AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. 109 



Nor is this all. Perhaps it is not even the worst. Nearly all of 

 this work exists anonymously. Alfred Henry Lewis and Edith 

 Wharton put their names on their books; and 200,000 copies of 

 "Coniston" repeat the name of Winston Churchill 200,000 times. 

 But when Frederick Law Olmsted works with ecjual skill and devo- 

 tion to make Franklin Park a place of beauty and of joy forever 

 there remains no sign nor mark to repeat his name to the thousands 

 who thoughtlessly enjoy his labors. It is well nigh impossible to 

 discover the existing works of particular landscape architects. 

 It would require a directory and a chart to do it; and it seems 

 hardly necessary to remark that such a directory has not yet been 

 compiled. 



In many places where good works of landscape gardening exist 

 it seems to be a point of professional etiquette to keep the names 

 of the designers a secret. 



Another difficulty lies in the fact that a landscape gardener's 

 picture is not finished when it leaves his hand. Nearly always the 

 lapse of years must be waited for its completion. Sometimes a 

 generation must pass; and it would be hard in any case for the 

 artist himself to say just at what moment his masterpiece gave the 

 fullest expression of his original design. 



What is even worse is the positive infraction of the design by 

 ignorant or wilful meddlers. A gardener, a park superintendent, 

 a half-baked engineer, or a thrifty contractor executes the artist's 

 design. Sometimes he executes it to death. This work is often 

 performed ignorantly, often without sympathy, sometimes with 

 unconcealed hostility. How then shall we judge the designer by 

 the result? 



It is true that artists, like other people, must be judged chiefly by 

 results; and the best landscape architects provide means for over- 

 coming or mitigating these difficulties, just as they provide against 

 other technical difficulties in their work. Nevertheless under the 

 best of management these difficulties exist in large measure and form 

 a serious barrier to the progress of criticism in the field of landscape 

 gardening art. 



We may here pass over the fact that criticism in the field of land- 

 scape architecture has no traditions, no criteria, no background of 

 history. These defects are real and serious, but they are not vital 



