The chorus of A-ra-rüng is invariable, but the verses which are sung in connection with it take a wide range through the fields of lyrics, epics, and didactics.
There is a third style, which is between the classical and the popular, but which hardly deserves mention.
To my thinking, the melancholy which seems the motif of most Oriental music becomes an extreme plaintiveness in that of Korea, partly due probably to the unlimited quavering on one note. While what may be called concerted music is torture to a Western ear, solos on the flute ofttimes combine a singular sweetness with their mournfulness and suggest “Far-off Melodies.” Love songs are popular, and there is a tender grace about some of them, as well as an occasional glint of humor, as indicated by the last line of the third stanza of one translated by Mr. Gale.[23] The allusions to Nature generally show a quick and sympathetic insight into her beauties, and occasional stanzas, of which the one cited is among several translated by Mr. Hulbert, have a delicacy of touch not unworthy of an Elizabethan poet.[24] The Korean Repository is doing a good work in making Korean poetry accessible to English readers.
There was not, however, any flute music at Ta-ri-mak. There were classical songs, with a direful drum accompaniment, and a wearisome repetition of the A-ra-rüng, continuing all day and late into the hot night.
A few pedlars passed by, selling tobacco, necessaries, and children’s toys, the latter rudely made, and only attractive in a country in which artistic feeling appears dead. There are shops in Seoul, Phyöng-yang, and other cities devoted to the sale of such toys, painted in staring colors, and illustrative chiefly of adult life. There are also monkeys, puppies, and tigers on wheels, all for boys, and soldiers in European uniforms have appeared during the recent military craze, and boys are very early taught to look forward to official life by representations of mandarins’ chairs, red-tasselled umbrellas, and fringed hats. Girls being of comparatively small account, toys specially suited to them are not many.
Japanese lucifer matches, which, when of the cheap sort, seem only slightly inflammable, as I have several times used a whole box without igniting one, were in the stock of the pedlars, and are making rapid headway in the towns, but even so near Wön-san as Ta-ri-mak is, the people were still using flint and steel to light chips of wood dipped in sulphur, though the cheap and smoky kerosene lamp has displaced the tall, upright candlestick and the old-fashioned dish lamps there and in very many other country places.
From the high-road from Seoul to Wön-san we diverged at Nam-San to visit the large monastery of Sök-wang Sa, famous as being the place where, in the palmy days of Korean Buddhism, Atai-jo, the first king of the present dynasty, was educated and lived. The monastery itself, with its temples, was erected by this king to mark the spot where, 504 years ago, he received that supernatural message to rule in virtue of which his descendant occupies the Korean throne to-day. In this singularly beautiful spot Atai-jo’s early years were spent in religious exercises, study, and preparation, and many of the superb trees which adorn the grand mountain clefts in which Sök-wang Sa is situated are said to have been planted by his hands. His regalia and robes of state are preserved in a building by themselves, which no one is allowed to enter except the duly appointed attendant. A bridle track alongside of a clear mountain stream leads through very pretty and prosperous-looking country, and over wooded foothills for some miles to the base of a fine mountain range. We passed for a length of time through rich and heavily-timbered monastic property, then the beautiful valley narrowed, and by a “Red Arrow Gate” we entered on a smooth broad road, on which the sun glinted here and there through the heavy foliage of an avenue of noble pines, a gap now and then giving entrancing glimpses of the deep delicious blue of the summer sky, of a grand gorge dark with pines, firs, and the exotic Cleyera Japonica and zelkawa, brightened by the tender green of maples and other deciduous trees, and by flashes of foam from a torrent booming among great moss-covered boulders.
Then came bridges with decorative roofs, abbots’ tombstones under carved and painted canopies, inscribed stone tablets, glorious views of a peaked, forest-clothed mountain barring the gorge, and as the pines of the avenue fell into groups at its close, and magnificent zelkawas, from whose spreading branches white roses hung in graceful festoons, overarched the road, a long irregular line of temples and monastic buildings appeared, clinging in singular picturesqueness to the sides of the ravine, which there ascends somewhat rapidly towards the mountain, which closes it.