Matilda Betham Edwards, in her remarks upon Gipsies, says:—“Your pulses are quickened to Gipsy pitch, you are ready to make love or war, to heal and slay, to wander to the world’s end, to be outlawed and hunted down, to dare and do anything for the sake of the sweet, untramelled life of the tent, the bright blue sky, the mountain air, the free savagedom, the joyous dance, the passionate friendship, the fiery love.”
I come now to notice what a few of the poets have said about these ignorant, nomadic tribes, who have been skulking and flitting about in our midst, since the days of Borrow, Roberts, Hoyland, and Crabb—a period of over forty years.
“He grows, like the young oak, healthy and broad,
With no home but the forest, no bed but the sward;
Half-naked he wades in the limpid stream,
Or dances about in the scorching beam.
The dazzling glare of the banquet sheen
Hath never fallen on him I ween,
But fragments are spread, and the wood pine piled,
And sweet is the meal of the Gipsy child.”—Eliza Cook.“The Gipsy eye, bright as the star
That sends its light from heaven afar,
Wild with the strains of thy guitar,
This heart with rapture fill.
Then, maiden fair, beneath this star,
Come, touch me with the light guitar.
Thy brow unworked by lines of care,
Decked with locks of raven hair,
Seems ever beautiful and fair
At moonlight’s stilly hour.
What bliss! beside the leafy maze,
Illumined by the moon’s pale rays,
On thy sweet face to sit and gaze,
Thou wild, uncultured flower.
Then, maiden fair, beneath this star,
Come, touch me with the light guitar.”Hubert Smith: “Tent Life in Norway.”
“From every place condemned to roam,
In every place we seek a home;
These branches form our summer roof,
By thick grown leaves made weather-proof;
In shelt’ring nooks and hollow ways,
We cheerily pass our winter days.
Come circle round the Gipsy’s fire,
Come circle round the Gipsy’s fire,
Our songs, our stories never tire,
Our songs, our stories never tire.”—Reeve.“Where is the little Gipsy’s home?
Under the spreading greenwood tree,
Wherever she may roam,
Wherever that tree may be.
Roaming the world o’er,
Crossing the deep blue sea,
She finds on every shore,
A home among the free,
A home among the free,
Ah, voilà la Gitana, voilà la Gitana.”—Halliday.“He checked his steed, and sighed to mark
Her coral lips, her eyes so dark,
And stately bearing—as she had been
Bred up in courts, and born a queen.
Again he came, and again he came,
Each day with a warmer, a wilder flame,
And still again—till sleep by night
For Judith’s sake fled his pillow quite.”—Delta.“A race that lives on prey, as foxes do,
With stealthy, petty rapine; so despised,
It is not persecuted, only spurned,
Crushed under foot, warred on by chance like rats,
Or swarming flies, or reptiles of the sea,
Dragged in the net unsought and flung far off,
To perish as they may.”George Eliot: “The Spanish Gipsies,” 1865.
“Help me wonder, here’s a booke,
Where I would for ever looke.
Never did a Gipsy trace
Smoother lines in hands or face;
Venus here doth Saturne move
That you should be the Queene of Love.”Ben Jonson.
“Fond dreamer, pause! why floats the silvery breath
Of thin, light smoke from yonder bank of heath?
What forms are those beneath the shaggy trees,
In tattered tent, scarce sheltered from the breeze;
The hoary father and the ancient dame,
The squalid children, cowering o’er the flame?
Those were not born by English hearths to dwell,
Or heed the carols of the village bell;
Those swarthy lineaments, that wild attire,
Those stranger tones, bespeak an eastern sire;
Bid us in home’s most favoured precincts trace
The houseless children of a homeless race;
And as in warning vision seem to show
That man’s best joys are drowned by shades of woe.“Pilgrims of Earth, who hath not owned the spell
That ever seems around your tents to dwell;
Solemn and thrilling as the nameless dread
That guards the chambers of the silent dead!
The sportive child, if near your camp he stray,
Stands tranced with fear, and heeds no more his play;
To gain your magic aid, the love-sick swain,
With hasty footsteps threads the dusky lane;
The passing traveller lingers, half in sport,
And half in awe beside your savage court,
While the weird hags explore his palm to spell
What varied fates these mystic lines foretell.“The murmuring streams your minstrel songs supply,
The moss your couch, the oak your canopy;
The sun awakes you as with trumpet-call,
Lightly ye spring from slumber’s gentle thrall;
Eve draws her curtain o’er the burning west,
Like forest birds ye sink at once to rest.“Free as the winds that through the forest rush,
Wild as the flowers that by the wayside blush,
Children of nature wandering to and fro,
Man knows not whence ye came, nor where ye go;
Like foreign weeds cast upon Western strands,
Which stormy waves have borne from unknown lands;
Like the murmuring shells to fancy’s ears that tell
The mystic secrets of their ocean cell.“Drear was the scene—a dark and troublous time—
The Heaven all gloom, the wearied Earth all crime;
Men deemed they saw the unshackled powers of ill
Rage in that storm, and work their perfect will.
Then like a traveller, when the wild wind blows,
And black night flickers with the driving snows,
A stranger people, ’mid that murky gloom,
Knocked at the gates of awe-struck Christendom!
No clang of arms, no din of battle roared
Round the still march of that mysterious horde;
Weary and sad arrayed in pilgrim’s guise,
They stood and prayed, nor raised their suppliant eyes.
At once to Europe’s hundred shores they came,
In voice, in feature, and in garb the same.
Mother and babe and youth, and hoary age,
The haughty chieftain and the wizard sage;
At once in every land went up the cry,
‘Oh! fear us not—receive us or we die!’”Dean Stanley’s Prize Poem, 1837: “The Gipsies.”
Part IV.
Gipsy Life in a Variety of Aspects.
In Part III. I have endeavoured, as well as I have been able, to show some of the agencies that have been set in motion during the last three centuries for and against the Gipsies, with a view to their extermination, by the hang-man, to their being reclaimed by the religious zeal and fervour of the minister, and to their improvement by the artificial means of poetry, fiction, and romance. First, the persecution dealt out to the Gipsies in this, as well as other countries, during a period of several centuries, although to a large extent brought upon themselves by their horrible system of lying and deception, neither exterminated them nor improved their habits; but, on the contrary, they increased and spread like mushrooms; the oftener they were trampled upon the more they seemed to thrive; the more they were hated, hunted, and driven into hiding-places the oftener these sly, fortune-telling, lying foxes would be seen sneaking across our path, ready to grab our chickens and young turkeys as opportunities presented themselves. Second, that when stern justice said “it is enough,” persecution hanging down its hands and revenge drooping her head, a few noble-hearted men, filled with missionary zeal, took up the cause of the Gipsies for a period of nearly forty years in various forms and ways at the end of the last and the commencement of the present century. Except in a few isolated cases, they also failed in producing any noticeable
change in either the moral, social, or religious condition of the Gipsies, and with the death of Hoyland, Borrow, Crabb, Roberts, and others, died the last flicker of a flickering light that was to lead these poor, deluded, benighted heathen wanderers upon a road to usefulness, honesty, uprightness, and industry. Third, that on the decline of religious zeal, fervour, and philanthropy on behalf of the Gipsies more than forty years ago the spasmodic efforts of poets, novelists, and dramatists, in a variety of forms of fiction and romance, came to the front, to lead them to the goal through a lot of questionable by-lanes, queer places, and artificial lights, the result being that these melodramatic personages have left the Gipsies in a more pitiable condition than they were before they took up their cause, although they, in doing so, put “two faces under one hat,” blessing and cursing, smiling and frowning, all in one breath, praising their faults and sins, and damning their few virtues. In fact, to such a degree have fiction writers painted the black side of a Gipsy’s life, habits, and character in glowing colours that, to take another 20,000 men, women, and children out of our back slums and sink-gutters and write the word “Gipsy” upon their back, instead of “scamp,” and send them through the country with a few donkeys, some long sticks, old blankets and rags, dark eyes, dirty faces, filthy bodies, short petticoats, and old scarlet hoods and cloaks, you would in fifty years make this country not worth living in. It is my decided conviction that unless we are careful, and take the “bull by the horns,” and compel them to educate their children, and to put their habitations, tents, and vans under better sanitary arrangements, we shall be fostering seeds in these dregs of society that will one day put a stop to the work of civilisation, and bring to an end the advance in arts, science, laws, and commerce that have been making such rapid strides in this country of late years.
It is more pleasant to human nature to sit upon a stile on a midsummer eve, down a country lane, in the twilight, as the
shades of evening are gathering around you, the stars twinkling over head, the little silver stream rippling over the pebbles at your feet in sounds like the distant warbling of the lark, and the sweet notes of the nightingale ringing in your ears, than to visit the abodes of misery, filth, and squalor among the Gipsies in their wigwams. It is more agreeable to the soft parts of our hearts and our finer feelings to listen to the melody and harmony of lively, lovely damsels as they send forth their enchanting strains than to hear the cries of the poor little, dirty Gipsy children sending forth their piteous moans for bread. It is more delightful to the poetic and sentimental parts of our nature to guide over the stepping-stones a number of bright, sharp, clean, lively, interesting, little dears, with their “hoops,” “shuttle-cocks,” and “battle-doors,” than to be seated among a lot of little ragged, half-starved Gipsy children, who have never known what soap, water, and comb are. It is more in harmony with our sensibilities to sit and listen to the drollery, wit, sarcasm, and fun of Punch than to the horrible tales of blood, revenge, immorality, and murder that some of the adult Gipsies delight in setting forth. It is more in accordance with our feelings to sit and admire the innocent, angelic being, the perfection of the good and beautiful, than to sit by the hardened, wicked, ugly, old Gipsy woman who has spent a lifetime in sin and debauchery, cursing the God who made her as she expires. Nevertheless, these things have to be done if we are to have the angelic beings from the other world ministering to our wants, and wafting us home as we leave our tenement of clay behind to receive the “Well done.”
I will now, as we pass along, endeavour to show what the actual condition of the Gipsies has been in the past, and what it is at the present time, which, in some cases, has been touched upon previously, with reference to the moral, social, and religious traits in their character that go to the making up of a man—the noblest work of God. The peculiar fascinating charms about them, conjured up by