Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/229

 shapes by centuries of collision with rushing waters. The arrangement of these rocks did not yet suggest the complete concealment of art which was attained in later ages. Although the great painter, Kose no Kanaoka (850-890), whose perception of the glories of decorative art was almost a revelation, devoted his genius to the planning of parks and rockeries, his designs did not break away altogether from the hard stiff style of the Chinese horticulturists, nor give much promise of the delightfully natural originality that distinguished the work of his successors in subsequent eras. Nevertheless he certainly showed his countrymen that the Chinese "garden of the sacred fountain" (shinsen-yen), which they had hitherto regarded as an inviolable model, might be replaced by other conceptions, and within the two centuries immediately following his death, Kyōtō was enriched with a number of detached palaces and noblemen's villas sufficiently grand and beautiful to be recorded in the pages of history. Of these the most famous was the "tiled hall" (Kawara-in) of the Minamoto chief, Tōru; so famous, indeed, that its owner received the pseudonym of the "tyled first-minister" (Kawara-no-Sadaijin). This villa has a special interest because its park showed the first definite attempt to reproduce in miniature one of the country's most celebrated scenic gems, the "salt-shore" (shio-hama) of the province of Mutsu. Fidelity of imitation was carried to the extent of boiling down