[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.