Appendix D: The Criminal as Artist
In both “The Canterville Ghost” and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” Wilde presents characters who are murderers as well as gentlemen. Two possible real-life murderers from whose lives Wilde may have drawn inspiration for these characters are Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and John Williams. Wainewright was well known in Wilde’s day, having entered into the fictions of many authors including Charles Dickens and Edward Lytton-Bulwer. Williams was an earlier, although still well-known figure for the Victorians, preserved mainly through the satirical essays of Thomas de Quincey. The following excerpts are taken from Wilde’s own essay about Wainewright and from two essays by de Quincey.
Oscar Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green,” Intentions, 1891. [1]
[This excerpt is taken from the second version of Wilde’s essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” which was published in 1891 in Intentions, a collection of Wilde’s essays on artistic criticism. The original version of “Pen, Pencil and Poison” was published in Fortnightly Review in January 1889. The artist and murderer, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, whom Wilde discusses in the essay, was likely one of the sources Wilde used in creating the Ghost of Sir Simon in “The Canterville Ghost.”]
It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. . . . To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule. . . . Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison,’ as a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794. His boyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual influences of Wordsworth’s poetry. . . .
He went to school at Charles Burney’s academy at Hammersmith. . . .It was [here] that he first developed his talent as an artist. . . . Indeed, painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find expression by pen or poison. . . .
[T]he editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man’s genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day. Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he chose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his mark. . . .
. . . [H]e determined to startle the town as a dandy[2], and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded. . . as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. . . .
This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. . . .
He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. . . .
He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things belong to the same age. . . .
As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions. . . .With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy. . . . The qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. . . .
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and scene-painting. ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn. In literature . . .he was ‘on the side of the angels.’ He was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical Shelley,’ as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in existence was wrought specially for him. He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. . . .
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man. . . was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. . . .
His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths.[3] He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had always been very much attached. In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason. But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured her life in various offices. The circumstances were as follows. On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House. . . . With them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. . . .
When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’ . . .
His love of art, however, never deserted him. . . . Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to make away with people who had offended him. . . . But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete failures. . . . In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he had evinced an extraordinary affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received . . . an oil portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.’ M. Zola, in one of his novels[4], tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin. . . .
Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this memoir . . . is of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. . . . There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him. . . . But had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value. I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. . . . However, Art has not forgotten him. He is the hero of Dickens’s Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer’s Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’ To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
Thomas de Quincey, From “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 1827.
[Thomas de Quincey’s trio of satirical essays concerning the fine art of murder are also possible sources that Wilde used in creating the characters of Sir Simon in “The Canterville Ghost” and Lord Arthur Savile in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” as well as a model for his essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison.”]
The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder, and the father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. . . . The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to see how it slumbered without improvement for ages. . . .
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with so much of the nineteenth as we have yet seen, jointly compose the Augustan age of murder. . . . I find that, out of 229,250 who died in London during one period of twenty years in the seventeenth century, not more than eighty-six were murdered; this is, about four three-tenths[5] per annum. A small number this, gentlemen, to found an academy upon. . . .
I should say a few words about the principles of murder. . . .
As to the person, I suppose that it is evident that he ought to be a good man; because, if he were not, he might himself, by possibility, be contemplating murder at the very time. . . . Whenever that is the case, or may be thought to be the case, farewell to all the genuine effects of the art. For the final purpose of murder considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy. . . .
The subject chosen ought to be in good health: for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to bear it. . . . The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display in this point is enough for them. But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all the other liberal arts when thoroughly mastered, the result is, to humanize the heart. . . .
Thomas de Quincey, From “Three Memorable Murders,” 1854.
Mr. John Williams[6]. . . .made it a rule never to practice his art but in full dress—point ruffles, bag wig[7], and diamond-hilted sword. . . . In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed . . . that Mr. Williams wore a long blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk. Amongst the anecdotes which circulated about him, it was also said that at the time, that Mr. Williams employed the first of dentists, and also the first of chiropodists[8]. On no account would he patronize any second-rate skill. And beyond a doubt, in that perilous little branch of business which was practiced by himself, he might be regarded as the most aristocratic and fastidious of artists.
But who meantime was the victim, to whose abode he was hurrying? For surely he never could be so indiscreet as to be sailing about on a roving cruise in search of some chance person to murder? Oh, no; he had suited himself with a victim some time before, viz., an old and very intimate friend. For he seems to have laid it down as a maxim—that the best person to murder was a friend; and, in default of a friend, which is an article one cannot always command, an acquaintance.
Notes
[1] The subtitle refers primarily to the “greenish impressionistic portraits” painted by the murderer in Emile Zola’s novel (Thérèse Raquin) and to Wainewright’s “curious love of green” which points to a “subtle artistic temperament”; critics have also pointed out that it could connote poison, envy, and hashish in the minds of Wilde’s readers.
[2] A man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely pursuits.
[3] His uncle was actually named George.
[4] Thérèse Raquin (1863)
[5] .03%
[6] Believed to be the Ratcliff Highway murderer who killed 7 people in December 1811; Williams hanged himself in his cell before his case went to trial.
[7] An 18th-century wig, the back-hair of which was enclosed in an ornamental bag
[8] podiatrists
