LORD LYTTON ON THE AGE OF MURDERERS.
IN Lord Lyttonla last novel, he introduces some curious remarks ou the age of murderers, apropos of the conjecture that Macbeth- ought to be imagined as not more than twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan. It belongs to youth, he says, to begin the habit of miscalculating its own power in relation to the society in Which you live, and this habit, unless- begun in youth, is rarely beg= later. But we will give the whole passage:— " Do you think Macbeth was young when he murdered Duncan ?'— Certainly. No man ever commits a first crime of violent nature, sunk as murder, after thirty ; if he begins before, he may go on up to any age. But youth is the season for commencing those wrong calculations which belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus read in the newspapers that the persona who murder their sweethearts are generally from two to six-and-twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than love—that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambi- tion—are generally about twenty-eight—lago's age. Twenty-eight is the usual close of the active season for getting rid of one's fellow- creatures—a prize-fighter falls off after that age. I take it that Macbeth was about twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan, and from about fifty-four to sixty when he began to whine about missing the comforts of old age. But can any audience understand that difference of years in seeing a three-hours' play; or does any actor ever pretend to impress it on the audience, and appear at twenty-eight in the first act and as a sexagenarian in the fifth ?'" We take it that Lord Lytton never made a greater mistake than in the abstract conclusion he thus formed. No doubt it is true that passionate murders, murders of women by their lovers, com- mitted in violent transports of jealousy, are usually committed young ; but then that is not due to the miscalculation of individual power as regards the rest of the world, but to the absence of all cal- culation,—to the blinding and absorbing heat of a passion that turns the perpetrators of these deeds into something like mere automatons worked for the moment by a spasm of jealousy or despair. Far from sharing Lord Lytton's view as to Macbeth, we feel little doubt that Shakespeare attributed the ambitious crime of Macbeth to a much more mature age than it pleased Lord Lytton to suggest. It isimpossible to suppose, if we study the context, that there is any considerable interval of time between the murder of Duncan and that of Banquo. In the scene describing the plot for the murder of Banque, Macbeth speaks of Duncan's sons as having just reached England and Irelmad, whither they fled on the morrow of Duncan's murder,. so that a few weeks at most must be supposed to have intervened. Yet it is in the scene in which Banquo's ghost appears that Lady Macbeth excuses her husband to his guests for his delirious talk, as follows:— "Sit, worthy friends; my Lord is•often thus, And hath been from his youth,"
..aa• form of expression certainly not easily implying that Macbeth was still in his youth. Add to this Lady Macbeth's language in encouraging her husband to the murder, and we have additional evidence that the time of a mother's cares was, to her imagination, in the past
"I have given suck, and know How tender 'tie to love the babe that milks me : I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed his brains out, had I so sworn As von have done' to this."
A young mother could hardly have spoken in that way. We cannot help thinking, from both Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's language, that Shakespeare intended to place them in the epoch, not of youthful passion, but of hard ambition,—in
middle life. And again, would Lord Lytton have attributed to Shakespeare the intention to make Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, a young man under thirty when he contrived his brother's death ? Surely no hypothesis could be less like Shakespeare's picture.
But to leave the world of dramatic fiction, which is important only because Shakespeare's knowledge of men was so marvellous that what he represents is sure to have a basis of fact beneath it, is it true that the more remarkable of real murders,—murders committed not in sudden passion, but from ambitious or other calculations, like those of Macbeth and Hamlet's uncle Claudius, — have been committed by the young ? Certainly in the case of women it has almost always been otherwise; though Constance Kent was a remarkable instance to the contrary. Both the women who have attained a horrible notoriety this year for the number and cold calculation of their poisonings — Lydia Sherman in America, and Mary Anne Cotton in England were mature women, who did not begin to think of such crimes till near the age of forty, or beyoud it. The Countess de Brinvilliers and her accom- plice Gaudin de St. Croix were apparently both over thirty-five when they began their career as poisoners. And a German poisoner as notorious as any of them, Anna Maria Zwauziger, whose strange series of crimes, trial, and confession, Lady Duff Gordon narrated in her " Remarkable Criminal Trials," some twenty- seven years ago, was nearly fifty when she began to revel in the power which poison gave her over human life. In- deed, if •Lord Lytton had had Lady Duff Gordon's volume before him, he would have seen that among the more remark- able murders, murders of calculation like both Macbeth's and that of the King in "Hamlet," it is very raze, instead of very common, to find the murderers young. Anna Maria. Zwanziger, —who is sometimes called the German Brinvilliers,—eonfeased to the judge that her death was fortunate for mankind, as it would have been impossible for her to discontinue her prac- tice of poisoning, so much did she revel in the power she felt it gave her; and we suspect that Lydia Sherman and Mary Anne Cotton, and probably Catherine Wilson, the poisoner of some ten years or so back, and Christina Edmunds, the Brighton poisoner of last year,--none of them in their youth,—might have said the same ; indeed it is hardly possible to conceive that a very young woman could have felt this frightful pleasure iu the wielding of an evil power of destruction,—if for no better reason, because other and more natural hopes and pleasures would keep their attraction till the season of youth had passed. Then take the more serious murders of deliberation. Certainly Sandt, the German student who murdered Kotzebue, was a lad ; and Ravaillac, who murdered Henri IV., was only 31, a little over Lord Lytton's age ; but Felton, the murderer of Buckingham, -seems to have been a mature man ; Louvel, the murderer of the Duo de Berri in 1820, was 37; Guy Fawkes was 35; and in our own time, Orsini, who attempted the life of the late Emperor of the French, was 39.
The ages of men who first engage in calculated crimes of violence range, no doubt, lower than that of women, for the obvious reason that women's strongest instrument in working for even the same class of ends is, while young, a different one, that of persuasion, and that they are only likely to have recourse to violence when their chief engine fails them. But in any case, Lord Lytton's analysis of the reason for the youth of murderers fails, and it is to that we wish to draw attention. It is not the experience of maturity, of the great power of the world and the little power of the individual, which deters from calculated violence, bat more often, one might say, the sense of being utterly baffled which that experience engenders in a self-willed mind whereon some one desire has fastened a firm hold, that most often leads to it. It is far less " irrational hope and the sense of physical power," than rational fear and the sense of moral incapacity which precipitate men who have once fixed their desires in a particular groove into thiedesperate last resource. Scott's Balfour of Burley is an admirable type of the higher kind of murderous resolve of this sort, —the kind due to a grim tenacity of purpose which cannot deny itself the satisfaction of a violent collision with all laws human or divine that seem to balk its purposes. There is an element of desperation, rather than of over-sanguine, over-youthful hope in almost every calculating murder,—though, as in Macbeth's ease, there may be a sense of predestination, too. Evidently neither he nor his wife believed that the witches' prophecy could fulfil itself without their own aid. The prophecy suggested to them that the murder of Duncan was the only possible path to' the throne, and whetted their ambition fot it ; but the conviction that it would be quite impossible for the preternatural prediction to be fulfilled with- out their help, was akin rather to desperation, than to "irrational hope and the sense of physical power." The great *Weed murders
have far oftener sprung out of the savage and brutal despair of ambitious, hat only too much experienced self-will, driven back upon itself, and fully conscious of its want of living resource, than out of the glowing audacity and excessive hopefulness of youth. Coast Guido, in Mr. Browning's "Ring and the Book,"—a character painted not from imagination, but from history, and after a most careful study of the real pleadings of a real trial,—is a perfect type of murderers on calculation ; and Count Guido is middle- aged, nearly fifty, and his crime is essentially the crime of middle age,—the crime not of flowing, but of ebbing life, of re- source failing and hate growing at the expense of life. He himself speaks of his failing sense of life as the warning which first precipitated him into the plot that ended in the murder :— " Brief, one day I felt The tick of time inside me, turning-point,
And slight sense there was now enough of this,—
That I was near my seventh climacteric Hard upon, if not over, the middle of life."
And bow does the poet describe his murderous temper? In words carefully chosen to express most eloquently not fullness, but starvation of soul ; not irrational hope and the sense of physical power, but the very destructiveness of a sort of spiritual death :- " And thus I see him slowly and surely edged Of all the table-land whence life upeprings Aspiring to be immortality, As the snake hatched on hill-top by mischance, Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders down Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale: So I lose Guido in the loneliness, Silence and dusk, till at the doleful end, At the horizontal line, creation's verge From what just is to absolute nothingness,— Lo ! what is this he meets, strains onward still?
What other man deep further in the fate, Who, turning at the prize of a footfall, To flatter him and promise fellowship, Discovers in the act a frightful face,— Judas made monstrous by much solitude There let them grapple, denizens o' the dark, Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound, In their cue spot out of the ken of God Or care of man, for ever and ever more !"
That surely is a much truer picture of the typical murderer than any other which modern poetry has given us. And it is a picture which, cantrary to Lord Lytton's theory, makes such murder to spring out of the selfish and wilful desperateness which can hardly come till middle-age even to the worst man, and which has no part or share in the sanguine temper and hopeful audacity of youth.
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