Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/275

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES in strict accord with rules inspired by principles of severe simplicity and rustic chasteness. Their proportions are of the smallest; their framework of the frailest, and their furniture of the scantiest. It is necessary that the gardens surrounding them should be of a similar character. For in laying out a Japanese garden no principle is more carefully observed than that there should be thorough congruity between the scenic scheme and the nature of the edifice from which it is contemplated. So studious, indeed, is the designer's attention to this canon that he will even vary the nature of a garden's parts so as to suit the different sections of the edifice it surrounds; a fact which becomes more intelligible when we remember that a Japanese house is often divided into several virtually independent blocks connected by covered passages, and that each block has its own individuality. The Cha-no-yu garden, then, having for its basis an edifice which is little more than a suggestion of a dwelling, and being intended for the contemplation of men who live in a world of impressions and abstractions rather than of realities and facts, is itself a mere sketch, suggesting landscapes, not portraying them. The semblance of a mountain moor is conveyed by some of the shrubs and grasses that grow on its expanse; a lake is implied by a few of its marginal rocks and overarching trees; special rivers are shown by the flowers for whose bloom their banks are 247