JAPANESE GARDENS
CHAPTER I
ON JAPANESE GARDENS IN GENERAL
“Here in my leafy garden where I sit,
Protected by the big trees, kind and green,
I learn to love contentment more than wit,
The lure of known things less than those unseen.”
While the gardens of the Japanese have much of material charm, of rich and plentiful vegetation, of rare and splendid as well as exquisite though less striking flowers, of gracious bodily attraction (if I may so name it), it is to the inner sense, to the mind and the heart, that they make their chiefest appeal. In its most real meaning a garden, to them, must be a place of repose, of contemplation, of spiritual communion with Nature. There can a man loaf, and invite his soul; and, though that soul may be shrivelled and shrunk to the dimensions of a withered Jerusalem Rose, it will swell and grow and blossom in the atmosphere of the place. The very shopkeeper who may have done you an ill turn in business (just as a child with a stick hits you joyously and without malice) will retire to the tiny scrap of a place behind his premises, and, as if whirled away on the wonderful carpet of the Arabian Nights, he is another man, in another world, instantly; and, with all that is kindly and beautiful and poetic uppermost, he will contemplate his frail little Morning Glory in its pot, or tenderly lift his butterfly-winged babies up to watch the pretty, swift flashings of the goldfish in the basin. He no longer represents the somewhat sordid new Japan, which makes money by selling silk to foreigners; which so often models itself on the bad, not on the good side of their business methods. He is no longer the harassed innkeeper, the big mill-owner, the busy, important Government official; he has turned back the years, as one might the red petals of a Lotus—back to the golden heart of old Japan. He is the brave follower of the samurai, whose whole creed is keeping faith; or he is the samurai himself, a poet, though a soldier; or the great daimyo, who is an artist, though a courtier.
In the old days every common thing to a Japanese was hedged about with divinity. A god guarded each humblest tool, lived in every stone or stump, inspired the simplest act. A spirit was invoked of peace and joy by a man’s putting himself in the attitude to receive it. He walked into his garden, and, as if he had rubbed his magic ring, the Djin of the garden appeared to soothe, to comfort, to bless. I once heard Bishop Brent, that most practical of spiritual men, in speaking to a congregation of sailors say that to put themselves en rapport with God and goodness was as easy as to turn a cock that let in the Pacific Ocean. So a Japanese enters into the peace that passeth understanding when he takes his weary body and tired mind, but open soul, into that place dedicated to peace. It is the survival of the Japanese garden, and all that the love of it still implies, which has saved Japan from being brutalized by improvement, from being crushed beneath the responsibility of transformation into a great Power, that has redeemed her from the curse that money-making brings. In the overturning of old ideals, while love of beauty and living things remains, Japan, thank God, can never grow into one of the sordid countries that the West knows so well.
But not only does the average Japanese bring with him the temperament to realise these delicate delights: the inspiration, the impulse to enjoy with the soul, as it were, is there before him. The artist who designed the grounds has already deliberately put it there, and, in these days, when mental suggestion has become almost a commonplace, it would be foolish to deny the possibility of such a sentiment persisting in a garden.
I dare say the reader may fancy this a farfetched idea—both my interpretation and the Japanese original notion, into which I am trying to put a mystical sense of poetry—but it is very literally true. The artist plans the grounds, after a study of the owner’s personality and temperament, as well as of a very complete review of the capabilities of the place and of the material at hand to assist in the work. After this he decides—probably with the owner’s help and largely biased by his wishes—on the style of garden that is to be evolved. Shall it be great and grand, a wonderful and striking artist’s picture of some big and famous landscape, modified and altered, so that it is not merely a bald and otherwise unconvincing copy but an illuminating interpretation? Or shall it represent instead the last word in finished and elegant grounds with clipped trees and stone lanterns, and yet still, in its artificiality and careful finish, seeming only to suggest a richer phase of Nature? Or is it to be one of the many thousands of small gardens whose plot of ground, scarcely bigger than a tablecloth, has still the space to present one of the intimate, serene, and sweet little glimpses of water and stones and flowering tree that bring gladness into many of what would otherwise be such drab, colourless backyards, such grey and dingy lives?
I hope it is to be one of the last, for of all the many lovely things in Japan—high courage and patriotism, kindness and courtesy to the old and to the stranger, eternal cheerfulness and eternal industry, gentleness to children and to birds and to all timid wild things—I think that one of the loveliest is their love of beauty, their insistence on it as one of the primary needs of life, and their belief in it as a moral and spiritual uplifter.
I remember a poor little dwarf, whose tiny house on the shores of Lake Hakone stood in front of, but did not conceal, such a scrap of a garden for the worship of Nature. How she had cursed him one knew, not only from his physical affliction, but by his wretched little half-witted child, a cretin, whose dull, hopeless eyes were so often seen at the cracks of the shoji.[1] But no, he was not even half-witted, this poor little creature, for he could not move about as other young animals can, nor make an intelligible sound. Nevertheless, his father, who might have been working all day in the hotel garden—the poor back, with its short legs, pitifully near the ground he was weeding—would, with his snatches of song, attract the child’s attention before he reached his home, and would hold up the flowers he had brought for him, causing even those poor dull eyes to brighten a little. Never was that minute plot of earth less than well cared for; the little Azalea bushes were clipped, the stepping-stones were bright, the poor little shrine in a niche was tidy and well tended; and yet, handicapped by Nature, ugly and revolting to look at, poor, of a poverty we cannot guess, this man had a poet’s heart. The nation is great which even in the souls of the common people shews such gentle and beautiful ideas.
The thing that most struck me years ago when I first went to Japan, and even after repeated visits and an intimate acquaintance with many gardens, was, “What luck, what wonderful luck, these people have! They do not need to make their gardens: Nature has done it for them. It is not that they are so artistic in composing, but only so wise in not changing a single stone or tree from the place in which it was found.” And still, after studying their methods of gardening, and knowing, from hard work on my own part, the intricacy and finesse of system that is brought to the subject by their landscape artists: after seeing a garden made—hill and stream and projecting rocks and overhanging trees, from an almost flat and perfectly bare and unwatered bit of ground—I find it hard not to think still—so natural is the result—that theirs is only the good taste which selects, not the artist mind which creates.
And so one feels that the garden had to be arranged as it was, because it would have been impossible to move the great boulders that are its backbone; that the lake and the trickling stream and the cascade must have been set there by the Divine Landscape Gardener Himself, and that the beautiful old trees had grown to that precision of shape and loveliness by the help of Nature alone. We cannot believe that enormous sums have probably been paid for these stones, which may have been brought from hundreds of miles away (perhaps having been broken in pieces, marked, and stuck together again). We cannot understand how water, which, like the wind, goeth where it listeth, has had its bed of white stones built for it, and has been trained, as pet dogs are, to run and tumble and lie down at the will of the master. We cannot even understand, unless we have seen it done, that these age-old trees, and the young but sturdy blossoming ones, have perhaps been transplanted a few months before to this site. It is one of the constant wonders of this wonderful land that a new garden may, in so short a time, seem an old one.
If a rich man in Japan makes his house bigger, it goes without saying that he has to increase the size of his grounds, for, from least to largest, the one inflexible rule is to keep to scale in gardens and all surroundings. And this scale is not only one of size, of feet and inches; it means also character, sentiment, adornment: all must continue the idea, and work towards a harmonious whole. You would never find one part of a Japanese garden decorated with a Greek temple, approached by an Italian pergola, and surrounded by ‘old-fashioned’ flower-beds, as you might in home places. The whole garden would be subtly and delicately Japanese. Wherever any ideas are taken from China—as so many have been—they are incorporated into the garden politic by a process of ‘benevolent assimilation’; they are no longer foreign, but indefinably though perfectly Japanese—of the soil, because the work of man attempts only a transcription of natural scenery. A well-known story bears on this point. A wealthy man in England had laid out, at great expense, what he fondly thought was a Japanese garden. There were grotesquely clipped trees, stone lanterns, a gimcrack pagoda, a creaking and unsafe moon-shaped bridge thrown across an arbitrarily trained stream of water. In his pride, the owner took a Japanese gentleman to see it, who innocently summed up his conventionally polite praise of the place by saying, “It is truly wonderful: I have never seen anything like it.” As much can be said of most Japanese gardens outside Japan. If the soul is absent, how can dead lips deliver a message?
The nouveau riche in Japan does not, as in Western lands, at once set up motor cars, and huge houses with swarms of servants, but he enlarges his garden, or gets new ones; and such absolute connoisseurs are even this class (and from them straight down to the lowliest coolie does the same innate good taste appear) that he may produce, as I say, in a few months or years, as the case may be, a garden fit to compare with the best in the land.
Almost incredible sums are paid for stones; for trees, that are wonderfully transplanted, even when of great size; for dwarf plants, for flower-pots, for particularly choice Chrysanthemums; for specimen Irises; for beautifully designed stone lanterns or bridges, or well-covers, or pagodas. A New York millionaire’s trained architect or decorator could not more carefully consider and compare all the little details of ornament and design of the house, the appropriateness as to period and colour and make of the pictures, furniture, rugs, and bibelots with which he adorns it, than would a Japanese for his garden. Yet it is not this monetary value that makes their worth, but their appropriateness to the general scheme, the harmony each separate note brings to the whole. That may be valuable to one man which is worthless to another, and the priceless ornament useless to the owner of a simple garden.
In the Tempo Period (1830 to 1844) such great sums were spent on stones that an Imperial Edict was issued, restricting the amount that might be paid. Venice, in her opulent days, gave no greater sums for gold-decked gondolas; and Holland, in spite of her thrift and her riches, was not so extravagant in the sums spent on Tulips as were the Japanese noblemen with their specimen Chrysanthemums, their Morning Glories, their Irises, and their garden stones. To this day no foreigner will pay what they will spend for such things, because the one exquisite touch means less to us.
A Japanese, in his garden,—or in some one else’s, perhaps,—sits in the particular spot allotted to him; in his own garden, on the Master’s Stone; in another’s, on the Guest’s Seat of Honour, or on the Guest’s Isle, and drinks in the beauty as though it were golden saké,[2] tasting each honeyed, burning drop as it goes down, but never satiated. Sometimes he sits—like an image of Buddha, with a sensual face, perhaps, but with a spiritual mind teaching him how to look—sunk absorbed in the peaceful scene before him, in a very Nirvana of happiness—not himself, it would seem, but part of the spirit of the place.
I remember once, at Shimonoseki,—which, together with Moji, makes the Liverpool and Manchester, the New York and Pittsburg, of Japan; busy, bustling, dreadful places from the Oriental point of view,—seeing a young man in contemplation before a Rose. It was in a little nursery garden to which we had found our way by back streets and rather foul alleys, in search of flowers to take on board ship, and a stone lantern for our garden in Hong-Kong. A poor little spot it was, and the old Okka San,[3] who seemed the only one in charge of the place, had no word of English, and could not understand the few we had of Japanese. A lean young man
of perhaps five-and-twenty was standing, or rather leaning, beside a framework of flower-pots, watching a Tea Rose open. My husband, who had already visited the spot before breakfast, had seen him there thus early, drooping before an opening flower, and said that he did not appear to have budged an inch since, though this was an hour or two later. He was pale and languid, and seemed so absorbed by his rosebud that, although he was evidently a gentleman (and they almost always speak a little English), we did not like to ask him to translate for us, until our negotiations for a beautiful stone lantern seemed likely to fall through because of no medium of tongues. But as soon as we had begged for his assistance he roused himself, and at once went off to find the master of the place and to bring him to us. They were so long away that finally we gave up in despair, and went off to a near-by temple to look around; but by great good luck we met our æsthetic friend again, the garden’s master with him, returning to his preserves. This man, the master, spoke English, but, as even a small transaction takes an age in Japan (and this was a big one, for the lantern weighed nearly a ton), we negotiated for a good while: and all the time the visiting man of the pallid countenance stood in his grey kimono worshipping, oblivious of his surroundings, in front of his Rose.
And the recollection that counts for me of dusty, noisy, Western-imitating Shimonoseki is not of its bold and painted nésans[4] at the hotel; not of its rough and boisterous boys; not of its noise and rush and business; not of our perilous passage across the straits, when we thought our little steam-launch would be carried out to sea, stone lantern and all, by the tremendous tide, and that we were about to be engulfed in the boiling tide-rips; but of the quiet poet before his Rose.
For a garden in Japan may be only one flower in a pot, if its message, which is from God, is heard and understood by the god which is the divine spark in each human soul.
Japanese gardens have not only the fair external beauty of a pretty woman, of a rosy, dimpled child: they have the inner grace which makes its appeal to the heart long after colour has faded and the lustre and freshness of youth are past. They have the potential interest of the child, all youth’s wondering, iridescent possibilities, added to the deep heart, the sympathetic power of the woman, and the strength, the virility, the tonic force of the fine and large-souled man.
If you find no more in a Japanese garden than the look, or the lack, of a pretty face, you have never learned its magic, you have not got at the true spirit of its conception.