The Leicester Post, a little while ago, wrote:—
"I don't think that Lady Burton's coming book will contain any explanation of her action in destroying the manuscript which Sir Richard endeavoured to complete on his death-bed. It is now said, with some show of authority, that the work contained but one chapter, which in a virginibus puerisque light, might have given offence; if this were so, it seems appalling that the whole work should have been consigned to the flames. Lady Burton cannot know of this report, or she would hasten to relieve the literary minds, whose plaint is bitter because anything has perished which came from the translator of the 'Arabian Nights.'"
Now, it is absurd to suppose that Richard tried to complete a manuscript on a death-bed of three hours. As to authority, there were only three people who ever read that manuscript—Richard who wrote it, the copyist who copied it, and myself. I can relieve the literary minds at once. The first two chapters were a raw translation of part of the works of "Numa Numantius," without any annotations at all, or comments of any kind on Richard's part, and twenty chapters translation of Shaykh el Nafzáwih from Arabic. In fact, it was all translation, excepting the annotations on the Arabic work. I asked the copyist, who is a woman, "what she would have done with it," and she said, "I think I should most likely have been tempted with the money, but if I cared for my husband as much as you did, and if he was dead, I hope I might have burned it." I asked her "upon what grounds she would have burnt it," and she said, "Because the Press would assuredly have criticized it. If he were alive he could answer for himself, and explain—he being dead, you could not; and we all know what men-friends are, and how many would have put themselves in the slightest difficulty to take his part. Sir Richard had the courage of his opinions, but his friends have not, and would only come forward if it could aggrandize their own names a little bit. You have done very well." It makes me sick to hear all this anxiety of the Press and the literary world, lest they should miss a word he ever wrote. When he came back in 1882, after being sent to look after Palmer, he had a good deal of information to give, and he could not get a magazine or paper to take his most valuable article till it was quite stale. We used to boil over with rage when his books or articles were rejected. Only the other day I sent a most valuable letter of his, written in 1886, to a Liberal and a Conservative paper, and neither of them would take it. And now, because a few chapters, which were of no particular value to the world, have been burnt, the whole country's literary minds are "full of bitter plaint because anything has perished which came from the translator of the 'Arabian Nights.'" Such are the waves and whims of such people. They are (privately of course), selling down at Soho a "Scented Garden," translated by the bookseller himself, from a miserable little French copy, which they pretend is "Sir Richard Burton's Scented Garden," gulling people who ought to know better—but not scholars—and who deserve to lose their money, paying for trash that my husband never saw. I hope the seller charges them enormous sums, and I hope that some of the purchasers will have the common sense to bring an action against him for obtaining money under false pretences.
I have done no evil and am unharmed. I am not afraid of slander which I have not deserved; it will die out and I shall live.
Those who say I have failed in my trust, wish it to be so, mean that it shall be so, if it depends upon them. Slander is very cruel; it tracks its victims like a bloodhound, but it generally crushes its own begetter.
"The Second Bone of Contention is Religion.
"No, no; it is not there the sorrow lies,
Not in the lack of hands that could applaud,
But in the lack of hearts that, answering, rise
As loadstones to the magnet, the replies
Electric of a sympathy which cries:
'The truth is with thee!'"
——Maarten Maartens."Heredity is a strong thing, and cannot always be shaken off. It breeds alike forms of body, forms of soul, disease to this, good teeth or scanty hair to that, or colour, or talents, or creed. My Burtons mostly have Catholic-phobia; they hate it without knowing what it is, because their ancestors seceded from it at the time of the Reformation; but one of the most anti-Catholic of them, at the age of seventeen, wrote me more than one beautiful letter imploring me to take her, and get her baptised and received into the Catholic Church. I have them amongst my treasures now; but I did not do so, because it would have been an act of treachery to her mother, and dishonourable to take advantage of a girl, and she has since been very grateful for it. Another Burton, whilst labouring from the effects of an Indian sunstroke, used always to turn his face alternately towards Mecca (evidently thinking of my husband), and then turn the other way and say his rosary: something Catholic having come into his unbiased, unconscious brain. Richard, when he was out in India, had no one to keep him in order. As soon as he was well emancipated and untrammelled, he answered the call of his Bourbon blood, and transferred himself to the Catholic Church, and this is the way he describes it to the public—he always spoke lightly of the things he felt the most: 'What added not a little to the general astonishment was, that I left off "sitting under" the garrison chaplain, and betook myself to the Catholic chapel of the chocolate-coloured Goanese priest who adhibited spiritual consolation to the buttrels, butlers, and head servants, and other servants of the camp.' He frequently spoke in after writings of 'the Portuguese priest who had charge of his soul,' who, when Richard committed some escapade, 'was like a hen who had hatched a duckling.' These writings were lent by Richard to Mr. Hitchman, with other notes, in 1887, but he did not understand the importance of it, nor what it pointed to, and left it amongst the parts he did not use.[3] When I asked Richard how it was that it escaped public comment, he said, 'Because, when I mention that I went to the chocolate-coloured priest of the Goanese Church, the English only think it is some black tribe, where I have been probably tarred and feathered, whilst I was very much in earnest; but since it is no use annoying my people, and as it has escaped Mr. Hitchman, and as it only concerns you and me, and is no business of any outsider, I do not wish you to say anything about it till my death-bed, or some time after my death, and that only if you are put in any difficulty.' Cardinal Wiseman knew it, for he passed Richard through all the missions in wild places all over the world as a Catholic officer, and was willing to patronize my marriage. But Richard never let me know anything about it until after we were married, and I have kept it all my life a secret. I have always steadily said that 'I did not know,' because I never meant to tell it to any one but those who had a right to ask, as I did not see how it concerned the public.
"The public have allowed me to think it unworthy of having anything but public events related to it by the result of my stupid confidence about the burnt manuscript; one almost begrudges it the truth. Look at Grant Allen, a strong and clever man, who stated a while ago in the Athenæum in a paragraph, 'The worm will turn,' that he had been asked to write something personal, that he threw his whole soul and religion into a book, and that when he gave it to his publisher he besought him to destroy it, or 'no one would ever read one of his books again.' It is the same with me; but I have one advantage; I want nothing of the public except what it accords to me freely and out of its own courteous sympathy, and I do want it to understand its departed hero—therefore I sacrifice myself for the public good.
"I think that the World, if a man speaks its own shibboleth, if he wears its last new-fashioned coat in the Park, has no right to complain if he does not show it the colour of the singlet that he wears next to his skin, or the talisman that he wears round his neck, which his wife happens to see, because she helps him to dress and undress.
"Richard was so beautifully reserved, such a past master in concealing his real thoughts and feelings, whilst talking most freely, so as never to hurt his surroundings by letting them imagine that he did not trust them with everything. I used to tell him that he was like the 'Man with the Iron Mask.' He did not see what right any one had to know anything, except what he just absolutely chose them to know.
"I feel with Walt Whitman:—
'I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.'"I am by no means going to tell you that his Catholicity was a life-long, fixed, and steady thing, like mine. It was not. He had long and wild fits of Eastern Mysticism, but not the Agnosticism that I have seen in England since my widowhood. It was the mysticism of the East—Sufiism. Periodically he had equal Catholic fits, and practised it, hiding it sometimes even from me, though I knew it. In every place we lived in, except Trieste, he had a priest from whom he took lessons, but even this stopped, after he had resident doctors and could not go out by himself. From Trieste he used formerly to go to Gorizia, two hours express inland, and other towns. He was worse than ever in talk the three last years, but the things that he said were so innocent and so witty that I was often compelled to laugh or to go away and laugh. Still, as I saw his health declining I grew frightfully anxious, nay agonized, and in 1888, two years before he died, I made a general appeal for prayers in our Church, which he saw and kept a copy of in a drawer."