THE BROCHURE SERIES |
| PLATE XI | DAIMIO'S GARDEN AT SHINJIKU |
THE | ||
| 1900. | FEBRUARY | No. 2. |
JAPANESE GARDENS.
The Japanese garden is not a flowergarden, neither is it made for thepurpose of cultivating plants. Innine cases out of ten there is nothingin it resembling a flower-bed. Some gardensmay contain scarcely a sprig of green;some (although these are exceptional) havenothing green at all and consist entirelyof rocks, pebbles and sand. Neither doesthe Japanese garden require any fixedallowance of space; it may cover one ormany acres, it may be only ten feet square;it may, in extreme cases, be much less,and be contained in a curiously shaped,shallow, carved box set in a veranda, inwhich are created tiny hills, microscopicponds and rivulets spanned by tiny humpedbridges, while queer wee plants representtrees, and curiously formed pebbles standfor rocks. But on whatever scale, all trueJapanese gardening is landscape gardening;that is to say, it is a living model ofan actual Japanese landscape.
But, though modelled upon an actuallandscape, the Japanese garden is far morethan a mere naturalistic imitation. To theartist every natural view may be said toconvey, in its varying aspects, some particularmental impression or mood, suchas the impression of peacefulness, of wildness,of solitude, or of desolation; and theJapanese gardener intends not only topresent in his model the features of theveritable landscape, but also to make itexpress, even more saliently than the original,a dominant sentimental mood, so thatit may become not only a picture, but apoem. In other words, a Japanese gardenof the best type is, like any true work ofart, the representation of nature as expressedthrough an individual artistictemperament.
Through long accumulation of traditionalmethods, the representation ofnatural features in a garden model hascome to be a highly conventional expression,like all Japanese art; and the Japanesegarden bears somewhat the same relationto an actual landscape that a painting of aview of Fuji-yama by the wonderful Hokusaidoes to the actual scene—it is a representationbased upon actual and naturalforms, but so modified to accord with acceptedcanons of Japanese art, so full ofmysterious symbolism only to be understoodby the initiated, so expressed, in aword, in terms of the national artisticconventions, that it costs the Westernmind long study to learn to appreciate itsfull beauty and significance.