WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT My Diaries1888-1914 - London: Martin Secker 1919 & 1920
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18th March (1906) - There has been a new Life of Richard Burton published, and much discussion of his character in the papers. I will try and recollect my own impression of him. I knew his wife when she was an unmarried girl, having met her several times at the house of her aunt, Monica Lady Gerard, at Mortlake, in the fifties or early sixties. At that time she was a quiet girl enough, of the convent type - at least so I remember her - fair-haired and rather pretty - very different from my recollection of her in later years. When I next met her it was at Rio Janeiro in the autumn of 1867, where I spent some days in her company on my way to the Legation at Buenos Aires. Her husband then was Consul at Santos in Brazil, and he was travelling somewhere in the interior of Brazil, and had left her at Rio during his absence. She had developed into a sociable and very talkative woman, clever, but at the same time foolish, overflowing with stories of which her husband was always the hero. Her devotion to him was very real, and she was indeed entirely under his domination, an hypnotic domination Burton used to boast of. I have heard him say that at the distance of many hundred miles he could will her to do anything he chose as completely as if he were with her in the same room. Burton's sayings, however, of this kind, were not to be altogether depended upon, and he probably exaggerated his power.
A few months later Burton himself turned up, but without his wife, at Buenos Aires, the announcement of his arrival having been made beforehand with some parade in the local newspapers. The great traveller, it was stated, had the project of making a new exploration of Patagonia and the western Pampas and of ascending the highest summits of the Andes, including Anconcagua, then a virgin peak, and paragraphs were from time to time printed as to the preparations being made beforehand for so great an adventure. On his arrival, however, it was soon abundantly clear that there was nothing very serious in the plan. Burton, in spite of his naturally iron constitution, was no longer in a physical condition for serious work, and though he talked about it for a while to all who would listen, the expedition was gradually let drop by him and ended by becoming a matter of joke between his friends. I remember what I think was my first meeting with him, at Mrs. Russell's house in the autumn of 1868, where we had both been asked to dinner and with us the notorious Sir Roger Tichborne, in whose company Burton had arrived and with whom he chiefly consorted during his two months' stay at Buenos Aires. They were a strange, disreputable couple. Burton was at that time at the lowest point I fancy of his whole career, and in point of respectability at his very worst. His consular life at Santos, without any interesting work to his hand or proper vent for his energies, had thrown him into a habit of drink he afterwards cured himself of and he seldom went to bed sober. His dress and appearance were those suggesting a released convict, rather than anything of more repute. He wore, habitually, a rusty black coat with a crumpled black silk stock, his throat destitute of collar, a costume which his muscular frame and immense chest made singularly and incongruously hideous, above it a countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel, treacherous with eyes like a wild beast's. He reminded me by turns of a black leopard, caged but unforgiving, and again with his close cut poll and iron frame of that wonderful creation of Balzac's, the ex-gallerien Vautrin*, hiding his grim identity under an Abbe's cassock. Of the two companions Tichborne was distinctly the less criminal in appearance. I came to know them both well, especially Burton, his connection with the Consular service bringing him to us at the Legation, and I have sat up many nights with him talking of all things in Heaven and Earth, or rather listening while he talked till he grew dangerous in his cups, and revolver in hand would stagger home to bed.
On the first occasion, however, of our dinner at Mrs. Russell's my curiosity was excited more towards Tichborne than towards him. He had already laid claim to the Tichborne Baronetcy and was commonly called by his title, and his business at Buenos Aires was to collect evidence, proving his identity for the lawsuit he was about to bring for the family estates. Burton at that time, it is worth recording, more than half believed in him as being what he pretended, his wife's connection with the Catholic world probably disposing him to take an interest in the result. I too had something of a similar interest. I had been at school, not indeed with the real Roger Tichborne, but with his younger brother, Alfred, who had been a boy of about my own standing and whom I knew well. When, therefore, I was told I was to meet "The Claimant" at the dinner, I brushed up my recollection of Alfred so that I might be prepared to see or not to see a likeness between them. Alfred at the age of sixteen had been a rather nice looking boy with a round, good humoured face, across which, a very notable feature, his thick eyebrows met. Without being stupid he was a quite unintellectual boy, and had passed by seniority into the highest class of the school without, I think I may safely say, having learned a dozen words of Latin or Greek. It was about all he could do to write in ungrammatical sentences an English letter, and his time was spent in entire idleness and smoking so incurable that he had been allowed at last to indulge it as an alternative to his expulsion. I was consequently not prepared for special intelligence in his pretended brother, but I looked out for the eyebrows and there they were, without question, across Sir Roger's face. I treated him, therefore, as Burton did, in the light of a young man of decent birth gone woefully to seed, His huge frame and coarse manner seemed to conceal reminiscences of aristocratic breeding as authentic perhaps, it was not saying much, as Alfred's.
"With these two men I therefore spent much of my time during the next few weeks but naturally more with Burton. (I unfortunately kept no notes nor journals then.) My talks with Burton were of a most intimate kind, religion, philosophy, travel, politics. I had hardly as yet visited the East, but Eastern travel had interested me from the day I read Palgrave's 'Journeys in Arabia,' and Burton was fond of reciting his Arabian adventures. In his talk he affected an extreme brutality, and if one could believe the whole of what he said, he had indulged in every vice and committed every crime. I soon found, however, that most of these recitals were indulged in pour epater le bourgeiose and that his inhumanity was more pretended than real. Even the ferocity of his countenance gave place at times to more agreeable expressions, and I can just understand the infatuated fancy of his wife that in spite of his ugliness he was the most beautiful man alive. He had, however, a power of assuming the abominable which cannot be exaggerated. I remember once him insisting that I should allow him to try his mesmeric power on me, and his expression as he gazed into my eyes was nothing less than atrocious. NEXT