of plants growing in New England gardens three hundred years ago to a discourse on the "Roses of Yesterday," old time favorites thrust into the background by the latest creations of the rose grower. Mrs. Earle's book is pleasantly discursive. Its very lack of haste is one of the things that helps it to seize so perfectly the spirit of an earlier time. I Mr. Lowell's book, "American Gardens," treats the subject from the architect's point of view, yet with fairness and with an evident sense of the fact that there may be other points of view from which it may be seen with advantage. His essay is a brief one, partly historical, largely critical, serving as an introduction to a series of plates which show the fairest achievements of formal gardening in America, whether before the dominance of the landscape school or since the revival of the formal method. The subjects are wisely chosen and the value of the photographic views is greatly enhanced by sketch plans which accompany them. To those unfamiliar with the great strides made by garden design in America within the last five years, the book will prove a revelation of beauty of which they have not dreamed. In looking broadly over the field of garden design in America at the present day, we see the two old forces striving for the mastery just as they have striven these many years. On the one hand, we have the formal designers, for the most part architects, earnest that the effect of their work shall not be ruined by the juxtaposition of the work of others untrained in the arts of design, or trained in a school utterly at variance with their own. However skilful as designers, the architects find themselves, with the rarest exceptions, handicapped by their lack of knowledge of plants, a knowledge to be gained only by years of patient study. However delightful the general arrangement of the architect's garden, his planting plan, if he be so ill-advised as to attempt one unaided, is generally a thing for laughter. a thing for laughter. On the other hand, our professional landscape gardeners, skilful as they may be in (1) American Gardens. 112 plates. 934" x 12". Edited by Guy Lowell, Architect. 31 PP. the design of park-like areas, fail with scarcely an exception, when their work has to be seen in association with architecture. Strong as they may be in their knowledge of plants, their training has been too one-sided, too lacking in sustained effort at the solution of great problems in design, to enable them to deal successfully with one of the most important phases of their work. Their way of solving the problem of the transition from the purely formal lines of a building to the purely informal lines of the landscape about it, has consisted too largely in an attempt to ignore the formality of the building and to glorify the informality of the landscape. But it is reasonable to believe that a set of men, better trained for the practice of garden design than are either the architects or the landscape gardeners, will shortly be among us. The demand creates its own supply. Already there are young men well-trained in design who are taking up the serious study of horticulture and vice versa. Our schools of landscape architecture are prepared to give, and are giving us, well-rounded men who need only a few years of practical experience to demonstrate that they are capable of raising their art to a higher level than it has ever before reached in America. THE IDEA OF BEAUTY ETHEL D. PUFFER, Cambridge, Mass. The Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; today we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of æsthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation, is, no doubt, easily to be understood. But while this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity unassailable; and it is permitted us to question whether the addition of an independent element of expression to the older definition of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art. It Such an inquiry, however, cannot stop with the relation of the deeper meanings of modern art to the conception of beauty. must go further and find out what elements, the sensuous form or the ideas that are bound up with it, in a work of art, of the classical as well as of the idealistic type, really constitute its æsthetic value. What is it that makes the beauty of the Venus of Milo? Is it the pose and the modeling, or the idea of the eternal feminine. that it expresses to us? What is it that makes the beauty of St. Mark's or of Giotto's tower? the relation of the lines and Copyright, 1902, by Frederick A. Richardson. masses or the sacred significance of the edifice they go to form? What is it that makes the beauty of the Ninth Symphony? the perfection of the melodic sequence, or the Hymn of Joy, the message from the Infinite which they are meant to utter? The antithesis between these two points of view is, of course, not the same as that other antithesis between "art for art's sake" and art in the light of its moral meanings and effects. What we now call romantic or expressive art can certainly be made the more fruitful in moral suggestions; but this fact bears not at all on the question of what belongs fundamentally to the nature of beauty. We know, moreover, that on this matter the camps of the formalists and the romanticists are divided. The Greeks, the lovers of formal beauty, were so alive to the moral effects of art that their theories were in danger of being quite overwhelmed by this view. On the other hand, the idealists in art, the natural enemies, as one would have thought, of art for art's sake, have been most often impatient of any consideration of its moral elements or effects. This second question, then, of art as pleasure or as moral influence can be once for all excluded from the discussion of the Idea of Beauty. So far as yet appears, the issue is between form and expression. There is, perhaps, some point of common agreement from which to survey and distinguish more exactly these two diverging tendencies. Such a coign of vantage is offered by the nature of the aesthetic attitude, for since Kant there has been among æstheticians no essential difference of opinion on this point. The æsthetic attitude, all agree, is disinterested. We care for the image or appearance of the object, for the way its form affects us, and not for the actual existence of the object itself. If I delight æsthetically in a cluster of grapes, I do not want to eat them, but only to enjoy their image, and my feeling of pleasure, as æsthetic, would not be changed if before me were only a mirage, an hallucination, or a picture. It is just the pleasure in perception that appeals to me,-therein both schools agree, -and the only matter at issue is the question of what this disinterested pleasure of perception includes. Is that pleasure bound up with the powers of perception itself, or does it come from the end of the process and the ease with which it is reached, from the idea, in the contemplation of which we delight? One school asserts that the real pleasure in perception comes only from form. The given object is beautiful, through its original qualities of line, color, or sound, which strike the special senses in a way that is pleasing to them; and through its combinations of these qualities, which affect the whole human organism in a directly pleasurable way. What is outside of the given object of art,—is meant, suggested, or recalled by it,-belongs, it is said, to absolutely unæsthetic processes, as is shown by the fact that many things, which we are the first to acknowledge as ugly, are the exciting cause of great thoughts and delightful associations. The opposed school maintains that the meanings of a work of art are all that it exists for. The presentation of an idea, by whatever sensuous means, so only that they be transparent, and the joy of the soul in contemplating this idea, must be the object and the end of art. The later idealists admit value to the form only in so far as it may express, convey, symbolize, or suggest the content, whether as pure idea, or as a shadowing forth of the Divine World-Meaning. These theories are certainly intelligible; but the results of applying them with logical consistency are rather terrifying. Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces. Yet if we allow the idealists to pass sentence, what shall become of our treasures in "Khubla Khan," or "Ueber Allen Gipfeln," or "La Nuit de Décembre"? The results of such a judgment day would be even more appalling to the true lover of poetry. Moreover, if the idea, the end of art, need not reside in the object. itself, but may arise therefrom by subtle suggestion, the complications of poetry or painting are unnecessary. A geometric |