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.