OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

GYPSY MUSIC IN HUNGARY.

We have all, at some time or other, felt our curiosity and interest excited by the bands of wandering gypsies whom we may sometimes have come upon in their encampments pitched in some remote or sequestered wood or dell—wild-looking men and women and dark, ragged children grouped about fires over which hang kettles suspended from stakes arranged in a triangle; mongrel curs which seem to share their masters' instinctive distrust of strangers; and donkeys browsing near the tilted carts which convey the tribe from one place to another. We feel a sort of traditional repulsion for these people, almost amounting to dread, for stories of children stolen by gypsies, and of their dark, mysterious ways, have taken root in our infant minds along with those of ghosts and goblins, robbers and Indians. There are, it is true, romantic associations connected with them, and we try to fancy a Meg Merrilies in the swarthy old woman who examines the lines of our hand and tells us the past, present and future—sometimes with a startling consistency and probability. But few of us would have supposed that this race of vagabonds and outcasts had ever risen much above their traditional occupation of tinkering, far less that any portion of it had displayed original artistic genius. We have, however, from Robert Franz the composer a most interesting account of the wonderful music of the Hungarian gypsies or Tziganys, which he had several opportunities of hearing during a visit to OUR_MONTHLY_GOSSIPa friend in Hungary. He had been much impressed in his youth by the wandering apparitions of these people in the streets of Kiev, and by the strange, wild dances of their women, whose outlandish garb was rendered still more effective by the pieces of red stuff cut into hearts and sewed all over their skirts. "These caravans of strange beings, who preserve under every sky their dreamy laziness, their rebellion against the yoke, their love of solitude," had always possessed an irresistible charm for him, and he had never understood the scorn and disgust of which they were the object.

Being informed of the arrival of a gypsy band within eight or ten miles of his friend's château, he took his immediate departure for the forest where they had made their temporary home. The sun was going down when he reached the camp. It was in an open glade, where the ground was trampled down, in some places blackened by fire, and covered with fragments of coarse pottery, wooden bowls, bones, parings, etc. The gypsies were there pell-mell—men, women and children, horses, dogs and wagons. The men, lounging about in various attitudes, were smoking: all had a look of careless nobility about them, an air of melancholy, and eyes which burned with slumbering passion. Old women were cowering about the fires, surrounded by children whose meagre limbs were frankly displayed to view. Tall girls, with Oriental eyes, firm and polished cheeks, and vigorous forms, stood facing the horizon, and were distinctly defined against the blue of the sky. Some wore scarlet gowns, bodices covered with metallic ornaments, embroidered chemisettes and a profusion of glass trinkets. In the centre was one, taller by a head than her companions, her face of a fine and delicate oval unknown amongst us, with magnetic, disquieting eyes which suggested splendid vices; a black turban confined her black locks; a chemisette of dazzling whiteness half opened on her breast; she wore, as a necklace, twisted five or six times about her neck, a long chaplet of yellow flowers, clusters of which she held in her hands. The red rays of the setting sun flashed with fantastic effect upon the scene: then night fell, and in the flickering glare of the fires gleaming eyes, white teeth and mobile hands emerged from the gloom.

Franz had expressed his wish to hear their music, but for a while all was silent. Suddenly a strange, prolonged note vibrated through the air like a sigh from the supernatural world; another followed; then after a pause a majestic but sombre melody was developed. The sounds swelled like an immense choral, with incomparable purity and nobleness, fraught with memories of ruins and tombs, of lost liberty and love. Another pause, and some strophes of unbridled gayety burst forth; then again the principal phrase, detaching itself like a flower from its stem, among myriads of winged notes, clusters of vaporous sounds, long spirals of transparent fioritures. Still the violins grew bolder and more impetuous. Franz rose from his seat while watching these men standing with their violins pressed against their breasts, as if they were pouring their life's blood into them: he felt oppressed with anguish, when, by an ingenious inversion, the gloomy theme was transformed into a graceful, poetic melody. The sounds passed away rapidily like sparks, then were extinguished for a moment. A ferocious violence animated the last measures, and the gypsies laid down their bows. But, divining a sympathetic listener, they recommenced and played on till the night was far advanced. At length they ceased, and Franz left the camp, carrying with him the revelation of a hitherto unknown art.

Three principal features (he tells us) determine the character of Tzigany music—its intervals, not used in European harmony, its peculiar rhythms, and its Oriental fioritures or grace-notes. In the minor scale the Tziganys take the fourth augmented, the sixth diminished and the seventh augmented. It is by the frequent augmentation of the fourth that the harmony acquires a wonderfully audacious and disquieting character. The educated musician at first thinks he hears false notes, but the law of their harmonies is to have no law. Their abundance is incalculable, and the solemn and intoxicating effects resulting from the rapid and beautiful transitions cannot be imagined. As for the grace-notes, they give to the ear a pleasure like that which Moorish architecture gives to the eye: the architects of the Alhambra painted on each of their bricks a graceful little poem; the gypsies adorn each note with melodious designs and luxuriant embroideries. But (we quote M. Franz throughout) who shall describe the impalpable flame of Tzigany sentiment, the strange, subjugating charm of which is a vital animation almost adequate to life itself? or the mysterious equilibrium which reigns in this undisciplined art between the sentiment and the form? Mystery of genius, which bears in itself its inexplicable power of emotion, and which science and taste in vain deny!

When Franz again heard Tzigany music it was under very different circumstances. A fete was given by a Hungarian gentleman, of which this music was to be one of the attractions, the most distinguished performers being Farkas Miska and Remenyi Ede. The arrival of the latter on the morning after the first evening concert (the fete seems to have lasted some days) was announced to M. Franz by a great noise, a banging of doors and windows and moving of furniture in the room next his own. It at length ceased, and he was just getting to sleep again when some one knocked at his door, and a pretty, fair-haired boy entered, who announced himself as Ptolemyi Nandor, the fervent disciple of Remenyi Ede, who, he said, had just arrived and was about to take possession of the adjoining apartment.

"Well, sir, is it to inform me of your name and your fervor that you have come to prevent me from sleeping?"

"No," said the boy decidedly: "it is to ask you to dress yourself and go out for a walk."

To the astonished exclamation of M. Franz he replied that his master wished to practice, beginning early, and that it annoyed him to have any one hear him.

"Go to the devil, you and your master!" naturally shouted our composer.

The boy became purple. "What!" he said, "send him to the devil?—him, the great violinist, the successor of Czemak, of Bihary!"

"Is your master a gypsy?"

"No, but he is the only living violinist who possesses the authentic tradition of gypsy music."

"I love this music; therefore I will get up and go down to the garden."

"Oh no, sir: go into the fields. See!" and he opened the window, "every one has left the castle." And actually the master of the house and his guests were all defiling through the garden-gate, having had only three hours' sleep. M. Franz soon joined them, and heard from them the story of Remenyi.

At the age of seventeen he had been attached to the person of Görgey during the Hungarian war. Leaving his country with the emigration, he had shared the exile of Count Teleki, Sandor and others; then passed some time at Guernsey, where he knew Victor Hugo. He had afterward performed with brilliant success in London, Hamburg, etc., and his renown, after his return to Hungary, went on increasing. He traveled about the country in every direction, astonishing nobles and peasants, and playing with the same enthusiasm and poetry in barns as in palaces. On hearing this our author slipped back to the garden, where he hid himself to listen to Remenyi, who, to his great disgust, was playing a concerto of Bach's.

At breakfast, Remenyi appeared, a very commonplace-looking man, full of his own praises, and always speaking himself in the third person. "Remenyi practiced well this morning," said he.

"Yes, a concerto of Bach's!" Franz.

Thereupon Remenyi asked for his violin, and they heard a marvelous specimen of real Tzigany inspiration. Vanity disappeared—passion, nerve and sentiment took its place. He had all the qualities demanded by science, together with those of imagination. It was the passionate inspiration of genius. After his performance was over, he went gravely to the mantelpiece, stopped the clock, and said to the master of the house, "Let this hand mark for ever the hour when Remenyi played at your house."

M. Franz taking no pains to disguise; his admiration, Remenyi, gratified by it, invited him to accompany him home. Wherever he went he received a perfect ovation. At one place he ordered a pair of boots, which were sent home, paid for by the municipality. Art is a national glory in Hungary, especially that of the gypsies, which has taken root in the very heart of the soil.

Remenyi's house at Rakos-Palota, near Pesth, is a long, rambling building, the courtyard of which is given up to chickens, ducks and pigs. M. Franz says the poplars before the door look like exclamation-marks, and he thinks they are planted there to serve as such. There are heaps of rare and precious objects of every imaginable description—all gifts—but the ones which the owner shows with most pride are his Hungarian sabre and a pair of boots which Liszt wore when a child.

The question is often discussed in Hungary whether the national Hungarian music is the production of Tzigany genius, or whether the gypsies are only the exponents of what properly belongs to Hungary itself. The gypsies are proved to have been in Hungary as early as the thirteenth century, and their musicians were celebrated in the sixteenth, some of their names still living in the memory of the people. What has been preserved of genuine old Hungarian music (some melodies of Timody Stephens) has no charm save its antiquity. These and other facts—but, above all, the impression produced on him by the music itself—have convinced M. Franz that the gypsy faculty is one not only of execution, but creation. Gypsy art proceeds from the sentiment, the genius, of the Tzigany race. It is too strange, its elements are too wild, to be the exclusive product of a thoughtful, wise, believing, practical and civilized people; but the Hungarians have understood this art—they have surrounded it with love and respect. Gaining new life, warmth and vigor from the welcoming applause of Hungary, it belongs to her by virtue of her admiration and sympathetic tears.

E.C.R.

THE "GIORNO DEI MORTI."

We all know that the second of November is All Souls' Day, and that it is the day dedicated in the Roman calendar to the commemoration of all those who have departed "in the faith." And few who have traveled on the continent of Europe are not aware that the day is observed in all Southern countries with a degree of devotion which the greater part of the communities in question are not in the habit of according to any other of the ordinances of the Church. But to observe the manifestation of this devotion in its most striking forms, to seize all the more picturesque developments and presentations of it, the "Giorno dei Morti" must be passed at Rome.

It is a curious fact—one of the many of a similar order which illustrate the moral specialties of the Latin populations—that hundreds of thousands of people of both sexes, who neither believe, nor affect to believe, the doctrines of the orthodox Church, and who are in the habit of utterly disregarding all her prescriptions and teaching, should nevertheless, as often as this sad anniversary comes round, behave as if they were to all intents and purposes good Catholics. It will be said, perhaps, that the feelings to which the special character of the commemoration appeals are so common to all human hearts that the manifestation of them on any customary occasion is in no degree to be wondered at. But I do not think that this will suffice to explain the phenomenon—at least as it may be witnessed here in Italy. Other church ordinances might be pointed out of which the same thing might be said, but which are not similarly observed. The real cause of the phenomenon I take to be that this population is—as it was of old, and as it always has been through all outward changes—pagan. I put it crudely for the sake of putting it shortly, for this is not the place to trouble the readers of a few paragraphs of "Gossip" with a dissertation in support of the assertion. The innate paganism of these people, born of the beauty of the climate and of all external Nature, and of the sensuous proclivity to live and breathe and have their being in the present and the visible which results therefrom, first forcibly shaped their early Christianity into moulds which assimilated it to pagan observances and modes of thought, and still remains ready to resume more and more of its old empire as the authority of Church beliefs waxes feeble. The very striking and singular scene which was to be witnessed in the great Roman cemetery outside the Porta di San Lorenzo on the second day of November was to all intents and purposes pagan in its spirit and meaning. And it is curious to observe in this, as in so many other instances, how the use of words supplies illustrations of national peculiarities and specialties of character. The Church has dedicated the day in question to the commemoration "omnium animarum"—of all souls. And we others, people of a Teutonic race, have taken and used the phrase in its proper Christian sense: we talk of "All Souls' Day." But with the peoples of the Latin stock all thought or question of "souls" is very speedily lost sight of. With them the day is simply the "Giorno dei Morti"—the day of the dead. And their observance of it is to all intents and purposes what it might have been two thousand years ago.

The very ancient church of San Lorenzo, one of the four extramural basilicas, is situated some ten minutes' walk outside the gate of the same name on the road to Tivoli; and around and behind this church is the vast cemetery to which all the Roman dead are carried. It was first used as an extramural cemetery at the time of the first French occupation, but has been very greatly extended since that time. Clergy, nobles and monks were at first, and as long as Papal rule lasted, exempted from the decree which forbade interment within the city. Now all must be taken to San Lorenzo, and the greatly increased population of the city has already very thickly filled an immense area. The first thing that strikes the visitor to this huge necropolis is the very marked division between the poor and the rich quarters of this city of the dead. The fashionable districts are quite as unmistakably divided and separated from those occupied by "the lower classes" as they are in any city of the living; as is perhaps but right and natural in the case of a population among which it is held that the condition and prospects of the dead may be very materially influenced by a quantum sufficit of masses said for them, and where these can be purchased in any quantity for cash. A very large parallelogram, for the most part surrounded by cloisters, is first entered from the gates which open on the road. But this has been but little used as yet. Beyond it, to the right, is the vast space occupied by the graves of the multitude. Let the reader picture to himself a huge flat space extending as far as the eye can see, thickly planted with little black wooden crosses, with inscriptions on them in white letters. The sameness of all these fragile memorials produces a strange and depressing effect. The undistinguished thousands of them make all the space seem black spotted with white. They are ugly; and the poverty of these bits of painted stick, incapable of resisting the effects of the weather, seems sordid in the extreme. In the graves of this part of the cemetery all are in truth equal. To the left of the vast cloister-surrounded square which has been mentioned the scene is a very different one. There, immediately behind the eastern end of the basilica, the soil rises in a very steep bank to a height greater than that of the church. To the space on the top of this bank a handsome and garden-decorated flight of step leads; and there the "Upper Ten" take their dignified rest, and their dust is perfectly safe from all danger of being mingled with that of less distinguished mortality. This higher ground is called the Pincetto—as who should say the "Little Pincian"—a name adapted from that of the celebrated promenade of the gay and fortunate in life, with a suggestion of meaning so satirical that it might seem to have been given to the "fashionable" quarter of the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor, and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of numerous weeping willows and other such botanical helps to sentiment. The great majority of the inscriptions are in Latin, for Pius IX., so long as his power lasted, absolutely forbade the use of any other language; which was a measure of very questionable judiciousness, seeing that a large crop of Latinity by no means creditable to Italian scholarship has been the result. It would have been better to stick to good Della-Cruscan Italian, or to have employed some English school-usher to come here as resident reviser of Roman Latinity. Inelegant and even ungrammatical inscriptions, however, do not interfere with the general picturesqueness of the spot, or with its singular adaptation to show to advantage the remarkable scene enacted there on the last "Giorno dei Morti."

The cemetery had been visited by great numbers of persons, bringing chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one, which did not make the scene by any means less strange and weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially in the poor quarter of the dead city, were women. Such is always the case, whether it be that the female mind is more generally accessible to gentle thoughts of and yearnings over their lost ones, or whether the explanation be simply that, as is especially the case here, women, having less to occupy their leisure either in the way of business or amusement, are more eager to seek any emotion or occasion which may serve to break the flat monotony of their lives.

Certainly the scene in the cemetery on the evening of the "Day of the Dead" was one calculated to make an impression not to be readily forgotten by any mere looker-on who witnessed it. Nor was that presented by the road from the gate to the cemetery less remarkable in its way. It is an ugly, disagreeable bit of road, between high walls, deep with mud in wet, and with dust in dry weather, as was the case on the present occasion, and without the smallest vestige of a pathway for foot-passengers; so that the motley crowd, with their lights and chaplets and flowers, had to make their way amid a cloud of dust and among the carriages of those bound for the "Pincetto" as best they might. But it was the general apparent mood and temper of mind in which these pilgrims, bound on so sad an errand, seemed to be performing their self-imposed task that was especially noteworthy. It might be supposed that a certain degree of reverential self-concentration, or at least of quietude, would have been the characteristic of a crowd bound on such an errand. There was not the smallest symptom of anything of the sort. It is true that many visit the cemetery on the evening in question who have not recently lost any relative or friend, going thither merely as performing an act of devotion or of amusement, or, as is usually the case with all devotion in this country, of both combined. But the greater number of the pilgrims is composed of those who have buried their dead within the preceding year. Yet, as I have said, there was observable in the bearing of the crowd not only no reverential feeling, but not even that amount of quietude which the most careless body of people of our race would have deemed it but decent to assume on such an occasion. Laughter might have been heard, though not perhaps very much. But the noise was astonishing—noise of incessant chatter in tones which bespoke anything but the tone of mind which might have been expected. The truth is, that he who expects to find in the people of this race the sentiment of awe or reverence under any circumstances whatever does not know them. It is not in them. The capacity for it is not in them. It is not a question of more or less education, or of this or that condition of life. The higher and the lower classes, the clergy and the laity, are equally destitute of the capacity for feeling or comprehending the sentiment which makes so large a part of the lives of the people of a different race. To me the observation, far from being suggested by what met my eye on the occasion in question, is the outcome of more than a quarter of a century's experience of Italian ways and thoughts. But the exhibition of the peculiarity on that occasion was very striking. Doubtless there was many a mother among that throng whose heart had been wrung, whose very soul had been struck chill within her, by the loss of the child on whose grave she was about to place the humble tribute of common flowers which she carried in her hand. No doubt many a truly-sorrowing husband and yet more deeply-stricken wife were on the way to visit the sod beneath which their hopes of happiness had been buried with their lost ones. But whatever might have been in their hearts was not manifested by any token of reverential feeling. There were tears, there were even sobs occasionally to be heard, but there was neither reverence nor what we should deem decency of behavior.

Within the cemetery "distance lent enchantment to the view." As seen from the cloister which surrounds the great square, as has been mentioned, the outlook over the "poor quarter" of the vast burial-ground was very striking. Amid the wilderness of black crosses, which extends farther than eye could see, numerous figures were flitting hither and thither, many of them with lights in their hands. In the farther distance, where the figures were invisible, the lights could still be seen mysteriously, as it seemed, moving over the closely-ranged graves like corpse-candles, as the old superstition termed the phosphoric lights which may in certain states of the atmosphere be seen in crowded graveyards. In the foreground, where the figures could be distinguished, many were seen on their knees in the damp and malarious evening air at the graves of their lost relatives. But not even in the bearing these could anything of real earnestness be traced. They were performing a routine duty, of which no doubt their own consciences and their friends and neighbors would have disapproved the omission; and that was all. Nevertheless, the picturesqueness of the general effect was perfect, and it appealed to the imagination of a looker-on in a manner which to many minds, more intent on sensational emotions than on discrimination of social characteristics, would have caused the above remarks to appear sadly ill-timed and out of place.

The scene which was meantime being enacted on the Pincetto, where the wholly separated resting-places of the "Upper Ten" protest so successfully against the leveling notion that in death all are equal, I might have suggested many a mordant epigram to the cynically-minded visitor. I fear that there is often something provocative of cynicism in sundry of the aspects of fashionable devotion, but on such an occasion as the present it could hardly be otherwise. Rachels in Parisian bonnets and sweeping silk skirts, muttering over their rosaries for their children on splendid cushions borne in due state by attendant plush-clothed ministers, were contrasted in these realms of the universal Leveler somewhat too strongly with the scene one had just left in the (physically and socially) lower regions of the cemetery. Of course hearts that beat beneath silken bodices may be wrung as bitterly as those that serge covers. I am speaking only of those outward manifestations which contributed to complete the strangeness of the general spectacle which I had come out to see. The better tending of the aristocratic portion of the cemetery, and the greater space between the graves and their monuments, made it of course easier and less disagreeable to pass among them and to note the bearing of individual mourners. If the former scene had presented much that was indecorously formal, here all was decorously formal. The routine, cut-and-dry nature of the duty being performed exercised in either case its property of numbing natural feeling, or at least the appearance of it.

On the whole, the experience offered by a visit to the great Roman cemetery on the evening of the "Giorno dei Morti" is a singular and curious one, as will be admitted, I think, by any one who may be tempted by my example to go and see it.

T.A.T.

MR. MILL'S MOTHER.

The publication of the late Mr. John Mill's Theism (writes a correspondent from England) has again brought forward its author and his peculiarities as subjects of general conversation. Not content with having talked these matters pretty well over some months ago, people are at this moment discussing them with not a whit less of interest than if they were brand-new. But it is what Mr. Mill has omitted to tell us in his Autobiography, quite as much as what he has there told us, that excites popular curiosity about him. How came it that a man whose admiration of his wife was hardly distinguishable from idolatry should never once mention his mother? Thousands have asked, and have asked in vain, who she was, and whether she could have been so entirely insignificant as to deserve being passed over, without even so much as an allusion to her, by her very philosophic son. These questions, and others connected with them, I might answer at length. However, the few facts I shall here state will perhaps be no less welcome than a long detail. The wife of James Mill, and mother of John Mill, was a Miss Burrows, daughter of a Dr. Burrows who superintended an asylum for the insane at Islington. She died in London about twenty years ago, having outlived her husband not quite that period. Her children were nine in number, of whom four daughters are still living—two in England and two in France. She was not what would be reckoned a conspicuously intellectual woman, and yet she by no means deserved the heartless slight which was put on her memory by her son. Indeed, such a slight could have its justification in little short of utter worthlessness; and Mrs. James Mill was not only esteemed, but beloved, by a large circle of friends. On the appearance of the Autobiography her daughters were, naturally enough, not a little indignant at finding their mother as much ignored in it as if she had never existed, and were inclined, at first, to supplement, publicly, their brother's account of himself by certain disclosures not exactly of a character to exalt him in the estimation of the world. Suffice it to say here that for many years before his death he had been estranged from his family; and this estrangement was attributed, by those who had the best opportunities of judging, to the sinister influence of his wife. This is all that I am disposed to communicate at present, but I should not be at all surprised if we were to know, by and by, much more of the private life of John Mill than we as yet know.