The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania. E. Smith Gerard
character of the Saxon finds vent in many inscriptions, of which I give a few specimens:
“Trust yourself to only one—
’Tis not wise to trust to none;
Better, though, to have no friend
Than on many to depend.”
“If you have a secret got,
To a woman tell it not;
For my part, I would as lieve
Keep the water in a sieve.”
“When I have both gold and wine,
Many men are brothers mine;
When the money it is done,
And the wine has ceased to run,
Then the brothers, too, are gone.”
“Hardly do a man I see
But who hates and envies me;
Inside them their heart doth burn
For to do an evil turn,
Grudge me sore my daily bread;
More than one doth wish me dead.”
“Those who build on the highway,
Must not heed what gossips say.”
The four last I here give are among the best I have come across, the first of these having a slightly Shakespearean flavor about it:
“Tell me for what gold is fit?
Who has got none, longs for it;
Who has got it, fears for thieves;
Who has lost it, ever grieves.”
“We cannot always dance and sing,
Nor can each day be fair,
Nor could we live if every day
Were dark with grief and care;
But fair and dark days, turn about,
This we right well can bear.”
“Say, who is to pay now the tax to the King?
For priests and officials will do no such thing;
The nobleman haughty will pay naught, I vouch,
And poor is the beggar, and empty his pouch;
The peasant alone he toileth to give
The means to enable those others to live.”
“How to content every man,
Is a trick which no one can;
If to do so you can claim,
Rub this out and write your name.”
Among the many house inscriptions I have seen in Transylvania, I have never come across any referring to love or conjugal happiness. The well-known lines of Schiller—
“Raum ist in der kleinsten Hütte
Für ein glücklich liebend Paar,”[6]
of which one gets such a surfeit in Germany, are here conspicuous by their absence. This will not surprise any one acquainted with the domestic life of these people. Any such sentiment would most likely have lost its signification long before the wind and the rain had effaced it, for it would not at all suit the Saxon peasant to change his house motto as often as he does his wife.
CHAPTER VIII.
SAXON INTERIORS—CHARACTER.
The old-china mania, which I hear is beginning to die out in England, has only lately become epidemic in Austria; and as I, like many others, have been slightly touched by this malady, the quaintly decorated pottery wine-jugs still to be found in many Saxon peasant houses offered a new and interesting field of research.
These jugs are by no means so plentiful nor so cheap as they were a few years ago, for cunning bric-à-brac Jews have found out this hitherto unknown store of antiquities, and pilger hither from the capital to buy up wholesale whatever they find. Yet by a little patience and perseverance any one living in the country may yet find enough old curiosities to satisfy a reasonable mania; and while seeking for these relics I have come across many another remnant of antiquity quite as interesting but of less tangible nature.
SAXON PEASANT AT HOME.
Inside a Saxon peasant’s house everything is of exemplary neatness and speaks of welfare. The boards are clean scoured, the window-panes shine like crystal. There is no point on which a Saxon hausfrau (housewife) is so sensitive as that of order and neatness, and she is visibly put out if surprised by a visit on washing or baking day, when things are not looking quite so trim as usual.
If we happen to come on a week-day we generally find the best room, or prunkzimmer, locked up, with darkened shutters; and only on our request to be shown the embroidered pillow-covers and the best jugs reserved for grand occasions will the hostess half ungraciously proceed to unlock the door and throw open the shutter.
This prunkzimmer takes the place of the state parlor in our Scotch farm-houses; but those latter, with their funereal horse-hair furniture and cheerless polished table, would contrast unfavorably beside these quaint, old-fashioned German apartments. Here the furniture, consisting of benches, bunkers, bedsteads, chest of drawers, and chairs, are painted in lively colors, often festoons of roses and tulips on a ground of dark blue or green; the patterns, frequently bold and striking, if of a somewhat barbaric style of art, betray the Oriental influence of Roumanian country artists, of whom they are doubtless borrowed. A similarly painted wooden framework runs round the top of the room, above the doors and windows, with pegs, from which are suspended the jugs I am in search of, and a bar, behind which rows of plates are secured.
On the large unoccupied bedsteads are piled up, sometimes as high as the ceiling, stores of huge, downy pillows, their covers richly embroidered in quaint patterns executed in black, scarlet, or blue and yellow worsted. They are mostly worked in the usual tapestry cross-stitch, and often represent flowers, birds, or animals in the old German style—the name of the embroideress and the date of the work being usually introduced. Many of the pieces I saw were very old, and dates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are constantly turning up; but alongside are others of recent date, for the custom of thus employing the long winter evenings is still kept up among the village girls.
I asked some of them whence they took their patterns, whether they had any sampler books or printed designs to copy from. Nothing of the sort, I was told; they just copy from one another and from old pieces of work. Thus it comes about that many of them to-day go on reproducing some old bird or flower, first introduced by an ancestress of the worker many hundred years ago.
This system of copying is clearly to be traced in the different villages. As each village forms a separate body or community, and intercourse and intermarriage hardly ever take place, these patterns become localized, and one design is apt to run in one particular place to the exclusion of others. Thus I remarked one village where flourishes a peculiar breed of square-built peacocks, alternated with preposterous stags in red and blue worsted, but these fabulous animals are rarely wont to stray beyond the confines of their own parish; while in another community there is a strongly marked epidemic of embroidered double-eagles, perhaps explainable by the fact that part of the population is of Austrian extraction.
SAXON