but of flower-painting as well, in the
old days made up the whole of an ordinary woman's education. Among the
lower classes, especially the merchant class, instruction was sometimes
given in the various pantomimic dances which one sees most frequently
presented by professional dancing girls. The art of dancing is not
usually practiced by women of the higher classes, but among the
daughters of the merchants special dances were learned for exhibition at
home, or even at the _matsuri_ or religious festival, and their
performance was for the amusement of spectators, and not especially for
the pleasure of the dancers themselves. These dances are modest and
graceful, but from the fact that they are always learned for
entertaining an audience, however small and select, and are most
frequently performed by professional dancers of questionable character,
the more refined and higher class Japanese do not care especially to
have their daughters learn them.

In the old days, little girls were not sent to school, but, going to the
house of a private teacher, received the necessary instruction in
reading, and writing. The writing and reading at the beginning, are
taught simultaneously, the teacher writing a letter upon a sheet of
paper and telling the scholar its name, and the scholar writing it over
and over until, by the time she has acquired the necessary skill in
writing it, both name and form are indelibly imprinted upon her memory.
To write, with a brush dipped in India ink, upon soft paper, the hand
entirely without support, is an art that seldom can be acquired by a
grown person, but when learned in childhood it gives great deftness in
whatever other art may be subsequently studied. This is perhaps the
reason why the Japanese value a good handwriting more highly than any
other accomplishment, for it denotes a manual dexterity that is the
secret of success in all the arts, and one who writes the Chinese
characters well and rapidly can quickly learn to do anything else with
the fingers.

The fault that one finds with the Japanese system--a fault that lies
deeper than the mere methods of teaching, and has its root in the
ideographic character of the written language--is that, while it
cultivates the memory and powers of observation to a remarkable extent,
and while it gives great skill in the use of the fingers, it affords
little opportunity for the development of the reasoning powers.[8] The
years of study that are required