Bibliography:
74. Six Months at Abbazia. 1888. 75. Lady Burton's Edition of the
Arabian Nights. 1888.
141. In Morocco, 21st November 1885.
On October 28th the Burtons went down to Hatfield, where there was a
large party, but Lord Salisbury devoted himself chiefly to Burton. After
they had discussed the Eastern Question, Lord Salisbury said to Burton
"Now go to your room, where you will be quiet, and draw up a complete
programme for Egypt."
Burton retired, but in two or three minutes returned with a paper which
he handed to Lord Salisbury.
"You've soon done it," said his Lordship, and on unfolding the paper he
found the single word "Annex."
"If I were to write for a month," commented Burton, on noticing Lord
Salisbury's disappointment, "I could not say more."
However, being further pressed, he elaborated his very simple programme.
[500] The policy he advocated was a wise and humane one; and had it
been instantly adopted, untold trouble for us and much oppression of
the miserable natives would have been avoided. Since then we have
practically followed his recommendations, and the present prosperous
state of Egypt is the result.
On 21st November 1885, Burton left England for Tangier, which he reached
on the 30th, and early in January he wrote to the Morning Post a letter
on the Home Rule question, which he thought might be settled by
the adoption of a Diet System similar to that which obtained in
Austro-Hungary. On January 15th he wants to know how Mr. Payne's
translation of Boccaccio [501] is proceeding and continues: "I look
forward to Vol. i. with lively pleasure. You will be glad to hear that
to-day I finished my translation and to-morrow begin with the Terminal
Essay, so that happen what may subscribers are safe. Tangier is beastly
but not bad for work.... It is a place of absolute rascality, and large
fortunes are made by selling European protections--a regular Augean
stable."
Mrs. Burton and Lisa left England at the end of January, and Burton met
them at Gibraltar.
142. K.C.M.G., 5th February 1886.
When the first volume of The Arabian Nights appeared Burton was
sixty-four. So far his life had been a long series of disappointments.
His labours as an explorer had met with no adequate recognition, the
Damascus Consulship could be remembered only with bitterness, his
numerous books had sold badly. Every stone which for forty years he had
rolled up proved to be only a Sisyphus stone. He was neglected, while
every year inferior men--not to be mentioned in the same breath with
him--were advanced to high honours. Small wonder that such treatment
should have soured him or that--a vehement man by nature--he should
often have given way to paroxysms of anger. Still he kept on working.
Then all of a sudden the transplendent sun sailed from its clouds
and poured upon him its genial beams. He had at last found the golden
Chersonese. His pockets, so long cobwebbed, now bulged with money.
Publishers, who had been coy, now fought for him. All the world--or
nearly all--sang his praises. [502] Lastly came the K.C.M.G., an
honour that was conferred upon him owing in large measure to the noble
persistency of the Standard newspaper, which in season and out of season
"recalled to the recollection of those with whom lay the bestowal of
ribbons and crosses the unworthy neglect with which he had been so long
treated."
Lady Burton thus describes the reception of the news. "On the 5th of
February 1886, a very extraordinary thing happened [503]--it was a
telegram addressed 'Sir Richard Burton!' He tossed it over to me and
said, 'Some fellow is playing me a practical joke, or else it is not for
me. I shall not open it, so you may as well ring the bell and give it
back again.' 'Oh no,' I said, 'I shall open it if you don't.'"
It was from Lord Salisbury, conveying in the kindest terms that the
queen had made him K.C.M.G. in reward for his services. He looked very
serious and quite uncomfortable, and said, "Oh, I shall not accept it."
[504] His wife told him, however, that it ought to be accepted because
it was a certain sign that the Government intended to give him a better
appointment. So he took it as a handsel.
143. Burton at 65.
Having accompanied Sir Richard Burton to the meridian of his fame, we
may fitly pause a moment and ask what manner of a man he was at this
moment. Though sixty-five, and subject to gout, he was still strong and
upright. He had still the old duskened features, dark, piercing eyes,
and penthouse brows, but the long and pendulous Chinaman moustaches had
shrunk till they scarcely covered his mouth. The "devil's jaw" could
boast only a small tuft of hair. There were wrinkles in "the angel's
forehead." If meddlesome Time had also furrowed his cheeks, nevertheless
the most conspicuous mark there was still the scar of that great gash
received in the ding-dong fight at Berbera. His hair, which should have
been grizzled, he kept dark, Oriental fashion, with dye, and brushed
forward. Another curious habit was that of altering his appearance.
In the course of a few months he would have long hair, short hair, big
moustache, small moustache, long beard, short beard, no beard. Everyone
marked his curious, feline laugh, "made between his teeth." The change
in the world's treatment of him, and in his circumstances, is noticeable
to his countenance. In photographs taken previous to 1886 his look
betrays the man who feels that he has been treated neglectfully by an
ungrateful world for which he had made enormous sacrifices. Indeed,
looking at the matter merely from a pecuniary standpoint, he must have
spent at least L20,000 of his own money in his various explorations.
He is at once injured, rancorous, sullen, dangerous. All these pictures
exhibit a scowl. In some the scowl is very pronounced, and in one
he looks not unlike a professional prize-fighter. They betray a mind
jaundiced, but defiant. A restless, fiery soul, his temper, never of
the best, had grown daily more gnarled and perverse. Woe betide the
imprudent human who crossed him! What chance had anybody against a man
who had the command of all the forcible words in twenty-eight languages!
His peremptory voice everywhere ensured obedience. To all save his
dearest friends he was proud and haughty. Then came the gold
shower. There was actually a plethora of money. The world, so long
irreconcilable, had acknowledged his merits, and the whole man softened.
The angelical character of the forehead gradually spread downwards, and
in time tempered even the ferocity of the terrible jaw. It was the same
man, but on better terms with himself and everybody else. We see him
sitting or strolling in his garden with quite a jaunty air--and when
there is a cigar in his mouth, the shadow of which modifies still more
the characteristics of that truculent region, it is hard to believe that
we are looking at the same man. He has a youthful vigour, an autumnal
green. In one photograph Lady Burton, devoted as ever to her husband, is
seen nestling at his side and leaning her head against his shoulder. She
had grown uncomfortably stout and her tight-fitting dress was hard put
to it to bear the strain. Her glorious hair was now grown gray and thin,
and it was generally hidden by a not very becoming big yellowish wig
with curls, which made her look like a magnified Marie Antoinette.
Burton's chief pleasure in his garden was feeding the birds. They used
to wait for him in flocks on an almond tree, and became "quite imperious
in their manners if he did not attend to them properly." He loved the
sparrow especially, for Catullus' sake.
His gigantic personality impressed all who met him. Conversation
with him reduced the world from a sphere to a spherule. It shrank
steadily--he had traversed so much of it, and he talked about
out-of-the-way places so familiarly. As of old, when friends stayed
with him he never wanted to go to bed, and they, too, listening to his
learned, animated and piquant talk, were quite content to outwatch the
Bear. As an anthropologist his knowledge was truly amazing. "He was also
a first-rate surgeon and had read all the regular books." [505] People
called him, for the vastness of his knowledge, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. He looked to the past and the future. To the past, for no
one was more keenly interested in archaeology. He delighted to wander on
forlorn moors among what Shelley calls "dismal cirques of Druid stones."
To the future, for he continued to study spiritualism, and to gaze into
crystals. He longed to make himself master of the "darkling secrets
of Eternity." [506] Both he and Lady Burton were, to use Milton's
expression, "struck with superstition as with a planet." She says:
"From Arab or gipsy he got.... his mysticism, his superstition (I
am superstitious enough, God knows, but he was far more so), his
divination." [507] Some of it, however, was derived from his friendship
in early days with the painter-astrologer Varley. If a horse stopped for
no ascertained reason or if a house martin fell they wondered what it
portended. They disliked the bodeful chirp of the bat, the screech of
the owl. Even the old superstition that the first object seen in the
morning--a crow, a cripple, &c.--determines the fortunes of the day,
had his respect. "At an hour," he comments, "when the senses are most
impressionable the aspect of unpleasant spectacles has a double effect."
[508] He was disturbed by the "drivel of dreams," and if he did not
himself search for the philosopher's stone he knew many men who were
so engaged (he tells us there were a hundred in London alone) and he
evidently sympathised with them.
Fear of man was a feeling unknown to him, and he despised it in others.
"Of ten men," he used to say, quoting an Osmanli proverb, "nine are
women." Behind his bed hung a map of Africa, and over that a motto in
Arabic which meant:
"All things pass."
This saying he used to observe, was always a consolation to him.
If he had been eager for money, it was only for what money would buy. He
wanted it because it would enable him to do greater work. "I was often
stopped, in my expeditions," he told Dr. Baker, "for the want of a
hundred pounds." He was always writing: in the house, in the desert,
in a storm, up a tree, at dinner, in bed, ill or well, fresh or
tired,--indeed, he used to say that he never was tired. There was
nothing histrionic about him, and he never posed, except "before fools
and savages." He was frank, straightforward, and outspoken, and his face
was an index of his mind. Every thought was visible just "as through a
crystal case the figured hours are seen." He was always Burton, never by
any chance any one else. As. Mr. A. C. Swinburne said of him: "He rode
life's lists as a god might ride." Of English Literature and especially
of poetry he was an omnivorous reader. He expressed warm admiration
for Chaucer, "jolly old Walter Mapes," Butler's Hudibras, and Byron,
especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with its allusions to his beloved
Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio. Surely, however, he ought not to have
tried to set us against that tender line of Byron's,
"They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died," [509]
by pointing out that the accent of Arqua is rightly on the second
syllable, and by remarking: "Why will not poets mind their quantities in
lieu of stultifying their lines by childish ignorance." [510] Then, too,
he savagely attacked Tennyson for his "rasher of bacon line"--"the good
Haroun Alraschid," [511] Raschid being properly accented on the last
syllable. Of traveller authors, he preferred "the accurate Burckhardt."
He read with delight Boswell's Johnson, Johnson's Journey to the
Western Islands, Renan's Life of Jesus, Gibbon, whom he calls "our great
historian" [512] and the poems of Coleridge. At Cowper he never lost an
opportunity of girding, both on account of his Slave Ballads [513] and
the line:
"God made the country and man made the town." [514]
"Cowper," he comments, "had evidently never seen a region untouched
by the human hand." It goes without saying that he loved "his great
namesake," as he calls him, "Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of
facete and juvenile memory." Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the
poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald's
Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse's lyrics. Of
novelists Dickens was his favourite. He called Darwin "our British
Aristotle." Eothen [515] was "that book of books." He never forgave
Carlyle for denouncing The Arabian Nights as "downright lies" and
"unwholesome literature;" Miss Martineau, as an old maid, was, of
course, also out of court. If she had written Shakespeare, it would have
been all the same. He enjoyed a pen and ink fight, even as in those old
Richmond School days he had delighted in fisticuffs. "Peace and quiet
are not in my way." And as long as he got his adversary down he was
still not very particular what method he employed.
Unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen, he was a lover or art, and
had visited all the galleries in Europe. "If anyone," he used to say,
"thinks the English have the artistic eye, let him stand in the noblest
site in Europe, Trafalgar Square, and look around." On another occasion
he described the square as "the nation's last phase of artistic bathos."
The facade of the National Gallery was his continual butt.
A fine handwriting, he said, bespoke the man of audacity and
determination; and his own might have been done with a pin. Then he used
to split his words as if they were Arabic; writing, for example, "con
tradict" for contradict. When young ladies teased him to put something
in their albums he generally wrote:
"Shawir hunna wa khalif hunna,"
which may be translated:
"Ask their advice, ye men of wit
And always do the opposite."
Another of his favourite sayings against women was the Persian couplet:
"Agar nek budi zan u Ray-i-Zan
Zan-ra Ma-zan nam budi, na Zan," [516]
which may be rendered:
"If good were in woman, of course it were meeter
To say when we think of her, Beat not, not Beat her."
Zan meaning "woman" and also "beat," and ma-zan "beat not."
There was in Burton, as in most great men, a touch of the Don Quixote,
derived, no doubt, in his case, from his father. He was generous
and magnanimous, and all who knew him personally spoke of him with
affection. He was oftenest referred to as "a dear chap." Arbuthnot
regarded him as a paladin, with no faults whatever. When younger he had,
as we have noticed, never undervalued a good dinner, but as he advanced
in years, everything--food, sleep, exercise--had to give way before
work.
144. More Anecdotes.
For silver he had a conspicuous weakness. "Every person," he used to
say, "has some metal that influences him, and mine is silver." He would
have every possible article about him of that metal--walking-stick
knobs, standishes, modern cups, ancient goblets--all of gleamy silver.
Had he been able to build an Aladdin's palace it would have been all of
silver. He even regarded it as a prophylactic against certain diseases.
If his eyes got tired through reading he would lie on his back with a
florin over each. When the gout troubled him, silver coins had to be
bound to his feet; and the household must have been very thankful
for this supposed panacea, for when in pain, Burton, never a placid
creature, had tremendous outbursts of anger. One of these scenes, which
occurred at an hotel, is thus described by a witness. "The dinner had
been ordered at six. At half-past the hour it was not ready. The waiter
was summoned. He made excuse. "Mille tonnerres! Ventrebleu!" roared
Burton with a volley of unutterable language which he only could
translate. The waiter literally flew before the storm, looking back
at the witness with "Mais, mon Dieu, l'Anglais!" The dinner quickly
arrived, and with the soup, Burton recovered his equanimity, though
inveighing against all waiters, and the Triestine in particular." [517]
Another anecdote of this period reveals Burton doing a little smuggling.
One day, we are told, Lady Burton invited the consular chaplain to
accompany her to the quay. Stopping her cab just in front of the Custom
House, she induced her companion to talk to the Custom house officer
while she herself went on board a vessel to see about a case of wine
for her husband. Presently a porter came with the case and some loose
bottles, the later being placed by the chaplain's orders in the bottom
of the carriage. No sooner had this been done than Lady Burton followed,
and stepping into the cab bade the coachman drive off. Up to this moment
the chaplain had kept watch, smoking a cigar, at the window of the
carriage. The officer seeing a case being placed in the carriage was
about to make inquiry just as the coachman whipped up the horse. Lady
Burton smilingly saluted the officer from the window and thus allayed
his suspicions. He returned her nod with a military salute, and was soon
invisible. The speed, however, was too much for the loose bottles, and
the duty was paid in kind, as the wine flowed freely at the bottom of
the cab, while Burton pretended to rate his wife for exposing him to the
charge of smuggling and damaging the reputation of the chaplain. [518]
At Trieste Burton was always popular. The people appreciated his genius
and sympathised with his grievances, and he could truly say of them in
the words of his prototype, Ovid:
"They wish, good souls, to keep me, yet I know
They wish me gone, because I want to go." [519]
Not that he pleased everyone. Far from it, and hereby hangs a delectable
anecdote. Some Englishman at Trieste, who took umbrage on account of the
colossal muddle Burton made with his accounts and the frequency of his
absence, wrote to the Foreign Office something to this effect. "As Sir
Richard Burton is nearly always away from his post and the Vice-Consul
has to do the greater portion of the work, why on earth don't you get
rid of Sir Richard and let the Vice-Consul take his place? I wonder the
Foreign Office can put up with him at all."
To which came the following graceful reply. "Dear Sir,--We look upon the
consulship of Trieste as a gift to Sir Richard Burton for his services
to the nation, and we must decline to interfere with him in any way."
[520]