Quam propè ad crimen sine crimine? How nearly may a man approach to guilt, without being guilty? was a favourite topic or vexed question when Casuistry flourished.

One of Mr. Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales is concerned with "a venerable gentleman, one Mr. Smith," whose silver hair is the bright symbol of a life unstained, except by such spots as are inseparable from human nature, whose solitude is one night broken, allegorically, by the entrance of Fancy with a show-box, wherein he is made to see himself committing sins which may have been meditated by him, but never were embodied in act. Not a shadow of proof, it seems, could have been adduced, in any earthly court, that he was guilty of the slightest of those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. "And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment?" Such is the query propounded, such the problem discussed, such the grave question vexed, in the fantasiestück entitled: FANCY'S SHOW-BOX: A MORALITY.

Must the

For to meditative souls in general, and to curiously speculative Mr. Hawthorne in particular, it is, as he says at starting, a point of vast interest, whether the soul may contract guilty stains, in all their depth and flagrancy, from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon, but which have never come into outward and actual existence. fleshly hand, and visible frame of man, set its seal to the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner? It is not until the crime is accomplished that guilt clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for its own. Then, and not before, our author argues, "sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousand-fold more virulent by its self

consciousness.

"Be it considered, also, that men over-estimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice, and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it. They may take the steps which lead to crime, impelled by the same sort of moral action as in working out a mathematical problem, yet be powerless with compunction, at the final moment. They knew not what deed it was that they deemed themselves resolved to do. In truth, there is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve, either for good or for evil, except at the very moment of execution."

Mr. Hawthorne would hope, therefore, in conclusion, that all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be incurred, unless the act have set its seal upon the thought.

There is another story in the same volume which tells how two

*David Swan.

villains were just about, for plunder's sake, to stab to the heart a traveller sleeping by the wayside, when interrupted by approaching footsteps. Hereupon each ruffian quietly takes a dram on the spot, and together they depart, ré infectâ, "with so many jests and such laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness, that they might be said to have gone on their way rejoicing." In a few hours, it is added, they had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the recording angel had written down the crime of murder against their souls, in letters as durable as eternity. (But does this square with the writer's previous conclusion ?)

The recording angel's book-keeping is altogether divergent from that of clerks of sessions and criminal courts. It is not theft, as lawyers advise us, to determine to steal a purse, nor to follow the man who carries it for the purpose of stealing it, nor to stretch out the hand for the purpose of taking it, nor even to lay hold of it with the same intention. The definition is not satisfied-we quote an essayist on the Morality of Advocacy-"till the purse is actually removed from its place; but as soon as that is done, the crime is complete, whatever may have been the temptation, however rapidly repentance, and even confession and restitution, may follow. The servant who sees a halfpenny lying about, takes it into her hand with the intention of stealing, and immediately changes her mind and puts it back, is a thief. A professional criminal, who has planned a robbery for weeks together, who has gone out with the full intention of committing it, and who runs away at the last moment because he sees a policeman coming, has committed no crime at all." This injustice, if so it must be called, at any rate this ethical anomaly, is inevitable here below. But they manage these things differently in another place.

Le mal qui ne se fait pas, observes M. Desiré Nisard, “n'est su que de celui qui seul connait le nombre des bons et des méchants et qui pèse les sociétés et les siècles."*

For tho' in law, to murder be to kill,
In equity the murder's in the will.†

The ancients frequently touched on this subject of a guilty will. It is the animus, and not the act, that constitutes the crime, says Juvenal: -Scelus intrà se tacitum qui cogitat ullum Facti crimen habet.

Seneca teaches that he who is about to commit an injury, has committed it already: injuriam qui facturus est jam fecit. So Keats, in an admired passage, speaks of the "two brothers and their murdered man," meaning the man they were taking away with them, for the purpose of murdering him.

Benvenuto Cellini relates, in his autobiography, how he had formed a resolution, in case he could meet with that malicious fellow, Bandinello, one of the blackest (painted) of Ben's many black beasts, "to fall upon him, and punish his insolence" without quarter. One evening, just as Cellini arrived at the square of St. Domenico, in Florence, Bandinello entered it on the other side-as Ben knew to be Ban's nightly wont.

* Etudes d'Histoire, p. 259.

VOL. LIV.

† Lady Mary W. Montagu's Poems. Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. 2 K

Whereupon, writes Ben, "I came up to him with a full resolution to do a bloody piece of work upon the spot. I looked up, and saw him upon a little mule, which appeared no bigger than an ass, and he had with him a boy about ten years of age. As soon as he perceived me, he turned as pale as death, and trembled all over; I, who knew what a cowardly wretch he was, cried out to him, ' Fear nothing, vile poltroon! I do not think you worth striking.' He gave me a look of the most abject pusillanimity, and returned no answer.

"I thereupon resumed just and virtuous sentiments, and returned thanks to the Almighty for preventing me from perpetrating the rash action I intended. Being in this manner delivered from the diabolical frenzy by which I had been agitated, I recovered my spirits," &c.*

Ben (italice) it was for Ben that he stopped just in time, and that Ban became not his ban-in the shape of a life-long remorse (if at least Ben was capable of that sort of feeling).

-Oh yet,

Thank Heaven that you have not quite barter'd regret
For remorse, nor the sad self-redemptions of grief
For a self-retribution beyond all relief !†

Possibly the author of these lines was not unmindful, as he wrote them, of a near relation's picture of "nobler bliss still" than the sudden relief of pain-the rapture of the conscience, namely, at the sudden release from a guilty thought. We refer to Harley L'Estrange, when "the sense of the danger his soul had escaped-the full knowledge of the guilt to which the fiend had tempted-came dread before his clearing vision.” He had meditated foul wrong towards his oldest friend. And thus already had he been apostrophised on the eve of its meditated accomplishment: "But woe, woe to thee, Harley L'Estrange, if to-morrow at this hour thou stand at the hearthstone, thy designs accomplished... .. Wilt thou ever wash from thy memory the stain ?"

So again Adam Smith moralises on the case of a man who, having resolved, and perhaps taken measures to perpetrate some crime, has fortunately been prevented by an accident which put it out of his powersuch a man being "sure, if he has any remains of conscience, to regard this event all his life after as a great and signal deliverance." He can never think of it, our philosopher goes on to say, without returning thanks to Heaven for saving him from actual guilt, and therefore from life-long horror and remorse :-but though his hands are innocent, he is conscious that his heart is equally guilty as if he had executed his resolve. Still, it gives, practically, great ease to his conscience, to consider that the crime was not executed, though he knows that the failure arose from no virtue in him. "To remember how much he was resolved upon it, has no other effect than to make him regard his escape as the greater and more miraculous: for he still fancies that he has escaped, and he looks back upon the danger to which his peace of mind was exposed, with that terror, with which one who is in safety may sometimes remember the hazard he was in of falling over a precipice, and shudder with terror at the thought."§ For, by one stroke and

*Life of Benvenuto Cellini, book iv. ch. iv.

My Novel, book xii. chapters xxviii. and xxxi.

† Owen Meredith, Lucile.

§ Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, part ii. sec. iii.

-in one moment, we may plunge our years

In fatal penitence, and in the blight

Of our own soul turn all our blood to tears,

And colour things to come with hues of Night.*

Shakspeare had thought deeply, and has touched repeatedly, on this general subject. The distinction broadly drawn by human judgments between a guilty design and a guilty deed, he illustrates in Bolingbroke's answer to Aumale, when the latter rushes in, and implores pardon beforehand for a yet unavowed crime:

Bol. Intended, or committed, was this fault?

If but the first, how heinous e'er it be,

To win thy after-love I pardon thee.†

To which a parallel passage might be quoted in Isabella's plea for the

life of Angelo:

His act did not o'ertake his bad intent;

And must be buried but as an intent

That perish'd by the way: thoughts are no subjects;
Intents but merely thoughts.‡

Suffolk less charitably pleads, a special pleader, against the spirit of leniency such as this, where he supposes the case of

Who being accused a crafty murderer,
His guilt should be but idly posted over,
Because his purpose is not executed.§

one

It is too truly objected by English critics, that a French dramatist's notion of virtue would seem to resolve itself into the conception, in the first instance, of some base design against the honour of a friend, or the chastity of a woman, and a valiant conquest of the meditated villany at the last moment. His hero must sin greatly in thought, before he can prevail upon himself to exhibit a little virtuous instinct in act. His example is that of loose and vagrant passions checked on the eve of consummation by an impulse. "In England, we place the morality of the stage on a different basis. We do not dramatise mental violations of the Decalogue, and take credit to ourselves for the non-commission of crimes which we hold it to be demoralising even to contemplate." We do not sit in the playhouse "merely for the satisfaction of seeing an imperfect criminal retreat from his purpose in the end."

When with a sudden revulsion his heart recoils from its purpose,
As from the verge of a crag, where one step more is destruction.

Let us hope that the French conception of virtue, as thus delineated, may not take root downward and bear fruit upward, on English soil; and that few censors of our press may have to say of native fiction what

*Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto iii. King Richard II., Act V. Sc. 3.

§ King Henry VI., Part II. Act III. Sc. 1.

Measure for Measure, Act V. Sc. 1.

Westminster Review, New Series, V. 96. Art.: The English Stage.
Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standish.

a discerning judge said of a novel entitled "Creeds," that the author's definition of innocence, so far as it could be made out, is, to be ready and willing to do wicked things, but not yet to have done them.

True, most true, that between the crime designed, and the crime committed, there is a great gulf fixed-by the communis sensus of practical ethics. When Enone reasons with Phèdre,

Quel crime a pu produire un trouble si pressant?

Vos mains n'ont point trempé dans le sang innocent?

the wo-begone queen replies,

Grâces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles.

But for all that, in her case, it is due alike to rhyme and reason to add, Plût aux dieux que mon cœur fût innocent comme elles !†

But it is something, it is much, that besides her self-reproachful Plut aux dieux! she can vent, as regards criminal action, an earnest Grâces au ciel! She has not crossed the gulf, which, deep as it may be, it takes but one step to cross. She has not come to the pass of the accomplished criminal, who, in virtue or by vice of his accomplished fact, must fall into the strain of guilty Hesperus, and say,

It is a remark of Mr. Disraeli's, that the pursuit of gaming, oftener than any other, leads men to self-knowledge. Appalled, he argues, by the absolute destruction on the verge of which the gamester finds his early youth just stepping; aghast at the shadowy crimes which, under the influence of this life, seem, as it were, to rise upon his soul, often he hurries to emancipate himself from this fatal thraldom, and with a ruined fortune and marred prospects, yet thanks his Creator that his soul is still white, and his conscience clear§ from those dark stains which Phèdre deprecated, from that one "damned spot" of which all the perfumes of Arabia could not cleanse Lady Macbeth's little hand.

It is Horace's teaching, in one of his seriously reflective moods, that not Heaven itself can annihilate or undo a deed done-non tamen irritum Quodcunque retro est, efficiet ;