KOREAN WOMEN—(continued).

Slight as is the visible part played by woman in Korea, yet there are an almost endless number of facts concerning her which are either significant or in themselves interesting.To me at least, woman, and the conditions of her life, together form the most interesting branch of the study of Korea.And even to those who take no deep interest in burning social questions, and whose interest in far-away lands scarcely exceeds an intelligent curiosity, any facts about Korean women must be especially interesting, I fancy, because those facts are less generally known, less easily known than almost any other facts connected with this wonderful peninsula, and its wonderful people.So I do not hesitate to devote another of my very limited number of chapters to the women of Korea.

Cosmetics are not, it is gratifying to say, a product of our Western civilization.They are greatly used all over the Orient.But in two particulars there is less to be said against the face-painting of Eastern women than there is to be said against the face-painting of the women of the West.In Asia, hair-oil, rouge, powder, kohl for the eyes and eyebrows, and brilliant pigments for the lips, are put on frankly, and are as avowedly, and as sincerely, a seemly and decent adornment, and as much an item of being “dressed up,” as is a silken petticoat or a jewelled necklet.Ladies of Asia “make up” more brazenly than the ladies of Europe, and their ugly, painted imitation is still less like the loveliness of nature than is the painted ugliness of ourselves when we do not feel that we have sufficient beauty of face to leave it unadorned.But the Eastern woman who “makes up” her face has no thought of deceiving anyone, or of obtaining masculine admiration or feminine envy under false pretences.Her painting is as much a matter of convention as is the Chinaman’s wearing of his queue; and she lays on the thick layers of brilliant red and ghastly white as devoutly and as dutifully as she says her prayers.The other good word I have to say for the cosmetics of the Orient is this—they are infinitely less harmful than the cosmetics we are wont to use in Europe.I know that.For, on the stage I have tried both very thoroughly.

A well-to-do Korean woman usually has a very interesting collection of hair-pins.They are long, heavily ornamented, made of silver, of gold, or of copper; more usually of silver.Some of them are very beautiful, and some that I have seen reminded me very much of the long silver pins that are thrust through the braids of Italian peasant women.

The well-to-do women, especially in the capital, now very generally wear European under-clothing.They invariably wear a pouch which is fastened by cords to their girdle.This is their pocket, the only pocket they have, except their sleeves, and in it they carry a tiger’s claw for luck, a small cushion of sachet, or a bottle of thick, rich perfume, some of their favourite pieces of jewellery, scissors usually, or a knife, two or three of their most frequently used toilet implements, and almost invariably a small Korean chess-board and chess-men.The board and the pieces are often made of silver or even of gold.Chess is, perhaps, the most popular of all Korea’s many games, and the Korean women of the leisure class play it incessantly.The pocket also contains, more likely than not, the official book of female politeness; a book which every Korean lady studies assiduously.But whatever this pocket contains or does not contain, it must by no means be without several charms, charms for good luck, charms for health, charms for wealth, and for any or every other good desirable under the Korean sun.Of its charms the most valuable is the tiger’s claw.Mr. Griffis says, “Nor can the hardy mountaineer put into the hand of his bride a more eloquent proof of his valour than one of those weapons of a man-eater.It means even more than the edelweiss of other mountain lands.”The tiger is probably the most dreaded foe of the Koreans.They fear it more than they fear China; hate it more than they hate Japan.The Chinese have a saying which so vividly pictures the tiger-Korean situation that I must quote it, though it has, I believe, already been quoted by every other European and the majority of Orientals who have ever written on Korea.It is this: “The Korean spends one half of the year hunting the tiger, and the other half in being hunted by him.”

The hands of a Korean lady are always exquisitely kept, and usually loaded with rings, often with rings of very great value.

Among some classes of Korean women the dressing of their hair is the most important item of their toilet, and one skilled in ways Korean, and in signs of Korean rank, can very readily determine, from a glance at her coiffure, who and what a Korean woman is.The ladies of the court wear their hair in different prescribed ways.The geisha girls have an artistic fashion of their own, and a Korean woman servant, one part of whose duty is to fetch and to carry, makes out of the braids of her own hair an enormous cushion upon which she can carry with the greatest security a huge bundle, or a vast dish of food.

The men of no other race are so amply dowered with hats as are the men of Korea. Probably the women of no other civilized country are so badly off for head-gear as are the women of Chosön, and this is not, though we might easily fancy it to be, because those women are not supposed to walk or ride abroad. For innumerable years Korea has taken her fashions from China, changing them with the change of dynasty at Pekin. But for five hundred years the Koreans have failed to change the fashion of their hats, and they remain true to the style of head-gear which was in vogue when the present Korean dynasty came into power. When the present fashion in hats was imported from Pekin, just about five hundred years ago, the Koreans neglected to learn, or were unable to learn, what the women of China were wearing on their heads, or else the women of China were going bare-headed. The result was that Korean women, having discarded their previous head coverings, and receiving no authority from Pekin for the fashion of new ones, became hatless, and have been hatless ever since. The only hat the Korean women wear now is the folded dress which I have described before. There is indeed a jaunty, little embroidered cap not unlike a modified Turkish fez, or the glorious capote of a French vivandière, which is supposed to be at the disposal of any Korean woman who cares to assume it, but it has been adopted by the geisha girls, and so, of course, discarded by Korean ladies.Korean women used to wear a huge hat not unlike a small, flat, Chinese parasol.It was perched well up on and well to the back of their heads, and was surrounded by a rather fascinating silk fringe, through which they could see and be seen—a fringe that was, perhaps, as becoming to them as our white spotted veils are to us.

A few words here about divorce in Korea, for divorce is always a matter of more importance to a woman than to her husband.This is so in every country, because as yet in every country woman is more confined to her home, more dependent upon her home, and less free to go abroad at all seasons and under all circumstances than man is, and therefore less able to escape the daily torment of married unhappiness.In the United States, and in most European countries whose laws I have at all studied, the divorce laws are very much more in favour of woman than of man.In Korea the direct opposite is true.There is little or nothing for which a Korean woman can obtain a divorce, and there is little or nothing for which a Korean man cannot.Whether it is more to the credit of Korean woman or to the credit of Korean man far be it for me to say; but it is a very rare occurrence for a Korean husband to put aside his wife.The sanctity of the home circle, the inviolate maintenance of that home circle is more than a religion, more than an instinct with nine-tenths of the people of Asia.Their idea of a home circle may be more elastic than ours, but, as a rule, they abide by it almost with the courage of martyrs.The women must, and the men do.In one respect the divorce laws of Korea are more radical than the divorce laws of the West.Incompatibility of temper justifies divorce in Korea, and is the cause of most Korean divorces.Truly nothing could be more sensible, more humane—provided one has no religious scruples—for even children lose more than they gain by living in an unhappy home.Incompatibility of temper may not be a sin, but it is the one difficulty in the path of married happiness, in Asia or in Europe, which can never be smoothed away.It is insurmountable, nor can you go around it.It seems to me that the only decent thing to do when you come upon it, again provided your conscience will let you, is to turn round and go back.A harsh word, a quick gesture, and many things that are many times worse can be forgiven readily enough, and almost forgotten, by people who have the common justice to judge not lest they be judged.But incompatibility of temper, that strange something which makes it impossible for me to teach my pet cat to eat or drink with my pet dog, ah!that is the marital thorn, the marriage plague, “past cure, past help, past hope.”And I congratulate the law makers of Korea for recognizing it for what it is, and dealing with it as it should be dealt with.To be sure, if a Korean man and wife fail to get along, perpetually fail, the woman has no direct voice in the matter; but if she and her husband agree together to untie the mistakenly-tied knot, he can very easily do so.And even in Korea a woman of average wit does not probably find it too difficult a task to make herself so very disagreeable that the husband may be brought to propose the separation which she secretly desires.

But where the Korean law seems to me very inconsistent is in not punishing, when the marriage is a failure, the geomancer who selected the wedding day.The method of this sage is so simple that it ought to be infallible.He adds the age of the bride to the age of the groom, and after determining which star rules the destiny of their united ages, he decrees that the wedding shall take place upon the day sacred to that star.How a day so chosen can ever fail to be auspicious, and to be the beginning of many days of uninterrupted happiness it is hard for a simple Western mind to understand.To do the geomancer justice, it is perhaps because of his occult wisdom that divorce plays so minor a part in Korean life.

One Korean law concerning women seems to me uniquely cruel.A woman may not die in the arms of a man, nor may a woman hold in her arms a man who is dying.Husbands and wives love each other sometimes—even in Korea.Mothers love their sons, the wide world over, and sons their mothers.Korean fathers yearn over their daughters, and are loved tenderly by those daughters in return.What a barbarous law!how infamous; how unworthy of the East or of the West!what a reflection upon humanity; what a stain upon Korea!That inferiority of sex (sex—that unexplained accident of our physical existence), inferiority, real or imagined, should separate man from wife, father from daughter, son from mother, even by a hair’s breadth, at the moment when Death, the merciless, the relentless, pronounces the great, and perhaps eternal separation!

Though a Korean woman nominally counts for nothing in the ruling of her own household, and, as far as the workings of the State go, does not exist, she is invariably treated with the manner of respect; she is always addressed in what is called “honorific language;” to her the phraseology is used which is used to superiors, people of age, or of literary eminence.A Korean nobleman will step aside to let a Korean peasant woman pass him on the street.The rooms of a Korean woman are as sacred to her as a shrine is to its image.Indeed, the rooms of his wife or of his mother are the sanctuary of any Korean man who breaks the law.Unless for treason or for one other crime, he cannot be forced to leave those rooms, and so long as he remains under the protection of his wife, and his wife’s apartments, he is secure from the officers of the law, and from the penalties of his own misdemeanours.

It is often said that the men of the East regard women not only as their inferiors, but as burdens, as superfluous, useless, and despicable.This is a mistake, as large a mistake in speaking of Koreans as of any other Oriental race.The potence of sex, the impotence of either sex alone, is the great underlying thought of all Eastern philosophy, I had almost said, of all Oriental ethics.Which of the great Eastern religions ignores it, or passes it by lightly?Study the symbols in the old caves of India: read Confucius.Every educated Oriental believes that without women life would not only be impossible but worthless.They regard her sphere of usefulness as important as their own.An Oriental mother is almost an Oriental deity.This is as true in Korea as in China, in Japan, in Persia, in Hindostan, and in Burmah.The thinkers of Asia differ from us in what they regard as the most appropriate and the most essential spheres of women’s usefulness, but they never ignore, nor do I think they underrate, the importance of woman’s work.Mr. Griffis, who is not over partial to the Koreans (perhaps if he had ever lived among them he might have liked them better), himself says:⁠—

“With the ethics of the Chinese came their philosophy, which is based on the dual system of the universe, and of which in Korean, yum-yang (positive and negative, active and passive, or male and female) is the expression. All things in heaven, earth, and man are the result of the interaction of the yum (male or active principle), and the yang (female or passive principle). Even the metals and minerals in the earth are believed to be produced through the yum-yang, and to grow like plants or animals.”

Even so clear, so cool, so sympathetic, so cultured, and best of all, so unbigoted an observer, a thinker, and a writer as Percival Lowell, seems to me to have blundered a little in his summing up of the position of woman in the East.He says:⁠—

“The lower man’s place in the scale of nations, the lower, relatively to his own, has always been that of woman. Woman, being physically less strong, naturally suffers where physical strength is made the basis of esteem. But as men have advanced in civilization, gradually a chivalrous regard has been paid the weaker, but fairer sex. Now, though the countries of the Far East have had their age of feudalism, in a general parallelism to those of the West, loyalty took the place of chivalry as one of its attendant feelings. At the point where woman elsewhere made her début upon the social stage, here she failed to appear; and she has not done so since. The history of these races has been a history of man apart from any help from woman. To all social intents and purposes, woman has remained as she was when she followed as a slave in her Lord’s wanderings. She is better fed now, better clothed, cleaner and more comfortable than she was; but, relatively to the position of the people, no higher. She counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted for nothing in it from the beginning.”

That the history of the races of the Far East has been a history of man apart from any help of woman, I cannot understand Mr. Lowell’s saying. He is evidently a man of very wide education, and he has lived in the Far East. Undoubtedly he has read the history of the Far East, and I cannot imagine the author of “Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm,” reading anything unintelligently. “That woman counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted as nothing in it from the beginning!” Ah! yes, Mr. Lowell. She counts for a great deal. The tally of her influence may not be kept in the market-place, nor her power blazoned on the house-tops, but influence and power are there. She counts for a hundred things, and will count in every part of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, until Nature adopts a very different modus operandi from her present one. And in Korea, in China and Japan, woman counts above all for motherhood, and for the perpetuation of the race. And that she so counts must give her really great power among any race of men whose one eradicable religion is the worship of their ancestors, whose universal and insatiable ambition is to beget sons who may in turn worship them, and secure them a prosperous and a happy eternity.

There is much, very much that I deplore in the condition of woman in Korea.But once in a while woman gets the whip hand, and once in a very great while she has the wit to use it—and the nerve—even in Korea.

If it must be a canon of European literary good form to say very little, and to say it gingerly about Oriental polygamy, it has been a more than general custom among European writers to say nothing, nothing at least of any significance about the large class of Oriental women who stand outside the pale even of polygamy.There are some things that I think ought to be said about them; said now, when we are so very earnestly trying to understand the East, and, I hope, honestly striving to help the East.These things would come with more convention I know from the pen of a man, but I think they would come more appropriately from the pen of a woman, and I take upon myself the saying of them, in so far as I am able.I feel impelled to explain, as well as I can, the exact social position, and the exact personally mental attitude of the yoshiwara women of Japan, the flower girls of China, and the geisha girls of Korea.These three are sisters.They are cousins, more or less close of kin, to the nautch girls of India, and the posture girls of Burmah and of Siam.But these three were born of one father, and of one mother, and are the result of one bringing up.What shall I call them?I have no wish to use a harsh word that would offend select European ears, nor will I use a harsh word that would wrong and mis-describe them.I might almost call them the understudies of the happier women of the East; for in Asia’s social life they take the parts which ought, perhaps, to be played by the harem-hidden wives and mothers of the Orient.Those women, whose profession is publicity, are an important part of the social structure of every Asiatic race I have known, except only the Parsi race.To ignore their existence, when travelling through Asia in person, or with pen, is stupid.To slink by the strong position that they hold in the East, the big significance of their firm placement in the East, and the several lessons they will not fail to teach us, if we do not fear to learn, is prudish.To pass them by with a cry of horror, and to condemn them as being what they are not, is un-Christian and unjust.

For the men that mocked His agony and spat upon Him, Jesus claimed forgiveness, because “they knew not what they did.”And certainly the professionally unfortunate women of the East have as little consciousness of degradation and of sin as they have of shame.There are many reasons why this is so, and I will try to state them.I am only less sorry for the homeless, nameless women of Asia, than I am for the homeless, nameless women of Europe.Perhaps this is the best place for me to say that I am making no plea for the profession of which I am writing.For the women who through folly, through ignorance, or who beneath the lash of that hardest of all task-masters, circumstance, follow this nameless profession, I could easily find it in my heart to plead, and to plead, and to plead; but not now nor here.What I wish to do now is to write frankly, freely, and truthfully of the women who make the seclusion and the sanctity of gentlewomen possible in the Far East.

After all’s said and done, the social scales must balance or break, weight them as you will.And as the women of the Korean gentry are more secluded than those of any other Oriental gentry, so are the geisha girls of Chosön more interesting, more fascinating even than the yoshiwara women of Japan, and infinitely more so than the flower girls of China.Men living in the Far East, superior as they find the society of men to the society of men and women, tire of the perpetual society of men, and long to let down its intellectual average a bit by the introduction into it of women.Now the men of the East cannot possibly, from their point of view, bring their wives and daughters out from the safe shelter of home seclusion.But still they long for the mental, not to speak of the moral relaxation of woman’s companionship, and so in the East a class of women has sprung up which is only very slightly analogous to the class of Western women from whom respectable Western women draw their skirts aside as they pass them in the Western streets.

Women seem to be an indispensable element of society after all.Social enjoyment without them is more or less a failure, at least in any very prolonged form.And in those countries where wives and mothers must veil their faces, a class has sprung into existence—a class whose exact social position is almost, if not quite, outside the pale of modern European comprehension.

The geisha of Korea, like the yoshiwara women of Japan, are sweetly pretty, soft-voiced, and charmingly mannered.And, like their sisters of Japan, they seem almost happy and quite dignified.Perhaps indeed, they feel that they fulfil a national want—perform a national duty.

Companionship is the first and the chief thing required by an Oriental man from the women he pays to share some of the hours that he spends away from home.If the Hindoo, or Chinaman, or the Japanese, or the Korean man be poor, he has no leisure hours, and certainly cannot afford the illicit companionship which comes dear, and becomes dearer in the long run, all the world over.If he be well-to-do, the chances are that he has a bungalow or yamun running over with wives.Therefore, it is not for a common bestial satisfaction, but altogether for natural human companionship, that the men of the Far East so largely employ and so generously pay those Eastern women who have broken through the closed curtains and out of the sure safety of Oriental home-life, into the turmoil and the promiscuousness of society.Here, I must emphatically say, and it should be most emphatically remembered by anyone who is trying to understand the East: the nameless women of the East sin, but sin is neither their sole nor their chief occupation.To please, to amuse, to understand, and to companion men, mentally and socially, is their chief duty, their chief occupation, and their most earnest study.Sin follows, as sin has the grievous habit of following wherever people are human.But sin is neither the beginning nor the end, and I who can see no difference between a Korean wife and a Korean concubine, can see little or none between a Korean concubine and a Korean geisha.I am speaking of their morals, of course.The geisha girl is, as a rule, rather better educated than the concubine, better educated, quite possibly, than the wife; for the geisha must make her way, and hold any position she gains, solely by personal talent, personal attractiveness, and personal attainments.Not for her to lay at the man’s feet a son who may worship him into the most desirable corner of the Korean heaven; only for her to please him while she is with him, to touch for him odd instruments and sing to them soft, weird songs, to shake the soft perfume of her hair across his cheek and the perfume of the flowers she wears upon the bowl of food, or of fish, or fruit she humbly places before him; only for her to laugh at his humour, flat howsoever it may be; only for her to applaud his ambitions, urge on his hopes, charm away his fears; only for her to please; never for her, save by accident, to be pleased.And that is the state of their sad fate in Europe, in Asia, in America, or in Africa: the women who give an everlasting all for a momentary nothing.Feminine unchastity is less degrading in the East than in the West, and the unfortunate women of the East are far less degraded than the unfortunate women of the West.There are three reasons why this is so.In the Orient no woman is born to immorality.In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral.And immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate.

In the Orient no woman is born to immorality. The ranks of the immoral profession are recruited from homes and from family circles that are quite up to the Asiatic average, and an immoral method of life is usually adopted by an Eastern girl not from impulse, not from caprice, but from a conviction that it is the surest and the most sensible way for her to earn her living, and assist in earning the living of her family. Her parents, in all probability, share this conviction with her, and nine times out of ten she makes her début in the profession of sin after the elders of her family have consulted earnestly together, and sifted, as best they can, the probabilities and the possibilities of her future. So she starts into her sad pilgrimage from a clean home, from clean associations, and her instincts and herself are clean and normal. She adopts sin gravely and as a business; nor does it ever occur to her to regard it as a self-indulgence; rather is it a penance, or an act of filial self-sacrifice.

In the East the life of a young girl is seldom wrecked by the misfortune which overtakes so many of our own girls.The social arrangements in the East prevent that, prevent it very effectually.When an Eastern girl takes upon herself a long martyrdom of public service she is at least of normal mind and whole of heart.Her nature, mental and moral, however it may be debased by her future life, is as yet unvitiated by any accumulation of ancestral wrong-doing.She may adopt sin for reasons that seem good and sufficient to herself and her parents, but she has no appetite for sin, no appetite inherited from her mother at least, so she has a fairer start than have the majority of unfortunate women in the Occident.

In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral.“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This may not be altogether true, but certainly there is a good deal of truth in it.The unfortunate women of the East have vastly more self-respect than have the unfortunate women of the West.They are not despised, and therefore they do not despise themselves; nor are they driven by the merciless scourges of public opinion to lower and coarser methods of life than those unavoidably entailed by the profession they follow.Their profession is not considered an honourable, an elevating, nor an enviable one; but it is considered, by the people among whom they live, as a useful and necessary and, within certain loose limits, an honest one.This makes it possible for them to lead lives of comparative respectability, and to enjoy frankly, fearlessly, and purely some of the best things of life.The flowers that grow about their houses, and the wonderful skies that canopy their countries, convey to them no word of reproach.They gather the blossoms as innocently, and they smile back at the smiling heavens as unashamedly as does any maiden in the East.

If one gives a dog a sufficiently bad name it becomes almost righteous to hang him.The peoples of the Orient spare their unfortunate women unnecessary contumely.And this is the second reason why those women are better, less deplorable, individually and collectively, than are such women in Europe or America.This seems to me another instance of Asiatic justice and good sense.Why such women, and such women alone, should be blamed for an existing state of general immorality I cannot imagine.They are not responsible for it, though, of course, they help to perpetuate it.They take to life’s sad market-place wares for which they know there is a demand.They supply the demand; but they do not create it.

Immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate.As I have said, companionship is the chief return an Eastern man expects and exacts for the coin that he throws into the lap of a light woman.The loose women of the East must be educated, and that they are educated makes it possible for them to spend many hours of each day in wholesome, refining occupations—occupations which are closed to the great mass of European unfortunates.

To recapitulate, the women of whom I am writing are of a better grade than are such women in the West, because in the East those women come from respectable homes and have memories of innocent and happy childhoods.Secondly, because they are so regarded in the East that they need not altogether part with self-respect; and lastly, because education and refinement are not only possible to them, but necessary to them, and because the majority of their professional hours are passed in conversation or with music, and are altogether free from coarseness.

I have spoken of these women as being out of the pale of matrimony.This is true, I believe, in China and in Korea, and in most other Oriental countries; but it is not at all true in Japan.It used to be in Japan an ordinary occurrence, and even now it is not, I think, unusual for a girl to sell herself for a stated period of time into the horrible slavery of a tea-house, or become for some definite number of years the mistress of a well-to-do man.This is often done to earn enough money to pay some debt of family honour, to redeem the pledged word of a father or of a brother.The girl who does it is considered anything and everything rather than a bad woman.She returns to her native village, or to her father’s house, when the time of her servitude has expired, and she is received with every possible sign of honourable welcome, and is pointed out then and thereafter as an example of daughterly perfection, and of virtuous womanhood.She marries as readily and as well as any of her girl friends, and her past is not regarded as to her detriment either by her husband or his family.This practice is more common among the poor than among the rich.But there are women of very high position in Japan who have had this terrible experience, and who have survived it, mentally and morally.

There is, of course, in Japan a large number of women who adopt immorality when they are very young, and who never put it aside.They are called yoshiwara women.In the old times they lived apart, not only in quarters of the town set aside for them, but in quarters that were enwalled, and through the gateways of which they could not pass without permission—permission that was not too readily granted.Even now there are streets set apart in almost every Oriental city—set apart for the occupancy of unfortunate women.The roads and the byways of Japan are sprinkled with tea-houses, and in almost every tea-house there are two or more yoshiwara women.These tea-houses are models of cleanliness, are usually pretty in situation, and always artistically furnished.The tea, cakes, and sweets sold in them are almost invariably delicious.The girls who are supposed to be the chief attraction of the tea-houses are rather brazen as a rule, far more so than the flower-girls of China, or the geisha girls of Korea, but it is a very butterfly sort of brazenness.Their manners are so pretty, their movements so bird-like, and their voices so tinkling and silvery, that it seems rather unfair to criticize them for being somewhat over-emphatic in what they say and do, and in how they say and do it.

I remember one warm afternoon in Kobe, I was in my jinrickshaw and several miles from home.I was tired, very thirsty, and my four-year-old boy, who was with me, assured me that he could not live much longer unless he had something to eat.I stopped at a tea-house—a pretty, carved, lantern-hung place that was perched on the hillside, not very far from the marvellous waterfall.I had not been very long in Japan, and had no idea that I was making a social blunder, but I noticed that my jinrickshaw coolie looked disturbed and dubious.Two Japanese girls sat on the verandah; one was smoking a long silver pipe, and the other was picking whispered music from a diminutive white guitar.One girl wore a kimono of pale green crêpe, brocaded with pink apple-blossoms; the other girl’s kimono was of dark, bright blue, but it was almost covered with huge yellow roses.Both girls wore the ordinary Japanese sash, had their hair elaborately dressed, and were rather loaded with jewellery.Through the openings of their kimonos peeped the edges of sundry other garments, all of crêpe or of silk, and all brilliantly coloured.They laughed and nodded as I came up the steps, and when I said that my boy and I were hungry and thirsty, one of them rose and led me into the house.We passed through a fair-sized room in which half a dozen European men, one of whom I happened to know, and as many Japanese girls were feasting rather merrily.The girls looked at me with considerable good-natured amusement; the European men looked at me in most considerable surprise.Baby and I were taken into a dainty little room which really was not big enough for more than two, and there were given quite a delightful luncheon.The girl who had showed us in waited upon us gravely and most attentively, and with admirable patience, for we were both hungry, very hungry, and thirsty, very thirsty.I found out afterwards that it was the first time she had poured afternoon tea for one of her own sex, and that I had made a most unfortunate mistake in going into the tea-house at all.But the girl who served us treated me and herself with perfect respect.

Respectable Japanese women wear the quietest of colours, in public at least.Bright flowers, glittering jewellery, and gaudy garments are the avowed livery of the yoshiwara women.They are pretty as a rule—these women—prettier even than the run of Japanese women; for in Japan personal beauty is considered one of the indispensable attributes of women who would lead a life of remunerative idleness.

The flower-girls of China are in most ways more to be pitied than the yoshiwara women of Japan.They are not as a rule so well educated, nor so comfortably housed, and though treated with a good deal of allowance, and collectively taken, as a matter of course, their position is neither so assured, nor the circumstances of their lives so endurable as are those of the Japanese girls.The breaking of the seventh commandment may be as common in China as it is in Korea or Japan, but it is not so lightly regarded, and the flower-girls are almost without exception the children of extreme poverty.And a Chinese woman who has once lived in a house of ill-fame can never go back to even apparent respectability.This is not so in the Straits Settlements, where there are very many Chinamen and very few Chinese women.In Singapore and in Penang Chinese girls who have been sent from China for immoral purposes very frequently marry well, and pass the rest of their lives in security and comfort.But in China I fancy that this never happens.

The Chinaman is the most domesticated of the men of the East, and the least fond of general society.He does not go to the houses of the flower-girls for society, for companionship, not at least in any quiet and unobjectionable sense, nor so commonly as do Korean and Japanese men.The Chinese flower-girl, except the very lowest type, is taught to sing, to play on several instruments, to heat wine and to spice it, to prepare delicacies and table dainties, and to serve a feast.She is taught to keep herself as good-looking from a Chinese standpoint as possible.But this is usually the list of her accomplishments, the limit of her education, and she is vastly ignorant compared to the women who dwell in the house of the man who patronizes her.Many of these Chinese women live outside the gates of Chinese cities.Thousands of them live in little boats that are called “flower-boats” and off of which they seldom go.The “flower-boats” of Canton are a most distinctive feature of that most distinctly quaint place.Shortly before the declaration of war between China and Japan, the following telegram was sent from Hong Kong:⁠—

“A terrible fire has occurred on the Canton river among the flower-boats which crowd the surface and form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population.Hundreds of the flower-boats were destroyed, and fully one thousand natives must have perished.

“The boats were moored stem and stern in rows, and the flames spread with such rapidity that many of the craft were fully alight and their occupants overcome before they could cut the boats from their moorings and push them out into the open water.”

As if poor China were not in trouble enough just then, with a terrible plague still in rather full swing, and with war and with rumours of war, but must needs go and set herself on fire!

I don’t in the least doubt that there was a terrible fire on the Canton river, and that over a thousand human creatures perished in the flames.Such a catastrophe is by no means unprecedented in China, and most especially in Canton.But I do doubt that the fire broke out among the flower-boats.In the first place the flower-boats do not crowd the surface of the Canton river.In the second place they do not form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population.I think that the sender of the dispatch, or one of the operators through whose hands it passed, must have confused flower-boats, sampans and Chinese cargo-boats.

The flower-boats are not in a crowded part of the river.They are moored quite by themselves at the wide mouth of the river and some little distance from the city.They are together, but not painfully near.No families dwell upon them.They are occupied solely by the flower-girls and their servants, and at night their decks and cabins swarm with rich and dissipated Chinamen.Then their windows are brilliant with light, their decks are bright with fanciful lanterns, and they are noisy with laughter and the tinkling of strange stringed instruments, and they smell of hot samshu.Not the sort of place in which one would expect flowers to thrive!Alas!the flowers on those boats are human flowers.They are painted with brilliant colours, but not by the hand of nature.

The girls who live there are not vendors of buds and blossoms. “Flower-girl” is the name by which the over chivalrous Chinamen designate a woman who is professionally unchaste.

On the opposite side of the river’s mouth, but still farther from the city, are moored the miserable boats of the lepers.The saddest of sins and the saddest of diseases are within sight of each other.Both are outside the pale of Chinese society.Both are excluded from Cantonese citizenship.

Because of their isolation, I doubt that the recent fire occurred among the flower-boats.But among the small cargo-boats, among the thickly huddled sampans!Yes; likely enough there.

Surely it is horrible enough to live all one’s life in a Chinese sampan or in a small junk, without being burnt to death into the bargain.Drowning, now, is a very common occurrence on a Chinese river.No one takes much notice of that in Canton.To be sure the mothers put crude, home-made life preservers on their babies, or tie a long rope about their little yellow waists, fastening the other end firmly to the boat.So if a Chinese baby falls overboard (as it usually does two or three times a day), it has a very fair chance of floating or being hauled back.But the adults must take their chances, and extraordinary numbers of them manage to tumble into a watery grave.Hundreds of Chinese are born in sampans, live in sampans, die in sampans.Yet almost none of them can swim.

For one thing the canals and rivers are too crowded.There is no room for them to swim in.For another thing they have no time to learn how to swim.It’s all work and no play to most of the sampan dwellers.

Think of a family of ten or twelve, or even more, who live in a one-roomed boat, a boat not many times the size of a big row-boat.Think what their family life must be.And they are only one of myriad families.They live in a quarter denser than the densest of the crowded city streets.Think of the stench!Think of the din!Small wonder that they take drowning almost tranquilly.But to be burnt to death!That’s another matter.Even stolid Chinese philosophy may be expected to shrink from that.Think of being burned to death in a boat, on a river, and yet not being able to drown one’s death agony in the cooling water, because every inch of the water’s surface was covered with hundreds of other burning humans!

Such things happen not infrequently in China, and yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese continue to live in the sampans and in the cargo-boats.They must live there.There is no place else for them to live; unless they leave China, and few of them have the wish to do that: none of them have the means.Their dire poverty drives them into the wretched boats and imprisons them there, and there they must remain until they die of old age, of overwork, of starvation, or die by drowning or fire, as the case may be.And the children born and bred on those boats!No wonder that when the boys are grown to manhood many of them are only fit to hide themselves within the leper-boats; that when the girls are grown to womanhood very many elect to have the comparative luxury of the flower-boats!

The Korean geisha probably gets more enjoyment out of life and is less conscious of wrong-doing than is the woman of any other race who follows the same profession.It follows naturally enough that the race whose standard of sexual morality is lowest, regards women of unchaste lives more leniently than does any other race.Then, too, the seclusion of Korean ladies is more rigid than the seclusion of the gentlewomen of any other Asiatic country.This makes the men of Korea entirely dependent upon the geisha girls for any outside female companionship, and the Korean man is very sociable, very fond of good times, and if he can afford it, apt to make not only a plaything, but rather a friend out of the girl whose profession it is to be amusing, entertaining and cheerful, at so much an hour.

The word geisha is a Japanese word, and it signifies “accomplished person.”The Korean word for the class of women of whom I am writing is ki-saing; but they are generally called geisha.The Japanese yoshiwara women are called geisha, as often as anything else.

In proportion to the populations of the two countries there are far fewer geisha in Korea than in Japan, but this is solely, I think, because Korea is so much poorer than Japan; for nowhere are women of their profession more appreciated, more esteemed, and treated by men more on an equality than they are in Chosön.The Korean geisha is systematically and carefully trained for her intended profession.Several years are occupied by her education, and not until she is proficient in singing, in dancing, in reciting, in the playing of many instruments, in repartee, in the pouring of wine, in the filling and lighting of pipes, in making herself generally useful at feasts and festivals, and above all, in being good-natured, is she allowed to ply her trade.In or near every large Korean city are picturesque little buildings called “pleasure-houses.”They are very like the tea-houses of Japan.They are usually built in some secluded spot, and are surrounded by the brilliance of flowers, and half hidden beneath the shadow of trees.They are scantily but artistically furnished, and are running over with tea and sweetmeats and girls.

The geisha of the King are, of course, the flower of the profession, and are dressed even more elaborately than the ordinary geisha, which is quite superfluous. They remind one very much, both in manner and in habit, of the posture girls of Burmah, and the European who was a looker-on at a festival in Li Hsi’s palace might easily fancy that when Thebaw was dethroned, his posture girls, whose occupation was of course then gone, had fled en masse to the court at Söul. Most Asiatic dances are slow. Probably the slowest of them all is the dance of the Korean geisha. Like all the dances of the Far East, with which I am at all familiar, it is absolutely free from vulgarity, or from suggested coarseness. The geisha herself is covered and covered from throat to ankle. It would be imprudent to say how many dresses she usually wears at once. She dresses in silk and in glimmering tissues. Before dancing she usually takes off two or three of her gowns, and tucks up the trains of the robes she still wears, but even so she is very much dressed, and a thoroughly well-clad person. In winter she wears bands of costly fur on her jaunty little cap, and an edge of the same fur about her delightful little jacket of fine cashmere, or of silk. She wears most brilliant colours, and all her garments are perfumed and exquisitely clean. Indeed, cleanliness must be her ideal of godliness. At least, it is the only godliness she knows, and, save the virtue of amiability, the only virtue she would be ashamed to lack. Her parents are poor, always very poor, and she is pretty, always very pretty. It is this prettiness which causes her almost from her babyhood to be destined for the amusement profession. It makes her suitable for that profession, and ensures her probable success in it. Her parents gladly set her aside from the toilers of the family, and she is given every possible advantage of mind and person. So she is insured a life of ease, and even of comparative luxury. She is a blooming, gladsome thing, with gleaming eyes, and laughing lips, and happy dancing feet. She looks like some marvellous human flower when you meet her in the streets of Söul, and forms an indescribable contrast to the draggled crowds that draw apart to let her pass as she goes on her laughing way to her well-paid work.

The geisha girls are greatly in demand for picnics, and in the summer often spend days in the cool, fragrant woods, playing for, reciting to, and feasting with some merry party of pleasure-makers.If their services are required at a Korean feast they usually slip in one by one when the meal is more than half done.The host and his guests make room for them, and each girl seats herself near to a man whose attendant she thus becomes for the entire evening.They pour wine for the men, and see that all their wants and creature comforts are well looked after.They do not eat unless the men voluntarily feed them.To feed them is to give them a great mark of favour, and it would be the worst of bad form for them to refuse any morsel so offered.After the feast they sing and dance in turn and together.They recite love stories and ballads, and strum industriously away upon funny Korean instruments.Their singing is very plaintive: as sad as any earthly music, but it is not sweet nor pleasing to European ears.The geisha are often employed to perform before private families, and not unfrequently before the harems of rich men or mandarins.To introduce them for an evening into the most respectable family circle is regarded as the best of good taste.Some of these girls live together, many of them live, nominally at least, in the homes of their own childhood.They form strange contrasts to their sisters of approximately the same age, whose lives have been lives of virtue and incessant work.

The geisha never by any chance become familiar with, or are treated familiarly by the women of the harems into which they are occasionally introduced, and yet some of them are not unchaste in their personal lives.This, however, is of course very exceptional.Occasionally the geisha becomes the concubine of a man of position, or the personal attendant of a man of wealth.When old age, that dread foe of woman the wide world over, creeps upon them, they become the teachers of the girls who are ambitious to become geisha.

No geisha girl expects to be entertained.It is her business to entertain.The moment she enters the presence of her employer or employers, she takes unobtrusively the thorough charge of the social side of the function.She makes herself useful and amusing, and agreeable in every possible way, and apparently has no thought of self.Often a large party of Korean gentlemen will go for a stay of some days to one of the monasteries that still dot the Korean hillsides.They usually take with them an incredible train of servants, and a number of geisha.Rare times they have on these excursions, and rare welcome do the monks give them.The monks and the servants and the geisha devote themselves to the lords of the situation.And the Korean man who goes picnicking to a Korean monastery probably has as good a time as any reveller in the East.

Such are the Magdalenes of the far Orient!To be pitied, to be deeply pitied, but to be less pitied than the Magdalenes of the West, for they are better housed, better treated, and less conscious of their misfortune.There is, I think, a good deal worth pondering over in the way the peoples of Asia deal with the great social sin—a sin from which our human race can scarcely hope for redemption, unless indeed,⁠—

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE.

What her dress is to woman, his dwelling is to man.I am speaking, of course, of average man and of average woman.What she wears indicates what she is, and is the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of her individuality, and of her character.She, her very self, peeps from beneath the laces at her neck.The house in which he lives shelters his women and his young; the buildings which he erects, or helps to erect, indicate who and what he is, and are the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of his individuality, and of his character; and we may see him as he really is, in his roof, his door-step, and, in brief, in the exterior and the interior of his home.

It is this, its revelation of mankind, which makes architecture so intensely interesting a study, the most interesting, I often think, of all the studies of the inanimate.Not for their grace of outline, not for their beauty of colour, not for their artistic consistency, not for their happy placement, are the great buildings of this world supremely interesting to us; but for the glimpses they give us into the souls, the lives of the men who have reared them.

Of more recent years records have been made and preserved of the doings of most of the civilized peoples, but, beyond a doubt, many such records made in olden times have been irretrievably lost, and many a page of history—a page clear and convincing to us to-day—would have been lost to us for ever were it not for the silent but indisputable testimony of old buildings: ruined houses, scraps of temples, broken bridges, crumbling towers, and grotesque caves.

It is impossible to speak of Korean architecture without speaking of Chinese architecture, and of Japanese architecture.And it is so impossible to separate the architecture of Korea from either the architecture of China, or the architecture of Japan, that one has a very convenient excuse for writing of the architecture of Korea as it visibly is, and for writing little or nothing of what it means.Korean architecture, in all its best phases, is purely Tartar.Chinese architecture is largely Tartar.But China, in architecture, as in ethics, and as in sociology, is at heart more or less Mongolian.China has been ridden under, not exterminated, by Tartar supremacy.Japanese architecture is Tartar, but it is very many other things, and the charitable mantle of Japanese art is so all-covering, and her artists have graciously adopted the art-methods of so many different peoples, that it is quite impossible to say whether Tartar influence is the parent or the powerful adopted child of Japanese art.

For convenience, I will divide Korean architecture into the architecture of the poor and the architecture of the rich.Korean hovels are like most other hovels.Extreme poverty goes rather naked the wide world over, and the Korean poor live in houses of mud, roofed with leaves; and if the leaves and the mud give out they have holes in their roofs instead of chimneys.

Korean hovels, Korean houses, and Korean palaces have many characteristics in common, characteristics which are climatic and racial.Let us peep first at the homes of the Korean poor.The home of a poor Korean, dwell he in a Korean city, dwell he in a Korean village, or dwell he desperately perched upon the rocky side of a Korean mountain, is a house of one story—that is, of one story in which people live.Above is a thin sort of attic in which grains and other provisions are stored, and beneath is a fairly thick sort of basement in which heat is bred, from which heat is generated.Like all other Korean houses the interior of this house is lined with paper.It has a paper roof, paper floor, or floor-cloth, and paper walls.The walls slide back or lift up, or are in one of several other ways got rid of, in the summer; but they are walls for all that, no less walls because they are also windows and doors.Paper is the chief feature of every ordinary Korean house; and to say that is to say a great deal for paper: because the cold of a Korean winter is excessive, is far beyond the cold of the winter in which I write.In every Korean house, be it the house of prince or of pauper, there is what seems to be at first sight, to European eyes, a paucity of furniture.There is nothing more significant of the difference between the simple artisticness of the East and the elaborate inartisticness of the West than the way in which Western rooms are crowded with inanimate unnecessaries, and the way in which Eastern rooms are sparsely supplemented with inanimate necessaries.

I had afternoon tea yesterday with a friend who loves me so well, and whom I so well love, that I am sure she will forgive me for drawing, to her disadvantage, a comparison between her drawing-room and the drawing-room of a Korean man, or the boudoir of a Korean woman, I never go into my friend’s drawing-room without feeling a thrill of admiration for the nice way in which her butler avoids knocking over one of a pair of priceless vases, which were stolen from Pekin about the time that Sir Harry Parkes and Sir Henry Loch were rather inconveniently imprisoned there.I creep in, as gracefully as I can, between the butler and the two priceless blue things.I cross a bit to the left, to avoid a malachite table crowded with silver pigs (some of them so little that they would look lost on a threepenny-bit, some of them a foot or more long); then I cross to the right, to avoid a wonderful teak-wood cabinet of no particular style, that looks very staggery beneath a multitude of tea-pots—tea-pots most of which are not interesting in themselves, and none of which are interesting in their common conglomeration.Then I almost trip over the wool of a slaughtered Persian lamb, and I just save myself from tumbling into a Louis Quinze chair, and so I work my way through the ages—through the races, until I reach my hostess, who, like myself and everyone else there, is in nice, new, nineteenth-century, ugly raiment.There may be space in this London drawing-room for her, for me, and for all the other ordinary folk which are gathered together, because we are very much alike, but there is not room for all the chairs, and the tables, and half the other pieces of furniture, because no two of them are alike.We humans are used to fashionable crushes, but I think it is a shame not to give the furniture room to breathe.

Let us peep into a Korean drawing-room.A long cool place.There is a padded quilt, probably covered with silk, in one corner.The host sits on that, and any guests that come to him.If the weather be cold, and the host be rich, a brazier of charcoal usually stands in another corner.There is a small table, or perhaps there are two, with writing and painting materials.Unless the house be one of dire poverty there is, at one end of the room, a chest of drawers or a buffet, or a sideboard, or something of that sort: a huge piece of furniture made out of more or less costly woods, fitted with drawers and doors, and embellished with metal handles.The handles, or the clasps, or the locks are made in the shape of butterflies, for the butterfly is a very favourite expression of Korean artistic outline.When it is time to eat, a table is brought in for the host and one for each of his guests—a table a foot or two high, and just about as square as high.Upon this, small dishes of food are placed, and small but often-filled cups of drink.When the meal is over, the tables and the dishes and the remnants of meat and of liquor (but there are not often many of either) are taken away.

In an ordinary Korean house there is little or no other furniture.A screen perhaps, precious for its decorations, and for the carvings of its frame, and three or four pictures—pictures distinctly Korean, but I assure you by no means inartistic.I can think of nothing else that ordinarily furnishes a Korean room, except the quaintly clad people, and the sunshine that comes in almost iridescently—it shines through windows of so many different colours: windows of paper.The colour of the light depends entirely upon the colour and the texture of the paper through which it comes.A Korean bed-room is very like a Korean sitting-room.The quilt upon which a Korean sits through the day is the same as, or very like, the quilt upon which he sleeps at night.Tiger skins are also greatly used for floor rugs and bed coverings.

To stray a moment from the exact subject of architecture.The Koreans wear, I believe, very much the same clothes in day as in night.Indeed, I believe that the Korean changes his or her garments for five reasons only: to eat, to put on new clothes when the old ones are worn out, to have the clothes she or he is wearing washed, to put on his or her best clothes in celebration of some festival or other ceremonial, and to go into mourning.Firstly and foremost, a Korean undresses to eat.They are not civilized enough, the people of Chosön, to array themselves for feeding time.They do not deny their relationship with other hungry mammals.When they are hungry they eat.When they are thirsty they drink, and to be truthful, their hunger and their thirst is usually enormous, and of long endurance.They are neither ashamed of their hunger nor of their thirst, for they appease neither before going to a feast.Indeed, to gorge oneself is considered the acme of Korean elegance, and it is the one elegance in which all Koreans, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, prince and peasant, indulge themselves on every possible or semi-possible occasion.And that they may eat the utmost possible morsel, they loosen their garments before they sit down to the feast.

But I was speaking of the houses of the Korean poor.Perhaps it is rather inappropriate to speak of banquets in connection with them; yet, except among the most abjectly poverty-stricken, banquets are held sometimes (at marriages, on birthdays, on feast-days, and on lucky-days, if possible) in every Korean home.

Only Koreans of certain position are allowed to cover their roofs with tiles.A peasant’s roof is almost invariably thatched with straw or grass.Every Korean house contains but one room, or, to state it differently, every Korean room, excepting for a door opening into another house or room, is in itself a complete house.It has a roof of its own, and four walls of its own, and is in every way independent of any other rooms or houses, which may form other parts of its owner’s dwelling.When inside a Korean dwelling one may fancy oneself in a suite of apartments opening into each other, that is, of course, if a certain number of the paper walls are opened.From the outside of a Korean dwelling, one seems to be looking at a collection of more or less closely built, but entirely independent houses.The position of woman being what it is, even the poorest Korean house has, or ought to have, more than one room.This peculiarity; this similarity between exteriors and interiors, makes Korean architecture uniquely picturesque, and public buildings and the dwellings of the rich supremely so.Indeed, the better class of houses often have not only a roof to each room, but two or three roofs to each room.Now a Korean roof, to my mind, is the most beautiful roof in the world.It is Chinese in general character, and slopes from the ridge pole in graceful concave curves.Except in the houses of the poor it is tiled.The tiles overlap each other, are unevenly curved, and rest upon a foundation of earth.In the course of a few seasons a Korean roof breaks into bud, and into blossom.Perhaps a great patch of odd blue flowers covers one-half of the roof, perfuming the air for many yards.Perhaps quaint crimson tulips lift their happy heads between every few tiles.Wild pinks, forget-me-nots, and orchids mingle on one roof, and another roof glitters in the sunshine like gold because it is the bed of a thousand yellow sun-lilies.

Imagine an old Korean monastery which is backgrounded by hills, some of them covered with verdure, and some of them naked rocks, rocks that are broken here and there by patches and cracks of hardy flowers.In the distance, we hear the melodious drip of some gentle waterfall.Nearer we hear the full-throated soprano of the larks.And a dozen other birds, green and blue, and purple, and grey with breasts of yellow, fly from their nests in the teak-wood trees, to drink the sweet blood of the blooming iris.The monastery has a score or more of houses, each rambling from some other.The monastery is low and porticoed, and the doors, which are also its windows and its walls, are slid back in the grooves, and our view of each of the many interiors is only obstructed by the eight square posts which are the only permanent walls of a Korean building.Inside we catch a glimmer of metallic Buddhas, and hear the careless Sanskrit sing-song of the monks.In the courtyard stands a great brass Korean bell or gong, and the stick with which it is struck lies beside it.A huge glimmering gong is this; to call the brethren to prayer and to rice.Around the edges of the monastery’s roofs runs a peculiar shell-like beading, which is a distinction of a sacred or religious edifice.The roof was a dark brown once, but the tiles, those that have not been broken away, have grown purple and blue, softened by time and blighted by weather.Where the tiles have crumbled away, and over many tiles that have not yet succumbed to decay, honey-suckles, yellow and buff, and white and rose-coloured, are creeping and tangling themselves with great, green ropes that are heavy with gourds—gourds that are little and pale, and gourds that are big and golden and speckled.

Or let us look at some one of the king’s many houses.Its round columns and its square rafters are lacquered and crimson.Its paper walls are as fine and as polished as silk.Innumerable steps lead up to it, and it is almost heavy with carvings.Three roofs shelter it, and look like a tent with an awning above an awning.Each roof is a bed of flowers that are brilliant and fragrant—flowers among which birds that are splendid of feather, and sweet of throat, make their nests.But the birds and the flowers are not the only denizens of the typical Korean roof.Effigies in mud, in bronze, or in wood squat on the ridges.They look a little like monkeys, very little like men, and some of them very much like pigs.They are absurd and impossible to a degree, and yet, for all that, they are rather life-like, and, on a weird moonlight night, decidedly startling.These are the protectors of the houses; and what the scarecrow which the European or American farmer manufactures out of his oldest trousers, his most ragged coat, and his most disreputable hat, is to the blackbirds and the crows of the Occident, these grotesque figures are to the evil spirits of Korea.They frighten away the devils, the gods of misfortune, and the demons of disease that would fain light upon the roofs, and curse the dwellers of the houses.Socially they belong with the demons and the imps and the witches, with the monks and the nuns, and the hundred other personages of Korea’s queer religious or irreligious spiritualistic community.But physically they are a striking and a fascinating detail of Korea’s remarkable architecture.

I have spoken of the khans, which are the furnaces of the Korean houses.They are not altogether underground, and so every Korean house rests, as it were, upon a pedestal—a pedestal of stone or of earth.But the house is almost never built of stone.Wood and paper are its only materials, and few of the countries in the world are richer in woods, and no country is so rich in paper as Korea.

The fame of Korea’s paper is more world-wide than the fame of any other Korean product.But admirable as it is, superior for many purposes as it is to all other papers, it is really for her woods, and for their quality, that Korea should be noted more than for any other thing which she grows or manufactures.Bamboo is there, of course, in abundance, and abundantly used.Find me the country in Asia where bamboo does not grow, and I’ll vow to you that that country has been an iceberg and in some strange way become detached from its anchorage at the North Pole, drifted down to the southern seas, and after centuries become overgrown with all sorts of green and gay things, and so come to think itself, and to be thought, a part of the Orient.When I say that bamboo grows in Korea I am saying that Korea is in Asia, and I am saying no more.The temples, the palaces, the shrines, and the lumber-yards of China and Japan were for many years, and now largely are, dependent for the most choice of their woods upon the forests of Korea.And many of the most valued of the tree species in Japan have sprung up from seeds that were gathered in Chosön.In the palaces, and in the joss-houses of Pekin, and in the famous temples of Tokio and Kioto, columns and ceilings of especial beauty and of great value, commercially and artistically, have been hewn from trees that grew in Korea.Korea is rich in willow, in fir, in persimmon, in chestnut, and in pine—pine which the Chinese prefer above all other woods for many of the parts of waggons, boats, and ships.Korea is rich in ash, in hornbeam, in elm, and in a dozen other hard, very hard, enduring timbers.The flag that flies above the yamun of a Chinese mandarin is in all probability attached to a pole of Korean wood, and, beyond doubt, the white flags that so recently fluttered upon the ill-fated ships outside the forts of Wei-Hai-Wei, had not those ships been built in Europe, would have made their signals of defeat from the top of what once had been trees in Chei-chel-sang or in Hoang-hai.Korea is splendid with oaks, and with maples, and is well supplied with larch and with holly.And at one season of the year many of her hill-slopes are purple with mulberries.The juniper-tree grows there in vast numbers; the cork-tree and the Korean varnish-tree, from the sap of which comes the golden-hued lacquer, which is one of the important materials of Korean art.This sap is poisonous, so poisonous that the men who work with it are paid above the rates usually received by Korean art-artisans.There is another tree in Korea which has so disagreeable a name that I won’t name it, but from it a very fine white wax is extracted.And there are trees that are pricked for the oil that gushes from them—oil from which one of the great national drinks—a hot, peppery drink—is made, and which is almost the only oil used in the toilet of a Korean woman.

So the Korean architect and the Korean builder have the choice of many woods in the erecting of Korean edifices.A marvellous species of oak grows plentifully in Korea—oak whose timbers have been known, and proved to have been, under water for a century at least, and without decaying.But perhaps the most famous of the woods of Korea are the wonderful red and black woods that grow on the island of Quelpaert.

Paper forms a larger part, and is almost as indestructible a part of the Korean house as is wood. This paper is made from cotton—cotton whose fibre is exceptionally long, soft, satiny, and fine. Most Korean papers are beautiful to look at, delightful to touch, and incredibly strong. It is almost impossible to tear them, especially when they are oiled as they are for all architectural purposes. The varieties of Korean papers are almost endless. One kind is an excellent substitute for cloth, and is used for the making of garments, and for linings, and in many ways it takes the place of leather, of woods, and of metals, and of all sorts of woollen things. There is a very thick paper which is made from the bark of the mulberry-tree. It is soft and pliable, and is as glazed as satin. It is almost, if not quite, the most easily washed substance I have ever seen, and is par excellence the Korean choice for table-cloths.

Glass is almost unknown in Korea, and until recent years was quite unknown there.And as we are all very apt to prize most that with which we are least familiar, and the use of which we least understand, so Koreans set great value upon glass.Old bottles, washed ashore from some European shipwreck, often form the most prized bric-a-brac in a mandarin’s dwelling, and any Korean who can get a square foot or two of glass to insert in one of the paper windows of his house is a very proud householder indeed.

In the house of a noble the front or outer apartment is used as a reception-room.Here his friends and acquaintances (indeed, all whose rank entitle them to mingle with him) gather night after night for gossip, for tobacco, and for drink.These rooms take the place of clubs, of bar-rooms, and of the smoking-rooms of hotels, all of which are unknown in Korea.

Background and environments are so studied by every architect in the Far East that landscape-gardening may almost be said to be a part of Korean architecture.No Korean building of any importance lacks courtyards, lotus ponds, groves of trees, and tangles of flowers, through all of which are scattered elaborate little summer-houses.And what the rich Korean does for the surroundings of his house and his city, nature almost invariably does for the surroundings of the house of the poor Korean, who does not live in one of the crowded cities.The Korean hut is sometimes half covered with vines, and is altogether cool and delightful from the shade and the perfume of trees that are heavy with flowers, with fruits, and with nuts.No Korean need be roofless.If a house be burned down, or be blown down, the entire community are more than ready to assist at its re-erection, and the poorest man in the village, the hardest-worked, will spare some fraction of his time to help in the re-building.If a new-comer appears in a Korean village, the inhabitants go to work to help him build, or, if necessary, build for him a where-to-lay-his-head.

Such are a few of the characteristics, the most vivid characteristics, I think, of the architecture of Chosön,—an architecture which is even more significant than architecture usually is.Korean architecture is significant of Korean artisticness.It is significant of Korean good sense; for the architecture of Chosön is invariably well-adapted to the climate of the peninsula.But far beyond this, Korean architecture is significant of the Korean love of seclusion, and of the Korean faith in the efficacy of appearances.The Koreans, more perhaps than any other people, realize that fine feathers make fine birds, and the most studied, the most elaborated, and architecturally the most important part of a Korean house is its fence; which of course is not a part of the house at all.This fence may be a hedge, it may be a wall encircling the domains of a magistrate, or engirdling the city.It may be a series of hedges, of moats, of walls, and of gates.The Koreans are exclusive and seclusive to a degree.This should command for them the sympathy of English people.All Koreans strive heroically to put their best feet forward, personally, financially, and architecturally.This should command them the sympathy of Americans.The Korean farmer screens his house inside a quadrangle of hedges, hedges as sweet as are the hedges of North Wales in the month of July.A Korean king hides his palace behind an externity of many walls that are splendid in height, in colour, in detail, in outline, and in material.Walls between which a score of flowers fight each other for the glory of killing every inch of the grass,—walls between which marble-outlined ponds sleep cosily beneath their green and pink and white coverlets of lilies, and of lotus.And the Koreans who are neither princes nor peasants, but who stand between the two, spend a world of thought, and a good deal of money upon the fences—floral or stone—thrown about their homes.Only the poorest of Korean houses—of which there are many—and only the shops—of which there are few—lack some sort of a wall, some manner of a barrier between the private family life, and the public life of the going and coming community.

Korean walls (I mean the walls of masonry which mark the boundaries of a city or the limits of a gentleman’s grounds, and not the paper walls of a Korean house) are, without exception, Chinese in character.But even more important than these walls are the gateways with which they are broken, and above all, the gateways or gates that stand some distance outside the walls.In Far Asia gates have a significance which they never have had, even in our own old Norman days, and never can have, in Europe.Gates are the architectural ceremonies of the East.They frame many of the most ceremonial ceremonies of the East, and it necessarily follows that they are big and gorgeous.For never did a picture justify more lavish framing than does the picture of Eastern ceremony.There are three great classes of gates in the Far East: the torii of Japan, the red-arrow gates of Korea, and the pailow of China.But before I try to say something of these three gates, there are two or three pleasant things to be said of the gates that ordinarily pierce the wall of a Korean city.The gates themselves are heavily built of wood, are elaborately ornamented with metal, and slowly swing in a rusty sort of way at sunrise, and at sunset—swing at sunrise to let the people of the city out, and the people of the country in; swing at sunset to let the people of the country out, and the people of the city in.Korea not being a land of machinery, it becomes necessary for a certain number of officials to tend these gates.They are not called gate-keepers, but are officers, rather important officers, if I remember, of the Korean army.Now, an army officer, all the world over, does not mind where he lies, what he eats, or how he suffers—when he is on active service: but when debarred from fighting, the soldier, all the world over, and especially the officer-soldier, wants to be well-housed, well-roomed, well-fed, and above all, well-amused.This seems to be the one military trait which Korea has not yet forgotten.Above the gates that open into Söul, and into every other walled Korean city, are built very cosy little stone houses.In these the soldiers on guard—the gate keepers—play cards, eat rice, munch sweetmeats, and sip arrack.Above the gateways that lead into the houses of Korean magistrates, Korean nobles, and of Korean millionaires, just such houses are built.They are the concert halls of Korea.In them the band of the Korean magistrate, the Korean noble, or the Korean millionaire discourses more or less discordant music, and at delightfully respectful distance from its employer’s house.They never play in the cold weather.It has been said that this is so, not because the Korean in whose service they are cares a whit whether their fingers freeze to their instruments or not, but because he is unwilling to open the paper walls of his house wide enough to hear the music that is being played in the gate-houses of his outer walls.I doubt this.A rich Korean, who is covered with layers and layers of silk and wadding, and who sits upon a khan in full fire, and who is surrounded by braziers of charcoal, and whose house is deplorably lacking in ventilation, does not, I think, as a rule, shrink from having his front door or his side wall opened once in a while.Beneath the guard-house building, above the gate of a Korean wall; there can be no khan, for the guard-house is above the gate, and many feet from the ground in which the Khan must be embedded.And so I put it down to the humanity of the average well-to-do Korean that he never makes his band play, on his walls, save in fairly warm weather.

These rooms, these little houses built above the gates of a Korean walled city or the gates of a great man’s domain, have been in years past the scenes of many a Korean romance, and even now they are often the favourite retreats or lounging places of Korean poets and philosophers.They are usually furnished with considerable comfort.They are cosy in the autumn and in the spring, and delightfully cool in the summer.They’re well above the city’s sights, and high above any unpleasant intrusion of the city’s sounds, and so are fit resting-places for one who wants to meditate or dream or write poetry, or be at rest, or escape from the hundred nagging vexations of daily life.

Korean walls are adjuncts to Korean gates, and not, as with us, the gates adjuncts to the walls.The walls are built to emphasize the importance of the gates, to supplement them, and to attract attention to them.To the Korean mind the walls are so much less important than the gates that the gates are often built and the walls omitted altogether.Such gates are the torii of Japan, the pailow of China, and the red-arrow gates of Chosön.Every Korean gate has a name, a name that is meant to be impressive and poetical, symbolical of beauty and of good.And doubtless these names are so to Korean ears, but they are apt to strike the European mind of average stolidity as amusing or silly.In Korea, indeed, every edifice of any pretension has a name.The people of the Far East personify their buildings to a great extent, and endue them with individuality, and with human attributes.Royal gateways are often flanked by two immense Chinese lions, or, as they are more generally called, Korean dogs.These dogs are but one of the many most universal expressions of Korean art.They are the one expression of Korean art with which we, in Europe, are very familiar.

There is nothing else in picturesque Korea so picturesque as the red-arrow gates.I wish I might devote a chapter to them, and I am rather appalled at undertaking to at all clearly describe them in a few paragraphs.A dozen or more of the most eminent European authorities on Korea unanimously declare the red-arrow gates to have either been copied from, or to have been the originals of the Japanese torii.Why, in the bulk of literature that has been written about these strange gates of the Far East, little or no mention has been made of the Chinese pailow puzzles me.There can, I think, be no doubt that the three gates are three generations of one architectural family, or that they have had a common origin.The pailow of China are memorial arches, erected, as a rule, to commemorate the virtue and the character of women who have slaughtered themselves that they might follow their husbands to the grave.These arches are heavier than the Japanese torii, or the Korean red-arrow gates, but they are like both in their general outlines and in situation.And all Chinese architecture is very much heavier than the architecture of Korea or of Japan.The torii of Japan marks the approach to a temple, or to some sacred place.It is formed of two upright columns or pillars which lean slightly toward each other at the top, and are crossed by two or three graceful bars; the upper of which is slightly, but very beautifully curved.The word “torii” is most usually translated “birds’ rest,” from “tori” a “bird,” and “I” “to be” or “rest.”And the theory has been that they were originally built as convenient resting-places for birds: as birds, with all other animals, were sacred in the eyes of the Buddhists.This translation is unsatisfactory.The etymology of the word itself, like that of so many other Japanese words, is hidden in a good deal of mystery, and though to-day we find the torii outside of every Buddhist temple in Japan, we also find one outside every Shinto temple in Japan, and it is easily proved that they were first reared outside the Shinto, and not outside the Buddhist temples.Long before Buddhism was introduced into Japan, the torii stood outside numerous Shinto temples.The most plausible translation of the word “torii,” though it is not a translation altogether convincing, is “a place of passing through.”It is Mr. Chamberlain, I believe, who gives this translation, but his book is not at my hand, and I am not positive.Certainly both in Korea and in Japan the birds make a very general resting-place of the torii, and of the red-arrow gates.But then so do they in China of the pailow, and so do they in America and Europe of the telegraph wires.It is very possible that from this habit of theirs “torii” has come to mean, or has been thought to mean, “birds’ rest.”The red-arrow gates of Korea are taller and narrower than the torii of Japan.The red-arrow gate never stands outside a temple, but outside a palace or some high magistracy, and it denotes the approach to a house of the king, or to the house of one of almost kingly authority.So in Söul we find a red-arrow gate standing outside the yamun of the Chinese Resident, one of the many silent, but clearly legible proofs that Korea has long regarded herself as a vassal of China.These gates are painted a most brilliant red, which is the Korean royal colour.The upright columns of a red-arrow gate are crossed by two horizontal bars.These bars are quite straight, and unlike the cross-bars of the torii, the upper one does not extend quite to the top of the perpendicular column.These gates are called arrow-gates because of twenty or more speared-shaped bits of wood that are embedded in the lower of the two horizontal bars, pierce through the upper bar, and extend a little higher than the shaped ends of the perpendicular columns.They are simplicity itself, these red-arrow gates, except for their gorgeous colouring, and altogether lack the elaboration of the Japanese torii.They are thirty feet high at least, often much higher.But however simple in themselves they make wonderful frames for wonderful bits of Korean landscape.On the exact centre of the upper cross-bar rests a peculiar design which represents the positive and negative essences—the male and female essences of Chinese philosophy.This again is surmounted by tongue-shaped or flame-shaped bits of wood, which are supposed to, in some way, represent the power of the king.The two symbols together signify Korea’s king as omnipotent, since he is under the protection of China, and has espoused the religion of Confucius.It is noticeable that the torii of Japan invariably marks the vicinity of a temple, or of some building, or some place sacred to one or more of the Japanese deities; while in Korea the red-arrow gate invariably signifies the proximity of the dwelling of temporal power.I am inclined to think that the Koreans borrowed the idea of their red-arrow gates from the Chinese, and that the Japanese seeing them, translated them into torii.If this is so, it is presumable that in both instances the borrowers erected the gates in front of what was to them the most important places in their own countries.The Emperor of Japan is the nominal head of the Shinto religion.In the days when the torii was introduced into Japan, religion was probably a great force in the three islands, and the temples seemed to the Japanese the most appropriate places to be honoured by this arched sign of importance.In Korea, on the other hand, religion is, and for many years has been, under a social and governmental ban.In Korea the king is all, and the gods are naught, so—as a matter of course—the red gates reared their graceful, arrow-crowned heads outside the house of a king, or of a deputed representative of the Chinese emperor.

The bridges of Korea, the big bell at Söul, and a dozen other characteristic details of Korea’s rich architecture, all rise up before me and seem to reproach me for passing them by without a word.To touch upon them with anything approaching adequacy would require pages and not words, and the pages at my disposal are growing few.But I can heartily recommend their study and the study of Korean architecture in general to all who are interested in the East, and in architecture, and who are fascinated by the quaint and the symbolical.

HOW THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES.

There is nothing else, I think, that so positively proves the intimate relationship of China, Japan, and Korea, as does the great similarity between their games and their amusements—a similarity which almost amounts to identicalness.If it is true that “in vino veritas,” it must be equally true that men are most natural when they are happiest, freest from care, and have neither business nor duties beyond recreating themselves.So when we study the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans at play, and find that they all play very much alike, appreciate the same or kindred amusements, have the same methods of feasting, of resting, and of enjoyment, we are justified in concluding that these three peoples are very near of kin.But if they be children of the same parents, they are not the children of one birth, and this to me, at least, is proved by the few but sharp differences between each of their three ways of amusing themselves.

China, Korea, and Japan!And the greatest of these is China.Let us watch them, beginning with China, at their recreations, and then let us note how in those recreations they differ.

Feasts naturally form an important part of the happiness of a people, the majority of whom commonly go hungry.A Chinese dinner is in more than one way startling—to the average European mind.But it is a very good dinner for all that.

I have been at many a Chinese dinner.Sometimes I have sat with the quaint Chinese women, behind the shelter of the lattice.Sometimes I have feasted brazenly with the men; and more than once the women of a Chinese household have, out of courtesy to me, come forth from the prized seclusion of their lattice-screened coign of vantage, and joined me in eating with the commoner faction of the family herd; in breaking bread with men.

Chinese festivals!The subject is so intricate and so interesting that I have not the impertinence to dismiss it in a sentence.But, in passing, I may say that no people enjoy festivals more, no people indulge in them more discreetly, less frequently than do the Chinese.

Chinese ceremonials!Funerals, weddings, and a hundred others!I know, in all the East, nothing more incomprehensible to the average, well educated European mind; nothing more philosophically pregnant to minds that are exceptionally industrious and exceptionally open.

Chinese recreations are almost myriad.They fly kites; they let go perfumed, brightly-lit balloons of silk and of silk-like paper; they light their fire-fly-lit land with a hundred thousand lanterns, and in honour of those lanterns, in indulgence of themselves, they hold a feast.

The dramatic is the chief of all arts.In China dramatic performances take the precedence of all entertainments.A Chinese theatre, at the best, is a barn-like place.It is devoid of scenery.Only men take part in Chinese theatrical performances.

In China, actors are looked down upon as social pariahs, and their sons may not enter for the competitive examinations which are the birthright of almost every Chinaman.

But nevertheless the Chinese have a god of play-acting, and they pay him no small homage. Indeed, all the Chinese deities are supposed to be great theatre-goers; and for their benefit theatrical performances are frequently held in the courtyards of the temples. The people (who have a free entrée) flock to these performances and enjoy them as much or even more than the gods are supposed to do.

To almost no Chinese dramatic performance is admission charged.A number of people club together, hire the actors, engage the musicians, put up a shed—on the street, in a field, anywhere, anyhow—invite the entire community—which needs no urging—and the performance begins.Or a rich man is the momentary impresario.But even then the people expect to be admitted, and usually are.

The Emperor of China is a great devotee of the drama.He often commands a play at eight in the morning.Indeed, the day is the more usual hour for all theatrical performances in China.

But the most well worth seeing of Chinese Thespian entertainments are those that take place in the temple courtyards.No need of scenery there!Behind the bamboo stage rise the not unimpressive walls of the queerly-architectured Chinese temple.Where we are wont to have glaring footlights there is a soft, rosy glow, for there great rhododendrons lift their proud and heavy heads.The courtyard is partly surrounded by a wall so old and broken that it might be the veritable old wall of China.From its sides lean double-flowering apricots and the sweet yu-lan, with its thousand blooms of pale peach colour.From the wall’s top strange Chinese grasses nod and flower-heavy vines hang.Among the vines and grasses primroses nestle cosily.Beside the wall tulips flaunt, and great clumps of mignonette grow among the hibiscus flowers.The actors are very fine with their crowns of tinsel and their robes of silk.The audience, too, is well worth watching, with their intelligent yellow faces, and their glittering black eyes.They are tense with interest, those Mongolian play-goers.And the Chinese orchestra!Ah!that is droll indeed.

We are apt to think of Chinese music as being noise pure and simple.Certainly very much Chinese music is superlatively noisy.But even Chinese music has its softer side, its refined moments.I remember a little band in Canton that used to make very pleasant lullaby music, and to handle their odd instruments with most considerable taste.

When Noah was learning something of boat-building, the Chinese were, in their Chinese way, expert musicians.Their principal instrument was made of twelve tubes of bamboo.Six tubes were for the sharps, and six for the flats.

To-day the Chinese have over fifty musical instruments—instruments made of stone, of metal, and of wood.

Chinese dramatic literature is unusually interesting.To study it is no mean mental tonic, and it is, I believe, the best way to study the Chinese people, unless one can live among them with some little intimacy.

But I must not linger too long by the wayside of my pleasant subject.Yet I must touch—if only with a sentence—upon four or five of the many other ways in which the Chinese recuperate their overburdened bodies and their jaded minds.

They take great joy in Nature.Picnics are a most Chinese institution.They are invariably planned to be at some spot where there is an exceptional view.And the picnic party will sit for hours, and watch the hills, or masses of fruit trees in bloom, or the sunset—sit silently too; for the Chinese, though the noisiest nation on earth, are apt to be hushed in the presence of nature, however much they chatter in the presence of their gods.

The Chinese are intensely fond of gardening.Every Chinaman that can afford it has a flower garden, and in nothing, save the graves of his ancestors, does he take more pride.In the garden’s centre there will be a lake—a very round, funny lake—and on its rippleless bosom great drowsy lien-hoas will sleep away their perfumed lives.

The lien-hoa is the Chinese water-lily.There are many varieties.They are single and double.They are red, they are rose, they are white.And some are of an indescribably lovely pale red, delicately streaked with white.

In almost every Chinese garden you will find a summer-house, its roof heavy with festoons of the wisteria.And there will be a pansy bed, a bosque of bamboo, a grove of camellias, a field of chrysanthemums, a world of peonies, trees of peaches, of plums, and of apricots, parallelograms planted with hydrangeas, and clumps of azaleas.

There are two other Chinese pleasures that I must at least mention—opium-smoking and gambling.Both are ineradicable characteristics of the Chinese.

The poppy gives the Chinese masses inestimable alleviation, and does them, I believe, the veriest minimum of harm.

Gambling, I fear, has a more baneful effect upon them.But it is their most positive and commonest diversion, and it will, I fancy, always be their national habit.

I have spoken of Chinese amusements, and now my trouble begins.I am at an entire loss to know how to speak of Korean amusements without repeating myself almost word for word.I can think of but two Chinese amusements which are not as general in Chosön as in Cathay—card-playing and theatre-going.In Korea it is not good form to play cards, and they are not played openly, except by the soldiers, and the lowest grades of society.Soldiers are allowed to play cards as much as they like, and for a very quaint reason.A soldier is often called upon for night duty.Now after eating, the thing dearest to the average Korean is sleeping, and the Korean government, which is not, from the Far Asiatic point of view, so merciless after all, has decreed that, as the playing of games of chance is more likely than any other thing to keep a man from being sleepy, the Korean soldiers may indulge in any and every game of chance, including those that are played with cards.

Korea is not without theatrical performances, no Eastern land is; but the theatrical performances of Korea are very different from the theatrical performances of China and of Japan.Indeed, in no branch of amusements do the three countries so differ as they do in the branch dramatic.With the possible exception of the Hindoo and the Mohammedan, the Japanese dramatic school approaches our own more than that of any other Oriental country.I have seen performances in Yeddo that seemed to me to quite merit classification with London productions at the Lyceum, and at the Savoy.Chinese dramatic art is a thing apart, and a law unto itself.It makes little or no appeal to European intelligence, or to European imagination.It is for the Chinese, and takes as little concern as the Chinese themselves voluntarily do of other peoples.

Korean dramatic art, if it is at all akin with the dramatic art of Europe, approaches most nearly the art methods of the high-class music halls, and the best French variety theatres.Every Korean actor is a star, superior to, indifferent to, and independent of scenery.

More often than not, the Korean actor is not only the star, but the entire company. He plays everything—old men, juveniles, low comedians and high tragedians, leading ladies, ingénueux, and rough soubrettes—plays them with little or no change of costume, plays them in quick succession, and wholly without aid of scenery.And very clever, indeed, he is to do it.Closely allied as all the three great peoples of the far Orient are in their amusements, the amusements of the Koreans resemble the amusements of China very much more than they do the amusements of Japan; and yet Korean acting is very much more like Japanese than like Chinese acting.This is especially worthy of note, I think, because in every nation in the world, the theatrical is the highest form of amusement.

Korean acting would come, perhaps, more properly under the heading of Korean art than under the head of Korean amusements, or quite as appropriately, perhaps, under the head of Korean religion.For in Korea, as in every other country, acting is not only an exquisite, and one of the highest expressions of a nation’s intellectuality, but is the child, almost the first-born child, of that country’s religion.It is, perhaps, because Korea has ceased to have a religion that Korea has no theatre, at least, no permanent theatre.The Korean actor gives his performance on the bare paper floor of some rich man’s banqueting hall, or at the street corner.The actors of Japan are surrounded with every possible accessory, and with the perfection of accessories.The most faultless stage setting I ever saw, the utmost nicety of properties that I ever saw, and the best trained supers I ever saw, I saw on the stage of a Tokio theatre.The Korean actor has no stage setting, he has no properties, and he never heard of supernumeraries.His theatre—for, after all, I am inclined to withdraw what I said, and to maintain that wherever an artist acts there is a theatre—his theatre consists of a mat beneath his feet, and a mat over his head, and four perpendicular poles separating the two mats.And yet the Korean actor shares very largely the polish, the definiteness of method, and the convincing artisticness of the Japanese actor.If religion had flourished in Korea as it has flourished in Japan, it is probable that, under the sheltering patronage of religion, Korean acting would now equal, if not excel, the best acting of Japan.As it is, the Korean actor is remarkable for his versatility, for his mastery of his own voice, his mastery of facial expression, and his comprehension of, and his reproducing of, every human emotion.A Korean actor will often give an uninterrupted performance of some hours length.He will recite page after page of vivid Korean history; he will chant folk-songs; he will repeat old legends and romances, and he will give Punch and Judy-like exhibitions of connubial infelicity and of all the other ills that Korean flesh is heir to.And he will intersperse this dramatic kaleidoscope with orchestral music of his own producing.Perhaps he has pitched his theatre of mats in the full heat of the noon-day sun, but even so, he only pauses to take big, quick drinks of peppery water, or of a very light, rice wine, in which good-sized lumps of hot ginger float.If the actor is performing at a feast of some mandarin or other wealthy Korean, he is, of course, paid by an individual employer; and the audience which has, in all probability, been amply dined and amply wined, sit near him, sit at their ease, and in an irregular semicircle.If the performance is given in the street, it is purely a speculation on the part of the actor.The audience sit about on queer little wooden benches, or squat on mats, or stand.And when the actor knows (and this is something which an actor always does know, the acting-world over) that he has struck the high-water mark of his momentary possible histrionic ability, he pauses abruptly and collects such cash as his audience can or will spare.The result is usually very gratifying to the actor.The audience want to see the play out, and the player won’t play on until he is paid.A street audience appreciates the play highly, appreciates it none the less, perhaps, because it—the audience—eats and drinks from the first scene until the last.It is an interesting sight to see in front of the temporary temple of a Korean actor a concourse of men with eyes a-stark with pleasure, and faces a-bulge with refreshment, but it is a sight which is not too open to the criticism of the people in whose own theatres ices and coffees and sweetmeats are hawked about between the acts.It always seems to me that we insult art grossly when we tacitly admit that we cannot sit through a fine dramatic performance without the stimulant of meat or of drink.The Japanese also eat between the acts, but then they have the excuse of sitting through performances that are sometimes twelve hours long.We lack that excuse in Europe.And though the Koreans munch and sip through the intensest moments of a Korean theatrical exhibition, no dramatic performance in Korea lasts, unless I mistake, for more than three, or at the utmost, four hours.A Korean actor, to attain to any eminence in his profession, must be able to improvise, and probably in no Eastern country, certainly in no Western country, is the art of improvising carried to so high a degree of perfection as it is in Korea.The Korean actor also approaches somewhat to the Anglo-Saxon clown.He must be quick with cheap witticisms, glib jests, and jokes that would be coarse if they were not above all stupid.He must be ready with topical quips, for the Korean crowd will have its laugh, or it won’t pay.This branch of his trade he is seldom called upon to ply when he performs at private entertainments.

The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans are all inveterate picnickers.They are all intensely fond of Nature, and of feasting out of doors.All three of these peoples take the greatest delight in tobacco.Opium is smoked in Korea more than in Japan, but far less than in China.But all the Koreans, whatever their age, whatever their station, whatever their sex, smoke tobacco almost as perpetually as do the Burmese.The Koreans use a pipe, of which the bowl is so small that it only holds a pinch or two of tobacco, and the stem of which is so long that it is almost impossible to light one’s own pipe.When not in use, a gentleman’s pipe is carried in his sleeve, or tucked into his girdle.The labouring man or the coolie usually thrusts his down his neck between his coat and his back.All three of these peoples are great patrons of professional story-tellers, and of magicians.The Japanese excel the others in magic, and the Koreans excel in story-telling.

It is a favourite pastime both in Japan and Korea to watch trained dancers.There is no dancing in China.

In Korea fights are the occasions of great national joy.In Japan skilful wrestlers and fencers give really artistic exhibitions, but never carry them to the point of brutality.But in Korea a fight is a real fight.Blow follows blow; limbs are bruised, dislocated, and broken.During the first month of the year it is legal, and is the height of Korean good form, to indulge in as many fights as possible.Antagonistic guilds, numbering hundreds of men, face each other at some convenient and appointed spot, and in the sight of thousands of enthusiastic spectators, fight out an entire year’s debt of envy and hatred.Men engage in the roughest of personal combat; men who during the other eleven months of the year scarcely fight upon the gravest provocation.A considerable fight between two Korean women of the poorest class is not unknown, and some of them fight extremely well.Mothers often devote considerable time training their small sons in the art of defence, and of fisty attack.Every Korean town, almost every Korean village, has a champion fighter.Prize-fights are to Korea what the race-course is to Europe and to Anglo-Asia.The spectators bet until they have nothing left to bet with, and then very often start an amateur fight of their own.Korean gentlemen do not as a rule fight, nor are they apt to attend a public fight.They often, however, go to very great expense in engaging professionals to give private exhibitions of their prowess.There is one rather comical side to a Korean fight.Every Korean wears an abundance of big clothing, and the antagonists never dream of disrobing in the least.And so two fighting Koreans, from a little distance, look as much like two fighting feather beds as anything else.Debt is said to be the cause of nine out of ten of the fights that are not exhibitions of skill.In Korea, as in China, it is a great disgrace not to pay all your debts on, or before the New Year; and any Korean who fails to do so is very apt to find himself involved in a pugilistic reckoning.Club fights and stone fights are very common.When a stone fight is proposed the friends or admirers of the combatants spend some hours in collecting two mounds of small rough stones.Then the battle begins, and it is a battle.Sometimes it is a duel, and sometimes fifty or even a hundred take an active part in it, pelting each other as rapidly and as roughly as possible.

But the most important, and the most popular of all amusements in Korea is that of eating and drinking. Intemperance, I fear, is very common, and is so little condemned by public opinion that it is quite as much a national recreation as a national vice, but it is seldom or never indulged in by women, and even the geisha girls are sobriety itself. The Koreans drink everything and anything of an intoxicating kind that they can get. They are improving, however, in this respect, of late years. Japanese beer is somewhat displacing the heavier rice liquors, and among the very wealthiest people both claret and champagne are popular. But the Koreans eat as much as ever they did, and no other people extract so much genuine enjoyment from eating. The Koreans season their food more highly, and use more chillies, more mustard than any other people in Asia. They are very fond of the taro, a smooth, small, sweet potato. They devour sea-weed by the pound, and eat lily-bulbs by the bushel. Here is the mênu of a very elegant Korean dinner:⁠—

Both the Koreans and the Chinese, at least those who can afford it, use very much more meat than do the Japanese.

Sleeping is another great national amusement in Korea.I know no other people that seem to take so much positive enjoyment in sleep, and who go at it so deliberately and systematically.They positively regard it as a pastime.

The Koreans are fond of music, and have many concerts, but then so, too, do the Japanese and the Chinese.Fishing is a popular sport in all three countries.

The Koreans have many festivals, at which they indulge themselves in as much pleasure as possible.As in China, New Year’s day is perhaps the most important, and certainly the most generally observed of the festivals.The Korean New Year customs and the Chinese New Year customs are almost identical.I won’t describe the New Year customs of Korea, because to do so, I should have to say almost word for word what I recently wrote about the Chinese New Year.Kite-flying and top-spinning occupy a good deal of the time of old and young in China, in Korea, and in Japan.Kite fights and top battles are of very frequent occurrence, and are really very pretty to watch.

The Koreans are very fond of visiting, and of being visited, but in this again, they in no way differ from the other peoples of the further Orient.

Besides fishing, there are three manly sports in vogue in Korea, and I believe, three only; all others being considered undignified and ungentlemanly.The three are archery, falconry, and hunting.Indeed, I scarcely know if I am right in including hunting in the list.It is so very generally pursued as a business, and not as a pleasure.I believe that a few Koreans do sometimes hunt for sport, and very good sport they usually get.Deer, tigers, leopards, badgers, bears, martens, otters, sables, wolves, and foxes are abundant, and the peninsula is full of feathered life.Pheasants are as plentiful, as beautiful, and as toothsome in Korea as they are in China.And they have wild geese, plover, snipe, varieties of ducks, teal, water hens, turkeys and turkey-bustards, herons, eagles, and cranes; and the woods are full of hares and of foxes.

Archery is considered in Korea the most distinguished of recreations.Every Korean gentleman, from the king down, is, or tries very hard to be, expert at archery.They use a tight, short bow, never over three feet long, and arrows of bamboo.The Koreans are wonderful marksmen, and professional archers are among the most popular of public entertainers.

Falconry is almost as popular as archery, and every nobleman has at least one falcon.The falcon is invariably extensively and gaudily wardrobed, and has usually a personal attendant.Falcon competitions, both public and private, are frequent, and among the nobility are often made the occasion of elaborate entertainments.

The Koreans have a quaint little festival, called “Crossing the Bridges.”Söul abounds in queer little stone bridges.A moonlight night is chosen for the festival.Usually a man and a woman walk to the centre of the bridge, and make a wish for the ensuing year, or pray for good-luck, and search the stars for some augury of prosperity.They have a number of peculiar, picturesque customs in connection with “Crossing the Bridges,” but I fancy that with both men and women it is more an excuse for a night out than anything else.

The Koreans are even more impersonal than the Chinese.The Japanese are intensely personal.The Korean is impersonal in business, and impersonal in pleasure.He feasts with other men, and mingles with other men in all his amusements, but his interest is absorbed by his surroundings, and not by his companions.Introspection, and the study of other men, are seldom or never methods of Korean self-entertainment.Nature is after all the greatest entertainer of the Koreans; and to study Nature, to watch her, and to fall more and more deeply in love with her, is a Korean’s greatest amusement.

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART.

The subject of Korean art is vast, intricate, and difficult.It could not possibly be covered, even in the most superficial way, in one chapter, or in a series of several chapters.But it would be preposterous to altogether exclude it from any book whose pages are devoted to Korea generally.For perhaps the most really interesting thing about Korea, and certainly one of the most interesting things to be said about Korea is this:—Korea was the birthplace of a great deal that is finest and highest in the art of that wonderful art country—Japan.

A great deal that is most distinguished in Korean art, past and present, is undeniably indigenous to Korea, but, on the other hand, the Korean artists have borrowed or absorbed a good deal from the arts of other countries.In the early days of its prosperity Korean art seems to have owed a great deal to China.But, even in its infancy, through the long years of its magnificent splendour, and in these days of its decay or of trance, Korean art always has had, and has, a marked individuality, and bears the indubitable hall-mark of genuine originality.

In the beginning, then, Korean art was probably a mingling of the national expression of an intensely artistic people, and what was most striking in the rich, but less graceful art of China. Under the Sung dynasty, between the years 960 and 1333 A.D., lay the most brilliant period of China’s literary existence, and perhaps the most brilliant period of her art life.And it was also between these years that Korean art reached, and for some time maintained, its highest perfection.

No careful art student who visits both countries, or has access to typical collections of the art productions of both countries, can fail to observe that apparently either Persia has distinctly influenced the art of Korea, or Persia’s art been distinctly influenced by Korea.Probably both are true.Persian embassies and Korean embassies were wont to meet in Pekin.Very probably showed each other the presents sent by their respective masters to the Chinese Emperor.These presents were always largely made up of works of art.And their inspection probably led to an interchange of presents between the embassies themselves, and later on, to reciprocal studies, between Persia and Korea, of the art methods of the two countries.Korea has excelled in fret-work, in scroll-work, and in a great variety of arabesque decorations, and in all of these has very largely followed Persian lines.

The key-note of Korean art, as the key-note of all Far Eastern and, indeed, of most Oriental art, is the inferior place held in it by the study of the human figure.Far Eastern art is a study of nature and of decorations.This is even more true of Korea than of China or Japan, though the Koreans excel both the Chinese and the Japanese in their drawing of animals.The chief characteristic of Korean decorative art is its chastity.One cannot fail to be reminded by it of the severe simplicity of old Grecian art.A good specimen of Korean pottery or porcelain is never heavily covered with decoration.A Korean vase, or a Korean bowl, is simple and elegant of outline, and the surface is finely finished, but probably three-fourths of that entire surface is undecorated.The old specimens of Japanese Satsuma (the Koreans taught the Japanese how to make Satsuma) are usually distinguishable from the new and cheaper, because the former are touched with decoration, and the latter are hidden beneath it.The Koreans use colour very lavishly when they use it at all.But conventional design, conventionalized decorations, and decorations which are more exact copies of nature, whether in black and white or in colour, they use very carefully, and never crowd them together.Their porcelains are not so glazed as those of Japan, and the usual, or favourite colour is a creamy white.The dragon, which is so conspicuous a personage in all Far Eastern art, is perpetually drawn by Korean artists in colour, and by Korean artists in black and white, but is rather sparingly used on the Korean pottery; which in this differs from the potteries of China and Japan.The mythical animals and the symbolical animals, though they all figure largely in Korean art, are not often found on Korean porcelain.The Koreans value highly all sorts of crackle ware, and have been excelled, I fancy, in its manufacture by no other people.

Griffis says: “Decoration is the passion of the Orient, and for this, rather than for creative or ideal art, must we look from this nation, to whose language gender is unknown, and in which personification is unthought of, though all nature is animate with malignant or beneficent presences.Abstract qualities embodied in human form are unknown to the Korean, but his refined taste enjoys whatever thought and labour have made charming to the eye by its suggestion of pleasing images to the imagination.His art is decorative, not creative or ideal.His choice pieces of bric-a-brac may be rougher and coarser than those of Japan, but their individuality is as strongly marked as that of the Chinese, while the taste displayed is severer than that of the later Japanese.”

Perhaps the design that they most often employ, in their decorative art, is the well-known “wave-pattern.”We find it on their porcelain, on their bronzes, in the most conventional of their pictures, and even on their coins.Some one has suggested that it is perhaps used on the small copper coins to symbolize their circulation and fluctuation in value.The wave-pattern symbolizes successive and interminable wave-motion.The love of the Korean artist for water in nature, and for conventionalized water effects in decoration, amounts to a passion.Water in some form or phase is introduced into almost every Korean picture, and on to the majority of the porcelains, bronzes, the lacquers, and into the carvings.We find the wave-pattern beautifully executed on curtains and panels, on armour and on weapons.It often circles the columns of a building, and is conspicuous in interior architectural decorations.A strand of twisting, turning, curling waves is commonly the handle of a fine Korean teapot, and many a Korean dish, or vase, or bowl rests upon a porcelain or bronze bed of seemingly angry waves.The Japanese have seized upon the wave-pattern, and have vastly improved it.It is doubtless through their much exported, and much copied wares that we have become very familiar with it; and I have not infrequently seen it mingled with incongruous European patterns, in fancy printing, both in London, on the Continent, and in America—used for the background of decorative initial letters, or introduced into fancy tail-pieces.

The chrysanthemum was the favourite, the most favoured, and the most studied flower in Korea long before it became the imperial flower, the badge of Japan.The Koreans have always been, and are, wonderfully skilled in rearing it; and in reproducing it in colour, in black and white, in relief, and in conventional designs.We find it whenever we turn our eyes toward Korean objects of art.We find it, or some design suggestive of it, in Korean brocades, and in Korean carvings, and many of the most beautiful Korean borders have been designed from ingenious arrangements of its petals.In several ways the chrysanthemum lends itself with peculiar facility to Korean art ideals.It is rich, splendid, and varied in colour, and the Koreans have a passion for colour.It is interesting and noble in shape, and comes out splendidly in relief, or in half-relief.It is beautiful, but unique, and sometimes even grotesque in outline, and all the Eastern peoples admire the grotesque.Certainly the artists of Korea and of Japan understand the grotesque’s usefulness in art above all other artists, and employ it to relieve gentler, simpler forms of beauty, which might grow monotonous if used perpetually.Clouds and stars and the sun are utilized in a variety of ways by the Korean decorative artist.And a conventional pattern, called “the dragon’s tooth,” is extremely striking, and is nicely adaptable to vases or dishes that are big at the base, and small at the top.

Lacquer has been for centuries as commonly used in Korea as in Japan, but it has never reached the perfection, the artisticness in the former country that it has in the latter.

Korea was once the store-house of innumerable and invaluable works of art; art treasures of great variety, fine in design, excellent in execution, and rich in symbolism.To-day there are comparatively few art treasures in Korea.The nobles and the rich men probably each have a few hidden away.The king has a number.And some are still to be found in the ostracized monasteries, in the nunneries, and in other unexpected places.But Chosön is no longer the great art treasure-house she once was.In the palaces and the temples of China and Japan are to be seen many of what were once Korea’s most prized works of art.And these have been taken as booty from Korea, or sent by Korea as tribute.But the peninsula has not continued in her old glory of art production.Korean art has deteriorated in quality, and in many of its branches shrunk to something nominal in quantity, because great bodies of her best artists and artisans have been sent to Japan, or have gone there.Keenly alive to all that is beautiful in nature, and all that is most exquisite in art, the Japanese readily appreciated the high degree of excellence that had been attained by the artists of Chosön.Not content with taking to Japan the most perfect specimens of Korean art, the Japanese offered every inducement to the best Korean artists to settle in Japan, and spread throughout Japan their superior knowledge of art, and skill in art work.To the instructions of the Koreans the Japanese owed their unrivalled skill in making the beautiful Satsuma faïence, and the almost as beautiful Imari porcelain.The Koreans taught the Japanese how to carve wood, and then, apparently, forgot how to do it themselves; though there are still in Korea some very beautiful specimens of fine carving, especially in the royal palace at Söul.The majority of Japanese patterns for brocades and for stuffs, and many of their favourite designs for embroidery, are purely and indisputably Korean.

A scholar, who seems to me always anxious to do Japan full justice, has written:⁠—

“The existence of any special traits or principles of decoration, or a peculiar set of symbols in Korean art, has been thus far hardly known.When fully studied these will greatly modify our ideas of Oriental art, and especially of the originality of the Japanese designers.Korea was not only the road by which the art of China reached Japan, but it is the original home of many of the art-ideas which the world believes to be purely Japanese.”

The Japanese themselves, to be fair to them, do not claim to have a largely original art, and my attention was first called to the magnitude of Japan’s art debt to Korea by a Japanese gentleman in Tokio.

Old Persian writers express the greatest admiration for Korean porcelains, and for the beautiful decorated saddles that were sent to Persia from Chosön.The Koreans still excel in the making of gorgeous and (after once the eyes grow accustomed to their gorgeousness) really beautiful saddles.They are inlaid with pearls, and are richly embroidered.Bows and arms and fans are among the many things that the Koreans used to, and still do, make.They are beautiful with pearls, with jade, and with gold and silver and iron inlaying.The Koreans once made splendid and beautiful bells, and were expert in all sorts of metal work, but they have lost or laid aside these arts to a very great extent.There are still some very fine bells in the peninsula, and some beautiful Korean bells in Japan, but their manufacture dates back a long time.And this is also usually true of many of the best specimens of all kinds of Korean art-work that we find in Chosön or in Japan.It is true of most of the beautiful images found in the temples, and many of the vases, the braziers, the incense-burners, the trenchers, the kettles, the bowls, the decanters, and the censors, all of which are exceedingly graceful in form, pure in outline, and decorated with simplicity and dignity.

The throne in the palace of Söul is a very beautiful example of well-controlled art.It is simplicity itself, but it is as majestic as it is simple; perfect in every detail, royal in its proportions, and in severe but perfect taste.

Among the minor arts that still flourish in Korea is that of toy-making.The Korean toy-makers really are artists, and the playthings of the children of the well-to-do are so carefully designed and so faithfully executed, that in their little way they have every claim to be considered works of art.Armour, palanquins—indeed, all the impedimenta of Korean daily life, and of the daily life of old Korea—are reproduced with minute exactness, and very wonderful toys are made out of bits of tiger skins and of the fur of the tiger and other wild beasts.

The battle-flags and the banners of Korea are interesting both to the student of history and the student of art.The mysticism and the symbolism that is so characteristic of all Korean art is noticeable on almost every Korean flag.

The strange animals that we find in Korean art, animals that are like none that ever lived, are symbolical, and, to the Korean mind, typify a great deal that the Koreans think it important to remember.

A branch of art which is much thought of in Chinese-Asia, and is there indeed a fine art, is pen-work or brush-work.In this art the Koreans are as adept to-day as they ever have been—as adept as the Chinese or the Japanese.Fine specimens of calligraphy are written with a brush—written upon scrolls of silk or of soft paper, and are either put away to be treasured, or are hung upon the walls as ornaments of great interest.The last time I was in Tokio the wife of a Japanese official, whose home is very rich in paintings, both European and Japanese, showed me, with great pride, her collection of such scrolls—scrolls, all of which were specimens of fine writing.Very much such scrolls form the principal wall decoration of the study of the Chinese minister in London, and such scrolls are among the most cherished household goods of every well-to-do Korean.The Koreans write with the greatest ease and elegance, and it is almost as natural for them to draw and paint very fairly well as it is for them to write.

The making of fine pottery is almost, if not quite, a lost art in Korea, but they still know the secret of, and still make and use, the exquisite tints and the matchless colours that characterized their glazes in the days when Korean art was at its greatest height.The Korean potters are among the nomads of the peninsula.A family, or several families, of potters choose some spot where wood and clay are convenient, and there they build their huts, and there they live till the wood or the clay is exhausted.All Korean pottery is fired in ovens that are heated with wood.There are no great potteries in Korea or in Japan.Each specimen of their art is the individual work of an individual, and in this, perhaps, lays one of the secrets of the fascination of any genuine work of art from these countries.The most beautiful piece of porcelain that has ever been made in China, Japan, or in Korea, has probably been made in some humble little hut and fired by an insignificant-looking little oven.

I have spoken elsewhere of the famous Chinese lion, or Korean dog.It is more grotesque than beautiful, and is chiefly interesting because it has so strong a hold upon the affections of three so different peoples.For a conservative Asian, he is a very great traveller, is this Korean dog.He has found his way into every fancy bazaar, and every cheap notion shop in Europe and America; and we really feel quite as if we had met an old friend when we stumble upon him in Yeddo, in Pekin, or in quaint Söul.

It is being constantly urged against Far Eastern art that it is artificial.Mr. Lowell refutes this so clearly, so distinctly, with so much discernment, and to my mind, so convincingly, that I feel it would be a pity to refute it in any other words.He says:⁠—

“Far from being artificial, Far Eastern art is emphatically natural.The reason that it does not so appear to us at first is due to two causes.The first is very simple—an absence with us of what the Far Oriental sees around him at home.A picture of snow-peaks would undoubtedly appear conventional, in the sense used above, to a man who had dwelt all his life on the plains, and never heard of such things as white-headed mountains.The second cause is that certain very salient features of his landscapes have engrossed the Far Oriental attention, to the partial neglect of other less striking but, perhaps, even more common scenes.

“Every traveller knows the effect of this in other things beside art.Narrators insensibly, if not on purpose, pick out the salient points of any land to give an idea of it to those to whom it is an undiscovered country.The result is, that on acquaintance no country seems so odd as imagination, fed on a few startling facts, has pictured it to be; and yet, for all that, the facts may be perfectly true.Now, what we do to give others an idea of foreign lands, the Far Oriental does to give himself an idea of his own.His art, by reason of this strong simplicity, is all the higher art.”

Landscape gardening holds a prominent place among the arts of Korea, and is as well understood, and as generally practised to-day as it has ever been in the history of the peninsula.Water forms the principal, and the indispensable feature of every Korean garden.Indeed, the pond, which must be in the centre of the garden, often takes up nine-tenths of the garden’s entire area.This pond is always called a “lotus pond.”Usually the lotus is there, but not always, and its absence only emphasizes the title of the pond.It is interesting to notice how indispensable the sight of water is to the Koreans, and it speaks a great deal, I think, for their genuine love of Nature.

Korea is so surrounded by water, so intersected with rivers, and has so many high hills from which water can be seen for some distance, and down which rivulets and waterfalls break, that every Korean must be very familiar with water in all its moods and tenses.But he does not tire of it.On the contrary, a Korean who has his domain on the very sea-shore, will dig up the larger part of his garden for the sake of having an artificial lotus-pond; that he may sit on the artificial island in its centre and fish and dream and watch the water.Fantastic groups of strange rock work are put in almost every Korean garden: groups to which European eyes have to grow very used before they can see any beauty in them.

Korean music, like almost all Asiatic music, requires a great deal of study before we can at all understand it or like it.Its scale differs entirely from our gamut—differs even more than do Korean instruments from ours.Japanese music is of Korean origin, but has changed greatly of later years.But all classical Japanese music is still identical with Korean music, which has changed little or not at all.Korean government labourers are called to and released from their day’s work by music, and to music do the gates of a Korean city close or open for the day.

When Korea was in its infancy she was thrown into intimate contact with China. Korea had not had time to develop a literature, and so she very naïvely adopted the literature of China. Chinese literature is the classical literature of Korea still. The great majority of Korean books (and they are not surprisingly many), are written and printed in Chinese. The Koreans have neglected their own language and its literary possibilities for centuries. Still there is considerable poetry written in the Korean tongue (but in the Chinese character almost always), and we may consider the writing of this poetry as one of Korea’s national arts. “Poetry parties” are a popular form of Korean picnics. A number of friends meet at some unusually beautiful spot. They have been preceded by servants carrying writing materials and wine. Very gravely the competitors (for such they are) set to work. They sun and joy themselves in the beauty of the scene, they sip the cup that cheers, but alas! intoxicates too! and when they have enough assimilated the beauty of the scene and the gladness of the wine, then they write verses. The verses take the form of songs, or are ballads in praise of nature. They write of the bamboo, of the stars, of the storm, of moonlight and of sunrise, but never of woman!

KOREA’S IRRELIGION.

Korea has no religion.This is a sweeping statement, I know, and one that is susceptible of a great deal of dispute, but I believe that in the main it is true.The books that have been written during the last hundred years about Korea teem with thick chapters on Korea’s religion, but for all that, I believe that Korea is without religion.There are without doubt Koreans who are deeply and genuinely religious, but they are so infinitesimal a fraction of the population of the peninsula that they no more justify us in crediting Korea with a religion than the handful of Theosophists, who are probably in England to-day, would justify a Korean in crediting England with an at all large acceptance of Theosophy.Buddhism, which was once as dominant in Korea as ever it has been in China or Japan, has been almost destroyed.Confucianism is still a great power in Korea, as it must be in every country where ancestor-worship and the sanctity of the family are the backbone of the nation’s moral existence.But I maintain that Confucianism is not, properly speaking, a religion.It is a theory of ethics, a code of morals, admirable, sublime even, but it is not, as I understand the word religion, a religion.There are superstitions in Korea and to spare.The common people are as superstitious as the common people of any other civilized country, which is saying a great deal, and the upper classes are by no means free from superstition.But who shall venture to call superstition a religion?Unless we call superstition and religion synonymous; unless we accept Confucianism as an individual and actual religion; or unless we say that a few scattered monasteries, that must by law be built far beyond the walls of a city—monasteries inhabited by monks, who are looked down upon even by the common people, and are not allowed within the gates of any city; monasteries that are resorted to by the leisure classes for revel and for roystering, and never for prayer or penitence—unless we say that these constitute a national religion, we must, I think, admit that Korea is distinctly irreligious.

The real difficulty in deciding whether Korea is in any way religious or altogether irreligious lies in the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between religion and superstition.The dividing line between the two is often indistinct—sometimes missing altogether—so perhaps I am wrong in saying that a country so amply dowered with superstition is devoid of religion.

I base my statement that Korea has no religion not upon the absence of religion from Korea, not upon the paucity of religion in Korea, but upon the fact that in Korea religion is neither respected nor respectable.Of course, if we define religion as broadly as do some of the most eminent authorities (Rossiter Johnson, W.Smith, Bishop Taylor, Macaulay, and a host of others), and admit that atheism and superstition are forms of religion—and I am far from sure that they are not—my statement totters, if it does not altogether tumble.

Buddhism was until three hundred years ago strong in Korea, and Confucianism, which, if not a religion, is the most elaborate, and one of the most perfect systems of morality that the world has ever known, and has served humanity better than most religions, is strong in Korea still.A study of these two is, as is the study of all the higher Oriental doctrines, beliefs, and systems of thought, intensely interesting, and the temptation to dwell here upon Buddhism and Confucianism is great.But I fancy that everyone who is interested in reading about so remote a part of the East as Korea is more or less familiar with the outlines at least of both Buddhism and Confucianism, and so I will content myself with trying to tell how the first was driven out of Chosön, and how the second is still the guardian angel of such morality as the peninsula possesses.

Buddhism flourished there for centuries, and it was at least tolerated until the Japanese invasion in 1592.Indeed, up to that time Korea was not only not without a religion, but she was not without several.The religions of the Far East are as easy-going as the peoples—they are modest as a rule, the beliefs of further Asia—and rub along together very amicably, no one of them seeming over-sure that it is better than its fellows.

Three hundred years ago, when two great Japanese warriors, Konishi and Kato, with their respective armies landed in Korea, each was so anxious to have the glory of reaching and conquering the capital before the other, that neither dare pause to subdue the towns and the fortresses (and many of these latter were monasteries) that lay along his route.Yet neither dare leave behind him a long track of unsubdued and, for those days, well-armed country.In this dilemma they dressed themselves and their followers in the garbs of Buddhist priests, and so by strategy made their entrance into the walled cities, and into the forts, and once in, put the inhabitants, the unprepared soldiers and monks, to death.About thirty years afterwards, when Korea had shaken off, for the time at least, the Japanese yoke, the Korean priests suffered for the cupidity of the Japanese generals; as the innocent so generally do suffer for the guilty in this nice world of ours.The royal decree went throughout Korea that no Buddhist priest might dwell or even pass within the gates of a walled city.The priests fled to the mountains, and there erected themselves such dwellings as they could.The monasteries, in which they had lived within the city’s walls, crumbling away with time, and decaying with disuse, ceased to be architectural features of any Korean city.And this is why all Korean cities are so monotonous in aspect.For religion has been the patron of architecture as of art, of music, of literature, and of drama the world over, and more especially so in the Orient.The priests of the temples of Buddha, having incurred the disfavour of the government, rapidly lost what hold they had had upon the people.And the nation, which had always considered its king almost mightier and more divine than its very gods, soon ceased to pay tribute to, or ask the services of, a body of men who had lost the royal countenance.Then, too, the Koreans are great dwellers in cities.They go far into the country to look at Nature, to rest, and to amuse themselves, but it would never occur to the Korean mind to journey far for prayer or sacrifice.So the revenues of the monasteries fell off.Men well-born and well-to-do ceased to join the order.And little by little Korean Buddhism passed away, until now it is but a wraith of its old self.

This at least is the most general account of how Korea ceased to be Buddhist, but its authenticity is disputed by several of the most reliable historians, and by one, at least, who has written in English.These historians claim that some centuries ago all the powerful people in Korea were divided into two factions—one Buddhist, one Confucist—and great was the rivalry between these two.Social war ensued, and the Buddhists, who had become corrupt and enervated, were terribly defeated.Buddhism was forbidden to dwell within the capital or within the cities.True, the monasteries that had always been important features of the rural landscape were in no way interfered with, but “banishment from the cities produced two results.First, desuetude rendered the mass of the people quite oblivious to religious matters; and secondly, the withdrawal of religion from the seats of power threw the profession into disfavour with the aristocracy.Here, then, we have a community without a religion—for the cities are to a peculiar degree the life of the land—a community in which the morality of Confucius for the upper classes, and the remains of old superstitions for the lower, takes its place.”

How, then, in Korea have the religiously mighty fallen!For Buddhist monks once formed a fourth portion of the entire male population of Chosön, and there were tens of thousands of them in Söul alone.At first thought it seems strange that now any Korean should be found willing to embrace the monastic life; but the Koreans are not industrious, many of them are wretchedly poor, and life in the monasteries affords the greatest opportunity for the indolent, dreamy, and meditative life, and the proximity to Nature, which is so dear to the Korean heart.No Korean monk is called upon to do hard manual labour, and it is still almost a religion with the Koreans, rich and poor, to give something toward the sustenance, and even toward the creature comforts of the brothers.So laziness, and poverty, and misery keep the Korean monasteries and the Korean nunneries from falling into utter disuse.Strangely enough, the monks of Korea rarely or never have the brutal sinful-looking faces that characterize so many of their brethren in China.

I should divide the religion, or the irreligion, of Korea into rationalism: the religion of the patricians; and superstition: the religion of the plebeians.Both rationalism and superstition are well controlled by a system of morality which is rooted in Confucianism, and impregnably enwalled by ancestor-worship.

Rationalism and superstition have their points of touch—points at which the one is indistinguishable from the other—lost in the other—in Korea as everywhere else.

I do not mean that reason and unreason ever lose themselves in each other, though, like other rival powers, the boundary line between them may be narrower than any fraction of any hair, and quite imperceptible to human eyes.

Korean rationalism is practically identical with rationalism the world over.Korean superstitions are unique in form if not in essence.It merits at least passing notice that Reason expresses herself in one way everywhere, and that Unreason in different parts of the earth speaks in tongues as differing as fantastic.

The expression of Korean superstition is picturesque.The more picturesque a superstition is the more impregnable it is.

Korean demon-worship is positively fascinating. Superstition has not always been the power in Korea that it is now. In Korea religion and superstition have played a long game of see-saw. The Koreans outgrew their early superstitions, discarded them, and embraced a highly civilized and civilizing form of religion; then they discarded that religion. Now, the average human mind must believe in something outside of its own material ken, beyond its own demonstrating. Quod erat demonstrandum forms no part of the rituals and the creeds of most religions, so when the time came that Buddha and his coterie of well-bred and fairly rational deities had practically been banished from Korea, the Koreans fell back on their old superstitions, and to-day superstition and its ridiculous rites are more rife in Korea than in any other civilized country.

There are three classes of supernatural beings in whom the people of Korea believe—the demons who work all manner of evil, the beneficent spirits whose practice it is to do good occasionally, and who semi-occasionally combat the evil spirits, and an intermediate class of spirits who dwell, as a rule, on the mountains, and neither work good nor evil, but who, in themselves and in their lives, are the subjects of much charming folk-lore.The Korean—the Korean of the populace—the superstitious Korean attributes all his ills to demons.He, being a Korean, cannot conceive that Nature can be malignant, nor can he conceive that he is ever punished for breaking laws of whose very existence he is ignorant.So he peoples the air, the sea, and the rocks with devils of earthquake, devils of pestilence, devils of lightning, devils of hurricane, and a thousand other devils of blight and of sorrow.Having determined that they cause all his troubles, he then sets about doing the best he can to propitiate the spirits of evil.Korean demons are supposed to be very small, and I have never heard of one to whom much physical strength was attributed; and almost always when it comes to a face-to-face contest between one of them and a powerful man (and such contests occur very often in Korean myths), the demon has the worst of it.Still, the majority of the Korean populace live in unceasing terror and dread of these demons.Korean methods of circumventing them are delightful, and delightfully simple.I have already spoken of the beasts that sit on guard on many Korean roofs.They are supposed to be the most efficacious combatants of the Korean devils; but the privilege of having them is rather monopolized by royalty and by the high favourites of the royal family.On lintels of the houses of well-to-do Koreans are usually hung two oblong pieces of coloured paper upon which are drawn in black, or two oblong pieces of white paper on which are drawn in colours, terrible enough portraits of two famous old generals.One of these warriors was a Chinaman, the other was a Korean, and both are renowned in the legends of the peninsula as having waged highly successful warfare against several evil spirits of Chosön, and their portraits are supposed to protect the houses, outside of which they hang, from the invasion of the imps of mischief and of misery.Korean devils, for some unfathomable reason, are supposed to be far more powerful indoors than out, and so the Koreans are at special pains to exclude their devilships from Korean interiors.The Korean householder, who is debarred by poverty or by his own social inferiority both from using the roof-scarecrows, and from hanging counterfeit presentments of the two old warriors on his portals, fastens a strip of cloth and some wisps of rice straw outside his door.He fastens the rice straw there in the hope that the devil about to enter may be hungry, and stop to gorge himself and then go away.He fastens the bit of cloth (which must be torn from some old garment of his own), because the Koreans have the nice taste to consider their devils extremely stupid, and so believe that any devil who is confronted with a fragment of a man’s garment will mistake it for the man himself, and, in view of how often men have defeated devils, fly and trouble that house no more.

The evil spirits of Korea are also frightened away by noise; noise so enormous, so metallic, so discordant, so altogether diabolical, that it is no wonder the devils rush from it, rush on their wings of sulphurous flame, and the only wonder is that any human person or persons can endure to make it.This practice of frightening with noise the evil ones of heaven (for mark you, the peoples of the Far East, unlike the Greeks, have no belief in Hades) is common to China, to Siam, to Korea, and to Burmah.The devil-jails and the devil-trees, and the professional devil-catchers, of which I have spoken before, come in importance next to the roof-beasts, and then, I think, come the prayer-poles.A prayer-pole may be a straight, symmetrical, polished piece of wood, or it may be a carelessly cut branch of a tree.In either case it is stuck in the earth a few feet from the doorway, and on it are hung prayers to the good spirits, and bits of rag, and bits of refreshment to allure and deceive the evil spirits.Sometimes a bell is hung on the top of the branch to attract the attention of both the cursers and the blessers of the land.

The good spirits that inhabit the big kingdom of Korean credulity are unfortunately lazy, and have to be rather urgently supplicated when their good services are needed.When their good services are not needed they are left, to do the Koreans justice, beautifully alone.But when the evil-doers who dwell in the Korean heaven get altogether unmanageable, the good spirits are called upon with dance and with song, with counting of rosaries and with ringing of bells, to wage war against their wicked brethren.Often the Korean angels, being Korean, go to sleep, forget to wake up, and neglect to send rain.The sending of rain is one of their few active offices.If it does not rain in Korea the rice does not grow in Korea, and then, indeed, are the Korean devils to pay.When drought falls upon Korea all Korea prays.The superstitious and the rational kneel down together, and if their united invocations fail to pierce the slumber of their well-meaning deities, then the king goes beyond the city’s walls, and entering into a temple, or a sort of rustic palace that is kept in readiness for the purpose, throws himself upon the ground, and prays that his people may be blessed with rain.The rain may fall the next day, it may fall the next moon; but whenever it falls the loyal Koreans attribute it altogether to the intercession of their king.It is only when drought falls upon the land that the ordinary Korean is allowed to pray directly to most of the Korean gods.But every Korean has a household spirit—a good guardian angel of his own hearthside—to whom he may pray as often as he likes.And best beloved, most god-like, most fit to be worshipped, most fit to be prayed to, most fit to be loved of the Korean gods, and of all the Korean spirits, is one called “the blesser of little children.”He is the favourite vassal of the great spirit: the phrase “great spirit” is as often upon the tongue of a Korean as upon the tongue of a North American Indian.“The blesser of little children” has under his personal charge every home in Korea.He journeys from house to house scattering blessings upon the baby heads, and forbidding evil to approach the baby people.

The Koreans emphatically believe that Korea was originally peopled by spirits and by fairies, and this belief has developed a folk-lore that is delightful and interesting in the extreme, and that often reminds us of the Norwegian folk-lore.

“When a belief rational and pure enough to be called a religion disappears, the stronger minds among the community turn in self-reliance to a belief in nothing; the weaker, in despair, to a belief in anything.This happened here; and the anything to which they turned in this case was what had never quite died out, the old aboriginal demon-worship.”

And the stronger minds among the Korean community turned to the belief in nothing, which is so often called rationalism.But in Korea rationalism is tinged with, almost disguised by, that strange phenomenon of Asiatic mentality, of Asiatic belief, of Asiatic instinct called ancestor-worship.

Ancestor-worship in Korea, and ancestor-worship in China, are almost identical.The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising agnostic I ever knew was a Korean.The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising atheist I ever knew was a Chinaman, but both were staunch and uncorruptible ancestor-worshippers.Korean ancestor-worship is more than interesting, but it is merely a vassal of Chinese ancestor-worship.Like, and with Confucianism, it has come from China to Korea, and like and with Confucianism it is the mainstay of Korean morality.The worship of ancestors is an almost daily detail of Korean life.The observances of ancestor-worship are more rigidly carried out by the well-to-do Korean rationalist than by the poor superstitious Korean peasant.Death and burial mark the first, the greatest, and the most picturesque of the functions of ancestor-worship.Logically enough, the death and the interment of a child or of any unmarried person involves almost no expense, and demands no ceremonial.The infant (an unmarried man or woman of eighty is an infant in Korea) is wrapt about with the mats, the tiger skins, or the rugs upon which he died.These are wrapt about with rice straw, and the bundle is buried.That is the end of a Korean who leaves no descendants.When the father of a family dies his eldest son closes the eyes as the breath leaves the body, and the family (men and women gather together for once) let loose their hair, and shriek and sob, and, if possible, weep.So long as the dead remains in the house his relatives eat the food they like least, and as little of that as will sustain life.Indeed, the eldest son is supposed to eat nothing.Four days after the death, the members of the family redress their hair, and put on their first mourning.In Korea, as in all the Far East, mourning consists of coarse, unbleached fabrics that are commonly called, but are not quite, white.On this fourth day the family, friends, and acquaintances prostrate, prostrate, and prostrate themselves before the dead, and an exceptionally good dinner is laid beside him.Huge loaves of especially prepared bread also, and as many kinds of fruit as the market affords—the rarer, the more expensive, and the more hard to obtain, the better.A dinner is also prepared for the friends, but not for the family.About the body, and throughout the house, candles and incense burn, and wailing is incessant.The mourners and the professional wailers take turns in sleeping, and relieve each other in the audible grieving.Paper money, that is, imitation money, and long paper banners covered with the titles and the good qualities of the dead, are burned.With the poor, burial takes place five, or at the most nine days after death.With the rich the body remains unburied for at least three months.Korean coffins, like Chinese coffins, are, or are supposed to be, air-tight.But the Korean coffin is much smaller than the Chinese coffin, and the spaces left between the outlines of the coffin and the outlines of the body are, in Korea, filled up with the old clothing of the dead.If the dead had not enough clothing, pieces of linen or of silk are added to it.The rich Koreans usually employ a geomancer to indicate the most auspicious day for burial.The coffin is covered with beautiful brocaded silk, or with beautifully carved pieces of wood.Prayers are said almost continuously, from the hour of death until some time after the interment.The coffin is borne on a death-car, a unique Korean vehicle, or by men who are hired for a small sum and who do nothing else.Beside the coffin are carried the banners, recording the rank and the virtues of the dead, and the lanterns which in life he was entitled to use.His sons follow him, in Korean mourning, and Chinese-like, leaning heavily upon sticks.Acquaintances and friends bring up the rear, in sedan chairs and on horseback.

Korean graves are usually on hill sides, and are decorated at the utmost possible expense.Even the graves of the Korean poor are well tended, and covered with the gentle green grass, and with the soft flowers of spring, if no monument or temple is possible.But if it can be managed, a miniature temple is erected near the grave—a temple which is a shelter for those who come periodically to mourn the dead—and the grave is guarded with quaint stone images of men and other animals.

If a Korean family is unlucky they are very apt to think that one or more of their ancestors has been buried in an uncongenial spot.Then, no matter what the cost, no matter what the trouble, the grave is, or the graves are, opened, and the dead moved to some more desirable place.Korean mourning is as long or longer, as intricate or more intricate, than Chinese mourning, but so similar to Chinese mourning, which has been so often and so fully described, that it would be superfluous to here more than mention Korean mourning.

Such, then, is the religion or the irreligion of Korea.Superstition for the people; ancestor-worship for the people, the princes, and for those who are between.Strange that a nation that has driven from its midst one of the great religions of this earth, and has unrelentingly persecuted the religion of Christ, should be so devoted in its ancestor-worship.But which of us that has ever lain awake through the wordless watches of the lonely night and longed in vain⁠—