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
