Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/266

JAPAN style. The fact is, however, that the Japanese designer of a landscape garden, like the Japanese painter of a picture, never admits the possibility of obtaining photographic realism, which the Western artist, on the contrary, constantly strives to reach. The principle followed by the Japanese is that certain features only can be represented with the means and appurtenances at command of human skill, and that it is the artist's duty to select those features justly and to express them intelligibly. By long and careful observation he has discovered, or thinks that he has discovered, what may be called the aesthetic instincts of nature's operations, as displayed in the growth of trees, or the contours and grouping of hills, or the modelling and association of rocks, or the flow and spread of water; and he undertakes not only to depict those instincts by object lessons but also to formulate them in a grammar. Two results are noticeable: first, that his emphasis of special features is sometimes exaggerated to the verge of grotesqueness; secondly, that by the elaborateness of his terminology and the minuteness of his codes he seems to have lost himself in profusion while straining after selection. Thus, though the landscape gardener in Europe attaches little importance to rocks except as materials for building a grotto or constructing a bed for ferns or mosses, the Japanese gardener considers the shape and size of every rock and boulder with reference to the scale of his plan and the nature of the 238