Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/269

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES finest types of their kind, but also to have been restrained from developing dimensions incongruous with their surroundings. For the Japanese gardener is not more particular about the shapes and grouping of his materials than about the general scale of the scene they produce, the aspects from which they have to be viewed, and the nature of their surroundings. It would be shocking if the trees and shrubs in a garden of limited area had the dimensions they attain in a primeval forest or on a trackless moor, and it would be crude and unsatisfactory if their size could be regulated only by the stages of their natural growth. Hence one of the gardener's important functions is to limit the stature of trees and, at the same time, to make them assume all the features of maturity and unrestrained vigour; a task demanding large endowment of the sense of proportion and comparison and its high training.

To this part of the subject belongs the art of miniature landscape-gardening, which also received great development in the Military epoch. The principles and rules of practice mentioned above apply to this art with undiminished force, but the scale of construction is reduced so that a landscape or waterscape, accurate in all details and having all its parts perfectly balanced, is produced within an area of two or three square feet. China gave this conception to Japan. A Chinese poet, constantly quoted by the devotees of the art, says that "it induces serenity of 241