THE IMAGINATIVE SIDE OF CRIME.
PROBABLY most men who live "within the hounds of rature," or suppose that they do so, when in fact they live soul and body within the bonds of custom and the respectabilities, occasionally conceive that there is a certain imaginative sacrifice in thus sub- mitting their whole life to the discipline of law, or more truly, per- haps, of routine. We do not envy, indeed we shrink back from the fevering and stimulating atmosphere of a criminal life, but we carry about with us some faint impression that the moral degradation is accompanied, if not compensated, by a greater imaginative vitality, by the vividness of sensation, the highly strung purpose, the thrilled nerves, and the forecasting apprehension of moral outlawry. If there are ever times when as "The intellectual power through words and things
Goes sounding on its dim and perilous way,"
it presents us to ourselves, in some mere day dream, as guilty of acts that we heartily hold to be infamous and criminal,—then at such times we are conscious that the very hypothesis awakens, as it were, all the sleeping vigour of our imagination, and paints with oppressive vivid- ness the details of our conduct in acts from which our whole nature starts away. And we attribute this galvanic vitality of our own imagination, whenever it trespasses into forbidden regions, of thought, to all great crime, and peer curiously into its annals, as if its hideous features would at least be lighted up by that electric atmosphere which men who are weary of the deadness and monotony of human custom sometimes learn to admire.
"Youth hears a voice within it tell Calm's not lire's crown, though calm is well,"
and is sometimes disposed to look with feelings approaching to envy on the imaginary vividness of the life which is purchased even at the expense of peace. To such conceptions nothing brings a ruder con- tradiction than most of the actual records of great crimes. The scenes in which Shakspeare has described how Macbeth, "with Tar- quin's ravishing stride, towards his design moves like a ghost," his imagination lit up by unearthly fires, and his ambitious dreams alternated by fitful glimpses of the hell which he is preparing for him. self ; or the picture which Scott has painted of Mary Stuart, startled by some sudden allusion to the murder at Holyrood into a fit of guilty but royal delirium, summoning her accompli. ces in sin to
swell her army of followers,—such pictures sometimes mislead us into scanning the story of every great crime, as if we should find in it signs of preternatural wakefulness of the imagination, of a mind scourged by the furies into attitudes that at least combine grandeur with guilt. In general, however, it is far otherwise. The present i
day is not poor n crimes of tremendous magnitude. Within the last fortnight we have had the story of parricide in humble life, and of the still more unnatural crime of attempted filicide in the higher ranks, with no insignificant array of murders of a more ordinary class ; tut in none of them is there discernible any striking imaginative-ex- citement, any cracking of that brutal crust with which the murderer's mind is generally armed against imaginative horrors—any dis- play of the malignant hell within. The wretched Ekeston parricide would seem as casehardened and vulgar a criminal as could be found among the professional class of common pilferers. And the unhappy man whose wavering purposes led him into an irresolute and ineffectual attempt on his son's life has shown, as yet at least, no sign of any but the least romantic im- pulses to such a deed, or of any imaginative stirrings of remorse. In the ease of the attempted murder, prompted by jealousy, in Northum- berland-street, Strand, there was no doubt a sea of furious passions and hopes buried in the heart of the man who met his own death in the attempt ; but even in him, if we may judge by the evidence, the low cunning of his habitual life can scarcely have been consistent with the nobler qualms and deeper speculative hesitations which are apt to fascinate the imagination when depicted in the tinselled philosophy of Bulwees Eugene Aram, or the starting and shrinking conscience of Macbeth. By far the majority of great crimes are committed hymen who pass with as little imaginative horror into the last and lowest gulf of guilt as besets ordinary men in ordinary conflicts with con- science and God. How, then, can we account for the habitual dis- position to clothe such crimes in the atmosphere of a special magnifi- cence of colouring, and to make them the centres of the highest creative efforts of the imagination ? In the first place, there are no doubt a few great imaginative tempta- tions to startling crime—temptations which might beset a man whose ordinary life had been not less pure than that of those around him, if his imagination were much more active and powerful. Such espe- cially are crimes of ambition which Shakspeare has generally taken as the centre of his tragedies of crime, simply because it permits the de- lineation of a mind stilt open to all the higher spiritual questionings in conjunction with the worst shades of premeditated evil. The hope of attaining great power is one which, more than any other, is permitted to magnetize and fascinate a certain class of men, not into passionate and unconscious, but into deliberate and conscious guilt, dragging them on under that shadowy disguise of an inevitable Destiny which Shakspeare has intuitively perceived to be a nearly uniform element in this kind of sudden and tragic plunge into the deepest abyss of crime. And in cases like these, where the force of the temptation takes effect chiefly through the instrumentality of the imagination, -the warning instincts also seem to make the imagination their instru- ment, so that the whole force of the battle is fought out upon this arena. And hence, no doubt, its peculiar charm for dramatic writers. There is no other class of temptations which nerve men to face the imagination of deadly crime so consciously, and in all its horrors, without the preparation of a previous moral declension. The only tempering element is that curiously vivid sense of fatality which seems to make the plunge less an action than a destiny. This, how- ever, is probably nearly the only class of crimes which are, in fact, attended by that cloud of spurious imaginative grandeur generally supposed to envelop all kinds of heinous guilt. Perhaps, indeed, we should qualify this assertion. There is a class of crimes generally of the secondary order of guilt, because in some sense disinterested, and incurred under the influence of others, which seem, at least in their consequences, to involve the highest possible stimulus to the imagination,—crimes of which the penalty is a convulsed imagination, though in their origin they may have been due to some overmastering impulse which, while it lasts, keeps the whole mind in a kind of deadly trance. Such, as a rule, are the worst deeds of women, even when they seem most cold and cruel, and do most violence to their deepest instincts ;—crimes not in their na- ture imaginative or even intellectual, but the offspring of sortie one
powerful instinct which for the time gains the victory over all others, though terribly avenged sooner or later by the reaction of the other violated instincts on the imagination. It was amongst this class, we are persuaded, that Shakspeare meant to include even the guilt of Lady Macbeth. He has delineated her nature as more unscrupulous than her husband's, but as less deeply degraded by their common guilt. Her crime begins in ambition for her husband, not for herself; she is haunted by no imaginative restraints like her weaker and more selfish
lord; natural instinct, indeed, asserts its force decisively once : she would have taken the guilt of the murder itself upon her had not Duncan resembled "her father while he slept ;" but as Macbeth plunges deeper and deeper in guilt, with less and less shrinking, she begins to feel the recoil of outraged instincts, and at last her mind yields to the strain and is broken by the horror of its own haunting memories. As a rule, feminine crimes are of the same class, crimes of instinct avenged by instinct, beginning in unscrupulous self. abandonment, ending. in a kind of remorse that is almost mono- mania, and only imaginative when the instinct that asserts its sway over the mind can find no other than imaginative food. The stories of child-murder followed by monomania which we read so commonly, and of which the greatest picture ever given to the world is contained in Adam Bede, are all of this class. To this also belongs the large class of crimes committed by such women as the Queen of Scots, of whose paroxysms of remorse Sir Walter Scott has given us so marvellous a picture in The Abbot. But the imaginative side of these crimes is the remorseful side. They seldom involve any deliberate weighing of guilt beforehand, and represent, so far as they are wilful, the utter blindness of wilfully one-sided impulse. Seen truly—as they are depicted, for instance, in Hetty's character in Adam Bede—nothing can be blinder than the first stupified plunge; it is not till the lacerated instinct reasserts its power, without finding any way of stilling the pain, that it begins to take effect on the ima- gination, and to replace its natural and unconscious influence over the mind by awakening empty echoes in the memory, and painting unreal pictures on the air.
With these exceptions, we believe it to be for the most part true that the imaginative atmosphere with which great crimes are gene. rally surrounded is really an invention of the looker-on. Seeing events which it shocks and startles our own imaginations even to conceive, we attribute to the actors in them the same visionary appre- hensions, the same intensified perceptions, the same far-reaching field of reproachful associations as would haunt a comparatively healthy nature in the same circumstances. But, as it turns out, nothing is less true to fact. As a rule, in a descending career, the ima- gination, in any wide sense, is one of the first faculties to be blunted and depraved. A man who retains any healthy vividness of imagination has seldom sunk far, or hopelessly, in the moral scale. We do not mean, of course, that mere physical terrors will not haunt the minds of the very lowest ; but fits of moral delirium tremens do not constitute a vivid imagination. What we mean by that imaginative vitality, which is so often, and generally so erroneously, ascribed to crime, is that vivid grasp of the true meaning and bearing of all that it involves, that full perception of the deeper contradic- tions and outrages upon nature which are implied in it, which is always comprehended m the romantic delineation of crime. In con- trast to this, let us only consider such a ease as that of the Ilkeston parricide, a case in which, if anywhere, we might expect to find some horror of the imagination, even in the most ignorant and brutal nature. Except, perhaps, the murder of a son or daughter, from purely avaricious motives, there is no kind of crime which seems more likely to scourge the criminal through his imagination than this. Even in the lowest nature some feeling of the sacredness of the tie which ought to bind children to parents might be expected to linger —something of that instinctive shyness, if not reverence, which erects so strong a barrier round a parent's life. Cateris paribus, crimes com- mitted upon equals are much less guilty than those which concern persons who ought to excite the feelings either of tender compassion or of reverence. There is a warning in the vulgarest minds against violating the sacredness of such relations which we might expect to exercise some restraint, and even when defied, to reset in bitter remorse. Yet there was no trace of this in the unhappy man who murdered his father apparently without the excuse of momentary passion. His imagination seemed even on his trial to be in no way absorbed with the act of which he had been guilty. There was no trace in him of any of the romance of crime.
The truth probably is that every act of great spiritual audacity does to a certain extent stimulate the imagination; but that crime requires less and less real spiritual audacity, has less and less meaning alto- gether to the mind, as it is repeated. The first breaking of conscious raw is like a plunge in cold water, and braces every faculty to protest. But when the boundaries of law are altogether effaced, there is no shock, and therefore no stimulus any longer. The visionary dagger which led on Macbeth to the murder of Duncan no longer haunted him when he despatched his creatures to slaughter the wife and children of Macduff.
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