And we drew near the tent and greeted its owner, who was equally astonished and delighted at seeing such distinguished Romany tāni rānis, or gypsy young ladies, and brought forth his wife and three really beautiful children to do the honors. W. was a good specimen of an American-born gypsy, strong, healthy, clean, and temperate, none the worse for wear in out-of-dooring, through tropical summers and terrible winters. Like all American Romanys, he was more
straightforward than most of his race in Europe. All Romanys are polite, but many of the European kind are most uncomfortably and unconsciously naïve. Strange that the most innocent people should be those who most offend morality. I knew a lady once—Heaven grant that I may never meet with such another!—who had been perfectly educated in entire purity of soul. And I never knew any devergondée who could so shock, shame, and pain decent people as this Agnes did in her sweet ignorance.
“I shall never forget the first day you came to my camp,” said W. to Britannia. “Ah, you astonished me then. You might have knocked me down with a feather. And I didn’t know what to say. You came in a carriage with two other ladies. And you jumped out first, and walked up to me, and cried, ‘Sa’shān!’ That stunned me, but I answered, ‘Sa’shān.’ Then I didn’t speak Romanes to you, for I didn’t know but what you kept it a secret from the other two ladies, and I didn’t wish to betray you. And when you began to talk it as deep as any old Romany I ever heard, and pronounced it so rich and beautiful, I thought I’d never heard the like. I thought you must be a witch.”
“Awer me shom chovihani” (but I am a witch), cried the lady. “Mukka men jā adré o tan.” (Let us go into the tent.) So we entered, and sat round the fire, and asked news of all the wanderers of the roads, and the young ladies, having filled their pockets with sweets, produced them for the children, and we were as much at home as we had ever been in any salon; for it was a familiar scene to us all, though it would, perhaps, have been a strange one to the reader, had
he by chance, walking that lonely way in the twilight, looked into the tent and asked his way, and there found two young ladies—bien mises—with their escort, all very much at their ease, and talking Romany as if they had never known any other tongue from the cradle.
“What is the charm of all this?” It is that if one has a soul, and does not live entirely reflected from the little thoughts and little ways of a thousand other little people, it is well to have at all times in his heart some strong hold of nature. No matter how much we may be lost in society, dinners, balls, business, we should never forget that there is an eternal sky with stars over it all, a vast, mysterious earth with terrible secrets beneath us, seas, mountains, rivers, and forests away and around; and that it is from these and what is theirs, and not from gas-lit, stifling follies, that all strength and true beauty must come. To this life, odd as he is, the gypsy belongs, and to be sometimes at home with him by wood and wold takes us for a time from “the world.” If I express myself vaguely and imperfectly, it is only to those who know not the charm of nature, its ineffable soothing sympathy,—its life, its love. Gypsies, like children, feel this enchantment as the older grown do not. To them it is a song without words; would they be happier if the world brought them to know it as words without song, without music or melody? I never read a right old English ballad of sumere when the leaves are grene or the not-broune maid, with its rustling as of sprays quivering to the song of the wode-wale, without thinking or feeling deeply how those who wrote them would have been bound to the Romany. It is ridiculous to say that gypsies are not “educated”
to nature and art, when, in fact, they live it. I sometimes suspect that æsthetic culture takes more true love of nature out of the soul than it inspires. One would not say anything of a wild bird or deer being deficient in a sense of that beauty of which it is a part. There are infinite grades, kinds, or varieties of feeling of nature, and every man is perfectly satisfied that his is the true one. For my own part, I am not sure that a rabbit, in the dewy grass, does not feel the beauty of nature quite as much as Mr. Ruskin, and much more than I do.
No poet has so far set forth the charm of gypsy life better than Lenau has done, in his highly-colored, quickly-expressive ballad of “Die drei Zigeuner,” of which I here give a translation into English and another into Anglo-American Romany.
THE THREE GYPSIES.
I saw three gypsy men, one day,
Camped in a field together,
As my wagon went its weary way,
All over the sand and heather.And one of the three whom I saw there
Had his fiddle just before him,
And played for himself a stormy air,
While the evening-red shone o’er him.And the second puffed his pipe again
Serenely and undaunted,
As if he at least of earthly men
Had all the luck that he wanted.In sleep and comfort the last was laid,
In a tree his cymbal [238] lying,
Over its strings the breezes played,
O’er his heart a dream went flying.Ragged enough were all the three,
Their garments in holes and tatters;
But they seemed to defy right sturdily
The world and all worldly matters.Thrice to the soul they seemed to say,
When earthly trouble tries it,
How to fiddle, sleep it, and smoke it away,
And so in three ways despise it.And ever anon I look around,
As my wagon onward presses,
At the gypsy faces darkly browned,
And the long black flying tresses.TRIN ROMANI CHALIA.
Dikdom me trin geeria
Sār yeckno a tacho Rom,
Sā miro wardo ghias adūr
Apré a wafedo drom.O yeckto sos boshengero,
Yuv kellde pes-kokero,
O kamlo-dūd te perelé
Sos lullo apré lo.O duito sār a swägele
Dikde ’pré lestes tūv,
Ne kamde kūmi, penava me
’Dré sār o midúvels pūv.O trinto sovadé kushto-bāk
Lest ’zimbel adré rukk se,
O bavol kelld’ pré i tavia,
O sutto ’pré leskro zī.Te sār i lengheri rūdaben
Shan katterdi-chingerdo
Awer me penav’ i Romani chals
Ne kesserden chi pā lo.Trin dromia lende sikkerden kan
Sār dikela wafedo,
Ta bosher, tuver te sove-a-lé
Ajā sā bachtalo.Dikdom palal, sā ghiom adūr
Talla yeckno Romani chal
’Pré lengheri kāli-brauni mūi,
Te lengheri kāli bal.