Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/474

 CHAPTER XXIX OLK-LORE is a very ambiguous term, including at one extreme not only the folk-tales of a people, but the folk-songs, superstitions, charms, incantations, proverbs, conundrums and many other odds and ends of domestic tradition which find no classification under other headings. Folk-lore is the back attic, to which are relegated all those interesting old pieces of ethnological furniture which do not bear the hall-mark of history and are withal too ambiguous in their origin and too heterogeneous in their character to take their place downstairs in the prim order of the modern scientific drawing-room. But if we wish to feel as well as to know what the life of a people has been, we must not sit down in the drawing-room under the electric light and read their annals simply, but we must mount to the attic and rummage among their folk-lore, handle, as it were, the garments of bygone days and untie the faded ribbon which confines the love-letters of long ago. Written history stalks across the centuries in sevenleague boots, leaping from one great crisis to another, and giving but a bird's-eye view of what lies between ; but folk-lore takes you by the hand, leads you down into the valley, shows you the home, the family, the every-day life, and brings you close to the heart of the people. It has been well said that the test of a man's knowledge of a foreign language is his ability to understand the jokes in that language. So I should say that to know a people's life we must understand their folk-lore.

The back attic of Korean folk-lore is filled with a very miscellaneous collection, for the same family has occupied the house for forty centuries and there never has been an auction.