Part 32 (1/2)
As regards religion, Burton had in early life, as we have seen, leaned to Sufism; and this faith influenced him to the end. For a little while he coquetted with Roman Catholicism; but the journey to Mecca practically turned him into a Mohammedan. At the time of his marriage he called himself an agnostic, and, as we have seen, he was always something of a spiritualist. Lady Burton, charmingly mixing her metaphors, [521] says ”he examined every religion, and picked out its pear to practise it.” The state of his mind in 1880 is revealed by his Kasidah. From that time to his death he was half Mohammedan and half Agnostic. His wife pressed him in season and out of season to become a Catholic, and, as we shall see, he did at last so far succ.u.mb to her importunities as to sign a paper in which, to use Lady Burton's expression, ”he abjured the Protestant heresy,” and put himself in line with the Catholics. [522] But, as his opinions do not seem to have changed one iota, this ”profession of faith” could have had little actual value. He listened to the prayers that his wife said with him every night, and he distinctly approved of religion in other persons.
Thus, he praised the Princess of Wales [523] for hearing her children say their ”little prayers,” [524] every night at her knee, and he is credited with the remark: ”A man without religion may be excused, but a woman without religion is unthinkable.” Priests, ceremonials, services, all seemed to him only tinkling cymbals. He was always girding at ”scapularies and other sacred things.” He delighted to compare Romanism unfavourably with Mohammedanism. Thus he would say sarcastically, ”Moslems, like Catholics, pray for the dead; but as they do the praying themselves instead of paying a priest to do it, their prayers, of course, are of no avail.” He also objected to the Church of Rome because, to use his own words, ”it has added a fourth person to the Trinity.” [525] He said he found ”four great Protestant Sommites: (1) St. Paul, who protested against St. Peter's Hebraism; (2) Mohammed, who protested against the perversions of Christianity; (3) Luthur, who protested against the rule of the Pope; (4) Sir Richard Burton, who protested against the whole business.” The way in which he used to ridicule the Papal religion in his wife's presence often jarred on his friends, who thought that however much he might disapprove of it, he ought, for her sake, to have restrained his tongue. But he did not spare other religious bodies either. He wanted to know, for instance, what the clergy of the Church of England did for the 3,500,000 a year ”wasted on them,” while he summed up the Nonconformists in the scornful phrase: ”Exeter Hall!” He considered anthropomorphism to explain satisfactorily not only the swan maiden, and the other feathered ladies [526] of the Nights, but also angel and devil. Both Arbuthnot and Payne regarded him as a Mohammedan. Another friend described him as a ”combination of an Agnostic, a Theist and an Oriental mystic.” Over and over again he said to his cousin, St. George Burton, ”The only real religion in the world is that of Mohammed. Religions are climatic. The Protestant faith suits England.” Once he said ”I should not care to go to h.e.l.l, for I should meet all my relations there, nor to Heaven, because I should have to avoid so many friends.” Lady Burton, who prayed daily ”that the windows of her husband's soul might be opened,” relied particularly on the mediation of ”Our Lady of Dale”--the Dale referred to being a village near Ilkestone, Derbys.h.i.+re, which once boasted a magnificent Premonstratensian monastery, [527] and she paid for as many as a hundred ma.s.ses to be said consecutively in the little ”Church of Our Lady and St. Thomas,” [528] at Ilkeston, in order to hasten that event. ”Some three months before Sir Richard's death,” writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, ”I was seated at Sir Richard's tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, 'I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.' [529] Perhaps, however, this should be considered to prove, not that he was an atheist, but that he could not resist the pleasure of shocking the clergyman.”
146. Burton as a Writer.
On Burton as a writer we have already made some comments. One goes to his books with confidence; in the a.s.surance that whatever ever he saw is put down. Nothing is hidden and there is no attempt to Munchausenize.
His besetting literary sin, as we said, was prolixity. Any one of his books reduced to one-quarter, or better, one-sixth the size, and served up artistically would have made a delightful work. As it is, they are vast storehouses filled with undusted objects of interest and value, mingled with heaps of mere lumber. His books laid one on the top of another would make a pile eight feet high!
He is at his best when describing some daring adventure, when making a confession of his own weaknesses, or in depicting scenery. Lieutenant Cameron's tribute to his descriptive powers must not be pa.s.sed by.
”Going over ground which he explored,” says Cameron, ”with his Lake Regions of Central Africa in my hand, I was astonished at the acuteness of his perception and the correctness of his descriptions.” Stanley spoke of his books in a similar strain.
Burton owed his success as a narrator in great measure to his habit of transferring impressions to paper the moment he received them--a habit to which he was led by reading a pa.s.sage of Dr. Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands. ”An observer deeply impressed by any remarkable spectacle,” says Johnson, ”does not suppose that the traces will soon vanish from his mind, and having commonly no great convenience for writing, defers the description to a time of more leisure and better accommodation. He who has not made the experiment or is not accustomed to require vigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many practical features and discriminations will be found compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea.” [530] ”Brave words,” comments Burton, ”somewhat pompous and diffused, yet worthy to be written in letters of gold.”
[531] Very many of Burton's books, pamphlets and articles in the journals of the learned societies appeal solely to archaeologists, as, for example Etruscan Bologna, [532] an account of the Etrurian people, their sharp bottomed wells, the pebble tombs of the poor and the elegant mausoleums of the wealthy with their figures of musicians and dancing girls ”in garments of the most graceful form, finest texture and brilliant hues;” reminding us of the days when Veii fell, and its G.o.ddess, who ”was light and easily removed, as though she followed willingly,” as Livy, with his tongue in his cheek, says, was conveyed to Rome; and of the later days when ”Lars Porsena of Clusium” poured southward his serried host, only, according to the Roman historians, to meet with defeat and discomfiture.
Of Burton's carelessness and inaccuracies, we have already spoken. We mentioned that to his dying day he was under a wrong impression as to his birthplace, and that his account of his early years and his family bristles with errors. Scores of his letters have pa.s.sed through my hands and nearly all are imperfectly dated. Fortunately, however, the envelopes have in almost every case been preserved; so the postmark, when legible, has filled the lacuna. At every turn in his life we are reminded of his inexact.i.tude--especially in autobiographical details.
And yet, too, like most inexact men, he was a rare stickler for certain niceties. He would have defended the ”h” in Meccah with his sword; and the man who spelt ”Gypsy” with an ”i” for ever forfeited his respect.
Burton's works--just as was his own mind--are vast, encyclopaedic, romantic and yet prosaic, unsystematic; but that is only repeating the line of the old Greek poet:
”Like our own selves our work must ever be.” [533]
Chapter x.x.xII. 5th June 1886-15th April 1888, Burton and Social Questions: Anecdotes
147. The Population Question.
In social questions Burton took a keen interest. Indeed he was in many respects a man far in advance of his age. In denouncing various evils he betrays the earnestness of a Carlyle, and when propounding plans for the abolition of the Slave Trade in ”that Devil's Walk and Purlieu,” East Africa, Saul becomes one of the prophets. That he was no saint we should have known if he himself had not told us; but he had, as he believed, his special work to do in the world and he did it with all his might.
Though a whirlwind of a man, he had, as we have seen, the tenderest of hearts, he thought with sorrow of the sufferings of the poor, and he often said to his wife: ”When I get my pension we'll spend the rest of our lives in helping the submerged tenth.” Although sympathising warmly with the efforts of General Booth and other men who were trying to grapple with social evils, he could see, nevertheless, that they touched only the fringe of the difficulty. He was, broadly speaking, what is now known as a Neo-Mathusian, that is to say, he held that no man had a right to bring into the world a larger number of children than he could support with comfort, that the poor ought to be advised to limit their families, and that persons suffering from certain terrible diseases ought not to be allowed to marry, or at any rate to have children.
Himself a man of splendid physique, Burton wanted to see every man in England physically healthy and strong. He considered it abominable that infant monstrosities or children born blind should be allowed to live, and held that showmen and others who exhibit monstrosities should be promptly jailed. ”Indeed,” he says, ”it is a question if civilisation may not be compelled to revive the law of Lycurgus, which forbade a child, male or female, to be brought up without the approbation of public officers appointed ad hoc. One of the curses of the 19th century is the increased skill of the midwife and the physician, who are now able to preserve worthless lives and to bring up semi-abortions whose only effect upon the breed is increased degeneracy.” [534] He thought with Edward FitzGerald and many another sympathiser with the poor, that it is the height of folly for a labouring man living in a cottage with only two small bedrooms and earning twelve s.h.i.+llings a week to burden himself with a family of from ten to a dozen. Three or four children he considered enough for anybody. At the same time he perceived that the Neo-Malthusian system might be abused--that is to say, rich persons who could well afford to bring up respectable-sized families might be tempted to restrict the number to one or two. [535] Consequently, in the Terminal Essay to the Arabian Nights, we find him recommending the study of an Arabic work, Kitab al Bah not only to the anthropologist but also to the million. He says, ”The conscientious study would be useful to humanity by teaching the use and unteaching the abuse of the Malthusian system, [536] whereby the family is duly limited to the necessities of society.” At the present time--with the diminis.h.i.+ng birth-rate and when the subject is discussed freely in every upper and middle cla.s.s home in England--these ideas cause no wonderment; but in those days they were novel.
148. New Projects.
We left the Burtons, it will be remembered, at Gibraltar. After a short stay there, they crossed over to Morocco in a cattle tug. Neither of them liked Tangiers, still, if the Consulate had been conferred upon Sir Richard, it would have given them great happiness. They were, however, doomed to disappointment. Lord Salisbury's short-lived administration of 1886 had been succeeded by a Liberal Government with Lord Rosebery as Premier; and Tangiers was given to Mr. (afterwards Sir) W. Kirby Green.
[537] The Burtons were back in Trieste at the end of March.
The success of The Arabian Nights, which was owing entirely to its anthropological and p.o.r.nographic notes, was for Sir Richard Burton both good and bad. It was good because it removed for the remainder of his life all pecuniary anxieties; it was bad because it led him to devote himself exclusively to subjects which certainly should not occupy exclusively the attention of any man. Henceforth every translation was to be annotated from a certain point of view. [538] One can but regret this perversity, for the old Roman and other authors have unpleasantnesses enough without accentuating them. Thus in reading some sweet poem of Catullus, spoilt by perhaps a single objectionable line, we do not want our attention drawn particularly to the blemish.