The passing of Korea/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII
LITERATURE
Historical narrative of the baldest kind, without any attempt to generalise, holds a most conspicuous place. In the West the historian analyses the material which historical records put in his hands; he searches for the causes of things, and frequently epitomises the salient features of a whole era in a few sentences. Such a thing as this is absolutely unknown in the dusty annals of the Far East. The scientific ability to deduce principles from mere statements of historical fact seems to have been utterly adumbrated. In his poetry the Korean is hampered rather than helped by the character. A large part of his effort is expended in the nice balancing of characters with reference to their sound, just as if a Western poet were to consider rhyme, assonance and alliteration the main elements of true poetry. And yet it must be confessed that the character has had a less deleterious effect upon the poetical faculty than upon the logical.
It may be said with considerable truth that the whole literature of Korea, as of China, is history and belles lettres. The practical side of life is hardly touched upon. To be sure, there are countless aphorisms, and moral essays of an academic character are most common, but these in their practical bearing on the Chinese or Korean mind are no more than mere polite literature, and are always perused as such.
As for scientific literature, the government now and again publishes a ponderous work in a score of volumes on some subject like farming, astronomy, medicine or law. A few wealthy gentlemen and officials can afford to secure a copy, but as for practical use by the people, these works are utterly worthless, and would be so even if the contents were unimpeachable, which is probably far from the case.
To make a very long matter short, the literatures of Korea and of China have a backward look. Imitation of past writings is the highest excellence to be achieved. Not only is there no such thing as originality, but the very word itself is wanting, and if the idea were expressed by a circumlocution it would be laughed at. To what extent the Chinese character is responsible for this state of things is a moot question, but I believe that it is one of the main causes of the backward condition of these peoples. The art of imitation dominates literature, art, dress, morals and everything else. Ask a man thoroughly conversant with these countries whether it is not true that when you have seen a single Chinese temple you have really seen them all, when you have heard one piece of music you have heard them all, when you have seen one good sample of cloisonne you have seen them all, when you have seen one sample of embroidery you have seen them all. In this arraignment Japan must be excepted, for she has received a new impetus along artistic lines through the demand of foreign trade. But I dare say that the true Japanese connoisseur to-day would by far prefer the simple and pure forms of earlier Japanese art to the more modern departures.
Korean literature, the more celebrated portions of which are all in the Chinese character, consists of voluminous histories, some of them running into several scores of volumes, the Chinese classics, founded on the Confucian code, belles lettres proper, consisting of what the Koreans vaguely call kenl, or " writing," the nature of it being supposedly poetic, a few heavy works on medicine, geography (native), law and government, and finally, a large number of biographies. Each family of note will have its history transcribed in volume after volume. Many of these are in manuscript, waiting for the time when some member of the family shall attain wealth and be able to have the work published for circulation throughout the clan. We see, then, that quite a list of Korean books could be gotten together, but the trouble is that very few Koreans can afford to possess them. The ordinary gentleman may have half a dozen works of various kinds, but it is only here and there that one of them will have what we could call a library. And right here comes in a most marked peculiarity of this people. While they are very open-handed with their money, as a rule, yet in the matter of books they are the utmost misers. I know personally of a number of well-stocked libraries in Seoul, but it is absolutely impossible even to get a look at them. Not only will the owner not lend a book, but he will not show one to a visitor except under the most unusual circumstances. They do well not to lend, but it is one of the most difficult traits of the Korean to explain, this extreme unwillingness even to show a book at his own house. It is easy to see, therefore, that the cause of general reading is badly handicapped. There are no public libraries, except those in Seoul, which handle fiction in the native character, and many of the really valuable works are so voluminous that very few can afford to purchase. Let me illustrate. One of the really valuable books is the Mun-hon Pi-go, an encyclopaedia in one hundred and twelve volumes. This work is nearly as well known by name in Korea as the Britannica is in England or America, and yet I have never discovered more than three copies of it in the country. I worked for months to secure even a look at one, and it was only the sudden collapse of a wealthy family which threw a copy on the market and gave the opportunity to buy. Even then it was a matter of considerable diplomacy. There are half-a-dozen of the leading Korean works that I have never been able to set eyes upon even after years of inquiry and search.
When we come to the matter of fiction, we find that the imagination of the Korean was not to be held completely in check even by the iron grasp of Chinese ideals. FICTION
To say that Korea has never produced a great novelist is true, if we mean by a novelist a person who makes his life-work the writing of fiction and bases his literary reputation thereon. But if, on the other hand, a man who in the midst of graver literary work turns aside to write a successful novel may be called a novelist, then Korea has produced a goodly number of them. If the word " novel " is restricted to a work of fiction developed in great detail and covering a certain minimum number of pages, Korea cannot be said to possess many novels, but if a work of fiction covering as much ground as, say, Dickens' " Christmas Carol " may be called a novel, Korea has thousands of them.
The literary history of Korea opened in the seventh century of our era. The great scholar Ch'oe Chi-wun was the Korean Chaucer, and he was one of the very few Koreans whose writings have been widely recognised outside the confines of the peninsula. But even at the very dawn of letters we find that he wrote and published a complete novel under the name " Adventures among the Kuen-lun Mountains." It is a fanciful account of a Korean's ramblings among the great mountains in southern China. The same writer also produced a volume of poems and stories. Many of the latter were of a length to merit at least the name of novelette. At about the same time another writer, Kim Am, wrote a story of adventure in Japan, which was quite long enough to be called a novel.
Kim Pu-sik, the greatest of the Koryu writers, to whom we owe the standard History of the Three Kingdoms, wrote a complete novel in one volume, called " The Story of the Long North Wall." This may be called an historical novel, for Korea once boasted a counterpart to the Great Wall of China, extending from the Yellow Sea to the Japan Sea across the whole of northern Korea.
About 1440 the celebrated monk Ka-san wrote "The Adventures of Hong Kil-dong," and another monk, Ha Jong, wrote "The Adventures of Kyong-op." Coming down to more modern times, we might mention the novel of Yi Mun-jong, written about 1760, and bearing the Aristophanean title of " The Frogs." Then there were " The Praise of Virtue and Righteousness," " Nine Men's Dreams," " A Dream at Keum-san Monastery," " The Adventures of Yi Ha-ryong," " The Golden Jewel," " The Story of a Clever Woman," " The Adventures of Sir Rabbit " and many others.
While many of these novels place the scene of the story in Korea, others go far afield, China being a favourite setting for many purely Korean stories. In this the Koreans have but followed the example of writers in other lands,, as the works of Bulwer Lytton, Kingsley, Scott and a host of others bear witness.
These that we have mentioned are written in Chinese characters, but Korea is also filled with fiction written only in the native character. Nominally these tales are despised by the literary class, which forms a small fraction of the people, but in reality there are very few even of this class who are not thoroughly conversant with the contents of these novels. They are on sale in every bookstore in the country, and in Seoul alone there are several circulating libraries where novels both in Chinese and in pure Korean are found by the hundreds. Many, in fact most, of these novels are anonymous, their character being such that they would hardly reflect credit upon their writers. And yet, however discreditable they may be, they are a true mirror of the morals of Korea to-day.
The customs which prevail in Korea, as in every other Oriental country, make it out of the question for anyone to produce a " love story " in our sense of the term ; but as the relations of the sexes, here as elsewhere, are of absorbing interest, we find some explanation of the salacious character of many Korean novels. Just as the names of Aspasia and other hctairai play such an important part in a certain class of Greek literature, so the kisang, or dancing-girl, trips through the pages of Korean fiction.
There remains here in full force that ancient custom which antedates the printing of books, of handing down stories by word of mouth. If a gentleman of means wants to " read " a novel, he does not ordinarily send put to a book-stall and buy one, but he sends for a kwang-da, or professional story-teller, who comes with his attendant and drum and recites a story, often consuming an entire day or even two days in the recital. Is there any radical difference between this and the novel? In truth, it far excels our novel as an artistic production, for the trained accent and intonation of the reciter add an histrionic element that is quite lacking when one merely reads a novel. This form of recital takes the place of the drama in Korea ; for, strange as it may seem, while both China and Japan have cultivated the histrionic art for ages, Koreans have never attempted it.
Fiction in Korea has always taken a lower place than other literary productions, poetry and history being considered the two great branches of literature. This is true of all countries whose literatures have been largely influenced by China. The use of the Chinese character has always made it impossible to write as people speak. The vernacular and the written speech have always been widely different, and it has always been impossible to write a conversation as it is spoken. This in itself is a serious obstacle to the proper development of fiction as an art, for when the possibility of accurately transcribing a conversation is taken away, the life and vigour of a story are largely lost. Dialect stories and character sketches are practically barred. And besides this, subserviency of Chinese literary ideals to the historical and poetical forms has made these people cast their fiction also in these forms; and so we often find that a genuine romance is hidden under such a title as " The Biography of Cho Sang-geun," or some other equally tame. It is this limitation of the power of written language to transcribe accurately human speech that has resulted in the survival of the professional story-teller, and it is the same thing that has made Korean written fiction inferior and secondary to history and poetry. In this, as in so many other things, Korea shows the evil effects of her subserviency to Chinese ideals.
But the question may be asked, To what extent is fiction read in Korea as compared with other literary productions? There is a certain small number of the people who probably confine their reading to history and poetry, but even among the so-called educated classes the large majority have such a rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese character that they cannot read with any degree of fluency. There is no doubt that these confine their reading to the mixed script of the daily newspaper or the novels written in the native character. It is commonly said that women are the greatest readers of these native books. This is because the men affect to despise the native alphabet, but the truth is that an overwhelming majority, even of the supposedly literate, can read nothing else with any degree of fluency, and so they and the middle classes are constant readers of the native books. As in America, so in Korea the newspapers and novels form the greater part of the literary pabulum of the masses.
It is a hopeful sign that there is nothing about this native alphabet or writing that prevents its being used as idiomatically and to as good effect as English is used in fiction to-day; and it is to be hoped that the time will soon come when someone will do for Korea what Defoe and other pioneers did for English fiction, namely, write a standard work of fiction in the popular tongue.