THE FASCINATION OF CRIME.*
Ir is reported by Mr. H. -B. Iriing in his Introduction to his Book of Remarkable Criminals that Tennyson and JOWett once sat up till the small hours discussing murders. " The fact," he adds, " is a tribute to the interest that crime has for many men of intellect and imagination." Any one who knows anything of Mr. Irving's career knows the faseination 'the subject has for him, and his book proves that this interest is not confined to the attrectivea nesnof its more picturesque and bizarre asjaects for stage purposes. For many readers we imagine Mr. Irvirtg's Introduction, which is a little essay on crime, will be of more interest than the main part of the book. He has no eympathy, we gather, with the tombroso theory -according to. which a inert is the almost helpless victim of heredity. A man needs be a criminal for no more urgent reason than that his ear is set on his head at a particular angle, that his forehead is low and receding, or that. he has a certain- shaped occiput Mr. Irving agrees rather with those who hold, like the French Judge whom he quotes, that the passions and desires which are the chief causes of crime-a-lust, idleness, anger, hatred, revenge-a " are ahared by richand poor alike, by the educated and uneducated. They are inherent in human nature ; the germ is in every man." To these causes Mr. Irving, -strangely, omits to add ambition, yet unquestionably this has been the inspiration of most of the " splendid sinners " of history whom he would. include in an en. . largedaNetvgate Calendar. For Mr. Irving's, definition of crime is by no means met. by that implied by our penal laws. ". Crime," 'says, ?Jaya, " broadly speaking, the attempt by fraud or violence to posiess oneself of Something belonging to another." This premiss granted, it follovis that the crimes of Napoleon " are in essence no different from those of Sheppard or. Peace." " If," said Frederick the Great to his Minister Radziwill, ". there. is any- thing to be gained by it, we will be honest ; if deeeption is necessary. let us be cheats." " These," adds. Mr.. Irving, " are the very
sentiments of Jonathan Wild." The present Head of the Criminal .
Investigation Department has said that many criminals are animated by a spirit of "perverts adventure," and is it .trot' • A Book of Reniarkable BY Gesell saki 0.. us. ed. rata
this spirit, says Mr. Irving in effect, which animated Alexander the Great and now animates the present German Emperor Historians, he maintains, by their " fine writing " have distorted facts and done infinite harm. He suggests a new reading of history in which heroes should be heroes, and criminals criminals, and " thus something might be done towards restoring that balance of moral judgment in historical transactions for the perversion of which we are suffering to-day." If a Kaiser Wilhelm, bent on " perverse adventures," could feel that he would be regarded by the world as no better than a Peace or a Crippen, would he be prevented from plunging into them ? The idea is interesting, but unfortunately your great sinners, from Lucifer onwards, were never deterred by the fear of obloquy.
Mr. Irving goes on to show that, apart from the general interest which crime has always had for men of " intellect and imagination," it has frequently been a direct inspiration to works of art :- " The murder of Mr. Arden of Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics to Shakespeare. The Peitzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's remarkable novel AndrE Comilla. To Italian crime we owe Shelley's Cenci and Browning's The Ring and the Book. Mrs. Manning was the original of the maid Hortense in Bleak House. Jonathan Wild, Eugene Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas Griffiths Wainwright have all been made the heroes of books or plays of varying merit."
From this to a comparison of real criminals with those of romance was an easy and attractive step. Mr. Irving has confined himself to the creations of Shakespeare, and his analyses of Ingo, of Cassius, of Macbeth, of King Claudius, are extremely interesting, but, as is inevitable with all Shakespearean criticism, his con- clusions are also extremely debatable. An incidental remark in Mr. Irving's Introduction assures us that life must be for him a thing of extraordinary, if lurid, interest. " Some years ago James Payn, the novelist, hazarded the reckoning that one person in every five hundred was an undiscovered murderer. This gives us all a hope, almost a certainty, that we may reckon one such person at least among our acquaint. antes." Since that passage was written we gather that Mr. Irving's curious taste in his acquaintance has been satisfied to the extent of the " one person," for he adds in a footnote : " The author was one of three men discussing this subject in a London club. They were able to name six persons of their various acquaintance who were, or had been, suspected of being successful murderers." How Robert Louis Stevenson would have delighted in this outlook !
From Mr. Irving's fascinating essay, with its moral and philo- sophic flavour, it is a somewhat abrupt descent to the stories of crime that form the main part of his book. Careful not to imitate the faults of the historians, he writes a strictly impartial account of each crime, sparing no detail. Indeed, the dispassionateness of his method and his anxiety to spare us no details have had the effect of giving a curious and rather unpleasant prominence to the physical aspect of the crimes, and by the end of the book we feel somewhat as if we had emerged from a charnel-house. In selecting his cases Mr. Irving has given preference to those criminals pre-eminent " in 'character or achievement." These include, of course, the notorious Charles Peace, but to the general public most of the other names will be new. The collection is cosmopolitan, Mr. Irving having drawn his criminals from France and Austria, the United States and New Zealand, as well as from this country; but those who look for any striking evidence of racial differences in crime will be disappointed. The careers of Hobert Butler, of Dunedin ; of Holmes, " the wandering assassin " of America ; of Denies, " the merry murderer " of Paris, show that fundamentally human nature is very much the same all the world over.
Previous page
