Murder by Candlelight (32 page)

“Poetry” is an ambiguous word; where murder is concerned, it is enough to say that it is a means of describing experience that lies beyond the literal reality to which our commonplace language refers. The poet cannot, of course, forego the use of this everyday language when he invokes these inarticulable aspects of our being; but precisely because he is trying to describe not only the “real” world which the senses apprehend but another world that is
not
present to the senses, he resorts to a language of metaphors and symbols, to what we call poetry.

It was the achievement of De Quincey to see that, if a writer was to get his hands around a thing like murder—if he was to do justice to it in the way Shakespeare did justice to it in
Macbeth
—he could not very well do without this poetic and figurative language. It was for this reason that, although he himself wrote prose and not verse, he drew freely, in his murder writings, on the language of the poets, which he used to make his reader sensible of murder's Gothic depths, abysses which more pedestrian writers overlooked.

Much like Stephen and De Quincey, the twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson blamed progress for the banalization of murder. In his essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?”—one of three he wrote on that vacuous genre—he argued that progress has at once subjected men to new kinds of uncertainty and at the same time undermined the credibility of those religious consolations which do something to reconcile people to the precariousness of their situation. The modern man, Wilson wrote, lives in perpetual fear of disaster; yet when disasters come, he is never able “to pin down the responsibility” for them with any degree of certainty. He is demoralized by the feeling that he is surrounded by evil-doers lurking in the shadows, or sitting comfortably in places of power—evil-doers who, moreover, are always getting away with it. For the agitated modern man, the detective novel, Wilson argued, is balm in Gilead: it enables him to forget, for a moment, the complexities and ambiguities of the world in which he lives, and gives him the satisfaction of temporarily inhabiting a make-believe world in which the bad guy (who undoubtedly
is
a bad guy) is always caught and justly punished. The murderer is spotted, Wilson writes, “and—relief!—he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain—known to the trade as George Gruesome—and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.”

It is Wilson's theory that the modern reader adores detective fiction in part because he finds in it a substitute for a lost religion; he is consoled by the presence, in the heart of the mystery novel, of an omniscient God, one who has incarnated himself as an infallible private eye, ever ready to detect and punish the sinning criminal. But if this is true—if the readers of these ersatz gospels really do seek a religious consolation in them—surely there must come a time when they ask themselves why the omniscient detective-divinity is content to punish cartoon villains only. Why is he never shown to prosecute more credible evil-doers than poor George Gruesome, whom he is always running to ground? Why do Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers never give their readers the courage to look real evil-doing in the face? The detective novel gives its proselytes not Macbeth or Vautrin, but George Gruesome, and can do no other. For it is very hard to look, closely and steadily, at something that is really appalling (the Moors murders, for example) if you haven't, in the back of your mind, a compensatory idea of goodness to buck you up. A real religion supplies the prophylactic ideal—the vision of transcendent grace that enables those who have embraced it to look closely at evil; he who believes that his redeemer liveth can contemplate even the spider sucking the life-juices out of its victim without feeling that the universe is morally sick.

It is precisely because Shakespeare (I think) believed (or hoped) that there
is
“a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” that he was able to look so closely not only at Iago, but also at Lear as he carries the body of Cordelia in his arms.
^‡
It is the same with the tragic poets of Athens. The Dionysian orgy became Attic tragedy only when Athens itself was Platonizing, moving toward a belief that there is an arch-goodness which is not only stronger
than evil, but which will eventually overcome it.
^§
Armed with this apotropaic confidence, Aeschylus and Sophocles could look Medusa in the face without fear of her petrifying power. For although Plato had not yet translated, into the language of philosophy, the belief that grace will prevail, the idea was in the air. Aeschylus, certainly, has caught the essence of it when he has the chorus in
Agamemnon
sing of wisdom as the
(a favor, grace, or loveliness of the gods) which comes drop by drop to men through anguish and suffering, that is, through the experience of evil.

With detective fiction, it is different. Having no vision of a greater goodness, the books cannot conjure a deeper horror. Dante could plumb the depths of hell because he knew that Beatrice was in heaven. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has no such faith; and that is why Sherlock Holmes, for all the brilliance of his mind, is a lost soul. At a time when all “Europe was ringing with his name,” Watson says in “The Adventure of Reigate Square,” when “his room was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams, I found him a prey to the blackest depression.”

With the Ripper murders, the history of Romantic murder which it has been my object to trace comes properly to its end. Already, in 1888, the highly poetic and spiritualized language with which Carlyle and De Quincey sought to understand murder had ceased to be credible; and it is no more so now, in an age which, if it has lost the taste of God, is even more oblivious of the stench of the Devil. The sages of the Enlightenment taught their proselytes to scoff at the old theories of evil which De Quincey and Carlyle sought to revive: reason and science, they believed, would usher in a world
that could do without such Gothic nonsense. That notable merchant of light, Francis Bacon, went so far as to argue that inductive science would prepare the way for a new Eden. It is a belief that is just now in vogue in Silicon Valley, where the cyber moguls are busy planning to live forever, or, failing that, for five hundred years. Carlyle and De Quincey would have blanched at such alchemistical overreaching—shrunk from the shallowness and hubris of it as from a thing but too likely to breed new forms of Gothic horror.

Could it be that they were right to try to rouse us from our prosaic slumbers? Have we not had enough of utopiasts who pretend that we can abolish evils which are inseparable from our nature? If so, the time may be ripe for a reappraisal of the work of the Romantic murder writers.

*
Afterwards Sir Leslie, Knight Commander of the Bath; father of Virginia Woolf.

†
In his essay “Witches, and Other Night Fears,” Lamb argues that the night-evils we dread are often metaphysical rather than physical in nature: “the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual . . . it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth.” Such fear, he speculates, may “afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane existence, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.” The devils of our nightmares are for Lamb a symbolic expression of our terror before the incomprehesibility of a universe bounded by such enigmatical propositions as Eternity and Infinity.

‡
“And if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage,” says Dr. Johnson, “I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

§
“O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good.” Milton,
Paradise Lost
, XII, 469–71. Murder can never of course be condoned: yet precisely because it is among the most harrowing forms of evil, it has sometimes driven men to God.

Acknowledgments

I
have especially to thank, in connection with the writing of this book, Michael Carlisle of InkWell Management and Jessica Case of Pegasus. I am, too, deeply grateful to my family for their love and support.

Notes and Sources