The Gypsies | Page 4

those of the Greek or
Norseman; and there is also vanishing with the gypsy an unexpressed
mythology, which those who are to come after us would gladly recover.
Would we not have been pleased if one of the thousand Latin men of

letters whose works have been preserved had told us how the old
Etruscans, then still living in mountain villages, spoke and habited and
customed? But oh that there had ever lived of old one man who, noting
how feelings and sentiments changed, tried to so set forth the souls of
his time that after-comers might understand what it was which inspired
their art!
In the Sanskrit humorous romance of "Baital Pachisi," or King Vikram
and the Vampire, twenty-five different and disconnected trifling stories
serve collectively to illustrate in the most pointed manner the highest
lesson of wisdom. In this book the gypsies, and the scenes which
surround them, are intended to teach the lesson of freedom and nature.
Never were such lessons more needed than at present. I do not say that
culture is opposed to the perception of nature; I would show with all
my power that the higher our culture the more we are really qualified to
appreciate beauty and freedom. But gates must be opened for this, and
unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every
form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land
of delight.
The gypsy is one of many links which connect the simple feeling of
nature with romance. During the Middle Ages thousands of such links
and symbols united nature with religion. Thus Conrad von Wurtzburg
tells in his "Goldene Schmiede" that the parrot which shines in fairest
grass-green hue, and yet like common grass is never wet, sets forth the
Virgin, who bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained
unchanged. So the parrot and grass and green and shimmering light all
blended in the ideal of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird
appears in pictures by Van Eyck and Durer. To me the gypsy-parrot
and green grass in lonely lanes and the rain and sunshine all mingle to
set forth the inexpressible purity and sweetness of the virgin parent,
Nature. For the gypsy is parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain
as in green; for green was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as
it is to-day in Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may
never dare on heath to wear that fatal fairy color.
These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set

forth a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany. The
day is coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild
wanderers, no wild nature, and certainly no gypsies. Within a very few
years in the city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and
cad of birds, has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful
feathered creatures whom, as a boy, I knew. The fire-flashing scarlet
tanager and the humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden
oriole, are now almost forgotten, or unknown to city children. So the
people of self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing
the wilder sort, and it is all right, and so it must be, and therewith basta.
But as a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child
was perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, "Somehow we feel
sorry for that child."

THE RUSSIAN GYPSIES.
It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having
quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even in
science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to
something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of
fancy. The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still
"genial," because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the
inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual. We are not
rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of
curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed
about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated
manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or
minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their
late majesties the Georges. Until such a science is formed, the new one
of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents most
attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who
should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere
amusement. For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as
primeval