Page:A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design (1880).djvu/24

6 them into a bouquet, without symmetry, which shall possess the originality of an inspiration. It is in this manner that the Japanese bear the palm from the Chinese, supplying, by natural taste, the elegance and imagination which their prosaic masters lack.

Calligraphy in Japan, as in China, holds a position at least equal to that of painting, and this has without doubt greatly conduced to the artistic power of the people. The school-life of the “samurai” boy begins when he is about six years of age. His first task is to copy, in weary routine, the Japanese letters. He uses at first a brush as large as one’s little finger, so that every defect of his execution would be plainly manifest. The master sits by him and directs his movements. Every one of the complicated letters is required to be made with the strokes in the same order, and with the same emphasis. As the cost of the paper is a serious burden, he is required to use the same sheets many times over; the letters of one day are smeared out at its close, and the papers dried in the sun for the next. As you pass along the streets of a Japanese town, you may see the schoolboy’s copy-book hung out to dry, and the schoolboy himself you can always detect in his homeward march from school by his smudged fingers and face, which have received more than their share of the writer’s ink. At the lowest estimate, a schoolboy is required to learn one thousand different characters. In the government elementary schools about three thousand characters are taught. A man laying any claim to scholarship knows eight or ten thousand characters; and those who pass for men of great learning are expected to be acquainted with some tens of thousands. It is noticeable that the Japanese word kahu has, like the Greek γραφειν, the double signification of writing and painting. We have no record of the introduction or manufacture of paper until about 610, but it is probable that it was known many centuries before, and was used when the art of writing was first introduced.

The Japanese pencil is called fumute, or fude, the latter name being most commonly used. Pencils were at first made by Chinese immigrants. About the period of Taiko ( 701–703), ten pencil-makers began to be employed in the “Board of books and writings,” in manufacturing pencils for use there. These pencils were made of the hairs of rabbits, badgers, deer, and of other materials.