A GIPSY GENIUS.
BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.
MEN are the only things worth while, in this world, and I
purpose to write briefly of a man, who, though living in
these, our own, so-called, degenerate days, would have
found a perfect setting in "the spacious times
of great Elizabeth." He would have been a worthy
companion of Raleigh, half-pirate and half-poet. He had in
his time but one soul-kinsman, and that man was at once
England's shame and glory, embalmed forever in the
ominous work, Khartoum.
Sir Richard Burton was the last of the English
"gentleman adventurers." He came late into the world,
but he had in him the large, strong qualities that have
made England master of the world. He was a Gypsy
genius, though his utmost research could never find more
clew to a Romany ancestry than the fact that there was
a Gypsy family of the same name. He looked the Gypsy
in ever feature, and he had upon him such an urging
restlessness as no man ever had, save, perhaps, the Wandering
Jew. His life was an epic of thought, of investigation
and of adventure. The track of his wanderings laced
the globe. He loved "the antres vast and deserts idle,"
and he had the
flair, the houndscent, as it were, to find
the hearts of strange peoples. His "Life," by his wife,
is the most interesting biography since that of Boswell,
and strangely enough, it is, like the famous "Johnson,"
as interesting for its revelation of the biographer as for
its portrayal of the subject. Burton's wife was the
loving-est slave that ever wedded with an idol. The story
of the courtship is ridiculous almost to the verge of tragic.
As a girl, a gypsy woman named Burton, told Isabel
Arundell that she would marry one of the palmist's name,
would travel much, and receive much honor.
One day, at Boulogne, she was on the ramparts, with
companions, when she saw Burton. She describes him
raptuously; tall, thin, muscular, very dark hair, black,
clearly-defined, sagacious eye-brows, a brown weather-beaten complexion, straight Arab features, a determined
looking mouth and chin. And then she quotes a clever
friend's description, "That he had the brow of a God,
the jaw of a Devil."
His eyes "pierced you through and through." When
he smiled, he did so "as though it hurt him." He had a
"fierce proud melancholy expression," and he "looked
with contempt at things generally." He stared at her,
and his eyes looked her through and through. She turned
to a friend and said in a whisper, "That man will marry
me." The next day they walked again. This time this
man wrote on the wall, "May I speak to you?" She
picked up the chalk and scrawled, "No, mother will be
angry." A few days later they met in formal manner,
and were introduced. She started at the name, Burton.
Her
naif rhapsodies on the meeting are refreshing. One
night he danced with her. She kept the sash and the
gloves she wore that night as sacred mementoes. Six
years passed before she saw her Fate again. He had
been in the world though, and she had kept track of his
actions. In 1856 she met him in the Botanical Gardens
"walking with the gorgeous creature of Boulogne—then
married." They talked of things, particularly of
Disraeli's "Tancred." He asked her if she came to the
Gardens often. She said that she and her cousin came there
every morning. He was there next morning, composing
poetry to send to Monkton-Milnes. They walked and
talked and did it again and again. "I trod on air,"
wrote the lady in her old, old age. Why not? She was
one woman who had found a real hero. He asked her if
she could dream of giving up civilization, and of going
to live there if he could obtain the Consulate of Damascus.
He told her to think it over. She said, "I don't
want
to think it over—I've been thinking it over for six years,
ever since I first saw you, at Boulogne, on the ramparts.
I have prayed for you every day, morning and night. I
have followed all your career minutely. I have read every
word you ever wrote, and I would rather have a crust
and a tent with
you than to be Queen of all the world.
And so I say now, yes, yes, yes." She lived up to this
to the day of his death, and long after it.
In 1859 she was thinking of becoming a Sister of
Charity. She had not heard from Burton in a long time.
He had left her without much ceremony to search for the
sources of the Nile with Speke. Speke had returned alone,
Burton remained at Zenzibar, and she says, "I was very
sore "because Burton, according to report, was not thinking
of coming home, to his love, but of going for the source
of the Nile once more. She called on a friend. The
friend was out. She waited, and while waiting Burton
popped in upon her. He had come to see the friend to
get her address. Her description of the meeting is a
pitifully exact reproduction of her emotions over the
reunion. He was weakened by African fevers. Her family,
ardent Catholics, opposed the idea of marriage. The
lovers used to meet in the Botanical Gardens, whence she
often had to escort him fainting, to the house of sympathetic
friends, in a cab. He was poor. He was out of
favor with the government. Speke had pre-empted the
honors of the expedition. But she was happy.
Then one day, in April, 1860, she was walking with
some friends when "a tightning of the heart" came over
her, that "she had not known before." She went home,
and said to his sister, "I am not going to see Richard for
some time." Her sister re-assured her. "No, I shall
not," she said, "I don't know what is the matter." A tap
came at the door, and a note was put in her hand. Burton
was off on a journey to Salt Lake City, to investigate
Mormonism. He would be gone nine months and then he
was to come back, to see if she would marry him. He
returned about Christmas, 1860. In the later part of
January they were married, the details of the affair being
appropriately unconventional, not to say exciting. The
marriage was, practically, an elopement. Lady Burton's
description of the event, and of every event in their lives,
ever after, discloses an idolatry of the man that was
almost an insanity. She reveals herself as a help-mate, with
no will but her husband's, no thought that was not for,
and of, him. She annihilated herself as an individual,
and she has left in her own papers a set of "Rules For
a Wife," that will make many wives, who are regarded as
models of devotion, smile contemptuously at her. She
was utterly happy in complete submission to his will. She
described how she served him almost like an Indian squaw.
She packed his trunks, was his amanuensis, attended to
the details of publishing his books, came, or went, as he
bade, suffered long absence in silence, or accompanied him
on long journeys of exploration, uncomplainingly, was
proud when he hypnotized her for the amusement of his
friends. One can but feel deeply sorry for her, for with
all her servility, she was a woman of the finer order of
mind. The pity of her worship grows, as the reader of
his life, and hers, realizes how little return in demonstrative
affection she received as the reward for her vast, and
continuous lavishment of love. She strikes me, in this,
as a strange blend of the comic and the tragic. The world
neglected Burton. He almost deserved it; so great a
sacrifice as his wife consecrated of her life to him would
compensate for the loss of anything. You admire it; but
you catch yourself suspecting that this consecration must
have been, at times, an awful bore to him. He was
unfaithful to her, it is said, with ethnological intent, in all
the tribes of the earth. He had no morals to speak of.
He had no religion, having studied all. He was a pagan
beyond redemption, though his wife maintained that he
was a Catholic. Unfortunately, for her, his masterpiece
refutes her overwhelmingly. He wrote the most remarkable
poem of the last forty years, one that is to be classed
only with Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and the "Rubaiyat"
of Omar Khayyam. By this poem, and, probably,
by the revelation of the love he excited in one woman, he
will live. This poem expresses himself, and his conclusion,
after years spent in wandering, fighting, studying
languages, customs and religions. To understand the man
and his poem, we must understand what he did, and since
the time of the Old Romance, no man surpassed him in
"deeds of derring-do." He was a modern, a very modern,
Knight of the Round Table. He was the possessor
of innumerable abstruse, and outlandish accomplishments.
He was a scientist, a linguist, a poet, a geographer, a
roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a polyhedric
personality, that caught and gave, something from and
to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890,
at the age of Sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for
him that was almost worth dying for.
What he did is hard to condense into an article. I
can do no more than skim over his career, and make out
a feature here and there. He was an unstudious youth.
He was not disciplined. He grew as he might, and he
absorbed information at haphazard from any book he found
to his liking, but he was a sort of intellectual Ishmael. He
studied things not in the curriculum. He plunged into
Arabic and Hindustani, and was "rusticated." He cared
nothing for the classics, yet he left a redaction of Catullus
that is a splendid exposition of that singer's fearful
corruption, and with all of his art. He entered the Indian
Army, and he became so powerful, though a subordinate,
that he was repressed. His superiors feared, that in him,
they would find another Clive or Hastings. Then he
joined the Catholic church, but he joined many a church
thereafter to find its hidden meaning. He was trusted to
a limited extent by Sir Charles Napier, and he so insinuated
himself with the natives, that he was one of them,
and sharer of their mysterious powers. Kipling has
pictured him under the name of "Strickland" as an occultly
powerful personage in several of his stories. He
was close to the Sikh war, and he mingled with the hostile
natives in disguise, until he knew their very hearts. His
pilgrimage to Mecca was a feat that startled the world.
He was the first "infidel" to kiss the Kaabba. To do this
he had to become a Mohammedan, and to perform almost
hourly minute ceremonials, in which, had he failed of
perfection, he would have been torn to pieces. His book on
this journey is a narration that displays the deadly cold
quality of his courage, and indeed a stupendous
consciencelessness in the interest of science. Next we find
him in the Crimea in the thick of things, and always in
trouble. He said that all his friends got into trouble,
and Burton was, usually, "agin the government." It
was after the Crimea that he met the lady who became his
remarkable wife, in the remarkable manner I have sketched.
Then he went off to discover the sources of the Nile, and
with Speke navigated Lake Tanganyika. He knew that
he had not discovered the source, and he wanted to try
again, but he and Speke quarreled, and pamphleteered
against each other in the press. Burton, deficient in
money, and in sycophancy, was discredited for a time,
although now his name is immortal in geography as a pioneer
of African travel. We have seen how he left his betrothed
to study the Mormons, and he studied them more
closely than his wife's book intimates, for she everything
extenuated and ignored for her God-like Richard.
After his experiences of marriage in Mormondom,
undertaken it now seems, in a desire to ascertain if polygamy
were not better for him than monogamy, he returned to
London, and was married despite the objections of Isabel
Arundell's Catholic family. The lot of the couple was
poverty, although now and then, thoughtful friends
invited them to visit, and they accepted to save money.
After a long wait he was appointed Consul at Fernando
Po, on the West African coast. This was a miserable
place, but Burton made it lively; he disciplined the
negroes, and he made the sea captains fulfill their contracts
under threat of guns. He went home, and then went back
to Fernando Po, and undertook delicate dealings with the
king of Dahomey, and explored the west coast. He went
to Ireland, but Ireland was too quiet for him, but he
found there were Burtons there, which accounted to himself
for much of himself. After that he went to Brazil
as Consul at Santos, Sao Pablo, another "Jumping off
place." He explored. He found rubies, and he obtained
a concession for a lead mine for others. He met there
the Tichborne Claimant, and invented a Carbine pistol.
He visited Argentina. All this time he was writing upon
many things, or having his wife take his dictation. She
went into the wilds, down into the mines, everywhere with
him. Next he was transferred to Damascus, where his
honesty got him into trouble, and his wife's Catholicity
aroused great sentiment against him. He went into
Syria, and he created consternation among the corrupt
office holders in Asia Minor. One can scarcely follow his
career without dizziness. By way of obliging a friend,
who wanted a report on a mine, he went to Iceland, and
came back to take the Consulship at Trieste. He went
back to India and into Egypt, and then returned to
Trieste to die. He wrote pamphlets, monographs, letters
and books about everything he saw, and every place he
visited. He had information exact, and from the fountain
head about innumerable things; religions, races, ruins,
customs, languages, tribal genealogies, plants, geology,
archaeology paleontology, botany, politics, morals, almost
everything that was of human interest and value, and
besides all this, he was familiar with Chaucer's vocabulary,
with recondite learning about Latin colloquialisms, and
read with avidity everything from the Confessions of Saint
Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the
Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for
the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian
Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light
upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will
keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His
translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition
of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus
is familiar to students, but not edifying. He wrote a
curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of
bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of
African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales.
He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes
for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and
Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the
catalogue of a small library. All the world knows about
his book, "The Scented Garden," which he translated
from the Persian, and which, after his death, his wife
burned rather than permit the publication of its naked
naturalism. It was in the same vein as his "Arabian
Nights," and contained much curious comment upon many
things that we Anglo Saxons do not talk about, save in
medical society meetings, and dog Latin.
When such a man sat down to write a poem, embodying
his view of "the Higher Law," what could have been
expected but a notable manuscript. With his poem, "the
Kasidah," we shall now concern ourselves. It purports
to be a translation from the Arabic of Haji Abdu El
Yezdi. Its style is like that of the Rubaiyat. It is erude,
but subtile. It is brutal in its anti-theism, and yet it has
a certain tender grace of melancholy, deeper than Omar's
own. It is devoid of Omar's mysticism and epicureanism,
and appallingly synthetic. It will not capture the
sentimentalists, like the Rubaiyat, but, when it shall be known,
it will divide honors with the now universally popular
Persian poem. Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in
his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine,
has issued it in beautiful and chaste form, for the edification
of his clientele of searchers for the literature that is
always almost, but never quite completely forgotten. The
"Kasidah" was written in 1853, and it is, in its opening,
much like Fitz Gerald's Rubaiyat, though Burton never
saw that gem of philosophy and song, until eight years
after. "The Kasidah" was not printed until 1880. It
is difficult to interpret, because it so clearly interprets
itself. It must be read. It cannot be "explained."
The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable
vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations
of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived,
and it holds forth the writer's own view. He
maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided,
and distributed in this world. Self cultivation is, in his
view, the sole sufficient object of human life, with due
regard for others. The affections, the sympathies, and
"the divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments.
He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper
suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions." This is
pure agnosticism. There runs all through the poem a
sad note that heightens the courage with which the writer
faces his own bleak conclusion, and, "the tinkling of the
camel bell" is heard faint and far in the surge of his
investive, or below the deepest deep of his despair. In
Arabia, Death rides a camel, instead of a white horse, as
our occidental myth has it, and the camel's bell is the
music to which all life is attuned. Burton reverts from
time to time to this terrifying tintinnabulation, but he
blends it with the suggested glamour of evening, until the
terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this
minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest
against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the
"Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the
world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it
is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The
verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and
there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the
sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power,
of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts,
Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus the
vine and the rose, and ali Persian silkiness. The problem
he sets out to solve, and he solves it by a
petitio
principii, is
Why must we meet, why must we part, why must
we bear this yoke of Must,
Without our leave or ask or given, by tyrant
Fate on victim thrust?
The impermanence of things oppresses him, for he
says in an adieu,
. . . Haply some day we meet again;
Yet ne'er the self-same man shall meet;
the years shall make us other men.
He crams into one couplet after another, philosophy
after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean,
Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw
in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid,"
and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming
Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread."
There is an echo of Koleleth in his contempt for the divinity
of the body. It is unclean without, impure within.
The vanity of vanity is proclaimed with piteous indignation.
"And still the weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof
is wretched Man,
Weaving the unpattern'd, dark design, so dark we doubt
it owns a plan.
Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears
and blood,
Man say thy mercy made what is, and saw the made and
said 'twas good?"
And then he sings:
Cease Man to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy the shining
hour of sun;
We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less
full of fun?
In sweeping away the old philosophies and religions, he
is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of
scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson
declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the
Greek paganism runs:
And when at length, "Great Pan is dead" uprose the
loud and dolorous cry,
A glamour wither'd on the ground, a splendor faded in
the sky.
Yes, Pan is dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat
beneath the sun,
The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three, whose
three is one....Then the lank Arab, foul with sweat, the drainer of the
camel's dug,
Gorged with his leek-green, lizard's meat, clad in his
filmy rag and rug,
Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands
Where, he asks, are all the creeds and crowns and
scepters, "the holy grail of high Jamshid?"
Gone, gone where I and thou must go, borne by the
winnowing wings of Death,
The Horror brooding over life, and nearer brought with
every breath.
Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they rose and
reigned, they fought and fell,
As swells and swoons across the wold the tinkling of the
camel's bell.
For him "there is no good, there is no bad; these be
the whims of mortal will." They change with place, they
shift with race. "Each Vice has borne a Virtue's crown,
all Good was banned as Sin or Crime." He takes up the
history of the world, as we reconstruct it for the period
before history, from geology, astronomy and other
sciences. He accepts the murderousness of all processes of
life and change. All the cruelty of things "Builds up a
world for better use; to general Good bends special Ill."
And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in the time
to be
Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari-men another falling
star shall see:
Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where
gone, no Thought can tell,—
Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling of the
camel-bell.
Yet follow not the unwisdom path, cleave not to this and
that disclaim;
Believe in all that man believes; here all and naught are
both the same.
Enough to think that Truth can be; come sit me where
the roses glow,
Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also
how to unknow.
He denies the Soul and wants to know where it was
when Man was a savage beast in Primeval forests, what
shape it had, what dwelling place, what part in nature's
plan it played. "What men are pleased to call the Soul
was in the hog and dog begun."
Life is a ladder infinite-stepped that hides its rungs from
human eyes:
Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above
the skies.
The evolution theory he applies to the development of
reason from instinct. He protests against the revulsion
from materialism by saying that "the sordider the stuff,
the cunninger the workman's hand," and therefore the
Maker may have made the world from matter. He
maintains that "the hands of Destiny ever deal, in fixed
and equal parts their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and
weal" to all that breathe our upper air. The problem of
predestination he holds in scorn. The unequality of life
exists and "that settles it" for him. He accepts one
bowl with scant delight but he says "who drains the score
must ne'er expect to rue the headache in the morn."
Disputing about creeds is "mumbling rotten bones." His
creed is this:
Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self
expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps
his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but
Phanton's dwell,
A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a tinkling of the
Camel's bell.
He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but
he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of
pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first
is "eternal war with Ignorance." He says: "Thine
ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest
bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against
a myriad giants. The end is to "learn the noblest lore,
to know that all we know is naught." Self-approval is
enough reward. The whole duty of man is to himself,
but he must "hold Humanity one man" and, looking back
at what he was, determine not to be again that thing.
"Abjure the Why and seek the How." The gods are
silent. The indivisible puny Now in the length of infinite
time is Man's all to make the best of. The Law may
have a Giver but let be, let be!
Thus I may find a future life, a nobler copy of our own,
Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge
shall be known;
Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on earth
he sees a part;
Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope
deferred shall hurt the heart.
But—faded flower and fallen leaf no more shall deck the
parent tree;
A man once dropt by Tree of Life, what hope of other
life has he?
The shattered bowl shall know repair; the riven lute shall
sound once more;
But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to
man restore?
The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed
shall pipe again;
But we, we die and Death is one, the doom of brutes,
the doom of men.
Then, if Nirvana round our life with nothingness, 'tis
haply blest;
Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won
their guerdon—Rest.
Cease, Abou, cease! My song is sung, nor think the gain
the singer's prize
Till men hold Ignorance deadly sin till Man deserves his
title, "Wise."
In days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns
to dwell with men,
These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake
responsive strain:
Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble
tale to tell—
The whispers of the Desert wind: the tinkling of the
Camel's bell.
So ends the song. The notes appended thereto by
Burton are a demonstration of his learning and his polemic
power. The poem is his life of quest, of struggle, of
disappointment coined into song more or less savage. It
seems to me that he overlooked one thing near to him that
would have lighted the darkness of his view, while looking
To Reason for balm for the wounds of existence. He
ignored his wife's love which, silly and absurd as it seems
at times, in the records she has left us, is a sweeter poem
than this potent plaint and protest he has left us. He
explored all lands but the one in which he lived unconsciously—
the Land of Tenderness. This is the pity of his
life and it is also its indignity. He was crueler than "the
Cruelty of Things." He "threw away a pearl richer than
all his tribe"—a woman's heart. But—how we argue in
a circle!—that he, with his fine vision could not see this, is
perhaps, a justification of his poem's bitterness. Even
her service went for naught, seeing it brought no return
of love from its object.
Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife's
life was one continuous act of love for him that he ignores
and her life was a failure, too, since she never succeeded
in making the world worship him as she did. Still "the
failures of some the infinities beyond the successes of
others" and all success is failure in the end. Still again,
it is better to have loved in vain than never to have loved
at all, and fine and bold and brave as was Richard Francis
Burton, his wife, with her "strong power called weakness,"
was the greater of the two. She wrote no "Kasidah" of
complaint, but suffered and was strong.
St. Louis, August 16th, 1897.