Books: Intentions
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Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
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The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case,
declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of
misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage,
the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against the
Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all the
cases. The trial, however, did not come on for five years, when,
after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in the
companies' favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger.
Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet,
and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the
other side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
at either of the trials. The refusal of the companies to give him
the 18,000 pounds had placed him in a position of most painful
pecuniary embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of
Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the
streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of
one of his friends. This difficulty was got over at the time, but
shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he could
come to some practical arrangement with his creditors. He
accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young
lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his
life with the Pelican Company for 3000 pounds. As soon as the
necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as
they sat together one evening after dinner. He himself did not
gain any monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to
revenge himself on the first office that had refused to pay him the
price of his sin. His friend died the next day in his presence,
and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most
picturesque parts of Brittany, and was for some time the guest of
an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St.
Omer. From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for several
years, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of his
'skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who
knew him.' In 1837 he returned to England privately. Some strange
mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom he
loved.
It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels
in Covent Garden. His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen
years before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica
and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a
power of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of
the money which he had inherited from his mother, and had brought
into marriage settlement. He knew that this forgery had been
discovered, and that by returning to England he was imperilling his
life. Yet he returned. Should one wonder? It was said that the
woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did not love him.
It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the
street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in
modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one
outside called out, 'That's Wainewright, the Bank-forger.' It was
Forrester, the Bow Street runner.
On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The
following report of the proceedings appeared in the Times:-
Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance,
wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain
power of attorney for 2259 pounds, with intent to defraud the
Governor and Company of the Bank of England.
There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which
he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant
Arabin in the course of the morning. On being brought before the
judges, however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former
plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were
not of a capital nature.
The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three
other indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood,
the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the
prisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to
transportation for life.
He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the
colonies. In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had
fancied himself 'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death'
for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some
Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete his
collection. The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his
culture a form of death. He complained bitterly of it to his
friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people
may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to
him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been
committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was
at least a circonstance attenuante. The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English
law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.
There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy
punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal
influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the
worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came
across him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of
London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they
suddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant
stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was 'horrified to recognise a
man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he
had dined.'
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their
old literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted
Janus whom Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite
cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one
afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing
out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied:
'Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chances
of them. Some of your speculations succeed, some fail. Mine
happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded. That is the
only difference, sir, between my visitor and me. But, sir, I will
tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last. I have
been determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman.
I have always done so. I do so still. It is the custom of this
place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning's
turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a
sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she
had very thick ankles.'
From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent
from there in the Susan to Van Diemen's Land along with three
hundred other convicts. The voyage seems to have been most
distasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke
bitterly about the ignominy of 'the companion of poets and artists'
being compelled to associate with 'country bumpkins.' The phrase
that he applies to his companions need not surprise us. Crime in
England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the
result of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom
he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
psychologically interesting nature.
His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he
started a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting,
and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.
Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases
on record in which he tried to make away with people who had
offended him. But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both
of his attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, being
thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a
memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John Eardley
Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of himself
as being 'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of
the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.' His
request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge
consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificiels
whose secret is only known to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died
of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he
had evinced at extraordinary affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They
gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early
work certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster
mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother,
Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that
'he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into
the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.' M. Zola, in one of his
novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder,
takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of
perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious
resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright's
style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an
intense personality being created out of sin.
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a debut in life and letters,
is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his
latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts
contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite
invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and
nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied
to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least
a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing
against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of
art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for
second-rate artists. It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated
his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is
much in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too
journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word. Here and there he
is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the
self-restraint of the true artist. But for some of his faults we
must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that
Charles Lamb thought 'capital' has no small historic interest.
That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite
certain. There is no essential incongruity between crime and
culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose
of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to
form any purely artistic judgment about him. It is impossible not
to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned
Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But had
the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our
own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian
Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land
or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite
able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position
and value. I know that there are many historians, or at least
writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to
apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise
or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster.
This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral
instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will
make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the
true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding
Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have become
like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or
horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in
immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They
have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor
science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval. And so it
may be some day with Charles Lamb's friend. At present I feel that
he is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit of
disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of
the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr.
John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
and other distinguished writers. However, Art has not forgotten
him. He is the hero of Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney of
Bulwer's Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has
paid some homage to one who was so powerful with 'pen, pencil and
poison.' To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance
than a fact.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF
DOING NOTHING
A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene: the
library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.
GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?
ERNEST (looking up). At a capital story that I have just come
across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your
table.
GILBERT. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet.
Is it good?
ERNEST. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning
over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike
modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have
either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything
worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true
explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels
perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives
everything except genius. But I must confess that I like all
memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their
matter. In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what
fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as
Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de
Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is
rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.
Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins,
not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that
Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green
and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not
given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the
supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his
splendour and his shame. The opinions, the character, the
achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic
like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son
of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm
our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought
that Cardinal Newman represented--if that can be called a mode of
thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of
the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot, I think, survive.
But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in
its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at
Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and
worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men
see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they
will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's
sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the
Benign Mother of his days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or
her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is
irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has
chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious
that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among
them in that 'shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace'
which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and
prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue
petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the 'good hog's hars-
let,' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved to
eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding after
beauties,' and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing
of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even
in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people
talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to
us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one
could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one
can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be
perfect absolutely.
ERNEST. There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.
But do you seriously propose that every man should become his own
Boswell? What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives
and Recollections in that case?
GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age,
nothing more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has his
disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
ERNEST. My dear fellow!
GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our
heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of
great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are
absolutely detestable.
ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?
GILBERT. Oh! to all our second-rate litterateurs. We are overrun
by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at
the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty
is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are the
mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one, and
the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now,
let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy
by Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.
ERNEST. No; I don't want music just at present. It is far too
indefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner
last night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect,
she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in
the German language. Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to
say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like German.
There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading. No;
Gilbert, don't play any more. Turn round and talk to me. Talk to
me till the white-horned day comes into the room. There is
something in your voice that is wonderful.
GILBERT (rising from the piano). I am not in a mood for talking
to-night. I really am not. How horrid of you to smile! Where are
the cigarettes? Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are!
They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greek
things of the best period. What was the story in the confessions
of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins
that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were
not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It
creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills
one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.
I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing
by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering
that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed
through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild
romantic loves, or great renunciations. And so tell me this story,
Ernest. I want to be amused.
ERNEST. Oh! I don't know that it is of any importance. But I
thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of
ordinary art-criticism. It seems that a lady once gravely asked
the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated
picture of 'A Spring-Day at Whiteley's,' or, 'Waiting for the Last
Omnibus,' or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?
GILBERT. And was it?
ERNEST. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what
is the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone,
to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth
the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would
each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice
and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it
for us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It seems to me that
the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it,
and works best in silence and in isolation. Why should the artist
be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those
who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of
creative work? What can they know about it? If a man's work is
easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .
GILBERT. And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is
wicked.
ERNEST. I did not say that.
GILBERT. Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so few
mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of
them. The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of
the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's Great
Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain
their divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was a
mystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.
Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have
proved that he had but little to reveal. But I speak merely of his
incoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not
belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could
sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he
passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still,
he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a
man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was
not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which
thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine
makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as
dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed,
did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised
language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow
hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands
of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of
metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion
also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of
ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some
golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain;
rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme,
the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert
Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made
him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too
often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he
wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by
breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in
discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous
wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or
the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned
language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that
live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If
Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer
through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and
speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room
the pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his
cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands
dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.
Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred,
and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The
spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa
pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his
own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the
melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal
Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears
the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered?
As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer
of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that
we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled,
and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put
problems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered from
the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him
who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside
him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George
Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He
used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
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