RITTEN LITERATURE OF THE CAUCASIAN MOUNTAINEERS.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

All or nearly all of the unwritten literature of the Caucasian
mountaineers may be referred to one or the other of three great classes.
First. Literature which is intended simply to amuse or entertain,
including popular tales, beast-fables, anecdotes, riddles and
burlesques. Second. Literature which grows out of, and afterward reacts
upon, the popular love of glory, of war, of adventure and of heroism,
including historical ballads, death-songs and the fiery orations of the
mullahs. And third. Literature which serves merely as an outlet for the
emotions. A fourth class might perhaps be made of the prayers,
exhortations, pious traditions and edifying anecdotes of the theological
schools and the mosques, but such productions are more or less alike
among all Mohammedan peoples, and those current in the Caucasus are
interesting only as illustrations of a peculiar phase of Oriental
mysticism--viz. the philosophy of the Murids.

Of these three classes, that which includes anecdotes, beast-fables and
popular tales is, although not the most original, by far the most varied
and extensive, comprising as it does full four-fifths of the entire body
of Caucasian traditionary lore. The popular tales already collected by
the officers of the Caucasian mountain administration at Tiflis would
make a volume of four or five hundred pages, and as yet the collectors
have hardly gone outside the limits of the single province of Daghestan.
For the most part, however, these stories are only variants of
well-known Aryan and Turanian originals, and are valuable chiefly for
their local coloring and for the light which they throw upon the tastes,
the habits and the mental processes of a peculiar and long-isolated
people. Yet the fact that they are among the oldest heirlooms of the
human race does not detract in the least from their value as indices to
character. On the contrary, it adds to it by linking them with the
folk-lore of the world, and enabling the student to compare them with
their original types and understand and estimate aright the significance
of the variations. Every one knows how a story is unconsciously varied,
colored and adapted in the course of repeated narration to accord with
the views, knowledge and tastes of its successive narrators, and how
differently the same intellectual framework of fact or fancy will be
filled up by the imaginations of different ra