Chapter IV: Criminal Anthropology (psychical) (3)

Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds,
Filons en fleur,
Mes chers, mes bons,
Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons-nous
Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.”

I do not know any more interesting document in criminal literature than one poem, _Læti et Errabundi_, contained in this volume. Fully to understand the significance of this remarkable poem, it is necessary to state that Verlaine’s imprisonment was due to an attempt on the life of his comrade in sexual perversity, himself also a poet of some note. The latter left Europe, and it is not now known whether he is alive or dead. To him _Læti et Errabundi_ is addressed.

I quote the concluding lines:--

“On vous dit mort, vous. Que le Diable
Emporte avec qui la colporte
La nouvelle irrémédiable
Qui vient ainsi battre ma porte!

Je n’y veux rien croire. Mort, vous,
Toi, dieu parmi les demi-dieux!
Ceux qui le disent sont des fous.
Mort, mon grand péché radieux.

Tout ce passé brûlant encore
Dans mes veines et ma cervelle
Et qui rayonne et qui fulgore
Sur ma ferveur toujours nouvelle!

Mort tout ce triomphe inouï
Retentissant sans frein ni fin
Sur l’air jamais évanoui
Que bat mon cœur qui fut divin!

Quoi le miraculeux poème
Et la toute-philosophie,
Et ma patrie et ma bohème
Morts? Allons donc! tu vis ma vie!”

Verlaine’s very remarkable head, though large, is the head of a criminal much more than of a man of genius, with its heavy jaw, projecting orbital arches and acrocephalic occiput, with central ridge--the head which the acute Lauvergne called Satanic, and which, in its extreme form, he believed to announce the monstrous alliance of the most eminent faculty of man, genius, with the most pronounced tendencies to crime. M. Verlaine has long been a victim to chronic alcoholism, and the author of the _Fêtes Galantes_ and of some of the most tender lines written in our day is now most often found within the wards of Parisian hospitals.

“Je compte parmi les maladroits.

J’ai perdu ma vie et je sais bien
Que tout blâme sur moi s’en va fondre:
A cela je ne puis que répondre
Qui je suis vraiment né Saturnien.”

A few words may be added concerning criminal art as shown in design. Lombroso reproduces numerous drawings, etc., made in prison. They are generally very rough and slight, never beautiful, but frequently expressive, rendering character, now and then, in face and attitude, with ease and felicity. Scenes of murder or robbery, law courts, men hanging from the gallows, women, mostly nude, with huge or pendent breasts, men or women in extravagantly perverse sexual attitudes--these are the visions which come to the criminal in prison, and to which he seeks, by such means as may be within his reach, to give artistic expression. Sexual imagery, not beautiful but gross and ugly, undoubtedly has the chief part in these designs; but it is scarcely necessary to point out that the artificial conditions under which the prisoner lives is largely responsible for this characteristic of his art, although not for its generally deliberate ugliness.

Dr. Laurent, in his work, _Les Habitués des Prisons_, has treated this matter more completely than any other writer known to me, and has reproduced some very characteristic and instructive examples of this art, although he has not dared to reproduce the more extravagant designs which he describes. What has chiefly impressed him among the large number of drawings by prisoners which have passed through his hands is the absence of any elevated thought, of any noble sentiment. In the erotic designs there is occasionally an imaginative audacity, but love is always regarded as a purely physiological act, and everywhere else the design is pathetically commonplace; it is naturalistic in the lowest sense of the word, adding nothing, suppressing nothing; and these drawings have therefore a remarkable family likeness. If there is any great artist of whom they ever remind us it is Ostade, with his perpetual research of the mean and degraded, physically and morally, in humanity. Dr. Laurent draws special attention to a design which appears to represent some winged angel of hope; there is something in the bold, predaceous face of this vulgar fairy, in the coarse firm attitude, so suggestive of the things that alone have left a firm impress on the artist’s mind, that is very pathetic. In one of those designs only is it possible to catch a glimpse of the ideal; it is the figure of a woman by a clerk of some education, and possessed of personal qualities which brought him into relation with women of a somewhat superior type. The face in this drawing has a tender and melancholy air; even here, however, the body is drawn in too crude and realistic a manner. Where these artists succeed best is in the photographic delineation of commonplace or unpleasant human types, such as may be seen in large cities, especially after nightfall. There is usually something hard, cynical, degraded in these types, in their whole bodies as well as their faces; they remind us of what was said of portraits executed by Wainewright, that he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into them.

These artists also do not succeed in caricature, and rarely attempt it. To be successful here involves some judgment, delicacy, and insight, and these the prison artists do not appear to possess.

In the nude, as I have already mentioned, prison artists take great delight, and they even achieve a certain amount of success. There is a certain Hogarthian vigour and ease with which the faces and forms of these coarse, low-browed, animal, energetic women, with their large pendent breasts, are brought before us. The only prison sketch I have seen showing anything more than a crude sense of beauty, any real appeal to the imagination, or distinct science of form and composition, is a group of nude women in extravagant attitudes, which Dr. Laurent reproduces; he says nothing of the artist, except that he was probably a Saint Anthony by necessity, who, in this scene as of a Sabbath of witches, has given expression to the dreams that tormented him. It is a genuine piece of fantastic art, and seems to recall certain designs of the Belgian artist, Félicien Rops. This design escapes to some extent--and to some extent only--from the judgment which Dr. Laurent pronounces on the treatment of sex by criminals:--“Sex is not for them a sacred and mysterious thing, a mystic rose hidden beneath the obscure vault of the body, like a strange and precious talisman enclosed in a tabernacle. For them it is a thing of ugliness, which they drag into the light of day and laugh at.”

§ 10. _Criminal Philosophy._

One of the most interesting and instructive departments of criminal literature is that dealing with the criminal’s mental attitude towards crime. In considering the problems of crime, and the way to deal with them, it is of no little importance to have a clear conception of the social justification for crime from the criminal’s point of view. Not only is he free from remorse; he either denies his crime or justifies it as a duty, at all events as a trifle. He has a practical and empirical way of his own of regarding the matter, as Dostoieffsky remarks, and excuses these accidents by his destiny, by fate. “What contributes to justify the criminal in his own eyes is that he is quite certain that the public opinion of the class in which he was born and lives will acquit him; he is sure that he will not be judged definitely lost unless his crime is against one of his own class, his brothers. He is secure on that side, and with so good a conscience he will never lose his moral assurance, which is the main thing. He feels himself on solid ground, and by no means hates the knout which is administered to him. He looks upon it as inevitable, and consoles himself by thinking that he is not the first nor the last to receive it. Does the soldier hate the Turk who sabres him? By no means!”

To be caught is the foolish part of the business. “You are a lot of fools to get in here, myself included,” is one of the prison inscriptions noted by Mr. Horsley. “Had God wished me to be different, He would have made me different,” said Goethe. In the same spirit is the philosophy of crime set forth by a man known to Lombroso: “If God has given to us the instinct to steal, He has given to others the instinct to imprison us; the world is an amusing theatre!” It is rare, however, for the criminal to take so lofty a standpoint as this; more usually he bases the justification for his own existence on the vices of respectable society--“the ignorance and cupidity of the public,” as one prisoner expressed it--that he is shrewd enough to perceive; “it is a game of rogue catch rogue,” a convict told Mr. Davitt. A youthful French brigand in the days of Charles IX., as he impassively ascended the scaffold, declared that he was innocent, because he had never robbed poor people but only princes and lords, the greatest robbers in the world. “We are poor rogues, and so hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escape,” pleaded Captain Bartholomew Roberts’s fifty-two pirates, executed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. “Law for the rich but none for the poor,” is a modern English prison inscription which would probably have expressed its writer’s meaning better if it had been transposed. _Quels gredins les honnêtes gens!_

An Italian criminal wrote in a book of “Moral Maxims” by Tommaseo: “When you have read this book become a priest or a master; if not it will be of no use to you. There are fine maxims in this book, but maxims are no good in this world, where the god of gold reigns alone. He who has money is brave and virtuous; all the maxims of Tommaseo are of no use to him who has none; he will still be treated with contempt.” A Milanese thief said to Lombroso: “I do not rob; I merely take from the rich their superfluities; and, besides, do not advocates and merchants rob? Why accuse me rather than them?” “Knowing,” wrote the murderer Raynal, “that three-fourths of the social virtues are cowardly vices, I thought that an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the cautious combinations of fraud.” J. G. Wainewright, when in prison, said to a visitor: “Sir, you city men enter upon your speculations and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, and some fail. Mine happen to have failed.” An Italian thief, one Rosati, said: “I am proud of my deeds; I have never taken small sums; to attack such large sums I consider a speculation rather than a theft.” Another Italian thief said that there were two kinds of justice in the world: natural justice, that which he himself practised when he shared the proceeds of his thefts with the poor; and artificial justice, that which is protected by social laws. The criminal is firmly convinced that his imprisonment is a sign that the country is going to the dogs. A prison inscription quoted by Lombroso runs: “I am imprisoned for stealing half-a-dozen eggs; Ministers who rob millions every day are honoured. Poor Italy!” “We are necessary,” a brigand chief said proudly to his judges; “God has sent us on the earth to punish the avaricious and the rich. We are a kind of divine scourge. And for the rest, without us what would you judges do?”

This conviction of the criminality of the honest is engrained in the criminal mind, and one meets it at every turn. “Who doesn’t deserve the galleys?” was a remark often heard by Dr. Lauvergne at the convict establishment at Toulon, and the same idea was cynically expressed by Lacenaire:--

“Buvons à la sagesse,
A la vertu qui soutient!
Tu peux sans crainte d’ivresse,
Boire à tous les gens de bien.”

Most people must have observed, in talking with persons of vicious instincts, the genuine disgust which these so often feel for the slightly different vices of others and their indifference to their own. So the man in prison feels indulgence for his own offence and contempt for his more cautious brother outside who continues to retain the respect of society, feelings which the latter heartily reciprocates. Every individual, whatever his position, feels the need of a certain amount of _amour propre_. “I may be a thief, but, thank God, I am a respectable man.”

Among the criminal songs still found in Sardinia there is one (quoted by Lombroso from Bouillier’s _Les Dialectes et les Chants de la Sardaigne_) that may be quoted here. “Tell me,” asks Achea of the priest, “if I have nothing to eat, and if I find wherewith to appease my hunger, may I take the goods of another?” “Believe me, if you have nothing to eat, and you meet with something, you would be a fool not to take it.” “That is a good counsel, but here is a difficulty: what I have taken in this way, ought I to return it?” “No. The observance of the law would subject you to a fast too severe; you are a great fool if you do not understand that in the face of necessity all things belong to all.” That is the morality of a lawless and primitive society, but it has points of contact with some of the latest and highest developments of social morality. Tolstoï would justify it; as, to a certain extent, a respected archbishop has justified it.

“The laws of society,” remarked an educated convict to Mr. Davitt, “are framed for the purpose of securing the wealth of the world to power and calculation, thereby depriving the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances. Why should they punish me for taking by somewhat similar means from those who have taken more than they had a right to? My dear sir,” said he, “I deny your contention that there is any such thing as honesty in the world at all.” This man, who had a considerable acquaintance with literature and philosophy, maintained soberly that “thieving was an _honourable_ pursuit,” and that religion, law, patriotism, and bodily disease were the real and only enemies of humanity. “Religion,” he would observe, “robbed the soul of its independence, while society’s social laws, in restraining the desires and faculties given by Nature to men for the purpose of gratification, declared war against the manifest spirit of the law of our being.” Patriotism he termed “the idolatry of an idea, in the stupid worship of which the peace of the world, and the wellbeing of its inhabitants, were sacrificed by the lawmakers and others who profit thereby.”

Lombroso found the following note written with a piece of iron in a politico-economical work, under the chapter of “Considerations on the Co-operative spirit”: “The best governed nation is that which has fewest thieves. Do you want to abolish thieves? See to it that the working man and the peasant have work to do, and are better paid for it; then they will be content, and will have nothing to say against the government; in consequence they will do their duty, and will not be forced to do evil.” Another, reading a book about an official who had been removed from the administration of taxes, wrote: “I advise you all to be public thieves, and then you will be free citizens and men who are useful to society, and will be decorated with medals and crosses. This man here was a public thief; but I am only a private robber; if I had been a public one I should not have been here.” Again: “Why are those who wear coarse breeches treated in one way, and those who are dressed finely and wear yellow gloves treated in another? Why are the first called thieves while the others are said to have committed undue appropriation? Have not both classes broken the commandment which says simply ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” In a confession made to Gisquet, the prefect of police, a different standpoint is taken up; the criminal justifies himself, not on moral grounds, but as a man of the world: “You regret the robbery that I have committed, and you call it a bad action; the insignificant act for which I have been condemned is the first link in a chain which will not, I hope, finish so soon. If I were not a thief by vocation, I would be one by calculation. I have faced all the good and the evil of other occupations, and I find that this is the best. What would have become of me among honest men? A bastard, with no one to take care of me, what could I do? Become a shopman, earn at the most six hundred francs a year, and having sweated all my life, grow old and ill and finish at a hospital. Take men in the mass and you will find them all humiliated, slaves, disgraced; it is never talent and honesty that are recompensed; vice prospers more often than virtue.

“In our profession we depend on nobody; we enjoy the fruits of our experience and ability. I know well that we may end in prison; but out of the 18,000 thieves in Paris not one-tenth are in prison, so that we enjoy nine years of freedom against one of prison. Besides, where is the working man who is not sometimes without work? For the rest, the working man has to pledge his things at the pawn-shop, while we, when we are free, want for nothing, and lead a life of constant feasting and pleasure.

“The fear of being arrested, and the pretended remorse that people talk of, are things to which one soon gets accustomed, and which finish by giving a pleasurable emotion.

“And then, if we are arrested, we live at the expense of others, who clothe us, feed us, and warm us, all at the cost of those whom we have robbed!

“I will say more. During our detention in prison we think out and prepare new means of success.

“If I regret anything, Mr. Prefect, it is that I am condemned to only a year. If it had been for five I should have been sent to a central prison, where I should have met some old hands, who would have taught me some new trick, and I should have returned to Paris clever enough to live without working.

“They talk of thieves as of persons always in misery, and who always finish their lives in prison; but they think of those whom they have seen in their apparent state when arrested. They do not consider that many have secret resources, and that most of them are clever enough to get on without ever having anything to do with justice.” This man, it is clear, had aspirations and ideals which, though they found satisfaction by a different method, were much the same as those of ordinary persons. He represents the professional criminal.

“Ah! too often it is forgotten,” wrote G. Ruscovitch, a prince among forgers, the accomplished student of science, the perfect master of half-a-dozen languages, “too often it is forgotten that criminals are members of society. All these bodies, sometimes abandoned by all except the satellites charged to guard them, are not all opaque; some of them are diaphanous and transparent. The vulgar sand which you tread under foot becomes brilliant crystal when it has passed through the furnace. The dregs may become useful if you know how to employ them; to tread them under foot with indifference and without thought is to undermine the foundations of society and to fill it with volcanoes. The man who has not visited the caverns, can he know the mountain well? The lower strata, for being situated deeper and farther from the light, are they less important than the external crust? There are deformities and diseases among us to make one shudder; but since when has horror forbidden study, and the disease driven away the physician?”