speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its
tendency. Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people
mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all
that; and I do affirm, and always shall (let what will come of it), that
murder is an improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not
stick to assert that any man who deals in murder must have very
incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far
from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim’s hiding-place,
as a great moralist[A] of Germany declared it to be every good man’s
duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpence to have him
apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent
moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? Everything in
this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of
by its moral handle (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old
Bailey); and _that_, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be
treated _æsthetically_, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to
good taste.
To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons,
namely, S. T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon. To
begin with S. T. C. One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with
him in Berners Street (which, by the way, for a short street, has been
uncommonly fruitful in men of genius). Others were there besides myself;
and amidst some carnal considerations of tea and toast, we were all
imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of S. T. C.
Suddenly a cry arose of “_Fire,--fire!_” upon which all of us, master
and disciples, Plato and ὁι περί τον Πλάτωνα, rushed out, eager for the
spectacle. The fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker’s; and,
as it promised to be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my
engagements forced me away from Mr. Coleridge’s party before matters
were come to a crisis. Some days after, meeting with my Platonic host, I
reminded him of the case, and begged to know how that very promising
exhibition had terminated. “O sir,” said he, “it turned out so ill, that
we damned it unanimously!” Now, does any man suppose that Mr.
Coleridge,--who, for all he is too fat to be a person of active virtue,
is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,--that this good S. T. C., I say, was
an incendiary, or capable of wishing any ill to the poor man and his
piano-fortes (many of them, doubtless, with the additional keys)? On the
contrary, I know him to be that sort of man, that I durst stake my life
upon it he would have worked an engine in a case of necessity, although
rather of the fattest for such fiery trials of his virtue. But how stood
the case? Virtue was in no request. On the arrival of the fire-engines,
morality had devolved wholly on the insurance office. This being the
case, he had a right to gratify his taste. He had left his tea. Was he
to have nothing in return?
I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was
entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any
other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which
afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority, what
says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his
Metaphysics) describes what he calls κλεπτὴν τέλειον, i.e. _a perfect
thief_; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion, he
makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he had
seen, and which he styles “a beautiful ulcer.” Now will any man pretend
that, abstractly considered, a thief could appear to Aristotle a perfect
character, or that Mr. Howship could be enamored of an ulcer? Aristotle,
it is well known, was himself so very moral a character that, not
content with writing his Nichomachéan Ethics, in one volume octavo, he
also wrote another system, called _Magna Moralia_, or Big Ethics. Now,
it is impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all, big or
little, should admire a thief _per se_; and, as to Mr. Howship, it is
well known that he makes war upon all ulcers, and, without suffering
himself to be seduced by their charms, endeavors to banish them from
the county of Middlesex. But the truth is, that, however objectionable
_per se_, yet, relatively to others of their class, both a thief and an
ulcer may have infinite degrees of merit. They are both imperfections,
it is true; but to be imperfect being their essence, the very greatness
of their imperfection becomes their perfection. _Spartam nactus es, hanc
exorna._ A thief like Autolycus or Mr. Barrington, and a grim phagedænic
ulcer, superbly defined, and running regularly through all its natural
stages, may no less justly be regarded as ideals after _their_ kind,
than the most faultless moss-rose amongst flowers, in its progress from
bud to “bright consummate flower”; or, amongst human flowers, the most
magnificent young female, apparelled in the pomp of womanhood. And thus
not only the ideal of an inkstand may be imagined (as Mr. Coleridge
demonstrated in his celebrated correspondence with Mr. Blackwood), in
which, by the way, there is not so much, because an inkstand is a
laudable sort of thing, and a valuable member of society; but even
imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
Really, gentlemen, I beg pardon for so much philosophy at one time, and
now let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense,
and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it
morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it,
Τετέλεςαι, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) είρξαςαι; suppose
the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it
off like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have
done our best, by putting out our legs to trip up the fellow in his
flight, but all to no purpose,--“abiit, evasit,” etc.,--why, then, I
say, what’s the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to
morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it
was, no doubt, very sad; but _we_ can’t mend it. Therefore let us make
the best of a bad matter; and as it is impossible to hammer anything out
of it for moral purposes, let us treat it æsthetically, and see if it
will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man,
and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction,
perhaps, to discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was
shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of
Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance. Thus all the
world is pleased; the old proverb is justified, that it is an ill wind
which blows nobody good; the amateur, from looking bilious and sulky, by
too close an attention to virtue, begins to pick up his crumbs, and
general hilarity prevails. Virtue has had her day; and henceforward,
_Vertu_ and Connoisseurship have leave to provide for themselves. Upon
this principle, gentlemen, I propose to guide your studies, from Cain to
Mr. Thurtell. Through this great gallery of murder, therefore, together
let us wander hand in hand, in delighted admiration, while I endeavor to
point your attention to the objects of profitable criticism.
* * * * *
The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder, and
the father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
All the Cains were men of genius. Tubal Cain invented tubes, I think, or
some such thing. But, whatever were the originality and genius of the
artist, every art was then in its infancy, and the works must be
criticised with a recollection of that fact. Even Tubal’s work would
probably be little approved at this day in Sheffield; and therefore of
Cain (Cain senior, I mean) it is no disparagement to say, that his
performance was but so so. Milton, however, is supposed to have thought
differently. By his way of relating the case, it should seem to have
been rather a pet murder with him, for he retouches it with an apparent
anxiety for its picturesque effect:--
“Whereat he inly raged; and, as they talk’d,
Smote him into the midriff with a stone
That beat out life: he fell; and, deadly pale,
Groan’d out his soul _with gushing blood effus’d_.”
_Par. Lost_, B. XI.
Upon this, Richardson, the painter, who had an eye for effect, remarks
as follows, in his Notes on Paradise Lost, p. 497: “It has been
thought,” says he, “that Cain beat (as the common saying is) the breath
out of his brother’s body with a great stone; Milton gives in to this,
with the addition, however, of a large wound.” In this place it was a
judicious addition; for the rudeness of the weapon, unless raised and
enriched by a warm, sanguinary coloring, has too much of the naked air
of the savage school; as if the deed were perpetrated by a Polypheme
without science, premeditation, or anything but a mutton bone. However,
I am chiefly pleased with the improvement, as it implies that Milton was
an amateur. As to Shakespeare, there never was a better; as his
description of the murdered Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI., of
Duncan’s, Banquo’s, etc., sufficiently proves.
The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to see
how it slumbered without improvement for ages. In fact, I shall now be
obliged to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly
unworthy of notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in
the age of Pericles, produced no murder of the slightest merit; and Rome
had too little originality of genius in any of the arts to succeed,
where her model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks under the
very idea of murder. “The man was murdered”;--how will this sound in
Latin? _Interfectus est_, _interemptus est_,--which simply expresses a
homicide; and hence the Christian Latinity of the Middle Ages was
obliged to introduce a new word, such as the feebleness of classic
conceptions never ascended to. _Murdratus est_, says the sublimer
dialect of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish school of murder kept alive
whatever was yet known in the art, and gradually transferred it to the
Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was always respectable, even in
the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln shows, which was honored
with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of another performance from
the same school which he puts into the mouth of the Lady Abbess.
Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot but
think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie would have made
first-rate artists; and it is on all accounts to be regretted, that the
priggism of Cicero robbed his country of the only chance she had for
distinction in this line. As the _subject_ of a murder, no person could
have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have howled with
panic, if he had heard Cethegus under his bed. It would have been truly
diverting to have listened to him; and satisfied I am, gentlemen, that
he would have preferred the _utile_ of creeping into a closet, or even
into a _cloaca_, to the _honestum_ of facing the bold artist.
To come now to the dark ages (by which we, that speak with precision,
mean, _par excellence_, the tenth century, and the times immediately
before and after), these ages ought naturally to be favorable to the art
of murder, as they were to church architecture, to stained glass, etc.;
and, accordingly, about the latter end of this period, there arose a
great character in our art, I mean the Old Man of the Mountains. He was
a shining light, indeed, and I need not tell you that the very word
“assassin” is deduced from him. So keen an amateur was he, that on one
occasion, when his own life was attempted by a favorite assassin, he was
so much pleased with the talent shown, that, notwithstanding the failure
of the artist, he created him a Duke upon the spot, with remainder to
the female line, and settled a pension on him for three lives.
Assassination is a branch of the art which demands a separate notice;
and I shall devote an entire lecture to it. Meantime, I shall only
observe how odd it is that this branch of the art has flourished by
fits. It never rains, but it pours. Our own age can boast of some fine
specimens; and about two centuries ago there was a most brilliant
constellation of murders in this class. I need hardly say that I allude
especially to those five splendid works,--the assassinations of William
I., of Orange, of Henry IV., of France, of the Duke of Buckingham (which
you will find excellently described in the letters published by Mr.
Ellis, of the British Museum), of Gustavus Adolphus, and of Wallenstein.
The King of Sweden’s assassination, by the by, is doubted by many
writers, Harte amongst others; but they are wrong. He was murdered; and
I consider his murder unique in its excellence; for he was murdered at
noonday, and on the field of battle,--a feature of original conception,
which occurs in no other work of art that I remember. Indeed, all of
these assassinations may be studied with profit by the advanced
connoisseur. They are all of them _exemplaria_, of which one may say,--
“Nocturna versata manu, versate diurne”;
especially _nocturna_.
In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to
excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths; and,
from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed to
the aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving for
scenical effect. But there is another class of assassinations, which has
prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really
_does_ surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For,
gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the two
last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very
near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never
had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and
against Locke’s philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable
objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about
with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended
to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are
generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here
read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own
learning.
The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except
Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was
all _but_ murdered,--murdered within an inch,--one must say it of him.
The case was this, as reported by Baillet in his _Vie De M. Des Cartes_,
Tom. I. pp. 102-3. In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might be about
twenty-six years old, he was touring about as usual (for he was as
restless as a hyena), and, coming to the Elbe, either at Gluckstadt or
at Hamburg, he took shipping for East Friezland: what he could want in
East Friezland, no man has ever discovered; and perhaps he took this
into consideration himself; for, on reaching Embden, he resolved to sail
instantly for _West_ Friezland; and, being very impatient of delay, he
hired a bark, with a few mariners to navigate it. No sooner had he got
out to sea, than he made a pleasing discovery, namely, that he had shut
himself up in a den of murderers. His crew, says M. Baillet, he soon
found out to be “des scélérats,”--not _amateurs_, gentlemen, as we are,
but professional men,--the height of whose ambition at that moment was
to cut his throat. But the story is too pleasing to be abridged; I shall
give it, therefore, accurately, from the French of his biographer: “M.
Des Cartes had no company but that of his servant, with whom he was
conversing in French. The sailors, who took him for a foreign merchant,
rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must have money about him.
Accordingly they came to a resolution by no means advantageous to his
purse. There is this difference, however, between sea-robbers and the
robbers in forests, that the latter may, without hazard, spare the lives
of their victims; whereas the other cannot put a passenger on shore in
such a case without running the risk of being apprehended. The crew of
M. Des Cartes arranged their measures with a view to evade any danger of
that sort. They observed that he was a stranger from a distance, without
acquaintance in the country, and that nobody would take any trouble to
inquire about him, in case he should never come to hand, _quand il
viendroit à manquer_.” Think, gentlemen, of these Friezland dogs
discussing a philosopher as if he were a puncheon of rum. “His temper,
they remarked, was very mild and patient; and, judging from the
gentleness of his deportment, and the courtesy with which he treated
themselves, that he could be nothing more than some green young man,
they concluded that they should have all the easier task in disposing of
his life. They made no scruple to discuss the whole matter in his
presence, as not supposing that he understood any other language than
that in which he conversed with his servant; and the amount of their
deliberation was--to murder him, then to throw him into the sea, and to
divide his spoils.”
Excuse my laughing, gentlemen, but the fact is, I always _do_ laugh when
I think of this case,--two things about it seem so droll. One is, the
horrid panic or “funk” (as the men of Eton call it) in which Des Cartes
must have found himself upon hearing this regular drama sketched for his
own death,--funeral,--succession and administration to his effects. But
another thing which seems to me still more funny about this affair is,
that if these Friezland hounds had been “game,” we should have no
Cartesian philosophy; and how we could have done without _that_,
considering the world of books it has produced, I leave to any
respectable trunk-maker to declare.
However, to go on; spite of his enormous funk, Des Cartes showed fight,
and by that means awed these Anti-Cartesian rascals. “Finding,” says M.
Baillet, “that the matter was no joke, M. Des Cartes leaped upon his
feet in a trice, assumed a stern countenance that these cravens had
never looked for, and, addressing them in their own language, threatened
to run them through on the spot if they dared to offer him any insult.”
Certainly, gentlemen, this would have been an honor far above the merits
of such inconsiderable rascals,--to be spitted like larks upon a
Cartesian sword; and therefore I am glad M. Des Cartes did not rob the
gallows by executing his threat, especially as he could not possibly
have brought his vessel to port, after he had murdered his crew; so that
he must have continued to cruise forever in the Zuyder Zee, and would
probably have been mistaken by sailors for the _Flying Dutchman_,
homeward bound. “The spirit which M. Des Cartes manifested,” says his
biographer, “had the effect of magic on these wretches. The suddenness
of their consternation struck their minds with a confusion which blinded
them to their advantage, and they conveyed him to his destination as
peaceably as he could desire.”
Possibly, gentlemen, you may fancy that, on the model of Cæsar’s address
to his poor ferryman,--“_Cæsarem vehis et fortunas ejus_,”--M. Des
Cartes needed only to have said, “Dogs, you cannot cut my throat, for
you carry Des Cartes and his philosophy,” and might safely have defied
them to do their worst. A German emperor had the same notion, when,
being cautioned to keep out of the way of a cannonading, he replied,
“Tut! man. Did you ever hear of a cannon-ball that killed an emperor?”
As to an emperor I cannot say, but a less thing has sufficed to smash a
philosopher; and the next great philosopher of Europe undoubtedly _was_
murdered. This was Spinosa.
I know very well the common opinion about him is, that he died in his
bed. Perhaps he did, but he was murdered, for all that; and this I shall
prove by a book published at Brussels, in the year 1731, entitled _La
Vie de Spinosa; Par M. Jean Colerus_, with many additions, from a
manuscript life, by one of his friends. Spinosa died on the 21st
February, 1677, being then little more than forty-four years old. This,
of itself, looks suspicious; and M. Jean admits, that a certain
expression in the manuscript life of him would warrant the conclusion,
“que sa mort n’a pas été tout-à-fait naturelle.” Living in a damp
country, and a sailor’s country, like Holland, he may be thought to have
indulged a good deal in grog, especially in punch,[B] which was then
newly discovered. Undoubtedly he might have done so; but the fact is,
that he did not. M. Jean calls him, “extrêmement sobre en son boire et
en son manger.” And though some wild stories were afloat about his using
the juice of mandragora (p. 140), and opium (p. 144), yet neither of
these articles appeared in his druggist’s bill. Living, therefore, with
such sobriety, how was it possible that he should die a natural death at
forty-four? Hear his biographer’s account: “Sunday morning, the 21st of
February, before it was church time, Spinosa came down stairs and
conversed with the master and mistress of the house.” At this time,
therefore, perhaps ten o’clock on Sunday morning, you see that Spinosa
was alive and pretty well. But it seems “he had summoned from Amsterdam
a certain physician, whom,” says the biographer, “I shall not otherwise
point out to notice than by these two letters, L. M. This L. M. had
directed the people of the house to purchase an ancient cock, and to
have him boiled forthwith, in order that Spinosa might take some broth
about noon, which in fact he did, and ate some of the _old cock_ with a
good appetite, after the landlord and his wife had returned from church.
“In the afternoon L. M. stayed alone with Spinosa, the people of the
house having returned to church; on coming out from which they learnt,
with much surprise, that Spinosa had died about three o’clock, in the
presence of L. M., who took his departure for Amsterdam the same
evening, by the night boat, without paying the least attention to the
deceased. No doubt he was the readier to dispense with these duties, as
he had possessed himself of a ducatoon and a small quantity of silver,
together with a silver-hafted knife, and had absconded with his
pillage.” Here you see, gentlemen, the murder is plain, and the manner
of it. It was L. M. who murdered Spinosa for his money. Poor S. was an
invalid, meagre and weak: as no blood was observed, L. M. no doubt threw
him down and smothered him with pillows,--the poor man being already
half suffocated by his infernal dinner. But who was L. M.? It surely
never could be Lindley Murray; for I saw him at York in 1825; and
besides, I do not think he would do such a thing; at least, not to a
brother grammarian: for you know, gentlemen, that Spinosa wrote a very
respectable Hebrew grammar.