Profound research and philosophical observation and reasoning do not seem to constitute Mr. Leland’s forte. It is a little puzzling to decide how to treat a man like him; for his “confident assertions” in regard to the disappearance, or what some would call the extinction, of the race are but “contradictions” of his own information and opinions; saying nothing of what I published at great length on the perpetuation of the Gipsies in a settled state, all of which he admits having “carefully read.” Among Mr. Leland’s information is the following:—
“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 Gipsy” (p. 18). “It . . . . has penetrated into every village which European civilization has ever touched. He who speaks Romany . . . . will meet those with whom a very few words may at once establish a peculiar understanding . . . This widely spread brotherhood . . . are honestly proud that a gentleman is not ashamed of them” (p. 25). “Communities of gentlemanly and lady-like Gipsies’” in Russia (p. 25). “All the Gipsies in the country are not upon the roads. Many of them live in houses, and that very respectably, nay, even aristocratically. Yea, and it may be, O reader, that thou hast met them and knowest them not . . . It is intelligible enough” that such a Gipsy “should say as little as possible of his origin, . . . and ever carefully keep the lid of silence on the pot of his birth” (p. 272). “The Gipsy of society, not always, but yet frequently, retains a keen interest in his wild ancestry. He keeps up the language; it is a delightful secret; he loves now and then to take a look at ‘the old thing’ [one of my phrases, as I have already mentioned] . . . I know ladies in England and in America, both of the blood and otherwise, who would give up a ball of the highest flight in society to sit an hour in a Gipsy tent, and on whom a whispered word in Romany acts like wild-fire. Great as my experience has been I can really no more explain the intensity of this yearning, this rapport, than I can fly. My own fancy for Gipsydom is faint and feeble compared to what I have found in many others” (p. 274).
One would naturally conclude that this race is not disappearing as “British birds are chasing American ones out of Philadelphia”; and that it could not be said that “the child is perhaps born who will see the last Gipsy,” even in his primitive condition. [16]
Mr. Leland explains, in his chapter on Cobham Fair, how the Gipsy problem “puzzled and muddled” him.
“I was very much impressed at this fair with the extensive and unsuspected amount of Romany existent in our rural population . . . There were many men in the common room, mostly well dressed, and decent even if doubtful looking. I observed that several used Romany words in casual conversation. I came to the conclusion at last that all who were present knew something of it” (p. 140). And of eleven kinds of people that were at the fair, he said that “there is always a leaven and a suspicion of Gipsiness. If there be no descent, there is affinity by marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together” (p. 140).
In my Disquisition on the Gipsies I said:—
“In Scotland the prejudice towards the name of Gipsy might be safely allowed to drop, were it only for this reason, that the race has got so much mixed up with the native blood, and even with good families of the country, as to be, in plain language, a jumble, a pretty kettle of fish, indeed” (p. 427).
Mr. Leland continues:—
“No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet clearly explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people like ourselves. It is leavened with direct Indian blood; it has, more or less modified, a peculiar morale.” “It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it” (p. 140).
Had Mr. Leland said that, with the exception of myself, “no writer whatever” had even alluded to the phenomenon described, I believe he would have stated what was true. I endeavoured to explain it in a Disquisition of 171 pages, which he indirectly admitted he “carefully read”; so that if I did not “clearly explain” the “puzzle and muddle” it must have proceeded from a lack of intellect on my part, or on his in not understanding me. Since then I have frequently expatiated on and described it, but I am not aware that Mr. Leland has seen what I wrote on these occasions. In The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies I said that the Gipsy problem “may at first present an aspect of a ‘labyrinth of difficulties’”; but that to solve it “there is little intellect wanted for the occasion, but such as it is it should be allowed to act freely on the subject of inquiry” (p. 23). To judge of Mr. Leland’s works on the Gipsies one would think that he had been indebted to no one for anything; so that it is remarkable he should have complained that novelists should not have “clearly explained” to him what he himself should have told us—particularly as he spoke of his “great experience” among the Gipsies—unless it appears that even to novelists he—as a professional writer taking up a subject that came to his hand—has been indebted for putting him on the track for repeating or illustrating an “oft-told tale.” [18] We can easily imagine how Mr. Leland got “puzzled and muddled” in contemplating his subject when he says so positively that the Gipsies are disappearing as “British birds are chasing American ones out of Philadelphia”; and that the mixed state of Gipsydom seen at Cobham Fair “was old before the Saxon Heptarchy” (p. 140). What he said he could find in “no writer whatever” was elaborately described in the book which I published. That he used for his own purposes, and then apparently turned round and threw out his heels at it.