RURAL ART 249 



art is the application of art principles to rural problems. When 

 we reach this ground, no one can doubt that art is able to render 

 a service to the country as much as to the city. Its purpose is 

 to bring order and beauty in place of disorder and ugliness. 

 Beauty seems to be more natural to the country than to the city, 

 and more indispensable. Perhaps it would be wise therefore to 

 make a stronger effort to preserve and enhance the beauty of the 

 country districts. 



But the country needs also to be orderly. An orderly arrange- 

 ment of roads, farms, fields, public grounds, buildings and of the 

 whole landscape will have considerable practical value. In- 

 deed, order, heaven's first law and the foundation of art, has 

 also great practical value. The ministrations of art may be justi- 

 fied, therefore, on wholly practical grounds. It is wise to pre- 

 sent this argument in most cases, though it would be wrong to 

 make the final test of the service which art would render to the 

 country. 



It will be worth while to point out in beginning that rural art 

 in America is entirely different from ''peasant art" in the old 

 country. The artists of the Old World recognize and value very 

 highly what they know as bauer-kunst. Perhaps nothings would 

 differentiate more clearly the spirit of American country life 

 from the spirit of Bavarian peasant life than this very difference 

 between American rural art and bauer-kunst. 



It seems to me that rural art in America ought to deal first 

 with rural architecture. Farmhouses ought to be essentially and 

 typically rural. In the past twenty-five years we have seen 

 many horrible examples of town houses built in the country. 

 The architects have been designing city houses almost exclu- 

 sively and the only new ideas in circulation have been developed 

 to meet urban conditions. In most instances they are wholly 

 unadapted to rural conditions and the results are often genuinely 

 grotesque. 



It should be remembered distinctly in this connection that some 

 of the best American domestic architecture has been developed 

 in the country. The old-fashioned New England farmhouse and 

 the good old Southern ante-bellum plantation house were fine 

 types. The modern bungalow in its pristine purity is essen- 

 tially a country house and suited to certain types of rural seen- 



