Book of Scoundrels — Introduction - Part 2

A stern test of artistry is the gallows.

Perfect behaviour at an enforced and public scrutiny may properly be esteemed an effect of talent--an effect which has not too often been rehearsed.

There is no reason why the Scoundrel, fairly beaten at the last point in the game, should not go to his death without swagger and without remorse.

At least he might comfort himself with such phrases as 'a dance without the music,' and he has not often been lacking in courage.

What he has missed is dignity: his pitfalls have been unctuosity, on the one side, bravado on the other.

It was the Prison Ordinary, who first misled him into the assumption of a piety which neither preacher nor disciple understood.

It was the Prison Ordinary, who persuaded him to sign his name to a lying confession of guilt, drawn up in accordance with a foolish and inexorable tradition, and to deliver such a last dying speech as would not disappoint the mob.

The set phrases, the vain prayer offered for other sinners, the hypocritical profession of a superior righteousness, were neither noble nor sincere.

When Tom Jones (for instance) was hanged, in 1702, after a prosperous career on Hounslow Heath, his biographer declared that he behaved with more than usual 'modesty and decency,' because he 'delivered a pretty deal of good advice to the young men present, exhorting them to be industrious in their several callings.'

Whereas his biographer should have discovered that it is not thus that your true hero bids farewell to frolic and adventure.

As little in accordance with good taste was the last appearance of the infamous Jocelin Harwood, who was swung from the cart in 1692 for murder and robbery.

He arrived at Tyburn insolently drunk.

He blustered and ranted, until the spectators hissed their disapproval, and he died vehemently shouting that he would act the same murder again in the same case.

Unworthy, also, was the last dying repartee of Samuel Shotland, a notorious bully of the Eighteenth Century.

Taking off his shoes, he hurled them into the crowd, with a smirk of delight.

'My father and mother often told me,' he cried, 'that I should die with my shoes on;

but you may all see that I have made them both liars.'

A great man dies not with so mean a jest, and Tyburn was untouched to mirth by Shotland's facile humour.

On the other hand, there are those who have given a splendid example of a brave and dignified death.

Brodie was a sorry bungler when at work, but a perfect artist at the gallows.

The glory of his last achievement will never fade.

The muttered prayer, unblemished by hypocrisy, the jest thrown at George Smith--a metaphor from the gaming-table--the silent adjustment of the cord which was to strangle him, these last offices were performed with an unparalleled quietude and restraint.

Though he had pattered the flash to all his wretched accomplices, there was no trace of the last dying speech in his final utterances, and he set an example of a simple greatness, worthy to be followed even to the end of time.

Such is the type, but others also have given proof of a serene temper.

Tom Austin's masterpiece was in another kind, but it was none the less a masterpiece.

At the very moment that the halter was being put about his neck, he was asked by the Chaplain what he had to say before he died.

'Only,' says he, 'there's a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I am hanged, because I don't know when I shall see any again.'

There is a brave irrelevance in this very human desire, which is beyond praise.

Valiant also was the conduct of Roderick Audrey, who after a brief but brilliant career paid his last debt to the law in 1714. He was but sixteen, and, says his biographer, 'he went very decent to the gallows, being in a white waistcoat, clean napkin, white gloves, and an orange in one hand.'

So well did he play his part, that one wonders Jack Ketch did not shrink from the performance of his.

But throughout his short life, Roderick Audrey--the very name is an echo of romance!

--displayed a contempt for whatever was common or ugly.

Not only was his appearance at Tyburn a lesson in elegance, but he thieved, as none ever thieved before or since, with no other accomplice than a singing-bird.

Thus he would play outside a house, wherein he espied a sideboard of plate, and at last, bidding his playmate flutter through an open window into the parlour, he would follow upon the excuse of recovery, and, once admitted, would carry off as much silver as he could conceal.

None other ever attempted so graceful an artifice, and yet Audrey's journey to Tyburn is even more memorable than the story of his gay accomplice.

But it is not only the truly great who have won for themselves an enduring reputation.

There are men, not a few, esteemed, like the popular novelist, not for their art but for some foolish gift, some facile trick of notoriety, whose actions have tickled the fancy, not the understanding of the world.

The coward and the impostor have been set upon a pedestal of glory either by accident or by the whim of posterity.

For more than a century Dick Turpin has appeared not so much the greatest of highwaymen, as the Highwaymen Incarnate.

His prowess has been extolled in novels and upon the stage; his ride to York is still bepraised for a feat of miraculous courage and endurance; the death of Black Bess has drawn floods of tears down the most callous cheeks.

And the truth is that Turpin was never a gentleman of the road at all!

Black Bess is as pure an invention as the famous ride to York.

The ruffian, who is said to have ridden the phantom mare from one end of England to the other, was a common butcher, who burned an old woman to death at Epping, and was very properly hanged at York for the stealing of a horse which he dared not bestride.

Not one incident in his career gives colour to the splendid myth which has been woven round his memory.

Once he was in London, and he died at York.

So much is true; but there is naught to prove that his progress from the one town to the other did not occupy a year.

Nor is there any reason why the halo should have been set upon his head rather than upon another's. Strangest truth of all, none knows at what moment Dick Turpin first shone into glory.

At any rate, there is a gap in the tradition, and the chap-books of the time may not be credited with this vulgar error.

Perhaps it was the popular drama of Skelt which put the ruffian upon the black mare's back; but whatever the date of the invention, Turpin was a popular hero long before Ainsworth sent him rattling across England.

And in order to equip this butcher with a false reputation, a valiant officer and gentleman was stripped of the credit due to a magnificent achievement.

For though Turpin tramped to York at a journeyman's leisure, Nicks rode thither at a stretch--Nicks the intrepid and gallant, whom Charles II.

, in admiration of his feat, was wont to call Swiftnicks.

This valiant collector, whom posterity has robbed for Turpin's embellishment, lived at the highest moment of his art.

He knew by rote the lessons taught by Hind and Duval; he was a fearless rider and a courteous thief.

Now, one morning at five of the clock, he robbed a gentleman near Barnet of £560, and riding straight for York, he appeared on the Bowling Green at six in the evening.

Being presently recognised by his victim, he was apprehended, and at the trial which followed he pleaded a triumphant alibi.

But vanity was too strong for discretion, and no sooner was Swiftnicks out of danger, than he boasted, as well he might, of his splendid courage.

Forthwith he appeared a popular hero, obtained a commission in Lord Moncastle's regiment, and married a fortune.

And then came Turpin to filch his glory!

Nor need Turpin have stooped to a vicarious notoriety, for he possessed a certain rough, half conscious humour, which was not despicable.

He purchased a new fustian coat and a pair of pumps, in which to be hanged, and he hired five poor men at ten shillings the day, that his death might not go unmourned.

Above all, he was distinguished in prison.

A crowd thronged his cell to identify him, and one there was who offered to bet the keeper half a guinea that the prisoner was not Turpin; whereupon Turpin whispered the keeper, 'Lay him the wager, you fool, and I will go you halves.'

Surely this impudent indifference might have kept green the memory of the man who never rode to York!

If the Scoundrel may claim distinction on many grounds, his character is singularly uniform.

To the anthropologist he might well appear the survival of a savage race, and savage also are his manifold superstitions.

He is a creature of times and seasons.

He chooses the occasion of his deeds with as scrupulous a care as he examines his formidable crowbars and jemmies.

At certain hours he would refrain from action, though every circumstance favoured his success: he would rather obey the restraining voice of a wise, unreasoning wizardry, than fill his pockets with the gold for which his human soul is ever hungry.

There is no law of man he dares not break but he shrinks in horror from the infringement of the unwritten rules of savagery.

Though he might cut a throat in self-defence, he would never walk under a ladder; and if the 13th fell on a Friday, he would starve that day rather than obtain a loaf by the method he best understands.

He consults the omens with as patient a divination as the augurs of old; and so long as he carries an amulet in his pocket, though it be but a pebble or a polished nut, he is filled with an irresistible courage.

For him the worst terror of all is the evil eye, and he would rather be hanged by an unsuspected judge than receive an easy stretch from one whose glance he dared not face.

And while the anthropologist claims him for a savage, whose civilisation has been arrested at brotherhood with the Solomon Islanders, the politician might pronounce him a true communist, in that he has preserved a wholesome contempt of property and civic life.

The pedant, again, would feel his bumps, prescribe a gentle course of bromide, and hope to cure all the sins of the world by a municipal Turkish bath.

The wise man, respecting his superstitions, is content to take him as he finds him, and to deduce his character from his very candid history, which is unaffected by pedant or politician.

Before all things, he is sanguine; he believes that Chance, the great god of his endeavour, fights upon his side.

Whatever is lacking to-day, to-morrow's enterprise will fulfil, and if only the omens be favourable, he fears neither detection nor the gallows.

His courage proceeds from this sanguine temperament, strengthened by shame and tradition rather than from a self-controlled magnanimity; he hopes until despair is inevitable, and then walks firmly to the gallows, that no comrade may suspect the white feather.

His ambition, too, is the ambition of the savage or of the child; he despises such immaterial advantages as power and influence, being perfectly content if he have a smart coat on his back and a bottle of wine at his elbow.

He would rather pick a lock than batter a constitution, and the world would be well lost, if he and his doxy might survey the ruin in comfort.

But if his ambition be modest, his love of notoriety is boundless.

He must be famous, his name must be in the mouths of men, he must be immortal (for a week) in a rough woodcut.

And then, what matters it how soon the end?

His braveries have been hawked in the street; his prowess has sold a Special Edition; he is the first of his race, until a luckier rival eclipses him.

Thus, also, his dandyism is inevitable: it is not enough for him to cover his nakedness--he must dress; and though his taste is sometimes unbridled, it is never insignificant.

Indeed, his biographers have recorded the expression of his fancy in coats and small-clothes as patiently and enthusiastically as they have applauded his courage.

And truly the love of magnificence, which he shares with all artists, is sincere and characteristic.

When an accomplice of Jonathan Wild's robbed Lady M----n at Windsor, his equipage cost him forty pounds; and Nan Hereford was arrested for shoplifting at the very moment that four footmen awaited her return with an elegant sedan-chair.

His vanity makes him but a prudish lover, who desires to woo less than to be wooed; and at all times and through all moods he remains the primeval sentimentalist.

He will detach his life entirely from the catchwords which pretend to govern his actions; he will sit and croon the most heartrending ditties in celebration of home-life and a mother's love, and then set forth incontinently upon a well-planned errand of plunder.

For all his artistry, he lacks balance as flagrantly as a popular politician or an advanced journalist.

Therefore it is the more remarkable that in one point he displays a certain caution: he boggles at a superfluous murder.

For all his contempt of property, he still preserves a respect for life, and the least suspicion of unnecessary brutality sets not only the law but his own fellows against him.

Like all men whose god is Opportunity, he is a reckless gambler; and, like all gamblers, he is monstrously extravagant.

In brief, he is a tangle of picturesque qualities, which, until our own generation, was incapable of nothing save dulness.

The Bible and the Newgate Calendar--these twain were George Borrow's favourite reading, and all save the psychologist and the pedant will applaud the preference.

For the annals of the 'family' are distinguished by an epic severity, a fearless directness of speech, which you will hardly match outside the Iliad or the Chronicles of the Kings.

But the Newgate Calendar did not spring ready-made into being: it is the result of a curious and gradual development.

The chap-books came first, with their bold type, their coarse paper, and their clumsy, characteristic woodcuts--the chap-books, which none can contemplate without an enchanted sentiment.

Here at last you come upon a literature, which has been read to pieces.

The very rarity of the slim, rough volumes, proves that they have been handed from one greedy reader to another, until the great libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them.

They do not boast the careful elegance of a famous press: many of them came from the printing-office of a country town: yet the least has a simplicity and concision, which are unknown in this age of popular fiction.

Even their lack of invention is admirable: as the same woodcut might be used to represent Guy, Earl of Warwick, or the last highwayman who suffered at Tyburn, so the same enterprise is ascribed with a delightful ingenuousness to all the heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill their pockets.

The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in 1605, and was the example of after ages.

The anecdote of the road was already crystallised, and henceforth the robber was unable to act contrary to the will of the chap-book.

Thus there grew up a folk-lore of thievery: the very insistence upon the same motive suggests the fairytale, and, as in the legends of every country, there is an identical element which the anthropologists call 'human'; so in the annals of adventure there is a set of invariable incidents, which are the essence of thievery.

The industrious hacks, to whom we owe the entertainment of the chap-books, being seedy parsons or lawyers' clerks, were conscious of their literary deficiencies: they preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent ineptitudes.

So you may trace the same jest, the same intrigue through the unnumbered lives of three centuries.

And if, being a philosopher, you neglect the obvious plagiarism, you may induce from these similarities a cunning theory concerning the uniformity of the human brain.

But the easier explanation is, as always, the more satisfactory;

and there is little doubt that in versatility the thief surpassed his historian.

Had the chap-books still been scattered in disregarded corners, they would have been unknown or misunderstood.

Happily, a man of genius came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and sparkling a piece of literature as the time could show.

This was Captain Alexander Smith, whose Lives of the Highwaymen, published in 1719, was properly described by its author as 'the first impartial piece of this nature which ever appeared in English.'

Now, Captain Smith inherited from a nameless father no other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts, and the sanguine temperament which views in horror a well-ordered life.

Though a mere foundling, he managed to acquire the rudiments, and he was not wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the road.

His courage, fortified by an intimate knowledge of the great tradition, was rewarded by an immediate success, and he rapidly became the master of so much leisure as enabled him to pursue his studies with pleasure and distinction.

When his companions damned him for a milksop, he was loftily contemptuous, conscious that it was not in intelligence alone that he was their superior.

While the Stuarts were the gods of his idolatry, while the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence, it was from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his style; and he owed not only his historical sense, but his living English to the example of Philemon Holland.

Moreover, it is to his constant glory that, living at a time that preferred as well to attenuate the English tongue as to degrade the profession of the highway, he not only rode abroad with a fearless courtesy, but handled his own language with the force and spirit of an earlier age.

He wrote with the authority of courage and experience.

A hazardous career had driven envy and malice from his dauntless breast.

Though he confesses a debt to certain 'learned and eminent divines of the Church of England,' he owed a greater debt to his own observation, and he knew--none better--how to recognise with enthusiasm those deeds of daring which only himself has rivalled.

A master of etiquette, he distributed approval and censure with impartial hand; and he was quick to condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law.

Nor was he insensible to the dignity of history.

The best models were always before him.

With admirable zeal he studied the manner of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua.

Above all, he realised the importance of setting appropriate speeches in the mouths of his characters; and, permitting his heroes to speak for themselves, he imparted to his work an irresistible air of reality and good faith.

His style, always studied, was neither too low nor too high for his subject.

An ill-balanced sentence was as hateful to him as a foul thrust or a stolen advantage.

Abroad a craftsman, he carried into the closet the skill and energy which distinguished him when the moon was on the heath.

Though not born to the arts of peace, he was determined to prove his respect for letters, and his masterpiece is no less pompous in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection.

He handled slang as one who knew its limits and possibilities, employing it not for the sake of eccentricity, but to give the proper colour and sparkle to his page;

indeed, his intimate acquaintance with the vagabonds of speech enabled him to compile a dictionary of Pedlar's French, which has been pilfered by a whole battalion of imitators.

Moreover, there was none of the proverbs of the pavement, those first cousins of slang, that escaped him; and he assumed all the licence of the gentleman-collector in the treatment of his love-passages.

Captain Smith took the justest view of his subject.

For him robbery, in the street as on the highway, was the finest of the arts, and he always revered it for its own sake rather than for vulgar profit.

Though, to deceive the public, he abhorred villainy in word, he never concealed his admiration in deed of a 'highwayman who robs like a gentleman.'

'There is a beauty in all the works of nature,' he observes in one of his wittiest exordia, 'which we are unable to define, though all the world is convinced of its existence: so in every action and station of life there is a grace to be attained, which will make a man pleasing to all about him and serene in his own mind.'

Some there are, he continues, who have placed 'this beauty in vice itself; otherwise it is hardly probable that they could commit so many irregularities with a strong gust and an appearance of satisfaction.'

Notwithstanding that the word 'vice' is used in its conventional sense, we have here the key to Captain Smith's position.

He judged his heroes' achievements with the intelligent impartiality of a connoisseur, and he permitted no other prejudice than an unfailing loyalty to interrupt his opinion.

Though he loved good English as he loved good wine, he was never so happy as when (in imagination) he was tying the legs of a Regicide under the belly of an ass.

And when in the manner of a bookseller's hack he compiled a Comical and Tragical History of the Lives and Adventures of the most noted Bayliffs, adoration of the Royalists persuaded him to miss his chance.

So brave a spirit as himself should not have looked complacently upon the officers of the law, but he saw in the glorification of the bayliff another chance of castigating the Roundheads, and thus he set an honorific crown upon the brow of man's natural enemy.

'These unsanctified rascals,' wrote he, 'would run into any man's debt without paying him, and if their creditors were Cavaliers they thought they had as much right to cheat 'em, as the Israelites had to spoil the Egyptians of their ear-rings and jewels.'

Alas!

the boot was ever on the other leg; and yet you cannot but admire the Captain's valiant determination to sacrifice probability to his legitimate hate.

Of his declining years and death there is no record.

One likes to think of him released from care, and surrounded by books, flowers, and the good things of this earth.

Now and again, maybe, he would muse on the stirring deeds of his youth, and more often he would put away the memory of action to delight in the masterpiece which made him immortal.

He would recall with pleasure, no doubt, the ready praise of Richard Steele, his most appreciative critic, and smile contemptuously at the baseness of his friend and successor, Captain Charles Johnson.

Now, this ingenious writer was wont to boast, when the ale of Fleet Street had empurpled his nose, that he was the most intrepid highwayman of them all.

'Once upon a time,' he would shout, with an arrogant gesture, 'I was known from Blackheath to Hounslow, from Ware to Shooter's Hill.'

And the truth is, the only 'crime' he ever committed was plagiarism.

The self-assumed title of Captain should have deceived nobody, for the braggart never stole anything more difficult of acquisition than another man's words.

He picked brains, not pockets; he committed the greater sin and ran no risk.

He helped himself to the admirable inventions of Captain Smith without apology or acknowledgment, and, as though to lighten the dead-weight of his sin, he never skipped an opportunity of maligning his victim.

Again and again in the very act to steal he will declare vaingloriously that Captain Smith's stories are 'barefaced inventions.'

But doubt was no check to the habit of plunder, and you knew that at every reproach, expressed (so to say) in self-defence, he plied the scissors with the greater energy.

The most cunning theft is the tag which adorns the title-page of his book: Little villains oft submit to fate That great ones may enjoy the world in state.

Thus he quotes from Gay, and you applaud the aptness of the quotation, until you discover that already it was used by Steele in his appreciation of the heroic Smith!

However, Johnson has his uses, and those to whom the masterpiece of Captain Alexander is inaccessible will turn with pleasure to the General History of the lives and adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c. , and will feel no regret that for once they are receiving stolen goods.

Though Johnson fell immeasurably below his predecessor in talent, he manifestly excelled him in scholarship.

A sojourn at the University had supplied him with a fine assortment of Latin tags, and he delighted to prove his erudition by the citation of the Chronicles.

Had he possessed a sense of humour, he might have smiled at the irony of committing a theft upon the historian of thieves.

But he was too vain and too pompous to smile at his own weakness, and thus he would pretend himself a venturesome highwayman, a brave writer, and a profound scholar.

Indeed, so far did his pride carry him, that he would have the world believe him the same Charles Johnson, who wrote The Gentleman Cully and The Successful Pyrate.

Thus with a boastful chuckle he would quote: Johnson, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning Thus, ignoring the insult, he would plume himself after his drunken fashion that he, too, was an enemy of Pope.

Yet Johnson has remained an example.

For the literature of scoundrelism is as persistent in its form as in its folk-lore.

As Harman's Caveat, which first saw the light in 1566, serves as a model to an unbroken series of such books, as The London Spy, so from Johnson in due course were developed the Newgate Calendar, and those innumerable records, which the latter half of the Eighteenth Century furnished us forth.

The celebrated Calendar was in its origin nothing more than a list of prisoners printed in a folio slip.

But thereafter it became the Malefactor's Bloody Register, which we know.

Its plan and purpose were to improve the occasion.

The thief is no longer esteemed for an artist or appraised upon his merits: he is the awful warning, which shall lead the sinner to repentance.

'Here,' says the preface, 'the giddy thoughtless youth may see as in a mirror the fatal consequences of deviating from virtue'; here he may tremble at the discovery that 'often the best talents are prostituted to the basest purposes.'

But in spite of 'the proper reflections of the whole affair,' the famous Calendar deserved the praise of Borrow.

There is a directness in the narration, which captures all those for whom life and literature are something better than psychologic formulæ.

Moreover, the motives which drive the brigand to his doom are brutal in their simplicity, and withal as genuine and sincere as greed, vanity, and lust can make them.

The true amateur takes pleasure even in the pious exhortations, because he knows that they crawl into their place, lest the hypocrite be scandalised.

But with years the Newgate Calendar also declined, and at last it has followed other dead literatures into the night.

Meanwhile the broadside had enjoyed an unbroken and prosperous career.

Up and down London, up and down England, hurried the Patterer or Flying Stationer.

There was no murder, no theft, no conspiracy, which did not tempt the Gutter Muse to doggerel.

But it was not until James Catnach came up from Alnwick to London (in 1813), that the trade reached the top of its prosperity.

The vast sheets, which he published with their scurvy couplets, and the admirable picture, serving in its time for a hundred executions, have not lost their power to fascinate.

Theirs is the aspect of the early woodcut; the coarse type and the catchpenny headlines are a perpetual delight; as you unfold them, your care keeps pace with your admiration; and you cannot feel them crackle beneath your hand without enthusiasm and without regret.

He was no pedant--Jemmy Catnach; and the image of his ruffians was commonly as far from portraiture, as his verses were remote from poetry.

But he put together in a roughly artistic shape the last murder, robbery, or scandal of the day.

His masterpieces were far too popular to live, and if they knew so vast a circulation as 2,500,000 they are hard indeed to come by.

And now the art is wellnigh dead; though you may discover an infrequent survival in a country town.

But how should Catnach, were he alive to-day, compete with the Special Edition of an evening print?

The decline of the Scoundrel, in fact, has been followed by the disappearance of chap-book and broadside.

The Education Act, which made the cheap novel a necessity, destroyed at a blow the literature of the street.

Since the highwayman wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation.

Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain.

The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith.

Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a moral and unimaginative world.

Yet the wise man sighs for those fearless days, when the brilliant Macheath rode vizarded down Shooter's Hill, and presently saw his exploits set forth, with the proper accompaniment of a renowned and ancient woodcut, upon a penny broadside.