TRANSCAUCASIA.*

(FIRST NOTICE.]

Mn. Bayou's ascent of Mount Ararat has been already com- memorated in our columns ; it is now our pleasant duty to com- ment on his book, the most remarkable and interesting record of travel and observation which has been published for some years, • Tranicaueasia and Ararat: being Notes of et Vacation 7'our in the Autumn of 1876 By James Bryce, author of " The Holy Roman Empire." London : Macmillan and Co.

and which derives additional value from the fact that it presents the very latest trustworthy picture of the regions with which it deals, before the outbreak of the war which is again desolating their neighbourhood. Prominent among the characteristics of Mr. Bryce's style are exactness and modesty ; ho observes closely,

he reports faithfully, he does not come, see, and conquer, in the sense of comprehending, and instructing the world from

his saddle ; he is the opposite of the scampering traveller and politician, and he never has the luck to meet exactly the right persons in precisely the right places to confirm all the views with which he started, that has so strangely befallen the gentleman who has recently instructed the public upon horse- flesh and the profundities of the Pasha order in Asia Minor.

Mr. Bryce's journey had its difficulties and its dangers, apart from those of the memorable feat which gives to it a unique character ; but he dwells upon them not at all, and reveals them only because they are incidentally illustrative of the countries which he visited. His point of departure was Nijui, where he visited the famous annual fair, which has of late lost much of its former picturesqueness, but which is still interesting, in the evidence it affords of those movements and relations of trade which the imagination usually finds it so bard to realise, and which are such mighty factors in social as well as political history. Of the Volga, Mr. Bryce writes more admiringly than other travellers, and he describes in his quietly picturesque manner the peaceful scenery, and the village people who, when the steamer takes in wood at the wharves, come, clothed in sheepskins and munching cucumbers, to look on. " If I were asked," he says, " to characterise the most conspicuous externals of Russia in three words, they should be ' sheep-skins, cucumbers, emeralds.'" A brief pause at Kazan enabled the travellers to see the famous city, which from the river looks so lordly still, with its towers and battlements and gilded domes, as the former capital of a great Tatar Khanate should look. Inside, however, hardly a trace of antiquity re- mains. The Tatars, who are Turks, are quite content under the Russian rule, which does not interfere with their faith or their social practices. Since the fall of their 'Urinate, three hundred years ago, they have rarely given any trouble, and they are good soldiers of the Czar. When

sailing away from Kazan, Mr. Bryce vainly inquired about the ruins of the ancient capital of the Bulgarians, which are said to exist some few miles from the river, to the east. No one knew anything • about them, and Mr. Bryce remarks, ir. propoe of the general ignorance :--4‘ The only countries in which the traveller finds the common people knowing and revering the monuments and legends of their remote past are Norway and Iceland, where

the Sagas, read aloud in the long nights of winter from manuscripts preserved in lonely farmhouses, have through many generations fired the imagination and ennobled the life of the peasant, who knew no other literature and history than that of his own an- cestors." At the point at which the course of the wide, calm river turns suddenly to the south, breaking through a ridge of hills which has bordered it for twenty miles, we find a striking picture

"Here, at the town of Samara, one seems suddenly to pass, as if through a gate in the hills, from Europe into Asia. Up to this point all has boon green, moist, fresh-looking, the air soft, though brilliantly clear, the grass not less juicy than in England, the wayside flowers very similar to our own, if not always of the same species. But once through the hills, and looking away south-east across the boundless steppe towards Orenberg and the Ural river, a different climate and scenery reveal themselves. The air is hot and dry, the parched earth gapes under the sun, the hills aro bare, or clothed only with withored.weeds; plants and shrubs of unfamiliar aspect appear, the whole landscape has a tawny, torrid look, as if of an African desert. Henceforth, all the way to the Black Sea, one felt oneself in the glowing cast, and seemed at a glance to realise the character of the wilderness that stretches from here all the way, a plain with scarcely a mound to break its

monotony, to the banks of the Oxus, and the foot of the Tian-Shian Mountains."

At Saratof the travellers landed, and climbing the heights, took a last look at the solemn eastern steppe still left to the rude tribes of Kirghiz and Bashkirs that wander over it with their flocks and their tents of felt, but "destined, such is the fertility of its soil, to wave from end to end with luxuriant harvests." From this moment the activity of the journey began, places and people succeeded each other rapidly, and the traveller's faculty of observation was always alert. Mr. Bryce points out how superficial, slight, and limited is the Oriental character which travellers are so fond of imputing to Russia, and starts what is, to us at least, the entirely novel notion cf a resemblance in many ways and things between Russia and America, " nations apparently as far removed from one another in manners, religion, history, and government as they are in space." He carefully notes these points of resemblance, those which are merely external and accidental, as well as those which really have a meaning, in a passage of remarkable interest, too long for extract, but which cannot fail to fix the attention of his readers. A railway journey of 1,100 miles took the travellers from Saratof to the foot of the Caucasus, occupying from Sunday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon, under very comfortable conditions, without fatigue, with plenty of leisure for looking about one at the numerous stoppages, and passing through scenery so monotonous that its uniformity almost rises to grandeur. Rolling plain, open fields, forests without gloom or sublimity, merely land covered with trees, then a night and a day on the true steppe—of which the author gives a fine and impressive description—the crossing of the Don, hundreds of miles of grassy wilderness, not even a wandering horde of Kalmucks to tell of human life,—at last, eighteen hours beyond Rostof, craggy hills of limestone rise on the southern horizon, and behind them the Caucasus, unrolling its majestic chain upon the border of the 2,000 miles of plain which stretched between the travellers and the Gulf of Bothnia.

Mr. Bryce devotes a chapter to general remarks upon the

range of the Caucasus, which admirably supplements Mr. Fresh- field's and other trustworthy accounts of the great chain, which oven in the days of the Crimean war was so mysterious to our imagination,—a chapter marked by the author's usual carefulness of detail and liveliness of style, and enriched with many a scholarly and artistic touch of illustration and association. Especially fine is his description of the famous Dario.' Pass :—" A scene whose grandeur is all the more striking because one comes so suddenly upon it, after the exquisite beauty of the wooded lime- stone mountains farther down ; a scene worthy of the historical associations which invest it, alone of all Caucasian glens, with an atmosphere of historical romance."

Nothing can be better for purposes of sound instruction

than the arrangement of this work, which is the happiest mixture of solid and entertaining reading, the author treat- ing first of the geography and history of the Transcaucasian regions, and afterwards resuming his personal narrative of travel, and his observation of the people and their social and political condition. He gives an impression of dreariness in his descrip- tion of Eastern Transcaucasia, and indeed admits that there is not much to attract the lover of natural beauty, except in the spurs of the Caucasus, and the part of Armenia that lies around and commands a prospect of Mount Ararat ; these exceptions form pictures that one must go to the Himalaya to find a parallel for. " Ararat, an isolated volcanic cone, rising 17,000 feet above the sea, and 14,000 feet above the plain at its own base, is a phenomenon the like of which hardly exists in the world." Whether beautiful or the reverse, however, the country is nearly everywhere rich, and might do wonders if it were filled by a larger, more energetic, better-educated population. " There are hardly three millions of people in it now, it might easily support twenty, the steppe soil needing only irrigation to produce heavy crops of grain,"—evidently a fair land of the far future. The physical aspects of Transcaucasia are wonderfully various, its population is strangely mixed, and the difficulty of giving a general idea of both is so great that the skill with which Mr. Bryce has surmounted it arouses his reader's strongest admira- tion, as the scene expands before his fancy, and the tribes,

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differing in origin, in creed, in physical aspects, in customs, in all save the " unspeakable stagnancy " of their lives (of which the author speaks with still more expressive force when he writes about Poti) present themselves to his mind's eye. The only people who seem to have any natural activity are the Tatars. We learn that they do all the hard work of the Volga navigation and trade, and here we find them the general carriers of the country. They are

supposed to do the highway robbery also. Mr. Bryce disclaims any personal knowledge of the existence -

of this industry, but he believes that robberies do sometimes occur, and are effected by bands led by a Tatar chief. He tells some charming brigand stories, and says, in fact, that the pleasure of life in a dull country is sensibly increased when people have got the exploits of robbers to talk about. "It is a subject level with the meanest imagination ; the idle Georgian noble and the ignorant peasant enjoy it as heartily as Walter Scott himself." The variety of races and the distinctions of religion render the division between the dwellers in this strange land hopelessly wide and complete. The author deals at length with this branch of his subject, expressing the curious sense of a complex and almost unexplored past, and a still stranger feeling of perplexity as to the I future :—

" Transcaucasia," ho says, " is so rich by nature, so important by position, that nobody can doubt it has a considerable part to play in history. What will that part be ? Are commerce and culture likely to advance? Can Russia maintain her hold on these peoples? The chief races are, in point of numbers, equally balanced, so that no one of them is able to absorb the other. Neither is any one sufficiently superior in intellect and force of character to take the load and impress its typo upon the whole mass The Russians, as being the rulers and the most civilised, might bo expected to bo able to effect this ; but they are not very numerous, consisting only of the upper officials, of the soldiers, who aro a transitory element in the population, and of some isolated settlements of dissenting peasants. Moreover, they are not thoroughly civilised themselves, and cannot impart what they have not got. Civi- lisation in Russia is like a coat of paint over unseasoned wood,—you may not at first doted the unsoundness of the material, but test it, and it fails."

The probability of all these peoples growing into a Trans- causian State independent of Russia, which was discussed some years ago by Mr. Ashton Dilke, is not entertained by Mr. Bryce, who discusses the arguments against it in a very interest- ing passage, packed with facts, and which ends thus :- " Transcaucasia is not well governed, being like so much else in the Empire, both over-administered and ill-administered. In material pro- sperity, in the diffusion of light, morality, refinement, it is advancing very slowly. Germans, or Frenchmen, or Americans would probably have effected far more in seventy yours of occupation than the Russians have done. But compare it with the condition of Georgia or Min- grelia under their own princes, or still better, compare it with that of the neighbouring territories of the Sultan or the Shah, which aro daily going back, whore there is absolutely no security for life, honour, or property, and its fortunes appear happy indeed."

Of Tiflis, the capital of Transcaucasia, which is composed of three distinct towns, with a population of at least six distinct nationalities, Mr. Bryce says :—" It is a type of the country ; a melting-pot, into which elements have been poured from half Europe and Asia, and in which they, as yet, show no signs of combining." The city is so sheltered by hills, that it is sufficiently warm in winter to allow consumptive patients to go out with safety ; in summer it is intolerably hot, water is scarce, and dust "truly Oriental." The Russian town is new, bright, showy, and clean ; it is the official quarter, and that of the rich Armenians, and is like Odessa or the new portions of Moscow.

Deep down in the hollow along the river lies old Tiflis, " a genuine Eastern city, with its narrow crooked streets, ill-paved or not paved at all, and houses of one or two stories only, the whole horribly dirty, yet incomparably more picturesque than the smart propriety of the modern town." Here are the shops, after Eastern fashion, the handicraftsmen working in the sight of all men, and all the " trades " in their respective streets ; here are the ddpOts of ornamental arms, of beautiful silver cups and flagons, and of the far-famed rugs and carpets ; here, too, the crowd, noise, bustle of an Eastern market. "From the rocks above, the grim walla of the citadel frown down, and beside them appears the grey cupola of the most ancient among the Georgian churches ; nearer, and half-hidden by the confused mass of houses, you see the domes and minarets of the rival mosques of the Sunni Tatars and the schismatic Persian Shiahs. One can hardly believe that a Russian Paris is only half a mile away." The third town within this motley city is the strangest sight of all, in such a place. "You forget Russia," says the author, "you forget Asia ; you fancy yourself on the banks of the Swabian Neckar," in this German settlement of about 6,000 people, chiefly artisans and gardeners, but including a few merchants and shop-keepers. It is still called " the Colony," and its inhabitants are the de- scendanes of emigrants who came hither from Wurtemberg sixty years ago, driven from their homes by a new hymn-book, which their Prince insisted on forcing upon his subjects, and which they considered too lax in its statements of doctrine :— " Rows of trees run along the principal street ; breweries and beer- gardens border it, where the honest burgher sits at night and listens over his supper to a band, as his cousins are doing nt the same hour in the suburbs of Stuttgardt. Tidy little Fraus come out in the evening cool to the doorsteps, and knit and chat among their fair-haired Earls and Grotcbens. They have their own schools, far better than any which Russian organisation produces ; they are nearly alt Protestants, with a wholesome contempt for their superstitious Georgian and Arme- nian neighbours. They speak nothing but German among themselves, and show no sign of taking to Russian ways, or letting themselves be absorbed by the populations that surround them."

Neither do the German dwellers at Tiflis diffuse their superior civilisation, or exert any influence upon the social life of the city. In accounting for this, which is also true of all German colonies on Russian soil, Mr. Bryce hits a blot in the Russian system

which has a serious meaning for the empire nowrand contains a grave menace for its future. The difference of religion, he says,

is probably at the bottom of this separation. "It prevents inter- marriages, for there is a most objectionable law in Russia, com- parable to those which the English formerly enforced in Ireland, which requires the children of a mixed marriage to be brought up in the orthodox Eastern faith, even if neither of the parents has belonged to that communion. And where there can be no intermarriage, there is, after all, but little familiar intercourse." The writer gives a vivid picture of the motley population of the great city, praising highly the beauty of the Georgians of both sexes, but evidently regarding them as mainly ornamental, and pointing out the peculiar interest of Tiflis, in the following striking and comprehensive passage :-

" It is not the things to bo seen in the city that impress themselves on one's memory, it is the city itself, its races, tongues, religions, cus- toms. Its character lies in the fact that it has no one character, but over so many different ones. Hero all these people live side by side, buying and selling, and working for hire, yet never coming into any closer union, remaining indifferent to one another, with neither lova, nor hate, nor ambition, peaceably obeying a government of strangers, who conquered them without resistance, and retain them without effort, and hold together by no bond but its existence. Of national life, or municipal life, there is not the first faint glimmering; indeed, the aboriginal people of the country seem scarcely loss strangers in its streets than do all the other races that tread them. It is herd to say what the future has in store for such a town ; meantime, it prospers, delivered for over from the fear of Persian devastation, and in spite of new boulevards and stuccoed shop-fronts, it is wonderfully picturesque."