MtlIT.F.It TO HIS PARENTS.
'WE remember few if any great criminal trials in which the evidence produced bore so purely on the act itself and so little on the character of the murderer and his moral qualifications, so to say, for committing it, as the trial of Miiller for the murder of Mr. Briggs. The evidence in its peculiar way was all but per- fact; it brought the crime home to the man with a moral de- monstration almost more complete than that of direct testimony; and yet . a wide-spread uneasiness continued till it was known that he had confessed. And the reason was evident ; the poplin? imagination had never been really satisfied ; there was no clear in- consistency indeed, but there was also no clear consistency or keep- ing between the crime and the character of the man to whom it was traced. For the public at least the clue ended with the ex- ternal identification of the man, and never reached his personal character.. The chain of evidence was broken precisely at the most interesting point of a, where you expected to establish the inclina- tion or at least the, adequacy of the man for a bloodthirsty deed. It was traced up to the hand and arm, but not to the nature and temper of its actor. It was a crime perfectly authenticated, but never dramatically pictured. The deed seemed to have been projected into the world as free of all mark or hint of its doer's personal cha- racter as a stone would be that his hand had held for a moment and then flung from him. This is rare with crime, and it is almost more unsatisfactory to the people than a deficiency in direct evidence. In Palmer's case, where the circumstantial demonstra- tion was less satisfactory than in Muller's, the indications of sinister character were greater, and consequently there was much less of the sort of uneasiness which accompanied the confirmed belief in ?Stiller's guilt. The public understanding was convinced, but the public imagination was baffled.
We are inclined to think that Miiller's only posthumous work, the epistle to his parents, which has been published this week, will do much to fill up the missing links between the man's character and his act. The letter is in many respects a curious one, and, read with our knowledge of his confession of his crime at the very last moment of life, one that characterizes the writer. It is reticent and sly ;—it is a clumsily imagined and, like the rest of Miiller's proceedings, rather witless appeal of the man to the pity and sympathy of his parents—and the public,—conceived on the plan of abasing himself just so far as to gratify the self-esteem of others. without giving them any substantial handle against him ; and it is in this respect only a continuation of the practice of his life and the policy he had pursued throughout of conciliating everybody,-- his fellow-workmen, the passengers on board the Victoria on his way to New York, the newspaper correspondents there, the police, the chaplain, the volunteer dissenting ministers, the jury, the judge, and all officials of any influence. Nevertheless this confidential let- ter to his parents ends with just one savage and, as it were, irrepres- sible blow, foolishly conceived and badly delivered, but violent and sudden, against the witness whose evidence had led to his detection. "I remain," he says, "your loving son and brother Franz Muller, who was sold as a slave in London by John Matthews [the cab- man] for 2,000 thalers" [the reward offered by the Government and Mr. Briggs's family for the detection of the murderer], an abrupt and remarkable close to a flowery epistle of very unreal religious feeling with which he seems to have been attempting to divert his secret and embarrassed thought.
Muller was apparently a man of a very profound, but not the commonest kind of vanity,—not the sort of vanity which attaches an excessive importance to everything affecting itself, but the sort which divides a man absolutely in two, giving him a blind side which he scarcely ever turns towards his own gaze, and a fancy side in which alone he recognizes himself. This, too, is generally the amiable kind of vanity, for it is this kind which, anxious to keep up its own dramatic fiction, invests in fine sentiments which tend to support the fiction, and of which it unconsciously hopes to receive an echo back in the good opinion of others. But it is very rare to find any vanity even of this kind strong enough to stand the test to which Muller put it,—that of ignoring and shutting out of its own view with a perfectly startling composure and tenacity the greatest event of a life, and that event a crime of the first order. In almost any other character vanity, if it sur- vived the strain at all, would have connected itself with the crime and come to pique itself thereupon. Not so Muller's. There can scarcely be another case, we imagine, in which a man ever con- trived to separate so completely, and so unfortunately for him- self, between his crime, and its gains,—to accept the latter so composedly and with so little uneasiness or painful asso- ciation of any kind, — and to put the former at a distance from him as if, having answered its purpose, it was a part of him no longer. Every account agrees that on the day after the murder Miller was the same sober, composed, quiet kind of con- ciliatory person he had always been, without a trace of agitation. The day after that he wrote his name in the new hat, and wore the watch, and was showing his friends his pretended purchases with evident pride and unconcern. When he got on board the Victoria,
his strongest characteristic, that disposition to conciliate everybody and leave a sort of sentimental picture of himself in their minds, — which was perhaps to him the only true picture,—induced him to write from the Downs that flowery farewell to his former friends which helped so materially to track him to New York. After his apprehension he sedulously and successfully endeavoured—not to clear himself, for he would not sufficiently acknowledge to himself Miller the murderer to make any serious effort in that direction,— but to imbue every one he came across with his own more senti- mental view of himself. He was gentle to the police, respectful to the gaol authorities, confidential to the chaplains, trustful to the jury, complimentary to the Court, penitent and affectionate to his parents, and ferocious only (by starts) to Matthews. Even his final confession of the crime, delayed to the very last moment, almost sounds to our ears like a sort of concession made to the eternal tri- bunal under the sole jurisdiction of which he was just passing, of its right to condemn, in the hope that in return he should get his own estimate of himself more or less admitted in extenuation of the guilt.
The man's sentimental ideal of himself was so widely severed from the unpleasant facts of the murder and robbery, that we doubt if the real view of himself as a criminal ever came vividly under his notice. He confesses imaginary, or, if not imaginary, still trivial faults, and magnifies them into crimes in order to blend a sort of candour and humility with the pathos of his position, and yet at the same time to satisfy his own feelings by admitting a sort of abstract criminality. He says to his parents :—" I now plainly comprehend the sentence which stands written in the Bible —that whosoever does not honour his father and mother will be followed by an early death ; but I only see it now when it is too late. I hope, nevertheless, that you who were so dear to me will not discard me if all the world repulse me. For hope ushers us into life, floats around the happy boy, animates youth with its magic light, and will not be buried with the grey-headed man, for if he closes his weary career at the grave, yet at the grave he plants hope ;' and on this account I also hope that you will forgive me with all your hearts." Is all this, with its flowery quotation, pure hypocrisy, intended to re-act upon his judges in England,—or is it the view of himself which he himself entertained on the whole? We are disposed to think the latter. Had it been otherwise we could scarcely conceive of Muller never viewing the plundered hat and watch of his victim with guilty dread, but rather looking upon them as filling up naturally the lamentable voids in his per- sonal effects.
It is clear that Miiller's vanity had early blinded completely his common sense, which must always have been very small. He had evidently great tenacity of will, which, unaided by judgment, no doubt fostered his vanity by giving him a vague sense of force, and so contributed to make him restless and false. He had quitted Germany against the wish of his family to push upwards in England, and, not having pushed upwards, quitted England to try again in America, giving out without any truth that he was sent thither on business by his English employers. He had been obliged to part with his watch, which he had learned to identify with him- self as the only thing that satisfied his self-esteem, in order to find the means for this second venture ; and his narrow mind once accustomed to this tangible symbol of respectable station, and not imaginative enough to substitute for it mere hope for the future, chafed bitterly at the blank. He was thrown by sheer accident into the presence of another watch and chain that he recognized as part of the true Muller, as a proper part of himself. The conception of himself restored to self-respect by possessing again something even better than his lost treasure was too much for him ;—his will shut blindly with a snap over that watch and chain ; and in taking them he was compelled in self-defence to kill their owner. It was a sort of gape of the jaws of appetite closing on their prey before considering consequences. The curious thing, however, was the apparent absence of both intellectual and moral responsibility for the crime. Its effect upon him seems to have been more like that of reclaiming his own property than shame or dread of detection. The tame sense of pleasurable proprietorship beamed out in him as mildly as though the greedy, rapacious, murderous aide of him had never flashed out at all. It was just like the sudden revengeful blow at Matthews at the end of the maundering piety he addressed to his parents. In that case certainly,—if he in- tended the letter to react upon the English official mind,—he must have been quite blind to the effect of that savage and random stroke of passion at the end,—quite blind to the gleam of light it threw over the whole letter ; and even if he really wrote only for his parents, he must still have been unaware of the contrast be- tween that furious sentence and the letter which preceded it. And hence it seems most likely that he had really so severed himself in two as it were, between his own sentimental idea of himself and his hungry appetites, that he scarcely thought it possible the murder should ever be brought home to him the mild, the con- ciliating, the quiet-mannered Miiller ; nay that he scarcely ever brought it home to himself,—having turned his back upon the deed, shut out the secret with the force of his tenacious will from his own heart, and concentrated his mind voluntarily on the other side of the matter, his spoil. It is clear, at all events, that he set to work very soon and very successfully, to restore for himself that fancy image of himself which he may perhaps for a moment have disturbed, and that he ignored (if he saw) the risk of leaving traces of himself by so doing, being absorbed in the wish to connect the gains with his mild sentimental vanity, and incorporate them into his ideal Muller. Anyhow it seems certain that Muller must have had, in the most marvellous degree, that power which all vanity of the same sort shows in a lower degree, of shutting out far in the background by force of conscious or unconscious will, and in some sense disowning, all disagreeable and humiliating memories,—like those dangerous outbursts of blind, voracious passions, which are so sudden and so impetuous, that they don't seem to belong to the character,—and of taking credit for all the sentimental andon- ciliatory traits with which fancy habitually pleases itself.
Previous page
