I have somewhat abbreviated the Romany text of this letter, and Miss Lee
herself has somewhat polished and enlarged the translation, which is
strictly fit and proper, she being a very different person in English
from what she is in gypsy, as are most of her kind. This letter may be,
to many, a strange lesson, a quaint essay, a social problem, a fable, an
epigram, or a frolic,--just as they choose to take it. To me it is a
poem. Thou, my friend, canst easily understand why all that is wild and
strange, out-of-doors, far away by night, is worthy of being Tennysoned
or Whitmanned. If there be given unto thee stupendous blasted trees,
looking in the moonlight like the pillars of a vast and ghostly temple;
the fall of cataracts down awful rocks; the wind wailing in wondrous
language or whistling Indian melody all night on heath, rocks, and hills,
over ancient graves and through lonely caves, bearing with it the hoot of
the night-owl; while over all the stars look down in eternal mystery,
like eyes reading the great riddle of the night which thou knowest
not,--this is to thee like Ariel's song. To me and to us there are men
and women who are in life as the wild river and the night-owl, as the
blasted tree and the wind over ancient graves. No man is educated until
he has arrived at that state of thought when a picture is quite the same
as a book, an old gray-beard jug as a manuscript, men, women, and
children as libraries. It was but yester morn that I read a cuneiform
inscription printed by doves' feet in the snow, finding a meaning where
in by-gone years I should have seen only a quaint resemblance. For in
this by the _ornithomanteia_ known of old to the Chaldean sages I saw
that it was neither from arrow-heads or wedges which gave the letters to
the old Assyrians. When thou art at this point, then Nature is equal in
all her types, and the city, as the forest, full of endless beauty and
piquancy,--_in saecula saeculorum_.
I had written the foregoing, and had enveloped and directed it to be
mailed, when I met in a lady-book entitled "Magyarland" with the
following passages:--
"The gypsy girl in this family was a pretty young woman, with masses
of raven hair and a clear skin, but, notwithstanding her neat dress
and civilized surroundings, we recognized her immediately. It is, in
truth, not until one sees the Romany translated to an entirely new
form of existence, and under circumstances inconsistent with their
ordinary lives, that one realizes how completely different they are
from the rest of mankind in form and feature. Instead of disguising,
the garb of civilization only enhances the type, and renders it the
more apparent. No matter what dress they may assume, no matter what
may be their calling, no matter whether they are dwellers in tents or
houses, it is impossible for gypsies to disguise their origin. Taken
from their customary surroundings, they become at once an anomaly and
an anachronism, and present such an instance of the absurdity of
attempting to invert the order of nature that we feel more than ever
how utterly different they are from the human race; that there is a
key to their strange life which we do not possess,--a secret free
masonry that renders them more isolated than the veriest savages
dwelling in the African wilds,--and a hidden mystery hanging over
them and their origin that we shall never comprehend. They are
indeed a people so entirely separate and distinct that, in whatever
clime or quarter of the globe they may be met with, they are
instantly recognized; for with them forty centuries of association
with civilized races have not succeeded in obliterating one single
sign."
* * * * *
"Alas!" cried the princess; "I can never, never find the door of the
enchanted cavern, nor enter the golden cavern, nor solve its
wonderful mystery. It has been closed for thousands of years, and it
will remain closed forever."
"What flowers are those which thou holdest?" asked the hermit.
"Only primroses or Mary's-keys, {285} and tulips," replied the
princess.
"Touch the rock with them," said the hermit, "and the door will
open."
* * * * *
The lady writer of "Magyarland" held in her hand all the while, and knew
it not, a beautiful primrose, which might have opened for her the
mysterious Romany cavern. On a Danube steamboat she saw a little blind
boy sitting all day all alone: only a little Slavonian peasant boy, "an
odd, quaint little specimen of humanity, with loose brown garments, cut
precisely like those of a grown-up man, and his bits of feet in little
raw-hide moccasins." However, with a tender, gentle heart she began to
pet the little waif. And the captain told her what the boy was. "He is
a _guslar_, or minstrel, as they call them in Croatia. The Yougo-Slavs
dedicate all male children who are born blind, from infancy, to the
Muses. As soon as they are old enough to handle anything, a small
mandolin is given them, which they are taught to play; after which they
are taken every day into the woods, where they are left till evening to
commune in their little hearts with nature. In due time they become
poets, or at any rate rhapsodists, singing of the things they never saw,
and when grown up are sent forth to earn their livelihood, like the
troubadours of old, by singing from place to place, and asking alms by
the wayside.
"It is not difficult for a Slav to become a poet; he takes in poetic
sentiment as a river does water from its source. The first sounds he is
conscious of are the words of his mother singing to him as she rocks his
cradle. Then, as she watches the dawning of intelligence in his infant
face, her mother language is that of poetry, which she improvises at the
moment, and though he never saw the flowers nor the snow-capped
mountains, nor the flowing streams and rivers, he describes them out of
his inner consciousness, and the influence which the varied sounds of
nature have upon his mind."
Rock and river and greenwood tree, sweet-spiced spring flower, rustling
grass, and bird-singing nature and freedom,--this is the secret of the
poets' song and of the Romany, and there is no other mystery in either.
He who sleeps on graves rises mad or a poet; all who lie on the earth,
which is the grave and cradle of nature, and who live _al fresco_,
understand gypsies as well as my lady Britannia Lee. Nay, when some
natures take to the Romany they become like the Norman knights of the
Pale, who were more Paddyfied than the Paddies themselves. These become
leaders among the gypsies, who recognize the fact that one renegade is
more zealous than ten Turks. As for the "mystery" of the history of the
gypsies, it is time, sweet friends, that 't were ended. When we know
that there is to-day, in India, a sect and set of Vauriens, who are there
considered Gipsissimae, and who call themselves, with their wives and
language and being, Rom, Romni, and Romnipana, even as they do in
England; and when we know, moreover, that their faces proclaim them to be
Indian, and that they have been a wandering caste since the dawn of Hindu
history, we have, I trow, little more to seek. As for the rest, you may
read it in the great book of Out-of Doors, _capitulo nullo folio nigro_,
or wherever you choose to open it, written as distinctly, plainly, and
sweetly as the imprint of a school-boy's knife and fork on a mince-pie,
or in the uprolled rapture of the eyes of Britannia when she inhaleth the
perfume of a fresh bunch of Florentine violets. _Ite missa est_.