"A ready trick tried Hildebrand,
That old, gray-bearded man;
For when the younger raised to strike,
Beneath his sword he ran."
And, like the son, I had no ill feeling about it. My obligations to him
for "Lavengro" and the "Romany Rye" and his other works are such as I owe
to few men. I have enjoyed gypsying more than any sport in the world,
and I owe my love of it all to George Borrow. I have since heard that a
part of Mr. Borrow's "Romano Lavo-Lil" had been in manuscript for thirty
years, and that it might never have been published but for my own work.
I hope that this is true; for I am sincerely proud to think that I may
have been in any way, directly or indirectly, the cause of his giving it
to the world. I would gladly enough have burnt my own book, as I said,
with a hearty laugh, when I saw the announcement of the "Lavo-Lil," if it
would have pleased the old Romany rye, and I never spoke a truer word.
He would not have believed it; but it would have been true, all the same.
I well remember the first time I met George Borrow. It was in the
British Museum, and I was introduced to him by Mrs. Estelle Lewis,--now
dead,--the well known-friend of Edgar A. Poe. He was seated at a table,
and had a large old German folio open before him. We talked about
gypsies, and I told him that I had unquestionably found the word for
"green," _shelno_, in use among the English Romany. He assented, and
said that he knew it. I mention this as a proof of the manner in which
the "Romano Lavo-Lil" must have been hurried, because he declares in it
that there is no English gypsy word for "green." In this work he asserts
that the English gypsy speech does not probably amount to fourteen
hundred words. It is a weakness with the Romany rye fraternity to
believe that there are no words in gypsy which they to not know. I am
sure that my own collection contains nearly four thousand Anglo-Romany
terms, many of which I feared were doubtful, but which I am constantly
verifying. America is a far better place in which to study the language
than England. As an old Scotch gypsy said to me lately, the deepest and
cleverest old gypsies all come over here to America, where they have
grown rich, and built the old language up again.
I knew a gentleman in London who was a man of extraordinary energy.
Having been utterly ruined, at seventy years of age, by a relative, he
left England, was absent two or three years in a foreign country, during
which time he made in business some fifty thousand pounds, and,
returning, settled down in England. He had been in youth for a long time
the most intimate friend of George Borrow, who was, he said, a very wild
and eccentric youth. One night, when skylarking about London, Borrow was
pursued by the police, as he wished to be, even as Panurge so planned as
to be chased by the night-watch. He was very tall and strong in those
days, a trained shoulder-hitter, and could run like a deer. He was
hunted to the Thames, "and there they thought they had him." But the
Romany rye made for the edge, and, leaping into the wan water, like the
Squyre in the old ballad, swam to the other side, and escaped.
I have conversed with Mr. Borrow on many subjects,--horses, gypsies, and
Old Irish. Anent which latter subject I have heard him declare that he
doubted whether there was any man living who could really read an old
Irish manuscript. I have seen the same statement made by another writer.
My personal impressions of Mr. Borrow were very agreeable, and I was
pleased to learn afterwards from Mrs. Lewis that he had expressed himself
warmly as regarded myself. As he was not invariably disposed to like
those whom be met, it is a source of great pleasure to me to reflect that
I have nothing but pleasant memories of the good old Romany rye, the
Nestor of gypsy gentlemen. It is commonly reported among gypsies that
Mr. Borrow was one by blood, and that his real name was Boro, or great.
This is not true. He was of pure English extraction.
When I first met "George Eliot" and G. H. Lewes, at their house in North
Bank, the lady turned the conversation almost at once to gypsies. They
spoke of having visited the Zincali in Spain, and of several very curious
meetings with the _Chabos_. Mr. Lewes, in fact, seldom met me--and we
met very often about town, and at many places, especially at the
Trubners'--without conversing on the Romanys. The subject evidently had
for him a special fascination. I believe that I have elsewhere mentioned
that after I returned from Russia, and had given him, by particular
request, an account of my visits to the gypsies of St. Petersburg and
Moscow, he was much struck by the fact that I had chiromanced to the
Romany clan of the latter city. To tell the fortunes of gypsy girls was,
he thought, the refinement of presumption. "There was in this world
nothing so impudent as a gypsy when determined to tell a fortune; and the
idea of not one, but many gypsy girls believing earnestly in my palmistry
was like a righteous retribution."
The late Tom Taylor had, while a student at Cambridge, been _aficionado_,
or smitten, with gypsies, and made a manuscript vocabulary of Romany
words, which he allowed me to use, and from which I obtained several
which were new to me. This fact should make all smart gypsy scholars
"take tent" and heed as to believing that they know everything. I have
many Anglo-Romany words--purely Hindi as to origin--which I have verified
again and again, yet which have never appeared in print. Thus far the
Romany vocabulary field has been merely scratched over.
Who that knows London knoweth not Sir Patrick Colquhoun? I made his
acquaintance in 1848, when, coming over from student-life in Paris and
the Revolution, I was most kindly treated by his family. A glorious,
tough, widely experienced man he was even in early youth. For then he
already bore the enviable reputation of being the first amateur sculler
on the Thames, the first gentleman light-weight boxer in England, a
graduate with honors of Cambridge, a Doctor Ph. of Heidelberg, a
diplomat, and a linguist who knew Arabic, Persian, and Gaelic, Modern
Greek and the Omnium Botherum tongues. They don't make such men
nowadays, or, if they do, they leave out the genial element.
Years had passed, and I had returned to London in 1870, and found Sir
Patrick living, as of yore, in the Temple, where I once and yet again and
again dined with him. It was in the early days of this new spring of
English life that we found ourselves by chance at a boat-race on the
Thames. It was on the Thames, by his invitation, that I had twenty years
before first seen an English regatta, and had a place in the gayly
decked, superbly luncheoned barge of his club. It is a curious point in
English character that the cleverest people do not realize or understand
how festive and genial they really are, or how gayly and picturesquely
they conduct their sports. It is a generally accepted doctrine with them
that they do this kind of thing better in France; they believe sincerely
that they take their own amusements sadly; it is the tone, the style,
with the wearily-witty, dreary clowns of the weekly press, in their
watery imitations of Thackeray's worst, to ridicule all English festivity
and merry-making, as though sunshine had faded out of life, and God and
Nature were dead, and in their place a great wind-bag Jesuit-Mallock were
crying, in tones tainted with sulphuretted hydrogen, "_Ah bah_!" Reader
mine, I have seen many a fete in my time, all the way from illuminations
of Paris to the Khedive's fifteen-million-dollar spree in 1873 and the
last grand flash of the Roman-candle carnival of 1846, but for true,
hearty enjoyment and quiet beauty give me a merry party on the Thames.
Give me, I say, its sparkling waters, its green banks, the joyous,
beautiful girls, the hearty, handsome men. Give me the boats, darting
like fishes, the gay cries. And oh--oh!--give me the Alsopp's ale in a
quart mug, and not a remark save of approbation when I empty it.
I had met Sir Patrick in the crowd, and our conversation turned on
gypsies. When living before-time in Roumania, he had Romany servants,
and learned a little of their language. Yes, he was inclined to be
"affected" into the race, and thereupon we went gypsying. Truly, we had
not far to seek, for just outside the crowd a large and flourishing
community of the black-blood had set itself up in the _pivlioi_
(cocoa-nut) or _kashta_ (stick) business, and as it was late in the
afternoon, and the entire business-world was about as drunk as mere beer
could make it, the scene was not unlively. At that time I was new to
England, and unknown to every gypsy on the ground. In after-days I
learned to know them well, very well, for they were chiefly Coopers and
their congeners, who came to speak of me as _their_ rye and own special
property or proprietor,--an allegiance which involved on one side an
amount of shillings and beer which concentrated might have set up a
charity, but which was duly reciprocated on the other by jocular tenures
of cocoa-nuts, baskets, and choice and deep words in the language of
Egypt.
As we approached the cock-shy, where sticks were cast at cocoa-nuts, a
young gypsy _chai_, whom I learned to know in after-days as Athalia
Cooper, asked me to buy some sticks. A penny a throw, all the cocoa-nuts
I could hit to be my own. I declined; she became urgent, jolly, riotous,
insistive. I endured it well, for I held the winning cards. _Qui minus
propere_, _minus prospere_. And then, as her voice rose _crescendo_ into
a bawl, so that all the Romanys around laughed aloud to see the green
Gorgio so chaffed and bothered, I bent me low, and whispered softly in
her ear a single monosyllable.
Why are all those sticks dropped so suddenly? Why does Athalia in a
second become sober, and stand up staring at me, all her chaff and
urgency forgotten. Quite polite and earnest now. But there is joy
behind in her heart. This _is_ a game, a jolly game, and no mistake.
And uplifting her voice again, as the voice of one who findeth an
exceeding great treasure even in the wilderness, she cried aloud,--"_It's
a Romany rye_!"
The spiciest and saltest and rosiest of Sir Patrick's own stories, told
after dinner over his own old port to a special conventicle of clergymen
about town, was never received with such a roar of delight as that cry of
Athalia's was by the Romany clan. Up went three sheers at the find;
further afield went the shout proclaiming the discovery of an
aristocratic stranger of their race, a _rye_, who was to them as
wheat,--a gypsy gentleman. Neglecting business, they threw down their
sticks, and left their cocoanuts to grin in solitude; the _dyes_ turned
aside from fortune-telling to see what strange fortune had sent such a
visitor. In ten minutes Sir Patrick and I were surrounded by such a
circle of sudden admirers and vehement applauders, as it seldom happens
to any mortal to acquire--out of Ireland--at such exceedingly short
notice and on such easy terms.
They were not particular as to what sort of a gypsy I was, or where I
came from, or any nonsense of that sort, you know. It was about
_cerevisia vincit omnia_, or the beery time of day with them, and they
cared not for anything. I was extremely welcome; in short, there was
poetry in me. I had come down on them by a way that was dark and a trick
that was vain, in the path of mystery, and dropped on Athalia and picked
her up. It was gypsily done and very creditable to me, and even Sir
Patrick was regarded as one to be honored as an accomplice. It is a
charming novelty in every life to have the better class of one's own kind
come into it, and nobody feels so keenly as a jolly Romany that _jucundum
nihil est nisi quod ref icit varietas_--naught pleases us without
variety.
Then and there I drew to me the first threads of what became in
after-days a strange and varied skein of humanity. There was the Thames
upon a holiday. Now I look back to it, I ask, _Ubi sunt_? (Where are
they all?) Joshua Cooper, as good and earnest a Rom as ever lived, in
his grave, with more than one of those who made my acquaintance by
hurrahing for me. Some in America, some wandering wide. Yet there by
Weybridge still the Thames runs on.
By that sweet river I made many a song. One of these, to the tune of
"Waves in Sunlight Dancing," rises and falls in memory like a fitful
fairy coming and going in green shadows, and that it may not perish
utterly I here give it a place:--