Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/83

Rh paradises. Like the exquisite simplicity of a Japanese room, each stone has a certain use, a certain meaning, a certain sentiment attached to it. It usually fills a double purpose, and is of use as well as a thing of beauty; for although, if any people ever did believe that beauty is its own excuse for being, these do, they make their beautiful things useful, and their useful things are invariably beautiful.

Again, as in all this gentle people’s arts, the most delicate and perfect sense of proportion prevails. Large stones and boulders are for large gardens, for big scenic effects; small stones for small and intimate scenes. The same careful grading is again observed as regards the number of stones employed. In a large garden there are a hundred and thirty-eight principal rocks and stones (as well as others not so important), all named and classified, which may be employed, according to size and scope. This number reduces itself, until it reaches, in a tiny garden,—and there are thousands of them in this land, where every one, rich and poor, has something of the kind,—what is practically the irreducible minimum, five.

This sounds perhaps arbitrary and artificial—as who should say of one of the usually horrible montrositiesmonstrosities [sic] which we call a ‘rockery’ or a ‘rock grotto’ that it may contain so many rocks, of such and such a prescribed shape and size, and no more. But when we compare the