The English Gipsies and Their Language | Page 7

and all things were simply ideas of development. The last remark which I can recall from him was "Ja, ja. We advanced Hegelians agree exactly on the whole with the Materialists." Now, to my mind, nothing seems more natural than that, when sitting entire days talking with an old Gipsy, no one rises so frequently from the past before me as Mr P---. To him all religion represented a portion of the vast mass of frozen, petrified developments, which simply impede the march of intelligent minds; to my Rommany friend, it is one of the thousand inventions of gorgio life, which, like policemen, are simply obstacles to Gipsies in the search of a living, and could he have grasped the circumstances of the case, he would doubtless have replied "Avali, we Gipsies agree on the whole exactly with Mr P---." Extremes meet.
One Sunday an old Gipsy was assuring me, with a great appearance of piety, that on that day she neither told fortunes nor worked at any kind of labour--in fact, she kept it altogether correctly.
"Avali, dye," I replied. "Do you know what the Gipsies in Germany say became of their church?"
"Kek," answered the old lady. "No. What is it?"
"They say that the Gipsies' church was made of pork, and the dogs ate it."
Long, loud, and joyously affirmative was the peal of laughter with which the Gipsies welcomed this characteristic story.
So far as research and the analogy of living tribes of the same race can establish a fact, it would seem that the Gipsies were, previous to their quitting India, not people of high caste, but wandering Pariahs, outcasts, foes to the Brahmins, and unbelievers. All the Pariahs are not free-thinkers, but in India, the Church, as in Italy, loses no time in making of all detected free-thinkers Pariahs. Thus we are told, in the introduction to the English translation of that very curious book, "The Tales of the Gooroo Simple," which should be read by every scholar, that all the true literature of the country--that which has life, and freedom, and humour--comes from the Pariahs. And was it different in those days, when Rabelais, and Von Hutten, and Giordano Bruno were, in their wise, Pariahs and Gipsies, roving from city to city, often wanting bread and dreading fire, but asking for nothing but freedom?
The more I have conversed intimately with Gipsies, the more have I been struck by the fact, that my mingled experiences of European education and of life in the Far West of America have given me a basis of mutual intelligence which had otherwise been utterly wanting. I, myself, have known in a wild country what it is to be half-starved for many days--to feel that all my thoughts and intellectual exertions, hour by hour, were all becoming centered on one subject--how to get something to eat. I felt what it was to be wolfish and even ravening; and I noted, step by step, in myself, how a strange sagacity grew within me--an art of detecting food. It was during the American war, and there were thousands of us pitifully starved. When we came near some log hut I began at once to surmise, if I saw a flour sack lying about, that there was a mill not far distant; perhaps flour or bread in the house; while the dwellers in the hut were closely scanned to judge from their appearance if they were well fed, and of a charitable disposition. It is a melancholy thing to recall; but it is absolutely necessary for a thinker to have once lived such a life, that he may be able to understand what is the intellectual status of those fellow beings whose whole life is simply a hunt for enough food to sustain life, and enough beer to cheer it.
I have spoken of the Gipsy fondness for the hedgehog. Richard Liebich, in his book, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und in ihrer Sprache, tells his readers that the only indication of a belief in a future state which he ever detected in an old Gipsy woman, was that she once dreamed she was in heaven. It appeared to her as a large garden, full of fine fat hedgehogs. "This is," says Mr Liebich, "unquestionably very earthly, and dreamed very sensuously; reminding us of Mahommed's paradise, which in like manner was directed to the animal and not to the spiritual nature, only that here were hedgehogs and there houris."
Six or seven thousand years of hungry-marauding, end by establishing strange points of difference between the mind of a Gipsy and a well-to-do citizen. It has starved God out of the former; he inherited unbelief from his half fed Pariah ancestors, and often retains it, even in England, to this day, with many other unmistakable signs of his Eastern- jackal origin.