Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/273

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES expression within such narrow limits often tends to exaggeration or even grotesqueness. Thus, on first acquaintance with the products of the art, one is disposed to denounce some of them as monstrosities. But it may safely be asserted that the fault is generally subjective. In every branch of Japanese aesthetics a multitude of conventions, evolved from infinitely painstaking study of nature's methods, and stamped with the cachet of great masters in bygone times, have passed into a revelation from which no one ventures to take away an alpha or an omega. Intelligent sympathy with the spirit that dictated these conventions cannot survive slavish obedience to their laws, and it may not be denied that some of these dwarfed trees and shrubs show the mechanics of the art without its genius. But when that seems to be the case with a specimen which has obtained the sanction of two or three generations of connoisseurs, its faithfulness to some freak of nature can be taken for granted, since although hyperbole of type or abuse of convention may be temporarily permitted, such solecisms cannot pass current for any length of time among people like the Japanese. A stranger must be careful, therefore, before he condemns as unnatural in Japan everything which offends his own sense of nature's methods. Eloquence of orthodox form is probably there if his faculties were trained to recognise it.

The object of this book being to trace the 245