It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having
quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even
in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to
something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of
fancy. The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still
"genial," because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the
inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual. We are
not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of
curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed
about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated
manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or
minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their
late majesties the Georges. Until such a science is formed, the new one
of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents
most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who
should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement.
For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval
kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk
attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or
in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with the quaint jewelry
of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find,"
"speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or
scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore
mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on
pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his
ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and
asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested
everybody in every age.
_Ad interim_, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that
of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is
that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two
which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and
cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves.
These are the Jew and the gypsy. From time whereof history hath naught
to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the
first man. Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a
peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius
and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings. 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 gypsy. The
Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is
lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a
prehistoric caste. Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India
and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of
course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy. One
thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably
much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of
very troublesome indwellers. What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan
wars,--invaders outlawing invaded,--the number of out-_castes_ became
alarmingly great. To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton,
constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their
entire nation. Excommunication among the Indian professors of
transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty.
Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before
leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a
country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from
early times. And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in
India, and is known as the Dom, {19} the emigrants to the West probably
derived their name and several characteristics. The Dom burns the dead,
handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which
were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several
countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several
centuries after their arrival there. The Dom of the present day also
sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy. It is
remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to
excess, being by no means a "temperate Hindoo," and that even in extreme
old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among
our own gypsies of pure blood. I know and have often seen a gypsy woman,
nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly
perceptibly changed. It is extremely probable that the Dom, mentioned as
a caste even in the Shastras, gave the name to the Rom. The Dom calls
his wife a Domni, and being a Dom is "Domnipana." In English gypsy, the
same words are expressed by _Rom_, _romni_, and _romnipen_. D, be it
observed, very often changes to _r_ in its transfer from Hindoo to
Romany. Thus _doi_, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy _roi_, a term
known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin
of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance.
Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies
went there, the word for man is _romi_, and after leaving Greece and the
Levant, or _Rum_, it would be natural for the wanderers to be called
_Rumi_. But the Dom was in all probability the parent stock of the gypsy
race, though the latter received vast accessions from many other sources.
I call attention to this, since it has always been held, and sensibly
enough, that the mere fact of the gypsies speaking Hindi-Persian, or the
oldest type of Urdu, including many Sanskrit terms, does not prove an
Indian or Aryan origin, any more than the English spoken by American
negroes proves a Saxon descent. But if the Rom can be identified with
the Dom--and the circumstantial evidence, it must be admitted, is very
strong--but little remains to seek, since, according to the Shastras, the
Doms are Hindoo.
Among the tribes whose union formed the European gypsy was, in all
probability, that of the _Nats_, consisting of singing and dancing girls
and male musicians and acrobats. Of these, we are told that not less
than ten thousand lute-players and minstrels, under the name of _Luri_,
were once sent to Persia as a present to a king, whose land was then
without music or song. This word _Luri_ is still preserved. The
saddle-makers and leather-workers of Persia are called Tsingani; they
are, in their way, low caste, and a kind of gypsy, and it is supposed
that from them are possibly derived the names Zingan, Zigeuner, Zingaro,
etc., by which gypsies are known in so many lands. From Mr. Arnold's
late work on "Persia," the reader may learn that the _Eeli_, who
constitute the majority of the inhabitants of the southern portion of
that country, are Aryan nomads, and apparently gypsies. There are also
in India the Banjari, or wandering merchants, and many other tribes, all
spoken of as gypsies by those who know them.
As regards the great admixture of Persian with Hindi in good Romany, it
is quite unmistakable, though I can recall no writer who has attached
sufficient importance to a fact which identifies gypsies with what is
almost preeminently the land of gypsies. I once had the pleasure of
taking a Nile journey in company with Prince S---, a Persian, and in most
cases, when I asked my friend what this or that gypsy word meant, he gave
me its correct meaning, after a little thought, and then added, in his
imperfect English, "What for you want to know such word?--that _old_
word--that no more used. Only common people--old peasant-woman--use that
word--_gentleman_ no want to know him." But I did want to know "him"
very much. I can remember that one night, when our _bon prince_ had thus
held forth, we had dancing girls, or Almeh, on board, and one was very
young and pretty. I was told that she was gypsy, but she spoke no
Romany. Yet her panther eyes and serpent smile and _beaute du diable_
were not Egyptian, but of the Indian, _kalo-ratt_,--the dark blood,
which, once known, is known forever. I forgot her, however, for a long
time, until I went to Moscow, when she was recalled by dancing and
smiles, of which I will speak anon.
I was sitting one day by the Thames, in a gypsy tent, when its master,
Joshua Cooper, now dead, pointing to a swan, asked me for its name in
gypsy. I replied, "_Boro pappin_."
"No, _rya_. _Boro pappin_ is 'a big goose.' _Sakku_ is the real gypsy
word. It is very old, and very few Romany know it."
A few days after, when my Persian friend was dining with me at the
Langham Hotel, I asked him if he knew what Sakku meant. By way of reply,
he, not being able to recall the English word, waved his arms in
wonderful pantomime, indicating some enormous winged creature; and then,
looking into the distance, and pointing as if to some far-vanishing
object, as boys do when they declaim Bryant's address "To a Water-Fowl,"
said,--
"Sakku--one ver' big bird, like one _swen_--but he _not_ swen. He like
the man who carry too much water up-stairs {22} his head in
Constantinople. That bird all same that man. He _sakkia_ all same wheel
that you see get water up-stairs in Egypt."
This was explanatory, but far from satisfactory. The prince, however,
was mindful of me, and the next day I received from the Persian embassy
the word elegantly written in Persian, with the translation, "_a
pelican_." Then it was all clear enough, for the pelican bears water in
the bag under its bill. When the gypsies came to Europe they named
animals after those which resembled them in Asia. A dog they called
_juckal_, from a jackal, and a swan _sakku_, or pelican, because it so
greatly resembles it. The Hindoo _bandarus_, or monkey, they have
changed to _bombaros_, but why Tom Cooper should declare that it is
_pugasah_, or _pukkus-asa_, I do not know. {23} As little can I
conjecture the meaning of the prefix _mod_, or _mode_, which I learned on
the road near Weymouth from a very ancient tinker, a man so battered,
tattered, seamed, riven, and wrinkled that he looked like a petrifaction.
He had so bad a barrow, or wheel, that I wondered what he could do with
it, and regarded him as the very poorest man I had ever seen in England,
until his mate came up, an _alter ego_, so excellent in antiquity,
wrinkles, knobbiness, and rags that he surpassed the vagabond pictures
not only of Callot, Dore, and Goya, but even the unknown Spanish maker of
a picture which I met with not long since for sale, and which for
infinite poverty defied anything I ever saw on canvas. These poor men,
who seemed at first amazed that I should speak to them at all, when I
spoke Romany at once called me "brother." When I asked the younger his
name, he sank his voice to a whisper, and, with a furtive air, said,--
"_Kamlo_,--Lovel, you know."
"What do you call yourself in the way of business?" I asked.
"_Katsamengro_, I suppose."
Now _Katsamengro_ means scissors-master.
"That is a very good word. But _chivo_ is deeper."
"_Chivo_ means a knife-man?"
"Yes. But the deepest of all, master, is _Modangarengro_. For you see
that the right word for coals isn't _wongur_, as Romanys generally say,
but _Angara_."
Now _angara_, as Pott and Benfey indicate, is pure Sanskrit for coals,
and _angarengro_ is a worker in coals, but what _mod_ means I know not,
and should be glad to be told.
I think it will be found difficult to identify the European gypsy with
any one stock of the wandering races of India. Among those who left that
country were men of different castes and different color, varying from
the pure northern invader to the negro-like southern Indian. In the
Danubian principalities there are at the present day three kinds of
gypsies: one very dark and barbarous, another light brown and more
intelligent, and the third, or _elite_, of yellow-pine complexion, as
American boys characterize the hue of quadroons. Even in England there
are straight-haired and curly-haired Romanys, the two indicating not a
difference resulting from white admixture, but entirely different
original stocks.
It will, I trust, be admitted, even from these remarks, that Romanology,
or that subdivision of ethnology which treats of gypsies, is both
practical and curious. It deals with the only race except the Jew, which
has penetrated into every village which European civilization has ever
touched. He who speaks Romany need be a stranger in few lands, for on
every road in Europe and America, in Western Asia, and even in Northern
Africa, he will meet those with whom a very few words may at once
establish a peculiar understanding. For, of all things believed in by
this widely spread brotherhood, the chief is this,--that he who knows the
_jib_, or language, knows the ways, and that no one ever attained these
without treading strange paths, and threading mysteries unknown to the
Gorgios, or Philistines. And if he who speaks wears a good coat, and
appears a gentleman, let him rest assured that he will receive the
greeting which all poor relations in all lands extend to those of their
kin who have risen in life. Some of them, it is true, manifest the
winsome affection which is based on great expectations, a sentiment
largely developed among British gypsies; but others are honestly proud
that a gentleman is not ashamed of them. Of this latter class were the
musical gypsies, whom I met in Russia during the winter of 1876 and 1877,
and some of them again in Paris during the Exposition of 1878.