OR, THE HERO OF OUR DAYS.
["—The curious tendency towards imitation which is observed whenever some specially sensational crime is brought into the light of publicity."—Morning Post.']
NARCISSUS? He, that foul ill-favoured brute,
A fevered age's most repulsive fruit,
The murderous coxcomb, the assassin sleek?
Stranger comparison could fancy seek?
Truly 'tis not the self-admiring boy
Nymph Echo longed so vainly to enjoy;
Yet the old classic fable hath a phase
Which seems to fit the opprobrium of our days.
Criminal-worship seems our latest cult,
And this strange figure is its last result.
Self-conscious, self-admiring, Crime parades
Its loathly features, not in slumdom's shades,
Or in Alsatian sanctuaries vile.
No; peacock-posing and complacent smile
Pervade the common air, and take the town.
The glory of a scandalous renown
Lures the vain villain more than wrath or gain,
And cancels all the shame that should restrain:
Makes murder half-heroic in his sight,
And gilds the gallows with factitious light.
And whose the fault? Sensation it is thine!
The garrulous paragraph, the graphic line,
Poster and portrait, telegram and tale,
Make shopboy eager and domestics pale.
Over the morbid details workmen pore,
Toil's favourite pabulum and chosen lore,
Penny-a-liners pile the horrors up,
On which the cockney gobe-mouche loves to sup,
And paragraph and picture feed the clown
With the foul garbage that has gorged the town.
"Vice is a monster of such hideous mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen."
So sang the waspish satirist long ago.
Now Vice is sketched and Crime is made a show.
A hundred eager scribes are at their heel
To tell the public how they look and feel,
How eat and drink, how sleep and smoke and play.
Murder's itinerary for a day,
Set forth in graphic phrase by skilful pens,
With pictures of its face, its favourite dens,
Its knife or bludgeon, pistol, paramour,
Will swell the swift editions hour by hour,
More than high news of war or of debate,
The death of heroes or the throes of state.
From club-room to street-corner runs the cry
After the newest fact, or latest lie:
The hurrying throng unfolded broad-sheets grasp,
And read with goggled eyes and lips a-gasp,
Blood! Blood! More Blood! It makes hot lips go pale,
But gives the sweetest zest to the unholy tale.
What wonder if the Horror, homaged thus
By frenzied eagerness and foolish fuss,
Swells to a hideous self-importance, struts
In conscious dignity, and gladly gluts
With vanity's fantastic tricks the herd
Whose pulses first by murderous crime it stirred.
Narcissus-like, the slayer bends to trace
Within Sensation's flowing stream its face,
And, self-enamoured, smiles a loathsome smile
Of fatuous conceit and gloating guile;
Laughs at the shadow of the lifted knife,
And thinks of all things save its victim's life.
The "Noisy Nymph," the Echo of our times,
The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes,
Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there,
Watching Narcissus with persistent stare,
And ready note-book. Nothing but a Voice?
No, but its babblings travel, and rejoice
A myriad prurient ears with noisome news,
Fit only for the shambles and the stews.
These hear, admire, and sometimes imitate!—
Narcissus is a danger to the State,
And Echo hardly less. Vain-glorious crime;
That pestilent portent of a morbid time,
Would flourish less could sense or law avail
To strangle coarse Sensation's clamorous tale,
Silence the "Noisy Nymph," for half crime's ill
Would end were babbling Echo's voice but still.
