PEN, PENCIL AND POISON: A Study in Green
Oscar Wilde
Table of Contents
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Oscar Wilde....................................................................................................................................................2
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PEN, PENCIL AND POISON: A Study in Green
PEN, PENCIL AND POISON: A Study in Green
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Oscar Wilde
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IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in
wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision
and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To
those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many
exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humorists, essayists, and novelists of
modern America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country; and
Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely
artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an art−critic, an
antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a
forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any
age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with "pen, pencil and poison," as a great poet of our own day has finely
said of him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray's Inn and
Hatton Garden. His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of the Monthly
Review, the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson
said that he was not a bookseller, but "a gentleman who dealt in books," the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood,
and one of the most well−known men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the early age of
twenty−one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine tells us of her "amiable disposition and
numerous accomplishments," and adds somewhat quaintly that "she is supposed to have understood the writings
of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person of either sex now living." His father did not long survive his young
wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1805,
by his uncle, George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His boyhood was passed at Linden
House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared before
the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely gardens and well−timbered park he owed that simple and
impassioned love of nature which never left him all through his life, and which made him so peculiarly
susceptible to the spiritual influences of Wordsworth's poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney's academy at
Hammersmith. Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was
destined to turn out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of a good deal of culture, and in
after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an
admirable teacher, who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not forget the importance of early
moral training. It was under Mr. Burney that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that a
drawing−book which he used at school is still extant, and displays great talent and natural feeling. Indeed,
painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find expression by pen or
poison.
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams of the romance and chivalry of a
soldier's life, and to have become a young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to
satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things. In a short time he wearied of the
service. "Art," he tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, "Art
touched her renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot,
and tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple−hearted." But Art was not
the only cause of the change. "The writings of Wordsworth," he goes on to say, "did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept over them tears of happiness and gratitude." He
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accordingly left the army, with its rough barrack−life and coarse mess−room tittle−tattle, and returned to Linden
House, full of this new−born enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was
"broken like a vessel of clay," prostrated him for a time. His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it
might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as
a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia
from which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was young—only twenty−five
years of age—and he soon passed out of the "dead black waters," as he called them, into the larger air of
humanistic culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost to the gates of death, he
conceived the idea of taking up literature as an art. "I said with John Woodvil," he cries, "it were a life of gods to
dwell in such an element," to see and hear and write brave things:—
"These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality."
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance of a man who had a true passion for
letters. "To see and hear and write brave things," this was his aim.
Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man's genius, or under the influence of the
strange fascination that he exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of articles on
artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonyms he began to contribute to the literature of his day.
Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he
chose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified
his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of "kind
light−hearted Wainewright" whose prose is "capital." We hear of him entertaining Macready, John Forster,
Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit−dîner. Like Disraeli he
determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast−pin, and his pale
lemon−coloured 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
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien 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 affectations 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.
His life−work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted
that, if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly justifies his
reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This
young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is an art, and has
its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without interest. We hear of William
Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be "very fine." His essays
are prefiguring of much that has since been realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of
modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets
and the Italian Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and
Psyche, and the Hypnerotomachta, and book−bindings, and early editions, and wide−margined proofs. He is
keenly 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
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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.
There is, of course, much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for decoration, that shows that he did not
entirely free himself from the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to recognise what is,
indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective
of age or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room for show, but a
room to live in, we should never aim at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves with
any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things
belong to the same age.
And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely
painted figures and the faint **KALLOS finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the
"Delphic Sibyl" of Michael Angelo, or of the "Pastoral" of Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and
here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, "cased in a cover of solid silver
gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and rubies," and close by it "squats a little ugly
monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn−bearing Sicily." Some dark antique bronzes contrast
"with the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in wax." He has his
trays of Tassie's gems, his tiny Louis−Quatorze bonbonnìere with a miniature by Pettitot, his highly prized
"brown−biscuit teapots, filagree−worked," his citron morocco letter−case, and his "pomona−green" chair.
One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle
connoisseur turning over his fine collection of Marc Antonios, and his Turner's "Liber Studiorum," of which he
was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, "the head of
Alexander on an onyx of two strata," or "that superb altissimo relievo on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus." He was
always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to the best means of forming a
collection. Indeed, while fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of reproductions of
the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.
As an art−critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a work of art, and
certainly the first step in aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions. He cared nothing for abstract
discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did
not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art's first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to
the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this temperament, this
"taste," as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by frequent contact with the best work,
becomes in the end a form of right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as there are fashions in dress,
and perhaps none of us can ever quite free ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty.
He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary
work. But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turner and Constable at a time when they
were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require more than
"mere industry and accurate transcription." Of Crome's "Heath Scene near Norwich" he remarks that it shows
"how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a most uninteresting flat," and of
the popular type of landscape of his day he says that it is "simply an enumeration of hill and dale, stumps of trees,
shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses; little more than topography, a kind of pictorial mapwork; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most
valuable materials of the real painter, are not." He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace in
art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's pictures as he did for
Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy, and he tells us
frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider it
necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees. The qualities that he sought for in a picture were
composition, beauty and dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other hand, he was
not a doctrinaire. "I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or
not it be consistent with itself is the question." This is one of his excellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters
so different as Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical, he is trying
"to see the object as in itself it really is."
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However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his criticisms of contemporary work. "The
present," he says, "is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal.... Modern things dazzle
me. I must look at them through Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is
uncertain; 'print,' as he excellently says, 'settles it.' Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture." He is
happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt,
Correggio, and Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is Gothic touched
him very little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English
school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing out to the young student the
artistic possibilities that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work. In his judgments on the
great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, "there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in one who
spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books." The highest praise that we can give to him is that he
tried to revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or "plans
for advancing the fine arts," will ever produce this result. The people, he says very wisely, and in the true spirit of
Toynbee Hall, must always have "the best models constantly before their eyes."
As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely technical in his art criticisms. Of
Tintoret's "St. George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon," he remarks:—
"The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from the pale greenish background by a
vermilion scarf; and the full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the purple−lake
coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saints, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the
foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle."
And elsewhere he talks learnedly of "a delicate Schiavone, various as a tulip−bed, with rich broken tints," of
"a glowing portrait, remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni," and of another picture being "pulpy in the
carnations."
But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate those
impressions into words to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect. He was
one of the first to develop what has been called the art−literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature
which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning its two most perfect exponents. His description of Lancret's
Repas Italien, in which "a dark−haired girl, 'amorous of mischief,' lies on the daisy−powdered grass," is in some
respects very charming. Here is his account of "The Crucifixion," by Rembrandt. It is extremely characteristic of
his style:—
"Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through
a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge—'sleety−flaw, discoloured water'—streams down amain,
spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and
fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are drops—the air is stagnant—a muttering rumble growls
underneath their feet, and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The horses snuff the coming
terror, and become unmanageable through fear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His
own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and
breast drowned in sweat and His black tongue parched with the fiery death−fever, Jesus cries, 'I thirst.' The deadly
vinegar is elevated to Him.
"His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of the cross.' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer
through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the
sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are
mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The
veil of the temple− the unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing
the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the tables and seven−branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light
of unearthly flames to the God−deserted multitude.
"Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. It would have lost nearly all its charms in losing
that perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting imagination may
speculate. At present it is like a thing in another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible by the body.
We can only approach it in the spirit."
In this passage, written, the author tells us, "in awe and reverence," there is much that is terrible, and very
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much that is quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a certain crude
violence of words, a quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief defect. It is pleasanter,
however, to pass to this description of Giulio Romano's "Cephalus and Procris"—
"We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the
picture as a preparation for the lament. We have nearly the same images in both. For either victim the high groves
and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy
lands, and the swallow in the long−winding vales; 'the satyrs, too, and fauns dark−veiled groan,' and the fountain
nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters. The sheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, 'who love
to scale the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,' hurry down from the song of their wind−courting pines;
while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan for white Procris, 'with
many−sobbing streams.'
'Filling the far−seen ocean with a voice.'
The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling horn of Aurora's love no more shall
scatter away the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassy sunburnt bank,
broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of land−breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot−tripping
roots and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing out light−green shoots. This
bank rises rather suddenly on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of which sits the
stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees that ivory−bright body which was, but an instant agone,
parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns and flowers with jealousy−stung
foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.
"From between the closely−neighboured boles astonished nymphs press forward with loud cries—
'And deerskin−vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists,
advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.'
"Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of death. On the other side of the group,
Virtuous Love with 'vans dejected' holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan people, fauns, rams,
goats, satyrs, and satyr−mothers, pressing their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on whose lowest ridge a brook−guardian pours
from her urn her grief−telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending her
locks, appears among the vine−festooned pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filled by shady
meadows, sinking down to a river−mouth; beyond is 'the vast strength of the ocean stream,' from whose floor the
extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine−washed steeds to behold the death−pangs of her
rival."
Were this description carefully re−written, it would be quite admirable. The conception of making a prose
poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and
sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was
always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
scene−painting. "In art," he says in one of his essays, "whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well"; and he
points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be
drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, he was "on the side of the angels." He
was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley—"the tremulously−sensitive and poetical Shelley," as he calls
him. His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of
the best copies of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience" that is now in existence was wrought specially for
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him. He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. "Our critics," he remarks with much wisdom, "seem hardly aware of
the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one
art co−generates a proportionate perfection in the other"; and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire
Michael Angelo talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his listeners. To his fellow
contributors in the London Magazine he was always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan
Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a friend. Some of his sketches of
Charles Lamb are admirable in their way, and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
subject:—
"What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man:
as gentle a heart as ever sent tears to the eyes.
"How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk
without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold,
his sentences would beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation
on the fashion for men of genius was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie' of his; so was
Burton, and old Fuller. In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many−folio odour; and with
the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams. He would deliver critical touches on
these, like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if another began even on the
acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define, whether as
misapprehensive or mischievous. One night at C——'s, the above dramatic partners were the temporary subject of
chat. Mr. X. commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but was
instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'That was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!'"
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as
much to him as to any man of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and delighted in
pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the
highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader−writers, and this school
Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented. He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic articles this extraordinary young
man tells the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of
health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the
least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence. A publicist, nowadays, is a man
who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. "I hold three things in high estimation," he says
somewhere: "to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees while the
sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood. The country gives them all
to me." He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath, repeating Collins's "Ode to Evening," just to
catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face "in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
dews"; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet−breathed kine "pass slowly homeward through the twilight,"
and hearing "the distant clank of the sheep−bell." One phrase of his, "the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of
earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel," is curiously characteristic of his temperament,
and this passage is rather pretty in its way:—
"The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—'such that men called daisies in our town'—thick as
stars on a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of
elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the
newly−sown seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm
æther; only round the horizon's edge streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines
written in March.'"
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so
susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most
subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell
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us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he
adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was always reticent on the matter, and
preferred to speak about "The Excursion," and the "Poems founded on the Affections." There is no doubt,
however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and
which served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux
vomica, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, "nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of almost
infinite dilution." His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially. This is no
doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. His first victim was his uncle, Mr. George Griffiths. He
poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had always been very much
attached. In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following
December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, 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 Abercrombie was carried out by
himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured her life in various offices.
The circumstances were as follows. On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from
Linden House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With them were the two sisters, Helen
and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night Helen
sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She
lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some
poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they returned, Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about
twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red−chalk drawing of her by her
brother−in−law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas
Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says that Mrs.
Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no
accomplices.
The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the technical
ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, and with curious courage the poisoner entered an action in the
Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all the cases. The trial,
however, did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in the
companies' favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger. Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erle
and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney−General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the other side. The
plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials. The refusal of the companies to give him
the £18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the
murder of Helen Abercrombie, 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 insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000.** As soon as the necessary formalities had
been gone through and the policy executed, 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, and was for a time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St. Omer.
From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of
his "skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who knew him." In 1837 he returned to England
privately. Some strange mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom he loved.
It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in Covent Garden. His sitting−room was on
the ground floor, and he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen years before, when he
was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power
of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had inherited from his mother,
and had brought into marriage settlement. He knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
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England he was imperilling his life. Yet he returned. Should one wonder? It was said that the woman was very
beautiful. Besides, she did not love him.
It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in his
artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called out, "That's
Wainewright, the Bank−forger." It was Forrester, the Bow Street runner.
On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The following report of the proceedings appeared in
the Times:—
"Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged forty−two, a man
of gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of attorney
for £2259,** with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.
"There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he pleaded not guilty, when he was
arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning. On being brought before the judges, however,
he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which
were not of a capital nature.
"The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other indictments, but that the Bank did not
desire to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded and the prisoner at the close of the
session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation for life."
He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies. In a fanciful passage in one of his
early essays he had fancied himself "lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death," for having been unable
to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete his
collection. The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained bitterly
of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people may fancy, that the money was
practically his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been committed
thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a circonstance attenuante. The permanence of
personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an
extremely rough−and−ready manner. There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy
punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism,
was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance. They had been
going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was "horrified to recognise a man
familiarly known to him in former years and at whose table he had dined."
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge. Many men of letters
went down to visit their old literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light−hearted Janus whom Charles
Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve the
occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: "Sir, you City men enter on your
speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have
failed, yours happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my visitor and me. But, sir, I will
tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the position
of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell
shall take his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer
me the broom!" When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders
and said, "Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles."
Prom Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from there in the Susan to Van Diemen's
Land along with three hundred other convicts. The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in a
letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of "the companion of poets and artists" being
compelled to associate with "country bumpkins." The phrase that he 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.
His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to sketching
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and portrait−painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he give up his
habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to make away with people who had
offended him. But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete failures, and in
1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the
settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket−of−leave. In it he speaks of himself as being "tormented
by ideas struggling for outward form and realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech." His request, however, was refused, and the associate of
Coleridge consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificiels whose secret is only known to the
eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he had evinced an
extraordinary affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a
quality that his early work certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady
Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that "he had contrived to put the expression of his
own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kindhearted girl." M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly
respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright's
style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant a début
in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I
am indebted for many of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in
its way, is of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere presence and assumption, and others have denied
to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view. 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. It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers,
and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too
journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word. Here and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is
always lacking in the self−restraint of the true artist. But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which
he lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought "capital" has no small historic interest. That he had a
sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite certain. There is no essential incongruity between crime and
culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him.
It is impossible not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or Mr.
Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our
own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth
century, or in any land or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly
unprejudiced estimate of his position and value. I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on
historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise
or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely
shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance
wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding
Tiberius, or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us
with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have
nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows
anything of moral approval or disapproval. And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb's friend. At present I
feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so
many charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Addington
Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee, and other distinguished writers. However, Art has not
forgotten him. He is the hero of Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer's Lucretia; and it is gratifying to
note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with "pen, pencil and poison." To be
suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
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PEN, PENCIL AND POISON: A Study in Green
Oscar Wilde
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