Miscellaneous Papers
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Charles Dickens >> Miscellaneous Papers
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More than a hundred such cases are known, it is said in this Report,
in English criminal jurisprudence. The same Report contains three
striking cases of supposed criminals being unjustly hanged in
America; and also five more in which people whose innocence was not
afterwards established were put to death on evidence as purely
circumstantial and as doubtful, to say the least of it, as any that
was held to be sufficient in this general summary of legal murders.
Mr. O'Connell defended, in Ireland, within five and twenty years,
three brothers who were hanged for a murder of which they were
afterwards shown to have been innocent. I cannot find the reference
at this moment, but I have seen it stated on good authority, that
but for the exertions, I think of the present Lord Chief Baron, six
or seven innocent men would certainly have been hanged. Such are
the instances of wrong judgment which are known to us. How many
more there may be in which the real murderers never disclosed their
guilt, or were never discovered, and where the odium of great crimes
still rests on guiltless people long since resolved to dust in their
untimely graves, no human power can tell.
The effect of public executions on those who witness them, requires
no better illustration, and can have none, than the scene which any
execution in itself presents, and the general Police-office
knowledge of the offences arising out of them. I have stated my
belief that the study of rude scenes leads to the disregard of human
life, and to murder. Referring, since that expression of opinion,
to the very last trial for murder in London, I have made inquiry,
and am assured that the youth now under sentence of death in Newgate
for the murder of his master in Drury Lane, was a vigilant spectator
of the three last public executions in this City. What effects a
daily increasing familiarity with the scaffold, and with death upon
it, wrought in France in the Great Revolution, everybody knows. In
reference to this very question of Capital Punishment, Robespierre
himself, before he was
"in blood stept in so far",
warned the National Assembly that in taking human life, and in
displaying before the eyes of the people scenes of cruelty and the
bodies of murdered men, the law awakened ferocious prejudices, which
gave birth to a long and growing train of their own kind. With how
much reason this was said, let his own detestable name bear witness!
If we would know how callous and hardened society, even in a
peaceful and settled state, becomes to public executions when they
are frequent, let us recollect how few they were who made the last
attempt to stay the dreadful Monday-morning spectacles of men and
women strung up in a row for crimes as different in their degree as
our whole social scheme is different in its component parts, which,
within some fifteen years or so, made human shambles of the Old
Bailey.
There is no better way of testing the effect of public executions on
those who do not actually behold them, but who read of them and know
of them, than by inquiring into their efficiency in preventing
crime. In this respect they have always, and in all countries,
failed. According to all facts and figures, failed. In Russia, in
Spain, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, in Sweden, in England, there
has been one result. In Bombay, during the Recordership of Sir
James Macintosh, there were fewer crimes in seven years without one
execution, than in the preceding seven years with forty-seven
executions; notwithstanding that in the seven years without capital
punishment, the population had greatly increased, and there had been
a large accession to the numbers of the ignorant and licentious
soldiery, with whom the more violent offences originated. During
the four wickedest years of the Bank of England (from 1814 to 1817,
inclusive), when the one-pound note capital prosecutions were most
numerous and shocking, the number of forged one-pound notes
discovered by the Bank steadily increased, from the gross amount in
the first year of 10,342 pounds, to the gross amount in the last of
28,412 pounds. But in every branch of this part of the subject--the
inefficiency of capital punishment to prevent crime, and its
efficiency to produce it--the body of evidence (if there were space
to quote or analyse it here) is overpowering and resistless.
I have purposely deferred until now any reference to one objection
which is urged against the abolition of capital punishment: I mean
that objection which claims to rest on Scriptural authority.
It was excellently well said by Lord Melbourne, that no class of
persons can be shown to be very miserable and oppressed, but some
supporters of things as they are will immediately rise up and
assert--not that those persons are moderately well to do, or that
their lot in life has a reasonably bright side--but that they are,
of all sorts and conditions of men, the happiest. In like manner,
when a certain proceeding or institution is shown to be very wrong
indeed, there is a class of people who rush to the fountainhead at
once, and will have no less an authority for it than the Bible, on
any terms.
So, we have the Bible appealed to in behalf of Capital Punishment.
So, we have the Bible produced as a distinct authority for Slavery.
So, American representatives find the title of their country to the
Oregon territory distinctly laid down in the Book of Genesis. So,
in course of time, we shall find Repudiation, perhaps, expressly
commanded in the Sacred Writings.
It is enough for me to be satisfied, on calm inquiry and with
reason, that an Institution or Custom is wrong and bad; and thence
to feel assured that IT CANNOT BE a part of the law laid down by the
Divinity who walked the earth. Though every other man who wields a
pen should turn himself into a commentator on the Scriptures--not
all their united efforts, pursued through our united lives, could
ever persuade me that Slavery is a Christian law; nor, with one of
these objections to an execution in my certain knowledge, that
Executions are a Christian law, my will is not concerned. I could
not, in my veneration for the life and lessons of Our Lord, believe
it. If any text appeared to justify the claim, I would reject that
limited appeal, and rest upon the character of the Redeemer, and the
great scheme of His Religion, where, in its broad spirit, made so
plain--and not this or that disputed letter--we all put our trust.
But, happily, such doubts do not exist. The case is far too plain.
The Rev. Henry Christmas, in a recent pamphlet on this subject,
shows clearly that in five important versions of the Old Testament
(to say nothing of versions of less note) the words, "by man", in
the often-quoted text, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
blood be shed", do not appear at all. We know that the law of Moses
was delivered to certain wandering tribes in a peculiar and
perfectly different social condition from that which prevails among
us at this time. We know that the Christian Dispensation did
distinctly repeal and annul certain portions of that law. We know
that the doctrine of retributive justice or vengeance, was plainly
disavowed by the Saviour. We know that on the only occasion of an
offender, liable by the law to death, being brought before Him for
His judgment, it was not death. We know that He said, "Thou shalt
not kill". And if we are still to inflict capital punishment
because of the Mosaic law (under which it was not the consequence of
a legal proceeding, but an act of vengeance from the next of kin,
which would surely be discouraged by our later laws if it were
revived among the Jews just now) it would be equally reasonable to
establish the lawfulness of a plurality of wives on the same
authority.
Here I will leave this aspect of the question. I should not have
treated of it at all in the columns of a newspaper, but for the
possibility of being unjustly supposed to have given it no
consideration in my own mind.
In bringing to a close these letters on a subject, in connection
with which there is happily very little that is new to be said or
written, I beg to be understood as advocating the total abolition of
the Punishment of Death, as a general principle, for the advantage
of society, for the prevention of crime, and without the least
reference to, or tenderness for any individual malefactor
whomsoever. Indeed, in most cases of murder, my feeling towards the
culprit is very strongly and violently the reverse. I am the more
desirous to be so understood, after reading a speech made by Mr.
Macaulay in the House of Commons last Tuesday night, in which that
accomplished gentleman hardly seemed to recognise the possibility of
anybody entertaining an honest conviction of the inutility and bad
effects of Capital Punishment in the abstract, founded on inquiry
and reflection, without being the victim of "a kind of effeminate
feeling". Without staying to inquire what there may be that is
especially manly and heroic in the advocacy of the gallows, or to
express my admiration of Mr. Calcraft, the hangman, as doubtless one
of the most manly specimens now in existence, I would simply hint a
doubt, in all good humour, whether this be the true Macaulay way of
meeting a great question? One of the instances of effeminacy of
feeling quoted by Mr. Macaulay, I have reason to think was not quite
fairly stated. I allude to the petition in Tawell's case. I had
neither hand nor part in it myself; but, unless I am greatly
mistaken, it did pretty clearly set forth that Tawell was a most
abhorred villain, and that the House might conclude how strongly the
petitioners were opposed to the Punishment of Death, when they
prayed for its non-infliction even in such a case.
THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY IN WESTMINSTER HALL
"Of all the cants that are canted in this canting world," wrote
Sterne, "kind Heaven defend me from the cant of Art!" We have no
intention of tapping our little cask of cant, soured by the thunder
of great men's fame, for the refreshment of our readers: its freest
draught would be unreasonably dear at a shilling, when the same
small liquor may be had for nothing, at innumerable ready pipes and
conduits.
But it is a main part of the design of this Magazine to sympathise
with what is truly great and good; to scout the miserable
discouragements that beset, especially in England, the upward path
of men of high desert; and gladly to give honour where it is due, in
right of Something achieved, tending to elevate the tastes and
thoughts of all who contemplate it, and prove a lasting credit to
the country of its birth.
Upon the walls of Westminster Hall, there hangs, at this time, such
a Something. A composition of such marvellous beauty, of such
infinite variety, of such masterly design, of such vigorous and
skilful drawing, of such thought and fancy, of such surprising and
delicate accuracy of detail, subserving one grand harmony, and one
plain purpose, that it may be questioned whether the Fine Arts in
any period of their history have known a more remarkable
performance.
It is the cartoon of Daniel Maclise, "executed by order of the
Commissioners", and called The Spirit of Chivalry. It may be left
an open question, whether or no this allegorical order on the part
of the Commissioners, displays any uncommon felicity of idea. We
rather think not; and are free to confess that we should like to
have seen the Commissioners' notion of the Spirit of Chivalry stated
by themselves, in the first instance, on a sheet of foolscap, as the
ground-plan of a model cartoon, with all the commissioned
proportions of height and breadth. That the treatment of such an
abstraction, for the purposes of Art, involves great and peculiar
difficulties, no one who considers the subject for a moment can
doubt. That nothing is easier to render it absurd and monstrous, is
a position as little capable of dispute by anybody who has beheld
another cartoon on the same subject in the same Hall, representing a
Ghoule in a state of raving madness, dancing on a Body in a very
high wind, to the great astonishment of John the Baptist's head,
which is looking on from a corner.
Mr. Maclise's handling of the subject has by this time sunk into the
hearts of thousands upon thousands of people. It is familiar
knowledge among all classes and conditions of men. It is the great
feature within the Hall, and the constant topic of discourse
elsewhere. It has awakened in the great body of society a new
interest in, and a new perception and a new love of, Art. Students
of Art have sat before it, hour by hour, perusing in its many forms
of Beauty, lessons to delight the world, and raise themselves, its
future teachers, in its better estimation. Eyes well accustomed to
the glories of the Vatican, the galleries of Florence, all the
mightiest works of art in Europe, have grown dim before it with the
strong emotions it inspires; ignorant, unlettered, drudging men,
mere hewers and drawers, have gathered in a knot about it (as at our
back a week ago), and read it, in their homely language, as it were
a Book. In minds, the roughest and the most refined, it has alike
found quick response; and will, and must, so long as it shall hold
together.
For how can it be otherwise? Look up, upon the pressing throng who
strive to win distinction from the Guardian Genius of all noble
deeds and honourable renown,--a gentle Spirit, holding her fair
state for their reward and recognition (do not be alarmed, my Lord
Chamberlain; this is only in a picture); and say what young and
ardent heart may not find one to beat in unison with it--beat high
with generous aspiration like its own--in following their onward
course, as it is traced by this great pencil! Is it the Love of
Woman, in its truth and deep devotion, that inspires you? See it
here! Is it Glory, as the world has learned to call the pomp and
circumstance of arms? Behold it at the summit of its exaltation,
with its mailed hand resting on the altar where the Spirit
ministers. The Poet's laurel-crown, which they who sit on thrones
can neither twine or wither--is that the aim of thy ambition? It is
there, upon his brow; it wreathes his stately forehead, as he walks
apart and holds communion with himself. The Palmer and the Bard are
there; no solitary wayfarers, now; but two of a great company of
pilgrims, climbing up to honour by the different paths that lead to
the great end. And sure, amidst the gravity and beauty of them all-
-unseen in his own form, but shining in his spirit, out of every
gallant shape and earnest thought--the Painter goes triumphant!
Or say that you who look upon this work, be old, and bring to it
grey hairs, a head bowed down, a mind on which the day of life has
spent itself, and the calm evening closes gently in. Is its appeal
to you confined to its presentment of the Past? Have you no share
in this, but while the grace of youth and the strong resolve of
maturity are yours to aid you? Look up again. Look up where the
spirit is enthroned, and see about her, reverend men, whose task is
done; whose struggle is no more; who cluster round her as her train
and council; who have lost no share or interest in that great rising
up and progress, which bears upward with it every means of human
happiness, but, true in Autumn to the purposes of Spring, are there
to stimulate the race who follow in their steps; to contemplate,
with hearts grown serious, not cold or sad, the striving in which
they once had part; to die in that great Presence, which is Truth
and Bravery, and Mercy to the Weak, beyond all power of separation.
It would be idle to observe of this last group that, both in
execution and idea, they are of the very highest order of Art, and
wonderfully serve the purpose of the picture. There is not one
among its three-and-twenty heads of which the same remark might not
be made. Neither will we treat of great effects produced by means
quite powerless in other hands for such an end, or of the prodigious
force and colour which so separate this work from all the rest
exhibited, that it would scarcely appear to be produced upon the
same kind of surface by the same description of instrument. The
bricks and stones and timbers of the Hall itself are not facts more
indisputable than these.
It has been objected to this extraordinary work that it is too
elaborately finished; too complete in its several parts. And Heaven
knows, if it be judged in this respect by any standard in the Hall
about it, it will find no parallel, nor anything approaching to it.
But it is a design, intended to be afterwards copied and painted in
fresco; and certain finish must be had at last, if not at first. It
is very well to take it for granted in a Cartoon that a series of
cross-lines, almost as rough and apart as the lattice-work of a
garden summerhouse, represents the texture of a human face; but the
face cannot be painted so. A smear upon the paper may be
understood, by virtue of the context gained from what surrounds it,
to stand for a limb, or a body, or a cuirass, or a hat and feathers,
or a flag, or a boot, or an angel. But when the time arrives for
rendering these things in colours on a wall, they must be grappled
with, and cannot be slurred over in this wise. Great
misapprehension on this head seems to have been engendered in the
minds of some observers by the famous cartoons of Raphael; but they
forget that these were never intended as designs for fresco
painting. They were designs for tapestry-work, which is susceptible
of only certain broad and general effects, as no one better knew
than the Great Master. Utterly detestable and vile as the tapestry
is, compared with the immortal Cartoons from which it was worked, it
is impossible for any man who casts his eyes upon it where it hangs
at Rome, not to see immediately the special adaptation of the
drawings to that end, and for that purpose. The aim of these
Cartoons being wholly different, Mr. Maclise's object, if we
understand it, was to show precisely what he meant to do, and knew
he could perform, in fresco, on a wall. And here his meaning is;
worked out; without a compromise of any difficulty; without the
avoidance of any disconcerting truth; expressed in all its beauty,
strength, and power.
To what end? To be perpetuated hereafter in the high place of the
chief Senate-House of England? To be wrought, as it were, into the
very elements of which that Temple is composed; to co-endure with
it, and still present, perhaps, some lingering traces of its ancient
Beauty, when London shall have sunk into a grave of grass-grown
ruin,--and the whole circle of the Arts, another revolution of the
mighty wheel completed, shall be wrecked and broken?
Let us hope so. We will contemplate no other possibility--at
present.
IN MEMORIAM--W. M. THACKERAY
It has been desired by some of the personal friends of the great
English writer who established this magazine, {1} that its brief
record of his having been stricken from among men should be written
by the old comrade and brother in arms who pens these lines, and of
whom he often wrote himself, and always with the warmest generosity.
I saw him first nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to
become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly
before Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he told me that he had
been in bed three days--that, after these attacks, he was troubled
with cold shiverings, "which quite took the power of work out of
him"--and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he
laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and looked very bright.
In the night of that day week, he died.
The long interval between those two periods is marked in my
remembrance of him by many occasions when he was supremely humorous,
when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and
serious, when he was charming with children. But, by none do I
recall him more tenderly than by two or three that start out of the
crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, announcing
how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry yesterday,
and how that he had come to dinner, "because he couldn't help it",
and must talk such passage over. No one can ever have seen him more
genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive, than I have
seen him at those times. No one can be surer than I, of the
greatness and the goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself.
We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much
feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of under-
valuing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in
trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never very
gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both
his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end
of the discussion.
When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr. Douglas
Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of
which, he read his very best contribution to Punch, describing the
grown-up cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing
him could have doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly
unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the
paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that
certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently
after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched
his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterwards added a
verbal postscript), urging me to "come down and make a speech, and
tell them who he was, for he doubted whether more than two of the
electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there might be as
many as six or eight who had heard of me". He introduced the
lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering
failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good
humour.
He had a particular delight in boys, and an excellent way with them.
I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had
been to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did
in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give
him a sovereign? I thought of this when I looked down into his
grave, after he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the
shoulder of a boy to whom he had been kind.
These are slight remembrances; but it is to little familiar things
suggestive of the voice, look, manner, never, never more to be
encountered on this earth, that the mind first turns in a
bereavement. And greater things that are known of him, in the way
of his warm affections, his quiet endurance, his unselfish
thoughtfulness for others, and his munificent hand, may not be told.
If, in the reckless vivacity of his youth, his satirical pen had
ever gone astray or done amiss, he had caused it to prefer its own
petition for forgiveness, long before:-
I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;
The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;
The idle word that he'd wish back again.
In no pages should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse
of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle
acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his delightful
playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of
his mastery over the English language. Least of all, in these
pages, enriched by his brilliant qualities from the first of the
series, and beforehand accepted by the Public through the strength
of his great name.
But, on the table before me, there lies all that he had written of
his latest and last story. That it would be very sad to any one--
that it is inexpressibly so to a writer--in its evidences of matured
designs never to be accomplished, of intentions begun to be executed
and destined never to be completed, of careful preparation for long
roads of thought that he was never to traverse, and for shining
goals that he was never to reach, will be readily believed. The
pain, however, that I have felt in perusing it, has not been deeper
than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his
powers when he wrought on this last labour. In respect of earnest
feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain
loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much
the best of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that he
had become strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed great pains
upon it, I trace in almost every page. It contains one picture
which must have cost him extreme distress, and which is a
masterpiece. There are two children in it, touched with a hand as
loving and tender as ever a father caressed his little child with.
There is some young love as pure and innocent and pretty as the
truth. And it is very remarkable that, by reason of the singular
construction of the story, more than one main incident usually
belonging to the end of such a fiction is anticipated in the
beginning, and thus there is an approach to completeness in the
fragment, as to the satisfaction of the reader's mind concerning the
most interesting persons, which could hardly have been better
attained if the writer's breaking-off had been foreseen.
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