Burton - almost too much was contained here in one man

 Burton, despite the plethora of books that have been written either by or about him, still remains beyond the range of ordinary definition. Above all else he was a romantic and an Arabist; he belongs decidedly to that small perennial group of Englishmen and women who are born with something lacking in their lives: a hunger, a nostalgia, that can be sent at rest only in the deserts of the East. Whatever the reason may have been — whether it was a natural revulsion from the narrow horizons and the wet and cloudy climate of England, or from the constricting Victorian code of manners there — it was the tinkling of the camel bell that beckoned him until the day he died. And yet with all his amazing concentration and intelligence he remains an amateur of the Islamic world, a devoted dilettante, more Arab than the Arabs, but never absolutely one of them. He returns to the East again and again like a migratory bird, never at peace when he is away, yet never able to stay for long without succumbing to an overmastering restlessness. There are moments in his career when it seems that nothing in the world can appease his almost insane hunger for fulfilment and excitement. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt remembers meeting Burton once in Buenos Aires at the end of one of his debauches, when he reappeared collarless and in filthy clothes. He had, Blunt says, ‘a countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel, treacherous, with eyes like a wild beast’. It was his eyes — the ‘questing panther eyes’ — that everyone remembered. Swinburne, who knew him well, speaks of ‘the look of unspeakable horror in those eyes which gave him at times an almost unearthly appearance’. ‘He had,’ the poet adds, ‘the brow of a god and the jaw of a devil.’ Burton’s wife, who was certainly not one to criticize, describes him as being five feet eleven inches tall, and muscular, with very dark hair, a weather-beaten complexion, an enormous black moustache, large, black, flashing eyes, long lashes, and a fierce, proud, melancholy expression.

Yet beneath all this drama Burton was an intensely fastidious and scholarly man. No one else has chronicled a journey through Africa with such erudition as he has. Nothing is beyond his observation : the languages and customs of the tribes, the geography of the land, its botany, geology, and meteorology, even the statistics of the import and export trade at Zanzibar. No other explorer had such a breadth of reference, or had read so much or could write so well; none certainly was graced with such a touch of sardonic humour. His Lake Regions of Central Africa remains, possibly, not only his best book but also, in a field of writing that was remarkably good, one of the best explorer’s journals ever written.

At this time he was just thirty-six years of age, and we are not here concerned with the second half of his life, with all its tumultuous journeys, its quarrels and humiliations, its fantastic outpourings of books and translations, which in the end, with the publication of his Thousand Nights and One Night and other Eastern erotica, were to earn for him the reputation of being a sort of intellectual rake.

Yet at thirty-six he was already a famous man, though not a very popular one. After an education in France and Italy and at Oxford he had served seven years in the Indian Army, had made his famous journey to Mecca and a second hardly less perilous expedition to the forbidden city of Harar in Abyssinia, and had written his books about these adventures. Never at any point in his army career in India had he proceeded in a normal, orthodox way; his way was through the interior lines and the endless subtleties and aberrations of Eastern life. He was forever disguising himself in Eastern clothes, even dyeing his face and hands, and visiting low bazaars which would have been extremely distasteful to the ordinary British officer. In consequence he knew a great deal more about Indians and their way of life than the authorities cared to know. They were no more amused by his account of vice in Karachi than by his prediction that the Indian army was on the point of mutiny. As an officer he was irascible, impatient of discipline, and highly critical of his colleagues. Yet he was not altogether to be dismissed as just another British eccentric, for he was a swordsman of note, he was incontestably brave, and in his command of languages and dialects there had been few to equal him. It was said that he had discovered a system by which in two months he could learn a new language, and at the end of his life he was believed to speak and write no less than twenty-nine. At one stage he lived with thirty monkeys in order to study the noises they made, and he even succeeded in putting together a short monkey-vocabulary.

Almost too much was contained here in one man. Had he been of a sedentary disposition no doubt his life would have been easier, but there was something in his nature — perhaps inherited from his Irish parentage — that constantly drove him towards the most outlandish places and the most difficult adventures. One has the feeling that he lived in a state of continual conflict within himself, the intellectual warring with the man of action, the methodical scholar grating against the poet and the romantic, the fastidious hypochondriac fighting a losing battle with the libertine. But then he recoils from his own unorthodoxy and struggles back to a respectable show of things; and it was in one such recoil that, just before the opening of this new African adventure, he entered into an engagement of marriage with the doting and carefully nurtured Isabel Arundell, in England. Having become engaged to her, however, he at once abandoned her — a thing he was to do again more than once in the long married life that lay before them — and now he had involved himself in another relationship which was even more singular. That this brilliant, courageous, highly-strung adventurer should have adopted as his close companion a man who was so complete an opposite as John Hanning Speke is, surely, as ironic a phenomenon as anything Cervantes contrived with his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Not that Speke was in any way servile to Burton. Indeed, he was the very reverse, and this in the end was to be Burton’s undoing. Burton needed a disciple and instead he got a rival. Speke was thirty, some six years younger than Burton, and although a story was put about at one time that he was an Anglo-Indian with mixed blood there was no truth in it; he came from a West Country family that dated back to Saxon times. He was tall and slender and his blue eyes and fair hair gave him rather a Scandinavian appearance. Moreover he looked after himself; he ate a great deal but drank very little and never smoked. The ordinary relaxations and dissipations of a young man of his age were not for Speke; his life was in the open air, and to fit himself for that life he was prepared to go to great lengths. Once in Africa he even discarded his boots and walked barefoot so as to toughen himself. He planned ahead, he set himself definite objectives, and having once made up his mind he proceeded with great prudence and determination. In short, he measured up very well to the Victorian notion of what a young man ought to be: steady, abstemious, methodical in his habits, and respectable. But he was not entirely humourless and he had the gift of friendship. Underneath that cool and rather prosaic exterior there was a certain charm. Even Burton was prepared to admit this, though as is usual with most of Burton’s judgements of people, his summing up of Speke carried a violent sting in the tail. He wrote:

To a peculiarly quiet and modest aspect — aided by blue eyes and blond hair — to a gentleness of demeanour, and an almost childlike simplicity of manner which at once attracted attention, he united an immense fund of self-esteem, so carefully concealed, however, that none but his intimates suspected its existence.

Alan Moorehead

The White Nile