Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/262

JAPAN attention to the spirit, the European to the form. Efforts to compose poetry in such a medium sometimes betrayed the composer into apparent extravagances and arbitrary analogies. Not always able to resolve into an exact alphabet the subtle language in which nature couches her suggestions, he manufactured an alphabet of his own, and ascribed to each letter a value which it possessed only in this artificial vocabulary. If history, tradition, or fiction has invested a certain scene with indelible memories of a glorious pageant, a pathetic tragedy, or a delightful incident, it is easy to foretell that a transcript of that scene will move the beholder to a triumphant, a sorrowful, or a joyous mood. But if without the aid of such well-emphasised association it is sought to secure special interpretations for particular scenes, then the artist must either invent a code to guide the interpreter, or leave the results of his art largely to chance. It was thus that there grew up about landscape gardening in Japan a species of written religion, often embodying beautiful and purely aesthetic principles, but frequently making incursions into the regions of myth, superstition, and petty conventionalism. It may justly be called a "religion," because, while it appeals, on the one hand, to some of human nature's highest moods, it prescribes, on the other, sanctions and vetoes which derive their force solely from supernaturalism. When from the contemplation of some exquisite landscape 234