Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/61

wide acquaintance with parks, public gardens, and pleasaunces all over the world, that the parks in the United States are the most beautiful to be found anywhere, because, like Japanese gardens, they base the science of their art on Nature. I do not include Japanese public parks, with the single exception of Ueno, and the remains of one or two others done in the old style, in Tokio, because, whenever they have laid out public grounds according to so-called modern Western methods, they are so vilely ugly that I prefer not to speak of them at all. As a matter of fact, wherever their landscape art has been affected by our ideas they have degenerated, and wherever our gardens have been inspired by the same fundamental ideas as their classical models it has been to their betterment. But, while I have not one word of praise for the mid-Victorian hideousness of their new official grounds and buildings, I feel serenely confident that such an artistic people must in time return to their own old ideals of the gardener’s art. The feeling for the poetry of Nature, the sympathetic response to the appeal of natural beauty, is so great in the whole people, from Emperor to rickshaw coolie, that no amount of national pride—which thinks it ranks itself with the great nations of the West in assuming their bad taste—can for long be so misguided. Some of the delicate attention to detail will have gone with the replacing of hand and heart