But how strangely classic are the musical instruments of the Croats! What visions of bucolic shepherds, of fauns and dancing satyrs; what memories of idyllic strains do they call up! Can it be merely that we are overlooking the same Arcadian kind of life that the Greek poet might have surveyed when he strolled forth beyond the walls of Syracuse? Is ‘the oaten stop and pastoral song’ the same, simply because the Croat shepherd of the Save-lands is in the same stage of civilization as was the rural Greek? Or are the pipes and lutes before us actually heirlooms from the very shepherds of whom Theocritus piped on the thymy pastures of Hybla?—the same with which Thyrsis and Corydon contended on the green banks of the Mincius? It really almost seemed so. I asked a countryman the name of his pipe, and to my amazement his reply was Fistjela. The man did not understand a word of Latin, but this seemed a very good attempt at Fistula, the pastoral pipe of the Romans, the very instrument which Thyrsis vowed to hang on the sacred pine. The old Pan’s pipe,[149] however, was a series of reeds waxed on to a stem in decreasing order, while this was a single reed, though more often a wooden pipe. It was also known as Fuškola.[150] Then there are the double pipes, the Roman Tibiæ. A slight development has indeed taken place. Instead of being held separate in the mouth, their ends are joined by a mouth-piece. The V has become a Y, that is all. They are also like the double pipes of classic times in being, as the ancients have it, ‘male and female,’ for the number of holes being uneven in the two branches—four in one and three in the other—one barrel is shriller than the other, and their blended notes may still be called, as they were by the Greeks, ‘married piping.’[151] Their name is Svirala, but in parts of Serbia Diplé, which is evidently Greek; and yet if their origin can be traced back to Hellenic times, it can be traced further back still to the double pipes of the Theban monument, on which the Egyptian ladies of Moses’ time are seen playing to their God Ptah.
Next, the Croats have a rude kind of flute possessed of the same Romance name Fluta, the Wallachian Flaute, the Italian Flauto; and lastly, the favourite instrument of all—the Tamburica, a simple form of lute with a straight neck and oval body, and four strings, or rather wires. Its name seems connected with the Persian drum or Tambûr; though in form, but for its extra chord, it is almost an exact reproduction of the three-stringed lute, the Nefer, which Thoth, their Mercury, is said to have given to the Egyptians, which dates back at least to the time when the Second Pyramid was built, which was handed on by the Egyptians to the Phœnicians and Greeks, who knew it as Nafra and Pandoura, under which name they gave it to the Romans.[152] Among the Latin peoples of the West, at least, it never died out, and though at times changing its form it has given the Italians their Pandora, the French their Mandore, the Spaniards their Bandurria and Bandole,[153] and even to us our Bandoline and—horresco referens!—the Banjo. Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s description of the Egyptian Nefer will almost answer to describe the Croatian Tamburitza of to-day. It had, he tells us, ‘a long flat neck and hollow oval body, either wholly of wood or covered with parchment, having the upper surface perforated with holes to allow the sound to escape. Over this body and the whole length of the handle were stretched three strings of cat-gut, secured at the upper extremity either by the same number of pegs or by passing through a hole in the handle.’
Outlines of Croatian Musical Instruments.
1, 2. Fistjela, or whistles. 3, 4. Svirala. 5, 6, 7. Tamburica. 8, 9. Fluta.
It would be easy to show that the conical-shaped baskets, the Corpa, which [the Croat countryman on p. 4] has in his hand, is as like the Roman Corbis in form as it is in name, and may claim sisterhood with the Corbella of the Campanian peasant of to-day. Some even of the windows of Agram have a Roman air, for in several upper-storeys and outhouses, to save glass, they are provided with a heavy unglazed plate tracery of an angular kind, which is an exact reproduction of the Roman tracery, to be seen, for example, in the Amphitheatre of Pola in Istria.
Outline of Tracery.
It is hard to say how far these various reproductions of antique forms may be due to the earlier Roman or more Byzantine empire; how far they may be waifs from the wrecks of Siscia or Sirmium; how far filtered in from that later Constantinople which gave the old Serbs their religion and the model of their empire. We know that the traces of the more purely Roman empire, which embraced the old Dacia, Pannonia, and Illyricum, have not entirely perished, for its language lives still among the Roumans of the Carpathian and Danubian plains, among the Tzintzars of Mount Pindus, and never died out in the coast cities of Dalmatia. The Latin population, though reduced to the condition of shepherds, may yet have prevailed to introduce some of their arts among their Sclavonic conquerors. To this day the Tzintzars of the Macedonian mountains assert their technical superiority to the races round in the practice of the art of wood-carving. Considering the preservation of such Latin words as Testja, or Fistjela, or Korpa, we may perhaps be justified in assuming that many of the homely arts we see before us are rather the direct inheritance from Trajan than from Heraclius. Nor must the influence of the Venetians in Croatia be forgotten; for these kept open, in mediæval and later times, the old trade-route between the Adriatic and the Danube, opened out long before by their prototypes the Aquilejans.[154] To them probably is due the small wooden cask, the Croatian Baril, the Italian Barile; but one evident trace of Venice is to be found in the glass-works which exist at Samobor in Croatia, and in the heart of the deep oak forests of Slavonia. The name Flašica, of the glass bottles, may be formed from the Italian Fiasco, Flascon, and the forms of the rude beakers and the prettily rippled Croatian flasks are true Venetian—light, roughly blown, and of Roman bottle-green. In Dalmatia the importation of similar rude glass vessels still continues from the small Venetian island of Murano—the seat of the famed glass-works of old. But even these Venetian forms are, less directly, but another inheritance from Rome.
In modern times we must not forget the activity of the new Queen of the Adriatic, ‘la bella Trieste,’ the Austrian successor of the great republic, nor the Italian seaport of Hungary, Fiume, connected now with the interior by rail as well as by the magnificent Louisa-way; so that, with the old Venetian influences, we have plenty to account for the presence of a considerable Italian ingredient in the population of Agram and Croatia generally. For anyone here unacquainted with Croatian, Italian, not German, is the best means of communication. The Styrian mountains seem to form a shed between the areas of German and Italian influences, and besides, the Croats, like the Czechs, feel a certain jealousy of the German language which they do not experience of the Italian. Many of the high officials here show, by their names or features, an Italian descent. The military governor of Croatia is a Signor Mollinary; the director of telegraphs, whose acquaintance we were pleased to make, has an Italian, or rather a thoroughly Roman physiognomy, and speaks Tuscan by preference; the more civilized race seems to climb over the shoulders of the ruder Croats.