Lest the reader should think that Hamel had become a Buddhist or a Confucist, or had adopted some other shameful form of heathenism; lest the reader may think that Hamel was altogether partial to the people among whom he had been thrown, I will add what he wrote of two other governors. After complaining of one in detail, he adds, “But, God be praised, an apopletic fit delivered us from him in September following, which nobody was sorry for, so little was he liked.”
And of another unsatisfactory governor he writes, “He put many more hardships upon us, but God gave us our revenge.”
These last two quotations ought, I think, to establish Hamel as a highly civilized, and by no means gushing, historian.
Hamel’s narrative proves two things most conclusively. It proves that of all the civilized countries the centuries have wrought the least change upon Korea. Indeed, the geological changes in the peninsula have scarcely been slower than the changes in the social customs of the Koreans. It is even more interesting to me that Hamel’s book proves him one of the most truthful men who ever put pen to paper. He wrote with a brilliant, vivid pen, but he dipped it in no false colour. And yet in his own time Hamel was, to put it mildly, called a liar of liars; and until comparatively recent days his statements have been doubted, and “exaggerated” has been the least abusive adjective applied to them. But travellers of our own time, missionaries and statesmen, men whose word is beyond impugnment, testify that Hamel wrote well within the mark, that he created nothing, imagined nothing, distorted nothing. It is much to be regretted that a man who wrote of Korea so simply, so charmingly, so truthfully, and from so splendidly inside a point of view, did not write far more about a country of which the fairly well-informed of us until yesterday knew almost literally nothing; and yet a country a-teem with interest for all who feel keen interest in humanity, in art, and in high civilization, a country which threatens to disappear, if not as a country, why then, as a country apart, and whose magnificent personality may soon be lost amid the neutral generality of modern civilization, and the brotherhood (such brotherhood!) of all nations.
The history of Korea we may have always with us; but Korea—Korea of the lotus ponds and the red-arrow gates—Korea of the big hats and the devil-traps—Korea of the geisha girls and the omnipotent, red-clad king!—that we may not have so long. Civilization and war are on the march, and if ‘smooth success be strewed before their gentle feet,’ why then, the twentieth century in her youth may see the matrons of Chosön walk abroad unveiled, and night on the streets of Söul turned into day by electric light.
CHAPTER II
SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS.
It is difficult to decide how to attack the study of a people of whom one knows practically nothing, and to whom one cannot have personal access.
There are two classes of travellers—of people who travel for self-gratification, and not on business or of necessity.
The traveller belonging to the first class diligently studies a whole library of guide books and other volumes of more or less tabulated, and more or less reliable information. He learns the country to which he intends journeying as he might learn his catechism or his “twelve times twelve.” He buys a ticket for the land of his destination. He knows where he is going, and he goes there. He sees everything he expected to see, all he intended to see, which is all he wishes to see, and, on my word of honour, he sees no more! I know, for I have travelled with him often, oh, so often! Having worked out his own petty educational salvation, he goes home again almost as wise as when he started for abroad: just a little hazed, perhaps (unless he be a globe-trotter of the ultra rigidly-minded, blind-eyed type), for things as they really are often give in so pronounced a way the lie to things as we have read of them, that the difference between fact and fiction must shock all but the densest of tourists.