John Bunyan and the Gipsies — Text and Context

ort belong together” (p. 140).

In my Disquisition on the Gipsies I said:—

“In Scotland the prejudice towards the name of Gipsy might be safely allowed to drop, were it only for this reason, that the race has got so much mixed up with the native blood, and even with good families of the country, as to be, in plain language, a jumble, a pretty kettle of fish, indeed” (p. 427).

Mr. Leland continues:—

“No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet _clearly_ explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people like ourselves. It is leavened with direct Indian blood; it has, more or less modified, a peculiar _morale_.” “It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it” (p. 140).

Had Mr. Leland said that, with the exception of myself, “no writer whatever” had even alluded to the phenomenon described, I believe he would have stated what was true. I endeavoured to explain it in a Disquisition of 171 pages, which he indirectly admitted he “carefully read”; so that if I did not “clearly explain” the “puzzle and muddle” it must have proceeded from a lack of intellect on my part, or on his in not understanding me. Since then I have frequently expatiated on and described it, but I am not aware that Mr. Leland has seen what I wrote on these occasions. In _The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies_ I said that the Gipsy problem “may at first present an aspect of a ‘labyrinth of difficulties’”; but that to solve it “there is little intellect wanted for the occasion, but such as it is it should be allowed to act freely on the subject of inquiry” (p. 23). To judge of Mr. Leland’s works on the Gipsies one would think that he had been indebted to no one for anything; so that it is remarkable he should have complained that _novelists_ should not have “clearly explained” to him what he himself should have told us—particularly as he spoke of his “great experience” among the Gipsies—unless it appears that even to novelists he—as a professional writer taking up a subject that came to his hand—has been indebted for putting him on the track for repeating or illustrating an “oft-told tale.” {18} We can easily imagine how Mr. Leland got “puzzled and muddled” in contemplating his subject when he says so positively that the Gipsies are disappearing as “British birds are chasing American ones out of Philadelphia”; and that the mixed state of Gipsydom seen at Cobham Fair “was old before the Saxon Heptarchy” (p. 140). What he said he could find in “no writer whatever” was elaborately described in the book which I published. That he used for his own purposes, and then apparently turned round and threw out his heels at it.

I have spoken of Mr. Leland’s “confident assertions,” but I have space merely to allude to some of them. Among these are the following:—That there is no mystery about the origin of the Gipsies (p. 331), and that “it is a matter of history that, since the Aryan morning of mankind, the Romany have been chiromancing” (p. 225); that “among those who left India were men of different castes and different colours, ranging from the pure Northern invader to the Negro-like Southern Indian” (p. 24); that the Gipsies in Egypt have lost their tongue (p. 296); that the English Gipsy cares not a farthing “to know anything about his race as it exists in foreign countries, or whence it came” (p. 34); and that there is hardly a travelling company of dancers, musicians, singers, or acrobats, or theatre “in Europe or America in which there is not at least one person with some Romany blood” (p. 332). This at least is common, I dare say very common. On one occasion I looked over the show-bill while in MS. of an English Gipsy company who travelled in America with a small panorama. {19a}

The conclusion which I drew of Mr. Leland after reading his Cyclopædia article was that, apart from the language, he knew little of the _subject of the Gipsies_. The knowledge of the language has given him the entrée into the circle of a certain class of the Gipsies, leading to a “flash-in-the-pan” knowledge of them; but not constituting him a reliable guide on the whole question under consideration; for, in keeping with his “confident assertions” generally, he disposes of it by saying that “the child is perhaps born who will see the last Gipsy.” {19b}