Chapter XXXVIII

. 20th October 1890-December 1890, The Fate of "The

Scented Garden"

173. The Fate of The Scented Garden.

Burton wad dead. All that was mortal of him lay cold and motionless in the chapelle ardente. But his spirit? The spirits of the departed, can they revive us? The Roman poet Propertius answers:

"Yes; there are ghosts: death ends not all, I ween."

and Lady Burton was just as thoroughly imbued with that belief. Hereby hangs a curious story, now to be told as regards its essentials for the first time; and we may add that Lady Burton particularly wished these essentials to be made public after her decease. [646]

For sixteen days after her husband's death Lady Burton shut herself up in the house in order to examine and classify his manuscripts, pack up books, &c., ready for the journey to England, and "carry out his instructions." To the goodness--the sweetness--of her character we have several times paid tributes. We have spoken of the devotion to her husband which surrounds her with a lambent glory; but we have also shown that she was indiscreet, illiterate, [647] superstitious and impulsive; and that she was possessed of a self-assurance that can only be described as colossal. We have also shown that her mind was unhinged by her sad trouble. Such, then, was the woman and such the condition of the woman upon whom devolved the duty of considering the manuscripts of one of the most original men of the 19th century. Which of them were valuable and which mere lumber she was quite incapable of judging. Her right course would have been to call in some competent person; but she thought she was competent.

At Lady Burton's request, Mr. Albert Letchford and Miss Letchford had come to stay with her "for the remembrance of the love her husband bore them." It fell to Miss Letchford to sort Sir Richard's clothes and to remove the various trifles from his pockets. She found, among other things, the little canvas bags containing horse-chestnuts, which, as we have already noticed, he used "to carry about with him against the Evil Eye--as a charm to keep him from sickness."

Lady Burton now commenced with the manuscripts--and let it be conceded, with the very best intentions. She would have nobody in the room but Miss Letchford. "I helped Lady Burton to sort his books, papers, and manuscripts," says Miss Letchford. "She thought me too young and innocent to understand anything. She did not suspect that often when she was not near I looked through and read many of those MSS. which I bitterly repent not having taken, for in that case the world would not have been deprived of many beautiful and valuable writings. I remember a poem of his written in the style of 'The House that Jack built,' the biting sarcasm of which, the ironical finesse--is beyond anything I have ever read. Many great people still living found their way into these verses. I begged Lady Burton to keep it, but her peasant confessor said 'Destroy it,' so it was burnt along with a hundred other beautiful things." She destroyed valuable papers, [648] she carefully preserved and docketed as priceless treasures mere waste paper. [649]

There now remained only the manuscript of The Scented Garden and a few other papers. By this time Lady Burton had discovered that Miss Letchford was "not so ignorant as she thought," and when the latter begged her not to destroy The Scented Garden she promised that it should be saved; and no doubt, she really intended to save it. Miss Letchford having gone out for the evening, Lady Burton returned again to her task. Her mind was still uneasy about The Scented Garden, and she took out the manuscript to examine it. Of the character of the work she had some idea, though her husband had not allowed her to read it. Fifteen hundred persons had promised subscriptions; and she had also received an offer of six thousand guineas for it from a publisher. [650] She took out the manuscript and laid it on the floor, "two large volumes worth." [651] When she opened it she was perfectly bewildered and horrified. The text alone would have staggered her, but, as we have seen, Burton had trebled the size of the book with notes of a certain character. Calming herself, she reflected that the book was written only for scholars and mainly for Oriental students, and that her husband "never wrote a thing from the impure point of view. He dissected a passion from every point of view, as a doctor may dissect a body, showing its source, its origin, its evil, and its good." [652]

Then she looked up, and there, before her, stood her husband just as he had stood in the flesh. He pointed to the manuscript and said "Burn it!" Then he disappeared.

As she had for years been a believer in spirits, the apparition did not surprise her, and yet she was tremendously excited. "Burn it!" she echoed, "the valuable manuscript? At which he laboured for so many weary hours? Yet, doubtless, it would be wrong to preserve it. Sin is the only rolling stone that gathers moss; what a gentleman, a scholar, a man of the world may write, when living, he would see very differently as a poor soul standing naked before its God, with its good or evil deeds alone to answer for, and their consequences visible to it from the first moment, rolling on to the end of time. Oh, he would cry, for a friend on earth to stop and check them! What would he care for the applause of fifteen hundred men now--for the whole world's praise, and God offended? And yet the book is for students only. Six thousand guineas, too, is a large sum, and I have great need of it."

At this moment the apparition again stood before her, and in a sterner and more authoritative voice said: "Burn it!" and then again disappeared. In her excitement she scarcely knew where she was or what she did. Still she hesitated. Then she soliloquised: "It is his will, and what he wishes shall be done. He loved me and worked for me. How am I going to reward him? In order that my wretched body may be fed and warmed for a few miserable years, shall I let his soul be left out in cold and darkness till the end of time--till all the sins which may be committed on reading those writings have been expiated, or passed away, perhaps, for ever? Nafzawi, who was a pagan, begged pardon of God and prayed not to be cast into hell fire for having written it, and implored his readers to pray for him to Allah that he would have mercy on him." [653]

Still she hesitated. "It was his magnum opus," she went on, "his last work that he was so proud of, that was to have been finished [654] on the awful morrow that never came. If I burn it the recollection will haunt me to my dying day," and again she turned over the leaves.

Then for the third time Sir Richard stood before her. Again he sternly bade her burn the manuscript, and, having added threatenings to his command, he again disappeared.

By this time her excitement had passed away, and a holy joy irradiated her soul. She took up the manuscript, and then sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling, she burnt it sheet after sheet, until the whole was consumed. As each leaf was licked up by the fire, it seemed to her that "a fresh ray of light and peace" transfused the soul of her beloved husband.

That such were the facts and that the appearance of her husband was not mere hallucination, Lady Burton stiffly maintained until her dying day. She told Mr. T. Douglas Murray [655] that she dared not mention the appearances of her husband in her letter to The Morning Post [656] or to her relatives for fear of ridicule. Yet in the Life of her husband--almost the closing words--she does give a hint to those who could understand. She says: "Do not be so hard and prosaic as to suppose that our dead cannot, in rare instances, come back and tell us how it is with them." [657]

That evening, when Miss Letchford, after her return, entered Sir Richard's room, she saw some papers still smouldering in the grate. They were all that remained of The Scented Garden. On noticing Miss Letchford's reproachful look, Lady Burton said, "I wished his name to live for ever unsullied and without a stain."

174. Discrepancies in Lady Burton's Story.

Some have regarded this action of Lady Burton's--the destruction of The Scented Garden manuscript--as "one of rare self-sacrifice prompted by the highest religious motives and the tenderest love for one whom she looked to meet again in heaven, to which her burnt offering and fervent prayers might make his entrance sure." If the burning of the MS. of The Scented Garden had been an isolated action, we might have cheerfully endorsed the opinion just quoted, but it was only one holocaust of a series. That Lady Burton had the best of motives we have already admitted; but it is also very evident that she gave the matter inadequate consideration. The discrepancies in her account of the manuscript prove that at most she could have turned over only three or four pages--or half-a-dozen at the outside. [658]

Let us notice these discrepancies:

(1) In her letter to the Morning Post (19th June 1891) she says of The Scented Garden: "It was his magnum opus, his last work that he was so proud of." Yet in the Life (ii., 243) she calls it the only book he ever wrote that was not valuable to the world and in p. 445 of the same work she alludes to it "as a few chapters which were of no particular value to the world." So it was at once the most valuable book he ever wrote and also of no value whatever. (2) In Volume ii. of the Life (p. 441) she says the only value in the book at all consisted in his annotations, and there was no poetry. This remark proves more than anything else how very superficial must have been her examination of the manuscript, for even the garbled edition of 1886 contains nearly 400 lines of verse, while that of 1904 probably contains over a thousand. [659] For example, there are twenty-three lines of the poet Abu Nowas's. (3) On page 444 of the Life she says: "It was all translation except the annotations on the Arabic work"--which gives the impression that the translation was the great feature, and that the notes were of secondary importance; but on p. 441 she says, "The only value in the book at all consisted in the annotations." As a matter of fact, the annotations amounted to three-quarters of the whole. [See