Louise Jordan Miln

“ The people are homeless, at the best, more than probably, they, too, are torn and maimed, most possibly they are killed. The rice is spilled, and the bowls of blue, and white, and of yellow Satsuma are broken. Silver pipes, torn kimonos, bits of pottery, that if whole again were worth a king’s ransom, strew the scene, and for the moment hide the gashes in the ground. And yet, like everything else in Japan, even this scene of desolation has its juvenile aspect; it looks not unlike a toy that a spoiled child has broken in anger. ”

“ 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! ”

“ But in one phase of landscape gardening— (the art of bringing Nature into a garden, and there ornamenting her, without insulting her) —the Koreans quite equal the Japanese.
Water, in the form of miniature lakes, is the crown—the centre of every far-eastern garden. Nowhere in the world are artificial lakes or ponds so perfected, so ablush with bloom, so aquiver with perfume, as they are in Korea. Sometimes they dot great green swards. Sometimes they softly ripple against the very foundations of a palace; oftenest they are the one blessed detail of a middle-class man’s dwelling. ”

“ So a Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in her husband’s garden or summer-house, as is a nun in her cell.
The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans spend a great deal of time in their gardens, sharing naturally enough the intense love of their menkind for nature, and probably finding their peculiar lives more endurable among the trees and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they do in their queer little rooms, through the paper windows of which they cannot look unless they poke a hole with their fingers first—rooms in which there is little space and less furniture. ”

“ 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 women of the very poorest class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, are indeed compelled to, with uncovered heads and unveiled faces, go about the streets. But they move rapidly. They look neither to the right nor to the left. And they slink by men with downcast eyes. And men never look at them. Indeed a Korean gentleman will not, by one single glance, betray that he is aware of the presence in public of any woman; unless indeed she belong to the geisha, or “accomplished class.” The geisha girls go about the streets frankly, and unhiddenly enough. But they are a class aside. ”

“ The most powerful women of whom we can read in the history of India, from the time of the Rock Temples to the time of the Indian Mutiny, were purdah-women; and the woman who has perhaps had more influence and more power over her own husband than ever other woman had over other husband—the woman who was perhaps at her death the most sincerely mourned, and the woman who was entombed as no other woman has ever yet been entombed, and probably as no other woman will ever be entombed—the beautiful Arjamand Banu—lived in the strictest purdah. ”

“ When Nature recovers herself a bit, and sees what she has done, she is always very sorry, and about the tumbled, broken, paper houses, through the ruined fields of paddy and of rice, over the heaps of torn and burned wisteria, well, she does what mothers have done before her, she stoops and kisses the place that she has made sting, she scatters violets over her pet child’s bruises, she makes vines, blue with blossom and purple with perfume, grow over the marks which she has made upon the dimpled limbs and the pretty features of her favourite, but somewhat trying child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wings of butterflies add falsetto, but, oh! so sweet, notes, and the wind, as it wantons between the wanton trees, and kisses the fragrant flowers, steals from them their honey, and adds perfume unto perfume, and music unto music, until Japan, Nature’s pet baby, cuddles down into the warm eider-down of its cradle, an eider-down that is incomparably soft with flower-petals, and that smells of blossoms that are sweeter than music. ”

“ The Sarahs of the East are far more just, far more kind to the Hagars of the East than Sarah of old was to the mother of Ishmael. Would that the women of the West, who are secure in their sole wifehood—secure at least in the sole legality of their position, had more humanity for the less fortunately placed women of the West. Whatever the social conditions of the West, the women of the West are, in part at least, responsible for them; not the outcast women, not the women who have made a public failure of life, but the women of assured positions, of intellect, and of moral weight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know no race in which the women who earn their individual slice, and a goodly share of the family loaf, in the sweat of their brows retain their beauty long. The women seen on the streets of Söul and in the fields, and on the mountain slopes of Korea, belong—if I may for the sake of emphasis repeat myself—belong to the hardest-worked, the most weather-beaten, burden-bent, and ill-fed class in Korea. Their personal appearance is no indication of the real type of Korean womanhood. ”

“ I have never seen a Korean lady—I have never seen a gentlewoman of any Eastern race—décolleté, except Japanese ladies in European dress. It seems strange, at first thought, that races, whose standards of sexual morality seem to us so far beneath our own, should be so universally modest in their covering of their persons. I am inclined to think that it is not modesty at all, but rather a peculiar phase of Oriental dignity which causes the people of the East to drape themselves as entirely as possible. ”

“ But save for her momentary losses of temper, Nature is to Japan the tenderest of mothers, fashioning for her, as all mothers love to fashion for their favourite children, the daintiest of garments. And never yet did pet child wear such fine frocks, such robes of soft but splendid beauty, as Nature makes, year in year out, season in season out, for Japan. She weaves them of flowers, she buckles them with brilliant berries, and she sprays them with a drench of soft, warm, unsoiling, and altogether incomparable perfume. ”

“ Wide streets seem to the Korean mind unnecessary luxuries. The people of Söul utilize the streets of their city by erecting temporary booths outside their houses, and beyond the booths they spread their trays and mats of merchandise. Inch by inch the street disappears beneath the extemporized shops of the people, until at last just enough room is left for the interminable procession of humanity to squeeze through. This encroachment is taken good-naturedly enough by everyone. The people positively pick their slow way between trays of nuts and mats of grain, booths of hats and sleds of fish. ”

“ As I have said, they are not on a social equality with the wife, but they are, to the best of my belief, on a moral equality with her, both in the eyes of Oriental law and in the eyes of morality itself. I see no difference ethically between the woman who consents to marry (as every well-born Korean woman does consent to marry) a man who she knows has, or will have, a well filled harem—I see no difference between her and the woman who consents to make that harem her home.
A Korean’s concubines are almost as absolutely the handmaidens of his wife as of himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The houses and grounds of the rich Chinese that I have known in Singapore, in Penang, in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong, have been models of order and neatness, if not (according to European standards) of beauty.
The poorer quarters of the Chinese cities are undeniably filthy. But it is the filth bred of overcrowding and of dire penury, and of the inability of the government to cope with such enormous masses of humanity, rather than of natural uncleanliness. It is an almost infallible rule that only lazy people are dirty; sloth and filth are old bedfellows. ”

“ The King of Korea does not hang about the doorways, nor prowl into the back-yards of his subjects, but in every Korean city he has several, and in every Korean village at least one appointed listener. European history tells us that more than one European monarch has disguised himself at night, and held up his thirsty ears to the nectar or the gall of his subjects’ candid opinions of himself. Whether eaves-dropping is more admirable when performed in person or when deputed to the hireling, is a nice question for those who would judge between East and West. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And she, good purdah-woman that she is, is lying down with considerable wifely dignity upon the funeral pile, which civilization has lit to cremate the false, old notions of the past.
One who has lived in Korea can but think it rather a pity that Korea should cease to be, or be too much remodelled, whoever’s in the wrong—Japan or China.
Nature has found Korea so nearly perfect, that it seems almost profane for man (or those combinations of men called nations) to find fault with her. In Korea there are snows that never melt. In Korea there are flowers that never cease to bloom. ”

“ CHAPTER IX. A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART.
“Far Eastern art draws its inspiration from Nature, not from man. It thus stands, in the objects of its endeavour, in striking contrast to what has ever been the main admiration and study of our own, the human figure. A flower, a face—matter as it affects mind, mind as it affects matter—from such opposite sources spring the two. Art, or the desire to perpetuate and reproduce the emotions, must, of course, depend upon the character of those emotions. Now to a Far Oriental Nature is more suggestive and man less so than with us.”—Percival Lowell. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But they are almost always emerald with lotus-leaves, and in season, brilliant with the bloom, and fragrant with the breath of the lotus-flowers. Marble bridges span them, if they are in the king’s gardens; a unique island centres them wherever they are—a wee island that is shaded by its one drooping tree. There the master of the garden spends the long summer days, basking in the surrounding beauty, smoking, drinking tea, and fishing. ”

“ Korean women (those of them who have not been scarred by over-toil, nor deformed by privation) have remarkably small, and remarkably pretty hands and feet, and of nothing are they prouder than of their dimpled fingers, and their shapely, delicate feet, But the feet of a Korean woman are small by nature, never by art. They have lovely eyes—these women—musical voices, and are graceful of motion. ”

“ How history repeats itself! Twenty years ago the war cloud that hung over China and Japan was fanned away by the temperate winds of European advice, absorbed in the sunshine of common sense. To-day the storm of war has burst over Further Asia, burst in splendid, awful fury; and the Chinese and Japanese are slaying each other by the shoal. We have taught them how to do it. And the Chinese Goliath lies smitten (smitten almost to death, at least so his enemy seems to think) , by the well directed pebbles of Japan. ”