A Criminal Head
When men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science)
speak of studying history or human society scientifically they
always forget that there are two quite distinct questions involved.
It may be that certain facts of the body go with certain facts
of the soul, but it by no means follows that a grasp of such
facts of the body goes with a grasp of the things of the soul.
A man may show very learnedly that certain mixtures of race make
a happy community, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is)
about what communities are happy. A man may explain scientifically
how a certain physical type involves a really bad man, but he may be
quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man is really bad.
Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only one half
of the equation.
The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, "Celts are unsuccessful;
look at Irishmen, for instance." To which I should reply,
"You may know all about Celts; but it is obvious that you know
nothing about Irishmen. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful,
unless it is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great
part of the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too."
A man with a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year
greeting), "Fools have microcephalous skulls," or what not.
To which I shall reply, "In order to be certain of that, you must
be a good judge both of the physical and of the mental fact.
It is not enough that you should know a microcephalous skull
when you see it. It is also necessary that you should know a fool
when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you do not know
a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and intimate
of all forms of acquaintanceship."
The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that
while their knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle,
their knowledge of man and society, to which these are to
be applied, is quite exceptionally superficial and silly.
They know everything about biology, but almost nothing about life.
Their ideas of history, for instance, are simply cheap and uneducated.
Thus some famous and foolish professor measured the skull of
Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type; he had not historical
knowledge enough to know that if there is any "criminal type,"
certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I believe,
afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all;
but that is another story. The point is that the poor old man
was trying to match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without
knowing anything whatever about her mind.
But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.
In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles
about criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good
if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I
know of are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process,
the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however,
a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from such
galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we
are called upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the
forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary sad men, who stole
because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage.
The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely; sometimes it is
the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round head;
sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development,
sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head.
I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one
permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive
classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists
in being poor.
But it was among the pictures in this article that I received
the final shock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting
possession of the fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant
than criminals. Among the starved and bitter, but quite human,
faces was one head, neat but old-fashioned, with the powder of
the 18th century and a certain almost pert primness in the dress
which marked the conventions of the upper middle-class about 1790.
The face was lean and lifted stiffly up, the eyes stared forward
with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm with a heroic firmness;
all the more pathetic because of a certain delicacy and deficiency
of male force, Without knowing who it was, one could have guessed
that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's Brutus, a man
of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government as a mere
machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of inconsistency
and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable life.
I say I should have known this almost from the face alone,
even if I had not known who it was.
But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath
the portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written
these remarkable words: "Deficiency of ethical instincts,"
followed by something to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is
certainly untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead,
a peculiarity which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people
of his time and ours.
Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the knowledge
and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology
might be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance
of that human material of which it is supposed to be speaking.
The man who could say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts
is a man utterly to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics.
He might as well say that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts.
You may say that Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say
the same of Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced
they were morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality,
not by feeling too little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was
(in a negative sort of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics.
He and a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient
of unreason and wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up
in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank.
The work was the greatest that was ever given to men to do except
that which Christianity did in dragging Europe out of the abyss
of barbarism after the Dark Ages. But they did it, and no one else
could have done it.
Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe
on a point of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful
class as mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter
the great estates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves
in an awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all
things seem intelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth.
We are not strong enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong
enough to be as weak as Robespierre. There is only one thing,
it seems, that we can do. Like a mob of children, we can play
games upon this ancient battlefield; we can pull up the bones
and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of that unimaginable war;
and we can chatter to each other childishly and innocently
about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.
I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know
whose are imbecile.
