Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Vital Lamp

  From shadowy types to truth

  —Milton

  Unlike the slaughter in Wapping, the Whitechapel murders inspired no work of literary art in which their horrors were recreated through the power of a master. Yet the murders nevertheless made an impression on English literature, or rather on that part of it which was true to the old Tory theory of evil, which held that the best way to understand the horrors of the present is to study them in the light of the poetries of the past.

  The Whig theory of evil, which reduced it to a problem of social hygiene, had come to dominate European letters in the nineteenth century, as it did nearly every other department of life. It found its most articulate expression in the realism or naturalism of such writers as Gissing and Zola, who were “quite sure that the soul is a nervous fluid.” But there were always writers, both in England and on the Continent, who were faithful to the older methods. Balzac’s Vautrin, under a semblance of realistic portraiture, is an infernal fiend, with this additional distinction, that as a character he is not unsympathetic and is for that reason the more disturbing. The character that is wholly evil disturbs no one’s self-complacency, precisely because few people think of themselves as wholly bad and therefore see no connection between themselves and the villain they read about; they fail to see that the worst people differ from the best only in degree.

  Dostoevsky (who incidentally admired De Quincey and thought of translating him) wrote the two best murder mysteries of the century; but the murders in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are solved, not with the detective’s magnifying glass or an appeal for reform legislation, but through the author’s understanding of the struggle between good and evil that is continuously taking place in the human soul, which he depicts as a contest between the philosophies of Christ and Anti-Christ.

  I find, in the works of certain writers who lived through the Whitechapel murders, passages that conjure precisely the fiendishness which is the dominant note of the Ripper, and do so in a language closely related to the old Gothic rhetorics of diabolism. Henry James fled to the Continent, he told his brother William, to get “away from Whitechapel” and the “hundred other constantly thickening heavinesses” that oppressed him during the “detestable summer” of 1888. A decade later, he conjured a similarly mysterious evil in The Turn of the Screw, in which two children are the victims of an “infernal” ghoulishness. Only it is never clear whether the governess who tells the story is doing her best to protect the children from the lurking evil, or whether she is herself the ghoulish being, the parasitic vampire, who preys upon them in the insane belief that she is saving them from perdition.

  The fiendishness of Whitechapel has its echo, too, in certain of the characters of Joseph Conrad, most notably “Mr. Jones,” the living ghoul in Victory, and Mr. Kurtz, the cannibal anti-hero of Heart of Darkness. On going back, just now, to Victory, I find that Conrad has drawn so copiously on the Gothic idioms that I wonder whether he has not perhaps overdone it. The “dark, sunken stare” of Mr. Jones, the misogynist villain of the book, is that of “an incurious spectre”; and his voice “somehow matched his sunken eyes.” It is “hollow” and “distant,” as though spoken “from the bottom of a well.” His “handsome but emaciated face” is corpse-like, and the “spectral intensity” of his glance has the power to “dissolve the last grain of resolution” in the man upon whom he chooses to fix it. His “lifeless manner” seems “to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave” and a mastery of “horrors worse than murder.” He resembles nothing so much as an “insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and a subtle power of terror.” Conrad has laid it on pretty thick; but it must be remembered that I have here gathered in one place descriptions which in the book itself are spread out over the course of many pages. So dispersed, they are, I think, entirely effective.

  EPILOGUE

  The Decay of Murder

  I believe that all minds which have contemplated such horrors as deeply as I have done, must, for their own protection from utter despondency, have early encouraged and cherished some tranquillising belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings.

  —De Quincey

  The Ripper murders were an instance of the evil De Quincey diagnosed in his essay on the Wapping murders—the evil of the erotic cannibal, the modern serial killer. But although the evil had taken root in England long before the Ripper himself struck, the Victorian mind was unfit to comprehend it and was therefore taken by surprise by the carnage in East London in 1888. De Quincey, had he been living at that hour, might have written something that did justice to the Gothic psychology of the Whitechapel murderer: no contemporary writer did. The Romantic wave had crested.

  And yet there was at least one Victorian literary man who, where murder was concerned, saw a little farther than his contemporaries. Quite as much as De Quincey, Leslie Stephen* deplored the trivialization of murder. De Quincey, in his 1827 essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” mocked the shallowness of the modern attitude toward homicide; he imagined a “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” whose members professed “to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art.” In a similar vein, Stephen, in his 1869 essay “The Decay of Murder,” lamented the disintegration of sensibility which was coarsening the modern perception of murder. No “power of imaginative insight” was, he said, being brought to bear on the subject; and as evidence of the degeneration, he pointed to the rise of the modern detective novel. The murder mystery, he said, had become “a weariness to the flesh,” and the “intelligent detective” a “drug in the market.”

  It was not that Stephen objected to murder literature per se. “If all novels and dramas turning upon startling crimes were to be expunged from our literature,” he wrote, “we should have to make a surprisingly clean sweep. Hamlet and Othello and King Lear would have to go at once; Richardson’s great novel would be put into the critic’s Index; even Sir Walter Scott would require expurgation. . . .” What Stephen regretted was the loss of grandeur in murder writing. The infernal mystery inherent in the act of one man deliberately doing another to death without the justification of war, self-defense, the executioner’s writ, or the code duello, was being lost in the pleasant whimsies of the whodunit; the spirit of Wilkie Collins and Paul Féval was coming to prevail over that of De Quincey.

  Quite true; only Stephen was less satisfactory in explaining why the Victorians wrote murder’s epitaph. Like De Quincey before him, he fingered, as his scapegoat, Progress, that mysterious force which, he said, was “insidiously transforming us into a very dull, highly respectable, and intensely monotonous collection of insignificant units.” But he failed to isolate the particular strain of dullness which had proved so fatal to murder. As a “Godless Victorian,” Stephen could not, perhaps, bring himself to admit it, but the dullness he lamented was that of a people too engrossed in their day-to-day material well-being to rise to the spiritual apprehension of evil.†

  “Poetry” is an ambiguous word; where murder is concerned, it is enough to say that it is a means of describing experience that lies beyond the literal reality to which our commonplace language refers. The poet cannot, of course, forego the use of this everyday language when he invokes these inarticulable aspects of our being; but precisely because he is trying to describe not only the “real” world which the senses apprehend but another world that is not present to the senses, he resorts to a language of metaphors and symbols, to what we call poetry.

  It was the achievement of De Quincey to see that, if a writer was to get his hands around a thing like murder—if he was to do justice to it in the way Shakespeare did justice to it in Macbeth—he could not very well do withou
t this poetic and figurative language. It was for this reason that, although he himself wrote prose and not verse, he drew freely, in his murder writings, on the language of the poets, which he used to make his reader sensible of murder’s Gothic depths, abysses which more pedestrian writers overlooked.

  Much like Stephen and De Quincey, the twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson blamed progress for the banalization of murder. In his essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?”—one of three he wrote on that vacuous genre—he argued that progress has at once subjected men to new kinds of uncertainty and at the same time undermined the credibility of those religious consolations which do something to reconcile people to the precariousness of their situation. The modern man, Wilson wrote, lives in perpetual fear of disaster; yet when disasters come, he is never able “to pin down the responsibility” for them with any degree of certainty. He is demoralized by the feeling that he is surrounded by evil-doers lurking in the shadows, or sitting comfortably in places of power—evil-doers who, moreover, are always getting away with it. For the agitated modern man, the detective novel, Wilson argued, is balm in Gilead: it enables him to forget, for a moment, the complexities and ambiguities of the world in which he lives, and gives him the satisfaction of temporarily inhabiting a make-believe world in which the bad guy (who undoubtedly is a bad guy) is always caught and justly punished. The murderer is spotted, Wilson writes, “and—relief!—he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain—known to the trade as George Gruesome—and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.”

  It is Wilson’s theory that the modern reader adores detective fiction in part because he finds in it a substitute for a lost religion; he is consoled by the presence, in the heart of the mystery novel, of an omniscient God, one who has incarnated himself as an infallible private eye, ever ready to detect and punish the sinning criminal. But if this is true—if the readers of these ersatz gospels really do seek a religious consolation in them—surely there must come a time when they ask themselves why the omniscient detective-divinity is content to punish cartoon villains only. Why is he never shown to prosecute more credible evil-doers than poor George Gruesome, whom he is always running to ground? Why do Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers never give their readers the courage to look real evil-doing in the face? The detective novel gives its proselytes not Macbeth or Vautrin, but George Gruesome, and can do no other. For it is very hard to look, closely and steadily, at something that is really appalling (the Moors murders, for example) if you haven’t, in the back of your mind, a compensatory idea of goodness to buck you up. A real religion supplies the prophylactic ideal—the vision of transcendent grace that enables those who have embraced it to look closely at evil; he who believes that his redeemer liveth can contemplate even the spider sucking the life-juices out of its victim without feeling that the universe is morally sick.

  It is precisely because Shakespeare (I think) believed (or hoped) that there is “a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” that he was able to look so closely not only at Iago, but also at Lear as he carries the body of Cordelia in his arms.‡ It is the same with the tragic poets of Athens. The Dionysian orgy became Attic tragedy only when Athens itself was Platonizing, moving toward a belief that there is an arch-goodness which is not only stronger than evil, but which will eventually overcome it.§ Armed with this apotropaic confidence, Aeschylus and Sophocles could look Medusa in the face without fear of her petrifying power. For although Plato had not yet translated, into the language of philosophy, the belief that grace will prevail, the idea was in the air. Aeschylus, certainly, has caught the essence of it when he has the chorus in Agamemnon sing of wisdom as the (a favor, grace, or loveliness of the gods) which comes drop by drop to men through anguish and suffering, that is, through the experience of evil.

  With detective fiction, it is different. Having no vision of a greater goodness, the books cannot conjure a deeper horror. Dante could plumb the depths of hell because he knew that Beatrice was in heaven. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has no such faith; and that is why Sherlock Holmes, for all the brilliance of his mind, is a lost soul. At a time when all “Europe was ringing with his name,” Watson says in “The Adventure of Reigate Square,” when “his room was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams, I found him a prey to the blackest depression.”

  With the Ripper murders, the history of Romantic murder which it has been my object to trace comes properly to its end. Already, in 1888, the highly poetic and spiritualized language with which Carlyle and De Quincey sought to understand murder had ceased to be credible; and it is no more so now, in an age which, if it has lost the taste of God, is even more oblivious of the stench of the Devil. The sages of the Enlightenment taught their proselytes to scoff at the old theories of evil which De Quincey and Carlyle sought to revive: reason and science, they believed, would usher in a world that could do without such Gothic nonsense. That notable merchant of light, Francis Bacon, went so far as to argue that inductive science would prepare the way for a new Eden. It is a belief that is just now in vogue in Silicon Valley, where the cyber moguls are busy planning to live forever, or, failing that, for five hundred years. Carlyle and De Quincey would have blanched at such alchemistical overreaching—shrunk from the shallowness and hubris of it as from a thing but too likely to breed new forms of Gothic horror.

  Could it be that they were right to try to rouse us from our prosaic slumbers? Have we not had enough of utopiasts who pretend that we can abolish evils which are inseparable from our nature? If so, the time may be ripe for a reappraisal of the work of the Romantic murder writers.

  * Afterwards Sir Leslie, Knight Commander of the Bath; father of Virginia Woolf.

  † In his essay “Witches, and Other Night Fears,” Lamb argues that the night-evils we dread are often metaphysical rather than physical in nature: “the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual . . . it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth.” Such fear, he speculates, may “afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane existence, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.” The devils of our nightmares are for Lamb a symbolic expression of our terror before the incomprehesibility of a universe bounded by such enigmatical propositions as Eternity and Infinity.

  ‡ “And if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage,” says Dr. Johnson, “I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

  § “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good.” Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 469–71. Murder can never of course be condoned: yet precisely because it is among the most harrowing forms of evil, it has sometimes driven men to God.

  Acknowledgments

  I have especially to thank, in connection with the writing of this book, Michael Carlisle of InkWell Management and Jessica Case of Pegasus. I am, too, deeply grateful to my family for their love and support.

  Notes and Sources

  xi In his essay: George Orwell, “The Decline of the English Murder,” Tribune, 15 February 1946.

  xiii “To move a horror skillfully”: Charles Lamb, The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), 214.

  xv Sir Robert Walpole: He was raised to the peerage in 1742 as Earl of Orford.

  xvi “Charming as were all”: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Murray, 1818).

  xvii “a deeper philosophy”: John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Being a History of his Religious Opinions (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 96.

  xvii “love—for a person”: Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 7.

  xvii “new conquering empire”: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (
London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 114.

  xviii “He hath a demon”: William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” in Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (London: J. M. Dent, 1916), 153. Hazlitt was alluding to the New Testament verses.

  xviii “flowers that adorn”: Ibid.

  xviii “really began to talk ghostly”: The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: E. Moxon, 1870), I, lxxxix.

  xix “suddenly shrieking”: Ibid.

  xx “a kind of ghastly object”: Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1887), 293.

  xx “vampire bats”: Shelley, “The Triumph of Life,” in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Macmillan, 1891), 484.

  1 “This lane is a d—d nasty”: The Times, 31 October 1823.

  3 “That is the place”: A Narrative of the Murder of Mr. Weare (London: J. Edgerley [1824]), 8.

  4 “cold-blooded villainy”: The Times, 31 October 1823.

  4 “dull uniformity”: The Times, 5 November 1823.

  4 “offer no apology”: Ibid.

  5 most “literary” of British murders: Albert Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case (London: Robson, 1988), 254.

  7 “lord of the concourse”: George Borrow, quoted in “An Historical Villain,” Macmillan’s Magazine (June 1900), LXXXII, 131; see also Borrow, Lavengro: The Scholar—the Gypsy—the Priest (London: John Lane, 1902), 169–70.

  7 “were grey”: Ibid., 154.

  7 mastiff’s jowl: George Borrow, Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), VI, 534.