Against the houseless stranger shuts his door,
he is only stating what we knew by actual experience to be still true. It is not so soon forgotten—that chilly night, when, for want of a single hospitable roof in a whole village to shelter midnight travellers, we were fain to stall ourselves in the creepiest of church porches—and had we not sundry other reminiscences of slammed doors and long parleyings to boot in the moonlight of the Julians? There was always something morose in the temperament of those Slovenes; something too much in harmony with the prevailing black of the Upper-Carinthian costume, with the sad weirdness of their music—what a dirge it was that accompanied our way to that ghostliest of shelters! The Granitza folk, on the contrary, are light in heart as in garment; sociable, hospitable; finding their poetic portraiture rather among those Acadians of whom it is written that
Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows,
But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of their owners.
Is it that these Croats of the Marches still retain the old Sclavonic communism, which the Wends and Slovenes have lost?
It is most delightful, too, to come upon a place where ‘charity’ in its mischievous, oriental form, is kept from the door. Here every community is of its very essence a kind of benefit club; the common homestead is the only asylum for the old, infirmary for the sick; in times of war it was not the least important advantage of the Military Frontier, that each house-community formed a hospital for disabled soldier house-brothers. The communal system prevents moreover the rise of an actual proletariate; the flunkeyism of service is absent where all are alike fellow-helps and fellow-masters; and no doubt if a brother be disproportionately lazy, moral suasion of an unmistakable kind is brought to bear on him by the rest of the community. Here we have a kind of industrial police organisation.
Endued with all this brotherly co-operation, these social advantages and virtues, Granitza life cannot be said to be without its brighter aspects; but alas that it should have shadow as well as sunshine! After all we must own that those earnest staid Slovenes, likened by the German to his Mecklenburgers and Nether-Saxons, possess, with all their moroseness, a more solid civilization. It was admitted to us here—who, indeed, could not see it?—that education was far behind-hand, and the children unkempt and neglected; indeed, the mortality among Granitza infants is said to be outrageous. Why, indeed, should they be better cared for? Why in the name of Fortune should the celibate portion of the community be mulcted for the sake of philoprogenitive brothers? Agriculture here is at a standstill, and the fields undunged.
This wretched wind-wry shanty before us, how little does it answer to the richness of the soil! The inmates, like those around, are poor in the midst of plenty. Dame Nature certainly would fain be bounteous; you have only to look at the luxuriant wild flowers that crowd along the garden skirts to see that; they are at least quite as good as the niggard garden patches, themselves half-wild, of sunflower, marigold, and zinnia,—just see! how scornfully yon aspiring tufts of saffron meadow-sweet climb above the paling, or peep between the rickety bars as if to make fun of those cockered garden favourites within! The apples and plums in the orchard to the side are, as such, puny and poor of flavour; but the hedgerow which fences it round is loaded with sloes very nearly as fat as damsons; and as to the rose hips, you might take them for filberts, scarlet-mantled. Further beyond you catch a glimpse of the contours of Mt. Capella masted with oak-woods, now mere pannage for swine, but fit to timber a hundred fleets.
The truth is, that the incentives to labour and economy are weakened by the sense of personal interest in their results being subdivided. Even the social virtues engendered by this living in common are apt to run off into mere reckless dissipation. One may think their fruit poor, and their wine abominable; but their maxim is none the less, ‘Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ True, a man has a legal right to lay by his share of the profits; but who does? To do so would be to fly in the face of public opinion, and this Granitza way of life is favourable to the growth and influence of public opinion of a kind. At Radovac there is a well-known yearly market, and the peasants, as we heard from an innkeeper’s son, drink away their whole earnings on this greatest of money-making occasions in the four inns which compose the moiety of this little village. In short, the house-communities have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. One may regret the Military Frontier from an antiquarian point of view. Some pleasant features of this unique society may be lost; but on the whole no one can quarrel with the government for passing that permissive bill which entails its speedy self-immolation.
There is no need to give special descriptions of the other villages that we saw in this part, as Radovac has been made the peg on which to hang wider generalisations. The village of Trn may be noticed, as there we came upon peasants belonging to the Greek Church, called ‘Vlachs,’ like the Sluin folk, but not like them a peculiar people, and indeed differing in nothing from their Roman Catholic neighbours, except that Greek icons were hung in their rooms in place of Romish saints. But in the villages about Karlovac the house-communities are generally small, division has already been at work, and I will therefore ask the reader to accompany us per saltum to a more easterly part of the Granitza which we explored a few days later, namely to the neighbourhood of Brood in Slavonia.