On murder considered as one of the fine arts

Sir,

We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice,De Q. probably parodies the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded by Thomas Bray (1656–1730) in 1698 to encourage the distribution of Christian literature and counteract the growth of vice and immorality. of the Hell-Fire Club,The first of several early eighteenth-century Hell-Fire Clubs is reputed to have been founded around 1720 by Philip, duke of Wharton (1698–1731). These informal aristocratic groups were allegedly devoted to drink, sacrilege, and sexual excess, and were bombastically condemned in the anonymous Hell-Fire-Club : Kept by a Society of Blasphemers… With the King’s Order in Council, for Suppressing Immorality and Prophaneness (London, 1721). Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81) founded a similar but better-known Club around 1750. &c. At Brighton I think it was that a Society was formed for the Suppression of Virtue.De Q. parodies the Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1802 by William Wilberforce (1759–1833), abolitionist and politician. That Society was itself suppressed—but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a character still more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a Society for the Encouragement of Murder ; but, according to their own delicate ευφημισμὸς,‘euphemism’. it is styled—The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder. They profess to be curious in homicide ; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed ; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art. But I need not trouble myself with any attempt to describe the spirit of their proceedings, as you will collect that much better from one of the Monthly Lectures read before the Society last year. This has fallen into my hands accidentally, in spite of all the vigilance exercised to keep their transactions from the public eye. The publication of it will alarm them ; and my purpose is that it should. For I would much rather put them down quietly, by an appeal to public opinion through you, than by such an exposure of names as would follow an appeal to Bow-street ;The chief magisterial business of London was for many years carried on in the Bow Street Police Court. Its officers were popularly known as the ‘Bow-Street Runners’, the first London police force. In 1829, two years after De Q. published this article, the ‘Runners’ were officially replaced by the Metropolitan Police. which last appeal, however, if this should fail, I must positively resort to. For it is scandalous that such things should go on in a Christian land. Even in a heathen land, the public toleration of murder was felt by a Christian writer to be the most crying reproach of the public morals. This writer was Lactantius ;Lactantius (c. ad 240–c.320), North African Christian apologist and one of the most reprinted of the Latin Church Fathers. De Q. quotes from Lactantius, ‘Epitome 58’ in Epitome Divinarum Institutionum, ed. Eberhared Heck and Antonie Wlosok (Stuttgart, 1994), 91. De Q. distorts the quotation in a number of ways, including the omission of the opening question (‘What is as horrid, as foul as the murder of a man?’) and the translation of ‘voluptas’ (‘pleasure’ or ‘delight’) as ‘demands of taste’. and with his words, as singularly applicable to the present occasion, I shall conclude :—Quid tam horribile,” says he, tam tetrum, quam hominis trucidatio? Ideo severissimis legibus vita nostra munitur ; ideo bella execrabilia sunt. Invenit tamen consuetudo quatenus homicidium sine bello ac sine legibus faciat : et hoc sibi voluptas quod scelus vindicavit. Quod si interesse homicidio sceleris conscientia est,—et eidem facinori spectator obstrictus est cui et admissor ; ergo et in his gladiatorum caedibus non minus cruore profunditur qui spectat, quam ille qui facit : nec potest esse immunis à sanguine qui voluit effundi ; aut videri non interfecisse, qui interfectori et favit et prœmium postulavit.” “Human life,” says he, is guarded by laws of the uttermost rigour, yet custom has devised a mode of evading them in behalf of murder ; and the demands of taste (voluptas) are now become the same as those of abandoned guilt.” Let the Society of Gentlemen Amateurs consider this ; and let me call their especial attention to the last sentence, which is so weighty, that I shall attempt to convey it in English :—Now, if merely to be present at a murder fastens on a man the character of an accomplice,—if barely to be a spectator involves us in one common guilt with the perpetrator ; it follows of necessity, that, in these murders of the amphitheatre, the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who sits and looks on ; neither can he be clear of blood who has countenanced its shedding ; nor that man seem other than a participator in murder who gives his applause to the murderer, and calls for prizes in his behalf.” The prœmia postulavit‘he has demanded rewards’. I have not yet heard charged upon the Gentlemen Amateurs of London, though undoubtedly their proceedings tend to that ; but the interfectori favit‘he has shown favour to the killer’. is implied in the very title of this association, and expressed in every line of the lecture which I send you.—I am, &c.

(Note of the Editor.The note is almost certainly the addition of either William Blackwood or John Wilson, and seems to have been inserted without De Q.’s consent.—We thank our correspondent for his communication, and also for the quotation from Lactantius, which is very pertinent to his view of the case ; our own, we confess, is different. We cannot suppose the lecturer to be in earnest, any more than Erasmus in his Praise of Folly,Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469– 1536), the greatest of the Renaissance humanists, satirized theologians and widely practised religious observances in his celebrated Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly (1509). or Dean Swift in his proposal for eating children.Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish author and Dean of St Paul’s, Dublin. In ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), Swift satirically suggested eating the children of the Irish poor. However, either on his view or on ours, it is equally fit that the lecture should be made public.)

Gentlemen,—I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams’For John Williams, see above, p. 166. Lecture on Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts—a task which might be easy enough three or four centuries ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models had been exhibited ; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be evident, that in the style of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance pari passu.‘at an equal pace’. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Aeschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael AngeloAeschylus (525–456 bc), Greek tragedian. Michelangelo (1475–1564), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet. in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.”William Wordsworth (1770–1850) declared in his ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815) that ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), iii. 80; Wordsworth’s italics). To sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles critiically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from his Majesty’s Judges of Assize.High Court judges who presided in county criminal and civil cases.

Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency. Immoral!—God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that ; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an improper line of conduct—highly improper ; and I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles ; and so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim’s hiding-place, as a great moralistKant—who carried his demands of unconditional veracity to so extravagant a length as to affirm, that, if a man were to see an innocent person escape from a murderer, it would be his duty, on being questioned by the murderer, to tell the truth, and to point out the retreat of the innocent person, under any certainty of causing murder. Lest this doctrine should be supposed to have escaped him in any heat of dispute, on being taxed with it by a celebrated French writer, he solemnly reaffirmed it, with his reasons.In 1797 the Franco-Swiss novelist and political writer Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) accused the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) of going ‘so far as to maintain that it would be a crime to lie to a murderer who asked us whether a friend of ours whom he is pursuing had taken refuge in our house’. Kant admitted that ‘I actually said this somewhere or other, though I cannot now recall where’, and then reaffirmed his view in On the Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy (1797), in which he states that ‘if you have by a lie prevented someone just now bent on murder from committing the deed, then you are legally accountable for all the consequences that might arise from it. But if you have kept strictly to the truth, then public justice can hold nothing against you, whatever the unforeseen consequences might be’ (see Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, 1996), 611–12). Kant, however, did not argue that one should ‘point out [the] victim’s hiding-place’ (as De Q.’s lecturer claims). of Germany declared it to be every good man’s duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpence to have him apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles.De Q. borrows from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford, 1998), 83 : ‘Every thing in this world, continued my father, (filling a fresh pipe)—every thing in this earthly world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles.’ Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey ;The Central Criminal Court in London.) and that, I confess, is its weak side ; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.

To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons, viz. S. T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr HowshipJohn Howship (1781–1841), English surgeon and author. the surgeon. To begin with S.T.C.—One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with him in Berners’ Street, (which, by the way, for a short street, has been uncommonly fruitful in men of genius.)Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) lived with his friends John and Mary Morgan at 71 Berners St., London, from 1812 to 1813. Other ‘men of genius’ who lived in Berners St. include the architect Sir William Chambers (1726–96) and the painters John Opie (1761–1807) and Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). Others were there besides myself ; and amidst some carnal considerations of tea and toast, we were all imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lipsPlotinus (205–70), Platonist philosopher. ‘Attic’ is ‘of or pertaining to Attica, or to its capital Athens’; thus, ‘marked by simple and refined elegance, pure, classical’ (OED). of S.T.C. Suddenly a cry arose of “Fire—fire!”—upon which all of us, master and disciples, Plato and ὁι περί τον Πλάτωνα,‘those around Plato’. rushed out, eager, for the spectacle.De Q. invokes John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae (XIV)’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, 15 (April 1824), 382: ‘I call this a very passable fire. … I fear the blockheads will be throwing water upon the fire, and destroying the effect. Mr Ambrose, step over the way, and report progress.’ Revealingly, Wilson then proceeds to a discus- sion of John Thurtell. Cf. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kean’s Iago’ in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930–4), v. 213 : Shakespeare ‘knew that the love of power … was natural to man. … Why do we always read the accounts in the newspapers, of dreadful fires and shocking murders, but for the same reason?’ The fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker’s ; and, as it promised to be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my engagements forced me away from Mr Coleridge’s party before matters were come to a crisis. Some days after, meeting with my Platonic host, I reminded him of the case, and begged to know how that very promising exhibition had terminated. “Oh, sir,” said he, “it turned out so ill, that we damned it unaniimously.” Now, does any man suppose that Mr Coleridge,—who, for all he is too fat to be a person of active virtue, is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,—that this good S.T.C., I say, was an incendiary, or capable of wishing any ill to the poor man and his piano-fortes (many of them, doubtless, with the additional keysThe first five and a half octave piano appeared in the late eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century piano keyboards reached six and a half octaves.)? On the contrary, I know him to be that sort of man that I durst stake my life upon it he would have worked an engine in a case of necessity, although rather of the fattest for such fiery trials of his virtue. But how stood the case? Virtue was in no request. On the arrival of the fire-engines, morality had devolved wholly on the insurance office.Fire brigades were employed by the insurance companies, and responded only to fires at premises insured by their own companies. The government was not involved in fire-fighting until 1865. This being the case, he had a right to gratify his taste. He had left his tea. Was he to have nothing in return?

I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority, what says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his Metaphysics,) describes what he calls χλεπτὴν τέλειον, i.e. a perfect thief ;Aristotle (384–322 bc) was born in Stagira and known as the ‘Stagirite’. In his Metaphysics, v. xvi, he defines ‘excellence’ as that which ‘cannot be surpassed relative to its genus … transferring it to the case of bad things, we speak of a complete scandalmonger and a complete thief—as indeed we even call them good : a good thief and a good scandalmonger’. and, as to Mr Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion, he makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he had seen, and which he styles “a beautiful ulcer.”De Q. almost certainly has in mind Howship, Practical Remarks upon Indigestion (London, 1825), 155: ‘External to the cavity … was now seen, quite distinct from the fine injected membrane, the section of a small white soft tumor. … The contrast was beautiful, the natural structure well injected, that of the tumor not injected at all’. Now will any man pretend, that, abstractedly considered, a thief could appear to Aristotle a perfect character, or that Mr Howship could be enamoured of an ulcer? Aristotle, it is well known, was himself so very moral a character, that, not content with writing his Nichomachéan Ethics, in one volume octavo, he also wrote another system, called Magna Moralia, or Big Ethics.Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was dedicated to or edited by his son, Nichomachus. The authorship of the Magna Moralia is uncertain : it may have been written by Aristotle, or it may have been compiled from his lectures by one of his students after his death. Now, it is impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all, big or little, should admire a thief per se, and, as to Mr Howship, it is well known that he makes war upon all ulcers ; and, without suffering himself to be seduced by their charms, endeavours to banish them from the county of Middlesex. But the truth is, that, however objectionable per se, yet, relatively to others of their class, both a thief and an ulcer may have infinite degrees of merit. They are both imperfections, it is true ; but to be imperfect being their essence, the very greatness of their imperfection becomes their perfection. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna.Adapted from Cicero, Letters to Atticus, iv. vi. 2, which itself quotes Euripides, Fragments, 723: ‘Sparta is your portion: embellish it!’ A thief like Autolycus or Mr Barrington,Autolycus is the thief and rogue in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. George Barrington (1755–1804) was an Irish adventurer and notorious pickpocket. and a grim phagedaenic ulcer,‘spreading ulcer’ (OED). superbly defined, and running regularly through all its natural stages, may no less justly be regarded as ideals after their kind, than the most faultless moss-rose amongst flowers, in its progress from bud to “bright consummate flower” ;Milton, Paradise Lost, v. 481. or, amongst human flowers, the most magnificent young female, apparelled in the pomp of womanhood. And thus not only the ideal of an inkstand may be imagined, (as Mr Coleridge demonstrated in his celebrated correspondence with Mr Blackwood,Coleridge, ‘Selection from Mr Col- eridge’s Literary Correspondence with Friends, and Men of Letters’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10 (1821), 256 : ‘What qualities and properties would you wish to have combined in an ink-stand? … The union of these desiderata will be your ideal of an ink-stand.’) in which, by the way, there is not so much, because an inkstand is a laudable sort of thing, and a valuable member of society ; but even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

Really, gentlemen, I beg pardon for so much philosophy at one time, and now, let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurumA grammatical term referring to the verb form used for an event that is about to happen. tense, and a rumour of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it, Τετέλεςαι, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) εἴργασαι ;Respectively, ‘it is completed’ and ‘it is done’. A molossus is ‘a metrical foot consisting of three long syllables’ (OED). De Q.’s reference seems to be to Medea, a Greek tragedy by Euripides (c.485–406 bc). But the word εἴργασαι does not appear in the play. De Q. probably has in mind Euripides, Hecuba, 1122. suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot, nobody knows whither ; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose—“abiit, evasit,”Cicero, In Catilinam, ii. I: ‘Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit’ (‘He has gone, left us, got away, broken out’). &c.—why, then, I say, what’s the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality ; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad ; but we can’t mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter ; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction perhaps to discover, that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance. Thus all the world is pleased ; the old proverb is justified, that it is an ill wind which blows nobody good; the amateur, from looking bilious and sulky, by too close an attention to virtue, begins to pick up his crumbs, and general hilarity prevails. Virtue has had her day ; and henceforward, VertuVariant of ‘Virtu’, ‘a knowledge of, or interest in, the fine arts’ (OED). and Connoisseurship have leave to provide for themselves. Upon this principle, gentlemen, I propose to guide your studies, from Cain to Mr Thurtell.Cain was the first~born son of Adam and Eve, and murdered his brother Abel (Genesis 4: 1-16). John Thurtell (1794–1824) believed his fellow gambler William Weare had cheated him of £300 and, after enticing Weare into the country, he murdered him. Thurtell’s trial and execution attracted enormous attention, including William Maginn, ‘The Lament for Thurtell’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, 15 (January 1824), 101 : ‘What if, after swallowing brains and blood, he ate pork chops like turtle, | Sure, don’t we swallow anything? Alas! for Whig Jack Thurtell’. Through this great gallery of murder, therefore, together let us wander hand in hand, in delighted admiration, while I endeavour to point your attention to the objects of profitable criticism.

The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder, and the father of the art,De Q. parodies Pierce Egan (1772–1849), sporting writer, whose Boxiana (1812) opens with a lively survey of ‘the origin, rise, and progress of pugilism in England’, and ponders ‘whether our first parent, Adam, had any pretensions to this art’ (Egan, Boxiana, ed. Scott Noble (Toronto, 1997), 1). Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. All the Cains were men of genius. Tubal CainEve ‘also bare-Cain, Tubal an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron’ (Genesis 4:22). invented tubes, I think, or some such thing. But, whatever were the originality and genius of the artist, every art was then in its infancy ; and the works must be criticised with a recollection of that fact. Even Tubal’s work would probably be little approved at this day in Sheffield ;Sheffield, in south Yorkshire, was in the 19th century the world centre of high-grade steel manufacture. and therefore of Cain (Cain senior, I mean,) it is no disparagement to say, that his performance was but so so. Milton, however, is supposed to have thought differently. By his way of relating the case, it should seem to have been rather a pet murder with him, for he retouches it with an apparent anxiety for its picturesque effect :—

Whereat he inly raged ; and, as they talk’d, Smote him into the midriff with a stone That beat out life : he fell ; and, deadly pale, Groan’d out his soul with gushing blood effus’d.
—Par. Lost, B. XI.Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 444–7.

Upon this, Richardson the painter, who had an eye for effect, remarks as follows, in his Notes on Paradise Lost, p. 497 :—“It has been thought,” says he, that Cain beat (as the common saying is,) the breath out of his brother’s body with a great stone ; Milton gives in to this, with the addition, however, of a large wound.”Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745), portrait painter, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost (1734), 497. In this place it was a judicious addition ; for the rudeness of the weapon, unless raised and enriched by a warm, sanguinary colouring, has too much of the naked air of the savage school ; as if the deed were perpetrated by a Polyphemein Homer’s Odysseus, Polyphemus is the most famous of a race of savage, one-eyed giants known as Cyclopes. In Book IX Odysseus narrowly escapes being killed and eaten by Polyphemus. without science, premeditation, or anything but a mutton bone. However, I am chiefly pleased with the improvement, as it implies that Milton was an amateur. As to Shakspeare, there never was a better ; as his description of the murdered Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI.,Shakespeare, Henry VI, iii. ii. of Duncan’s, Banquo’s,Shakespeare, Macbeth, ii. ii and Macbeth, iii. iii. &c. sufficiently proves.

The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to see how it slumbered without improvement for ages. In fact, I shall now be obliged to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly unworthy of notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in the age of Pericles,Pericles (c.495–429 bc), Athenian statesman, led Greece during an age of great political and cultural achievement. produced no murder of the slightest merit ; and Rome had too little originality of genius in any of the arts to succeed, where her model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks under the very idea of murder. “The man was murdered ;”—how will this sound in Latin? Interfectus est, interemptus est‘He was killed, he was destroyed’—which simply expresses a homicide ; and hence the Christian Latinity of the middle ages was obliged to introduce a new word, such as the feebleness of classic conceptions never ascended to. Murdratus est,De Q. playfully Latinizes German stems : ‘He was murdered’. says the sublimer dialect of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish school of murder kept alive whatever was yet known in the art, and gradually transferred it to the Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was always respectable, even in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln shows, which was honoured with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of another performance from the same school, which he puts into the mouth of the Lady Abbess.In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Prioress (not ‘Abbess’) relates the story of a choirboy in Asia who was murdered by Jews. At the end of the tale she likens him to Hugh of Lincoln (1245–55), a legendary English child martyr whose alleged murder by Jews became a focal point of medieval anti‑Semitism.

Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot but think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie, would have made first-rate artists ; and it is on all accounts to be regretted, that the priggism of CiceroCicero (106–43 bc), statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer, was also the greatest Roman orator. Catiline (c.108–62 bc), aristocrat and demagogue, plotted to overthrow the Roman republic and murder its leading citizens, including Cicero. He was denounced by Cicero in the Senate and died in battle shortly thereafter. Clodius (c.93–52 bc), politician and thug, was a bitter enemy of Cicero. robbed his country of the only chance she had for distinction in this line. As the subject of a murder, no person could have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have howled with panic, if he had heard CethegusCethegus was the most dangerous of Catiline’s associates and undertook to murder Cicero. He was executed by order of the Senate. under his bed. It would have been truly diverting to have listened to him ; and satisfied I am, gentlemen, that he would have preferred the utile of creeping into a closet, or even into a cloaca, to the honestumDe Q. means the useful (‘utile’) as opposed to the honourable (‘honestum’) thing. A ‘cloaca’ is a ‘sewer’. of facing the bold artist.

To come now to the dark ages—(by which we, that speak with precision, mean, par excellence, the tenth century, and the times immediately before and after)—these ages ought naturally to be favourable to the art of murder, as they were to church-architecture, to stained-glass, &c. ; and, accordingly, about the latter end of this period, there arose a great character in our art, I mean the Old Man of the Mountains. He was a shining light, indeed, and I need not tell you, that the very word “assassin”The ‘Assassins’, whose name derives from the Arabic ‘Hashshash’ (‘hashish smoker’), were an Islamic sect dating from the eleventh century, and infamous for their alleged practice of taking hashish to induce ecstatic visions and then murdering their religious enemies. Rashid ad-Din (d. 1192), leader of the Syrian branch of the Assassins, was known in the West as the Old Man of the Mountain. is deduced from him. So keen an amateur was he, that on one occasion, when his own life was attempted by a favourite assassin, he was so much pleased with the talent shown, that notwithstanding the failure of the artist, he cre- ated him a Duke upon the spot, with remainder to the female line, and settled a pension on him for three lives.The anecdote has not been traced, and is probably De Q.’s own apocryphal addition. Assassination is a branch of the art which demands a separate notice ; and I shall devote an entire lecture to it. Meantime, I shall only observe how odd it is, that this branch of the art has flourished by fits. It never rains, but it pours. Our own age can boast of some fine specimens ; and, about two centuries ago, there was a most brilliant constellation of murders in this class. I need hardly say, that I allude especially to those five splendid works,—the assassinations of William I. of Orange, of Henry IV. of France,William I, Prince of Orange (1533–84), leader of the Protestant Netherlands in their revolt against Spanish rule, was shot dead by a fanatical Roman Catholic, Franc-Comtois Balthasar Gérard. Henri IV (1553–1610), first Bourbon King of France, was stabbed to death by a deranged Roman Catholic, François Ravaillac (1578–1610). of the Duke of Buckingham, (which you will find excellently described in the letters published by Mr Ellis,George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), statesman and royal favourite, was murdered in Portsmouth by a disaffected naval lieutenant, John Felton (c.1595–1628). Sir Henry Ellis (1777–1869), principal librarian of the British Museum, published a letter ‘announcing the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham’ in Original letters, illustrative of English History, 3 vols. (London, 1824), iii. 254–60: ‘the Duke of Buckingham … was by one Felton … slaine at one blow, with a dagger-knife. In his staggering he turn’d about, uttering onely this word, “Villaine!”’ of the British Museum,) of Gustavus Adolphus, and of Wallenstein.Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632), king of Sweden and champion of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War, was not murdered, but died in battle at Lützen. Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein (1583–1634), Bohemian soldier and commander of the armies of the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years War, was stabbed to death by an English mercenary, Walter Devereux. The King of Sweden’s assassination, by the by, is doubted by many writers, Harte amongst others ;De Q. refers to Walter Harte (1709–74), mis- cellaneous writer, The History of the Life of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden (1759). Harte’s account does not tally with De Q.’s : as Gustavus’s followers ‘were preparing to retreat, an Imperial cavalier advanced, unobserved … and having cried out, Long have I fought thee, transpierced his majesty with a pistol-ball through the body’ (Harte, The History of Gustavus Adolphus, 2 vols. (London, 1807), ii. 377) but they are wrong. He was murdered ; and I consider his murder unique in its excellence ; for he was murdered at noon-day, and on the field of battle,—a feature of original conception, which occurs in no other work of art that I remember. Indeed, all of these assassinations may be studied with profit by the advanced connoisseur. They are all of them exemplaria,‘models’ or ‘examples’. of which one may say,—

Nocturnâ versatâ manu, versate diurne ;Horace, Ars Poetica, 269 : ‘handle [them] by night, handle them by day’.

Especially nocturnâ.

In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to excite our wonder : important changes often depend on their deaths ; and, from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed to the aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving for scenical effect. But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really does surprise me ; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it ; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him ; and against Locke’sJohn Locke (1632–1704), philosopher and author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the seminal work of British empiricist philosophy. philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.

Graphisme

Typographie

UX·UI design

Bibliographie

Beaux-arts

Appendice