Did the Tziganes bring their music ready-made into Hungary, or did they find it there and merely adopt it? is a question which has occasioned much learned controversy. Liszt inclines to the former opinion, which would mean that no Hungarian music existed previous to the Tziganes’ arrival in the country in the fifteenth century. That this music is essentially of an Asiatic character is, however, no positive proof in favor of this theory, for are not the Hungarians themselves an out-wandered Asiatic race? and what more natural than the supposition that one Asiatic race should be the best interpreter of the music of a kindred people? More likely, however, this music is an unconscious joint production of the two, the Tzigane being the artist who has sounded the depths of the Hungarian nature and given expression to it. I remember once asking a distinguished Polish lady—Princess C——, herself a notable musician and pupil of the great Chopin—whether she ever played Hungarian music. “No,” she answered, “I cannot play it; there is something in that music which I have not got—something wanting in me.” What was here wanting I came to understand later, when I became familiar with Hungarian music as rendered by the Tzigane players. It was the training of several generations of gypsy life which was here wanting—a training which alone teaches the secret of deciphering those wild strains which seem borrowed from the voice of the tempest, or stolen from whispering reeds. In order to have played Hungarian music aright she would have required to have slept on mountain-tops during a score of years, to have been bathed over and over again in falling dews, to have shared the food of eagles and squirrels, and have been on equally intimate terms with stags and snakes—conditions which, unfortunately, lie quite out of the reach of delicate Polish ladies! Music was the only art within the Tzigane’s reach, for despite his vividness of imagination and the continual state of inspiration in which he may be said to live, he could never have been a poet, painter, or sculptor to any eminent degree, because of the fitfulness of his nature, and of his incapacity to clothe his inspirations in a precise image, or reduce them to a given form. Every man has the impulse to manifest his feelings in some way or other, and music was the only way open to the Tzigane, as being the one solitary art which, _à la rigueur_, can dispense with a scientific training and be taught by instinct alone.