Gypsies and the British imagination, 1807

IN CHAPTER 11 of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, an aggrieved Maggie Tulliver runs away from home to join the Gypsies on Dunlow Common. Feeling like an outcast in her own family and told repeatedly that her dark skin and thick, unruly hair make her look like a mulatto or a Gypsy, she goes in search of her true kin. Maggie harbors a number of fantastic preconceptions about the Gypsies. She believes that they are sure to embrace her as one of their own and even, perhaps, make her their queen and firmly expects that they live on a common: a “mysterious illimitable common where there were sand-pits to hide in, and one was out of everybody’s reach.”¹ After searching in vast green fields and finding neither Dunlow Common nor any Gypsies, she discovers them in a lane behind a gate. Eliot uses Maggie’s naïve disappointment to suggest the gap that commonly exists between the folkloric images and the actual circumstances of Gypsy life. Eliot also alludes to certain historical developments of the 1820s and 1830s (the period during which the novel is set) to help direct her readers’ attention toward the sometimes harsh realities of Gypsy experience: the enclosure movement, which prohibited the public use of open spaces, like commons, and vagrancy laws, which allowed for the harassment and uprooting of Gypsies if they camped on commons or highways.

After the late eighteenth century and, in particular, after passage of the Vagrancy Act of 1824, Gypsies were prosecuted not as they had been, as a nation or “race,” but as nomads, “vagrants, rogues, and vagabonds.”² The overtly racist content of anti-Gypsy legislation had disappeared in 1783, when the laws that mandated the imprisonment, deportation, or even execution of individuals simply because they were Gypsies were repealed. These statutes, passed in the Elizabethan period, were replaced, however, with legislation that targeted Gypsies through the ostensible crime of vagrancy. Beginning in 1783 and culminating in 1824, Gypsies could be rounded up simply by virtue of their nomadic existence. For the offenses of hawking, peddling, begging, camping on the side of a turnpike, telling fortunes, “wandering abroad and lodging under any tent or cart,” or vagrancy (however defined), Gypsies could be prosecuted, fined, locked up, or persistently harassed.³ They often tried to set up camp in cramped, isolated places—like lanes, as in The Mill on the Floss—or to elude arrest and imprisonment by continually moving on. But simply sleeping outside or having no apparent and regular employment could serve as the basis for legal action and, certainly, for persecution of moderate but persistent intensity.

Walter Scott took up the theme of the displacement and homelessness of Gypsies, their status as wanderers and pariahs, and tied it to specific economic and legal developments that he had observed in the Orkney Islands. In a similar but more impassioned manner, the poet John Clare yoked the Gypsies’ endangered way of life to the pattern of enclosures that he witnessed and lamented.⁴ “There is not so many of them as there used to be,” he wrote in an autobiographical fragment on Gypsies, “the inclosure has left nothing but narrow lanes w[h]ere they are ill provided with a lodging.”⁵ For Clare, as for William Wordsworth slightly before him and Matthew Arnold after him, Gypsies played a role in a changing landscape, but they were also figures in a pastoral tradition. Their literary representation was bound up with particular poetic conventions, with ways of understanding and imagining the landscape, and with the transformations they registered in the countryside around them. In nineteenth-century pastoral, Gypsies were marked both as casualties of rural transformation and as itinerant and vagabond doubles of the poet. For Wordsworth, whose identification with Gypsy wanderers and “travellers” was ambivalent at best, the Gypsy was a primitive, an unevolved fellow resident of the Cumberland hills, whose vagrancy was itself a defining characteristic. Clare, whose father was an agricultural laborer, wished fervently to be of the Gypsies, and the Cambridge-educated Wordsworth to be spared their fate, but both regarded them, as did Scott, as an aboriginal people with their own customs and habits who lived on the always visible periphery of settled society.⁶ For Arnold, however, the Gypsy became a focus for modern nostalgia, a preindustrial figure untainted by the “strange disease of modern life.” What was primitive but contemporary for Wordsworth and Clare was idealized, allied with the past, and all but invisible for Arnold. Clare’s pastoral was inseparable from the economic and political vicissitudes of the people who inhabited the land, whereas Arnold’s pastoral expressed an inchoate and abstract sense of loss.

Arnold’s Gypsy poems—“Resignation,” “Thyrsis,” and, especially, “The Scholar-Gipsy”—played a major role in the mid-nineteenth-century creation of the Gypsy figure as a remnant of prelapserian England, a marker of the transition from rural to industrial society that was imagined, in the words of Raymond Williams, as a “kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering and disorder.”⁷ As the Gypsies took on this association with a world that no longer existed, they were figured more and more frequently as mythic beings, as phantom visitors from another world, “seen by rare glimpses,” like Arnold’s scholar-gypsy. A few decades earlier, in Wordsworth’s and Clare’s day, the palpable loss of common lands and open fields, of settled rural communities and traditions, had been registered with pain and dismay. Williams estimates that between 1775 and 1825, about one-quarter of all cultivated acreage was appropriated by large and usually politically powerful landowners, and he relates these enclosures to the intense feeling for “unaltered nature [and] wild land” in the poetry of the period, as well as to the new emphasis in a poet like Wordsworth on “the dispossessed, the lonely wanderer, the vagrant.”⁸ In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Helsinger has written about a slightly different but related subject, “nostalgia is a luxury the embattled rural scene does not often afford.”⁹ Toward the end of the century, however, nostalgia had replaced the sense of immediate loss and struggle characteristic of earlier decades, and Arnold, as observer of a world in transition and anatomist of “modern life,” began to create the contours and images of longing for a premodern world. As an aspect of this imagery, the Gypsy became, in Arnold’s hands, both a more transcendent and a less actual, less corporeal, figure. Indeed, his scholar-gypsy is not a Gypsy at all, but a one-time Oxford student who has abandoned “English” society and who, in a way that has had a lasting effect on the way the poem has been read, stands in for the Gypsies.

Wordsworth and Arnold saw themselves and their poetic projects in relation to the patterns of existence that Gypsies, among other vagrants and vagabonds, seemed to embody: wandering, unproductive repetition, cyclical movement, detachment, and marginality. The interesting and, to some, frustrating aspects of this identification in Wordsworth is that he denies Gypsies the same sympathy and charitable interest that he accords almost all other rural vagrants and wanderers about whom he wrote. Arnold, though, who distanced himself from what David G. Riede calls the “passionate, committed, deep empathy of Romanticism,” accepted Gypsy existence with apparent equanimity.¹⁰ He imbued the Gypsies’ distance from the contentious and distracting hub of society with the serenity of detachment to which he himself aspired. In the process, he removed Gypsies from the context of certain political and historical realities and transformed them into creatures of myth. The paradoxes of Wordsworth’s apparent disdain and Arnold’s adulation can be understood in the context of certain aspects of the poet’s and the Gypsy’s relationships to time and space: to repetitive movement, stasis, and intense watchfulness.

In order to understand the complexity of William Wordsworth’s and John Clare’s variations on the idea of the Gypsy as stock pastoral figure, we begin with the conventional example of Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (1832). The two sketches that feature Gypsies in this collection offer a crude but representative version of the Gypsy’s role in the tradition of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century picturesque.¹¹ The homey, occasionally giddy narrator of “The Old Gipsy” and its sequel, “The Young Gipsy,” begins by lamenting the paucity of Gypsies in her neighborhood. The reason for this regrettable state is that the town is too well penned, watched, and guarded—too successfully insulated from theft, that is—to be easy prey to “that ambulatory race.”¹² “In short,” she declares, “we are too little primitive” (436). This “gipsyless” condition is most unfortunate for the landscape painter or lover, she complains. Gypsies—“that picturesque people”—harmonize with nature and complement the rustic scene (436). In an analogy that she will extend later in the sketch, the narrator elaborates on the potentially picturesque qualities of this group by comparing them to wild but unthreatening and aesthetically pleasing animals. Gypsies are the “wild genus,” she writes, “the pheasants and roebucks of the human race” (436).

The sketch proceeds to focus on a family of Gypsies the narrator once discovered at a nearby encampment, a group “innocent” in its appearance and happily absent of the “tall, dark, lean Spanish looking men” she would be loathe to encounter alone on an empty path (437). Devoid of threatening masculine sexuality—no thieving or pillaging from this lot—“our village’s” Gypsies are headed by a female fortune-teller and answer the demands of the landscape painter: “a pretty picture … the group … so harmless, poor outcasts! and so happy—a beautiful picture!” (438) (figure 8). This “modern Cassandra,” whom the narrator predictably compares with Walter Scott’s Meg Merrilies, tailors her fortunes to suit each client and emerges as a colorful and benign, if implicitly dishonest, figure. But her talents are also equated with those of an animal, the narrator’s dog May, an “oracle” consulted by the entire village about matters of character and commerce.¹³ This prophetic greyhound, her mistress records, “probably regarded the gipsy as a sort of rival, an interloper on her oracular domain” (442). The gently humorous and superficially appreciative tone of the sketch—the old Gypsy is ultimately shrewd in her predictions and the Gypsies are a welcome and picturesque presence—barely masks the narrator’s belief in the Gypsies’ semihuman status. Like the picturesque pheasants and domesticated dogs of the landscape, but unlike the sexually predatory “Spanish looking men” who might roam elsewhere, these Gypsies are harmless primitives. They possess cunning instincts but exhibit no refined talents or cultivated behavior.

In Mitford’s second Gypsy sketch, “The Young Gipsy,” the old Cassandra, “dark as an Egyptian,” proves an embarrassment to her granddaughter, a young beauty whose rosy, bright-skinned looks make her worthy of a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The girl, Fanny, has the chance to marry a non-Gypsy gamekeeper and assimilate into English village life, where the “sin of her gipsyism [might be] forgotten” (458). Fanny is “clever and docile, and comports herself just as if she had lived in a house all her days” (458). But her grandmother, the old Cassandra, must decamp, leave town, and disappear so the girl can “pass” as English and suffer no stigma as the granddaughter of a Gypsy fortune-teller. A classic story of upward mobility through the denial of an ethnic past, “The Young Gipsy” belies the benign, if condescending, regard of “The Old Gipsy.” Mitford may wax enthusiastic about the picturesque presence of the Gypsies of “our village,” but ultimately she imagines a community purged of its dark tricksters and bolstered by their passable kin. Foreignness and difference are blunted as the light-skinned Gypsy beauty blends into a homogeneous Englishness.

Mitford’s contemporary John Clare also made use of the familiar association between Gypsies and the aesthetic of the picturesque, casting them as primitives with distinct, although not alien, moral and social codes. Beyond that, however, his disposition toward Gypsies in his poems and private writings is radically different from the genteel condescension of Our Village. First, Clare saw Gypsies, as I have indicated, in the political and economic context of enclosure and of deeply unsettling rural change and so regarded them as emblematic of both persecution and liberty. Second, Clare regarded Gypsies as pastoral figures. For him, they not only represented an insulated and authentic state of being to be cherished and celebrated, but appeared as objects of empathy and identification, seemed to offer possibilities for escape and refuge, and were imbued with qualities that the poet aspired to possess (if only partially and temporarily).¹⁴ The Gypsy carried both a political and a psychological charge for Clare, and one was inseparable from the other.

Clare, like Scott, was a collector of ballads and folk traditions and gathered the cultural artifacts of Gypsy life as part of a general retrieval and conservation of local history and custom.¹⁵ Clare was particularly interested in Gypsies for their music and, at first, associated mainly with the Boswells, a nearby “tribe … famous for fidd[l]ers and fortunetellers” for the purpose of instrumental instruction: “I usd to spend my sundays and summer evenings among them learning to play the fiddle in their manner by the ear and joining in their pastimes of jumping dancing and other amusements.”¹⁶ Not only did he learn to play Gypsy songs, but he wrote down their musical notation in a series of notebooks and, as his biographer Jonathan Bate puts it, saw himself in the “self-appointed role [of] mediator between oral and written cultures.”¹⁷ He also picked up their slang and “black arts”—really just the ability to trade on local gossip—and observed their habits, which he catalogued in his fragments of autobiographical writing. Like an ethnologist—and like Henry Mayhew, an urban explorer himself influenced by ethnology—Clare recorded the Gypsies’ relationship to religion (ignorance), morality (loose), learning (none), murder (also none), honesty (tenuous), food (badgers and hedgehogs), and tea (great fondness).¹⁸ He believed that what the ignorant wider world interpreted as criminality and viciousness were really cultural differences, and he often preferred the straightforward, unembellished tricksterism of the Gypsies to the hypocrisy of their “calumniators.”¹⁹

In some of Clare’s most moving Gypsy poems, he transforms these objects of intense fascination into objects of longing. A sonnet that he began at the age of fourteen or fifteen, “The Gipsies Evening Blaze” (1807–1810), pictures a group of Gypsies at dusk, sitting around a “quivering” fire in a “warm nook,” protected from fierce winds by sheep-nibbled, “shrubby” bushes. The warmth and light of the scene attract and invite the speaker of the poem from out of the bleakness of the evening, and it is his intensity of feeling and what we might call pastoral longing that begin and end the sonnet. “To me how wildly pleasing is that scene,” he begins, before shifting from himself as subject to the Gypsies and their camp and then circling back. “Grant me this life,” he pleads in the final line, “thou spirit of the shades!”²⁰ In the “October” section of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827), the narrator catalogues all the “pleasing objects” that might make the poet pause and turn to gaze while proceeding on his “solitary way.” Among them are

This Gypsy camp is at once an image of protection and comfort, a secret and hidden nook of cozy pleasure—like the scene in “The Gipsies Evening Blaze”—and a locus of liberty, free from the restrictions of law and the tyranny of those who enforce it.²² Banished from commons by enclosure, these Gypsies have nonetheless found a rare safe and open spot where they can settle, like the unfettered hedges and brook, “as they will.” The poet, who is stopped in his tracks by this picture “that October yields,” covets both the freedom and the womb-like security of the Gypsies’ pastoral refuge, their “snug shelterd nook.”

The canny and enviable ability of Clare’s Gypsies to create oases of comfort and warmth in inhospitable surroundings reappears in a late poem, “The Gipsy Camp” (1841), a sonnet that describes a scene much like that in “The Gipsies Evening Blaze”:

The Gypsies’ “picturesqueness” has been much mitigated by the blunt description of the impoverished camp, so the word “picture” in the penultimate line cannot be read without irony. The double-edged “picture” modulates into the sober and wistful conclusion, a line that maintains in perfect tension the contradictory aspects of the Gypsies’ state. They are quiet, but they steal; they steal, but they are unprotected—by law as well as by adequate shelter. They are both enemies and victims of the law; their circumstances are picturesque but seedy and foul; they keep to themselves but are parasitic. As Anne Williams has remarked of this line, it is free from “any sentimentality or romantic cliché,” an instance of Gypsy representation notable for its understatement and complexity.²⁴

Clare demonstrated the same equanimity with regard to the Gypsies, their glories, and their foibles during his period of incarceration for insanity in Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping. In 1841, he planned an escape and chronicled his attempt in his journal.²⁵ He recorded that, wandering in the forest near the asylum, he fell in with Gypsies who offered to help him run away by hiding him in their camp. Here was the Gypsy life as pure pastoral: escape and haven from the constraints of an oppressive world. But the poet could not afford to pay them for their trouble; the Gypsies wavered in their promise; and, when he went to meet them on the day he planned his journey, they had disappeared. Abandoned by his prospective rescuers, he nonetheless resolved to follow the route they had showed him: “Reconnitered the rout the Gipsey pointed out and found it a legible one to make a movement and having only honest courage and myself in my army I led the way and my troops soon followed.”²⁶ With no expressed disappointment or anger, no admonishment of the peripatetic band, Clare sought to emulate their movements and follow them to freedom. He accepted their nomadic existence and necessary unreliability even as he longed for their liberty and for the comfort and warmth of their makeshift hearth. Clare’s imaginative and psychic identification with Gypsies in all phases of his life contrasts markedly with the caricature of Mitford’s sketches. Although both treat Gypsies as pastoral and picturesque figures, Clare replaces Mitford’s condescension and dehumanizing regard with social critique and poignant longing.

The conclusion of Wordsworth’s “Gypsies” (1807), a poem contemporaneous with “The Gipsies Evening Blaze,” expresses a sentiment antithetical to Clare’s supplication in the final lines of his poem. In place of “Grant me this life, thou spirit of the shades!” we have “[O]h better wrong and strife / Better vain deeds or evil than such life!” in response to the sight of a group of inert Gypsies on the moors. With considerable passion, both poets call for the intervention of the fates, the first wishing to achieve a destiny like that of the Gypsies. and the second hoping to ward it off.²⁷ Whereas the sight of a Gypsy encampment inspires longing and desire in one, it triggers a phobic reaction in the other. While Clare laments the “tyrant” laws that harass Gypsies and force them to abandon their temporary homes, Wordsworth seems to endorse the sentiments and reproduce the emphases of these laws. Both of them, Wordsworth no less than Clare, however, see their own lives in relation to those of the Gypsies, and it is the former’s complicated and highly vexed identification with the motionless, “unbroken knot / Of human Beings” that I address here. But before discussing what David Simpson calls “one of Wordsworth’s prickliest poems,” I consider a pair of Gypsy poems that Wordsworth wrote in a very different key: the slightly earlier “Beggars” (1802) and its companion, “Sequel to ‘Beggars’ Composed Many Years After” (1817).²⁸ Although these poems do not focus exclusively on the poet’s disapproval of what he regards as the doubtful moral status of Gypsies, they do suggest his inability to settle on a consistent response of either sympathy or antipathy.

Wordsworth based “Beggars,” an eight-stanza poem about a haughty “Amazonian” or “Egyptian brown” beggar woman, on an incident that his sister Dorothy had experienced while alone and recorded in her journal in June 1800.²⁹ In Dorothy’s account, a woman “tall beyond the measure of tall women,” with skin that was dark brown but had “plainly once been fair,” came begging at her door.³⁰ The woman claimed to have come from Scotland and explained that her family could not keep a house, and “so they travelled.” Later that day, Dorothy encountered the woman’s husband, a tinker, and then her two boys, who were begging as well as chasing a butterfly. They told her that their mother was dead; she answered that she had met their mother that morning (she noticed their strong resemblance to her) and then sent them away with nothing—a clear indication of her disapproval. Later still, she saw the boys with their mother and so was confirmed in her belief that the boys had lied about being orphans.

In “Beggars,” Wordsworth keeps the outlines of the story and makes the double act of begging the central drama of his lyric, but effects a few small but telling changes. First, he makes overt the woman’s Gypsy identity. In Dorothy’s account, there are markers of Gypsy ways—tinkering and traveling—but the woman’s dark skin seems to be a product of time and the elements rather than inheritance. Wordsworth, although he never calls her a Gypsy outright, introduces the adjective “Egyptian” to describe the color of the woman’s skin. He also masculinizes her by announcing her stature in the first line as “a tall man’s height or more.”³¹ An ancestor of both Scott’s Meg Merrilies and Keats’s “Old Meg,” this beggar woman is commanding, almost marshal in her bearing, and it is her unusual appearance that moves the poet to give her alms

But Wordsworth evinces far greater interest in the boys than in their mother. The beggar children are at the moral heart of the poem, and they become the subject of its companion piece, “Sequel to ‘Beggars’ Composed Many Years After,” in which their mother is never mentioned. The boys appear in the original poem as pastoral putti “wreathed” with flowers and laurels, chasing a crimson butterfly, reveling in their utter freedom, and “so blithe of heart” that, had they wings, “they might flit / Precursors to Aurora’s car” (ll. 31–34). For the moment cleansed of their “racial” or criminal associations, they ultimately revert to type by begging. The poet quickly tells them that he has given money to their mother—he recognizes in their features “Unquestionable lines of that wild Suppliant’s face”—and they answer that she is dead:

Wordsworth leaves out the final confirmation of the boys’ relationship to the beggar woman that concludes Dorothy’s story, thereby allowing for the possibility of their honesty or, at least, of some misunderstanding between them and the poet—the kind of speaking at cross-purposes found in “Now We Are Seven” (1798), in which death means different things to the child and her interlocutor. The “lie” with which he charges the boys has, in any case, a benign inflection in the poem, and his admonishing “Hush” betrays no anger but only a gentle, avuncular scold. They flit away insouciantly, exhibiting no consciousness of guilt, and their animal spirits outweigh their unreliability in the poet’s parting image of them. Only the naming of the boys as “Vagrants” and the jarring yoking of that word with “joyous” in the final line betray uneasiness, a dissonance of tone. The harder note of realism or even of disavowal in the noun, an uncomfortable echo of the category under which Gypsies could be prosecuted, sits awkwardly with the breezy, untroubled adjective that precedes it. Unlike Clare’s “pilfering, unprotected race,” which balances knowingly the complex and apparently contradictory elements of the Gypsies’ state, Wordsworth’s “joyous Vagrants” conveys discord, unintended irony, perhaps callousness.³²

The cast of amorality that Wordsworth lends the Gypsy boys in “Beggars” becomes an aura of innocence in the retrospective “Sequel.” The poet now wonders what has become of the “wanton Boys” he imagined and wrote about fifteen years earlier. No longer identified as Gypsies, vagrants, or the children of a beggar woman, they have been transformed into emblems of purity and gladness, “lambs” who “Walk through the fire with unsinged hair,” and are forever associated with a time of innocence in the poet’s own life. The “Egyptian brown” of the mother’s face has been replaced by the whiteness of clouds, the clarity of a brook, the immaculateness of lambs. “They met me in a genial hour,” he writes,

Although the poem begins and ends with a question about the whereabouts and well-being of the boys, its central subject is the poet’s own departed innocence and wistful reminiscence. Separated from their origins, in the sense of both their parentage and the moral context in which Dorothy and William had initially placed them, the Gypsy boys mutate into abstractions through which the poet can evoke something of himself. He can, in other words, identify with the state of innocence the boys are made to represent, and the tinge of disapprobation in “Beggars” vanishes completely in “Sequel.” Together, the two poems suggest something of the ambivalent and vexed sympathy that Wordsworth felt for this subject and prepare us for the strident but unconvincing denial of affiliation with the Gypsies’ state of being in his poem of 1807.

“Gypsies”—which earned the opprobrium of William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, for its moralizing tone—takes as its subject the contrast between stasis, exemplified by the band of inert Gypsies the poet meditates on, and change, enacted in nature, especially in the rising and setting of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon. Having himself walked to and from a particular destination—we know from his notes that it was Derby—and seeing the Gypsy families camped in the same pose and place on both legs of his journey, the poet begins with a question, “Yet are they here?” and ends with the declaration that even “vain deeds or evil” would be better than this lethargy and paralysis.³⁴ After twelve hours, he has covered a good deal of ground, the sun has set, the waning moon has risen, the “silent Heavens” have been busy, the stars have accomplished their “tasks,” but the “unbroken knot / Of human Beings” has remained precisely as he left them.³⁵ The poem turns on the speaker’s relationship, as a kind of third term, to the unchanging, unproductive Gypsies, on one side, and to busy nature, on the other. His own status in this regard is ambiguous: Who does he more resemble? Can he, as walker and poet, claim a kinship to nature in its cyclic, ever-changing, and awe-inspiring movements? Or is he uncomfortably like the Gypsies, indolent, static, and ineffectual?³⁶

The language of the poem, and especially of three lines near the middle, betrays the poet’s anxiety about his similarity to the Gypsies and his worthiness as a protégé of nature:

Most striking in its inadvertently ironic reference to the poet and the Gypsies alike is, of course, the word “Traveller,” used often by Wordsworth to describe himself as wanderer on the hills and moors and commonly by others to refer to Gypsies. Indeed, Coleridge takes Wordsworth to task for ignoring the fact that “the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves … for one whole day.”³⁷ Gypsies were represented alternatively as settled (or stagnant), as in Clare’s various scenes of Gypsy encampments, or as itinerant (or vagrant), as in Wordsworth’s “Beggars.” In this poem, Wordsworth chooses the former without, apparently, acknowledging or making use of the possibility of the latter, so when the speaker of “Gypsies” refers to himself as a “Traveller,” he seems to separate himself from rather than ally himself with the Gypsies. But traveling combines movement and inertia, purpose and purposelessness in a way that draws poet and Gypsy together, and the word “Traveller” carries too strong an association with Gypsy life to preclude such an alliance, particularly in conjunction with other aspects of these lines.

The speaker has subsisted “under open sky” for the past twelve hours, as have the Gypsies. There is, as well, the question of what he has accomplished in these “bounteous” hours, in this generous and expansive period of time: he has walked, of course, but has returned to the same spot, and he has witnessed change and cheer. The poet himself has not undergone change, as have the heavens, but has merely observed it, just as he now observes the “Spectacle” of the Gypsy encampment. If his moral indictment of the Gypsies rests on their changelessness, the poet cannot claim himself exempt from the same charge. As a mere witness to change, he also invites accusations of passivity, sloth, and marginality. The motion of walking to and fro, of going out but coming back by covering the same ground, suggests repetition without purpose, traveling without advancing. In his screed against the poem, Hazlitt mocks Wordsworth as a “patron of the philosophy of indolence” who nonetheless attacks a band of Gypsies for doing nothing. “What had he himself been doing in these four and twenty hours,” Hazlitt asks, “… admiring a flower, or writing a sonnet?”³⁸ The distracting syntax of this section’s final line—“Yet as I left I find them here”—further complicates the overt disavowal of any correspondence between poet and Gypsies. The two “I”s and “them” bump up against the verbs “left” and “find” in a contracted space, forcing the reader to sort out carefully the nature of the relationship between subject and object, both syntactically and existentially. If the second “I” is taken, fleetingly (and ungrammatically), as the object of “left,” the line can be understood as the poet’s disappointment at discovering himself just as he had been twelve hours earlier. In addition, the first word of the line echoes that of the first line of the poem—“Yet are they here?”—linking the speaker (“I”) to stasis and to others who, like him, are still here “in this self-same spot.”

As Simpson has argued, the poet’s reaction to the Gypsies in this troubling poem is inseparable from his sense of the “ambiguous position of the poet, neither a laborer nor an idler.”³⁹ As poet, he is witness and wanderer, and his nervousness about this aspect of his vocation is registered as a strident and exaggerated protest:

He berates himself for being indolent, for living always in “pleasant thought,” for expecting others to work for him—“Build for him, sow for him”—and he thinks explicitly of other poets whose lives have ended in misery. It is precisely his distance from the work-a-day world and from the industry in which others engage that worries him, just as it does in a more covert manner in “Gypsies.” As so often happens in such moments in Wordsworth’s poetry, a figure—here, a leech gatherer—appears suddenly both to admonish him and to allay his fears. The leech gatherer, too, is an itinerant:

The leech gatherer’s ability to comfort, rather than to unnerve or even anger, the poet derives from his fortitude and, perhaps even more important, from his industry. This traveler, unlike the Gypsies as Wordsworth has imagined them, can appear to be without purpose and yet, in fact, be diligent. Invisible work, like gathering leeches and writing poetry, might be work nonetheless, and if one marginal form of labor can be sustained, then so, perhaps, can the other. Wordsworth must suppress the Gypsies’ work, make them sedentary rather than itinerant, portray their inactivity as repellent rather than inviting, and classify them as an undesirable type of vagrant—sleeping out of doors, exhibiting no means of subsistence, and, perhaps, breaking the law.⁴¹ He cannot openly claim the Gypsies as his counterparts because, as a collectivity (“Men, women, children”), they carry the taint of “race,” immorality, and primitivism. The mother and sons of “Beggars,” although dishonest, can be somewhat redeemed because they are beautiful and take pleasure in nature, because they are represented as individuals, separate from their “tribe.” Both the leech gatherer and the Gypsies mirror the poet’s apparent idleness, but, for reasons that are both psychically and culturally determined, the former can more easily be imagined to reflect an image that gratifies the ego and soothes the cares of the poet.

In a startling moment in Isobel Armstrong’s chapter on Matthew Arnold in her monumental work on Victorian poetry, she writes of “an uncanny meeting point” between Arnold, the “liberal in crisis,” and John Clare, the “peasant poet” who is in many ways Arnold’s antithesis. “Both write of dislocation and isolation,” she observes, “both are fascinated by Gipsies, traditional outsiders of the culture, both negotiate a bewildering number of poetic voices and traditions, Keats, Wordsworth, song, ballad and political lyric—and both are acutely sensitive to spatial boundary and limit.”⁴² This unlikely pairing of poets is explained, too, by their attraction to the pastoral mode and their sorrow over “estrangement from … earlier environment[s].”⁴³ Armstrong’s acknowledgment of Clare’s and Arnold’s fascination with Gypsies is crucial, for it serves as a focal point for much else that they share. The Gypsy as a distinctly pastoral figure is linked to the loss and alienation that each registers in his poetry and is deeply connected to a sense of cherished place and the unforgiving character of time and change. The palpable losses of land and space that Clare laments had, by Arnold’s time, become more abstract, less tied to the legal and practical realities of enclosure, but Arnold notes these brutal changes as well. “They must live still,” he writes of the beleaguered and uncomplaining Gypsies in “Resignation (To Fausta)” (1849),

These lines lack the anger and edge of Clare’s “tyrant justice” in the “October” section of The Shepherd’s Calendar, but they offer the same association between the laws that dictate oppressive change and the Gypsies’ struggle to survive. For both, the Gypsy becomes emblematic of a bitter and always losing battle against what Arnold calls, also in “Resignation,” “time’s busy touch.” What in Clare’s poetry appears as the transformation of the land and accompanying shifts in social and economic life, becomes in Arnold “modern life” itself, a more sweeping and more cataclysmic mutation of the spirit, as well as of the world.

If Arnold echoes generally the sentiments of Clare’s interest in Gypsies, he quite specifically rewrites and revises Wordsworth’s central Gypsy poem. “Resignation” contains an explicit challenge to the older poet’s mode of representation in “Gypsies” and an implicit critique of his apparent disdain for the Gypsies’ way of life. Others have noted the resemblance of “Resignation” to another Wordsworth poem, “Tintern Abbey” (1798): each is dedicated and addressed to the respective poet’s sister (Arnold’s subtitle refers to his sister Jane) and commemorates a revisiting, a return to a memorable landscape. David G. Riede sees Arnold’s poem as a general rejection of the Wordsworthian view, of both the role of the poet and his deep and passionate engagement with nature.⁴⁵ But to the extent that “Gypsies” is, as I have suggested, also a poem about the poetic vocation and the return to a particular scene, it, too, serves as a model after which and against which Arnold fashions “Resignation.” He does so by transplanting the scene of the Gypsy encampment from Wordsworth’s poem to his own and by radically changing its meaning for the speaker’s meditation on the nature of change, repetition, and resignation.

In “Resignation,” Arnold uses the occasion of a walk in the Lake District with his sister, first taken ten years before and repeated in the present, to contemplate the painfulness of time’s passage and the human habit of circling back to former places and states of being. He begins by ventriloquizing those whose energies are focused fiercely on the realization of a goal, those who quest, battle, or journey as pilgrims: “To die be given us or attain!” they would proclaim. For these questing spirits, the act of repeating, of returning—or turning back—is untenable:

“Thread[ing] back” is precisely what he and his sister have been doing, traveling again “this self-same road” and wondering whether they have changed little or are, rather, only “ghosts” of the “boisterous company” they once were. We glean from her brother’s words that the unheard sister expresses some discontent, some regret about this return journey, and so he enumerates a variety of responses to the experience and frustration of repetition for her to consider. After the impatient ones, those who must attain or die, he mentions the “milder natures,” those who are resigned, serene, freer because less passionate. Those who have achieved equanimity and calm acceptance in the face of inexorable change and the tyranny of time might be models for him and his sister, for whom this revisiting brings wistfulness and feelings of loss.

The speaker-brother then offers “Fausta” two examples of these “milder natures,” a group of Gypsies they have passed on their walk and the generic “poet,” who combines intensity—“a quicker pulse”—with detachment:

Although it is, arguably, the poet’s “sad lucidity of soul” as a model for sister and brother that is of greatest interest in “Resignation,” it is not at all clear that the Gypsies’ perseverance and stoic acceptance of the passage of time are not equally, if differently, exemplary. In stanza 5, Arnold makes explicit his indebtedness to Wordsworth’s “Gypsies” and, like his predecessor, raises the possibility of the Gypsies’ resemblance to the traveler who narrates the poem. Only in Arnold’s poem, the correspondence is fully acknowledged and the Gypsies are capable of providing moral instruction. Like the poet and his sister and like the traveler of Wordsworth’s poem, the Gypsies have “roamed to and fro.” Indeed, for this “migratory race,” the pattern of returning to a “former scene” and finding remnants—“fragments”—of previous sojourns is a way of life, not simply an occasional experience.

Arnold seems to be answering and correcting Wordsworth, reminding him that it is the practice of Gypsies to be peripatetic, habitually to-ing and fro-ing like him, rather than, as the older poet would have it, sedentary and inert. Alluding again to “Gypsies,” the poet of “Resignation” remarks on the “dark knots” that the Gypsies form in their huddle around the fire. Arnold’s knot, however, consists exclusively of children, while Wordsworth’s “unbroken knot” includes “[m]en, women, children” in a promiscuous and indiscriminate jumble of generations and sexes.⁴⁶ With apparent deliberateness, Arnold makes innocent the “knot / Of human Beings” that his predecessor obviously viewed with suspicion and distaste. With the image of the children by the fire, he also imbues the scene of the Gypsy camp with a powerful sense of return, of transitory homecoming. This encampment, unlike Wordsworth’s, which suggests stagnation, or Clare’s, which beckons the poet as a redoubt against the elements, combines the weariness of the Gypsies’ travels and their fleeting pleasure in returning to a scene they once knew.

If Wordsworth insists on taking at face value the “Spectacle” of dormant Gypsies, Arnold counters him with the admonition that these habitual travelers, their outward appearance notwithstanding, are not impervious to the wearing vicissitudes of life. They, too, could measure themselves against the past and so feel unease and regret. As he instructs his sister,

By reiterating the word “ghost,” which in the previous stanza refers to themselves—brother and sister—Arnold underscores their own resemblance to the Gypsies. Time is the Gypsies’ enemy as well. Their joints grow stiff and the winds cold; laws become oppressive and open land scarce. But this “migratory race” will not stop to complain or compare “times past with times that are,” but will persevere—“rub through” is the colloquial phrase that Arnold uses—in their customary way.⁴⁷ The “resignation” of the Gypsies is very like that of the “poet,” although what may be stoicism and stolidity in the former is more considered, more self-conscious and intellectualized, in the latter. The poet’s greatest strength is his ability to observe, his watchfulness and disinterestedness. In stanza 6, which evokes the poet’s powers of resignation, the language of seeing and watching dominates. The poet “scans,” “admire[s],” “looks down,” “surveys,” “gazes,” “leans upon a gate and sees,” and “sees” again and again. He can know through detached observation and discernment what others apprehend through experience. Just by witnessing love, the poem suggests, he knows its nature.

Does the poem suggest an identity between poet and Gypsy, both resigned, although differently? “Fausta” is apparently skeptical. To her, both poet and Gypsy seem poor models for mere mortals, but the first appears superior to the common mass of humankind and the second decidedly inferior. We know that the silent sister thinks this because her brother, “scan[ning]” (like a poet) her thoughts, has articulated them for her. Indeed, he continues to read her mind for twelve lines, dilating particularly on “Fausta’s” views of the poet as a creature who avoids human experience and never, as a result, sees deeply within it. Does he share her assessments of poet and Gypsy? Does he agree that the Gypsies “feel not, though they move and see?” (l. 205). We know that he dissents from her characterization of the poet, for he devotes the rest of the poem to its refutation. But only by extension and by returning to what he has said about the Gypsies’ vulnerability and refusal to indulge their feelings can we conclude that he disagrees with her description of the travelers. After speaking in “Fausta’s” voice, he never again directly mentions the Gypsies.

Like Wordsworth, who can imagine the leech gatherer in “Resolution and Independence” but not the Gypsy as a model for human endurance, Arnold cannot sustain the implicit yoking of poet and Gypsy in “Resignation.” Nor can he overtly urge his sister to emulate the “migratory race” as well as the man of “mighty heart.” Put simply, the poet’s vocation is noble and his vision complex, while the Gypsy, although resigned, never transcends the realm of the mundane. Nonetheless, Arnold allies the poet and the Gypsy—in part by alluding to Wordsworth’s “Gypsies”—as creatures on the periphery of human community and as observers of change who “rub through.” His revision of Wordsworth’s poem expressly moves the Gypsies from the position of the observed—the “Spectacle”—to the place of the traveler and observer, the wanderer who, like the poet, compulsively returns to where he began.

If Arnold rewrites Wordsworth’s “Gypsies” in “Resignation,” he rewrites his own Gypsy poem four years later in “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853). In place of an address to his sister, set in a naturalistic and familiar Lake District scene, Arnold offers a pastoral lyric complete with an opening call to a shepherd and a coda that removes the poem from the Cumner Hills near Oxford to an ancient beach in the Aegean. The poetic realism of “Resignation,” which casts the Gypsies as objects of oppressive modern laws, is relinquished in favor of the stylized conventions of the pastoral form; accordingly, the buffeted, weary, stiff, and wind-chilled Gypsy has become an immortal, blithe-spirited apparition of a man. In a striking turnabout, the Gypsy, formerly deployed to evoke human vulnerability and care, is made indestructible and immune to change. In this poem, the figures of Gypsy and poet—or qualities associated with each in the earlier poem—are merged. The scholar-gypsy combines the social marginality and nomadic habits of the Gypsies of “Resignation” with the exquisite watchfulness and ocular disposition of the generic poet of that poem. Whereas the brother-speaker of “Resignation” cannot sustain his praise of the Gypsies’ exemplary stoicism, the author of “The Scholar-Gipsy” has no difficulty in representing his Gypsy figure as an explicit ideal. For not only are poet and Gypsy merged, so are insider and outsider, self and other, university student and rustic. The Gypsy has been anglicized.⁴⁸ Through this conflation of scholar-poet and Gypsy, Arnold creates not only a highly sympathetic and idealized Gypsy figure, but an emblem of preindustrial nostalgia that would have an effect on Gypsy symbolism and iconography throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By means of the artifice of pastoral convention and the separation of the Gypsy from history, Arnold imagines the scholar-gypsy as the ultimate exile—excluded from privilege and established community but free from the corroding diseases of modern life (figure 9).

Embedded in the conventional pastoral frame of the poem, between the poet’s invocation of the shepherd and his departure by means of the classical world, lies a real and very familiar place: the hills outside Oxford, which the legendary scholar-gypsy was said to have inhabited and where the young Matthew Arnold roamed as a student. For Arnold, it was a place of nostalgic longing and of memories that he feared would themselves disappear. He wrote to his brother Tom that this poem, “The Scholar-Gipsy,” was “meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced” and to commemorate “the freest and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and [Arthur Hugh] Clough and [Theodore] Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country.”⁴⁹ Although the best remembered parts of the poem—its complaint against the “sick fatigue,” “languid doubt,” and aimless striving of modern life—are heavy with adult weariness and cynicism, other moments, especially those surrounding the description of the scholar-gypsy himself, are infused with sensual pleasure and youthful indulgence. Arnold’s shaking off the strictures of university life and escaping into the delights of spring and countryside are given form in the poem as the penniless scholar-gypsy’s abandonment of the student’s life and its oppressive exclusivity (he “tired of knocking at preferment’s door”) and his complete absorption into the “wild brotherhood” of Gypsies. The scholar-gypsy’s narrative revises the traditional Gypsy kidnapping plot to make wholly voluntary the young man’s exile from the world into which he was born. He becomes a Gypsy and never looks back, and those he has left behind encounter him only rarely. He has dropped out, gone through the looking glass. The fantasy of secret origins has become a fantasy of escape, and the anxiety about the true nature of identity has evolved into an alternative identity freely chosen and embraced.

Although the gulf between the poet and the scholar-gypsy remains wide—the poet ends by repeatedly urging the scholar to stay away from him—they cannot remain wholly separate throughout the poem. Arnold’s younger self, the self he sloughed off, is fused with the scholar. As Dwight Culler has phrased it, “Seeing the Scholar-Gipsy and being the Scholar-Gipsy are a process imperfectly distinguished. One sees him by being him and in no other way.”⁵⁰ The poet’s search for the scholar-gypsy begins in reverie, in response to his reading of “Glanvil’s book,” The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), which tells the story of an Oxford lad who left the university to seek his livelihood and ended in the company of “Vagabond Gypsies” to “follow their trade.”⁵¹ There is a clear logic to Arnold’s use of Joseph Glanvill as a source for his poem, for in his book the story of retreat from the mainstream is connected to a particular institution and place: the university that nurtured Arnold and yet exemplified a privileged life of traditional learning and its wilder environs, where he sought release from “the bonds and formalities of the place.” But the choice of Glanvill as a source for Arnold’s representation of Gypsies is striking for another reason. It goes against the grain of nineteenth-century representation by associating Gypsies with both breadwinning and learning, rather than thieving and ignorance. Glanvill’s scholar joins the Gypsies at the outset to make a living and is ushered into the secrets of their “Mystery” only after earning their trust. The scholar explains to old friends who encounter him years after his disappearance that the Gypsies are not “Impostours,” as was widely believed, but have “a traditional kind of learning … and could do wonders by the power of Imagination.”⁵² Neither mere parlor tricks nor fakery, their mental powers enable them to guide—and not simply read—the thoughts of others through a kind of telepathy. It is the mind of the Gypsies that interests Glanvill and not their purported criminality, vagrancy, or chicanery. Arnold takes from Glanvill this focus on the Gypsies’ “lore” and “arts,” seeing them as the possessors of occult knowledge and imaginative powers. Their talents, then, lie not so far from the poet’s.

The “I” of “The Scholar-Gipsy” reads his Glanvill looking down on the spires of Oxford, lays the book beside him, and contemplates the “lost Scholar” who frequented that landscape two centuries before. In stanza 7, the poet suddenly shifts the locus of this legend from seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Oxford by indicating that he has seen the scholar-gypsy: “And I myself seem half to know thy looks.”⁵³ With this sentence, the scholar-gypsy becomes either immortal or ghostly and the poet brings himself into some form of communion with the subject of the poem. Unhinged from time, the scholar-gypsy becomes a phantom for all times and yet maintains the integrity and purity that had resulted from his initial flight. The poet, half-knowing that he has seen the scholar, tries to conjure him again. He watches for him in this way:

The poet’s posture—lying back, in passive enjoyment of nature’s scene, and watching—is transferred in the next stanza to the scholar-gypsy himself. The poet seems to believe that mimicking the habits and recumbent position of the scholar will either make him appear or induce a dream of the scholar in his mind (he appears to have fallen asleep because, after “seeing” the scholar, he shakes himself awake). Or perhaps this impersonation will simply enable him to become the scholar-gypsy, to see him by being him, as Culler proposes.

For the next six stanzas, he evokes the phantom wanderer across the seasons as an onlooker, a pastoral, even pagan figure whose eyes are his most animated and powerful organ. Like the poet, the scholar-gypsy floats on the Thames in his punt, “leaning backward in a pensive dream,” with his “eyes resting on the moonlit stream” (ll. 77, 80). Associated with water, flowers, and fecundity—“fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers”—the scholar is a feminized and happily indolent figure (a flower child, if you will), framed by a luscious and fertile scene.⁵⁴ In this continuing description of him, two things are emphasized: the scholar’s watching and “eying,” on the one hand, and the impossibility of fixing him with one’s own eyes, on the other. He is forever vanishing, visible one moment but gone the next, so those who believe they have glimpsed him from afar can never be sure that he is really there.

The scholar-gypsy’s ocular disposition, his rambling, and his apparent purposelessness place him in the tradition of poet vagrants and Gypsy wanderers I have been discussing: Wordsworth’s “Traveller … witnessing … change and chear”; Arnold’s generic poet of “Resignation,” who eschews experience and “sees life unroll” before him; the “I” of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” whose “eye travels down to Oxford’s towers” and who lies waiting for the scholar in his tethered boat. From “Resignation,” Arnold repeats an image suggestive of the poet’s customary place as an observer on the periphery. “He leans upon a gate and sees / The pastures and the quiet trees” (ll. 172–73) in the earlier poem becomes “Thou hast been seen … hanging on a gate / To watch the threshers in the mossy barns” (ll. 103–4). Not only marginal—resting at the gate—and peripatetic, these intent watchers of nature and humankind also seem lacking in efficacy and agency. Neither conforms to conventional manly activity or worldly engagement. What are their “tasks”? we might ask, as Wordsworth asks of the “human knot” of sleeping Gypsies. Distributing stores of “white anemony, / Dark bluebells … / And purple orchises,” the “spare” figure with “dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air” seems to have, at best, a decorative and lyrical mission (ll. 87–88, 99). The scholar’s feminine associations—with flowers and vegetal lushness—combine with his passivity and apparent lack of purpose to make him a dubious model of nineteenth-century masculinity. Wordsworth reviles the Gypsies of his poem of 1807 at least in part because of his discomfort with their insufficient manhood. The male Gypsy figures conjured by Clare, Wordsworth, and Arnold share a heterodox gender identity with Scott’s Meg Merrilies: as she is a masculinized Gypsy woman, they are feminized Gypsy men.

The surprise, then, is that the scholar-gypsy’s mission as a creature of the imagination is to aid those overwhelmed by purpose and striving. It is precisely his unconventional relationship to the demands of Victorian manliness that make him a needed antidote to the oppressiveness of contemporary life. Modern man, distracted by too many aims and worn out by unceasing change, needs to conjure the scholar-gypsy as an immortal, unchanging, and hopeful presence:

Arnold represents the contemporary world as a place devoid of concentration and productive constancy. Far better, he suggests, to drop out of sight—to be a “truant boy”—and follow the Gypsy’s lore than to live a harried, divided, and empty life. Far better to embrace the “Mystery” than to believe in half-creeds and lukewarm faiths. Not only is a truant and adopted Gypsy to be a lodestar, a source of hope, but the “wisest” of the time seem able only to spew misery and dejection and then to offer numbing and useless comfort. The official poets or sages, whether Tennyson, Carlyle, or someone else, can no longer offer true solace or provide a model of “resignation.” Only those who hang on the gate—be they Gypsies, dreamers, or exiles—can proffer transcendence. They do so because they are disengaged from worldly concerns and partisan disputes. As unwitting practitioners of disinterestedness, they possess the quality that Arnold required of the true critic.

In the last five stanzas of the poem is a final paradox, and, in the context of representations of the Gypsy in the nineteenth century, it comes as a striking reversal. In numerous other texts, the Gypsy is depicted as a contaminant, a figure who, although living on the margins of settled society, threatens it with certain contagion. “Despite their self-containment,” writes Katie Trumpener, summing up this phenomenon of the imagined Gypsy,

the Gypsies’ wildness is highly contagious, as their arrival in a new place initiates and figures a crisis for Enlightenment definitions of civilization and nationalist definitions of culture. Here, in the Gypsy camp, is a culture without “culture,” transmission without “tradition”—self-knowledge and collective amnesia side by side. Anchored themselves in an eternal present, a self-continuity that transcends context and time, they seem able to remove and replace the memory of others at will. Those who join them—whether as stolen children, “scholar-gipsies,” or willing or resistant fellow travellers—seem not only to forget who they are but to lose all sense of time.⁵⁵

Arnold’s scholar-gypsy conforms, to a large degree, to the pattern that Trumpener describes. His susceptibility to change ceases when he joins the Gypsies, perhaps even to the extent of defying death. We can imagine that he loses all sense of time, that he has forgotten who he is. But Arnold does not worry about contagion from contact with the scholar; indeed, he regards it as a boon. Rather, he worries about contagion that travels in the opposite direction, about the scholar-gypsy’s vulnerability to “infection” from “us.” To that end, he implores the scholar to flee “our” presence, and he does so no fewer than four times in the final stanzas of the poem:

The settled community, or Enlightenment civilization, is quite clearly the contaminant, the diseased and feverish body that will infect innocence through contact. And, consistent with the emphasis in the poem on the scholar-gypsy’s mind and imagination, the poet also makes clear that the “strong infection” from which we suffer is of the mind: “our mental strife.” At all costs, the scholar-gypsy must avoid us. If not, he risks breaking the spell, inviting distress, courting mortality.

The coda of the poem, which begins just after the poet has implored the scholar-gypsy to flee for the final time, underscores the power and peculiarity of this reversal. The lone “Tyrian trader” sailing the waters of the Aegean is the scholar-gypsy’s analogue, and the intruding Greeks, their boats laden with fresh and plentiful cargo, correspond to the society that Arnold has described as suffering “this strange disease of modern life.” The trader flees the scene “indignantly,” heading for the Atlantic through the Mediterranean and ending at the Iberian Peninsula. There he finds “the dark Iberians,” counterparts of the Oxfordshire Gypsies, and settles, at least for the moment, among them. If this reading of the coda is correct, Arnold seems to be suggesting that his beloved Greeks, models of a rich and highly developed culture, are also to be understood as a flawed ideal. The strivings and accomplishments of modern England or ancient Greece carry with them certain liabilities that, if left unchecked, threaten to infect the pure of spirit. Retreat from “civilization” may be preferable, even if it means disappearing among peoples presumed to be benighted, whether Gypsies or Iberians. The poem suggests, of course, that such peoples are not ignorant or primitive but possess a kind of knowledge and mental strength of their own. Indeed, they have regenerative powers that must be protected from contact with populations that rule and dominate, from ways of thinking and even forms of learning that corrupt and sicken the mind.⁵⁶

Arnold returned to the scene of the Cumner Hills and the subject of the scholar-gypsy in the pastoral elegy he wrote in 1866 to mark the death, five years earlier, of Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough, a fellow poet and one of the university friends with whom he had roamed the countryside surrounding Oxford, appears as “Thyrsis,” a poet-shepherd whose quest for the scholar-gypsy Arnold, or his poetic persona, had shared. More conventional than “The Scholar-Gipsy,” the elegy makes overt what its predecessor only implies: that the identities of the scholar-gypsy and the poet are, if not interchangeable, then conjoined. “Thyrsis” begins with the poet’s recognition of change—“How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!”⁵⁷—and his resolve to find again those things that marked the glory of his youthful rambles: Thyrsis, the scholar-gypsy, and the elm tree whose existence attested to the scholar’s immortality. With Thyrsis gone, first self-exiled from this spot and now dead, the poet seeks confirmation that the scholar, at least, lives on. He finds it when he discovers the elm:

The elusive scholar-gypsy, the lamented Thyrsis, and the poet himself are of a piece in this elegy. Poet figures, exiles, faithful to their separate and collective missions, they persist in the face of the change that Arnold registers at the very beginning of “Thyrsis” and that serves as a fundamental theme of “The Scholar-Gipsy.” Whereas in the earlier poem the line between scholar and poet is clearly demarcated and, for the most part, maintained, in the later one, the two poet friends replicate every aspect of the scholar that is heralded in the poem, except his immortality. Although the poet of “The Scholar-Gipsy” mimics the scholar’s recumbent posture on the Thames and eagerly seeks him out, he makes a passionate plea for separateness, for the scholar’s need to maintain his distance. In “Thyrsis,” the scholar himself is invisible, but the tree that stands in for him establishes the likeness between the phantom “Gipsy-Scholar” and the youthful friends. They all are, or have been, wanderers. The tension that characterizes the relationship between Gypsy and poet in Wordsworth’s “Gypsies,” in Arnold’s “Resignation,” and even in “The Scholar-Gipsy” vanishes in “Thyrsis.” In this elegy, the scholar-gypsy seems hardly to be a Gypsy at all, making possible the complete fusion of poet, wanderer, phantom, and exile.

Denied access to land that was never legally their own, as a result of the enclosure movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gypsies became a symbol for dispossession and homelessness and for ultimate impermanence. They were figures in a changing landscape and emblems of rural transformation and, as a consequence, easily absorbed into pastoral imagery as citizens of a green and better world. For some, like John Clare, vagrancy carried with it possibilities for liberation. He was attracted to the Gypsies’ apparent resistance to law and identified with their victimhood. Wordsworth, on the contrary, could not completely separate vagrancy from depravity or excessive inertia, from the lawlessness that the word had come to signify in relation to Gypsy life. To the extent that he nursed anxieties about his own ambiguous relationship to indolence or unproductive labor, he reviled the Gypsies rather than claiming them as kindred travelers. Insistent on their inactive, nearly motionless state in “Gypsies,” he could imagine only himself as the detached witness of change and walker “to and fro,” failing to see that vagrancy could involve peripatetic and perhaps contemplative, not just sedentary, phases of life.

Despite the difference in their responses to the Gypsies, though, both Clare and Wordsworth focus on stasis in their poetic evocations of Gypsy groups. For Wordsworth, stasis appears repellent and threatening; for Clare, it signals rest, shelter, and home. Both poets also understand Gypsies in the context of particular social and economic patterns: Clare sees them as casualties of enclosure; Wordsworth, as unproductive, taskless, without industry. For them, as for Mary Russell Mitford, the Gypsies were primitives, the bearers of a distinct culture and mode of life that survived in tandem with their own. They were a race apart—less than fully human for Mitford, slothful and uncivilized for Wordsworth, canny and resourceful for Clare.

With Matthew Arnold, the Gypsy’s vagrancy and static pose are replaced by circulation, movement, and, finally, wandering. The Gypsies of “Resignation” travel back and forth, returning repeatedly to places they have occupied before, weary, like Wordsworth’s Gypsies, but not indolent. They are subject to change, to age and infirmity, to the legal and geographic restrictions that Clare lamented. But in “The Scholar-Gipsy,” the Gypsy himself becomes elusive. The hybrid figure of the scholar-gypsy occupies a middle ground between the settled English world and the “wild brotherhood”: his new form of identity anglicizes the Gypsy and uncouples the qualities of gypsyhood and the “race” itself. The “wild brotherhood” of the Gypsies remains all but invisible in the poem, their “smoked tents” pitched on the outskirts of Bagley Wood and glimpsed only from a great distance (ll. 111–13), and the scholar figures as their surrogate. But the scholar himself is a ghostly presence, a phantom whose very existence may itself be the poet’s projection.

Gypsy identity, then, is greatly attenuated in Arnold’s poem, and the poet’s desire for the scholar-gypsy’s equanimity and grace overshadows the story and the being of the scholar. It is the poet’s sympathy with exile and wandering, in both “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis,” that defines the contours of Gypsy identity. In this way, the scholar-gypsy serves, as we shall see, as a prototype for the bohemian Gypsy lorist of the late nineteenth century—the Englishman who leaves “society” and voluntarily adopts the social posture of the outcast and nomad. He does not fear for the safety of settled civilizations, as, by implication, Wordsworth appears to in “Gypsies,” but frets that Gypsy life and lore will disappear and be forgotten. Intent on preserving and maintaining the imagined purity of Gypsy culture, the scholar and lorist insist on the contaminating powers of English life, of modern life. No longer the primitive tribe coexisting with its host culture, Gypsies occupy a frozen, lost, prelapserian, imagined world. In Wordsworth’s pastoral, it is nature that embodies the principle of beneficent and healthful change and the Gypsies who signify a disconcerting and dangerous stagnation. In Arnold’s pastoral, change is associated with human society, and its powers are insidious and corroding. For him, then, the timeless Gypsies, immortal and unreal, offer redemption and solace. They do so, however, at the cost of their identity as both victims of law and agents of history.