CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PSYCHICAL).
§ 1. _Moral Insensibility._
The moral insensibility of the instinctive and habitual criminal, his lack
of forethought, his absence of remorse, his cheerfulness, had been noted
long before they were exhaustively studied by Despine. In the _argot_ of
French criminals, conscience is _la muette_, and to induce any one to lead
a dishonest life is _l’affranchir_. This moral insensibility is, indeed, a
commonplace of observation with all who have come in close contact with
criminals. Gall remarked: “If criminals have remorse, it is that they have
not committed more crimes, or that they have let themselves be caught.”
Dostoieffsky, speaking from his intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with
convicts in Siberia, said: “During so many years I ought to have been able
to seize some indication, however fugitive, of regret, of moral suffering.
I have perceived positively nothing. Seclusion and excessive work only
develop among those people a profound hatred, the thirst of forbidden
pleasures, and a terrible indifference.” He goes on to tell of a parricide
who remarked carelessly, in the course of conversation: “Take my father,
for example; he was never ill up to the day of his death.” “Scenes of
heartrending despair are hardly ever witnessed among prisoners,” observes
Dr. Wey of Elmira; “their sleep is disturbed by no uneasy dreams, but is
easy and sound; their appetites, also, are excellent.”[54] “It is a most
singular thing,” remarks Mr. Davitt, “that I have met very few individuals
in prison who gave evidence in appearance or talk of being _truly_
miserable, no matter what the length of their sentence, amount of extra
punishment, or contrast between their previous and their convict life may
have been.”[55] Mr. Davitt seems inclined to attribute this sinister
contentment to a sort of heroic fortitude providentially implanted in the
criminal breast. He refers, however, to one man who never smiled during
the time he was in Dartmoor. “His existence seemed to be one perpetual
sorrow, and he formed altogether the most striking exception to the rule
of non-despairing prisoners which came under my notice during my long
intercourse with Dartmoor’s criminal population.” Now this man was a
Swansea stone-mason who had come home one Saturday evening “a little
fresh,” but not drunk, to find his wife in tears, and on learning that she
had been insulted by a man who lived on the other side of the street, he
rushed out, chisel in hand, to the man’s house and left him desperately
wounded. It is clear that this man, who was sentenced to seven years’
penal servitude, was not an instinctive criminal, or an habitual criminal
at all; it was the strength of his social, and not of his anti-social,
instincts which had caused his crime. He was merely a criminal by passion,
and his case forms, therefore, no exception to the general rule.
On the whole we may conclude that the practice of the instinctive and
habitual criminal corresponds very closely with the faith of that
religious sect who in Commonwealth days held “that heaven and all
happiness consists in the acting of those things which are sin and
wickedness,” and “that such men and women are most perfect and like to God
or eternity which do commit the greatest sins with least remorse.”
Despine, in his _Psychologie Naturelle_ (1868), studied this question on
the largest scale in order to obtain exact results. “I addressed myself
for this purpose,” he tells us, “to the collection of the _Gazette des
Tribunaux_, going back to 1825, and I soon acquired certainty that this
psychical peculiarity is an invariable rule among these criminals.... I
acquired the certainty that those who premeditate and commit crime in cold
blood never experience moral remorse. I found also that those who manifest
acute sorrow and real remorse after a criminal act, have committed that
act either under the influence of a violent passion which has momentarily
stifled the moral sense, or by accident, without intention.” He concludes
that the two great psychical conditions for crime are moral insensibility
and perversity, with two accessory moral anomalies, imprudence and lack of
foresight.
“You premeditated your crime?” said the judge. “Yes, for eighteen months.”
“But that is monstrous.” “I know; I ought to have done it in April, but
having no money, I arranged it for January.” A murderer, after receiving
sentence, was led out in the midst of a crowd who hurled imprecations at
him. He saw a comrade and shouted to him, almost laughing--“Hallo! I’ve
just been condemned to death.” An Albanian, after having killed a
traveller to rob him, lamented that the expense of the shot amounted to
five paras; he had only found four paras on the victim; that was his one
regret. An assassin after his crime passed two days eating and drinking
with a comrade; “he was as gay as a lark,” said the latter. “But,” said
the judge to the accused, “one fact indicates remorse on your part: you
were about to cut your throat when arrested.” “That was that I might not
be taken to prison.”
Wainewright unblushingly avowed his atrocities. How could he kill such an
innocent and trustful creature as Helen Abercrombie, he was asked once.
After a moment’s reflection he replied, “Upon my soul I don’t know, unless
it was because she had such thick legs.”
It would be easy to give many similar stories exhibiting the moral
insensibility of the instinctive criminal, frequently manifested in brutal
bravado. They are, however, easily accessible and of sufficient notoriety.
It is enough to give one more. A corporal at Paris killed an old woman,
the landlady of an inn, in order to rob her. He was condemned to death
without any hope that his penalty would be commuted. He knew this, but was
not disturbed, and was proud of his calmness and _sangfroid_; he talked to
his warders on the most various subjects, without reference, however, to
his crime; read books from the prison library, and finally devoted himself
to what he called the literary labours of his last hours. He had a taste
for verse, and wrote a drama concerning his crime. “Death!” he often said
to those around him; “I cannot fear it either as a soldier or as a
philosopher. Yet it is overtaking me in my youth and strength. It is a
terrible thing, but I am prepared, and I shall go to my execution
courageously and with head erect.” The acts of this Socratic criminal
agreed with his words. He slept peacefully, rose and dressed himself with
a smile on his lips, glad, as he said, to find himself still in this
world, where it is, after all, so pleasant to live. His appetite was
always good, and he joked with the warder who attended him about the small
amount of food supplied to him. “Patience!” he exclaimed, “_à la guerre
comme à la guerre_.”
An executioner told Lombroso that all the highwaymen and murderers went to
their deaths joking. It would, however, be a mistake to trace moral
insensibility in the tranquil avocations and _bon-mots_ of men who,
whatever their crimes, are about to pay the extreme forfeit for them. One
criminal occupied his last hours with arranging his unpublished literary
works; another gave lessons in hygiene to the warders; a third remarked to
those who sought to hurry him to the place of execution, “Do not be
disturbed; they will not begin without me.” Such stories have, however,
been recorded of the most eminent political offenders in all countries.
[Illustration: PLATE IX.]
Dr. Corre, in his interesting work, _Les Criminels_, has investigated the
historic and judicial documents relative to the last moments of 88
criminals condemned to death, of whom 64 were men and 24 women. Of the men
25 died in a cowardly manner, already half-dead with fear, or else after a
despairing struggle with the executioner. These were more than two-fifths
of the whole number, and included many of the chief criminal celebrities,
some of them educated men, doctors and priests. Four accepted their fate
in a state of extreme nervous excitement, accompanied by loquacity. Twelve
maintained to the end a cynical and theatrical attitude; these were
vain individuals, often with some pretensions to literary ability;
Lacenaire is the type of them. Five died with indifference, an impassivity
which recalls the insensibility of the brute or the unconsciousness of the
madman. Eighteen went out of the world with a calm and resigned courage,
often repentant, and prepared by the exhortations of the priest. They
belonged to various social classes. Those of the lower classes were
generally more sincere, and publicly avowed their guilt, holding
themselves up as warnings to others; those belonging to the middle
classes, anxious to leave behind a doubt as to their guilt, declared
themselves innocent; others were silent. Of the 24 women, only 5 (about
one-fifth) showed cowardice. Only one, a poisoner, showed “revolting
cynicism.” The rest, 18 in number, were self-possessed and resigned,
frequently repentant, and generally consoled by religious administrations.
In this category is included the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who for a long
quarter of an hour was exposed to an immense crowd nearly naked--“mirodée,
rasée, dressée et redressée par le bourreau,” wrote Mme. de Sevigné--with
unshaken firmness. Three-fourths of the women, little more than one-fourth
of the men, are among those who died with resigned self-possession. The
cynicism, cowardice, and brutal passivity of the others alike testify to
moral insensibility.
Out of more than 400 murderers Bruce Thomson had known, only three
expressed remorse. Of the 4000 criminals who have passed through Elmira,
36.2 per cent. showed on admission positively no susceptibility to moral
impressions; only 23.4 per cent. were “ordinarily susceptible.” Dr.
Salsotto, in his recent study of 130 women condemned for premeditated
assassination or complicity in such assassination,[56] was only able to
recognise genuine penitence in six. He is careful to point out that
precise statistics on this point are of no great value, unless they are
associated with a very intimate knowledge of individual criminals; the
assumed penitence is seldom real, and the real penitence is not obtrusive.
Dostoieffsky, the most profound student of the human heart who has ever
studied criminals intimately, has noted this fact--“In one prison there
were men whom I had known for several years, whom I believed to be savage
beasts, and for whom, as such, I felt contempt; yet at the most unexpected
moment their souls would involuntarily expand at the surface with such a
wealth of sentiment and cordiality, with such a vivid sense of their own
and others’ suffering, that scales seemed to fall from one’s eyes; for an
instant the stupefaction was so great that one hesitated to believe what
one had seen and heard.”
The moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal is the cause of his
cruelty, a cruelty which he frequently displays from his childhood. Rossi
found in ten of his 100 criminals an exaggerated and precocious cruelty;
one of them, as a child, used to take young birds, pull out their
feathers, and roast them alive; another revenged himself on birds for the
punishments imposed on him by his parents. A certain amount of cruelty is,
however, almost normal in healthy children. The instinctive criminal is
more distinctively marked by his continuance of the same practices
throughout life. At Buenos Ayres a man killed his father in order to rob
him, and not finding the money, he placed his mother’s feet on the fire to
make her confess that of which she was ignorant. Another, after killing an
entire family, played with the corpses of the children by throwing them in
the air and catching them alternately. Another, mentioned by Lombroso,
when shown a photograph of his wife whom he had murdered, testified to the
identity without the tremor of an eyelid, tranquilly adding that after
inflicting the fatal wound he had asked for forgiveness, which had not
been granted. A little nursemaid poisoned the twin children under her care
with the phosphorus from a box of matches, in order to procure the
excitement of going out to the doctor’s and the chemist’s.[57]
In India no motive for murder seems too unnatural or too far-fetched to be
occasionally true. “A village schoolmaster in Aligarh (1881) killed one of
his pupils; and a stepfather in the same district threw his two stepsons
into the Ganges because he was tired of them. A man in Jhansi (1885)
killed his daughter because his neighbour had slandered her, in order that
the girl’s blood might be upon the neighbour’s head. A master murdered his
servant (1881) and threw the body before his enemy’s door, solely in order
to bring a false charge against the latter. A similar case occurred in
Azamgarh five years later: a boy was murdered by his grandfather and
uncle; they threw the body into a sugar-cane field, and then charged the
owner with the crime. A still stranger story comes from the Mutha
District: Randbir, a Jat, who had once been a thriving man in Randbirpur,
fell into the hands of the moneylenders, lost his property and his house,
and became for some crooked reason embittered against his old
fellow-villagers. He made up his mind to bring them into trouble. Taking
his chopper with him, he met a little Chamar girl, whom he took into a
temple in Bahadurpur. There he cut her throat and slightly wounded
himself, and then brought a charge of dacoity and murder against the
people of his old village.”[58]
Such moral insensibility is, no doubt, intimately related to the physical
insensibility already noted, and is of an equally morbid or atypical
character. It passes far beyond that of the savage with which the moral
insensibility involved in deliberately killing or injuring a
fellow-creature may fairly be compared. “How you snore!” said one person
to another. “Do it again, and I kill you.” An hour afterwards he killed
him. Lord Gifford mentions an Australian woman of the Muliana tribe who
admitted having killed and eaten two of her own children, who annoyed her
by crying. (The Australian aborigines are, however, usually very tender to
their children.) A Maori chief said to Mr. Tregear--“If I go out for a
morning walk with my spear, and I see a man, and I push my spear through
him, _that_ isn’t murder--that is ‘_killing_.’ But if I invite him to my
home, give him food, tell him to sleep, and then kill him, _that_ is
‘_murder_.’”[59] Such a clear-cut distinction as this testifies to a
considerable degree of moral insensibility. It must be noted, however,
that while in this respect the criminal approximates to the savage, he is
at the same time related to those more or less civilised persons who
tolerate killing with equanimity when it is called war.
§ 2. _Intelligence._
The two most characteristic features in the intelligence of the average
criminal are at first sight inconsistent. On the one hand he is stupid,
inexact, lacking in forethought, astoundingly imprudent. On the other hand
he is cunning, hypocritical, delighting in falsehood, even for its own
sake, abounding in ruses. These characteristics are fully illustrated in
the numerous anecdotal books which have been written concerning crime and
criminals.
Several attempts have been made to attain accurate figures as to the
relative intelligence of criminals, but there must be a considerable
element of guess-work in such calculations. Dr. Marro, a reliable
observer, detected a notable defect of intelligence in 21 cases out of
500. He found that incendiaries and then murderers yielded the largest
proportion of individuals with defective intelligence; then came
vagabonds, sexual offenders, those convicted of assault, highwaymen, and
those convicted of simple theft. The fraudulent class, as well as
pickpockets and burglars, showed no instances of defective intelligence.
That is to say that criminals against the person show a much lower level
of intelligence than criminals against property.
The stupidity and the cunning of the criminal are in reality closely
related, and they approximate him to savages and to the lower animals.
Like the savage, the criminal is lacking in curiosity, the foundation of
science, and one of the very highest acquisitions of the highly-developed
man. He is constantly compared in this respect to animals. Macé, a former
chief of the Parisian _police de sûreté_, remarks: “In spite of the
cunning and tricks, which are too gratuitously credited to thieves, their
stupidity generally is scarcely credible; they nearly all resemble the
ostrich who, when his head is hidden behind a leaf, thinks that he is not
seen because he cannot see.” Dr. Corre remarks: “There is something feline
in the criminal: like the cat, indolent and capricious, yet ardent in the
pursuit of an aim, the anti-social being knows only how to satisfy his
impulsive instincts.” Dr. Wey of Elmira says: “It is a mistake to suppose
that the criminal is naturally bright. If bright, it is usually in a
narrow line and self-repeating. Like the cunning of the fox, his smartness
displays itself in furthering his schemes, and personal gratification and
comfort.” “Many criminal illiterates,” he remarks elsewhere, “are so
densely stupid as to be unable to tell the right hand from the left.” M.
Joly, discussing the criminal’s delight in ruse, adds: “Animals are of all
living things fondest of ruse when their special instincts are in action.
Idle and untrained children, resolved to deceive their teachers and to
amuse themselves at all risks, are more _rusé_ than their comrades at the
head of the class. Women make use of ruse much more than men.” I will
quote, finally, on this point some words of Dr. A. Krauss[60]:--“The
specialists say that criminals are more astute than intelligent. But what
is this astuteness? It is an instinctive, innate faculty, which does not
depend on real intelligence, and which is already found precociously
perfected in children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in
imbeciles; although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of
artificial culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the
consideration of concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the
deception of others. The mental inertia so often combined with this
faculty is recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does
not calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the
success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind
directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one stroke.
Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of infinite
variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language and
questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with diligence,
and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous centres. It often
develops late even in highly-gifted men.”
At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are sometimes found
among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not one of the greatest of
poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in danger of the gallows; it does
not seem to me, however, by any means clear that he was what we should
call an instinctive criminal. Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an
equally successful police official, and wrote his interesting and
instructive _Memoirs_, may not have been, as Lombroso claims, a man of
genius, but he was certainly a man of great ability. Eugene Aram is now
generally recognised as a comparative philologist who foresaw and to some
extent inaugurated some of the later advances of that science.
[Illustration: PLATE X.]
Jonathan Wild is an interesting example of a criminal of great practical
ability, a man whose genius for organisation would have made him equal to
any position in which he might have been placed. “In the republic of the
thieves’ guild”--I quote Mr. Pike’s excellent summary of his
career[61]--“Jonathan Wild became as it were a dictator; but like many of
the great men of the middle ages, he owed his greatness to double dealing.
From small beginnings he became, in London at least, the receiver-in-chief
of all stolen goods. He acquired and maintained this position by the
persistent application of two simple principles: he did his best to aid
the law in convicting all those misdoers who would not recognise his
authority, and he did his best to repair the losses of all those who had
been plundered and who took him into their confidence. By degrees he set
up an office for the recovery of missing property, at which the government
must, for a time, have connived. Here the robbed sought an audience of the
only man who could promise them restitution; here the robbers congregated
like workmen at a workshop, to receive the pay for the work they had done.
Wild was, in some respects, more autocratic than many kings, for he had
the power of life and death. If he could reward the thief who submitted to
him, he could hang the robber who omitted to seek his protection. If he
could, for a sufficient fee, discover what had been lost, he could, when
his claims were forgotten, make the losers repent their want of worldly
wisdom. He was not above his position, and never allowed such a sentiment
as generosity to interfere with the plain rules of business. He carried
a wand of office, made of silver, which he asserted to be an indication of
authority given to him by the government. Valuable goods he carefully
stowed away in some of his numerous warehouses; and when there was no
market for them in England, through the apathy of the persons robbed, or
the dangers to dishonest purchasers, he despatched them on board a ship of
his own to Holland, where he employed a trustworthy agent. Like barbarian
monarchs, he gave presents when he wished to express a desire for
friendship and assistance; and in order that the recipients of these
favours might not be compromised, he retained a staff of skilled artizans,
who could so change the appearance of a snuff-box, a ring, or a watch,
that not even the real owner could recognise it. When satisfied with the
good service of any of his subordinates who might be in danger, he gave
them posts in his own household, with money and clothing, and found
employment for them in clipping and counterfeiting coin. He did not even
restrict his operations to London, but, in imitation of other great
conquerors and pillagers, or perhaps through the independent working of
his own intellect, he divided England into districts, and assigned a gang
to each; each had to account to him, as the counties of old to the king,
for the revenue collected. And as a well-appointed army has its artillery,
its cavalry, and its infantry, so among Jonathan Wild’s retainers there
was a special corps for robbing in church, another for various festivities
in London, and a third with a peculiar aptitude for making the most of a
country fair. The body-guards of a sovereign are usually chosen for their
appearance, or for tried valour in the field. Wild’s principle of
selection was somewhat different. He considered that fidelity to himself
was the first virtue in a follower, and that fidelity was certain only
when there was absolute inability to be unfaithful. For this reason the
greatest recommendation which any recruit could possess was that he had
been a convict, had been transported, and had returned before the time of
his sentence had expired. Such a man as this not only had experience in
his profession, but was legally incapable of giving evidence against his
employer. Through his actions he was always in the power of Wild, who, as
the law stood, could never be in his power. Thus Wild’s authority was in
two ways supreme. Nor was he the first man who ever abused such authority.
He did what political parties had done in earlier times. He used without
stint or scruple all the means at his disposal, either to ensure his own
safety, or to crush any one whom he suspected. It was necessary, according
to the public opinion of his time, that a considerable number of thieves
and robbers should be hanged; he satisfied at once the popular notions of
justice and his own principles by bringing to the gallows all who
concealed their booty, or refused to share it with himself. When required,
he provided also a few additional victims in the form of persons who had
committed no offence whatever. Sometimes he destroyed them because they
were unfortunately in possession of evidence against himself, sometimes
only because a heavy reward had been offered for the conviction of any one
who might have perpetrated a great crime, and because, with the gang at
his back, it was quite as easy to prove the case against the innocent as
against the guilty, and not less convenient.” Wild’s greatness had a
sudden fall. He was arrested for coming to the rescue of a highwayman near
Bow, and his enemies at once took courage. He was speedily overwhelmed
with evidence, and was hanged in 1725.
§ 3. _Vanity._
The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact.
It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves,
and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character
with a large proportion of artist and literary men, though, as Lombroso
remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the
artist and literary man marks the abnormal element, the tendency in them
to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak points of a mental
organisation, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist
in the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme
forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental
organisation, artist or criminal.
George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men, has some remarks on the
vanity of criminals in regard to dress:--“There is not a set of people in
the world more vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a figure
whenever they have an opportunity, and of attracting the eyes of their
fellow-creatures by the gallantry of their appearance. The famous Sheppard
of olden times delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when he
appeared in public generally wore a silver-hilted sword at his side;
whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later day, were the best-dressed men
on the _pavē_ of London. Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly
decorated, and the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of
dress; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, a leader of the cannibal gipsy
band which infested Hungary towards the conclusion of the last century,
was adorned with gold and jewels to the value of four thousand guilders.
Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonise. The
Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display as their brethren
of other lands, and, whether in prison or out of it, are never so happy as
when, decked out in a profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun,
or walk jauntily up and down.” He then describes the principal features of
Spanish robber foppery.[62]
More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of
criminals. “In ordinary society,” said Vidocq, “infamy is dreaded; among a
body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to be an _escarpe_
(assassin) is the highest praise.” This is universally true among every
group of murderers or of thieves; the author of a large criminal
transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero, and he looks down
upon the others with contempt; the man who has had the misfortune to be
imprisoned for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society,
disreputable offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of
magnitude.
A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard that
all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said: “Now, my schoolfellows
will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should never be heard
of.” It is this same weak-minded desire to excite interest and sympathy
which leads young men and women of ill-balanced mental organisation to
commit suicide in some public and startling fashion. The same feeling, and
also, doubtless, the need for expression, leads to the frequency with
which criminals keep diaries. The Marquise de Brinvilliers wrote a minute
account of her vices and crimes which was brought up in evidence against
her; Wainewright appears to have kept a diary of this kind which also fell
into other hands; John Wilkes Booth, the shallow-brained young actor who
killed President Lincoln, had, with his stagy patriotism, some of the
characteristics of the instinctive criminals, showing themselves
especially in his morbid vanity. The chief suffering he felt after the
deed was to his vanity. He wrote in his diary: “I struck boldly, and not
as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through thousands of his
friends; was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted
_Sic Semper_ before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all the
pickets. Rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the
flesh at every jump.” And again he writes: “After being hunted like a dog
through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gun-boats till I was
forced to return, wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against
me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honoured
for--what made Tell a hero.” And again: “I am abandoned, with the curse of
Cain upon me, when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have
made me great.”
The excessive vanity of the criminal sometimes leads him to commit the
imprudence of talking about his plans beforehand, and so courting
detection. Before killing three rich men, a murderer was heard to say, “I
want to do something great: oh, I shall be talked about!” We hear of
Wainewright’s “insatiable and morbid self-esteem.” He enjoyed the respect
paid to him in prison, and insisted upon being treated as a gentleman. A
prisoner concluded a letter to her accomplice, “Your Lucrezia Borgia.”
Sometimes the vanity of the criminal shows itself in the artistic or
dramatic representations which he makes of his crime. Perhaps the most
curious and audacious attempt is that recorded by Lombroso, who gives a
representation of it: three assassins had themselves photographed as they
appeared with knives in their hands and looks of resolute villainy, when
about to commit the deed.
The Abbé Moreau has described the reception of a great criminal by his
fellows at the prison of La Grande Roquette. He is immediately surrounded,
though the curiosity remains respectful; “he is a king in the midst of his
subjects; envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who have
succeeded in placing themselves near him; they listen eagerly for his
slightest word; they do not speak their admiration for fear of
interrupting him, and he knows that he dominates and fascinates them.”
§ 4. _Emotional Instability._
The criminal everywhere is incapable of prolonged and sustained exertion;
an amount of regular work which would utterly exhaust the most vigorous
and rebellious would be easily accomplished by an ordinary workman. He is
essentially idle; the whole art of crime lies in the endeavour to avoid
the necessity of labour. This constitutional laziness is therefore one of
the chief organic bases of crime. Make idleness impossible and you have
done much to make the criminal impossible. It is not without reason that
French criminals call themselves _pègres_ (from _pigritia_), the idle.
Lemaire, a notorious French criminal of the beginning of the century, was
speaking for all his class when he said to his judges: “I have always been
lazy; it is a shame, I admit, but I am not adapted for work; to work one
needs an effort, and I am incapable of it; I only have energy for evil; if
one must work I do not care about life; I would rather be condemned to
death.”
While he is essentially lazy, and exhibits this even in his general
neglect of personal cleanliness (though sometimes dressed outwardly as an
ordinary man of the world), the criminal is capable of moments of violent
activity. He cannot, indeed, live without them; they are the chief events
of his spiritual life.
Louis Desprez, an unfortunate _littérateur_, imprisoned at Saint-Pélagie
for a literary offence, “summed up the psychology of criminals,” remarks
M. Émile Gautier, “in one picturesque formula: They see the world under
the aspect of an immense gaol alternating with an immense brothel. And
this is true. For them imprisonment is the normal condition. Liberty is
their holiday, an occasional transitory holiday, during which they wallow
in the _far niente_ and debauch, like sailors who consume in three days
the earnings of eighteen months, but a holiday which will have an end, a
foreseen and expected end.”
The criminal craves for some powerful stimulus, excitement, uproar, to
lift him out of his habitual inertia. That is why the love of alcohol is
in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is organised as we
have seen the criminal to be must have some powerful stimulant to take him
out of himself, to give him a joy which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and
alcohol is the stimulant which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently
happens, he is the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon
obtains morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together,
although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as the
cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid manifestations of
organic defects which for the most part precede birth. The abuse of
alcohol is not, however, universal among criminals, at all events when any
intellectual ability is required. “It would not do to drink in our
business,” said a sharper to Lombroso.
The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling. The love
of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than the love of
drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of a band of
criminals who played for two days without intermission. We hear of a
French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations of bread and wine and
at last died of starvation; of another who in the excitement of the game
forgot his approaching execution.
To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of
both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which the
criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to
develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince Krapotkine,
speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners in France,
writes:--“The facts which we came across during our prison life surpass
all that the most frenzied imagination could invent. One must have been
for long years in a prison, secluded from all higher influences and
abandoned to one’s own and that of a thousand convicts’ imaginations, to
come to the incredible state of mind which is witnessed among some
prisoners. And I suppose that I shall say only what will be supported by
all intelligent and frank governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons
are _the_ nurseries for the most revolting category of breaches of moral
law.”[63] There is unquestionable evidence that the same practices exist,
notwithstanding all discipline, in English prisons.
Such practices grow up chiefly as a means of excitement and diversion in
vacuous lives. Love, in its highest and strongest forms, seems to be
extremely rare. This is true even when love is the cause of the crime. The
love, even when strong, remains rather brutal. When a man was asked if he
really loved the woman for whose sake he had murdered her husband, he
replied: “Oh, if you had seen her naked!”
The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief
satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all
events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the
prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival; here he
attains his highest experiences of forgetful exhilaration. Vidocq, still
a criminal at heart, even after he had become a police official, has
described the orgy in his _Memoirs_:--“Imagine a rather large square hall,
with walls, once white, now blackened by exhalations of every kind: such
is, in all its simplicity, the aspect of a temple of Bacchus and
Terpsichore. At first by a very natural optical illusion, one is only
struck by the smallness of the place, but when the eye succeeds in
piercing the atmosphere, thick with a thousand vapours which are not
inodorous, the size becomes manifest by the details which escape from the
chaos. This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist
dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation,
not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in
every direction. What beatitude! What a joyous life! Never for epicureans
were so many felicities gathered together as here for those who love to
wallow in mire. Around, rows of tables, on which, without their ever being
cleaned, disgusting libations are renewed a hundred times a day, serve to
frame in a space which is reserved for what are called the dancers. At the
end of this infectious den rises, supported by four worm-eaten pillars, a
kind of platform, its construction hidden by two or three fragments of old
tapestry. On this hencoop the musicians are perched, two clarinettes, a
fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening drum.... In this receptacle one
finds none but prostitutes and their bullies, sharpers of all kinds,
swindlers of the lowest sort, and a good many of those disturbers of the
night whose lives are divided into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism,
the other to robbery.”
More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and
more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous outbursts
of excitement common among criminals, curious self-evolved intoxications
springing from mysterious and incalculable depths of the organism.
Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts and admirably described them. “A
prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he tells us,[64] “for several consecutive
years, and his conduct has been exemplary. All at once, to the great
astonishment of his guardians, he mutinies and recoils before no crime,
even murder or rape. Every one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is
the anguished, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive
melancholy, a desire to affirm the degraded _ego_, an emotion which
obscures the judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man
who is buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his
coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces
him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to do
with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every
manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a crime;
also that the question whether the manifestation is important or
insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it
is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first step
that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no longer be
held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the development of these
emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison that there is opportunity of
studying them. It would, however, be rash to conclude that they are
entirely due to prison conditions. They are in harmony with all that we
know of criminal psychology, and it is not alone under prison conditions
that they are the causes of crime.
In Germany these periodic explosions (known as _Zuchthaus-Knall_) have
been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they have been noted
by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at such times as epileptic
attacks are most frequent, and he regards them as fresh proof of a close
relationship between the instinctive criminal and the epileptic. In
England they appear to be rare in men, but, on the other hand, common in
women who have, in prison language, “broken out.” This wild fit of
maniacal violence which from time to time seizes on the women confined in
prisons, and might almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form
of orgy, has been studied with some care in England. Here as well as
abroad it is frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination
deserving punishment.
A lady superintendent thus described the “breaking out” to
Mayhew:--“Sometimes they know when the fit is coming on, and will
themselves ask to be locked up in the refractory wards. When they’re in
these fits they’re terribly violent indeed; they tear up and break
everything they can lay their hands on. The younger they are the worse
they behave. The most violent age, I think, is from seventeen to two or
three and twenty;--indeed they are like fiends at that age very often.”
The medical officer told him that “4 per cent. of the whole of the
prisoners, or 20 in 600, were subject to such fits of violent passion, and
these were almost invariably from fifteen to twenty-five years of age.”
“Women,” he added, “seldom injure themselves or those around them, though
they will break their windows, and even occasionally tear their own
clothing to ribbons.”[65]
Miss Mary Carpenter, in her _Female Life in Prison_, reproduces what she
tells us is a characteristic dialogue:--
“‘Miss G., I’m going to break out to-night.’
“‘Oh, nonsense; you won’t think of any such folly, I’m sure.’
“‘I’m sure I shall.’
“‘What for?’
“‘Well, I’ve made up my mind, that’s what for. I shall break out
to-night--see if I don’t.’
“‘Has any one offended you or said anything?’
“‘N-no. But I _must_ break out. It’s so dull here. I’m sure to break out.’
“‘And then you’ll go to the “dark” [cell].’
“‘I want to go to the “dark.”’
“And the breaking out often occurs as promised; the glass shatters out of
the window frames; strips of sheets and blankets are passed through or
left in a heap in the cell; the guards are sent for, and there is a
scuffling and fighting and scratching and screaming that Pandemonium might
equal, nothing else.”
Dr. Nicolson has made an interesting observation as to the periods when
these “breakings-out” are most liable to occur. “At dates corresponding
with the menstrual period there is a greater likelihood of their
occurrence. Besides having verified this in several cases myself, I have
the testimony of experienced prison matrons to the same effect.” These
maniacal outbursts of hysteria may be compared to the somewhat similar
effects observed especially at the menstrual periods among the epileptic,
the insane, and the imbecile. Thus Dr. H. Sutherland (_West Riding Asylum
Reports_, vol. ii.), from observations on 500 inmates of the West Riding
Asylum, remarks that in epileptic insanity the fits are generally
increased in number, and the patients generally become excited at the
catamenial period; while the mania exacerbations usually occur at this
time. He notes the frequency of excitement, violence, indecent language,
tearing up clothes, etc., among insane women generally at this period. In
a girl with congenital imbecility, who became violent, cruel, and
capricious at puberty, Dr. Langdon Down noted that the monthly period was
always marked by insubordination, violent language, rude gestures, and
untruthfulness. In ordinary healthy young girls the onset of the monthly
period is often marked by a fit of unusual boisterousness.
The period of the year seems also to have some influence on the emotional
instability. Miss Carpenter remarks that “the prisoners are always the
most ill-behaved at Christmas time,” perhaps because this period has, even
before the days of Christianity, been associated with excesses. Among the
men at Elmira, judging from the charts given by Dr. Wey, there is a
tendency to insubordination in the autumn, and also in the spring. In
Spanish prisons, it appears from Salillas’s _Vida Penal en España_,
quarrels and arrests are much more common in spring and summer than at any
other season. Thus, to take one record: March-May, 8; June-Aug., 9;
Sept.-Nov., 4; Dec.-Feb., 3. Two suicides both occurred in September.
Very interesting is the instinctive and irresistible character of
criminal impulses, as shown by evidence which there is no good reason to
impeach. Casanova, speaking of his clever schemes of fraud, says: “When I
put into execution a spontaneous idea which I had not premeditated, it
seemed to me that I was following the laws of destiny, and yielding to a
supreme will.” Several pickpockets have said to Lombroso: “You see, in
those moments of inspiration (_sic_) we cannot restrain ourselves, we have
to steal.” “I did try very hard, Miss,” the women will sometimes say to
the matron, remarks Miss Carpenter, “but it wasn’t to be. I was obliged to
steal, or to watch some one there was a chance of stealing from. I did try
my best, but it couldn’t be helped, and here I am. It wasn’t my fault
exactly, because I _did_ try.” A pickpocket said to Marro: “When I see any
one pass with a watch in his pocket, even though I have no need of money,
I feel a real need to take it.” Dostoieffsky, giving a minute account of
one of the convicts who was most feared, but who was sincerely devoted to
him, says: “He sometimes stole from me, but it was always _involuntary_;
he scarcely ever borrowed from me, so that what attracted him was not
money or other interested motive.” Once it was a Bible which he sold to
obtain drink. “Probably he felt a strong desire for drink that day, and
when he felt a strong desire for anything it had to be satisfied. I
endeavoured to reproach him as he deserved, for I regretted my Bible. He
listened to me without irritation, very peacefully; he agreed with me that
the Bible is a very useful book, and he sincerely regretted that I no
longer possessed it, but he felt no repentance, not even for an instant,
for having stolen it; he looked at me with such assurance that I
immediately ceased to scold him. He bore my reproaches because he judged
that it could not be otherwise, that he deserved to be blamed for such an
action, and that I ought to abuse him, in order to relieve myself, as a
consolation for the loss; but privately he esteemed it a folly, a folly
which a serious man would have been ashamed to speak of. I even think he
regarded me as a child, an urchin who does not understand the simplest
things in the world.”
Precisely the same instinctive and involuntary impulses, unaccompanied by
shame, are found among various lower races. Of the natives of British New
Guinea, for instance, it has been said, “They are inveterate thieves, but
they experience no sense of shame when they are discovered. They
frequently say that they can feel an irresistible power which compels them
to put out their hand and close it upon some article which they covet, but
which does not belong to them.”[66]
§ 5. _Sentiment._
It may seem a curious contradiction of what has already been set down
concerning the criminal’s moral insensibility, his cruelty, and his
incapacity to experience remorse, when it is added that he is frequently
open to sentiment. It is, however, true. Whatever refinement or tenderness
of feeling criminals attain to reveals itself as what we should call
sentiment or sentimentality. Their cynicism allies itself with sentiment
in their literary productions. Their unnatural loves are often
sentimental, as revealed in the character of the tattoo marks. Two
interesting examples of criminal sentiment have recently been recorded by
Dr. Lindau. A German criminal (it is perhaps as well to note that he was a
German), having murdered his sweetheart most cruelly, went back to her
house to let out a canary which might suffer from want of food. Another,
after having killed a woman, stayed behind to feed her child which was
crying. Lacenaire, on the same day that he committed a murder, risked his
own life to save that of a cat. Eugene Aram was very indulgent to animals.
Wainewright was always very fond of cats; in his last days “his sole
companion was a cat for which he evinced an extraordinary affection.” One
of the chief characters of Wainewright’s essays is their sentimentality.
Himself, when in prison, he described as the possessor of “a soul whose
nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still
holier philosophy.”
[Illustration: PLATE XI.]
All prisoners make pets of birds, or animals, or flowers, if they get the
chance. This is simply the result of solitude, and has no connection
whatever with criminal psychology. It is found, if anything, more
frequently among non-criminal prisoners. No one has described better than
Dostoieffsky, in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_, the part that
animals play in the lives of prisoners. He describes at length the goat,
the horse, the dogs, the ducks, the eagle. No one who has once read it may
forget the history of the eagle. The eagle would not be tamed; solitary
and inconsolable he refused all food; at last his mournful despair aroused
the sympathy of the convicts; they resolved to liberate him, bore him to
the ramparts on the cold and grey autumn afternoon, and stood long and
wistfully watching him as he winged his way across the steppes, free.
Family affection is by no means rare among criminals. Often indeed, as is
well known, it constitutes the motive for the crime. It is very rare to
find a prisoner who is not touched by an allusion to his mother. Inspector
Byrnes, of New York, says: “Remember that nearly all the great criminals
of the country are men who lead double lives. Strange as it may appear, it
is the fact that some of the most unscrupulous rascals who ever cracked a
safe, or turned out a counterfeit, were at home model husbands and
fathers. In a great many cases wives have aided their guilty partners in
their villainy, and the children too have taken a hand in it. But in as
many all suggestions of the criminal’s calling was left outside the front
door. There was George Engles, the forger. His family lived quietly and
respectably, mingled with the best of people, and were liked by all they
met. George Leonidas Leslie, _alias_ Howard, who was found dead near
Yonkers, probably made away with by his pals, was a fine-looking man, with
cultured tastes and refined manners. Billy Porter and Johnny Irving were
not so spruce, but they would pass for artisans; and Irving is said, in
all his villainy, to have well provided for his old mother and his
sisters. Johnny the Greek paid for his little girls’ tuition at a convent
in Canada, and had them brought up as ladies, without even a suspicion of
their father’s business reaching them. I know this same thing to be done
by some of the hardest cases we have to contend with.”
Inspector Byrnes also mentions a celebrated burglar and forger of
America, called by the fraternity “the Prince of Thieves,” on account of
his great liberality; “it is a well-known fact that he has always
contributed to the support of the wives and families of his associates
when they were in trouble.”
The criminal appreciates sympathy. Dostoieffsky tells how immediately the
convicts responded to a governor who was affable and good-natured, and
treated the prisoners as equals: “They did not love him, they adored
him.... I do not remember that they ever permitted themselves to be
disrespectful or familiar. On the contrary. When he met the governor the
convict’s face suddenly lighted up; he smiled largely, cap in hand, even
to see him approach.” Prince Krapotkine quotes and confirms the
observations of Dr. Campbell, an experienced prison surgeon. By mild
treatment, says Dr. Campbell, “with as much consideration as if they had
been delicate ladies, the greatest order was generally maintained in the
hospital.” He was struck with that “estimable trait in the character of
prisoners--observable even among the roughest criminals; I mean the great
attention they bestow on the sick. The most hardened criminals,” he adds,
“are not exempt from this feeling.”
Such sentiment as this--limited, imperfect, fantastic, as it may sometimes
seem--is the pleasantest spot in criminal psychology. It is also the most
hopeful. In the development of this tenderness lies a point of departure
for the moralisation of the criminal. What a ruined fund of fine feeling,
for instance, was concealed in the young thief, recorded by Lombroso, who
committed suicide by hanging, having first set his shoes on the bed
between two straw crosses, as though to say, “I am going; pray for me.”
“If one thinks of it,” adds Lombroso, “it is a pathetic poem.”
§ 6. _Religion._
In all countries religion, or superstition, is closely related with crime.
The Sansya dacoits, in the Highlands of Central India, would spill a
little liquor on the ground before starting on an expedition, in order to
propitiate Devi. “If any one sneezed, or any other very bad omen was
observed, the start was postponed. If they heard a jackal, or the bray of
the village donkey, their hearts were cheered; but a funeral or a snake
turned them back. They were also very superstitious about their oil. The
vessel was not allowed to touch the ground until the oil had been poured
upon the torch, and then it was dashed on the earth; and from that moment
until the job was finished no water touched their lips.”[67]
Among 200 Italian murderers Ferri did not find one who was irreligious. “A
Russian peasant,” remarks Mr. Kennan, “may be a highway robber or a
murderer, but he continues nevertheless to cross himself and say his
prayers.” Dostoieffsky also notes the religious ardour with which the
convicts gave candles and gifts to the church. All those who live by
unlawful methods, said Casanova, confide in the help of God. Naples is the
most criminal city in Europe for crimes against the person; the number of
murderers there is about 16 in 100,000, while in Italy generally it is
8.12; and in Ireland (the least criminal land in Europe) it is about 5.
Naples is also the most religious city in Europe. “No other city,”
observes Garofalo,[68] “can boast of such frequent processions; no other,
perhaps, is so zealous an observer of the practices of the church. But
unfortunately--as an illustrious historian [Sismondi], speaking of the
Italians of his day, wrote--‘the murderer, still stained with the blood he
has just shed, devoutly fasts, even while he is meditating a fresh
assassination; the prostitute places the image of the Virgin near her bed,
and recites her rosary devoutly before it; the priest, convicted of
perjury, is never inadvertently guilty of drinking a glass of water before
mass.’ Those words of Sismondi’s,” Garofalo adds, “are as true to-day as
when they were written.” Of Marro’s 500 criminals, 46 per cent. were
regular frequenters of church, 25 per cent. went irregularly. Among sexual
offenders the proportion of frequenters rose to 61 per cent. A man of
sixty, known to Marro, imprisoned for rape on a child of eight, was much
scandalised at the irreligious talk of some of his companions. “I do not
imitate them,” he said; “morning and evening I say my prayers.”
Among women, the governor of Saint Lazare remarked to M. Joly, it is
especially the criminals by passion who are superstitious, thieves very
slightly so; they are practical women.
It must not be supposed that there is insincerity or hypocrisy in the
religion of criminals. For the man of low culture the divine powers lend
themselves easily to the succour of the individual, and it is always as
well to propitiate them. German murderers believe they can do this
crudely, according to Casper, by leaving their excrement at the spot of
the crime. A rather higher grade of intelligence will effect the same end
by prayer. A wife who was poisoning her husband wrote to her
accomplice:--“He is not well ... if God wished it. Oh, if God would have
pity on us, how I would bless Him! When he complains [of the effects of
the poison] I thank God in my heart.” And he answers, “I will pray to
Heaven to aid us.” And she again, “He was ill yesterday. I thought that
God was beginning His work. I have wept so much that it is not possible
God should not have pity on my tears.” Lombroso found 248 tattooed
prisoners out of 2480 bearing religious symbols, while the slang of
criminals witnesses to a faith in God, in the immortality of the soul, and
in the church. When a woman who had strangled and dismembered a child, in
order to spite its relations, heard her sentence of death pronounced, she
turned to her advocates and said, “Death is nothing. It is the salvation
of the soul that is everything. When that is safe, the rest is of no
account.”
It is clear how easily religious beliefs and religious observances,
especially in Catholic countries, lend themselves to the practices of the
ignorant criminal, and it very rarely happens that the criminal condemned
to death fails to avail himself of the ministrations of the chaplain (only
once in more than thirty years at La Roquette), and frequently to respond
to them with gratifying eagerness. In religion his primitive emotional
nature, with its instability and love of sentiment, easily finds what it
needs. A French chaplain of experience and intelligence told M. Joly that
he had “more satisfaction” with his prisoners than with people of the
world. The Rev. E. Payson Hammond, who has conducted many missions to
prisoners, finds very great aptitude for conversion among them. Of the
convicts of the State Prison of Jefferson City, in the United States, for
instance, he remarks:--“Many hearts were melted to tears, and I believe
that a very large number were converted.” “Convicts at their last hour,”
wrote Lauvergne, “nine times out of ten die religiously. Whatever the
enormity of their crimes, they all leave durable recollections in the
heart of the priest who assists them. He sees them long afterwards in his
dreams, beautiful and happy.”
When the criminal is not superstitiously devout, he is usually stupidly or
brutally indifferent. Maxime du Camp, during a visit to the prison of
Mazas, at service time on Sunday, had the curiosity to look into
thirty-three cellules, to observe the effect of the ceremony: three were
reading the mass; one stood up, with covered head, looking at the altar;
one was on his knees; one displayed a prayer-book, but was reading a
pamphlet; one wept with head buried in his arms; twenty-six sat at their
tables, working or reading.
It seems extremely rare to find intelligently irreligious men in prison.
The sublime criminals whom we meet with in Elizabethan dramas, arguing
haughtily concerning Divine things and performing unheard-of atrocities,
are not found in our prisons. Free-thinkers are rarely found. A trifle
will induce the prisoner to inscribe himself as Protestant, instead of
Catholic, or _vice versâ_, or to change from one side to the other; but
out of 28,351 admissions to three large metropolitan prisons, remarks the
Rev. J. W. Horsley, only fifty-seven described themselves as atheists, and
this number, he adds, must be further reduced as containing some Chinese
and Mahommedans. It should be noted that a profession of atheism would
deprive the prisoner of no advantage or privilege open to the others. Mr.
Horsley once resolved to keep notes of the first twelve consecutive cases
of those who on entrance described themselves either positively as
atheists or negatively as of no religion. The results were interesting: 1
was a thief, a rather ignorant person, whose chief reason for being an
infidel was that his parents had “crammed religion down his throat.” 2 an
ex-soldier, a heavy drinker, and when asked why he had described himself
as an atheist, “he said he only called himself mad;” he was actually
insane. 3 a burglar, who said he meant that he never attended church
because he had seen so much hypocrisy among professing Christians; in a
few days he gave up the designation of atheist. 4 was a swindler, a great
liar, and probably insane. 5 was a lad of nineteen, of very little
intellect, who had deserted from the army; his father had been “a follower
of Bradlaugh.” 6 a German Jew, who frequented Christian churches, but not
having been baptised, simply did not know how to describe himself. 7 an
intemperate schoolmaster, charged with deserting his family; he meant that
he had ceased to attend religious worship because he was conscious that
his religion was merely formal; his “atheism” was simply a form of
penitent self-abnegation. 8 a conceited lad of seventeen who had assaulted
his guardian, and had adopted atheism to justify his spirit of revenge. 9
a young man who had robbed his employer; he was brought up under religious
influences, but having attracted attention by objecting to revealed
religions, became a Secularist lecturer. 10 a prostitute and
dipsomaniac with 150 convictions; always called herself an atheist when
she was in a bad temper or drunk. 11 a young baker who had taken poison;
called himself an atheist under influence of laudanum; goes regularly to a
Congregational Chapel. 12 a girl of fifteen; she meant that she rarely, if
ever, attended any place of worship. So that only in two or three, or at
most four cases out of the twelve, was there profession of atheism in any
legitimate sense of the word.
[Illustration: PLATE XII.]
§ 7. _Thieves’ Slang._
Every profession, every isolated group of persons, almost every family
possesses a more or less extended set of words and phrases which are
unintelligible to strangers. This dialect is termed in English _slang_, in
French _argot_, in Italian _gergo_. The most highly developed and the most
widely extended slang of this kind is that used by habitual criminals.
Every country has its own thieves’ slang, but within the bounds of that
country the slang is generally intelligible; the Lombard thief, Lombroso
remarks, can understand the Calabrian; Parisian _argot_ is intelligible at
Marseilles. The use of criminals’ slang marks the recidivist. “When a man
talks _argot_,” said the Abbé Crozes, “he is registered in the army of
evil-doers.”
“I was jogging down a blooming slum in the Chapel, when I butted a reeler,
who was sporting a red slang. I broke off his jerry, and boned the clock,
which was a red one, but I was spotted by a copper, who claimed me. I was
lugged before the beak, who gave me six doss in the Steel. The week after
I was chucked up I did a snatch near St. Paul’s, was collared, lagged, and
got this bit of seven stretch.” That is a pickpocket’s history of his
arrest as narrated to Mr. Davitt. Here is the translation:--“As I was
walking down a narrow alley in Whitechapel, I ran up against a drunken
man, who had a gold watch-guard. I stole his watch, which was gold, but
was seen by a policeman, who caught me and took me before the magistrate,
who gave me six months in the Bastille [the old House of Correction,
Coldbath Fields]. When I was released I attempted to steal a watch near
St. Paul’s, but was taken again, convicted, and sentenced to seven years’
penal servitude.”
Mr. Horsley has an interesting passage on English thieves’ slang, which I
will transcribe at length:--“Of multifold origin, it is yet mainly derived
from Romany or gipsy talk, and thereby contains a large Eastern element,
in which old Sanskrit roots may readily be traced. Many of these words
would be unintelligible to ordinary folk, but some have passed into common
speech. For instance, the words bamboozle, pal (companion, a friend), mull
(to make a mull or mess of a thing), bosh (from the Persian), are pure
gipsy words, but have found some lodging, if not a home, in our
vernacular. Then there are survivals (not always of the fittest) from the
tongue of our Teutonic ancestors, so that Dr. Latham, the philologist,
says--‘The thieves of London’ (and he might still more have said the
professional tramps) ‘are the conservators of Anglo-Saxonisms. Next there
are the cosmopolitan absorptions from many a tongue. From the French
_bouilli_ we probably get the prison slang term ‘bull’ for a ration of
meat. ‘Chat,’ thieves’ term for house, is obviously _château_. ‘Steel,’
the familiar name for Coldbath Fields Prison, is an appropriation and
abbreviation of Bastille; and he who ‘does a tray’ (serves three months’
imprisonment) therein, borrows his word from our Gallican neighbours. So
from the Italian we get _casa_ for house, filly (_figlia_) for daughter,
donny (_donna_) for woman, and omee (_uomo_) for man. The Spanish gives us
_don_, which the universities have not despised as a useful term. From the
German we get durrynacker, for a female hawker, from _dorf_, a village,
and _nachgehen_, to run after. From Scotland we borrow _duds_ for clothes,
and from the Hebrew _shoful_ for base coin. Purely of native manufacture,
however, and entirely artificial, are the two classes of rhyming and
back-slang which mingle with cant to make a whole. By the former, any word
that rhymes with the one you mean to use is put in its place, and
gradually becomes accepted. This has the merit of unintelligibility when
it is desired not to let chance passers-by know of what we are speaking,
which naturally occurs not seldom in the days of detectives and
plain-clothes constables. Suppose I have ‘touched’ (_i.e._, been
successful in some robbery), and feel inclined for some relaxation in
company with my sweetheart (or one of them), I might address her
thus--‘Come, cows and kisses, put the battle of the Nile on your Barnet
Fair, and a rogue and villain in your sky-rocket; call a flounder and dab
with a tidy Charing Cross, and we’ll go for a Bushey Park along the frog
and toad into the live eels.’ This would apparently be but a pendant to
the celebrated bit of nonsense extemporised by Foote, but, as a matter of
fact, to a master or mistress of rhyming slang it would at once be
understood as--‘Come, missus, put a tile (hat) on your hair, and a
shilling in your pocket; call a cab with a tidy horse, and we’ll go for a
lark along the road into the fields.’ And the second class of manufactured
slang is that largely patronised by costermongers. It is called
back-slang, and simply consists of spelling (more or less accurately)
words backwards. Thus--‘Hi, yob! kool that enif elrig with the nael ekom.
Sap her a top o’ reeb and a tib of occabot,’ is only, ‘Hi, boy! look at
that fine girl with the lean moke (donkey). Pass her a pot of beer and a
bit of tobacco.’ The art or merit of this form of slang consists in the
rapidity, often remarkable, with which such words can be reversed. Thus a
gentleman, wishing to test the skill of a professor of the art with a word
not in common use in the market, asked his coster friend what was the back
slang for hippopotamus. At once he answered, ‘Summatopoppy,’ the _y_ being
euphoniously put for _ih_.”[69] Mr. Davitt thus describes a form of slang
(“thieves’ Latin”) commonly used by professional burglars and the superior
order of thieves:--“Its chief peculiarity consists in reversing the
position of the syllables of a word containing more than one syllable, and
making two syllables of all words having only one in ordinary
pronunciation, by adding a vowel or liquid consonant to the first or
second part of such word. By the application of this simple rule to slang
words, the ‘lingo’ becomes too complicated for any but the initiated to
understand. For instance, if two thieves were hunting for game, and one
were to see a policeman, he would shout to his comrade--‘Islema! Ogda the
opperca!’ which in slang is--‘Misle! Dog the copper!’ Otherwise--‘Vanish!
See the policeman!’”[70] Very similar practices prevail in the thieves’
slang of France, Italy, Spain, and India. It is doubtless, indeed,
universal. Closely allied is the kind of slang called _largongi_, by
which, for example, _macaroni_ becomes _lacaronimique_, and _vache_,
_lachevane_.
The chief interest of the slang of habitual criminals is psychological. It
furnishes us with a curious insight into the mental processes of those who
invent and use it; it is itself an embodiment of criminal tendencies; in
Victor Hugo’s vigorous phrase, “C’est le verbe devenu forçat.” It is full
of metaphorical expressions, of objects named after their attributes.
Nearly everything is degraded, sometimes with coarse and fantastic wit.
“While the imagination of the poet gives a soul to animate objects,”
remarks M. Joly, “the imagination of the criminal transforms living forms
into things, assimilates man to animals.” Thus the skin for them is
leather, the face _un mufle_, the mouth _un bec_, the arm _un aileron_.
The body is called the corpse, and to eat is to put something in one’s
corpse. The woman who supports a bully is called his saucepan (_marmite_),
a friend _un poteau_; _ne pas être méchant_ means to be a fool. Everything
is thus vulgarised. The criminal instinctively depreciates the precious
coinage of language, just as to his imagination money is at Paris “zinc,”
and in the Argentine Republic “iron.”