Volume 2, Number 5 · April 16, 1964
Sir Richard and Ruffian Dick
By F.W. Dupee
Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton
by Byron Farwell
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 431 pp., $5.95
In high school a friend and I sometimes managed to get hold of the various volumes of The Arabian Nights in the privately printed translation by Richard Burton. There we found greater wonders than any in 'Aladdin and His Lamp' and other expurgated or inauthentic examples of oriental story that had reached us as children. In Burton's 'Terminal Essay' to the Nights, when we had the luck to get it also, were still better things, true things in plain prose with a minimum of Latin. How is it possible for a sodomite Moslem Prince to force a Christian missionary against his will and the strong resistance instinctively put up by his sphincter muscle? Burton could tell us: by the judicious use of a tent peg. Not that we had really wondered about such things. Burton's charm was that he set the questions as well as answered them, enlarging our curiosity even while he satisfied it—the perfect pedagogue. There was much also in the 'Terminal Essay' to inflame the anti-Victorian passions we were beginning to feel. The Victorian age, Burton said, was 'saturated with cant and hypocrisy.' But I doubt that we knew anything about the other adventures for which he had once been famous: his pilgrimage, in Moslem disguise, to Mecca; his expedition to the still more forbidden city of Harrar; his discovery of Lake Tanganyika, an exploit that inspired Livingstone and Stanley and helped to clear up the ancient mystery surrounding the sources of the Nile. It seems unlikely that we knew how very recently he had died (in 1890).
Review, 3032 words
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