26 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Teaching 

 and Taste 



Criticism 



needs of mankind, perhaps felt before but never given form, they may 

 be acclaimed as geniuses, and may put the stamp of their personality 

 on a new school, which will arise and do its work, and eventually in its 

 turn be supplanted by some other conception of art. But not all such 

 innovations are improvements. Many of these conceptions, based on 

 some insignificant consideration or some evanescent public fancy, may 

 be worthy of the name of nothing more than fashions or fads. 



Taste may be deliberately developed by teaching. Wherever any 

 professional instruction is given in a fine art, such as landscape archi- 

 tecture, the teacher may strive to cultivate the taste of his pupil in one 

 of two ways. He may in each problem under discussion give his own 

 judgment, and say categorically that in his opinion such a solution is 

 good, such another bad; and by noting enough such decisions, the 

 pupil may be able to learn what the taste of the teacher is and to know 

 what his decision would probably be in a new case. On the other 

 hand the teacher may point out in each problem what he considers to 

 be the important elements, and allow the pupil to make his own deci- 

 sion, which the constitution of his own mind inevitably brings about. 

 In this way, too, the pupil should ultimately develop a definite and con- 

 sistent taste ; but it will be his own taste, based less on a cold intel- 

 lectual memory of another man's decisions, and more on his own natural 

 esthetic preferences. There is little question that the second of these 

 methods is usually much the better. 



The purpose of the artist is to express to the beholders through 

 his work of art ideas and emotions with which he has been previously 

 impressed in his experience. The critic on the other hand endeavors 

 to understand the work of the artist, to discover the esthetic principles 

 on which its effect is based, and to explain these principles to others so 

 that they may better understand the artist's work and get more pleas- 

 ure from it. Thus the critic, too, is concerned in having the beholder 

 impressed with the emotion expressed by the artist, but the critic's 

 own work expresses not so much esthetic emotion as intellectual truth. 

 He interprets the design intellectually by setting it forth in its logical 

 relations.* 



* " The three types of criticism which I have called classical, romantic, and scien- 

 tific the three sorts of critics, described by me as judges, showmen, natural histori- 



