Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/427

 no scientific development in their art, no formulation of aesthetic laws, no intermixture of a rational or regulative method. The statement that there is a pronounced arithmetical element in music, that geometry is essential to successful landscape gardening or that a knowledge of conic sections is essential to bridgebuilding, would arouse only mirth in the Korean. But it is nevertheless true that the lack of the mathematical element has deprived all Asia of genuine martial music.

A Korean house is a good illustration of the statement that bijouterie is the prevailing aim of their art. However large the house may be or however spacious the site, the place is divided by a network of walls into a vast number of alleys and courtyards, each very pretty in its way, but destroying all possibility of effective combination. The whole space is frittered away in a labyrinth of cheerless walls, which to the Westerner are more suggestive of a prison than a residence. Now the Korean delights in this bee-hive sort of existence. Each suite of rooms has its special charm to him. In one of them he keeps, perhaps, a beautifully embroidered screen, in another an ancient vase which is a family heirloom, and in another a rare potted palm or cactus; but he would never think of exhibiting all these things in combination.

One advantage that arises from their one-thing-at-a-time form of aesthetic development is that it can be shared more equally by high and low alike. If a single flowering plant can give as much pleasure as a whole gardenful, the poor man is much nearer his wealthy neighbour in his opportunities for aesthetic pleasure than is the case in Western countries.

This method has its advantages. It tends to a concentration of attention and a consequent exactness in detail which are not generally found in connection with a broader form of art. His embroidered butterfly will be worked out to a painful point of exactness, while the perspective of the whole scene may be ludicrously wrong. The Korean almost invariably makes the farther edge of the table longer on his canvas than the nearer edge, and