BOOKS.
THE CZAR'S BOOK.'
Tars magnificent volume is the first of two written by order of the Czar by Prince Ookhtomsky, a naval officer in his suite,. to describe the journey of the Cesarewitch, now the Czar, through Egypt and India. It is fall of drawings of unusual merit, which leave on the mind a deep impression of the
picturesqueness of India, and also revive for those who have seen them accurate impressions of the scenes and peoples,
depicted. We can recall in the hundreds of pictures of India which we have seen none more faithful or more vivid- The artisb perhaps has attended too persistently to the architecture of India, and too little to India itself, few of his drawings giving any impression of the scenery of the peninsula; but it was
natural that he should sketch what was pointed out to him as wonderful, and he had little opportunity of seeing anything
else. The general impression of Indian plains, mountains, forests, and rivers—an impression distinct from that to be obtained from any other division of the world—has still to be recorded either on canvas or on paper. The letterpress is partly of the gazette kind—a mere account of ceremonies unrelieved by criticism—and partly of the better guide-book sort, and would be in no way noticeable but for a single definite note which runs through it all. Prince Ookhtomsky recognises with a certain clearness of insight, as well as a certain naivete, the special peculiarity of India,—its un- intelligibleness, or rather the impossibility of obtaining from any survey of it a general and consistent impres- sion. Whatever you see there is too old and too young; too varied, too conflicting, too provocative of jarring and tumultuous thoughts, to allow of any conviction or even any opinion arising in the mind. Even limited scenes in India are not scenes but rather phantasmagoria about which it is impossible to form, much more to record, definite or nutritive convictions. The eyes are filled too full, and the true mind is bewildered and sinks powerless. Take, for instance, Bombay. Prince Ookhtomsky, obviously a keen and attentive observer, was shown Bombay under the most favourable circumstances, with a whole population anxious that he should see everything, and this is his skilful, yet bewildering, account :—
"Penetrating into the Oriental quarter, as soon as we rose sight of the colossal tower of the University, which rises above the European quarter of the city, and was built at an enormous expense by a famous Hindu, Premchand Raichand, in pions memory of his mother, Rajah Bai, the attention is at once attracted to the peculiar surroundings. The lofty houses, several flats high, with coloured fronts, little carved balconies, little sculptured pillars, stand much closer to each other, it is- true, than the buildings at and near the landing-place, but still, in places, they leave room enough for a tram-line, presenting a unique spectacle,—as a mode of locomotion, which, like a railway, obliges members of all possible strata of society to reconcile them- selves to each other's neighbourhood on one and the same bench • Travels in As East of Nicholas IL, Emperor of Russia, when Cosaretritch. 1890 1891. Written by Order of I is Impern 1 Maj,,,ty by Prince B. Ookhtomalty, and translated from the Rugg an by Robert Gondiet (St. Pete eburg). 2 vo S. Edited by oir George Birdwood, K.G.LB.,dic.. VoLL London: Archibald Con.table saLd Co. of the car, in spite of caste intolerance and natural pride and haughtiness. Tall, lean Hindus in red head-dresses, with caste- marks on their foreheads,—stout Parsees in dark blouses, and strange glistening caps (clumsy-looking, brimless cylinders), borrowed from the tradesmen in their new home at Gujerat,— rich merchants with whole pyramids of muslin on their heads,— native women of the lower classes, with unveiled faces and with baskets of manure on their heads, but wearing elegant bracelets and nose-rings, and with silver hoops round their ankles, — bheesties (water-carriers) wandering through the crowd with downcast look,—almost naked, golden-dusky little boys with blue rosaries round their necks,—Mohammedans from Central Asia,— all throng in the streets among the Hindu temples, inaccessible to the infidel, and remarkable for their gaudy and tasteless architecture, among shops full of stuffs, imported goods, and all sorts of things, workshops with objects of native manufacture, &e. Carts, introduced in the days of Portuguese rule, harnessed with trotting-bullocks, with a linen awning on poles (over the passengers, and partly also to shelter the animals themselves from the sun), the carriages of well-to-do Parsees, with their richly dressed children in gold-embroidered caps, the sturdy foreign horses of the tram company, in large hats (like human beings) to protect them from sunstroke,—all this passes like a phantasmagoria before the eyes, without leaving any connected, definite, organically whole impression on the memory. Owing to the racial variety, and even more on account of the heterogeneity of the populace, Bombay, as yet, has not enough individuality of its own, so that to form a clear conception of it from a superficial survey (as, for example, in Cairo, with its comparative sameness) is perhaps quite impossible."
This central idea is repeated again and again at least a dozen times, more especially when the writer has been gazing at temples, or has become conscious in any way of the fathomless antiquity which so often marks Indian buildings, races, customs, and specialities of social organisation. His bewilderment is the more curious because as a Russian he is often conscious, or thinks he is conscious, of a certain kinship with the East, even declaring that the peasantry
often remind him, especially in the colours in which they delight, of Russian moujiks. His perception of the great Indian truth diminishes the interest of his book, but it is creditable to his own acuteness. He has detected the reason why books upon India teach so little ; why, though we have reigned there nearly a century and a half, no book has ever appeared which has brought home to
Englishmen even the external features, much less the people or the social organisation, of their magnificent possession. India is not only too big, it is too various, too choked with the materials of thought, for clear opinion to arise from travelling through it or even from residing in it. To describe it, or even one country in it, is like trying to describe a brie- i-brac shop, so vast, so rich, so full of all incongruous and even jarring things, that description is either a failure or the dullest of catalogues. There are a hundred descriptions of Persia which are pictures, and enable us to call up Persia and Persians, but there is not one of the Bombay Presidency, and there never will be. No genius can describe what is so per- fectly kaleidoscopic. The conqueror Baber realised this, and mistaking bewilderment for tedium, declared that India was of all places in Asia the most tiresome. It ought not to be tiresome, but it is like a gallery in which there is too much to see, and all is confused. That impression, the true one, has as yet baffled every observer, and Prince Ookhtomsky, of whose literary skill the reader will form a rather high impres- sion, especially when the writer grows dreamy, acknowledges that it has baffled him. His narrative is always pleasing, sometimes, as in the description of Cailasa, with its wealth of rained temples, even striking, but only the pictures by which it is accompanied add anything, and that is not very much, to the clearness of the student's appreciation of what India is. The book is a fine one in its way, but it is one for the drawing. room, not the library.
Previous page
