The Life of Sir Richard Burton | Page 7

one, and therefore almost
entirely her own. The publication of The Scented Garden would not-- it
could not--have added to Burton's fame. However, the matter will be
fully discussed in its proper place.
It has generally been supposed that two other difficulties must confront
any conscientious biographer of Burton--the first being Burton's choice
of subjects, and the second the friction between Lady Burton and the

Stisteds. But as regards the first, surely we are justified in assuming
that Burton's studies were pursued purely for historical and scientific
purposes. He himself insisted in season and out of season that his
outlook was solely that of the student, 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