pleasant place wherein to walk when the sun is hot and the heart is weary.” And the thought was a good one, and Japan adopted it, as she adopts to this day anything that strikes her as true, or useful, or excellent; and so long as she kept only to this, and let Nature inspire her,—or her own artists, whose guide was Nature, laid out and arranged these open spaces about her homes and high places,—all was well. But when she slavishly imitated the Chinese interpreters of her own idea, she lapsed. I firmly believe that if Japan had continued to copy even and only the gardens of China, and had gone her course in other ways, she would not be to-day one of the great nations of this earth. For I assert unfalteringly that, her gardens being an expression of the national spirit, the beautiful outward and visible sign of the country’s inward and spiritual grace, if they had not existed in their present state of evolution Japan would have become, like China, corrupt, artificial, mercenary, of few extraordinary private virtues, and of no civic and public ones. This is no exaggeration. I have tried through my entire book to show how Japanese gardens are the outcome of Japanese spirit, are typical of her advance, spiritual and moral as well as artistic. Their gardening is not so much an art as an evolution—the growth of character; and if they had not evolved in this direction in exactly the way they have, they would not now be the people
