The Gypsies | Page 3

long walk without knowing that the chances were that I should
meet within an hour some wanderer with whom I should have in
common certain acquaintances. These be indeed humble folk, but with
nature and summer walks they make me at home. In merrie England I
could nowhere be a stranger if I would, and that with people who
cannot read; and the English-born Romany rye, or gentleman speaking
gypsy, would in like manner be everywhere at home in America. There
was a gypsy family always roaming between Windsor and London, and
the first words taught to their youngest child were "Romany rye!" and
these it was trained to address to me. The little tot came up to me,--I
had never heard her speak before,--a little brown-faced, black-eyed
thing, and said, "How-do, Omany 'eye?" and great was the triumph and
rejoicing and laughter of the mother and father and all the little tribe.
To be familiar with these wanderers, who live by dale and down, is like
having the bees come to you, as they did to the Dacian damsel, whose
death they mourned; it is like the attraction of the wild deer to the fair
Genevieve; or if you know them to be dangerous outlaws, as some are,
it is like the affection of serpents and other wild things for those whom
nature has made their friends, and who handle them without fear. They
are human, but in their lives they are between man as he lives in houses
and the bee and bird and fox, and I cannot help believing that those
who have no sympathy with them have none for the forest and road,
and cannot be rightly familiar with the witchery of wood and wold.
There are many ladies and gentlemen who can well-nigh die of a sunset,
and be enraptured with "bits" of color, and captured with scenes, and to
whom all out-of-doors is as perfect as though it were painted by Millais,
yet to whom the bee and bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in
their true inner life strangers. And just as strange to them, in one sense,
are the scenes in which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them
only pictures, though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold
in them the fairy-land of childhood. Only in Ruysdael and Salvator
Rosa and the great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany,
and this spell is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy

have no words in which to express their sense of nature and its charm,
but they have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring
culture, retain it. And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just
as the old delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's
beauty--the perfection of natural beauty--is rapidly vanishing in every
country, and being replaced by the mingled real and unreal
attractiveness of "cleverness," intellect, and fashion. No doubt the
newer tend to higher forms of culture, but it is not without pain that he
who has been "in the spirit" in the old Sabbath of the soul, and in its
quiet, solemn sunset, sees it all vanishing. It will all be gone in a few
years. I doubt very much whether it will be possible for the most
unaffectedly natural writer to preserve any of its hieroglyphics for
future Champollions of sentiment to interpret. In the coming days,
when man shall have developed new senses, and when the blessed sun
himself shall perhaps have been supplanted by some tremendous
electrical light, and the moon be expunged altogether as interfering
with the new arrangements for gravity, there will doubtless be a new
poetry, and art become to the very last degree self-conscious of its
cleverness, artificial and impressional; yet even then weary scholars
will sigh from time to time, as they read in our books of the ancient
purple seas, and how the sun went down of old into cloud-land,
gorgeous land, and then how all dreamed away into night!
Gypsies are the human types of this vanishing, direct love of nature, of
this mute sense of rural romance, and of al fresco life, and he who does
not recognize it in them, despite their rags and dishonesty, need not
pretend to appreciate anything more in Callot's etchings than the
skillful management of the needle and the acids. Truly they are but rags
themselves; the last rags of the old romance which connected man with
nature. Once romance was a splendid mediaeval drama, colored and
gemmed with chivalry, minnesong, bandit-flashes, and waving plumes;
now there remain but a few tatters. Yes, we were young and foolish
then, but there are perishing with the wretched fragments of the red
Indian tribes mythologies as beautiful as