The Fascination of Murder and Murderers

ALDOUS HUXLEY

An Immoral Freedom and Power Secretly Coveted by Even the Gentlest Human Beings

MURDER is one of the few crimes punishable by law which is, in almost every circumstance, a genuine moral offence. It differs in this respect from most of the other officially punishable crimes. Theft, for example—though it may sometimes involve a real turpitude, as when a financier swindles the trusting and ignorant poor out of their savings—is more often relatively trivial as a moral offense. We jail the pickpocket and the burglar because they are an intolerable nuisance to society. Only the very rich, fearful for the safety of their wallets and their ponderous jewel cases, would consider the hungry thief or the adventurous housebreaker as being intrinsically very evil men.

Real crimes are not, then, mere offences against social organization. They are those which we feel, obscurely but profoundly and certainly, to involve some sort of outrage on our common humanity. Cruelty, falsehood, the expense of spirit in stupid, animal excesses— these are the fundamental immoralities. Crimes are morally serious in so far as they partake of these. The law admits the existence of a difference between social offences and real moral turpitudes by taking into consideration the motives of the criminal and the circumstances of the crime. But 'the law is an ass'—necessarily, since the law is the application of sweeping generalisations to particular cases—and this admission of a distinction is extremely half-hearted.

MURDER is peculiar among officially punishable crimes because, as I have said, it is usually a moral as well as a social offence. The murderer is generally a thoroughly bad man. The exceptional cases are recognized by law. Manslaughter in self defence is not murder; the most gentle and virtuous of human beings may find himself compelled to kill in self defence. Then there is unpremeditated murder, murder committed in the heat of a quarrel or under the influence of drink. The man who commits such a crime need not necessarily be morally very evil.

Among premeditated murders, the law of certain countries admits a distinction in favour of those committed under the influence of sexual passions. Among the Latin peoples you can murder for jealousy and be quite certain of getting off scot-free. After your acquittal you will even receive, in all probability, a popular ovation. And though murder is by no means the best way of settling conjugal disputes, though the regular acquittal of wifeor husband-slaughtering murderers most certainly tends to promote the idea that it is, the leniency of the law towards those 'perplex'd in the extreme' by love is obviously sound. English law, refusing to admit the crime fassionelIe> errs on the side of formalism and rigidity.

So much for the exceptional cases. The murders for which there is no extenuation arc those committed for material interests, or because the victim's existence is in some way inconvenient to the murderer, or out of mere delight in cruelty. Murderers of this class commit crimes which outrage humanity.

It is precisely for this reason that we all take such a passionate interest in such murderers. Not even Jackie Coogan or Mary Bickford, not even the Prince of Wales can rival in popularity a really revolting murderer of the type of Mahon, or Landru, or George Smith. And we arc interested in the Mahons and the Landrus for precisely the same reasons as those for which we arc interested in great actors, virtuosos and all exceptionally gifted or fortunate beings— because they actualize and carry to perfection in a startling and dramatic way certain tendencies which we feel to be latent in ourselves, because they really live through the scenes and act the parts which we only live through and act in some obscure corner of our minds. Who has not dreamed of being popular, rich, talented, powerful? Charlie Chaplin, Lloyd George, Lady Diana Manners—these are our dreams come true and walking about in flesh and blood; these are what zee should be if the world of imagination coincided with the world of fact. Hence our interest in these brilliant beings, hence their enormous popularity.

BUT dreams arc not always harmlessly' ambitious. We are all tinged with original sin, all have our little vices. Little vices, if they are given the opportunity, turn into large ones. Most ordinary respectable citizens arc potentially Nero, Tiberius or Caligula. To turn an ordinary decent stockbroker into a monster of iniquity one has only to place him above law and give him the wealth and power of a Caesar.

There are very few people who have not secretly dreamed, if only in their years of adolescence, of the horrifying delights of the Caesarean life. To be perfectly free, to have unlimited power, to be able to fulfill every wish and give rein to every instinct and passion— there is something vastly exciting in the mere idea. Great criminals arc men who do not stop at dreaming; they put the Caesarean theory into practice. The murderer goes further than other criminals; he gives a precise and spectacular form to the most evil of all the vaguclv evil dreams that float through the minds of ordinary men. Hence the immense interest he arouses. Like the poet who expresses what we have often felt but have never been able to put into words, he vividly embodies the badness latent and potential in all human minds. The murderer is, in a certain sense, our scapegoat; he sins in our stead. Looking at him, we can say, with the hero of the history books: "There, but for the grace of God, goes . . . myself."

If that were our only reaction to the description of a murder, all would be very well. The newspaper accounts of Mahon and Landru would be cautionary tales, and moralists would rejoice at their publication. But unfortunately that is not our only reaction. A great many people who read about murder trials, though they may loudly express their indignation, secretly rather admire the criminal, half envy him his courage in daring to defy the social and the moral laws, and sympathize with him in his fate. At the same time they take a certain pleasure in poring over the bloody details of the murder and of the punishment.

Human nature has not perceptibly changed in historical times. Our great great grandfathers flocked to executions; the Romans found gladiatorial shows deliciously exciting. Under a thin crust of custom and education we arc still Romans. A few vigorous and enthusiastic humanitarians, working through three or four generations, have deprived the mob of its hangings, burnings, floggings, pilloryings and other gratuitous spectacles of the same nature. We have to be content nowadays with the printed description of horrors. Hence the enormous amount of space devoted by the newspapers to every considerable murder.

Stern moralists always deplore the public taste and reproach the readers of newspapers with their excessive interest in murder trials. This gloating over blood and wickedness they regard as disgusting. And disgusting, according to the standard of purely rational, angelic beings, it certainly is. But then we arc neither angelic nor particularly rational and none but the most imprudent and incorrigible optimists ever supposed that we were. The judicious student of humanity will rather point out that this interest in the description of horrors is decidedly less disgusting than the interest taken by our ancestors in the horrors themselves.

WE read of murder; our ancestors went to the amphitheatre to see it committed. Crowds assemble outside our jails on the morning of an execution to watch the hoisting of the black flag; but two hundred years ago much larger crowds assembled at Tyburn to watch the criminals being actually hanged. If anyone wants to know just how ghastly such spectacles could be—as recently as the eighteenth centurv and in the most civilized country in the world —let him read Casanova's description of the execution of Damien, the man who attempted to assassinate Louis XV. I know of few things in all literature more appalling, more hideously discreditable to humanity than the description given by Casanova who, to his credit, thought the whole thing very disgusting) of the tortures inflicted on Damien and the behaviour, during the execution, of the spectators who shared his balcony. We should be thankful that such spectacles are not officially organized by contemporary governments and that the public of to-day contents itself with comparatively harmless substitutes. About Mahon, and Locb and Leopold, the journalists of the civilized world must have written about a thousand times as many words as there are in the Bible and the works of Shakespeare together. Certainly the ink might have been more judiciously spent. But in any case the liquid spilt for the public diversion was only ink. In the past it was blood. That is a fact on which, I think, we can congratulate ourselves.