectual existence,—almost necessary to our very physical life. These beauties of the out- door world are argued to be our chief source of aesthetic sustenance and growth. Yet this enormous wealth is largely unappro- priated, and little understood. On careful examination we find also that these good things are not confined to any elect persons, to any favored country, 323 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL to any time or season. God looked on the world and saw that it was good. The most critical of us are obliged to agree with him. The world is beautiful in toto, in all its parts, and in all its phenomena. The weather is good, no matter how often polite conversation may run to the contrary, and every change, from equinox to solstice, offers a new spectacle of delight. This occupies us through the first five essays of the book. And then we come to landscape gardening, and for two quite competent reasons. The first reason is that these essays were all conceived from the standpoint of the landscape architect, from which point it is altogether natural and proper to discuss some more practical matters belonging to a highly technical art. The second reason is this: that as success- ful landscape making depends absolutely on a well-attuned love of natural scenery, so the artificial landscape, when sympathet- ically designed, adds new beauties to Nature’s painting. It is “the art which doth mend nature.” It clarifies and epi- tomizes the pictures which we see some- times dubiously and imperfectly rendered in field and wood and mountain chain. So 324 SUMMARY the man who loves the natural landscape should find a double joy in the refined, har- monized and humanized renderings of the same themes as offered by the artists of lawn and lake and forest, while, on the other hand, the best landscape architects have always derived their main inspiration from the beauties of nature. These discussions of landscape garden- ing occupy essays six to eleven; where- upon we are ready to proceed to some practical applications. The nature lover simply enjoys the contemplation of such beauties as he finds offered; the landscape gardener tries to create, or at least to as- semble and organize, such pictures for himself and for those who appreciate them. But he, and we also, wish to go further and to make this art the means of many practical benefits to society. We want to make the cities and the open coun- try more beautiful and comfortable, as we have said in Essay Twelve; and we want to use this tremendous capital of beauty for the instruction of every child in the public schools, as outlined in Essay Seven- teen. Incidentally, we notice, in Essays Fourteen and Fifteen, some applications 325 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL of landscape knowledge in other arts. Then the student of such matters who is deeply interested in these themes will want to examine the foundations of all such knowledge. The psychology of the subject will appeal to him. This is all the more likely if he be a teacher. Other people may find it easier and quite as profitable just to omit Essay Fifteen. Finally, once more, let us all enjoy to the utmost the good and beautiful world we have had given to us. We will daily praise it and give God thanks. Thus will we be prepared to enjoy a better world if God sees fit to give us one. 326 Index Index A American Landscape . American Landscape Gardeners American Landscape Gardening American Masterpieces Amherst, Massachusetts . Art and Utility . Art for Art’s Sake . Art Which Mends Nature Applications . Association . Sh wie Authority on Beauty . Bailey, L. H. Beautiful Amherst . Beautiful vs. Picturesque . Beauty, Its Nature . Beauty of Landscape . Berlin, Germany Bible, The Billboard Nuisance Brooks. . _. : Bryant, W. C. . Burnham, Daniel H. 329 72, 175; PAGE 99 153 II5 181 307 242 241 85 301 293 283 257 307 36 273 269 393 261 217 49 258 189 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL PAGE Burns, Robert . . . . . . . . . . 258 Burroughs, John . . . . . «257 Cc Central Park, New York. . . . . . . 184 Chiaroscuro. . ... . . . . . . ~~ Qf Chicago Parks. . . . ..... . IQ Chicago World’s Fair. . . . . . . . 186 City Design. . . . . . . 1 1. 244 City Planning . . ..... . . . 208 Climate a 6 es a eS Cloud Pictures. . . . . . . . . . 60 Colonial Gardening . . ... . . . 116 Connecticut. . . . . . . . . .). «6108 Conservation of Resources . . . . . . 220 Corot’s Paintings . . . . . . . . . 314 Country Planning. . . . . . . . . 207 Criticism. 2. 2... ww ee ee Q Criticism, Purposes of . . . . . . . 145 Criticism, Difficulties of - 2. . . . . . 145 Cyclones Wiss oe we OS ew ae ew a Gg D Decorative Use of Landscape . . . . . 241 Diversity of American Landscape . . . . 104 Downing, Andrew Jackson . 120, 131, 155, 200 Downing’s Disciples . . . . . . . . 156 Drama and Landscape . . . . . . . 259 Dramatic Criticism . . . . . . . . 6142 330 INDEX E Elements of Landscape Eliot, Charles : Environment, Power of Exercises for Students Experience of Beauty . Expression Farm Improvements . Far Outlook . Fields . ; Field of Criticism i Franklin Park, Boston Fruit Trees . G Gallagher, Percival ‘ Geography and Landscape German Cities ’ Graceland Cemetery, Chicago Great Lakes, The . H Harrisburg, Pennsylvania . Health Historic Spots . Holmes, Oliver W. Homesickness 331 170, 195 PAGE 43 20 312 281 293 218 290 105 139 190 214 173 107 243 192 105 201 75 216 258 23 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL I Improvement of the Open Country . Italian Style in America . J Jensen, Jens . ‘ Jesus and the Landscape : Job K Kansas Roads Keney Park, Hartford Kinosuke Adachi (Quoted) . Knowledge of Beauty . L Lakes . : Landscape Art . Landscape Gardeners . Landscape Gardening . Landscape Gardening and the Weather Landscape in Literature . Landscape Links Landscape Ownership Landscape Resources . Landscape Study Landscapes, Definition Laws of Composition . Learning to Like Things . 332 174, 198 PAGE 207 124 262 262 212 196 100 280 50 87 153 79 253 316 228 129 316 58 270 282 INDEX PAGE L’Enfant. ... ee Ok Oe a ye 200 Life, Relation to Landscape ee we we we we Literary Criticism. . . oe eee «GO Literature and the Landscape So ee ae jee (92153 Local Color. . . . . . 1 . ee 255 Looking at the Sky . . . . . .. . 657 Lowell, J. Ro 2. 2. 2. 1. we ee 258 M Manning, Warren H.. . . . . . = = 1972, 201 Masterpieces of Landscape Architecture . . 181 McPherson, Kansas ....... . 212 Methods of Teaching. . . - + 305 Metropolitan Park Reservation, ‘Boston . . 95 Ministry of Trees. . . . . . . . . 31 Mountains . . ... . . . «. « 45, 106 Mount Mansfeld . . . . . . . . .) 47 Mount Royal, Montreal . . . . . . . 189 Mount Vernon. . A? gh Ue, ED EE. pt Muddy Brook Parkway . fe « # ~~ “Tga N National Forest Reserves. . . . . . . 229 oO Obstacles in Landscape ee a ne: Olmsted Brothers . .. . 172, 196 Olmsted, Frederick L., Sr., iis iia; 160, 190, 191 333 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL PAGE Olmsted, Works of . . eke A we ET Olmsted’s Work Characterized, oe w 2 63 Olmsted and Vaux. . . ..... .~ 8g Open Country . . . ... . . . . «207 Ownership of Scenery. . . . . . . . 227 P ’ Painting and Landscape. . . s a « 245 Painting Compared With Lendecape eo a oe CI2G Parker, Geo. A. BA gels de a Oe A 169, 196 Parks of Gidesse yO Ges ob. Sh . Bo on SP TOF Parks, Use Of «0 .5..2 &% og) (4 w wi -« Soe Parmentier, Andre. . . . . . . .). 6154 Pedagogic Methods . . . . . . . . 305 Photographs of Landscapes. . . . . . 310 Photography and Weather . . . . . . 78 Photography of Skies. . . . . . . . 59 Picnic Grounds, . + + « « © «© « «= 236 gata og a ee a 6 Plains. . . Be Be a Be Ed ge ORT Platt, Chas. A. OO Ge eo ge lg TER g 73 Playgrounds. . « « + « «© « + S$ ags Poetry of Trees. 2 5 + @ « ¢ + & « 4&8 Practical Applications. . . . . . . . 301 Preservation of Scenery . . . . . . . 216 Professional vs. Amateur . oo) LP Cac. “a QO Psychology . . « ¢ s© = « + »# * « 269 Public Ownership. . . . . . . . ) .) 228 Puffer, Miss (Quoted) . . . . . . . 295 334 INDEX Rainbow . es Repton, Humphrey Reservations of Scenery . Riley, James Whitcomb Rivers Roads . : Roadside Trees . Robinson, Charles M. . Rural Improvements . S Santayana, Professor (Quoted) . Sargent, Professor C. S. . Scenery Ownership Scenic Roads School Exercises Scott, Frank J. . Seasonal Changes . Shakespeare . Simonds, O. C. . Sky, The . Snowfall . Stars, The State Parks . Stiles, W. A. . Study of Paintings . Sublimity Summary 335 121, . 88, 173, PAGE 292 160 230 258 48 209 214 244 218 275 175 227 215 307 157 go 259 193 57 62 63 231 175 314 102 323 THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL Sunset : ‘ Surveys of Resources . T Thoreau, Henry D. Town Parks . Tree Planting Trees . by ox Trees in America . U Unity of Landscape Vv Vaux, Calvert . Vandervelde, Chas. Versatility of American Teahidabane : Village Improvement . Ww Warner, Charles Dudley . Washington, D. C. . Weather . 2: ek Whatley, Thomas . Wildness of American Dandecape : World’s Fair at Chicago . Worship of Trees . 336 PAGE 292 220 258 235 214 31 106 289 245 104 207 15 199 71 256 103 186 36 CS rae aed ee eae ae a