The Relation of Natural to Artificial Beauty in Landscape 
And which is most desolate,—the city street, 
devoid of one touch of natural growth, 
whether of leaf or flower, or the unbroken 
expanse of a trackless plain ? We have our 
moods when each of these may please us, and 
Nature has every advantage both in majesty 
and beauty, but it remains that man is a social 
being, and, as a rule, he loves to be reminded 
of the existence of his fellow man both past 
and present. He will never resent the evi¬ 
dences of that existence, if they occupy a 
reasonable and proper place. 
To come, then, to details. Where and 
how may we invade Nature ? We must build 
our houses, our cities, we must bridge our 
rivers and ravines, we must lay out our roads, 
even our railroads, and we must go even 
further. We must, if we are to satisfy our 
sense of eternal fitness, make our terraces and 
gardens where, while asserting our dominance, 
we can hand over a larger share to Nature’s 
decoration of trees and flowers. Nay, we can 
even take these trees and flowers and arrange 
them in formal lines, as we might build a 
wall, according to our own ideals of what man 
should do. Nature would never do so of her 
own accord. An avenue of trees planted at 
regular intervals, or a trimmed hedge, is as 
much and as confessedly artificial as the road 
which they skirt. The box-borders of a 
garden are, in a sense, as architectural as a 
stone balustrade. They are simply the works 
of man in a living medium instead of in a 
dead one. It is merely a question of how 
much we shall do of this sort of work, how 
much is appropriate in a given place to 
emphasize this mastery of man over Nature. 
Manifestly, it must depend upon the domi¬ 
nance with which we wish to assert, the extent 
to which we wish to remind ourselves of, the 
human element. A planted avenue has no 
place in the midst of an uninhabitable plain. 
It belongs as part of a house, some human 
arrangement made for man’s use and delight. 
AT STOURTON 
ENGLAND 
602 
