One morning I was walking with Mr. Thomas Carlyle and Mr. Froude. We
went across Hyde Park, and paused to rest on the bridge. This is a
remarkable place, since there, in the very heart of London, one sees a
view which is perfectly rural. The old oaks rise above each other like
green waves, the houses in the distance are country-like, while over
the trees, and far away, a village-looking spire completes the picture.
I think that it was Mr. Froude who called my attention to the beauty of
the view, and I remarked that it needed only a gypsy tent and the
curling smoke to make it in all respects perfectly English.
“You have paid some attention to gypsies,” said Mr. Carlyle.
“They're not altogether so bad a people as many think. In Scotland, we
used to see many of them. I'll not say that they were not rovers and
reivers, but they could be honest at times. The country folk feared
them, but those who made friends wi' them had no cause to complain of
their conduct. Once there was a man who was persuaded to lend a gypsy a
large sum of money. My father knew the man. It was to be repaid at a
certain time. The day came; the gypsy did not. And months passed, and
still the creditor had nothing of money but the memory of it; and ye
remember 'nessun maggior dolore,'—that there's na greater grief
than to remember the siller ye once had. Weel, one day the man was
surprised to hear that his frien' the gypsy wanted to see
him—interview, ye call it in America. And the gypsy explained that,
having been arrested, and unfortunately detained, by some little
accident, in preeson, he had na been able to keep his engagement. 'If
ye'll just gang wi' me,' said the gypsy, 'aw'll mak' it all right.'
'Mon, aw wull,' said the creditor,—they were Scotch, ye know, and
spoke in deealect. So the gypsy led the way to the house which he had
inhabited, a cottage which belonged to the man himself to whom he owed
the money. And there he lifted up the hearthstone; the hard-stane they
call it in Scotland, and it is called so in the prophecy of Thomas of
Ercildowne. And under the hard-stane there was an iron pot. It was full
of gold, and out of that gold the gypsy carle paid his creditor. Ye
wonder how 't was come by? Well, ye'll have heard it's best to let
sleeping dogs lie.”
“Yes. And what was said of the Poles who had, during the Middle
Ages, a reputation almost as good as that of gypsies? Ad secretas
Poli, curas extendere noli.” (Never concern your soul as to
the secrets of a Pole.)
Mr. Carlyle's story reminds me that Walter Simpson, in his history
of them, says that the Scottish gypsies have ever been distinguished
for their gratitude to those who treated them with civility and
kindness, anent which he tells a capital story, while other instances
sparkle here and there with many brilliant touches in his five
hundred-and-fifty-page volume.
I have more than once met with Romanys, when I was in the company of
men who, like Carlyle and Bilderdijk, “were also in the world of
letters known,” or who might say, “We have deserved to be.” One of the
many memories of golden days, all in the merrie tyme of summer song in
England, is of the Thames, and of a pleasure party in a little
steam-launch. It was a weenie affair,—just room for six forward
outside the cubby, which was called the cabin; and of these six, one
was Mr. Roebuck,—“the last Englishman,” as some one has called him,
but as the late Lord Lytton applies the same term to one of his
characters about the time of the Conquest, its accuracy may be doubted.
Say the last type of a certain phase of the Englishman; say that
Roebuck was the last of the old iron and oak men, the triplex aes et
robur chiefs of the Cobbet kind, and the phrase may pass. But it
will only pass over into a new variety of true manhood. However
frequently the last Englishman may die, I hope it will be ever said of
him, Le roi est mort,—vive le roi! I have had talks with
Lord Lytton on gypsies. He, too, was once a Romany rye in a small way,
and in the gay May heyday of his young manhood once went off with a
band of Romanys, and passed weeks in their tents,—no bad thing,
either, for anybody. I was more than once tempted to tell him the
strange fact that, though he had been among the black people and
thought he had learned their language, what they had imposed upon him
for that was not Romany, but cant, or English thieves' slang. For what
is given, in good faith, as the gypsy tongue in “Paul Clifford” and the
“Disowned,” is only the same old mumping kennick which was
palmed off on Bampfylde Moore Carew; or which he palmed on his readers,
as the secret of the Roms. But what is the use or humanity of
disillusioning an author by correcting an error forty years old. If one
could have corrected it in the proof, a la bonne heure! Besides,
it was of no particular consequence to anybody whether the characters
in “Paul Clifford” called a clergyman a patter-cove or a
rashai. It is a supreme moment of triumph for a man when he
discovers that his specialty—whatever it be—is not of such value as
to be worth troubling anybody with it. As for Everybody, he is
fair game.
The boat went up the Thames, and I remember that the river was, that
morning, unusually beautiful. It is graceful, as in an outline, even
when leaden with November mists, or iron-gray in the drizzle of
December, but under the golden sunlight of June it is lovely. It
becomes every year, with gay boating parties in semi-fancy dresses,
more of a carnival, in which the carnivalers and their carnivalentines
assume a more decided character. It is very strange to see this
tendency of the age to unfold itself in new festival forms, when those
who believe that there can never be any poetry or picturing in life but
in the past are wailing over the vanishing of May-poles and old English
sports. There may be, from time to time, a pause between the acts; the
curtain may be down a little longer than usual; but in the long run the
world-old play of the Peoples' Holiday will go on, as it has been going
ever since Satan suggested that little apple-stealing excursion to Eve,
which, as explained by the Talmudists, was manifestly the direct cause
of all the flirtations and other dreadful doings in all little outings
down to the present day, in the drawing-room or “on the leads,” world
without end.
And as the boat went along by Weybridge we passed a bank by which
was a small gypsy camp; tents and wagons, donkeys and all, reflected in
the silent stream, as much as were the swans in the fore-water. And in
the camp was a tall, handsome, wild beauty, named Britannia, who knew
me well; a damsel fond of larking, with as much genuine devil's
gunpowder in her as would have made an entire pack or a Chinese hundred
of sixty-four of the small crackers known as fast girls, in or around
society. She was a splendid creature, long and lithe and lissom, but
well rounded, of a figure suggestive of leaping hedges; and as the sun
shone on her white teeth and burning black eyes, there was a hint of
biting, too, about her. She lay coiled and basking, in feline fashion,
in the sun; but at sight of me on the boat, up she bounded, and ran
along the bank, easily keeping up with the steamer, and crying out to
me in Romanes.
Now it just so happened that I by no means felt certain that all
of the company present were such genial Bohemians as to appreciate
anything like the joyous intimacy which Britannia was manifesting, as
she, Atalanta-like, coursed along. Consequently, I was not delighted
with her attentions.
“What a fine girl!” said Mr. Roebuck. “How well she would look on
the stage! She seems to know you.”
“Certainly,” said one of the ladies, “or she would not be speaking
her language. Why don't you answer her? Let us hear a conversation.”
Thus adjured, I answered,—
“Miri pen, miri kushti pen, beng lel tute,
ma rakker sa drovan! Or ma rakker Romaneskas. Man dikesa
te rania shan akai. Miri kameli—man kair _mandy ladge!” (My sister, my nice, sweet sister!—devil take you! don't hallo at me
like that! Or else don't talk Romany. Don't you see there are ladies
here? My dear, don't put me to shame!)
“Pen the rani ta wusser mandy a trin-grushi—who—
op, hallo!” (Tell the lady to shy me a shilling—whoop!)
cried the fast damsel.
“Pa miri duvels kam, pen—o bero se ta duro.
Mandy'll de tute a pash-korauna keratti if tu tevel ja. Gorgie
shan i foki kavakoi!” (For the Lord's sake, sister!—the boat is
too far from shore. I'll give you half a crown this evening if you'll
clear out. These be Gentiles, these here.)
“It seems to be a melodious language,” said Mr. Roebuck, greatly
amused. “What are you saying?”
“I am telling her to hold her tongue, and go.”
“But how on earth does it happen that you speak such a language?”
inquired a lady. “I always thought that the gypsies only talked a kind
of English slang, and this sounds like a foreign tongue.”
All this time Britannia, like the Cork Leg, never tired, but kept on
the chase, neck and neck, till we reached a lock, when, with a merry
laugh like a child, she turned on her track and left us.
“Mr. L.'s proficiency in Romany,” said Mr. Roebuck, “is well known
to me. I have heard him spoken of as the successor to George Borrow.”
“That,” I replied, “I do not deserve. There are other gentlemen in
England who are by far my superiors in knowledge of the people.”
And I spoke very sincerely. Apropos of Mr. George Borrow, I knew
him, and a grand old fellow he was,—a fresh and hearty giant, holding
his six feet two or three inches as uprightly at eighty as he ever had
at eighteen. I believe that was his age, but may be wrong. Borrow was
like one of the old Norse heroes, whom he so much admired, or an
old-fashioned gypsy bruiser, full of craft and merry tricks. One of
these he played on me, and I bear him no malice for it. The manner of
the joke was this: I had written a book on the English gypsies and
their language; but before I announced it, I wrote a letter to Father
George, telling him that I proposed to print it, and asking his
permission to dedicate it to him. He did not answer the letter, but
“worked the tip” promptly enough, for he immediately announced in the
newspapers on the following Monday his “Word-Book of the Romany
Language,” “with many pieces in gypsy, illustrative of the way of
speaking and thinking of the English gypsies, with specimens of their
poetry, and an account of various things relating to gypsy life in
England.” This was exactly what I had told him that my book would
contain; for I intended originally to publish a vocabulary. Father
George covered the track by not answering my letter; but I subsequently
ascertained that it had been faithfully delivered to him by a gentleman
from whom I obtained the information.
It was like the contest between Hildebrand the elder and his son:—
“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:—
AVELLA PARL O PANI.
Av' kushto parl o pani,
Av' kushto mir' akai!
Mi kameli chovihani,
Avel ke tiro rye!
Shan raklia rinkenidiri,
Mukkellan rinkeni se;
Kek rakli 'dre i temia
Se rinkenidiri mi.
Shan dudnidiri yakka,
Mukkelan dudeni;
Kek yakk peshel' sa kushti
Pa miro kameli zi.
Shan balia longi diri,
Mukk 'lende bori 'pre,
Kek waveri raklia balia,
Te lian man opre.
Yoi lela angustrini,
I miri tacheni,
Kek wavei mush jinella,
Sa dovo covva se.
Adre, adre o doeyav
Patrinia pellelan,
Kenna yek chumer kerdo
O wavero well' an.
Te wenna butidiri,
Ke jana sig akoi
Sa sig sa yeck si gillo
Shan waveri adoi.
Avella parl o pani,
Avella sig akai!
Mi kamli tani-rani
Avell' ke tiro rye!
* * * * *
COME OVER THE RIVER
O love, come o'er the water,
O love, where'er you be!
My own sweetheart, my darling,
Come over the river to me!
If any girls are fairer,
Then fairer let them be;
No maid in all the country
Is half so fair to me.
If other eyes are brighter,
Then brighter let them shine;
I know that none are lighter
Upon this heart of mine.
If other's locks are longer,
Then longer let them grow;
Hers are the only fish-lines
Which ever caught me so.
She wears upon her finger
A ring we know so well,
And we and that ring only
Know what the ring can tell.
From trees into the water
Leaves fall and float away,
So kisses come and leave us,
A thousand in a day.
Yet though they come by thousands,
Yet still they show their face;
As soon as one has left us
Another fills its place.
O love, come o'er the water,
O lore, where'er you be!
My own sweetheart, my darling,
Come over the river to me!