SENSATIONAL TRIALS.
FORTY years ago—it seems a century, so rapid has been the march of opinion—the orthodox argument against the abolition of the taxes on literature was, that if the poor could buy newspapers cheap, they would read nothing but police reports. A clergyman—we think his name was Spencer, and that he was Hon. as well as Rev.—who stated before a Committee of the House of Commons that, in his judgment, reading police reports would not do the expected harm, was considered singularly audacious, not to say a little impious, and was asked questions which were in fact, and were intended to be, austere rebukes. We do not know that he was right, though we fancy he was, and for the reason he gave that the empty gossip of a village is much more corrupting than any newspaper report is likely to be ; but it is quite certain that the better classes have given up the right to raise the old objection. They read police reports quite as eagerly as ever the poor did. Nothing marks the end of the century in all countries more decidedly than the appetite of the public for reports of sensational cases in Courts of Justice, and especially cases in which the parties are in any way generally known. They need not be "aristocratic" cases,—that is a blunder caused
by the fact that aristocratic cases linger a little the longest in the general memory of a community overtaxed with endlessly succeeding incidents. Theatrical cases will do just as well, or cases involving any class, provided only the names are not absolutely indistinguishable, in which event the public some- times stolidly refuses to attend. If, however, the names are fairly familiar, the community pounces upon the record of trials as the most delightful of all reading, and while they are going on, scarcely attends to any report of public events even of considerable importance. This week, for instance, the public has had two trials before it, or inquiries leading to trials, and it has busied itself with them, and with nothing else whatever. Mr. Hurlbert's conduct has been discussed in clubs ten times as much as Mr. Quinton's ; and in omnibuses, though the passengers all read about the Queen at Grasse—why, Thackeray only could explain—they mention Miss Baskett fifty times as often. The later editions of the evening newspapers, which alone contain much fresh report of evidence, are almost torn out of the newsboys' bands, and are swept off the railway bookstalls in reams at a time, while the ear catches nothing but "the verdict," "the Judge," "the Magistrate," or "the plaintiff," and, more rarely, "the jury," each of them usually prefaced with strong adjectives. of con- demnation and approval. The interest, in fact, in such trials is genuine and intense, and far exceeds that excited by any public event whatever, except, indeed, a very great smash in the City, which somehow excites not only those who might fairly be supposed to be affected, but classes who, it might be fancied, stood wholly outside the range of any pecuniary catastrophe whatever. It is not too much to say that through- out London on Monday afternoon, foreign affairs and Par- liamentary disputes were alike forgotten, and that the single question on the tongue of all men, cultivated and uncultivated alike, was, "How has the verdict gone? " nobody even stopping to explain about what verdict he inquired.
The old Conservatives, who used upon this question to irritate Mr. Bright so deeply, it is clear, understood English nature, or rather human nature, more profoundly than he did, though they made the foolish mistake of thinking the different classes of society radically different from each other. The world does use its privilege of cheap reading to read "police reports," or their equivalent sensational trials, first of all, the only failure in the prophecy being that all classes are fascinated by them alike. The cultivated read. as well as the poor, and it is not difficult to understand their impulse. They are both alike seeking excitement and distraction from the monotony of ordinary life, and to both the stories revealed in such trials are like sensational novels, only a little more in- teresting, because, to employ for once a bit of rather detestable literary slang, of their ":flavour of actuality." There is always a bad hero, and usually a bad heroine; there are exciting adventures in plenty ; there is the Providence or Fate necessary to plots, in the shape of the silent but all- powerful Law, controlling all and rendering all efforts f rue- tuous or futile; there is an infinity of surprises ; and there is, nine times out of ten, the winding-up catastrophe for one aide or the other, the jurymen's long-delayed verdict. The dialogue in. these novels is always racy, for hardly any art could depict character as the witnesses unconsciously paint their own; and the situations, especially in murder trials or trials in which the true penalty is social ruin, are often strained till one hardly wonders that proceedings are occasionally interrupted by a death or a suicide. The plots, too, are sometimes such as novelists, with all their liberty, hardly dare invent, lest they should be accused of stretching their right to suggest the improbable. No popular writer in England would venture to depict a person such as Captain Verney is charged with being, and will, we heartily hope, prove himself not to be ; while the most daring of French or Russian analysts of secret crime would have hesitated before the surprise involved in Mr. Hurlbert's successful defence,—that be once had in his service a secretary who personated him through months of evil adventure, wrote a hundred and fifty letters in a hand- writing exactly like his employer's, and then vanished into the impenetrable cloudland of the United States. No such stories are to be found in print, and however much we may regret it, it is impossible to be surprised at the interest they excite, or to hope that, for good or evil, the next story—and they crop up as if the demand helped to produce the supply—will not be similarly devoured. It will be, we may rely on it, for mankind will study mankind to the end of time, and those whose lives are lived within limits will feel the interest of astonishment, or horror, or curiosity as to the lives of those who in any way—usually it is a fright- fully bad way, but not quite always—have stepped or rushed or fallen outside the lines. Think how you breathe when a window-cleaner steps fairly to the edge of the sill forty feet in the air, and remember that that is the mental position of the millions when any one they know of is on trial for his life, or his existence as a man among fellow-men. ;Unless something really great in the way of public events, a war, for instance, absorbs all public attention upon itself, the appetite for stories told in Courts of Justice will not die out, or even greatly diminish. They were the enjoyment of the Athenian slave-owners—perhaps the most intellectual class who ever existed—and of Roman plebeians, and whatever sur- vives for centuries dies too slowly for any one generation to expect in its own time a visible and notable decline.
We say this without in the least receding from our old position, that the appetite for sensational trials is in itself a tad sign, and its indulgence almost invariably attended with deterioration. The last generation, which habitually exu.g- lerated the impact produced by every recurring thing, from church going to the reading of broadsheets, just as we now exaggerate the results of methods of education, and the effects of want and comfort, may have exaggerated in some respects the consequences of sensational literature. As Mr. Spencer tried to explain to the House of Commons' Committee, which sat respectful but incredulous, men are very savage still, and it is probable that the cultivated overrate the 'impression, whether good or bad, produced by all litera- ture whatever. It takes a hard blow to bruise a rhino- ceros, and the effect produced by hundreds of thousands of sermons is so slight, that there is reason to hope that the consequences of years of sensational reporting may be slight also. The devotees of respectability are an immense majority, and their views of things do not change much, for all the blizzards of evening papers which occasionally disturb the ,surface of the world. Still, there are two evil consequences about this appetite for sensational trials about which there can be no dispute, although one of the two may prove to be only temporary. They increase exceedingly the cleavages of society. Owing mainly to our system of reporting, which is healthily reticent whenever poor men are -exclusively concerned—the very worst English trial of our time never obtained one line in a London paper—the trials which are fully detailed are nearly alWaye those of the culti- svated, to the increase of the entirely unfounded theory that -the cultivated are exceptionally corrupt, and to the creation of a most regrettable impediment in the way of their moral leadership. The uncultured lose reverence for the cultured, -and with it half the advantage they might derive from their existence. This phase of feeling will probably pass 'with the spread of knowledge, as it was passed in Germany and Scotland ; but the injury done by the other evil, the habitual dissipation of the mind, must be more lasting. 'The public is perpetually swallowing mental absinthe till it loses all relish for healthy diet. It will scarcely read .anything so dry as political thinking, and for independent reflection it leaves itself no time. Already it demands that its mental bread shall be cut into minute squares, so that it may be swallowed as pills are, without mastication or effort, and presently it will refuse bread altogether, as young men and women do who have indulged for years in a course of -exciting novelettes. That is an immense evil, threatening the whole progress of the new generation, and we confess we see no remedy for it, any more than we do for the sale of shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls. It is a mischief of the times, produced by the rushing advance in the means of disseminating knowledge of which some of us are so proud ; but though at ,present incurable, the mischief may at least be acknowledged.
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