CHAPTER VI 

 LANDSCAPE EFFECTS 



Taste in landscape effects — Variety of landscape effects — Literary dis- 

 cussions OF landscape effects — The "beautiful" and the "picturesque" 



— Their fundamental difference — Their application in design — Examples of 

 OTHER effects — Sublimity — Desolation — Melancholy — Gayety — Mystery 



— Effects from transitory conditions — Harmony and contrast in effects — 

 Effects in landscape characters — Effects in styles — Design in effects. 



The total reaction which the perception of a landscape may have 

 upon a man, we have called landscape effect. Any landscape effect 

 is made up in part of some kind of emotional response in the observer, 

 and it is this emotion alone which makes the effect interesting and 

 which gives value — in the eyes of the observer — to the landscape 

 which is the immediate cause of the effect. It is the effect of a land- 

 scape, and particularly the emotional component in this effect, by which 

 the worth of the character or of the style of the landscape must ulti- 

 mately be judged. And in this effect alone, to the mind of the de- 

 signer, style and character and all the characteristics of the landscape 

 must find their ultimate esthetic justification. 

 Taste in The constitution of the minds of different men will make them dif- 



Landscape ferently sensitive to landscape effects* : not only will one man be pro- 



foundly moved by a landscape which impresses another only slightly, 

 but one man may get great pleasure from a landscape which to another 

 man is distinctly distasteful. In this way the innate sensitiveness of 

 one man to certain kinds of landscape effects will make him, in judging 

 a landscape which he sees, use a scale of values not at all in accord with 

 the ideas of another man of a different type of mind. Thus the whole 

 matter of landscape effects appears as a matter of taste and is individual 

 to the same extent that taste is individual. 



* Cf . Sitwell, An Essay on the Making of Gardens, p. 40-43 . 



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