Sir Richard Burton

by

the Reverend P.D. Carey [Aleister Crowley]

For voice is sound, and dies with air; light is co-excellent with God;

As Hate’s a poison for delight, so love’s a physic for the spleen.

And El Qahar is Truth, and nought but Allah stuffs his gaberdine,

And Allah windeth he about with tarband gemmed of gold and green.

Bagh-i-Muattar

Sir Richard Francis Burton once observed that he had been endowed with all the talents except one—that of failure—utilizing the others! He erred; his failure in life—by flunkey standards—was due to his possession of positive qualities, principally independence and the sense of humour. One of our greatest men of letters now living wanted, as a boy, to join the Navy. "No", said his father very seriously "success depends on servility, subtlety, and silence: you wouldn't, you aren't, and you couldn't." If Burton had been a lesser man, he might have been a greater soldier; if he had been a lesser artist, he might have been a greater name in art. The present generation does not understand how colossal is his figure; even among the Victorian giants he stands head and shoulders above all but a very few indeed; yet the present generation owes its very existence to him, in a very special sense; and the best thing it can do is to study him.

His achievement is almost incredible, he demands and deserves a full year's intimate worship; every truly ambitious young man should devote at least that period to this transcendent Titan.

Sir Richard spoke practically all the languages of Europe, Asia, and Africa with fluency, and was a profound scholar in most of the important literary dialects.

He was by far the greatest, because the most original, of the explorers of his time. He was an ethnologist and anthropologist of vast experience.

He was one of the first swordsmen in Europe. He published about one hundred books, all of permanent value because they dealt with facts and direct experience. His translation of the Arabian Nights, of Calderon, of Catallus, of the Priapeia, the Ananga-Ranga, the Scented Garden, etc., etc., are classics. He has given the only impartial account of the [illegible] Religion. His books of travel are of unique value, because of his sympathetic knowledge of the races and religions which he studied, his power of making comparative judgments, and his complete freedom from bias and suggestion.

He made practical experiments with the secret doctrines of Asiatic mystics; and, obtaining their results, attained the impersonal illumination which they confer, thus acquiring the point of view which is the key to the fundamental treasures of psychology. He was a philosophical poet of unequalled eminence.

With these two latter facts this present essay is more immediately concerned; the first five are however important to our purpose as emphasizing the value of the others. They guarantee the mind which they illustrate; for it is too often the case that the transcendentalist, the thinker, and the rimer speak ex cathreda of that which they know not; their conclusions are vitiated by ignorance, or unbalanced by prejudice.

Literary criticism in England still lingers for the most part in the formal gardens, with their stucco statuary and [illegible] Greek temples, of the Eighteenth Century, when Hume wrote of the 'unhappy barbarism' of Shakespeare. It looks for 'polish', as if the painters and varnishers of automobiles were the highest artists. It forgets Browning's retort: "Sweet for the future, story for the nonce" when "The poets pour us wine", though it has incomprehensibly acquiesced in Browning himself, one can only suppose on account of his respectability. The revolt against this ancestor-worship-like devotion to Pope, Addison, Tennyson, and other so-called stylists has been anarchical; it has led to the idolatry (or rather coprophilia) of mere brutal assassins of the language like James Joyce, the latrine that boiled over, there has been no Middle Way whereon one might erect temples to the really strong writers, the men who were too virile to smoothe down their Memorials—such as Jacob erected at Beth-El—with rottenstone and oil, or to hang them with festoons of pink ribbon. Yet these are the only men who count. Shelley's mastery of technique is but a secondary glory. The formal perfection of Keats would have destroyed a lesser man; he was already aware of his danger, and on his guard against [illegible], when he began Hyperion. Tennyson was altogether lost to poetry in the labyrinths of polite phrasing. Swinburne died of perfection; he was only accepted when his genius had been smothered under the perfumed pillows of classicism.

'So the vigour of the "Father of Mustachios" was found to be incompatible with curates, croquet, culture and the Prince Consort. Real ladies do not like shooting [illegible] in their boudoirs; and their literary lions distrusted a man who had brought home so many lion-skins from Africa; he might only to easily discover what animals they were that wore such gear at garden parties.

Thus it came to pass that even to-day the derivative and decorative art of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam survives Ruskinian Christianity, and Morris wall-paper, and [illegible]'s Jesus to the detriment of the supremely original and comprehensive graft of Oriental philosophy upon the tree of Occidental Science which flowers so marvellously in the Kasidah of Burton.

The Revolutionary Renaissance died when Shelley was murdered; the reaction swept everything before it. Bourbonism broke out like a boil, and impacted European thought for decades. The early promise of Tennyson petered out into priggish platitudes, while that of Browning ended in such performance as would earn the application of the post-climber, the portly, and the self-important. One cultivated the 'drawing-room of the country vicarage, the rooms in college of ambisexual adolescence, and the servants' hall of flatulent [illegible]; the other arrived at the pulpits of compromising clerics and the high Fable of intellectual Pharisees. When the revolt came at last, it was imported from Paris; the pre-Raphaelites were not autoclithorous; they derived their inspiration from the Greece of Euripides, the Italy of Michelangelo, and the France of Baudelaire. The true revolutionaries were men of the most solid English stock, physically and intellectually. Their achievement is not [illegible], but it is unique and authentic. They are the most truly original thinkers of the century; for they are not dependent upon artistic ancestry. Their names are James Thomson, Richard Francis Austin, and Samuel Butler. It would be vain to explore history for a phenomenon parallel to that of the appearance of these three men. Each is utterly independent of the other two. Each possesses the same fundamental mental authority; they are agreed entirely upon the main principles of philosophy; yet Thomson found his light in Science and Charles Bradlaugh, Butler in original meditation upon classical reading, and Burton in first-hand investigation of living types of thought.

It is indeed strange that all three, despite the diversity of their social, intellectual and moral origins, should have arrived independently at the same goal of atheistic mysticism, antinomian ethics, and scientific scepticism. More strange that these three, and these three only—unless we include Huxley in this class; to do so would fortify the argument—should have attained such colossal supremacy in literature. Criticism, or rather absence-of-criticism, in England being what it is, one dare not expect that even the present demonstration of the case will affect public opinion to any appreciable extent; one must content oneself by awaiting the concurrence of the King of the Critics; for whether or no the pen be mightier than the sword, there can be no doubt that the scythe is mightier than the pen. the true claim of Swinburne to fame is that he said more sublimely than any other man, in Hertha, the Choruses of Atalanta, the Hymn to Prosephine, and Anactoria, what these three men were saying, each in his eager violent voice, vivid and virile, it may yet prove more permanently than he, for the very reason that their style is less serene and splendid. For what is language in itself? No matter how brightly blaze the beams of Apollo, no matter how fervent are his fries, how rhythmical his rays, it is yet not he but Hermes who bears the Word of Zeus from Olympus. A poem, whether in verse or prose, is essentially a simple and direct presentation of Truth. The formulae of Euclid or Newton are poems in proper sense of the word; and there is actually [illegible] of Probability in the value of the style of a differential equation. For it is part of our notion of Truth that its expression should not outrage our sense of Beauty—as Keats himself said, more profoundly, one may suspect, than his conscious mind was aware.

There is no general disposition, even in England-as-she-is-to-day, to deny that the City of Dreadful Night and The Way of All Flesh are masterpieces in form as well as in essence; and it must be confessed that the Kasidah is rhythmically more rugged than is quite readable, more learned and profound than seems proper to an artistic composition, more formally faulty than is commonly considered compatible with the highest attainment in literature. Yet, having pronounced Peccavit, one feels that the penance need be no more than nominal. It adds to the glory of a Saint that he should have faults of his own; otherwise, he would be inhuman and incredible; but such an argument is not to be brought forward lightly in the High Court of Literature. It is, no doubt, necessary to the supreme self-analysis of Burton that he should manifest those very awkwardnesses and impatiences that marked him as a man. It would be easy to revise the Kasidah; the occasional defects of the rhythm could be repaired in a few hours without in any way interfering with the sense of the stanzas; and it would be fatuous to assert that Burton's blunders, however psycho-analytically precious, improve the general effect of the poem. It is better to pass over them with brief regret, and to attend to the business in hand, which is to make it abundantly clear that these verses, the crown of their creator's victory over life and death, from an imperial circlet (as also the aureole of a saint) about the brows of Burton. Firstly, what is the plea of the poem at the Bar of the Justice of Jupiter? "As he pronounces lastly on each deed of so much fame in heaven accept thy need!" The Kasidah makes this colossal claim, that it is the first (and indeed the only) attempt to coordinate the conceptions of all classes of men, all codes of thought. It forges a coherent claim from the first to the last 'syllable of recorded time', from the nearest to the farthest stretch of space. It takes into account every fact that was known at the time of its composition—which occupied a quarter of a century—and every speculation that has ever been based upon them. It considers them with sceptical candor as with impersonal impartiality. It accepts intuitive arguments with the same cool common-sense consideration as a it does objective observations. It holds the balance with absolute indifference; the feather of Truth is not stirred either by the wind of the desert of the breath of the traveller. Finally, it sums up the whole argument with a critical submission to the limitations of human light, while at the same time it delivers a verdict which attains the asymptote of philosophical possibility by distrusting the disputants. Things as they are? Things as they seem? That which seems actually is by virtue of the fact that is seems.

Reason is Right, because the laws of Reason are of the substance of the matter. The problem of Existence is solved by the simple recognition that it is a problem. It is the Nature of Things that it should be insolvable; all that is necessary is to accept that circumstance is ineluctable. For instance, it is certainly the case that a triangle is a three-sided figure; but to analyse the triangle does not explain it away; it remains as one of the fundamental ideas in the mind, utterly unintelligible and irreducible in one sense, absolutely simple and self-evident in another. So in all investigation of life and action, thought and impression, the further we go the more we know; yet the additional knowledge merely establishes new relations between various ideas in our minds. Such relations are new facts, even new types of facts; they do not answer our original question as to what any thing actually is in itself.

Now this philosophy is pantomorphic. One cannot proceed beyond it—so soon as it is fully understood. It may be expressed indifferently in as many sets of terms as there are minds; it is equally sceptical as it is mystical, as idealistic as it is pragmatic. Any attempt to enlist it on the side of any possible theory is merely to select one of its aspects for special attention.

There is a certain Vision in which the seer advances up towards the summit of a mighty mountain. Thereon is a vast Temple ringed round by pylons; and as the adept passes through the pylon which crowns his path the Angel Warden communicates the awful secret of the peak: "There is no God!" This pass-word then goes round the circle from one to another; but each Angel pronounces and intones it in his own way, so that the Candidate is aware that every possible interpretation thereof in any particular mind is but partial, and that the Truth is hidden behind the pylons, upon the peak of the mountain itself.

This philosophy of the Kasidah is then at the apex of the Pyramid, where all lives, long and short abide, merge in a point, common to all, which hath nor parts nor magnitude, and it is this stupendous summary of speculative thought which makes the poem unique in history. It does not end with a sublime exclamation, but with the simple superficial sense-perception with which it began: "The whisper of the desert wind; the rumbling of the camel-bell." The pilgrim has recognised that these things are illusion, and sought Reality beyond them. He has found each deeper truth equally illusion; and only when "the wheel has come full circle" does he discover than even the most absurdly shallow illusion is itself uttermost Reality. Every thing, even the securest certainty of the profoundest philosopher, is a frivolous falsehood; yet also every thing, even the vainest phantasm of sense or imagination, is the ultimate and absolute Truth!

However the professional philosopher may pigeon-hole this Summum of Burton, it shares at least on equality with that or The City of Dreadful Night, as also with those of Butler and Hoxley: videlicet, it is based on thorough scepticism and realism, yet its fundamental assumption is that the Universe is sublime. We see the same spirit in the regular realists of the Victorian period: [illegible] enables [illegible], [illegible], even the Baron d' Hubot gigantic in their various forms of evil. Goriot is more terrifying than King Lear, and La Peau de Chagrin a more frightful tale than Paradise Lost. Emile Zola, failing to create a simple human character that lives, yet finds sublimity in their milieu, in the assassin "Assommoir", in the syphilophorous atmosphere of Nana, of the financial plague-pit of La Curée. Similarly remarkable are Nietzsche and Ibsen: the iconoclast excludes this essential Sublimity of Things from his agenda.

But the present generation or degeneration seems to have forgotten the formula of greatness; it does not believe in itself. As a lady novelist observed the other day, "the harp is not in fashion."

One may look through English literature, such as it is to-day, for a long while without finding a figure, abstract or concrete, that commands respect. Morefield, [illegible], Wells, Bennett, have created nothing—and the 'monitors requirement of women' still less. Hardy and Conrad are the sole stylists of Reality which is sublime on this side of the Atlantic, the former a contemporary of Burton and the other Victorian men of valour, the latter uncannily aloof from the modern spirit.* The realist under George the Fifth explores the nakedness of a set of dingy dolls. It is easy enough to prophecy that this generation will pass unremarked by the historian of literature, a rusty night with one or two violent stars above the murk, which they pierce in vain, for the astronomers have hidden their snouts in the mire. The seer may speak with the more assurance, because there is already a great light born in the West. James Branch Cabell and Alexander Harvey have both achieved sublimity in their divers mediums, and H.L. Mencken has devised a dreadful engine of destruction for those who come short of the measure—of the Reed that has been given him whereby to mete the Temple of God. For the Spirit of the Lord may not wholly be withdrawn from the Ark of the Covenant. Genius will not utterly be balked; and by the achievement of modern America we may estimate the abominations into which the English writers have fallen through their devotion to the Golden Calf. Arthur Machen, one of the very few artists in these islands who have not bowed the knee to Baal, and the only critic in our history who has found the touchstone for artistic gold, has called it 'ecstasy': if the word sublimity seems better chosen as implying objectivity, the quarrel will hardly be à l'outrance. The change means no more than an affirmation that the writer is not merely hysterical in his enthusiasm, but justly beholding the wonder and splendour of the Universe, set on fire thereby, so that the elements of consciousness, the Ego and the non-Ego, fitly mated together, melt and dissolve in the fervent heat whose distillation and quintessence is greatest.

The tepid vaporish vapidities of most English writers of the present day are done principally to their lack of actual manhood. Show me the traveller, the hunter, the man whose life has been a series of dangers, whose love is virile, and I will show you the potential artist. "Mr. Plushpen's car is at the door, sir!" "Many thanks and excuses; I am engaged to ride Captain Burton's camel!"

* Note that Conrad is not English. Nor are any of his stable companions the idealistic writers Frank Harris, Bernard Shaw, George Moore, or Arthur Machen.

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