Richard Burton dedicated his literal version of the epic of Camões "To
the Prince of the Lyric Poets of his Day, Algernon Charles Swinburne."
He begins:
My dear Swinburne, accept the unequal exchange--my brass for your gold.
Your _Poems and Ballads_ began to teach the Philistine what might there
is in the music of language, and what marvel of lyric inspiration, far
subtler and more ethereal than poetry, means to the mind of man.
In return for this Swinburne dedicated to him _Poems and Ballads_,
Second Series.
Inscribed to Richard F. Burton in redemption of an old pledge and in
recognition of a friendship which I must always count among the highest
honors of my life.
It was nine years before then, when they were together in the south of
France, that Swinburne was seized by a severe illness; and, as he
assured me, it was Burton who, with more than a woman's care and
devotion, restored him to health. The pledge--it was not the covenant
sealed between the two greatest, the two most passionate, lovers in the
world, Iseult and Tristan, on the deck of that ship which was the ship
of Life, the ship of Death, in the mere drinking of wine out of a
flagon, which, being of the nature of a most sweet poison, consumed
their limbs and gave intoxication to their souls and to their
bodies--but a pledge in the wine Swinburne and Burton drank in the hot
sunshine:--
For life's helm rocks to windward and lee,
And time is as wind, and waves are we,
And song is as foam that the sea-waves fret,
Though the thought at its heart should be deep as the
sea.
It was in July, 1869, that Swinburne joined the Burtons and Mrs.
Sartoris at Vichy. As I have never forgotten Swinburne's wonderful
stories about Burton--besides those on Rossetti and Mazzini--I find in a
letter of his to his mother words he might really have altered.
If you had seen him, when the heat and the climb and the bothers of
travelling were too much for me--in the very hot weather--helping,
waiting on me--going out to get me books to read in bed--and always
kind, thoughtful, ready, and so bright and fresh that nothing but a
lizard (I suppose that is the most insensible thing going) could have
resisted his influence--I feel sure you would like him (you remember you
said you didn't) and then--love him, as I do. I never expect to see his
like again--but him I do hope to see again, and when the time comes to
see him at Damascus as H.B.M. Consul.
They traveled in carriages, went to Clermont-Ferrand, where Pascal was
born; then to Le Puy-en-Velay. In 1898 I stayed with the Countess De la
Tour in the Château de Chaméane, Puy de Dôme, and after leaving her I
went to Puy-en-Velay. I hated it, the Burtons did not. Stuck like a
limpet on a rock, the main part of the town seems to be clinging to the
side of the hill on which the monstrous statue desecrates the sky. At
night I saw its gilt crown merge into a star, but by day it is
intolerably conspicuous, and at last comes to have an irrational
fascination, leading one to the very corners where it can be seen best.
And always, do what you will, you can not get away from this statue. It
spoils the sky. The little cloister, with its ninth-century columns, is
the most delightful spot in Le Puy; only the intolerable statue from
which one can not escape showed me nature and humanity playing pranks
together, at their old game of parodying the ideal. This is Swinburne's
comment:--
Set far between the ridged and foamless waves
Of earth more fierce and fluctuant than the sea,
The fearless town of towers that hails and braves,
The heights that gild, the sun that brands Le Puy.
This year there has been a great Pardon at Le Puy. I have seen several
pilgrimages, in Moscow, for instance, at Serjevo, which is an annual
pilgrimage to the Troitsa Monastery, and in these people there was no
fervor, no excitement, but a dogged desire of doing something which they
had set out to do. They were mostly women, and they flung themselves
down on the ground; they lay there with their hands on their bundles,
themselves like big bundles of rags. How different a crowd from this
must have assembled at Le Puy; made so famous so many centuries ago by
the visitations of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, who left, in 1254, in
the Cathedral a little image of Horns and Isis. Then there was Jeanne
d'Arc, who in 1429 sent her mother there instead of herself, being much
too busy: she was on the way to Orléans.
As it is, Our Lady gets all the honors; only, there is a much older
Chapel of Saint Michael, which is perched on the sheer edge of a rock;
it is perhaps more original than any in France, with the exception of
the Chapel of Saint Bonizel in Avignon. When I stood there and looked
down from that great height I remembered--but with what a
difference!--Montserrat in Spain, where the monastery seemed a part of
the mountain; and from this narrow ledge between earth and heaven, a
mere foothold on a great rock, I looked up only at sheer peaks, and down
only into veiled chasms, or over mountainous walls to a great plain,
ridged as if the naked ribs of the earth were laid bare.
V
I have been assured, by many who knew him, that Richard Burton had a
vocabulary which was one of his inventions; a shameless one--as
shameless as the vocabularies invented by Paul Verlaine and by Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, which are as vivid to me as when I heard their
utterance. These shared with Villiers de Isle-Adam that sardonic humor
which is not so much satire as the revenge of beauty on ugliness, the
persecution of the ugly: the only laughter of our generation which is as
fundamental as that of Rabelais and of Swift. Burton, who had much the
same contempt for women that Baudelaire imagined he had, only with that
fixed stare of his that disconcerted them, did all that with deliberate
malice. There was almost nothing in this world that he had not done,
exulted in, gloried in. Like Villiers, he could not pardon stupidity; to
both it was incomprehensible; both saw that stupidity is more criminal
than even vice, if only because stupidity is incurable, if only because
vice is curable. Burton, who found the Arabs, in their delicate
depravity, ironical--irony being their breath of life--might have said
with Villiers: "_L'Esprit du Siècle, ne l'oublions pas, est aux
machines._"
Every individual face has as many different expressions as the soul
behind it has moods; therefore, the artist's business is to create on
paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but which
those helped to make in his own soul. I see, as it were, surge before me
an image of Swinburne in his youth, when, with his passionate and pale
face, with its masses of fiery hair, he has almost the aspect of
Ucello's Galeazzo Malatesta. Burton's face has no actual beauty in it;
it reveals a tremendous animalism, an air of repressed ferocity, a
devilish fascination. There is almost a tortured magnificence in this
huge head, tragic and painful, with its mouth that aches with desire,
with those dilated nostrils that drink in I know not what strange
perfumes.