Economic single arguments for their existence.* The designer should also have in mind minor ethical considerations, and avoid in his design such arrangements as might serve as temptation to ill-doing. But the ethical value in landscape work is to be obtained only through the esthetic and economic value of the objects created, and so ethical unity, while a moving force, is seldom a directly governing consideration in landscape design. The great majority of the objects which man makes take their shapes, as they take their names, from their fitness to some economic purpose. It is difficult for man to refrain from attempting to invest them with some beauty, but the first cause of their creation is their use. The primary value of such objects is their ability to satisfy a physical need; they give a man warmth or light or shelter or whatever one of the innumerable satisfactions he is for the instant engaged in winning from the surrounding world. The well-considered fitness of a thing to its use gives a pleasure beyond the pleasure of the use, beyond the mere knowledge that this pleasure is possible: an intellectual pleasure in the completeness of the organization of the thing itself. Also, the completeness of physical organization which makes an object serve well its economic purpose is very apt to manifest itself in such a relation of part to part that the object gives also esthetic pleasure. No example of this is better than the often-quoted sailing ship.‡ *“. . . Every evil to which men are specially liable when living in towns, is likely to be aggravated in the future, unless means are devised and adapted in advance to prevent it." "Is it doubtful that it does men good to come together . . . in pure air and under the light of heaven, or that it must have an influence directly counteractive to that of the ordinary hard, hustling working hours of town life?" "The question remains whether the contemplation of beauty in natural scenery is practically of much value in counteracting and alleviating these evils. . . . I do not propose to argue this question . . . for if the object of parks is not that thus suggested, I know of none which justifies their cost." F. L. Olmsted, Sr., Public Parks, 1902, pp. 32, 40–41, 113-114. (See References.) † Cf. What would be fair must first be fit, reprinted in Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, pp. 549-553. (See References.) Cited by F. L. Olmsted, Jr., as "an example used by my father in discussing village improvement," in City Planning: an Introductory Address, pp. 31-32 in Proceedings of National Conference on City Planning, 1910. Also published separately by the American Civic Association. We are to some degree concerned with unity in the fields of logic and Esthetic Unity ethics, and, since we are practitioners of an applied art and a profession, we have, almost as a constant factor, the economic element of use in all our designs; nevertheless, since we are practitioners of a fine art, our field is that of esthetics, and unity in this field is our especial concern. and As we have found, the artist in the course of his life receives many Esthetic impressions from external objects which he calls beautiful, that is, he Expression perceives with pleasure the unity of certain relations within these ob- Impression jects, and he stores up in his mind the memory of the pleasurable relations. When he designs, when he sets out to produce a pleasurable emotion in the mind of some one else who shall behold the object which he makes, he arranges or organizes the parts of this object according to these remembered relations; that is, he expresses in his design those relations with which he has himself been previously impressed. And the pleasurable emotion in the mind of the beholder arises from his perception of this organization, of this subjection to a common law, of this unity of the relation of the parts of the object. The state of mind of the observer might be exactly the same if the pleasurable relations which he finds to exist in the thing observed had come there purely by accident and not by design. It is the observer's perception, his own organization of the relations, that causes his pleasure. In this sense, then, a thing which is perceived to be unified and organized may be said to express to the mind of the observer this unity and organization; and in the field of esthetics, completeness of this expression, perception of complete esthetic organization with its necessarily accompanying pleasurable emotion, is what we call beauty. Actually, we objectify this pleasurable perception and we attribute it as a quality to an object, calling such an object beautiful, just as we objectify our perceptions of yellowness and roundness, which go to make our percept of an orange, and call the orange round and yellow. And so, speaking objectively, objects are called beautiful which have a physical organization such that their characteristics cause this perfect synthesis. We will, then, define beauty for our purposes, in the terms of the Definition Italian philosopher Croce,* as "successful expression," " complete of Beauty * Benedetto Croce, Estetica come Scienza dell' Espressione e Linguistica generale, Milano, 1902. English translation by Douglas Ainslee. spiritual esthetic synthesis," that is, perception of complete esthetic organization. Beauty is thus complete unity of organization; ugliness is lack of unity. If a thing has beauty, but fails of being absolutely beautiful, it can in every case be shown that such beauty as it has is beauty of certain parts or aspects which are in themselves perfectly unified. Beauty can exist in one degree only, perfect beauty; ugliness, being disunity, can exist in all degrees, from what might be called beauty with a flaw to disunity so complete that the mind can hardly grasp the dissimilar mass of detail as forming one entity at all. Many definitions of beauty make it not a perceptive synthesis, as we have just said, but an emotion. Professor Santayana, for instance, says, "Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing."* The difference is, we believe, purely one of statement. Any perception is inevitably attended with an emotion, pleasurable or otherwise, this emotion being in a great majority of cases so slight as not to be noticed. As the unity of an object becomes more and more evident, the ease and completeness of the synthesis arising from unity of impressions, and consonance of these with the mental content - becomes greater, and the consequent pleasurable emotion becomes stronger. Thus a beautiful object, that is, an object so organized as to cause a complete synthesis in the observer's mind, should be perceived with the greatest possible amount of this kind of pleasure. And as the act of perception is in itself commonly unconscious, it is this pleasurable emotion which attracts our attention as the essence of beauty. The pleasure accompanying the formation of a percept is greater as this percept fits more completely the ideal for this particular kind of percept existing already in the mind of the beholder. The more nearly complete the unity of this percept and its subjection to its own ruling law, the more nearly it usually fits this ideal, since this ideal is normally formed under the same law. It is emphasis of this aspect of the perception of beauty that has given rise to definitions of beauty as approximation to an ideal. The conception of beauty as approximation to an ideal or standard has caused people to believe that there must be universal standards of beauty to which objects must conform George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1896. * to be beautiful; but this overlooks the fundamental fact that the standards for each observer come from his own experience of the world, depend on the constitution of his own mind, and are therefore inevitably different for each observer. * When a man has perceived objects of the same class many times, Types he discovers (not necessarily consciously) that there are certain characteristics always pertaining to examples of this particular class of object, while other characteristics are only occasionally and, as it were, accidentally present. Thus he forms in his mind a type of this particular object, that is, a memory of the average, a sort of composite photograph, which he uses thereafter in perceiving examples of the class. But the characteristics of this type are not a mathematical average of the observed essential characteristics of all examples; they are modified, exaggerated, in the direction in which the attention and interest of the observer lies; commonly, therefore, they are modified in the direction of their ability to give pleasure. A type the characteristics of which have been modified as far as is Ideals possible for the observer in the direction of perfect unity, consequently in the direction of pleasure, is called an ideal.* This ideal may be entirely the product of the experience of the individual observer, but each man observes what are the ideals of his fellow-men, and it is a human characteristic for each individual to be deeply influenced by these ideals, and to modify his own ideals toward accordance with them. Thus there arise class or social ideals, but it is plain that there is nothing universal or ultimate about them; they are merely composites of individual ideals, which in turn are merely modified composites of individual experiences. There can therefore be in the ideal no characteristic which has not been perceived in some degree in the experience of the observer. This ideal or idealized type, we may observe, is the result of perceptive synthesis according to some definite scheme; in a sense, indeed, we might say that the ideal itself is another name for the best scheme of organization of the qualities of the object and their mental effect which the observer knows. The ideals, therefore, in each man's mind, being the results of his own modes of synthesis, differ from man to man as men's modes of synthesis differ. * Santayana, Sense of Beauty. Taste and Style Landscape Character Landscape Taste is the name for the mode of this esthetic synthesis. The mode of organization by which a designer perceives and synthesizes will be the mode of organization which can be perceived in his work as a designer. This perceived mode of organization is called the de/signer's style, and thus a designer's style is merely the objectified expression of his taste. Taste is involved in the appreciation of beauty; style, in the creation of beauty. The artist must first have the power to appreciate, to perceive organization, but he must have also the power to express, to put his idea into physical form (speech, action, written word, work of sculpture, architecture, landscape architecture), so that some one else can perceive with pleasure the organization on which his work of art is based. Just as we can recognize in a man-created object a mode of esthetic organization which expresses the taste of the designer and which we call style, so may we recognize in an example of natural scenery a mode of esthetic organization which is a result of the operation of the forces of nature not guided by man, and which we may call character. Perfection of esthetic organization manifested in landscape character is just as potent a source of beauty as is perfection of esthetic organization manifested in style; but its appreciation often demands a more highly developed esthetic sensitiveness and greater keenness of perception, because its organization is likely to be of a more complicated and less obvious kind. Every object in the world, then, which has style, or character, or their perfection in some aspect — beauty beauty thereby arouses in us a corresponding emotion; but every object has a further emotional effect, partly due at times to less characteristic attributes of the object, even perhaps to very transitory and unessential conditions, and always varying in some degree with our mental attitude. There is in us a general emotional reaction to the whole experience and its associations, which in its totality we feel as a mood, or state of mind. When this mood is at all definite, we are likely to attribute it as a quality — by a sort of personification -to the object which immediately causes it, and, for instance, to call a landscape peaceful, smiling, majestic, gloomy, as the case may be. This total emotional reaction, commonly attributed to the landscape as a quality, we shall call landscape |
