The Chicago Tribune - Sunday, April 21, 1895

CRIME AND CULTURE:
WILDE'S SIGNIFICANT WORDS.

"THERE is no essential incongruity between crime and culture." So wrote Oscar Wilde a few years ago in his book of essays entitled "Intentions," published in this country by Dodd, Mead & Co. The sentence which occurs in the article on "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," - a sketch of Wainwright, the criminal esthete of a preceding generation - is, of course, a truism to every thoughtful reader of history who knows overrefinement and vice have been coexistent in nations and may be both synchronous and congruous in individuals. "What an artist dies in me!" exclaimed Nero with his latest breath. Herod probably prided himself on his taste in terpsichorean art just before chopping off the head of John the Baptist. More modern instances of the combination of crime and culture will suggest themselves to all who have read any history of the renaissance. So there is nothing surprising in the axiomatic utterance that "there is no essential incongruity between crime and culture"; but it is striking in view of the recent revelations in the newspapers that these words should have been penned by Oscar Wilde. Let us glance at his essay on Wainwright and see what a remarkable parallel to that life is now furnished by his own career, which ends in a catastrophe.

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who is powerful with "pen, pencil, and poison," as Swinburne said of him, was born in 1794 of a family the members of which were noted in law and letters. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by his uncle, George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. He went to school to Mr. Burney, son of the historian of music, and according to Hazlitt a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant and displays great talent and natural feeling. "Indeed," says Oscar Wilde in the present essay, "painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find expression by pen or poison." He first became a soldier, but the reckless, dissipated life of his companions failed to satisfy the refined, artistic temperament of one who was made for other things. He wrote of himself: "Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influences the noisome mists were purged; my feelings parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated with cool fresh bloom, simple, beautiful, to the simple-hearted. He wept over the poems of Wordsworth. He resolved to enter literature, "to see and hear and write brave things." Under fanciful synonyms, such as Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, he contributes to the periodicals of his day.

Charles Lamb speaks of "kind, light-hearted Wainwright, whose prose is capital." We read of him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, and others at a little dinner. But let Oscar Wilde draw his portrait, who did not know that he was executing his own portrait in these striking lines:

"Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breastpin, and his pale lemon-colored kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt 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. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of Julian Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,' he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath whose affections of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty."

Further on in the same strain of fatuity (for was it not the strangest fatuity?) Wilde writes of his own artistic and moral prototype: "He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of ‘Cupid and Psyche,' and the ‘Hypnerotomachia,' and book-bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is deeply 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. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’ of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre."

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, according to Mr. Wilde, "was one of the first to recognize the very keynote of esthetic eclecticism - I mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner." There followed descriptions of the luxurious objects of art with which Wainewright surrounded himself. His art criticisms are quoted at length, and from a perusal of them it is apparent that Wainewright's ink well contained the colors of his palette. In addition to his other gifts, according to Mr. Wilde, "he saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality," in which faculty, by the way, he was surpassed by certain esthetes of a later era.

Yet this exquisite of the earlier part of the century was one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had always been very much attached. In August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Ambercrombie, 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 Ambercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000 for which they had ensured her life in various offices.

In commenting on the murder of Helen Ambercrombie Mr. Wilde expresses the opinion that Mrs. Wainewright was not privy to the crime, and then adds with fatuous dogmatism: "Let us hope that she was not; sin should be solitairy and have no accomplices." The insurance companies refused to pay Wainewright the wages of his crime, and their refusal placed him in pecuniary embarrassment. Lawsuits were long and costly. Indeed a few months after the murder of Helen Ambercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends. This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical arrangement with his creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there induced him to ensure his life with the Pelican company for 3,000 pounds. As soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one evening after dinner. He himself did not gain any monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge himself on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin. His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany.

It is a curious fact that Wainewright was ultimately punished for a minor crime, that of forgery. It seems that he returned to England in the 1837, having followed there a woman with whom he was infatuated. His trial was at the Old Bailey, and Mr. Wilde takes extracts from the newspaper reports of it. His sentence was transportation for life to Van Dieman's Land. "The sentence passed on him," remarks Mr. Wilde "was to a man of his culture a form of death."

The voyage to the colonies seems to have been very distasteful to Wainewright. In a letter to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of the companion of poets and artists being compelled to associate with "country bumpkins." Mr. Wilde’s comment on this is not less peculiar than his other observations in the course of this essay:

"The phrase that he (Wainewright) applies to his companions need not surprise us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature."

Wainewright died of apoplexy in 1852, his sole living companion being a cat.

There is no occasion to moralize on the parallel which presents itself between the careers of the first esthete of the nineteenth century in England and the last. But Mr. Wilde was not content to dismiss his artistic forerunner without certain cynical reflections. He shows that Wainewright’s paintings after his transportation suggested his criminality, just as future critics will find in "Dorian Grey" a reflection of Wilde’s personality.

Of all the unfortunate remarks which Mr. Wilde makes in this essay - unfortunate in the light of his own predicament - is the sneer which caps the climax: "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists." And farther on in the same paragraph he uses the sentence which one quoted at the beginning of this article, and with which one desires to end it (for it has a moral which carries the emphasis of Oscar Wilde's fate, whatever that fate may be). "There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture."

E.J.M.