Burton himself admitted that he was a devil; for, said he: "the Devil
entered into me at Oxford." Evidently, also, besides his mixture of
races, he was a mixture of the normal and the abnormal; he was perverse
and passionate; he was imaginative and cruel; he was easily stirred to
rage. Nearly six feet in height, he had, together with his broad
shoulders, the small hands and feet of the Orientals; he was Arab in his
prominent cheek-bones; he was gypsy in his terrible, magnetic eyes--the
sullen eyes of a stinging serpent. He had a deeply bronzed complexion, a
determined mouth, half-hidden by a black mustache, which hung down in a
peculiar fashion on both sides of his chin. This peculiarity I have
often seen in men of the wandering tribe in Spain and in Hungary.
Wherever he went he was welcomed by the gypsies; he shared with them
their horror of a corpse, of death-scene, and of graveyards. "He had the
same restlessness," wrote his wife, "which could stay nowhere long nor
own any spot on earth. Hagar Burton, a Gypsy woman, cast my horoscope,
in which she said: 'You will bear the name of our Tribe, and be right
proud of it. You will be as we are, but far greater than we.' I met
Richard two months later, in 1856, and was engaged to him." It is a
curious fact that John Varley, who cast Blake's horoscope in 1820, also
cast Burton's; who, as he says, had finished his _Zodiacal Physiognomy_
so as to prove that every man resembled after a fashion the sign under
which he was born. His figures are either human or bestial; some remind
me of those where men are represented in the form of animals in Giovanni
della Porta's _Fisonomia dell' Huomo_ (Venice, 1668), which is before me
as I write; Swinburne himself once showed to me his copy of the same
book. Nor have I ever forgotten his saying to me--in regard to Burton's
nervous fears: "The look of unspeakable horror in those eyes of his gave
him, at times, an almost unearthly appearance." He added: "This reminds
me of what Kiomi says in Meredith's novel: 'I'll dance if you talk of
dead people,' and so begins to dance and to whoop at the pitch of her
voice. I suppose both had the same reason for this force of fear: to
make the dead people hear." Then he flashed at me this unforgettable
phrase: "Burton had the jaw of a Devil and the brow of a God."
In one of his letters he says, I suppose by way of _persiflage_ in
regard to himself and Burton: "_En moi vous voyez Les Malheurs de la
Virtu, en lui Les Prospérités du Vice._" In any case, it is to
entertain Burton when he writes: "I have in hand a scheme of mixed verse
and prose--a sort of étude à la Balzac _plus_ the poetry--which I
flatter myself will be more offensive and objectionable to Britannia
than anything I have done: _Lesbia Brandon._ You see I have now a
character to keep up, and by the grace of Cotytto I will."
Swinburne began _Lesbia Brandon_ in 1859; he never finished it; what
remains of it consists of seventy-three galleys, numbered 25 to 97,
besides four unprinted chapters. The first, "A Character," was written
in 1864; "An Episode" in 1866; "Turris Eburnea" in 1886; "La Bohême
Dédorée" must have been written a year or two later. Mr. Gosse gives a
vivid description of Swinburne, who was living in 13, Great James
Street, and who was never weary of his unfinished novel, reading to him
parts of two chapters in June, 1877. "He read two long passages, the one
a ride over a moorland by night, the other the death of his heroine,
Lesbia Brandon. After reading aloud all these things with amazing
violence, he seemed quite exhausted." It is possible to decipher a few
sentences from two pages of his manuscript; first in "Turris Eburnea.
'Above the sheet, below the boudoir,' said the sage. Her ideal was
marriage, to which she clung, which revealed to astonished and admiring
friends the vitality of a dubious intellect within her. She had not even
the harlot's talent of discernment." This is Leonora Harley. In _La
Bohême Dédorée_ we read:
Two nights later Herbert received a note from Mr. Linley inviting him to
a private supper. Feverish from the contact of Mariani and hungry for a
chance of service, he felt not unwilling to win a little respite from
the vexation of patience. The sage had never found him more amenable to
the counsel he called reason. Miss Brandon had not lately crossed his
ways. Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of
her professional art. It was not her fault if she could not help asking
her younger friend when he had last met a darker beauty: she had seen
him once with Lesbia.