My white teeth are my pearlins,
My diamonds my own black eyes;
My bed is the soft green meadow,
My palace the world as it lies.
Free is the bird in the air,
And the fish where the river flows;
Free is the deer in the forest,
And the gypsy wherever he goes.
Hurrah!
And the gypsy wherever he goes.
There is a deep, strange element in the gypsy character, which finds no
sympathy or knowledge in the German, and very little in other Europeans,
but which is so much in accord with the Slavonian and Hungarian that he
who truly feels it with love is often disposed to mingle them together.
It is a dreamy mysticism; an indefinite semi-supernaturalism, often
passing into gloom; a feeling as of Buddhism which has glided into
Northern snows, and taken a new and darker life in winter-lands. It is
strong in the Czech or Bohemian, whose nature is the worst understood in
the civilized world. That he should hate the German with all his heart
and soul is in the order of things. We talk about the mystical Germans,
but German self-conscious mysticism is like a problem of Euclid beside
the natural, unexpressed dreaminess of the Czech. The German mystic goes
to work at once to expound his "system" in categories, dressing it up in
a technology which in the end proves to be the only mystery in it. The
Bohemian and gypsy, each in their degrees of culture, form no system and
make no technology, but they feel all the more. Now the difference
between true and imitative mysticism is that the former takes no form; it
is even narrowed by religious creeds, and wing-clipt by pious
"illumination." Nature, and nature alone, is its real life. It was from
the Southern Slavonian lands that all real mysticism, and all that higher
illumination which means freedom, came into Germany and Europe; and after
all, Germany's first and best mystic, Jacob Bohme, was Bohemian by name,
as he was by nature. When the world shall have discovered who the as yet
unknown Slavonian German was who wrote all the best part of "Consuelo,"
and who helped himself in so doing from "Der letzte Taborit," by
Herlossohn, we shall find one of the few men who understood the Bohemian.
Once in a while, as in Fanny Janauschek, the Czech bursts out into art,
and achieves a great triumph. I have seen Rachel and Ristori many a
time, but their best acting was shallow compared to Janauschek's, as I
have seen it in by-gone years, when she played Iphigenia and Medea in
German. No one save a Bohemian could ever so _intuit_ the gloomy
profundity and unearthly fire of the Colchian sorceress. These are the
things required to perfect every artist,--above all, the tragic
artist,--that the tree of his or her genius shall not only soar to heaven
among the angels, but also have roots in the depths of darkness and fire;
and that he or she shall play not only to the audience, and in sympathy
with them, but also unto one's self and down to one's deepest dreams.
No one will accuse me of wide discussion or padding who understands my
drift in this chapter. I am speaking of the gypsy, and I cannot explain
him more clearly than by showing his affinities with the Slavonian and
Magyar, and how, through music and probably in many other ways, he has
influenced them. As the Spaniard perfectly understands the objective
vagabond side of the Gitano, so the Southeastern European understands the
musical and wild-forest yearnings of the Tsigane. Both to gypsy and
Slavonian there is that which makes them dream so that even debauchery
has for them at times an unearthly inspiration; and as smoking was
inexpressibly sacred to the red Indians of old, so that when the
Guatemalan Christ harried hell, the demons offered him cigars; in like
manner tipsiness is often to the gypsy and Servian, or Czech, or Croat,
something so serious and impressive that it is a thing not to be lightly
thought of, but to be undertaken with intense deliberation and under due
appreciation of its benefits.
Many years ago, when I had begun to feel this strange element I gave it
expression in a poem which I called "The Bohemian," as expressive of both
gypsy and Slavonian nature:--