A RESIDENCE IN BULGARIA" Tuts handsome octavo volume, though readable
throughout and in parts interesting, is nevertheless little more than a strong party pamphlet on the Eastern Question, its single object being to show that in Bulgaria, and more especially in the hill country, the Turkish population is better than the Christian, and consequently Western Europe is deceived and prejudiced when it desires that the latter shall be free. This thesis is supported by a heap of anecdotes all intended to show that the Bulgarian Rayah is inhospitable, dirty, cowardly, avaricious, lazy, superstitious, and deceitful ; and
that the Turk is none of these things, and that consequently the Turk ought to rule, and in the interests of civilization to reduce the Bulgarians to a mild kind of slavery, to make them work, whether they will or no, by heavy taxes. Of the writers, one has lived three years in a Bulgarian village, and knows Turkish and most Slavonic dialects, and the other has lived eighteen months, while both have made constant shooting excursions into neigh; bouring villages, and consorted familiarly with the Mohammedan villagers. Consequently, the two authors seem to think that they must be unprejudiced in their view of the Christian people, quite forgetting that prejudices almost insane in their virulence are constantly imbibed by acute persons in exile ; that, for example, many English residents in India, men who " know the language," cannot be convinced that the people who built Benares have any trace of civilization ; that Englishmen in Ireland for centuries believed Irishmen lazy cowards, that Englishmen in America often contract a positive hatred of Yankees, that Germans in Venetia frequently learned to contemn the great though widely different race among whom they dwelt. There are Englishmen who have resided years in Greece whom no argument will convince that Greeks are not universally cowards, and hundreds of Southern gentlemen who had passed their lives among them literally could not believe that black men could be turned into disciplined soldiers. Our authors belong evidently to the class of observers who, it may be from very natural causes, lack sympathy with the people among whom they reside, or sympathy with one section of them, and therefore see in that section only bad or gross qualities which doubtless exist, but do not constitute the whole character. Of course, so far as they relate facts, their facts are to be considered in estimating the people ; but in this case, the facts amount to exceedingly little. They prove that the Bulgarian Christians, kept down for ages alike by their rulers and their creed, are very like the lowest class of every other community, a little gayer, it would seem, a little less possessed with the thirst for gain, and a little—a very little— dirtier, but otherwise much the same.
Captain St. Clair and Mr. Brophy make a grand point of this dirt, and no doubt it exists. A people living in a country so infamously governed that they have learned to avoid windows lest brigands should shoot them through the apertures while sleeping, and who do not wash any more than our own lowest class, are sure to be unsavoury, and are of course very offensive to cleanly Englishmen, so that we can quite believe the following description :
"The atmosphere produced by these arrangements and by the presence of a dozen persons who do not take off their underclothing four times during the year, and who are, moreover, redolent of garlic and raki, isnot agreeable to the stranger in Bulgaria ; for the Rayah, like the negro, diffuses around him a peculiar aromatic odour by no means Sabzettn, which makes one feel inclined to apply to the whole race Dante's description of Geryon,—
Bee° cold the tutto it raondo appuzza
more especially as this aroma extends itself in some subtle manner even to the cookery, so that it is easy for any one who has eaten food with both Christian and Mussulman to distinguish both by taste and smell the victuals of the one creed from those of the othor. After what we have just said about the unfrequent changes of clothes and linen, it is not surprising that, as a corollary, parasitic insects of every variety abound in every individual and in every house."
But all that is not one whit more offensive than the stories related a century ago of all Scotchmen, and true to this hour of all Spaniards and of a very great many Italians ; and, nevertheless, those races have proved themselves capable alike of civilization and of freedom. The Turk is cleaner because, in the first place. his creed enjoins cleanliness ; and, secondly, because he is a member of a superior caste, and in ages of domination has acquired many of the instincts of a gentleman, among others the self-restraint and personal pride which our authors so much admire. Nobody doubts that the Virginian planters were cleanlier and more gentlemanly than their slaves, but that does not prove that the power of the planters was not the cause of the dirtiness and loutishness of the slaves. Then the authors say the Bulgarians are inhospitable, charging the stranger for what he eats, and charging excessively, being, in fact, in that respect nearly as wicked as the English and Americans, who do precisely the same thing. That the Turks do not is, we dare say, quite true ; no dominant caste ever did, and whatever their position now, Turkish manners were formed when they were a dominant caste. Indeed, even now no Rayah in Bulgaria would dare to raise his hand against a Turk, being, say the authors, cowardly by nature. Well, it may be so ; and if so, there is one more reason why the Bulgarian Christians should be released from a thraldom which has destroyed their manliness ; but if so, is it not odd that they should take so readily to the highway as robbers and brigands, and that their Mussulman kinsmen—for we believe the majority of the 6, Turks " in Bulgaria are the descendants of converts—should be so brave? As a matter of fact, every conquered race seems
cowardly to its conquerors, and the Russian peasant of ten years ago seemed as he crouched to his lord as great a coward as the Bulgarian. He made a good soldier none the less, and so will the Bulgarian when he is made to fight, he being, like the Slavon everywhere, an essentially peaceful person. Then the Bulgarian is deceitful, as we are afraid sometimes is the Irish peasant when it is inconvenient to be frank, and excessively superstitious. He is degraded enough to believe that there is a day in the year when nature rests as well as man :
"Last week a peasant said to us, ' The 25th March [0. S.] is the Blagostina ; it is only a little feast of the church, but it is a great feastday for all nature, for then even the swallows and the boos cease from labour : all nature reposes and makes ready for the birth of spring ; so it is a great festival, for it is that of the new-born spring and of serpents.' "
Is not that shocking? You see that belief only attaches to one day in the year, whereas if it attached to one in every seven, then it would be both poetical and right. Then the Bulgarian occasionally gets drunk on festival days, a habit unknown in England; and the women become disorderly, and try to pull travellers off their horses ; and, in fact, behave very much like English women employed in agricultural gangs. There arc relics among the people of Serpent-worship, just as there are in wild parts of Ireland of the Moloch-worship of the Phoenicians ; and the Rayalis believe in vampires and witches, just as a great many French peasants do now. Above all, their priests are very ignorant and oppres
sive, demanding that all church fees shall be paid in advance:— "The curate assents, and follows his rector, fancying that he is going to make a round of visits in the parish: after a minute's walk along a muddy road an old woman stops them, saying, 'Papas, my husband Tanaz is dying, and he implores you for the love of heaven to c)me and see him.'—' Have you got the seventy piastres ?' is the reply of the priest.—' We are poor ; very, very poor, Papas.'—"That's a lie, Tranitza, you are quite rich enough to pay me.'—' But the funeral only costs forty piastres r—"That's what I have to pay to the Wladylta, but do you suppose I have bought this parish in order to make nothing out of it ? Pay me the seventy piastres or —.'—' Then I will sell the cow and pay you —.'—• Not a bit of it, I shan't give credit.'—' laze, Bore ! my husband is dying!'—' Let him die, then, if you are not going to pay me!'—The curate offers to go and console tho dying man, for, thanks to Professor Max Miiller's lectures, ho has understood something of this dialogue, though he is rather astonished at the absence of the Mcwo-Gothic element ; but the Papas stops him with. ' What! you'd go and rob me of my seventy piastres? those people will never pay unless we got it out of them in advance.'—The woman goes away sobbing, and the sensitive heart of the Oxonian is so touched that he ventures to offer the sum in question to his rector, who accepts it with the greatest possible condescension, and calls back Tranitza.' This young gentleman has advanced some of the money for you, so I'll come and see your husband for you presently, but get ready for me two dozen eggs, six fowls, and five sultans of flour.'—The Tukban is reached, and they enter, slightly to the surprise of the curate when he finds himself in a very dingy and disreputable-looking pot-house ; but as all the villagers rise and kiss his hands as well as those of the Papas, he fancies that he is being presented to his parishioners. Time passes rapidly with the Papas, who calls for innumerable small glasses of raki varied by numberless big tumblers of wine. About four o'clock he begins to sing unclerical songs, and by five be cannot stand upright. At this stage enters the son of Tanaz, asking him to visit his father, who is at death's door. 'Get along with you.' says the Papas, whom his potations have rendered ill-tempered, adding a strong-flavoured Turkish oath much in DSO amongst the Rayahs. The young man has also been drinking, probably to drown his grief, and he answers so rudely that the Papas raises his arm to strike him ; a scuffle ensues," &c., &e.
Are we dreaming, or have we read scenes almost identical with that in descriptions of Irish and Italian life? Aud how is it, if the Turkish Government is so good for the country, that the purchase of parishes is not prevented ? But it is on the laziness of the Rayah that our authors are strongest. He is, they say, as a farmer, very well placed ; for his direct taxes, exclusive of rent, only amount to 18s. per household per annum, or more than double the Indian average; while he obtains as much land as he will
for a tenth of the produce per annum, the truth being, we conceive, that, as in every other Eastern country, the Land is his, subject to
the Government due, which is, we admit, in theory sufficiently light. Having much land, he cultivates it very roughly, as farmers do in the West, and proves to a demonstration his consummate and disgraceful ignorance of agriculture by raising without manure as much wheat per acre as the British farmer does with it. "The amount of produce," say the authors, "equals the average of a good year in England ;" but then the Bulgarian wastes Reed, and does not use the manure of his village, any more than we do that of onr cities, and has a fertile soil and a favourable climate, and declines altogether to grow more than he chooses, having a traditional fear that if he grew rich some Turk would
take his surplus away. 'rho authors say in one page that this is a bad economic calculation, but in another they produce heaps of figares to show that the right of collecting the tithe is sold to the farmer of the revenue, that he expects 100 per cent. profit, and that, as a final result, the peasant pays just three times what reaches the State. Now a rent of a third of the gross produce is a heavy one, and till the means of export are a little easier, may well deter the cultivator from extending his cultivatiou till it involves hired labour. Moreover, no corn can be cut till the tax-gatherer has been round to inspect, and he " frequently appears two or three weeks after the corn has been out, during the whole of which time it remains at the mercy of the weather, or of the pigeons, who never fail to exact their tithe from it. In looking at the sheaves thus left upon the fields, we have frequently noticed that from the heat of the sun and other causes munch of the grain falls out, and that instead of sixty or seventy grains in the ear we could rarely find more than a third of that number, whilst every day the loss became greater and greater." Very lazy person the Bulgarian !—who in the teeth of that system rivals the English fanner in his crop, and quite worthy the heavy taxation by which the authors would as a public benefit to Europe compel him to produce more wheat. For, say they,—" If the Itayah worked as he ought to work, England and France would buy their bread 20 per cent. cheaper, which means that the labouring classes in these countries would lice one day snore in six; and this 20 per cent. might perhaps even do much in checking pauperism ; this aspect of the Rayah is probably a novel one, but surely it merits serious consideration." If he were enslaved as well as taxed, he would probably do better still ; and apparently Captain St. Clair and Mr. Brophy would hardly shrink from this conclusion, for they say that emancipation has ruined Russia, which was getting civilized. An odder compost of prejudices than some of their ideas we do not remember to have seen, prejudices the more striking because, whenever they discuss the country Turks, they are not only kindly, but full of insight and shrewdness. 'With their descriptiv of this caste we heartily sympathize, only adding to it that these honest, hospitable, abstemious, and truthful country Turks are, as they admit, incapable of civilizatiou,—the civilized Turk being a Turk without Eastern virtues and with Western vices,— and, as they do not admit, has been the cause of all the degradation they depict among his subjects. To estimate Spartan institutions we must ask not, what were the Spartans, but what were the Helots? By the account of these residents, the Bulgarians are very quiet, submissive farmers, who raise a great crop, pay heavy taxes, drink a good deal, laugh a good deal, are very superstitious, are very dirty, and altogether as like Tipperary men in sheepskin as they can possibly be. Well, there are hopes of Tipperary men.
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