Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/282

JAPAN over the door. At once the Cha-no-yu obtained wide vogue among the aristocracy. They found in it, just as Shukô had hoped, an element of gentle asceticism gratifying to the conscience, and a charm of method appealing to the most refined taste. It seemed, in fact, to bring within easy reach of fashionable dilettante the virtues which the samurai cultivated by the severe discipline of religious meditation; while to the samurai, on the other hand, it disclosed a vista of refined graces without any apparent concession to the vices of self-indulgence or effeminacy. For the tendency of the cult was to combine aesthetic eclecticism of the most fastidious nature with the severest canons of simplicity and austerity. As each disciple of the system sat in a tiny chamber, its dimensions and furniture conforming with rigid rules, handled utensils of rude type, and looked out on a garden where the wild and rustic features of nature were prominent, he seemed to himself to be a kind of social anchorite eschewing every form of luxury or ostentation, but at the same time cultivating artistic tastes which differentiated him agreeably from the vulgar and the uninitiated. The aristocrat and the soldier thus came together on a common plane, and if the blasé sybarite, Yoshimasa, found something delightful in the cult, the jovial soldier, Nobunaga, and the splendid strategists and statesmen, Hideyoshi (the Taikō) and Tokugawa Iyeyasu, patronised and practised it with equal ardour. Its 254