[16] It is not only puzzling, but provoking to decide how to treat a writer like Mr. Leland, for sometimes he shows a great deal of knowledge of his subject, and sometimes apparently nothing of it—one assertion contradicting another on the same question. What in reality has an antipathy between birds, or the idea of “people of self-conscious culture and the man and factory,” or the destiny of the American Indians to do with the destiny of the Gipsies? For he says, “Gipsies in England are passing away as rapidly as Indians in North America” (The English Gipsies, Pref. X.). As a native of the United States, Mr. Leland must know that these Indians become extinct, and of the Gipsies in England that although there are comparatively few “dwellers in tents” of full blood, so called, there are many, many thousands of more or less mixed blood following various callings, or in various positions in life, as he has frequently admitted. The distinction between “old-fashioned” Gipsies and other members of the tribe is but trifling with the subject.
The following extracts from The English Gipsies and their Language are interesting:—
“Other writers have had much to say of their incredible distrust of Gorgios and unwillingness to impart their language, but I have always found them obliging and communicative” (Pref. V.).—“In every part of the world it is extremely difficult to get Romany words even from intelligent Gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them” (p. 17).—“Now the reader is possibly aware that of all difficult tasks, one of the most difficult is to induce a disguised Gipsy, or even a professed one, to utter a word of Romany to a man not of the blood” (p. 37).—“Be it remembered, reader, that in Germany, at the present day, the mere fact of being a Gipsy is still treated as a crime” (p. 74).—“Though the language of the Gipsies has been kept a great secret for centuries, still a few words have in England oozed out here and there from some unguarded crevice” (p. 78).—“The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their Gipsy life and nature from the Gorgios would of itself indicate the depths of singularity concealed beneath their apparent life” (p. 153).—“Behind it all . . . . the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived . . . and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways” (p. 156).—“A feeling of free-masonry, and of guarding a social secret, long after they leave the roads and become highly reputable members of society. But they have a secret, and no one can know them who has not penetrated it” (p. 174).
With all that has been said, the words which I have put in italics have a curious meaning—that the Gipsies in giving their language to “strangers” “may be willing with all their heart to communicate them”! I have explained this subject at length in the Disquisition (pp. 281 and 282) in reference to Mr. Borrow and others, not in regard to the willingness and stupidity, but the shuffling of the Gipsy in giving the meaning of words, although isolated and abstract ideas might occasionally puzzle some of them; for they translated to Mr. Borrow the Apostles’ Creed, sentence by sentence. The Lord’s Prayer, given by Mr. Borrow, Mr. Leland admits to be “pure English Gipsy” (p. 70). I do not think Mr. Leland states, with what stock of words and how acquired, he first approached the Gipsies, and how he used them, to get inside of the guard of the tribe.
[18] In the Preface to The English Gipsies and their Language, Mr. Leland says that all that it contains “was gathered directly from the Gipsies themselves” (v.); that he did not take “anything from Simson, Hoyland, or any other writer on the Romany race in England”; and that nothing is a “re-warming of that which was gathered by others” (x.). All that appears strictly true; yet he says nothing of how he was “put on the track for repeating or illustrating an ‘oft-told tale.’” But he says:—
“If I have not given in this book a sketch of the history of the Gipsies, or statistics of their numbers, or accounts of their social condition in different countries, it is because nearly everything of the kind may be found in the works of George Borrow and Walter Simson” (xi.).
He did not find much of the kind mentioned in Mr. Borrow’s books, so far as I remember, and omitted to say that I had written very fully on the points stated. It would have been interesting to have been told by Mr. Leland about his being “puzzled and muddled” at what he saw at Cobham Fair, how he came to write, nine years before that, as follows:—
“There have been thousands of swell Romany chals who have moved in sporting circles of a higher class than they are to be found in at the present day” (p. 92).—“It may be worth while to state, in this connection, that Gipsy blood intermingled with Anglo-Saxon, when educated, generally results in intellectual and physical vigour” (p. 174).—And where was it that he found the idea that John Bunyan was a member of the Gipsy race (p. 63), if it was not as elaborately given in my Disquisition?
[19a] One of Mr. Leland’s “confident assertions” is that “the English Gipsy cares not a farthing ‘to know anything about his race as it exists in foreign countries, or whence it came’”; which is not a fact. He seems to have misinterpreted the English Gipsy peculiarity which assimilates in appearance to the native English one, as I have written thus in the History of the Gipsies:—“Though Gipsies everywhere, they differ in some respects in the various countries which they inhabit. For example, an English Gipsy of pugilistic tendencies will, in a vapouring way, engage to thrash a dozen of his Hungarian brethren” (p. 359). And of the more mixed kind of Gipsies, I have said:—“In Great Britain the Gipsies are entitled, in one respect at least, to be called Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen; for their general ideas as men, as distinguished from their being Gipsies, and their language indicate them at once to be such, nearly as much as the common natives of these countries” (p. 372).—What is described very fully throughout the History, and especially in the note at pp. 342 and 343, about the different colours or castes of the Gipsies, meets Mr. Leland’s remarks about those who left India. Thus:—“What are full-blood Gipsies, to commence with? The idea itself is intangible; for, by adopting, more or less, wherever they have been, others into their body, during their singular history, a pure Gipsy, like the pure Gipsy language, is doubtless nowhere to be found” (p. 342).
[19b] With the limited space at his disposal for his cyclopædia article, Mr. Leland could not be expected to tell us much in it about the Gipsies. In it he says that “their hair seldom turns gray, even in advanced age, unless there be ‘white’ blood in their veins”; that, “like North American Indians, the Gipsies all walk with their feet straight”; and that “there are nearly 100 English Gipsy family names, most of which are represented in America.” And further:—“At the present day the Romany is the life of the entire vagabond population of the roads in England, it being almost impossible to find a tinker or petty hawker who is not part Gipsy. There are now but a few hundred full-blooded tent Gipsy persons in England (1874), but of . . . house-dwellers, who keep their Gipsy blood a secret, and of half-breeds . . . or of those affiliated by blood, all of whom possess the great secret of the Romany language to a greater or less degree, there are perhaps 20,000.” “The tinkers in England are all Gipsies.”