[January 22, 1874]

These two books come together to the reviewer’s table. The one from the East is a thick volume, designed to cultivate a love of nature, and to recommend simplicity of life. It is much better adapted to the first of these purposes than to the second, its method being to point out, as it does carefully and well, though sometimes in too much the manner of a catalogue, the leading points of beauty and interest in the natural objects of the old, neglected roads and paths and farmsteads of the less cultivated parts of Eastern Massachusetts, and to set in contemptuous contrast with these that which it is the chief purpose of the more modest little volume which meets it from the West to commend.

Mr. Flagg supposes that landscape gardeners and architects, in distinction from ordinary cultivators and builders, have it for their business to superadd artificial decoration to the beauties of nature. He regards them not only as the declared enemies of all natural simplicity, grace, and picturesqueness, but as the accepted ministers of the purse-proud, ostentatious, and vulgarly-conceited among men. His antipathy to them extends even to “popular writers on nature’s aspects” —among whom he can never have thought of ranking himself — and those on landscape painting, who, “with all their professed admiration of nature, always place her in subordination to art.” Mr. Cleveland, writing as a landscape architect, bases his work on the proposition that what is essentially important in his art lies back and absolutely independent “of mere decorations.” The grouping of trees and shrubs, and the arrangement of fountains, flower-beds, rustic seats, and other such garden furniture, is but an incidental duty of his business, which is to adapt ground to the varied requirements of civilized society with artistic refinement of completeness. The gratification and cultivation of a love of nature he regards as but one among many such requirements.

The instructions of one author are directly contradicted by the other. Mr. Flagg says “the road that winds around the hill or the meadow is the one you must follow.” “The old road is bordered with wild shrubbery, groups of trees of bold and irregular growth — there is no sameness.” The new road, the landscape architect’s road, is formal, unnatural, uninteresting, dreary. Mr. Cleveland says that in the old and common way of laying out roads “all the naturally beautiful or picturesque features have been destroyed or rendered [35] hideous”; that the landscape architect asks, how can the road “be best adapted to the natural shape of the ground?” “How can any naturally attractive features, such as a river, a lake, or a mountain, near or distant, be made to minister to the beautiful or picturesque character of the place [neighborhood] by adapting the arrangement to the development of their most attractive aspects?”

Mr. Flagg loves the simplicity of the old, brown, slightly dilapidated house under the elms, its gambrelled roof studded with mosses, the green-sward of its door-yard close cropped by the cows; he loves to follow the paths by which the cows stray from it through the adjoining huckleberry lots; he loves to pick his way from tussock to tussock along the edge of the lily ponds, and to point out the thousand charms offered on every side to the enjoyment of a lover of nature. It is in such neighborhoods, such houses, and such simplicity, might Mr. Cleveland say, that I have found women living more confined, dull, and dreary lives than in any barbarous country; caring less for simple, natural pleasures than any other women in the world; that I have found the chief objects of their admiration and ambition the furthest removed from nature and nature’s grace; it has been in such homes that insanity, consumption, typhoid fever, and diphtheria have found more victims than in those even of the densest and dirtiest of cities.

Mr. Cleveland thinks that a civilized home is distinguished from a barbarous one by the convenience and economy with which those who live in it can command the conditions of health, and the gratification of healthful desires and tastes, and that, while there are beauties to be found by the side of a cow-path and on the boggy shores of a pond, it is also possible to have them where they can be enjoyed with more convenience, under conditions more favorable to health and more economical of civilized raiment. He assumes that to associate natural and artificial attractions successfully in a home, much more where many homes are found in a limited neighborhood, as in villages and towns, and to secure with them other conditions of health and happy life, requires much and varied study, a deep sympathy with and reverence for nature, a designing fancy, and a shrewd power in adapting means to ends. This he would say is what is required in a landscape architect. Unquestionably he is right. Mr. Flagg has been misled by quacks. The home of ignorance, conceit, and vulgarity is what he finds it not through excess, but through lack, of art.

The latter half of Mr. Cleveland’s book is an urgent plea for forest planting, especially on the Great Plain and its borders, with a review of what little has been done, and some practical advice as to what should be undertaken. The publication is valuable, timely, and altogether of good omen for the West.

Before anything more is done about the improvements of the public grounds in Washington concerning which you have asked my opinion, the question, what shall be the motive of their improvement, should be conclusively settled.

For convenience sake I will consider this question first with reference to the whole body of open ground from the Capitol to Lafayette Square, and afterwards, more especially to that immediately about the Capitol.

Within or on the borders of the larger ground stand the Capitol, the Executive Mansion and the several buildings occupied by the State, Judiciary, Treasury, and War and Navy Departments, the Agricultural Bureau and the Smithsonian Institution. To these the National Library and other buildings are expected to be added.

The larger part of the exterior of the existing buildings is of marble and granite elaborately wrought. Beyond the cost of all necessary accommodations for the business to be done in them, they represent an investment by the Nation of Millions of dollars, made solely with a view of producing certain impressions upon the mind of observers. Had this outlay been wisely and comprehensively directed to the purpose in view, no nation in the world would now possess as noble and fitting a capital as the United States. As it is, the effect produced is admitted to be a broken, confused and unsatisfactory one and is unhappily often alluded to as a standing reproach against the system of government which has been able to secure no better adaptation of means to such an end.

That the result of so much architectural effort is so comparitively insignificant is largely due to the circumstance that the several government buildings are seldom seen under conditions favorable to the impression designed to be established; that this impression, so far as it might otherwise be [37] produced, is not sustained or supported by objects adjoining them and that long rows of other buildings have been intruded between the more important of them, the character of which is adapted only to bewilder and dissipate the desired effect. In short the capital of the Union manifests nothing so much as disunity. This is not because of the distance between the government buildings simply: were this reduced one half, the intervening spaces remaining occupied as at present, the lack of any coordinating purpose would be felt none the less. What is wanting is a federal bond. Had the buildings been ranged about a single field of landscape all the other objects within which were not only objects of beauty but were consistent and harmonious one with another, a much more sustained and consequently more impressive effect would have been produced. Great breadth in this field of landscape and largeness of scale in all its features {provided it were consistently sustained} would not be felt in the least as a disadvantage.

It follows that if a space could now be introduced into the plan of the city by which the same result even in a modified degree could be gained, the capital would be more transformed and elevated in the scale of art than by any and all other means for the purpose that can be proposed.

It is my judgement that the canal district, now mainly a dreary waste, with the adjoining public grounds, presents an opportunity for accomplishing this object, and this is my answer to the question, what should be the motive of any scheme for its improvement.

It would be requisite to the end in view that the motive should be absolutely controlling in all parts of the ground and the first obstacle to success would exist in the fact that certain portions of it have already been worked and are held and managed under divers committees and other authorities each with a different purpose.

General Babcock showed me plans which had been prepared for other portions, the plan of each being substantially in dependant of that for every other, and he informed me that there was a project for improving yet other parts in the same way and for finally connecting each part with those adjoining it so that it would form a link in a chain of such grounds, extending from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion.

Under existing laws a project of this kind may be the best that can be adopted but with reference to the purpose of forming a ground which shall bring the various government buildings into a relation of landscape unity it can lead only to its antithesis.

Each building and other object of interest instead of appearing as one in the National assemblage will have its own little separate domain and seem more distinctly set apart from all the others even, than at present. And no matter how pretty each of these might be in itself by no aggregation of such prettiness can any great beauty or any fine impression of unity throughout all be produced.

I apprehend that the first step necessary to be taken toward a comprehensive [38] improvement would be the most difficult one, that is, to place the control of all these grounds under one body so constituted that it would be likely to pursue a sustained policy year after year and not be led off by regard for special and temporary interests. The cost of carrying out such a plan as I suggest would probably be less — acre per acre — than of pursuing the project now entertained.

Before proceeding to the second question of the motive which should govern a plan for the improvement of the ground immediately about the Capitol, I will observe that too much importance seems to be generally given to the circumstance that the first Capitol building was designed on the supposition that the city of Washington would be built on the East side of it and that it is therefore considered to be fronted to the East. A building may have two fronts and most noble buildings in fact are designed with two, of which not unfrequently that of the carriage or most used entrance is the less important architecturally and in the landscape. Such is the case with the palace of the Tuileries, of the Luxembourg and of Versailles, for example, as it is of the noblest halls of England. It is much better for most purposes to which a large building is to be put that one side of it should be left entierly free from the disturbance of carriages and it is on that front that any beauty of architecture possessed by the building will commonly be seen to the highest advantage and on which any landscape beauty associated with it may be best enjoyed from within.

If the suggestion of a federal ground on the west should be carried out I should think the circumstance that the carriage front of the Capitol was on the East and that the question of the treatment of the ground on the West need not be complicated by the necessity of a grand approach road a fortunate one. I do not know the full history of the arrangement by which the West front surmounts an elevation looking out upon a space of ground gradually and symmetrically widening as the distance from it increases, extending to a broad river a mile away beyond which and toward the setting sun verdant heights terminate a prospect the natural elements of which are all broad, simple and tranquilizing, but if the most firmly established principles and the most satisfactory precedents in Landscape Architecture had been consulted the arrangement would not have been different. The cause of regret lies solely in the poor use that has been made of the opportunity thus originally secured.

The capitol building is a very large one and its design grand and imposing. The ground about it should be so managed as to sustain and minister to this design as much as possible. To this end its general features should be large in scale, simple in outline and in all respects as quietly dignified in character as the requirements of convenience will allow. Trees should be so placed that nature will gradually bring them into satisfactory landscape relation with the building.

Under present conditions advantages are nowhere found for fully enjoying [39]

View Of U.S. Capitol With Earth Terraces, C. 1880

Looking from the West, owing to the disposition of the trees, there is no position from which a general view of it can be taken; none from which its real proportions are not apparently distorted. It is best seen as a whole. from points on the Northwest or the Southwest but from these it appears crowding over the edge of the hill and to have no proper standing room.

The face of the hillside is broken by two formal terraces which are relatively thin and weak, by no means sustaining in forms and proportions the grandeur of the superimposed mass.

These disadvantages of the Capitol are mainly due to the single fact that the base lines of the wings were not adapted to the ground they stand upon but were laid down with relation to those of the original much smaller central structure, and that the trees now growing about it were planted with no thought of the present building but only with regard to the old one. A considerable number of those on the East have also been introduced subsequently to the original planting and apparently without reference to the purposes then had in view. It is chiefly by these trees that the design of the architect is on that side obscured. On the West a few of the permanent trees were probably planted with consideration only for the effect they would have while young and small-others unquestionably with the expectation that they would be thinned out. [40] Had this been done at the proper time the Capitol would be seen to much greater advantage than it now is and the general effect of the trees would be much more umbrageous as well as more harmonious with its architecture.

The proposed lowering of the surface to meet the new grade of the street which bounds the Capitol grounds on the East offers an opportunity for remedying the principal defects to which I have referred on that side. It would not be a necessity of this lowering of the surface that the trees upon it should be destroyed but not more than half can, I think, be advantageously retained where they are. It is quite practicable by removing a part and introducing others to rehabilitate the ground in a short time with a larger body of foliage than is provided by the present trees and to have them grouped in much better relation with the enlarged building.

The defect of the West front is due, as I have said, to the fact that the new parts of the building are further advanced on the face of the hill side than they probably would have been had it been possible to design them with reference to it, and that the terraces by which this misfortune is designed to be relieved, being continuations of lines originally laid out with regard to a much smaller building, are inadequate to the purpose.

As the building cannot be moved back, the only remedy possible is to be found in bringing the face of the hill simply and boldly forward. This is especially needed on the flanks where the terraces are now run out with a constantly diminishing face. The material for this purpose could now be supplied at a moderate cost, by the proposed reduction of the surface on the East side but the work should not be undertaken until after the intended new lines on the West side have been most carefully studied in relation to the Architecture.