The Gypsy Girls

The Music and Dancing of the Wandering Tribes

ARTHUR SYMONS

IN the tragic and passionate youth of the Gypsy girls, one finds often an hieratic beauty, with their oblique eyes, and mouths woven into sinister smiles; with their faces curiously traced into a work of art; with, one imagines, a consciousness as pale and vague as the moon they worship. The soul, one wonders, behind those eyes? The temperament under that, at times, almost terrifying mask? And some have the drowsy and inarticulate beauty of the serpent.

And there are those who are feline, furtive, feverish, whose regards fascinate us by their magic malignities. Living lies, they have the harmony of music. Chaste as it seems, by no miracle, but by the instinct in their blood, they have all the fire and all the spices of an infernal coquetry; when they dance, as in Spain, they dance the dances of the daughter of Herodias, poisonous flowers, exotic. They are the clairvoyants, as Pater says of the Daughters of Herodias painted by Leonardo da Vinci, "through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of expression, which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve, and the keener touch can follow; it is as if in certain revealing instances we actually saw them at their work with human flesh."

DO not the dancing-girls one admires so immensely seem actually to touch, to mingle with us? The air grows thick in the musichall at the mere turn of their skirts; a shiver passes across one, a shiver of strange emotion; then a perverse hallucination; then a nervous excitement; and all the time one holds one's breath, as one sways bodily, unconsciously, to the rhythm of the Gitana's body, of her beckoning hands, of the glittering smile that comes and goes in her eyes. And in these dances there is something of mere gaminerie and something of the devil; there is a coldness even in their frenzy; and, above and beyond all these, a very learned art of love.

AMONG the many passions of the foreign gypsy is that for music. They talk with their violin; they imagine it has a soul, that the strings are made out of a woman's heart. As they play they are tormented into agonies, raised into raptures, plunged into depths; seized on the wings of their irregular imaginations. The Hungarian Gypsies are the most naturally musical people in the world. Music is their instinctive means of expression: it comes of itself, they never learn it. They hold their violin in almost every position but the normal one: against the middle of the chest, on the shoulder near the ear, on the knee. Their fingering is elementary: they pluck at the strings with all their fingers at once, as if they would tear the heart out of the tormented fiddle. And it is the heart that cries and sobs, and is happy and exults, in the joyful agonies of the csárdás. In its keen intensity and profuse ornamentation, an arabesque of living flame, it islike nothing else in music.

AND their music, I think, at times, is after all, scarcely music; but rather nerves, a suspense, a wheeling of wings around a fixed point. In this mournfulness, this recoil and return, there is a kind of spring and clutch; a native wildness speaks in it, as it speaks in the eyes of these dark, animals, with their look of wild beasts eying their keepers. It is a crushed revolt, and it cries out of a storm. It is tigerish, at once stealthy and wild, and it draws everything into its own net. Hungarian Gypsy music is a music full of surprises, always turning along unexpected ways; the music of a race whose roots, are exotic, unusual, and wholly outside Europe.