Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Second-sight seems to be, and to have always been, a genuine possession with the Asiatic peoples. We in the West have, I think, never possessed second-sight; but that does not altogether prove that there is no such thing as second-sight. I remember an Æolian harp that used to hang upon one of the crumbling, wild-flower-wreathed walls of the old castle at Heidelberg. I remember the love songs that the wind used to sing to that harp; the love songs with which the harp accepted the wooing of the wind. If a nice new organ, a parlour organ, bought on time-payment, were placed beside that Æolian harp (for I suppose the harp is still where I, in my girlhood, years ago, saw it), the wind would have nothing to say to that organ. If the wind had, the organ would not hear. I do not for a moment rank an Æolian harp above a nice, new parlour organ, but I may, perhaps, prefer the harp to the organ. We all have our secrets.

The Korean mind is, if I at all understand it, an Æolian harp. Compared with the Oriental mind, the Occidental mind—in many instances at least—partakes somewhat of the character of the parlour organ. The peoples of Asia do less than we, but I think that they foresee more. The wind of prophecy, the wind that prophesied the unavoidable future, swept the nerve-strung heart of Asiatic sensibility, swept it very many, many years ago. And Asia, having ears to hear, and, perhaps, eyes to see into the future, realized that her only safety lay in seclusion. It seems to me that the sensitive Asiatic mind, the exquisitely-strung Æolian harp of Oriental existence, sings one eminently, practicable, sensible song into the moon-lit, star-gemmed Asiatic midnight, and the refrain of the song is this: “Asia for the Asians. Mangoes for the Chinese and the Bengalese. Mogree flowers for the nautch-girls; and the Taj Mahal for the wife who was loved with a love exceeding the love of European men.” It has, I think, been an instinct, a second-sight, an inspiration, with the Asiatic peoples to keep our feet from off the flower-made brilliance of their native sod. But we have conquered Asia, as surely as the music pumped by the thick, red fingers of the Board-School-taught girl—pumped from out the well-manufactured depths of the time-payment-bought parlour organ—would drown the indefinable, soft, methodless, nameless music of the Æolian harp. Just so well have we subdued Asia, hushed her music, quenched her light, torn her flowers petal from petal.

I am speaking from the sentimental standpoint, of course. But, in this utilitarian age of ours, isn’t it worth while to look at things sentimentally, once in a way, if only for variety? We have conferred the greatest practical blessings upon Asia; that I admit and maintain. But we have blurred the picture a bit, and I can’t help being sorry. Only one country in Asia has, until lately, entirely escaped the blight and the blessing of our civilizing touch—Korea! Korea has not seemed worth our shot and powder. And many of us have not really known that there was such a place as Korea. But the war that is raging in farther Asia now has quickened our interest in the quaint kingdom of the morning calm.

The following chapters have been largely written from notes that Mrs. Q. made during the pleasant months she spent in Korea, and from her memories of those months. But Chosön is too interesting and, to us, too new a theme to need the fillip of any petty personality; and so, after these few pages of introduction and of explanation, we may excuse Mrs. Q., or at least her personality, from our service, and leave her in her privacy, to congratulate herself upon her good luck in having had the unique experience of seeing Korea, and of seeing it in company with one of the best-informed of Tartars, and one of the most intelligent of Europeans.

I felt impelled to write this explanation of how the material for the book was gathered, and the manner of woman who gathered it. Helen Q. lays as little claim to being profound as do I myself, and this is no volume for those who gloat on statistics, on accurate tables, and insist upon having over-exact information or no information at all. It is a peep at Korea as a very average woman saw it, a woman who enjoyed herself in Korea, and who there jotted down some of her impressions that they might serve her and another for ‘sweet discourses in their time to come’—jotted them down with no dream of future publication. I sometimes think that the half-gossip of such travellers, the honest, unstudied report of their observations, gives, to the generality of readers, a more vivid, concrete picture of a strange land than do the more elaborate, more careful volumes of more accomplished writers, more professional makers of books.

These pages have had the advantage of being revised both by Mr. Q. and Ja Hong Ting, both of whom are acute observers, exact thinkers, and happen to be in Europe now.

The inclusion here of the chapters on China and Japan needs, I think, no apology. The histories of the three countries have been so interknit socially, artistically, and scientifically; the people of Korea are so like the people of Japan, so like the people of China—though so unlike both—that we shall only even partially see Korea, by keeping one of our mental eyes on the rival countries between which she lies.

The island of Quelpaert is barely fifty miles long and only half so wide; but it is big with history, huge with interest, and great with special claim upon European attention.

In 1653 a Dutch boat was wrecked on the shore of Quelpaert. To that shipwreck Europe owed her most vivid, if not her first photograph of Korea; for on the Sparrow-hawk was not only Min Heer Cornelius Lessen, the governor-elect of Tai-wan, but also a man of genius, a sailor who had a great gift for narrative writing. That man’s name was Hendrik Hamel. It is two hundred years and more since he wrote his simple, straightforward, convincing record of the years he perforce spent in Korea. Since then some score of books have been written about Korea and things Korean. None of them are more readable than Hamel’s “Narrative of an Unlucky Voyage,” and only one of them compares, at all to its author’s credit, with the quaint old book, written two centuries ago by the Dutch seaman.

I should like to quote a great deal of Hamel’s own record of the thirteen years he spent in Korea, and it has been done very much at length by several eminent writers. Moreover, it would be an entirely safe thing to do, for the copyright must have long since run out, if the book ever had a copyright. But I will content myself with a very few words about this wonderful man and his stay in Chosön, and a few brief quotations from one of the most interesting books of travel that has ever been written; a book as fresh and readable to-day as if it had just come smoking from the printer’s press.