The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 1 (of 2) By His Wife, Isabel Burton

WHO IS WAITING FOR ME ON HEAVEN'S FRONTIERS.

Whilst waiting to rejoin you, I leave as a message to the World we inhabited, the record of the Life into which both our lives were fused. Would that I could write as well as I can love, and do you that justice, that honour, which you deserve! I will do my best, and then I will leave it to more brilliant pens, whose wielders will feel less--and write better.

Meet me soon--I wait the signal!

ISABEL BURTON.

FOREWORD.

"No man can write a man down except himself."

In speaking of my husband, I shall not call him "Sir Richard," or "Burton," as many wives would; nor yet by the pet name I used for him at home, which for some reason which I cannot explain was "Jemmy;" nor yet what he was generally called at home, and what his friends called him, "Dick;" but I will call him Richard in speaking of him, and "I" where he speaks on his own account, as he does in his private journals. I always thought and told him that he destroyed much of the interest of his works by hardly ever alluding to himself, and now that I mention it, people may remark it, that in writing he seldom uses the pronoun I. I have therefore drawn, not from his books, but from his private journals. It was one of his asceticisms, an act of humility, which the world passed by, and probably only thought one of his eccentricities. In his works he would generally speak of himself as the Ensign, the Traveller, the Explorer, the Consul, and so on, so that I often think that people who are not earnest readers never understood who it was that did this, thought that, or saw the other. If I make him speak plainly for himself, as he does in his private journals, but never to the public, it will give twenty times the interest in relating events; so I shall throughout let him speak for himself where I can.

In early January, 1876, Richard and I were on our way to India for a six months' trip to visit the old haunts. We divided our intended journey into two lots. We cut India down the middle, the long way on the map, from north to south, and took the western side, leaving the eastern side for a trip which was deferred, alas! for our old age and retirement. We utilized the voyage out (which occupied thirty-three days in an Austrian Lloyd, used as a Haj, or pilgrim-ship), and also the voyage back, in the part of the following pages which refers to his early life, he dictating and I writing.

In 1887, when my husband was beginning to be a real invalid, he lent some of these notes to Mr. Hitchman (who asked leave to write his biography), Richard promising not to tread upon his heels by his own Autobiography till he should be free from service in 1891. It will not, I think, do any harm to the reading public to reproduce it with more detail, because only seven hundred people got Mr. Hitchman's, who did not by any means use the whole of the material before he returned it, and what I give is the original just as Richard dictated it, and it is more needful, because it deals with a part of his life that was only known to himself, to me only by dictation; because everything that he wrote of himself is infinitely precious, and because to leave to the public a sketch of an early Richard Burton is desirable, otherwise readers would be obliged to purchase Mr. Hitchman's, as well as this work, in order to make a perfect whole.

I must take warning, however, that when Mr. Hitchman's book came out, part of the Press found this account of my husband's boyhood and youth charming, and another part of the Press said that I was too candid, and did nothing to gloss over the faults and foibles of the youthful Burtons; they doubted the accuracy of my information--I was informed that my style was too rough-and-ready, and of many others of my shortcomings. In short, I was considered rather as writing against my own husband, whilst both sides of the Press in their reviews assumed that I wrote it; this charmed Richard, and he would not let me refute. Not one word was mine--it was only dictation, and peremptory dictation when I objected to certain self-accusations. I beg leave to state that I did not write one single word; I could not, for I did not know it--and all that the family objected to, or considered exaggerated, will not be repeated here. Before entering on these pages, I must warn the reader not to expect the goody-goody boy nor yet the precocious vicious youth of 1893. It is the recital of a high-spirited lad of the old school, full of animal spirits and manly notions, a lively sense of fun and humour, reckless of the consequences of playing tricks, but without a vestige of vice in the meaner or lower forms--a lad, in short, who would be a gentleman and a man of the world in his teens, and who, from his foreign travel, had seen more of life than boys do brought up at home.

I do not begin this work--the last important work of my life--without fear and trembling. If I can perform this sacred duty--this labour of love--well,--I shall be glad indeed, but I begin it with unfeigned humility. I have never needed any one to point out to me that my husband was on a pedestal far above me, or anybody else in the world. I have known it from 1850 to 1893, from a young girl to an old widow, i.e. for forty-three years. I feel that I cannot do justice to his scientific life, that I may miss points in travel that would have been more brilliantly treated by a clever man. My only comfort is, that his travels and services are already more or less known to the public, and that other books will be written about them. But if I am so unfortunate as to disappoint the public in this way, there is one thing that I feel I am fit for, and that is to lift the veil as to the inner man. He was misunderstood and unappreciated by the world at large, during his life. No one ever thought of looking for the real man beneath the cultivated mask that generally hid all feelings and belief--but now the world is beginning to know what it has lost. The old, old, sad story.

He shall tell his own tale till 1861, the first forty years, annotated by me. Whilst dictating to me I sometimes remarked, "Oh, do you think it would be well to write this?" and the answer always was, "Yes! I do not see the use of writing a biography at all, unless it is the exact truth, a very photograph of the man or woman in question." On this principle he taught me to write quite openly in the unconventional and personal style--being the only way to make a biography interesting, which we now class as the Marie Bashkirtcheff style. As you will see, he always makes the worst of himself, and offers no excuse. As a lad he does not know what to do to show his manliness, and all that a boy should, ought, and does think brave and honourable, be it wild or not, all that he does.

What appals me is, that the task is one of such magnitude--the enormous quantity of his books and writings that I have to look through, and, out of eighty or more publications, to ascertain what has seen the light and what has not, because it is impossible to carry the work of forty-eight years in one's head; and, again, the immense quantity of subjects he has studied and written upon, some in only a fragmentary state, is wonderful. My wish would be to produce this life, speaking only of him--and afterwards to reproduce everything he has written that has not been published. I propose putting all the heavier matter, such as pamphlets, essays, letters, correspondence, and the résumé of his works--that is, _what portion shows his labours and works for the benefit of the human race_--into two after-volumes, to be called "Labours and Wisdom of Richard Burton." After his biography I shall renew his "Arabian Nights" with his Forewords, Terminal Essay, and Biography of the book in such form that it can be copyrighted--it is now protected by my copyright. His "Catullus" and "Pentamerone" are now more or less in the Press, to be followed by degrees by all his unpublished works. His hitherto published works I shall bring out as a Uniform Library, so that not a word will be lost that he ever wrote for the public. Fortunately, I have kept all his books classified as he kept them himself, with a catalogue, and have separate shelves ticketed and numbered; for example, "Sword," "Gypsy," "Pentamerone," "Camoens," and so on.

If I were sure of life, I should have wished for six months to look through and sort our papers and materials before I began this work, because I have five rooms full. Our books, about eight thousand, only got housed in March, 1892, and they are sorted--but not the papers and correspondence; but I fancy that the public would rather have a spontaneous work sooner, than wait longer. If I live I shall always go on with them. I have no leisure to think of style or of polish, or to select the best language, the best English,--no time to shine as an authoress. I must just think aloud, so as not to keep the public waiting.

From the time of my husband's becoming a real invalid--February, 1887--whilst my constant thoughts reviewed the dread To Come--the catastrophe of his death--and the subsequent suffering, I have been totally incapable, except writing his letters or attending to his business, of doing any good literary work until July, 1892, a period of five years, which was not improved by four attacks of influenza.

Richard was such a many-sided man, that he will have appeared different to every set of people who knew him. He was as a diamond with so many facets. The tender, the true, the brilliant, the scientific,--and to those who deserved it, the cynical, the hard, the severe. Loads of books will be written about him, and every one will be different; and though perhaps it is an unseemly boast, I venture to feel sure that mine will be the truest one, for I have no interest to serve, no notoriety to gain, belong to no party, have nothing to sway me, except the desire to let the world understand what it once possessed, what it has lost. With many it will mean I. With me it means HIM.

When this biography is out, the public will, theoretically, but not practically, know him as well as I can make them, and all of his friends will be able after that to put forth a work representing that particular facet of his character which he turned on to them, or which they drew from him. He was so great, so world-wide, he could turn a fresh facet and sympathy on to each world. I always think that a man is one character to his wife at his fireside corner, another man to his own family, another man to her family, a fourth to a mistress or an amourette--if he have one,--a fifth to his men friends, a sixth to his boon companions, and a seventh to his public, and so on ad infinitum; but I think the wife, if they are happy and love each other, gets the pearl out of the seven oyster-shells.

I fear that this work will be too long. I cannot help it. When I embarked on it I had no conception of the scope: it was a labour of love. I thought I could fly over it; but I have found that the more I worked, the more it grew, and that the end receded from me like the mirage in the desert. I only aim at giving a simple, true recital without comment, and at fairness on all questions of whatever sort. I am very personal, because I believe the public like it. I want to give Richard as I knew him at home. I apologize in advance to my readers if I am sometimes obliged to mention myself oftener than they and I care about; but they will understand that our lives were so interwoven, so bound together, that I should very often spoil a good story or an anecdote or a dialogue were I to leave myself out. It would be an affectation that would spoil my work.