STUDY AND READING
Again in the nineties, when Mr. Olmsted was thinking over and
analyzing his early experiences in their effect on his subsequent
professional work, there is a letter to an old friend, a lady, which
shows especially his turn of mind in youth and some of his self-chosen
readings:
I am thinking that of all the young men you know, I was the least
likely to do what I have, and that you cannot know or guess in what
way I was led to it. Nor can you know what is most prominently in my
mind when I refer to these doings. I need not conceal from you that
I am sure that the result of what I have done is to be of much more
consequence than any one else but myself supposes. As I travel, I
see traces of influences spreading from it that no one else would
detect, which if given any attention by others, would be attributed to
“fashion.” There are, scattered through the country, seventeen large
public parks, many more smaller ones, many more public or semi-public
works, upon which, with sympathetic partners or pupils, I have been
engaged. After we have left them, they have, in the majority of
cases, been more or less barbarously treated, yet as they stand, with
perhaps a single exception, they are a hundred years ahead of any
spontaneous public demand, or of the demand of any notable cultivated
part of the people. And they are having an educative effect perfectly
manifest to me--a manifestly civilizing effect. I see much indirect
and unconscious following of them. It is strange how often I am asked:
“Where did you get that idea?” as if an original idea on the subject
had not been expected. But I see in new works of late much evidence
of effects of invention--comprehensive design; not always happy, but
symptomatically pleasing. Then I know that I shall have helped to
educate in a good American school a capital body of young men for my
profession,--all men of liberal education and cultivated minds. I know
that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised
my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of
a liberal profession, an art, an art of design. I have been resolute
in insisting that I am not to be dealt with as a mere agent of my
clients, but as a councillor, a trustee, _on honor_. I have always
refused to take employment on other terms, and when it has appeared
that I must do so or yield the point, I have seven times already
resigned the charge of important and interesting works. It is what I
have done in these respects, and what I see of the indirect effect on
the standing of my profession and the progress of my art, that leads
me to write to you after so many years, in the self-complacent way
that I do. This, rather than anything you have seen, or of which you
have read.
I was saying that of the young men, comradic young men, that you knew,
I was the last to have been expected to lead such a life as I have.
I was strangely uneducated,--mis-educated. Because of an accident
putting my eyes in some peril, I was at the most important age left to
“run wild,” and when at school, mostly as a private pupil in families
of country parsons of small, poor parishes, it seems to me that I was
chiefly taught how not to study,--how not to think for myself. I tried
to learn Euclid by rote, without trying to understand what it meant.
While my mates were fitting for college, I was allowed to indulge my
strong natural propensity for roaming afield and day dreaming under
a tree. The year before John entered college, I went to sea before
the mast. It was soon after my return from China that I first met you
and you lifted me a good deal out of my constitutional shyness and
helped more than you can think to rouse a sort of scatter-brained
pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding,
and mis-education were not such bars to an “intellectual life” as I
was in the habit of supposing. Or, if this is too personal, let me
say that, through visiting at your house the first winter I was at
New Haven with John, I was given a turn, not to study, but toward an
“intellectual life” to which I feel that nearly all that I have been
saying complacently of my doings is to be remotely attributed. You
will smile of my thinking of you at all as a mentor, especially in a
literary way, if you remember a certain Christmas present that you
gave me: (It was burned thirty years afterwards with some heirlooms,
autograph letters of Washington and Webster and other treasures).
But in some way in which you had to do, I was led up at that time to
Emerson, Lowell and Ruskin, and other real prophets who have been
familiar friends ever since. (Here they are on my bed-table). And
these gave me the needed respect for my own constitutional tastes and
an inclination to poetical refinement in the cultivation of them that
afterwards determined my profession. Yet that is not quite fair, for I
had had two lifts in the same direction before. One, when I had heard
my father reading the books of travel in New England of President
Dwight, Professor Silliman and Miss Martineau, in all of which the
observations on scenery with which I was familiar had helped to make
me think that the love of nature, not simply as a naturalist but as a
poet loves it, was respectable. The other, when, yet a boy, I found
in the Hartford Public Library certain books, which it is a strange
thing that I should have looked into; stranger that I should have
assimilated as much as, when re-reading them perhaps twenty years
afterwards, I found that I had. They were Price on the _Picturesque_
and Gilpin on _Forest Scenery_,--books of the last century, but which
I esteem so much more than any published since, as stimulating the
exercise of judgment in matters of my art, that I put them into the
hands of my pupils as soon as they come into our office, saying,
“You are to read these seriously, as a student of law would read
Blackstone.”
Of Mr. Olmsted’s early reading we have several accounts in letters
written at the time.
There is a letter to Fred. Kingsbury in which Fred. Olmsted enumerates
“Books to Read.”
MORAL PHILOS: “Butler’s Sermons,” (recommended by Dr. Chalmers,
Sir James Mackintosh, Arnold, Pycroft and others). In place of
it, “Sewell’s Chstn. Morals”; “Abercrombie’s Philos. of Moral
Feeling” (brief and comprehensive); “Foster’s Essay on Decision
of Character.” MENTAL PHILOS: “Abercrombie on the Intellectual
Powers, and the Investigation of Truth”; “Combe’s Constitution.”
POLITICAL PHILOS: “Miss Martineau’s Tales,” (I suppose they are to
Polit. Philos. similar to Historic Novels to History); “Whately”
[Richard]; “M’Culloch’s Principles”; “The Encyclopedia” (Rent,
tax, etc.); “Jefferson”; “The Federalist, etc.”; ART: “Abstract of
Sir Josh. Reynolds’ discourses”; “Abstract of Pilkington’s Lives
of Painters”--(Visit collection in compy. with an artist); “Allan
Cunningham’s British Painters”--Sculpture--Encyclopedia. BRITISH
HISTORY: “Socy. for Prom. Chstn. Knowledge”; “Miller’s Life of George
III”; “Lives of George IV and Wm. IV”; “History of British India”;
“Basil Hall”; “Macaulay.”
I say nothing about Poetry or Fiction or Ecclesiastical Literature.
I’ve read enough already to choose from to read over again without
going wrong, and I presume I can read back to better advantage than I
can read ahead. I say nothing either about Agriculture or Law--I have
a course in each laid out. I expect to read on Geology, Mineralogy,
and Anatomy before long and Nat’l History generally as I have
opportunity or inclination.
I’ll thank you to give me any advice suggested to you in reading
the above. I have left out “Cobbett’s Grammar,” “Whately’s Rhetoric
and Logic.” I have read “Burke on Taste” and your Rept. of Prof.
Lardner’s Lecture. I should like to find more of those comprehensive
Lectures on such subjects. Prof. Lardner’s Lectures are brief and
comprehensive and very well adapted to give a simple man a common
information in regard to Natural Science and Mechanics. You must have
been bored with this letter but I expect you to answer it becomingly.
It must have been earlier than this that he attended with Charles Brace
“a private course of lectures on architecture.”
From 1845, Mr. Olmsted’s main study centered in agriculture. From
“Fairmount,” Mr. Geddes’s farm, he wrote to his father June 16, 1846:
“_Farmer’s Lib._ &c I received Monday. I am glad they are going to
publish the _Book of the Farm_ next. I had hoped they would. It is a
cheap way of getting it. English price is I think $20.”
Again on Aug. 12, 1846, he wrote:
I have been looking for a letter from you and the _Monthly Journal_
for two or three days. I am anxious to hear about the Head Farm. If
the _Farmer’s Library_ can be had separately at half subscription
price, I would drop the _Monthly Journal_ though it is very good, in
favor of Drs. Emmons and Prime’s _Quarterly Journal of Agriculture and
Science_, a very able, practical, scientific, periodical, $1.50.
I have thought of writing an article about Fuller’s Farming, etc.
for the _Cultivator_, but have given it up because I have not myself
sufficient reliance on the correctness of statements.
The same year he wrote to Fred. Kingsbury: “I am reading now everything
on Horticulture and Pears and Arnold’s life and correspondence--I
always loved Arnold--and pears.”
From Guilford, Connecticut, February 16, 1847, Frederick wrote his
brother John: “Tell Father I want the _Horticulturist_, etc. Nothing
here but the _Boston Cultivator_.”
On a visit to New York City in October, 1847, he mentioned spending a
forenoon “at Colman’s,” who has “a beautiful new portfolio of sketches
in Holland and Belgium, mostly interiors. They are very fine” ...
“lots of fine things of course--two finer than I ever saw of Landseer”
... “I bought a number of books, cheaply at the auctions.”
After his father purchased for him the farm on Staten Island, he began
to think of a rounded-out collection of his own. We find him writing
to his brother: “There are a lot of books that are essential to even a
common library--or a country tavern parlor--that I have not got. Such
buy if you can, without fail.”
The young farmer thought also of decorating his walls, and wrote to his
father about pictures (March 9, 1848): “You said I could have a lot
out of the portfolios; I should be exceedingly glad if you could spare
me some frames.” The “portfolios” doubtless included the one which Mr.
Olmsted referred to later in life in a reminiscent jotting:
The first portfolio of prints that I ever saw was a possession of my
childhood and was a series of views of English park scenery. Chance
soon after put in my hand Gilpin’s _Forest Scenery_ and Gilpin’s and
Marshall’s _Tours_ and criticisms of parks. I have been studying the
subject ever since.
In February, 1849, Frederick mentioned in a letter to his brother John
that he had been reading and discussing _Modern Painters_, for which he
always continued to have a high regard. Later in the month he referred
to one of the subjects in which he was then principally interested
as “Landscape Beauty and the Beauty of all Nature.” His tastes were
varied, for he mentioned also several other miscellaneous subjects
including the “Theory of Language” and the “Theory, Economy, etc. of
Love.”
On his English tour in 1850 he acquired a number of works on
agriculture and gardening, of which unfortunately we have no specific
record; and after his return he wrote over to one of his travelling
companions Charles Brace, still abroad: “I want you to get or order in
London in addition to what I asked previously: _Morton on Soils_ (up to
$2.), _Hutchinson on Spring Draining_ (not over $2.), _Hewit Davis on
Thin Sowing_ (a pamphlet), Prof Johnstone’s _Tables of Experiments in
Agriculture_ (a pamphlet, very important).”
Mr. Olmsted’s own book _Walks and Talks_ came out in 1852. On a bill
(1852) from G. P. Putnam & Co., Publishers and Importers, including
several copies of _Walks and Talks_ evidently purchased for gifts,
are listed also: “1 Pencil Sketches,” “1 Smith’s Parks and Pleasure
Grounds,” “1 Am. Farmer,” “1 Caird’s Agriculture,” “1 Miniature Fruit
Garden,” and “1 Agricultural Survey.”
It is a great pity that the library collected by Mr. Olmsted during his
career as a farmer and later as a writer, and during the first years of
his work as a landscape architect, was practically all burned in the
winter of 1863-64 after his departure for California. Regarding this
calamity, he wrote a friend:
“Since I left New York all my household goods including a library with
a number of rare technical books which I got in Europe and can never
replace have been destroyed by fire.”
The books were stored at the Staten Island farm in an outbuilding,
thought to have been maliciously fired.