The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, vol. II, by Isabel Burton.

What the World said about Marocco.

Pictorial World, March 13th.

"'We sincerely trust that the present Government will not fail, amidst other acts of justice and good works, to bestow some signal mark of her Majesty's favour upon Captain Richard Burton, one of the most remarkable men of the age, who has displayed an intellectual power and a bodily endurance through a series of adventures, explorations, and daring feats of travel, which have never been surpassed in variety and interest by any one man.' 'Twas thus that our contemporary, the Morning Advertiser, concluded a leader a few weeks ago on one whom it rightly called 'A Neglected Englishman.' The protest, however, has passed unnoticed by the powers that are. The gallant Captain still remains in the comparatively humble position of her Majesty's Consul at Trieste, while men whose claims upon their country cannot be compared to his are constantly receiving far more important appointments. Others wear the honours which he should have worn. Captain Speke's services in the East were duly recognized—Captain Burton's were not; yet Speke was Burton's lieutenant, and it was to the latter's guidance that the former owed not a little of his success. Burton discovered Lake Tanganyika, which he declared contained the Sources of the Nile; Burton it was who exposed the horrible massacre at Jeddah; Burton explored the Pacific coast, crossed the Andes, navigated the river San Francisco, gathering most valuable information, political, geographical, and scientific, on the way. The same intrepid traveller made that extraordinary pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Again, Burton originated the system of bayonet exercise which is now in use in the British army, and the same gentleman has given us some of the most interesting and instructive books of travel that were ever penned. And yet, forsooth, an obscure Consulate is considered a fitting reward for such services! Let Mr. Disraeli's administration look to it."

Manchester Courier, October 18th, 1889.

"The truth about Sir Richard Burton, whose versatility is only equalled by his thoroughness and solidity, is that he is far too able for the Foreign Office. That very superior department does not want able men; it wants persons of average—below rather than above—ability, who will prostrate themselves like a fire-worshipper to the rising orb of day, before 'the Office.' It hates like poison the clever Secretary or Consul who obtains praise or reputation in any other way than through Downing Street. Personally, I rather like Foreign Office clerks when they are off duty; but when they put on official 'side,' and array themselves in war-paint, especially when they commit themselves to foolscap paper with large margins, they always remind me of Thackeray's 'Ranville Ranville, Esq., of the Foreign Office, who was such an ass, and so respectable.'"

Society, October 28th, 1889.

"It has at least seemed good to those who are set in authority over us to do something for that accomplished, indefatigable, and patriotic Englishman, Sir Richard Burton. No man has in his way done more for the country than this intrepid traveller and humane man. Yet his reward hitherto has been simply that worthless title which is flung as a bone to a hungry dog, to those Court lackeys who assist in the establishment of Imperial institutes, or emerging from the digger and sheep-washing stage, amass a pile in Australia, and, returning to their native land, put a price on their loyalty or their party services. In honouring a man like Sir Richard Burton, the nation reflects honour upon itself."

Whitehall Review, July 15th.

"Sir Richard Burton, K.C.M.G., is at present in London, on one of those rare, brief visits which are the special delight of all who have the fortune to be acquainted with Al-Haji Abdullah. Friends and admirers of the famous pilgrim will hear with pleasure that Sir Richard is in excellent health, and that, with the indefatigable energy which is characteristic of this modern amalgamation of the wanderer and the scholar, of Odysseus and Aristotle, he is rapidly bringing to a conclusion his famous translation of the 'Arabian Nights,' and organizing the issue of a popular edition of the same, adapted for the lasses and lads of the Latin lyrist. Sir Richard is, however, we regret to say, one further victim of the administrative blunders of the existing—if it can now be called existing—Government. As every one knows, Sir Richard Burton is without a peer in his knowledge of the languages, manners, customs, habits, and thoughts of the great races of the East. He has been in places where but half a dozen Europeans have ever penetrated, he has perilled his life again and again in the pursuit of knowledge, he has amassed more stories of information on all things Oriental than probably a single scholar or any six scholars ever gained before, he has enriched literature with some of its most valued works on Eastern subjects. He is the very man to be employed in some of our great Eastern dependencies, but he has been kept in Trieste, where his special talents are of little avail, for long enough; and now, when he is especially desirous of obtaining the Marocco Legation, he is passed over, and the place given to an obscure official. It is simply a scandal.

"It is true that we are a stiff-necked, narrow-minded race. We require to have genius cried out from the house-tops before we would recognize it amongst us; and, as usual, such recognition comes too late, regretfully. 'You must teach us better things.'"

Evening Post, November 1st, 1888.

"Sir Richard Burton and Lady Burton were interviewed as they passed through Paris with regard to the news from Lille, announcing the death of Henry Stanley. Sir Richard said, 'I don't believe that Stanley is dead yet. It is just as I told you last August. When everybody thinks the time has come to pull out their handkerchiefs and weep over him, he will amaze us all by turning up safe and sound and smiling.'"

From the Bat.

"Burton the Bewildering.

"At long last, those who are high in office seem to have made up their minds that it was time to bestow some sign of official favour upon Captain Burton. None too soon, certainly. For more than a generation Captain Burton has been one of the most remarkable of living Englishmen. In a life that has already run pretty close to the span of the Psalmist, he has laboured with a fiery energy at work which no other living Englishmen could or would have accomplished. Thirty years ago all Europe, ay, all the civilized, and much of the uncivilized, world, was holding its breath in amazement at the record of the adventurous Briton, who had made his way, guided only by his genius and his stout heart, into the very core of Mohammedanism, into that sacred and secret city into which through all time only half a dozen men who were not the devotees of Islam were ever able to penetrate. There is something peculiarly fascinating in the story of that daring enterprise, of the lonely, gallant English gentleman converting himself with a skill more marvellous than enchantment into the Caboolee pilgrim and medicine man, and invading Meccah, inspired by the passion for strange knowledge, and supported only by his own strong will and unfailing courage. In the Oriental legend two angels always attend upon the body of a man. It is only stretching the Eastern fancy a little further to declare that Azreel, the Oriental angel of death, was Burton's closest companion during that eventful pilgrimage. 'A blunder, a hasty action, a misjudged word, and the wanderer's bones would have whitened the desert sand,' and the world would have been the poorer by one of the most brilliant books of travel ever written, by a whole library of other books, and by a whole history of deeds scarcely less daring. There is, indeed, a familiar, we may almost call it a famous story, to the effect that Burton, when within the walls of the sacred city, did perform a common action after the fashion of the Frank and not of the Moslem, that he saw a true believer watching him curiously, and that for fear of accidents he promptly 'went for' that true believer, and killed him on the spot, on the 'dead men tell no tales' principle. That anecdote has formed the text for scores of arguments. Men have wrangled fiercely over the question it suggests as to whether a traveller placed in such imminent and deadly peril was or was not justified in slaying the spectator of his mistake, on the chance that such spectator might betray him. The argument remains to afford food for contest, but the story on which it is founded has vanished into nothingness. For Captain Burton has assured the City and the world, in a note to one of the recent volumes of his 'Arabian Nights,' that the whole thing is fiction, a canard, a literary wild duck of the wildest.

"Meccah, and the record of the pilgrimage thereto, would haw been venture enough and renown enough for an ordinary lifetime. It is merely an episode in the active and literary career of Captain Burton. Into the generation that has come and gone since the Sheikh Abdullah shook the dust of Meccah from off the soles of his sacrilegious feet, where has Burton not been and what has he not done? He has gone hither and thither 'like the wind's blast, never resting, homeless'—now to the Land of Midian, now to the Gold Coast for gold, now dwelling in Damascus, now in the dim and dangerous Cameroons, now in Trieste, and now in Marocco. With all this, as if possessed by a very demon of work, he has found time to store his brain with a most marvellous multiplicity of learning, and to write a very Alexandrian library of books on all manner of strange and widely differing subjects. Every one of his travels has been made the theme for a long, but never too long, record. He has translated the lengthy 'Lusiads' of Camoens with the same lightness of heart with which most men would sit down to scratch off a leading article. He has given the world that monument of fascinating knowledge on a fascinating subject, 'The Book of the Sword,' to which the erudition and research of a long lifetime might well appear to have been devoted. He has imported grotesque devil tales from Hindostan. He has written under the thin disguise of a Persian bard—a disguise as thin as that of Bodensted's 'Mirza Shaffy'—a wonderful poem which speculates upon the life of man in something of the spirit of Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam.' He has translated, for the benefit of the curious and initiated few, a Hindoo work on 'Martial Relationships,' which is one of the eccentricities of literature. Now, in what would be called, were he any one else but Richard Burton, his old age, he is bringing out his great translation of the 'Arabian Nights,' one of the most valuable contributions that have ever been made to the literature of Oriental investigation.

"Was there ever a more bewildering man than this modern Admirable Crichton, who can speak more languages than Mezzofanti—it is a treat to hear him troll out some Persian love-ditty or Arabic desert-song in their guttural originals—who has been everywhere, who can fight with every weapon, who is something of a doctor, and something of a wizard, and something of a philosopher. The English Government, in whose service he has passed his life, has scarcely made the best use of him. He knows more about Eastern countries and Eastern peoples, and can speak more Eastern languages than probably any living man, and therefore a wise Administration planted him, during many recent years of Eastern complication, in which he might have rendered splendid service to the State, in an Italo-Austrian town, where the mouse-coloured cattle recall the Campagna, and neighbouring Miramar suggests the luckless lord of Mexico, and where Burton's special knowledge was well-nigh of no avail. He is happier now beneath the blue Marocco skies. There, with the white domes and the spreading palms of the East ever in his eyes, he can peacefully finish what is, perhaps, the greatest labour of his life—his version of those marvellous tales which have delighted the Orient for cycles, and which have profoundly influenced European thought and literature for nearly two centuries."

"A 'Diet' for Ireland.

"Tangier, Marocco, January 10th, 1886.

"Every province of Austro-Hungary (the Dual Empire which should and will be tripled to Austro-Hungaro-Slavonian) enjoys the greatest advisable amount of 'Home Rule' by means of its own Landstag or Diet. The little volumes, each in the local dialect, containing the rules and regulations for legislative procedure are broadcast over the country; and I would especially recommend those which concern the Diet of Istria and—a thing apart—the Diet of Trieste City to the many who are now waxing rabid with alarm at the idea of an Irish Parliament in the old house on College Green.

"In 1883 I undertook a detailed study of Diets in general, but first sickness and then a decidedly more interesting work intervened. Englishmen abroad will find such a task the reverse of unprofitable. A certain school of politicians, which aims mainly at destroying whatever is, and to whom an aristocrat Empire is a red rag to a rageous bull, have ignored the fact, still true as when the saying was first said, that if Austria did not exist she would have to be invented. Even they may be interested to learn that the tie by which she connects such a host of various nationalities—differing in speech, religion, manners, customs, and interests—is the local Diet, which satisfies the aspirations of every reasonable man to 'Home Rule.'

"The local Diet (Landstag) offers the immense advantage of submitting to the discussion of experts, provincial questions which, in the shape of Bills sent up to the much overworked Imperial Parliament (Reichstag), would be disposed of by a 'Massacre of the Innocents.' Otherwise the great assembly in Vienna, as in London, would be placed in a false position, which, 'like a wrong focus in photography, distorts every object.'

"The local Diet encourages decentralization; the growing evil of Europe being that of crowded Cities and over-populated Capitals, where wealth may prosper but where man decidedly decays; in fact, becomes non-viable. Hence Mandarin Tseng is reported to have said that the strength has gone out of England; and it surely will go when we have a greater majority of town population.

"The local Diet acts as a distributor to wealth; and we all know that questions of self-government rest mainly on the solid base of £ s. d. When absentee-landlords carry their money to, and never fail to spend the season in, the Metropolis, reserving their economy for home residence, local industries cannot but suffer. The provincial Diet meets, we will say, two months before the Imperial Parliament; and creates a kind of sub-season in the provincial Capital, which, like Dublin and Edinburgh, never forgets that she was once a real Capital. The deputies take their families with them, and part of the revenue and income drawn from the land is returned to the land.

"As with us, dire consequences were predicted for Magyar Home Rule in Pesth, and for Czech Home Rule in Prague, which would soon swamp the German element and eat up the landlords. Now there is a notable social resemblance between the Magyar and the Irish Kelt; nor will any one pretend that the animosity in the sister island against foreign rule is hotter in 1886 than was that of the Magyar against Austria in 1848-50. Yet the latter learned only moderation from Home Rule, and he is now a loyal subject. If, however, any especial defence for the landlord-class be temporarily necessary, this can be done by counting acres instead of noses, till increased national prosperity, and a sense of having had justice dealt to the people, shall allay the ill feeling.

"The local Diet has at times proved troublesome by intermeddling with Imperial questions; for instance in Croatia, which has produced a Slavonian Parnell—men both to be honoured for the energy and persistency with which they have claimed liberty for their fellow-countrymen. But these troubles are good in one point; far better an outburst in open air than in confinement, where the strength of the explosion is immensely increased. In normal times the limits of local authority are studiously kept, as they are exactly laid down, and every member knows his competency or incompetency to lay a measure before the House. A law officer of the Crown, appointed ad hoc, attends every meeting of the local Diet, and can veto debate upon questions beyond its legislative sphere.

"I believe that the study of these little volumes, treating upon the local Diets of Austria, will suggest to England not only a Parliament in Dublin, but a similar assembly in Edinburgh and in Carnarvon; furthermore, that if they prove useful and important, as they promise to do, England will presently be distributed into circuits or districts, each provided with its own Diet.

"Richard F Burton."

Pall Mall Gazette, January 18th, 1886.

"Sir Richard Burton, that extraordinary scholar, who touches no subject that he does not illuminate, has written a letter on Home Rule too interesting to be lost to sight. His object is to point out that a solution of the Irish question is possibly to be found in the way each province of Austro-Hungary enjoys the greatest advisable amount of Home Rule by means of its own Landstag or Diet. To those 'who are now waxing rabid with alarm at the idea of an Irish Parliament in the old house on College Green,' he especially prescribes a study of the Diet of Austria and the Diet of Trieste. Sir Richard Burton enumerates three great advantages of the Diet system as it is there seen. First, provincial questions are submitted to the discussion of experts in the Landstag, whereas if they were simply poured into the overworked Reichstag, they would be slaughtered almost without a hearing. Second, the local Diet encourages decentralization, and the most evil effects of it, the tendency of the population to concentrate itself in the towns, and there decay. Third, the local Diet acts as a distributor of wealth; a kind of sub-season is created in the provincial capital, the deputies take their families there, and a proper part of the revenue from the land returns to it again. Sir Richard Burton's scheme is well worthy of further study, and this, he believes, will suggest a Parliament, not only in Dublin, but also in Edinburgh and in Carnarvon."

"A Diet for Ireland.

"To the Editor of the Morning Post.

"Sir,—Would you kindly allow me space for a few lines by way of postscript to my note 'A Diet for Ireland,' printed in the Academy of January 16? Since that time 'a Diet' with a witness has been proposed, and hapless Hibernia has been offered the proud position of 'our latest colony.' But, if the 'Speak-house' in College Green be refused, what then? Will England have the pluck to fight for the integrity of her Empire, as did our Yankee cousins a quarter of a century ago? Or is she so blind, as not to see that civil war is threatened, that even civil war is better than disruption, ignominy, ruin, and that her success would be easy, certain, and decisive? Though no longer in the première jeunesse, I would willingly shoulder a musket in such a cause, and so, doubtless, would many myriads of my fellow-countrymen.

"Yours, etc.,

"Richard F Burton.

"April 26, 1886."

Another Postscript.

"But," he afterwards wrote, "I should have put a rider on to the first letter, because it only touches the political, not the religious state of the question. Austrians and Hungarians are both more or less Catholic, whilst England and Ireland are bitter Protestant and bitter Catholic. It becomes no longer a political, but a religious question. There are plenty of good, honest, loyal Irish Catholics in Ireland, as well as good, loyal Protestants in the North of it. The loyalty of the English Catholic is well known; the mischief lies with the Fenian Priest, who prefers stepping into the political arena to confining himself to the more humble and obscure calling to which he is vowed, that of saying Mass, and administering the Sacraments to his fold. Woe be to him! And if the Pope is properly informed, it would take a wiser head than mine to know, why he does not excommunicate them. No honestly minded Catholic wants to see temporal power put into the hands of these Fenians, which might possibly lead back to the Inquisition. When they clamour for Home Rule, it is not Home Rule that they want, it is the education of their children. They say, 'We want to bring up our children as good Christians and good loyalists, but we do not want them brought up for us as Materialists and Socialists." In this I think they are right, but the education should be compulsory; and if they had the spirit of a louse, or any esprit de corps, and a civil tongue with decent behaviour, they would get it. For my own part, I see no hope of a rightful sentiment until they get a Man at the helm of the British Government. When I say a man, I understand somebody who does not care one fig for his place, and when he does right, it is for the Nation to take him or leave him as they like, and if there was such a man, they would accept despotism from his hands. If it were me, I should have my agents in Ireland, quietly separating the goats from the sheep. I should have my Men-of-War lying off in different places. In one single night the goats would be seized, priest or layman, and they would be conveyed far, far away to my Monastic jail, my Siberia, where they would be well treated, well taken care of, and allowed their Mass and their Sacraments; but the only ships that touched there would be provision ships, and it would be a 'lifer,' without any communication, by letter or otherwise, with the outer world; and any one aiding or abetting would be hung at the yardarm. Ireland would be quiet in a year; peace, happiness, and union restored.