HORRORS

The subject is suggested to me by the notice-board outside the Court Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A "horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and I, who might have revelled in it, have made, per viltate, the Great Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case. "Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's Horror was due to Decadence. Fuimus. There has been a period when such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the aged lady who told her doctor that she feared she was breaking up, for she could no longer relish her Murders.

Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money; and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I could have pointed out the house where the murder took place—it went cheap for a good many years afterwards,—and could have described the murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act, and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which, forty years later, was boldly plagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in the Daily Telegraph, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack on the bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Boeuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.

But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.

It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded of all living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.

To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us; and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousness these visions have "something of celestial light" about them—they are spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die away, "and melt into the light of common day"—very common day indeed, the day of the Old Bailey and the Police News. By a curious chain of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples, pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end. I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury where he expiated his crime.

Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But, as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not much more cheering was the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne, convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools, founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in 1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr. James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments, and recorded in his journal—"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young girl; it was fine and hot."

One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids; and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating, most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the "Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and tell the butler that it will do for a cold bath to-morrow; still I plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that Burgundy, of which no drop remained in the decanter; and still I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by antimonial poisoning.

But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams.