The Cloud Dream of the Nine | Page 2

is because of a combination of social qualities with scholarship that Dr. Gale has been able so convincingly to translate Far Eastern romance and character study.
* The Rev. James Scarth Gale, son of John Gale, a native of Aberdeen, N.B., and Miami Bradt of Ontario. Born 1863. Published "Korean Grammatical Forms," 1892; "The Vanguard: a Tale of Korea," 1894; "Korean-English Dictionary," 1897; "Korean Sketches," 1898; " Korean Folk Tales," 1913. For ten years was one of the translators of the Bible into Korean. Married, first, the widow of Dr. Heron, Physician to the Emperor of Korea; second, Ada Sale of Yokohama. Presbyterian missionary since leaving the Toronto University.
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All the literary interpretative work that Gale has done before the present book--from the fascinating diary of a Korean general of a thousand years ago, who wrote his impressions as he travelled through Manchuria to pay his devoirs at the great court of China, to that literary gem preserved in Gale's translation of the brief Petition of two aged Korean Viscounts, who pleaded in terms of archaic simplicity with the Japanese Governor-General Hasegawa to listen to the plaint of their people for freedom--is so sincere, lucid, and impersonal, that the reader knows that he is being given reality and not an adaptation.
Dr. Gale is the unhurried man who has time for every public behest. Much of the hard literary work of his full day is done in the hours of morning calm before the world has breakfasted. The chief native helper of this quiet-eyed missionary in the work of translation has been with him for thirty years. The unsought, almost unconscious influence of a man like Gale justifies the hopes of the most old-fashioned believers in Christian missions and lends romance to work that too often seems to lead nowhere. Here is the real ambassador in a foreign land: that rare thing the idealist and scholar who has an understanding of the small things of life; the judicially-minded man who makes such deep demands on principle that he draws all men to him.
III.--THE AUTHOR
Writing somewhere of the Korean love of literature, Dr. Gale says: "Literature has been everything in Korea. The literati were the only men privileged to ride the dragon up into the highest heaven. [pxii] The scholar might not only look at the King, he could talk with him. Could you but read, intone or expound the classics, you might materially be dropping to tatters but still the world would wait on you and listen regardfully to show you honour. Many an unkempt son of the literati has the writer looked on with surprise to see him receive the respectful and profound salutations of the better laundered classes. Korea is not commercial, not military, not industrial, but she is a devotee of letters. She exalts books."
I hear some traveller say: "What! Do you mean to suggest that those funny chaps I saw in the streets of Seoul wearing baggy white trousers and queer little Welsh hats, who sat around in lazy groups smoking long pipes and looking into nowhere, have a literature? I always understood that the Japanese had an awful time cleaning up their country and getting them to bury their dead. I've always heard that if it weren't for Japanese money and hustle the Koreans would be nothing but walking hosts of smallpox and plague germs."
And the traveller would be wrong.
"The Cloud Dream of the Nine" lures the reader into mysterious vales and vistas of remotest Asia and opens to him some of the sealed gateways of the East.
The seventeenth-century author, Kim Man-Choong, mourned all his life that he should have been born after his father had died. So remarkable was his filial piety that his fame as a son spread far and wide.
In his devotion to his mother, Yoon See, he never left her side except on Court duty. He would entertain [pxiii] her as did those of ancient days who "played with birds before their parents, or dressed and acted like little children." In his efforts to entertain his mother Kim Man-Choong would read to her interesting stories, novels and old histories. He would read far into the night to give her pleasure, and his reward was to hear her laugh of joyful appreciation.
But there came a day when Kim Man-Choong was sent into exile. His mother's words were: "All the great ones of the earth, sooner or later, have gone thus to distant outlying sea coasts or to the hills. Have a care for your health and do not grieve on my account." But those who heard these brave words wept on the mother's behalf.
Kim Man-Choong wrote "The Cloud Dream of the Nine" while he was an exile, and his aim in writing it was to cheer and comfort his mother. The thought underlying the story