THE SOCIAL EMANCIPA TION OF THE GIPSIES. 



153 



treat a question like the present. 

 Their minds seem to be so besotted 

 with fiction, as not, in a matter of 

 this kind, to be capable of distin- 

 guishing between fact and fable. As 

 a class, or almost invariably, they 

 are anything but men of science or 

 philosophy. With their tawdry senti- 

 mentality and improbable coinci- 

 dence of circumstances, and all 

 their " mystery - mongering," they 

 cannot produce anything of lasting 

 interest, that can approach facts, 

 when found out of the beaten track, 

 and seem jealous of them in conse- 

 quence. A man of Dickens' stand- 

 ing might naturally have been sup- 

 posed to become fired with the new 

 ideas presented to him, so as to 

 make them the subject of one of 

 his powerful romances ; but that 

 would have been inconsistent with 

 his genius, which preferred to stick 

 to what people already admitted ; so 

 that he proved but " an ordinary 

 personage " on the occasion, assum- 

 ing that he was the writer of the 

 article in question. Does the re- 

 mark of Bunsen, in his Egypt's 

 Place in Universal History, hold 

 good, when he says : 



" Sound judgment is displayed rather 

 in an aptness for believing what is histori- 

 cal, than in a readiness at denying it. 

 . . . Shallow minds have a decided 

 propensity to fall into the latter error." 

 " Incapability of believing on evidence 

 is the last form of the intellectual imbe- 

 cility of an enervated age, and a warn- 

 ing sign of impending decay." * 



* Mr. Lei and, in his English Gipsies, 

 writes: "Mr. Dickens has set before 

 us Cheap Jacks, and a number of men 

 who were, in their very face, of the class 

 of which I speak ; but I cannot recall in 

 his writings any indication that he knew 

 that these men had a singular secret life 

 with their confreres, or that they could 

 speak a strange language ; for we may 

 well call that language strange which is, 

 in the main, Sanscrit, with many Persian 

 words intermingled. Mr. Dickens, how- 

 ever, did not preten-d, as some have done, 

 to specially treat of Gipsies, and he made 

 no affectation of a knowledge of any 

 mysteries. He simply reflected popular 

 life as he saw it " (p. 5). Dickens' making 



In an article in Black-wood's Maga- 

 zine, for May, 1866, it is said : 



"If an enterprising traveller gets 

 starved to death in Australia, or frozen 

 up at the North Pole, or eaten by the 

 natives .in Central Africa, at least he 

 reaps the glory of the venture. But to 

 penetrate into Gipsydom . . . offers 

 no sort of honour or credit by way of 

 reward." 



The motive here presented rises 

 no higher than the one described by 

 Samuel Johnson, when he said, that 

 such a one " would tumble in a pig- 

 stye, if he could but get people to 

 come and admire him." I admit 

 that the subject of the Gipsies, so 

 far as it is understood, and as Black- 

 wood will have, or will allow, it to be 

 understood, presents little interest 

 to the world, if it means only a cer- 

 tain style of life that may cease at 

 any moment. The reviewer abso- 

 lutely ignores the allusions of the 

 author to the Gipsies, in a greatly 

 mixed state, as regards blood, and 

 in a settled and civilized condition, 

 and characterizes my additions to 

 the work in the following terms : 



"But they [some of the facts and 

 anecdotes] have unfortunately been 

 mixed up on the editor's part with so 

 much w^ld speculation, and so many 

 unsupported assertions, which are made 

 to pass for arguments." "These ac- 

 cessories take, up nearly half of the 

 volume, which would be much more 

 readable in every way if they had been 

 omitted." 



That is, if all I have added were 

 represented by blank paper, litera- 

 ture and the world at large would 

 have been gainers ! That conserv- 

 atism which might be termed Black- 

 woodism could go no further. How 

 does this writer know that these ad- 

 ditions are " wild speculations " and 

 " unsupported assertions " ? It never 

 seems to have occurred to him that 

 his additions to the subject are 



no pretence of any knowledge of the 

 Gipsies was a good reason why he should 

 not have allowed the article in question 

 to appear in All the Year Round. 



