Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/25

Rh unknown or the unknowable, only into what he knew—what I know; therefore I shall freely quote his early training, his politics, his Mohammedanism, his Sufiism, his Brahminical thread, his Spiritualism, and all the religions which he studied, and nobody can give me a sensible reason why I should leave out the Catholicism, except to point the Spanish proverb, "that no one pelts a tree, unless it has fruit on it," but were I to do so, the biography would be incomplete.

Let us suppose a person residing inside a house, and another person looking at the house from the opposite side of the street; you would not be unjust enough to expect the person on the outside to describe minutely its inner chambers and everything that was in it, because he would have to take it on trust from the person who resided inside, but you would take the report of the man living outside as to the exterior of the house. That is exactly the same as my writing my husband's history. Do you want an edition of the inside or an edition of the outside? If you do not want the truth, if you order me to describe a Darwin, a Spencer, a John Stuart Mill, I can do it; but it will not be the home-Richard, the fireside-Richard whom I knew, the two perfectly distinct Richards in one person; it will be the man as he was at lunch, at dinner, or when friends came in, or when he dined out, or when he paid visits; and if the world—or, let us say, a small portion of the world,—is so unjust and silly as to wish for untrue history, it must get somebody else to write it. To me there are only two courses: I must either tell the truth, and lay open the "inner life" of the man, by a faithful photograph, or I must let it alone, and leave his friends to misrepresent him, according to their lights.

It has been threatened to me that if I speak the truth I am to reap the whirlwind, because others, who claim to know my husband well, see him quite in a different light. (I know many people intimately, but I am quite incompetent to write their lives—I am only fit to do that for the man with whom I lived night and day for thirty years; there are three other people who could each write a small section of his life, and after those nobody; I do not accept the so-called general term "friend.") I shall be very happy indeed