The strong accents in which these things are condemned (and the fatuous replies put in the mouth of “Dr. Polyglott”) make it evident that Burton shared the views of his Brahman “stone. These features of Stone Talk cast strong doubt on the claims put forward by some writers that his negative pronouncements about Africans, even when couched in terms of race, were those of an apologist for empire. In fact, Burton had been a critic of it all along, condemning British domination of India for the hatred and animosity it bred even before he left in 1849, and in one unwelcome memo effectively predicting the bloody uprising that shook the foundations of British rule in 1857, leading the crown to take over the East India Company’s status as the Raj’s sovereign authority. He repeated this diagnosis in the autobiographical memoir published by his wife, describing how the rigidity of the Company’s administrators and their failure to understand local life led them to turn once flourishing villages into places of poverty and suffering; in contrast, the native rulers whom the Company displaced had taxed heavily when harvests were good and lightly when they were not. “Anglo-Indian rule had no elasticity, and everything was iron-bound; it was all rule without exception. A crack young Collector would have considered himself dishonored had he failed to send in the same amount of revenues during a bad season, as during the best year.”65
The religious and moral radicalism and the extreme cultural relativism of both Stone Talk and the Kasidah sprang in large part from the generalization of these views. Railing against the readiness of British Protestants to condemn Catholics for their errors and to attribute immorality to countries still loyal to the papacy, thus hypocritically casting a veil over their own lapses, the Brahman insists that religious beliefs are never founded on anything objective, and that people simply absorb whatever views happen to hold sway where they grow up:
Chance birth, chance teaching—these decide
The faiths wherewith men feed their pride;
And, once on childhood’s plastic mind
The trace deep cut, you seldom find
Effaceable, unless the brain
Be either wanting or insane.
The Kasidah applies the same perspective to morals:
There is no Good, there is no Bad;
these be the whims of mortal will:
What works me weal that call I “good,
what hams and hurts I hold as “ill”:
They change with place, they shift with race;
and, in the veriest space of time
Each Vice has worn a Virtue’s crown;
all Good was banned as sin or crime.
In the notes appended to his “translation” of Haji Abdu’s verses, “F.B.” refers back to these lines when he says that his friend was “weary of … finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error.” It is from these observations, more than from any philosophical argument, that the poem’s author derives his conviction that no religious system can contain universal truth; at best each one grasps some fragment of the meaning that every human group seeks to wrest from the world in order to give value to its own form of life.
All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
his little bit the whole to own.
But this is no mere banal affirmation of diversity. Quoting Pope’s line “whatever is, is right,” “F.B.” at once accepts and upends it: “Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is wrong.”66
Applied to the interweaving of claims to universal truth with the particular forms of life they seek to validate, Burton’s variation on Pope’s maxim stands as a generalized declaration that the “self-spun webs of significance” that are human cultures are interwoven with threads of nonsense. Achieving a liberating distance from them is the precondition for acquiring genuine knowledge and understanding: “he knows not how to know / who knows not also how to unknow.” One particular point on which Haji Abdu offered such skeptically grounded knowledge was that there exists no spiritual realm independent of material reality, and that therefore the soul was not an entity separate from the body. The soul was one of those “words that gender things. … Sufficeth not the breath of life / to work the matterborn machine?” Burton elaborated this mix of materialism and skepticism in part by drawing on Enlightenment thinking; the Kasidah quoted both Voltaire and Diderot, and its author surely knew that Montesquieu had preceded him in warning against the limited and parochial perspective from which peoples stake their claims to cosmic significance. Haji Abdu followed the author of the Persian Letters in finding both irony and grounds for modesty in the way that creatures who live on a mere “dot in the universe” propose themselves “as an exact model for providence.”67
But the particular inflection the Kasidah gave these notions put Burton closer to an intellectual figure of his own time, Friedrich Nietzsche. Burton’s skepticism about culturally rooted notions of morality and truth led him to speak in radically individualist terms very close to those Nietzsche would use in connection with the figure he called the Übermensch,the heroic personality who creates life-sustaining values wholly from within, summoning up the deep power that lesser individuals both lack and fear. “He noblest lives and noblest dies / who makes and keeps his self-made laws,” the Kasidah proclaims in one place, and in another, “Be thine own Deus: make self free, / liberal as the circling air.” Nietzsche’s path to similar formulations was more complex and more philosophically sophisticated than Burton’s, but he too drew part of the inspiration for them from the recognition that every human culture, in setting up what Zarathustra called a “tablet of good” for itself, at once releases the force of human creativity and imprisons it within limits, erecting barriers against the very powers that humanity might employ to raise itself to a higher and freer mode of existence.68 Burton shared with Nietzsche the sense that the path to such liberation lay through people recognizing themselves as the sole source of their beliefs and values, and of the supposedly divine beings that proclaim and enforce them, thereby regaining access to the creative powers cultures obstruct in the very moment of releasing them.
In proclaiming this radical message, Stone Talk and the Kasidah also shine a light on the link Burton himself recognized between it and his condition of living between cultures. Already in writings of the 1840s, as we saw above, he associated the skepticism and materialism he would advocate in his later works with Indians whose intellectual independence was made possible by their simultaneous connection to two competing belief systems. This was the case with certain Amils who “become Dahri, or materialists” through reflecting on the similarities and differences between their traditional Hinduism and the Muslim beliefs of their neighbors; they acknowledged a deity, but one uncoupled “from all revelation,” and embodying “the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications.” Only a few of these materialists became outright atheists, but those who did were more likely than European unbelievers to urge their conclusions on others. Burton’s involvement in Eastern religions and forms of life played a parallel role in the evolution that drew him to a similar advocacy, a connection he acknowledged by choosing Hindu and Muslim spokesmen for himself in his two verse books. These connections would be reaffirmed in the project that capped his career in the 1880s, his translation of the Thousand and One Nights; but we will see that in it he declared Islam to be no less in need of rescue from the limits
