Posterity (11 page)

On the 18
th
Instant I ship to New York 5 Numbers of Water Birds to be forwarded to London by London Packet (I hope that the 1
st
of Feb.y.—When you receive them, write by duplicate from London & way of Liverpool that you have them, to relieve my anxiety about them. Inclosed is a list of them and of 3 more numbers composed of Drawings which you have in England,
and which
should you not receive the present 5 Numbers; have published rather than to stop the Work from going on regularly—but I hope the 5 Numbers will reach you safely.—

One of the 2 Volumes you sent is also received here and I have sent John to deliver it to
Mr Rees'
agent who I expect will pay John.—
In a few days
I will send you a Draft or Bill for some money.—

Show all the Drawings at once to Havell when you receive them—it will prove to him that
the Water Birds
have not more work upon them than the Land ones.—As many Birds have been
Pasted
, take great care of those Drawings and shew them to
a very few
of your Friends.—

The 3 Small Drawings of Land Birds being
New Species I wish you to give them for the 3 extra small plates
. —be sure that these go instead of hitherto known Birds which I have sent you and which you have, but which will come in the 4
th
Volume, a Volume which will be composed of both Land & Water Birds.—take good heart attend strictly to the Publication &c & all will go on well.—

Friend Bachman has finished another paper on Buzards, notes for this Country—and I shall have 200 Copies of it struck in a few days, for all our Subscribers here and others whom it may concern—

Good night God bless you.—

Make arrangements with M
rs
Russel for us.—

Ever yours Father & Friend
John J. Audubon.

C
HARLES
W
.
E
LIOT TO
C
HARLES
E
LIOT,
J
R.

“If you feel the blues coming upon you,
get a book and a glass of wine . . .”

Following the Civil War the United States went through a period of astounding progress in industry, science, and engineering. Yet there was no greater advancement made than in the world of ideas. From 1869 to 1909, leading the way of advancement and reform in American education was Harvard president Charles W. Eliot. Modern American universities, as we know them today, were largely structured and shaped by the changes Eliot instituted during his forty-year tenure.

He believed individual interests, rather than requirements enforced by the university, should be the driving force guiding curriculum. He wanted students to be treated as adults. He felt that those Harvard students who were from modest means were “the very best part” of the university and he took great interest in their welfare. When word of a death in a student's family reached the university, it was the president himself who delivered the news to the young man. On more than one occasion he gave his house over to a student who was gravely ill.

With his eldest son, Charles, he had an unusually close friendship. Recognizing their differences, Eliot described himself as “sanguine, confident, content with present action,” whereas he thought his son to be “reticent, self-distrustful” and “speculative.” In 1886, having just finished an apprenticeship with Frederick Law Olmsted, twenty-six-year-old Charles was in Europe studying landscape architecture. He wrote to his father referring to himself as “incompetent in dealing with men.” Here Charles Eliot responds.

April 20, [18]86

Dear Charles,

Don't imagine yourself deficient in power of dealing with men. Such dealings as you have thus far had with boys and men you have conducted very suitably. There is no mystery about successful business intercourse with patrons and employés. Nobody can think, and at the same time pay attention to another person, as you seem to expect to do. On the contrary, exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is a very important point in business manners. Nothing is so flattering as that. Some audible or visible signs of close attention are of course desirable. Then there is very seldom any objection to the statement, “I should like to think that over.” . . . I wish you were tough and strong like me. But you have nevertheless an available measure of strength, and within that measure an unusual capacity of enjoyment. In this respect you closely resemble your mother. She enjoyed more in her short life than most people in a long one; and particularly she delighted in natural scenery. You get a great deal more pleasure out of your present journeyings than I ever could have. I should not have your feelings of fatigue and weakness, but neither should I have your perception of the beautiful and your enjoyment of it. When you come to professional work, you will have to be moderate in it. Where other men work eight hours a day, you must be content with five. Take all things easily. Never tire yourself out. If you feel the blues coming upon you, get a book and a glass of wine, or go to bed and rest yourself. The morbid mental condition is of physical origin. Take comfort in the thought that you can have a life of moderate labor,—the best sort of life. You will have a little money of your own, and need not be in haste to earn a large income. I am strong and can work twelve hours a day. Consequently I do; and if it were not for Mt. Desert, I should hardly have more time for reflection and real living than an operative in a cotton mill. For a reasonable mortal, life cannot truly be said to have “terrors,” any more than death. The love of beauty is a very good and durable correspondence between your soul and the world; but the love of purity, gentleness, and honor is a better one.

[Charles Eliot]

F
REDERICK
L
AW
O
LMSTED TO
F
REDERICK
L
AW
O
LMSTED,
J
R.

“I have all my life been considering distant effects and
always sacrificing immediate success and
applause to that of the future.”

Americans owe Frederick Law Olmsted an enormous debt of gratitude. Through his genius of design, his capacity to manage enormous projects, his ability to get things done, and his remarkable foresight, landscapes of his design and execution serve as oases of serenity stretching from coast to coast: from New York City's Central Park, to Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery, to Chicago's village of Riverside, to the grounds of the United States Capitol. He was a pioneer in his field who elevated landscape architecture to a respected profession and redirected the focus of the work from decoration to creating spaces for the enjoyment, health, and well-being of people, especially for those residing in the new and growing American cities.

The son of a well-respected Connecticut merchant, Olmsted, as a young man, jumped again and again from one line of work to another. He had been a merchant seaman, a farmer, a travel writer, an editor, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, the manager of a California gold mine, and a publisher. In hindsight, Olmsted considered the time before he settled into landscape architecture to be a “sad waste” and thought his own father to have been “overly-indulgent to my inclinations.” He would not make the same mistake with his son, Rick. In fact, he even went so far as to change the boy's name at seven years old from Henry Olmsted to Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., because he knew it would serve him well in his future career as a landscape architect.

“Looking forward several generations” was what Olmsted always did in his design work and it seems, too, he took the same long view for his children. Here sixty-eight-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted writes to twenty-year-old Frederick, Jr., who was about to begin his freshman year at Harvard.

5th September 1890

Dear Rick:

I found your letter of the 12th [J]ul[y] when I came back here from the West. I should have replied to it sooner but I knew that you had left Lake George and had no clue to your address. John and I have both been away since in different directions on business and we only came together this morning. If I am well eno' I start again tomorrow morning for North Carolina and from there may have to go on to Chicago, so I may not be able to see you before you are matriculated. Hence, I write, though I can not say nearly what I would like to say. I enclose the paper containing Professor Shaler's remarks to which I referred (accidentally omitted, I suppose, from my former note).

Your letter pleases me very much as showing that you have sought sound advice and have used personal judgment and have been cautious and considerate. I am not disposed to differ with your conclusions. My only question is whether you are not undertaking too much in the regular college lines to allow you to give the time that you should to others. I want you to systematically give a good deal of time, thought and management to other sorts of education than the college provides. I cannot fully say what and why but can perhaps show some of the stems of my wishes in these respects. My life is pretty nearly run out. At the best I shall be disabled from all business long before you are to enter upon it. I wish that it were otherwise so far that your professional education could proceed with my actual work as John's has and Eliot's, Codman's and Coolidge's. As that cannot be reckoned upon, it is consolation that you must have acquired a good deal of knowledge of my principals and methods unconsciously, and it is to be hoped that you will henceforth be much more than you have been in an attitude of interest and intelligence to take in more. I want you to keep up a certain regular methodical reading and thinking on the subject, I will say at least five hours a week. I reckon that in four years you would thus have read everything not ephemeral in English, French and German and would be the best read man as to this Art in the world. I want you at the same time to keep such knowledge of what is going on in our office that you will gradually be led to an understanding of practice in relation to theory and of theory in relation to practice. What I want now is that you adopt this wish of mine and let it enter into your plans and expectations and habit, in the same way that the cut and dried requirements of the college course will enter into them.

One reason of this wish has this foundation. I have, with an amount of forethought, providence, sacrifice and hardship of which you can hardly have an idea, been making a public reputation and celebrity of a certain kind, which at last has a large money value. We have, as a consequence, more business than we can manage. The business increases faster than we can enlarge our organization and adjust our methods to meet it. And it is plain that this depends as yet almost entirely on me. Clients insist on having my personal examination and personally conferring with me. I do not mean that the process of shifting the business more and more to Jno. and Harry is not going on successfully. After a work has started I am surprised to find how they come gradually to be accepted, and indeed I am loosing the run of a good deal of business and occasionally small commissions from the start carried on independently of me. Yet all of our large and profitable commissions come to us from those who know no one but me and who are prepared at the outset to take advice from no one else. Hence whenever I drop out the business will fall off greatly, the more so that there are so many young men lately starting in it. Of the income from the present business more than half comes to me and with my share of it we are able to live as we do and are now putting a thousand dollars or more to windward every year. But a large share of my earnings laid up otherwise in various indirect ways, making the business, have been lost in fitting out Owen and the beef business, and so when my name no longer attracts clients, your mother, Marion and you will be in comparatively very straitened circumstances. You and Jno. will have to support them and John is entitled to marry and have others to support. That's sufficient indication of the business side of the matter. You ought to have it in mind, however, that we are getting much higher prices and larger works and works that relatively to what they yield us cost less, than any others of our profession are getting. I do not suppose any one, or any three working together, earn a quarter as much as we do in L[andscape] A[rchitecture]. I say this with reference to what you have to expect as to your own future earning capacity. The measure of this capacity will depend on the capital you can acquire in no inconsiderable degrees in five hours reading a week during the next four years and the insight you obtain of the manner in which business is conducted in our office.

Another foundation of my wish is the modest pride and satisfaction I have in what, against great difficulties, I have accomplished in—if not elevating the art and profession of L. A., at least in contending for a much higher standard than could, but for what I have done, been maintained. I feel that I have been rather grandly successful in this respect, and yet only successful in holding the fort as it were. It is as if the war had just begun and my part had been to keep the enemy in check until reinforcements could arrive. These young men, John and Harry, Eliot and Coolidge, with Sargeant and Stiles and Mrs. Van Renssalaer are the advance of the reinforcements. I want you to be prepared to be a leader of the van. How much abler should I have been had I had your education, to this time of your education. How much more had I had that education that you may have ten years hence. I would speak of myself and what I have done, as I have to no one but you, and to you, only under these circumstances. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out the Central Park we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years. Now in nearly all of our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick? I ask, and then, with reference to your education, How is Rick to be best prepared to take advantage of what in reputation I have been earning? Reputation coming as a result of what I shall have done, but not coming in my time. How best prepared to carry on the war against vulgarity and continued further and successfully against ignorance and prejudice and meanness. How best to make L. A. respected as an Art and a liberal profession.