Burton's judgment of Lord Salisbury was justified to me later in a peculiar way. One evening Teresa, Lady Shrewsbury, after meeting me somewhere at dinner, offered to take me home in her brougham. I thanked her warmly, for she was always interesting, knew everybody, and had a real salon in London.
Arthur Balfour had been one of the chief personages at the dinner. I asked her what she thought of him. "I know him very slightly," she replied, "but think him very distinguished-looking."
"I'm afraid," I said, "that his outward is the best part of him." "Strange," she said, "that reminds me that once, driving like this a few years ago with Lady Salisbury, I asked her what she thought of her husband's good-looking nephew. 'Oh, my dear," she replied, 'he's nothing for us women: I don't believe he has any more temperament than my poor old Bob!'"
So Lord Salisbury was judged by his wife very much as Sir Richard Burton had judged him.
When Burton showed me his translation of The Arabian Nights and I saw that he had described every sort of sensuality with the crudest words, I got frightened for him; still, I told him that I would help him so far as I could and put myself at his disposal. I would have liked him to modify some of the bestialities; however, as I have said elsewhere, it wasn't my business to condemn a great man but to help him; and I am proud of the fact that partly through my help he made ten thousand pounds out of the venture. No one could be with Burton for an hour without feeling his extraordinary force of character and the imperial keenness of his intelligence. If England had treated him as she should, he would have given her a glorious empire, the whole central plateau of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, without a war, and no one would be astonished now that I should compare him with Bismarck; but England couldn't use her greatest man of action!
I have never told how we came to know each other intimately. Captain Lovett Cameron, his lieutenant on several of his African journeys, had introduced me to him; but I was awkward and self-conscious and made some conventional foolish remark that caused Burton to turn from me contemptuously. I confessed my fault to Cameron afterwards, who insisted that the faux pas could easily be repaired. "You've no idea how generouskind Dick is; as soon as he gets to know you, he'll cotton to you," and he fixed a meeting for the morrow in Pall Mall at one of the clubs.
I thought over the meeting and arranged what I'd say. It had suddenly come into my head that Burton knew Lord Lytton and that they were friends. As soon as the three of us met next day, I shot off my bolt. "The other morning," I began, "I walked down Pall Mall just behind two men curiously differentiated in clothes and in person; the one was a little dandy, high heels, yellow kid gloves, tall hat, rouged cheeks-he evidently wore corsets too; the other, a very tall man, swung along with a sombrero on his head and a heavy stick in his hand. I was near enough to hear them talk. The dandy was intent on persuading his companion. "Ah, Dick," he began, "delicacies escape you men of huge appetite; you miss the deathless charm of the androgyne: the figure of the girl of thirteen with sex unexpressed as yet, slim as a boy with breasts scarcely outlined, and narrow hips; but unlike a boy, Dick; no lines or ugly muscles, the knees also are small; everything rounded to rhythmic loveliness-the most seductive creature in all God's world."
"You make me tired, Lytton," cried the big man in a deep tone, "you cotquean, you! Your over-sweet description only shows me that you have never tried the blue-bottomed monkey!"
"First-rate," cried Burton laughing to me, "you have hit off Lytton to the soul, which probably means that my portrait, too, is life-like."
From that hour on the ice was broken between us and we became friends, and I soon found Burton, as Cameron had said, determined unconditionally to forgive all injuries, one of the noblest spirits I have met in this earthly pilgrimage!
It was Burton who discovered the source of the Nile, for on that memorable journey of '58 Speke was merely his lieutenant; and when they reached Ujiji, on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, Burton was the first to proclaim the obvious fact; yet when Speke returned to England and claimed the honor of the discovery, Burton said nothing about the matter; there was in him at all times a real generosity.
Who can forget the verse in which he embodied his stalwart creed?
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
When Burton died, Swinburne wrote for me a long elegy on him in the Saturday Review, which ends with this couplet that appealed to me intensely.
The royal heart we mourn, the faultless friend Burton-a name that lives till fame be dead.
Like Burton, Bismarck, too, had intimate little messages for me. On the occasion of his seventy-second birthday he said a thing that brought him close to me, for it has been my experience all through my life. "Out of the eight thousand letters of sympathy," he said, "that I have received, a quarter came from women-that pleased me greatly: I regard it as a good sign, for it is my experience that one doesn't reach the female sympathy as easily as the male; besides, women have never liked me: I don't know why; perhaps I couldn't speak nicely enough to them." Yet, if gossip is to be believed, he was more than nice to Pauline Lucca-the great Jewish singer — when she visited Berlin once.
Bismarck made an extraordinary impression on me. I always see him as I saw him first in the Reichstag: he would often sit for hours without speaking or suddenly get up in the middle of a debate and go out, and one felt at once that the Chamber had become common; vitality, distinction, any possibility of the extraordinary had gone out of the atmosphere.
One day, I shall never forget it, though it must be now nearly fifty years ago, he had been baited in the House, and at length, some socialist, I think it was little fiery Bebel, used the word wagt (dare) about his reticence. "The Imperial Chancellor does not tell us whether the edict has come from himself or from the Emperor, er wagt es nicht zu sagen," he added. (He dares not speak out.) Bismarck started up, his three hairs bristling on his bald head, and stalked out towards his persecutor. "Who says wagt to Bismarck?" he jerked out with intense passion. The whole House broke into applause, while the little socialist fairly cowered on his seat as the great man continued. "You can either take it that the project came from His Majesty, the Emperor, and was approved by his Chancellor, or that the project came from the Chancellor and was approved by His Majesty, the Emperor. And whichever you fancy the more probable, you can make it square with what you think is constitutional, exactly as it suits you: wie Sie wollen." The contempt of the corps-student for the little Jew raged in the disdain of voice and manner and words. He strode back to his place and went right on out of the House.
This scene taught me that Bismarck was the most impressive person I had seen up to that time-impressive, of course, chiefly for his courage, but also for his insight. Bit by bit I came to see that he was altogether unscrupulous, determined to make Germany the first country in Europe.
If Ms voice had been as impressive as his great frame and imperious manner, he would have been simply overwhelming! As it was, it was impossible to be in his presence and hear him speak without being impressed by his greatness of character.
The only time I met Bismarck to speak to was an event in my life. We had a literary society in Gottingen, his old university. The house he had lived in was shown on the edge of the ramparts; as a corps-student he had fought half a dozen duels, and all successful, thanks chiefly to his great height and length of reach. For some reason or other, the civic authorities in my time passed a law shutting up all drinking places, and all Kneipen even (the places where students drank) at one o'clock in the morning. The corps-students objected to this, defied the civic ordinance, and soldiers were ordered out to close the drinking places. At once the corps-students sent a deputation to the Chancellor to beg him to defend their liberties.