PARK AND CEMETERY. 
166 
tion is to show the very general and 
liearty suspicion in which all such in- 
quiries are held. 
Some landscape gardeners politely 
<but firmly refuse to give any infor- 
mation regarding their own works or 
•anybody’s else. With rare exceptions, 
information, if given at all, is given 
grudgingly, as though a favor had 
been presumptuously and unwarrant- 
ably asked. This being the attitude 
toward the giving of information, 
what is to be expected when these 
men are asked for an expression of 
•opinion? The majority of them re- 
fuse flatly to give it. It seems to be 
•considered a crime to say that Mr. 
Brown’s design for the public park 
is good, and Mr. White’s design for 
the college campus inadequate. In- 
deed, some of these good men appear 
to feel that it is unprofessional and 
ungentlemanly to think about such 
things. 
Let us understand now and ever- 
more that this attitude is wrong and 
harmful. The right way is to wel- 
come and assist criticism. Well-in- 
formed, intelligent criticism will clear 
the air, will set a standard of taste, 
will foster a wide and better appre- 
ciation of our gracious art, will tend 
to the improvement of technique, will 
.-set higher ideals before our profes- 
sional workers, and in a thousand 
ways will help both the makers and 
the enjoyers of landscape pictures. 
In the field of landscape architec- 
ture the critic meets certain practical 
•difficulties which do not exist in other 
fields or which elsewhere offer less 
;serious obstacles. It is quite possible 
to read all the works of almost any 
popular or classic writer and to know 
what his entire output has been. The 
•experienced art critic has seen prac- 
tically all the works of the masters; 
and before he writes about Dewing’s 
paintings or of Saint-Gaudens’ sculp- 
ture he will have seen a majority of 
the artist’s productions. Now it is 
practically impossible for any critic 
to know the work of any landscape 
architect in this complete fashion. 
Each man’s work is scattered all over 
the continent, from coast to coast 
and from Canada almost to the Gulf. 
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 boks; and 200,- 
■000 copies of “Coniston” repeat the 
name of Winston Churchill 200,000 
times. But when Erederick Law 
Olmsted works with equal skill and 
■devotion 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 di- 
rectory 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. Some- 
times a generation must pass; and it 
would be hard in any case for the art- 
ist himself to say just at what mo- 
ment 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 en- 
gineer, or a thrifty contractor exe- 
cutes 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 archi- 
tects provide means for overcoming 
or mitigating these difficulties, just 
as they provide against other techni- 
cal difficulties in their work. Never- 
theless, under the best of manage- 
ment 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 his- 
tory. These defects are real and se- 
rious, but they are not vital; neither 
are they permanent. They belong 
only to the infancy of our art and 
will be outgrown in due time. My 
present plea is only for the necessity 
of establishing as speedily as possible 
a broad, thorough and rational criti- 
cism in the field of landscape archi- 
tecture. 
American Works and Workers. 
If we undertake now to study for 
a moment the men and the works in 
the field of American landscape archi- 
tecture, we may best adopt the usual 
historical method, beginning at the 
first and following through in order. 
It becomes convenient then to recog- 
nize four periods in the history of 
American landscape gardening, as fol- 
lows: 
1. The colonial period. 
2. The ante-bellum period, in 
which Andrew Jackson Downing was 
the conspicuous figure. 
3. The post-bellum period, in 
which Frederick Law Olmsted was 
the great leader. 
4. The present time, marked by a 
wide development and popularization 
of the art, by the appearance on the 
scene of many skilful workers, and by 
an unprecedented eclecticism in style. 
The Colonial Period. 
Gardens of considerable importance 
existed in America from the times 
of the earliest settlements It is re- 
markable how soon they began to be 
established. Before the war of the 
Revolution broke over the country 
a number of fine places had gained a 
wide reputation, a reputation which in 
fact comes down to our own day. 
The domestic architecture of co- 
lonial times is now universally ad- 
mired, and gardens we know have 
always been much influenced by do- 
mestic architecture. The arts of 
house furnishing and the handicrafts 
also flourished; and these too are by 
no means distantly related to gar- 
dening. 
On the other hand, one of the 
prime defects in colonial gardening 
lay in its subserviency to European 
traditions. European plants were 
grown by European methods, and the 
very design itself was Dutch or Eliz- 
abethan. 
The Ante-Bellum Period. 
Between the Revolution and the 
Civil War a few families found them- 
selves in comfortable circumstances 
and able to develop pleasant country 
estates. For them new ideas were 
waiting on every hand. The Revolu- 
tion had broken all the old traditions. 
But even in the Mother Country a 
new gospel of landscape gardening 
was being preached by Repton, Price, 
Milner, and Kemp, and these new 
notions found congenial soil in Amer- 
ica. And all these ideas were caught 
up, crystallized and adapted to the 
times in America by one man, An- 
drew Jackson Downing. 
Downing is by all odds the first of 
American landscape gardeners. His 
ability as a student of this art is 
nearly always judged by one piece of 
work, namely his book on Landscape 
