| Francis "Frank" Brinkley
(1841-1912) Born in County Meath, Ireland, he went to Trinity College, where he received the
highest records in mathematics and classics. After graduating he chose a military career and was
subsequently accepted at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, becoming an artillery officer. In this
capacity his cousin, Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell the 6th Governor of Hong Kong invited him out to the east to
serve as his Aide-de-camp and Adjutant. In 1866, on his way to Hong Kong, Brinkley visited Nagasaki and
witnessed a duel between two samurai warriors. Once the victor had slain his opponent he immediately
covered him in his haori, and "knelt down with hands clasped in prayer." It is said that Brinkley was so
impressed by the conduct of the Japanese warrior that this enticed him to live in Japan permanently. In
1867 Captain Brinkley returned to Japan, never again to return home. Attached to the British-Japanese
Legation, and still an officer in the Royal Artillery, he was assistant military attache to the Japanese Embassy.
He resigned his commission in 1871 to take up the post of foreign advisor to the new
Meiji government, and taught
artillery techniques to the new Imperial Japanese Navy at the Naval Gunnery School. He mastered the Japanese
language soon after his arrival, and both spoke and wrote it well. In 1878 he was invited to teach mathematics
at the Imperial College of Engineering, which later became part of Tokyo Imperial University, remaining in this post
for two and a half years. In 1881 until his death he owned and edited the Japan Mail newspaper (later
merged with the Japan Times), receiving financial support from the Japanese government and consequently
maintaining a pro-Japanese stance. The newspaper was perhaps the most influential and widely read English
language newspaper in the far East. After the First Sino-Japanese War Brinkley became the Tokyo-based
correspondent for The Times of London, and gained fame for his dispatches during the Russo-Japanese War
of 1904-1905. He was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Meiji for his contributions to
better Anglo-Japanese relations.
"Japan Its History, Arts and Literature" by Frank Brinkley (1901): Associated with miniature gardening is the art of growing trees in pots, which also may be said to have attained the rank of a national pastime from the Muromachi era; or, speaking more accurately, from the close of the fifteenth century. It is not suggested that the practice of dwarfing trees and shrubs by confining their roots in pots had not been inaugurated long before the days when the Ashikaga dilettante carried (243) the æsthetic cult to extravagant lengths in Kyōtō. But it had not attracted special attention prior to that time, nor given any indications of the extraordinary proportions it was destined ultimately to attain. Something of the impulse it then received must be attributed to the contemporaneous development of keramic skill which marked the epoch. The pot itself began to rank as an object of art, and to take shapes, sizes, and colours which, by suggesting new possibilities of harmony between the receptacle and its contents, encouraged new conceptions on the part of the tree-trainer. Thenceforth the bonsai (potted shrub) became a specialty of the Japanese gardener, and the worship of the cult is perhaps more fervent among the upper classes to-day than it ever was. There is only one canon of practice, and only one test of perfection: the tree or shrub, though but five or six inches in height, must be, in everything save dimensions, an absolute facsimile of what it would have been had it grown for cycles unrestrained in the forest: must have the same spread of bough in proportion to girth of trunk; the same girth of trunk in proportion to height; the same set of branch gnarling of stem, and even symptoms of decrepitude. To be able to place upon the alcove-shelf one of the monsters of the forest in miniature, and to receive from it unerring suggestions of the broad moor, the mossy glade, the play of shadow and sunlight, the voice of the distant waterfall, and the sound of the wind in (244) the treetops, -- that is the ideal of the disciple of the cult. Each pigmy tree must tell faithful stories of the landscape among which its giant representative lives and dies. It would seem at first sight that this canon can never be applied to the foliage; that there the art is foiled; for though the trunk may be dwarfed and the branch stunted, the leaf must always attain its natural size. Such is not the case. By accurately regulating the tree's diet of water, its foliage, too, may be reduced to dimensions exactly proportional to its stature, and thus the delusion becomes complete in every detail. There may be differences of opinion as to whether the decades and cycles of unremitting labour and attention required to bring nature's processes into such precise control are justified by results, but there can be no doubt that to sacrifice the art on the altar of economy would be to rule a delightful element out of the life of the nation. Many a Japanese statesman or man of affairs, when he finds himself in the presence of his treasured collection of bonsai, can pass from the troubled realm of political squabbles and business cares to the imaginary contemplation of quiet rustic scenes and tranquil landscapes, and can refresh his tired brain by realistic visions of nature's peaceful solitudes. It may well be supposed that the art of interpreting and emphasizing the æsthetics of vegetation finds its extreme development in the training of bonsai, and the attempt to give full (245) expression within such narrow limits often tends to exaggeration or even grotesqueness. Thus, on first acquaintance with the products of the art, one is disposed to denounce some of them as monstrosities. But it may safely be asserted that the fault is generally subjective. In every branch of Japanese æsthetics a multitude of conventions, evolved from infinitely painstaking study of nature's methods, and stamped with the cachet of great masters in bygone times, has passed into a revelation from which no one ventures to take away an alpha or an omega. Intelligent sympathy with the spirit that dictated these conventions cannot survive slavish obedience to their laws, and it may not be denied that some of these dwarfed trees and shrubs show the mechanics of the art without its genius. But when that seems to be the case with a specimen that has obtained the sanction of two or three generations of connoisseurs, its faithfulness to some freak of nature can be taken for granted, since although hyperbole of type or abuse of convention may be temporarily permitted, such solecisms cannot pass current for any length of time among people like the Japanese. A stranger must be careful, therefore, before he condemns as unnatural in Japan everything that offends his own sense of nature's methods. Eloquence of orthodox form is probably there if his faculties were trained to recognize it.1 |
|
1 Brinkley, Capt. F. Japan Its History, Arts and Literature
(Boston and Tokyo: J.B. Millet Company; 1901), Vol. 2, pp.
242-245.
The most eloquent and poetic summary of bonsai we have come across thus far.
|