SIR R. BURTON'S " DAHOMEY " AND " VIKRAM."*

SIR RICHARD BURTON'S account of his visit to Gelele, King of Dahomey, and his adaptation of " Vikram and the Vampire,"

form the second and third volume of this very interesting republication of his works, undertaken by Lady Burton in memory of her late husband. A generation has passed away since Burton wrote these books. Many of the principal actors

in the scenes he records have, like himself, left us, and the angry feeling which the first appearance of some of his works

excited need not, or cannot, now return, and we may be left to enjoy the genius, the wit, and even the audacity of the author undisturbed by sympathy for the wounded feelings of others, or the quizzing of our own pet foibles.

The visit to Gelele was undertaken by order of the British Government while Burton was Consul at Fernando Po, in the year 1863, for the purpose of discouraging the slave-trade and human sacrifices. King Gelele, who appears to have been as helpless as he was despotic, declared that as the Europeans had originated the slave-trade, they must pay for its discontinuance ; it was a matter of revenue to him ; if the British Government would pay, he would put an end to it. Not a very satisfactory result of the mission. The coast-town of Dahomey, Whydah, appears to enjoy a good character amongst tropical sea-ports, for "the nights are cool, and the day-breeze is, if anything, somewhat too strong for safety. At this season (November), the people do not suffer from mosquitoes 'much provoking the exercise of a man's nails,' as the old traveller has it." This is a great improvement on most tropical towns, where these persistent little pests exercise not only a man's nails, but his inventive faculties also,—first, in devising means of protection against their incursions, and afterwards, in describing their manners and customs to his friends at home.

Arrived at the capital, Burton and his party were lodged in the house of " the English host." Burton, as usual, set to work at once on the language, and in a month was able to converse in it. They spent about two months in this place in a state of actual captivity, for the King would not let them go before it suited him to do so. Every day they were summoned to attend a dance, in which at last even they were forced to take part; Mr. Bernasko (a missionary who was one of the party), however, excused himself, and sang them some hymns to his own accompaniment on the con- certina instead. The King deferred to the prejudices of Captain Burton in the matter of executions, so far as to conduct these ceremonies in private, more or less. It was explained that the men and women were killed for a definite purpose,—not merely for the fun of the thing, as is some- times supposed. Either they were prisoners of war, and it was cheaper to kill them than to feed them, or they were malefactors, or a message had to be sent to the King's deceased father ; sometimes a mistake was made in a message, and then another messenger had to be despatched to rectify it. As regards the cruelty of the executions, Burton observes : —" The executions are, I believe, performed without cruelty; these negroes have not invented breaking on the wheel or tearing to pieces their victims, as happened to Ravaillac and the half-witted Damiens." " I could not find out whether, like

• (1.) Vikram and the Vampire : Tales of Hindu Deoi/ry.—(2.) A Mission to Goleta, King of Dahomey. "Memorial Edition of the Works of Sir Richard F. Burton." London Tyiston and Edwards.

the Meriah victims of the Khonds, who hardly thanked General Campbell for saving their lives, the doomed are intoxicated ; it is probable, the object being to send them to the other world in the best of tempers."

There is a good deal of unavoidable repetition in the description of the dances and processions ; they were all very much alike ; perhaps the most amusing was one which took place towards the end of the visit, when the King paraded his " stable " :-

" The royal equipages then began to pass, the animals being

men harnessed with ropes. Most of them are old barouches a blue-green shandridan two things like Palkigaris, or broncards, supported a light umbrella. The present King's cab- brougham Two American trotting-waggons a band of flageolets followed by a man in a red blanket a peculiar old sedan chair, dating from the days of Mr. Nash. Another state hammock ; a wheeled platform with a bench for two a rocking-horse with housings and bridle, on wheels ; rattles ; a large green chariot four hunch- backs, two flags, an enormous red and green board for playing tables a Bath chair little iron swivel guns carried on women's heads a metal soup-tureen ; nine large bottles urns, jars, &c."

On the subject of the Amazons, Captain Burton has a good deal to say, and the observations which he makes upon women in this connection may be compared with those which Raja Vikram and the Vampire make in the volume, which forms the subject of the latter part of this notice.

Burton objects to the phrase " weaker sex," observing that it is only weaker because it is made so. "The feminiclx, like the females of the equidw, show little corporeal inferiority to the males, and the best proof is, that amongst tribes living in the so-called state of nature, women are generally the only

labourers It appears to me that in England there is a revival of the feminine industries; and when it is asked what we shall do with our old maids ?' I would reply that many might be enlisted." The Lady Volunteers would find much to encourage them in what Sir Richard says upon this subject. " In Dahome the woman is officially superior, but under other considerations she still suffers from male arrogance. The King has repeatedly said to me that a woman is still a woman. And when the Amazons boast that they are not women but men, they stand self-convicted of the fact that, however near to equality the sexes are, there is always a somewhat of preponderance of the active over the passive half of humanity." Judging from the picture of the very unattractive lady which graces the cover of the book, and forms its frontispiece, it appears that this proposition is true only of humanity as a whole, and that when individuals are thus analysed, the converse may be the case.

On February 15th, Captain Burton and his party at last succeeded in getting away from the King, and they reached the coast a few days later. On their arrival they heard that the King had set off on a long promised campaign against the Egbas, a neighbouring people. This was to have been a great victory ; and so it proved to be, but not for the King, who lost 6,821 men and women killed, and 2,000 prisoners ; while his enemies lost 40 killed and 100 wounded ; but " the incorrigible King at once bought a number of slaves, and returned to his capital a conqueror !"

Vikramaditya, or Vikram, lived about the same time as C. Julius Cmsar, but Hindoo history is not particular as to dates, and it appears that Vikram is just as likely to have been contemporary with William the Conqueror. Probably—like Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, and other heroes whose habit of acquiring the property of others during their lifetime, has, in a manner, survived them—his memory, like his royal person, has been clothed with much that does not properly belong to it, and his name has become a cachet under which any story of heroism, or of rapacity, may be made acceptable to the public, just as the name of Sheridan has been stamped on so many clever sayings that were invented long after his death. But whatever may be the old hero's right to the part ascribed to him in the collection of stories that bears his name, makes very little difference to the tales themselves, for he merely personifies Hindoo philosophy on certain subjects. Being ordered by a Jogi to fetch a Vampire, or Baital, from the tree on which he was hanging, he trudges off with his son and finds the Baital, but altogether fails to put him into the bag he has provided for the purpose of carrying him. Why, having obtained a complete victory, the Baital should then have proposed a compromise, unless he could think of no other way of securing an audience, it is difficult to imagine ; but he did propose one, which was to the effect that he would consent to be carried off in the bag, and that he world tell the Raja a story en route ; if the Raja could be entrapped into answering any question that the Baital should put to him at the end of his story, he should be free to return to his tree ; while if the Raja had sufficient self-control to avoid answering, he would remain in the bag, and suffer himself to be made over to the Jogi.

The chief subject of the Baital's stories is woman and her lack of every virtue, human or divine, except the power of temporarily pleasing her owner, and even that, it appears, she sometimes exercises for the benefit of those who have no right to it. The Baital found a ready listener in the Raja to all his denunciations of the sex, for Vikram when on the seat of judgment "ever suspecting women, and holding them to be the root of all evil, he never failed when some sin or crime more horrible than usual came before him, to ask the accused ' Who is she ? ' and the suddenness of the question often elicited the truth by accident, for there can be nothing thoroughly and entirely bad unless a woman is at the bottom of it." A young Raja converses with his friend and mentor, who says, " A woman ever hates her lover's or her husband's friend." " What could I do ? " rejoined the young Raja, in a querulous tone of voice ; " when I love a woman I like to tell her every- thing—to have no secrets from her—to consider her another self—" " Which habit," interrupted the Pradhan's son, " you will lose when you are a little older, when you recognise the fact that love is nothing but a bout, a game of skill between two individuals of opposite sexes ; the one seeking to gain to as much, and the other striving to lose as little, as possible." And a little later, in reply to the young man's question, what his father would do if he brought home a second wife in addition to the one he possessed already, he observes, " In my humble opinion, woman is a monogamous, man a polygamous creature, a fact scarcely established in physiological theory, but very observable in everyday practice."

The Raja Vikram, at the end of the first story, in incautious reply to the Vampire's question as to which of the four per- sons of the tale was the most in fault, declared for the woman. —" With respect to the young woman, I have only to say that she was a young woman, and thereby of necessity a possible murderess." The Baital at once slipped out of the bag, and the poor Raja had to toil a couple of miles back to the tree and recapture him. In the course of another story, a misogynist parrot exclaims : "For perfect love is perfect happiness, and the only perfection of man and what makes man's love truly divine, is the fact that it is bestowed upon such a thing as woman." There is some- thing very pleasing in this quiet taking down of those ministering angels whose mission on earth, as they are for ever telling us, is to raise and purify our fallen nature. It is gratifying to a mere man to find that the wise Hindoo has ages ago declared what we, however much we may have suspected it, have never dared to put into words,—namely, that the sublimity of our nature is not due to the influence of women, but to the ennobling effect that high-minded and dis- interested actions have upon the doer ; that the very unworthi- ness of the objects of our magnanimous affection is what our honour feeds on. One more remark of the parrot is worth consideration. "The beauty of the nightingale is its song, science is the beauty of an ugly man, forgiveness is the

beauty of a devotee, and the beauty of a woman is virtue,—

but where shall we find it ? " But these and many other quotations from the ancient Sanscrit set the Raja's son thinking. " I was thinking, sire what women would say of us if they could compose Sanscrit verses " (un- luckily, Sanscrit verse is not the only medium for the expression of philosophical thought in the West, and we know very well what women think of us). " Then keep your thoughts to yourself," replied the Raja, nettled at his son's daring to say a word in favour of the sex ; "you always take the part of wickedness and depravity." It was imprudent of the Raja to carp at his son like that, for soon the Vampire was tempting him again by asking him to decide upon the " relative wickedness and villainy of men and women." It was a well-baited snare, as the son very clearly saw, but he held his peace, and would not warn his parent. " Women," Troth the Raja, oracularly, " are worse than we are ; a man, however depraved he may be, ever retains some notion of right and wrong, but a woman does not." Too late he saw his error, and no woman will doubt that the ungallant old gentleman richly deserved the chase back to the tree that the Baital immediately afforded him.

After ten such failures the Raja at last succeeded in holding his tongue (what would women say about that if they could write Sanscrit verses ?) and in presenting the Baital (who rather perplexed him by suddenly changing into the body of a dead child) to the Jogi, and the book closes with an appropriate exhibition of thunder and blue flame.

These stories, like The Milesian Tales, The Arabian Nights, and Boccaccio's Deeamerone, make up a collection of after- dinner anecdotes, such as have formed the theme of conversa- tion amongst men at periods of relaxation in the smoking-room ever since man first dined. As told by Burton they are softened down as much as the preservation of their points will admit of, and the wit with which he has clothed them will be their excuse for admission to the library, but will hardly gain them the entree to the drawing-room, and certainly not to the schoolroom or the nursery.