But, though modelled upon an actual landscape, the Japanese garden is far more than a mere naturalistic imitation. To the artist every natural view may be said to convey, in its varying aspects, some particular mental impression or mood, such as the impression of peacefulness, of wildness, of solitude, or of desolation; and the Japanese gardener intends not only to present in his model the features of the veritable landscape, but also to make it express, even more saliently than the original, a dominant sentimental mood, so that it may become not only a picture, but a poem. In other words, a Japanese garden of the best type is, like any true work of art, the representation of nature as expressed through an individual artistic temperament.
Through long accumulation of traditional methods, the representation of natural features in a garden model has come to be a highly conventional expression, like all Japanese art; and the Japanese garden bears somewhat the same relation to an actual landscape that a painting of a view of Fuji-yama by the wonderful Hokusai does to the actual scene—it is a representation based upon actual and natural forms, but so modified to accord with accepted canons of Japanese art, so full of mysterious symbolism only to be understood by the initiated, so expressed, in a word, in terms of the national artistic conventions, that it costs the Western mind long study to learn to appreciate its full beauty and significance. Suppose, to take a specific example, that in the actual landscape upon which the Japanese gardener chose to model his design, a pine tree grew upon the side of a hill. Upon the side of the corresponding artificial hill in his garden he would therefore plant a pine, but he would not clip and trim its branches to imitate the shape of the original, but rather, satisfied that by so placing it he had gone far enough toward the imitation of nature, he would clip his garden pine to make it correspond, as closely as circumstances might permit, with a conventional ideal pine tree shape (such a typical ideal pine tree is shown in the little drawing on page 25), a shape recognized as the model for a beautiful pine by the artistic conventions of Japan for centuries, and one familiar to every Japanese of any pretensions to culture whatsoever. And, as there are recognized ideal pine tree shapes, there are also ideal mountain shapes, ideal lake shapes, ideal water-fall shapes, ideal stone shapes, and innumerable other such ideal shapes.
| PLATE XII | "RIVER VIEW," KORAKU-EN, KOISHIKAWA |
In like manner in working out his design the gardener must take cognizance of a multitude of religious and ethical conventions. The flow of his streams must, for instance, follow certain cardinal directions; in the number and disposition of his principal rocks he must symbolize the nine spirits of the Buddhist pantheon. Some tree and stone combinations are regarded as fortunate, and should be introduced if possible; while other combinations are considered unlucky, and are to be as carefully avoided.
| MODEL PINE TREE |
But endless and complex and bewildering to the western mind as are the rules and formulæ, æsthetic, symbolistic and religious, by which the Japanese landscape gardener is bound, it is apparent that most of them were originally based upon purely picturesque considerations, and that the earliest practitioners of this very ancient art, finding that certain types of arrangement, certain contrasts of mass or line, led to harmonious results, formulated their discoveries into rules, much as the rules of composition are formulated for us today in modern artistic treatises. Moreover, as Japanese gardening was at first, and for many years, practised only as a sacred art and by the priests of certain religious cults, it was but natural that they should impart to these laws which they had discovered symbolic and religious attributes. To preserve the arts in their purity, and to prevent the vulgar from transgressing æsthetic laws, combinations productive of beauty were represented as auspicious, and endowed with moral significance, while inharmonious arrangements were condemned as unlucky or inauspicious. It is one of the cardinal principles of Japanese philosophy, for example, that the inanimate objects of the universe are endowed with male or female attributes, and that from a proper blending of the two sex essences springs all the harmony, good fortune and beauty in this world. When, therefore, two contrasting shapes, colors, or masses, such as those of the sturdy pine tree and the graceful willow, were found conducive of a pleasing combination, they were named respectively male and female, and it became almost a religious observance to thereafter place them together in their attributed sex relations.
It will be apparent, therefore, that with an art of such antiquity, originally practised as a religious ceremony, and in a country in which inherited tradition has such binding force, that there should have grown up around the craft of landscape gardening, a code of the most complex laws, rules, symbolism, formulæ and superstitions, which the artistic gardener is bound to learn and to implicitly obey.