A GIRL'S WANDERINGS IN HUNGARY.*
WE confess at once that we have never met a " mouse_ screeching " woman, nor are we sure what Miss H. Ellen Browning means when she applies that compound epithet to herself. It can hardly mean that she screeches " mouse " when there is no mouse, as the buy in the fable called " wolf ; " so we conclude that she considers herself a woman armed with the usual paraphernalia of feminine nerves, conscious of her weaknesses, and not ashamed of them, though she has expressed herself in a somewhat contradictory manner. It seems also to be a proof of some fine quality for a woman to wear "cloth knickers," invisible, we hasten to explain, and to be disgusted equally by garlic and drunken men. This last trait is, we imagine, peculiar to most women, whether they are " mouse-screeching " or " knicker-wearing" or not, but one thing we gather from Miss Browning's somewhat naive account of herself, and that is that she is frankly egotistical, and also that she is as frankly outspoken about the Hungarian friends of whose hospitality she partook. " Im- pressionableness," as Miss Browning says on p. 5, "has its advantages as well as its disadvantages; " but apparently it allows the person endued with that polysyllabic quality to discover what peasants are saying of her when they discuss her looks in an unknown tongue. Of course they are saying that the young lady "looks like a princess," just as later on a poetical cook calls her "angel-miss," and those in a higher class of life look on her as a "female Solomon," and consult her on every subject. Indeed, one " well-known speaker" asked her opinion on the measures to be introduced for the reform of the Upper House, and actually used her suggestion, "with some modifications," as an amendment to a Bill, which passed both Houses without much difficulty. Miss Browning records that she had a succiJs fou on her first attempt at dancing the ceardt'ui in public, that her favourite guide told her she climbed the mountains as nimbly as a Karpathian chamois, and some one else that she spoke the " very best German," so after this we are not surprised to hear that she is only twenty-three years of age, and has blue eyes and fair hair of silky texture. In one respect Miss Browning's narrative of her travels in Hungary recalls a somewhat similar account, published some years ago, of a • A Girl's Wanderings in Hungary. By IL Ellen Browning. London: Long- mane, Green, and Co. girl's solitary wanderings in the Karpathians, and that is in the minute detail with which encounters with insect pests are chronicled ; bat if we remember rightly the author of the former book of adventure wore her " knickers " conspicuously, and stayed among peasants and farmers, while Miss Browning conceals her manly garments under a feminine garb, and her friends are all highly " cultured " and generally of noble birth. There were certainly exceptions, for her hosts at Plizmand, where she first experienced the warmth of Hungarian hospitality, though wealthy and "cultured," were not nobles, not even genuine Magyars—" It did not take me long to discover that Society (with the biggest possible S') was the one aspiration of their lives "—but all their charm and their culture and their wealth availed them nothing, the owner of the estate bad been in trade, and had married a very beautiful Hungarian peasant, so the "charmed circle of the great world''" shut its doors inexorably upon him. Except for difficulties with a team of donkeys, and an encounter with a buffalo-bull which ended harmlessly, Miss Browning says truly that the adven- tures her soul thirsted for failed to come to her ; but it was a sufficiently adventurous feat for a young lady possessed of all the attractions we are told of to travel by herself in the less-known parts of Hungary, and we willingly add our mite of compliment to the general chorus of admiration with which she was surrounded, and we are glad to know that our country- women, whether " mouse-screeching " or otherwise, are so highly respected in Magyar-land. According to Miss Browning, "an Englishwoman can do things, almost any- where, with immunity, that might be fraught with dangers for a native. Our reputation amongst the Magyars is a high one. We are held to be distinguished' in our manners, irreproachable in our moral characters, and too-altogether- angelic in our general conduct for anything except the most distant of worship. Our fair hair, our blue eyes, and our pink and white complexion call forth admiration ; but we are too cold for the popular taste." The morals of the upper classes in Hungary are apparently the reverse of irreproachable, while among the Wallachian peasants the disregard of our conventional theories respecting marriage- laws caused Miss Browning, in her thirst for information, to receive many unexpected surprises. Her descriptions of towns and plains and forests, of gipsy music and dancing, and of the homely peasant interiors, are vivid and interesting, and she has a true love of picturesque scenery. Here is a description of the Buda hills:- " Their northern steeps are like Siberia in winter ; their southern slopes are like Sicily in summer. The wild fig grows and ripens there in the clefts of the Bloeksberg. Vineyards are everywhere, and wine is, to quote the words of the Hungarian poet, Gorey, the juice of the hills.' At some of the tiny inns up there I have tasted wines, nameless and without brand, that seemed full of living sunshine, and acted like a magic elixir on my frozen blood and tired limbs. A glass of wine and a slice of black carraway bread have often given me renewed energy to face the icy air and climb down again to the chain suspension- bridge that stretched like a cobweb across the mile of frozen river lying between me and Pest in the plain, standing out with its myriad lights clear against the dark, distant mountains that bounded the horizon."
The Alfold, the great plain of Hungary, possesses a peculiar charm of its own; its inhabitants differ from the mountaineers, as the Lowlanders in Scotland differ from the Highlanders. Though a railway runs across the plain, and the great swamps have been drained and turned into cornfields, there are yet districts "in which Nature rules supreme," and it has pro- duced a lyric poet, Skidor Petofy, a Barns of its own. By the way, Miss Browning says that Petay's " Pearls of Love " reminded her of Burns, of Byron, and of Eric Mackay. We imagine that when a few more years mellow her experience and develop her taste she will perhaps wonder at the youth- fulness that bracketed those three names together. Music plays an important part in the daily life of Hungary, each village has its gipsy band, the Hungarian women have good natural voices, and the men play on various instruments. Miss Browning heard a young Magyar girl singing folk-songs at Arad, and noted down some of the words. She remarks that most of these songs begin with an illustration from Nature, but some of her specimens are trite and of little interest, and they lack the extraordinary imagination of the Roumanian peasant songs. This is the best of them :-
" How ruffled is the face of Balaton !
A fisher o'er its waters rows his boat Trawling, and singing o'er his well-fill'd nets (He little knows his sweetheart plays him false). Like Balaton, my heart is ruffled too.
My grief is like the rocking boat upon it ; My love was once the helm, my soul the sail.
Ab, me ! my life is wrecked, for hope is gone !"
The Transylvanian swine-herd has his horn, the Theocritean shepherd "takes his long wooden flute with him, on which he loves to play melancholy folk-songs, lying stretched at ease, wrapped in his furry cloak ; " but the gipsies, despised as they are socially, are the principal professional musicians in the villages and towns. They have kept alive the old Hungarian songs and airs, and have handed down unwritten music ; they provide the accompaniment to the universal love of dancing and singing; no festivals or merry-makings can be success- fully organised without their assistance.
Hungary, with its plains and its mountains, its rivers and its vineyards, well repays the traveller in search of more untrodden ways, and we have read Miss Browning's account of the scenery, and the picturesque hospitable Magyars with interest. If she would prune her too luxuriant language, abjure hackneyed phrases, and such monstrosities as " paintable " and " shootable," and give us less of her own trite reflections, she would retain the equipment necessary for a successful writer of books of travel,—namely, pluck and endurance, an easy style, and a gift of vivid descriptiveness.
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