Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/271

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES the aesthetic cult to extravagant lengths in Kyoto. But it had not attracted special attention prior to that time, nor given any indications of the extraordinary proportions it was destined ultimately to attain. Something of the impulse it then received must be attributed to the contemporaneous development of keramic skill which marked the epoch. The pot itself began to rank as an object of art, and to take shapes, sizes, and colours which, by suggesting new possibilities of harmony between the receptacle and its contents, encouraged new conceptions on the part of the tree-trainer. Thenceforth the bonsai (potted shrub) became a specialty of the Japanese gardener, and the worship of the cult is perhaps more fervent among the upper classes to-day than it ever was. There is only one canon of practice, and only one test of perfection: the tree or shrub, though but five or six inches in height, must be, in everything save dimensions, an absolute facsimile of what it would have been had it grown for cycles unrestrained in the forest: must have the same spread of bough in proportion to girth of trunk; the same girth of trunk in proportion to height; the same set of branch, gnarling of stem, and even symptoms of decrepitude. To be able to place upon the alcove-shelf one of the monsters of the forest in miniature, and to receive from it unerring suggestions of the broad moor, the mossy glade, the play of shadow and sunlight, the voice of the distant waterfall, and the sound of the wind in 243