And it is not so easy to answer. Why, indeed? In Spain one who has been
fascinated by them is called one of the _aficion_, or affection, or
"fancy;" he is an _aficionado_, or affected unto them, and people there
know perfectly what it means, for every Spaniard is at heart a Bohemian.
He feels what a charm there is in a wandering life, in camping in lonely
places, under old chestnut-trees, near towering cliffs, _al pasar del
arroyo_, by the rivulets among the rocks. He thinks of the wine skin and
wheaten cake when one was hungry on the road, of the mules and tinkling
bells, the fire by night, and the _cigarito_, smoked till he fell asleep.
Then he remembers the gypsies who came to the camp, and the black-eyed
girl who told him his fortune, and all that followed in the rosy dawn and
ever onward into starry night.
"Y se alegre el alma llena
De la luz de esos luceros."
And his heart is filled with rapture
At the light of those lights above.
This man understands it. So, too, does many an Englishman. But I cannot
tell you why. Why do I love to wander on the roads to hear the birds; to
see old church towers afar, rising over fringes of forest, a river and a
bridge in the foreground, and an ancient castle beyond, with a modern
village springing up about it, just as at the foot of the burg there lies
the falling trunk of an old tree, around which weeds and flowers are
springing up, nourished by its decay? Why love these better than
pictures, and with a more than fine-art feeling? Because on the roads,
among such scenes, between the hedge-rows and by the river, I find the
wanderers who properly inhabit not the houses but the scene, not a part
but the whole. These are the gypsies, who live like the birds and hares,
not of the house-born or the town-bred, but free and at home only with
nature.
I am at some pleasant watering-place, no matter where. Let it be
Torquay, or Ilfracombe, or Aberystwith, or Bath, or Bournemouth, or
Hastings. I find out what old churches, castles, towns, towers, manors,
lakes, forests, fairy-wells, or other charms of England lie within twenty
miles. Then I take my staff and sketch-book, and set out on my day's
pilgrimage. In the distance lie the lines of the shining sea, with ships
sailing to unknown lands. Those who live in them are the Bohemians of
the sea, homing while roaming, sleeping as they go, even as gypsies dwell
on wheels. And if you look wistfully at these ships far off and out at
sea with the sun upon their sails, and wonder what quaint mysteries of
life they hide, verily you are not far from being affected or elected
unto the Romany. And if, when you see the wild birds on the wing,
wending their way to the South, and wish that you could fly with
them,--anywhere, anywhere over the world and into adventure,--then you
are not far in spirit from the kingdom of Bohemia and its seven castles,
in the deep windows of which AEolian wind-harps sing forever.
Now, as you wander along, it may be that in the wood and by some grassy
nook you will hear voices, and see the gleam of a red garment, and then
find a man of the roads, with dusky wife and child. You speak one word,
"Sarishan!" and you are introduced. These people are like birds and
bees, they belong to out-of-doors and nature. If you can chirp or buzz a
little in their language and know their ways, you will find out, as you
sit in the forest, why he who loves green bushes and mossy rocks is glad
to fly from cities, and likes to be free of the joyous citizenship of the
roads, and everywhere at home in such boon company.
When I have been a stranger in a strange town, I have never gone out for
a long walk without knowing that the chances were that I should meet
within an hour some wanderer with whom I should have in common certain
acquaintances. These be indeed humble folk, but with nature and summer
walks they make me at home. In merrie England I could nowhere be a
stranger if I would, and that with people who cannot read; and the
English-born Romany rye, or gentleman speaking gypsy, would in like
manner be everywhere at home in America. There was a gypsy family always
roaming between Windsor and London, and the first words taught to their
youngest child were "Romany rye!" and these it was trained to address to
me. The little tot came up to me,--I had never heard her speak
before,--a little brown-faced, black-eyed thing, and said, "How-do, Omany
'eye?" and great was the triumph and rejoicing and laughter of the mother
and father and all the little tribe. To be familiar with these
wanderers, who live by dale and down, is like having the bees come to
you, as they did to the Dacian damsel, whose death they mourned; it is
like the attraction of the wild deer to the fair Genevieve; or if you
know them to be dangerous outlaws, as some are, it is like the affection
of serpents and other wild things for those whom nature has made their
friends, and who handle them without fear. They are human, but in their
lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and
fox, and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with
them have none for the forest and road, and cannot be rightly familiar
with the witchery of wood and wold. There are many ladies and gentlemen
who can well-nigh die of a sunset, and be enraptured with "bits" of
color, and captured with scenes, and to whom all out-of-doors is as
perfect as though it were painted by Millais, yet to whom the bee and
bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in their true inner life
strangers. And just as strange to them, in one sense, are the scenes in
which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them only pictures,
though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold in them the
fairy-land of childhood. Only in Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa and the
great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany, and this spell
is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy have no words in
which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this
sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it.
And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just as the old
delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's beauty--the
perfection of natural beauty--is rapidly vanishing in every country, and
being replaced by the mingled real and unreal attractiveness of
"cleverness," intellect, and fashion. No doubt the newer tend to higher
forms of culture, but it is not without pain that he who has been "in the
spirit" in the old Sabbath of the soul, and in its quiet, solemn sunset,
sees it all vanishing. It will all be gone in a few years. I doubt very
much whether it will be possible for the most unaffectedly natural writer
to preserve any of its hieroglyphics for future Champollions of sentiment
to interpret. In the coming days, when man shall have developed new
senses, and when the blessed sun himself shall perhaps have been
supplanted by some tremendous electrical light, and the moon be expunged
altogether as interfering with the new arrangements for gravity, there
will doubtless be a new poetry, and art become to the very last degree
self-conscious of its cleverness, artificial and impressional; yet even
then weary scholars will sigh from time to time, as they read in our
books of the ancient purple seas, and how the sun went down of old into
cloud-land, gorgeous land, and then how all dreamed away into night!
Gypsies are the human types of this vanishing, direct love of nature, of
this mute sense of rural romance, and of _al fresco_ life, and he who
does not recognize it in them, despite their rags and dishonesty, need
not pretend to appreciate anything more in Callot's etchings than the
skillful management of the needle and the acids. Truly they are but rags
themselves; the last rags of the old romance which connected man with
nature. Once romance was a splendid mediaeval drama, colored and gemmed
with chivalry, minnesong, bandit-flashes, and waving plumes; now there
remain but a few tatters. Yes, we were young and foolish then, but there
are perishing with the wretched fragments of the red Indian tribes
mythologies as beautiful as those of the Greek or Norseman; and there is
also vanishing with the gypsy an unexpressed mythology, which those who
are to come after us would gladly recover. Would we not have been
pleased if one of the thousand Latin men of letters whose works have been
preserved had told us how the old Etruscans, then still living in
mountain villages, spoke and habited and customed? But oh that there had
ever lived of old one man who, noting how feelings and sentiments
changed, tried to so set forth the souls of his time that after-comers
might understand what it was which inspired their art!
In the Sanskrit humorous romance of "Baital Pachisi," or King Vikram and
the Vampire, twenty-five different and disconnected trifling stories
serve collectively to illustrate in the most pointed manner the highest
lesson of wisdom. In this book the gypsies, and the scenes which
surround them, are intended to teach the lesson of freedom and nature.
Never were such lessons more needed than at present. I do not say that
culture is opposed to the perception of nature; I would show with all my
power that the higher our culture the more we are really qualified to
appreciate beauty and freedom. But gates must be opened for this, and
unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every
form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land
of delight.
The gypsy is one of many links which connect the simple feeling of nature
with romance. During the Middle Ages thousands of such links and symbols
united nature with religion. Thus Conrad von Wurtzburg tells in his
"Goldene Schmiede" that the parrot which shines in fairest grass-green
hue, and yet like common grass is never wet, sets forth the Virgin, who
bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained unchanged. So the
parrot and grass and green and shimmering light all blended in the ideal
of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird appears in pictures by Van
Eyck and Durer. To me the gypsy-parrot and green grass in lonely lanes
and the rain and sunshine all mingle to set forth the inexpressible
purity and sweetness of the virgin parent, Nature. For the gypsy is
parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green
was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in
Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to
wear that fatal fairy color.
These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth
a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany. The day is
coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no
wild nature, and certainly no gypsies. Within a very few years in the
city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and cad of birds,
has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful feathered creatures
whom, as a boy, I knew. The fire-flashing scarlet tanager and the
humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden oriole, are now
almost forgotten, or unknown to city children. So the people of
self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder
sort, and it is all right, and so it must be, and therewith _basta_. But
as a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child was
perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, "Somehow we feel sorry for
that child."