Although novelists, dramatists, and poets are particularly fond of trying
to paint the gipsies, it cannot be said that many of them have been
successful in their delineations. And this is because the inner and the
outer life of a proscribed race must necessarily be unlike each other.
Meg Merrilies is no more a gipsy than is Borrow’s delightful Isopel
Berners. Among the characteristic traits of the Romany woman, Meg does
no doubt exhibit two: a wild poetic imagination and a fearlessness such
as women rarely display. But no one who had been brought into personal
contact with gipsy women could ever have presented Meg Merrilies as one
of them. In the true Romany chi poetic imagination is combined with a
homeliness and a positive love of respectability which are very curious.
Not that Meg, noble as she is, is superior to the kind of heroic woman
that the Romany race is capable of producing. Indeed, the great
speciality of the Romanies is the superiority of the women to the men—a
superiority which extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that
gift of music for which the gipsies are noticeable. Even in Eastern
Europe—Russia alone excepted—where gipsy music is so universal that,
according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany
extraction, it is the men and not, in general, the women who excel.
This, however, may simply be the result of opportunity and training.
It is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over
language, in breadth of view regarding the “Gorgio” world around them,
that the Romany women, in Great Britain at least, leave the men far
behind. In character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine
a gipsy hero is not easy. The male gipsy is not without a certain amount
of courage, but it soon gives way, and in a physical conflict between a
gipsy and an Englishman it always seems as though ages of oppression have
damped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefighters
have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was
fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment”
with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly,
perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more
sensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has
passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow
her husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her without
returning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among the
gipsies. It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities of
the gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualities
among the men of which we have been speaking. The lack of masculine
chivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistible
impulse among the women for taking their own part without appealing to
the men for aid. Also this may account for the strong way in which a
gipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye,” the young English
gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the
‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often in
such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy
in the Romany woman is seen. The unconquerable virtue of the Romany chi
was often commented upon by Borrow; and, indeed, every observer of gipsy
life is struck by it.
Seeing that the moment the Romanies are brought into contact with the
Gorgio world they adopt a method of approach entirely different from the
natural method—natural to them in intercourse with each other—it is
perhaps no wonder that the popular notion of the gipsy girl, taken mainly
from the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong. With regard
to the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared on
the boards, save the characters in Tom Taylor’s ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’
In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright,
devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman. The
fact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really exists
there is but little devilry. “Romany guile,” which is well defined in
the gipsy phrase as “the lie for the Gorgios,” does not prevent gipsy
women from retaining some of the most marked characteristics of childhood
throughout their lives. This, indeed, is one of their special charms.
In his desire to depict the supposed devilry of the Romany woman, Prosper
Mérimée has perpetrated in ‘Carmen’ the greatest of all caricatures of
the gipsy girl. A mere incarnation of lust and bloodthirstiness is more
likely to exist in any other race than in the Romanies, who have a great
deal of love as a sentiment and comparatively very little of love as a
movement of animal desire.
In G. P. R. James’s ‘Gipsy’ (1835) there are touches which certainly show
some original knowledge of Romany life and character. The same may,
perhaps, be said of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Bird of Passage,’ but the
pictures of gipsy life in these and in all other novels are the merest
daubs compared with the Kiomi of George Meredith’s story ‘Harry
Richmond.’ Not even Borrow and Groome, with all their intimate knowledge
of gipsy life, ever painted a more vigorous picture of the Romany chi
than this. The original was well known in the art circles of London at
one time, and was probably known to Meredith, but this does not in any
way derogate from the splendour of the imaginative achievement of
painting in a few touches a Romany girl who must, one would think, live
for ever.
Between some Englishmen and gipsy women there is an extraordinary
attraction—an attraction, we may say in passing, which did not exist
between Borrow and the gipsy women with whom he was brought into contact.
Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn to any woman, she would
have been of the Scandinavian type; she would have been what he used to
call a Brynhild. It was tall blondes he really admired. Hence,
notwithstanding his love of the economies of gipsy life, his gipsy women
are all mere “scenic characters”—they clothe and beautify the scene; they
are not dramatic characters. When he comes to delineate a heroine,
Isopel Berners, she is physically the very opposite of the Romany chi—a
Scandinavian Brynhild, in short.