Paul Clifford — Complete
cross-examination had excited; a sudden and chilling sense of the dread
importance of the tribunal made itself abruptly felt in the minds of
every one present.
Perhaps, as in the gloomy satire of Hogarth (the moral Mephistopheles of
painters), the close neighbourhood of pain to mirth made the former
come with the homelier shock to the heart; be that as it may, a freezing
anxiety, numbing the pulse and stirring through the air, made every
man in that various crowd feel a sympathy of awe with his neighbour,
excepting only the hardened judge and the hackneyed lawyers, and one
spectator,--an idiot who had thrust himself in with the general press,
and stood, within a few paces of the prisoner, grinning unconsciously,
and every now and then winking with a glassy eye at some one at a
distance, whose vigilance he had probably eluded.
The face and aspect, even the attitude, of the prisoner were well fitted
to heighten the effect which would naturally have been created by any
man under the same fearful doom. He stood at the very front of the bar,
and his tall and noble figure was drawn up to its full height; a glow of
excitement spread itself gradually over features at all times striking,
and lighted an eye naturally eloquent, and to which various emotions at
that time gave a more than commonly deep and impressive expression. He
began thus:--
“My lord, I have little to say, and I may at once relieve the anxiety
of my counsel, who now looks wistfully upon me, and add that that little
will scarcely embrace the object of defence. Why should I defend myself?
Why should I endeavour to protract a life that a few days, more or less,
will terminate, according to the ordinary calculations of chance? Such
as it is and has been, my life is vowed to the law, and the law will
have the offering. Could I escape from this indictment, I know that
seven others await me, and that by one or the other of these my
conviction and my sentence must come. Life may be sweet to all of us, my
lord; and were it possible that mine could be spared yet a while, that
continued life might make a better atonement for past actions than a
death which, abrupt and premature, calls for repentance while it forbids
redress.
“But when the dark side of things is our only choice, it is useless
to regard the bright; idle to fix our eyes upon life, when death is at
hand; useless to speak of contrition, when we are denied its proof. It
is the usual policy of prisoners in my situation to address the feelings
and flatter the prejudices of the jury; to descant on the excellence of
our laws, while they endeavour to disarm them; to praise justice, yet
demand mercy; to talk of expecting acquittal, yet boast of submitting
without a murmur to condemnation. For me, to whom all earthly interests
are dead, this policy is idle and superfluous. I hesitate not to tell
you, my lord judge,--to proclaim to you, gentlemen of the jury,--that
the laws which I have broken through my life I despise in death! Your
laws are but of two classes; the one makes criminals, the other punishes
them. I have suffered by the one; I am about to perish by the other.
“My lord, it was the turn of a straw which made me what I am. Seven
years ago I was sent to the house of correction for an offence which I
did not commit. I went thither, a boy who had never infringed a single
law; I came forth, in a few weeks, a man who was prepared to break all
laws! Whence was this change? Was it my fault, or that of my condemners?
You had first wronged me by a punishment which I did not deserve; you
wronged me yet more deeply when (even had I been guilty of the first
offence) I was sentenced to herd with hardened offenders, and graduates
in vice and vice's methods of support. The laws themselves caused me
to break the laws: first, by implanting within me the goading sense
of injustice; secondly, by submitting me to the corruption of example.
Thus, I repeat,--and I trust my words will sink solemnly into the hearts
of all present,--your legislation made me what I am; and it now destroys
me, as it has destroyed thousands, for being what it made me! But for
this, the first aggression on me, I might have been what the world terms
honest,--I might have advanced to old age and a peaceful grave through
the harmless cheateries of trade or the honoured falsehoods of a
profession. Nay, I might have supported the laws which I have now
braved; like the counsel opposed to me, I might have grown sleek on the
vices of others, and advanced to honour by my ingenuity in hanging
my fellow-creatures! The canting and prejudging part of the Press has
affected to set before you the merits of 'honest ability,' or 'laborious
trade,' in opposition to my offences. What, I beseech you, are the props
of your 'honest' exertion,--the profits of 'trade'? Are there no bribes
to menials? Is there no adulteration of goods? Are the rich never duped
in the price they pay? Are the poor never wronged in the quality they
receive? Is there honesty in the bread you eat, in a single necessity
which clothes or feeds or warms you? Let those whom the law protects
consider it a protector: when did it ever protect me? When did it ever
protect the poor man? The government of a State, the institutions
of law, profess to provide for all those who 'obey.' Mark! a man
hungers,--do you feed him? He is naked,--do you clothe him? If not, you
break your covenant, you drive him back to the first law of nature, and
you hang him, not because he is guilty, but because you have left him
naked and starving! [A murmur among the mob below, with great difficulty
silenced.] One thing only I will add, and that not to move your
mercy,--no, nor to invest my fate with an idle and momentary
interest,--but because there are some persons in this world who have not
known me as the criminal who stands before you, and whom the tidings of
my fate may hereafter reach; and I would not have those persons view
me in blacker colours than I deserve. Among all the rumours, gentlemen,
that have reached you, through all the tales and fables kindled from my
unhappy notoriety and my approaching doom, I put it to you, if you have
heard that I have committed one sanguinary action or one ruinous and
deliberate fraud. You have heard that I have lived by the plunder of
the rich,--I do not deny the charge. From the grinding of the poor, the
habitual overreaching, or the systematic pilfering of my neighbours, my
conscience is as free as it is from the charge of cruelty and bloodshed.
Those errors I leave to honest mediocrity or virtuous exertion! You
may perhaps find, too, that my life has not passed through a career of
outrage without scattering some few benefits on the road. In destroying
me, it is true that you will have the consolation to think that
among the benefits you derive from my sentence will be the salutary
encouragement you give to other offenders to offend to the last, degree,
and to divest outrage of no single aggravation! But if this does not
seem to you any very powerful inducement, you may pause before you
cut off from all amendment a man who seems neither wholly hardened
nor utterly beyond atonement. My lord, my counsel would have wished to
summon witnesses,--some to bear testimony to redeeming points in my own
character, others to invalidate the oath of the witness against me,--a
man whom I saved from destruction in order that he might destroy me. I
do not think either necessary. The public Press has already said of
me what little good does not shock the truth; and had I not possessed
something of those qualities which society does not disesteem, you would
not have beheld me here at this hour! If I had saved myself as well as
my companions, I should have left this country, perhaps forever, and
commenced a very different career abroad. I committed offences; I eluded
you; I committed what, in my case, was an act of duty: I am seized, and
I perish. But the weakness of my body destroys me, not the strength of
your malice. Had I” (and as the prisoner spake, the haughty and rapid
motion, the enlarging of the form, produced by the passion of the
moment, made impressively conspicuous to all the remarkable power of his
frame),--“had I but my wonted health, my wonted command over these limbs
and these veins, I would have asked no friend, no ally, to favour my
escape. I tell you, engines and guardians of the law, that I would have
mocked your chains and defied your walls, as ye know that I have mocked
and defied them before. But my blood creeps now only in drops through
its courses; and the heart that I had of old stirs feebly and heavily
within me.” The prisoner paused a moment, and resumed in an altered
tone: “Leaving, then, my own character to the ordeal of report, I cannot
perhaps do better than leave to the same criterion that of the witness
against me. I will candidly own that under other circumstances it might
have been otherwise. I will candidly avow that I might have then used
such means as your law awards me to procure an acquittal and to prolong
my existence,--though in a new scene; as it is, what matters the cause
in which I receive my sentence? Nay, it is even better to suffer by the
first than to linger to the last. It is some consolation not again to
stand where I now stand; to go through the humbling solemnities which I
have this day endured; to see the smile of some, and retort the frown of
others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the
caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the
drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den
until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the
monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law
deems the prisoner's counsel,--to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it
has delegated his fate,--I leave the chances of my life.”
The prisoner ceased; but the same heavy silence which, save when broken
by one solitary murmur, had lain over the court during his speech, still
continued even for several moments after that deep and firm voice had
died on the ear. So different had been the defence of the prisoner from
that which had been expected; so assuredly did the more hackneyed part
of the audience, even as he had proceeded, imagine that by some artful
turn he would at length wind into the usual courses of defence,--that
when his unfaltering and almost stern accents paused, men were
not prepared to feel that his speech was finished, and the pause
involuntarily jarred on them as untimeous and abrupt. At length, when
each of the audience slowly awoke to the conviction that the prisoner
had indeed concluded his harangue, a movement, eloquent of feelings
released from a suspense, which had been perhaps the more earnest and
the more blended with awe, from the boldness and novelty of the words on
which it hung, circled round the court. The jurors looked confusedly
at each other, but not one of them spoke, even by a whisper; their
feelings, which had been aroused by the speech of the prisoner, had not
from its shortness, its singularity, and the haughty impolicy of its
tone, been so far guided by its course as to settle into any state of
mind clearly favourable to him, or the reverse; so that each man waited
for his neighbour to speak first, in order that he might find, as it
were, in another, a kind of clew to the indistinct and excited feelings
which wanted utterance in himself.
The judge, who had been from the first attracted by the air and aspect
of the prisoner, had perhaps, notwithstanding the hardness of his mind,
more approvingly than any one present listened to the defence; for in
the scorn of the hollow institutions and the mock honesty of social
life, so defyingly manifested by the prisoner, Brandon recognized