I presume that you will be arriving in Washington before long and may wish to hear from me. I have made no reportable progress, having been waiting for the topographical map, which (admirably drawn for my purpose) has just arrived. As, in any work to be done on the site that you have selected for the University, copies of this map will be of value to be used in the field, I have arranged to have it photo-lithographed. General Walker has communicated to me the substance of the report that you will have received from him. I am obliged to go next week to Niagara Falls on business of the State Reservation Commission which it is needful to get through before the ground near the Falls is much encumbered with ice. As soon as I return I shall set about the drawing that you have wished of me, intending to embody in it the principles of General Walker’s advice, as I shall find them adapted to the topography of the site. I cannot hope to complete this study before the latter part of December.

This is all I have to report at present but I should like to state my understanding of the object to be accomplished during the next month and something of the view with which I shall pursue it.

[351]

The immediate object is to present, in the form of a diagram, a coherent proposition, the critical discussion of which will aid you to formulate definite instructions as to the scope and as to many particulars, of a more mature study of the problem to follow. This problem I take to be the devising of a plan, that, spreading from a nucleus such as General Walker proposes, shall not only show how additions may from time to time be made to the primary building scheme that he defines, but how several series of buildings may be arranged, the buildings of each series radiating connectedly from the common centre of the primary buildings. (By several series of buildings, I mean, for example, the Academic series, the Collegiate Lodging series, the Work Shop series, the Outer Residence series and so on.)

It is not certain that such a problem can be solved except at a cost of convenience during the infant life of the University that will outweigh its advantages. But of this you will be able to much better judge with a drawing before you in the preparation of which the desired result has been tried for.

As I have been reflecting on what passed in our conferences at Palo Alto, I have been led more and more to feel that a permanently suitable plan [352]for a great University in California must be studied with constant watchfulness against certain mental tendencies from which neither you, nor General Walker, nor I, nor anyone likely to have influence in the matter, can reasonably be supposed to be free. The subtle persistency of the class of tendencies to which I allude is shown in the fact that the English in India, after an experience there of nearly two centuries, still order their lives in various particulars with absurd disregard of requirements of comfort and health, imposed by the climate, because they cannot dismiss from their minds standards of style, propriety and taste, which are the result of their fathers’ training under different climatic conditions.

Because of less marked but not less positive differences of climate, with buildings and grounds arranged on the principles that have had control at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, Amherst and Williams, nothing like that which impresses a visitor as appropriate and pleasant in the general arrangement and environment of these colleges, can be had in California. The same may be said with regard to other collections of buildings with semi-rural surroundings to which throngs of people are likely to resort. It would be impossible, for instance, in California, to maintain simply such degree of neatness as is seen in the Eastern or in English institutions of that description, at ten times their outlay for the purpose. Yet if to secure some tolerable degree of neatness all who have to do with them should be required to pass from one building to another only upon certain prepared passages, as we pass on ordered lines between the beds of an old-fashioned flower garden, the result in neatness would not pay for the trouble it would cost.

Neither turf nor any known substitute for covering unpaved surfaces between the buildings of a college can be used in California as turf is used in the East. Trees rooted in ground that is trampled as the ground is trampled about the college buildings of the East would be sickly, deformed and shortlived. Arrangements upon which, in the climate of the Atlantic States the beauty and comfort, not only of broad areas but even of streets and roads and yards depends, when reproduced as nearly as possible under the climate of California, will soon become unsuitable, dreary and forlorn. An example of what is to be apprehended in this respect already appears at Berkeley.

It has often been observed that the character of the buildings and grounds, the scenery and atmosphere, of Oxford has greatly aided English veneration for learning and is to all Oxford students a highly important element of a liberal education. It is surely a sad misfortune that a young man seeking a liberal education, should be led, at the most impressible period of his life, to pass four years or more in an establishment the outward aspect of which is expressive of an illiterate and undisciplined mind, contemptuous of authority and that is essentially uncouth, ill-dressed and ill-mannered.

One of the largest of the college buildings at Amherst, of masonry construction, not old nor in bad repair, but graceless and gracelessly placed, has been lately taken down because as an offense to good taste, it had come [353]through the advancing refinement of the times, to be no longer endurable. The same experience will, probably, by and by occur at Berkeley on a larger scale. I may predict this with more propriety because before the Amherst Trustees had thought of getting rid of the building to which I refer and fifteen years before they screwed their courage up to doing so, I had advised them that it could be only a question of time when that conclusion would be reached. What I have in mind at Berkeley is not alone that the buildings are in a “cheap and nasty” style but that the disposition of them and of all the grounds and offices about them betrays heedlessness of the requirements of convenience and comfort under the conditions of the situation and climate.

What I say, then, is that in the plan for a great University in California ideals must be given up that have been planted by all that we have found agreeable and have been led to regard as appropriate in the outward aspect of Eastern and English colleges. If we are to look for types of buildings and arrangements suitable to the climate of California it will rather be in those founded by the wiser men of Syria, Greece, Italy and Spain. You will remember in what a different way from the English methods, the spirit of which we have inherited, the open spaces about nearly all buildings that you have seen in the South of Europe to which throngs of people resort, have been treated. In the great “front yard” of St. Peter’s, for example, not a tree nor a bush nor a particle of turf has been made use of. This is not because Michael Angelo and his successors have been blind to the beauty of foliage and verdure in suitable places.

For reasons that I have thus, I fear not successfully, tried to indicate, as well as because opportunity must be left open for enlarging particular buildings in the manner advised by General Walker and for continuously extending special departments of buildings as suggested in the beginning of this letter, it appears to me that all spaces not thus specifically reserved for well-defined purposes of usefulness, should, as much as possible, be avoided and a degree of compactness of arrangement anticipated in public ways and places, especially near the centre of operations, that, having regard to Eastern and English standards would be regarded as illiberal and tasteless.

If the principle buildings of the University could have been placed near the edge of an elevated table-land, commanding a fine characteristic California distance, an advantage might, with proper study, have been gained that would at once be felt to more than compensate for any shortcomings from standards of taste of the sort that I have indicated. Considerations, the wisdom of which I do not question, having determined such a situation to be inexpedient, something is most desirable to be devised, appropriate to the circumstances, through which, when the University is born into the world, it may be saved from bearing on its face an expression of hard materialism and “Gradgrind” practicality. This under General Walker’s advice, cannot come from any stately beauty of the buildings, any picturesqueness in the manner of their disposition or any gardening or landscape appendages. It must be a matter [354]

[355]of Art. It must have scholarly dignity. It must not be ostentatiously costly, and it must be unobtrusively incidental to a means of a manifestly useful purpose. Some element of this description I feel has yet to be designed.

With kind regards and my best service to Mrs. Stanford,

I am, dear Sir,