Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/409

 and secondary to history and poetry. In this, as in so many other things, Korea shows the evil effects of her subserviency to Chinese ideals.

But the question may be asked, To what extent is fiction read in Korea as compared with other literary productions? There is a certain small number of the people who probably confine their reading to history and poetry, but even among the so-called educated classes the large majority have such a rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese character that they cannot read with any degree of fluency. There is no doubt that these confine their reading to the mixed script of the daily newspaper or the novels written in the native character. It is commonly said that women are the greatest readers of these native books. This is because the men affect to despise the native alphabet, but the truth is that an overwhelming majority, even of the supposedly literate, can read nothing else with any degree of fluency, and so they and the middle classes are constant readers of the native books. As in America, so in Korea the newspapers and novels form the greater part of the literary pabulum of the masses.

It is a hopeful sign that there is nothing about this native alphabet or writing that prevents its being used as idiomatically and to as good effect as English is used in fiction to-day; and it is to be hoped that the time will soon come when someone will do for Korea what Defoe and other pioneers did for English fiction, namely, write a standard work of fiction in the popular tongue.