II.
Mr. Leland’s style of reasoning, his lack of candour, and his reserve as to how he took up the Gipsy question, and to whom he had been indebted at first for some of his ideas, detract very much from the desire that one would naturally have to put confidence in him. His many confident assertions about what others have grave doubts and his frequent contradictions have a similar effect.
In The Gipsies there is very little told us of the race in America (not American Gipsies) of any kind, and yet Mr. Leland says that it 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” (Pref. III.).
In my Preface I said:—
“To the American reader generally the work will illustrate a phase of life and history with which it may be reasonably assumed he is not much conversant; for, although he must have some knowledge of the Gipsy race generally, there is no work, that I am aware of, that treats of the body like the present” (p. 7).
And I illustrated the race in America in notes to the work, and in as much as I could well introduce in my long Disquisition, bringing in that part of it which had its origin perhaps from the settlement of the American Colonies. When Mr. Leland borrowed from my work for his article in Johnson’s Cyclopædia he gave the name of the book with the London imprint, while from the first page to the last it showed that it was an American book, based on a Scotch MS.; and the copy which he used in all probability bore a New York imprint.
I admit this of Mr. Leland, that, by availing himself of the hard labours of others, at least to give him a start, he has added greatly to our knowledge of the Gipsy language, so far as I know and can judge; but that is nearly all that can be said of him. What he has told us of the information got from a native of India as to the Gipsies there being called “Syrians” shows that he was merely in good luck in falling in with the man from whom he obtained it; while, if it is reliable, it confirms my conjecture, although of that it does not seem to have been his business to inform the world. His chapter on the “Shelta or Tinkers’ Talk,” picked up also as it were by accident from a stray tinker, is indeed of great interest; but the world has reason to question his judgment when he says that “it is, in fact, a language, for it can be spoken grammatically, and without using English or Romany” (p. 371). Another occasion for questioning his judgment is when he says that “Mr. [Walter] Simson, had he known the ‘Tinklers’ better, would have found that, not Romany, but Shelta was the really secret language which they employed, although Romany is also more or less familiar to them all” (p. 371); for almost anyone by reading the History can see the absurdity of it. [15]
This book of Mr. Leland (although described in the Preface as “Sketches of experiences among the Gipsies”), to justify its title of The Gipsies, should have been constructed on some plan and scientifically arranged, with a great variety of particulars, and no extraneous matter or padding in it. In place of that we have little but random sketches or scenes connected with the race. There is no principle running through it, for we are told in the Introduction that
“The day is coming when there will be no . . . wild wanderers . . . and certainly no Gipsies” (p. 15). And after describing how English sparrows have driven so many kinds of native birds out of Philadelphia, he says, “So the people of self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder sort . . . As a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child was perhaps born who would see the last Gipsy, ‘Somehow we feel sorry for that child’” (p. 15). And in describing English fairs, as represented by that at Cobham, he says, “In a few years the last of them will have been closed, and the last Gipsy will be there to look on” (p. 142).