GKB
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Comrades in Adversity:Richard Burton and William Robertson SmithAt first sight these two eminent Victorians appear unlikely travelling companions: the one a relatively austere young professor of Hebrew in the Free Church of Scotland, the other a mature, hard-swearing, short-tempered, thoroughly agnostic trouble-maker with an unconcealed penchant for oriental erotica. Both men, however, had provoked widespread controversy and were regarded in high places as decidedly “unsound”.[1] Despite his notable exploits in the 1850s as a pioneering African explorer, Richard Burton had so frequently blotted his diplomatic record that in 1872 he was relegated by Her Majesty’s Government from his consulship at Damascus to a relatively lowly consular post at Trieste, where he was to remain until his death in 1890. Robertson Smith, on the other hand, had incurred the wrath of the more conservative elements in the Free Church of Scotland through certain biblical articles written in 1875 for the newly emerging ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – articles which called into question such matters as the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and which thus impugned the literal veracity and divine inspiration of the Old Testament. An investigation by the Free Church’s College Committee began in the following year and was to lead to a lengthy, tortuous and bitterly-fought heresy trial, the outcome of which was a formal acquittal in 1880, superseded one year later by Smith’s outright dismissal from his professorial post. Robertson Smith’s first visit to the Egypt and the Middle East had been undertaken in the winter and spring of 1878/9, his primary aim at that time being to acquire a competency in the Arabic tongue. That he was able to spend almost six months there was a fortuitous consequence of his suspension from all teaching duties at Aberdeen Free Church College while his presbytery brethren struggled to formulate precisely those alleged heresies which were to constitute the “libel” (as it was termed in Scots ecclesiastical law) with which he was to be charged. It was during his second visit to Egypt, a year later, that Burton and Smith met one other in Cairo and, early in April 1880, undertook an eleven day expedition together as far as El Faiyum,[2] where Smith hoped to discover Coptic manuscripts or inscriptions, while Burton, as ever, was on the lookout for gold – or indeed any other mineral resources capable of being profitably exploited. Neither man found anything of particular interest to carry home from that expedition – apart from some first-hand information about the slave-trafficking which was once again endemic in the region – and, so far as we know, they met again only once, during a brief visit by Burton to London in 1882; yet the preservation of five letters from Burton to Smith confirms that their relationship was of some significance to both men.[3] None of Smith’s letters to Burton appear to have survived, perhaps because of Lady Burton’s compulsion to destroy all such personalia following her husband’s death. All the letters are written from Trieste, being penned in Burton’s highly characteristic and frequently illegible scrawl; in tone, they are tinged with that robust bravado, boisterous joviality and headstrong impatience which had been integral to his personality since childhood. The first letter is dated St John’s Day (June 24) and, like each of the others, is prefixed in Arabic by Burton’s self-chosen cognomen: Abd Allah al-hajj (Abdullah the Haj pilgrim). It begins: “Who is your ‘Dear Captain Burton?’” – a teasing reprimand for the unduly formal opening to a letter from Smith which RFB acknowledges having received on June 4. He goes on to explain his delay in responding:
Burton’s exploring days in Central Africa had left him susceptible to all manner of ill-health, of which his “gout” (whatever that may have signified in reality) was to prove progressively incapacitating during the Trieste years. Characteristically, Burton blames his current ill-health on having been advised to avoid too much alcohol, while the fleeting reference to having been “knocked down” alludes, not to any incapacity due to illness, but to his having literally been assaulted and robbed in the streets of Alexandria, just prior to leaving Egypt in May.[4] He goes on:
Smith had written, and published,[6] his “Open Letter to Principal Rainy” immediately upon his return home from Egypt on May 4, 1880 – and before the Free Church Assembly were due to meet later that month. During April, rumours had begun to circulate in church circles to the effect that Principal Rainy[7] would abandon the libel and instead aim to deprive Smith of his chair.[8] The Open Letter itself – seventeen pages in length – is a remarkable display of forensic skill: always courteous in tenor, yet devastating in its condemnation of a quasi-judicial act which, if implemented, would equal the worst of “civic despotism”. If deprived of his office as a punishment, Smith argued, he ought first be proved guilty of an offence. To dismiss him merely by “an act of policy and administration” would constitute the exercise of “absolute power uncontrolled by constitutional principles” – equivalent to secular tyranny. Burton’s second letter to Robertson Smith is dated November 26 [1880] and in it he thanks WRS for sending him a copy of “the Speech”.[9] This had been delivered on October 27, 1880, to the Commission of Assembly, following its deliberations on the two articles published shortly after Smith’s dramatic acquittal by the Assembly in May, 1880: these were destined to reignite the whole controversy and to confirm Rainy in his determination to oust Smith from his academic post.[10] In what is certainly the most outspoken of Burton’s letters to Robertson Smith, he goes on:
Burton clearly underestimated the staunch conservatism of the Scottish Free Church and failed to anticipate how tamely the May Assembly of the following year would endorse Rainy’s formal motion to dismiss Smith by what the Scotsman called “an arbitrary assumption of prerogative” – the claim that the Church possessed a notional reserve power or nobile officium which could override normal constitutional procedures. Meantime, Burton proceeded to tell Smith of his own literary work – which was as prolific and varied as ever:
By this time, Robertson Smith’s friends, foreseeing the inevitable outcome, had encouraged him to prepare a set of lectures for public delivery in both Glasgow and Edinburgh during the first months of 1881.[19] Beginning on Monday, January 10, the whole series commanded wide public interest and was swiftly published in May of that year by Messrs A.&.C Black under the title The Old Testament in the Jewish Church [hereafter OTJC]. Essentially, the publication of these lectures heralded a turning point in Smith’s fortunes. Smith sent a copy of the book to Burton, who responded very promptly indeed[20] – and not without some pertinent criticisms:
Amongst his extensive “Notes and Illustrations” appended to the published lectures, Smith had cited Mohammed’s claim to have received the story of Joseph “by direct revelation” as “one of the clearest proofs of the latter’s imposture”. However, in the revised (1892) edition of OTJC, where most of the lengthy notes were reduced to footnotes within the main text, Smith omitted the word “imposture” yet now quoted (p.298fn.) the eminent German theologian Theodor Nöldeke in charging Mohammed with “making use of pious fraud to gain adherents”. And, as one might expect, WRS makes no reference to the biblical proscription of incest and other deviant sexual practices (e.g. Lev. xx, 11-21) which so fascinated Burton. After a brief holiday in Italy with two of his closest Edinburgh friends, Alexander Gibson and Irvine Smith, Robertson Smith returned home in time to attend the fateful Free Church Assembly of May, 1881.[22] Burton’s fourth letter, dated May 28, 1881, would have reached WRS just after that event and is clearly written in response to a communication from his beleaguered Scottish friend just prior to his dismissal. Burton writes:
The reviews of Burton’s Lusiads had been at best lukewarm. Though Algernon Swinburne had rhapsodised over the work, while the now little-known poet Gerald Massey had sent a poetic eulogium, most of the journals cavilled at the archaic language which Burton had employed in his translation of Camoens. The reception of Smith’s published lectures was in general far more favourable by the Scottish public, although his enemies in the Free Church still railed vehemently against the publication of such heterodox critical views. Burton’s final letter is dated September 9 of the following year[24] and indicates that the two men had met up, albeit briefly, in London:[25]
Edward Palmer had been professor of oriental languages at Cambridge and was thoroughly familiar moreover with the culture and geography of Arabia. Following the uprising in Alexandria of June and July, 1882, headed by the nationalist army leader, Arabi Pasha, the British and French governments belatedly made efforts to restore peace by way of the customary show of military force – in the form of a naval bombardment of Alexandria.[26] Fears of a subsequent attack by Arabi on Suez, however, had led to Palmer being secretly commissioned to bribe the local Bedouin tribesmen with large sums of gold. That plan misfired disastrously and Palmer, along with his two British companions, was taken prisoner and killed by the Bedouins whom he had regarded as his friends. It is perhaps indicative of the British government’s desperation that Burton was amongst those approached by the Foreign Office[27] to assist in the search for Palmer; and he set off enthusiastically from Trieste, only to be forestalled in his task by Col. Charles Warren – a member, like Palmer himself, of the euphemistically-named Palestine Exploration Fund, whose cartographical and archaeological work had for years been an admirable cover for British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East. So far as one can tell, the correspondence between Robertson Smith and Burton concludes at this point; but the events described above were to have consequences of immense significance for the young Scotsman. Palmer’s death left a vacancy to be filled at Cambridge University (technically, the “Lord Almoner’s Readership in Arabic”) and Smith was urged by his many influential friends to offer himself as candidate, with the surprisingly rapid outcome that he was formally appointed to the post on the first day of 1883.[28] The remaining eleven years of his short life were to be spent accordingly in the most congenial of academic surroundings, from where he was able to continue his editorship of the Britannica, while simultaneously fulfilling numerous other duties, within and beyond the university, before his death from tuberculosis in 1894. Twenty-five years older than Smith, Richard Burton was to die at Trieste in 1890 at the age of 69, after belatedly receiving the award of K.C.M.G. in 1886. The two men, ostensibly of widely disparate temperaments and backgrounds, shared a number of significant personality characteristics. Both were controversialists by nature, alike incurring both admiration and condemnation from their peers. Each was highly ambitious: and in that regard Robertson Smith may perhaps be judged to have gained the greater success, although there was undoubtedly much more that his early death prevented him achieving. Burton’s career was dogged by setbacks and official snubs, all emanating ultimately from his own unrealistic expectations – whether these were of discovering gold or of solving his country’s political imbroglios at a stroke. Both men gained notoriety by their writings, and suffered accordingly; but, while Smith’s enterprise and wide-ranging abilities enabled him to recover rapidly from his humiliation at the hands of the Free Church, Burton was forever to resent what he saw as the unwarranted disregard of his manifold talents.[29] At heart Richard Burton was a incorrigible fantasist who believed that fame and fortune would smile upon him – as to some extent they ultimately did when his translation of the Thousand and One Nights caught the public’s imagination and reaped handsome profits. But it was Robertson Smith who was essentially the realist, despite the pervasive childhood influence of the Shorter Catechism. His closely critical analysis of the biblical text, as his writings repeatedly illustrate, authoritatively elucidated the chronological inconsistencies of the Hebrew Bible and set the standard for all subsequent scholarly biblical interpretation. The two men had been brought together through chance encounter in Egypt and their brief relationship clearly stemmed from being comrades in adversity; but the stronger attraction, it seems fair to infer, was on Burton’s side. As Michael Hastings observed acutely in his biography of Burton; “Throughout his life there are many instances of his keenness for a companion to whom he could wax happily in his role of tutor, guide and seer”.[30] Burton’s letters to Smith reveal interesting aspects of this, though they are never unduly paternalistic in tone. They do, however, reflect Burton’s need for sympathetic companionship – something which his wife, Isabel, could not wholly satisfy, despite her adulation and constant attention to her husband’s every need and whim. References
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