The log cabin Democrat., 1915-04-27


 of Goethe which have hitherto puzzled, gain full significance: "You may say, paint, describe as you will, but here is more than all' The rav- lsnlng beauty of the sea- the sky, the castle, the cathedral finds no adequate expression. A new earth has dawned and in the land of lovliness self and sense seem to relax and dissolve. The strangeness and the glamor of it, the fragrance of the lemon, the orange and the acacia blossoms, the cataracts of roses falling over the walls and the pergolas, the music, especially that of many little children, all make the wanderer believe that here is beauty which can hardly be borne and never described.
 Yet, ones faculty of admiration cannot be kept long at concert pitch, especially an Americans. His curi- osity so quickly gets the better of him that even as he stops to admire he begins to question, to find some sig nificance, "the reason why" in all that he sees. And so it is that many prac- tical lessons can be learned from the new surroundings, lessons which can be taken home to find some slight i'm pression perhaps on the problems of civic art which for the time being seem to have been left so far behind,
 After the first bewildering excite ment is over, the realization comes that it is unfair to apply too fully standards of European art to our own country, for unlike our cities so very, very young in comparison, these have been, many of them, twenty cen turies or more in the building and the mellowing. Here have lived for ages upon ages men and women of highly developed aesthetic sense upon whom no curve or line of beauty no touch of poetry or romance was ever lost; and as this beauty has existed, so the power to interpret it is race old
 One realizes, however, that this in- herent spirit of the European must, to great degree, teach the Ameri- can, for meet the question as he will he recognizes that in development of the senses, in appreciation of the ar tistic our impulse is still as is natur- al the old world, Greece and Italy particularly. And that he is finding the ideal with characteristic Ameri- can zeal is not to be doubted. Art in our own country has been learning so we'll to subvert nature to her pur- poses that landscape gardening, long neglected, is becoming in many of our cities of equal importance with inter for decoration; and the artistic ar rangement of flowers and shrubs and trees assures us that many of the se- crets of harmony in nature are being taught us by the silent influences of the European.
 Observation and comparison also bring to mind that not only has the interpretation of nature made it's way to our own country, but that the high est types of architecture have been presented. They have found their ex- pression in far off Conway, for many of our homes are constructed along the simple lines of the Ionic or the Corinthian types-models which are as pleasing today as they were ages upon ages ago. Vast differences in our civic art and in theirs impress us. Though space with them is so limited and property of such priceless value, the foreigner allows no mon strous skyscrapers to mar the perfect contour of the landscape. They may I.N f,,1 k,,t %lo of the country must be preserved, what ever the sacrifice.
 While We are too wantonly devas- tating our forests, building so slight ly and unsubstantially, that often in a decade the forest must again be called upon, they conserve their tim Der as far too precious to be destroy ed, and build in brick or stucco, stone or marble. They are too poor, they tell us, to build just for today, the generations to come must also be pro- vided for. In vain one looks for a simple wooden cottage or for roof made of shingles. In a perfect state of preservation was the first hotel in which we slept, an old stone palace overlooking the blue bay of Naples, said to have been thousand years ago the home of one of the Medicis.
 Thrifty Switzerland, somewhat more impressively than other south ern countries, teaches us the two most practical lessons which civic art de- < mands-cleanlines and economy. Her uondarf,I1 mountain citiac cucnap6ad between lake and sky and surrounded by perhaps the most beautiful scen- cry in the world, gain their charm to great extent by their perfect or der and cleanliness, by their complete sanitary arrangement and by reason of the fact that with their inhabi- tants civic pride, or civic righteous