STTLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



55 



Romantic landscape style which we have already discussed. In both 

 styles designers found an inspiration in Nature which they used in a 

 conventional way in design ; in both styles the separate scenes of a 

 design are unified by the emotional effects which they were intended to 

 produce ; but whereas the western Romantic landscape style was a 

 sudden unreasoning outburst of revolt against previous repression, 

 which arose, ran to absurdity, and died down within less than a century, 

 the Japanese styles are the expression of a racial feeling and reverence 

 for Nature, wrought out, conventionalized, and symbolized through a 

 period of over a thousand years, by successive generations of artists, 

 who, unlike the designers of the Romantic style, produced almost in- 

 variably symbols of intrinsically beautiful form. (See Plate 4.) 



In the best of the Japanese gardens, every natural beauty large 

 and small of the sites occupied has been made use of and increased. 

 Any harmonious outside views which could possibly be developed 

 have been recognized, enframed, and made a part of the picture of 

 the garden. The garden itself is thoroughly screened, when its size 

 makes this possible, from the intrusion of anything out of scale or 

 inharmonious in association with the purpose of the design. Where 

 the scale of the design warrants it and equally where a careful 

 diminution of scale makes it possible, the gardens are often adapta- 

 tions and imitations of scenes in Nature ; but they are almost never 

 indiscriminate copies. They are representations of a chosen expres- 

 sion of Nature, a chosen effect, and everything in the design is care- 

 fully studied to cooperate in this effect. Through centuries of studied 

 appreciation, the ordinary forms used in garden design, as in the other 

 arts in Japan, have become largely conventionalized. Trees and 

 shrubs have been pruned into shapes not natural but supposed to 

 represent more typically the character of the particular plants. There 

 is a conventional relation of plants to water or stones or lanterns. 

 Certain arrangements of stones represent a brook ; certain light- 

 colored stones represent a waterfall, being set and enframed as a 

 waterfall might be ; a level area covered with white sand represents 

 a sheet of water ; certain shapes and arrangements of stones represent 

 a mountain. Many forms are used, too, in a purely symbolic way, 

 representing and suggesting certain emotions supposed to be proper 



