The English Gipsies and Their Language | Page 7

them--I mean "the real article."
Among the most thorough of these, a man on whom utter and entire
freedom of thought sat easily and unconsciously, was a certain German
doctor of philosophy named P---. To him God 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