575 Tyrolese House-Mottoes. IN Lessing's Nathan the Wise the daughter of the wise Jew says to her friend, "I suppose you have not read many books;" and, on being asked why she supposes so, makes answer, "Because you are so upright and downright, so inartificial, so thoroughly and naturally your real self; and my father says that people seldom retain these characteristics who have read many books." (I quote from memory, and give only the sense of the passage.) The study of the mottoes which are to be found carved or painted on old-fashioned Tyrolese houses affords a commentary upon, and an illustration of, this saying of Lessing's Nathan. It is manifest that those who chose such mottoes, or invented them, had read but few booksperhaps none; and certainly it would be hard to find more complete specimens of downrightness, inartificiality, and naïveté. It is true that many of the mottoes are repeated and copied from one house to another; and invariably the later versions of them are improved in orthography-often in syntax; but have somehow lost the stamp of sturdy, unconscious simplicity which marks the older ones. In a word, their writers have been reading many-house-fronts! and have lost in originality what has been gained in correctness. All over the beautiful green land of Tyrol you come upon picturesque, many-gabled old dwellings, with massive vaulted entrance halls and huge projecting eaves. They stand a little backward from the village street, with verdant orchards stretching behind them, and scarlet geraniums flaming in their sleepy old windows. Or it may be that one stands lonely and venerable on a town Platz, surrounded by newer and flimsier constructions, and offers to the passerby a tempting depth of cool shadow beneath its beetle-browed portal. Or, again, you may find such a one solidly defying wind and weather in some mountain solitude: a very patriarch of a house, with a numerous family of barns, out-houses, stables, and peasants' cottages, grouped around him. A great dog, sleek and well fed, as all dumb beasts seem to be among German folk, blinks in the sunshine before the door. Poultry cluck and flutter round the barn, whence comes a fragrant smell of grain and spicy hay. The cattle-bells clink and tinkle from the green, green pastures down by the stream. Even the great stern mountains seem to shimmer and grow soft in the warm autumn air. Only two or three wooden sledges and a snow-plough piled up beside the stable-door remind us that in a month or two bitter winds will blow through the gorge, that the peaks yonder which pierce the blue, will pour down their dread artillery of hail and stones and torrents and cold, cruel avalanches, and that the old house needs all his strength of wall and roof to resist the assaults of King Winter and his army. And there on the house-front, whether it be in village, town, or mountain valley, you may read some pious prayer, or pithy sentence, or worldly-wise saw carved in quaint German for the edification of those who pass by. The same thing is common in Switzerland and in many parts of Germany. But our business now is with the Tyrolese inscriptions. More than one collection of these has been made and published by native Tyrolese. But I have met with no volume in which the inscriptions are classified or commented on. They are simply jotted down literally, as one might write them in one's note-book. But even thus barely and simply presented, they are full of interest for the observer of national manners and characteristics. They are gradually and not very slowly disappearing. If by time or accident a motto becomes effaced, it is scarcely ever replaced by the owner of the house. Such things are old-fashioned,―zopfig, as the Germans have it (that is to say, literally, pigtailish an expression to which our "square-toed" may answer), and few persons choose to brave the ridicule of their modern-minded neighbours by carving again the old inscription, with its rude spelling and antique phrase. It is curious to conjecture how far, and in what manner, new mottoes would differ from the old, if Fashion suddenly took it into her light head to patronise the writing of them up pro bono publico! The religious inscriptions, which are very numerous, would surely change their tone very considerably. They would probably become more or less controversial. And, instead of the comfortable, confident, easy-going kind of piety which seems to take for granted all men's assent to its postulates, we should probably have a taste of the defiant spirit which is aware that its dicta may, likely enough, be contradicted, and therefore utters them with tenfold zeal and emphasis. Nay, in these times of strife and upheaval, it might be that the concoctors or choosers of religious mottoes in the Tyrol should rather seek such words as might serve for missiles against their enemies than pour out thanksgiving and prayer and blessing in the antique fashion. The most purse-proud and prosperous farmer or merchant would scarcely announce now-a-days to all the world, in letters calculated to last some centuries, that he was "a man of good repute, and with well-filled hands," as a certain Hans Stoffner did, who built in the year 1547. And an innkeeper would think twice before he so wore his heart upon sleeve as to write up in his tap-room, "Come hither and sit down; if your purse be light, make off again at once. Come hither, my dear guest, if only you have money in your purse!" which sincere invitation exists in an inn at Klausenbach. his but Many causes, doubtless, co-operate to change all that. But amongst them all perhaps increased intercommunication between distant com munities is the most active. It is, in fact, in some sense equivalent to Nathan's "reading of many books." It brings men in contact with other minds. It reveals to them what is thought and said by that mysterious authority, "other people," of whose existence outside his or her own village the Tyrolese peasant could form but a dim conception eighty or a hundred years ago. Meanwhile there still remains a sufficiently copious store of old mottoes-pious, comic, simple, and cynical-from which to offer a selection to the reader, which may not be without interest and amusement. The inscriptions dedicating the house to God, to the Virgin, or to some favourite saint, are naturally the most numerous. They frequently consist of but two lines roughly rhymed. Sometimes they extend to four, or even six lines. In the following translations care has been taken to give the measure of the lines, which, as will be seen, is frequently halting and unsymmetrical, and to preserve, as far as possible, the rude unsophisticated simplicity of the original. Take this one from Jochberg: The Lord this dwelling be about, And bless all who go in and out. Another : Mother of God, with gracious arm Here the supplication for the cattle-who are, it will be observed, put before the inhabitants of the house-speaks as eloquently as a long description could do, of the pastoral character of the country; of green Alp pastures, and the importance to the peasant of his milky herd. All travellers in the Tyrol will remember to have seen images of St. Florian on many a village house and above many a village well. The latter, indeed, is a favourite position for the figure of the saint. His especial vocation is to ward off fire from dwelling-houses, or to extinguish it should it break out. In a country where so large a proportion of the dwellings is built of wood, fire is a frequent and terrible scourge. And consequently the good offices of St. Florian are in very general request. There stands the little wooden image, painted in flaring colours, and, if possible, gilded into the bargain, above the cool well, and looks down. majestically upon generation after generation of village damsels washing or drawing water. St. Florian is represented as a warrior, with sword and helmet, and scarlet drapery, and cheeks almost as scarlet, and a black truculent-looking beard. Often he is painted in fresco, on a house-front, in the act of pouring a bucket of water over a burning house;—which house is usually represented as reaching up to the calf of his leg, or thereabouts. Here is a double dedication to this saint and another, from Terfens : : Holy Sebastian and Florian The German word "patron" is quietly turned into "patrian" in 28. order to rhyme with Florian; which example I have taken the liberty to follow. Another has a strong flavour of feudality, and the homage due to good birth : Thou of Austrian knightly race, Keep fire and danger from this place. (At Tramin, under a picture of St. Florian.) There are other inscriptions to St. George, St. Martin, &c.; and a very large number inculcate trust in God as the only sure hold-fast on earth. For example: The love of God's the fairest thing, (Rinn.) Another : The help of man is small, (Lermos.) The following from Matrei, in the Pusterthal, sums up the principal evils which the inhabitants of that village considered they had to fear a century or so ago. The bold conceit of the enemy "lightening" against them is literally rendered : O Lord, protect this house, He whom Thy hand protects no ill shall frighten, Apropos of Matrei, here is another inscription from that often burneddown village, which has something touching in its quaint simplicity of trust: In thirty years completed by God's grace, Burnt down four times upon the self-same place, In faith entrusted, and built up again. This one, from Wenns in the Pitzthal, is amusing, from the emphatic way in which the change is mentioned to St. Florian from a higher patron : This house in God's hand I did lay, One seems to hear the worthy peasant add sotto voce, "Let's see what he'll do for us!" The following is found in at least half-a-dozen villages of North Tyrol : 1 It would be hard to put more dreamy melancholy into four lines than is expressed by the following inscription on the Domanig inn, at Telfes, in the Stubay valley : I live, how long I trow not. I die, but when I know not. I journey,—whither I cannot see. 'Tis strange that I should merry be! The following, also from Telfes, is not without pith : When the will of God I do, Then what I will God does too. But if I cross His holy will, God follows His own counsel still. But all the inscriptions are by no means tinged with this tone of sadness. Many of them express the writer's satisfaction with life in general, and with himself in particular. Take that one of the sixteenth century, alluded to above: Zum Stainer this house we call. (Sarnthal. 1547.) The builder of a dwelling in Huben, in the Oetzthal, seems to have looked upon things in general with a good deal of cheerful philosophy. The assurance of his ability to pay, "be the cost great or small," has a touch of ostentation in it, and perhaps accounts for his pleasant frame of mind! The lines and rhymes of this inscription are rougher than usual: : The house is built, Be the cost great or small, The masters and workmen I pay. So oft as I go in and out the door, The name of Jesus shall be praised therefor. Honest John Hartler, of Ambras, does not lose heart either; but his purse is evidently not quite so deep as that of the Huben man, and he seems to have felt a twinge of dismay when the bill was presented. This is his inscription : |