Chapter I

One hundred years ago, on March 19th, 1821, Sir Richard Burton was born; he died at Trieste on October 19th, 1890, in his seventieth year. He was superstitious; the fact that he was born and that he died on the nineteenth has its significance. On the night when he expired, as his wife was saying prayers to him, a dog began that dreadful howl which the superstitious say denotes a death. It was an evil omen; I have heard long after midnight dogs howl in the streets of Constantinople; their howling is only broken by the tapping of the bekjé's iron staff; it sounds like loud wind or water far off, waning and waxing, and at times, as it comes across the water from Stamboul, it is like a sound of strings, plucked and scraped savagely by an orchestra of stringed instruments.

In every age there have been I know not how many neglected men of genius, undiscovered, misunderstood, mocked at in the fashion Jesus Christ was mocked by the Jews, scorned as Dante was scorned when he was exiled from Florence, called a madman as Blake used to be called, censured as Swinburne was in 1866, for being "an unclean fiery imp of the pit" and "the libidinous Laureate of a pack of satyrs;" so the greatest as the least--the greatest whose names are always remembered and the least whose names are invariably forgotten--have endured the same prejudices; have been lapidated by the same stones; such stones as Burton refers to when he writes in Mecca:

On the great festival day we stoned the Devil, each man with seven stones washed in seven waters, and we said, while throwing the stones, "In the name of Allah--and Allah is Almighty--I do this in hatred of the Devil, and to his shame."

Burton was a great man, a great traveler and adventurer, who practically led to the discovery of the sources of the Nile; a wonderful linguist, he was acquainted with twenty-nine languages: he was a man of genius; only, the fact is, he is not a great writer. Continually thwarted by the English Government, he was debarred from some of the most famous expeditions by the folly of his inferiors, who ignorantly supposed they were his superiors; and, as Sir H. H. Johnston says in some of his notes, not only was Burton treated unjustly, but his famous pilgrimage to Mecca won him no explicit recognition from the Indian Government; his great discoveries in Africa, Brazil, Syria and Trieste were never appreciated; and, worst of all, he was refused the post of British Minister in Morocco; it was persistently denied him. He adds: "Had he gone there we might long since have known--what we do not know--the realities of Morocco."

Still, when Burton went to India, I do not imagine he was likely to suffer from any hostility on the part of the natives nor of the rulers. Lord Clive, who, in Browning's words, "gave England India," which was the result of his incredible victory in 1751 over the Nabob's army of 60,000 men, was never literally "loved" by the races of India; no more than Sir Warren Hastings. Still, Clive had genius, which he showed in the face of a bully he caught cheating at cards and in his mere shout at him: "You did cheat, go to Hell!" Impeached for the splendid service he had done in India he was acquitted in 1773; next year, having taken to opium, his own hand dealt himself his own doom. So he revenged himself on his country's ingratitude. So did Burton revenge himself--not in deeds, but in words, words, if I may say so, that are stupendous. "I struggled for forty-seven years, I distinguished myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a 'Thank you,' nor a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age, and I immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money."

Burton first met Swinburne in 1861 at Lord Houghton's house, who, having given him _The Queen Mother_, said: "I bring you this book because the author is coming here this evening, so that you may not quote him as an absurdity to himself." In the summer of 1865 Swinburne saw a great deal of Burton. These two men, externally so dissimilar, had taken (as Swinburne said to me) a curious fancy, an absolute fascination, for each other. Virile and a mysterious adventurer, Burton was Swinburne's senior by sixteen years; one of those things that linked them together was certainly their passionate love of literature. Burton had also--which Swinburne might perhaps have envied--an almost unsurpassable gift for translation, which he shows in his wonderful version of _The Arabian Nights._ He used to say:

I have not only preserved the spirit of the original, but the _mécanique._ I don't care a button about being prosecuted, and if the matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that before they condemn me, they must cut half of _them_ out, and not allow them to be circulated to the public.

In his Foreword to the first volume of his Translation, dated Wanderers' Club, August 15th, 1885, he says:

This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of official banishment to the luxurious and deadly deserts of Western Africa, it proved truly a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency. The Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection, Arabia. In what is obscure in the original there are traces of Petronius Arbiter and of Rabelais; only, subtle corruption and covert licentiousness are wholly absent.

Therefore, in order to show the wonderful quality of his translation, I have chosen certain of his sentences, which literally bring back to me all that I have felt of the heat, the odor and the fascination of the East.

So I donned my mantilla, and, taking with me the old woman and the slave-girl, I went to the Khan of the merchants. There I knocked at the door and out came two white slave-girls, both young, high-bosomed virgins, as they were Moons. They were melting a perfume whose like I had never before smelt; and so sharp and subtle was the odor that it made my senses drunken as with strong wine. I saw there also two great censers each big as a mazzar bowl, flaming with aloes, nard, perfumes, ambergris and honied scents; and the place was full of their fragrance.

The next quotation is from the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinn:

He loosened the lid from the jar, he shook the vase to pour out whatever might be inside. He found nothing in it; whereat he marvelled with an exceeding marvel. But presently there came forth from the jar a smoke which spread heavenwards into ether (whereat again he marvelled with mighty marvel) and which trailed along earth's surface till presently, having reached its full height, the thick vapors condensed, and became an Ifrit, huge of bulk, whose crest touched the clouds when his feet were on the ground.

I have before me Smithers' privately printed edition (1894) of _The Carmina of Valerius Catullus now first completely Englished into Verse and Prose, the Metrical Part by Capt. Sir Richard Burton, and the Prose Portion by Leonard C. Smithe._ Burton is right in saying that "the translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone, manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall justify the accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted. He must produce an honest and faithful copy, adding nought to the sense or abating aught of its _cachet._" He ends his Foreword: "As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and of the same date."

Certainly Burton leaves out nothing of the nakedness that startles one in the verse of Catullus: a nakedness that is as honest as daylight and as shameless as night. When the text is obscene his translation retains its obscenity; which, on the whole, is rare: for the genius of Catullus is elemental, primitive, nervous, passionate, decadent in the modern sense and in the modern sense perverse. In his rhymed version of the Attis Burton has made a prodigious attempt to achieve the impossible. Not being a poet, he was naturally unable to follow the rhythm--the Galliambic metre, in which Catullus obtains variety of rhythm; for, as Robinson Ellis says:

It remains unique as a wonderful expression of abnormal feeling in a quasi-abnormal meter. Quasi-abnormal, however, only: for no poem of Catullus follows stricter laws, or succeeds in conveying the idea of a wild freedom under a more carefully masked regularity.

As one must inevitably compare two translations of the same original, I have to point out that Burton's rendering is, both metrically and technically, inaccurate; whereas, in another rendering, the translator has at least preserved the exact metre, the exact scansion, and the double endings at the end of every line; not, of course, in this case, employing the double rhymes Swinburne used in his translation from Aristophanes. These are Burton's first lines:--

O'er high deep seas in speedy ship his voyage Atys sped Until he trod the Phrygian grove with hurried, eager tread, And as the gloomy tree-shorn stead, the she-God's home he sought, There sorely stung with fiery ire and madman's raging thought, Share he with sharpened flint the freight wherewith his frame was fraught.

These are the first lines of the other version:--

Over ocean Attis sailing in a swift ship charioted When he reached the Phrygian forests, and with rash foot violently Trod the dark and shadowy regions of the goddess, wood-garlanded, And with ravening madness ravished, and his reason abandoning him, Seized a pointed flint and sundered from his flesh his virility.