Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/408

 There remains here in full force that ancient custom which antedates the printing of books, of handing down stories by word of mouth. If a gentleman of means wants to " read " a novel, he does not ordinarily send put to a book-stall and buy one, but he sends for a kwang-da, or professional story-teller, who comes with his attendant and drum and recites a story, often consuming an entire day or even two days in the recital. Is there any radical difference between this and the novel? In truth, it far excels our novel as an artistic production, for the trained accent and intonation of the reciter add an histrionic element that is quite lacking when one merely reads a novel. This form of recital takes the place of the drama in Korea ; for, strange as it may seem, while both China and Japan have cultivated the histrionic art for ages, Koreans have never attempted it.

Fiction in Korea has always taken a lower place than other literary productions, poetry and history being considered the two great branches of literature. This is true of all countries whose literatures have been largely influenced by China. The use of the Chinese character has always made it impossible to write as people speak. The vernacular and the written speech have always been widely different, and it has always been impossible to write a conversation as it is spoken. This in itself is a serious obstacle to the proper development of fiction as an art, for when the possibility of accurately transcribing a conversation is taken away, the life and vigour of a story are largely lost. Dialect stories and character sketches are practically barred. And besides this, subserviency of Chinese literary ideals to the historical and poetical forms has made these people cast their fiction also in these forms; and so we often find that a genuine romance is hidden under such a title as " The Biography of Cho Sang-geun," or some other equally tame. It is this limitation of the power of written language to transcribe accurately human speech that has resulted in the survival of the professional story-teller, and it is the same thing that has made Korean written fiction inferior