EGYPTIAN MAGIC

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 18

EGYPTIAN MAGIC

THE ROMANY RACE

PERSISTENT . PERSECUTION

The future of the gipsies of Central Europe is to be discussed at a conference in Budapest when it Trill be suggested that the League of Nations should find a home for them on an island, says,a recent exchange. It is a strange thing that, harmless, easily, contented, and simple in their desires.and their home life aa the gipsies are, no race except the Jewish has ever been more persistently persecuted, all over the world. In Spain and Hungary the mere fact of being a gipsy was once a crime punishable by hanging! Even in England in the New Forest there are now only seven places where gipsies are allowed to camp. -In all countries, at all times, the Boinauy has been bullied, tortured, beaten, segregated, driven, and yet he has survived, with all his strange Oriental customs, his gaiety, his music, and his -'lovely' secret language, says Lady Eleanor Smith, author of several novels of gipsy life and a warm champion of ..the race. ' Into the grey Puritanism of our, dreary modern life he strolls like a spielmann, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He is a wizard, and his wife a sorceress.:.He. still bewitches people with his music, she with her spells and potions. Sometimes they charm" snakes, sometimes they train bears to .dance, sometimes they doctor horses, sometimes they play the fiddle, . sometimes the guitar. But they are always the same. For centuries they.,have refused to be tamed, nor will they /ever be. They have not the slightest •.' wish to work regularly or to live Jl in, cities. They know they are better ,6tt iir their hedgesides and ditches., Perhaps it is the supreme disdain'of civilisation that so much irritates the busybodies of modern life. In any ease, no one will ever leave the gipsies itt peace; •~" ~ A PRINCE'S TORTUNE. In England oil Derby Day they contribute colour and gaiety to this great open-air festival, and the story goes that the Prince Begent had his fortune told by one of them —a fortune which so delighted him that he presented the prophetess with a diamond ring still in the possession of her descendants. It was the gipsy who inspired the music of Liszt and that of many other Hungarian composers; without him the glowing prose of Borrow and Prosper Merimee would never have been wx'itten. " ' i He is the hero of many a legend— the Jongleur of Notre Dame was a gipsy—his folk-lore is as rich and colourful as the. stories that have been woven about him, and there are so many of these that there is not room to mention more than a few. "Carmen," "Guy Mannering, *' "The Bomany Eye," the ballet of "The Three Cornered Hat, "poems by Keats, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and even Shakespeare himself, not to speak of the music of most contemporary Spanish composers, and an enormously long novel by Victor Hugo! It is because the Eomany, in an age drab and tedious beyond belief, still has the power to bring with him Egyptian magic—music, colour, necromancy, gaiety, vivid romance —that the time has come to cease these petty persecutions and' to present him with the one thing in life that lie has learned to prize—the freedom of English, lanes.