Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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with the continental communities. The “Anglo-Saxondom” they established was devoid of “snobs,” as well as of the “bitter discord” often found in ménages bourgeoises. The prudery then spreading in English life was absent, too: “The difference of the foreign colonies was that the weight of English respectability appeared to be taken off them, though their lives were respectable and respected. The expatriates were not exactly cosmopolitans, since living abroad made them “intensely patriotic” (although not much concerned about English politics); they “stuck to their own Church because it was their Church, and they knew as much about the Catholics at their very door, as the average Englishman does of the Hindu.” Many looked on their French neighbors with suspicion and especially condemned romantic relationships between young people of the two countries.39
But continental life all the same gave Burton and his siblings a taste for a broader and more open kind of social existence than England afforded, a preference that he discovered both when the family returned briefly to England in 1830 and still more later on, when he became a student at Oxford. On the first trip the children were put off by the small and commonplace nature of English buildings, by the inferior food, and by “the national temper, fierce and surly …a curious contrast to the light-hearted French of middle France.” Later, in Oxford,
the old dislike to our surroundings returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception. … The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. … The little bits of garden were mere slices. … The interiors were cut up into such wretched rooms. … And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling.
To contrast England and France in such terms was not unique to Burton in these years: the young John Stuart Mill reported a similar impression from a visit across the Channel, later recalling that being “able to breathe for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life” made him aware of “the low moral tone” of British social intercourse.40 But no one ever saw Mill as un-English, whereas people in Oxford viewed Burton in just this way, disapproving of his manners, his accent in Latin (the continental pronunciation was closer to Italian), and his dislike of the teaching and food in his college. The disapproval was mutual; when one student laughed at his mustache Burton tried to challenge him to a duel: “I felt as if I had fallen among épiciers.” None of the learning or experience he had absorbed was appreciated: “It was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provençale, barely knew the Lord’s Prayer, broke down in the Apostles’ Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation.” That Burton’s animus was directed at least as much against British smugness as against religious education as such seems clear in the positive impression he retained of John Henry Newman, the don who later became a Catholic and a cardinal; although his person and speech struck Burton as somewhat colorless, he showed qualities of “complete candour and honesty; he said only what he believed, and he induced others to believe with him.”41
Neither the preference for continental life nor the strong sense for the power of cultural difference these experiences bred in Burton kept him from seeing many things about France and Italy in negative terms, too, the pettiness of life in small French towns, the squalor and dirtiness of pre-Risorgimento Rome. But toward his own country Burton’s childhood cast him as an outsider in another way: it deprived him of the formative experiences and personal connections that making a career in nineteenth-century England required. “The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so artificial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest day. The future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and Cambridge. The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair, the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us.” In particular, Burton lacked a kind of tie that formed an important part of every national identity in the nineteenth century (and in many ways still does), namely to a particular locality (he used the word “parish”). “It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.” Burton already felt much of this distance during his time at Oxford (it contributed to his leaving without taking a degree), but through all these comments there beams a clear sense that his impaired and conflicted British identity was one he could never cast off, however much it came to be mixed with other ones.42
As other writers have noted, his description of himself as “a waif, a stray … a blaze of light without a focus” fits with some persisting features of his personality already visible in his childhood. His mother seems to have had a complex fascination with both self-command and indiscipline (she was passionately attached to a half-brother she described as “wild”), two contradictory qualities that Burton would display and value in later life. Their roots seem readily visible in such incidents as the one in which she called her two sons’ attention to tempting apple tarts in a French pastry-shop window, only to call the boys away, praising the virtues of self-denial. Burton and his younger brother Edward broke the glass with their fists and ran off with the tarts in their bloody fingers.43 A persisting desire to challenge and outrage their parents seems evident in a later moment that involved disguise as part of their strategy. An epidemic of cholera broke out while the family was living in Naples; mortality was especially high among the poor, many of whose bodies were cast into mass graves outside the city in the dead of night. Fascinated by the macabre events, Burton and his brother put on clothes in which they could pass as mute undertaker’s assistants and helped with the internments. Later he remembered the decaying bodies as giving off “a kind of lambent blue flame … which lit up a mass of human corruption, worthy to be described by Dante.”44 The disguise was much simpler than the ones Burton would later employ, but here as later it served to gain entry to actions in which mystery was mixed with religious significance; now as later he was moved by a fascination for foreign and forbidden things and a disposition to manipulate his own identity in order to draw closer to them.
Burton recounted these things about his childhood at least partly because he thought they pointed toward the conflicted relationship to English life he would always retain. The suspicion in which he was held by many influential people cast a pall over the diplomatic career he began in 1861; although he received a number of consular appointments, most of them sent him to difficult, even dangerous places in which he had little interest. Only Damascus, where he arrived in 1869, allowed him to draw on his knowledge of Eastern cultures (there he went back to his old practice of masquerading as a local, wandering about incognito in order to gain information, a stratagem in which he was now joined by his wife); but his inability to deal effectively with conflicts between various ethnic groups there—and especially his hostility toward the city’s Jews, part of a complex attitude to which we will come in a moment—overcame him and he was forced out. Trieste, his next and final posting, was easier to deal with but it was also a comedown from Damascus and paid less (he did a great deal of writing there, working in a room he furnished in a Moroccan style). During these years he spent periods in England, but often unhappily, and his closest associates in London were figures who resembled him in arousing suspicion and hostility in more conventional people. Among them were Richard Monckton Milnes and Algernon Swinburne, members with Burton of a band that called itself the “Cannibal Club,” known for their sometimes poetic eccentricity, their interest in erotic and pornographic literature, and their association with nonstandard sexual practices. Burton displayed these involvements most publicly in his translations of the Thousand and One Nights (including the commentaries that accompanied it) and his publication of the Kama Sutra (in a translation by someone else that he revised).
All the same, the knighthood he eventually received in 1886, four years before his death, owed more to his writing than to his government service. That he received it should remind