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.
