effect. Its clarity, its completeness, its power, will be the result and the measure of the style or character manifested in the whole landscape and in its component parts. Although landscape effect is in many cases so subtle and complicated a thing that it is impossible to determine all the causes that bring it about, it is still a great essential to be sought by the designer, for it is the whole and the only ultimate esthetic value which a landscape can possess. CHAPTER III TASTE, IDEALS, STYLE, AND CHARACTER IN LANDSCAPE TASTE, individual and community - Development of taste "Schools" and tradi- SCAPE CHARACTER. According to the natural constitution of a person's mind, and according to the store of memories which have come to him through experience, he likes certain things and dislikes certain other things. He has inevitably acquired a personal and individual taste. In most people this is not consciously acquired, nor consciously applied, and is to be discovered only by the man's emotional reaction in each individual case. A man may however go consciously to work to define and cultivate his individual taste. Possibly he may analyze his own experiences and determine what it is in each that makes it pleasing or displeasing, so that in time he has found certain laws by which his own likes or dislikes, at any rate, seem to be governed. His taste, so cultivated, might be quite at variance with the taste of his fellows. Actually, however, as man is a very imitative animal, each person is greatly influenced in his likes and dislikes by what he discovers to be the likes and dislikes of his fellows. This is a very deep-seated instinct; and may well trace its origin to the time when similar thinking by the whole tribe was an important means of tribal unity and safety. It comes about, therefore, that if a number of people live together under the same circumstances, they will have the same taste, to a considerable extent, through similarity of experience and through imitation, and so, even without any conscious fostering of taste, there may be com munity or even national taste, recognizable as a fairly constant and definite thing. The taste of individuals and of communities develops, or at any Development rate changes, with time, coördinately with their changing fund of ex- of Taste perience. People with undeveloped and simple minds are likely to prefer obvious effects, bright colors, evident and man-made compositions. As their experience of beautiful things increases, they may come to enjoy more subtle and complicated harmonies, more restrained designs, and develop an esthetic sensitiveness which will enable them to see and enjoy beauty in objects which before would have given them no pleasure.* and Tradition A person's taste may also be developed by being intentionally modeled "Schools on that of another. The taste of some artist or group of artists may become especially noted and may collect a group of disciples following a master and forming a "School." A definite body of taste of this kind tends to perpetuate itself for a considerable time in the same way that community or national taste does. Such traditions of taste for work along definite lines are exceedingly valuable to the progress of art. The individual artist who is willing to base his work on the work of his predecessors can profit by their experience; and the conception on which the school is founded may thus ultimately be carried, perhaps through generations of artists, to its most complete expression. But a school so perpetuated may end by producing nothing but bad work, because its fundamental conception, which was at first a life-giving principle, has been supplanted by some of its mere outward manifestations, some trick of the trade, and has become only a dead formula. Or it may be that the constantly changing needs and thoughts of the community may no longer be expressed by the tradition, so that this dies because it finds no new artists to carry it on. There will always be certain men whose individual likes and dislikes are so strong, whose minds organize their experiences so definitely and so originally, that they refuse to be bound by the common taste of their community. If they have also the gift of artistic expression, and if their ideas prove to be in some measure an expression of the * Cf. the section Experience, Emotion, and Association, Chapter II, p. 12, and reference to Shaler. needs of mankind, perhaps felt before but never given form, they may be acclaimed as geniuses, and may put the stamp of their personality on a new school, which will arise and do its work, and eventually in its turn be supplanted by some other conception of art. But not all such innovations are improvements. Many of these conceptions, based on some insignificant consideration or some evanescent public fancy, may be worthy of the name of nothing more than fashions or fads. Taste may be deliberately developed by teaching. Wherever any professional instruction is given in a fine art, such as landscape architecture, the teacher may strive to cultivate the taste of his pupil in one of two ways. He may in each problem under discussion give his own judgment, and say categorically that in his opinion such a solution is good, such another bad; and by noting enough such decisions, the pupil may be able to learn what the taste of the teacher is and to know what his decision would probably be in a new case. On the other hand the teacher may point out in each problem what he considers to be the important elements, and allow the pupil to make his own decision, which the constitution of his own mind inevitably brings about. In this way, too, the pupil should ultimately develop a definite and consistent taste; but it will be his own taste, based less on a cold intellectual memory of another man's decisions, and more on his own natural esthetic preferences. There is little question that the second of these methods is usually much the better. The purpose of the artist is to express to the beholders through his work of art ideas and emotions with which he has been previously impressed in his experience. The critic on the other hand endeavors to understand the work of the artist, to discover the esthetic principles on which its effect is based, and to explain these principles to others so that they may better understand the artist's work and get more pleasure from it. Thus the critic, too, is concerned in having the beholder impressed with the emotion expressed by the artist, but the critic's own work expresses not so much esthetic emotion as intellectual truth. He interprets the design intellectually by setting it forth in its logical. relations.* *"The three types of criticism which I have called classical, romantic, and scientific the three sorts of critics, described by me as judges, showmen, natural histori |