The Life of Sir Richard Burton | Page 7

and my researches for the purposes of this work have thoroughly convinced me that, however much we may deprecate some of these studies, Burton himself was sincere enough in his pursuit of them. His nature, strange as it may seem to some ears, was a cold one[FN#15]; and at the time he was buried in the most forbidding of his studies he was an old man racked with infirmities. Yet he toiled from morning to night, year in year out, more like a navvy than an English gentleman, with an income of ￡700 a year, and 10,000 "jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid," as R. L. Stevenson would have said, in his pocket. In his hunger for the fame of an author, he forgot to feed his body, and had to be constantly reminded of its needs by his medical attendant and others. And then he would wolf down his food, in order to get back quickly to his absorbing work. The study had become a monomania with him.
I do not think there is a more pathetic story in the history of literature than that which I have to tell of the last few weeks of Burton's life. You are to see the old man, always ailing, sometimes in acute pain--working twenty-five hours a day, as it were--in order to get completed a work by which he supposed he was to live for ever. In the same room sits the wife who dearly loves him, and whom he dearly loves and trusts. A few days pass. He is gone. She burns, page by page, the work at which he had toiled so long and so patiently. And here comes the pathos of it--she was, in the circumstances, justified in so doing. As regards Lady Burton and the Stisteds, it was natural, perhaps, that between a staunch Protestant family such as the Stisteds, and an uncompromising Catholic like Lady Burton there should have been friction; but both Lady Burton and Miss Stisted are dead. Each made, during Lady Burton's lifetime, an honest attempt to think well of the other; each wrote to the other many sweet, sincere, and womanly letters; but success did not follow. Death, however, is a very loving mother. She gently hushes her little ones to sleep; and, as they drop off, the red spot on the cheek gradually fades away, and even the tears on the pillow soon dry.
Although Miss Stisted's book has been a help to me I cannot endorse her opinion that Burton's recall from Damascus was the result of Lady Burton's indiscretions. Her books give some very interesting reminiscences of Sir Richard's childhood and early manhood,[FN#15] but practically it finishes with the Damascus episode. Her innocent remarks on The Scented Garden must have made the anthropological sides of Ashbee, Arbuthnot, and Burton's other old friends shake with uncontrollable laughter. Unfortunately, she was as careless as Lady Burton. Thus on page 48 she relates a story about Burton's attempt to carry off a nun; but readers of Burton's book on Goa will find that it had no connection with Burton whatever. It was a story someone had told him.
In these pages Burton will be seen on his travels, among his friends, among his books, fighting, writing, quarrelling, exploring, joking, flying like a squib from place to place--a 19th century Lord Peterborough, though with the world instead of a mere continent for theatre. Even late in life, when his infirmities prevented larger circuits, he careered about Europe in a Walpurgic style that makes the mind giddy to dwell upon.
Of Burton's original works I have given brief summaries; but as a writer he shines only in isolated passages. We go to him not for style but for facts. Many of his books throw welcome light on historical portions of the Bible.[FN#17]
Of those of his works which are erotic in the true sense of the word I have given a sufficient account, and one with which I am convinced even the most captious will not find fault.[FN#18] When necessity has obliged me to touch upon the subject to which Sir Richard devoted his last lustrum, I have been as brief as possible, and have written in a way that only scholars could understand. In short I have kept steadily in view the fact that this work is one which will lie on drawing-room tables and be within the reach of everyone. I have nowhere mentioned the subject by name, but I do not see how I could possible have avoided all allusion to it. I have dwelt on Burton's bravery, his tenderness, his probity, his marvellous industry, his encyclopaedic learning--but the picture would not have been a true one had I entirely over-passed the monomania of his last days. Hamlet must be shown, if not at his maddest, at