Murder by Candlelight (17 page)

Schopenhauer nevertheless forgave Greenacre his stupidity and his cruelty: he was for him the idiot savant who proved that even imbeciles could be brought to discern the truth of his philosophy, that nothing can “be given as the end of our existence but the knowledge that we had better not be.”

Schopenhauer was in his fiftieth year when Greenacre was brought to trial. The patrimony bequeathed him by his father, a Danzig merchant prince, afforded him the leisure and liberty of a philosopher, and as a young man he saw more of the great world than is commonly the case with German intellectuals. Before his departure for Italy, Goethe gave him a letter of introduction to Lord Byron, and in Venice he caught a glimpse of the poet in his gondola. But on observing how his mistress swooned at the sight of the beautiful
milord
, he chose not to risk an acquaintance that might end in his own cuckoldry, or so the perhaps-apocryphal story goes. He later regretted this and thought it remarkable that the three great Romantic pessimists should have been in Italy at the same moment—“Byron, Leopardi, and myself! And yet not one of us has made the acquaintance of the other.”

Given his low opinion of the human race, Schopenhauer ought perhaps to have foreseen that it would fail to interest itself in what
Nietzsche called the “cadaverous perfume” of his philosophy; but when the first edition of
The World as Will and Representation
fell dead-born from the press, he suffered quite as much as less philosophic authors do when their books fail. He continued, however, to cherish a paternal affection for the stillborn volume, and he was diligent in the collection of fresh proofs of the soundness of its theories. His father had made it a practice to look at the French and English newspapers as well as the German ones each day, and during much of his life Schopenhauer did the same. He was drawn especially to accounts of executions, the gallows being for him “a place of quite peculiar revelations,” a “watch-tower from which the man who even then retains his presence of mind obtains a wider, clearer outlook into eternity than most philosophers over the paragraphs of their rational psychology and theology.”

More to the point, the gallows was a place of acute suffering. Dostoevsky, who as a young man had been about to be hanged when the Tsar's reprieve came, spoke from experience of the terror felt by a man who knows, to a virtual certainty, that he will be dead within the hour.
^*
What fascinated Schopenhauer about such cases was the power of this anguish to annihilate the will to live, and to force even the coarsely animal soul to see life for what, in Schopenhauer's view, it really is—a Gothic horror, and a painful mistake. As evidence of such gallows conversions, he pointed (in the second, enlarged edition of
The World as Will and Representation
, which appeared in 1844) to the extinction of personality which took place in one Mary Cooney, a servant girl hanged at Gallows
Green, Limerick, in 1837 for the murder of an old widow lady. The newspapers reported that, as she stood on the scaffold waiting to die, she “kissed the rope which encircled her neck,” a gesture Schopenhauer interpreted as the outward sign of her inward longing for the grace of non-being.

“Still more remarkable,” he said, were the sentiments attributed to “the well-known murderer, Greenacre.” He made much of Greenacre's refusal to accept the suggestion of the Newgate chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Horace Cotton, that he “pray for forgiveness through the mediation of Jesus Christ.” Greenacre replied that “forgiveness through the mediation of Christ was a matter of opinion; for his part, he believed that in the sight of the highest Being, a Mohammedan was as good as a Christian and had just as much claim to salvation.” Ever since his imprisonment, he said, he had directed his attention “to theological subjects,” and he had become convinced not only of the comparative insignificance of sectarian dogmas, but of the supreme grace conferred by the halter. The gallows, he declared, was “a passport to heaven”—a proposition to which the Rev. Dr. Cotton, who was fond of expatiating on the hellfire in which his parishioners would be burnt if they rejected his ministrations, could by no means assent.

Schopenhauer believed that it was just this indifference to religious orthodoxy that proved Greenacre's words to be the image of his chastened soul. He spoke not under the “fanatical delusion” of received opinion and conventional wisdom, but from “individual immediate knowledge.” His words were those of a man standing in the “presence of a violent and certain death,” and the very horribleness of his position was for Schopenhauer the guarantor of his candor.

Undoubtedly, Greenacre spoke the words to which Schopenhauer attached such significance from the depths of a pit. His last hours were upon him. The only question is whether, in the brief interval of life that remained to him, he was quite so entirely liberated from the world as the philosopher supposed.

*
In Dostoevsky's
The Idiot
, Prince Myshkin argues that the death penalty “is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. . . . But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Gallows

Not merely philosophy but also the arts work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence: “What is life?”

—
Schopenhauer

O
n the eve of his death, Greenacre slept soundly. When, at four o'clock on the morning of May 2, he rose from his bed, workmen were already engaged in assembling, in front of the Debtors' Door, the scaffold on which he was in a few hours to die.

He dressed, wrote several letters, and breakfasted; afterwards he was seen to weep. At a quarter to eight, the tenor bell in the bell-tower of St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate began to toll; he was by this time visibly agitated.

The mild morning was full of the promise of the spring, of the renewal of the earth; but the immense crowd that was by this time gathered outside the prison was transfixed by the thought not of life but of death. Some of the spectators had come as early as the night before and had slept under the stars; not a few were in a “state of beastly intoxication, laughing, singing, dancing, fighting.” A young Glasgow merchant in London on business was appalled by the sight of the “smoking, drinking, laughing vagabonds,” revels not unlike those with which primitive peoples propitiated their vegetation gods.

Greenacre, in his double character as an atavistic scapegoat and a symbol of the rational retribution of the law, submitted without complaint to having his hands tied and his arms pinioned with leather straps.
^*
Afterwards, a horrible howling was heard; it betokened the appearance, on the scaffold, of the hangman, Calcraft. The sight of this man fingering the tools of his trade drove the crowd to a new height of delirious ecstasy.

The procession to the gallows commenced. The constables, sheriffs, and other responsible officers passed through the Debtors' Door to a covered platform. The sheriffs took their places beside the two flights of steps that led to the scaffold: the other dignitaries proceeded to the viewing galleries that had been arranged about three of the scaffold's sides.

The death of a man on the gallows is a rare public edition of a fact which, like the other great biological acts of birth and copulation, is generally hid under so many decent veils. We have innumerable
accounts of natural deaths in private rooms; but as a rule they have been sanitized, and in reading them one feels a little in the dark as to what actually happened. The dying person, in these deathbed scenes, is apt to be suspiciously calm, wise, and even epigrammatic; he says something profound, like the dying Goethe (“
Mehr Licht!
”) or witty, like the dying Voltaire, who, when asked whether he rejected Satan and all his works, replied, “This is no time to be making enemies.”

A public execution is a very different kettle of fish; there is no question of an hygienic suppression of grotesquerie; indeed, the more nauseating the detail, the more eagerly it is seized upon and treasured up. A dozen witnesses punctiliously record every word that drops from the soon-to-be-dead man's lips; and after his fall, there is no twitch or shudder of his dangling body that is not scrupulously set down for the edification of posterity.

Even so, there is a barrier. The gallows is a stage, and those who tread it are conscious of playing a part. They will not, of course, live to read the critics' appraisals of their performances; but whether from pride, vanity, or the decorous shyness that shrinks from making a scene (even though it be the scene of one's death), the gallows-goer is as a rule careful to observe the proper forms. Miss Blandy, sentenced to die at Oxford for having poisoned her father, went up the black-draped ladder with a wonderful propriety and, what was still more meritorious, a consciousness of what was due to her feminine dignity. “Gentlemen,” she said to those who were about to kill her, “pray do not for the sake of decency hang me too high.” Jack Sheppard, the notorious burglar, was praised for having behaved “very gravely”
^†
in his last moments, while the robber John Waistcott was admired for the coolness of the self-possession he showed at the end of his
tether: “The dog died game,” the dandy George “Gilly” Williams told his friend George Selwyn.
^‡
Jack Thurtell himself, who for a time had been universally reviled as a swine in human form, bore himself so beautifully at his trial and on the gibbet that his crime, in the popular imagination, lost half its grossness, and he became something of a folk hero.

For the condemned man who courted public favor, there was an established ritual to be enacted on the day of his dying. He was the hero of a tragedy in comic form; he was expected to make his way to the fatal tree with a superb nonchalance. His progress from Newgate to Tyburn, where until 1783 London's capital convicts were hanged, had a carnival air. He was showered with nosegays, and at an alehouse near St. Giles was presented with a flagon of ale, the “Giles Bowl,” which he dutifully drank down.

It was a grave breach of etiquette if the bravo let the comic mask slip, even for a moment, to reveal the soul that cowered beneath.
^§
As his death-day drew nigh, the highwayman Paul Lewis found himself unable to sustain the pose of bluster and swagger he had previously exhibited before the world: he “became as abject as before he appeared
hardened,” and was generally regarded as a disgrace to his profession. Yet it is perhaps only in cases like Lewis's, when the nerves fail, that we gain some faint insight into what the last moments must really be like. This is why the unconcealed terror of Madame du Barry, the former mistress of Louis XV who was guillotined in 1793, is so much more revealing than the decorous and theatrical exits. Her eyes were “bathed in tears”; she uttered piteous shrieks; the words she spoke to Sanson, the executioner, before the blade fell were long to haunt Dostoevsky. “
Encore un moment, Monsieur le Bourreau, un petit moment.
” “Just a moment, Mr. Executioner, just a small moment.”

*
It was the indignity of the binding of the hands that is said to have particularly disconcerted Louis XVI on the day of his death. His confessor, it is said, implored him to submit to this last humiliation in the manner of his divine model, and afterwards exhorted him with the famous words “
Fils de saint Louis, montez au ciel
” (“Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven”).

†
No pun, I think, was intended. See
Select Trials at the Sessions-House of the Old-Bailey, for Murder, Robberies, Rapes, Sodomy, Coining, Frauds, Bigamy, and Other Offences
(London: J. Applebee, 1742), II, 146.