House £f? Garden 
THE PROPER FUNCTIONS OF OPEN-AIR STATUARY. 1 
It is idle to talk about the necessity of art. 
A savage does not need it—and the civil¬ 
ized man is never without it. Art is the 
crystalization, in concrete form, of the dreams 
of beauty of the soul. And great works of 
art are the sublimest products of the activity 
of man. Therefore a nation’s rank in the 
pi ness and actively help the growth of crime. 
Beauty is the largest source of joy on earth, 
and therefore, also, the deepest fountain of 
health. Few men know the profound in¬ 
fluence the beautiful exerts over the soul 
and through the soul over the body. And 
there are certain kinds of ugliness so oppres- 
r 
A REMNANT OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION AT BARCELONA 
scale of real greatness is determined exactly 
by its art and its art alone. Of course, by 
art I mean all kinds of art from Poetry to 
Painting, from Architecture to Gardening, 
and from Sculpture to Music. 
The beautiful is the one thing of supreme 
importance in this world after you have 
enough clothes and bread and butter to keep 
you out of jail. Wise men know this. They 
also know that ugliness and ugly surround¬ 
ings paralyze the moral sense, create unhap- 
1 An address delivered by F. W. Ruckstuhl at the Public Library, 
Boston, April 14, 1901. 
sive that they eternally invite melancholy and 
disease. 
When the morning sun—that glorious 
decorator of the world—gilds a landscape 
after a storm, do you not feel an inexpressible 
joy in your soul?—and does not that joy set 
the heart beating faster and send the blood 
coursing to the ends of every vein in a fine 
health-giving flow? Whatever is a joy to 
the soul is medicine to the body, and the 
initiated know the therapeutic value of the 
beautiful. Let us hope that it will soon be 
understood by those who make our laws. 
481 
