Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/406

 To say that Korea has never produced a great novelist is true, if we mean by a novelist a person who makes his life-work the writing of fiction and bases his literary reputation thereon. But if, on the other hand, a man who in the midst of graver literary work turns aside to write a successful novel may be called a novelist, then Korea has produced a goodly number of them. If the word " novel " is restricted to a work of fiction developed in great detail and covering a certain minimum number of pages, Korea cannot be said to possess many novels, but if a work of fiction covering as much ground as, say, Dickens' " Christmas Carol " may be called a novel, Korea has thousands of them.

The literary history of Korea opened in the seventh century of our era. The great scholar Ch'oe Chi-wun was the Korean Chaucer, and he was one of the very few Koreans whose writings have been widely recognised outside the confines of the peninsula. But even at the very dawn of letters we find that he wrote and published a complete novel under the name " Adventures among the Kuen-lun Mountains." It is a fanciful account of a Korean's ramblings among the great mountains in southern China. The same writer also produced a volume of poems and stories. Many of the latter were of a length to merit at least the name of novelette. At about the same time another writer, Kim Am, wrote a story of adventure in Japan, which was quite long enough to be called a novel.

Kim Pu-sik, the greatest of the Koryu writers, to whom we owe the standard History of the Three Kingdoms, wrote a complete novel in one volume, called " The Story of the Long North Wall." This may be called an historical novel, for Korea once boasted a counterpart to the Great Wall of China, extending from the Yellow Sea to the Japan Sea across the whole of northern Korea.

About 1440 the celebrated monk Ka-san wrote "The Adventures of Hong Kil-dong," and another monk, Ha Jong, wrote