To answer your question, I should have to know what your conception of true freedom is. True freedom is, as it appears to me, the triumphing of the spirit or better part of man over the flesh or weaker part; that is, acting according to one’s highest conception of what is right. Do you agree with me?
I do.
Then do you not think that the truly righteous man, be he in prison or out, is free? Do you not see that a man who does right, even though he lose fortune or life by doing so, is freer than the one who allows his conduct to be regulated by fear, malice, or other passions? Remember that a man may be free in a dungeon and bound down with chains, and that he may be an abject slave and be clothed in purple.”
The Summary perhaps does something to encourage priggishness, but priggishness, it need scarcely be said, indicates a far higher moral level than the vacuous brutality which lies behind so large a proportion of prison inscriptions.
So far we have been dealing with writers who are first and above all criminals. It is necessary to mention a few artists and men of letters who, while distinctly criminals, are not primarily criminals. Villon is generally named at the head of these, and with good reason, as he has himself supplied the evidence by which he must be counted a criminal. But Villon was a poet, and a great poet; his crimes never degraded his art. It is worth noting that almost the only passage[74] which Lombroso quotes to prove such degradation is, on independent grounds and apparently with good reason, regarded by Jannet, Villon’s editor, as spurious.
Cellini, as self-revealed in his wonderful autobiography, bears more distinct marks than Villon of instinctive criminality. Crime is, however, rare among great sculptors; on the other hand it has been, as Lombroso points out, very common among painters; numerous are the examples of murder, cruelty, theft, sexual offences, among distinguished painters; alcoholism is also very common.
Casanova, a man of various and extraordinary abilities, has in his Memoirs, of which the strict historical accuracy is now generally accepted, produced one of the most valuable and interesting records of the eighteenth century, and at the same time a most complete and complaisant history of his own criminal offences. It is difficult to say whether in him the criminal or the man of genius is most prominent.
A living poet of some eminence, M. Paul Verlaine, furnishes an interesting example of the man of genius who is also distinctly a criminal. M. Verlaine is the chief of the so-called “Decadant” school. The precise rank that he will ultimately take as a poet is not yet clear; while on the one hand he has been unduly neglected, on the other he has been unduly extolled. At his best he excels in delicate passages of vague and mystic reverie, in sudden lines of poignant emotion. His style, a curious mixture of simplicity and obscurity, is studded with words borrowed from the criminal’s argot. His latest volume[75] contains poems which well show his curious power of expressing the most delicate nuances of sentiment side by side with the crudest, most unabashed impulses of cynical depravity, self-revelations of sexual perversity, which might have earned for the book a title in a line of its own, “L’embarquement pour Sodome et Gomorrhe.” I do not propose to quote any of these but from a short but interesting series written during an imprisonment of several years at Brussels. Here is a poem describing the life of the prisoner:—
“La cour se fleurit de souci
Comme le front
De tous ceux-ci
Qui vont en rond
En flageolant sur leur fémur
Debilité
Le long du mur
Fou de clartè.
Tournez, Samsons sans Dalila,
Sans Philistin,
Tournez bien la
Meule au destin.
Vaincu risible de la loi,
Mouds tour à tour
Ton cœur, ta foi
Et ton amour!
Ils vont! et leurs pauvres souliers
Font un bruit sec,
Humiliés,
La pipe au bec.
Pas un mot ou bien le cachot,
Pas un soupir.
Il fait si chand
Qu’on croit mourir.
J’en suis de ce cirque effaré,
Soumis d’ailleurs
Et préparé
A tous malheurs.
Et pourquir si j’ai contristé
Ton vœu tetu,
Société,
Me choierais tu?
Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds,
Filons en fleur,
Mes chers, mes bons,
Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons-nous
Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.”
I do not know any more interesting document in criminal literature than one poem, Læti et Errabundi, contained in this volume. Fully to understand the significance of this remarkable poem, it is necessary to state that Verlaine’s imprisonment was due to an attempt on the life of his comrade in sexual perversity, himself also a poet of some note. The latter left Europe, and it is not now known whether he is alive or dead. To him Læti et Errabundi is addressed.