THE art of landscape is wholly a modern art. It is but recently, indeed, that it could with any plausibility prefer a claim to a place among the arts; as it is but recently that any serious attempt has been made to reduce it to any artistic principles.

It is more than any other of the fine arts, perhaps, an art of peace. Only where civil quietness and security, and consequent domestic enjoy ment, reign in a high degree, can it well be cultivated. The warlike Greek, while he carried other arts of design to the highest perfection, never dreamed of expressing "immortal sentiments and divine ideas" in landscape; for the sentiments and ideas most appropriate to such expression, were in a great measure by his social habits and condition driven from his bosom. He could chisel sentiments of courage and heroic endurance in forms of matchless beauty, for they were sentiments which his condition was every way fitted to develope and strengthen; and such products of his constructive genius were not so liable to perish in an age of incessant strife and war. The sculptor found in the solid and enduring marble, the fittest material in which both to embody the commanding ideas of his age-an age of martial heroism, and also safely to enshrine the workings of that anticipating genius which can find in nothing short of immortality its end and satisfaction. The reigning ideas of such an age naturally delighted, too, for

We think it time to drop a part of the cumbersome expression, landscapegardening, and designate the art hence forth directly from the material on which it is employed. Justified as the designation is, by abundant philological analogies, use will soon wear off whatever of harshness or strangeness may appear at first in the expression.

the same reason, in the massive stateliness, the solidity and firmness of architectural forms.

Hence in the two departments of sculpture and architecture, Grecian art particularly developed and perfected itself.

How uncongenial both with the material and the sentiments proper to the art of landscape, was such an age and such ideas. This art is the expression more of domestic seclu sion and tranquillity,-of the mild, the gentle, the yielding graces. It implies a state of civil and social security and confidence. Strong-walled towns thronged with a population seeking protection and defense on the one hand, and waste, deserted fields on the other; states condensed into cities, and cities the common and fit designations of states; aggressive warfare for its own sake, the prime element and characteristic feature of all state-polity and all state-policy; society in its inmost structure clannish, if not Ishmaelitish, and in its actual outworkings marauding, pillaging, wasting, even the humble art of agriculture hardly reached in growth the measure of mere necessary wants, and a welltilled, well-stocked field was regarded as a rare and admirable achiev ment of energy and skill. The kitchen-garden of Alcinous, Homer paints with a poet's enthusiasm, as if a prodigy of art; and in later times, Plutarch gives us but a sorry view of the development of taste in this direction, when he tells us the common practice in ornamental gardens was, to set off the beauties of roses and violets by intermingled leeks and onions.

Roman life, at certain periods of its history, admitted more readily the culture of the art. But those periods were periods of luxury and prodigality; and Roman gardens

were rather exhibitions of lavish profusion in proprietors, than of true taste in artists. Mechanical skill was not undervalued; but it rose no higher than bare imitation. The highest name that the Romans could give an artist in landscape, was one that designated mere skill in training and paring vegetable growths in to curious shapes The topiarius The topiarius was first and chief in the art; and his most admired works were monsters sheared out in the spray of shrubbery and trees. Elevated and pure as was their taste for natural scenery, and rich and glowing as are the descriptions given of it by their poets, yet the Romans seem never to have conceived of the possibility of true garden and field decoration.

Among the ancients, the art of landscape rose hardly to the first stage of development. It did not gain admittance even into their conceptions as an art by itself.

During the barbarous ages that succeeded the decline of Roman civilization, when every existing art perished, it was not to be expected that a new art, much less an art emphatically of peace, should arise. While the soil was tilled, and lords and bishops decorated to some extent their palaces and their courts, still no proper art of landscape had existence. Indeed the very name of the art has a significant historic import. While other arts have derived their names as their origin from classic times, this art proclaims its recent nativity in the name it has taken from our own expressive vernacular.

We are to date the birth of the art, in its proper sense, down as late as the sixteenth century. Since that time it has been cultivated at periods with great ardor and success. In its progress, like other arts, it has had its schools-its specific phases and characteristics, determined to it by the character of the age or people by which it has been cultivated. It will not be irrelevant to our ob

ject to enumerate and describe in brief terms, the several prominent stages by which the progress of the art has been characterized. It will be seen at once from the description, that these stages naturally succeed each other;-that not only was the order in which they successively appeared such as was to have been anticipated beforehand, but that each subsequent phase of the art was induced and determined by the preceding. These several stages areThe French or Geometric; The Chinese or Pseudo-natural; The modern English or Picturesque; to which we may add as the last and highest, but yet to be realized

The Expressive or True Artistic.

The French or Geometric is the first in order of nature, as it was first to appear in time. Even the Romans, here and there, seem almost to have attained this stage. Regularity, straight lines, plane angles, proportion, are the first, most unequivocal deviations from irreg ular nature. Nothing so decisively indicates that reason, more or less perfect, has been at work, than a straight line. It tells us at once that rude nature has been met and overcome; and as art pleases us ever, even rude art, as compared only with wild, unreduced nature, rectilinear streets and walks give naturally a pleasing effect. If a higher culture of the taste experi ences no such pleasure, but even disgust at the square and compass landscape, it is only because it compares it with a higher, more truly artistic method. The less cultivated taste is satisfied; for it has no conception of a higher form of the art. And the first awakenings of the æsthetic spirit should not be frowned upon because not mature and per fect. If the straight-lined sculpture of Egypt is despicable by the side of the free Grecian art, it is not so by the side of utter barbarism. If it was much to rise from the stiff

Egyptian to the graceful Grecian, it was more to wake up art from the dead sleep of barbarism, and give it real although immature life.

Illustrations of the geometric style of landscape, are found every where in the first awakenings of taste. The traveler in France meets it at every turn. In city and in country alike, in garden and park, orchard and forest, we find nothing but straight lines. The magnificent entrance into the city of Paris, and its copy, the entrance into Milan in Lombardy-the bold conception and work of Napoleon-fill every mind with admiration. Here true artistic propriety demands the rectilinear style; and hence the highest and truest taste is satisfied. In Great Britain, also, are to be found not unfrequent specimens of this style; the remains, perhaps, of French influence on the English mind in past ages. It would have been well if it had reached, also, some of the high roads whose serpentine course now awakens in the hasting traveler other emotions than those of æsthetic pleasure. In our own country we find it every where in place and out of place. It is not seldom in place; for, as already intimated, the geometric style of landscape is sometimes required by true principles of taste. Order, regularity, system, are the first principles of city life; and these are expressed properly and naturally in rectilinear forms. Many of our towns are thus appropriately and beautifully laid out and decorated. But we find this style, also, in places altogether unmeet. An infantile taste, dissatisfied with the absence of all art, and yet incapable of rising to the true and perfect, reaches the first stage only, and is content. It has no conception of any higher, and of course does not seek it nor miss it. Hence every where, we find alike, yard and garden, cemetery and common, all laid off by rod and chain. Fences, trees, shrubs, walks, all range; and poor,

passive nature, who had done her best to mold her features into smiles of ease and grace, is scraped and shorn and sliced under the hard rule of level and plummet, till she literally gives up the ghost-is reduced to mere unexpressive matter. Art has triumphed over nature, indeed; but in so doing has destroyed itself. Instead of living, expressive art, it has become spiritless artifice. Free invention, the true soul of art, has given place to mere mathematical formulas; and ingenious execution has become mere mechanical skill, the drudge of models and numbers.

It was not to be expected that the free spirit of man would rest satisfied with this utter annihilation of natural expressiveness and beauty, in an endeavor only to make it more perfect. It is not, perhaps, surprising that in its effort to correct itself, so obviously in the wrong, it should fall back on the opposite extreme. Indeed, the Chinese or Pseudo-natural style was rationally to be expected as the second stage in the progress and development of the art. The mechanical stiffness of the rectilinear style, so utterly opposed both to the character of the material of the art-living nature,

and also to the character of the sentiments for the most part to be expressed by it, naturally drove men in their dissatisfaction with it, to the closest imitation possible of irregular nature. The compass and the chain were now rejected. Every thing was to be done as it should happen, just as it was supposed to take place in nature. At least, nature was to be imitated as exactly as possible; and the standard of perfection in the art was the utter concealment of all art. The Chinese carried out the principles of this style to the farthest extent and most consistently. The landscape, under the hands of the artist, was to be a perfect miniature of the natural world. There were to be rivers

and lakes and grottoes and valleys and mountains and precipices and cascades-in short, every thing that is found in nature. As in nature, there are contrasts, so in the park and garden, there must be jagged cliffs hanging over luxuriant flowergardens; gentle rivulets suddenly changing into mountain torrents; retired groves permeated by navigable canals; broad rivers disappearing in the earth; the wildest desolation succeeded by the highest cultivation. While nothing was to be introduced that might not be found in the natural world, nothing that was to be found there was out of place in the landscape. Hence old, dilapidated mills were put upon the streams; lightning-struck and half consumed buildings were thrown in here and there; dead trees were transplanted, and decayed logs dragged in, and all to be more true to

nature.

There was much that was plausi. ble in this view of the art of landscape. It shunned the repugnant features of the mechanical or geometrical school. It admitted of a show of art in the lower sense of the indication of human ingenuity and skill. Indeed, the landscape created by these principles, evinced often admirable accuracy of observation and finish of execution. It was, however, only the geometrical eye of the practical engineer that measures accurately distances and angles, and the skill of the mere mechanic that works by models.

The principles of this style, more over, were easily applied. There was no need of plan or study of effect. The whole work was to proceed hap-hazard-precisely after the supposed course of nature. Seeds of future shrubs and trees were to be dropped just where it was most convenient at the time to dispose of them. Enclosures could be made any where and in any shape. Groves, orchards, streams, every thing, were to be disposed as the merest chance

should dictate. In fact, the ex tremest stupidity and indolence were pretty sure to succeed as well as the utmost study and labor.

The theory itself, too, sounded well. What better than to imitate nature-the great product of divine skill? How better can nature speak than in the way the God of nature has bidden her speak? Is not every style opposed to this, necessarily unnatural, and therefore irrational and absurd? Is it not the very design and end of landscape to express the loveliness and harmony which the natural world expresses; and how can this be done but by exactly imi. tating nature?

The reasoning, at least, has proved conclusive with many minds. In Great Britain, not merely among the unthinking and unpracticed, but both among the theorists and the practi cal artists, this style has found extensive advocacy and patronage. Even Kent, the parent of the mod. ern English landscape, with all his high training as an artist, adopted it, with some modifications which his taste as a professional painter forced him unconsciously to introduce, in all his landscapes, and carried it out to the last of its principles. Even Kent was Chinese enough to set out dead trees to imitate nature. And Lord Kames dwells on the description of the style with unconcealed satisfaction. Some modern writers regard it as the true art of landscape, and seem to imagine that the only alternative of rejecting it is to embrace the repulsive stiffness of the French method.

The reasoning by which the theory is supported need not be se verely investigated in order that its sophistry and fallaciousness should be discovered. It has precisely the plausibility and conclusiveness, and no more, of that of the musical dreamer who, setting out with the position that all harmony of sweet sounds is in nature, should hence conclude at once that the only true

way of producing it by man is to congregate all sound-uttering things in the natural world, and by force or persuasion put all together on one grand musical effort: and the effect of this Chinese art of landscape on a truly refined taste, is much the same that we might imagine the effect to be on a well-harmonized ear of such a burst and swell of utter ance from all that is noise-making in the living and material universe.

The transition from this method to the picturesque or modern English was easy and natural. It was readily seen and felt that not all of nature was beautiful; at least that the grand and lovely of the great actual world could not be daguerreotyped into a garden. The idea of expression was now fully developed; and there was no danger of falling back upon the unexpressiveness of the rectilinear style. Na ture was not to be utterly destroyed in landscape, nor yet servilely copied in her mere outward dress, and that by fragments and rents. The study of nature had discovered that she had a voice by which she could reach the heart, and that the way to feel the true force of her varied tones, was not to crowd all her utterances together, and thus turn what was sweet and harmonious by itself into an element of harsh discord; but to search out her most perfect individ. ual harmonies, and transfer them where their effect could be freely experienced. Claude Lorraine and the two Possinos had shown how the harmonies of the natural world could be displayed on canvas ;-not by exact, servile imitation of any one natural scene, but by combina tion of what was perfect and lovely as found feature by feature, in diverse scenes; and the art of landscape, now, for the first time, advancing into the field of true art, taking its measure and its rule from the canvas, demanded congruous combination, and required all to be subservient to harmonious effect.

In the geometric school, the landscape was conceived and planned from its outlines on paper as laid off by scale and dividers; in the Chinese, plans were all laid aside, and the landscape grew up in all the freedom and unconstraint of unconscious nature, or what amounted to the same, nature was the copy and the landscape was the miniature; now the landscape was conceived and planned, not from maps nor from the actual world, but from the imagined representation in color and in crayon. At first straight lines alone were to rule, then no lines at all, at least none imaginary or artificial, and now the lines of perspective, light and shade, and harmo nious coloring. The guide and rule was simply harmonious effect. While the map-like precision, the stiffness and leanness of the rectilinear school, gave place to a picturesque richness and variety, the contrasts and surprises in which the Chinese delighted also gave way to that harmonious composition, which is a first and indispensable characteristic of true art.

This style may be denominated the modern English, to distinguish it from that which prevailed in Great Britain before the times of Knight and Price; or the Picturesque, as indicating the point from which the view of the art is taken, and from which it is judged. It is the style now generally recognized by the numerous writers on the art, and by most of the professed artists in landscape. One of the latest and best writers of this school, is Mr. Downing; whose works, every where characterized by a refined taste and sound judgment, have greatly contributed to the improvement of landscape in this country, and are every where justly esteem. ed of the highest authority. The following extracts from his leading work on this subject, exhibit in brief the conception of the art as now for the most part entertained here and