Sir Richard Francis Burton on a good day
Not all Renaissance men lived in the Renaissance. In fact I am beginning to believe that compared with nineteenth-century London, fifteenth-century Florence looks pretty monochrome. The common belief seems to be that most eminent Victorians, including the four treated in Lytton Strachey’s classic book of that title, were uptight conformists. It’s hard to know where that idea came from—not from Strachey, certainly. All four were Renaissance men, including the one who was a woman, Florence Nightingale. (“Renaissance man” is a state of mind, not a gender identity.) For the past few weeks I have been intermittently caught up with a sensational example of the Victorian Renaissance man: Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890).*
I was vaguely aware of this man’s name at least—probably through its association with an early translation of the tales of the Arabian Nights—but my real introduction to his genius grew out of an association with a former student. I suspect that the principal pleasures of most teachers’ lives derive from informal experiences, and outside the classroom.
Though not exactly an established custom, it is not uncommon for graduate students, upon completing their dissertations, to present their professors with a parting gift. This often may be simply a bound copy of the dissertation--not that there is anything simple about writing a dissertation--but sometimes it is some other kind of gift. About fifteen years ago, not long before my retirement, I received from a departing graduate student a gift that I have particularly treasured. In my own researches I was at that time beginning serious work on the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões and even beginning to contemplate writing a book about him. This poet is best known for his epic poem Os Lusiadas, first published in 1572, which deals with the voyages of Vasco da Gama between Portugal and India in 1497-99. The poem’s name derives from the old Latin word for Portugal. My student—whom I shall not name only because I have lost track of him and been unable to secure his permission to publicize his gift—presented me with the two-volume edition of Richard Burton’s Camoens: His Life and His Lusiads: A Commentary, (2 vols, London: Quaritch, 1881). This is a work of enormous if often eccentric erudition written by a man who must have known, as well as any other mariner of his day, the maritime route that Vasco da Gama had taken four hundred years earlier, including the populations of East Africa and Goa and the Malabar Coast of India. Working on Camões was the man’s hobby for twenty years; yet so broad and varied were his interests and accomplishments, his Portuguese studies are barely mentioned.
Burton, though a considerable amateur scholar, had little regard for institutional academia. He was an Oxford drop-out, with Oxford doing the dropping. But he was an amazing linguist, having about thirty tongues on his palette, and a voracious reader. He was not a scholar, but an adventurer with scholarly interests. His principal enthusiasms were sex, travel, exploration, military derring-do, sex, cartography, comparative religions, sex, horsemanship, espionage, and poetry. His essays in Portuguese philology were merely a twenty-year hobby. His checkered career as a British army office (he was Captain Burton, eventually Captain Sir Richard) offered him opportunities for frankly self-indulgent adventure. He was married to a super-wife, Isabel Arundell (Lady Isabel), who not only put up with and enabled him, but edited and defended his work, and wrote his biography. She has her own biographies, and merits a blog essay of her own.
Burton’s most famous exploit came early (1853): his successful pilgrimage to Mecca in the disguise of an Afghan Muslim. This potentially fatal deception was at the very least culturally insensitive, but is an extraordinary testimony to his courage and his linguistic and thespian skills. Perhaps, dangerously, it may have encouraged him to think he could get by with anything.
I have insufficient room to do justice to Burton’s other travels. He did major exploratory work in both East and West Africa. He is credited with being the first white man to lay his eyes on Lake Tanganyika—“first white man” being an important category for the Imperial Book of World Records. Often he was ill, injured, or wounded, several times on the verge of death, especially in a particularly disastrous episode at Berbera on the Somalian coast. The Crimean War (1855-56) gave him the false hope of much desired military glory. The highly effective officers of the Indian Army in which he served seemed like a ragtag Wild Bunch to the spit-and-polished bluebloods so incompetently led by the Crimean Supreme Commander, Lord Ragland, infamous for ordering the charge of the Light Brigade. Burton barely got a look in from him.
I mentioned sex as among Burton’s interests only three times, as I feel constrained by self-imposed word limits for my essays. One of his fantasies had to do with nuns. This one had a long literary run beginning at least as early as Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, but it really took off in 1669 with the anonymous publication(in French) by the Comte de Guilleragues of his steaming if pretended Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Contemporary readers pretended they thought the letters were genuine, and until fairly recently too many modern scholars really thought they were. If I ever get sufficiently desperate, I could perhaps write an essay on this subject too. I have to believe Burton’s interest was entirely academic, as he was bolstered by so many moralities. He was married to a serious Roman Catholic, and he himself was a devout Muslim-Buddhist-Confucian-Catholic-atheist Anglican. In his anthropological ventures, he often sought to measure the penises of the males of the tribes he investigated. One of those times one might wish to be a fly on the wall of the hut. He translated the Kama Sutra and several other Oriental sex guides that offered his contemporaries in England wonderful opportunities to be shocked, titillated, and officially disapproving of the translator/scholar. He had a strange episode of recuperation in America, on the eve of our Civil War, checking out the Mormons on the Great Salt Lake. Several of his greater adventures were subsequent to his late marriage in 1861 at age forty. “The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late,” says Mencken. The formidable Isabel was often with him in his important years in Brazil (1864-60) and later in Damascus, India, in his English homecoming, and in Trieste.
Burton spent his final years trying to finish several writing projects and to organize many earlier ones, though much would be left to his feisty widow. Altogether he published more than thirty books, several of them multi-volume like the Arabian Nights, several doorstoppers. The biographer, Farwell is a marvelous writer himself. On October 20, 1890, Burton was seriously ill in his lodgings in Trieste. “And there came to him then the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies.”
and a really bad day
*My principal source is Byron Farwell: Burton, A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Longmans, Green, 1963). I recommend the Penguin edition, in many printings and cheap on the second-hand market.
Elizabeth II Regina, died 8 September 2022. May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.