A British judge is reported to have wept recently as he sentenced two murderers for a particularly vicious and sadistic killing. A reporter for the BBC apparently wept on air as he described the aftermath of the Paris massacre. I couldn’t help thinking of Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. It was a satirical novel published in 1924 by Sir Henry Bashford, an eminent physician of the time, and it begins:
It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed—then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world.
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Having written somewhat in this vein myself, I know only too well that what counts as higher example changes over time, and that these days the highest form of virtue is display of emotion over obviously appalling events—the more incontinent the display, the better. The corollary is that only a really bad man, in the Augustus Carpian sense, would refrain from weeping. Self-control is a sign of moral insensibility.
After the killings in Paris, many of the newspapers in Britain paid “tribute” to the victims, as they nowadays often do to the victims of murder. “Tribute” was the word they used, and it was the wrong one, for the victims had done nothing to deserve a tribute (except, perhaps, those who acted bravely or laid down their lives for the sake of others, but this was not what the newspapers meant). For once, the victims were victims and nothing else; they had done nothing to bring their fate upon themselves either by good actions or by bad. To pay tribute to them was to imply that the victims were meritorious in some special way, and that therefore if the people who had been killed had been less good, the crime would have been that much less heinous than it actually was. But the crime was of killing people, not of killing good people. It was perfectly right that the victims should be commemorated, but not paid tribute to. This is a small but important distinction.
