For a moment the present scene has faded from your eyes, and in its place you see a vanished face and hear a voice grown strange to your ears. That valse, once to you the most entrancing music on earth, now sounds like the gibings of some tormenting spirit, and you breathe an involuntary sigh for a time that is no more!
Thus the Tzigane player, unlike the hired musicians in other countries, has an intimate and artistic connection with his dancers. In England or Germany the musician is simply the machine which plays, no more to be regarded than a barrel-organ or a musical-box; in Hungary alone he is something more, his power of directing being here not limited to the feet, but may almost be said to extend to the fancies and feelings of his audience—feelings which it is his delight to share and sway, with actual power to stimulate love or jealousy, and reawaken grief and remorse, at the touch of his magic wand.
[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
GYPSY POETRY.
Very little genuine Tzigane poetry has penetrated to the outer world, and many songs erroneously attributed to the gypsies (by Borrow among others) are proved to be adaptations of Spanish or Italian canzonets picked up in the course of their wanderings, while of those few which are undoubtedly their own productions hardly any exceed the length of six or eight lines.
“We sing only when we are drunk,” was the answer given by an old gypsy to a collector of folk-songs, which pithy and concise definition of gypsy literature would seem to be a tolerably correct one—though, on the other hand, it might be urged with some show of reason that the gypsy, being often drunk, we might naturally expect his poetical effusions to be proportionately numerous.
And perhaps they are in fact more numerous than is generally supposed, only that for lack of a recording pen to take note of them as they arise their momentary inspirations pass by unheeded, leaving no more mark behind than does the song of some wild forest-bird when it has ceased to wake the woodland echoes. The conditions of the gypsy’s life render all but impossible the task of a scribe, who has little chance of picking up anything of interest unless prepared for the time being to become almost a gypsy himself.
Nor have there been wanting ardent folk-lorists (if I may coin a word) who have gone this length; so, for instance, Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki, who, in the summer of 1883, spent several months as member of a wandering troop of tent gypsies in Transylvania and Southern Hungary, and has lately published a volume of gypsy fairy tales, the fruit of his laborious expedition. Yet on the whole the harvest is a meagre one, if we take account of the time and trouble spent on its realization; and even this energetic collector has declared that he would hardly have the courage a second time to face the deceptions and fatigues of such an undertaking.
To his pen it is that we owe the first poem contained in this chapter; the second one, entitled, “The Black Voda,” interesting as being an almost solitary instance of a consecutive gypsy ballad, was communicated to me by the courtesy of Professor Hugo von Meltzl, of Klausenburg, another Transylvanian authority in the matter of folk-lore, who, in his “Acta Comparationis Literarum Universum,” has given many interesting details bearing on these subjects.