Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/214

204 and the deformity it occasions, and also to the ostentation of the wealth or station of the owner. "It is a substitution of little things for great when we would put a whole country into a nobleman's livery," he says with spirit, and, declaring that the laying out of grounds is a liberal art not unlike poetry and painting, he goes on to protest against the monopoly of nature by the great ones of the earth, upon high æsthetic grounds. "No liberal art," he says, "aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a class; the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does so.... If this be so when we are merely putting together words or colors, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when we are in the midst of the realities of things.... What, then, shall we say of many great mansions with their unqualified expulsion of human creatures from their neighborhood, happy or not—houses which do what is fabled of the upas tree—that they breathe out death and desolation?" These strictures on the aristocratic handling of land he continues for some pages in an interesting advocacy of æsthetic communism—still a suggestive topic. This sense of the beauty and