Such are the Magdalenes of the far Orient! To be pitied, to be deeply pitied, but to be less pitied than the Magdalenes of the West, for they are better housed, better treated, and less conscious of their misfortune. There is, I think, a good deal worth pondering over in the way the peoples of Asia deal with the great social sin—a sin from which our human race can scarcely hope for redemption, unless indeed,—
“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, Hold, hold!”
What her dress is to woman, his dwelling is to man. I am speaking, of course, of average man and of average woman. What she wears indicates what she is, and is the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of her individuality, and of her character. She, her very self, peeps from beneath the laces at her neck. The house in which he lives shelters his women and his young; the buildings which he erects, or helps to erect, indicate who and what he is, and are the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of his individuality, and of his character; and we may see him as he really is, in his roof, his door-step, and, in brief, in the exterior and the interior of his home.
It is this, its revelation of mankind, which makes architecture so intensely interesting a study, the most interesting, I often think, of all the studies of the inanimate. Not for their grace of outline, not for their beauty of colour, not for their artistic consistency, not for their happy placement, are the great buildings of this world supremely interesting to us; but for the glimpses they give us into the souls, the lives of the men who have reared them.
Of more recent years records have been made and preserved of the doings of most of the civilized peoples, but, beyond a doubt, many such records made in olden times have been irretrievably lost, and many a page of history—a page clear and convincing to us to-day—would have been lost to us for ever were it not for the silent but indisputable testimony of old buildings: ruined houses, scraps of temples, broken bridges, crumbling towers, and grotesque caves.
It is impossible to speak of Korean architecture without speaking of Chinese architecture, and of Japanese architecture. And it is so impossible to separate the architecture of Korea from either the architecture of China, or the architecture of Japan, that one has a very convenient excuse for writing of the architecture of Korea as it visibly is, and for writing little or nothing of what it means. Korean architecture, in all its best phases, is purely Tartar. Chinese architecture is largely Tartar. But China, in architecture, as in ethics, and as in sociology, is at heart more or less Mongolian. China has been ridden under, not exterminated, by Tartar supremacy. Japanese architecture is Tartar, but it is very many other things, and the charitable mantle of Japanese art is so all-covering, and her artists have graciously adopted the art-methods of so many different peoples, that it is quite impossible to say whether Tartar influence is the parent or the powerful adopted child of Japanese art.