VAGRANTS.* THE fragments here collected are of unequal value and
vary- ing interest. The chapters devoted to the Jew are worth recovery, despite their prejudice, while the reflections upon El Islam are inspired with the eloquence that comes of enthusiasm. But where Sir Richard Burton should have the most to say, there for the moment he is revealed in the weakest light, and his notes upon the gipsies are scarcely worth reprinting. It is unimportant to-day that once upon a time he had a dispute with M. Bataillard, nor is it of the slightest consequence whether he or Professor Pott first detected the relationship which is said to exist between the gipsies and the Jats. But Burton was an intellectual warrior, to whom a contest of wit was always a necessity, and doubtless it was loyalty which persuaded his editor to forget that ancient controversies lose their perfume as rapidly as gathered flowers.
At any rate, there is enough in the book to amuse the curious, even though Burton was not always an accurate scholar. Moreover, it possesses the solid merit of homogeneity, which it does not share with many casual reprints. The Jew, the gipsy, the Mithommedan, different as they are in creed and character, have suffered the same experience : they have all been wanderers upon the globe's surface. Chased by war, by ambition, or by the lust of travel from their own homes, they have one and all lived among aliens, and wn strong upon the hatred of others. It is a destiny which few men would envy, but which they have shaped to brave, if not always to glorious, ends. And their greatest triumph has been to preserve unaltered their primitive character. A pride in the purity of their blood has rendered amalgamation with their foreign hosts impossible, and the Jew and the gipsy are the same to-day as they were before we began to reckon the centuries. Moreover, they still pursue the same ends, and with the same success. As the gipsy pilfers and makes music, so the Jew grows rich and powerful, while as for the Moslem, the superb conqueror, he has renounced his wanderings, and in his release from constant warfare harks back to the lazy, casual savage.
The successful alien is not a popular figure, and the un- reasoning hatred to which the Jew has been exposed ever since he left his native Jerusalem, need not surprise us. But that historian is rash who would find a definite explanation for this secular quarrel. Jealousy, doubtless, counts for something. The surpassing qualities of persistence and resolution are irritating to those who possess them not. For many centuries the world has attempted to destroy the Jews. Bat the Jews are indestructible, and to-day they are richer, stronger, and more numerous than at any moment in their history. Moreover, as Sir Richard Barton points out, they are not called the Chosen People for nothing. Many a time
• The Jew, the Gym. and El Islam. By the late Captain Sir Richard F. Barton. London; Hutcliuson and Co. [21e.]
since Moses has the Angel of Death passed their houses by, and while the historian attributes their strange immunity to their nomadic life and ascetic habits, the man of prejudice finds therein another reason for hatred. But all these pre- tended reasons might prove of no account were they not exaggerated by the fury of race and the feud of blood. The Western nations have hated the Jew because his colour and his type are different from their own. As the cat and the dog are born enemies, so the Jew was born to prey upon the Christian, the Christian was born to execrate his successful rival. And the hate being presumed to be preordained and eternal, the ingenious have always been eager with explanations. All the sins imaginable have been set down to the Jews' account. They are thieves, says their enemy ; they are misers; their hand is against all men ; and worse still, they kidnap children that they may celebrate the more acceptably their horrid rites. Thus speaks prejudice when it is driven to justify itself. And Sir Richard Burton is even more precise in accounting for his unconcealed dislike. It is all the fault of the Talmud, he says, which excuses the worst crusade, and makes a merit of brutality. Vindictive teaching, he argues, must result in atrocity. Bat this argument leaves still unexplained the shameful persecu- tion of the Jews by those who never heard of the Talmud. And the most that can be said is that the natural man, in denouncing the Jew, professes no more than a hatred which lurks in his blood and race. That the natural man is wicked and unreasoning does not lessen the acerbity of the contest. Such waves of infamous oppression as now engulf France will from time to time overwhelm Europe, and it is only when champions of genius arise, such as Disraeli, that the Chosen People may expect justice or appreciation.
The Jew, in truth, has few champions, and though Sir Richard Burton's condemnation of the Talmud, which is not nowadays read in schools, proves a defective fancy, he is not singular in his dislike. Nor is he singular in his admiration of that other vagrant, the gipsy, whose ambulatory house and predatory habits are the very soul of romance. He, too, lives everywhere and nowhere. Now, as at Yetholm, he finds a cottage, and with all the pride of an unaccustomed house- dweller, he calls it a palace ; now (and more often) he en- camps upon the moorland, hobbles his horse, and makes him- self happy with petty theft. His habits, indeed, are as ancient as the habits of the Jew. He pilfers, or is accused of pilfering, to-day, as in the remote past; yet no slur has ever been cast upon his aristocracy, and he is as justly proud of his untarnished race as the Cohens themselves. When he has renounced his roving life and become noble in the common sense, he has founded great families, such as the Hunyadis and the Tolstoys, but he has given up more than he has gained, and lost, with his true nobility, the priceless gifts of freedom and carelessness. But wherever you find him, he is an artist in destiny, a cunning spy, an accomplished fighter, a trusty messenger, and above all, a vagrant to whom music is at once a necessity and a power. And the result is that while the Jew makes enemies, the gipsy, with his less useful endow- ment, makes friends, and even when he robs a hen-roost, encounters the enthusiastic sympathy of the victim.
But of all vagrants who ever put foot across their own tent or threshold, surely the greatest was the Moslem. His sojourn was shorter, it is true, than the sojourn of the others, who are still with us, but it was incomparably more brilliant. History cannot show an episode more glorious than the descent of the Moors upon Spain. Coming into a foreign land, they declined absorption. The gipsy wandered aim- lessly into the plain ; the Jew, with his genius for adaptation, hid himself in the capital and grew rich. But the Moor said, "I am master," and straightway he built him a temple and a pleasure house. He must be King or nothing, and when the splendour of empire was denied him, be disappeared with his treasures and his learning and his indomitable courage. The Jew and the gipsy have given nothing to the world save themselves. The tent and the waggon of the Zingari are their only contribution to the world's architecture. As for the Jews, they are ready to live in any house built with hands, and they conceal themselves as easily in Park Lane as in Hounds- ditch. But they have added nothing to the aspect of our cities. The Ghetto is annexed, and takes its character from its inhabitants. So that we have the unique experience of a nation which has crossed Europe and left no trace (savo itself) of its migration. The Moors, on the other hand, dominated to such purpose that they transformed Spain. The heroes who built the matchless mosque of Cordova were something better than valiant wanderers. Wherever they went, they brought more than they expected to find, and their very nobility of temper and intellect insured their failure. Had they been egotistical as the Jews, they would have grown rich without effect. Had they been careless swindlers, like the gipsies, they would unto this day have advertised the buried treasure in the neighbourhood of a prison which is still a steady source of income to some adventurer. But they played for a vast stake, and ultimately they lost. And their loss is far more glorious than the gain of others. No sooner had Philip IIL compassed their expul- sion than Andalusia, which had been their profit and their pride, fell back into a waste; and the King's dying regret that he had driven out the Moors was abundantly justified. How- ever, their work lived after them ; the aqueducts they built still carry pure water to their enemies ; the Alhambra is still the glory of the country which banished them ; and by a curious irony the Jew and the gipsy still flourish where the benevolent Moor has long been an outcast. But his monu- ments will outlive the very life of other aliens, for of these three vagrants—the Jew, the Gipsy, and the Moslem—fortui- teusly brought together by Burton's editor, the most success- ful in art by far was the Moslem.
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