WALKS, PATHS, ENTRANCES 77 



chosen. But the obviousness of material should 

 by no means detract from a realization of the 

 importance of a walk's form or line of direction 

 and its scale — although I personally feel that a 

 walk or path or even an entrance gateway may 

 be more comfortably tolerated when its design 

 and scale are altogether failures but its material 

 suitable and harmonious, than when a very ex- 

 cellent design or plan is executed in the wrong 

 substance and thus thrown distressingly out of 

 scale. 



Material and scale — otherwise proportion — 

 affect each other so intimately that they can- 

 not, as a matter of fact, be considered as things 

 apart; indeed, scale in one sense is altogether 

 dependent on material. For example, a grano- 

 lithic walk leading to the door of a shingled cot- 

 tage is out of scale even though its width be 

 kept down to the minimum, whereas a most 

 generous walk of gravel or even of bricks, loosely 

 laid, would not be, owing of course to the greater 

 harmony of material. 



Sidewalks of cement along the highway are 

 unquestionably superior to any others, but with- 

 in the garden — which means within the bound- 

 aries of the plot, remember — they are in nearly 

 all cases quite hopeless. Indeed I cannot recall 

 a single exception. There is something so grimly 



