Across deaths dark stream I give thee my hand; and what Thou wouldst have desired for thyself I wish theemayst thou sleep well.



II.

Although novelists, dramatists, and poets are particularly fond of trying to paint the gipsies, it cannot be said that many of them have been successful in their delineations. And this is because the inner and the outer life of a proscribed race must necessarily be unlike each other. Meg Merrilies is no more a gipsy than is Borrows delightful Isopel Berners. Among the characteristic traits of the Romany woman, Meg does no doubt exhibit two: a wild poetic imagination and a fearlessness such as women rarely display. But no one who had been brought into personal contact with gipsy women could ever have presented Meg Merrilies as one of them. In the true Romany chi poetic imagination is combined with a homeliness and a positive love of respectability which are very curious. Not that Meg, noble as she is, is superior to the kind of heroic woman that the Romany race is capable of producing. Indeed, the great speciality of the Romanies is the superiority of the women to the mena superiority which extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift of music for which the gipsies are noticeable. Even in Eastern EuropeRussia alone exceptedwhere gipsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men and not, in general, the women who excel. This, however, may simply be the result of opportunity and training.

It is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over language, in breadth of view regarding the Gorgio world around them, that the Romany women, in Great Britain at least, leave the men far behind. In character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine a gipsy hero is not easy. The male gipsy is not without a certain amount of courage, but it soon gives way, and in a physical conflict between a gipsy and an Englishman it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefighters have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon to take punishment with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow her husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her without returning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among the gipsies. It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities of the gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualities among the men of which we have been speaking. The lack of masculine chivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistible impulse among the women for taking their own part without appealing to the men for aid. Also this may account for the strong way in which a gipsy woman is often drawn to the Tarno Rye, the young English gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the Scholar-Gipsy, and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often in such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy in the Romany woman is seen. The unconquerable virtue of the Romany chi was often commented upon by Borrow; and, indeed, every observer of gipsy life is struck by it.

Seeing that the moment the Romanies are brought into contact with the Gorgio world they adopt a method of approach entirely different from the natural methodnatural to them in intercourse with each otherit is perhaps no wonder that the popular notion of the gipsy girl, taken mainly from the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong. With regard to the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared on the boards, save the characters in Tom Taylors Sir Roger de Coverley. In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright, devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman. The fact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really exists there is but little devilry. Romany guile, which is well defined in the gipsy phrase as the lie for the Gorgios, does not prevent gipsy women from retaining some of the most marked characteristics of childhood throughout their lives. This, indeed, is one of their special charms. In his desire to depict the supposed devilry of the Romany woman, Prosper Mérimée has perpetrated in Carmen the greatest of all caricatures of the gipsy girl. A mere incarnation of lust and bloodthirstiness is more likely to exist in any other race than in the Romanies, who have a great deal of love as a sentiment and comparatively very little of love as a movement of animal desire.

In G. P. R. Jamess Gipsy (1835) there are touches which certainly show some original knowledge of Romany life and character. The same may, perhaps, be said of Sheridan Le Fanus Bird of Passage, but the pictures of gipsy life in these and in all other novels are the merest daubs compared with the Kiomi of George Merediths story Harry Richmond. Not even Borrow and Groome, with all their intimate knowledge of gipsy life, ever painted a more vigorous picture of the Romany chi than this. The original was well known in the art circles of London at one time, and was probably known to Meredith, but this does not in any way derogate from the splendour of the imaginative achievement of painting in a few touches a Romany girl who must, one would think, live for ever.

Between some Englishmen and gipsy women there is an extraordinary attractionan attraction, we may say in passing, which did not exist between Borrow and the gipsy women with whom he was brought into contact. Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn to any woman, she would have been of the Scandinavian type; she would have been what he used to call a Brynhild. It was tall blondes he really admired. Hence, notwithstanding his love of the economies of gipsy life, his gipsy women are all mere scenic charactersthey clothe and beautify the scene; they are not dramatic characters. When he comes to delineate a heroine, Isopel Berners, she is physically the very opposite of the Romany chia Scandinavian Brynhild, in short.

THE END



Footnotes:

{15} Mr. Coulson Kernahan.

{17} The writer is much indebted to Mr. Coulson Kernahan for this story and much other information of life at The Pines.

{18} My Reminiscences, by Lord Ronald Gower.

{25} Of August 13, 1881. By Mr. A. Egmont Hake.

{32} Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, art-critic, who poisoned a number of his relatives for their money, a contributor to The London Magazine and exhibitor at the Royal Academy. He died a convict in Tasmania in 1852.

{33} C. G. Leland (Hans Breitmann), on whom Borrows books had an incredible influence, and caused him to take up the study of things Romany.

{34} Louis Jeremiah Abershaw, better known as Jerry Abershaw, 1773?-1795, a notorious highwayman, who was the terror of the roads from London to Wimbledon and Kingston. Borrow with characteristic perversity persisted in regarding the redoubtable Jerry as a hero, in spite of the fact that he justly met his death on the gallows.

{50} Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow. Derived from Official and other Authentic Sources. By William I. Knapp, Ph.D. With Portrait and Illustrations. 2 vols. (Murray.)

{60} The reader was Richard Ford, author of the Handbook for Travellers in Spain, &c. He subsequently became Burrows warm admirer and friend.

{77} Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as Designer and Writer. Notes by William Michael Rossetti. (Cassell and Co.)

{104} Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 18541870. By George Birkbeck Hill. (Fisher Unwin.)

{108} The year of Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee.

{132} Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a Memoir. By his Son. 2 vols. (Macmillan).

{156} My fathers words.

{168} The Times, October 18, 1876.

{195} New Poems. By Christina Rossetti. Edited by William Michael Rossetti. (Macmillan & Co.)

{231} Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. By Lord de Tabley. Second Series. (Lane.)

{263} A Dream of John Ball and a Kings Lesson. Signs of Change.

{264} Written in 1888.

THE END