The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

SATURDAY REVIEW.—There were points which

might well have lifted the murder atWigwell Lodge
out of the annals of vulgar crime and given it an
ideal character. The heroine filled her part well.

Beautiful, attractive, self-reliant, and fearless, as it
seems, of that temper which by the murderer's o PM'
showing had betrayed itself to her as dangerous—
bent on softening the blow she must inflict, and not
shrinking from scenes that cannot bat have been
highly wrought and harrowing—there is no short-
coming here. The hero, too, had some of the qua-
lities we look for in romance. Tall, handsome, of
good bearing, gifted with many of the qualities that
ladies love, and capable of a fixed purpose for which
he is ready to sacrifice his life—at least we should
have expected violence from him to harmonise with
our poetical conceptions of crime to which passion,
and no directly sordid aim, is the instigator. Yet
what a strange revelation the whole scene is of the
predominance of habit, of the mastery of the com-
moner influences over the obvious claims of the

occasion, of that slowness to apprehend the bearing
and consequences of anything terrible or startling
which characterises ordinary men so long as cir-

cumstances will allow!

E;-en the very

proper-

ties and surroundings, the images brought be-fore
our eyes by the narrative, excite a sense of indigna-
tion at the deference to instincts of the very com-
monest everyday life in that snpremest moment.
That sweet girl, for such she was—pretty, graceful,
animated, courted, beloved—who had, less than
an hour before, left her drawing-room, her own
proper domain, in all the pride of youth and bloom,
is carried dead into the kitchen by her lover, and
laid on its hard, rude floor. Then, to be sure, fol-
lows a melodramatic flourish of heroics. The old
grandfather asks, " What ever made you do it ?"
and there is the reply, "The woman that deceives
me dies." But here begins and ends the only fea-
ture of the scene in common with the romance of
fiction. No remorse, no apostrophizing !—how
should there be in the kitchen P It would seem as
if the poor old gentleman, in a vague sense of dis-
comfort and bewilderment, wanted that great con-
soler of old age—his tea. The murderer had been
his guest. For different reasons he must not leave
him in the kitchen ; and the way that suggested
itself out of the dilemma was to propose that they
should have a cup of tea together, and "talk it
over." Townley accordingly goes upstair to wash
his hands, and sits down with his" Bessie'e grand-
father to tea ann brandy and water. How far,
we wonder, did the scene strike the family doctor
as natural when, having taken his necessary survey
of the murdered girl he had known so well, stretched
cold and stff on the kitchen floor, he was introduced
into the library to find the pair at tea together ?
There was, he says, little conversation during the
quarter of an hour of waiting for the policeman.
The prisoner, however, was perfectly self-possessed,
and alive to little personal inconveniences. "Look
here," he says, showing his hand, "I have cut my-
self too; can you do something for it ?'"rhen
arrives the constable. The prisoner gives himself
up, asks to see his victim, is taken once more to the
kitchen, looks at her, and pronounces himself far
happier than he was before. Now this apathy, this
unimpassioned look of things, this routine of every
day in such tin unspeakable contrast of circumstance,
does not, we know, mean all that it appears to do,
but it does mean something. We see a sort of stolid
habit prevailing among the main actors. The poor
old grandfather might think afterwards that he
had acted with a set purpose of detaining the pri-
soner; but in fact, when utterly bewildered, especi-
ally at his age, people do follow habit, and the
idea " of talking it over at tea" implied, no doubt,
a very indistinct notion of what the thing to be
talked over was. But how sit down to tea with
bloody hands ?—therefore his guest must be asked
to wash them. And that poor girl on the kitchen
floor ! It is not in ordinary human nature—in no
nature that is not carried out of itself—to bring
dropping blood, even life-blood of the dearest
upon carpets and furniture and front stairs.
It belongs to a universal instinct, strengthened by
nurses and servants till it becomes part of us; there-
fore the victim must be laid where blood will leave

no stain. We resent it all, but the true vulgarity

_
of the scene rests with the murderer himself--with
that dull low nature which felt no remorse, which

could be sensitive to the pain of a scratch, and still
feel a relish for his tea after he had satisfied his

revenge—which could look upon her be professed
to have loved, and realise that recent act of brutal
vengeance, and " feel happier," and keep a good
appetite, and be composed and well-behaved, and
never for a moment sorry, never stung by memory,

never oppressed by that ‘ insupportable and heavy
hour" when a soul made for better things wakes to
the sense of an irrevocable crime. A restless desire
to be comfortable seems to lie at the bottom of this

state of mind—a craving for satisfaction and an
immediate relief when this is attained. Selfishness
of this magnitude cannot regard things for a
moment out of their relation to self, so as to be ob-
jects of disinterested pity or sorrow. Remorse
does not know how to find its way into such minds.
They feel so strongly the right and duty to make
themselves comfortable that no other consideration
can find an entrance. A very similar case, tried in
the same court, occurred, it may be remembered,
two years ago. The man Thorley was a pugilist,
a low sort of fellow, but not without friends and
sympathisers. He saw his sweetheart two
or three times in company with a soldier cousin,
" and didn't like it ;" and so he cut her throat,
and told the policeman to whom he gave him-
self in charge that he felt a deal more comfortable
after it. He had but two requests to make after
this relief to his feelings—the first to the constable,
that he would allow him to smoke his pipe out, for
perhaps he should never have another—the second
to the magistrates, that his mother might bring
him his Sunday dinner. Education does not uni-
formly make a differenee. At the bottom of all may
lurk the savage, lulled for the moment and smoothed
over by a little outside polish, bat only waiting for
his occasion. There was a moment when Othello
felt a touch of this mood, and he knew it—when he
felt the rising demon turning that into murder
which was sacrifice. But he did not rest an instant
in the comfortable stage. Nor did he murder his
wife for the sake of his own ease, but on some blind
notion of injured honour. He felt for his victim
throughout—" the pity of it, lago, the pity of it"—
and remorse rushed in with the first knowledge that
he had accomplished his parpose, not waiting to be
undeceived. With him it was—" My wife, my
wife ! What wife ? I have no wife" instead of
pipes, and tea, and brandy and water.
LONDON REVIEW.—The curious stress laid on the fact
that Townley justified openly in his cell the deed for which
he was condemned, reminds us not a little of a similar scene
depicted ty that master hand which, within the last few
weeks, has been laid cold in death. Everybody knows Sir
Bulwer Lytton's " Eugene Aram." Everybody knows Mr.
Thackeray's amusing and witty parody of it in his comic
imitation novel, entitled " George de Barnewell." Seated
in the condemned cell, George de Barnewell conversed with
his excellent chaplain upon metaphysics in general—the
soul—existence—Plato—and the Ideal and the Beautiful.
Where there is no remorse, said George de Barnewell,
there can b 2 no crime. I am not sorry—therefore I am
innocent. Is my reasoning correct? And the venerable
chaplain admitted that the argument could not be con-
futed. We cannot help thinking that some similar
scene must have taken place in the gaol, when Mr. Gordon
a' tempting to prove to George Victor Townley that murder
was sinful, George Victor Townley rolled his eyes, and told
the gentleMr.Gordon that, upon all moral and philosophical
grounds, Mr. Gordon's reasoning was unsound. Lastly,
the public have before them at some length, in the Derby-
shire Advertiser, a history of the vacillations which Sir
George Grey's mind has undergone on the subject. The new
material on which the prisoner's sentenee was changed is set
forth at length. First and foremost, having brought Dr.
Winslow to swear that the prisoner's conversation contained
symptoms of moral insanity, the friends of the prisoner now
come forward to declare that the prisoner's early life and