“All Beauty Must Die”

Had Thomas De Quincey not already gained notoriety as the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), he would most assuredly have been immortalized on the strength of his remarkable series of “murder” essays which followed. In his paper, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), De Quincey sought an explanation for why certain acts of murder had greater purchase than others on the human capacity for sympathy; why, that is, certain murders seemed more pathetic (in the sense of pathos), the plight of their victims more poignant, the deed more terrifying—in short, why certain murders were productive of that peculiar experience known as sublimity. ¹ He followed this initial inquiry with a series of essays,“On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827–1854), in which he pronounced his own explanation for the phenomenon described in the Macbeth article. It appears that the otherwise incomprehensible inhumanity of such fiendish acts of violence is rendered intelligible by a rational grasp of aesthetic design. Where the imagination cannot cope, reason provides a solution of sorts—or at least a glimpse of the origins and motivations of such evil. Although the theory De Quincey promulgated was predicated on the aesthetics of murder, his conception of how, precisely, these aesthetics produce their effect was not static or final, but developed continually throughout this period. In tracing the trajectory of the theory’s evolution, I wish to discuss the gradual shifting of emphasis from the role of the murderer to the role of the witness, who occupies a liminal position of nominal security, risking what would undoubtedly be a lethal exposure to the killer at work. I do so in order to reassess the merits of De Quincey’s case for why and how murder might be productive of sublimity.