Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/59

Rh the hand of Nature, not of man, had wrought them into such strange lines of beauty. Of course these shapes are sometimes exaggerated, as who can say that Nature could thus often be at once so perverse and so kind—could, by the effect of age, and almost of deformity, give so many trees these lines of rugged strength, and such curves, or rather angles, of beauty?

If their art did not conceal its methods—if the eye could detect the craftsman in the artist—it would not pass muster as an art at all. Probably in our transplanted garden only the pounded-down, purple-brown earth, or the use of pebbles or drifted sand in place of green grass, would strike one as unusual, or as ‘quaint and fanciful in conceit.’

In the case of Mr. Chamberlain, I simply do not believe that he does not see. He is too deeply imbued with the very spirit of Japan not to see. He pokes mild ridicule at Japanese poetry, and even dissects it coldly, but he belies all this on the next page by a charming and sympathetic interpretation of those nearly untranslatable things, Japanese poems. So I believe his other strictures on their arts, which he always damns with faint praise, or dismisses finally as puerile; his dictum that their gardens may do well enough to please these pleasant children, but are hardly worth the grown-up consideration of the foreigner—are only the insistence of the Briton that whatever is British