Morality and Taste in Garden Designs: The Garden of Suggestion

It partly served to immobilize the creative instinct into certain forms and it was partly a trick designed to perpetuate what was no longer understood. Symbolism served the same purpose as those proverbs which played their part in the examinations compulsory for all who wished to enter the public service, and gave consistent principles to the governing classes. To the Western mind the mixing of morality and taste in those proverbs seems overprecious, but the Chinese literati would not have understood the Western dissociation of ethics and aesthetics. ... A private garden should have a section of rustic wildness: if it merely dazzles by its sumptuousness the vulgarity of it suffocates one's breath. . There are four rules for living in the mountains: let there be no formation in trees, no arrangement of rocks; no sumptuousness in the living house, and no contrivance in the human heart. ... To go to see the prune flowers after snow, pay a visit to the chrysanthemums during frost, tend the orchid during rain, or listen to the swaying bamboos before the breeze such are the joys of leisure of a rustic fellow, but they are also moments of the greatest meaning to the scholar. This degree of awareness, these exquisite sensations, are not unknown to those of European culture, but what seems unusual is the devoted care with which the mind is prepared for such sensations. The difference between the European and the Chinese attitude to art is shown up by the comment of Roger Fry: `... One feels one must be a little on one's guard with people who invented the "tea ceremony", people who deliberately hypnotized themselves into an attitude of expectant aesthetic adoration. They would say, no doubt, that this hypnotic business of walking along the garden path in silence to the tea-house only served to produce a due receptivity, only put one into a favourable attitude. But that is just it: they are always getting one into too favourable an attitude, hypnotizing away one's critical common sense.