seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was
compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like
grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.
He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
_fashion for men of genius_ was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne
was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller. In his
amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio
odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he
induced light dreams. He would deliver critical touches on these,
like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if
another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to
interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as
misapprehensive or mischievous. One night at C-’s, the above
dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X.
commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know
which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him
‘_That_ was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the
early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and
delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations. To have a
style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest
achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street
leader-writers, and this school _Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have
invented. He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely
journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what
he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for
some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least valuable
side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence. A
publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of
the illegalities of his private life.
Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. ‘I hold
three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an
eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees
while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the
consciousness of neighbourhood. The country gives them all to me.’ He
writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating
Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass
slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of
the sheep-bell.’ One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold
bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage
is rather pretty in its way:—
The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men
called _daisies_ in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.
The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high
dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard
the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.
The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a
cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed
a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was
also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle
and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated
by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he
carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods
that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days,
too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about
‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’ There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In one of
the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show
off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry
crystals of the Indian _nux vomica_, a poison, one of his biographers
tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of
almost infinite dilution.’ His murders, says De Quincey, were more than
were ever made known judicially. This is no doubt so, and some of them
are worthy of mention. His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas
Griffiths. He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a
place to which he had always been very much attached. In the August of
the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his
sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It
may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured
her life in various offices. The circumstances were as follows. On the
12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden
House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With
them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the
evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
Helen sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of
Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the
20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they
returned Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of age,
a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing
of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much
his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter
for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey
says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us
hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.
The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in
the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one
decision should govern all the cases. The trial, however, did not come
on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately
given in the companies’ favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord
Abinger. _Egomet Bonmot_ was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William
Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for
the other side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
at either of the trials. The refusal of the companies to give him the
£18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary
embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen
Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of
London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.
This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical
arrangement with his creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a
visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there
induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000. As
soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they
sat together one evening after dinner. He himself did not gain any
monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge himself
on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.
His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at
once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a
beautiful country house at St. Omer. From this he moved to Paris, where
he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all
who knew him.’ In 1837 he returned to England privately. Some strange
mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom he loved.
It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in
Covent Garden. His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen years
before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc
Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney,
which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement. He
knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
England he was imperilling his life. Yet he returned. Should one
wonder? It was said that the woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did
not love him.
It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street
attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he
pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called out,
‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’ It was Forrester, the Bow Street
runner.
On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The following
report of the proceedings appeared in the _Times_:—
Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
of the Bank of England.
There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he
pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
in the course of the morning. On being brought before the judges,
however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and
then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a
capital nature.
The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
for life.
He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
former years, and at whose table he had dined.’
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their old
literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning’s turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’ When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.’
From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from
there in the _Susan_ to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other
convicts. The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in
a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the
companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with
‘country bumpkins.’ The phrase that he applies to his companions need
not surprise us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is
nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on
board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
psychologically interesting nature.
His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started
a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he
give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
which he tried to make away with people who had offended him. But his
hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete
failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian
society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir
John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of
himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’ His request,
however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by
making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known
to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary
affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked. In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions
that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who
held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put
the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice,
kind-hearted girl.’ M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which
bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr.
Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can
fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary
London, and made so brilliant a _début_ in life and letters, is
undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this
memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is
of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and
assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power. This seems
to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a
poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the
true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists. It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his
critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his
published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in
the bad sense of that bad word. Here and there he is distinctly vulgar
in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
artist. But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he
lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no
small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature
seems to me quite certain. There is no essential incongruity between
crime and culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the
purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form
any purely artistic judgment about him. It is impossible not to feel a
strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or
Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But had the man worn a costume
and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial
Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and
this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced
estimate of his position and value. I know that there are many
historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think
it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute
their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that
the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it
will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the
true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius,
or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets
of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they
do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have
nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and
science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or
disapproval. And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend. At
present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that
fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming
studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens
of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
and other distinguished writers. However, Art has not forgotten him. He
is the hero of Dickens’s _Hunted Down_, the Varney of Bulwer’s
_Lucretia_; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some
homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’ To be
suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
_A DIALOGUE_. _Part I._ _Persons_: _Gilbert_
_and Ernest_. _Scene_: _the library of a house in_
_Piccadilly_, _overlooking the Green Park_.
GILBERT (_at the Piano_). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?
ERNEST (_looking up_). At a capital story that I have just come across
in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.
GILBERT. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet. Is it
good?
ERNEST. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the
pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.
They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their
memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however,
is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English
public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to
it.
GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives
everything except genius. But I must confess that I like all memoirs. I
like them for their form, just as much as for their matter. In
literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in the
letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and
Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné. Whenever we come across it, and,
strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not
easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I
think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled
soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at
Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy
that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a
prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited
Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the
Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour,
bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons
and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at
his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the
Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s
hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to
eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after
beauties,’ and his reciting of _Hamlet_ on a Sunday, and his playing of
the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even in
actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to
us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about
themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them
up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of
which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.
ERNEST. There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say. But
do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?
What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections
in that case?
GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age, nothing
more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and
it is always Judas who writes the biography.
ERNEST. My dear fellow!
GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our
heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great
books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely
detestable.
ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?