I have considered that you probably determined your course after consultation with Vaux, and have therefore felt freer than I otherwise should to follow you in declining to serve on the Committee, but I came to the conclusion to do so with some reluctance and hesitation, because of the fear that the result would be a Committee essentially packed against natural landscape and against Vaux, and having the doubt whether a minority of such a Committee sustaining Vaux might not have weight in forming public opinion.

It makes me grind my teeth to see how Vaux is treated. But, the harder it is, the more expedient it is, to keep one’s temper in anything that is to come before the public.

White and those who follow him are sincere and unquestioningly strong in their convictions. They are even fanatical. Vaux and I have had to contend with men of like convictions before. In the original Park Board Commissioner Dillon represented them. It might be worthwhile to rake up his demonstration against our plan, and his demand for a broad avenue entering the park at the middle of the south end and going straight to the reservoir regardless of topographical obstacles. His plan for the purpose was sent to the newspapers, and the Tribune editorially favored it. Thereupon I invited Raymond of the Times and Dana to breakfast with me. I seated them at table in a tent set on a grand rock in the Ramble, right on the line of the proposed avenue. When they were smoking I asked them to look southward and consider what destruction even of existing natural beauty; what excessive belittling of the already too petty scenery, the proposition meant. They at once both confessed that they had not realized its import, and if they did not both come out against it publicly, they at least ceased to favor it. It was a case [906]of natural eloquence versus grandiloquence. About 1868, after the lower park had been fully blocked out and planted, Dillon again moved in the Board of the Park Commission for the construction of a broad Central Avenue between 59th Street and the Reservoir. His resolution was referred to me and I wrote a report on the subject. His proposition had in it the making of all the rest of the park a decorative attachment to a grand central place of assembly; a Champs Elysees. That would have made it an affair of the south of Europe where there can be no turf, and where natural landscape is rightly made subordinate to the stateliness of an effect essentially architectural; an intensification and aggrandizement of urban art rather than a means of recreation from the town; any broad rural effect being considered out of place and anacronistic.

The proposition was referred to me and again I reported against it and it was rejected, Dillon himself acknowledging that after the progress that had been made in working out a radically different motive, it would, directly and indirectly, cost too much, but not abandoning his view, which was, essentially, that an Alameda or a Champs Elysees was a more desirable means of recreation for the people of a city than a place of rural character.

Mind you, I am not in hot contention with this view. What I am fighting is a weak, fragmentary and vaccilating compromise between two leading general motives. Such artificial elements as are necessary to the convenience of public use in a park I believe in making, and sometimes I think it best to display and aggrandize the display of them. But I would make them distinctly as means for the better enjoyment of natural scenery where I well could.

Now I want you to take my assurance that there is a strenuous fight coming on between those of our side and those who are disposed to revise every body of public land that has been laid out regardfully of natural beauty with the object of transforming it as far as possible into a field of architectural beauty. There is to be a strong and able, organized, systematic and methodic renaissantic movement in this direction. It is already afoot; not perhaps consciously to all those engaged in it, but to certain of the leaders, I believe, it is consciously so, and that it is to be advanced with deliberate campaigning, plotting, strategy and tactics. We are and have been this past year, just as distinctly engaged with it in Brooklyn Park, for example, as if war had been formally declared; nay, as if we were engaged in an actual assault upon an entrenched position which Stanford White had been, has been, and is now, month after month, building in the single Brooklyn Commissioner’s mind. That is to say Stanford White has been and is trying to establish the rule of motives that are at war with those that ruled in the original laying out of Brooklyn Park. He distinctly hates these older motives. He would at least, now that so much has been established in the spirit of the original design, get the Commissioner to make the Park an incongruous hybrid between that which was aimed at in this design and that which would be aimed at in such a design as a French architect would have made early in the century, introducing sentimental passages of “Nature,” like that attempted at Petit Trianon, but making them secondary, and as interludes of [907]efforts approaching the ruling Versailles character. Of course this is theory and conjecture. It is not an assertion. It is the only way that I have been able to imagine by which his course can be explained. And in certain lines he is gifted. The talent, even the literary talent, which he and those with him, can apply to their purpose, is not to wisely be underrated.

I want to write a great deal more; feeling that in what I have written no justice has been done the subject or to my feelings, but I am pressed with other duties. You can show this to Prof. Sargent if you think best. It is time that we, who are essentially of one faith in this matter, however we may differ among ourselves, should be closing our ranks and be moving more warily than we have been. We have an organized enemy before us, strong in its convictions, able, proud even to superciliousness, confident and enthusiastic. They have struck down Vaux and are doing their best to kill him in the name of the Lord and of France. They are strong; they are sincere; they are confident; they are mostly cultivated gentlemen to be dealt with courteously, but they are doctrinaires and fanatics and essentially cockneys, with no more knowledge of nor interest in real rurality than most men of Parisian training and associations.

Reading over what Rick has type-written for me, I am dissatisfied with it, but if you will translate the metaphoric into plain language you will have what I have wanted to say in the main. You know that these men of the enemy are my friends; that here and at other points (at Chicago, for example) I have managed to work in hearty, active, friendly cooperation with them. A sufficient explanation of the apparent anomaly is that there is a place for everything. At Chicago we sought for a site, first, that would be favorable to formality and architectural gardening. There was none available. Taking the site that in all other respects was most suitable we tried to reconcile a picturesque motive of natural scenery with the formal stateliness that our architectural associates were determined to have in the buildings, and we succeeded to their satisfaction. The site was not ill-adapted to the purpose. Here, again, at Biltmore we have managed to reconcile the requirements of Hunt in his renaissance buildings with a generally picturesque natural character in the approaches, and in the main landscape features; introducing more or less formal spurs and outworks of architectural motive for that purpose. And Hunt has accepted our way of doing it, and even, at my request, has aided in marrying the two motives, extending, modifying and altering architectural outworks at my suggestion. Getting well away from the transcendent architectural features there is not in the whole 9000 acres a suggestion of any other than natural landscape motives. There has not been the slightest break of harmony between us. He has accepted every single suggestion that I have made and I have accepted every single suggestion that he has made and I do not think that in the end there will be a note of discord in the combined work. (I am not quite certain. There are one or two points about which I am nervous and this is because I am not quite at home when required to merge stately architectural work into natural or naturalistic landscape work. I am taking heavier risks in this respect here [908]than I did at Chicago. But as yet nobody seems aware of it but myself.) I write as if I were doing it but not a step has been taken here, nor was there one at Chicago which was settled without thorough discussion and cordial agreement with my partners before engaging with Hunt.

As soon as you can you must be prepared to come here and go over it with me and give us the benefit of your criticism. When do you look for a vacation next? There are points—the flower garden, for instance—where we distrust ourselves. And there is one point, at least, where I hardly dare undertake what I am nevertheless contemplating. I shall probably come here next in May or June.

Very Truly Yours,