12 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Experience, 

 Emotion, and 

 Association 



From the ordinary experience of his life and from observations which 

 he purposely makes, the artist acquires a store of impressions which 

 are the material from which his designs must be wrought. These 

 impressions tend to be chosen from the infinity of impressions which 

 are presented to the mind, according as they seem to find their kin in 

 the already acquired mental content. If they are so akin, the pleas- 

 urable emotion which attends their dawning perception attracts the 

 attention of the artist to them and makes them valuable and chosen ; 

 and those things which cause noticeable emotion when they are per- 

 ceived are likely to hold a place in the memory. The artist's emotion 

 may be simply esthetic pleasure, or it may be the pleasure of finding 

 something which obviously he can use in his design, or it may be caused 

 by a congruity, of any degree of complication and indefiniteness, be- 

 tween the perception and whatever else is in his mind at the time, — 

 some relationship with the memories, some faint associational flavor 

 so subtle that nothing may surely be said of it, except that its presence 

 in our thoughts is a pleasure. The designer whose mind is open and 

 sensitive to beautiful things, who responds to each new experience of 

 beauty with a powerful emotion, will in the very nature of things win 

 many valuable impressions from experiences which would be dull and 

 unprofitable to a less sensitive person. Also a keenness of interest in 

 facts not primarily esthetic will in the long run add to an artist's es- 

 thetic power. An ability to appreciate the beauty of free landscape, 

 for instance, while it must have its beginnings inborn in the mind, may 

 be greatly developed by a definite study of landscape forms, which leads 

 to the perception, and so to the enjoyment, of subtler relations which 

 without study might go unseen.* 



* This Idea is discussed in The Landscape as a Means of Culture, an article by 

 N. S. Shaler in the Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1898. (See References.) : — 



" It is evident that our culture is near the station where we may hope for some 

 effort to develop the landscape sense by a systematic training in the arts which may 

 enable us to appreciate scenery. . . . 



" With the advance which an assiduous training of the landscape sense brings, 

 the observer finds himself less in need of the human note in the view ; his development 

 follows the course by which the landscape motive became established. . . . 



" From the limited though varied aspects of the overhumanized views in and 

 about the town, the student should pass, in a well-devised gradation, to the scenes 



