MOUNT ROYAL

I.

To the Owners of Mount Royal:

In 1874 you had bought this property and were wishing to begin its improvement. To do so prudently, you needed a fixed design and policy, and to forward this, I had the honor to be engaged to aid you, with the special duty of drafting a plan for laying out the ground.

It was presumed that my draft would be matured, discussed, and, if necessary, revised in time to serve as the basis of operations to be prosecuted the following summer; and I have no reason to doubt that I could easily have supplied a drawing in a few months, which would have been accepted as the fulfillment of my duty.

The matter, however, gave me a great deal of labor, and was a source of constant and increasing anxiety for nearly three years, and when, at last, under repeated urgings, I reluctantly reported the result, it was with the conviction that my work had, with reference to its principal object, been vainly expended.

Having a strong, abiding sense of its importance, I have not been able to acquit myself of accountability to you and your heirs, and have deferred a formal ending of my engagement, pending conditions less unfavorable [352] than those of the late extreme hard times, to solicit a consideration from you for views which it will be my aim in this writing to commend.

I cannot but think that a certain dead weight of passive public opinion, which, rather than an actively intelligent resistance, I have seen to stand in their way, is partly to be attributed to an overlooking of certain aspects of the business which I have had a special duty to keep before me.

For example, I just now referred to your heirs, which to some may have seemed superfluous; but with a little reflection it will be apparent that the property could not have been justly purchased with regard only for the profit to be got from it by a few thousands of the generation ordering it; and that I was bound, in suggesting a plan, to have in view the interests of those to inherit it as well as yours; and to bear in mind that, before the first planting of the plantations which I was to outline should reach their full growth, these inheritors would begin to be counted not by the thousand but by the million; and also to remember that, if civilization is not to move backward, they are to be much more alive than we are to certain qualities of value in the property which are to be saved or lost to them, as shall presently be determined.

And lest there should be the slightest doubt in any of your minds of the pertinence of my taking this way to draw your attention to this and some other considerations, I will submit a single illustration of many which might be offered of the teachings of history upon the point.

About the time that certain Frenchmen were laying out the first street of Montreal, a court comrade whom they had left behind, a distinguished man of my profession, André Le Notre by name, was laying out roads and walks, defining plantations, selecting trees, fixing the form and position of seats, and otherwise determining the character and quality of a park at Dijon, the capital of ancient Burgundy, and of the present Côte d’Or.

Since I was last in Montreal I have made a pilgrimage to this ground (long ago acquired by the town), and found the superintendent of it still scrupulously following the plans prepared more than two hundred years ago by Le Notre, and the motives by which he was led, and the pictures which he had conceived, much better realized than they could have been while he was yet living. The roads, the walks, the verdant carpets, the leafy vistas — in none of these had the original work lost, or even ceased to gain, value; and I saw children of the seventh generation in direct descent from those whom Le Notre looked upon, carried by their mothers, and led by their teachers, as their kindred now are, to your mountain, to take their share of the value which had so long ago been prepared for them. It is not at all improbable that yet for hundreds of years to come every child of Dijon shall enjoy the same nurture.

To our nineteenth-century minds the design of the park might, for this end, have been better, but it was then the best attainable, and the good people of Dijon have shown the highest common-sense in resisting all passing [353] fashions, fancies, and whims by which it might have been sophisticated; in religiously preserving its originating spirit and character; and in gaining for themselves, year by year, more and more of the incalculable advantage of learning, by communion with it, veneration for the past and duty to the future.

I have no reason to suppose that anyone in Montreal has been dissatisfied with my work. No one has spoken of it, as far as I know, but with praise. To understand why it seemed to me to have been futile, it must first by considered that the preparation of a plan means the invention of a process by which certain proposed ends may be brought about upon certain conditions. A plan serviceable for one scheme of ends will be worthless for another. A plan soundly based on one set of conditions will be good for nothing when these conditions are changed.

The reason for the prolonged labor, and the poor results of it, which were at the outset given to the study of a plan assigned, in your behalf, to me, was that, as to one point or another essential to the firm framing of a plan adapted to a fixed policy in this business, your appointed special agents, the commissioners, could never be sure that their, or any attainable, conclusion was at all to be depended on; never sure of what might be determined over their heads; never of what, of their own judgment, upon the absolutely essential foundation-stones of a soundly-built plan, they might not feel it due, any coming day, to yield to what should appear to them to be a determined drift of public opinion.

More than once I had a design worked out upon grounds which I had been instructed to regard as fixed, or authorized to assume, at the least, as practicable, and upon which I had been urged to proceed; in which I had met, with a great deal of study, according to my ability, all the difficulties which I could foresee; each element devised, as far as controllable, to augment the value of all others and to be augmented in value by all devised of others; only to find that it must be thrown up and the work begun anew at the bottom, because of the ripening of some determination or the unsettlement of something previously regarded as determined.

Not one of the changes to which I refer appeared to be the result of a more advanced deliberation upon the object which had led to the purchase of the property, or to have been made with a full realization of what was determined by it with respect to that object.

Nor, in the discussion of them, did I hear that what I believe and propose to argue should be the ruling motive of the undertaking had even been given the slightest weight. In the questions put to me it was not referred to; and the reason I suppose to be, not that those favoring the propositions in [354] question really thought it of no consequence, but that they were not in the habit of looking at it in a practical way — of considering it from the point of view of business.

Even when, after three years, I had submitted my final draft and it had been favorably received by the commissioners, I was told (as if it were a matter of little consequence and to have been more or less expected) that certain of the premises on which it had been based, and which had been as distinctly recognized in my instructions as any, would probably be withdrawn by the City Council, and others were referred as not unlikely to be. It did not appear to be supposed that the plan would be materially less adapted to its purpose in consequence, and yet I doubt if I had not had the particular premises in question in view, whether a line or a dot of my draft would have been in the same place or been made without a variation of motive.

Besides what occurred in the more conclusive official form, I was often asked to consider propositions urged upon the commissioners, which were based on ideas of the conditions of value in the property so different from those on which I was, with their concurrence, proceeding, and yet so urged, so received and labored with, as to show that no real anchorage in the matter was felt to be practicable.

In short, it was impossible to avoid a conviction that, whatever formality of adopting a plan might be ultimately come to, there could be no security against such subsequent interpolations and excisions as would make the result a burlesque of its leading motives.

Contending with easy, apparent success with the side-winds of doctrine (as to conditions of value of the property) to which I have referred, as far as the commissioners of the moment were concerned, the wish was often expressed that I would give you, directly, in the form of public discourse, the view which my study of the subject had led me to adopt, and upon which the plan was expected to be based, — upon which, indeed, important operations upon the ground had somewhat prematurely been begun, quite unjustifiably if that view was not to be sustained and borne out by those to direct the matter afterward.

And as, at last, it became more distinctly impressed upon me that the work I was doing, or the worthy work of any man at any time, was liable to be wasted or worse, because of the supposed impracticability of any fixed policy based on a deliberate study of principles, and as I saw no other way of putting myself face to face with this danger, I agreed that I would read before a public meeting to be called by the commissioners, two papers, one discussing general principles of design for works of the kind in hand, and showing the puerile, extravagant, and wasteful character of much that had been proposed in contravention of these principles; the other, their application to the particular conditions of the site to be dealt with, and the population to be served.

I consented, however, only upon the promise of the commissioners that certain gentlemen should be specially invited by them to hear me, whose [355] official positions and whose duty of influence on public opinion made it particularly to be wished that they should find some holding-ground in the matter; and as it had appeared to me that its educational, sanitary, and moral aspects particularly needed support against motives of comparatively trifling importance, I asked also that personal invitations should be given to the teachers, physicians, and clergymen of the city.

I tell the result because of its bearing upon a point of direct pecuniary interest to you, which I shall more distinctly present later.

The result was that half an hour after the time appointed, of a fine autumnal afternoon, in a hall for a thousand, in the heart of the city, time and place being selected by your commissioners with a view to the convenience of those invited, less than thirty persons (ladies, gentlemen, and children) had come together. There was not, I believe, among them one teacher, one physician, or one clergyman; not one member of the City Council (the commissioners excepted) or of the executive departments of the city government. Nor was there one, as far as I have reason to suppose, of all those gentlemen as to whose propositions, demands, and questions my judgment had during the three previous years been asked, and whose power to embarrass the undertaking I had been led to regard with concern.

At the end my little audience kindly thanked me and asked for the publication of the papers read.

This request, with some suggestions as to what might be omitted, the commissioners seconded. But it afterward became evident that they were not fully satisfied of its expediency, or that they questioned if it would be pleasing to the City Council. One of the commissioners acknowledged that he had not himself been able to follow my argument at all points, and that he doubted the results to the undertaking of its publication. I understood his doubt upon finding that another listener had been so well pleased with my efforts to set forth kindly and candidly certain common and conventional ideas of a park that he had failed to catch the argument by which I tried to show that they were not, as a matter of course, to be in all cases adopted; and would, in fact, be applied to the mountain most wastefully and extravagantly. I was even reported in a newspaper as urging a proposition which I had stated only that its unsuitability to the circumstances should be evident.

It must not be forgotten that the original suggestion that I should address you directly came from the commissioners, that the meeting was called by them, and invitations to it given by them. As I had been constantly assured of a great public interest in the work, not, it was to be presumed, the interest of indolent unqualified approval, but a critical interest, inciting to thorough study and cautious advance, review, and revision, the result was thought to require some explanation, and I was advised that it was not to be attributed, at least not wholly to be attributed, to the indifference of those invited, but to some extent, in some cases, to a disposition to repress any such excess of eagerness in the matter as might lead to hasty and excessive outlays [356] during a period of extreme business gloom. Expressions were quoted which seemed to imply that I had been regarded in the light of a paid counsel of a rash and extravagant policy, and that it was presumed that all I should have to say would be with the purpose of keeping alive what would now be termed a park “boom,” or perhaps of aiding men who had been speculating in the effects upon the value of neighboring real estate of the city’s expenditures upon the mountain to make better terms with their creditors; a purpose to be discountenanced by good citizens.

While these were to be considered as hasty expressions of the few thoughtless and uninformed individuals making them, they came into association in my mind with others which had proceeded from warm friends of the enterprise, much earlier in its history.

“We, who are to pay the bills, have an interest in economy, you know.” Something of that kind had been said to me often, in a kindly, advisory, and even confiding way. (Yet one of those saying it, happening to be a lawyer, I should not like to think that a like implication advanced to him by a client would have been pleasing.)

Now, I profess, in what I am about to write, to wish to commend a policy of sound economy to you, and if there is the slightest disposition to suppose that as a stranger, from whose pockets nothing you expend on the property is to come, or from any supposed personal interests in the early accomplishment of sensational results, or lack of interest in what may follow, I am disqualified for advising you on questions of economy, or am insincere in my profession, I should like, not self-defensively, but in your defence against inconsiderateness, to tell you how the case really stands.

The management of properties of the class of that under consideration, it must be premised, is a branch of business unlike any in which you have hitherto been locally interested. Judicious courses in it are less matters of intuition than in building ships, locomotives, or sewers. A servile adoption in it, under any special circumstances, of methods in use elsewhere is seldom practicable; never profitable. And yet it is absurd to suppose that you can prudently strike out recklessly of the experience of others.

I have been thirty years engaged in the study of the experience of others; have four times visited, for the purpose, the principal examples of such properties in Europe; and have practically followed, with official opportunities for doing so, the management of nine in America, besides numerous smaller ones, some being for towns of much less wealth than Montreal.

I did not seek the engagement which your commissioners, after I had declined to come to Montreal for the purpose, came to New-York to make with me. I was not eager to take it, partly, I admit, because of diffidence in my ability to do justice to so unusual a problem without living for years upon the ground, and personally watching the development of its singular opportunities.

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I was finally induced to accept it by information and assurances which, given in good faith, were misleading.

But when I accepted it I did so with a sense of definite business responsibility, from which it resulted that if there has been one man among you who has at any time had a wish to secure a management for the property on a lower scale of outlay (for the long run), or in any way with a more economical motive, or one who has appreciated the continuous weight of taxation, and the difficulty of maintaining it, which any respectable management of the property would involve, more fully than I, or who has more habitually, studiously, and methodically sought to wisely limit its weight and secure adequate results from what would be continuously practicable, I have never been offered the benefit of his counsel, in the smallest particular, of a plan for the purpose, while I have been wearied with promptings, from comparatively short-sighted, time-serving, and improvident points of view.

Nor, if I can be regarded as your professional adviser and an honorable man, will it be thought in the least creditable to me, or reproachful to you or any among you, that this should be so.

Still, plainly, for sound counsel’s sake, the fact needs to be better understood. Therefore, let me mention further that the first advice I gave in the matter was that parts of the land pointed out to me, in my preliminary visit to the property, as that to which it was desired that I should fit a plan, were of comparatively small value for the objects in view, and that large rebates of the purchase-money might be legally, honestly, and thriftily secured, and considerable subsequent expenditure avoided, by so managing the plan as to leave them out.

Again, at the moment I first put foot on the ground, I pointed out the difficulty, danger, and extravagance which would result if certain suggested “improvements,” common in parks elsewhere, but by no means essential to the more important purpose of them, should be attempted on the mountain; and the better to guard against the tendency to blindly follow expensive and inappropriate precedents in this respect I then urged, as I often did afterward, that the term park, as applied to the mountain, should be discarded, and its older, more dignified, and more wholesomely suggestive appellation preserved and emphasized.

I did not wait for the hard times to urge that all manner of superfluities, and all propositions based on a consideration of particular interests of portions of the community independently of all, should be left out of view. At no time did I advise the outlay of a dollar for a merely ornamental object; at no time any building which will not be indispensable for the convenient, orderly, and decent public use of the property or for keeping its operating expenses on an economical footing.

Finally, it is of record that much of the work done on the mountain during the period of my engagement would have been done more deliberately, [358] savingly, and at a slower rate of expenditure had not my advice been overruled by what was supposed to be popular pressure upon the Council and the commissioners. To make this the clearer to you, I refer below to letters not intended by me for publication, but given to the newspapers by the commissioners. Why given, if they were not at the time reluctantly yielding to the unstudied judgment of uninformed men against their own tendencies of conviction, I know not.

I do not mean to object to such a use of my letters. My opinions on the subject were at all times your property. I remind you of the fact only because it fixes the position in which I stood when not a man of you, as far as I had reason to suppose, stood with me, and thus makes manifestly absurd the apprehensions of any who may be disposed to regard my present essay as that of a Greek bringing gifts.

On the grounds thus sufficiently set forth, I ask a hearing for the counsel I am now to offer you, and I again remind you that it may have something of that claim upon your patience which any poor words may have, said in behalf of the absent, — in this case the children and the children’s children of the present Montreal, over-busy with many things besides the shaping of a permanent policy of park-management.

Note. — June 10, 1876, a letter of mine to the commissioners was published (see Star of that date) protesting that the road on the mountain side had been so urged ahead as to waste much material and labor; that any beauty to be enjoyed in passing over it would exist in spite, not at all in consequence, of what had been done; that a valuable opportunity had been lost forever, and that such ill-considered work could never have been allowed under the supervision of a man “influenced in the least degree by a sense of professional responsibility.” The copy of this letter in my hands is introduced by an editorial note that it “demands the earnest consideration of the taxpayers.” It concludes with specific recommendations which were adopted at the time by the commissioners, but were overruled within a year by the Council.

October 5, 1876, two letters were published from me (see Gazette); in the first “I strongly recommend a delay” in certain proposed operations, and advise instead “some slight and inexpensive improvements.” The letter concludes: “I have not a doubt that any other course will require a large expenditure for a result less satisfactory.” The second is a protest against intended operations, and contains the following warning: “The necessity of making the project temporarily popular is constantly urging a policy upon your Commission, which, if its results could be fully recognized, would be anything but popular. It is most unfortunate that any attempt should be made to improve such a noble property at all, while so many elements of uncertainty exist as to conditions by which its value must be affected, and with a [359] policy toward it, on the part of the Council, so unfixed and uncertain from year to year.”

An illustration may be asked for of the manner in which disconcerting propositions were urged. I will tell of one, as my memory serves about it after six or seven years. A bridle-road was called for on a certain course. The only ground on which an outlay of public money for a bridle-road upon a park can be justified is that an important part of the population will want, and cannot otherwise obtain, a place in which horses may be ridden rapidly without excessive jar, and that it can be given them at reasonable cost, and without putting other people to loss or danger. The course, in this case, was through a very attractive part of the property, and on a line constantly crossed by those using it as a rambling and picnic ground, and it is much resorted to by children. It is rocky and wooded; and, as a horse, coming rapidly upon the soft surface of a properly-made riding-way, makes little noise, if the project had been carried out, lamentable accidents could have been avoided only by so restricting speed on the road as to make it useless for its purpose, or by depriving the public in general of the more natural, appropriate, and valuable use of an important part of the property. But, in any case, the necessary grade would have been so steep that no horseman would have wished to put his horse to speed upon it. Moreover, as the intention was to take out the natural, firm earth and rock, and substitute loose gravel to a certain depth in order to get a yielding surface, every great storm sweeping down the mountain side would have made the road a ditch or gully. To guard, as far as practicable, against this, to make necessary repairs and keep the road in tolerable condition, would have been a costly business, while its value to the community would have been very questionable. Nevertheless, when I first heard of the proposition (having been already at work upon the problem of introducing a bridle-road open to none of these objections), I was told that it was so strongly backed and peremptorily insisted on that it was feared that if the commissioners did not set about it before agreeing upon the general plan the City Council would compel them to do so, and one member of the Council was named as having avowed his intention of voting for nothing advised by the commissioners until this object was accomplished. The commissioners, however, fortunately proved to be too “unpractical.”

II.

As in this affair you are taking up a line of business in which you have had no local experience, and as the special conditions, topographical and climatic, are so far out of common that judgments lightly formed upon superficial observation and partial information are to be trusted even less than in most business, it is best that you should see clearly that you are, in fact, systematically leaving more in this business than in any other that you have in common to just such judgments.

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So far as you know that you are doing so, and are deliberately convinced that it is prudent because of the supposed trifling importance of anything at stake between cautious and incautious management, you and your heirs must take the consequences. So far as you do not know it I ask you to look at the facts.

No other branch of your city business is carried on without the constant aid of men who have made the ends to be accomplished through it, and the means of reaching them, a subject of systematic study under competent direction. The methods of your business, not only in courts, schools, and hospitals, for instance, but in pavements, gutters, and sewers, while determined, in part, by judgments based on scrutiny of local experience during long periods, are much more determined by what certain men have learned to be the conclusions of more thorough examinations of larger and wider ranges of experience. Even where these men stand out of sight in public discussions, they are not out of reach, and they are really your main security against falling into inadequate, uselessly experimental, theoretic, and impracticable courses.

In your business on the mountain you have no such precaution available against insufficiency and excess. The architects, engineers, and craftsmen whom you may at times employ in it, though they be of the highest standing, do not necessarily know more of what its distinctive value consists in, and in what way numerous parts and operations are to work together to secure it, than the surgeon and the purser, the engineer and the steward of a steamship know of what passes in the mind of the master navigator and seaman.

Some of you forgetting how much the value of a park must be the result of its courses in growth, as affected by seasons and the varying discipline of nature, may have supposed that I, living in New York, was to supply what was necessary in this respect. It might almost as well be supposed that a ship could be prudently sent to sea in charge of landsmen with the precaution only of giving them written sailing directions.

I advised your commissioners, when they first came to me in New York, that any “plan” I could furnish them would be “waste paper” if it were not to be followed up by a continuous work of design in detail by men imbued with its leading motives, trained and firmly required to steadily pursue them under contingent circumstances, and with reputations of value at stake in the permanent results of their work.

Note. — The site and the general purpose seemed to me to offer the best opportunity for the exercise of original judgment and of refined and delicate taste applied to novel conditions that had ever been presented to my profession. While other engagements would have prevented me, had I been [361] asked, from undertaking a resident superintendence of the work, I thought, upon the assurances of the commissioners and the city engineer, that it would be practicable to aid in its initiation in the manner that I understood I was asked to do; that is to say, to so far advance the scheme as to fix limits of economy to what should be attempted; establish its leading aims, and determine the general character of the results to be had in view, leaving yet open to the resident executive force a most attractive and worthy field for the exercise of a high order of designing judgment. My duty I conceive to have been to supply the main plot or arrangement — the theme of the work to be afterward composed. Shakespeare was not above giving his best powers to works thus laid out by inferior men — his predecessors.

III.

Seeing that you lack for this business an element of security against immature judgments, which you have in special professional servants for everything else of corresponding importance, consider next that what are called the commissioners in your case (the park commissioners of other cities are on a different footing) are simply three members of your elected Council asked, for the time being, to give more particular attention to this branch of its business. There is no other of which, when appointed, they know as little. (My acquaintance with each of the three first commissioners began with his profession that his sole qualification was a good intention.) If they take hold as men do who are bent on mastering a new business, they have no assurance that they will not be superseded before they are grounded in its rudiments. (Two of the three first appointed were displaced while I was still in conference with them.) They address the other members of the Council with no authority of their own in the matter, and with none such as a building committee derives from an architect; a committee on litigations from a barrister; quarantine from a physician; aqueducts from a hydraulic engineer; schools from a teacher; fire telegraphs from an electrician; matters of fine art from an artist; and public gardens, it is to be hoped, from a gardener.

Lastly, to fully understand the riskiness of the arrangement, it must be remembered that the actual directing power of these gentlemen is so limited and uncertain that they cannot feel any strong sense of responsibility in the business. They are constantly checked in any disposition to form cautious judgments upon the question, What would best serve the permanent interests of the city? by the intrusion of the question: What will suit the momentary disposition or fitful demand of more superficial observers and of the Council? Even if they enter upon courses marked out not only with a good intention, but with all the knowledge and judgment which they can, with their best efforts, bring to bear, they well know that they are liable at any moment to be ordered out of them through the influence of men less informed in the premises and acting on less mature reflection.

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If I question whether the judgment required for the prudent management of the property is to be secured by such a method of direction, it is the method alone that I question. I write with respect for the members of the Council and the commissioners I have known. If they were the wisest and best men in the world, and had all given years to a study of the subject, steady, good management would only be possible by inducing some few men to act in the matter with a concentration of judgment as in private business, and, as in nearly all other important public business, through a more liberal delegation of responsibility and power.

But, of course, any improvement upon the present method would make those in immediate management of the property less directly amenable to the public will, and involve greater danger of an abuse of power for selfish, partisan, factional, or local ends, and the community of Montreal may as yet be so imperfectly communified (if the term may be allowed) that the difficulties of administration to which I have pointed must be accepted as a necessity. But in that case it is obvious that prudent dealing with the property can only be hoped for through strong convictions of the ends and limits of purpose for which it can profitably be used on the part of a sufficient number of the owners to lead the force to which the Council, Commission, engineer, superintendent, forester, and foremen will alike bend their personal wills — the force of public opinion.

So long and so far as such sound conviction and genuine concern fail to be evident, is it not certain that selfish, partisan, and speculative objects, and puerile, shallow, tempo rising, spendthrift interests will have undue weight and will overrule proper commercial prudence?

IV.

A Wall Street property was visited by a mining engineer who found capital pumping and hoisting works, efficiently operated; a shaft and gallery skilfully timbered; a busy tram, and, at the end of a long drift, miners hard at work. “But,” said he, “I see no metal.” “No, sir.” “I see no vein.” “No, sir.” “I see no signs of a vein.” “No, sir.” “What are you working here for?” “Two dollars a day, sir.” And his visit resulted in the abandonment of an enterprise lacking but one thing of perfect business management, — an adequate purpose.

Without constant reference to a fixed leading purpose, you cannot spend a dollar on the mountain with any assurance that it is not wasted. If your leading purpose is trivial, or of but temporary consequence, you have already spent more than you can afford upon it. It is childish to go further. Every dollar you appropriate will be a dollar more of inexcusable extravagance.

To open discussion upon the question, What purpose is adequate to justify your purchase of the property, the outlay you have made, and any further [363] outlay you may choose to make for better turning it to account? Suppose the following proposition offered for your consideration — a proposition I do not mean to sustain, but which, I doubt, will for a moment be very unsatisfactory to many of you to whom the business is new:

“The value of this city property is to depend on the degree in which it shall be adapted to attract citizens to obtain needful exercise and cheerful mental occupation in the open air, with the result of better health and fitness in all respects for the trials and duties of life; with the result also, necessarily, of greater earning and tax-paying capacities, so that in the end the investment will be, in this respect, a commercially profitable one to the city.”

Taking this as a definition of your purpose, roads and walks will be so made to and on the mountain as to give the readiest access to its more important points of view and objects of interest, and to make exercise convenient and agreeable. Trees will be removed when of ugly forms, threatening to fall from decay, or when they too much interrupt distant prospects; trees planted where needed for shading and ornamenting the roads, walks, and points of view. Staircases, seats, shelters, and drinking-fountains will be provided to make the taking of air and exercise more convenient, and they will be so designed and placed as to form in themselves additional objects of attraction and agreeably hold the attention. If, through private liberality or by public subscription, as has occurred in most parks, statues, fountains, sculptural memorials of men or events, or other objects of art or scientific interest can be obtained, they will, as usual, be given such prominent position as will present them to the best advantage. So also as to buildings, such as museums, prospect-towers, club-houses, and fanciful houses of entertainment.

It will be obvious that with the general purpose thus stated, and the policy growing out of it, cheapness of management might easily be had. All required roads might be ordered, for example, almost as easily as so many miles of iron piping. The laying out and building of them is but a common engineering operation. In like manner, monuments and architectural works, as easily for the mountain as for a cemetery or a garden. Most of the work otherwise called for corresponds closely with that which can generally be got in private life out of any good hired man, well-directed, with an occasional lift from a jobbing gardener or florist. What more may be wanted at times in particular constructions is an every-day affair of architects, masons, carpenters, paviors, and painters.

To manage the mountain, with this theory of its value in view, would require more of a man’s time and thought, because the operations would be larger and should, perhaps, be more substantial and more refined than those of an ordinary private lawn and door-yard, but only that; nothing essentially different from what hundreds of you are, every summer, doing for yourselves without any deep absorption of purpose; in fact, without interruption of your regular and more serious avocations, without special study, and rather in a recreative and care-free humor.

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And the fact that such an estimate of what thought is wanted for the mountain slides easily into the ordinary courses of life, that it satisfies a common form of self-esteem, and suits established mental habits, makes it hard to lay aside even though it be seen to embody a fallacy.

That it does embody a fallacy will be clear to every man of you if he ask himself what would be the difference of attractive effect — literally speaking — if for that object which he has found most attractive, tree, flower-bed, or fountain, in the garden or fore-court, which is altogether the most attractive among all those which he is in the habit of passing, there should be substituted some fine morning a Punch and Judy show, or a hog with its face shaved, dressed in a woman’s cap and cloak, seated in an arm-chair facing the street?

The truth is that with no shrewder purpose than the proposition I have stated represents, not half the dividends which the property may be profitably made to yield, will be attainable.

V.

The first step toward a safe conclusion as to the general purpose to be had in view will be, in this, as it would in any other business, to determine what the situation puts economically out of the question.

Suppose that the owners of a vacant lot with a narrow frontage on an important business street were about to determine what to build upon it. These stated conditions of space, frontage, and situation would at once rule out two large classes of buildings: first, such as would be inadequate to the value of the ground — a cottage, for example; second, such as the ground would be inadequate to sustain, as a hotel, an iron foundry, or a theatre.

So, as to the site for a park. If a city has a large area of level prairie it can, without excluding or cramping provisions for other park purposes, provide great breadths of tranquil scenery with parade, lacrosse, cricket, archery, tennis, and croquet grounds, all in excellent fashion at small cost, the landscape motives, and others in which the whole community has a direct interest, harmonizing with the special motives of recreation of particular classes.

But any attempt to form picturesque scenery through abrupt variations of surface, not to be puerile in its results, will be costly and to aim at having an outlook comparable with that you have already obtained on the mountain will be, if not impossible, ridiculously extravagant.

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Having chosen ground everywhere broken and with but scanty breadths of thin soil at any point between its rocks your case is the reverse. Economy begins with fixing upon a plan and a permanent policy in the business which looks to nothing which could be better accomplished at much less cost on less rugged ground. True, this restricts the value of your park. But consider the compensation: for example, in this one respect.

In parks at Liverpool, London, Paris, Milan, Genoa, and other cities, there is a good deal of rock brought with cost from a distance, or of artificial rock made of materials brought from a distance, set as facings to mounds laboriously built up so as to obtain scraps and ravellings of scenery which will seem, under the circumstances, to have a flavor of this same quality of ruggedness. The rock, in itself, is generally ugly; the mounds are hills suitable for a doll’s pleasure-ground, but, when aided by adequate vegetation skilfully selected and disposed, the comparatively insipid picturesquishness of the result is generally regarded by those who pay for the work as economically purchased.

Of raw material of this quality you have already on your ground a wealth beside which all that these older cities have accumulated is poverty. At slight cost you may soon obtain results of the same class beside which theirs will be backwoods makeshifts.

I know that there is a prevalent notion that you must make the best of such opportunities as you find upon your site for purposes to which it is not generally well adapted, but you cannot build a policy on this basis without bringing aims in which success can never be satisfactory into conflict with aims through which any adequate return for your total outlay must mainly come.

In short, the conclusive objection to the entire tendency of management with which I am now contending, and the drift to which may perhaps be deeper and stronger and more insidious than you can readily realize, is that it favors a constant waste of what, if preserved, will unquestionably be, in the long future of the city, the two most important elements of value in this property. For, if you think of it, the reasoning out of which it grows, while allowing some value to natural objects of beauty (trees, for example) with reference to the purpose of air and exercise, first, wholly disregards the pervading charm of natural scenery (scenery in distinction from scenes) with reference to this purpose, and the result of pursuing it would, by the interposition of a variety of objects appealing to a different exercise of taste, greatly restrict if not wholly pervert such charm; then, second, it wholly leaves out of account an element of value much more important to be borne in mind than inducements to take air and exercise — more important because much less available to the city by other means than the improvement of the mountain — the intrinsic value of charming natural scenery.

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That this last element of value in the mountain is one for practical consideration, that it is a matter of dollars and cents to you quite as much as air and exercise, I will show in the next chapter.

Here it remains to be affirmed that the opportunities and advantages for producing certain charms of natural scenery which you hold as yet inert and unproductive in the mountain, are such as are possessed by no other city in any ground held for a public park. To allow it to be so used and dealt with as that these elements of value shall be lost, will be a scandalous extravagance.

VI.

It is a great mistake to suppose that the value of charming natural scenery lies wholly in the inducement which the enjoyment of it presents to change of mental occupation, exercise, and air-taking. Beside and above this, it acts in a more directly remedial way to enable men to better resist the harmful influences of ordinary town life, and recover what they lose from them. It is thus, in medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value; there is not one in the apothecaries’ shops as important to the health and strength or to the earning and tax-paying capacities of a large city. And to the mass of the people it is practically available only through such means as are provided through parks.

This is simply a fact. If we want to go behind the fact — from the physician to the metaphysician — we must begin by reflecting that a charm is something that acts, we know not how, to make us in some way different from what we should otherwise be; that is, it acts otherwise than through our reason.

This is the primary superstitious idea of a charm — of what is charming. We can apply the term rationally to scenery only because of a common experience that certain scenery has a tendency to lift us out of our habitual condition into one which, were the influence upon us stronger and the moods and frames of mind toward which it carried us more distinctly defined, we should recognize as poetic. Let us say that for the time being the charm of natural scenery tends to make us poets. There is a sensibility to poetic inspiration in every man of us, and its utter suppression means a sadly morbid condition. Poets, we may not be, but a little lifted out of our ordinary prose we may be often to our advantage.

To compare our small measures with larger let us take a recorded experience of a full-grown poet.

Wordsworth (only greater in poetic sensibility than anyone of us, not differently organized, not differently affected by medicine) came home from a painful experience in France after its great revolution, sick, broken down, unfit for business. Everything was going wrong with him. His sister, Dorothy, of whom it has been well said that she was the greater poet of the two, only that she was not a literary poet, watched his symptoms, saw the nature of his [367] trouble, and divined the cure. She persuaded him to let her guide him into the midst of charming scenery, and to subject himself for a time to its influence; “and thus,” says Doctor Shairp, telling the story, “began that sanative process which restored him to his true self and made that blessing to the world he was destined to become.”

These terms (sanative, restoring) are not metaphorical. They testify precisely that the charm of natural scenery is an influence of the highest curative value; highest, if for no other reason, because it acts directly upon the highest functions of the system, and through them upon all below, tending, more than any single form of medication we can use, to establish sound minds in sound bodies — the foundation of all wealth.

For practical purposes, such as we are now discussing, it is not necessary to better understand how this influence works; it is not necessary that we should agree upon a theory of it, but some may like to feel their way toward an idea on the subject, with such aid as Doctor Shairp attempts to give in the following comments on the case of Wordsworth:

“Continuing that study of nature (not with the science of the botanist or the florist, but the poet) he at last came to hold with conscious conviction what he had at first felt, hardly knowing that he felt it, that Nature had a life of her own, which streamed through and stimulated his life; a spirit which, in itself invisible, spoke through visible things to his spirit.

“That the characteristics of this spirit were calmness which stilled and refreshed man.

“Sublimity which raised him to noble thoughts.

“Tenderness which, while stirring in the largest and loftiest things, condescends to the lowest; is with the humblest worm and weed as much as in the greatest movements of the elements and of the stars.

“Above all, nature he now saw to be the shape and image of right reason — reason in its highest sense, — embodied and made visible in order; stability; in conformity to eternal law. The perception of this satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his heart.” — The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 240.

It may be added that this influence is such with reference to the highest form of the prosperity of a community that many divines have referred to it in terms commonly reserved for means of grace and religious nurture more distinctly canonical. Since the disciples were led out of the town to the mount (as to this day the children of Jerusalem are led to the same high olive groves), men have ever found “tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones.” Moreover, as George Herbert said of the work of the “literary poet,” it may happen that the word thus preached shall sometimes

“— find him who a sermon Hies,

And turn delight into a sacrifice.”

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“What Science is not called on to supply, the fervor and the piety that humanize her truths, and bring them into harmony with permanent emotions of the soul, may be found in all that Wordsworth wrote:—

‘For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.’”

VII.

The possession of charming natural scenery is a form of wealth as practical as that of wholesome air, pure water, or sunlight unobstructed by smoke and fog; as practical, then, as that of sewers, aqueducts, and pavements. And whatever of sensible purpose there was in your selection of the mountain property for a park, was a purpose to increase your common wealth in that form.

If, therefore, in discussing questions of its management, or in urging what shall or what shall not be done with it on the ground of economy, you take, as you generally have done, no serious business-like account of what makes for or against poetic value, do you not stultify yourselves?

What I ask you to accept as the true key to economy on the mountain is the clear sense that by the degree in which people, while resorting to it, will be subject to the bracing, soothing, tranquilizing medication of poetical scenery, in that degree will it be valuable, and your investment in it profitable. In so far as the management fails to constantly serve that end; in so far, especially, as it runs counter to it, you must judge those responsible for it as you would judge those responsible for leaky sewers and wasting aqueducts.

Determine your attractions simply with reference to air and exercise instead of to this purpose, and your park will be like a school which provides instruction, but not education; a police which aims at the punishment, not the prevention of crime; a church aiming at a moral, but not a religious character.

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Yet it may be as well to consider that if you secure this all else will be added. The air will not be fouled by that which gives poetic charm to the scenery, nor will exercise in it be enervating.

VIII.

Soon after you bought the property a friend of mine said to one of your citizens, whose experience should make his counsel valuable in your debates: “You are going to improve the mountain?” “No,” was the reply; “we are going to spoil it.” This gentleman may have had a greater degree of foresight in one respect than many of you. Possibly you would not have made your purchase if you had all as plainly seen that much of what made the property attractive to you depended upon the wildness and seclusion of its natural elements.

If it is to be cut up with roads and walks, spotted with shelters, and streaked with staircases; if it is to be strewn with lunch papers, beer bottles, sardine cans and paper collars; and if thousands of people are to seek their recreation upon it unrestrainedly, each according to his special tastes, it is likely to lose whatever of natural charm you first saw in it.

It is true, moreover, that when the mountain is suitably fitted for public use and traversed by gaily-dressed throngs of ladies and children, polished carriages, and highly groomed and caparisoned horses, that much of its original nature will appear comparatively rude, harsh, incongruous, and dreary.

What follows? Surely not that you should abandon your purpose; surely not that the more money you spend on improvements the less value for your purpose the mountain will have.

It follows only that all that you have seen and admired of the old work of nature must be considered as simply suggestive of what (that is practicable, suitable, and harmonious with your purposes of large popular use) nature, wisely entreated, will give you in place of what must be abandoned.

You need to have new mountain ideals in view; ideals with more not less, of poetic charm; and your roads and other artificial constructions must be made with studied regard to that which you thus have before you, not to what you are necessarily putting behind. To accomplish this transition skilfully and gracefully requires, it must be admitted, an exercise of judgment and taste in a direction not often followed with commercial purposes; and it must be further admitted that if you secure this and yet cannot, as a community, find satisfaction in anticipating, forecasting, and watching the development of the new charm, and in seeing it gradually emerge from and overgrow the ruin of the old, then the gentleman I have quoted was in the right, and the policy was sound which I presume him to have since followed, of opposing every measure of pretended improvements upon the mountain as, in [370] truth, a measure for spoiling it. Indeed, no man should account himself a gentleman to whom any other course is not only repugnant, but in whom such measures do not stir up a disposition to something more than idle grumbling.

In short, it is not to be denied that you cheated yourselves when you bought the mountain for a park, unless you were prepared to have it managed on principles applicable to WORKS OF ART.

IX.

Before I go further it is perhaps but just that I should still more distinctly say that there was never a moment’s difference between your first board of park commissioners and myself as to the general soundness of the views I have been urging upon you. There were great departures from the course which I think those views would have prescribed, but they were always made on grounds of expediency — as a yielding to demands which it would be impolitic to further resist, and on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread. But the fact is, if you could be convinced of it, the whole loaf would cost you less than the half.

X.

I have been urging you to regard the work to be done in your behalf on the mountain as primarily a work of art, and to insist that in this respect you shall have the fair value of what you pay for it.

I have used the term with some reluctance, because there is so much quacking and silly affectation afloat about art, that with many sensible people the simplest mention of it kindles prejudice. I know also that to speak of the work before you on the mountain as a work of art will again seem “unpractical,” as looking to something above the heads of the people and opening channels of lavish expenditure.

I beg all who feel about it at all in this way to let me ask, first, are you sure that if you oppose art ever so much you are going to get on without it? Are you sure, that by a method which compels an offhand, slap-dash way of going to work you escape quackings and affectations? Is it not smart, shallow, Jack-of-all-trades art that is most of all contemptible to you? Can you despise or wish to put away art, of which the chief condition is a sincere, devoted, and devout application of judgment to the purpose upon which it is engaged?

Second, please reflect also whether it may not be a teaching of snobbishness and vulgarity against which every true man should rebel, that good art is above the heads of the common people. Those whom all accept as the highest authority regard the highest art to be that which was made for public places and for the use of all.

Psalms and hymns are works of art, and to this day, in the degree that [371] they rank high or low in the scale of art, are they consoling and cheering to generation after generation of the poor and needy.

Among thousands of college-bred Scotchmen not one has shown as high poetic sensibility as the ploughboy Burns, and this sensibility is strongly exhibited in respect to the charm of natural scenery formed largely by art.

This may seem a contradiction of terms. It is not. When an artist puts a stick in the ground, and nature in time makes it a tree, art and nature are not to be seen apart in the result. In verses called out by an enjoyment of a brawling stream under trees, the ploughboy begs for the planting of more trees, that the poetic charm by which he has been inspired may be deepened by art.

But, third, as to the economy of art. You know that the market-value of a literary work of art (the psalms of David, the novels of Scott, the idylls of Tennyson) does not depend on the amount of paper and ink used in them; that a work of the painter’s art is not valued by counting the cost of the canvas, pigments, and day’s labor which has been spent on it, or a statue by the cost of the marble and its cutting. You know also that of the works of two men, given the same subject to draw, paint, or carve, one representing no more school-knowledge, industry, faithfulness, or hand-labor, only higher art, will sell at once for ten times as much as the other, and that this difference in market value instead of lessening will increase century after century.

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There is this, then, about good art; it is not, like bad art, to go out of fashion. Let your work upon the mountain be directed by sound art, and the older the results the more they will be valued; the oftener and more familiarly they are seen the more wholesome pleasure will be taken in them.

Again, then, in your choice of what to do, have some regard for your heirs.

XI.

An incident occurred in the early work upon the mountain which gave rise to some discussion in which a proposition was more or less definitely advanced or its soundness assumed, which may be thus stated:

“Suppose a road is to be made along a naturally wooded and otherwise attractive hillside, and it is an object to give those who pass over the road as much as practicable of the enjoyment of its natural scenery, then the simpler the means taken to obtain desirable courses and grades; the more strictly operations are confined to the space necessary to obtain them; and the less cutting and covering of the adjacent ground, the better. The highest art consists, under such circumstances, in making the least practicable disturbance of nature; the highest refinement in a refined abstinence of effort; in the least work, and the most simple and the least fussy and pottering.”

To see the crudity of this dictum, consider first, what must necessarily result from proceeding upon it, and, to make the principle plainer, suppose that the hillside is a little steeper and a little more perfectly furnished with old wood than was the case on the mountain.

You lay out as an engineering affair what is the most direct, convenient, and economical route with reference to the purpose of transportation. You begin construction by removing the trees in the way of a road of the prescribed breadth. You then have two broken lines of spindling trunks supporting sprawling limbs, which sustain meagre tufts of feeble foliage, not at all natural, for if the opening had been a natural one, such as might have been caused, for example, by a watercourse, or a long narrow outcrop of rock, the trees would have grown beside it in a way much more effective for your purpose; a much more beautiful way.

Next, to obtain a plane surface for your road, you break into the slope of the mountain on one side, and bank out on the other. You then have two steep, formal, unnatural banks, one above your wheel-way, the other below it. Next, as you will have cut off a third of the roots of the trees growing above, and banked over a third of the roots of those growing immediately below, and established conditions favorable to a constant waste of the natural vegetable mould, the change from the circumstances to which the bordering trees are habituated in respect to moisture, food, frost, and light, will lessen their vitality.

It may happen that in process of time, by the death of some of them, the decay of their roots, and through the effect of freezing, thawing, washing, [373] and vegetable growth and decay, your banks will take natural forms more or less agreeable. Of the trees that do not soon die, some will sprout out in an eccentric new growth; suckers will be thrown out from the roots of others; and, here and there, young trees and bushes will grow up from seed in front of the old ones.

In this way the first rude aspect of your work will be partly obliterated, partly obscured, and a degree of natural charm obtained; if the circumstances are favorable it may even be accounted a high degree of charm. And yet it will have been folly, worse than the folly of gambling, to take your chance in this way of the value of the results, for, even with the same inconsiderate grades and courses for your wheel-way, you can shape the banks at once in such desirable forms as frost, and rain, and root growths might chance to give them after many years. You can do more. You can, by a little forecast, make them at one point bolder and more picturesque in contour by a fitting buttress of rock than nature, working alone, would be able to do. By inserting little pockets of leaf-mould about this rock, and proper seeds or plants, you can then prevail upon nature to dress it with characteristic mountain forms of foliage and bloom, more interesting than nature would, in a century, otherwise provide. You can put in the way of immediate growth behind this rock a broad dark mass of low mountain pine, or a pensive, feathery and brooding hemlock, educated to a character which nature, left alone, gives to one of its species in a thousand, to supply the degree of canopy and shadow which will be most effective for your purpose. And, this being done, you are finally relieved of the nuisance and expense which the natural washing down of your abrupt bank would have otherwise entailed.

Then, at another point, you can cut back on the crest of your bank and make it gentle and graceful, with long double curves of the surface, dressed with low, soft verdure and decked with modest wild flowers.

You can cut out the feebler and uglier of the old trees (their ugliness is due in many cases to the falling of others upon them and other unhappy accidents); shorten in the tops of others more promising, but which have been strained upward in feeble forms to avoid suffocation in the crowd. You can enrich the soil and induce a lower growth upon them; and you can everywhere plant at once such trees, shrubs, and herbage as will best harmonize with what you select to stay of this old wood, and best carry out, grace, and enrich the necessary inanimate detail of the immediate road border.

Thus, you can rapidly establish a new face to the wood which will in truth be equally natural in aspect, and, whether regarded as the foreground of a distant view or looked at closely for its local beauty, far more charming than the best that nature, unencouraged, would much more slowly give you.

Why is it more irrational to thus sympathetically coöperate with nature for the end which you have in view in your use of this property, than for that of raising apples, corn, or buckwheat, where nature, left to herself, would not provide them?

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And yet the process I have here imagined, of laying out a road, determining its courses and grades with no regard to scenery, and then adapting scenery to them, is by no means a completely rational or economical one.

Second, then, sound art, following sound sense and sound economy, will require, at the first step, and at every step afterward, a forecast of the best attainable ultimate results, and in view of them will waive a little of directness here, a little of grade there, so as to spare an interesting group of trees, or a bold rock, and place them at such a distance from, and in such relation of elevation to, the eye of those passing on the road, as to enhance their value. Sound sense and economy will make a similar concession in view of the poverty of some broad, flat, uninteresting body of rock; bending the road slightly from its direct course, or carrying it up a little more rapidly with a view either of putting the rock out of sight under the road, or of leaving sufficient beds of soil for the growth of plantations to cover it.

This, then, is the precept which a more mature study of art would have reached. A road must be located not alone with reference to economy of construction in respect to convenience of passage from one point to another, but with reference to economy in the ultimate development of resources of poetic charm of scenery; and these resources must be considered comprehensively and interactingly with reference to the entire property.

This is not simply a requirement of art over and above the requirements of mere engineering, but, as with reference to the manner in which the first road-making on the mountain was done differently from that I had provided for, is a requirement of sound in distinction from unsound art; of good art over bad. Those who urge the rejection of the good and the adoption of the bad, under the impression that something is to be thus gained in economy, are the real spendthrifts and prodigals. And the principle, thus illustrated, applies to every thing to be done — quite as much, for instance, to walks, staircases, seats, shelters, shades (and shade trees), to gutters, gratings, drinking-fountains, and horse-watering-places, as to wheel-ways; most of all to any necessary buildings.

XII.

There are, upon the mountain, spaces of raw, barren surface, possessing no element of natural beauty, and in no way agreeably interesting; simply blots. Indeed, it must be confessed that, in parts, most even of the trees are rather forlorn objects; forlorn both as individuals and in their grouping. Many on the heights are of kinds which, for anything like their full natural beauty, as they reach mature years, require a rich soil, genial climate, and freedom to stretch widely out in root and branch. In parts of the mountain they lack each one of these conditions, and, consequently, bear all the marks of severe exposure, of Arctic temperature, of having grown in shallow, rock-bottomed pockets of poor soil, alternately arid and water-soaked, and of barely [375] surviving in a struggle for existence one with another, and all against those vermin which attack feeble vegetable life.

Many are decrepid with wounds and premature old age, and these, while they cannot possibly hold out many years, and are now falling, or casting their limbs with mortal injury to others in every storm, are yet cramping, starving, and suffocating the more promising.

The error in art, referred to in the last chapter, would preserve and maintain this aspect of mountain scenery, simply because it is a natural aspect, and does not wholly exclude the charm of nature. Would it not be as rational for a farmer to say that because his cows sometimes pick a little food out of boggy vegetation he will not drain the ground and get a field of rich, corn-producing soil?

By a little improvement of the elements of growth; removing unsuitable and hopelessly debilitated trees; heading down; healing the wounds; balancing and protecting the more sturdy; planting low and specially hardy conifers and underwood in the northern and western borders, and gradually developing wind-breaks; introducing in each available situation trees and shrubs distinctively adapted to the circumstances; protecting all from fire, vermin, and the violence of man, there is not the least ground for doubt that a great and happy change in the general aspect of even the most forlorn localities would be brought about; a change giving a large return for the necessary investment.

Nor is it to be apprehended that the new aspect would be less natural, or less mountain-like, or in any respect less valuable, than that which it would supersede. It would surely be much more so.

The most common trees on the more exposed, dry, barren parts of the mountain, are such oaks as under congenial circumstances are the stateliest of all northern trees. Examine them closely and (excepting the few white oaks, and these only where they have been a little favored in respect to room) you will hardly find one that does not appear out of place, deformed, mutilated in its trunks and limbs, scraggy, and, in the heat of summer, weak and sickly in foliage. These are not picturesque and interesting, as characteristic mountain trees often are, through their ingenious and successful efforts to adapt themselves to trying conditions, but have the fixed sad look of unacclimated emigrants, hopelessly depressed by conditions foreign to their inherited habits and instincts.

Yet, under the same, or even harder conditions, hanging where there seems to be no soil at all, you will find a few sumacs which are pictures of health and contentment; quite as much so as if the seed from which they sprang had happened to fall in a rich, sheltered meadow; more so than if they had been pampered in your lawns and gardens. Look, too, at some of the thorns; and, again, at the ironwood: where it has not been excessively crowded or crippled by fire or violence, you will almost always find it in good health. But here again you see the need of discrimination, for, if the mountain [376] were covered with ironwood, you would lose a good month of summer beauty, its period of leafage being so unusually short.

But you need not lack all desirable variety. If you do not find enough in the sound and healthy indigenous trees of the neighborhood, you can draw some beautiful species from Siberia and the high Alps of Europe, suitable for the most exposed situations, and if you go to work a-right they need cost you but a few cents a-piece.

A large proportion of all the trees on the mountain, not yet saplings, have suffered from the effects of ice storms or the falling of others. They have, in consequence, fractures and wounds which are the starting-points of processes of decay. Often this has already reached the heart of the tree, and is beyond remedy. These trees have little life left. Others not yet so badly affected are constitutionally injured and will not attain full growth. As they become weaker, their branches or trunks falling will again be destructive to others.

Trees should be planted with references to the vacancies which are to be anticipated, and a constant systematic pruning should be kept up. Thousands of trees could be preserved by good pruning to grow to twice the size, and ten times the age which they are otherwise likely to attain. The pruning required is not that of an orchard, or an avenue, or a forest, but it differs from that taught in scientific economical forestry only so far as the aim should be neither to induce individual symmetry of head, nor long, “clear” timber trunks, but rather a compact and sturdy growth, and heads formed not to stand independently, but picturesquely massing with others, the value of each tree being, as a rule, dependent on an interchange of influence with others grouping with it. Often it will be best to head off the natural leader; often to induce a strong low, lateral growth, such as in economic forestry is to be prevented. With this reservation, the best conveniently available instruction in the principles of good pruning for the mountain, for those who wish to intelligently watch its forestry, will be found in a recent publication for the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, by Williams & Co., Boston: A Treatise on Pruning Forest Trees, by A. des Cars. Translated from the Seventh French edition by C. S. Sargent, Professor of Arboriculture in Harvard College. One of the mottoes of this book is: “It is the duty of an enlightened [377] community to plant trees, and to so take care of them that posterity shall not suffer.” — Decaigne.

XIII.

Necessarily, in a resort for thousands, there must be much that is not natural and not in itself poetic, but I fear that I have reason to more distinctly urge that this is no ground upon which to justify a neglect to secure the largest practicable measure of poetic charm. It simply requires that all available means shall be taken for making the necessary artificial things of the park as inconspicuous as is consistent with a frank avowal of their purpose, and for preventing incongruous things without the park from being forced on the attention of those needing to obtain relief from them.

Taking again for illustration, a road, (because it is the most unavoidably conspicuous artificial thing that you must have), you will have been compelled at various points by the topography to so lay it out that, though slightly curving, its course is open to view and excessively prominent far ahead, dissecting and distracting the landscape. Planting trees close upon the road, they must either be trimmed too high to serve as a screen to its course ahead, or their limbs will, in time, obstruct passage upon the road. Your resort, then, must be to bushes of species chosen with reference to the height and breadth of foliage they will ultimately develop, with a view to the range of vision of observers in carriages. If there is a walk following the road it should, in such cases, be so far divided from it as to give room for the required bank of low foliage between it and the wheel-way.

A similar course will be taken where roads are approaching a junction, to prevent one from being unnecessarily conspicuous in looking from another.

Still more imperatively, with like motives, you will plant both trees and thickets of underwood wherever from within the property there is a liability that outside objects, of which the influence on the mind would be adverse to your ruling purpose, may, in the future, be forced on the attention.

For example, it cannot serve that purpose, it can serve no proper purpose for which you hold the property, that tombs, hearses, and groups of mourners shall be brought into view from it, or the backs and out-buildings of adjoining dwellings, or factory walls and chimneys, such as it may be someone’s interest, by and by, to build at any point on its borders. Consequently, the first thing to be done is the planting of outer screens of foliage that will guard against such waste of mountain value. These, on the northern [378] side especially, will be mainly of sturdy conifers, as white and red pine, hemlock, and very hardy dwarf mountain-pines (lightened up a little with white birches, ironwood, and moose-maple), so that in time they will also provide wind-breaks and temperers by which the park will be made available to the recreation of delicate people one or two months longer than otherwise.

But besides the more direct economies, sufficiently suggested, of such low screen-plantings, they would, if wisely made, incidentally go far to secure qualities in the scenery of the mountain (generally referred to in books on the subject as intricacy, obscurity, and mystery, and through these affecting the apparent aerial-perspective) of which the result would be more than equivalent to doubling the extent and value, for your purpose, of the property. I have frequently known intelligent countrymen estimate an area of broken ground, through which they had been walked, actually of thirty acres, at from seventy-five to a hundred, and solely because of such treatment of it.

Such prescriptions as these, I hardly need say, are of the alphabet of the business. No man who has given the slightest study to it can be unfamiliar with them. Yet, as I regret to testify, propositions were at an early day urged upon your commissioners so confidently and from such influential quarters that they were forced, if not to yield to them, to give them grave and anxious consideration, in which principles of management directly the reverse were assumed as if their adoption were to be a matter of course, nor did your commissioners appear to have ground for confidence that in resisting them they would have any strong support in the public opinion of the present generation.

XIV.

In works of art which the experience of the world has stamped of a high grade of value, there is found a strong single purpose, with a variety of subordinate purposes so worked out and working together that the main purpose is the better served because of the diversity of these subordinate purposes. The first secures the quality of unity and harmony; the others, that of a controlled variety.

Sound business management will surely seek to gain value for your property by making use of the same double method. False economy will think it impracticable, or of no consequence, or that it will make too much trouble; failing to count the cost and losses of what it assumes to be of less trouble.

You have chosen to take a mountain for your park, but, in truth, a mountain barely worthy of the name. You would call it a hill if it stood a few miles further away from the broad, flat, river valley. Its scenery, that is to say, [379] is but relatively mountainous. Yet, whatever of special adaptation it has to your purpose lies in that relative quality. It would be wasteful to try to make anything else than a mountain of it; equally wasteful to attempt anything which would involve a loss of such advantages as it has for this purpose. No condition of economical management, then, is more stringently binding than that of a steady resistance to all short-sighted aims which would result in such waste, or lead to conditions inconsistent with mountain dignity, serenity, and strength. Fancies, fashions, and affectations, for which room might be temporarily allowed on another site, should have no place. But this unity involves neither sameness nor sombreness. The queen is not less queenly for jewels on her head, ermine on her shoulders, and velvet in her skirts.

Small as your mountain is, it presents in different parts no little variety of mountain form and feature. A leading economy in its management will be found to lie in turning to still better account this consistent diversity, so that the visitor in passing out of one part into another, will receive a stronger impression and be more charmed than he would with greater sameness.

In a separate map appended to the general plan furnished you, I have designated eight topographical divisions of the mountain, each possessing natural characteristics distinguishing it from those adjoining. In the selection and development of the choicer distinctive peculiarities of these several divisions, the exhibition of them to the best advantage, and the merging of them harmoniously together in one consistent beautiful mountain, the highest economy will be found.

I will presently point out the distinctive raw material of each, and give some indication of how its value is to be increased; but I wish first to suggest one other general motive of unity which should be kept in mind, in addition to that referred to in the last chapter of obscuring incongruities.

It is to so select the material of planting, or the native material to be left growing, that, within reasonable limits, the principle upon which Nature, unassisted, proceeds in her selections (though often very imperfectly) shall be emphasized, idealized, or made more apparent in landscape quality.

In the lower and less rugged parts, that is to say, the predominating trees should be such as attain their most perfect character only under conditions still lower, more fertile, and softer; the elms being the most characteristic of those available to you. These parts should also be planted (where screens or wind-breaks are not required) in more open groups, and every fair opportunity taken to leave clean, unbroken surfaces of turf between the groups.

On the other hand, in the most elevated, exposed, Arctic, and continuously rocky regions, the predominating trees should be those which are [380]

“Mount Royal Design Map,” 1877

[381]

Pursuing this hint skilfully, and not at all in a pedantic or exact spirit, you will cheaply give a stronger emphasis to the difference of elevation between your mountain top and base, making your mountain more mountain-like, gaining: withal, a natural and appropriate element of variety.

I will now indicate the distinctive raw material of each of the topographical districts to which I have referred, and attempt to offer some slight indication of how its value is to be increased; the motive last explained being [382]

Map of Mount Royal Keyed to Olmsted’s Report of 1881

(1.) First, there is the broken, rocky declivity which, on the city side, stands between the upper and the lower parts, and which is designated [383] on my map the crags. Its special character and value as an element of scenery is so well known to you that it needs no description. I will refer at once to its defects.

In parts, the rock which is its distinguishing feature, is of a quality [384] which rapidly decomposes under the influence of frost; consequently, its surface has a comparatively soft, weak appearance, and takes forms which are only half rocky. It results, also, that thin bodies of disintegrated rock and earth occur, the surface of which is more or less loose, so that no soil can be firmly bedded upon them. Large spaces have, therefore, the landscape quality simply of a steeply inclined plane with a scanty vegetation of coarse plants, chiefly annual, or of feeble seedlings of trees which are to be soon uprooted or slowly starved to death.

In a general view, these elements are not of sufficient consequence to prevent the Crags from having a most interesting character, but they detract materially from the value of what is most valuable in that character. (Really, pecuniary value.) Forty years ago, and more, their beauty was much greater than at present, because of a native forest growth chiefly of spruces, pines, and birches, which had the effect of checking the tendency of the softer surface to wash and slide, causing soil to accumulate, and support on the tamer parts a richer undergrowth both of shrubs and perennials, and partially veiling in shadow and obscurity that which was less bold, firm, and distinctive. The Crags, as a whole, appeared in consequence, larger, bolder, stronger, and approached more nearly to grandness and sublimity of effect; at the same time their general tone of color was more cheerful, and the impression of detail obtained under close observation more interesting and agreeable.

If you wish to realize the value of what you have paid for the property, as far as the Crags are concerned, what has thus been said indicates the general principles of design upon which you will proceed in dealing with them. You will by no means be content, however, with aiming to restore, as far as practicable, the old conditions. While trying to guard against landslides and destructive washing, and seeking to establish firmer and less barren surfaces, the growth of large trees will be prevented where they will have either of three results: first, to hide the bolder and more effective rocks in views from below; second, to interrupt, when of mature growth, the best distant views from above; third, where, from growing tall and spindling and unsupported by adjoining wood of the same character, they will be specially liable, when loaded with ice, to be broken or uprooted by high winds. (From the appearance of the stumps and wreckage which I found in 1874, I judged this to have been a chief cause of the destruction of the old forest.)

Trees of a low and compact sort will be chosen; they will be planted while yet very small, their early growth nursed with care, and any tendency to shoot up in a thin and weakly way checked with the knife. The native growth of low shrubs, and particularly of vines, brambles, and bracken, will be generally encouraged, guarded from wash and fires, and supplemented by other like plantings. The different native sumacs will be specially propagated in the upper shelves of the ledges and in the gaps and wash-ways between the bolder rocks; because, with a little use of the knife, they will not, even when [385] reaching within a few feet of the top, grow upward so much as to obstruct the view from the heights; because they supply the most beautiful of our northern foliage to be looked upon from above (being fountain-like in the disposition of spray spreading out under spray of foliage); and, lastly, because they maintain, as I have before observed, under the most unfavorable circumstances, cheerful qualities of color. Various diminutive spruces, firs, and pines may be used also to advantage where large trees will be undesirable; and in all the more moist, shady places the Canadian yew (an evergreen trailer with large bright berries) should be profusely planted. I would have it grown in seed-beds by thousands. I would make trial also of a Japanese yew (Taxus adpressa) which is hardier on the American Atlantic coast than the English churchyard yew, and much more bushy and graceful, falling very nicely over rocks.

(2.) Immediately above the Crags there is a large district the surface of which lies at various inclinations and is much broken, though seldom abruptly, by comparatively small outcrops of rock, between which the soil is generally poor, thin, and arid. The trees upon it, when not standing singly, tend to grow in clusters and groups, and many are dwarfed, feeble, and sickly. A little yearly continuous planting will be needed to replace those falling out or intentionally removed. I have before indicated the principles which should govern its selection.

(3.) Farther to the south, and extending from a little beyond the south end of the Crags to the Côte de Neige road is another district of similar character, with a little deeper and better soil between the rocks, and with finer trees (partly because of the better soil, and partly because less harshly treated by storm and frost.)

(4.) Away to the north, and below the northern crags, there is another division of similar characteristics.

To all of this rugged and rocky land I apply the old English term fell, and the three divisions of it indicated I distinguish respectively: the Upperfell being all that above the Crags, the underfell being that below the Crags; and the brakenfell, which includes all the steep, broken ground, much overgrown with braken, south of the Crags.

The two latter districts should be treated as a forest with numerous ferny openings. The natural growth of the Brakenfell is largely of maples in the lower parts, of pines and birches above; none can be better. It simply needs to have the poorer trees taken out, to be broken a little into groups and groves, and to have younger low foliage added, on their skirts. This and careful pruning.

(5.) Between the Upperfell and the Brakenfell there is a long, gentle depression of the surface, extending from the south end of the Crags westerly toward the Cote de Neige Cemetery. Here the ground is smooth, little wooded, and the soil generally alluvial and peaty; moister than any other on the mountain. It is, in fact, a mountain meadow of severe exposure. The [386] old house, now occupied by the superintendent, stands in the midst of it (destroying its most marked natural quality, and interrupting lovely distant views). This district I call the glades. It is important that its original, simple, attractive character should, as soon as you can afford it, be regained and made the most of. It needs no planting, except to restore a natural face to the bordering woods, where they have been ill-used. It can easily be made the finest spread of turf on the continent. But it will be best kept, when once well formed, with sheep and not with lawn-like smoothness.

(6.) The small district below the Crags, between the Brackenfell and the Underfell, I have called the cragsfoot. It is that containing the little reservoir and the unfortunate zigzag road from Drummond Street, by which its natural character is destroyed. The native wood should be thickened, and the sides of the road planted densely and simply with thick bodies of ordinary underwood; the object being to make the artificial features unobtrusive, and induce a simple, calm, forest effect.

(7.) On the slope below the Underfell, toward Saint Jean Baptiste, there is a district lying between two low but well-defined ledges of rock, being that in which the City Council has ordained a pest-house, and including a considerable smooth field of fair soil, on which is growing an orchard. This generally resembles the fell-land, but is less broken by lumpy rocks, and more amenable to cultivation. I designate it the piedmont. It should be planted, in addition to its present scattering growth (largely of basswood rapidly approaching decay), with groups of the lowland trees before mentioned (next above the lowest range), with underwood only to obscure the poorest rocky parts. The groups should be formed generally in connection with the rocks and ledges, leaving between them the broadest turfy openings practicable. In forming the groups, species should be associated which are inclined to form soft and harmonious outlines together, and most, if not all, the trees of each group should be of one kind, and the adjoining groups not of trees of strongly contrasting qualities, the object here being not local picturesqueness, but a softer charm enhancing the characteristic quality of the fells and crags.

(8.) There remains the large district of gentle slopes below the last ledge, with still less of protruding rock, which, taking the way of your old Norman colonists, I call “Côte Placide,” a term to be liked none the less because it brings to mind that other branch from the same trunk, which formed the Parish Placide on the Red River of Louisiana, and poor Evangeline. But it must be well understood that it is only by comparison with the adjoining mountain-land that it has the character indicated. Its value is great, if properly used; as, with reference to your possible scale of scenery, it will represent the opposite note to the necessary sternness of the Upperfells. Also, if properly used, it will add greatly to the effect of the views down the great valley from the northern heights, for, with lofty trees along its border, it will give greater distance and obscurity to the buildings in the adjoining quarter [387] of the town, and form a rich and consistent foreground to a scene which, under certain atmospheric conditions, is hardly surpassed among all those of its class upon which the world has fixed the highest value.

By “properly used,” I mean, however, not only so used that its present moderate contrast of character with the more rugged parts of your property should be increased, but that it shall also be adapted to provide a measurably complete sylvan experience in itself for visitors who have not time or, in the inclement part of the year, physical endurance for the ascent of the mountain.

What is first needed for these ends is additional soil. I consulted several of your city officers on the point of economy involved in this suggestion, and was assured by all that an abundant supply of street dirt and other wastes could be obtained, by an order of the Council, to more than double the present depth of soil wherever it is important, in two or three years’ time, at a cost (in addition to what is now paid for disposing of the same material) that will make it inexpensive; some said it would even be at a saving.

Wherever there are rocks in this district, they should either be exposed as boldly as possible (other loose rocks being sometimes laid upon them, to make the incident more decided), and overgrown with vines, or they should be covered, at least two feet deep, with good loam and soil. Clusters, chiefly of elms, American white ash; and white oak may be planted as indicated on the design-map, and broken rows or narrow belts of the same along the exterior suburban roads.

XV.

One of the most inconsiderately wasteful ways of spending money on the mountain to which you are liable to be tempted, is that of the introduction upon it of flower-beds, clumps of flowering shrubs, cushions of rhododendrons or azaleas, schools of roses — possibly ribband-gardening, floral embroidery, sub-tropical borders, and whatever is commonly found on a polished lawn of the present fashion in lawns, in a place furnished with propagating houses and wintering pits, and given over to a fashionable gardener.

The delusion that these things may be of the required proper furniture of a public park, as they more or less may be of a luxurious private residence, of a botanic garden, or an urban promenade, is the more to be guarded against, because culpable neglect of the permanent and substantial business of the undertaking can be so readily glossed over by means of them, and the question will often be pressed, Why should the taste that they gratify not be catered to?

It should not, because the result would be an adulteration and counteraction of the wholesome influence of the appropriate scenery of the mountain, which alone supplies a sound justification for any of the outlay to be [388] made on it, and the management which resorts to it will be tearing down with one hand what it builds up with the other.

But does it follow that you can have none of the refinement of grace, delicacy, color, and incense which is supplied by flowering plants? By no means. There can be no greater mistake than to suppose either that dug beds or borders and garden primness are necessary to this end, or that it is inconsistent with mountain character.

I once stood at an elevation seventeen times higher than Mount Royal; great fields of snow below, and, in general view, nothing to be seen for hundreds of acres about me but shapeless fragments of rock; yet casting the eye downward, everywhere, even in the darkest shadows, there were gleams of color; and, upon looking closely, there was, in every slightest shelter, a most exquisite bloom and verdure.

What, then, is not practicable that you can reasonably wish to have of floral wealth in your little mountain, clear of snow as it is for more than half the year, and with a climate which, on its sunny side at least, is not found inhospitable to more than one of the trees which grow naturally in association with the fig and the olive?

Let it be borne always in mind that your mountain of less than a thousand feet of elevation is royal only by courtesy, and that if you attempt to deal with it as if it had the impregnable majesty of an Alpine monarch, you only make it ridiculous.

Be assured that if you will keep but one good honest man intelligently at work for the purpose, you may in five years find upon it charming refinements of mountain beauty, refinements which will be thoroughly appropriate and add incalculably to its value.

I will go further, and tell you that if you cannot afford to keep a single man so employed, there are hundreds of little places on the mountain within which, if you can but persuade yourselves to regard them as sacred places and save them from sacrilegious hands and feet, the original Gardener of Eden will delight your eyes with little pictures within greater pictures of indescribable loveliness. And remember that it is the lilies of the field, not the lilies of the garden we are bid to consider.

Such beauty as is thus available, will make no amends for rudeness, coarseness, and vulgarity in the borders of your roads and walks; it will but [389] make what is crude and unnatural the more conspicuous, as a jewel set upon soiled linen makes it the more offensive. But when you have natural homes for it, especially with much and rapid inflections of surface, as in the little rocky notches and gaps, dinglets and runlets of the Brackenfell, you need not be afraid of too great a profusion nor too great a variety of perennial and annual plants; of too much color, nor of a growth too intricate and mazy.

This is not the most difficult form of refinement for you to gain; indeed, it is so easy, so cheap, that when I was last on the mountain I found many places where no small degree of it already existed, and places, too, which, when I had first studied them in 1874, appeared rude, raw, and barren. To what did you owe this improvement? To any digging and bedding; raking, sowing or weeding of a florist? Not at all, but simply and solely to the fact, as far as I could judge, that before that time cattle had been ranging over the ground, and afterward it had been protected from them.

But remember that there is nothing to prevent a hundred men from trampling over one of these spots to-morrow and making a complete wreck of it, destroying not only the plants but the conditions of their reproduction.

XVI.

If you attempt anywhere to have such refinements of detail as 1 have been last suggesting (I do not say they are essential), or even a fair quality of turf, trees, and shrubs, and yet shrink from attempting to control the movements of people on the ground, you will find the losses from filching and from injuries through carelessness, discouraging and disheartening. The natural flowering plants, except a few coarse weeds, will gradually disappear; choice trees will be sickened; often their bark will be cut or bruised, sometimes girdled and their limbs broken down in such a manner as to establish disease from which they never recover.

The only way in which any town park can long be kept in a generally useful and improving condition, is by providing so well and amply for the uses which are designed to be made of it that the great body of decent, orderly, tidy, and respectable people will not be impelled to fall into practices inconvenient to others or unfavorable to the preservation and improvement of its natural beauty. This done, the silent influence of example and of an obvious custom, acting helpfully to the police regulations, will strongly persuade others to exercise due control upon perverse inclinations.

[390]

Half the practical business of park management may, in fact, be referred to a lively sense of two traits of character of the average civilized man as we have to deal with him.

One is his disposition to adapt his conduct to the circumstances in which he finds himself, and especially to be neat, cleanly, and nice where the objects about him are neat, cleanly, and nice. I have repeatedly had occasion to observe that while any park work is in an incomplete condition, with materials in the rough, and litter of workmen lying about, no police, no fences, and guards are adequate to prevent the occurrence of wanton injuries and manifestations of rudeness, recklessness, and destructiveness. (How few boys can resist the temptation to throw stones at the windows of a vacant and dilapidated house?) Passing the finished point, the litter cleared up, the turf established and once smooth-mown, and everything in view having a complete and refined aspect, a change occurs, and fences and guards, before necessary, may be removed, and the police reduced without danger.

Again, if provisions for any purpose have an appearance of being well considered and liberal, there is a common disposition to be content with them; if they make no such impression, but on the contrary seem mean and makeshift, the sense of shame in what would otherwise be lawlessness cannot be counted on.

If in public places you have a walk of a certain capacity between borders of fine turf, people will submit to considerable crowding without going out of it; when the crowding passes a certain point a few will step on the turf, doing little harm, but when the walk is so crowded that the provision seems absurdly inadequate, of a sudden, the rule, by common assent, becomes a dead letter, and the most reserved and cautious take to the turf. Under corresponding influences seats will be used to stand upon, and may be broken or defiled without compunction.

So, if the necessities of the body cannot be accommodated decently within reasonable distance, there will soon grow up upon the park a common law by which they will be accommodated indecently. Your police will for a time contend with this in vain, and then will be sullenly blind to it.

At a small part of the study required for putting and keeping the mountain in a condition in which it will have a high degree of usefulness to the average citizen of Montreal, his wife and children, it can be kept in a condition in which a small proportion of your least valuable population, to whom any refinement of manners or check upon vulgar and brutal habits is irksome, will continue to resort to it with more or less of pleasure. This pleasure will consist not so much in positive enjoyment as in negative relief from what is elsewhere tiresome and dreary. And if nothing or but little more is done than is necessary to adapt the mountain to be satisfactory in this way, it will gradually come to be satisfactory in no other, and what money you spend on it will be mainly ill-spent.

On these grounds I advise you not to allow the mountain to be in all [391] parts left open to be wandered over and used at will at all times by all comers. You cannot afford the force of police which, if you do so, will be necessary to the protection of its finer elements of value. You cannot afford to waste these elements. As a measure of economy, therefore, I submit the following suggestions, to the adoption of which the roads and walks of the plan have been adjusted:

Open all of the Upperfell, to be used by all comers at all times, for rambling at will; for picnicing; for all boys’ and childrens’ games and plays that do not involve the use of missiles. Supply swings and other amusements for the little ones. Furnish abundance of comfortable seats, and do not forbid decent seating on the ground and rocks.

Have a well provided public house, with so much roofing that in case of sudden showers a large company may obtain shelter in it. Let a part of its rent be paid in providing, gratuitously, under constant supervision and in a cleanly and decent way, such accommodations as are necessary for women and children when absent some hours from home. Let it also provide gratuitously, or at a nominal price, hot water for those who want to make tea on the ground.

Make it an easy custom to fall into for all classes of people, even your poorest workingman, to come here by families, once or twice a week, late in the day, during the hot season, to take their evening meal.

In short, let the district be used as, from the opening of the ground to the public, it has been used, with only the differences that would occur from additional conveniences and better provisions for the safety and comfort of women and children. Keep active and intelligent guardians moving briskly through it, so that the modest, timid, and nervous may have frequent assurance of protection against rudeness.

I was glad, in my last visit, to see clergymen leading large schools to the mountain for recreation. Offer every encouragement to the growth of the custom. The presence of these gentlemen will give countenance and confidence to mothers to come with their daughters and little ones.

When the ground shall be constantly and largely used in the domestic ways I have thus indicated, the danger of its misuse in any way will be slight, and your expense for police and for repairs may with safety be moderate. No men are reckless in their conduct in a place in which good women and children seem to be at home.

The district of which I here speak, the Upperfell, has an area of 50 acres, of very diversified surface; it includes the highest elevation of the [392] mountain. It has little soil, and with a proper treatment will be occupied by low, sturdy wood and a few strong thorny thickets, the trees in groups and small groves with numerous mossy openings, with a great deal of natural rocky surface on which children can play and picnic parties sit, harming nothing. Many of these rocks command fine distant views, and it is the district now more resorted to by the public than any other.

This fifty acres of the Upperfell being at all times open to everybody, aim in other parts of the two fell-land districts to cultivate somewhat richer mountain character, and, in order to do so, restrict movement through them to the roads, walks, and prepared places, except upon holidays. Let there be, however, numerous places well adapted by the character of their ledges, open groves, and finely verdured dells for picnic parties. Provide springs or little natural rock fountains in connection with them. Hold each of these places open to be used at any time for picnic or festive parties, whether of friends or of schools, churches, societies, or any organizations either permanent or formed for the occasion.

Require only that each shall take the trouble to make application and have suitable grounds assigned for its use in advance, and that it shall give some reasonable assurance that the privilege will not be abused. All such places can then be decked about with shrubbery and suitable wild flowering plants, naturally disposed, and each have its own distinctive sylvan and idyllic attractions.

Again, at suitable houses, one in the Brackenfell and one in the Underfell, let desirable conveniences for such parties be supplied, and at the upper one let there be sheds so that some can come in vehicles and have their horses properly cared for.

The two districts being adequately provided in all respects for their designed use, in all the remainder of the park let visitors be restricted under ordinary circumstances to the roads, walks, and other accommodations specially prepared for them. On holidays, when (at special cost for the occasion) you throw all open, have much of the ordinary housekeeping work of the ground finished early in the morning or the night before, and let the more intelligent and trustworthy of the men ordinarily employed upon it act as assistant watchmen to the regular police, mainly with a view to check, by their presence and a polite cautionary word upon occasion, any tendency they may observe of visitors to fall into practices wasteful of the value of the property. It is wonderful how much may be accomplished in this way, especially when care has been once taken to establish good and prevent the forming of bad customs.

Such management of the property as I have thus advised may require some little self-restraint of you and some troublesome thoughtfulness of your [393] servants. So does any soundly economical management of any of your business. So does every advantage which civilized men possess over barbarians.

XVII

Among properties of its class your mountain possesses one marked advantage over all others. I mean that of noble landscapes extending far beyond its borders. These are of such extent and so composed, and their foregrounds within the property are to be so easily adapted to increase their value; their interest is so varied according to the direction of the outlook and the passing effects of clouds and atmospheric conditions, that it is not only impossible to speak of them in adequate terms of admiration, but, trying to take a business estimate of them, and seeking standards of comparison for the purpose, it will be found that the best that other communities have been able to obtain by expenditures counting in millions of dollars, is really too insignificant to be available for the purpose.

And yet, trying still to take a business view of them, simply as an element in the general value of the mountain as a city property, it may possibly come about that you would be richer without them. I say this because among the currents of public opinion of which I had some experience with you, there was a certain spendthrift tendency to slight every element of value in the property except that of the great views. There were those who would have thought it a triumph of art to whisk people up to the highest eminence of the mountain, give them a big mouthful of landscape beauty, and slide them back to town in the shortest possible way; and there were, even before I was consulted, speculations afoot for doing something of the kind at so much a head.

It might be to some a question whether the most valuable influence of properties of this class is to be found in such distinct sensational features, even though provided by nature, as are commonly most consciously felt, talked about, and written about, or in more unobtrusive, pervading, home-like qualities of which the effects come to one less in a torrent-like way, than as the gentle, persuasive dew, falling so softly as to be imperceptible, and yet delightfully reinvigorating in its results. Even this might be to some a question; but let any man ask himself whether the value of such views as the grandest the mountain offers, is greater when they are made distinct spectacles or when they are enjoyed as successive incidents of a sustained landscape poem, to each of which the mind is gradually and sweetly led up, and from which it is gradually and sweetly led away, so that they become a part of a consistent experience, — let him ask this with reference to the soothing and refreshment of a town-strained human organization, and he will not need argument to lead him to a sound conclusion.

But as you have the one thing and as yet have not the other, except in a very crude and imperfect form, disturbed throughout with blotches, it [394] may be worthwhile to try, if ever so poorly, to suggest what would rule a wise economy. (Would that a literary artist would undertake the duty.)

It is not the stronger but the weaker links of a chain that you must consider in determining what strain you will put upon it. Fit your work on the mountain to over-weighted nervous conditions and you may be sure that it will suit the robust and light-hearted.

On this principle it is better in dealing with it to cultivate the habit of thoughtful attention to the feebler sort of folk — of asking, for instance, can this or that be made easier and more grateful to an old woman or a sick child, without, on the whole, additional expense, except in thoughtfulness? If so, ten to one, the little improvement will simply be that refinement of judgment which is the larger part of the difference between good and poor art, and the enjoyment of every man will be increased by it, though he may not know just how.

With this idea in mind think over what you would like to be able to do if you were much concerned about the health of a father, brother, or son whose private business cares you saw to be wearing upon him to a point of danger; who was growing morbidly irritable and despondent, or, what is quite as bad, morbidly sanguine and reckless. Or again, take the case of a woman recovering with tedious slowness from a severe illness, still weak, low in spirits, and under obvious nervous prostration. Take cases such as these, that you never have to go far to find, and ask what of all practicable ways of turning the mountain to business account for their benefit a reasonably refined common-sense would lead you to adopt?

Would you, if you could take the man from his counting-room, the woman from her sick-room, and plant them both as quickly and abruptly as possible before the finest view on the mountain, keep them there till they tired of it, and then send them straightway back again?

Let us try to imagine a better way.

First, then, taking our friends in a carriage, we should find, under wise arrangements, that without going far we could turn into a road leading toward the mountain, by which noisy and jolting pavements would be escaped. In this road there would be no heavy grades to overcome; no street railways to be avoided; no funeral processions to be passed; but the carriage, moving at a steady pace, and with the least occasion to awaken sadness, irritation, anxiety, or impatience, would, in a few moments, have slipped easily out of town, and be passing along a shady, soft, and quiet suburban street, like a village highroad.

This would be lined on one side with cottages, before which trees would be rapidly falling out of lines into groups and spreading from groups [395] into groves. The village would be divided by a pretty open green with a quietly undulating surface, skirting which our road would bend away to avoid too steep a course. Then, getting more and more out of town, it would wind along with gentle curves as the movement of the ground and the openings among the trees should invite. (This may be the Côte Placide of my plan.)

At a fork of the ways the last of the village houses would be passed, the surface grow more diversified, stretches of pasture land would open on both sides, and bits of stoney ground appear. Presently there would be a rocky bank in a dark shade of hemlocks, its base lost in a thicket of brambles, brake, golden-rod, Soloman’s seal, and fringed gentian; preluding the mountain. Then moving along easily higher and higher, the ground would become more rocky, the herbage more tufty, till, at a turn in the road, views through the trees would open: on one side, of distant steeples over houses and gardens; on the other, of a stretch of woodland. (This from the Piedmont.)

Then, going on, the prospect on each side would be more confined, but by glimpses between the trees we should be aware that not far away to the left there was a great picturesque declivity shadowed by hanging woods. Before our attention had been fully fixed in the direction, it would be drawn off by a broad gap among the trees to the right, and we should find that we had already attained a sufficient elevation to command a far view to the northwest. The carriage would stop, and we should look upon a broad country-side with woods and fields, orchards and gardens, farm-houses and village spires, all sloping gently from distant blue hills down to a stream hidden among the trees of the intervening dale. (A peaceful, soothing prospect, this may be cheaply made, in which, though accessible in twenty minutes from the Post Office, and at a third the cost of a visit to the heights, the town may be left far out of sight and further out of mind.)

If it is the first airing of the convalescent here might well be the end of her day’s journey. There would be a little inn near by at which she could rest, or from which she would perhaps be served with warm milk or tea; after which, varying the return road, within an hour from the time of starting, she would be back again in her armchair.

But going on after a few minutes’ halt the scenery would become wilder and more forest-like, and as the road, winding where spurs of the ledge, and heaps of fallen rock, and old water-ways gave opportunity, led higher and higher, but always by easy grades, and, without apparent effort, following a course invited by nature, the trees would stand closer and the roadsides be crowded by underwood. Between and beneath overhanging foliage, glimpses would be caught, on the right, of the near crag-side decked with dark bushy evergreens and draped with creepers, mosses, and blooming Alpine plants; on the other hand, out of deep shade, through chance loopholes of the verdant screen, of a distant gleaming river and a sunny expanse beyond it. (From the Underfell.)

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The crags passed, the underwood becoming more scattered, the wood more open, the road would now lead along a mountain slope of constantly gaining quietness, with gleams of sunlight falling upon ferny dells (the Brackenfell), until again, the tree tops opening to the right and left, the carriage would stop, and over a rapidly declining, bosky surface another outlook would be gained, revealing a lake-like expanse of water lying in a broad valley stretching far away to a faint horizon, beyond which the evening mists would be gathering to receive the declining sun.

After this, the road would presently lead out upon a broad highland valley, all its soft features bathed in sunshine unbroken by foliage (the Glades). From its wooded borders would rise rocky and fir-crested steeps, but crossing the space between them and following near the edge of the northern woods, we should be led, by quiet curves and with an easy ascent, to a position from which having now so long left the city, it would be looked down upon from the brink of a woody cliff. High above its roofs, beyond the harbor with its stately ships, a great champaign would open, broken by a few noble hills, and beyond all, the distant billows of the Adirondacks.

Turning back from this scene which, were it not familiar, might as yet be too strong for our purpose, it would be a relief to course along the edge of woods in which, while the surface is rough and the trees tell the story of much harder exposure than those we have seen below, there are pleasant sheltered and sunny openings in which groups of children will be at play. (The Upperfell.)

Still rising, the road will then lead with more rapid turns along the face of a steeper slope till, wheeling upon the depression of a narrow spur, a northern outlook is gained, with the lower valley of the great river spreading before the eye; that lovely view to which I have before referred.

At the next move, steeper and wilder declivities would be skirted, and the foreground show yet more evidence of elevation and the severity of its winter in the aspects of the rocks and the picturesque character of the vegetation, until with a final rapid turn the carriage would stop at the open porch of a timber-built hospice, so situated upon the highest rock of the mountain that from chairs on its wide galleries the nearest thing to be seen would, on all sides, be a broad mass of tree-top foliage, sloping quietly away in simple undulations of light and shade to a rounded edge distinctly defined against a much lower and more remote middle distance.

Looking over this deep foreground of forest, we should now have before us more extended views in all directions than we had had before in any. Did they offer nothing for our enjoyment but a rolling surface of grass or an endless prospect of desert sand, with only sky and clouds to relieve its monotony of color, the effect would be irresistible. As it is, what element of interest could be added without crowding? What new object of beauty without disturbance? Yet, gradually led up to it from the streets, as I have supposed our friends to be, so that it comes in natural and consistent sequence of the [397] entire preceding experience, the impression could but carry to a still higher point the restful, soothing, and refreshing influence of the entire work.

I deplore my inability to present the purpose which good management of this property would have exclusively before it, in a manner more worthy than that of this scrappy memorandum of what might be offered even to a poor invalid taken up the mountain in a carriage. But in truth, the heart of the argument lies in something which it would be beyond the power of even a gifted writer to represent, and to which not the greatest of landscape painters could nearly do justice.

Yet if you have kindly let your imagination aid me you can hardly fail to see wherein the advantage of the property lies, not simply in the direction in which I have been pointing, as a sanitary influence, but also as an educative and civilizing agency, standing in winning competition against the sordid and corrupting temptations of the town. You can hardly fail to realize how much greater wealth it thus places within your reach than is to be found in the ordinary parks and gardens, not to say the museums and galleries, which are the pride of other cities, and which millions have been thriftily expended to obtain. Nor can you fail to recognize that what remains for your securing of this wealth is not any towering constructions, princely expenditure, or heavy addition to your taxation, but simply moderate ability, though of a special kind, continuously directed in a modest and frugal way by a suitable, sincere, consistent purpose. A purpose in which there shall be no mixture, for instance, of the motives proper to a circus or a variety show, to military parades or agricultural fairs, to race-courses or cemeteries. An intelligent purpose to bring out the latent loveliness of mountain beauty, which you have bought with the property, in such manner as shall make it of the highest distinctive value. Thinking over all that I have advised to be done as an affair of years, take the largest estimate of the cost and trouble of securing what is necessary to it that you can; all I ask is that you think out also what will become of the property, what will be spent and what will be lost, if it shall continue long to be managed with no more distinct purpose, upon no more firmly defined principles of economy, with no sharper limits to the enterprise of successive councils and commissioners (leaping from the ranks to the supreme command of it) than economy has thus far been held to require.

XVIII.

Wisely or unwisely you have bought the property, and must do something with it. You will probably take one of four courses:

1st.   Let it run to waste, in which case your purchase-money will have been misspent.

2d.   Make such ill-considered improvements upon it that your outlay for them will be an addition to that previously misspent.

3d.   Make extravagant improvements, misspending more.

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4th.   Make such substantial, well-devised, economical improvements that the result, as a whole, shall repay the original purchase-money, together with the cost of the improvements, and a fair percentage of profit.

I trust that you will choose to take the last, and that, choosing it, you will find the plan which I have prepared, adapted to aid you in doing so.

Do not think of it as if, by its adoption, you were binding yourselves to carry it out at once, or within any definite period, but as a plan, with reference to which you may, with advantage, organize, direct and restrict any expenditures which you shall hereafter, at any time, think well to make for the improvement of this property.

Do not, above all things, imagine that it can enable you to dispense with the constant exercise of refined discrimination in the determination of working details, any more than with technical skill, or with common administrative and executive ability.

It is no part of my duty to advise you how fast and how far to go on with the work of improvement, but I may suggest that a little desultory cobbling, a touch here and a touch there, and that what may pass for somewhat temporary improvements, are almost sure, not simply to be costly with reference to the value of their designed results, but to make obstructions and embarrassments to the essential permanent improvements that are desirable.

It will even now cost you more to carry out this or any other plan, you may adopt, looking to a permanently satisfactory improvement, and the result will be less valuable than would be the case if you had had the patience to do nothing until you could be sure that every stroke would tell toward a maturely studied comprehensive purpose.

You may, as a matter of convenience, or of necessity, put off for years entering upon well-organized, steady courses, but do not flatter yourselves that you can do so without paying a round penalty. You will find that this is, like any other important business, left at loose ends. The difficulty of getting it into an economical current increases the longer it is pottered with.

To proceed economically, you need to have a small staff of men who are, or who can be trained to be, experts in three or four main divisions of the required service, and, recollect that if these men are well chosen, their value is to increase with every year’s additional special experience in the locality, and that their work is to be continuous work, the value of what they do in one year being relative to what, in doing it, they have intended to do and may do the following year.

These leading men of the work should be under such supervision and discipline as to insure the subordination of all they do to the general ends of the plan, but they should also be allowed, each man within his own field, that measure of discretion which is necessary to induce zealous, continuous effort, and pride and pleasure in its gradually accruing results.

Working with and under this staff, there should be a constant force — a very small force, if you please, at the outset, but a constant force — of men [399] who can be trained and depended on for a variety of services, some of which will never fail to be in request. Such a minimum force, constantly employed, will, in time, accomplish much more than a much larger and costlier average force employed irregularly. Then, having such a constant force as a steady element, to maintain tone and method, you may, as from time to time you feel able and disposed, employ temporarily a much larger force, a great deal more economically than would be otherwise possible.