The Gypsies Part 1

The Gypsies.

by Charles G. Leland.

PREFACE.

The reader will find in this book sketches of experiences among gypsies of different nations by one who speaks their language and is conversant with their ways. These embrace descriptions of the justly famed musical gypsies of St. Petersburg and Moscow, by whom the writer was received literally as a brother; of the Austrian gypsies, especially those composing the first Romany orchestra of that country, selected by Liszt, and who played for their friend as they declared they had never played before for any man; and also of the English, Welsh, Oriental, and American brethren of the dark blood and the tents. I believe that the account of interviews with American gypsies will possess at least the charm of novelty, but little having as yet been written on this extensive and very interesting branch of our nomadic population. To these I have added a characteristic letter in the gypsy language, with translation by a lady, legendary stories, poems, and finally the substance of two papers, one of which I read before the British Philological Society, and the other before the Oriental Congress at Florence, in 1878. Those who study ethnology will be interested to learn from these papers, subsequently combined in an article in the "Sat.u.r.day Review," that I have definitely determined the existence in India of a peculiar tribe of gypsies, who are _par eminence_ the Romanys of the East, and whose language is there what it is in England, the same in vocabulary, and the chief slang of the roads. This I claim as a discovery, having learned it from a Hindoo who had been himself a gypsy in his native land. Many writers have suggested the Jats, Banjars, and others as probable ancestors or type-givers of the race; but the existence of the _Rom himself_ in India, bearing the distinctive name of Rom, has never before been set forth in any book or by any other writer. I have also given what may in reason be regarded as settling the immensely disputed origin of the word "Zingan," by the gypsies' own account of its etymology, which was beyond all question brought by them from India.

In addition to this I have given in a chapter certain conversations with men of note, such as Thomas Carlyle, Lord Lytton, Mr. Roebuck, and others, on gypsies; an account of the first and family names and personal characteristics of English and American Romanys, prepared for me by a very famous old gypsy; and finally a chapter on the "Shelta Thari," or Tinkers' Language, a very curious jargon or language, never mentioned before by any writer except Shakespeare. What this tongue may be, beyond the fact that it is purely Celtic, and that it does not seem to be identical with any other Celtic dialect, is unknown to me. I cla.s.s it with the gypsy, because all who speak it are also acquainted with Romany.

For an attempt to set forth the tone or feeling in which the sketches are conceived, I refer the reader to the Introduction.

When I published my "English Gypsies and their Language," a reviewer declared that I "had added nothing to our" (that is, his) "knowledge on the subject." As it is always pleasant to meet with a man of superior information, I said nothing. And as I had carefully read everything ever printed on the Romany, and had given a very respectable collection of what was new to me as well as to all my Romany rye colleagues in Europe, I could only grieve to think that such treasures of learning should thus remain hidden in the brain of one who had never at any time or in any other way manifested the possession of any remarkable knowledge. n.o.body can tell in this world what others may know, but I modestly suggest that what I have set forth in this work, on the origin of the gypsies, though it may be known to the reviewer in question, has at least never been set before the public by anybody but myself, and that it deserves further investigation. No account of the tribes of the East mentions the Rom or Trablus, and yet I have personally met with and thoroughly examined one of them. In like manner, the "Shelta Thari" has remained till the present day entirely unknown to all writers on either the languages or the nomadic people of Great Britain. If we are so ignorant of the wanderers among us, and at our very doors, it is not remarkable that we should be ignorant of those of India.

INTRODUCTION.

I have frequently been asked, "Why do you take an interest in gypsies?"

And it is not so easy to answer. Why, indeed? In Spain one who has been fascinated by them is called one of the _aficion_, or affection, or "fancy;" he is an _aficionado_, or affected unto them, and people there know perfectly what it means, for every Spaniard is at heart a Bohemian.

He feels what a charm there is in a wandering life, in camping in lonely places, under old chestnut-trees, near towering cliffs, _al pasar del arroyo_, by the rivulets among the rocks. He thinks of the wine skin and wheaten cake when one was hungry on the road, of the mules and tinkling bells, the fire by night, and the _cigarito_, smoked till he fell asleep.

Then he remembers the gypsies who came to the camp, and the black-eyed girl who told him his fortune, and all that followed in the rosy dawn and ever onward into starry night.

"Y se alegre el alma llena De la luz de esos luceros."

And his heart is filled with rapture At the light of those lights above.

This man understands it. So, too, does many an Englishman. But I cannot tell you why. Why do I love to wander on the roads to hear the birds; to see old church towers afar, rising over fringes of forest, a river and a bridge in the foreground, and an ancient castle beyond, with a modern village springing up about it, just as at the foot of the burg there lies the falling trunk of an old tree, around which weeds and flowers are springing up, nourished by its decay? Why love these better than pictures, and with a more than fine-art feeling? Because on the roads, among such scenes, between the hedge-rows and by the river, I find the wanderers who properly inhabit not the houses but the scene, not a part but the whole. These are the gypsies, who live like the birds and hares, not of the house-born or the town-bred, but free and at home only with nature.

I am at some pleasant watering-place, no matter where. Let it be Torquay, or Ilfracombe, or Aberystwith, or Bath, or Bournemouth, or Hastings. I find out what old churches, castles, towns, towers, manors, lakes, forests, fairy-wells, or other charms of England lie within twenty miles. Then I take my staff and sketch-book, and set out on my day's pilgrimage. In the distance lie the lines of the shining sea, with ships sailing to unknown lands. Those who live in them are the Bohemians of the sea, homing while roaming, sleeping as they go, even as gypsies dwell on wheels. And if you look wistfully at these ships far off and out at sea with the sun upon their sails, and wonder what quaint mysteries of life they hide, verily you are not far from being affected or elected unto the Romany. And if, when you see the wild birds on the wing, wending their way to the South, and wish that you could fly with them,--anywhere, anywhere over the world and into adventure,--then you are not far in spirit from the kingdom of Bohemia and its seven castles, in the deep windows of which AEolian wind-harps sing forever.

Now, as you wander along, it may be that in the wood and by some gra.s.sy nook you will hear voices, and see the gleam of a red garment, and then find a man of the roads, with dusky wife and child. You speak one word, "Sarishan!" and you are introduced. These people are like birds and bees, they belong to out-of-doors and nature. If you can chirp or buzz a little in their language and know their ways, you will find out, as you sit in the forest, why he who loves green bushes and mossy rocks is glad to fly from cities, and likes to be free of the joyous citizenship of the roads, and everywhere at home in such boon company.

When I have been a stranger in a strange town, I have never gone out for a long walk without knowing that the chances were that I should meet within an hour some wanderer with whom I should have in common certain acquaintances. These be indeed humble folk, but with nature and summer walks they make me at home. In merrie England I could nowhere be a stranger if I would, and that with people who cannot read; and the English-born Romany rye, or gentleman speaking gypsy, would in like manner be everywhere at home in America. There was a gypsy family always roaming between Windsor and London, and the first words taught to their youngest child were "Romany rye!" and these it was trained to address to me. The little tot came up to me,--I had never heard her speak before,--a little brown-faced, black-eyed thing, and said, "How-do, Omany 'eye?" and great was the triumph and rejoicing and laughter of the mother and father and all the little tribe. To be familiar with these wanderers, who live by dale and down, is like having the bees come to you, as they did to the Dacian damsel, whose death they mourned; it is like the attraction of the wild deer to the fair Genevieve; or if you know them to be dangerous outlaws, as some are, it is like the affection of serpents and other wild things for those whom nature has made their friends, and who handle them without fear. They are human, but in their lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and fox, and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with them have none for the forest and road, and cannot be rightly familiar with the witchery of wood and wold. There are many ladies and gentlemen who can well-nigh die of a sunset, and be enraptured with "bits" of color, and captured with scenes, and to whom all out-of-doors is as perfect as though it were painted by Millais, yet to whom the bee and bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in their true inner life strangers. And just as strange to them, in one sense, are the scenes in which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them only pictures, though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold in them the fairy-land of childhood. Only in Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa and the great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany, and this spell is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy have no words in which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it.

And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just as the old delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's beauty--the perfection of natural beauty--is rapidly vanishing in every country, and being replaced by the mingled real and unreal attractiveness of "cleverness," intellect, and fashion. No doubt the newer tend to higher forms of culture, but it is not without pain that he who has been "in the spirit" in the old Sabbath of the soul, and in its quiet, solemn sunset, sees it all vanishing. It will all be gone in a few years. I doubt very much whether it will be possible for the most unaffectedly natural writer to preserve any of its hieroglyphics for future Champollions of sentiment to interpret. In the coming days, when man shall have developed new senses, and when the blessed sun himself shall perhaps have been supplanted by some tremendous electrical light, and the moon be expunged altogether as interfering with the new arrangements for gravity, there will doubtless be a new poetry, and art become to the very last degree self-conscious of its cleverness, artificial and impressional; yet even then weary scholars will sigh from time to time, as they read in our books of the ancient purple seas, and how the sun went down of old into cloud-land, gorgeous land, and then how all dreamed away into night!

Gypsies are the human types of this vanishing, direct love of nature, of this mute sense of rural romance, and of _al fresco_ life, and he who does not recognize it in them, despite their rags and dishonesty, need not pretend to appreciate anything more in Callot's etchings than the skillful management of the needle and the acids. Truly they are but rags themselves; the last rags of the old romance which connected man with nature. Once romance was a splendid mediaeval drama, colored and gemmed with chivalry, minnesong, bandit-flashes, and waving plumes; now there remain but a few tatters. Yes, we were young and foolish then, but there are perishing with the wretched fragments of the red Indian tribes mythologies as beautiful as those of the Greek or Norseman; and there is also vanishing with the gypsy an unexpressed mythology, which those who are to come after us would gladly recover. Would we not have been pleased if one of the thousand Latin men of letters whose works have been preserved had told us how the old Etruscans, then still living in mountain villages, spoke and habited and customed? But oh that there had ever lived of old one man who, noting how feelings and sentiments changed, tried to so set forth the souls of his time that after-comers might understand what it was which inspired their art!

In the Sanskrit humorous romance of "Baital Pachisi," or King Vikram and the Vampire, twenty-five different and disconnected trifling stories serve collectively to ill.u.s.trate in the most pointed manner the highest lesson of wisdom. In this book the gypsies, and the scenes which surround them, are intended to teach the lesson of freedom and nature.

Never were such lessons more needed than at present. I do not say that culture is opposed to the perception of nature; I would show with all my power that the higher our culture the more we are really qualified to appreciate beauty and freedom. But gates must be opened for this, and unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land of delight.

The gypsy is one of many links which connect the simple feeling of nature with romance. During the Middle Ages thousands of such links and symbols united nature with religion. Thus Conrad von Wurtzburg tells in his "Goldene Schmiede" that the parrot which shines in fairest gra.s.s-green hue, and yet like common gra.s.s is never wet, sets forth the Virgin, who bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained unchanged. So the parrot and gra.s.s and green and shimmering light all blended in the ideal of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird appears in pictures by Van Eyck and Durer. To me the gypsy-parrot and green gra.s.s in lonely lanes and the rain and sunshine all mingle to set forth the inexpressible purity and sweetness of the virgin parent, Nature. For the gypsy is parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to wear that fatal fairy color.

These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany. The day is coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no wild nature, and certainly no gypsies. Within a very few years in the city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and cad of birds, has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful feathered creatures whom, as a boy, I knew. The fire-flashing scarlet tanager and the humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden oriole, are now almost forgotten, or unknown to city children. So the people of self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder sort, and it is all right, and so it must be, and therewith _basta_. But as a London reviewer said when I a.s.serted in a book that the child was perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, "Somehow we feel sorry for that child."

THE RUSSIAN GYPSIES.

It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of fancy. The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still "genial," because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual. We are not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated ma.n.u.scripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their late majesties the Georges. Until such a science is formed, the new one of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amus.e.m.e.nt.

For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval k.u.mbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with the quaint jewelry of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find,"

"speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested everybody in every age.

_Ad interim_, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves.

These are the Jew and the gypsy. From time whereof history hath naught to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the first man. Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings. Go where we may, we find the Jew--has any other wandered so far?

Yes, one. For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy. The Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a prehistoric caste. Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy. One thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast mult.i.tude of very troublesome indwellers. What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan wars,--invaders outlawing invaded,--the number of out-_castes_ became alarmingly great. To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton, const.i.tuted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their entire nation. Excommunication among the Indian professors of transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty.

Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a country where such cla.s.ses had already existed in very great numbers from early times. And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in India, and is known as the Dom, {19} the emigrants to the West probably derived their name and several characteristics. The Dom burns the dead, handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several centuries after their arrival there. The Dom of the present day also sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy. It is remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to excess, being by no means a "temperate Hindoo," and that even in extreme old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among our own gypsies of pure blood. I know and have often seen a gypsy woman, nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly perceptibly changed. It is extremely probable that the Dom, mentioned as a caste even in the Shastras, gave the name to the Rom. The Dom calls his wife a Domni, and being a Dom is "Domnipana." In English gypsy, the same words are expressed by _Rom_, _romni_, and _romnipen_. D, be it observed, very often changes to _r_ in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany. Thus _doi_, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy _roi_, a term known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance.

Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies went there, the word for man is _romi_, and after leaving Greece and the Levant, or _Rum_, it would be natural for the wanderers to be called _Rumi_. But the Dom was in all probability the parent stock of the gypsy race, though the latter received vast accessions from many other sources.

I call attention to this, since it has always been held, and sensibly enough, that the mere fact of the gypsies speaking Hindi-Persian, or the oldest type of Urdu, including many Sanskrit terms, does not prove an Indian or Aryan origin, any more than the English spoken by American negroes proves a Saxon descent. But if the Rom can be identified with the Dom--and the circ.u.mstantial evidence, it must be admitted, is very strong--but little remains to seek, since, according to the Shastras, the Doms are Hindoo.

Among the tribes whose union formed the European gypsy was, in all probability, that of the _Nats_, consisting of singing and dancing girls and male musicians and acrobats. Of these, we are told that not less than ten thousand lute-players and minstrels, under the name of _Luri_, were once sent to Persia as a present to a king, whose land was then without music or song. This word _Luri_ is still preserved. The saddle-makers and leather-workers of Persia are called Tsingani; they are, in their way, low caste, and a kind of gypsy, and it is supposed that from them are possibly derived the names Zingan, Zigeuner, Zingaro, etc., by which gypsies are known in so many lands. From Mr. Arnold's late work on "Persia," the reader may learn that the _Eeli_, who const.i.tute the majority of the inhabitants of the southern portion of that country, are Aryan nomads, and apparently gypsies. There are also in India the Banjari, or wandering merchants, and many other tribes, all spoken of as gypsies by those who know them.

As regards the great admixture of Persian with Hindi in good Romany, it is quite unmistakable, though I can recall no writer who has attached sufficient importance to a fact which identifies gypsies with what is almost preeminently the land of gypsies. I once had the pleasure of taking a Nile journey in company with Prince S---, a Persian, and in most cases, when I asked my friend what this or that gypsy word meant, he gave me its correct meaning, after a little thought, and then added, in his imperfect English, "What for you want to know such word?--that _old_ word--that no more used. Only common people--old peasant-woman--use that word--_gentleman_ no want to know him." But I did want to know "him"

very much. I can remember that one night, when our _bon prince_ had thus held forth, we had dancing girls, or Almeh, on board, and one was very young and pretty. I was told that she was gypsy, but she spoke no Romany. Yet her panther eyes and serpent smile and _beaute du diable_ were not Egyptian, but of the Indian, _kalo-ratt_,--the dark blood, which, once known, is known forever. I forgot her, however, for a long time, until I went to Moscow, when she was recalled by dancing and smiles, of which I will speak anon.

I was sitting one day by the Thames, in a gypsy tent, when its master, Joshua Cooper, now dead, pointing to a swan, asked me for its name in gypsy. I replied, "_Boro pappin_."

"No, _rya_. _Boro pappin_ is 'a big goose.' _Sakku_ is the real gypsy word. It is very old, and very few Romany know it."

A few days after, when my Persian friend was dining with me at the Langham Hotel, I asked him if he knew what Sakku meant. By way of reply, he, not being able to recall the English word, waved his arms in wonderful pantomime, indicating some enormous winged creature; and then, looking into the distance, and pointing as if to some far-vanishing object, as boys do when they declaim Bryant's address "To a Water-Fowl,"

said,--

"Sakku--one ver' big bird, like one _swen_--but he _not_ swen. He like the man who carry too much water up-stairs {22} his head in Constantinople. That bird all same that man. He _sakkia_ all same wheel that you see get water up-stairs in Egypt."

This was explanatory, but far from satisfactory. The prince, however, was mindful of me, and the next day I received from the Persian emba.s.sy the word elegantly written in Persian, with the translation, "_a pelican_." Then it was all clear enough, for the pelican bears water in the bag under its bill. When the gypsies came to Europe they named animals after those which resembled them in Asia. A dog they called _juckal_, from a jackal, and a swan _sakku_, or pelican, because it so greatly resembles it. The Hindoo _bandarus_, or monkey, they have changed to _bombaros_, but why Tom Cooper should declare that it is _pugasah_, or _pukkus-asa_, I do not know. {23} As little can I conjecture the meaning of the prefix _mod_, or _mode_, which I learned on the road near Weymouth from a very ancient tinker, a man so battered, tattered, seamed, riven, and wrinkled that he looked like a petrifaction.

He had so bad a barrow, or wheel, that I wondered what he could do with it, and regarded him as the very poorest man I had ever seen in England, until his mate came up, an _alter ego_, so excellent in antiquity, wrinkles, k.n.o.bbiness, and rags that he surpa.s.sed the vagabond pictures not only of Callot, Dore, and Goya, but even the unknown Spanish maker of a picture which I met with not long since for sale, and which for infinite poverty defied anything I ever saw on canvas. These poor men, who seemed at first amazed that I should speak to them at all, when I spoke Romany at once called me "brother." When I asked the younger his name, he sank his voice to a whisper, and, with a furtive air, said,--

"_Kamlo_,--Lovel, you know."

"What do you call yourself in the way of business?" I asked.

"_Katsamengro_, I suppose."

Now _Katsamengro_ means scissors-master.

"That is a very good word. But _chivo_ is deeper."

"_Chivo_ means a knife-man?"

"Yes. But the deepest of all, master, is _Modangarengro_. For you see that the right word for coals isn't _wongur_, as Romanys generally say, but _Angara_."

Now _angara_, as Pott and Benfey indicate, is pure Sanskrit for coals, and _angarengro_ is a worker in coals, but what _mod_ means I know not, and should be glad to be told.