Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/265

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES as unlimited as their skill, and polished by four cycles of changing seasons, was destroyed in as many months during the iconoclastic era that followed the Restoration of 1867—the thirty-six views seen by travellers on the "Eastern Sea Road" between Tōkyō and Kyōtō, were copied so faithfully that to make the circuit of the park was to travel from one capital to the other. In many parks the "Eight Views of Omi Lake" are depicted. Sometimes models are borrowed from a poet's conception of supernatural beauties, as the isles of Elysium or the mountains of paradise. Sometimes dells or nooks of special beauty are consecrated to the memory of great philosophers or sanctified by shrines to tutelary deities. And every component of the scene—rock, shrubbery, hill, or valley, even each fence or lantern—has its distinguishing appellation and approved shape.

This extraordinary elaboration to which the art has been carried deserves consideration. It has already been said that landscape gardening is reduced almost to an exact science in Japan, and that though nature is supposed to be the teacher, the symbols she uses to convey her instruction, being interpreted by human intelligence, frequently assume arbitrary and conventional forms. From that point of view they may be compared to the mannerisms which, while they are not without a value of their own, often mar the purity of an accomplished author's 237