‘Why, then, it was answered,’ interrupted Toad-in-the-hole, ‘non est inventus.’ And then, in spite of all I could do or say, the orchestra opened, and the whole company began—’Et interrogatum est à Toad-in-the-hole—Ubi est ille Sicarius? Et responsum est ab omnibus—Non est inventus.’*
When the tempestuous chorus had subsided, I began again: — ‘Gentlemen, you will find a very circumstantial account of the Sicarii in at least three different parts of Josephus; once in Book XX. sect. v. c. 8, of his Antiquities;* once in Book I. of his Wars:* but in sect. 10 of the chapter first cited you will find a particular description of their tooling. This is what he says—“They tooled with small scymetars not much different from the Persian acinacae, but more curved, and for all the world most like the Roman sickles or sicae.”* It is perfectly magnificent, gentlemen, to hear the sequel of their history. Perhaps the only case on record where a regular army of murderers was assembled, a justus exercitus,* was in the case of these Sicarii. They mustered in such strength in the wilderness, that Festus* himself was obliged to march against them with the Roman legionary force.’
Upon which Toad-in-the-hole, that cursed interrupter, broke out a-singing—’Et interrogatum est à Toad-in-the-hole—Ubi est ille exercitus? Et responsum est ab omnibus—Non est inventus.’*
‘No, no, Toad—you are wrong for once: that army was found, and was all cut to pieces in the desert. Heavens, gentlemen, what a sublime picture! The Roman legions—the wilderness—Jerusalem in the distance—an army of murderers in the foreground!’
Mr R., a member, now gave the next toast.—‘To the further improvement of Tooling, and thanks to the Committee for their services.’
Mr L., on behalf of the Committee who had reported on that subject, returned thanks. He made an interesting extract from the Report, by which it appeared how very much stress had been laid formerly on the mode of Tooling by the Fathers, both Greek and Latin. In confirmation of this pleasing fact, he made a very striking statement in reference to the earliest work of antediluvian art. Father Mersenne, that learned Roman Catholic, in page one thousand four hundred and thirty-one1 of his operose Commentary on Genesis,* mentions, on the authority of several Rabbis, that the quarrel of Cain with Abel was about a young woman; that, by various accounts, Cain had tooled with his teeth, (Abelem fuisse morsibus dilaceratum à Cain;*) by many others, with the jaw-bone of an ass; which is the tooling adopted by most painters. But it is pleasing to the mind of sensibility to know that, as science expanded, sounder views were adopted. One author contends for a pitchfork, St Chrysostom* for a sword, Irenaeus* for a scythe, and Prudentius* for a hedging-bill. This last writer delivers his opinion thus:—
Frater, probatae sanctitatis aemulus,
Germana curvo colla frangit sarculo:
i.e. his brother, jealous of his attested sanctity, fractures his brotherly throat with a curved hedging-bill.* ‘All which is respectfully submitted by your Committee, not so much as decisive of the question, (for it is not,) but in order to impress upon the youthful mind the importance which has ever been attached to the quality of the tooling by such men as Chrysostom and Irenaeus.’
‘Dang Irenaeus!’ said Toad-in-the-hole, who now rose impatiently to give the next toast:—‘Our Irish friends—and a speedy revolution in their mode of Tooling, as well as every thing else connected with the art!’
‘Gentlemen, I’ll tell you the plain truth. Every day of the year we take up a paper, we read the opening of a murder. We say, this is good—this is charming—this is excellent! But, behold you! scarcely have we read a little farther before the word Tipperary or Ballinasomething betrays the Irish manufacture. Instantly we loathe it: we call to the waiter; we say, “Waiter, take away this paper; send it out of the house; it is absolutely offensive to all just taste.” I appeal to every man whether, on finding a murder (otherwise perhaps promising enough) to be Irish, he does not feel himself as much insulted as when Madeira being ordered he finds it to be Cape;* or when, taking up what he believes to be a mushroom, it turns out what children call a toadstool. Tithes, politics, or something wrong in principle, vitiate every Irish murder. Gentlemen, this must be reformed, or Ireland will not be a land to live in; at least, if we do live there, we must import all our murders, that’s clear.’ Toad-in-the-hole sat down growling with suppressed wrath, and the universal ‘Hear, hear!’ sufficiently showed that he spoke the general feeling.
The next toast was—‘The sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism!’
This was drunk with enthusiasm; and one of the members, who spoke to the question, made a very curious communication to the company:—‘Gentlemen, we fancy Burkism to be a pure invention of our own times: and in fact no Pancirollus has ever enumerated this branch of art when writing de rebus deperditis.* Still I have ascertained that the essential principle of the art was known to the ancients, although, like the art of painting upon glass, of making the myrrhine cups, &c., it was lost in the dark ages for want of encouragement. In the famous collection of Greek epigrams made by Planudes* is one upon a very charming little case of Burkism: it is a perfect little gem of art. The epigram itself I cannot lay my hand upon at this moment:* but the following is an abstract of it by Salmasius,* as I find it in his notes on Vopiscus:* “Est et elegans epigramma Lucilii, (well he might call it “elegans!”) ubi medicus et pollinctor de compacto sic egerunt, ut medicus aegros omnes curae suae commissos occideret”*—this was the basis of the contract, you see, that on the one part the doctor for himself and his assigns doth undertake and contract duly and truly to murder all the patients committed to his charge: but why? There lies the beauty of the case—“Et ut pollinctori amico suo traderet pollingendos.”* The pollinctor, you are aware, was a person whose business it was to dress and prepare dead bodies for burial. The original ground of the transaction appears to have been sentimental: “he was my friend,” says the murderous doctor—“he was dear to me,” in speaking of the pollinctor. But the law, gentlemen, is stern and harsh: the law will not hear of these tender motives: to sustain a contract of this nature in law, it is essential that a “consideration” should be given. Now, what was the consideration? For thus far all is on the side of the pollinctor: he will be well paid for his services; but meantime, the generous, the noble-minded doctor, gets nothing. What was the little consideration, again, I ask, which the law would insist on the doctor’s taking? You shall hear: “Et ut pollinctor vicissim quos furabatur de pollinctione mortuorum medico mitteret doni ad alliganda vulnera eorum quos curabat.”* Now, the case is clear: the whole went on a principle of reciprocity which would have kept up the trade for ever. The doctor was also a surgeon: he could not murder all his patients: some of the surgical patients must be retained intact; re infectâ.* For these he wanted linen bandages. But unhappily the Romans wore woollen, on which account they bathed so often. Meantime, there was linen to be had in Rome: but it was monstrously dear: and the or linen swathing bandages in which superstition obliged them to bind up corpses, would answer capitally for the surgeon. The doctor, therefore, contracts to furnish his friend with a constant succession of corpses, provided, and be it understood always, that his said friend in return should supply him with one-half of the articles he would receive from the friends of the parties murdered or to be murdered. The doctor invariably recommended his invaluable friend the pollinctor, (whom let us call the undertaker;) the undertaker, with equal regard to the sacred rights of friendship, uniformly recommended the doctor. Like Pylades and Orestes,* they were models of a perfect friendship: in their lives they were lovely; and on the gallows, it is to be hoped, they were not divided.
‘Gentlemen, it makes me laugh horribly when I think of those two friends drawing and redrawing on each other: “Pollinctor in account with Doctor, debtor by sixteen corpses; creditor by forty-five bandages, two of which damaged.” Their names unfortunately are lost; but I conceive they must have been Quintus Burkius and Publius Harius. By the way, gentlemen, has anybody heard lately of Hare? I understan
d he is comfortably settled in Ireland, considerably to the west, and does a little business now and then; but, as he observes with a sigh, only as a retailer—nothing like the fine thriving wholesale concern so carelessly blown up at Edinburgh. “You see what comes of neglecting business,”—is the chief moral, the , as Aesop* would say, which he draws from his past experience.’
At length came the toast of the day—Thugdom in all its branches.
The speeches attempted at this crisis of the Dinner were past all counting. But the applause was so furious, the music so stormy, and the crashing of glasses so incessant, from the general resolution never again to drink an inferior toast from the same glass, that my power is not equal to the task of reporting. Besides which, Toad-in-the-hole now became quite ungovernable. He kept firing pistols in every direction; sent his servant for a blunderbuss, and talked of loading with ball-cartridge. We conceived that his former madness had returned at the mention of Burke and Hare; or, that being again weary of life, he had resolved to go off in a general massacre. This we could not think of allowing: it became indispensable, therefore, to kick him out, which we did with universal consent, the whole company lending their toes uno pede,* as I may say, though pitying his grey hairs and his angelic smile. During the operation the orchestra poured in their old chorus. The universal company sang, and (what surprised us most of all) Toad-in-the-hole joined us furiously in singing—
Et interrogatum est ab omnibus—Ubi est ille Toad-in-the-hole?
Et responsum est ab omnibus — Non est inventus.
POSTSCRIPT [TO ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS]
IT IS impossible to conciliate readers of so saturnine and gloomy a class, that they cannot enter with genial sympathy into any gaiety whatever, but, least of all, when the gaiety trespasses a little into the province of the extravagant. In such a case, not to sympathise is not to understand; and the playfulness, which is not relished, becomes flat and insipid, or absolutely without meaning. Fortunately, after all such churls have withdrawn from my audience in high displeasure, there remains a large majority who are loud in acknowledging the amusement which they have derived from this little paper; at the same time proving the sincerity of their praise by one hesitating expression of censure. Repeatedly they have suggested to me, that perhaps the extravagance, though clearly intentional, and forming one element in the general gaiety of the conception, went too far. I am not myself of that opinion; and I beg to remind these friendly censors, that it is amongst the direct purposes and efforts of this bagatelle* to graze the brink of horror, and of all that would in actual realisation be most repulsive. The very excess of the extravagance, in fact, by suggesting to the reader continually the mere aeriality of the entire speculation, furnishes the surest means of disenchanting him from the horror which might else gather upon his feelings. Let me remind such objectors, once for all, of Dean Swift’s proposal for turning to account the supernumerary infants of the three kingdoms, which, in those days, both at Dublin and at London, were provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them.* This was an extravaganza, though really bolder and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church; its own monstrosity was its excuse; mere extravagance was felt to license and accredit the little jeu d’esprit,* precisely as the blank impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos,* &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while to tilt against so mere a foam-bubble of gaiety as this lecture on the aesthetics of murder, I shelter myself for the moment under the Telamonian shield* of the Dean. But, in reality, which (to say the truth) formed one motive for detaining the reader by this Postscript, my own little paper may plead a privileged excuse for its extravagance, such as is altogether wanting to the Dean’s. Nobody can pretend, for a moment, on behalf of the Dean, that there is any ordinary and natural tendency in human thoughts, which could ever turn to infants as articles of diet; under any conceivable circumstances, this would be felt as the most aggravated form of cannibalism—cannibalism applying itself to the most defenceless part of the species. But, on the other hand, the tendency to a critical or aesthetic valuation of fires and murders is universal. If you are summoned to the spectacle of a great fire,* undoubtedly the first impulse is—to assist in putting it out. But that field of exertion is very limited, and is soon filled by regular professional people, trained and equipped for the service. In the case of a fire which is operating upon private property, pity for a neighbour’s calamity checks us at first in treating the affair as a scenic spectacle. But perhaps the fire may be confined to public buildings. And in any case, after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair, considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. Exclamations of—How grand! how magnificent! arise in a sort of rapture from the crowd. For instance, when Drury Lane* was burned down in the first decennium of this century, the falling in of the roof was signalised by a mimic suicide of the protecting Apollo* that surmounted and crested the centre of this roof. The god was stationary with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had the air of a voluntary act. What followed? From every one of the bridges over the river, and from other open areas which commanded the spectacle, there arose a sustained uproar of admiration and sympathy. Some few years before this event, a prodigious fire occurred at Liverpool; the Goree,* a vast pile of warehouses close to one of the docks, was burned to the ground. The huge edifice, eight or nine storeys high, and laden with most combustible goods, many thousand bales of cotton, wheat and oats in thousands of quarters, tar, turpentine, rum, gunpowder, &c., continued through many hours of darkness to feed this tremendous fire. To aggravate the calamity, it blew a regular gale of wind; luckily for the shipping, it blew inland, that is, to the east; and all the way down to Warrington, eighteen miles distant to the eastward, the whole air was illuminated by flakes of cotton, often saturated with rum, and by what seemed absolute worlds of blazing sparks, that lighted up all the upper chambers of the air. All the cattle lying abroad in the fields through a breadth of eighteen miles, were thrown into terror and agitation. Men, of course, read in this hurrying overhead of scintillating and blazing vortices, the annunciation of some gigantic calamity going on in Liverpool; and the lamentation on that account was universal. But that mood of public sympathy did not at all interfere to suppress or even to check the momentary bursts of rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet* of many-coloured fire rode on the wings of hurricane, alternately through open depths of air, or through dark clouds overhead.
Precisely the same treatment is applied to murders. After the first tribute of sorrow to those who have perished, but, at all events, after the personal interests have been tranquillised by time, inevitably the scenical features (what aesthetically may be called the comparative advantages) of the several murders are reviewed and valued. One murder is compared with another; and the circumstances of superiority, as, for example, in the incidence and effects of surprise, of mystery, &c., are collated and appraised. I, therefore, for my extravagance, claim an inevitable and perpetual ground in the spontaneous tendencies of the human mind when left to itself. But no one will pretend that any corresponding plea can be advanced on behalf of Swift.
In this important distinction between myself and the Dean, lies one reason which prompted the present Postscript. A second purpose of the Postscript is, to make the reader acquainted circumstantially with three memorable cases of murder, which long ago the voice of amateurs has crowned with laurel, but especially with the two earliest of the three, viz., the immortal Williams’ murders of 1812.* The act and the ac
tor are each separately in the highest degree interesting; and, as forty-two years have elapsed since 1812, it cannot be supposed that either is known circumstantially to the men of the current generation.
Never, throughout the annals of universal Christendom, has there indeed been any act of one solitary insulated individual, armed with power so appalling over the hearts of men, as that exterminating murder, by which, during the winter of 1812, John Williams, in one hour, smote two houses with emptiness, exterminated all but two entire households, and asserted his own supremacy above all the children of Cain.* It would be absolutely impossible adequately to describe the frenzy of feelings which, throughout the next fortnight, mastered the popular heart; the mere delirium of indignant horror in some, the mere delirium of panic in others. For twelve succeeding days, under some groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the panic which had convulsed the mighty metropolis diffused itself all over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles from London;* but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable. One lady, my next neighbour, whom personally I knew, living at the moment, during the absence of her husband, with a few servants in a very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors (so she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing-room, was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered fortress; at every sixth step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis. The panic was not confined to the rich; women in the humblest ranks more than once died upon the spot, from the shock attending some suspicious attempts at intrusion upon the part of vagrants, meditating probably nothing worse than a robbery, but whom the poor women, misled by the London newspapers, had fancied to be the dreadful London murderer. Meantime, this solitary artist, that rested in the centre of London, self-supported by his own conscious grandeur, as a domestic Attila, or ‘scourge of God;’* this man, that walked in darkness, and relied upon murder (as afterwards transpired) for bread, for clothes, for promotion in life, was silently preparing an effectual answer to the public journals; and on the twelfth day after his inaugural murder, he advertised his presence in London, and published to all men the absurdity of ascribing to him any ruralising propensities, by striking a second blow, and accomplishing a second family extermination. Somewhat lightened was the provincial panic by this proof that the murderer had not condescended to sneak into the country, or to abandon for a moment, under any motive of caution or fear, the great metropolitan castra stativa* of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames. In fact, the great artist disdained a provincial reputation; and he must have felt, as a case of ludicrous disproportion, the contrast between a country town or village, on the one hand, and, on the other, a work more lasting than brass—*—a murder such in quality as any murder that he would condescend to own for a work turned out from his own studio.
On Murder (Oxford World's Classics) Page 16