HIS FIRST BOOK, “CHOSÖN”
He did write the book, and published it in 1885, under the title of
“Chosön—the Land of the Morning Calm—A Sketch of Korea” It is an account
of his personal experiences, under peculiarly favorable conditions, in a
land of Asiatic civilization almost wholly unknown to the outer world,
and as such it was, and after fifty years remains, a highly interesting
book of travel. Although there is too much clever play on words, a
natural temptation to a brilliant young writer, the story is graphically
told, with much appreciation and many poetic touches on men and scenes.
But the book is far more than this. It is a careful study of the land
and its people, their customs, ideas and manner of life. He describes
the geography of the country and of the walled capital, then little
known, the legends and government; the houses and mode of life of the
upper and lower classes, then sharply distinguished; the architecture,
landscape gardening and costumes, some of them very peculiar; for while
much of the civilization had been derived from China, and parts of it
bore a close relation to the conditions in Japan, it was in many ways
quite distinct and unlike anything else even in the Far East. Three
things struck him greatly, as lying at the base of the mode of life, and
these he called the triad of principles. They were the strange lack of
individual variation, which he called the quality of impersonality, of
which we shall hear more in connection with the Japanese; the
patriarchal system, with the rules of inheritance and the relation of
children to the fathers, which was carried very far; and the position of
women, in which the principle of exclusion, universal as it is in Asia,
was more rigidly enforced than elsewhere in the Far East.
He was also impressed by the absence of what we understand by religion,
in substance or in manifestation, unless the ethics of Confucius can be
so called. Save for a few monasteries there were no ecclesiastical
buildings, no temples, no services, public or observable. Buddhist
priests had long been excluded from the walled cities, and the ancient
cult that developed into Shinto in Japan died out or never developed. On
the other hand, there was a general belief in a multitude of demons,
some good, but, so far as they affected man, evil for the most part, and
kept away by trivial devices, like images of beasts on the roofs and
wisps of straw over the doors.
How he succeeded in acquiring all the knowledge set forth in the book it
is difficult to conceive, for he was there only about two months, came
with the slight knowledge of the language he could have picked up from
his colleagues on the Mission to America; and there were only two men,
it would seem, who could speak both Korean and any European tongue,—one
of them a German in the Foreign Office, and the other an English
schoolmaster who had been there but a short time. His chief source of
information must have come through people who spoke Korean and Japanese,
but his own knowledge of the latter was still very limited, for he had
spent only a few months in Japan, and his secretary, Tsunejiro Miyaoka,
afterward a distinguished lawyer in Tokyo, who knew English, was
desperately ill almost all the time he was in Korea. To have absorbed
and displayed so clearly all the information in “Chosön” makes that
work, if not one of his greatest contributions to knowledge, yet a
remarkable feat. Most books of travel are soon superseded, but this one
has a distinct permanent value, because the life he portrays, especially
that of the upper class, which was almost all connected with the holding
of public office, has been swept away, never to reappear, by the
conquest and ultimate incorporation of the country by Japan.