Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/57

Rh garden has, beneath the beautiful body that meets the eye, the æsthetic sentiment that is perceived only by the mind, the heart, the soul. This is the primary aim of a garden, not simply to tickle the eye, to display the owner’s wealth, or to give a background to a garden fête, but definitely to suggest tranquillity or awe, homely pleasure and the simplicity of open country, or the exhilaration and inspiration of rugged and wild Nature.

And when so many people—Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain among them—declare that they see nothing more in Japanese gardens than a certain charm of quaintness,—hardly more beauty than that of strangeness,—they simply announce that they see with the eyes only, and not with the true insight of the soul. I do not complain of them any more than I do of those unhappy mortals who are unable to find anything in the pictures of the old masters, who are bored by what is not called popular music, who cannot read those poets whose alchemy has changed the drab lead of life into the gold and iridescence of a dream.

Even Mr. Josiah Conder, who, by his great knowledge of the science of Japanese landscape gardening, has made himself almost its prophet, thinks that these gardens could not be transferred to another land and clime lest they might appear affected ‘examples of a quaint conceit.’ And yet I venture to say that if the most rigid