Murder as a Fine Art

If once a man indulges in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

(On Murder as One of the Fine Arts: Thomas de Quincey)

Not only were the Romantics prepared to analyse nightmares and the violence of nature, they were also able to confront violence in man. Shelley's play The Cenci (1819) deals with incest, murder and intrigue. Set in the year 1599, it tells how a debauched old man, Count Cenci, conceives an implacable hatred for his children along with an incestuous passion for one of his daughters, Beatrice, using cruelty and violence to satisfy it. To escape the unremitting contamination of her body and mind, Beatrice plots with her mother in law and brother to murder the tyrant. The crime is quickly discovered and the perpetrators brought to justice. Beatrice, who committed the murder, pleads with her judges, but they will not pardon her and she is executed. Her final speech is redolent with horror and pity:

Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope:

It is the only ill which can find place

Upon this giddy, sharp and narrow hour

Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost

That it should spare the eldest flower of spring:

Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch

Even now a city stands, strong, fair and free;

Now stench and blackness yawns, like death. O plead

With famine, or wind-walking pestilence,

Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!

Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words,

In deeds a Cain. No, mother, we must die...

Evidence of a growing detachment towards things once regarded as beyond the pale can be found in the combination of jocular robustness and delicate cynicism in De Quincey's On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Briefly stated, the argument is that, once a murderer has been condemned and the demands of morality satisfied, the conoisseur of homicide will naturally be drawn to compare the narratives of the different cases, the degrees of finesse or brutality involved and then to pass an aesthetic judgement. He cites Mr Howship, author of a book on indigestion, who shows no scruple in referring to a certain ulcer as "a beautiful ulcer", so why not be prepared to acknowledge that merit may be perceived in certain criminal acts? De Quincey is here playing upon the divide between "beautiful" as an aesthetic as opposed to moral epithet. Presumably a "beautiful" murder signifies an act that was effective within the scope of its intentions rather than an alluring spectacle.

Aside from murder, De Quincey evokes the fear and fascination engendered by wanton, disorderly acts of destruction, like the terrible fire which occurred at Liverpool docks, when flakes of blazing cotton were carried by the wind some eighteen miles eastward and "public sympathy did not at all interfere to suppress or even check the momentary bursts of rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet of many-coloured fire rode on the wings of the hurricane."

Impish argument of this type is interspersed with deeper reflection. De Quincey identifies the morbid intoxication which murder may confer on both criminal and spectator. As civilians rather than combatants (the legitimacy of soldiers 'killing' for their country is usually accepted), we place the murderer in a special class, for he is able, as Coleridge observed, to generate "the tremendous power which is laid open in any moment to a man who can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscious restraints, if, at the same time, thoroughly without fear."

Once supplied, such an intensity is not easily abandoned. In order to satisfy a growing appetite for excitement, the criminal may need to repeat his actions. The deed becomes a craving. He has entered a realm of heightened risk in which killing may be likened to "a condiment for seasoning the insipid monotonies of everyday life".

From such observations arose the German word lustmord, indicating a murderer possesed by the thrill of his occupation in the same way worshippers of Dionysus were intoxicated by the spirit of the vine. The 'joy' or heightened state of arousal dissolves moral distinctions. One grabs a repeater rifles, goes out into the street, shooting innocent bystanders willy nilly, or stabs some poor stranger repeatedly. The philosopher Schopenhauer might say the blind, remorseless 'Will' is working through the individual who has no power to resist. Man is an empty vessel or puppet whose strings are jerked by an impassive, compassionless force. This force, manifest in lust, greed and vanity, draws him along and shatters him like a tidal wave. Only by renouncing this 'Will' may he gain redemption or insight into his essential helplessness.

The Dream of Eugene Aram

As we have seen, fear provoked by a murder may give rise to both frisson and poetic inspiration. Ballads and verse narratives chronicling the deeds of murderers usually attain no great literary heights but Thomas Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram is an exciting exception. There is a tainted elation in its thrilled depiction of the murderer-outcast who is branded with the mark of his calling. Aram walks apart from others, locked in a trance of torment and isolation:

I know that murderers walk the eath

Beneath the curse of Caine

With crimson clouds before their eyes

And flames about their brain;

For murder has put upon their souls

An everlasting stain.

Aram was a relatively well-educated criminal, a scholar and teacher. He was born in 1704 and publicly hanged at Tyburn Field outside the gates of York for murdering Daniel Clark, shoemaker in Knaresborough, fourteen years earlier. Along with William Flaxman, a flax-dresser, after relieving the "stammering, pockmarked and weedy cobbler" of £220, they brained him with a pick and put the corpse doubled up beneath a rock in St Robert's Cave, Knaresborough. Because he had been seen in the company of Clark the previous evening, Aram decided it was timely for him to leave the district, going first to Nottingham and then to London where he lived a full and profligate existence, until a yearning for academic life tempted him to take a post of teacher at the Grammar School, King's Lynn, Norfolk.

He was a stern and authoritarian teacher who performed his duties ably. But then, in June 1758, a Knaresborough visitor to the town recognised him. Aram denied his identity but two months later, under interrogation, he confessed to the crime and led the Justices to the remains at St Robert's Well. For about a year, he was confined to York jail where he wrote an elaborate defence, pointing out that the bones in the cave might be the relic of a saint or hermit - but this convinced no one. Found guilty, he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists the night before the execution and was dragged half-dead to the gibbet. His bones were left dangling in a nearby forest and there was no uproar when his skull was donated to the College of Physicians.

Seventy years later, the grim and tragic affair was resurrected in Thomas Hood's black and swaggering ballad, stanzas from which, it has been noted by Colin Wilson and Pat Pitman, "were often recited at Victorian musical evenings by that other callous criminal, Charley Peace."

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