Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/263

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES copied for his pleasure by years of costly toil, the rich aristocrat passes to the presence of a lowly peasant's cot and its rustic surroundings, reproduced with strict fidelity in some corner of his spacious park, he can scarcely fail to draw from the contrast its proper lesson of charity and tolerance; or when the beauties of a fair landscape are invoked to lend attractions to some high moral ideal; or even when, as an able writer puts it, "obedience to laws of balance, contrast and continuity in line, form, mass, and colour, applied to the component parts of gardens, is enforced through the medium of precepts found in obsolete philosophies," the better aspects of the cult are seen. But when it has recourse to the doctrines of the Book of Changes or the terrors of demonology to obtain compliance with its canons, it assumes the character of a degraded religion. There is, however, very little room to find fault with the garden-making cult of Japan. Its results are invariably beautiful and aesthetically correct by whatever processes they are reached, and though the interest of the story they tell is much enhanced by intelligent study of the language in which it is written, their charms are palpable to the most superficial observer. Nature's masterpieces are reproduced and her principles applied with loving fidelity. From the gracefully spreading margins of lakes, or out of valleys between harmoniously contoured hills, rise rockeries, 235