House and Garden 
In whichever of these innumerable fields 
of human activity a man may work, or in 
whatever group of them, whether as a design¬ 
ing handicraftsman or as a designing director 
of the work of others, if in doing any piece 
of work he is controlled by the motive of 
producing a beautiful result and has the 
temperament and training that fit him to 
reach his aim, he is in so far an artist and 
his work is a work of fine art. 
That essential quality is unaffected by the 
label you may put upon him or the name 
that appears upon his sign. He may be a 
blacksmith or a carpenter by trade, or he 
may have received the degree of civil engi¬ 
neer and put out his shingle as such, but if 
he is an artist, he is an artist and his work 
will show it. And on the other hand no 
mere assumption of the title of sculptor or 
architect will make an artist out of a com¬ 
mercial artisan or engineer. 
Mr. Hastings, I am sure, would be the 
last man to allow mere names to obscure the 
kinship of all true art, or hide the essential 
distinction between the artist and the mere 
utilitarian. 
Now “to so study grades and landscape 
conditions as to make a drive from one 
country town to another economical of con¬ 
struction and of service when once built” is 
truly but a matter of engineering, just as it 
is but a matter of engineering to build a 
house so as to be serviceable and economical; 
but if the result is to “look well in the 
landscape” there is involved in each case 
some measure of fine art. The same is true 
of the gardens attached to a dwelling, of its 
approaches and surroundings; of the city 
street, the group of public buildings, the 
bridge, the river bank, the meadows and woods 
of a park, the clearings and thinnings and 
plantings of a forest; true of every work of 
man visible on the face of the earth. 
The vital distinction, mark it by what 
names you will, is not that which separates a 
house and its surroundings from those works 
of man with which Mr. Hastings’ practice is 
not ordinarily concerned; but that which 
separates the things that are done for bald 
utility from those that are also works of art; 
that which separates mere economic engineer¬ 
ing from what might be called the construc¬ 
tional and industrial fine arts. 
One branch of art interweaves inextricably 
with another, and 1 have little patience with 
those who would apply the trade union spirit 
to artistic effort, saying, for example, “Thus 
and such are the limits between architecture 
and sculpture, and you, John Doe, being an 
architect, shall not do the work of a sculptor 
without a union card.” But gladly as we 
hail the rare genius who shines strongly in 
many fields of artistic endeavor, we cannot 
but recognize in the face of human limitations 
that most artists reach real success only by a 
certain concentration which brings thorough 
mastery in their selected fields. 
Regardless of any mere question of nomen¬ 
clature, there is a great region of artistic 
endeavor in arranging the surface of the 
earth for human use and enjoyment, only a 
portion of which is covered by the practice 
of most of those who bear the name of archi¬ 
tect today. Indeed for successful practice in 
much of this field there is need for a knowl¬ 
edge of materials and methods and for a 
kind of artistic appreciation and training 
which are hardly to be secured without sacri¬ 
fice of much of the training which is regarded 
as needful to the successful practice of archi¬ 
tecture. The variety and extent of knowl¬ 
edge which a well equipped architect ought 
to have, seemed appalling even in the days 
when the subjects were enumerated by Vitru¬ 
vius. Every decade the difficulty increases 
with the increasing differentiation and com¬ 
plexity of modern buildings. Very large and 
varied architectural work can now be done 
onlv by a “well equipped firm,” a sort of 
composite architect, in which one man sup¬ 
plements the deficiencies of another and the 
designs are produced and elaborated and 
revised and finally put forth by a complex 
piece of human machinery which is very 
wonderful, but which runs with a waste of 
energy and at an expense that are seldom 
realized by those who have not watched the 
wheels go round and seen the figures of cost. 
There is a tendency for architects either to 
do their work in this cooperative fashion or 
to concentrate mainly on certain classes of 
problems toward which they are led by their 
several capacities. This tendency, unfor¬ 
tunate as it seems, is but the continued action 
of the same forces that have separated the 
practice of sculpture and painting from archi- 
